‘He is the Vagabond that Hath No Habitation in the Lord’: The Representation of Quakerism as Vagrancy in Interregnum England,c. 1650–1660

This article examines the printed representation, and prosecutorial characterisation, of the movements, actions and motivations of early Quakers as vagrant. It argues that the prevalence and power of representing (and subsequently treating) early Quakers as vagrants is an understudied aspect of the social and cultural history of the Society of Friends, particularly in Interregnum England. As evidence, it interrogates a furious pamphlet debate between mid-century religious writers and preachers, who devoted much time and ink to painting Quakers as mendacious vagabonds, and Quaker ‘First Publishers’, who responded at length and in a striking way to these accusations. The article concludes that these images of Quakerism as a form of ‘spiritual vagrancy’ created historically significant echoes in English and Atlantic culture.     

Culture Wars

Abstract

In Revel, Riot and Rebellion, David Underdown reasserted the importance of the concepts of social change, revolution and puritanism to an understanding of the English Civil War. Regional cultures provided the framework through which the fracturing of England into opposing societies, cultures and, ultimately, armies could be explained. The book contributed to a re-thinking of puritanism as a cultural phenomenon. If the intensity of puritan feeling helps to explain the division of England, so also does the strength of support for the Established Church identified by recent research. Further micro-studies are needed to understand the dynamics of local cultural and religious conflicts before and during the Civil War.     

The cross-cultural transfer of educational technology: A myth

This paper argues that technologies can never be transferred from one culture to another. The implementation by Costa Rica of the Open University system of technologies developed in England is used as a case in point. The paper focuses on the non-applicability of using the term “transfer” with its attendant connotations, to signify the implementation of similar technologies in different cultures; differentiates between system specific and culture specific problems in the process of this implementation: and discusses the interaction of three cultures in the process of “transferring” a system of technologies from one of these cultures to another. The Open University system of technologies is described as it exists in England and the system specific problems of these technologies are delimited. The system of technologies is then “transferred” to Costa Rica and the culture specific problems discussed as seen by two evaluators from yet a third culture (the United States). The expectations of individuals from all three cultures (English, Costa Rican and U.S.) are raised in tight of these culture specific problems.     

Why heritage counts: researching the historic environment

The role of English Heritage in commissioning new research into the historic environment is considered. The place of research within the organization and the priorities for research as highlighted in the proposed English Heritage Research Strategy are set out. Research commissioned or carried out by English Heritage covers a wide range of areas, from archaeology and buildings history to applied conservation research. However, the focus of the article is on research that addresses social, economic and policy issues. Work that has been carried out by English Heritage in three areas is explored: the economic value of heritage investment; issues of social inclusion and access to heritage; and analysis of the threats faced by the historic environment and the resources available to address these threats. A key driver for this research activity is the annual Heritage Counts report produced by English Heritage on behalf of the wider heritage sector.     

Radical Conservatism and International Nationalism: The Peasant Arts Movement and Its Search for the Country Heart of England

ABSTRACT

The Peasant Arts Movement (fl. 1890s–1930s) was dedicated to reviving traditional country life in England. This article analyses its key educational tools, its magazine and museum, to explore its underlying ideologies. Sometimes seen as eccentric, it was nonetheless connected, practically and intellectually, with the broader Arts and Crafts and folk revival movements in England and Europe. It shared with these a largely radical spirit but was nonetheless essentially conservative in its views on class and gender. However, it demonstrated an internationalist spirit in its concern for peasantry worldwide and in its use of European models to re-invigorate English culture.     

Preserving The English Landscape,c.1870–1914

ABSTRACT

This article examines the significance and ideological character of the landscape preservation movement in England before 1914. In these years, preservationist discourse had considerable resonance across all sections of society. At a time of change, mainstream English culture increasingly valued natural landscapes seen to be ‘relics' of ages past, or associated with historical figures, events and customs. This historicized reading of landscape was bound up with patriotic sentiment, but did not reflect the dominance of any atavistic ideology of rural Englishness. In late Victorian and Edwardian England, the preservationist dispensation ran with the grain of modernity, not against it.     

Christianity and Humanitarianism in the Doukhobor Campaign, 1895–1902

This article examines the campaign undertaken by British Quakers in the 1890s to defend the Doukhobor sect of Russian Christians. The notion of humanitarian sympathy is too often applied as if it were a constant. Quakers are seen by many as exemplars of humanitarian action. By contrast this article argues that the concern that led to defend the Doukhobors came from very specific images of Christian suffering, and that the campaign to defend the sect was shaped by religious, not humanitarian, aims and methods and the particular history and repertoire of Quaker campaigning. It contributes to the history of humanitarianism by showing how humanitarian campaigning derives from the social and cultural history of various actors, and how humanitarian activity is coloured, at all levels, by its social and ideological positioning.     

Culture and Composure: Creating Narratives of the Gendered Self in Oral History Interviews

ABSTRACT

This article tracks the development of French social history from its Labroussian origins through to the uncertainties that beset the subject in the 1970s and 1980s, and the call for a tournant critique (‘critical turning point’) in response to the conceptual challenges to its traditional methodological approaches. It then describes the responses that emerged in the wake of the tournant critique, as social historians attempted to renew their field. Instead of pursuing the debate about whether ‘class' or ‘order’ was a more useful category of analysis for early modern historians, French social historians have attempted, like their colleagues in the social sciences, to make the individual rather than collectivities the central focus of their research. The article outlines three approaches which try to capture the agency of individuals: prosopography, micro-history, and network analysis. Finally, the article makes the case that longitudinal studies can provide a means through which social history's traditional concerns with explaining the ‘social’ can be met whilst not losing sight of the exciting questions posed by cultural history in the last two decades.     

Auditing the historic environment: Measurements,datasets and English heritage's state of the historic environment report 2002

This chapter sets out the current context for historic environment management, and the associated information requirements to manage organisations successfully within the sector for the benefit of the country's heritage. The initiative undertaken by English Heritage (the English government's conservation advisors) in developing a pilot State of the Historic Environment Report is used as a case study in the collation of management information for advocacy purposes. Political support for such a development is considered, as well as the history of the report's development with its roots outside the heritage sector. The challenges of project management for report delivery are discussed, particularly where information collation and analysis is reliant on third‐party data sources, often created for separate purposes. Tourism data is focused on, showing how results from the former English Tourism Council's annual surveys of visitor attractions were used to inform key messages in the heritage sector. Comments are made on specific types of data used, and a review given of the methodology for collecting dedicated heritage management organisational data.     

The Passions of the Prince: Moral Philosophy and Staatskirchenrecht in Thomasius's Conception of Sovereignty

This paper argues that in his discussions of the ethics of sovereignty, Christian Thomasius makes use of two very different conceptions of the prince's moral persona. In his natural law works, Thomasius draws on a Christian-Epicurean moral anthropology, in order to model a sage–prince whose capacity to rule is conditioned by his capacity for restraint of the passions. In his works in the area of Staatskirchenrecht or constitutional church law, however, Thomasius adopts a different stance. Here, drawing on Pufendorf's construction of multiple moral personae, Thomasius restricts the ethic of passional restraint to the personae of the ‘man’ and the Christian, drawing the duties of the prince from a quite different source: the goal of preserving social peace through the exercise of a coercive sovereign power. It is argued that these different kinds of political ethic are associated with the different purposes of Thomasius's natural-law and staatskirchenrechtlich writings, the former being dedicated to the moral formation of his law students, the latter to the provision of political advice to the prince.     

A possible teleology of cultural sector data in England

ABSTRACT

In March 2019, Arts Council England (ACE), an official statistics producer, started collecting a new set of data from its National Portfolio Organisations intended to reveal whether those organizations’ intentions correlate with the perceptions of their peers and audiences. In a world dominated by quantitative data, the Impact and Insight Toolkit addresses a perceived lacuna and marks a substantial investment in qualitative metrics. ACE also expects it to address a number of other concerns – help organizations self-evaluate, measure their short-term outcomes and advocate more effectively. Indeed, it envisages that an aggregation of the data collected will support the case for sustained public support of the sector. The Toolkit’s launch comes at a time when changes to the UK’s official statistics are encouraged, and policymakers are looking elsewhere to inform their thinking. The campaigning aspect of ACE’s aspirations suggests a model of data collection and analysis distinct from that of official statistics production, valued for its impartiality. This article considers what might happen if the Toolkit, which relates to ACE’s role as a development agency, encourages data to be collected and analysed in order to deliver specific outcomes. It reflects on three visions of cultural sector data from the past 50 years: Toffler’s The Art of Measuring the Arts, DCMS’s Taking Part and ACE’s Impact and Insight Toolkit. These suggest a trajectory of cultural sector data determined by increasing importance being attached to institutional interests, and implies that the future of cultural sector data in England may be determined by how ACE addresses its potentially conflicting interests as an official data provider and development agency. Greater investment in the former would more accurately reveal the arts’ contribution to economic and social development; greater investment in the latter would encourage the teleological development of cultural sector data designed for sectorial advocacy.     

Trade and Textiles from Medieval Antioch

This article examines the significance of textiles called “cloth of Antioch”, which are named in late seventh/thirteenth and early eighth/fourteenth century church inventories from England. The practice of naming a type of cloth for a geographic place-name was common in this period, but did not necessarily mean that a textile with a particular name had been produced there. Antioch was a known centre of textile production, although references are scant. The English church inventories that mention Antioch cloth are from St. Paul's Cathedral, London; Canterbury Cathedral; and Exeter Cathedral. Such church inventories are a source of important information about textiles that would have been consumed in medieval England. One can associate the Antioch textiles with important individuals at court. The English royal family emphasised their associations with the city of Antioch in this period, which may explain why important members of the court donated Antioch textiles. The textiles are also mentioned in Scottish and the Vatican treasury inventories, however, which indicates that the cloth was known elsewhere, even if it did not have the same resonance in other places     

Daejanggeum as ‘affective mobilization’: lessons for (transnational) popular culture and civil society

Abstract

(Transnationalized) popular culture and (global) social movement are often seen as unrelated, if not mutually exclusive. Popular culture is entertaining, consensual but trivial; social movement is serious, idealized and oppositional. Yet the WTO Ministerial Conference, held in Hong Kong in December 2005, saw the Korean protesters' adoption of the theme‐song of a popular Korean television drama, Daejanggeum, as their protest strategy. The Korean protesters had been framed by mainstream Hong Kong media as ‘violent rioters’, but the inclusion of the drama elements helped the protesters advance their cause by gaining instant rapport with the local Hong Kong news media and public/fans (of Korean wave). The impact of celebrity involvement in the WTO was also about an immediate transferal of fan affect, from celebrities to the movement, and to the Korean protesters. This ‘affect mobilization’, becomes important as movement capital, as the effective manipulation of emotions is a key to ‘getting the message across’ as movement strategies. The case of WTO Hong Kong reveals the possibility of a symbiotic relationship between transnational popular culture and globalized social movements. The ‘use’ of (Korean) popular cultural products enriches and complicates the affect subjectivities within the social movement, and arranges fan affect into multiple layers of emotion hierarchies/spheres. It remains to be seen, however, if this would set a precedence to protesters in future WTO rounds as they are keen to mobilize their causes in different locales. More research is needed, too, to demonstrate if the success of the Korean wave fosters the emergence of a transnational Asian ‘public’ or civil society. Yet, for now, the success of Korean protesters in the mobilization of Hong Kong public's affect epitomizes the hegemonic flow, or soft power, of Korean TV dramas in the Asian popular.     

How do Indonesians remember Konfrontasi? Indonesia–Malaysia relations and the popular memory of “Confrontation” after the fall of Suharto

After the fall of Suharto in May 1998, mass rallies yelling anti-Malaysia sentiment broke out several times in a number of major cities in Indonesia. The rallies were triggered by various conflicting issues involving the two countries. Every time a mass rally against Malaysia happens, memory of “Konfrontasi” is recalled, as is seen in the use of “Ganyang Malaysia” (Crush Malaysia) rhetoric, whereas during the Suharto era, the narrative of the historical episode of “Konfrontasi” was constructed in the tone of criticizing Sukarno’s “Crush Malaysia” campaign as an escape from the internal economic crisis, rather than as an expression of nationalist sentiment. However, as this article addresses, there is a gap between the “national memory” as is constructed by the history school textbook and “popular memory” as is embodied in society. Beneath this “popular memory,” as this paper contends, there is a sort of nationalist sentiment in the sense of longing for “national pride” as projected upon the “persona” of Sukarno.     

Working Within the Crisis

ABSTRACT

This article examines microhistories and the histories of the everyday both in the context of developments in social and cultural history since the 1960s, and in the light of political and social change in post-war European society. Moving beyond debates about historical narrative, it emphasizes issues of perspective, space, size and historical distance in shaping historical interpretation. This historiographical trend, it argues, emanates from two major debates within the social sciences and politics. One concerns the nature of everyday life under modern capitalism and ‘consumer society’, the other the vexed issue of human agency. Focusing particularly on Italian microstoria, it argues that such writing is best understood as the commitment to a humanist agenda which places agency and historical meaning in the realm of day-to-day transactions, and which sees their recuperation as the proper task of the historian.     

Nothing but Propaganda? Historians and the Study of Early Modern Royal Ritual

This essay traces the history of the ‘propagandist idiom’, a form of discourse that has come to exercise considerable influence over historical writing on political rituals. According to this idiom, state rituals such as coronations, royal entries and funerals were authentically instrumental, self-conscious exercises in power management within the state. The idiom necessarily restricts historians' conception of the meaning of early modern state rituals. After a brief introduction to the historiography of early modern royal rituals, this essay focuses on English and French historiography from the middle of the twentieth century to trace the origins of the propagandist idiom, measuring the impact of anthropology and the social sciences. The essay does not claim to be conclusive. It is intended to offer a guide to a neglected aspect of the historiography, and to stimulate debate.     

The Media Archaeology of File Sharing: Broadcasting Computer Code to Swedish Homes

What form did file sharing take before the internet’s usage became mainstream, and what practices from that period remain? This article examines a Swedish radio show that broadcast listener-contributed computer code in the mid 1980s. It applies a combined theoretical framework of intermediality and sharing theory and argues that this combination is central to the analysis of piracy and social change. The results indicate an interesting paradox in terms of pushing and pulling content as the practice relied on both in public broadcasting as well as with contributing media users. As such, the case of Datorernas värld prefigures how peer interaction and sharing relies on more centralized and controlled channels of communication. The article historically situates themes such as intermediality, surveillance, gender representation, and piracy and provides a piece of computing history that is topical but, strangely, critically ignored.     

A Complaint with the Cadi,ca. 1896: an East/West Cultural Encounter

This article presents a case study of A Complaint with the Cadi (Algeria), ca. 1896 – a painting by the French Orientalist artist Marie Lucas-Robiquet (1858–1959). Using cultural and social history as prisms, it explores what Lucas-Robiquet’s visual record communicates to the cultural ‘outsider’ about Muslim social life in French colonial Algeria. Attention is given to this artwork because it depicts the Islamic judiciary system as practised in late nineteenth-century Algeria. This article argues that this painting and its subject matter are rare in the Orientalist canon; that the artist was female, is, I posit, crucial to the ways in which this work can be read. Lucas-Robiquet, a decorated Orientalist, used a Naturalist style of painting which was both nuanced and sensitive to Islamic cultural traditions. I contend that A Complaint with the Cadi (or qā?ī meaning judge) is an important work because it represents a locus of historicised forms of Otherness: the French female artist and the Algerian cultural attribute.     

In Loco Parentis,Corporal Punishment and the Moral Economy of Discipline in English Schools, 1945–1986

ABSTRACT

This article uses debates surrounding teachers’ in loco parentis position to explore the social and cultural responses to school corporal punishment in post-1945 English schools. Analysing materials produced by educators and campaigners, it argues that retentionists conceived of their right to inflict physical chastisement as one based on an imagined and discursive status as a parent. This was challenged by opponents who stressed not only the severity of the practice but sought to directly counter the view that parental rights should be automatically delegated to teachers. Whilst the abolition of corporal punishment was ultimately a consequence of an ECHR ruling, it is suggested that it can also be read as the culmination of a longer shift in the status and forms of parental rights in twentieth-century Britain.     

The social stratification of theatre,dance and cinema attendance

In current sociological literature the relationship between social inequality and patterns of cultural taste and consumption is the subject of a large and complex debate. In this paper the primary aim is to examine, in the light of empirical results from a research project in which the authors are presently engaged, three main, and rival, positions that have been taken up in this debate, here labelled as the ‘homology’, the ‘individualization’ and the ‘omnivore–univore’ arguments. Elsewhere, we have concentrated on musical consumption in England, and find evidence that is broadly supportive of the omnivore–univore argument. Here we ask whether such findings are confirmed in the case of theatre, dance and cinema attendance. A secondary aim of the paper is to bring to the attention of practitioners in the field of cultural policy and administration the need to address the issues that arise through the use of more powerful methods of data analysis than those often applied in the past. We explain how indicators of theatre, dance and cinema attendance derived from the Arts in England survey of 2001 can be subject to analysis so as to reveal two distinctive patterns of attendance and, in turn, two distinctive types of consumer—who can, it turns out, be regarded as omnivores and univores, even if with some qualification. The former have relatively high rates of attendance at all kinds of the events covered, including musicals and pantomimes as well as plays and ballet, while the latter tend to be cinema-goers only, that is, non-consumers of theatre and dance. A range of measures of social inequality are then introduced into the authors' analyses, including separate measures of social class and social status and also of educational level and income, and it is further shown that, again in conformity with the omnivore–univore argument, these two types of consumer are socially stratified. Omnivores are of generally higher social status than univores and also have usually higher levels of education and higher income than do univores (the latter finding marking the main difference with musical consumption, which was unaffected by income once other stratification variables were controlled). In sum, our results for theatre, dance and cinema attendance lend, overall, further support to the omnivore–univore argument as against its rivals, but also indicate that different aspects of social inequality impact on different forms of cultural consumption in varying degrees and probably through largely separate processes.