Stephen D Behrendt, Philip D. Morgan, Nicholas Radburn
{"title":"African Cultures and Creolization on an Eighteenth-Century St Kitts Sugar Plantation","authors":"Stephen D Behrendt, Philip D. Morgan, Nicholas Radburn","doi":"10.1093/PASTJ/GTAA023","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/PASTJ/GTAA023","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47870,"journal":{"name":"Past & Present","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2021-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43702769","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Throughout the later Middle Ages, bishops across Latin Christendom issued statutes to guide the clergy and instruct the faithful within their dioceses. Following the lead of medieval jurists, modern scholars have understood this local episcopal legislation as disseminating and reinforcing the so-called ‘universal law’ promulgated by popes and general church councils. Yet a closer look at the surviving corpus of diocesan statutes reveals bishops’ readiness to wield selective citations and editorial omissions so as to shape local knowledge of church law in accordance with episcopal priorities. More broadly, this article contends that such local law-making also offered bishops a means to resist the papacy’s increasing claims to legislative and jurisdictional supremacy within the church. Faced with a wealth of new legislation that was firmly papalist in its origin and presentation, many bishops opted to emphasize their law-making authority by framing their borrowings of the universal law as emanations of their own episcopal will. The resulting corpus of diocesan statutes thus expressed in practice a vision of episcopal authority that differed sharply from the prescriptions of popes and jurists, and which presaged the explosive ecclesiological controversies of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
{"title":"The Bishop as Lawmaker in Late Medieval Europe","authors":"Rowan Dorin","doi":"10.1093/PASTJ/GTAA045","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/PASTJ/GTAA045","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Throughout the later Middle Ages, bishops across Latin Christendom issued statutes to guide the clergy and instruct the faithful within their dioceses. Following the lead of medieval jurists, modern scholars have understood this local episcopal legislation as disseminating and reinforcing the so-called ‘universal law’ promulgated by popes and general church councils. Yet a closer look at the surviving corpus of diocesan statutes reveals bishops’ readiness to wield selective citations and editorial omissions so as to shape local knowledge of church law in accordance with episcopal priorities. More broadly, this article contends that such local law-making also offered bishops a means to resist the papacy’s increasing claims to legislative and jurisdictional supremacy within the church. Faced with a wealth of new legislation that was firmly papalist in its origin and presentation, many bishops opted to emphasize their law-making authority by framing their borrowings of the universal law as emanations of their own episcopal will. The resulting corpus of diocesan statutes thus expressed in practice a vision of episcopal authority that differed sharply from the prescriptions of popes and jurists, and which presaged the explosive ecclesiological controversies of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.","PeriodicalId":47870,"journal":{"name":"Past & Present","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2021-03-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1093/PASTJ/GTAA045","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45881351","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In a relatively brief, not very lethal, but meticulously documented guerrilla war in Ireland there is an opportunity to reflect on who historians choose to listen to when writing about violence. Across 1920–21 thousands of inquests captured the voices of the men, women and sometimes children who were the first to describe and define the act of killing in this conflict, but who very quickly fell out of the historical record after that point. This article considers the contribution these bystanders can make to a history of violence, and some of the challenges their evidence presents. By witnessing death were they an integral part of how killing was meant to be understood? Are they fundamental to an understanding of how terror worked, and did they, by their presence, by the way they spoke of what they saw, contribute to why so few deaths were needed for the message to be understood in the Irish context? Ultimately, these witnesses also raise questions about the reactions they prompted then as well as now. Is it easier to hear of killing from a combatant than from a child, and are there consequences for the history of violence in the making of that choice?
{"title":"Death in the Archives: Witnessing War in Ireland, 1919–1921*","authors":"A. Dolan","doi":"10.1093/PASTJ/GTAB003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/PASTJ/GTAB003","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 In a relatively brief, not very lethal, but meticulously documented guerrilla war in Ireland there is an opportunity to reflect on who historians choose to listen to when writing about violence. Across 1920–21 thousands of inquests captured the voices of the men, women and sometimes children who were the first to describe and define the act of killing in this conflict, but who very quickly fell out of the historical record after that point. This article considers the contribution these bystanders can make to a history of violence, and some of the challenges their evidence presents. By witnessing death were they an integral part of how killing was meant to be understood? Are they fundamental to an understanding of how terror worked, and did they, by their presence, by the way they spoke of what they saw, contribute to why so few deaths were needed for the message to be understood in the Irish context? Ultimately, these witnesses also raise questions about the reactions they prompted then as well as now. Is it easier to hear of killing from a combatant than from a child, and are there consequences for the history of violence in the making of that choice?","PeriodicalId":47870,"journal":{"name":"Past & Present","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2021-03-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1093/PASTJ/GTAB003","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44244193","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Historians examine the Mongol practice of holding interfaith court debates either with regard to the efforts of religious representatives to convert the khans, or as emblematic of the Mongols’ religious pluralism. However, staging interfaith debates had other religious and political purposes as well. The debate was an arena for the religiously and ideologically charged performance of the Mongol khan’s own divine-like wisdom and model of sacral, deified kingship. From the Mongol perspective, the objectives of the debate were not only different from those of its religious participants, but the debate further represented an altogether different mode of religiosity. Situating the debate in the context of the Mongol religious world view, this article proceeds to examine it in the Mongol court in medieval Iran (the Ilkhanate) shortly after its conversion to Islam. Muslim interlocutors there identified and exploited the Mongols’ religious logic to reinforce the Mongol rulers’ conversion. They transformed the debate into a forum for experimenting with a new synthesis of Mongol and Muslim, divinized and righteous, kingship. The continuous role of the debate in the performance of sacral monarchy among the Mongols’ successors, especially the Mughals in early modern India, testifies to the enduring impact of Mongol religiosity on the Islamic world.
{"title":"Disenchanting Heaven: Interfaith Debate, Sacral Kingship, and Conversion to Islam in the Mongol Empire, 1260–1335*","authors":"J. Brack","doi":"10.1093/PASTJ/GTAA002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/PASTJ/GTAA002","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Historians examine the Mongol practice of holding interfaith court debates either with regard to the efforts of religious representatives to convert the khans, or as emblematic of the Mongols’ religious pluralism. However, staging interfaith debates had other religious and political purposes as well. The debate was an arena for the religiously and ideologically charged performance of the Mongol khan’s own divine-like wisdom and model of sacral, deified kingship. From the Mongol perspective, the objectives of the debate were not only different from those of its religious participants, but the debate further represented an altogether different mode of religiosity. Situating the debate in the context of the Mongol religious world view, this article proceeds to examine it in the Mongol court in medieval Iran (the Ilkhanate) shortly after its conversion to Islam. Muslim interlocutors there identified and exploited the Mongols’ religious logic to reinforce the Mongol rulers’ conversion. They transformed the debate into a forum for experimenting with a new synthesis of Mongol and Muslim, divinized and righteous, kingship. The continuous role of the debate in the performance of sacral monarchy among the Mongols’ successors, especially the Mughals in early modern India, testifies to the enduring impact of Mongol religiosity on the Islamic world.","PeriodicalId":47870,"journal":{"name":"Past & Present","volume":"250 1","pages":"11-53"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2021-02-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46268462","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Public concerts offer a new perspective on the controversial subject of secularization and the Enlightenment. From 1725–90, the Concert spirituel in Paris, one of the earliest and most famous concert series in Europe, presented a mixture of sacred and secular music when other entertainments were forbidden during religious holidays. Over the course of the century, the proportion of religious works in its repertoire declined significantly. Whereas previous interpretations tended to describe secularization as resulting either from battles between philosophes and the Church or from broader declines in belief, this article casts doubt on these explanations by showing the heterogeneous composition of the Concert’s audience. Instead, it depicts a process of ‘inadvertent secularization’ stemming from market pressure, in this case due to the multiplication of new concert series and other entertainments in Paris during the second half of the eighteenth century. This framework accounts for secularization at the institutional level without assuming that the society as a whole was marked by declining Christian belief. Bringing together the study of markets and religion reveals how multiple logics increased the autonomy of artistic fields formerly subject to religious constraints.
{"title":"Concerts and Inadvertent Secularization: Religious Music in the Entertainment Market of Eighteenth-Century Paris*","authors":"A. Pesic","doi":"10.1093/PASTJ/GTAA011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/PASTJ/GTAA011","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Public concerts offer a new perspective on the controversial subject of secularization and the Enlightenment. From 1725–90, the Concert spirituel in Paris, one of the earliest and most famous concert series in Europe, presented a mixture of sacred and secular music when other entertainments were forbidden during religious holidays. Over the course of the century, the proportion of religious works in its repertoire declined significantly. Whereas previous interpretations tended to describe secularization as resulting either from battles between philosophes and the Church or from broader declines in belief, this article casts doubt on these explanations by showing the heterogeneous composition of the Concert’s audience. Instead, it depicts a process of ‘inadvertent secularization’ stemming from market pressure, in this case due to the multiplication of new concert series and other entertainments in Paris during the second half of the eighteenth century. This framework accounts for secularization at the institutional level without assuming that the society as a whole was marked by declining Christian belief. Bringing together the study of markets and religion reveals how multiple logics increased the autonomy of artistic fields formerly subject to religious constraints.","PeriodicalId":47870,"journal":{"name":"Past & Present","volume":"250 1","pages":"135-169"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2021-02-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1093/PASTJ/GTAA011","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48456544","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Civil executions in Imperial Russia were punitive ceremonies that were staged before crowds and presaged a sentence of penal labour and lifelong exile in Siberia. Intended to underline the absolute supremacy of the autocracy, they choreographed the public humiliation of the criminal and collective condemnation from the crowds who gathered to witness the stripping away of the rights and entitlements that gave civil life in the autocracy its meaning. Many took place without incident, and followed the ritual of debasement and expulsion endorsed by the state. Yet when at the civil executions of revolutionaries during the reign of Alexander II both convicts and spectators departed from the state’s script of public humiliation and orderly opprobrium, the performance of monarchical power and autocratic justice proved liable to subversion. Russian radicals sometimes succeeded in hijacking the ceremony to denounce despotism and proclaim an alternative vision of activism, solidarity, and revolution. In so doing, they contested the autocrat’s position as the source of status, rights and, ultimately, of sovereignty. Building on studies of law, punishment, performance, and the revolutionary movement, this article demonstrates how radicals and their supporters recast “scenarios of power” as “scenarios of rebellion”.
{"title":"Civil Death, Radical Protest and The Theatre of Punishment in the Reign of Alexander II*","authors":"D. Beer","doi":"10.1093/PASTJ/GTAA003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/PASTJ/GTAA003","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Civil executions in Imperial Russia were punitive ceremonies that were staged before crowds and presaged a sentence of penal labour and lifelong exile in Siberia. Intended to underline the absolute supremacy of the autocracy, they choreographed the public humiliation of the criminal and collective condemnation from the crowds who gathered to witness the stripping away of the rights and entitlements that gave civil life in the autocracy its meaning. Many took place without incident, and followed the ritual of debasement and expulsion endorsed by the state. Yet when at the civil executions of revolutionaries during the reign of Alexander II both convicts and spectators departed from the state’s script of public humiliation and orderly opprobrium, the performance of monarchical power and autocratic justice proved liable to subversion. Russian radicals sometimes succeeded in hijacking the ceremony to denounce despotism and proclaim an alternative vision of activism, solidarity, and revolution. In so doing, they contested the autocrat’s position as the source of status, rights and, ultimately, of sovereignty. Building on studies of law, punishment, performance, and the revolutionary movement, this article demonstrates how radicals and their supporters recast “scenarios of power” as “scenarios of rebellion”.","PeriodicalId":47870,"journal":{"name":"Past & Present","volume":"250 1","pages":"171-202"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2021-02-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1093/PASTJ/GTAA003","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44445434","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
One of the ways in which towns and cities in pre-industrial Europe responded to food crises was by establishing public grain stocks, intended for relief. This article shows how purchases and distribution of grain in Holland were affected by the long-term developments of commercialization and state formation. Two conclusions stand out. Firstly, both the acquisition of supplies and the distribution of relief relied heavily on the market. However, while market mechanisms were originally used to provide targeted relief through subsidies, at the end of the period under examination this was supplanted by a — largely unjustified — trust in the effects of the presence and release of stocks on food prices in general. Secondly, in keeping with a long-standing tradition of decentralized governance, urban governments and urban poor relief organizations were the main providers of the safety net that protected the food entitlements of vulnerable groups throughout the period under examination, even after the establishment of a centralized unitary state in the early nineteenth century.
{"title":"Managing Food Crises: Urban Relief Stocks in Pre-Industrial Holland*","authors":"J. Dijkman","doi":"10.1093/PASTJ/GTAA014","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/PASTJ/GTAA014","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 One of the ways in which towns and cities in pre-industrial Europe responded to food crises was by establishing public grain stocks, intended for relief. This article shows how purchases and distribution of grain in Holland were affected by the long-term developments of commercialization and state formation. Two conclusions stand out. Firstly, both the acquisition of supplies and the distribution of relief relied heavily on the market. However, while market mechanisms were originally used to provide targeted relief through subsidies, at the end of the period under examination this was supplanted by a — largely unjustified — trust in the effects of the presence and release of stocks on food prices in general. Secondly, in keeping with a long-standing tradition of decentralized governance, urban governments and urban poor relief organizations were the main providers of the safety net that protected the food entitlements of vulnerable groups throughout the period under examination, even after the establishment of a centralized unitary state in the early nineteenth century.","PeriodicalId":47870,"journal":{"name":"Past & Present","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2021-02-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1093/PASTJ/GTAA014","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42225111","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
On 10 August 1792, the Parisian sans-culottes surrounded the Tuileries Palace, overthrew the monarchy and helped to found a Republic. What might otherwise have taken centuries to achieve appeared to materialize within hours. During the preceding weeks, sans-culotte discourse began to coalesce around the belief that a demonstration of collective violence could enable France to bypass the ordinary laws of history and thereby realize, instantaneously, the revolutionary ideal of regeneration. It would create, in effect, a time warp. While historians are familiar with the perception of accelerated time that accompanied the Revolution, insufficient attention has been paid to ways in which time, as a discursive category, remained circumscribed by ideas of space. It was problematized as an interminable distance, a gulf or abyss, that separated present and future, nullifying the sense of limitless possibility unleashed in 1789. The process of political radicalization that culminated in 10 August was prompted not so much by a desire to quicken time as by a need to escape it altogether. In centring upon a micro-historical analysis of the time discourse that accompanied 10 August, this article reassesses the theories of temporality that have emerged in the historiography of the Revolution by foregrounding the perspective of lived experience.
{"title":"Time Warps during the French Revolution*","authors":"Rhys Jones","doi":"10.1093/PASTJ/GTAA048","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/PASTJ/GTAA048","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 On 10 August 1792, the Parisian sans-culottes surrounded the Tuileries Palace, overthrew the monarchy and helped to found a Republic. What might otherwise have taken centuries to achieve appeared to materialize within hours. During the preceding weeks, sans-culotte discourse began to coalesce around the belief that a demonstration of collective violence could enable France to bypass the ordinary laws of history and thereby realize, instantaneously, the revolutionary ideal of regeneration. It would create, in effect, a time warp. While historians are familiar with the perception of accelerated time that accompanied the Revolution, insufficient attention has been paid to ways in which time, as a discursive category, remained circumscribed by ideas of space. It was problematized as an interminable distance, a gulf or abyss, that separated present and future, nullifying the sense of limitless possibility unleashed in 1789. The process of political radicalization that culminated in 10 August was prompted not so much by a desire to quicken time as by a need to escape it altogether. In centring upon a micro-historical analysis of the time discourse that accompanied 10 August, this article reassesses the theories of temporality that have emerged in the historiography of the Revolution by foregrounding the perspective of lived experience.","PeriodicalId":47870,"journal":{"name":"Past & Present","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2021-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1093/PASTJ/GTAA048","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46557889","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Soon after the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, China experienced a ‘fortune-telling fever’. After having been suppressed by the Chinese Communist Party for the previous three decades, fortune tellers re-emerged in the 1980s to publish extensively on the topic and ply their trade in public. Yet despite the general relaxation of state policies toward folk beliefs, fortune telling was still considered a ‘superstition’ and therefore remained against the law. To bypass ongoing proscriptions against divinatory practices and publications, fortune tellers began to frame their undertakings in a language that closely mirrored two priorities of the post-Mao state: the advancement of scientific research and the reclamation of traditional culture. As this article argues, the example of China’s fortune-telling fever adds a new perspective to studies that have viewed the resurgence of Chinese spirituality as a form of communal resistance against an atheist regime. Rather than combating the government’s accusation that their practices were superstitious, fortune tellers instead positioned themselves as allies of the state by appealing to its rhetoric of science and cultural nationalism. Downplaying the mystical qualities of their craft, they framed divination as an academic and economic endeavour, one that was both compatible with secular modernity and in keeping with the Chinese Communist Party’s demands for entrepreneurial activity.
{"title":"Enchantment in an Age of Reform: Fortune-Telling Fever in Post-Mao China, 1980s–1990s*","authors":"Emily Baum","doi":"10.1093/PASTJ/GTAA019","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/PASTJ/GTAA019","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Soon after the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, China experienced a ‘fortune-telling fever’. After having been suppressed by the Chinese Communist Party for the previous three decades, fortune tellers re-emerged in the 1980s to publish extensively on the topic and ply their trade in public. Yet despite the general relaxation of state policies toward folk beliefs, fortune telling was still considered a ‘superstition’ and therefore remained against the law. To bypass ongoing proscriptions against divinatory practices and publications, fortune tellers began to frame their undertakings in a language that closely mirrored two priorities of the post-Mao state: the advancement of scientific research and the reclamation of traditional culture. As this article argues, the example of China’s fortune-telling fever adds a new perspective to studies that have viewed the resurgence of Chinese spirituality as a form of communal resistance against an atheist regime. Rather than combating the government’s accusation that their practices were superstitious, fortune tellers instead positioned themselves as allies of the state by appealing to its rhetoric of science and cultural nationalism. Downplaying the mystical qualities of their craft, they framed divination as an academic and economic endeavour, one that was both compatible with secular modernity and in keeping with the Chinese Communist Party’s demands for entrepreneurial activity.","PeriodicalId":47870,"journal":{"name":"Past & Present","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2021-01-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1093/PASTJ/GTAA019","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49022665","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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