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Archiv für Januar 2017

Openness and Closure in the Later Medieval Village *

Januar 29, 2017, 10:00 am, Mileson S., Allgemein.

For all the growing scholarly interest in the daily life and perceptions of ordinary medieval people, there has been little attempt to conceptualize the social space of the rural settlements in which the great majority of the population lived in the Middle Ages. This article examines how villages and hamlets in England may have been used and perceived in the later Middle Ages (c. 1200 to 1500), especially in terms of access and permeability — in other words how ‘open’ or ‘closed’ (or, more crudely, ‘public’ or ‘private’) the components of a settlement were, and how the spatial relationships between these components affected their use and social significance. For both buildings and open spaces, permeability can be understood in relation to ease of entry and freedom of use, factors that were shaped by social norms and regulations, and delineated by physical markers and barriers.11 It will be argued that differences in openness and closure across space and time supply a guide to rural social interaction as a whole. The data are drawn mainly from lowland England, with a special focus on Ewelme hundred in Oxfordshire, an area of mixed countryside including open-field villages and dispersed wood-pasture settlements.

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Presentism and the ‘Myth’ of Magna Carta

Januar 29, 2017, 10:00 am, Coss, P., Allgemein.

While the concept of presentism seems to have been in gestation for some time, and with various shades of meaning, it has recently been highlighted by François Hartog in a critical interpretation of our age. For Hartog, presentism is a way of experiencing time or, in his words, a regime of historicity or temporality, which puts increasing emphasis upon the present; the present is extended backwards and forwards in time, and living it becomes in a sense a more intensive experience.11 He uses it, not solely but predominantly, in contradistinction to the modernist programme with its pervasive futurism and general belief in progress. Numerous forces appear to be driving this shift in appreciation, including consumerism. The most pervasive, however, seems to be a loss of confidence in the future: ‘The crisis of the future unsettled our idea of progress and produced a sense of foreboding that cast a shadow over our present’.22 Hartog, while expressing some caution and ambivalence, would fain elevate presentism as the distinctive feature of our current age, rather in the way that postmodernists have elevated their epistemological insights into a description of the condition in which mankind currently lives.

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Presentism and China’s Changing Wartime Past *

Januar 29, 2017, 10:00 am, Mitter, R., Allgemein.

‘War is like a mirror. Looking at it helps us better appreciate the value of peace … We must learn the lessons of history and dedicate ourselves to peace’.11 These unexceptionable words were spoken by the Chinese president Xi Jinping on 3 September 2015. There was a certain ironic quality to them, however, since the speech took place as part of a major display of military discipline and technology at the parade commemorating the seventieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War in China. Media attention was focused on the twelve thousand troops who marched in Tiananmen Square, and on the absence of leaders in attendance from any of the major Allied nations, other than Vladimir Putin of Russia. However, one wider development reflected in the parade received relatively little attention: the major changes in China’s attitude towards the Second World War itself, from the late Cold War era to the early twenty-first century. For at the centre of the parade were eight elderly veterans of the war against Japan, four of them from the Communist armies and four from the Nationalist (Guomindang) forces. Just a couple of decades earlier, it would have been unthinkable for Mao Zedong’s old Nationalist enemies to have been placed in such a position of honour within a major state ceremony.

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Classical Presentism *

Januar 29, 2017, 10:00 am, Osborne R., Allgemein.

There was a young man who said ‘GodMust find it exceedingly oddTo think that the treeShould continue to beWhen there’s no one about in the quad.’Reply:‘Dear Sir: Your astonishment’s odd;I am always about in the quad.And that’s why the treeWill continue to beSince observed by, Yours faithfully, God.’

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Presentism and the Renaissance and Early Modern Historian

Januar 29, 2017, 10:00 am, Welch E., Allgemein.

Writing in 1941, Benedetto Croce argued, ‘All history is contemporary history’. In doing so, he created an aphorism that offers two dimensions to ‘presentism’.11 It can mean, for example, that we seek present-day concerns in the past, searching in the archives for the earlier versions of our own contemporary lives and interests. But ‘presentism’ can also mean attempts to remove texts from any particular period or place, asking them to represent universal rather than historically situated values. Like Robin Osborne’s classicism (described elsewhere in this set of articles), the framework of the Renaissance and early modern in Europe poses particular challenges in understanding this dual role. Both period labels drew on complex nineteenth-century nationalistic historiographies.22 The concept of the ‘rebirth’ of classical antiquity, a rinascita, or renaissance, was first adopted by Jules Michelet for the seventh volume of his nationalistic Histoire de France (1855), while in English the term ‘early modern’ was originally used by William Johnson in 1869 for his book Early Modern Europe. Whether looking backwards to a revival of classical art and architecture or forward to Protestant nationhood, the two historians connected the transition to nineteenth-century modernity to imagined beginnings in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.33 But it was not only nationhood that mattered. Like classicists, Renaissance and early modernist specialists saw themselves as having a unique role in creating a sense of a higher purpose, something that was particularly important during the fight against Fascism in the 1930s and 1940s.44 If the Renaissance was the juncture between a medieval way of life and modern values and mores, then its study was fraught with moral imperative.

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Introduction: Past and … Presentism

Januar 29, 2017, 10:00 am, Walsham, A., Allgemein.

What place does ‘presentism’ have in modern historical scholarship? Can students of the past avoid seeing it through the prism of the present? Should our research be undertaken with an eye to its current relevance and with the aim of transforming the future? Past and Present invited seven historians to reflect critically on these questions with reference to their own periods and specialisms. The results of this experiment are published below. It is hoped that this collection of short viewpoints will help to stimulate discussion and debate about the state of the discipline and the practice of history both within and beyond the academy.

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Obscene Humour, Gender, and Sociability in Sixteenth-Century St Gallen *

Januar 29, 2017, 10:00 am, Roth C., Allgemein.

The surgeon of Bischofszell gave a purgative powder to a companion, a widower already engaged, who had begged him for an aid for fornication for the [wedding] night. When he entered his bride’s bed, he soiled it. He got up [and] would have grabbed the doctor by the throat if others had not intervened.11

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Four Fishermen, Orson Welles, and the Making of the Brazilian Northeast *

Januar 29, 2017, 10:00 am, Campbell CJ., Allgemein.

In December 1941, Orson Welles read an article in Time magazine about four Brazilian fishermen who as a protest against their labour conditions had sailed nearly 2,500 kilometres, from the city of Fortaleza to Rio de Janeiro, on a rustic sail-raft called a jangada (see <a href=“#gtw052-F5″ class=“reflinks“>Map</a>).11 Their voyage, which lasted sixty-one days, was intended to persuade Brazil’s so-called New State (Estado Novo) to recognize the fishermen’s trade as an official profession within its expanding social programmes and centralized labour laws. The protest of the fishermen — Jerônimo André de Souza (Mestre Jerônimo), Manuel Olimpio Meira (Jacaré), Manuel Pereira da Silva (Manuel Preto) and Raimundo Correia Lima (Tatá) — was successful in part due to extraordinary national media support. The protest would also draw international attention: the half-page article in Time would bring Welles to Fortaleza to film an episode for his movie It’s All True. While the movie was left unfinished, the fishermen’s voyage, and Orson Welles’s attempt to recreate it, reflected and inspired debates about the meaning of the Northeastern region in the nation and the world. Mapofthefishermen’svoyage, by Courtney Campbellusingdatafrom Google Maps

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Thinking Reflexively: Opening ‘Blind Eyes’ *

Januar 29, 2017, 10:00 am, Hall C., Allgemein.

Where do the questions come from that inspire us to investigate the past but from ourselves and the world in which we live? It is life as it is lived in the present with its problems and difficulties, anxieties and fears, notions of progress made and unmade, that provokes us to explore the relationship between past, present and possible futures. Our reading of the archive, of historiographies and of conceptual texts will always be inflected through our own lives. The truths we seek to establish will be partial, addressed to the particular questions we explored, inevitably selective given the limitations of our own understandings and of the sources we can utilize. As Miri Rubin puts it in her contribution to this discussion, we are always at work from and through the present, while trying to be attentive to potential anachronisms. ‘Presentism’, in Hartog’s definition as explicated by Steve Smith, with its notion of a contemporary phase of history writing which sees the present as self-sufficient, was not a term I was familiar with. That notion seems well worth challenging: perhaps one way of disrupting the global triumph of neo-liberalism, the sense that there is no other possible future, can be disrupted through an engagement with the past. History writing has always been informed by the present, but perhaps there is something more that we have learned, something about the ‘politics of location’, a term associated with feminist thinking, that allows us to be self-reflexive in our writing, more aware of our ‘blind eyes’, more alert to disavowal with its patterns of knowing and not-knowing, more open to the need for an awareness of those many ‘others’ whose ways of thinking are so different from ours.11

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Stray Dogs and the Making of Modern Paris *

Januar 29, 2017, 10:00 am, Pearson, C., Allgemein.

Quelle: https://academic.oup.com/past/article/234/1/137/2965802/Stray-Dogs-and-the-Making-of-Modern-Paris?rss=1

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Archiv für Januar 2017

Openness and Closure in the Later Medieval Village *

Presentism and the ‘Myth’ of Magna Carta

Presentism and China’s Changing Wartime Past *

Classical Presentism *

Presentism and the Renaissance and Early Modern Historian

Introduction: Past and … Presentism

Obscene Humour, Gender, and Sociability in Sixteenth-Century St Gallen *

Four Fishermen, Orson Welles, and the Making of the Brazilian Northeast *

Thinking Reflexively: Opening ‘Blind Eyes’ *

Stray Dogs and the Making of Modern Paris *

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