Thomas Becket and the Royal Abbey of Reading
Drawing on a wide variety of evidence, including letters, charters, indulgences, poems, miracle stories, relic lists, and a stained-glass panel in Canterbury Cathedral, this essay examines how the monks of Reading Abbey reacted to the controversy between King Henry II and Thomas Becket in the late 1160s and the beginning of Becket’s cult in the 1170s and 1180s. Reading Abbey was founded and richly endowed by Henry II’s grandfather, Henry I. William the Templar, abbot of Reading from 1168–73, was, unsurprisingly, on the side of Henry II and Becket’s opponents. The sympathies of the prior of Reading and of at least one Reading monk, however, were with Becket’s supporters. After Becket’s death, this dissension continued. Abbot William banned pilgrimage to Canterbury, orders that his monks circumvented. Abbot William’s successor, Abbot Joseph (1173–86), had a very different outlook. He promoted Becket’s cult to an extraordinary degree, despite the fact that Reading Abbey was in possession of an important relic, the Hand of St James, which had been placed at Reading by the king himself. The story of Reading Abbey’s relationship with Thomas Becket provides new perspectives on the factionalism triggered by the Becket controversy, the strength of Becket’s early cult, and the devotional history of a major English Benedictine abbey.
Quelle: http://ehr.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/short/131/548/1?rss=1
Mass-Observation, Left Intellectuals and the Politics of Everyday Life
This article examines the careers of a number of left thinkers who broke with the Communist Party of Great Britain in the late 1930s, committing themselves instead to a ‘politics of everyday life’ based on social investigation. Central to this moment was the social research organisation Mass-Observation, the sociologists of which argued that democracy should be built around the vibrancy and irreverence they identified in ordinary culture. This ambition gained its fullest application during the 1940s, as a number of former M-O researchers became influential in the social reconstruction effort, in Labour Party policy circles and, later, in post-war academic sociology. By tracing the sociological arguments of unaligned left intellectuals from the 1930s to the 1950s, this article emphasises the rich plurality of influences at play within British progressive thought in the mid-twentieth century—influences which spanned the worlds of far-left activism, literature, art, the social sciences, town planning and parliamentary politics. It also helps us to reassess the genesis of the first ‘New Left’ in 1956. This is often hailed as the moment when British socialists first started to appreciate ordinary culture, freed from political dogmatism. In fact, left intellectuals had been engaging with the politics of everyday life for at least two decades previously. Indeed, the nostalgic accent which some New Left writers placed on the traditional working-class group was but one facet of a more heterogeneous political tradition—one concerned to think beyond ‘class’ altogether, and to examine how culture operated at the level of the individual.
Quelle: http://ehr.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/short/131/548/92?rss=1
America and the American Revolution in British Geographical Thought, c.1760-1830
This article investigates British ideas about ‘America’ in the years before and after the American Revolution. What characteristics and qualities were thought to distinguish the continent from other parts of the globe? How did the Revolution affect ideas about ‘American’ space? Existing studies tend to present the Revolution as a disruptive moment in British intellectual life. Instead, this article analyses mainstream geographical works—sources which, due to their popularity and summative nature, can help expose the longstanding, formative ideas about America circulating widely in British literate culture. Collectively, these books interpreted America both as a novel space literally and conceptually outside the ‘Old World’ and as a space defined in terms of Britain and its European neighbours. Significantly, the books’ responses to the Revolution were shaped by the same conceptual frameworks. This means that, far from signalling a comprehensive shift in British perceptions of the continent, Revolutionary events were inserted into established narratives; they were used to reinforce and amplify existing structures and terminologies for understanding America in British literate culture.
Quelle: http://ehr.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/short/131/548/64?rss=1