Historical Truth and the Miraculous Past: The Use of Oral Evidence in Twelfth-Century Latin Historical Writing on the First Crusade
This article uses a number of twelfth-century Latin chronicles of the First Crusade (1096–99) as a point of entry into a wider discussion of medieval attitudes toward historical truth. It analyses how chroniclers used and interpreted spoken evidence in the composition of their accounts of the crusade. It is asserted that, if modern scholars are properly to understand those chroniclers’ methods, it must be recognised that twelfth-century conceptions of historical truth were vastly different from their modern equivalents. In that period authors could discern the truth of an oral report in a number of ways. While medieval chroniclers in general often emphasised the identity and status of the witnesses who had provided the reports in order to authenticate them, it is shown here that chroniclers of the First Crusade discussed the identity of their informants in only a small number of instances. However, of the crusade may have approached spoken material concerning the expedition according to a methodology which was more often exercised in this era in the writing of hagiography. According to that methodology, the historical truth of an oral report relating to the crusade could be discerned from the expedition’s place within sacred history, that is, those events during which God had intervened directly in the world by means of miracles. This essay concludes by setting out its implications for modern approaches towards twelfth-century writing about the past.
Quelle: http://ehr.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/short/130/543/263?rss=1
The Politics of Economic Distress in the Aftermath of the Glorious Revolution, 1689-1702
The economic problems of the 1690s spurred an extraordinary surge in politicised debates and complaints about commercial, financial and other material affairs. This article begins by examining the magnitude of the shift that occurred in economic fortunes between the reigns of James II (1685–8) and William III (1689–1702), highlighting the main sources of concern: wartime disruption to trade, rising taxes, the currency crisis associated with the recoinage of 1696, and the high food prices of 1693–9. More significantly, it then assesses the nature and extent of the public response. Trade, finance and fiscal impositions became increasingly pervasive topics of public conversation and printed debate, as evidenced both by anecdotal reports and an approximate but telling analysis of published titles. Moreover, national political divisions—between Williamites and Jacobites, Whigs and Tories, Court and Country, anti-French and anti-Dutch—were central to this economic discourse. Perceptions of the monarch and parliamentary leaders were directly linked to how people interpreted the hardships of this decade. This manifested itself in innumerable short tracts, broadside ballads, seditious conversations, riotous protests and many other modes of public communication. Finally, through comparisons with earlier and later periods such as the 1540s, 1590s, 1640s and the early eighteenth century, this article demonstrates that the tumult of the 1690s had a long-term impact and has been unjustly neglected in the historiography of economic crisis and political conflict.
Quelle: http://ehr.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/short/130/543/318?rss=1
‚From the Housewife’s Point of View‘: Female Citizenship and the Gendered Domestic Interior in Post-First World War Britain, 1918-1928.
This article explores the work of the Women’s Housing Sub-Committee, a government-appointed body which reported to the Advisory Council of the Ministry of Reconstruction, in recognising the home as a key site where active, respectable female citizens might be produced. The Sub-Committee started work in 1918, a month after the Representation of the People Act gave votes to some British women, prompting a wide debate about how best to integrate them into political life. Charged with reporting on plans for post-war social housing in England and Wales, the Sub-Committee demanded that these homes should be designed from the point of view of the working-class housewife who would occupy them. Through considering the evidence gathered by the Sub-Committee and its responses to the plans suggested by Ministry architects, the paper demonstrates how the sub-committee demanded new spatial configurations that would afford women citizens the space they needed to think and discuss politics while new labour-saving devices–and the room to house them–would free up time for them to develop themselves as active citizens. Finally, it considers how this connection was pursued in the discourse of the three main political parties as they attempted to connect with the rising numbers of women voters in the decade between women’s partial and full enfranchisement.
Quelle: http://ehr.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/short/130/543/352?rss=1