Pisan Perspectives: The Carmen in victoriam and Holy War, c.1000-1150
The Carmen in victoriam Pisanorum, a verse account of a successful Pisan and Genoese attack of 1087 on the Zīrid King Tamīm ibn al-Muʿizz ibn Bādīs of al-Mahdiyya and Zawīla, should be dated to 1087–95, making it a source of huge importance both for the maritime cities’ wars against the ‘Saracens’, and for the pre-First Crusade development of ideas of holy war. This study argues that the expedition was to a large degree motivated by local, economically charged adventurism in Pisa, but that it found itself under the leadership and intellectual domination of a close-knit, pro-Gregorian party. This party, based around Matilda of Canossa, Pope Victor III, Bishop Benedict of Modena and, most probably, the Pisan author of the Carmen himself, ensured that the attack was publicised as a great success for the Gregorian papacy, at this time in competition with Antipope Clement III. The attack also set a seal upon Pisa’s return from a pro-imperial to a pro-papal position. In publicising the victory, the poet expounded a highly developed discourse of holy war that, while representing his own party’s particular interests, is indicative of wider trends in the Mediterranean that developed over the course of the second half of the eleventh century, rather than appearing suddenly after 1095.
Quelle: http://ehr.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/short/131/552/983?rss=1
Father Confessors and Clerical Intervention in Witch-Trials in Seventeenth-Century Lutheran Germany: The Case of Rothenburg, 1692
In 1692 a woman named Barbara Ehness was awaiting execution for attempted murder by poison in the Lutheran imperial city of Rothenburg ob der Tauber. She requested spiritual solace, and three Lutheran clerics duly visited her in gaol. As a result of their intervention, Barbara was, at first, persuaded to admit she was a witch, and that she had attended witches’ gatherings where she had seen several other (named) Rothenburg inhabitants. However, Barbara soon retracted these denunciations, telling the city councillors that she had been forced into making them by one of the three clerics who had visited her in gaol, the territory’s chief ecclesiastical official, Church Superintendent Sebastian Kirchmeier. This article offers a close analysis and contextualisation of this richly detailed trial (which included a lengthy defence of his actions by Kirchmeier), exploring Kirchmeier’s motivations, why the councillors refused to follow his witch-hunting lead, and how the case fitted into the wider context of urban politics. The potentially abusive role of father confessors had already been identified by some seventeenth-century critics of witch-hunts (beginning with Friedrich Spee in 1631), but the confidentiality of the confessor–sinner relationship has usually meant that no record of it is left to us in specific cases. The exposure of Kirchmeier’s intervention in the Ehness trial thus gives us a unique insight into how one father confessor tried (and failed) to use his relationship with a prisoner to influence a trial outcome, and to start a witch-hunt, based on the denunciations of alleged sabbath-attenders whom he suggested to her.
Quelle: http://ehr.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/short/131/552/1010?rss=1
Pandoras Post Box: Empire and Information in India, 1854-1914
This essay examines the historical relationship between empire and information in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British Asia through a new examination of the imperial post. It argues that the creation of an Indian penny post in 1854 set in motion an information revolution which impacted regionally on literate and illiterate Indian subjects of the British Empire, on Indian publishers, and on colonial administrators. What historians have so far written about Britain’s imperial post has largely presented it as an instrument of modern colonial state-building. When it has merited attention as an engine of social communication it has been mistakenly judged an outright failure. But, as this essay argues, a study of the imperial post reveals Britain’s colonial state, within the wider context of a very illiberal British imperialism in Asia, trying to behave like a liberal one. While its desire for control and surveillance pulled it in one direction, Victorian notions of free trade, which in turn demanded an unrestricted circulation of information, pulled it in another. These contradictory impulses have largely been ignored in a literature more often focused on the authoritarian aspects of British rule after 1850; yet, as this study suggests, they are fundamental to comprehending both the history of the imperial post and the everyday foundations of Britain’s imperial authority in India.
Quelle: http://ehr.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/short/131/552/1043?rss=1
The Information Research Department, Unattributable Propaganda, and Northern Ireland, 1971-1973: Promising Salvation but Ending in Failure?
This article examines the role of the Information Research Department (IRD) in Northern Ireland during the first half of the 1970s. After discussing British conceptualisations of propaganda, it offers a detailed account of IRD activity, including how a Foreign Office department came to be involved in operations on British soil; how IRD propaganda fitted into the broader British state apparatus in Northern Ireland; the activity in which the IRD was engaged—both in Northern Ireland and beyond; and some of the challenges it faced, which ultimately limited the campaign’s effectiveness. It argues that the IRD’s role was driven by decisions taken at the very top of government and took shape against a context of financial cuts, a deteriorating security situation in Northern Ireland, and a tradition of domestic propaganda in the UK. The IRD sought to advance four key themes: exploiting divisions within the IRA; undermining the IRA’s credibility amongst the population; linking the IRA to international terrorism; and portraying the IRA as communist.
Quelle: http://ehr.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/short/131/552/1074?rss=1