bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Revising the Two Cultures Debate Science, Literature, and Value
Authors: Waugh Patricia
Published: November 2023

On 7 May 1959, C. P. Snow delivered the annual Rede lecture in Cambridge entitled ‘The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution’. Snow’s argument was that although the scientific revolution had opened up new and exciting possibilities for the social and techno logical transformation of post-war Britain, the nation continued to stagnate under the rule of a backward-looking and blinkered cultural elite, trained in the exegesis of classical and modern literature, para lysed by a cultural pessimism which refused to acknowledge the scientific concept of progress. Snow clearly saw his historical intervention as updating T. H. Huxley’s ‘Science and Culture’ which had been delivered as a response to Matthew Arnold’s own 1882 Rede lecture, ‘Literature and Science’. When Leavis offered his own out raged, if Arnoldian, response to Snow in the Richmond lecture of 1962, the replaying of the original controversy seemed complete.
The Aesthetic, the Cognitive, and the Ethical Criticism and Discursive Responsibility
Authors: Burke Sean
Published: November 2023

Literary criticism inevitably entertains a curious relationship to the object of its investigation. The practice of literary interpretation or formal reading exists in some indefinite region between the creative acts it studies and a philosophical discipline which has often been in quarrel with the idea of a truth discoverable in literature. Indeed, one might argue that the ethos of criticism is closer to philosophical analysis than to the creative and poetic acts which constitute its objects. Certainly, its attempts at disinterested analysis make its mode of being both adjacent to and yet incommensurable with the literary works which it studies. In this sense, criticism flourishes at an intersection between aesthetic, cognitive, and ethical ways of knowing. While its objects are aesthetic, literary criticism translates those objects according to a language of cognition rather than feeling; when justifying itself as a cultural practice, criticism’s strongest appeals are to the ethical significance of studying literature. Even advocates of pure aesthetic experience, when asked to justify their endeavours, will admit to an ethical mission in terms of the benefits to society of broadening access to such experience. Literary criticism proceeds from a variety of impulses which, while often hostile to one another, none the less betray ethical convictions.
Introduction: Is Dryden a Classic?
Authors: Hammond Paul
Published: November 2023

When H. A. Mason in r 962 asked Latinists the question, ‘Is Juvenal a Classic?’,’ he was challenging them to lift their eyes above the minutiae of philological and historical scholarship to address the large issues which affect human and humane living. Does Juvenal, he wondered, deserve a place amongst those writers who enlarge and refine our understanding of human nature and society? Is he a classic in the sense that Homer and Shakespeare are classics? Mr Mason’s question was framed by a humanism which he learned from long study of Greek and Latin literature, of Dante, of More and Erasmus, and of Shakespeare, Dryden, and Pope; and his pursuit of ‘the classic’ was repeatedly inflected by invocations of Matthew Arnold and Arnold’s search for the ‘central, truly human point of view’. Looking back now at Mason’s generation—the generation of Scrutiny, and in America the generation of men like Lionel Trilling and Walter Jackson Bate—I am tempted to say, as Dryden did of his predecessors, ‘Theirs was the Gyant Race, before the Flood’.
Dryden’S Milton and the Theatre of Imagination
Authors: Von Maltzahn Nicholas
Published: November 2023

Among the many satires deploring Dryden’s conversion to Rome, one of the more obscure describes him as hanging ‘(like Mecha’s tomb) I Twixt Malmsbury and Helicon’. If Dryden had been long thus suspended between Hobbesian and classicizing thought, his conversion in the mid-1680s must have brought him relif Unlike the satirist, we may view his choice of faith more sympathetically, as Dryden’s attempt to free himself from the pains this suspension had caused—pains we may see as almost existentialist, except that they were also shaded by the often punitive cast of seventeenth-century soteriology. In the mid-168os, then, Dryden had converted less from Protestantism to Catholicism, or from scepticism to fideism, than from an almost Hobbesian determinism to a more traditional Christian voluntarism. I am interested in the poetic consequences of the shift, with reference to his changing reaction to that epic of choice, Paradise Lost.
Constructing Classicism: Dryden And Purcell
Authors: Love Harold
Published: November 2023

So Pope in the ‘The first Epistle of the Second Book of Horace Imitated’ (II. 267 − 9), placing Dryden at a crucial point in the evolutionary narrative of English poetry — a point at which force marries with elegance of form in a way that constitutes the ‘classical’. Dryden had been complicit in the construction of an earlier version of this narrative, which saw the reign of Charles II identified as the Augustan age of English poetry — exhibiting the same refinement of cruder precedents as had been achieved by Virgil, Horace, and Ovid, while not yet overtaken by the restless striving for effect that afflicted their successors, Persius, Seneca, and Lucan. Later adjustments to this model were concerned with the exact chronological placing of the apex-whether, for instance, the truly Augustan reign might have been Anne’s rather than Charles’s. But there was a clear understanding that the writers of the Restoration stood closer to the summit than their Jacobean and Caroline predecessors and that this distinction resulted from a more faithful conformity to the practice of the best ancients.
Dryden, Tonson, And The Patrons Of The Works Of Virgil (1697)
Authors: Barnard John
Published: November 2023

The Works of Virgil published by Jacob Tonson in 1697 is a fascinating example of cultural production in the early modern period. It has attracted a good deal of recent interest among scholars. My starting-point is an article on authorship in the age of Milton and Dryden published in 1990 by Dustin Griffin, where he writes: In order to understand better what authorship meant in their era, how writers negotiated a balance among the claims of occasion, audience, patron, bookseller [i.e. publisher], immediate financial need, and longterm career — we need a better — a thicker — literary history. We need to acknowledge that in this period there was no simple and steady progress from a court-based to a marketplace-based literature.’
‘The Last Parting of Hector and Andromache’
Authors: Sowerby Robin
Published: November 2023

I must not forget, that Mr. Dryden has formerly translated this admirable Episode, and with so much Success, as to leave me at least no hopes of improving or equalling it. The utmost I can pretend is to have avoided a few modern Phrases and Deviations from the Original, which have escaped that great Man. Such was Pope‘s tribute (in the notes that he appended to his own translation) to ‘The Last Parting of Hector and Andromache‘, Dryden‘s version of an extract from Book VI of Homer‘s Iliad, published in Examen Poeticum in 1693. For a critical account of the beauties of the original which have made this episode one of the most famous in the whole of Homer Pope‘s own commentary can hardly be bettered, but to introduce Dryden‘s version it will perhaps be more fitting to suggest the appeal of the episode from two earlier testimonies.
Another Country: Aelfric and the Production of English Identity
Authors: Lavezzo Kathy
Published: November 2023

Legend has it that Pope Gregory the Great (540-604), while admiring some attractive English slave boys for sale at the Roman Forum, playfully foretold the Anglo-Saxons’ conversion to Christianity through a series of puns, the most famous of which is his claim that ‘rightly are [the slaves] called Angles, since they have the beauty of angels’.
‘Studying’ in the Middle Ages-and in Piers Plowman
Authors: Zeeman Nicolette
Published: November 2023

Srudie is hard. Views about studie in the late Middle Ages reflect complex late medieval attitudes and practices in relation to pedagogy and labour. Many texts observe that acquiring understanding involves suffering, practice, and hard work. The initiatory arts of ‘grammar’ and the education of the young are frequently defined in terms of ‘disciplinary’ chastisement. In his discussion of studiositas, Aquinas says that because human nature is lazy, ‘vehementia intentionis ad scientiam rerum percipiendam’ (‘eagerness in [acquiring knowledge about things]’) is required.
School and Scorn: Gender in Piers Plowman
Authors: III Ralph Hanna
Published: November 2023

I Hope here to clarify several rather inchoate suggestions I have scattered through some earlier writings about Piers Plowman. I will here expand upon bits of unsubstantiated argument I thought I could get away with in footnotes of earlier articles, for example: ‘As a hermit feminized by his reliance on a non-male/clerical conception of ordo’, I once said, ‘Will needs antifeminist discourse to reassert his resemblance to the male.’ I hope to unpack what I was thinking about thert”-or in another off-the-cuff footnote, where I called Piers Plowman ‘an extremely masculine poem’. And I hope to do so in a way that will perturb disciplinary boundaries once again: an argument not just theorized (my bow to the explicitly literary) but also historicized, packed with a certain variety of fourteenth- to sixteenth-century information.
Dirty Stories: Abjection in the Fabliaux
Authors: Griffin Miranda
Published: November 2023

Anna freud was reaching maturity and began to show an interest in her father’s work, so Freud gave her some of his writings to read. About a month later he asked her if she had any questions about what she had been reading. ‘Just one’, she replied, ‘what is a phallus?’ Being a man of science, Freud unbuttoned his pants and showed her. ‘Oh,’ Anna exclaimed, thus enlightened, ‘it’s like a penis, only smaller!’ —A Joke.1 The humour of Gallop’s joke, like that of many fabliaux, derives especially from the discrepancy between the attempt to construct a dignified, comprehensible body by naming it in language, and the way in which the body always defies such attempts.
Mythologies of Modernity
Authors: Parsons Deborah L
Published: November 2023

A not able feature of the differentiation of male and female modernism is the relative status of the fiâneur; a conceptual figure related to the characteristics of the modern artist, his modes of observation, and the public spaces he portrays. The term fiâneur was formally recognized at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Elizabeth Wilson notes a French pamphlet from 1806, detailing a day in the life of a fiâneur, M. Bon homme, in which the concept is already worked out along the themes that have been accepted as constituting the defining principles of the figure.1 The life of M. Bonhomme is characterized by freedom from financial/familial responsibility, by membership of the aesthetic circles of cafe life, by interest in the sartorial codes of society, by a fascination with womanhood but detachment from sexual relationships, and by a position of isolated marginality.
Science and Love
Authors: Richardson Angelique
Published: November 2023

Around the middle of the nineteenth century, love became less a question of social and scientific debate as the love-plot began to appeal as much to the biologist as to the novelist. In the Descent of Man, Darwin justified his new, and extensive, focus on sexual relations, citing Schopenhauer: ‘the final aim of all love intrigues, be they comic or tragic, is really of more importance than all other ends in human life . . . it is not the weal or woe of any one individual, but that of the human race to come, which is here at stake’. While the Origin of Species had overturned traditional values and beliefs, the Descent endorsed many, particularly in relation to the role of women in society.
Sarah Grand and Eugenic Love
Authors: Richardson Angelique
Published: November 2023

At Sarah Grand’s death in 1943 The Times remarked that her bestselling novel of 1893, The Heavenly Twins, ‘may be said to mark something of an epoch in English fiction . . . Sarah Grand and other writers of the school widened the field of English fiction by freeing it from some of its former limitations as to subject and treatment.’ One of the most widely read and talked about of late Victorian novelists, Sarah Grand was a committed exponent of biological determinism and eugenic feminism.
Sarah Grand, the Country, and the City
Authors: Richardson Angelique
Published: November 2023

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, a third of all workers were employed in agriculture; by the end, fewer than a tenth. With the transformation of Britain from an agrarian to an urban population over the course of the century, more than three-quarters of the population were classified as urban in the census of 1901, as compared to one-fifth in 1801. The theory of degeneration underpinning analyses of the urban poor came increasingly to focus on the division between country and city, bringing environmental and biological concerns together in the name of regeneration. The narrative of class opposition that underpinned eugenic thinking became overlaid with—and complicated by—this narrative of countryside versus town. These overlapping narratives inform the complex politics of Grand’s late novels. While they show a new support for country living, which seems to suggests an attachment to aristocracy, they also gesture towards socialism. However, as I shall show, the socialism that enters these novels is underpinned by eugenic ideas on health, and reveals the ideological complexity and deep-seated class hostility that continued to motivate eugenics in twentieth-century Britain.
Shakespeare and Modern Popular Culture
Authors: Lanier Douglas
Published: November 2023

Our notions of Shakespeare have been shaped partly by his diffuse presence in films, comics, television, popular novels, kitsch, and advertising. Through a series of case studies, Douglas Lanier examines how modern popular culture has appropriated and refashioned Shakespeare as a cultural icon.
The Genesis of a Public Sphere (1913–17)
Authors: Taylor Georgina
Published: November 2023

At the start of 1913 H.D. was virtually unknown in the public arena, but between 1913 and 1917, thirty-two of her poems appeared in some of the most significant little magazines of the time. Many were reprinted in collections such as the Imagist Anthologies, The New Poetry, and her 1916 collection, Sea Garden.
Expansion and Consolidation—New Experiments in the Public Sphere (1918–24)
Authors: Taylor Georgina
Published: November 2023

Between 1918 and 1924 the public sphere of modernist women writers underwent expansion, diversification, and consolidation. Whereas in its early years a few pioneers—largely H.D., Moore, Lowell, Sinclair, and Richardson—had attacked thematic and stylistic conventions adhered to by the majority of their contemporaries, they were now joined by many more women writers, together forming a diverse and broadly experimental group.
Incubation (1925–31)
Authors: Taylor Georgina
Published: November 2023

By 1925 there was a sense of a pause in the public exchange of ideas in this public sphere, replaced by a period of more private reflection and exploration. Though much work of individual merit was being written in this period, there was a loss of a sense of collective endeavour and sharing of ideas.
Responses to a World in Crisis (1932–46)
Authors: Taylor Georgina
Published: November 2023

Recent examinations of the literature of the 1930s have typically focused on a small group of almost exclusively male writers—W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Cecil Day Lewis, Louis MacNeice, and others in this group.2 Studies of the early 1940s have been less sure in their focus—critics have turned variously to the work of the older generation (Eliot’s Four Quartets), the ‘war poets’ (considered to be primarily men in the armed services),3 the now more mature and reflective ‘Auden Generation’ and their young male successors (including Roy Fuller and Julian Symons), or, finally the younger wave of more Romantic, contemplative writers including Dylan Thomas, and Sidney Keyes.4
Myths of Community in the Lyrical Ballads 1798-1998: The Commonwealth and the Constitution
Authors: Shaffer Elinor
Published: November 2023

The bicentenary of the publication of Lyrical Ballads has given us the opportunity to be struck again by the freshness, the urgency, and the significance for our own day of the momentous events and new thinking that touched these poems. The English Romantic movement is normally dated from the first publication of Lyrical Ballads with a few other Poems in I798, the collaborative work of the two leading poets of the older generation, Coleridge and Wordsworth.
Theorizing Golgotha: Coleridge, Race Theory, and the Skull Beneath the Skin
Authors: Fulford Tim
Published: November 2023

In 1828 Coleridge was speculating on human races, distinguishing between them and suggesting that the Caucasian was, alone at present, aspiring to the condition of the historic race: ‘in the idea of the Historic Race we have presented a Vision of Glory-the very ... fact that its realization is the final cause of our existence in this world cannot but wonderfully raise and ennoble our nature & the Race to which we belong in our own eyes-and the eye of Reason’ (SWF, ii. 1405-6).
Spenser’s Monstrous Regiment
Authors: McCabe Richard A
Published: November 2023

Spenser's Monstrous Regiment examines the works of Edmund Spenser within the dual, but interactive, contexts of imperial aspiration and female 'regiment' to provide a reinterpretation of The Faerie Queene as a (frustrated) colonial romance more akin to Camões' Os Lusíadas in its political and racial outlook than to the heroic verse of Ariosto or Tasso. It is the first study to contextualise Spenser's polemical response to the Irish colonial situation by reference to contemporary Gaelic literature, and particularly Bardic Poetry. The dialectical format of A View of the Present State of Ireland operates to exclude the Gaelic voice from participation in the Irish political debate, and contemporary criticism unwittingly participates in the exclusion through its concentration upon colonial tracts written by English politicians and planters. The present study constitutes a sustained attempt to reverse this tendency and thereby provide a new perspective for the understanding of his work. The enterprise is all the more significant to colonial studies in general in that Spenser virtually invented the techniques of interpretation, and denigration, that remained prevalent in colonial discourse for over two centuries. At the same time, the experience of writing from Ireland intensified Spenser's sense of alienation from female sovereignty and progressively displaced Virgilian with Ovidian perspectives as the would-be laureate became the critic in exile. The queen's apparent frustration of the colonial and expansionist aspirations of Grey, Leicester, and Ralegh led to the remarkable fusion of colonial and sexual anxieties manifest in Spenser's pervasive images of anti-heroic emasculation. Richard McCabe argues that structural incoherence of The Faerie Queene is directly related to the perceived absence of male 'regiment', of 'mans well ruling hand' (5. 5. 25). The prospect of miscegenation, and the generation of racially hybrid offspring amongst the planter community, intensified the dilemma by challenging Spenser's notions of national identity. His creation of an 'English' myth of origin coincided uneasily with the attempted discrediting of its Gaelic counterpart, as formulated, for example, in the Lebor Gábala Érenn. A View is therefore drawn to concede the fictive nature of the myth of origin upon which The Faerie Queene relies but without recognising, or admitting, the logical implications of this concession. If Spenser's 'faerie' race is intended to function as a metaphor for the successful assimilation of Briton, Saxon, Angle and Norman into a unified 'English' people, the opposite process of cultural assimilation operative in Ireland (regarded by Spenser as a process of racial degeneration) challenges the validity of that metaphor and the integrity of all political 'myth'.
Spenser and the Rival Poets
Authors: McCabe Richard A
Published: November 2023

Of the seventeen dedicatory sonnets that preface the first edition of The Faerie Queene, this is the only one addressed to an ‘Irish’ aristocrat. I use the term ‘Irish’ with considerable circumspection, however. Ormond was not Gaelic Irish but Old English, what the Irish termed ‘Sean-Ghall’ or ‘Old Foreigner’. The Butlers had been established in Ireland since the twelfth century and were commonly reputed by New English commentators to be amongst the least ‘Gaelicized’ of the surviving Old English families. Black Thomas (or Tomas Dubh), as he was known to his contemporaries, was the first of the Butlers of Ormond to be professedly Protestant and, as the queen’s kinsman, exercised considerable influence at court.
‘In Contrayez Straunge: Colonial Relations, British Identity, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Authors: Ingham Patricia Clare
Published: November 2023

Empires need to tell the stories of their past. Those imperial representations-whether told in popular or scholarly versions, by way of folktale or with the apparent sobriety of national history-constitute what the postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha calls a nation’s ‘regime of truth’, offering a ‘fantasy of origin and identity’ that none the less demands an ‘otherness’ at its heart. In foregrounding the representational quality of empire-building, Bhabha points to a complicity between textuality and colonial rule as historiographic or literary regimes of apparent ‘truth’ authorize, imagine, and justify political, social, and economic regimes of apparent ‘order’. And when he points to ‘otherness’ as constitutive of national narratives, Bhabha cautions modern scholars against a nai”ve reception of the definitions of cultural identity that we are taught to claim.
Prophetic Nations
Authors: Nissé Ruth
Published: November 2023

In Book N of the autograph manuscript of the otherwise patriotic monastic chronicle Eulogium Historiarum, the narrative of British geography and the different ‘nations’ of Britain is interrupted by the insertion of two quires—in the author’s hand—containing Jean de Roquetaillade’s popular and vehemently pro-Valois apocalyptic tract, Vade mecum in tribulatione. This is a rare case of textual crisis akin to the sudden wail of an emergency warning signal drowning out the evening news: the voice of the Malmesbury chronicler writing in the early 1360s gives way to the prophet who has scheduled the advent and rule of Antichrist, followed by the beginning of a ‘third age’ of spiritual renewal just then, between 1360 and 1370. The account of British national legitimacy that the chronicler nevertheless continues to pen in Book V takes on new meanings in light of this End of History in the middle of his work.
Introduction
Authors: Trotter David
Published: November 2023

This book grew out of, or got left over from, a previous study of the idea of mess in nineteenth-century art and fiction. The main emphasis of that study is on the relation between mess and chance: messes tend to happen by accident, and the representation of mess in art and fiction can be a way to think about chance, about the part chance plays in our lives. Mess is contingency’s signature; mess is what contingency’s signature would look like, if contingency had a signature. Contingency, the dictionaries tell us, can be regarded either as a freedom or as a vulnerability. It is the condition of pure escape, of the absence of predetermining necessity; and it is the condition of being subject to chance and change, at the mercy of accident. Either way, it leaves little room for the meaning and value our habits of mind (religious, philosophical, ideological, literary) have often led us to expect from the world.
Paranoia, Psychoanalysis, and Cultural Theory
Authors: Trotter David
Published: November 2023

It could bf said of ‘paranoia’, though not of ‘dementia praecox’, that it was the point of intersection between developments in descriptive psychopathology and developments in the psycho dynamic understanding of mental illness which had preceded Freud, but which he and his followers were to put into elaborate and authoritative order. Kraepelin himself, as we have seen, argued in his later work that paranoia was a psychogenic disorder, like hysteria. Freud for the most part avoided discussion of the psychoses, which he thought inaccessible to his methods; but he did regard the unmistakably paranoid (or paranoid-schizophrenic) Daniel Paul Schreber as a suitable case, if not for treatment, then at least for intensive analysis. Freud’s psychodynamic understanding of the mind as a site of conflict produced a new slant on paranoia. It drew attention to features of paranoid personality which descriptive psychopathology had tended to ignore or downplay: notably, I shall argue, the nausea which in some cases either inaugurates delusion, or intervenes whenever its ability to make sense of the world comes under threat; and the end-of-the-world fantasies which figure the destrnctiveness of the mania disgust articulates.
Veteran Poetry Combat Experience—The Actuality and the Need to Bear Witness
Authors: Chattarji Subarno
Published: November 2023

Combat training, even in the elite Marine Corps, did not (could not?) prepare soldiers for the reality of death, and initial poetic responses dwelt on the fact in minute detail. The close proximity to arbitrary and immediate annihilation or grave injury heightened one’s sense of mortality and, according to some veterans, provided an adrenalin rush and excitement, that made life after war seem pallid and boring. William Broyles Jr. served as a Marine in 1969 and 1970, and his article, ‘Why Men Love War’, attempts to explain its allure:

Part of the love of war stems from its being an experience of great intensity; its lure is the fundamental human passion to witness, to see things, what the Bible calls the lust of the eye and the Marines in Vietnam called eye fucking. War stops time, intensifies experience to the point of a terrible ecstasy⃛if you come back whole you bring with you the knowledge that you have explored regions of your soul that in most men will remain uncharted.
Veteran Poetry The Aftermath
Authors: Chattarji Subarno
Published: November 2023

The transition from Vietnam to America, from ‘in country’ to ‘the World’ was a swift, often bizarre and almost incomprehensible process for many veterans. In thirty-six hours they were transported from the immediacy of war to the sometimes hostile, but mostly pleasant and placid environment of ‘home’. The most common response to returning veterans was a stolid, uncomprehending silence: an absolute refusal to know. This, combined with the hostility of anti-war protesters, contributed to the veterans’ sense of alienation. Just as the war had betrayed stereotyped expectations, so did the homecoming.
The ‘Other’ Vietnamese Poetic Representations
Authors: Chattarji Subarno
Published: November 2023

A study of Vietnamese poems in translation poses problems which I discuss later in the chapter. At this juncture two preliminary points are worth mentioning. The first is the rhetoric of war that is an uncanny parallel of absolutist US policy statements. Nguyen Huu The, presenting the National Liberation Front point of view, stated: ‘Today, in spite of all kinds of double talk about “peace” and “negotiation”, they [the US] have appeared under their true colors as the most cruel and bloodthirsty aggressive colonialist devil.’ General Tran Van Tra said of the larger political rationale behind the Tet Offensive in 1968: ‘Ours was a just war against foreign aggression and a traitorous puppet regime, against brutality and injustice, for national independence and freedom, and for human dignity. The war was thus in tune with the conscience of our time.’ Both statements present true aspects of the conflict in that it was a war of independence for many Vietnamese, and that American attempts at negotiating peace were half-hearted at best.
Introduction
Authors: Houen Alex
Published: November 2023

Words, fictionalization, plays ‘1th meaning these are the last things that most people associated with the impact of the terrorist attacks in America on 11 September 20(H. It was a day in which terrorism exploded into a sheer ‘lscerality of fact: four planes hijacked by Is laic extremists had crashed into the World Trade Center, the Pen tango, and a field in Pennsylvania within a few hours of each other. Short1y after, both towers of the World trade Center collapsed. The total casualties were immediately in the thousands; the world was suddenly being confronted with the most devastating act of terrorism in history. Television footage of the aftermath made the devastation all too apparent; images of the Trade Center towers collapsing, and of shocked and bloodied casualties, said it all.
The Contours of Republicanism: William Mcllvanney and the Geography of Difference
Authors: Ryan Ray
Published: November 2023

Throughout William Mcilvanney’s work, there is a commitment to the idea of an indigenous Scottish humanism rooted in the industrial, urban experience of the west-central working class. This conflation of geography and justice, space and history, the cultural specificity of Scotland and the universality of civic humanism, is developed in Surviving the Shipwreck, a collection of essays written between 1974 and 1990
Introduction
Authors: Golding Brian
Published: November 2023

The hundred years between c.1050 and c.1150 witnessed a religious excitement in the West unparalleled since the era of the Early Church. It saw the emergence of a self-confident papacy that bore many of the attributes of a secular monarchy, and which was primarily responsible for the militant reconquest (however short-lived) of regions that had been subject to Islam for generations and the extension of Christianity further into Scandinavia and north-eastern Europe. At a local level, the develop¬ ment of the parochial system and a parochial clergy consolidated belief amongst the laity, though at the same time some were drawn towards heresy, now perceived as a real threat to the Church as it had not been for centuries. This was also a period of extraordinary intellectual enquiry that produced some of the most remarkable scholars, theologians, and philosophers of the Middle Ages: men such as Anselm, Abelard, or Hugh of St Victor. To cater for the new demand for learning that was generated both within the Church and from increasingly bureaucratized secular governments, new institutions, particularly the universities, were to emerge. But not all were attracted by public clerical careers; many looked to lives of greater solitude and contemplation. Monasticism had been a feature of the Church since earliest times, but never before had there been so many and so diverse opportunities in the religious life. Long-established Bendictine monasteries like Cluny or Winchester flourished; others sought the more ascetic life of the ‘new’ orders that sprang up all over western Europe, of which the Cistercians were only the most widespread and successful expression, while yet others lived apart from the world as anchorites and anchoresses, now a familiar feature of the settled and unsettled landscape.
The Making of a Saint
Authors: Golding Brian
Published: November 2023

The Vita of Gilbert of Sempringham, often styled the Liber Sancti Gilberti, is by far the most important surviving source both for the life of the founder and for the early history of the communities. It is also unquestionably one of the most illuminating documents for the history of monasticism in twelfth-century England: it ranks with the life of Christina of Markyate as a spiritual biography, while being at the same time a major source for the understanding of the dynamics of monastic reform.’ The Vita was written shortly after the translation of the newly canonized Gilbert’s relics on 13 October 1202. The author, who was almost certainly Ralph de Insula, sacrist of Sempringham and one of the envoys to Rome during Gilbert’s canonization process, dedicated it to archbishop Hubert Walter of Canterbury. It was prepared at the request of Roger, Gilbert’s successor as Master of the order, and of Albinus, chaplain and close friend of the saint. An earlier, shorter version of the Life was taken to Rome to further the canonization campaign: the final expanded version was undertaken on the commission of the archbishop and corrected by William de Montibus, chancellor of Lincoln.
The Life Within
Authors: Golding Brian
Published: November 2023

There could be no closer tie between benefactor and priory than the placing of one or more members of the grantor’s family as a nun or canon, or the reception of the grantor him- or herself as a member of the religious community. Men and women entered the priories for a number of reasons. As the customary of the Augustinian canons of Springiersbach put it: ‘some come from monasteries of our own order, nearby or distant, either as deserters of their place and profession or in order to follow the canonical way of life more strictly. Some come from communities of monks; these have neither been oblated by their kin nor as yet professed as monks, but have left during their novitiate. Some are secular clerks. Some are laymen, and these are of two kinds; some of them are young, and because of their age and intelligence are suitable for instruction in letters and promotion to clerical status, while others, older and of duller understanding, emulate the canonical life while retaining their lay status and, being placed under a Rule, are governed by a discipline appropriate for them.’ A nunnery was ‘a career, a vocation, a prison, a refuge: to its different inmates the medieval nunnery was all of these things’. Gilbertine nunneries were no exception. We can hardly ever explain, however, why recruits chose the Gilbertine alternative. Charters never record specific motives, and it can only be assumed that in the majority of cases the Gilbertines drew their nuns and canons from local families which had already developed ties with the house. One of Gilbert’s miracle stories provides one possible explanation for a canon’s entry into the community.
Gilbertine Foundations
Authors: Golding Brian
Published: November 2023

By the time of his death in 1189 Gilbert had founded nine double houses and four for canons only. The former included all the double communities except Shouldham; the small house of Tunstall had already failed. The four single houses are hard to identify with certainty, but were probably St Katherine’s, Lincoln, Malton, Newstead, and Mattersey. By the Dissolution there was a total of twenty-three Gilbertine houses, ten of them double communities. At least six more, three of them in England, one each in Scotland and Normandy, and another at Rome, had a more ephemeral life and survived for no more than a few years.
Patterns of Endowment
Authors: Golding Brian
Published: November 2023

The mid-twelfth century was the high-water mark of monastic foundations in England. Thereafter the tide of benefactions receded. In part this was due to changing fashions of pious giving, in part to the fact that there was a decreasing amount of land available for distribution to the religious. The majority of the Gilbertine houses, founded as they were between 1148 and 1160, operated in a world where there was an increasing scramble for endowments, where investment in the land market was essential for expansion, and sometimes for survival, and where competition between the religious was now regulated by formal agreement.
The Gilbertines and their Churches
Authors: Golding Brian
Published: November 2023

When Gilbert returned from his studies in France his father presented him to his two demesne churches of Sempringham and West Torrington. In spite of his reluctance, Gilbert agreed to receive them ‘in order that his father’s rights in them might be preserved’. A few years later Gilbert used the income from these churches to support his first community of anchoresses, and it is likely that these revenues continued to provide the greater part of their income until c.1150. Since the mid-eleventh century the church-owning laity of western Europe had been disposing of their spiritual possessions to more acceptable proprietors, chiefly monks, and by 1150 a ‘flood of donations’ of parish churches to religious orders was already well under way. The reasons for this transfer of rights, unparalleled in England (or western Europe) until the sixteenth century, have been much discussed and there is no necessity to examine this issue in detail here. The motives for lay donation of churches were mixed, owing something to the growing disapproval of the laity’s ownership of tithes and their ius proprietatis in churches, a right which was now being reduced to one of patronatus, and something to the fact that a lay proprietor probably received relatively little financial benefit from ownership of a church when compared with that enjoyed by a religious owner. Since the laity could no longer be granted any spiritual possessions nor enjoy the temporal benefits of tithes, it made more sense to give or, perhaps as likely, sell their churches, and gain spiritual rewards for their benefactions. Pressures on the laity to ‘disinvest’ in churches were considerable: the chief beneficiaries were the religious.
Liberal Politics, 1886–1892
Authors: Shepherd John
Published: November 2023

In 1886 the opening of the Emigrants’ Information Office by the government, after the successful emigration conference in London, demonstrated George Lansbury’s notable political expertise. This soon attracted the attention of the local Liberal party bosses. Samuel Montagu (later Baron Swaythling), Liberal MP for Whitechapel, who was at the emigration conference to observe Lansbury’s political credentials at first hand, saw an important representative of the working class who could be usefully recruited to the Liberal fold. On leaving the King’s College conference he told him, ‘You must let me get you into the House of Commons. You are just the sort of man we want there.’
The People’s Guardian, 1893–1914
Authors: Shepherd John
Published: November 2023

‘Abandon hope all ye who enter here’ was George Lansbury’s verdict as a newly elected guardian after his first memorable visit to the workhouse in Poplar High Street in 1893 revealed its formidable Bastille-like environment. Sick and aged, mentally deficient, lunatics, babies and children, as well as the able-bodied and vagrants, were all crowded together in the single institution which was the hated symbol of the Victorian poor law. Throughout his life Lansbury was more popularly linked with the battle to end working-class poverty, destitution, and un employment than any other cause. By 1929, when the local authorities assumed responsibility for poor law administration, no one was more identified than Lans bury with the various crusades to reform and ultimately abolish the horrors of the Victorian system, which had cast a long shadow over social provision during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
At Westminster, 1911–1912
Authors: Shepherd John
Published: November 2023

In 1911 George Lansbury entered Parliament as the member for Bow and Bromley during the political crisis in the Edwardian state caused by a series of major domestic conflicts in the immediate pre-war years. The Liberal government faced wide spread unrest in the trade union and labour movement, with major large-scale strikes and disturbances, and a serious threat of civil war over the crisis in IB ster. From 1909 the rejection at Westminster of the ‘People’s Budget’ produced a constitutional impasse in the House of Lords over the passage of the Parliament Bill. Out side Parliament, the WSPU, led by Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst, escalated the militant women’s campaign for the parliamentary franchise by the use of civil disobedience and arson.
By-Election and Prison, 1912–1913
Authors: Shepherd John
Published: November 2023

On 11 Novemben912 The Times reported that two days previously George Lansbury MP had crossed the English Channel to Boulogne with the suffragette leader, Emmeline Pankhurst, to confer with her daughter, Christabel, hiding from the English police at the Parisian Hotel Cite Bergere as ‘Miss Amy Richards’. A few days later, Lansbury dramatically resigned his parliamentary seat to force a by election at Bow and Bromley over ‘Votes for Women’. According to Raymond Postgate, the Pankhursts, who led the militant WSPU, had persuaded the Labour MP and champion of the East End working class that by taking this course of action he would strike a brilliant publicity coup for the women’s cause.
Daily Herald, 1911–1914
Authors: Shepherd John
Published: November 2023

On 14 April 1912 at 10.25 p.m. New York time, the 46,382 ton flagship of the White Star line on her maiden voyage from Southampton to New York collided with an iceberg in mid-Atlantic at or near latitude 41 46., longitude 50 14., North Atlantic Ocean, and early on the following morning foundered with the loss of over 1,300 passengers and crew. The sinking of RMS Titanic, one of the greatest maritime disasters of the twentieth century, occurred on the very day that a new Daily Herald was published in Britain.
The Great War Years, 1914–1919
Authors: Shepherd John
Published: November 2023

On 5 August 1914 the Daily Herald carried a short and utterly bleak headline on its front page: ‘ENGLAND AND GERMANY AT WAR’. Underneath it was the official government statement: ‘His Majesty’s Ambassador to Berlin has received his passports, and His Majesty’s Government declared to the German Government that a state of war exists between Great Britain and Germany as from 11 p.m. on August 4th’.
‘Poplarism’, 1921–1928
Authors: Shepherd John
Published: November 2023

On 29 July 1921, preceded by a drum-and-fife band, George Lansbury and twenty nine Labour councillors-including Charlie Sumner, the deputy mayor, with mace bearer-headed a procession of over two thousand supporters the five miles from Poplar town hall to the Law Courts. Among the various banners, carried to explain their case to thousands of spectators lining the route, the largest one on that historic march proclaimed proudly and in defiance: ‘POPLAR BOROUGH COUNCIL, MARCH ING TO THE HIGH COURT, AND POSSIBLY TO PRISON, TO SECURE THE EQUALISATION OF RATES FOR POOR BOROUGHS’.
First Labour Government, 1924
Authors: Shepherd John
Published: November 2023

On 22 January 1924 King George V made a famous observation in his diary on the first occasion he asked Ramsay MacDonald to form a government: ‘Today 23 years ago dear Grandmama died. I wonder what she would have thought of a Labour Government!’ His note reflected the panic and despondency in governing circles in this country in 1924 at the prospect of a Socialist administration full of revolution aries led by a Prime Minister who had never held even junior ministerial office. Cautiously, MacDonald chose moderate Labour politicians and trade unionists in assembling his first Cabinet, including as well some former Liberals and Conservative peers. However, there was no place in the first Labour Cabinet in Britain for George Lansbury, the most prominent representative of the political Left in 1924.
Backbench Rebel, 1925–1927
Authors: Shepherd John
Published: November 2023

On Saturday 1 May 1926 over 800 delegates, representing more than 140 unions, gathered at a Special Conference of Trade Union Executives at the Memorial Hall in London. On that celebrated May Day they voted overwhelmingly by 3,653,529 to 49,911 to empower the TUC to call a national shut-down if the coal owners’ lock-out of almost 1 million British miners did not end within two days. On 3 May, the General Strike of 1926-the most famous industrial conflict in twentieth-century Britain-started at one minute to midnight. Over 1.5 million ‘first-line’ workers in transport, printing, iron and steel, power, building, and chemicals answered the TUC General Council’s summons to halt work.
Party Leader: Domestic Politics, 1931–1933
Authors: Shepherd John
Published: November 2023

The general election of 1931 was the greatest electoral landslide in twentieth-century political history and by far Labour’s greatest defeat. The National government secured 67 per cent of the poll and a gargantuan total of 554 out of 615 seats. Only a rump of forty-six Labour MPs remained to survey the parliamentary scene. To cap ture the dramatic election result, two people were photographed scaling a pair of colossal ladders outside the main office of a daily newspaper. The National government figure had virtually disappeared from sight high in the sky while his Labour opponent was barely off the first rung.
Pacifism, 1935–1940
Authors: Shepherd John
Published: November 2023

Following his resignation as Labour leader after the Brighton party conference, George Lansbury was convinced that his association with the Labour party was over and that he would never hold any kind of office in the national organization again. Financially, he was in desperate straits and needed his son, Bill, to help clear up his election expenses with a temporary loan of £100. ‘I can’t ask the party for money. I am really finished with them. Most of the men and women at the centre have never accepted me as leader and have just used my influence with the masses for their own ends,’ he claimed bitterly to his son. Deserted by faithful followers at Brighton, Lansbury was scathing and contemptuous about ‘the loyalty of that little band’ of friends and supporters who in the end had ‘fallen in with the top dogs’, as well as those who opposed him in the leadership crisis.
Home and Family, 1881–1940
Authors: Shepherd John
Published: November 2023

The important part played in the public careers of prominent politicians by their families is often given little attention by historians, unless perhaps close scrutiny reveals scandal or similar indiscretion. Even then, it is the public figure that pre dominates, rather than the private life of the subject. In many memoirs and biographies, the male politician’s wife and family remain ‘hidden from history’. Rarely are the women forward and centre-stage.
George Lansbury’s Legacies
Authors: Shepherd John
Published: November 2023

After George Lansbury’s death, tributes world wide poured in-letters, telegrams, and messages-so numerous it was impossible for his family to acknowledge them individually. At Westminster, the debate on the Nazi invasion of Norway was interrupted for Neville Chamberlain, in one of his last acts as Prime Minister, to pay an official tribute to Lansbury’s contribution to parliamentary life-particularly his leadership of HM Opposition in 1931-5. Clem Attlee followed with the perfect accolade: ‘He was a great Londoner and a great Englishman and a Socialist who practised and preached the brotherhood of man. He was a sincere and devoted Christian who strove to follow in the footsteps of his Master.’
Gentlemen And Tarpaulins
Authors: Davies J D
Published: November 2023

This is the first scholarly study of the Royal Navy during the reigns of Charles II and James II. Historians have long viewed the Restoration Navy through the eyes of Samuel Pepys, the greatest diarist and naval administrator of the age. Perceptive and intelligent as Pepys was, he presented only a one-sided view of the Navy, that of a bureaucrat attempting to reorganize it. J. D. Davies assesses this traditional picture of the Restoration Navy in the light of recent scholarship, using the evidence not only of Pepys but of his contemporaries. He examines the reactions of naval personnel to the demands imposed by Pepys, and analyses the structure of the service. He also explores the lives and attitudes of the men (the `tarpaulins') and their officers - the quests for promotion, enrichment, and glory; the very different problems posed by peace and war; the nature of life at sea; and the role of the Navy in national life. Gentlemen and Tarpaulins provides a fascinating glimpse into the history of the Royal Navy.