bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Neurocognitive Developmental Changes in Trust and Reciprocity Across Adolescence
Authors: Burke Sarah M. , van de Groep Suzanne , Brandner Philip , Crone Eveline A.
Published: October 2020

One of the most prominent changes in adolescence concerns the way adolescents experience and develop social relationships. Two processes that are highly important for developing secure and intimate social relationships are trust and reciprocity. Trust helps individuals to develop social relationships, whereas reciprocity is crucial for maintaining social relationships. This chapter investigates the development of trust and reciprocity from a behavioral and neuroscience perspective. In the first section, the authors show that economic games that manipulate trust and reciprocity conditions can be informative for understanding motivations for trusting others, including the developmental changes in these processes. Next, the authors describe neuroimaging studies that examined trust and reciprocity in adults and adolescents. Special emphasis is given to possible individual differences relating to gender, perspective taking skills, and social context, factors that all may influence trust and reciprocity behavior. Finally, the chapter will end with several compelling questions that are important for relating lab-based experimental designs and neuroscientific studies to understanding trust and reciprocity in the complexity of adolescents’ daily lives.
Borderline personality disorder in development
Authors: Sicorello Maurizio , Schmahl Christian
Published: October 2020

Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is a severe mental disorder that affects around 3 percent of the world’s population. It has a substantial genetic heritability and precursors often already manifest during childhood. Understanding the developmental neurobiology of BPD therefore becomes a key element to identify early signs, promote theoretical models, and inform treatment. Even though developmental and neurobiological research on BPD has grown over the past decades, these two branches are yet to team up. This chapter synthesizes evidence on the neurobiology and developmental psychopathology of BPD with knowledge on normative neurodevelopment to lay a foundation for this endeavor. It briefly reviews the biosocial developmental model of BPD to then identify potential biomarkers and age-related changes for the most central symptoms: impulsivity, emotion dysregulation, and interpersonal problems.
The effects of socioeconomic adversity on the development of brain systems for attention and self-regulation
Authors: Stevens Courtney , Pakulak Eric
Published: October 2020

This chapter reviews research identifying brain systems that are sensitive to early socioeconomic adversity, as well as the key pathways linking aspects of early adversity to alterations in neural function. The research suggests that the structure and function of an integrated network underlying self-regulation and attention—including the prefrontal cortex (PFC), amygdala, and hippocampus—is particularly sensitive to early socioeconomic adversity. Drawing on both experimental data from animal models and correlational evidence from humans, alterations in these systems are linked to chronic stress associated with early adversity as well as differences in supportive caregiving in response to environmental stressors. This research highlights a specific set of malleable pathways amenable to family-based intervention that link early adversity to brain development. In this respect, neuroplasticity is framed as incorporating both sensitivity in the face of adverse experiences as well as resilience through buffering and adaptive change.
Lutheranism
Authors: Stjerna Kirsi
Published: October 2020

Christmas for Lutherans is a celebration of light and the birth of Jesus, the son of Mary. A mixture of medieval practices, pre-Christian customs, and ethnic preferences, the Lutheran Christmas includes festivals of lights, Christmas trees and hymns, ethnic foods, and liturgical services that rhythm the twelve days of the season. Christmas proclamation addresses the revelation of the good news for humanity found in the infant Jesus in the arms of his mother, Mary. The miracle of God’s Incarnation is interpreted in light of the cross and humanity’s needs for redemption and divine compassion. The humility of Christ’s birth is understood as an invitation to Christian life oriented with that compassion. The tradition of exchanging gifts at Christmas has a theological foundation in the gift of life given to humanity in Christ, and the invitation it extends to follow a Christian way of life with concern for the well-being of one’s neighbour. The sixteenth-century German reformer Martin Luther shaped many of the traditions that characterize Lutheran Christmases around the world theologically and liturgically. They also have some cultural customs with roots in Northern European climates. Musically, Luther also left a strong legacy in Christmas hymns, and Johann Sebastian Bach brought the Lutheran Christmas theology to church and homes beyond denominational and cultural borders.
The Dating of Christmas
Authors: Bradshaw Paul F.
Published: October 2020

The origins of Christmas lie in an Egyptian festival on 6 January, which spread to much of the Christian world as a celebration of the birth and/or baptism of Christ and known as the Epiphany or Theophany. The church at Rome did not adopt this festival but later instituted a celebration of the Nativity of Christ on 25 December, which gradually supplanted its observance on 6 January in other churches, leaving this latter occasion as a commemoration of Christ’s baptism alone, or of the visit of the Magi in those churches like Rome that had not observed that date previously. This essay traces that evolution and examines the merits of the two competing scholarly theories that have sought to explain the original choice of these particular dates.
Trees and Decorations
Authors: Bertaina David
Published: October 2020

This chapter explains how trees and their decorations became a symbol for the celebration of Christmas, as well as the historical processes and contemporary aspects that have made it an indispensable part of the religious feast and civil culture. Christmas trees and decorations have their roots in German culture, spread globally over the course of the nineteenth century and have become one of the most recognizable Christmas symbols. The Christmas tree is part of a body of traditions that were shaped by numerous factors, including guilds, liturgical and public celebrations, domesticity, child rearing, industrialization, commercialization, consumer capitalism, law, and ecology. By tracing how trees are procured, decorated, and displayed, this chapter explains how the tree represents the religious, moral, familial, and national identities of peoples across the globe.
Gifts and Charity
Authors: Litwicki Ellen M.
Published: October 2020

The period between the late eighteenth and the early twentieth century saw the domestication of Christmas, and this chapter considers its impact on Christmas giving. It focuses primarily on this period in the United States, with some consideration of British and German developments. Drawing on the influential works of Charles Dickens and Ralph Waldo Emerson on Christmas charity and gifts, respectively, as well as the gift practices of Ellen Tucker Emerson, it argues that domestication redefined Christmas giving, enmeshing it in both the family and the marketplace (with the emergent Santa Claus bridging the gap), and rationalized charity towards institutionalized forms. With regional variations, the emerging middle class in the United States and Europe created new gift traditions centred on family, domesticity, and the duty of charity to the worthy poor. Although they have faced valid critiques, the forms of charitable and personal giving created by the bourgeoisie in the industrial age seem to have staying power, as shown by their continuing ability to deflect criticism and adapt to changing times, as well as their resonance with each new generation’s conceptions of family and home.
Children and Childhood
Authors: Bunge Marcia J.
Published: October 2020

Even though children play a central role in Christmas traditions worldwide and have been members of Christian communities since the early Church, little scholarly attention has been paid to the vast and varied interconnections between children and Christmas. This chapter examines this theme by: 1) focusing on children’s active participation and, at times, central role in Christmas traditions, such as Advent rituals in the home and Nativity plays in the congregation; 2) exploring traditions in which both children and adults seek to address the urgent needs of children locally and around the world; and 3) highlighting ways in which Christians past and present have sought to attend to the spiritual formation of children and the meaning of Christmas amidst various obstacles and distractions. By exploring these three lines of inquiry and offering examples from world Christianity, including Ethiopian Orthodox traditions, the chapter demonstrates the central yet often neglected role of children in Christmas traditions and highlights the need for further research into the intimate connections between children and many other religious traditions.
Carols and Music Since 1900
Authors: Decker Todd
Published: October 2020

This chapter defines and describes a core repertory of seventy-five Christmas songs that have been frequently recorded for popular consumption in the United States since 1900. Song titles in the repertory enjoy an enduring presence on the Billboard charts and on twenty-first-century streaming platforms. While traditional Christian carols from before 1900 survive in this repertory, secular popular songs introduced between 1942 and 1965 dominate. Christmas narratives, whether religious (birth of Jesus) or secular (arrival of Santa Claus; holiday celebrations set in cold weather), provide consistent points of reference for carol and song lyrics respectively. In some cases, Christmas songs have added new characters (Frosty the Snowman; the Little Drummer Boy) to a season centred on stories. Popular Christmas songs also explore the varied temporal nature of this holiday as event, season, and annual recurrence.
Paintings
Authors: von Barghahn Barbara
Published: October 2020

The historical Christmas story begins with the Incarnation of Christ in Nazareth and concludes with the return of the Holy Family to Galilee. This chapter focuses upon twelve select paintings from the Renaissance to the Baroque period which illustrate the events recorded in Gospel and Apocryphal narrative accounts. Included in the iconographical analysis of art is a consideration of the ‘journey’ theme, which runs as a refrain through Jesus’s life. So many individuals travel home during the Yuletide season to be with family and friends. It is worthwhile during such a joyful time of the year to recollect the itinerary taken centuries ago by the Christ Child, Mary, and Joseph from their homeland and back.
Fiction
Authors: McKnight Natalie
Published: October 2020

The most lasting Christmas fiction tends to use Christmas as a setting not as the main subject and to draw from the warmth and sensory onslaught of the holidays and on friends and families gathering, not on the specific religious origins of the holiday. Yet religious themes persist in Christmas fiction right up to the present day, even when the stories take place in fantasy worlds, such as in J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter stories and C. S. Lewis’ Narnia. This chapter is not comprehensive in its coverage but instead focuses on those works that seem to have had the greatest cultural impact, including those of Washington Irving, Charles Dickens, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Hans Christian Andersen, and Louisa May Alcott.
Film and Television
Authors: Connelly Mark
Published: October 2020

The global phenomenon that Christmas has become has been inspired by the twin forces of commercialism and its ubiquitous visual image through film and television, encapsulated by the Hallmark Channel. Although much of the imagery has foregrounded spiritual values over materialist consumerism, cinema and television have done much to promote the season as one of lavish consumption. From its earliest days, cinema picked up on the season as something it could both interpret and use as a tool to draw in audiences, though Santa Claus was a surprisingly late arrival to this media. Hollywood’s adoption of Christmas then created images which have become icons around the globe, and also promoted the celebration of Thanksgiving around the world. Cinema and television have been potent advocates for the alleged father of the modern Christmas, Charles Dickens, with A Christmas Carol having been produced in many versions over the years. In turn, this has helped maintain the image of Christmas as the key family festival, which was then promoted in the overwhelming majority of Christmas film and television productions.
The United States
Authors: Vaca Daniel
Published: October 2020

What is Christmas about? This chapter answers this question by examining a wide range of ritual practices and cultural productions associated with Christmas in the United States. Although one response to the question seems inherent in the name of the holiday and its reference to ‘Christ’, more than a third of the American population that celebrates Christmas does not claim religious reasons for celebrating. This fact suggests that Christmas is about more than Christianity, and this chapter identifies some of the primary preoccupations that have stood at the heart of Christmas and related celebrations. For centuries, the time surrounding Christmas perennially has been a season in which Americans have sought to imagine and enact ideal visions of self, family, community, and nation. This chapter illustrates how these ideal visions took shape through varied forms of indulgence, social inversion, giving, and conflict. While some Christians continually have used Christmas as an occasion to enshrine their own social power and privilege, other Americans have responded to Christmas’s prominence by cultivating contrasting celebrations and traditions. Examples include the celebration of Hanukkah by American Jews and the creation of Kwanzaa as an occasion for African Americans to affirm their racial identity and cultural heritage.
Africa
Authors: Cabrita Joel
Published: October 2020

This chapter focuses on Southern Africa, examining how the transformation of Johannesburg and the Witwatersrand into the region’s industrial gold-mining hub has shaped the Christmas culture of the last one hundred years. What follows scrutinizes three distinct Christmas Days in and around Johannesburg. First, I show how the largely unattached male community of early twentieth-century Johannesburg interpreted Christmas as a period of (licensed) seasonal debauchery, while also pointing to the evangelical temperance organizations simultaneously pioneering a new definition of urban respectability. Moving to the 1930s, the chapter charts the rise of a new black middle-class in the city, and the manner in which Christmas celebrations became an opportunity to demonstrate their upward social progress and purchasing power, part of their larger argument for equal rights within a repressive and racially segregated South Africa. The final Christmas Day snapshot looks at the complex rural–urban networks that characterized the lives of those who worked in Johannesburg. It argues that annual labour migration patterns—whereby most city workers returned ‘home’ to the countryside over Christmas—established the holiday as a key node in monetary networks of obligation, support, and exchange. The chapter concludes by showing that most rural ‘African Independent Churches’ have emphasized other liturgical events—for example, Easter, or devising entirely new celebrations—due to Christmas’ popular associations with alcoholism and criminality.
Asia
Authors: Lee Joseph Tse-Hei
Published: October 2020

The widespread acceptance of Christmas in Asia hinges on several factors, such as the adoption of the Gregorian calendar, the influence of Christian missionary evangelization and local churches, relatively stable church–state relations, and the integration of host societies into a global consumer economy. Following a chronological approach, this chapter explores how Western missionaries and Asian converts indigenized the ritual of Christmas celebrations and remembrance from the nineteenth century on. Examples are given from China, Hong Kong, India, and Korea, showing how the spread of Christmas took place in an environment different from Europe and America, where most people self-identified as Christians and had observed Christmas for generations. The nineteenth century, the era of missionary expansion and colonialism, witnessed a regionally diverse pattern of localizing Christmas. By the early twentieth century, the spread of nationalistic sentiments led to public attacks on Christmas as a symbol of imperialism. From the late twentieth century to the present, Christmas celebrations have been commercialized worldwide and the festival has become a magnet, not only for Christians concerned about spiritual reflection, but also for merchants and consumers intent on business activities.
The Nineteenth Century
Authors: Larsen Timothy
Published: October 2020

While Christmas was already a popular feast day at the start of the nineteenth century, the holiday was transformed and greatly expanded over the course of the Victorian age. One reason for this was that many Reformed and Dissenting Protestants went from opposing Christmas to celebrating it. Christians in the United States from Episcopalians to the Salvation Army also promoted the rise of Santa Claus as a surreptitious gift bearer. The holiday experienced a significant domestication: for many people Christmas was no longer primarily an open-air event, nor an ecclesial one, but one focused on home and family, especially children. The Christmas tree was a German Protestant tradition that become popular in numerous countries. The British gave the world the Christmas card. Finally, new forms of charity rose side-by-side with new forms of commercialism, as well as new forms of devotion such as the Lessons and Carols service.
The Blessed Virgin Mary and the Virgin Birth
Authors: Schmidt Katherine G.
Published: October 2020

This chapter surveys the place of Mary, the mother of Jesus, in the Christian tradition. It examines her place in the New Testament, with particular focus on her role in the infancy narrative found in the Gospel of Luke. It also considers Mary’s place in the early Church, from the first Christian community through the Christological councils of the fourth and fifth centuries The chapter includes a brief history of Marian devotions such as the Rosary from the Reformation period to modern day, including debate over the Immaculate Conception and the perpetual virginity of Mary, and the history of Marian apparitions at Lourdes, Guadaloupe, Mexico, and Guadaloupe, Spain.
James, Intentionality, and Analysis
Authors: Jackman Henry
Published: October 2020

William James was always gripped by the problem of intentionality (or “knowing”), that is, of how our thoughts come to be about the world. Nevertheless, coming up with a sympathetic reading of James’s account requires appreciating that James’s approach to analyzing a phenomenon is very different from that which most contemporary philosophers have found natural. In particular, rather than trying to give necessary and sufficient conditions for a thought’s being about an object, James presented an account of intentionality that focused on certain core cases (particularly those where we actually see or handle the objects of our thoughts), and explained the extension of our “knowing” talk to other cases (objects and events in the past, unobservables, etc.) in terms of various pragmatically relevant relations that can be found between those cases and the “core.” Once this account of intentionality is in place, a number of features of James’s approach to truth come in to clearer focus, and can seem less problematic than they would if one presupposed a more traditional account of intentionality and analysis.
James and Attention
Authors: Prinz Jesse
Published: October 2020

This chapter discusses William James’s analysis of attention in the Principles of Psychology (1890). Though presented as an empirical review, it is really much more, since James offers original theoretical perspectives on attention, and attention becomes an important player in his theory of the mind, more broadly. It factors, for example, into his theories of perception, belief, and the will. The chapter then summarizes James’s treatment of attention and offers a theory of what attention is and what it does. It suggests that James postulates a kind of spontaneity in mental processes that are often regarded as merely receptive, and that this has implications for philosophical psychology, the philosophy of mind, epistemology, and even ontology.
James’s Radical Empiricism
Authors: Cooper Wesley
Published: October 2020

This chapter examines the concept of sensation in William James’s Principles of Psychology (1890). Like empiricists before him, James thought that the contents of the mind are built up from sensations; this is the sensationalism of the Principles. But for him, this interior location is secondary to sensation’s first location, which is exterior to the mind. In James’s psychology, the interiority and exteriority of sensations are differentiated by their role in the economy of the mind. In his radically empiricist metaphysics, the economy of the mind will become the economy of the world. The law-governed dualism of mind and body persists, even if these categories are anachronistic from a metaphysical viewpoint. The world of pure experience retains the nomic structure introduced in the Principles, and as such it is not autonomous from the physical. The physical is rendered pure-experiential, but its relationship to the mental, also now rendered pure-experiential, remains governed by scientific law. The chapter then considers how, in the Principles, James’s sensationalism is tied to his cerebralism.
Paul and Sexuality
Authors: Martin Dale B.
Published: October 2020

This chapter considers the topic, only raised in relatively recent intellectual history, of the apostle Paul and sexuality. First, it considers a number of common claims about Paul and sexuality for which there is in fact no historical evidence: that Paul held a ‘healthy’ modern view of sex, that Paul had a psycho-sexual dysfunction, that Paul had an early sexual trauma, that Paul was gay, and more. From there, the chapter builds a constructive case for what we can say about Paul and sexuality, beginning by identifying the relevant historical sources, then considering Paul’s identity as an apocalyptic Jew in the diaspora, then looking at key evidence from 1 Thessalonians, 1 Corinthians, and Romans, in turn, then considering the crucial question of the meaning of Greek porneia, and finally touching on developments in the Pauline tradition after the death of the apostle. It is argued that early Christian interpreters managed to find both a pro-household and an anti-household Paul in their readings of Paul’s letters.
King Arthur and the Tudor Dynasty
Authors: Schwyzer Philip
Published: October 2020

The reception of the legend of Arthur in the Tudor era presents something of a paradox. On the one hand, Arthur featured prominently in pageants and public spectacles throughout the period, and at times played a surprisingly important role in foreign policy. On the other hand, chroniclers found it increasingly difficult to defend Arthur’s historicity, and the period failed to produce a major work of Arthurian literature beyond Spenser’s Faerie Queene, in which the British prince cuts a perplexingly elusive figure. With its complex and conflicting attitudes to the Arthurian tradition, the Tudor era seems to constitute a bridge or way-station between the Arthur of the Middle Ages and the Arthur of more securely post-medieval (and, hence, medievalist) eras.
The Later Victorian Recovery of Anglo-Saxon Sculpture
Authors: Hawkes Jane
Published: October 2020

It is generally accepted that understanding of Anglo-Saxon sculpture emerges from the work of William Gershom Collingwood who published systematically on the subject from 1907 onwards. This, however, presents an incomplete impression of the origins of the modern ‘academic’ study of the material, which has firmer roots in the work of George Forrest Browne, a vocal promoter of High Church interests, whose studies on Anglo-Saxon art and sculpture commenced in the 1880s. His indefatigable activities devoted to the promotion of the material ensured not only continued interest in the subject, but may have established the understanding of the need to conserve the sculptures in the twentieth century, leading to the multi-volume British Academy Corpus of Anglo-Saxon Stone Sculpture. This contribution will explore his activities, interests and the ways in which the study of the sculpture was established by Browne in the emerging academic disciplines of art history and archaeology.
The Irish and Welsh Middle Ages in the Victorian Period
Authors: Pryce Huw
Published: October 2020

This chapter compares how the Irish and Welsh of the Victorian period engaged with their respective medieval cultures and histories. Although medieval Ireland and Wales both produced extensive and varied literatures in Celtic vernaculars and experienced English conquest that had major long-term consequences, they also differed in important respects. The same is true of the post-medieval histories of both countries. These differences in turn help to explain why uses of their medieval legacies by the nineteenth-century Irish and Welsh reveal significant contrasts. After outlining the contexts in which engagement with medieval culture and history took place, the discussion focuses on the significance attached to the Middle Ages in understandings of the Irish and Welsh pasts; idealizations of the medieval Church and secular rulers; medieval influences on art and architecture; and the editing and translating of medieval Irish and Welsh literary texts, together with medieval influences on modern literature.
The Lure of Boccaccio’s Medievalism in D. G. Rossetti, William Morris, and Algernon Swinburne
Authors: Sasso Eleonora
Published: October 2020

This chapter takes as its starting point Erich Auerbach’s notion of creatural medievalism based on materiality and carnality, i.e. ‘the mixture of the sublime with the low’ (284), as well as Bolter and Grusin’s logic of remediation and George Lakoff’s theory of conceptual metaphors, and uses these theoretical frameworks to advance a new reading of D. G. Rossetti’s double works of art (‘Bocca baciata’, 1859, ‘Fiammetta’, 1868, ‘A Vision of Fiammetta’, 1878), William Morris’s The Earthly Paradise (1868), and Algernon Swinburne’s poems (‘The Two Dreams’, 1858, and ‘The Complaint of Lisa’, 1870), one which sees them as excellent models to investigate their indebtedness to Boccaccio’s The Amorous Vision (1342), Decameron (1349) and Rime (1350–69). In their carnal adaptations of Italian medievalism, Rossetti, Morris, and Swinburne seem to exalt Boccaccio’s vision of erotic love as embodied by a Neapolitan lady, the princess Maria, whom Boccaccio was to immortalize under the name of Fiammetta.
Old English and Old Norse Studies to the Eighteenth Century
Authors: Graham Timothy
Published: October 2020

This chapter examines the committed scholarship that facilitated the recovery of Old English language and literature from the mid-sixteenth century and, about a hundred years later, applied itself to the study of Old Norse texts, including the Poetic and Prose Edda and the sagas. Varying impulses—religious, legal-historical, and nationalistic—motivated the initial investigation and publication of Anglo-Saxon texts. Early English interest in Old Norse coincided with a growth in correspondence with continental scholars and found full expression in explorations of the Germanic origins of the English that drew extensively upon vernacular material published in Scandinavia. The chapter concludes with an appraisal of the work of the Oxford Saxonists and their collaborative efforts on the monumental Thesaurus of George Hickes, in which, for the first time in England, Old English and Old Norse texts were analysed and discussed together, providing a rich fund of material upon which subsequent generations could draw.
Toryism and the Young England Movement
Authors: Gaunt Richard A.
Published: October 2020

This chapter explores the Young England movement, a small but active group of parliamentarians who opposed Sir Robert Peel’s Conservative government during the period 1842–5. It highlights the crucial role of Lord John Manners and George Sydney Smythe in forming the group. The two men were close from Cambridge days and saw a solution to contemporary social problems in the restoration of medievalism. They sought the revival of the Anglican Church, the restoration of communal activities and past-times, such as May Days, and the strengthening of social relations between the nobility and the working classes. The group attracted the interest of Benjamin Disraeli but maintained a strong sense of independence on individual issues. Young England fractured over Irish policy after Peel proposed an enhanced grant to the Catholic seminary at Maynooth. Though the group never realized its principal purpose, the experience was not without significance for its leading participants.
The Oxford Movement, Asceticism, and Sexual Desire
Authors: Janes Dominic
Published: October 2020

The chapter is set in the context of the history of the denominational evolution of monasticism and sainthood within Victorian Catholicism in both its Roman and Anglican forms. It explores, by means of a series of key examples, the battle between the proponents and opponents of medieval and contemporary monasticism and sainthood. The aim of this is to explain the range of views towards religious asceticism within Victorian society and their relationship to contemporary constructions of gender and forms of sexual desire. Examples of key figures, notably John Henry Newman, Charles Kingsley, and Joseph Leycester Lyne, provide instances of some of the ways in which sexual desire became associated with Catholic forms of devotion which, on the face of it, championed celibacy and resistance to fleshly desires.
Bodies and Buildings
Authors: Wagner Corinna
Published: October 2020

Issues around the body have tended to be seen as the concerns of medical materialists and utilitarians, but rarely medievalists. This perception is reflected in the fact that the body only features occasionally in scholarship on Victorian medievalism. However, this chapter makes the claim that medievalists were deeply invested in issues of health and death, as well as anatomy and other branches of medicine. Moreover, medievalists often evoked the past in support of views about the ethics and care of the body that were surprisingly comparable to that of their supposed sworn enemies, materialists and utilitarians. There is a strain of thought, and an aesthetics, that runs through Victorian culture, which could be called ‘materialist medievalism’. I argue that the view of a bifurcated Victorian society has obscured how often opinions between seemingly incompatible thinkers overlapped on aesthetic, philosophical, and ‘condition of England’ questions that focused on the body. It is my hope that this reconsideration will help us better understand the Victorian foundations of our modern concerns with surveillance, medical research on human subjects, health and well-being in urban environments, and memorialization and care of the dead.
Orientalism, Medievalism, Colonialism, and Militarized Mercantilism
Authors: Davis Kathleen , Altschul Nadia R.
Published: October 2020

This chapter investigates the intersections of British medievalism and colonialism in two very different places in the world: early nineteenth-century Chile, as Britain exercised economic domination over parts of the former Spanish Empire (thus it will be termed neocolonial); and late eighteenth-century India, as British officials devised strategies for extracting revenue from Bengal. Despite their many differences, in both cases an area beyond Europe is defined as Moorish and its present is associated with Europe’s past, specifically with the centuries now termed ‘medieval’. In both cases, too, medievalization forwards the economic interests at the basis of this temporal discourse, which is also fully enmeshed in the history of Orientalism. These similarities demonstrate the value of studying the under-examined effects of British medievalism beyond the familiar national frameworks, and, more broadly, underscore the importance of investigating the global dimensions of temporalizing phenomena.
Victorian Medievalism and Secular Design
Authors: Cheshire Jim
Published: October 2020

This chapter traces how the arguments used to promote ecclesiastical Gothic became diffused in the context of a wider discourse about taste. Pugin’s arguments for Gothic had been designed to persuade a narrow group of ecclesiastical patrons but this approach became problematic when addressing Victorian consumer culture. Attempts to influence the judgement of the consumer run through the work of other apologists for medievalism such as John Ruskin, G. G. Scott, and Charles Eastlake. Owen Jones appropriated the discourse of medievalism and some of its principles but applied them to a much wider historiography of architecture and ornament, thus dissolving the more partisan hermeneutics promoted by the medievalists. The principles underlying the Gothic Revival were perpetuated through movements such as Aestheticism but these principles no longer pointed to the superiority of the Gothic style.
William Morris and Medievalism
Authors: Marsh Jan
Published: October 2020

Successively renowned as poet, designer, calligrapher, businessman, architectural conservationist, pioneer socialist, utopianist, and typographer-printer, William Morris (1834–96) based his life’s work on his passion for all things medieval. Almost every aspect of William Morris’s career, indeed his whole life, may be seen as an endeavour to valorize and revivify medieval culture in preference to that of the centuries from 1600 to 1900. His achievement was to do so without nostalgia or antiquarianism, despite his fervent love of old things for their own sake. His signature method was not to describe or copy the Middle Ages, but to imaginatively inhabit them—preferably his favoured fourteenth century—and then to make new things in the same spirit. He views of the past created practical pathways for future enterprises in literature, building, decoration, and, possibly, political action. No revivalist, he aimed to develop archaic forms to serve the aesthetic, material, and political needs of the present and future.
Mid-to-Late Victorian Medievalist Poetry
Authors: Harrison Antony H.
Published: October 2020

Victorian poetry constitutes a particular field of cultural production that displays the increasing acceptance, power, and, dominance of medievalist discourses, and of values attributed to the medieval world, over the course of nineteenth century in Britain. Analysis of a range of medievalist poems by Matthew Arnold, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Dante Rossetti, William Morris, Thomas Hardy, and A. C. Swinburne demonstrates how this particular topical genre of Victorian poetry served to disseminate specific ideological values held by its authors and do so at a level of power and authority unique to the poetry of the period. This analysis compels us to understand Victorian medievalism not as a decorative veneer atop bedrock Victorian culture but rather as a dynamic ‘system’ of interrelated components—linguistic, visual, conceptual, material—deployed by various thinkers, writers, artists, and artisans to transform that culture in potentially profound ways
Representing Icelandic Saga Narrative for Victorian Readers
Authors: O’Donoghue Heather
Published: October 2020

The nineteenth century was the period during which, at last, the great naturalistic prose literature of medieval Iceland—the saga—was beginning to appear in English translations. The subject of this chapter is the representation or recycling of this saga material in new prose fictions, and the difficulties it presented, whether or not there was an attempt to imitate the style and narrative structures of the original. I will explore Longfellow’s adaptation of Snorri Sturluson’s Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar as part of ‘Tales of a Wayside Inn’; Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Master of Ballantrae as an experiment in saga narrative method, and his representation of part of Eyrbyggja saga as a short ghost story, ‘The Waif Woman’; H. Rider Haggard’s bravura imitation of a saga, Eric Brighteyes; and W. G. Collingwood’s three ‘Lakeland sagas’: Thorstein of the Mere, The Bondwoman, and the short piece ‘The Story of Thurstan of the Thwaite’.
Tennyson and the Return of King Arthur
Authors: Bryden Inga
Published: October 2020

This chapter—which is informed by cultural geographers’ concern for ‘recuperating the spatial practices’ that may be detected within literary texts—discusses an architecture of ‘situated objects’ across literary texts that were produced as part of the Victorian Arthurian revival. It investigates the extent to which Arthurian objects are exoticized and rendered part of fantastical (and actual) landscapes (taking issue with ‘thing theory’). It also considers how in some Arthurian literary reworkings, the Arthurian artefact may not obviously return at all, or be recycled as `ordinary’, in a more familiar, domesticized setting. The chapter argues that Victorian Arthurian texts become an assemblage of codified objects, with those objects referencing and reinterpreting earlier sources of the Arthurian legend, whilst also pointing to complex social change and material cultural encounters.
The Diggers and the Norman Yoke
Authors: Simmons Clare A.
Published: October 2020

During the English Civil War period, the Diggers asserted that social degree was a product of humanity’s fallen nature, rather than part of God’s plan. Such a claim does not require a historical precedent beyond the Bible, yet the Levellers, Diggers, and other radical reformist groups frequently appealed to the Middle Ages, suggesting that the Norman Conquest was England’s own ‘fall’ from a more equitable political and economic system, and that documents such as Magna Carta marked the people’s efforts to reclaim those rights. The Diggers’ distinct contribution to this discussion, taken up in the nineteenth century by radical thinkers such as Thomas Spence, was that property ownership should be communal. This idea of the Middle Ages survived in the radical reformist tradition into the nineteenth century and can be found in the medievalism of William Blake, William Morris, and many others. The theory of the Norman yoke remained a significant influence on social and racial theory in Britain for much of the nineteenth century.
Introduction
Authors: Parker Joanne , Wagner Corinna
Published: October 2020

The introductory chapter charts the evolution of Victorian medievalism in art and architecture, literature and language, politics and social life in Britain, but also in Europe and the Americas. The introduction compares and contrasts what were often described as the two great cultural movements of the century: medievalism and classicism. It examines the turn toward the Middle Ages in earlier eras, and traces the various nineteenth-century offshoots of this turn, including antiquarian collecting, Romantic poetry, Gothic novels, Pre-Raphaelite painting, church building in New Zealand and Canada, popular music and dance, colonial economic discourse, and in the language of Toryism, radicalism, High Church Anglicanism and even utilitarianism. The introduction describes how Victorian medievalist architecture, art, and literature are finally receiving the attention and appreciation they deserve—far more than they had received throughout much of the twentieth century—from scholars, curators, collectors, conservators, town planners, and members of the general public alike.
The Ballad Revival and the Rise of Literary History
Authors: Matthews David
Published: October 2020

This chapter describes the rediscovery and reinvention of the ballad in the 1760s and 1770s, tracing the later impact of the resultant conception of the Middle Ages on nineteenth-century literature and scholarship. The chapter traces the way in which a notion of the ‘Gothic’ was differentiated, in the early nineteenth century, from the ‘medieval’ (a word newly coined around 1817) and goes on to look at the way in which the early beginnings of English literary history resulted from the antiquarian researches of the eighteenth century. It concludes with reflections on the extent to which it can be said there was truly a revival of the ballad, and posits that there was instead a revaluation something already there, with a new conferral of prestige.
Medieval Forgery
Authors: Lynch Jack
Published: October 2020

As the canon of medieval literature expanded rapidly in the Romantic era, critics and literary historians had to be on the lookout for fakes. Unscrupulous writers had often altered authentic medieval texts, misrepresented their origins, or even invented documents out of whole cloth. Some texts some were malign hoaxes, some were light-hearted pranks, and some were unintentionally misleading pseudepigrapha. Whatever the nature of the fakes, though, Victorian antiquarians were obliged to sort carefully through the evidence and try to distinguish the true from the false. But while these fakes took a toll on editors and literary historians, some of whom inadvertently passed on falsehoods, they also forced critics to develop a new set of scholarly tools, which had the paradoxical effect of strengthening scholarship. The need to keep the canon free of fakes ended up training antiquarians, editors, and literary historians to become better historicist critics.
Gothic Ruins and Revivals
Authors: Duggett Tom
Published: October 2020

This chapter discusses Gothic history and Gothic selfhood in the writings of the Lake Poets: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey. Wordsworth’s ‘Michael, A Pastoral Poem’ is the central text, and the chapter traces the mixture of traditionalism and ‘temporalization’ in this ‘history / Homely and rude’ of family breakdown and generational crisis. The chapter then relates ‘Michael’ to the personal and artistic context of a gradually ‘materializing’ Gothic ‘Plan’ (Coleridge’s phrase), from Lyrical Ballads (1798) to The Excursion (1814) and The White Doe of Rylstone (1815), and argues that these works reflect the turn from a ‘revolutionary architecture’ of the Gothic to an influential ethos of ‘self-evolving’ ‘insularity’. The chapter ends with a discussion of ‘global’ presences in the ‘national theodicy’ of Wordsworth’s Prelude. Preserving and erasing lines on China after the loss of his brother John to the Canton trade, Wordsworth replays the historical drama of ‘Michael’ in personal and global form.
The Eastern Traditions Today
Authors: Kenworthy Scott M.
Published: October 2020

The revolution of 1917 ended a dynamic period of monastic growth in Russia and brought to power a government that was militantly anti-religious. It eliminated all monasteries in the first decade after the revolution, and it persecuted monastics in the 1930s. A limited number of monasteries were tolerated after the Second World War until the end of the Soviet period. Since the collapse of communism, however, Russian monasticism has experienced a significant revival. In Romania, monasticism has always been central to Orthodoxy. Because Romania became communist after the Second World War, the persecution of monasticism was less severe there than in the Soviet Union, and there was greater continuity with the pre-communist past. Monasticism continues to enjoy a significant presence in contemporary Romania. Historians have only just begun to study the fate of monasticism under communism, and sociologists and ethnographers are engaging in promising studies of contemporary monastic life in Russia and Romania.
Monasticism in Early Ireland
Authors: Follett Westley
Published: October 2020

The chapter surveys the issues that have occupied scholars of monasticism in early medieval Ireland. Particular attention is given to the concept of ‘Celtic’ monasticism, the role of fifth- and sixth-century continental and British churchmen in the establishment and development of religious life in Ireland, the allegedly ‘monastic’ organization of the early medieval Irish Church, and the supposed decline and revival of asceticism in Irish monasteries. Current areas of research include such themes as fasting, liturgy, learning, monastic women, monastic voyaging, and monastic churches as proto-urban centres. Lastly, the chapter points to possible directions for future investigation, such as more focused treatments of specific monastic houses and their communities, comparative studies of religious sites in Ireland and abroad, and the role of Irish peregrini in the dissemination of monastic ideas and practices to Ireland.
Spirituality and Prayer in the Eastern Traditions
Authors: Louth Andrew
Published: October 2020

This chapter examines the practice of prayer, both public and private, in the Eastern Churches, principally in the Byzantine and Slav traditions. It begins with the earliest reflections on prayer and the life of prayer by St Basil the Great and, behind him, by pre-Nicene thinkers such as Tertullian and Origen. Continuities with classical culture are evident in Basil’s writing, as is a strikingly cosmic dimension. The chapter then considers the corporate worship of the Church—the Divine Liturgy and the Divine Office—in the contexts of both space and time. Here there is a notable eschatological dimension. It addresses, finally, the modalities of private prayer, never completely separate from public prayer.
The Dissolution of the Monasteries
Authors: Clark James G.
Published: October 2020

This chapter examines the experience of the dissolution of monasteries in the British Isles in the sixteenth century. Perhaps because of their complete removal from England, Wales, and Scotland and their collapse in Ireland, this moment in Britain’s Reformation history has suffered comparative neglect. Its archival and material traces are still coming into view, and what they reveal is a process that was unpredictable, protracted, and far from uniform across the British regions. This is not to suggest that it proceeded wholly in separation from the parallel experiences of the European mainland. The role of legislative and judicial authority in Britain’s secularization must be seen in a continental perspective. Yet in its cultural, social, and economic effects—above all, the disconnect between old monastic foundations and new reformed religious, educational, and welfare enterprises—the British dominions were set apart from the post-monastic renewal seen in regions of northern Europe.
Christian Monasticism in Asia
Authors: Nicolini-Zani Matteo
Published: October 2020

The chapter begins with an overview of the history of Christian monasticism in the various countries of Asia, giving attention to major publications in the field. It reconstructs the process of documenting early foundations and their later evolution, with particular reference to China, Korea, and Sri Lanka. It then considers the ways in which contemporary Western monasticism has responded to the manifold challenges of the Asian context. Two themes are explored: the creation of a distinctive ‘monastic missiology’ for Asia; and the role of some key figures in the historical encounter of Western monastics with their Eastern confrères. The chapter addresses, finally, the present state of Christian monasticism in Asia. It charts the number of Christian monasteries throughout Asia, and it identifies the major issues that now face Christian monasticism there.