bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Private Uniform Law and Global Legal Pluralism
Authors: Calliess Gralf-Peter , Jarass Insa Stephanie
Published: October 2020

Global legal pluralism comes in many forms and carries various implications. This chapter traces the phenomena of legal pluralism in the field of commercial law. It is commonly held that legal certainty is of paramount importance to merchants. Therefore, efforts to harmonize commercial law on the international level are pertinent, albeit with limited success. As states proved unwilling or unable to create uniform commercial law, various private initiatives were established to achieve this end, the most prominent examples being the International Commercial Terms (Incoterms) and the Uniform Customs and Practice for Documentary Credits (UCP), both promulgated by the International Chamber of Commerce. From the perspective of global legal pluralism, such privately created uniform commercial law is an instance of legal pluralism. Interestingly, in this case it is not state law as the universal rule, which encounters conflicting normative claims of a substate social field, but it is a privately created normative regime that claims universal authority over the fragmented domestic commercial law regimes. According to conventional legal theory, such claim is simply ridiculous and it seems to be impossible for private uniform law to operate successfully. However, an analysis of English and German case law reveals that the Incoterms and the UCP in fact are effectively operating as uniform law and thus as a privately created functional equivalent to international instruments such as the Convention on the International Sale of Goods. This chapter, therefore, argues that beyond theoretical discussions in textbooks, judges do practice what global legal pluralism suggests.
Other Parts of the Forest
Authors: Weisbrod Carol
Published: October 2020

This chapter discusses some sources of the current writing on global legal pluralism. It joins other writing in stressing that while the question “What is law?” is considered critically important in some contexts, and for some purposes, that is not necessarily the important question for writers whose focus is on the reality of coexisting and possibly incompatible regulatory orders. At the same time, the chapter suggests that lawyers—now as in the past—may make a distinct contribution to this conversation. The other parts of the forest referred to in the title are both the regulatory arrangements that do not emanate directly from states and the academic commentary from various disciplines discussing those arrangements, their existence, their justifications, their effectiveness, and their relationship to particular political ideas.
Compliance as an Exchange of Legitimacy for Influence
Authors: Parella Kishanthi
Published: October 2020

This chapter explores the reasons why nonstate actors, such as business entities, may voluntarily comply with nonbinding international institutions. Specifically, it explores an exchange between legitimacy and influence that can compel such compliance: actors in the business’s environment provide it with legitimacy that the former requires in order to compete and succeed. However, by providing that resource, the external actor obtains a degree of influence over that corporation’s practices or policies. This chapter examines the following three questions implicated by this dynamic: (1) why would a corporation permit such influence, (2) what types of actors wield such influence, and (3) how is this influence exercised? For example, corporate legitimacy is often compromised following a corporate crisis. It is at these moments that a corporation will seek out association with an external actor that enjoys greater legitimacy than itself, who may improve the legitimacy of a corporation through endorsements, certifications, partnerships, and awards, among other acts. But this association may allow the third-party actor to exert influence over the business’s practices in the areas that suffered a legitimacy crisis. This influence may take the form of institutional development that involves the business adopting an existing institution or the external actor and business developing a new institution that addresses the business’s practices.
The Application of Non-State-Based Standards in International Arbitration
Authors: Ali Shahla
Published: October 2020

The inevitable interaction of legal and quasi-legal systems and norms across territorial borders not only impacts individuals as members of multiple communities (both territorial and nonterritorial), it also has implications for the conduct of cross-border arbitration. This chapter charts emerging non-state-based norms as applied in the context of international arbitration. It addresses how arbitral bodies can and do use nonstate standards in adjudication including industry standards, customs, and practices and how national courts uphold such applications. Over time, resort to these various quasi-legal standards is contributing to the creation of a transnational set of norms that is reshaping the global arbitral system.
Reformed Theology and Global Christianity
Authors: Hart D. G.
Published: October 2020

From its inception, Reformed Protestantism was an international phenomenon. Invariably, the places where European and American missionaries went were the very same locations where European powers operated a vast set of economic and political enterprises. Furthermore, because the missionaries themselves were the product of Christian developments in the West—whether the Protestant opposition to Roman Catholicism or intra-Protestant squabbles (Lutheran vs. Reformed, pietist vs. confessional)—missionaries faced a considerable challenge in trying to adapt a faith heavily bound up with Western civilization for people for whom Europe’s history, language, and culture were alien. In other words, the challenge of foreign missions was how to decouple the simple Christian message from a set of understandings and practices thoroughly situated for over a millennium in the West. The globalization of Reformed Protestantism, then, was a by-product of European expansion around the world chiefly for the purpose of commerce and conquest. This process happened in two stages. The first, as exemplified by the experience of Dutch Reformed Protestants in Africa, involved the creation and establishment of European-styled churches for Western settlers in a foreign land. The second, as the history of Presbyterianism in Korea shows, occurred through the modern missionary movement where Protestants of European descent sought to evangelize and disciple an indigenous population. In both cases, despite the best of intentions eventually to rid Christianity of its cultural assumptions, European-based patterns of theology and church life continue to set the standard for Christians around the world who constitute what some scholars refer to as ‘global Christianity’.
Jonathan Edwards’ A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections
Authors: Strobel Kyle C.
Published: October 2020

In the face of two extremes—the excesses of the revivals and the reactive rejection of them—Jonathan Edwards posits religious affection as the key feature of the truly religious life. Affection, understood in light of the divine blessedness and its communication to the creature in regeneration, serves to ground knowledge of God in a distinctively spiritual register, distinguishing between regenerate and non-regenerate knowledge of God. But non-regenerate knowledge, virtue, and religion often mimic and mirror regenerate forms, raising questions about the church’s ability to discern true from false religion. To remedy this problem, Edwards advances his theoretical material to develop positive and negative signs for discerning true religion, a move that has troubled later Reformed theologians.
Reformed Theology and the Church Fathers
Authors: Goudriaan Aza
Published: October 2020

The purpose of this chapter is to describe and explain the inherent ambivalence of the reception of patristic writers in (early modern) Reformed theology by concentrating on the early modern period, when patristic authority was discussed intensely, and on those aspects of the reception history that are, more or less strictly, concerned with theology. The theological continuity between Reformed theology and the church fathers is visible most obviously in the adoption of early Christian creeds and in the fact that Reformed theologians commented upon and explained their own confessions by means of compilations of patristic testimonies. The pursuit of catholicity evidenced by numerous other publications and by the corresponding acceptance of patristic heresiology, however, had evident limitations, and was accompanied by caveats and criticisms that have been articulated from the sixteenth century onwards.
Future Prospects for Reformed Theology
Authors: Allen Michael
Published: October 2020

Whatever reform might mean and what could possibly be intended by the moniker ‘Reformed’, then, must be thought amidst a distinctly Christian and overtly theological portrayal of the theological act, indeed, of the theologian as a person. While we might construe reform in many terms—ranging from the register of the market to the evolutionary adjustments of the biological world and many other idioma beside them—a claim about ‘Reformed theology’ offers not first and foremost a sociological or historical attestation but one of a distinctly theological calibre. Amidst any other significant elements of Reformed identity, this notion that Reformed theology is that being reformed by the Word of God remains a central thread. And understanding its meaning demands sketching a metaphysics within which the theologian might be plotted vis-à-vis that God who issues forth his own Word.
Reformed Theology and the Humanities
Authors: Robinson Marilynne
Published: October 2020

The Reformed tradition has been influential in many cultures, in Europe and also in Asia and the Americas. Over the centuries it has absorbed various influences and it has engaged in criticisms of its own traditions, emphasizing some doctrines associated with it and muting or abandoning others, as religious traditions tend to do as they adapt to time and setting. This chapter will look at one place and period, the Reformation and Renaissance in England, when Reformed influence was new, its aesthetic, theological, and intellectual impact was clear, and its sources, notably the Geneva Bible and the writings of John Calvin, were available and widely read. In so doing, this chapter also fixes on ways in which assessments of the humanities and the Puritans are and are not helpful.
Reformed Theology and Modern Biblical Criticism
Authors: Collett Don , Gignilliat Mark
Published: October 2020

Reformed theology’s relation to scripture’s canonical status as divine in genesis, preservation, and purpose settles comfortably alongside the Bible’s creaturely and historical character. As the previous discussion intimates, the canonical formation of scripture as a two-testament canon is itself an historical phenomenon, the result of a tradition-building process under the providential governance of human activities. Reshaping scripture’s canonical form in light of a reconstructed historical or tradition-historical schema runs the real danger of attenuating this achievement of providence. Modern criticism brings a set of challenges and opportunities for Reformed theology and hermeneutics. Where modern criticism dismantles the canonical text, Reformed thought registers its reservations. Where modern criticism provides insight into the historical and literary machinations leading to scripture’s final form, a Reformed view of providence remains open to critical inquiry. Navigating these challenges within the institutional dynamics of Reformed thought continues as a challenge. But the twin commitments remain intact. The Christian scriptures as a twofold canon assume the operative work of the Holy Spirit in scripture’s human production and continued effectiveness.
Effing the Ineffable
Authors: Mooney Sinéad
Published: October 2020

This chapter considers the outsiders and exiles who provide the narrative voices of Samuel Beckett’s prose fiction in terms of their deviations from narrative orthodoxy, and links these deviations to specific cultural anxieties in post-independence Ireland. It explains that although Beckett’s work is radically at odds with the central preoccupations of Irish cultural nationalism and shies away from any form of mimetic representation of Ireland, it is in no sense entirely evacuated of all traces of his culture of origins. Rather, his is an oeuvre that persistently, if obliquely, engages with questions of linguistic, national, and authorial identity. The chapter also examines the radical oddness of Beckett’s 1950s prose trilogy as a literary artefact, and uses the trilogy as the basis for a consideration of Beckett as a translator in the broadest sense, positioning his work in relation to myths of national identity and their literary expressions.
Edna O’Brien and the Politics of Belatedness
Authors: Dougherty Jane Elizabeth
Published: October 2020

This chapter explores the politics and poetics of Irish female belatedness in Edna O’Brien’s work, career, and critical reception, examining in particular her representation of Irish female maturation, her place in Irish literary history, and her frequent use of intertextuality. It explains that, although O’Brien is in many ways a literary pioneer, not least in being the first postcolonial female writer of rural Irish Catholic background to achieve international prominence, in other ways her work and career are emblematic of a kind of belatedness. Her first novel was among the last to be banned in Ireland, she writes about female subjects struggling to be included in the Irish social and symbolic orders, and her work has been criticized for being derivative of earlier writers, particular James Joyce. Only in recent years, as Irish society has itself radically changed, has O’Brien come, belatedly, to be seen as a major author.
‘Half-Arsed Modern’
Authors: Shovlin Frank
Published: October 2020

This chapter discusses the development of John McGahern’s imaginative and intellectual responses to the nature of the independent state and society that took shape in Ireland after 1922. It explains that, although the Ireland McGahern depicts in his writing is frequently a naturally beautiful and socially cohesive place, it is flecked with images of tyranny and brutality as he becomes one of the most unsparing critics of a republic he envisions as a failed state. The chapter examines how McGahern’s fiction registers the material and psychological aspects of living in a country where the dividends of national independence failed to materialize, where the restrictions of Irish conservative Catholicism were strong, and where Church and state conspired to uphold the power of a small elite, with corruption across all ranks of society as an inevitable consequence.
The Great Famine in Fiction, 1901–2015
Authors: Fegan Melissa
Published: October 2020

This chapter considers Irish writers’ continual reimagining of the Great Famine and the way it has shaped understandings of the past and present. In doing so, it addresses novels and short stories from nineteenth-century writers such as William Carleton, Mary Anne Hoare, and Margaret Brew, who sought to explain or reinterpret the catastrophe while it was still a living memory. The return of the Famine in later historical and neo-Victorian fiction by writers such as Liam O’Flaherty, John Banville, and Joseph O’Connor is considered in light of the association between Famine fiction and various crises in the post-independence era. The discussion also extends to the resurgence in literary interest in the Famine in the 1990s and early 2000s, which, the chapter suggests, was due not only to the greater exposure of the Famine in public discourse but also to a revival of insecurities that seemed to belong to the past.
Irish Literary Cinema
Authors: Rockett Kevin
Published: October 2020

This chapter examines the adaptation of Irish literary fiction for the screen over the past century. The discussion addresses three main aspects of this theme, beginning with the influence of the cinema and cinema-going on authors as recorded in their memoirs and literary output, and the influence of cinematic form on narrative structure, the latter being most evident in the later work of James Joyce. A second strand examines notions of female agency as they are refracted through the lens of the migrant experience in the novels of Edna O’Brien, Maeve Binchy, and Colm Tóibín. Finally, the post-independence legacy, as depicted in adaptations of the novels and short stories of John McGahern and William Trevor in particular, is discussed as a means of revealing the predicament of those psychically frozen during a time of economic, social, and cultural stagnation.
Devolutionary States
Authors: Lehner Stefanie
Published: October 2020

This chapter examines works of contemporary Irish and Scottish fiction in relation to the post-1998 devolutionary political frameworks in Scotland and Northern Ireland and the rise and fall of the Celtic Tiger economy in the Republic. Using the multivalent concept of ‘devolution’ as a guiding lens, it considers over three sections how novelists have been engaged in transforming inherited literary paradigms that have proven disabling and restrictive, and creatively rethinking conceptions of history, gender relations, and cultural identity. Focusing on works by Alasdair Gray, Patrick McCabe, Robert McLiam Wilson, Anne Enright, A. L. Kennedy, Jenni Fagan, and Mike McCormack, the chapter explores the relationship between the formal and stylistic experiments found in their writings and the concepts of identity that they give rise to and/or resist.
Sex, Violence, and Religion in the Irish-American Domestic Novel
Authors: Ebest Sally Barr
Published: October 2020

This chapter compares post-war Irish-American domestic novels by male and female authors, examining the influence of politics, assimilation, and ethnic identity on their plots and characters. Focusing on representative novels per decade from the 1940s to the present, the analysis finds that while both male and female writers agree that married life rarely equals domestic bliss, the authors’ gender identity determines their representation of the roles played by marriage, sexuality, and religion. The first part of the chapter examines the preponderance of adultery and gendered abuse; the second discusses attitudes towards women, sex, and sexual preference; and the third traces the movement from immigrant piety to an intellectual, independent view of the Church that acknowledges its ongoing gender hierarchy. The discussion not only reveals the progression of Irish Americans’ fictional lives since the 1940s but also examines the role of Irish-American women writers in expanding that view.
Australia’s Electoral Innovations
Authors: Hill Lisa
Published: October 2020

This chapter explores Australia’s well-deserved reputation as a democratic innovator and, in particular, an electoral innovator. This tendency has been driven substantially by two uniquely Australian inheritances: first, a relative absence of rights protections in the Constitution; and second, a pragmatic political culture less concerned with individualized rights than with utility, fairness, and equality. Australia introduced a number of electoral innovations that have defined and distinguished its democracy, some of which were enthusiastically adopted by other democracies. These include the secret ballot, preferential voting, mobile polling booths, Saturday voting, and, more recently, direct update. It was also an early adopter of women’s suffrage and compulsory voting, the latter of which is arguably Australia’s most important and consequential innovation. The latter also helped to drive the development of integrated, effective, and inventive electoral management that is respected the world over. All of these developments have resulted in an electoral system that is well managed and highly trusted and has unusually high and socially even rates of electoral inclusion. In turn, this has made Australian democracy quite robust.
Ethics of Animal-Assisted Psychotherapy
Authors: Hediger Karin , Grimm Herwig , Aigner Andreas
Published: October 2020

Animal-assisted psychotherapy is increasingly popular and attracts considerable attention in science. Integrating animals into therapy aims at generating added value in health and well-being of humans as well as non-human animals. This approach is reflected in the One Health perspective. However, animal-assisted psychotherapy raises issues regarding the ethical standards in the therapy setting in general and ethical reflections about our responsibilities towards therapy animals in particular. According to a dominant account in animal ethics, our moral obligations are based on welfare concerns. But this approach can be supplemented by a contextual view that highlights the moral relevance of particular relationships in animal-assisted psychotherapy. Therapy animals place moral duties on the therapist that go beyond welfare considerations and can be based on relation-based reasoning in the therapeutic context.
Festivals
Authors: Sapiro Gisèle
Published: October 2020

International literature festivals are a surprisingly big business. As Gisèle Sapiro points out in this chapter, there are now more than 450 such festivals in the English-speaking world alone, and some of them draw paying audiences in the hundreds of thousands. Unlike readings, which traditionally take place in independent bookshops or university auditoria, and which thus benefit from only modest publicity campaigns, literature festivals provide heavily promoted venues in which readers can meet their favourite authors (or at least see them from a distance). Their importance for the construction of world authorship is thus undeniable, even though they have received less critical attention than, for example, translators or global publishing houses. This chapter offers a sociological analysis of these festivals and demonstrates how they all too often perpetuate many of the well-known inequalities of the world literary system.
Law
Authors: Domínguez César
Published: October 2020

This chapter offers a reminder that ‘authorship’ is far from an abstract interest for actual literary producers. It is what allows authors to file a legal claim to their works, which for them are not only ‘texts’, or examples of ‘discourse’ in the manner discussed by Roland Barthes or Michel Foucault, but rather pieces of intellectual property. And intellectual goods—eminently portable, endlessly diverse, and difficult to reverse-engineer—were among the earliest to circulate widely throughout the world. They thus required legal protection on a global scale. Offering a revisionist history of the origins of transnational copyright regimes, this chapter thus draws attention to the role that authors—first and foremost that giant of nineteenth-century literature Victor Hugo—played in ensuring the protection of their names.
Performance
Authors: Spiers Emily
Published: October 2020

‘Performativity’ became a watchword of cultural theory at the turn of the millennium. Yet, while ideas of performative play and the fluidity of identity have gained much traction in conceptual debates about the experience of being human, large chunks of literary theory still skirt past the question of how to account for actual performances by humans in the real world. What happens when literature stops being just a text on a page and unfolds within a communal setting as a live event? In her chapter, Emily Spiers demonstrates how spoken-word poetry makes particularly apparent an underlying and little conceptualized phenomenon that applies for all literature: the ‘perpetually unstable dynamic of literary connectivity’. Through the frame concept of ‘worlding’ as applied to the Badilisha online poetry platform, the chapter shows how the author–performer and audience share the tangible unfolding of ‘a potentiality of the literary act in time’ at the live scene of a spoken-word performance.
Popularity
Authors: Bassnett Susan
Published: October 2020

Susan Bassnett shows in this chapter how the study of world literature has traditionally been dominated by a focus on ‘great’ authors, on the one hand, and avant-garde writers, on the other. Missing from this research programme is a corresponding emphasis on popular literature, and thus on those authors, such as Jack London or J. K. Rowling, who are actually read by massive amounts of people. The trouble with such an approach is that it blatantly disregards many of the most exciting dynamics by which authors reinvent the world. The chapter makes the case that, in thinking about those writers whose work becomes global, we need to broaden our horizon beyond the texts studied in schools and universities so as to take more seriously books once dismissed as what the Germans term Trivialliteratur.
Self-Publishing
Authors: Di Leo Jeffrey R.
Published: October 2020

In the twenty-first century, the barriers to authorship are lower than ever. Whether on blogs or on communal discussion forums, Facebook ‘walls’, or Twitter threads, anyone with access to the internet can fancy him or herself an author. The road to genuine cultural capital, however, still passes through the book, whether in its traditional print format or in the guise of ebooks consumed on Kindles, Nooks, and other electronic devices. Here too, though, a publishing revolution is underway. Thanks to services such as CreateSpace or iUniverse, it is cheaper than ever to self-publish a book, and, thanks to Amazon, it is easier to disseminate one. In this chapter, Jeffrey Di Leo shows how the results of this development are dramatic, both in a numeric sense and in a qualitative one.
Celebrity
Authors: Braun Rebecca
Published: October 2020

This chapter shows how the methods and approaches of Celebrity Studies throw fresh light on what authors and literature can do in the world. In particular, the divide between elite and popular fiction turns out to be illusory once we start paying attention to the way authors and their works actually move around. Combining celebrity theory with a practical analysis of the networks sustaining literature allows us to examine afresh the ways and degrees to which authors accrue ‘attention capital’ and from which social groupings, and why. Working through examples taken from the early modern period to the present day, this chapter provides a model approach not only for seeing beyond the individual author to witness the complex networks of agents involved in the process of authorship—from editors to translators, agents, and readers, and so on—but also for placing the question of agency once again at the heart of that process.
Censorship
Authors: Harrington Alexandra
Published: October 2020

Eastern Europe has been provocatively defined as ‘that part of the world where serious literature and those who produce it have traditionally been overvalued’ (Baruch Wachtel Remaining Relevant after Communism (2006)). This situation arose because of the particular modes of production and circulation of texts brought about by strict censorship and routine state interference in literary matters. This chapter illustrates how this shaped a model of the Russian writer as ‘conscience of the nation’ and opponent of tyranny. It then traces what happens to this model of authorship in the post-Soviet era in the face of different forms of censorship. Despite there no longer being official pre-publication censorship, legislation that limits freedom of expression has created the pervasive phenomenon of ‘self-censorship’ or ‘censorship readiness’ among authors and other agents in the literary field.
Eastern Orthodoxy
Authors: Cunningham Mary B.
Published: October 2020

Christmas in the Eastern Orthodox Churches (limited to, for the purpose of this chapter, those patriarchates and jurisdictions that accept the Council of Chalcedon) is celebrated with liturgical services and feasting. The liturgical offices have changed little since the late Byzantine period: the hymnography for the feast contains prophetic, typological, and historical celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ in Bethlehem. The feast celebrates the Incarnation of Jesus Christ, which is understood to offer renewal to a fallen creation, along with the hope of eternal life. Patristic homilies, which inspired the hymns that are still used in churches today, stress the joy that is felt not only by humans but also by the whole of creation at the liturgical celebration of Christ’s Incarnation. The fasting that precedes the feast causes Orthodox Christians to appreciate the food and celebration on Christmas Day all the more. This chapter examines three main topics: 1) the liturgical services and their theological meaning; 2) the meaning of a standard Orthodox icon of the Nativity; 3) the celebration of Christmas in Orthodox communities, with special focus on Serbia and a mountain village in Greece. Whereas separate Orthodox jurisdictions celebrate the same liturgical services (albeit in different languages), local customs that are carried out in homes and villages throughout the Orthodox world show considerable variation.
The Magi and the Star
Authors: Williams D. H.
Published: October 2020

Matthew’s account of the Magi (magoi) is unique in the Bible and has led to a great many questions about their identity and what we should make of the ‘star’ that prompted their trip in the first place and led them to Christ. Exactly when Christian writers first ascribed the Magi as kings is unknown, but attribution of royalty to the Magi appears to have been established by the onset of the sixth century. Thereafter, the three ‘kings’ become commonplace in European illuminated manuscripts and art. Although it is generally assumed that the Magi were three in number, because they presented three gifts, three is not the only accounting. In the later Eastern sources, especially in Syria, the names of twelve Magi are also listed. But in the West, three names prevailed: Gaspar, Melchior, and Balthasar, with different spellings. By Late Antiquity, it was commonly thought that each of the Magi had a separate country of origin: each one signified one of the three parts of the world—Africa, Asia, and Europe—and that these were linked with the sons of Noah, who fathered the three races of Earth. Writers perpetuated this construct through the medieval period.
Plays
Authors: Clemson Frances
Published: October 2020

This chapter discusses Christmas plays and playing in theatres and courts, streets and churches. As an embodied art form, dramatic performance is able to powerfully convey the central Christian doctrine that God was born into the world as a human being, the Word made flesh. The fleshiness of the dramatic form has made performances of the Nativity controversial at times. The chapter explores dramatic treatments of Christ’s birth, before turning to the festive and playful nature of the Christmas season. Christmas playing has often involved joyous interruptions to the regular routines and order of social life, such as in the Feast of Fools. In some plays, however, an outward appearance of festivity disguises a more troubling narrative. The chapter concludes by considering Christmas plays as ‘gathering time(s)’. Christmas brings people together; it also draws together memories of past celebrations and hopes for the future. The stage offers its own modes of gathering, for characters and audiences, to discover together what Christmas means to them.
The Reformation and Early Modern Periods
Authors: Wheeler Katrina Jennie-Lou
Published: October 2020

From the sixteenth through to the eighteenth centuries, Christians in Western Europe and North America celebrated Christmas in a variety of ways. Some of the practices or elements of celebration are familiar as they are still a part of many Christmas celebrations today, such as gift-giving, hospitality, feasting, singing, and decorating with greenery and Christmas trees. Other aspects of Christmas revelry were reduced during this period, as reformers in both the Protestant and Catholic Churches worked to rid the holiday of some of its excessive forms of festivity, such as misrule, social inversion, or superstitious practices. While in some areas, namely Scotland, England, and New England, radical reformers, including the Puritans, did away with Christmas festivities in the late-sixteenth and early- to mid-seventeenth centuries, these legal strictures were difficult to enforce and were not long-lasting. Instead, in both Protestant and Catholic countries, Christmas celebrations continued, though they often changed from what they had been in the Middle Ages. By the nineteenth century, traditions such as Christmas carols, Christmas trees, Nativity scenes, and Saint Nicholas iconography had been established that were taken up and popularized on a wider scale, but claims that those traditions were not invented until the nineteenth century are often rather overstated. Instead, many of these traditions grew and blossomed throughout the early modern period, sometimes despite radical Reformation attempts to get rid of Christmas, sometimes because of reforms in its celebration.
Culture Wars
Authors: Bowler Gerry
Published: October 2020

As the most significant annual cultural event on the planet, it is inevitable that Christmas becomes entangled with social movements, religious arguments, nationalism, constitutional wrangling, and politics. In 1905 in New York City there was opposition from Jewish families to religious ceremonies in public schools at Christmas. After the Second World War, there was a series of court battles in the United States over the First Amendment and the separation of Church and State. The Christmas Tree, or Holiday Tree, and Santa Claus have been objected to in a variety of contexts and places. Special attention is given to concerns about Christmas in Communist and Muslim countries. This chapter examines these conflicts over the last century and concludes that culture wars will likely endure.
The Old Testament
Authors: Barton John
Published: October 2020

This chapter surveys the passages from the Old Testament that have traditionally been used in Christian churches in the Christmas season. It argues that sometimes these passages may have generated features in the Christmas story, and that their use is a reading of the Old Testament with the hindsight provided by Christian belief: some of the ‘prophecies’ of the coming of Jesus were not regarded as messianic before Christians began to read them in the light of their own distinctive beliefs, for example passages in Isaiah and Micah. The texts used in Christmas festivals were not taken over from contemporary Jewish reading of the Old Testament Scriptures.
Social Control through LawCritical Afterlives
Authors: Greenhouse Carol J.
Published: October 2020

Through much of the twentieth century, social control was a major theoretical concern for anthropologists engaged with law and those lawyers interested in the colonial administration of indigenous communities, later falling out of fashion as scholarship changed with the times. Today, the association of law with social control once again looms large as the hardening of national borders, the militarization of security practices, and the imposition of austerity measures (among other measures) instrumentalize the classic idea of social control through law in new ways. The chapter argues that social control merits a critical afterlife that would examine the construction of legal subjects for political purposes, and the predicates of such projects in historic forms of legal inequality. The contemporary economization of public discourse indicates wide scope for such projects. Social control names a multisided and multiscalar political contest, involving both governmental efforts to manage populations through the private sector and efforts on the part of the public to hold governors to account. The chapter begins with an intellectual history of the idea of social control in anthropology and law, next turning to an ethnographic discussion of the neoliberalization of welfare policy and civil rights in the United States. The conclusion looks beyond the United States, proposing that social control—in contrast to its original meaning—today indicates fresh directions for interdisciplinary dialogue and debate over the means and ends of investment in accountability.
Coalition-Building and Political Fragmentation, 1924–1930
Authors: Stibbe Matthew
Published: October 2020

This chapter examines the functioning and communication of arrangements for power-sharing between political parties in the middle years of the Weimar Republic. It looks at the formation of coalitions at Reich and state level; the role played both by the development of a specific parliamentary culture and by pressures stemming from symbolic and real conflicts beyond the control of the Reichstag and provisional legislatures; the place of the press and press policy; and the slide towards growing political fragmentation, especially after 1928. It also broadens the analysis of coalition-building to encompass the temporary and highly unstable alliances forged between rival forces at the time of direct elections. This includes both the two-round presidential election campaign of March–April 1925, and the two national referendums fought by popular demand during the Weimar period, one in June 1926 over the issue of confiscation of the property of former princely households, and the other in December 1929 over a right-wing proposal to reject the Young Plan.
Sir Walter Scott and the Medievalist Novel
Authors: Watt James
Published: October 2020

This chapter focuses primarily on Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe (1819) and the novels—including Scott’s subsequent crusading fictions—that paid tribute to it through their engagement with roughly the same period of English history. In the hands of writers such as Edward Bulwer-Lytton and Charles Kingsley, the historical novel after Scott tended to present the Norman invasion as an enduringly formative moment in the making of modern imperial Britain. Popular fictions by Charlotte Yonge and G. A. Henty, composed for child readers, were similarly inspired by Scott, though in their reductive rewriting of Ivanhoe they further contributed to Scott’s ‘descent to the school-room’. Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Black Arrow (1883), by contrast, I will argue in conclusion, recovers the playfully reflexive scepticism of Ivanhoe and detaches the adolescence of its confused hero from any idea of an analogous national emergence.
Scottish Neo-medievalism
Authors: Dunnigan Sarah , Carruthers Gerard
Published: October 2020

The phenomenon of Scottish neo-medievalism in the long nineteenth century is diverse, finding expression in Gothic architecture; paintings and murals; book illustration; fiction, poetry, revivals of ballad and romance; the founding of scholarly and antiquarian societies; and Arts and Crafts-related educational practices. This chapter explores neo-medieval articulations which can be termed ‘vernacular’—in other words, explicitly Scottish or ‘Celtic’ in subject matter. It traces their recurrent ideological, cultural, and political associations (for example, Catholicism, Anglo-Scottish relationships and Wars of Independence, Jacobitism and political rebellion), and the patterns of nostalgia and desire which underpin them. The chapter also discusses turn-of-the century literary and artistic practices which draw on a distinctly Scottish neo-medieval aesthetic.
The Influence of French Medievalism on Victorian Britain
Authors: Emery Elizabeth , Marquardt Janet T.
Published: October 2020

This chapter traces the rich literary, historical, artistic, architectural, and theatrical cross-pollination that took place in the nineteenth century as the French and English travelled back and forth across the English Channel (La Manche) to examine medieval cultural history and heritage and to share creative works of medievalism generated by such discoveries. France did not merely serve as a ‘source’ for Victorian medievalism, but rather as a locus for transnational representations of a European Middle Ages and its cultural productions. In order to better understand English medievalism in the nineteenth century, it is important to trace French developments from the same period.
Ecclesiastical Gothic Revivalism
Authors: Whyte William
Published: October 2020

This chapter argues that the ecclesiastical Gothic revivalism of the nineteenth century was the consequence of a wider change in contemporaries’ understandings of the nature of church buildings themselves. The product of new ideas about faith and time as well as novel notions about the nature of architecture, this revival was every bit as revolutionary and as distinctively Victorian as contemporaries believed it to be. Thus, although it is now impossible to argue that the Gothic Revival of the nineteenth century completely replaced one style with another, it is possible to see that a Gothic revival of the nineteenth century helped change conceptions of ecclesiastical architecture most profoundly, not least by transforming churches into vehicles of communication in their own right.
Revisiting the Medievalism of the British Arts and Crafts Movement
Authors: Ibbotson Rosie
Published: October 2020

This chapter focuses on the British Arts and Crafts Movement, and considers its engagement with the pre-existing but flexible paradigm of medievalism. While accounts of the Arts and Crafts frequently emphasize the influence on the Movement’s designs of material culture from the European ‘Middle Ages’, this research draws out other facets of how this period was reimagined and appropriated. In particular, the chapter emphasizes Arts and Crafts protagonists’ tendency to idealize all things medieval, cultivating a pseudo-historical imaginary that was problematically conceptualised spatially as well as temporally, and was used to legitimize a range of the Movement’s aims and initiatives. A key case study here is the Art Workers’ Guild, a fraternal organization that counted among its members many of the London Arts and Crafts elite, and which contrived a medievalizing organizational aesthetic that rehearsed the group’s exclusivity, and its dismay at contemporary artistic and socio-political conditions.
The Romantic Gothic Imagination
Authors: Crawford Joseph
Published: October 2020

The French Revolution was famously described by Edmund Burke as proof that ‘the Age of Chivalry is gone’, and the fall of the French monarchy prompted a major controversy over the value of Britain’s remaining ‘Gothic institutions’. As a result, the shifting ideological sympathies of the British Romantics can be tracked through the changing fashion in which they made use of medieval history and symbolism in their poetic works. This chapter maps out the different ways in which the major British Romantics made use of the medievalist discourses that they inherited from their eighteenth-century predecessors, showing how the Romantics variously depicted the Middle Ages as a dark era of Gothic horrors, an age of feudal oppression, or as the wellspring of Britain’s ‘Gothic liberty’.
Monastic Art, Sacred Space, and the Mediation of Religious Experience
Authors: Dale Thomas E. A.
Published: October 2020

The chapter argues that between the ninth and thirteenth centuries medieval Benedictines understood art and architecture as a means of mediating religious experience. This perspective differs from that of the more ascetic strain of Western monasticism exemplified by Bernard of Clairvaux and the Cistercian Order. The ninth-century Benedictine revival of sculpture was predicated on its insistent materiality and its capacity to engage the multiple senses of the devotee with the ritual settings of sacred space. Whether portable or architectural, sculpture was also used within ritual contexts to convey actual or implied movement in space, thus participating in a larger constellation of images, rituals, relics, liturgical objects, and architectural frames that fashioned sacred space both within and outside the cloister. Setting the multi-sensory approach to monastic art within a broader historiography, the chapter focuses particular attention on architectural sculpture, using the Pentecost portal of Vézelay as a primary case study.
Asceticism before Monasticism
Authors: Finn Richard
Published: October 2020

Christian asceticism began not in the desert or other monastic settings, but within the urban churches of the first three centuries. Teachings attributed to Christ and the Apostles, together with older beliefs from Judaism and Greek philosophy, variously influenced patterns of communal and individual asceticism: abstention from foods, sexual relations, and wealth. Communal fasting was practised weekly by many, and by most before the celebration of Christ’s death and resurrection. Literature, especially the apocryphal Acts, celebrated or advocated sexual abstention, but the relationship between these texts and social practices remains opaque. Widows and virgins were honoured for their sexual renunciation, which strengthened the purity of heart essential for prophecy and prayer. However, in the mid-third century Origen offered a highly persuasive account of asceticism within the individual’s struggle for holiness, and it was this struggle which was finally carried into the desert and the cloister.
Landscape, Land Use, and the Environment
Authors: Oram Richard
Published: October 2020

The chapter explores the nature of the idealized and real landscapes within which monasteries were located during the period c.1000–c.1500. It examines the philosophical construction and physical manifestation of ‘desert’, and then considers the composition and physical characteristics of real property portfolios. Discussion of similarities and differences in approach between various monastic orders challenges notions of ‘types’ of landscape peculiar to specific orders. An exploration of twelfth- and thirteenth-century land clearance and drainage practices and their environmental consequences follows, raising questions of sustainability and challenging traditionally positive views of monastic estate management. Monastic responses to rapidly changing climatic conditions in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and their impact on estate landscapes conclude the main discussion. The chapter ends with suggestions for future interdisciplinary research that marries the document-based studies of monastic landholding and management practice with landscape archaeology and environmental history to provide better understanding of the dynamics which drove monastic landscape formation.
Friendship, Family, and Community
Authors: Haseldine Julian P.
Published: October 2020

Friendship, family, and community were central to the ways in which members of religious communities understood and negotiated their relationships with one another and with the societies around them. In many respects the religious vocation was defined in relation to these concepts, all of which were, in different ways and at different times, treated by contemporary monks and nuns as subjects for spiritual, ethical, or political thought. The same themes have been approached by historians from a range of analytical perspectives which relate to broader scholarly agendas, including the histories of emotions, social capital, trust, and networks. This chapter considers these three subjects in relation to the history of the religious orders and describes some emerging themes. While varied, they all reflect to some degree a longer-term change from the histories of individual institutions to the study of religious communities as embedded in the societies and cultures of premodern Europe.