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Authors: Fish Stanley
Published: October 2023

The notion of “interpretive communities” was originally introduced as an answer to a question that had long seemed crucial to literary studies. What is the source of interpretive authority: the text or the reader? Those who answered “the text” were embarrassed by the fact of disagreement. Why, if the text contains its own meaning and con strains its own interpretation, do so many interpreters disagree about that meaning? Those who answered “the reader” were embarrassed by the fact of agreement. Why, if meaning is created by the individual reader from the perspective of his own experience and interpretive de sires, is there so much that interpreters agree about? What was required was an explanation that could account for both agreement and dis agreement, and that explanation was found in the idea of an interpretive community, not so much a group of individuals who shared a point of view, but a point of view or way of organizing experience that shared individuals in the sense that its assumed distinctions, categories of understanding, and stipulations of relevance and irrelevance were the content of the consciousness of community members who were there fore no longer individuals, but, insofar as they were embedded in the community’s enterprise, community property. It followed that such community-constituted interpreters would, in their turn, constitute, more or less in agreement, the same text, although the sameness would not be attributable to the self-identity of the text, but to the communal nature of the interpretive act.
External Influences and Analogues: I
Authors: Edwards Huw M
Published: October 2023

Attention to the poetry of Continental Europe in the preceding chapters has for the most part been confined to comparisons with ele ments in the cywyddau, such as the ‘bird-messenger’ motif and the serenade-type poems, which have been considered as analogous but essentially native developments, drawing on a rich vein of popular tradition. It has been seen also that some signs of external influence may be perceived in the work of poets who flourished a generation or so before the time of the early Cywyddwyr, and in the work of Gruffudd ap Dafydd in particular. The aim of this and the final chapter is to examine the significance of the Cywyddwyr’s debt to this wider European lyric tradition, not only in terms of their general response to the pervasive influence of the courtly love movement, but more especially by drawing attention to a number of themes, motifs, images, and poetic genres which may be related to a literary culture quite different from that of medieval Wales. To what extent did these external borrowings expand the repertoire of the Welsh poets and enrich the fabric of their lyrics? Some of the analogues identified may appear somewhat trivial when examined in isolation, but seen in the wider context of a considerable body of cumulative evidence even the most minor parallels acquire a more powerful suggestive ness.
‘Ce Sont Les Huis Et Les Cleres Fenestres ... ‘: The Text As A Building
Authors: Cowling David
Published: October 2023

In a verse epistle written in 1463 and designed to impress the influential older writer George Chastelain, the young poet Jean Robertet resorts to the Horatian topos of the imperishable nature of the literary monument which, alone, can withstand the assaults of wind, weather, and time. Chastelain, the true successor of the Greek historiographers, has immortalized the deeds of his duca1 master Philippe le Bon through his writing and has, by so doing, deserved the praise of his literary acolyte. In a novel extension of the Horatian metaphor, Robertet evokes the interstices (doors and windows) through which the events of the past, like shafts of light (or knowledge) arc transmitted to the present.
Herta Müller, Reisende auf einem Bein (1989)
Authors: Haines Brigid , Littler Margaret
Published: October 2023

Reisende auf einem Bein stands out among Herta Müller’s works in that the main events are not set in the author’s native Romania, or a thinly disguised version of it. Germans, or more accurately Swabians, had been living in the part of Romania called the Banat for nearly two hundred years when Müller was born there in a small village in 1953, and had preserved a strong sense of a distinct identity. Many Banat Germans of Müller’s parents’ generation had supported Hitler during the Second World War. After the war Romania changed from a fascist to a communist state, ruled over from 1966 until its fall in the winter of 1989 by the particularly brutal and oppressive regime of Nicolae Ceauescu. Most of the ethnic Germans left the country in the course of the 1980s and 1990s.
Projecting the Feminine Sexual Subject: Women, Pleasure, and Power
Authors: Martin-Marquez Susan
Published: October 2023

IN earlier pages I have analysed several films, such as Nunca pasa nada and Función de noche, whose female protagonists boldly articulate their own sexual desire. Yet the depiction of female characters who actively pursue that desire onscreen has been much less in evidence. Indeed, it could be argued that the representation of sexuality constitutes a last frontier for feminist film-making in Spain, for, although sexually explicit images have abounded since the destape years, the portrayal of female sexual subjectivity has not.
Continued Response: Die Niemandsrose
Authors: Eskin Michael
Published: October 2023

Given that Celan’s Mandel’shtam translations and Die Nie- mandsrose can be read as one complex, diachronically dis- placed, yet unitary response, Die Niemandsrose must be materially linked to Celan’s Mandel’shtam translations. While the structural inseverability of Celan’s translations and original poetry is most clearly indicated by their concomitant dedicatory publication in Die Neue Rundschau, their organic interdependence-whose demonstration is the condition for the unitary dialogic treatment of both bodies of text-can only be established by way of a detailed analysis of Die Niemandsrose itself. In the following three sections I elaborate the material groundedness of Die Niemandsrose in Mandel’shtam’s poetry (and poetics). Die Niemandsrose consists of a dedication and fifty-three poems, which are divided into four internal cycles.
The Falling Line
Authors: Smith G S
Published: October 2023

On 19 February 1934 Mirsky informed Dorothy Galton that ‘Edward Bagritsky, one of our two or three finest poets, and about my best friend in Moscow has just died. This is a very bad blow to poetry here, and to me personally.’ Mirsky published four articles in memory of Bagritsky. This abundance points up the fact that he wrote nothing to commemorate three other important poets whose work he had proclaimed in earlier years: Maksimilian Voloshin (1877-11 August 1932), Andrey Bely (1880-8 January 1934), and the pre-revolutionary poet he had known best, Mikhail Kuzmin (1872-1 March 1936). Back in Paris, Tsvetaeva wrote something substantial about all three of them, even though Voloshin was the only one she had met more than once. Her essays about them form part of the extraordinary autobiographical prose she embarked on in the 1930s, none of which Mirsky can have read.
Conclusion
Authors: Crowley Martin
Published: October 2023

It is 14 March 1996. Duras has been dead for eleven days. Paris Match opens a twelve-page tribute with a photograph, taken in 1993 by Helene Bamberger, of Duras working at the desk in her room at Trouville.
Electoral Scrutinies
Authors: Rubinstein Nicolai
Published: October 2023

IT might be argued that the development of the office and functions of the Accoppiatori during the twenty years following on Cosimo’s return was bound to undermine the position of the scrutinies in the Florentine electoral system. The foregoing observations should suffice to show that this is not borne out by the facts. However long the Accoppiatori actually remained in power, their office was not a permanent one; nor could it always be safely expected that their term would be extended, or that, once abolished, elections a mano would be restored. Moreover, their powers to hold the horse a mano concerned only the Signoria; the vast majority of the magistracies inside and outside the city were still filled by the normal method of sortition. As we have seen, the a mano system itself did not entirely dispense with the latter, and presupposed the existence of scrutiny qualifications; indeed, from a purely technical point of view, all it did was to insert an additional stage into the electoral process, between the scrutiny and the drawing of the name-tickets. Finally, if the Accoppiatori had acquired certain discretionary powers to modify the results of the scrutinies before filling the bags, these powers were almost exclusively limited to the addition of names of citizens who, in their turn, had been qualified in previous scrutinies.
From the Church Fathers to the Renaissance
Authors: Hamilton Alastair
Published: October 2023

The decision to attribute the pseudepigraphic 2 Esdras to Ezra was judicious. As he emerges from the canon of the Old Testament in the first two books attributed to him, Ezra and Nehemiah, Ezra, the priest or the scribe, is a tantalizingly obscure figure, the very stuff from which legends could be made. He was allegedly dis¬ patched from Babylon to Jerusalem by the king of Persia at some time around the turn of the fifth and the fourth century BC. The date and the identity of the king, Artaxerxes I or Artaxerxes II, are still debated. The purpose of Ezra’s mission was to legislate to the Jews who had returned to their homeland from the Babylonian Captivity. ‘And thou, Ezra,’ the king tells him in Ezra 7:25-26, ‘after the wisdom of thy God, that is in thine hand, set magistrates and judges, which may judge all the people that are beyond the river,
Chiliastic Mysticism and Radical Pietism
Authors: Hamilton Alastair
Published: October 2023

The enthusiasm for 2 Esdras was at its height during the Thirty Years War. By far the majority of references to it are contained in publications produced between 1618 and 1623 and circulated, if not actually written, in the area afflicted by the fighting. Yet an interest in the book was fostered concurrently in other parts of Europe by the movement we encountered in Chapter 6 and which consisted of the admirers of Jacob Boehme. The man who played a pre-eminent part in it was a Silesian nobleman, Abraham von Franckenberg, responsible for editing a number of Boehme’s works. Influenced by Sebastian Franck, Schwenckfeld and Weigel, Franckenberg shared the current faith in prophecy and lived in expectation of the arrival of a new Elijah which would be followed by the millennium. Yet, in the tradition of the more spiritual thinkers we have examined, Franckenberg was not only convinced that the ‘golden age’ was a distant prospect, but also that it would be an essentially spiritual condition. Of the many prophets of his day he had a particular veneration for Ludwig Gifftheil, but he was aware of the false claims to be Elijah which had been made in the past and which he attributed to Postel, Paracelsus and Campanella.
The Aftermath
Authors: Hamilton Alastair
Published: October 2023

The effect of the publication of the Arabic 2 Esdras on the reception of the book was mixed. While a scholar like Fabricius realized the philological importance of the discovery, others, such as Whiston and Floyer, continued to treat the book with enthusiasm and to argue for its antiquity. In doing this they were in a diminishing minority. Although many people would continue to consult 2 Esdras and to credit it as a book of prophecy, there was a growing tendency either to say nothing about its actual authority or, if it was discussed at all, to take into account the theories of a late date.
Introduction
Authors: Higson Andrew
Published: October 2023

Cinema, one of the most important social and cultural forces of the twentieth century, seemed in the early 1980s in Britain to be on its last legs. The numbers of people watching films at the cinema were at their lowest ebb, while British film production had all but disappeared. Since the mid-1980s, with the rise of the multiplex and the blockbuster success of a few huge Hollywood films each year, audiences, remarkably, have risen once more, and quite dramatically. The development of the home video market, new terrestrial television channels, cable, and satellite have further ensured that film is once more a central part of British popular culture. In that same period, British film-making, while never exactly financially stable, maintained a vigorous critical presence, a new British art cinema emerged, and a select band of films achieved considerable box-office success both at home and internationally.
Case Study II: Elizabeth
Authors: Higson Andrew
Published: October 2023

Elizabeth (1998), a film set in the mid-sixteenth century, dealing with one of England’s great historical personages, Queen Elizabeth I, represented a new stage in the development of the quality ‘British’ costume drama of the 1980s and 1990s. This is a film that delights in the unrestrained passions of the early modern period rather than the genteel reserve of Austen’s drawing-rooms or the bourgeois respectability of Forster’s. Where Howards End (1992) had emerged at the tail-end of the Thatcher period, Elizabeth was a product of Tony Blair’s ‘Cool Britannia’. Even so, the film is not unique; rather, its difference from earlier heritage films is one of tone, and a tone that became increasingly familiar as the 1990s wore on. There were in fact three Elizabeths in English heritage films made in that decade: Quentin Crisp’s cross-dressed queen in Orlando (1992), Cate Blanchett’s interpretation in Elizabeth, and Judi Dench’s Oscar-winning outing in Shakespeare in Love (1999).
The Politics of Singularity
Authors: Docherty Thomas
Published: October 2023

Writing in 1940, Walter Benjamin famously argued, in his seventh thesis on the philosophy of history, that ‘Whoever has emerged victorious participates to this day in the triumphal procession in which the present rulers step over those who are lying prostrate. According to traditional practice, the spoils are carried along in the procession.
Pessimism, Community, and Utopia in Aesthetic Education
Authors: Docherty Thomas
Published: October 2023

Hume famously woke Kant from his dogmatic slumbers in Konigsberg; but if the response to his work closer to home was somewhat delayed, the response there in Scotland was no less vigorous for its tardiness. Typical of those who placed themselves in the ranks of his (philosophical) enemies was James Beattie who, in 1770 in Aberdeen, published his Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth. Beattie had no time for the celebration of any mythic primal condition such as that explored by Rousseau; but he did share with Rousseau a passion for truth, even acknowledging in true Alceste-fashion, that he will probably have to be rude to those with whom he disagrees.
Education, English, and Criticism in the University
Authors: Docherty Thomas
Published: October 2023

In or about December 1810, humanistic education changed. The turn of that century was a period in which there was much lively debate over what constituted the nature of the university; and, importantly, it was in this period that the question assumed the corollary task of identifying a national culture and a national character through education, most often through an education grounded in a conception of a foundational philosophy which served to unify the variety of the disciplines.
Turner’s Litter
Authors: Trotter David
Published: October 2023

In a remarkable chapter in the fifth volume of Modern Painters, Ruskin contrasts the boyhoods of Giorgione and Turner, the one brought up in fifteenth-century Venice, with its emerald pavements and alabaster columns, the other in London in the 1770s and 1780s, in an atmosphere of Thames mud and Covent Garden cabbage-stalks. Ruskin imagines the whole difference between the Old Master and the new as a difference in upbringing, a difference in mentality. Giorgione was able to bask in colour and light. Turner had to ‘endure’, had to make do with, the ugliness which hemmed him in on all sides.
Modern Writers I: English Mess
Authors: Trotter David
Published: October 2023

In Chapter 3, I drew attention to a brace of significant literary departures: in Armadale, Wilkie Collins suspended the paranoia governing the genre of sensational fiction in order to give weight to the toss of a coin; in Sentimental Education, Gustave Flaubert set aside the doctrine of psychological determinism he had upheld for many years in order to emphasize the part played in his hero’s life by chance and by ‘external facts’. The only explanation I have so far advanced for these departures is bio graphical: Collins, still savouring the success of The Woman in White, no doubt felt that he could do more or less what he liked with his new narrative toy; Flaubert, who took care not to repeat himself, found in the force of circumstance a fresh (and ample) incentive to irony. That two such unlikely com panions should both choose to depart from the established pattern of their separate careers at roughly the same moment in the history of the European novel is, one might suppose, a coincidence.
The Specialist, the Generalist, and the Populist
Authors: Whitworth Michael H
Published: October 2023

The popularization of science is a symptom of modernity; its relation to modernism is more complex. The verb ‘to popularize’ originally referred to a political process of gaining favour at court; by the late eighteenth century it had come to imply a division between an elite and a democratic mass; it was first used in relation to technical or abstruse knowledge in I833, the year before the word ‘scientist’ entered the language.
Introduction
Authors: Walker Simon
Published: October 2023

‘Too many generalizations have been based upon the quite abnormal retinue of John of Gaunt .. .’. It might fairly be asked whether it requires, or deserves, another lengthy study. The simplest answer is that, with the exception of the Lancastrian estates and their administration, detailed work on John of Gaunt’s affinity has hardly progressed beyond the conclusions reached by the pioneers of the modem study of bastard feudalism some forty years ago. One purpose of this book is, therefore, simply to test those conclusions against a more extensive investigation of the available evidence and, if any modifications must be made, to ask what wider implications they possess for the study of English society in the later middle ages. Valuable analyses of the composition and workings of a number of other affinities are now available, providing a convincing picture of the way a lord viewed his following and it responded to his wishes. Inevitably, the perspective adopted in these analyses is seigneurial, for the most abundant and accessible evidence comes from surviving seigneurial archives. Yet the strength of the bastard feudal tie lay, not in the pre-eminence of the lord, but in an expectation of mutual benefit, a community of aim and outlook between the contracting parties.
The Lancastrian Affinity at War
Authors: Walker Simon
Published: October 2023

John of Gaunt’s life was dominated by war and the rumours of peace. From 1359, when he accompanied Edward III on his last great expedition to France, until his return from the duchy of Gascony in 1395, he was continually employed in the wars against the French and their allies. Nor was he simply an English war-leader but, by reason of his marriage to Constance of Castile in 1372, a European prince with pretensions to a throne of his own that had to be secured by force of arms. In consequence, Gaunt participated in 12 major military expeditions, besides preparing for several more that failed to materialize, while his responsibility for peace negotiations with the French involved him in 15 separate diplomatic missions. These facts have an immediate importance for the study of the duke’s retinue, historiographical as well as historical. Much of the most distinguished pioneering work on ‘bastard feudalism’ and the indentured retinue was based principally upon a study of the contracts between John of Gaunt and his retainers.
The Lancastrian Affinity: Cohesion, Reward, and Loyalty
Authors: Walker Simon
Published: October 2023

The rights and duties of a Lancastrian retainer in time of war were carefully specified and, it would seem, carefully adhered to, but his indenture was vague over what was expected in peacetime, insisting only that he should attend the lord wherever and whenever sum moned.1 The commitment a retainer made to the duke was, therefore, primarily one of time: he had to be ready to attend the duke in the Lancastrian household or. to accompany him around the country in his riding retinue. This obligation could comprehend a wide variety of duties. Retainers were dispatched to garrison the duke’s Welsh castles during an invasion scare, summoned to attend the duke at Richard Il’s coronation, to provide a bodyguard during the Peasants’ Revolt, to prosecute his feud with the earl of Northumberland on the streets of London. They were also required, from time to time, to provide the imposing escort by which the duke was always accompanied on his frequent diplomatic missions abroad; behind the expensive splendour of Lancaster’s suite at Leulingham in 1384 and Amiens in 1393 lay the more permanent physical resources of his indentured retinue.
The Lancastrian Affinity And Local Society: Sussex And Lancashire
Authors: Walker Simon
Published: October 2023

The previous chapters have examined in some detail the structure and composition of John of Gaunt’s affinity and made a tentative assessment of what it meant, for both duke and retainer, to belong to the same organization. For both parties, the military role of the affinity emerged as its most important feature: the duke was heavily dependent upon his retinue in the vital business of raising his armies and it was still in terms of campaigning abroad that most retainers envisaged their obligation to their lord. The material rewards of this service seem to have been slight enough but the chivalric prestige conferred by fighting in the duke’s company did much to compensate for any financial loss. In any case, many retainers fought abroad principally in order to consolidate their standing at home, for to win the duke of Lancaster’s attention and esteem on campaign was to secure oneself a position of influence and respect in English local society. Yet it is precisely this direct relationship between military service and civilian life, between employment abroad and reward at home, that constitutes the principal charge against the indentured retinue as a form of social and political organization. In the robust formulation of Plummer: ‘when the war was over, they [the temporal lords] returned to England with bands of men accustomed to obey their orders, incapacitated by long warfare for the pursuits of settled and peaceful life and ready to follow their late masters on any turbulent enterprise.’
Controversy and compromise
Authors: Slack Paul
Published: October 2023

What a madness and cruel foolishness is this, that in the time of any great plague, such as are infected, you shut up in houses, set marks It was inevitable that controversy would be provoked by the administrative procedures whose development has just been described. As we saw in Chapter 2, commonplace assumptions about plague could be used to justify that kind of government intervention; but they also embraced a stress on divine providence which might inhibit any sort of human action - apart from repentance and prayer. Contemporaries were not unaware of this ambiguity in their intellectual inheritance. It was brought out into the open during the epidemic of 1603, and it was only after that that an uneasy but generally acceptable compromise was arrived at. It was a compromise which relegated the Almighty to a subordinate role and permitted the growth of secular interpretations based on observation of the phenomenon.
Towns under stress
Authors: Slack Paul
Published: October 2023

Thomas Pullein, vicar of Pontefract, told the aldermen of York what their duties were during the plague of 1604.In doing so he demon strated that the attitudes described in the last chapter did not deter mine action in any simple linear way. The rulers of towns must not seek refuge in flight. To that extent they had to ignore the fact that plague was infectious, and to assume that God willed their presence and might protect them. On the other hand, they must not be passively fatalistic. They must act, both to relieve the sick and to prevent further contagion. It was the need to encourage this nice balance of selfless dedication and prudence which led the Privy Council so often to attribute the growth of epidemics to negligence on the part of magistrates, rather than to an infected atmosphere which might lead to wholesale magisterial flight. As one might expect, however, the psychological balance was more easily stated on paper than achieved in practice.
The Dawes Interlude
Authors: Kent Bruce
Published: October 2023

By dint of clever financiar and political stage-management the Dawes Committee were able to set the scene for five years of relatively trouble free reparation payments. In the course of 1924 the mark was stabilized with the aid of an American-backed international loan; Germany’s multifarious financial obligations arising out of the treaty were consolidated; and an interim schedule of five annuities was drawn up which was not immediately beyond the debtor’s capacity. The French and Belgians also undertook to evacuate the Ruhr in return for a purely financial system of guarantees and controls; and the responsibility for supervising the day-to-day collection and transfer of reparations was taken away from the Paris-based Reparation Commission and delegated to specialist commissioners who were stationed in Berlin under an American Agent-General for Reparation Payments. Despite all these achievements the Dawes experts were unable to usher in a definitive settlement because neither the French nor the Americans would consent to the formal reduction of reparations and war debts which this would entail. The future of the Dawes scheme therefore depended entirely on the financial co-operation of the German government and the support of the international investing public, neither of which could be relied upon except in the temporary boom conditions of the late 1920s.
The Young Plan
Authors: Kent Bruce
Published: October 2023

True to its makeshift origins, the Young Committee proved more concerned to shore up the creaking structure of inter-Allied indebtedness than to devise a genuine final reparation settlement. For this reason its recommendations enjoyed the powerful, if schizophrenic, support of the United States, the arch-creditor nation. The Young Plan was also welcomed, after some initial misgivings, by France and the minor European creditors because it recommended that their foreign debt repayments should henceforth be covered by reparation receipts. It was not, however, well received in Britain, whose prolonged efforts to obtain the cancellation of inter-Allied debts had suffered a serious setback, and whose relative share of the spoils was appreciably diminished under the new dispensation. British disapproval was mild by comparison with that of Germany, whose financial capacity had never really been taken into account by the Young experts. The dis¬ satisfaction of Britain and Germany was responsible for the protracted and acrimonious struggle over the ratification of the Plan at the Hague Conferences of August 1929 and January 1930.
‘Those with Angry Bowels’: Develop men ts in Northern Eturkan 1903—1913
Authors: Lamphear John
Published: October 2023

As Lokoel had promised, Loolel Kokoi and Ebei found that Mt. Labur provided a secure sanctuary from British harassment: for as British East Africa had been extending its control over southern Eturkan for a decade before 1913, Uganda clung to a policy of restraint regarding the northern areas under its jurisdiction. The guidelines had been laid out by James Hayes¬Sadler, the Uganda commissioner, in 1905: The policy of the Administration is rather to avoid conflict with the wilder tribes, such as those inhabiting the large tract of country to the north of Elgon and between the Nile and Lake Rudolf, and trust to the principle of our rule becoming known to them through the intervening tribes until such time as the permanent occupation of their country becomes a necessity.
‘The War of Apara and the War of Kokoi’: The Escalation of Turkana Resistance to the End of 1917
Authors: Lamphear John
Published: October 2023

Following the crushing of the southern Turkana by the expedition of 1915, officials from Uganda and British East Africa met to explore the question of how an efficient administration might be best implemented in Eturkan. Back in 1911 the two protectorates had begun to realize that dividing the Turkana between them had not been a good idea. Neither side had been anxious to take on sole responsibility, however, and nothing transpired. In the meetings of 1915 everyone again agreed that the division of Eturkan had been a mistake, and now British East Africa, which had taken the lead in introducing some vestige of genuine control to the south, was prevailed upon to accept responsibility for administering it all.
Biography
Authors: Borsay Peter
Published: October 2023

The previous section of this book sought to demonstrate that the image of Georgian Bath is something which has been created and re-created, interpreted and re-interpreted; in other words, that it has a genesis and a history. This section will focus on the image as an artefact, with a specific formal content, expressed through particular media. To take the analogy of a painting. What is produced, at least in non-abstract art, has a recognizable subject-matter—such as people, buildings, and natural features—and this matter is conveyed through various media, like oils, watercolours, and inks. Chapters 4 to 6 will explore the subject-matter or form of Bath’s Georgian image, Chapter 7 the materials or media used to transmit it.
Architecture: Pre-Modern
Authors: Borsay Peter
Published: October 2023

The centrality of architecture to the image of Georgian Bath is today self-evident. In many respects the eighteenth-century spa only survives in the imagination because substantial parts of its physical landscape have survived in reality. Not only do buildings provide convenient hooks on which to hang allusions to famous personalities; the fabric itself resonates with meaning and significance. The following two chapters will explore the history of Bath’s Georgian architecture, tracing the changing appreciation and treatment of it across the chronological periods outlined earlier in this study. This chapter will examine the Georgian, Victorian, late Victorian and Edwardian, and inter-war eras, and Chapter 6 will continue the analysis into the modern and post-modern periods. In each era three issues will be investigated. First, how was the Georgian fabric perceived; what status did it enjoy, how was it interpreted, how sophisticated were judgements about it? Second, what competition did it face from other styles of architecture and other elements in the Georgian image, which could detract from its significance? Third, what role has conservation played in preserving and protecting the historic landscape?
Media
Authors: Borsay Peter
Published: October 2023

The previous chapters have explored the dominant features of Bath’s Georgian image. This chapter will examine the media through which those features were expressed. Conventionally historians would title such a section’sources’, and consign it to an appendix or bibliography, signifying it to be part of the scholarly infrastructure of the work, and not crucial to its comprehension. Such an approach seems inappropriate when investigating a topic like image, the very notion of which implies an especially close relationship between the subject of study and its sources. The latter are not simply a vehicle for accessing a problem; they are the object of examination itself. There is, therefore, a particular need to scrutinize the texts-and theterm is here deployed in its broadest sense to include both literary and non-literary modes of expression—used to represent Georgian Bath. An extraordinary variety of such texts were produced. Printed works like guidebooks and histories were only the tip of an iceberg, which included radio and television programmes, postcards, posters, cigarette cards, stained-glass windows, museum displays, exhibitions, and pageants. The sheer diversity is itself of significance, since it meant that public perceptions were bombarded from a multiplicity of channels, greatly enhancing the chance that the message would reach its target. Literary images were reinforced by visual ones, and even a visitor who ignored formal tourist literature and museums, could still have acquired some view of the Georgian city through the unavoidable street publicity of the heritage industry—posters, performing artists, oralguides, direction markers, wall plaques, and shop signs, not to mention the historic buildings themselves.
Towns, Heritage, and History
Authors: Borsay Peter
Published: October 2023

This has been the study of an image across three centuries, from its genesis to its manifestation on the eve of a new millennium. The focus of attention has been the way that Georgian Bath was represented. During the eighteenth century a galaxy of images were created of the city, constructed around the themes of health, environment, society, consumption, morality, and order. For much of the century the city was perceived in widely diverging—positive-negative, idealistic—’realistic’—ways. Only towards the end of the era did a common image emerge among the elite, though this was a response to deepening tensions within society as a whole, and a need among the rulers to close ranks, rather than to any new-found stability. During the course of the eighteenth century Bath’;s history was also subtly but radically reconstructed, replacing the pre-modern ‘magical’; foundation myth of Bladud with a twin-focused classical ‘rational’; myth based upon Rome and Nash. For much of the Victorian era the impact of this new his tory remained relatively muted, caught between nineteenth-century Bath’;s pas sion for the Gothic and a belief in its own civic, technical, economic, moral, and spiritual progress. As nationally these enthusiasms and certainties declined, so the way was cleared for the classical conception of the city’;s history to reassert itself, carried forward on a wave of nostalgia. Throughout the twentieth century Bath’;s Roman and Georgian images exercised a mutually reinforcing duopoly over the city’;s perception and presentation of its past. Freed from late Victorian moral inhibitions, the first full blossoming of the Georgian myth came in the 1930s. Post-war modernism checked its ascendancy temporarily, but post-modernist forces induced a second and even more prolific flowering in the 1980s. By the late twen tieth century Bath was enjoying an ‘urban renaissance’; almost comparable to that which it had experienced in the eighteenth century, and was doing so by recycling the image of the earlier period.
Introduction: Economic And Social Interpretation Of The First World War
Authors: Offer Avner
Published: October 2023

Here, in a few pages, is the gist of the book for readers in a hurry, but be warned-only the chapters that follow contain the whole story and every book says more than its author knows. Do not count on this summary alone. The First World War is often depicted as a great industrial war, fought by industrial methods. In fact, given a strong industrial capability on both sides, primary commodities were more decisive: food, industrial raw materials and that most primary of all commodities, people. Germany did not run out of rifles or shells. It suffered badly from shortages of food. Likewise the Allies: their agrarian resources decided the war. So not only a war of steel and gold, but a war of bread and potatoes.
Did Germany Really Starve?
Authors: Offer Avner
Published: October 2023

Not all nutritionists in Germany accepted Rubner ‘s authority, but his influence kept discord out of the post-war histories and official statements. The dissenting nutritionists revealed a reality more complex than the simplicities of patriotic scientists. When the Eltzbacher commission considered food requirements in 1914, it estimated that pre-war production and imports exceeded physiological needs by about 50 per cent. That ample margin was the source of the commission ‘s optimism. Its members failed to note that physiological need had been deduced from consumption estimates in the first place. This should have alerted the scientists to defects in their data. Perhaps the figures were dressed up a bit, since the group included Carl Ballod, the foremost critic of Germany ‘s food statistics.
‘Like Rats In A Trap ‘: British Urban Society And Overseas Opportunities
Authors: Offer Avner
Published: October 2023

Many Britons were unhappy with their country during the Edwardian period. More than 5 per cent of the population left for good between 1900 and 1914.1 The proportion of young adult single males who emigrated was much higher. The number of net migrants from the United Kingdom to the English-speaking countries was about 2.4 million.2 More than a million more emigrated and came back again.3 The previous chapters examined the countryside and showed how status affected motivation and economic performance. This chapter looks at the towns; the next two will examine some of the overseas alternatives.
Asian labour and white nationalism,1907-1914
Authors: Offer Avner
Published: October 2023

Exclusion was not merely the “dark side” of colonial societies.1 Rather, racism arose directly out of their virtues of democracy, civic equality and solidarity. It expressed these virtues and often confirmed and reinforced them. Democracy first. On the Pacific rim, manual workers transformed economic interest and popular prejudice into political action. Democracy elsewhere was still on trial, and in thrall to the middle and upper classes. Exclusion was a harbinger of mass politics. King ‘s political economy was populist in his preference for the smallholder over the large corporation. As an educated easterner he stopped short of the cruder forms of xenophobia, but accepted its democratic legitimacy.
Power And Plenty: Naval Mercantilism, 1905-1908
Authors: Offer Avner
Published: October 2023

Another strand in British blockade planning was the Anglo-German commercial rivalry, or rather, its perception by naval officers. This has to be stressed: commercial rivalry is not in itself a direct cause of war. It works through perceptions and minds. Naval officers had little direct experience of economic affairs, except as rentiers, in possession of portfolios of stocks and bonds. Likely as not, they acquired their economic ideas from the Press. For a decade, ever since the “Made in Germany” scare of 1896, the Press had regarded the rising economic power of Germany as a threat to British economic well-being. Whatever the finer points of analysis, the reality of the challenge was hard to deny.
The Atlantic Orientation: Hankey, Fisher And Esher
Authors: Offer Avner
Published: October 2023

Between 1910 and 1914 the doctrine that inspired the blockade project was this: the key to Britain’s security was not the balance of power on the continent, but the resources of English-speaking societies overseas. Not a “continental commitment” but an “Atlantic orientation”. The German challenge offered Britain a range of possible responses, from complete inactivity to massive intervention. The choice was partly a matter of judgement, partly a matter of values, partly a matter of temperament, if the three can be separated. As a serious strategic option, the Atlantic orientation was largely the creation of three unorthodox individuals: a junior staff officer, a retired Admiral and a gentleman of leisure’. The three were Captain Maurice Hankey, Admiral Jacky Fisher and the second Viscount Esher.
War Aims August 1914-April 1917
Authors: Stevenson David
Published: October 2023

It is time to probe more deeply the fundamental conflict into which the peripheral Powers were drawn. Despite escalating levels of violence, that conflict’s central feature was a military, political, and diplomatic impasse. Deadlock in military operations and the steadfastness of the political truces formed on the home fronts were complemented by a deepening incompatibility between the opposing coalitions’ war aims. Although the sacrifices that the war exacted were immensely greater than had been foreseen, the sacrifices entailed in compromise were still thought to exceed the price of fighting on. More precisely, Governments became entangled in a web of incremental commitment. The practical choice they faced was whether to launch the next offensive, or spurn the latest peace offer, in the knowledge that a few more weeks or months of effort might yield breakthrough and redeem the losses so far borne. And war deadened the sensibilities. It was easier to forfeit the second than the first 50,000 lives, especially if to do so might bring victory and not to do so would make certain that the casualties so far suffered were in vain. Only afterwards, with hindsight, could a later generation weigh the fruits of victory against their cumulative cost, and find them wanting.
Great Expectations
Authors: Phillips John A
Published: October 2023

OF the many men and women in England who anxiously awaited the passage of the Great Reform Bill during the months of delay in 1831 and 1832, few had more reason to feel gratified by the country’s widespread, increasingly vociferous concern than Thomas Hardy, one of the founders of the London Corresponding Society in 1792. Hardy, the guiding force behind the growth of the Society, was arrested with four others on charges of high treason in 1794 and tried for his determination to discuss and promote parliamentary reform. Though Hardy’s trial began just ten days after the execution of a Scottish Jacobin, Thomas Erskine’s skill full defence and a sympathetic jury resulted in Hardy’s acquittal on Guy Fawkes Day, 1794 after a remarkable nine-day trial. Attorney General Sir John Scott’s nine hour opening statement was matched by an equally extreme three hour jury deliberation capped by the foreman fainting from the strain immediately after delivering the ‘not guilty’ verdict. Following these exceptionally protracted and intense proceedings, London dissolved into celebrations of Hardy, Erskine, the jurors, and what Londoners perceived as the triumph of English justice.
Reform Act or Reform Era?: Political Change in Shrewsbury and Northampton
Authors: Phillips John A
Published: October 2023

Few nineteenth-century towns were more diverse physically, socially, or economically than Shrewsbury and Northampton, yet both towns reveal an important aspect of Reform in the boroughs. The behaviour of voters in Maidstone and Colchester raised the possibility that the agitation for Reform may have been more influential than the Act itself. Elections in Shrewsbury and Northampton demonstrate the politicizing effects of popular agitation during the months of debate, delay, and dismay leading up to Reform. The provisions of the Reform Act affected political behaviour in both towns, but the politicization stemming from the excitement of 1831 played an even greater role in altering their political fabric.
The Townshends And The law
Authors: Moreton C E
Published: October 2023

The Townshends lived in an intensely litigious age, one reason why Roger I flourished as a lawyer. But what of them as litigants? Of course, one family’s litigation cannot provide the basis for an extensive survey of the law in their period, ground which has in any case been well covered by scholars like Ives, but it offers some worth-while insights.
The Hammūdids
Authors: Wasserstein David J
Published: October 2023

The Hammūdids are of importance here for several reasons. As has been seen, they functioned as successors to and as replacements of the Umayyads. Once their hour of glory in Cordoba was spent, they also fitted in to the overall political system of the fifth/eleventh century like the majority of the other lesser taifa rulers. And, most importantly, they functioned as the first and probably the most dangerous of the leaders of the various Berber attempts to establish a north African hegemony over Islamic Spain following the collapse of the caliphal-‘ āmirid regime. Although these attempts failed, they came close to success, and such a result would have changed radically the nature, and probably also the fate, of Islam in the peninsula.
Caliphs, Counter-Caliphs, and Counteifeit Caliphs: Hishām and ‘Abd Allāh on Taifa Coins
Authors: Wasserstein David J
Published: October 2023

The political changes of the period between the overthrow of the Mansūrids, in 399/1009, and the Almoravid intervention in al-Andalus, nearly a century later, are reflected in the coinages of the peninsula, at least so far as such coinages actually existed and have survived. Perhaps the most significant change, if only on the surface, was the decline and eventual disappearance of the institution of the caliphate, an event which is traditionally assigned to the year 422/1031. In the sphere of the coins, this date is marked by no new departure: the names and titles of people with caliphal pretensions appear on coins of well before this date, and they continue with scarcely any interruption or change to appear on them after this date.
Fundamentals: Population, Prices, and Agriculture
Authors: Doyle William
Published: October 2023

In basic economic terms, the lives of most people were not much different in 1800 from what they had been 140 years before. The European economy remained overwhelmingly agricultural and the pattern of agriculture in most areas had hardly changed. Agricultural inertia was perhaps the basic economic fact of the period. Yet important changes had taken place, with wide ramifications. Certain areas had revolutionized their agriculture. The population of Europe was much larger in 1800 than in 1660. The cost of living had soared. Such changes made the details of people’s lives very different from those of their ancestors-even if individuals were scarcely aware of them.
A Doubtful Progress
Authors: Doyle William
Published: October 2023

The greatest problem about the Enlightenment is to estimate its influence. Philosophes, most of them brilliant publicists, ostentatiously applauded measures of which they approved. It was easy to infer that they had brought them about. ‘Opinion governs the world,’ Voltaire proudly declared in 1766, ‘and in the end the philosophes govern men’s opinions.’ But the events claimed as successes by the Enlightenment were usually the product of complex circumstances in which the state of advanced opinion was only one strand: Not surprisingly, the results often fell far short of expectations. By the 1780s the philosophic tide had left few European intellectuals untouched, but the concrete achievements remained fragmentary. As Kant declared in 1784, it was the Age of Enlightenment, but not an enlightened age.
Executing ‘Social Others’
Authors: Gatrell V A C
Published: October 2023

As The Promptings Of Sympathy And Of Decorum Combined to muddy polite people’s feelings about execution, means of evad ing engagement with the terror of the condemned became more elabo rate, it seems. The previous chapter surveyed individuals’ unconscious strategies of evasion. This chapter and the next are about the capacity of the scaffold’s polite witnesses to economize in their responses to execu tions by means of social and political discriminations. They survey the constraints on sympathy which in a highly polarized society timelessly ensued from the social and hence emotional distances between the propertied classes and most victims of the law; these last so alien to elite understanding that it was next to impossible to identify with them.