bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Petrarch and Cino da Pistoia: A Moment in the Pre-history of the Canzoniere
Authors: Took John
Published: February 2012

This chapter examines the influence of Italian poet Cino da Pistoia on Petrarch's Canzoniere. It traces the emergence of the distinct tone of Petrarchan lyric from the dolce stil novo through the important filter of Cino da Pistoia. It suggests that the consonances between Cino da Pistoia's lyrics and Petrarch's may explain that warm homage to Cino at his death in Canzoniere 92 where Petrarch deliberately copied Cino's manner.
Renaissance Misogyny and the Rejection of Petrarch
Authors: Zancani Diego
Published: February 2012

This chapter traces the origin of the rejection of Petrarch and misogyny during the Renaissance period. It investigates some aspects of a reaction against the Petrarchan poetic clichés among Italian writers with some reference to a few English Elizabethan texts. It shows a model which depicts how an idealised view of one woman can be used to create a negative, basically chaotic, and even scurrilous image, in a period in which parody and mocking texts abound.
Impersonations of Laura in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-century Italy
Authors: Panizza Letizia
Published: February 2012

This chapter examines the impersonations of the character of Laura of Petrarch's Canzoniere in sixteenth and seventeenth century Italy. It analyses commentaries and the rewritings of Petrarch's Canzoniere that gave Laura celebrity status, either by hyperbole or denigration or outright impersonation. It suggests that the works on the ambivalence of Laura's identity are part a general questioning of the nature of the love lyric, its remote language, and its moral codes in an era of reform.
The Comedy of Astrophil: Petrarchan Motifs in Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella
Authors: Roe John
Published: February 2012

This chapter examines the presence of Petrarchan motifs in Sir Philip Sydney's English sonnet Astrophil and Stella. It argues that despite Sidney's reputation as an anti-Petrarchan, much of his Astrophil and Stella was positively influenced by Petrarch. It explains that Sidney expanded Petrarchan antitheses beyond anything that can be found in the Canzoniere and in some poems he offered a witty critique of the Platonic interpretations of Petrarch commentators such as Giovanni Andrea Gesualdo.
Petrarch and the Scottish Renaissance Sonnet
Authors: Jack Ronald D. S.
Published: February 2012

This chapter examines the Scottish Petrarchans before and after 1603 or the Union of the Crowns. It explains that Petrarch was initially resisted as a model for the connection between poetry and nationhood and that the Scottish sonnet became more anglicised when James VI became King of England and Scotland and Petrarchism became the more dominant lyrical influence. It considers three Scottish poets who exemplify this development of the Petrarchan sonnet, culminating in William Drummond of Hawthornden.
Between Tradition and Transgression: Amelia Rosselli’s Petrarch
Authors: Tandello Emmanuela
Published: February 2012

This chapter examines the influence of Petrarch on the poetry of Amelia Rosselli. It argues that Rosselli's poetry can be seen to reaffirm the enduring value of the Petrarchan legacy at the close of the second millennium and shows how Petrarchan discourse operates within her poetry as a veritable ghost in the machine. It suggests of Rosselli's three major books, Serie ospedaliera appears to be the one in which the dialogue with Petrarch is more explicitly and productively engaged.
Nineteenth-century British Biographies of Petrarch
Authors: Mclaughlin Martin
Published: February 2012

This chapter documents the extraordinary enthusiasm for biographies of Petrarch in Great Britain in the three-quarters of a century between 1775 and 1850. It explains that during the late eighteenth century Petrarch was more popular than Dante in Britain but Dante soon eclipsed his successor after the rise of Romanticism. It considers works on Petrarch including those of Ugo Foscolo and Walter Savage Landor and suggests some reasons why Petrarch's popularity died out in Britain so suddenly and so radically in the second half of the nineteenth century.
Translating Petrarch
Authors: Hainsworth Peter
Published: February 2012

This chapter examines the translations of Petrarch's poetry in English. It discusses different translations of Petrarch from the early Renaissance period to the twentieth century including the works of Sir Thomas Wyatt, the Earl of Surrey and Robert M. Durling. It also describes the author's own translation and explains the rationale and problems behind his own version and situates these within the broader context of the British preference for the more ‘concrete’ poetry of Dante, Michelangelo and Montale.
The Neolithic sensory revolution: monumentality and the experience of landscape
Authors: Tilley Chris
Published: February 2012

If Neolithic communities did feel and think differently about the world from those in the Mesolithic, what caused the change? This chapter argues that a fundamental part of a new Neolithic ‘mode of thought’ was directly stimulated by fresh forms of sensory experience of place and landscape. If there was a Neolithic ‘revolution’, it entailed a sensory revolution in which through altering the earth people transformed their own experiential conditions of existence in a fundamental way. A new sensory experience of place and landscape and new modes of dwelling led directly to new ways of thinking and new sets of cosmological ideas explaining the place of people in the world.
From Picardie to Pickering and Pencraig Hill? New information on the ‘Carinated Bowl Neolithic’ in northern Britain
Authors: Sheridan Alison
Published: February 2012

This chapter highlights the considerable and growing body of evidence for Neolithic activity, reliably dated to between c. 3950/3900 and 3700 cal bc in northern Britain (especially Scotland), which is associated with the use of pottery in the ‘Carinated Bowl’ ceramic tradition. The distribution of this type of pottery extends far beyond the area under review, to encompass much of Britain and much of Ireland. It is argued that the appearance of the Carinated Bowl-associated Neolithic package (and indeed that of other strands of Neolithization) is best explained in terms of the arrival of small farming groups from the Continent. An acculturationist, gradualist position on the Mesolithic–Neolithic transition simply fails to account for the evidence to hand. And even though many writers have highlighted the difficulties of pinpointing an area of origin for our hypothetical Continental ‘Carinated Bowl settlers’, it is argued that the search is neither fruitless nor hopeless.
Going over: people and their times
Authors: Whittle Alasdair
Published: February 2012

This concluding chapter does not aim to be a magisterial overview or a comprehensive summary. The preceding chapters speak for themselves of the range and quality of research currently being carried out across north-west Europe relevant to the Mesolithic–Neolithic transition. Instead, the chapter offers some brief, personal reflections on what we are doing well and what we could still do better, and thus tries to define some of the continuing challenges for future research.
Memes, Minds, and Imagination
Authors: BLACKMORE SUSAN
Published: February 2012

This chapter determines the existence of human imagination and creativity through the concept of human culture and meme. It aims to rebut the two assumptions governing creative imagination in humans. The first assumption suggests that imagination evolved because humans are biologically adaptive. The second assumption claims that the existence of consciousness is the driving force behind creativity and imagination. In this chapter, it is argued that human creativity is the result of evolutionary processes based on memes rather than genes. This concept suggests that if hominid ancestors of humans are capable of imitation, a new set of replicators are set loose driving human minds to become better at copying, storing, and recombining memes. This coevolution of memes and their copying machinery led to the modern imaginative minds which evolved not because they are biologically adaptive but because they are advantageous for the memes. Hence the driving force behind human imagination is therefore not consciousness but aevolutionary algorithm which function is not biological but memetic.
Autonomy and Control in Children’s Interactions with Imaginary Companions
Authors: TAYLOR MARJORIE , CARLSON STEPHANIE M. , SHAWBER ALISON B.
Published: February 2012

This chapter discusses children’s private role play with imaginary companions and playmates which the children created and interacted with and/or talked about regularly. Although imaginary companions are at times integrated into play with other children or family members, this type of role play in general occurs within a solitary context. Imaginary companions are interesting as they provide information on social and cognitive development. For instance, relationships formed by children with their imaginary companion offer a glimpse of the child’s concept of friendship and how it functions. In this chapter, explanations of why some children create imaginary companions with negative characteristics are considered. It discusses how studies of negative imaginary companions of children has the potential of providing fresh information on the distinction between automatic and controlled processes in consciousness and the relation between inhibitory play and pretend play.
Imagination and Testimony in Cognitive Development: The Cautious Disciple?
Authors: HARRIS PAUL L. , KOENIG MELISSA
Published: February 2012

Imagination is often associated with the capacity to contemplate non-existent possibilities; however imaginative faculty is also used when thinking about several non-observable but real events that are learned through testimony rather than direct observation. This chapter discusses the relation ship between imagination and testimony in the cognitive development of children. Testimony is the manner with which adults impart information to the younger members of the society. Through testimony, children gain insight into events that they are not able to observe firsthand. And just as children process a fictional narrative through imagination, they also rely on imagination to make sense of real events that they have not witnessed for themselves. To test the interweaving relationship of testimony and imagination, an experimental study testing the credulity of children on matters they cannot verify themselves was conducted. Evidence has shown that even preschool children do not readily believe what they are told and often measure this information with concepts and constructs they have devised for themselves. They are also cautious in their trust, wherein they often seek out and endorse information from reliable informants. They are also capable of showing differentiation among different types of non-observable entities. They exhibit more credence in invisible scientific entities and less credence in non-scientific entities.
Mental Imagery and Creative Thought
Authors: PEARSON DAVID G.
Published: February 2012

Mental imagery is the quasi-perceptual state of consciousness in which the mind appears to be able to create sensory-like experience. It is often cited as having a crucial role in creative thought; it is often associated with successful acts and performances across a wide range of creative tasks, including the development of scientific models, the conceptualization of architectural design, and the aspects of everyday problem-solving. Despite its assumed role in creative thought, its exact contribution remains a debated issue. This chapter outlines some of the anecdotal evidence that supports the link between imagery and creative thought. It also reviews evidence garnered from a number of experimental studies that have examined the use of imagery under controlled conditions. It also discusses the extent to which representational theories of imagery have failed to directly account for the phenomenology that is associated with imagery.
Comments on Cottingham ‘Plato’s Sun and Descartes’s Stove’
Authors: HEDLEY DOUGLAS
Published: February 2012

This chapter comments on John Cottingham’s chapter on Platonism in Rene Descartes’ cosmology, metaphysics, and moral theory. It explains the concept of implicit Platonism as consisting in certain Platonic or Neoplatonic notions, such as the notion of Ideas or Archetypes in the mind of God, and suggests that there is nothing Platonic in Descartes’ philosophy beyond such widely accepted ideas. It also questions Cottingham’s assumption that Platonism does not contain within itself the means of reconciling the controlling and contemplative mindsets.
Peter Brian Herrenden Birks 1941–2004
Authors: Rodger Alan , Burrows Andrew
Published: February 2012

Peter Birks was one of the most influential legal scholars of his generation. He owed that influence to the admiration in which his rigorous and innovative thinking was held by lawyers and judges, not only in this country, but throughout the Commonwealth and in Europe. Birks was most widely known through his writings, but in Oxford, in particular, his reputation also rested on his teaching, especially in the famous restitution seminars that he conducted with various colleagues over three decades. He had an enormous impact on the law of restitution/unjust enrichment both in the universities and in the courts. The ‘Birksian school of thought’ has pursued, and will continue to pursue, rational transparency and elegant coherence in legal reasoning, not only in the law of restitution, but across English private law generally.
Philip Grierson 1910–2006
Authors: Brooke Christopher , Stewartby Lord
Published: February 2012

Philip Grierson, historian and numismatist, was for seventy years a Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, and for over sixty of them he lived in the same set of rooms. His work on the Cambridge Medieval History, culminating in his production of the Shorter History in 1952, brought him an encyclopaedic knowledge of the political structures of medieval Europe. This gave Grierson a much broader historical background than most historians or numismatists can command. He was equally at home in the fifth century and the fifteenth, in western Europe or the Byzantine east.
The Child in Poetry: Foundlings, Lostlings, Changelings
Authors: Reynolds Margaret
Published: February 2012

This lecture discusses children out of place, and talks about how children in general, from the eighteenth century until contemporary times, came to be seen as always out of place. Foundlings, lostlings, and changelings are studied in this lecture, and three key dates — 1739, 1872, and 1926 — are examined. The lecture also tries to show how ideas on children formed poetry, and how poetry formed ideas about children.
Recovering Maya Civilisation
Authors: Hammond Norman
Published: February 2012

This lecture discusses three successive themes in relation to recovering Maya civilisation. The first is the origins of a settled society, and the second is the emergence of a complex literate civilisation in the latter part of the first millennium BC in the Maya lowlands. The third theme is the wider understanding of that culture's apogee in tenth century AD. The lecture sheds new light on the understanding of the Mayan culture. It looks at some factors of Mayan culture and everyday life, such as their hieroglyphic writing, rituals and structures. The information was based on the various archaeological digs and excavations conducted in the area where the Mayan civilisation was believed to exist.
Einstein
Authors: Stachel John
Published: February 2012

This lecture discusses the nature of creativity; creativity is defined in terms of the interaction between the individual and the field of experts in a certain domain. This interaction eventually determines the form and content of the results that are admitted into the domain. The lecture considers the nature of his cognitive processes and presents evidence that supports the crucial role played by social relations in shaping the domain-specific cognitive apparatus. It also looks at the myth of Einstein as magus and some of the dynamical polarities in his personality that allowed him to contribute to changes in theoretical physics.
Death and Immortality
Authors: Dixon Thomas
Published: February 2012

One of the main appeals of the language of altruism, especially in the first twenty or thirty years of its existence, was its association with a scientific and humanistic religiosity. Its growing acceptance by users of the English language both enabled and reflected intellectual and institutional shifts away from Christianity and towards some form of humanism. Altruism in the 1870s was strongly associated with the denial not only of the existence of God but also of the immortality of the soul. It was the watchword of an atheistic and humanistic ethics. In sermons, books, and articles in periodicals, defenders of Christianity found this and other reasons to resist the humanistic ideology which they believed the advocacy of altruism entailed, and which they associated with positivists and high-minded unbelievers such as Frederic Harrison and George Eliot.
Herbert Spencer, the Radical
Authors: Dixon Thomas
Published: February 2012

Aside from Darwin, the writer most commonly associated with evolution in Victorian Britain, and the country’s most famous living philosopher, was the individualistic Herbert Spencer. Spencer certainly seems an unlikely altruist, but it was the influence of his writings, including his Data of Ethics (1879), that did most to guarantee the wider dissemination of the language of altruism from the 1870s onwards. This chapter explains what altruism meant to Spencer; how he used it in his attacks on the brutality and hypocrisy of British imperialism; how it led many readers, to his great frustration, to identify him as a disciple of Comte; and how he finally dropped the term as it came to be associated with socialism. Spencer’s combination of altruism abroad and egoism at home made sense as two sides of his resistance to political and ideological movements which he thought represented the ‘New Toryism’.
Motherhood and the Ascent of Man
Authors: Dixon Thomas
Published: February 2012

This chapter looks at three different ways that evolutionary science developed from the 1880s onwards to give rise to some quite different visions of altruism—including those which featured in two of the best-selling non-fiction works of the 1890s. Henry Drummond’s The Ascent of Man (1894) provided a theistic version of human evolution dominated by motherhood and altruism. Benjamin Kidd’s Social Evolution (1894) endorsed August Weismann’s rejection of the inheritance of acquired characteristics and consequently argued that increased altruism could only be guaranteed by the cultural impact of religion rather than by heritable moral improvements in the race. Nonetheless, advocates of eugenics continued to put forward proposals for how to achieve moral progress through selective human breeding. Despite their scientific and political differences, these writers all agreed about the desirability of altruism and shared the hope that it might somehow be increased.
Egomania
Authors: Dixon Thomas
Published: February 2012

This chapter surveys varieties of post-Victorian moral thought at the turn of the century, as exemplified in the individualistic, egoistic, and aesthetic philosophies of Oscar Wilde, Friedrich Nietzsche and his British followers, and G. E. Moore. All of these new philosophies involved radical redefinitions and revaluations of altruism and marked the beginnings of a post-Victorian ‘egomania’, which looked for ways to escape from the dull and cloying cult of sentimental selflessness that characterized high Victorian moralism. Wilde mocked the idea of living for others and instead celebrated Jesus Christ as the first and greatest of all individualists. Nietzsche and his British admirers waged war on Christian pity and Spencerian altruism as different varieties of a single decadent value-system. G. E. Moore used analytic philosophy to articulate and justify a neo-pagan ethics of art and emotion.
The book, the wilderness, and the family: Islamic doctrine and African practice
Authors: Becker Felicitas
Published: February 2012

The renegotiation of relationships of dependency within households and families in which Muslim teachings became implicated took place amid the consolidation of the political practice that is termed ‘republican’, and was similarly low key. Differences in the way men and women related to the sphere of commerce existed before the colonial period in Southeast Tanzania. Muslim teachings could be readily evoked to argue for changes that affected women. The villagers' views of religious change are discussed. Funerary practices common among non-Muslims have come to be redefined as Muslim. In addition, the chapter presents the problems surrounding healing and dealing with witchcraft. The development of witchcraft cleansing in Southeast Tanzania shows the resilience of pre-existing ways of addressing misfortune. Witchcraft cleansing constituted a significant field of religious practice, whose dynamics cannot be reduced to the concurrent spread of Islam. Furthermore, the chapter reports the survival and decline of sacrifice.
The heritage of slavery and the educationalist shehe of the Sufi brotherhoods
Authors: Becker Felicitas
Published: February 2012

This chapter describes the significance of the Sufi brotherhoods. It starts by addressing the arrival of the tarika in Southeast Tanzania. The tarika-shehe of the inter-war period, who are most clearly remembered in the coastal towns, were themselves fairly well travelled, well connected, and partly of patrician parentage. Ritual practices constitute a crucial unifying element for the tarika. Two tarika became influential in the late nineteenth century in Southeast Tanzania. The main characters of twentieth-century saints are summarized. The outlines of the shehes' lives and work already give a sense of the tensions they negotiated: between urbanites versed in Arabic script and immigrants to town versed in ngoma, between the ideology of patrician separateness and superiority, and the self-assertion of villagers struggling to make the colonial towns their home. The ritual expertise, colonial domination, and the reformulation of categories of social distinction are discussed. The spread of the tarika and their ritual practices along the Swahili coast illustrates the unity in diversity of this culture area at work.
Conclusion
Authors: Becker Felicitas
Published: February 2012

The future of relations between Tanzanian Muslims and the state is in the balance as recriminations between reformists and Bakwata continue, and the outline of potential compromises between Ansar and Lailah Muslims is as yet hard to see. Beyond the acceptance of basic religious practices, being Muslim meant very different things to different people at different times: a privileged connection to coastal sites of exchange for pre-colonial big men; social ascendancy for pre-colonial patricians, but social equality to inter-war immigrants; full participation in the social and ritual life of the village for rural converts in the mid-twentieth century; an increasingly problematic separate allegiance for post-colonial Tanzanians. The permutations of public ritual are covered. The concern about ignorance is not in itself a product of post-colonial political rhetoric. The chapter then discusses the political topography and the distribution of religious affiliations. The history of town and countryside helps in the understanding of the context that has shaped academic representations of Swahili culture as an urban culture. The Ansar and the debate on Islam and modernity are explained. The Islamist movements in the Southeast and East Africa at large draw on allegiances and grievances rooted in both recent and long-term history.
A False Start
Authors: Herbert James
Published: February 2012

In general, modern governments invest only a small portion of the national income to the generation of new knowledge. In the United Kingdom, the Department of Science and Industrial Research carried out this task until 1965. Then the Science and Technology Act changed responsibility for the curiosity-driven research to five Research Councils which are funded through the Department of Education and Science. In 1993, a White Paper, Realizing Our Potential called for the reorganization of the Research Councils. This chapter discusses the struggles of the establishment and recognition of the need for Council for Research in the Humanities. In 1961, the British Academy suggested for the creation of Council for Research in the Humanities, however it was not granted in the legislation made in 1965. Instead, a separate Research Council for social science was established, which opened up the possibility of creating a separate Research Council for Humanities. In 1990s, discussions on the reorganization of UK research funding reopened the question of how the government funds and supports research in humanities. It also opened talks for the establishment of a freestanding Humanities Research Council. Sometime in 1992, after deliberate considerations of the possible contributions of a separate research council on humanities, a recommendation for the establishment of Humanities Research Council was made. However, on the same year, the government decided not to set up an agency that would support humanities, and, in 1993, the government made a firm decision not to include humanities in any form to the circle of Research Councils — a decision which irked humanities scholars and academy members.
Back on to the Agenda
Authors: Herbert James
Published: February 2012

This chapter discusses the reintegration of the need for Humanities Research Council back onto the public agenda and into the policy stream of the UK government. The issue of the Research Council for the humanities came into public and governmental attention when it was fastened to the dilemmas of financing higher education, which itself was tied to the uncertainty of the UK economy. In May 1996, the Secretary of State for Education and Employment together with Secretaries of State for Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland appointed Chairman Ron Dearing to create a body that would inquire into the higher education system of the UK. In 1997, the committee produced a report, Higher Education in a Learning Society, or the Dearing Report. The report charted a course for higher education in the UK for the next twenty years. This so-called intellectual capital called for a higher quality of teaching and the need for researchers and research facilities. It offered 93 specific recommendations, among which was a recommendation advocating the immediate establishment of a new Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). In 1998, the government recognized the need for the establishment of a research council for humanities and announced the provision of £8M in 1998–1999 for arts and humanities research, albeit after lengthy considerations.
Introduction
Authors: Bayly C. A. , Biagini Eugenio F.
Published: February 2012

This introductory chapter begins with a discussion of how Giuseppe Mazzini played a crucial role in popularizing the word ‘democracy’ in the 19th century, and how he remained an iconic figure whose memory was invoked as an analogical and conjunctural symbol by democrats, nationalists, humanitarians, and religious reformers from the River Plata to the River Ganges. It describes how Mazzini's deep, albeit ambiguous, unorthodox, and syncretistic religiosity was key to his success. The chapter also details the spread of Mazzini's influence, which followed the route of Italian political emigration and was later magnified through the British prism.
‘Comunicare con il popolo’: Novel, Drama, and Music in Mazzini’s Work
Authors: Sorba Carlotta
Published: February 2012

This chapter observes and relocates the role of the arts in Mazzini's political reflections, seeing in it a kind of prelude to the aesthetic dimension of politics generally explored in the 20th century. Through a close analysis of his large output of literary and musical criticism (1826–44), it shows how the language of the arts, and especially drama as ‘the social art par excellence’, was considered by the Italian thinker to be the main means to communicate to the public – in a forceful and emotional way – political and national goals. Mazzini believed that, in the specific case of Italy, opera, with its active power to move, thrill, and provoke enthusiasm in Italian theatres, could play a crucial political role.
Mazzini’s International League and the Politics of the London Democratic Manifestos, 1837–50
Authors: Mastellone Salvo
Published: February 2012

This chapter focuses on Mazzini's first exile in England. Writing in English after 1839, Mazzini discussed the socio-political implications of democracy, in a debate conducted mainly through the Chartist press (both newspapers and pamphlets). Mazzini's interlocutors were a number of other democrats – including both British radicals and Chartists, and other European exiles (mainly Polish, German, and French). They spanned the whole political spectrum, from liberals to communists, involving men belonging to different generations, including Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. In the course of such debate a number of ‘Manifestos’, ‘Addresses’, and ‘Appeals’ were published by different and sometimes competing organizations. Several of these social and political programmes were signed by refugees from continental Europe.
Mazzini and Anticlericalism: The English Exile
Authors: Biagini Eugenio F.
Published: February 2012

The Mazzinian movement has often been associated with radical anticlericalism, epitomized by the leader presiding over the republic that replaced papal rule in Rome in 1849. Yet, unlike many of his followers, Mazzini himself was less than an ‘anticlerical’ and in fact favoured a close relationship between politics and religion, provided the latter became the organic expression and spiritual mirror image of a democratic, non-hierarchical society. In contrast to much of the historiographical consensus, which stresses the influence of Saint-Simon, this chapter argues that Mazzini's vision incorporated features from a wider variety of cultural traditions, including Jansenism and Protestantism. In particular, during his long exile in England, the great eclectic became increasingly aware of the affinities between his project and Protestant Nonconformity. While the latter made a number of converts within the Italian émigré community in Britain, it was the less-orthodox views of the ‘Rational Dissenters’ that were most interesting to Mazzini as he tried to define his republican ideal of the relationship between church and state.
Mazzini and Spain, 1820–72
Authors: Thomson Guy
Published: February 2012

This chapter examines the Italian factor in Spanish politics between the ‘liberal triennium’ (1820–3), when Mazzini first showed an interest in Spain, and his death in 1872. The first part looks at the lessons Mazzini drew from Spain's liberal and patriotic struggles in developing his ideas about insurrection and popular warfare, and assesses the impact on Spain of the influx of Italian Carbonari refugees from the failed revolutions in Naples and Piedmont in 1820–1. The second part considers the influence of Mazzini on Spanish social and political thought during the 1830s and 1840s. The third part explores the impact of Mazzini's ‘action’ strategy, ideas of democratic internationalism, and news of the unfolding Risorgimento on the ideology and practice of the Spanish Democrat party, from its foundation in 1849 until ‘La Gloriosa’ of September 1868, the revolution that brought down the Bourbon monarchy. An epilogue charts the responses of Mazzini and Garibaldi to the constitutional experiments and political rollercoaster of Spain's ‘revolutionary sexennium’ (1868–74).
The Relevance of Giuseppe Mazzini’s Ideas of Insurgency to the American Slavery Crisis of the 1850s
Authors: Roberts Timothy M.
Published: February 2012

This chapter discusses Mazzini's influence in the context of the slavery crisis of the 1850s in the United States. That decade, which saw a crisis erupt in Kansas over the question of whether slavery should be allowed to expand, ended dramatically at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, where the violent abolitionist John Brown led a doomed attempt to arm and liberate slaves. Mazzini studied, wrote about, and on occasion attempted to enact popular insurrection and guerilla warfare. His ideas became essential to Brown's ideology and actions, which precipitated the Civil War. The chapter suggests an under-appreciated aspect of Mazzini's influence in America, invites a reassessment of the American sectional crisis of the 1850s for its transatlantic dimensions, and proposes a sobering but important dimension to the historical path of the spread of democratic nationalism.
Commentary
Authors: Enmarch Roland
Published: February 2012

The use of editorial marks in the transliteration and translation of The Dialogue of Ipuwer and the Lord of All broadly follows Paul Maas (1958 [1927]), and in part the Leiden papyrological conventions. In the transliteration, words that belong together in a prosodic colon as defined by Gerhard Fecht are connected with hyphens. Specifically, the stative generally does not form a separate colon except when there is a chain of statives, or when the grammatical subject itself consists of several cola, or when the stative forms an adjunct clause. In ambiguous cases, where two prosodic analyses are possible, the alternative is given where it significantly alters the interpretation of the strophe. The transliteration ignores unetymological features of Ramessid orthography. The theme of insubordination and unruliness among subordinate workers recurs in the poem. This chapter also analyses the poem's strophes, audience, structure and laments.
William Gerald Beasley 1919–2006
Authors: Nish Ian
Published: February 2012

William Gerald Beasley (1919–2006), a Fellow of the British Academy, was the pioneer in introducing Japanese history into British academic circles as teacher, researcher, and author. He was born in Hanwell, Middlesex on December 22, 1919, and moved to Brackley, Northamptonshire, where he was educated at Magdalen College School. In 1937, Beasley registered for a degree in history at University College London. In the last weeks of World War II, he was in the Pacific Islands interrogating Japanese naval prisoners who were few in number and ‘never seemed to possess important information’. Late in June 1945, Beasley was ordered to join the flagship of the British Pacific Fleet, the HMS King George V, so as to be ‘available for duty in Japan, if needed’. In 1947, he began to teach at the School of Oriental and African Studies, which was the beneficiary of financial help under the recommendations of the Scarbrough Commission. In his great book Japanese Imperialism, 1894–1945 (Oxford, 1987), Beasley re-examined the nature of Japan's imperialism.
Julian Medford Budden 1924–2007
Authors: Petrobelli Pierluigi , Parker Roger
Published: February 2012

Julian Medford Budden (1924–2007), a Fellow of the British Academy, was the finest scholar of nineteenth-century Italian opera of his generation. He will be remembered for his achievements as a producer at the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), for his broadcasts and reviews, and above all for his books on Giuseppe Verdi and Giacomo Puccini. Indeed, his passing leaves a huge gap in the field of opera studies. Budden was born in Hoylake, near Liverpool, on April 9, 1924, the only child of Lionel Budden and Maud Budden. In 1951 he started at the BBC, where he remained for his entire working life. Budden's first post was as a clerk and script editor; he then rose through the ranks to become a producer, Chief Producer of Opera, and finally External Services Music Organizer. Two aspects of Budden's background were likely to have been fundamental to his scholarly achievement: his exposure to Classics at Oxford University and his career in BBC Radio.
Charles Henry Gifford 1913–2003
Authors: Ricks Christopher
Published: February 2012

Charles Henry Gifford (1913–2003), a Fellow of the British Academy, was a scholar-critic whose death at the age of ninety brought home what true piety is, in contemplation of his supple stamina and of his own discriminating piety towards the literary geniuses whose presences he owned: Leo Tolstoy and George Seferis, Boris Pasternak and Samuel Johnson, Dante and T. S. Eliot. He was a teacher for thirty years at the University of Bristol, a reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement, as essayist for Grand Street, and general editor (for Cambridge University Press) of the Cambridge Studies in Russian Literature. Educated at Harrow and then at Christ Church, Oxford, Gifford gained his BA in 1936, securing those foundations in Classics that were once held to be indispensable to all humane literary studies. Though he changed his mind as to whether he was cut out to be a poet, he never dispensed with what underpinned his love of poetry, the trained analytical and synthesising powers that his study of classical literature had helped to establish within him.
Palace or Powerstation? Museums Today
Authors: ROBINSON DUNCAN
Published: February 2012

This lecture presents the text of the speech about art museums in England delivered by the author at the 2007 Isaiah Berlin Lecture held at the British Academy. It comments on the role of museums as palaces or powerstations. The lecture suggests that the shape and size of museum buildings are bound to reflect not only their purpose but also the cultural assumptions of the period in which they were created, or recreated. It describes the Louvre and the Fitzwilliam Museums.
Mind the Gap; or Why Humans are Not Just Great Apes
Authors: DUNBAR R. I. M.
Published: February 2012

This lecture presents the text of the speech about humans and apes delivered by the author at the 2007 Joint British Academy/British Psychological Society Annual Lecture held at the British Academy. It comments on the claim that an evolutionary perspective is not a competing paradigm for conventional explanations in the social sciences, and explains the why humans are so different from other apes and monkeys, despite the fact that we share so much of our evolutionary history with them.
Classical Music and the Subject of Modernity1
Authors: BUTT JOHN
Published: February 2012

This lecture presents the text of the speech about classical music and modernity delivered by the author at the 2007 Aspects of Art Lecture held at the British Academy. It discusses the development of notation and the tonal system and suggests they seldom engaged with western classical music. The lecture also explores the works of Lloyd Webber and the views of Tina Redford about music education and teaching methods.
The Promise—and Limits—of Embedded Cosmopolitanism: Restraint, ‘The Enemy’, and the Problem of Incompatible Communities
Authors: Erskine Toni
Published: February 2012

This chapter discusses the promise and limits of an embedded cosmopolitanism position by placing it in the context of war. This is where popular particularist appeals to care and consensus have obvious and practical limits. It makes a specific reference to two prominent norms that relate to the conduct of organized violence, namely the prohibition against torture and the principle of non-combatant immunity. The chapter illustrates two extremes of an embedded cosmopolitan position and highlights how embedded cosmopolitan insights can help identify and avoid ‘traps of membership’.
The forms of credit and their uses
Authors: Briggs Chris
Published: February 2012

Interactions and exchanges in medieval Europe were dominated by the involvement of credit. In the broad sense, it means allowing someone a benefit or granting them a service on the premise and understanding that one would be able to make claim upon that person or their family in the future. Although credit in medieval Europe has the potential for diversity, most credit in medieval villages took a number of similar and familiar forms. This chapter aims to determine which forms of credit transaction were in use in England in the period and to establish which was the most important. The chapter also assesses the uses of credit and the amount and quantities of credit extended to the villages. In addition to determining the meaning of debt in the fourteenth-century context, the chapter also addresses the strengths and weaknesses of the English rural credit system compared with the contemporary regions of Europe. It also tackles two propositions concerning the credit system of medieval England. The first proposition assumes that the credit transactions in this period were generally small-scale and tended towards providing essentials on a short-term basis. The second proposition addressed herein assumes that borrowing during this period was large-scale, a reflection of the orientation of the transactions to enhance the borrower's future as well as the lender's.
The formation of credit relationships
Authors: Briggs Chris
Published: February 2012

This chapter examines the investigating techniques employed by the borrowers for identifying and selecting lenders and vice versa in creating credit relationships and transactions. It examines the terms and conditions agreed upon by creditors and lenders in their credit transactions. It discusses the quantity of the credit extended in the fourteenth-century in terms of its overall value and the average size of individual credit. It also discusses the exploitation and expropriation of the debtors through high levels of interest, loss of land, and pledging of properties in connection with the debts. The chapter also tackles the formation of credit contracts and their terms and conditions, including their effects on mobilization of capital within the creditors, the debtors, and the community as a whole.
Credit and social relations
Authors: Briggs Chris
Published: February 2012

In the previous chapters, the dominant view of the creditor-debtor relationship was exploitative – where lenders capitalize on the dependence of the poor borrowers. In this view, the creditors profited while the debtors become poorer as a consequence of their borrowing. This chapter discusses the nature and consequences of the relationships between creditors and debtors, both for the individuals involved and the village society as a whole. It seeks to rebut the above-mentioned observations. In this chapter, it is assumed that the acquisitive behaviour of the lenders has limits and that the exploitative nature of the credit system has boundaries. Although the idea of debt as a malign force has a long tradition within the history of European agrarian societies, this chapter presents a rather different picture of the credit-debtor relationship during the medieval period. Undeniably, the creditors generally profited from the credit system. However, most credit relationships did not result in negative consequences for the borrower. In the villages studied in this chapter, most people who were involved in credit did not experience serious long-term economic problems or exploitation from the creditors. This scenario suggests that many of the borrowers during the period were relatively wealthy with almost the same economic characteristics as those of the lenders. It also established that debtors generally are lessors wherein they lease their parts of land to pay for their debts instead of formally pledging their lands as collateral.
Where Environmental and Frontier Studies Meet: Rivers, Forests, Marshes and Forts along the Ottoman–Hapsburg Frontier in Hungary
Authors: ÁGOSTON GÁBOR
Published: February 2012

It has been fashionable in the generalist literature to argue that the Ottomans lacked knowledge in European geography and politics. This chapter first offers some comments regarding Istanbul's understanding of geography and environment in the context of Ottoman strategy and frontier warfare. The, it presents a short overview of the importance of rivers, marshlands and mountains with regard to the formation of the opposing Hapsburg and Ottoman defence systems in Hungary. The last part of the chapter deals with the relationship between landscape, climate and fortifications and offers some preliminary results and tentative observations regarding deforestation and marshlands. The discussion also argues, although in somewhat different ways, that the Ottomans and their Hapsburg rivals both had a keen interest in geography and mapped their empires and resources, and possessed adequate information as to the terrain and river systems of their lands and frontiers.
The Ottoman Conquest of Arabia and the Syrian Hajj Route
Authors: PETERSEN ANDREW
Published: February 2012

This chapter discusses the Ottoman presence in Arabia, from the initial conquests in the sixteenth century up to the end of the eighteenth century, before the French invasion of Egypt followed by the rise of Mehmed Ali Pasha fundamentally changed the balance of power in the region. In particular, it focuses on the evolution of the Syrian hajj route and compares it to wider developments elsewhere in the Arabian Peninsula. The first part of the chapter focuses on the expansion and contraction of Ottoman rule in Arabia. The second part focuses on the Hijaz and the fortification of the hajj route linking it to Mecca.
Ottoman Attempts to Control the Adriatic Frontier in the Napoleonic Wars
Authors: ŞAKUL KAHRAMAN
Published: February 2012

This chapter attempts to analyse the shift in the Adriatic policy of the Ottoman Empire in the Napoleonic period. The focus is on the formation of the Republic of the Seven United Islands — the Ionian islands of Corfu, Paxos, Leucada, Cephalonia, Ithaca, Zante and Cythera — through active Ottoman and Russian intervention. Ottoman-Russian quarrels over the status of the Republic as well as the conflict between imperial realities versus local interests are integral to the understanding of the delicacies of running the Adriatic frontier in the Napoleonic period. When the Russo-Ottoman alliance shattered and the Ionian Islands were abandoned to the French together with the four coastal towns, the Ottomans once again resorted to the good old policy of cautious diplomacy; that is to say, the provisioning of the occupying force in Corfu.
The Garrison and its Hinterland in the Ottoman East, 1578–1605
Authors: MURPHEY RHOADS
Published: February 2012

This chapter gives an overview and analysis of the consequences and localized effects of the period of endemic war between the Ottomans and Safavids along an extended front in eastern Anatolia over the thirteen years between 1578 and 1590. It assesses how the creation of a new militarised zone where large and very resource-demanding garrisons, constituting a key element of Ottoman military strategy, contributed to the stability or otherwise of the frontier regions in the post-war period. In particular, it evaluates the impact of Ottoman military investment, deployment of resources and local cost-sharing and manpower provision arrangements on social relations, both in cities where the major garrisons were situated and in the surrounding countryside whose resources contributed to their maintenance.