ARTICLES
The Pervasiveness of Lordship (Italy, 1050–1500)
Sandro Carocci
Pages 3–47
https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtab015
The impact of medieval lordship on the society it dominated has not received the attention it deserves. This article stresses the need to look at lordship from the bottom up, making an effort to understand how much and in which ways lordship weighed on the life of subjects, by developing the notion of its ‘pervasiveness’. Such a concept is arguably the most effective if we want to evaluate how seigneurial power was more, or less, able and willing to deeply influence the people subject to it. It highlights that in the world of lordship there was a disconnect (or at least potentially) between political power and socio-economic domination. Which factors enabled lordships to become pervasive, and which lords, from which regions, were best equipped with these characteristics? Using the influential French historiographical framework as a starting point, the article considers as case studies a set of signorie in several Italian regions. It highlights the differences between the great territorial lordships of the counts of the Kingdom of Sicily, the barons of Rome and the lords of Lombardy, on the one side, and the innumerable knightly lordships at a lower level on the other. The use of pervasiveness helps us to re-conceptualize lordship itself with different criteria.
Speaking in Hands: Early Modern Preaching and Signed Languages for the Deaf
Rosamund Oates
Pages 49–85
https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtab019
This article demonstrates that deaf men and women were integrated into early modern communities through use of sign language, and that Protestant concerns about preaching and hearing promoted sign language as a legitimate form of communication. Historians have believed that the Protestant emphasis on preaching excluded deaf people from heaven. However, not only did contemporaries believe that deaf people could be saved, but debates on this topic prompted a wider assessment of the nature of hearing loss and sensory knowledge. Discussions about deafness therefore had implications for all congregations, as English preachers used well-known manual gestures from rhetorical texts to make their sermons accessible for both the ‘spiritually’ and the ‘physically’ deaf. The experiences of deaf people in early modern England demonstrate the importance of religious practices in shaping perceptions of disability and impairment. By focusing on deaf parishioners, it is possible to explore some of the impacts of the Reformation on ideas of embodiment while modifying literary accounts of the representation of disability in the period. A little-known part of early modern history, the role of preachers in the evolution of signed languages for the deaf offers new perspectives on Reformation history and the growing field of disability history.
Dynastic Scenario Thinking in the Holy Roman Empire
Jasper van der Steen
Pages 87–128
https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtab029
Owing to the prevailing definition of ‘dynasty’ as a line of succession, historians have long neglected the fundamental tensions that underlie succession, and have undervalued both the active attempts of princes to control these tensions as well as their ability to anticipate the need to adjust to changing circumstances. Yet premodern dynasties were well equipped to anticipate and develop coping mechanisms for a wide range of future challenges regarding succession, religion, marital alliances and extinction. They did so by considering alternative scenarios for the future in house regulations. Using as an example the seventeenth-century house of Nassau in the Holy Roman Empire, this article argues that even though conflict remained endemic to dynastic power, future-orientated regulations constituted a basic consensus within princely families on how to deal with conflict, which both reflected and contributed to the associative political practices that held the Holy Roman Empire together.
Seasonable Coexistence: Temporality, Health Care and Confessional Relations in Spa, C.1648–1740
Liesbeth Corens
Pages 129–164
https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtab018
This article adds a temporal dimension to our interpretation of confessional relations. While historians are increasingly attuned to the subtleties of space in their interpretation of interconfessional contact, we also need to acknowledge interactions differed according to multiple intersecting calendars and societal rhythms. I use a case study of the watering place of Spa (current-day Belgium) around the turn of the eighteenth century in order to unravel practices of and motivations for confessional coexistence. Spa attracted an internationally and confessionally mixed clientele, capable of living in tranquillity while Europe was only tentatively finding ways to coexist in diversity. In the watering town, on a small scale, the practices of coexistence were put to the test: interim measures and exceptions bracketing out time to engage and exchange, interwoven calendars inspiring varying interactions, and fluctuating priorities challenging narratives of linear chronological progress. Rather than casting Spa as ahead of its time in championing an abstract value of toleration, this article shows how coexistence was built on traditional and charitable duties of healthcare, which would, in turn, give shape to later spa culture.
Democracy in Spanish America: The Early Adoption of Universal Male Suffrage, 1810–1853
José Antonio Aguilar Rivera and others
Pages 165–202
https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtab028
Universal manhood suffrage — the right to an equal vote for all adult males, regardless of racial, economic or literacy conditions, as adopted by some Spanish American countries in the 1850s, at a time when very few countries in the Western world had done so — is the subject of this article. It considers in more detail the experience of New Granada (Colombia), with some comparative references, especially to Argentina and Mexico, in the wider context of the 1848 European revolutions. It offers a novel contribution to the wider historiography of suffrage while also contributing to a growing literature that seeks to decentre the history of democracy. Additionally, in as much as issues related to suffrage were central to the process of constitution-making, what we detail here has some bearing on the renewed interest in constitutional history. While this is above all an engagement with history, it is hoped that its findings will have relevance to theoretical discussions among social scientists on the expansion of suffrage.
Accumulation by Attachment: Colonial Benevolence and the Rule of Capital in Nineteenth-Century Panjab
Navyug Gill
Pages 203–238
https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtab020
A persistent theme in the emergence of capitalism is the displacement of peasants from the countryside into industrializing cities, with regions not undergoing such a transition usually deemed semi-feudal, proto-capitalist or pre-modern. Instead of separations, however, Panjab was the site of an altogether different dynamic of accumulation based on forging a series of novel attachments. This article begins by tracing the East India Company’s conquest in 1849, and the development of an ostensibly benevolent land revenue settlement based on surveying, measuring and calculating agrarian potential. Next, it examines how this process generated a set of natural and human contingencies so that certain castes were fixed to parcels of land, and expected to pay increasing rates while cultivating global commodities and conducting exchanges in cash. To make sense of this difference, it then contrasts the archive of settlement work with Karl Marx’s narrative of primitive accumulation, to explicate the conditions and limitations of its universality. Together this demonstrates how caste-based peasant agriculture in Panjab was a new phenomenon implicated in a modern yet distinctive rule of capital. In a broader sense, this offers possibilities to rethink the politics of comparative analysis as well as the alterity of capitalist transitions across the colonial world.
Revolutionary Decolonization and the Formation of the Sacred: The Case of Egypt
Yoav Di-Capua
Pages 239–281
https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtab026
Egypt’s successful struggle over ownership of the Suez Canal under President Gamal ʿAbd al-Nasser in 1956 is usually seen as pivotal in the history of decolonization. Scholars have written about how the Suez War brought many of the classical themes of decolonization into focus, such as sovereignty over natural resources, the hegemony of the new Cold War order, the rise of popular anti-colonial nationalism and the international politics of development. But what about freedom? Freedom is both a political and a theological concept. Scholars of decolonization have dealt with its political aspects, but they have yet to make sense of the theological, wherein the struggle for freedom results in the sacralization of the political sphere. Conceived as a deep study of freedom during decolonization, this article engages the field of political theology to examine how an organization of the politics of liberation that was founded on the imagination of the sacred became an article of faith that shaped everyday life for millions of people around the Arab world and the Global South.
DEBATE
Out of the East (or North or South): A Response to Philip Slavin
Monica H Green
Pages 283–323
https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtab031
This article responds to Philip Slavin’s ‘Out of the West: Formation of a Permanent Plague Reservoir in South-Central Germany (1349–1356) and Its Implications’. Genetics has transformed the study of plague, one of the most lethal diseases in human history. But this technically demanding science raises questions of what constitutes valid evidence and supportable argument when examining historical phenomena at a microscopic level. Slavin argues that two new lineages of Yersinia pestis, the causative organism of plague, were seeded in central Germany following the Black Death; appearing sequentially, one lineage caused plague outbreaks in the 1350s and early 1360s, only to retreat and be replaced by a second lineage. Here, evidence is adduced to support the early central European proliferation of one lineage of Y. pestis, but also to suggest that the second lineage arose simultaneously in a different locale, outside Europe and within different epidemiological parameters. Because of the inherent rarity of biological evidence, the reconstruction of epidemiological phenomena will always require consilience with archaeological and documentary sources. Establishing ‘best practices’ of analysis and verification in this emerging multidisciplinary field has implications not only for Europe’s four hundred-year experience with plague, but for all fields of global health history.
Reply: Out of the West — and neither East, nor North, nor South
Philip Slavin
Pages 325–360
https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtac026
