The Politics of Stuart Medievalism

Sweden, Inc.: Temporal Sovereignty of the Realm and People from the Middle Ages to Modernity

Elizabeth Barrett Browning's engagement with and contribution to cultural discourse of Victorian medievalism is an area of her work which deserves far more critical attention than it has received: indeed whole question of female-authored medievalism has received scant discussion. (1) Medievalism, way the Middle Ages have been stretched in many directions in order to provide ideological space in which society can explore and articulate concerns which are otherwise repressed, (2) especially nineteenth-century medievalism, has received attention in recent years in Clare A. Simmons's Reversing Conquest (1990), Kathleen Biddick's Shock of Medievalism (1998), and Elizabeth Fay's Romantic Medievalism (2002), (3) following seminal studies by Alice Chandler and Marc Girouard. (4) However, all these critics largely focus on work of only celebrated male medievalists of nineteenth century, with exception of Fay, who gives equal focus to male and female writers, considering work of Anna Seward, Mary Robinson, Letitia Landon, and Mary Shelley alongside male poets within her Romantic time-frame. When critics have addressed EBB's medievalism, they often suggest that poet's view corresponds with that expressed by Aurora Leigh: I do distrust poet who discerns No character or glory in his times, And trundles back his soul five hundred years, Past moat and drawbridge, into castle-court. (5) Some critics have judged EBB's endeavor to use medieval images and forms failure. For example, while suggesting that EBB's ballads provided a covert but thorough-going reassessment, often total repudiation of Victorian ideas about womanliness to which they ostensibly appeal, Dorothy Mermin proposes that poet's use of medieval settings and ballad form were part of her search for world which would give scope for passion and action, quest would later deem misdirected and repudiate in fifth book of Aurora Leigh. (6) Mermin places use of medieval forms and settings by women poets firmly within ideology of Victorian medievalism as [male] constructed cultural movement, and thus judges it futile: In terms that would matter most to women who felt imprisoned in women's sphere--the relative freedom or fixity of social roles --nineteenth-century medievalism's dream of order thoroughly retrogressive.... Elizabeth Barrett's ballads investigate resources of medievalism, which one of main imaginative alternatives in nineteenth century to constrictions of modern life, and reject it as nostalgic folly. (p. 94) This verdict fails to assess, however, power of EBB's use of medieval chivalric images to demonstrate hypocritical and unjust gender confines of contemporary life, expectations and demands of feminine behavior. She uses medievalism for her own purposes, not aligning herself entirely with belief system of movement. Instead, clearly refutes gender constructions of chivalry while highlighting contemporary social problems. In her innovative use of ballad form, most obviously in The Romaunt of Page and Rhyme of Duchess May (both from Poems, 1844), as Marjorie Stone points out, she employs starker power structures of medieval society to foreground status of women as objects in male economy of social exchange, and to unmask subtler preservation of gender inequities in contemporary Victorian ideology. (7) By contrast, Karen Hodder has focused on EBB's medievalism, and provided rare and thorough analysis of her translation of Chaucer's Annelida and Arcite, which poet's contribution to 1841 volume Poems of Geoffrey Chaucer, Modernized. (8) Hodder argues convincingly that EBB's work was not just brushed by fringes of Romantic and Victorian medievalism, but that serious medievalist, that is scholar who applied her knowledge seriously; and that her familiarity with primary medieval texts, like that of Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Morris, not temporary or superficial, but developed and woven into fibre of her art (p. …

In Chateaubriand's Voyage en Amérique et en Italie, we read: “In Gothic languages, Scandinavia was called Mannaheim, which means ‘country of men,’” and what the Latin of the sixth century has translated with vigor by these words: “the factory of the human race.”2 This extract, as an echo of Jordanes's vagina nationum, demonstrates the growing interest for Scandinavia in French intellectual life during the nineteenth century, and especially for Iceland, described by Chateaubriand as “the Norse historical archive.” Just as MacPherson's Ossian had at the end of the preceding century, the discovery of Ari Thorgilsson or Snorri Sturluson (“the Herodote of the North” for Chateaubriand) further opened a new field of research for French scholars.In fact, this field had been opened up from at least the middle of the eighteenth century, when Montesquieu fantasized about a mythicized North as a homeland of freedom (in opposition to the South) and saw it not only as factory of mankind but as the “factory of instruments that break the iron forged in the South” (Montesquieu 1973, EL, XVIII:5; Mohnike 2016, 18; Davy 2010, 96–7). Reviving Montesquieu's historical approach, the French scholars of the nineteenth century saw the North as a well that drew its waters from many streams.Legal historians did not hesitate to tap into it (Sturmel 2002, 90–121; Audren and Halpérin 2013), testifying to their own curiosity, but more generally to the scientific interest of French lawyers and historians for Scandinavia. This was demonstrated when the academician Louis-Jean Koenigswarter wrote in 1853: “The ancient customs and laws of Scandinavia have real advantages for those who study the antiquities of European laws over the first written customs of the barbarians.”3 This interest of French historical, legal, or geographical sciences for Iceland is reflected also in the superlatives used to qualify the Nordic island. For Jean-Marie Pardessus, Professor at the Faculty of Law of Paris, Iceland is, of all the parts of Northern Europe, “the most remarkable by its civilisation, its literature and its laws” (Pardessus 1834, 45). For Jean-Baptiste Bory de Saint-Vincent, geographer and politician, the Icelandic nation “is one of most intelligent from all over the world,” and “no one is more faithful to its own traditions’ (Bory de St-Vincent and Lacroix 1840, 251–8). For Henri Prentout, Professor at the University of Caen, Iceland is “the most interesting country to have a picture of the Scandinavian society in [the] 9th century” (Prentout 1911, 206). Pardessus's judgment about Icelandic singularities reads as follows: I could say that Iceland is almost more Scandinavian than Norway, because alliances and invasions [that] came from Europe have quickly altered the pure Scandinavian race in Norway. . . . That is so true that historians who wanted to study mores, customs, laws, and Scandinavian literature have always focused on Iceland.4Such an affirmation by a French scholar in the middle of the nineteenth century is not surprising because the North had become the home of a myth a few centuries earlier, dating back perhaps to the reception in France of Olaus Magnus's Historia om de nordiska folken in the middle of the sixteenth century (Davy 2019, 12), or to Rudbeck's Atlantica sive Manheim, a work that so influenced Montesquieu and Chateaubriand (Wolfram 1990, 2) in its confusion of Plato's Atlantis story and Virgil's Ultima Thule, and which managed to trace the homeland of all civilizations back to Scandinavia (Anttila 2014, 245). Thus, what Xavier Marmier writes in the middle of the nineteenth century is significant: Beyond the Baltic Sea, we leave our science. A wall of fog hides the surroundings and Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Lapland, Spitzberg, Finland, and also Russia appear behind this wall with their imprecise forms and confuse themselves with our imagination. It is here our Thule; here is this country half fabulous and half historical of Ancients, this foggy kingdom whose customs we cannot identify and position with precision, and on which we are told so many strange things. (Marmier 1840, 95)In fact, since the beginning of the early modern period, Thule seemed to embody a sort of original sanctuary where the origins of peoples and of their laws could be found, the birthplace of the world. Why should it not, therefore, also be the fons et origo of the homo juridicus? Certainly, French scholars were not unanimous in assimilating Thule to Iceland. But such an assimilation was often made by many of them, and it contributed to this mythical approach and the quest for the origins of Europe's nations there.At the beginning of the nineteenth century, John Pinkerton reminded everyone that famous and talented scholars had based their research on the “imaginary hypothesis” of a Scythian migration from Scandinavia outwards. In their minds, he says, the language, mythology, and morals of the Scythes had been preserved in the “Icelandic desert” intact, such that the Scythian advance through Scandinavia has become “a very curious object of study” (Pinkerton 1804, 247). A few years later, in 1822, Fabre d'Olivet believed that he had located the source for the first Mexican legislators in the Atlantis, and in the Borean race, “whose peregrinations have led it from Iceland to America” (Fabre d'Olivet 1822, 188). The belief was repeated by the jurist Ernest Glasson at the end of the same century (1889, 12). Here, we find ourselves on the threshold of a larger Indo-European perspective, amply exploited since the beginning of the nineteenth century by Malte-Brun, for example, who envisaged “one great family from the banks of the Ganges River to the shores of Iceland” (Malte-Brun 1828, 400), but also by Frédéric Eichhoff (1853, 11–2) and Adolphe Pictet (1859, 3).Furthermore, since the days of Montesquieu, there was no doubting that the North had been, long ago, a country of freedom. This was an idea that became widespread through to the end of the nineteenth century. Ernest Nys (the famous Belgian promoter of the study of international law), for example, envisaged the Far North as “the liberty's servant and defensor which fought for the independence of men versus despotism” (Nys 1896, 125). Iceland embodies this topos through the memory of the Norse migrations, Norsemen being forced to flee the tyranny of Harald Fairhair (Haraldr inn hárfagri) at the end of the ninth century. Land of freedom, founded on an anti-monarchical legacy, Iceland is also described as the land of equality, that being, as Henri Prentout pointed out, a dominant trait in old Scandinavian society (1911, 206).Following in the footsteps of Paul-Henri Mallet, who called Iceland “the Athens of the Ice,” several French historians in the nineteenth century presented Scandinavia as the “paragon of democracy.” “Common misfortune had brought them together,” wrote Georges Depping, “all equal, and no one could impose their own domination on others.” And, after enumerating the powers of the assemblies and the “lavmand” (i.e., lawman, lögmaðr/lögsögumaðr, who presided over the Althing), he added: Here was the simple and democratic government of this small Free State, separated from Europe by the boreal seas, and seated between the rocks, volcanoes, and ices of Iceland.5Various scholars made the small step that transformed Iceland into the antecedent of the Parliamentary system. Charles Hertz saw medieval Iceland as a Parliamentary republic (1879, 336); Gabriel Gravier located Iceland as the origin of Parliaments (1887, 171); Joseph-Louis Ortolan attributed a Norse origin to the word “Republic” (1831, 373); and Ernest Nys depicted Iceland as the “mother of England and grand-mother of United-States” (1896, 100).All these historical and legal reflections attest to the evidence of a relationship woven in fantasy between Iceland and the French scholarly world from the end of the eighteenth century until the end of the following century. There are therefore questions to be asked about the stance of French legal historians in that period toward Iceland, and about what it meant. On the one hand, it allowed them to renew their approach to their indigenous legal culture by locating in unknown (or hitherto ignored) sources the origins of their own national law elsewhere than in Roman law or in those law-codes that they termed “barbarian.” On the other hand, this allowed them to retain the notion of a civil law-code whilst avoiding the risk of an ever more perilous “Germanism.” When it comes to meaning, the use of Icelandic sources gave to many of these scholars of a liberal disposition (almost all of them from 1830s to 1840s) a sort of historical base from which their own political opinions could flourish.It even gave birth to a “Norse school” in French universities, a “school of legal history with a Scandinavian wing.” This school focused, on the one hand, on discovering (or rediscovering) Icelandic sources of law (see section I below) and, on other hand, on modeling those sources as a way to discover the distant origins of French law (see section II below).At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Noël de la Morinière, interested in Scandinavian antiquities in Normandy, admitted to the widespread contemporary ignorance of Norse texts: “They are not familiar to French people,” he said. “These documents seem to us like as Boreal forests which we only know from the sea littoral but in whose milieu we dare not penetrate” (Morinière 1799, 28). And when Domenico Alberto Azuni, a Sardinian jurist summoned to Paris by Napoleon Bonaparte, published his treaty on maritime law in 1810, he managed to ignore Norwegian, Swedish, Danish and, of course, Icelandic laws. When Jean-Marie Pardessus presented his monumental Collection des lois maritimes in the Themis review of 1823, he disregarded Scandinavian laws on the subject before the fifteenth century. In 1839, Édouard Laboulaye, member of Académie des inscriptions et belles lettres and Professor at the Collège de France, wondered out loud: ‘Who knows the name of Gragàs [sic], that curious law-code of the Icelanders?’ (Laboulaye 1839, 49). So we need to step back and review how the interest of French scholars in Icelandic sources took shape.The corpus of old Icelandic texts in France became known less through the writings of the early French pioneers of Icelandic studies in the seventeenth century (Isaac de La Peyrère or La Martinière) than through the authors of the eighteenth century, such as Jean-Baptiste Des Roches de Parthenay and Paul-Henri Mallet. The former, with a presentation of the Edda and a few sagas, such as the Eiríkr saga rauða (Saga of Erik the Red), in his Histoire du Dannemarc (1730), showed how French intellectuals begin to become acquainted with the wealth of this hitherto unknown culture (Des Roches de Parthenay 1730, lii–lviii). Mallet rooted the Icelandic medieval corpus within the domain of European learning. Mallet analyzed the Edda, used the sagas and the Grágás, and joined together the three elements of the poetic, narrative, and legal triptych in Icelandic patrimony (1755). For this Swiss scholar, these sources are the tabernacle of an immemorial culture (Davy 2022). A century later, Frédéric Eichhoff, a linguist and philologist, after translating Völuspá (sometimes called a “mythological code of the old Scandinavians” [Cordier de Launay de Valéri 1806, 168]), wrote as follows: How not to recognize in [this patrimony] the vigorous and true picture of the ancient Scandinavia's beliefs, the same as that in the Germania, the same as that across barbarian Europe before the Middle Ages; these latter fade into obscurity before the Gospel light, cast like a late spine-chilling gleam on the frozen rocks of Iceland?6Mallet and Eichhoff both follow in the path of Giambattista Vico and his hope that poetry and myths will help to unravel the mystery of ancient cultures (Gianturco 1977, 93–4). The philological development of fables and legends becomes a “literal mime of history,” and the mythological corpus becomes “its articulated discourse” (Schefer 1977, 172). In French universities, the reading of Vico offered a challenge to the exegetic school that gradually influenced the small band of legal historians such as Lerminier, Klimrath, or Laferrière (Audren and Halpérin 2001, 4). At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the influence of Vico's New Science opened up two lines of thought.On the one hand, we know how, via Vico and through Mallet, the members of the Coppet group draw inspiration from Icelandic poetry for their own approach to liberalism. For Germaine de Staël, to take an example of someone whose influence on the destiny of legal history in France remained important during the first half of the nineteenth century (Gaudemet 1998, 109), the North seemed “naturally metaphysic” and a national “soul,” a “genius,” and a “spirit.” These are the lessons that she derived from the Icelandic sources that she discovered through her reading of Mallet (Berthier 1977, 206). With Mallet, as Sismondi repeated in 1807, the study of Scandinavian customs, laws, religion, and liberty became paramount, “not only for Scandinavian peoples, but for all Europeans too” (Sismondi 1807, 17). This would have notable consequences on the works of some French jurists such as Henri Klimrath (Audren 2006, 123). And, at the end of the nineteenth century, Charles Ginoulhiac, Professor at the Faculty of Law in Toulouse, affirmed nothing less when he wrote that “because German and Frankish peoples, as Gauls before them, kept, in their own poetry or their songs, the memory of the important events of their founders, it is hardly surprising that they should preserve by that same route the legislation that they adopted” (Ginoulhiac 1884, 151). In other words, for many lawmen or historians of the French nineteenth century, Icelandic poetry was the to discovering the of old the other hand, the texts were also a source for ancient famous and that Icelandic legal were to the democratic de la These to Klimrath, as a of the legal Frédéric de at the sagas in the same In his they are the of the Scandinavian first For some jurists in the nineteenth century who the origins of French laws, the sagas which Iceland has a were fables and that a that allowed one to For them, this was no an and their about the legal an behind which was to human destiny through to discover the origins of through the of and also and In at the Faculty of Law in Paris and the of in the ancient that he would take the most ancient texts of barbarian by to the Edda and the saga on which Jean-Marie Pardessus that the wrote “a that the civil and political of his A few later, would a of this famous saga on two Danish and as “the true picture of ancient Scandinavian de la 1896, to in his about the in French law from sagas were written they us with on the law of Scandinavian peoples because they ancient customs (1879, These French scholars did not the about the of the texts on which they those of Mallet, who on the of between and in sagas because of their for the and fabulous or those of who that no one should ignore the that the sagas are of On the many French jurists of the period wanted to the between sagas and and to name but a Grágás, the of which was by in of to have remained unknown during a of the to be used in French historical in the of the nineteenth century. Pardessus, who in with the Danish of the that of the sagas would we had the our very A of for de la a sort of of to the French for (1879, the could not, be as laws or to Pardessus, because the had not been (Pardessus such many French jurists of the nineteenth century this as a of “the most ancient Scandinavian as Koenigswarter it 188). For the in his at the Faculty of Law of Paris in of all the old laws, the Icelandic customs most For the is the Scandinavian most ancient For at the Collège de the only to the century, but it a law So it becomes to the as the of ancient customs, which is how the legal and Henri would it in the first of the century the late of the was not as because jurists and historians had in the by sources that to the laws before the century Pardessus and or because one had to the of an by the of the that it into Scandinavian laws could not the whilst “the most laws in of their of are the in of their other words, the philological of discovering a corpus of texts that had been hitherto had a of when it came to Iceland, a that European nations were to at is what Ernest Nys Icelandic our and life is based on that most the of This them with remarkable which a to the modern world. It is to them, that we on the subject of the most interesting of the Scandinavian the Norsemen the some of the first It is to them that we to know so many about customs, and was and it was with those Icelandic sources in that a of the French legal was the half of the nineteenth century, In Scandinavia we find the ancient Germania, the morals and that had no by the of and they have been altered or through this the simple did French jurists and historians discover through their interest in old Icelandic the first many legal historians of the period a of history that the as the barbarian invasions of the century. The origins them, perhaps more Gothic than of all these peoples from a of the North as a of as Koenigswarter it It was from ancient Ortolan that “the old us the of Gothic who to other their own (1831, 45). This approach both of that of late and that of the reflected that in the middle of the century. here the approach of a of history that several French such as to “In the and sixth Scandinavian was the same as that of the who not to the great wrote Ernest the national of the the when they focused on ancient laws, many French legal historians on through what medieval Scandinavian sources to For the law of Scandinavian the with law as by In de was to the notion that Scandinavian law and what and us about and barbarian laws in the century” between what the legal historians about old barbarian laws and what they about ancient Scandinavian laws is Louis-Jean Koenigswarter pointed out, what had been on the of ignorance was by some research on ancient Scandinavian laws, which have been to have with the and customs of German peoples, hitherto described by the modern world as when they on the historical on the of this legal many authors Icelandic sagas as a way to ancient barbarian laws The of Frédéric de on this is “The law-code was not a of barbarian laws but the of customs, as not only in Icelandic and the and the but also in the and the Scandinavian sources could be a to old Europeans laws. This was one of the lessons in the works of the academician on medieval The study of the history of Scandinavian law and customs one of the sources from which modern Icelandic and the Grágás, us the example in modern that had not been transformed by and the Edda, that great whose is a the the and its us back to the customs, the and the through which we in the and of our Middle the until the end of the nineteenth century, French scholars barbarian laws in the of Icelandic texts For the French the to that of ancient Scandinavian it is they take with the So that in the have a Nordic origin in the word in Icelandic law one that in the of Montesquieu, the origins of many French scholars in the nineteenth century, Iceland as the sanctuary of the culture of that an ancient brought together “the from a The discovery of legal Icelandic sources through that Koenigswarter into his history of French law as a of its origins a in the of our ancient and allowed modern legal to the Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish us of some new to they will help us to the study of the of laws in their and to approach to Icelandic one which “the of the old was not, its at the University of it as he that the study of Icelandic law in the century the interest of an ancient and based on the of but not influenced by the and very to the other Norse laws of the years earlier, Louis-Jean Koenigswarter had also written that the Scandinavian race is nothing than the race in its ancient is But he that the myths and of ancient Scandinavia could on antiquities than the barbarian laws written in Latin and influenced by the 4). he “one on which all European scholars is that they the customs, religion, and law from Scandinavian and cast on the between religion, customs, and law in both French ancient Icelandic law was because of its to and Roman in to the laws, which all from the of the on them the pointed out, the laws written during the century cannot an idea of laws because and had the life and of the Roman Thus, Icelandic it became to study old laws in their original forms Norse culture was therefore in to a medieval Europe after had been to the political and legal of And it was a of by their very the most of scholars many to for the origins of European laws in Icelandic That is what a of law at the University of in his study of French law The old Scandinavian documents are the most important source of the legal That is not only because they are and more than other but also because they are written in the through which to us added: The first them, that is to say those of Iceland, law to us in its and from for the of Icelandic law-codes was historical and geographical which many scholars pointed to the and de it is to their boreal that the the of their national de Ganges presented in the Grágás, the and academician to us a hitherto the world In his in at the Faculty of Law in Paris, seemed in his affirmation that on the were the of the influence of the on ancient On the many French jurists in Iceland an original and legal In that they an that a to and history in the of ancient law 2001, 17). pointed out, the was an original code that had not been by It is a law from all repeated a national law-code to Laferrière This was the of French legal historians in the and For Louis-Jean law remained to Norse and only Scandinavia many centuries after other European peoples had been to Iceland into a Scandinavian Iceland That is where there are the most of Norse and Norse Icelandic laws, as we them, are not than those of Sweden, or Norway, but they are more by the of the ancient de la culture had been altered in or Sweden, their own customs and their intact, writes Eichhoff (1853, used by French scholars in the nineteenth century to attest the original of Icelandic law-codes was to on the in which they had been preserved over many barbarian laws transformed by out Icelandic law has an (1853, 4). In the same Laferrière writes that “Icelandic law . . . had been in the of the a long before it was written at the beginning of this law was by the of called the of This sort of the interest of French jurists and historians in on the as evidence of legal In Icelandic law is of a widespread are in Iceland, And this of gradually came to on the (Davy the remained example, the in a study published in in the they the interest in the the for the was the for written laws are the of his he was of civil French jurists saw the as the of the “Icelandic legal The interest of French legal scholars in Iceland should not be In many the Icelandic legal to historians and jurists a to find an but political and on which to their about the origins of European laws and and the origins of their own But such an approach was on a of only some of which out to be was a in a that has to be was this “Norse school” in French a Certainly, it was a hope that a of liberal jurists Klimrath, influenced by legal It had a on the following which had to in the of and the of the in The to Icelandic sources to through a sort of political which Laferrière until or the to through Norse history the origins of French laws from those of laws of of were of to a into French The political and of its also have to its before the the of Edda, of the sagas and of the Grágás, was as new and Scandinavian works became into French The sciences also a real in France at the of the nineteenth and between the quest for the New and its of new scientific and the influence of other on how to the national law of ancient It was the end of an we should on the of by when to further back than the century in of the origins of the law of de la en Paris, could on not in some

The term meal means a structured event of eating (an eating occasion) organised by rules concerning time, place and sequence of action. A meal can also be considered a product (a dish), i.e. ingredients transformed by cooking and combined into a meal. In contrast with a meal, a snack is typically a relatively unstructured food event usually without any culturally understood rules of combination or sequence. Meals contribute to ordering our days into segments: morning—midday—afternoon—evening. Food preparation and meals involve interactions with work and other activities. This model was created during the Neolithic Revolution. In the Middle Ages, doctors believed that one should eat only when an earlier meal had left the stomach. According to this opinion, people were able to eat two full meals a day. The two-day meal pattern (lunch––dinner) became the standard for mediaeval Europe. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Europe were a time when national cuisine was formed. There are three basic pillars of national cuisine—basic foods, culinary techniques and flavour principles. Three basic types of cuisines co-existed for centuries: the rural cuisine, the burgher cuisine and the aristocratic cuisine. The most widespread type was the rural cuisine. The rural cuisine in the Czech Lands was based mostly on local products and plants. Cereals consumed in the form of mashes or bread were the basis of the diet in the Middle Ages. Potatoes spread in the nineteenth century and replaced cereals to some extent in some regions. Since the seventeenth century, the proportion of meat in the diet has declined. In the nineteenth century, its proportion fell to twenty percent in comparison with the sixteenth century. From the Middle Ages until the eighteenth century, meals were prepared in open fireplaces. However, these were gradually replaced by a bread oven with a closed fireplace with a cooking plate. The flavour of dishes was influenced by the herbs and spices used, and by garlic, onion, horseradish, chervil and root vegetables. A long-term cultural-historical perspective is obviously important in understanding the cultural heritage regarding food at any given point in time.KeywordsNational cuisineCulinary technologyCerealsPotatoesCabbage

Cunning Distortions: Folk Christianity and Witchcraft Allegations in Early Mormon History

REVIEWS AND SHORT NOTICES

This book explores the reception and creation of memories of an Anglo-Scandinavian medieval past between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. A key premise is that “Memory is a dynamic process” (p. 1) and is performative rather than merely reproductive, leading to “the creation of some kind of community across time” (p. 1). Machan argues that the English Middle Ages have been, and need to be, understood in relation to Scandinavia (p. 2). Memories of this relationship were passed down from the medieval period and later inspired the creation of new “memories” articulating a distinctive perspective on the “emerging global role of Great Britain” (p. 3). Evoking Scandinavia was a way of remembering the medieval English past: much of what writers “remembered about medieval English geography, history, religion, and literature, they remembered by means of Iceland, Norway, and, to lesser extents, Denmark and Sweden” (p. 3).Having established the book's main claims, the opening chapter surveys English-Scandinavian relations in the medieval period itself and in medieval texts. The rest of the book is not organized chronologically, but instead repeatedly revisits a series of tropes relating to four main topics: natural history, ethnography, moral assessments, and literature. The book in this way resembles a series of variations on a set of related themes.Chapter two is concerned with the striking number of travel narratives devoted to Scandinavia and Iceland in the period 1600–1900. Machan considers well-known travelers such as Mary Wollstonecraft and William Morris alongside many more obscure writers. He argues that Norway and Iceland offered British visitors a kind of time travel, taking them back to what their own land had been like before its rise to global superpower status: “encountering the north could be a way for British travelers in particular to encounter themselves” (p. 28). Observing the inadequacies of city life in Oslo and Reykjavik enhanced travelers’ sense of the splendors of British cities. The Nordic countryside, on the other hand, offered natural wonders that could not be experienced in Britain. Alongside scientific interest in these natural phenomena, the medieval Icelandic sagas provided a literary stimulus to visit Iceland and determined what readers wanted to see there. By offering a mix of the familiar and the unfamiliar, Scandinavia and Iceland sharpened travelers’ understanding of their own past and present: “What was discovered in the process was Britain as much as Scandinavia” (p. 45).Chapter three charts the development of ideas of the English and Scandinavians as (originally) a single people. This history is linked to evolving ideas about the common linguistic origins of English and the Scandinavian languages. The chapter includes an interesting analysis of the importance of Odin to a sense of ethnic identity in England, and a telling comparison with contemporary Scandinavian writings about the god. The chapter concludes by observing that British and Nordic writers differed in their use of the past to define the present: British writers sought similarities between England and Scandinavia, whereas Nordic writers ignored Britain or “saw only differences” (p. 81).The next chapter develops the idea that Scandinavia represented an open-air museum that enabled British travelers to visit their own past, providing a kind of homecoming tinged with painful recognition of the simplicity that had been lost in Britain and the ambiguous consequences of modernization in Scandinavia. Other topics touched on here include the importance of the Norse past to some regional identities in England and the way a shared Protestant faith became a “ubiquitous trope in accounts of Anglo-Scandinavian ethnicity” (p. 95).Chapter five is devoted to language and literature, revisiting earlier themes to demonstrate how “the English encounter with Scandinavia involved the active fashioning of what was being remembered” (p. 117). Attention is paid to George Hickes's pioneering philological work and to intriguing claims by some nineteenth-century British travelers in Scandinavia that the local languages were similar enough to English to enable comprehension. Turning to literature, Machan explores the use of Norse mythological texts from the seventeenth century onwards, noting the influential role of Thomas Percy in their Anglophone dissemination. The book then reaches a little beyond its period to relate the issues discussed to J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit (1937) with its debt to “the recycled Anglo-Scandinavian Middle Ages” (p. 130). The chapter ends with further reflections on the role of Icelandic sagas in inspiring travel to Iceland and includes thoughtful commentary on William Morris's saga translations.The concluding chapter again steps beyond 1900 to consider Tolkien's views on the relationship between English and Norse cultures and his opposition to the use Nazis made of a Nordic past. After briefly considering the place of Old Norse in Anglophone higher education and global interest in Norse mythology, Machan reads accounts of the kraken as figuring the workings of memory: “There may not be real krakens in the oceans, but that does not make them any less real as cultural icons, in the past or today” (p. 162). Finally, Machan concludes that “any definition of the reality of the English Middle Ages cannot but evolve from what the Anglo-Scandinavian Middle Ages came to mean” (p. 162).As Machan several times points out, the period 1600–1900 saw the successive creation of the modern states of Great Britain and the United Kingdom, a process entwined with the kind of national remembering examined in this book. Given that context, it is regrettable that Machan does not distinguish more rigorously between England/English and Britain/British in his analysis. For example, the Nordic peoples are said to have influenced “Great Britain's languages,” so that in the tenth and eleventh centuries “distinctions between the Norse and English peoples are not easily drawn” (p. 5): this obscures the fact that Norse was far less influential on Cornish, Scottish Gaelic, and Welsh than on English, and passes from a statement about Britain as a whole to a conclusion about only the English. A passage in the Icelandic Gunnlaugs saga ormstungu claiming that before the Norman Conquest the language in “England” was the same as that in Norway and Denmark is offered as evidence of a belief that “Britain” and Iceland shared a language (p. 8). On p. 14 the “so-called Celtic fringe” is said to be an “external reference point” for the forging of a British nation, but Celtic-speaking parts of Scotland and Wales were and are part of—not “external” to—Great Britain.In Chapter three it is not clear how the proposition that “early modern British people could be understood to remain fundamentally Nordic” (p. 53) can have been true of all the peoples of Britain. Indeed, Machan claims that this was the case “despite the sustained presence of several neighbouring Brythonic groups” (ignoring non-Brythonic Gaelic). However, “Brythonic groups” were British people: they had been on the island since before the arrival of English-speakers and by the period referred to here they were part of the modern British state, not its “neighbours.” A brief reference to English colonization of other parts of Britain on p. 150 seems to me to oversimplify the process by which a British state and British identity were created.Machan does address the question of “what to call the regions” with which he is concerned (p. 18), rightly pointing out that modern distinctions do not necessarily coincide with those made in earlier periods. But noting that although most of the Anglophone writers he will discuss wrote during the formation of Great Britain and the United Kingdom they “lived in England proper” (p. 18) seems to undermine the very distinction it is trying to make by implying that there is after all an (improper) sense in which England can mean the same as Britain. Machan argues that the name “England” does not evoke the historical reality or the developing commitment to a colonial and imperial Britain found in his writers (p. 18), but his consequent preference for referring to the “English” people but to “Britain” as a place is not consistent with the historical (and contemporary) reality that England was and is only part of Britain.Some of the writers discussed in this book certainly themselves failed to distinguish carefully between England and Britain. Greater insight might, however, have been achieved by interrogating their imprecision rather than accepting it. Indeed, one might expect a book about memory and national identity to be particularly sensitive to the way such usage erases the memory of non-English peoples in the archipelago. The writer outside Machan's period to whom he occasionally turns for illuminating comparisons might have provided a model here: Tolkien had a very robust sense of the distinction between England/English and Britain/British.Other traditions about the past during this period (such as the prominent Arthurian strand in nineteenth-century culture) paid much more attention to the non-Anglo-Scandinavian elements in Britain's (real or imagined) medieval history. In Chapter five there is brief recognition of “other views of the Middle Ages and its relevance to the present, ones that do not depend on Nordic mediation; Anglo-Celtic dynamics for example produced their own powerful cultural memory” (pp. 115–16). The opportunity is not, however, taken to explore the relative importance of these competing perspectives or how people reconciled such different narratives.Despite its tendency to equate part and whole, this book is a valuable contribution to scholarship on English medievalism and the influence and reception of Nordic history, culture, and literature. It is full of interesting material and offers new perspectives on familiar texts alongside insightful discussion of less well-known material. Machan deploys impressive scholarship across all relevant languages and commands detailed knowledge of primary texts from the well-known to the now largely forgotten. The notes to each chapter extensively document relevant scholarship, and the author's deep learning is presented with eloquence and lucidity. The book's thesis is thought-provoking and readers will find much to stimulate them.

Ancient and Medieval: <b><i>Crown, Household and Parliament in Fifteenth‐Century England</i>. By A.R. Myers</b>

Edward Grant is one of the world's greatest authorities on medieval science. In the book under review he brings together his lifelong research on medieval science to reflect on the relation between natural philosophy and science. Grant constructs an illuminating history of natural philosophy, which he considers to be a discipline distinct from theology, mathematics and mixed mathematics. The chronological scope of the narrative reaches from around 3500 bc to the nineteenth century, but the book has a strong emphasis on the Middle Ages and the importance of this period for the Scientific Revolution. The central thesis for which the book argues is that “the most profound change in natural philosophy occurred in the seventeenth century. It involved a union of the exact sciences and natural philosophy, a phenomenon that has received relatively little attention in the vast literature about the meaning and causes of the Scientific Revolution” (p. xii). The outcome of this union, so Grant continues his argument, was that “natural philosophy, once regarded as largely independent and isolated from mathematics and the exact sciences, became significantly mathematized. In this mathematized form, natural philosophy became synonymous with the term science” (p. xii). The book derives its scope and central thesis from a disagreement between Grant and the historian Andrew Cunningham on the nature of natural philosophy. On multiple occasions, including an “open forum” discussion between Grant and Cunningham in the journal Early Science and Medicine (2000, 5 (3): 259–300), Grant had the opportunity to take issue with Cunningham's views. In the book under review he returns to these issues repeating most of his arguments against Cunningham's thesis on the nature of natural philosophy. Cunningham's view on the identity of natural philosophy is that it is about God and His creation. “For the whole point of natural philosophy was to look at nature and the world as created by God, and as thus capable of being understood as embodying God's powers and purposes and of being used to say something about them” (Andrew Cunningham and Perry Williams, ‘De-centring the “big picture”: The Origins of Modern Science and the modern origins of science’, Br. J. Hist. Sci., 1993, 26: 407–32, p. 421). Grant's response is to insist on the separation of natural philosophy from theology. He generalizes that “the penetration of substantive religious material into natural philosophy was minimal during the late Middle Ages. For the most part, medieval natural philosophers focused their attention on the study of natural phenomena in a rational and secular manner” (p. 261). Within the space of this review I will limit my brief comments to Grant's reaction to a second, but related aspect of Cunningham's thesis. Cunningham has insisted on the rejection of the concept of “scientific revolution” which placed, or rather misplaced, the origins of modern science in the seventeenth century. For Cunningham, natural philosophy and science, an “invention” of the nineteenth century, are two mutually exclusive endeavours. Grant's reaction is to return to the use of the concept of “scientific revolution” and to the restoration of continuity between the Middle Ages and the Scientific Revolution. However, his rejection of Cunningham's thesis depends here on the ambiguity of the term “science”. The medieval mixed mathematical disciplines were, of course, also scientiae (in their own terms), and Grant chooses to understand the term in this sense. Therefore, the central thesis of the book that the Scientific Revolution was about the fusion of the exact sciences (or mixed mathematics) and natural philosophy is for Grant an argument against Cunningham's thesis. An uncoincidental consequence of Grant's view is that endeavours such as medicine and alchemy—of which he only occasionally points out whether they were considered part of natural philosophy—are again pushed to the margins of the description of the Scientific Revolution. But perhaps this is somewhat unfair to Grant's book. With it, Grant joins the ranks of those historians (such as John Schuster and others, including Cunningham) who have pointed to the neglected importance of the category of natural philosophy for an understanding of the changes in natural knowledge practices in the seventeenth century. Although the polemical context may have introduced more ambiguities (such as that of the term “science”) than one would have wished, the book should, without hesitation, be applauded for this important contribution.

Reviewed by: Black Legacies: Race and the European Middle Ages by Lynn T. Ramey Jorge Carlos Arias Lynn T. Ramey, Black Legacies: Race and the European Middle Ages (Gainesville: University Press of Florida 2014) xii + 176 pp. Black Legacies: Race and the European Middle Ages is a valiant effort of scholarship in the current academic environment. The criticisms of the so-called linguistic turn, the complex history of the modern concept of race, and the weight of the idea of a clean break between the medieval and renaissance periods have made the study of “race” in a pre-modern setting a dangerous endeavor. Ramey’s goal is to point out that many important elements that would become much more explicit in “scientific racism” and nineteenth-century European colonialist discourses were already present in the Middle Ages. She supports this point armed with post-colonial and literary analyses of a wide variety of sources: medieval prose and verse, Classical ethnographies, medieval commentaries on the Bible, fifteenth-century colonial debates and, most surprisingly, modern films and nineteenth-century depictions of the Middle Ages. [End Page 289] Given that few scholars today would consent to the un-qualified use of the term race before the modern period, Ramey’s first task is to explain how she plans to use it and what she really intends to study. She settles on treating racism as “a form of xenophobia,” often utilizing the concept of “the Other” (1). She describes medieval culture not as “color blind” as many older studies of this topic have asserted but as “proto-racial” and containing a “cacophony of discourses” regarding race, before modern conceptions of phenotypic difference cemented a hegemonic idea of race (2). Ramey focuses on “prejudice against darker-skinned persons from non-Western cultures precisely because of their skin color and their usually imagined, always unfamiliar, cultural practices” (1). Lest there be some confusion, Ramey explicitly states that she is not arguing that racial consciousness was born in the Middle Ages, but that the medieval period did play an important role in its subsequent development (3). There are two central critiques in the book: first, of the scholarly tradition that asserted that a categorical rupture existed between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance; second, of the role of the nineteenth century in shaping not only our modern conceptions of race but also of the medieval period itself. The first tradition helped to isolate the study of race solely to the modern era and consequently resulted in the interpretation of the medieval period as a “golden age of cohabitation,” and erased “the history of prejudice that was present from what many consider to be the foundation of European civilization” (3). Writers of the nineteenth century displayed a particularly Romanticized view of the Middle Ages, for example evident in the development of professional history and its relationship to the creation of the modern nation-state based on supposed and Romanticized ties to medieval predecessors. This view became intertwined with a search for essentialist origins and a scientific racism that reflected certain nineteenth-century concerns on race back into the medieval period. Chapter 1 looks at various examples of this Romanticized view of the Middle Ages in the nineteenth century. Washington Irving’s tales of medieval Spain in The Alhambra (1832) are imbued with a fear of “racially linked degeneration more appropriate to his own American culture” (9). For example, his praise of the Arab elite of Muslim Spain, which he portrays as white and worthy of intermarriage with the “Gothic” Christian elite, is contrasted with depictions of the decay of the monarchy of Granada through its intermarriage with Berber groups, characterized as dark and governed by emotion. Eugène-Emmanual Viollet-le-Duc, as the architect in charge of restoring many of France’s most famous medieval structures (Vézelay Abbey, Mont Saint-Michel, Notre Dame Cathedral) between 1838 and 1879, not only had an immense influence in the representation and re-interpretation of medieval architecture, but he also helped to strengthen the notion that “elementary characteristics of… race” and environment were linked to ethnically essentialist aesthetic and architectural choices (23). Chapter 2 is an overview of how race has...

PART I. CULTURAL AND HISTORICAL BACKGROUND: CROSS DRESSING IN PERSPECTIVE -Mythology and History in the Ancient World -Cross Dressing and Social Status in the Middle Ages -Playing with Gender: Cross Dressing in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries -Cross Dressing Women and Men -Challenges to the Hierarchy -Women and Cross Dressing in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries -Men, Gender Concepts, and Transvestism in the Nineteenth Century PART II. MODERN PERSPECTIVES: THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE MEDICAL MODEL -Drag Queens and Cross Dressing on the Stage -Transsexualism -The Emergence of Organized Transvestism and Its Implications -Current Explanations of Cross Dressing -What to Do about Cross Dressing

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Racism and Modernity: Festschrift for Wulf D. Hundt

This article investigates the role of the emotional experiences of time in the constitutional debates of the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. It posits temporality as a shared, collective and emotional experience, rather than an external and natural line where events develop unidirectionally. As such, temporality is proposed as a new analytical framework for exploring the shift from a past-oriented to a future-oriented constitutional theory from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. Adopting this perspective, this shift in constitutionalism is framed, in part, as a response to different emotional experiences of time. Focusing on the writings of Coke in the seventeenth century, and Bentham and Godwin in the nineteenth century, this article also identifies a point of continuity between the past-oriented claims for legitimacy of the English constitution in the seventeenth century and the future-oriented ones in the nineteenth century, and indicates new paths for future investigation. Questioning the role of historicity in the legitimation of the English constitution in the seventeenth century, and the role of progress in the nineteenth century as ‘past’ and ‘future’, this article proposes to analyse these temporal categories as a qualified ‘immemorial’ past as opposed to a qualified ‘timeless’ present ruled by the steady category of progress.

Fetishizing the Foot: Mobility and Meaning in Indian Ocean Sandals