Contemporary Biographies Research Articles

Biography, History and Democracy: Contemporary Writing about Australian Lives

ABSTRACT Biography is one of the most potent arts of democracy because it links the individual to the body politic and to history. It stands in parallel with independent long-form journalism. Whereas independent journalism is under threat, biography is currently one of the most popular and productive genres of publishing, breaking down the stratification of readership associated with almost every other category of writing. In the academy, the status of biography has transformed over the last few decades, with historians embracing the genre, literary studies scholars experimenting with form, and a wealth of new infrastructure embedding biographical inquiry in Australia. The biographical turn in Australia has brought the two disciplines of history and literary studies closer together and enriched their scholarship. David Marr’s Patrick White, Fiona Capp’s My Blood’s Country, Mark McKenna’s Return to Uluru and Alexis Wright’s Tracker are just some examples of the field over the last 30 years. This article considers the principles underpinning contemporary biography and its practice. It reflects on the particular challenges of writing about living subjects, negotiating intimacy and privacy, and the uses of empathic listening in biographical interviews. It also explores the value of collective biography as a genre of current significance.

La biographie comme atelier commun. À propos d’Être ici est une splendeur de Marie Darrieussecq

Standing apart from the rest of Marie Darrieussecq’s work, Being Here is Everything (2016) is, to date, the only ‘biography’ written by this author. It recounts the short life of a German painter, Paula M. Becker (1876 - 1907), whose work was largely unknown in France when this book was published. This text takes its place within a very broad contemporary literary movement – as everyone knows, ‘a fair number of today’s novelists grapple with that uncertain and unstable construct which is the story of a life’ and make it into a major ‘literary genre in the publishing landscape’ (Tadié & Cerquiglini, 339-340). Yet it stands out, in our view, thanks to the different possible levels of reading that it offers. Studying the details of Paula Becker’s life that are selected here, the words chosen and the construction of the text, makes it possible to show that Being Here is Everything also constitutes for the author an opportunity to dig down into themes and topics previously addressed in her fiction, such as feminism, the importance of travelling and of geography, the question of death and what remains after death, thus, as it were, turning certain features of this biography into mirrors. But this story also turns out to be - perhaps more than anything else - a fascinating locus of interrogation and reflection where the great questions arising in the polymorphous genre that is contemporary biography are worked through. It is such avenues that this article sets out to explore.

ІНТЕРПРЕТАЦІЯ АНТРОПОЛОГІЧНИХ ІДЕЙ ЕПОХИ В МИСТЕЦЬКІЙ БІОГРАФІЇ

The article is dedicated to considering the specifics of interpreting humanistic statements of the epoch in the creative personality’s biography. The dominating toposes of European civilization have been revealed by the author and their productivity for constructing the contemporary artist’s existence, as well as overcoming the homo sapiens topical challenges, were justified. The research objective is to analyze anthropological views of different ages/centuries, to reveal the specifics of their implementation in the significant person’s biography, as well as to prove the remarkable dogmas of the preceding epochs being able to become the basis for shaping the master’s chronicle and to enhance the solution of current philantropic questions. The methodological basis of the research presupposes a complex of the following approaches: culture studies, systemic, comparative and analytical. The scientific novelty lies in the fact that for the first time ever, national arts studies are introduced by the thesis throwing light on the key humanistic fundamentals of world culture being explicated by the master’s chronicles. The conclusions confirm the following: the contemporary spiritual issue is a crisis; thus, it requires social structuring based on axiological background of the previous historical periods. The biography demonstrates a focus on the unique profile’s personal heritage. Ancient patterns reflect an image of an ideal personality reaching the harmonious combination of the intellectual, mental and corporal issues. The chronicles of the Middle Ages illustrate the Christianity-centric focus of an individual. The Renaissance patterns interpret the person as the Universe domain, the essense of which combines high moral qualities and physical perfection. The Enlightenment philosophy confirms the rational personality type, the chronicle witnessing the skill of taking responsibility for both personal and social being. The Romanticism interprets private existence and the character’s creative initiative, while the biography idealizes the images and reveals their inner intentions. Individual history of the Modernism facilitates the psychological and documental constituents. The Postmodernism issue suggests the variations of solving anthropological controversy of the epoch and understands the master as the embodiment of key ontological tendencies. The contemporary biography is free of dogmas; however, the suggested character combines the fundamental concepts of the past centuries being based on them and constructing a unique world concept able of solving the contradictions of a period.

The First Biography of Jesus: Genre and Meaning in Mark’s Gospel

The First Biography of Jesus: Genre and Meaning in Mark’s Gospel

When History Caught Up with Historians

Thanks in part to the influence of Friedrich Brockhaus’s Konversations-Lexikon, a German encyclopedia inaugurated in 1796, biographies of the living had become unremarkable in Europe’s encyclopedias by the early nineteenth century. Today, they are pervasive. Between 1674 and 1750, they remained rare and controversial in the alphabetical ancestors of the modern encyclopedia. In this article, I explain why, and show how encyclopedists’ practices evolved in the period in which the historical dictionary and other alphabetical proto-encyclopedias burst onto the European literary scene, that is, the late seventeenth century and the first half of the eighteenth. I begin by exploring early encyclopedists’ motives for not treating the living. My second section then examines the most influential historical dictionaries as well as the encyclopedia that best covered the living, tracking how practices regarding contemporary biographies evolved. Finally, I consider some of the broader social and cultural changes, both internal and external to the history of encyclopedia-making, that are reflected in encyclopedias’ growing coverage of the living and the recently deceased.

Wolsey by Glenn Richardson

Reviewed by: Wolsey by Glenn Richardson Sally Fisher Richardson, Glenn, Wolsey (Routledge Historical Biographies), New York, Routledge, 2020; ebook; pp. 338; 5 b/w illustrations; R.R.P. AU $60.29; ISBN 9781003056263. John Skelton's satirical poem directed against the rise of Thomas Wolsey, Why Come Ye Nat to Court (1521–22), asks: 'Why come ye nat to court? To which court?'(ll. 398–99). Surely the residence of the butcher's son from Ipswich could not be mistaken for that of the English king? Skelton's lines feature in Glenn Richardson's recent contribution to scholarship on the English cardinal who fell so spectacularly from grace, drawing attention to material display at the Tudor court and the inherent danger in seeking to rise above one's allotted station in life. [End Page 251] Richardson is well established as an historian of the Tudor court and Renaissance monarchy, having explored the 1520 diplomatic meeting between Henry VIII and Francis I in The Field of Cloth of Gold (Yale University Press, 2013) and analysed the reigns of Henry VIII, Francis I, and Charles V in Renaissance Monarchy (Bloomsbury Academic, 2002). This latest offering is an obvious successor to his study of the Field of the Cloth of Gold, across which Wolsey is omnipresent. Richardson acknowledges that Wolsey has endured as a popular and often polarizing figure for historical enquiry and literary representations. His historiographical survey deftly moves from George Cavendish's contemporary biography of Wolsey (1556–58) to recent scholarship, noting growing interest in Wolsey's role in foreign affairs. After an overview encompassing A. F. Pollard's biography Wolsey (Longmans, 1929), J. J. Scarisbrick's discussion of Wolsey within his biography Henry VIII (University of California Press, 1968), and Peter Gwyn's biography The King's Cardinal: The Rise and Fall of Thomas Wolsey (Barrie & Jenkins, 1990), Richardson confronts the inevitable question: why another book on Wolsey? He argues that the justification for this work lies in its dialogue between past research and contemporary thought and his own research on Wolsey's European diplomacy. The book is structured chronologically, around three major themes: Wolsey's role in international affairs, with attention to his management of the relationship between Henry, Francis, and Charles; Wolsey's governmental, secular, and sacred activities within England; and his political, cultural, and educational patronage. Chapter 1 traces Wolsey's early life and career trajectory as Wolsey's ascent is connected to his support of war against France and his treatment of Henry as a young man and as a king. By chapter's close, Henry has gained experience on a European battlefield and Wolsey is Archbishop of York. Chapter 2 explores Wolsey's involvement in foreign affairs, celebrated in the 1520 meeting at the Field of the Cloth of Gold, by which time he was a cardinal and a papal legate a latere. On Wolsey's use of material display, Richardson discusses the arrival of Wolsey's cardinal's hat in a slightly different and credible light, drawing attention to Wolsey's rise and the associated elevation of Henry and England. The third chapter concentrates on English events, with a focus on Wolsey in council and court. Tensions between the king, his nobles, and Wolsey are recognized as ongoing concerns, as Richardson outlines how Wolsey worked to limit opportunities for nobles to advise Henry. His speculative term 'the cardinal-courtier' suggests the problems and opportunities presented to Wolsey by proximity to the king. Chapter 4 assesses Wolsey as cardinal legate, concentrating on his working relationship with Rome and the English church. Richardson highlights Wolsey's belief in education as critical to the defence of orthodoxy. The fifth chapter examines Wolsey's cultural and educational patronage, his wealth, and his household. If the reader seeks to ask how one might think there were two royal courts in England, the answer is here. [End Page 252] Chapter 6 returns to Wolsey's peacekeeping efforts. As transitions from war to peace are charted, Richardson shows how easily one could lose the king's favour, hinting, too, that events on the European stage would be shaped by Henry's desire to annul his marriage with Katherine. The seventh chapter...

Telling Transnational Histories of Women in Architecture, 1960–2015

This essay uses an emergent transnational research project — a global encyclopaedia of women in architecture — as a site for unsettling the terms, chronology, and geography of feminist histories of architecture. By locating feminist architectural history in multiple geographies and histories, feminist practice can attend to the specific geopolitics of architecture and knowledge. This project uses a crowdsourced approach, rooted in local regional reference groups and writers, to facilitate a greater range of entries, voices, and expertise. Transnational histories are generated from difference and disseminate diverse models of architectural practice and lives. Biography is a central tool for providing these counter-narratives of architecture. In this essay feminist scholarship of the 1980s on women’s lives provides a critical foundation for the current biographical turn in journalism and academia. Life writing has long been foundational to women’s history writing, but contemporary biography, with its strategies of visibility, de-canonisation, and mobilisation around gender identity, also provides an affective politics for contemporary architectural feminism. The global turn in architectural history is enriched by an intersectional lens, capable of mapping the myriad geographies and differences of women’s lives, and the precise contours of agency and oppression.

Archiwum w biografii. Biograf/ka w archiwum

The article discusses the role of the archive in biographical narrations and the relationship between the biographer and the archive in research practice. It discusses author’s metacomment in contemporary biographies, articles on archive research, memoirs and novels (by A. Y. Kaplan, Ryszard Matuszewski, J. P. Sartre, Monika Rudaś-Grodzka, Joanna Krakowska, Joanna Kuciel-Frydryszak, Olof Lagercrantz and others). A key role in understanding their texts is played by a philological imagination and memory as elements of creating a biography, daily work in the archive and placing the biographer and the archive both in the process of creating knowledge and in the narrative figures.

Promise and Peril: Reflections on Jewish International Legal Biography

The burgeoning field of Jewish legal biography has produced a profusion of new studies of Jewish lawyers, lawyering, and legal thought in the international arena. This biographicalization of legal history promises obvious rewards. Biography can unlock deeper chains of influence and forgotten acts of invention. It possesses the moral potential to restore lives displaced or disrupted by the Holocaust to their rightful places in the history of the law and law’s memory. In our own fraught moment of historical reckoning, the European Jewish experience beckons as a rich historical resource with which to rethink transnational activism and individual agency, migration and statelessness, antisemitism and fascism. Yet biography is never a neutral art. The very choice of which life to deem worthy of attention depends on an often implicit set of assumptions about relevance and uniqueness that risk historical essentialism. In this chapter, I explore these challenges by discussing the specter of “interest” in the writing of Jewish legal biography, past and present. I take “interest” in a variety of senses: the reasons why so many Jews gravitated in disproportionate numbers to international law as a profession; the biographer’s underlying motivation for choosing which specific Jewish legal lives to chronicle; and international law’s own image of itself as a neutral sphere of human action transcending political interests. Reviewing assorted key moments in the past century of attempts at Jewish legal biography, I posit that two different approaches have governed these biographical efforts vis-a-vis the concept of interest: a liberal cosmopolitan meta-narrative that frames international Jewish lawyering as a form of legalist anti-politics; and a liberal nationalist meta-narrative that hails Jewish politics as the proper starting point for a necessary legal reordering of the world. As we shall see, the links and tensions between these different kinds of interest are crucial to questions of method and meaning. They come together in the challenge at the root of all contemporary legal biography: How do we relate the one to the many without flattening individual lives into essentialist fables in the process?

Biography and History: The Historiography of Lee Kuan Yew

ABSTRACTThis article revisits the question of whether contemporary biography can be considered as history through a close examination of the political biographies (and autobiography) of Singapore’s Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew and the historiography of Singapore. According to the late British historian Benjamin Pimlott, widely respected for his contribution to the genre of political biography, it defies an easy answer. The answer remains complex and there is still no clear consensus. As Robert Jervis noted, however, “memoirs are as essential as they are misleading” (Jervis, 2013). For all its strengths and limitations, biography “is indispensable to understanding of motive and intention” and “the motives of individuals have some part to play in explaining historical events” (Pimlott, 1999). Through the historiography of Lee, this article also attempts to describe the on-going “history war” in modern Singapore history, between the dominant narrative promoted by the state and the alternative accounts. The master narrative is increasingly being challenged by the latter.

Chaucer's Other Wyf: Philippa Chaucer, the Critics, and the English Canon

Abstract This article surveys the critical history of scholarship on Philippa Chaucer, the wife of the famous English poet. Beginning with the late Victorian work of Frederick Furnivall and ending with contemporary biographies of Geoffrey Chaucer, this article argues that male critics have constructed their depictions of Philippa Chaucer with little reference to historical fact. Instead, male critics have formed an intellectual community with one another (and with the medieval poet) by the act of denigrating Philippa, with an appeal to a supposedly universal knowledge about disagreeable women and their effect on men of genius. From harpy to harlot to cold careerist, Philippa Chaucer's life and relationship with her husband have proved flexible media for male critics to manipulate. The biographical evaluations published over the last century therefore have much to reveal about the intellectual priorities and gender prejudices of her husband's critics.

Modern Scholarly Biography in the Humanities: its Teaching Potential and Possible Pitfalls in Post-totalitarian Czech Society

This paper describes the changing role of biography in the context of historiographical methodology and the historian’s approach to research. The primary focus is on biographies by history scholars, though the same developmental tendency may be observed in contemporary biographies of prominent literary historians, historians of the creative arts and music, ethnographers, archaeologists, pedagogues and so on. There is a description of certain methodological problems, the potential and the pitfalls of research in the field of modern historiography and other social sciences which have arisen as a result of changes in academic discourse during the 20th century, including specific restrictions in the availability or usability of sources, or the classical limits of ego-history as such.

Jerome’s letter 108 to Eustochium: Contemporary biography in service of ascetic ideology?

Epistula (Letter) 108, one of the longest of Jerome’s letters, was written in 404 AD to console Eustochium for the loss of her mother Paula. Scholars have referred to this letter as a lengthy epitaphium with hagiographic features, a eulogistic tribute, a biographical eulogy of Paula, a laudatio funebris, a travelogue, a memoir, a metaphorical account of Paula’s pilgrimage through life, a piece of ascetic propaganda and a textual basis for a Bethlehem-centred cult of Paula the ascetic martyr-saint. The aim of this article is to analyse and comment on Jerome’s letter as an example of the genre of Graeco-Roman biography, containing various features of ancient βίοι. While Jerome cast the letter ostensibly as a consolatio for Eustochium, it turned out to be a commemoration of Paula, his patron, devoted disciple and monastic companion. The article will ultimately investigate whether this letter was written to sub-serve a higher motive of Jerome, the chief architect of 4th-century asceticism.

The New Luther's Works Companion Volume: Contemporary Biography:

The New Luther's Works Companion Volume: Contemporary Biography: Samuel J. Dubbelman You can soon access in one volume English translations of seven important sixteenth-century sources on Luther's life. Editorial work on the new series of Luther's Works: American Edition is now focused on the Companion Volume: Contemporary Biography, edited by Christopher B. Brown and scheduled for a late 2017 release date. The Contemporary Biography volume will be unnumbered, like Jaroslav Pelikan's Luther the Expositor in the original series. It is "contemporary biography" in that it contains sixteenth-century biographical accounts of Luther's life. This brief comment describes the seven documents found in the collection, which reflects a central emphasis of the new series, namely, the turn in Luther studies from depicting Luther as an isolated hero toward reconstructing the important contributions of other people and institutions in Luther's life. The only piece written by Luther himself is the short Preface to the Catalog of Luther's Writings (1533). In this preface Luther reflected on the way that his writing had changed over the prior fifteen years: his early works yielded too much to the papacy, whereas his later writings dealt solely with Christ. In his own defense, Luther enlisted Augustine's claim to have likewise developed his thoughts while writing and teaching. As such, he seems to be responding to opponents who noted inconsistencies in his writing, for example, Johann Cochlaeus and Johann Fabri. The volume includes two important biographical accounts by Philip Melanchthon: his Preface to the Second Wittenberg Volume of Luther's Latin Works (1546), and his Oration at the Funeral of Dr. Martin Luther [End Page 189] (1546). Melanchthon understood his Preface as a fulfilment of Luther's unsuccessful autobiographical attempt due to his untimely death. Melanchthon's emphasis in both the Oration and the Preface is doctrinal: Luther was an inspired teacher and guardian of true doctrine, who came to his insights through diligent study. The fact that Melanchthon's eyes are on doctrine is also clear in that he takes time in a "biography" of Luther to outline four historical stages of doctrinal mutations. In the Oration, Melanchthon places Luther in a privileged list that extends from Adam through the apostles to various church fathers such as Polycarp, Irenaeus, Gregory of Neocaesarea, Basil the Great, Augustine, Prosper of Aquitaine, Maximus the Confessor, Hugh of St. Victor, Bernard of Clairvaux, and Johann Tauler. The most unusual contribution of the volume is Johann Walther's A New Spiritual Song, about the Blessed, Precious, and Highly-gifted Man, Dr. Martin Luther, the Prophet and Apostle of Germany (1564). The hymn consists of sixty-four rhymed stanzas divided into four parts: part one details the rule of the antichrist, who is clearly identified with the papacy; part two describes God's use of Luther, "Mansfeld's rarest treasure," to expose the papacy as the Antichrist; part three entails a summary of Luther's doctrine and achievements; and part four exhorts the listeners to remain thankful for and faithful to Lutheran doctrine. The poetry is beautifully translated and affords a unique look into how "biography" functioned in sixteenth-century religious settings. The volume also includes the Account of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther's Christian Departure from this Mortal Life by Justus Jonas and Michael Coelius (1546). This document is a detailed narrative of Luther's journey from Wittenberg to Eisleben in late January of 1546, the immediate events preceding his death in Eisleben, and the procession of his body back to Wittenberg. The authors emphasize Luther's blessed departure. Jonas and Coelius ask Luther if it is his intent to die in Christ and the doctrines as Luther had preached them. Luther emphatically answers, "Yes" (thus his last word, according to this account). The authors reiterate that Luther did not experience the "pangs of death," but died peacefully. Luther's death is then interpreted through John 8:51, "Truly I say to you, whoever keeps my words will never see death eternally." [End Page 190] Johannes Bugenhagen's funeral sermon A Christian Sermon Over the Body and Burial of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther (1546) is an emotionally charged exposition of 1...

Writing Imperial Lives: Biography, Autobiography, and Microhistory

Lynne Ann Hartnett, The Defiant Life of Vera Figner: Surviving the Russian Revolution. 324 pp. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014. ISBN-13 978-0253012845. $35.00. Dmitrii Kalugin, Proza zhizni: Russkie biografii v XVIII--XIX vv. (The Prosaic Side of Life: Russian Biographies in the 18th--19th Centuries). 260 pp. St. Petersburg: Evropeiskii universitet, 2015. ISBN-13 978-5943801846. Willard Sunderland, The Barons Cloak: A History of the Russian Empire in War and Revolution. 344 pp. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014. ISBN-13 978-0801452703. $35.00. Francis W. Wcislo, Tales of Imperial Russia: The Life and Times of Sergei Witte, 1849-1915. 314 pp. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. ISBN-13 978-0199543564. $70.00. Professional historians have, at best, mixed feelings about biography. (1) Suffused with all the worst excesses of great-man theories of history, and at times characterized by an unseemly closeness between author and subject, biographies, in their stereotyped form, are holiday presents from wellmeaning relatives, not something a serious scholar writes. (2) Yet we keep coming back to the individual life as a promising anchor for our projects. There are sound reasons, both methodological and affective, for doing so. After all, that biography can be bad history does not mean that it has to be; biography, the historian Lois Banner observes, overlaps significantly with social and cultural history, and there is no prima facie reason its contributions to either should be less than any other approach. (3) Nor, for that matter, is a traditional biography the only way to write a life, or to write with a life. Following life trajectories can help reconstruct networks and understand the connectivity of diverse and far-flung polities, very much in line with the goals of global and transnational history. (4) Looking outward, the prosaic details of an individual life can be used microhistorically and read into broader contexts, transforming our understanding of familiar themes and narratives. (5) The very representation of the individual life, whether from outside (contemporary biographies) or within (autobiographies, memoirs, and personal archives), provides a useful entry point into vexed questions of identity, subjectivity, and selfhood. (6) All the while, life histories connect with the reader in a way that, perhaps, more hermetic or abstract approaches do not. (7) We have known all this for a long time. (8) Yet we sometimes forget it, and have to rediscover the various methods of writing life histories--biography, microhistory, analysis of autobiography--as useful to the questions our discipline, and our subfield, is asking. Lives, and the way that historical subjects wrote them, are like a prism, shedding different kinds of light when turned in different ways. Historians of the Russian Empire and Soviet Union have begun leveraging such approaches to their advantage, generating what Stephen Norris has called a biographical boom in the field. (9) The four books under review here are an impressive set of contributions to this flowering of interest in life histories. Dmitrii Kalugin makes a study of biography in Russia as a genre, from its emergence in the late 1700s to its transformation in the tumultuous literary and social world of the 1850s. Both Francis Wcislo and Lynne Ann Hartnett bring literary tools to the exhaustive documentation two of the key personages of the late Russian Empire, Sergei Witte and Vera Figner, left about their own lives. In doing so, they provide a more robust understanding of the connections among personality, self-fashioning, and political life in the biographies of these well-known figures. Finally, Willard Sunderland's approach to the life of the notorious bloody Baron, Roman von Ungern-Shternberg, is indebted to microhistorical methodologies, especially those based in imperial settings, using Ungern's life as an entry point to the history of the Russian Empire during its last years. …

An experimental 'Life' for an experimental life: Richard Waller's biography of Robert Hooke (1705).

Richard Waller's 'Life of Dr Robert Hooke', prefixed to his edition of Hooke's Posthumous Works (1705), is an important source for the life of one of the most eminent members of the early Royal Society. It also has the distinction of being one of the earliest biographies of a man of science to be published in English. I argue that it is in fact the first biography to embrace the subject's natural-philosophical work as the centre of his life, and I investigate Waller's reasons for adopting this strategy and his struggle with the problem of how to represent an early experimental philosopher in print. I suggest that Waller eschews the 'Christian philosopher' tradition of contemporary biography - partly because of the unusually diverse and fragmentary nature of Hooke's intellectual output - and draws instead upon the structure of the Royal Society's archive as a means of organizing and understanding Hooke's life. The most quoted phrase from Waller's biography is that Hooke became 'to a crime close and reserved' in later life; this essay argues that Waller's biographical sketch was fashioned in order to undo the effects of that reserve. In modelling his approach very closely on the structure of the society's records he was principally concerned with making Hooke's work and biography accessible, intelligible and useful to the fellowship in a context familiar to them, a context which had provided the institutional framework for most of Hooke's adult life. I argue that Waller's 'Life' was also intended to make the largest claims for Hooke's intellectual standing that the author dared in the context of the enmity between Hooke and Isaac Newton once the latter became president of the Royal Society. However, I also adduce fresh manuscript evidence that Waller actually compiled, but did not publish, a defence of Hooke's claim to have discovered the inverse square law of gravity, allowing us to glimpse a much more assertive biography of Hooke than the published version.

History, migration and identity in contemporary Zimbabwean biography as reflected in Peter Orner and Annie Holmes’ (2010) Hope Deferred: Narratives of Zimbabwean Lives

This article endeavours to establish the relationship between history, migration and identity in contemporary Zimbabwean biography as reflected in Peter Orner and Annie Holmes’ Hope Deferred: Narratives of Zimbabwean Lives. History is conceptualised as a heterogeneous discourse constitutive of conflictual and competing personal and public histories that contest for hegemony in defining individual and national identities. Through the power of narration, the various characters explored do not just engage in storytelling but are (un) consciously reworking their life trajectories and deliberately redefining and reconstructing their identities, especially their political identities. This reconfiguration is attributed to the political landscape of Zimbabwe that has largely been shaped by Zimbabwe African National Union Patriotic Front’s political leadership and ideological hegemony since 1980. However, this dominance is being challenged and undermined by the personal histories of individuals who engage in (forced) migration and thus are able to author and construct counter/alternative narratives and identities.

The residential development of Sefton Park, Liverpool, c .1872– c .1900

Sefton Park, 3.5km south-east of the centre of Liverpool, was an exceptionally ambitious and costly outcome of the nineteenth-century public park movement. Its perimeter was set aside for high-class housing, and within 15 years of opening in 1872 the park had become the focus of an affluent new suburb. This article describes the process by which the houses came to be built and their architectural character. Taking the buildings as a starting point, it draws on a range of quantitative and qualitative sources—leasing records, census returns, contemporary biography, personal diaries and satirical journalism—to give an account of the social character of the area. The park-side houses reflect the mercantile wealth of late nineteenth-century Liverpool, but the verdict of some contemporary critics—that Sefton Park was a ghetto of nouveaux riches—turns out, not surprisingly, to be an over-simplification.

Biographies and Knowledge Transmission of Mercury Processing in Twentieth Century Tibet

Abstract The processing of metallic mercury into the form of a mercury sulphide ash, called tsotel (btso thal), is considered the most refined pharmacological technique known in Tibetan medicine. This ash provides the base material for many of the popular “precious pills” (rin chen ril bu), which are considered essential by Tibetan physicians to treat severe diseases. Making tsotel and precious pills in Tibet’s past were rare and expensive events. The Chinese take-over of Tibet in the 1950s, followed by the successive reforms, including the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), affected the opportunities to transmit the knowledge and practice of making tsotel. In this article, I discuss two Tibetan physicians, Tenzin Chödrak (1924–2001) and Troru Tsenam (1926–2004), both of whom spent many years in Chinese prisons and labour camps, and their role in the transmission of the tsotel practice in a labour camp in 1977, contextualising these events with tsotel practices in Central and South Tibet in preceding decades. Based on two contemporary biographies, their descriptions of making tsotel will be analysed as well as the ways in which the biographies depicted these events. I argue that the ways of writing about these tsotel events in the physicians’ biographies, while silencing certain lines of knowledge transmission, established an authoritative lineage of this practice. Both physicians had a decisive impact on the continuation of the lineage and the manufacturing of tsotel and precious pills from the 1980s onwards in both India and the People’s Republic of China (PRC).

A Ruler’s Consort in Early Modern Germany: Aemilia Juliana of Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt

Court studies remains a booming business and nowhere is this more true, it seems, than in the German-speaking lands, blessed—or cursed as the case may be—with numerous large and medium-sized ‘major’ courts and almost innumerable duodecimo ones. Simultaneously, the interest in courts has also fructified, and been fructified by, several studies of princesses, margravines and duchesses that have, to a large extent, significantly shifted our understanding of courts and courtly environs. Judith P. Aikin’s volume about Aemilia Juliana of Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt makes a worthy contribution to this literature and, like the best of the genre, offers far more than a finely-sketched portrait of a lady: it also provides a subtle study—as the title indicates—of a consort ’s part in the ruling of a territory and of the unique contributions Aemilia Juliana made in that role. Aikin’s task was not an especially easy one. She lacked some standard sources for a biography. Although Aemilia Juliana was a ‘prodigious correspondent’ (p. 7), the approximately 430 surviving letters are ‘limited in that nearly all address a single recipient over a relatively short period of just six years early in her marriage’ (p. 8), an apparently happy marriage to her cousin that lasted some forty-one years until her death in 1706. Thus, Aiken, unlike, for instance, Alisha Rankin (in Panaceia’s Daughers: Noblewomen as Healers in early modern Germany , 2013, her treatment of several such women as healers) could not draw on a vast correspondence to approach her subject. Nor did Aemilia Juliana and Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt dominate a political stage as did Landgravine Amalia Elisabeth and Hesse-Kassel (both so brilliantly handled by Tryntje Helfferich in The Iron Princess , 2013). One might certainly argue that Amelia Juliana deserves a book because she represented a type—the consort—central to many smaller principalities. That is indeed true and in fact forms one thread of Aikin’s argument. But Amelia Juliana was also unusual as a prolific writer of music and poems: she composed more than 700 songs and a large number of prayer texts that are still extant. Aikin skilfully mines this trove of materials, in combination with funerary and contemporary biographies, iconography, ephemera, archival records and the physical and built landscape, to produce her picture of a woman who was typical of many others in similar positions, linked to many ruling families (some of considerable political moment) and yet also an individual who developed an individualized style as a territorial female head of household ( Hausmutter ).