Gentry Class Research Articles

Grassroots authority in rural Guangdong during late Qing and early Republican times

Gongju, or public offices, controlled by the local gentry class, were the grassroots authorities in rural Guangdong during the late Qing. These offices maintained their own armed forces and usually had powers of administration, tax collection, and self-defense, as well as judicial powers. They were considered the extension of prefecture and county governments. With the authorization of the prefecture and county governments, these offices had the power to deal with important legal cases. Although they came under attack during the 1911 Revolution, these offices were able to recover quickly in different forms. In the late Qing era, local gentry with official titles earned in middle-level or lower-level civil service examinations took the leadership roles in such grassroots offices, but they were replaced by people who had direct control over the armed forces during Republican times.

A Study on the Gagok Enjoyment in Daily Life of the Gentry Class - Focusing on the Celebrating Gagok at the Birthday Feast for an Old Man

A Study on the Gagok Enjoyment in Daily Life of the Gentry Class - Focusing on the Celebrating Gagok at the Birthday Feast for an Old Man

The stock-in-trade of a Parish Scavenger: an 18th-century community reflected in refuse from excavations at 9 and 11 Duke Street, London

Archaeological investigations in Duke Street, London W1 during 2010 have opened a window onto a rarely excavated conservation area within the Portman Estate. An inauspicious dump of domestic rubbish laid in preparation for the construction of 18th-century townhouses has provided a tightly dated window onto the tastes and fashions of the West End c. 1765–74. To the 18th-century scavenger and builder, several cartloads of pottery, a by-product of the dust-trade, would have been the perfect material to consolidate waterlogged ground. To the archaeologist, this nationally significant assemblage, representing at least 436 vessels, evokes the lives and leisure activities of the gentry and middle classes within one of London’s great estates.

“This receipt is as safe as the Bank”: Reading Irish Culinary Manuscripts

“This receipt is as safe as the Bank”: Reading Irish Culinary Manuscripts

RETHINKING INFLUENCE BY READING WITH AUSTEN

The Romantic concept of artistic influence—arising in the eighteenth century and finding new expression in Harold Bloom's concept of “anxiety”—presupposes a genealogical model of literary evolution and development, one in which the great achievements of revered ancestors at once overshadow and inspire their literary descendants. This is hardly less arbitrarily unjust or patriarchal than the actual system of patrilineal inheritance consolidated in the eighteenth century, forming the backbone of the British economy and its law, and providing the historical background to Jane Austen's novels. Austen's position as just another disinherited daughter of the gentry class no doubt fuelled her critical, even cynical view of her society, its shortcomings and hypocrisies. This essay argues that her attitude towards literature was equally critical. Paying particular attention to the way in which Austen's Emma (1815) “reads” literature as diverse as Shakespeare's Twelfth Night and Mary Brunton's Discipline (1814), this essay demonstrates Austen's career-long preoccupation with the nature and practice of reading, and her attempts to train an ideally critical reader. It is through such active, critical, objective reading that Austen developed her manifesto for a new kind of novel in the face of ongoing cultural conservatism—a form which, unburdened by the influence of heroic predecessors, could maintain its connections with a rich literary heritage without suffering from the creativity-stifling anxieties of poetic influence.

Culture and Liberty in the Age of the American Revolution, by Michal Jan Rozbicki

‘The liberty argument’, Michal Jan Rozbicki rightly asserts, ‘exploded with great force at the start of the American Revolution, and almost immediately became the symbol of the entire contest with Britain’. This book’s object is to recover ‘the eighteenth-century American sense of liberty’, and how that sense changed over time. Its central argument, subtly explored in Chapter One, is that ‘liberty’ was still understood in an older intellectual setting as ‘privilege’, and was therefore enjoyed in a system of ‘assumed social inequality’. The Founders’ simultaneous commitments to liberty and inequality showed how these assumptions survived the Revolution. Chapter Two explores ‘British Legacies’—rightly arguing for the British origins of ‘an organic concept of a free and unequal society’, and even examining three atypical proponents of enslaving the idle poor (Andrew Fletcher, George Berkeley, Francis Hutcheson) to show the compatibility of such ideas with natural rights. Chapter Three counters the image of pre-Revolution colonial society as one experiencing little gradation of wealth and disregarding of distinctions of rank; it argues that even differences of culture between New England and the South assumed a single gentry class. It was this drive by the colonial élite towards gentry status that was affronted by English refusals to accept its gentility.

Training the Virtuoso: John Aubrey’s Education and Early Life

John Aubrey (1626-1697) is well-known for his contributions to the intellectual life of the early Royal Society, prehistoric archaeology in Britain, and other scientific and antiquarian disciplines.1 His education, however, has been comparatively neglected. Since Anthony Powell's 1948 biography, there has been no full-scale study of the young Aubrey within his scholarly contexts.2 Historically, there existed a perception of Aubrey as a dilettante, an amateur with superficial knowledge of many subjects but who lacked the will, or the ability, to become master of any.3 While that tradition has been exploded by the work of Kate Bennett, Michael Hunter, Rhodri Lewis, and William Poole, more recent studies have focused on Aubrey's major scholarship, rather than its educational underpinnings.4 This paper explores those underpinnings by reconstructing his intellectual development up to his election to the Royal Society in 1663. Building on studies of university education, scientific culture, and the origins of the Royal Society by Mordechai Feingold, Robert G. Frank, Jr., Michael Hunter, and Charles Webster, it establishes a more nuanced intellectual biography and places his education within its larger context.5 Attending to the familial, social, and scholarly networks in which he moved by virtue of his class, his education, and his residence, it situates him within the contexts of Early Modern English scientific and antiquarian scholarship and amends prior assessments of the extent and nature of his education. In doing so it paints a portrait of Aubrey at the inception of his major research projects and encourages a reassessment of his approaches and contributions to individual disciplines. It also delineates the social and scholarly circles within which he moved in Civil War-era Oxford and Commonwealth London, networks that played significant roles in the foundation of the Royal Society and the conduct of scholarship in Restoration England.Wiltshire and SchoolAubrey was born at Lower Easton Pierse (now Easton Piercy) in northern Wiltshire, on 12 March 1626.6 He was the eldest child of his parents, Richard and Deborah (Lyte) Aubrey. On his father's side, he was the great-grandson of the lawyer, MP, and confidant of Queen Elizabeth, William Aubrey, and cousin to Sir John Danvers the Regicide.7 However, his grandfather Aubrey was a younger son and his father, though owning land in several counties, possessed only moderately substantial means when he married Deborah, daughter and heir of Isaac Lyte of Easton Pierse. Deborah Lyte's family were of more modest background than her husband's: yeomen and small gentry whose estates were grouped around the village of Kington St Michael, a few minutes walk from Easton Pierse.8 The farm of Broad Chalke in south Wiltshire, where Aubrey spent much of his early life, had been leased by the Brownes, Deborah's mother's family, from the Earls of Pembroke and by 1640 this lease had passed from Aubrey's great-uncle to his father.9Aubrey was born into that class of gentry who could boast of ancient descent and who had cousins in positions of wealth and power, but whose own resources were more limited. Richard Aubrey's will disposed of substantial landed property in Wiltshire, Herefordshire, and Wales, but, by his son's account, also lefthis estate encumbered with £1,800 in debt.10 Aubrey's affluence was precarious, and would gradually crumble during the course of his adult life.During his childhood, Aubrey was plagued with illness, including a potentially fatal fever and a 'sicknesse of vomiting' that lasted until he was sent to school, aged twelve.11 This may partly be responsible for the fragmentary formal schooling he was given prior to his matriculation at Oxford. In 1634, he began to study Latin grammar under Robert Latimer, rector of Leigh Delamere, near Easton Pierse, but Latimer died soon after and the young Aubrey was given over to a succession of 'dull ignorant rest-in-house teachers' before finally being sent to Blandford School in Dorset, and the care of William Sutton. …

Prostitutes and Courtesans in the Confucian Moral Universe of Late Ming China (1550–1644)

SummaryThis study pursues three goals: to unravel the socio-economic conditions which pushed women into prostitution and courtesanship, to analyse their position in Chinese society, and to relate what changes occurred at the end of the Ming dynasty that affected their status. According to contemporary judicial regulations, both prostitutes and courtesans were classified as “entertainers”, and therefore had the status ofjianmin[mean people], which made them “outcasts” and pariahs. But there were great differences, beyond the bestowal of sexual favours, in the kind of work these women performed. That courtesans operated at the elite level of society, and that they were often indistinguishable from women born into the upper or gentry class, is indicative of this era's blurry social strata, which has prompted scholars and writers to elevate the place of the educated courtesan in Ming society.

Tibor Eckhardt: His American Years 1941-1972. EEM, 709 by Katalin Kádár Lynn (review)

572 SEER, 88, 3, JULY 20IO 'Czechoslovak' Germans about themerits of the Protectorate, many felt like 'second-class Germans' (p. 49), not least because of the disadvantages that it brought them: it introduced draft,work duty and ruined parts of the economy. Conversely, some Czechs favoured the Protectorate, since it solved the problem of unemployment, and although most Czechs lost control of their businesses they continued to play leading roles. A related observation is that what was perceived as Germanification was in fact nazjfication:Bryant attempts to free the events from theProtectorate from the straitjacket ofCzech history writing that reduces all events to components of the Czech-German struggle. Bryant does not entirely succeed in showing themutual influence between the two chaotic, violent and ad hoc attempts at nation building. The Czech inclination to obey Nazi rule remains somewhat one-dimensional. Pragmatic attitudes are correcdy presented, but the roots can arguably be found much deeper, perhaps even in nineteenth-century Czech nation-building or in the ambivalences of the First Czechoslovak Republic. Moreover, the domestic move towards rightwing positions during the so-called Second Republic and particularly the propaganda activities in the Protectorate would have provided additional insight. In this respect journalists-politicians such as Emanuel Moravec and Emanuel Vaj tauer are remarkably absent. The Czechs and resistance movements are discussed as rathermonolithical groups, with the exception of theLondon exile community. Itwould have been interesting to determine if there were crucial differences between conservative and Communist resistance with regard to the national issue. Even with these com ments inmind, Prague inBlack isa highly appreciated contribution to thefield. It successfully undermines fixed conceptions about the era, reinterprets the events in national terms and provides enlightening revelations from archival sources. Department of European Studies Universityof Amsterdam Carlos W. C. Reijnen Lynn, Katalin K?d?r. Tibor Eckhardt:His Amer?can Tears 1941-1972. EEM, 709. East European Monographs, Boulder, CO, 2007. ii + 253 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Appendix. Bibliography. Index. $40.00. Tibor Eckhardt was one of the second tier of politicians in inter-war Hungarian politics. A member of the gentry class that served as the true backbone of theHungarian political system,he was born in 1888, received a first-class education and entered the bureaucracy in 1908 where he rapidly earned promotion into the senior ranks of the Ministry ofHomeland Defence, thereby avoiding active service in World War One. In the chaos thatmarked the firstpost-war months, Eckhardt joined the various counter-revolutionary groups opposed to the revolutionary governments of Mih?ly K?rolyi and B?la Kun, ultimately ending up as press secretary in theNational Army led by Mikl?s Horthy that 'liberated' Budapest from theCommunists in the autumn of 1919. REVIEWS 573 From 1920 he served as head of the Prime Minister's Press Office in the governments of P?l Teleki (1920-21) and Istv?n Bethlen (1921-22) but in 1922 he gave up his administrative responsibilities in order to run for parliament and as a new MP immediately marked himself out as one of a small group of right-radicalMPs noted for their antisemitism, pro-Italian/German orienta tion, and their demands for social reform. In 1923, this group, led by Gyula G?mb?s, broke with the government and established the Race-Defending Party which was prompdy relegated to the fringes of parliamentary politics and was electorally obliterated in the 1926 elections. Eckhardt lost his parlia mentary mandate, while his erstwhile leader, G?mb?s, rejoined Bethlen's Government Party, began to rise through theministerial ranks, and in 1932 was appointed Prime Minister. Eckhardt, in contrast, remained steadfastiy in opposition to the Govern ment Party for the remainder of the inter-war period, and even launched a new opposition party dedicated to the defence of agricultural interests.At the same time, however, Eckhardt worked hard to jettison his right-radical baggage. He severed his linkswith the various quasi-fascist organizations in Hungary and the National Socialists in Germany, cultivated excellent relations with theAmerican ambassador to Budapest, embarked on various uninspiring lecture tours that asserted his foreign policy credentials, assumed themantle of leader ofHungary's campaign for the revision of thepost-World War One borders, and...

"Temples to Christ's Indwelling": Forms of Chastity in a Barking Abbey Manuscript

Br i t i s h l i b r a r y , m a n u s C r i p t a d d i t i o n a l 10596 (hereafter MS add. 10596), a fifteenth-century collection of Middle english religious texts, belonged at first in succession to two nuns of Barking abbey in essex, england. This article interprets the self-contained latter half of this manuscript, perhaps copied by one of these nuns, Matilda Hayle, as an anthology of writings on christian chastity that derived particular meanings from the social milieu of Barking. The book gathers a unique group of narratives and prayers that together emphasize the overlapping and mutually influential sexualities of virgins, chaste widows, and continent wives in a religious setting where these groups mingled with unusual freedom. When one reads this book’s contents in terms of contemporary discourses of chastity and the particular practices of Barking, it becomes clear how the anthology made monastic chastity inseparable from the states of wifehood and widowhood. in the later Middle ages women of varying social and sexual statuses played important roles in the administration and support of Barking, a Benedictine abbey founded in the seventh century. a royal house dedicated to the queenly Saint ethelburga, Barking enjoyed a history of aristocratic abbesses, including three queens and two princesses, and it drew members and bequests from the higher echelons of english society, though by the end of the Middle ages new recruits came primarily from the gentry class, that is, from wealthy commoners. among its many late

The Homestead Moat: Security or Status?

The conventional wisdom on the origins and purpose of homestead moats is that they functioned as indicators of status. But that makes no distinction between manorial and homestead moats, and fails to take account of the combination of circumstances in early fourteenth-century England that resulted in a subsistence crisis of devastating proportions: the worst, it is now believed, in our recorded history. In 1300, many rural areas were already dangerously overcrowded. But it was the Agrarian Crisis of 1315–22, starting with back-to-back harvest failures and the Great European Famine of 1315–17, that caused the starving ‘undersettles’ to turn to crime and brought a tide of criminal violence to the localities. Harvests improved, but the violence continued until the Black Death (1348–49), fuelled by poverty and unprecedented taxes. And it is the argument of this paper that homestead moats, far from being the trophy assets of a would-be gentry class, were in reality precautions against the criminal activity to which all well-off householders were exposed.

The People and the Dao: New Studies in Chinese Religions in Honour of Daniel L. Overmyer (review)

Reviewed by: The People and the Dao: New Studies in Chinese Religions in Honour of Daniel L. Overmyer H. Swindall (bio) Philip Clart and Paul Crowe, editors. The People and the Dao: New Studies in Chinese Religions in Honour of Daniel L. Overmyer. Sankt Augustin, Germany: Institut Monumenta Serica, 2009. 480 pp. Hardcover €60,00, ISBN 978-3-8050-0557-9. Daniel Overmyer was the son of missionaries in China, where he grew up and developed the interest in late imperial popular sects that became his specialty. He taught at the University of British Columbia for a quarter century, inspiring many students (p. 23), some of whom are contributors to this volume and pay tribute to his inspiration in the opening paragraphs of their articles. Overmyer’s wide-ranging publications on Chinese folk religions were characterized by a depiction of them on their own terms. He rejected European-based models for understanding Chinese popular religious phenomena and foregrounded the religious expression of the common people and not that of the gentry class, as previous scholars had done (pp. 27–28). The studies in this volume are all done in an Overmyerian spirit, deeply increasing international understanding of Chinese popular religion around east Asia from the Ming to the late twentieth century. Part 1, dedicated to popular sects and religious movements, is the most faithful to the volume’s title. The first study, by Hubert Seiwert, interprets the element of rational choice in popular religious movements of the Ming and Qing. These movements were suspicious to the establishment, which passed legislation against them and sometimes actively persecuted them (p. 41). The reason why their memberships continued to expand, Seiwert argues, was the “rational choice theory of religion,” that is, that people believe they gain either “mundane” or “religious” rewards and avoid punishment in the long run by adhering to a particular faith [End Page 416] (p. 43). Numerous small sectarian movements offered salvation at lower cost to the common people than, say, the Buddhist lay communities that were popular with the middle class. Nevertheless, there was a change in the social composition of these sects during the period in question, with more and more members of the middle class joining (pp. 47–51). Seiwert’s main example of such a sect is the Patriarch Luo movement, which was associated with popular rebellions, Maitreya Buddha, millenarianism, and messianic teachings. Patriarch Luo promised his followers prosperity in a coming catastrophe. On a similar note is Shin-yi Chao’s case study on the worship of Zhenwu by popular cults in the Ming and Qing. Zhenwu, the Perfected Warrior, was an orthodox Daoist deity who was popular among Chinese commoners everywhere at that time (p. 63). Incorporating Zhenwu into sectarian belief systems required “rewriting his hagiography in order to create a connection between him and . . . the Eternal Mother,” which was “the product of a collective effort within the sects,” which were often considered heretical (p. 64). These sects believed that the Eternal Mother sent Buddhas and patriarchs down to earth to save mankind, and Zhenwu was appropriated as one of them in the pantheons of many (pp. 67–68). The sects transmitted their teachings via “precious volumes” (baojuan), which promulgated piety and were thought to have magical powers. Zhenwu appeared in one in 1523, along with the Eternal Mother as the central figure (pp. 68–70). Chao analyzes baojuan in which Zhenwu appears in various ways, always as a subordinate to the Eternal Mother, who was the sects’ central deity. Next, Christian Joachim brings Chinese popular religion into the twentieth century with his study of popular Confucianism in sectarian lay groups in postwar Taiwan. He argues that these groups’ interpretations of Confucianism “provide evidence of the pervasive influence of Confucian morality in Chinese popular religion” and that “sectarian lay groups are among the few institutions that still serve as carriers of Confucian teachings in Chinese societies” (p. 83). The main sect that Joachim studies is Yiguan Dao, whose membership grew rapidly in Taiwan after the 1970s, even though it was not legalized until 1987 (p. 88). At this point, many intellectuals interested in preserving Chinese culture began to join and produced writings derived from...

"My name was Isabella Linton": Coverture, Domestic Violence, and Mrs. Heathcliff's Narrative in Wuthering Heights

While critics have scrutinized Emily Brontë's use of the framed narrative in Wuthering Heights (1847), raising questions about the reliability of the central narrators, Lockwood and Nelly Dean, scant attention has been paid to Isabella Heathcliff as the third narrator. Though readers have overlooked the importance of Isabella's narrative, Brontë highlights her narrative by including it as the only intact letter in the entire novel and devotes almost an entire chapter to her narrative. Isabella's narrative surfaces in a letter to Nelly Dean, offering a highly unorthodox portrait for the mid-Victorian period of the domestic abuse of a young bride from the gentry class. Isabella's letter, which comprises most of chapter 13, also becomes a critical tool to ferret out the reliability of Heathcliff's account in chapter 14 of their marriage. By analyzing the conflicting accounts of their marriage, this essay demonstrates that Heathcliff 's argument acts as a carefully crafted legal rationale, based upon the laws of coverture, to defend and sanction the domestic confinement of his wife. While the laws of coverture deprived women of a legal and economic voice, Brontë endows Isabella with a complex and at times ironic voice. Brontë paints a powerful portrait of the radical transformation of Isabella from the pampered and infantile Miss Linton to the hardened Mrs. Heathcliff, ending with her as the intrepid, fugitive wife, Isabella Heathcliff. Brontë demonstrates through Isabella's story that as long as the laws of coverture are intact, companionate marriage is at risk of being exploited and compromised.

Living in a nation, a state or a place? The Protestant gentry of County Cork

The communal narrative of the Irish state defined the criteria for membership of the nation in opposition to the characteristics of the Irish gentry class, whether in their Protestantism, Anglicised lifestyles or external focus on Britain and its empire. The result ensured that while all Protestants engaged with the institutions of state, their inclusion in the nation proved much more difficult to negotiate, and for those with a gentry background, it would appear an impossibility. This article argues, in contrast, that the remnants of the Protestant gentry class successfully insert themselves into an alternative conception of the Irish nation that draws directly upon the longevity of their family association with specific localities in the Irish landscape.

:The Man Awakened from Dreams: One Man's Life in a North China Village, 1857–1942

The Man Awakened from Dreams: One Man's Life in a North China Village 1857-1942, by Henrietta Harrison. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2005. xii + 207 pp. US$40.00 (hardcover), US$16.95 (paperback). This is a wonderful book, which I recommend highly for use in a variety of academic courses on Chinese history and culture as well as for general reading pleasure. By concentrating on the life of a single individual, Henrietta Harrison has significantly enhanced our understanding of Chinese history and culture in general during a critical period of transition. Her book is a splendid example of the value of studying particular individuals, areas and events to expand, refine and enliven the relatively abstract generalizations of more broadly based studies. The "man awakened from dreams" in the title is Liu Dapeng, an impoverished scholar living in a small village in Shanxi Province in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. We learn about him principally from his voluminous writings-more than 400 handwritten volumes, including a diary, an autobiography, a local gazetteer, travel observations, a plan for local flood defenses, a collection of local superstitions, a family genealogy, family regulations, essays on various topics and many volumes of poetry. Harrison has judiciously used these materials, as well as interviews with Liu's descendents, local records and numerous other sources, to draw us into Liu's world. Liu Dapeng was not a typical example of his time or place ("Real people are never typical" p. 7); rather, he provides a striking example of idealized Confucian rectitude and propriety. He thought of himself as an exemplar of Confucian values and earned the respect of his neighbors for his honesty and sense of justice. But his Confucian thought and behavior were not sufficient qualifications for the appointment to government office to which he aspired; he considered himself a failure for never having passed the national civil service examinations, though he was one of a very select few who succeeded in county and provincial examinations, becoming a member of the lower gentry class. In his determination to lead a Confucian life, adherence to traditional expectations of filial behavior was Liu's foremost concern. He continually chided himself for caring insufficiently for his parents and ancestors, to the unrealistic (and unwittingly egotistical) extent that he was convinced that natural disasters, such as floods, drought, and personal tragedies like the death of a child were Heaven's retribution for his personal moral failings. As a Confucian exemplar, Liu had enormous respect for tradition and great distrust for the "modernization" efforts that characterized the late Qing Dynasty and early Republican period in which he lived. He felt increasingly isolated after the revolution of 1911, writing in his journal: "Everyone is for the reforms, and I alone hold to the old ways. Everyone is destroying the bonds of relationships, and I alone hold to principles" (p. 93). He felt that concepts of democracy and progress then in vogue threatened the essential moral foundation of society, though ineluctably he was forced to make concessions to the times and participate, albeit peripherally, in the process of change he abhorred. …

Inventing Medieval Landscapes: Senses of Place in Western Europe edited by John Howe and Michael Wolfe (review)

REVIEWS??? The book includes some truly beautiful color illustrations and a good index. Each article is followed by its own bibliography. It should be suitable for upper-level undergraduates and above, and will lend itselfvery well to courses on gender. The sensitive ways in which the articles deal with the construction and interpretation of masculinity in the early modern period would provide an excellent foil for more female-centered studies of the same period. Those scholars who have found themselves wondering about the elusive stage between child and adult will also appreciate this book. BELLE S. TUTEN Juniata College john Howe and Michael wolfe, eds., Inventing Medieval Landscapes: Senses of Phce in Western Europe. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002. Pp. ix, 237. isbn: 0-8130-2479-x. $59.95. The impressive range of essays in this volume combats two fundamental misconceptions that scholars of the Middle Ages may not even realize they hold. The first view is that, as in the Arthurian romances that so many of us teach, the Middle Ages were a time when the boundaries between nature and culture were firm and in which the forest or wasteland always remained a looming presence, populated by uncanny Others and undifferentiated by quotidian human experience. The second view dispelled in this volume involves the deeper and, in my opinion, more widespread notion that premodern peoples had little impact on their environments. The volume opens with two essays which immediately complicate the notion that the medieval landscape was necessarily a primeval landscape. Oliver Rackham's excellent essay, "The Medieval Countryside of England,' builds upon his already seminal work in landscape studies. He focuses here with illuminating detail on medieval practices of woodland management. His enumeration of the various methods by which medieval Europeans harvested trees—coppicing, stooling, pasturing, etc.—reveals a peasantry surprisingly skilled in forest management and a gentry class well aware of its reliance on woodland consumption. Rackham thus effectively overturns the idea that phenomena such as forestry and environmental awareness are exclusively modern categories. Likewise, John Cummins's 'Veneurs s'en vont en ParadL·,' reveals how the 'timeless' English countryside is largely the byproduct ofhuman use. His informative examination ofaristocratic hunting practices deftly illustrates his point that all landscapes, both medieval and modern, constitute the 'accumulation ofhistorical, social, literary, and artistic factors' (34). Scholars ofmedieval literature will find that the essays later in the volume speak even more directly to their interests. Nicholas Howe, for instance, provides a thorough overview of Anglo-Saxon poetic attitudes toward the environment; he notes in particular how the the seascape—perceived by the Anglo-Saxons as empty and untouched by human will—serves as a useful trope for the exploration of existential crises in such poems as The Wandererand The Seafarer. In addition, John 102ARTHURIANA Howe's discussion ofthe creation ofChristian sacred space is also useful, cataloguing the underlying topoi that structure hagiographies and pilgrim itineraries alike. I found the studies by Lisa Bitel and Laura Howes to offer the most fruitful syntheses ofliterary and landscape analyses, for each highlights the extent to which imagined landscapes can structure literary texts. Scrutinizing the invasions described in the Old Irish Lebor Gabdh, Bitel shows how a succession of mythical peoples created the cultural and historical terrain ofmedieval Ireland. She demonstrates, moreover, the considerable importance relegated to gender throughout the various invasions: the migrations dominated by women fail, while the successful migrations strike an uneasy balance between the masculine forces of culture and the often feminized landscape. Laura Howes's 'NarrativeTime and LiteraryLandscapes in Middle English Poetry' takes as its point ofdeparture the idea that most medieval travel experience was slow and on foot. With this in mind, she explicates the more uncanny moments in such romances as Orfeo and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, showing how narrative space in these cases undergoes a transformation foreign to human experience. Several essays mayprove ofgreater immediate interest to historians than to literary scholars, but are nonetheless an absorbing read for those of us who have rarely considered the human impact on the medieval landscape. Petra van Dam's study of English and Flemish rabbit farming, for example, not only explains the explosion of rabbit...

The Randolph Scandal in Early National Virginia, 1792-1815: New Voices in the "Court of Honour"

CONFRONTED BY RUMORS THAT MADE THEM APPEAR REPREHENSIBLE, IN 1792 members of elite Virginia family tried recast themselves exemplars of virtue. Dogged by notoriety, they choreographed a series of public responses, targeted at a specific audience of their peers, effort extricate themselves from scandal. At first, their strategy worked: they carefully crafted narratives which they figured embodiments of private and public rectitude--and they avoided criminal conviction. Yet over the next quarter century the family fractured. Relatives became combatants, and the tales they told about the events of 1792 increasingly reflected bitterness, family rifts, gender division, and their society's shifting but incessant concern for republican morality. Moreover, the audience for their stories widened. As their ordeal acquired a life of its own, the family began seek allies far down the social scale and broadcast their assertions a larger public sphere. By analyzing angry early-national southern family telling stories on itself, one can perceive a world changing. Slave voices wove themselves into familial stories; women's voices emerged and grew strident; questions of domestic integrity spilled over into political combat. What began intimate self-justification became cultural metaphors for a society tilting toward passionate democracy. scandal commenced with denials. At age eighteen, Ann Cary Randolph gave birth a dark, tiny, unfinished room on the second floor of a remote Virginia great house, Glenlyvar, which belonged a cousin, Randolph Harrison. Alone, unmarried, she could not help screaming out that night of October 1, 1792. Her cries, like an hysteric fit, shattered the stillness and startled her hosts, other house guests, and slaves. Nancy's brother-in-law and cousin, Richard Randolph, reached her first and kept the other whites the place at bay. Later, someone apparently hustled the corpse of Nancy's infant outside, deposited [it] on a pile of shingles nearby, and unsuccessfully tried wash away the bloodstains on her childbed. Within hours, Nancy mastered whatever terror, shock, and exhaustion she felt, composing herself sufficiently deny the fact of her pregnancy before hosts and company. Five days later, Nancy, Richard, and her sister Judith, Richard's wife, coolly returned home and pretended carry on as usual. (1) Despite the Randolphs' charade, over the next few months rumors of impropriety emerged, circulated, and gathered strength. By January 1793 the trio's pretense of normality became more forced. They left Bizarre, their aptly named Cumberland County plantation, for advice and comfort from Richard Randolph's stepfather, St. George Tucker, a judge and law professor at the College of William and Mary. Richard admitted, My character has lately been the subject of much conversation, blackened at the imputation of crimes at which humanity revolts. Randolphs spent two months Williamsburg, making a show of familial bliss from the urban stage of the former capital, but their masquerade failed staunch the flow of gossip. Chagrined, Richard conceded, The charge against me was spread far and wide ... and ... has daily acquired strength the minds of my fellow citizens. (2) burgeoning scandal dictated a change of tactics. Members of the high gentry class, which the Randolph family belonged, increasingly suspected that Richard Randolph had committed adultery with Nancy and murdered the child he had fathered by her. By March such suspicion began harden into belief in the minds of everyone, Richard reckoned. Tucker therefore counseled him to promote, rather than stifle a fair, open, and judicial enquiry into the truth of the charges. Richard and Judith took this advice and pondered expanded, confrontational campaign for the hearts and minds of their peers. (3) family agonized while weighing their options. …

FROM SMALL FRY TO BIG FISH: REPRESENTING THE RISE OF JIUJIANG TOWNSHIP, NANHAI COUNTY, 1395–1657

In 1657, before the dust from the traumatic Ming-Qing dynastic transition had settled in south China, a literatus named Li Chunxi compiled a local history of his native Jiujiang township (bao) in Nanhai county. The place it described was a relatively new one on the cultural map of seventeenth-century Guangdong. Located in the Pearl River Delta hinterland southwest of the provincial capital, Guangzhou, Jiujiang was part of an area that had recently emerged as the epicenter of commercialized agriculture in the delta. This area consisted of several prosperous Nanhai county townships and the neighboring townships of Longshan and Longjiang in Shunde county, all bordered by the North and West Rivers. The industrial town of Foshan lay to the north, between Jiujiang and Guangzhou. Despite Jiujiang's booming commercial economy, it had only begun to produce a gentry class — defined in terms of degree-holders — in the middle of the fifteenth century. But two centuries later Li Chunxi could justifiably boast of the thriving elite culture as well as the economic prosperity that the township had achieved on the eve of the Ming-Qing transition.

Mercantile Ideology in Chaucer's Shipman's Tale

Chaucer's Canterbury Tales were produced at a time of significant social change following the gradual but inexorable emergence of the urban middle classes, to which Chaucer himself belonged. 1 Participating in the structures of urban government, where wealth was a prerequisite to holding office, merchants as a group were "at the apex of urban society in the later middle ages". 2 Yet despite their wealth and status in the day-to-day life of the towns, despite their professional contacts and associations with members of the nobility, fourteenth-century merchants were not yet regarded as "gentlemen". Excluded from a precariously defined gentry class, the wealthier merchants developed a unifying ideology based on the trade and financial practices which characterized their occupation. It is this ideology, and its implications for urban government, which are constructed as central concerns of Chaucer's Shipman's Tale.

Nuo amžių slenksčio : naujausia Lietuvos XIX amžiaus istoriografija

This article discusses the historiography of the past decade focusing on the historical studies of the 19th century (1795-1917) Lithuania. The essay traces the main developments in the field through a survey of works that enrich the scholarship on the 19th century and implicitly include amendments or new ideas about it whether in terms of theme or methodology. The analytical inquiry into historiography profiled here is linked to the political, cul- tural as well as socio-cultural context of the histor- ical study and takes into account the multi-causal dynamics of its change. The national revival, which surged in the ninth decade of the past millennium, inspired interest in the 19th century national movement and the formation of modern nation. The challenges and parallels, cross-bridging the two periods characterized as national renaissance, influenced the choice of themes for historical projects and played a significant role in establishing a periodical in series Studies in the History of Lithuanian National Revival. Sixteen volumes of the periodical have already been published both as collections of topically arranged articles and book-length publications by single authors. Studies in the History of Lithuanian National Revival assembles a group of middle and younger generation historians to consider, expand, and reassess the scholarship on the socio-political and socio-cultural aspects of the 19th century history of Lithuania. A new body of historiography produced by these scholars also includes a study of history of other ethnic groups and their intercommunications. After the restoration of Lithuania's Independence, older generation positivist historians maintained the continuity of their works while they also relished the regained freedom of thought and the possibility of discussing subjects, which had been banned during the Soviet period. Some scholars included into their works episodes or interpretations that had long been prohibited while others radically changed their conceptual positions. Particularly significant among the historical studies of the decade is Vytautas Merkys' research on Motiejus Valančius, the central figure in the 19th century Lithuania. Merkys' work comprises a systematic study and analysis of nearly the entire body of bibliographical sources on the subject. Valančius is presented as the most prominent figure of the Church who played a very important role in its modernization and contributed to the development of public education as well as protection from the imposition of the Russian language and culture. According to the author, Bishop Valančius foregrounded the harmony of universalism and nationalism though, in Merkys' study, the term nationalism remains vaguely defined. Research into the national identity of Polish-speaking Lithuanian gentry class and the investigation of its communication with the nation at large leads to a hypothesis about the formation of a multicultural territory-bound political community, a tendency that is assumed to have existed until the seventh decade of the 19th century. Reflections have also been renewed on the impact of the national politics of the Czarist Government on the development of the ethno-political and ethno-social situation. In historiography, the most significant signs of renewal - in terms of theme, methodology, and partly method - are manifested in the works of younger generation historians. This generation in many ways expands on the works of their scholarly predecessors who inspire the younger generation historians and supervise their doctoral dissertations. In the investigation of modern nation formation, the concept of nationalism has developed into a comprehensive scholarly application while the exploration of Lithuanian national consciousness, a historiohraphical focus that has been prevalent in the historical studies of Lithuania for over a century, shows a considerable decline. Attention has been turned to a systematic study of the urgent problems of contemporary society and ap- pealing everyday realities of the past.