post-Conquest Period Research Articles

Caliphs and Merchants: Cities and Economies of Power in the Near East (700–950)

Caliphs and Merchants: Cities and Economies of Power in the Near East (700–950)

:Translation Effects: Language, Time, and Community in Medieval England

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EXTERIOR DECORATION AT SITES BELONGING TO THE NORMAN KINGS

The five most complete royal buildings remaining from the post-Conquest period in Britain have exterior decoration resembling that at churches. It is widely appreciated that the scale of royal buildings demonstrated the earthly power of the Norman kings, but their decoration, largely overlooked, can be shown to proclaim that the power of God was also present there. The sacred power of the king was explicit in the coronation rite at the anointing, and the subsequent investiture with regalia was re-staged by the crown-wearing practised in varying degrees by the Norman kings.

Building Yanhuitlan: Art, Politics, and Religion in the Mixteca Alta since 1500

Fieldwork in Mexico's Mixteca Alta, a highland region in the northwestern portion of Oaxaca, immerses the researcher into a physical encounter with the imposing church complexes that stretch across the mountains. These structures bear witness to a decades-long effort by the Dominicans in the sixteenth century to build churches that would serve as centers to evangelize the local population. The most impressive of the convents is the one at Yanhuitlan, a powerful head town in the Mixteca's southeast. As Alessia Frassani explains in Building Yanhuitlan, the precinct functions as a useful case study to analyze changes in local politics and the role of art in shaping power during the colonial period. Frassani argues that the convent's multiple roles—as ritual center, school, and public building—helped define the way that different social actors negotiated access to land and economic resources. A rich array of sources, including pictorial manuscripts, engravings, and notarial records as well as architectural photographs, crucifixes, and paintings, allow Frassani to reconstruct the convent's complex history.The life of the convent begins with the leveraging of Native labor and the ability to raise capital. The book's first two chapters establish the sociopolitical and economic history of Yanhuitlan during the sixteenth century, when powerful figures, including an influential cacique and a wealthy encomendero, shaped strategic alliances between Dominicans, Spaniards, and the Native elite. One of Frassani's major contentions challenges long-standing narratives in art and architectural history that suggest that a process of Hispanicization gradually but systematically destroyed Indigenous cultural expression. The author forcefully argues that to see things in this light obscures the numerous ways in which Yanhuitecos engaged, renovated, and invested in the convent. The third and fourth chapters examine ritual and evangelical activities through the lens of material culture. Photographs of architectural details of the convent, such as carvings, masonry, statues, and wooden crosses, help the author illustrate the manner in which missionaries “turned painting and books into performative objects capable of moving between official exigencies and local practice” (p. 35). Material culture, Frassani proposes, helps us sharpen our vision of the ways in which different forms of religious practice coexisted despite efforts by authorities to stamp out unorthodox customs.Frassani's microhistorical approach, a deep dive into the goals and expectations of Yanhuitlan's social networks, helps expand our understanding of the strategies used by Indigenous leaders, hereditary Mixtec rulers known as yya, Catholic priests, and Spanish officials to negotiate power. In the fifth chapter, Frassani analyzes an early eighteenth-century complaint against the town of Yanhuitlan by the yya, who sought to restore the privileges that royal authorities had granted to his ancestors in the sixteenth century. He wanted to reclaim the casa del cacique, a dwelling that formed “part of a long Mesoamerican tradition of royal architecture, with residential and political/diplomatic functions, that found new expressions in the early postconquest period” (p. 66). Disputes between parties in Oaxaca typically included witness testimonies, complaints, boundary measurements, and petitions that could date back 200 years. Frassani navigates these records with aplomb, demonstrating not only that towns and rulers used the legal system to mitigate disputes but also that multiple corporate entities in Yanhuitlan eroded as a result of changing religious and cultural norms.The author's commitment to ethnographic research allows her to offer a refreshing account of religion that skillfully connects the present to the past. Images, she writes, circulated widely across social spheres and cut through a variety of ritual practices. In the last chapter, Frassani traces the lives of processional sculptures, finely decorated wooden crucifixes and figures of archangels made during the colonial period. She analyzes the role that these objects play in shaping contemporary discourse on social memory and identity, observing that the shared cost of hosting celebrations during the ritual calendar and gathering for public performances reinforces the bonds of community. Mass migration due to lack of economic opportunities threatens to destroy these long-standing customs and rituals.Building Yanhuitlan looks beyond the architectural details of one of the early colonial era's most impressive buildings. Readers will delight in Frassani's lively prose as much as in the beautiful color plates and the black-and-white images that illustrate every chapter. Likewise, she provides useful appendixes, which include transcriptions of agreements between subject and head towns, contracts with artists, account records, and inventories of religious images. Historians of art and architecture, ethnohistorians, anthropologists, and religious scholars will find Frassani's detailed visual analysis, painstaking archival research, and critical reading of sources thoughtful and well balanced.

THE ANGLO-NORMAN ABBEY CHURCH OF ST ALBANS AND THE AISLELESS NAVE OF ITS CRUCIFORM PREDECESSOR: THE MATERIAL EVIDENCE

Within the Romanesque abbey church at St Albans (Hertfordshire), the vestiges of an earlier structure have been identified for the first time. A hitherto unrecorded feature in the transept, noted by the author in 2017, indicates that, at some stage, the nave lacked its existing arcade piers and instead had solid walls. The implications of this are considerable, calling for a thorough reassessment of the building’s history. For now, it is important to record the primary evidence, so as to make it available for further research. This article aims to provide a concise account of the evidence and a summary of what it might mean.According to the thirteenth-century chronicler, Matthew Paris, the existing church was begun in 1077 and completed in 1088. New evidence indicates, however, that the Romanesque building, with its aisled nave and presbytery, was preceded by a cruciform structure without aisles. The inference is that the existing building contains the fabric of this unaisled predecessor. The obvious conclusion – that it therefore represents the lost Anglo-Saxon abbey church – does not follow without question; as yet, excavation has yielded no conclusive evidence of an earlier church on the site.The critical diagnostic feature presented here for the first time adds substance to the view that the remodelling of unaisled buildings was not uncommon in the post-Conquest period, including large as well as minor churches, as identified long ago at York Minster and, more recently, at Worksop Priory.

Book Review: The Death of Aztec Tenochtitlan, The Life of Mexico City by Barbara E. Mundy

Barbara E. Mundy. The Death of Aztec Tenochtitlan, The Life of Mexico City . Austin: University of Texas, 2015 [First paperback edition, 2018]. ISBN 9781477317136. 256 pages, 5 black and white illustrations, 22 maps, 72 color illustrations, 62 color photos, 1 black and white photo. $45.00 Barbara E. Mundy’s multiple award-winning book is a landmark contribution to the understanding of the history of Mexico City. Challenging the extended idea that the physical destruction of Tenochtitlan and the overthrow of its leaders in 1521 constituted the “death” of the Aztec capital, Mundy offers an insightful and enthralling story about the endurance of native Tenochtitlan in the post-conquest period. With a population of nearly 150,000, Tenochtitlan was one of the largest cities in the world at the beginning of the 16th century. It was located on an island in the middle of lake Tetzcoco in the Central Valley of Mexico and was the center of a vast empire formed by a network of tributary states subdued during the military campaigns of the Triple Alliance, a political coalition established by the Mexica of Tenochtitlan, the Acolhua of Tetzcoco, and the Tepanec of Tlacopan in 1428. Multiple accounts, like Hernan Cortes’ Third Letter to the Emperor Charles V, claimed that this magnificent metropolis died after the wars of conquest and that, with the construction of buildings that represented the power of the Crown and the Church, …

LITURGY AS HISTORY: THE ORIGINS OF THE EXETER MARTYROLOGY

Through an Anglo-Norman case study, this article highlights the value of normative liturgical material for scholars interested in the role that saints’ cults played in the history and identity of religious communities. The records of Anglo-Saxon cults are largely the work of Anglo-Norman monks. Historians exploring why this was the case have therefore concentrated upon hagiographical texts about individual Anglo-Saxon saints composed in and for monastic communities in the post-Conquest period. This article shifts the focus away from the monastic to those secular clerical communities that did not commission specific accounts, and away from individual cults, to uncover the potential of historical martyrologies for showing how such secular communities remembered and understood their own past through the cult of saints. Exeter Cathedral Library, MS 3518, is a copy of the martyrology by the ninth-century Frankish monk, Usuard of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, written in and for Exeter cathedral's canons in the mid-twelfth century. Through investigation of the context in which it was produced and how its contents were adapted to this locality, this article uncovers the various different layers of the past behind its compilation. It further suggests that this manuscript is based on a pre-Conquest model, pointing to the textual debt Anglo-Norman churchmen owed to their Anglo-Saxon predecessors.

Two Thousand Years of Land-Use and Vegetation Evolution in the Andean Highlands of Northern Chile Inferred from Pollen and Charcoal Analyses

The European conquest of the New World produced major socio-environmental reorganization in the Americas, but for many specific regions and ecosystems, we still do not understand how these changes occurred within a broader temporal framework. In this paper, we reconstruct the long-term environmental and vegetation changes experienced by high-altitude wetlands of the southcentral Andes over the last two millennia. Pollen and charcoal analyses of a 5.5-m-long core recovered from the semi-arid puna of northern Chile indicate that while climatic drivers influenced vegetation turnaround, human land use and management strategies significantly affected long-term changes. Our results indicate that the puna vegetation mostly dominated by grasslands and some peatland taxa stabilized during the late Holocene, xerophytic shrubs expanded during extremely dry events, and peatland vegetation persisted in relation to landscape-scale management strategies by Andean pastoralist societies. Environmental changes produced during the post-conquest period included the introduction of exotic taxa, such as clovers, associated with the translocation of exotic herding animals (sheep, cattle, and donkeys) and a deterioration in the management of highland wetlands.

Prehispanic and colonial landscape change and fluvial dynamics in the Chalco Region, Mexico

The late Quaternary deposits of the lakeshore plain and western edge of Lake Chalco in the southeastern Basin of Mexico were explored in order to understand the influence of alluvial sedimentation on archeological visibility and preservation, as well as to seek out records that would permit direct comparison of erosion and sedimentation with the demographic record derived from the archeological survey. The Chalco lakeshore plain is traversed by two of the largest rivers in the region, and the pattern of human settlement recorded here by archeological survey is partly an artifact of alluvial sedimentation, where the most prominent settlements were observed in areas with little or very slow sedimentation. Detailed radiocarbon dating of the alluvial deposits indicates that prior to the establishment of a sedentary lifestyle, alluvial sedimentation was slow. Catastrophic soil erosion is inferred from a period of widespread rapid alluviation and mass movements during late Preceramic, Early and Middle Formative periods, which were periods of rapid population growth. Mass movements appear to coincide also with periods of wetter climate. No evidence of sedimentation was noted during the population collapse that occurred at the end of the Formative. The next phase of alluvial sedimentation occurred during the Early Classic to Late Toltec periods, which were also periods of population expansion during a gradually drying climate. The Postclassic period, which was the largest Pre-Columbian demographic expansion, was paradoxically accompanied by minor evidence of alluvial activity. The last and most widespread period of alluvial activity occurs in the post-Conquest period and is difficult to date with precision but appears to occur primarily during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

“Do not kill them, lest my people forget”: Changes in Attitudes Towards Jews in Twelfth- and Thirteenth-Century England

This essay supports Paul Hyams’ thesis that while attitudes toward Jews over the twelfth and thirteenth centuries certainly cooled, they did so less dramatically or inevitably than the 1290 expulsion might suggest if imagined as a culmination of policy. Chronicled hostility, alongside which the Jewish ‘blood libel’ myth developed as justification, appears to have increased with perceived Jewish economic status. Their status after their impoverishment decreased as royal policy perpetuated longstanding social divisions that largely originated from neither religious nor economic cleavages, only cultural ones. The treatment of the Jews in the period may simultaneously be understood as one of English identity consolidation in the post-Conquest period, as Jews first coexisted with Anglo-Saxons after the Norman invasion. Since economic reasoning alone does not explain the treatment of the Jews in the latter half of the thirteenth century, this essay also examines instances of anti-Jewish violence and successive Plantagenet king’s policies targeting the Jews and understands them as indicators or constructions of religious and national alterity.

Text over time: The written word in English charm before 1350

After the Norman Conquest, many of the charms that had circulated in Anglo-Saxon England disappeared from the written record, while new charming techniques emerged. Among the most striking changes was a sudden increase in the proportion of charms using written words. This paper explores this post-Conquest change in the use of charms by examining examples preserved in manuscripts written or owned in England from the Anglo-Saxon period to 1350. It begins by arguing that in Anglo-Saxon England different types of words were used to treat different kinds of illness or injury. Turning to the post-Conquest period, it identifies not only an increase in the proportionate use of written charms, but also emerging interest in the idea of textuality.

Technológia-kontinuitási kérdések a somogyi vasvidék „izzó” vasbucái fényében

The study offers a comparison of the eight-century Avar, ninth-century Pannonian Carolingian and the tenth–eleventh-century post-Conquest period bloomery furnaces and the iron blooms found in their proximity, which suggested that a local population with stable craft skills preserving the late Avar traditions can be assumed in the light of the technological continuity.

Frontiers of the Ottoman Imagination: Studies in Honour of Rhoads Murphey Edited by MariosHadjianastasis

The emphasis of the twelve essays in this well-deserved Festschrift in honour of Rhoads Murphey is on the history of Ottoman Greece and Cyprus between the fourteenth and nineteenth centuries. This is not only appropriate—Rhoads was a member of the Centre for Byzantine, Modern Greek and Ottoman Studies in the University of Birmingham from 1992 until his retirement—but also very welcome. As the editor points out in the cogent introduction to his own contribution (‘Between the Porte and the Lion: identity politics and opportunism in seventeenth century Cyprus’), it is only recently that historians have begun not simply to question but to abandon the nationalist paradigm which had effectively prevented any intelligent study of the tourkokratia. This volume continues on this pioneering path. The first essay in the volume, by Hasan Çolak, does not discuss the ‘Greek lands’ in particular, but is rather a study of the persistence and transformation of Byzantine titulature in the Ottoman Empire (‘Tekfur, fasilyus and kayser: disdain, negligence and appropriation of Byzantine imperial titulature in the Ottoman world’), whether applied to the Byzantine emperors before 1453 or adopted by the Ottoman sultans themselves after the fall of Constantinople. Still in the early Ottoman period, Konstantinos Moustakas presents a study of Ottoman slave labour (‘Slave labour in the early Ottoman rural economy: regional variations in the Balkans during the 15th century’), largely in the areas of Thessaly and south-eastern Macedonia which saw large-scale Muslim settlement in the immediate post-conquest period. The major sources for this study are the surviving tahrir defters of the region, which unexpectedly reveal the existence—although with an infuriating lack of detail—of slave-holding peasants in the area. The defters also form one of the sources for Ourania Bessi’s investigation of the development of Ottoman Dimetoka, from the time of Murad I (1362–1389) to the sixteenth century (‘The topographic reconstruction of Ottoman Dimetoka: issues of periodization and morphological development’). Dr Bessi takes as her starting point Gilles Veinstein’s description of what he saw as the characteristics of a ‘typical Ottoman town’, showing how Veinstein’s observations apply to Dimetoka, and demonstrates how the Ottomans transformed the Byzantine town with the settlement of the wealthier inhabitants in the area outside the walls (varoş), rather than in the citadel as had been the case in Byzantine times. The study is amply illustrated with maps, historic photographs and tables, extracted from the defters, showing the tax-paying population of each quarter between 1485 and 1570. From the sixteenth century, the articles in the volume covering the tourkokratia skip to the time of the Greek war of independence. Katerina Stathi’s ‘The Carta Incognita of Ottoman Athens’ is an account of the author’s chance discovery of an Ottoman map of Athens in the Hatt-i hümayun collection in the Başbakanlık Archives in Istanbul, and a description and an analysis of the map itself, leading her to the conclusion that it was produced for the use of the Ottoman military during the siege of the Acropolis in 1826-7. Sophia Laiou’s article (‘Entre les insurgés reaya et les indisciplinés ayan: la revolution grecque et la réaction de l’État’) is, as the title suggests, as much about the Ottoman authorities’ reaction to the rebellion of the Samiots and their plundering of the coasts of Anatolia, during the Greek war of independence, as it is about the rebels themselves, showing how it was, in most cases, the protection of their own lands and revenues that guided their actions in the face of insurgency. The last paper with a Greek theme is Michael Ursinus’ ‘Regional reform as an ambition: Charles Blunt Sen., His Majesty’s consul in Salonica, during his early years in the Ottoman Empire (1835–39)’. Describing the consul’s service in Salonica in the years immediately before the announcement of the Tanzimat reforms, the article demonstrates the close involvement of a foreign consul in the affairs of an Ottoman region, and what might be described as the mutually dependent relationship between the consul and the local authorities in effecting administrative improvements. As an example of how the British attempted to establish an ‘informal Empire’, the article is as much of interest to English, as it is to Ottoman, historians.

Transatlantic Obligations: Creating Bonds of Family in Conquest-Era Peru and Spain

During the sixteenth century the journey from Seville to Lima took five months under the best of circumstances. Yet, as Jane Mangan so vividly demonstrates, blood was thicker than water, and the bonds of family that were fundamental to survival in early modern society transcended the obstacles of travel and distance.Transatlantic Obligations makes an important contribution to the current scholarship that emphasizes the connections between Spain and its American colonies. Focusing on the first decades immediately after the Spanish conquest, Mangan analyzes how the subjects of Spain’s new, racially complex empire in Peru negotiated the obligations that defined one’s place in colonial society—husbands to wives, parents to children, sibling to sibling. As much or more than before the conquest, these relationships articulated status and lineage, provided economic security, and demonstrated affection. In the immediate postconquest period, Spaniards and Indigenous people quickly came to understand that both Andean traditions and Castilian law facilitated the creation and maintenance of familial ties, especially through marriage and inheritance.To uncover these relationships Mangan has labored in the archives, doing the rich but often tedious work of combing through notarial records to find the dowries, wills, and licenses to travel in which people expressed their sense of obligation to family members. The payoff for her hard work is great, as she fills the Iberian Atlantic with fathers who love their children, husbands who miss their wives, and sisters who mourn the loss of siblings. Of course, not all of the relationships were positive. Spanish fathers wrested their mestizo children from the arms of indigenous mothers, husbands abandoned wives on the peninsula and mistresses in the Americas, and embittered and scared peninsular women refused to make the transatlantic journey. Yet, even interpersonal conflict was evidence that familial bonds were not broken when a member moved from Spain to the Americas or vice versa; rather, they were extended and accentuated.Although in most cases, Castilian law clearly defined the obligations among family members, Mangan has a keen eye for the ways that love, lineage, and necessity pushed men and women to circumvent, redefine, or even ignore legal norms. Most poignantly, Spanish men who fathered children with indigenous women under a variety of circumstances often expressed strong ties to those children and their mothers. Thus, when the law hindered their illegitimate children’s ability to inherit, many Spanish men invested considerable energy in finding ways to provide for their futures.One of Mangan’s most important revelations is how the Iberian Peninsula was transformed by the family ties that crossed the empire. Spanish fathers took their mixed-race children to Spain to be raised by wives and sisters. Madalena de la Paz, a free black woman, moved from Seville to Lima, but at her death designated her mulata sister in Seville as her heir (105). Enslaved indigenous men and women were brought to Spain by their owners, where they then used the Spanish legal system to sue for their freedom. After the conquest, Peru was deeply changed, but Spain was not the same place either.In this deeply researched book, Jane E. Mangan reminds us that in the wake of the violence of conquest the bonds of family were fundamental to the establishment and perpetuation of the Spanish Empire. It is critical reading for scholars of the Atlantic world.

Lime Powder Production in the Maya Puuc Region (A.D. 600–950): An Experimental Pit-Kiln

ABSTRACTPowdered lime was one of the most significant materials in the daily lives of the Prehispanic Maya, yet archaeologists have uncovered relatively little evidence of production methods or locales prior to the Spanish conquest. The recent identification of a series of pit-kilns dating to the Late and Terminal Classic periods (ca. a.d. 650–950) in and around the site of Kiuic in the Puuc region of the northern lowlands of the Yucatán Peninsula provides the opportunity to investigate a sub-regional Prehispanic lime production technology. Here we present the preliminary excavation results of nine pit-kilns and then describe the experimental reconstruction and firing of a lime pit-kiln. The results indicate that the pit-kilns are more fuel-efficient than the aboveground pyres used during the post-conquest period. This in turn suggests that Prehispanic inhabitants of the Puuc managed their consumption of natural resources for producing lime during a period of sociopolitical, demographic, and environmental stresses.

Religion, Language, and Community in the Roman Near East: Constantine to Muhammad by Fergus Millar

Reviewed by: Religion, Language, and Community in the Roman Near East: Constantine to Muhammad by Fergus Millar Adam H. Becker Fergus Millar Religion, Language, and Community in the Roman Near East: Constantine to Muhammad Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013 Pp. 178. $55.00. Fergus Millar is a well-known historian of the Roman Near East who has long engaged with the question of language and identity among the various people subject to Roman rule. Based upon his 2010 Schweich Lectures at the British Academy, this book consists of what he describes as three different essays respectively on the Greek Christian world of late antiquity, Jews and Samaritans in that world, and finally Syrians (writers of Syriac to be more precise) and “Saracens” (and other peoples often identified by scholars as “Arabs”). The chapters are fit between a Prologue that provides a sketch of the shared biblical world of late antiquity and an Epilogue on the emergence of Islam and the question of Arab identity. Although some of Millar’s long term interests are apparent throughout, the book provides a survey of his more technical essays and articles written over the preceding decade, putting the significance of his work into a broader context and linking it to some of the more recent secondary literature. Relying on both epigraphic and literary sources, Millar often asks more questions than he answers. He tends to be a minimalist in his approach to the sources, avoiding the kinds of inferences that lead to a series of connected positions about Greek and Aramaic bilingualism and corresponding Aramaic identity. For example, it is commonly thought that Aramaic was a lingua franca introduced for administrative purposes by the Achaemenids and that this persisted through the development of Greek bilingualism in the Hellenistic period until the spread of Arabic in the post-conquest period. A further part of this paradigm is that all along the margins of this Greek/Aramaic bilingual culture there were Arabs, which means people who identified themselves thus and spoke some form of Arabic. The Aramaic speakers in cities like Hatra or Dura, it is inferred, enjoyed their own local literary cultures, and all of this was lost, as was the local Aramaic literary culture of Edessa, with Christianization. In contrast, in Millar’s reading the Jews and the Samaritans stand out as exceptions to what was fundamentally an elite Greek literate culture across much of the Near East. According to him, “the universal culture of the Greek world was shared in, and expressed by, both pagans and Christians in the Near East” (28), and [End Page 321] Christianization tended to increase Greek’s ecumenical—in the more literal sense of the term—role. More than once he points out that the ecumenical councils from the fourth century onwards were held in Greek and that most signatories to the canons of these councils ascribed to them in Greek. The Aramaic substrate just beneath the veneer of Greek culture is, according to him, absent from the evidence. For example, from the fourth century “[w]e can find no literary expression of paganism written in any Semitic language, whether Syriac or any other” (22). Until deep into late antiquity, Greek sources lack any explicit reflection of the locally spoken Semitic languages. Palestine is an exception to this in that Jews and Samaritans expressed their identity in the Hebrew and Aramaic literature they produced, texts that were composed amidst the ongoing spread of Greek Christianity in Palestine. By the late fifth century, we can witness the emergence of a Syriac identity among the Syrian Orthodox. (Evidence for the Church of the East and Sassanian culture is excluded from the book.) Millar emphasizes that this Syriac identity was not a “product of pre-existing communal or ethnic divisions” (138). In the end he turns his attention briefly to the “Saracens” or “Tayyoye,” further asserting the continuing importance of Greek in interactions with these peoples on the frontiers of the Roman Empire. At times one gets the sense that Millar is responding to old questions, ones that unfortunately remain relevant because there are certain textbook understandings of language and identity that persist about the Roman Near East. It is difficult...

Ethnography and Empire through an Envoy’s Eye: The Manchu Official Akedun’s (1685-1756) Diplomatic Journeys to Chosǒn Korea

Akedun’s 1725 album Fengshi tu [Diplomatic Paintings] is an extraordinary example of the diplomatic painting genre popular during the High Qing era (1661-1796) that represents imperial delegations through the commissioners’ eye-witness experiences. Created after his four journeys to Chosǒn Korea, this album constructs a narrative in which Akedun carries out the role of an imperial ambassador while it captures ethnographic details of the lived places, curious customs, and courteous peoples of Korea. By rendering an imperial image of the Manchu Qing court, the album commemorates the amelioration of the Qing-Chosǒn relations after they had fraught confrontations during the Manchu’s post-conquest period. I argue that the Manchu ambassador Akedun keenly established his persona as an orthodox Confucian scholar in order to justify his position as a civil court-official whose missions were to negotiate for a mutual respect between the two regimes in the process of reaffirming an overarching Qing imperial order.

Late Holocene anthropogenic and climatic influences on the regional vegetation of Mexico's Cuenca Oriental

Scholars continue to debate the relative magnitude of pre- and post-Conquest anthropogenic landscape transformation in many regions of Mesoamerica. These debates have important implications for our understanding of the role of anthropogenic practices in the development, or at times degradation, of regional environments. Paleoecological records that provide long-term perspectives on climate change and human land-use patterns are critical to addressing these uncertainties. However, many regions of Mexico including the Cuenca Oriental, a semi-arid basin in the rain shadow of the Sierra Madre Oriental, remain poorly studied. We present a new paleoecological record from sediment cores recovered from Lake Aljojuca, located in the southern part of the basin. Stable isotope analyses of authigenic carbonates provide an independent record of past climate, while pollen and microscopic charcoal provide insights into past vegetation and fire history. The Aljojuca record is one of the only well-dated multi-proxy paleolimnological records from the Cuenca Oriental, and is one of few charcoal studies from highland Mexico. Zea mays pollen and increased fire activity at 2700calendaryears before present (calyr.BP) suggest Formative period human settlement around the lake. Between 1700 and 800calyrBP, a drying climate combined with human uses of fire likely resulted in increases in the extent of xeric scrub vegetation. The Aljojuca record also documents important landscape changes during the historic period (~430calyr.BP–present) likely related to the introduction of invasive species and agricultural intensification. The Aljojuca record provides a unique perspective on human–environment relationships and highlights differences between landscape transformations in the pre- and post-Conquest periods.

Malthusian pressures: empirical evidence from a frontier economy

In this paper, we study Malthusian pressures in a frontier economy. Using the empirical data on real prices and demographic variables from 1688 to 1860 for Quebec and Montreal, we test for the existence of Malthusian pressures. Bearing in mind the particularities of frontier economies and the development of the Canadian economy, we conduct a Granger-causality analysis for the time-series of real wheat prices, birth and death rates with the help of VARs in order to identify positive and preventive checks. Using the Bai–Perron test we find a structural break in 1767 and divide the sample into pre- and post-conquest periods. We find that the positive checks were operating in the years prior to the conquest but that they faded during the nineteenth century. It follows that an increase in the wheat prices Granger-causes an increase in death rates in the pre-conquest period. Additional tests and a robustness check of the detrending methods are performed.

The Virgin and the Archbishop: A Comparative Analysis of the Cults of Mildred and Augustine at St Augustine's Abbey, Canterbury

This article provides a comparative analysis of the medieval cults of SS Mildred and Augustine at the abbey of St Augustine in Canterbury, England. The author argues that while Augustine was widely recognized as a saint in medieval England, Mildred’s cult was of equal importance at the abbey in the post-conquest period. By examining the placement of their eleventh-century shrines, hagiographies, charters, and later testamentary evidence, the article shows the complementary nature of these two saints’ cults.