Upper Echelons Of Society Research Articles

アリー・ブン・ムハンマドの反乱

The aim of this paper is to clarify the real character of the “Revolt of the Zanj, ” the great rebellion in the Abbasid empire, by analyzing the backgrounds of the participants in the revolt. To study it, I divided this revolt into three periods, the beginning (863-869), the heyday (869-879), and the decline (879-883), and analyzed the participants at the beginning and the heyday, and the rebels who surrendered to the Abbasid military at the decline.In the beginning, the number of participants was small. The group consisted of townspeople and those from the upper echelons of society. The reason that participants consisted of various groups was that 'Ali b. Muhammad had not confined the scope of the rebellion to a particular social class.The heyday of this revolt began when tens of thousands of Zanj, who had been taken from East Africa to Iraq as agricultural slaves, joined the revolt in 869. Through their participation, the rebel troops swelled in number and occupied Southern Iraq in 879. During this heyday, various types of people, such as townspeople, farmers, Arab nomads and people from the upper echelons of society, participated. However, they were lacking in solidarity as they participated merely because the rebel troops were powerful militarily.The decline of this revolt began in 879 when the Abbasid military launched an attack against the rebels. The leader of the Abbasid military, Muwaffaq, while besieging the rebel stronghold of Mukhtara, called on the rebels to surrender to the Abbasid military and treated the rebels who did surrender respectfully. Therefore, the main body of the rebel troops surrendered and this revolt collapsed. The reason for this rapid collapse was that the main body of the rebel troops were people who put their own interests first, such as Zanj and townspeople.

English University Benefactors in the Middle Ages

The medieval universities of Oxford and Cambridge owed an enormous debt to the generosity of a plurality of benefactors of diverse social origins. Given their limited incomes, the universities could not have functioned at a successful level without the substantial material aid of benefactors. Although the English monarchy made a valuable contribution to several areas of university and collegiate life, it nevertheless appears that this monarchical beneficence was less extensive than might have been supposed. The English male nobility gave the occasional gift of property and made donations to loan‐chests but before 1500 only one nobleman was a principal founder of a secular academic college. This opened the way for queens consort and female members of the greater aristocracy to emerge as significant benefactresses in both the university and collegiate spheres. Indeed, it could be argued that women from the upper echelons of society came to rank in importance as university and college benefactors with lesser ecclesiastics, knights, burgesses, merchants, current and former members of colleges and university servants. However, taking the donations of the episcopate in the round, it is probably true to say that the English bishops made the most decisive contribution

Debate: Fiction in the archives: the York cause papers as a source for later medieval social history

In a recent article Frederik Pedersen used the records of matrimonial litigation from the York consistory, the principal Church court of the province, during the fourteenth century to make a number of observations concerning the relationship of these records to the society from which they were generated. He argued that ‘the medieval court documents do not present a random sample illustrating trends in the surrounding society’ and that litigants tended to be disproportionately drawn on the one hand from the upper echelons of society and on the other hand from locations close to York itself. He has further suggested that the age structures of male and female deponents found within the surviving cause papers do not fit the same model life tables and that this raises ‘further doubts about the representativeness of court documents as evidence of changing patterns of lay behaviour’. In this article, I shall show that his analysis is based upon a flawed methodology, is marred by error, and is ultimately mistaken. Pedersen's essential point in ‘Demography in the archives’, as outlined in the Abstract to the article, is that the people who appear in the court records are unrepresentative of society as a whole, and hence ‘that the court records tell us more about the people who used the courts than about trends in the society in which litigation arose’. My argument is that it is the very unrepresentativeness of the people and their cases that provides us with a window into the society from which the cases arise. I shall suggest ways in which the York cause paper evidence can indeed be used to illuminate broader social trends, but also suggest caveats as to the reading of individual causes.

Male Authors, Female Readers: Representation and Subjectivity in Middle English Devotional Literature by Anne Clark Bartlett

REVIEWS appealed to them. But apart from the Crawned King the poems also all belong to the years before Oldcastle's 1413 rebellion had made it all too easy for the church to associate Lollardy with civil as well as religious dissent. Had laypersons in the upper echelons of society been able to con­ tinue thinking of Lollardy in terms resembling those deployed in these poems, the English reformation might have belonged to the fifteenth rather than the sixteenth century. Oldcastle helped destroy this possibility. As we learn more about Lollard discourse and the discourses immedi­ ately adjacent to it we will doubtless want to qualify some of Barr's find­ ings. At present, however, her book leaves little room for criticism. It may be worth noting that for this reader at least her section on "Legal Fictions" seemed in places inadequately assimilated to its present context. And rhe­ torically her discussion is sometimes less forceful than it might be: it is too often propelled by the observation that something is "interesting," for example (as in pp. 10, 17, 19, 65, 127, 129, 130, 163). There are some other minor flaws. It is not easy to find one's way around the volume's bibliography of primary sources, which at one point abandons all pretense at alphabetization. It also seems odd in a work so concerned with locating a Piers Plowman tradition to find no reference to the first chapter ofHelen C. White's Social Criticism in Popular Religious Literature of the Sixteenth Cen­ tury (New York: Macmillan Co., 1944). But all such criticisms fade into insignificance beside Barr's discussion as a whole, which obviously grows from wide reading as well as a good deal of hard thinking. We may well wish that the volume were more affordable. But we should be very grateful to Barr for having written it. CHRISTINA VON NOLCKEN University of Chicago ANNE CLARK BARTLETT. Male Authors, Female Readers: Representation and Subjectivity in Middle English Devotional Literature. Ithaca, N.Y, and Lon­ don: Cornell University Press, 1995. Pp. xii, 212. $32.50. Feminist scholars of the past two decades have enriched the discipline by making accessible medieval women's writings as well as engaging the issue offemale representation in canonical texts. A few-such as Elizabeth Rob­ ertson, Bella Millett, Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, and now Anne Clark 175 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER Bartlett-have ventured into the less glamorous territory of devotional literature; yet this is undoubtedly where the richest vein of information concerning gender and reception is yet to be mined, including material evidence of female textual communities, manuscript transmission, devo­ tional trends, literacy and Latinity, and, as Bartlett argues, "representation and subjectivity." Given the evidence for female ownership of manuscripts including male-authored works like the Speculum devotorum and Contempla­ tions on the Dread and Love ofGod, it is perhaps surprising that no enterpris­ ing scholar has attempted a full-length study to address Bartlett's central concern: "Why were these texts, whose antifeminism ranges from the sub­ tle to the vociferous, so popular among female readers? What did reading these works do to women?" (p. 2). Bartlett's response demonstrates just how fruitful a theoretically informed and interdisciplinary methodology can be. Bartlett's intellectual eclecticism is learned, sensible, and convincing. In negotiating the space between representation and subjectivity, Bartlett constructs authorship and reception in the "complex dynamism" of reading in medieval textual communities, "each with its own cultural authorities, reading strategies, and levels and definitions of competence" (p. 2). Rather than presenting the transmission and reception of devotional literature as an authoritative, hierarchical, or static process, Bartlett deftly explores the tensions, inconsistencies, and polyvalence of devotional works that ap­ peared in codices assimilating a variety of genres (courtly romances, prayers, antifeminist diatribes) and thus discourses of female representa­ tion. Three kinds of "counterdiscourses" in devotional literature challenge misogynist representations of women, each transmitting its own "cluster of social and cultural conventions" from which to "regender" female identity (p. 3). The conventions of courtly romance, monastic epistles of spiritual friendship, and narrative of nuptial and Passion contemplation offered women a variety of roles and rhetorical strategies from which to experience and...

From, Machine Shop to Industrial Laboratory: Telegraphy and the Changing Context of American Invention, 1830–1920 by Paul Israel

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 413 began with brass buttons. His sons found a small but steady market for rolled zinc. They learned the idiosyncracies of working zinc few others would bother with. As demand for one product declined, they shifted to another: the Platts made, successively, zinc tent buttons for the army in the Civil War, riveted zinc fly buttons, the zinc strip for shoelace ferrules, and precision strip for the fusible links of electrical fuses. They made all the iron-cored zinc rod that provided cathodic protection for the steel in the Alaska pipeline. Roth used the records kept by the Platt family to show how Alfred and the following generations survived wartime dislocations, the mo­ nopolistic practices of the large brass mills, and the worst flood in Connecticut history. These records detail business and real estate transactions, and relations between family members. (Readers would have found it easier to follow Roth’s sources if the publishers had allowed him to include a bibliography and had keyed the endnotes to page numbers.) The Platts, like most Waterbury entrepreneurs and mechanics, left few records of the techniques they used. Only in the 1920s, as they began to manufacture fuse wire for the electrical industry, did they ask professional metallurgists for advice and, con­ sequently, generate a record of some of their techniques. Even then, the Platts preferred to leave the finer points of rolling in the hands of experienced artisans rather than professional engineers. The pau­ city of the documentary record of the techniques that the Platts devel­ oped meant that Roth could not tell us as much about this aspect of their entrepreneurship. Robert B. Gordon Dr. Gordon is professor of geophysics and applied mechanics at Yale University. From, Machine Shop to Industrial Laboratory: Telegraphy and the Changing Context ofAmerican Invention, 1830—1920. By Paul Israel. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. Pp. viii + 251; illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $38.50. Each generation imposes its own mental models on the history of prior generations. Historians writing in the shadow of Big Science saw the early history of industrial research as characterized by the corporate laboratory staffed by professional engineers and scientists. Now historians are rediscovering the role of “practical man” as inven­ tor, and the critical connection between workshop, technology, and innovation that was fostered by the American patent system. The Edisonian approach to invention that a whole generation of post— World War II Ph.D. physicists derided as “cut-and-try” has regained credibility. In this book Paul Israel deals with the evolution of telegra­ phy from original invention to technology-based industry until it was displaced as the cutting-edge electricity-based technology by radio and telephony. Israel skillfully locates telegraphy in the several con­ texts that shaped this progression—the social, intellectual, commer­ 414 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE cial, and technological environments that characterized the United States as it moved from a society chiefly oriented toward agriculture and westward expansion to an urban society geared for mass pro­ duction. Drawing on the trove of materials available in the Edison Papers project at Rutgers University, this particular story of telegraphy de­ rives much of its interest from the accounts of the careers of many individuals—men and women—whose collective contributions made telegraphy what it was. Myths of republican individualism notwith­ standing, the author, an editor of the Edison papers, shows that these inventors, operators, manufacturers, investors, and corporate tycoons rarely functioned alone, but formed communities of expertise whose practices developed around, as they also shaped, both telegraphic technology and the communications services it enabled. At the institutional level the book depicts the evolution of telegra­ phy both as a technical system and as an industry. In Europe telegra­ phy was linked to the scientific elites and their fascination with the intellectual problems of electricity. European telegraphy served gov­ ernment communications and the upper echelons of society, and its technologists were well educated in the science of electricity. In the United States, by contrast, the development of telegraphy had its initial impetus from the practical problems of users in a rapidly ex­ panding economy with a republican ideology. Telegraphy grew first in partnership with the...