Vernacular History Research Articles

3 - African History / History in Africa: Academic, Vernacular Histories and Area Studies

3 - African History / History in Africa: Academic, Vernacular Histories and Area Studies

Medieval Influence in Early Modern Neapolitan Historiography: The Fortunes of the <em>Cronaca di Partenope</em>, 1350-1680

This article argues for the foundational role of a fourteenth-century vernacular history of Naples (the Cronaca di Partenope) in the development of Neapolitan historiography through the seventeenth century. Thrice printed, the Cronaca was also frequently mined for source material by later historians; its uses illustrate the blurred boundaries between amateur and erudite printed historiography and between “foreign” and “native” accounts, as well as the evolving concerns and historical methods that informed treatments of the city’s and realm’s past over some two and one- half centuries.

The Womb of Tantra: Goddesses, Tribals, and Kings in Assam

This article examines two central but controversial themes in the early development of Tantra in South Asia: the relationship between Tantra and kingship and the role of non-Hindu, indigenous traditions in Tantric practice. As its primary focus, the article will examine the relationship between goddess-worship, kingship, and tribal religions in Assam, which has long been regarded by both Sanskrit texts and Western scholars as the symbolic and/ or literal heartland of Tantra. Using Sanskrit texts from the tenth to the seventeenth centuries as well as vernacular histories and archeological evidence, the article will discuss the complex negotiations between Hindu brahmans and the non-Hindu tribal kings who adopted the worship of Kāmākhyā, Kālī, and other Śākta Tantric goddesses. Assamese Tantra, I suggest, represents a complex negotiation between Sanskritic brāhmaṇic traditions and local indigenous rituals, which we see most clearly in the offering of animal and human sacrifice.

Imagining the past in France: history in manuscript painting, 1250-1500

This beautiful volume examines the most important illuminations found in French history manuscripts. From around the mid 13th to the end of the 16th century, the most important and original work being done in secular illumination was unquestionably in French vernacular history manuscripts. This beautiful volume celebrates the vivid historical imagery produced during these years by bringing together around 55 manuscripts representing some of the finest masterpieces of illumination created in the Middle Ages. As such, it is the first major publication to focus on exploring the ways in which text and illumination worked together to help show medieval readers the role and purpose of history. The images enabled the past to come alive before the eyes of medieval readers by relating the adventures of epic figures such as Hector, Alexander, Charlemagne, and the Virgin Mary.

Identity Politics Revisited: Secular and ‘Dissonant’ Islam in Colonial South Asia

AbstractThis paper analyzes the political project of secular Islam as outlined by the Indian political and religious leader, Muhammad Shah—also known as Aga Khan III (1877–1957). As first president of the All India Muslim League, Muhammad Shah facilitated the installation of separate electorates for Muslims as well as the call for Partition. The reformist notion of Islam he invoked for this separatist programme was informed by the secular and modernizing projects of the colonial public sphere. Simultaneously, however, Muhammad Shah claimed a divine role as Imam of the Ismaili Muslim community—a position validated by Ismaili beliefs and teachings of messianic Islam. The paper engages Muhammad Shah's writings and the devotional texts of the Ismailis to illustrate how the heterogeneous forms of practices peculiar to the vernacular history of Islam in early modern South Asia were displaced by the discourse of religious identity in the colonial period.

Becoming English: Ronwenne’s Wassail, Language, and National Identity in the Middle English Prose Brut

Becoming English: Ronwenne’s Wassail, Language, and National Identity in the Middle English Prose Brut Margaret Lamont Ronewenne, þat was Engistes douʒter, come wiþ a coupe of golde in here honde, and knelede bifore þe kyng, and saide to him “Whatsaile!” and þe kyng wist nouʒt what it was forto mene, ne what he shulde ansuere, for-asmiche as himself ne none of his Britons ʒitte couþe none Englisshe speke, ne vnderstonde it, but speken þo þat same langage þat Britons ʒitte done. . . . and þat was þe ferst tyme þat “whatsaile” and “drynkehaile” come vp into þis lande; and fram þat tyme into this tyme it Haþ bene wel vsede. [Ronwenne, who was Hengist’s daughter, came with a cup of gold in her hand, and knelt before the king, and said to him, “wassail!” And the king did not know what it meant, nor what he should answer, because neither he nor any of his Britons could speak any English yet, nor understand it, but they spoke the same language that Britons [i.e. the Welsh] still do. . . . And that was the first time that “wassail” and “drink hail” [End Page 283] came into this land, and from that time unto this time it has been well used.]1 The Middle English prose Brut, the most widely circulating vernacular history of Britain in the Middle Ages, consistently presents England as a unified nation, one that arises out of the multiplicity of peoples in medieval Britain. This marks a departure from both its earlier sources and many of the histories contemporary with it, which present, instead, conflicting ethnic and regional identities within Britain. Recent scholarship has focused so heavily upon this counternational, regional tradition that it is easy to forget that there was also a strong current of “nationalistic” British historiography. I want to focus on this current here, with special emphasis on the prose Brut’s presentation of the Saxon2 arrival in Britain and on the figure of Ronwenne in particular. To speak of the English nation and English national identity in the medieval period is controversial. For the majority of scholars today, the nation is a strictly modern phenomenon, rising in concert with the Industrial Revolution and capitalism and dependent on these—the trappings of modernity—for its existence. These scholars argue that competing regional, religious, and familial identities posed a continual challenge to any unified national identity in the Middle Ages. In addition, there has been much recent work that rethinks the practice of studying the whole of medieval Britain rather than examining each region separately.3 Yet [End Page 284] there were discourses in medieval Britain that attempted to imagine the island of Britain as a single political and cultural entity. Responding to the presence of terms and ideas suggestive of the nation in the literature of the past, an increasing number of scholars within medieval studies have questioned the most dominant narrative of the origin of the nation and proposed the existence of medieval national identities.4 In my approach to nationhood and national identity in the later European Middle Ages, I take my cue from Bernard Guenée’s cogent summation: Did national consciousness exist in Europe at the end of the Middle Ages? That is an open question and badly phrased. It would be better to say: what did a European understand by “nation” at the end of the Middle Ages? In which State did the inhabitants see themselves as part of a nation? How intense was this “national” consciousness and what was it like? What vigour and cohesion did the State derive from this “national” sentiment?5 That medieval nations were different from our own modern ones—which themselves vary widely—is clear; but it is equally clear that there was some sense of what it meant to be English in the late medieval period. The modernist bias fails to account for a work like the Middle English prose Brut, with its persistent engagement with questions of cultural and ethnic identity, with nationhood both political and ideological, and, most importantly, with how to create a single, defining history of England that incorporates, nonetheless, its repeated colonization and ethnic...

Remembering the year of the French: Irish folk history and social memory

Remembering the Year of the is a model of historical achievement, moving deftly between the study of historical events - the failed French invasion of the West of Ireland in 1798 - and folkloric representations of those events. Delving into the folk found in Ireland's rich oral traditions, Guy Beiner reveals alternate visions of the Irish past and brings into focus the vernacular histories, folk commemorative practices, and negotiations of memory that have gone largely unnoticed by historians. Beiner analyzes hundreds of hitherto unstudied historical, literary, and ethnographic sources. Though his focus is on 1798, his work is also a comprehensive study of Irish folk and grass-roots social memory in Ireland. Investigating how communities in the West of Ireland remembered, well into the mid-twentieth century, an episode in the late eighteenth century, this is a history from below that gives serious attention to the perspectives of those who have been previously ignored or discounted. Beiner brilliantly captures the stories, ceremonies, and other popular traditions through which local communities narrated, remembered, and commemorated the past. Demonstrating the unique value of folklore as a historical source, Remembering the Year of the offers a fresh perspective on collective memory and modern Irish history.

ARTHURIAN TIME AND SPACE: CHRÉTIEN'S "CONTE DEL GRAAL" AND WACE'S "BRUT"

IntroductionTwo names stand out among the most important writers of French narrative verse in the latter half of the twelfth century. 'Maistre' Wace, born on the Isle of Jersey and educated at Caen and then in the Ile-de-France (Paris or perhaps Chartres), was known first for his adaptations of hagiographical texts, the lives of SS Margaret and Nicholas, and a work on the Immaculate Conception. Later he produced two important legendary histories in service to the English royal court: the Roman de Brut (Vernacular History of Brutus), dated 1155, a history of the British people adapted from Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia regum Britanniae presented to Eleanor of Acquitaine, and an experimental Roman de Rou (Vernacular History of Rollo), a history of the dukes of Normandy in three versions (begun in 1160) commissioned by Henry II, the longest of which (11,440 verses) was left unfinished after 1174. For Arthurian studies, Wace's most significant work is the octosyllabic Brut, where, in amplified sections devoted to Uther Pendragon and his son Arthur, he introduces material not found in any known Latin sources and associates these kings' reigns with forms of courtesy that were evolving in his own times. In fact these sections of the Brut constitute the oldest surviving Arthurian matter written in French or indeed any other vernacular language.Meanwhile, Wace's much younger contemporary, Chretien de Troyes, is known to have been active in the courts of Champagne and, later, Flanders sometime between 1160 or so and 1189. Many of Chretien's earliest works were vernacular adaptations of Ovidian texts, but he later produced the first known Arthurian romance, Erec et Enide,1 written in octosyllabic verse, followed by others in the same style: Cliges, Le Chevalier de la Charrette (The Knight of the Cart or Lancelot, written under the patronage of Marie, Countess of Champagne), Le Chevalier au Lion (The Knight of the Lion or Yvain), and the uncompleted Conte del Graal (Story of the Grail or Perceval, written at the behest of Philippe d'Alsace, Count of Flanders). As we shall see, scholars are generally uncertain as to the relationship, if any, between Wace's Brut and Chretien de Troyes's Arthurian corpus as a whole. I shall argue, however, that Chretien's last romance, the Conte del Graal, is consciously - and playfully - informed by the 'Utherian' and Arthurian sections of the Brut and that, in forging intertextual links between his work and Wace's, Chretien's Grail romance heralds a new mode in the writing of legendary history.The Conte del Graal is unique among Chretien de Troyes's romances. Chretien left it incomplete, like his Charrette, yet it is by far the longest of them all; moreover, unlike the Charrette, which was completed by a single privileged clerk, no fewer than four other writers continued it or sought to bring it to a conclusion. No work by Chretien is informed to such a degree by prediegetic and extradiegetic matter - notably, in addition to customs and references to recent events, organized accounts of sacred history, the history of Britain, past and present events in communities in exile from Authur's kingdom, and, most extraordinary of all, history and current happenings in a mysterious world, that of the Grail kingdom, which remains largely hidden to those outside it, including Chretien's readers.2 No work by Chretien, not even Cliges, offers a secondary protagonist, Gauvain, who threatens to overshadow the one presumed to be predominant. Finally, no work by Chretien, perhaps with the exception of Erec et Enide,3 is to such a degree complemented by or, I would add, interacts with a work outside itself. Wace's Brut validates both Chretien's references to the history of Britain and new histories invented by him. Subsequent discussion will touch on all of the issues just mentioned, but of primary concern are the secondary prediegetic histories, most particularly those involving the reigns of Uther Pendragon and Arthur, communities in exile, and the Grail kingdom. …

HISTORICAL AND ETHNOGRAPHICAL PUBLICATIONS IN THE VERNACULARS OF COLONIAL ZAMBIA: MISSIONARY CONTRIBUTION TO THE 'CREATION OF TRIBALISM'

AbstractThis paper examines the chronology and attributes of literate ethno-history in Northern Rhodesia. While the earliest published authors were invariably members of missionary societies whose evangelical policies were predisposed towards the Christianisation of local chieftaincies, the expansion and Africanisation of vernacular historiography from the late 1930s owed much to the intervention of the colonial government in the publishing sphere. A survey of their contents shows that vernacular histories and ethnographies mirrored preconceptions and preoccupations typical of the times of their composition. By placing these texts in the political and economic context of the colony, and by providing new data on their wide circulation among literate Africans, the article contends that published ethnohistories were one of the principal cultural components of the process of crystallisation of ethnic identities in the middle and late colonial era.

Of the People Who Love the Land: Vernacular History in the Poetry of Modern Hawaiian Hula

Standard histories of Hawai'i record the demise and disenfranchisement of the native Hawaiian population. These histories draw upon publicly available data such as population statistics and government documents, the majority of which are in the English language. Historians and sociologists have commented on trajectories of assimilation in the decades following the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy and annexation to the U.S. at the end of the nineteenth century, touting the rise of English standard education as a cornerstone in social transformation.

Vernacular histories in late nineteenth-century Banaras: Folklore, Purānas and the new antiquarianism

Vernacular histories in late nineteenth-century Banaras: Folklore, Purānas and the new antiquarianism

“It Wasn't a Good Part of History”: National Identity and Students' Explanations of Historical Significance

In this study, we investigated middle graders' understanding of significance in U.S. history through open-ended interviews with forty-eight students in grades five through eight. Students pointed to steadily expanding lights and opportunities as a central theme in U.S. history, but they also had difficulty incorporating some historical patterns and events into their image of progress. This study suggests that students need experience with the complexities of the past within a context that provides some framework for making critical sense out of both legitimating stories and alternative, vernacular histories.

SELLING WATERFRONT HERITAGE: A CRITIQUE OF MILLERS POINT, SYDNEY

ABSTRACTThis article explores the assimilation of a Sydney waterfront precinct, Millers Point, into the cultural tourism industry. Heritage tourism offers a potential economic base to revitalise an area whose nineteenth‐century wharves and port infrastructure have become redundant. The selection of Millers Point over other places occurred through the presence of artefacts dating from the nation's early European history. Marking tourist sites in Millers Point as part of a Bicentenary Project of the Royal Australian Historical Society (RAHS) inhered to this locality imaginings of Australian national identity. Within the rhetoric of ‘cradle of the nation’, aspects of this officially sanctioned locality that threaten the national imaginings were either suppressed, trivialised or silenced. Furthermore, these claims of national identity are appropriated, communicated and amplified within representations of the tourism industry's brochures and guidebooks. Representations of national identity within Millers Point privilege official over vernacular histories. Furthermore artefacts are prioritised over social memory, in particular first and oldest structures over all others. Finally where social memory is addressed, emphasis is given to the elite over the proletariat, men over women, Anglo‐Celtic over indigenous peoples, glorious decisions over the ignoble, and an egalitarian ideology over extant social relationships. Such a selective representation of Millers Point allows conflictual and challenging elements of Australian national identity to be cast aside, leaving dominant social norms unchallenged.

The Royal Image: Illustrations of the Grandes Chroniques de France, 1274-1422

Grandes Chroniques de France is a vernacular, frequently illustrated history of the medieval French monarchs. Originally describing the lives of the kings from their origins in Troy in 1274 to the reign of Philip Augustus, it was updated in several stages to the life of Charles VI. Copied and amended for a variety of royal and courtly patrons, approximately 130 of these manuscripts exist today. Anne Hedeman provides the first critical and comprehensive study of the chronicle's illustrations. Hedeman concentrates on the illustrations in twenty manuscripts, analyzing their artistic and cultural significance and offering new methods for studying illustrated manuscripts. She discusses the chronicle in relation to the political ideology of Louis IX, vernacular history, and the Latin chronicle tradition at Saint-Denis. Looking at the manuscripts of various periods, the author compares their representations of historical events, kingship, and individuals in and around the royal court. She also contrasts the styles of several authors and illustrators of the chronicle. The Royal Image includes a catalogue of over seventy-five illustrated manuscripts, and an appendix listing the artists. An additional appendix lists surviving manuscripts.

Turning to the Mothers: Mormon Women's Biographies of Their Female Forebears and the Mormon Church's Expectations for Women

As the dissident voices of Mormon women themselves are lately making clear, female Latter-Day Saints (Mormons) are subject to a rigorous-and, many would say, unrealistic and limiting-set of expectations. They are assigned a clearly subservient role in their church (they may not hold most major church offices, for instance, and they are taught that they may not achieve the highest degree of glory in the afterlife [the Celestial Kingdom] unless they are sealed in marriage in the Temple through Temple Ordinances). Yet they are expected to be paragons of their faith, accepting without question the church's insistence that motherhood is the highest calling for a woman, that working outside the home is undesirable, and that selfish is the worst accusation that can be leveled against them. In quasi-Victorian language, church leaders exhort women to be spiritual guides for their families: You provoke us to good works, and . . your encouragement and unwavering faith are often all we have to keep us in the path of right. . . . I can truly testify that your inspiration and faith become our buckler and shield. .... From Father Adam down through the ages, men have needed to be inspired by the steadying influence and purifying power of women.1 For some Mormon women, the church's demands that they be always selfless, always virtuous lead to serious disorders born of guilt, as recent studies of depression and drug abuse among Mormon women indicate.2 Others, though, obviously find healthier ways of with the burden of expectations that their church places on them. One of these ways, my research in Mormon culture and Mormon women's writings suggests, is that classic human strategy for dealing with pressure: Mormon women tell true stories, which shape the past in ways that help the tellers cope with the stress of the present, ways that challenge, in this case, what their church demands of them. Ironically enough, one of the main vehicles for coping stories that Mormon women apparently employ is that classic genre of orthodox Mormon literature, the laudatory ancestor biography. I first became aware in 1983 that something odd and perhaps subversive is going on in many ancestor biographies that twentieth-century Mormon women are writing when, with the assistance of a grant from the Idaho Humanities Council, I collected an archive of vernacular history from Southeast Idaho-place histories, family histories, autobiographies, and biographies written by nonprofessional writers. Most of the works in the collection have not been published previously and were not written for the collection; they were written for friends and descendants and were in the possession of the writers or their relations when I sent calls for donations to every local paper, every television and radio station, every church (LDS and non-LDS), every old persons' home, and every historical society in Southeast Idaho (not quite such a huge task as it may seem, given the area's small population). In response to that request, some 775 documents were donated, totaling about 6,000 pages. Of the total, 158 are biographies of men, and 95 are biographies of women. The collection is now housed, in duplicate copies, in the archives of the Oboler Library at Idaho State University in Pocatello and the Idaho State Historical Society Library in Boise. As a non-Mormon, I was struck at first with the formulaic surface of the LDS ancestor biographies among the works in the collection (approximately two-thirds of the 253 biographies

Machiavelli, Guicciardini, and the Tradition of Vernacular Historiography in Florence

To UNDERSTAND EVENTS AND REPRESENT THEM MEMORABLY are the twin tasks of the historian. But analysis and representation are not easy to combine, and historians who excel at one often slight the other. In Florence before Machiavelli and Guicciardini there were two styles of historical writing, classical and vernacular, each with its own strengths. Inspired by classical example, the humanist historians concentrated on affairs of state and composed linear narratives that were clarified and augmented by reference to broad moral and political lessons. Vernacular chroniclers, on the other hand, wrote to preserve the memory of notable events, both political and nonpolitical, especially those they had themselves witnessed. Niccolo [Machiavelli] and Francesco Guicciardini drew strength from both of these styles and in different ways each made an effective combination of clarity and concreteness. This division between classical and vernacular history was not new, for the basis of the two styles had been set long before. As Erich Auerbach has written, classical Latin prose an almost excessively organizing language in which the material and sensory side of the facts is rather viewed and ordered from above than presented in its materiality and sensoriness. In contrast, the proto-vernacular written by the early medieval historian Gregory of Tours is a language that organizes badly or not at all. But it lives on the concrete side of events, it speaks with and in the people who figure in them.' Gregory's aim was to make things vividly visible, and, unlike classical historians, he was drawn to represent a scene simply because of its vividness. Auerbach did not deny that Gregory's clumsy and unclassical language represents a decline, but he has forcefully argued that it is also much more. It is a reawakening of the directly sensible and lies on the path toward the modern sense of literary realism.2 With the Renaissance revival of classicism, these two styles of histori-

Patronage of French Vernacular History Writers in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries

Patronage of French Vernacular History Writers in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries

The Lovedale Press: Literature for the Bantu Revisited

The fact is that the mass of the vernacular literature published in the past emanated, and still to-day emanates, from missionary presses, and naturally such literature has sought to fulfil the aims of missionary societies.The special features of written vernacular history as a specific category of African historical documentation still await a general theoretical analysis. This article makes no attempt to remedy the deficiency, but considers two possible hypotheses from the relationship between Xhosa traditional historians and the Lovedale Press during the 1930s. First cf Vansina, that it is not only oral traditions which are affected by their mode of transmission. Second, cf Goody and Watt, that it is one thing to be literate, but quite another to find a publisher.Perhaps the first printed work in Xhosa was that of a stoic-looking cow bestriding the legend “All cattle come from God,” which appeared in 1823. The writer was Rev. John Bennie of the Glasgow Missionary Society, and the printing was done at the Chumie mission station, shortly to be renamed Lovedale. From that time, Lovedale remained the focal point of the literate Christian culture which emerged among the Xhosa of South Africa's Eastern Cape. This primacy was reinforced in 1915 when the South African Native College (now Fort Hare) was established nearby under the chairmanship of the Principal of Lovedale. The Lovedale Press flourished along with its host institution. The only available estimates indicate that up to January 1939, 238 books were produced in Xhosa, more than in any African language except Swahili.

The Kinglists of Buganda

In 1901 the katikkiro or ‘prime minister’ of Buganda, Apolo Kagwa, published a vernacular history of his country entitled The Book of the Kings of Buganda. Most of this work dealt with the events of his own lifetime, but it also included a circumstantial account of the twenty-nine reigns which, he alleged, had preceded that of King Mutesa, who received the first European visitors and who died in 1884. This version of the Ganda past has not since been challenged in its essentials either by Ganda traditionalists or by European or European-trained commentators. Some of the former have tried to lengthen the history still further by naming ancestors or forerunners of King Kintu, with whom Kagwa began his tale. But these additional kings are plainly legendary, like the dragon Bemba, or abstractions, like ‘King Buganda,’ and have not achieved official status. Scholars, by contrast, have been inclined to shorten the list slightly, holding with Sir Harry Johnston that the first real king of Buganda was Kimera [K3] and relegating the first two of Kagwa's rulers, Kintu and Cwa, to a nebulous prehistory. In other respects they have generally accepted Kagwa's account with only a few amendments and hesitations, and have used it as the basis for quite elaborate chronological and developmental studies.

The Vernacular History of A. M. Simons

No recent student of American historiography has failed to acquire a passing acquaintance with some of the historical writing of the American Socialist A. M. Simons. No treatment of economic determinism in American thought omits at least a footnote of credit toSocial Forces in American History, published in 1911, in which the irascible radical touched upon ideas and interpretations that Charles Beard and others were to develop with less heat and less haste. Simons's treatment of the American Revolution and the Constitutional Convention, of the Jacksonian era, and of the Civil War and Reconstruction periods, sounded themes that became staples of debate within the historical profession. In fact, however, Simons's history has a distinction that goes beyond its role as the first Marxist interpretation of the American past, or as an expression of ‘progressive history’. It is part of a much older, larger and many-sided body of thought that made up an attack upon the genteel tradition in American intellectual and cultural experience. In literature, that attack developed a set of responses that recent scholars have termed the ‘vernacular tradition’. By examining Simons's historical writing in the context of the vernacular tradition, one can see that his history is much more than a Marxist curiosity. His history was shaped both by experience and ideology, and it was intended to be a cultural critique as well as an economic one.