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This paper returns to one of the germinal texts of nineteenth-century Arab political thought, Butrus al-Bustani's Nafir Suriyya (‘The Clarion of Syria’). A series of broadsides published between September 1860 and April 1861, these reflected on the confessional violence that had rent apart Mount Lebanon and Damascus in mid-1860. As scholars have suggested, Bustani – now regarded as one of the pre-eminent thinkers of the nineteenth-century Arab nahda, or ‘awakening’ – here offered a new vision of Syrian patriotism, which formed part of a longer reflection on political subjectivity, faith, and civilisation. But, this paper argues, these texts can also be read as reflections on the changing workings of empire: on the imperial ruler's duties and attributes and his subjects’ obligations and rights; on the relationship between state and population and capital and province; on imperial administrative reform; and on the dangers foreign intervention posed to Ottoman sovereignty. Drawing on the languages of Ottoman reform and ethical statecraft, as well as on imperial comparisons, Bustani argued against the autonomy some counselled for Mount Lebanon and for wholesale integration with the Ottoman state. These texts offer grounds for methodological reflection and for writing Ottoman Arab thought into broader histories of imperial political thought.

Funder: Cambridge Philosophical Society; doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/100013858, Debate over migrations to Britain during the fifth and sixth centuries AD is still rampant in archaeological discourse. Stable carbon, nitrogen and oxygen isotope values from multiple tissues in individuals buried at Finglesham in Kent during the first millennium AD demonstrate not only migration of individuals to the region but also highlight community integration through foodways and refute previous models of ‘invasion’ and replacement. This case study community suggests gendered differences in mobility into early medieval England, with males more likely to be migrants from cooler regions than women. It also challenges traditional narratives of social status in these furnished cemeteries being linked to diet or migrant status with no clear correlations found between funerary treatment and isotopic signatures. This multi-tissue and multi-isotope study tracks dietary changes in this multi-origin community throughout their lives and shows that they may have even changed their diets to adapt to Christianising influences in the region.

As COVID-19 began to spread across Malaysia in early-2020, Jesus began to materialize with increasing frequency on my Facebook feed. A familiar figure with light skin, beard, long hair, and flowing robes, He appeared in many classic poses: praying, healing the sick, carrying a cross, crucified. Overlaid onto these images, however, were references to a disease that we have only recently come to know: ‘COVID: Christ Over Infection, Virus and Death’; ‘JESUS is the best doctor and prayer is the best medicine’; ‘Harapan di Tengah Coronavirus! Tuhan Yesus Sayang Kita Semua’ (‘Hope in the midst of Coronavirus! Jesus loves us all’).

This essay is meant as a contribution to debate over the nature and significance of the ‘Justinianic Plague’, which struck Western Eurasia between the sixth and eighth centuries CE, and the methodological challenges posed by attempting to reconcile historical evidence with that derived from the realm of the Natural Sciences. In recent years, major advances have been made in our genetic understanding of the Justinianic Plague. Yet growing scientific interest in the disease has coincided with a concerted effort amongst some historians to seek to down play its historical importance. This article surveys our current state of historical and scientific understanding with respect to the sixth-century pandemic, responds to the recent attempts to argue that the disease had only a minimal impact on the societies which it struck, and considers how historians should respond to the burgeoning scientific evidence in order to take study of the plague forward. For co-operation between geneticists, environmental scientists, archaeologists and historians, it argues, offers the chance to transform our understanding of how, when and where the plague spread and to assess its impact across the Afro-Eurasian world as a whole, and not just on the Mediterranean, for which we have our best written sources.

This article traces the evolution of branded commodity advertising and consumption from corporeal health concerns to the racialisation of beauty through skin-lightening cosmetics in late colonial India. It centres two empirical foci: the marketing of personal hygiene products to Indian markets, and their racialised and gendered consumption. This article argues that the imperial economy tapped into and commodified ideals of cleanliness, beauty and fairness through marketing—ideals that continue to pervade contemporary South Asian communities. Contrary to claims that multinational corporations permeated Indian markets after the economic liberalisation of the late 1980s, there is a much deeper genealogy to the racialised imperial economy operating in European colonies. This article also examines the phenomenological underpinnings of imperial whiteness in colonial encounters to demonstrate how certain commodities appealed to Indians as ‘modern’ consumers, as well as how middle-class Indians and local entrepreneurs became active participants in the demand for, consumption and production of personal hygiene commodities.

Julia Brichta, a Jewish-Hungarian refugee, came to the Channel Island of Guernsey in 1939, a year before the arrival of German occupying forces. The story of what happened to her during the war, when she was sent to Ravensbrück, was given in her own words on a number of occasions between 1945 and 1965, yet the specifics of her trajectory towards Ravensbrück, where she became a camp policewoman, have hitherto been unclear. This paper attempts to untangle the evidence to establish some of the facts behind this ‘grey zone’ survivor of the Holocaust based on the surviving archival documents. It examines Julia’s trajectory towards Ravensbrück, and the ways in which her pre-camp and camp life impacted the ways in which she narrated her story between 1945 and 1965. Whether she was a non-Jewish resistance heroine, or a Jewish perpetrator who lied about her wartime activities, this paper argues that such judgements, in the end, are simplistic and mask the complexity of survivor stories. Instead, seeking to understand changes in testimony over time based on pre-camp and camp experiences and audience offer a more fruitful path of analysis.

The movements of ancient crop and animal domesticates across prehistoric Eurasia are well-documented in the archaeological record. What is less well understood are the precise mechanisms that farmers and herders employed to incorporate newly introduced domesticates into their long-standing husbandry and culinary traditions. This paper presents stable isotope values (δ13C, δ15N) of humans, animals, and a small number of plants from the Hexi Corridor, a key region that facilitated the movement of ancient crops between Central and East Asia. The data show that the role of animal products in human diets was more significant than previously thought. In addition, the diets of domestic herbivores (sheep/goat, and cattle) suggest that these two groups of domesticates were managed in distinct ways in the two main ecozones of the Hexi Corridor: the drier Northwestern region and the wetter Southeastern region. Whereas sheep and goat diets are consistent with consumption of naturally available vegetation, cattle exhibit a higher input of C4 plants in places where these plants contributed little to the natural vegetation. This suggests that cattle consumed diets that were more influenced by human provisioning, and may therefore have been reared closer to the human settlements, than sheep and goats.

This article compares the party apparatuses of the National Socialist Movement of the Netherlands and the National Socialist Workers’ Party of Sweden. These two parties, founded in the 1930s, both to some extent mimicked the organisational model of Hitler's party in Germany. While this has been frequently noted, the deployment of this model in practice has not been analysed in any detail. The article explores the specific characters of the Swedish and Dutch fascist party organisations diachronically vis-à-vis propaganda, member activism and internal cohesion, highlighting their changes, successes and failures. The comparison reveals that the party apparatus was highly dependent on the specifics of national infrastructure, demographic distribution and urbanisation and the physical landscape, with notable consequences for internal party cohesion and morale. In the final analysis the relative appeal and popularity of the parties is shown party be the result of how the Nazi organisational model was deployed in practice within each national context.

This article re-centres the American home-front and the domestic politics of racial segregation in the history of Allied sexual violence in World War II by examining the transnational uses of white women’s victimhood. It focuses on a story about the rape of German women by French colonial troops under American command in the city of Stuttgart in April 1945. The article shows how allegations of rape by men of colour precipitated the transformation of an enemy nation into a violated and victimised one, while facilitating the efforts of some American lawmakers to collapse different ethnic and national categories into hegemonic visions of blackness and whiteness. In so doing, Democratic senators from mostly southern states utilised German women’s stories of rape as a spectacle to illustrate and advance their domestic ends: to sever post-war Germany from its Nazi past, thereby welcoming the country back into a union of white nations; to further their agenda of racial segregation; and to deflect attention from the violence committed by white GIs in Europe. This story, which became known as “The Stuttgart Incident”, ultimately shows how ideas about race and gendered violence overseas were used to bolster the politics of white supremacy at home, how these allegations were mobilised for material political purposes, and how they transcended national boundaries.

This article investigates the impact of the ‘communications revolution’ upon experiences of time and space during the nineteenth century. Focusing upon the first three decades of telegraphic communication, it unpacks the assumptions underlying linear narratives of ‘acceleration’ and ‘time-space compression’ to understand the roots of Germany’s fraught relationship to modernity. In doing so, it highlights the importance of the changes which took place between the 1848 revolutions and the early years of the Kaiserreich and which laid the foundations for the peculiarities of the Wilhelmine Era. During this period, it argues, the perceived impact of telegraphic communication, the ‘expansion’ or ‘contraction’ of space and time, varied from one person and place to another, reflecting the technology’s progressive and uneven expansion across Germany. Access to new networks of communication was dependent upon, and in turn influenced, the changing status of individuals, towns and the countryside experiencing the forces of industrialization, market capitalism and globalization. Speed, space and time, as a result, became a measure of the divisions emerging in modern Germany.

Catherine of Siena (1347-1380) is well known as a saint and mystic with a colourful biography. Recent scholarship has begun to recognise Catherine's substantial political contributions. She wrote letters to notable political figures including Bernabò Visconti and Pope Gregory XI, and also brought her influence to bear in person, visiting numerous Tuscan cities as well as Avignon and Rome. There has been little investigation, however, into the relationship between Catherine's writings and major political discourses of the period. This article offers evidence that Catherine should be viewed within the bonum commune tradition of high medieval political thought. Like other Dominican political thinkers of the period, Catherine was particularly interested in the concept of caritas, which she used to justify her involvement in political disputes such as the War of the Eight Saints (1375–8) between the papacy and Florence, and the disputed papal elections of 1378. Recognising that the content of Catherine's writings was political as well as spiritual provides an important counterpoint to accounts of late fourteenth-century Italian political thought which give excessive prominence to 'secularising' humanists. This study also challenges lingering assumptions that the political thought of the early Renaissance must be studied through a narrow (and male) canon.

Hunters of acrostics have had little luck with Horace. Despite his manifest love of complex wordplay, virtuoso metrical tricks and even alphabet games, acrostics seem largely absent from Horace's poetry. The few that have been sniffed out in recent years are, with one notable exception, either fractured and incomplete—the postulatedPINN-inCarm.4.2.1–4 (pinnis?Pindarus?)—or disappointingly low-stakes; suggestions of acrostics are largely confined to theOdesalone. Besides diverging from the long-standing Roman obsession with literary acrostics, Horace's apparent lack of interest is especially surprising given that Virgil, his contemporary, friend and ‘poetic pace-maker’, was at the time conducting what seems to be a systematic adaptation of Hellenistic acrostic-poetics into Latin poetry.

The view that the idea of citizenship almost entirely lost significance in late antiquity depends, it is argued here, on too narrow and too rigid a definition of citizenship. The major turning poin...

Property documents and placita, alongside a small body of archaeobotanical evidence, suggest a significant change in the planting of cultivated spaces in Italian cities during the early middle ages. This article will chart the usage of a rare term, uiridarium, in the documents of early medieval Italy in order to explore the history of decorative pleasure gardens between c. 600-c. 1000. A few charters refer to enclosed gardens called uiridaria attached to houses of the highest status people in Italy: dukes, kings, emperors, and bishops. We have a glimpse of how they were used and here examine the role played by ornamental gardens in the performance of the highest echelons of power in Italy.

Cliff tombs and decorated stone sarcophagi from the Eastern Han period have been found in especially large numbers in Sichuan. The sudden rise of cliff tomb burial in the southwest and its decline by the 3rd century CE suggests that it was a trend that answered a particular call in a specific period. Their geographical concentration and use in a period of general social and political stability and economic prosperity in the region point to a distinctive new development in burial custom. Cliff tomb burial represented a fundamental shift in artistic and communicative objectives and a modification in cemetery layout. After examining cliff tombs found in Hejiang county, Sichuan, and especially the iconography and meaning of images carved on stone sarcophagi found therein, the paper suggests a number of possible reasons for the rise of cliff tomb burial, including a wish to eschew the ostentation associated with funereal practice at the time.

Historical accounts of sickle cell disease tend to draw a distinction between its theoretical role in catalyzing the postwar field of medical genetics or its clinical and social significance in representing the healthcare disparities experienced by African-Americans. This article bridges these theoretical-evolutionary and clinical-racial narratives by focusing on the discovery of sickle cells in marginalized Arabic-speaking communities of Yemen and Turkey in the 1950s. Like in North America, sickle cell research in the Middle East unfolded along the fractured social politics of race. I analyze how British, Turkish, and Arab geneticists attempted to create evolutionary hypotheses that reconciled historical and sociological boundaries between white and African, Arab and Turk. As the parameters of Turkish and Arab nationalism shifted in the Cold War-era Middle East, so did the favored explanatory narratives for the presence of sickle cells in different communities, which assigned different degrees of importance to African ancestry, socially enforced endogamy, and evolutionary adaptations to malaria.

Peter’s Pence began as an annual donation from England to the papacy. It was later taken up more widely and lasted until the Reformation in England, but its beginnings are much murkier. This article reassesses the earliest forms of Peter’s Pence in the period before 1066. Offerings made by individual Anglo-Saxon pilgrims to Rome gave rise to more regular gifts from several kings between Offa (757–96) and Alfred (871–99); under the latter, gifts also began to be associated with the people as well as the king. A fully articulated mechanism for raising Peter’s Pence only emerges later, however, in the time of Edgar (959–75) and his successors, especially Æthelred II (978–1016). The nature of the national and local frameworks which were used to extract, channel and safeguard the render are assessed in detail, based on sources from across England. Bishops played a central role in this system, above all the archbishop of Canterbury, who received the collected tribute from the kingdom as a whole. The article, utilising a variety of chronicles, law codes and religious texts, as well as coins, stresses the significance of the emergence of Peter’s Pence for views of late Anglo-Saxon England’s government and religious ideology. Comparisons with gifts to Rome from post-Conquest England and from other parts of early medieval Europe underscore the uniqueness of Anglo-Saxon England’s large and regular offering—a powerful reflection of its close and ongoing relationship with St Peter and his heirs. The research conducted by Francesca Tinti for this article forms part of the activities carried out within the research project HAR2017-86502-P, funded by the Spanish Ministerio de Economía, Industria y Competitividad.

Recent histories have challenged narratives of a late medieval decline in monastic scholarship. This article extends that work to the natural sciences, showing how monks could learn astronomy and mathematics through their scholarly labour of reading, copying and glossing. Although the processes of learning are often poorly documented, and are often conflated with teaching, it is possible, through close reading of annotations and reconstruction of mathematical processes, to get a glimpse of an individual in the moment of acquiring scientific skills. Focusing on a piece of adaptive copying carried out by an English Benedictine monk c.1380, this article explores the devotional motivations underlying his work, and argues that it was through such copying and compilation that he acquired the expertise necessary to invent an astronomical instrument some years later.

The sustained and more powerful presence of the Westminster parliament following the Revolution of 1688-89 facilitated the passage of legislation on an unprecedented scale. Statutes, including thousands of local and specific acts, strengthened the ability of the central state to raise money and men, and for local interests to adapt and direct state activity to local ends. Because relatively little of this statutory activity was devised centrally, and was rather local, particular and limited, the impact of this growth was far from orderly or uniform. Building on research that has demonstrated the highly varied nature of eighteenth-century British state building, this article draws comparisons between the legal institutions and cultures of Britain and Europe. In the first instance, it puts greater emphasis on the importance of the legal system to policymaking. Through reassessing the trajectory of the caseload of European central and high courts, this article demonstrates that litigation remained an important means of law making, despite the “great litigation decline.” Secondly, the article shows that Britain was not only a statutory state but a judicial one. Like other European states, it remained governed by a “weak legal pluralism,” with statutes dependent upon multiple systems and tapestries of law for their enforcement and legitimacy. The persistence of pluralism, litigiousness and court initiative suggests that jurisdictional decentralization performed an important role in the making of the eighteenth-century British state and enabled the growing numbers of parliamentary statutes to be frequently amended or mitigated by judges.

On 14 April 1622, John Knight, a theology student at Broadgates Hall, Oxford, delivered a Palm Sunday sermon before his University. In it, Knight defended the thesis that subjects defending themselves on grounds of religion would be justified in taking up arms against their sovereign. This study reconstructs the content of, political context for, and reaction to Knight’s sermon. In establishing the importance for Knight’s sermon of non-English authorities, above all the authoritative Palatine theologian David Pareus and the Lausanne theologian Guillaume Du Buc (Bucanus), it demonstrates that justifications of armed resistance to sovereign powers were widely known in pre-civil war England, but that their expression in English was effectively controlled.

This article tracks the shifting contours of John Maynard Keynes's invocation of certain ideas associated with Thomas Robert Malthus, between 1914 and 1937 especially. These ‘Malthusian moments’ in Keynes's work form a triptych. In pre-war thinking about global population dynamics as a Malthusian ‘devil’ threatening national political and economic stability, Keynes found optimism in the thought that modern political economy could be repurposed to avoid the horns of such a dilemma. In the 1920s, he moved to consider the international, and particularly European, responses to both population and to the developing Malthusian ‘devil’ of unemployment. Finally, in the 1930s, Keynes's view became increasingly domestic, focusing on ways that these devilish twin problems could be managed by nation-states organized for prosperity and self-sufficiency. Across these moments, Keynes sought to assert the power of past political and economic ideas to aid in the formulation of present policy, by continuously (if rather loosely) invoking the Malthusian trope of ‘effective demand’.

This article examines Strabo’s attitude towards Homeric scholarship, textual emendation and the wanderings of mythical heroes. By exploring the interconnections between these themes, three broader aspects of the Geography are elucidated: the relationship between Homeric and historical truth and fiction, Strabo’s self-fashioning as a consciously late Hellenistic scholar, and the significance of interpretations of past heroic wanderings as a means of exploring present geo-political concerns. The discussion focuses upon two particular case studies: the travels of Jason and the Argonauts, and the wanderings of Aeneas. Ultimately through this examination Strabo emerges as a liminal figure who firmly straddles the divide between the worlds of past Hellenistic textual scholarship and Imperial Greek literature.

Collections are made and maintained for pleasure, for status, for nation or empire building, for cultural capital, as a substrate for knowledge production and for everything in between. In asking how collections end, we shift the focus from acquisition and growth to erosion, loss and decay, and expose the intellectual, material and curatorial labour required to maintain collections. In this introductory essay, we draw together insights from the history of science and from science and technology studies to investigate the dispersal, destruction, absorption, repurposing and repatriation of the diverse scientific collections discussed in the papers that make up this issue of BJHS Themes, and many other collections besides. We develop a distinction first suggested by the curator and bibliographer John Willis Clark between ‘working’ collections of objects valued for the information they hold or produce, and ‘unique’ collections of objects valued for their historical singularity. We show that in many cases, the ‘end’ of an object or collection involves a shift in the dominant account of its cultural value from ‘working’ to ‘unique’ or vice versa. Moving between the laboratory, the museum and difficult-to-classify spaces in between, we argue that ‘ending’ is not anathema to ‘collecting’ but is always present as a threat, or as an everyday reality, or even as a necessary part of a collection's continued existence. A focus on ending draws attention not only to the complex internal dynamics and social contexts of collections, but also to their roles in producing scientific knowledge.

This chapter explores the history of the Hebrew Bible from the point of view of its layout on the two main material forms of the Jewish book: scroll and codex. It examines several of the fundamental ways in which Jews (and a few Christians) have organized the Hebrew Bible visually, from the earliest surviving witnesses among the so-called Dead Sea Scrolls (third century BCE) to the printed editions of Early Modern Europe. It pays special attention to the way the material and spatial limitations of a writing support spurred various kinds of scribal creativity; and it traces the way practices that began by chance become ritually, legally or exegetically meaningful in the process of transmission across centuries. The chapter explores book-historical evidence internal to the biblical corpus and considers possible models for scribal practices among other, non-Jewish and non-Hebrew cultures of the book in the Ancient Near East. It explores the development of scribal law in early Rabbinic literature, in which ancient textual accidents and idiosyncrasies are reinterpreted as meaningful, visual expressions of a perfect, sacred text. It then considers the dynamic relationship between scroll and codex in the Medieval period, focusing both on the transformative emergence of the Masoretic codex and on the iconography of the Temple therein, as expression of the idea of the Hebrew Bible as portable Temple and a visual response to exile. The chapter then considers various ways in which Jewish and Christian editors and printers adopted and adapted these ancient and medieval visual practices of textual distribution in the early years of print. Finally, it looks at the paratextual superimposition of Christian and Jewish reading traditions onto the text, and therewith, the origin of the shape of the Hebrew Bible as commonly printed to this day.

This article examines the impact of Mexican eugenics on different programs relating to the familythroughout the postRevolutionary period. It deals with how Mexican elites thought about thefamily and how these discussions delimited who should be part of or exist under the banner of “lagran familia mexicana”. I discuss how eugenicists' debates regarding motherhood, puericulture,class, and different preventive health measures were intended to keep “undesirables”—or thepeople who, in their view, should not be part of “la gran familia mexicana”—at bay. I argue thatscience was used as a tool for implementing different eugenic plans that would make ideas ofmestizaje and “rational mixing” into the modern Mexican nation. I argue that according to theMexican Society of Eugenics (MSE), it was through the regulation of individual families and theacceptance of eugenic precept of selfmanagement and rational reproduction that the creation ofthe national family was to be crafted. Thus, the “gran familia mexicana” would become theorganizing principle for both the individual and broader national dynamics in Mexico.

This article focuses on how sound – and hearing – shaped the relationship between religion and the urban environment in the rapidly industrialising towns of eighteenth-century northern England. Examining individual responses to sounds, it argues that not only did a religious ear help contemporaries to navigate and interpret urban space, but the sounds of the town could act as a stimulus to religiosity. It therefore challenges a prevailing historiographical tendency to associate urbanisation with declining religiosity, and instead argues for the importance of faith to how contemporaries inhabited and interpreted industrialising towns.

This chapter examines Anne Conway’s ‘argument from love’ in her Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy. This argument, supported by a further argument, the ‘argument from pain’, undermines the dualist dichotomy between mind and matter by appealing to a vitalist similarity principle. The goal is two-fold: first, to contribute to a close systematic reconstruction and analysis of Conway’s arguments, which so far is largely lacking in the literature; second, to establish that these arguments are richer and more compelling than commentators have thought. The chapter shows that Conway’s case against the dualist poses a considerable challenge to the dualisms of Henry More and Descartes.

Funder: University of Cambridge, Nation-states are inherently part of cultural formations, sustaining, legitimating, and inspiring them. The nations sustaining contemporary states are very different, and major routes of historical nation-state formation can be distinguished, which means that global discussions of nation-states cannot be confined to such states “in a European sense” only. Civilization(s) is a concept with different meanings in singular and in plural, belonging to different semantic fields, at least in European languages. As a singular concept it arose in mid-eighteenth century, distinguishing a high degree of social and cultural development from “barbarism” and “savagery”. It spread rapidly across European languages in the nineteenth century with European world supremacy and evolutionism, as a European self-designation. Civilizations in plural first appeared on a large intellectual scale after World War I, the horrendous slaughters of which shattered the Western ideas of continuous evolution and progress, and of the West as the unique pinnacle of human development. In the plural, civilizations have been used in philosophies of comparative history and evolution, but it may also be used as a tool of cultural analysis. In this sense, civilizations refer to large, ancient enduring cultural configurations, to the deepest layer of contemporary cultural geology. In terms of current demographic size five major such civilizations can be identified. They impinge upon the political culture of states, upon the visions and the language of the state rulers. They do not clash, and they do not determine state behaviour. Nations and civilizations are compared as cultural entities or referents, with a view to laying a basis for analytical comparisons of nation states and civilization-states, in particular their implications of agency, time and history, including their different historical contexts of emergence. The nation and civilization designations of states also related to a wider range of contemporary state categorizations. Contemporary politics and political theorizing of civilizations are looked at in brief empirical overviews of the impact of civilizations upon international relations in the wake of Samuel Huntington’s thesis of “clashes of civilizations”, and of the promise of civilization states as a political project, and as an illuminating tool of cognition.

Funding to carry out this research was provided by the Centre for Liberal Arts and Social Sciences, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore; Chinese National Social Science Key Project Grant for The Mogou Cemetery Project: Multidisciplinary Research in Gansu Lintan (grant number: 18ZDA225); Banco Santander through the Santander Mobility Grant scheme at the University of Cambridge; Darwin College, Cambridge; the LieberthalRogel Center for Chinese Studies at the University of Michigan; the Esherick-Ye Family Foundation; the Association for Asian Studies China and Inner Asia Council; and the American Association of Physical Anthropologists Cobb Professional Development Grant programme.

The following article provides significant new evidence of John Locke’s interest in Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651). The evidence derives from the collection of manuscripts amassed by the historian Thomas Birch (1705–66), the author of The History of the Royal Society of London (1756–7). Within this collection are several documents in the hand of Pierre Des Maizeaux (1672/3–1745), the Huguenot journalist and biographer. In 1718–19, Des Maizeaux set about compiling A Collection of Several Pieces of Mr. John Locke, a posthumous compilation of lesser known works and manuscripts by Locke, edited with the guidance of Anthony Collins (1676–1729). In preparing the volume, Des Maizeaux interviewed one of Locke’s friends, whose recollections he recorded in an anonymized memoir, in French. The article reveals that the anonymous friend was James Tyrrell (1642–1719), the Whig propagandist, and one of Locke’s closest acquaintances. Tyrrell’s claim that Locke ‘almost always’ had Hobbes’s Leviathan on his table in Oxford, c.1658–1667, is one of several in the memoir which revises our understanding of Locke’s intellectual development and the history of one of his best known friendships. The article contextualizes and translates the memoir, and revisits the debate surrounding Peter Laslett’s relegation of Hobbes’s significance to Locke’s political thought.

This chapter examines how the historiography of Greek religion renewed itself between 1920 and 1950. This period invested a great deal of effort in the answers that could be sought from the celebrated old sources. As the former certainties were battered from all sides, the revered voices from the past often resonated with the intensity of a battle call for renewal. Greek religion, one of the most contested domains in the reception of ancient culture, was to be solicited again and again to help imagine a new future. The chapter then considers the great changes that saw the Belle Époque study of ancient religion thoroughly transformed after the Great War, and the stakes of some of the fundamental disagreements that set influential scholars of the Interwar years against each other. Ultimately, the battle for the Greek Irrational was a search for the new foundations of modernity.

Herodotus’ investigation of the ‘most distant populations’ of the north at the edge of the oikoumenē in 4.5-36 is woven over the rival legacy of the Ionian traveler and mystic Aristeas of Prokonnesos into a very deep web of contestations and appropriations. After looking at the specificities of Herodotus’ engagement with Aristeas in 4.5-36, the paper proceeds to discuss the roles played by this staging of opposition in the text’s construction of ethnic authority.

Recent research in northern Spain has revealed the disappearance of Neanderthal populations in the Vasco Cantabrian region a few millennia earlier than in eastern and southern Iberia and discovered a short period of overlap with modern humans, at least, in terms of radiocarbon dates. However, the causes of Neanderthal decline understood as a regional and temporal process remain open. Despite the abundance of technological studies, modern?quality chronological dating, and the availability of archaeofaunal and palaeoenvironmental data, there is a lack of consensus about how climatic and environmental conditions could have affected ungulate prey and, therefore, Neanderthal subsistence strategies. In this paper, an analytical summary of the archaeofaunal and taphonomic data available for the Vasco?Cantabrian region, combined with the most recent chronological evidence, present general knowledge about animal biogeography and ecology during the Middle?Upper Palaeolithic transition, and provides an interpretation of the behaviour of both human species in the region. This work reviews the palaeomammal community of animals represented in the record as exploited by human groups in several caves and rock shelters and pointing to continuing lacunae in knowledge. Further research is needed to verify and potentially explain the apparent hominin population gap and the ultimate fate of the Neanderthals This research is funded by the European Research Council under the European Union's Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme (grant agreement No. 818299‐ SUBSILIENCE project (https://www.subsilience.eu) and the Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades (ABRUPT ‐ HAR2017‐84997‐P) to ABMA. ASR's PhD is supported within the SUBSILIENCE project. The authors would like to thank J. García Sanchez (Instituto de Arqueología‐ Merida, CSIC‐Junta de Extramadura) for technical assistance with catchment areas analysis and Figs. 1, 5 and 6. Special thanks to L. Agudo (EvoAdapta‐University of Cantabria) for her technical assistance and G. Terlato for comments on the final version of the manuscript. The authors wish to acknowledge L. Straus for editing the manuscript and for his suggestions to improve this manuscript, as kind and effective as always.

Mortuaries were death duties owed to parish priests. The early sixteenth century was a pivotal moment in their long history. In 1529, an act of parliament significantly altered these dues. This article explores mortuary practices in the preceding decades. It examines what mortuaries were, who gave them, and what purpose they served. The importance of local custom is emphasised. The article reconsiders the modern view that mortuary dues were generally disliked. A more complex attitude explains both why mortuaries were reformed and why they would survive for centuries thereafter. Mortuary dues exemplify the symbiotic relationship between law and custom.

The law‐text known as I Æthelstan is commonly accepted as the earliest evidence of a legal obligation to pay tithes in England. As it turns out, it might not be. The extant Old English version of I Æthelstan does indeed legislate for tithe payments. However, this version is an eleventh‐century revision of the original text, probably penned by Archbishop Wulfstan of York (d. 1023). As I will argue in this article, the original version, which survives only as contained in a twelfth‐century translation into Latin, appears to be a call for a one‐off charitable alms payment. Publisher PDF

Francis Finch (d. 1660) was a poet, a barrister, and a significant member of the coterie of the poet Katherine Philips (1632-64). This article presents previously unrecognized evidence of his relationship to Philips, in the form of three letters from Finch to his half-sister Frances Clifton. These letters give new information about Finch’s contacts with Philips in 1650, and about the practices of naming in her coterie. The article’s broader aim is to offer the first full account of Finch’s life and work, and his influence on Philips. It argues that Finch’s 1654 prose discourse, Friendship, should be located among a cluster of responses to the philosophy of Hobbes among his circle. Finch emerges as an author with a distinct, hitherto unrecognized, intellectual project, echoes of which appear in Philips’s poetry.

This article is a case study in doing new things with old data. In 1953 Lord William Taylour directed the excavation of a monumental vaulted tholos tomb known as 'Tholos IV' at the site of ancient Pylos, Messenia, Greece. The excavation was conducted over two months, during which detailed notes were recorded in three notebooks now kept in the Archives of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. The formal publication of Tholos IV, however, contains only a basic narrative of the excavation, offering neither precise detail on stratigraphy, object find spots, nor even a complete inventory of small finds. The present study goes back to the original notebooks kept by Taylour and combines the data contained in them with a new digital survey of Tholos IV to produce a comprehensive and accurate 3D GIS model for the excavation. Furthermore, the GIS has been produced in such a way that its dataset is compatible with new excavation data currently generated in the ongoing Palace of Nestor Excavations (PONEX) project, bringing together two excavation campaigns conducted under very different circumstances, methodologies, and recording protocols. Discussion follows on how the production of this GIS deepens our understanding not just of the legacy excavation, but also of the site and its wider landscape.

The late 1960s witnessed a key conjunction between political activism and the history of science. Science, whether seen as a touchstone of rationality or of oppression, was fundamental to all sides in the era of the Vietnam War. This essay examines the historian Robert Maxwell Young's turn to Marxism and radical politics during this period, especially his widely cited account of the ‘common context’ of nineteenth-century biological and social theorizing, which demonstrated the centrality of Thomas Robert Malthus's writings on population for Charles Darwin's formulation of the theory of evolution by natural selection. From Young's perspective, this history was bound up with pressing contemporary issues: ideologies of class and race in neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory, the revival of Malthusian population control, and the role of science in military conflict. The aim was to provide a basis for political action – the ‘head revolution’ that would accompany radical social change. The radical force of Young's argument was blunted in subsequent decades by disciplinary developments within history of science, including the emergence of specialist Darwin studies, a focus on practice and the changing political associations of the history of ideas. Young's engaged standpoint, however, has remained influential even as historians moved from understanding science as ideology to science as work.

This paper presents the first ever analysis of the logbooks of the aliens in the Channel Island of Guernsey in the 1930s; logbooks termed here as ‘objects of collaboration’ because of the role they played in the persecution and deportation of the island’s Jews. Such actions would have been seriously hampered had these records been destroyed or hidden before the arrival of German occupying forces, or if they had not been used to supply the Germans, on demand, with the data that they regularly requested to carry out their persecutions. When placed in context, they highlight both the complicity of the local authorities and provide another example of how Britain failed Jewish refugees.

An Eastern Han stele with an unusual relief decoration and 367 character memorial inscription tells us much about the southwest in early imperial times. Unearthed in 2004 from the banks of the Yangtze River and dated to 173 C.E., the stele was dedicated to Quren county magistrate Jing Yun who died seventy years earlier in 103 C.E. The paper provides a full translation, annotation and analysis of the stele’s commemorative text, which borrows from the content and language of one of China’s oldest anthology of poems, the Chuci, and places it in its historical context. It also examines the iconography at the head of the stele which reflects beliefs in transcendence and the pursuit of immortality prevalent at the time and demonstrates its close relation to the inscription. Overall, the paper suggests that the decoration and text together exhibit a regional heritage that is distinct to the southwest, its memorial culture and poetic and religious traditions.

Historical maps present a unique depiction of past landscapes, providing evidence for a wide range of information such as settlement distribution, past land use, natural resources, transport networks, toponymy and other natural and cultural data within an explicitly spatial context. Maps produced before the expansion of large‐scale mechanized agriculture reflect a landscape that is lost today. Of particular interest to us is the great quantity of archaeologically relevant information that these maps recorded, both deliberately and incidentally. Despite the importance of the information they contain, researchers have only recently begun to automatically digitize and extract data from such maps as coherent information, rather than manually examine a raster image. However, these new approaches have focused on specific types of information that cannot be used directly for archaeological or heritage purposes. This paper provides a proof of concept of the application of deep learning techniques to extract archaeological information from historical maps in an automated manner. Early twentieth century colonial map series have been chosen, as they provide enough time depth to avoid many recent large‐scale landscape modifications and cover very large areas (comprising several countries). The use of common symbology and conventions enhance the applicability of the method. The results show deep learning to be an efficient tool for the recovery of georeferenced, archaeologically relevant information that is represented as conventional signs, line‐drawings and text in historical maps. The method can provide excellent results when an adequate training dataset has been gathered and is therefore at its best when applied to the large map series that can supply such information. The deep learning approaches described here open up the possibility to map sites and features across entire map series much more quickly and coherently than other available methods, opening up the potential to reconstruct archaeological landscapes at continental scales.

This article presents a reassessment of the seventeenth-century debate over the origin of the Hebrew vowel points. Previous accounts have treated this debate from the perspective of Protestant scholarship, with the reception of Louis Cappel's Arcanum punctationis revelatum (1624) used to measure progress or reaction according to how far scholars accepted or rejected-the latter for theological reasons-the critical advance his work has been taken to represent. The article argues this mischaracterizes the issue, showing why the question only became especially pressing in the mid-1640s in the context of broader developments in Catholic and Protestant biblical criticism.

Romola Davenport's recent article is presented as a significant revision of the interpretation of the reasons for rising and then falling urban mortality in Britain in the nineteenth century put forward by Szreter and Mooney, which emphasized the importance of the politics of public health. Davenport's claims that mortality patterns c. 1830–70 were driven by a synchronized rise and fall of scarlet fever across Europe and North America, as well as in rural locations in Britain, are based on frail and inconclusive forms of evidence. The epidemiological evidence presented by Davenport in fact indicates a chronologically lagging—not leading—role for scarlet fever in contributing to the rise in urban death rates before 1850 and the subsequent fall in urban mortality after c. 1870 in Britain.

This article provides for the first time a robust quantitative estimate of the amount of syphilis infection in the population of London in the later eighteenth century. A measure of the cumulative incidence of having ever been treated for the pox by the age of 35 is constructed, providing an indicator of over 20 per cent syphilitic infection. The principal primary sources are hospital admissions registers, augmented with an analysis of London’s workhouse infirmaries. A range of potentially confounding factors are taken into account, including the contemporary conflation between syphilis and other sexually transmitted infections, patients who shunned hospitals in favour of private treatment, possible double-counting of patients, institutional patients who may have hailed from outside London, and the complexity of establishing what should constitute the ‘at-risk’ population of London for this period. Cultural and medical historians have demonstrated considerable pre-occupation with venereal disease in the texts of the eighteenth century, while demographic and epidemiological historians, lacking any quantitative evidence, have tended to ignore the disease. This article can now demonstrate for the first time just how extensive syphilis was likely to have been and, by doing so, offer an original contribution to major debates in the history of sexuality and the demography of early modern London.

In the late eighteenth century, like most European fleets, the British Royal Navy still employed some foreign officers. This phenomenon, almost completely unexplored, seemingly embodies a contradiction between the national and the transnational meanings of honour. Using archival and printed sources, this article examines the foreign presence, or lack thereof, in four distinct categories of ‘quarterdeck’ officer: commissioned officers, ‘young gentlemen’ (aspirant officers), surgeons and assistant surgeons, and a final miscellaneous group fulfilling special tasks, sometimes ashore. The peculiar values attached to the officer class, and the relative social and occupational positioning of these four categories, serve to test the real motives behind ‘national’ acceptance and exclusion: beyond the opposing discourses of gentlemanly and professional cosmopolitanism on the one hand, and patriotic duty, loyalty and emerging anti-mercenarism on the other, the levels of foreign presence among navy officers should be explained mainly with reference to supply and demand on the international labour migration market. The distinction between natives and foreigners was culturally and politically meaningful in a wartime context, and strategically deployed by various actors to regulate access and exclusion, but it can also operate as a red herring for the social historian. This has broader implications for the way in which we conceptualize honour, patriotism and the nation at the turn of the nineteenth century.

Over the last thirty years, historians have made several important contributions to our understanding of the short but dramatic restoration of Catholicism in 1550s England. United by a shared rejection of the hitherto dominant interpretation of Mary I's reign as a retrograde and unfortunate interlude in the history of the English Reformation, so-called ‘revisionists’ have convincingly argued that Mary in fact presided over a remarkably dynamic and innovative revival of Catholicism. Whilst this scholarship has been extremely valuable in tackling the teleological assumption that Marian Catholicism was predestined to fail, this review suggests that the revisionist programme continues to be preoccupied by somewhat ill-conceived and unhelpful questions about how ‘successful’ Mary's church was in providing for a Catholic future. Such questions demonstrate just how far the historiography of Marian religion continues to operate within a framework still subtly shaped by sixteenth-century, confessionally charged polemic. This review suggests that, rather than debates about ‘successes’ or ‘failures’, we need to start working outwards from the valuable findings of revisionists regarding the dynamism of Marian religion, exploring their broader implications for how we understand the long-term development of Catholicism in England, as well as the Marian church's place within European Christendom more broadly.