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This article examines the meaning and function of the Old English noun reaflac in two tenth‐century lawsuit documents, Sawyer 877 and Sawyer 1211. It suggests that reaflac was the vernacular counterpart to the Latin terms violentia and rapina. Such connected terminology suggests that a collection of now lost tenth‐century Old English charters, like S 877 and S 1211 in form, was the original source for the twelfth‐century Ely house chronicle, the Libellus Æthelwoldi. Charter draftsmen purposefully selected a language of violence in order to delegitimize a rival party’s claim to an estate, regardless of whether any acts of violence had taken place. Reaflac formed part of this narrative strategy in early English lawsuit documents because of its association with contemporary discourses on moralized wrongdoing.

This article examines the significant relationship that existed between commercial British television and the study of animal behaviour. Ethological research provided important content for the new television channel, at the same time as that coverage played a substantial role in creating a new research specialism, the study of primate facial expressions, for this emergent scientific discipline. The key site in this was a television and film unit at London Zoo administered by the Zoological Society and Granada TV. The Granada unit produced ‘Animal expressions’, a twenty-five-minute television film based on research on monkeys and apes by the Dutch postgraduate student and soon-to-be-leading-authority Jan van Hooff. Recovering the production and multiple uses of ‘Animal expressions’, this paper offers the first sustained historical analysis of science on commercial television. I show how Granada patronage helped Van Hooff to support his argument that human expressions such as smiling and laughter shared common evolutionary origins with similar facial movements in nonhuman primates. Emphasizing the mutual shaping of science and ITV, I argue that ‘Animal expressions’ repurposed televisual conventions of framing talking heads, and blended serious science with the comedy of ‘funny faces’, thereby epitomizing Granada's public-service strategy at a time when commercial television was defending itself from criticism in the Pilkington report.

Richard West was undoubtedly the greatest British Quaternary geologist of his generation. Following National Service in India, he was admitted to Clare College, Cambridge in 1948 to study the Natural Sciences Tripos. Considering Geology for Part II, he finally selected Botany and was awarded First Class Honours. Under the supervision of Professor Harry Godwin FRS, in the Subdepartment of Quaternary Research (SDQR) for his PhD thesis he studied Pleistocene interglacial deposits in East Anglia. His detailed investigations at Hoxne and Ipswich led to a lifetime unravelling the environmental, geological and vegetational history of Quaternary deposits in Britain, particularly in East Anglia. In the course of this work, he was responsible for recognizing and defining the majority of the cold or glacial and interglacial stages into which the Quaternary Period in Britain is subdivided. His expertise extended from pollen and plant macrofossil analysis to physical geological evidence, glacial deposits, periglacial phenomena, and sea-level change. These studies required extensive cooperation with specialist colleagues, to the extent that the majority of his investigations are determinedly multi-disciplinary, an approach in which he was undoubtedly a leader. At Cambridge, becoming Director of the SDQR and later Professor of Botany, he supervised, nurtured and inspired numerous research and Master's students and influenced many others, both academics and amateurs alike. His research articles (over 150) and books provide a lasting legacy in Quaternary research. After retirement and up to the time of his death he continued to research, producing several important publications, principally on the evolution of the East Anglian Fenland.

This article examines the intersections between sweetness, femininity and the confectionery trade in eighteenth-century Barcelona, at a time of growing consumption of sugar and slavery. Drawing on a range of underexplored archival material, this study traces the stories of women of different social groups, namely, elite housewives, nuns and tradeswomen, who engaged with the production and trade of sweets in ingenious ways. This article argues that in the period when women were culturally diminished through their portrayals as ‘sweet’ and barred by guild structures, many women exercised social and economic agency in the confectionery trade in Barcelona.

Handaxes have a uniquely prominent role in the history of Palaeolithic archaeology, and their early study provides crucial information concerning the epistemology of the field. We have little conclusive evidence, however, of their investigation or societal value prior to the mid seventeenth century. Here we investigate the shape, colour and potential flake scarring on a handaxe-like stone object seen in the Melun Diptych, painted by the French fifteenth-century artist Jean Fouquet, and compare its features with artefacts from diverse (including French) Acheulean handaxe assemblages. Commissioned by a high-status individual, Étienne Chevalier, Fouquet's work (Étienne Chevalier with Saint Stephen) depicts an important religious context, while the handaxe-like object points to the stoning to death of an important Christian saint. Our results strongly support the interpretation that the painted stone object represents a flint Acheulean handaxe, likely sourced from northern France, where Fouquet lived. Identifying a fifteenth-century painting of a handaxe does not change what we know about Acheulean individuals, but it does push back the evidence for when handaxes became a prominent part of the ‘modern’ social and cultural world.

Writing is a social practice, and as such is fundamentally entwined with a wide array of other forms of human activity, professional categories and aspects of cultural life. However, this is often not fully reflected in scholarly approaches to writing practices, which tend to focus almost exclusively on the act of inscription itself, and on the practices of literates alone. Taking as its case study the Late Bronze Age Syrian polity of Ugarit and focusing on the social and cultural aspects of the procurement of raw materials for writing, this article aims to explore some of the ways in which groups of people beyond the urban, literate elite facilitated, contributed to and shaped the nature of writing practices.

Across a 1000‐km stretch of the River Nile, from the 1st Cataract in southern Egypt to the 4th Cataract in Sudan, many hundreds of drystone walls are located within active channels, on seasonally inundated floodplains or in now‐dry Holocene palaeochannel belts. These walls (or river groynes) functioned as flood and flow control structures and are of a type now commonly in use worldwide. In the Nile Valley, the structures have been subject only to localised investigations, and none have been radiometrically dated. Some were built within living memory to trap nutrient‐rich Nile silts for agriculture, a practice already recorded in the early 19th century C.E. However, others situated within ancient palaeochannel belts indicate construction over much longer time frames. In this paper, we map the distribution of these river groynes using remote sensing and drone survey. We then establish their probable functions and a provisional chronology using ethnoarchaeological investigation and the ground survey, excavation and radiometric dating of the structures in northern Sudan, focusing on the Holocene riverine landscape surrounding the pharaonic settlement of Amara West (c. 1300–1000 B.C.E.). Finally, we consider the historical and economic implications of this form of hydraulic engineering in the Nile Valley over the past three millennia.

Between the late 1940s and the early 1970s, the majority of teenage girls in Britain attended secondary modern schools. Yet, histories of the meaning and experience of postwar education continue to neglect this constituent of postwar women, favouring grammar-school leavers. This article draws upon a set of fifty-eight newly mined life histories from two postwar birth cohort studies to recapture the perspectives of ordinary women who attended secondary modern schools in England, Wales, and Scotland between c.1957 and c.1963. The longitudinal sources show that these women developed their attitudes to education gradually, across their lifecourses. Hairdressing, which stood for a desire for clean, creative, and autonomous paid work that could be balanced with domesticity, is identified as a reoccurring theme in the testimonies of secondary modern women. The article diagnoses secondary modern women with the hairdresser blues, a formulation that encapsulates their collective expectations, disappointments, and regrets born out of their closely interlinked experiences of schooling and paid work across the 1960s and early 1970s. These women’s educational attitudes were defined by the cumulative realization that a secondary modern education might not even be able to make you into a hairdresser. The article ultimately suggests that it was more often the hairdresser blues rather than ‘missing out’ on the prestigious grammar school that politicized secondary modern schools for the ordinary women who attended them.

The article is an analysis of a dispute between the canons of Augsburg cathedral chapter and their bishop, Hermann II (1096¬–1133). It concentrates on a series of short texts collected in the margins of an older patristic manuscript and argues that most of these texts can be said to form a kind of dossier, likely assembled by the canons in the aftermath of a cancelled personal visit by Pope Paschal II (1099–1118) to Augsburg in 1107. In the conclusion, the case is situated in the broader context of papal communication at the time of the Investiture Contest.

East Timorese nationalism experienced a unique generational transition during Indonesia's occupation hinging onto internationalism in the changing world. In contrast to the existing literature on nationalism, which is overwhelmingly focused on earlier construction of nationalism and post‐independence nation building, this article offers a theoretical account of the transformation of nationalism from an older to newer generation through a socio‐historical analysis. In light of interactions between nationalism and internationalism, it argues that while the older generation relied on a Lusophone cosmology of anti‐colonialism derived from counterparts in Portuguese colonies in Africa in the 1960s, the younger generation took advantage of universal human rights advocacy in the 1990s in its aspiration for independence. In doing so, this study demonstrates both generational continuity and change in the construction, development and transformation of East Timorese nationalism.

Acknowledgements: I would like to thank Susanne Hakenbeck and Sam Leggett for her comments on my draft and her help in my research. I am also very grateful to Tamsin O’Connell for her invaluable support and advice. Many thanks to Michael Kempf for discussing the issues raised in the text and proofreading the draft, as well as to Elizabeth La Duc for proofreading the revised manuscript. I also thank Alexander Gramsch, Eszter Bánffy, and Frans C. W. J. Theuws for encouraging the production of this article., Funder: University of Basel, Early Mediaeval Archaeology was long influenced by traditional narratives related to so-called Völkerwanderungen. Based on the interpretation of ancient written sources, the “Migration Period” was traditionally perceived as a time of catastrophic changes triggered by the collapse of the Western Roman Empire and massive migration waves of “barbarian” groups across Europe. In the last decades, isotope analyses have been increasingly used to test these traditional narratives by exploring past mobility patterns, shifts in dietary habits, and changes in subsistence strategies or in socio-economic structures among early medieval societies. To evaluate the achievements of isotope studies in understanding the complexity of the so-called Migration Period, this paper presents a review of 50 recent publications. Instead of re-analysing the data per se, this review first explores the potentials and limitations of the various approaches introduced in the last decades. In a second step, an analysis of the interpretations presented in the reviewed studies questions to what extend traditional expectations are supported by isotope data from the Migration Period. Beside revising the concept of massive migrations, isotope data reveal so-far underestimated mobility patterns and open new perspectives in the investigation of early medieval world.

Acknowledgements: Foremost, we deeply appreciate the permission to work on the Povegliano Veronese skeletal collection of Soprintendenza Archeologia belle arti e paesaggio per le province di Verona, Rovigo e Vicenza. We want to thank Dr.Rossella Bedini and Ing. Raffaella Pecci of the Istituto Superiore di Sanità in Rome (IT) for acquiring the Micro CT scans of the vertebra. We thank Dr. Tania Ruspandini of the Department of Scienze della Terra, Sapienza, University of Rome (IT) and Dr. Marco Albano at CNR in Rome (IT) for SEM investigation. We thank Ryan Mills at the University of North Carolina for help with the Sr ratio analysis. Ultimately, we would like to thank Dr. Matteo Mussoni of the Centro Veterinaio Valmarecchia, Rimini, for the X-ray acquisition. This work is part of the doctoral thesis in Environmental and Evolutionary Biology that the first author is carrying out at the Sapienza University of Rome (Italy)., Here we report the reconstruction of the osteobiography of an adult male buried in the Longobard cemetery of Povegliano Veronese (Northern Italy, late 6th – early 8th century CE), who shows signs of interpersonal violence. The palaeopathological investigation reveals sharp force traumas on the body of the fourth lumbar vertebra and on two right ribs. The absence of signs of healing or bone remodelling indicates that the defects were perimortem. The injuries probably affected vital organs, leading to death. Further macroscopic observations of the skeleton suggest horseback-riding activity. Strontium isotope data from tooth enamel indicate a non-local origin of the individual. X-ray and CT scan acquisition and Scanning Electron Microscopy analyses were performed to investigate the bone defects. His osteobiography was interpreted and contextualised in the complex socio-political scenario of post-classical Italy. The results document that he spent his childhood outside the Povegliano Veronese area, that during his life he was likely a horseback rider active in battle, but that his violent death did not happen during warfare/battle. This multi-layered approach, supported by archaeological information, osteological investigation, biomolecular analysis, and virtual imagery, allowed for the extensive reconstruction of an individual's life history.

This article takes the opening of the Brook Advisory Centres in London (1964) and Birmingham (1966) as a comparative case study for exploring the public debate on youth sexuality. The two centers were the first in postwar Britain specifically dedicated to the provision of advice on birth control and emotional problems to unmarried and young people. By focusing on an initiative that launched amid rising concerns over illegitimacy and promiscuity, the article engages with the debate over social change in the 1960s and the so-called permissive society. The author argues that the notion of responsibility became a key paradigm for supporters of a new sexual culture. Combining archival material, media analysis, and oral history interviews, the author shows that in constructing the need for a service for unmarried people, the Brook Advisory Centres faced accusations of encouraging promiscuity. Their main line of defense was the production of a narrative that stressed the notion of responsibility and moral guidance for unmarried people in avoiding unwanted babies. And in the debate around youth sexuality, locality mattered. In Birmingham, the prospect of formal contraceptive advice for unmarried girls was violently opposed by church members and family-planning doctors, whereas London witnessed the creation of a viable discourse with an emphasis on sexual responsibility.

This paper investigates two New Kingdom Egyptian texts pertaining to labour regulation: the Karnak Decree of Horemheb and the Nauri Decree of Seti I. They focus on combating the unauthorized diverting of manpower and represent the oldest Egyptian texts (fourteenth–thirteenth century BCE) explicitly concerned with the legal dimension of managing the workforce. After a brief historical overview, the paper outlines each text's key content and stylistic features. It shows that while some of these are likely native to Egypt, others may have been imported from Mesopotamia. More specifically, it appears that the sentence structure is native Egyptian, but the sanctions deployed are likely of foreign origin, aligning more closely to the contemporary punitive tradition of Mesopotamia. This is probably no coincidence, given the close contact between Egypt and the broader Near East at that time. This uptake of foreign ideas may have achieved more efficient labour regulation by enforcing stricter rules for non-compliance while simultaneously maintaining a veneer of Egyptian authenticity in line with official state ideology.

Peer reviewed: True

This article focuses on a distinctive feature of Robert Southwell's poetic technique, namely, his approach to metaphor. I argue that a number of Southwell's metaphors have a surprisingly literal quality where their vehicles are given greater prominence than their tenors. For instance, in my reading of ‘The Burning Babe’ and ‘Christ's Bloody Sweat’, I draw attention to how the metaphor of ‘the fires of love’ comes to describe the literal burning of recusant Catholics in Elizabethan England. Here, the intense feeling figured by the tenor is actually secondary to the burning evoked by the vehicle – an inversion of the usual operation of metaphor. I connect this approach to Southwell's political context as a dissident poet, showing that our tendency to look past the vehicles of metaphors to their referents allowed him to hide political statements in plain sight. I also highlight how ‘literalising’ metaphors served Southwell's aesthetic project to reform the neo‐Petrarchan love lyric in service of religious ends. Selecting certain hyperbolic metaphors from amorous verse, Southwell charged these platitudes with new force by making them literal and so uncovering darker meanings within them.

This article examines the early modern household's importance for producing experimental knowledge through an examination of the Halifax household of Margery and Henry Power. While Henry Power has been studied as a natural philosopher within the male-dominated intellectual circles of Cambridge and London, the epistemic labour of his wife, Margery Power, has hitherto been overlooked. From the 1650s, this couple worked in tandem to enhance their understanding of the vegetable world through various paper technologies, from books, paper slips and recipe notebooks to Margery's drawing album and Henry's published Experimental Philosophy. Focusing on Margery's practice of hand-colouring flower books, her copied and original drawings of flowers and her experimental production of ink, we argue that Margery's sensibility towards colour was crucial to Henry's microscopic observations of plants. Even if Margery's sophisticated knowledge of plants never left the household, we argue that her contribution was nevertheless crucial to the observation and representation of plants within the community of experimental philosophy. In this way, our article highlights the importance of female artists within the history of scientific observation, the use of books and paperwork in the botanical disciplines, and the relationship between household science and experimental philosophy.

Anne. Conway rejects More’s commitment to the simplicity thesis, breaking the connection between divisibility and immateriality that he strives so hard to maintain. All of creation, she argues against More’s modified Cartesianism, consists of spiritual particles, each of them potentially divisible ad infinitum, be they called “minds” or be they called “bodies.” While Rene Descartes’ philosophy takes its starting point in the cogito of the thinking self, Conway’s begins with a consideration of God’s nature, from whose attributes, she holds, ultimately all properties of the natural world can be deduced. According to an influential interpretation first proposed by Caroline Merchant, Conway’s metaphysics of created substance strikingly resembles G. W. Leibniz’s metaphysics of monads. Contrary to Leibniz, for Conway vitality is therefore closely linked to multiplicity, because only a complex being is able to extend itself and become more subtle through its parts.

Review of Elizabeth Morrison, ed. Book of Beasts: The Bestiary in the Medieval World by Irène Fabry-Tehranchi

This afterword reflects on the characteristics that might encourage us to consider ours a plural century, before pointing to examples from the monograph that help illustrate this. We begin with an account of the very category of pluralism, and then move to how it is discussed and mobilised politically. Pluralism, we believe, can only be positively mobilised through a dialogue that registers and works through power imbalances. As such, this afterword draws out a key inference from the volume as a whole.

This is the author accepted manuscript. It is currently under an indefinite embargo pending publication by Palgrave., In this article I consider medieval blood imagery in the paintings, films and journals of Derek Jarman, focusing on works made between 1989–1993. Taking a transhistorical comparative approach, I analyse Jarman's images alongside his medieval sources, primarily Julian of Norwich's Revelations and Gerard of Cremona's translation of Ibn Sīnā's (Avicenna's) al-Qa'n ū n fī al-tibb (Canon of Medicine). In addition, I find my own commonalities between Jarman and the medieval, for example, juxtaposing his Queer series of paintings with MS Egerton 1821. Critics have explored the medieval as a site of historical precedent for the stigmatisation of disease, providing a reservoir of images of leprosy and plague which inform the discourse of AIDS as immoral pollution. However I follow Jarman's lead in seeking new avenues through the medieval in relation to the AIDS crisis. Refusing to accept the discourses which cast his HIV+ blood as the ultimate symbol of pollution and death, Jarman mobilised the aesthetics and imagery of medieval affective devotion as a powerful alternative. Through the deployment of these traditions, HIV+ blood becomes holy blood, the source of salvation, desire, community and healing.

The distribution of Roman pottery depended on the transportation system which moved it. Here we trace developments in these distributions during the Roman period in Britain to document how the transportation system developed and assess its impact on the island’s economy. We created a database with records from 775 excavations at 652 sites, and data on over two million pottery sherds. By analyzing the changing distributions of pottery from production centers, we are able to measure improvements in the Roman transportation system over time. These improvements seem to have been most rapid soon after conquest, with transport costs almost halving in the first century of Roman occupation. As the road network expanded and transportation technology improved and pottery gained access to wider markets, producers’ dominance over their local markets declined as rival products became more accessible, and certain industries dramatically increased their outputs. Production by small industries fell in our Middle and Later Roman periods.

This article identifies one of the great but unstudied paradoxes in the history of early modern global Christianity: that the stronger the desire for a uniform Christian way of life burned, the deeper the fractures between different Christian denominations began to grow. It explores this issue by examining the learned exchanges between the infamous Greek Orthodox Patriarch Cyril Lucaris (1572–1638) and members of the Dutch Reformed Church. These efforts have often been seen as an expression of Christian ecumenism or as evidence that the early modern Middle East had become yet another arena for Catholic–Protestant rivalry. But once motivations on both sides are placed in the distinctly local religious climate that fostered them neither of these explanatory paradigms suffices. On the contrary: a decentred approach to this material reveals how Protestant and Eastern Christian understandings of what reform meant and how it could be attained were completely distinct and irreconcilable. It is thus imperative to resist any simple application to Middle Eastern Christianity of categories rooted in European Christian traditions and, instead, to tease out how different Christian denominations defined reform differently. Only then can we make good on our commitment to approach early modern global Christianity as a pluriform and multi-centred phenomenon.

Who were the Lelegians? Ancient Greek and Latin texts refer to the Lelegians as an indigenous people, locating them in southwestern Anatolia in a region known in historical times as Caria. Yet attempts to find evidence for the Lelegians ‘on the ground’ have met with questionable success. This paper has two aims. First, it provides an up-to-date picture of the archaeology of ancient Caria and shows that there is little indication of distinctly ‘Lelegian’ forms of material culture during the first millennium BCE. Second, it juxtaposes archaeological evidence with the development of the Lelegian ethnonym and suggests that the idea of a distinct Lelegian identity was retrospectively constructed by the Carians to fulfil the role of an imaginary ‘barbarian other’. This happened in the late Classical and early Hellenistic periods, a time of intensified Carian ethnogenesis, and was a process that responded to and made creative use of earlier Greek knowledge traditions. Finally, this paper argues that a later horizon of Lelegian imagining occurred in modern scholarship of the 19th and 20th centuries. Who, then, were the Lelegians? This article proposes that they were an imaginary people, invented and reinvented over the centuries.

Interview with Frédéric Lordon

Sacrilegious attitudes toward the Eucharistic host are one of the most commonplace accusations leveled against Jews in premodern Europe. Usually treated in Jewish historiography as an expression of anti-Judaism or antisemitism, they are considered a hallmark of Jewish powerlessness and persecution. In medieval and early modern Spain, however, Jews and conversos (Jewish converts to Christianity and their descendants) were not the only proclaimed enemies of the Eucharist. Reports about avoidance, rejection, criticism, and even ridicule and profanation of the consecrated host were similarly leveled against Muslims and moriscos (Muslim converts to Christianity). This essay seeks to assess the parallels and connections between the two groups through a comparative examination of accusations of sacrilegious behavior towards the host. The first part of the essay analyzes religious art, legal compendia, and inquisitorial trials records from the tribunals of Toledo and Cuenca in order to show some evident homologies between the two groups. The second part of the essay focuses on the analysis of the works of Jaime Bleda and Pedro Aznar y Cardona, two apologists of the expulsion of the moriscos, and draws direct connections between Jewish and morisco sacrilege. By exploring the similarities and differences between accusations against conversos and moriscos, this essay aims to offer a broader reflection on Jewish exceptionalism.

On Friday 6 February 1970, Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson visited Nottingham to address an evening meeting of party workers. After fighting his way through a hostile crowd of farmers and anti-Vietnam War protesters, the Prime Minister used his speech to lambast the policy agenda which Edward Heath’s Shadow Cabinet had announced after its conference at the Selsdon Park Hotel the previous weekend. The new Conservative policy, Wilson claimed, was ‘not just a lurch to the Right’ but signalled ‘an atavistic desire to reverse the course of 25 years of social revolution’: What they are planning is a wanton, calculated and deliberate return to greater inequality. The new Tory slogan is: back to the free for all. A free for all in place of the welfare state. A free for all market in labour, in housing, in the social services. They seek to replace the compassionate society with the ruthless, pushing society. The message to the British people would be simple. And brutal. It would say: ‘You’re out on your own.’ Wilson returned to the theme a fortnight later in a rally at Camden Town Hall, in which he conjured up the figure of ‘Selsdon Man’ – a sarcastic echo of the famous ‘Piltdown Man’ forgery. ‘Selsdon Man’, he warned, was ‘designing a system of society for the ruthless and the pushing, the uncaring’. If the Tories won the forthcoming election, Wilson claimed, they would ‘make life dearer for the many’ by raising indirect taxes and food prices, cutting welfare services down ‘to means-tested levels’, and pushing up rents ‘in a free-for-all in housing’.

This essay presents a survey of recent work in the history of international and global health from the mid-nineteenth to the early twenty-first centuries. It considers longstanding narratives alongside recent studies that have deployed approaches consonant with scholarship in the emerging global history of science and medicine. The cumulative impact of this work is to show how the history of international health has long been embedded in colonial landscapes of power, even as it also fostered revolutionary nationalism and grew from anti-colonial socialist internationalism; and how the absence, as well as presence, of intervention has shaped understandings of global health in recent decades.

The Andes offers a particularly effective focus for an archaeology of mobility because their extreme topography compresses enormous vertical resource diversity across short horizontal distances. In this article, the authors combine findings from two large-scale archaeological studies of adjacent watersheds—the Nasca-Palpa Project and One River Project—to provide the necessary context in which to explore changing mobilities from the Archaic Period to the Inca Empire, and from the Pacific coast to the high Andes. Analyses of obsidian lithics and stable isotopes in human hair are used to argue that changing patterns of mobility offer a new way of defining the ‘Horizons’ that have long dominated concepts of periodisation here.

This article calls into question a story that has become part of the folklore and indeed the official history of Cambridge University. Supposedly, the passage of the Chantries Act posed a threat to university colleges which was averted by the lobbying of Cambridge academics early in 1546, and this adroit intervention inspired Henry VIII to found new colleges at Oxford and Cambridge. Close reading of the sources, however, indicates that the universities were singled out for special treatment from the start and that Henry's new foundations were in his mind before the Chantries Act was passed.

A challenge has recently been made to the venerable tradition that the passage of Henry VIII's first act for suppressing monasteries (1536) was facilitated by the presentation in parliament of details of monastic sexual misconduct gathered during the royal visitation of the monasteries in 1535–6. This article, by following up clues missed in the evidence cited for that challenge, precisely identifies a now lost source, last sighted in the hands of John Bale, which casts important new light on the visitation and, it is argued, was very probably the exact document presented to parliament in 1536.

Peer reviewed: True, In the introduction to this special volume, Dhont reflects on Jewish literature in Greek as a research topic and contextualizes the primary research question that lies at the heart of the volume, namely, how did Greek-speaking Jews in the Hellenistic period navigate the multicultural encounter between Jewish and Greek traditions? The study of intertextuality and allusion provides a philological entry point into looking at the ways in which Jewish-Greek authors expressed their position in the cultural matrix of the ancient Mediterranean.

The Austin friars in Cambridge was an important religious institution between the late thirteenth and mid-sixteenth centuries. Excavations have revealed well-dated and contextualised burials associated with the friary, as well as a range of material culture. The burials have been subject to a wide range of analyses including osteology, palaeopathology, stable isotopes, ancient DNA and geometric morphometrics. Significantly the distinction between clothed and shrouded burials allows members of the Augustinian order and the laity to be identified. This represents the best-understood published group of burials from an Austin friars in the British Isles and emphasises the importance of nuanced interpretation, as burial at friaries was a structured and multi-local phenomenon. These burials and other material can be interpreted in terms of both mendicant ideals and anti-fraternal criticisms.

Viking invasions and settlements left substantial legacies in late Anglo-Saxon England, attested in legal texts as a division between areas under Dena lage and those under Ængla lage. But how legal practice in Scandinavian-settled England functioned and differed from Anglo-Saxon law remains unclear. III Æthelred, the ‘Wantage Code’, provides critical evidence for legal customs being practised in the Danelaw at the close of the tenth century. An investigation into the code’s peace protections re-examines the argument for occurrences of communal liability in England before the Normans. Wantage’s restrictions on access to law and the need to ‘buy law’ suggest a departure from English conceptions of rights. Provisions on proof in legal cases, including a ‘jury’ of thegns, denote alternative measures of the truth. These analyses depict a Danelaw legal culture that reflects viking army origins, a Scandinavian preference for informal dispute-settlement (‘love’) and the concerns of a landholding Anglo-Scandinavian elite.

This paper examines the cultural framework and material evidence for teeth and oral health in later medieval Europe, using as a case study the bioarchaeological analysis of an excavated cemetery in central Italy (Villamagna). It proffers an alternative approach to the study of human skeletal material by reframing the questions that bioarchaeologists normally ask about mouths. Instead of: how much disease? what state of health? we ask: how did the mouth relate to individuals’ experiences of their world, and how might our scientific information about health and disease provide insight into wider aspects of life, society and economy? We point to a range of cultural understandings around the mouth which were changing in the central and later Middle Ages (c. 1000-1400), namely: the Bible and changing explanations for the relationships between mouth, heart, confession and experience of the divine; an evolving understanding of medicine and medical principles; and new forms of saintly intervention involved in healthcare. We then illustrate through the detailed osteobiographies of two adults from Villamagna the ways in which their oral condition reflected use-patterns and lifeways common to their communities, and shaped their individual experiences.

This paper discusses the process, prospects, and challenges of making bikini glass in Bida (Nupeland), central Nigeria. The Masagá glassmakers of Bida provide the ideal case study for investigating the production of bikini. Nineteenth-century Arab and European writings have described glassmaking in Nupeland; however, with the exception of the study carried out by Peter Robertshaw and his colleagues in 2009, there is no work that identifies the raw materials and formula used to produce bikini glass. Our recent ethnographic work at Bida provided the opportunities to collect raw glass, beads, and unfused raw material for bikini glass as well as vitrified furnace wall fragments for analysis. We present results of binocular observation and chemical compositional analysis conducted on the raw materials, glass products, and furnace remains to understand the mineralogical and chemical characteristics of various materials connected with the production of bikini. From the manufacture of glass to that of glass ornaments, bracelets, and beads, the documentation of the work of Masagá glassmakers provides new data for the history of glass and its techniques. This information is relevant for understanding glassworking in the past. The paper also addresses issues relating to migration, technology transfer, and culture contact between Nupeland and its neighbors in the Lower Niger region. It argues that the investigation of the production of bikini glass in Bida is essential for expanding our knowledge of the archaeology of glassmaking and glassworking in Sub-Saharan Africa and beyond.

This article explores how Spanish women formed grassroots groups to fight for the transformation of their neighbourhoods in the late 1950s and 1960s — the latter years of Francisco Franco’s dictatorship. In contrast to most histories of feminism, which focus on literate, secular groups in universities or the centres of cities, its subjects are activists based on the outskirts of Madrid and in the industrial areas of Asturias, many of whom were Catholic, came from rural areas and left school before the age of 14. Histories of feminism have tended to overlook completely movements in the southern European dictatorships, while accounts of modern Spain often see male politicians and experts as the driving forces shaping the built environment under Franco. But photographs, archival material and oral history interviews show that women demanded ‘cosas básicas’ (basic resources) on a widespread scale in Asturias and Madrid. They made these claims in the context of unprecedented internal migration, industrial unrest and the spread of social Catholic movements: factors often neglected in studies of social movements. The women involved have sometimes struggled, however, to take pride in their actions in later life. Patterns in their life stories suggest why, and offer insight into what agitating under Franco has meant for how they understand their lives, identities and relationships.

This paper reviews the evidence for long term trends in anthropogenic activity and population dynamics across the Holocene in the central Mediterranean and the chronology of cultural events. The evidence for this has been constituted in a database of 4608 radiocarbon dates (of which 4515 were retained for analysis following initial screening) from 1195 archaeological sites in southern France, Italy and Malta, spanning the Mesolithic to Early Iron Age periods, c. 8000 to 500 BC. We provide an overview of the settlement record for central Mediterranean prehistory and add to this an assessment of the available archaeological radiocarbon evidence in order to review the traditional narratives on the prehistory of the region. This new chronology has enabled us to identify the most significant points in time where activity levels, population dynamics and cultural change have together caused strong temporal patterning in the archaeological record. Some of these episodes were localized to one region, whereas others were part of pan-regional trends and cultural trajectories that took many centuries to play out fully, revealing prehistoric societies subject to collapse, recovery, and continuing instability over the long-term. Using the radiocarbon evidence, we model growth rates in the various regions so that the tempo of change at certain points in space and time can be identified, compared, and discussed in the context of demographic change. Using other published databases of radiocarbon data, we have drawn comparisons across the central Mediterranean to wider prehistoric Europe, and northern Africa. Finally, we include a brief response to the synchronously published but independently developed paper (Palmisano et al. in J World Prehist 34(3), 2021). While there are differences in our respective approaches, we share the general conclusions that large-scale trends can been identified through meta-analyses of the archaeological record, and these offer new perspectives on how society functioned.

This essay offers a brief intellectual history of the discourse surrounding “the future of culture” in Egypt. Starting with reflections on the future of the official cultural apparatus after the 2011 revolution, the essay moves on to three significant moments in the longer history of such reflections, each with its own set of concerns. These concerns range from culture and globalization in the 1990s and early 2000s, to cultural planning and development in the 1960s and 1970s, to culture and education in the wake of Taha Hussein’s The Future of Culture in Egypt (1938). Such changing concerns show how the so-called “future of culture” changes in different historical circumstances, while conceptions of culture remain tied to changing imaginaries of the nation-state.

During the 1850s and 1860s, Jinan, the provincial capital of Shandong, faced repeated threats from Taiping and Nian forces, but Qing control was never seriously contested. The limited capacities of both the provincial administration and local elites necessitated governmental-elite collaboration, such as in forming militias and building defensive structures. These efforts were successful in preserving Qing control of Jinan across this period. However, the limited capacities of both the local government and elites became increasingly evident during attacks by Nian forces on Shandong in the 1860s, which left the city of Jinan itself defended as securely as ever but the surrounding countryside devastated. This history of a place that was a relative success story for the Qing both adds nuance to existing narratives of straightforward state decline in north China while still allowing us to see how the limits of elite power proved a constraint on state capacity as well. The involvement of both officials and elites in post-war reconstruction projects that echo themes in existing scholarship on the south demonstrates how the mid-nineteenth century conflicts generated long-term cultural effects that were shared across regions of the empire. In Jinan, these projects demonstrate how the construction of local history bound the city and its elite class to the Qing state, calling into question arguments that the increasingly powerful roles elites played in public spaces in the late Qing necessarily posed a challenge to the Qing state. Rather, in both war and peace, elite participation continued to be an integral element of maintaining the Qing state.

While in recent decades historians have, to some degree, engaged with anthropological debates over the nature of ‘religion’, they have tended still to take the key term ‘belief’ somewhat for granted. This article suggests that we have inherited an Enlightenment legacy of thought on ‘belief’ that tends to treat it as credulity when applied to the general masses (taking Edward Gibbon as an important exemplar of that legacy). More recently, the theorist Bruno Latour has written about belief in terms of J. L. Austin’s speech-act theory, a useful theoretical move, despite the fact that Latour himself in some ways mirrors Gibbon’s perspective, particularly as it applies to the pre-modern. Using a range of examples to discuss change over time, via a case study of southern France about 1000 to 1300, this article argues that social historians may find it useful to consider these issues in terms of performative ‘belief acts’, where the contextual setting — the ‘conditions of felicity’, to use Latour’s and Austin’s phrase — are amenable to historical analysis.

Funder: Wellcome Trust, Human herpes simplex virus 1 (HSV-1), a lifelong infection spread by oral contact, infects a majority of adults globally. Phylogeographic clustering of sampled diversity into European, pan-Eurasian, and African groups has suggested the virus codiverged with human migrations out of Africa, although a much younger origin has also been proposed. We present three full ancient European HSV-1 genomes and one partial genome, dating to the 3rd-17th century CE, sequenced to up to 9.5× with paired human genomes up to 10.16×. Considering a dataset of modern and ancient genomes we apply phylogenetic methods to estimate the age of sampled modern Eurasian HSV-1 diversity to 4.68 (3.87 - 5.65) kya. Extrapolation of estimated rates to a global dataset points to the age of extant sampled HSV-1 as 5.29 (4.60-6.12) kya, suggesting HSV-1 lineage replacement coinciding with the late Neolithic period and following Bronze Age migrations.

Funder: Alma Mater Studiorum - Università di Bologna, The Late Bronze Age (1700–900 BC) represents an extremely dynamic period for Mediterranean Europe. Here, we provide a comparative survey of the archaeological record of over half a millennium within the entire northern littoral of the Mediterranean, from Greece to Iberia, incorporating archaeological, archaeometric, and bioarchaeological evidence. The picture that emerges, while certainly fragmented and not displaying a unique trajectory, reveals a number of broad trends in aspects as different as social organization, trade, transcultural phenomena, and human mobility. The contribution of such trends to the processes that caused the end of the Bronze Age is also examined. Taken together, they illustrate how networks of interaction, ranging from the short to the long range, became a defining aspect of the “Middle Sea” during this time, influencing the lives of the communities that inhabited its northern shore. They also highlight the importance of research that crosses modern boundaries for gaining a better understanding of broad comparable dynamics.

Accounts of twentieth-century agricultural industrialization in the United States and beyond often center the production and distribution of commercial F1 hybrid seed as a pivotal development. The commercialization of hybrid corn seed in the 1930s was initially heralded as a science-driven advance in agricultural productivity. However, since the 1970s "hybrid seed" has been linked to many perceived perils attendant on industrialized agriculture, from the undermining of farmers' independence to the diminishment of crop genetic diversity to the consolidation of corporate control over the global food system. First grouped with the semidwarf varieties of the Green Revolution to emblematize capital- and chemical-intensive agriculture, hybrids are today often lumped together with genetically modified (GM) varieties for much the same reason. This essay revisits the scholarship that helped produce this understanding of hybrid seed. It explores how and why the singular history of hybrid corn inflected understandings of crop breeding and seed production in general, contributing to lasting confusion about the promises and pitfalls of distinct approaches to crop development and the nature of hybrid seed.

Several densely-glossed copies of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy survive from tenth- and early eleventh-century Canterbury and associated centres, which give the impression of intense activity. Such annotation is, of course, a relatively late stage in a long process of accumulation. With the advantage of an overview of all known glosses to the Consolation in surviving manuscripts up to 1100, one can begin to sift out layers and to see the outline of new material as opposed to earlier glossing that travelled with the main text. This paper will seek to answer two questions in relation to these frenetically-glossed books from England: first whether they can tell us anything about the specific interests of, and other texts known to, their late tenth-century creators and users. Secondly, what balance can one see between careful selection and the relentless, even seemingly mindless, accumulation of glosses, which begins to obscure meaning rather than revealing it?

Following the abolition of the transatlantic trade in African captives, slave traders from France, Spain and Cuba devised strategies of concealment to perpetuate and even expand their enterprise. A close reading of the unexpurgated logbooks and business correspondence of the Jeune Louis, a French ship that transported more than three hundred captives from the Bight of Biafra to Havana in 1825, identifies three decisive innovations in the Franco-Cuban branch of the illegal slave trade. Transnational business structure, risk management through honour-based marine insurance policies, and redacted record keeping transformed the wider Atlantic slave-trading sector into one capable of eluding attempts at international suppression. The clandestine techniques that this transnational slaving network developed to skirt the law also distorted the archival record of that traffic. Accounting for the resulting distortions and disappearances will enable future researchers to better navigate them.