FAITH AND URBAN DOMESTIC SOCIABILITY IN NORTHERN ENGLAND, 1760–1835

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
KATE GIBSON

Abstract This article examines the relationship between religion and the informal, everyday instances of sociability that took place in urban homes between 1760 and 1835. Using the letters and diaries of middling and labouring individuals living in northern English towns, it suggests that religious practice was not separate from ‘secular’ sociability, but occurred in the same time and space. The article demonstrates that worldly practices and considerations such as courtship and the demonstration of status were entwined with matters of faith, and that the social opportunities offered by the industrializing town were considered to revitalize rather than endanger faith. The article builds on existing research into sociability and nonconformity in earlier periods to suggest that informal domestic sociability was a significant arena for lay agency and an integral part of individual faith for Anglicans, as well as individuals across the Protestant spectrum, well into the nineteenth century.

2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 261-285
Author(s):  
Karen Y. Morrison

Abstract With the social reproduction of slavery in colonial Cuba as its center point, this essay draws on the recent historiographical acknowledgment of the way vassalage mediated the often starkly drawn social distinctions between whites and enslaved people within colonial Spanish America. Inside the region’s emergent, capitalist political economy, feudal vassalage continued to define each social sector’s rights and responsibilities vis-á-vis the Spanish Crown. The rights of enslaved vassals derived from their potential contributions to the Spanish monarchy’s imperial survival, in their capacity to populate the extensive empire with loyal Catholic subjects and potential military defenders. These concerns also justified the Spanish monarchial state’s ability to intervene between its slaveholding vassals and its enslaved vassals, by limiting private property rights over enslaved people and operating in ways that did not fully conform to capitalist profit motives. Awareness of such sovereign-vassal interdependencies challenges historians to broaden their understanding of the relationship between capitalism and slavery to include the remnants of feudal social-political forms, even into the nineteenth century.


2009 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 309-331 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ivan Vander biesen

Abstract Starting from the nineteenth century descriptive literatures on Zanzibar by authors such as Sir Richard Burton and Charles Guillain, and Salima bint Said-Ruete's autobiography, we can draw a rather detailed picture of the relationship between the different social layers, cultures and genders on Zanzibar. Describing and differentiating the complexity of Zanzibar society in the nineteenth century is the main aim of this paper. The focus is on clothing in order to sketch the social organization of the society and to highlight the cultural relations between the different groups in Zanzibar. The evidence obtained from the description of clothing is used as an eye-opener for the Zanzibar society and this evidence is supported by nineteenth century literature and photography on Zanzibar.


2005 ◽  
Vol 50 (S13) ◽  
pp. 179-218 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bart Van de Putte ◽  
Michel Oris ◽  
Muriel Neven ◽  
Koen Matthijs

This article examines social heterogamy as an indicator of “societal openness”, by which is meant the extent to which social origin, as defined by the social position of one's parents, is used as the main criterion for selection of a marriage partner. We focus on two topics. The role first of migration and then of occupational identity in this selection of a partner according to social origin. And in order to evaluate the true social and economic context in which spouses lived, we do not use a nationwide sample but rather choose to examine marriage certificates from eleven cities and villages in Belgium, both Flemish and Walloon, during the nineteenth century. By observing different patterns of homogamy according to social origin we show in this article that partner selection was affected by the relationship between migration, occupational identity and class structure. It seems difficult to interpret all these divergent patterns in terms of modernization. In our opinion the historical context creates a complicated set of conditions reflected in differences in the type and strength of migration and in the sectoral composition and evolution of the local economy. The whole exerts an influence over partner selection.


2011 ◽  
Vol 19 (5) ◽  
pp. 1265-1271 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tiago Braga do Espírito Santo ◽  
Taka Oguisso ◽  
Rosa Maria Godoy Serpa da Fonseca

The object is the relationship between the professionalization of Brazilian nursing and women, in the broadcasting of news about the creation of the Professional School of Nurses, in the light of gender. Aims: to discuss the linkage of women to the beginning of the professionalization of Brazilian nursing following the circumstances and evidence of the creation of the Professional School of Nurses analyzed from the perspective of gender. The news articles were analyzed from the viewpoint of Cultural History, founded in the gender concept of Joan Scott and in the History of Women. The creation of the School and the priority given in the media to women consolidate the vocational ideal of the woman for nursing in a profession subjugated to the physician but also representing the conquest of a space in the world of education and work, reconfiguring the social position of nursing and of woman in Brazil.


2020 ◽  
pp. 122-142
Author(s):  
Jonah Siegel

This chapter brings to a close the argument of the first part of the book through an analysis of the social crises Ruskin discovers in the works of Joseph Mallord William Turner. Ruskin gave the name “the English death,” to the grim combination of economic and military violence and social indifference characteristic of the nineteenth century, which he finds at the heart of the achievement of his preeminent modern painter. According to this account, even Turner’s most beautiful landscape is shaped by the boyhood experience of urban poverty that determined the painter’s sensibility, and which fitted him to capture the melancholy forms of alienation and suffering in reaction to which the experience of nature derives its force. This chapter puts Ruskin’s claims about the formal evidence of the sources of the painter’s sensibility in relation to later theoretical and artistic attempts to represent the relationship between material conditions and the reactions they provoke. Returning to the split form of Raphael’s Transfiguration and looking forward to arguments about historical crisis in Walter Benjamin and Jacques Rancière, it proposes the recognition of the power of material conditions driving both the nineteenth-century painter and his major critic by highlighting a number of linked displacements that have been difficult for criticism to address: not just the sophistication of the political work entailed in the creation of beautiful objects in the nineteenth century, but the complex forms of solidarity and social analysis that may be discovered in the critical work of the period


Author(s):  
Josephine M. Guy

This chapter analyses the relationship between nineteenth-century and modern debates about the academic discipline of English. It discusses the development of the discipline of English in terms of wider changes in the social organisation of knowledge which took place in the late decades of the nineteenth century, particularly the processes which constitute professionalisation and specialisation. It suggests that a framework placing English in relation to general criteria for disciplinary knowledge represents a complete or sufficient understanding of its history. The chapter also discusses the role played by local institutional politics and practices and different countries and nationalities in the development of English as a discipline.


Author(s):  
Virginia Crossman

This essay focuses on a special category of Irish crime: vagrancy. While vagrancy was a criminal offence in its own right, it was often its association with other forms of criminality and immorality that ensured ‘tramps’ could be viewed with fear and contempt in the Irish countryside. The relationship between crime and poverty has been a subject of considerable debate in numerous scholarly fields. This essay makes the important point that tramps were viewed with suspicion, not on account of their poverty intrinsically, but rather because they consciously rejected social norms in favour of an itinerant lifestyle. The ‘tramp problem’ occupied the attentions of the public and the administrators alike at the turn of the century: the former sometimes startled by the arrival at their door of a ‘big lazy fellow’ demanding relief, and the latter busily issuing circulars to magistrates and police imploring them to clamp down on the offenders. In the end, however, an unsatisfactory justice system predicated on punishment merely reinforced existing prejudices and did little to alleviate the social inequality that gave rise to vagrancy in the first place.


2015 ◽  
Vol 70 (01) ◽  
pp. 173-184
Author(s):  
Laurence De Cock

Abstract This paper argues that a discipline taught in schools is more than a mere copy of scientific knowledge. It investigates the relationship between scholarly and pedagogic knowledge from the end of the nineteenth century, when the teaching of history was tasked with participating in the construction of a shared national culture. In fact, it is only by mobilizing tools from the social sciences that the complexity of history teaching can be understood. The repeated accusations directed at the teaching of history in schools therefore reflect a trite and hackneyed understanding of its nature and mission.


1999 ◽  
Vol 68 (3) ◽  
pp. 598-626 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph F. Byrnes

The revolutionary and legislator Bertrand Barrère in his Sur les idiomes étrangers et l'enseignement de la langue française had said, “Federalism and superstition speak Breton; emigration and hatred of the Republic speak German; the counter-revolution speaks Italian, and fanaticism speaks Basque.” For Barrère, regional languages were intertwined with religion (“superstition,” “fanaticism”) and the other antigovernment forces. And he was right, at least in part. Surveys made in the last century indicate that of those regions where a language other than French was spoken (German in Alsace-Lorraine, Flemish in the department of the Nord, Gaelic in Brittany, Basque in the Southwest, and Catalan in the Roussillon), all save the Roussillon had statistically high levels of religious practice. To explore how religious practice has been supported by linguistic culture in modern France, I have chosen the high-practice region of Alsace and the low-practice region of the Roussillon in the last half of the nineteenth century. I want to interpret the dynamics through which Alsace supported religious practice and the Roussillon did not.


Author(s):  
Michael Tanner

A complex set of questions is raised by an examination of the relationship between art and morality. First there is a set of empirical considerations about the effect that works of art have on us – one obviously contentious case is that of pornography. Many would argue that the artistic merits of a work are independent of any attitudes or actions it may lead us to adopt or perform. This claim does not survive scrutiny, however, though there is a distinction to be drawn between artistic value and the value of art as a whole. Though there are no coercive arguments to show that we have to take into account the moral qualities of works of art, it is in practice very difficult to ignore them, especially when the point of the work is insistently moral, or when the work is conspicuously depraved. There is a long tradition, dating back to Plato, of regarding art with suspicion for its power over our emotions, and much of Western aesthetic theorizing has been a response to Plato’s challenge. The longest-lasting defence justified art in terms of a combination of pleasure and instruction, though the two never hit it off as well as was hoped. In the early nineteenth century a new, more complex account of art was offered, notably by Hegel, in the form of a historicized view in which art is one of the modes by which we come to self-awareness; the emphasis altered from truth to an independently existing reality to truthfulness to our own natures, as we explore them by creating art. Taken into the social sphere, this became a doctrine of the importance of art as an agent of political consciousness, operating in subtle ways to undermine the view of reality imposed on us by the ideologies that hold us captive.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document