Andrew Lang and Scottish Historiography: Taking on Tradition

2015 ◽  
Vol 94 (2) ◽  
pp. 207-236 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catriona M. M. Macdonald
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sir Walter Scott ◽  
Scientific Methods ◽  
European Context ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Cast Doubt ◽  
Scottish History ◽  
University Setting ◽  
Andrew Lang

The career and posthumous reputation of Andrew Lang (1844–1912) call into question Scottish historiographical conventions of the era following the death of Sir Walter Scott which foreground the apparent triumph of scientific methods over Romance and the professionalisation of the discipline within a university setting. Taking issue with the premise of notions relating to the Strange Death of Scottish History in the mid-nineteenth century, it is proposed that perceptions of Scottish historiographical exceptionalism in a European context and presumptions of Scottish inferiorism stand in need of re-assessment. By offering alternative readings of the reformation, by uncoupling unionism from whiggism, by reaffirming the role of Romance in ‘serious’ Scottish history, and by disrupting distinctions between whig and Jacobite, the historical works and the surviving personal papers of Andrew Lang cast doubt on many conventional grand narratives and the paradigms conventionally used to make sense of Scottish historiography.

The National Drama

1992 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 96-108 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara Bell
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Close Association ◽  
Sir Walter Scott ◽  
The Core ◽  
Walter Scott ◽  
Scottish History ◽  
At Home

The National Drama was a nineteenth-century dramatic genre unique to Scotland, dealing with Scottish characters in Scottish settings. It has been neglected this century by scholars of theatre and of Scottish history in general. This is a curious oversight given the importance of the National Drama in the development of the Scottish theatre and to the image of Scotland as a nation at home and abroad. The omission may have been the result of a too close association with Sir Walter Scott in the minds of many for whom the phrase ‘High Tory Romanticism’ summed up Scott's career and influence. But, the National Drama is worthy of fresh consideration because, although it is true that dramatizations of some of Scott's Scottish works formed the core of the national repertoire, the National Drama comprised a wide variety of pieces from a range of sources and its influence over the Scottish theatre was considerable.

The observatory, the land-based ship and the crusades: earth sciences in European context, 1830–50

2007 ◽  
Vol 40 (4) ◽  
pp. 491-504 ◽  
Author(s):  
FABIEN LOCHER
Keyword(s):  
Earth Sciences ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Scientific Community ◽  
Historical Understanding ◽  
Terrestrial Environment ◽  
European Context ◽  
Research Fields ◽  
The Earth

AbstractThe 1830s and 1840s witnessed a European movement to accumulate data about the terrestrial environment, enterprises including the German and British geomagnetic crusades. This movement was not limited to geomagnetic studies but notably included an important meteorological component. By focusing on observation practices in sedentary and expeditionary contexts, this paper shows how the developing fields of geomagnetism and meteorology were then intimately interlinked. It analyses the circulation and cross-connections of the practices and discourses shared by these two research fields. Departing from a Humboldtian historiography, the paper especially stresses the role of Adolphe Quetelet, director of the Brussels Observatory, whose importance in the development of the earth sciences has until now been largely neglected. It reassesses the involvement of the French scientific community in the British and German geomagnetic crusades, moving beyond the well-known account of Arago's opposition to these undertakings. It is hoped thereby to contribute to a better historical understanding of the renewal of the earth sciences in the second quarter of the nineteenth century.

Material Culture, Museums, and the Creation of Multiple Meanings

2020 ◽  
pp. 473-490
Author(s):  
Neil G. W. Curtis
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
First Century ◽  
Recent Developments ◽  
Multiple Meanings ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Scottish History ◽  
Museum Practice ◽  
The Impact

This chapter aims to show that ideas of the sacred, the numinous, and the contested, rather than of the rational, are most important in understanding how the meanings of material culture are formed and the role of museums. It considers how museums have offered rich contexts in which the changing, conflicting, and multiple meanings of material culture have developed. Scottish national identity, contested and unsettled, is shown in the contribution of museums and objects to discussions about a link between the Classical past and Scottish history in the early nineteenth century, the creation of a national museum in the second half of the nineteenth century, a temporary exhibition of Scottish history as part of a Great Exhibition in 1911, and two repatriation cases at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Recent developments in museum practice are discussed, including the impact of both growing professionalism and the recognition of the rights of groups in museums. The chapter concludes by arguing that objects generate and embody meanings that are shared, entangled, and co-constitutive. Instead of attempting to identify the “correct” meaning, it is therefore the responsibility of museums to explore the range of personal and shared rights that objects engender.

The Ancient Office of Parish Clerk and the Parish Clerks Company of London

2006 ◽  
Vol 8 (38) ◽  
pp. 307-322
Author(s):  
Oswald Clark
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Social Involvement ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Changing Role

Attempt is made to trace the work and role of the parish clerk from menial monastic beginnings to its emergence in the thirteenth century as a canonically recognised office–probably the oldest unordained office at the parochial level in the English church and the last vestigial survival of Minor Orders. In parallel is developed the story of the coming together of London parish clerks as a guild or fraternity, radically distinguished from the merchant, craft and service guilds, and of the grant to that fraternity of ‘clerici et literati’– with its unique livery and ethos–of the first of its six Royal Charters. The duties and activities of mediaeval parish clerks and the constitution of their Company are considered along with its possessions, especially its Bede Roll. Attention is paid to the understanding of Purgatory and the devastating effects of the Chantries Act 1548. The parish clerk's changing role following the Reformation is examined within the prevailing continuities and discontinuities. New duties in relation to Registration and Bills of Mortality are marked in addition to the parish clerk's increasing social involvement in the civil affairs of the parish. The decline in the parish clerk's duties from the nineteenth century is studied and its effect on the office, the London Company and the ancient parishes of old London, from which the Company is exclusively recruited.

scholarly journals Of Church Orders and Postmodernism

2021 ◽  
Vol 136 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-77
Author(s):  
Philip Benedict
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Netherlands ◽  
Historical Study ◽  
The Political ◽  
Historical Understanding ◽  
Institutional History ◽  
Low Countries ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
History Of

Self-avowedly influenced by the postmodernist critique of nineteenth-century ‘positivism’, Jesse Spohnholz's ambitious and multiple prize-winning 2017 The Convent of Wesel: The Event that Never was and the Invention of Tradition speaks at once to the political and institutional history of the Reformed churches of the Netherlands and northwestern Germany, to the role of archiving practices in shaping historical understanding, and to the nature of historical study. This review offers both an extended synopsis and a critique of the book. While recognizing its considerable achievement, it questions its framing of its findings about the Reformation era with reference to the ‘confessionalization’ debate, its reliance on a prefabricated narrative about archives as instruments of power and marginalization, and its mischaracterizations of post-Rankean historical practice and theory. Implications of the book’s findings for further research into the politics and personalities of the Reformation in the Low Countries are also suggested.

The Division between Western and Eastern Manuscripts in the Peshitta Psalter: An Insurmountable Obstacle for a Critical Edition?

2008 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 145-174
Author(s):  
Ignacio Carbajosa
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Old Testament ◽  
Classical Theory ◽  
Critical Edition ◽  
Cast Doubt ◽  
Insurmountable Obstacle

Abstract At the end of the nineteenth century Alfred Rahlfs stated that the manuscripts of the Old Testament Peshitta were clearly divided into two families according to confessional criteria (following the schism between the Eastern and Western Syriac Churches). As a consequence, no critical edition could be done. One century later Piet B. Dirksen cast doubt on the classical theory saying that the schism had been of no consequence for the transmission of the text. But there was one exception: the book of Psalms, on which the old paradigm would continue to weigh. This article challenges the statement on the role of the Psalter.

scholarly journals THE REFORMATION AND ‘THE DISENCHANTMENT OF THE WORLD’ REASSESSED

2008 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
pp. 497-528 ◽  
Author(s):  
ALEXANDRA WALSHAM
Keyword(s):  
Max Weber ◽  
Protestant Reformation ◽  
Ongoing Debate ◽  
Linear Path ◽  
European Context ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
The World

ABSTRACTThis essay is a critical historiographical overview of the ongoing debate about the role of the Protestant Reformation in the process of ‘the disenchantment of the world’. It considers the development of this thesis in the work of Max Weber and subsequent scholars, its links with wider claims about the origins of modernity, and the challenges to this influential paradigm that have emerged in the last twenty-five years. Setting the literature on England within its wider European context, it explores the links between Protestantism and the transformation of assumptions about the sacred and the supernatural, and places renewed emphasis on the equivocal and ambiguous legacy left by the upheavals of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Attention is also paid to the ways in which the Reformation converged with other intellectual, cultural, political, and social developments which cumulatively brought about subtle, but decisive, transformations in individual and collective mentalities. It is suggested that thinking in terms of cycles of desacralization and resacralization may help to counteract the potential distortions of a narrative that emphasizes a linear path of development.

Illustrated Media, the Built Environment and Identity Politics in Fin-de-siècle Catalonia: Printing Images, Making the Nation

2015 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 113-135
Author(s):  
Lucila Mallart
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Built Environment ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
Constitutive Relationship ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Late Nineteenth

This article explores the role of visuality in the identity politics of fin-de-siècle Catalonia. It engages with the recent reevaluation of the visual, both as a source for the history of modern nation-building, and as a constitutive element in the emergence of civic identities in the liberal urban environment. In doing so, it offers a reading of the mutually constitutive relationship of the built environment and the print media in late-nineteenth century Catalonia, and explores the role of this relation as the mechanism by which the so-called ‘imagined communities’ come to exist. Engaging with debates on urban planning and educational policies, it challenges established views on the interplay between tradition and modernity in modern nation-building, and reveals long-term connections between late-nineteenth-century imaginaries and early-twentieth-century beliefs and practices.

Gender, Technology and the New Woman

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lena Wånggren
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New Woman ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Gender And Technology ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
Grant Allen

This book examines late nineteenth-century feminism in relation to technologies of the time, marking the crucial role of technology in social and literary struggles for equality. The New Woman, the fin de siècle cultural archetype of early feminism, became the focal figure for key nineteenth-century debates concerning issues such as gender and sexuality, evolution and degeneration, science, empire and modernity. While the New Woman is located in the debates concerning the ‘crisis in gender’ or ‘sexual anarchy’ of the time, the period also saw an upsurge of new technologies of communication, transport and medicine. This book explores the interlinking of gender and technology in writings by overlooked authors such as Grant Allen, Tom Gallon, H. G. Wells, Margaret Todd and Mathias McDonnell Bodkin. As the book demonstrates, literature of the time is inevitably caught up in a technological modernity: technologies such as the typewriter, the bicycle, and medical technologies, through literary texts come to work as freedom machines, as harbingers of female emancipation.

Disruptions of the Local, Eruptions of the Feminine: Local Reportage and National Anxieties in Egypt’s 1890s

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marilyn Booth
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Gender Roles ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Female Images ◽  
The Feminine ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Advocacy Role ◽  
Representations Of Women ◽  
Gendered Expectations

This chapter demonstrates that inscriptions of female images in Cairo’s late nineteenth-century nationalist press were part of a discursive economy shaping debates on how gender roles and gendered expectations should shift as Egyptians struggled for independence. The chapter investigates content and placement of ‘news from the street’ in al-Mu’ayyad in the 1890s, examining how these terse local reports – equivalent to faits divers in the French press – contributed to the construction of an ideal national political trajectory with representations of women serving as the primary example in shaping a politics of newspaper intervention on the national scene. In this, an emerging advocacy role of newspaper correspondents makes the newspaper a mediator in the construction of activist reader-citizens.

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