Imitations of Christ in 17th-century France: Some attendant difficulties

The most important verse paraphrase of the Imitation of Christ in 17th-century France was written by the dramatist Pierre Corneille. In his paratexts he discusses the difficulties he has encountered in the project, which expands on the original by including engravings, many of which illustrate episodes from the lives of saints. One such is Theodora, who is the subject of his closely contemporary martyr tragedy, Théodore. But here too he encountered difficulties, in the context of bienséance, from objections expressed to the prostitution with which the eponym is threatened. In a different idiom, the Jesuit priest Jean-Joseph Surin, seeing his role as exorcist as another kind of imitation of Christ, records his ordeal in two autobiographical works, one of which moves progressively into stylistic incoherence. Finally, Bossuet engages in the polemic surrounding a further possible implication of the term, in the form of the Catholic doctrine of the Real Presence.

The Making and Breaking of States: The End of Empire in India Revisited

Recent events in the Arab world have sharpened and widened public interest in the way states can be broken and made. Since the end of the Second World War the world has seen three great waves of state-breaking and state-making: the end of European empires; the collapse of the Soviet Union; and the contemporary ‘Arab Spring’. By revisiting an example from the first of these great waves, perhaps the greatest ‘imperial ending’—the end of British imperial rule in India in 1947, this lecture investigates issues which may prove instructive in probing the dynamics of other phases of turbulence in the structures and nature of states. It addresses four major questions which are relevant across the many different episodes of state breaking and making, with the help of evidence from the case of the South Asian subcontinent. What is the relationship between state and society and the patterns of relationship which help to determine the nature and vulnerability of the state? What makes a viable and destabilising opposition to the imperial state? What is the nature of the breaking or collapse of that state? How are states refashioned out of the inheritance of the previous regime and the breaking process?

From Hypatia to Victor Hugo to Larry and Sergey: ‘All the world's knowledge’ and universal authors' rights

Access to ‘all the world’s knowledge’ is an ancient aspiration; a less venerable, but equally vigorous, universalism strives for the borderless protection of authors’ rights. Late 19th-century law and politics brought us copyright universalism; 21st-century technology may bring us the universal digital library. But how can ‘all the world’s knowledge’ be delivered, on demand, to users anywhere in the world (with Internet access), if the copyrights of the creators and publishers of many of those works are supposed to be enforceable almost everywhere in the world? Does it follow that the universal digital library of the near future threatens copyright holders? Or are libraries the endangered species of the impending era, as publishers partner with for-profit Internet intermediaries to make books ubiquitously available? Does access-triumphalism therefore risk giving us not the universal digital library, but the universal digital bookstore? And, whether libraries or commercial intermediaries offer access, how will the world’s authors fare?

Edward Lear's lines of flight

‘Verily I am an odd bird’, Edward Lear wrote in his diary in 1860. This article examines a range of odd encounters between birds and people in Lear’s paintings, illustrations, and poems. It considers how his interest in birds—an interest at once scientific and aesthetic—helped to shape his nonsense writings. It is suggested that poetic and pictorial lines of flight became, for Lear, a means of exploring the claims that art might make on our attention.

The Sanctuary at Keros: Questions of Materiality and Monumentality

The discovery of the early bronze age sanctuary on the Cycladic island of Keros is briefly described. Why islanders in the Aegean should establish the world’s first maritime sanctuary around 2500 BC is then considered, and other instances of early centres of congregation are briefly discussed. Specific features of the Special Deposit South at Kavos, a key component of the sanctuary, are then reviewed along with those of the accompanying settlement on the islet of Dhaskalio. The Aegean context for the development in the later bronze age of cult, involving the reverence of specific deities, is then surveyed. The conclusion is reached that the Confederacy of Keros may not have involved the practice of cult in this sense, but rather the performance of rituals of congregation such as are widely seen at very early centres before the development of hierarchically ordered (‘state’) societies.

An intelligent Scotland: Professor Sir Godfrey Thomson and the Scottish Mental Surveys of 1932 and 1947

In the first half of the paper the focus is historical on the work of Professor Sir Godfrey Thomson (1881–1955). In particular, new primary sources are described and illustrated. The principal new source is a collection of his public lectures from 1924 until 1954 that illustrate his interests and opinions in education and intelligence, and their place in society. The second half consists of an illustrative summary of follow-up studies on the Scottish Mental Surveys of 1932 and 1947, in which Thomson played such a large part. These data are now being used in the study of cognitive ageing and cognitive epidemiology

Andaman Islanders and Polar Eskimos:emergent ethnographic subjects c.1900

In this lecture the focus is on A.R. Radcliffe-Brown’s ethnographic work, notably his fieldwork in the Andaman Islands in 1906–8. About the same time, the Danish ethnographer Knud Rasmussen studied the Polar Eskimos in North-West Greenland. While sharing a general quest for ethnographic description of little-known groups, they styled their fieldwork in different ways, saw colonialism in different terms, adhered to different knowledge traditions, and not least, worked in different natural environments. This resulted in very distinct portraits of ‘the natives’, which were to cast long shadows into the present, within which the history of first encounters is firmly embedded.

Editorial

An introduction to the British Academy’s public lecture programme.

Parts of Speech: Solid Citizens or Slippery Customers?

The ‘parts of speech’ which have played a fundamental role in most descriptions of grammar, from primary school curriculum to advanced linguistic theory, are explored in this article, which considers some intriguing changes in recent everyday English that challenge traditional assumptions about the definition and usefulness of word classes such as ‘pronoun’, ‘adjective’ and ‘noun’. The article raises important questions about what happens at the boundaries between these word classes and looks at how we can answer these questions—potentially changing the direction of both future linguistic research and pedagogical practice.