The “Russian” Woman? Cultural Exceptionalism among Noblewomen in Late Imperial and Revolutionary Russia

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In this article Darcie Mawby poses two important questions: firstly, to what extent did cultural exceptionalism exist among Russian noblewomen in the late imperial and revolutionary periods? Secondly, were Russian noblewomen part of a transnational European elite, or is national specificity integral to understanding their identity construction? In doing so Darcie provides important insights into the extent to which Russian noblewomen consciously engaged with national and international ideological developments related to marriage, education and adult vocations and the impact these interactions exerted on their sense of national identity. Through a comparison with the written work of English upper-class women, particularly travel accounts of Russia, Darcie identifies points of similarity and departure which highlight instances of transnational cultural crossover and national specificity. This article offers new interpretations of cultural exceptionalism and national identity in Europe during the increasingly global nineteenth- and early-twentieth centuries.

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Darcie Mawby

Author Biography 

Darcie Mawby is a Masters student in the Department of History at the University of Nottingham. This article formed part of her Undergraduate dissertation which was completed in the summer of 2017.

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The Iconography of Kingship: Masques, Antimasques, and Pastorals

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In this article Thomas Black explores the production of, and dispute over, images of kingship and authority during the reign of Charles I and the Interregnum. Thomas analyses some of the images of kings and kingship that were developed and challenged in the Caroline masques, as well as topographical and pastoral poetry composed during the turbulent decades of the 1630s and 1640s. The basis of the study is the works of royalist poets D’avenant, Cowley and Denham, as well as the allegiance-shifting Edmund Waller. By analysing examples of topographical poetry dating from the Restoration, as well as Dryden and Milton’s engagement with English pasts and prophecies, Thomas examines how images of kingship were both retained and refashioned in the context of the rupture of regicide and Interregnum.

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Thomas Black

Author Biography 

Thomas Black is a second year English Literature PhD student at the University of Nottingham. Before his PhD Thomas completed a masters in English Literature at Nottingham and undergraduate studies at the University of Glasgow. Thomas’s research is funded by the Midlands 3 Cities doctoral training partnership and his thesis explores the changing experience of cultural identities in 17th and early 18th century Britain, focusing particularly on literature written in Scotland and Ireland. Thomas’s other research interests include republicanism and political theory in the War of Three Kingdoms, classical literature, postcolonial literature, and 20th century Irish literature.

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Pierre Nora, Memory, and the Myth of Elizabeth I

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In this article Tom Rose explores the dominant theme in cultural history: the concept of memory. Tom argues  that the concept of memory should be a vital component of early-modern studies and evaluates the applicability of the theorist Pierre Nora to the mythology of Elizabeth I.

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Tom Rose

Author Biography

Tom Rose is a Midlands3Cities AHRC-funded PhD student based at the University of Nottingham. Tom’s current research explores the relationship between hunting, politics and culture in early Stuart England. This essay explores the role of memory in the production of history and was written for the University of Nottingham History Masters module ‘Research Methods in History’.

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Ants and Cicadas: South American Football and National Identity

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Ants and Cicadas Introduction Despite having spent centuries together as part of the Spanish colonial Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata, the independence wars of the nineteenth century and their aftermath saw Argentina and Uruguay separate, with the creation of the latter as an independent buffer state guaranteed by the UK in 1827 to […]

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Book Review: Daniel Martin Varisco’s, Orientalism: Said and the Unsaid

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In this article David Robinson explores how historians communicate, interpret and commentate on the work of Edward Said. As David acknowledges, most Arts and Humanities students will encounter  Said’s canonical work, Orientalism, at some point during their degree. For those uninitiated or inexperienced in literary criticism, however, it can be a difficult, even opaque, text. Unsurprisingly, many turn to commentaries on Orientalism; to borrow a bad pun from the work under review here, to see what has been said about Said. David argues that while Daniel Martin Varisco’s Reading Orientalism: Said and the Unsaid, (Seattle, WA., 2007) is certainly a comprehensive study and is to be recommended to students as a reference work on Said,  it fails in its primary aim of going ‘beyond the binary’ of East versus West.

David Robinson

Author Biography

David Robinson is a second-year, AHRC-M3C-funded PhD student supervised by the Department of History at the University of Nottingham. His thesis is entitled ‘Orientalism or Meridionism? Comparing Imperial and European Travel Writing in the Creation of British and European Identity’ and explores the British construction of Italy and India as cultural and geographical spaces contributing to British identity formation.

 

Reading Orientalism

Edward Said’s Orientalism is the seminal work proposing a ubiquitous ‘othering’ of the Orient by Europe, evident in canonical European literature from Aeschylus onwards, a process Said called ‘orientalising’. Said claimed that the Orient was ‘almost invented’ by the West, as a feminised, exoticised, and eroticised space; an unchanging and unchangeable mirror-image of the rational, morally and culturally superior Occident.[1] ‘Orientalising’, claimed Said, was largely responsible for two centuries of European imperialism.[2] Attracting adoration and vitriol equally, Said was an American scholar with a Palestinian heritage, politically active in the cause of his cultural homeland.[3] Orientalism has, consequently, a significant political edge, polarising opinion as either a brilliant expose of Western prejudice, or a polemical rant which ‘invents’ the West as equally as Said accuses the West of inventing the East. Regardless, Orientalism has remained in print since 1978 and ‘its influence can hardly be disputed.’[4] Credited by many as the founding text of post-colonialism, Orientalism remains one of the most cited academic works of modern times.[5]

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Book Review: John H. Arnold’s, Belief and Unbelief in Medieval Europe

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Book Review: John H. Arnold’s Belief and Unbelief in Medieval Europe

In this article Joe Peake reviews John H. Arnold’s Belief and Unbelief in Medieval Europe, (London, 2005). Joe outlines the Foucauldian approach to Medieval religious belief taken by the  historian John Arnold and provides some useful insights for Medievalists questioning the applicability of modern theories to their research.

Joe Peake

Author Biography 

Originally from Sheffield, Joseph Peake is an MA graduate in history at the University of Nottingham. His MA dissertation was on the changing depictions of canines in medieval European Psalters and Books of Hours. He is currently in employment while applying for a PhD.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Belief and Unbelief

‘Since it is the task of the historian to look upon a particular fact as merely a link in a chain, to regard it in relation to some greater whole… the writer of history who desires to be more than a mere antiquarian must have a thorough theoretical training in those fields of inquiry with which his work is concerned…  No theory, no history!’ [1]

The economist Werner Sombart wrote these words in 1929, and they are no less true for the present-day historian of the medieval period. The influence of long-dead economists and social scientists upon our field can be seen in the intellectual inheritance of its most renowned practitioners; Michael Postan drew heavily from the theories of Thomas Malthus when outlining his population-resources model of English demographics; Maurice Dobb, Rodney Hilton and Robert Brenner developed distinct Marxist approaches to the study of class, feudalism and popular revolt; and D. L. D’Avray and Jean-Claude Schmitt are just two prominent examples of how the social histories of lay religion and the medieval church continue to be informed by Durkheim and Weber. However, historians of the Middle Ages have traditionally maintained a distance between their discipline and the kind of ‘theory’ popular among social scientists and modernists. Since the late 1990s, Michel Foucault has been one of the most cited theorists in the humanities and yet medieval history has scarcely begun to engage with his theoretical frameworks as they have with those of Marx and Malthus.[2] Applications of Foucauldian approaches in medieval history tend to be found in the study of sexuality, and there remains considerable division among these scholars as to whether Foucault’s theories are useful tools for avoiding anachronistic readings or whether they themselves lend themselves to anachronistic readings.[3] Furthermore, Foucault’s own work on the Middle Ages are sub-par compared to that which is concerned with the early-modern and modern periods, leading the majority of medievalists to dismiss them for their ‘superficiality, lack of detail, and indifference to documents and their nuances.’[4]

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Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner and Hollywood’s Misrepresentation of the Politics of Interracial Relationships in 1960s America

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Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967) is a Hollywood film, starring Sidney Poitier as an African-American man who is engaged to Joanna Drayton, a white woman with liberal parents. The film, directed by Stanley Kramer, depicts the reactions of the couple’s parents to their prospective union, ultimately emphasising an acceptance […]

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Human Nature and the Joint Social Project: Towards a Coherent Notion of Alienation

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Human Nature and the Joint Social Project: Towards a Coherent Notion of Alienation Introduction In the 1844 Manuscripts Marx flips Feuerbach’s criticism that religion alienates us, and instead claims that the economic system alienates us first, and religion is the response to this as ideology distracts us from our miserable alienated existence.[1] Thus this new […]

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