This essay analyses the literature on the foibe to illustrate a political use of human remains. The foibe are the deep karstic pits in Istria and around Trieste where Yugoslavian Communist troops disposed of Italians they executed en masse during World War II. By comparing contemporary literature on the foibe to a selection of archival reports of foibe exhumation processes it will be argued that the foibe literature popular in Italy today serves a political rather than informational purpose. Counterpublic theory will be applied to examine how the recent increase in popular foibe literature brought the identity of the esuli, one of Italy‘s subaltern counterpublics, to the national stage. The paper argues that by employing the narrative structure of the Holocaust, contemporary literature on the foibe attempts to recast Italy as a counterpublic in the wider European public sphere, presenting Italy as an unrecognised victim in World War II.
Given the widespread belief in witchcraft and the existence of laws against such practices, why did witch-trials fail to gain momentum and escalate into ‘witch-crazes’ in certain parts of early modern Europe? This book answers this question by examining the rich legal records of the German city of Rothenburg ob der Tauber, a city that experienced a very restrained pattern of witch-trials and just one execution for witchcraft between 1561 and 1652. The book explores the factors that explain the absence of a ‘witch-craze’ in Rothenburg, placing particular emphasis on the interaction of elite and popular priorities in the pursuit (and non-pursuit) of alleged witches at law. By making the witchcraft narratives told by the peasants and townspeople of Rothenburg central to its analysis, the book also explores the social and psychological conflicts that lay behind the making of accusations and confessions of witchcraft. Furthermore, it challenges the existing explanations for the gender-bias of witch-trials, and also offers insights into other areas of early modern life, such as experiences of and beliefs about communal conflict, magic, motherhood, childhood and illness. Written in a narrative style, the study invites a wide readership to share in the drama of early modern witch trials.
. Yet for today’s folklorist or oral historian, this context represents unknown territory. Without information concerning their social setting and underlying motivations, practices aimed at magical harm may appear as dark, mysterious, anti-social events completely divorced from normal, everyday social interaction and experience, or opposed to social integration and cohesion. In this chapter I draw upon over 300 narratives
-belief was not due to an increasing respect for the claims of science and a matching retreat from irrationality, but to a falling off in the acceptability of the traditional witchcraft narrative, and an attendant rise in the acceptability of a forensic narrative based on the demonstration of detective skills – in particular the skills of policemen, doctors and lawyers. My analysis can be seen as just part of a tale that others have
, ethnicity and religion but also the fact that many brothers served alongside or in close proximity to their siblings. The predominance of the ‘soldier’s tale’ is an inversion of the tendency of women’s narratives to foreground their roles as sisters and lovers, pushing war work to the periphery. 1 By bringing ‘blood’ brotherhood to the forefront, Brothers in the Great War has widened our perception of wartime and domestic masculinities. The growing interest in the history of emotions has invoked ‘an emotional turn’. 2 Concepts such as William Reddy’s ‘emotional
constituencies faced eternal damnation. Here, to my mind, were discourses that drew upon imperial concerns to construct narratives of progress. This seemed a more productive way of proceeding, and so I studied evangelical and travel writings on the metropolitan poor and India in order to understand better the ways in which they were structured by, and the mechanisms they displayed to express fears about, the
to be included in international comparative research, but the sophisticated chapters in this volume invite us to engage in further research using the concepts and agendas of our Belgian colleagues. The editors invited me to comment on the volume and the potential of its ‘new narratives’. They even suggested a title for my epilogue – ‘Medicine Beyond Belgium’ – implying I take
societies. As histories of violence and restraint are usually written from national and nationalist perspectives, this volume brings global approaches to the study of violence to probe historical assumptions about the limits of violence and its decline during the early modern period. It thereby also questions narratives of the inexorable rise of the nation state alongside historical periodization of the ‘early modern’ and ‘modern’. The study of violence offers a way to connect otherwise potentially disparate historical themes, since it relates to so many other aspects of
provides a case study of how the reality was not so simple. The IODE collaborated with the SOSBW in this impressive cross-Canada tour. In its organization, itinerary and subjects, the tour provides a vivid snapshot of the IODE’s ideal Canada. The itinerary formed a narrative of superior British-based culture, economy and politics in a modern resource-rich, technologically advanced, democratic Canadian
By expanding the geographical scope of the history of violence and war, this volume challenges both Western and state-centric narratives of the decline of violence and its relationship to modernity. It highlights instead similarities across early modernity in terms of representations, legitimations, applications of, and motivations for violence. It seeks to integrate methodologies of the study of violence into the history of war, thereby extending the historical significance of both fields of research. Thirteen case studies outline the myriad ways in which large-scale violence was understood and used by states and non-state actors throughout the early modern period across Africa, Asia, the Americas, the Atlantic, and Europe, demonstrating that it was far more complex than would be suggested by simple narratives of conquest and resistance. Moreover, key features of imperial violence apply equally to large-scale violence within societies. As the authors argue, violence was a continuum, ranging from small-scale, local actions to full-blown war. The latter was privileged legally and increasingly associated with states during early modernity, but its legitimacy was frequently contested and many of its violent forms, such as raiding and destruction of buildings and crops, could be found in activities not officially classed as war.