Spanish Sociology and Anti-Semitism Between passed prejudice and key to civilization

There is a significant lack of sociological research in Spain about anti-Semitism. At the same time there are alarming anti-Semitic tendencies and anti-Jewish stereotypes which are above the European average. This article aims to explain this lack of sociological research about anti-Semitism in Spain. Therefore two types of explications are offered: on the one hand side some structural problems will be shown which sociology in general had since its beginnings and which complicate the understanding of anti-Semitism. Furthermore explications regarding the specific social and historic situation in Spain and of Spanish sociology in particular will be exposed. It will be shown that for its rationalistic character and with the exception of very few authors ��� who are considered marginalized for practical research ��� sociology in general has had enormous problems in understanding anti-Semitism. The specific historic situation, Francoism, the dispute about the historic memory and the delayed institutionalisation of sociology could also explain the lack of sociological interest in the topic especially in Spain. The article shows that the study of anti-Semitism is not only relevant for struggling against this burden of society in many of its variants. Furthermore, thinking about anti-Semitism can help sociology to recognise its own epistemological problems. It can serve to criticise and improve instruments of sociological research by showing the limitations of the sociological approach and to uncover the importance of interdisciplinary research for understanding specific social phenomena. In that sense, anti-Semitism, far from being a marginal subject, can be considered a key topic in the process of civilisation and it can help us to decipher the contemporary Spanish society.

Rambling in the Field of Modern Identity: Some Speculations on Irish Traditional Music

This article argues that Irish ���traditional��� music is modern in its form and history, and explores the ramifications of this thesis for understanding of the peculiarities of Irish modernity and identity. The article exhaustively surveys the historiography of Irish traditional music and uniquely interprets this literature in relation to competing conceptions of identity and modernity articulated by Taylor, Appiah and ��i��ek. It also interprets Irish traditional music in relation to conceptions of Irish modernity articulated in a wide range of disciplines within Irish studies. Reflecting on the author���s lifelong engagement with traditional music performance, the article argues that the resilience of traditional music within the broader culture is connected to the peculiar character of Irish modernity, and that it suffers from problems of aesthetic exhaustion shared by much modern art in the contemporary conjuncture.

La Anunciaci��n del Monasterio de Caleruega (Burgos): contextualizaci��n en la Baja Edad Media peninsular

La Anunciaci��n del Monasterio de Santo Domingo de Caleruega, fundado por Alfonso X el Sabio, ha permanecido pr��cticamente olvidada por la historiograf��a nacional. Aislado tras los muros de la clausura, el grupo escult��rico presenta una particularidad que, durante mucho tiempo, no fue analizada convenientemente: la Virgen est�� embarazada. La cantidad de ejemplos contabilizados de la misma naturaleza demuestra que esta clase de representaciones fue habitual, durante la Baja Edad Media, en algunos reinos de la pen��nsula ib��rica. Con un enfoque fundamentalmente iconogr��fico pero sin renunciar a otra clase de aproximaciones, el presente art��culo pretende estudiar en profundidad la singularidad de la Anunciaci��n calerogana que, al mismo tiempo, se convierte en el punto de partida para un an��lisis global de esta variante de la Salutaci��n Ang��lica.

The Madrilenian Chapel of San Isidro and its Previous Proyects

Desde antiguo ha examinado la historiograf��a la documentaci��n relativa a la capilla de San Isidro en Madrid, deteni��ndose en algunos proyectos que quedaron sin realizar hasta el definitivo de 1657. Sin embargo, esos intentos anteriores no han sido rese��ados en su totalidad ni de manera correcta y exhaustiva. En este trabajo damos a conocer nuevos proyectos y precisamos muchos aspectos de los conocidos.

(Un)settlement: Political Parody and the Northern Irish Peace Process

This essay examines Tim Loane���s political comedies, Caught Red-Handed and To Be Sure, and their critique of the Northern Irish peace process. As ���parodies of esteem���, both plays challenge the ultimate electoral victors of the peace process (the Democratic Unionist Party and Sinn F��in) as well as critiquing the cant, chicanery and cynicism that have characterised their political rhetoric and the peace process as a whole. This essay argues that Loane���s transformation of these comedic pantomime horses into Trojan ones loaded with a ruthless polemical critique of our ruling political elites is all the more important in the context of a self-censoring media that has stifled dissent and debate by protecting the peace process from inconvenient truths. From these close and contextual readings of Loane���s plays, wider issues relating to the political efficacy of comedy and its canonical relegation below ���higher forms��� in Irish theatre historiography will also be considered.

Popular Writers: Women Historians, the Academic Community and National History Writing

The research for this paper formed part of the European Science Foundation project on Representations of the Past: The Writing of National Histories in Europe. Using data generated by the project, the article traces the emergence of professional academic women historians in twentieth-century European universities. It argues that the marginalisation of women historians in academia until the 1980s led women history graduates to develop research-based careers outside the university. In particular, the ambiguous attitude of academic historians towards popular history writing opened up a space for the woman author. The article analyses the careers and writings of five historians who pursued very successful careers as authors of popular history in England, France, Ireland and Scotland. They were among the first 'public' historians.<br/><br/>

Early modern Ireland and the history of the child

Analysis of public policy on the care of children and youth in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Ireland has generated a substantial historiography in recent years. By contrast there has been far less exploration of the state's attitude to young people in early modern Irish society. The historical dimension to the current debate on state care of minors is usually identified as beginning in the nineteenth century but the institutional custody of children originated in the sixteenth century. A central aim of this essay is to document the early modern context of public concern with children and youth in order to provide a more precise historical dimension to the contemporary debate.

Secularism and Religion in Nineteenth-Century Germany: The Rise of the Fourth Confession

Negotiating the boundaries of the secular and of the religious is a core aspect of modern experience. In mid-nineteenth-century Germany, secularism emerged to oppose church establishment, conservative orthodoxy, and national division between Catholics, Protestants, and Jews. Yet, as historian Todd H. Weir argues in this provocative book, early secularism was not the opposite of religion. It developed in the rationalist dissent of Free Religion and, even as secularism took more atheistic forms in Freethought and Monism, it was subject to the forces of the confessional system it sought to dismantle. Similar to its religious competitors, it elaborated a clear worldview, sustained social milieus, and was integrated into the political system. Secularism was, in many ways, Germany's fourth confession. While challenging assumptions about the causes and course of the Kulturkampf and modern antisemitism, this study casts new light on the history of popular science, radical politics, and social reform.

Religious Geographies in Ireland: Pre-Famine, Post-Famine, Pre-Partition

This paper examines changes in religious geographies for Ireland from 1834 to 1911. It shows that in a period of dramatic social and economic change religious geographies remained remarkably stable. In this it challenges the accepted historiography. It makes use of new data in new ways with the full exploitation of the 1834 Enumeration of Religion and, in so doing, is able to examine the impact of the Great Irish Famine on geographies of religion. These data are visualised both using traditional choropleth maps and, more innovatively in this subject area, cartograms.

Geography's medieval history: A neglected enterprise?

This paper examines the marginal place of ���medieval geography��� in contemporary geographical scholarship. Over the past two decades, geographers' studies of the subject���s historiography have tended to focus mainly on ���modern��� and ���early-modern��� rather than medieval geographies. This contrasts with the early 20th century when ���medieval geography��� was seen by geographers to be part of the discipline���s long history. Set within the context of current discussion on writing geography���s histories, the paper examines how geographers, and latterly historians, have sought to characterize and represent medieval geographies. This reveals that the subject of geography in the Middle Ages shared in the same fluidities and ambivalences that characterize geography today. The paper thus helps to challenge orthodox views of geography���s history, and argues that the connections and continuities that have shaped geography for over two millennia cautions us against taking a compartmentalized approach to historiographies of geography.

Crowd Control? Depictions of the Many in Anglo-Saxon Literature, with Particular Reference to the Old English Legend of the Seven Sleepers

This article argues for the distinctiveness of the presentation of crowds in the Old English version of the Legend of the Seven Sleepers . In traditional Old English poetry, crowds are mostly conspicuous by their absence, since the social groupings portrayed are typically those ofthe lord's retinue and the fellowship of the hall. In writings deriving from Latin traditions (in Anglo-Latin, Old English prose and strands of Old English poetry) such as historiography andhagiography, crowds are presented in highly conventional terms based on literary models. The crowd scenes in the Legend of the Seven Sleepers , on the other hand, have an immediacy and urgency that seem based on real-life experience of Anglo-Saxon England rather than simply imitative of the work's Latin (ultimately Greek) source or of other literary models. Drawing upon crowd theory and historical studies, the article demonstrates that the crowds in this text are presented in ���domesticated��� Anglo-Saxon terms and may be seen as reflective of growing urbanization in late Anglo-Saxon England. ���Real��� crowds are glimpsed elsewhere in Anglo-Saxon literature but in the Legend of the Seven Sleepers they are particularly foregrounded; this text also presents the literature's liveliest picture of town life more generally.

A Slaveholders' Republic in the Tumult of War

Review essay of recent work on wartime disaffection in the southern Confederacy: Stephanie McCurry's award-winning _Confederate Reckoning_ and Victorian Bynum's _Long Shadow of the Civil War_. Includes a broader assessment of recent historiography, state of the field.

"Angels and Demons in Cromwellian and Restoration Ireland: Heresy and the Supernatural"

This essay explores accounts of supernatural activity in Cromwellian and Restoration Ireland. Religious life in Cromwellian Ireland was driven by expectations of the unusual���including audible voices from heaven, material encounters with angels, and spiritual encounters with demons. Some conservative Protestants linked this activity to the development and dissemination of heretical belief, while some who had such encounters were confident that it was compatible with the Cromwellian religious mainstream. Crawford Gribben explores the flexibility in the discourse of the marvelous in Ireland and the ways in which the administration contributed to it, and the alignment of the supernatural with various confessional convictions and postures, as well as theological radicalism. After the Restoration, accounts of supernatural encounters were remembered as ghost stories, not as matters for theological debate, a cultural transition linked to the development of a historiography that has continued to invest the Irish Cromwellian past with Gothic tropes.

Terry Eagleton, Postmodernism and Ireland

Terry Eagleton devoted considerable thought to the nature of postmodernism during the heyday of the postmodernist debate in the Eighties and Nineties, and always expressed strong reservations about it.1 It is worth noting that these reservations do not imply any hostility to formal experimentation, or to the registering of alienation in its postmodern form. Rather, he seeks to show how there might be a politically and morally engaged art which was very much of our time. His position is consistent with those he adopts in dealing with other subjects, and may be illuminated by reference to those works where he does so. Of all these other subjects, the most illuminating for understanding his work is that of Irish literature, for it was during this period that Eagleton became a major figure in Irish studies, and his thinking on postmodernist relativism was developed alongside his critique of revisionism in Irish historiography.