The Social Circulation Of The Past

Woolf details here the ways in which English men and women first became seriously aware of and interested in their own and the world's past. Previous works have focused exclusively on the writings of a small minority of historians, yet, through using a variety of manuscript and printed sources, this study examines the wider 'historical culture' within which historical and antiquarian studies could emerge.

This collection explores ways in which people have reckoned with history and put the past to work. Contributors respond to the writings of Daniel Woolf, whose scholarship illuminates the history of the historical discipline and the social circulation of the past.

Observing that the vast majority of surviving Northern Song poems are directly addressed to other people, Colin S. C. Hawes explores how literati of China's mid-Northern Song period developed a social and therapeutic tradition in poetry. These social poems, produced in group settings and exchanged with friends and acquaintances, are often lighthearted in tone and full of witty banter and wordplay. Hawes challenges previous scholars' dismissal of these poems as trivial and insignificant because they lacked serious political and moral content by arguing that the central function of poetry at the time was to release pent-up emotions and share them with others in a socially acceptable manner—what Hawes views as circulating emotional energy or qi. Focusing on the circle of poets around Ouyang Xiu (1007–72 CE) and Mei Yaochen (1002–60 CE), the most influential literary figures of the mid-Northern Song period and the creators of a distinctive Song poetic style, Hawes provides a number of translations of poems of the period. Several major functions of poetic composition are discussed, including poetry as a game, as therapy, as a means of building relationships, and as a way of finding solace in history and in the natural world. Ultimately, the Northern Song attitude toward poetic composition spread throughout Chinese society.

Generations injects fresh energy into tired debates about England's plural and protracted Reformations by adopting the fertile concept of generation as its analytical framework. It demonstrates that the tumultuous religious developments that stretched across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries not merely transformed the generations that experienced them, but were also forged and created by them. The book investigates how age and ancestry were implicated in the theological and cultural upheavals of the era and how these, in turn, reconfigured the relationship between memory, history, and time. It explores the manifold ways in which the Reformations shaped the horizontal relationships that early modern people formed with their siblings, kin, and peers, as well as the vertical ones that tied them to their dead ancestors and their future heirs. Generations highlights the vital part that families bound by blood and by faith played in shaping these events, as well as in mediating our knowledge of the religious past and in the making of its archive. Drawing on a rich array of evidence, it provides poignant glimpses into how people navigated the profound challenges that the English Reformations posed in everyday life.

The book examines potentially important factors that may have affected the Hadley and Walker Circulations and evaluates changes in the Hadley Circulation and the monsoons as simulated by coupled models of past climate conditions, and predicted future conditions under an enhanced greenhouse effect. This book is meant to serve as a fundamental reference work for current and future researchers, graduate students in the atmospheric sciences and geosciences, and climate specialists involved in interdisciplinary research.

An examination of women's work, rhetorical agency, and the construction of female reputation Before the full and honest tale of humanity can be told, it will be necessary to uncover the hidden roles of women in it and recover their voices from the forces that have diminished their contributions or even at times deliberately eclipsed them. The past half-century has seen women rise to claim their equal portion of recognition, and Remembering Women Differently addresses not only some of those neglected—it examines why they were deliberately erased from history. The contributors in this collection study the contributions of fourteen nearly forgotten women from around the globe working in fields that range from art to philosophy, from teaching to social welfare, from science to the military, and how and why those individuals became either marginalized or discounted in a mostly patriarchal world. These sterling contributors, scholars from a variety of disciplines—rhetoricians, historians, compositionists, and literary critics—employ feminist research methods in examining women's work, rhetorical agency, and the construction of female reputation. By recovering these voices and remembering the women whose contributions have made our civilization better and more whole, this work seeks to ensure that women's voices are never silenced again.

In this, the first comprehensive study of post-Reformation provincial English portraiture, Robert Tittler investigates the growing affinity for secular portraiture in Tudor and early Stuart England, a cultural and social phenomenon which can be said to have produced a 'public' for that genre. He breaks new ground in placing portrait patronage and production in this era in the broad social and cultural context of post-Reformation England, and in distinguishing between native English provincial portraiture, which was often highly vernacular, and foreign-influenced portraiture of the court and metropolis, which tended towards the formal and 'polite'. Tittler describes the burgeoning public for portraiture of this era as more than the familiar court-and-London based presence, but rather as a phenomenon which was surprisingly widespread, both socially and geographically, throughout the realm. He suggests that provincial portraiture differed from the 'mainstream', cosmopolitan portraiture of the day in its workmanship, materials, inspirations, and even vocabulary, showing how its native English roots continued to guide its production. Innovative chapters consider the aims and vocabulary of English provincial portraiture, the relationship of portraiture and heraldry, the painter's occupation in provincial (as opposed to metropolitan) England, and the contrasting availability of materials and training in both provincial and metropolitan areas. The work as a whole contributes to both art history and social history: it speaks to admirers and collectors of painting as well as to curators and academics.

Three of the papers were presented to the Ethnohistory Workshop at the University of Pennsylvania during 1983-84; the others were presented at a Symposium on the Relationship between Commodities and Culture, held May 23-25, 1984, in Philadelphia. Includes bibliographies and index.