Common Violence: Vengeance and Inquisition in Fourteenth-Century Marseille

Histor

Neuroscience and the Dialectics of History

Historians, like all social scientists, must make assumptions about how the brain works. This essay suggests how some of the recent findings of the brain sciences might enhance our ability to understand or describe patterns or processes in the past. A key feature of the brain and nervous system is that they are open to developmental and epigenetic influences, meaning that cultural patterns can shape or influence brain structures, at least in the aggregate population. This essay sets out the theoretical basis for a neuroscientific approach to the past, and develops a case study based on the neurobiology of stress.Histor

Telling Tales in Angevin Courts

Angevin Marseille was wracked by a vendetta pitting loosely organized factions led by two noble families, the Vivaut and the Jerusalem. In grappling with this vendetta, the courts of Angevin Marseille unwittingly contributed to the very tensions they sought to suppress. By allowing the court to be used as a forum for the telling of tales, Angevin justice helped groups of unrelated men form a historical identity. By naming and prosecuting these groups, the court not only contributed to the grievances that fostered that identity but also helped create a language of group membership. Angevin justice in Marseille, then, did as much to institutionalize as it did to repress hatreds, rigidifying relationships of enmity rather than dissolving them.Histor

The Original Subaltern

This essay invites readers to consider how exclusions operate in the framing of history. In conventional historical thought, agency was accorded only to the limited few. Marginals, ranging from third world nations to subaltern groups of all types, were excluded from the making of history. The task of recuperating the historicity of marginals has been underway now for decades. As I hope to suggest in this essay, however, we have yet to restore historicity to the original subalterns: the peoples of the Paleolithic. The field of medieval studies, curiously enough, is implicated in their exclusion. In the developmental narratives that emerged early in the twentieth century, medieval Europe was presented as the point of origins from which modernity sprang. To the extent that medievalists continue to reaffirm the prehistoricity of the Great Before, they instantiate the very same historical exclusion that modernists currently impose on the Middle Ages.Histor

Varer og mennesker i et dyphistorisk perspektiv: Et essay om historie, nevrovitenskap og materiell kultur

Histor

Genealogy, Ontogeny, and the Narrative Arc of Origins

Histor