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

Common Violence: Vengeance and Inquisition in Fourteenth-Century Marseille

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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

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

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

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Genealogy, Ontogeny, and the Narrative Arc of Origins

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The Rhythms of Vengeance in Late Medieval Marseille

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Violence and Predation in Late Medieval Mediterranean Europe

In the full-text databases of Latin sources from Europe from the period between 400 and 1500, the Latin word for violence crops up around two thousand times, about as often as “justice” (2,400) though not as often as other interesting words like “envy” (6,000) or “vengeance” (3,800). The frequency of use of the word, adjusted for the vagaries of survival, reveals an interesting trend. From the tenth to the eleventh centuries, an age of predatory castellans and violent territorial expansion, the frequency nearly doubles in the extant literature, and remains high for several centuries to come. The word often appears in texts alongside nauseating tales of violence, of hands lopped off and eyes plucked out and intestines dragged from their hidden recesses. There is the story told by Guibert of Nogent about the predatory castellan Thomas de Marle, who hung his captives by their testicles until the weight of their own bodies tore them off. These were exempla. They painted verbal pictures of the behavior of those who were surely doomed to hell. In the hands of clerical authors like Guibert, they served as a goad to kings and princes who, in their indolence, might allow this stuff to go unavenged.Histor

El desmantelamiento del patrimonio. Las mujeres y los bienes en la Marsella medieval

Historians and sociologists interpret specifically the rights of women to assets and succession as an important force in checking the dismantling of societies. This article shows that in 14th century Marseille, there were other forms for transferring assets between the sexes, between mother and son, and father and daughter. The author studies how the legal protection afforded by dowry rights revealed different strategies for keeping assets and wealth within the family lineage, the issue of whether they were patrilineal or matrilineal being of little signiticance.Los historiadores y sociólogos interpretan específicamente los derechos de la mujer a los bienes y a la sucesión como una fuerza importante contra el desmantelamiento de las sociedades. En este artículo se demuestra que existieron otras formas de la movilidad de los bienes entre los sexos, en el siglo XIV, en Marsella -de la madre al hijo y del padre a la hija- y se estudia cómo la protección legal que creaban los derechos dotales constituía estrategias distintas para mantener los bienes y las riquezas en el linaje familiar. Que éste fuera patrimonial o matrilineal no revestía demasiada importancia