Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Mentalités And The Search For Total History In The Works Of Annalistes, Foucault, And Microhistory, Jason U. Rose

The Hilltop Review

In this brief essay, the links between the Annales, the works of Michael Foucault, and microhistory are analyzed through the theoretical lens of histoire des mentalités (mentalités). Common threads that link these approaches include the willingness of using outside fields of analysis as well as the willingness to work with vagueness in search of those who Foucault calls, “lost people.” Relatedly, each of these groups and individuals are willing to analyze all aspects of the historical record to fully understand the minds, cultures, and histories of past people. The key to recognizing the relationship of these approaches involve knowing and …

A Village Comes To Life: The Interpretation Of Henry Ford's Greenfield Village, Claire E. Herhold

The Hilltop Review

Of all American living history sites, Greenfield Village, in Dearborn, Michigan, is one of the most interesting. Founded by Henry Ford and opened in 1929, Greenfield Village consists of 90 acres of nearly 100 historic buildings, all moved to the site from around the country and reassembled in a vague village formation. Unlike Colonial Williamsburg, the site is not historically significant and represents no one geographic location or time period. While in keeping with Ford’s vision of celebrating small-town life and the humble origins of many great thinkers and innovators, this structure has presented challenges for both the staff and …

Pirates, Merchants, And A Small Battle On The Island Of Kythira In The Later Middle Ages, David D. Terry

The Hilltop Review

Merchants in the later medieval Mediterranean crossed boundaries both geographical and moral. In November 1327 two Mallorcan investors complained to the king’s court that their ship, which they had sent to the eastern Mediterranean laden with tradable goods, had been ransacked by the violent natives of Kythera, an Aegean island at that time ruled by Venice. The Venetians, always conscious of maintaining good trade relations, sent representatives to the island and conducted a full investigation. After interviewing the islanders, the duke of the island sent his conclusions back to Venice: the Catalan “merchants” had come ashore on the island and …

Royalist Propaganda: Fabrication Of Magna Farta, Daniel R. Palthe

The Hilltop Review

This paper examines the perception and usage of Magna Carta in interregnum England. The central question is whether or not Oliver Cromwell ever referred to this royal document as the "Magna Farta." While one of the most common posthumous charges against him was a disdain for Magna Carta and English rights, accounts of his calling it a "Magna Farta" are questionable. The ways in which the Magna Carta was actually used under Cromwell rather seems to indicate a different opinion. Essentially, this paper compares royalist propaganda with the Commonwealth's accounts.

Book Review Of King & Etty's England And Scotland, 1286-1603, Austin M. Setter

The Hilltop Review

This review addresses the strengths and weaknesses of Andy King and Claire Etty's 2016 book England and Scotland, 1286-1603.

Passion Through Slander: Saintliness, Deviance, And Suffering By Speech In The Book Of Margery Kempe, Connor Yeck

The Hilltop Review

A late medieval mystic prone to violent bouts of sobbing, Margery Kempe suffers a range of verbal abuse in her titular text, ranging from simple rumors, to outright accusations of heresy and possession. While we might accept such accusatory speech as indicative of the era and Margery’s controversial role as a public “holy woman,” further investigation reveals a narrative strongly driven by the notion of “suffering by slander,” and the weight attributed to the spoken word. The Book of Margery Kempe shows us an oral culture filled with “deviant speech,” and within its own rhetorical construction as a text, elevates …

Chinese Propaganda And The People’S Republic In The Twentieth Century, Christopher E. Maiytt

The Hilltop Review

This paper is an examination of the development of propaganda in twentieth century China; Mao Zedong and the People Republic of China utilized images that called up cultural and economic ideas to propagate Communist thought. Propaganda imagery uniquely was able to motive mass rural support, allowing the People’s Republic to come to power, but the reason for its effectiveness in China and it’s continuous utilization in the modern day is worthy of a deeper exploration. Beginning with the Long March, the assessment of the topic moves into the revolving Party sanctioned economic campaigns and the role propaganda played to control …

Liturgical Processions In The Black Death, Eric A. Gobel

The Hilltop Review

The popularity of the flagellant movement in the German speaking lands during the Black Death is due to a number of factors. Flagellation may seem like a nonsensical reaction to despair from a modern perspective, but for medieval people, the itinerant processional penitent pilgrims represented more than a bloody, painful spectacle. Rather, it was a rational and emotion reaction to their troubles. The success of the flagellants lays, not in the grotesquerie of their performances, but instead in their ability to provide people with familiar, engaging ways to perform and observe penance while also departing from ecclesiastical norms that had …

Eternal Perspectives In Nineteenth-Century Friendship Albums, Jenifer Blouin

The Hilltop Review

It is apparent through the inscriptions made in nineteenth-century friendship albums that the young women who wrote in and owned the albums were highly concerned with eternity, with things they believed would last forever. This preoccupation with eternity raises the question of how young women in the nineteenth century related to time and to religion, both of which are inherently concerned with eternity. These topics will therefore be addressed in brief discussions of how nineteenth-century conceptions of time and the Second Great Awakening affected young women. This will be followed by an examination of the friendship album verses themselves, which …

More Than One Way To Measure: Masculinity In The Zurkaneh Of Safavid Iran, Zachary T. Smith

The Hilltop Review

The zurkhaneh of early modern Safavid Iran was an institution where men undertook physical training, in some ways reminiscent of a modern-day gymn. This paper attempts to theorize the zurkhaneh as a public space in which primarily non-elite men participated in the social economy of early modern Safavid Iran based upon their pursuit of the ideal of javanmardi, or young manliness. To accomplish this, this paper will combine the themes of publicity, the social utility of the body, and the authority of textuality with an examination of the physical culture of the zurkhaneh to theorize the utility, representation, and …

Killing The Rotten Citric Lump: A Somatic Reading Of The Death Of Shahrazād’S Hunchback, Erin S. Lynch

The Hilltop Review

Throughout the narrative of the Hunchback’s Tale within the Thousand and One Nights, the hunchback is always at the center of the action, yet with the exception of the first time he is “killed,” he is never written as the reader’s focus, except in instances of violence performed against the hunchback’s body. The reader’s gaze is constantly drawn to the killer, rather than the victim, and led to laugh at or empathize with the killers of the hunchbacked corpse, rather than the deformed, ever-abused body. Neither the champion nor the foil, the body of the hunchback functions merely as …

From “Black Is Beautiful” To “Gay Power”: Cultural Frames In The Gay Liberation Movement, Eric Denby

The Hilltop Review

In lieu of an abstract, a short excerpt is provided:

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The 1960s and 1970s were a decade of turbulence, militancy, and unrest in America. The post-World War II boom in consumerism and consumption made way for a new post-materialist societal ethos, one that looked past the American dream of home ownership and material wealth. Many citizens were now concerned with social and economic equality, justice for all people of the world, and a restructuring of the capitalist system itself. According to Max Elbaum, the traditional narrative of the 1960s begins with an “idealistic, impassioned” youth working on voter registration …

Late Medieval Mediterranean Apocalypticism: Joachimist Ideas In Ramon Llull’S Crusade Treatises, Michael Sanders

The Hilltop Review

The thirteenth century witnessed dramatic changes that transformed the medieval world and remain important today. The violent changes caused by the War of the Sicilian Vespers and Spiritual Franciscan movement popularized the apocalyptic ideas of the twelfth-century Italian abbot, Joachim of Fiore. The abbot's historical paradigms of biblical history influenced many southern Europeans, including the medieval mystic, missionary, and philosopher Ramon Llull (c. 1232-1316). Llull dedicated his life to converting the world to Catholic Christianity using a variety of means, including evangelical missions, Neoplatonic philosophy, and crusades. Llull's crusade treatises, the Tractatus de modo convertendi infideles (1292), Liber de fine …

Ritual, Culture, And Power: Politics And The Shrine Of Notre-Dame De Cambron, 1322-1329, Benjamin Wright

The Hilltop Review

Does religious ritual transform political identities? Political identities often rise out of culture; and cultures in turn are shaped by the countless manifestations of religious ritual. It should come as no surprise that this triangle of ritual, culture, and power is used as a tool for the construction of the homogeneous political identities upon which nation states are created. The case study of the religious cult center of Notre-Dame de Cambron, a 14th century pilgrimage shrine in Belgium a few miles from the French border, provides one example of this triangularity. In the midst of its bicultural region, Cambron's shrine …

Castle Rushen, Valerie Dawn Hampton

The Hilltop Review

This picture features Castle Rushen, the royal seat of the Kingdom of Man on the Isle of Man, UK, during the 12th-15th centuries. The Isle of Man is also home to the internationally renown TT races. The motorcyclist rounding the curve of Castle Rushen links a "modern knight" on mount with armor in a very historic setting.

Viking Women In The Isle Of Man, Valerie Dawn Hampton

The Hilltop Review

The gender roles of important women in the Viking controlled Isle of Man has never been studied before. This is an exceptional case as women were not normally so influential in the Middle Ages, especially in Viking controlled regions. By examining memorial stones, burial goods, and their excavated skeletal remains, certain facts about Viking women's life in Medieval Manx society can be discerned. The visual remains of the Viking period in Mann, covering the ninth to thirteenth centuries, emphasizes the influence of women, confirming their importance in the kingdom's language, society, and religion.

Power, Piety, And Rebellion In Al-Andalus: The Reception And Influence Of Al-Ghazali's Political Philosophy In Islamic Iberia, Patrick Harris

The Hilltop Review

Dissident Muslims have utilized discourses of pious rulership to justify their revolt against centralized authority at least as far back as the Kharijite rebellion in the 1st/7th century, which, in turn, resulted in the first major schism within the Islamic community. One may, indeed, interpret the very founding of Islam, in part, as a pietist response to a Meccan regime which fostered an environment of injustice and iniquity. Thus, the need for a pious rulership has been at the heart of Islamic political sensibility, if not from its very foundation, then at least from its first division. Rebels and reformers …

Harvard Cowboys: The Role Of Silas Weir Mitchell's Creative Works In Defining Western-Style American Masculinity, Becky De Oliveira

The Hilltop Review

There were probably few men better placed in the latter part of the nineteenth century to help other men create a persona of strength and vigor--based quite firmly, too, in the tradition of literature and writing--than Silas Weir Mitchell (1829-1914), a physician who "achieved great success in popularizing the idea of a correlation between mental activity and nerve strain" (Will, 293).

Imagining Women In U.S. Politics: The Problem Of Sisterhood In The Long 1960s, Sara Bijani

The Hilltop Review

The gendered expectations of the masculinist political establishment of the long 1960s made it difficult for women to define their own unique terrain as politicians. Even with the guarantee of formal political rights firmly in place, women's status as second class citizens persisted throughout the long 1960s. Often, women were forced into frames that defined their political interests around their embodied sex, rather than the needs of their constituents. This imagined construction of women as a separate subject class established a fundamentally unequal platform for women's participation as first class citizens of the United States. While ideological differences between male …

Trust, But Verify: Reagan, Gorbachev, And The Inf Treaty, William D. Watson

The Hilltop Review

This paper is a discussion of the relationship between the deployment of two types of intermediate (medium) range missile systems in Europe, how leaders on both sides viewed the situation, and how the potential use of such weapons affected superpower relations during the last decade of the Cold War.

Viking Age Arms And Armor Originating In The Frankish Kingdom, Valerie Dawn Hampton

The Hilltop Review

The export of Carolingian arms and armor to Northern regions outside the Frankish Empire from the 9th and early 10th century is a subject which has seen a gradual increase of interest among archaeologists and historians alike. Recent research has shown that the Vikings of this period bore Frankish arms, particularly swords, received either through trade or by spolia that is plunder.1 In the examination of material remains, illustrations, and capitularies, the reason why Carolingian arms and armor were prized amongst the Viking nations can be ascertained and evidence found as to how the Vikings came to possess such valued …

Greek In Marriage, Latin In Giving: The Greek Community Of Fourteenth-Century Palermo And The Deceptive Will Of Bonannus De Geronimo, Jack Goodman

The Hilltop Review

This article explores some of the difficulties inherent in the discussion of medieval ethnicity. Early fourteenth-century Palermo was a city with a celebrated multi-ethnic Latin, Arabic, and Greek past, but by the 1300s, much had changed, with Latin culture eclipsing the others. However, two small Greek ethnic minorities persisted in this culture: one indigenous, descending from the ministers, notaries, and monks who thrived under twelfth-century Norman rule, and the other immigrant, composed primarily of Byzantine slaves and freed slaves. The second group is identified in the sources as grecus, while the indigenous Italo-Greeks cannot easily be located in the …

Re-Visioning White Nudes: Race And Sexual Discourse In Ottoman Harems 1700-1900, Jennifer M. Black

The Hilltop Review

As a viable social actor, art constitutes one of many institutions participating in the creation and reification of ideologies constructed within our society. Investigating the work of Ingres, Gérôme, and others reveals striking connections between the ritual use of Europeanized women in Orientalist harem paintings and the perpetual nature of women’s social oppression. A close examination of prominent works provokes the question “why paint recognizably white women against such non-white Eastern backdrops?” Continually, visual hierarchies and prescriptive codes allow the virtual entrance of the male voyeur into the painting. (first paragraph)

Burgundian/Habsburg Mint Policies And World Bullion Flows: A Monetary Interpretation Of The Rise And Fall Of Antwerp, 1400-1600, Shawn Adrian

The Hilltop Review

During the first half of the sixteenth century, the city of Antwerp (located in present-day Belgium about thirty miles north of Brussels) was one of the most significant entrepôts of the nascent modern world economy. A transcontinental clearinghouse, Antwerp served as a center for the redistribution of commodities from the Baltic and Mediterranean regions of Europe as well as from Africa, Asia, and the New World, and, as such, was the nexus of a trade network that encompassed the entire globe. Yet Antwerp’s position at the heart of the world economy was ephemeral; its economic power lasted scarcely more than …