Cultural & intellectual history

The Nordic welfare state of the 20th century has been hailed around the world as a model of how to build democratic and egalitarian societies. It has often been described as a project of social democracy often following a narrative of secularization and rationalization of society. However some of the most important actors and ideas of the "Scandinavian Sonderweg" had their roots in Protestant often Pietist and revivalist milieus that dreamed of creating an egalitarian community. The present volume explores these often forgotten roots in several case studies of phenomena from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century focusing primarily on questioning the function of aesthetics in the creation of the welfare state model. We argue that aesthetics and what Friedrich Schiller called aesthetic education played an important unifying role for Nordic societies. These aesthetics were shaped by Protestant ideas and practices. Through references to the then widespread circulation of educational texts based on Luther's catechism the later pietistic catechism of Erik Pontoppidan Nordic hymnbooks and practices such as communal singing and preaching in church church coffee reading circles and conventicle meetings a common aesthetic language emerged that unified different social groups and their competing goals and claims. Civic actors and movements learned specific ways to engage in society to develop practices of internalizing responsibility (self)critique and accountability and to communicate and develop a more democratic modern civic sphere. We therefore propose to look at this history from the perspective of a historically changing aesthetic as an integrating principle for understanding the political social cultural economic and many other aspects of the Nordic welfare state.

'Desnortar' or disoriented means to lose the north or the sense of direction to disorient. In Disoriented a collective book from a gender perspective we consciously seek to lose both the geographical north and the north of the contemporary art canon. We aim to rethink and disrupt from feminist LGTBQ+ and postcolonial approaches the coordinates that have articulated the discourses on the art history and art system along the 20th and 21st centuries. Coordinates that define how these artistic practices and systems of modernity and the contemporary are understood the cardinal directions and main conceptual issues or which artists are relevant or expendable according to the narratives of avant-garde and contemporary art history. It is crucial to reinterpret and disorientate to disnorth and thereby shatter these references to overcome the gaps that prevent the emergence of alternative knowledges. To address questions or artists often perceived as peripheral to a grand historical narrative we propose an intersection of modern and contemporary art history gender feminist queer and postcolonial approaches and transnational interrelations. This intersectionality allows us to actively lose the north of the canon and to direct our gaze towards subjects outside the usual centres of legitimation. Mostly we attend to women artists to peripheral geographical centres to subaltern collectives or to practices or materials regularly considered of little artistic interest.  All of the above critiques how conventional discourses have excluded some collectives or certain artistic proposals and the resistances that have emerged against them.

In the last two decades objects have become increasingly relevant to historical studies as the primary focus of research discussing cross-cultural relations. Objects are produced used modified preserved and destroyed according to historically specific political and cultural settings thus providing researchers with information and insights about their original background. However they can also throw light on a large array of cross-cultural encounters when their mobility is put to the fore. Objects can move by being bought gifted bartered and sold borrowed or stolen collected and dispersed just as they can be modified repaired reshaped repurposed and destroyed in the process.

The Mediterranean as a barrier and as a meeting place for different polities and communities and as the setting of conflicted experiences of cultural political economic and social transformation easily lends itself to this kind of historical analysis. Featuring articles on Byzantine imperial silks and bronze doors from southern Italy eastern luxuries in Istanbul and African bolsas from the Canary Islands Arabic geographies and Hebrew religious texts travelling from shore to shore and from manuscript to the press and the ‘dead’ bodies of holy women and men this volume intends to tackle objects as sources and subjects of the history of cross-cultural encounters in innovative ways: focusing on the ‘second-handedness’ of displaced objects across the Mediterranean the volume intersects different chronologies — from antiquity to the present-day — and varying scales from the individual objects to the much larger one of the histories of their reinterpretation and repurposing.

The use of the past for contemporary purposes has been a feature of historical and archaeological investigation from ancient times. This ‘politicization of the past’ is often associated with at best an inadvertent detachment from an objective use of evidence and at worst its wilful misuse. Such use of the past is perhaps most evident in the construction of narratives of nations and ethnic groups — particularly in relation to origins or the perceived ‘golden ages’ of peoples.

This book seeks to assess the role played by different ideologies in the shaping of the past from early times up until the present day in the interpretation of the history and archaeology of Northern Europe whether in Northern Europe itself or further afield. It also considers how those who research interpret and present the Northern European past should respond to such uses. The chapters drawn together here explore key questions asking how contemporary ideologies of identity have shaped the past what measures should be taken to discourage an inaccurate understanding of the past and if scholars should draw on the past in order to counter racism and xenophobia or if this can itself lead to potentially dangerous misunderstandings of history.

Claude Langlois est l’auteur d’une œuvre considérable par son ampleur sa diversité et son inventivité qui fait sans nul doute de lui l’un des très grands historiens de sa génération. Il fut directeur d’études à l’EPHE de 1993 à 2005 président de la section des sciences religieuses entre 1995 et 2002 co-fondateur avec Régis Debray en 2002 de l’IESR dont il fut le directeur de 2002 à 2005. Il n’a cessé - du Catholicisme au féminin (1984) à la suite sur Thérèse de Lisieux en passant par L’Encyclopédie théologique de Migne (1992) Le crime d’Onan (2005) et nombre de ses articles - de questionner le statut de l’histoire religieuse au regard d’une histoire sociale d’une histoire culturelle d’une histoire du genre ; il a fait de la production du discours théologique un observatoire aigu du changement religieux.

Où en est aujourd’hui le débat sur les manières d’historiciser la théologie ? Quel parti tirer des voies pionnières ouvertes par Claude Langlois ? Les auteurs de ce volume - historiens sociologues théologiens et spécialistes de littérature - explorent ces questions et donnent à voir à travers la pluralité de leurs contributions un paysage de recherche nourri d’intelligence complice.

Cet ouvrage est le témoignage de leur reconnaissance envers un historien et un professeur qui n’a cessé d’ouvrir des chantiers nouveaux et d’arpenter des terrains en friche livrant sa propre recherche aux surprises de l’archive et à ses détours imprévus sans jamais renoncer au dialogue avec celles et ceux pour lesquels son œuvre continue d’être une précieuse source de réflexion.

The Enlightenment has often been used as a fundamental reference point for understanding the evolution of societies. Nevertheless the broad nature of this term hides great inequalities between different historiographical traditions with some countries considered to have ‘ownership’ of this intellectual and cultural current which arose in the eighteenth century while other lands have been considered at best peripheral or at worst have been wholly disregarded. This is particularly true of the Ottoman Empire and of the Balkan states founded in the first decades of the nineteenth century which have often been studied only through their relationship with France Great Britain and German. This however is not sufficient for understanding how these countries entered modernity. The studies gathered in this book seek to question the invention of the National Enlightenment the history of representations of the European Enlightenment and their variations in Balkan space and time and the phenomena of acculturation and rejection that can be identified in the histories of these lands in order to offer new insights into the contradictory aspirations of nations that have often been torn between several different models of society.

Voici un siècle que Max Weber est mort. Ses thèses parfois audacieuses font encore couler beaucoup d’encre aujourd’hui. Auteur en sciences humaines parmi les plus lus cités convoqués dans la sphère publique et intellectuelle le sociologue allemand du début du xx e siècle avait avancé que l’essor du capitalisme au xvi e siècle puisait certaines de ses origines dans la conduite quotidienne des protestants puritains anglais. C’est la thèse d’un chercheur inclassable. Les historiens francophones de Lucien Febvre à Fernand Braudel en passant par Henri Pirenne seront des obstacles à de rares exceptions à la diffusion des thèses de Weber qui mirent plusieurs décennies avant d’être traduites en français. Ce livre porte sur l’histoire d’un refus d’une absence de désir d’une communauté de savoir à l’égard d’un auteur auquel on reproche de maltraiter la causalité en histoire de pratiquer l’anachronisme le jugement de valeur de jargonner d’incarner une science allemande dont la rationalité n’a pas évité deux guerres mondiales et d’avoir lancé un défi hors norme à la notion de discipline. Cette occultation de Weber donne à voir un impensé des intellectuels et des historiens dans la France du xx e siècle. Ce qu’ils n’ont pas lu ou refusent de comprendre nous informe avant tout sur eux-mêmes.

Plus vivaces que jamais les traditions musicales et dansées du Pays basque peuvent parfois donner l’impression d’une intemporalité qui aurait traversé les siècles. Or ici comme ailleurs les traditions ont une histoire et seule l’analyse du temps long permet de restituer l’épaisseur des permanences mutations emprunts qui émaillent l’histoire de la musique et des danses sur ce territoire. Ce livre s’attache à résoudre l’énigme du recours contemporain à la tradition en analysant l’historicité de la musique à danser et de ses usages sociaux. Des ménétriers rehaussant les corporations urbaines d’Ancien régime jusqu’aux usages sociopolitiques contemporains de la farce charivarique en passant par la relecture de la musique par le mouvement culturel basque au xix e siècle ce livre propose un voyage à la fois musical et sociohistorique qui bien au-delà du cas basque informe sur notre rapport sélectif aux héritages culturels.

Les livres d’heures best-seller durant six siècles sont le meilleur témoin des mutations qui affectent l’objet-livre entre le xiv e et le xx e siècle. L’économie dans laquelle il s’insère les mutations iconographiques et textuelles enfin les usages symboliques qu’en font leurs propriétaires sont révélateurs des inflexions majeures que connaît le livre au cours du temps. Au-delà d’une classique histoire du livre cet essai entend aussi et surtout prolonger la réflexion en direction des usages patrimoniaux des livres de prière : comment un livre conçu pour les oratoires domestiques renaît-il aujourd’hui dans les réserves climatisées des bibliothèques publiques d’Occident ? Ce parcours est retracé dans le détail des cabinets des collectionneurs depuis le xvii e siècle jusqu’aux équipements culturels actuels en passant par les salles des ventes les bureaux des érudits depuis le xix e siècle les manuels scolaires les tables à dessin des enlumineurs amateurs. Une attention particulière est réservée aux politiques culturelles et aux mesures conservatoires édictées par l’État depuis le début du xix e siècle et aux effets des « classements » sur les biens patrimoniaux.

Cette histoire des livres d’heures entend donc articuler le temps de la production et de la consommation d’une part et celui des requalifications patrimoniales sur le temps long.

Since the early nineteenth century European pedagogical theory has stimulated a didactic turn towards the visual as an alternative to textual mediations of knowledge through books and lectures. Pedagogues and policymakers who strove for a more child-centred approach to teaching were soon joined by media producers and marketers in their aim to transform the classroom into a multimodal space for learning. From the turn of the twentieth century onwards teachers were increasingly pressured to incorporate high-profile media technologies such as stereoscopes lantern and film projectors into their lessons.

This collection of essays focuses on European educational light projection from its first appearance at the end of the nineteenth century through the 1990s when digital image projection started to gradually replace analogue film slide and overhead projectors. It explores the classroom use of these technologies. In doing so it challenges top-down approaches to the introduction of new visual technology and questions discourses that characterize the relation of visual media technology to teachers as one of consumption. The studies in this volume demonstrate how everyday demands and preferences transformed the 'ideal' instructional culture as put forward by policymakers producers and pedagogues into distinctive didactic practices that worked around or went beyond the pre-imposed ways of usage of visual media products. The volume moves beyond the view of instructional technology as a one-way route to modernization and teaching efficiency. By laying bare the power relations interests and ideologies at play the contributions also lend insight into the intertwinement between politics media material culture and classroom practices.