Funded by
Curry, Professor Anne
Professor of Medieval History, University of Southampton
The English Army in Normandy, 1415–1450
Henry V is best known for his victory at Agincourt but equally impressive was his later systematic conquest of Normandy which ushered in over thirty years of English rule. This was a unique military experience for the English. Never before had they sustained such an intensive hold over such a large area of France for such a long period. The surviving archives for the army of occupation, left behind when the English were booted out in 1449-50, are exceptionally rich, making possible the reconstruction of the composition as well as the actions of the army. The project will create an analytical narrative contrasting five main periods: conquest 1415-20; consolidation 1420-1428; crisis 1428-1436; retrenchment 1436-1444; and denouement 1444-50. The methodology will be to investigate interrelationships between, on the one hand, trends in political and military circumstances in both England and France, and, on the other, changes in the deployment, organization and personnel of the army in Normandy. Military historians in the past have tended to treat ‘events’ separately from ‘systems’: the aim here is to integrate the two. In addition, four key themes will be explored comparatively over the whole period: command structures; the soldiery; civil/military relations; support systems (such as the rise of artillery). The uniting theme of the whole study is an evaluation of the English military system within the broader debate about the rise of state armies in late medieval and early modern Europe. Should we see the English army which occupied Normandy during the exciting and intriguing second phase of the Hundred Years War (1415-50) as ‘the first English standing army’?
Duff, Professor Peter
Professor of Criminal Justice, School of Law, University of Aberdeen
Theorising the Scottish Law of Criminal Evidence: Hearsay and Expert Opinion Evidence
The law of criminal evidence in Scotland is under-theorised, unlike its counterpart south of the border where there are a variety of excellent textbooks which adopt a theoretical perspective and many excellent, scholarly articles commenting upon and criticising developments in the law of evidence. The main reason for this lacuna is that there has been almost no academic writing in the area of Scots criminal evidence, primarily because in the five Scottish law schools, until very recently, the law of evidence was traditionally regarded as a ‘professional’ subject and was thus taught by practitioners engaged by the universities very much on a part-time basis. Another contributory factor is a widespread feeling that the Scots law in this field is very distinctive, if not unique, and a consequent lack of interest in both the law and academic writing in other jurisdictions. On closer scrutiny, this insularity is not intellectually justifiable, the problems facing the Scots law of criminal evidence, unsurprisingly, bearing a remarkable resemblance to the issues arising elsewhere.
The sub-projects referred to above are part of a greater and longer-term enterprise which aims to bring a theoretical perspective to the law of criminal evidence in Scotland. I have recently published long articles on other aspects of the law of criminal evidence in Scotland, namely ‘similar facts’ evidence and the admissibility of irregularly obtained real evidence. These draw heavily upon the English academic writers, such as Ashworth, Cross, Dennis, McEwan, Tapper, Twining and Zuckerman, and their efforts to develop an intellectually rigorous framwork within which the law of evidence can develop. The topics involved in the present study - ie hearsay evidence and expert opinion evidence – represent the next stages involved in going through all major aspects of the Scottish law of criminal evidence.
The work to be done in 2004-5 will involve tracing the development of the Scots law in these two areas from the time of the institutional writings of Hume until the present day by analysing all the relevant cases and attempting to identify the principles which have been guiding the Scottish courts. In addition, there has been some legislative activity as regards hearsay evidence, following a consideration of this topic by the Scottish Law Commission in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The main purpose of this exercise will be to identify a theoretical framework, informed by the body of English scholarship, which justifies and clarifies the approach adopted by the Scottish courts to hearsay and expert opinion evidence without unduly distorting the main Scottish authorities and remaining true to the separate character of Scots law.
Forsdick, Professor Charles
James Barrow Professor of French, School of Modern Languages, University of Liverpool
Toussaint Louverture as Transnational Figure: Representations of the Haitian Revolutionary in World Literature and History
The celebration of the bicentenary of Haitian independence (2004) provides an opportunity to reassess the centrality of Toussaint Louverture to post-colonial history, culture and literature. Reducing the revolutionary leader to the national level risks, however, denying him the transnational, transcultural status he has achieved over the past two centuries. For Toussaint has been translated, transculturated and reinterpreted in such a wide range of historical, cultural and ideological contexts that, even shortly after his death, he had transcended the marginality to which French revolutionary historiography has regularly endeavoured to relegate him. This project proposes to analyse these processes, presenting the posthumous figure as a phenomenon open to a range of re-interpretations and re-contextualizations that variously consolidate, strengthen or dilute the historical figure’s initial impact.
The project’s methodology engages with areas central to recent developments in Arts and Humanities research. Having identified a series of interpretations of Toussaint from a representative range of historical, political, geographical and cultural contexts, I intend to explore the network of relationships between these, considering how the meanings of Toussaint change as they are repeated but also repeat as they are changed. A principal point of reference will be Edward Said’s ‘travelling theory’, of which the project is in many ways a practical exploration; it presents the posthumous Toussaint as a phenomenon open to a range of re-interpretations and re-contextualizations that variously consolidate, strengthen or dilute the historical figure’s initial impact. This investigation of the ‘travelling theory’ thesis will be linked to a reconsideration of two other key concepts in postcolonial studies: transculturation (understood especially as the radical transformation of ideas and phenomena as a result of their transfer between cultures) and translation (presented as part of a wider shift, or ‘translation turn’, in cultural studies). Although the project will not focus in detail on the biographical debates surrounding Toussaint, to which research devoted to him has often been restricted, the processes of transfer and transformation on which it concentrates will also be situated in relation to recent critical work on biography and mythologization, as well as recent studies of memorialization. Toussaint will be read as a figure whose various interpretations range from hagiography to instrumentalization, and who might accordingly be seen as an exemplary postcolonial illustration of what Nora has dubbed a ‘lieu de mémoire’. Two of the global aims of the project are, through exploration of Toussaint in a range of historical contexts, to move beyond some of the restrictions inherent in postcolonial criticism and accordingly to suggest more complex and attenuated ways of understanding intercultural and transcultural phenomena.
Gregor, Dr Neil
Reader in Modern German History, University of Southampton
War, Memory and Urban Culture: Nuremberg and the Nazi Past, 1945–1968
The past was constantly present in post-war West Germany. Far from being driven to the margins of public consciousness by a population whose desire to forget constituted a ‘second sin’ (Giordano), it was a key site on which contemporary politics was played out. The effects of the Cold War and of the ‘restorationist’ politics of the Adenauer era in allowing some stories to be told and causing others to be suppressed, in giving voice to some communities of remembrance whilst silencing others, have been explored in several studies recently. Together, they have explored how Germans chose to remember their own suffering over that which they had caused to others, how they equated the victims of their own crimes with victims of expulsion in 1945 or of internment in the Soviet Union after the end of the war, how they otherwise imagined the past in a manner which sought to marginalise the peculiar racial destructiveness to which they, as a community, had been party under Nazism. But in treating the stories told of the past simply as a set of apologetic fictions which served contemporary political and ideological ends, such studies fail to answer the question of just why these stories were so compelling to ordinary Germans. The contention of this project is that, as well as seeing in stories of German trauma a set of self-serving fictions which suited the political needs of the 1950s and 1960s, we need to stop and think about the public narratives of the multi-dimensional shocks and aftershocks of the war as being connected to a set of human experiences. This study will thus seek to explain the marginalisation of the Holocaust in West German remembrance as a product less of the Cold War or of domestic political pressures than of the social conditions engendered by war, defeat and occupation.
Schulze, Dr Max-Stephan
Lecturer in Economic History, LSE
A Macroeconomic History of the Habsburg Empire, 1815–1913
Characterized by profound regional differences in geography, income and resource endowments, the Central and East European lands under Habsburg rule formed by area the second largest country in Europe after Russia and ranked among the Continent’s largest economies in terms of total output. This project addresses several major issues in Austria-Hungary’s economic development. First, why did the Habsburg economy fall behind neighbouring western economies with similar initial levels of per capitaincome in the first half of the 19 th century? Second, how can we explain the failure to catch-up thereafter? Third, to what extent was the pattern of growth and structural change shaped by historical contingency? Fourth, why did market integration within Austria-Hungary’s customs union not lead to a more rapid diminution in regional income/development differentials than is observable across European economies not tied together by free trade and a common external tariff? Finally, what were the effects of expanding foreign trade on these regional differentials and what its repercussions on the rate and direction of structural change? The aim of this research is to produce a book on the quantitative macro-economic history of the Habsburg Empire that recognizes both the empire’s position on the European periphery and its internal locational concentration of economic activity. Its purpose is a re-interpretation of the pattern of economic change and its main determinants in the light of new evidence.
Shipley, Professor Graham
Professor of Ancient History, University of Leicester
Macedonian Power and Landscape Change in the Early Hellenistic Peloponnese
This project explores the effects of Macedonian power on the landscapes of the Peloponnese, Greece, in the early Hellenistic period (late fourth to early second centuries BC). It draws on literary sources, inscriptions, and new archaeological data as well as recent work on landscape theory and ancient Mediterranean ecology. It seeks to treat the Peloponnese in a new way, as a set of interacting regions, and explores landscape change in the sense of changes in settlements (rural and urban), cult sites, land use and ownership, and relations between places. Differences of scale (e.g. region, city-state, locality) will be used to characterize change and continuity. Focuses of investigation include regional and local identities, the political structure of city-states and leagues, changes in property ownership and élite power, regional and local interactions, the mechanisms of Macedonian rule and its impact upon the landscape, and the causes of civil strife within Greek cities.
Stewart, Dr Charles
Reader in Anthropology, UCL
The Unconscious and Historical Consciousness: Dreaming of the Past in Greece
Cultural continuity has been a vexed question for those concerned with the history of the area now known as Greece (or ‘Hellas’, as the Greek State recently dictated). Romantic philhellenes and modern Greek patriots assume that contemporary Greek culture must be continuous with ancient Greek culture. Latter-day historians and anthropologists have been more sceptical.
Dr Stewart maintains that how people in this area have themselves thought about continuity or rupture over the last two millennia is what critically matters. The evidence of dreams (systems of interpretation, imagery/motifs of particular dream narratives) has never been considered in relation to continuity. He will explore numerous types of dreams (e.g. of illness, incubation, treasure) to see how they reflect upon historical events. The Hellenic record of dreaming may be considered an unconscious tradition in two respects: 1) Dreaming is generally a non-conscious form of mentation; 2) Contemporary ideologues (folklorists, nationalists) have not yet conceptualized them as a usable ‘tradition’. The great American anthropologist Franz Boas maintained that such ‘unconscious traditions’ furnished prime evidence for the recognition of a culture and its continuity over time. In this case, however, the dreams are often bound up with the mediation of change. By investigating the unconscious as a mode in which people engage with their historicity this project explores new territory in the borderland between History, Anthropology and Psychology.