Department of History and Civilization (HEC)HEC research covers the history of Europe, from the late medieval and early modern period to the presenthttps://hdl.handle.net/1814/19262024-03-23T04:41:09Z2024-03-23T04:41:09ZThe unusual suspects of social change : the sodalities of the Blessed Virgin Mary in late Austrian GaliciaGRUZIEL, Dominikahttps://hdl.handle.net/1814/767252024-03-21T10:59:26Z2023-01-01T00:00:00ZThe unusual suspects of social change : the sodalities of the Blessed Virgin Mary in late Austrian Galicia
GRUZIEL, Dominika
The article joins the research on early twentieth century Catholicism’s transformation to meet challenges of rapidly alternating socio-economic conditions, respond to its ideological competitors, and, finally, rebuff the seculars’ conviction that modernity would see little use for religiously informed forms of collective belonging and religion in general. It builds on the understanding of modernity as a context-contingent and ambiguous project that historical actors, here Roman Catholics male religious and female laity in Habsburg Galicia, filled in with their specific visions, aspirations, and solutions. Specifically, by zooming in on the associative culture of the Sodalities of the Blessed Virgin Mary, this article discusses how forging a local version of Catholic modernity included the deployment of women’s activist aspirations and, further, how this deployment led to the appearance of an intriguing model of pious womanhood with an inbuilt obligation of acting outside of domicile as a prerequisite for its fulfilment.
Published online: 05 December 2023
2023-01-01T00:00:00ZRussia against modernityETKIND, Alexanderhttps://hdl.handle.net/1814/767072024-03-16T02:03:09Z2023-01-01T00:00:00ZRussia against modernity
ETKIND, Alexander
Putin's war is a "special operation" against modernity. The invasion has been directed against Ukraine, but the war has a broader target: the modern world of climate awareness, energy transition and digital labor. By trading oil and gas, promoting Trump and Brexit, spreading corruption, boosting inequality and homophobia, subsidizing far-right movements and destroying Ukraine, Putin's clique aims at suppressing the ongoing transformation of modern societies. Alexander Etkind distinguishes between Russia's pompous, weaponized paleomodernity, on the one hand, and the lean, decentralized gaiamodernity of the Anthropocene, on the other. Putin's clique has used various strategies - from climate denialism and electoral interference to war and genocide - to resist and subvert modernity. Working on political, cultural and even demographic levels, social mechanisms convert the vicious energy of the oil curse into all-out aggression. Dissecting these mechanisms, Etkind's brief but rigorous analyses of social structuration, cultural dynamics and family models reveal the agency that drives the Russian war against modernity. This short, sharp critique of the Russian regime combines political economy, social history and demography to predict the decolonizing and defederating of Russia.
Published online: 19 June 2023
2023-01-01T00:00:00ZDe republica saeculari : the architectonic of freedom and the temporal Republic of Algernon SidneyASHBY, Thomas Alberthttps://hdl.handle.net/1814/767012024-03-16T02:03:02Z2024-01-01T00:00:00ZDe republica saeculari : the architectonic of freedom and the temporal Republic of Algernon Sidney
ASHBY, Thomas Albert
During the twentieth century a flurry of historical and theoretical studies contributed to a renewed and sustained scholarship on English republicanism and the political thought of Algernon Sidney (1623-1683). This literature on Sidney has predominantly been in English, French, Italian, and Portuguese, with further contributions in Dutch and German. Despite the fruits of this voluminous attention, however, the various assumptions of these opposing historiographies – not always in conversation with one another – have often served to obscure, rather than illuminate, what Sidney himself was saying and doing in his work. This thesis seeks to reassess the thought of Sidney in reference to his major works, Court Maxims [1664-1665](1996) and Discourses Concerning Government [1681-1683](1698), but also his overlooked essay Of Love [1650s](1748) and a range of neglected and fresh sources, especially his correspondence. Indeed, utilising an array of sources beyond his works, I also re-examine Sidney’s life and activities, particularly his time as ambassador from the English republic to the monarchies of Denmark-Norway and Sweden (1659-1660). Introducing a significant collection of new manuscript material by Sidney, my first chapter investigates Sidney’s earlier political thinking as a republican magistrate, often intentionally adapted and utilised as an active tool of diplomacy, and the ways in which this early thought is developed into his later writings on government, which is what I reconsider across the remaining six chapters. Crucial to my reassessment of Sidney’s political thought is a conceptual reconstruction, deeper than hitherto attempted, of his vision of fallen and bipartite human nature – body and soul, passion and reason, will and understanding, sense and cognition, vice and virtue – within the time and history of the saeculum. States, like humans, are mortal and exist in historical time, an insight that runs throughout Sidney’s various accounts on the life and death of states, from Greece and Rome to contemporary England. I argue that by closely exploring Sidney’s comprehension of human nature it becomes possible to envision how he proposes not only a synthesis of republicanism and natural law, including virtue ethics and natural rights, but also his Reformed beliefs and what can be called a rationalist political thinking that centres temporal liberty as a right and the end of civil government. Liberty conceived in neo-Roman terms, not virtue, is the essential ordering principle of Sidney’s politics, with virtue redescribed as a supporting force. Accordingly, Sidney cannot be adequately described as Aristotelian or Platonist without serious qualification – something he makes clear in his own words, as I demonstrate, because such perfectibility is beyond mortal beings fallen in time. Moreover, it also becomes apparent that Sidney’s forays into English constitutional historiography, far from contradicting his other arguments, also cohere into his understanding of natural law and temporality. Sidney might appear an eclectic thinker, but he is not as inconsistent as he is often portrayed. Ironically, it is precisely the gravity of Sidney’s idiosyncratic theological beliefs that lead him to not only forsake the extremes of Greek virtue politics, but also adopt a rationalist political thinking later mistaken as irreligious. In a sense, therefore, this thesis also offers to demonstrate the genesis of a confusion and series of false binaries that came to define the contours of the interconnected and opposing historiographies of Sidney from his execution to the present day.
Defence date: 13 March 2024; Examining Board: Prof Ann Thomson, (European University Institute, supervisor); Prof Nicolas Guilhot, (European University Institute); Dr Hannah Dawson, (King's College London); Prof Rachel Hammersley, (Newcastle University)
2024-01-01T00:00:00ZNavigating revolutions and restorations : the Irish colleges in Paris and Rome between 1772 and 1849MCCANN, Muireannhttps://hdl.handle.net/1814/766852024-03-18T08:44:28Z2024-01-01T00:00:00ZNavigating revolutions and restorations : the Irish colleges in Paris and Rome between 1772 and 1849
MCCANN, Muireann
Scholarship on the Irish in Europe has flourished in recent decades and studies examining the network(s) of Irish Catholic continental colleges and their members have formed a significant part of this. However, much of the existing literature focuses on the early modern period, while the nineteenth century has been comparatively neglected. While patterns of Irish migration began to shift in the eighteenth century and legislation previously imposed on Catholics and dissenting Protestants in Ireland was gradually repealed, this thesis shows that these institutions and their residents remained important nodes connecting Irish people and continental Europe. Drawing on material from a mixture of state, church and newspaper archives in Paris, Rome and Ireland, this thesis builds on earlier literature and constructs a fuller analysis of the two Irish Colleges during the first half of the nineteenth century. It establishes why they proved to be so enduring; how they navigated the challenges they faced and the extent to which the nature of their role in relation to their host cities and Ireland was transformed by the process of adaptation and development. It highlights the connections and disconnections within and between the Colleges, as well as with their host cities, the broader Irish community in Europe and, of course, with Ireland itself. These relationships could be shaped—indeed in some cases strained—by the revolutions, regime changes and wars that punctuated the period, and also by political, social and economic developments back in Ireland. As Catholic institutions, the Colleges were frequently impacted by changing relations between the church and the state. Moreover, as Irish institutions composed of subjects of Britain, shifting relations between states, whether France and Britain, Britain and the Papal States or the Papal States and France, were also significant.
Defence date: 22 January 2024; Examining Board: Lucy Riall, (European University Institute, supervisor); Ann Thomson, (European University Institute); Liam Chambers, (Mary Immaculate College); Colin Barr, (University of Notre Dame)
2024-01-01T00:00:00Z