In This Issue

     This issue contains three articles, an AHR Forum Essay, and a review essay. The articles analyze the nature and experience of the Black Death, the origins of Anglo-American anti-Catholicism, and the emergence of an Ottoman Orientalism. The Forum Essay argues that the reach of environmental history must be extended to ensure that historians incorporate the natural world into their narratives. It is the fifth of a series that we call Forum Essays. Instead of commissioning comments on the essay, as is our usual practice with Forums, we are opening up the commentary process to readers by soliciting their reactions to the article. And this year rather than print a few replies, we will take advantage of the new online AHR to hold a moderated discussion between the author and commentators in early September. Details can be found in the Forum Essay introduction on page 797. The article section concludes with an assessment of the current state of historiography on emotions. In addition, the issue contains our usual array of book and film reviews.

Articles

     Samuel K. Cohn, Jr., reexamines the European Black Death of 1347–1351. He makes two basic arguments. First, the social, political, and psychological reactions to the Black Death did not recur with successive strikes of the plague as historians often assume. Later plagues of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries did not provoke attacks against Jews or lead to widespread flagellant movements outside the church's control. Chroniclers turned from supernatural and religious explanations of the plague increasingly to one grounded in social and political realities, and doctors went from utter despair in 1348 to claim with confidence afterward that their cures had "triumphed over the plague." Second, Cohn challenges the standard assumption that the Black Death and its successive waves were the same disease as the subtropical rat plague transmitted by fleas, whose bacillus (Yersinia pestis) was first cultured in Hong Kong in 1894. One key difference between them was the adaptation between pathogen and human hosts. While humans possess no natural immunity to Yersinia pestis, they adapted rapidly to late medieval plagues, as illustrated by the sharp and steady declines in plague mortalities and increasing proportions of victims who were children, unexposed to previous bouts of the disease. Cohn contends that this adaptation helps to explain a fundamental enigma of the early Renaissance mentality: why a new culture of secularism, state-building, and "fame and glory" should have sprung forth in the midst of mass mortality. His article thus raises compelling questions about the social and political implications of epidemiological evidence.

     Anne McLaren tells us that virulent anti-Catholicism became a hallmark of Anglo-American political culture during the early modern period. And, she reminds us, the effects of that development are still with us. McLaren traces its genesis in late sixteenth-century England and considers some of its implications, in particular the move to republicanism and "constitutional" monarchy in the seventeenth century. She notes that in his seminal study Foxe's "Book of Martyrs" and the Elect Nation (1963) William Haller asserted that anti-Catholicism was a "functional tool" in Elizabethan state formation. McLaren argues that Haller arrived at the right conclusion, but from anachronistic premises. During Elizabeth's reign, it was female rule that was at issue, specifically the specter of a female succession: the English crown, and the British Empire, handed from Elizabeth to her cousin Mary Queen of Scots on the basis of blood right. In this specific historical context, McLaren contends, Mary's Catholicism proved to be an effective tool for mobilizing the male political nation to disallow this outcome. She tracks the deliberate construction of Catholicism as a stigma sufficiently powerful to undermine the blood claims to political authority of a female ruler. This undertaking drew on existing conceptions of gender to articulate Protestantism, nationalism, and the civic capacity for virtue, which was defined as an exclusively male entitlement. The men engaged in this endeavor, she concludes, did not intend to open the gateway to republicanism but rather to secure a male Protestant succession, specifically a line of godly kings. McLaren's article thus provides yet another example of the critical role of gender beliefs and practices in political history.

     Ussama Makdisi explores the emergence of an Ottoman Orientalism. He argues that the nineteenth century saw a fundamental shift from an earlier Ottoman imperial paradigm based on a hierarchal system of subordination along religious, class, and ethnic lines into an imperial view suffused with nationalist modernization rooted in a discourse of progress. Ottoman modernization, he explains, supplanted an established discourse of religious subordination with a temporal subordination in which an advanced imperial center reformed and disciplined backward peripheries of a multi-ethnic and multi-religious empire. By showing how the temporal categories of Western Orientalism were appropriated by non-Western elites, Makdisi begins to explore now non-Western modernization and resistance to Western imperialism engendered its own interrelated forms of representation and domination.

AHR Forum Essay

     Ted Steinberg argues that despite the growing recognition of environmental history as a field of study, historians have largely failed to incorporate the natural world into their narratives. He maintains, however, that adopting an ecological approach can change how we view some of the most venerable topics in history. He develops that point with examples from the history of the United States, including industrialization, agrarian change in the post–Civil War South, Progressive Era urban reform, and the conservation movement. Moving nature from the background to the foreground, Steinberg shows that the enclosure of common resources—river fisheries, pastureland, city streets, and hunting grounds—emerged as a major theme in nineteenth-century America. And he reveals how attention to environmental issues can result in a different and more satisfying understanding of how power operates in society. Building on the theoretical work of Anthony Giddens and William H. Sewell, Steinberg challenges readers to rethink their views on agency, urging those concerned with oppression to supplement the categories of race, class, and gender with some respect for the dynamics of the world of nature. Rather than commission commentators for this Forum, we invite interested readers to participate in an online discussion of Steinberg's essay during the first two weeks of September 2002. Details can be found in the introduction to the Forum.

Review Essay

     Barbara H. Rosenwein contends that the current historiography of emotions is disquieting. Without explicitly articulating its own assumptions, it traces a progressive evolution that begins with a childish, violent, and unrestrained Middle Ages and moves to the present, when emotions are disciplined and supposedly under control. This grand narrative, already found in the work of the turn-of-the-century medievalist Johan Huizinga, is powerfully bolstered by theories of the sociologist Norbert Elias and by the penchant of modernists to bracket off the Middle Ages. It relies, however, on a mistaken view of the nature of emotions, a hydraulic model in which emotions are pressing for release and difficult to contain. The cognitive and social constructionist paradigms of emotions, elaborated by psychologists and anthropologists over the last several decades, have overturned this hydraulic model in scientific circles. Rosenwein argues that these new paradigms can be very useful for historians. She explains that they allow historians to recognize that there is no such thing as "untrammeled" and "pure" emotion. Emotions are evaluations that depend on social norms, mores, and perceptions—and that in turn affect such norms, mores, and perceptions. She calls on historians to jettison the evolutionary model and concentrate instead on "emotional communities," which exist in every period, and which have their own shape and style of emotional feeling and expression. By bringing to the fore the largely hidden assumptions that have lain behind emotions history as it has been practiced, Rosenwein not only repositions the Middle Ages but also frees historians of any period to explore emotions without being in thrall to the radically simplifying binaries of discipline and indiscipline.