In This Issue

     This issue contains four articles and a review essay. The articles examine secret churches in early modern Europe, anti-Jewish discrimination in medieval Spain, voluntary associations in tsarist Russia, and the connections between Buffalo Bill Cody and Bram Stoker. The review essay is a global assessment of the current literature on mass violence and mass killings in the twentieth century. In addition, the issue contains our usual array of book and film reviews.

Articles

     Benjamin Kaplan examines an aspect of the history of religious toleration often ignored: the practical arrangements that have enabled different religious groups to live alongside one another peacefully. He focuses on one such arrangement, a type of church building invented in the wake of the Protestant and Catholic reformations. Known in Dutch as a schuilkerk, or clandestine church, it had hundreds of examples in the Dutch Republic, the Holy Roman Empire, the British Isles, and other parts of early modern Europe. These structures went by a great variety of names: house chapel, prayer house, and mass house, to name a few. Often looking on the outside like ordinary houses, they hid the worship of religious dissenters from public view. They were not truly secret, however, since neighbors and officials invariably knew of their existence. But, as dissenters learned, by practicing their faith behind a domestic façade, they gave less offense to members of the local official church. Kaplan argues that giving these places of worship a superficial invisibility allowed communities to maintain a semblance of religious unity. Through their connivance in this comforting fiction, dissenters, conformers, and officials all contributed to the creation of a new distinction between public and private spheres. Kaplan's essay thus gives us a new understanding of both the mechanisms of religious coexistence and the way in which boundaries were drawn between public and private spheres of life.

     David Nirenberg reminds us that sexual prohibitions are among the most universal ways in which communities imagine their boundaries. Although he explains that this universality makes them attractive to historians and other social scientists, he also acknowledges that it makes them difficult to analyze historically. How, he asks, are we to subject such general phenomena to the particulars of place and time? In order to confront this question, Nirenberg first describes a sexualized logic through which medieval Christians imagined their common solidarity and the boundaries that set them apart from their Muslim and Jewish neighbors. Then he traces that logic across a period of dramatic transformation in Spanish history, a period punctuated by the massacre of thousands of Jews in 1391 and the conversion to Christianity of thousands more. He does so to analyze how the logic of sexual boundaries structured the expression of contemporary anxieties about these changes and how this logic itself was transformed by these anxieties. In this manner, Nirenberg's investigation of medieval Spain provides a case study for questions that are relevant to any number of societies whose categories and classifications are radically destabilized by mass conversion, assimilation, or emancipation.

     Joseph Bradley explores civil society and the public sphere in imperial Russia by focusing on voluntary associations, a component watched closely by tsarist officialdom but neglected by historians. He does so within a broad theoretical and comparative context that uses the study of associations to highlight the relationship between state and society in authoritarian regimes, such as Russia's, where civil society was vigorously contested. By examining the contribution of a select group of well-known St. Petersburg and Moscow societies to three broad areas of public life—the application of science, the study of the national heritage, and social reform movements—he reconstructs the broader institutional framework in which associations operated. Bradley argues that, in the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, Russians created a public sphere and secular associations based on the model of the European Enlightenment that raised consciousness, accorded an opportunity for special-interest constituencies of men to enter the public arena, framed policy issues, and mobilized a public in the language of representation. Accordingly, he maintains, views of Russian political culture must be modified to take into consideration what kept tsarist Russia together as well as what broke it apart, the opportunities as well as the constraints for individual initiative. By suggesting how the growth of associations and the idea of citizenship could emerge under autocracy, Bradley's essay helps us think about how to conceptualize the development of civil society and the way in which the disenfranchised enter public life.

     Louis S. Warren tells us that, as unlikely as it may seem, during the 1880s and 1890s, William F. Cody, the impresario of Buffalo Bill's Wild West show, and Bram Stoker, the author of Dracula, socialized together in London. He argues that their relationship was crucial to the creation of Stoker's vampire tale, and that the most famous gothic novel should be read as a frontier story. As Warren demonstrates, showman and novelist each sought to address pervasive anxieties about racial decay by appealing to frontier myths of Anglo-Saxon race origin. But where the Wild West show's vision of frontier history was optimistic and progressive, the novel Dracula was pessimistic about the legacy of frontiers for Western civilization. He suggests that European ideas of the frontier merit more examination, and there is much to be learned by exploring the dark fears of frontier conquest that informed much gothic literature and contemporary criticism of American expansion. Warren's provocative new interpretations of frontier mythology and the novel Dracula provides us with a new way of examining the frontier mythology of the transatlantic world.

Review Essay

     Mark Mazower explores the recent tendency to highlight the violent nature of the modern state and questions the degree to which our understanding of this phenomenon has been influenced by the contemporary concern with the Holocaust. He examines the general categories—notably "genocide," "ethnic cleansing," and "totalitarianism"—that have been employed to generate wide-ranging discussions of mass violence, and suggests that these categories are of limited usefulness to historians. Instead, Mazower argues in favor of giving greater attention to the role of contingency in explaining the origins of episodes of mass violence, notably the impact of wars and of periods of international tension such as the Cold War, and explores the differing roles played by military, paramilitary, and civilian agencies within the state apparatus of various regimes and countries. He also examines how the Eurocentric character of the debate on mass violence has led settler violence against indigenous peoples to be downplayed, and how the connections between practices of violence in imperial and European settings have similarly been neglected. Mazower concludes by suggesting that even though mass violence may be a weapon in the hands of non-state actors, we should not write off the state too readily as a violent actor. His comprehensive and thought-provoking analysis places mass violence in a global perspective that challenges us to reexamine the ways in which we understand this critical issue.

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