{"title":"Tying the knot in language-divided Belgium. A research into marriage partner selection in Flemish municipalities along the language border with Wallonia, 1798–1938","authors":"W. Metzlar, K. Matthijs, P. Puschmann","doi":"10.1017/S0268416023000206","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0268416023000206","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In nineteenth-century Europe, local and regional marriage markets turned into national marriage markets as a result of modernisation. However, the question is whether this applied also to Belgium, a nation that became increasingly divided over a language dispute between French-speaking Walloons and Dutch-speaking Flemings. To answer this question, this study examines trends and determinants of mixed marriages in municipalities in which Flemings and Walloons lived in close proximity of each other. The results show that marriages between Flemings and Walloons had always been rare and became even rarer over time, suggesting a strong and growing divide in the marriage market.","PeriodicalId":45309,"journal":{"name":"Continuity and Change","volume":"38 1","pages":"193 - 223"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48074493","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The regulation of the rural market in waged labour in fourteenth-century England","authors":"M. Bailey","doi":"10.1017/S0268416023000188","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0268416023000188","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article reconstructs the size and organisation of the rural market in hired labour in fourteenth-century England, providing a comparative reference point for arrangements elsewhere in medieval Europe. Quantitative assessment of 1,445 manorial court sessions from six manors casts new light on the English labour market, which was larger and less regulated than previously assumed and the government's wide-ranging labour legislation in the wake of the Black Death was novel in its scale and provisions. Contrary to received wisdom, manorial authorities made few efforts to regulate labour. The older view had placed an over-reliance on the early work of W.O. Ault and had ignored the significance of nil returns. The reasons for the lack of regulation, and its implications for our understanding of the complex interaction between pandemics, labour markets, and legal responses are explored. Finally, the study illustrates how legal responses to pandemics can have inadvertent yet profound consequences.","PeriodicalId":45309,"journal":{"name":"Continuity and Change","volume":"38 1","pages":"137 - 162"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-07-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44903984","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Oath-taking and the politics of secrecy in medieval and early modern British towns","authors":"Esther Liberman Cuenca","doi":"10.1017/s0268416023000073","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0268416023000073","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In premodern Britain civic officials took oaths in solemn ceremonies in full view of their colleagues and fellow citizens. This article examines oaths ranging from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries from 31 towns in England, Scotland, and Ireland to demonstrate how officials were ritually enjoined to keep secrets. Oaths were public acknowledgments that secrets were going to be kept. The act of governing necessitated the keeping of secrets to ensure the protection of the town's interests. But oath-taking was also a concession to the idea that governing required a degree of transparency for the ruling elite and other authorities to appear legitimate and incorruptible.","PeriodicalId":45309,"journal":{"name":"Continuity and Change","volume":"38 1","pages":"9 - 29"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-04-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42197270","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Peter Collinge and Louise Falcini (eds.), Providing for the Poor: The Old Poor Law, 1750–1834 (London: Institute of Historical Research, 2022). Pages xv + 224 + 10 Images +5 Maps. £24.99 paperback.","authors":"Carrie Long","doi":"10.1017/S0268416023000139","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0268416023000139","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45309,"journal":{"name":"Continuity and Change","volume":"38 1","pages":"107 - 108"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-04-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49207107","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Performative openness and governmental secrecy in fourteenth century Valencia","authors":"Adam Franklin-Lyons","doi":"10.1017/S0268416023000085","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0268416023000085","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In the fourteenth century, the urban council of Valencia tried to balance maintaining the secrecy of their government with a perceived need to publicise their actions. The council knew from experience that information vacuums could be dangerous. Feuds between noble groups made the urban council wary of the secret actions of council members. Food shortages and the anti-Jewish riots in 1391 also pressured the council to project a public face of action to quell urban unrest. In response, the city enacted a performative publicity: a public show of information dissemination concerning the normal operations of government that still occluded the actual discussions of the council.","PeriodicalId":45309,"journal":{"name":"Continuity and Change","volume":"38 1","pages":"31 - 52"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-04-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46434462","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The materiality of secrets: everyday secrecy in postwar Soviet Union","authors":"A. Siddiqi","doi":"10.1017/S0268416023000103","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0268416023000103","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The intensive culture of secrecy and censorship in postwar Soviet society was enabled by bureaucracies such as Glavlit, the principal agency for censorship, but also by a secondary level of ‘parasitic bureaucracy’ involving institutions and paperwork which drew lifeblood from the core regime of secrecy but had no reason to exist otherwise. In highlighting everyday secrecy at the office (through the ‘first departments’ responsible for workplace secrecy) and in libraries (in the work of special storage units for censored books), this article shows how this parasitic bureaucratic culture of secrecy prioritised the regulation of knowledge in its material and spatial forms.","PeriodicalId":45309,"journal":{"name":"Continuity and Change","volume":"38 1","pages":"75 - 97"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-04-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48117762","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Bureaucratic secrecy and the regulation of knowledge in Europe over the longue durée: Obfuscation, omission, performance, and policing","authors":"Esther Liberman Cuenca, A. Siddiqi","doi":"10.1017/S0268416023000061","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0268416023000061","url":null,"abstract":"In his now-classic mediation on the sociology of secrecy, Georg Simmel cautioned that while ‘human interaction is conditioned by the capacity to speak, it is [also] shaped by the capacity to be silent’.1 As historians, we are trained to see what is present, what is material, and what has effect. Investigating absence, on the other hand, as rewarding as it can be when we are able to reconstruct the seemingly unknowable, can lead us astray with speculative banalities or even counter-factual histories. Yet, as one manifestation of absence in society – in this case, the absence of knowledge – secrecy has had a fundamental place in the constitution, shaping, and functioning of the premodern and modern worlds. It has operated in many registers and appeared in many forms, such as censorship, coded language, classification regimes, and in oaths promising secrecy. All these modes in which we find practices related to secrecy operated within bureaucracies where the regulation of knowledge was either explicitly or implicitly part of their functioning. In looking at manifestations of absences – in particular, practices designed to regulate and then render knowledge absent – bureaucracies represent an emblematic and instructive site to explore questions on the co-constitution of power and knowledge.2","PeriodicalId":45309,"journal":{"name":"Continuity and Change","volume":"38 1","pages":"1 - 8"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-04-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49384837","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Keeping you in the dark: the Bastille archives and police secrecy in eighteenth-century France","authors":"N. Bauer","doi":"10.1017/s0268416023000097","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0268416023000097","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract During the French Revolution, the Bastille prison had become synonymous with abuses of power and government secrecy. The Paris police had long exercised secrecy in its operations, but in the eighteenth century, they became a target of the revolutionaries as the most visible arm of a government that was seen as opaque but intrusive. Both the growing power of the modernising state and the rise of public opinion in this period contributed to changing attitudes towards government secrecy and to the valorisation of transparency in the political culture of the Revolution.","PeriodicalId":45309,"journal":{"name":"Continuity and Change","volume":"38 1","pages":"53 - 73"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-04-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43037071","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Afterword: hidden beauty","authors":"M. Gordin","doi":"10.1017/S0268416023000115","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0268416023000115","url":null,"abstract":"People love a secret, as long as they are in on it. One might even argue that historians are more attracted to secrecy than the average scholar, or average individual, in that the tools we have for unearthing documentation from the past regularly trawl up long-dormant secrets. At one time, someone may have died to preserve this secret; for me, it is lying accessible in an archive. The challenge is not reading the secret – it is crafting an argument and a narrative that would make others care for this once tightly-held confidence. This fascination of access to privileged information, to being (whether licitly or not) in the know, and the rich texture that hidden material provides, partly explains the recurrent historiographical attention to secrecy. Historians get to have both secrecy and transparency at once, at least in many cases where the precious documents survive and are not still locked behind the classificatory walls of national-security states or profit-seeking megacorporations.","PeriodicalId":45309,"journal":{"name":"Continuity and Change","volume":"38 1","pages":"99 - 104"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-04-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44900551","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}