|
|
- Bureaucratic secrecy and the regulation of knowledge in Europe over the
longue durée: Obfuscation, omission, performance, and policing-
Free pre-print version: Loading...
Rate this result:
What is this?
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating.
A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Authors: Cuenca; Esther Liberman, Siddiqi, Asif A.
Pages: 1 - 8
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
PubDate: 2023-04-28
DOI: 10.1017/S0268416023000061
- CON volume 38 issue 1 Cover and Front matter
-
Free pre-print version: Loading...
Rate this result:
What is this?
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating.
A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Pages: 1 - 2
PubDate: 2023-04-28
DOI: 10.1017/S0268416023000152
- CON volume 38 issue 1 Cover and Back matter
-
Free pre-print version: Loading...
Rate this result:
What is this?
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating.
A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Pages: 1 - 2
PubDate: 2023-04-28
DOI: 10.1017/S0268416023000164
- Oath-taking and the politics of secrecy in medieval and early modern
British towns-
Free pre-print version: Loading...
Rate this result:
What is this?
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating.
A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Authors: Cuenca; Esther Liberman
Pages: 9 - 29
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.
PubDate: 2023-04-28
DOI: 10.1017/S0268416023000073
- Performative openness and governmental secrecy in fourteenth century
Valencia-
Free pre-print version: Loading...
Rate this result:
What is this?
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating.
A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Authors: Franklin-Lyons; Adam
Pages: 31 - 52
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.
PubDate: 2023-04-28
DOI: 10.1017/S0268416023000085
- Keeping you in the dark: the Bastille archives and police secrecy in
eighteenth-century France-
Free pre-print version: Loading...
Rate this result:
What is this?
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating.
A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Authors: Bauer; Nicole
Pages: 53 - 73
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.
PubDate: 2023-04-28
DOI: 10.1017/S0268416023000097
- The materiality of secrets: everyday secrecy in postwar Soviet Union
-
Free pre-print version: Loading...
Rate this result:
What is this?
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating.
A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Authors: Siddiqi; Asif A.
Pages: 75 - 97
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.
PubDate: 2023-04-28
DOI: 10.1017/S0268416023000103
- Afterword: hidden beauty
-
Free pre-print version: Loading...
Rate this result:
What is this?
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating.
A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Authors: Gordin; Michael D.
Pages: 99 - 104
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.
PubDate: 2023-04-28
DOI: 10.1017/S0268416023000115
- Stuart Banner, The Decline of Natural Law: How American Lawyers once used
Natural Law and Why They Stopped (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2021).
Pages 264. £39.99 hardback.-
Free pre-print version: Loading...
Rate this result:
What is this?
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating.
A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Authors: Helmholz; R. H.
Pages: 105 - 106
PubDate: 2023-04-28
DOI: 10.1017/S0268416023000127
- 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.-
Free pre-print version: Loading...
Rate this result:
What is this?
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating.
A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Authors: Long; Carrie
Pages: 107 - 108
PubDate: 2023-04-28
DOI: 10.1017/S0268416023000139
- Charlotte Berry, The Margins of Late Medieval London, 1430–1540 (London:
University of London Press, 2022) Pages xl + 244 + figures 15 + tables 13.
£40 hardback, £25 paperback, free eBook.-
Free pre-print version: Loading...
Rate this result:
What is this?
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating.
A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Authors: Colson; Justin
Pages: 109 - 111
PubDate: 2023-04-28
DOI: 10.1017/S0268416023000140
|
Hybrid journal (It can contain Open Access articles)
