An unrealized cult? Hagiography and Norman ducal genealogy in twelfth‐century England
This article traces the adoption and ideological uses of the image of the pious Norman dukes in four consecutive hagiographical texts written in twelfth-century England. While this is a well-known topos of the earlier Norman tradition, its reception in England has been neglected in the existing scholarship. The article also examines further evidence of an interest in pious Norman dukes under Henry II, focusing on the translation of the remains of Richard I and Richard II at Fecamp in Normandy in 1162 and discussing whether the dukes' official cult could have been established. The conclusion situates the material in the general context of the development of the cults of lay rulers in twelfth-century Europe and sheds light on the interplay between hagiography, historical memory and politics at the time.
Pope Alexander III and the Canonization of Saints: The Alexander Prize Essay
Although the cult of the saints was so prominent an element in medieval religion, decrees controlling it occupy a comparatively small place in the medieval canon law. In the Decretum of Gratian, composed about nineteen years before Alexander III became pope, there are only two decrees of importance which seem to concern the canonization of saints. They come from the two chief periods of legislation on this subject, the fifth and the ninth centuries. The first of them is a canon of the so-called fifth Council of Carthage (401 A.D.) which was perpetuated in the West in the Dionysian and Hispana collections, and was among the canons chosen from the Dionysiana by Charles the Great as specially relevant to his time. The second was passed in 813 by the Council of Mainz and under the influence of the same emperor. Together they appear in the collections of Burchard of Worms and Ivo of Chartres and then in the Decretum of Gratian where they remained in effect the only written legislation on the subject until the time of the fourth Lateran Council.
Selling the War Abroad: West African Initiatives and the making of British War Propaganda 1939-1945
Studies in British war propaganda during the Second World have focussed mainly on the efforts made at “selling the war at home.” In many of these studies war propaganda in the colonies is seen simply as extensions of the discourses produced in the metroples of Europe. Imperial propaganda was essentially the dissemination of information from the metropole to the colonies. This paper argues that West Africans were not just receivers and replicators of colonial war propaganda. The colonies were also sites for the production of imperial war propaganda and Africans were central to colonial propaganda machinery. Imperial propaganda had to be modified to meet the needs of the colonies and Africans played important roles in this process. The role of Africans in the making of colonial war propaganda is particularly evident in the impact of war propaganda on the politics of decolonisation in British West Africa. Although war propaganda provided an opportunity for Britain to rally the support of her West African subjects against what was presented as a dreaded common enemy, it also provided new opportunities for emergent West African elites to articulate nationalist demands on a world stage drawing on the same discourses of self-determination that underscored British war propaganda. Lagos Historical Review Vol. 7 2007: pp. 35-56