Ulrich von Hutten (1488–1523), a renowned sixteenth-century German humanist, documented the symptoms of the epidemic that swept through Europe starting around 1495, commonly known as the French Disease. While it has traditionally been associated with venereal syphilis, Dutch tropical physician Willem F. R. Essed proposed in 1933, largely unnoticed to this day, that this new disease might instead be tropical yaws. This study establishes a clear link between Hutten’s reported symptoms and yaws, especially in its secondary and tertiary stages. The skeleton discovered in 1968 on Ufnau Island in Lake Zurich where Hutten died and was buried, exhibits distinct bone manifestations of ancient treponematosis with a pattern more consistent with yaws than syphilis. Furthermore, the correspondence between Hutten’s main symptoms and the lesions observable on the 1968 skeleton further confirms the identification of these human remains. The historical evidence of yaws significantly contributes to our understanding of this early modern epidemic.

This article discusses early modern North Indian ways of expressing how barrenness could be mapped onto a woman’s maternal identity. Scholars have engaged with the historical evolution of women’s identities, focusing overwhelmingly on their economic and political potential. This article is the first to use medical and erotological sources from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to study women as procreative agents, and the socio-sexual anxieties prompted by infertile female bodies. Through a critical study of a wide range of medical material, I demonstrate that by the eighteenth century, several transformations in medical discourses can be mapped onto textual transmissions from Sanskrit (and Braj Bhasha) to Persian, as well as between competing but conterminously flourishing medical paradigms, Ayurveda and Yunani. While cures for childlessness have a much longer history, a new genre of ‘anonymous’ sources, particularly focused on the sexual diseases of men and women emerged in early modern North India. Lastly, my comparative methodological approach to different textual genres will complicate our understanding of early modern medical episteme and its intended audience.

The collapse of communism in Eastern Europe did not bring about widespread destruction of the material heritage of communist dictatorships in the region. In fact, given that – on the whole – public acceptance of the regime change has been high, the process of de-commemoration has been more contested than anticipated. This paper focuses on the process of de-commemoration after the fall of communism in Poland. It examines urban residents’ responses to the renaming of streets, paying close attention to the practices and discursive strategies they adopted to resist change. Investigating these responses provides a means of understanding the multifaceted aspects of the contested nature of de-commemoration and sheds light on the ways in which the top-down remaking of urban streetscapes affected local residents. It also enables us to better understand the nature of the post-communist transition in the region and provides insights into the everyday conflicts that underlie symbolic change.

This paper discusses the career of Emanuel Asanes Sophianos, a Byzantine refugee who settled in Cornwall in the aftermath of the fall of the despotate of the Morea to the Ottomans. It traces his later career in England and marriage to an English widow. The unusually detailed documentation for Asanes’ later life aside, it is of particular interest on account of his association with one of the most notorious aristocratic law-breakers in the period.

This article analyses how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) created and spread new forms of subjectivity and social belonging in the formative years of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) (1949–present). Specifically, it examines how the CCP blended medical and emotional discourses to foster communal hatred of narcotics users and promote social cohesion. Building on scholarship that conceptualizes hatred as a way of producing and animating subjectivity, the article argues that the CCP saw it as a key tool of unification, bringing people together to commit acts of emotional and physical violence against drug users and traffickers. Propaganda officers and police forces worked hard to persuade people to hate drug users and traffickers, writing anti-narcotics songs, plays, and skits to make hating an entertaining and interesting activity for audiences. The article underscores how the CCP encouraged mass participation in the ostracizing and killing of narcotics producers, consumers, and traffickers to spawn a shared social hatred of them, and shows how people responded to state efforts to incite hate. To conclude, the article considers the unlikely agency of some accused drug criminals who resisted the tides of public and state pressure, and challenged their accusers.

Through an in-depth exploration into the Norwich weavers’ riots in 1829 and Swing Riot protests in Swanton Abbott, Norfolk, in January 1831, this article shows urban and rural protests were linked together in multifaceted ways. When these two protests are situated in the context of urban-rural relations, it becomes clear that the participants were part of an active renegotiation of the relationship between city and country brought on because the pressures of industrialization were pushing the two together in ways that many found threatening. Each of those involved had a different vision for what this relationship should look like, as well as a vested interest in ensuring this vision prevailed. By foregrounding how these participants approached the boundaries between urban and rural worlds, this research emphasizes the ways this boundary could be a crucial point of contention in early industrial Britain.

Southwest China is a region that has been perhaps uniquely shaped over the longue durée by mutual appropriations of status, authority, land, material culture, genealogies, and cultural-historical identities. Drawing on both ethnographic fieldwork and the official and unofficial Chinese and Nuosu-Yi textual evidence, in this article I offer a new view of how, during the Ming and Qing dynasties, native officials were shaped by their efforts at appropriating elements of officialdom (responsibility towards the court) and nativeness (adherence to local customs). My historical textual-cum-anthropological analysis builds on C. Patterson Giersch’s notion of the “middle grounds” between the Chinese state and its borderland peoples to reveal “further ways” of uncovering the history of their history. I show that mutual appropriations of officialdom and nativeness have led to specific forms of acculturation that are neither linear nor irreversible. Cultural hybridizations underpin the current Yi core identity and culture in Liangshan today.

The recovery of soldiers’ remains has been a major concern of the US military since the mid-nineteenth century. However, military defeats during the Cold War left the remains of US soldiers unattended for decades, which diminished the odds of their identification and created ambiguities about their fates. After the Vietnam War, some statespersons and soldiers’ families alleged that many missing soldiers had not been killed, but rather detained by the enemy and abandoned by US authorities. The US military strove to recover and identify as many missing soldiers as possible to debunk these allegations. Existing forensic methods failed to provide definitive conclusions, straining the relationship between the military and the American public. Consequently, the military turned to DNA profiling to identify missing personnel. Technical limitations and US society’s lingering distrust of authorities turned DNA profiling into a new battleground between the US military and prisoners of war/missing in action (POW/MIA) families. Despite the promise DNA technology seemed to offer for remains’ identification, this article argues that its success was reliant on POW/MIA families’ attitudes towards the military and politics, who demanded much more than identified remains as a means of achieving closure.

The merchant and art agent Philipp Hainhofer (1578–1647) is best known for his extraordinary art cabinets. Collaborating closely with neighbouring Augsburg artisans, Hainhofer worked to compile, collate, and market these visually and materially astounding collections to a range of elite patrons. His first commission, the Pomeranian Cabinet, was for Duke Philipp of Pomerania-Stettin in 1610, and took around seven years to complete. This article adopts a body-centred approach, arguing that in doing so, new light is shed on the ways period actors enacted their relationships with materials, objects, and other bodies. It uncovers the process through which the body of the art-lover was constructed, convening with those engaged in a shared material community through the lens of health and bodily entanglements. Hainhofer, as a merchant, diplomat, and secret agent, occupied a dubious position. Through the staging of the shared, art-loving body, he was able to create and sustain friendships, while simultaneously raising the status of the merchant through his material identification with these practices.

This article examines Kazantzakis’ travel writing in his 1926 newspaper series on ‘the Land of Palestine’, which introduces Zionism, and in his posthumously published chapter ‘Jerusalem’ in Journeying (1961). Revisiting the relation between the two, I argue that each is to be seen as a distinct work. While free from the antisemitic sentiment of Venizelist circles, the Greek author's reportage has three important silences – and these are matched by a sweeping lack of scholarly interest in this material. This article hopes to generate renewed interest so that Kazantzakis’ 1926 reportage may help construe a more complex reception of Zionism in interwar Greece.