The study of late antique and early medieval urban religion in the Iberian Peninsula suffers from a dearth of datable and localizable source material. Martyr passions abound, as do liturgical texts, but these almost always survive only in later manuscripts, filtered through monastic libraries and scriptoria. How far these copies preserve the genuine texts performed in earlier cult remains an open question. This article intervenes in this discussion by focusing on a somewhat unusual cult known as the ‘Innumerable’ or ‘Eighteen’ martyrs of Zaragoza. The cult’s Passion text survives in two variant redactions. One originates from the sixth-century city of Zaragoza, the cult’s center, while the other derives from the Carolingian monastery of Saint-Germain-des-Prés in ninth-century Paris. These divergent lines of transmission make possible a comparative study that both elucidates the process of ‘monasticization’ that the Passion underwent in Carolingian hands and vindicates the relative conservatism of the Iberian lines of transmission. Indeed, the Iberian manuscripts retain a remarkable amount of distinctly local material, thereby presenting a rich case study in the civic and oral sensibilities of martyr passions. This article places the Passion back in its civic context, amidst the complex and fractious religious life of Visigothic Zaragoza, complementing the burgeoning interest in communal liturgical and ceremonial life evident among historical liturgists and musicologists. More broadly, it shows that Iberian passions are indispensable texts for historians of urban religious expression and civic Christianity in the Visigothic period.

The Progressive Era was characterized by debates about the future of the United States and the role of individuals, households, and organizations in shaping that future. These debates included those about domestic work, sometimes specifically referred to as the “servant question” or the “servant problem.” This discourse considered not only paid household labor, but also the nature of race, gender, and American life after slavery. This article reviews the servant question in Washington, D.C., and reveals how commentators engaged with modernity and nostalgia to understand the contradiction between their sense of white and African American women’s failures and their belief that both groups of women belonged in white households. The servant question is key cultural context for a 1917 “favorite servant contest.” The second half of the article examines the clubwomen who organized the contest and the experiences of an elderly, formerly enslaved woman named Theresa Harper. The organizers responded to the D.C. servant question with an effort to carry racial hierarchies into the twentieth century, a vision of the future of household labor very different from that of Black domestic workers.

Few figures appear so frequently and yet remain so poorly understood in the narrative of the Gilded Age as does Henry George. This historiographic essay traces George’s evolving role in historians’ accounts of the political drama of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. George’s popular memory has been shaped overwhelmingly by a few influential survey accounts that have tended to depict him either as a rear-guard apologist of old, small-town ideals or as one of many radical critics of modernity who were stamped out at the end of the nineteenth century. More recent historians have instead sought to present a nuanced George and to emphasize his more concrete and underappreciated contributions to American political thought; but even in many of their hands George’s unique ideas concerning land monopoly have proven difficult. In addition to charting these developments, this essay offers a lens for making sense of the “Prophet of San Francisco” in the twenty-first century.

This article challenges the narratives that we tell ourselves about women’s history in the nineteenth century, particularly narratives that celebrate progress in the legal status of women, based on the acquisition of rights. As it shows, legal changes in the nineteenth century lumped all women into an artificially reductive category “women,” separated them from their families’ property, and turned those claims into something so problematic that they were linked to fraud. By the end of the nineteenth century, it was difficult to imagine that family property to which women contributed all their lives might actually belong to them. The article focuses on white women of considerable means. But the point is that the problematic legal category “women” not only compromised all women’s legal claims to property, but also obscured other, important social and legal differences—including those of race and class—among them.

In the late 1950s, a widespread drive to defy gravity pervaded architectural culture. Bold and seemingly weightless structures gave spatial form to a moment poised on a knife-edge. Cold War tensions, the space race, nuclear anxiety, economic recession and decolonisation fostered a global instability reflected in cultural concerns with balance and its disruption: vertigo. At this historical juncture, gravity became a vital theme of research and expression. Drawing on Roger Caillois’s sociology of play, this essay posits that a distinct phenomenon emerged from this context: what might be called architectural ilinx. While the pursuit of weightlessness had animated the Modern Movement from its inception, the 1950s saw this ideal assume increasingly disembodied forms that appeared to defy gravity outright. By the decade’s end, architects embraced vertigo’s thrill (ilinx) as a design principle, producing a new realm of spatial play. That juncture was characterised by an underlying tension between exhilaration and anxiety, which culminated in the Brussels World’s Fair of 1958, a watershed event showcasing designs that tested the boundaries of structural stability through forms suspended in space. Expo 58 marked a broader shift toward a built environment untethered from the ground. However, many critics were troubled by its ‘acrobatic exhibitionism’, warning against a drift towards structural experimentation for its own sake; and indeed, among other things, the proliferation of gravity-defying architecture seems to have been one of the forebears of what we now know as the ‘experience economy’. Situating the emergence of architectural ilinx within its cultural and historical context, the essay offers a critical reading of a phenomenon that continues to hold relevance.

Most scholars tend to focus on the metaphysical and epistemological aspects of Anselm of Aosta’s Proslogion and they often consider any meditative features to be of little importance. I will argue that reading the Proslogion as a meditative text can be justified based on the manuscript evidence and its textual history. A careful examination of the manuscript witnesses to this text reveals at least four versions, which enabled different readings of the text. I will argue that one version was a more meditative reading, namely, the first version of the Proslogion. That focus is also attested by the type of texts that travelled with this version from the twelfth to the fifteenth century. Having established the validity of such a reading, I will bring to the surface the features of the Proslogion that make it a meditative text. Of the many possible outcomes focusing on the meditative features of the Proslogion, this essay will explore only one here: the fool of chapter two emerges not as some heretic, pagan, or proto-atheist, with whom Anselm has engaged in intellectual combat. Instead, in the mimetic tradition of meditative texts of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the fool is Anselm himself and, by extension, the reader.