A defence of witchcraft belief

A Progressive Education? argues that concepts of both childhood and adolescence were transformed in English and Welsh primary and secondary modern schools between 1918 and 1979, and that, by putting childhood at the centre of the history of education, we can challenge the stories we tell about how and why schooling itself changed. A ‘progressive’ or ‘child-centred’ education began to emerge theoretically in the United States and Western Europe from the late nineteenth century, claiming to rewrite curriculums to suit children and young people’s needs, wants and abilities. Existing work suggests that progressivism both rose and retreated in Britain in the 1960s and 1970s, when a right-wing backlash against permissive teaching and the deschooling movement led to the imposition of central state control over education. However, the child-centred pedagogies that became mainstream in English and Welsh schools after 1945 rested on a fundamentally different vision of childhood. Unlike utopian deschoolers, post-war child-centred educationalists assumed that the achievements of mass democracy and the welfare state must be carefully preserved. Children needed to be socialised by adult educators to ensure that they acquired the necessary physical, intellectual, social and emotional maturity to become full citizens. Teachers, far from enthusiastically advocating child-centred methods, perceived them as a profound challenge to their authority in the classroom, and implemented them partially and reluctantly. Child-centred education, in alliance with developmental psychology, thus promoted a much more restrictive and pessimistic image of childhood and youth as it came to dominate mainstream schooling after the Second World War.

This book explores how Muslims, Christians and Jews interacted in frontier zones of the early modern Mediterranean (primarily 1530–1670), and how they developed a frontier consciousness that took into account how their interlocutors thought and acted. Sources used include the gamut of genres ranging from factual to fictive, from inquisitional records and different sorts of treatises to plays, novels and (auto)biographies, in numerous languages of the Mediterranean. The Muslim-Christian divide in the Mediterranean produced an unusual kind of slavery, fostered a surge in conversion to Islam, offered an ideal setting for Catholic martyrdom in its rivalry with Protestantism, and provided a haven of sorts for Spanish Muslims (Moriscos) as well as Jews. The book argues that identities and alterities were multiple and versatile, that there was no war between Christianity and Islam during the early modern period, that ‘popular religion’ prevailed over theological principles, that women experienced slavery and religious conversion differently from men, that commerce prevailed over ideology and dogma, and that ‘positive’ human relations among people of different categories were not only possible but inevitable despite prevailing hostile conditions. In the spirit of Braudel, who asserts that ‘the Mediterranean speaks with many voices; it is a sum of individual histories’, this book endeavours to allow the people of the early modern Mediterranean to be heard more than one can find in any other study till now, and strives to cast all its major themes in a new light.

This book examines the importance of rules for many of the world’s great moral traditions. Ethical systems characterised by detailed rules – Islamic sharia and Christian casuistry are notable examples – have often been dismissed as empty formalism or as the instrument of social control. This book demonstrates, on the contrary, that rules often enable, rather than hinder, personal ethical life. Here anthropologists and historians explore cases of rule-oriented ethics and their dynamics across a wide range of historical and contemporary moral traditions. Examples of pre-modern Hindu ethics, codes of civility from early modern England and medieval Christian casuistry demonstrate how rules can form an essential element of what Michel Foucault called ‘the care of the self’. Studies of Roman exemplary ethics, early modern Christian theology and the calculation of sin and merit in contemporary Muslim Palestine highlight the challenges posed by the coexistence of moral rules with other moral forms, not least those of virtue ethics. Finally, explorations of medieval and modern Islamic sharia, Christian moral theology and Jewish halakhah all highlight how such traditions develop complex meta-rules – rules about rules – for managing the tensions and dilemmas that the use of rules can entail. Together, these case studies and the theoretical framework proposed in the book’s Introduction offer a more nuanced, cross-cultural appreciation of the role of rules in moral life than those currently prevalent in both the anthropology of ethics and the history of morality.