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indigenous medicine was also integral to many ethnographical and anthropological studies. Medicine was often discussed as part of descriptions of customs, religions and cosmologies. 9 In the acquisition of indigenous medicines local co-operation was key and secrecy could sometimes prove a major obstacle, as seems to have been the case for those in the Cape who sought treatment from Khoi healers, a group
Chapter 2 . Secrecy, counsel and ‘outward shows’ Introduction T he effectiveness of the mechanisms through which James controlled the expression of opinion, and particularly of print, have attracted considerable debate. Older accounts stressed the strength and oppressiveness of the censorship regime.1 This view has been challenged by Sheila Lambert, who has pointed to the gap between the theory and practice of censorship, suggesting that James and Charles were unable and often unwilling to impose strict controls.2 More recently, historians have presented a
The absence of a vociferous popular demand for less secrecy reflects the fact that in a secretive country the extent of secrecy is itself a well-kept secret. This, together with a widespread misunderstanding about the real impact of the Official Secrets Act on everyday life, the mistaken assumption that it is all about spying, and the British tradition of deference and respect for authority, has contributed to the lack of sustained popular concern. 1
1 SECRECY AND DISCLOSURE: THE POLITICS OF CONTAINMENT three cases Sex, as the category each of us is entitled to, should correspond to the sex of our body. There is no doubt this rationale for the category of sex is primordial. After all, its logic determines everybody’s sex from birth, when the genitals are immediately checked and the baby is subsequently inscribed as either female or male. If there is doubt concerning someone’s physical sex – at birth or later in life – the question arises to which sex the person in question belongs. In such cases, further
Introduction Every year, dozens of national and international aid workers are kidnapped. Like governments and companies, most humanitarian organisations handle these events with the utmost secrecy. While Médecins sans Frontières (MSF), for example, publicly confirmed the abduction and release of staff members kidnapped in Kenya in 2011 and Syria in 2014, 1 the organisation made no effort to mobilise public opinion as a way to gain their
Francis Lathom was a novelist and playwright, well-known in his lifetime, but whose reputation died with him. He is best known today for his novel The Midnight Bell (1798) which formed part of the Gothic reading material on which Jane Austen‘s Northanger Abbey is founded. Lathom is described as a second or third rank Gothicist, who also wrote novels dealing with upper-class social life. This article begins with a brief biography, collated from a series of ‘facts’ that have survived about Lathom. The article debates and queries these received facts. Was he from an aristocratic family? Why did he move from Norwich to reside in a series of small Scottish villages? His life is itself considered as a narrative construct that has been amended and has accreted layers of rumour through time. The combination of secrecy and display which seem to characterise his life are the same as those found in Gothic fiction itself. These themes are explored in The Midnight Bell. A plot summary is followed with an examination of the connections between the narrative of the book and the narrative of the life of Francis Lathom.
put forward a proposal to end, or at least soften, the rule of silence that is generally imposed within the sector. Weissman argues secrecy is often as much of an impediment to resolving current cases as it is to preventing and managing futures ones. Strub questions the definition of risk-management policy from the point of view of the NGO security advisor responsible. She highlights the tensions she experienced in her role, in particular the lack of institutional support from the very institution that
This study examines how political news was concealed, manipulated and distorted in late Jacobean England. Using a wide range of extraordinarily rich manuscript sources, it analyses how news was managed and interpreted during a period of acute political and religious conflict. It analyses how the flow of information to and from the King was managed by his secretaries of state and diplomats, and how the King prevented information about his policies from leaking in to the wider public sphere. It analyses the ‘outward shows’ James made to signal his intentions and mislead a variety of audiences, as well as they ways in which these ‘performances’ could backfire and undermine royal authority. It also examines the sceptical and often cynical reception of news, and the political significance of the rumours that circulated in court and country. It thereby contributes to a wider range of historical debates that reach across the politics and political culture of the reign and beyond. It advances new arguments about censorship, counsel, and the formation of policy; propaganda and royal image-making; political rumours and the relationship between elite and popular politics, as well as shedding new light on the nature and success of James I’s style of rule. In doing so, it aims to examine news as a source of influence and even power in Jacobean England.
This book considers in detail the culture and language of plots, conspiracies and intrigues and exposes how the intelligence activities of the Three Kingdoms of the 1640s began to be situated within early modern government from the Civil Wars to the rule of Oliver Cromwell in the 1650s. It also introduces the reader to some of the personalities who were caught up in this contemporary intelligence and espionage world from the intelligencers, especially Thomas Scot and John Thurloe, to the men and women who became its secret agents and spies. The book includes accounts of espionage activities not just in England but also in Ireland and Scotland, and it especially investigates intelligence and espionage during the critical periods of the British Civil Wars and the important developments which took place under the English Republic and Oliver Cromwell in the 1650s.
assumption that Orangeism was somehow an entirely closed and private institution which sought to maintain anonymity to the point of invisibility. Nothing could be further from the truth, my Orange informants assured me. After all, Orangemen regularly paraded through Scotland’s streets alongside marching bands, and made proclamations in public parks amplified by loudspeakers. Such behaviours, my informants scoffed, were hardly those of a secret society. What, then, does it mean to be a ‘society with secrets’? What is it about secrecy that makes us want to know what