Volume 296, Issue 2 -

It was a common practice in the Greco-Roman world to appeal to the deities for help in existential danger or in order to fulfil personal wishes. The petitioners made vows to the gods in return for granting their request. More than 12 000 Latin votive inscriptions show that these vows were eventually redeemed. Usually altars were erected bearing the terms votum or ex voto . Christians in late antiquity used the term votum in almost the same sense as pagans in the Imperial era. These inscriptions are often analyzed as examples of religious practice and individual cult but are largely ignored in the discussion of vows as ritual processes and expressions of ancient mentalities. This first systematic study asks for the reasons for dedicating votives identifiable by the inscriptions. 130 votive inscriptions were collected in which causal conjunctions allow to identify reasons explicitly. In the same way, a group of 235 Imperial pagan and late antique Christian epitaphs with the expression contra votum is analyzed to determine what happened if a vow remained unfulfilled. The inscriptions give us an idea of situations in which people were afraid, and they reflect fears and desires of different population groups.

The thirst for knowledge is the prerequisite for every insight. The author examines this desire to acquire knowledge and its justification, focusing on the theory of curiosity in the Early and High Middle Ages. Curiosity as a historical phenomenon is looked at in three distinct periods and contexts: the royal Carolingian court in the ninth, the emerging school system in the in the twelfth, and the courts of Frederick II and Alfonso X in the thirteenth century, thus focusing on three typical centers of power and knowledge of the time, in which the considerations of antiquity with respect to curiosity were transformed in their own particular way.

Against the background of the classical question concerning the relationship of knowledge and power, the article deals with the functionality of secret service knowledge for political decision making processes. The international espionage activities of the staff of Sir Francis Walsingham (1532–1590) serve as an example. Walsingham is regarded as the great architect and operative of Elizabethan policy towards Spain and as co-founder of the modern secret service apparatus. The argument is that secret service knowledge is characterized by a precarious epistemic status, so political action based on such knowledge can end in aporia. This can be demonstrated by English foreign policy prior to the demise of the Spanish Armada in 1588. While the Spanish attack was in preparation, the staff of Walsingham’s secret service was flooded by information about it. However, secret service knowledge was regarded as highly suspicious, so the most obvious plan was considered the most improbable. This led to a situation where nobody, not even Walsingham, could be sure to know anything any more.

This article compares perceptions of European integration in the English, German, and Dutch liberal press against the backdrop of national self-images. The survey is based on a source sample of more than 700 newspaper editorials about the founding treaties of the European Communities in the 1950s. The term ‚image‘ is used for stereotyped perceptional patterns of nations about themselves and other nations. Images are systems of convictions, attitudes, values, and opinions that structure and control human perception. The genesis of images is significantly influenced by country-specific public remembrance, traditions, and normative moral concepts. The representation of European integration in Dutch, English, and German newspapers shows that both, the perception of Europe and national self-images, are essentially controversial. The survey shows how national self-images impacted on the perception of European integration and that the view of Europe was a national one. Europe was not a counter-project to the nation, but images of the nation shaped and developed imaginings and ideas of Europe. The perception of Europe was tinted and judged by national self-images. Besides, European integration could cause the emergence of new self-images and impacted on the transformation of older perceptional patterns. The discourse on European integration was inseparably intertwined with the discourse on the nation. Europe was essentially thought ‚through‘ the nation.

The uses of historical material by non-historians in their different forms of commemoration of the past have been in the focus of scholarly debate for nearly two decades now, often under the label of different „turns“ – from „visual“ to „affective“ (or visceral). Interestingly, one aspect of these representations of the past, although highly visible, is usually omitted, if not completely ignored, especially in the German-speaking countries: Tourism. Tourism as a phenomenon may be trivial, but it has a substantial social and economic impact. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, tourism is a gigantic globalized service industry that can look back on half a century of unprecedented growth: An image-making industry in the literal sense, transforming both individual and collective imaginations into economic realities.