Volume 303, Issue 3 -

Beginning with the reign of Constantine the Great, the Roman emperors discussed matters of faith in their legislature with increasing frequency and later even issued laws in the form of creeds. Three stages of this development may be discerned. (1) Until Theodosius the emperors did not, by and large, express specific views regarding the content of the creed, but attempted instead to unite the Church on the basis of existing synodal formulae. (2) From 380 onwards the legal texts increasingly included descriptions of the content of the faith, which was then made obligatory, albeit still in a relatively unspecific manner. (3) The Henoticon of 482 was the first law which claimed to be a personal creed of the emperor himself, who thus began to compete with the councils in the definition of credal formulae. This development reached its climax in the numerous creeds of Justinian and extended until the Ecthesis of Heracleius (638). The article describes this process and also discusses the characteristics of the relevant laws and their significance for the imperial self-definition in ecclesial matters.

Today, there is hardly anybody who wholeheartedly accepts the master narrative of the scholastic-humanistic opposition as constitutive factor of learned life in the 15th and early 16th centuries. To assume that scholasticism and humanism were entangled in an epic battle means to follow uncritically the self-fashioning of the proponents of an emphatic humanism. But this view was not just caused by a false representation of reality. On the contrary, it was the result of border politics which aimed to reconfigure the field of learning by establishing an antagonism between scholasticism and humanism. The Reuchlin affair is a landmark in this process. What had started as a conflict on the question how to deal with Jewish books, was seized by the proponents of an emphatic humanism: They reframed the affair and exploited it to ban those men of learning who wanted to use humanistic as well as scholastic techniques and contents. In order to gain support, Reuchlin himself had alluded to this interpretation of events. But by exploiting the affair to create an antagonism between scholasticism and humanism, the humanists eclipsed Reuchlin’s concern to use Jewish knowledge for the Christian tradition by promoting his Christian cabala.

In recent years, historians of the Atlantic world have covered much new ground with respect to spatial aspects of Atlantic history. They have produced a large number of studies which examine transoceanic coherences, transfers and migrations. As far as the chronological structure of the “New Atlantic History” is concerned, however, most of them follow a conventional pattern. It is usually taken for granted that the time between 1760 and 1830 was a period of transformation from early modern to modern history, characterized by revolutions, which ended the colonial era, and other processes of acceleration and condensation. This article aims to question the paradigm of a European-centered “Sattelzeit” which transformed the Atlantic world between 1760 and 1830. It suggests alternative time frames to structure Atlantic history chronologically. The article concentrates on the cultures of time in non-European societies and examines how the decades between 1760 and 1830 were perceived by the indigenous peoples of the Americas and in the African diasporas. Did they regard these years as a time of change or did continuities prevail in their perceptions? What forms of temporality were relevant to them, and in how far were they influenced by European chronologies? The article investigates different forms of temporality. It deals with various ways to measure time and explores processes of temporalization in slave revolts and indigenous uprisings. Furthermore, the article analyses how European forms of historiography were adapted by non-Europeans in order to defy European interpretations of history and to legitimize indigenous political claims. By looking at different categories of temporality in both European and non-European contexts, the article argues for a plurality of cultures of time (“multitemporality”) in the Atlantic world.

The Dreyfus affair is widely considered a victory of science and intelligence over the army and the judiciary. Revisiting the affair, this essay develops a new explanation for the role of science and for the rise of the intellectuals as the scandal unfolded. It examines the reports furnished by experts on the main piece of evidence – a letter accompanying secret documents – used to convict Dreyfus. Analysis shows that during the first years of the scandal all the experts involved lacked a tried and tested method for establishing the authorship of the incriminating document. This fundamental shortcoming, however, hardly deterred any of the experts from presenting their findings as an absolute, incontrovertible certainty, irrespective of whether they considered Dreyfus guilty or innocent. Thus misjudgements, in the guise of factual claims, were made on both sides. Not only political pressure and ideological bias accounted for these errors of judgment, but also the positivistic ideal of science shaping research culture from physics to philology at the time. In the field of handwriting analysis, positivism had promoted the rise of a new science that promised methodological accuracy: graphology. During the early years of the affair, graphologists provided widely regarded reports for and against Dreyfus. This prevented handwriting experts adopting more conservative methods from making the principle of epistemic caution heard. But by the time the publication of Émile Zola’s “J’Accuse...!” escalated the affair, the graphologists had already shot their bolt. The role of the intellectual, as developed by Zola’s supporters in their confrontation with the anti-Dreyfusards, can be understood as a figure devised to compensate for the collective failure of experts. The role of the intellectual enabled scientists and scholars to make up for their methodological weaknesses with moral furore. In their guise as intellectuals, however, the Dreyfusards themselves became mired in epistemic shallowness, by depicting morals and methods as two sides of the same coin.