Professor David Nash

This book covers a wide range of topics related to honor and shame in European historical societies: history of law and literature, social and ancient history, as well as theoretical contributions on the state of research and the importance of honor and shame in traditional societies.

Honor and shame in Western History brings together 14 texts of interdisciplinary scholars from Europe and North America. It covers a wide range of topics related to honor and shame in historical societies. The contributions cover periods of Western history from Greek and Roman times to the nineteenth century and many of them integrate the concept of a "deep history" of honor and shame in social interaction.

The book is essential for a broad audience interested in social history and the history of emotions. -- Provided by publisher.

This book challenges the prevailing historiography of female criminality in nineteenth-century Britain which is currently dominated by stereotypes. In doing so it questions the construction of these and produces a much more nuanced reading of women’s criminality which does not crudely categorize or essentialize their behaviour. This approach has implications for the history of crime, behaviour, and gender in the nineteenth-century history and historiography of other societies. The micro histories in this work challenge conventional perceptions and stereotypes of female criminality created both by male crime historians and historians of gender studies. Every chapter in this new book examines one (or sometimes more) of these assumptions about how women commit crimes such as murder, infanticide, robbery, blasphemy, theft, and sexual misbehaviour. Women emerge from these instances as being more autonomous individuals, whose behaviour around criminality really does not warrant classification as either homogeneous, nor should be generally characterized as making them passive accessories to criminal action. Moreover, the suggestion that they display quintessentially ‘feminine’ approaches to the committal of crime or the contemplation of poor behaviour is shown to be overstated and even questionable. Women thus display motivations, assumptions, and actions much closer to those of men than has been previously been considered or portrayed. This has implications for seeing a range of historiographies (gendered criminality, politeness, separate spheres, and civilizing processes) as constructions that have conceivably been adopted too readily and too hastily.

Since the turn of the 20th century, Humanism has become a major force in British life. The Humanist Movement in Modern Britain sees Callum G. Brown and David Nash, two of the world's leading historians of modern Humanism and non-belief, explore the ways in which Humanists organised to influence the British nation as it faced the moral issues of the modern world.

Brown and Nash examine how Humanism transformed the philosophical and belief landscape of the country, engaged in significant campaigns for reducing religious privilege, and in recent decades offered to tens of thousands of people the celebration of Humanist marriages and baby-naming ceremonies, and the celebration of life in Humanist funerals. The book analyses the Humanist impact on the civil and moral life of Britain through contributions to human rights and equality discourse and legislation covering: freedom of speech; homosexual law reform; gay marriage; a woman's right to choose abortion; the ending of blasphemy laws and censorship; sex education; non-doctrinal religious and moral education in schools; equal access to broadcasting from non-religious viewpoints; and voluntary euthanasia and dignity in dying. It also looks in detail at how the British Humanist Association (BHA), known as Humanists UK since 2017, has been at the heart of this work.

This is the definitive history of Humanism in Britain in modern times. -- Provided by publisher.

Demystifying the Sacred: Blasphemy and Violence from the French Revolution to Today offers a much-needed analysis of a subject that historians have largely ignored, yet that has considerable relevance for today’s world: the powerful connection that exists between offences against the sacred and different forms of violence. Drawing on cases from revolutionary France to the Russia of Vladimir Putin, the international authors probe the nature and agency of local blasphemy accusations, the historical and legal framework in which they were expressed and the violence, both physical and symbolic, accompanying them. In doing so, the volume reveals how cultures of blasphemy, and related acts of heresy, apostasy and sacrilege, were a companion to or acted as a trigger for physical action but also a form of how violence was experienced. More generally, it shows the importance of religious sensibilities in modern society and the violent potential contained in criticism or ridicule of the sacred and secular alike.

Adopting a microhistory approach, Fair and Unfair Trials in the British Isles, 1800-1940 provides an in-depth examination of the evolution of the modern justice system. Drawing upon criminal cases and trials from England, Scotland, and Ireland, the book examines the errors, procedural systems, and the ways in which adverse influences of social and cultural forces impacted upon individual instances of justice.

The book investigates several case studies of both justice and injustice which prompted the development of forensic toxicology, the implementation of state propaganda and an increased interest in press sensationalism. One such case study considers the trial of William Sheen, who was prosecuted and later acquitted of the murder of his infant child at the Old Baily in 1827, an extraordinary miscarriage of justice that prompted outrage amongst the general public. Other case studies include trials for treason, theft, obscenity and blasphemy. Nash and Kilday root each of these cases within their relevant historical, cultural, and political contexts, highlighting changing attitudes to popular culture, public criticism, protest and activism as significant factors in the transformation of the criminal trial and the British judicial system as a whole.

Drawing upon a wealth of primary sources, including legal records, newspaper articles and photographs, this book provides a unique insight into the evolution of modern criminal justice in Britain. -- Supplied by publisher.

A phenomenon that spans human experience, from the ancient world right up to today’s ferocious religious debates, blasphemy is an act of individuals, but also a widespread and constant presence in cultural, political and religious life. Acts Against God is the first accessible history of this crime – its prosecution, its impact and its punishment and suppression.

The book begins in ancient Greece with the genesis of blasphemy’s link with the state. From here we move on to blasphemy in the medieval world, in the Reformation and the Enlightenment. The book concludes with the twenty-first century, with individuals and the state seeking to adopt blasphemy as the means to resist the secular and the globalization of culture.

This monograph traces the use, abuse and negotiation of the concept of shame from 1600-1900. The book shows good and bad behaviour, morality and perceptions of crime in British society at large, and identifies the changing interaction between popular and official notions of shame. Each of the chapters is a single episode in the ongoing history of shame contextualized by two chapters which discuss the historiography and theory of shame and their implications for the history of crime and social relations. The wide acceptance and utility of shame, as the early episodes in the book suggest, became manifestly less obvious during the eighteenth century. The traditional uses and functions of shame were questioned, yet the growth of the public sphere allowed some of its messages to become recast in modern forms. The last examples in the book demonstrate shame's longevity and relevance beyond the arrival of modernity.

Providing a rounded and coherent history of crime and the law spanning the past 400 years, Histories of Crime explores the evolution of attitudes towards crime and criminality over time. Bringing together contributions from internationally acknowledged experts, the book highlights themes, current issues and key debates in the history of deviance and bad behaviour, including:marital cruelty and adultery, infanticide, murder. the underworld, blasphemy and moral crimes, fraud and white-collar crime, the death penalty and punishment. Individual case studies of violent and non-violent crime are used to explore the human means and motives behind criminal practice. Through these, the book illuminates society's wider attitudes and fears about criminal behaviour and the way in which these influence the law and legal system over time. This fascinating book is essential reading for students and teachers of history, sociology and criminology, as well as anyone interested in Britain's criminal past.

This chapter investigates how the peculiar nature of blasphemy laws has regularly utilized the concept of shame as both a signifier and psychological lever. In the medieval world communities acted against the blasphemer because they brought the specter of shame down upon such a community. Such individuals were ostracized and comfort offered to such a society by seeing perpetrators punished in shame-orientated spectacles. In more modern times some blasphemers in the West have utilized shame as a method of indicting forms of religion for their poor treatment of minorities The survival of these imperatives is startling in many modern episodes of blasphemy in both East and West. Modern conceptions of shame are utilized to describe breaches of multiculturalism, of tolerance, of laws against incitement, and generally as breaches of more civilized taste. This chapter investigates the endurance of this phenomenon and asks what it means within modernity for the concept of censorship, and indeed free speech alongside their respective mechanisms and purposes.

This chapter examines the history of shame and the reaction of nineteenth-century liberalism in England to its existence and persistence. Through an engagement with the ideas of Ute Frevert the chapter examines the legacy of Enlightenment-inspired reforming zeal and its impact primarily upon English society in the period 1780 to the present. Such zeal challenged the unmodern, the uncivilized and the primitive, which it saw in institutions practices and behaviors. Surprisingly we discover the utility of shame as a tool co-opted in the service of precisely this modernization and liberal progressivism. The economic phenomenon of class—invention of the bourgeois century—became a tool by which citizens policed their own interactions and aspirations. All this happened with the determination of the desire to civilize and create compliant citizens. Nonetheless, we uncover incidents where human intervention prevented the worst excesses of market and supposedly benign “rational” logic. Postmodernity claimed to have shaken liberal meta-narratives and certainly introduced an interest in performativity and context, which fits with the reappearance of shame in more forms of media and its reappearance in many contexts. The chapter ends by asking whether the grand liberal narrative of “civilization” and its Janus-faced attempts to remove shame have been eclipsed, or whether the universality of shame and its usefulness requires or spawns its constant reinvention.

The Victorian secularist movement was a profound challenge to a society that drew its morals from revealed Christianity. Secularism and secularists appeared to operate without morals and thus attracted stories and accusations that pointed to scandalous behavior, repetition of which threatened norms. Much of this criticism coalesced around the person of Charles Bradlaugh, especially after his attempts to enter parliament. Financial scandal was cited to prevent him taking his seat. He was also accused of sexual impropriety with the daughter of Richard Carlile as well as with Annie Besant, the latter with whom he was presumed to practice neo-Malthusianism advocated in the Knowlton pamphlet trial—an event which itself appeared to demonstrate an appeal to sexual licentiousness, alienating many in the secularist movement. Bradlaugh would later be accused of being involved in a plot to burn down London during the Second Reform Act agitation; of regularly standing on the lecture platform and offering the Almighty the chance to strike him dead within the span of one minute (the regularly cited “Watch Story”); and lastly of recanting his atheism upon his deathbed. However, Bradlaugh did attempt to preserve the reputation of the secular movement with covert actions to hide the behavior of Edward Aveling, one-time husband of Eleanor Marx. Aveling combined intellectual prowess and charisma with long running financial impropriety, theft, and default on numerous loans, as well the attempted seduction of his extension class female students. Such stories threatened to undermine everything the Victorian secularist movement was striving for.

England substantially escaped the religious and political turmoil that was more commonplace elsewhere in nineteenth-century Europe. As a result, challenges to established religion were comparatively slight, and a vibrant anticlericalism was substantially missing from the country’s history. This situation however bred a deep sense of providentialism, which had profound effects on how the authorities and the population at large viewed blasphemy and blasphemous incidents. With only events on the continent as exemplars, individuals regularly stated how England had been providentially spared the nightmare scenarios that unfolded elsewhere. This created a narrative that monarch, Church and government had provided political and social peace which had engendered prosperity for all; any threat to this set-up might create its downfall and a descent into continental-style revolution. Thus individuals had to explore in their own minds the imagined violence that blasphemy would create within society. In reply to this, Abstracts 291 some nineteenth-century blasphemers indicted the God of the Bible as intemperate and prone to violence. The imagined fear of violence that might result from blasphemy also substantially influenced courtroom decisions and the pronouncements of judges that formed English Common Law into a series of precedents, which reflected the desire to prevent violence. Such attitudes also strongly influenced the actions of authority and policing agencies that regularly sought to define blasphemy as a public order problem

The nineteenth century is the first century in which definitions circumvented the globe, promoting discussion of their helpfulness in describing the universe that humankind found itself within. This impetus is especially exemplified by the growth of unbelief into a movement in the nineteenth century. From its inception right through to its mutation in the twentieth century it would, throughout, be obsessed with such words and labels. Oftentimes these were attempts to escape from the unhelpfulness of a previous label as much as to forge something innovative and helpful with a new one.

This chapter investigates the construction of the blasphemy provisions of the Indian Criminal Code of 1860 and its subsequent revisions. This is shown to have a substantial afterlife as a touchstone of potential multicultural significance in refereeing between the competing claims of different religious groups. As such, it has regularly been invoked as a possible solution to issues facing countries seeking to move beyond protection for a state religion to a wider recognition of the rights of all the religious. The Code’s provisions also seemed attractive because they focussed upon apparently equalising conceptions of public order, but the politics surrounding this often served to inhibit the wholesale adoption of its provisions.

A chapter on witchcraft in film, one that appears in a book primarily about the history of the phenomenon clearly has a different purpose than the numerous treatments of witchcraft that appear in film studies and popular culture volumes. Thus, this chapter will consider several of the central themes thrown up by numerous depictions of witchcraft in film and will focus upon these in specific examples. Perhaps one overarching theme that cultural historians should most be interested in is how depictions of witchcraft in film have been a communicative and exploratory device. That is, they should be regarded as methods by which the public at large learn aspects of otherwise specialist or academic knowledge. As such, they have a crucial role in shaping popular perception of the particular phenomena depicted. This chapter displays illustrations of witchcraft practice, vivid re-creations of what particular periods of historiography have established as fact and interpretation and, lastly, a variety of themes which seek to place witchcraft in a wider historical and cultural context. As such, these have lasting influence upon popular perceptions of witchcraft and the occult. Indeed we might consider how far some of these depictions have become cultural archetypes in themselves, further influencing cultural products and outputs about this particular subject.