Blockchain Papers

Fabienne Henryot

Entre 1778 et 1788, les chanoinesses du chapitre noble de Remiremont font appel à un cordelier, Claude Vuillemin, pour dresser l’inventaire de leurs archives. Vuillemin travaille non seulement à cet inventaire, mais aussi au cartulaire du chapitre et prend l’initiative de produire, en marge de ce travail, des Monuments, recueils de pièces hétérogènes relatives à l’histoire du chapitre. Cet article se propose d’examiner les modalités du travail de Vuillemin et leur conformité aux pratiques documentaires de son temps pour en déterminer les enjeux. Si les dernières abbesses se sont montrées aussi vigilantes dans la gestion des archives, c’est que le contexte change à la fin du xviiie siècle. Les chapitres nobles font l’objet dans toute la France d’une attention soutenue du pouvoir, ce qui contraint les Dames de Remiremont à apporter les preuves d’une prééminence chronologique, temporelle et symbolique. Abstract Between 1778 and 1788 the canonesses of the noble chapter of Remiremont asked the Franciscan Claude Vuillemin to draw up an inventory of their archives. Vuillemin worked not only on this inventory, but also on the cartulary of the chapter, and in addition compiled on his own initiative the Monuments, which are collections of disparate pieces related to the history of the chapter. This article examines the Vuillemin’s working methods and their conformity with documentary practices of his time so as to determine the issues at stake. If the last abbesses were vigilant in the administration of their archives, it is the context that changes at the end of the 18th century. Throughout France noble chapters were under close surveillance by authorities, which obliged the Dames de Remiremont to provide proof of a chronological, temporal and symbolic preeminence. Abstract Zwischen 1778 und 1788 beauftragten die Kanonikerinnen des adligen Kapitels von Remiremont den Franziskaner Claude Vuillemin mit der Erstellung eines Inventars ihrer Archive. Vuillemin arbeitete nicht nur an diesem Inventar, sondern auch am Kartular des Kapitels und stellte darüber hinaus auf eigene Initiative neben dieser Arbeit eine Sammlung ganz verschiedener Schriftstücke zur Geschichte des Kapitels zusammen: die Monuments. In diesem Artikel sollen Vuillemins Arbeitsweise bei der Bewältigung dieser Herausforderungen und ihre Übereinstimmung mit den dokumentarischen Gepflogenheiten seiner Zeit untersucht werden. Dass die letzten Äbtissinnen bei der Verwaltung der Archive so wachsam waren, ist darauf zurückzuführen, dass sich die zeitlichen Umstände gegen Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts änderten. Die adligen Kapitel waren in ganz Frankreich Gegenstand einer anhaltenden Aufmerksamkeit von Seiten der Machthaber ausgesetzt, was die Damen von Remiremont dazu zwang, ihre chronologische, zeitliche und symbolische Vorrangstellung nachzuweisen.

Patrice Higonnet

This book is a virtuoso performance. At stake is the trajectory of modern France and its historiography, which gives us, briefly, varying monarchic heroes from Jeanne d’Arc to Henry IV, Louis XIV, and, especially since 1789, Napoleon Bonaparte and Charles de Gaulle, along with their allies and enemies, their admirers and their critics.1 The book outlines their careers and summarizes the work of their many historians, even that of René Goscinny, the creator of the comic-book characters Astérix and Obélix. Gueniffey considers all of them from a lofty point of view. He begins with a judgment about “the end of history” borrowed from Furet—not the “end of history” from an American standpoint with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1988 but for France.2 De Gaulle’s place in history marked the end of the history for France as it been written for centuries, as “a traditional idea of the nation—[of] the Monarchy and the Revolution, together; [of the] economy and [of] consciousness.” Thus, today, “Anti-Gaullism is dead. And so is Gaullism.” To cite the title of Williams’ biography of de Gaulle, the man was The Last Great Frenchman.3We can now, today, calmly, consider all the French heroes and their commentators, from Jeanne d’Arc to Henry IV very briefly and Louis XIV briefly but to Napoleon and de Gaulle in considerable detail. This book, Gueniffey explains, is not “an essay in comparative history.” It does not aim to follow its two subjects from their cradles to their graves. The introduction proposes instead “une réflexion” on various “lines of thought,” such as the exercise of power, the centrality of writing, their deaths, their funerals, and the place in history of “great men,” as in the work of Carlyle and Nietzsche. “Through them, my subject is France itself.”4In five chapters, Gueniffey’s text considers how Napoleon and de Gaulle resolved—for themselves, for France, and for the world—their political trajectories and their political resurrections during the decisive 100 days, in 1815 for Napoleon and in the creation of the Fifth Republic in 1958 after World War II for de Gaulle. As we might expect, the two men are both similar and dissimilar: Napoleon with his war of movement and de Gaulle with his tanks, the battles of Lodi in 1796 and Abbeville in 1940 serving as mutual positive proof. The two men were also authors, de Gaulle showing himself as an admirer, inter alia, of André Malraux and Napoleon engaging in a puerile quarrel with Germaine (Madame) de Staël.Underlying all of this comparison is a troublesome problem: What happens if Napoleon was not really French (curiously, the title of the book in Paris was Napoléon et de Gaulle: Deux héros français)? At one point, Gueniffey hints at the matter, quoting Taine’s characterization of Napoleon as “a Corsican, foreign to France” (127), but later in the book, Gueniffey is more direct: “Napoleon did not know a word of French as a child.… [He] belonged nowhere and as a teenager dreamed of succeeding [Pasquale] Paoli” (214). How true. He was also, incidentally, not merely a war criminal; like Adolf Hitler (an Austrian) and Joseph Stalin (a Georgian), he used war as an excuse to silence any kind of popular and nativist opposition to his demonic activities. De Gaulle was much closer to Michelet’s Jeanne d’Arc than to Chateaubriand’s “Buonaparte.”5The style of this book is flamboyant and invariably elegant even when it occasionally turns, for effect, to mere slang—for example, when it refers to Napoleon as “un bon zigue.” The book’s translation of Zazie’s utterance “Mon cul” from Raymond Queneau’s Zazie dan la Metro (Paris, 1959) as “my ass” also seems fair enough. But should we translate the rest of her dismissal of Napoleon, “Il m’intéresse pas du tout, cet enflé, avec son chapeau à la con,” as “a bombastic swell with his stupid hat”? Probably not.

Noriko Aso

Reviewed by: An Anthropology of the Machine: Tokyo's Commuter Train Network by Michael Fisch Noriko Aso (bio) An Anthropology of the Machine: Tokyo's Commuter Train Network. By Michael Fisch. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2018. xi, 302 pages. $82.50, cloth; $27.50, paper; $27.50, E-book. Michael Fisch employs a science and technology studies (STS) approach in this "technography" (ethnography of technology) of the Tokyo commuter train system, thus contributing to the global literature on trains as iconic machines of modernization. However, Fisch does not consider railway technology in isolation but rather insists that humans and machines must always be considered together, shaped by and shaping the other, in contrast to a technological determinism that would see railroad design as having only a one-way impact on societies. Because human communities are at stake, Fisch embraces rather than shies away from raising ethical considerations through the use of such terms as "technicity," which he defines as a machine's "quality of relations" (p. 16) that "emphasizes a technology's ontological and conceptual affordances, as well as its trustworthiness as a partner of collective life in the present and future" (p. x). The complex and perilous order of Tokyo's commuter train network provides Fisch with a prime opportunity to assess technicity, as he asks what makes for a system that deserves trust. His case study of Tokyo railways provides the answer of yoyū (leeway, margin, or breathing room). Each of the six chapters highlights a set of human actors and nonhuman factors which together either make it possible for the commuter train system to operate beyond (and later without) capacity or cause it to break down. The titles, from "Finessing the Interval" to "Ninety Seconds," all point to the critical necessity of accounting for time within the system. Fisch begins with the engineers of the Tokyo commuter system and how they responded to overwhelming growth in the number of riders over the course of the twentieth century. Rather than pursuing ironclad scheduling as the solution to having to operate beyond capacity, they came to recognize that skillful drivers who practiced "recovery driving" and riders savvy in how they navigated flows were essential to the everexpanding system. Drivers and commuters [End Page 291] created and "finessed" yoyū (Fisch prefers to use the Japanese term throughout), which in turn was incorporated into planning as manageable gaps between principal and operational schedules. Fisch then focuses on commuters and the train spaces they inhabit. Silence, manners, calculation of best connections, and, now, electronic devices and social media produce a commuter railway spatiality that exceeds any mapmaking while maintaining a coherent collective. Having laid out the successes, Fisch turns to darker aspects of the Tokyo commuter railway system. Returning to the system engineers, he examines the adoption of ATOS (Autonomous Decentralized Transport Operation Control System) in 1996. The bottom-up organizational principles of ATOS allow it to embrace irregularity as regular, thereby weakening or even doing away with conventional logistical thresholds. Fisch terms this operating without capacity. Despite the organicism and resilience of this mode of organization, he points out that its very success all but ensures human failure to reckon with environmental and other costs tied to this scale of operation: the network's "extreme capitalism . . . generat[es] a novel, frictionless synergy of human and machine toward boundless consumption" (p. 109). Fisch then goes back to the community of commuters to explore the possibilities and limits of empathy: "can the train teach us to care?" (p. 125). He works through attempts to answer in mass media utopian and dystopian representations, but his most compelling examples highlight how discussion boards, hypertext novels, video games, and other media geared toward consumption during a train ride interact in real time with commuter alienation and/or collectivity. The principal effect has been to maintain the status quo of crowding and other forms of stress by encouraging a mental state balanced between attention and inattention; yet Fisch also catches a glimmer of potential critique in moments when riders take a step or two outside the script. In contrast, commuter train suicides prompt communal disengagement. The railway companies employ euphemisms and cleaner teams to immediately erase...

Brian McCammack

A slim volume that adds to Dominic A. Pacyga’s extensive Chicago scholarship, Slaughterhouse: Chicago’s Union Stock Yard and the World It Made surveys the city’s meatpacking industry from its mid-nineteenth-century origins to its post–World War II demise and beyond. Although the book traces a century and a half of changes in the “Square Mile” of the Union Stock Yard on Chicago’s South Side, the focus of Slaughterhouse is the stockyards’ heyday between roughly 1880 and 1920, when meatpacking helped drive the city’s—and the nation’s—economy. That heyday, facilitated by Chicago’s status as a rail hub, is lauded in chapters 1–4. Chapter 5 affords comparatively less attention to the stockyards’ Depression-era struggles and postwar collapse, which was driven in part by industrial decentralization that highway trucking made possible. The concluding chapter surveys the innovative businesses populating the industrial park that rose from the stockyards’ ashes in the 1990s, propped up by tax increment financing schemes.

Erik Grimmer‐Solem

The German public pension system created under Otto von Bismarck in 1889 was the first of its kind in the world. It also managed to survive the upheavals of two world wars, revolution, military occupation, and no fewer than five different forms of government in the twentieth century. In A History of the German Public Pension System: Continuity and Change, Alfred Mierzejewski seeks to account for the resiliency of this remarkable institution while also offering his readers a comprehensive new history of the German pension system from its inception to the major reforms implemented under the governments of Gerhard Schröder and Angela Merkel. Mierzejewski is well equipped to tell this story, drawing on extensive research in German archival and printed primary sources and demonstrating a complete mastery of this complex topic and its rich historiography throughout his narrative. The book begins by recounting a now-familiar story of the Bonapartist, anti-Socialist, and Pietist Lutheran origins of the idea of public pensions under Bismarck. It is to the author’s credit that he highlights how much the actual legislation passed in 1889 was altered from Bismarck’s original proposal during debate in the Reichstag and Federal Council. Unfortunately, little of the rich tenor of those debates over no fewer than forty-three Reichstag committee meetings and twenty-four plenary sessions was conveyed by the author’s brief summary of the legislative process (14–17). In any case, Bismarck, the “Iron Chancellor,” was highly dissatisfied with what was passed. Rather than a centralized and uniform system of generous worker pensions funded from taxation and the proceeds of a state tobacco monopoly, he got a compulsory insurance system financed primarily by worker and employer contributions, with very modest benefits scaled to employee contributions. The system’s administration was decentralized to some thirty-one self-governing regional state-insurance institutes, thirteen in the state of Prussia alone. Out of sheer expediency, it became a pay-as-you-go system with a modest reserve accumulated to protect against economic fluctuations. With minor modification, it would remain that way for most of the twentieth century.

Virginia Reinburg

Seventeenth-century historians and antiquarians lavished attention on nearly every place in the French kingdom. So it is hardly surprising that pilgrim shrines numbered among the many cities, provinces and dioceses whose pasts attracted such passionate interest and extensive research. Dozens of books about shrines were published over the course of the seventeenth century. Most shrines were dedicated to the Virgin Mary and reported apparitions, miracles and marvels. Authors of shrine books regaled readers with a shrine’s truths as well as delights, thereby establishing the place’s identity and spreading its renown among potential pilgrims and patrons.1 Although the shrine books do not comfortably fit within the category of history, they depend on contemporary practices of history-writing. They share much with sacred or ecclesiastical histories in the mode of Cesare Baronio’s Annales Ecclesiastici (1588–1607).2 Like sacred history, authors of shrine books documented historical precedent in order to support an institution’s privileges. They also shared sacred historians’ goal of restoring ruined ancient sites of worship. Books about shrines borrowed conventions from the vernacular manuscript chronicles that early modern notaries, artisans and merchants penned about their cities and towns.3 Confronting the historical craft embedded in the shrine books — how authors carried out research, how they documented a shrine’s past and how they recounted its history — sheds light on the multiple uses to which the past was put in the seventeenth century. This is the first goal of this essay. The second goal of the essay is to expose what is most remarkable about the shrine books: their hybrid form which melds myth, history and archive. Almost all the shrines in question were rebuilt — and truly revitalized — in the wake of the religious wars (1562–98, 1620–29). Authors invented the literary form that I call ‘the shrine book’ in order to repair the ruptures — material and epistemological — that the religious wars created. For them, the fusion of myth, history and archives would counter iconoclasm, invasion and, above all, doubt. In a recent study of German and Dutch legends such as ‘the pied piper of Hamelin’ and ‘the baby and the cat in the flood’, Judith Pollmann argued that those legends, no matter how apparently fantastic, lodged in the popular imagination because they acquired ‘the flavour of authenticity’ provided by specific historical references.4 This insight also rings true for shrine books, whose authors wanted to show that the shrines were ancient and their reported miracles and legends were true, or at least believable. But key to believability was an archive: a written, legally established and orderly record of God’s and the Virgin Mary’s favours bestowed at a particular place, and of human devotion expressed there in prayer, liturgy and processions. The books’ authors established an archive or written record for their shrines, and thereby laid claim to significant places through the preservation of testimony about the shrines’ marvels. They wanted to save shrines from oblivion by filling in gaps in documentation created by what they condemned as their ancestors’ deplorable failure to keep records, and by the fires that were the scourge of early modern archives. This meant restoring a register of miracles and marvels from legal acts or depositions, or even creating one from scratch in many cases. But the creation of a shrine’s register or archives had a large goal: to prove the truth of the shrine, and of the Catholic faith woven into its history. The two meanings of the word ‘faith’ (foi) that the authors of shrine books employed reinforced the books’ truth claims: ‘faith’ could mean ‘the Catholic faith’ or the content of beliefs that some Catholic authority approved, but ‘faith’ was also invoked as a legal term, as in ‘to bear witness’. The ways that the authors of shrine books both invoked and used history, and invoked and created archives — by demonstrating faith in archives and by preserving witnesses’ testimony — is the subject of this essay. Authors of shrine books showed faith in archives as sources of historical knowledge at the same time that they created archives of the faith that pilgrims placed in the shrines. Authors used the term ‘faith’ in two very particular senses. ‘Faith’ could mean ‘the Catholic faith’, ‘the true faith’, or ‘the ancient faith’: a bounded body of beliefs that a Catholic authority ostensibly or actually approved. For Pierre de Marca, a lawyer turned bishop, the shrine of Notre-Dame de Betharram in the Pyrenees provided evidence of ‘the true faith of our fathers’ that Queen Jeanne of Navarre had tried in vain to ‘bury’ and to ‘ruin’.5 Marca also wrote of the principles of ‘the Faith’ as a body of Catholic doctrine, and sometimes of faith as a theological virtue. It was not entirely new to call the totality of Catholic doctrines ‘the Faith’. But after the religious wars it became a common shorthand for ‘the true Catholic faith’ and moreover signified a bounded code of doctrine. What was particularly potent was the mixture of this definition of faith with the second one. Marca often used ‘faith’ specifically as a legal or quasi-legal term, to indicate testimony, bearing witness, or authenticity (as in faire foi, or en foi de quoi). Using ‘faith’ in both senses, as many authors of shrine books did, effectively created a web of meanings that drew on the authority of both legal and theological language. In this way authors amplified their claims to truth as they created archives of faith. Today’s readers may be surprised by how many pages are devoted to apparitions and miracles in books that were purportedly histories of the shrines. But early modern people avidly consumed tales about marvels, wonders and prodigies. Wonders were ‘good to think with’, providing the occasion for investigating and arguing about nature, divine action and philosophy.6 Over the course of the early modern period, those who wrote about marvels and wonders increasingly felt compelled to provide evidence for them, an intellectual development that also shaped shrine books. What should most strike today’s reader is the tremendous effort that authors devoted to documenting their research into the shrines’ origins and miracles in authoritative written sources and among only the most reliable witnesses. Or at least they created the impression of having done so. ‘All these miracles have their attestations in the Archives of Liesse’, J. de Saint-Pères wrote in his book about the shrine of Notre-Dame de Liesse.7 Pierre Geoffroy assured readers that his documentation of events at Notre-Dame de Garaison was impeccable: ‘Dear Reader … [I assure you] that I recount nothing I have not seen myself’ as superintendent of the chapel, ‘or that I have not learned from people worthy of trust (foy) and of irreproachable character’, drawn from the depositions of those witnesses in public records.8 Yet Geoffroy artfully wove myth into his lively account of Garaison’s history. Pierre Alabert, a later historian of the Garaison shrine, promised that ‘all that I will report about the miraculous is verified and attested appropriately in the Archives of the Chapel’.9 About one especially ‘prodigious’ cure that might raise a reader’s doubts, Alabert added ‘I was present’ and ‘I am a witness to these Prodigies’.10 Like Saint-Pères, Geoffroy and Alabert, most authors of shrine books professed a personal commitment to sound historical method, while also spinning a good yarn about the shrine’s divinely ordained origins, which they admitted were not always scrupulously recorded in writing. The shrine of Notre-Dame du Puy provides a good example of how authors worked. By early modern standards, Le Puy was amply documented by writers of a historical bent: no fewer than four artisan-authored manuscript chronicles and five histories published by clerics survive. I begin with the Jesuit Odo de Gissey (1567–1643), because his Discours historiques de la tres-ancienne devotion à N. Dame du Puy (1620) was an early example of the shrine book.11 It was not the first such book; Mont Saint-Michel (1604), Garaison (1607) and Chartres (1609) had already found their historians.12 But Gissey’s book was a popular and influential example of the genre, judging from the numbers of editions and surviving copies. Notre-Dame du Puy in Velay was a major shrine, drawing pilgrims from across the French kingdom between around 1300 and the Revolution. With its renowned ‘ancient’ image of the Virgin Mary (a dark coloured or ‘black’ madonna), its robust Catholic identity, and steady influx of pilgrims Notre-Dame du Puy, as did other major Marian shrines, provided a tempting opportunity for religious orders intent on expanding their influence in the last decades of the religious wars. Odo de Gissey probably arrived at Le Puy in 1588, part of a Jesuit project to establish a school, church and pilgrim hospice. Other Catholic religious orders arrived in the late 1580s and 1590s, making Le Puy a centre of reformed Catholicism in the region. Gissey’s work was embedded in a world of intellectual collaboration. He belonged to a of in Le history and a that of the religious orders and some Gissey also had a his whose work often and other whose work and and with may have Most had a in Le Puy with shared the common of the history of the shrine and its ‘ancient’ of an who around of the of was to Le Puy in published a book on Notre-Dame du Puy four Gissey published his and a of his book in the same Gissey’s book books were published by the same Gissey’s and books are not in and Gissey to his work to the of modern ecclesiastical historians such as He his Discours historiques by He and He tried to by and the Jesuit a He that to of and the Virgin always especially the of Le would ‘the origins and of the an in the book the of the image and to his claim about the shrine’s Yet Gissey had a claim to a modern historian than Gissey and on a that ‘I this is did a late historian from Gissey for about But Gissey and had in common than The two and wrote their books at the same and in the same They shared books and of the same recent marvels in their books, sometimes in the same Gissey could to what call for It is to they were to in the apparently of the and For most of the seventeenth to of all was to even the learned and those with in the of our two those who were out that in to of and was in order to of a that also rings true for of and church in that to the of and was Gissey and do with written in their religious or what was to by of the and other They also borrowed and from other to the of Gissey’s the material ancient and modern and the of book that the were or Gissey and a of material from the same manuscript written by a and to the wrote his Le de a that the hybrid between and He published but the multiple penned for the manuscript show that an for his This was not a book for an or as was the written over the course of a by a from the de to his that the of our will be for — from and from his decades as a to and in the of Notre-Dame — may have from his over to archives. Although a did not have to records, or for that matter other as in one of the to his I was not to the and worthy of which are in in the and of the of Le Puy, the of the the the of and the the and also the and in the of the of and other in the of Le Puy … which I worthy of For all the Le Puy authors on the of of and Gissey’s to and are than an of to be the authors may have such of and But what had a also provided a on the authenticity of the For the from which Gissey and were were as than as public of and by and church in order to But such were from the authoritative public that they would after and have attention to the that to in trust in and But for most of the early modern period, in the of about what was and what was an archive or of as of their authority as or they to other writers and for their The authors of shrine books their faith in such archives by readers that they their from the most In this way they showed readers that they on the of the to a and by to the truth of its This is Odo de Gissey and other authors to who that they on those who the of his book wrote that an account of two recent marvels from of and Catholic — and of the and the and a and a meant to assure readers not only that the were but also that the of a of the would as a of the good faith of who the In and his on Notre-Dame du Puy, Odo de Gissey on other authors of shrine books, did not report testimony it had recorded in writing. on the legal authority of the written But for all his for Gissey also on the authority of the who a written to This web of and trust is even in book on Notre-Dame de a shrine in the of This book was the creation of a who was also a published and but did of what would call research of his He the ecclesiastical historians of the and historians of such as and the a — part of a of learned to the — had at his at least as around the world of and Yet hardly they were all that was in the wars between and the ‘the of our archives with those of our This one of an all the This is a about a that The sheds light on the authority that for an authority to of authority and places of an of both written to which this is an of one literary But was not in this of to the authority of writing. In a key of the book — of an to Notre-Dame at — by how a of was placed in his a record from the of the of to the of He from the after some people of this whose are and in of and the Virgin Mary this of of and a to and dedicated the after the of the the to on that to some was after and the chapel, and acquired over the was in the did not the at are a in as by other But placed faith in this and wove a lively around The had placed in his by a worthy of his and his de in the only had an the The of because it a that on the of the shrine to the of and that the was dedicated by other than the of de to what had verified by a key of by the seventeenth a to had in the but the in In his readers provided of of the by that the of of the of had seen the in the the was of authority in — as in ways — on the ancient origins of the in the testimony to a of past of the shrine’s sacred of and the shrine’s his claims with and but a of as an account of the documenting a from the shrine’s early his on the authority of both and who could for the Seventeenth-century authors on as they created an archive of faith for their shrines. shrine book created an archive for its an archive provided a record of God’s and the Virgin Mary’s action in the and of Authors of shrine books created archives by documenting the origins and history of the shrine and shrine books testimony from witnesses to the miracles and marvels at the they did research, authors of shrine books this testimony in two through written sources and through or of miracles They may have at the time authors their research. especially those who were or of the shrines, and depositions to and other favours that pilgrims But authors that to have at all, or were in or they were not to of the failure of to the miraculous of the image of Notre-Dame de to a written record for Odo de Gissey expressed a about Notre-Dame du miracles have into Most authors professed a commitment to creating a written record of their shrine’s marvels. Pierre Geoffroy to be the first to the of Notre-Dame de Garaison’s to than expressed a goal for Notre-Dame de ‘I in to the word about the and bestowed his effort to that already by the of who had depositions to be from those who a In this way and other authors or created a register or archive on whose the truth of God’s at the shrine could be sources could be in the seventeenth and authors the most of what they could But sources an For authors had two to with that often to and ‘the of the the shrines’ and were key to the shrines’ in a way they provided the for the shrines’ Like authors of shrine books used material by way of and the Authors of shrine books might not have to on or ecclesiastical historians for much in but they reported from or from witnesses’ and or from recounted by that around the Notre-Dame de Garaison in the to people who to about the of the Virgin Mary to a an which had over a later Pierre Alabert to have to the people of the same about miraculous Yet some of the material that authors in sources was from written This is in the quasi-legal of the testimony But a is at the impression that a and had to the of a particular is a common of shrine books. authors to have the written origins of testimony, by a personal with an or at least that one had This to the truth claims that authors the other the authority of written documentation among early modern people also be Most authors on an of and witnesses to show their readers that the they were The of written and sources testimony about the and miraculous are in books about the shrine of Notre-Dame de published books about with Pierre Geoffroy in and his in Pierre Alabert published book about Garaison in later the shrine’s a and of and authors increasingly that the truth the and miracles had to be The was by which myth with history. a the first of this were and it is from to that the occasion was as a of was by the of the Virgin who the to to the that Mary to a church on that the of the Geoffroy created a a about a past through the sacred with historical of the Geoffroy was with a the in the had no but only ‘the ‘the Yet added to the are specific to time and the about a on the same the the in of on the other strike a They to be of legal are only a or often the and of the with a but always the of the to the Virgin of The or as Geoffroy his about the the of the and the of witnesses and all in other shrine books, a of and witnesses were or from to the legal and religious authors that readers would be to trust the word of those from the of who were to be and decades later a to the one Geoffroy tried to the a historical that Geoffroy only He and they may have had no in evidence than the showed in this of Garaison to a by way of this to to the place, and to those who would particular do not the and the but the time because the or the or the of those who in a and in that were no than the were to in and to to those and of such a remarkable and was content to the in its and which be to the reader but the truth of the is no I in course the research that I did that to the place, to an of the of the of a from the than a and who was ordained to the in who to that the in question his which would to the at on the significant of the — especially how they with and the history of other apparitions — how the truth of the as a of how apparitions and miracles should be He felt to his because was on who is not to be by a and human who are by their and only about and miraculous from and ‘to to to and ‘to myself’ of every of having or of having ‘I to and which after having them, to and as to assure the truth of the on What are the ways of the truth about apparitions and a over and provided the of ‘the truth of an ancient or la But other ways of the truth of a past would from to or popular witnesses who not after the or and the that the and into the that the would evidence provided by the and good of the and miracles at the all these of testimony may have written and in it that about having about the most of his material from written So the of the sources is not the key What should be is on testimony and in his of at common and of all the people of these and the no one or to even a in the will to the truth of an action to which of the it is not a is and human that the should be reported to the most authoritative about the miraculous is the testimony of and their and J. de Saint-Pères, de de Marian of J. de Saint-Pères, de de Marian of authors of shrine books even to the legal of attestations about and favours at Notre-Dame de into his on the This was also the by Pierre de Marca in his book on Notre-Dame de and Marca the of writers who legal into their books. But other authors created the of legal documentation in the way they testimony from a testimony, or the of marvels and miracles in a quasi-legal as the had to a or by a is about legal and about the of bearing Authors legal into their of or they a quasi-legal to an impression of legally established But of authors drew the early modern of to their of of who and how many of pilgrims and have a impression on readers for that such divine were are all to the and the the and the the and the promised his as evidence many of God’s bestowed on the at Notre-Dame de Like other authors of shrine books a of to a shrine’s history, and its sacred Authors of shrine books created an archive even as they recounted a shrine’s history and For sites of Catholic ruined by as well as Pierre Geoffroy to the of and to his shrine of Notre-Dame de Garaison to after the religious wars Other authors the for because were both by and by and put ancient and of past are the and of that and that the and of our of to and for our material authors of shrine books an they created archives in order to their that of a shrine’s history and miracles were They did this by demonstrating faith in archives. They to readers their on the authority of and other written In they also showed how there could in be an archive of faith — that of God’s action in the and to Authors created an archive by preserving testimony, or from sources and or ‘the of the probably in written In these ways the authors created the impression of a of witnesses and knowledge the of a shrine’s history. they such testimony from a shrine’s or or from legal such as depositions or or it from witnesses and other they an and it their as might Geoffroy wanted to the of in Notre-Dame de Garaison by a record of divine out in that ancient and sacred by theological and religious the shrine books, but authors with history, archives and — last but not least — a good

Adam Diamond

The American Reaper: Harvesting Networks and Technology, 1830-1910 By Gordon M. Winder Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012. xii + 225pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and Index. $124.95 (hardcover), ISBN: 9781409424611.What role does the manufacturing of farm machinery play in the rise of corporate capitalism? How did networks, legal protections, and technology condition how the American reaper was produced? How did the harvesting machinery industry prefigure contemporary economic geographies of globalized networks of industrial capital and localized networks of agglomeration economies with urban metropoles? These are some of the questions Gordon M. Winder seeks to answer in his fascinating volume Ihe American Reaper: Harvesting Networks and Technology, 1830-1910.Winder demonstrates quite clearly that the development of the reaper industry prefigures later patterns of vertical disintegration, flexible specialization, and agglomeration economies that were identified by economic geographers as exemplary of the new face of industrial capitalism starting in the latter third of the twentieth century. In Winder's retelling of this important chapter in United States economic history, it is not simply a case of individual firms and an industrial sector implementing mass production techniques in response to rising demand for farm machinery. Rather, the development of complex production networks and the eventual rise of corporate-led vertical integration was the outgrowth of the interplay between the technological limitations of Victorian era craft production, a strong patent protection system that facilitated technology transfer and decentralized production networks, and struggles over control of the labor process.From the 1830s to the 1880s, harvesting machinery manufacturing in North America and globally was dominated by a decentralized craft production paradigm due to locational, technological, labor process, seasonal, and institutional factors. First, it made sense to distribute production to minimize transportation costs of the finished product. Second, prior to the production of steel, harvesting machines used wood, then iron as the primary materials; these materials were not amenable to mass production techniques, which required both skilled labor and significant modification of finished parts before final assembly of harvesting machines. Third, the International Molders Union struggled with reaper manufacturers over the shop floor, and the key role of skilled foundry workers in producing iron implements served to limit economies of scale and hold down productivity advances. Fourth, most production prior to 1870 was seasonal for two reasons: One, this was the general pattern in manufacturing because laborers would work on the farm or forest for part of the year, and in factories another part of the year. Two, the sale of harvesting machinery was seasonal, with sales having to take place before the harvest season. Seasonality of production discouraged large investments in plants because of low capital utilization, and encouraged dispersal of production to reduce capital requirements. Fifth, a strong patent system and requirements by many foreign governments to license manufacture for sale to domestic markets, along with import limitations, encouraged the creation of decentralized production networks and technology transfer as a business expansion strategy in the United States and abroad. Reaper manufacturers licensed out production of entire machines, as well as components used in their own plants. Patent holding companies, such as McCormick or Deering, would license other companies to manufacture and sell machines within a particular region or country, with royalties paid per machine sold to the patent holder. This type of business organization demanded high levels of trust among the members of a business network of largely autonomous actors.Winder provides an extensive case study of one highly decentralized harvest implement manufacturer based in New York - D. …

Natacha Coquery

With recourse to two main sources, trading almanacs and ledgers, this article is intended to establish the crucial role played by eighteenth-century Parisian shopkeepers in accelerating new modes of consuming. The uniqueness of Paris as a market rested on the strong influence of the court. Craftsmen and shopkeepers knowingly exploited the rule of distinction borne by their clients and invented novelties and launched fashions capable of enticing them. Their advertising thus focused on a multi-faceted notion of quality: quality as it related to the shopkeeper, to the consumer, to the shop and to the products. Always on the lookout for novelty, aristocrats were the great suppliers of quality goods. Invariably short of cash, they used such goods as a means of payment to tradesmen, who stood at the centre of a triple market, made up of new and second-hand goods and those sold on credit. High quality and imitation, new and old: shopkeepers used a wide qualitative vocabulary to attract customers. This is how the semi-luxury market developed also among the less affluent. Thus, apparently archaic practices such as barter were in fact used to promote a new market, a semi-luxury market, and are essential to understanding the eighteenth-century consumer explosion.