Dr. Michele Alacevich (University of Bologna) At the end of World War II, Italian anti-fascist Carlo Levi published his memoir of one year of internal exile in Southern Italy. In it, Levi describes “that other world, hedged in by custom and sorrow, cut off from History and the State . . . where the peasant lives out his motionless civilization on barren ground in remote poverty”.1 Translated into English in 1947, Levi’s Christ Stopped at Eboli quickly became a classic—not only for readers interested in narrative and memoirs, but also for anthropologists and social scientists. “Christ stopped short of here, at Eboli” was the way Levi’s peasants signified they excluded from human civilization, part of a world of immutable backwardness.2 As I have shown in my article “Planning Peace: The European Roots of the Post-War Global Development Challenge” (Past & Present, Volume 239, Issue 1, 1 May 2018, pp. 219–264), Levi’s book was only one—though an important one—of the many channels through which the concepts of backwardness and development emerged from the specific context of eastern and south-eastern Europe via southern Italy to global discourse. (As an addendum to my article: I recently stumbled upon a World Bank internal correspondence […]

by the Past & Present editorial team

by the Past & Present editorial team

by the Past & Present editorial team   Programme in Full Monday 3rd September 12.30 -1.15: Lunch 1.15 Welcome and Introduction 1.30 – 3.15 Chair: Matthias Pohlig 1. Sarah Rindlisbacher, ‘Ambassadors of Protestantism: Swiss Reformed Clergymen and their Influence on Foreign Relations with England in the 1650s’ 2. Thomas Grunewald, ‘Pietism and nobility – the reinterpretation of the representative architecture of Wernigerode’ Comment: Sam Fornecker & Sarah Stefanic 3.15 – 3.45: Tea and Coffee 3.45 – 5.30 Chair: Markus Wriedt 1. Nora Epstein, ‘Illustrating Authority: The Creation and Reception of an English Protestant Iconography’ 2. Christina Faraday, “[T]he livelier the counterfeit is, the greater error is engendered’?: Re-assessing ‘liveliness’ in Post-Reformation English visual culture’ Comment: Esther Counsell & Eleanor Barnet Tuesday 4th September 9.15 – 11.00 Chair: Bridget Heal 1. Abdulaziz Al-Salem, Martin Luther (1483-1546) and Muhammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb (1703-1792): A Comparative Study through Cultural Materialism 2. Wiebke Voigt, ‘The ‘New Papacy’ vs. the ‘Heavenly Prophets’: Invectivity in the Controversial Pamphlets of Martin Luther and Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt’ Comment: Martin Christ & Thomas Grunewald 11.00 – 11.30: Tea and Coffee 11.30 – 1.15 Chair: Alex Walsham Howard Barlow, ‘Bunbury was not Banbury: Catholic-Protestant relations in pre-Civil War Cheshire, […]