INTRODUCTION

I place these two extracts together in order to investigate how Greek historians and social scientists have explored the relationship between democracy, prosperity and inequality. My aim in this chapter is twofold: first, to outline some of the questions asked within the social science literature, particularly that which draws on this passage of Aristotle, and to see how Greek historians might contribute to, indeed critique, these debates; and second, to use some of the frameworks of this literature to explore Greek history in new ways. By placing these in dialogue with one another, I hope to show not only what social science approaches can offer a Greek historian, but also what Greek history might offer a social scientist.

A fifteenth-century manuscript from the Dominican convent of Adelhausen in southern Germany bears a brief account of the convent's history from the time of its founding to the Observant reform, so called because of the insistence on strict observance of the Order's Rule and Constitution. After copies of the letters and bulls establishing the convent and incorporating it into the Dominican Order, the narrative begins by referring the reader to another chronicle. ‘Das andechtig selig geistlich leben der heiligen swestern des wirdigen closters’ (‘The devout, blessed, spiritual life of the holy sisters of the worthy convent’) was recorded in the early fourteenth century by Adelhausen's prioress Anna von Munzingen. This text, however, concerns the aftermath of the nuns’ descent into disorder and disobedience. From such remarkable holiness the convent had fallen so far that in 1410 God sent a fire that burned the convent to the ground as punishment for their willfulness. After begging for the means to restore their grounds and staying for years as guests in the convents of St Katherine and Klingental, the Adelhausen sisters finally went home. Yet the years spent in exile had made them used to commerce with the outside world, and upon their return to the rebuilt convent, the sisters failed to rebuild a spiritual life. Even after a divine admonition as extreme as the fire of 1410, the nuns persisted in their fallen way of life for another fifty years. The convent was not reformed until 1465, when a priest of the Dominican Order brought nuns out of Observant convents in Alsace and Basel to teach their sisters in the three Freiburg convents to live in enclosure and observe the Rule as devoutly as their fourteenth-century predecessors had done.

The story of Adelhausen's fall and reform is preserved in an autograph manuscript written at the convent by the reforming priest himself a little more than fifteen years after the reform and re-enclosure. Johannes Meyer (1422– 1485) had spent the years after 1465 serving as confessor and reforming other Dominican convents throughout southwestern Germany and Alsace before returning to Adelhausen as confessor in 1482. Despite the fact that Meyer was not only present but also responsible for the events of 1465, he does not name himself and speaks only of ‘ein priester unsers orden’ (‘a priest of our order’).

This volume addresses the question of whether, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, there existed a distinctive dualist religious movement, ranging from Asia Minor almost to the Atlantic. It seems important in this context to consider terminology and how it affects the discussion. Specifically, I am going to consider terminology used in the Middle Ages for southern French examples of what historians have come to call ‘Cathars’ and ‘Catharism’. There is a legitimate debate about whether we should be using the terms. This is quite distinct from the debate about whether ‘Cathars’ were dualists. It is also distinct from the debate about whether southern French dualists, called ‘Cathars’ or otherwise, were connected to other pockets of dualism. However, all three elements of the traditional approach – the name, the dualism, the international phenomenon – are coming to be dealt with separately in recent, refreshingly iconoclastic, but very scholarly, francophone works. Monique Zerner et al. deny the evidence of dualism in the West; Jean-Louis Biget finds an indigenous dualism which was independent of external influence, and does not call it Catharism; Pilar Jiménez-Sanchez considers the western phenomena as different ‘Catharisms’.

In the dominant anglophone literature, as in the traditional francophone, it is as though ‘western dualism’ and ‘Catharism’ were the same thing, even though we all know that ‘Catharism’ is an ahistorical term for the medieval phenomenon, or phenomena, under discussion. The traditionalists know that it was hardly used in, or of, southern France, and not very often elsewhere either, and do not argue otherwise. But whilst it could be argued that we need some universal label for the people whom inquisitors, unhelpfully, simply called ‘heretics’, so that we know that we are all talking about the same phenomenon (however we interpret it), this approach presupposes an association between western heresies called ‘Cathar’ by their detractors; that they were alike and connected, even though they were geographically distant, and did not always use the same terminology as each other to describe themselves. My opinion is that ‘alike and connected’ does indeed describe what the sources reveal, and that we may legitimately use a short-hand terminology for it, while nonetheless noting significant differences between groups on account of the ways they developed.

This chapter charts the development of women's writing within Colombia from independence up until the present day. Although women were writing in Colombia as early as the Colonial period, it was in the nineteenth century, with the rise to prominence of one of Colombia's most prolific writers, that women first made their mark on the national literary scene in a sustained fashion. Following on from this, the early twentieth century saw a significant number of women poets, short story writers, and writers of crónicas, followed, in the second half of the twentieth century, by the rise of the post-Boom generation and a significant number of women novelists. Toward the latter part of the century, a generation of new women writers emerged whose prose was heavily influenced by journalism, and since then and into the twenty-first century, we have seen the rise of urban, popular, and genre fiction among Colombian women writers.

The nineteenth century

In the nineteenth century in Colombia, as with most other Latin American countries, letters and politics were intimately entwined, with literature mostly dominated by male writers who were often at the same time statesmen and military leaders. Yet the nineteenth century also saw the emergence of published women writers, and in Colombia none was more prominent than Soledad Acosta (1833–1913). Widely recognized as Colombia's most significant woman writer in the nineteenth century, Acosta was a hugely prolific writer who turned her hand to a myriad of genres and styles, including short fiction, novels, drama, translations, essays, crónicas, and journalistic articles.

Daughter of the famous national hero of the War of Independence Joaquín Acosta and wife of the prominent Liberal politician and writer José María Samper, Acosta formed part of the Liberal elites of the time, yet her works also display a growing concern for women and their roles within the nation. Among her most famous works is the novel Dolores: cuadros de la vida de una mujer (Dolores: Portraits of the Life of a Woman), published originally as a serial in the newspaper El Mensajero in 1867 and subsequently republished in the book Novelas y cuadros de la vida sur-americana (Novels and Portraits of South American Life) in 1869. In Dolores, the eponymous heroine discovers she has leprosy and as a result must cancel her marriage plans subsequently withdrawing from the world.

Introduction

The Colombian novel of the twenty-first century is a heterogeneous genre of multiple tendencies published by three generations of writers. In addition, with the rise of the new technologies since the early 1990s, the new digital genre offers a different concept of what a novel might be. In the twenty-first century, the most visible generation consisted of the writers known in Latin America as the “McOndo” generation, also identified as the “Crack” generation in Mexico and the Generation of the 1990s in Brazil. This generation was born in the 1960s, began publishing in the 1990s, and includes most prominently Mario Mendoza (b. 1964), Jorge Franco (b. 1962) Santiago Gamboa (b. 1965), Efraim Medina Reyes (b. 1967), Juan Carlos Botero (b. 1960), Octavio Escobar Giraldo (b. 1962), Pablo Montoya (b. 1963), and Enrique Serrano (b. 1960). The generation that preceded it began publishing earlier (in the 1970s and 1980s), and these writers, such as Fernando Vallejo (b. 1942), Darío Jaramillo (b. 1947), Laura Restrepo (b. 1950), Albalucía Angel (b. 1939), Fanny Buitrago (b. 1945), Ramón Illán Baca (b. 1942), Héctor Abad Facciolince (b. 1958), Evelio Rosero (b. 1958), Roberto Burgos (b. 1948), Oscar Collazos (b. 1942), Piedad Bonnet (b. 1951), William Ospina (b. 1954), Azriel Bibliowicz (b. 1949), Gustavo Alvarez Gardeazábal (b. 1945), José Gabriel Baena (b. 1952), and Tomás González (b. 1952), have all published a significant body of work that began appearing in the 1970s and 1980s. With respect to the youngest generation that followed the Generation of the 1990s, born since 1970 are Juan Gabriel Vásquez, Ricardo Silva Romero (1970 b.), Juan Manuel Ruiz, and Juan B. Gutiérrez. In this chapter, we will provide a brief overview of these three generations and then discuss some major topics of twenty-first century writing: the new urban violence, sicaresque and urban neorealism, exile and new experience of urban space, and new digital genres.

Three generations of writers

Of the three generations of writers, a Generation of the 1990s has been widely discussed since the mid-1990s, but there is little agreement about exactly what they represent. In general, these writers have rejected some aspects of the 1960s Boom, particularly the magical realism that in Colombia they associate with García Márquez but also, to some degree, with the popular commercial writer Isabel Allende.