Chen Lang (Oxford), ‘How is the situation under heaven excellent?’ Cultural Revolution Theory Study Sessions and Chinese Presentations of the mid-1970s Financial Recession

This presentation provides some preliminary findings from my research on Chinese publications about the financial recession of the 1970s. By the end of the Cultural Revolution, the Chinese government attempted to encourage working-class participation in debates about the nature of socialism in China, which Maoist officials regarded as politically significant. Some of the study sessions that were organised in response to this call examined the economic troubles that Western Europe and the United States were facing in the aftermath of the 1973 energy crisis. Between 1975 and 1976, factory theory-study groups and university researchers published several studies on the subject. By studying how these publications interpreted the recession through official Maoist frameworks, I hope to contribute to scholarship on the global 1960s and global Maoism. The global character of Maoist China's interactions with the outside world stemmed not only from China's role as an initiator of global flows of radical ideas, but also from the ways in which contemporaries produced radical ideas in response to global developments. In the presentation, I plan to show how the 1970s recession became an opportunity for Maoist cadres to demonstrate the validity of China’s official interpretation of the world situation and broaden workers’ knowledge of economic theories.

Enzo Acosta Cunanan (Oxford), Royal Manhood Through Tridentine Eyes: How Pedro de Ribadeneyra Read Henry VIII in “Siglo de Oro” Spain

Far from quelling the polemical firestorm that had raged around his life and reign since he'd requested an annulment from Catherine of Aragon, Henry VIII's death in 1547 merely fanned the flames of posthumous controversy. In particular, Catholic attacks would find their fiercest vernacular articulation in the Spanish Jesuit Pedro de Ribadeneyra's 1588 history, the Historia Eclesiástica del Scisma del Reyno de Inglaterra. Key to Ribadeneyra's damning portrait of Henry as a negative moral exemplar par excellence was his thoroughly hostile picture of the king's masculinity. But to truly understand Ribadeneyra's polemical portrayal of Henrician manhood, one must examine it in light of two (trans)national contexts: prescriptions of ideal royal manhood in "Siglo de Oro" Spain, and those for ideal “private” masculinity in Tridentine Catholicism.

In this paper, I will analyse how Ribadeneyra drew on these two traditions of ideal manhood - one national, one transnational - to create a thoroughly negative picture of Henry as a lustful despot lacking in conventionally “masculine” virtues. Writers of royal advice literature in “Siglo de Oro” Spain emphasised the importance of upholding divine justice in kingship. In the private sphere, Tridentine Catholic pedagogical texts like the Catechismus ex decreto Concilii Tridentini stressed how it was imperative for all men, regardless of social status, to uphold order in their families and rigorous self-control in their sexualities. Reflecting these injunctions, Ribadeneyra denied the veracity of Henry VIII’s masculinity as both king and man by highlighting his perversions of justice, cruelty to Catherine of Aragon and their daughter Mary, and enslavement to lust.

I will explore how Ribadeneyra’s depiction of Henry’s masculinity, when analysed against the backdrop of “Siglo de Oro” royal advice literature and Tridentine prescriptions, can offer historians fresh insights into the ways that late sixteenth-century European histories of foreign countries often functioned as a mirror of (trans)national ideals. Thus I will ultimately question the still persistent adoption of national frames of analysis and categorisation in reference to early modern histories.