This essay focuses on territorial conflicts between European masonic bodies outside Europe, and on the impact of these conflicts on inner-European masonic relations. The period between c. 1870 and c. 1930 marks the height of the European expansion respectively the age of ‘high imperialism’. It also marks the first wave of decolonization. The tid…[Read more]

How did (Western) European freemasonries on a transnational level came to terms with the idea of a closer union of the European peoples? Concepts of “Europe” and “Europeanness” were the background music of the formation of masonic pan-European networks, building on transnational encounters either by individual freemasons (in the Universala Framaso…[Read more]

Any memorials, monuments, historic sites, and other public facilities commemorate, celebrate and generally remind us about the landscape of the Cowpastures. In recent decades there has been a nostalgia turn in recovering the memory of the Cowpastures landscape. This is cast in terms of the pioneers and the legacy of the European settlement.
Some…[Read more]

One of the first directors of the Sydney Railway Company was colonial identity Thomas Barker who established Maryland at Bringelly in the 1850s. He developed the farm Maryland as a Sydney gentleman’s retreat and starting building his hilltop homestead in 1854. Barker was a successful Sydney businessman and philanthropist who was one of the…[Read more]

The establishment of Camden in 1840 was a private venture of James and William Macarthur, sons of colonial patriarch John Macarthur, at the Nepean River crossing on the northern edge of the family’s pastoral property of Camden Park. The town’s site was enclosed on three sides by a sweeping bend in the Nepean River and has regularly flooded the…[Read more]

This article examines the grounds on which the Anglican philosopher and theologian Eric Mascall opposed the ordination of women, in a series of influential publications from the 1950s to the 1970s. It examines their basis in Mascall’s understanding of the church, the Incarnation and the ontological status of the sexes. It examines the particular a…[Read more]

The Cowpastures was a vague area south of the Nepean River floodplain on the southern edge of Sydney’s Cumberland Plain. The Dharawal Indigenous people who managed the area were sidelined in 1796 by Europeans when Governor Hunter named the ‘Cow Pasture Plains’ in his sketch map. He had visited the area the previous year to witness the escaped…[Read more]

This article demonstrates the interplay between national, international and transatlantic dimensions within fraternalism. From the late nineteenth century, masonic lodges took part in the broader push towards the formation of transnational organisations and institutions. They were mainly based in western and southwestern Europe. However,…[Read more]

proofs, to be published in a volume 2023

Gotteshäuser en miniature? Architekturbezug, Funktion und Medialität der sogenannten Tempelmodelle der südlichen Levante, in: Jens Kamlah/Markus Witte (Hg.), Sacred Architecture in Ancient Palestine from the Bronze Age to Medieval Times (ADPV 49), Wiesbaden 2023, 153-234.

[Note: these are the slides for the second talk described in the abstract.]

Phylogenetics is an approach developed in evolutionary biology to reconstruct organisms’ relationships of descent based on observations of their trait similarities and differences. It finds a close analogue in textual criticism, where manuscripts correspond to o…[Read more]

This dissertation deals with aristocratic historiography and political legitimation in late-medieval Portugal (late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries). It offers a perspective into the historical imaginary of the late-medieval Portuguese aristocracy; an imaginary that underlay the argumentation of members of this social class in defence of their…[Read more]