Bouvines

This article explores the relation between the expulsion of Jews from medieval England and France and state building, geo-politics, regime styles, and taxation in these countries. Jews were evicted as a result of attempts by kings to manage royal insecurity, refashion relations between state and society, and build more durable systems of taxation within the territories they claimed as theirs. As they engaged in state building and extended their ties, often conflictual, to key societal and political actors, Jews became financially less important but more visible as outsiders, becoming a liability for the crown. Similar mechanisms were at work despite important differences distinguishing England’s growing regime of rights and representation and France’s emergent absolutist patrimonialism.

The Persian wars have been widely studied in Greek history and historiography, as well as in terms of world military history and cultural reception. Only recently, they have been approached through the lens of mnemohistory, which has called for a more contextualized reading of the ancient evidence and pointed out the changing meaning of each battle in space and time (Yates 2019; Proietti 2021). Following the latter approach, this paper focuses on the battle of Marathon, and explores how its representation, as well as the historical meaning attached to it, developed and changed throughout the 5th century. By investigating the ancient literary, epigraphic, and archaeological evidence it pinpoints at least four stages in its multi-layered process of memorialization, starting from its immediate aftermath to the time of the Peloponnesian war.