English summaries Australia facing its Colonial Past I. MERLE In 1992, for thefirst time in its history, the High Court of Australia was presented with a case involving récognition of the ancestral land rights of an indigenous community, the inhabitants of the Murray Islands in the Torres Straits. The court ruled in favour of the islanders in the Mabo Case, creating a new légal category in Australian common law: native land rights, or native title. The décision provoked a storm of controversy in Australian public opinion. The repercussions of the décision went far beyond the spécifie case of the Murray Islanders as it amounted to a récognition of the "customary" land rights which ail indigenous Australians were held to inherit from the period preceding European colonisation. The ruling thereby overturned one of the fundamental légal principles of the Australian nation: the doctrine of "terra nullius". This article discusses the stakes in the current debate by reviewing the genesis of a "white " Australia based on the wholesale rejection of its first inhabitants through the légal doctrine that the continent was uninhabited before the arrivai of the Europeans. What was the origin of the idea of "terra nullius" and what did that principle mean? How was it applied and accepted as legitimate for more than two hundred years? In what circumstances was it finally overturned and what are the major conséquences of that ruling ? The Mabo Case points to a séries of historical and légal questions which hâve profoundly challenged the whole of Australian society, its perception of the country's past and the nation's conscience. The Body of a Sinner. The Price of Piety. The Politics of Adultery in Late Antiquity H. SIVAN Using Jérôme's Ep. 1 as a point of departure this article examines the légal définition of the crime of adultery in Late Antiquity. Underlying the exposition of the case narrated by Jérôme is an effort to relate légal théories to realities and idéologies to practicalities. The leading question is how did the moral wrong of adultery contribute to shaping relations between the governed and the government on the one hand, and the private and the public sphères on the other. This study also analyses Jérôme's own attempts to provide a Christian interprétation of a taie of adultery and a public exécution of an adultress. Séduction, Family Space and Authority in the Italian Renaissance L. MARTINES Based upon 251 taies by more than thirty writers, this essay examines family space in Italian Renaissance cities (c. 1350 to 1560). Seen in the context of parental 449 Annales HSS, mars-avril 1998, n° 2, pp. 449-451. h tt p s: // d o i.o rg /1 0. 10 17 /S 03 95 26 49 00 05 09 88 D o w n lo ad ed f ro m h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re . C ar n eg ie M el lo n U n iv er si ty , o n 0 6 A p r 20 21 a t 01 :0 6: 07 , s u b je ct t o t h e C am b ri d g e C o re t er m s o f u se , a va ila b le a t h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re /t er m s. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0395264900050988 https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms ENGLISH SUMMARIES authority, the thème and stratagems ofamatory séduction, whether by maie orfemale, focus the inquiry. Household space, window and door areas, going into the streets, and visits to relatives and churches are ail considered. Women of the propertied classes were supervised and kept mostly at home. Family space went where women went; it did not follow men. Given the extrême dangers involved, séduction was bound to be fearful. Closed domestic space encouragea real or imagined incest. Having corralled his women, the hégémonie maie was then haunted byfears ofwhat went on inside the enclosure. Fatma's Dilemma: Sexual Crime and Légal Culture in an Early Modem Ottoman Court L. PEIRCE In 1541, the judge of the court of Aintab heard the testimony of a peasant girl, Fatma, who had accused two young men of making her pregnant, and one of the two of raping her. The scénario that unfolded revealed that the râpe accusation was made at the urging of the mother of the young man who was actually the father. Fatma 's case is examined hère, not with the goal of resolving it, but rather as a complex site of conflicting légal principles and interests. By situating this case in the context of other cases of sexual crime in mid-16th-century Aintab, this essay contemplâtes the ways in which a local society interpreted and used the law to résolve moral and social problems. It argues that the local court, while functioning as an instrument for the enforcement of normative law, acted at the same time as an arena for negotiation of the very law it was mandated to enforce. The Search for a Historical Tradition: Early India R. THAPAR It has long been held that Indian society in ancient times was an a-historical society and therefore no historical works were written. This view was propagated by colonial writers who argued that they had to "discover" and reconstruct the past of India. This article indicates the existence of a historical consciousness in early India, referred to as the it ihâsa-purâna tradition. It has constituted of a variety of texts—généalogies, historical biographies, chronicles of kingdoms and of families, and of inscriptions issued by many dynasties, recording certain events. There was also a récognition of linear time as important to thèse records, even though a cyclic form was given to cosmic time. It would therefore be appropriate to investigate what was viewed as history in such a society. At the Edge of Médiéval Islam: Urban Elites and Islamization in the Algarve M. MARIN The article analyses the islamization of the extrême Western région in the lberian Peninsula (the Algarve). This process, while following the gênerai trends of the whole of the history of al-Andalus, présents certain peculiarities, among them a late development (by the second half of the 4th/10th century) of the scholarly activities of the "ulamâ". Reasons for this late appearance are proposed, through an exa- mination of Arabie sources which shows the establishment of Arab cultural models prior to the process of islamization itself. Finally, attention is given to the rôle 450 h tt p s: // d o i.o rg /1 0. 10 17 /S 03 95 26 49 00 05 09 88 D o w n lo ad ed f ro m h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re . C ar n eg ie M el lo n U n iv er si ty , o n 0 6 A p r 20 21 a t 01 :0 6: 07 , s u b je ct t o t h e C am b ri d g e C o re t er m s o f u se , a va ila b le a t h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re /t er m s. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0395264900050988 https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms ENGLISH SUMMARIES played by the "ulamâ" in shaping the Islamic character of society. As members of urban élites, scholars in the Algarve established their own family networks (mainly of non Arab origin), played an active rôle in local politics and, in a significant number of cases, displayed life styles of extrême asceticism. 451 h tt p s: // d o i.o rg /1 0. 10 17 /S 03 95 26 49 00 05 09 88 D o w n lo ad ed f ro m h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re . C ar n eg ie M el lo n U n iv er si ty , o n 0 6 A p r 20 21 a t 01 :0 6: 07 , s u b je ct t o t h e C am b ri d g e C o re t er m s o f u se , a va ila b le a t h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re /t er m s. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0395264900050988 https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms