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Offers a reassessment of universal chronicle-writing and its ideological implications in the twelfth century.
The Chronography of Robert of Torigni is a key source for the political landscapes of twelfth-century Normandy, England, and wider Western Europe. Robert was at the heart of the Norman political network that revolved around Empress Matilda and her son Henry II, and so a crucial witness to the intense political transformations occurring in the Anglo-Norman world.
This book places his chronicle within its wider textual community, casting new light on the social practices, intellectual rationale, and ambitions of the chroniclers who followed the historiographical traditions of Eusebius of Caesarea, Jerome and Sigebert of Gembloux. Along with Torigni's Chronography, the book examines how independent chroniclers and continuators at Savigny, Mortemer, Ourscamp as well as John of Salisbury adapted the chronicles of Eusebius-Jerome and Sigebert, openly engaging with - or reacting against - their understanding of time, empire and power. It demonstrates how textual traditions and ideological discourses can move across geopolitical boundaries, illuminating the specific circumstances that made the Eusebius-Jerome and Sigebert tradition of chronicle-writing successful in this period.
The first English translation into verse of the full Vox Clamantis, with explanatory notes.
John Gower's Vox Clamantis is one of the major poetic achievements of the Middle Ages. Its subject matter ranges from his dream-vision account of the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 to sharp critiques of the clergy, merchants, and lawyers, all with the intention of teaching the lessons of the past as a guide to the present. In Gower's view, everything that is and happens must be read and interpreted for the guidance God provides: history, Scripture and nature are replete with auguries sent by God to guide rulers if they but learn to read them. Ultimately for Gower, rulers - and we ourselves - are responsible for our own choices, for good or ill.
This line-by-line translation from the original Latin into Modern English is intended for a wide audience, and to be easily readable by scholars and non-scholars alike. It replicates Gower's Latin meter as closely as possible in English, uses straightforward language, and clarifies many difficult points of medieval legal theory, Classical allusion, and theological interpretation heretofore left unexplained in any previous attempts, full or partial, to translate the poem. Extensive notes trace Gower's sources, from Ovid to Peter Riga's Aurora to Alexander Nequam's De Naturis rerum to Nigel Wireker's Speculum Stultorum and the Bible, among many others. Classical and Biblical allusions are identified and fully but succinctly explained. This book also includes the "Letter to Arundel", translated in verse for the first time.
Indispensable for understanding the historical forces that shaped modern governance.
How did Enlightenment philosophy shape the modern bureaucratic state? While thinkers like Adam Smith and David Hume are celebrated for their contributions to political economy, the crucial work of administrative reformers has largely been forgotten-until now. Here, this question is explored through the untold story of the specialists of public administration, such as the Commissioners for Examining the Public Accounts, whose pioneering efforts to translate political economy into practice laid the foundation for contemporary public administration.
This methodologically refined study re-evaluates Britain's administrative reforms of the late eighteenth century. It traces how systematic, resource-oriented administrative rationality replaced patrimonial notions of office, which treated public offices as royal privileges similar to titles of nobility. Sebastian Meurer relates the British reforms to contemporary administrative reform processes in British India and Ireland and reveals their manifold interconnections. Furthermore, the book offers an analysis of the very process, in which new notions pervaded public administration and traces the interrelations of different perspectives and their gradual shift of credibility.
By connecting the rise of public administration with the early social sciences, this monograph illuminates how ideas once confined to philosophical discourse were adapted into the practical realities of governance, reform, and statecraft across the British Empire.
A nuanced and complex portrayal of female voices which have long been silenced, offering a fresh perspective on the history of Brazilian journalism and restoring women's rightful place in Brazil's cultural memory.
This book examines the groundbreaking contributions of Maria Amália de Carvalho, Júlia Lopes de Almeida, Emília Moncorvo Bandeira de Melo (pseudonym Carmen Dolores), and Maria Benedita Câmara Bormann (pseudonym Délia) in Brazil's mainstream press, focusing on their writings published in the influential newspaper O País between 1884 and 1912. Employing psychoanalysis, gender studies, media theory and literary criticism, the chapters in this book explore how these four writers cultivated a collective intellectual network and how their columns became a forum for a critical engagement with the conservative narratives of the male-dominated public sphere. This book questions why their legacies have been marginalised in traditional literary histories and aims to restore their rightful place in Brazil's cultural memory. By presenting a nuanced analysis of these silenced voices, it challenges the persistent myth that women's writing was limited to the 'small press'. A vital reassessment of press history, this book demands a more inclusive understanding of Brazil's journalistic and intellectual heritage, one that properly recognises women as active participants in shaping the Brazilian literary system.
ANA CLÁUDIA SURIANI DA SILVA is Associate Professor in Brazilian Studies at University College London (UCL), UK.
TANIA REGINA DE LUCA is Professor in the History of Brazilian Republic at São Paulo State University (Unesp), Brazil.
CONTRIBUTORS: Alexandro Henrique Paixão, Álvaro Santos Simões Junior, Ana Cláudia Suriani da Silva, Milena Ribeiro Martins, Tania Regina de Luca.
Arthurian Literature has established its position as the home for a great diversity of new research into Arthurian matters. It delivers fascinating material across genres, periods and theoretical issues. TLS
Appropriately for the journal's fortieth milestone, this volume of Arthurian Literature offers an especially wide range of topics, from printers' modifications in early Arthurian books to a study of archetypal characters in several linguistic traditions. It begins with the winner of the Derek Brewer Essay Prize, which has this year been awarded to an original and intriguing investigation of how and why Wynkyn de Worde (or various of his staff working under his direction) modified his 1529 printing of Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte Darthur. Thereafter, literary-critical explorations range across French, Welsh, and Middle English Arthurian literatures, including examinations of marriage in Chrétien's Chevalier au Lion, Peredur in the Welsh Grail texts, fairies and cosmic providence in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and the shifting degrees of agency possessed by Malory's Gwenyvere. The volume also features a lively reconsideration of the Arthurian tomb at Glastonbury from the point of view of material culture, and an examination of Arthur's hagiographical characterisation in Latin-Breton Saints Lives'. It closes with a survey of twentieth-century English-language retellings of Arthurian fiction that highlights female authors' many contributions to the genre.
Analyzes the role of emotions in the religious lives of women from across Germany and Europe from the nineteenth century to the 1970s.
Scholarship on women and religion has focused primarily on the intersection between women's religious engagement and their emancipation. This volume goes beyond that to examine the vital role religion has played in the private and public lives of German and European women. Because emotions are central to the expression of religiosity, it draws on approaches from the history of emotions to examine how women understood, felt and practiced religion in their search for meaning.
Spanning from the nineteenth century to the 1970s, the volume's essays show how religion helped women make sense of their lives. It also illuminates the degree to which women used religion and its attendant emotional scripts to shape modern society and how religious discourses in turn shaped women's emotions and comportment in the public sphere. The volume builds on recent research that shows that religion-especially the religiosity of women-remained a pressing public concern in modern Europe. From anxieties over the religiosity of Bavarian servants to restrictive norms imposed on Jewish widows, from the interfaith commitments of kindergarten teachers to the autobiographical narratives of aspiring Protestant deaconesses, from the suffering of stigmatics in Germany and Belgium to Irish women's public narratives of their religiosity, this book reveals how women's faith and attendant religious emotions have been central to their public and private lives.
Surveys the considerable nineteenth-century American discourse on and response to the writings of the German dramatist, critic, art theorist, and theological thinker.
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-1781) was a leading figure in the humanist revival in German culture that culminated in Weimar Classicism. His plays and drama criticism mark the rise of middle-class forms and values and influenced contemporaries and successors alike. His work in art theory still stimulates discussion, while his liberal theological writing has had a perhaps even greater impact. In the US, Lessing first drew major attention during the German craze of the early nineteenth century and achieved his greatest fame during the third quarter of the century. His drama criticism and views on theology and the arts became entrenched in a robust American discourse about those subjects. Many Americans thought of him less as a historical figure than as a virtual contemporary.
This book surveys critical commentary on Lessing published in prominent journals and periodicals from 1796 to the end of the nineteenth century, a period before the professionalization of literary scholarship in America, when individuals of varying professional backgrounds routinely assessed foreign writers in the context of their own national experience. Chapters focus on the unfolding of Lessing's presence in the US, on broad assessments of his life and work, and, respectively, on American responses to his fables and epigrams, his plays and drama criticism, his art-historical and -theoretical writing, and his theological work.
Does dance tell a story? What, if anything, is it intended to represent? How was it conceived in the early modern period?
This book examines the theories and political uses of dance in Spain during the period preceding and following the 'Poetics turn', which coincided with the rule of Philip III (1598-1621), also known as the Dancing King, and the onset of the reign of Philip IV. While this turning point finalised the definition of dance as an art form, it was also paradoxical. Indeed, this development saw the emergence of an aesthetic thought of dance within Aristotelian poetics, thanks to a common court culture, yet it never led to the formulation of a poetics of ballet.
By recontextualising this turning point, the book examines the relationship between dance and representation during Spain's Golden Age. It revisits the initial codifications of dance in Italy and figurative experiments at the Burgundian court during the second half of the 15th century, as well as their influence on subsequent practices and humanist theories of dance at the courts of Charles V and Philip II. Subsequently, it focuses on the various shifts in court dance as it became a scenic art at the beginning of the seventeenth century, interrogating the possibility of the king performing dance himself. The book concludes that, in Spain, neo-Aristotelian ideas enabled a shift from an ethical to an aesthetic problematic, which saw dance, whether symbolic or purely kinetic in nature, as a legitimate art form to be placed at the service of the monarchy.
Brings to light an important and unconventional teacher of literature whose way of thinking and method are relevant in German Studies and beyond, particularly in view of the present crisis of the humanities.
At a time when enrollment in the humanities is said to be in "free fall" (Nathan Heller, The New Yorker, 2/27/2023), the figure of Andrew Jaszi offers an alternative vision of what a literary education might look like. Jaszi was a Hungarian-born philosopher and literary scholar in the German Department at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1948 to 1985. His accessible, jargon-free approach, a method he developed through analogy with Goethe's unique way of doing science, attracted students of diverse backgrounds and majors to his classes, while also winning acclaim from colleagues who compared him to Wittgenstein and Buber.
Drawing on a set of previously unknown tape recordings of Jaszi's seminars, this book offers readers the opportunity to witness this legendary teacher in action. The book's immediate benefit is the illumination provided by Jaszi's original interpretations of Goethe's Faust and Kafka's "The Judgment." More broadly, it illustrates the transformative, whole-self education Jaszi advocated and himself embodied, one that runs counter to the technocratic imperatives of our time. Ultimately, the book's goal is to make better known an important literary thinker and an unconventional teacher of German Studies, the value of whose work extends beyond a single discipline to humanities education in general, with special bearing on its present crisis and potential future.
An exploration of Yoruba Pentecostalism's role in child witchcraft accusations, examining migration, leadership, and collective responsibility to address faith-based child abuse globally.
What drives communities to accuse children of witchcraft, and how do religious beliefs and leadership dynamics perpetuate this phenomenon across borders? Claire Ayelotan delves into the involvement of Yoruba (Nigerian) Pentecostal leaders in accusations of child witchcraft in Nigeria and the UK. Using a multidisciplinary approach, her research examines the theological, cultural, socioeconomic, and legal influences that drive such behaviours. Ethnographic studies and interviews with pastors and practitioners reveal how power dynamics, gender roles, and international migration intersect to perpetuate these harmful beliefs. The book uncovers gaps in current literature and presents original insights on the collective responsibility, shared beliefs, and complexities of Pentecostal leadership in this context. By focusing on the global aspects of child witchcraft accusations, it sheds new light on how migration impacts these practices and the negative consequences they have on vulnerable children.
An important read for academics, policymakers, and child welfare professionals, this book challenges assumptions and urges immediate action to combat faith-based child abuse in all its manifestations.
The best new research on medieval clothing and textiles, drawing from a range of disciplines.
The essays collected here continue to showcase the Journal's wide-ranging and eclectic tradition. The topics addressed are the sensory perceptions of textiles in Early Medieval Britain; evidence of the global textile trade as reflected in church facades in Lucca, Italy; the ways in which spinning and weaving in late medieval Cologne influenced the presentation of the cult of the Eleven Thousand Virgins within the city; sumptuary legislation in thirteenth-century Montauban, in the Occitan region of Southern France; visual representations of male underwear in northern European art; and the late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century trade in knitted jersey stockings in Norwich and Yarmouth.
Examines one of the few documented early examples of restorative justice from Africa or Latin America.
With a writing system, Ethiopian emperors as well as pretenders to the throne chronicled their exploits including peace-building feats, and this book showcases and analyses historically verified instances, from as early as 1769, where restorative justice modalities were used to resolve conflict and bring peace to the country.
Peace not War traces Ethiopia's evolving understanding of restorative justice from the 'forgive and forget' approach which characterized the Zemene Mesafint (Era of the Princes), where perpetrators were exonerated, allowing them to recoup and build their armies to fight another day, to conditional forgiveness, recorded by the imperial court and dependent on atonement. Ethiopia's long history of experimentation with different forms of restorative justice demonstrates ingenuity, flexibility, and adaptability, but as the twentieth century progressed, workable, indigenous forms of restorative justice were sidelined by Western codified law that emphasized retribution.
A detailed overview of East African diplomacy at the end of the pre-colonial era, which provides a corrective to the commonly held view that African diplomats were inexperienced, naïve and parochial.
This book traces the history of an elite group that rose to power and wealth in the interlacustrine kingdoms of East Africa at the end of the eighteenth and over the course of the nineteenth century. Katikiro played a major role in shaping the history of their societies at a time of profound change. Royal administrators, chief advisors, envoys - these influential men navigated and directed shifts in the balance of power as old hegemons like the kingdom of Bunyoro stumbled, new contenders like Buganda and Rwanda emerged, the region opened up to trade with the East African Coast and Egypt, and Europeans arrived, first as explorers and missionaries and then as colonial rulers.
Katikiro were in midst of these changes: as politicians they shaped them; as diplomats they mediated them; and as wealthy businessmen they profited from them. Their rise in the nineteenth century offers a unique inside into the agency of Africans in these events and highlights the many continuities of pre-colonial and colonial histories in the region.
Uncovers a vibrant literary culture often overlooked by colonial historiography and Anglocentric critical traditions. Reimagines Spenser's Munster through multilingual networks, bardic poetry, and digital methodologies.
Long dominated by Anglocentric narratives, early modern literary studies have often cast Ireland as a backdrop to English self-fashioning. This volume reorients that perspective by foregrounding the multilingual, polyvocal literary culture of Munster in the late sixteenth century, situating Edmund Spenser not as an isolated colonial voice but as one writer among many-Gaelic, Old English, and New English-engaged in a contested cultural landscape. Drawing on archival, digital, and geospatial methodologies, the essays presented here explore bardic poetry, deep mapping, and the politics of language in texts by and about Spenser and his contemporaries. Case studies of bardic poetry, manuscript culture, and poetic networks reveal a vibrant and dynamic Gaelic literary tradition that responded to colonial violence.
By integrating perspectives from Irish-language literature, English studies, and digital humanities, this collection offers a vital corrective to monolingual historiographies and opens new pathways for understanding the cultural entanglements of Spenser's Munster. It reconceptualises the idea of Spenser in Ireland by highlighting the region's cultural complexity and multilingualism, demonstrating how attention to this richness deepens our understanding of one of the most fraught and fateful periods in the shared history of Ireland and England.
Uncovers the hidden networks behind Catholic publishing in Restoration London, where politics, religion, and print intersected in unexpected ways under Charles II, James VII/II, and Queen Catherine of Braganza.
In the politically volatile decades following the Restoration, the Catholic book trade in London remained a vibrant and adaptive force. This study reconstructs the networks-commercial, familial, and religious-that sustained the production and circulation of Catholic texts between 1660 and 1688. These networks operated within and across confessional boundaries, drawing in Protestants and Catholics alike, and were shaped by shifting legal frameworks, urban patronage, and the ambiguities of what constituted a 'popish' text.
Focusing on the lived experience of printers, booksellers, and readers, the book challenges the notion of Catholic isolation in Protestant England. It reveals how Catholic print culture was embedded in the broader English print economy and public sphere, often sharing tools, spaces, and strategies with dissenting and loyalist traditions. From Somerset House to the streets of London, Catholic actors navigated censorship and suspicion with ingenuity, contributing to a paradoxical print culture that was both illicit and integrated.
Engaging with the fields of Catholic history, book history, and Restoration studies, this monograph offers a new framework for understanding religious identity, toleration, and the mechanics of clandestine publishing. It brings to light the agency of overlooked figures and repositions Catholic print as a central, rather than marginal, feature of early modern English society.
"A brilliant and provocative synthesis of a thousand years of coastal farming." Tim Soens, University of Antwerp, Belgium.
The fascinating story of how the North Sea coast has been farmed is ever changing. Long before the industrial revolution, the inhospitable fens and marshes of the low-lying coastal wetlands on both sides of the Sea had been transformed into one of the most productive agricultural regions in Europe. Agriculture in the coastlands reached its apogee during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as is witnessed by the many impressive farm buildings established then. However, more recently, it has become clear that lowland farming and even the physical existence of the lowlands are in jeopardy, owing to rising sea levels and problems of drainage.
This book offers a history of farming and water management on the North Sea coast, assessing the forces driving - and inhibiting - agricultural progress more broadly. It examines the ways in which farmers in the past dealt with the two main constraints on their decision-making: the natural environment and the human environment of institutional rules and customs regulating behaviour. It looks in particular at how setbacks were overcome, and how farming practices were improved which then raised the money with which to finance the maintenance of dykes, canals, and sluices.
The first comprehensive study of gentry coming of age celebrations, offering insights into the social and cultural dynamics of estate communities in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Wales.
"Coming of age" celebrations were landmark events in the annals of gentry families and for local society, marking the occasion when the heir or heiress to an estate attained their majority at the age of twenty-one, with an assumption that they would eventually inherit the land together with all the privileges and responsibilities attached to its proprietorship. Hundreds of these lively dynastic occasions were celebrated in Wales from the late eighteenth through the "long" nineteenth century, involving masses of participants in an array of public festivities; they provide fascinating evidence for understanding the social and cultural dynamics of estate communities in a rapidly changing environment.
This book provides the first comprehensive study of these events, examining their development, purpose and significance. It considers the role that gentry and aristocracy played in their communities, why landed estates were an integral part of Welsh society, and how they contributed to the character and experience of place, landscape and landowner-tenant relations. Overall, it offers a reassessment of still-prevalent interpretations of an anglicised, alien and absentee landowning elite bearing no connection with or consideration for Welsh communities, culture and consciousness in the two centuries prior to the mass sale and breakup of their country houses and estates in the early-mid twentieth century.
This volume continues the series' engagement with intellectual and cultural pluralism in the Middle Ages, showing the best new work in the field.
Essays in this volume deal with texts from the ninth to the fifteenth century and include some unexpected comparisons with British Romanticism. Great attention is paid to manuscripts in their contexts and situations of production: thirteenth-century mortuary rolls are examined as sites of fluidly variegated scribal training and practice, revealing a "scriptscape" of social networks spread across the country. Elsewhere, close analysis of manuscripts known to have belonged to Henry Despenser, bishop of Norwich (1370-1406) makes the case for an effective scribal atelier in the city, presided over by the "Despenser Master". Three essays are linked by a consideration of didactic writing: the Old English translation of Gregory the Great's Pastoral Care is analysed both textually and paleographically for what it reveals about grammatical study in England's early Middle Ages, and the moral freighting of that learning; a comparative analysis of multilingual retellings of sheep fables making an important contribution to animal studies; and recent, violent historical events are shown to have been reshaped into a parable for the instruction of wives in the Mesnagier de Paris. Finally, Gower's expansive geographical and genealogical imaginary in the Confessio Amantis reveals the impossibility of controlling the affordances of his multivalent "East"; while the Alliterative Morte Arthur is newly examined for its representation of mountains and mountaineering as sites of active moral allegory and spiritual importance, as well as real-world experiences of beauty and danger.
Essays by feminist scholars of German Studies looking at how women-particularly women of color-have put their anger to use in German-language cultural production and how they themselves might do so in their scholarship.
In Germany and in Western culture more broadly, women experience anger in response to misogyny, racism, and other injustice, but open expression of that anger is often considered unwomanly. Yet a rich tradition of feminist thinkers of color-including Audre Lorde, Brittney Cooper, Amia Srinivasan, and Sara Ahmed-understands anger as energizing and imperative for structural change. How might we cultivate an anger that is affirming, inclusive, legitimate, creative, animating, and most of all, feminist?
This volume of essays by feminist scholars of German Studies-writing in dialogue with such thinkers while acknowledging their own largely white, privileged positionalities-looks at how women have put their anger to use in German-language cultural production and how they themselves might do so in their scholarship. The eleven contributions approach the topic of female anger intersectionally and transnationally. They examine angry women in the contexts of politics, activism, philosophy, economics, race, nationality, sexuality, illness, and humour. Covering a wide array of genres and discussing works from the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries, they explore creators including writers, filmmakers, comedian/activists, musicians, and journalists. They investigate the tensions between the emotion of anger and the practice of being an angry woman, global responses to anger, and artistic representations of angry women in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.
"A series which is a model of its kind": Edmund King
The articles collected here demonstrate the range and vitality of current work on the Anglo-Norman period. Writers and writing form an important strand, with analyses of the work and contribution of Peter the Deacon; the portrayal of Harold and Tostig Godwinson and William the Conqueror in Old Norse sagas; the forging of charters in the twelfth century; the production of charters in Oxfordshire in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; and what the career of Baldwin of Bury St Edmunds tells us about the production of diplomas during the reign of Edward the Confessor. The volume also includes articles on the relationship between Bishop Odo of Bayeux and Abbot Scolland of St Augustine's Canterbury; the rise and fall of Old Sarum as a centre of Anglo-Norman power; Archbishop Lanfranc of Canterbury, Pope Clement III and the papal crisis of 1088; the career of Eudo Dapifer and his foundation of St John's abbey in Colchester; the Augustinians in Britain and Normandy c. 1100-c. 1215; and the activities of papal judges-delegate during the reign of King Stephen.