Elke Schmitter's 2000 novel Frau Sartoris (Mrs. Sartoris, 2003) begins and ends with the same scene: a hit-and-run accident, in which the eponymous protagonist deliberately kills her sixteen-year-old daughter's abusive lover, the nightclub owner and pimp Willroth. For the main character, the murder is an act of female self-assertion and an attempt at establishing agency in a male-dominated society. Reading Schmitter's novel through a lens offered by works that trace the gendered history, psychology, and moral dimension of anger, through Sara Ahmed's and Audre Lorde's notions of anger as a possible catalyst for social change, and through Amia Srinivasan's concept of “apt anger,” highlights the diverse societal and emotional factors that fuel and shape Margarethe Sartoris's anger. These include gender normativity and double moral standards for men's and women's sexualities, motherhood, class, and competing notions of marriage and love, as well as feelings of guilt, vulnerability, helplessness, and humiliation effected by these circumstances. Set in West Germany during the decades following the Second World War, Margarethe's development from romantic young woman to middle-aged adulterer and eventually murderer pinpoints the frustrations and emotional distress the period's gender inequality evoked in many women— an inequality on which second-wave feminism shed light at the time and that despite continued efforts has affected German society to this day. An analysis of the transformation of Margarethe's emotional state from selfdestructive, ineffectual depression to the kind of fury that enables murder contributes to the ongoing debates about the effects of gender inequality on women and the social, psychological, and existential conditions necessary for female subjectivity and authenticity. At the same time, Schmitter's novel raises the question of the legitimacy of a sense of female subjectivity achieved through a kind of vengeful fury that drives the furious individual to suspend moral considerations.

With these lyrics, written by poet and writer Emanuel Harussi (1903–1979) and set to music by composer and pianist Nahum Nardi (1901–1977), the satirical theater Ha’Matate (The Broom) debuted in Tel Aviv in April 1928. This frisky song served as the theater's anthem and manifest. As performances progressed, new stanzas were added while the last lines were retained as the refrain.

Even now, almost a hundred years later, the song's satirical message still stings and bites. The verses from the third program criticized the vagaries of the municipality of Tel Aviv, where the right went left, and the left went right, and circumcision was compulsory; the lyrics of the fourth program refer to the Land of Israel as “occupied territory”; and the final verses scolded local theater critics, who were rich in pretense and poor in talent. Between the 1920s and 1950s, a unique and diverse arena of theaters and theatrical companies evolved in the Jewish community in Mandatory Palestine, known as the Yishuv. Among these, theaters that were called “cabarets,” “light stage,” or “satirical theaters” were Ha’Kumkum (The Kettle), the literary cabaret Tevat Noaḥ (Noah's Ark), or cabaret-cafes such as Semadar (Grape Blossom).

In 1862, fifteen-year-old Dorothea Bernecker applied to become a deaconess at the Kaiserswerth Institute near Düsseldorf, where Protestant women from across Europe had been trained as teachers and nurses for vocational and missionary work since 1836.1 After being rejected on account of her young age and fragile health, she applied again four years later. In the Lebenslauf, or curriculum vitae that she submitted the second time, she wrote of how the initial rejection had made her look at her weakened body with sadness. Then, she went on to describe how she had learned to accept her weakness and find happiness in knowing that her Redeemer lives. This time, she was admitted and began her training on October 31, 1866 (Reformation Day).

The crux of Dorothea's emotional testimony is uncomplicated: physical and worldly despair could be cured through religious piety and redemption. Following the theological arc of Lutheran redemption narratives, it is only when Dorothea accepts her state of helplessness that God's grace can transform the emotional experience of her life. Her writing conveys the basic emotions of sadness and happiness, which perhaps is a reflection of her youth and inexperience, though other Lebensläufe draw upon a broader range of lived experiences to develop more complicated feelings of suffering and grief, familial and Christian love, humility and pride. Dorothea's real life, like those of many deaconess probationers, did not reach an idealized or miraculous state of grace.

A grounding is when a ship strikes the seabed, while a stranding is when the ship then remains there for some length of time.

Running aground could be one of the most disastrous misadventures to befall a ship, the situation requiring prompt and strong action by the officers as the vessel could quickly break up. Furthermore, as the crisis evolved the crew could become disorderly. Sailing across the open seas of the Bay of Bengal presented few dangers of groundings. But weaving one's way through the Andaman Archipelago, the South China Sea and the straits of the Malay Archipelago was a different matter. It was a beautiful region of verdant tropical islands, sandy beaches and azure seas but presented numerous navigational challenges. Between 1805 and 1819, there were fourteen Protests lodged by British country traders at Malacca relating to groundings or strandings, ten of which occurred in the Malacca Strait or the Singapore Strait.

Surprisingly, in his India Directory, starting from the first edition of 1809–11, Horsburgh downplayed the dangers in the Malacca Strait: ‘To persons unacquainted, Malacca Strait appears an intricate navigation, but as the channels are mostly spacious, with good anchorage, it is certainly not dangerous, if common prudence is observed. Many ships keep under way day and night, in most parts of the strait, and often pass through, without anchoring above once or twice.’

Why then, at the turn of the nineteenth century were vessels still running aground in Malay waters? What were the navigation tools available?

Legal proceedings concerning Captain Francis Balston and his voyage of 1820 in the Lady Flora are of interest as an illustration of the restrictions under which private trade took place and the sort of legal argument that could be advanced. Although this matter does not involve a Protest at Malacca, Balston had in the past availed himself of the facility, once in 1816 as captain of the James Drummond and again in 1818 when he commanded the Lady Flora.

In 1820 Balston took the Lady Flora, owned by John Palmer, in ballast from Calcutta to Canton under special licence from the EIC to take on a cargo of tea there and bring it back to Calcutta or ‘any intermediate port’. Instead, the ship took on not tea but other goods at Canton, then proceeded to Batavia to take on more cargo and then to the Cape of Good Hope, arriving on 20 January 1821. Here the Comptroller of Customs, Mr Bird, after taking advice and in conjunction with Mr Luson, the EIC Resident, arrested the ship and refused permission to land the cargo, alleging an infringement of the terms of the ship's licence. However, the suit brought by the Fiscal General in the Court of Justice for condemnation of the ship and cargo was lost; the ship was returned to Balston and the cargo unloaded on 27 February.

Not content with this outcome, later described as ‘an indulgence to which … [he] was not entitled’, Balston brought actions against both Bird and Luson for damages resulting from the delay in unloading the cargo.

Thinking as poeisis

By the mid-eleventh century the cathedral city of Liège was the intellectual capital of the Rhineland, greater than Chartres or any other center of learning in northern Europe. Scholar-monks from elsewhere, including Sedulius Scottus from Ireland, often fleeing marauding raids on their monasteries in vulnerable coastal areas, had come to Lotharingian Liège in the mid-ninth century. By the early eleventh century, despite a rocky century involving various wars and insurrections, fierce ongoing quarrels with the papacy over rights of clerical investiture, and issues of legitimacy among the Rhenish warlords who constituted the Ottonian kingdoms, Liège entered its most illustrious period, especially under a particularly energetic, effective scholar-bishop, Notger (d. 1008), a contemporary of Gerbert of Aurillac (Pope Sylvester II, d. 1003).

The later eleventh to mid-thirteenth centuries were a most productive period not only for scholarship in the textual and logico-literary arts of the trivium but also in the mathematical arts of the quadrivium, including music and geometry. This occurred in monastic, contemplative circles, especially among Carthusians, Cistercians, Victorines, and, as lay religious culture increased into the late thirteen- and fourteenth centuries, among the religious solitaries such as anchorites, lay mystics, and among various orders of friars, especially Augustinians and Franciscans, and very often women, in religious orders and not. In this final chapter I will examine a few of the many inventive formae tractandae using a great variety of geometricala, not just the familiar biblical ones, taught and used mainly in monastic and cathedral circles for productive meditation. My choices are certainly not comprehensive, but I hope they may be fruitful for other scholars in their own studies.

Cultural studies, leaning upon discussions in the social sciences, teaches us that there are binaries in the societies in which we live and define the spaces in which we circulate, the opportunities we have, and the representation we receive in public and private narratives. This can sometimes be read as the difference between teachers and students, the young and the old, the wealthy and the poor, the hegemonic and the marginal. We also learn that within these categories there are other binaries that divide them even further (students at the top of the class and those at the bottom, those that are marginalized for one reason and those that are for two or more reasons). These categorizations can continue ad infinitum. The key point to draw from this is that certain groups (normally those most hegemonic) receive more representation in society in terms of voice, power, place in history, and so forth. Those that fall into the category of the Other tend to receive less representation.

The definition of the Other that this study will use to focus its arguments is that their identity is forged from difference. This difference in power leaves the Other in the position of marginality or dispossession. It is possible to understand the Other to be the subordinate of any binary (Barker 155). Photography has a strong capacity to represent the Other, to give it another place in history. It can reveal lesser seen aspects of the lives of the Other and can broaden the understanding of the entire society in which the reader lives, works, or studies. For this reason, this chapter will consider how photography relates narratives of the Other that offer important insights and opportunities for seeing this sector of Latin America with greater confidence and increased detail, enabling renewed reflection and facilitating deeper study.

The connection of spinning, weaving, and binding with both generative and destructive agency in peaceweaving, healing, and deathweaving is paralleled in particular in the Old English corpus by both generative and destructive weaving of a more cosmic sort: the weaving of creation and the forces of nature and the spinning, weaving, and binding of fate. I will discuss each in its turn with an eye to the textual, linguistic, material, and analogical environment in which it is situated. The discussion, in particular, of wyrd and related terms is complicated by many years of scholarly attention and a large array of evidence, and I will take a fresh and relatively unique look at this evidence and the novel patterns that emerge in the abundant fatal textile imagery in Old English and Anglo-Latin literature, often mirroring patterns in associated classical and medieval cultures.

Weaving Forces of Nature: Creation and Water-Weaving

Among the many riddles of the Exeter Book are found references to metaphorical, cosmic weaving by forces of nature. The first appears in Riddle 40. The narrator, personified “creation,” describes its influence and mode of generative action: ic uttor eaþe eal ymbwinde, / wrætlice gewefen wundorcræfte “I easily wind around outside all things, wondrously woven with marvellous power” (84–5). “Creation” acts in concert with God, whose power alone it respects, as it winds and is woven throughout the world.

‘Don't you think it's a disgrace, and a sure sign of poor education, to be forced to rely on an extraneous justice – that of masters or judges – for want of a sense of justice of one's own?’

‘The greatest disgrace possible,’ he said. ‘And yet, is it really any more disgraceful, would you say, than the person who in addition to spending the greater part of his life in the law courts as defendant or plaintiff, is also convinced, such is his ignorance of what is good, that his cleverness at committing crimes, and his subsequent ability to use every evasion and loophole to escape conviction and avoid paying the penalty, is actually a matter for self-congratulation? And all for the sake of what is trivial and of no importance, because he does not realise how much finer and better it is to see to it that his life does not depend on finding a juror who is half-asleep.’

1. Christian culture and secular justice between repression and reconciliation

In the evolution of the concepts and concrete methods of governing human justice in Western European societies, Christian thought, including its Judaic roots, has played a decisive role. The debate on such a complex and profound topic is so vast that any attempt at synthesis proves impossible.