Around the same time that women such as Margaret Baker were explaining charges of infanticide with reference to false conceptions, male physicians and surgeons in England's capital were beginning to argue that such conceptions were a misnomer. Writing in 1777, physician, midwifery teacher, and founder of the Westminster Lying-in Hospital, John Leake, suggested that false conceptions were not to be ‘looked upon as a false production of nature herself’. Rather than approach the mole as an unnatural form of generation, Leake argued that these so-called conceptions were simply uterine tumours or retained placentas. Leake concluded that the idea of ‘the false conception lies in the brain of old women, and silly nurses’. The notion that false conceptions were not, in fact, a form of human generation was one that turned centuries of medical knowledge on its head. By the end of the eighteenth century, as I show in this chapter and the next, terms like ‘false conception’ and ‘mola’ were disappearing from medical treatises, textbooks, and midwifery guides, replaced with new theories about uterine expulsions. False generation was being reclassified, such that these phenomena were not envisioned as a separate, ‘false’ form of conception following sexual intercourse. Now, they were explained as the aftermath of true conception and reproductive-related by-products, including retained placentas, retained menstruation, miscarriages, and uterine diseases.

In this chapter, I trace the emergence of these new theories about false conceptions and molas, to make sense of Leake's claim that moles were simply the erroneous beliefs of ‘silly’ or ‘old’ women. I argue that there were two medical figures in particular who were responsible for the changing anatomical and surgical perspectives on false conceptions which appeared at this time.

In an era in which the long-established modes of communication by mail, letter-writing, and face-to-face interactions have increasingly been displaced by digital media – video, audio, text, and images – the epistolary form might seem like a ‘throwback’. Online culture, email, and texting privilege immediacy and speed, and chatbots substitute simulation for human interactions. No such privileging for letter-writing, one of the traditional channels. The humorous evocation of its form and processes in the quaint epithet ‘snail-mail’ occludes the aesthetics that are part of letter-writing. Hine's sonnet, with which this article begins, draws attention to that aspect of letterwriting, whether as a general activity or a specially cultivated form. The poem's formal title and Petrarchan sonnet structure reprise an earlier era and, along with the first stanza, frame letter-writing as a now vanished narrative genre that once regaled the rich and dramatic lives of humans.

What happens to the magic women in Middle English romance when the differences that render them powerful are bound up with corporeality, and specifically the mature female body? Here, the latent threat of social tension and unstable gender norms explored throughout the previous chapters pulls taut, and in the conjunction of monstrosity and feminine physiology, we at last find hints of more overtly negative incarnations of the magical woman in medieval romance. This chapter uses the late medieval English Melusine romances as a case study to demonstrate the medieval anxieties about female biology, aging, and imagined monstrosity in both fiction and scientific discourse. Both in the Melusine texts and in romance more broadly, we see generic treatment of women who are no longer young, mothers rather than lovers, defined by their potential to disturb the borders of acceptability both through their monstrous (and menstrual) bodies and also in their particular maternal power to threaten patriarchal, patrilineal order.

The Melusine narrative follows the relationship between a human man and the fairy Melusine, who, like the fairy mistresses discussed in the previous chapter, offers him her love and endless wealth on the condition that he obey her privacy taboo; unbeknownst to him, she transforms into a serpent once a week. The text, originating in French and with two Middle English redactions, was enormously popular in the late medieval period, with well-developed traditions in German, Dutch, and Spanish as well. That popularity invites us to read Melusine's tale intratextually, imagining the reactions of an audience already familiar with the narrative. Moreover, the structure and beats of the narrative would also have been familiar to medieval audiences due to the textual adherence to the fairy mistress pattern and familiar motifs of transformed serpent-women. Intertextual expectations therefore suffuse the reception of the narrative, and attention to their resonance reveals unexpected nuances.

In many ways, the emergence of comics as an internationally respected art form is intimately linked with the representation of traumatic experiences and with the genre of autobiography. As comics scholar Andrew J. Kunka points out, “the autobiographical comics that get the most critical and scholarly attention often deal with trauma (the Holocaust, the Iran-Iraq War, a father's suicide).” Similarly, in her study of graphic narratives by women, Hillary Chute notes that female creators of comics often focus on “retracing—materially reimagining trauma.” According to Chute, comics are “invested in the ethics of testimony.” Indeed, the most celebrated graphic narrative, Art Spiegelman's Maus: A Survivor's Tale (1986), is a case in point. Maus, which, along with Will Eisner's A Contract with God and Other Tenement Stories (1978), marked the birth of the contemporary “graphic novel” form, combines the memories of Spiegelman's father, who suffered persecution as a Jew in Nazioccupied Poland and survived Auschwitz, with the artist's own experience of growing up in a family of survivors.

In May 1568, during the regime's calling to account of leading Lancashire ‘men of value’, Mary queen of Scots crossed into northwest England. Northern political horizons were expanded, indeed potentially revolutionised, by the dramatic arrival in their midst of the principal Catholic claimant to the throne. Here on their own ground was the woman who, in the eyes of much of Catholic Europe, was not only the rightful heir but the rightful queen regnant.

Mary crossed the Solway Firth on 16 May 1568, landing at Workington in Cumberland. Held in Carlisle Castle until 13 July, she was moved, via Lowther Castle near Penrith and Wharton Hall near Kirkby Stephen, to Castle Bolton in Wensleydale, where she remained until her removal to Tutbury in Stafordshire in February 1569. Mary's arrival gave immediate salience to the succession question as the key to England's religious future. The question was how magnate afnities would position themselves. Tis chapter considers evidence of a Marian Catholic party willing to act and of a developing ideology of resistance.

12.1 Introduction

Defeat at Tara in 980 was emphatic confirmation of Dublin's subordination to Uí Néill overking Máel-Sechnaill mac Domnaill, who first dominated Dublin in 975, it seems. (See Fig. 12.1 for locations in Ireland.) Failure to shake off that yoke, in 980, marks the start of the last phase studied in this book, when Dublin was largely subject to Irish kings: first Máel-Sechnaill, then Brian Bóraime. Their rivalry, in the 980s and 990s, allowed Dublin some autonomy, but, about the turn of the century, submission to Brian Bóraime was secured, it seems, until the year or two immediately before the battle of Clontarf, in 1014. Waterford and Limerick, likewise, fell largely under the sway of Munster, apparently as early as the mid-tenth-century reign of Cellachán mac Búadacháin. He was the last assertive Éoganacht king of Munster, before Dál Cais prevailed, in the persons of Mathgamain mac Cennétig and his brother, Brian. Mathgamain made Limerick subject, in 967 and 972, and was also evidently overlord of Waterford by 969. The Dublin dynasty's interests outside Ireland were drastically curtailed when York was lost, being limited thereafter to the spheres of its Manx-Hebridean cousins, and of Orkney. The Manx-Hebridean regime of the sons of Aralt had intervened in east Ulster, in 970, at Limerick, in 974 and, as we will see, at Waterford, in 984. In the final phase covered by this study, there was a low volume and limited range of recorded church-raiding, characteristic of the entire period after c. 955. Nevertheless, individual church raids and clusters of raids continue to illuminate and be illuminated by the political disposition of Dublin in particular.

Since the early days of the Zionist enterprise, Hebrew songs have mirrored the ways in which successive generations have shaped and reshaped Israeli identity. This essay traces the musical manifestations of this complex history in a case study of a single song, “At Adama” (You, Land). Through an analysis of the musical choices involved in successive arrangements alongside a discussion of the rhetoric accompanying the dissemination of commercial recordings, I explore the degree to which Israeli identity embodies different ideals at various historical moments.

“At Adama” holds a special place in Israeli culture. A Hebrew song in praise of the desert and based on a traditional Bedouin tune, it was created by the young immigrant Arie Yechieli (1922–1947) only a few months before his death in the skirmishes leading up to the Israeli War of Independence. Yechieli, born Leo Martin Kufelnizky, grew up in the town of Kiel, where he was active in Zionist movements. In 1936 he immigrated to Jerusalem through the Aliyat HaNoar (Youth Aliyah) program. A talented artist and poet, Yechieli was passionately interested in Hebrew and Arabic culture and quickly became fluent in both languages. In 1943 he moved to the Negev desert to found Mizpe Revivim (later Kibbutz Revivim) along with members of his youth movement, HaBonim (The Builders). Yechieli soon became friendly with the local Bedouins and was recognized by them as a mukhar (leader), serving as one of the chief intermediaries between the Jewish settlement and the neighboring Azazmeh tribe. He immersed himself in their culture, transcribing and translating over one hundred texts and over thirty traditional songs into Hebrew. Among his works are original poems written in Bedouin poetic rhyming schemes and a children's book about the desert that he illustrated himself.

Manuscript Descriptions and Locations

This chapter attempts to provide an abstract – albeit a rather thick abstract – on the theory and practice of restorative justice in Ethiopia. The historicity is intentionally left imprecise in order to uplift the ideological roots of justice, their reflection of society's moral code and the normative manner in which understandings of justice were coded into restorative justice modalities. Broken down further the central questions are: Where do Ethiopia's concepts of justice come from? Who adjudicated cases? How were good governance and restorative justice schooled? What was the imperative to restore social order and how tightly was it connected to land tenure and the insecure political-religious hierarchy created to tax the peasantry – a hierarchy characterized by a wobbly social ladder that promoted and demoted aristocrats in near equal numbers? Why was the performative aspect of restorative justice centered on honor and shaming so important? Finally, why be magnanimous?

The chapter intends to leave the reader with four observations or signposts about restorative justice: 1. The Ethiopian Christian Orthodox overtones to restorative justice in both substance and application; 2. The extreme lengths society went to to identify and educate individuals – debteras (unordained church clerics) versed in the liturgical poetry known as qiné – who possessed superior intellect to decipher the possibility for reconciliation between good and evil in order to produce lasting peace; 3. The role of restorative justice in maintaining a stable mode of production; and 4. The importance of a public honor and shaming ceremony to ensure appropriate penitence associated with conditional forgiveness.

In 1363, after a long and successful career in crown administration, John Buckingham left royal service, and the people of the diocese of Lincoln finally got a new bishop. They had had over a year to wait. John Gynewell died on 4 August 1362, but the appointment of his successor was not straightforward. Buckingham was the king's candidate, but it seems likely that there was a rival whose local supporters were prepared to thwart the royal will. In the end, though, the king got his way, and in June 1363, before he was consecrated, let alone enthroned, Bishop Buckingham commenced his diocesan duties.

The start of his episcopate is mysterious, for it is likely that the first folios of his memoranda register (Lincolnshire Archives, Register 12) have been lost. These would doubtless have contained his bulls of provision which were read both at his consecration and his enthronement, but his memoranda register indicates that he was working on diocesan administration from early in that month. The first surviving memoranda entry is a commission to act as sequestrator in the archdeaconries of Oxford and Buckingham. It is followed by commissions to sequestrators in the other archdeaconries. Most other entries were of three routine types of business: licences for non-residence, letters dimissory, and permissions to have oratories in private places.