Moses' Cushite Wife echoes Hosea's Woman of Harlotries: Exposure of Unfaithfulness in the Wilderness

ABSTRACT

This paper suggests that Numbers 12 implies that the Cushite woman whom Moses marries is an immoral woman and that Moses' marriage with her is based on an implicit divine command which echoes the one God gives Hosea when exhorting him to marry a woman of harlotries. In both cases God wants the prophetic protagonist to experience infidelity, thus enabling him to experience what God feels like when Israel acts unfaithfully to Him. However, after experiencing the unfaithfulness of the Israelites in the narrative of the scouts Moses himself demonstrates unfaithfulness in Meribah. Moses' inability to respond appropriately to Israel's unfaithfulness at Baal-peor, an incident mentioned in Hos 9,10, reflects his inability to contend with the Israelites in the manner of Hosea.     

A 'Female Columbus' in 1887 America: Marking new social territory {1}

As a self-styled 'female Columbus', E. Catherine Bates took a transcontinental journey across North America with a woman companion in the late 1880s and, on her return to England, published A Year in the Great Republic . This paper, following critical theory approaches to the study of travel writing, explores the ways in which several of Bates's many-layered social identities as a woman of the British e lite class came to the fore in her travel narrative. I argue that Bates constructed her narrative primarily around her shifting gender identities- as 'feminine' and 'feminist'- and suggest that imperialistic writing was less apparent because she was travelling to a place that had an 'empire-to-empire' rather than a 'colony-to-empire', relationship to Britain during its 'Age of Empire'. In this paper I am searching for a middle ground between what I have termed 'modernist' interpretations of women's travel writing and the more recent post-structural interpretations. I make the case that Victorian women travellers' revisionist commentary on gender roles, as well as their observations of domestic scenes, should remain in focus as we continue to mark them for historical study.     

‘My Lord Sue’: Lady Susan Keck and the Great Oxfordshire Election of 1754

As one of the most memorable campaigners for the New Interest whigs in the Oxfordshire election of 1754, Lady Susan Keck inevitably became the subject of press ridicule and criticism. Undaunted and irrepressible, she not only continued to campaign, but also turned the criticism back on the Old Interest, effectively neutralising it. This detailed examination of Lady Susan's electioneering illustrates the possibilities for electoral involvement at mid‐century that were available to a woman of rank and spirit who was determined to make a difference. Propelled into action by sheer frustration with the poor planning and lacklustre campaigning that had marked the New Interest campaign in the 1751 election, Lady Susan put her, not inconsiderable, energy into securing a victory for the New Interest. Driven by ideology rather than by family interests, she used her age, rank, sex and connections, to political advantage. Confident and characterful, she was ideally suited to the rumbustious, personal politics of the age. Most importantly, her canvassing achieved results and the eventual New Interest victory owed, at least in part, to her efforts.     

Irrefutable arguments: Teresa de Cartagena defends her right to authorship

Teresa de Cartagena wrote a masterful text of consolation for all who suffer illness or impairment entitled Arboleda de los enfermos [Grove of the Infirm] in which she recounts her spiritual response to the onset of deafness. The work was maligned, not for its content, but rather because detractors refused to believe that Arboleda could have been penned by a woman, especially one who suffered from a physical impairment. Teresa responded to those who doubted her authorship by writing a second text, Admiraçión operum Dey [Wonder at the Works of God]. She felt compelled to respond to her critics in order to assert a single, and irrefutable, truth: God gave her the ability to write Arboleda, and, since anything is possible for God, to deny her authorship is tantamount to denying the omnipotence of God. She declares that any reader who doubts her authorship does not believe that God is capable of miraculous deeds. She argues that it is rare for a woman to write but certainly not impossible if God so wills it. This article explores how Teresa constructs and builds what, on the surface, appears to be a simple, in not outright indisputable, tenet of Christian doctrine, i.e., God’s unlimited and inscrutable power.     

¿Hacia una literatura de compromiso? Cohesión social desde el individuo en La muerte de Kurt Cobain de Care Santos

Socially committed writing in contemporary Spanish narrative scene sometimes eliminates the possibilities of depicting individual realities. Care Santos's novel La muerte de Kurt Cobain (1997) develops the case of a unique young girl who goes through a life-changing experience during a summer when she has to overcome personal issues in order to form her persona. The novel is half crime-fiction since there is a mystery to solve and half bildungsroman due to the formation of the personality of the female lead character. Coming of age by becoming a human being, a friend, a sister, and a woman is the main focus of this text, which rejects generalizations regarding youth as a reckless period of life and embraces adulthood as a natural process of growth. Young Spanish girls represented in Santos's work are portrayed through the protagonist who contributes to build a human and cohesive society that stems from the level of commitment of the individual.     

La virtud sospechosa: Teresa de Jesús y su condición femenina

ABSTRACT

Teresa de Jesús (1515–1582) lives in a patriarchal society opposed to the intellectual and spiritual development of women, something that she will not only not accept but also fight against, claiming a series of rights (the right to life, to expression, to autonomy, to the free development of her abilities, to have an active role in the Church, to relate to God through prayer, etc.) in spite of the restrictions of censorship and the cloud of suspicion that hung over her for being a mystic, the founder of convents, and the daughter and granddaughter of a converso. Furthermore, Teresa, with her reforms, would present an alternative life for women, as her convents would be spaces for freedom and women's solidarity.     

‘There Is Graite Odds between A Mans being At Home And A Broad’: Deborah Read Franklin and the Eighteenth‐Century Home

From 1764 to her death in 1774, Deborah Franklin lived in ‘their’ new house without husband Benjamin. The correspondence between them reveals several ambiguously gendered constructions of that house – ideologically, materially, and architecturally. Deborah was ‘homeless’ legally and conceptually. Her household variously consisted of her mother, her adopted son, her daughter, relatives, guests, boarders and servants – she permanently assumed the role of head of the household. His household consisted of his landlady, Widow Margaret Stevenson, and her daughter Polly – he could not assume his role as head of household. Moreover, as Deborah wrote to her husband about turning the house into a fortress during a raid on it during Stamp Act crisis, he wrote to her about the household goods; as she talked about politics, he discussed familial matters. Their permeable, even ambiguous, masculine and feminine roles reconstructed the meaning – and thereby symbolised the gendered complexity – of the early American white middling and elite eighteenth‐century home.     

Samuel Butler's Sheep

Alice Stopford Green, widow of proto-social and Teutonic nationalist historian J.R. Green, who went on to become an Irish nationalist historian and campaigner, complicates our view of fin-de-siècle women writers. Surprisingly for an amateur historian in an age of professionalization, she took a consciously separatist position, privileging the particular over the general, and defining her writing as both female and Irish.

This article focuses on Stopford Green's 1915 epilogue to her husband's Short History of the English People (1874), and her startlingly anguished periodical article of 1897 from Nineteenth Century, to demonstrate a separatism both bold and self-aware.‘Woman's Place in the World of Letters’ (1897) prefigures Cixous in its call for an écriture feminine. It views women as utterly alien to the established order of this world. Stopford Green at once acquiesces with female essentialisation – ‘woman’ comes in the singular – and undermines it by insisting that woman's true nature is almost never seen. In the ‘Epilogue’ (1915), which updates her husband's narrative to her war-torn present, Stopford Green voices jingoistic rhetoric, but employs unobtrusive asides to distance herself from these calls to imperialism. Through such surreptitious means, she uses her late-husband's popular textbook as the conduit of subversive ideas, both voicing and subverting his English nationalism.     

‘Mɔn’ (to marry/to cook): negotiating becoming a wife and woman in the kitchens of a northern Ghanaian Konkomba community

In this article, I consider the kitchen as domestic space that is at once gendered and gendering in its construction and use by women as they negotiate their social position across the life course. Deeply rooted patriarchal values structure Konkomba society in northern Ghana, and a woman's role is to be a wife, to prepare food in support of her husband's family and community. Although the normative definition of woman's role in society stems from a clear-cut division of labor between women and men, a woman must negotiate her social position and ability to fulfill these labor obligations; she becomes a woman and wife by working to gain access to and control over resources and labor. I explore the shifting dynamics of women's work and social position across the life course, emphasizing the transition from young woman to woman-as-wife-as-cook in her husband's community. These negotiations take place in the kitchen – a fiercely feminine space in which a woman becomes a wife when she earns the right to place hearth stones and prepare a ceremonial ‘first meal’ for her husband and his community.     

The reader as writer,the author as con artist: Nuala O'Faolain and the criminal narratives of Chicago May

Nuala O'Faolain seeks to revise the life story of May Churchill Sharp, an international con woman born in Ireland, in hopes of establishing a feminist identification with her. But O'Faolain's claim for her writing of a kind of authorial authenticity ultimately precludes an identification with Sharp, as Sharp's narrative – like all narratives – is a criminal narrative which renders feminist ‘authenticity’ impossible to achieve, something O'Faolain herself refuses to acknowledge.     

Voices from the Margins: Gendered images of ‘Otherness’ in colonial Morocco

The main goal of this essay is to study a book- El Marroc sensual i fanatic - of travel writings written by a Catalan woman traveller, and to put it within the context of the recent scholarship that relates, on the one hand, travel narrative with Orientalism and gender and, on the other, geography and colonialism. The contradictory nature of the contents of the book leads us to challenge the notion of simple 'Othering' as presented in Said's works where the heterogeneity of colonial power is neglected in a totalising dichotomy between the colonising Self and the colonising Other. The contemporary Spanish official discourse was indeed pro-colonial and paternalistic and often drew on notions of shared history and geographical proximity in order to legitimise an 'altruistic' colonial presence. The author's position is very different from this official discourse, but is deeply ambivalent. Her ambivalence arises from her gender which allows her to live the last Spanish colonial adventure as an outsider, and also from her positioning in Spanish politics. The confrontation between different cultures and traditions is sharply delineated in her accounts on Moroccan women, the primary aim of her travel. The (cultural) impermeability of the Others, with whom she would like to identify deeply, yet with whom she cannot really communicate, forces her to construct her own vision of the identity of these Others, projecting her own view of (Western) feminism. The essay demonstrates the importance of focusing on narratives that come from the margins (and particularly from female authors). These provide new perspectives which can destabilise established conceptions of the colonial relationship and, at the same time they can broaden the conceptual and factual history of our disciplines.     

The Marketing of Norwich Stuffs,c. 1660–1730

Abstract

This essay examines late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century handcrafted Irish lace as material object related to both its conditions of production and its consumption with an emphasis placed upon the consumption of what was consistently referred to in the contemporary press as 'real lace'. Why, for example, would a woman specifically choose handmade Irish lace for her elegant court gown or bridal costume? What might have influenced a consumer to select Irish lace rather than imported lace? Did the wearing of 'real' Irish lace have any symbolic or social meaning beyond adornment? Might the relationship between patrons and workers be viewed through the lens of today's fair trade movement, thereby expanding the consumers' intentions and complicating the workers' conditions?     

Responsibility Ethics and Postliberalism: Rereading H. Richard Niebuhr's The Meaning of Revelation

Abstract

Postliberals have hailed H. Richard Niebuhr's The Meaning of Revelation as a harbinger of narrative theology. A careful reading of Niebuhr's argument, however, suggests a theological ethic that is at once attentive to the narrative formation of agency and yet distinct from postliberalism because of its attention to the divine object of Christians' stories. Niebuhr's theocentrism yields a view of narrative as opened from the inside because it requires appropriation of what he calls "external" narratives in order to do justice to the sovereignty of God. The result is a theological ethic which is sharply critical of modern conceptions of agency and yet continually sifted by contemporary insights and experience.     

Civil Liberties and the Referendum

Abstract

The defeat of the Australian government's attempts to outlaw communism in 1950 and 1951 was a significant victory for the protection of civil liberties. Yet for the Australian Council for Civil Liberties, which had fought a long battle against the measures, the result was not greeted with a sense of triumph. The campaign to avert draconian powers exposed a Council struggling to adapt to the Cold War, and revealed tensions in the Council's belief in democratic institutions and the popular opinion that underpinned them.     

Jonah 4,11 and the Problem of Exegetical Anachronism

ABSTRACT

Modern interpretations of Jonah 4,11 see God's reference to the Ninevites' animals as an example of divine solicitude for all created life. This article, rather, looks at the reference in light of ancient religious and po-litcial beliefs. Doing so demonstrates that the Ninevite beasts' function in the story is as sacrficial animals. The offering of their animals shows the Nine-vites submitting to the sovereignty of God, and portrays God in terms of an-cient Near Eastern royal ideology.     

“Let Me Come to Tell You”: Loide Shikongo,the King,and Poetic License in Colonial Ovamboland

In this paper, I explore cultural discourse, gender and the subjectivities of local people on the frontier of empire in mid‐20th century southern Africa. Using the example of Nekwaya Loide Shikongo, a prominent woman from Ondonga in northern Namibia (the colonial “Ovamboland”), and an epic poem on the deposed King Iipumbu yaShilongo that she performed in 1953, I discuss how gender was constituted and mediated. The narrative of a remarkable woman’s life and her poetry is told to understand how gender in relation to other forms of identity was constructed in different cultural discourses. I argue that both the Christian mission’s cultural discourse and the South African colonial administration’s efforts to masculinise the “native” political authority gendered Owambo elite women whose identities had previously included “gender” only as a rather contingent component. The example of Loide Shikongo, however, also shows that many Owambo continued to pursue heterogeneous, and sometimes ambiguous, strategies in their claims to Christian models of modernity.     

Political Image Making in Portraits of Isabella d'Este,Marchioness of Mantua

Isabella d'Este (1474–1539), marchioness of the northern Italian city state of Mantua, commissioned portraits of herself from some of the foremost painters of her day, including Titian and Leonardo da Vinci. These works have mostly been analysed through the prism of artistic connoisseurship and Isabella's motivations for commissioning them have been seen in gendered terms as idiosyncratic and trivial. This article explores the ways in which Isabella deployed portraiture as a political tool and investigates how she integrated this avenue of self-fashioning with other forms of identity branding to underpin her reputation as a woman capable of exercising authority and deserving of respect for her administrative and diplomatic skills. By analysing the trajectory of Isabella's portrait commissions in the context of her changing levels of political influence, and by considering them as a group, I aim to make sense of their iconography and show that the idea that she merely wished to be memorialised for a beauty she never possessed in reality fails to take into account the sophistication of her political image making.     

The Tannenberg myth in history and literature, 1914–1945

ABSTRACT

The Battle of Tannenberg in late August 1914 has been described as the ‘most powerful German myth’ of the First World War. This essay analyses the role of the battle in German collective memory up to the end of the Third Reich. During the war, the victory in East Prussia was celebrated widely and greatly contributed to the personality cult surrounding Paul von Hindenburg. After 1918, Tannenberg served right-wing circles as a political argument against the post-war order, evoked to underscore the notion of German victimhood against Slav ‘encirclement’, the ‘war guilt lie’ and the territorial provisions of the Treaty of Versailles. However, it never really captured the attention or imagination of writers and artists. Linked primarily to national-conservative groups and ideals, Tannenberg was also of no major significance in National Socialist propaganda.     

Impoverished mothers and poor widows: negotiating images of poverty in Marseille's courts

In the early fifteenth century, in Marseille's court of first instance, a sailor's wife Margarida Gramone sued her son-in-law's estate to recoup money she had spent nursing her dying daughter and granddaughter. She justified her claim on the money by arguing that she had been completely impoverished by the medicine, doctors and wet nurses that her sick family had needed. She called witnesses to attest to her impoverished state and they told a story of a woman unable to pay her bills and reliant on the charity of her neighbours. Other witnesses in the same case, however, suggest Margarida was not poor, but a woman of means. Attempting to reconcile this discrepancy, this article will examine how Marseille's legally savvy citizens negotiated between at least two different attitudes towards the poor: a Christian celebration of charity and a legal scepticism of a pauper's word. The legal records from late medieval Marseille show a multivalent attitude towards the poor. They suggest that the city's citizens were able to draw on different narratives about poverty in order to win over the presiding judge. At the same time, witness testimony about the poor reminds us that the burden of charity was not always welcomed by Marseille's citizens.