Auctoritas as sanctitas: Balthild's depiction as ‘queen-saint’ in the Vita Balthildis

This paper assesses the representation of Queen Balthild of Neustrian Francia in her seventh-century Vita as a new kind of saintly figure, a ‘queen-saint’ rather than as a traditional saint-queen. Balthild made herself unpopular among certain factions of the Frankish nobility during her son's minority by interfering in Church matters. In particular, she compelled bishops to grant episcopal exemptions to monasteries and promoted her own, unpopular, candidates to Neustrian dioceses, leading to her identification as a ‘modern-day Jezebel’ by her enemies, and her banishment to the monastic community at Chelles. Modern scholarship on Balthild, led by Lynda Coon, has assumed that Balthild's biographer was keen to erase from popular memory her actions as queen, actions which could be interpreted as inappropriate behaviour for a saint, and that the Life reflects this by emphasising Balthild's more stereotypical saintly behaviour as a nun once she had retired to Chelles. However, it will be argued that, rather than underlining her humility, the author of the Vita Balthildis was in fact keen to show that her interference in Church matters should be seen as contributing to her identification as a saint, by stressing that her autonomous and authoritative use of her power was actually a positive attribute.     

Beauty,Bath and Beyond: Framing Bathsheba as a Royal Fantasy in 2 Sam 11,1-5

This paper investigates the function of beauty in David and Bathsheba’s encounter in 2 Sam 11,1-5. It argues that the female bather’s pleasant appearance, rather than simply kindling king David’s desire, focalizes the woman as sexually available (and vulnerable) and wraps the whole episode in a royal fantasy of shared intimacy. The focus on Bathsheba’s beautiful body—her wash, her motion towards the king, her self-sanctification and her pregnancy—frames the episode in a very erotic way, suggesting adultery. It conceals the sexual violence committed by the king who sends, takes and sleeps with the woman. David’s violent entitlement to Bathsheba reveals the beauty politics at play in his royal House.     

Man,Woman and God in Judg 4

This paper attempts to explain the peculiarities of the Deborah narrative. In contrast to other savior- judges, Deborah is a prophetess, a judiciary, and a woman. Her role as a savior differs from other judges in that she is a high commander, but Barak carries out the actual task of battle. Deborah's rule conveys the lesson that God is responsible for victory. This is why she is presented as a prophet and a messenger of God and her personality is not portrayed in the story at all; rather, she is shown as a well-established judge and therefore an anti-charismatic figure. The emphasis on her status as a woman is meant to prevent her from becoming involved in an actual battle; this is left for Barak to carry out. When Barak demands the presence of Deborah on the battlefield, it might be thought that her presence is necessary to gain victory; then, as in the Ehud narrative, an unhealthy dependency between the people and Deborah might have been produced. Deborah responds with a prophecy that a woman will kill Sisera; in this way she reinforces her prophetic role rather than her personality, rectifying the damage caused by Barak's request.     

Meaning in a Changing Context: Towards an Interdisciplinary Approach to Authorial Revision

Summary

In this article, I seek to develop a genetic/diachronic approach to the phenomenon of authorial revision, and to the interpretation of texts that exist in multiple versions. In all such cases, the reconstruction of textual meaning cannot be separated from the reconstruction of the process through which the text in its ‘final’ form came into being; furthermore, an understanding of the author's intentions in (re)writing cannot be entirely separated from an understanding of his/her motives for (re)writing. This article is divided into three sections. In the first section, I consider recent trends in editorial and literary theory that aim at characterising texts in terms of processes rather than products, in order to uphold the equal dignity of each version without losing sight of its connectedness to other stages in the history of the text. In the second section, I discuss how Quentin Skinner's views on meaning and context apply to cases of authorial revision, and I suggest that some key aspects of Skinner's contextualism need to be reconsidered. In the concluding section, I focus on a case study in order to demonstrate the operational value of such a genetic and motive-based approach to authorial revision: more particularly, I seek to show how a close examination of Jean Bodin's rewriting practices in the Methodus (1566–1572) and the République (1576) can throw new light on his shift from a concept of limited sovereignty to one of absolute sovereignty.     

Facing Climate Change: Andrea Juan's Visual Play with Science and the Sublime

Andrea Juan has responded to climate change in her art since 2002, highlighting the potential enjoyment of uncertainty and the pleasure of discovering this ecological crisis. Through an examination of El bosque invisible: Serie Antártica [The Invisible Forest: The Antarctica Series], 2010, this article will examine how Juan represents environmental transformations through her process, aesthetic choices, and work in Antarctica. Antarctica—an emblem of environmental change and advancements in scientific research—serves as one of the main stages for Juan's placement of colorful fabrics and cloth figures that are meant to represent specific natural phenomena connected to climate change. Juan's documentation of these scenes in videos and digital stills quotes the Romantic tradition of the sublime in landscape painting, the artist-traveller, and a heroic notion of scientific fieldwork, which exposes a continued desire for control despite our increasing knowledge of our limitations, as well as two principal means through which we understand climate change: science and the sublime. Furthermore, the pleasing quality of Juan's art, in spite of the crisis to which she alludes, aligns with contemporary trends that favor participation, pleasure and hope. This tendency itself exposes the uncertainty of art's role in the face of such crises.     

Review articles

Colette is not generally included in recent narratives of twentieth-century French neoclassicism. However, her contemporaries of various political and aesthetic persuasions considered Colette to be a classique of the first order. This article explores classification as classique by critics sympathetic to Charles Maurras and the aesthetics of the Action française as well as left-leaning critics associated with André Gide and the group surrounding the Nouvelle Revue française. The article shows that it is Colette's strong association with a particular type of femininity that allows her to be thought of as classique by critics of such different political and aesthetic commitments. The article also examines examples of resistance to Colette's categorisation as classique, and attempts to assert the modernity of her work, coining the term classique moderne as a way of bringing together diverse attempts to explain the harmony between classicism and modernity in Colette's work. The article suggests that Colette's incorporation in the canon of the classique is part of a larger solidifying of the role of femininity in French identity at that moment.     

Writing from the margins: Marina Carr's early theatre

This article analyses Marina Carr's first four plays: Low in the Dark (1989), The Deer's Surrender (1990), This Love Thing (1991) and Ullaloo (1991). It aims to show how Carr seeks to eschew the mimetic conventions of what can be seen as a dominant, patriarchal theatre establishment, marking (and possibly maintaining) her marginal position as a theatre-maker at the time. I argue that Carr, at this point in her career, was engaged in distinctly feminist theatre practices. Materialist feminist discourse provides a useful framework for understanding what the emergent dramatist was trying to achieve and the meaningful possibilities of her work. A study of this phase of Carr's career, encompassing all four works preceding The Mai, has not been offered in research on the dramatist to date. In addition to expanding the history of feminist theatre practice in Ireland, it promotes an enriched understanding of Carr's theatre as a whole.     

From the Absent Mother to the Oppressive Mother to the New Mother in Lucía Etxebarria's Un milagro en equilibrio

This article examines the transformation of maternal and paternal images that occurs in Lucía Etxebarria's 2004 novel Un milagro en equilibrio. Sandra Schumm argues that the novel engages and transforms the postwar archetype of the “absent mother.” Using Schumm's study as a springboard, my article takes this argument further by showing how Etxebarria rewrites a second maternal archetype, the “oppressive mother,” a figure that symbolizes patriarchal values and the Francoist regime in many postwar narratives by women. At first, protagonist Eva Agulló characterizes her mother, Eva Benayas, as one of these oppressive mothers, a characterization that Etxebarria has also employed in her two most famous novels to date, Amor curiosidad, prozac y dudas and Beatriz y los cuerpos celestes. Un milagro en equilibrio marks a change in Etxebarria's treatment of mothers because, as the novel progresses, Agulló questions and then complicates this portrayal. The Benayas that emerges is a complex woman influenced by personal, familial, and national conflicts. Conversely, Agulló's father comes to assume more culpability for family abuse and dysfunction as Agulló associates him with Francoism. This reassessment of maternal and paternal roles demonstrates Etxebarria's own evolution in maternal representations as it dialogues with and recreates previous works such as Ana María Moix's 1969 novel Julia and Ana María Matute's 1959 Primera memoria and 1969 La trampa—three foundational novels that also employ tyrannical maternal figures. In rejecting the oppressive mother role she had assigned to her mother, Agulló rewrites a long history of maternal figures associated with the Francoist regime in many postwar narratives by women.     

‘The revolt of the medievalists’. Directions in recent research on the twelfth-century renaissance

This paper examines an attempt to introduce a male administrator at a Benedictine women's monastery in Catalonia in the fourteenth century. It argues that records from the monastic and episcopal archives indicate the existence of a complex and dynamic interplay between the nuns and their abbess and the bishop. Due to this complicated process of negotiation, the bishop did not succeed in imposing a new male authority figure over the traditional leadership of the community. Over the next fifty years, the abbesses reasserted themselves and redefined the procurator's role as one subordinate to themselves. The episode illustrates that nuns could employ varied tactics to resist attempts to change their traditional administrative structure.     

Unravelling the Alexiad: Who was ‘Devgenevich’of the Russian Primary Chronicle and ‘Pseudo-Diogenes’ of the Greek sources?

Abstract

An individual claiming to be related to the Emperor Romanos IV Diogenes (1068–71) took part in a major Cuman invasion of Byzantium on the eve of the First Crusade. This article assesses the date of the assault, which is recorded by the Russian Primary Chronicle, by John Zonaras, and by Anna Komnene in the Alexiad . The identity of the man referred to as the False Diogenes by the Byzantine sources is considered, and it is argued that, rather than being an impostor, the individual in question may well indeed have been the son of Romanos IV Diogenes. Modern scholars have tended to ignore this possibility, instead following Anna Komnene's meticulous character assassination of the man who accompanied the nomad attack. This paper therefore also seeks to address the question of the identity of ‘Pseudo-Diogenes’, to examine Anna Komnene's methods of savaging a natural rival to her father for the imperial throne, and to assess her motives for doing so.     

The Emotions in Sixteenth‐Century Spanish Spirituality

This article examines discourses on emotion produced and circulated in the context of spiritual reform in sixteenth‐century Spain as teleological methods of self‐interpretation which nonetheless stressed the individuals’ responsibility in actively recognising, displaying, and directing their emotions to a spiritual purpose. Paying particular attention to key devotional books such as Ignatius of Loyola's Spiritual Exercises, Francisco de Osuna's Third Spiritual Alphabet, Bernardino de Laredo's Ascent of Mount Sion, and Teresa of Avila's Book of her Life and The Way of Perfection as a framework of beliefs and guidelines which helped to shape actual cultural practices such as self‐examination and meditation, it seeks to show the complexity of sixteenth‐century understandings of emotion, rationality and the role of the will. It thus aims to challenge the narrow approach taken by recent philosophers like Ronald de Sousa and Robert Solomon in their critique of the historical role of emotion within religion.     

THE HISTORIAN AS A PUBLIC MORALIST: ON THE ROMAN ORIGINS OF A SCHOLARLY PERSONA

In her recent book, Virtus Romana, Catalina Balmaceda provides a fascinating analysis of the concept of virtus in Roman historiography. Although virtus, which translates as courage or more generally as virtue, meant different things to different Roman historians, Balmaceda shows that disagreement was never about whether historians should provide readers with examples of virtue. Historians' differences of opinion focused rather on where such models were to be found and what they should look like. This review essay summarizes Balmaceda's main arguments, raises a question about historians' own virtus, and draws some implications from the book for the study of scholarly personae. Did the persona of the historian as a public moralist, such as is known from nineteenth‐century Europe, originate in ancient Rome?     

The Swinging Gate: Katherine Mansfield's Missionary Vision

At the age of thirteen, Mansfield wrote “I want to be a Maori missionary” in her Book of Common Prayer. “The Swinging Gate: Katherine Mansfield's Missionary Vision” by Richard Cappuccio argues that Mansfield's initial diary entry is a lens through which one can read her interests in, rebellion against, and modifications of her Anglican background. The article discusses close readings of her poems “The Sea Child,” “The Butterfly,” and “To L.H. B.” as well as two of her stories — “Prelude,” and “How Pearl Button Was Kidnapped.” In addition it draws on journals and letters to focus on a relationship between Maori systems of belief, her affinities with Frank Harris's “A Holy Man (After Tolstoi),” and her final observations about G. I. Gurdjieff.     

WHAT WAS CRITICAL HISTORY? A READING OF RICHARD SIMON'S HISTOIRE CRITIQUE DU VIEUX TESTAMENT

The roots of our modern critical historical attitude are usually set in one of the following phenomena: (1) the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns; (2) the establishment of historiography as a scientific discipline; and (3) the newly gained awareness of anachronism. However, these accounts either neglect the normative character of the above‐mentioned phenomena or operate with an a priori definition of “critical history,” which leads them to retrospectively attribute the concept of “critique” to historical realities that have not used the term to denote their attitude toward or their treatment of the past. Rather than starting from an a priori definition of what “critical history” is, I propose to inquire into what “critical history” was at the moment when it was first conceived as such—namely in Richard Simon's Histoire critique du Vieux Testament. I will begin by presenting Simon's conception of critique, which entailed: (a) a grammatical and philological treatment of the text in question; (b) a historical and cultural contextualization of this text; and (c) a specific type of judgment to be applied to what is written therein. Since this last aspect constitutes the key to understanding critique's attitude toward the past, I will, in the second part, focus my attention on the notion that plays a pivotal role in the exercise of “critical judgment,” that is, on the concept of tradition. Last, I will propose that since Simon's critical history does not seem to be completely autonomous in relation to its object, the roots of our modern call for normative autonomy vis‐à‐vis the past should be sought with the authors whom Simon opposed in his work, but from whom nonetheless he inherited the term critique: Protestant authors such as Scaliger, Casaubon, and Cappel.     

Substitute or subordinate? The role of a male procurator at a Benedictine women's monastery

This paper examines an attempt to introduce a male administrator at a Benedictine women's monastery in Catalonia in the fourteenth century. It argues that records from the monastic and episcopal archives indicate the existence of a complex and dynamic interplay between the nuns and their abbess and the bishop. Due to this complicated process of negotiation, the bishop did not succeed in imposing a new male authority figure over the traditional leadership of the community. Over the next fifty years, the abbesses reasserted themselves and redefined the procurator's role as one subordinate to themselves. The episode illustrates that nuns could employ varied tactics to resist attempts to change their traditional administrative structure.     

Some Literary Cafes of the Late Nineteenth Century

A concern with the use and abuse of power, how it is exercised, by whom, and to what ends runs throughout the fiction of Catalan writer Jaume Cabré. His 1984 novel Fra Junoy o l'agonia dels sons, which was awarded the Premi Prudenci Bertrana, Crítica Serra d'Or, and Nacional de la Crítica, dramatizes the intransigence of ecclesiastical authorities in conflict with the desire for tolerance of a friar. Cabré employs different temporal and spatial planes, shifting points of view, and one of his favorite strategies, that of beginning his novels in medias res and showing the consequences of actions before narrating the actions themselves. A contrapuntal technique contrasts not just characters, but differing concepts of religion and religious life, and sets quotations from the Bible against passages from the governing documents of the convent where Fra Junoy serves as confessor. The clash between his doubts and the certitude of the convent's rigid abbess calls to mind the contest between Sister Aloysius and Father Flynn in John Patrick Shanley's Doubt: A Parable (2005).