The temptations of cult: Roman martyr piety in the age of Gregory the Great

Pope Gregory the Great (590–604) was arguably the most important Roman writer and civic leader of the early middle ages; the Roman martyrs were certainly the most important cult figures of the city. However modern scholarship on the relationship between Gregory and the Roman martyrs remains curiously underdeveloped, and has been principally devoted to comparison of the gesta martyrum with the stories of Italian holy men and women (in particular St Benedict) told by Gregory in his Dialogues; in the past generation the Dialogues have come to be understood as a polemic against the model of sanctity proposed by the Roman martyr narratives. This paper explores Gregory's role in the development of Roman martyr cult in the context of the immediate social world of Roman clerical politics of the sixth and seventh centuries. Gregory's authority as bishop of Rome was extremely precarious: the Roman clerical hierarchy with its well-developed protocols did not take kindly to the appearance of Gregory and his ascetic companions. In the conflict between Gregory and his followers, and their opponents, both sides used patronage of martyr cult to advance their cause. In spite of the political necessity of engaging in such 'competitive generosity', Gregory was also concerned to channel martyr devotion, urging contemplation on the moral achievements of the martyrs – which could be imitated in the present – as opposed to an aggressive and unrestrained piety focused on their death. Gregory's complex attitude to martyr cult needs to be differentiated from that which was developed over a century later, north of the Alps, by Carolingian readers and copyists of gesta martyrum and pilgrim guides, whose approach to the Roman martyrs was informed by Gregory's own posthumous reputation.     

A College Student's Rural Journey: Early Sociology and Anthropology in China Seen through Fieldwork on Sichuan's Secret Society

This paper focuses on the investigators of rural society in the Republican period,specifically research made through fieldwork on the Gowned Brothers (or,Paoge) in 1940s Sichuan.It takes up one such investigator,Shen Baoyuan—a student at Yenching University;her youthful work never became published or recognized.The present study reveals how the pioneers of Chinese sociology and anthropology,who called themselves "rural activists," tried to understand rural China.It argues that the developments in those fields in China of the 1920s and 1940s made it possible for us today to have a better understanding of the contemporary rural problems.The investigators played an important role in the Rural Construction and Rural Education Movements in Republican China.They show us how Western sociology and anthropology were localized in order to answer "Chinese questions" and to solve "Chinese problems." As source material,these investigations have given us rich records,which in turn have become precious sources and historical memories of rural China's past.     

Philip of Harvengt's Life of the Blessed Virgin Oda

For every famous author of the twelfth-century renaissance, there are numerous lesser-known writers. Despite being overshadowed by more brilliant scholars or those closer to the centre of important events, their voices add depth to the study of the intellectual and religious history of this period. A founding member of one of the earliest Premonstratensian houses, a highly-educated and prolific author, much in demand as a hagiographer, and a vigorous defender of the clerical order, Philip of Harvengt is one such writer, and a worthy subject for study. This article examines one of his hagiographical works, the Life of the Blessed Virgin Oda, a nun attached to his own house, whom he portrays as a martyr. It analyses the predominant and recurrent concerns and ideals expressed in the Life, particularly the claim to martyrdom, and the means by which this is expressed.     

Studying Dream Interpretation from Early Christianity to the Rise of Islam

Early Christian and early Islamic texts on dreams and dream interpretation have come under increased scrutiny in recent decades. Dream literature from pagan and Jewish antiquity to the early medieval period demonstrates that dreams, especially prophetic dreams, were used to establish spiritual authority, enforce compliance, and justify violence in a religious context. The common cultural roots of Christianity and Islam emerge when we recognise the crucial role played by dreams and prophecy in the two traditions. The various methodologies used in recent scholarship on dreams and their interpretation are surveyed with a view to identifying those most relevant to the analysis of first‐millennium CE literary sources in Latin, Greek, Syriac, and Arabic. The key texts from the three major religious traditions in this period (Western Christian, Eastern Christian, and Islamic) are then analysed with a view to assessing whether early Christians and Muslims understood and taxonomised dreams differently. Literary genre and audience (lay, clerical, or monastic) are revealed as the key determinants of difference, rather than religious origins.     

Poetry and Prayer: Women and Politics of Spiritual Relationships in the Early Twelfth Century

Writers such as the author of the Histoire , Richard of Devizes, Jordan Fantosme, earlier writers such as Orderic Vitalis and William of Malmesbury, or even the dubious Geoffrey of Monmouth, used gendered language to comment, criticise or alternatively applaud women's roles. Their views on women can be explained by the climate of clerical misogyny within which they wrote, their desire to please their patron and the convention of genre. There were many influences working on individual writers which can explain their views. William of Malmesbury was partisan to the Angevin cause; Orderic Vitalis wrote an ecclesiastical history which criticised the morals of secular society and castigated violently the enemies of the patrons of his monastery. The complex nature of the portrayals of both men and women therefore has to be studied in the light of such biases. Noblewomen participated in literary patronage, they inspired authors as models of virtue, were condemned for typically feminine vices, and as such exerted some influence over the shape of texts. They also commissioned texts, were connected with churchmen and such networks could be used for political purposes. Literary sources have been the subject of much theoretical discussion, yet they can be read alongside charters, the evidence of women's economic, administrative, religious patronage and individual initiative, which have in comparison been relatively neglected.     

Between heroism and sainthood: New martyr Evgenii Rodionov as a moral model in contemporary Russia

This paper explores the developing cult of a new martyr – the Russian soldier Evgenii Rodionov, killed in 1996 in Chechen captivity, allegedly for his refusal to convert to Islam. I examine how the notion of moral personhood – a capacity to have convictions and values and to stand by them – emerges as a central object of ethical problematization across the disparate narratives of the soldier’s death. I argue that the appeal of the radical model of morality personified by the soldier’s figure reflects a pervasive trend of longing for spirituality in contemporary Russia, which developed in response to the perceived moral collapse that followed the democratic transition. Through investigating how Evgenii’s image is being employed as a public symbol of patriotism and as a private moral exemplar for militaristically oriented young men, this article contributes to the understanding of the entangled relationship among religion, nationalism and conservative morality in contemporary Russia.     

Somatic Styles of the Early Middle Ages

‘Somatic Styles’ examines how classical modes of gender played significant roles in carving out competitive arenas between clerical and lay elites, c.600–900 CE. The paper explores the hermeneutical obstacles standing between the contemporary theorist of gender and the complex nature of the early medieval texts under scrutiny. The analysis reconstructs classicising techniques of gender deployed by early medieval churchmen, and it does so in a way that both challenges the stranglehold of the ‘one‐sex’ model on pre‐modern understandings of gender and heals the ‘rupture’ between the ‘Ancient’ and the ‘Dark Age’. Finally, the essay maps early medieval somatic and gendered styles onto an architectural space where lay and consecrated bodies met – a ninth‐century monastic basilica.     

Medbh McGuckian's source texts and the challenge to authorial identity in “The Good Wife Taught her Daughter”

This article contends that Medbh McGuckian's “The Good Wife Taught her Daughter”, from her 2006 volume The Currach Requires No Harbours, offers an example of the poet's direct engagement with and rejection of negative commentary regarding her opaque style and incorporation of material from source texts. This article first presents a contextualising overview of the main strands of criticism of McGuckian's work. Following this, two detailed readings of this poem are offered. The first of these readings foregrounds McGuckian's challenge to the possibility of stable meaning in any linguistic act. The second reading identifies McGuckian's source texts and examines how their content and nature underline her deliberate destabilisation of identity and meaning.     

The Lance of St Maurice as a component of the early Ottonian campaign against paganism

The so‐called Holy Lance that formed part of the Holy Roman imperial insignia from the middle of the tenth century was for a time believed to be identical with that carried by the early Christian soldier‐martyr, St Maurice. While the earliest documentary evidence for a Maurician identification dates to 1008, I argue that Otto I (936–73) already associated the blade with this saint in the context of his anti‐pagan campaign along the empire's eastern borders, in which the figure of the saint played a significant role. Construed as the lance of St Maurice, this weapon was a potent visual tool of early Ottonian proselytism.     

A Father,a Daughter and a Procurator: Authority and Resistance in the Prison Memoir of Perpetua of Carthage

The prison narrative attributed to the early third‐century Christian martyr Perpetua of Carthage has long attracted attention because of its dramatic portrayal of a Roman father's failure to extract obedience from his adult daughter as he tries to dissuade her from allowing herself to be punished as an enemy of the Roman state. This study explores the alignment between paternal authority and the authority of the Roman procurator Hilarianus in Perpetua's narrative, considering how the civic spaces of forum and arena became theatres for both filial and civil disobedience.     

Women's translations of scientific texts in the 18th century: a case study of Marie-Anne Lavoisier

In the 18th century, many outstanding translations of scientific texts were done by women. These women were important mediators of science. However, I would like to raise the issue that the 'selection,' which is the process by which intellectual women chose to conduct translation works, and those 'selections' made by male translators, would not be made at the same level. For example, émilie du Chatelet (1706-1749), the only French translator of Newton's "Principia," admitted her role as participating in important work, but, still, she was not perfectly satisfied with the position. For du Chatelet, the role as a translator was only an option under the current conditions that a female was denied the right to be a creator by society. In the case of Marie-Anne Lavoisier (1743-1794), like du Chatelet, we find an acute feeling in her mind that translation was not the work of creators. Because of her respect toward creative geniuses and her knowledge about the practical situation and concrete results of scientific studies, the translation works done by Marie-Anne Lavoisier were excellent. At the same time, the source of this excellence appears paradoxical at a glance: this excellence of translation was related closely with her low self-estimation in the field of science. Hence, we should not forget the gender problem that is behind such translations of scientific works done by women in that era. Such a possibility was a ray of light that was grasped by females, the sign of a gender that was eliminated from the center of scientific study due to social systems and norms and one of the few valuable opportunities to let people know of her own existence in the field of science.     

The Linguistic and Rhetorical Legacy of the Prague Spring: Reading the Czechoslovak Communist Party Daily,Rudé právo,from the Late 1980s

This study uses a corpus-informed lexicological approach to analyse texts published in the Czechoslovak Communist Party daily Rudé právo during the final years of Communist rule in Czechoslovakia. The analysis aims to uncover how far such texts represented a departure from or a reaffirmation of the norms of the pre-Gorbachev era and, in particular, the role that they played in the Party’s attempt to control interpretations of the 1968 Prague Spring. The investigation also considers ways in which the texts sought to construct a ‘new’ reality in the light of the changes in the Soviet Union and other Warsaw Pact countries. The article maintains that the ‘authoritative discourse’ model represents an especially useful analytical framework for evaluating the impact of ideological language in the context of the Communist system. The model both helps to explain the relative acquiescence of most of the population, and also to track the extent to which the ‘coded’ message of the approved discourse was successful in slowing the demise of the regime.     

The Overthrow of the Government of Mosaddeq Reconsidered

The overthrow of the government of Mosaddeq has received considerable attention, scholarly and otherwise. The scholarly explanations differ in emphasis, but not in the general contours, particularly regarding the significant role of the Anglo-American secret services. There have also long been attempts to portray the overthrow of Mosaddeq as an isolated event taking place on 19 August 1953 and representing a conflation of royalist and traditionalist sentiments among soldiers and civilians. More recently it has been contended that it was not the Anglo-American secret services but the clerical nexus—prompted by Ayatollah Borujerdi, the highest religious authority in the country—which played the crucial role. This paper argues against reducing the overthrow of Mosaddeq's government to the events of 19 August, and views it as a protracted process. It further argues that assertions regarding the crucial and active role of Borujerdi are, on the basis of available evidence, untenable.     

‘The races and conditions of men’: women in nineteenth-century geography school texts in the United States

Geography schoolbooks published in the United States were important opinion makers in the nineteenth century, often joining the Bible as the main source of information about the world outside North America. The texts examined here are noteworthy for their static and pejorative treatment of non-American cultures and may be seen as playing a key role in forming isolationist and chauvinist American public opinion. They also played a role in reinforcing ideas about the proper niche for women in American society, even though it may seem at first that these books could not have had much influence on ideas about American women because they barely mentioned women, almost always relegating them to illustrations and captions. The few women depicted were usually characterized as ‘poor souls’ in distant lands worthy of pity. We discuss the national political context in which these writers (many of whom were women) were producing geography school texts, the social roles they were fulfilling by reinforcing such limited images of ‘foreign’ women, and the sources they may have used in their research. Furthermore, we demonstrate that much more could have been drawn ethnographically from the illustrations of women. The images of women in these geography schoolbooks reinforced the marginalization of women, particularly non-white and non-western women.     

Texts,Practice and Practitioners: Computational Cultures at Work in Early Modern South India**

This essay will discuss the hegemonic role that texts have come to play in the historiography of subcontinental mathematical traditions. It will argue that texts need to be studied as records of practices of people's working lives, grounded in social hierarchies. We will take particular mathematical texts to show how different occupational registers have come to shape practices that defy the binaries of concrete and abstract, high and low mathematics or the pure and applied conundrum. Measuring, counting and accounting practices as part of the routine work of practitioners performing their caste occupations then provide us with a spectrum of the computational activities that controlled and regulated the lives of people in the past. In the process the act of computing itself gained certain political values such as cunning and manipulation, identified with professions of village accountant and merchant, for example. Drawn from my earlier work on these records, I discuss the occupational role of the accountant as a political functionary who assessed and authenticated the measurements of land and produce in the village, making values of the labor performed by others, and creating avenues for his own proficiency as a mathematical practitioner.     

Conflict,Order, Harmony: The Modern Meaning of the Confucian Tradition

An examination of how a focus on the reading of traditional Confucian texts as a spiritual exercise can enable us to deal productively with modern understandings of the divergences among different ideals of human excellence.An investigation of such ideals has often focused on virtue discourse,but that discourse generates understandable suspicions in many people.A productive approach to these suspicions is to examine both the idea that new virtues (such as spiritual regret) are needed,and the notion that three distinctive modern emphases must play a central role in any contemporary consideration of the relationships among diverse ideals.After considering two kinds of principled opposition to this approach,we turn to Walter Benjamin's exemplary account of the huge gulf between modern and traditional understandings,and the possible aid some texts may offer in bridging it.Focusing on the distinctive operation of specific forms of presentation in the Confucian tradition,we conclude by investigating the idea that reading Confucian texts can be seen even today as an illuminating kind of spiritual exercise.