A Byzantine hagiographical parody: Life of Mary the Younger

Abstract

In this paper, it is argued that The Life of Mary the Younger, an anonymous Byzantine text of the eleventh century, has a conscious intertextual dialogue with the oldest Byzantine Life venerating a holy woman, the Life of Macrina written by her brother, Gregory of Nyssa, between 380 and 383. The intertextual relation between these two female Lives takes the form of parody. Following Linda Hutcheon's theory of parody, this article shows how the anonymous hagiographer of Mary reworks Gregory's authoritative text to create a new work, a parody in terms of postmodern literary criticism, whose aim was to criticise old and contemporary customs, conventions and ideologies. In other words, the present article approaches and decodes the literariness, the function and ideology of Mary's Life in the light of Macrina's Life.     

Creole Performance in Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands

Mary Seacole's autobiography has been read as a feminist performance as well as a paradigmatic Victorian travel narrative. While these assessments address important aspects of the memoir, neither affords the author's Jamaicanness significant space in its analysis. This essay addresses the silences left when Wonderful Adventures is removed from its Jamaican context, then offers a reading of it from this perspective. Grounded in histories that document nineteenth‐century Jamaican social categories, the article analyses Seacole's book using Caribbean literary perspectives that explore raced, ‘coloured’ and geographically‐located identities. The result is an interpretation of the memoir that offers insight into Jamaica's Creole population, its status and colour politics, and identity concerns. All have been expertly shaped by Seacole's rhetorical manoeuvres.     

Eliza’s Babes: Poetry ‘Proceeding from Divinity’ in Seventeenth–Century England

This article examines the poetry and prose meditations in the anonymous 1652 volume Eliza’s Babes: or The Virgins–offering. The article begins by reconsidering Liam Semler’s recent assertion that Eliza was a Parliamentarian and religiously radical, arguing instead that she was a centrist, loyalist Protestant. The article then examines the handbooks to devotion and meditation from this loyalist tradition that helped define Eliza’s understanding of public and private and how these concepts were gendered. In keeping with writers such as Joseph Hall and Daniel Featly, Eliza views her private devotion as on a continuum which leads to public worship, or ‘thanks’ as she terms it. Eliza uses this paradigm of public and private to justify both the printing of her poems and her very unusual theology of marriage, in which she considers Christ her only true husband. The final section of the article considers whether Eliza’s understanding of public and private offers her more ‘freedom’ than other women writers, and concludes that any judgement of her freedom must be carefully calibrated to the religious and political contexts of her book.     

Beyond the stereotypes: Mary Lavin's Irish women

This paper discusses Mary Lavin's place within the Irish literary tradition by means of an analysis of her representations of female characters. It argues, first, that Lavin's short stories depart from the short story tradition in general and the Irish short story tradition in particular by failing to subscribe to the cultivation of the romantic outsider and focusing instead on family relations and social responsibilities. Second, Mary Lavin's marginal position in a feminist or female literary tradition is explained through her unwillingness to portray women as victims and through the absence of a clear critique of patriarchy in her work. The paper then tries to characterise the relationship between individual and society in Lavin's short fiction in a more positive way, by focusing on the notions of individual fate and personal responsibility, which turn out to be crucial to Mary Lavin's philosophy. This philosophy is first discussed explicitly in a reading of the story ‘Happiness’ and ‘The Widow's Son’ and subsequently shown to lie behind the oppositions and dilemmas in several other stories. Finally, the article demonstrates how Lavin manages to realise her Nietzschean belief in an Amor Fati in some of her most positive female characters through a clever use of imagery and point of view, without thereby succumbing to sentimentality or cliché.     

Josephine's Journey: Gender‐based Violence and Marian Devotion in Urban Papua New Guinea

ABSTRACT This article deals with how, in the urban setting of Madang, Papua New Guinea, Marian devotion is deployed in response to domestic and gender‐based violence. While providing insight into the lived religious experiences of Catholic women living in Madang, this article shows how Mary empowers her followers to resist violence, yet, at the same time, paradoxically, is instrumental in sanctioning women to tolerate violence. Josephine's ‘journey of violence’ reveals not only Josephine's turning to Mary, but more so, her negotiations with values belonging to different cultural logics. Caught between ‘tradition’, Christianity and ‘modernity’, Josephine and other Catholic women engage in painful processes of self‐analysis and self‐transformation to adapt to and change their situation. In these processes, Mary is used as a role model.     

The Ultimate "Other": Post-Colonialism and Alexander von Humboldt's Ecological Relationship with Nature

This article is a meditation on the overlaps between environmentalism, post‐colonial theory, and the practice of history. It takes as a case study the writings of the explorer‐scientist‐abolitionist Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859), the founder of a humane, socially conscious ecology. The post‐colonial critique has provided a necessary corrective to the global environmental movement, by focusing it on enduring colonialist power dynamics, but at the same time it has crippled the field of environmental history, by dooming us to a model of the past in which all Euro‐American elites, devoid of personal agency, are always already in an exploitative relationship with the people and natural resources of the developing world. A close reading of Humboldt's work, however, suggests that it could provide the basis for a healthy post‐colonial environmentalism, if only post‐colonial critics were willing to see beyond Humboldt's complicity in colonial structures. In particular, this article attempts to rehabilitate Humboldt's reputation in the face of Mary Louise Pratt's canonical post‐colonial study, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. Humboldt's efforts to inspire communion with Nature while simultaneously recognizing Nature's “otherness” can be seen as radical both in his day and in ours. In addition his analysis of the link between the exploitation of natural resources and the exploitation of certain social groups anticipates the global environmental justice movement.     

In Loving Memory of Mary Belshaw,May McRidge,and the Nyungar People of the Badjaling Mission, 1930–1954

Using examples from his family and religious history, Patrick O’Farrell analysed the transition from Irish emigrant to assimilated colonial in what was perceived as vacant land. Like O’Farrell, this article will also use family history to address the issues of memory, religion, and assimilation. The Irish weaver Mary Belshaw (1879–1960) came to Australia in 1913 and was instrumental in the emigration of her family to Australia during the 1920s. She worked as a Protestant missionary among Aboriginal Australians from 1915, until her retirement in 1953. Although the grave she shares with her co‐worker May McRidge (1882–1943) bears the words “Ever remembered by what she has done,” her story was largely forgotten by her family. In 1986, the Nyungar people erected a memorial stone to Belshaw and McRidge and the thirty‐nine Nyungar families who lived at the Badjaling Mission in Western Australia from 1930 to 1954. This article will address the wider issues in twentieth‐century Australia which contributed to the neglect of the story by Belshaw's Irish Australian family and then led to its recovery. It will reveal how an Irish heritage was rediscovered because the story lived within a Nyungar community who had survived terra nullius and assimilation policies to return to their land at Badjaling.     

THE ENDURING PUBLIC STRUGGLE TO CONSTRUCT,CONTROL, AND CHALLENGE HISTORICAL MEMORIES

Sumit Guha's History and Collective Memory in South Asia, 1200–2000 develops important arguments about the public significance of historical knowledge and the essential role of historians in public life. All societies need collective memories to sustain their cultural identities, as Guha shows in this wide‐ranging account of how such memories have been constructed in South Asian societies since the thirteenth century. The knowledge of historical experts is increasingly challenged or derided by contemporary social groups and political activists, who circulate their own historical narratives via new networks of communication. Political uses of historical knowledge are not new, however, as Guha shows in detailed accounts of how Hindu, Muslim, and British imperial regimes all used historical narratives to justify their own power. He also explains how other social groups challenged official historical narratives with their own popular stories about the past. This book contributes to recent work in global intellectual history by comparing similarities in the historical practices of premodern Europe and South Asia, discussing the cross‐cultural exchanges in colonial‐era institutions, and describing postcolonial challenges to European ideas. Guha thus offers an insightful analysis of how social and political forces influence and respond to the cloistered institutions that produce historical knowledge and construct collective memories. He concludes that evidence‐based historical narratives must be continually defended amid current public assaults on historical knowledge in both South Asia and the United States. More generally, Guha's book suggests the need for ongoing analysis of how public events, social conflicts, and new communication systems can reshape or discredit the work of historical experts.     

Rethinking ‘the Human’ in Memory of Fay Gale (AO)

In 1972, the late Fay Gale (AO) published a characteristically self‐styled book titled Urban Aborigines. It launched a richly diverse career that delivered an exceptional legacy to the academic discipline of geography, aboriginal justice, university administration, and women's professional advancement. This article, based on a 2010 lecture in her honour, takes up Fay's intellectual contribution to one of these fields. It pursues her critical interest in the clash of indigenous/settler cultures in Australia through a novel account of the notorious head‐measuring practices of 19th century racial craniometry. Probing the Western premise that ‘mind’ is the assured marker of human distinction from nature, the article explores a question of fundamental contemporary relevance for Australian audiences and others across the globe: are there fresh prospects for reconciling settler and indigenous, as well as ‘green’ and ‘growth’, values if the conceit of this distinction can be overcome? This question is provoked from a peculiarly southern perspective in the spirit of the insistently geographic project that was Urban Aborigines.     

Hair in the Disraeli Papers: A Victorian Harvest

The Hughenden Collection of Disraeli Papers at the Bodleian Library in Oxford comprises over 50,000 items relating to the life and work of Benjamin Disraeli and his family. This article tracks hair through the Hughenden Collection in order to explore the collecting habits of Mary Anne Disraeli. It argues that reading Mary Anne Disraeli's story through hair – both hair as object, held in an archive and hair as represented in archival text – reveals aspects of that story occluded by reading only those archival texts with self-evident documentary value. It thus makes the case for a holistic reading of the Disraeli archive, and Victorian collections of personal papers more generally, by taking Mary Anne Disraeli as its central case study. In so doing it also illuminates her story, and points to the necessity of reading the stories of forgotten women through archival silences and absences. Section I reviews recent scholarship on hair in nineteenth-century Britain in order to contextualize Mary Anne Disraeli's case. Section II anatomizes the Hughenden hair collection in order to illuminate Mary Anne's history, her impulses as a collector, and the extent to which her activities complicate scholarly narratives about the sentimental commodification of Victorian hair. Section III gestures towards recent work on the archive and material culture to tease out the consequences of her example for our reading of the archive and our understanding of the texture of Victorian ‘thing culture’ more generally.     

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 Iron Butterfly and the Political Warrior: mobilising models of femininity in the Australian Liberal Party

Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop and former Prime Minister Tony Abbott's Chief of Staff Peta Credlin have experienced very different political fortunes. Once the two most powerful women in the Australian Liberal Party, Credlin's political demise was mired in controversy, while Bishop continues to enjoy the support of her Party and the public. While there are many reasons for this, the article focuses on the gendered politics surrounding their experiences. Based on analysis of the media representations of Bishop and Credlin between 2011 and 2015, we argue that Bishop successfully negotiates gender politics by deploying the Iron Butterfly model of conservative femininity, while Credlin's fierce Political Warrior persona saw her pilloried.     

‘The innate yearnings of our souls’: Subjectivity,Religiosity and Outward Testimony in Mary Howitt's Autobiography (1889)

Recent years have seen a resurgence of interest in women's involvement in nineteenth-century religious cultures. However, the overwhelming focus remains firmly on the role of religion in providing motivation, sustenance and justification for women's involvement in feminism and other public campaigns. Questions of faith and devotion, spirituality and Christian selfhood, and the relationship of spiritual freedom to other liberations – religious issues that are at the heart of many women's life histories – remain largely unaddressed. This article focuses on the life of Mary Howitt, the popular nineteenth-century English poet, journalist and campaigner for women's rights, whose Autobiography (1889) describes an extraordinary religious journey. Raised in a strict Quaker household, Howitt resigned from the Society of Friends in the midst of a Unitarian interlude in the 1840s, became deeply involved with Spiritualism in the 1850s and 1860s, and finally moved to Rome, both physically and spiritually, at the end of her life. The article explores Howitt's representation of the Quaker piety of her youth as stifling and oppressive in its concern with outward forms of religious observance, particularly an emphasis on a traditional style of dress and on resisting ‘worldly’ activities, including poetry and art. A reading of the autobiography alongside her earlier writing reveals how themes become ‘composed’ into a coherent, stable life story, one shaped by later nineteenth-century public discourses that allowed for a greater religious fluidity and a new reflection on childhood experiences.     

The Spatial Organisation of Women's Soccer in Adelaide: Another Tale of Spatial Inequality?

Although sport is considered an important component of Australian society and a precious vehicle of social interaction, sports geography remains in many ways a neglected field of investigation. Nevertheless, geographical studies of sports can add valuable insights to more acknowledged geographical discourses. They can also contribute to regional sporting success. This paper analyses the current spatial organisation of women's soccer in Adelaide and outlines the unequal spatial expression of its recent professionally‐oriented approach, the achievement phase. A significant proportion of Adelaide's female population experiences limited opportunity to participate fully in the sport. The sport therefore fails to maximise its human resources and its spatial organisation constitutes a limit to the competitiveness of South Australian women's soccer as a system. The paper uses the concept of social capital to explore the unequal engagement of four sub‐regions in women's soccer. Many of the areas experiencing relative exclusion from women's soccer are the same ones that suffer the most from disengagement from the global economy. In those areas, socio‐economic disadvantage is matched by limited opportunities for self‐fulfilment through sport, and the effectiveness of social networks is weaker. This work aims to provide information for South Australian women's soccer institutions to foster enhanced equity in terms of access to the sport in metropolitan Adelaide. It also provides a base from which to investigate the reasons behind sub‐regional differences in the ability to produce quality players, knowledge that, if applied to these less productive areas, may contribute to the general enhancement of overall sporting outcomes.     

An argument manqué: Kate O'Brien's Pray for the Wanderer

Kate O'Brien wrote Pray for the Wanderer (1938) as a riposte to the Irish Censorship of Publications Board for the banning of her novel Mary Lavelle (1936). While Irish writers routinely fell afoul of the government, Pray for the Wanderer stands alongside only Liam O'Flaherty's The Puritan (1932) as a novelistic response to censorship. However, despite the historical importance of these two books to Irish Studies, there has been very little of substance written on either of them. It has instead become a short-hand method of discussing censorship for scholars to simply gesture towards these works and their authors as exemplary. In the end, this approach does nothing to enhance our understanding of how censorship functions, the contentious debates it engenders, or the social nature of such a text. The article addresses these lacunae by examining Pray for the Wanderer as a critique of censorship. By setting the novel alongside contemporary press reports and editorials, the article demonstrates that while the book might be critical of censorship and its effects on artists, there is much in it that undermines the anti-censorship position it purportedly takes.     

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.     

Expanding the Australian Empire?: The Australian Council for the World Council of Churches,the Menzies Government and the New Hebrides in the late 1950s

In the late 1950s the Australian Council for the World Council of Churches (AC‐WCC) inspired primarily by the Presbyterian Church, undertook a concerted campaign to pressure the Australian government to assume a greater role in the affairs of the New Hebrides. The AC‐WCC wanted the Australian government to take over the United Kingdom's role in the administration of the Anglo‐French Condominium. It was motivated to undertake this campaign by the dismal social and economic conditions in the islands, the neglect of the British and French colonial authorities, and their failure to offer the indigenous people a way forward to self‐government. The high point of the campaign was a meeting between Robert Menzies, the Australian prime minister and a delegation from the AC‐WCC in early 1958. As a result of this meeting Australian ministers and officials, for the final time, gave extended consideration to expanding Australia's empire in the South Pacific to include the New Hebrides. This article examines the AC‐WCC's campaign, explores the Australian government's response, and analyses the outcome of this important episode in Australia's involvement in the colonial territories of the South Pacific.     

Brewarrina: An Australian Story

This short paper discusses Barry Morris's account of the ‘riot’ at Brewarrina, New South Wales, in 1987 and its legal aftermath, which continued for some years. An iconic event in Australian race relations, much can be learnt from its various dimensions, a fact that Morris amply demonstrates. Notwithstanding, this discussion questions a related narrative in his book, which interprets capitalism's impact on self‐determination simply in terms of neoliberalism's ‘political effects’. The paper seeks to broaden the discussion of the relations between the state and self‐determination, and between capitalism and race.     

Exploring the Contributions of Cultural Theory for Improving Public Deliberation about Complex Policy Problems

In this article, we argue that the Cultural Theory pioneered by Mary Douglas can help resolve two pressing issues in the study and practice of public deliberation. The first of these issues concerns how best to structure deliberative processes (or “minipublics”) that have increasingly been implemented around the world. We use Cultural Theory's analysis of social relations to derive a hypothesis concerning the ideal design of minipublics, and outline research strategies to test the hypothesis. The second issue pertains to scaling out minipublics. We describe John Dryzek's and Simon Niemeyer's influential proposal for deploying discourses to make public deliberation more representative, and discuss the limits of their proposal. Furthermore, we show how Cultural Theory's analysis of people's cultural biases (i.e., collectively shared perceptions, beliefs and norms) may help overcome these limits and how the design of minipublics can generate trust in and legitimacy of public deliberation.     

George Egerton,James Joyce and the Irish Künstlerroman

George Egerton (Mary Chavelita Dunne, 1859–1945), from Co. Laois, was the New Woman author most closely associated with the Decadent movement. As such, she was also the New Woman writer most profoundly affected by the downfall of Oscar Wilde. After the Wilde trials of 1895, Egerton's connection to Decadence and New Womanhood would make her work anathema to much of the British public. This essay will argue that ongoing tendencies to situate her texts solely within the New Woman categorisation and an English cultural location have had the detrimental effect of obscuring their importance to a specifically Irish literary tradition. By examining Egerton's 1898 novel The Wheel of God, focusing on its status as an Irish Künstlerroman written from a position of exile, and drawing comparisons between it and the works of James Joyce, this essay will seek to redress this imbalance.