The Changing Faces of Canada: Images of Canada in National Geographic

Carol Shields, one of Canada's and America's most popular and critically acclaimed writers, is the perfect example of the former permeability of the Canada–United States border. Born Carol Ann Warner in Oak Park, Illinois, in 1935, she married Canadian engineering student Donald Shields and immigrated with him to Canada in 1957, becoming a Canadian citizen in 1971. Between her immigration to Canada and her death nearly half a century later, Shields criss-crossed the 49^th parallel – traditionally known as the world's longest undefended border, until 9/11 drastically changed travel – with ease. Her fictional characters cross the Canada–United States border with equal ease. Shields crosses borders not only literally, but also figuratively, as she travels from genre to genre with ease. Most famous for her fiction, Shields published in many genres, including poetry, drama, short stories, biography, and literary criticism, and she incorporates these other genres in her novels. Thus, Shields shows how art can cross borders with exemplary grace.     

Agnes of Burgundy: an eleventh-century woman as monastic patron

As an eleventh-century monastic patron, Agnes of Burgundy was generous, thoughtful, and involved; she galvanized others into endowing monasteries and won the respect of the houses she supported. The association with grateful abbeys helped her and her husband, Geoffrey Martel, to establish the legitimacy of their rule. In this symbiosis, Agnes used the system for all it was worth, even eventually retiring as an old lady into one of her foundations, while religious life in west-central France flourished, aided by her support. Yet, although enormously wealthy and powerful, she did not act with full autonomy. Her life was shaped by the biological determinants of menarche and menopause; by involvement in familial strategies to advance her spouse's and children's careers; by limitations on her use of feudal power; and by gender roles that patterned behavior. She, and every other woman like her, functioned within a web of gender, class, and family constraints and expectations.     

Andrea's Baggage: Reading (in) Laforet's Nada

One overlooked feature of Andrea's arrival in Barcelona at the beginning of Nada is the old and battered suitcase that she drags with her to her relatives’ apartment. It is filled almost entirely with books, books that—we may assume—she has read and plans to read again. Reading, it is clear, has played a large part in her intellectual and psychological formation as a teenager, but one of the strands of her overall maturation process during the forthcoming year will involve achieving a greater understanding of the distortions involved in how people (including her) see life through the optic of literature and literature through the optic of life. Gradually disabused of her overly literary adolescent imaginings, then, she eventually becomes a writer—of the text that is Nada—who is well aware of the traps that reading and writing hold.     

“Much the more political of the two”: Mabel FitzGerald and the Irish revolution

This article offers an assessment of the career and ideology of the Irish republican and Cumann na mBan activist Mabel FitzGerald, née McConnell (1884–1958). From a staunchly Unionist Belfast Presbyterian family, Mabel converted to republicanism while an undergraduate in the early 1900s. In 1911 she eloped with Desmond FitzGerald, a Catholic poet. The couple became prominent nationalist activists, and participated in the Easter Rising. In 1922 Desmond, now a minister in the provisional government, supported the Anglo-Irish Treaty. This caused a rift with Mabel, who remained a republican. Although she chose not to separate from her husband, she retained her republican sympathies; there is evidence that she continued to offer aid to the anti-Treaty side. After the Civil War, Mabel and Desmond were reconciled, and she strongly revised her political views, eventually coming to regret the Irish separatist project. Mabel FitzGerald’s career offers insight into the nature of radicalisation among Irish nationalist activists, as well as providing an example of the competing loyalties of family and politics that frequently informed and constrained the actions of nationalist activists.     

The Queen and the City: Royal Female Intervention and Patronage in Hellenistic Civic Communities

In 196 bce , Queen Laodike III issued a decree (I.Iasos 4, I) to Iasos in Caria, Asia Minor, announcing that she was giving the Iasians a ten‐year supply of grain to alleviate their penury after her husband's conquest of their city, and she specified that the grain ought to be sold and the income used to provide dowries for the daughters of poor citizens. This and other donations were part of rebuilding efforts in the wake of military violence by Laodike's husband Antiochos III. For her beneficence, Laodike was honoured by cities with foundations of festivals, priestesses and sacred areas dedicated to preserving her cult. This reciprocity of goodwill was gendered, not only in the establishment of priestesses, but in the nature of the honours given; for example Iasos celebrated Laodike III's birthday with a procession of a maiden priestess and couples who were about to wed (I.Iasos 4, II), and the people of Teos dedicated a fountain in their city centre to Laodike and required that all brides should draw from it the water for their baths (SEG 41, 1003). Laodike's patronage and the cities’ responses to her bring to light the role of female citizens within the structures, perpetuation and ceremonial of the civic body. At the heart of honours given Laodike and her own self‐promotion was the identity of sister and mother, roles shaping her own queenship and the civic participation and power of the women she assisted.     

Mary McLeod Bethune's Feminism: Black Women as Citizens of the World

This article focuses on the particular moment of the 1945 United Nations charter meeting as a catalyst for a shift in Mary McLeod Bethune's feminist thought. The meeting, where Bethune served as the only African American female delegate, signalled a change in Bethune's thinking about equality for black women, so she used the founding of the United Nations as a platform to promote black women's alliances with other women of colour. Her idea was to reframe black women as citizens of the world, thus putting them in a numerical and ideological majority rather than keeping them in a minority position. Bethune has often been viewed as a reformer of race and gender issues in the early twentieth century, but a focus on her activism has hidden the intellectual contributions that she made to a form of black feminism that emerged out of her work with other clubwomen and through the United Nations in the 1920s through the 1950s. Specifically, this article argues that Bethune's intellectual work created a framework for African American women's feminism that emphasised anti-colonialism and their global alliance with other women of colour throughout the world.     

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.     

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.     

Crane,Elaine Forman The Poison Plot: A Tale of Adultery and Murder in Colonial Newport,Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 257 pp., $32.95, ISBN 2131-1 978-1-5017

Elaine Forman Crane’s The Poison Plot opens with the core challenge facing her as a scholar and author. “How,” she asks, “to frame a narrative that more closely resembles fiction than most nonfiction works, while remaining faithful to the historical record?” (xi). It is a matter of historical record that Newport, Rhode Island, resident Benedict Arnold petitioned to divorce his wife, Mary Arnold, in 1738 and that his petition accused her of attempting to poison him. Whether she had, in fact, poisoned him and her motivations for doing so, by contrast, remain unknown, particularly because there are no surviving documents from her perspective. The Poison Plot also poses readers with challenges. What can a reader gain from a historical monograph whose conclusions must, by their very nature, be rooted more in circumstantial evidence and speculation than in concrete documentary evidence? In what contexts might readers approach this book?     

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.     

Social structure is where the hearth is: a "woman's place" in Beti society

Among the patrilineal, virilocal Beti, a people of the Southern Cameroon, the 3 stones of the cooking hearth symbolize the 3 kinship identities which define a woman's place in Beti society: her mother-in-law ("senior co-wife"), her daughter-in-law ("junior co-wife"), and her son-in-law ("daughter's husband"). Among her own descent group she is always a daughter; among her marital relations she is an adult, but a foreigner; but her real place in society is defined in terms of her position among her "co-affines," i.e., those with whom she is linked by common marital ties. A Beti village is the material manifestation of the "house of people," which is composed of a headman, his same-womb brothers, his mother's house's junior co-wives' sons, and his unmarried same-womb sisters and daughters. The house of people's women's children are classified as "of same father." Within the "same father house of people" are a series of matrifocal houses, which form the basis of new domestic units when the headman dies and the mens' house is dismantled. A new house of people is formed with son as headman and mother as "hindwoman." Thus, although the Beti are patrilineal, a man's house of people proceeds from his mother's house, but whether or not a woman becomes a "hindwoman" depends on her sons-in-law's bridewealth payments, which enable her to have daughters-in-law. A woman's becoming a "hindwoman" and originator of a new domestic unit depends on both her mother-in-law/daughter-in-law relation and her mother-in-law/son-in-law relation. Thus in the domestic organization of the village, the making of a woman's place determines the making of a man's. On the level of the lineage system, an analogous process takes place. The Beti are divided into about 100 exogamous, patrilineal, patrilocal clans, each consisting of up to 4 levels of patrilineages, designated by the names of their eponymous female ancestors. Descent is determined by recruitment and alignment. Recruitment proceeds from the matrimonial ties to the mother's husband's group or (in the absence of bridewealth) to her father's group. Alignment is founded on ritual food distribution and operates through co-affinal links between women. On the level of lineage organization a woman's place is determined by a succession of mother-in-law/daughter-in-law ties. The woman's place in Beti society is thus defined by both the static domestic structure and by the dynamic supra-domestic lineage syste.     

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.     

Why the World Matters: Hannah Arendt’s Philosophy of New Beginnings

Hannah Arendt’s philosophical project is an untiring attempt to argue that the world with all its failures and weaknesses does and should matter. Refusing to succumb to the destructive tendency within modernity, she cultivates creativity, action and responsibility. One way to appreciate the originality of Arendt’s philosophy of action and new beginnings is via her reading of two thinkers who were part of what she terms, “the great tradition.” If most commentary deals either with Heidegger’s influence on Arendt‘s thought or with her Augustinian origins, my aim is to trace Arendt’s lifelong conversation with both thinkers. It is in her doctoral dissertation on St. Augustine that she begins to distinguish herself from Heidegger’s understanding of the world, Dasein, and care. Without arguing that her work on Augustine is a hidden key to understanding her philosophy of new beginnings, an appreciation of Arendt‘s lifelong debate not only with Heidegger but also with Augustine enriches our understanding of why philosophy should pay more attention to the world, rather than try to escape from it .     

Elizabeth Elstob (1674–1752): England's First Professional Woman Historian?

Elizabeth Elstob was a scholar of Anglo‐Saxon, who published two important books and was admired by the leaders of the new movement for Anglo‐Saxon studies in the early eighteenth century. She was able to be part of this community because her brother William encouraged and enabled it. His death in 1715 was a catastrophe, marking the end of her productive life as an intellectual and plunging her into poverty. She disappeared for almost twenty years, but was discovered and rescued by the first generation of bluestockings. A project she had begun – a history of intellectual women – was taken up and completed by George Ballard. His Memoirs of British Ladies(1752) included Elstob's memories about Mary Astell, and is, among other things, the single most important source of information about this pioneer feminist.     

Poison and romance: Oscar Wilde and the strange case of Edith Thompson

Oscar Wilde considered crime and sin no impediment to art or culture, as the case of the poisoner-artist-critic Thomas Wainewright (1794–1847) allowed him to demonstrate. English society of the time, as George Orwell famously declared, was as fascinated by poisoning as was Wilde. One of Orwell's cases was that of Edith Thompson who, along with her young lover, was convicted in 1922 in London of conspiracy to murder her husband whom it was alleged she had tried to poison. She and her lover were hanged in early 1923. Thompson's preoccupation with poison was entangled with her preoccupation with popular romance fiction of the day which she read copiously and discussed perceptively with her lover in the letters that helped to convict her. Her favourite novelist was Robert Hichens, the acquaintance, imitator and caricaturist of Wilde. She quoted Hichens's novel Bella Donna (1909) in letters to her lover, including on the practical matter of poison, which helped convince the jury of her guilt. Her trial, like Wilde's trials – all involving sexual transgression – raised the difficult question of whether literature could poison and influence for the worse its readers or whether it lay outside both morality and the world of action. Moreover, were Thompson's own letters literature and fantasy or were they oblique discussions of practical intent, including the intent to murder? As in the case of Wilde, a larger question supervened. In part through her reading, in part through her own experience, Edith came to believe, even before the murder, that freedom is an illusion, fate an inescapable reality.     

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.     

与谢野晶子的战争观

与谢野晶子是日本近代文学史上一个充满传奇又广受争议的女作家。在青年和中年时代,她走在时代前列,勇于追求艺术的进步与人性的解放,成为近代著名浪漫女歌人和提倡女性解放的社会评论家。但就是这样一个曾经与时代进步同步的文学家,在晚年思想意识却发生蜕变,成为“极端国家主义者”,战后受到批判和指责。与谢野晶子一生所处的时代基本上与明治维新以后日本的近代侵略战争史同步。本文梳理她战争认识的思想变化轨迹及晚年思想产生蜕变的成因。与谢野晶子晚年蜕变折射的,既是一个文学家的悲哀,也是作为侵略者的帝国主义日本的必然归宿。     

Written in Stone: subverting the authoritative (auto)biographical voice—Carol Shields’s The Stone Diaries and Margaret Laurence’s The Stone Angel

Diaries imply true confessions, and readers wish to believe Daisy Flett’s life story in Carol Shields’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Stone Diaries (1994), but her layered narration, alternating first- and third-person narrative, proves problematic. “Death,” the final chapter, is particularly puzzling, as third-person accounts of Daisy’s demise are punctuated by her comments, such as, “I’m still in here” (320). But how does a first-person narrator relate her own death? The secret to Daisy’s death narrative, as David Williams observes, is the correspondence between Shields’s postmodernist gem, The Stone Diaries, and Laurence’s modernist masterpiece, The Stone Angel (1964), published three decades earlier, as Shields’s title clearly references Laurence’s. Two decades after Williams’s insightful essay, we can extend the parallels (and delineate the differences) between the two—and explore their implications. Such intertextual resonance illustrates Shields challenging the borders between fiction and biography and parodying canonical texts.     

PEGGY PIGGOTT: WOMEN AND BRITISH ARCHAEOLOGY (1930–1945)

The 2021 film, The Dig, stimulated much interest in discovering more about Peggy Piggott, the archaeologist who first ‘struck gold’ at Sutton Hoo. Piggott was a leading British prehistorian, who produced over sixty published works for the field. Here we examine her early life and career, her training with the Curwens and the Wheelers, her marriage to Stuart Piggott, and her recognized expertise that led to her joining the Sutton Hoo team in 1939. During WWII, she established the modern standard for barrow excavation, and in 1944 was recognized by the Society of Antiquaries for her ‘devotion to the study of archaeology’. Piggott provides a lens through which we consider the careers of 1930s women archaeologists – those factors enabling access to archaeology (class, wartime opportunity) and factors that limited progress (lack of a degree, marriage).