The penalties for treason in medieval life and literature

Treason appears to have fascinated the middle ages. As the most fundamental felony, it struck at the rools of feudal society through a complex of crimes: compassing or plotting the death of the sovereign, betraying his realm to an enemy, counterfeiting his coinage or falsifying his signature, seducing his wife or the wife of his son and heir. The basis of the felony was the same — betrayal of trust by an attack upon the security of the state, its administrative or economic validity, or the legitimacy of the succession — whether directed against the king or some lesser liege lord, and the law made no absolute distinction between high and petty treason. Both demanded exemplary punishment and drawing, hanging, emasculation, disembowelling, beheading, and quartering were employed in various combinations. In rare and aggravated cases flaying alive seems to have been included. This paper, though surveying the legal, moral, and symbolic bases of the penalties for treason, concentrates on the evidence for flaying, which has largely been ignored. It reviews and analyses the legal, historical, and literary records of this exceptional penalty. The frequency with which it occurs in literature, and the varied thematic use made of it to express abhorrence of treason, illustrates the significance which that crime had for the middle ages.     

Judas and his Phallus: The Carnivalesque Narratives of Holy Week in Catholic Philippines

On the eve of Easter Sunday, or what is called Black Saturday in Catholic Philippines, a secluded barrio in the Visayan province of Antique comes alive with a ritual involving an effigy of Judas and his phallus. As one of the country's main sources of Overseas Contract Workers, Antique is a specific illustration of the truism that third world countries like the Philippines consist concurrenty of premodern, modern, and postmodern societies. This paper examines the Judas ritual as a carnivalesque trope, in which folk and modern literature, colonial apparatuses, popular culture, and the agency of the subaltern intersect. I read the plaza, in which the Judas ritual is enacted, as the locus of struggles for power between the dominant and the oppressed. Finally, I read the narratology of Judas' phallus in adjunction with other texts across historical periods and insular boundaries so as to unmask the codes of ideological regulation.     

点点意味在萧红——简析端木蕻良的《初吻》和《早春》

萧红的死对端木蕻良的打击是巨大的,端木长久地沉湎于对萧红的怀念之中,写成了短篇小说《初吻》和《早春》。本文简析了这两篇小说的写作背景、内容及寓意,指出《初吻》和《早春》即是端木对萧红的怀念之作。     

History of a renegade revolutionary: revolutionism and betrayal in colonial India

This paper highlights an understudied aspect of the history of anti-colonial resistance – the role of people who sat on the fence, displayed ambivalence, or at times played an active role in wrecking, damaging and sabotaging resistance against the state. Such people appear, if at all, in popular parlance as ‘traitors’ and in academia as ‘collaborators’, labels which carry a categorical moral bias. By examining nationalism through the lens of betrayal, this paper engages with a methodological question – is there a way of broadening the scope of the history of anti-colonial nationalism which incorporates acts of collaboration (e.g. spying, informing, perfidy, denunciation), without the implicit moral judgment embodied in each term? To tackle this question, this paper reconstructs the history of one renegade revolutionary, Hans Raj Vohra (1909–1985), a government witness who testified against his comrades, the revolutionaries of the Hindustan Socialist Republican Army in the Lahore Conspiracy Case trial (1929–30). This paper contextualizes Hans Raj Vohra's decision to become an ‘approver’, or a government witness, demonstrating the difficulties in framing his perfidy as a form of collaboration.     

神仙说与中国古代小说

神仙是道教的基本观念。先秦以降的神仙观念和神话传说为道教神仙小说的出现提供了思想的资源和丰富的素材。道教小说作为一种文学形式,其形成、演变和发展过程与神仙观念息息相关。