Legal learning and saintly authority in thirteenth-century hagiography: the Magna vita sancti Hugonis

Law is central to the construction of sanctity in Adam of Eynsham’s Magna vita of Hugh of Lincoln (1186–1200). Hugh had no formal training in canon law, and, beyond the Magna vita, there is no evidence to suggest that he was a particularly proficient judge. If that lack of legal training was not a problem in Hugh’s lifetime, it had become a more sensitive issue by c.1212, the date of the composition of the Magna vita. Rather than ignoring the law, or denying its importance, Adam attempted to demonstrate that Hugh received mastery of legal argument as a divine gift, and multiple miracles involve Hugh correcting legal scholars. Recognising these careful patterns of construction raises problems for reading Adam’s Magna vita. While Adam has traditionally been characterised as a truthful biographer, this reading suggests he was engaged in a more complex project of marrying sanctity to legal learning.     

Portraits of the garçonne as artist: gender and creativity in French fiction of the années folles

This article examines a series of popular and middlebrow works of fiction from the 1920s that represent the garçonne (the flapper, or androgynous, emancipated young woman) as artist. Challenging the popular view of the années folles as a period of relatively relaxed social conventions and gender norms, it shows that far from embracing female creativity, the authors of the period took pains to link it to moral and aesthetic deviance. Having considered what the representation of female creativity in novels by Berthe Bernage, Victor Margueritte and Marcel Prévost can tell us about gender in the 1920s, I go on to examine novels by the art critics André Warnod and François Fosca, who use the figure of the garçonne as artist to air art-critical positions about the modernist art produced in Montparnasse, especially by members of the École de Paris. Whereas Warnod represents his female artist as a victim of a modernism linked with the foreign and the ‘primitive,’ in Fosca’s novel the female painter is a more threatening figure: an agent of a modernism whose attacks on the female body (in the form of the conventional academic nude) are in turn echoed in a broader ‘troubling’ of gendered and aesthetic categories.     

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.     

BodiesTouchingBodies: Jenny Saville's over-life-sized paintings and the ‘morpho-logics’ of fat,female bodies

Recent work in geography on materiality and embodiment has drawn attention to the ways that the varied materials of bodies, their capacities to leak and flow, to grow and shrink and endure and disappear, are central to an understanding of the spatialities of bodily experience. This article seeks to contribute to this work by considering how bodies touch themselves, or what I have termed ‘intra-body touching’, through an interrogation of two over-life-sized paintings (Branded and Propped) by the artist Jenny Saville. Her paintings present the topographies of a female fleshy body through detailed observations of bodily surfaces and orifices which include breasts hanging, hands grabbing and fat rolling and pressing upon itself. In drawing upon Luce Irigaray's critical engagement with Merleau-Ponty's account of hands touching, the article seeks to utilise her notion of the mucous for highlighting the ‘morpho-logics’ of sexed and sized bodies as they are produced through the example of intra-body touching. A focus upon the embodied spatialities of intra-body touching challenges accounts of the female body that centre upon women being located in a position of estrangement and distance from its varied materialities. Instead it will suggest that Saville's bodies are centred upon distinctly geographical relations of proximity and intimacy in ways which surprise and challenge our understandings of what a fleshy body can do.     

Between history and hagiography: Eadmer of Canterbury's vision of the Historia novorum in Anglia

Written between c.1093 and the end of the 1120s, Eadmer of Canterbury's Historia novorum in Anglia is one of the best-known sources for the study of Anglo-Norman political, ecclesiastical and cultural history. This article explores the identity of the text as it developed in Eadmer's own mind. While modern scholars have placed the Historia novorum within the development of English national historiography, Eadmer showed no desire for his work to be received in this way. Instead, Eadmer's Historia was profoundly influenced by his extensive experience in writing the lives and miracles of saints. The Historia novorum occupies a space between history and hagiography, which successfully redeployed Eadmer's experiences of writing the past through hagiography, in order to produce an innovative and unique example of the genre of medieval historiography.     

The irreparable and the imprevidible: fathers and failures at Joyce's family circus

This paper reconsiders ideas of the father in Joyce's writing. It does so by examining in detail those ideas as they are elucidated through circus anecdote and imagery. The focus rests decisively on Ulysses (1922), but references to Joyce's earlier writing and to Finnegans Wake (1939) demonstrate the enduring popularity of the circus as image or metaphor for the author. The paper works broadly to contextualise hitherto overlooked circus references within the history of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century popular culture – Joyce is here connected to circus clown Johnny Patterson, music hall star Henry Clifton, and artist Jack B. Yeats. Through this history, it appears that Joyce imitates others in placing male authorities within both actual and invented circus rings to question legitimate influence in local domestic and wider social settings. It moves between these two locations to assess disquieting consequences of imagining political authority within this particular performance space in the fraught period of Irish history from 1904 to 1922.     

Rape on the Railway: Women,Safety, and Moral Panic in Victorian Newspapers

In the Victorian press, the railway carriage was painted as a site of particular danger for women travelling alone. As a hybrid public and private space, the carriage placed strangers together in an intimate, quasi-domestic setting for which there were few established norms of behaviour. When male and female solo travellers found themselves confined together, it set the scene both for sexual assault and for false charges of assault, which the newspapers played upon; solo female travellers were depicted as either potential victims or potential Potiphar's wives. These representations were prominent in two moral panics that attempted to regulate women's movement. In this article, I examine accounts of sexual assault from the Lancet, The Times, the English Leader, and the People's Advocate from the 1860s and 1870s and consider newspaper reports as a source of erotic stimulation in a late-century pornographic novel, Raped on the Railway. I argue that the newspapers' fascination with sexual violence on trains, while connected to the weakened division between public and private spaces and an association of railway engines with virility, was primarily a response to fears about women's increasing freedom.     

Chastity Models in the Legenda Aurea and in the Sermones de Sanctis of Jacobus de Voragine

Abstract

The Sermones de sanctis of Jacobus de Voragine is not an independent text but the last written link of a communicative chain that starts with the holy figurae of the Legenda aurea and is completed with a final speech from a preacher to his audience. Chastity is represented in this hagiographical material, which is closely connected to the most important saints of the Dominican calendar, through absolute models that are removed from everyday experience: these models need to be interpreted by a preacher's spoken words and to be illustrated with a choice of exempla to reach laypeople effectively.     

Hysteria as a Shape-Shifting Forensic Psychiatric Diagnosis in the Netherlands c. 1885–1960

Based on criminal court cases found in archives and newspapers, this article traces how the diagnosis of hysteria functioned in trials and Dutch forensic psychiatric practice c. 1885–1960. Informed by Science and Technology Studies and praxiography, hysteria is studied as a ‘fire object'. It can make multiple relations with gender, which can be absent or present. This approach asks whether and how gender is important regarding hysteria. Gender only ‘stuck’ to hysteria in certain situations. In rape cases, hysteria took the form of lying and was connected to women. Although a woman's hysteria could be used as a reason to exonerate the male perpetrator's crime of murder, a man's hysteria never served to exculpate a female perpetrator of a crime. Signs on the body appeared to be very significant but did not suffice for a clear diagnosis. Inconsistencies during the psychiatric examination of the body therefore needed to be coordinated by pointing to other bodily symptoms, personal life stories, academic literature or logical reasoning. To analyse the ways hysteria functioned as a versatile fire object in the courtroom and pre-trial investigation alerts us to hysteria's shapeshifting potential that might explain the power of the hysteria label in twentieth-century medicine and culture.     

Uneven Developments: From The Grundrisse To Capital

Abstract: Since its publication, Marxists have debated the relation between the Grundrisse and the first volume of Capital. This paper offers one entry point into this debate by comparing the way each text frames its “problematic of uneven development”, that is, the way that capitalism's inherently uneven development is thematized as a problem for explanation. In the Grundrisse the uneven nature of capitalism as development is explained by the emergence of capitalism from precapitalist relations. While this analysis is not entirely absent from Capital (cf the discussion of primitive accumulation), precapitalist formations are not treated as systematically in Capital. By contrast, uneven development enters Capital in the final section, particularly where Marx criticizes Wakefield. Reading these two texts together, I argue that the problematic of uneven development shifts from Grundrisse to Capital in a way that underscores Marx's growing stress on capital's imperial character. This shift has its roots in political events of the period when Marx rewrote Grundrisse into Capital.     

Practical Hagiography: James of Voragine’s Sermones and Vita on St Margaret of Antioch

Abstract

In addition to his exceedingly popular Legenda Aurea, James of Voragine wrote in another hagiographical genre: sermons on the saints. The Sermones de sanctis likewise became immediately popular, as his Dominican brothers used James’s model sermons to learn to preach about the saints in a format that would provide the laity with intelligible and practical theological instruction. James’s corpus gives us a rather unusual opportunity to compare the ways in which a single author manipulates multiple hagiographical genres, and his writings on St Margaret of Antioch allow us to explore how a medieval preacher used a historically disputed saint — a dragon-fighter — to provide a practical model of sanctity to his lay audience. I compare the representations of Margaret in James’s sermones and vita, arguing that James adapted certain features of Margaret’s saintly example in the vita to instruct the audience of his sermons about proper Christian virtues and actions. As a point of comparison, I explore a sermon by Évrard of Val des Écoliers in which the Augustinian teaches his audience a practical skill — how to pray — through Margaret’s example.     

Crusading and crusade memory in Caesarius of Heisterbach's Dialogus miraculorum

This article is a preliminary investigation into the way the Cistercians of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries conceptualised and contextualised the history of the crusading movement, with a specific focus on the way in which they integrated their involvement in crusading into the Order's sense of institutional memory and corporate identity. The article presents a study of Caesarius of Heisterbach's Dialogus miraculorum, a collection of exempla that was composed for the edification of Cistercian novices in the first quarter of the thirteenth century. Although the text is well known to medievalists (and particularly to scholars of medieval Cisterciana), it has yet to be subjected to a close reading by historians of the crusades. By examining the way in which Caesarius used and described the crusades in the Dialogus, the article demonstrates the potential of using non-narrative texts to explore medieval understandings of the crusading past and, more generally, illustrates further the importance of warfare in the shaping of medieval monastic culture.     

Talcott Parsons as translator of Max Weber's basic sociological categories

The first four chapters of Max Weber's Economy and Society presented by Talcott Parsons in 1947 as Theory of Social and Economic Organization present a coherent and complete analysis of social, economic and political structures based upon a consistent theory of social action and its understanding. Parsons did not see them this way. His lengthy introduction sought to insert them into his own “action frame of reference”, and his rearrangement of the text made it difficult for a reader to understand why it was constructed the way that it is. This essay describes how Parsons came to be principal translator and editor of the text, examines the changes that he made to it, and links his editorial practice to the analytical procedures that he followed in his Structure of Social Action.     

Beyond Bodies: Aspects of the Politicisation of Exchange in the South-West Highlands of Papua New Guinea

Different exchanges offer varying potential for transactors to gain prestige in Anganen, Southern Highlands (PNG). The central argument is that this variation — what I call politicisation — is in part linked with how bodies are variously appropriated as the premise upon which exchange is undertaken. The least prestigious for individual actors are collective prestations in which wealth acts as direct substitution for persons and their bodies. At the other extreme is ceremonial pork distribution where individual prestige is directly measurable in terms of a man's own endeavours. This event is ‘beyond bodies’ and centres the transactor as the sole, focal individual. In between lie warfare compensations where bodies still create debt, but the focus shifts from the female associated body such as the bride to male associated bodies as when allies compensate slain warriors' agnates. The second most prestigious event is ‘moka’ in which the ‘body’ is metaphorised in the Anganen names of its sequence together with aspects of performance. Here wealth does not substitute for the body but rather creates debt. These varying ‘body logics’ can be seen to lie at the heart of the politicisation in their interrelations with other indices of prestige such as individual autonomy or finance for provisioning. I conclude by suggesting the way bodies are variously appropriated may be a useful comparative base for Highlands political economies more generally.     

‘Her Cause Against Herself’: Margaret Fuller,Emersonian Democracy,and the Nineteenth‐Century Public Intellectual

Recent interpretations of Margaret Fuller's ideological significance have embedded her biography in an older understanding of Transcendentalism's history that imagines a post‐Brook Farm cleavage between ‘Emersonian individualists’ and more socially conscious communitarians. In late 1844, Margaret Fuller left New England for employment at Horace Greeley's New‐York Tribune, a moment that a number of biographers and critics have imagined as Fuller's own personal Brook Farm, her resignation from the ‘party of Emerson.’ Recent work in the history of Transcendentalism and romantic liberalism more generally, however, has been more careful about confusing romantic individuality with modern bourgeois individualism. This essay furthers the discussion of Transcendentalist ideology by arguing that Fuller's New York journalism was representative of the broad intellectual unity of the movement's democratic experiments – experiments that experientially, socially, and intellectually aimed to overcome the boundaries between the body and the mind, manual and mental labor, and the manual and mental classes.     

Performing gender in lay saints' Lives

Abstract

Taking as its point of departure Judith Butler's theory of gender performativity, this article shows how femininity and masculinity are performed in three lay saints' Lives from the middle Byzantine period: the Life of Philaretos the Merciful (820), the Life of Thomaïs of Lesbos (mid-tenth century) and the Life of Mary the Younger (eleventh century). The approach of these texts through gender performativity shows in the most graphic way the difference between male and female constructions of sanctity on the one hand, and the important role that gender plays in the construction of lay sanctity, on the other.     

The very personal history of Nithard: family and honour in the Carolingian world

Nithard's Histories of the civil wars fought between Louis the Pious's sons reveal much about mid‐ninth‐century nobility, political values, and the author's changing social position. This article considers how Nithard's immediate familial history affected the text's composition. We argue that his incorporation of authorial voice and detail, crafting of the royal lineage, and emphasis on fraternitas suggest that Nithard employed the text to fight for legitimacy and honour, both familial and individual. We propose that the Histories should be read as a social commemoration of Nithard's familial memories, thus complicating the assumption that family histories were the purview of women.     

Anna Comnena's account of the First Crusade: History and politics in the reigns of the emperors Alexius I and Manuel I Comnenus

Abstract

Anna Comnena's history the Alexiad has been accorded a high honorary status by Byzantine historians. Her pioneering efforts in philosophy and the thoroughness of her historical methodology are admired, although there is a distinct reluctance to analyse her historical writing. On a superficial level the Alexiad is a straightforward text: an historical panegyric in its organisation, frequently eulogistic in tone, in the manner of court orations, and rhetorically strongly influenced by conventional Byzantine pastiches of Homer. A triumphal mood pervades the biography. A somewhat more careful assessment soon reveals the significant tensions and contradictions which lurk beneath the formalised strength of this epic historical narrative. Ideological and cultural problematics abound. The self-conscious celebratory presentation of Byzantium's cultural elitism is frequently subverted by the author's pessimism. The spatial and temporal terrain of the Alexiad contains many visionary qualities, even though the text purports to narrate the events ‘as they occurred‘. Historical perspectives and idiosyncratic philosophical positions impinge, blend, envelop, and disorganise the text. Among the many themes is Anna's presentation of the ‘Latin West’, and in particular her characterisation of the appearance of crusaders in Byzantine society. A more personalised feature is Anna's self-projection of herself within the Alexiad as ‘a dutiful daughter’ and ‘a loving wife’. Yet the narrative contains elements of gender confusion, for there is an assertive and possessive interest in forms of political power that were usually culturally exclusive to Byzantine men.     

“UNABLE TO RESIST”: ON THE “POSSIBILITY” OF “IMPOSSIBILITY” AND CHRISTOPHE BOUTON'S TIME AND FREEDOM

This essay reflects critically on Martin Heidegger's remarks about authenticity and death with the aid of Christophe Bouton's Temps et liberté (2002), translated by Christopher Macann as Time and Freedom (2014). It first raises general questions concerning the possible thematic relationship between human endeavoring (action) and the experiences of finitude and freedom. Heidegger's Being and Time is particularly useful for exploring this relationship, but certain problems emerge when using this text for accessing the essay's themes. To wit: there are good reasons for mistrusting readings of Being and Time as a “practical” guide for grounding action. Against the practical reading, the essay wishes to reclaim the ontological‐existential significance of Heidegger's text. Although Bouton's treatment of Being and Time excludes its ontological dimensions and is entirely practical, even to the point of disregarding certain theoretical risks inherent in this approach, Bouton's study is indispensable for situating Being and Time in a historical‐intellectual context, whereby the experiences of freedom and time are understood within certain metaphysical presuppositions rendering them difficult to establish together on reliable grounds. Following Bouton's lead, the essay shows that the hermeneutic differences between practical and ontological readings of Being and Time can be explored through reflections on what Heidegger might have meant by the term “Möglichkeit” (“possibility”), from which Bouton infers “freedom.” It is alleged that Bouton does not fully consider all of Heidegger's assertions regarding Möglichkeit, most problematically the claim that the human being's most essential “possibility” is its “impossibility,” that is to say, its death.