The clandestine marriages of the Fair Maid of Kent

The obscure circumstances surrounding the marriages of Joan Plantagenet, the Fair Maid of Kent, are here clarified by reference to the pertinent original documents. In 1340, aged twelve, Joan clandestinely married Sir Thomas Holland. While he was away fighting in Prussia, she was induced by her family to wed the earl of Salisbury. When Holland returned and claimed his wife, Salisbury refused to give her up and Holland was compelled to bide his time. In 1347, while serving in the war against France, Holland received a large ransom for a high-ranking prisoner; he was now financially able to petition the curia for restoration of his conjugal rights, and he reported that Salisbury was holding Joan incommunicado. Under the first papal auditor the case reached an impasse, but a second auditor managed to ensure that Joan was properly represented at the hearings. The curia decided in 1349 that Salisbury's marriage was invalid, and Joan was restored to Holland. After the latter died, in December 1360, Joan secretly wedded her second cousin, the prince of Wales, even though Edward III was then negotiating a foreign marriage for the prince. This clandestine marriage was necessarily invalid because of consanguinity. King Edward, despite annoyance at the thwarting of his plans, petitioned the pope for a dispensation; and in October 1361, the prince and Joan were wedded in public.     

从离婚权的演变透视中世纪欧洲犹太妇女的婚姻地位

犹太教允许离婚.在<圣经>时代,犹太男子可以随心所欲地休妻,犹太妇女没有任何话语权.到了<塔木德>时代,犹太社会尽管对男子的单方面休妻权利有所限制,但是并没有从根本上改变婚姻的男权制结构,犹太妇女在离婚问题上依然处于完全被动的地位.这种局面在中世纪的欧洲有了质的改变,而且,这种改变通过犹太社团最具权威的"市集大会"颁布的法规条例而不断地强化,从而使得犹太妇女的婚姻地位在附属中有了改善.     

20世纪初英国的社会改革及其影响

20世纪初,在英国自由党的支持和推动下,英国政府进行了一系列旨在减少贫困、缓解矛盾的社会改革,推出了养老金条例和国民保险法案,调节了社会各阶层之间的关系,打下了社会保障的基础,从而对20世纪英国社会的发展产生了深远的影响.     

The clandestine marriages of the Fair Maid of Kent

The obscure circumstances surrounding the marriages of Joan Plantagenet, the Fair Maid of Kent, are here clarified by reference to the pertinent original documents. In 1340, aged twelve, Joan clandestinely married Sir Thomas Holland. While he was away fighting in Prussia, she was induced by her family to wed the earl of Salisbury. When Holland returned and claimed his wife, Salisbury refused to give her up and Holland was compelled to bide his time. In 1347, while serving in the war against France, Holland received a large ransom for a high-ranking prisoner; he was now financially able to petition the curia for restoration of his conjugal rights, and he reported that Salisbury was holding Joan incommunicado. Under the first papal auditor the case reached an impasse, but a second auditor managed to ensure that Joan was properly represented at the hearings. The curia decided in 1349 that Salisbury's marriage was invalid, and Joan was restored to Holland. After the latter died, in December 1360, Joan secretly wedded her second cousin, the prince of Wales, even though Edward III was then negotiating a foreign marriage for the prince. This clandestine marriage was necessarily invalid because of consanguinity. King Edward, despite annoyance at the thwarting of his plans, petitioned the pope for a dispensation; and in October 1361, the prince and Joan were wedded in public.     

Dominican Dignitaries and Private Preaching at Papal Avignon Part I: The Sermon by Pierre de Palme (12 March 1340)

ABSTRACT

Private preaching at papal Avignon (or in general, for that matter) has yet to receive much scholarly attention, in part because the texts of private sermons are not always easy to come by. The survival of two private sermons, both by Dominican dignitaries and both delivered to the same audience (a cardinal and his familia) in the same venue during the same Lenten preaching cycle, provide an opportunity to explore the phenomenon of private preaching at the Avignonese curia. In the first article of a three-part series, I present the edited text of the sermon by Pierre de Palme, Prior of the Dominican Province of France; the second text will appear in part II, with analysis and observations in the third and final part.     

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.     

Josephus' Retelling of Nathan's Oracle (2 Samuel 7)

This paper deals with the way Josephus has retold and rewritten the narrative in 2 Sam 7 in his Jewish Antiquities 7.90-95. Recent studies made on this issue have focused either on the question of Messianism or on the characterization of king David in Josephus' writings. However, our study focuses on Josephus' qualities as a commentator and discusses how Josephus handled the hermeneutical problems he encountered in the story, for example: why did God forbid David to build a temple? What was the nature of God's promise to David that his dynasty will rule forever? These questions are examined through a close reading of the Josephus' retelling of the biblical story in 2 Sam 7. We have considered omissions, additions, and changes in the sequence of actions. Our aim was to find out whether the differences between the biblical text and that of Josephus should be ascribed to a different Vorlage (which may be identical to the LXX), to harmonization or to intentional changes made to clarify difficult verses within the text.     

(Sick) Love and the Older Woman in Marcel Prévost's L’Automne d’une femme

Marcel Prévost, a prolific novelist, journalist, and academician, is best known for works such as Les Demi-Vierges (1894), which demonstrates how Parisian society and education corrupt young women, and Les Vierges fortes (1900), which, according to Louise Lyle, “develop[s] the concept of the secular, self-perpetuating community of female educators only to explode it as an empty ideal” (60). In his 1893 novel, L’Automne d’une femme, Prévost focuses not on virgins but on the older woman, telling the story of forty-year-old Julie, who has languished for over twenty years in an arranged marriage to Antoine Surgère. Despite having the natural ability to ease the suffering of others, Julie shows no interest in nursing her husband when he falls ill, though she eagerly cares for the daughter of one of his colleagues, Claire Esquier, and the son of another associate, Maurice Artoy, who is all too eager to reciprocate when Julie's feelings for him become something more than maternal. Unbeknownst to Julie, however, Maurice and Claire once dabbled in a youthful romance that neither forgot. The glue that holds this tangled web of relationships together is illness, a theme so pervasive that the verb souffrir and its derivatives are employed no fewer than 137 times, along with myriad other terms related to pain. Prévost's creation of a veritable culture of illness in which love cannot possibly flourish for the woman in her “autumn” might be said, in fact, to feed into the Decadent vision of woman as dangerous and corrupting.     

FORGOTTEN MEANING

ABSTRACT

In a recent article Steven McKenzie argues for the priority of the account of David sparing Saul's life in 1 Sam 26 over that of the parallel account 1 Sam 24. To do this he uses one of the categories of evaluating interdependence of biblical texts, namely, that of “ungrammaticality” as set forth by Cynthia Edenburg in SJOT, 1998. Thus McKenzie opposes my own view for the priority of chap 24, as argued most recently in The Biblical Saga of King David (2009). In this article I critically evaluate the use of his examples of “ungrammaticality” as well as the possible application of the other four Edenburg categories of evaluating evidence for interdependence and priority, as they apply to these parallel texts. Contrary to McKenzie, I conclude that these principles of comparison confirm the priority of 1 Sam 24 over that of 1 Sam 26, and I argue that chap 26 was a later supplementation of the David story for the purposes of polemic and a parody of the earlier account.     

Beauty,Bath and Beyond: Framing Bathsheba as a Royal Fantasy in 2 Sam 11,1-5

This paper investigates the function of beauty in David and Bathsheba’s encounter in 2 Sam 11,1-5. It argues that the female bather’s pleasant appearance, rather than simply kindling king David’s desire, focalizes the woman as sexually available (and vulnerable) and wraps the whole episode in a royal fantasy of shared intimacy. The focus on Bathsheba’s beautiful body—her wash, her motion towards the king, her self-sanctification and her pregnancy—frames the episode in a very erotic way, suggesting adultery. It conceals the sexual violence committed by the king who sends, takes and sleeps with the woman. David’s violent entitlement to Bathsheba reveals the beauty politics at play in his royal House.     

The Judicial Bookshelf

A well‐established fact of American government is the unpredictability of vacancies on the U.S. Supreme Court. Representatives and Senators face voters every two and six years, respectively. A President serves for four years and may be reelected only once. Justices, however, do not sit for fixed terms and in effect enjoy life tenure. After his inauguration as the forty‐third president in January 2001, George W. Bush had no opportunity to make a High Court appointment until he was well into his second term when, on July 1, 2005, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor announced her intention to leave the Bench. ¹ By contrast, the forty‐fourth President encountered his first High Court vacancy much sooner, and in his first term, as Justice David Hackett Souter notified the Obama White House on May 1, 2009, of his intention to retire from “regular active service as a Justice” when the Court recessed for the summer. ²     

“Ill‐natured comparisons”: Racism and relativism in European representations of ni‐Vanuata from Cook's second voyage

Landes’ anthropological theorizing, highlighting the connections between race, gender, sexuality and class, expressed an Eastern European Jewish female praxis well-established by the late 1920s and early ‘30s when Landes began her research career. Landes’ changing Jewish identification through her life resulted from gendered aging and the reformulation of Jewish racialization processes in the U.S. Her late life reflections are evidence of what Susan Watkins calls ‘gendered late-style’ as well as Jewish conceptions of time as anti-linear and counter-normative. I investigate how her Jewish socialist Yiddish-speaking family background inflected her interpersonal and professional networks and her writings on anti-racist, class and gender-based themes.

Abbreviations: RLP: Ruth Landes Papers; NAA: National Anthropological Archives; SI: Smithsonian Institution; RBP: Ruth Benedict Papers; ASC: Archives and Special Collections Library; VCL: Vassar College Libraries     

The Case of Beatrice Brooke: Fictions of Law and Marriage in Caroline Norton's Lost and Saved (1863)

In comparison with her influential political essays on matters of child custody, divorce and marital property settlements, the novels of Caroline Norton remain relatively under-studied. The purpose of this article is to revisit one of these novels, Lost and Saved, published in 1863, and to do so more particularly as an exercise in literary jurisprudence. It argues that the story of Beatrice Brooke, the unfortunate heroine of the novel, is shaped in considerable part by the law; first, by the peculiar terms of a probate settlement which serves to preclude her marriage to her ultimately duplicitous lover Montagu Treherne, and then second, by the broader terms of matrimonial law in nineteenth-century England, the construction of which serves to delude Beatrice into thinking that an ‘irregular’ marriage to Treherne enjoys some residual legal force. Though the medium is very different, the critique of marriage presented in Lost and Saved is just as urgent as that engaged in Norton's more famous political essays.     

St Anselm and the English investiture controversy reconsidered

The Investiture Controversy in England has generally been viewed as a two-sided contest between king and pope. But in reality the struggle was between three parties — king, pope, and primate. St Anselm, devoted to his duties as God's steward of his office and its privileges, worked against both King Henry I and Pope Paschal II to bring into reality his idea of the proper status of the primate of all Britain. Anselm had a vision of a political model which he conceived as God's ‘right order’ in England, and all his efforts were directed toward fulfilling this vision.The Investiture Contest may be divided into two parts. The first phase began when Anselm was thwarted by Henry I's duplicity in the archbishop's attempt to force the king to accept the decrees of Rome at the height of a political crisis. Anselm may have seen these decrees as beneficial to the Canterbury primacy. From 1101 to 1103, Anselm wavered between supporting either party completely, meanwhile securing from Paschal all the most important privileges for the primacy of Canterbury. Each time Paschal refused to grant a dispensation for Henry, as Anselm requested, he granted Anselm a privilege for the primacy. Thus Anselm's vision of the primate as almost a patriarch of another world, nearly independent of the pope, was fulfilled by 1103.At this point, Anselm abandoned his vacillation between king and pope, and worked seemingly on behalf of Paschal, but in reality on behalf of the Canterbury primacy. During this second phase, Anselm's political adroitness becomes clear by a correlation, never before made, between the church-state controversy and Henry's campaign to conquer Normandy. By careful maneuvering and skilful propaganda, Anselm forced Henry to choose between submitting to the investiture decree or failing in his attempt to conquer Normandy. At the settlement, a compromise was worked out, Henry conceding on investitures, and Paschal conceding on homage. But investiture was only secondary to Anselm. He ended the dispute not when Henry submitted on investitures, but only when he had gained from Henry concessions which made the primate almost a co-ruler with the king, as his political vision demanded. Only after a public reconcilliation with his archbishop did Henry feel free to complete the Norman campaign.Thus the Investiture Controversy was a three-way struggle. Both king and pope compromised, each giving up some of their goals. But Anselm emerged from the contest having won nearly all his political objectives.     

1 samuel 19: David and the Teraphim. and the Emplotted Narrative

This article interprets the use of teraphim in 1 Sam 19,13 through a historiographical lens. A close reading of 1 Sam 13-19 reveals Saul's doomed kingship (a lack of God's presence) and God's continual presence with David. Drawing on Hayden White's historiography, archaeological material, and textual sources, one can see how the teraphim functions as part of the emplotted (arranged) narrative of David and Saul, emphasizing the leitmotiv that runs through David's rise and Saul's decline. The author of the 1 Sam 19 arranged the narrative vis-a-vis David and Saul in such a way that her or his audience would understand.     

The political will and the administrative won't? Mathieu Thomassin and his dauphins (Charles III and Louis II)

The delphinal counsellor Mathieu Thomassin composed a Breviere des anciens droys … du Dauphiné de Viennoys (c.1453) after a career of 30 years in the service of Charles III (the French king Charles VII) and Louis II (the future Louis XI). This was his first major historical text in French, but has been overshadowed by his better-known Registre delphinal, commissioned by Louis II in 1456. This article analyses the historical culture and the conception of history revealed in the Breviere. It notes how Thomassin's careful definitions of frontiers in the past and present reflect his experience of territorial disputes. History and geography are imbued with polemic, however, allowing Thomassin to override competing claims to territory or autonomy by delphinal opponents within and outside the Dauphiné. The principles set out in the Breviere were refined and extended in the Registre. However, it is unlikely that either work was ever intended for wide circulation; rather, they were written to provide ‘authentic’ texts which could be consulted primarily by other delphinal officers. As such, they reflect on occasion the divergence of views between a proto-professional administrator, with a concern for the long-term, and his preoccupied (if not dilettante) prince, much more subject to the requirements of realpolitik.     

Two Theories of Toleration: Locke versus Mill

Abstract

In her book, Zuckert presents a new interpretation of the Platonic corpus based on the internal dramatic chronology of all the dialogues. According to Zuckert, once the dialogues are ordered in this way, then it is possible to understand Plato's story of the development of Socratic philosophy, especially in relation to the other non-Socratic philosophers: Parmenides, Timaeus, the Eleatic Stranger, and the Athenian Stranger. For Plato, Socratic philosophy is superior to these other types of philosophy because of its acute understanding of both the limitations and the erotic character of human knowledge. It is only with his account of erôs in the Symposium that Socrates was able to account for the ways in which the eternal and intelligible ideas of the noble, the just, and the good could come to be exemplified in the life of mortal human beings, via the cooperative practice of philosophic virtue.     

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?     

Lucy Hutchinson,Lucretius and Soteriological Materialism

Abstract

This article examines Lucy Hutchinson's pervasive materialism, arguing that her use of corporeal imagery – in part shaped by her early translation of Lucretius – contributes to the soteriological purposes of her later works in multiple ways. Criticism on Hutchinson has tended to divorce the materialist imagery of her translation from the Calvinistic themes of her other writings. I argue, however, for the lasting presence of a materialism constructed from the vocabularies of Lucretian Epicureanism, Neoplatonism and John Owen. Focusing especially on the poem Order and Disorder and Hutchinson's theological tract to her daughter, I show how she uses materialism as a “means” to achieving assurance and grace. I suggest that these various responses to physical experience are part of Hutchinson's enduring investigation into the ontology of “Order” and “Disorder”, and her quest for stable spiritual being.     

‘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.