A Grand-Guignol legacy: Martin McDonagh's A Behanding in Spokane

This article examines Martin McDonagh's most recent play, A Behanding in Spokane (2010), through the lens of Théâtre du Grand-Guignol, deploying the scholarship of Richard J. Hand and Michael Wilson on this specific theatrical style. The article links discussions of Grand-Guignol with the amputation suffered by the drama's main character, Carmichael, played by Christopher Walken in the play's first production, and with the case of hands he brings with him on his journey around America. I draw on V.S. Ramachandran's work on consciousness, phantom limbs, and apotemnophilia in order to consider Carmichael's amputation in relation to self-defining narratives, loss, lack, excess and difference, with particular emphasis given to issues of race.     

Lady Gregory's The Gaol Gate,Terence MacSwiney and the Abbey Theatre

In September 1920, a French translation of Lady Gregory's 1906 play The Gaol Gate was staged in a Parisian drawing room. The play's original setting outside the gate of Galway Gaol was transferred to Mountjoy Prison at a time of republican hunger strikes. The drama's central character of Denis Cahel – refusing to inform on his neighbours and hanged as a consequence – gained contemporary currency with Terence MacSwiney's hunger strike and impending death as both men had turned their bodies into a political tool. With a focus on the concept of the political body, this article illustrates the power of The Gaol Gate by tracing the play's provenance and production history, demonstrating its flexibility through performance in a particular historical context.     

Locke on representation in politics

This article contextualises Hegel's writings on international order, especially those concerning war and imperialism. The recurring theme is the tragic nature of the struggles for recognition which are instantiated by these phenomena. Section one examines Hegel's analysis of the Holy Roman Empire in the context of French incursions into German territories, as that analysis was developed in his early essay on ‘The German Constitution’ (1798–1802). The significance of his distinction between the political and civil spheres is explored, with particular attention being paid to its implications for Hegel's theory of nationalism. The second section examines Hegel's development of the latter theory in The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), stressing the tragic interpenetration of ‘culture’ and intersubjective recognition. A recurring theme here is the influence of this theory on Hegel's interpretation of Napoleon's World-Historic mission, as that was revealed in his contemporaneous letters. Section three traces the tragic dynamic underlying the discussion of war between civilised states in The Philosophy of Right (1821). Section four examines three other types of imperial action in Hegel's mature writings, particularly The Philosophy of History (1832). These are relations between civilised states and culturally developed yet politically immature societies; colonial expansion motivated by capitalist under-consumption; and conflict between civilised states and barbarous peoples. It is concluded that it is misleading to claim that Hegel glorified conflict and war, and that he did not see domination by ‘civilised states’ as the ‘final stage’ of World History.     

‘It is not fair that he is treated as a commoner’: lower-level native lords in the repartimiento of Macha (Charcas) under colonial rule, 1540–1619

This article studies the impact of colonial rule on Andean hierarchies of power, underlining the role of lower-level native leaders who enabled paramount lords to organize labor services, levy tribute, and govern Andean polities. Using the repartimiento of Macha (Charcas) as a case study, this article examines the impact of external colonial authorities' actions against the backdrop of rising internal tensions within Andean polities. Segmented polities such as Macha faced increasing tensions, giving rise to new mediating roles for lesser-ranking native leaders, placing the subordinate lords' fight for status at the center of debate. This article starts by exploring the first interrelations between lesser-ranking lords and colonial authorities under the encomienda system through the late 1560s. It then turns to the impact of Viceroy don Francisco de Toledo's reforms in the early 1570s, which simplified and standardized native hierarchies of power within each repartimiento while also fragmenting local Andean elites between tribute-paying lords and those exempted of from it. Finally, the article examines the reactions of lower-level native leaders in the face of new constraints regarding tribute exemption and related obligations in the early seventeenth century, as exemplified by indio principal don Diego Chambi.     

Review articles

Colette is not generally included in recent narratives of twentieth-century French neoclassicism. However, her contemporaries of various political and aesthetic persuasions considered Colette to be a classique of the first order. This article explores classification as classique by critics sympathetic to Charles Maurras and the aesthetics of the Action française as well as left-leaning critics associated with André Gide and the group surrounding the Nouvelle Revue française. The article shows that it is Colette's strong association with a particular type of femininity that allows her to be thought of as classique by critics of such different political and aesthetic commitments. The article also examines examples of resistance to Colette's categorisation as classique, and attempts to assert the modernity of her work, coining the term classique moderne as a way of bringing together diverse attempts to explain the harmony between classicism and modernity in Colette's work. The article suggests that Colette's incorporation in the canon of the classique is part of a larger solidifying of the role of femininity in French identity at that moment.     

Sovereignty,mercy, and natural law: King James VI/I and Jean Bodin

ABSTRACT

The affinities between Jean Bodin's and King James VI/I's political theories have been recognized, and the fact that James had owned Bodin's Six livres de la république has been recorded, but Bodin's specific influence on James has remained nebulous. This article examines the evidence for James's direct engagement with Bodin, by studying James's copy of the Six livres alongside James's political treatises. It provides substantial new archival evidence for Bodin's influence on James's political thought and, thereby, on Scottish and English theories of sovereignty.     

Much Ado About Dugald: The Chequered Career of Dugald Stewart's Letter to Sir William Forbes on James Beattie's Essay on Truth

Summary

Although Sir William Forbes of Pitsligo's An Account of the Life and Writings of James Beattie has long served as an invaluable resource for those interested in Beattie's life and thought, there has been little scholarship on the genesis of Forbes's book. This article considers the role played by Dugald Stewart—as well as that of his friend, Archibald Alison—in the making of Forbes's Life of Beattie. It also examines the reasons for Forbes's decision not to print Stewart's letter in its entirety in the Life of Beattie and explores the letter's significance for understanding Stewart's philosophical development.     

Catholic resistance theory: William Barclay versus Jean Boucher

ABSTRACT

This article examines William Barclay's response to Jean Boucher's De Justa Abdicatione Henrici Tertii (1589) in view of the complexities of Catholic political thought in this post-Tridentine period. It argues that Barclay's famous category of ‘monarchomach’ is problematic for its avoidance of the issue of confessional difference, and that on questions of the relationship between the respublica and the ecclesia Barclay struggled to find an adequate response to Boucher in his De Regno et Regali Potestate (1600). His De Potestate Papae (1609) is treated as the intellectual extension of his battle with Boucher, and more broadly his confrontation with the position of the Catholic League and Jesuits on indirect papal power. By considering Barclay's works in the context of French Gallicanism and the Catholic League in the French Wars of Religion, this discussion aims to reposition Barclay in relation to other Catholic political theorists and thereby re-evaluate the category of Catholic resistance theory.     

Warfare and propaganda: the portrayal of Andronikos II Palaiologos (1282–1328) as an incompetent military leader in the Histories of John VI Kantakouzenos (1347–54)

Abstract

The Histories of Kantakouzenos is the main source for the civil war between Andronikos II and Andronikos III which was fought intermittently from 1321 until 1328. This article examines how Kantakouzenos remodelled and fabricated events, conversations and deliberations in order to depict Andronikos II as an incompetent military leader. By criticizing Andronikos II's military abilities and by blaming him for the military failures of the period, Kantakouzenos diverts suspicion of his personal responsibility and Andronikos III's mistakes that led to the advance of Byzantium's enemies and demonstrates that the elder Andronikos was not worthy of being on the throne.     

Challenging Englishness from the racial margins: William Macready's Irishman in London; Or; The Happy African

William Charles Macready's farce The Irishman in London; Or; The Happy African (1792) can be read as an exploration of Englishness in its relationship to Irishness as presented on the London stage in the period following the French Revolution. This article examines Macready's play as a critique of the common identification of Irishness with blackness that uses stock characters and attitudes to examine English identity. Through a marriage plot displaced from the traditional romantic heroes onto their Irish and black servants, we see English as a commercial identity rather than a cultural one. Linking race to culture and culture to nationality, Macready's play presents Irishness and blackness as culturally rich while calling into question the content of Englishness.     

Gildas and the ‘grievous divorce from the barbarians’

This article examines a specific phrase from Chapter 10 of Gildas's De Excidio Britonum. It suggests that to date, this phrase (lugubre divortium barbarorum) has not been properly understood or translated. In a new interpretation, the article argues that it refers to the breaking of the treaty between the Britons and Saxons mentioned in Chapter 23 of De Excidio Britonum. This new interpretation expands our understanding of Gildas's attitude towards barbarians and the British church.     

The Lore of Liu An and the Authorship of the Huainanzi

This article provides an alternative approach to the issue of the Huainanzi's authorship by exploring how it was related to the Liu An lore emphasizing him as a talented writer. Beginning with a redefinition of the concept of the author in early Chinese literature, the article first examines how Liu An as the author of the Huainanzi functions as the key to our understanding of the text in previous scholarship. The article then moves to investigate the materials relied upon by previous scholarship in defining Liu An as the author of the Huainanzi. The investigation reveals the conflicting messages in different sources regarding when and how Liu An was hailed as a talented writer, what the neipian would likely be, and whether or not Liu An presented the Huainanzi to the Han court. Finally, this article examines the formation of the Liu An lore, in which he is portrayed as a prolific writer especially associated with esoteric writings of the time, and argues that it is this Liu An lore that has defined the Huainanzi's authorship.     

Cernuda,poeta de un sur imposible

This article examines the poetics that Luis Cernuda developed throughout his life in connection with its sublime illusion of a genuine Spanish south through the romantic recreation he made of his native Seville, in several texts written from exile: they are various poems of The Reality and Desire and the essays Digressions on Romantic Andalusia and History of a Book, and, above all, the autobiographical prints from Ocnos, in which Albanio's sensitive experiences reflect both the meditative elegance of Cernuda's childhood and adolescence and the utopian promise of a true relationship with the world beyond the social hypocrisy of bourgeois capitalism and the coercion of Franco's dictatorship. My intention in this article is to weave innovatively, in a consistent and documented way, the biographical events with the artistic intentions of the poet, to reveal original interpretive links between desolate reality and the desire for transcendence in his strange lyrics.     

The Rhetorics of Slavery and Citizenship: Suffragist Discourse and Canonical Texts in Britain, 1880–1914

This article examines the pivotal role played by two canonical texts in shaping the political subjectivities of suffragists in late nineteenth‐ and early twentieth‐century Britain. Read and discussed by three generations of British feminists, John Stuart Mill's Subjection of Women and Giuseppe Mazzini's Duties of Man shaped suffragist thinking on relationships between family, state, and citizenship and provided impetus for the creation of new kinds of argumentation and organisations for women's political activism.     

Margherita of Cortona: Women,Preaching, and the Writing of Hagiography

Abstract

This article examines Margherita of Cortona (1247–97), who took a penitent habit in the late 1270s. In 1290 Margherita was granted permission to rebuild the church of San Basilio near her cell and a secular priest became her confessor. After her death in 1297, her former confessor, the Franciscan Giunta Bevegnati, composed Margherita's Legenda, which provides an account of her life, conversion and penitence, her conversations with Christ, and her charitable works. In addition to the Legenda, there is also an altarpiece, portraying Margherita and scenes from her life, and the seventeenth-century watercolour paintings that reproduce the frescos which once decorated the church of Santa Margherita, the former San Basilio. Following a short introduction to Margherita's life, and a brief examination of preaching for women in the Middle Ages and its prohibitions, the article examines how the biographer, Giunta Bevegnati, represents the relationship of Margherita to preaching and sermons, in particular focusing on passages in Margherita's Legenda, where her efficacious speech or performance has a clear impact on an audience and her biographer does not use the term 'preach' for her utterances. Finally, the extent to which Margherita's biographer uses hagiography for homiletic purposes is discussed.     

The interaction of methodology with an impegno del dopo in Nuto Revelli's collections of oral testimonies

Among his varied publications, Nuto Revelli (1919–2004) produced three collections of oral testimonies gathered from the contadini (peasants) of Piedmont: La strada del davai, Il mondo dei vinti and L’anello forte. This article argues that these collections were the product of the same specific impegno del dopo (‘obligation of afterwards’) as his initial autobiographical writings, which had arisen from his experiences as an officer on the Russian Front during the Second World War. From this premise, the article then examines the interaction of Revelli's sense of impegno del dopo with the methodology he developed. The article concludes with an assessment of Revelli's stated aims and his actual achievements.     

The Reception of ‘That Bigoted Silly Fellow’ James Beattie's Essay on Truth in Britain 1770–1830

This article examines the Scottish philosopher James Beattie's (1735–1803) controversial work of moral philosophy An Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth (1770), noted for its pugnacious attack on the sceptical philosophy of David Hume. Usually treated only as an ephemeral success in the early 1770s, the Essay actually had two distinct periods of enormous popularity that account for its contemporary significance in the period between 1770 and 1830. The prominence of the Essay is demonstrated by its widespread positive reception, evinced in both published and private responses, in both England and Scotland, by the high estimation in which it was held within pedagogical circles as an anti-sceptical philosophical primer, and by its continual use as a textbook in both university and dissenting academy logic and moral philosophy classes. In these senses, Beattie's Essay was arguably the most significant work of the Common Sense School of Scottish philosophy.     

On the path to oblivion: The pilgrims' declining role in the St. Christopher plays of early and early modern Spain

This article examines the representation of the pilgrim in the corpus of St. Christopher dramas of early and early modern Iberia. The importance of the character's supporting role varies according to the era in which each play is written. At first, in the medieval religious dramas of the Crown of Aragon, the pilgrim not only celebrates St. Christopher's piety and anticipates his meeting with Jesus Christ, but also embodies the sanctity and devotion necessitated of pilgrimage. The pilgrims undergo a transformation in the sixteenth century as they become comic and serve as foils to the protagonist's gravity. On the seventeenth-century secular stage, the representations diverge: they begin with a traditional representation of the pilgrim, but then the figure ultimately disappears as the comedias focus on the later period of St. Christopher's life, the result of a Tridentine directive that refocused the general worship of saints and hagiographical literature.     

What is scepticism and can it be found in the Hebrew Bible?

Abstract

This is the first installment of a two part study examining scepticism and irinic correlations in the joy statements of Qoheleth. In this article, a synoptic overview of scepticism is provided from Pyrrho to Descartes, Hume and Kant. The article then examines scepticism's methodology and provides a working definition followed by a critical assessment of the above. The article then examines both the general views of a sceptical tradition in the Hebrew Bible and Dell's specific view of scepticism in the Book of Job followed by a critical assessment of them. Finally, a conclusion is provided for this article.     

Challenging the Quimera (Sirena) Negra: Unamuno Reads Pardo Bazán

This article examines the literary relationship of Emilia Pardo Bazán and Miguel de Unamuno by analyzing Unamuno's 1905 review of La Quimera, as well as his tribute to Pardo Bazán on the occasion of her death in 1921. These two critical pieces, together with Unamuno's Dos madres and La tía Tula, reveal that while Unamuno dismisses Pardo Bazán's realism in his discussion of her works, he develops in his own fiction alter egos who struggle with dominant female figures, just as he competes with Pardo Bazán's model of authorship.