“Tell Thou the Tale”: Shakespeare's Taming of Folktales in The Taming of the Shrew

William Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew adapts two European folktales, “The Taming of the Shrew” (ATU 901) and “Lord for a Day” (ATU 1531). The playwright adapts these tales in order to negotiate his role as storyteller with the audience, alternately insisting on his right to innovate and deferring to the audience by allowing them to choose among multiple possible endings.     

Archaeology,Ethno‐history and Oral Traditions: Approaches to the Indigenous Past

Indigenous groups across the world are actively looking to maintain or rediscover their past. Many historians and archaeologists are sympathetic to their quest. As a result different ways of narrating the past are in action: oral tradition, ethno‐history and archaeology.

In the following the potential of each approach is discussed. In particular the possibility for collaboration between indigenous approaches and academic disciplines is evaluated. The focus is on the interpretative narrative, rather than on cultural heritage management. It is argued that we need multivocality as well as collaboration and integration of narratives.     

Spiders,Horror, and Animal Others in Late Victorian Empire Fiction

By the 1850s, the representation of the spider in Victorian natural history was beginning to change. No longer associated solely with ingenuity and industry, the spider took on more disturbing connotations in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Unable to pin down the creature's precise rhetorical and metaphorical function, naturalists could not decide whether the spider ought to be loved or feared and at the same time the spider began to emerge as a ubiquitous, protean and unstable Gothic trope in popular fiction. While natural history books warned of the hazards of the foreign spider's bite, in adventure fiction the alien arachnid lurks in liminal spaces far from the safety of British shores. Much maligned as the unfamiliar Other, the spider caused – and mitigated – anxieties about the limits of the human. In the Gothic empire fiction of Bertram Mitford and H.G. Wells, the spider takes on the role of the harbinger of death on both sides of the colonial encounter.     

To Punish or Protect: The New Poor Law and the English Workhouse

Aimed to alleviate pauperism in nineteenth-century England, the New Poor Law of 1834 resulted in the creation of hundreds of workhouses across the English landscape. Through the workhouses’ continuing use and adaptation over nearly a 100 years, these buildings illustrate the complexities of attitudes towards, and the treatment of, the poor. In its use of the built form to understand the human experience, this research identifies the variable implementation of the policies of segregation, surveillance, and specialization to promote care and/or control. Ultimately, this multifaceted approach to the workhouse reveals how workhouse architecture reflected, and sometimes contradicted, contemporaneous attitudes towards poverty, structuring, yet not defining, a pauper’s identity.     

Le Marché au Cœur de L’Invention Muséale?

Before Vivant Denon, the dealer Jean-Baptiste-Pierre Lebrun played a crucial role in the creation of the Louvre collections, despite the revolutionary discourse which opposed the market to the museum. Lebrun's position as a polemicist is interpreted here as a strategy of self-presentation which made possible the controversial birth of the figure of the museum expert. With Lebrun, the Louvre imposed itself as a public space of artistic expertise, where values imported from the market - such as attributionism, materiality, and authenticity - became prominent in the evaluation of paintings.     

Sexually dimorphic sea urchins: identifying the sexes in Pentechinus mirabilis

The sexes of most sea urchin species are externally indistinguishable from one another. Where gross sexual dimorphism does exist, it is invariably associated with nonplanktotrophy. In the most extreme examples, female morphology has become modified to create depressions on the test where offspring may be sheltered throughout development. Since a number of the features used for taxonomic classification are lost on fossilization, it can be difficult to recognize fossil individuals as the dimorphic males and females of the same species. In addition, diagnoses of dimorphic taxa commonly concentrate on the striking female traits, hindering identification of the simpler male form. Here, we present an approach based on morphology and crystallographic determination of developmental mode that allows the recognition of the males of marsupiate echinoid taxa. Males of the brooding temnopleurid Pentechinus mirabilis from the Oligocene of Victoria, Australia are described for the first time.     

Sister-in-Law Marriage in the Empire: Religious Politics and Legislative Reform in the Australian Colonies 1850–1900

In 1835, a statute was passed in the parliament of the United Kingdom making it illegal for a widowed man to marry his sister-in-law. 1 Lord Lyndhurst's Act (1835) 5 & 6 Will VI c. 54. Marriage to a sister-in-law after a wife's death was common practice in nineteenth-century England and colonial Australia and aunts often took on the responsibility of raising children after a sibling's death. In the 1840s, a protracted parliamentary and social debate began over whether a widowed man's marriage to his sister-in-law should be made legal and this debate lasted over seven decades. In the Australian colonies, where English law had been inherited, 2 Those Australian colonies settled prior to the passing of Lord Lyndhurst's Act inherited the English position regarding deceased wife's sister marriage at the time, that such unions were voidable in the ecclesiastical courts during the lifetime of the parties, and in those colonies established afterwards, the 1835 statute applied and deceased wife's sister unions were illegal. In both cases colonial parliaments attempted to pass legislation to clarify the law. a similar debate occurred in the 1870s. The marriage was legalised in most of Australia in the 1870s while it remained illegal in England until the turn of the century. The parallel debates in each country provide a window into the comparative effect of religious culture on the development of marriage law. One of the primary reasons for the protracted nature of the struggle for marriage reform in England was its significance for the relationship between church and state. This article explores the implications of the relationship between church and state in Britain and the colonies for marriage legislation.