Girls’ Carnival Morris Dancing and Contemporary Folk Dance Scholarship

Competitive, urban-centred and female-led, girls’ carnival morris dancing functions at a remove from the ‘traditional’ spaces of the English folk movement. However, it has a comparable history in north-western England where it retains great popularity. Perhaps this overlooked practice has the potential to unsettle dominant assumptions about contemporary folk performance in the United Kingdom.     

Managing gendered expectations upon resettlement: the experiences of Iraqi Kurdish Muslim women in the UK

This article discusses research surrounding the migration experiences of Iraqi Kurdish Muslim women migrants who have settled in the UK. Looking at some of the important and influential works by post-colonial feminist writers, what is revealed are arguments that provide some false senses of separation between different women. These writers' concepts provide for a stagnation of extreme oppositionally based models of power that fail to recognise the existence of current and future transgressive, positive and empowering relationships of power which exist between women; and that happen in ways that remake the process, whereby transnational feminisms reach out, speak to, touch and reject each other – often all at the same time – and yet, in fresh and reconstituted forms. Considering both oppressive and transgressive relationships of power revealed complex combinations of often contradictory and simultaneously negative and empowering experiences. The Kurdish women practise strategies of Othering, of distance and of proximity corresponding to a variety of different concepts held within several different forms of feminism; they demonstrate an eclectic approach to their self-determination and to the development of rethinking forms of transnational feminism.     

The monastic conversion of Romuald of Ravenna and the church of Sant’Apollinare in Classe

Romuald of Ravenna was one of the foremost reformers of the late tenth and early eleventh century, devoting his energy to establishing monastic communities that emphasised asceticism. After his death, he was celebrated for this work in a vita written by Peter Damian that described the conditions of the conversion of Romuald, who rejected the world after an encounter with St Apollinaris in the church of Sant’Apollinare in Classe outside Ravenna. Peter Damian’s detailed account of this space not only created a fitting location for the conversion to monastic life, but in its appropriation of the visual, textual and hagiographic landscape it would have invited his eleventh-century audience who entered Sant’Apollinare in Classe to share in the same type of experience as his monastic hero, Romuald, and to connect with Ravenna’s late antique patron saint directly.     

Hegemony,rebellion and history: Flodoard's Historia Remensis ecclesiae in Ottonian perspective

This article considers the growth of Ottonian hegemony through a close examination of Flodoard's Historia Remensis ecclesiae. Specifically, it scrutinises Flodoard's laconic account of a property dispute between the church of Rheims and Conrad the Red, Otto the Great's powerful duke of Lotharingia. Reading Flodoard's testimony alongside diplomatic evidence and Ottonian narratives, this study argues that the controversy was a factor in Conrad's rebellion against Otto in 953. Both the central role of Rheims' property in an Ottonian political conflict and Flodoard's silence on numerous aspects of the affair reveal that the church was deeply enmeshed in Ottonian politics. The Historia therefore offers an unrecognised angle on the expansion of Ottonian power, while further investigation of its content suggests that this emergent hegemony may indeed have been welcomed by Flodoard and his superiors at Rheims.