Gender and Sanctity in the Middle Ages

This review essay examines recent trends and developments in the study of medieval sanctity and gender, looking at the range of approaches which have been and are being taken by both historians and literary scholars to a wide variety of hagiographic texts. Two recent studies of medieval hagiography are reviewed, John Kitchen, Saints' Lives and the Rhetoric of Gender: Male and Female in Merovingian Hagiography and the collection Gendered Voices: Medieval Saints and Their Interpreters edited by Catherine Mooney. These works are representative of differing approaches to the issue of male authors' representations of female sanctity and concomitant issues of gender ideology.     

Learning to sail the Duyfken replica

The rig of the Duyfken 'replica', a reconstruction Dutch jacht of c . 1600 is described. Sail-handling techniques and sailing performance including steering with a whipstaff are also described. Experiments to improve sailing efficiency, some prompted by analysis of contemporary iconography, are discussed.     

Multiplying Labour,Multiplying Resistance: Class Composition in Buenos Aires’ Clandestine Textile Workshops

Buenos Aires’ talleres clandestinos (clandestine textile workshops) are powerful sites of accumulation and resistance; a complex and communitarian migrant economy. The economy’s complexity is, however, masked by its spatiality, clandestinity, and the promotion of culturalist analyses that ignore intra-collective class differentials. This paper considers the “autonomy of migration” approach through the lens of “class composition” to explore the talleres’ contours. Witnessed in the talleres is a clear “multiplication of labour”, yet approaching this multiplication compositionally highlights the multiple examples of resistance and refusal immanent to the workshop economy. But this dialectic of control and resistance transcends the workplace, with the talleres one node in a wider, socially reproductive borderscape. By developing a framework that neither condemns nor celebrates economic structures like the talleres, but instead unpacks their antagonistic nature, the paper highlights the benefits of (a) analysing the autonomy of migration approach compositionally, and (b) further geographical engagement with autonomist thinking.     

Place-based corporate hegemony: General Electric in Tell City, Indiana, 1943–1947

This paper examines the dynamics behind the selling of a federally owned World War II factory in Tell City, Indiana in 1946 and 1947. The federal agency charged with disposing of wartime plant, the War Assets Administration, reversed its decision to sell the factory to a small innovative company, Electra-Voice, selling it instead to the giant electrical equipment manufacturer, General Electric. What would make federal administrators who were part of a powerful liberal state apparatus committed to economic competition and anti-monopoly change their mind? The answer lies in what I call place-based corporate hegemony. Probing the material consequences of everyday action, place-based corporate hegemony revolves around the formation of alliances based on axiomatic values, the continued appeal of these values, the redistribution of symbolic and material resources, and the incorporation of threatening elements. Deploying a range of archival materials I show how the concerted efforts of the community, business organizations, politicians and unions as well as General Electric to question the initial decision forced the state to rethink and change its decision.