Having her hand in it? Elite women as ‘makers’ of textile art in the Middle Ages

ABSTRACT

In the Middle Ages, elite women acted as creators, donors and recipients of textile art. This article analyses a small but representative group of seventh- to thirteenth-century embroideries in order to examine the motivation for their creation and to investigate the ways in which women could mark their own presence through textile art. It discusses written sources alongside the material evidence; these sources include documentary, hagiographical and literary texts, which provide information about cultural norms and the expectations of society. Set within the context of these sources, the evidence suggests that society both channelled women's creativity into textile art and idealised it. At the same time, as artists and patrons of ornamented textiles, noblewomen had creative control over the medium; embroidery became a field in which their works were noted and celebrated.     

Legend,Legacy and the French 12/01 Raid in 1948

Comparison is drawn between a village's circle of lay Buddhists and an association of former ex-guerrilla fighters in a Northern Vietnamese commune and their respective modes of commemoration. Both groups commemorate the same raid by French soldiers on their commune in 1948, known as the 12/01 Raid. The Association's mode of commemoration is conceptualized as legend; a story that is considered true, but which also retells the 12/01 Raid in terms of a series of ordeals and trials, and with the protagonists overcoming them. The Buddhists' commemorative mode is conceptualized as legacy to capture their vision of a common tragedy. It is argued that the Buddhists commemorate the 12/01 Raid in terms of a common, fateful point of origin, and that legend should be considered a restricted version of legacy.     

Holocene land-use evolution and associated soil erosion in the French Prealps inferred from Lake Paladru sediments and archaeological evidences

A source-to-sink multi-proxy approach has been performed within Lake Paladru (492 m a.s.l., French Prealps) catchment and a 6-m long sediment sequence retrieved from the central lacustrine basin. The combination of minerogenic signal, specific organic markers of autochthonous and allochthonous supply and archaeological data allows the reconstruction of a continuous record of past human disturbances. Over the last 10,000 years, the lacustrine sedimentation was dominated by autochthonous carbonates and the watershed was mostly forest-covered. However, seven phases of higher accumulation rate, soil erosion, algal productivity and landscape disturbances have been identified and dated from 8400 to 7900, 6000 to 4800, 4500 to 3200, 2700 to 2050 cal BP as well as AD 350–850, AD 1250–1850 and after AD 1970. Before 5200 cal BP, soil erosion is interpreted as resulting from climatic deterioration phases towards cooler and wetter conditions. During the Mid-Late Holocene period, erosion fluxes and landscape disturbances are always associated with prehistorical and historical human activities and amplified by climatic oscillations. Such changes in human land-used led to increasing minerogenic supply and nutrients loading that affected lacustrine trophic levels, especially during the last 1600 years. In addition, organic and molecular markers document previously unknown human settlements around Lake Paladru during the Bronze and the Iron Ages.     

Humphrey and Civil Rights: The Politics of Racial Progress

Abstract

This article explores and defends Leo Strauss's interpretation of Edmund Burke's thought. Strauss argues that Burke's conservatism is rooted in the modern empiricist school of John Locke and others. Following Strauss, this article sets out to consider the suitability of these foundational principles to conservative politics. Burke wants to temper or ennoble Lockean politics by inspiring sublime attachment to the political community and its traditions, but he shies away from stating universal standards according to which the traditions of political communities ought to be judged. This respect for reason in history without moorings in transcendent standards of reason or revelation leaves his conservatism on precarious ground.     

A Single Thread of Meaning: Esperanza Ortega's Hilo solo

Scholarship on Marie de France's Lai de Lanval has long held Guinevere's accusation of homosexuality against Lanval to have been motivated by hurt feelings: it is made, in the words of one commentator, "in the fury of a woman scorned." This article suggests that subtler motives may have been apparent to the text's earliest audiences. By the twelfth century, sodomy was increasingly categorized by ecclesiastical legislation as a kind of treason. Accordingly, it is likely that Guinevere's charge is meant to counter Lanval's insinuation that, in attempting to seduce him, she has tried to lure him into an act of treason as well.     

The Symbol of Orpheus in the Sturm und Drang Period

The handling of gender in the Old French Roman de Silence has caused considerable scholarly conflict because the poem simultaneously endorses two competing and mutually irreconcilable gender ideologies. Asserting that gender is essential and its boundaries inviolate—even as its eponymous heroine freely crosses gender boundaries to become supremely successful in male roles—the poem creates a radically unstable conception of gender that has implications not only for its portrayal of social gender roles but also for its use of gendered language. The heroine's name, Silence, becomes emblematic of language's inability to fully represent its subject, as neither Latin nor the vernacular proves adequate to the task of depicting an ambiguously or multiply gendered character. Gendered language and gendered behavior emerge as mutually dependent sources of paradox that point to the limitations of both language and narrative.     

Babinski's Anosognosia for Hemiplegia in Early Twentieth-Century French Neurology

In 1914, Babinski first described “anosognosia”; a term he coined for a phenomenon involving unawareness of disability in hemiplegia. Historical roots of contemporary perspectives on anosognosia after stroke may be found in early discussions among French neurologists. Current notions and debate regarding the roles played by cognition, emotional factors, sensory loss and somatosensory neglect in anosognosia, and the distinctness of anosognosia as a symptom echo the theoretical dilemmas of an earlier past. Historical overview of the development of perspectives on anosognosia enriches our understanding of unawareness of disability.     

The history of modern and contemporary Italy: Made in France (from the late 1970s to the late 1990s)

Abstract

Over the past three centuries Italy has been the focus of numerous studies by French historians, who have taken advantage of the great wealth of sources available there. While no new synthesis has yet been achieved, we can identify certain main lines of development in French historiography. In the late 1970s and into the 1980s international relations and, especially, the relations between France and Italy were given the greatest attention, before a new focus on forms of sociability and political pedagogy began to be more common. However, the shifting of focus of historical studies to the centres of political decision making often coincided with less attention being paid to social stratification. Beyond these major themes, some researchers have reconstructed ‘global’ historical models, which have been characteristic of the renewal of post‐war French historiography.     

The Newer New Life: A.S. Byatt,E. Nesbit and Socialist Subculture

This article considers the political implications of Victorian language-study for Thomas Carlyle's The French Revolution (1837) (reprinted and edited by K.J. Fielding and David Sorensen (Oxford: Oxford World's Classics, 1989)). I investigate how Carlyle responded to the scientific study of language with what he termed a ‘bodied word’, a reading of language based in the word-become-flesh or the doctrine of the Incarnation. I show how this bodied word reflects wider changes in modern conceptions of the polity in the wake of the French Revolution, in the shift from a hereditary body politic towards what critics have termed a ‘social body’ or a more broadly inclusive model that incorporates the working classes. I then offer a reading of The French Revolution to show how Carlyle's French history was crucial to the linguistic and conceptual production of this liberal notion of the social body, even as he worked both to acknowledge and contain its political agency.