Medieval Sermon Studies since The Sermon: A Deepening and Broadening Field

Abstract

Since the publication of The Sermon in 2000, the field of medieval sermon studies has matured into a well-established and growing interdisciplinary area of medieval studies. This article seeks to illustrate how we are doing our work and where our interests are taking us. Growing numbers of print and electronic resources facilitate locating, accessing, and interpreting texts and other historical sources pertinent to preaching. Via the preparation of carefully edited texts, the exploration of specific themes, and the illumination of particular preaching traditions, increased depth of understanding is being achieved. Sermonists use an expanding range of scholarly methodologies and pursue a broadening range of topics, here exemplified by memory and visual arts. Overarching much of our work is the desire to recover medieval experiences of what was fundamentally an oral and performative genre through its largely textual remains.     

Abraham Lincoln and the Movies

Comparatively little work has been done on how Abraham Lincoln has been represented in American cinema. Yet movies have been a major – and during the first half of the twentieth century probably the major – influence on how his memory has been constructed in American popular culture. This article analyzes changing representations of Lincoln on screen, showing that differing cinematic constructions of the sixteenth president were shaped by a range of factors, including popular biographies and the biases of directors. They also echoed salient issues of the era in which they were produced and more general changes in American attitudes.     

Voices from the sea ice: the reception of climate impact narratives

This paper argues that indigenous peoples' responses to climate change are better understood in relation to emerging notions of citizenship than to climate change crisis narratives. The latter, like development narratives, are often used to license the intervention of experts in debates about resource management and conservation. Dominant climate change narratives about the Arctic emphasise the power of global climate systems to threaten northern communities by situating them as being intrinsically ‘at risk’. These narratives envisage Arctic citizenship within very narrow parameters which have largely masked the voices of northern citizens. Definitions of ecosystem resilience, while providing a framework for comparing disparate cultural and ecological contexts, are predicated on avoiding systemic collapse. It is argued that such definitions heighten the sense of risk implicit in climate change impacts. This may ultimately impede the development of different aspects of civic participation by northern citizens with climate change policy opportunities. Policy responses across a range of diverse geographical contexts require new narratives that put communities back into the calculus of risk and decision-making. One way to be more critical about the language of climate change narratives is to evaluate the extent to which they can account for, and mitigate, growing inequalities of power and wealth. Studies in the historical reception of science narratives are proposed as a better approach for making grounded comparisons of the discursive strategies with which climate change narratives are made to work. This also helps to bridge discussions of climate change across regions like the Arctic and Africa, which share much in common, but are too often studied in isolation.     

A Multidisciplinary Study of a Group of Post‐Classical Cameos from the National Museum in Krakow,Poland

A group of 18 cameos dated from the 16th to 19th centuries (bearing motifs of Roman emperors and female members of their families) from the Constantine Schmidt‐Ci??yński collection was investigated with gemmological analyses, supported by non‐destructive mineralogical methods such as X‐ray diffraction (XRD) and micro‐Raman spectroscopy (RS) to ascertain the material used. Although there is no scientific method to date the specimens precisely, the mineralogical data supported by archaeological analyses enabled the estimation of the possible timing of the manufacture of the gems. As a result, the cameos were divided into four basic chronological groups: (1) Renaissance, (2) Baroque, (3) uncertain and (4) Classical and Neoclassical.     

WRITING THE HISTORY OF SPINOZISM

In this essay I reflect on Knox Peden's Spinoza contra Phenomenology, a history of French rationalist Spinozism in the mid‐twentieth century. The book marks an important intervention in modern French and European intellectual history, depicting the importance of Baruch Spinoza's thought in the negotiation of and resistance to the phenomenology that captivated much of twentieth‐century French intellectual life. With philosophical and historical sophistication, Peden tells the story of several relatively overlooked thinkers while also providing substantially new contexts and interpretations of the well‐known Louis Althusser and Gilles Deleuze. While accounting for Peden's major accomplishment, my aim is also to situate his work among a number of recent works in the history of Spinozism in order to reflect on the specific methodological questions that pertain to the widely varying appropriations of Spinoza's thought since the seventeenth century. In particular, I reflect on Peden's claim that Spinoza's thought cannot provide an actionable politics, a claim that runs counter to nearly two centuries of leftist forms of Spinozism. I offer a short account of some of the ways that theorists have mobilized Spinoza's thought for political purposes, redefining “action” itself in Spinozist terms. I then conclude by reflecting on the dimensions of Spinoza's thought (and recent interpretations of it) that make it possible for such significantly different claims about its political potential to be credible.     

Tropical Ulcer on a Human Tibia from 5000 Years Ago in Northern Italy

The term tropical ulcer, as applied to bone pathology, describes the specific pathologic phenomenon of the presence of a well‐defined osteomatous shelf formation on the anteromedial aspect of the tibia. Despite the appellation ‘tropical,’ this pathology is not geographically limited to tropical regions, although it has not previously been reported from continental Europe. Observations of a 4583 BP burial from the Tanaro River area of Northern Italy represent the first such case. Dating of the site to the time of climate change at the end of the first Glacial suggests that hot–warm, humid conditions may have allowed the occurrence of this bone pathology, the first observed in continental Europe. A second explanation is the possible migration of an individual to Italy from an area that is more conventionally considered tropical. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The role of classical music in the construction of nationalism: a cross‐national perspective

This paper explores the role of classical music in the construction of nationalism in the twentieth century. It takes its point of departure in the Danish composer Carl Nielsen and analyses competing interpretations and receptions of his works. The paper seeks to move beyond the single case study. Hence, it includes three additional cases: the Soviet composer Dimitry Shostacovich (particularly the reception of his 5th Symphony); the position of Paul Hindemith in the Third Reich; and finally the development in Aron Copland's oeuvre. In so doing, it aims to clarify the relationship between classical music and nationalism.     

读《中古中国与外来文明》札记

本文以新出版的《中古中国与外来文明》为切入点,对半个多世纪以来有关中古中国与外来文明的研究进行了回顾与评述,认为学术接轨对于提高中古中国与外来文明的研究十分重要,感情投入对于深化人文社会科学的研究也十分重要。