Concepts of Necessity in Voltaire's Poème sur le Désastre de Lisbonne

The eleventh-century Chanson de Sainte Foy is a paradigmatic example of early Romance textuality. Composed in southwestern France and intimately tied to the saint's cult centered around the abbey at Conques, an important site on the French pilgrimage road to Santiago, the almost 600-line poem is among the earliest examples of an extended narrative poem in Romance. Nonetheless, the place of composition and the language of the text remain a controversy. Most editors and linguistic studies of the text have identified its language with the French department of the Aude, specifically around the vicinity of Narbonne, thus rejecting a more southerly Catalan locus of composition. While widely recognizing the poem's cultural matter, this article argues for a stronger Catalan presence in the language of the poem. Specifically, the author examines forms of the so-called Pyrenean definite article derived from Latin IPSE in light of contemporary dialect features of the Catalan of the Eastern Pyrenees.     

Castration of male sex offenders in the Nordic welfare state in the context of homosexuality and heteronormativity, 1930–1955

The eugenic legislation was a defining aspect in the development of the Nordic welfare state. While sterilization is a widely recognized method of restricting reproduction, another part of the legislation was the castration of male sex offenders for criminal-therapeutic purposes. This article discusses the conflicts arising from the castration of male criminals. Especially targeted were male criminals whose crimes could be traced back to a conflicted sexuality, including homosexuality and such vaguely termed conditions as hypersexuality and an abnormal sex drive. This article highlights the exclusive connection of sexual violence to male violence in the context of Nordic castration legislation. It is further argued that the decriminalization of homosexuality did not lead to sexual liberation but rather to much more harshly restricted sexuality through medicalization. The medicalization of homosexuality and the castration of men labelled as sexual offenders show how the conformity of the Nordic welfare state has tended to restrict sexuality with the help of the concept of heteronormativity.