On the Early Religious Houses of Somersetshire

The paper offers a reassessment of the patrons involved in the construction of Saint-Hilaire-le-Grand in Poitiers during the 11th century. Three stages are identified. The first, to which Queen Emma of England may have contributed, fell perhaps in the 1020s. The second is that associated with Countess Agnes of Poitou-Aquitaine around 1049. The third followed on and saw the involvement around the 1070s and 1080s of the layman Gautier, a cordwainer by trade, as administrator of the work. The respective roles of the dukes of Aquitaine and the treasurers of Saint-Hilaire are also examined.     

Unresolved implicative dilemmas: a cognitive-constructivist reading of Emma Donoghue’s The Sealed Letter

The protagonist of Emma Donoghue’s historical novel The Sealed Letter (2008), Emily “Fido” Faithfull, is a New Woman, a campaigner for women’s rights, whose involvement in a scandalous divorce that shocked the London society of 1864 was overtly silenced. In an attempt to unearth her role as one of the leaders of first-wave feminism, Donoghue explores the nature of female friendship through her unfortunate attachment to a troublesome woman with a duplicitous nature and her resentful husband. Considering the game of perspectives displayed in the narrative as propositions for the coexistence of a plurality of truths, this article will venture towards the understanding of the implicative dilemmas characters have to unravel in face of each other and of Victorian mores, as these have been defined by constructivist epistemology and, more specifically, within the framework of constructive psychology.     

Cross-cultural sexual narratives and gendered reception in Republican China

ABSTRACT

This article examines nonfiction sexual narratives inspired by foreign thought in Republican China. It highlights female viewpoints to recover their hidden voices in history and shows the socio-cultural significance of the gendered reception of cross-cultural theories. I focus on three foreign female thinkers – Ellen Key, Emma Goldman, and Alexandra Kollontai – whose works stood for different schools of free love and drew numerous adherents in China. My study shows a nuanced but telling difference in the focuses of sexual narratives along gender lines. Whereas male writers sought to modernize marriage and liberate sexuality from socio-eugenic perspectives, female writers pursued sexual autonomy from relatively more personal stances. The rhetorical feature of Chinese female essayists, I argue, was essentially iconoclastic towards sexual conventions and yet reticent about free sexuality, as opposed to the progressive eloquence often shown in male writings about sexual matters. In sum, this article illustrates how Chinese female essayists retained gender propriety when openly addressing intimate matters, while male writers glamorized free sexuality and free love as a panacea for nation-strengthening and social/racial progress in a cross-cultural context.