title: Space Dandy

text: The series received generally positive reviews. Writer Alasdair Wilkins of the "A.V. Club" gave "Space Dandy" a B+, stating: "This is a proudly frivolous show, one that delights in its juvenile sense of humor and sneers at the very idea of an ongoing storyline. The show is a surreal throwback to a bygone era of science fiction, like an old Flash Gordon serial or a wacky Superman comic from the Silver Age – if the heroic protagonist were obsessed with butts and breasts. That doesn't mean "Space Dandy" is a disappointment." Paul and Caroline Daley of Three If By Space wrote, "Dandy himself both in look and personality, combines Elvis Presley, Zapp Brannigan, and Han Solo. While Dandy may come off inept or silly at times, he often does possess the skill needed to save the day (or at least their skins). This makes him very watchable because you never know which Dandy you’ll get." and "Space Dandy feels like a throw-back. No, not like throw it back, like something out of another time. The bright colors, the music, and especially the main character, the titular Space Dandy, all remind me of a time when adventures didn’t have to make total sense and political correctness wasn’t really a thing yet."


title: Space Dandy

text: Brandon Postal of Capsule Computers gave Space Dandy Season 1 Blu-Ray a 7.5 rating and wrote, "Space Dandy is a fun romp but not exceptionally so. It’s an enjoyable look at Japanese comedic portrayals of different science fiction tropes and styles, but ultimately only good for laughs. If you’re looking for a hard sci-fi series, or even a comedy with a strong narrative, then you might want to look somewhere else. Funimation has done a good job with the dub, making this enjoyable for a wide range of anime fans. I enjoyed some of the characterizations and the takes on various science fiction tropes. I would recommend giving this a watch as long as you don’t take it seriously." Laurent Backman of Slug Magazine wrote in a Space Dandy Season 2 DVD Review, "Space Dandy is just such a show. It’s over the top, at times crass, nonsensical, and seeing as it comes from the creative team behind Cowboy Bebop, not without its fair share of great music." and "There’s not much over-arching narrative for the season, and episodes are their own self-contained storylets, but the formula works perfectly, letting Space Dandy mess around with a bunch of different ideas while never straying too far from its strong comedy backbone."


title: Sugar, Sugar

text: "Sugar, Sugar" is a song written by Jeff Barry and Andy Kim. It was originally recorded by the Archies – a fictional band of studio musicians linked to the 1968–69 US Saturday morning TV cartoon "The Archie Show", inspired by the Archie Comics. In the autumn of 1969 the single topped both "Billboard's" Hot 100 (for four weeks) and the UK Singles Chart (for eight weeks), ranking number one for the year in both America and Britain. “Sugar, Sugar” is the most successful bubblegum pop single of all time, and is widely regarded as the apotheosis of the late-1960s/early-1970s bubblegum music genre. In mid-1970 R&B/soul singer Wilson Pickett achieved success on both the US soul and pop charts with a cover version.


title: Sugar, Sugar

text: Produced by Jeff Barry, the Archies' recording of "Sugar, Sugar" features a group of studio musicians managed by Don Kirshner, former music supervisor to the Monkees. Ron Dante provided the lead vocals, accompanied by Toni Wine and songwriter Andy Kim. Together they provided the voices of the Archies using multitracking. The single was initially released in late May 1969 on Kirshner’s Calendar label (as with the Archies’ two previous singles), achieving moderate success in the early summer in several radio markets. When re-released in mid-July 1969 (with pressings also on the Kirshner label), it attained enormous success nationwide across several months. The track was also made available (along with two other Archies singles) on the back of boxes of Post breakfast cereal Super Sugar Crisp. “Sugar, Sugar” features on the LP "Everything's Archie" – the second album credited to the Archies, released in November 1969.


title: Sugar, Sugar

text: Upon the song's initial release Kirshner had promotion men play it for radio station personnel without revealing the group's name, as the Archies' previous single, "Feelin' So Good (S.K.O.O.B.Y-D.O.O)", had peaked at no. 53 on the "Billboard" Hot 100 chart. In an article published in "The Washington Times", lead vocalist Ron Dante recounts that the label was removed from the record, taken to a top radio station (KYA) in San Francisco, where the program director was told: "Just play it! It's a mystery group".


title: Sugar, Sugar

text: In the chart dated September 13, 1969, “Sugar, Sugar” topped the "RPM 100" national singles chart in Canada, where it remained for three weeks. In the issue of "Billboard" magazine dated September 20, the single started a four-week run at number one on the Hot 100, replacing the Rolling Stones’ "Honky Tonk Women". It spent a then-lengthy 22 weeks on the Hot 100 (longer than any other single in 1969), and was one of only ten singles to spend 12 weeks in the Top Ten during the decade. It topped "Billboard"’s year-end list of the Top Hot 100 Singles of 1969. In August 1969 the record was certified gold by the RIAA for sales of one million. (In 1989 the gold threshold was lowered to 500,000.) In 2018 “Sugar, Sugar” ranked 81 in "Billboard"'s Hot 100 60th Anniversary chart.


title: Sugar, Sugar

text: Between late October and mid-December 1969 the single spent eight weeks at the top of the UK Singles Chart. It also peaked at number one on the South African Singles Chart. On February 5, 2006, "Sugar, Sugar" was inducted into the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame, as co-writer Andy Kim is originally from Montreal, Quebec.


title: Sugar, Sugar

text: Although official music recording sales certifications were not introduced in the United Kingdom until the British Phonographic Industry was formed in 1973, "Disc" introduced an initiative in 1959 to present a gold record to singles that had sold over one million units. The awards relied on record companies correctly compiling and supplying sales information, and "Sugar, Sugar" was erroneously awarded a gold disc in January 1970 despite having sold approximately 945,000 copies, as RCA Records had informed "Disc" that one million copies had been shipped, but not all were sold. Nevertheless, following the introduction of music downloads in 2004, "Sugar, Sugar" passed the one-million sales mark. In April 2020 the song was certified Silver by the BPI for selling 200,000 units since it was made available digitally in November 2004.


title: Sugar, Sugar

text: In 1970 American R&B/soul singer Wilson Pickett recorded a cover version of "Sugar, Sugar" (titled "Sugar Sugar", with no comma) in his Criteria Studios sessions. Pickett's rendition of the song was produced by Dave Crawford, Jerry Wexler, Rick Hall and Tom Dowd. The track was released by Atlantic Records as the second single from Pickett's tenth studio album, "Right On".


title: Sugar, Sugar

text: In May 1970 Pickett's cover of "Sugar, Sugar" reached no. 4 on "Billboard"'s R&B chart, then in June peaked at no. 25 on the Hot 100. The parent album "Right On" reached no. 197 on the Billboard 200 album chart. Pickett's recording was used in Ang Lee's 1997 film "The Ice Storm". In Canada, "Cole, Cooke & Redding" was the A-side and charted first, reaching no. 58 in April 1970.


title: 1996 Indian general election

text: General elections were held in India on 27 April, 2 May and 7 May 1996 to elect the members of the 11th Lok Sabha. The elections resulted in a hung parliament with no single party having a clear majority. The Bharatiya Janata Party, which had won the most seats, formed a short-lived government under Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee. However, two weeks later the United Front coalition was able to secure a parliamentary majority and H. D. Deve Gowda of Janata Dal became Prime Minister. In 1997 Inder Kumar Gujral, also from the United Front, succeeded Gowda as Prime Minister. Due to the instability, early elections were held in 1998. The elections were the first since 1980 in which every states' seats were elected in a single election period.


title: 1996 Indian general election

text: The Indian National Congress government of Prime Minister P. V. Narasimha Rao came into the election on the back of several government scandals and accusations of mishandling. Seven cabinet members had resigned during the previous term, and Rao himself faced charges of corruption. The Congress Party more generally had been plagued in recent years by a series of splits, issues conflicts and factional disputes that had seen various key regional parties and figures abandon the party. In particular, the high-profile May 1995 defection of Arjun Singh and Narayan Datt Tiwari to form the new All India Indira Congress (Tiwari) party underscored the internal divisions within the INC.


title: 1996 Indian general election

text: The government was further weakened by a series of major scandals breaking less than 12 months from the election. In July 1995 it was found a former Congress youth leader had murdered his wife and tried to destroy the evidence by stuffing her corpse into a tandoor. In August 1995 the Vohra Report was finally released to the parliament, decrying that a politician-criminal nexus was "virtually running a parallel government, pushing the state apparatus into irrelevance". Government credibility fell further still when in late 1995 when violence significantly worsened in the Kashmir region, and sporadic fighting and ethnic tensions boiled over in Punjab province. As a result of the scandals, the Rao government went into the 1996 election at a low of ebb of public support.


title: 1996 Indian general election

text: The elections triggered a significant realignment of political forces in Indians, with all-India parties attempting to construct widespread regional coalitions with minor parties in order to secure a central majority. Such political negotiations were to become an increasingly necessary process in Indian politics over the next two decades as the dominance of the INC declined and smaller, ethnic and regional parties took its place. The Bharatiya Janata Party, led by Lal Krishna Advani attempted to add several regional coalition partners - most notably the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam and the Bahujan Samaj Party, but was ultimately unsuccessful in overcoming ideological differences. Yet it did join with several strong regional partners - Shiv Sena, Haryana Vikas Party, and the Samata Party. The Congress party attempted to form regional allies as well, most notably with the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK).


title: 1996 Indian general election

text: The so-called "Third Force" during the 1996 elections was the National Front (NF). After its collapse in 1990, the coalition had chopped and changed before reuniting in the run up to the 1996 election. Three main parties grouped back together in September 1995 in hopes of presenting a viable political choice - the Left Front, Janata Dal and the Telugu Desam Party. It attempted to build a wider coalition of regional partners and state parties, however negotiations repeatedly broke down, and no consensus could be arrived at on a 'common minimum program' - a platform of issues on which all parties could agree upon. A split in the Uttar Pradesh government in December 1995 divided the front further. Finally, lacking a strong leader or common set of principles, the main three parties joined with the Samajwadi Party in a common goal of simply denying power to either the Congress or BJP. Thus a characteristic of the 1996 elections was a large number of strong regional and state parties declined to form an alliance with any of the three major contenders for government.


title: 1996 Indian general election

text: In January only a few months before the election, a major scandal erupted: the Jain hawala scandal. Jain, an industrialist in the steel and power sectors, was revealed to have given US$33 million in bribes to politicians from nearly all major parties in return for favours. Further shocking the public, Jain had also channelled money to Kashmiri Muslim militants. In the first wave of names implicated were three Rao cabinet members, Arjun Singh from the breakaway Congress (T) party, Bharatiya Janata Party leader Lal Krishna Advani, Sharad Yadav (leader of the Janata Dal Parliamentary Party), and former Congress Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. Almost 115 names would eventually be released, and numerous candidates and ministers were forced to resign in the aftermath. Most significantly was the forced resignation of L.K. Advani, with Atal Bihari Vajpayee taking over as leader of the BJP.


title: 1996 Indian general election

text: The BJP ran a campaign centred around a four-point plan which aimed for probity of public life, self-reliance in the economy, social harmony and greater security. It strongly advocated an economic plan which would significantly scale back government intervention and encourage capital investment and creation. It stressed the role of Hindutva in its vision for India, creating a more Hindu orientated state by banning cow slaughter, introducing a uniform civil code and removing the special status of Kashmir. The Congress Party attempted to campaign on its foreign policy record, its handling of the numerous natural and ethnic crises that had emerged over the past five years, and on better concessions for ethnic minorities and separated state governments. It additionally stressed the economic gains already made by the government due to its Liberalization policies post 1992. Janata Dal and the National Front campaigned on maintaining a strong public sector though with some commitment to deregulation and anti-corruption measures. It pushed other more populist measures as well, such as more state-run infrastructure projects, subsidised fertilizer, and increased education investment.


title: 1996 Indian general election

text: The election delivered an unclear mandate and resulted in a hung parliament. The result was the worst result for the INC in history to that date, with commentators blaming the poor result on the personal unpopularity of Prime Minister Rao and the numerous internal divisions that had dogged the party. Congress was almost wiped out in its traditional strongholds of Uttar Pradesh & Bihar with many stalwarts like Ram Lakhan Singh Yadav, Jagannath Mishra, Satyendra Narain Sinha suffered electoral setbacks. The BJP became the largest party within the Lok Sabha, a first for a non-Congress party, although it secured neither a significant increase in the popular vote or enough seats to secure a parliamentary majority.


title: 1996 Indian general election

text: Following Westminster custom, Indian President Shankar Dayal Sharma invited Atal Bihari Vajpayee as leader of the BJP to form a government. Sworn in on 15 May, the new Prime Minister was given two weeks to prove majority support in parliament. In the weeks leading up to the first confidence vote on 31 May, the BJP attempted to build a coalition by moderating positions to garner support from regional and Muslim parties, however sectarian issues and fears of certain nationalist policies of the BJP hampered efforts. On 28 May, Vajpayee conceded that he could not arrange support from more than 200 of the 545 members of parliament, and thus resigned rather than face the confidence vote, ending his 13-day government.


title: 1996 Indian general election

text: The second largest party, the Indian National Congress, declined to attempt to form a government, instead choosing to support one headed by Janata Dal, and chose Karnataka Chief Minister H. D. Deve Gowda to assume the Prime Minister post. Janata Dal and a bloc of smaller parties thus formed the United Front, with outside support from INC. Gowda resigned on 21 April 1997 to pave way for I. K. Gujral, who maintained good relations with INC.


title: 1996 Indian general election

text: However the Fodder Scam resulted in many United Front members demanding the resignation of Lalu Prasad Yadav, an alliance partner and the then Chief Minister of Bihar. Yadav retaliated by breaking away from Janata Dal and forming Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) on 3 July 1997. Out of 45 Janata Dal members of parliament, 17 left the party and supported Yadav. However, the new party continued in the United Front and Gujral's government was saved from immediate danger. Gujral resigned 11 months later when INC withdrew support to the government, and the country went back to the polls in 1998.


title: Joshua Henry

text: Joshua Anthony Charlton Henry (born September 2, 1984) is a Canadian-American actor and singer of stage and screen. He is best known for portraying Haywood Patterson in Kander and Ebb's 2010 musical "The Scottsboro Boys", for which he received a Tony Award nomination. He has also received Tony Award nominations for his role in "Violet" and for portraying Billy Bigelow in a Broadway revival of "Carousel". He portrayed the lead role of Aaron Burr in the first U.S. tour of "Hamilton", previously playing the role in the Chicago production that began performances in late September 2016. His other notable performances include Dr. Pomatter in "Waitress", Rapunzel’s Prince in a Broadway revival of "Into the Woods", and Gaston in "Beauty and the Beast Live!".


title: Joshua Henry

text: Henry was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada to Zadoc Henry (a teacher at Calvary Christian Academy), and raised in Miami, Florida, United States. He currently resides in Harlem, New York City. He had originally wanted to be an accountant, like his mother. However, he was cast as Harold Hill in his high school (Florida Bible Christian School) production of "The Music Man" and with the experience he changed his mind. Henry studied theatre at the University of Miami, graduating in 2006. He married his college sweetheart, Cathryn Stringer, in October 2012.


title: Joshua Henry

text: Henry made his acting debut when he co-starred as Judas in the Paper Mill Playhouse (Milburn, New Jersey) production of "Godspell" in 2006. He was set to star in a 2008 Broadway transfer, but the project was cancelled.


title: Joshua Henry

text: In 2007, Henry appeared in the ensemble of the Off-Broadway musical "In the Heights", re-joining the cast for the show's Broadway production. For "In the Heights", the entire cast won a Drama Desk Award, and Henry and the ensemble won an ACCA Award for Outstanding Broadway Chorus from Actors' Equity Association.


title: Joshua Henry

text: Henry starred in "Serenade", which played off-Broadway from December 9, 2007, to December 15, 2007. Henry then appeared in the first "Sex and the City" film in 2008, subsequently playing the Tin Man in "The Wiz" at the New York City Center in 2009.


title: Joshua Henry

text: On September 23, 2008, Henry performed in a concert performance titled "Party Worth Crashing" in New York City. In June 2009, Henry contributed original music to the off-Broadway musical "Shafrika, The White Girl" at the Vineyard Theatre.


title: Joshua Henry

text: From March 24, 2010 to July 20, 2010 he played "Favorite Son" in the original Broadway cast of the Green Day musical "American Idiot".


title: Joshua Henry

text: Henry then joined the Broadway cast of "The Scottsboro Boys", directed and choreographed by Susan Stroman with a score by John Kander and Fred Ebb. He portrayed Haywood Patterson, for which he achieved critical praise. "The Star Tribune" wrote of his performance, "Joshua Henry ... ignites the role of Haywood Patterson as the lightning rod for our identification with the men." Charles Isherwood in "The New York Times" asserted that Henry "gives a performance of keen intensity as Haywood Patterson, an illiterate young man who becomes the focus of our sympathy as he steadfastly refuses to sign his name to a lie in order to obtain parole. Mr. Henry performs Haywood’s ballad of hopeless yearning, "Go Back Home," with a powerful simplicity that slashes through the evening's artifice." Despite these positive reviews, "The Scottsboro Boys" closed within a month. For his performance, Henry was nominated for the 2011 Tony Award for Best Actor in a Musical, but lost to Norbert Leo Butz in "Catch Me If You Can".


title: Joshua Henry

text: Henry, along with Corbin Bleu and Andréa Burns, was featured on "Dare to Go Beyond: The Album", by the nonprofit organization R.Evolución Latina. It was released on December 13, 2010, produced by Luis Salgado. Henry has also appeared on the television series "Kings" and "Nip/Tuck", as well as the 2010 short film "Once Upon a Time in Australia".


title: Joshua Henry

text: On January 16, 2011, Henry, Laura Osnes, and Natalie Weiss were featured performers in Kait Kerrigan and Bree Lowdermilk's "You Made This Tour" concert at the Laurie Beechman Theatre. On January 22, he was among the performers in the "Broadway Memories" concert performance in New York, in which he performed selections from "The Scottsboro Boys".


title: Joshua Henry

text: Henry performed in the 92nd Street Y's "Lyrics & Lyricists" event, honoring Burton Lane, on February 14, 2011. On March 2, 2011, he performed with "The Scottsboro Boys"' original Broadway cast in "Stro!", a gala celebration honoring Susan Stroman.


title: Joshua Henry

text: From March 15, 2011 until the show's closing on April 24, 2011 he returned to the role of "Favorite Son" in "American Idiot".


title: Joshua Henry

text: Henry attended and performed at a MCC Miscast Gala in New York, held on March 15, 2011. The performance showcases "Broadway's hottest stars performing songs from roles in which they would never be cast."


title: Joshua Henry

text: On April 10, 2011, he returned to the University of Miami to perform in their "Broadway Unplugged" concert. In addition, Henry and the cast of "The Scottsboro Boys" performed in the May 16, 2011, performance of "Broadway Sensation" in New York City.


title: Joshua Henry

text: Henry performed the role of Jake in the American Repertory Theater's production of "Porgy and Bess", which began previews August 17, 2011, at the Loeb Drama Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It officially opened on August 31 and ran through September 30, 2011. It transferred to the Richard Rodgers Theatre on Broadway where it played from January 12 until September 23, 2012.


title: Joshua Henry

text: Henry also appeared in the role of Corporal Quincy Montclair on season 7 of the Lifetime series "Army Wives".


title: Joshua Henry

text: Henry performed the role of Flick in the Roundabout Theatre production of "Violet" which began in April, 2014. On April 29, 2014, he was nominated for a Tony in the category of Best Actor in a Featured Role in a Musical.


title: Joshua Henry

text: He appeared in the role of Noble Sissle in the 2016 production of "Shuffle Along, or, the Making of the Musical Sensation of 1921 and All That Followed" at the Music Box Theatre on Broadway. Henry starred as Jamie alongside Cynthia Erivo in a one-night benefit concert performance of Jason Robert Brown's "The Last Five Years" on September 12, 2016. Proceeds from the performance went to the Brady Center, a national gun violence organization. Henry had also performed in a one-night concert performance of another one of Brown's shows, "Parade", at the Lincoln Center.


title: Joshua Henry

text: In 2018, Henry starred as Billy Bigelow alongside Jessie Mueller in the third revival of Rodgers and Hammerstein's "Carousel", for which he received a Tony Award nomination.


title: Joshua Henry

text: Henry was also featured in the film adaptation of Jonathan Larson's musical "tick, tick... BOOM!", released in November 2021.


title: Joshua Henry

text: In 2022, he starred as Rapunzel’s Prince in the Broadway revival of "Into the Woods" and as Gaston in "Beauty and the Beast Live!".


title: Imitation (TV series)

text: Imitation (Korean: 이미테이션; RR: "Imiteisyeon") is a South Korean television series starring Jung Ji-so, Lee Jun-young, Jeong Yun-ho, and Park Ji-yeon. Based on the webtoon of the same name, it tells the story of the lives of idols in the entertainment industry, centered around the secret romance between a member of a rookie girl group and a member of the top boy group in the industry. The series aired on KBS2 from May 7, 2021, to July 23, 2021.


title: Imitation (TV series)

text: After her dreams of debuting as an idol are dashed due to a tragic incident involving the former member of her group at her entertainment company, Lee Ma-ha (Jung Ji-so) supports herself by impersonating the solo singer La Ri-ma (Park Ji-yeon) at cheap events. She and the members of Omega III are given a second chance at stardom when Ji Hak (Danny Ahn), the former manager of the famed boy band Shax, recruits them to rebrand as his new girl group, Tea Party. Ma-ha suddenly finds herself thrust into the spotlight, using her La Ri-ma impression to gain Tea Party attention from the public—both positive and negative.


title: Imitation (TV series)

text: Ma-ha repeatedly encounters Kwon Ryok (Lee Jun-young), Shax's most popular member, at various idol events. Despite his successful career, Ryok is still haunted by the disappearance of group member Lee Eun-jo (Kang Chan-hee) during a concert three years prior. While initially annoyed by Ma-ha, he develops feelings for her and they start a secret relationship that puts their careers at risk. Lee Yu-jin (Jeong Yun-ho), Ma-ha's close friend and fellow idol, notices their budding romance and determines to protect Ma-ha from Ryok and lead his own group, Sparkling, to dethrone Shax as the top boy band in the industry.


title: Imitation (TV series)

text: In October 2020, it was announced that the popular webtoon by Park Kyung-ran "Imitation" would be made into a television series with Jung Ji-so, Lee Jun-young, Park Ji-yeon, and Jeong Yun-ho in lead roles. "Imitation" marks director Han Hyun-hee and screenwriters Choi Sun-young and Kim Min-jung's second collaboration after "Rookie Historian Goo Hae-ryung" (2019). In March 2021, it was announced that "Imitation" would be moving its first air date up from late May to the beginning of the month, in order to fill the empty time-slot left by the indefinite postponement of the drama "Dear. M."


title: Imitation (TV series)

text: As part of the program's promotional campaign KBS created social media accounts on Instagram and Twitter for Shax, Sparkling, and Tea Party, posting photos, interviews, and other special content related to the characters, as though they were real groups. The posts sometimes reference events that occur in recent episodes of the show. Additionally, the actors portraying members of Tea Party and Shax were slated to perform and be interviewed on "Music Bank" in-character, promoting their singles "Show Me" and "Malo" respectively. Each of the three groups, as well as the character La Ri-ma, are set to release individual mini-albums of their in-show songs.


title: Imitation (TV series)

text: With 0.8% ratings, "Imitation" recorded lowest ratings for KBS2's drama, tied with 2020 drama "Welcome", and second lowest overall for free TV behind MBC's "Dae Jang Geum Is Watching" with 0.7% in 2018. On the 6th episode "Imitation" recorded 0.4% ratings, the lowest of all time.


title: Eleanor of Castile

text: Eleanor of Castile (1241 – 28 November 1290) was Queen of England as the first wife of Edward I, whom she married as part of a political deal to affirm English sovereignty over Gascony.


title: Eleanor of Castile

text: The marriage was known to be particularly close, and Eleanor travelled extensively with her husband. She was with him on the Ninth Crusade, when he was wounded at Acre, but the popular story of her saving his life by sucking out the poison has long been discredited. When she died, at Harby near Lincoln, her grieving husband famously ordered a stone cross to be erected at each stopping-place on the journey to London, ending at Charing Cross.


title: Eleanor of Castile

text: Eleanor was better educated than most medieval queens and exerted a strong cultural influence on the nation. She was a keen patron of literature and encouraged the use of tapestries, carpets and tableware in the Spanish style, as well as innovative garden designs. She was also a successful businesswoman, endowed with her own fortune as Countess of Ponthieu.


title: Eleanor of Castile

text: Eleanor was born in Burgos, daughter of Ferdinand III of Castile and Joan, Countess of Ponthieu. Her Castilian name, Leonor, became Alienor or Alianor in England, and Eleanor in modern English. She was named after her paternal great-grandmother, Eleanor of England, the daughter of Eleanor of Aquitaine and Henry II of England.


title: Eleanor of Castile

text: Eleanor was the second of five children born to Ferdinand and Joan. Her elder brother Ferdinand was born in 1239/40, her younger brother Louis in 1242/43; two sons born after Louis died young. For the ceremonies in 1291 marking the first anniversary of Eleanor's death, 49 candlebearers were paid to walk in the public procession to commemorate each year of her life. As the tradition was to have one candle for each year of the deceased's life, 49 candles would date Eleanor's birth to 1240 or 1241.


title: Eleanor of Castile

text: As her parents were apart from each other for 13 months while King Ferdinand was on a military campaign in Andalusia, from which he returned to the north of Spain only in February 1241, Eleanor was probably born towards the end of that year. The courts of her father and her half-brother Alfonso X of Castile were known for their literary atmosphere. Both kings also encouraged extensive education of the royal children, and it is therefore likely that Eleanor was educated to a standard higher than the norm, a likelihood which is reinforced by her later literary activities as queen.


title: Eleanor of Castile

text: Eleanor's marriage in 1254 to the future Edward I of England was not the only marriage her family planned for her.


title: Eleanor of Castile

text: The kings of Castile had long made a tenuous claim to be paramount lords of the Kingdom of Navarre due to sworn homage from Garcia VI of Navarre in 1134. In 1253, Ferdinand III's heir, Eleanor's half-brother Alfonso X of Castile, stalled negotiations with England in hopes that she would marry Theobald II of Navarre.


title: Eleanor of Castile

text: The marriage afforded several advantages. First, the Pyrenees kingdom also afforded passage from Castile to Gascony. Secondly, Theobald II was not yet of age, thus the opportunity existed to rule or potentially annex Navarre into Castile. To avoid Castilian control, Margaret of Bourbon (mother and regent to Theobald II) in August 1253 allied with James I of Aragon instead, and as part of that treaty, solemnly promised that Theobald would never marry Eleanor.


title: Eleanor of Castile

text: In 1252, Alfonso X resurrected another ancestral claim, this time to the duchy of Gascony in the south of Aquitaine (the last possession of the Kings of England in France), which he claimed had formed part of the dowry of Eleanor of England. Henry III of England swiftly countered Alfonso's claims with both diplomatic and military moves. Early in 1253, the two kings began to negotiate; after haggling over the financial provision for Eleanor, Henry and Alfonso agreed she would marry Henry's son Edward (by now the titular duke), and Alfonso would transfer his Gascon claims to Edward. Henry was so anxious for the marriage to take place that he willingly abandoned elaborate preparations already made for Edward's knighting in England and agreed that Alfonso would knight Edward on or before the next Feast of Assumption.


title: Eleanor of Castile

text: The young couple were married at the monastery of Las Huelgas, Burgos, on 1 November 1254. Edward and Eleanor were second cousins once removed, as Edward's grandfather King John of England and Eleanor's great-grandmother Eleanor of England were the son and daughter of King Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine. Following the marriage they spent nearly a year in Gascony, with Edward ruling as lord of Aquitaine. During this time Eleanor, aged thirteen and a half, almost certainly gave birth to her first child, a short-lived daughter. She journeyed to England alone in late summer of 1255. Edward followed her a few months later.


title: Eleanor of Castile

text: Henry III took pride in resolving the Gascon crisis so decisively, but his English subjects feared that the marriage would bring Eleanor's kinfolk and countrymen to live off Henry's ruinous generosity. A few of her relatives did come to England soon after her marriage. She was too young to stop them or prevent Henry III from supporting them, but she was blamed anyway and her marriage soon became unpopular.


title: Eleanor of Castile

text: The presence of more English, French and Norman soldiers of fortune and opportunists in the cities of Seville and Cordoba, recently conquered from the Moorish Almohads, would be increased, however, thanks to this alliance between royal houses, until the advent of the later Hundred Years War, when it would be symptomatic of extended hostilities between the French and the English for peninsular support.


title: Eleanor of Castile

text: There is little record of Eleanor's life in England until the 1260s, when the Second Barons' War, between Henry III and his barons, divided the kingdom. During this time, Eleanor actively supported Edward's interests, importing archers from her mother's county of Ponthieu in France. It is untrue, however, that she was sent to France to escape danger during the war; she was in England throughout the struggle and held Windsor Castle and baronial prisoners for Edward. Rumours that she was seeking fresh troops from Castile led the baronial leader, Simon de Montfort, to order her removal from Windsor Castle in June 1264 after the royalist army had been defeated at the Battle of Lewes.


title: Eleanor of Castile

text: Edward was captured at Lewes and imprisoned, and Eleanor was honourably confined at Westminster Palace. After Edward and Henry's army defeated the baronial army at the Battle of Evesham in 1265, Edward took a major role in reforming the government and Eleanor rose to prominence at his side. Her position was greatly improved in July 1266 when, after she had borne three short-lived daughters, she gave birth to a son, John, to be followed by a second boy, Henry, in the spring of 1268, and in June 1269 by a healthy daughter, Eleanor.


title: Eleanor of Castile

text: By 1270, the kingdom was pacified and Edward and Eleanor left to join his uncle Louis IX of France on the Eighth Crusade. Louis died at Carthage before they arrived, however, and after they spent the winter in Sicily, the couple went on to Acre in the Holy Land, where they arrived in May 1271. Eleanor gave birth to a daughter, known as "Joan of Acre" for her birthplace.


title: Eleanor of Castile

text: The crusade was militarily unsuccessful, but Baibars of the Bahri dynasty was worried enough by Edward's presence at Acre that an assassination attempt was made on the English heir in June 1272. He was wounded in the arm by a dagger that was thought to be poisoned. The wound soon became seriously inflamed, and a surgeon saved him by cutting away the diseased flesh, but only after Eleanor was led from his bed, "weeping and wailing". Later storytellers embellished this incident, claiming Eleanor sucked poison from the wound, thereby saving Edward's life, but this fanciful tale has no foundation.


title: Eleanor of Castile

text: They left Acre in September 1272, and in Sicily that December, they learned of Henry III's death (on 16 November 1272). Following a trip to Gascony, where their next child, Alphonso (named for Eleanor's half brother Alfonso X), was born, Edward and Eleanor returned to England and were crowned together on 19 August 1274.


title: Eleanor of Castile

text: Arranged royal marriages in the Middle Ages were not always happy, but available evidence indicates that Eleanor and Edward were devoted to each other. Edward is among the few medieval English kings not known to have conducted extramarital affairs or fathered children out of wedlock. The couple were rarely apart; she accompanied him on military campaigns in Wales, famously giving birth to their son Edward on 25 April 1284 at Caernarfon Castle, either in a temporary dwelling erected for her amid the construction works, or in the partially constructed Eagle Tower.


title: Eleanor of Castile

text: Their household records witness incidents that imply a comfortable, even humorous, relationship. Each year on Easter Monday, Edward let Eleanor's ladies trap him in his bed and paid them a token ransom so he could go to her bedroom on the first day after Lent; so important was this custom to him that in 1291, on the first Easter Monday after Eleanor's death, he gave her ladies the money he would have given them had she been alive. Edward disliked ceremonies and in 1290 refused to attend the marriage of Earl Marshal Roger Bigod, 5th Earl of Norfolk; Eleanor thoughtfully (or resignedly) paid minstrels to play for him while he sat alone during the wedding.


title: Eleanor of Castile

text: That Edward remained single until he wedded Margaret of France in 1299 is often cited to prove he cherished Eleanor's memory. In fact, he considered a second marriage as early as 1293, but this does not mean he did not mourn Eleanor. Eloquent testimony is found in his letter to the abbot of Cluny in France (January 1291), seeking prayers for the soul of the wife "whom living we dearly cherished, and whom dead we cannot cease to love". In her memory, Edward ordered the construction of twelve elaborate stone crosses (of which three survive, though none of them is intact) between 1291 and 1294, marking the route of her funeral procession between Lincoln and London. (See below.)


title: Eleanor of Castile

text: Only one of Eleanor's four sons survived childhood, however, and even before she died, Edward worried over the succession: if that son died, their daughters' husbands might cause a succession war. Despite personal grief, Edward faced his duty and married again. He delighted in the sons his new wife bore, but attended memorial services for Eleanor to the end of his life, Margaret at his side on at least one occasion.


title: Eleanor of Castile

text: Eleanor is warmly remembered by history as the queen who inspired the Eleanor crosses, but she was not so loved in her own time. Her reputation was primarily as a keen businesswoman. Walter of Guisborough preserves a contemporary poem:


title: Eleanor of Castile

text: The annalist of Dunstable Priory echoed him in a contemporary notice of her death: "a Spaniard by birth, she acquired many fine manors".


title: Eleanor of Castile

text: Her acquisition of lands was an unusual degree of economic activity for any medieval noblewoman, let alone a queen – and the level of her activity was exceptional by any standard: between 1274 and 1290 she acquired estates worth above £2500 yearly. In fact, it was Edward himself who initiated this process and his ministers helped her. He wanted the queen to hold lands sufficient for her financial needs without drawing on funds needed for government. One of his methods to help Eleanor acquire land was to give her the debts Christian landlords owed Jewish moneylenders. In exchange for cancelling the debts, she received the lands pledged for the debts. The debtors were often glad to rid themselves of the debts, and profited from the favour Eleanor showed them afterwards; she granted many of them, for life, lands worth as much as the estates they had surrendered to her, and some of them became her household knights.


title: Eleanor of Castile

text: There is, however, very clear evidence that Eleanor's property dealings made her widely unpopular. John Peckham, Archbishop of Canterbury warned Eleanor's servants about her activities in the land market and her association with the highly unpopular moneylenders: "A rumour is waxing strong throughout the kingdom and has generated much scandal. It is said that the illustrious lady queen, whom you serve, is occupying many manors, lands, and other possessions of nobles, and has made them her own property - lands which the Jews have extorted with usury from Christians under the protection of the royal court." Given the chroniclers' passages quoted above, the accusation is indeed borne out by contemporary writers. Peckham also warned her of complaints against her officials' demands upon her tenants. Eleanor must have been aware of the truth of such reports since, on her deathbed, she asked Edward to name justices to examine her officials' actions and make reparations. The surviving proceedings from this inquest reveal a pattern of ruthless exactions, often (but not always) without Eleanor's knowledge. Her executors' financial accounts record the payments of reparations to many of those who brought actions before the judicial proceedings in 1291. In her lifetime, Eleanor had righted such wrongs when she heard of them, and her deathbed request of Edward indicates that she knew, suspected, or feared, that her officials had perpetrated many more transgressions than were ever reported to her.


title: Eleanor of Castile

text: Two other letters from Peckham, moreover, show that some people thought she urged Edward to rule harshly and that she could be a severe woman who did not take it lightly if any one crossed her, which contravened contemporary expectations that queens should intercede with their husbands on behalf of the needy, the oppressed, or the condemned.


title: Eleanor of Castile

text: Thus, he warned a convent of nuns that "if they knew what was good for them", they would accede to the queen's wishes and accept into their house a woman the convent had refused, but whose vocation Eleanor had decided to sponsor. Record evidence from the king's administrations shows that Hugh Despenser the Elder, who agreed to allow the queen to hold one of his manors for a term of years in order to clear his debt to her, thought it well to demand official assurances from the King's Exchequer that the manor would be restored to him as soon as the queen had recovered the exact amount of the debt.


title: Eleanor of Castile

text: Thus the evidence tends unavoidably to the conclusion that Eleanor was not greatly loved outside her own circle. It is only with a chronicle written at St Albans in 1307–08 that we find the first positive remarks, and it is hard to avoid the impression that the chronicler was writing to flatter her son, Edward II, who had succeeded his father in 1307. It is also likely that the impressive succession of "Eleanor Crosses" Edward constructed after her death (as discussed below) was intended to improve the late queen's image.


title: Eleanor of Castile

text: It has traditionally been argued that Eleanor had no impact on the political history of Edward's reign, and that even in diplomatic matters her role was minor, though Edward did heed her advice on the age at which their daughters could marry foreign rulers. Otherwise, it has been said, she merely gave gifts, usually provided by Edward, to visiting princes or envoys. Edward always honoured his obligations to Alfonso X, but even when Alfonso's need was desperate in the early 1280s, Edward did not send English knights to Castile; he sent only knights from Gascony, which was closer to Castile.


title: Eleanor of Castile

text: However more recent research has indicated that Eleanor may have played some role in Edward's counsels, though she did not exercise power overtly except on occasions where she was appointed to mediate disputes of a between nobles in England and Gascony. Some of Edward's legislation, for example the Statute of Jewry and his approach to Welsh resettlement show some similarities to Castilian approaches. His military strategies, too, appear to have been influenced by the work of Vegetius, to which Eleanor directed his attention. Edward was, however, clearly prepared to resist her demands, or to stop her, if he felt she was going too far in any of her activities, and that he expected his ministers to restrain her if her actions threatened to inconvenience important people in his realm, as happened on one occasion when Robert Burnell, the Lord Chancellor, assured the Bishop of Winchester, from whom the queen was demanding a sum of money the bishop owed her, that he would speak with the queen and that the business would end happily for the bishop.


title: Eleanor of Castile

text: If she was allowed no overt political role, Eleanor was a highly intelligent and cultured woman and found other satisfying outlets for her energies. She was an active patroness of literature, maintaining the only royal scriptorium known to have existed at the time in Northern Europe, with scribes and at least one illuminator to copy books for her. Some of the works produced were apparently vernacular romances and saints' lives, but Eleanor's tastes ranged far more widely than that and were not limited to the products of her own writing office. The number and variety of new works written for her show that her interests were broad and sophisticated. In the 1260s she commissioned the production of the Douce Apocalypse. She has also been credibly linked to the Trinity Apocalypse, although the question of whether she commissioned it, or simply owned an apocalypse which influenced its production, remains a matter of debate. On Crusade in 1272, she had "De Re Militari" by Vegetius translated for Edward. After she succeeded her mother as countess of Ponthieu in 1279, a romance was written for her about the life of a supposed 9th century count of Ponthieu. She commissioned an Arthurian romance with a Northumbrian theme, possibly for the marriage of the Northumbrian lord John de Vescy, who married a close friend and relation of hers. In the 1280s, Archbishop Peckham wrote a theological work for her to explain what angels were and what they did. She almost certainly commissioned the Alphonso Psalter, now in the British Library, and is also suspected to be the commissioner of the Bird Psalter which also bears the arms of Alphonso and his prospective wife. In January 1286 she thanked the abbot of Cerne for lending her a book—possibly a treatise on chess known to have been written at Cerne in the late thirteenth century—and her accounts reveal her in 1290 corresponding with an Oxford master about one of her books. There is also evidence suggesting that she exchanged books with her brother Alfonso X.


title: Eleanor of Castile

text: Relevant evidence suggests that Eleanor was not fluent in English, but was accustomed to read, and so presumably to think and speak, in French, her mother's tongue, with which she would have been familiar from childhood despite spending her early years in Spain. In this she was luckier than many medieval European queens, who often arrived in their husband's realms to face the need to learn a new language; but the English court was still functionally bilingual, in large measure through the long succession of its queens, who were mostly from French-speaking lands. In 1275, on a visit to St Albans abbey in Hertfordshire, the people of the town begged her help in withstanding the abbot's exactions from them, but one of her courtiers had to act as translator before she could respond to the plea for assistance. All the literary works noted above are in French, as are the bulk of her surviving letters, and since Peckham wrote his letters and his angelic treatise for her in French, she was presumably well known to prefer that language.


title: Eleanor of Castile

text: In the domestic sphere she popularised the use of tapestries and carpets – the use of hangings and especially floor coverings was noted as a Spanish extravagance on her arrival in London, but by the time of her death was plainly much in vogue amongst richer magnates, with certain of her hangings having to be reclaimed from Anthony Bek, the bishop of Durham. She also promoted the use of fine tableware, elegantly decorated knives, and even forks (though it remains uncertain whether the latter were used as personal eating utensils or as serving pieces from the common bowls or platters). She also had considerable influence on the development of garden design in the royal estates. Extensive spending on gardens is evidenced at her properties and in most places she stayed, including the use of water features – a common Castilian garden design feature, which was owed to Islamic and Roman influences in Spain. The picturesque Gloriette at Leeds Castle was developed during her ownership of the castle.


title: Eleanor of Castile

text: The queen was a devoted patron of the Dominican Order friars, founding several priories in England and supporting their work at the University of Oxford and the University of Cambridge. Not surprisingly, then, Eleanor's piety was of an intellectual stamp; apart from her religious foundations she was not given to direct good works, and she left it to her chaplains to distribute alms for her. Her level of charitable giving was, however, considerable.


title: Eleanor of Castile

text: She patronised many relatives, though given foreigners' unpopularity in England and the criticism of Henry III and Eleanor of Provence's generosity to them, she was cautious as queen to choose which cousins to support. Rather than marry her male cousins to English heiresses, which would put English wealth in foreign hands, she arranged marriages for her female cousins to English barons. Edward strongly supported her in these endeavours, which provided him and his family (and Eleanor herself, in her potential widowhood) with an expanded network of potential supporters. In a few cases, her marriage projects for her lady cousins provided Edward, as well as her father-in-law Henry III, with opportunities to sustain healthy relations with other realms. The marriage of her kinswoman Marguerite de Guines to the earl of Ulster, one of the more influential English noblemen in Ireland, not only gave Edward a new family connection in that island but also with Scotland, since Marguerite's cousin Marie de Coucy was the mother of Edward's brother-in-law Alexander III. The earliest of Eleanor's recorded marriage projects linked one of her Châtellerault cousins with a member of the Lusignan family, Henry III's highly favoured maternal relatives, not only strengthening the king's ties with that family but also creating a new tie between the English king and a powerful family in Poitou, on Gascony's northern flank.


title: Eleanor of Castile

text: Eleanor was presumably a healthy woman for most of her life; that she survived at least sixteen pregnancies suggests that she was not frail. Shortly after the birth of her last child, however, financial accounts from Edward's household and her own begin to record frequent payments for medicines to the queen's use. The nature of the medicines is not specified, so it is impossible to know what ailments were troubling her until, later in 1287 while she was in Gascony with Edward, a letter to England from a member of the royal entourage states that the queen had a double quartan fever. This fever pattern suggests that she was suffering from a strain of malaria. The disease is not fatal of itself, but leaves its victims weak and vulnerable to opportunistic infections. Among other complications, the liver and spleen become enlarged, brittle, and highly susceptible to injury which may cause death from internal bleeding. There is also a possibility that she had inherited the Castilian royal family's theorised tendency to cardiac problems.


title: Eleanor of Castile

text: From the time of the return from Gascony there are signs that Eleanor was aware that her death was not far off. Arrangements were made for the marriage of two of her daughters, Margaret and Joan, and negotiations for the marriage of young Edward of Caernarfon to Margaret, the Maid of Norway, heiress of Scotland, were hurried on. In summer 1290, a tour north through Eleanor's properties was commenced, but proceeded at a much slower pace than usual, and the autumn Parliament was convened in Clipstone, rather than in London. Eleanor's children were summoned to visit her in Clipstone, despite warnings that travel might endanger their health. Following the conclusion of the parliament Eleanor and Edward set out the short distance from Clipstone to Lincoln. By this stage Eleanor was travelling fewer than eight miles a day.


title: Eleanor of Castile

text: Her final stop was at the village of Harby, Nottinghamshire, less than from Lincoln. The journey was abandoned, and the queen was lodged in the house of Richard de Weston, the foundations of which can still be seen near Harby's parish church. After piously receiving the Church's last rites, she died there on the evening of 28 November 1290, aged 49 and after 36 years of marriage. Edward was at her bedside to hear her final requests. For three days afterward, the machinery of government came to a halt and no writs were sealed.


title: Eleanor of Castile

text: Eleanor's embalmed body was borne in great state from Lincoln to Westminster Abbey, through the heartland of Eleanor's properties and accompanied for most of the way by Edward, and a substantial cortege of mourners. Edward gave orders that memorial crosses be erected at the site of each overnight stop between Lincoln and Westminster. Based on crosses in France marking Louis IX's funeral procession, these artistically significant monuments enhanced the image of Edward's kingship as well as witnessing his grief. The "Eleanor crosses" stood at Lincoln, Grantham, Stamford, Geddington, Hardingstone near Northampton, Stony Stratford, Woburn, Dunstable, St Albans, Waltham, Westcheap, and Charing – only three survive, none in its entirety. The best preserved is that at Geddington. All three have lost the crosses "of immense height" that originally surmounted them; only the lower stages remain. The top (cross) part of the Hardingstone monument is believed to reside in the Northampton Guildhall Museum. The Waltham cross has been heavily restored and to prevent further deterioration, its original statues of the queen are now in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.


title: Eleanor of Castile

text: The monument now known as "Charing Cross" in London, in front of the railway station of that name, was built in 1865 to publicise the railway hotel at Charing station. The original Charing cross was at the top of Whitehall, on the south side of Trafalgar Square, but was destroyed in 1647 and later replaced by a statue of Charles I.


title: Eleanor of Castile

text: In the thirteenth century, embalming involving evisceration and separate burial of heart and body was not unusual. Eleanor however was afforded the more unusual "triple" burial – separate burial of viscera, heart and body. Eleanor's viscera were buried in Lincoln Cathedral, where Edward placed a duplicate of the Westminster tomb. The Lincoln tomb's original stone chest survives; its effigy was destroyed in the 17th century and has been replaced with a 19th-century copy. On the outside of Lincoln Cathedral are two statues often identified as Edward and Eleanor, but these images were heavily restored and given new heads in the 19th century; probably they were not originally intended to depict the couple.


title: Eleanor of Castile

text: The queen's heart was buried in the Dominican priory at Blackfriars in London, along with that of her son Alphonso. The accounts of her executors show that the monument constructed there to commemorate her heart burial was richly elaborate, including wall paintings as well as an angelic statue in metal that apparently stood under a carved stone canopy. It was destroyed in the 16th century during the Dissolution of the Monasteries.


title: Eleanor of Castile

text: Eleanor's funeral took place in Westminster Abbey on 17 December 1290. Her body was placed in a grave near the high altar that had originally contained the coffin of Edward the Confessor and, more recently, that of King Henry III until his remains were removed to his new tomb in 1290. Eleanor's body remained in this grave until the completion of her own tomb. She had probably ordered that tomb before her death. It consists of a marble chest with carved mouldings and shields (originally painted) of the arms of England, Castile, and Ponthieu. The chest is surmounted by William Torel's superb gilt-bronze effigy, showing Eleanor in the same pose as the image on her great seal.


title: Eleanor of Castile

text: When Edward remarried a decade after her death, he and his second wife Margaret of France, named their only daughter Eleanor in honour of her.


title: Eleanor of Castile

text: Eleanor of Castile's queenship is significant in English history for the evolution of a stable financial system for the king's wife, and for the honing this process gave the queen-consort's prerogatives. The estates Eleanor assembled became the nucleus for dower assignments made to later queens of England into the 15th century, and her involvement in this process solidly established a queen-consort's freedom to engage in such transactions. Few later queens exerted themselves in economic activity to the extent Eleanor did, but their ability to do so rested on the precedents settled in her lifetime.


title: Eleanor of Castile

text: Despite her ambiguous reputation in her own day, the St Albans Chronicle and the Eleanor Crosses assured Eleanor a positive, if slightly obscure standing over the next two centuries. As late as 1586, the antiquarian William Camden first published in England the tale that Eleanor saved Edward's life at Acre by sucking his wound. Camden then went on to ascribe construction of the Eleanor crosses to Edward's grief at the loss of an heroic wife who had selflessly risked her own life to save his. A year later in 1587, Raphael Holinshed's "Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland" described Eleanor as "the jewel [Edward I] most esteemed ... a godly and modest princess, full of pity, and one that showed much favour to the English nation, ready to relieve every man's grief that sustained wrong and to make them friends that were at discord, so far as in her lay."


title: Eleanor of Castile

text: But a counter-narrative, driven by rising anti-Spanish feeling in England from the Reformation onwards, may already have begun to emerge. "The Lamentable Fall of Queene Elenor", a popular ballad sung to the popular tune "Gentle and Courteous", is thought to date from as early as the 1550s, and to be an indirect attack on the half-Spanish queen Mary Tudor and her husband the Spanish Philip II of Spain. It depicts Eleanor as vain and violent: she demands of the king "that ev'ry man / That ware long lockes of hair, / Might then be cut and polled all"; she orders "That ev'ry womankind should have/Their right breast cut away"; she imprisons and tortures the Lady Mayoress of London, eventually murdering the Mayoress with poisonous snakes; she blasphemes against God on the common ground at Charing, causing the ground to swallow her up; and finally, miraculously spat up by the ground at Queen's Hithe, and now on her death-bed, she confesses not only to murder of the Mayoress but also to committing infidelity with a friar, by whom she has borne a child.


title: Eleanor of Castile

text: This was followed in the 1590s by George Peele's "The Famous Chronicle of King Edward the First". The first version of this, written in the early 1590s, is thought to have presented a positive depiction of the relationship between Eleanor and Edward. If so, it sank with little trace. The surviving revised version, as printed in 1593, depicts a haughty Eleanor as "a villainess capable of unspeakable treachery, cruelty, and depravity"; intransigent and hubristic, "concerned primarily with enhancing the reputation of her native nation, and evidently accustomed to a tyrannous and quite un-English exercise of royal prerogative"; delaying her coronation for twenty weeks so she can have Spanish dresses made, and proclaiming she shall keep the English under a "Spanish yoke". The misdeeds attributed to her in "The Lamentable Fall of Queene Elenor" are repeated and expanded upon: Eleanor is now also shown to box her husband's ears; and she now confesses to adultery with her own brother-in-law Edmund Crouchback and to conceiving all her children, bar Edward I's heir Edward II, in adultery – which revelation prompts her unfortunate daughter Joan of Acre, fathered by a French friar, to drop dead of shame. This is a portrait of Eleanor that owes little to historicity, and much to the then-current war with Spain, and English fears of a repeat attempt at invasion, and is one of a number of anti-Spanish polemic of the period.


title: Eleanor of Castile

text: It would appear likely Peele's play, and the ballad associated with it, had a significant effect on the survival of the Eleanor Crosses in the 17th century. Performances of the play and reprints of "The Lamentable Fall" (it was reprinted in 1628, 1629, 1658, and 1664, testifying to its continuing popularity) meant that by the time of the Civil War this entirely hostile portrait of Eleanor was probably more widely known than the positive depictions by Camden and Hollingshed. The loss of most of the crosses can be documented or inferred to have been lost in the years 1643–1646: for example Parliament's Committee for the Demolition of Monuments of Superstition and Idolatry ordered the Charing Cross torn down in 1643. Eleanor's reputation however began to change for the positive once again at this time, following the 1643 publication of Sir Richard Baker's "A History of the Kings of England", which retold the myth of Eleanor saving her husband at Acre. Thereafter, Eleanor's reputation was largely positive and derived ultimately from Camden, who was uncritically repeated wholesale by historians. In the 19th century the self-styled historian Agnes Strickland used Camden to paint the rosiest of all pictures of Eleanor. None of these writers, however, used contemporary chronicles or records to provide accurate information about Eleanor's life.


title: Eleanor of Castile

text: Such documents began to become widely available in the late 19th century, but even when historians began to cite them to suggest Eleanor was not the perfect queen Strickland praised, many rejected the correction, often expressing indignant disbelief that anything negative was said about Eleanor. Only in recent decades have historians studied queenship in its own right and regarded medieval queens as worthy of attention. These decades produced a sizeable body of historical work that allows Eleanor's life to be scrutinised in the terms of her own day, not those of the 17th or 19th century.


title: Eleanor of Castile

text: The evolution of her reputation is a case study in the maxim that each age creates its own history. If Eleanor of Castile can no longer be seen as Peele's transgressive monstrosity, nor as Strickland's paradigm of queenly virtues, her career can now be examined as the achievement of an intelligent and determined woman who was able to meet the challenges of an exceptionally demanding life.


title: Eleanor of Castile

text: It has been suggested that Eleanor and Edward were more devoted to each other than to their children. As king and queen, however, it was impossible for them to spend much time in one place, and when the children were very young, they could not tolerate the rigors of constant travel with their parents. The children had a household staffed with attendants carefully chosen for competence and loyalty, with whom the parents corresponded regularly. The children lived in this comfortable establishment until they were about seven years old; then they began to accompany their parents, if at first only on important occasions. By their teens they were with the king and queen much of the time. In 1290, Eleanor sent one of her scribes to join her children's household, presumably to help with their education. She also sent gifts to the children regularly, and arranged for the entire establishment to be moved near to her when she was in Wales. In 1306 Edward sharply scolded Margerie de Haustede, Eleanor's former lady in waiting who was then in charge of his children by his second wife, because Margerie had not kept him well informed of their health. Edward also issued regular and detailed instructions for the care and guidance of these children.


title: Eleanor of Castile

text: Two incidents cited to imply Eleanor's lack of interest in her children are easily explained in the contexts of medieval royal childrearing in general, and of particular events surrounding Edward and Eleanor's family. When their six-year-old son Henry lay dying at Guildford in 1274, neither parent made the short journey from London to see him; but Henry was tended by Edward's mother Eleanor of Provence. The boy had lived with his grandmother while his parents were absent on crusade, and since he was barely two years old when they left England in 1270, he could not have had many substantial memories of them at the time they returned to England in August 1274, only weeks before his last illness and death. In other words, the dowager queen was a more familiar and comforting presence to her grandson than his parents would have been at that time, and it was in all respects better that she tended him then. Furthermore, Eleanor was pregnant at the time of his final illness and death; even given the limited thirteenth-century understanding of contagion, exposure to a sickroom might have been discouraged. Similarly, Edward and Eleanor allowed her mother, Joan, Countess of Ponthieu, to raise their daughter Joan of Acre in Ponthieu (1274–1278). This implies no parental lack of interest in the girl; the practice of fostering noble children in other households of sufficient dignity was not unknown and Eleanor's mother was, of course, dowager queen of Castile. Her household was safe and dignified, but it does appear that Edward and Eleanor had cause to regret their generosity in letting Joan of Ponthieu foster young Joan. When the girl reached England in 1278, aged six, it turned out that she was badly spoiled. She was spirited and at times defiant in childhood, and in adulthood remained a handful for Edward, defying his plans for a prestigious second marriage for her by secretly marrying one of her late first husband's squires. When the marriage was revealed in 1297 because Joan was pregnant, Edward was enraged that his dignity had been insulted by her marriage to a commoner of no importance. Joan, at twenty-five, reportedly defended her conduct to her father by saying that nobody saw anything wrong if a great earl married a poor woman, so there could be nothing wrong with a countess marrying a promising young man. Whether or not her retort ultimately changed his mind, Edward restored to Joan all the lands he had confiscated when he learned of her marriage, and accepted her new husband as a son-in-law in good standing. Joan marked her restoration to favour by having masses celebrated for the soul of her mother Eleanor.


title: Wonderland (2003 film)

text: Wonderland is a 2003 American crime drama film, co-written and directed by James Cox and based on the real-life Wonderland Murders that occurred in 1981. The film stars Val Kilmer, Kate Bosworth, Dylan McDermott, Carrie Fisher, Lisa Kudrow, Josh Lucas, Christina Applegate, Tim Blake Nelson, and Janeane Garofalo. Kilmer plays the role of John Holmes, a famous pornographic film star and suspected accomplice in four grisly murders committed in a house at 8763 Wonderland Avenue, in the Laurel Canyon section of Los Angeles.


title: Wonderland (2003 film)

text: The girlfriend of John Holmes, Dawn Schiller, is on the streets and picked up by a holy roller after Holmes leaves Schiller in a hotel room. Schiller eventually calls Holmes to come and get her. Holmes arrives at the apartment, and they have sex and snort cocaine in the bathroom. The next morning, while in a motel room, Dawn sees a newscast that states four people were murdered at a rowhouse on Wonderland Avenue, the same one she had earlier been at with Holmes. The story eventually moves on to two city detectives investigating the crime, Sam Nico and Louis Cruz, and their contact with Holmes. Another officer, Billy Ward, intervenes in the investigation.


title: Wonderland (2003 film)

text: The next major character introduced is David Lind. He hears of his friends' murders at Wonderland and soon discovers his girlfriend was there. While at the crime scene, he is picked up by Nico and Cruz. Through Lind's story (told in flashbacks), we are introduced to some of the people who partied at Wonderland. These people, known as the Wonderland Gang, included Ron Launius and his wife Susan, Billy Deverell, Lind's 22-year-old girlfriend Barbara Richardson, and Joy Miller. Ron has a fondness for antique guns and frequently shows them off. When he learns that Holmes knows notorious gangster Eddie Nash, he gives Holmes a pair of stolen antique guns to take to Nash, so that Nash can fence them and the Wonderland Gang can split the loot. (Nash had befriended Holmes because of Holmes' notoriety as the porn film phenomenon Johnny Wadd.) Holmes takes the guns to Nash, but Nash says the guns are too rare to be sold, as they would be recognized right away and everyone involved would be apprehended. Rather than return the guns to Holmes, Nash keeps them for himself. Attempting to get back in the gang's good graces, Holmes suggests robbing Nash's home. Ron Launius is reluctant to go along with the robbery at first, but after Holmes gives him a rundown of what's there, he is eager to participate. Holmes volunteers to draw them a map to plan the robbery, since he has visited Nash's house frequently. Holmes then visits Nash to buy drugs, and on the way out leaves the kitchen door unlocked to give the Wonderland gang easy access.


title: Wonderland (2003 film)

text: The next morning, Ron Launius, Lind, and Deverell carry out the robbery, while wheel-man Tracy McCourt waits outside in a car, serving as lookout. Neither Holmes nor any of the women are present when the robbery occurs. The Wonderland Gang gains access through the unlocked kitchen door and robs Nash at gunpoint. Lind accidentally fires his gun, wounding Nash's bodyguard, Greg Diles. The gang hurls racial epithets at Nash and Diles and walks away with over one million dollars in cash, jewels, and drugs. They bring their loot back to the Wonderland apartment to divide everything up. Holmes is unhappy with the cut he is given, even though he did not take part in the robbery and he's in debt to the gang.


title: Wonderland (2003 film)

text: Nash discovers Holmes was involved in the robbery, he has Holmes beaten and finds Holmes' little black book. He tells Holmes he will kill every person listed in the book, starting with Holmes' mother, if Holmes does not give up the men who robbed him.


title: Wonderland (2003 film)

text: The retaliation for the robbery is swift and fatal. On July 1, 1981, a group of Nash's henchmen (including Holmes), led by Diles, gains access to the apartment at Wonderland Avenue. Ron Launius, Deverell, Richardson, and Miller are all brutally beaten to death with striated lead pipes. Diles compels Holmes to deliver blows to Launius. Susan Launius is beaten but survives, and is questioned by Nico and Cruz in her hospital bed. She tells them (in a near comatose state) that she does not remember anything, only shadows. Lind is not present during the attacks.


title: Wonderland (2003 film)

text: On Rotten Tomatoes the film has an approval rating of 34% based on 101 reviews. The site's consensus states: "A sordid and pointless movie with some good performances." On Metacritic it has a score of 43% based on reviews from 36 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews".


title: Wonderland (2003 film)

text: Roger Ebert gave the film a mediocre review, granting it two out of four stars, and saying: "True crime procedurals can have a certain fascination, but not when they're jumbled glimpses of what might or might not have happened involving a lot of empty people whose main claim to fame is that they're dead."


title: Jake Borelli

text: Jake Borelli (born May 13, 1991) is an American actor. He is known for his roles as Wolfgang on the Nickelodeon comedy series "The Thundermans" (2015–2018) and Dr. Levi Schmitt on the ABC medical drama "Grey's Anatomy" (2017–present).


title: Jake Borelli

text: Borelli was born in Columbus, Ohio, to Linda Borelli and Mike Borelli. He has two older brothers, Ben and Zack. He enjoys painting, art and considered attending art school when he won a national art competition during his senior year of high school. In 2009, he graduated from Upper Arlington High School and was accepted to University of California, Los Angeles and Ohio State University but decided to move to Los Angeles to pursue acting. Whilst in Columbus, Borelli also performed in more than a dozen shows with the Columbus Children's Theatre which included roles in "Cheaper by the Dozen; The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe; Wiley and the Hairy Man", and "Holes".


title: Jake Borelli

text: Jake Borelli publicly came out as gay on his personal Instagram in November 2018, moments after the airing of the sixth episode of "Grey's Anatomy"s fifteenth season, in which his character, Dr. Levi Schmitt, also came out.


title: Jake Borelli

text: Upon moving to Los Angeles, Borelli quickly landed supporting roles in television shows such as "iCarly", "Parenthood", "", "True Jackson, VP", "Greek" and "Suburgatory". He has also appeared in several short films.


title: Jake Borelli

text: In 2017, he landed a role in the Netflix comedy drama film "Reality High". That same year it was announced that Borelli would be playing intern Dr. Levi Schmitt on "Grey's Anatomy".


title: Dura mater

text: In neuroanatomy, dura mater is a thick membrane made of dense irregular connective tissue that surrounds the brain and spinal cord. It is the outermost of the three layers of membrane called the meninges that protect the central nervous system. The other two meningeal layers are the arachnoid mater and the pia mater. It envelops the arachnoid mater, which is responsible for keeping in the cerebrospinal fluid. It is derived primarily from the neural crest cell population, with postnatal contributions of the paraxial mesoderm.


title: Dura mater

text: The dura mater has several functions and layers. The dura mater is a membrane that envelops the arachnoid mater. It surrounds and supports the dural sinuses (also called dural venous sinuses, cerebral sinuses, or cranial sinuses) and carries blood from the brain toward the heart.


title: Dura mater

text: Cranial dura mater has two layers called "lamellae", a superficial layer (also called the periosteal layer), which serves as the skull's inner periosteum, called the endocranium and a deep layer called the meningeal layer. When it covers the spinal cord it is known as the "dural sac" or thecal sac. Unlike cranial dura mater, spinal dura mater only has one layer, known as the meningeal layer. The potential space between these two layers is known as the epidural space.


title: Dura mater

text: The dura separates into two layers at "dural reflections" (also known as "dural folds"), places where the inner dural layer is reflected as sheet-like protrusions into the cranial cavity. There are two main dural reflections:


title: Dura mater

text: This depends upon the area of the cranial cavity: in the anterior cranial fossa the anterior meningeal artery (branch from the ethmoidal artery) is responsible for blood supply, in the middle cranial fossa the middle meningeal artery and some accessory arteries are responsible for blood supply, the middle meningeal artery is a direct branch from the maxillary artery and enter the cranial cavity through the foramen spinosum and then divides into anterior (which runs usually in vertical direction across the pterion) and posterior (which runs posteriosuperiorly) branches, while the accessory meningeal arteries (which are branches from the maxillary artery) enter the skull through foramen ovale and supply area between the two foramina, and the in posterior cranial fossa the dura mater has numerous blood supply from different possible arteries:


title: Dura mater

text: The two layers of dura mater run together throughout most of the skull. Where they separate, the gap between them is called a dural venous sinus. These sinuses drain blood and cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) from the brain and empty into the internal jugular vein.


title: Dura mater

text: Arachnoid villi, which are outgrowths of the arachnoid mater (the middle meningeal layer), extend into the dural venous sinuses to drain CSF. These villi act as one-way valves.


title: Dura mater

text: Meningeal veins, which course through the dura mater, and bridging veins, which drain the underlying neural tissue and puncture the dura mater, empty into these dural sinuses. A rupture of a bridging vein causes a subdural hematoma.


title: Dura mater

text: The supratentorial dura mater membrane is supplied by small meningeal branches of the trigeminal nerve (V1, V2 and V3). The innervation for the infratentorial dura mater are via upper cervical nerves and the meningeal branch of the vagus nerve.


title: Dura mater

text: Many medical conditions involve the dura mater. A subdural hematoma occurs when there is an abnormal collection of blood between the dura and the arachnoid, usually as a result of torn bridging veins secondary to head trauma. An epidural hematoma is a collection of blood between the dura and the inner surface of the skull, and is usually due to arterial bleeding. Intradural procedures, such as removal of a brain tumour or treatment of trigeminal neuralgia via a microvascular decompression, require that an incision is made to the dura mater. To achieve a watertight repair and avoid potential post-operative complications, the dura is typically closed with sutures. If there is a dural deficiency, then a dural substitute may be used to replace this membrane. Small gaps in the dura can be covered with a surgical sealant film.


title: Dura mater

text: In 2011, researchers discovered a connective tissue bridge from the rectus capitis posterior major to the cervical dura mater. Various clinical manifestations may be linked to this anatomical relationship such as headaches, trigeminal neuralgia and other symptoms that involved the cervical dura. The rectus capitis posterior minor has a similar attachment.


title: Dura mater

text: The dura-muscular, dura-ligamentous connections in the upper cervical spine and occipital areas may provide anatomic and physiologic answers to the cause of the cervicogenic headache. This proposal would further explain manipulation's efficacy in the treatment of cervicogenic headache.


title: Dura mater

text: The American Red Cross and some other agencies accepting blood donations consider dura mater transplants, along with receipt of pituitary-derived growth hormone, a risk factor due to concerns about Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease.


title: Dura mater

text: Cerebellar tonsillar ectopia, or Chiari, is a condition that was previously thought to be congenital but can be induced by trauma, particularly whiplash trauma. Dural strain may be pulling the cerebellum inferiorly, or skull distortions may be pushing the brain inferiorly.


title: Dura mater

text: Dural ectasia is the enlargement of the dura and is common in connective tissue disorders, such as Marfan syndrome and Ehlers–Danlos syndrome. These conditions are sometimes found in conjunction with Arnold–Chiari malformation.


title: Dura mater

text: Spontaneous cerebrospinal fluid leak is the fluid and pressure loss of spinal fluid due to holes in the dura mater.


title: Dura mater

text: The name "" derives from the Latin for "tough mother (or hard mother)", a loan translation of Arabic (), literally 'thick mother of the brain', matrix of the brain, and is also referred to by the term "pachymeninx" (plural "pachymeninges").


title: Beheading video

text: A beheading video is a form of propaganda or snuff video in which hostages are graphically decapitated. It is often employed by groups seeking to instill shock or terror into a population, whilst beheading has been a widely employed public execution method since the ancient Greeks and Romans, videos of this type only began to arise in 2002 with the beheading of Daniel Pearl and the growth of the Internet in the Information Age which allowed groups to anonymously publish these videos for public consumption. The beheadings shown in these videos are usually "not" performed in a "classical" method – decapitating a victim quickly with a blow from a sword or axe – but by the relatively slow and torturous process of slicing and sawing the victim's neck, while still alive, with a knife. Despite the number of groups and ideologies that employ this form of propaganda, the process is overwhelmingly associated with Islamist extremists.


title: Beheading video

text: The first beheading by the National Movement for the Restoration of Pakistani Sovereignty was of Daniel Pearl in 2002. The videos were popularized in 2004 by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a radical Islamic militant.


title: Beheading video

text: The videos caused controversy among Islamic scholars, some of whom denounced them as against Islamic law; al-Qaeda did not approve and Osama bin Laden considered them poor public relations. Regardless, they became popular with certain Islamic terrorist groups, such as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.


title: Beheading video

text: Early videos were grainy and unsophisticated, but, according to the "Chicago Sun-Times", had by 2004 been "growing in sophistication, using animated graphics and editing techniques apparently aimed at embellishing the audio to make a victim's final moments seem more disturbing". These videos are often uploaded to the World Wide Web by terrorists, then discussed and distributed by web-based outlets, such as blogs, shock sites, and traditional journalistic media. After a beheading video by a Mexican drug cartel spread virally on Facebook, the Family Online Safety Institute petitioned to have it removed. Initially, Facebook refused to remove the video, then did so, and subsequently clarified their policies, stating that beheading videos would only be allowed if posted in a manner intended for its users to "condemn" the acts.


title: Beheading video

text: Writing in "The Atlantic", Simon Cottee drew a comparison between jihadist videos and gonzo pornography.


title: Beheading video

text: A hoax beheading video filmed by Benjamin Vanderford, Robert Martin, and Laurie Kirchner in 2004 received wide attention by the American press. The video used Jama'at al-Tawhid wal-Jihad's logo, but not the group's flag. It was originally filmed for Vanderford's local election campaign. He was seeking Matt Gonzalez's seat on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. Vanderford's second intention was to point out how uncritically the mainstream media would accept an anonymous video. The Islamic Global Media Center claimed to have made the video, but removed it from their website after the hoax was discovered. The video also appeared on other militant websites and was broadcast on Arabic television.


title: Grievance studies affair

text: The grievance studies affair, also referred to as the "Sokal Squared" scandal, was the project of a team of three authors—Peter Boghossian, James A. Lindsay, and Helen Pluckrose—to highlight what they saw as poor scholarship and eroding criteria in several academic fields. Taking place over 2017 and 2018, their project entailed submitting bogus papers to academic journals in cultural, queer, race, gender, fat, and sexuality studies to determine whether they would pass through peer review and be accepted for publication. Several of these papers were subsequently published, which the authors cited in support of their contention.


title: Grievance studies affair

text: Prior to the affair, concerns about the intellectual validity of much research influenced by postmodern philosophy and critical theory were highlighted by various academics who composed nonsensical hoax articles parodying the language and content of much research in the modern humanities and succeeded in having these articles accepted for publication in academic journals. One of the most noted previous examples of this was Alan Sokal's 1996 hoax in "Social Text", a cultural studies journal, which inspired Boghossian, Lindsay, and Pluckrose. The trio set out with the intent to expose problems in what they called "grievance studies", referring to academic areas where they claim "a culture has developed in which only certain conclusions are allowed… and put social grievances ahead of objective truth". As such, the trio, identifying themselves as leftists and liberals, described their project as an attempt to raise awareness of what they believed was the damage that postmodernism and identity politics-based scholarship was having on leftist political projects, but mainly Science and Academia.


title: Grievance studies affair

text: Boghossian, Lindsay, and Pluckrose wrote 20 articles that promoted deliberately absurd ideas or morally questionable acts and submitted them to various peer-reviewed journals. Although they had planned for the project to run until January 2019, the trio admitted to the hoax in October 2018 after journalists from "The Wall Street Journal" revealed that "Helen Wilson", the pseudonym used for their article published in "Gender, Place & Culture", did not exist. By the time of the revelation, 4 of their 20 papers had been published; 3 had been accepted but not yet published; 6 had been rejected; and 7 were still under review. Included among the articles that were published were arguments that dogs engage in rape culture and that men could reduce their transphobia by anally penetrating themselves with sex toys, as well as Adolf Hitler's "Mein Kampf" rewritten in feminist language. The first of these had won special recognition from the journal that published it.


title: Grievance studies affair

text: The hoax received a polarized reception within academia. Some academics praised it for exposing flaws that they saw as widespread among sectors of the humanities and social sciences influenced by postmodernism, critical theory, and identity politics. Others criticised what they perceived as the unethical nature of submitting deliberately bogus research. Some critics also asserted that the work did not represent a scientific investigation, given that the project did not include a control group, further arguing that invalid arguments and poor standards of peer-review were not restricted to "grievance studies" subjects but found across much of academia.


title: Grievance studies affair

text: Through their series of hoax articles, James A. Lindsay, Peter Boghossian, and Helen Pluckrose intended to expose issues in what they term as "grievance studies", a subcategory of academic areas where the three believe "a culture has developed in which only certain conclusions are allowed ... and put social grievances ahead of objective truth". The trio referred to several academic fields—postcolonial theory, gender studies, queer theory, critical race theory, intersectional feminism, and fat studies—as "grievance studies" because, according to Pluckrose, such areas begin "from the assumption of a grievance" and then bend "the available theories to confirm it". Pluckrose argued that all of these fields derive their underlying theoretical perspectives from the postmodern philosophy that developed in the late 1960s. Focusing on the work of French postmodern philosopher Michel Foucault, she highlighted how he argued that knowledge and power were interwoven and emphasised the role of discourse in society.


title: Grievance studies affair

text: Pluckrose suggested that fields such as postcolonial theory and queer theory could be called "applied postmodernism" in that they sprung up largely in the late 1980s as a means of pushing the gains of the civil rights movement, gay rights movement, and liberal feminism from the arena of legislative change and into the territory of changing discourse. She argued that these fields adapted postmodernism to suit their activist agendas. From postmodernism, they adopted the idea that knowledge is a social construct, but at the same time they held to the modernist view that "no progress could be made unless some things were objectively true". Thus, the "applied postmodernists", Pluckrose argued, insisted that "systems of power and privilege that oppressed women, people of colour and the LGBT" are objectively real and could be revealed by analysing discourses. At the same time, she argued, they retained postmodernism's scepticism toward science and objective knowledge, its view of "society as a system of power and privilege" and "commitment to the belief that all imbalances are socially constructed", rather than arising from biological reality.


title: Grievance studies affair

text: Pluckrose described herself and her collaborators as being "left-wing liberal sceptics". She stated that a core reason for why they wanted to carry out the project was to convince other "leftist academics" that there was a problem with "corrupted scholarship" in academic fields that were "based on identity politics and postmodernism." She argued that in rejecting modernism, much postmodernist-derived scholarship was also rejecting science, reason, and liberal democracy, and thus undermining many important progressive gains. Pluckrose also expressed concern that, in both foregrounding the importance of group identity and facilitating the growth of post-truth by claiming that there is no objective truth, this postmodernist theory was contributing to "the reactionary surge to the right" seen in many countries during the 2010s.


title: Grievance studies affair

text: In 2020, Pluckrose and Lindsay further investigated the effects of critical theory in their book "Cynical Theories: How Universities Made Everything About Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody".


title: Grievance studies affair

text: By the time of the reveal, 7 of their 20 papers had been accepted for publication, 7 were still under review, and 6 had been rejected. Included among the articles that were published were arguments that dogs engage in rape culture and that men could reduce their transphobia by anally penetrating themselves with sex toys, as well as Adolf Hitler's "Mein Kampf" rewritten in feminist language. One of the published papers in particular had won special recognition from the journal that published it.


title: Grievance studies affair

text: Prior to the affair, expressing concerns about the intellectual validity of much research influenced by postmodern philosophy and critical theory, various academics highlighted this by publishing hoax articles in various journals. It was the 1996 hoax by Alan Sokal in "Social Text", in particular, that influenced James A. Lindsay and Peter Boghossian to publish a hoax article of their own.


title: Grievance studies affair

text: On May 19, 2017, peer-reviewed journal "Cogent Social Sciences" published "The conceptual penis as a social construct", which argued that penises are not "male"; rather, they should be analyzed as social constructs instead. The same day, Lindsay and Boghossian revealed it to be a hoax aimed at discrediting gender studies, although "Cogent Social Sciences" is not exclusively a gender-studies journal. While the journal did conduct a postmortem, both authors concluded the "impact [of the hoax] was very limited, and much criticism of it was legitimate".


title: Grievance studies affair

text: The authors claim to have started their second attempt on August 16, 2017, with Helen Pluckrose joining them in September. The new methodology called for the submission of multiple papers, each of which would be submitted to "higher-ranked journals"; if it were rejected, feedback from the peer-review process was used to revise the paper before it was submitted to a lower-ranked journal. This process was repeated until the paper was accepted, or until the three authors gave up on that paper. The authorship of each paper was either fictional—such as "Helen Wilson" of "Portland Ungendering Research Initiative"—or real people willing to lend their name, such as Richard Baldwin, professor emeritus of history at Gulf Coast State College.


title: Grievance studies affair

text: Over the course of the project, 20 papers were submitted and 48 "new submissions" of those papers were made. The first acceptance, "Human Reactions to Rape Culture and Queer Performativity at the Dog Park", was achieved five months after the project began. During the initial peer review for its second, and ultimately successful, attempt at publication in "Gender, Place & Culture", what the hoaxers called the "Dog Park" paper was praised by the first reviewer as "incredibly innovative, rich in analysis, and extremely well-written and organized". Similar respectful feedback was provided for other accepted papers.


title: Grievance studies affair

text: The project was intended to run until January 31, 2019, but came to a premature end. On June 7, 2018, the Twitter account "New Real Peer Review" discovered one of their papers. This brought it to the attention of reporters at "The College Fix", "Reason", and other news outlets who began trying to contact the fictional author and journal it was published in. The journal "Gender, Place & Culture" published a note on August 6, 2018, stating that it suspected "Helen Wilson" had breached their contract to "not [fabricate] or [misappropriate] anyone's identity, including [their] own", adding that "the author has not responded to our request to provide appropriate documentation confirming their identity". According to the trio, another journal and a reporter at "The Wall Street Journal" were also asking for proof of identity at this point, and that it was the right time to go public; they admitted the hoax to the journalist in early August.


title: Grievance studies affair

text: When "The Wall Street Journal" report went public on October 2, the trio released an essay describing their project, as well as a Google Drive archive of most of their papers and email correspondence which included reviewer comments. Simultaneously, filmmaker Mike Nayna released a video on YouTube revealing the story behind the project. , Nayna and producer Mark Conway were working on a documentary film about the project.


title: Grievance studies affair

text: The project drew both praise and criticism. The science writer Tom Chivers suggested that the result was a "predictable furore", whereby those already sceptical of gender studies hailed it as evidence for "how the whole field is riddled with nonsense", while those sympathetic to gender studies thought it was "dishonestly undermining good scholarship."


title: Grievance studies affair

text: The political scientist Yascha Mounk dubbed it "Sokal squared" in reference to the Sokal affair hoax accomplished by Alan Sokal, and said that the "result is hilarious and delightful. It also showcases a serious problem with big parts of academia." The psychologist Steven Pinker said the project posed the question "is there any idea so outlandish that it won't be published in a Critical/PoMo/Identity/'Theory' journal?" In contrast, Joel P. Christensen and Matthew A. Sears, both classicists, referred to it as "the academic equivalent of the fraudulent hit pieces on Planned Parenthood" produced in 2015, more interested in publicity than valid argumentation.


title: Grievance studies affair

text: In "The Atlantic", Mounk said that "Like just about everything else in this depressing national moment, Sokal Squared is already being used as ammunition in the great American culture war." He characterized two sets of responses to the affair as "intellectually dishonest": right-wing responses that used the affair to discredit wider academia and left-wing responses that treated it as a politically motivated attack on academia. He said the former overlooked that "There are many fields of academia that have absolutely no patience for nonsense", including the fact that all the papers submitted to sociology journals had been rejected, while the latter attacked the motives behind the hoax instead of refuting it.


title: Grievance studies affair

text: Ann Garry, a co-editor of "Hypatia", which had accepted one of the hoax papers ("When the Joke's on You", which purported to be a feminist critique of hoaxes) but had not published it yet, said she was "deeply disappointed" by the hoax. Garry told "The New York Times" that "Referees put in a great deal of time and effort to write meaningful reviews, and the idea that individuals would submit fraudulent academic material violates many ethical and academic norms." Nicholas Mazza, editor of the "Journal of Poetry Therapy", said: "Although a valuable point was learned regarding the authenticity of articles/authors… the authors of the 'study' clearly engaged in flawed and unethical research."


title: Grievance studies affair

text: Yascha Mounk of Johns Hopkins University said that while the authors received no favors for preparing the hoax, they demonstrated mastery in postmodern jargon and not only ridiculed the journals in question, but, more importantly, outed double standards of gender studies which happily welcome hoaxes against "morally suspect" fields like economics, but are unable to accept a criticism of their own methods. He also noted the "sheer amount of tribal solidarity it has elicited among leftists and academics" and the fact that many of the reactions were purely "ad hominem", while few have actually noted that there is an actual problem highlighted by the hoax: "some of the leading journals in areas like gender studies have failed to distinguish between real scholarship and intellectually vacuous as well as morally troubling bullshit". Mounk also countered criticism that the trio received about the lack of controls as a "confused attempt to import statistics into a question where it doesn't apply".


title: Grievance studies affair

text: Justin E. H. Smith defended hoaxing as an intellectual or scholarly practice, providing a series of examples of hoaxes ranging from the Italian Renaissance to the 2000s. In "The Chronicle of Higher Education", Heather E. Heying pointed out that the hoax helped to expose many pathologies of the modern social sciences, such as "repudiation of science and logic" and "extolling activism over inquiry".