bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Right Book: 1883-1884
Authors: Sutherland John
Published: November 2023

THE Wards’ early years in London were among the most hectic and engrossing of Mary Ward’s life. They should also have been fulfilling. She was a successful hostess, a successful journalist, a successful mother and wife. Yet she seems never to have relinquished for a minute her ambition to write a great book. Every other success was secondary.
Families—the Arnolds: 1890-1900
Authors: Sutherland John
Published: November 2023

MRS HUMPHRY WARD’S career as author and public woman was ostentatiously motivated by self-sacrifice. Like the mother pelican, she gave her life’s blood for others. What others? In the largest sense, her ideals were philanthropic.
Respectable Genius: 1890-1900
Authors: Sutherland John
Published: November 2023

THE dominant tone of Mrs Humphry Ward’s mind and conduct in the 1890s was one of deafening ‘Respectability’. Appearance—or ‘what people will think’—was her fetish. Social conformity is usual enough in middle age, as a kind of hardening of the moral arteries. But in Mary Ward’s case there were other factors than her advancing fiftieth birthday.
Health: 1890-1900
Authors: Sutherland John
Published: November 2023

THE refrain running through all Mary Ward’s letters and private papers from 1883 until her death is that of ill health. One could write her biography as a sixty-nine-year medical case report or an anthology of the age’s female invalidisms. Over the years she was racked by a baffling array of chronic, acute, subacute, psychosomatic, and organic ailments.
Mid-Edwardian: 1906
Authors: Sutherland John
Published: November 2023

BY 1905 Mrs Humphry Ward could plausibly claim to be the most famous living novelist in the world. Russian prisoners taken in the 1905 war with Japan asked for her novels above all others. Their compatriot Tolstoy concurred in ranking Mrs Ward as England’s greatest artist in fiction—England’s Tolstoy. Although it was not a source of much money for her, she was translated and read everywhere on the Continent, in Scandinavia, in the Balkans, and in the English colonies.
Calamities: 1912-1914
Authors: Sutherland John
Published: November 2023

THE early months of 1912 saw the anticlimax of the Conciliation Bill. Mrs Ward, who was the antis’ only star woman speaker, motored all over England to rallies. That at Colston Hall in Bristol on 16 February was memorable. Lord Cromer—-now a doddering old man—was in the chair; Charles Hobhouse, MP for Bristol, was the main male speaker.
The End: 1918-1920
Authors: Sutherland John
Published: November 2023

THE WARDS discovered like the rest of the British middle classes that world wars do not come cheap. They were in fact peculiarly vulnerable to sky- high tax assessments. Mary Ward had an extraordinarily large income from her books and the family possessed what looked on paper like vast property holdings. They leased a fine house in the West End of London; they owned a country house and estate in Hertfordshire, and a clutch of adjoining farms and cottages.
Introduction
Authors: Fuller David , Fuller Patricia
Published: November 2023

The underlying purpose of this collection of essays is to reflect, directly and obliquely, on developments in criticism which bear on a debate between different models of knowledge—a science model and its place in the university versus other ways of conceiving knowledge for which the arts have traditionally been seen as vehicles but which the science model makes currently problematic. It has, of course, been open to contributors to challenge this way of conceiving the problem. We invited contributions from outside the literary academy (Doris Lessing, Raymond Tallis, and, in his current work, David Lodge) so that discussion could range beyond points of view directly informed by, but also therefore inevitably caught up in, the institutional construction of the subject on which it was part of our aim to reflect.
Science and the Self Lacan’s Doctrine of the Signifier
Authors: Berthoud Jacques
Published: November 2023

Interpretations of Lacan’s work vary enormously, but there seems to be some convergence on the view that it represents an attempt to raise psychoanalysis to the level of a science, along with other so-called human sciences such as linguistics, anthropology, sociology, even literary theory. It is well known that this project, which would variously occupy Lacan’s energies for the rest of his life, first emerged in his address to the newly formed Socićtć Française de Psychanalyse in Rome in September 1953.’ It is equally agreed that it was in this ‘Rome Discourse’, as it is familiarly known, that Lacan registered for the first time, though somewhat covertly, the impact on himself of Levi-Strauss’s structural anthropology. What Lacan found in Levi-Strauss was a radical claim: ‘Like language, the social is an autonomous reality (in fact the same reality); symbols are more real than what they symbolise, the signifier precedes and determines the signified.’2 These combative propositions reflected Levi-Strauss’s early decision to ground social meaning in symbolic codes understood as conditions of social meaning.
Literary Criticism and Literary Creation
Authors: Lodge David
Published: November 2023

The word ‘criticism’ covers a great many types of reflection on literature, from the most private and casual to the most public and systematic. It includes the activity of reading itself, inasmuch as reading a literary text is a process of continuous interpretation and evaluation. The mere decision to go on reading a novel or poem to its end is a kind of critical act, since you will suffer no material loss or practical inconvenience by abandoning it. In this large sense, criticism is, as T. S. Eliot observed, ‘as inevitable as breathing’. But for the most part I shall be concerned with criticism as the written articulation of the reading process in the form of reviews, essays, books, which may themselves take many different forms and have many different objectives: descriptive, prescriptive, polemical, theoretical, and so on. Criticism covers a huge variety of discourses, and when generalizations are made about the relation between it and creative writing, or between it and scientific discourse, it is usually a particular type of criticism that is being referred to, implicitly or explicitly.
Beneath Interpretation Intention and the Experience of Literature
Authors: Fry Paul H
Published: November 2023

Literary theory is for the most part a thing of the past. To be sure, if we allow that all of today’s approaches to literature that have already been grounded in social identity are ‘theoretical’, then certainly a great deal of theory is still being written concerning the identification, interpretation, and criticism of literature. And indeed, although it seems to me that no single one of these ‘discourses’, as they are called, entails a power of generalization strong enough to support either a foundational or an antifoundational account of the human science we call literary, it is true none the less that all of them taken together (all the race, class, gender, and historicist theories) do continue to reflect a paradigm conflict of general purport in the antifoundational tradition. The pioneering version of this conflict was Jacques Derrida’s ‘Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences’, where the system of binary oppositions central to structuralism, from Saussure to Levi-Strauss, was subjected to critique under the general notion of ‘freeplay’. On this view, the ‘signified’ yoked to the ‘signifier’ in the Saussurian formula stands revealed as itself a signifier in an indeterminate chain of implication, such that there can be no governing signifier or god-term standing outside a given structure with respect to any signified taken to be that structure. I (Wittgenstein’s deconstruction-if I may-of objectivist accounts of the part-whole relation in paragraphs 47-67 of the Philosophical Investigations is a similar landmark along the separate path that led to neo-pragmatist appropriations of speech-act philosophy.)
Mac Flecknoe, Heir of Augustus
Authors: Erskine-Hill Howard
Published: November 2023

The aim of this essay is to balance a largely literary-critical account of Mac Flecknoe, certainly correct so far as it goes, with a historical and political account. For a start we may briefly review some of the salient points of the poem’s reception during the last forty-seven years. Ian Jack’s Augustan Satire (1952) insisted on the work’s mockheroic logic: high terms used, ironically, to ridicule a low subject. On the occasion of the poem, James Kinsley, in his edition The Poems of John Dryden (1958), candidly stated that while the critical disagreements between Dryden and Shadwell concerning the achievement of Jonson and the nature of comedy were ‘the basis of Mac Flecknoe’ yet ‘the occasion of the satire on Shadwell is unknown’. Kinsley found no personal animosity on Dryden’s part in his critical exchanges with Shadwell, and was unable to explain Dryden’s sudden change to poetic satire without positing ‘some personal quarrel’ thus far undiscovered.
Editing, Authenticity, and Translation: Re-Presenting Dryden’s Poetry In 2000
Authors: Hopkins David
Published: November 2023

I begin with two quotations. The first is from James McLaverty‘s paper ‘The Concept of Authorial Intention in Textual Criticism‘: Whereas some works of art (painting and sculpture, for example) are particulars, instanced by one unreproducible individual, other works of art, most clearly music, are types, instanced by any number of tokens. Those works of art which are types may have scores from which ‘performances‘ of the work can be realized. If we accept that literature should be classed with music as an art in which works can be composed in the mind, can have any number of instances, and can be performed (as plays are and as poems used to be) we can say that the editor‘s concern is with the score. The score represents the work, it is not identical with it.
Dante in Somerset: Ghosts, Historiography ,Periodization
Authors: Wallace David
Published: November 2023

English readers, or readers who have spent much time in England, will probably find the notion of ‘Dante in Somerset’ faintly comic, perhaps preposterous. Why is that? And how did that particular ‘structure of feeling’ (the finding comic or preposterous) come to be?1 Perhaps it is the unassimilable largeness and foreignness of Dante (as a medieval Italian Ghibelline Roman Catholic) that makes him seem so unlikely a visitor, or long-term resident, of such a quiet, deeply rural locality. The landscape of Somerset in south-west England has never been fully assailed by the energies of an industrial revolution nor fully hymned as a site of natural grandeur.
Forgery at the University of Cambridge
Authors: Hiatt Alfred
Published: November 2023

In 1564 the visit of Queen Elizabeth I to the University of Cambridge provoked a venomous and long-winded debate between the Cambridge physician and classicist John Caius, and his Oxford namesake, Thomas Caius. The object of each man was to assert that his own university was the most ancient, not only in England, but in the whole of Christen¬ dom. The Cambridge Caius argued that an exiled Spanish king, Cantaber, had founded the East Anglian studium in annomundi 3588; the Oxford Caius maintained in his Assertioantiquitatisacademiaeoxoniensis—presented to the Queen in 1566—that Oxford could trace its history back to the Trojan colonization of Britain. The argument rumbled on well into the eighteenth century, and gained fresh impetus from the contributions of such prominent and verbose Oxford antiquarians as Brian Twyne, Anthony a Wood, and Thomas Hearne.
Rivalry and Reciprocity in Lydgate’sTroy Book
Authors: Straker Scott-Morgan
Published: November 2023

Shortly after the marriage on 2 June 1420 of England’s King Henry V to Katherine of Valois, the youngest daughter of Charles VI of France, John Lydgate completed his massive translation of Guido delle Colonne’s Historiadestructionistroiae, which Henry commissioned him to write in 1412. The Troy Book begins and ends with a tribute to its patron, and in 1420 the achievements Lydgate chooses to celebrate are Henry’s marriage and the diplomatic coup represented by the Treaty of Troyes (ratified 21 May 1420). Although the history he translates visits disaster upon all its protagonists, Lydgate ends the TroyBook on a note of literary and political triumph: the completion of his task coincides with the consummation of Henry V’s continental ambition.
Reading Caxton: Transformations in Capital Authority, Print, and Persona in the Late Fifteenth Century
Authors: Kuskin William
Published: November 2023

The printed book’s authority in the late fifteenth century is complex: a combination of the text’s authorial and exemplary authority clearly, but also an expression of the social and political authority vested in the various audiences that sponsored its initial production in manuscript and its subsequent reproduction in print. Readings of William Caxton traditionally rely on the categories of patronage and commerce to explain his press’s relationship to this authority.
Introduction: Gendered Cartographies of Viewing
Authors: Parsons Deborah L
Published: November 2023

THE RE are infinite versions of any one city. The city as a text to be read, the text as a city to be traversed; this formulation has become so common as to be almost a clich é. Not only linguistic terms and figures of speech, but also forms of perception, experience, and communication are predicated on the ‘body’ and ‘soul’ of the city. Yet the relationship is not just one of analogy —we are increasingly realizing the significance of the urban map as influential in the very structures of social and mental daily life. A city can be analysed demographically, economically, architecturally, as the result of an urban plan or a history of literary and visual representation.
Epilogue: Re-envisioning the Urban Walker
Authors: Parsons Deborah L
Published: November 2023

Put her brain, together with the other million brains, women’s brains, that recorded in such tiny loving anxious detail the histories of windowsills, skins of paint, replaced curtains and salvaged baulks of timber, and there would be a recording instrument, a sort of six-dimensional map which included the histories and lives and loves of people, London-a section map in depth.’
Homoerotic Puns and Queer Collaborations
Authors: Bly Mary
Published: November 2023

Even given a very loose definition of ‘pun’, Chapter 4 dealt with homoerotic imagery rather than with puns. However, I argued that certain rhetorical flourishes were experienced as puns—in other words, they offered a code to early modern audience members. They are, then, of a family with those puns whose pivotal moment is the figurative undressing of the speaker, the bawdy regendered puns of Chapters 2 and 3. This chapter will mediate between the most material of facts—the White friars syndicate’s contracts, lawsuits, and debts—and the most elusive of linguistic forms, a pun in the moment of performance. I will be constructing a triangular enquiry, pitting the nature of the theatrical company, the nature of queer puns, and the nature of authorial collaboration against each other.
Epilogue
Authors: King Kathryn R
Published: November 2023

The view of Barker proposed in this study has emphasized continuities linking her with her own time and place even if, ironically, these links call into question the feminist paradigms that brought her to our attention in the first place. Approaches which stress her kinship with other women writers serve well the feminist literary historical aim of reconstructing the lineages and networks of female affiliation which for their part bring significance to the study of early modern women’s writings, but their effect is to distort the nature of Barker’s literary achievement and, less happily still, to obscure much of what is most distinctive in her work.
Slavery, Testimony, Propaganda: John Newton, William Cowper, and Compulsive Confession
Authors: Wood Marcus
Published: November 2023

John Newton is one of the most terrifying personalities of the second half of the eighteenth century. Still lionized by Christian publishers as one of theproudest examples of a converted sinner, he published several autobiographical accounts of his life and has been the subject of a steady flow of biographies ever since.1 At least ten have been published in the last two decades, four of them designed for a juvenile market.2 Newton is currently reincarnated within the celebratory rhetoric of the British Tourist Board, his bewigged and jowelly face appearing on the display boards, and interspersed among the images and narratives, of the ‘Cowper and Newton Museum Home of Olney’s Heritage’.
Introduction: Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the Sciences of Life
Authors: Roe Nicholas
Published: November 2023

On the evening of 26 January 1793 members of the Physical Society squeezed onto the benches in the Theatre at Guy’s Hospital, London, to listen to a lecture which brought advanced science into explosive contact with revolutionary politics. John Thelwall, who was the most notorious ‘Jacobin’ reformist in the country, a leader of the London Corresponding Society, a poet and orator, addressed the audience on the theme of ‘Vitality’.
Glorious Causes
Authors: Swindells Julia
Published: November 2023

Glorious Causes explores the politics of theatricality and the theatricality of politics in late Georgian Britain, at a time when the British nation can be described as a stage for reform. 1832 is particularly significant for legislation in relation to both the drama and the parliamentary franchise. In many ways, though, the forces of change date back to the later part of the eighteenth-century, and were set in motion by powerful liberation movements, not only in France and North America, but in Britain itself. Particularly important, in addition to agitation for the vote, were the movements for abolition of the slave trade and slave emancipation, the attempt to improve conditions in the factory, resistance to the exploitation of agricultural workers and, not least, the early struggle for women's rights. Political rhetoric was characterized by a rich vocabulary, drawing on theatrical language and forms, from melodrama and tragedy, to comedy and burlesque. Most importantly, activity in the theatres themselves, often dismissed until recently as vulgar or sentimental, was highly charged with political dynamic and controversy, central to the drama of reform.
Introduction: Beyond the Pale
Authors: McCabe Richard A
Published: November 2023

I OWE the idea for this book to a question posed by a disgruntled student at a Spenser seminar in Dublin: ‘If King Arthur was Celtic how can he be the hero of an English national epic?’ AB I was preoccupied at the time with explaining the influence of Neoplatonism on the Gardens of Adonis, this salvo from the blue, or rather from the green, was most unwelcome. I mentioned ‘poetic licence’ and passed swiftly on, but the question lingered in my mind and I thought of it again when I visited Kilcolman for the first time. It reminded me that the Irish dimension of The Faerie Queene is as much a matter of text as context, as much a concern of poetic fabric as polemical allusion.
Diana’s Spite
Authors: McCabe Richard A
Published: November 2023

In presenting the Mutability Cantos to the reading public in 1609, Matthew Lownes judged his moment shrewdly. During the1590s Spenser was one of the most popular authors published by his rival, William Ponson-by, and his success was greatly enhanced by a reputation for topicality. Lownes had sought to capitalize on this by attempting to publish A View of the Present State of Ireland at the very height of the Nine Years’ War. That project had come to nothing but now, with Ireland at the top of the political agenda once again, Spenser could be made to address current issues from beyond the grave. The appearance of the Mutability Cantos, set in the devastated wastelands of the Munster plantation, coincided with the issuing of James I’s ‘Orders and Conditions’ for the plantation of Ulster.
Modern Irish Poetry
Authors: Sewell Frank
Published: November 2023

Recently, chapters on individual Irish-language authors have formed part of publications regarding modern Irish art and culture in general. Such chapters are welcome but they have excited the curiosity of readers to the degree that longer, more detailed works are now required to put writing in Irish into perspective. In this study of four modern poets (two each from two generations), Sewell attempts to illustrate not only the accumulative but the transformative nature of tradition. Chapters 1 and 2 turn from the mid-20th century master Seán Ó Riordáin to the contemporary poet Cathal Ó Searcaigh because the comparison and contrast highlights significant aspects of the amazing development of Irish poetry and, indeed, society in the period. Here, importantly, the word 'development' is meant in a neutral way - the image used is that of a zig-zag movement in the pattern of the continuing Irish tradition. Chapter 3 returns to the slightly earlier, major Irish-language poet Máirtín Ó Direáin. In doing so, it returns home (from the internationalism of the previous chapter on Searcaigh) to Ireland - a major focus and concern for the more solely traditionalist Ó Direáin. This switch back (in time, geography, social mores or outlook) fits and illustrates Sewell's concept of the zig-zag movement of a country's culture as it proceeds from generation to generation. The positioning, therefore, has a thematic purpose. The fourth and final chapter focuses on the contemporary poet Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill who has managed to synthesise tradition and modernity (central concerns of this book) and who, in doing so, has become the current trail-blazer of Irish poetry in either language.
Máirtín Ó Direáin: Departures You Cannot Go Back On
Authors: Sewell Frank
Published: November 2023

Throughout his career, however, his private concerns mainly of love and loss (in a word: change) mirror, in varying degrees, those of the contemporary Irish public and of humanity in general.
The Old English Exodus and the Colonization of the Promised Land
Authors: Savage Anne
Published: November 2023

Translation, the moving of one thing to occupy another place, is of unusual significance in Anglo-Saxon England, because of that culture’s transition into Christianity: written language-to-language translation is a broad, general category, while other kinds of translation—of systems of belief and behaviour—bear close examination. For example, the moving of saints’ relics to more prestigious sites with particular significance to the Anglo-Saxon Church, or the transmutation of Christian values in terms of the warrior ethos, reclaimed and transformed pre-Christian Anglo-Saxon beliefs in a process which carried validation and revalidation along with it. First, I would like to discuss translation generally in Anglo-Saxon England; then the Old English Exodus, which exemplifies this process.
The Knight of the Tower and the Queen in Sanctuary: Elizabeth Woodville’s Use of Meaningful Silence and Absence
Authors: Kemp Theresa D
Published: November 2023

0n 29 April 1483 Richard, Duke of Gloucester (later Richard III) intercepted the 12-year-old King Edward V at Stony Stratford as he headed toward London for his coronation. On the following day Richard also arrested the king’s closest companions, chief among them Anthony Woodville (his maternal uncle), Richard Grey (his maternal half-brother), and his chamberlain, Thomas Vaughan. When the news reached London four days later, Elizabeth Woodville (Edward V’s newly widowed mother) immediately fled with her daughters and remaining son into the Sanctuary at Westminster Abbey. During the period between Elizabeth’s flight and Richard Ill’s death at Bosworth, the Ricardian and Woodville factions engaged in a political struggle for dynastic power which involved two competing versions of Elizabeth’s identity. In general, the Ricardians drew upon the prevailing ideology requiring female obedience to male authority and prohibiting female speech. Accusing her of the double crime of not only speaking (a woman naming herself rather than being named) but also of speaking falsely (naming herself queen and royal mother), they charged her with seditiously disrupting England’s social order by wrongfully inserting herself and her children into the royal dynastic chain.
Gender and Politics in Osbern Bokenham’s Legendary
Authors: Hilles Carroll
Published: November 2023

There is much evidence to support the now widespread association of women and pious reading in the latter part of the Middle Ages. Elite women were not only historically important patrons, they were also interpellated as ideal readers of clerical texts.1 Hence the sense of inevitability associated with Osbern Bokenham’s decision to create a legendary of female saints. Between 1443 and 1447, Bokenham, an Augustinian friar at Clare Priory, Suffolk, wrote the only collection of lives of female saints in Middle English. Called ‘Legends of Holy Women’ by its twentieth-century editor, Mary Serjeantson, the untitled legendary exists in a single manuscript, London, British Library Arundel 327.
Towards an Epidemiology of Paranoid Narrative
Authors: Trotter David
Published: November 2023

By Harold Perkin’ s account, it was during the period between 1880 and the First World War that ‘professional society’ finally and unequivocally ‘rose’. ‘By r9u,’ Perkin notes, ‘if we add the lesser professionals and technicians to the higher ones, the professions were 4. r per cent of the occupied population, not much short of the 4.6 per cent who were “employers” in the census of industrial status, and if we add “managers and administrators” the figure rises to 7.5 per cent, larger than the category of “employers and proprietors” (6.7 per cent).’ As significant as the overall increase in numbers was the degree of organization now to be found within the majority of professions. To the seven qualifying associations extant in 1800—two Royal Colleges, four Inns of Court for barristers, and the Society of Apothecaries—twenty had been added by 188o. In the period between 1880 and the First World War, by contrast, no less than thirty-nine further associations were formed: for chartered accountants, estate agents, insurance brokers, and so on. Several non-qualifying associations, such as the National Union of Teachers, also came into being, as did an ‘intellectual class’ consisting of ‘men of letters’, ‘men of science’, and university teachers.
The Will-to-Abstraction: Hulme, Lewis, Lawrence
Authors: Trotter David
Published: November 2023

People no longer wanted the self-effacements of impressionism, Wyndham Lewis told Ford Madox Ford in 1914. And while I have tried to show in my previous two chapters that literary impressionism was less self-effacing than one might suppose, nobody could doubt that the stunts and firework-displays Lewis had in mind were of a different order to the sad stories told by Conrad and Ford. ‘What’s the good of being an author’, Lewis demanded, ‘if you don’t get any fun out of it?’ This chapter is in part an attempt to determine what it was that Lewis got his fun out of. For the purpose of the stunts he performed in the years before the war was to outshine impressionism. Ford (Hueffer, as he then was) had given Lewis his big literary break by publishing some pieces in the English Reviell’. He was ripe for outshining.
Beyond Modernism, Beyond Paranoia
Authors: Trotter David
Published: November 2023

My argument concerning ‘paranoid Modernism’ has reached a point where any further elaboration would be significantly reiterative. It must stand or fall by what it has enabled me to say about works by Conrad, Ford, Lawrence, and Lewis, and about the embeddedness of those works in early twentieth-century English culture and society: their reckoning with professional status and with the psychopathies of expertise, their grasp of masculinity as a form of cultural capital, their postliberalism, their susceptibility to moral panic. To develop the argument further would require the construction of a different frame of reference.
Making, Mourning, and the Love of Idols
Authors: Fradenburg L O Aranye
Published: November 2023

For one to be responsible and responsive seems, in the dominant strains of Western ethics, to require that one be ‘alive’ or ‘sentient’ and address a living other. Sentience here is ‘consciousness, susceptibility to sensation’; something is sentient if it ‘feels or is capable of feeling’, has ‘the power or function of sensation or of perception by the senses’. Classical ethical regimens enhance sentience by stylizing sense-feeling and awareness of aliveness. In medieval moral theology, the more sentient the creature, the more extensive its ethical responsibilities. For Aquinas, the intellectual capacity to derive universals from sense-perception—a process with clear implications for justic—is a sublime form of human sentience.
The Sacrament of the Altar in Piers Plowman and the Late Medieval Church in England
Authors: Aers David
Published: November 2023

This chapter explores Langland’s understanding of sacramental signs, particularly of the sacrament of the altar. Scholars of Piers Plowman seem to have found such an enquiry rather irrelevant and the reason is probably the one given in the chapter on ‘Langland’s theology’ in The Companion to Piers Plowman. There Robert Adams writes that Langland’s theology of the sacraments is ‘ethical rather than sacramental’. It is indicative that we have a massive and often informative work on Piers Plowman and the sacrament of penance, a substantial work on Piers Plowman and marriage, work on Piers Plowman and the liturgy, but nothing comparable, as far as I am aware, on the sacrament of the altar and Piers Plowman.
Langland’s Ymaginatif: Images and the Limits of Poetry
Authors: Hanna III Ralph
Published: November 2023

Ymaginatif has recently attracted more attention than any other personification in piers plowman save perhaps the narrator Wille himself. Indeed, critical interest in this character has exceeded even that accorded the title figure. Certain broad views of Ymaginatif are widely held, as Mary Carruthers suggests: ‘we generally agree that Ymaginatif is the soul’s image-making power, the vis imaginativa of the scholastics’.

But Carruthers’s identifying phrase ‘of the scholastics’ prejudges the issue, although not, perhaps, without justice. Her formulation attends to an anomaly of Langland’s presentation: as a name, Ymaginatif is neither quite complete nor quite sensible in English. Morphologically, the word is not properly a name, a noun, but an adjective, and all its fourteenth-century uses, of which Langland’s is probably the earliest, represent calque formations on learned Latin phrases in which the word is adjectival. Yet these usages do not cohere in a single discourse, nor one specifically ‘scholastic’, if by that one means ‘the talk of theologians’. Langland’s term might depend on the discourse of faculty psychology, where vis imaginativa is commonplace.
Sophistic, Spectrality, Iconoclasm
Authors: Copeland Rita
Published: November 2023

The most important moment in the history of rhetoric is also the moment that was effectively blotted from the record for nearly two millennia, at the very point when rhetoric’s historiography began to be written: the moment of the ancient sophists, the predecessors and immediate contemporaries—and rivals—of Socrates. It was Socrates’ own historiographer and mythographer, Plato, who successfully disparaged and discredited the sophists. Some say that we should credit the sophists with the very invention of rhetoric as a pedagogy and science; but all would agree that it is to the sophists that we owe the emergence of rhetoric as an intellectual system and as an epistemology based on the power of language.
The Vivacity of Images: St Katherine, Knighton’s Lollards, and the Breaking of Idols
Authors: Stanbury Sarah
Published: November 2023

One of the most graphic accounts of an act of iconoclasm in pre-Reformation England occurs in Henry Knighton’s Chronicle, written in an Augustinian abbey in Leicester and covering the years 1337–96. In a long discussion of the Lollard heresy, Knighton tells the story of two ‘collatores principales’, chief sustainers of heresy, William Smith and a chaplain, Richard Waytestathe, who chopped up an image of St Katherine and then burned it as fuel to make a cabbage stew. In this account, which is told with Knighton’s characteristic skill as a raconteur and with an eye to the lurid horrors of Lollard violations of decency, Knighton gives us information about character and motivation: William Smith, ‘so called from his craft’, was deformed in person and had taken on an extremist sectarian faith when he was spurned in love.
Stateside Poetry Protest and Prophecy
Authors: Chattarji Subarno
Published: November 2023

The Second World War in its global reach, its effect on vast civilian populations, the extermination of 6 million Jews, and the use of atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, was an exercise in mass destruction. That the allies, and particularly America, won the war and constructed a post-war mythology of a righteous triumph over evil, cannot mitigate the actual evil: the war itself. Numbers give us an idea of the extent of the carnage, but as Paul Fussell points out,

the sheer numbers defeat attempts to flesh them out with actual, unique human beings. Killed and wounded were over 78 million people, more of them civilians than soldiers. Close to 6 million Jews were beaten, shot, or gassed to death by the Germans. One million people died of starvation and despair in the siege of Leningrad⃛If the battle of the Somme constitutes a scandal because 20,000 British soldiers were killed in one day, twice the number of civilians were asphyxiated and burned to death in the bombing of Hamburg. Seventy thousand died at Hiroshima, 35,000at Nagasaki, and the same at Dresden.
Introduction: The Republic of Ireland and Scotland: What Difference Does it Make?
Authors: Ryan Ray
Published: November 2023

On I May I997, the day Tony Blair’s Labour Party triumphed in the British general election, the then leader of the Scottish National Party, Alex Salmond, published an article in the Irish Timesentitled ‘Irish Show Scots Road to Success’. The piece strongly criticized Blair’s plans for Scottish Home Rule. Salmond quoted Parnell’s famous speech at Cork on 2I January I885, invoking Parnell’s declaration that ‘No man has the right to fix the boundary to the march of a nation; no man has the right to say to his country-”thus far shalt thou go and no further”.
The Republic and Ireland: Dermot Bolger, ‘Bolgerism’, and Dublin
Authors: Ryan Ray
Published: November 2023

One Consequence of the revision of Irish history has been the gradual redefinition of the Irish nation until it becomes almost conterminous with the twenty-six counties. Hence Tom Garvin, professor of political science at University College Dublin, can claim that ‘Long before the island of Ireland was partitioned in 1920 … the areas that were to become the Irish Republic and Northern Ireland had shown clear signs of developing in different directions and of becoming different societies … Partition therefore accelerated or aggravated a process of divergence that had previously existed, and did not artificially instigate it for the first time.’ This is refreshingly frank, and ‘artificial’ is an intriguing term.
Colm T6ibin, Partition, and the Ends of History
Authors: Ryan Ray
Published: November 2023

It was the centre of power, our neo-gothic cathedral at the top of the main street … much grander than the town’s Protestant church it was a sign of the great rich might of the Catholic church in the nineteenth century … There are certain things that I know about them [his rural ancestors, or can imagine, but before them I can imagine nothing and I know nothing. The Cathedral is the beginning of real imaginable time.
The ‘Gentleman-Tarpaulin’ ISsue And The Reform Of The Officer Corps
Authors: Davies J D
Published: November 2023

The officers of the Restoration navy in general, and the gentlemen captains in particular, have long been damned by the judgements in Pepys’s diary, in his 01hcr writings, and in the works of other contem porary or near-contemporary writers, all of whom accuse them of having been indisciplined and incompetent.
Liverpool, Eton, and Oxford
Authors: Matthew H C G
Published: November 2023

The earliest document in the Gladstone family papers is dated 1550; none the less, John Gladstone, the Prime Minister’s father, was a self-made man. His career epitomized the entrepreneurial drive which made British commerce the dominant influence in world trade in the first half of the nineteenth century. His father, Thomas Gladstones, was a middle-ranking corn dealer in Edinburgh and Leith, the family having moved to the capital from the village of Biggar in the Scottish Borders. John Gladstone, born in Leith in 1764, soon saw the limitations of east coast trade, and moved west. Ignoring the difficulties of the French and American wars, and indeed turning those difficulties to advantage by surefooted anticipation of shortages, he assembled a huge fortune, travelling widely in North America and the Baltic in pursuit of purchases.
Church, State, and Free Trade: the Public Crisis of the 1840s
Authors: Matthew H C G
Published: November 2023

Thus Gladstone wrote in his diary (or journal, as he always called it) on his birthday, 29 December 1844, as he prepared to resign from Peel’s cabinet on the Maynooth question. And indeed strong cords were being both woven around him and released, cords which, partly by his own tying and partly by the developments of the day, came to bind him to political and intellectual positions which in the 1830s he would have regarded as inconceivable, even satanic. The predominant features of Gladstone’s life in the 1840s are those of sharp change and sometimes painful consolidation: change in domestic, political, and intellectual affairs; consolidation in the gradual establishment of life-long attitudes and commitments. Domestically, Gladstone’s marriage in 1839 marked the start of wide-ranging responsibilities and changes.
Colonial, Foreign, and Defence Policy, 1880-1885
Authors: Matthew H C G
Published: November 2023

Colonial or, as it was increasingly called, Imperial policy and foreign policy were the chief areas in which Gladstone intended to restore right conduct and right principles after the disasters of Beaconsfieldism. Gladstone had seen these disasters as caused by individual failures of ‘panic or pride’ within what he saw as a systematic perversion of good government: good men with right principles—’the exercise of moral control over ambition and cupidity’—could restore proper conduct and right relations. Though recognizing Britain’s inherent capacity for Empire, he explicitly declined to accept that there was any underlying or determinist pattern of causation.
Towards Home Rule
Authors: Matthew H C G
Published: November 2023

Within thirteen months of the fall of his second government in June 1885, Gladstone had fought two elections, had proposed a gigantic settlement of the Irish question which dominated Liberal politics for the rest of their significant existence, and had split his party. We now, therefore, turn our attention to that ‘mighty heave in the body politic’, ‘the idea of constituting a Legislature for Ireland’‡ History of an Idea was the title of the first half of the apologia on Home Rule which Gladstone wrote in 1886 after his electoral defeat.§ The phraseology and the format of a public, historical explanation take us back to A Chapter of Autobiography (1868), Gladstone’s other public apologia.
The Fourth Gladstone Government, 1892-1894
Authors: Matthew H C G
Published: November 2023

On 15 August 1892, Gladstone went to Osborne House to receive the Queen’s commission to form a government: the only one of the four times on which she did not seriously attempt to find an alternative.† She did not need to: Gladstone’s party position was unassailable, but his political position was broken by the results of the general election. Early results at the start of July were ‘even too rosy’, but a gain of So British seats at least was expected.
The Making of English Collegiate Statutes in the Later Middle Ages
Authors: Davis Virginia
Published: November 2023

In 1852 Magdalen College Oxford filed a bill in chancery to obtain an injunction against G. R. Ward prohibiting the publication of his translation of the college’s statutes. The injunction was subsequently withdrawn but the publication of the volume resulted in much criticism. At the heart of this dispute was concern about the dissemination of the founder’s statutes which, it was claimed by detractors of the publication, had been forbidden by the founder himself. Ward in his defence pointed out that the real words of William Waynflete, founder of the college in 1458, had been ‘We strictly inhibit the President and all and each of the Fellows and Scholars of our College, from being over-ready and hasty in displaying their evidences ... the other muniments and originals and the original book of all our Statutes’.
The Nature and Influence of Late Renaissance Paduan Psychology
Authors: Michael Emily
Published: November 2023

The University of Padua, the state university of the Venetian Republic and second oldest university in Europe, was founded after the University of Bologna in 1222. During the Renaissance and early modern period, the University of Padua, attended by important thinkers of all nations, was one of the most important universities in Europe, and it has for some time been reputed to be the centre of a distinctive philosophical approach. Since Ernest Renan’s classic work, Averroes et l’averroisme, written during the latter part of the nineteenth century, this distinctive Paduan approach has been associated with the influence of Averroes and Alexander of Aphrodisias, and, indeed, both played a significant role in the development of Paduan thought, but this is not the whole story. Charles B. Schmitt explains that, in fact, the views of individual Renaissance Aristotelians are so diverse and so eclectic that he prefers to speak of Renaissance Aristotelianisms, and to focus upon individual accounts. There can be no doubt Aristotelians at Padua did develop complex and individual analyses that often go beyond the influence of Averroes and Alexander. In what follows I wish to add a further chapter to this story.
Monarchic Liturgies and the ‘Hidden King’: The Function and Meaning of Spanish Royal Portraiture in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries
Authors: Cremades Fernando Checa
Published: November 2023

With the start of the reign of the house of Austria in the kingdoms of Spain, the Habsburg dynasty acquired a place within the widest community of peoples during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, to such an extent that the Spanish branch of the Habsburgs became one of the most decisive factors in the internationalization of Spanish art in the modem period. Not only did the Habsburgs produce a characteristic and defining iconography (expressed, for example, in the continued reference to the myth of Hercules, the importance of representations of the dynasty, and the enormous significance of the symbolism linked to the Order of the Golden Fleece), which was used in triumphal arches and commemorative cycles, but also a very distinctive self-image best reflected in the portrait genre—and one which was to transcend even its own stylistic evolution. Consequently, the study of this phenomenon cannot be approached merely from formal and iconographical perspectives, since the reasons for it must also be sought in political, ritual, and even anthropological factors.
The Arnerican war and the volunteers
Authors: Mcdowell R B
Published: November 2023

During the long recess which followed the Irish parliamentary session of I 773-4 discontent in the American colonies and the determination of the home government to assert its authority produced a series of incidents which formed a grim chain of causation leading to armed conflict at Concord in April I 775. Ireland and America were linked by innumerable family ties and Irishmen settled in the colonies were conspicuously involved in the War of Independence. Early in the war a young officer serving in America, in a letter published in the Hibernian Magazine stated that the troops which ’kept up the spirit and life of the rebellion were totally Scotch and Irish’, many of the latter being tenants forced by eviction to emigrate. Some years later an Irish M.P. went further, declaring that ‘the Irish in both the British and American forces have distinguished themselves and borne away the laurels’.
The catholic agitation
Authors: Mcdowell R B
Published: November 2023

While during 1791 the radical agitation for reform was getting under way, another section of Irish society, already provided with well-tried machinery through which it could exercise political pressure, was beginning to stir. The Irish catholics for some years after the passing of the 1782 relief act had refrained from pressing for the abolition of the remaining disabilities. For the moment they were grateful for what they had received and perhaps sensed that the protestant mind needed an interval in which to adjust itself to the inevitability of further concession. But by the close of the eighties their instinctive urge to ask for more was stimulated by events outside Ireland. In the United States religious equality was accepted as politically axiomatic. At Westminster in 1789 and 1790 the disabilities of the English dissenter were debated when it was moved that the test and corporation acts be repealed, and at the end of 1789 the French national assembly decreed that French protestants should enjoy all civic rights.
Radicalism and reaction
Authors: Mcdowell R B
Published: November 2023

While the catholics had been developing a sustained and well organized drive for relief, the Irish radicals had been both encouraging the catholics and strenuously striving to promote what they regarded as the more comprehensive cause of reform. During 1792 the Dublin society of United Irishmen produced six important addresses declaring their aims and ideals, and early in 1792 it publicly challenged parliament and the executive on two important constitutional issues, though, unfortunately for the radicals, political drama was interspersed with farce. During the commons debate on the catholic petition, Toler, the solicitor-general, who had a penchant for robust humour, entertained the house by offensive puns based on Tandy’s distinctive and unattractive facial appearance. Tandy immediately sent a friend, Colonel Smith, to demand an explanation. Toler refused to apologize and suggested as a suitable place for a meeting the fields adjacent to Merrion Square.
Agrarian trouble and militant radicalism
Authors: Mcdowell R B
Published: November 2023

At the close of the session of 1795 Camden and Pelham could congratulate themselves on having coped successfully with the problems created by Fitzwilliam’s incursion into Irish politics. The catholic question had been disposed of, and official and parliamentary relationships established which seemed to guarantee the smooth working of the political machine. Fitzwilliam, Camden with some complacency remarked, ‘is as much forgotten here as in the more enlarged scale of London’. But there were already signs that a situation was developing of the utmost gravity, that forces were at work which could cause the collapse of the whole existing political and social regime in Ireland. The country was by the beginning of 1796 clearly in a very vulnerable condition. Agrarian trouble, in the past sporadic, was from the early nineties continuously surging up. Radicalism, which early in 1794 seemed to be a discredited and rapidly diminishing force in Irish politics, was becoming a dangerously well-organized underground movement.