bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
THROUGH THE PRISM OF MALE WRITING: REPRESENTATION OF LESBIAN LOVE IN MING-QING LITERATURE
Authors: Wu H. Laura 
Published: June 2005

AbstractRepresentation of lesbian relations in Ming-Qing vernacular literature is foremost a male discourse. A close look into this discourse will help gauge the contemporary social stance, especially the male stance, towards lesbianism. This paper examines textual strategies and the narrative norm of portraying lesbian love and sex in twelve Ming-Qing texts. The normative pattern extracted from these texts suggests a consensus in the male position that favors suppression of lesbianism via trivializing or heterosexualizing passions and romance between women. Male writing on lesbianism thus seems to function as containment of homosexuality for the benefit of the institutions of heterosexual sex and marriage.
FIGHTING FOR LOVE: MALE JEALOUSY IN EIGHTEENTH CENTURY CHINA
Authors: Paderni Paola 
Published: June 2005

AbstractThis article considers male jealousy as reflected in judicial sources, thus placing it in historical context. Men who lived in an increasingly difficult and complex world committed acts of violence because of jealousy, driven by a sense of honor, by love and by desire for a woman. Magistrates handling these cases were forced to recognize that jealousy, considered in Chinese literary tradition a typically female and dangerous sentiment, is a powerful force conditioning male behavior.
SUBLIME LOVE AND THE ETHICS OF EQUALITY IN A HOMOEROTIC NOVEL OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: PRECIOUS MIRROR OF BOY ACTRESSES
Authors: McMahon Keith 
Published: June 2005

AbstractPrecious Mirror of Boy Actresses is the most serious piece of fiction about male love since the late Ming and the lengthiest of all in Chinese literary history. It is remarkable in its extension of the egalitarian implications of the qing aesthetic that it inherits from the late Ming and from earlier Qing literature such as Dream of the Red Chamber. In the homoerotic relationship it idealizes, lovers who are rigidly separated in terms of status nevertheless experience a sublime love which necessarily results in the liberation of the man of lower status. The novel makes unique use of the qing aesthetic's idealization of the feminine to arrive at this ethically pragmatic conclusion whereby liberation is achieved. The foregrounding of this sublime love and the qing-perfected characters who embody it, moreover, link the novel with other works of the period which portray a China that is ultimately a stable and invulnerable entity. Thus Precious Mirror's interpretation of qing carries a historical significance in spite of the novel's obliviousness of the social and political turmoil of China in the mid-nineteenth century.
Concealment, Revelation, And Gender: The Veil Of Moses in The Bible And in Christian Art
Authors: Britt Brian 
Published: June 2005

AbstractMoses's wearing of a veil (Exod 34:25-39) remains a puzzling and relatively obscure biblical episode. This article interprets Moses's veil as a sign of divine communication and prophecy. Through analysis of the passage, commentary, and images from the history of art, I trace the legacy of the veil as a symbol of the problem of divine revelation itself. For written commentary and artistic tradition, I argue that the veil is concealed, repressed, and transformed in order to ease an anxiety about the veil that is also an anxiety about the text. Christian interpreters (following 2 Cor 3:7-18) associate the veil with Jewish blindness to the gospel. In artistic tradition, the veil of Moses is often linked to the allegorical female Synagogue, who wears a blindfold. The veil, which originally enables Moses to act as a prophet, is thus concealed by religious polemic and linked to the Christian feminization of Jewishness. At the same time, the ambiguity and uncanniness of the veil images evoke the mysterious quality of Exodus 34:29-35. The veil of Moses may thus be seen as a meta-text that alternates between presence and absence, concealment and revelation.
Christ aux Outrages by Henry De Groux: Fin de Siècle Religion, Art Criticism, and the Sociology of the Crowd
Authors: Davenport Nancy 
Published: June 2005

AbstractThe Belgian symbolist painter, Henry De Groux (1866-1930), produced in his life one masterwork, Christ aux Outrages (1888-1889), a vast painting (293-363 cm.) which both embodies his own tormented nature and that of many similarly unsettled fin de siècle Catholics in that age of Positivism, secularization, European sabre rattling, and anarchism. Following its success in the Salon Triennal in Brussels, Henry De Groux, financed by King Leopold II of the Belgians, brought his painting to Paris in 1890 where it was exhibited in the Salon des Arts Liberaux, after being rejected by the salon jury. The image of a timorous, bound, and defenseless Christ and a savagely screaming mob of women, dogs, and children repelled faint-hearted academically-minded critics concerned with religious art and moved the ardent and orthodox. While these writers of religious orientation had their own reasons for praise and blame, this research considers the connection between the painting and the dominant concern among socialists such as Gustave Le Bon in Le Psychologie des Foules (1895) and novelists such as Emile Zola in Germinal and other of his novel for "Crowd Theory." It is the fearful and irrepressible crowd attacking Christ, it is argued, that gave Christ aux Outrages its peculiar significance in fin de siècle Paris.
More on the Sculpture of the West Front of Bath Abbey: Christ of the Charter and Antichrist
Authors: Luxford Julian 
Published: June 2005

AbstractThe iconography of the early sixteenth century sculptural program of Bath Abbey's west front has been shown in a previous article (Religion and the Arts, 4.3 (2000), 313-36) to represent an allegory of spiritual ascent through the virtue of humility and descent through the vice of pride, as explained in chapter seven of the Rule of St Benedict. The current article focuses upon two sculptures largely overlooked by the earlier study, the iconography and positioning of which further substantiates the proposed meaning of the program. One sculpture represents Christ as the Man of Sorrows, holding the Charter of Human Redemption (a devotional text widespread in England during the late Middle Ages). The other represents Antichrist, who was a subject of much speculation during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It is argued that Christ, standing on the north side of the west front, constitutes an additional symbol of humility, while Antichrist, standing on the south, makes another reference to pride. The iconography of these figures is further analyzed for its intrinsic interest, that of Antichrist being unusual, Christ holding the Charter of Human Redemption all but unique.
What is Real. A Reply to Ockham's Ontological Program
Authors: Amerini Fabrizio 
Published: June 2005

AbstractWhen Ockham's logic arrives in Italy, some Dominican philosophers bring into question Ockham's ontological reductionist program. Among them, Franciscus de Prato and Stephanus de Reate pay a great attention to refute Ockham's claim that no universal exists in the extra-mental world. In order to reject Ockham's program, they start by reconsidering the notion of 'real', then the range of application of the rational and the real distinction. Generally, their strategy consists in re-addressing against Ockham some arguments extracted from Hervaeus Natalis's works. Franciscus's and Stephanus's basic idea is that some universals are not acts of cognition, but extra-mental, predicable things. Such things are not separable from singulars, nonetheless they are not the same as those singulars. Consequently, it is not necessary to allow, as Ockham does, that if two things are not really identical, they are really different and hence really separable. According to them, it is possible to hold that two things are not really identical without holding that they are also really non-identical and hence really different. Basically, their reply relies on a different notion of the relation of identity. Identity is regarded as an intersection of classes of things, so that it is possible to say that two things are really identical without saying that they also are the same thing. Franciscus and Stephanus, however, do not seem to achieve completely their aim.
Duns Scotus's Parisian Question on the Formal Distinction
Authors: Dumont Stephen 
Published: June 2005

AbstractThe degree of realism that Duns Scotus understood his formal distinction to have implied is a matter of dispute going back to the fourteenth century. Both modern and medieval commentators alike have seen Scotus's later, Parisian treament of the formal distinction as less realist in the sense that it would deny any extra-mentally separate formalities or realities. This less realist reading depends in large part on a question known to scholars only in the highly corrupt edition of Luke Wadding, where it is printed as the first of the otherwise spurious Quaestiones miscellaneae de formalitatibus. The present study examines this question in detail. Cited by Scotus's contemporaries as the Quaestio logica Scoti, we establish that it was a special disputation held by Scotus at Paris in response to criticisms of his use of the formal distinction in God, identify its known manuscripts, and provide an analysis based upon a corrected text, showing in particular the total unreliability of the Wadding edition. Our analysis shows that the Logica Scoti does not absolutely prohibit an assertion of formalities as correlates of the formal distinction, even in the divine Person, so long as their non-identity is properly qualified. That is, the positing of formalities does not of itself entail an unqualified or absolute distinction.
Johannes Sharpe's Ontology and Semantics: Oxford Realism Revisited
Authors: Conti Alessandro 
Published: June 2005

AbstractThe German Johannes Sharpe is the most important and original author of the so called "Oxford Realists": his semantic and metaphysical theories are the end product of the two main medieval philosophical traditions, realism and nominalism, for he contributed to the new form of realism inaugurated by Wyclif, but was receptive to many nominalist criticisms. Starting from the main thesis of Wyclif's metaphysics, that the universal and individual are really identical but formally distinct, Oxford Realists introduced a new type of predication, based on a partial identity between the entities for which the subject and predicate stood, called predication by essence, and then redefined the traditional post-Aristotelian categories of essential and accidental predication in terms of this partial identity. Sharpe substantially shares the metaphysical view and principles of the other Oxford Realists, but he elaborates a completely different semantics, since he accepts the nominalist principle of the autonomy of thought in relation to the world, and Ockham's explanation for the universality of concepts. Unfortunately, this semantic approach partially undermines his defence of realism, since it deprives Sharpe of any compelling semantic and epistemological reasons to posit universalia in re. Therefore, Sharpe's main ontological theses certainly are sensible and reasonable, but, paradoxically, within his philosophical system they cannot in any way be considered as absolutely consistent.
Scotus's Realist Conception of the Categories: His Legacy to Late Medieval Debates
Authors: Pini Giorgio 
Published: June 2005

AbstractScotus claims that the extramental world is divided into ten distinct kinds of essences, no one of which can be reduced to another one. Although by the end of the thirteenth century this claim was not new, Scotus's way of articulating it into a comprehensive metaphysical doctrine resulted into a ground-breaking contribution to what became known as 'late medieval realism'. This paper shows how Scotus's view of the categories as ten kinds of irreducible essences should be seen as a development and correction of his predecessors' (including Thomas Aquinas's and Henry of Ghent's) views. The main elements of Scotus's doctrine are his application of the real distinction to the categories, his view of inherence as a categorial item separated from accidents, and his distinction between absolute and non-absolute accidents. Finally, although Scotus's doctrine of the univocity of being seems to pose a challenge to his claim that categories are irreducible to each other and do not have anything in common, this paper shows how Scotus's doctrine of univocity and his realist conception of the categories can be reconciled as two theories that describe the world from different points of view.
The Problem of Universals and Wyclif's Alleged "Ultrarealism"
Authors: Spade Paul Vincent 
Published: June 2005

AbstractJohn Wyclif has been described as "ultrarealist" in his theory of universals. This paper attempts a preliminary assessment of that judgment and argues that, pending further study, we have no reason to accept it. It is certainly true that Wyclif is extremely vocal and insistent about his realism, but it is not obvious that the actual content of his view is especially extreme. The paper distinguishes two common medieval notions of a universal, the Aristotelian/Porphyrian one in terms of predication and the Boethian one in terms of being metaphysically common to many. On neither approach does Wyclif 's theory of universals postulate new and non-standard entities besides those recognized by more usual versions of realism. Again pending further study, neither do Wyclif 's views appear to assign philosophically extreme or novel roles to the entities he does recognize as universal. On the contrary, by at least one measure, his theory of universals is less extreme than Walter Burley's, as Wyclif himself observes. For Wyclif, the universal is numerically identical with its singulars, but numerical identity is governed by something weaker than the Indiscernibility of identicals.
The Abuse of Religion and Ecology: the Visha Hindu Parishad and Tehri Dam
Authors: Mawdsley Emma 
Published: June 2005

AbstractA number of commentators have suggested various cautions and caveats about assuming a positive relationship between Hinduism and the environment. The main points of contention are the limitations of textual exegesis; the environmentally damaging consequences of some Hindu beliefs and practices; and questions over whether any religion provides an adequate or appropriate basis from which to address contemporary environmental challenges. This paper explores a rather different and very problematic relationship that is being drawn, by some, between Hinduism and the environment. It focuses on the recent involvement of the Vishva Hindu Parishad (World Hindu Council) in protests against Tehri Dam. Neglecting the social and environmental problems that motivate other protestors, the VHP has sought to frame the dam as a communal issue—a threat by "outsiders"/Muslims to the holy river Ganges, and "therefore" to the Hindu religion, and "thus" the nation. The paper argues that, in the context of an increasingly aggressive Hindu nationalism, environmental issues and movements are by no means immune from the dangerous and divisive religious politics that are being played out in contemporary India.
The Conspicious Body: Capitalism, Consumerism, Class and Consumption
Authors: Carolan Michael 
Published: June 2005

AbstractA little over a century ago, Thorstein Veblen introduced us to the now commonplace term "conspicuous consumption": the idea that we consume, at least in part, in order to display to others our social power. While the conceptual utility of this term is just as valid today as it was the day Veblen penned it, further elaboration is now required to account for shifting cultural and economic imperatives. In this paper, I argue that we are entering a new era of conspicuous consumption; an era where surrounding oneself with "nice things" is becoming increasingly insufficient for our modern sensibilities in our quest to display status and power. Rather, we are progressively striving to become the "nice thing" itself—to literally embody conspicuous consumption. I locate this conspicuous body within evolving historical tensions of consumer capitalism; tensions which the conspicuous body attempts to resolve (but not without social, cultural, and ecological consequences). This paper also represents an attempt to introduce into the socio-environmental literature the body as a legitimate topic of inquiry. While the body has recently experienced an increase in attention by some social and cultural scholars, such interest has been lost among most environmental sociologists; a surprising point, particularly given the fact that through the body, self and the environment become embodied.
The Fowls of Heaven and the Fate of the Earth: Assessing the Early Modern Revolution in Natural History
Authors: Miller Gordon 
Published: June 2005

AbstractIn recent years scholars have begun to question in various ways the traditional notion of the Scientific Revolution, which has long been seen as a fountainhead of modern Western approaches to nature. One line of questioning involves the suggestion that there were significant, and perhaps revolutionary, developments during the early modern era not only in the realms of astronomy and physics but also in the field of natural history. This article takes up this suggestion and begins by examining the seventeenth-century transformation of natural history in relation to the work of two representative English naturalists—Edward Topsell and John Ray—by looking specifically at their contrasting ornithological descriptions of cranes. It then analyzes how the different theological orientations of these two devout naturalists shaped their natural histories and contributed to the shift from a symbolic to a literalistic understanding of natural entities. This change of mind is examined in light of the phenomenon of secularization and the loss of "the dimension of depth" and in relation to the promise and problems of a utilitarian orientation to the natural environment, with observations on cranes as they have migrated through history in the thought of some leading naturalists and across some changing natural habitats.
From Climate Change to Sustainability: An Essay on Sustainable Development, Legal and Ethical Choices
Authors: Voigt Christina 
Published: June 2005

AbstractThis paper discusses some fundamental impediments to implementing the complex concept of sustainable development within the international legal framework in general, and the climate change regime in particular. It argues that sustainable development should primarily be seen as a normative concept, closely linked to an idea of environmental justice that incorporates the interests not only of present humans but also of future generations and the non-human environment. The paper explores the relationship between sustainability as a moral idea and sustainability as located in a legal context. It argues for the evolution of a coherent system of ethics and law of sustainability, with particular relevance to decreasing greenhouse gas emissions on a global scale. The importance of multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary research is emphasised. It is suggested that the fundamental challenges posed by a globally changing climate might function as an important impulse to "cross-faculty" research and innovative thinking. The results of such thinking might in turn inform international action in tackling climate change. Although the investigation cannot be exhaustive, this paper aims to serve as an impetus for multidisciplinary research and further discourse on the reconciliation of society and the environment, law and ethics.
Knowing Me, Knowing You: Aboriginal and European Concepts of Nature as Self and Other
Authors: Strang Veronica 
Published: June 2005

AbstractBased on long-term fieldwork with Aboriginal groups, Euro-Australian pastoralists and other land users in Far North Queensland, this paper considers the ways in which indigenous relations to land conflate concepts of Nature and the Self, enabling subjective identification with elements of the environment and supporting long-term affective relationships with place. It observes that indigenous cultural landscapes are deeply encoded with projections of social identity: this location in the immediate environment facilitates the intergenerational transmission of knowledge and identity and supports beliefs in human spiritual transcendence of mortality. The paper suggests that Aboriginal relations to land are therefore implicitly founded on interdependent precepts of social and environmental sustainability. In contrast, Euro-Australian pastoralists' cultural landscapes, and constructs of Nature, though situated within more complex relations with place, remain dominated by patriarchal and historically adversarial visions of Nature as a feminine "wild-ness" or "otherness" requiring the civilising control of (male) Culture and rationality. Human spiritual being and continuity is conceptualised as above or outside Nature, impeding the location of selfhood and collective continuity within the immediate environment. In tandem with mobile and highly individuated forms of social identity, this positions Nature as "other". There is thus a subjective separation between the individualised life of the self, and the life of Nature/other that, despite an explicit discourse in which ecological well-being is valorised, inhibits affective connection with place and confounds sustainability.
Athenian Curiosity (Acts 17:21)
Authors: Gray Patrick 
Published: June 2005

AbstractWhereas commentators regularly note that Luke, through Paul, employs ambiguous language at the beginning of his address before the Areopagus in Acts 17, the link between Paul's reference to his audience as δεισιδαιμονεστεροζ in v. 22 and Luke's mention of the Athenians' insatiable curiosity in the preceding verse has gone heretofore unnoticed. This study discusses the popular stereotype of the busybody in Greek and Roman literature and the ways in which it sheds new light on the opening and closing of the speech.
The Urban Earthquake Imagery and Divine Judgement in John's Apocalypse
Authors: Murray James 
Published: June 2005

AbstractThis paper seeks to explain a Johannine innovation in first century apocalyptic: the urban earthquake. Assuming that John's Apocalypse is best understood against a backdrop of the historical and political setting of first century proconsular Asia, the paper presents three facts of provincial life under the Julio-Claudian Principate which, when seen together, suggest the significance of John's urban earthquake: 1. the cities of Asia were renown as the victims of devastating earthquakes; 2. the cities provided an infrastructure for Roman control; and 3. the cities were beneficiaries of publicly announced and memorialized imperial earthquake relief. In short, the apocalyptic urban earthquake demonstrates the victory of God over Caesar, for the cities which once were saved from seismic destruction by imperial benefaction, now experience a divine judgement against which Caesar can offer no help.