English Queenship from the Mid-Fifteenth to Mid-Sixteenth Centuries and England's Place in the European World

Reviewed by: Translation Effects: Language, Time, and Community in Medieval England by Mary Kate Hurley Stephen Harris mary kate hurley, Translation Effects: Language, Time, and Community in Medieval England. Interventions: New Studies in Medieval Culture. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2021. Pp. 226. isbn: 978-0-8142-1471-8. $99.95. A challenge faced by any book on a broad theme like translation is to quarry a small number of texts for something widely applicable. The challenge is made more difficult if one's aim is to reveal 'community,' which has to be abstracted from dozens of familial, tribal, ethnic, legal, religious, and linguistic groupings across centuries, evinced (in Britain) in at least four languages, and encrypted within conventions of genre. The challenge seems to me insurmountable except as a thought-experiment, itself much complicated by addressing readers who entertain modern prejudices, expectations, and unfamiliarity with source material. In that view, Translation Effects is an instructive thought experiment. Mary Kate Hurley interprets a variety of medieval translations in order to propose their 'imagined political, cultural, and linguistic communities' (p. 1). These imagined communities are the 'translation effects' of her title. Hurley's first chapter discusses the Old English (OE) translation of Paulus Orosius' History Against the Pagans, written in Latin. Hurley focuses on a handful of instances when the OE translator writes, 'Orosius said.' This phrase, Hurley claims, 'constructs an audience located in two distinct times: the fifth-century Roman world … and the ninth-century Old English-speaking world' (p. 27). A subtle effect on a reader of the OE Orosius, this trans-temporal community exemplifies Hurley's 'translation effect.' The second chapter concerns the Catholic abbot Ælfric of Eynsham, who around the year 1000 recorded a set of saints' lives in OE. By translating some local lives from Latin, especially that of Saint Oswald, King of England, Ælfric creates a 'protonationalist' tradition around which an Anglo-Saxon community can form (p. 70). In Chapter Three, Hurley adopts a trope from Christine Schott: the 'community of the page,' which comprises readers, scribes, and glossators of a manuscript. The post-Conquest glossator known as the Tremulous Hand of Worcester returned often to a manuscript and therefore had a 'multitemporal relationship' to it (p. 98). In another manuscript, an illustrator has marked Latin phrases with red ink, while another marked OE sentences with red ink, thereby indicating 'the multilinguality of the text' (p. 102). Scribes are aware of translations and have methods to help future readers (p. 108). Thus, the manuscript invites readers who are multilingual and who can add information to what they find there. Chapter Four concerns the story of Constance as retold by Nicholas Trevet, John Gower, and Geoffrey Chaucer. The three authors are 'united by their temporally heterogeneous portrayals of an emerging sense of "Engelond"' (p. 128). My knowledge of these authors is too limited to be able to assess the success of Hurley's argument. The last chapter concerns Beowulf. In it, Hurley explores moments in the poem 'in which the process of community formation and dissolution is worked out through the telling and retelling of stories' (p. 154). It is a terrific meditation on how the poem portrays the vicissitudes of human community. This chapter reveals a critic who has thought deeply and well about this poem. [End Page 152] Hurley contributes to a scholarly conversation about English identity that focuses on idealized communities as a source of political and social aspiration. For decades scholars have tried to isolate sources of ethnic and national identity in the early medieval world and to weigh both their credibility and their effects. A common assumption in this conversation is that stories, especially historical ones, bore a 'kernel of identity' (in Herwig Wolfram's phrase) around which communities could—but not necessarily did—form. Readers can entertain ideas they never act on. And stories of identity are always provisional, a point Hurley illustrates extremely well in her final chapter. The contributing role of stories to a shared potential identity opened the door to literary critics. Critics, this reviewer among them, mined literary texts for ideals of community. I'm not sure that the effort yielded much that was useful to...

The Life and Death of King John by William Shakespeare is a dramatization of the reign of John, King of England. In comparison to Shakespeare's other history plays, the subversive ideological messages of the play have been somewhat overlooked by scholars. Theories which have enhanced understanding of the allusions to Republicanism in the works of Shakespeare allow for a more comprehensive interpretation of King John as a play which has an ideological purpose. This article explores the way in which self-referential and meta-theatrical devices within the text indicate an attempt on the part of Shakespeare to reflect the growing political awareness and aspirations of the burgeoning Fourth Circle. In doing so, it could be argued that Shakespeare subtly makes the case for an alternative method of government in a country that was beginning to change.

For Japanese intellectuals, the encounter with European geography in the mid-sixteenth century meant more than a simple, physical dilation of the world. More profoundly, it meant overthrowing the traditional Buddhist worldview. In the process of confronting a greatly expanded set of continents, educated Japanese had to fundamentally transform their understanding of Asia. Since the ninth century, the prototype of the world for most Japanese had consisted of Three Sacred Countries—Tenjiku 天竺 (India), Shintan 震旦 (China), and Honchō 本朝 (Japan)—surrounded by numerous minor lands. In a traditional world map, the bulk of the world consisted of India and China, which were always depicted in the center. By contrast, Japan was located to the northeast as one of many peripheral countries. One mission of ancient and medieval monks had been to overcome this miserable situation and articulate Japan’s sacredness if not superiority in the world. In the context of this longstanding challenge, the arrival of European atlases and world maps presented an opportunity as well as a threat. Armed with new knowledge of the globe, some Japanese cartographers leapt at the chance to relativize the position of China and India. Others altered their maps more slowly, and with more reluctance. By illuminating the geographical imagination embodied in early modern world maps, this paper explores the impact of this process on Japan’s traditional Asia-centric worldview.

<p>Lady Jane Lumley’s <em>Iphigenia at Aulis</em> exemplifies the process of dramatic reproduction in the mid-sixteenth century and in 2014. Lumley’s translation (ca 1554) of Euripides’ tragedy is a text which revivifies the past to confront the emotional consequences of betrayal and loss. In the sixteenth-century context of Lumley’s own family, her translation disturbs and manages the emotional consequences of her father’s involvement in the sacrifice of Lady Jane Grey to fulfil the family’s political ambitions. My historicist approach juxtaposes a consideration of the play's performances in the Rose Company Theatre in 2014. Drawing on interviews with the director and actors and my observation of spectators’ reactions, I discuss the production's testing of the script’s immediacy for audiences in a present which had its own preoccupations with the past; namely, the centenary of the outbreak of World War I.</p>

The political events in Ireland in the early twentieth century which led to the partitioning of the country in 1920 — with a Dublin-based government assuming control of 26 counties and a Belfast administration with close links to Westminster overseeing the remaining six — had particular effects for the Protestant communities on either side of the new border. In the Irish Free State, which became a republic in 1949, the already declining authority and influence of the once prosperous Protestant Anglo-Irish community were further eroded, and many families chose to leave the country rather than adapt to life in a radically altered political landscape, where the growing power and influence of the ultra-conservative Catholic church added to their sense of alienation. Some less socially privileged Protestants in the south felt betrayed by the leaders of their co-religionists in the north-east who had preferred to protect their interests by partition rather than to take their place in an all-Ireland political system; most faced the necessity of accommodating themselves to life in de Valera’s Ireland. In Northern Ireland itself, the in-built Protestant majority prepared to rule in perpetuity, making minimal concessions to Catholics within its jurisdiction, affirming its loyalty to the British monarchy and its defence of the liberties associated with reformed faith, and forever distrustful of the political and religious aspirations of its neighbours across the border.

Book Review ‘And so began the Irish Nation’: Nationality, National Consciousness and Nationalism in Pre-modern Ireland, Brendan Bradshaw (Surrey and Burlington: Ashgate, 2015), 318 pages. In the Irish parliament of 1536, legislation was passed which marked the introduction of the Reformation in Ireland, and the designation of the Church of Ireland as the Church ‘as by law established’. In 1969, almost fifty years ago, an article by Brendan Bradshaw on that parliament appeared. Thus began an academic output which has revolutionised our understanding of sixteenth century Ireland, largely by focusing on the political thought of those reformers from within the older colonial community, subsequently known as theAngloIrish . The high point of that local reform tradition, Bradshaw has shown in his book The Irish Constitutional Revolution of the Sixteenth Century (1979), was the act for the kingly title of 1541. The constitutional status of Ireland changed from that of medieval lordship, effectively embracing the Pale and, in a much weaker sense, the great dynasties of Ormond and Desmond, to that of kingdom, covering the entire island, and including all the inhabitants as subjects of the English king. Almost as a by-product of that research, Bradshaw produced a groundbreaking study of one of the Reformation’s consequences, entitled The Dissolution of the Monasteries in Ireland under Henry VIII (1974). To these book-length studies may be added several seminal articles, including an exploration of the outbreak of the Kildare rebellion of 1534. This body of work, rooted in the approach of the Cambridge scholar G R Elton to the Tudor state, served to integrate the study of mid-sixteenth century Ireland into the mainstream of historical research and publication. As editor of five edited essay collections, Bradshaw contributed to the study of the emergence of the British state, leading to a reconfiguration of its early modern history by bringing the interplay between the constituent kingdoms into sharper focus. The year of Bradshaw’s first publication, 1969, marked the outbreak of the Northern troubles in Ireland. Among the groupings involved in the decades of violenceweretheIRA,drawingonahistoricsenseofnationalistgrievanceanda militarist republican genealogy. For professional historians, revulsion at the IRA campaign led to a questioning of the nationalist historical tradition. A process Studies • volume 106 • number 424 493 Book Review: Winter 2017/18 of deconstruction got underway. ‘Revisionism’ entered public discourse. In an article in 1989 (reproduced in this book), Bradshaw offered a wide-ranging critique of the ‘revisionist’trend in recent Irish historiography. Thus, in addition tohisspecialistworkontheTudorworld,asecondstrandemerged:thearticulation and defence of a nationalist view of Irish history. The present volume reflects both of these fields of interest. Of the fourteen essays (twelve already published, and two new pieces), nine are articles on particular historical topics, while the remaining five are reflections on the writing of Irish history. The locus classicus of Bradshaw’s case against the revisionists is in his article published in the professional journal Irish Historical Studies in 1989. While acknowledging the achievements arising from the professionalising of Irish history since the 1930s, Bradshaw challenged some dimensions which he detected in the direction this professionalisation had taken. Specifically, the tacit assumption of neutrality on the part of the historian: while enjoining objectivity, Bradshaw disputes that real neutrality is possible; the pursuit of neutrality (ultimately futile on his account) leads to an anodyne presentation which deepens the cleavage between the professional historian and the public who are interested in the story of their community. He noted a tendency to ignore or downplay catastrophe (for the early modern period he mentions land expropriation, large-scale violence against indigenous people, religious and ethnic discrimination), and a corresponding propensity to normalise disasters (for example, the Famine). In response to this deconstruction of the Irish nationalist tradition, Bradshaw seekstoassertitshistoricalcontinuity,anditsemergenceinthepoliticalthought of local reformers in the sixteenth century. These drew on classical notions of love of patria or homeland, current in the Renaissance, and built on a form of proto-nationalism among the colonial political group in the late middle ages. Bradshaw sees the integration into a single Irish nation of the descendants of the Anglo-Normans with the older Gaelic community as the fruit of shared dislocation at the hands of the new Elizabethan colonial elite...

By the time Cnut the Great came to power in England, the king of southern England had been involved in complex arrangements of overlordship with the regions neighbouring his realm for nearly a hundred and fifty years. By the middle of the tenth century the political ambition of a number of southern English kings had led them to attempt to make these temporary power-relations into a more permanent imperium of dominated territory. Through marriage and warfare Athelstan made predatory advances towards Wales, Northumbria, and Scotland, cementing these new relations through public ceremonies of mass-submission of multiple rulers from a number of subject-regions. The evidence for Cnuts interaction with the components of late Anglo-Saxon Englands imperium indicates that a definitive change occurred immediately after 1030. This chapter deals initially with the relations in the initial decade of Cnuts rule, and then discusses the relations in the second part of Cnuts reign.Keywords: Anglo-saxon England; Cnut The Great; imperium; Ireland; Northumbria; Scotland; Wales