Charles Butler Research Articles

A Question of Freedom: The Families Who Challenged Slavery from the Nation's Founding to the Civil War by William G. Thomas III

Reviewed by: A Question of Freedom: The Families Who Challenged Slavery from the Nation's Founding to the Civil War by William G. Thomas III Alice L. Baumgartner A Question of Freedom: The Families Who Challenged Slavery from the Nation's Founding to the Civil War. By William G. Thomas III. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2020. Pp. [x], 418. Paper, $25.00, ISBN 978-0-300-26150-9; cloth, $35.00, ISBN 978-0-300-23412-1.) From the 1780s to the Civil War, enslaved people in Prince George's County, Maryland, filed over a thousand legal actions for their freedom. With careful research and beautiful prose, William G. Thomas III makes the powerful argument that freedom suits laid bare the uncertain legal foundations of slavery and, in the process, represented "a public counterpart of the Underground Railroad" (p. 9). In 1770, William and Mary Butler sued for their freedom on the grounds that their grandmother Eleanor Butler, or "Irish Nell," was a "free white woman" and indentured servant (p. 24). Although Eleanor had married an enslaved man in 1681, which, under a 1664 act, consigned her to bondage "for the duration of her husband's life," the Maryland General Assembly overturned this law shortly after Eleanor's marriage (p. 24). In their suit for freedom, William and Mary Butler argued that Eleanor's children were free because they were born after the repeal of the 1664 act. The provincial court decided in the Butlers' favor, but the court of appeals reversed the lower court's ruling, asserting that the 1664 act applied because Eleanor and Charles Butler were married under its terms. Undeterred, the next generation of Butlers filed lawsuit after lawsuit—and in the wake of the American Revolution, the Butlers started to win. Soon other enslaved people started to claim their freedom on the grounds that their ancestors were free. In 1791, Edward Queen sued for his freedom because his grandmother, Mary Queen, was a "free woman of color" from New Spain sold as an indentured servant (p. 168). Also in 1791, Charles [End Page 408] Mahoney filed a petition that he was descended from a free woman named Ann Joice. In response, the Maryland assembly made it more difficult for enslaved people to bring suits. In 1793, the legislature granted jurisdiction over petitions for freedom to lower district courts, which were often more favorable to slaveholders. Three years later, in 1796, the assembly required that attorneys representing enslaved people pay the court costs if their freedom suits were dismissed. The courts also handed down decisions that were unfavorable to enslaved people. In 1810, when Mina Queen claimed her freedom because she descended from Mary Queen, the District of Columbia Circuit Court ruled parts of a crucial deposition "hearsay" and, consequently, inadmissible (p. 171). The tightening of evidentiary standards made it more difficult for enslaved people to secure their freedom on the basis of ancestry. To make matters worse, the Jesuits sold 272 enslaved people to Louisiana in 1838, depriving those who remained in Maryland of crucial witnesses in freedom suits. As evidentiary standards tightened, and as enslaved people were sold from the Eastern Seaboard to the south-central United States, the opportunities for freedom on the basis of ancestry dwindled. But enslaved people continued to file petitions on other legal grounds. The most successful cases were of emancipated enslaved people who had been illegally imported into the District of Columbia. In 1828, Thomas Butler successfully sued for his freedom because he and his family had been sold in the district, violating Maryland's laws against the slave trade. Four years later, Ann Williams won her freedom on the same grounds. Enslaved people from Prince George's County secured their freedom not by escaping to Canada but by filing petitions with the courts. Thomas convincingly argues that these freedom suits were an important, if overlooked, route on the Underground Railroad. The "conductors" on this route were lawyers of mixed allegiances, like Joseph Bradley, himself a slaveholder, and Allen Bowie Duckett, Thomas's own ancestor. The heroes of this route were not the lawyers but the petitioners themselves, who, by ingenuity, perseverance, and legal acumen...

Bee-keeping as Holy Distraction in the Life of the Revd Charles Butler, 1571–1647

ABSTRACTMany clergy have been bee-keepers and have made studies of hive management and thereby contributed to apicultural understanding. What is less well known is how far their keeping of bees has helped their wellbeing as clergy. This article examines in greater depth the life of the Revd Charles Butler, ‘the father of English bee-keeping’ to see whether bee-keeping for him was holy distraction.

A Review of Research into the Intonation of the Lithuanian Language

The article deals with the development of research into the intonation of the Lithuanian language, the methods employed, and the results achieved compared with the history of research of intonation of other languages. The beginning of research into the intonation of the Lithuanian language is recorded only at the beginning of the twentieth century in the works of the linguists Jonas Jablonskis (1911) and Mykolas Durys (1927). Substantial research into intonations of other European languages (English, Russia) was conducted in the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries (English: John Hart (1551) and Charles Butler (1634); Russian: Mikhail Lomonosov (1755). The beginning and the second half of the twentieth century, when the intonation of the Lithuanian language was studied by Lithuanian linguists syntacticians and phoneticians, was the most productive research period. A considerable amount of research was carried out using the methods of experimental phonetics. It resulted in the development of terminology of Lithuanian intonation, the establishment of its functions and of the main phonetic features. The key authors: syntactician Jonas Balkevičius (1963, 1998), phoneticians Vincas Pukelis (1972) and Petronėlė Bikulčienė (1976), Antanas Pakerys (2003), Aleksas Girdenis (1980; 2003). A variant of the Lithuanian language intonation system inventory is presented in the works of Gintautas Kundrotas (2004, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2012). It was found that the intonation system of the Lithuanian language consists of four elements: (1) a subsystem of seven units of intonation types; (2) a shift of intonation centre (marking of intonation centre); (3) syntagmatic spread, and (4) the pause as an additional element within the syntagma. The intonation system is a constituent part of phonetic (phonological) means of the whole language.

Rhetorik und Musik in England (16. bis 18. Jahrhundert)

Abstract The article deals with the influence of rhetoric on musical thinking and musical practice in England from the end to fifteenth century until the eighteenth century. The humanistic rediscovery of sciences and arts led to the revival of the artes liberales and to an insight in the relationship of ars oratoria and ars musica and the affinity between poetry and music. The close connexion is based on the similarity of effects,which are produced by the eloquence of speech and the affective power of vocal and instrumental sounds: They convey a message and move the heart. The relation of the sister arts was primarily considered not in theoretical musical sources but in writings dealing with poetry or rhetoric by George Puttenham, Henry Peacham the Elder, Francis Bacon, Charles Butler and others. However, the treatises by Christopher Simpson,Thomas Mace,Charles Avison and William Jones attestagrowing importance of rhetorical principles on the creation of music. Ayres and wordless pieces by Campion, Dowland, Purcell and Händel give evidence, that the composers applied rhetorical procedures and figures to intensify the expressive and persuasive qualities of their art.

Robert Southey: History, Politics, Religion by Stuart Andrews

Stuart Andrews. Robert Southey: History, Politics, Religion. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Pp. 270. $95. Stuart Andrews's new book argues for Southey's literary and ... historical importance, and lasting significance of his seeming ... paranoia, both political and religious (xi). It is book, Andrews says, about Southey laureate, rather than Southey poet (ix). It could equally be described as study of question, 1790s 1829, with ensemble cast of Southey, Coleridge, John Milner, Charles Butler, Blanco White, Richard Musgrave, and many others. But emancipation is particularly rewarding angle for life and letters of Southey, who was, in Hazlitt's phrase, shaped on any model. Southey's biographer Bill Speck describes him as oddity and anachronism, almost Quaker, who behaved like a seventeenth-century Anglican at war with both Popery and enthusiasm. (1) But Southey's stance looks less odd in view of antediluvian nature of his (Roman) Catholic enemy. The Romantic epoch of 1798 was also year Napoleon abolished papacy by Act of Sovereign People (1). Robert Peel later recalled how religion, we were told, was ... volcano burnt out, that could never be rekindled (qtd. 172). Like William Pitt, polemicist John Milner asked rhetorically if it was from side of Popery, or opposite quarter of Jacobinism, that Established Church is in most at present day (qtd. 8). But Union of Great Britain and Ireland of 1801 turned defunct danger into contradiction at heart of political life. As Coleridge later summed it up: There is and can be but one question: and there is and can be but one way of stating it. A great numerical majority of inhabitants of one of realm profess religion that professed by great majority of whole realm.... In fewer words, three-fourths of his Majesty's Irish subjects are Roman Catholics, with papal priesthood, while three-fourths of sum total of His Majesty's subjects are Protestants. (Church and State; qtd. 2) The question created problem for political language. After 1801, integral part not only does not imply, but is hostile to, greater whole. Charles Butler suggested that even this was false ... perspective, giving two-page list of vastly more extensive territories where Roman Catholicism was established religion (qtd. 114). Southey reasserted Protestant perspective by mocking such exhibitions of Siamese, and Tonquinese, and ... Cochin-Chinese converts (qtd. 134). But context perhaps helps explain Southey's reductive rhetoric on church and state: facing complex disintegration of parts and wholes, he insisted on complete homology between these two pillars of temple of our prosperity, bound by mathematical necessity stand or fall together (qtd. 55). Andrews describes general shift relatively reasoned, courteous exchanges of debating points in 1790s barrages of vituperative language in 1820s (9, 18, 128). Southey was critic of Catholicism his early experiences in Lisbon in 1795-96. In his 1797 Letters written during short residence in Spain and Portugal, Southey spoke of his mingled ... pity and disgust at [t]he sight of Monastery or Monk ... foul and filthy men without accomplishments or virtues, [because of] system they are subject to (qtd. 4). Southey's visceral sense of Catholicism as throwback was at heart of question. [T]hey will not tolerate, Southey told Charles Wynn in 1807: the proof is in their practice all over Europe, and it is in nature of their principles now (qtd. x). Andrews reads Southey's Letters England by Don Manuel Alvarez Espriella (1807) as complex double-bluff. In character of Espriella, an able man, bigoted his religion . …

Robert Southey: History, Politics, Religion. Stuart Andrews.British Romanticism and the Catholic Question: Religion, History and National Identity, 1778-1829. Michael Tomko.

Stuart Andrews, Robert Southey: History, Politics, Religion (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) xvii + 250 $85.00 Michael Tomko, British Romanticism and Catholic Question: Religion, History and National Identity, 1778-1829 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) xii + 224 $84.00 Catholic was a persistent and usually passionate debate about relieving Roman Catholics of civil disabilities that had been imposed on them by Penal Laws of 17th century, a debate that intensified between anti-Catholic Gordon Riots of 1780 and Catholic Emancipation act of 1829--the years of Romantic period in literature. The public policy issue was complicated by deep-rooted prejudice against Romish superstition with a history going back to Mary Tudor's persecution of Protestants and series of popish plots, real or imagined, that followed. A more serious complication was problem of Ireland. Following rebellions of 1798, an Act of Union dissolved Dublin parliament, raising question of how five million Irish Catholics could be admitted to full participation in political life of a united kingdom. The dispute thus involved a legal and cultural struggle over religious difference, historical grievances, and very definition of Britishness. Michael Tomko's British Romanticism and Catholic Question and Stuart Andrews' Robert Southey: History, Politics, Religion, two books under consideration, make case that Catholic Question played a more central role in culture of Romantic period than previous literary historians have noticed. Tomko addresses impact of controversy on imaginative literature while Andrews provides a vivid clarification of issues at heart of conflict and passions that drove one writer's lifelong obsession with threat he thought Roman Catholicism posed to Britain's survival as a Protestant nation. After he became Poet Laureate in 1813, Southey wrote little verse, devoting his creative energies to historical and argumentative prose. He was a conscientious and energetic historian, as his biographies of Wesley and Nelson still demonstrate, but prose that Andrews examines here mainly concerned dispute on Catholic Question, in which he was a committed partisan. In a series of books, articles, and reviews, debate became primary concern of his life as an author. He engaged in acrimonious public quarrels with two able and prominent defenders of Catholic rights, John Milner and Charles Butler. In his Book of (1824) Southey's admiration of of England necessitated invidious comparisons with the errors, corruptions and crimes of pernicious Romish Church (as he almost always called it). Milner's Strictures on Poet Laureate's Book of (1824), responded in kind to what he thought was a tissue of vituperation and fanaticism, whose author raves through history of many centuries, in abusing and calumniating common source of Christianity, in order to court heads of present Establishment, under pretence of vindicating it (121). Butler's Book of Roman Catholic (1825) similarly argued that Southey's book was calculated to revive past animosities, to inflame prejudice, to perpetuate discord (119). Southey responded to his critics in Vindiciae Ecclesiae Anglicanae (1826), with still more rancorous attacks on idolatrous and superstitious of Rome, and in a later publication wrote, Throughout papal Christendom there has been substituted for Christianity a mass of corruption which nauseates understanding (184). In various writings he ridiculed transubstantiation, indulgences, belief in purgatory, veneration of Mary and saints, and authority of Pope. He thought that auricular confession by absolving sin encouraged more of it; he found priestly celibacy repugnant; and he entertained gothic visions of innocent girls being shut up convents, forced to practice idolatry, denied meat on Fridays, and encouraged to indulge in self-flagellation. …

Book Review: Head and Neck Reconstruction

Charles Butler, MD, Editor Head and Neck Reconstruction, Philadelphia, PA: Saunders Ltd., 2008 ISBN-10: 0702029262 ISBN-13: 978-0702029264 Head and Neck Reconstruction , edited by Dr. Charles Butler, fills a void in the library of texts discussing the practical applications of flap reconstruction in the head and neck. The book contains 307 pages of text, beautifully documented with excellent anatomic photography and graphic illustrations. In addition, an accompanying DVD provides insight into techniques used for nasal, facial, cleft lip, palate, and aero-digestive tract reconstruction. The scope of this topic is immense, yet Dr. Butler has been able to compile an excellent … Corresponding Author: Dr. Geoffrey Keyes, 9201 Sunset Boulevard, Suite 611, Los Angeles, CA 90069-3701 E-mail: geoffkeyes{at}gmail.com

The Cultural Geography of Fantasy Britain

The Cultural Geography of Fantasy Britain Naomi Wood (bio) Four British Fantasists: Place and Culture in the Children's Fantasies of Penelope Lively, Alan Garner, Diana Wynne Jones, and Susan Cooper, by Charles Butler. Lanham, MD: Children's Literature Association and Scarecrow P, 2006. The four British fantasists of this study—Penelope Lively, Alan Garner, Diana Wynne Jones, and Susan Cooper—have all made tremendous contributions to what Tolkien called the "cauldron of story." Charles Butler's study is worthy of his subject. Four British Fantasists explores in illuminating detail, and with an acute and appreciative critical eye, the role history and culture have played in shaping each writer's sensibility, not in order to make bald claims about "influence," but to consider the situatedness of fantasy in its historical, cultural, and geographical context. Fantasy is always in part about setting—much of the pleasure of The Lord of the Rings for the true fan, for example, is wandering the paths and exploring the groves of Middle Earth; part of the success of Peter Jackson's films is attributable to their rich rendering of those landscapes and dwellings. It is fitting, therefore, that Charles Butler highlights the importance of place in the works of Lively, Garner, Jones, and Cooper. For them, as Butler shows, geography is even more crucial than it is in the average fantasy novel. For each novelist is inspired by the geography of Britain in particular, and each uses its man-made and natural land-scape features to reflect on the presence of the past, and to consider the relation of human beings to their environments. The book is organized thematically. The first chapter, "Contexts and Connections: Four Fantasists," details the reasons these authors should be considered together, although they didn't necessarily know one another, they read different subjects at university, and some made efforts not to read one another's work until their own was completed. Butler makes a convincing case that in spite of these differences these authors' similarities allow us to understand their work more intelligently, appreciatively. Rather than seeking to establish reductive causal relationships, Butler asserts that "through cultivating a sensitivity to the cultural, historical, social, and even personal contexts within which these authors have worked we can provide illuminating ways of reading them, [End Page 251] individually and as a group" (31). Coincidences of birth, education, and orientation draw these writers together: they were all children during World War II, they were all at Oxford during the 1950s when C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien taught there, and they "share a profound concern with time, myth, magic, the nature of personal identity, and the potency of place" (7). Wartime childhood is always traumatic; Garner, Jones, and Cooper have all said that the war made them writers concerned with themes such as the struggle between good and evil, the instability of life, and the fragility of trust. Butler's extensive reading and research into each author's autobiographical, nonfiction, and adult writings richly establishes the connections and demonstrates each author's awareness of her or his inspiration. As well, he considers autobiographical accounts of their experiences and traces how those experiences are translated, through imagery and event, into the stuff of fantasy. Butler's very useful discussion of the influence of Oxford as a place and a university reinforces the notion that all these fantasists are "heirs," in a limited sense, to Tolkien and Lewis, but that they are also independent and aesthetically quite distinct. Oxford's "history, its architecture, its inexplicable but jealously-upheld customs, its hidden courts and walled gardens, its combination of industrial town and ivory tower" (15) clearly influence the construction of these authors' secondary worlds. But the direct influence of Tolkien and Lewis is not so clearcut as many have assumed. Jones attended lectures by both professors and acknowledges that "they taught us to believe in dragons" (15). Oxford's English Literature reading list emphasized Old Norse, Old English, and Middle English texts, whose bestiaries, social structures, and language have provided inspiration for countless fantasies. However, as Butler shows, despite the surface similarities between Tolkien's Middle Earth and the allusions to Norse and Welsh...

An Unnoticed Early Reference to Shakespeare

IN a recent article in the Dictionary of Literary Biography Douglas Bruster noted that in the second edition of Thomas Vicars's manual of rhetoric, Xeipaγωγia, Manuductio ad artem rhetoricam (1624, first edition 1621), the author introduced a list of outstanding English poets.2 Following the Rhetorica of Peter Ramus's associate Omer Talon (as revised by Ramus in 1569) Vicars had divided rhetoric into an elaborate series of dichotomies. The reference to the English poets occurs in a section on poetical number (numerus poeticus), which opens the treatment of figure, the second of the two main subdivisions of elocutio (style). After having explained that poetical number is divided into rhyme and metre, Vicars baldly states that he will not treat the subject in his manual, because the quantity of syllables is part of grammar, not rhetoric. If readers would like to find out more about the subject, however, he recommends they consult Bartholomaeus Keckermann's Philippo-Ramaeum rhetoricae systema (1605)3 and especially Charles Butler's popular rhetorical manual, Rhetoricae libri duo (first printed in 1597 under the title Rameae rhetoricae libri duo). In the latter, he continues, Butler ‘lists certain poets whose measures and wit our countrymen have praised and of whom our England boasts, perhaps not without cause: Geoffrey Chaucer, Edmund Spenser, Michael Drayton, and George Wither’.4 Vicars then goes on to say that he personally enjoys reading Drayton most and offers two brief English poems in praise of him, supposedly written after having been inspired by Drayton's extremely popular Englands Heroicall Epistles (1597). Before continuing to the next subject, oratorical number (numerus oratorius, or prose rhythm), he also includes a poem in praise of Wither. 2 Douglas Bruster, ‘Thomas Vicars’, in British Rhetoricians and Logicians, 1500–1660, First Series, ed. Edward A. Malone, Dictionary of Literary Biography, 236 (London, 2001), 260–8 (264). 3 I have been unable to trace any surviving copies of this book, but Vicars provides full bibliographical details in the preliminaries to his book (Thomas Vicars, Xeipaγωγia, Manuductio ad artem rhetoricam (London, 1624), sig. A11r). 4 Vicars (1624), 93–4: ‘Quo quidem in loco recenset ille poetas quosdam quorum & numeros & laudavere sales nostri, & de quibus forsitan non immerito Anglia nostra gloriatur, Galfridum Chaucerum, Edmundum Spencerum, Michaelem Draytonium, & Georgium Withersium.’ In the most recent edition of his handbook, Rhetoricae libri duo (London, 1621), Butler had in fact written, in a note to his mention of the ‘best poets’, whose study will teach pupils the correct use of different metres and rhyme schemes: ‘as are with us (to be compared with Homer, Virgil, Ovid, and other ancients of great note) Sir Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, Samuel Daniel, Michael Drayton, Joshua Sylvester, George Wither, and others who flower through talent and art, of which this age is so plentiful, and especially the teacher of all these poets, the only light of his dark times, Sir Geoffrey Chaucer [Quales sunt apud nos Homero, Maroni, Ovidio, caeterisque melioris notae priscis aequiparandi, D. Philippvs Sidney, Edmvndvs Spencer, Samvel Daniel, Michael Drayton, Iosvah Silvester, Georgivs Wither, aliique ingenio & arte florentes, quorum haec aetas uberrima est: atque inprimis horum omnium magister, unicum caligantis sui seculi lumen, D. Galfridvs Chavcer]’ (sig. B5v).

Bees in America: how the honey bee shaped a nation

Beekeeping is far from being an undocumented activity. A quick subject search for bees in the catalog of my own university library produced 666 titles, the earliest the 1609 publication of Charles Butler, The Feminine Monarchie, a classic in its way, in that he was partly right and partly wrong in identifying the roles of the drones, workers, and queen. But the European literature on bees goes back far beyond 1609 to classical times. The fourth book of Virgil’s Georgics was for centuries read as an authoritative account of the subject and now, given its inaccuracies, is appreciated as literature rather than science. The really serious student of beekeeping will want to go to Cardiff, Wales, home of the International Bee Research Association (ibra), which, to quote from its Web site, has assembled the “world’s first and best-established specialist bee library” and includes not only books but also a journal collection. The director of ibra for thirty-five years, Eva Crane, is the present reigning authority on the history of beekeeping. In 1983 she published The Archaeology of Beekeeping, following it in 1999 with a greatly expanded version, The World History of Beekeeping and Honey Hunting, a well-written, well-illustrated volume intended to be the standard work on the subject, but unfortunately rather expensive: £85.00 at the time of publication. These two books, particularly the latter, are very broad in their scope, extending into chapters on the representation of bees in works of art, in heraldry, and on coins. Crane argues that knowledge of bee life was inaccurate and rather static until 1600, when research began to improve. There were two challenges in the history of beekeeping. One was to work out the roles of the queen, workers, and drones as Butler had tried to do; the second was to design a hive that would satisfy the bees but permit the easy stealing of their honey. By the early nineteenth century the first challenge had been set to rest, the life of bees by then largely understood; while in 1851, the Rev. L.L. Langstroth of Philadelphia produced a solution to the second with his movable-frame hive. Research on bees has, of course, continued, even producing one Nobel prize, awarded in 1973 to Karl von Frisch for his work on the language of bees, in which he demonstrated both how and what bees communicated to each other. Crane has discussed this progress in detail, and the authors of all three books reviewed here acknowledge the importance of her contribution. Yet, even with an extensive bibliography on the shelves and major issues seemingly resolved, new contributions to the study of beekeeping continue to appear. During 2005 at least five histories of beekeeping were published: the Times Literary Supplement noticed three at length, one of which—Bee Wilson’s book—is also reviewed here, plus two more that escaped the attention of the tls. Two questions inevitably arise: who makes up the market for all these books on bees and beekeeping, and what do the new books add to our knowledge? To judge from the three reviewed here, they cover much of the same material, popularize scientific and historical research, and find a generally The Industry of Bees

Sex...Only If Really Necessary in a Feminine Monarchy

The honey bee society was famously described as “The Feminine Monarchy by the cleric Charles Butler in 1634. Honey bees and their relatives—including all hymenopteran societies—qualify for this label because their colonies are headed by one or a small number of fertile queens. These queens produce a large number of sterile or nearly sterile daughter workers and, later, with their assistance, produce a smaller number of fertile sons and daughter queens (1). The complex and diverse life cycles and social organization of the feminine monarchies are matched by their equally complex and diverse strategies for sexual and asexual reproduction (2). On page 1780 of this issue, Pearcy et al. (3) uncover a new dimension in the complexity of hymenopteran reproduction

Transitions

Transitions Roberta Seelinger Trites Four years ago, in the first issue of the Children's Literature Association Quarterly that Joel Chaston, Anita Tarr, and I edited (Vol. 25, No. 2), I made this comment in the introductory editorial: "The Quarterly will continue to serve as a compass for scholars, helping the field explore new territories that include balancing poststructural theory with other forms of scholarship while striving always to continue this journal's tradition of supporting all aspects of the study of children's literature" (66). I believe we've met that promise, both in ways we had anticipated and in ways we had not. For example, since 2000, the Quarterly has had seven special issues. They have been on psychoanalytic theory, the Golden Age of children's literature, poetry, narrative theory, multiculturalism, children's book publishing, and international children's literature. Some of those special issues were guest edited; some were compiled by groupings of essays on similar topics that arrived in our offices simultaneously. The special issues have ranged from traditional topics in our field to poststructural theory in its most highly articulated form. The general issues, too, have covered broad spectrums. One issue ranges from John Morgenstern's revisionist history of the relationship between literacy and publishing to Dara Rossman Regaignon's post-colonial reading of Mary Martha Sherwood; another ranges from Naomi Wood's symbolic reading of a Virginia Hamilton novel to Judith Robertson's Lacanian reading of Harry Potter. Phoenix award winners, including Peter Dickinson and Zibby Oneal, have shared their acceptance speeches with us; Francelia Butler Lecturers Gillian Adams and Anne Scott McLeod have, too. Articles in this journal won awards from the Children's Literature Association, including Karen Coats' essay in 2000, "P is for Patriarchy: Re-Imaging the Alphabet" (88-97), Charles Butler's essay in 2001, "Alan Garner's Red Shift and the Shifting Ballad of 'Tam Lin'" (74-83), and Sharon Smulders' in 2002 with "'The Only Good Indian': History, Race, and Representation in Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House on the Prairie" (191-202). This issue includes the range of scholarship that typifies our general issues. "Women, Sex, and Power: Circe and Lilith in Narnia," by Jean E. Graham, is a feminist reading of the literary influences on C.S. Lewis. Amanda Rogers Jones' "The Narnian [End Page 1] Schism: Reading the Christian Subtext as Other in the Children's Stories of C. S. Lewis" deconstructs the tensions created by Christianity in the Narnia Chronicles. Lorinda Cohoon brings historical theory to bear in reading how masculinity was constructed in the nineteenth century in "Necessary Badness: Reconstructing Post-Bellum American Citizenship Through Boyhood in Our Young Folks and The Story Of A Bad Boy." Nathalie op de Beeck relies on feminist theory to read the conservative agenda at work in Lurlene McDaniel's novels in "Sixteen and Dying": Lurlene McDaniel's Fantasies of Mortal Endangerment." Aparna Gollapudi demonstrates the relationship between semiotics and the depiction of the oral tale in "Show and Tell: The Visual Evocation of Orality in Peter Sís's A Small Tall Tale From The Far Far North." Given my vantage point as an editor over the last five years, I can see some scholarly evolutions in the recent past that help place in context the variety of scholarship in our field. When I first served as editor elect in 1999, poststructural theorists often felt they needed to apologize for their stance or explain their reasons for relying on their methodology, as Mike Cadden does in his 2000 essay "The Irony of Narration in the Young Adult Novel" (146-154). Sometimes, they felt the need to justify the pertinence of those theories' applicability to the corpus of children's literature, as Christine Wilkie-Stibbs does in her 2000 essay, "'Body Language': Speaking the féminine in Young Adult Fiction" (76-87). Few people spoke about children's studies in the twentieth century, although now the term is a commonplace in the field. Where literary critics were once decrying the lack of respect children's literature earned in their departments (as Peter Hunt did at the Nashville conference on Critical Approaches to Children's Literature, March 26...

Alan Garner's Red Shift and the Shifting Ballad of "Tam Lin"

Alan Garner's Red Shift and the Shifting Ballad of "Tam Lin" Charles Butler (bio) (For Catherine Storr 1913-2001) In his 1975 lecture, "Inner Time," the British writer Alan Garner suggested that each of his books could be seen as an "expression" of a different myth.1Elidor (1965), for example, was an expression of the myth contained in the ballad of "Childe Roland and Burd Ellen." For The Owl Service (1967) the myth was that of Lieu, Blodeuedd, and Gronw, from the Fourth Branch of the Mabinogion. As for Red Shift (1973), then his most recent novel, the myth was "another ballad, the story of Tamlain and Burd Janet and the Queen of Elfland" (111). The first two of these identifications will come as no surprise to anyone familiar with the books in question, but the third is more unexpected. Few people seem to have discerned the presence of "Tam Lin" in Red Shift independently2 Indeed, Neil Philip, certainly Garner's most important critic, has written that he finds Garner's statement "hard to accept" (Fine Anger 104). However, Garner is, famously, a man who does not use words lightly, and it is surprising that, in the twenty-six years since he made it, his assertion has not received greater attention. Not only has Red Shift itself been widely studied, but a number of critics have written on the use of "Tam Lin" in other recent children's books. However, the connection between Red Shift and "Tam Lin" has been largely overlooked.3 In this article I will consider the ways in which Red Shift can be seen as an "expression" of "Tam Lin," and what this tells us about Garner's conception of his novel's nature and origin. In doing so I will contrast the novel with a number of other books based on or inspired by this same ballad, particularly the British writer Catherine Storr's 1971 novel Thursday. The ballad of "Tam Lin" exists in numerous versions. There are nine in Francis Child's English and Scottish Popular Ballads alone, and that is certainly not an exhaustive collection.4 Many of the differences between versions are quite significant, but the narrative can be broadly summarized thus: a young woman called Janet (in some versions Margaret) goes to Carterhaugh (or Kertonha, Chaster's Wood, Chester Wood, etc.) against the injunction of her parents, who fear she will lose her virginity to Tam Lin, a fairy youth who haunts the place. There she plucks a flower and summons Tam Lin himself. He challenges her presence, but she replies defiantly that Carterhaugh is her own property and that she has as much right as he to be there. On her return home, it becomes apparent that she is pregnant. Her family (variously her mother, sister, brother, or a family retainer) is shocked. She asserts that Tam Lin is the child's father and returns to Carterhaugh, either to find Tam Lin or else (in some versions) to find an herb to cause an abortion. Tam Lin appears and explains that he is not a fairy at all but a young man of human blood who was stolen away by the Fairy Queen when he was a boy. Although his life with the fairies is pleasant, every seven years on Halloween the fairies must pay a "tithe to hell," and this year he is likely to be the victim. If Janet wishes to save him (and therefore give her baby a father), she must execute a complex procedure that involves pulling Tam Lin from his horse as he rides past with the fairy troop, holding fast to him while he undergoes a series of frightening transformations, and finally covering his naked body with her green mantle. She achieves all this and thus wins Tam Lin from the Fairy Queen, who is bitter at her loss. As the folklorist Katherine Briggs observes, "Tam Lin" brings together a remarkable number of motifs associated with fairy lore, making it "perhaps the most important supernatural ballad" (449). Although (as is common in ballads) characterization is minimal and several of the narrative episodes obscure, there are enough hints to expand upon and...

Sir Clifford Charles Butler. 20 May 1922 – 30 June 1999

Clifford Butler was born in Earley, Reading, on 20 May 1922 to Charles and Olive Butler. An only child, he went to Reading School in 1932, having won a Berkshire County Council Educational Scholarship worth £15 per year. In addition to his academic work he was active in the Scouts and was a House Prefect (East House). Leaving school he went to Reading University to take physics, as did Kathleen Collins, whom he was to marry in 1947. Graduating in 1942 with a first–class BSc (Special) he stayed on as a demonstrator, his National Service taking the form of teaching radio as part of the State scheme to produce radar physicists, and acted part–time as a physicist at the Royal Berkshire Hospital. Kathleen went to work at the Road Research Laboratory. Butler found time, largely in the evenings, to undertake research for a PhD in electronic diffraction in the laboratory of Professor J.A. Crowther. He worked very closely with his thesis supervisor Dr Tom Rymer and it was there that he started to demonstrate his considerable skills in technical matters. His thesis, ‘some factors affecting precise measurement in electron diffraction’, was presented in April 1946 and was a detailed study, covering both technical and theoretical aspects, of how to improve the use of Debye–Scherrer electron–diffraction photographs to investigate crystal structure. The research on which it was based initiated four very different papers and led Crowther to predict, immediately after Butler's PhD examination, the latter's Fellowship of The Royal Society.

‘Incompatible with the very name of Christian’: English Catholics and Unitarians in the Age of Milner

The confessional state in England during the eighteenth century defined itself in terms of Trinitarian Protestantism. The exemption from the penal laws conferred by the Toleration Act of 1689 specifically excluded the Catholic religion and the public profession of Unitarianism. Each could lay claim to an history of martyrdom; just as Charles Butler enumerated 319 Catholic martyrs in England since the Reformation, Arians had been burned during the reign of James I and the denial of the Trinity featured prominently among the charges of blasphemy for which Thomas Aikenhead was executed at Edinburgh in 1697. While the proscriptions and penalties enacted against and sometimes inflicted upon Catholics far exceeded those for non-trinitarianism, the public excoriation of the latter was further enshrined in the Blasphemy Act of 1698. Legal toleration for Catholic worship in England was enacted in 1791, in Scotland in 1793; Unitarian worship was not legally tolerated until 1813 in Britain, until 1817 in Ireland.

Hugh Davis's Commonplace Book: A New Source of Seventeenth-Century Song

Among the Stafford family papers in Staffordshire Record Office is a small bundle of miscellaneous musical items which is as yet uncatalogued. There are incomplete sets of Richard Dering's Cantiones Sacrae (1617) and Cantica Sacra (1618) for five and six voices respectively, Giovanni Croce's Musica Sacra: To Sixe Voices (1611 edition), Agostino Agazzari's Madrigali a Cinque Voci (1602), George Kirbye's First Set of English Madrigalls (1597), and Thomas Watson's Italian Madrigalls Englished (1590), as well as the Abbé Duval's Principes de la musique pratique par demandes et par réponses (1764). The only manuscript item in the collection is a commonplace book that appears to have been compiled over a number of years by a certain Hugh Davis. Its varied contents range from songs, catches, poems, and Latin orations written in the early 1650s, to folk remedies for various ailments, extracts from Charles Butler's The Principles of Musik in Singing and Setting (1636), and a verbatim copy of James II's first Declaration of Indulgence of 4 April 1687. Although the first ten pieces have been torn out and those that remain are roughly and at times inaccurately notated, the manuscript is of interest in that it provides a rare insight into the musical and literary tastes of an undergraduate in mid-seventeenth-century Oxford, and preserves not only a number of hitherto unrecorded songs but also new sources of acknowledged works by such figures as Nicholas Lanier, John Wilson, Thomas Holmes and the Lawes brothers.

Language and Society in Early Modern England: Selected Essays, 1981-1994

1. Editor's Foreword 2. I. Surveys of 16th and 17th Century Linguistic Scholarship 3. 1. Effort and Achievement in 17th-Century British Linguistics 4. 2. Anglo-Dutch Linguistic Scholarship 5. 3. Views on Meaning in 16th-Century England 6. 4. Language Politics of the 16th and 17th-Century English Church 7. II. On Universal and Individual Traits of Language 8. 5. William Bedell and the Universal Language Movement in 17th-Century Ireland 9. 6.Wh- and Yes/No Questions: Charles Butler's Grammar (1633) and the history of a linguistic concept 10. 7. Nathaniel Chamberlain and his Tractatus de Literis et Lingua Philosophica (1679) 11. III. Language Learning and Language Instruction 12. 8. Thomas Harriot (1560-1621) and the English Origins of Algonkian Linguistics 13. 9. The Study of Foreign Languages in 17th-Century England 14. 10. Arabists and Linguists in England in the 17th Century 15. 11. Missionary Linguistics in 17th-Century Ireland 16. 12. Bathsua Makin (1600-c.1673): A pioneer linguist and feminist 17. Appendix: List of Publications by Vivian Salmon, 1988-1996 18. Index of Personal Names 19. Index of Subjects, Terms and Languages

Parallel Distributed Processing: Explorations in the Microstructure of Cognition, vol 1: Foundations, vol 2: Psychological and Biological Models

Neural Computing: Theory and Practice , by Philip Wasserman, 230 pp, $41.95, with illus, ISBN 0-442-20743-3, New York, NY, Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1989. Neural Networks: A Tutorial , by Michael Chester, 182 pp, $38, with illus, ISBN 0-13-368903-4, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, Prentice Hall, 1993. Neural Networks: Algorithms, Applications, and Programming Techniques , by James Freeman and David Skapura, 401 pp, $50.50, with illus, ISBN 0-201-51376-5, Reading, Mass, Addison-Wesley, 1991. Understanding Neural Networks: Computer Explorations , vol 1: Basic Networks , vol 2: Advanced Networks , 309, 367 pp, by Maureen Caudill and Charles Butler, paper, with illus, spiral-bound, with 1 diskette/vol, $39.95/vol, vol 1: ISBN0-262-53102-X (Macintosh), 0-262-53099-6 (IBM), vol 2: ISBN 0-262-53103-8 (Macintosh), 0-262-53100-3 (IBM), Cambridge, Mass, The MIT Press, 1992. Artificial neural network research began in the early 1940s, advancing in fits and starts, until the late 1960s when Minsky and Papert published Perceptrons , in which they proved that neural networks, as then conceived, can

Biography of Charles Butler Hunt, Geologist

Biography of Charles Butler Hunt, Geologist

Cloak Without Dagger: Dr Thomas Hussey, 1746–1803

CHARLES BUTLER, who knew Thomas Hussey well, wrote of him that he ‘would long live the memory of his friends:—a man of great genius, of enlightened piety; with manners at once imposing and elegant; and enchanting conversation. He did not come into contact with many whom he did not subdue: the highest rank often sunk before him. One notes, straightaway, the language of avoirdupois: the man ‘imposes’, he ‘subdues’, and beneath him others ‘sink’. Thomas Hussey had weight. That is evident in the portrait which hangs today in the building that rests on his foundations, Spanish Place: it conveys the force of character of one who was, in the words of another acquaintance, ‘by talents, nerves, ambition and intrepidity fitted for the boldest enterprise’.