Figure Of Evil Research Articles

Kajian Struktur Visual Pada Pasca Produksi Film Eksperimental “Sweet Rahwana”

Experimental Film “Sweet Ravana” is a film artwork that raises about human nature that is translated through puppet approach. To realize the character in accordance with one of the human traits that exist in the puppet characters namely Ravana. Where Ravana is a figure of evil and always thirsty for power. In a movie there are some messages to be conveyed by the author. The message to be conveyed apart from the narrative aspect also through the cinematic aspect. In the experimental film "Sweet Ravana" this message to be conveyed made through shot attraction. Two previously unrelated shots then after going through the alignment process then generate a new meaning. The series of compositions of shots on the film is then the visual structure. Sintagmatik and paradigmatik is a theory that can be used to study the visual structure that exist in the experimental film "Sweet Ravana" with the aim to know the structure of the visual on the process jukstaposisi types of shot selection and editing.

РИТМЫ ЗЛА В АНГЛИЙСКОЙ ПСАЛТИРИ XIV В

In medieval iconography, one of the main properties of evil is its multiplicity and changeability. As we know from the works on medieval demonology published by Alexander Makhov, such fluidity of forms was often equated with disorder and contrasted with an orderly hierarchy of the sacred. The author demonstrates that this applied not only to demons, but also to figures of non-Christians, primarily Jews and Romans in scenes of the Passion of Christ. The author of the present article takes the case of the Fitzwarin Psalter, one of the most extraordinary manuscripts illuminated in England in the 14th century. He shows that the variations of forms and colors in the figures of demonized enemies of Christ were sometimes organized in the rhythmic sequences which gave disorder a partial ordering. However, even in images of saints, in which symmetry and hierarchy dominated for a long time, variations were constantly introduced. They complicated (made more “live”) the static composition and led the viewer’s gaze. These observations suggest that many of the transformations of markers of otherness that researchers have long noted should be seen not only as visual figures of evil, but also as particular instances of the desire for varietas characteristic of medieval aesthetics in general

What we do in the Shadows... Rapports de force/rapports de France dans quelques romans de Jean-Christophe Grangé

Auteur middlebrow, Jean-Christophe Grangé est peu étudié en tant que tel, mais ses romans (massivement lus) dessinent pourtant une étrange carte de France : la police, siège et incarnation visible du pouvoir officiel, y est régulièrement débordée par un ensemble mouvant et disparate de sectes, de camarillas, d'organisations plus ou moins occultes ou de groupuscules paramilitaires tout-puissants, dans la droite ligne de la pensée apocalyptique des illuministes du XVIIIe siècle. La France des rapports de force est fantasmatiquement présente, sillonnée à toute vitesse par des déplacements précisément décrits et minutés, mais totalement improbables par leur aisance même. Il y a donc réalisme – la Bretagne de Lontano, la rue Goujon de Miserere, la cathédrale Notre-Dame du Serment des Limbes... et en même temps plongée dans une « liquidité » des actions et des trajets qui appartient proprement au songe. Spectrographie d'un irréel surexposé, l'univers romanesque de Grangé pourrait être résumé par le leitmotiv qui parcourt, comme une isotopie, la plupart des rencontres et des échanges : “je serai là dans moins d'une heure”. Ce “pouvoir” curialisé des sectes du bizarre, des retours infernaux du passé, des fantômes de la (dé)colonisation mal liquidés s'incarne en plusieurs figures du Mal, tueurs en série ou apprenti sorciers (La forêt des mânes) qui ne cesse de miner les instruments officiels de la démocratie... La juxtaposition du licite et du paranormal, du réaliste et du loufoque, crée l'ambiance particulière de cet univers où le “dessous” grouillant et mortifère mine et corrompt toujours plus le “dessus” ordonné et brillant des normes sociales, et où la sauvagerie serpente infiniment dans les signes de la modernité.

TRANSFORM THE WAYANG FIGURE IN THE SERAT DAMARWULAN MANUSCRIPT

This study aims to reveal the elements that experience the process of cultural transformation and the meaning illustrated through the illustrations of wayang figures in the Serat Damarwulan Manuscript. In this study, descriptive qualitative methods are used, namely placing words or sentences in a logical structure to explain concepts in the relationships between existing elements. Furthermore the data in the form of a sign system will provide a more comprehensive understanding. Transformation of wayang characters is a transition or change that occurs in the surface structure of a set of symbols of figures in wayang to become figures that are likened to or equated with characters in Serat Damarwulan, while the structure in the puppet characters themselves has not changed. The results of this study indicate that the elements undergoing cultural transformation in addition to scripts and languages are also illustrations that show the character of wayang characters in the characters contained in the Serat Damarwulan Manuscript. Knight figures such as Ronggolawe and Damarwulan are portrayed as Bima and Arjuna characters. While evil figures like Menakjinggo are portrayed as giants. These figures give meaning in the Serat Damarwulan, but in their own way the characters remain or do not change. This shows that the Serat Damarwulan Manuscript describes the process of cultural transformation in the form of puppet characters from Hindu-Buddhist to Islam that goes peacefully by not changing the main character, storyline, or background.

‘Does She Look Like the Innocent Flower but Become the Serpent Underneath?’: The Femme Fatal Lady Macbeth in the Misogynist Macbeth

Renaissance's society used to bring into play an ad nauseam cliche woman's place is the home. However, Lady Macbeth, one of William Shakespeare's dramatic characters, represents an image of the powerful woman. Because she enabled her husband Macbeth to ascend the throne of Scotland. This is when she urges him to commit a crime. Accordingly, Lady Macbeth was labeled as a femme fatale and a disastrous woman. However, when Macbeth becomes the king she switched to the role of the submissive wife. Contemporary readers would feel ambivalent toward Lady Macbeth's feminity; she is a mix of both a powerful woman and a formidable villain. Lady Macbeth's dilemma, in a nutshell, is that she is a disastrous wife to urge her husband to kill the king and she is a faint-hearted woman to feel guilty and let the pang of conscience destroy her mind. Thus, Lady Macbeth ends up marginalized, the same as her Renaissance counterparts. Correspondingly, this paper focuses on the connection of Lady Macbeth’s demonic nature with gender discrimination and the misogynist attitude of Shakespeare. Bias against Lady Macbeth, here, is not just a product of individual male thought but is the result of the pervasive social norm of early modern patriarchy. The main methodological approach of this paper is the cultural study of the sixteenth-century feminism. Thus, interdisciplinary theory of feminist perspective in Shakespeare’s Macbeth as well as the historical study of the marginalized Renaissance women are applied to probe into the reality of misogyny and negative representation of women in Shakespearean drama as alluring and evil figures. Therefore, the focused question within this none-thesis is why Shakespearean female characters, mainly including Lady Macbeth, are prejudicially undermined. In the end, the paper urges other researches to apply the sociological study of female power within Shakespeare’s other plays to find out how all of the Shakespearean heroines are subordinate; following the Elizabethan social norm of disempowering women.

“Does she look like the innocent flower but become the serpent underneath ?”: The Femme Fatal Lady Macbeth in the Misogynist Macbeth

Renaissance's society used to bring into play an ad nauseam cliche woman's place is the home. However, Lady Macbeth, one of William Shakespeare's dramatic characters, represents an image of the powerful woman. Because she enabled her husband Macbeth to ascend the throne of Scotland. This is when she urges him to commit a crime. Accordingly, Lady Macbeth was labeled as a femme fatale and a disastrous woman. However, when Macbeth becomes the king she switched to the role of the submissive wife. Contemporary readers would feel ambivalent toward Lady Macbeth's feminity; she is a mix of both a powerful woman and a formidable villain. Lady Macbeth's dilemma, in a nutshell, is that she is a disastrous wife to urge her husband to kill the king and she is a faint-hearted woman to feel guilty and let the pang of conscience destroy her mind. Thus, Lady Macbeth ends up marginalized, the same as her Renaissance counterparts. Correspondingly, this paper focuses on the connection of Lady Macbeth’s demonic nature with gender discrimination and the misogynist attitude of Shakespeare. Bias against Lady Macbeth, here, is not just a product of individual male thought but is the result of the pervasive social norm of early modern patriarchy. The main methodological approach of this paper is the cultural study of the sixteenth-century feminism. Thus, interdisciplinary theory of feminist perspective in Shakespeare’s Macbeth as well as the historical study of the marginalized Renaissance women are applied to probe into the reality of misogyny and negative representation of women in Shakespearean drama as alluring and evil figures. Therefore, the focused question within this none-thesis is why Shakespearean female characters, mainly including Lady Macbeth, are prejudicially undermined. In the end, the paper urges other researches to apply the sociological study of female power within Shakespeare’s other plays to find out how all of the Shakespearean heroines are subordinate; following the Elizabethan social norm of disempowering women.

Comparative – contrastive analyze of anthropomorphic figures of evil in english and georgian languages

The article deals with the research of anthropomorphic figures which is related to the evil in folk tales. According to this our aims to pursue a typological analysis of the English and Georgian folk tales Our research based on Georgian and English folk tales of XX-XIX centuries as the object of research – Georgian folk tales the publishing house “Nakaduli”, Tbilisi 1976 year and the English folk tales collected by Joseph Jacobs http://www.surlalunefairytales.com/. The articles aimed to make a comparative-contrastive study of the anthropomorphic figures that are shown as evil faces in Georgian and English folk tales and it was discovered that throughout the study more similarities than differences were observed in both of the collections. It was also observed that Georgian and English folk tales represent universals expressed with the anthropomorphic figures of evil and deal with similar cultures. The article argues that anthropomorphic figures of evil in these folk tales result from the feeling of envy, jealousy, greed, dread or the struggle for power and superiority.

L'audace : du manque d'égards (anaideia) à la transcendance du crime

The aim of this paper is to study some of the aspects of audacity (tolma, audacia) in relation to crime in ancient Greek and Latin texts. Audacity is characterized by two schemes, the first is ethico-political, implying a moral deficiency characterized by the lack of respect (anaideia), and by insulting arrogance (hubris) and whose support is psycho-physiological, the thumos, an untranslatable word (something near to our « heart »). The second paradigm is metaphysical, inherited from the mystical and magical cosmo-theogonies, where audacity is both deified and assimilated to a figure of evil that gives rise to an « archive » in Foucault’s sense, illustrated by the myth of the Roman emperor Nero, whose fascination still operates.

Abismos da perversidade humana

O presente artigo elabora uma reflexão sobre questões éticas, tendo como pano de fundo o sistema do pensamento único de Arthur Schopenhauer. A questão central é constituída pelo problema filosófico do mal radical, uma figura de maldade extrema, que é recusada como possibilidade autenticamente humana na filosofia prática de Kant. A figura da alegria maligna (Schadenfreude), tal como esboçada na ética de Schopenhauer - ilustrada no artigo com exemplos da literatura universal – exibe um tipo de caráter capaz de transcender os limites do egoísmo e configurar uma modalidade de pura maldade, análoga ao caso do mal radical.

Leonidas Donskis: from faustian morphologies to criticisms of liquid evil

This paper analyzes the philosophical thoughts of Leonidas Donskis about the evolution of figures of evil in Central and Eastern Europe. The analysis is based on a reading of his theories of the morphology of culture, of the genealogy of ideas, and of the moral imagination. This subject is an integral part of Donskis’s whole intellectual biography, is central to his later researches, and thus partly characterizes all of his investigations. In this paper, after briefly surveying the assumptions of Oswald Spengler’s analysis as well as Donskis’s ideas of Renaissance titans and Enlightenment geniuses, I turn to his analysis of the moral imagination, its features, development, and main conceptions. Donskis discusses problems of the moral imagination on the levels of (1) Central and Eastern European social and political critique and of (2) the analysis of dystopias. The main figures of evil discussed are those of the true believers, the ideological doctrinaires, and the fundamentalists. At first Donskis delved into these topics basing himself on the ideas of Vytautas Kavolis and Aleksandras Shtromas. Differences in views about political leftness (revisionism vs. state nomenklatura socialism) served Donskis in developing his own views on the Soviet heritage and on being a true believer. Here the figures of kanukai (Ricardas Gavelis), murti-bingo (S. I. Witkiewicz), and ketman (A. de Gobineau and Czeslaw Milosz) come into play, as well as the dystopias of Yevgeny Zamyatin, George Orwell, and Aldous Huxley. I pay special attention to Donskis’s expansion of Michel Houellebecq’s dystopia The Possibility of an Island and his picture of the sensitive cynic. The critique of liberal society implicit in Houellebecq’s work provided an additional stimulus and opportunity for Donskis to reflect, together with Zygmunt Bauman, on the problem of the Global Anonymous, adiaphorization, and liquid evil in our contemporary society of alienated consumers. My article ends with a critique of intellectual apocalyptics, including those in Lithuania, who are opposed to Donskis’s picture of a Europe of intellectual and moral giants and geniuses.

A More Immediate Evil

A More Immediate Evil Andy Weaver (bio) Fast evil. When we hear those words, we tend, I think, to immediately think of evil as quick. This is a bit of a false proposition. I would suggest that the problem is not so much in the temporal sphere but, rather, in the realm of the immediate—not in the popular meaning of that word, which we tend to use as a synonym for instantaneous but, rather, in its truest meaning: immediate, lacking mediation. Time is certainly a mediator, but probably no more so than space is. In a sense, evil is the lack of mediation, due to lack of time or shared actual space. Along these lines, evil is something completely amorphous and unidentifiable, as lacking in any physical aspects (such as speed) as it is desire or intent. In the preface to Being Singular Plural, his study of subjectivity as both necessarily communal and necessarily singular at the same time (or, as he terms it, “being with”), Jean-Luc Nancy writes, “What I am talking about here is compassion, but not compassion as a pity that feels sorry for itself and feeds on itself. Com-passion is the contagion, the contact of being with one another in this turmoil. Compassion is not altruism, nor is it identification; it is the disturbance of violent relatedness” (xiii). Nancy argues that there is nothing outside of the melee, no part of identity or meaning that exists outside of the moment of relation, that encounter [End Page 12] when we discover our lack of singularity at the same moment we confirm our individuality. We exist as beings, he argues, only in relation—in other words, only in our mediation with and by the world. Which brings me to the single greatest figure of evil I can think of in existence today: fast zombies. Once upon a time, zombies lurched slowly through our worlds. In George Romero’s The Night of the Living Dead, victims had moments to encounter their zombie attackers, to go through the experience of mediation, of being with them. Moreover, in The Dawn of the Dead, zombies roamed slowly through shopping malls, letting the viewer, as well as the potential victims, mediate their experiences with the undead, allowing the movie to offer a strong indictment of capitalism as the wasteland of the zombie. With the recent turn to the fast zombie, the viewer/victim does not have the same allowance for mediation with the zombie; instead, viewer-victims live in a world where mediation, which is different from time but necessarily reliant on time as a crucial mediating factor, has no moment in which to occur. (I understand that this statement is hyperbolic and technically incorrect—there is always some time—but the world increasingly downplays and lessens the amount of time and other mediators through which mediation can occur, thus constantly marching us closer to the ever-nearing, if never quite present, asymptotic horizon of pure immediacy.) Predatory capitalism—the metonymic equivalent of the fast zombie—desires just such a world of less and less time for mediation. The result is that we lose the being with, the very action of identity. We become zombies ourselves. More precisely, due to the accelerating nature of the contemporary world, we become fast zombies, and what we are befuddled by most of all are the brief moments of empty, slow, mediating time that reveal our lack of identity to us. We remain perfectly atomized elements of predatory capitalism, streaking zombies, although we are occasionally, secretly driven forward in search of something we encounter in increasingly rare moments: the time and actual space to enjoy not brains but minds—delicious, nutritious minds. But unlike Romero’s zombies, we crave our own minds as much as we do others’; any mind will do so long as it forces us into a moment of mediation, a being with, an encounter that can reorient, and thus revitalize, our identity. The problem we must focus on, then, is not so much fast evil but, rather, the immediate evil. [End Page 13] Andy Weaver York University Andy Weaver Andy Weaver is Associate Professor of English at...

Noble or evil: the ṣaḍvārgika monks reconsidered

This article reconsiders how the ṣaḍvārgika monks, or monks in the band of six, are represented in Vinaya, the codified Buddhist law texts. Conventionally, these ṣaḍvārgika monks are portrayed as evil figures whose behaviours have subsequently become exemplary of monastic violations in Vinaya literature. In this article, I discover a neglected alternative discourse in which the ṣaḍvārgika monks are perceived as supporters of Buddhism who were well educated in various secular and religious subjects. Specifically, this study reveals that the authors of two Chinese texts Lujie benshu 律戒本疏 (T2788) and Guan wuliangshou jing yishu 觀無量壽經義疏 (T1749) argued that the ṣaḍvārgika monks are noble figures who had purposefully acted out various misdeeds to facilitate the promulgation of the Buddhist monastic law, which only becomes necessary when the situation requires it.

The Devil in Fred Stonehouse: The Aesthetics of Evil After Evil

The devil is not what he used to be. The mythic villain of the Christian tradition has become cartoon version of his former terrifying self. And nowhere is this more apparent than in the visual arts. Fearsome images of the devil and his minions once adorned church walls, altars, and holy books. He was the very real incarnation of and his image was lesson in the wages of sin. Today, however, when words like sin and evil have lost their theological if not cultural resonance, the arts have all but abandoned sincere representations of the devil, trading instead on his image as logo or slur. To image the devil after is to reimagine the very idea of evil. The artist Fred Stonehouse has accomplished precisely this.In the year 447 the Council of Toledo set out the first official description of the devil. At the council the devil was described as a large, black, monstrous apparition with horns on his head, cloven hoofs, or one cloven hoof-ass's ears, hair, claws, fiery eyes, terrible teeth, an immense phallus, and sulphurous smell (Hughes 104). Since then the devil has morphed into caricature of this fierce beast of Christian mythology. More recently the devil has made appearances as the logo for Underwood Deviled Ham and as regular character on South Park. The reason the devil has ceased to function in the cultural imaginary as the personification of is because itself has become something of superstitious relic. As Peter Stanford observes in his book, The Devil: A Biography, Greater knowledge, less dependency on the idea of figure of evil, and more on the nega- five within each individual has brought more precise delineation of the unknown, the darkness, the shadow (284). Like darkness brought to light, has lost its frightful mystery.The notion that is the willful product of an external cosmic agent bent on the pain, suffering, and misery of humanity has foundered as viable theory of evil. Consequently, the devil too has lost much of his historical, theological, and cultural cache. Robert Muchembled argues that [n]ot only has [the devil] ceased to exist as terrifying external figure, he no longer even provokes fear of the self, dread of the inner demon... (228). Two centuries of the demystification of have enfeebled the once mighty icon of incarnate malevolence.If for nearly two millennia the image of the devil was the didactic embodiment of evil, what then does the devil look like after evil? This article addresses that question by turning to the work of contemporary artist Fred Stonehouse, who has been painting the devil for over three decades with an uncanny awareness of, and artistic reflection on, the tradition of representing the devil in the arts.The following is composed of three sections. The first two form an argument regarding the place of the devil-as-villain in modem art, focusing briefly on the art historical trajectory of the image of the devil before attending to the work of contemporary artist Fred Stonehouse. The third section then turns to Stonehouse himself offering an in depth interview with the artist about his work, his practice, and the place of the devil in his painting.Section one presents the devil as the cosmic archetype for the nemesis-style villain. Here, I attend to how the devil has historically been imaged in the arts and, in anticipation of the work of Fred Stonehouse, the precarious place of that image in contemporary culture where the devil has become more cliche than cosmic villain. Section two turns to the artistry of Fred Stonehouse in consideration of the figure of the devil in modem art. In this section I propose that Stonehouse offers rare, sincere figuration of the devil after by transforming him from villain into an icon of vulnerability. Section three is an interview with Stonehouse exploring the evolution of his art practice, the origins of his fascination with the devil, and how he understands this devious character in his work. …

Between structure and agency: assassination, social forces, and the production of the criminal subject.

[[agencyassassinationLeon Czolgoszsocial forcesstructure ]] Assassins are often regarded as ahistorical figures of evil. In this article, I contest this view by analysing the assassination of President William McKinley by Leon Czolgosz in 1901. There are two purposes to this article. The first is to situate McKinley’s assassination within the history and development of the social sciences, principally sociology, rather than assume that the assassin is a trans-historical representation of willful irresponsibility. The second is to describe and critique the discourse that made Czolgosz into a rational agent once he entered history as an assassin.

Writing Against Theodicy: Reflections on the Co-Existence of God and Evil in Baudelaire’s Poetry and Critical Essays

This article uncovers a sustained reflection in Baudelaire’s writings on the coexistence of God and evil. In the 1857 and 1861 editions of Les Fleurs du Mal , there is already a movement away from the divine in poems that depict evil as a more compelling concept and as the dominant force. In his critical writings and prose poems, Baudelaire increasingly engages in questions of theodicy to suggest the incompatibility of God and evil. This article describes an overarching system of writing “against theodicy” that links Baudelaire’s book reviews, art criticism, and essays on child psychology and psychedelic drugs, and that provides a conceptual framework for the shift in his poetics from romanticism to realism. As a textual analysis of these works demonstrates, Baudelaire’s writing “against theodicy” repeatedly leads his readers to draw the conclusion of God’s nonexistence in the face of the reality of evil. ( smp )

Living quicksand

The image of quicksand merciless swallowing a victim has inspired the fantasy of kids and helped writers and moviemakers to get rid of evil figures. Is this really possible? This is still disputed since till today it is not even clear what quicksand exactly is. In soil mechanics, the “quick-condition” is usually described as a liquefaction due to high water pressure essentially possible with any soil. However, previous studies have detected anomalous rheological properties from natural quicksand. Pushed by these contradicting points of view we set off to Lencois Maranhenses in North-East Brazil, where quicksands are common, to investigate rheology and strength in situ. We found that along very quiet drying lakes cyanobacteria cement an impermeable crust above a suspension of grains. Beyond a critical pressure, the crust fails releasing water from the collapsing colloidal structure and radically changing the depth dependence of the shear strength from a constant to a linear function. The sedimenting solid fraction and the rapid increase of shear strength can indeed trap an intruder endangering his life if the basin is sufficiently deep. As opposed to some previous studies, we find that this quicksand condition cannot be restored once it has collapsed. Finally, we also show some preliminary results from a contact dynamics model specially designed to mimic the living quicksand behavior.

Tolkien in the Land of Heroes: Discovering the Human Spirit (review)

Reviewed by: Tolkien in the Land of Heroes: Discovering the Human Spirit Alexandra Bolintineanu Tolkien in the Land of Heroes: Discovering the Human Spirit, by Anne C. Petty . Cold Spring Harbor, NY: Cold Spring Press, 2003. 328 pp. $16.95 (trade paperback) ISBN 1892975998. Anne C. Petty's study Tolkien in the Land of Heroes is a collection of related essays that explore the themes of power, loss, and heroism, as they appear in J. R. R. Tolkien's finished works set in Middle-earth: The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion. Petty's study is explicitly aimed at a non-academic audience. Both its value and its weaknesses seem to stem from this approach. As a general reader's introduction to Tolkien studies, Petty's work is valuable not only because of its own insights, but also because of its abundance of annotated resources, which [End Page 273] include scholarly studies of Tolkien, as well as religious, philosophical, and sociological texts pertaining to the themes under discussion. Unfortunately, despite its potential, the book suffers from pervasive flaws of documentation, style, and analysis. Parts I and II of the book, "The Myth of the Fall" and "The Consequences of Power," form the strongest part of Petty's study. They contain rigorous, clearly-structured, well-illustrated analysis that reveals a number of interesting insights about the texts. In Part I, "The Myth of the Fall," Petty examines Melkor's fall from grace and the ways in which that fall manifests itself in the careers of other figures of evil. She traces compelling parallels between Melkor, Sauron, and Saruman, parallels that demonstrate the thematic continuity between The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings, a feature that Petty highlights throughout her study. In Part II, "The Consequences of Power," Petty discusses secondary agents of evil in the three books. She applies a variety of models to Tolkien's characters. Petty draws these models from sources relevant to Tolkien's intellectual background—the Bible, the Icelandic sagas, the Faust legend, European folktales—and even as she measures the characters against them, she points out the limitations of such models and categories. The discussion is summarized in a table of agents of evil (109) that provides an overview of both her theoretical categories and of the data that these models describe. Part III, "Loss and Longing," explores the themes of "impermanence, mortality, loss and longing" (179) that pervade Tolkien's work. In Chapter 5, which focuses on death and loss, Petty provides a detailed overview of Tolkien's techniques for dramatizing the age of his invented world: the inset narratives of history and legend, the presence of characters whose long lives encompass both the present of the story and the mythical past, the ubiquity of ruins and ancient statuary from lost or decaying civilizations throughout the landscape of Middle-earth. As well, this chapter contains an analysis sophisticated in its conclusions and delightfully novel in its method: like an archaeologist, Petty examines the various burial sites and practices of the races of Middle-earth. She highlights the cultural or racial attitudes towards life and death reflected by funeral customs, as well as the thematic significance of certain individual graves. Chapter 6, "In Defense of Nature," analyzes the impact of both the evil and the good inhabitants of Middle-earth upon the natural world. Exploring the effect of evil on nature, Petty convincingly establishes another aspect of the thematic continuity between The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings. Nor is Petty's exploration reductive: she points out what Drout and Wynne call "the complex interplay between wilderness and cultivation, and between nature and civilization, that Tolkien does not resolve unequivocally in favor of nature" (Drout and Wynne 114-15). [End Page 274] However, less paraphrasing of Tolkien's descriptions and more analysis would make this chapter a more useful resource. For example, concerning the Dead Marshes and the land outside the Black Gate, Petty writes: The sense of reality created in the detailed descriptions of these passages lets you know that Tolkien has seen these places as well as Frodo. The only green to be found here is pond slime. The...

Hrotsvit of Gandersheim: contexts, identities, affinities, and performances

Medieval Literature and Culture Brown, Phyllis R., Linda A. McMillin, and Katharina M. Wilson, eds. Hrotsvit of Gandersheim: Contexts, Identities, Affinities, and Performances. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004. vii+313 pp. 160 cloth. As every reader of the Canoness Hrotsvit of Gandersheim's dramatic works and her various verse narratives and poems has agreed, she defies all expectations in a premodern woman writer and especially in a tenth-century convent woman who was actively involved in producing outstanding literary works. Not surprisingly, scholarship has made many efforts to establish a reliable, historical-critical edition, to publish translations, and to provide numerous interpretations of her works. Hrotsvit was also the topic at a NEH Summer Institute directed by Jane Chance at Rice University in 1997. participants continued with their discussions on Hrotsvit since then and finally translated those into publishable essays that are presented in this volume. It is divided into four sections: I. Constructing a Context; II: Forming Identities; III. Creating Affinities; and IV: Conducting Performances. Beginning in the first section, Jay T. Lees studies Hrotsvit's epic poem Gesta Ottonis as a remarkable poetic document in which Hrotsvit energetically defended the dynastic claims of the Ottonians to rule over Germany against Henry of Bavaria, almost serving as a propagandist for the royal family to which she belonged as well. Focusing on Hrotsvit's verse narrative Basilius, but also on the fourteenth-century English Piers Plowman, David Day highlights the principle concept of fraud versus faith (29) through which the Devil is regularly made a fool who cannot achieve his goals with a strong Christian. Linda A. McMillin examines the surprisingly detailed information about Muslim Spain as portrayed in Hrotsvit's legend Pelagius, although the poet deliberately recast the character of the ruler Abd al-Rahman III as an evil figure fighting the Christians (see also Lisa Weston, The Saracen and the Marty, Meeting the Foreign in the Middle Ages, ed. A. Classen, 2002; here not consulted). Florence Newman demonstrates that the poet presents the erotic female not as a threat to holy women's spirituality, but rather, as a means of illustrating the spiritual strength women exercise through the body (72). Daniel T Kline alerts us to the phenomenon that Hrotsvit specifically plays on the motif of childhood in her religious play Sapientia where the young martyred girls serve as instruments to ridicule the pagan Emperor Hadrian. But Kline seems to misread the religious framework of Sapientia, treating it as a historical document which reflects on medieval attitudes toward children as expandable (91)-definitely a specious revival of Philippe Aries's old thesis (1960). Although Sayientia's, children are terribly martyred, this does not mean at all, as Kline sees it, that the mother and her children do not enjoy an intimate, emotional relationship, particularly in face of death. Moreover, it seems problematic to argue, as Kline does, that the children's martyrdom is closely related to the preparation of a feast, and that hence the audience witnesses a kind of Eucharist. …

Figures of Evil in the Business World

When you ask people What is evil?, their responses are striking in several respects. They tend to name individuals, singling out certain people as evil?e.g., Adolf Hitler, Saddam Hussein, or Joseph Stalin. They typically view evil as inhering in people or in quasi-personal agents (e.g., devils or vampires), not in animals or natural forces. Respondents never describe themselves as evil or as in any way complicitous in evil deeds. A recent poll of Americans who regularly attend church estimated that only three percent believe that they are the ones who might go to hell.1 And they perceive evil as an active, creative, and even autonomous force at work in the world. This last response suggests that perhaps the popular imagination knows something that ethical theorists do not. Ethicists who study busi nesses and organizations typically attribute malevolence and cruelty on the part of businesspeople to either a failure of moral reasoning or to a complete lack of empathie imagination. Some ethical lapses do appear to be the result of individuals' failure to think; they operate on a kind of moral autopilot, following a script they have never thought to question. The pilots who, during the 1950s, routinely dumped fuel into the ocean prior to landing did not set out to harm the environment. They were simply following the landing procedures they had been taught by those pilots who were their teachers. If evil is identical with mindlessness, then the best way to combat it is to instill habits of mindfulness. Those of us who teach ethics try to do so by asking our students to consider cases with a view to determining where and why people went wrong. We look for revealing patterns and causes. We

‘By this mark you shall know him’: clerical celibacy and Antichrist in English Reformation polemic

‘Antichrist’, wrote William Tyndale in 1528, ‘is not an outward thyng, that is to say a man that should sode[n]ly appeare with wonders as our fathers talked of him. No, verely, for Antichrist is a spirituall thing. And this is as much to say as agaynst Christ, ye one that preacheth against Christ.’ Such a definition of Antichrist marked a departure from the traditional medieval legend, which was based upon the prophecy of a single future figure of evil. This new image of Antichrist as a permanent and spiritual presence in the world is a central feature of English Protestant polemic, informing interpretations of both biblical prophecies, and the history of the Church. It was not history which engendered right understanding of Scripture, but Scripture that offered the means of interpreting the past. The Bible offered paradigms for the understanding of history because it was the embodiment of divine truth, which was irreproachable and immutable. In the words of John Bale, ‘yet is the text a light to the chronicles, and not the chronicles to the text’.