King Calls Research Articles

Abjection Incorporated: Mediating the Politics of Pleasure and Violence

Abjection Incorporated: Mediating the Politics of Pleasure and Violence

Martin Luther King Jr.’s white moderates and moderate Baptists: Moderateness as betrayal of the gospel

In his 1963 “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” Martin Luther King Jr. criticizes “the white moderate,” identifying them as empathizing with the Civil Rights Movement, but not acting upon it. King’s “white moderate” compares to contemporary white Baptists who embody King’s definition. Putting “white moderate” in conversation with “moderate Baptists” demonstrates how moderate actions betray the Gospel. Exploring the identity of the clergy whom King addresses in his letter aids in drawing out a fuller definition of “moderate.” This article applies three aspects of King’s critique to contemporary Baptist concerns, such as women in ministry and inclusion of LGBTQIA persons in all areas of ministry: (1) an avoidance of tension through silence, what King calls “negative peace;” (2) a sympathetic view without sustained change in social structure or policy, identified by King as “lukewarm acceptance;” and (3) using generalized statements to avoid speaking of “hot-topic” issues, which King phrases as “sanctimonious trivialities.” White Baptists can fight against the trend of “moderateness” through being transformed by and participating in what King calls “direct action.” In doing so, Baptists may become, to use King’s term, “extremists for love.”

Shakespeare and the Practice of Physic: Medical Narratives on the Early Modern English Stage by Todd H. J. Pettigrew

Reviewed by: Shakespeare and the Practice of Physic: Medical Narratives on the Early Modern English Stage by Todd H. J. Pettigrew Carol F. Heffernan (bio) Todd H. J. Pettigrew. Shakespeare and the Practice of Physic: Medical Narratives on the Early Modern English Stage. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2007. 197 pages. $85.00. Todd Pettigrew's Shakespeare and the Practice of Physic studies the medical practitioners that appear in Shakespeare's plays in the context of tracts and vernacular medical texts that were part of the debate on medical practice sparked by the establishment of the College of Physicians of London in the early sixteenth century. The College of Physicians attempted to establish a hierarchy of medical practitioners with themselves at the top. Pettigrew argues that "Shakespeare's drama consistently questions and challenges the elite physicians' claim on absolute authority in medical matters" (30). His introductory chapter (chapter 1) focuses on the rhetorical question the king in Cymbeline puts to the physician who delivers the news of his wife's death, "Who worse than a physician/Would this report become?" (5.5.27-28). Pettigrew suggests that the question "is the subtle medical refrain of the most sophisticated drama of the age" (30). The next five chapters each takes up one kind of practitioner of the healing arts: "the empiric," with no formal training but with practical experience (usually a woman); the university-trained physician; apothecaries and friars; surgeons; and, finally, those who heal with magic. Left unsaid is that most of the sick in Shakespeare's day, as in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, did not have the good fortune to be treated by a doctor of physic such as Richard Napier, mentioned several times by Pettigrew. Napier was a physician and clergyman whose medical records, kept from 1597–1634, are the source of Michael MacDonald's study of madness in seventeenth-century England, Mystical Bedlam. Napier's patients were exclusively dukes and duchesses and other members of the highest ranks of [End Page 161] the aristocracy. Patients were usually treated by barber surgeons who performed such operations as bleeding, tooth-drawing, and cauterization; midwives; apothecaries; and members of the clergy who were long in the habit of curing men's bodies together with their souls. Except for the clergy, these other leeches were unlatined and, therefore, unversed in the Latin medical authorities that formed the basis of university medical training. This reality makes more striking Pettigrew's assertion that Shakespeare challenges the establishment physicians. Chapter 2 presents Helena's cure of an ailing king in All's Well that Ends Well as Shakespeare's "case for greater tolerance in medical practice" (60). The king at first rejects Helena's offer of help because, as a woman, she lacks the formal training of the "learned doctors" of "the congregated college" (2.1.115-16) and, therefore, he groups her with "empirics" (2.1.121) who were thought to privilege experience over formal training. Helena, however, is no mere female empiric; she has inherited remedies from her father, Gerard de Narbon, a famous physician. In the end, the king calls Helena a "sweet practiser" of "physic" (2.1.183-84) and declares himself her "resolved patient" (2.1.203). Chapter 3 is primarily concerned with Macbeth and demonstrates the powerlessness of physicians—the establishment practitioners—to heal conditions beyond the physiological. Called in to treat the madness of Lady Macbeth, the physician seems to judge her condition in need of spiritual rather than medical treatment: "This disease is beyond my practice" (5.1.60). Timothy Bright's A Treatise of Melancholie would seem to concur: "the affliction of soul through conscience is quite another thing than melancholy." Chapter 4 takes up marginal practitioners: the apothecary and friar who appear in Romeo and Juliet, the one play that does not challenge the elite physicians' claim to absolute authority in medical matters. Both the apothecary and the friar exceed the limits of their profession, and thus lead to disaster. The apothecary breaks the laws of Mantua when he sells Romeo the poison because of his poverty; Friar Laurence's potion concocted for Juliet would have been forbidden by the College...

What Does the Study of Religion Study?

At the end of the twentieth century, scholars in the academic study of religion made what we might call “the reflexive turn,” in that they picked up the tools of genealogy, deconstruction, and post-colonial studies and they began in earnest to reflect critically on their own conceptual categories. Where did the very concept of “religion” come from? Whose interests are served by this apparently modern, European, and Christian way of categorizing practices? One way to think about the effect of the reflexive turn is to think of the conceptual vocabulary in religious studies as a window or lens through which scholars had previously been examining the world. What had been taken as natural and transparent now becomes itself the object of study. Richard King calls this “the Copernican turn,” that is, as he nicely puts it, a turn to focus on the representation that makes the object possible rather than the object that makes the representation possible. The goal of this turn is to “denaturalize” the concept of religion (King, 1). The reflexive or Copernican turn, in my judgment, is a crucial aspect of social inquiry that scholars of religion should not ignore. But it clearly leads to the question: once one denaturalizes the concept of “religion,” what does the academic study of religion study?

ANOTHER CENTURY OF GODS? A RE-EVALUATION OF SELEUCID RULER CULT

This paper proposes that living Seleucid kings were recognized as divine by the royal court before the reign of Antiochus III despite lacking an established centralized ruler cult like their fellow kings, the Ptolemies. Owing to the nature of the surviving evidence, we are forced to rely heavily on numismatics to construct a view of Seleucid royal ideology. Regrettably, it seems that up until now much of the numismatic evidence for the divinity of living Seleucid rulers has not been fully considered. I argue that the evidence from silver coinage produced in the name of the Seleucid kings presents a version of the official image of the reigning king and that images which portray the king as divine reflect central acceptance of the king's divinity. This is clear from the epithets on the coinage of Antiochus IV and his successors, but I will argue that the same principle holds for all earlier Seleucid kings. Thus coinage with divine images of Seleucid kings provided one of the mechanisms through which the royal court transmitted the divine nature of the kings to the population. As we will see, in the case of Antiochus Hierax, local considerations also influenced the numismatic representation of the king. This blurring of boundaries between the local veneration of the king, which has long been accepted as normal civic practice in the Greek city-states and in non-Greek temples, and the royal images of the divine king calls into question the strict division between civic and centralized ruler cults. The reflection of local cults within royal ideology can be seen as a manifestation of a negotiating model of Seleucid power that relied heavily on a dialogue with a wide range of interested groups. This article argues that the inconsistencies in the development of an iconography of divine kingship before the reign of Antiochus IV is a manifestation of the same phenomenon.

Changing Banking for Good: Counting the Costs of Market Misconduct

Because of the Budget 2016, the chancellor has been accused of “looking more like Gordon Brown as a purveyor of catchy gimmicks.” In difficult times when calls for his resignation over the row regarding the budget seemed to have eclipsed everything else, the rare bit of good news for George Osborne is that he can use the opportunity provided by the threat of Brexit – “a leap in the dark” which may cost the UK £100 billion or 5 per cent of GDP and 950,000 jobs by 2020 – to camouflage and obfuscate the real problems of conduct in the world of economics and finance. In an important interview with Charles Moore, the former Bank of England governor Mervyn King warned that lenders have not stopped taking excessive risks with savers’ money and the result is “bankers have not learnt the lessons of the Great Crash”. Equally, in his new book, The End of Alchemy, King calls banks “the Achilles heel of capitalism”. Reviewing Professor Lord King’s concerns, I sketch emerging issues in the intersecting themes of economics, law and politics as seen in the media, especially through the lens of “conduct costs” – other overlapping themes are also explored. The case of Barclays, which is said to suffer from “an identity crisis”, is examined in some depth. My analysis is anchored in a recent lecture titled The Cost of Trust Gone Wrong – $300 Billion and Counting where issues related to the “rebuilding of trust agenda” are highlighted. Roger McCormick and Chris Stears point out to members of the Chartered Institute for Securities and Investment that until 2012 recklessness and negligence used to be associated as banks’ conduct related failings rather than cheating, lying and fraud. As argued in the lecture, it was known for years that PPI “stinks” but the bigwigs in banks such as the Royal Bank of Scotland felt “we can’t be the first to stop”; in other words, “we don’t care”. Aided by this analysis, I explore ethical dilemmas and conduct and technology related themes in the wider arena of banking and financial services. Identifying new directions for future research, I conclude the CCP Research Foundation is an expanding new social movement with considerable scope for changing banking for good.This paper also sheds light on HSBC’s dealings with Syria’s corrupt Makhlouf family as revealed by the Panama Papers, which essentially affirm past fears and point to the wholesale abdication of ethics in the banking sector. The wider political ramifications of the leaked documents are also discussed, as are the activities of the FCA in that regard; the City watchdog has given the banks until 15 April 2016 to report on the extent, if any, of their involvement and links with Mossack Fonseca or firms serviced by them. The corporate sector has a poor reputation but Mark Carney strangely declared last year (2015) at Mansion House that “the Age of Irresponsibility is over”. However, on proper analysis, the plain truth is that the authorities keep trying to bottle up earlier scandals but new ones constantly keep arising making it impossible for regulators, and even courts, to remedy all the awful things that go on behind the scenes. In the event regulators take action by imposing further penalties on the banks for their involvement in the Panama Papers’ scandal, such regulatory disciplining will inevitably provide further fertile ground for expanding the scope of the conduct costs centred analysis contemplated by the CCP Research Foundation’s “league table” approach to reforming the banking sector. Accused of “hypocrisy”, even prime minister David Cameron is under serious pressure from the fallout of highly damaging revelations in the Panama Papers which show he profited from his father Ian Cameron’s offshore company Blairmore Holdings Inc. Taunted that he “misled the public” and “lost the trust of the British people”, Cameron is feeling the heat and a taskforce under the aegis of HMRC, NCA, SFO and the FCA is expected to assess the legality of his financial affairs.

A Special Issue on New Approaches to Eliza Haywood: The Political Biography and Beyond

A Special Issue on New Approaches to Eliza Haywood:The Political Biography and Beyond Amanda Hiner (bio) and Patsy S. Fowler (bio) The scholarly and critical treatment of Eliza Haywood’s work ranges from tidy nineteenth-century accounts of her reformation from a writer of scandalous amatory fiction to a writer of demure domestic fiction; to mid-twentieth-century relegations of her work to a subcategory of inferior, feminine, amatory fiction; to late-twentieth century reclamations of Haywood as a prolific, professional writer of diverse literary genres; to more recent, expansive interpretations of her as a “slippery, fluid, multifarious, strategic, opportunistic, chameleon-like, and performance-driven writer keenly attuned to the evolving circumstances of literary commerce” (King, Political Biography 195). Yet throughout these varied treatments, Haywood has remained what Kathryn R. King calls an “uncooperative biographical subject” (Political Biography 1) who, as David Erskine Baker famously reports in his 1764 The Companion to the Play-House, instructed her companions to keep any biographical details of her life out of the public sphere (Baker 321). These companions, as it turns out, were both very loyal and very successful. In fact, it is likely that this dearth of biographical information tempted early Haywood scholars toward apocryphal speculation and indeed, helped to create an enduring myth surrounding Haywood’s life. In part as an effort to correct biographical and interpretive errors in Haywood scholarship and in part as an effort to recast Eliza Haywood as a complex, market-savvy, and prolific author of wide-ranging literary genres, King [End Page 1] recently produced a thematically-focused, comprehensive political biography of Haywood titled A Political Biography of Eliza Haywood.1 This deliberate decision to analyze Haywood’s literary oeuvre strictly through the lens of political, historical, and cultural criticism effectively ended Haywood’s designation as a mere amatory novelist and modeled a potently effective method for the critical exploration of eighteenth-century literary texts. Even as it acknowledges the monumental contributions of previous Haywood scholars such as Patrick Spedding and Christine Blouch, King’s biography succinctly and effectively rejects many of the speculative claims about Haywood in order to demythologize the more scandalous narrative and recast it as a “compelling story… of a young woman’s journey towards literary professionalism and ultimately oppositional political engagement” (Political Biography 17). Over the past several decades, feminist scholars have successfully reclaimed Haywood as a legitimate literary subject, and many have focused their attention on her amatory novels in their examinations of female subjectivity and agency and of cultural constructions of sensibility, gender, and domesticity; Haywood’s work undoubtedly has been fruitful ground for this important critical work. Although fewer in number, others have carefully examined Haywood’s plays, periodicals, and overtly political writings, emphasizing her role as what Patsy Fowler has called elsewhere a “legitimate player within the literary marketplace” (179) and envisioning her as an intelligent and calculating participant in the public sphere who strove to secure patrons, dismantle her critics, and control her own image (her personal “brand,” we would say now). King’s comprehensive, detailed, and nuanced treatment of Haywood’s public life and political writings considerably advances this critical exercise, providing readers with the first full-length biography of Haywood in almost a century and offering readers a serious and attentive examination of Haywood’s fearless political engagement in the public sphere. King develops in her monograph a “long view” of Haywood, examining her writings over the course of forty years, and contending that, though Haywood “engaged energetically and at times vehemently in anti-ministerial satire and journalism,” her “political positions were complex and shifting, [and] to some degree situational” (Political Biography 7), especially during the early years of her literary career. In adopting such a nuanced view, King persuasively argues against the rather simplistic perception of Haywood as a Tory propagandist doggedly forwarding a party line. King’s meticulous examination of both Haywood’s literary and personal associations and [End Page 2] patrons and her rhetorical allusions and references reveals that Haywood was astute, calculating, and fluid in her political associations. When studied attentively, Haywood’s political writings reveal a public participant who fearlessly satirized and criticized both ministerial and Tory factions...

Archaeology, narrative, and the politics of the past: the view from southern Maryland

In this innovative work, Julia King moves nimbly among a variety of sources and disciplinary approaches--archaeological, historical, architectural, literary, and art-historical--to show how places take on, convey, and maintain meanings. Focusing on the beautiful Chesapeake Bay region of Maryland, King looks at the ways in which various groups, from patriots and politicians of the antebellum era to present-day archaeologists and preservationists, have transformed key landscapes into historical, indeed sacred, spaces. The sites King examines include the region's vanishing tobacco farms; St. Mary's City, established as Maryland's first capital by English settlers in the seventeenth century; and Point Lookout, the location of a prison for captured Confederate soldiers during the Civil War. As the author explores the historical narratives associated with such places, she uncovers some surprisingly durable myths as well as competing ones. St. Mary's City, for example, early on became the centre of Maryland's founding narrative of religious tolerance, a view commemorated in nineteenth-century celebrations and reflected even today in local museum exhibits and preserved buildings. And at Point Lookout, one private group has established a Confederate Memorial Park dedicated to those who died at the prison, thus nurturing the Lost Cause ideology that arose in the South in the late 1800s, while nearby the custodians of a 1,000-acre state park avoid controversy by largely ignoring the area's Civil War history, preferring instead to concentrate on recreation and tourism, an unusually popular element of which has become the recounting of ghost stories. As King shows, the narratives that now constitute the public memory in southern Maryland tend to overlook the region's more vexing legacies, particularly those involving slavery and race. Noting how even her own discipline of historical archaeology has been complicit in perpetuating old narratives, King calls for research--particularly archaeological research--that produces new stories and counter-narratives that challenge old perceptions and interpretations and thus convey a more nuanced grasp of a complicated past. |In this innovative work, Julia King moves nimbly among a variety of sources and disciplinary approaches--archaeological, historical, architectural, literary, and art-historical--to show how places take on, convey, and maintain meanings. Focusing on the beautiful Chesapeake Bay region of Maryland, King looks at the ways in which various groups, from patriots and politicians of the antebellum era to present-day archaeologists and preservationists, have transformed key landscapes into historical, indeed sacred, spaces. The sites King examines include the region's vanishing tobacco farms; St. Mary's City, established as Maryland's first capital by English settlers in the seventeenth century; and Point Lookout, the location of a prison for captured Confederate soldiers during the Civil War. As the author explores the historical narratives associated with such places, she uncovers some surprisingly durable myths as well as competing ones. St. Mary's City, for example, early on became the center of Maryland's founding narrative of religious tolerance, a view commemorated in nineteenth-century celebrations and reflected even today in local museum exhibits and preserved buildings. And at Point Lookout, one private group has established a Confederate Memorial Park dedicated to those who died at the prison, thus nurturing the Lost Cause ideology that arose in the South in the late 1800s, while nearby the custodians of a 1,000-acre state park avoid controversy by largely ignoring the area's Civil War history, preferring instead to concentrate on recreation and tourism, an unusually popular element of which has become the recounting of ghost stories. As King shows, the narratives that now constitute the public memory in southern Maryland tend to overlook the region's more vexing legacies, particularly those involving slavery and race. Noting how even her own discipline of historical archaeology has been complicit in perpetuating old narratives, King calls for research--particularly archaeological research--that produces new stories and counter-narratives that challenge old perceptions and interpretations and thus convey a more nuanced grasp of a complicated past. Julia A. King is an associate professor of anthropology at St. Mary's College of Maryland, where she coordinates the Museum Studies Program and directs the SlackWater Center, a consortium devoted to exploring, documenting, and interpreting the changing landscapes of Chesapeake communities. She is also coeditor, with Dennis B. Blanton, of Indian and European Contact in Context: The Mid-Atlantic Region.

O'Neill after Exorcism

O'Neill after <i>Exorcism</i>

Newman and the Alexandrian Fathers: Shaping Doctrine in Nineteenth-Century England (review)

Reviewed by: Newman and the Alexandrian Fathers: Shaping Doctrine in Nineteenth-Century England Charles M. Stang Benjamin John King Newman and the Alexandrian Fathers: Shaping Doctrine in Nineteenth-Century England Changing Paradigms in Historical and Systematic Theology Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009 Pp. xvii + 289. $100.00. This book surveys John Henry Newman's (1801–1890) lifelong study of the Alexandrian tradition with an eye to understanding both how he consistently turned to the Alexandrians as a resource for his own Anglican, and later Catholic, theological agenda and how his reading of the Alexandrians reflected and in turn shaped western historiography of Christian doctrine for many decades to come. Newman was an Alexandrian loyalist from start to finish, even as his tastes shifted over the years from the pristine pre-Nicene faith of Origen to the architects of conciliar orthodoxy, Athanasius and Cyril, and finally to his later tryst with Rome and a "scholasticized" Athanasius. King bucks a certain trend by refusing to read Newman through two stages, the Anglican and the Catholic, and charts instead a tripartite chronological frame: (1) the 1830s, when Newman operates with a "twofold system of doctrine"; (2) the 1840s and 1850s, when Newman deploys the notion of the "development" of doctrine; and (3) the 1860s and 1870s, when Newman increasingly saw doctrine as a "theological science." What cuts across these periods, however, is Newman's conviction that there is a compelling analogy between the fourth and fifth centuries, on the one hand, and the nineteenth, on the other. In other words, he feels as if the forces arrayed against the church (of England or of Rome) in his own day—namely liberalism and secularism—are deeply aligned with those forces arrayed against the church of Athanasius and, later, Cyril—Arianism and Nestorianism. The thinnest film, as it were, seems to separate the two beleaguered orthodox communities, and so he consistently turns to the Alexandrians for solace and guidance in his own perceived struggles on behalf of right belief and faithful authority. During the first phase, Newman's heroes were the pre-Nicene authors, especially Origen. He substantiated this elevation of the pre-Nicenes by what King calls a "twofold system of doctrine," according to which there were two categories of doctrine: the "Apostolic" or "Episcopal," which was unchanging, necessary to salvation, and concerning which the pre-Nicenes were consistent and unfaltering, [End Page 339] and the "Prophetical," which was dynamic and responsive to challenges. His preference for the pre-Nicenes can be seen in his assigning the belief that "God is three persons in one" to "Apostolic" doctrine, while the consubstantial relationship between persons (homoousios) falls into "Prophetic" doctrine. In fact, as Rowan Williams argues in his recent introduction to Newman's Arians of the Fourth Century (1833), the twofold system of doctrine implies that the Nicene formula is an arid and technical, if ultimately necessary, explanation of what the pre-Nicenes richly and dynamically confessed in a variety of idioms. The hero of the second phase, however, was undoubtedly Athanasius. Already in An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (1845), just as Newman was converting to Roman Catholicism, he was pushing Origen to the periphery of the orthodox center and faulting him for his hesitations avant la lettre regarding homoousios. King acutely notes that this shift to "development" is something of a shibboleth, for, as he puts it, "Newman's 'development' is shorthand for the triumph of Athanasian orthodoxy—an orthodoxy which, in the way he presents it, allows little room for complexity or dynamism" (185f.). One of the threads running through the first and second phases of Newman's Alexandrian enthusiasms is a peculiar geographical configuration of orthodoxy and heresy. Already in the 1830s, Newman could not countenance the fact that Arius, the heretic par excellence, was in fact an Alexandrian. Rather than imagine that Alexandria might have been home to more than one theological tradition, the Athanasian-Cyrillian line, Newman redrew the Mediterranean map such that Arius was, in his temperament and training, an Antiochene and so a descendent of the dubious line of Lucian of Antioch and Paul of Samosata. By prying Arius away from the Alexandrian context in...

Cinephilia as War Machine

Cinephilia, as we all know, is the love of cinema. But what a banal definition! What fan, of any kind or level, doesn't regard themselves as loving cinema? French critic Serge Daney's militant sense of his own cinephilia was directed precisely against this widespread, sickeningly populist vibe, as captured in an advertising slogan of the '70s that also elicited the ire of Guy Debord: People who love life go to the cinema!1 So, everybody loves the cinema. As N. Paul Todd would reply on the greatest television reality show of the decade, My Big Fat Obnoxious Boss (Fox, US, 2004-5): Why, so what, and who cares? The cinephile, however, wants to be identified as someone different from the mere fan or nerd who, in their dreary, uninspired ways, love the cinema. Cinephiles are a band of outsiders, a band apart-or they are nothing. And that is what is galling in the contemporary climate, when every second website is calling itself cinephilethis and cinephile-that, when the books and conferences on cinephilia as a scholarly topic are multiplying: when, in short, the institutionalization, and thus the taming, of cinephilia, looms. Cinephilia has become a kind of brand name or mark, a sexy surplus value that livens up the academy and the Ain't It Cool News Internet empire alike. This empty cinephilemania reaches its height in the out-of-control best film lists swamping the Internet. And to suggest that the cinephile passion can now be conveniently placed as a pre- TV variant of fandom does not improve this situation. The agenda of cinephilia is not always terribly clear or explicit. Paul Willemen described it as something murky, a smokescreen for some other psychic complex to which we cannot quite put a name.2 Thomas Elsaesser emphasizes that cinephilia is always a drama of displaced time, of deferral: the cinema that is lost, the lost object; the cinema associated with some exotic elsewhere; the cinema of a previous generation, but the kind your parents never watched and could never have understood.3 Alain Bergala, in his fascinating The Cinema Hypothesis, gives a positive, even a feverish spin to this generational game: for him, the cinephile objects par excellence are those films-from Fritz Lang's Moonfleet (US, 1955) and Martin Scorsese's The Color of Money (US, 1986) to Abbas Kiarostami's Where Is the Friend's Home? (IR, 1987)-that mirror the tender, secretive transmission of knowledge, of aesthetic passion, from teacher to student, parent to child.4 But there is no characterization of cinephilia, such as have been offered in the burgeoning literature on this subject, that I can accept as definitive. I do not believe, for instance, that cinephilia is essentially a solitary activity, a melancholic activity, a Christian activity, or a surrealist activity. I don't believe that it necessarily equates with either left or right politics, or a total lack of politics either. I don't believe cinephilia proceeds in tidy generational waves. I don't believe there is a discernible canon of cinephile films. I don't believe that cinephilia is dependent on any particular type of technology, whether the old-fashioned movie theater or the new-fangled DVD player. I don't believe that cinephiles only truly care about fragments (or Benjaminian ruins) of films in a modernist or postmodernist flux. I don't believe that cinephilia is essentially a matter of nutty, obsessive viewing rituals (however much fun these might be), or what Noel King calls discursive regularities in the way that cinephiles write or speak or teach about what they love.5 For there is no such regularity. I propose a way out of this deadlock, with reference to the premise of Antoine de Baecque's canny historical account, the title of which translates as Cinephilia: The Invention of a Gaze, the History of a Culture 1944-68.6 According to de Baecque, cinephilia may start with a kind of unutterable ecstasy or brute desire (you as the big cinephile baby before the vast cinema screen) but, straight away, that desiring engagement leads to acts-particularly of writing, speaking, programming, or curating (and also, of course, filmmaking, but that's another story)-acts that happen in public, that are broadcast, directed at the world, and that involve the forming of a community, even if that community is only a gang of friends, an editorial collective, a classroom of students, or an Internet chat group. …

One child, one world, and one permit expired

Demographer Maurice King calls for a one-child world, in which the planet's inhabitants restrict themselves to a solitary heir or heiress for the betterment of humankind and to deliver us from “entrapment,” the deadly curse of exhausted food supplies and civil war that comes with overpopulation. Africa, King argues, is a continent in the throes of entrapment and, although a commission sponsored by politicians and rubber stamped by pop stars has identified governance as the primary obstacle to Africa's emergence from poverty, it would be an error to sideline a debate on demography. The Commission for Africa promises much—an …

BOOK REVIEW: Amy M. King.BLOOM: THE BOTANICAL VERNACULAR IN THE ENGLISH NOVEL. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Reviewed by: Bloom: The Botanical Vernacular in the English Novel Barbara T. Gates (bio) Bloom: The Botanical Vernacular in the English Novel, by Amy M. King; pp. xxiii + 265. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2003, £31.00, $49.95. In Bloom: The Botanical Vernacular in the English Novel, Amy M. King sets out to show how the Linnaean system of botanical classification and its attendant language influenced English literature. King argues that Linnaeus's work led to a "botanical vernacular," a cultural language that extends well beyond scientific frontiers and into the world of novels. She reminds us that Linnaeus's system, dealing as it does with metaphors of sexual courtship and marriage, applied to plants a language used to discuss human beings and that in a post-Linnaean reversal, plant terms were more commonly applied to human sexual interactions. Primarily, King is concerned with the term "bloom" as it characterizes young women who have become sexually mature. As she explains it, "bloom" can refer both to innocent and provocative behaviors; in so doing, it can also help readers better understand key eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels (which King calls "classical novels"), both their descriptions and their narratives. To this reviewer, King's argument seems both obvious and a stretch. After Linnaeus, botanical language was indeed used as code for human behaviors, most particularly in sexual primers where the analogy between plants and their parts and human sexual reproduction was carefully drawn. A botanical vernacular—and King's term is a good one—developed in part through increasing amateur interest in botany and filtered into many discourses. Tracing it into nonscientific avenues could offer a fascinating linguistic journey. But as King extends her metaphor to encompass one novel after another, in each case probing a "workable figure that could represent marital sexuality without transgressing the boundaries of decorum" (7), the reader's own bloom can [End Page 510] quickly fade. Does this botanical vernacular consist of only one word and its variants? Is it mainly another way of talking about the marriage plot or, along with gesture and action, of coding texts for readers in the know? And if so—and King does relate her subject to the marriage plot—how deep can her metaphoric readings take us? To a "bloom narrative," seems King's answer (4, and elsewhere), but how effective is she in showing us just what such a narrative is, or why it is important for us to understand? This last question King never quite answers. For the most part,King organizes Bloom chronologically. In order to forge its primary link between the history of science and the evolution of the novel, the book sets out a useful discussion of Linnaeus's work. It continues with readings of eighteenth- century English texts—novels like Maria Edgeworth's Belinda (1801) and poems by Charlotte Smith and Erasmus Darwin, whose Loves of the Plants (1789) is strategically chosen. Next come close readings of Jane Austen's novels in a chapter titled "Austen's Physicalized Mimeses," where King weds the picturesque garden to sexualized young heroines. When King turns to George Eliot and Henry James for much of the second half of Bloom, readers of Victorian Studies may find the book of most moment. The chapters on Eliot and James are also embedded with readings of novelists like Charles Dickens and Oscar Wilde. Finally, the book concludes with a brief, if appropriate, nod to James Joyce's Molly Bloom, who might usefully have been contrasted with Virginia Woolf's Lily Briscoe. Bloom's strengths and weaknesses might best be probed by address to the chapter "Eliot's Vernaculars: Natural Objects and Revisionary Blooms," primarily because here King extends "bloom narrativity" beyond the bounds of the traditional marriage plot to the subjects of "second blooms" (Middlemarch, 1871-72)and "clandestine bloom" (Adam Bede, 1859) (133). Eliot, King suggests, might even have found the currency of bloom cloying, an interesting idea in and of itself, though one not developed here. What this all amounts to in King's reading of Middlemarch is this: Lydgate mistakes bloom for love in Rosamund, while Casaubon looks for a blooming girl in Dorothea. Then...

Bloom: The Botanical Vernacular in the English Novel (review)

Reviewed by: Bloom: The Botanical Vernacular in the English Novel Barbara T. Gates (bio) Bloom: The Botanical Vernacular in the English Novel, by Amy M. King; pp. xxiii + 265. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2003, £31.00, $49.95. In Bloom: The Botanical Vernacular in the English Novel, Amy M. King sets out to show how the Linnaean system of botanical classification and its attendant language influenced English literature. King argues that Linnaeus's work led to a "botanical vernacular," a cultural language that extends well beyond scientific frontiers and into the world of novels. She reminds us that Linnaeus's system, dealing as it does with metaphors of sexual courtship and marriage, applied to plants a language used to discuss human beings and that in a post-Linnaean reversal, plant terms were more commonly applied to human sexual interactions. Primarily, King is concerned with the term "bloom" as it characterizes young women who have become sexually mature. As she explains it, "bloom" can refer both to innocent and provocative behaviors; in so doing, it can also help readers better understand key eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels (which King calls "classical novels"), both their descriptions and their narratives. To this reviewer, King's argument seems both obvious and a stretch. After Linnaeus, botanical language was indeed used as code for human behaviors, most particularly in sexual primers where the analogy between plants and their parts and human sexual reproduction was carefully drawn. A botanical vernacular—and King's term is a good one—developed in part through increasing amateur interest in botany and filtered into many discourses. Tracing it into nonscientific avenues could offer a fascinating linguistic journey. But as King extends her metaphor to encompass one novel after another, in each case probing a "workable figure that could represent marital sexuality without transgressing the boundaries of decorum" (7), the reader's own bloom can [End Page 510] quickly fade. Does this botanical vernacular consist of only one word and its variants? Is it mainly another way of talking about the marriage plot or, along with gesture and action, of coding texts for readers in the know? And if so—and King does relate her subject to the marriage plot—how deep can her metaphoric readings take us? To a "bloom narrative," seems King's answer (4, and elsewhere), but how effective is she in showing us just what such a narrative is, or why it is important for us to understand? This last question King never quite answers. For the most part,King organizes Bloom chronologically. In order to forge its primary link between the history of science and the evolution of the novel, the book sets out a useful discussion of Linnaeus's work. It continues with readings of eighteenth- century English texts—novels like Maria Edgeworth's Belinda (1801) and poems by Charlotte Smith and Erasmus Darwin, whose Loves of the Plants (1789) is strategically chosen. Next come close readings of Jane Austen's novels in a chapter titled "Austen's Physicalized Mimeses," where King weds the picturesque garden to sexualized young heroines. When King turns to George Eliot and Henry James for much of the second half of Bloom, readers of Victorian Studies may find the book of most moment. The chapters on Eliot and James are also embedded with readings of novelists like Charles Dickens and Oscar Wilde. Finally, the book concludes with a brief, if appropriate, nod to James Joyce's Molly Bloom, who might usefully have been contrasted with Virginia Woolf's Lily Briscoe. Bloom's strengths and weaknesses might best be probed by address to the chapter "Eliot's Vernaculars: Natural Objects and Revisionary Blooms," primarily because here King extends "bloom narrativity" beyond the bounds of the traditional marriage plot to the subjects of "second blooms" (Middlemarch, 1871-72)and "clandestine bloom" (Adam Bede, 1859) (133). Eliot, King suggests, might even have found the currency of bloom cloying, an interesting idea in and of itself, though one not developed here. What this all amounts to in King's reading of Middlemarch is this: Lydgate mistakes bloom for love in Rosamund, while Casaubon looks for a blooming girl in Dorothea. Then...

Power and Periphery: Studies of Gender and Religion in Africa

Considering great cultural and religious diversity of African continent and dynamic role of at all levels of African life, Africa would seem to offer fertile ground for generating studies of gender and religion. However, such is not case. In addition to political, cultural, and academic marginalization of Africa, there are familiar reasons adduced in other contexts—namely that several of earlier, classic studies of African religions were conducted by European and African scholars for whom gender was not an analyti cal category—what Ursula King calls sexism by omission (King 1995: 2). This paper examines practical, as well as theoretical and methodological, problems and prospects in studies of gender and in vast African context. It is an overview and reflection, rather than a systematic and comprehensive survey. On an autobiographical note, I should add that my own interest in studying women and in Africa was not originally intentional, but emerged as I was working on new religious movements in Ni geria, and more specifically on religious pluralism in town of Calabar. Based on this research, I published an initial study of diversity of women's religious activities (1985). Following that I was asked to write more generally on women and in Africa (1994, 1995), which has led me to cast a critical eye over literature. For obvious reasons, notably dearth of historical and descrip tive data, there has been a tendency toward additive studies (e.g., Mbon 1987)—filling in gaps created by androcentric scholarship. Sometimes these studies have adopted a sentimental and nostalgic overtone, waxing lyrical about positive contributions of women— the flowers in garden—and their important procreative and nurturing roles (Mbiti 1991; Omoyajowo 1991). The heritage of phenomenological comparativism and a predilection for irreduc ibility of religion in history of religions has not served study of gender well, in that it has fostered a generalized, essentialized, and decontextualized view of religion. This is particularly inappropriate in African context where indigenous notions of are far

La pesquisa en Castilla y Aragón: un caso curioso del &lt;em&gt;Libre deis Feyts&lt;/em&gt; de Jaume I

In this autobiographical Libre dels Feyts, James I the Conqueror, King of Aragon, describes a juridical procedure which he instituted in 1267 against a gang of counterfeiters operating out of the town of Tarazona. This procedure, which the King calls an inquisicio, corresponds exactly to the pesquisa of the neighboring kingdom of Castile, although the Aragonese legal tradition was theoretically hostile to the pesquisa as a legal instrument. Here the various steps of James'trial of the counterfeiters are compared to the regulations governing the use of pesquisa in contemporary Alfonsine legislation.

The Elizabethan Theatre III: Papers Given at the Third International Conference on Elizabethan Theatre Held at the University of Waterloo, Ontario, in July 1970 ed. by David Galloway

Reviews 341 errors in the book, and the Index fails to list one of the authors treated at length in the text. The production of a carelessly printed book crammed with critical judgments that can only be called inanities at best is both an intellectual and an ecological disaster. GEORGE E. WELLWARTH State U niversity o f N e w Y o rk a t B ingham ton David Galloway, ed. The E lizabeth an Theatre III: P apers G iven a t the T hird International C onference on E lizabethan Theatre H eld a t the U n iversity o f W aterloo, O ntario, in July 1970. Hamden, Connecticut: The Shoestring Press, Inc., 1973. Pp. xviii + 150. $7.50. This volume of eight essays was, according to its editor, intended to have “The Theatre and Society” as its general theme. But as Professor Galloway himself admits, several of the essays have no relationship to this theme and concentrate instead on the physical structure of the Eliza­ bethan playhouse. For example, in the initial essay, “Shakespearian Staging, 1599-1642,” T. J. King surveys the staging requirements of some 276 professional plays produced between 1599 and the closing of the theaters. King’s conclusions, based on a wide sampling and scrupulous scholarship, are sound; but this essay, which King calls “an informal re­ port on the findings of my book” (p. 1), has been superseded before pu b­ lication by the book itself (Harvard University Press, 1971), which bears (with the exception of an “e”) the same title as the essay. The es­ say was undoubtedly useful when it was read at the University of Water­ loo in 1970, but at present it seems redundant and perhaps should have been excised, following the procedure of the Southeastern Renaissance Conference. The second essay, Clifford Leech’s “Three Times H o and a Brace of Widows: Some Plays for the Private Theatre,” analyzes the similarities among W estw ard H o, E astw ard H o, N o rth w a rd H o, and The W id o w ’s Tears, attempting with this selection to give us some picture of “the private theatre of the seventeenth century’s first decade” (p. 14). Leech feels that the atmosphere of the private theater was that of a “club”: “the profan u m vulgus was without, and could be safely mocked” (p. 15). Herbert Berry’s “The Boar’s Head Again” gives a detailed history of the Boar’s Head Inn from the sixteenth century to the present. In a brief appendix, Berry discusses the accuracy of Ogilby and Morgan’s map. I would like to suggest that this essay is a parody of historical scholarship. It is replete with P.R.O. references, social history, and architectural de­ velopments; but its final purpose is, ironically, to tell the Greater London Council where to place their blue commemorative plaque, and the essay ends with a national grid reference: TQ 33830/81306: a crowning touch. The only thing we miss in all this is an indication of any possible rele­ vance to the Elizabethan Theater; the Boar’s Head playhouse is virtually 342 Comparative Drama neglected. I can only conclude that Berry meant to satirize the vacuities of historical recreation. In the next paper, “Shakespeare and the Second Blackfriars,” J. A. Lavin openly attacks, in the scholarship of G. E. Bent­ ley, a major premise of historical criticism, i.e., that the artist is pro­ foundly and directly affected by his milieu. Lavin puts it succinctly: “Events which had a marked effect on the activities of the King’s Men need not have had any effect on Shakespeare’s dramatic creations” (p. 76). Lavin’s strictures should perhaps be remembered when rereading Leech’s essay on the private houses. Lavin’s careful skepticism is ex­ tremely appealing. Glynne Wickham in “Romance and Emblem: A Study in the Dra­ matic Structure of The W in ter’s Tale" feels that Shakespeare was com­ menting on contemporary history. Identifying a “gothic tradition of typo­ logical, prefigurative and emblematic methods of play-construction” (p. 83), Wickham claims that T he W in ter’s Tale was...

A Rejoinder To: Matrimony In The Theatre Of Guillen De Castro

A Rejoinder To: Matrimony In The Theatre Of Guillen De Castro by Robert R. La Du Marquette University A recent article entitled Matrimony in the Theatre of Guillen de Castro, which appeared in the Bulletin of the Comediantes, X (Fall, 1958), 1-3, purports to: . . . re-examine matrimony in Castro's plays, not as isolated instances to be cited out of context, but as an intregal part of his theater, (p. 1) The author, Mr. Weiger, states: It is evident throughout Castro's plays that there are three conditions necessary for a happy marriage, the lack of any one of which inevitably spells doom for the married couple (p. 1) The three conditions that Mr. Weiger proposes are: 1) "the man and woman to be married must belong to the same social class"; 2) "the couple's ages should be reasonably equal"; 3) the man and woman to be married must consent to the marriage of their own free will. After citing certain examples from Castro 's plays, he concludes: Thus it has been shown that unhappy matrimony in Castro's theater is often caused by a disregard for one of the principles discussed above. Hence the conclusion that Guillen de Castro does not disdain matrimony per se, but bases many of his plays on the problems which cause marriage to fail. While I agree to the general truth of the three proposed conditions for marriage in the comedia, and while Mr. Weiger's conclusion is general enough to permit me to agree with it, I hope to show in the following pages that: 1) the lack of any one of the three conditions does not "inevitably spell doom for the married couple" in Castro 's theater; 2) the theme of disparity of the married couple's ages is so negligible in Castro's works that the second condition is not at issue in the consideration of matrimony in his theater; 3) the third proposed condition is violated so many times in Castro 's plays without the unhappy results that Mr. Weiger believes is inevitable, that the importance attached to this condition is not warranted. Additionally, there are certain factual errors in Mr. Weiger's article which will be noted below. On p. 1 of the article in question it is pointed out that those who marry should belong to the same social class. Then is added: At times this maxim can be unusually strict, as in Pagar en propia moneda, where Elena, daughter of the King, is seen kissing a count. Although it was only a kiss in return for a favor, the King calls it an afrenta that the Princess lowered herself to kiss a count (I, 98).1 If only to rush to the defense of a woman 's reputation, I would like to point out, for those readers not acquainted with the above mentioned play, that Elena was not seen kissing a count, that it was not a kiss in return for a favor, and that the King did not accuse her of giving the count a kiss. The references to the alleged act are five, and they occur in I, 96b; I, 98a; and I, 98b. In the first reference the action is described as follows: "Los brazos te quiero dar,/ y esta cadena guarda."; in the subsequent references the verb abrazar is used to describe the act involved. It is apparent that Elena does not reward the count for a favor (that of acting as a go-between), but with a simple embrace, not with a kiss. Furthermore , she unconsciously mitigates any undercurrents which this unaffected action might have had by giving the count something of monetary value—treating him, in other words, as the go-between that he is. On p. 2 of Mr. Weiger's article we read: The first prerequisite for a happy marriage , equal social status, is, with one 10 interesting exception, never violated. In El desengaño dichoso, the Duke Polineso , who had attempted the most serious of crimes—assassination of the King—receives as his only punishment an order to marry Dalinda, the Princess ' lady-in-waiting. . . . Thus the King is punishing the Duke not with matrimony itself...

XI.—Observations on the Trial and Death of William Earl of Gowrie,a.d. 1584, and on their Connection with the Gowrie Conspiracy, a.d. 1600. By John Bruce, Esq. F.S.A.

In King James's singular narrative of the Gowrie Conspiracy, his majesty states, that Alexander Ruthven, younger brother of John Earl of Gowrie, having conducted him into a chamber of Gowrie House, which the king calls “a little studie,” suddenly “locked too the studie doore behinde him,” and at that instant, changing his countenance, put his hat on his head, and drew a dagger from the girdle of Andrew Henderson, a servant of the Ruthvens who had been previously stationed in the little study, clad in armour, to await his majesty's coming. His majesty goes on to relate, that young Ruthven held the point of Henderson's dagger to the king's breast, declaring that he “behoved to be in his will, and to be used as he list.” The king adds, “that Ruthven swore many bloody oaths that if the king cried one word, or opened a window to look out, that dagger should presently go to his heart.” He then adds, and it is the first word which seems to have been uttered in explanation of the cause of this singular outrage, that Alexander Ruthven affirmed “that he was sure that now the king's conscience was burthened for the murthering of his father.” The king replied (according to his own account) with singular coolness and self-possession. He “begun to dilate” (these are the words of his narrative) “how horrible a thing it was for his assailant to meddle with his majesty's innocent blood, assuring him it would not be left unrevenged, since God had given him children and good subjects, and if there [were] neither, God would raise up stocks and stones to punish so vile a deed.” After this oration upon regicide, which, considering the character of the king, and the circumstances of tremendous personal peril in which he was suddenly placed, is not very likely to have been uttered exactly in the way stated, the king proceeded to notice the allusion which had been made by Alexander Ruthven to the death of his father, “protesting before God,” his majesty says, “that he had no burthen on his conscience” on that account, “both in respect that, at the time of his father's execution, his majesty was but a minor of age, and guided at that time by a faction which over ruled both his majesty and the rest of the country; as also, that whatsoever was done to his father, it was done by the ordinary course of law and justice.”