Democratic subjects

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William G. Naphy and Penny Roberts

Fear of fire, flood, plague, invasion by the infidel, purgatory, death, witchcraft - these are just some of the fears that plagued the early modern world which are dealt with in this fascinating well-integrated collection of essays, based on extensive and ground-breaking new research. Drawing on British and Continental examples, the volume explores the panoply of personal and communal tragedies which tormented and terrified both elite and popular communities in this period, and shows how they formed strategies for dealing both practically and psychologically with their fears; it tells of the creation of the first fire service in France, of dog-massacres in times of plague in England, and of flood emergency plans in Holland.

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Judith C. Brown

"The discovery of the fascinating and richly documented story of Sister Benedetta Carlini, Abbess of the Convent of the Mother of God, by Judith C. Brown was an event of major historical importance. Not only is the story revealed in Immodest Acts that of the rise and fall of a powerful woman in a church community and a record of the life of a religious visionary, it is also the earliest documentation of lesbianism in modern Western history. Born of well-to-do parents, Benedetta Carlini entered the convent at the age of nine. At twenty-three, she began to have visions of both a religious and erotic nature. Benedetta was elected abbess due largely to these visions, but later aroused suspicions by claiming to have had supernatural contacts with Christ. During the course of an investigation, church authorities not only found that she had faked her visions and stigmata, but uncovered evidence of a lesbian affair with another nun, Bartolomeo. The story of the relationship between the two nuns and of Benedetta's fall from an abbess to an outcast is revealed in surprisingly candid archival documents and retold here with a fine sense of drama."--amazon.ca.

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Roxann Wheeler

Wheeler (English, Ohio State U.) compares Enlightenment science's speculations on human variety in natural history with accounts in civil histories, travel literature, and fiction, finding that black skin was not the most damning characteristic used by Brits to elevate themselves above the colonized. While Brits did prize paleness, Wheeler shows th.

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Andrea Freud Loewenstein

Biases held by artists have been a constant source of controversy in appraisals of their works, most recently in critiques of such authors as H.L. Mencken and Paul de Man. Should the belief systems of these thinkers be taken into account in assessing the value of the works which they made public? Andrea Freud Loewenstein here undertakes to address this crucial issue. At the heart of her study is an examination of the figures of Jew and woman in the works of three British male authors written between 1929 and 1945. While instances of misogyny and anti-Semitism were not uncommon in the literature of the period, Loewenstein argues that a hatred and fear of women was often the dominating preoccupation of their work, from which stemmed the intertwined and closely related loathing of Jews. Basing her interpretations on biographical information and on the close analysis of a large body of fiction by each author, Loewenstein reconstructs the psychological system through which each one envisions the world, showing how Jews and women function in their texts, and in each individual psychopathology, as a representation of the Other. Ranging far beyond a narrow study of three authors, Loewenstein situates the works studied in the context of the history of Jews in Britain, concentrating on recent historical scholarship on Britain and the Jews in the 1930s. She questions the widespread belief that the British government was a friend to the Jews and shows, as evident in the double-talk and hypocrisy behind some British governmental policies, that Britain instead actively collaborated in the Jews' destruction. To provide a greater context for her argument, Loewenstein presents a timeline of the history of the Jews in Britain. Firmly grounded in a range of disciplines, Loathsome Jews and Engulfing Women is a masterful blend of history, psychology, and literary criticism.