Green, Lepers and Their Bells (letter to NYT) 2013 (original) (raw)
The paper discusses the development in Iris's presentation of homosexuality in her novels, particularly The Bell, A Fairly Honourable Defeat and The Book and the Brotherhood. I contrast the anguish of the participants in The Bell, contemporary with The Wolfenden Report, with the casual naturalism of the depiction of Gerard and his friends in the Book and the Brotherhood thirty years later. This latter novel is centred on the relationship between Rose and Gerard, which can never develop because Gerard is homosexual, exacerbated by the fact of his former relationship with her brother. My thesis is that Gerard's homosexuality is epistemologically a choice not a necessity - he could have been barred by a number of other social constructs, for example like Cato Forbes by a vow of chastity, or like Brontë’s Jane by the ‘first Mrs Rochester’. Iris of course chose homosexuality as the barrier for good reasons, to do with the modern almost invisibilty of what had been a criminal, and strongly social, barrier. She underlines this by referring in the Book and the Brotherhood to two characters from novels written in the most intense period of agitation for homosexual law reform: The Bell and A Severed Head. This framework comprises a series of novels in which one or more gay men illustrate the legal and social realities of the decriminalization of male homosexuality, in particular A Fairly Honourable Defeat, written at a time when same-sex partnerships were becoming socially visible. I contrast her treatment of women through such characters as Emma Sands and Aunt Pat, and contextualize Murdoch herself with her characters, both male and female.
The Green Children: A cautionary tale
1999
This paper is inspired by Paul Harris’s thought-provoking contribution on “The Green Children of Woolpit” in Fortean Studies volume 4. Although not convinced by all his arguments, I believe that he has (as he hoped) indicated a potentially fruitful direction for research. But before we head too confidently in one particular direction it is, I think, worth looking again at some of the evidence and at some of Harris’s conclusions. In his article Harris rightly emphasises the need to return to primary sources when attempting to find the ‘truth’ behind the story. But one should draw attention to some problems with those original texts and the form in which Harris has presented them to us – and sound a note of caution to Harris or any others who might wish to pursue the research further.
Mending Bodies, Saving Souls: A History of Hospitals, 1999
Devoted to hospitals as tools for segregation and confinement, this chapter features the story of Grette S. Thielen, a married parishioner from the town of Diedenhofen in the Lorraine. Suspected by neighbors of suffering from leprosy, the woman was sent in June 1492 for diagnostic inspections, including an official probe in Cologne by a special medical panel. The narrative explains the proceedings within the context of contemporary views of this disfiguring ailment and the stigma attached to it. Medical confirmation forced the unfortunate Grette to be ritually separated from the community and probably conveyed to a prominent Lower Rhine leper house at Melaten, near Cologne. Subsequent sections explain the evolution of such institutions in medieval Europe with a focus on institutional life and rituals.
Peacock, Notes on the Folk-lore of Bells
Mabel Peacock, Notes on the Folk-lore of Bells, Antiquary 30 (1894), 156-161. This out of copyright article is part of MP's more general writing on folklore - as opposed to her Lincolnshire specific pieces. There is a case to be made for putting these together in a volume.
As both antiquarian and more recent studies have noted, bells played a central role in medieval Christianity. This article aims to show that the history and meanings of church bells are more complex than often assumed. Drawing on a mixture of archaeological and textual material, the article demonstrates that a variety of types of bell-and indeed other signaling devices-were found in early medieval Christianity, and argues that the social and spiritual meanings of bells, whilst in some aspects determined by liturgical texts of the eleventh century, could also vary markedly depending upon the context, use, and reception of their sound. A bell calling a community to prayer was thus not simply "marking" the hours; it was summoning and producing the spiritual community, and its voice could be contested and even on occasion rejected.
2015
After Bell scandal broke, many officials asserted that these sorts of startling public payouts were tremendous aberrations, when in reality these scandals have occurred multiple times before. In this white paper Sforza brings attention to municipal corruption scandals throughout the state of California and the lack of attention they recieved when the scandals broke in comparison to Bell\u27s
Environmental Humanities, 2022
Published open access: https://read.dukeupress.edu/environmental-humanities/article/14/3/661/319761/Theorizing-the-Gay-Frog The gay frog has taken on a surprisingly prominent role in contemporary environmental culture. Primarily associated with American shock-jock Alex Jones and the “alt-right” movement, fears of frogs being turned gay by hormones in water have nevertheless entered the mainstream, while gay frog memes are shared online by users from across the political spectrum. This article offers a genealogy of the gay frog, situating this recent moment in the longer history of “sex panics” over gay animals described by queer ecologists, and in the context of an ongoing backlash against feminism and trans liberation. It argues that the potency of the gay frog as alt-right symbol derives from the capacity of the frog to instantiate racialised and sexualised anxieties about border crossings. By examining the role of humour in gay frog clips and memes, this article shows how liberal mockery of Jones has inadvertently mainstreamed far-right beliefs and served to consolidate alt-right notions of victimhood. In spite of this, it argues that the comic potential of the gay frog holds promise for queer ecologists seeking to think differently about sex and nature.
The Green Man is a familiar image in British popular culture who is celebrated in a variety of ways, not least in an ever-growing number of festive processions in towns, villages, and cities, particularly around Beltane (May Day). Combining two scholarly voices, this article offers a survey of the Green Man image and related ritual phenomena in what we refer to as the 'Green Man complex'. Here we address the Green Man's role in what could be the mobilization of responses to the current ecological crisis, as well as his relationship to growing trends in dark green religion. Last, we turn our attention to the theoretical innovations that current Green Man phenomena invites: more than 'symbolic' or 'representational', the Green Man is a source for contemporary Pagan ritual religious creativity that is being used in animistic, embodied, territorializing, and reciprocal fashions to direct human attention toward the other-than-human vegetable kingdom.
Historical Reflections/Reflexions Historiques, 2016
This article explores the socio-religious construction of the medieval "ideal" leper; a male pedagogical symbol of social and moral status and a fi gure in a physical and spiritual state of liminality, where their physical decay was a sign of their moral corruption. It argues that within vernacular literature, and theology, the medieval male leper was typically perceived as an outcast experiencing social death before succumbing to the slow degeneration of the disease. Typically conceived, and represented as lusty and carnal, the "ideal" male leper wore his own sin as physical deformity as a result of the close theological interpretation of the body and the soul. However, once his spiritual and physical contagion was contained within a leprosaria (a leper hospital), he could be perceived as a semi-holy fi gure, living out his purgatorial punishment on earth. Living out his purgation and segregated from his former communities, the article contests that the once frightening and sinful medieval male leper could transform his social status, becoming "especially beloved by God. "