"Play, utopia or anguish" ? Accounting for the persistence of the discourse against slander from the Middle Ages to the early modern period (original) (raw)
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1999
A number of historians have studied the meanings of reputation in early modern English society through the medium of defamation cases in the church courts. More recent work has tended to focus on the gendering of participation in ecclesiastical litigation and the differences in the ways that men and women constructed and maintained their good names. This thesis takes a broader approach, and places defamation cases firmly in their legal and social context. The main focus of this thesis is a sample of defamation cases from the Chester consistory court in the later seventeenth century; this is supplemented by material from the church courts of Sussex and various secular tribunals in both Cheshire and Sussex. A discussion of the law forms an important part of this thesis for it shaped both the patterns of participation in litigation and the content of insults that were alleged. A central objective of this thesis is to discuss the complexity of the gendering of reputation in this period ...
Slander and the right to be an author in fifteenth-century Spain
Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies
Versified slander, particularly that addressed to converted Jews or conversos, is best understood within a social exercise of rhetoric as ars bene dicendi that channels ethnic and religious tensions through the practice of maldecir. Slanderous discourse or maldecir is both a flexible and a dangerous tool in the hands of an author, who becomes aggrandized through the poet's ethical responsibility to denounce social evils. However, slander can destabilize authorship due to the required use of despicable language. The result is a complex interplay among slandered authors and their critics that shows the flexible uses of slander in the context of ethnic and social strife.
The Literary Culture of Early Stuart Libeling
Modern Philology, 2000
The death in 1612 of the Lord Treasurer, Robert Cecil, earl of Salisbury, prompted a cultural phenomenon that few observers of state affairs could have failed to notice. As the days passed, libelous verses on Cecil began to proliferate and circulate in unprecedented numbers. 1 The anxiety surrounding this wave of textual production is evident in the letters of John Chamberlain, who wrote that "the memorie of the late Lord Treasurer growes dayly worse and worse and more libells come as yt were continually."2 Writing just three weeks later, however, John Donne provided a different view. He suggested, perhaps with a touch of irony, that many of the libels were so bad that they might have been written by Cecil's friends:
'Defamation, Gender and Hierarchy in Late Medieval Yorkshire', Social History, 43:3 (2018), 356-74.
This article focuses on a late-fourteenth-century defamation suit from the ecclesiastical court of York to demonstrate the granular nature of gender identity and homosocial cooperation and competition across status groups. In this case, a dispute between two gentry families developed into an accusation of sexual dishonour against the father of an unmarried pregnant woman. The analysis of networks of homosocial interaction reveals the gendered composition of reputation and identity at the social level. Male anxiety solidified around honesty in sexual and personal dealings, while concerns about social and religious status arose as the scandal became widely publicized. The study qualifies works on masculinity and insult in late-medieval society, demonstrating the significance of sexual honour and speech in men's disputes over reputation. It also illustrates the extent to which patriarchal authority could be enforced through control over the sexual activity of dependent men. Despite the involvement of gentry and lower aristocratic parties, the perspectives of women and non-elite men are visible and reveal the limits of patriarchal control in gentry households. Thus, the article delineates the nature of disputes between elite and lower-status men, tracing the boundaries of reputations, as well as their protection and maintenance in periods of conflict.
This essay focuses on the social history of language and politics. It studies insults that circulated among all social classes in Brabantine and Flemish towns from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries. The 'linguistic archaeology' of these 'filthy and indecent words' , as they were called in the sources of that time, uncovers the political messages inherent in them. After the publication of James C. Scott's 'Domination and the arts of resistance' in 1990, students of political culture, conflicts and protest have segregated the world of powerful elites from the world of 'the plebs' , i.e., those who did not have formal rights to participate in political life. Insults, gossip, slander and similar types of informal protest were seen as 'weapons of the weak' , used by powerless people, whose 'hidden transcripts' criticising the regime rarely appeared openly. However, this essay argues that both elites and members of the lower classes used a similar language of defamation, insults and other verbal injuries in public. Widespread insults, such as 'son of a bitch' , 'scoundrel' , and 'ruffian' , were used by late medieval and early modern clerics, aldermen, nobles, citizens, and craftsmen to attack the honour and social status of their opponents. The insults uttered by these people and their 'filthy speech acts' actually belonged to a register of 'radical language' known to all social groups, who used it continuously with the same goal: to weaken their political opponents. Consequently, this essay analyses insults not only as speech acts of defamation but also as carriers of political subversion and mobilising critiques.
sexual permutations that remained emotionally subordinate to her homosocial bonds. But Peakman declines to advance such interpretations. Peakman avoids another possibility for feminist analysis in a chapter on prostitutes' autobiographies, which she opens by claiming that women wrote to assert for their right to sexual pleasure, but closes by remarking "how little sex is mentioned" in the texts (98). These engrossing narratives meditate on the contradictions of prostitute sexuality: women crave constancy but engage in sex work; they love and are jilted; they are autonomous but are raped; their sex acts are both public and private. Pleasure is nowhere-and injustice everywhereso one wonders why Peakman tempts with the promise of a doctrine of sexual freedom. The documents bear out the precise opposite: an account of sexuality that focuses not on bodily pleasure but on the material conditions of gender and class that make women vulnerable to-and valuable within-a pervasive system of sexual commerce. These questions lead me back to Peakman's title: Amatory Pleasures. She works from the assumption that the sexual is the amatory and that the domain of sexuality is also that of pleasure. But her sources show sexuality to be, particularly for women, much more than an arena of diversion. Their bodies are used, read, and tested by commerce, literature, politics, and science, and their social recognition and material livelihood depend largely on their performance of sexuality, whether it be in the form of chastity or commercial sex work-a double bind of which Peakman is at times aware. But a reader new to this field will want to know why, for example, if "[g]irls were expected to remain chaste until marriage" (4), some communities ritualized premarital sexual activity (6). Peakman perceptively detects the peculiar, surprising facets of eighteenth-century attitudes toward sex, but oversimplifies her findings. The biggest of these simplifications is to cast sex as exclusively a realm of pleasure, a move that privileges historical actors like the landed aristocratic men who designed ejaculating fountains-who practiced sex with ease and without much consequence-far above the working prostitutes who risked sickness and incarceration in their trade. These complexities are not mere academic considerations; they are evidence that sexuality evades any one reigning designation-even that of pleasure.
2016
This thesis argues that in seventeenth century England, the tongue, or more specifically the female tongue, was understood as a fleshy weapon wielded to inflict misery and chaos on men. In response, early modern society reacted strenuously when faced with this form of living danger. The two primary processes were containment and correction. Female verbal expression was often framed or contained in artifices created through rhetorical texts, for example, satirical, judicial, or moralistic texts. These texts were made to disempower and dismiss female verbal expression categorised as dangerous, or abnormal. Two of the main constructs used in texts were the ‘cursed shrew’ and the ‘common scold’, both of which were created to vilify and dismiss verbal rebellion by presenting them in negative narratives. The shrew was defined through satire. The common scold was defined through a mixture of legal definitions, and community intervention. First, this dissertation investigates these two fema...