Soap and Water: Cleanliness, Dirt and the Working Classes in Victorian and Edwardian Britain by Victoria Kelley (original) (raw)
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Choice of language is one of the most important aspects of oral performance that is closely related to the issues of social differentiation, power and control in the society. Language was an instrument that created the special relationship between the speaker, the audience, and the message in the multilingual culture of Late Antiquity. The goal of this study is to investigate the meaning and purpose of the remarks that a particular language was used by characters of the early Christian narratives, and the correspondence of these remarks to the context of the performance. We examine a selection of the Greek, Latin, Syriac, and Coptic texts from the 4th to the 6th century which belong to different genres: hagiography, homiletics, travelogues, epistles, and missionary narratives. We are able to define several strategies beyond the references to a particular spoken language in these narratives. When the author emphasized the difference between the language of the text characters and that of its readers, or indicated the need for interpreters, he created the alienation effect that helped to construct a mental distance between the events narrated, the text as a medium, and the audience (Athanasius's Life of Antony 16.1; Palladius's Lausiac History 21.15, Theodoret, Religious History 13.7). On contrary, the instances when the obvious linguistic barriers were ignored in the text underplayed the presence of the ‘other’ and highlighted the integrity of the Christian universe (Egeria's Travelling, where she almost never mentioned the language she communicated with local people, with the only exception of ch.47). The command of foreign languages was represented as a sign of God's grace (The History of the Egyptian monks 6.3, 8.61-62); even unsuccessful attempts of a monastic leader to learn a foreign language could be considered praiseworthy since they had been undertaken to comfort a disciple, who was a speaker of another tongue (The Bohairic Life of Pachomius 89). Moreover, the deficient knowledge of a foreign language (Theodoret, Religious History 8.2), or the lack of such knowledge (John Chrysostom, On the Statues 19, Baptismal instructions 8) were effective characteristics in the descriptions of the genuine Christians, since the pious way of life was considered more important than eloquence and rhetorical skills. The gift of xenoglossia, or the miraculous ability to speak in foreign languages, helped to construct the image of a holy man (Ephrem the Syrian and Basil the Great in the Syriac Life of Ephrem); however, in the different context, unexpected ability to speak in a foreign language was reported as a sign of possession by the demonic powers (Jerome, Life of Hilarion 22). The linguistic barriers were important to protect one’s privacy, particularly, to keep in secret something discovered by God's revelation (The History of the Egyptian monks 10.25). The analysis of the narratives which describe real or imaginary situations of interactions of people speaking in different languages contributes to the better understanding of the symbolic and contextual meaning of languages in Late Antiquity, and the performative strategies beyond these situations.
English Women Catholic Translators
Palgrave Encyclopedia of Early Modern English Women Writers, 2023
The concept of a linear transmission of source to target text was inherited from the humanist theory of the translatio studii, the transfer of an ancient work to a new receiving language and culture. However, the trajectories of transmission are far more complex, constituting a matrix of intersecting and interrelating lines that crisscross, not simply linguistic, but also social and cultural spaces. One way in which scholars can map such pathways is by examining the networks in which translators and all those involved in the whole process of textual transfer and transmission participated, both directly (original authors, intermediate translators, printers, editors, booksellers, patrons, commissioners, some dedicatees) and indirectly (family members, friends, social contacts, facilitators, co-religionists, recipients of translations as gifts). This essay discusses the ways in which English Catholic women translators between 1500 and 1640 exercised agency by means of being actors in such networks and by transmitting, through their translations, foreign texts to a new and wider reading public, often using them as effective tools in ideological and political matters where other forms of intervention were forbidden to women.
Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, 1994
A]ll writing ... is writing within, whether for or against, inherited theories and discourses. 1 What we know is constrained by interpretive frameworks which, of course, limit our thinking; what we can know will be determined by the kinds of questions we learn to ask. 2 Just over a decade ago, Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza s now-classic In Memory of Her appeared, offering a systematic reading of both early Christian literature and its scholarly reception through the lens of a feminist criticism aligned with liberation theology. 3 A year later, Schüssler Fiorenza's more explicitly theoretical volume, Bread Not Stone, provided a programmatic statement of the stakes and promise of feminist biblical interpretation informed by a hermeneutics of suspicion. 4 In the wake of the so-called second wave of feminism, such work has made a place for itself in theoretical, historical, and cultural debates within institutions both religious and academic. In the years following the appearance of these two important books, a rich and compelling body of scholarship has emerged in the field of feminist studies of biblical literature and early Christianity. Encompassing the work of many scholars whose political, religious, or cultural orientations 1 C.
From Latin to the Vernacular: Medieval Women’s Letters, 1000–1400
This chapter discusses medieval women's uses of epistolarity, c. 1000-1400 in political, administrative and religious contexts, revealing the ways in which some women – typically elites – were able to negotiate the world in which they lived, and the hierarchies into which they were born. The chapter also examines changes and continuities between the expression and function of Latin and vernacular epistolary forms.
Early Christian legends of monastic women disguised as men have recently been the object of psychological, literary, sociohistorical, anthropological, and theological study. In this article, I will raise new questions about these legends from the perspective of the poststructuralist theory of intertextuality. What are the cultural "texts" that these legends "play upon"? What does this intertextuality tell us about how such legends participated in late antique cultural discourse on gender and the female body? Here, I examine five cultural "texts" reworked in the legends: 1) the lives of earlier transvestite saints like St. Thecla; 2) the Life of St. Antony; 3) late antique discourse about eunuchs; 4) the story of Joseph and Potiphar's wife from Genesis; and 5) the textual deconstruction and reconstitution of the female body in early Christian literature. These "intertexts," along with key christomimetic elements in the legends, suggest how binary conceptions of gender identity were ultimately destabilized in the figure of the transvestite saint.