The Multifaceted Nature of Fear

2019 ◽  
pp. 71-110
Author(s):  
Stephen J. Spencer
Keyword(s):  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Power Dynamics ◽  
The Face

By exploring the intersections between fear and contemporary conceptions of chivalry, masculinity, deception, and power, this chapter demonstrates that the ways in which fear was represented in twelfth- and thirteenth-century crusade narratives were far more complex and multifaceted than has hitherto been appreciated. This, in turn, necessitates that we reject the scholarly approach of treating chroniclers’ accounts of crusader trepidation as representative evidence of participants’ actual feelings. Gender- and shame-centred appraisals of fear add further weight to the argument set forth in Chapter 1: that fear was an emotion which Latin combatants ought to relinquish. However, in alternative contexts, such as in the face of treachery, it was simultaneously considered an understandable—perhaps even praiseworthy—sentiment for crusaders to openly display; and fear terminology was integral to the texts’ power dynamics.

Who Banishes? City Power and Anti-homeless Policy in San Francisco

2020 ◽  
pp. 107808742092590
Author(s):  
David J. Amaral
Keyword(s):  
San Francisco ◽  
Census Data ◽  
Power Dynamics ◽  
Systematic Analysis ◽  
Public Records ◽  
Adoption And Implementation ◽  
Economic Forces ◽  
The Face ◽  
Election Results ◽  
Business District

Despite cross-disciplinary attention to laws targeting homeless behavior in cities, systematic analysis of the power dynamics behind the adoption and implementation of such laws is surprisingly scarce. This article addresses that oversight by investigating the politics of anti-homeless policies in San Francisco, a critical and revealing case. Using a mixed-methods approach that joins qualitative analysis of public records with spatial and statistical analysis of precinct-level election results, census data, and geocoded police and 311 records, it evaluates previously unmeasured claims concerning the relative influence of social and economic forces in determining policy adoption and assesses whether enforcement patterns betray preferential treatment. Findings suggest that in the face of mobilized opposition, an anti-homeless regime composed of business and neighborhood merchants, elected officials, conservatives, and homeowners each contribute resources required to pass anti-homeless laws. Contrary to past claims, enforcement practices do not appear to privilege only the downtown business district.

Abruptly Dogen

2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kidder Smith
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Full Moon ◽  
The Moon ◽  
The World ◽  
The Buddha ◽  
The Way

In the thirteenth century Dogen brought Zen to Japan. His tradition flourishes there still today and now has taken root across the world. Abruptly Dogen presents some of his pith writings—startling, shifting, funny, spilling out in every direction. They come from all seventy-five chapters of his masterwork, the Eye of Real Dharma (Shōbōgenzō 正法眼藏), and roam through mountains, magic, everyday life, meditation, the nature of mind, and how the Buddha is always speaking from inside our heads. An excerpt from chapter 1, “A Case of Here We Are”: Human wisdom is like a moon roosting in water. No stain on the moon, nor does the water rip. However wide and grand the light, it still finds lodging in a puddle. The full moon, the spilling sky, all roosting in a single dewdrop on a single blade of grass. A man of wisdom is uncut, the way a moon doesn’t pierce water. Wisdom in a man is unobstructed, the way the sky’s full moon is unobstructed in a dewdrop. No doubt about it, the drop’s as deep as the moon is high. How long does this go on? How deep is the water, how high the moon?

Poetry and Matter in the English Renaissance

2019 ◽  
pp. 27-52
Author(s):  
Wendy Beth Hyman
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
Historical Background ◽  
English Renaissance ◽  
Poetic Form ◽  
Physical Practice ◽  
Erotic Poetry ◽  
The Face ◽  
Carpe Diem

Chapter 1, “Poetry and Matter in the English Renaissance” traces the crucial relationship between poetics and philosophical materialism in the early modern period, explaining why erotic verse so readily lent itself to confronting questions about the nature of being and of knowledge. This chapter shows that for Renaissance poets—informed by Lucretius’ great analogy between atoms and alphabetic letters—there is poetic form in elemental matter. The writing of poetry was therefore often understood as a physical practice, while poetry itself was understood as ontologically complex and efficacious. As terms such as “figuration” reveal, poetic making has both metaphorical and literal elements, which come especially to the fore in the ubiquitous blazons depicting the face of the beloved. Within the syntax of materialist poetics, foretelling the decay of the love object is therefore tantamount to a kind of deconstruction or unmaking—making poetry actually “do” the work of time. Multiple traditions, from Aristotelian hylomorphism to idealizing Petrarchism, had prepared the way for the female body to function as a proxy for embodied matter which poets could “figure,” “make,” or “undo.” This chapter presents the object of erotic poetry becoming just that: a fictional construct subjected to the recombinatory shaping of the godlike poet. As later chapters will develop, the paradoxical loneliness of the carpe diem invitation emerges from this troubling strategy, for it is an invitational form addressed to an entity it has forever exiled as metaphysically other. This chapter thus provides both a theoretical framework and historical background for the project’s larger claims.

A Revolution in the Courts

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melissa Milewski
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Federal Agencies ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Legal Rights ◽  
The South ◽  
Federal Support ◽  
White Southerners ◽  
Freedmen's Bureau ◽  
The Face

Chapter 1 traces the long, hard-fought battle over black southerners’ legal rights that took place during and in the wake of the Civil War. Individual African Americans who fought for their rights in the face of incursions by their former masters and other whites were at the front lines of this battle. By appealing to federal agencies like the Freedmen’s Bureau, hiring lawyers, and testifying in courtrooms throughout the South, they mounted a stiff challenge to white southerners’ attempts to continue to largely shut them out of the courts. The federally operated Freedmen’s Bureau and the northern military occupying the South also worked to open southern courts to African Americans during the early years of Reconstruction. In addition, Congressional Republicans’ takeover of Reconstruction helped give some black southerners the federal support to exercise the rights they claimed.

scholarly journals School Consolidation and Notions of Progress: Why Community Actors Almost Always Lose the Fight to Keep Local Schools and How They Can Turn the Tables

in education ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Patricia Elliott
Keyword(s):  
Essential Role ◽  
Local Community ◽  
Community Action ◽  
School Consolidation ◽  
Power Dynamics ◽  
Past Century ◽  
The Past ◽  
Local Schools ◽  
The Face ◽  
Effective Community

Supported by a growing body of research, the idea that schools have an essential role to play in local community cohesion and development has gained currency among urban and rural school advocates alike. Yet moving theory into action often grinds to a halt in the face of a recalcitrant bureaucracy. To understand why, it is important to step back and examine the theoretical framework of progress that has driven school consolidation and bureaucratization over the past century. Knowing these underlying power dynamics will help community advocates understand where their power is weakest, and where it is strongest, leading to more effective community action in defence of local schools.Keywords: school consolitation; community action; community school

Killing Ambition

2021 ◽  
pp. 167-220
Author(s):  
Oren Falk
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
State Formation ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Historical Reality ◽  
The Past ◽  
Political Consolidation ◽  
The Face ◽  
Political Centralization ◽  
Path Dependent ◽  
Dependent Product

This chapter seeks to account for the nearly complete absence of warfare from medieval Iceland and its sagas. It argues that a single logic dictated both the embrace of feud as a socially constructive idea and the rejection of war as an abomination. Drawing on anthropological examples and analyses, war is defined by contrasting it with feud; the bond between war and state-formation is emphasized. War presupposes political centralization and differentiation, which Icelanders, committed to the reciprocal logic of feuding, resisted. According to the sagas, ideological opposition to war manifested itself in abortive attempts at political consolidation within Iceland, in confusion and substitution in the face of war elsewhere (in Norway, England, and North America), and in failure to contend with burgeoning warlike activity in thirteenth-century Iceland. Tensions between state-centric warfare and state-resistant feuding existed in historical reality, however, not only in saga accounts of this history; and in reality, tensions could not always be resolved. Uchronia provided a tool for creative, retrospective textual resolution of problems that could not be overcome in practice. As demonstrated by the Icelandic law code, Grágás, the past thus became the path-dependent product of the future. Uchronic ideology worked to emend any perceived historical ‘errors’: any symptoms of war that could not be suppressed in reality were, instead, overwritten and repressed in text

From Towns into Battlefields

2020 ◽  
pp. 19-56
Author(s):  
Alex Dowdall
Keyword(s):  
Urban Space ◽  
World War ◽  
Western Front ◽  
The First World War ◽  
The Face ◽  
History Of ◽  
Physical Impact ◽  
Urban Warfare ◽  
First World

Chapter 1 explores the topography of the urban battlefield, and provides an urban history of the Western Front. It describes how Arras, Reims, Nancy, Lens, and other towns were progressively transformed into battlefields in the period after August 1914. It describes the transformation of urban space by the First World War, through artillery bombardment, the fortification of these towns by the militaries, and the proliferation of military weaponry and defensive architecture. It discusses how civilians changed their routines to adapt to the urban battlefield, and argues that as much as possible civilians at the front aimed to maintain a semblance of normality. This was encouraged by local authorities, and represented as a form of heroic resistance in the face of the enemy. The chapter charts the physical impact of urban warfare near the front, and describes the extent of urban destruction during the period of the stable Western Front. It also charts the transformation of the civilian population of the front, through discussions of evacuation policies and the scale of civilian death and injury.

Bearing the Stigmata

2020 ◽  
pp. 23-59
Author(s):  
Carolyn Muessig
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
Early Middle Ages ◽  
Francis Of Assisi

Chapter 1 traces the patristic and early medieval exegesis of Galatians 6:17. It assesses how language and imagery were appropriated and developed by eleventh- and twelfth-century monastic theologians (especially Peter Damian) into a soteriological system of penance and redemption that focused on Christ’s wounds. Significantly, it looks at examples of stigmatization before Francis of Assisi. These cases vary in their form; they gradually move from stigmata being almost exclusively associated with the sacerdotal order in the early Middle Ages to being linked to the laity by the early thirteenth century as with the cases of Peter the Conversus and Mary of Oignies.

Signs of Salvation: The Evolution of Stigmatic Spirituality Before Francis of Assisi

2013 ◽  
Vol 82 (1) ◽  
pp. 40-68
Author(s):  
Carolyn Muessig
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Eleventh Century ◽  
Seventh Century ◽  
Early Middle Ages ◽  
Medieval Europe ◽  
The Face ◽  
Biblical Commentaries ◽  
The Ideal

Francis of Assisi's reported reception of the stigmata on Mount La Verna in 1224 is widely held to be the first documented account of an individual miraculously and physically receiving the wounds of Christ. The appearance of this miracle, however, in the first quarter of the thirteenth century, is not as unexpected as it first seems. Interpretations of Galatians 6:17—“I bear the marks of the Lord Jesus Christ in my body”—had been circulating in biblical commentaries since the early Middle Ages. These works posited that clerics bore metaphorical and sometimes physical wounds(stigmata)as marks of persecution, while spreading the teaching of Christ in the face of resistance. By the seventh century, the meaning of Galatians 6:17 had been appropriated by bishops and priests as a sign or mark of Christ that they received invisibly at their ordination, and sometimes visibly upon their death. In the eleventh century, Peter Damian articulated a stigmatic spirituality that saw the ideal priest, monk, and nun as bearers of Christ's wounds, a status achieved through the swearing of vows and the practice of severe penance. By the early twelfth century, crusaders were said to bear the marks of the Passion in death and even sometimes as they entered into battle. By the early thirteenth century, “bearing the stigmata” was a pious superlative appropriated by a few devout members of the laity who interpreted Galatian 6:17 in a most literal manner. Thus, this article considers how the conception of “bearing the stigmata” developed in medieval Europe from its treatment in early Latin patristic commentaries to its visceral portrayal by the laity in the thirteenth century.

scholarly journals COVID-19 and Masculinities in Global Perspective: Reflections from Promundo’s Research and Activism

2021 ◽  
pp. 1097184X2110003
Author(s):  
Gary Barker ◽  
Stephen Burrell ◽  
Sandy Ruxton
Keyword(s):  
Violence Prevention ◽  
Violence Against Women ◽  
Global Perspective ◽  
Care Work ◽  
Power Dynamics ◽  
Unpaid Care ◽  
National Leaders ◽  
The Face ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Social Causes

COVID-19 has affected individuals and communities in gendered ways. A spike in men’s violence against women has been documented in multiple settings.  Women have faced disproportionate job losses in many countries. Men have died at higher rates from COVID-19 for both biological and social causes. Masculinist responses by some national leaders, and men’s lower propensity to adhere to COVID-19 related health recommendations are also gendered. Research further confirms that both women and men in the context of heterosexual households increased their time devoted to unpaid care, even as women’s increases were generally higher. In the face of these challenges some NGOs increased programming to engage men in violence prevention and carried out advocacy to promote men’s more equitable participation in unpaid care work.  As the world recovers from the pandemic in 2021, an understanding of how masculinities and gender norms and power dynamics affect recover will be vital.

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