[I] ‘did write this Wyll with my own hand’

2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (4) ◽  
pp. 66-77
Author(s):  
Vassiliki Markidou

This article attempts for the first time to shed light on the politics of simulation and dissimulation in Isabella Whitney’s ‘Wyll and Testament’. It also argues that the poem both reflects its creator’s awareness of the celebrated English historical and topographical narratives and deviates from them by crucially omitting a seminal part of London’s history, namely its Troynovant tradition. In so doing, as well as by defining a paradoxical urban landscape, Whitney presents a tale not of the (mythic) founding of the English capital with its patriarchal and nation-building connotations, but of its (satiric) bequeathal by benevolent femininity, as such offering its reader a different angle from which to explore and interpret early modern London.

2020 ◽  
pp. 128-138
Author(s):  
A. S. Bik-Bulatov

The article uses little known letters of M. Gorky, many of which were published for the first time in 1997, as well as findings of Samara-based experts in local history to shed light on the writer’s work as editor-in-chief of the Samarskaya Gazeta newspaper in 1895. The researcher introduces hitherto unstudied reminiscences of the journalist D. Linyov (Dalin) about this period, which reference a letter by Gorky, now lost. The paper details a newly discovered episode of Gorky’s professional biography as a journalist: it concerns his campaign against a Samara ‘she-wolf,’ the madam of a local brothel A. Neucheva. Linyov’s reminiscences turn out to be an important and interesting source, offering an insight into the daily grind of the young editor Gorky, providing new evidence of his excellent organizational skills, and describing his moral and social stance. The author presents his work in the context of a recently initiated broader discussion about the need to map out all Russian periodicals for the period until 1917, as well as all research devoted to individual publications.


AJS Review ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 48-75
Author(s):  
Tamara Morsel-Eisenberg

This article examines early modern learning through Ashkenazic responsa. Beyond explicit evidence from published responsa collections, implicit insights dwell in what these publications lack. These missing features shed light on sixteenth-century scholarly practices. The works’ organizational inconsistencies must be understood in context of learned archives. Such an adjustment offers a corrective to the regnant narrative, which views the introduction of print as a sharp rupture from earlier modes of transmission. This article suggests instead that the culture of printed books coexisted with older approaches, and that print was complemented by more disorderly and unconstrained forms of transmission. Comparing rabbinic “paper-ware” with contemporaneous humanist practices highlights the rabbi's working papers, focusing on a culture's dynamic activity rather than its stable output. This shift in perspective allows us to see rabbinic writings not merely as a collection of books but as a mode of scholarship.


Nuncius ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 309-329 ◽  
Author(s):  
Silvia Marinozzi

In the early 1980s a systematic investigation was begun by G. Fornaciari and his staff of a series of mummies from central and southern Italy, and in particular of important Renaissance remains. The study of a substantial number of artificial mummies has shed light on the human embalming techniques connected with the methods and procedures described by medical and non-medical authors in the early modern period. This has made it possible to reconstruct the history of the art of mummification, from the ‘clyster’ techniques to the partial or total evisceration of the corpse, to the intravascular injection of drying and preserving liquors. In addition to the bodies of Aragonese princes and members of the Neapolitan nobility, interred in the Basilica of San Domenico in Naples are the remains of important French personages dating to the modern age. Among the tombs arranged in two parallel rows to the right of the balcony are four sarcophagi containing the bodies of the wife and three children of Jean Antoine Michel Agar, who served as the Minister of Finance of the Kingdom of Naples from 1809 to 1815. The type of wrapping used for the corpses of the children presents strong analogies to those of ancient Egyptian mummies.


2011 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-45 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. F. MERRITT

ABSTRACTStudies of the rise of London's vestries in the period to 1640 have tended to discuss them in terms of the inexorable rise of oligarchy and state formation. This article re-examines the emergence of the vestries in several ways, moving beyond this traditional focus on oligarchy, and noting how London's vestries raised much broader issues concerning law, custom, and lay religious authority. The article reveals a notable contrast between the widespread influence and activities of London vestries and the questionable legal framework in which they operated. The political and ecclesiastical authorities – and in particular Archbishop Laud – are also shown to have had very mixed attitudes towards the legitimacy and desirability of powerful vestries. The apparently smooth and relentless spread of select vestries in the pre-war period is also shown to be illusory. The granting of vestry ‘faculties’ by the authorities ceased abruptly at the end of the 1620s, amid a series of serious legal challenges, on both local and ideological grounds, to the existence of vestries. Their rise had thus been seriously contested and stymied well before the upheavals of the 1640s, although opposition to them came from multiple sources – Laudians, Henry Spelman and the royal Commission on Fees, and local parishioners – whose objectives could vary.


2003 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 497
Author(s):  
Joseph P. Ward ◽  
J. F. Merritt

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