Pontormo and the Art of Devotion in Renaissance Italy

Both lauded and criticized for his pictorial eclecticism, the Florentine artist Jacopo Carrucci, known as Pontormo, created some of the most visually striking religious images of the Renaissance. These paintings, which challenged prevailing illusionistic conventions, mark a unique contribution into the complex relationship between artistic innovation and Christian traditions in the first half of the sixteenth century. Pontormo's sacred works are generally interpreted as objects that reflect either pure aesthetic experimentation, or personal and cultural anxiety. Jessica Maratsos, however, argues that Pontormo employed stylistic change deliberately for novel devotional purposes. As a painter, he was interested in the various modes of expression and communication - direct address, tactile evocation, affective incitement - as deployed in a wide spectrum of devotional culture, from sacri monti, to Michelangelo's marble sculptures, to evangelical lectures delivered at the Accademia Fiorentina. Maratsos shows how Pontormo translated these modes in ways that prompt a critical rethinking of Renaissance devotional art.

Vegetarian Evolution in Nineteenth-Century Britain

Victorian vegetarians envisioned the evolutionary progress of the human race from a cannibal past towards a vegetarian future, moralizing evolutionary science to vindicate their cause. This essay explores this rhetoric of vegetarian evolution and how it conjoined vegetarian identity with British identity by reinventing vegetarianism as a practice of individual liberty. The main archives I examine are the Dietetic Reformer and Vegetarian Messenger (1860–1887), a major vegetarian journal from the period, and Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race (1871), a work of speculative fiction that represents vegetarian utopianism from an evolutionary angle. My reading of the Dietetic Reformer reveals that Victorian vegetarians imagined themselves to be at the vanguard of human evolution, with their conscious, mindful, and individual practices of vegetarianism operating as a progressive departure from what they perceived as the communal and anti-modern vegetarianism of the non-Western world. By doing so, they reshaped human evolution not only into a teleological progress, but also into a humanized process, on which individual subjects had a direct bearing through their control over daily food consumption. The rhetoric of vegetarian evolution thus addressed a deeper cultural anxiety about individual agency in the Victorian period, provoked by the Darwinian turn. This vegetarian resolution, however, as my reading of The Coming Race uncovers, contained incongruities within its rhetoric. Bulwer-Lytton’s literary representation of an evolved vegetarian species as a homogeneous heap rather than a society of self-governing individuals discloses the inherent difficulty in reconciling individual moral agency with the framework of evolutionary vegetarianism.

‘Is it not strange that he is thus bewitch’d?’

This chapter addresses the representation of Edward II’s agency and culpability in his sexual and political relationships with his favourites. I situate depictions of Edward’s favourites as irresistibly attractive in the context of wider early modern cultural anxiety concerning transgressive sexual attraction; and consider medieval and early modern writers’ changing negotiations of the question of Edward’s culpability for the disastrous political events of his reign compared to that of his favourites’ ‘evil counsel’. Although willingness to attach some blame to Edward himself increases over time – reflecting the increasing temporal remoteness of his reign – chroniclers consistently retained a level of strategic polyvocality, demonstrating their need to negotiate the engaging political pertinence of their subject matter with its risky, seditious potential.

"MAY THE SHAME BE WITH YOU. ALWAYS." MITIGATING YOUNG PEOPLE'S INTIMATE EXCHANGES ONLINE

Cultural anxiety about the impact of young people's intimate exchanges online has increased over the past 15 years. Sexual media and 'digital intimacies' are routinely understood to be a source of harm and adverse outcomes. This paper engages with Finland's National Bureau of Investigation's $2 video campaign, the Police of Finland's public announcements on 'teen sexting' between 2017–2019 and young Finns responses to such educational efforts by using data from $2 study that is a part of a more significant research project on intimacy in data-driven culture in Finland. My research interest lies with some of the disconnections between current educational and policy discourses addressing young people's participation in digital cultures, and the lived experiences of young Finns. By asking from a focus-group of young Finns aged 15–19-years-old how they and their peers experience digital intimacy and their perceptions of the benefits, possible risks and harms, mitigations and solutions, I can draw a more ethical yet a complex picture of young people's engagement with digital intimacies. I call for a focus on the political, ethical and material implications of such educational efforts and policy responses that premises on digital abstinence to critically reflect on the question of young people's (sexual) rights in digital environments. The University of Turku ethics board has approved the research design and the uses of all the research datasets.

Alternative Therapies: Sociodrama, Nude Therapy, Primal Scream, Psychedelic

Alternative therapies are sometimes associated with non-biological approaches, or practices that do not undergo rigorous testing or produce consistently repeatable results. In the 1970s, some alternative therapies also openly embraced spiritual dimensions that directly conflicted with a Western bio-medical paradigm, placing them within a category of new age medicine, suggesting that such therapies were both eclectic and outside the boundaries of orthodox clinical care. The timing and location of these therapies reveals a particular context that gave rise to treatments seeking non-orthodox approaches, and arguably for a set of conditions that also emerged out of a Cold War context of affluence, dissatisfaction, and cultural anxiety. Some of these alternative therapies overlapped, with founders and consumers borrowing principles from different therapies to produce an approach that itself might be considered alternative to orthodox or mainstream western bio-medical practice. Situated predominantly on the American west coast, in California, these alternative therapies are illustrative of a regional culture of therapy. One, in particular, that embraced elements of radicalism alongside a collision of individualistic and collective approaches to care and responsibility. This article examines four such therapies: psychedelics, primal scream, nude therapy, and sociodrama. It is argued that beyond the inherent differences among them and their common flirtations with orthodox biomedicine, these four sets of practices are also historically significant for what they reveal about the place of psychology as a discipline after the Second World War. With each of these therapies, their history reveals a tension with psychoanalysis that attempts to redefine the relationship between the therapist and the patient. Although none of these therapies endured in their original form into the 21st century, revisiting this history offers insight into the changing state of psychotherapy in the latter half of the 20th century, and a focus on alternative therapies helps to elucidate some of the professional and cultural tensions that fuelled subsequent changes in the therapeutic landscape.