L'onomastique française : bibliographie des travaux publiés de 1960 à 1985

Love Between Women: Early Christian Responses to Female Homoeroticism, by Bernadette J. Brooten. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Pp. xxii + 412 + 12 halftones. $34.95 (cloth), $9.00 (paper). In her groundbreaking work Love Between Women; Bernadette Brooten has made a fundamental contribution to the fields of biblical studies and classics, as well as the history of sexuality, ancient Mediterranean women's history, and lesbian historiography. Brooten argues that the early Christian indictment of female homoeroticism was neither a theological nor a cultural innovation, but rather that Paul and other early Christian writers who condemned female homoeroticism wrote in full continuity with their precursors and contemporaries. The book is simultaneously a broadly focused history of ideology and interpretation, a detailed exegesis of Rom 1:18-32 (with a seventy-page commentary on the passage), and a Christian theological intervention into contemporary social debates about sexuality and civil rights. Brooten has meticulously collected Greek, Roman, and Jewish sources for her history of male attitudes toward female homoeroticism in the ancient world, a history that constitutes the first half of the book. Here, magical papyri, medical texts, astrological handbooks, novels, dream-books, polemics, and artistic representations are mined for evidence of the ancient world's knowledge about and attitudes toward tribades. In this rich elaboration of the sources, one encounters binding spells that seek to enslave one woman to another sexually; astrological explanations for sexual object choices among some women; recommendations for gynecological surgery to remove a large clitoris since it is "a symptom of turpitude" causing women to "strive to have their own flesh stimulated just like men"; and interpretive guides for analyzing different sexual desires as they are expressed in dreams. In concert with other historians of sexuality, Brooten argues that sexuality was conceptualized in antiquity in binary, hierarchically arranged terms, "active" and "passive." These active and passive roles of sexual acts were scrupulously scripted and were tied to carefully structured notions of gender identity. Ancient commentators viewed violations of the hierarchical script as dishonorable transgressions of role and status and judged these violations harshly as challenges to the proper ordering of society. Paul's description of female homoeroticism as the exchange of natural passions for unnatural ones, Brooten argues, should be situated in this broader cultural framework of a concern over gender transgressions and their potential threat to the social order. As Brooten puts it directly, "Paul condemns sexual relations between women as `unnatural' because he shares the widely held cultural view that women are passive by nature and therefore should remain passive in sexual relations" (p. 216). In part 2 of the book, Rom 1:18-32 emerges into high relief with a careful and lengthy exegesis. Here, Brooten provides an extremely close, line-by-line textual analysis that is a model for its genre, and she situates the passage in relation to a range of biblical intertexts. This analysis is followed by readings of other early Christian texts (the Apocalypse of Peter, the Acts of Thomas, the Apocalypse of Paul) and writers (Tertullian, Clement of Alexandria, Hippolytus, John Chrysostom, Shenute of Atripe, Augustine) in whose works the condemnation of female homoeroticism appears. The book concludes with a brief assessment of the contemporary theological, cultural, and political stakes involved when "through Paul's Letter to the Romans and other early church writings, the principal concepts discussed in this book have come to serve as authoritative for Western cultures, as a source for our ethics" (p. 361). Brooten's exegesis of Paul is painstaking, demanding, and persuasive. …

Love Between Women: Early Christian Responses to Female Homoeroticism

Famille et pouvoir dans le monde franc (VIIe-Xe siècle) : Essai d’anthropologie sociale

This thesis is an examination of the cultural and political climate of the medieval Welsh Marches. The investigation is structured around three case studies: Hereford, c. 1180–c. 1210; Ludlow, c. 1310–c. 1350; Cwm Tawe, c. 1380–c. 1410. Using these three case studies, the thesis develops a critique of the core-periphery model that has dominated modern conceptualisations of medieval political and cultural geographies. In its place, I formulate an alternative model based on an engagement with social theories of the network, including Manuel Castells’s ‘network society’ and, in particular, Bruno Latour’s work on ‘actor-network theory’. Reading with networks might, I contend, provide a new, more ethical interpretative model, one capable of restoring cultural and political agency to erstwhile ‘peripheral’ regions. The first chapter traces the multifarious textual networks in which the three case-study locales were active: it thereby identifies the corpus of the following three chapters (i.e. the texts circulated, composed, copied, or translated in each locale), and situates them in their manuscript contexts. The second chapter develops ‘networked’ readings of the texts themselves: I analyse the ways in which the texts position their local environments in relation to the global networks described in their narratives, such that they not only disprove the ‘peripheral’ status ascribed to the Marches, but more searchingly question the validity of the model that produces such ascriptions. Chapters 3 and 4 take a thematic approach, using networks to analyse the political modalities of the texts’ representations of nonhuman agency (Chapter 3) and of issues surrounding language, translation, and multilingualism (Chapter 4). Chapter 5 opens up the corpus to investigate representations of the Welsh Marches in Arthurian literature: I suggest that not only do the Marches emerge as highly connected regions, but that Arthurian literature more fundamentally imagines a networked model of political and cultural geography. The thesis concludes by turning to the Hereford mappa mundi as a succinct image of the investment of the so-called ‘periphery’ in a truly global worldview, and by reasserting the importance of reading with networks in the current political climate. This thesis is dedicated to the memory of my Granny Lampitt, my first, best, and most dearly missed friend. Table of

Networking the March : the literature of the Welsh Marches, c.1180-c.1410

Author(s): Torres, Sara Victoria | Advisor(s): Chism, Christine; Gallagher, Lowell | Abstract: My dissertation, "Marvelous Generations: Lancastrian Genealogies and Translation in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and Iberia," traces the legacy of dynastic internationalism in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and early-seventeenth centuries. I argue that the situated tactics of courtly literature use genealogical and geographical paradigms to redefine national sovereignty. Before the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588, before the divorce trials of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon in the 1530s, a rich and complex network of dynastic, economic, and political alliances existed between medieval England and the Iberian kingdoms. The marriages of John of Gaunt's two daughters to the Castilian and Portuguese kings created a legacy of Anglo-Iberian cultural exchange that is evident in the literature and manuscript culture of both England and Iberia. Because England, Castile, and Portugal all saw the rise of new dynastic lines at the end of the fourteenth century, the subsequent literature produced at their courts is preoccupied with issues of genealogy, just rule, and political consent. Dynastic foundation narratives compensate for the uncertainties of succession by evoking the longue duri?½e of national histories--of Trojan diaspora narratives, of Roman rule, of apostolic foundation--and situating them within universalizing historical modes. At the same time, they reconfigure national space and geography in fantasies of imperial mapping that spatialize their genealogical (re)constructions. The dynastic internationalism characterizing late medieval royal marriages contributes to emerging discourses of the nation and sets the stage for the imperial rivalries between England and Iberia during the Renaissance era. Within this Anglo-Iberian context, my dissertation tracks an understudied aspect of the legacy of Lancastrian kingship: its claims to the throne of Castile and the multiple Iberian marriages that materialize those claims as they shape late medieval and early modern international historiography. In the early stages of Lancastrian rule, the prestige of foreign kingship reinforced Lancastrian claims to England, claims which in turn fueled political ambitions in France. In the process, English and Iberian historiographies become entangled. I argue that common dynastic descent is mobilized as an alternative way of understanding national relations, thus positioning the consanguinity of royal houses against cultural, linguistic and religious difference--the international claims of dynastic affinity over the specifically national ones of the polity. In both cases, the political fantasy of a moment of dynastic origins reinforces political theories that render the "king's body" as proximate to the nation, while at the same time destabilizing the relationship between the monarch and the polity. In excavating the sometimes-repressed matter of Spain as a determinant in the domestic imaginings of England, my project works against insular nationalism to reveal a "sceptered isle" whose political integrity is both reinforced and troubled by its deep and unavoidable genealogical and geographical proximity to realms outside.

https://escholarship.org/content/qt25n6t2gq/qt25n6t2gq.pdf?t=nrvwc8

Marvelous Generations: Lancastrian Genealogies and Translation in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and Iberia

"Mr Bloch has attempted to establish what he calls a 'literary anthropology' The project is important and ambitious It seems to me that Mr Bloch has completely achieved this ambition" Michel Foucault "Bloch's Study is a genuinely interdisciplinaryone, bringing together elements of history, ethnology, philology, philosophy, economics and literature, with the undoubted ambition of generating a new synthesis which will enable us to read the Middle Ages in a different light Stated simply, and in terms which do justice neither to the density nor the subtlety of his argument, Bloch's thesis is this: that medieval society perceived itself in terms of a vertical mode of descent from origins This model is articulated etymologically in medieval theories of grammar and language, and is consequently reflected in historical and theological writings; it is also latent in the genealogical structure of the aristocratic family as it began to be organized in France in the twelfth century, and is made manifest in such systems of signs as heraldry and the adoption of patronymns    It is an ingenious and compelling synthesis which no medievalist, even on this side of the Atlantic, can afford to ignore" Nicholas Mann, "Times Literary Supplement""

Paul Zumthor

Papers

Etymologies and genealogies : a literary anthropology of the French Middle Ages