Open Journals @ UWA (The University of Western Australia)
Not a member yet
99 research outputs found
Sort by
Review: Henry the Liberal Count of Champagne, 1127–1181
No full textTheodore Evergates, Henry the Liberal Count of Champagne, 1127–1181 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016). Print, 320 pp., US$75.00, ISBN: 9780812247909
Review: Machiavelli’s Legacy: The Prince After Five Hundred Years
No full textTimothy Fuller, ed., Machiavelli’s Legacy: The Prince After Five Hundred Years (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015). Print, 216 pp., US$47.50, ISBN: 9780812247695
Review: By Steppe, Desert and Ocean: The Birth of Eurasia
No full textSir Barry Cunliffe, By Steppe, Desert and Ocean: the Birth of Eurasia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). Print, 530 pp., US$40.00, ISBN: 9780199689170
When Dylan Met the Bard: Fragments of Screen (Sound) in Michael Almereyda’s Hamlet
Get PDFDirector Michael Almereyda’s diverse musical choices in the film are a threshold into understanding his cinematic interpretation of Hamlet (2000). Almereyda recontextualises Hamlet in terms of contemporary social problems. Hamlet and Ophelia are confronted with and battle against urban claustrophobia, conspiracy and global corporate power. A fragment of the Bob Dylan song ‘All Along the Watchtower’ (1966) is used as a filmic shortcut to translate Shakespeare’s iconic ‘gravedigger scene’ between Hamlet and the Gravedigger from playtext to screen. ‘All Along the Watchtower’ encapsulates certain ideas about mortality and the worth of life from the ‘gravedigger scene’ and demonstrates these issues still resonate in the contemporary urban world the film is set
A ‘Divellish’ Woman Discovered: The Witch of Newbury, 1643
Get PDFDuring September 1643 a number of publications related the news that a witch had been found and killed by Roundhead soldiers just prior to the Battle of Newbury. This article will analyse the contents of the longest work on the Witch of Newbury, A Most Certain, Strange, and True Discovery of a VVitch, focusing in particular on aspects of the account which illustrate developments in early modern English witch beliefs. In ascertaining her identity, the soldiers relied upon popular beliefs about witches and their powers, and these beliefs informed their reactions to the witch. The discussion of the Witch of Newbury’s powers ,and the soldiers perceptions of them, illustrates how ideas about witchcraft could and did change throughout the seventeenth-century, and in particular, during the English Civil Wars.
For ‘Physitians of the Soule’: The roles of ‘flight’ and ‘hatred of abomination’ in Thomas Wright’s The Passions of the Minde in Generall
Get PDFThis article attempts to understand how Thomas Wright’s 1604 work, The Passions of the Minde in Generall, might have fitted into his overall mission as an English Catholic preacher, particularly when read via Wright’s understanding of Thomas Aquinas’s passion of fuga seu abominatio. Some historians claim that Wright was a controversialist, previously describing The Passions as either a radical departure from Wright’s mission, or the work of a different Thomas Wright. Earlier attempts to find a missionary element within The Passions have been inadequate. Through a close reading of The Passions, specifically analysing Wright'ʹs interpretation of fuga seu abominatio within the context of Wright’s intended readership, the main message of The Passions, and his background, this article suggests a possible reading of the text as a work aimed specifically at fellow English Catholics. To Wright, the passions of hatred of abomination and flight or detestation, derived primarily from Aquinas’s fuga seu abominatio, were not simply a form of disgust, as often assumed, but the potential worldly or otherworldly harm that someone we love, such as a neighbour, might face from the abominable evil of sin and damnation. By linking hatred of abomination, flight or detestation, and Wright’s particular view of sin together, Wright was teaching English Catholics how these passions might be used to cure diseased souls, turning the work into a guide for preaching.
Grotesque Encounters: Reading Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice along the Principles of the Sublime, Beautiful and Grotesque
Get PDFThis article is an attempt to apply the basic principles of the aesthetic discourse on the sublime, beautiful and grotesque to William Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice. Even though it is a discourse that only begins in the course of the eighteenth century, I will argue that the structure of the play parallels the model of the traditional sublime, as it deals with a subject-object binary and meditates on the relationship between the material (body) and the transcendental (mind). However, the play is also rich in disruptive — or grotesque — forces that unsettle this binary structure. The parallels between the play and the aesthetic discourse could not only help our understanding of postmodern criticism and rewriting of the sublime, but the sublime can also, in turn, shed light on the reception of the play
‘For musike meueþ affecciouns’: Interpreting Harp Performance in Medieval Romance
Get PDFPerformances are focal points in medieval romances with musical protagonists. Whilst these performances may not necessarily be accurate representations of medieval music, such episodes in popular literature are valuable to early music practitioners because they describe the whole context of the performance. These scenes preserve a snapshot of the medieval experience of music: the physicality of the performance, the sounds created and the emotional responses to the music. The hyperbolic tendencies of popular literature are effective at communicating imagined performance contexts because of the use of language that deliberately presents and evokes extremes of emotion, involving the reader or listener in a simulacrum of musical affect. When used alongside surviving musical notation, musical treatises, accounts of performances in historical records, and iconography, these romances are, I argue, a highly valuable and informative source for medieval performance. They reveal to the modern reader how music was perceived and represented in the medieval popular imagination. This paper will examine harp performances in several music-focused romances and I will set alongside these examples my own amateur reconstructions of the performances as described
‘Nonsence is Rebellion’: John Taylor’s Nonsence upon Sence, or Sence, upon Nonsence (1651–1654) and the English Civil War
Get PDFThis article examines the political content of John Taylor’s Nonsence upon Sence, or Sence Upon Nonsence: Chuse you either, or neither (1651–1654), challenging the customary dismissal of this poem as light-hearted nonsense verse. Taylor was a staunch Royalist who had openly criticised the divisions of the English Civil War, and the proliferation of religious separatists; I argue that Nonsence continues this project under a mask of playful ambiguity. The literary disorder created in this text, which Taylor calls ‘nonsence’, is made to mirror the social, religious and political fragmentation of post-war London, as sentences and words are broken down and rearranged in unfamiliar and disturbing ways. The paper serves not only as a stylistic assessment of Taylor’s satire as a reflection of the political and social instability of the time, but to historicise his engagement with nonsense and place within that literary tradition
The Andreios Eunuch-Commander Narses: Sign of a Decoupling of Martial Virtues and Masculinity in the Early Byzantine Empire?
Get PDFThe sixth-century Byzantine general Narses (478-573) has long earned historians’ respect. This acclaim is deserved since his major victories over the Goths in 552 and versus the Franks and Alamanni in 554, helped to secure the Emperor Justinian I’s (ruled 527-565) reconquest of Italy. So too did Narses perform admirably for twelve years in his role as prefect of Italy. Of course, it has always been important to emphasize that Narses was a eunuch. Indeed, for many modern historians, Narses’ identity as a castrate is more important for study than his military deeds and political achievements that proved ephemeral. For some, the presence of a eunuch in such an essential military role indicates a turning away from codes of generalship based on traditional martial courage and manliness. This paper questions such a view. It suggests that Byzantium had a much more flexible notion of the gender status of eunuchs than some recent scholarship allows. Indeed, I will show that Narses fits into a continuing hegemony of traditional masculine values based on the supremacy of Byzantine men’s martial virtues.