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In this article I demonstrate the significance of a flexible approach to examining the autobiographical in early eighteenth-century womens writing. Using ‘old stories’, existing and developing narrative and literary forms, womens autobiographical writing can be discovered in places other than the more recognizable forms such as diaries and memoirs. Jane Barker and Delarivier Manley‘s works are important examples of the dynamic and creative use of cross-genre autobiographical writing. The integration of themselves in their fictional and poetic works demonstrates the potential of generic fluidity for innovative ways to express and explore the self in textual forms.
The poor survival rate of primary sources for the history of Irish women in the early modern period is mitigated by the sophistication with which extant sources are now being analysed. When re-examined without reference to the demands of the traditional historical grand narrative, when each text itself is permitted to guide its own interrogation, previously undervalued texts are revealed to be insightful of individual existential experience. The memoir of eighteenth-century Dorothea Herbert, hitherto much ignored due to the authors mental illness, is becoming increasingly respected not just for its historic evidential value but for the revelations it contains of a distressed individuals use of literature to manage her circumstances. The interpretive tools deployed on such a text by different research specialisms necessarily lead to divergent conclusions; this in turn may lead to creative re-imagining of history although they cannot all equally reflect what was likely to have been the lived reality of the original author.
This article explores the contributions of women scholars, writers and artists to our understanding of the medieval past. Beginning with a contemporary artists book by Liz Mathews that draws on one of Boethius‘s Latin lyrics from the Consolation of Philosophy as translated by Helen Waddell, it traces a network of medieval women scholars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries associated with Manchester and the John Rylands Library, such as Alice Margaret Cooke and Mary Bateson. It concludes by examining the translation of the Old English poem, The Wife‘s Lament, by contemporary poet, Eavan Boland. The art of Liz Mathews and poetry of Eavan Boland and the scholarship of women like Alice Cooke, Mary Bateson, Helen Waddell and Eileen Power show that women‘s writing of the past – creative, public, scholarly – forms a strand of an archive of women‘s history that is still being put together.
The theological energies released by Martin Luther in 1517 created a set of theological insights and problems that eventually led to the development of kenotic Christology (i. e., the view that in order for the Son of God to become incarnate and live a genuinely human life, he emptied himself of his divine prerogatives or attributes). This article traces how kenotic Christology originated in the Eucharistic Controversy between Luther and Zwingli, before receiving its first extensive treatment in the debate between the Lutheran theologians of Tübingen and Giessen in,the early seventeenth century. Attention then turns to the nine-teenth century, when doctrinal tensions resulting from the enforced union of the Prussian Lutheran and Reformed churches created the conditions for a new flowering of kenotic Christology in the theologies of Ernst Sartorius and, subsequently, Gottfried Thomasius. Kenotic Christology ultimately originates with Luther, however, for it owes its existence to the creative theological energies he unleashed and which remain his lasting legacy.
Celebrated as a leader of London’s ‘Underground’ in the 1960–70s, and a leading British poet and performance artist of his time, Jeff Nuttall found fame through his critique of post-nuclear culture, Bomb Culture, which provided an influential rationale for artistic practice through absurdism but lost that recognition a decade or so later. Less well recognised, and with greater influence, is the distinctively visceral sensibility underlying much of his creative work, notably his poetry that draws on Dylan Thomas and the Beat Movement, his graphic drawing and luscious painting styles, and his pioneering performance art. This article argues that it is through these artistic expressions of visceral intelligence that Jeff Nuttall’s art and its long-term influence can now best be understood. It is intended to complement the Jeff Nuttall Papers in the Special Collections of The John Rylands Research Institute and Library, University of Manchester, deposited by the gallerist and poetry publisher Robert Bank (1941–2015), to whose memory this article is dedicated. Further papers have been added by Nuttall’s friends and relatives.
women did, though, encounter a very particular set of concerns and questions relating to their faith. The interviewees’ memories of early marriage were defined by a tension between the physical, bodily concerns of sexuality and the transcendent, ethereal domain of religious beliefs. Amidst the daily pressures that this schism exerted on them, they did not forgo their faith or relationships, but pursued creative
consciousness’ is an ‘organic part of our being,’ a striving for goodness that ‘cannot pause midway’ but must be oriented toward ‘the idea of absoluteness, or the highest good’ even if the latter cannot actually be reached. In this way, he argued, ‘the source of morality lies in humankind’ but he relates to it as something beyond himself; it is thus firmly grounded while yet free to function as a ‘creative force’ in progress toward perfection. This is how Steinberg understood the rabbinic doctrine of ‘Torah from Heaven ( Torah min ha'shamayim )’ — ‘moral truth stems from God
active categorisation of sexual and religious experiences provided something of a lifeline for many of the interviewees’ Catholic faith. It was a mechanism that developed in the later stages of their marriages to deal with the conflicts, tensions and frustrations they encountered in early marriage. Just as Catholic women pursued creative, physical tactics to negotiate spiritual and sexual impulses while
drawing on the hasidism to creatively reformulate Jewish spirituality for the Westernized Jewish masses (Persico 2014 ; Biale 2017 , 556–574) demonstrated the same tendency, it was most radically exemplified by followers of R. Yehudah Ashlag (1885–1954). Starting in the early 1940s with figures like Levi Yitshak Krakovsky (Meir 2013 ), but gathering momentum during the 1960s and 1970s with the founding of the Kabbalah Center under the leadership of R. Phillip Berg, a modified and simplified version of Ashlagian teachings was brought to the general public (Myers 2007
line of reasoning extends even products of the spirit: ‘the eye sees and the ear hears’ while the artist or thinker is scarcely aware ‘that his mind and his heart are being sown’ with ideas that later sprout during the creative process. Thus, his work is not ‘without external causes;’ it too comes ‘via the domain of another.’ Drawing an analogy to the rabbinic principle that partners to a single deed share liability for damages (Bava Kama 51a), Heyn indicated that partnership in the production process implies shared claims to the results (Heyn 1970 , 202–203). In