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Hybrid creatures emerging from the pages of Old English medical texts readily capture the modern imagination. A powerful medicinal root in an Old English herbal is rendered with distinctly human arms and legs; a swarm charm inscribed in the margins of Bede’s Old English history addresses bees as Valkyrie-like beings; an entry in the compilation known as the Lacnunga identifies a wayside plant as both herb and mother. Yet the most powerful forms of hybridity in the Old English healing tradition are more subtle and pervasive: linguistic hybrids of Latin and vernacular, cultural hybrids fusing Christian liturgy and Germanic lore, and generic hybrids drawing simultaneously from an ambient oral tradition and an increasingly ubiquitous culture of writing. Hybrid healing seeks to meet such textual hybridity with a methodological hybridity of its own. Drawing from a range of fields including historical linguistics, classical rhetoric, archaeology, plant biology, folkloristics, and disability studies, a series of close readings examines selected Old English medical texts through individually tailored combinations of approaches designed to illustrate how the healing power of these remedies ultimately derives from unique convergences of widely disparate traditions and influences. This case-study model positions readers to appreciate more fully the various forces at work in any given remedy, replacing reductive assumptions that have often led early medieval medicine to be dismissed as mere superstition. By inviting readers to approach each text with appropriately diverse critical frameworks, the book opens a space to engage the medieval healing tradition with empathy, understanding, and imagination.
‘Hybrid’ forms: The Street, Moving On, Accused 2 The decision to create a separate chapter for these three programmes is designed to highlight McGovern’s increasing tendency in his later career to both nurture new writers and push at the boundaries of television forms. All three programmes were made by independent production companies with McGovern acting in a producing as well as writing role, though as we shall see, he saw his contribution as being very much confined to the development of the ideas and the scripts rather than to production in any wider sense
4 Hybrid bodies (I): the impossible machine Man made the machine in his own image. Paul B. Haviland (1915: 1) On 18 February 1918 at the Berliner Sezession on the Kurfürstendamm Richard Huelsenbeck declaimed his ‘Erste Dada-Rede’ on the occasion of the first Berlin Dada soirée. Art was, for him, contingent on the immediacy of contemporary events: ‘The highest art will be that which in its conscious content presents the thousandfold problems of the day, the art which has been visibly shattered by the explosions of the last week, which is forever trying to
6 Leviathan and the hybrid network: Future Earth, co-production and the experimental life of a global institution Eleanor Hadley Kershaw In the opening words of A Sociology of Monsters, John Law caricatures a middle-class white male, middle-aged, non-disabled person’s perspective on the history of sociology: ‘We founded ourselves on class; then, at a much later date we learned a little about ethnicity; more recently we discovered gender; and more recently still we learned something … about age and disability’ (Law, 1991: 1). Thus, the hypothetical sociologist
Postcolonial theory has yielded productive methodologies with which to examine an institution such as the John Rylands Library. This paper reinterprets aspects of the Library‘s history, especially its collecting practices, using Bhabha‘s concept of hybridity. The Library‘s founder, Enriqueta Rylands, embodied hybridity and colonial talking back in her remarkable trajectory from a Catholic upbringing in Cuba, via her conversion to Nonconformity and her marriage to Manchester‘s most successful cotton manufacturer, to her usurpation of the cultural hegemony in purchasing spectacular aristocratic collections for her foundation. Hybridity was embedded in many other aspects of the Library‘s development: it was established as a public library with a board of governors but its collections were largely shaped by Enriqueta‘s tastes and interests; it was independent until 1972, while maintaining very close links to the University of Manchester; it has always fulfilled a dual remit of addressing the research needs of scholars and attracting wider audiences; and it is simultaneously a library of printed books and manuscripts, an archive repository, and a gallery of visual materials.
5 Hybrid bodies (II): the grotesque From the day they are confirmed to the day they are blasted into the paradisiacal beyond, ‘people are pigs’. George Grosz and Wieland Herzfelde (1925: 19) Schwitters’s Merzbau (1919–37) Goethe’s leg; a dental bridge; the mutilated corpse of a young girl; a lover with a prosthetic penis; a bottle of Schwitters’s own urine; a brothel with a three-legged woman; a 10 per cent disabled war veteran with his headless daughter; a headless man and an armless woman embracing beneath the large head of a child ‘with syphilitic eyes
hybrid style that emerged in their writings. Coinciding with discussions about neologisms and the contamination of the Spanish language, especially through the press, the prologue to Pedro Antonio de Alarcón’s Cosas que fueron (Things that were, 1871) reflected on form and held that language required a certain level of freedom to effectively convey meaning. The prologue’s author, Rodríguez Correa, expressed this sentiment as ‘esa honradez con la que la forma debe seguir la idea, no como esclava sumisa ni como señora imperante, sino como hermana dulce y bondadosa
The papers in this volume consider Gothic Ex/Changes, a concept at the heart of the essentially hybrid mode of Gothic, which constantly challenges prevailing orthodoxies. Papers foreground the confusion of boundaries and definitions of the human. A number take this examination of the hybrid into the realm of form and genre, including music and historiography. The analysis of Gothic in the collection demonstrates the way in which Gothic criticism has extended the subversive role of Gothic texts into the academy. It might be that as part of the ongoing process of change and exchange with a range of theoretical approaches, we are entering the period of ‘postGothic studies.’
Marcantonio Raimondis Il Sogno and Albrecht Dürers Sea Monster share a number of compositional similarities as well as a fascination with the bizarre. The association of monstrous forms as an omen of grave misfortune, including pestilence and war, was particularly common at the beginning of the sixteenth century. In Marcantonios engraving the chimeric monsters, billowing inferno and shooting star can be perceived as a graphic warning that by 1509 Venices world was in deep peril.
This article traces what Élie Faure believed to be the racial, ethnic and geographic origins of art. Influenced by the writings of Gobineau and Taine, he asserts that the taxonomisation of species provides a model for the taxonomisation of artistic productions. The mixing of various races is evidenced in their artistic production, with the relative presence or absence of the rhythmic serving as an index for the presence or absence of certain types of blood, or racial/ethnic origins. Similarly, the qualities of the land where art is produced results in visible effects upon the (artistic) forms created by the people living in that geographic area. Métissage is considered a positive characteristic, and cinema the apogee of modern artistic production because of its integration of machine rhythms into the rhythms of human gesture.