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1 Toxic trespass: Science, activism, and policy concerning chemicals in our bodies Phil Brown, Vanessa De La Rosa, and Alissa Cordner Exposure to chemical trespassers is ubiquitous for all people, with a daily onslaught of air particulates from factories and power plants, parabens in personal care products, phthalates and bisphenol (BPA) in consumer products, flame retardants in furniture, radiation from uranium mine tailings, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) in fish and marine mammals, and trichloroethylene (TCE) from common industrial usage. The US Centers for
This book explores the legal actions of women living in three English towns – Nottingham, Chester and Winchester – during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. For the first time, it brings together women’s involvement in a wide range of litigation, including pleas of debt and trespass, as well as the actions for which they were punished under local policing and regulations. The book details the multiple reasons that women engaged with the law in their local communities, all arising from their interpersonal relationships and everyday work and trade. Through the examination of thousands of original court cases, it reveals the identities of hundreds of ordinary urban women and the wide range of legal actions that they participated in. This wide-ranging, comparative study examines the differing ways that women’s legal status was defined in multiple towns, and according to different situations and pleas. It pays close attention to the experiences of married women and the complex and malleable nature of coverture, which did not always make them completely invisible. The book offers new perspectives on women’s legal position and engagement with the law, their work and commercial roles, the gendering of violence and honour, and the practical implications of coverture and marital status, highlighting the importance of examining the legal roles and experiences of individual women. Its basis in the records of medieval town courts also offers a valuable insight into the workings of these courts and the lives and identities of those that used them.
Urban living brought with it a fair share of interpersonal conflict and violence. Town court records reveal women’s involvement in physical and verbal assault, theft and attacks on property. When Margery Dod brought a complaint of trespass to Nottingham’s borough court in April 1324 against Robert de Spondon, his wife Hawise and daughter Alice, the list of alleged transgressions committed against her was long and detailed. She said that they had assaulted her in the town’s Saturday market place, called her false
or her religious origins. In the texts I examine in the next two chapters, the established nobility is seen as resisting similitude with plebeian trespassers through discourses that assert the genealogical superiority of ‘natural’ nobles – even if they themselves are not – and the indomitable desire of commoners to destroy their lineages. Social passers are figured in these texts as dangerous to the stability of the nobility precisely because their passing proves its very instability. Successful trespassers, in turn, are shown to adapt the behaviour of their
carrying away). 10 [ 3.12 ] A lesser group of criminal offences came under the heading of trespasses. In practice the dividing line between what constituted a felony and what amounted to trespass was blurred. Moreover, until the mid-thirteenth century, trespasses, minor wrongs or misdemeanours were not deemed to warrant royal judicial attention and were tried in the county
return to the Catholic faith. Moreover, there is none of the intergenerational deference, the respect for one’s elders, that we might expect to find in such a document. 10 Southwell’s Epistle outlines a horrifying vision of his father’s ‘departing-bed’, asking that he imagine himself ‘burdened with the heavy load of your former trespasses, and gored
unpublished, constructed by and about FANYs, produced across a number of decades – some highly mediated, others less explicitly so – speak to the multiple aspects of FANY life, representation and memory. It is worth us exploring these ideas of memory, memorialisation and media in more detail. Witnesses of war: FANYs’ contemporaneous and retrospective accounts The Corps’s unprecedented trespassing on male terrain and members’ status as witnesses to and co-participants in war gave FANYs narrative authority, facilitating their chronicling of their experiences, as well as
With a ten-million-euro budget and 400 extras on set, La Peste (The Plague) – a ten-episode TV show produced by Spanish communication conglomerate Movistar and aired in January 2018 – became not only the most ambitious production in Spanish television history but also an overnight sensation among viewers and critics. This chapter examines how La Peste combines historical accuracy and fiction to portray the role of medicine, health agents, and population around a late sixteenth-century epidemic outbreak. Its release coincided with the centennial of the Spanish flu that killed twenty to fifty million people around the globe. In placing the epidemic at the core of the narrative, the show unveils the multiple yet contradictory ways people from various social groups and backgrounds reacted to the pandemic: either to save their own lives, procure a cure for others, or to take advantage of the crisis.
The chapter highlights what makes La Peste a relevant case to study. As part of its marketing campaign, the production team deliberately sought to trespass the screen and insert the narrative into people’s daily lives. This team designed in advance of the TV series an interactive website with digital resources on the history of medicine and historical sites. Furthermore, in the days prior to the launch, several golden rats appeared in the streets of Seville to announce the show. While some viewers expressed their discomfort with the crude scenes depicting poor living conditions, others engaged with the campaign. As a result of this, La Peste constitutes a fascinating example of the possibilities offered by TV shows as vehicles for disseminating historical medical knowledge to a vast audience.
business in the form of trespass litigation. Recognition of trespass as a matter of interest to the crown considerably enlarged the scope of royal criminal jurisdiction as many matters previously remedied in the local courts could now come before the eyre justices. 5 Although minor offences and wrongs continued to be remedied in local courts, such an expansion in the business undertaken by the eyre
and disturb the peace, and were required to pay monetary fines when reported by local officials. As we have already seen, towns were sites of violence, theft, disruption, slander and many other eruptions of interpersonal strife. Derek Keene has suggested that the hundreds of presentments concerning breaches of the peace, bloodletting and the hue and cry among Winchester’s city records ‘are ample enough demonstration that violence was ingrained in medieval society’. 3 Through personal pleas, such as trespass