Since the publication of Philippe Aries’ Centuries of Childhood in the early 1960’s, historians of the family have been intrigued by the prospect of a history of change in familial sentiment. 1 Aries’ study of attitudes about children from the Middle Ages to the eighteenth century, based primarily on art and material evidence, demonstrates…[Read more]

This paper asks us to rethink the boundaries between consent and coercion in medieval England. From gentle persuasion to threats and abuse, coercion was a part of the courtship process. Although late medieval society expected parents to play an active, even heavy-handed, role in matchmaking, the English church recognized the possibility that…[Read more]

When Isabelle, widow of Richard Vergeons, commissioned the writing of a bill of complaint to Chancery at the end of the fifteenth century, she was clearly at the end of her tether. Six months before the writing of the petition, the wife of Thomas Hyll, a wire monger of London, approached the petitioner’s husband, begging for ‘‘secour and saufg…[Read more]

According to medieval common law, assault against a pregnant woman causing miscarriage after the fi rst trimester was homicide. Some scholars have argued, however, that in practice English jurors refused to acknowledge assaults of this nature as homicide. The underlying argument is that because abortion by assault is a crime against women, male…[Read more]

Scholars of the medieval family would generally agree that the lot of the medieval wife was not an easy one. Medieval husbands held the upper hand in the power relationship, both legally and socially. Although Lawrence Stone’s view of niarried life in the Middle Ages as “brutal and often hostile, with little communication, [and] much wife-beating”…[Read more]

Art historian Barbara Kellum’s 1973 article on child murder in medieval England paints a picture of a world replete with ruthless and murderous single mothers who escaped the legal consequences of their actions due to an indifferent court system that chose to turn a blind eye to the deaths of young children. Despite the overstated tone of her w…[Read more]

With regard to English common law, medieval women were able to participate in the curial process in only a limited way. This is not true of women as defendants: women could be sued for almost any civil or criminal plaint, but their privileges as plaintiffs were broadly curtailed by marital status and cultural expectation. The legal fiction of…[Read more]

In the year 1304, Matilda Bonamy of Guernsey, a young woman from one of the Anglo-Norman island’smost established and affluent families, found herself in a predicament familiar to many of today’s youth. A liaison with Jordan Clouet, also from a family of long provenance in Guernsey if not as comfortable, had left her pregnant. To Matilda the sol…[Read more]

Infrastructure is all around us, rarely remarked upon. Indeed, the latent state of
infrastructure is part of what marks it as such; as Susan Leigh Starr has noted,
infrastructure studies involves the examination of “boring things.”

This class will explore the emerging nexus of critical infrastructure studies and
critical university stu…[Read more]

In this introduction to the digital humanities (DH), we will approach the field via a Caribbean Studies lens, exploring how an understanding of the digital based in the growing area of digital Caribbean studies might shape the larger field of DH.

The course aims to provide a landscape view of DH, paying attention to how its various approaches…[Read more]

In this introduction to the digital humanities (DH), we will approach the field via a Caribbean Studies lens, exploring how an understanding of the digital based in the growing area of digital Caribbean studies might shape the larger field of DH.

The course aims to provide a landscape view of DH, paying attention to how its various approaches…[Read more]

Review of Medieval Dublin XVI: Proceedings of Clontarf 1014-2014

Review of Empty Houses: Theatrical Failure and the Novel, by David Kurnick

This report is intended as a guide to facilitate the development of the Transgender Media Portal (transgendermediaportal.org). The Transgender Media Portal aims to make audiovisual work by trans, Two Spirit, nonbinary, intersex, and gender-nonconforming people more available to artists, activists, festival programmers, researchers, instructors,…[Read more]

The documentation of performing arts by means of databases is a challenging task for several reasons. Primarily, this has to do with the absence of a central, sizeable object that can be described and quantified. Any information collected in a database for performing arts thus seems to be of second order, paraphrasing what cannot be reproduced.…[Read more]

The discovery of a photo album of the nineteenth century, the Andalusian village of Adra, Albuñol, Berja, Dalias and Almeria itself, causes a thorough investigation into its origin and its authors link with the history of these towns.
Spanish abstract: El descubrimiento de un álbum con fotografías del siglo XIX, de las localidades almeríenses de…[Read more]

After the discoveries and experiences of Charles Wheatstone and David Brewster, the stereoscopic photography turns into a great industry from the second half of the decade of 1850. The photography in general and the stereoscopic especially had great influence in the iconographic world of his time and therefore also in the image or graphic…[Read more]

Jean Laurent, of French origin, opened a photography studio in Madrid in the mid-1850s. During the following decades, between 1860 and 1880, he consolidated the most important photographic company in the Spain of the nineteenth century, in the style of the great European photographic houses. His work encompassed a large collection of sights and…[Read more]

The “replication crisis” that has been raging in fields like Psychology (Open Science Collaboration 2015) or Medicine (Ioannidis 2005) for years has recently reached the field of Artificial Intelligence (Barber 2019). One of the key conferences in the field, NeurIPS, has reacted by appointing ‘reproducibility chairs’ in their organizing committee.…[Read more]

The hermit-poet of modern Persian literature, Bijan Elahi (1945-2010) was a modernist poet, a prolific translator of Eliot, Rimbaud, Michaux, Hölderlin, and the founder of Other Poetry, the leading avant-garde movement within Persian modernism. Elahi passed the last three decades of his life in seclusion in his house in Tehran. He stopped…[Read more]