Clare Monagle

Barbara Caine

Carolyn James

David Garrioch

This book reveals the importance of personal letters in the history of European women between the year 1000 and the advent of the telephone. It explores the changing ways that women used correspondence for self-expression and political mobilization over this period, enabling them to navigate the myriad gendered restrictions that limited women’s engagement in the world. Whether written from the medieval cloister, or the renaissance court, or the artisan’s workshop, or the drawing room, letters crossed geographical and social distance and were mobile in ways that women themselves could not always be. Women wrote to govern, to argue, to plead, and to demand. They also wrote to express love and intimacy, and in so doing, to explain and to understand themselves. This book argues that the personal letter was a crucial place for European women’s self-fashioning, and that exploring the history of their letters offers a profound insight into their subjectivity and agency over time.

European Women's Letter-writing from the 11th to the 20th Centuries

Juanita Ruys

Our period opens at the end of the Roman Empire when intellectual currents are indebted to the Greek philosophical inheritance of Plato and Aristotle, as well as to a Romanized Stoicism. Into this mix entered the new, and from 313CE imperially sanctioned, religion of Christianity. In art, literature, music, and drama, we find an increasing emphasis on the arousal of individual emotions and their acceptance as a means towards devotion. In religion, we see a move from the ascetic regulation of emotions to the affective piety of the later medieval period that valued the believer's identification with the Passion of Christ and the sorrow of Mary. In science and medicine, the nature and causes of emotions, their role in constituting the human person, and their impact on the same became a subject of academic inquiry. Emotions also played an increasingly important public role, evidenced in populace-wide events such as conversion and the strategies of rulership. Between 350 and 1300, emotions were transformed from something to be transcended into a location for meditation upon what it means to be human.

A Cultural History of the Emotions in the Medieval Age

Michelle Arrow

Jeannine Baker

There has been a lot happening on Australia's small screens. Neighbours turned 30. Struggle Street was accused of poverty porn. Pete evangelised Paleo. Gina got litigious. Netflix muscled in. The Bachelor spawned The Bachelorette. Peter Allen's maraccas were exhumed. The Labor Party ate itself. Anzac was an anti-climax. And so much more...Join us as we survey the Australian televisual landscape, and try to make sense of the myriad changes transforming what and how we watch. We've come a long way since Bruce Gyngell welcomed us to television in 1956. We now watch on demand and wherever we want, in our lounge rooms and on our devices. But some things stay the same. The small screen is still a place for imagining Australia, for better or for worse. Small Screens challenges and celebrates our contemporary TV worlds.

Essays on Contemporary Australian Television

Small Screens

Dimitris Vardoulakis

This book questions what sovereignty looks like when it is de-ontologised; when the nothingness at the heart of claims to sovereignty is unmasked and laid bare. Drawing on critical thinkers in political theology, such as Schmitt, Agamben, Nancy, Blanchot, Paulhan, The Politics of Nothing asks what happens to the political when considered in the frame of the productive potential of the nothing? The answers are framed in terms of the deep intellectual histories at our disposal for considering these fundamental questions, carving out trajectories inspired by, for example, Peter Lombard, Shakespeare and Spinoza. This book offers a series of sensitive and creative reflections that suggest the possibilities offered by thinking through sovereignty via the frame of nihilism. This book was originally published as a special issue of Culture, Theory and Critique.

On Sovereignty

The Politics of Nothing

Scholastic theologians made the Virgin Mary increasingly perfect over the Middle Ages in Europe. Mary became stainless, offering an impossible but ideologically useful vision of womanhood. This work offers an implicit theory of the utility and feelings of women in a Christian salvationary economy. The Virgin was put to use as a shaming technology, one that silenced and effaced women's affective lives. The shame still stands to this day, although in secularised mutated forms. This Element deploys the intellectual history of medieval thought to map the moves made in codifying Mary's perfection. It then uses contemporary gender and affect theory to consider the implications of Mary's perfection within modernity, mapping the emotional regimes of the medieval past upon the present.

Clare Monagle

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