... narrative of decline historical inevitability © 2016 by Duke University Press 2016 • • “Botched Execution” or Historical Inevitability: Conceptual Dilemmas...

... narratives of the triumph of Christianity Walsham / Migrations of the Holy  263 over paganism toward narratives of the decline and degeneration of the church that Peter Brown dates to the early fifth century was both a measure and a motor of Christendom’s...

... declining. By the time of industrialization, 1750–1840, the sign of the correlation, while remaining insignificant, became negative. As observed elsewhere, the mid-eighteenth century marked a watershed after which young people were responding to a different set of conditions in making their decisions about...

.... Complexities of identity in Spain and England inform Barbara Weissberger’s essay. Noting the pan-European nature of anti-Semitism, espe- cially in England and Spain with the examples of Chaucer and a virtually unknown narrative by a citizen of Toledo, Damián de Vegas, she focuses on the uniquely Iberian...

... of text, reputation, narrative, or event for new audiences. These new audiences were of different language- traditions and geographical locations, accessing materials through different forms and media. As these articles show, the task of translating for later audiences shaped reception in sophisticated...

... to audiences ready to pay cash for a good suspense read. Hence the pamphle- teers’ interest in stories about a relentless clash of wills, in which the under- dogs could prevail, however briefly, over their superiors. In this narrative women—who were brought to court as witches, but who also accounted...

... time have been much debated, yet critical consensus holds that the practice generally declined across centuries and that this decline was characterized by an emphasis on its utilitarian function over its devotional purposes. Keith Thomas sees the decline resulting from agrarian change that led...

... What does it cost to imagine climate change as a catastrophe, given that concept's fundamentally literary, especially its dramatic and narrative, valences? Does an impending climate “catastrophe” require us to do something or just change our attitude to something (as a result of reading or witnessing...

... of Apocalyptic Thought: Medieval Attitudes,” in The Apocalypse in English Renaissance Thought and Literature , ed. C. A. Patrides and Joseph Wittreich (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), 40–72, at 49. 11 The classic study of this dynamic and its impact on the theory and practice of narrative...

... in the eighteenth century, “If it was possible to convert the Negroes to the Christian Religion, the Roman- Catholics would succeed better than we should, because they already agree in several particulars.”7 Despite the evidence he cites from the merchants’ narratives, how- ever, Pietz downplays...

... of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Partonopeu de Blois. The poem was translated into several languages and is found in several distinct narrative ver- sions.10 I’m not concerned here with trying to trace the versions, but I do want to note the choice that they offer for the development of the scene I...

... in a student paper. Other sleights-­of-­hand are a bit subtler. In principle one might think that Gregory’s narrative of historical decline could be refuted with evi- dence that traditions that he has declared dead are in fact very much alive, and even flourishing, but he has a response...

...-­to-­wear shoes and the earliest shopping malls. By tracing the declining numbers of artisans and increasing numbers of wage-­laborers in urban contexts over this period, scholars have identified a proletarianization of the workforce that presages the end of artisan-­dominated manufacturing...

...Natasha Simonova In 1804, The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia was described as “a book that all have heard of, that some few possess, but that nobody reads.” Indeed, the usual critical narrative has Philip Sidney’s romance falling sharply out of fashion in the eighteenth century from its height...

...David Aers; Sarah Beckwith; Madeline Lesser This article addresses Lucy Hutchinson’s Order and Disorder , an epic, twenty-canto retelling of Genesis. Scholars have often considered Hutchinson’s poem an inferior version of Paradise Lost insofar as it does not transgress biblical narrative. Attending...

... in the culture of the sacred object. Critical approaches to the status of religious objects across the period have often reflected this narrative of rupture: before the Reformations, belief that the divine inhered in the material world, and after the Reformations, concern about idolatry; before the Reformations...

... of Virgil's Aeneid , one of the most important influences on Petrarch's poetic vision. The poem's composition history is first documented by Suetonius, writing a generation after Pliny and about a century after Virgil's death, where the narrative centers on Virgil's deathbed. He demands that his scrolls...

... Stanford University Stanford, California The inspiration for The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, as Edward Gibbon famously recalls in his memoirs, came from ruins: “It was at Rome on the fifteenth of October 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol...

... offers the outlines of a more substantial and sophisticated narrative of the birth of modernity from the anvils of Reformation doctrinal wrangling. Instead of focusing solely on sola scriptura , the essay considers other interpretive supplements: (1) the Conciliarist vs. Curialist conflict...

... as contamination, decline, and fall. In the light of these remarks let us return to the category of doctri- nal formalism in the chapter on the Eucharist. It signifies the side-lining of narrative in the service of “doctrine,” understood by Gallagher and Green- blatt as “the ideological consensus...