Hunger is an embodied experience which impacts the physical and mental state. This chapter explores the impact of starvation. The physical effects of starvation on the body are wasting, swelling (edema), susceptibility to disease, and eventually death. The mental effects of starvation include behavioral changes, food obsession, and irritability. All of these were observed by individuals in the ghetto who recorded this as diarists or in some cases physicians studying the impact of the lack of food on their patients. This also chapter explores food fantasy resulting from hunger and humor which arose in response to food deprivation.

Intro: The introduction surveys the definition of “lyric” and the aspects of lyric poetry and lyric episodes in prose that run throughout the book, such as slowness, suspension, detail, and person, along with irony and reasoning. It also sketches out the human abilities elicited by the examined texts.

The German invasion and early occupation of Poland drained the resources of Jews and their communities even before ghettoization. On the individual and household levels, many Jews were severely impacted by the German seizure of their assets, the inability to work, and the requirement to expend limited resources even before ghettoization in order to provide food for themselves and their families as a result of these financial realities. Violence during the early occupation also could serve to pauperize a family through seizing, killing, or severely injuring a key family member on whom the household relied for support through work. Migration due to the war also sometimes served to sever social networks or access to assets as well as diminish social standing which endangered some individuals and families. The pressures placed on individuals and households left them more vulnerable to hunger and starvation. At the very point at which individuals and households were most in need of support, communities faced multiple challenges. These included an influx of refugees, seizure of community resources, and the flight of communal leadership during the occupation.

Conclusion: The conclusion summarizes the human abilities addressed throughout the book and adumbrates the notion of "person" that underlies these abilities.

Ch 1: The first chapter centers on three classical authors’ representations of the descent of Orpheus into the underworld to retrieve his wife. It focuses not on the myth of Orpheus or its abundant allegorical interpretations but on the workings of the representations themselves. In the Virgilian version, irony and pathos work together to produce an empathy that allows for the reader’s judgment and provides elements that prepare a case for equity. The Ovidian version places rhetoric at the foreground, on the one hand (specifically, a rhetoric of compelling respect), and privileges a different case for pardon, one based on the physical movement of the couple, on the other. The Senecan versions elide pathos and rhetoric entirely, in order to allow the reader to understand what is lacking in the gods unable to pardon.

Amsterdam, 1642

When the Classis of Amsterdam formally called Johannes Megapolensis to advance the gospel in Rensselaerswijck, the expectation to convert the Gentiles was once again made explicit:

Kiliaen van Rensselaer also reinforced the expectation of converting the Indians to the Reformed faith in the contract he made with Megapolensis. Megapolensis was, according to the contract, expected to diligently perform his duties, which included the “edifying instruction of the inhabitants and the Indians.” Eight months after the Megapolensis family arrived in Nieuw Nederland (New Netherland), Van Rensselaer reinforced the call to “proclaim the crucified Christ to [the] Gentile peoples” in and around Rensselaerswijck. In his letter, Van Rensselaer borrowed the imagery and theology of the conversion of the “blind Gentiles” as it had been articulated by the orthodox predikanten in the Republic:

In the first part of this work, I examined the ways in which marriages emerged out of cross-cultural encounter within elite transnational communities during the nineteenth century and the extent to which the cultural and emotional dynamics of those communities facilitated those unions. In this second part, I examine twentieth-century Franco-American marriages that occurred when national borders were most solidified—during and between the world wars. Unlike those discussed in the first part, wartime-marriage participants were no longer members of an elite, transnational social network that effortlessly carved out an existence and moved freely beyond national boundaries but were instead local women restricted by the conflict around them and soldiers who acted as representatives of a nation-state and moved only insofar as the military regulations allowed. Yet, despite encountering one another during a period of heightened boundary-making and hyper-nationalism, these men and women still managed to construct families that transcended those national limits in far greater numbers than the Franco-American marriages of the nineteenth century. In 1919, the Literary Digest, a weekly American magazine explained that “[s]o many of the American soldiers in France [had] married French girls that an official pamphlet [had to be] issued setting out the legal requirements governing marriage in that country.” Likewise, in a March 7, 1918 memo to the Adjutant General, one commanding general complained that 350 marriages to French women had taken place in his division alone in a period of only seven months. At the war’s end, American military newspaper Stars and Stripes estimated that 6,000 or more Franco-American marriages had been registered in town halls across France and speculated that many more went uncounted by authorities. Just after records of the American and European militaries, on which these studies are largely based, not only overemphasize the nation-state but also rarely detail the personal motivations or emotional expectations of marriage participants.

Therefore, while these matrimonial stories cannot be completely separated from the conflicts that facilitated them, what follows is not an account of war. It is instead an account of encounter. As in the first part, the central question rests on the cultural and emotional dimensions of Franco-American interaction; however, in the absence of elite transnational social networks like those that produced titled marriages during the previous century, this part seeks to locate new transnational spaces that were created by the war and map them accordingly.

Throughout, this study has built upon Wen-Shan Yang and Melody Chia-Wen Lu’s concept of transnational marriage, which successfully situates the concept of cross-border marriage within a context of wider transnational processes by placing the analytical focus on the transnational networks and spaces from which marriages emerged. Based on that working definition, in the case of wartime marriages during the twentieth century, the relative absence of a transnational community or social network among marriage participants, such as that which produced elite marriages in the nineteenth century, creates a methodological imperative to locate and define new transnational spaces that were created during the world wars. Therefore, in what follows, the focus shifts from wartime othering as an emotional process to a spatial analysis of transnational courtship and marriage.

This chapter is divided into four parts. In the first part, I attempt to locate and trace transnational cultural formation across and within multiple sites of wartime encounter by examining where and how soldiers and local women met and courted one another. Here, I argue that because most couples did not share a common language, other forms of mediated cultural cues, such as dancing, provided the translinguistic means of communication that became important cultural devices in courting rituals and transnational coupling. In this fashion, public dances, like those organized by the American Red Cross, came to serve as one of the most important examples of wartime transnational spaces that produced Franco-American marriages. In the second part of this chapter, I further explore subsequent courtship rituals among participants as well as the important role of their families in the cultural negotiation of these spaces. Finally, the third and fourth parts of this chapter examine how those transnational spaces of courtship and marriage existed in opposition to national spaces. Through an analysis of the conditions and frameworks that transnational couples had to navigate in order to form recognized matrimonial unions, I argue that state and military regulations, as well as the national criticisms of wartime Franco-American marriages further solidified participants’ conceptions of the national borders that they attempted to cross.

Utrecht, 1652

A few short weeks before the tulips reached peak bloom, a wealthy magistrate from Utrecht sat down to write a letter of complaint to the Heren XIX (Lords Nineteen). In his letter, the magistrate, one Cornelis van Werckhoven, expressed his frustration with the “wilden” (savages) of Nieuw Nederland (New Netherland). The previous year Van Werckhoven purchased large tracts of land near the Nevesinck and Tappan from the Raritan Indians who he considered to be the “lawful owners.” After returning from a trip to Gelderland, he opened a letter from the chief clerk of the Geoctroyeerde West-Indische Compagnie (Chartered West India Company or WIC) dated March 11. In it the clerk included an excerpt from a letter from Baron Hendrik van der Capellen tot Rijssel, a nobleman from Gelderland and a representative in the Staten-Generaal (States General). In his letter, Van der Capellen informed the Heren XIX that he purchased the very same parcels of land from the Raritans. Beside himself, Van Werckhoven exclaimed, “I cannot believe that, even though they are savages, they will sell a piece of property twice.” At the next city council meeting in April, a still fuming Van Werckhoven informed his fellow magistrates in Utrecht of his plans to head to Nieuw Amsterdam (New Amsterdam).

One month later, as growers cut the colorful flower heads from their tulips, the eldest son of Kiliaen van Rensselaer welcomed a newly minted dominee (reverend) into his office in Amsterdam.

Between 640 and 650, it is recorded, Queen Nanthild (610–642) and her son, the young Clovis, visited the city of Orleans, in the Kingdom of Burgundy, where she summoned all members of the aristocracy – including duces and bishops – to a meeting. The reason behind this gathering was her intention to appoint a new mayor of the palace: Frank Flachoald. She knew, however, that this decision had to come from the members of the primati regnum Burgundiam. An interesting detail is that Nanthild won the loyalty of these lords, one by one, during the ceremony, and her chosen candidate was finally appointed without arousing suspicion or conflict. She even offered her niece to Flachoald in marriage.

Certainly, not all situations were resolved peacefully and, in some cases, violence played the primary role. As illustrated by the war between King Theoderic II (595–613) and his brother, King Theodebert II (595–612), leaders often confronted each other, even when relatives were involved. We read that Theodebert was defeated and later humiliated by Theoderic in a parade in the city of Cologne, in which the former was divested of his royal clothing. This act was significant since it meant depriving the defeated opponent of the legitimizing elements of monarchical power. Another account reports that Theoderic actually murdered his brother and hung his head from the walls of Cologne. Moreover, the anonymous author of the Liber Historiae Francorum mentions that Theoderic took the city and its treasures, and that the Franci seniores swore loyalty to him in the Church of Saint Gereon.

As these episodes illustrate, the creation and consolidation of leadership and ties of social cohesion in late antique societies involved practices and strategies of a diverse nature: peaceful negotiations between coexisting authorities, deployments of military rites of victory, public demonstrations of power in significant places, humiliation of defeated opponents, uses of distinguished markers of legitimacy and identity, with many more examples possible.

The complex scenario that emerged after the disappearance of the political structures of the Western Roman Empire, a process that affected the former imperial provinces in many different ways, appears to us as an interwoven patchwork of identities and communities in which new forms of leadership and social cohesion were being shaped.