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3 results

Queering Medieval Latin Rhetoric
  • Silence, Subversion, and Sexual Heterodoxy
  • David Townsend
  • Published online:
    15 January 2023
    Print publication:
    05 January 2023
  • This book reflects on what medieval Latin authors don't say about the sex nobody had-or maybe some had-and about how they don't say it. Their silences are artfully constructed, according to a rhetorical tradition reaching back to classical practice and theory. The strategy of preterition calls attention to something scandalous precisely by claiming to pass over it. Because it gestures toward what's missing from the text itself, it epitomizes a destabilizing reliance on audience reaction that informs the whole of classical rhetoric's technology of persuasion. Medieval Latin preterition invites our growing awareness, when we attend to it closely, that silence is not single, but that silences are multiple. Their multiplicity consists not in what preterition is, but in what it does. Preterition's multiple silences enabled subversive interpretations by individuals and communities marginalized under dominant regimes of sexuality-as they still do today.

  • Chapter 4 - Hiding What Must Be Hidden

  • David Townsend, University of Toronto
  • Book:
    Queering Medieval Latin Rhetoric
    Published online:
    15 January 2023
    Print publication:
    05 January 2023, pp 95-112

  • Summary

    The representation of an Amazon queen’s fantasized body turns attention to what is concealed by Amazon dress. These celanda function as a somatized preterition of Amazon customs that incites readerly speculation around their social meaning within an imagined society. Together with unanswered questions about the variantly gendered body and its meanings, the alterity of her physical presence invites the reader to entertain utopian alternative organizations of gendered identity grounded in a sexually variant perspective at the margin of the text’s fictional world. The preteritive attention paid to her experience and the world view of her society thus opens up the possibility of an "Amazon reading" of Alexander himself, and by extension an Amazon reading of the epic that celebrates his exploits. With the possibility of Amazon reading comes as well the possibility of solidarity among those who read like Amazons, a solidarity effected not by any commonality of essential identity, but by their willingness to read the text’s preteritions against the grain of a sanctioned, "straight" interpretation informed by the received cultural values of an "ideal" audience.

Reading Spaces in South Africa, 1850–1920s

Reading Spaces in South Africa, 1850–1920s
  • Archie L. Dick
  • Published online:
    10 November 2020
    Print publication:
    26 November 2020
  • Voluntary societies and government initiatives stimulated the growth of reading communities in South Africa in the second half of the nineteenth century. A system of Parliamentary grants to establish public libraries in country towns and villages nurtured a lively reading culture. A condition was that the library should be open free-of-charge to the general public. This became one more reading space, and others included book societies, reading societies, literary societies, debating societies, mechanics institutes, and mutual improvement societies. This Element explains how reading communities used these spaces to promote cultural and literary development in a unique ethos of improvement, and to raise political awareness in South Africa's colonial transition to a Union government and racial segregation.