Negotiating violence at the feast in medieval British texts

The medieval period has been viewed historically as a time of excessive and senseless violence. This project participates in the ongoing field reassessment of violence in medieval literature as being culturally meaningful, rather than senseless and excessive, by advocating for greater attention to the ways in which medieval writers critiqued violence in their narratives and, by extension, their communities. While scholars readily read the tournaments and battles in medieval texts for such critique, I argue that feast scenes actually provide a clearer view of the ways in which violence is used narratively as a productive interventional force, particularly when latent conflicts that have been obscured by adherence to rigid social systems threaten to destabilize a community. Medieval chivalric and etiquette codes suggest that violence stems from those living outside of their jurisdiction; but the violence in feast halls, ungovernable by those codes, shows that conflict from within the community offers the greatest threat to its stability and must be redressed by meaningful action rather than through a prescribed ritualistic response. Making use of theoretical underpinnings from anthropology and history that characterize the feast as a culturally essential event and medieval violence as a rational and strategically-employed tool of constraint, coercion, and manipulation, I convert the essentially historical question of the cultural importance of feasts into a literary one by close reading feasting scenes and their aftermath in order to consider how the writers in medieval England used the motif of violence at or following the feast to illuminate, critique, and offer correction to social, political, and religious issues tied to the specific concerns of justice, loyalty, and treason within a community. Looking at texts ranging from the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf, the Welsh Mabinogion, and Latin Historia Regum Britanniae to chronicle-based works by Geoffrey Chaucer and John Gower, the Middle English Arthurian romances Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur, the Old Norse Clari’s Saga, and outlaw tales of Robin Hood, Gamelyn, and Hereward the Wake, I demonstrate through a comparative approach centered on interpretation and analysis supported with contextual historical evidence that violence associated with the feast is typically presented according to genre expectations and mirrors cultural anxieties that are specific to the community in which and for which a given text was produced. The use of the feast for such a purpose is possible precisely because of its essential quality in a given culture; everyone reading the text knows what the feast is supposed to be, and this common understanding of what a feast is permits the disruptions and violent altercations, rather than the event, to become the narrative focus when they occur. Because medieval society viewed it as a tool to be used, rather than simply a passionate outburst, when violence erupts unexpectedly during or after a feast it is being intentionally performed; since the codes of conduct and etiquette that govern the feast make no accommodation for dealing with that violence, there is no communal sense of how to address it; and so, instances of violence at the feast must be handled in the immediate sense on an individual level. This unscripted response to the violence forces a community in its wake to consider what led to the violence, who was involved, how it was handled, and what to do in its aftermath to try to rectify the issues that led to the violent altercation and determine how to avoid or address further potentially violent conflicts. Ultimately, I argue that while all of the instances of violence at the feast examined in this study are differentiated by genre expectations and culturally specific anxieties, together they reveal a continuous preoccupation on the part of writers in medieval England with the limitations of behavioral standards like the chivalric and conduct codes to control violence effectively. I challenge the idea that simply upholding the standards of conduct set forth by prescriptive manuals is enough to stave off social unrest by demonstrating that in fact, social unrest comes not from misbehavior but from the limitations of codes of behavior to account for interpersonal strife. Since the codes of conduct that prescribe how to behave at events like the feast do not address how to deal with latent conflict, when violence does erupt it can become a productive force for meaningful change, because it reveals interpersonal issues that the codes seek to repress and forces the community to deal with them

A Study Of Psychological Factors During Pregnancy And The Relationship To Labor, Delivery, And Infant Status At Birth

The purpose of this study was to explore psychological factors during pregnancy and their relationship to labor, delivery, and infant status at birth

Multiplex PCR technique could be an alternative approach for early detection of leprosy among close contacts - a pilot study from India

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Implementation of Multi drug Therapy (MDT) regimen has resulted in the decline of the total number of leprosy cases in the world. Though the prevalence rate has been declining, the incidence rate remains more or less constant and high in South East Asian countries particularly in India, Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Srilanka. Leprosy, particularly that of multibacillary type spreads silently before it is clinically detected. An early detection and treatment would help to prevent transmission in the community. Multiplex PCR (M-PCR) technique appears to be promising towards early detection among contacts of leprosy cases.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>A total of 234 paucibacillary (PB) and 205 multibacillary (MB) leprosy cases were studied in a community of an endemic area of Bankura district of West Bengal (Eastern India). They were assessed by smear examination for acid-fast bacilli (AFB) and M-PCR technique. These patients were treated with Multidrug Therapy (MDT) as prescribed by WHO following detection. A total of 110 MB and 72 PB contacts were studied by performing M-PCR in their nasal swab samples.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>83.4% of MB patients were observed to be positive by smear examination for AFB and 89.2% by M-PCR. While 22.2% of PB patients were found to be positive by smear examination for AFB, 80.3% of these patients were positive by M-PCR. Among leprosy contacts (using M-PCR), 10.9% were found to be positive among MB contacts and 1.3% among PB contacts. Interestingly, two contacts of M-PCR positive MB cases developed leprosy during the period of two years follow up.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>The M-PCR technique appears to be an efficient tool for early detection of leprosy cases in community based contact tracing amongst close associates of PB and MB cases. Early contact tracing using a molecular biology tool can be of great help in curbing the incidence of leprosy further.</p

Impact of PGL-I Seropositivity on the Protective Effect of BCG Vaccination among Leprosy Contacts: A Cohort Study

Although leprosy has become a neglected disease, it is an important cause of disability, and 250,000 new cases are still diagnosed worldwide every year. The current study was carried out in Brazil, where almost 40,000 new cases of leprosy are diagnosed every year. The study targeted contacts of leprosy patients, who are at the highest risk of contracting the disease. We studied 2,135 contacts who were diagnosed at the Leprosy Outpatient Clinic at the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation in Rio de Janeiro, RJ, Brazil, between 1987 and 2007. The presence of antibodies against a specific Mycobacterium leprae antigen (PGL-I) at the first examination and BCG vaccination status were evaluated. PGL-I-positive contacts had a higher risk of developing leprosy than PGL-I-negative contacts. Among the former, vaccinated contacts were at higher risk than unvaccinated contacts. Our results indicate that contact examination combined with PGL-I testing and BCG vaccination appears to justify the targeting of PGL-I-positive individuals for enhanced surveillance. Furthermore, it is highly recommended that PGL-I-positive contacts and contacts with a high familial bacterial index (i.e., the sum of results from index and co-prevalent cases), regardless of serological response, should be monitored. This group could be considered as a target for chemoprophylaxis

Globular Adiponectin Activates Motility and Regenerative Traits of Muscle Satellite Cells

Regeneration of adult injured skeletal muscle is due to activation of satellite cells, a population of stem cells resident beneath the basal lamina. Thus, information on soluble factors affecting satellite cell activation, as well as migration towards injury and fusion into new myofibers are essential. Here, we show that globular adiponectin (gAd), positively affects several features of muscle satellite cells. gAd activates satellite cells to exit quiescence and increases their recruitment towards myotubes. gAd elicits in satellite cells a specific motility program, involving activation of the small GTPase Rac1, as well as expression of Snail and Twist transcription factors driving a proteolytic motility, useful to reach the site of injury. We show that satellite cells produce autocrine full length adiponectin (fAd), which is converted to gAd by activated macrophages. In turns, gAd concurs to attract to the site of injury both satellite cells and macrophages and induces myogenesis in muscle satellite cells. Thus, these findings add a further role for gAd in skeletal muscle, including the hormone among factors participating in muscle regeneration

Comparative Gene Expression Profiling of P. falciparum Malaria Parasites Exposed to Three Different Histone Deacetylase Inhibitors

Histone deacetylase (HDAC) inhibitors are being intensively pursued as potential new drugs for a range of diseases, including malaria. HDAC inhibitors are also important tools for the study of epigenetic mechanisms, transcriptional control, and other important cellular processes. In this study the effects of three structurally related antimalarial HDAC inhibitors on P. falciparum malaria parasite gene expression were compared. The three hydroxamate-based compounds, trichostatin A (TSA), suberoylanilide hydroxamic acid (SAHA; Vorinostat®) and a 2-aminosuberic acid derivative (2-ASA-9), all caused profound transcriptional effects, with ∼2–21% of genes having >2-fold altered expression following 2 h exposure to the compounds. Only two genes, alpha tubulin II and a hydrolase, were up-regulated by all three compounds after 2 h exposure in all biological replicates examined. The transcriptional changes observed after 2 h exposure to HDAC inhibitors were found to be largely transitory, with only 1–5% of genes being regulated after removing the compounds and culturing for a further 2 h. Despite some structural similarity, the three inhibitors caused quite diverse transcriptional effects, possibly reflecting subtle differences in mode of action or cellular distribution. This dataset represents an important contribution to our understanding of how HDAC inhibitors act on malaria parasites and identifies alpha tubulin II as a potential transcriptional marker of HDAC inhibition in malaria parasites that may be able to be exploited for future development of HDAC inhibitors as new antimalarial agents

Interactions Between Laminin Receptor and the Cytoskeleton During Translation and Cell Motility

Human laminin receptor acts as both a component of the 40S ribosomal subunit to mediate cellular translation and as a cell surface receptor that interacts with components of the extracellular matrix. Due to its role as the cell surface receptor for several viruses and its overexpression in several types of cancer, laminin receptor is a pathologically significant protein. Previous studies have determined that ribosomes are associated with components of the cytoskeleton, however the specific ribosomal component(s) responsible has not been determined. Our studies show that laminin receptor binds directly to tubulin. Through the use of siRNA and cytoskeletal inhibitors we demonstrate that laminin receptor acts as a tethering protein, holding the ribosome to tubulin, which is integral to cellular translation. Our studies also show that laminin receptor is capable of binding directly to actin. Through the use of siRNA and cytoskeletal inhibitors we have shown that this laminin receptor-actin interaction is critical for cell migration. These data indicate that interactions between laminin receptor and the cytoskeleton are vital in mediating two processes that are intimately linked to cancer, cellular translation and migration