'Lift up your heart' : the poem Sursum corda by Margaretha Susanne von Kuntsch Let us lift up our heart with our hands unto God in the heavens (Lamentations 3:41)

Margaretha Susanna von Kuntsch (1651-1717) was a well-read, pious, Protestant author who blended a strong religious faith with a neoStoic philosophy in her writings, which encompass lyric poems and an operetta. She is a seriously under-appreciated writer whose work is rarely assessed from an aesthetic standpoint. Elke O. Hedstrom claims that Sursum corda, the poem with which the present essay is concerned, expresses a world-negating attitude, employing typical, antithetical statements, as well as images of vanitas.peer-reviewe

Gödelmann’s Faustus (1591). Concerning the Fluidity of the Early Transmission of the Adventures of Faustus in Germany

This article is the first to treat systematically the brief, contemporary references to the Fauststoff in the treatise De magis, veneficis et lamiis (1591) by Johann Georg Gödelmann, best known as a witchcraft theorist. He treats Johann Faustus as a “praedestigiator”, a black magician and trickster who belongs in the company of Simon Magus. Comparing Gödel­mann’s versions of the adventures of Faustus with those in the chapbook, Historia von D. Johann Fausten (1587), published in the same city (Frankfurt am Main), one sees that these adventures were in flux in the late sixteenth century

At Half Past Two I Will Marry You : (Tomorrow Afternoon.)

https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/mmb-vp/4156/thumbnail.jp

Michel Beheim’s Von Den Türken und dem adel sagt dis: A demotic lament and crusading song contemporary with the fall of Constantinople in 1453

Michel Beheim, a prominent 15th-century German author and musical composer — who was at the Siege of Nándorfehérvér (1456) in the entourage of King Ladislaus V (the Posthumous) of Hungary — wrote one of the first song-poems in reaction to the Fall of Constantinople in 1453. Entitled Von den Türken und dem adel sagt dis, these verses, translated here into English for the first time, have previously been neglected in scholarship. Beheim’s perspective is particularly important, documenting as it does an emotional reaction to a defeat that spawned invective-filled rhetoric, crusading propaganda, castigation of the Christian nobility for a failure to come together, and an interpretation of the Turks under Mehmed II as a scourge of God. Beheim here, and in his subsequent body of anti-Turkish works, including his detailed depiction of the Crusade of Varna (1443–1445), contributes to the shaping of a late mediaeval and early modern negative Türkenbild

Integrase-deficient lentiviral vectors mediate efficient gene transfer to human vascular smooth muscle cells with minimal genotoxic risk

We have previously shown that injury-induced neointima formation was rescued by adenoviral-Nogo-B gene delivery. Integrase-competent lentiviral vectors (ICLV) are efficient at gene delivery to vascular cells but present a risk of insertional mutagenesis. Conversely, integrase-deficient lentiviral vectors (IDLV) offer additional benefits through reduced mutagenesis risk, but this has not been evaluated in the context of vascular gene transfer. Here, we have investigated the performance and genetic safety of both counterparts in primary human vascular smooth muscle cells (VSMC) and compared gene transfer efficiency and assessed the genotoxic potential of ICLVs and IDLVs based on their integration frequency and insertional profile in the human genome. Expression of enhanced green fluorescent protein (eGFP) mediated by IDLVs (IDLV-eGFP) demonstrated efficient transgene expression in VSMCs. IDLV gene transfer of Nogo-B mediated efficient overexpression of Nogo-B in VSMCs, leading to phenotypic effects on VSMC migration and proliferation, similar to its ICLV version and unlike its eGFP control and uninfected VSMCs. Large-scale integration site analyses in VSMCs indicated that IDLV-mediated gene transfer gave rise to a very low frequency of genomic integration compared to ICLVs, revealing a close-to-random genomic distribution in VSMCs. This study demonstrates for the first time the potential of IDLVs for safe and efficient vascular gene transfer