The kingdom's two bodies? : corporeal rhetoric and royal authority during the religious wars

The conventional discourse of the body politic assumed a peculiar resonance during the French religious wars due to the unique identification of the king with the well-being of his kingdom. The duality of this relationship was echoed in the language and imagery of corporeal rhetoric which infused the declarations of all sides during the conflict. The combined threat of heresy and civil war, and the shared imperative to defend the unity and integrity of the kingdom, lent a renewed relevance, but also a profound discord, to this rhetoric. While opinions differed about the best means to cure France's ills—the royal policy of pacification being the most controversial of them—monarchical authority was bolstered by the king's undisputed role as head of the body politic and protector of, and physician to, his realm

Mesolithic Europe : glimpses of another world

[First Paragraph] Mesolithic Europe holds a special place in our imagination. Perhaps more than any other region and period, it is unique in conjuring up a strange sense of both 'otherness' and familiarity. The people who lived here were in many ways fundamentally different from ourselves. As hunters and gatherers, their experience, worldview, and knowledge could not be further from ours. In our imagination, we can conjure up images of how these people might have looked or felt, but even some of the most basic elements of their existence or perception, something far more knowable in later periods, are things of which we know little. The physical world in which they lived is somehow more tangible but, like its people, familiar and yet fundamentally distinct from our own experience. This was a place with landscapes that were vast and, to our minds, untamed, familiar to our experience at a local scale, yet at the same time extending over seemingly immense territories with swathes of dark forests, mountains, and relentlessly rising seas

Urban conflict and royal authority : popular revolts in sixteenth-century Troyes

This paper explores the relative balance between socio-economic grievance and confessional and political division in urban revolts during the period of the French religious wars. More particularly, it focuses on two such incidents in the town of Troyes in Champagne in the summer of 1586 and what they can tell us about the influence of popular discontent on municipal politics and town–crown relations, as well as the impact of civil war, subsistence crisis and increasing taxation on urban communities. The continuity of the traditions of popular revolt are explored alongside the implications for royal authority of the official response to such unrest. Social tensions and economic concerns dominated events in the town, whilst the crown’s right and ability to enforce its will continued to be accepted and upheld. Thus, despite the disruption of civil strife, the competing interests of the municipal authorities, the urban populace and the monarchy were able to maintain a delicate equilibrium through the traditional mechanism of negotiation and compromise

Hadithi ya Afrika: A collaborative project using dramatherapy and creative writing

This is the author's accepted manuscript. The final published article is available from the link below. Copyright @ 2011 the author.Hadithi ya Afrika (‘stories from Africa’ in kiSwahili) is an arts-in-the-community project that works with African communities who have experienced a life-changing event or decision, but who wouldn't ordinarily have any voice in the wider world. The principal investigators lead the project volunteers through a series of dramatherapy and creative writing workshops. The dramatherapy workshops create a ‘remembering experience’ in which the volunteers relive their memories of the period of their lives in which they made the decision. The creative writing workshops then teach the volunteers the writing skills to create an interesting and communicable story out of these memories, in a process Hadithi ya Afrika refers to as ‘story-capturing.’ At the end of the story-making process, an anthology is created from the stories about the event that has had such an impact on their lives. The anthology is written in both English and the first language of the volunteers. Sarah Penny was funded by Brunel University to start up the project in March 2011. The pilot project was held at St Francis Adult Education Centre in Langa Township in Cape Town. The six learner-participants in the pilot explored their experience of being educated in the rural areas of South Africa in the aftermath of Bantu Education, and their subsequent relocation to Cape Town in search of a better higher education and career path.Brunel Universit