Hugeburc, an Anglo-Saxon nun who moved to Germany and became abbess of Heidenheim, undertook a biography of Willibald, who with his brother Wynnebald had travelled from England with his father on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Willibald eventually became bishop of Eichstätt in Bavaria. The heart of Hugeburc’s biography is concerned with Willibald’s experiences in the Holy Land, where he visited many sites mentioned in the Bible: he told Hugeburc of his adventures and she recorded them in a kind of diary form, which contrasts with the more elaborate style of the Latin she uses in the non-dictated sections.

From Geoffrey of Monmouth’s hugely popular History of the kings of Britain, which influenced a great deal of medieval literature in various languages, are taken two excerpts. The first records a meeting, supposedly in the fifth century, between the Celtic leader Vortigern and the Saxon leader Hengist with his daughter Renwein (Rowen) who offers Vortigern a drink using the English greeting Wassail. The second is an account of king Arthur’s battle against the Saxons at Badon Hill.

This section contains excerpts from two sermons, one from the thirteenth century by Thomas of Chobham who wrote a number of sermons, a work on preaching and a work on virtues and vices, and one anonymous sermon in macaronic form, from the fifteenth century, in which Latin and English are blended to create a syntactically homogeneous whole. The purpose of such macaronic sermons is unclear. The third item in this section is a short ghost-story, which appears in a commonplace book, and was possibly used in a sermon to make a point about the importance of the Mass for remission from time in Purgatory.

Burginda was a woman about whom little is known, apparently writing around 710. She writes a letter to an unknown young man, urging him in rhetorical and learned prose, to lead a spiritual life. The letter includes a few lines where Burginda reworks part of a Christian poem from north Africa from about AD 500. The letter survives in a single manuscript.

Goscelin was born in Flanders but spent most of his life in monasteries in England. He was a great writer of biographies of saints, particularly of early Saxon women. His Book of Consolation is a wonderfully imaginative work addressed to a woman whom he loved after meeting her at Wilton Abbey before she was sent to a monastery in Gaul. Goscelin speaks much of spiritual friendship and the spiritual life, quotes from Christian and classical text and includes fascinating details about medieval life.

In an opinion that made national news, the high court in Maryland reversed the judgment of an intermediate court and upheld the defendant’s conviction for rape. The court explicitly rejected the defendant and intermediate court’s reasoning that consent should be evaluated using a reasonable victim standard. Although the opinion in Rusk is widely cited as a turning point in recognizing sexual violence in nonstranger rape cases, there remained many elements of the opinion that have been the object of feminist criticism.

In their public and private writings, lesbian poets Michael Field (Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper) and Amy Levy reflected the greater freedoms, including university education and physical mobility, of the New Woman. They travelled in Germany and Switzerland for professional development, aesthetic stimulation, and leisure. Europe as an aesthetic theatre underwrote new poems and provided imaginative stimuli for Michael Field, but they also moved from Anglocentric to Anglo-German perspectives and ethnoexocentrism during extended stays in Germany, when they also enhanced their German skills. The private writings of Amy Levy and Michael Field both mention the sexual danger that could accompany foreign travel. Katharine Bradley’s The New Minnesinger (1875) also shared interests in translation with Levy. Levy began translating German poets while attending Newnham College, Cambridge; Germany and German language became most closely associated for her with Heine and the Jewish identity she shared with him. Her travels additionally inspired minor short fiction susceptible to normative or queer readings. Queer sexuality also informs poems she inscribed to Vernon Lee, whom she loved; this cluster also reflects Levy’s in-depth cultural exchange with the poetry of Heine.

The story of one African American woman's journey with substance use disorder and recovery. She examines the stigma that is associated with substance use disorder and how various interactions led to self-stigmatizing views.

“Intimacies and Animacies: Queer Ecologies in Asian American Literature” interrogates ideologies that define and govern notions of gender, race, bodies, and nature in Nora Okja Keller’s Comfort Woman and Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night. This chapter explores not only how culturally constructed concepts of filth, decay, and normalcy are mobilized against certain subject positions, but the ways in which these marginalized subjects survive through a radical affiliation and re-orientation to more-than-human natures. Drawing on queer theory’s commitment to destabilizing ideological institutions that structure normative gender and sexual relations, and ecofeminism’s attention to how patriarchal structures overlay the commodification and exploitation of the natural world, this chapter explores the ways these Asian North American authors theorize human-nature relationships in opposition to logics of domination and violence. Suggesting that the fecund, chaotic domicile of Mala Ramchandin in Cereus Blooms at Night offers an articulation of queer space and reading the ingestion of soil, earth, and dust by Comfort Woman’s Kim Soon Hyo as queer incorporation, this chapter examines the oppositional orientations to subjectivity and place that these texts offer.

The chapter considers several directions through the field of Shakespeare and world cinema while acknowledging that no one interpretive method can do justice to the variety of filmic engagements with the dramatist’s work across the globe. Accordingly, this chapter looks at films from Africa, Brazil, Germany, India, Japan, Malaysia, Russia, Slovakia, Spain and Thailand in terms of a range of approaches the auteur approach, regional perspectives, time-bound moments of production and reception, the woman practitioner, and the place of particular plays in the adaptive process. It attends to the adaptations of auteurs such as Vishal Bhardwaj, Grigori Kozintsev and Akira Kurosawa and, at the same time, introduces readers to diverse adaptations of Hamlet, Macbeth, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Othello and Romeo and Juliet, thereby making visible the methodological challenges and joys necessarily entailed in any encounter with world Shakespeare.

Chapter 3 examines the creation of the image of God, pointing to the significance of the materiality and visibility of the image when compared with the invisibility of angels. This relates to how Gregory depicts the image of God as divine. Due to his narration of how God mixes the spiritual image with the dust, we shall see that Gregory portrays the image and the dust as becoming a unity, and thus a single, living human person. Drawing from Genesis 1, Gregory argues explicitly that God creates women and men equally as images of God; moreover he writes about the female image in a manner which demonstrates further his view of the image quite literally as a physical, living and divine image of God.