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This chapter concentrates on England during and immediately following the time of Geoffrey Chaucer. It is well known that Chaucer himself dealt extensively with the sacrament of penance in his Parson's Tale. The chapter focuses on the works of John Burgh and William Lyndwood and concludes with a brief review of their connection to Chaucer's works. Both men were writing for an English audience, but they were abreast of the latest Continental commentators. For an understanding of their ideas of penance, it will be useful first to review the authorities upon which they drew. The chapter then looks at a sequence of important works from the mid-12th century and early 13th century that treated penance and confession and that acquired significant glosses. Keywords: fifteenth century; Geoffrey Chaucer; John Burgh; penitential theology; William Lyndwood

The article sets out to show the ideological significance of the quotations from Vergil, Lucan, Horace, Homer, and Ovid found in Vita Nova 16 [XXV], the celebrated passage where Dante cites these poets as examples of personification in classical literature. In the quotations from Vergil’s Aeneid, Aeolus and Juno speak to each other, and Apollo speaks to the Trojans. In his framing of the quotations, Dante appears implicitly to regard pagan deities like Aeolus, Juno, and Apollo as inanimate things, raising the question as to why the author of the Vita Nova understood pagan gods in terms of poetic tropes. Focusing on the Vergilian quotations, this essay argues that Servius’s commentary to the Aeneid represents one of the major sources that might have led Dante to construe pagan deities as rhetorical personifications.

This article analyses how British popular music culture defined and responded to Krautrock, a subgenre of West German underground rock, during the 1970s. It examines and contextualises British and West German interactions in popular music immediately before Krautrock and at the time of its early definition. The article then explores how so-called Krautrock bands related to the British public and press and how they were described and understood in relation to their nationality. The article suggests that stereotypes and prejudices, shaped by the memory of World War 2, remained a significant aspect of British discourse on West Germany into the 1970s. However, interest in Krautrock gave rise to social and cultural interactions that inspired some to challenge and renegotiate ideas of Germany and Germanness. To some, bonds made through music, culture and politics proved more profound than the history of conflict between Britain and Germany.

Existentialist thought has influenced arts and literature movements in Turkey starting from the early Cold War years. The Second New movement in Turkish poetry was able to distinguish itself as a literary movement by focusing on the constrained individual who lost their voice and autonomy in the repressive and polarized conditions of the Cold War. Sezai Karakoç (b. 1933) is a prominent Turkish and conservative-Muslim intellectual, and a poet of the Second New whose work shows the effects of existentialist philosophy and he uses existential notions to formulate a doctrine. With this doctrine and his unique perspective of what this article construes to be a part of the Islamic existentialism, Karakoç remains a pivotal figure in explaining existentialism’s influence in Turkish literature and politics from a religious standpoint. Although affected by the existentialist thought, Karakoç refuses Sartrean atheism or Camusian absurdism to understand the laws of existence, and ties both nature’s and human’s reason of existence to Allah with a fundamental belief maintains that everything is linked to Him. In doing so, he uses the notion of death as a transcendental experience for the human beings, which enriches life with an experiment that exceeds the boundaries of the physical rules.

Recently, the use of word embedding models (WEM) has received ample attention in the natural language processing community. These models can capture semantic information in large corpora of text by learning distributional properties of words, that is how often particular words appear in specific contexts. Scholars have pointed out the potential of WEMs for historical research. In particular, their ability to capture semantic change might assist historians studying conceptual change or specific discursive formations over time. Concurrently, others voiced their criticism and pointed out that WEMs require large amounts of training data, that they are challenging to evaluate, and they lack the specificity looked for by historians. The ability to examine semantic change resonates with the goals of historians such as Reinhart Koselleck, whose research focused on the formation of concepts and the transformation of semantic fields. However, word embeddings can only be used to study particular types of semantic change, and the model’s use is dependent on the size, quality, and bias in training data. In this article, we examine what is required of historical data to produce reliable WEMs, and we describe the types of questions that can be answered using WEMs.

In the economists’ old conception of a market, perfection would arrive when all participants had complete knowledge. However, economists and psychologists have lately realized that ignorance and bias more accurately describe the state ofhuman knowledge even around those hallowed moments of transactional decision making. In these new academic stories, these models of irrationality and bias often take the form of basic cognitive features or evolutionary mal-adaptations. However, it’s just, as is often the case, that there is also a historically specific story about local culture to be told about ignorance. This paper will report back from field-work conducted with contemporary, computerized stock traders, develop a typology of the things they say they don’t know, and then suggest what this has to do with some of the more durable features and behaviours of contemporary financial markets.

Presenting new and diverse scholarship, this wide-ranging collection of forty-three original chapters asks what European cinema tells us about Europe. The book engages with European cinema that attends to questions of European colonial, racialized and gendered power; seeks to decentre Europe itself (not merely its putative centres); and interrogate Europe’s various conceptualizations from a variety of viewpoints. It explores the broad, complex and heterogeneous community/ies produced in and by European films, taking in Kurdish, Hollywood and Singapore cinema as comfortably as the cinema of Poland, Spanish colonial films or the European gangster genre. Chapters cover numerous topics, including: individual films, film movements, filmmakers, stars, scholarship, representations and identities, audiences, production practices, genres and more, all analysed in their context(s) so as to construct an image of Europe as it emerges from Europe’s film corpus. The Companion opens the study of European cinema to a broad readership, ideal for students and scholars in film, European studies, queer studies, and cultural studies, as well as historians with an interest in audio-visual culture, nationalism and transnationalism, and those working in language-based area studies.

The first names parents give to their female versus male children have different phonological (sound) characteristics. My work extends this from the real to the fictional world, studying name given by authors to their romance heroes -gay and straight—as well as to straight heroines. My corpus contains 2,536 contemporary romance novels: 1,668 with a male/female pairing and 868 with a male/male couple, resulting in 3,404 heroes (1,668 straight; 1,736 gay) and 1,668 (straight) heroines. Given that gay romance is a fast-growing sub-genre predominantly written and read by straight women, I explore possible cultural implications of this finding and how it may feed stereotypes and shape perceptions within straight and queer societies.

A common thread that runs in the work of the current generation of African science fiction and fantasy writers is the need to utilize “specificity” in their plot and setting. This chapter discusses the existence of “Africanfuturism” in modern African fiction, based on examples from specific novels and stories by African writers that are arguably examples of science fiction or fantasy, to argue that “Africanfuturism” does exist and is identifiable in works of fiction by first-generation African fiction writers and the succeeding generations that follow their trail. The Concubine possesses every charm one might find in a narrative that could easily pass as science fiction and fantasy fiction projecting the features of African futurism. Africanfuturism in fiction is real and exists in the novels written by renowned African fiction writers as well as those written by current authors specializing in the science fiction genre.