Summary

Culture, Class and Politics in Modern Appalachia takes stock of the field of Appalachian studies as it explores issues still at the center of its scholarship: culture, industrialization, the labor movement, and twentieth-century economic and political failure and their social impact. A new generation of scholars continues the work of Appalachian studies’ pioneers, exploring the diversity and complexity of the region and its people. Labor migrations from around the world transformed the region during its critical period of economic growth. Collective struggles over occupational health and safety, the environment, equal rights, and civil rights challenged longstanding stereotypes. Investigations of political and economic power and the role of social actors and social movements in Appalachian history add to the foundational work that demonstrates a dynamic and diverse region.

Contents

• Louis C. Martin and Ken Fones-Wolf
    Preface
• Dwight B. Billings
    Introduction: Writing Appalachia: Old Ways, New Ways, and WVU Ways
• Section I: Culture
  • Deborah Weiner
      ‘Scrip Was a Way of Life’: Company Stores, Jewish Merchants, and the Coalfield Retail Economy
  • Paul Rakes
      A Combat Scenario: Early Coal Mining and the Culture of Danger
  • Jennifer Egolf
      Radical Challenge and Conservative Triumph: The Struggle to Define American Identity in the Somerset County Coal Strike, 1922–1923
  • Connie Park Rice
      Separate But Never Equal: Dewey W. Fox and the Struggle for Black Equality in the Age of Jim Crow
• Section II: Class
  • Michael E. Workman
      ‘Sadly in need of organization’: Labor Relations in the Fairmont Field, 1890 to 1918
  • Rebecca Bailey
      The Matewan Massacre: Before and After
  • Richard P. Mulcahy
      Progress and Persistent Problems: Sixty Years of Health Care in Appalachia
  • John Hennen
      1199 Comes to Appalachia: Beginnings, 1970–1976
• Section III: Politics
  • Jeffery B. Cook
      Mining Reform after Monongah: The Conservative Response to Mine Disasters
  • Mark Myers
      Depression, Recovery, Instability: The NRA and the McDowell County, West Virginia Coal Industry, 1920–1938
  • Shirley Stewart Burns
      To Dance with the Devil: The Social Impact of Mountaintop Removal Surface Coal Mining
• Publications by Ronald L. Lewis
• Contributors
• Index

Author

Jennifer Egolf is a visiting professor at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. 

Ken Fones-Wolf is the Stuart and Joyce Robbins Chair and Professor of History at West Virginia University. 

Louis Martin is sssistant professor of history at Chatham University.

Reviews

“An excellent contribution to an understanding of modern developments in studies of Appalachia.”
Arthur G. Neal, Journal of American Culture

“Readers come away with some fine specifics but also a real feel for the state of regional scholarship.”
Appalachian Heritage

“Culture, Class and Politics is a fitting tribute to Ronald Lewis’s lifetime of work. The articles are pertinent [and] frequently break new ground . . . ”
Kenneth R. Bailey, West Virginia History

“The essays are well written and researched, are infused with historiography, and offer nuance, complexity, and pluralism to a region—not to mention a state—once seen as unitary and ripe for the ‘benefits’ of civilization.”
Chad Berry, Journal of Southern History

Summary

In the 1700s, Jean-Jacques Rousseau celebrated the Alps as the quintessence of the triumph of nature over the “horrors” of civilization. Now available in English, History of the Alps, 1500-1900: Environment, Development, and Society provides a precise history of one of the greatest mountain range systems in the world. Jon Mathieu’s work disproves a number of commonly held notions about the Alps, positioning them as neither an inversion of lowland society nor a world apart with respect to Europe. Mathieu’s broad historical portrait addresses both the economic and sociopolitical—exploring the relationship between population levels, development, and the Alpine environment, as well as the complex links between agrarian structure, society, and the development of modern civilization. More detailed analysis examines the relationship between various agrarian structures and shifting political configurations, several aspects of family history between the late Middle Ages and the turn of the twentieth century, and exploration of the Savoy, Grisons, and Carinthia regions.

Contents

0. Preface
1. The Alps: A Historical Space?
   • Key questions and the state of the research
   • The political construction of territory
2. Population
   • Data and collection methods
   • Comparing long-term trends
3. Agriculture and Alpiculture
   • The intensity differential in the Alps
   • Cropping frequency and yields
   • The intensification of animal husbandry
   • . . . and of plant cultivation
   • Technology
4. Cities
   • Statistics in the early modern era
   • Acceleration of growth
   • The slowing of urban growth
   • The nineteenth century
5. Environment and Development
   • An intermediate assessment: differentiated growth
   • Relations between the Alps and surrounding areas
   • History and ecological models
   • Illustrations After p. 134
6. Two Agrarian Structures (Nineteenth Century)
   • Farming establishments
   • Public order and property
   • Inheritance law, collective resources
7. Territories during the Early Modern Period
   • Savoy: the duke, the notables
   • The Grisons: communes with subjects
   • Carinthia: Lord, peasant, servant
8. State Formation and Society
   • The European dimension
   • Politics as a factor of differentiation
   • Rural societies
9. History of the Alps from 1500 to 1900
   • A summary
   • Arguments and outlook
10. Appendices
11. Bibliography
12. Index

Author

Jon Mathieu is Professor of History at the University of Lucerne, founding director of the Institute of Alpine History at the University of Lugano (Università della Svizzera Italiana). Matthew Vester is Associate professor in the Department of History at West Virginia University.

Reviews

"...Mathieu has done Alpine studies an immense service, collecting an expansive body of research long divided along national, linguistic, and disciplinary lines. As Mathieu accurately states, 'Quantitative history is sorely missing from Alpine research,' and this slim volume provides a very valuable resource for scholars who wish to redress this lacuna."
Lee W. Holt, H-Net Reviews

"Mathieu's book demolishes widespread cliches about the Alps, which seek to portray the Alpine region as the complete reversal of society in lowland areas, or as a world segregated from the rest of Europe."
Commission Internationale pour la Protection des Alpes

Summary

This book originated as a series of papers delivered at a Symposium on Irish and Anglo-Saxon Literary Culture in Honor of J. E. Cross, held in conjunction with the 30th International Congress on Medieval Studies at Kalamazoo in May 1996. The purpose of that symposium was to bring together a number of friends and admirers of Professor Cross to celebrate his remarkably rich career as a scholar of Old English and Insular Latin literature; Anglo-Saxon manuscripts; and medieval sermons, saints’ lives, and apocrypha.

Just over a decade earlier, a group of colleagues had honored Professor Cross with a Festschrift published as a special volume of Leeds Studies in English, but in the years since that collection appeared, Professor Cross had managed to launch into the most productive period of his entire career, producing over thirty new articles and books since 1984, including his ground-breaking monograph on the Pembroke 25 homiliary, a facsimile edition of the Copenhagen Wulfstan manuscript for the series Early English Manuscripts in Facsimile, a book on the Gospel of Nicodemus and Vindicta Salvatoris apocrypha from the St Omer 202 homiliary, and an edition and translation of Archbishop Wulfstan’s canon laws.

Surely these achievements were worthy of fresh recognition, we reasoned, and a small cohort of Professor Cross’s friends accordingly began conspiring to host a symposium in his honor with an eye toward producing a second Festschrift. Kalamazoo was the logical site for this event. Professor Cross had frequented the Medieval Congress at Kalamazoo for as long as any of us could remember, had chaired and presented in numerous sessions, and was a plenary speaker in 1990. It was also at Kalamazoo that Professor Cross initiated discussions of a plan to revise and update J. D. A. Ogilvy’s Books Known to the English, 597-1066, an ambitious project that has since given rise to two large collaborative ventures to which many Anglo-Saxonists around the world now contribute: Fontes Anglo-Saxonici and Sources of Anglo-Saxon Literary Culture.

Kalamazoo was thus a perfect match for Professor Cross, and with the kind indulgence of the Medieval Congress program committee, we proceeded to organize five sessions for the 1996 meeting on Irish and Anglo-Saxon studies as a tribute to Professor Cross’s work in these areas. The timing, as it turned out, proved meaningful: Professor Cross died unexpectedly the following December, just seven months after the symposium, and the Kalamazoo conference was consequently the last opportunity most of us had to see him.

Contents

-2. Abbreviations
-1. Illustrations
0. Preface
1. Re-Reading The Wanderer: The Value of Cross-References
     Andy Orchard, University of Toronto
2. Visualizing Judgement: Illumination in the Old English Christ III
     Sachi Shimomura, Virginia Commonwealth University
3. The Old English Dough Riddle and the Power of Women's Magic: The Traditional Context of Exeter Book Riddle 45
     Thomas D. Hill, Cornell University
4. The Old English Life of St. Pantaleon
     Phillip Pulsiano, Villanova University
5. The Earliest Anglo-Latin Text of the Trinubium Annae (BHL 505zl)
     Thomas N. Hall, University of Illinois at Chicago
6. Reconciling Family and Faith: Ælfric's Lives of Saints and Domestic Dramas of Conversion
     Dabney Anderson Bankert, James Madison University
7. Pearls before Swine: Ælfric, Vernacular Hagiography, and the Lay Reader
     E. Gordon Whatley, Queens College
8. Sanctifying Anglo-Saxon Ealdormen: Lay Sainthood and the Rise of the Crusadion Ideal
     John Damon, University of Nebraska at Kearney
9. The Old English "Macarius" Homily, Vercelli Homily IV, and Ephrem Lantinus, De paenitentia
     Charles d. Wright, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
10. Irish Homilies A.D. 600-1100
      Martin McNamara, M.S.C., Dublin
11. An Unpublished Homily on the Transfiguration
      Raymond Étaix, Lyon
12. Pembroke College 25, Arts. 93-95
      Paul E. Szarmach, Western Michigan University
13. Comments on the Codicology of Two Paris Manuscripts (BN lat. 13,408 and 5574)
      Frederick M. Biggs, University of Connecticut at Storrs
14. Links between a Twelfth-Century Worcester (F. 94) Homily and the Eighth-Century Hiberno-Latin Commentary Liber questionum in evangliis
      Jean Rittmueller, Memphis
15. An Eighth-Century Text of the Lectiones in virgiliis defuntorum: The Earliest Manuscript Witness of the biblical Readings for the Vigil of the Dead
      Denis Brearley, University of Ottawa
16. Liturgical Echoes in Laxdæla saga
      Andrew Hamer, University of Liverpool
17. Noble Counsel, no Counsel: Advising Ethelred the Unready
      Alice Sheppard, Pennsylvania State University
18. Gildas and Glastonbury: Revisiting the Origins of Glastonbury Abbry
      Alf Siewers, Buckness University
19. A Bibliography of the Writings of J.E. Cross 1985-2000
20. Index

Reviews

"Scholars in the field of medieval studies will fund much to admire in Via Crucis, and some of the chapters... are extraordinarily solid, incisive, and memorable and will no doubt be much cited. In all, the book is a fine and fitting tribute to the memory of a distinguished scholar."
Kirsten Wolf, Journal of English and Germanic Philology

Summary

Theorizing Anglo-Saxon Stone Sculpture significantly advances the complex study of Anglo-Saxon carved monuments, such as the Ruthwell Cross, by adopting more explicit theoretical approaches to the subject. Scholars included here are explicit in describing how their approaches complement (or, more often, contradict) the work of others. This book comes as a shot across the bow of these vessels. Contributors include the best scholars on this subject matter in England, Ireland, and America.

Contents

• List of Illustrations
• List of Abbreviations
• Preface
• Introduction
    Richard N. Bailey
• Reading Stone
    Jane Hawkes
• Naming and Renaming: The Inscription of Gender in Anglo-Saxon Sculpture
    Catherine E. Karkov
• Rethinking the Ruthwell and Bewcastle Monuments: Some Strictures on Similarity; Some Questions of History
    Fred Orton
• "Innocent From The Great Offence"
    Richard N. Bailey
• Ruthwell: Contextual Searches
    Ian Wood
• Between Annunciation and Visitation: Spiritual Birth and the Cycles of the Sun on the Ruthwell Cross: A Response to Fred Orton
    Éamonn Ó Carragáin
• Bibliography
• Index

Reviews

"For too long the seas of [these] studies have been traversed by powerful vessels, steered by an assortment of scholars armed with liturgical, patristic, and iconographical instrumentation, who have totally ignored the fact that others are on parallel or collision courses with them." 
Richard Bailey, University of Michigan

"... produce[s] a valuable debate about the interpretation of and approaches to early Anglo-Saxon sculpture." 
Benjamin C. Withers, Indiana University

"The bulk of preconquest sculpture, which is Viking Age and mostly distinguished by its plant, animal, and interlace ornament, is... largely lost to sight. That said, this is a valuable book, which draws attention to the lively debates around the interpretation of an important category of the material remains of Anglo-Saxon culture." 
Elizabeth Coatsworth, Manchester Metropolitan University

Summary

The Power of Words: Anglo-Saxon Studies Presented to Donald G. Scragg on his Seventieth Birthday edited by Jonathan Wilcox and Hugh Magennis will find its place on the same shelf with these and other such valuable tomes in the discipline. This is a complex and carefully edited book, that showcases the work of some of Professor Scragg’s best students and most admiring professional friends. The contents range from several studies in homiletic literature, one of Professor Scragg’s own passions, to other of his pursuits, including editing theory and orthography. These are not, however, derivative essays that recommend a single adjustment in a reading or to a source study; instead, they are studies that do what Professor Scragg himself did: they observe clues to larger realities, and they point the way to a broader comprehension of our discipline and its several methodologies.

Contents

• List of Figures
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
    Jonathan Wilcox, Univeristy of Iowa
• Donald G. Scragg: A Tribute
    Joyce Hill, University of Leeds
• Homiletic and Religious Literature
  • Ælfric and Heroic Literature
      Hugh Magennis, Queen's University Belfast
  • Reading "The Story of Joseph" in MS Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 201
      Daniel Anlezark, University of Sydney
  • Text as Image in Ælfwine's Prayerbook
      Catherine E. Karkov, Miami University, Ohio
  • Confessional Discourse in an Old English Life of St. Margaret
      Jill A. Frederick, Minnesota State University
  • Latin Sermons and Lay Preaching: Four Latin Sermons from Post-Reform Canterbury
      Thomas N. Hall, University of Notre Dame
  • Who Read Gregory's Dialogues in Old English?
      David F. Johnson, Florida State University
  • The Life and Times of Old English Homilies for the First Sunday in Lent
      Elaine Treharne, University of Leicester
• Words, Texts, and Traditions
  • Acribes of the Mind: Editing Old English, in Theory and in Practice
      R.M. Liuzza, University of Tennessee-Knoxville
  • "Þær weard hream ahafen": A Note on Old English Spelling and the Sound of The Battle of Maldon
      Richard Dance, University of Cambridge
  • "Ealde Udwitan" in the Battle of Brunanburh
      Kathryn Powell, DePaul University
  • The Interests of Compounding: Angelcynn to Engla land in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
      Jacqueline A. Stodnick, University of Texas at Arlington
  • Beowulf and the Queen's Cup: Determining the Danish Succession
      Stephen O. Glosecki, University of Alabama at Birmingham
  • "Kinge Athelston That Was a Worthy Kinge og England": Anglo-Saxon Myths of the Freemasons
      Andrew Prescott, University of Sheffield

Author

Jonathan Wilcox is Professor of Anglo-Saxon language and literature at the University of Iowa’s Department of English.

Hugh Magennis is Professor of Old English literature at Queen’s University, Belfast.

Reviews

"Donald G. Scragg has been actively shaping the field of Anglo-Saxon studies for more than forty years now. Since his first appointment at the University of Manchester in 1963… Don has been pursuing the intertwined activities of teaching and research, introducing students to the joys of Old English literature and philology in the classroom."
Jonathan Wilcox

Summary

This work includes twenty-four essays including a preface, introduction, afterword, and sections containing seminal methodological pieces by such giants as Edward Said and Michel Foucault, as well as contemporary applications to Beowulf and other Old English and Germanic texts focusing on historicism, psychoanalysis, gender, textuality, and post-colonialism.

Contents

1. Preface
   • After Everything, The Post Modern "Beowulf"
       Eileen A. Joy
2. Introduction
   • Liquid Beowulf
       Eileen A. Joy and Mary K. Ramsey
3. History/Historicism
   • Critical Contexts
   • The World, the Text, and the Critic
       Edward Said
   • In Transit: Theorizing Cultural Appropriation in Medieval Europe
       Claire Sponsler
   • "Beowulf" Essays
   • Beowulf and the Ancestral Homeland
       Nicholas Howe
   • Writing the Unreadable Beowulf
       Allen J. Frantzen
   • Locating Beowulf
       John D. Niles
4. Ethnography/Psychonalysis
   • Critical Contexts
   • Ethnicity, Power and the English
       John Moreland
   • Landscapes of Conversion: Guthlac's Mound and Grendel's Mere as Expressions of Anglo-Saxon National-Building
       Alfred K. Siewers
   • "Beowulf" Essays
   • Beowulf and the Origins of Civilization
       James W. Earl
   • Enjoyment of Violence and Desire for History in Beowulf
       Janet Thormann
   • The Ethnopsychology of In-Law Feud and the Remaking of Group Indentity in Beowulf: the Cases of Hengest and Ingeld
       John M. Hill
5. Gender/Identity
   • Critical Contexts
   • The Ruins of Identity
       Jeffery J. Cohen
   • Regardless of Sex: Men, Women, and Power in Early northern Europe
       Carol J. Clover
   • "Beowulf" Essays
   • Men and Beowulf
       Clare A. Lees
   • Beowulf's Tears of Fatherhood
       Mary Dockray-Miller
   • Voices from the Margins: Women and Textual Enclosure in Beowulf
       Shari Horner
6. Text and Textuality
   • Critical Contexts
   • What is an Author?
       Michel Foucault
   • The Textuality of Old English Poetry
       Carol Braun Pasternack
   • "Beowulf" Essays
   • Swods and Sighns: Dynamic Semeiosis in Beowulf
       Gillian Overing
   • Hrothgar's Hilt and the Reader in Beowulf
       Seth Lerer
   • "As I Once Did With Grendel": Boasting and Nostalgia in Beowulf
       Susan Kim
7. Postscript: Philology and Postcolonialism
   • Post-Philology
       Michelle R. Warren
8. Afterword
   • Reading Beowulf with Original Eyes
       James W. Earl

Author

Eileen Joy is Professor of English and Literature at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. Joy has a PhD in English from the University of Tennessee-Knoxville and an MFA and BA in creative writing and English from Virginia Commonwealth University.

Mary K. Ramsey is Assistant Professor of English at Southeastern Louisiana University.

Reviews

“Most of us are not looking to find adventure in Beowulf, much less the meaning of life. What we are looking for at this moment is the sort of knowledge that might proceed from a radical defamiliarization of this far-too-familiar text, setting it free from centuries of encrusted ideologies. In the case of Beowulf, I think, such a radical defamiliarization will reveal a radical strangeness in the poem. Freed from its roles in all our grand narratives, Beowulf stands apart, an unexpected singularity. It is, not to put too fine a point on it, weird.”
James W. Earl, University of Oregon

Summary

In Old English Literature in its Manuscript Context, editor Joyce Tally Lionarons has developed a multifaceted collection examining the issues facing the textual transmission of Anglo-Saxon writings. Eight established scholars consider the ideas of textual identity, authorship and translation, and editorial standards and obligations. This work also features a scholarly exchange of ideas and photographs of the original Anglo-Saxon manuscripts, making this essential reading for anyone interested in the history of Old English literature. The essays published in this text were originally composed at an NEH summer seminar conducted by Paul Szarmach and Timothy Graham at the Parker Library of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge in 1997.

Contents

• Foreword
    Paul E. Szarmach & Timothy Graham
• Introduction
    Joyce Tally Lionarons
• Nostalgia and the Rhetoric of Lack: The Missing Exemplar for Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, Manuscript 41
    Sharon M. Rowley
• Anglo-Saxon Orthodoxy
    Nancy M. Thompson
• Textual Appropriation and Scribal (Re)Performance in a Composite Homily: The Case for a New Edition of Wulfstan’s De Temporibus Anticristi
    Joyce Tally Lionarons
• Multilingual Glosses, Bilingual Text: English, French, and Latin in Three Manuscripts of Ælfric’s Grammar
    Melinda J. Menzer
• Three Tables of Contents, One Old English Homiliary in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 178
    Paul Acker
• The Boundaries Between Verse and Prose in Old English Literature
    Thomas A. Bredehoft
• Glastonbury and the Early History of the Exeter Book
    Robert M. Butler
• Parker’s Purposes Behind the Manuscripts: Matthew Parker in the Context of his Early Career and Sixteenth-Century Church Reform
    Nancy Basler Bjorklund
• Index of Manuscripts
• General Index

Author

Joyce Tally Lionarons is a professor in the Department of English at Ursinus College in Pennsylvania. She has been the president of the Delaware Valley Medieval Association and has served on the Executive Board of the Southeastern Medieval Association. She has also been a bibliographer in Studies in the Age of Chaucer and a member of the Editorial Board for Journal of Patristric, Medieval, and Renaissance Studies.

Reviews

"This volume makes a considered contribution to scholarship in the areas of textual and manuscript studies."
Elaine Treharne, Florida State University

Summary

West Virginia is one of the most homogeneous states in the nation, with among the lowest ratios of foreign-born and minority populations among the states. But as this collection of historical studies demonstrates, this state was built by successive waves of immigrant labors, from the antebellum railroad builders to the twentieth-century coal miners. Transnational West Virginia offers a new understanding of how laborers and their communities shape a region’s history. Transnational West Virginia includes essays and studies on immigrant networks, such as Irish workers along the B&O Railroad, Wheeling Germans in the Civil War era, Swiss immigration to West Virginia, and European Jews in Southern West Virginia. This work also covers Belgian glassworkers in West Virginia, black migration to Southern West Virginia, Italians in the Upper Kanawha Valley, Italian immigration to Marion County, Wheeling Iron and the Welsh, West Virginia and immigrant labor to 1920, Monongalia miners between the World Wars, and West Virginia rubber workers in Akron. Transnational West Virginia is the first volume in the West Virginia and Appalachia series.

Contents

• List of Tables
• Introduction: Networks Large and Small
• Section I: Antebellum Roots
  
  1. Matthew Mason, “Paddy vs. Paddy: Labor Unrest and Provincial Identities along the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, 1849–1951”
  2. Ken Fones-Wolf, “Caught between Revolutions: Wheeling Germans in the Civil War Era”
• Section II: Niche Communities
  
  3. Elizabeth Cometti, “Swiss Immigration to West Virginia, 1864–1884: A Case Study”
  4. Deborah R. Weiner, “From Shtetl to Coalfield: The Migration of East European Jews to Southern West Virginia”
  5. Ken Fones-Wolf, “Craft, Ethnicity, and Identity: Belgian Glassworkers in West Virginia, 1898–1940”
• Section III: Immigrant Coal Miners
  
  6. Joe William Trotter Jr., “Black Migration to Southern West Virginia”
  7. Frederick A. Barkey, “‘Here Come the Boomer ‘Talys’: Italian Immigrants and Industrial Conflict in the Upper Kanawha Valley, 1903–1917”
  8. William B. Klaus, “Uneven Americanization: Italian Immigration to Marion County, 1900–1925”
• Section IV: Representations of Ethnic Work Communities
  
  9. Anne Kelley Knowles, “Wheeling Iron and the Welsh: A Geographical Reading of Life in the Iron Mills”
  10. Kenneth R. Bailey, “Strange Tongues: West Virginia and Immigrant Labor to 1920”
  11. Ronald L. Lewis, “Americanizing Immigrant Coal Miners in Northern West Virginia: Monongalia County Between the World Wars”
• Epilogue: Leaving West Virginia
  
  12. Susan Johnson, “West Virginia Rubber Workers in Akron”
• About the Contributors
• Index

Reviews

“ . . . a truly worthy book.”
George Brosi, Appalachian Heritage

Summary

At different times and in different places, the human form has been regarded in different ways. The Ancient Greeks thought it was the most admirable subject for art, whereas early Christians often viewed it as lascivious in our post-lapsarian state. With illustrations taken from manuscripts, statuary and literary, this is a fascinating collection of essays with much that will be new to scholars and general readers alike.

Contents

-4. List of Illustrations
-3. List of Abbreviations
-2. Acknowledgments
-1. Forward: Uncovering the Body in Anglo-Saxon England
      Benjamin C. Withers, Indiana University South Bend
0. Introduction: Medieval Bodies Then and Now: Negotiating Problems of Ambivalence and Paradox
     Suzanne Lewis, Stanford University
1. The Wanton Hand: Reading and Reaching Into Grammars and Bodies in Old English Riddle 12
     Sarah L. Higley, University of Rochester
2. The Key to the Body: Unlocking Riddles 42-46
     Mercedes Salvador, Universidad de Sevilla
3. The Body as Text in Early Anglo-Saxon Law
     Mary P. Richards, University of Delaware
4. The Sacrificial Synecdoche of Hands, Heads, and Arms in Anglo-Saxon Heroic Story
     John M. Hill, United States Naval Academy
5. Nudity on the Margins: The Bayeux Tapestry and Its Relationship to Marginal Architectural Sculpture
     Karen Rose Mathews, University of Washington
6. The Donestre and the Person of Both Sexes
     Susan M. Kim, Illinois State University
7. Exiles from the Kingdom: The Naked and the Damned in Anglo-Saxon Art
     Catherine E. Karkov, Miami University, Ohio
8. Breasts and Babies: The Maternal Body of Eve in the Junius 11 Genesis
     Mary Dockray-Miller, Lesley University
9. Penitential Nakedness and the Junius 11 Genesis
     Janet S. Ericksen, University of Minnesota—Morris
10. Naked in Old English: The Embarrassed and the Shamed
      Jonathan Wilcox, University of Iowa
11. Index

Author

Benjamin Withers of Indiana University at South Bend and Jonathan Wilcox of University of Iowa have assembled one of the most talented groups of young scholars in the field of early medieval studies and asked them to present and explore the evidence for how the human form was regarded by the English before the Norman Conquest.

Reviews

"Naked Before God introduced a refreshing sense of possibilities that are offered by focusing on the multivalence of the body. This is a timely, lively and eclectic collection; the essays complement each other and offer a good variety of perspectives. This is an attractive volume by virtue of the range of—and emphasis on—illustration, and because it provides the reader with some real and provocative choices of interpretations of key texts and images of the period."
Clare Lees, King’s College, University of London

Summary

Nearly a century ago, hundreds of families journeyed from Spain to the United States, to search for a better life in the growing zinc-industry towns of Harrison County, West Virginia. As they created a new culture and a new home in this strange land, they added another thread to the rich fabric of our nation. Writing from his perspective as a first-generation son of this immigrant community, González recounts his childhood memories of his neighborhood, where these immigrants raised their families, worked in the often insufferable conditions of the zinc factories, and celebrated "romerias" and feast days with their neighbors.

Author

Gavin W. "Bill" González was born in 1909 in Anmoore, West Virginia, the son of immigrants from Asturias, Spain. The Gonzálezes and their neighbors built a lively community centered around a place called Pinnick Kinnick Hill. Though Gavin González eventually moved away from his childhood home, he never forgot West Virginia, often taking his children and grandchildren on pilgrimages to Pinnick Kinnick Hill. Only after his death in 1988 did the family discover that he had written a memoir recounting the stories of his youth. The book is partly a memoir, partly a history, and partly a novel, all combined in a sometimes heartwarming and sometimes bittersweet celebration of how one small Spanish community survived and then prospered in the ethnic cauldron that was America. Published in side-by-side English and Spanish, Pinnick Kinnick Hill: An American Story is a story of struggle and disappointment, but ultimately one of resilience, cooperation, and one man’s discovery of America.

Reviews

"Pinnick Kinnick Hill is part novel, part memoir. It's a history lesson and a love song. And while the book is published in both English and Spanish (the same narrative in Spanish appears on each facing page), the book really only has one universal language shared by immigrant families everywhere: the language of love, sacrifice, discipline, and devotion."
Jim Bissett, The Dominion Post

"...a welcome addition to the growing literature on Appalachian immigration."
Jerry Bruce Thomas, Journal of Appalachian Studies 

"...pure Americana, rich indeed in its evocation of a time long gone by...."
Stephen Goode, The Washington Times