Susan Crane

The Performance of Self: Ritual, Clothing, and Identity During the Hundred Years War

List of Illustrations Note on Citations Introduction Chapter 1 Talking Garments Chapter 2 Maytime in Late Medieval Courts Chapter 3 Joan of Arc and Womens Cross-Dress Chapter 4 Chivalric Display and Incognito Chapter 5 Wild Doubles in Charivari and Interlude Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index Acknowledgments

For the Birds

In Geoffrey Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale, a Mongol princess and a peregrine falcon talk together thanks to a magical ring that renders birdsong intelligible to humans. Or do they understand one another, as the falcon suggests, thanks to their shared femininity, nobility, and sensitivity to love? These registers of sympathy unite them across the species barrier and set them apart from the tale’s opening scene of masculine diplomacy and chivalry. The opening scene displays a relatively straightforward orientalism, in which the eastern kingdom of Cambyuskan (Genghis Khan) is both richly exotic and smoothly appropriated to express the Squire’s international sophistication. In the tale’s second part, species difference raises the stakes on ethnic difference, interrogating the limits that ethics might set on hospitality and compassion.

Animal Encounters: Contacts and Concepts in Medieval Britain

Notes on Citations Introduction 1. Cohabitation 2. Wolf, Man, and Wolf-Man 3. A Bestiarys Taxonomy of Creatures 4. The Noble Hunt as a Ritual Practice 5. Falcon and Princess 6. Knight and Horse Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index Acknowledgments

Anglo-Norman cultures in England, 1066–1460

For more than three centuries of Norman and Plantagenet rule, the British Isles were, with the exception of the Norman kingdom in Sicily, the most significantly multilingual and multicultural territory in western Europe. The interactions of William the Conqueror’s followers and peoples native to Britain were not simply adversarial, nor were the ethnic conceptions and political ambitions of the time equivalent to those inspiring Britain’s modern attempts at empire. The conquerors and their followers were unquestionably bent on dominating the inhabitants of Britain, but this process was not entirely a matter of force, nor should the inhabitants’ responding manoeuvres and successes be elided into a model of helpless subjection. The extent to which intermarriage, bilingualism and cultural adoptions came to characterize Norman rule sharply contrasts with the later British programme of empire-building and testifies both to the Normans’ desire to make Britain their permanent home and to the conquered inhabitants’ success at imposing themselves and their ways on the new arrivals. Chapters below on writing in Wales, Ireland and Scotland leave to this chapter the conquerors’ experience of England. Conquest and accommodation To be sure, the process of conquest begins with ethnic as well as military hostilities. Wace’s account of the minstrel Taillefer singing at the Battle of Hastings about Roland at the Battle of Roncevaux, an anecdote also found in William of Malmesbury’s chronicle, may indicate that the Normans considered Charlemagne’s men to be their own heroic predecessors – however recently the Normans had borrowed them from the Franks after moving in about 911 from Scandinavia into northern France. Taillefer’s song anticipates the Anglo-Norman copy of the Song of Roland , Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Digby 23, made some seventy-five years after the Battle of Hastings.

Cat, Capon, and Pig in The Summoner's Tale

For literary animals, the star turns, we might say, have long been figurative—the lion as king, the faithful turtledove—rather than literal—the cat as mouser, the pig as pork. Our analytical sensibilities thrill to the animal tropes, to distinguishing the metalepsis of the sacrificial lamb from the symbolic presence of the devil in the fox.1 Scholarship can too easily come to see literary animals only as figures for human concerns. Chaucer’s poetry often deploys animals to figurative ends, but occasionally his works also evoke an animal’s physical presence on the narrative scene. In The Summoner’s Tale, two moments of concrete representation assign narrative significance to cohabitation with animals and even ponder an ethical dimension of cross-species relationship. In the first of these moments, Friar John shoos a housecat off the bench of his bedridden host in order to make room for his own posterior and his several accessories. The briefly evoked housecat differs from the more characteristic deployment of animals in The Summoner’s Tale. In this more familiar strategy, animals figure the gross embodiment of humankind and the dichotomous relation of human body to eternal soul—the body always pulling away from virtue and threatening the soul’s health. Following this familiar teaching, the intercessory prayers of friars have a special effectiveness because ‘‘We lyve in poverte and in abstinence, / And burell folk in richesse and despence / Of mete and drynke, and in hir foul delit.’’2 In a diegesis Bakhtin would have appreciated, the precise opposite of abstinent prayer is a sick man’s fart, a supremely animal

Brain β-Hydroxybutyrate Utilization in Neonatal Hypothyroidism in Rats

The in vitro and in vivo utilization of 14C-β-hydroxybutyrate (BOHB) by the brain in neonatal hypothyroidism was studied in rat pups made hypothyroid by feeding dams a diet containing 0.02% propylthiouracil during pregnancy and lactation. In the in vitro studies, the oxidation of BOHB to CO2 was lower at 14 and 21 days of age in hypothyroid pups than in pair-fed controls but higher at 35 days. The incorporation of BOHB into brain lipid was significantly higher in hypothyroid pups at 14, 21 and 35 days. In contrast, in the in vivo studies, incorporation of BOHB into lipid was significantly lower in hypothyroid pups at 14 and 21 days. These results suggest that hypothyroid pups may have a normal or increased capability to use BOHB for lipid synthesis, but were unable to achieve normal rates of utilization in vivo, possibly due to a decreased substrate availability. These findings may have implications for the decreased brain lipid content characteristic of neonatal hypothyroidism.