Tag: Literature

Who is the Rifle Wielding Heroine of A True History of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson with Baylee Browning-Atkinson

Title page of one of the surviving 1682 editions of Mary Rowlandson’s captivity narrative.

Title page of one of the surviving 1682 editions of Mary Rowlandson’s captivity narrative.

This image of the title page is from one of the surviving 1682 editions of A True History of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson.  Mrs. Rowlandson was taken captive during a raid on Lancaster, Massachusetts during King Philip’s War; a war initiated by Metacom (Philip was his english name), sachem of the Wampanoag tribe, over strained relationships with New English settlers and encroachments on their lands and sovereignty.  Other regional tribes joined as allies of Metacom or independently as enemies of the New English settlers.  Mrs. Rowlandson and about twenty other survivors, mostly women and young children, were taken in what Native cultures called a Mourning War, in which captives were taken from neighboring or hostile people and gradually incorporated into the captors tribal unit to replace loved ones and replenish the population.  The bloody nature of the Lancaster raid can be attributed to deep seated hostilities between the Invasive and Native populations.  Many English captives were returned; those that were not had been assimilated or died.  Most Native captives were not so lucky.  Most were killed before they could be taken, others fled to neighboring tribes; those that were not dead and could not flee were sold into regional or foreign slavery, usually to the Caribbean sugar islands.  Christian Indians, Native people who had adopted Protestantism and the English language, were usually exiled to Praying towns or reservations.

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Plague and Passion in Boccaccio’s Decameron by Bonnie Soper

Giovanni Boccaccio wrote the Decameron in the mid-fourteenth century as a collection of stories that detail experiences of Florentines during an outbreak of the Black Death. He relayed these stories within the narrative framework of a party of young women and men, known as the brigata, who told the stories to each other after fleeing to the countryside to avoid the plague. The women narrators of the brigata outnumber the men seven to three. The brigata are depicted in the John William Waterhouse painting, A Tale From the Decameron, painted over 400 years after Boccaccio wrote the Decameron.

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The Aeneid: Political Commentary and an Ironic Hero with Anastasia Iorga

The Aeneid was written in a time that would feel familiar to all of us: political strife, civil unrest and decades long military campaigns that never quite seem to end. Towards the end of the 1st century BCE, after at least 50 years of continuous conflict within and beyond the Roman borders, Augustus, Julius Caesar’s heir, emerged victorious from the Battle of Actium, defeating Mark Antony and marking a turning point in history. Augustus declares himself the princeps civitatis of Rome, a term that literally means “first citizen” but actually means “emperor”, and so falls the Roman Republic to the dawn of the Roman Empire. Continue reading

The Year Without Summer with Fernie Amador and Bonnie Soper

 

Welcome, you’re listening to an episode of the Crisis and Catharsis podcast, where we explore stories of how people have found relief in times of crisis, focusing on artistic expression, like literature, music and art, but also expression in daily life, like cuisine and oral histories. This episode focuses on the summer of 1816 also known as the year without summer and the inventions and art that grew out of that environmental crisis. My name is Fernie, I’m a PhD student at Stony Brook University where I study Mexican migration history.  I’m here with Bonnie Soper, a PhD student at Stony Brook University who studies religious and political dissidence in early modern Scotland. 

Keep listening if you would like to learn about volcanic eruptions, the invention of the bicycle, and the creation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein… 

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