Litany

Abstract: Born in 1917, the year of the Russian Revolution, the eighty-five years of Eric Hobsbawm's life are backdropped by an endless litany of wars, revolutions and counter-revolutions. He has led a remarkably fulfilling and long life; historian and intellectual, fluent in five languages, a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, until it dissolved itself, and writer of countless volumes of history. He has personally witnessed some of the critical events of our century from Hitler's rise to power in Berlin to the fall of the Berlin wall. Hobsbawm has kept his eyes and ears open for eighty-five years, and has been constantly committed to understanding the 'interesting times' (as the Chinese curse puts it) through which he has lived. His autobiography is one passionate cosmopolitan Jew's account of his travels through that past which is another country, where they do things differently, and how it became the world we now live in.

Abstract: I am an Africabased queer scholar. I am an Africabased scholar who has accepted an invitation to participate in a conversation that will live behind a paywall and, thus, will be inaccessible to many in Africa. I am an Africabased scholar trained in the United States, struggling to unlearn the fluencies that so readily grant me access to conversations in mainstream queer studies. I am an Africabased scholar who has chosen to publish most of my thinking on queerness and especially queer Africa on a publicly available blog as an ethical and political act that refuses academic gatekeeping as the price one must pay to be legitimized as a scholar. My blog is called “Gukira,” a Kikuyu word that, depending on how one reads it, translates as to keep silent, to cross (as in cross a road), more than, and, if one really stretches it, to awaken. Gukira is a wandering word, a wayward invitation to linger in and on spaces of fugitivity.1 I am an Africabased queer scholar trying to find the right way to enter a conversation whose premises seem much less clear after more than a year spent away from the US academy. From here, my protestation, “I am not an Africanist,” meets with puzzled looks. Stella Nyanzi, a Ugandabased medical anthropologist, asked me, “What is an Africanist?” suggesting that this geodisciplinary designation does not travel well, if at all. Other terms are troubling. I am a queer scholar. By which I mean to say, I am trained in and identify with a field that does not exist in my present geography. A sense of deracination overwhelms me. But I say this with trepidation, because deracination has so often been fetishized, if not celebrated, in queer studies. Consider John D’Emilio’s urbanbased queers; Judith Butler’s abject; Lee Edelman’s early proclamation, “Queer theory is no one’s safe harbor for the holidays; it should offer no image of home,” now morphed into the “antisocial” thesis; Sara Ahmed’s “affect alien”;

Abstract: Part 1 Introduction: the liturgical background - supplicatory prayer the insular origin of the litany of the saints the insular diffusion of the litany of the saints the continental diffusion of the litany of the saints the litany of the saints in later Anglo-Saxon England later influence of the liturgical form. Part 2 The manuscripts. Part 3 Anglo-Saxon litanies of the saints - the texts.

Abstract: The Ecclesiae militantis triumphi (1583, 1585), a print series reproducing the late-sixteenth-century ambulatory frescoes of Santo Stefano Rotondo, offered Jesuits a concise history of Early Christian persecution through the depiction of martyrdoms from the time of the primitive church. The addition of four allegories not found in the Santo Stefano Rotondo cycle develops the meaning of the print series and links Early Christian sacrifice with theological doctrine established at the Council of Trent. Guided by both text and image, Jesuits could meditate upon the historical litany of martyred saints and at the same time examine, through allegory, the Catholic position on issues such as grace, sin, and justification. For Jesuit missionaries to the Protestant north, the Ecclesiae militantis triumphi pictorially established contemporary Tridentine decisions as worthy of the faith and sacrifice demonstrated by the Early Christian martyrs.