Three interlaced stories filled with music, murder, fire and fraud - erratically controlled by a narrator - comprise Scrundle: A Historical Novel.In 1348, as the Black Death spreads in Europe, musicians, who play a massive instrument called the Scrundle, are caught between two feuding barons. One captures them and the other burns the instrument on the advice of a peasant, who believes it to be a symbol of pestilence and religious corruption. Two musicians escape to tell the tale in a manuscript, or MS. One baron is banished for the destruction, while the other?s widow builds Scrundle Hall in Cambridge, bequeathing the MS to the College.In 1659, Joshua Mayne, descendent of the banished baron and a Fellow of the College, plans to translate the MS, and recreate the instrument. Ejected for heretical beliefs, he murders the College librarian, steals the MS, and covers his tracks by setting fire to the College. He escapes to his family home, where his unpolished translation remains in the family library.By 2000, the last of the Mayne family has refounded the College and intends to bequeath the family library to it. A musicology Fellow steals the Scrundle MS and other valuable items prior to cataloguing. Meanwhile, a television archaeological team has been invited to excavate the College foundations. It arrives when the library is finally delivered, unearths the bones of the murdered librarian, and tries to explain the original fire, even as another is about to ignite.
Three interlaced stories filled with music, murder, fire and fraud - erratically controlled by a narrator - comprise Scrundle: A Historical Novel.In 1348, as the Black Death spreads in Europe, musicians, who play a massive instrument called the Scrundle, are caught between two feuding barons. One captures them and the other burns the instrument on the advice of a peasant, who believes it to be a symbol of pestilence and religious corruption. Two musicians escape to tell the tale in a manuscript, or MS. One baron is banished for the destruction, while the other?s widow builds Scrundle Hall in Cambridge, bequeathing the MS to the College.In 1659, Joshua Mayne, descendent of the banished baron and a Fellow of the College, plans to translate the MS, and recreate the instrument. Ejected for heretical beliefs, he murders the College librarian, steals the MS, and covers his tracks by setting fire to the College. He escapes to his family home, where his unpolished translation remains in the family library.By 2000, the last of the Mayne family has refounded the College and intends to bequeath the family library to it. A musicology Fellow steals the Scrundle MS and other valuable items prior to cataloguing. Meanwhile, a television archaeological team has been invited to excavate the College foundations. It arrives when the library is finally delivered, unearths the bones of the murdered librarian, and tries to explain the original fire, even as another is about to ignite.
One of the earliest mill communities in the Massachusetts Bay Colony formed along Spot Pond Brook, a few miles north of Boston. Thomas Coytmore built the first mill in 1640 at the brook's downstream end in "Mistick Side" (present-day Malden). Other mills sprang up along the brook as well. Today, most of Spot Pond Brook is hidden in culverts beneath the busy streets of Malden and Melrose. However, remnants of the lost mill village of Haywardville--foundations, millruns and ponds and waterfalls--are preserved within Middlesex Fells Reservation, part of Boston's world-famous Metropolitan Park System. Authors Douglas L. Heath and Alison C. Simcox trace the history of this thriving early American community.
Comprising over 2,500 acres of forest, wetlands, and rugged hills, Middlesex Fells, just seven miles north of Boston, is one of the nation's first state parks and contains the world's first public land trust, Virginia Wood. For centuries, the Fells provided rich hunting and fishing grounds for Native Americans. In 1632, Gov. John Winthrop and others explored the area and named the largest pond Spot Pond because of the many islands and rocks protruding through the ice. The Fells was used for farming and timber, and Spot Pond Brook became the focus of industrial activity, which culminated in 1858 with the Hayward Rubber Mills. In the 1880s and 1890s, Middlesex Fells was a key property in the Boston metropolitan park movement driven by conservationists Wilson Flagg, Elizur Wright, Frederick Law Olmsted, Charles Eliot, George Davenport, and Sylvester Baxter. In 1894, the Metropolitan Park Commission began acquiring Fells land. Electric trolleys crossed the Fells from 1910 to 1946, and in 1959, with the car culture in control, Interstate 93 was built through the area. Today, the Fells, as envisioned by its founders, is a forested haven for city dwellers.
Translation and commentary are often associated with institutions and patronage; but in Italy around the time of Dante, widespread vernacular translation was mostly on the spontaneous initiative of individuals. While Dante is usually the starting point for histories of vernacular translation in Europe, this book demonstrates that The Divine Comedy places itself in opposition to a vast vernacular literature already in circulation among its readers. Alison Cornish explores the anxiety of vernacularization as expressed by translators and contemporary authors, the prevalence of translation in religious experience, the role of scribal mediation, the influence of the Italian reception of French literature on that literature, and how translating into the vernacular became a project of nation-building only after its virtual demise during the Humanist period. Vernacular translation was a phenomenon with which all authors in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Europe - from Brunetto Latini to Giovanni Boccaccio - had to contend.
NATIONAL BESTSELLER (The Globe and Mail) A moving memoir about growing up with a gay father in the 1980s, and a tribute to the power of truth, humour, acceptance and familial love. A true "It GOT Better" story. Alison Wearing led a largely carefree childhood until she learned, at the age of 12, that her family was a little more complex than she had realized. Sure her father had always been unusual compared to the other dads in the neighbourhood: he loved to bake croissants, wear silk pyjamas around the house, and skip down the street singing songs from Gilbert and Sullivan operettas. But when he came out of the closet in the 1970s, when homosexuality was still a cardinal taboo, it was a shock to everyone in the quiet community of Peterborough, Ontario—especially to his wife and three children. Alison’s father was a professor of political science and amateur choral conductor, her mother was an accomplished pianist and marathon runner, and together they had fed the family a steady diet of arts, adventures, mishaps, normal frustrations and inexhaustible laughter. Yet despite these agreeable circumstances, Joe’s internal life was haunted by conflicting desires. As he began to explore and understand the truth about himself, he became determined to find a way to live both as a gay man and also a devoted father, something almost unheard of at the time. Through extraordinary excerpts from his own letters and journals from the years of his coming out, we read of Joe’s private struggle to make sense and beauty of his life, to take inspiration from an evolving society and become part of the vanguard of the gay revolution in Canada. Confessions of a Fairy’s Daughter is also the story of “coming out” as the daughter of a gay father. Already wrestling with an adolescent’s search for identity when her father came out of the closet, Alison promptly “went in,” concealing his sexual orientation from her friends and spinning extravagant stories about all of the “great straight things” they did together. Over time, Alison came to see that life with her father was surprisingly interesting and entertaining, even oddly inspiring, and in fact, there was nothing to hide. Balancing intimacy, history and downright hilarity, Confessions of a Fairy’s Daughter is a captivating tale of family life: deliciously imperfect, riotously challenging, and full of life’s great lessons in love. Alison brings her story to life with a skillfully light touch in this warm, heartfelt and revelatory memoir.
This book explores the relationship among gender, desire, and narrative in 1940s woman’s films which negotiate the terrain between public history and private experience. The woman’s film and other form of cinematic melodrama have often been understood as positioning themselves outside history, and this book challenges and modifies that understanding, contextualizing the films it considers against the backdrop of World War II. In addition, in paying tribute to and departing from earlier feminist formulations about gendered spectatorship in cinema, McKee argues that such models emphasized a masculine-centered gaze at the inadvertent expense of understanding other possible modes of identification and gender expression in classical narrative cinema. She proposes ways of understanding gender and narrative based in part on literary narrative theory and ultimately works toward a notion of an androgynous spectatorship and mode of interpretation in the 1940s woman’s film.
Debates over censorship often become debates over the influence of culture on society's morals and the perceived need to protect women and children. Purifying America explores the widespread middle-class advocacy of censorship as a popular reform around the turn of the century and provides a historical perspective on contemporary debates over censorship, morality, and pornography that continue to divide women.
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