Early Christian legends of monastic women disguised as men have recently been the object of psychological, literary, sociohistorical, anthropological, and theological study. In this article, I will raise new questions about these legends from the perspective of the poststructuralist theory of intertextuality. What are the cultural "texts" that these legends "play upon"? What does this intertextuality tell us about how such legends participated in late antique cultural discourse on gender and the female body? Here, I examine five cultural "texts" reworked in the legends: 1) the lives of earlier transvestite saints like St. Thecla; 2) the Life of St. Antony ; 3) late antique discourse about eunuchs; 4) the story of Joseph and Potiphar's wife from Genesis; and 5) the textual deconstruction and reconstitution of the female body in early Christian literature. These "intertexts," along with key christomimetic elements in the legends, suggest how binary conceptions of gender identity were ultimately destabilized in the figure of the transvestite saint.
Abstract Monastic rules constitute a ‘form-of-life’ for monks and nuns seeking to pursue a life of withdrawal and renunciation. But when it comes to the cultivation of specific virtues—holiness, purity, or perfection—Christian, Jain, and Buddhist monastics have also had other cultural and ethical models to draw on, including charismatic ascetic virtuosi who inspire acts of imitation and veneration. ‘Saints and spirituality’ considers the privileged role that saints and their stories play in the shaping of monastic spirituality. It first defines sainthood in different traditions and then looks at the lives of monastic saints—including Francis of Assisi, Mahāvīra, Gautama Buddha, Anthony, and Milarepa—and the ethics of imitation.
Few studies have examined pediatric emergency department (ED) visits for snakebites. This study sought to examine characteristics of pediatric patients presenting to EDs nationally in the United States for snakebites.This retrospective cohort study obtained data from the Nationwide Emergency Department Sample for 2006 to 2014. Pediatric patients sustaining a snakebite were identified with International Classification of Diseases, Ninth Revision, E-codes E905.0 or E906.2. Data extracted included age, sex, insurance, disposition, hospital trauma designation, ED charges, and geographic region. Comparative analyses were performed for patients younger than 10 years and aged 10 to 17 years.There were 24,388 ED visits from 2006 to 2014 by pediatric patients for snakebites: 10,554 were younger than 10 years, and 13,834 were aged 10 to 17 years. Males comprised 62% and 67% of the respective age cohorts. Most patients (younger than 10 years, 68%; aged 10-17 years, 63%) experienced snakebites in the South. Only 14% of those younger than 10 years and 10% of those aged 10 to 17 years were treated at a level 1 trauma center, whereas 50% and 54%, respectively, were treated at hospitals with no trauma designation. The majority of patients were discharged from the ED (younger than 10 years, 72%; aged 10-17 years, 80%). The mean ED charges for snakebite victims younger than 10 years were $5363 and for those aged 10 to 17 years were $4618. Medicaid was the primary insurer of younger patients, whereas private insurance was more common in older patients.Most pediatric snakebites are seen in nontrauma centers and in the South region and are more commonly male. Most patients were discharged from the ED, with a small percentage being admitted or transferred to another facility.
An edition and translation of a trilingual manuscript recording the rite of a medieval liturgical procession at the White Monastery (Dayr al-Anba Shinudah) in Upper Egypt, accompanied by two introductions. Primarily in Coptic, with selected sections in Greek and Arabic, the original text is preserved in the Bibliotheque nationale in Paris (BN Copte 68), and it includes rubrics of biblical passages and a sermon by Shenoute meant to be read at different points during the procession. The first introduction situates the manuscript in relation to the history, archaeology, and ritual practice of the monastery. The second introduction provides a technical description of the manuscript and of the editorial methods used in producing the edition. The introductions, edition, and translation are supplemented by tables with selected images, an index of biblical citations, and a bibliography.
Abstract Chapter 7 focuses on the interpretation of infancy stories about Jesus in the Arabic-speaking world among both Muslims and Christians. Topics for investigation include the inclusion of the story about Jesus and the birds in the Qur'ān and Qur'ānic commentary, the transmission of the teacher stories in the Arabic Gospel of the Infancy (contextualized by the Graeco-Arabic translation movement), and the development of a "science of letters" in medieval Sufi asceticism. The chapter shows how Muslims and Christians in these different contexts shared a certain sensibility rooted in four areas of practice: scriptural interpretation and commentary, storytelling about prophetic miracles, the production of scientific knowledge, and ascetic discipline.
Multimedia is increasingly accessed online and within social networks; however, users are typically limited to visual/auditory stimulus through media presented onscreen with accompanying audio over speakers. Whilst recent research studying additional ambient sensory multimedia effects recorded numerical scores of perceptual quality, the users’ time-varying emotional response to the ambient sensory feedback is not considered. This paper thus introduces a framework to evaluate user ambient quality of multimedia experience and discover users’ time-varying emotional responses through explicit user tagging and implicit EEG biosignal analysis. In the proposed framework, users interact with the media via discrete tagging activities whilst their EEG biosignal emotional feedback is continuously monitored in-between user tagging events with emotional states correlated with media content and tags.
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