Journal articles on the topic 'Friars Europe History'

Abstract To explain the devastation of eastern Europe in 1241–2 by a hitherto unknown people, the Mongols, Latin Christians resorted to Scripture and to apocalyptic prophecy, notably the seventh-century Revelations of Pseudo-Methodius. They may have been encouraged to do so by information gleaned from contemporary Rus' and the Islamic world and by the Mongols' own notions about their origins. For all the accuracy of their reports, the Friars who visited the Mongol empire in the period 1245–55 were still apparently influenced by this perspective; they also transmitted to the West fresh material derived from the folklore they encountered in Asia.

AbstractThis article takes part in the recent project of reevaluating the place, role, and importance of different forms of engagement with Arabic and Arabic manuscripts in seventeenth-century Spain, and more broadly in Europe, by focusing on a single institution—the royal library of San Lorenzo of the Escorial. I examine if, and how, the Escorial fits within the new narrative of the history of Arabic in seventeenth- century Spain. Did the presence of an exceptionally sizeable collection of Arabic texts facilitate, hinder, or have no effect on the new Orientalism of the seventeenth century? More specifically, the article explores four questions: (1) What did Spanish and European scholars think about the collection of Arabic manuscripts in the Escorial? (2) What did the Hieronymites, the friars in charge of the library, do with its Arabic manuscripts? (3) What did the Hieronymites think about the study of Arabic? and (4) What access to the collection, if any, did Spanish and European scholars have? The answers to these questions suggest that the Escorial became a shrine of Arabic knowledge, to which scholarly pilgrims sought access, and that during seventeenth century Spain preserved its reputation among European orientalists as an important site for the study of Arabic.

The Capuchin friar, Valerian Magni, was one of the most influential churchmen of the first half of the seventeenth century. A confidant of Pope Urban VIII, an advisor to the emperor Ferdinand II and an intimate of the Polish king Władysław IV, Magni worked tirelessly as a religious mediator for nearly fifty years. This article investigates his ecumenical activity in two major arenas, Bohemia and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. In the Czech kingdom Magni collaborated with young Archbishop Harrach to counter the Jesuits' harsher policies of reCatholicisation while in Poland he endeavoured to reunite both Protestant and Orthodox communities with the Catholic Church.

The city name Man Kermen in The Secret History of the Mongols is identified with Kiev in the chapters concerning the great western Mongol campaign against Eastern Europe. It is based on the datum of Rashīd al-Dīn: ‘the great city of the Rus, which was called Man-Kermen.’ It is beyond doubt that the Cumans called Kiev as Man Kermen meaning Great Town in Turkic as the spiritual and ecclesiastic center of Kievan Rus. However, there is another possibility. The capital of the Volga Bulghars in the first decades of the 13th century has been excavated near to village Biljarsk. It is called by the contemporary sources as Velikij Gorod in the Russian annals, magna civitas in the work of the Hungarian friar, Julian both meaning Great Town.

The creation of the University of Mexico (1553) favoured the intensification of the processes of translation of normative knowledge between Europe and America, which had already begun with the arrival of the first Spanish conquistadores and missionaries to the New World. This article offers a synthesis of the recent historiography on the University of colonial Mexico, to be profiled as a missionary Studium, clearly differentiated from the European models with which it has tended to be compared (in particular, Salamanca). Focusing on the printed works of the Augustinian friar Alonso de la Vera Cruz (1507-84), one of the first teachers at the University of Mexico, we find representative examples of the type of propaedeutic teaching of the Arts (Logic, Natural Philosophy) which was common in the particular academic context of 16th-century New Spain. On the other hand, the theological production of Vera Cruz illustrates well the strategies of flexibilization and localization that were put into practice in order to successfully translate the preexisting Christian normativity to unforeseen and challenging contexts.

In 1570, the Franciscan friar Jerónimo de Mendieta bestowed a rare gift on Juan de Ovando, then president of the Council of Indies. Mendieta placed in Ovando's hands a small manuscript volume in superb Gothic script with illuminated initials and color illustrations, one of several important manuscripts he had brought to Spain for various prominent recipients. Were it not for its contents, one could have thought it a meticulous version of a breviary or a book of hours, but its contents were unprecedented. This tome contained a scholarly Nahuatl translation of the most popular devotional work in Western Europe in the previous century. It was Thomas à Kempis's Imitation of Christ, which caught Iberian Christians under its spell between the 1460s and the early sixteenth century by means of multiple Latin editions and translations into Portuguese, Catalan, and Spanish, including a version in aljamiado (Spanish in Arabic characters). Indeed, a decisive turning point in the Iberian reception of this work had taken place three decades earlier, through the 1536 publication of Juan de Ávila's influential Spanish-language adaptation.

Abstract Christian missionaries play an important role in the history of the relationship between China and Europe. Their presence in China has been widely explored, but little attention has been paid to the role played by the Bible in their preaching. From 13th to 19th century, although they did not translate the Bible, Catholic missionaries preached the Gospel orally or with catechisms. On the other hand, the Protestant missionaries had published many version of the Chinese Bible throughout the 19th century. It was only in the 20th century that the Franciscan friar Gabriele Allegra decided to go to China as a missionary to translate the Holy Scriptures into Chinese. He arrived in China in 1931 and translated from 1935 to 1961. He also founded a biblical study centre to prepare expert scholars to collaborate in the Bible translation. Allegra and his colleagues completed the translation in 1961, and the first complete single-volume Catholic Bible in Chinese was published in 1968. After presenting the historical background of Allegra’s activity, a textual analysis of some passages of his translation will be presented, emphasizing the meanings of the Chinese words he chose to use to translate particular elements of Christian terminology. This study will verify the closeness of the work by Allegra to the original Greek text and the validity of some particular translation choices.

As regards the Mongols, our knowledge of their history, of their customs, of their way of life, our relations with them, England presents an interesting case. We do not know the extent of the material lost on the Continent, but, in this (for the Mongols) remote corner of Europe, (in places safe from their devastation) documentation is to be found. A monk of Saint Albans, the chronicler Matthew Paris who died in 1259, is an important source. He was the only person to preserve Ivo of Narbonne's confession (which reveals that an Englishman was one of the first envoys of the Mongols to King Bela of Hungary), the report of Bishop Peter of Russia given at the council of Lyons in 1245 and information about André of Longjumeau's mission after the council. Incidently, twice at the end of hisChronica Majora, in an entry for the year 1257, Matthew Paris refers to a manuscript concerning ‘Tartarorum immunditias, vitam (spurcissimam) et mores (…) necnon et Assessinorum furorem et superstitionem’. It is the same work which is mentioned by John of Oxnead, in his Chronka under the year 1258, as a written command (mandatum scriptum) sent to Simon de Montfort, containing letters the length of a Psalter, and entitledDe vita et moribus Tartarorum(…)et de eorum fortitudine etguerra, et de adquisitionibuswhich was to be found in the book of Additions. Unfortunately this work has not survived. (Nevertheless it is tempting to see here a mention of William of Rubruck's report of his journey, which has the form of a letter and which was written in 1257, but which has little information about the Assassins. Later another Englishman, the Franciscan friar Roger Bacon († 1294) met William of Rubruck and became interested in the Mongols.)

‘This city has a circular form, and such a marvellous roundness is the sign of its perfection. A trench of surprising beauty and breadth surrounds this city and contains, not a swamp or a putrid pool, but living water from fountains stocked with fish and crayfish.’ For friar Bonvesin de la Riva at the end of the thirteenth century, as for most of his successors, glorifying Milan consisted of singing the praises of its running water. Abundant, regular, gushing water was everywhere; it was ‘marvellous to drink, clear, healthy, within reach of the hand’.This praise is evidently for the geographical situation of Milan, which brought it harmony and wealth. But it is also for the Milanese themselves, who brought running water from the rivers to the Lombard capital. Milan, after all, was naturally ‘Medio-Amnium’, at an equal distance from the two rivers (the Ticino and the Adda) that flowed around it. At the end of the Middle Ages, it was at the centre of the most immense system of navigable rivers in Europe, and it owed this condition to three centuries of effort during which the communal power, but also private initiatives, had dug the canals and connected the streams. Water became the vital element in the economy, and the development of Milan multiplied the concurrent, sometimes rival uses of it. How could stagnant water from trenches be reconciled with that of the navigable rivers? How could it be ensured that the water that irrigated the garden would also supply the needs of the paper mill? There were many economic contradictions that could be resolved only by an equitable and measured sharing of the water. At the same time, the growing strength of the seigniorial and territorial state sought to appropriate the management of the water to itself. If the prince succeeded in guaranteeing a supply of clean water, which flowed constantly for the good of the whole community, he would have found the best way not only of participating in the development of his city but also of ensuring that his own power was retained.

The historical research of the illustrated Nuremberg Chronicle [Schedelsche Weltchronik (English: Schedel’s World Chronicle)] of Hartmann Schedel com­prises the complex historical knowledge about numerous woodcuts which pre­sent views of various cities important in the world’s history, e.g. Jerusalem, Constantinople, or the European ones such as: Rome, some Italian, German or Polish cities e.g. Wrocław and Cracow; some Hungarian and some Czech Republic cities. Researchers have made a serious study to recognize certain constructions in the woodcuts; they indicated the conservative and contractual architecture, the existing places and the unrealistic (non-existent) places. The results show that there is a common detail in all the views – the defensive wall round each of the described cities. However, in reality, it may not have existed in some cities during the lifetime of the authors of the woodcuts. As for some further details: behind the walls we can see feudal castles on the hills shown as strongholds. Within the defensive walls there are numerous buildings with many towers typical for the Middle Ages and true-to-life in certain ways of building the cities. Schematically drawn buildings surrounded by the ring of defensive walls indicate that the author used certain patterns based on the previously created panoramic views. This article is an attempt of making analogical comparisons of the cities in medieval painting. The Author of the article presents Roman mosaics and the miniature painting e.g. the ones created in the scriptorium in Reichenau. Since the beginning of 14th century Italian painters such as: Duccio di Buoninsegna, Giotto di Bondone, Simone Martini and Ambrogio Lorenzetti painted parts of the cities or the entire monumental panoramas in various compositions and with various meanings. One defining rule in this painting concerned the definitions of the cities given by Saint Isidore of Seville, based on the rules which he knew from the antique tradition. These are: urbs – the cities full of architecture and buildings but uninhabited or civita – the city, the living space of the human life, build-up space, engaged according to the law, kind of work and social hierarchy. The tra­dition of both ways of describing the city is rooted in Italy. This article indicates the particular meaning of Italian painting in distributing the image of the city – as the votive offering. The research conducted by Chiara Frugoni and others indica­ted the meaning of the city images in the painting of various forms of panegyrics created in high praise of cities, known as laude (Lat.). We can find the examples of them rooted in the Roman tradition of mosaics, e.g. in San Apollinare Nuovo in Ravenna. They present both palatium and civitas. The medieval Italian painting, especially the panel painting, presents the city structure models which are uninha­bited and deprived of any signs of everyday life. The models of cities – urbs, are presented as votive offerings devoted to their patron saints, especially to Virgin Mary. The city shaped as oval or sinusoidal rings surrounded by the defensive walls resembled a container filled with buildings. Only few of them reflected the existing cities and could mainly be identified thanks to the inscriptions. The most characteristic examples were: the fresco of Taddeo di Bartolo in Palazzo Publico in Siena, which presented the Dominican Order friar Ambrogio Sansedoni holding the model of his city – Siena, with its most recognizable building - the Cathedral dedicated to the Assumption of Mary. The same painter, referred to as the master painter of the views of the cities as the votive offerings, painted the Saint Antilla with the model of Montepulciano in the painting from 1401 for the Cathedral devoted to the Assumption of Mary in Montepulciano. In the painting made by T. di Bartolo, the bishop of the city of Gimignano, Saint Gimignano, presents the city in the shape of a round lens surrounded by defence walls with numerous church towers and the feudal headquarters characteristic for the city. His dummer of the city is pyramidally-structured, the hills are mounted on the steep slopes reflecting the analogy to the topography of the city. We can also find the texts of songs, laude (Lat.) and panegyrics created in honour of the cities and their rulers, e.g. the texts in honour of Milan, Bonvesin for La Riva, known in Europe at that time. The city – Arcadia (utopia) in the modern style. Hartman Schedel, as a bibliophile and a scholar, knew the texts of medieval writers and Italian art but, as an ambitious humanist, he could not disregard the latest, contemporary trends of Renaissance which were coming from Nuremberg and from Italian ci­ties. The views of Arcadia – the utopian city, were rapidly developing, as they were of great importance for the rich recipient in the beginning of the modern era overwhelmed by the early capitalism. It was then when the two opposites were combined – the shepherd and the knight, the Greek Arcadia with the medie­val city. The reception of Virgil’s Arcadia in the medieval literature and art was being developed again in the elite circles at the end of 15th century. The cultural meaning of the historical loci, the Greek places of the ancient history and the memory of Christianity constituted the essence of historicism in the Renaissance at the courts of the Comnenos and of the Palaiologos dynasty, which inspired the Renaissance of the Latin culture circle. The pastoral idleness concept came from Venice where Virgil’s books were published in print in 1470, the books of Ovid: Fasti and Metamorphoses were published in 1497 and Sannazaro’s Arcadia was published in 1502, previously distributed in his handwriting since 1480. Literature topics presented the historical works as memoria, both ancient and Christian, composed into the images. The city maps drawn by Hartmann Schedel, the doctor and humanist from Nurnberg, refer to the medieval images of urbs, the woodcuts with the cities, known to the author from the Italian painting of the greatest masters of the Trecenta period. As a humanist he knew the literature of the Renaissance of Florence and Venice with the Arcadian themes of both the Greek and the Roman tradition. The view of Constantinople in the context of the contemporary political situation, is presented in a series of monuments of architecture, with columns and defensive walls, which reminded of the history of the city from its greatest time of Constantine the Great, Justinian I and the Comnenus dynasty. Schedel’s work of art is the sum of the knowledge written down or painted. It is also the result of the experiments of new technology. It is possible that Schedel was inspired by the hymns, laude, written by Psellos in honour of Constantinople in his elaborate ecphrases as the panegyrics for the rulers of the Greek dynasty – the Macedonians. Already in that time, the Greek ideal of beauty was reborn, both in literature and in fine arts. The illustrated History of the World presented in Schedel’s woodcuts is given to the recipients who are educated and to those who are anonymous, in the spirit of the new anthropology. It results from the nature of the woodcut reproduc­tion, that is from the way of copying the same images. The artist must have strived to gain the recipients for his works as the woodcuts were created both in Latin and in German. The collected views were supposed to transfer historical, biblical and mythological knowledge in the new way of communication.

Abstract In 2018, Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg began a school strike that quickly spread across the globe. After a ritual strike every Friday by school pupils to call for urgent action against climate change had gone on for several months, what had become Fridays for Future (FFF) called for various global days of action throughout 2019, bringing millions of people out onto the streets in the largest climate protests in world history. Drawing on unique protest survey data on FFF events across European cities in 2019, this article explores the structural bases of organized collective mobilization for climate justice. Nuancing narratives that focus on either the privileged background of climate justice protesters or the environmentalism of the poor, our results show the heterogeneity of the social composition of the protests, suggesting the need for cross-class alliances for mass mobilizations. Moreover, our analysis reveals that the social background of protesters shaped their attitudes regarding what institutions and approaches can be relied upon to tackle climate and environmental challenges. This suggests an important and under-studied connection between social background and the strategic choices of environmental movements.

The roads to becoming a palaeontologist or contributing to the discipline are many and varied and for women, often tortuous. Concentrating on early to mid 20th century women in Europe brings to light some of the ways in which women survived in the field of vertebrate palaeontology (VP) studying from the earliest fish to our own human relatives. Only are few are known: e.g., in Britain (Pearson, Steen, Rayner), France (Friant, Dechaseaux), Germany (Edinger, von Huene), Hungary (Mottl), The Netherlands (Schreuder, Sanders,), Romania (von Nopsca), and Sweden (Carlsson, Christie-Lind). It is not always easy to unravel the whys and hows of their scientific contributions or even the basic details of their lives but new historical research has brought to light over 1200 women in VP. Their paths to contributing to VP and the difficulties overcome add to the history of women in science and may inspire others to choose a life in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM).

This article tries to understand the travels of Ippolito Desideri to Tibet in the context of the recent work by Alison Gopnik. The central claim of Alison Gopnik is that the western philosopher David Hume’s works were significantly influenced by Tibetan Buddhism. Gopnik focuses on one aspect: the absence of a creator in Tibetan Buddhism that the Italian friar and traveller to Tibet, Ippolito Desideri, writes about, which she says was picked up by David Hume. Gopnik’s claim is based on the possibility that Desideri’s work was part of a Jesuit library in La Fleche, France. Hume frequented this library, which was part of a Jesuit knowledge network. In this article, some aspects of Desideri’s travels are analysed in the broader context of knowledge transfer from Tibet to Europe. Beginning with a description of the isolated context of Tibet and the larger context of knowledge flows that show some examples of ideas travelling from Asia and Africa to the West, the article then proceeds to examine selected aspects of the travels of Desideri. In his travels, we see that not only has Desideri acquired an intimate knowledge of Tibetan Buddhism but also documented in detail many minute aspects of Tibetan life. Further, his treatment of the religious practices of the Tibetans and their denial of a Creator is sufficient proof of the Tibetan source of this idea. This material has the potential to provide an elaborate base for a paradigm shift in the western world’s understanding of David Hume’s contribution. As Desideri travelled through different regions of the Indian subcontinent, his writings on Tibet remain uninfluenced by these biases. The article concludes by saying that there is a strong possibility that Tibetan ideas could have reached the West through Ippolito Desideri’s works.

Sticky, messy and nauseatingly saccharine, the sensory properties of jam may be a long way from the stylized corporate polish of Australia’s multi-billion dollar film exhibition industry, yet the history of Australian cinema space will be forever indebted to the Victoria Preserving Company; one-time producer of the humblest of sweet treats. Through an analysis of Melbourne’s Jam Factory cinema complex, this article explores the unusual intersection of jam, sensory gratification and contemporary Australian cinema-going at the dawn of the 21st century. Encompassing the historic architecture of the former Victoria Preserving Company, South Yarra’s Jam Factory complex provides a gentrified gloss to an inner suburban precinct historically renowned for the manufacturing of jam and preserves. Nestled in the heart of Chapel Street, less than two blocks down from Toorak road and a stone’s throw from the nightclub precinct of Commercial road, the Jam Factory occupies an important part of Melbourne’s cultural heritage; functioning as a quintessential signifier of the city’s traversal from wholesale manufacturing during the early 1900s into the service vectors of digital media technologies and mixed-use retail entertainment destinations at the start of the new millennium. Established in 1876, the Victoria Preserving Company, AKA the ‘Jam Factory’, hosts an array of diverse retail and leisure outlets. Included amongst its tenants are Borders Books, Villa & Hut, TGI Fridays, The Pancake Parlour, a Virgin Music Mega-store, an elaborate Village Cinema megaplex, and a range of ancillary restaurants, fashion stores and cafes. According to the venue’s promotional material, “The Jam Factory of today is, in short, ‘jam packed’ with entertainment” (Chapel St Precinct, n.pag.). With the original building’s façade and cooling store still intact, the architectural remnants of the Victoria Preserving Factory provide a culturally significant backdrop for what is ostensibly Australia’s most noteworthy cinema venture; Village Roadshow’s megaplex cinema flagship. Replete with fifteen large format screens, including two Gold Class cinemas, a Cinema Europa enclave and an interactive games alcove, The Village Jam Factory signifies Australia’s first foray into cinema-based retail entertainment destinations. In commenting on the opening of the Jam Factory megaplex in 1998, Village Roadshow’s general manager Mr. David Herman said, “The objective was to create Australia’s first non-gambling cinema and lifestyle complex” (Catalano 6). More than any other cinema venue, the Village Jam Factory played a key role in pushing Australian film exhibition standards into the new millennium. In an era marked by competing home theatre technologies and diversified sites of media consumption, the Jam Factory’s shift from suburban cinema to lifestyle complex dramatically altered both the business and social practice of movie-going in Australia. Central to this shift was a tripartite marketing strategy which sought to capitalize on: protracted movie-going experiences; sensory stimulation; and, venue promotion. Experiential Jam The promotion of a protracted movie-going experience has been essential to the continued success of the Village Jam Factory. As I have argued elsewhere, the Australian cinema industry of the mid 1990s faced a number of significant incentives for extending the movie going experience beyond the auditorium; not the least being the steady decline of box office takings that occurred during the late 1980s (Downing). In the face of new media technologies such as the internet, DVD and Pay TV, many cinema operators were forced to look beyond the box office as a primary source of profits. To this end Village Roadshow effectively used the Jam Factory as a testing ground for the generation of ancillary leisure and retail income streams. During the mid 1990s Village actively promoted the Jam Factory as a space in which audiences could not only see a film, but also engage in a series of expanded retail activities such as shopping, dining and video-game playing. Discussing the development of multi-use cinema venues during the 1990s, Charles Acland has commented that such spaces “…do not situate conditions of spectatorship alone; they also construct relations between public and cinematic practices” (Acland 119). Sensory Jam Far from being a traditional site of film consumption, the Jam Factory set an industry precedent by becoming the nation’s first cinema venue in which audiences were encouraged to engage in an entertainment experience that was, above all, aimed at stimulating the senses. In keeping with the ‘lifestyle destination’ mantra, the Village Jam Factory provided a new generation of Australians with a multi-sensory entertainment experience that could not be emulated by home theatre technologies. Wide sweeping foyers and elaborate ticket and merchandising counters greet the eye; ‘luxury’ stadium seating with wide aisles and broad armrests offer the ‘ultimate’ in tactile comfort; digital surround sound facilities pleasure the ears and a plethora of food and beverage novelties work to gratify the senses of taste and smell. More than any other Village cinema outlet, the Jam Factory venue smacks of sugar-coated commerce. With a revenue contribution of over 18%, the Village Roadshow candy bar is the undisputed cash-cow of the enterprise (Australian Film Commission 143). Colloquially known as ‘Lollywood’, the Village confectionary counter is an over-priced explosion of colour and candy that sustains industry revenue through a deliberate appeal to the audience’s sense of taste. This sugar dependency synchronistically mirrors the former success of Henry Jones, the entrepreneur behind Australia’s IXL jam brand, who operated his famous preserving company on the site between 1895 and 1926 (Chapel St Precinct, n.pag.). Venue Jam Village Roadshow’s promotion of the Jam Factory venue over the actual films being screened is indicative of Australia’s primary shift towards retail entertainment based cinema complexes. Unlike the homogenous multiplex venues of the 1970s and 1980s, the Village Jam Factory Complex has been aggressively marketed as a Melbourne icon, capable of offering a unique entertainment experience. This agenda is clearly documented in the 1999 Village Roadshow annual report which, pointing towards a perceived threat of home theatre technologies, proclaimed: [In] broadening the cinema going experience … [Village] aims to create an environment of quality entertainment theming and ancillary lifestyle retailing, thus providing a consistently high level of incentive for people to leave their homes for cinema anchored destinations. (Village Roadshow 19) To this end, the Jam Factory became the physical embodiment of Village Cinemas’ corporate tagline “Where Movies Live” (Village Cinemas, n.pag.). Throughout the late 1990s, a number of similar sites proliferated across Europe, the United States and Canada. Two noteworthy examples of this trend are the Manchester Times building in the UK (initially managed by a short lived Village-Warner synergy) and the Sony Centre at Potsdamer Platz, Berlin; previous home to the Third Reich and later, the Berlin Wall. In both of these examples a similar venue-promotion agenda is clearly at work. In reflecting the cultural specificities of their host cities, each of these venues pays a semiotic homage to the previous occupants of their space. The Manchester Times building, for example, retains much of its former architecture and reflects the nocturnal vibrancy of 19th century printing plant. Similarly, the Sony Centre offers an architectural reflection on the complexities of Berlin history and German cinema. In Melbourne, the Jam Factory’s history of jam and jam making are equally preserved. Drawing heavily on postmodern architectural styles, the Jam Factory’s interior uses South Yarra’s local history as a backdrop for a schizophrenic collage of seemingly incommensurate time/place references. From the distinctive red-brick cooling tower (located in the centre of the building) one encounters a hybrid fusion of Mediterranean pasta courts, European coffee lounges, Romanesque artwork and columns (complete with weathered-look paint and ‘crumbling’ tops), statues of Hollywood stars, as well as a dazzling gaming alcove and a series of subdued ‘luxury’ (Gold Class) cinemas. Such eclectic displays of visual hyperbole have been prefigured by Umberto Eco, whose discussion on hyperreality addresses an imagination which “… demands the real thing, and in order to attain it, must fabricate the absolute fake” (Eco 8). As a relatively recent contributor to Australian cinema history, the Village Jam Factory has achieved little sustained academic attention, yet its significance must not be undervalued. As Australia’s first cinema-oriented retail entertainment destination, the Village Jam Factory has been crucial in placing Australia into the global film exhibition arena. While the pungent aromas of ripened fruit, vinegar and boiling sugar have long since been replaced by the scent of popcorn and recycled air, the legacy and architecture of jam-making has played a key role in propelling Australian film exhibition into the new millennium. References Acland, Charles. Screen Traffic: Movies, Multiplexes and Global Culture. Durham: Duke UP, 2003. Australian Film Commission. Get the Picture. Sydney: Australian Film Commission, 2001. Catalano, Anthony. “Village to Extend Jam Factory to 14 Cinemas.” The Age 5 Aug. 1998. Chapel St Precinct. General History of Chapel Street & Surrounds. 2006. 30 Dec. 2006 http://www.chapelstreet.com.au/default.asp?mode=history>. Downing, Leanne. “More than Meets the Eye: The Suburban Cinema Megaplex as Sensory Heterotopia.” Refractory: Journal of Media and Culture 8 (2005). http://www.refractory.unimelb.edu.au/journalissues/vol8/downing.html>. Eco, Umberto. Travels in Hyper Reality. Orlando Florida: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986. Village Cinemas. 2006. 30 Dec. 2006. http://www.villagecinemas.com.au/>. Village Roadshow. Annual Report. Melbourne: Village Roadshow, 1999. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Downing, Leanne. "Sensory Jam: How the Victoria Preserving Company Pushed Australian Cinema Space into the New Millennium." M/C Journal 9.6 (2006). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0612/05-downing.php>. APA Style Downing, L. (Dec. 2006) "Sensory Jam: How the Victoria Preserving Company Pushed Australian Cinema Space into the New Millennium," M/C Journal, 9(6). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0612/05-downing.php>.

At a time when a trip abroad was out of the reach of most women, even if they could not make the journey, Australian women could imagine “abroad” just by reading popular women’s magazines such as Woman (later Woman’s Day and Home then Woman’s Day) and The Australian Women’s Weekly, and journals, such as The Progressive Woman and The Housewife. Increasingly in the post-war period, these magazines and journals contained advertisements for holidaying abroad, recipes for international foods and articles on overseas fashions. It was not unusual for local manufacturers, to use the lure of travel and exotic places as a way of marketing their goods. Healing Bicycles, for example, used the slogan “In Venice men go to work on Gondolas: In Australia it’s a Healing” (“Healing Cycles” 40), and Exotiq cosmetics featured landscapes of countries where Exotiq products had “captured the hearts of women who treasured their loveliness: Cincinnati, Milan, New York, Paris, Geneva and Budapest” (“Exotiq Cosmetics” 36).Unlike Homer’s Penelope, who stayed at home for twenty years waiting for Odysseus to return from the Trojan wars, women have always been on the move to the same extent as men. Their rich travel stories (Riggal, Haysom, Lancaster)—mostly written as letters and diaries—remain largely unpublished and their experiences are not part of the public record to the same extent as the travel stories of men. Ros Pesman argues that the women traveller’s voice was one of privilege and authority full of excitement and disbelief (Pesman 26). She notes that until well into the second part of the twentieth century, “the journey for Australian women to Europe was much more than a return to the sources of family identity and history” (19). It was also:a pilgrimage to the centres and sites of culture, literature and history and an encounter with “the real world.”Europe, and particularly London,was also the place of authority and reference for all those seeking accreditation and recognition, whether as real writers, real ladies or real politicians and statesmen. (19)This article is about two Australian writers; Helen Seager, a journalist employed by The Argus, a daily newspaper in Melbourne Australia, and Gwen Hughes, a graduate of Emily McPherson College of Domestic Economy in Melbourne, working in England as a lecturer, demonstrator and cookbook writer for Parkinsons’ Stove Company. Helen Seager travelled to England on an assignment for The Argus in 1950 and sent articles each day for publication in the women’s section of the newspaper. Gwen Hughes travelled extensively in the Balkans in the 1930s recording her impressions, observations, and recipes for traditional foods whilst working for Parkinsons in England. These women were neither returning to the homeland for an encounter with the real world, nor were they there as cultural tourists in the Cook’s Tour sense of the word. They were professional writers and their observations about the places they visited offer fresh and lively versions of England and Europe, its people, places, and customs.Helen SeagerAustralian Journalist Helen Seager (1901–1981) wrote a daily column, Good Morning Ma’am in the women’s pages of The Argus, from 1947 until shortly after her return from abroad in 1950. Seager wrote human interest stories, often about people of note (Golding), but with a twist; a Baroness who finds knitting exciting (Seager, “Baroness” 9) and ballet dancers backstage (Seager, “Ballet” 10). Much-loved by her mainly female readership, in May 1950 The Argus sent her to England where she would file a daily report of her travels. Whilst now we take travel for granted, Seager was sent abroad with letters of introduction from The Argus, stating that she was travelling on a special editorial assignment which included: a certificate signed by the Lord Mayor of The City of Melbourne, seeking that any courtesies be extended on her trip to England, the Continent, and America; a recommendation from the Consul General of France in Australia; and introductions from the Premier’s Department, the Premier of Victoria, and Austria’s representative in Australia. All noted the nature of her trip, her status as an esteemed reporter for a Melbourne newspaper, and requested that any courtesy possible to be made to her.This assignment was an indication that The Argus valued its women readers. Her expenses, and those of her ten-year-old daughter Harriet, who accompanied her, were covered by the newspaper. Her popularity with her readership is apparent by the enthusiastic tone of the editorial article covering her departure. Accompanied with a photograph of Seager and Harriet boarding the aeroplane, her many women readers were treated to their first ever picture of what she looked like:THOUSANDS of "Argus" readers, particularly those in the country, have wanted to know what Helen Seager looks like. Here she is, waving good-bye as she left on the first stage of a trip to England yesterday. She will be writing her bright “Good Morning, Ma'am” feature as she travels—giving her commentary on life abroad. (The Argus, “Goodbye” 1)Figure 1. Helen Seager and her daughter Harriet board their flight for EnglandThe first article “From Helen in London” read,our Helen Seager, after busy days spent exploring England with her 10-year-old daughter, Harriet, today cabled her first “Good Morning, Ma’am” column from abroad. Each day from now on she will report from London her lively impressions in an old land, which is delightfully new to her. (Seager, “From Helen” 3)Whilst some of her dispatches contain the impressions of the awestruck traveller, for the most they are exquisitely observed stories of the everyday and the ordinary, often about the seemingly most trivial of things, and give a colourful, colonial and egalitarian impression of the places that she visits. A West End hair-do is described, “as I walked into that posh looking establishment, full of Louis XV, gold ornateness to be received with bows from the waist by numerous satellites, my first reaction was to turn and bolt” (Seager, “West End” 3).When she visits Oxford’s literary establishments, she is, for this particular article, the awestruck Australian:In Oxford, you go around saying, soto voce and aloud, “Oh, ye dreaming spires of Oxford.” And Matthew Arnold comes alive again as a close personal friend.In a weekend, Ma’am, I have seen more of Oxford than lots of native Oxonians. I have stood and brooded over the spit in Christ Church College’s underground kitchens on which the oxen for Henry the Eighth were roasted.I have seen the Merton Library, oldest in Oxford, in which the chains that imprisoned the books are still to be seen, and have added by shoe scrape to the stone steps worn down by 500 years of walkers. I have walked the old churches, and I have been lost in wonder at the goodly virtues of the dead. And then, those names of Oxford! Holywell, Tom’s Quad, Friars’ Entry, and Long Wall. The gargoyles at Magdalen and the stones untouched by bombs or war’s destruction. It adds a new importance to human beings to know that once, if only, they too have walked and stood and stared. (Seager, “From Helen” 3)Her sense of wonder whilst in Oxford is, however, moderated by the practicalities of travel incorporated into the article. She continues to describe the warnings she was given, before her departure, of foreign travel that had her alarmed about loss and theft, and the care she took to avoid both. “It would have made you laugh, Ma’am, could you have seen the antics to protect personal property in the countries in transit” (Seager, “From Helen” 3).Her description of a trip to Blenheim Palace shows her sense of fun. She does not attempt to describe the palace or its contents, “Blenheim Palace is too vast and too like a great Government building to arouse much envy,” settling instead on a curiosity should there be a turn of events, “as I surged through its great halls with a good-tempered, jostling mob I couldn’t help wondering what those tired pale-faced guides would do if the mob mood changed and it started on an old-fashioned ransack.” Blenheim palace did not impress her as much as did the Sunday crowd at the palace:The only thing I really took a fancy to were the Venetian cradle, which was used during the infancy of the present Duke and a fine Savvonerie carpet in the same room. What I never wanted to see again was the rubbed-fur collar of the lady in front.Sunday’s crowd was typically English, Good tempered, and full of Cockney wit, and, if you choose to take your pleasures in the mass, it is as good a company as any to be in. (Seager, “We Look” 3)In a description of Dublin and the Dubliners, Seager describes the food-laden shops: “Butchers’ shops leave little room for customers with their great meat carcasses hanging from every hook. … English visitors—and Dublin is awash with them—make an orgy of the cakes that ooze real cream, the pink and juicy hams, and the sweets that demand no points” (Seager, “English” 6). She reports on the humanity of Dublin and Dubliners, “Dublin has a charm that is deep-laid. It springs from the people themselves. Their courtesy is overlaid with a real interest in humanity. They walk and talk, these Dubliners, like Kings” (ibid.).In Paris she melds the ordinary with the noteworthy:I had always imagined that the outside of the Louvre was like and big art gallery. Now that I know it as a series of palaces with courtyards and gardens beyond description in the daytime, and last night, with its cleverly lighted fountains all aplay, its flags and coloured lights, I will never forget it.Just now, down in the street below, somebody is packing the boot of a car to go for, presumably, on a few days’ jaunt. There is one suitcase, maybe with clothes, and on the footpath 47 bottles of the most beautiful wines in the world. (Seager, “When” 3)She writes with a mix of awe and ordinary:My first glimpse of that exciting vista of the Arc de Triomphe in the distance, and the little bistros that I’ve always wanted to see, and all the delights of a new city, […] My first day in Paris, Ma’am, has not taken one whit from the glory that was London. (ibid.) Figure 2: Helen Seager in ParisIt is my belief that Helen Seager intended to do something with her writings abroad. The articles have been cut from The Argus and pasted onto sheets of paper. She has kept copies of the original reports filed whist she was away. The collection shows her insightful egalitarian eye and a sharp humour, a mix of awesome and commonplace.On Bastille Day in 1950, Seager wrote about the celebrations in Paris. Her article is one of exuberant enthusiasm. She writes joyfully about sirens screaming overhead, and people in the street, and looking from windows. Her article, published on 19 July, starts:Paris Ma’am is a magical city. I will never cease to be grateful that I arrived on a day when every thing went wrong, and watched it blossom before my eyes into a gayness that makes our Melbourne Cup gala seem funeral in comparison.Today is July 14.All places of business are closed for five days and only the places of amusement await the world.Parisians are tireless in their celebrations.I went to sleep to the music of bands, dancing feet and singing voices, with the raucous but cheerful toots from motors splitting the night air onto atoms. (Seager, “When” 3)This article resonates uneasiness. How easily could those scenes of celebration on Bastille Day in 1950 be changed into the scenes of carnage on Bastille Day 2016, the cheerful toots of the motors transformed into cries of fear, the sirens in the sky from aeroplanes overhead into the sirens of ambulances and police vehicles, as a Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, as part of a terror attack drives a truck through crowds of people celebrating in Nice.Gwen HughesGwen Hughes graduated from Emily Macpherson College of Domestic Economy with a Diploma of Domestic Science, before she travelled to England to take up employment as senior lecturer and demonstrator of Parkinson’s England, a company that manufactured electric and gas stoves. Hughes wrote in her unpublished manuscript, Balkan Fever, that it was her idea of making ordinary cooking demonstration lessons dramatic and homelike that landed her the job in England (Hughes, Balkan 25-26).Her cookbook, Perfect Cooking, was produced to encourage housewives to enjoy cooking with their Parkinson’s modern cookers with the new Adjusto temperature control. The message she had to convey for Parkinsons was: “Cooking is a matter of putting the right ingredients together and cooking them at the right temperature to achieve a given result” (Hughes, Perfect 3). In reality, Hughes used this cookbook as a vehicle to share her interest in and love of Continental food, especially food from the Balkans where she travelled extensively in the 1930s.Recipes of Continental foods published in Perfect Cooking sit seamlessly alongside traditional British foods. The section on soup, for example, contains recipes for Borscht, a very good soup cooked by the peasants of Russia; Minestrone, an everyday Italian soup; Escudella, from Spain; and Cream of Spinach Soup from France (Perfect 22-23). Hughes devoted a whole chapter to recipes and descriptions of Continental foods labelled “Fascinating Foods From Far Countries,” showing her love and fascination with food and travel. She started this chapter with the observation:There is nearly as much excitement and romance, and, perhaps fear, about sampling a “foreign dish” for the “home stayer” as there is in actually being there for the more adventurous “home leaver”. Let us have a little have a little cruise safe within the comfort of our British homes. Let us try and taste the good things each country is famed for, all the while picturing the romantic setting of these dishes. (Hughes, Perfect 255)Through her recipes and descriptive passages, Hughes took housewives in England and Australia into the strange and wonderful kitchens of exotic women: Madame Darinka Jocanovic in Belgrade, Miss Anicka Zmelova in Prague, Madame Mrskosova at Benesova. These women taught her to make wonderful-sounding foods such as Apfel Strudel, Knedlikcy, Vanilla Kipfel and Christmas Stars. “Who would not enjoy the famous ‘Goose with Dumplings,’” she declares, “in the company of these gay, brave, thoughtful people with their romantic history, their gorgeously appareled peasants set in their richly picturesque scenery” (Perfect 255).It is Hughes’ unpublished manuscript Balkan Fever, written in Melbourne in 1943, to which I now turn. It is part of the Latrobe Heritage collection at the State Library of Victoria. Her manuscript was based on her extensive travels in the Balkans in the 1930s whilst she lived and worked in England, and it was, I suspect, her intention to seek publication.In her twenties, Hughes describes how she set off to the Balkans after meeting a fellow member of the Associated Country Women of the World (ACWW) at the Royal Yugoslav Legation. He was an expert on village life in the Balkans and advised her, that as a writer she would get more information from the local villagers than she would as a tourist. Hughes, who, before television gave cooking demonstrations on the radio, wrote, “I had been writing down recipes and putting them in books for years and of course the things one talks about over the air have to be written down first—that seemed fair enough” (Hughes, Balkan 25-26). There is nothing of the awestruck traveller in Hughes’ richly detailed observations of the people and the places that she visited. “Travelling in the Balkans is a very different affair from travelling in tourist-conscious countries where you just leave it to Cooks. You must either have unlimited time at your disposal, know the language or else have introductions that will enable the right arrangements to be made for you” (Balkan 2), she wrote. She was the experiential tourist, deeply immersed in her surroundings and recording food culture and society as it was.Hughes acknowledged that she was always drawn away from the cities to seek the real life of the people. “It’s to the country district you must go to find the real flavour of a country and the heart of its people—especially in the Balkans where such a large percentage of the population is agricultural” (Balkan 59). Her descriptions in Balkan Fever are a blend of geography, history, culture, national songs, folklore, national costumes, food, embroidery, and vivid observation of the everyday city life. She made little mention of stately homes or buildings. Her attitude to travel can be summed up in her own words:there are so many things to see and learn in the countries of the old world that, walking with eyes and mind wide open can be an immensely delightful pastime, even with no companion and nowhere to go. An hour or two spent in some unpretentious coffee house can be worth all the dinners at Quaglino’s or at The Ritz, if your companion is a good talker, a specialist in your subject, or knows something of the politics and the inner life of the country you are in. (Balkan 28)Rather than touring the grand cities, she was seduced by the market places with their abundance of food, colour, and action. Describing Sarajevo she wrote:On market day the main square is a blaze of colour and movement, the buyers no less colourful than the peasants who have come in from the farms around with their produce—cream cheese, eggs, chickens, fruit and vegetables. Handmade carpets hung up for sale against walls or from trees add their barbaric colour to the splendor of the scene. (Balkan 75)Markets she visited come to life through her vivid descriptions:Oh those markets, with the gorgeous colours, and heaped untidiness of the fruits and vegetables—paprika, those red and green peppers! Every kind of melon, grape and tomato contributing to the riot of colour. Then there were the fascinating peasant embroideries, laces and rich parts of old costumes brought in from the villages for sale. The lovely gay old embroideries were just laid out on a narrow carpet spread along the pavement or hung from a tree if one happened to be there. (Balkan 11)Perhaps it was her radio cooking shows that gave her the ability to make her descriptions sensorial and pictorial:We tasted luxurious foods, fish, chickens, fruits, wines, and liqueurs. All products of the country. Perfect ambrosial nectar of the gods. I was entirely seduced by the rose petal syrup, fragrant and aromatic, a red drink made from the petals of the darkest red roses. (Balkan 151)Ordinary places and everyday events are beautifully realised:We visited the cheese factory amongst other things. … It was curious to see in that far away spot such a quantity of neatly arranged cheeses in the curing chamber, being prepared for export, and in another room the primitive looking round balls of creamed cheese suspended from rafters. Later we saw trains of pack horses going over the mountains, and these were probably the bearers of these cheeses to Bitolj or Skoplje, whence they would be consigned further for export. (Balkan 182)ConclusionReading Seager and Hughes, one cannot help but be swept along on their travels and take part in their journeys. What is clear, is that they were inspired by their work, which is reflected in the way they wrote about the places they visited. Both sought out people and places that were, as Hughes so vividly puts it, not part of the Cook’s Tour. They travelled with their eyes wide open for experiences that were both new and normal, making their writing relevant even today. Written in Paris on Bastille Day 1950, Seager’s Bastille Day article is poignant when compared to Bastille Day in France in 2016. Hughes’s descriptions of Sarajevo are a far cry from the scenes of destruction in that city between 1992 and 1995. The travel writing of these two women offers us vivid impressions and images of the often unreported events, places, daily lives, and industry of the ordinary and the then every day, and remind us that the more things change, the more they stay the same.Pesman writes, “women have always been on the move and Australian women have been as numerous as passengers on the outbound ships as have men” (20), but the records of their travels seldom appear on the public record. Whilst their work-related writings are part of the public record (see Haysom; Lancaster; Riggal), this body of women’s travel writing has not received the attention it deserves. Hughes’ cookbooks, with their traditional Eastern European recipes and evocative descriptions of people and kitchens, are only there for the researcher who knows that cookbooks are a trove of valuable social and cultural material. Digital copies of Seager’s writing can be accessed on Trove (a digital repository), but there is little else about her or her body of writing on the public record.ReferencesThe Argus. “Goodbye Ma’am.” 26 May 1950: 1. <http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/22831285?searchTerm=Goodbye%20Ma%E2%80%99am%E2%80%99&searchLimits=l-title=13|||l-decade=195>.“Exotiq Cosmetics.” Advertisement. Woman 20 Aug. 1945: 36.Golding, Peter. “Just a Chattel of the Sale: A Mostly Light-Hearted Retrospective of a Diverse Life.” In Jim Usher, ed., The Argus: Life & Death of Newspaper. North Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing 2007.Haysom, Ida. Diaries and Photographs of Ida Haysom. <http://search.slv.vic.gov.au/MAIN:Everything:SLV_VOYAGER1637361>.“Healing Cycles.” Advertisement. Woman 27 Aug. 1945: 40. Hughes, Gwen. Balkan Fever. Unpublished Manuscript. State Library of Victoria, MS 12985 Box 3846/4. 1943.———. Perfect Cooking London: Parkinsons, c1940.Lancaster, Rosemary. Je Suis Australienne: Remarkable Women in France 1880-1945. Crawley WA: UWA Press, 2008.Pesman, Ros. “Overseas Travel of Australian Women: Sources in the Australian Manuscripts Collection of the State Library of Victoria.” The Latrobe Journal 58 (Spring 1996): 19-26.Riggal, Louie. (Louise Blanche.) Diary of Italian Tour 1905 February 21 - May 1. <http://search.slv.vic.gov.au/MAIN:Everything:SLV_VOYAGER1635602>.Seager, Helen. “Ballet Dancers Backstage.” The Argus 10 Aug. 1944: 10. <http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/11356057?searchTerm=Ballet%20Dancers%20Backstage&searchLimits=l-title=13|||l-decade=194>.———. “The Baroness Who Finds Knitting Exciting.” The Argus 1 Aug. 1944: 9. <http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/11354557?searchTerm=Helen%20seager%20Baroness&searchLimits=l-title=13|||l-decade=194>.———. “English Visitors Have a Food Spree in Eire.” The Argus 29 Sep. 1950: 6. <http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/22912011?searchTerm=English%20visitors%20have%20a%20spree%20in%20Eire&searchLimits=l-title=13|||l-decade=195>.———. “From Helen in London.” The Argus 20 June 1950: 3. <http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/22836738?searchTerm=From%20Helen%20in%20London&searchLimits=l-title=13|||l-decade=195>.———. “Helen Seager Storms Paris—Paris Falls.” The Argus 15 July 1950: 7.<http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/22906913?searchTerm=Helen%20Seager%20Storms%20Paris%E2%80%99&searchLimits=l-title=13|||l-decade=195>.———. “We Look over Blenheim Palace.” The Argus 28 Sep. 1950: 3. <http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/22902040?searchTerm=Helen%20Seager%20Its%20as%20a%20good%20a%20place%20as%20you%20would%20want%20to%20be&searchLimits=l-title=13|||l-decade=195>.———. “West End Hair-Do Was Fun.” The Argus 3 July 1950: 3. <http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/22913940?searchTerm=West%20End%20hair-do%20was%20fun%E2%80%99&searchLimits=l-title=13|||l-decade=195>.———. “When You Are in Paris on July 14.” The Argus 19 July 1950: 3. <http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/22906244?searchTerm=When%20you%20are%20in%20Paris%20on%20July%2014&searchLimits=l-title=13|||l-decade=195>.

IntroductionIn Britain, hunger is often hidden in the privacy of the home. Yet otherwise private hunger is currently being rendered public and visible in the growing queues at charity-run food banks, where emergency food parcels are distributed directly to those who cannot afford to feed themselves or their families adequately (Downing et al.; Caplan). Food banks, in providing emergency relief to those in need, are responses to crisis moments, actualised through an embodied feeling of hunger that cannot be alleviated. The growing queues at food banks not only render hidden hunger visible, but also serve as reminders of the corporeal vulnerability of the human body to political and socio-economic shifts.A consideration of corporeality allows us to view the world through the lived experiences of the body. Human beings are “creatures of the flesh” who understand and reason, act and interact with their environments through the body (Johnson 81). The growing academic interest in corporeality signifies what Judith Butler calls a “new bodily ontology” (2). However, as Butler highlights, the body is also vulnerable to injury and suffering. An application of this ontology to hunger draws attention to eating as essential to life, so the denial of food poses an existential threat to health and ultimately to survival. The body’s response to threat is the physiological experience of hunger as a craving or longing that is the “most bodily experience of need […] a visceral desire locatable in a void” in which an empty stomach “initiates” a series of sounds and pangs that “call for action” in the form of eating (Anderson 27). Food bank queues serve as visible public reminders of this precariousness and of how social conditions can limit the ability of individuals to feed themselves, and so respond to an existential threat.Corporeal vulnerability made visible elicits responses that support societal interventions to feed the hungry, or that stigmatise hungry people by withdrawing or disparaging what limited support is available. Responses to vulnerability therefore evoke nurture and care or violence and abuse, and so in this sense are ambiguous (Butler; Cavarero). The responses are also normative, shaped by social and cultural understandings of what hunger is, what its causes are, and whether it is seen as originating in personal or societal failings. The stigmatising of individuals by blaming them for their hunger is closely allied to the feelings of shame that lie at the “irreducible absolutist core” of the idea of poverty (Sen 159). Shame is where the “internally felt inadequacies” of the impoverished individual and the “externally inflicted judgments” of society about the hungry body come together in a “co-construction of shame” (Walker et al. 5) that is a key part of the lived experience of hunger. The experience of shame, while common, is far from inevitable and is open to resistance (see Pickett; Foucault); shame can be subverted, turned from the hungry body and onto the society that allows hunger to happen. Who and what are deemed responsible are shaped by shifting ideas and contested understandings of hunger at a particular moment in time (Vernon).This exploration of corporeal vulnerability through food banks as a historically located response to hunger offers an alternative to studies which privilege representations, objectifying the body and “treating it as a discursive, textual, iconographic and metaphorical reality” while neglecting understandings derived from lived experiences and the responses that visible vulnerabilities elicit (Hamilakis 99). The argument made in this paper calls for a critical reconsideration of classic political economy approaches that view hunger in terms of a class struggle against the material conditions that give rise to it, and responses that ultimately led to the construction of the welfare state (Vernon). These political economy approaches, in focusing on the structures that lead to hunger and that respond to it, are more closed than Butler’s notion of ambiguous and constantly changing social responses to corporeal vulnerability. This paper also challenges the dominant tradition of nutrition science, which medicalises hunger. While nutrition science usefully draws attention to the physiological experiences and existential threat posed by acute hunger, the scientific focus on the “anatomical functioning” of the body and the optimising of survival problematically separates eating from the social contexts in which hunger is experienced (Lupton 11, 12; Abbots and Lavis). The focus in this article on the corporeal vulnerability of hunger interweaves contested representations of, and ideas about, hunger with the physiological experience of it, the material conditions that shape it, and the lived experiences of deprivation. Food banks offer a lens onto these experiences and their complexities.Food Banks: Deprivation Made VisibleSince the 1980s, food banks have become the fastest growing charitable organisations in the wealthiest countries of North America, Europe, and Australasia (Riches), but in Britain they are a recent phenomenon. The first opened in 2000, and by 2014, the largest operator, the Trussell Trust, had over 420 franchised food banks, and more recently was opening more than one per week (Lambie-Mumford et al.; Lambie-Mumford and Dowler). British food banks hand out emergency food relief directly to those who cannot afford to feed themselves or their families adequately, and have become new sites where deprivation is materialised through a congregation of hungry people and the distribution of food parcels. The food relief parcels are intended as short-term immediate responses to crisis moments felt within the body when the individual cannot alleviate hunger through their own resources; they are for “emergency use only” to ameliorate individual crisis and acute vulnerability, and are not intended as long-term solutions to sustained, chronic poverty (Perry et al.). The need for food banks has emerged with the continued shrinkage of the welfare state, which for the past half century sought to mediate the impact of changing individual and social circumstances on those deemed to be most vulnerable to the vicissitudes of life. The proliferation of food banks since the 2009 financial crisis and the increased public discourse about them has normalised their presence and naturalised their role in alleviating acute food poverty (Perry et al.).Media images of food bank queues and stacks of tins waiting to be handed out (Glaze; Gore) evoke collective memories from the early twentieth century of hunger marches in protest at government inaction over poverty, long queues at soup kitchens, and the faces of gaunt, unemployed war veterans (Vernon). After the Second World War, the spectre of communism and the expansionist agenda of the Soviet Union meant such images of hunger could become tools in a propaganda war constructed around the failure of the British state to care for its citizens (Field; Clarke et al; Vernon). The 1945 Labour government, elected on a social democratic agenda of reform in an era of food rationing, responded with a “war on want” based on the normative premise that no one should be without food, medical care, shelter, warmth or work. Labour’s response was the construction of the modern welfare state.The welfare state signified a major shift in ideational understandings of hunger. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, ideas about hunger had been rooted in a moralistic account of divine punishment for individual failure (Vernon). Bodily experiences of hunger were seen as instruments for disciplining the indigent into a work ethic appropriate for a modern industrialised economy. The infamous workhouses, finally abolished in 1948, were key sites of deprivation where restrictions on how much food was distributed served to punish or discipline the hungry body into compliance with the dominant work ethic (Vernon; Foucault). However, these ideas shifted in the second half of the nineteenth century as the hungry citizen in Britain (if not in its colonies) was increasingly viewed as a victim of wider forces beyond the control of the individual, and the notion of disciplining the hungry body in workhouses was seen as reprehensible. A humanitarian treatment of hunger replaced a disciplinarian one as a more appropriate response to acute need (Shaw; Vernon). Charitable and reformist organisations proliferated with an agenda to feed, clothe, house, and campaign on behalf of those most deprived, and civil society largely assumed responsibility for those unable to feed themselves. By the early 1900s, ideas about hunger had begun to shift again, and after the Second World War ideational changes were formalised in the welfare state, premised on a view of hunger as due to structural rather than individual failure, hence the need for state intervention encapsulated in the “cradle to grave” mantra of the welfare state, i.e. of consistent care at the point of need for all citizens for their lifetime (see Clarke and Newman; Field; Powell). In this context, the suggestion that Britons could go to bed hungry because they could not afford to feed themselves would be seen as the failure of the “war on want” and of an advanced modern democracy to fulfil its responsibilities for the welfare of its citizens.Since the 1980s, there has been a retreat from these ideas. Successive governments have sought to rein in, reinvent or shrink what they have perceived as a “bloated” welfare state. In their view this has incentivised “dependency” by providing benefits so generous that the supposedly work-shy or “skivers” have no need to seek employment and can fund a diet of takeaways and luxury televisions (Howarth). These stigmatising ideas have, since the 2009 financial crisis and the 2010 election, become more entrenched as the Conservative-led government has sought to renew a neo-liberal agenda to shrink the welfare state, and legitimise a new mantra of austerity. This mantra is premised on the idea that the state can no longer afford the bloated welfare budget, that responsible government needs to “wean” people off benefits, and that sanctions imposed for not seeking work or for incorrectly filling in benefit claim forms serve to “encourage” people into work. Critics counter-argue that the punitive nature of sanctions has exacerbated deprivation and contributed to the growing use of food banks, a view the government disputes (Howarth; Caplan).Food Banks as Sites of Vulnerable CorporealityIn these shifting contexts, food banks have proliferated not only as sites of deprivation but also as sites of vulnerable corporeality, where people unable to draw on individual resources to respond to hunger congregate in search of social and material support. As growing numbers of people in Britain find themselves in this situation, the vulnerable corporeality of the hungry body becomes more pervasive and more visible. Hunger as a lived experience is laid bare in ever-longer food bank queues and also through the physiological, emotional and social consequences graphically described in personal blogs and in the testimonies of food bank users.Blogger Jack Monroe, for example, has recounted giving what little food she had to her child and going to bed hungry with a pot of ginger tea to “ease the stomach pains”; saying to her curious child “I’m not hungry,” while “the rumblings of my stomach call me a liar” (Monroe, Hunger Hurts). She has also written that her recourse to food banks started with the “terrifying and humiliating” admission that “you cannot afford to feed your child” and has expressed her reluctance to solicit the help of the food bank because “it feels like begging” (Monroe, Austerity Works?). Such blog accounts are corroborated in reports by food bank operators and a parliamentary enquiry which told stories of mothers not eating for days after being sanctioned under the benefit system; of children going to school hungry; of people leaving hospital after a major operation unable to feed themselves since their benefits have been cut; of the elderly having to make “hard choices” between “heat or eat” each winter; and of mixed feelings of relief and shame at receiving food bank parcels (All-Party Parliamentary Inquiry; Beattie; Cooper and Dumpleton; Caplan; Perry et al.). That is, two different visibilities have emerged: the shame of standing or being seen to stand in the food bank queue, and blogs that describe these feelings and the lived experience of hunger – both are vulnerable and visible, but in different ways and in different spaces: the physical or material, and the virtual.The response of doctors to the growing evidence of crisis was to warn that there were “all the signs of a public health emergency that could go unrecognised until it is too late to take preventative action,” that progress made against food poverty since the 1960s was being eroded (Ashton et al. 1631), and that the “robust last line of defence against hunger” provided by the welfare state was failing (Loopstra et al. n.p). Medical professionals thus sought to conscript the rhetorical resources of their professional credibility to highlight that this is a politically created public health crisis.This is not to suggest that acute hunger was absent for 50 years of the welfare state, but that with the closure of the last workhouses, the end of hunger marches, and the shutting of the soup kitchens by the 1950s, it became less visible. Over the past decade, hunger has become more visible in images of growing queues at food banks and stacked tins ready to be handed out by volunteers (Glaze; Gore) on production of a voucher provided on referral by professionals. Doctors, social workers or teachers are therefore tasked with discerning cases of need, deciding whose need is “genuine” and so worthy of food relief (see Downing et al.). The voucher system is regulated by professionals so that food banks are open only to those with a public identity constructed around bodily crisis. The sense of something as intimate as hunger being defined by others contrasts to making visible one’s own hunger through blogging. It suggests again how bodies become caught up in wider political struggles where not only is shame a co-construction of internal inadequacies and external judgements, but so too is hunger, albeit in different yet interweaving ways. New boundaries are being established between those who are deprived and those who are not, and also between those whose bodies are in short-term acute crisis, and those whose bodies are in long-term and chronic crisis, which is not deemed to be an emergency. It is in this context that food banks have also become sites of demarcation, shame, and contestation.Public debates about growing food bank queues highlight the ambiguous nature of societal responses to the vulnerability of hunger made visible. Government ministers have intensified internal shame in attributing growing food bank queues to individual inadequacies, failure to manage household budgets (Gove), and profligate spending on luxury (Johnston; Shipton). Civil society organisations have contested this account of hunger, turning shame away from the individual and onto the government. Austerity reforms have, they argue, “torn apart” the “basic safety net” of social responses to corporeal vulnerability put in place after the Second World War and intended to ensure that no-one was left hungry or destitute (Bingham), their vulnerability unattended to. Furthermore, the benefit sanctions impose punitive measures that leave families with “nothing” to live on for weeks. Hungry citizens, confronted with their own corporeal vulnerability and little choice but to seek relief from food banks, echo the Dickensian era of the workhouse (Cooper and Dumpleton) and indict the UK government response to poverty. Church leaders have called on the government to exercise “moral duty” and recognise the “acute moral imperative to act” to alleviate the suffering of the hungry body (Beattie; see also Bingham), and respond ethically to corporeal vulnerability with social policies that address unmet need for food. However, future cuts to welfare benefits mean the need for relief is likely to intensify.ConclusionThe aim of this paper was to explore the vulnerable corporeality of hunger through the lens of food banks, the twenty-first-century manifestations of charitable responses to acute need. Food banks have emerged in a gap between the renewal of a neo-liberal agenda of prudent government spending and the retreat of the welfare state, between struggles over resurgent ideas about individual responsibility and deep disquiet about wider social responsibilities. Food banks as sites of deprivation, in drawing attention to a newly vulnerable corporeality, potentially pose a threat to the moral credibility of the neo-liberal state. The threat is highlighted when the taboo of a hungry body, previously hidden because of shame, is being challenged by two new visibilities, that of food bank queues and the commentaries on blogs about the shame of having to queue for food.ReferencesAbbots, Emma-Jayne, and Anna Lavis. Eds. Why We Eat, How We Eat: Contemporary Encounters between Foods and Bodies. Farnham: Ashgate, 2013.All-Party Parliamentary Inquiry. “Feeding Britain.” 2014. 6 Jan. 2016 <https://foodpovertyinquiry.files.wordpress.com/2014/12/food>.Anderson, Patrick. “So Much Wasted:” Hunger, Performance, and the Morbidity of Resistance. 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