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This discussion links the odd-seeming ‘glad cheer’ ascribed to Arveragus at the crux of the Franklin’s Tale with strenuous Stoic aspiration to tolerant equanimity. Arveragus attempts an equanimity that contrasts provocatively with the heroine’s (and Aurelius’s) surging emotionalism. Chaucer’s interest in the ambivalent attraction of equanimity — never comfortably embraced within the Christian virtue of patience because equanimity seemed insensitive to a religion of zealous love — emerges again in Griselda in the Clerk’s Tale. Her robust patience is in creative tension with a gendered Christian virtue of humility. Since the converse of equanimity — which is fear — is another conflicted and gendered concept, its embodiment in Troilus and Criseyde and in the Nun’s Priest’s Tale, is explored.

This chapter explores the themes of displaced youths and slandered ladies in a number of Middle English verse romances designated as the ‘Eustace-Constance-Florence-Griselda Legends’: Sir Isumbras, The King of Tars, Sir Eglamour of Artois, Octavian, Le Bone Florence of Rome, Sir Triamour, and Sir Torent of Portyngale. In the romances of displaced youths, great value is attached to aristocratic birth as the prerogative of chivalric nobility is seen; even if the character's behaviour is boorish or incompetent because of his displaced upbringing, his birth ensures that he will eventually regain his correct position in society. In contrast, the female characters are judged not according to their birth but entirely by their deeds or alleged misdeeds. Although these women are usually of aristocratic birth, their social nobility is never seen by characters in the text as evidence that they are virtuous and chaste, or noble in a behavioural sense.

This chapter argues that Antigone is Argentina's ‘national play’. Antigona has been appropriated ‘at crucial foundational moments in which violence sealed tragic and unstable pacts of national unification and women played key roles, [and has been] summoned to build or to sacrifice for the nation or moved to resist power’. The chapter analyses Leopoldo Marechal's 1951 Antígona Vélez, Alberto de Zavalía's 1959 El Limite (The Limit), Griselda Gambaro's 1986 Antigona Furiosa, and Jorge Huertas 2002 Antigonas, Linaje de Hembrás (Antigones, Female Lineage), arguing that the central question of all these productions is: will Argentina continue to sacrifice its women and exclude others and promulgate internal violence and terror in order to build a modern nation?

This chapter looks at copies of Boccaccio's Decameron in the fourteenth century and poses questions around the reading of this work, the varity of manuscripts of the text, and what happens in the margins of some of those manuscripts. One particular manuscript is examined in detail: Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, MS Plut. 42,1, copied in 1384 by Francesco d'Amaretto Mannelli. It has an extraordinary paratextual apparatus of glosses that provides insights into reading Boccaccio at precisely the same time Chaucer was composing those works most influenced by his literary vernacular Italian traditions. The chapter examines in detail Mannelli's glosses to Decameron X. 10, the story of Griselda. This marginal response is a reading of the tale that is largely unknown to Chaucerians and yet provides an important context in which to consider Chaucer's treatment of the tale.

This chapter discusses the importance of the physical specialness of the mother's body to her dramatic value. Taking two plays about Patient Griselda written forty years apart (by Phillip and Dekker) and William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, it suggests that the body of the mother was subjected to an increasingly voyeuristic public scrutiny, not only on the stage, but in contemporary culture and practice, as maternity was increasingly exposed and controlled through state legislation and the processes of commodification. The discursive tensions created by an ambivalent appreciation of motherhood – sexual and creatural; spiritual and noble; endowing death as it gives life – are contained through performance. Theatre spectators were thus free to take pleasure in the spectacle of the maternal body and of its scrutiny and control. The production of obstetric manuals and also of domestic conduct books where the mother's role is clearly adumbrated is symptomatic of an increased emphasis upon motherhood as a fundamentally social function that is important in ensuring stability in the wider world.

The international and local feminist avant-garde of the 1970s is discussed in Chapter 6. Vancouver women’s rejection of canonical art history, their development of alternative distribution and exhibition systems for promoting artwork, and their psychoanalytic critique of the male gaze all implicitly challenged the legitimacy of the theoretical and historical project of Vancouver photo-conceptualism. These threats would thus be selectively integrated into the new male-authored photography. Historical and contemporary critical responses to Marian Penner Bancroft and Liz Magor’s work are also analysed, which through contrary-example further establishes the male-gendered character of avant-garde discourse formation in Vancouver.

This chapter explores the mediac rebirth of Colombia’s so-called Cocaine Queen of the 1970s, whose criminal reign extended from Medellín to New York and Miami. It argues that Blanco’s posthumous celebrity status in popular culture took place once the media’s interest in Escobar and narcocultura became a well-established trend. This is evidenced by the emergence of two biographies, the telenovela La viuda negra, and extensive press coverage, all of which invariably compare her notoriety to that of Escobar. Also worthy of note is the Colombian influence on cocaine trafficking in Miami, where extreme violence and cash flow changed the city’s character from a mecca for retirees to a refashioned Wild West. Informed on Billy Corben’s documentaries Cocaine Cowboys (two installments) and Max Marmelstein’s criminal autobiography The Man Who Made It Snow, this chapter examines Griselda Blanco’s brutality as a narca in the U.S., her relationship with Pablo Escobar, and her volatile marriages and partners’ suspicious deaths, as well as her position in the drug trade, where her extreme cruelty kept her hitmen both in check and in constant admiration.