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This chapter addresses the influence of human migration into the Middle Cumberland Region by examining the circulation of ritual goods as represented by four groups of objects: ceramics, shell cups and gorgets, stone tablets, and symbolic weaponry. While the presence of Ramey Incised and Cahokia Cordmarked ceramics in the MCR demonstrates the arrival of a community from the American Bottom in the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, the manufacture, use, and deposition of negative-painted ceramics in the MCR between A.D. 1250 and 1400 represents the adoption of motifs in contemporary use at Cahokia and the sustained interaction between a group of polities, including those in the American Bottom. The adoption of Braden-style imagery on marine shell and its association with female effigy vessels in an MCR mortuary practice centered on the graves of children reveals a pronounced ritual dedication to an Earth Mother deity in the MCR that is an important focus of our research. Furthermore, the sharing of iconography intimately associated with the Hero Twins in ceramics, marine shell, and stone tablets, and their association with symbolic weaponry, links these culture heroes with the female deity as the central figures in the religious practices of the MCR devoted to reincarnation and rebirth.

Sarah Grand's landmark New Woman novel The Heavenly Twins attacked the social and political structures that endangered middle-class women's physical health toward the end of the nineteenth century. This chapter shows how the novel's explicit desire to be political accounts for the many contradictions that it has generated for contemporary and recent readers. These contradictions bring to the surface the complexity of late Victorian liberalism: the very claim for freedom can constrain the liberal subject. The more the liberal subject fights to be “free,” the more she upholds the structures that subordinate her. Grand figures the relationship between the injured citizen and the healing state as a sexual one between a failed feminist, Evadne, and a physician who is also a baronet, Dr. Galbraith. Galbraith represents the ideal state in Grand's text. A professional expert who is also landed, he combines two kinds of disinterest and virtue. But Grand also expresses reservations about the kind of power such a state might wield. Ultimately, political hopelessness and sexual pleasure, elsewhere excised by the bourgeois moral economy of the novel, converge at the end of The Heavenly Twins in the spectacle of the heroine's hysterical submission to and withholding from the hero.

This chapter discusses Oshosi/Ochosi (minor God of Hunting), Orisha Oko/Oricha Oko (God of Horticulture and Farming), Ibeji/Ibeyi (the Sacred Twins), and Aganju/Agayú (ruler of the desert-like earth and owner of volcanoes). It also looks at minor Nigerian orishas who are also known in Cuba. Each god has their own worship practices, traditions, and myths in Africa and Cuba, which are discussed in detail in this chapter.

This chapter discusses Sarah Grand's The Heavenly Twins as Rachel Vinrace's unread book that is avowedly conjectural like Virginia Woolf's diaries, letters, and essays that contain no references to New Woman writers. It recounts how New Woman fiction was largely out of print and out of fashion by the time Woolf was choosing her own reading and reviewing books for publication. It also refers to Franco Moretti's bar graph “British Novelistic Genres, 1740–1900,” which constitutes one of the latest entries with one of the shortest durations. The chapter talks about fiction with a feminist purpose that is represented as unquestionably behind the times by 1915. It looks at Terence Hewet's use of the phrase “behind the times,” which implies that Vinrace lagged behind the contemporary moment that put her and her books at some distance from the present.

This chapter explores visibility as the defining feature enabled by the molecular gaze on life. Not only life is being recast through an ever expanding range of components (from genes to cells to omic profiles etc.); but these bits of living matter, once extracted from their original contexts, acquire an essential status precisely through their newly found visibility. Along with the unprecedented capacity that now enables interventions into living processes, this visibility of life’s mechanistic underpinnings shapes public discourse, conjuring the proximity of radical frontiers and sharp ruptures form existing societal arrangements. By focusing on the paradigmatic example of assisted reproduction, we show how many developments, within and around the molecular life sciences, stand instead in remarkable continuity with foundational traits of our culture.

This chapter explores how folkloric perspective on eastern woodlands and plains mythic narratives can be coupled with iconographic analyses of Mississippian cosmological imagery in different ways. In particular, it posits that a recursive interaction between analyses of Native American narratives and iconography can be productive and that disjunction can be viewed as a resource, rather than an obstacle that bedevils interpretation, because it indicates change through time that needs to be addressed with novel approaches. These issues are examined through several case studies that illustrate how aspects of Native American myths, such as Twins narratives, are exemplified by certain Mississippian symbols. A second case study focuses on Medicine societies, like the historic Algonkian Midewiwin, and specifically whether “migis” shells—an important ritual object used within them—are represented in Mississippian imagery from Moundville, Alabama.

Pagan Germanic art had favoured the representation of animals and invested it with apotropaic qualities. The new Christian animal iconography (Evangelists’ symbols, doves, peacock, the fauna in the vine-scrolls, etc.) was accepted and integrated into a tradition which saw it not as purely decorative, but as a potent symbolic image. It is not surprising that, just as in contemporary sculpture, manuscripts, metalwork, and embroidery, many of the reverses of the Secondary series show animals, real or fantastic. These representations must be analysed in the context of the culture of the time, and therefore as potential for metaphors. Whilst the gold coinage, following Merovingian numismatic prototypes, had crosses as reverses, the Primary coins of Series B introduced birds to this iconography. Birds will indeed dominate amongst the reverses of the whole of the early Anglo-Saxon coinage, and their importance can be understood in a Christian context. Several groups of coins sharing the iconography of a bust or head with diadem and spiky hair on the obverse, and of a bird surmounting a cross on the reverse, are gathered under the classification of Series B. Some issues have unintelligible legends on both sides, cordoned by a torque of pellets, sometimes snake-headed, and though they differ in details, their iconography is consistent (Fig. 4.1). Rigold regarded the coin iconography of the bird on a cross as original Anglo-Saxon, rejecting any Merovingian numismatic precedent. Conceptually close models may have developed in imitation of Roman and Christian standards or sceptres. Coptic bronze lamps present us with several examples where the reflector above the handle is in the shape of a cross topped with a bird (Fig. 4.1c), and there is also an interesting bronze lamp in the shape of a ram with a cross and bird on its head. Following Early Christian precedents, the bird on the coins can be identified as a dove, in a Christian context a symbol of the Holy Spirit, appropriately set on a cross. In Insular metalwork there are two three-dimensional dove-shaped mounts that may perhaps have similarly topped crosses.

The ‘third way’ we have been following in this study of the coins has of necessity been a collection of ‘cameos’, often diachronic. Whilst this approach has allowed imagery and themes to be examined, understood, and placed firmly within the visual culture of the time, it has also provided firm foundations for addressing a number of issues posed at the beginning of the work, concerning sources, context, and meaning. We can now proceed to draw some conclusions, which will broadly cover artistic, numismatic, and historical questions. The study of the iconography of the early coinage has highlighted the eclectic use of a great variety of sources beyond those of purely numismatic derivation, and indicated that the particular choice of idiom was symptomatic of the change in the perceived function of the coins. Within the period, distinctions can be made between the earlier and later coinages. Although a desire to conform to monetary types respected on the Continent, including Visigothic and Byzantine issues, suggests that commercial credibility was important at the inception of Anglo-Saxon coinage, an analysis of the iconography expands this picture. Early independent Anglo-Saxon coinage (c.630–700) appears to be relatively conservative, modelled on Roman prototypes via Merovingian issues showing busts on the obverse, and reverses with crosses. The classical bust, on account of its charisma and tradition, was clearly felt to be an important part of the iconography, and was reproduced on the majority of issues. Unlike classical prototypes, however, it was rarely accompanied by identifying legends. When these occur, they are reproduced in an increasingly degenerated manner, until they turn into patterns, perhaps pseudo-magical. Inscriptions may have been superfluous in an illiterate society, or perhaps it might have been considered more beneficial for all concerned for the bust to represent ‘authority’ in general, rather than a particular person. It is interesting to notice runic and Latin characters coexisting, and perhaps even challenging each other. Rigold’s scheme of the various elements derived from the gold coinage which eventually conflated in Series A shows the creative use of disparate elements, insignia, attributes, and details which, as with other ‘barbarian’ coinages, were selectively copied, and sometimes replaced with native equivalents.

The Comedy of Errors led to specific movie adaptations such as the musical The Boys from Syracuse and more generally it inspired films based on mistaken identity through identical twins. This has been especially fertile in Indian movies, where such stories abound in filmed versions.

This chapter places Mark Twain's Those Extraordinary Twins in two related contexts: the establishment of corporate personhood (along with Fourteenth Amendment protections for corporations) in the U.S. Supreme Court case Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad (1886) and popular representations of Chinese railroad workers as swarming, monstrous “coolies” functioning as collective—rather than individuated—agents. The chapter shows how Those Extraordinary Twins connects Pudd'nhead Wilson's interest in the legal fiction of race with other legal fictions central to the broader economic transformations of the Gilded Age. Unsuccessfully prosecuted “as a corporation,” the conjoined twins embody postwar disruptions precipitated by industrialization, monopoly capitalism, and the increasing prominence of immigrants as both a labor source and a means of dividing and controlling the U.S. working class.

Stephen Jay Gould, the biologist and author, once joked that were he an identical twin raised separately from his brother they could ‘hire ourselves out to a host of social scientists and practically name our fee’. In order to monetise Gould’s fantasy, one would want a form of twinship that could operate according to evidential, experimental, somatic and circumstantial ideals. And Gould admits that he and his brother would need to be viewed as ‘the only really adequate natural experiment for separating genetic from environmental effects in humans’. This chapter seeks to interrogate the evidential and experimental circumstances that may underpin the comic quips that guide modern biology. In human genetics, twins are used as experimental bodies that are made to matter in particular ways and for particular people; they become newly ‘animate’ for being enrolled into scientific research. Raised in cultures assumed to be alike or dissimilar, isolated by researchers for being valuable in the measured disentanglement of assembled molecular agents (which are sometimes distinguished from an assemblage referred to as an ‘environment’), twins achieve a status of experimental significance not just for what they do but also for what they are taken to be.

Chang and Eng Bunker, the famous Siamese Twins, make their fortune touring and settle in Mt. Airy, where they marry sisters and become prosperous slaveholders who raise lucrative crops, including tobacco. Chang’s eldest son, Christopher Wren, enlists in the 37th Virginia Cavalry at sixteen, quickly followed by Eng’s eldest, Stephen Decatur. Both are seriously wounded and Christopher is captured and imprisoned at Camp Chase, Ohio, where he survives by eating rats. Both eventually return home, but the war has ruined the family: their wealth was tied up in slaves, now free. Chang and Eng must tour again, with a disastrous outcome.

This chapter discusses the exhibition of the conjoined twins Giacomo and Giovani Battista Tocci, who became the basis for Mark Twain’s two novels, Those Extraordinary Twins and Pudd’nhead Wilson. It argues that the freak-garde that emerged in these novels served as a response to the simultaneous rise of corporate capitalism and disenfranchisement of African Americans, both of which were enabled by the Supreme Court’s radical interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment. It examines the notion of the two novels conveying the powerful ties that bind the landmark Plessy v. Ferguson, the case that essentially robbed African Americans of their Fourteenth Amendment protections concerning equality. It addresses how the novels confirmed that the only way to enjoy legal protections is to disown the autonomy and integration of liberal subjectivity and to become a “corporate person”, and appropriating freak show aesthetics as a means of experimenting with this subject of incorporation.