The Pied Piper Of Hamelin At The Crossroads Of History Religion And Literature

This study explores the subject of the Pied Piper of Hamelin from varied angles. It focuses on the historical circumstances in which it arose and leads on to the question of its essential ingredients, its universal appeal to poets and writers. A large part of the book concerns Robert Browning's famous ditty that has popularized the story of the Pied Piper thoughout the English-speaking world and farther still. The nature and power of the Pied Piper were not recognized by the people of Hamelin until it was too late. Browning's poem, though popular, is not generally appreciated as one of the poet's great works. Like its subject, the poem conceals great power that awaits discovery.

Even if we were to discover the historical truth about the origin of the legend of the Pied Piper of Hamelin, we still would not explain why its appeal to the imagination of artists and poets has been so extensive and the span of interpretations placed on the figure so divergent. The author of this book believes that the principle of reciprocity must be taken into account and this reflects the duality of the mind with its conscious and subconscious aspects. Can we align the Pied Piper with Ulysses and Gilgamesh on the basis of the mythology of the sun and its wandering surrogates as they journey through the night in quest of the anima, the eternal female?

The word "Trump" in the title serves as a nexus for ideas, associations and thoughts, some of a purely personal nature, thus giving rise to a medley of forms, essays, dialogues that hang together in some way.

Originally published: New Rochelle, N.Y.: Arlington House, 1978.

Placing the prostitute at the center of reading, Fictions of Bad Life moves between text and meta-text, exploring how to rescue the prostitute from her imprisonment and turn her into the subject of history.

The Malleus Maleficarum is a seminal treatise regarding witchcraft and demons, presented here complete with an authoritative translation to modern English by Montague Summers. At the time this book was published in 1487, the Christian church had considered witchcraft a dangerous affront to the faith for many centuries. Executions of suspected witches were intermittent, and various explanations of behaviors deemed suspect were thought to be caused by possession, either by the devil or demon such as an incubus or succubus. Kramer wrote this book after he had tried and failed to have a woman executed for witchcraft. Unhappy at the verdict of the court, he authored the Malleus Maleficarum as a manual for other witch seekers to refer to. For centuries the text was used by Christians as a reference source on matters of demonology, although it was not used directly by the Inquisition who became notorious for their tortures and murders.

This book interrogates the various manifestations of rival systems of justice in the plays and films of Martin McDonagh, in analysis informed by the critical writings of Michael J. Sandel, Steven Pinker, Julia Kristeva, and in particular Amartya Sen on violence, justice, equality and the law. In McDonagh’s works, failures to investigate adequately criminal actions are matched by multiple forced confessions and umpteen miscarriages of justice. The author explores McDonagh’s creative worlds as ones where distinctions between victim and perpetrator and guilt and innocence are precarious, where the burden of truth seldom reaches the threshold of beyond reasonable doubt and where the punishments and rewards of justice are applied randomly. This project considers the abject nature of justice in McDonagh’s writing, with the vast implications of justice being fragile, suspect, piecemeal, deviant, haphazard and random. Tentative forms of justice are tempered and then threatened by provocative, anarchic and abject humour. As the author argues, McDonagh’s writing cleverly circulates rival, incompatible and comparative systems of justice in order to substantiate the necessities and virtues of justice.