The Bedlam Academy

This article explores the polemical presentation of Oxford, the royalist capital between 1642 and 1646, in parliamentarian newsbooks. It argues that the novel seriality of the form offered opportunities for constructing political identities and identifying enemies through strategies of repetition and echoing within and across parliamentarian news media. Discussion of Oxford in these news titles suggests ways in which seriality helped establish and elaborate anti-royalist discourses by repeated reference to the corrupted centre of royalist politics. Sustained attention given to Oxford in weekly newsbooks built up a cumulative and complex picture of the city, and by extension royalism more broadly, as variously mired in Catholicism, subject to the damaging influence of female and foreign rule, riven by deviant sexualities, and possessed of a form of collective madness. The composite image of Oxford built up across parliamentarian news media helped construct a journalistic shorthand in which ‘Oxford’ came to denote a wealth of polemicised meanings readily accessible to comparatively humble readers. The article thus argues for a better recognition of the ways in which civil war news authors adopted the opportunities of serial publication for the elaboration of novel political stereotypes.     

品《五牛图》读韩滉其人

我国现存最早的纸本名画《五牛图》,为唐代宰相画家韩滉所作。从这幅稀世名画中,我们不仅可以领略到韩滉精妙的画牛技巧,同时也可以品读到这位宰相画家的政治理想和人格魅力。本文旨在通过品读《五牛图》,分析韩滉的农本思想及忠君思想,来解读其人。