Findings from a study comparing partner abuse in African American women suicide attempters (n = 148) and nonattempters (n = 137) revealed higher rates of physical and nonphysical partner abuse among attempters than their demographically similar nonsuicidal counterparts. The partner abuse--suicidal behavior link was mediated by psychological distress, hopelessness, and drug use and moderated by social support. Results also revealed that nonphysical partner abuse accounted for unique variance in the prediction of suicide attempt status beyond that attributable to childhood maltreatment. Implications of the findings for assessing both suicidal and abused women are discussed, and recommendations for preventive interventions for women at risk for suicidal behavior are provided.

Clothing maketh the man. Andrew Borde knew this when he began his Fyrst Boke of the Introduction of Knowledge with the image of a definitive Englishman striding confidently forward, naked apart from a tight loincloth and plumed hat, a pair of scissors in one hand and length of cloth over the other: I am an Englishman, and naked I stand here Musyng in my mynde, what rayment I shall were For now I wyll were thys and now I wyl were that Now I wyl were I cannot tel what All new fashyons be plesaunt to me I wyl haue them, whether I thryue or thee. 1 Richard II knew it when he paid £9 for two cloths of gold to make livery for himself and George Fellbrigge, an esquire of the royal household, at a time when an English yeoman or minor merchant might have earned £5 a year and a labourer would have earned no more than £2. Total royal wardrobe expenses that year were £128 13s. 2d. 2 Lorenzo de Medici also knew the value of clothing when he spent over 5,054 florins on his wardrobe in 1515, as did wealthy Florentine silk merchant Marco Parenti in 1454 in paying 177 florins for two fine cloaks for himself, one of red wool lined with miniver and the other black velvet lined with marten fur. 3 An average university professor's annual salary at the time was perhaps 75 florins and the most successful lawyers might earn 200 to 500 florins per annum. 4 English legislators of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries had no doubt about the power of clothing when they regularly petitioned for the regulation of dress. This sumptuary legislation has long been the subject of discussion among medievalists, usually to illustrate the complex gradations of status in late medieval English society and anxieties attached to post-Plague social mobility. 5 Unlike similar legislation in other contemporary European societies -notably Italian city-states -the English case has not been examined through the lens of gender. This is surely because the English legislators seem relatively unconcerned about the dress of women, and 'women' and 'gender' have not quite ceased to be synonymous in academic discourse. With all the important work on masculinity that has emerged over the past decade it is apparent that the medieval sumptuary laws need to be re-examined for their constructions of masculinity. They are, after all, primarily attempts to regulate the apparel of men. The

No abstract

No abstract

Travel and mobility were vital aspects of medieval European experience. Historians have long recognised this through studies of migration, exile, everyday journeys and long-distance voyages as recorded in travellers' reports and narratives. Yet it is only in recent decades that a distinct field of medieval travel writing studies has emerged. This article surveys recent significant contributions to the study of travel literature of the period c. 300 to c. 1500, concentrating on secondary scholarship in English and particularly on works published or reissued since the late 1990s. It considers issues of genre, offers a definition of 'medieval travel writing' and proposes the authorial category of the 'writer-traveller'. It examines selected recent trends in study of Christian pilgrimage, European travel writing on the wider world and medieval Islamic and Jewish voyage literature. It notes that there has been heightened attention to women and gender, to 'virtual' pilgrimage as Christian devotion, to attempts at cross-cultural comprehension before the age of European imperialism and to the distinctive perspectives offered by Muslim and Jewish authors. Concluding with suggestions for future directions, including enhanced attention to gender theory and cross-cultural comparison, it finally argues for the place of travel writing studies in histories of medieval globalism following the global turn.As is increasingly recognised, travel was fundamental to the medieval condition. In an age before modern communications and mass transportation of goods, many individuals had to travel for work, business, interactions and exchanges. It is true that dominant cultures of Latin Christendom valorised the settled, the agrarian and the urban, over the roaming, the nomadic and the cityless, and that to an extent travel was perceived as a disruption to normative modes of being rather than comprehended as a permanent process. In opposition to the nomadic populations of, for example, central Asia, European cultural traditions from the Greeks onward had denigrated the ways of life of people in perpetual motion. 1 Moreover, travel would have been limited for certain groups. Men and women born into serfdom were not supposed to leave their manor without the consent of their lord and payment of a fine; parishioners were enjoined to receive the sacraments within their home parishes; monks and nuns of many orders were supposed to remain enclosed within their communities; and women in general were more restricted than men in the physical boundaries of their worlds. Yet the stubborn caricature of medieval people as confined within limited geographical horizons, with village dwellers rarely venturing even to the next hamlet, now holds little sway in serious scholarship. 2 On the highways and byways of medieval Europe, we would find people travelling for work or trade, for preaching or pilgrimage, to wage war or in f light from it, to deliver justice or abscond from it, to beg or to gather revenues, to embark on a period of exile, to forge treaties ...