Power Play: The Literature and Politics of Chess in the Late Middle Ages
The game of chess reached western Europe by the year 1000, and within several generations it had become one of the most popular pastimes ever. Both men and women, and even priests played the game despite the Catholic Church's repeated prohibitions. Characters in countless romances, chansons de geste, and moral tales of the eleventh through twelfth centuries also played chess, which often symbolized romantic attraction or sexual consummation. In Power Play, Jenny Adams looks to medieval literary representations to ask what they can tell us both about the ways the game changed as it was naturalized in the West and about the society these changes reflected. In its Western form, chess featured a queen rather than a counselor, a judge or bishop rather than an elephant, a knight rather than a horse; in some manifestations, even the pawns were differentiated into artisans, farmers, and tradespeople with discrete identities. Power Play is the first book to ask why chess became so popular so quickly, why its pieces were altered, and what the consequences of these changes were. More than pleasure was at stake, Adams contends. As allegorists and political theorists connected the moves of the pieces to their real-life counterparts, chess took on important symbolic power. For these writers and others, the game provided a means to figure both human interactions and institutions, to envision a civic order not necessarily dominated by a king, and to imagine a society whose members acted in concert, bound together by contractual and economic ties. The pieces on the chessboard were more than subjects; they were individuals, playing by the rules.
Literary Theory at the Close of the Middle Ages: William Caxton and William Thynne
As an independent form of inquiry, literary theory seems a modern phenomenon, hardly a medieval one. For all their influ­ ence and productivity, even the poets themselves stand mute on the issue of criticism. We have no direct utterance from Chaucer, Gower, Lydgate, or Hoccleve or any of the Scots which could be called literary theory in the modern sense. Yet the fact remains that medieval writers and readers must have thought a good deal about what today gets called literary theory. Writing in certain styles and not others, choosing certain ideas to cast into verse, selecting partic­ ular kinds of literature to readall are "practical" forms of literary criticism and require at some level a theoretical base for judgment. Clearly, recovering theory from such oblique sources as we have would be a rewarding, if highly speculative, enterprise. If we are to do so, however, in what direction ought we to look to discover the seam which opens the near rocklike silence of our records? One potentially rich area is the Chaucerian apocrypha, and in particular the appearance and treatment of those poems in the publications of William Caxton and William Thynne. The prob­ lems inherent in approaching the subject of late-medieval literary theory through Caxton and Thynne are many, of course. Scholarly disagreement surrounds even the basic question of whether either man can be said to have given any critical thought at all to what he printed. Norman F. Blake, for example, has argued strongly on several occasions that Caxton cared to publish books of certain classes but had no feeling whatsoever for specific titles within those
A functional comparison of human Fc-receptor-bearing lymphocytes active in natural cytotoxicity and antibody-dependent cellular cytotoxicity.
Natural (or “spontaneous”) cytotoxicity against the K-562 myeloid cell line and antibody-dependent cellular cytotoxicity (ADCC) against sensitized Chang liver cells were monitored simultaneously in a 4 hr 51 Cr release assay, using the same preparations of normal human peripheral blood lymphocytes as effector cells. Both types of cytotoxic activity were expressed by lymphocytes bearing receptors for sheep erythrocytes and for the Fc portion of IgG. Up to 80% of the total natural killer (NK) cell and K cell (ADCC) activities were recovered in E-rosette pellets separated under optimal conditions. Since the ability to form rosettes with sheep erythrocytes is primarily a marker for human T cells, it seems likely that both NK and K cells are in the T cell lineage. Further, both NK and K cell cytolytic activities were severely depressed after brief exposure of lymphocyte suspensions or rosette pellets to ammonium chloride solutions. Both activities returned to normal values after 24-hr incubation at 24°C. Such sensitivity of human lymphocytes to ammonium chloride solutions may explain why other investigators have failed to observe NK or ADCC activity by E-RFC. When lymphocytes bearing Fc receptors were adsorbed onto plastic surfaces coated with a monolayer of immobilized antigen-antibody complexes made up of TNP and rabbit anti-TNP serum, both NK and ADCC activities were simultaneously depleted. Such depletion was completely blocked when Staphylococcal protein A, which binds selectively to the Fc portion of IgG, was incubated on the antigen-antibody monolayers before adding the lymphocytes. This confirmed that both NK and ADCC activities were mediated by effector lymphocytes bearing Fc receptors. When protein A at concentrations ranging from 0.01 to 100 µg/ml was added to the 51 Cr release assays, ADCC was significantly inhibited, presumably due to binding of protein A to available Fc sites of the sensitizing antibody. However, protein A had no effect on NK reactivity at any of the concentrations tested. When lymphocytes were treated for 30 min at 37°C with purified trypsin or α-chymotrypsin at concentrations from 0.01 to 10 mg/ml, NK activity was significantly inhibited whereas ADCC was unaffected. Other enzymes depressed (pronase, subtilisin) had no effect except at high concentrations (lipase), or stimulated (neuraminidase) both NK and K cell activity similarly, and therefore failed to distinguish between the effector cell types. Thus, our data indicate that effector cells in NK and ADCC are in overlapping, if not identical, subpopulations of Fc receptor-bearing lymphocytes of probable T cell lineage. The cytolytic mechanisms in NK and ADCC appear to be distinct, since we have been unable to find evidence for an “arming” antibody involved in this NK system.