Frueh’s performances are unabashedly autobiographical, as likely to reflect her scholarship as a feminist art historian as her love affairs or childhood memories. For Frueh, eros and self-love are part of a revolutionary feminist strategy; her work exemplifies the physicality and embrace of pleasure that she finds wanting in contemporary feminist theory. Scholarly and rigorous yet playful in tone, her performances are joyful, filled with eroticism, flowers, sexy costumes, and beautiful colors, textures, and scents. Recurring themes include Frueh’s passionate attachment to the desert landscape and the idea of transformation: a continual reaching for clarity of thought and feeling.
In an afterword as lyrical and breathless as her performance pieces, Frueh explores her identification with the desert and its influence on her art. Clairvoyance (For Those In The Desert) includes a detailed chronology of Frueh’s performances.

The Community of St. Cuthbert in the Late Tenth Century: The Chester-le-Street Additions to Durham Cathedral Library A.IV.19 reveals the dynamic role a seemingly marginalized community played during a defining period for the emergence of English religious identity. Based on her new critical edition of additions made to Durham Cathedral Library A.IV.19 and by questioning the purpose of those late tenth-century additions, Karen Louise Jolly is able to uncover much about the Chester-le-Street scribes and their tumultuous time, rife as it was with various political tensions, from Vikings and local Northumbrian nobles to an increasingly dominant West Saxon monarchy.

Why, for instance, would a priest laboriously insert an Old English gloss above every Latin word in a collection of prayers intended to be performed in Latin? What motivated the same English scribe to include Irish-derived Christian materials in the manuscript, including prayers invoking the archangel Panchiel to clear birds from a field?

The Country Music Message: Revisited is more than a history of commercial country music, a discussion of the performers, or a compilation of song lyrics. It is an examination of the way the “message” in country songs is relayed and received: why the songs move us as they do. As Jimmie Rogers saying in his preface, “A country song is a special form of communication——communication that more closely resembles interpersonal or face-to-face interaction between two people than do other types of mass appeal music. This close bond that exists between audience and performers, as well as the unique treatment of the song topics, helps to make the music, the performers, and the audience special. After the characteristics are reviewed, observations are made about the audience that accepts and approves these messages. The topics, and the approach to those topics by the songwriter and by the singers, tell us much about the audience that chose to listen to country music.”

If you are already a fan of country music, this book will provide insights into a process you’ve probably taken for granted. If you are a newcomer, you will better understand and appreciate the music that a “few folks are performing for a large number of people.”