Juliana 'Julie' Dresvina

The article interprets medieval mercy seats (misericords) as collections of memes (memeplexes), rooted in premodern oral culture, allowing for a cognitive shortcut in an otherwise long and obscure discussion of the origins of many misericords' exact iconography. It then proceeds to examine the use of such memes in 'The Book of Margery Kempe' (c. 1438) as a means for economic storytelling and self-fashioning.

Against the cult of change "Change is the only constant in life", as a popular adage, ascribed to Heraclitus, goes. Change and progress go hand in hand together, and it is evident that as time goes, the socioeconomic and technological changes become more rapid. Yet change, mandatory for survival, is often understood as something not only inevitable but necessarily positive-an attitude we very much inherited from the Enlightenment, the idea that the further the humankind develops the more it would change (itself and everything that surrounds it) for the better. This is not to say that the hard-won plurality of opinions precludes contrary voices, but the overall vector, one has to admit, is squarely in favour of change. The resistance to changes is often associated in the educated circles with the old, rigid, insular, on-the-way-out world, as it has been in the recent disastrous yet very indicative referendum in the UK, when a large proportion of the 'Leave the EU' voters appeared to be over 65s and those who wanted to "get their country back", nostalgic about the days of the British Empire. Similar sentiments in many ways now drive the Trump campaign in the US and underlie the right-wing movements in other Western countries.