Differentiation of neotropical ecosystems by modern soil phytolith assemblages and its implications for palaeoenvironmental and archaeological reconstructions II: Southwestern Amazonian forests

Accurate archaeological and palaeoenvironmental reconstructions using phytoliths relies on the study of modern reference material. In eastern Acre, Brazil, we examined whether the five most common forest types present today were able to be differentiated by their soil phytolith assemblages, and thus provide analogues with which to compare palaeoecological assemblages from pre-Columbian earthwork sites in the region. Surface soils and vegetation from dense humid evergreen forest, dense humid evergreen forest with high palm abundance, palm forest, bamboo forest and fluvial forest were sampled and their phytoliths analysed. Relative phytolith frequencies were statistically compared using Principal Components Analyses (PCAs). We found the major differences in species composition to be well-represented by the phytolith assemblages as all forest types, apart from the two sub-types of dense humid evergreen forest, could be differentiated. Larger phytoliths from the sand fraction were found to be more ecologically diagnostic than those from the silt fraction. The surface soil phytolith assemblages we analysed can therefore be used as analogues to improve the accuracy of archaeological and palaeoecological reconstructions in the region.

Making: the invisible visible

In this book essay I argue that modern and contemporary works of art (i.e. paintings, photographs, films, and videos) really ought to retrieve something of their auratic-character, which turns the physical toward the metaphysical, the material toward the immaterial, the visible toward the invisible - making artworks, ‘things among things, something other than [a] thing’ (Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 86). There is, perhaps, an aura to art or art is a medium or a conduit or a technology for rediscovering and reproducing aura, which makes it something other than a mere thing. Such works of art are constitutively enigmatic, a certain form of magic making: they (re-)distribute the visible and the invisible, they (re-)configure appearance and disappearance. Such works of art may become visual events, which begin an education in and through (dis-)appearances. To achieve this end, I detail Theodor W. Adorno’s and Walter Benjamin’s respective theories of (art’s) aura in the age of technological reproducibility, which I relate to Jacques Rancière’s more recent discussion of the ‘pensive image,’ and I focus my reading on a number of works by Susan Hiller (photographs), John Constable (paintings), Alfred Stieglitz (photographs), and Tacita Dean (photograph and 16mm film).

Regina Maris and the command of the sea: the sixteenth century origins of modern maritime strategy

The concept of the command of the sea has its roots in medieval notions of the sovereignty of coastal waters, as claimed by several monarchs and polities of Europe. In the sixteenth century, a surge of intellectual creativity, especially in Elizabethan England, fused this notion with the Thucydidean term ‘thalassocracy’ – the rule of the sea. In the light of the explorations of the oceans, this led to a new conceptualisation of naval warfare, developed in theory and then put into practice. This falsifies the mistaken but widespread assumption that there was no significant writing on naval strategy before the nineteenth century.

The Sick Child in Early Modern England, 1580-1720

The Sick Child in Early Modern England is a powerful exploration of the treatment, perception, and experience of illness in childhood, from the late sixteenth to the early eighteenth centuries. At this time, the sickness or death of a child was a common occurrence - over a quarter of young people died before the age of fifteen - and yet this subject has received little scholarly attention. Hannah Newton takes three perspectives: first, she investigates medical understandings and treatments of children. She argues that a concept of 'children's physic' existed amongst doctors and laypeople: the young were thought to be physiologically distinct, and in need of special medicines. Secondly, she examines the family's' experience, demonstrating that parents devoted considerable time and effort to the care of their sick offspring, and experienced feelings of devastating grief upon their illnesses and deaths. Thirdly, she takes the strikingly original viewpoint of sick children themselves, offering rare and intimate insights into the emotional, spiritual, physical, and social dimensions of sickness, pain, and death. Newton asserts that children's experiences were characterised by profound ambivalence: whilst young patients were often tormented by feelings of guilt, fears of hell, and physical pain, sickness could also be emotionally and spiritually uplifting, and invited much attention and love from parents. Drawing on a wide array of printed and archival sources, The Sick Child is of vital interest to scholars working in the interconnected fields of the history of medicine, childhood, parenthood, bodies, emotion, pain, death, religion, and gender.

The “Great Queen of Lightninge Flashes”: the transmission of female-voiced burlesque poetry in the early seventeenth century

The essay uncovers evidence for the construction of the ‘woman author’ in the largely male vogue for bawdy burlesque poetry by tracing the circulation of a pair of verses through seventeenth-century manuscript and print miscellanies. It argues that just as these verses are reworked and recontextualised through the process of transmission, so to their ‘authors’ are re-embodied and ascribed different identities in different publication contexts. Female-voiced bawdy poetry raises particular problems for authorial attribution, rather than searching for the real woman behind the text, the essay examines how the ‘authors’ of female-voiced bawdy poetry were produced and reproduced through shifting formal frameworks and socioliterary networks.

Writing westwards: medieval English literature and its early modern Irish audiences

Quite a few texts from England were translated into Irish in the fifteenth and early-sixteenth centuries. The number of these texts was significant enough to suggest that foreign material of this sort enjoyed something of a vogue in late-medieval Ireland. Translated texts include Mandeville’s Travels, Guy of Warwick, Bevis of Hampton, Fierabras and a selection of saints’ lives. Scholars have paid little attention to the origins and initial readerships of these texts, but still less research has been conducted into their afterlife in early modern Ireland. However, a strikingly high number of these works continued to be read and copied well into the seventeenth century and some, such as the Irish translations of Octavian and William of Palerne, only survive in manuscripts from this later period. This paper takes these translations as a test case to explore the ways in which a cross-period approach to such writing is applicable in Ireland, a country where the renaissance is generally considered to have taken little hold. It considers the extent to which Irish reception of this translated material shifts and evolves in the course of this turbulent period and whether the same factors that contributed to the continued demand for a range of similar texts in England into the seventeenth century are also discernible in the Irish context.

‘Rapt up with joy’: children’s emotional responses to death in early modern England

The chapter is an investigation of the child’s emotional response to death in early modern England. While much valuable scholarship has been produced on parents’ responses to the deaths of children, the reactions of the young themselves have rarely been explored. Drawing on a range of printed and archival sources, I argue that children expressed diverse and conflicting emotions, from fear and anxiety, to excitement and ecstasy. By exploring the emotional experiences of Protestants, the chapter contributes to the bourgeoning literature on emotion and religion, and contests earlier depictions of reformed Protestantism as an inherently intellectual, rather than an affective, faith. This study also suggests that we revise the way we classify the emotions, resisting the intuitive urge to categorise them as ‘positive’ or ‘negative’. The fear of hell, for example, though profoundly unpleasant, was regarded as a rational, commendable response, which demonstrated the work of the Holy Spirit in the soul, and was a prerequisite for the attainment of a joyful assurance of heaven. An underlying question is to what extent children’s responses to death differed from those of adults. I propose that although their reactions were broadly similar, the precise preoccupations of dying children were different. Through highlighting these distinctive features, we can come to a closer idea of what it was like to be a child in the early modern period.