Entre histoire et fiction: la représentation du règne d'Arthur dans le manuscrit enluminé du Brut en prose, Londres, Lambeth Palace 6 (c. 1480)

The manuscript London, Lambeth Palace 6, contains the Middle English prose Brut, a text which benefited from a great popularity throughout the fifteenth century. It was copied by an English scribe and richly illuminated by the Master of Edward IV and his assistants at Bruges around 1480. This article studies the representation and integration of the reign of Arthur in the historical framework of the Brut or Chronicles of England, including its fictional aspects: Arthur emerges as a historical character but also as a chivalric and mythical figure. The analysis covers the miniatures ranging from the plot leading to the conception of Arthur to the end of his reign (fols. 36-66). The textual and iconographic choices of the prose Bruts are highlighted by comparisons with Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae, Wace’s Brut, and later prose rewritings in the Lancelot-Grail romance cycle, especially Merlin and its Vulgate Sequel. They show the continuous interest raised by Arthur in the aristocratic and royal circles of late fifteenth century England and the relationship be¬tween continental and insular historiographical, literary and artistic traditions.

Amateurs meet professionals: theatrical activities in late sixteenth-century Italian Academies

This chapter explores the complex and still obscure relationship between Italian literary academies, which often engaged in amateur theatricals, and professional actors who formed part of the new theatrical companies (commedia dell’arte) which emerged on the theatrical scene at around the same time. By exploring particularly the cases of Adriano Valerini, Isabella Andreini and her son Giovan Battista Andreini, it is argued that some academies by the end of the sixteenth century showed greater openness to comici and particularly to female virtuose. This would lead at the start of the following century to changes in the relation between professionals and amateurs, especially where academies themselves became more hybrid.

Microliths and maritime mobility: a continental European-style Late Mesolithic flint from the Isles of Scilly

Once Britain had become separated from the European mainland in the seventh millennium BC, Mesolithic stone tool traditions on opposite sides of the newly formed Channel embarked upon different directions of development. Patterns of cross-Channel contact have been difficult to decipher in this material, prior to the expansion of farming (and possibly farmers) from northern France at the beginning of the fourth millennium BC. Hence the discovery of Late Mesolithic microliths of apparently Belgian affinity at the western extremity of southern Britain in the Isles of Scilly comes as something of a surprise. The find is described here in detail, along with alternative scenarios that might explain it. The article is followed by a series of comments, with a closing reply from the authors.

The origins of small wars: from special operations to ideological insurgencies

This edited volume explores the origins of the term small wars and traces it to special operations. In the 17th century, such "guerrilla/petite guerre" special operations grew out of training and winter operations of the regular forces as practiced in the 16th century. In the 18th century, they fused with a tradition going back to Antiquity, of employing special ethnic groups (such as the Hungarian Hussars) for special operations. Side by side with these special operations, however, there was the even older genealogy of uprisings and insurgencies, which since the Spanish Guerrilla of 1808-1812 has been associated with this term. All three traditions have influenced each other.

National experiences with insurgencies and counterinsurgencies: are there “National styles”?

There are clearly identifiable patterns in the way in which insurgents operate in certain geographic areas and cultures, and in which states deal with them. These have been stressed by writing about national "ways of war", strategic culture, or national styles. Nevertheless, there have been important ruptures and changes in some of these, so that for Britain, for example, three successive phases corresponding to patterns can be identified. For France, two pronounced rivaling traditions coincided over two centuries. Algerians by contrast changed fundamentally in their fighting style with the different political ideologies they were following. Palestinian insurgency against Israel is also marked by change in approach. Russia and China possibly show the longest continuity in their handling of insurgencies.

Shackle on time, uncertainty and process

This paper is intended both as a contribution to the conceptual work on process in economic thought and as an attempt to connect a non-institutionalist, non-evolutionary thinker to it. The paper has two principal objectives: (i) to delineate a broad, philosophically grounded conception of what an economic process theory (EPT) is; and (ii) to locate the contributions of George Shackle within this broad conception of EPT. In pursuing these two objectives, I hope to draw out the originality and significance of Shackle’s economics with a particular emphasis on what he adds to process conceptions developed within other heterodox traditions such as institutional and evolutionary economics. I will also highlight some of the perceived limitations of Shackle’s approach and link them to the limitations of process philosophy.

Cancer patients taking herbal medicines: a review of clinical purposes, associated factors, and perceptions of benefit or harm

Ethnopharmacological relevance: Cancer patients in all cultures are high consumers of herbal medicines (HMs) usually as part of a regime consisting of several complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) modalities, but the type of patient, the reasons for choosing such HM-CAM regimes, and the benefits they perceive from taking them are poorly understood. There are also concerns that local information may be ignored due to language issues. This study investigates aspects of HM-CAM use in cancer patients using two different abstracting sources: Medline, which contains only peer-reviewed studies from SCI journals, and in order to explore whether further data may be available regionally, the Thai national databases of HM and CAM were searched as an example. Materials and methods: the international and Thai language databases were searched separately to identify relevant studies, using key words chosen to include HM use in all traditions. Analysis of these was undertaken to identify socio-demographic and clinical factors, as well as sources of information, which may inform the decision to use HMs. Results: Medline yielded 5,638 records, with 49 papers fitting the criteria for review. The Thai databases yielded 155, with none relevant for review. Factors associated with HM-CAM usage were: a younger age, higher education or economic status, multiple chemotherapy treatment, late stage of disease. The most common purposes for using HM-CAM cited by patients were to improve physical symptoms, support emotional health, stimulate the immune system, improve quality of life, and relieve side-effects of conventional treatment. Conclusions: Several indicators were identified for cancer patients who are most likely to take HM-CAM. However, interpreting the clinical reasons why patients decide to use HM-CAM is hampered by a lack of standard terminology and thematic coding, because patients' own descriptions are too variable and overlapping for meaningful comparison. Nevertheless, fears that the results of local studies published regionally are being missed, at least in the case of Thailand, appeared to be unfounded.

A Linguistic Analysis of Spanglish: Relating Language to Identity.

According to the 2000 census, 35.3 million Hispanics live in the United States. This number comprises 12.5% of the overall population rendering the Latino community the largest minority in the United States. The Mexican community is not only the largest Hispanic group but also the fastest growing: from 1990 to 2000, the Mexican population grew 52.9% increasing from 13.5 million to 20.6 million (U.S. Department of Commerce News, 2001). The influx of Mexican immigrants coupled with the expansion of their community within the United States has created an unparalleled situation of language contact. Language is synonymous with identity (cf. Granger, 2004, and works cited within). To the extent that this is true, Spanish is synonymous with being Mexican and by extension, Chicano. With the advent of amnesty programs such as Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA), which naturalized millions of Mexican migrants, what was once a temporal migratory population has become increasingly permanent (Durand et al., 1999). In an effort to conserve Mexican traditions and identity, the struggle to preserve the mother tongue while at the same time acculturate to mainstream Americana has resulted in a variant of Spanglish that has received little attention. This paper will examine the variant of Spanglish seen in the greater Los Angeles area and liken it to the bi-national identity under which these Mexican Americans thrive.

Children’s physic: medical perceptions and treatment of sick children in early modern England, c. 1580-1720

Historians of medicine, childhood, and paediatrics, have often assumed that early modern doctors neither treated children, nor adapted their medicines to suit the peculiar temperaments of the young. Through an examination of medical textbooks and doctors’ casebooks, this article refutes these assumptions. It argues that medical authors and practising doctors regularly treated children, and were careful to tailor their remedies to complement the distinctive constitutions of children. Thus, this article proposes that a concept of ‘children’s physic’ existed in early modern England: this term refers to the notion that children were physiologically distinct, requiring special medical care. Children’s physic was rooted in the ancient traditions of Hippocratic and Galenic medicine: it was the child’s humoral makeup that underpinned all medical ideas about children’s bodies, minds, diseases, and treatments. Children abounded in the humour blood, which made them humid and weak, and in need of medicines of a particularly gentle nature.

Glastonbury Abbey: archaeological investigations 1904-79

This volume reports on the results of the Glastonbury Abbey Archaeological Archive Project, a collaboration between the University of Reading and the Trustees of Glastonbury Abbey, funded principally by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. The project has reassessed and reinterpreted all known archaeological records from the 1908–79 excavations and made the complete dataset available to the public through a digital archive hosted by the Archaeology Data Service (http://dx.doi.org/10.5284/1022585). The scope of the project has included the full analysis of the archaeological collections of Glastonbury Abbey by thirty-one leading specialists, including chemical and compositional analysis of glass and metal and petrological analysis of pottery and tile, and a comprehensive geophysical survey conducted by GSB Prospection Ltd. For the first time, it has been possible to achieve a framework of independent dating based on reassessment of the finds and radiocarbon dating of surviving organic material from the 1950s excavations. The principal aim of the Glastonbury Abbey Archaeological Project was to set aside previous assumptions based on the historical and legendary traditions and to provide a rigorous reassessment of the archive of antiquarian excavations. This research has revealed that some of the best known archaeological ‘facts’ about Glastonbury are themselves myths perpetuated by the abbey’s excavators.

Striking a balance: cultural conflicts or cultural adaptation

This paper explores the cultural representations embedded in the EFL textbooks for Primary English language education in China. In particular, it examines how cultural globalisation and localisation are competing with each other as the educational policy in English attempts to strike a balance between the local culture and ‘western’ culture. Using discourse analysis as an analytical framework, this paper argues that culture as a social construct is constantly evolving and traditions are fused with new cultural values and worldviews brought about by globalisation. As such, the analysis of the textbooks illustrates that culture as a social phenomenon has changed over the decades and glocalisation is gaining new perspectives in English language education in China. Importantly, the analysis shows that new cultural elements have been established and cultural globalisation has taken place when local culture adapt ‘foreign’ cultures to suit local needs. Acknowledging that there are cultural conflicts and competing ideologies in the texts, the paper argues that these conflicts and contradictories can be used to develop students’ critical language awareness and foster their critical analytical abilities. Importantly, the analysis can facilitate the students’ English language learning by providing them with opportunities to read beyond texts per se to cultural politics and practices. Juxtaposing different cultural and ideological perspectives can help students understand that cultural values are socially and politically constructed when they are confronted with complex linguistic and cultural environments in reality.

Generic intertextuality in online social activism: the case of the It Gets Better project

The It Gets Better project has been held up as a model of successful social media activism. This article explores how narrators of It Gets Better videos make use of generic intertextuality, strategically combining the canonical narrative genres of the exemplum, the testimony, and the confession in a way that allows them to claim ‘textual authority’ and to make available multiple moral positions for themselves and their listeners. This strategy is further facilitated by the ambiguous participation frameworks associated with digital media, which make it possible for storytellers to tell different kinds of stories to different kinds of listeners at the same time, to simultaneously comfort the victims of anti-gay violence, confront its perpetrators, and elicit sympathy from ‘onlookers’. This analysis highlights the potential of new practices of online storytelling for social activism, and challenges notions that new media are contributing to the demise of common narrative traditions.

The politics of slowness and the traps of modernity

This chapter re-evaluates the diachronic, evolutionist model that establishes the Second World War as a watershed between classical and modern cinemas, and ‘modernity’ as the political project of ‘slow cinema’. I will start by historicising the connection between cinematic speed and modernity, going on to survey the veritable obsession with the modern that continues to beset film studies despite the vagueness and contradictions inherent in the term. I will then attempt to clarify what is really at stake within the modern-classical debate by analysing two canonical examples of Japanese cinema, drawn from the geidomono genre (films on the lives of theatre actors), Kenji Mizoguchi’s Story of the Late Chrysanthemums (Zangiku monogatari, 1939) and Yasujiro Ozu’s Floating Weeds (Ukigusa, 1954), with a view to investigating the role of the long take or, conversely, classical editing, in the production or otherwise of a supposed ‘slow modernity’. By resorting to Ozu and Mizoguchi, I hope to demonstrate that the best narrative films in the world have always combined a ‘classical’ quest for perfection with the ‘modern’ doubt of its existence, hence the futility of classifying cinema in general according to an evolutionary and Eurocentric model based on the classical-modern binary. Rather than on a confusing politics of the modern, I will draw on Bazin’s prophetic insight of ‘impure cinema’, a concept he forged in defence of literary and theatrical screen adaptations. Anticipating by more than half a century the media convergence on which the near totality of our audiovisual experience is currently based, ‘impure cinema’ will give me the opportunity to focus on the confluence of film and theatre in these Mizoguchi and Ozu films as the site of a productive crisis where established genres dissolve into self-reflexive stasis, ambiguity of expression and the revelation of the reality of the film medium, all of which, I argue, are more reliable indicators of a film’s political programme than historical teleology. At the end of the journey, some answers may emerge to whether the combination of the long take and the long shot are sufficient to account for a film’s ‘slowness’ and whether ‘slow’ is indeed the best concept to signify resistance to the destructive pace of capitalism.

The new Hollywood, 1981–1999: special/visual effects

The emergence and development of digital imaging technologies and their impact on mainstream filmmaking is perhaps the most familiar special effects narrative associated with the years 1981-1999. This is in part because some of the questions raised by the rise of the digital still concern us now, but also because key milestone films showcasing advancements in digital imaging technologies appear in this period, including Tron (1982) and its computer generated image elements, the digital morphing in The Abyss (1989) and Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), computer animation in Jurassic Park (1993) and Toy Story (1995), digital extras in Titanic (1997), and ‘bullet time’ in The Matrix (1999). As a result it is tempting to characterize 1981-1999 as a ‘transitional period’ in which digital imaging processes grow in prominence and technical sophistication, and what we might call ‘analogue’ special effects processes correspondingly become less common. But such a narrative risks eliding the other practices that also shape effects sequences in this period. Indeed, the 1980s and 1990s are striking for the diverse range of effects practices in evidence in both big budget films and lower budget productions, and for the extent to which analogue practices persist independently of or alongside digital effects work in a range of production and genre contexts. The chapter seeks to document and celebrate this diversity and plurality, this sustaining of earlier traditions of effects practice alongside newer processes, this experimentation with materials and technologies old and new in the service of aesthetic aspirations alongside budgetary and technical constraints. The common characterization of the period as a series of rapid transformations in production workflows, practices and technologies will be interrogated in relation to the persistence of certain key figures as Douglas Trumbull, John Dykstra, and James Cameron, but also through a consideration of the contexts for and influences on creative decision-making. Comparative analyses of the processes used to articulate bodies, space and scale in effects sequences drawn from different generic sites of special effects work, including science fiction, fantasy, and horror, will provide a further frame for the chapter’s mapping of the commonalities and specificities, continuities and variations in effects practices across the period. In the process, the chapter seeks to reclaim analogue processes’ contribution both to moments of explicit spectacle, and to diegetic verisimilitude, in the decades most often associated with the digital’s ‘arrival’.

Late persistence of the Acheulian in southern Britain in an MIS 8 interstadial: evidence from Harnham, Wiltshire

This paper presents evidence of the discovery of a new Middle Pleistocene site in central southern England, with undisturbed evidence of hominin occupation well-dated to an interstadial towards the end of Marine Isotope Stage 8, c. 250,000 BP. The site consists of a preserved remnant of a river terrace and its alluvial floodplain overlain by chalk-rich bankside deposits, all abutting a Chalk bedrock riverbank. It preserves an area of occupation with activity focused on the riverbank, complemented by occasional activity on a palaeo-landsurface developed on the surface of the alluvial floodplain. Lithic technology at the site consists almost entirely of handaxe manufacture, allowing attribution to an Acheulian industrial tradition. Mammalian and other palaeo-environmental remains are present and associated with the occupation horizons, including large mammal bones showing signs of hominin interference. Dating was based on OSL determinations on the sediments and amino acid racemisation of molluscan remains, supported by biostratigraphic indications. Besides being a rare instance of an undisturbed Palaeolithic palaeo-landscape covering several hectares, the site contributes to wider Quaternary research concerns over the ability of Middle Pleistocene hominins to tolerate colder climatic episodes in higher latitudes, and over settlement history and changing lithic industrial traditions of northwest Europe in relation to climate change and British peninsularity. It is suggested that the Harnham evidence may represent an insular population that had persisted in southern Britain since MIS 10/9, which became locally extinct during the glacial maximum 8.2 marking the end of MIS 8.