Women in Ulster, 1600-1800

Some have entertained the belief that early modern Gaelic society conferred substantial rights on women. This could hardly be farther from the truth. In aristocratic Gaelic circles women were used ruthlessly as pawns in political alliances and other manoeuvres. The status of women at the lower levels of society also seems to have been low relative to men. While patriarchal relationships persisted after the Plantation of Ulster, they took new forms. Some women actually benefited in terms of property rights relative to men. Economic change in the eighteenth century, in particular the development of proto-industry, opened up opportunities for poorer women but it is notable that women did not feature at all in the public political sphere before 1800

Contemporary Radio Art and Spatial Politics: The Critical Radio Utopias of Anna Friz

The article explores the work of the Canadian sound artist Anna Friz over the last decade. Her work deals explicitly with issues of technology and the relative absence of women's voices on radio. Exploring her work as a composer, installation artist, instrumentalist, performance artist and storyteller, and contextualising these practices within feminist critiques and radio conventions, the article explores Friz's ‘self-reflexive radio’. Ideas of ‘supermodernity’, ‘displacement’ and ‘critical utopia’ are deployed to discuss specific pieces of Friz's work in relation to identity and space. The article argues that Friz reconfigures the radio as a site of resistance to dominant constructions of contemporary globalised space and cultures, the politics of informational capitalism and the uneven flows that these cultures and politics engender.

Banking in Crisis: The Rise and Fall of British Banking Stability, 1800 to the Present

Can the lessons of the past help us to prevent another banking collapse in the future? This is the first book to tell the story of the rise and fall of British banking stability in the past two centuries, and it sheds new light on why banking systems crash and the factors underpinning banking stability. John Turner shows that there were only two major banking crises in Britain during this time: the crisis of 1825–6 and the Great Crash of 2007–8. Although there were episodic bouts of instability in the interim, the banking system was crisis-free. Why was the British banking system stable for such a long time and why did the British banking system implode in 2008? In answering these questions, the book explores the long-run evolution of bank regulation, the role of the Bank of England, bank rescues and the need to hold shareholders to account.

Palynological perspectives on vegetation survey: a critical step for model-based reconstruction of Quaternary land cover

1. Quantitative reconstruction of past vegetation distribution and abundance from sedimentary pollen records provides an important baseline for understanding long term ecosystem dynamics and for the calibration of earth system process models such as regional-scale climate models, widely used to predict future environmental change. Most current approaches assume that the amount of pollen produced by each vegetation type, usually expressed as a relative pollen productivity term, is constant in space and time.
2. Estimates of relative pollen productivity can be extracted from extended R-value analysis (Parsons and Prentice, 1981) using comparisons between pollen assemblages deposited into sedimentary contexts, such as moss polsters, and measurements of the present day vegetation cover around the sampled location. Vegetation survey method has been shown to have a profound effect on estimates of model parameters (Bunting and Hjelle, 2010), therefore a standard method is an essential pre-requisite for testing some of the key assumptions of pollen-based reconstruction of past vegetation; such as the assumption that relative pollen productivity is effectively constant in space and time within a region or biome.
3. This paper systematically reviews the assumptions and methodology underlying current models of pollen dispersal and deposition, and thereby identifies the key characteristics of an effective vegetation survey method for estimating relative pollen productivity in a range of landscape contexts.
4. It then presents the methodology used in a current research project, developed during a practitioner workshop. The method selected is pragmatic, designed to be replicable by different research groups, usable in a wide range of habitats, and requiring minimum effort to collect adequate data for model calibration rather than representing some ideal or required approach. Using this common methodology will allow project members to collect multiple measurements of relative pollen productivity for major plant taxa from several northern European locations in order to test the assumption of uniformity of these values within the climatic range of the main taxa recorded in pollen records from the region.

The Scottish Reformations and the Origin of Religious and Civil Liberty in Britain and Ireland: Presbyterian Interpretations, c.1800-60

This article examines Presbyterian interpretations in Scotland and Ireland of the Scottish Reformations of 1560 and 1638–43. It begins with a discussion of the work of two important Presbyterian historians of the early nineteenth century, the Scotsman, Thomas McCrie, and the Irishman, James Seaton Reid. In their various publications, both laid the template for the nineteenth-century Presbyterian understanding of the Scottish Reformations by emphasizing the historical links between the Scottish and Irish churches in the early-modern period and their common theology and commitment to civil and religious liberty against the ecclesiastical and political tyranny of the Stuarts. The article also examines the commemorations of the National Covenant in 1838, the Solemn League and Covenant in 1843, and the Scottish Reformation in 1860. By doing so, it uncovers important religious and ideological linkages across the North Channel, including Presbyterian evangelicalism, missionary activity, church–state relationships, religious reform and revival, and anti-Catholicism