'An aid to mental health': natural history, alienists and therapeutics in Victorian Scotland

In the nineteenth century natural history was widely regarded as a rational and ‘distracting’ pursuit that countered the ill-effects, physical and mental, of urban life. This familiar argument was not only made by members of naturalists’ societies but was also borrowed and adapted by alienists concerned with the moral treatment of the insane. This paper examines the work of five long-serving superintendents in Victorian Scotland and uncovers the connections made between an interest in natural history and the management of mental disease. In addition to recovering a significant influence on the conduct of several alienists the paper explores arguments made outside the asylum walls in favour of natural history as an aid to mental health. Investigating the promotion of natural history as a therapeutic recreation in Scotland and elsewhere reveals more fully the moral and cultural significance attached to natural history pursuits in the nineteenth century.

Land-use patterns and cultural change in the Middle to Late Bronze Age in Ireland: inferences from pollen records

In Ireland, the Middle to Late Bronze Age (1500-600 cal. B.C.) is characterised by alternating phases of prolific metalwork production (the Bishopsland and Dowris Phases) and apparent recessions (the Roscommon Phase and the Late Bronze Age-Iron Age transition). In this paper, these changes in material culture are placed in a socio-economic context by examining contemporary settlement and land-use patterns interpreted from the pollen record. The vegetation histories of six tephrochronologically-linked sites are presented that provide high-resolution and chronologically well-resolved insights into changes in landscape use over the Middle to Late Bronze Age. The records are compared with published pollen records in an attempt to discern if there are any trends of woodland clearance and abandonment from which changes in settlement patterns can be inferred. The results suggest that prolific metalworking industries correlate chronologically with expansive farming activity, which indicates that they were supported by a productive subsistence economy. Conversely, declines in metalwork production occur during periods when farming activity is generally less extensive and perhaps more centralised, and it is proposed that disparate socio-economic or –political factors, rather than a collapse of the subsistence economy, lies behind the demise of metalworking industries.

Troubled Geographies: A Spatial History of Religion and Society in Ireland

Ireland’s landscape is marked by fault lines of religious, ethnic, and political identity that have shaped its troubled history. Troubled Geographies maps this history by detailing the patterns of change in Ireland from 16th century attempts to “plant” areas of Ireland with loyal English Protestants to defend against threats posed by indigenous Catholics, through the violence of the latter part of the 20th century and the rise of the “Celtic Tiger.” The book is concerned with how a geography laid down in the 16th and 17th centuries led to an amalgam based on religious belief, ethnic/national identity, and political conviction that continues to shape the geographies of modern Ireland. Troubled Geographies shows how changes in religious affiliation, identity, and territoriality have impacted Irish society during this period. It explores the response of society in general and religion in particular to major cultural shocks such as the Famine and to long term processes such as urbanization.

Los nuevos territorios de la gráfica: imagen, proceso y distribución

La gráfica se encuentra en un proceso de simbiosis con la cultura visual en el que la tecnología de la imagen, la descentralización de la matriz y la adaptación del formato expositivo se funden con el resto de las actividades artísticas. El análisis de las comunidades formadas alrededor de esta práctica configura un puzzle, aparentemente bien encajado, que se divide entre el formalismo y el conceptualismo y entre la idea y el proceso. Las bienales y trienales, a la vanguardia del discurso, cuestionan cualquier concepto que se haya podido asentar con solidez: ante la decadencia del proceso artesanal el mensaje se profundiza nutriéndose de la invectiva provocada por las contradicciones sociales, territoriales y medioambientales para convertirse en un reflejo de la sociedad contemporánea. Comprender la gráfica actual pasa por un ejercicio de aperturismo y un proceso de adaptación al cambio técnico e iconográfico de los sectores implicados. El grabado es ahora un territorio en el que la integración de todas las artes permite cruzar sus fronteras con fluidez.

Art, biology and technology. Interdisciplinary relations in the science lab

Bio art, understood as the convergence of the relations between art, biology and technology, constitutes a useful case study to discuss the meaning of interdisciplinarity in the artistic field. This paper explores different discourses around interdisciplinarity in order to challenge certain generic approaches for their ineffectiveness when assessing artistic practices. It is proposed that the analysis of interdisciplinarity must address the singular connections produced in the artistic practice itself, considering the impossibility of reducing the complexity of interdisciplinary dialogues into generic considerations. Taking bioart as a case study, different kinds of relationships between the artist and the lab are identified and analyzed, ranging from the use of the lab as a true atelier and as a resource for materials and techniques, to the rejection of the lab by proposing amateurism as an alternative. estrategias amateur, pasando por su utilización como fuente de técnicas y materiales.

Linking past cultural developments to palaeoenvironmental changes in Estonia

Connections between environmental and cultural changes are analysed in Estonia during the past c. 4,500 years. Records of cereal-type pollen as (agri)cultural indices are compared with high-resolution palaeohydrological and annual mean temperature reconstructions from a selection of Estonian bogs and lakes (and Lake Igelsjon in Sweden). A broad-scale comparison shows increases in the percentage of cereal-type pollen during a decreasing trend in annual mean temperatures over the past c. 4,300 years, suggesting a certain independence of agrarian activities from environmental conditions at the regional level. The first cereal-type pollen in the region is found from a period with a warm and dry climate. A slow increase in pollen of cultivated land is seen around the beginning of the late Bronze Age, a slight increase at the end of the Roman Iron Age and a significant increase at the beginning of the Middle Ages. In a few cases increases in agricultural pollen percentages occur in the periods of warming. Stagnation and regression occurs in the periods of cooling, but regression at individual sites may also be related to warmer climate episodes. The cooling at c. 400-300 cal b.p., during the 'Little Ice Age' coincides with declines in cereal-type and herb pollen curves. These may not, however, be directly related to the climate change, because they coincide with war activities in the region.

Dublin docklands. The urban fabric as cultural heritage

Introduction

Since the 1980s there have been major policies and projects for the redevelopment of Dublin Docklands. These projects were mainly aimed at profitable development of office, commercial and residential space, without a sound plan that would preserve the identity or community of the area. The recent shift in policies and urban design principles in the Dublin Docklands Area Master Plan 2008 shows that policy makers have acknowledged that mistakes were made in the last decades of the 20th century. The current map of the Dublin Docklands Area Master Plan 2008 gives us useful information about these changes. The Ringsend/ Irishtown area, which has kept a great part of its urban form and community identity throughout centuries, is described as an ‘area of protection of residential and services amenities’ (DDDA, 2008, map A). Meanwhile, the area of the Grand Canal Docks, recently developed, is described with the objective ‘to seek the social, economic and physical development or rejuvenation
within an area of mixed use of which residential and enterprise facilities would be the predominant uses’ (DDDA, 2008, map A). This classification shows that recent development has been unable to achieve the cohesion and complexity of existing neighbourhoods, revealing flaws not only in policy, but also in the built environment and approaches to urban design.

The shift towards the consideration of more community participation reveals a need to understand the tradition and past of these communities, while the urban fabric of small plots in the existing neighbourhoods, therefore, seems to have a very important role in the conservation of identity of place and providing the opportunity for difference within regularity. On the other hand, the new fabric of residential block developments in the docklands denies the possibility of developing a sense of community, and by providing only regularity, does not leave space for difference.

This paper will address questions related to urban morphology and town analysis in the case of Ringsend and Irishtown. This will provide a tool to learn from the past and perhaps find new models of development that might be less detrimental for the heritage of cities and urban communities. One of the ideas of this paper is to adhere to the new tendency in conservation policies to provide a broader analysis of urban areas, not only considering individual monuments in cities, but also analysing the significance of urban morphology and intangible heritage. It forms part of an OPW Post- Doctoral Fellowship in Conservation Studies and Environmental History.1 Research has been carried out in different areas of urban history of Dublin’s southern waterfront, including infrastructure history and a thorough analysis of the letters of the Pembroke Estate of the 19th century, which included the areas of Ringsend and Irishtown. However, this paper focuses on the study of urban form of the area and its significance to Dublin’s heritage.

Filming and Performing Renaissance History

Over the last one hundred years, many of the events and personalities of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries have been brought before home, cinema, exhibition, festival and theatrical audiences via a variety of visual media. This collection, for the first time, examines these representations, looking at recent television series, documentaries, feature films, pageantry, theatre and popular culture in a range of cultural and linguistic guises. Filming and Performing Renaissance History opens up wider avenues of interpretive opportunity and substitutes a more generous, nuanced acknowledgement of the ways in which the 'Renaissance' is made to signify across disciplines and in relation to a whole series of events and personalities. Accessing the Renaissance in this fashion generates a genuine sense of the modalities of historical representation, of what the Renaissance 'means' and of how its meanings have been negotiated in modernity.

Playing with the ‘Erbe’: The Legacy of the Songs of the 1848 Revolution in the GDR

After the twelve-year rupture caused by the Nazis, in the Soviet zone after 1945 attempts were made to reconnect with the traditions of workers’ songs and critical folk songs that were viewed as the cultural heritage of the communist movement. One of these ‘repertoires’ of song was that of the 1848 Revolution. In the 1950s GDR researchers such as the Germanist Bruno Kaiser, the musicologist Inge Lammel and in particular the folklorist Wolfgang Steinitz made substantial contributions to the collecting and publication of the 1848 songs. Their work provided an important reference point for the singers of the German folk song revival in the GDR from the late 1970s onwards. As the cases of groups such as Folkländer and Wacholder showed, theirs was a particularly creative appropriation of the revolutionary Erbe that involved performing protest songs of the past as if they were criticising the present.

Charabanc, cultural capital and the men of recognised credit

This paper compares the cultural legacy of the all-female Charabanc with that of Field Day, its fellow counterpart in the Irish Theatre touring movement in the 1980s. It suggests that a conscious awareness amongst the all-male Field Day board of successful writers and directors of what Bourdieu has called 'cultural capital' is implicated in the enduring authority of the work of that company within the history of Irish theatre. Conversely the paper considers if the populist Charabanc, in its steadfast refusal to engage with the hierarchies of academia and publishing, was too neglectful of the cultural capital which it accrued in its heyday and has thus been party to its own occlusion from that same history.

Men, Women and an Integrated History of the Russian Revolutionary Movement

Since its emergence as a discipline in the 1960s, women’s history has had a profound effect on the study of the past. Scholarship on women’s experiences of and contributions to the Russian revolutionary movement has increased exponentially since the publication of a number of biographies of Aleksandra Kollontai in the 1970s and 1980s and a comprehensive picture has emerged of women’s involvement in all the major revolutionary parties, as leading figures as well as rank and file activists. Despite this wealth of historical discovery, remarkably little has found its way into so-called ‘general’ histories of the revolution. An integrated history, which is the ultimate aim of women’s history, has yet to be produced for the Russian revolutionary movement, even though recent prosopographical studies of revolutionary women have made clear the numerous ways in which men and women cooperated and interacted on a daily basis in the underground. This article explores the nature of and reasons for this failure, makes a case for why incorporating women’s experiences into the grand narrative of the Russian revolution is important and discusses how this might be achieved.

Reading the Irishwoman: Studies in Cultural Encounter and Exchange, 1714-1960

In 1700 few Irishwomen were literate. Most lived in a rural environment, rarely encountered a book or a play or ventured much beyond their own domestic space. By 1960 literacy was universal, all Irishwomen attended primary school, had access to a variety of books, magazines, newspapers and other forms of popular media and the wider world was now part of their every-day life. This study seeks to examine the cultural encounters and exchanges inherent in this transformation. It analyses reading and popular and consumer culture as sites of negotiation of gender roles. This is not an exhaustive treatment of the theme but focusses on three key points of cultural encounter: the Enlightenment, emigration and modernism. The writings and intellectual discourse generated by the Enlightenment was one of the most influential forces shaping western society. It set the agenda for scientific, political and social thought for the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The migration of peoples to north America was another key historical marker in the development of the modern world. Emigration altered and shaped American society as well as the lives of those who remained behind. By the twentieth century, aesthetic modernism suspicious of enlightenment rationalism and determined to produce new cultural forms developed in a complex relationship with the forces of industrialisation, urbanisation and social change. This study analyses the impact of these three key forces in Western culture on changing roles and perceptions of Irish women from 1700 to 1960.