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.

History of Child Welfare and Protection Social Work in Northern Ireland: Finding Continuity amongst Discontinuity in Case Files from 1950-1968

This article reports on research carried out on 200 child welfare files from the largest welfare authority in Northern Ireland from 1950-1968. The literature review provides a commentary on some of the major debates surrounding child welfare and protection social work from the perspective of its historical development. The report of the research which follows offers an insight into one core, and less well-known period of child welfare history in Northern Ireland between the two Children and Young Persons Acts (1950 & 1968). Using a method of discourse analysis influenced by Michel Foucault, a detailed description of the nature of practice is offered. This paper is offered as a work in progress, with further work being planned for dissemination of more detailed analysis of the method and outcomes. The research seeks to ask a few core questions based on problems identified in the present with our current understandings of child welfare and protection histories. While recognising the limitations of this study and the need for broader analysis of the wider context surrounding child welfare practice at the moment, it is argued that some salient conclusions can be drawn about continuity and discontinuity in practice which are of interest to practitioners and students of child welfare social work.

From a ‘borderless world’ to a ‘world of borders’: ‘bringing history back in’

The first part of the paper explores some of the reasons why contemporary border studies understate the full significance of state borders and their global primacy. It is argued that this failing is rooted in a much wider lack of historical reflexivity-a reluctance to acknowledge the historical positioning (the 'where and when') of contemporary border studies themselves. This reluctance encourages a form of pseudohistory, or 'epochal thinking', which disfigures perspective on the present. Among the consequences are (a) exaggerated claims of the novelty of contemporary border change, propped up by poorly substantiated benchmarks in the past; (b) an incapacity to recognise the 'past in the present' as in the various historical deposits of state formation processes; and (c) a failure to recognise the distinctiveness of contemporary state borders and how they differ from other borders in their complexity and globality. The second part of the paper argues for a recalibration of border studies aimed at balancing their spatial emphases with a much greater, and more critical, historical sensitivity. It insists that 'boundedness', and state boundedness in particular, is a variable that must be understood historically. This is illustrated by arguing that a better analysis of contemporary border change means rethinking the crude periodisation which distinguishes the age of empire from the age of nation-states and, in turn, from some putative contemporary era 'beyond nation-states' and their borders.

Commonality in Returns, Order Flows, and Liquidity in the Greek Stock Market

Using a unique high-frequency data-set on a comprehensive sample of Greek blue-chip stocks, spanning from September 2003 through March 2006, this note assesses the extent and role of commonality in returns, order flows (OFs), and liquidity. It also formally models aggregate equity returns in terms of aggregate equity OF, in an effort to clarify OF's importance in explaining returns for the Athens Exchange market. Almost a quarter of the daily returns in the FTSE/ATHEX20 index is explained by aggregate own OF. In a second step, using principal components and canonical correlation analyses, we document substantial common movements in returns, OFs, and liquidity, both on a market-wide basis and on an individual security basis. These results emphasize that asset pricing and liquidity cannot be analyzed in isolation from each other.