Analysis of multiple aspects of a repeated signal: power and rate of rapping during shell fights in hermit crabs

Repeated activities used by animals during contests are assumed to act as signals advertising the quality of the sender. However, their exact functions are not well understood and observations fit only a limited set of the predictions made by models of signaling systems. Experimental studies of contest behavior tend to focus on analysis of the rate of signaling, but individual performances may also vary in magnitude. Both of these features can vary between outcomes and within contests. We examined changes in the rate and power of shell rapping during shell fights in hermit crabs. We show that both rate and power decline during the course of the encounter and that the duration of pauses between bouts of shell rapping increases with an index of the total effort put into each bout. This supports the idea that the vigor of shell rapping is regulated by fatigue and could therefore act as a signal of stamina. By examining different interacting components of this complex activity, we gain greater insight into its function than would be achieved by investigating a single aspect in isolation.

‘‘An old quarrel between us that will never be at an end": Middleton’s Women Beware Women and Late Jacobean Religious Politics

In this article, I examine Thomas Middleton's Women Beware Women as a response to the particular religio-political context in the years surrounding 1621. The onset of the Thirty Years War in 1618 and the subsequent humiliation of James' son-in-law Frederick, Elector of Palatine, the vexed question of a possible Catholic marriage for Charles, Prince of Wales, the ever present difficulty of Anglo-Catholic relations, particularly with Spain, as well as growing religious factionalism within the Church of England between Calvinists and Arminians: all contributed towards a culturally febrile atmosphere, one to which, as I will argue, Middleton was well placed to respond. Given Middleton's Calvinistic beliefs, I suggest that Women Beware Women offers an acerbic examination of contemporary debates concerning human will, especially women's will, as well as promoting a sceptically apocalyptic anti-Catholic agenda throughout. I also examine the religious language and imagery used to construct Bianca as the whore of Babylon, and argue that her emergence and fall offer a political commentary on the precarious position of the English Church around 1621.

Agency and Appetite for religious Song: Vexilla regis prodeunt and its first thousand years

When James Joyce made two of his characters in ‘‘Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man’’ refer approvingly to ‘‘Vexilla regis prodeunt’’ he was following in the footsteps of a long line of the Latin text’s admirers. Since Anglo-Saxon times English audiences had clearly appreciated the sonorous majesty of this processional hymn, largely because of the solemnity and craft with which it celebrated the nature of Christ’s martial triumph and sacrifice. This article offers a snapshot of different kinds of English appetite for Venantius Fortunatus’ famous religious song for the first thousand years of its existence, from the Anglo-Saxon period through to the mid sixteenth century.