THREE AND A HALF CENTURIES OF BOTTLE MANUFACTURE

Abstract

This paper looks at the development of the bottle glass industry in England. The production of bottles is considered from both a typological perspective and through the chemical composition of the glass used. Samples of bottles and bottle production debris from many different production sites have been analysed to determine their chemical composition. The changes in the social organisation of the industry are discussed in relation to the changing materials and technologies employed in bottle production.     

Esoteric Tangles

Abstract

I attempt here a very general reply to the preceding sixteen essays by addressing the broad, structural constraints of my book, from which many of the particular problems raised in the essays flow. Philosophy Between the Lines is an effort to give a very sweeping account—theoretically and historically—of a phenomenon that is, in many respects, highly particularized and situation specific. The characteristic sin of the book is overgeneralization or simplification. In the present essay I attempt a brief and partial clarification, primarily by selecting one main theme of the book—defensive esotericism—and redescribing it from a more localized and fine-grained perspective.     

Marriage and the Law: Politics and Theology in Measure for Measure

Abstract

In Measure for Measure, Shakespeare portrays a clearly political problem: a city whose citizens are so unable to govern themselves that only the most severe legal punishments appear capable of restoring civic order. Yet the play's conclusion, for all its dramatic fireworks, does not obviously resolve this problem. All that happens, it appears, is that everyone gets married. Understanding marriage's political significance, therefore, is key to unraveling the play's political teaching. By carefully framing marriage within Pauline language of sin and grace—and in particular by using the image of death and rebirth through baptism—Shakespeare offers a theological as well as a political image of a kind of self-government capable of easing the city's legal dilemmas and reconciling justice with mercy.     

The finds from the cellar of the Old Hall,Temple Balsall,Warwickshire

Abstract

The cellar, excavated in 1981, revealed late 17th and early 18th century material, which is the subject of this report. The pottery included yellow wares, English delftware, blackware, manganese-mottled wares, stonewares, slipware and coarseware. Tobacco pipes, medicine phials, table glass, wine bottles, bones and iron-work were also found. The excavation report will be published separately.¹ Ex inf. Paul Woodfield.     

Tom Stoppard’s Big Picture: The Chaos that is Our World

Abstract

Issues arising from discussions regarding the ‘two cultures’ of science and art are many and varied. Tom Stoppard’s very active utilization of science in many of his plays has resulted in his work — especially the quantum mechanics-informed Hapgood and the chaotics-informed Arcadia — being held up as paradigmatic of one science/art position or another. Often, critical approaches to these plays involve a checklist of scientific facts, implying that the goal of such art is to serve as a delivery device for scientific breakthroughs. While plays, novels, and movies of various sorts may have such goals in mind, Stoppard’s plays do not comfortably fill that agenda, critical arguments to the contrary notwithstanding. Neither do Stoppard’s plays show particular interest in engaging any debate about the superiority of one ‘culture’ over the other. In his two ‘science plays’ in particular, what Stoppard offers is an enrichment of both science and art through metaphorical intertwinings that suggest experience is best served when both camps collaborate. The bigger picture that results argues an overlap in epistemology, namely revealing the uncanny similarity in which artist and scientist approach the material that is our universe.     

Drinking Diplomacy: The St. Petersburg ‘Ordre des Antisobres’ and Fraternal Culture among European Envoys in Early Imperial Russia

Abstract

Early in 1728, in St. Petersburg, Russia, the Duke of Liria—a Spanish diplomat, prominent Jacobite, and an illegitimate grandson of James II—sought to establish a curiously-titled fraternity called the ‘Order of the Anti-Sober’. Using the surviving charter of the proposed fraternal order as a point of departure, this article reconstructs the context and the meaning of Liria’s initiative. While drinking has traditionally been associated with Russia and in particular with the mores of Peter I’s court, this microstudy helps us to see it as a part of European sociable and diplomatic practices of the era. This episode sheds light not only on the broader evolution of fraternal societies in the early eighteenth century, but also on the mechanisms that drove the spread of such forms of associational life across the continent.     

François bauduin's de institutione historie (1561): A primary text behind anders s⊘rensen vedel's de scribenda historia danica (1578)

Although acknowledged as well‐read in contemporary humanist literature, the Danish historian Anders S?rensen Vedel (1542–1616) has never been shown to draw inspiration from any one particular international author of the 16th century (apart from the general influence of Melanchthon and his school). Now, it turns out that the French jurist and pioneer of historical theory, François Bauduin (1520–73), was used extensively by Vedel in one of his early treatises. This leads to a reassessment of Bauduin's intellectual influence around the turn of the century—his theory of history had not yet receded out of sight.     

Civil Power and the Deconstruction of Scholasticism in the Thought of Marc'antonio de Dominis

Summary

Marc'antonio de Dominis is well known to historians as a figure in the political and religious culture of early modern Britain and Europe. This article contends that he was also a major theorist of civil power: his critique of Catholic scholastic political thought is compelling and his account of divine right kingship sheds light on conceptual problems that troubled a range of early modern thinkers. De Dominis dismantled the scholastic theory of political power on its own terms, insisting that Almain, Bellarmine, Suárez and others could not distinguish, as they sought to, between the potestas politica in general and the rule of particular princes. By this insight de Dominis could vindicate royal authority against the deposing pretensions of the Pope, the main objective of James I's supporters during the Allegiance Controversy, but his own positive account of how to think about power ran into theoretical trouble which he evidently perceived himself. If the potestas politica cannot be abstracted from a specific regime, and if the prince's absolute sovereignty depends on this fact, can politics be understood only at the level of the particular and contingent? The article closes by setting Thomas Hobbes—well versed in Jacobean polemic—in the context of this question.     

Shakespeare's Fault or Yours? Melzer's Maxim: A Guide to Tentative Omniscience for the Congenitally Hyperfallible

Abstract

Arthur Melzer's tremendous accomplishment is even greater than he may realize. The tradition of esoteric writing in political philosophy exists, as he convincingly demonstrates, and the consequences of this discovery are as significant as he claims. But the method of esoteric reading that he recommends applies more broadly than he seems to suggest. Applied liberally, moreover, as a corrective to nearly everything that's gone wrong with education in the humanities and social sciences over the last forty years, his humble heuristic—Melzer's Maxim, I call it—has the potential to reorient and renew the whole concept of Liberal Education for an age whose pedagogy is foundering. A boon to the sub-discipline of Political Theory in particular, Philosophy Between the Lines has even more to offer to classroom instruction in general. Read between the lines, Melzer's specialized work of scholarship promises nothing less than the opening of the American mind. It is the antidote to the poison of politically correct multiculturalism.     

Review article

Friedrich Fabri und der Imperialismus in der Bismarckzeit. Revolution—Depression—Expansion. By Klaus J. Bade. Freiburg i. Br., Atlantis Verlag, 1975. 579 pp.     

Mid 17th- and 19th-century English wine bottles with seals in London’s archaeological collections

Abstract

This article details work which has, for the first time, delivered a comprehensive catalogue of 17th- and 19th-century dated English glass bottles with applied seals derived from archaeological excavations in London by MOLA (Museum of London Archaeology) and its predecessors. This text introduces the cataloguing methodology employed, reviews the historiography of bottle seal studies and summarizes the survey results. We consider, among other issues, the context and parallels behind individual seal designs, their chronologies, geographies of their movement and spaces of use in early Modern London.     

Revitalizing Federalism: A Brownsonian Prescription for Preserving National Unity Amidst Growing Diversity

Abstract

Historically, the United States has achieved a relatively high degree of political stability. The reason: the Federal Constitution provides a complex architecture that checks and divides political power and compels compromise. In A Constitution in Full: Recovering the Unwritten Foundation of American Liberty, Richard Reinsch and Peter Augustine Lawler recommend the work of Orestes Augustus Brownson, a Civil War era theorist, to properly interpret the genius of this unique American constitutional order. In The American Republic (1865), Brownson emphasized that America’s written constitution is rooted in its unwritten constitution; the habits, customs, and sentiments of the people. The Founders’ federal division of authority between the nation’s general government and the particular governments of the states simultaneously recognized Americans’ national unity and genuine diversity. Today, that diversity—racial, religious, ethnic—is even more granular. In accommodating that diversity, a revitalized federalism would return greater power to the people of the states over domestic policies. This would not only regenerate democratic decision-making, but would also help to reduce the political polarization by allowing policy outcomes suitable to diverse communities.     

Decomposition as Practice and Process: Creating Boundary Objects in Computational Humanities

Abstract

The emergent reflexive process, by which researchers in a computational humanities project work towards a viable organizational modality for interdisciplinary collaboration, is analyzed. Using the metaphor of decomposition, successful collaboration between computer scientists and humanities scholars can be seen to require a reflexive scrutiny — a decomposition — of the disciplinary research processes that are involved, thus allowing crucial differences with respect to typical ways of posing research questions, the role of data, and the rhythm of the research process to be highlighted. It is argued that the currently popular expectation towards data as a self-identical organizational unit tends to downplay the role of decomposition as practice and process. A European cyberinfrastructure initiative that tries to respect the specificities of scholarly practice in the humanities is critically assessed, reflecting in particular on the inherent tension between ‘mutual shaping’ of digital tools and their users on the one hand, and the policy interest in efficient, functionalist design principles on the other.     

Is Feminist geography relevant?

Abstract

As the whole point of feminism is to empower women and girls and to improve the circumstances of their lives, most feminist geographers would claim that indeed feminist geography is — or at least aims to be — relevant; they would then hasten to point to the contradictions and ambiguities inherent in this claim: what counts as relevant and relevant to whom are complicating questions. The work of feminist geography encompasses teaching, activism and scholarship — all potentially relevant activities. In considering what counts as relevant, I discuss the difficulties of equating relevant with applied and of knowing whether or not our teaching, research and activism will turn out to be relevant. Complicating any claim to relevance is our inability to know, and lack of control over, how others will use our work. Asking ‘relevant to whom?’ points to the difficult truth that what some women view as positive change others may see as harmful to their interests; in this senserelevance is specific to particular contexts, scales and places. At the same time, relevance can enter the intricate web of global interconnections and transcend particular contexts, scales and places. Relevance itself is therefore a geographic concept. Feminist geographers struggle to hold together these sometimes contradictory geographic dimensions of relevance. I close by arguing that the growing body of feminist geography work engages with a range of social issues around the world and certainly has the potential for relevance at a variety of scales. But the relevance question will remain a complex and ambiguous one for feminist geographers.     

Vernacular memorialization in the military: personal acts of remembrance at RAF Thorpe Abbotts

ABSTRACT

In September 2017, an archaeological excavation at RAF Thorpe Abbotts (also known as Station 139) uncovered 7 identification ‘dog’ tags belonging to airmen of the United States Army Air Force (USAAF). It is the thesis of this article that these were purposefully buried by individuals within the 100th Bomb Group (Heavy) as acts of remembrance. Alongside the dog tags were a number of other artefacts, including coins, bottles, and a canteen cup. These likely formed the material culture of self-developed grieving rituals established by the primary group responsible for the deposition of the dog tags.     

Political Phenomenology: Radical Democracy and Truth

Abstract

In light of the "theological turn" in recent phenomenology, a question arises for contemporary thought of how the relationships among philosophy, religion, and democratic politics might be recontextualized and understood from a specifically phenomenological perspective. Essential in addressing this question is a critical examination of the method of reduction, or epoche instituted by Edmund Husserl as the original, core practice of phenomenology. Reinterpreting the epoche in terms of its social, historical, and political dimensions, later phenomenologists Enzo Paci and Jan Patocka demonstrate how phenomenology's conception of truth is necessarily coordinated with a commitment to collective democratic praxis. In Paci, the practice of epoche initiates critical resistance to ideological and idolatrous social and political forms through contrast with the infinite openness of truth's real universality. In Patocka, phenomenological method as applied to historically-embedded religious and philosophical traditions helps to clarify what in particular distinguishes democratic from autocratic forms of life. By drawing the insights of Paci and Patocka into conjunction, a new conception emerges of the unique religio— the collective, existential commitment— of phenomenology as such: to express the experience(s) of truth through democratic praxis in collaboration with other analogous philosophical, religious and scientific traditions.     

Pieter van den Ancker and imports of Frechen stoneware bottles and drinking pots in Restoration London c. 1660–67

Abstract

In the long history since the Middle Ages of the making and extensive trading of the stoneware pottery of the German Rhineland area a dominant role was achieved through most of the 17th century by the manufactory that developed around the village of Frechen, close to the major trading centre of Cologne. A clearer view of this production, and of the dating and context of individual products, would be of considerable interest for both archaeologists and historians. It is hoped that association here of a significant group of Frechen bottles and drinking pots during the 1660s with an individual London trader and consideration of questions related may make a contribution to future studies.     

Nahal Lavan 108: A Pre-Pottery Neolithic a Site in the Western Negev,Israel

Abstract

Although the recent publication of the results of excavation and restoration in the Siq at Petra by the Petra National Trust has thrown welcome light on the hydraulic engineering skills of the Nabataeans, it is suggested here that the conclusions reached by the authors regarding the chronology of those works are not necessarily correct and should not be accepted as definitive. It is shown that the interpretation of the ceramic evidence is faulty and that other, epigraphic, evidence is ignored. In particular, it is argued that the major works — the dam and the tunnel — as well as the paved road through the Siq, may be as late as, or even later than, the middle of the 1st century AD, rather than the late 1st century BC, as the authors assume. It is further suggested that this could also be the date of the Khazneh, and that this may be indicated also by the recent discovery of earlier tomb façades beneath the Khazneh.     

‘Enormous Opportunities’ and ‘Hot Frontiers’: Sub-Saharan Africa in U.S. Grand Strategy, 2001-Present

Abstract

This article argues that, in the 21st century, there has been a significant turnaround in the US approach to Sub-Saharan Africa. No longer is the region viewed solely as the site of human tragedy and internal wars where Washington has no tangible interests. Instead, US policymakers have increasingly viewed this part of Africa as a site of valuable commercial, geopolitical, and security interests—with particular emphasis on petroleum reserves, the market potential of its growing population, and its apparent locus as a site of transnational Islamist terrorism. Sub-Saharan Africa is now considered in grand strategic terms. Unintended consequences of US intervention are already visible, however; as it integrates the region into its global strategic calculus, the United States has begun to repeat mistakes made in other key regions of the world.