Legal learning and saintly authority in thirteenth-century hagiography: the Magna vita sancti Hugonis

Law is central to the construction of sanctity in Adam of Eynsham’s Magna vita of Hugh of Lincoln (1186–1200). Hugh had no formal training in canon law, and, beyond the Magna vita, there is no evidence to suggest that he was a particularly proficient judge. If that lack of legal training was not a problem in Hugh’s lifetime, it had become a more sensitive issue by c.1212, the date of the composition of the Magna vita. Rather than ignoring the law, or denying its importance, Adam attempted to demonstrate that Hugh received mastery of legal argument as a divine gift, and multiple miracles involve Hugh correcting legal scholars. Recognising these careful patterns of construction raises problems for reading Adam’s Magna vita. While Adam has traditionally been characterised as a truthful biographer, this reading suggests he was engaged in a more complex project of marrying sanctity to legal learning.     

The impact of broadband and other infrastructure on the location of new business establishments

This paper analyzes the impact of broadband infrastructure, along with a range of other local characteristics such as motorways and other infrastructure, availability of human capital, and access to third‐level educational facilities, on the location of new business establishments. The sample period spans the introduction and recent history of broadband in Ireland. The results indicate that the availability of broadband infrastructure is a significant determinant, but its effects may be mediated by the presence of sufficiently high human capital in an area.     

Escape into the City: Everyday Practices of Commoning and the Production of Urban Space in Dublin

In Dublin there are many needs and desires which are not met, or excluded, by the pattern of high rent, the commodification of social/cultural life, and the regulation of public space. Against this dynamic, Dublin has seen a number of experiments in urban commoning: people collectively finding ways of opening up space in order to do what they want. This might be as simple as wanting a space to work, to make food or to show films. Rather than trying to change this situation by appealing to existing institutions, these new urban commons are characterized by particular groups of people devising practical ways of escaping the forms of “enclosure” which limit what can happen in the city. This article takes a “militant research” approach to explore the potentials and limitations of these experiments in urban production and organization.     

Love & loss in the 1960s

Roland Barthes observed that though there is a ‘lover's discourse’ shared by all those who are in love, it is a discourse ignored or disparaged by ‘surrounding languages’. Concerned that the discourse of heritage may participate in this closure against the ‘in love’ experience, I begin to explore ways the field of heritage studies might start speaking this language. Specifically, I ponder the ways that a young Chinese woman in the film Days of being wild, following the breakup of a love affair, becomes locked in a landscape of lost love that is populated with objects sticky with affect, objects which although they transmit painful affects nevertheless bind her by a dynamic that Lauren Berlant terms ‘cruel optimism’. I then turn to imagine the way a Balinese house compound gateway might, in a similar way, have become impregnated with affects relating to victims of the 1965–1966 killings in Bali and how, for those left behind, it might assume the ability to ‘presence’ a lost one. Archaeology and heritage studies have great potential to foster empathy with the experience of past others, but this calls for a sophisticated understanding of how objects become imbued with affect and how they transmit it.