The Smiling Abbot: Rediscovering a Unique Medieval Effigial Slab

The article reports on a newly re-discovered fragment of a recumbent effigial slab commemorating Abbot Hywel (‘Howel’), most likely an abbot of the Cistercian house of Valle Crucis, near Llangollen (Denbighs.). The slab was probably carved very early in the fourteenth century, and could have covered the abbot’s burial place. The stone was dislocated and fragmented at an unknown point in the abbey’s history, and most likely removed from the site during the nineteenth-century clearance of the abbey ruins. It was briefly reported on in 1895 and has been lost to scholarship subsequently.

If indeed from Valle Crucis, the stone is the only known effigial slab commemorating a Cistercian abbot from Wales, and a rare example from Britain. Given that few similar Cistercian abbatial monuments have been identified from elsewhere, the ‘Smiling Abbot’, although only a fragment, is a significant addition to the known corpus of later medieval mortuary monuments. The article discusses the provenance, dating, identification and significance of the monument, including the abbot’s distinctive smile. The stone sheds new light on mortuary and commemorative practice at Valle Crucis Abbey in the early fourteenth century.     

Turbo Island,Bristol: excavating a contemporary homeless place

This paper provides an assessment of the excavation of an apparently ordinary space in Bristol (UK) in 2009. Although the space appears unremarkable to most passers-by, it is unusual in being a place used routinely by many of the city’s street-drinking and homeless community. Homeless people were ‘colleagues’, involved in excavation, finds processing and interpretation. The collaborative nature of this project goes further than merely attempting to represent social groups who have traditionally been excluded from heritage practice and interpretation — it lays methodological foundations for praxis.     

Evidence for volcanic ash fall in the Maya Lowlands from a reservoir at Tikal,Guatemala

Powder X-ray diffraction and petrographic analyses of reservoir sediments from Tikal, Guatemala have identified significant quantities of decomposed volcanic ash in the form of smectite and euhedral bipyramidal quartz crystals. X-ray fluorescence trace element content analysis was used to eliminate distant Sahara-Sahel and Antilles sources. The Zr/Y and Ni/Cr ratios of reservoir sediment from Tikal are consistent with a source from Central American volcanism (e.g., Guatemalan and Salvadoran). AMS radiocarbon dating of the smectite and crystalline quartz-rich reservoir sediments show that volcanic ash fell during the Preclassic, Classic, and Postclassic Maya cultural periods. It may now be possible to develop an effective chronology of ash fall at Tikal and the greater Peten.     

Charlotte Sophia Burne: Shropshire Folklorist,First Woman President of the Folklore Society,and First Woman Editor of Folklore . Part 2: Update and Preliminary Bibliography

THE EVIL EYE IN THE WESTERN HIGHLANDS. By R. C. MACLAGAN, M.D. pp. 232. London: David Nutt. 1902. Reviewed by John Abercromby.

WITCHCRAFT AND SECOND SIGHT IN THE HIGHLANDS AND ISLANDS OF SCOTLAND. By the late JOHN GREGORSON CAMFHELL. pp. 314. Glasgow : James MacLehose. 1902. Reviewed by John Abercromby.

OUTER ISLES. By A. GOODRICH-FREER. pp. 448. Westminster: A. Constable and Co. 1902. Reviewed by John Abercromby.

POPULAR RELIGION IN THE PANJAB. Report of the Census of the Panjab and North-West Frontier Province of 1901. By H. A. ROSE. Simla. 1902. Reviewed by W. Crooke.

LA VIE FUTURE D'APRÉS LE MAZDÉISME À LA LUMIÈRE DES CROVANCES PARALLÈLES DANS LES AUTRES RELIGIONS. ÉTUDE D'ARCHÉOLOGIE COMPARÉE. Par NATHAN SÖDERBLOM. Paris: Leroux. 1901. Reviewed by Alfred Nutt.

THE ORIGIN OF CIVILISATION AND THE PRIMITIVE CONDITION OF MAN. By the RIGHT HON. LORD AVEBURY, P.C., F.R.S., D.C.L., LL.D. Sixth edition, with numerous additions. Longmans, Green, &; Co. 1902. 8vo. Price 18s. Reviewed by A. C. Haddon.

THE MABINOGION. Translated by Lady C. GUEST, and Edited by A. NUTT. D. NUTT. 2s. 1 vol. Reviewed by Margaret Eyre.

THE LITERATURE OF THE CELTS, ITS HISTORY AND ROMANCE. By MAGNUS MACLEAN, M.A., D.Sc. 8vo. Blackie and Son. London. 1902. Reviewed by F. York Powell.     

Towards a Revaluation of the Legend of “Saint” William of Norwich and its Place in the Blood Libel Legend

The legend of William of Norwich is extremely well known and often quoted in discussions of defamatory folklore. However, since I started working on it three or four years ago I have found that there are surprisingly few folkloric analyses. Leaving aside those who have attempted to believe the story and to use it as anti-Jewish propaganda, most of the respectable work has been done by historians and has tended to concentrate either on debunking the legend or on attempting to reconstruct events in Norwich during Easter 1144. My aim in this paper is to redress this balance and tackle a couple of the more folkloric questions.     

Objects and interactivity: A conflict or a collaboration?

The rapid growth in the number of hands‐on centres has led to fears of museums being taken over by interactive exhibits. These are expensive to develop and maintain, causing a problem for traditional museums faced with ever‐expanding collections and diminishing resources. This article considers whether objects and interactive exhibits are inevitably in conflict or whether they can coexist in harmony. The implications for future developments at the Science Museum in London are considered in detail.

The authors conclude that, far from conflicting with traditional museum functions, interactive exhibits and new technologies will help to ensure that museums are able to compete in an increasingly complex marketplace. Their vision of the interactive gallery of the future incorporates exhibits which enhance understanding of artefacts. In short, the objective will be to ensure that visitors interacting with ‘hands‐on’ exhibits will take away ‘minds‐on’ understanding of the museum as a whole.     

The ‘Dividual Androgyne’ and Me: a Personal Affair

In the 25 years since Marilyn Strathern published The Gender of the Gift (1988) its signature concepts of the ‘dividual androgyne’ and ‘sociality’ have received almost no criticism in the anthropological literature and are now widely accepted as true. The ‘dividual’ is considered to be ‘a new, non‐unitary model of embodiment and … one of the most important theoretical accomplishments to emerge from Melanesian ethnography in the latter part of the 20^th Century’ despite the fact that it erases affect, agency, identity and other essential features of human beings (Lipset 2008). The present critique of Strathern's concept of the androgynous ‘dividual’ challenges its legitimacy as a Melanesian or any other ‘premodern’ form of personhood and suggests that it expresses the wish of academic feminists in the 1970s and 1980s to locate an indigenous model for androgyny and to characterise patriarchy, misogyny and sexual segregation as peculiarly Western. The article explores aspects of Gimi myth, ritual and exchange which Strathern claims helped her to formulate the concept of the ‘dividual’ (especially those surrounding men's sacred bamboo flutes) and concludes that she mistook a virulently anti‐female ideology – including a fantasy in which men may subsume or incorporate certain aspects of female anatomy – for benign accommodation between the sexes. The ‘dividual’ does not correspond to social reality among the Gimi and paradoxically affirms Lévi‐Strauss' classic demonstration in the Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949) that ‘the gender of the gift’ is invariably female.