The (Pregnant) Mouse Freed from the Gallows: A Ballad Parallel for the Conclusion of Manawydan fab Llŷr

In the concluding episode of the Third Branch of the Mabinogi, the Welsh nobleman Manawydan takes the (pregnant) mouse that he has captured to the magically significant site Gorsedd Arberth and prepares to hang her for theft, according to the law. As he prepares the gallows, various figures attempt to intervene until finally a ‘bishop’ redeems his transformed wife by disenchanting the land, freeing Manawydan’s companions, and swearing not to take vengeance. We argue that this scene is strikingly similar to the famous ballad widely attested all over Europe, ‘The Maid Freed from the Gallows’, a parallel which not only illuminates this episode in the Mabinogi, but also suggests how the Welsh storyteller used traditional material in shaping these narratives.     

Down Little Lon: An Introduction to the Casselden Place Archaeological Excavations, Melbourne

In 2002 Melbourne’s Casselden Place excavation provided a window into the urban past opened by an innovative relationship between the development industry, heritage consultancy and La Trobe University. The project demonstrated that with the support of consent authorities and the co-operation of the development industry, collaborations between the academic world and heritage consultants could be highly successful. The Casselden Place Project made a significant contribution to the ‘slum debate’ in Australia and delivered an enhanced understanding of the cultural, social and scientific significance of an inner-city block, and shed new light on a notorious chapter in the city’s history.     

‘A Rather Undefined Social Position and Public Recognition’: Professionalisation,Status and Masculinity in Provincial Museums,c.1870–1930

This article examines the background, careers and self-presentation of the first generation of British museum curators in local government-funded provincial museums, c.1900, to explore the issue of masculinity among the lower-middle classes. It argues that while such men were sometimes mocked for the lack of masculinity they showed in their domestic lives, a focus on their professional lives reveals a different set of problems facing them as they attempted to be manly men; curatorial roles, like others available to the lower-middle classes, involved a dependence on local elites, and required many of the skills and attributes which were being colonised by new women professionals. The study then examines the tactics used, with some success, by such men to assert a professional masculinity, focusing on their identification with their museum, their development of a professional body and their investment in manly physical activities.     

Reason and lovelessness: Tagore,war crimes,and Justice Pal

Rabindranath Tagore, whose oeuvre provincialized Europe, thought about the Nation-State’s wars and crimes in ways congruent with that of another man from Calcutta: Radhabinod Pal, the Indian judge at the Tokyo War Crimes Trial. Several themes intersect here. Tagore was prescient about the aeroplane as the colonial vehicle of atrocity in modern war, anticipating the atomic bombs. He began with high hopes for Japan and an Asia that was one, but his story is a transition from innocence to experience of Japan’s militarism. In the face Japanese scorn at his criticisms Tagore expressed a profound moral teaching about defeat, so called, and the extent to which even victorious civilizations might dishonor themselves. Justice Pal, naively thought by the great powers to be an ally in their legal endeavors to ratify a ‘victor’s justice’, arrived in Tokyo in 1946 with a secret weapon strapped to his heart: his faith in ancient Hindu law, which covertly informs the post-colonial tenor of his ‘dissentient’ judgment, first fully published in Calcutta in 1953. The argument here rests, if that’s possible, where Ashis Nandy ends his illuminating essay on Pal: culpability in matters of war is not easily divisible.     

The Litaniae maiores and minores in Rome, Francia and Anglo-Saxon England: terminology, texts and traditions

It has been noted that there are Frankish and Anglo-Saxon texts in which the three days before Ascension are designated as the Major Litanies, a practice generally regarded as an inexplicable deviation from the established norm of designating 25 April as the Major Litany and the three days before Ascension as the Minor Litany. This article shows, however, that this contrastive terminology was not in use in the Anglo-Saxon and Frankish churches and that the pre-Ascension litany days – more firmly established than the Roman tradition of 25 April – were commonly designated as the Litaniae maiores in authoritative contexts.     

Assembling the Austrasian Letters at Trier and Lorsch

This article is a reconsideration of the Epistulae Austrasicae. We critique the widespread notion that the constituent letters were compiled by a courtier in the late sixth century at Metz as a book of models for use in the Austrasian chancellery. We argue instead that a monk from the monastery of Lorsch assembled the letters in the early ninth century from individual exemplars and groupings that he found in archives at Trier. We conclude by outlining some implications of this rereading for the edition and interpretation of the letters as sources for the Merovingian period, and point out some avenues for future research on their reception in the Carolingian period.     

The Burghal Hidage: The Establishment of a Text

EXCAVATION OF THE 500 sq. m. waterfront site at Trig Lane in the City of London revealed a well-preserved series of timber and stone revetments on the medieval foreshore. They survived to heights of up to 3 m. and had been erected during the piecemeal reclamation and subsequent consolidation of the riverfront between the mid 13th and late 15th century.

The structures are described in detail, and their form and function discussed. Ninety-four oak samples were submitted for dendrochronological analysis, the results of which enabled a relative chronology for part of the revetment sequence to be established and absolute dates postulated.     

Own-child estimates of U.S. white fertility, 1886–99

Abstract

The collapse of empires is exceedingly difficult to understand. The author examined the distribution of imperial lifetimes using a data set that spans more than three millennia and found that it conforms to a memoryless exponential distribution in which the rate of collapse of an empire is independent of its age. Comparing this distribution to similar lifetime distributions of other complex systems—specifically, biological species and corporate firms—the author explores the reasons behind their lifetime distributions and how this approach can yield insights into empires.