The British Pharaoh?: James I and VI and internationalist religious writing at the wedding of Friedrich V and Elizabeth Stuart

The marriage of Elizabeth Stuart and Friedrich V, Prince Palatine, has recently been described as “the pinnacle of Protestant European festival,” a transnational, transcultural event celebrated throughout Protestant Europe. Politically, it marked a high point of internationalist Protestant sentiment in England. In this article, I examine three sermons preached for the occasion, by the court preacher Andrew Willet, the Wiltshire parson George Webbe, and Friedrich’s court chaplain, Abraham Scultetus. All three use the wedding to advocate an internationalist agenda and subtly critique the Church of England. This is done, in part, through a shared typological understanding of the event based on Psalm 45, read by early moderns as a song on the marriage of Solomon and Pharaoh’s daughter, which aligns James with an idolatrous Pharaoh. Their interpretation of the marriage implicitly anticipates a move toward the pure biblical worship practiced by the continental reformed churches, and shifts the focus of Pan-Protestant hopes from London to Heidelberg.     

A combined visual-geochemical approach to establishing provenance for pegmatite quartz artifacts

A technique for establishing source provenance for pegmatite quartz artifacts was developed using a quarry sample from the Churchill River basin of northern Manitoba and Saskatchewan. Secondary ion mass spectrometry (SIMS) was used to quantify Ti, Ge, Th, and U trace element concentrations and Pb isotope ratios, coupled with qualitative visual characteristics to distinguish between pegmatite quartz from different archaeologically exploited sources in the Churchill River basin region. The technique was also applied to a small sample of quartz artifacts recovered from sites in and around the study area in a preliminary attempt to assign or rule out raw material provenance to characterized sources.     

In search of lost selves: Aidan Higgins' Scenes from a Receding Past

This essay makes the case for a fresh evaluation of Aidan Higgins' long-neglected autobiographical novel Scenes from a Receding Past. It argues that it is most fruitfully understood as a contribution to the phenomenology of personal identity and that many of its formal idiosyncrasies, especially its deviations from the standard formula for Künstlerroman, are a direct result of its preoccupation with general concepts of selfhood rather than a concern with society, or with the artist's role. I trace the genealogy of Higgins' innovative and unique form of realism in this work, and in the novel to which it forms a prequel, Balcony of Europe, to his attempts to escape the influence of James Joyce; and using the work of, amongst others, Paul Ricoeur, demonstrate how his fiction contributes to a new understanding of the relations between narrative, memory, imagination, and consciousness.     

Doing Business: Chinese and European Socioeconomic Relations in Early Cooktown

This paper is an historical archaeological examination of the socioeconomic relations of the Chinese and European communities of Cooktown in north Queensland during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It looks at the social landscape and production, exchange and consumption of material culture to show that the Chinese were not a disengaged group, as depicted in conventional understandings of colonial life, but integral to the town’s socioeconomic fabric. This close relationship arose out of a process of negotiation between Chinese and Europeans which responded to the strengths, weaknesses and resources of their individual business networks, and the particular conditions of Cooktown’s frontier environment.     

Investigating the processes necessary for satisfactory freeze-drying of waterlogged archaeological wood

Preliminary studies into methods for improving and safeguarding the preservation of waterlogged archaeological wooden artefacts are presented. Mannitol, sorbitol and trehalose have been tested as replacements for polyethylene glycol (PEG) as a treatment prior to freeze-drying of wooden archaeological objects. The highest anti-shrink efficiency achieved in this short experiment was (70 ± 15) % using a 20% weight per volume solution of sorbitol after soaking for one week. The collapse or eutectic temperature of each solution used was determined using a freeze-drying microscope. Importantly, it was noted that the collapse temperature of the solutions was reduced by several degrees after use for treatment of the wood samples for one month. A freeze-drying microscope with a cold light source has been used to observe the real-time freeze-drying behaviour of various treatments inside a thin section of wood, confirming that this novel technique is indeed possible and useful. Lastly, the effects of magnesium phytate as an iron chelator have been studied. It was found that the treatment lowers the collapse temperature of a PEG 600/2000 solution by roughly 3 °C meaning that objects must be freeze-dried at a correspondingly lower temperature. Iron K-edge X-ray absorption near-edge spectroscopy analysis showed that the treatment extracted approximately half of the iron(III) ions present in the timbers.     

Governance at community level: Small towns in rural Victoria

The ‘blurring’ of the boundaries between and within public and private sectors has led to new styles of governing that affect the way that rural communities organise themselves. Some have called this a shift from ‘government’ to ‘governance’ where there has been a convergence of neo-liberal and communitarian ideologies to form the basis of a new relationship between the state, the market and civil society. We analyse the impact of these converging ideologies using a survey of development groups in 35 towns in rural Victoria and explore the types of community governance that have emerged as a response to changes in those towns that lost their local government authorities in the last decade of the twentieth century.