Bernardo del Carpio en el Poema de Fernán González

The focus of the Poema de Fernán González falls squarely on its protagonist, the tenth-century Castilian warrior lord known to us today as Count Fernán González. Nevertheless, a third of the poem is devoted to the narration of events and prominent figures who preceded the Count. Most notable among these is Bernardo del Carpio, a fully fictitious epic hero who prefigures the Count in his willingness to fight for the independence of the Castilian nation. This analysis of the narration of Bernardo's heroic deeds against the invading army of Charlemagne is meant to clarify lingering doubts about the sources of the poem and their mode of transmission.     

The Voting Rights of Incarcerated Australian Citizens

Drawing on and combining political science and legal frameworks, this article explores the validity of disenfranchising Australian prisoners. The authors examine and critically assess the various arguments used in Australia by both legislators and High Court Justices to defend the practice of disenfranchisement. Such arguments are assessed against liberal democratic principles as well as jurisprudence arising from cases in settings that provide protection for electoral rights in formal charters of rights. The authors show that in settings that entrench voting rights in the Constitution, any infringement attracts strict scrutiny from the courts. Courts insist that any abridgement of voting rights should serve a legitimate government purpose and be proportionate to that purpose. The arguments made for prisoner disenfranchisement by legislators in the Australian context invariably fail both parts of this test.     

Modern and Medieval Approaches to Pilgrimage,Gender and Sacred Space

This article examines both modern ethnographical, and medieval hagiographical, constructs of sacred space in the context of female pilgrimage. Beginning with an overview of the ways in which anthropological theories of sacred space and gender have informed pilgrimage scholarship over the last fifty years, it focuses in particular on two conceptual models: that which argues that spatial practices employed by cult centres served to distance women from holy places, and that which contends that accommodation was reached between the devotional aspirations of female pilgrims on the one hand, and the institutional policies of the Church on the other. In turning to the Middle Ages, the second part of the article examines narrative representations of sacred space, and reveals that the spatial challenges posed by female pilgrimage in the medieval West were addressed and mediated in hagiography in surprisingly similar ways.     

Earthenware production and distribution in the prehispanic Philippine polity of Tanjay: results from laser ablation-inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS)

This paper presents the results of laser ablation-inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS) analysis of low-fired earthenware from the prehispanic trading polity of Tanjay (c. A.D. 500–1600) in the central Philippines. The goal of this project was to determine whether or not the compositional analysis of ceramics could be used to examine the organization of pottery production and exchange relationships in the Bais-Tanjay region of Negros Island. Results indicate that at least five distinct groups of ceramics can be differentiated based on elemental compositions and that pottery production was both a part-time, dispersed endeavor and a full-time, likely centralized, craft. In addition, a number of compositional outliers in the ceramic dataset suggest that interregional trade took place, with pottery made outside the Bais-Tanjay region being imported, especially by upland swidden farmers.