Words and Deeds, Stasis and Change: New Directions in Florentine Devotion Around 1500

Members of Renaissance Italian confraternities spoke an official language that emphasized stability and permanence rather than change, a fact which can obscure the precise relationship between the culture of organized lay devotion and events in society as a whole. Examining four miraculous cults that achieved prominence in Florence around 1500, this essay argues that, far from their being static or conservative organizations, confraternities exemplify major changes transforming Florentine society at this time. The representations of class, wealth, gender, and age that emerge from the analysis help to problematize and complicate developments that otherwise appear as overly simplified, teleological trends.     

Kommunikation und Veränderung—aktuelle Herausforderungen in der Kommunalberatung

Die Herausforderung und das Ziel eines jeden kommunalen Beratungsprojektes ist die konsensorientierte und zielführende Kommunikation von notwendigen Veränderungen. Nicht unterschiedliche Städte und Gemeinden mit ähnlichen Problemlagen stehen im Vordergrund der Bearbeitung, sondern das höchst individuelle Angebot alternativer Kommunikationsverfahren. Auch der Kommunalberater aus der Geographie überzeugt vor allem durch seine persönliche Ansprache und seine beruflichen Erfahrungen. Die Perspektiven in diesem weiten Berufsfeld sind grundsätzlich nicht schlecht, wenn Geographen es heute und zukünftig verstehen, ihre fachlichen Vorzüge entsprechend darzulegen. Dieser Artikel soll Mut machen für die Herausforderungen vor Ort und Perspektiven aufzeigen!     

Vision and visualization

The art of visual communication is not restricted to the fine arts. Scientists also apply art in communicating their ideas graphically. Diagrams of anatomical structures, like the eye and visual pathways, and figures displaying specific visual phenomena have assisted in the communication of visual ideas for centuries. It is often the case that the development of a discipline can be traced through graphical representations and this is explored here in the context of concepts of visual science. As with any science, vision can be subdivided in a variety of ways. The classification adopted is in terms of optics, anatomy, and visual phenomena; each of these can in turn be further subdivided. Optics can be considered in terms of the nature of light and its transmission through the eye. Understanding of the gross anatomy of the eye and visual pathways was initially dependent upon the skills of the anatomist whereas microanatomy relied to a large extent on the instruments that could resolve cellular detail, allied to the observational skills of the microscopist. Visual phenomena could often be displayed on the printed page, although novel instruments expanded the scope of seeing, particularly in the nineteenth century.     

Oldowan behavior and raw material transport: perspectives from the Kanjera Formation

The archaeological record of Oldowan hominins represents a diverse behavioral system. It has been suggested that exploitation of lithic resources by Oldowan hominins was simplistic and represented mostly use of local sources of stone. Here we investigate the raw material selection and transport behaviors of Oldowan hominins reflected in the stone artifact assemblages from the Kanjera South Formation, South Rachuonyo District, Kenya. Using geochemical methods (ED-XRF) artifacts are linked to primary and secondary source outcrops throughout southwestern Kenya. These data show that hominins selected raw materials for transport at frequencies that are significantly different from their availability on ancient landscapes. Furthermore, a substantial proportion of the assemblage represents transport over relatively long distances (>10 km). Our study further suggests that in the early stages of stone tool use hominins used a wide variety of raw materials and selected these materials at some distance from their eventual discard locations. Early hominin behavior may have incorporated an understanding of raw material source distributions across a more extensive landscape than has been previously documented. This supports the growing perspective that Oldowan technology represents a more complex behavioral pattern than is usually associated with the beginnings of hominin tool use.     

Optically stimulated luminescence dating of heated materials using single-aliquot regenerative-dose procedure: a feasibility study using archaeological artefacts from India

Optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) dating of heated/fired materials of archaeological importance from various parts of India was attempted. A single-aliquot regenerative-dose (SAR) procedure was used for palaeodose determination in the quartz grains extracted from the heated materials using the luminescence produced by blue light stimulation. In most pottery samples, the palaeodose obtained using SAR-OSL is ∼6% lower than the palaeodose measured using thermoluminescence (TL) method. Broadly, there is good agreement between the SAR-OSL and TL ages of the artefacts and their archaeologically expected ages. The results suggest that routine dating of heated/fired materials using the SAR-OSL procedure is more practicable, especially when the TL sensitivity of the quartz grains is poor and availability of datable material is limited.     

Papier oder Online?

Am Beispiel einer touristischen Image- bzw. Marktuntersuchung besch?ftigt sich der vorliegende Aufsatz mit den M?glichkeiten zur internet-basierten Datenerhebung im Rahmen empirischer Forschungsprojekte. Die Ergebnisse einer auf einer Zufallsauswahl basierenden schriftlichen Befragung mit Postversand und einer Befragung im Internet werden hierzu miteinander verglichen und ihre Eignung für die gew?hlte Zielsetzung bewertet. Die Darstellung erfolgt anhand des konkreten Fallbeispiels des Projektes „Stuttgart Regio: Touristische Infrastruktur- und Marketing-Analyse.”     

Reflections on Retelling a Renaissance Murder

This mischievously artful essay plays out on several levels; think of them as storeys of an imaginary castle much like the real, solid, central Italian one it explores and expounds. On its own ground floor, the essay recounts a gruesome murder, a noble husband's midnight revenge upon his wife and upon her bastard lover, his own half–brother, in her castle chamber, in bed. In sex. Of course. The murder itself is pure Renaissance, quintessential Boccaccio or Bandello, but the aftermath, in fort and village, is more singular, more ethnographically delightful, as castle and village trace a ceremonious passage from frozen limbo to fluid grief and storytelling, finally set in motion by the arrival of the dead wife's brother. Meanwhile, one flight up, the essay retells my own investigation of the real castle's geometry, as I clambered through rooms, peered out windows, prowled the roof, and scanned blueprints seeking the places of the plotters' plots. In an expository attic, I lodge reflections on my teaching stratagems, as I led a first–year seminar into detection's crafts and exposition's ploys. All the while, on its rooftop, this essay dances among fantastical chimneys and turrets of high theory and literary practice, musing on the patent irony of artful artifice, which evokes both the irony and the pathos of scholars' cool histories about hot deeds and feelings. Art suggests we authors had best hide ourselves, unlike normal essayists, so as not to spoil the show. But, I posit, our self–effacement is so conspicuous that it proclaims our presence, as in fact it should, and, by so doing, trumpets the necessary tensions of our artifice and craft. Thus artfulness itself nicely both proclaims and celebrates the bittersweet frustrations of historians' and readers' quest for knowledge and, especially, for experience of a lost past.