Andrew Marvell,the Lord Maynard and the Ballastage Office

In the Restoration, Andrew Marvell was elected to the Elder Brethren of the London (Deptford) Trinity House (May 1674). Some “new” documents reveal him assisting that shipmasters’ corporation in its business. In this work, he was helping to protect a charity, shoring up a corporate bulwark against the rising tide of Court interest; he was soon to lament in An Account of the Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government (1677). At issue was the drafting of letters rejecting a claim by the Lord Maynard, a prominent courtier who, with the support of James Duke of York and of Charles II, sought the reversion of the Ballastage Office. That lucrative office was a major resource for the London Trinity House, and one which fuller profits it was reluctant to concede. Whatever Marvell's own observation of decorum, the heavy correction of his initial draughts shows his more abrupt style coming under review, with a more flourishing courtliness characterizing the final letters sent by the group.     

Le crépuscule des Dieux: Regards sur le polythéisme hindou et l'athéisme bouddhique (XVIIe‐XIXe siècle)

From the Age of Classicism to the Age of the Enlightenment. Indian heathendom (that is to say, Hinduism as it was perceived in those times) provided Europe with the spectacle of an incomparable profusion of polytheism. But if India appeared as the living sanctuary of countless divinities, it had also been the cradle of Buddhism which disappeared from its native land to spread over an immense part of Asia. Buddhism was conceived of as an “absolute atheism”; whose fundamental doctrine — the famous nirvana — was considered to be a form of nihilism which had no equivalent in the history of the human mind. Thus, the historiographical discourse on religious matters in India fits into a triad‐like structure in which atheism plays a pivotal role between monotheism and polytheism. A long time after the scholarly discovery of Hinduism and Buddhism, the archaic aspect of this discourse constantly reveals itself in the residual nature of the myth of the double doctrine and the persistence of the theme of the Monster. For philologists and historians of religions until the beginning of the twentieth century, Indian excesses in the religious domain continue to constitute a violation of Reason and Nature.     

First chronometric dates (TL and OSL) for the Aurignacian open-air site of Româneşti-Dumbrăviţa I,Romania

Currently, absolute dates for the emergence of the Early Upper Paleolithic and the timing of the earliest dispersal of anatomically modern humans (AMH) into Europe are sparse. This is especially true for regions adjoining the Eastern Mediterranean and Central Europe with its dense clusters of sites along the Austrian and German Danube Valley. This article makes a first step toward filling this gap and, for the first time, presents absolute ages for the open-air site of Române?ti-Dumbr?vi?a I (Banat, SW Romania) located close to the Oase Cave where some of the oldest AMH fossils were found. A set of heated artefacts recently excavated from the Aurignacian layer GH3 was dated by thermoluminescence (TL) and gives early chronometric dates for this technocomplex in Romania.     

An allosaurid theropod dinosaur from the Early Cretaceous of Victoria,Australia

The discovery of an astragalus of an allosaurid theropod in southeastern Australia extends the geographic range of the Allosauridae to include all continents except Antarctica and the Indian subcontinent. In addition, it confirms the presence of this family during the Early Cretaceous.     

The holotype individual of the ornithopod dinosaur Leaellynasaura amicagraphica Rich & Rich, 1989 (late Early Cretaceous,Victoria, Australia)

Doubt has been cast upon the association of the skull roof and postcranial bones, originally regarded as part of the same individual as the holotype, the left side of the skull, of Leaellynasaura amicagraphica Rich & Rich 1989. The reasons given for these doubts, the form of the prefrontal and the proportions of the supratemporal region being inconsistent with the holotype, are imprecise. The association is supported both by the morphology of the parietal and jugal, which are similar to those of Dryosaurus, and the unique sedimentological setting.