Faith in war: the religious experience of Scottish soldiery, c.1100–c.1500

This paper examines the comparatively patchy evidence for the pastoral provision and personal faith of late medieval Scottish combatants below the rank of knight. By examining such sources as papal supplications, royal financial accounts, parliamentary rolls, chronicles, poetry and the cartularies of Scottish monastic houses and burgh collegiate churches, it is possible to identify elite and parish provision of churchmen serving the needs of Scottish troops as they mustered, trained and prepared for battle. In addition, this evidence also highlights a number of cults and relics popular with the social ranks of the ordinary Scottish soldiery, including those of SS Ninian, Leonard, Thomas Becket, Columba, the Blessed Virgin Mary and — often cast as the nemesis of Scottish troops — Cuthbert. However, this survey also points to some tensions between the spiritual interests of Scottish servicemen and their ruling elites.     

Neutron activation analysis of fine grey pottery from Conimbriga,Santa Olaia and Tavarede,Portugal

The concentrations of two major elements and thirteen trace elements in 73 selected sherds of fine grey ware from the Iron Age and Roman period, excavated at Conimbriga, Santa Olaia and Tavarede, Portugal, were determined by instrumental neutron activation analysis. These concentrations were used to calculate distance matrices which were then subjected to cluster analysis employing SAHN and k-means methods, as well as to principal components analysis, to group the sherds according to the overall similarity of their compositional characteristics. The results showed that equivalent groupings appeared regardless of the taxonomic method used. Two major clusters were recognized corresponding to two different sites, namely Conimbriga and Santa Olaia, suggesting that the ceramics from these sites were made locally. No significant differences in compositional patterns were observed between iron age and roman sherds from Conimbriga.     

The historical dimension of French geography

In France, the study of history behind regional geography has suffered a long decline since the late nineteenth century, but a new historical dimension is beginning to emerge. In the nineteenth century, historians showed how much regional character owed to remains from antiquity while historical geographers traced the history of exploration and discovery from ancient to modern times. Vidal de la Blache integrated historical reconstruction with social analysis in the study of regions. Vidal's followers not only characterized the distinctiveness of regional features but also demonstrated that differences in regional ways of life were more pronounced before industrialization and urbanization than later. In the first quarter of the twentieth century, historical investigations by geographers were neither sufficiently comprehensive nor sufficiently rigorous to explain spatial patterns. Historians of the Annales school obtained deeper understandings of social and economic changes and took a broader view of long-term psychological, cultural and geographical changes. Their interpretations of agrarian structures illuminated problems fundamental to the development of European civilization. In the 1970s, reacting against mechanistic analyses of spatial organization, young scholars again turned to historical geography to examine problems of social evolution. At the moment, this revival of historical interest among geographers has not attracted much attention from historians.     

Geographical structure in nineteenth-century urban retailing: Milwaukee, 1836–1890

This study explores the spatial structure of retailing in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in the era before the introduction of the electric streetcar in 1890. It uses city directory listings to chart changes in the numbers and types of retail outlets, their degree of nucleation and the functional complexity of such nucleations. The evidence suggests the early appearance of non-central retailing, the rapid dispersal of high as well as low order goods to non-central sites and the early emergence initially of a three-level and then, by 1870, a four-level hierarchy of shopping clusters. The pattern of retail clustering varied with the class and ethnic character of neighbourhoods, and clusters gravitated toward major arterial routes even in the pre-mass transit ear. Urban retailing in the second half of the nineteenth century was neither randomly dispersed nor over-whelmingly concentrated in a single central retail district, but developed a spatial hierarchy that clearly anticipated modern patterns.