Preaching in thirteenth-century hospitals

This article uses thirteenth-century hospital sermons as a window into the moral and religious environment of these charitable institutions, large numbers of which were founded during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. What emerges from the reportationes of sermons preached in the hôtel-dieu of Paris and ad status sermons directed at hospitals' personnel and inmates by Jacques de Vitry, Humbert of Romans and Guibert de Tournai is a spirituality that stressed the penitential (and potentially salvific) power of doing works of mercy (in the case of hospital workers) and bodily suffering (in the case of hospital inmates). The particular social context of hospital preaching is also evident in preachers' anxieties about the quality of hospital administration. The sermons that were preached in thirteenth-century hospitals reflect the heightened value placed on caring for the sick and poor, a historical development more often associated with the later middle ages.     

The corporeal,the social and space/place: exploring intersections from a midwifery perspective in New Zealand

This article explores the interrelations between the corporeal, the social and the spatial as they operate to shape the discursive and material realities of childbirth in the obstetric hospital setting. It draws on interviews conducted with midwives throughout New Zealand and embodies key insights derived from the work of Michel Foucault and Elizabeth Grosz. The obstetric hospital is theorised as a product of particular socio-political relations that privilege biomedical constructions of the body and childbirth. Midwives, however, proffer an alternative construction of childbirth and the space/place it is enacted. It is one that requires a woman to actively engage with a variety of birth spaces and take up a range of subject positions that enable her to be a more active agent in the process of parturition. The limited and limiting spatial and discursive arrangements of the obstetric hospital, it is argued, shape the behaviour, subjectivity and corporeality of the maternal body confined within it and therefore the practises of midwives. Unfortunately, and as this article demonstrates, the opportunity to take up such an alternative is limited in the obstetric hospital despite some recent cosmetic attempts to render it more welcoming.     

POLICY-INDUCED DISTORTIONS IN SPATIAL COST SURFACES: THE CASE OF ONTARIO HYDRO

Underlying much of location theory is a presumption that the costs and revenues of enterprise vary from place to place. Such variations describe spatial cost and revenue surfaces to which locational decisions may be referenced. Changes in Ontario Hydro's pricing practices between 1906 and 1981 illustrate the substantial impact of policy on three major sources of spatial variation in costs. In consequence, it appears that locational decisions are increasingly referenced to artificial, policy-distorted cost surfaces. Prospects of achieving a spatially efficient configuration of economic activity appear to be severely compromised.
La «théorie d'emplacement >> se fonde sur la présomption que les dépenses et les revenus d'une enterprise varient selon l'endroit ou elle est située. Le choix de l'emplacement d'un project est affecté par ces variations de couts d'espace et de possibilités de revenus. Les changements dans les practiques des prix d'hydro Ontario entre 1906 et 1981 illustrent les impacts considerables de cette politique sur trois sources principales de variations des couts. Il semble cependant que les décisions basées sur la «théorie d'emplacement >> soient faussées d'autant plus que les couts se révélent irrealistes. Base sur cette théorie les chances de parvenir a une situation économique optimale apparaissent être sévérement compromises.     

The bioerosion of bird bones

This study presents a synthesis of the evidence for modern archaeological, and palaeontological bioerosion of vertebrate tissue. It describes the first evidence for the bioerosion of modern, archaeological and fossil bird bones. A new form of bone bioerosion, known as Hackett tunnels, is defined. The bioerosion of vertebrate tissue by cyanobacteria and algae in modern marine and lacustrine environments is also described. Archaeological evidence indicates that the destruction of bone by bioerosion occurs in other terrestrial environments, such as cave deposits and middens. Bone from marine and lacustrine environments that appears to be macroscopically well preserved can have large amounts of microscopic fabric destruction. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The British at Weihaiwei: A Case Study in the Irrationality of Empire

The grand spectacle of Britain's return of Hong Kong, its colony since the 1842 Treaty of Nanking, to Chinese sovereignty in July 1997 served to dramatize to a global audience the end of imperialism in its most overt political form. Beginning with China's defeat in the First Opium War in 1842, Britain and other European powers came to exercise varying degrees of forcible dominion, wrapped in a confusing array of legal guises, over parts of this proud but endangered country. Known to the Chinese ever since as the "unequal treaties," these agreements progressively infringed on China's sovereignty, administrative and legal integrity, and economic viability. Extraterritorial rights exempting foreigners from Chinese justice, treaty ports where administration was in the hands of foreigners, and foreign control of extensive portions of Chinese bureaucratic administration, including even the country's ability to collect revenue through the Maritime Customs Service—all became part of the elaborate edifice of extraordinary rights and privileges that the powers created for themselves in the name of the "great game" of empire in China.¹     

Media,Language Policy and Cultural Change in Tatarstan: Historic vs. Pragmatic Claims to Nationhood

Abstract. The politics of national identity in the Republic of Tatarstan are complex and often contradictory. Although sometimes posed in terms of an historical legacy, claims to nationhood are also strongly shaped by more pragmatic contemporary concerns. In addition to more conventional forms of political mobilisation, national identity is also contested in cultural arenas. Examining policies on language reform and media development, for example, sheds light on the processes through which a sense of national identity is currently being renegotiated in Tatarstan. The Republic's official multicultural policy is situated in the context of a range of distinct conceptions of Tatarstan's identity, from radical Islamic nationalism to a view of the republic as a Russian province.