Church Architecture in Devon

Identity is formed and reproduced through our relationships with human and non-human others. This paper applies this perspective to conduct an archaeological investigation of how identities emerged in urban environments during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries through cuisine. This is achieved through a comparative analysis of food remains and the associated material culture from a range of medieval sites in Hampshire of different size and status. I argue that choices and strategies in preparing, cooking and consuming food were enmeshed within multiple facets of urban identity including gender, status and profession.     

The Role of Faith in Historical Research

The implied strategy and the history projected in the new book of Jens Bruun Kofoed, Text and History, fails to measure up to the critical principles of both theology and science established by Thomas Acquinas' centuries' old distinction between faith and reason. An apologetic intention in Kofoed's book attempts to demonstrate that the biblical history of his evangelical faith is not unreasonable. Thomas Thompson, on the other hand, thinks it is necessary to hold the line between faith and science, which St. Thomas drew some seven centuries ago. What Kofoed argues in an effort to project a history of Israel, which would be an alternative to that of the “Copenhagen school” is not science. Nor are his rules of evidence those that the world of secular history requires. Led by an apologetic rhetoric and understanding of historical argument, Kofoed's revised Århus dissertation is dominated by a critique of the “Copenhagen school,” which attempts to show that an alternative answer is not impossible. Although emphasizing the historical methods of Thompson and Niels Peter Lemche in his critique, Kofoed neglects to include in his discussion their discussions of method or, in Lemche's case, anything he has written before 1991. His understanding of their dependency on the Annales school is clearly mistaken as is his understanding of the debates about the relationship between historicity, genre and composition. Finally, his discussion of the comparative method is misleading and ill informed.     

A History of the Concept of the Stimulus and the Role it Played in the Neurosciences

The term stimulus, as it was used in science from its earliest appearance in the sixteenth century up to the beginning of the nineteenth century, shows a gradual progress in denotation from the physical object designed to produce nervous and muscular excitation to the generically conceived event or object that initiates sensory or motor activity. To this shift corresponds a shift in the understanding of sensory experience. Johannes Müller's law of specific energy of sensory nerves played a major role in the shift, and Hermann von Helmholtz gave the shift its most thorough philosophical explanation.     

Progress and pitfalls in survey methodology

William M. O'Barr, David H. Spain, and Mark A. Tessler, eds. Survey Research in Africa: Its Applications and Limits. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1973. x + 349 pp. Illustrations, tables, references, bibliography, and index. $15.00 (doth), $4.95 (paper).