Masculinity and medicine: Thomas Walsingham and the death of the Black Prince

This article examines the nature of the illness that plagued Edward the Black Prince (1330–76) for the last nine years of his life and caused his death. The prince's premature death had profound political repercussions and a discussion of his symptoms provides a lens through which to examine late medieval attitudes to a wide range of social, religious and medical issues. The prince's symptoms, especially those described by Thomas Walsingham in his Chronica maiora, suggest traditional explanations of his death are incorrect. This article offers a number of varied but connected medieval and symbolic interpretations as well as a consideration of methodologies appropriate for analysing such material     

瘟疫何以肆虐?——一项医疗环境史的研究

"瘟疫何以肆虐"的问题,既与环境史相关,亦与医疗社会史不可分,但并不能用其中任何一者涵盖之;由此,我们提出"医疗环境史"的概念,以黑死病为个案,围绕瘟疫本身进行环境分析。在14世纪英国的聚落环境中,传染源普遍存在,鼠、蚤、人紧密共存,便于瘟疫的传播;交通运输的便利,利于瘟疫的跨聚落和跨地区流传;落后的医疗防治水平不能阻止瘟疫的肆虐,甚至会因不合理的举措而适得其反。上述病发、流传和应对环境还存在地区性的差异,从而导致瘟疫肆虐程度之不同。     

De victorias o derrotas: El metro,de Donato Ndongo-Bidyogo

El metro (2007), the most recent novel by the Equatoguinean author Donato Ndongo, ends with the failure of the immigrant experience for its African protagonist. I argue that the blurring of gender difference and a relationship with the world based on male competition leads to this ending of the novel in a fundamental manner. This text reflects an identity conflict in an African male individual, Lambert Obama Ondo, who relates to white men in terms of victory or defeat. Both black and white women have a subsidiary role. In this scenario, there is no possibility of conquest for Lambert, since he comes from a poor country and cannot count on a corrupt government to confront neocolonial exploitation. Finally, as an illegal Black African immigrant in Spain who has to endure racism and social vulnerability, he will not have a chance for a sound victory over white men. He will end being a victim, but at least a heroic one.     

The persistence of caffeine in experimentally produced black drink residues

Black drink is a native North American caffeinated tea produced from the leaves of Ilex vomitoria. The beverage was an important part of prehistoric Southeastern culture, as it was the only native source of caffeine in North America. The leaves of I. vomitoria were, therefore, a potentially valuable trade resource during the period. As such, the ability to identify archaeological black drink residues is useful to Southeastern archaeologists. In order to determine the plausibility of detecting I. vomitoria in residues, black drink was repeatedly produced in experimental unglazed pottery. The resulting potsherds were buried in several environmental contexts, recovered, and underwent absorbed pottery residue analysis. After two months of burial in three different soil types, plus a control stored in the freezer, caffeine was well-preserved in all sherds, suggesting that caffeine is a potentially useful biomarker for the detection of black drink.     

Over two centuries: Black people in nineteenth-century Hawaiʻi

ABSTRACT

This article charts the history of Black people in nineteenth-century Hawai?i, an Indigenous and non-White society that prohibited slavery. Far from the Black Atlantic, African-descended people in the Pacific found acceptance and refuge. Since the late 1700s, Black mariners and notable figures – including former slaves from the US as well as Cape Verdeans – arrived in a non-slave society which was in the process of adopting race. Largely unrecognized, they worked in concert with Native Hawaiians – as spouses, educators, attorneys, and advisors to the monarchs – to influence and resist the development of American racial ideologies. Combining Hawaiian language sources, missionary journals, and ship logs with the scant existing historiography, this article accounts for Black people in the Hawaiian Islands during its tumultuous shift from an independent nation to a US Territory – a period and people neglected in twentieth-century scholarship on the Black Pacific.     

Environment and integration on the edge of Europe

While European integration has predominantly been addressed in terms of its common market and through questions of European identity, this article explores alternate perspectives of environment in peripheral landscapes as a practice through which European center-periphery relations are negotiated. Drawing on two case studies, namely the Bulgarian Black Sea coast and the arid regions of Almeria in southeast Spain, we highlight how these landscapes have been variously framed as explicitly European spaces through either developmental narratives or environmental activism and advocacy. We argue that European integration is realized and contested through the discursive and material transformation of landscapes. With this, we contribute to an understanding of environmentalism and the politics of the environment as instrumental in addressing broader and parallel political concerns. Combining southern and eastern European perspectives on the political geography of the environment, we show that the landscape functions as an intrinsically political arena that materializes and discursively frames the different meanings and interests of European integration at stake.     

Blue planet,Black lives: Matter,memory, and the temporalities of political geography

This article considers how the ontological challenges posed by the ocean's materiality and the porous boundaries of marine ecologies and economies aligns with scholarship emanating from Black and Caribbean thought to rethink the linear histories and unitary identities that underpin modernist narratives. Focusing on the debate in Bristol, England in 2020 and 2021 concerning the disposition of the toppled statue of slave trader Edward Colston, the article engages postcolonial Caribbean theory and art to problematise the linear temporalities associated with solid land and the singular histories that are narrated through fixed memorialisations. As an alternative, the temporality of the ocean is called upon, because of its specific role in the histories of Colston, Bristol, and British imperialism, but also because of the ways in which oceanic ontologies complicate accepted divisions between past, present, and future, between scales of experience and explanation, between rootedness and connection, and between life and death.     

Rats cannot have been intermediate hosts for Yersinia pestis during medieval plague epidemics in Northern Europe

The commonly accepted understanding of modern human plague epidemics has been that plague is a disease of rodents that is transmitted to humans from black rats, with rat fleas as vectors. Historians have assumed that this transmission model is also valid for the Black Death and later medieval plague epidemics in Europe. Here we examine information on the geographical distribution and population density of the black rat (Rattus rattus) in Norway and other Nordic countries in medieval times. The study is based on older zoological literature and on bone samples from archaeological excavations. Only a few of the archaeological finds from medieval harbour towns in Norway contain rat bones. There are no finds of black rats from the many archaeological excavations in rural areas or from the inland town of Hamar. These results show that it is extremely unlikely that rats accounted for the spread of plague to rural areas in Norway. Archaeological evidence from other Nordic countries indicates that rats were uncommon there too, and were therefore unlikely to be responsible for the dissemination of human plague. We hypothesize that the mode of transmission during the historical plague epidemics was from human to human via an insect ectoparasite vector.     

Burnishing Versus Smoothing in Ceramic Surface Finishing: A SEM Study

From the Neolithic up to the present, people have used various methods to improve the surface of ceramic objects. In this study, we look specifically at smoothing and pattern burnishing of ceramics produced today by traditional methods. Optical microscopy and SEM show specific surface changes. Smoothing results in an irregular surface, which causes diffused reflection of light. Burnishing produces an even and compact surface, which causes specular reflection and lustre. The results can be used to infer methods of surface treatment employed by ancient peoples as well as to help identify the presence of ceramics production centres at archaeological sites.     

The Myth of Bondi's Black Sunday

On 6 February 1938, five bathers drowned while swimming between the flags at Bondi Beach, Sydney, Australia. In surf lifesaving history, the day is known as Black Sunday. The dominant heroic narrative of Black Sunday highlights freak surf conditions and the gallantry, efficiency, and adeptness of Bondi's volunteer surf lifesavers. In this article I analyse this representation as a myth. Here I employ the French philosopher Roland Barthes' concept of myth, not as a falsehood, but as simplistic story, replete with silences and devoid of critical assessment. I argue that the myth of Black Sunday served the interests of Surf Life Saving Australia well in establishing its status as the country's premier safety service. However, the culture that underpinned that myth still persists with ongoing ramifications for risk assessment at the beach.