Doctoral Theses in Progress

Abstract

Jean Bonfa's 1696 map offered the most accurate portrait in its day of the Comtat Venaissin. Commissioned when France threatened the region economically and politically, the map's topographical detail and allegorical themes exhibit a political geography favouring papal interests. Yet the map's coordinates for Avignon reflect neither Bonfa's skill as a positional astronomer nor his collaboration with the Paris Observatory. Finally, because local authorities controlled the distribution of Bonfa's map, it was not available to other cartographers.     

Michael J Clarke collections,from the Geological Survey of Tasmania,are transferred to the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery

Over 300 primary type and figured specimens of Late Palaeozoic invertebrates described by Michael J Clarke have been transferred to the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery Collections.     

Darwin’s missing links

The historical process underlying Darwin’s Origin of Species (Origin) did not play a significant role in the early editions of the book, in spite of the particular inductivist scientific methodology it espoused. Darwin’s masterpiece did not adequately provide his sources or the historical perspective many contemporary critics expected. Later editions yielded the ‘Historical Sketch’ lacking in the earlier editions, but only under critical pressure. Notwithstanding the sources he provided, Darwin presented the Origin as an ‘abstract’ in order to avoid giving sources; a compromise he acknowledged and undertook to set right in later editions, yet failed to provide throughout the six editions under his supervision. Darwin’s reluctance to publish the historical context of his theory and his sources, particularly sources which were also ‘precursors’, may be attributed as much to the matter of intellectual ownership as science, or even good literary practice. Of special concern to Darwin were issues of priority or originality over ‘descent with modification’ and especially over Natural Selection. Many later historians have argued that Darwin was unaware of the work of his precursors on Natural Selection. Darwin’s theory was an example of independent discovery, albeit along with such obscure precursors as Matthew or Wells, who were unknown to Darwin until after the publication of the Origin. Both Matthew and Wells had a medical education, like James Hutton or Erasmus Darwin earlier in the eighteenth century, or even (in part) Charles Darwin. Evolutionary theory, at least in Britain was a product largely of the medical evolutionists rather than the natural historians which ‘history’ has chosen to select for the focus of attention; and among the medical evolutionists the figure of John Hunter stands out as theorist, experimentalist and teacher: the medical evolutionists were predominantly the product of Hunter’s legacy or of the medical profession and particularly the Scottish Universities. Much recent Darwin scholarship has focused on the private Notebooks, to establish Darwin’s discovery of Natural Selection around 1837–1838 and demonstrate Darwin’s ignorance of his precursors; requiring an explicit acknowledgement by Darwin as the legitimate substantiation of any claim to prior influence. The precursors have been categorized as uniformly obscure or irrelevant to the science of evolution which may be defined exclusively as ‘Darwinian’. The inclination to acknowledge influences, however was not something Darwin was gratuitously given to doing, especially on matters of priority. The Notebooks are not Darwin’s private thoughts; from an early stage he considered them incipient public documents and later sought to protect them as proof of his originality. William C. Wells was not an obscure thinker, but a celebrated scientist whom Herschel, Darwin’s guide to scientific methodology, had recommended as providing a model of scientific method. Darwin discovered Wells through Herschel, and quickly acquired a copy of Wells’ recommended work, no later than 1831, and held it thereafter in his library at Down House. This book, the 1818 edition of Wells’ Two Essays contains a third essay, Wells’ account of Natural Selection. Later, in the Descent of Man (1871) Darwin acknowledged his separate discovery of the correlation of colour and disease immunity in man, also earlier recounted by Wells.     

J.S. Bach’s St. Matthew Passion and intellectual history

ABSTRACT

Recent thinking about Intellectual History has moved beyond studying only verbal texts, to encompass other kinds of visual and aural texts that can be vehicles for generative thought. Where might music fit into this expanded conception? If ideas are defined purely as concepts that can be expressed in words, music can be no more than an “epiphenomenon”, a consequence or representation of ideas that lie behind it, but not capable of embodying those ideas in itself. Yet to many musicians, it seems obvious that music can function as a way in which ideas are developed and worked out. What kinds of knowledge might be embodied in music, then, and how do its meanings change over time? In this paper, I examine some of these issues through consideration of one of the key texts of Western art music, J.S. Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, exploring how it was conceived in a liturgical context in Bach’s time, how its meaning changed when transposed to the very different milieus of concert performance in nineteenth-century Berlin and colonial Sydney, and as it has been re-imagined in a variety of recent staged and recorded versions.     

世界城市的未来及面临的区域政策问题

本文介绍J·弗雷得曼近来从城市管理学派的观点对世界城市的发展未来作的一些评述。认为世界城市的发展原因应当从城市区域的空间组织、区域政府管理、区域持续发展问题、社区民众在国家内地位的上升、城市移民问题、城市内部网络等几个方面考虑,21世纪仍然是城市贸易与竞争的时代,亚太社会和城市的未来都会取决于全球化动力,世界城市的未来将取决于城市管理者、政治家的观念和务实精神。     

什么是环境史?——对唐纳德·休斯的环境史理论的探讨

唐纳德·休斯是美国丹佛大学约翰.埃文斯历史学杰出教授,环境史的开创者之一,从环境史诞生伊始到现在,一直活跃于环境史研究领域,发表了大量的相关成果。休斯对环境史的贡献,不仅在于他取得的丰硕成果,更在于他所作的理论思考。这突出地表现在如下方面:1)对生态及其在历史中的作用的论述;2)对"什么是环境史"及其与其他学科之关联的分析;3)对环境史与其他历史门类之区别和联系的阐述;4)对环境史的丰富意义的揭示。通过对休斯环境史著述中的理论思考的梳理,我们既可以从总体上把握他对环境史的一般理论问题的认识,也可以在一定程度上领略他从事环境史研究的个性特征。而休斯对环境史的意义的揭示,还使我们更深刻地体会到,历史学家在研究和叙述历史的同时也在创造历史。     

’African Churches Willing to Pay Their Own Bills’: The Role of Money in the Formation of Ethiopian-type Churches with Particular Reference to the Mzimba Secession

ABSTRACT

Matters related to money were fundamental to the causes of the formation of Ethiopian-type churches. These included inter alia the raising of funds abroad and the subsequent need to control such funds by white ministers, delay or refusal of ordination due to cost factors and differentials in stipends, lack of or poor allowances, lack of trust in the use of funds, poor emoluments and accommodation. This was in contradiction to emerging mission policy as propounded by Henry Venn in his Three-Self formula, particularly with regard to the principle of self-support following Pauline methods. At the heart of such issues was the need for missionaries to control what they had created, and maintain and perpetuate a sense of dependency. The Mzimba Secession offers substantial evidence to support the suggestion that finance was a central concern in fostering inferiority and subjection in the mission field leading to the formation of a new church movement.     

安特生与丁文江的早期中外考古合作及其影响——读《中国之前的中国》

马思中(Magnus Fiskesjo)博士[瑞典]和陈星灿博士合著《中国之前的中国:安特生、丁文江和中国史前史的发现》(China before China)由瑞典东方古物博物馆出版发行。本文对该书内容作了详尽的介绍,重现了当年安特生和丁文江等早期科学家在中国史前田野考古合作的历史,以及评价他们对中国早期考古学发展的贡献。作者强调了当前中国考古学国际合作的意义,特别是涉及了对中国文物海外收藏政策的制定。     

Tradition and critique in Paul Muldoon's “Madoc: A Mystery”

Paul Muldoon's “Madoc: A Mystery” remains his longest poem and most thorough vision of an alternative history. This article argues that Muldoon's poem works to stage not only a visionary history of America but also, via the uneasy relations that develop between its two main characters (semi-fictionalised versions of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey), a dramatisation of the conflict that obtains between competing modes of historical understanding. Muldoon's Coleridge and Southey represent stances that may be usefully regarded as parallel to positions advanced in the famous debate regarding interpretation between Hans-Georg Gadamer and Jürgen Habermas, thinkers whose names appear in the poem itself. To read the poem in light of this connection between its fantastical transatlantic history and the history of critical theory allows a reading of Muldoon's treatment of both literary and political histories as secondary to the work's playful exploration of struggles between modes of historical interpretation.