The Armada Tapestries in the Old Palace of Westminster

The tapestry series of the ‘Defeat of the Spanish Armada’ was a national artistic treasure which hung in the old Palace of Westminster from the mid 17th century until the fire of 1834. This article outlines the creation of the tapestries in the 1590s and covers the major treatments of them in illustrations of parliamentary interiors and in John Pine's 1739 engravings; it ends with a short account of the curious episode of the tapestry which escaped the conflagration. In the absence of any known historical record of how the tapestries were displayed, suggestions are offered about how many and in what order they hung in the two chambers occupied successively by the house of lords (before and after 1801), and about how they were physically supported on the walls of the Parliament Chamber.     

Jaume Cabré's Viatge d’hivern and the Short Story Cycle

Critics have been uncertain as to the genre of Catalan writer Jaume Cabré's 2000 book, Viatge d’hivern. The confusion, I argue, is due to the fact that the volume is a short story cycle, a literary form situated midway between the novel and the short story collection. Forrest Ingram differentiates among composed, arranged, and completed cycles, and Cabré's comments in his Epilogue to Viatge d’hivern indicate that the book is an example of the third category. While he composed its fourteen narratives over a period of years, when he revised them for inclusion in a single volume he discovered that various threads, some secret and others more obvious, connected the stories. In this essay I examine ways in which theme, structure, and motifs, as well as recurrent imagery and wording, form a web of associations among the individual units of Viatge d’hivern.     

Illegible ethnicity and the invention of Scots-Irish narratives on the stages of Belfast and Appalachia

Theatrical stages have long been home to performances of identity, creating and sustaining legible visions of various peoples and groups for their audiences. Indeed, in the nineteenth century, the playwright/actor Dion Boucicault popularised the “stage Irishman” for Irish and American audiences alike, thus contributing to the invention of “Irish-America”. This paper examines a similar attempt in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries to query the definition of a distinct group of Irish-Americans: the Scots-Irish. Productions from Belfast, Northern Ireland, as well as from the southern Appalachian Mountains, demonstrate how the illegibility of the Scots-Irish – in other words, their status as a non-recognisable, incoherent segment of the white population in the USA – allows for narratives about this group to be highly malleable. Contemporary productions of the Scots-Irish story demonstrate the ways in which ethnic identities emerge as constructions of past and present, memory and history, and politics and culture.     

The Common Good,Pluralism and the Small Church

Abstract

This paper discusses the understanding of “Common Good” that has been used by the Church of England, especially over the last five years. It suggests that its implicit universalism and identification of Christian morality with the ethical norms for the nation is premised on an understanding of the role of the Church which is no longer realistic. After a brief discussion of the latest statistics for church attendance and a comparison with other national churches in Northern Europe, I suggest that the Church of England is a “small church” and even that Christians constitute a religious minority. This means that the pursuit of the “Common Good” as defined by the church may simply be a piece of nostalgic longing for the time of the “big church.” The recent exclusions for the churches on same-sex marriage legislation indicate that the gap between most of the churches and the wider society. Rather than defining the common good, I suggest that in a pluralist society the churches which recognize their limited role will need to build alliances and common causes with other groups, both religious and secular.     

Flexural Behavior of Typical Chinese Traditional Timber Stitching Beams

In Chinese traditional timber buildings, stitching is very common. When the bearing capacity or the rigidity is inadequate, a timber beam is often strengthened with another beam using the stitching method. The timber stitching beams are mainly of two types—the small-top/big-bottom type and the big-top/small-bottom type. To study the bending behavior of these two types of timber stitching beams, including the failure mode, the flexural capacity, the strain distribution at mid-span section, and the maximum deflection, bending tests are carried out on 14 timber stitching beams with Chinese traditional conformation for seven pine beams and seven fir beams. The results show that the failure modes of the small-top/big-bottom type of stitching beams all show brittle fractures at the bottoms of the bottom beams. The failure modes of the big-top/small-bottom type of stitching beams all show brittle fractures at the bottoms of the top beams. The distribution of section strain along the height of each part of the beam basically obeys plane hypothesis. Based on the theoretical and experimental analysis, the calculation formulas of flexural capacity and maximum deflection of these two types of timber stitching beams made of pine and fir are presented.     

The emergence of agropastoralism: Accelerated ecocultural change on the Andean altiplano, ∼3540–3120 cal BP

In the fourth millennium BP, there were major environmental and cultural changes on the Andean altiplano of South America, but the chronology remains vague. A recent synthesis describes a slow, gradual transition from hunting and gathering to agropastoralism. This proposal is tested by refining the date of the onset of more humid and stable conditions, around 3550 cal BP, based on a Bayesian model of 26 dates from Lake Wiñaymarka and an updated calculation of the lacustrine offset. This is compared to Bayesian models of 191 dates from 20 archaeological sites, which incorporate a number of recently processed radiocarbon dates. A synthesis is presented of 15 full coverage surveys, a summed probability distribution, and a Bayesian model of the transition to ceramics, which together support a scenario of a very rapid demographic increase. Fourteen models from archaeological sites are cross-referenced in a composite model, which identifies a brief, altiplano-wide emergence of agropastoralism with starting and ending boundaries of 3540 and 3120 cal BP, respectively. This starting boundary correlates strongly with the onset of improving environmental conditions, indicating synchronous cultural and environmental change. The suite of accelerating cultural changes included a marked reduction in mobility, a demographic surge, increased subsistence diversity, the adoption of ceramics, farming and the integration of camelid herding into a remarkably resilient economic strategy still in use today. This is a highly relevant but yet to be used comparative case study for the variable tempos of ‘big histories’, and ecocultural interactions that generate rapid, emergent episodes of wide-spread and enduring cultural change.     

胡适与近代诸子学研究的转型--以胡适的法家研究为中心

胡适对《韩非子》等法家著作的篇章真伪进行了考辨,并用近代的观念阐释法家思想。他将法家思想和西方法学相关联,用进化的观点对法家思想进行了解读,并从逻辑学的角度考察了法家的法治思想。胡适在法家思想研究中所创立的学术研究范式及其表现的学术精神,使其在近代诸子学研究转型中占有重要地位。     

建国前夕英美对华政策的分歧及其原因

新中国建立前夕,鉴于英美在华的利益侧重点、外交传统以及与国民党及其政府的历史关系存在不同,两国在对华政策上出现分歧,最终在诸如是否撤出中国、是否对新中国实施贸易管制以及是否打破国民党对上海的封锁等系列问题上立场迥异,争执激烈,并最终各行其是。根本而言,这是英美经通盘考虑后从自身利益出发所做出的政策抉择,同时也是两国不同的外交传统在对华政策层面上的集中体现。     

明代年例银制度形成探论

明代年例银制度是经过长期演变逐渐形成的一项军事供给制度。宣德十年(1435)首先出现京运银,历经景泰、天顺时期,京运银两中有一笔银两开始向"岁例"发生制度性转变的趋势;成化、弘治之际,"常数"、"岁运"、"岁例"、"年例"、"年例银"等名称的出现是这笔京运银两制度化发展的结果,标志着明代年例银制度的初步形成;嘉靖十六年(1537)年例银一年一发的规定以及年例银会计预算制的出现,意味着明代年例银制度的完全确立。年例银制度的形成和确立,改变了明代国家的军事供给体制,是明代军事财政史上的一个重大变革。     

甲午战争前后东亚海权与海防的较量及其影响

一场甲午战争,使东亚海权格局剧变,由此构成中日两国命运变化的历史拐点。战前,中日两国面对西方殖民扩张的相同遭遇,展开了近30年的海军现代化建设,并在互为敌手的竞争中日益凸显于以英国为主导的东亚海权格局之中。然而,不同的战略选择决定了不同的命运,甲午战争用血与火诠释了海权与海防的本质区别及其决定性影响。正因为战败后的中国已完全置身于东亚海权格局之外,再次陷入有海无防的境地,导致海权得以坐大的日本推行"大陆政策"更加有恃无恐,在列强瓜分中国的狂潮中走上独霸东亚之路。