High justice in fifteenth-century Normandy: the prosecution of Sandrin Bourel

By the fifteenth century the seigneurial exercise of high justice had become less common because of the growth of royal jurisdiction. The ancient and wealthy Benedictine nunnery of Montivilliers retained the right to high justice only during the octave of the Holy Cross. In 1493 Sandrin Bourel, a young man who had twice before been imprisoned for theft, was apprehended in the act of stealing from a bourgeois of Montivilliers. As the crime occurred during the octave of the Holy Cross the abbey claimed jurisdiction. A special tribunal was created to prosecute him. After having been tortured, Bourel was found guilty and hanged. The documents generated by this event provide the basis for a case study of the application of criminal procedure at the close of the middle ages. The condemned man's confession, rich in biographical detail, gives us a profile of a petty thief and vagabond on the margin of society. The financial account of the abbey's receiver-general documents in detail the total cost of the prosecution of a single medieval criminal.     

LOCALIZATION AND INDUSTRY CLUSTERING ECONOMETRICS: AN ASSESSMENT OF GIBBS MODELS FOR SPATIAL POINT PROCESSES

The objective of this paper is to assess an approach to statistical modeling of point referenced establishment data that permit inclusion of “environmental” or establishment‐specific covariates and specific forms of interestablishment interaction. Gibbs models are used to decompose the conditional intensity of the spatial point process into trend and interaction components. The trend is composed of access measures (primarily different classes of roads) and three different interaction processes are tested: Geyer, area interaction, and Strauss hard core. While the models used have proved to be useful in ecology, we are unaware of any applications to establishment or firm data. In empirical application, the models yield intuitively appealing results for the trend component, and the ability to specify the interaction component gives deeper insights into interestablishment spatial dynamics than any previously published methods.     

Histoire du fidéisme, histoire du scepticisme?

«The history of scepticism, the history of fideism?». It is a matter of pondering over the relevance of scepticism’s classification as fideism which Richard H. Popkin establishes in his work:The History of scepticism from Erasmus to Spinoza. The calling into question of the link between doubt and belief, and more generally between scepticism and religion, leads to contest the role of religious faith in what is presented by Popkin as the sceptical search for truth. The aim of this criticism is to propose a more conceptual approach to modern scepticism which, unlike Popkin’s historical approach (founded on the consideration of the origin of modern scepticism, the religious crisis of the Renaissance), includes the ethical aspects of this philosophy which are usually and unfortunately neglected.     

Producing liminal space: gender,age and class in northern Ontario's tree planting industry

Drawing upon qualitative data, this article examines how tree planters in northern Ontario, Canada engage with liminality in terms of gender, class, age and space. In doing so, it provides insight into concepts of gender liminality and the variegated experiences of males and females in liminal space. The article focuses on four aspects of the liminal engagement. First, the spaces of tree planting are liminal as they are marked by homelife and worklife, but dominated by neither. Second, gender performances are liminal, as males perform masculinities seldom necessary or appropriate – yet often valorized – in their permanent communities, while females (who make up nearly half of the workforce) are offered opportunities to work and succeed in a traditionally male industry. However, success often requires that they adopt certain masculine traits. Third, most tree planters are in the interstitial age of ‘youth’, somewhere between adolescence and adulthood. Finally, tree planters are generally members of affluent urban middle-classes, yet the work they perform is more readily associated with rural or peripheral working-classes.     

Problematizing Labour's Agency: Rescaling Collective Bargaining in British Columbia Pulp and Paper Mills

Abstract: This paper focuses on the contradictory nature and sometimes unintended consequences of workers’ efforts to defend particular communities against the ravages of capital restructuring. In the past decade, pattern collective bargaining in the highly unionized British Columbia pulp and paper industry has faced enormous strains due to intense industry restructuring. Our analysis focuses on the repercussions of actions taken by union locals in two British Columbia towns—Port Alice and Port Alberni—to try to secure the survival of their pulp and paper mills and, even in the case of Port Alice, the continued existence of the community. Our analysis resonates with recent debates surrounding worker agency as well as writing in the 1980s which addressed the often contradictory and problematic nature of workers’ struggles to “defend place”; writing largely neglected in more recent work in labour geography.