The British Pharaoh?: James I and VI and internationalist religious writing at the wedding of Friedrich V and Elizabeth Stuart

The marriage of Elizabeth Stuart and Friedrich V, Prince Palatine, has recently been described as “the pinnacle of Protestant European festival,” a transnational, transcultural event celebrated throughout Protestant Europe. Politically, it marked a high point of internationalist Protestant sentiment in England. In this article, I examine three sermons preached for the occasion, by the court preacher Andrew Willet, the Wiltshire parson George Webbe, and Friedrich’s court chaplain, Abraham Scultetus. All three use the wedding to advocate an internationalist agenda and subtly critique the Church of England. This is done, in part, through a shared typological understanding of the event based on Psalm 45, read by early moderns as a song on the marriage of Solomon and Pharaoh’s daughter, which aligns James with an idolatrous Pharaoh. Their interpretation of the marriage implicitly anticipates a move toward the pure biblical worship practiced by the continental reformed churches, and shifts the focus of Pan-Protestant hopes from London to Heidelberg.     

Potash - a key raw material of glass batch for Bohemian glasses from 14th-17th centuries?

The aim of this work is to verify or refute hypothesis of existence of basic/universal glass batch: quartz sand: potash: limestone, at a ratio of 2: 1: 1 used in Bohemian glass production since the middle ages onwards and to simulate the preparation of a potassium glass type with the composition used in medieval Bohemia. The chemical composition of Bohemian glass, which incorporated in the proposed glass batch for glassmaking on a laboratory scale, was evaluated by (a) findings directly related to glassmaking (samples from glasswork in Moldava dating back to the 15th century) and (b) information from publications.Experimentally produced glasses for the present paper were prepared from raw materials such as ash, leached ash, potash, limestone and quartz sand. The plant raw materials (spruce, beech and bracken ashes, raw and refined potash) were treated and prepared by methods similar to the production procedures used in the pre-industrial era.The main contrast was found in the CaO/K₂O weight ratio, which was determined in glasses that were characteristic of given periods. While this ratio was often below 1 in glasses of the 15th century, it reached values above 1 in glasses at the turn of the 16th-17th centuries. This result may indicate that the composition of the glass batch had changed.The results of the present study reject the current scholarly work dealing with glass batch composition during the 14th-17th centuries and confirm that glass produced in some Bohemian medieval glassworks could have been melted from a batch that included plant ash, making the use of limestone unnecessary. The traditional suggestion of the exact ratios of raw materials, often cited in historical literature, seems to be impossible. The glassmakers had to react to the variable composition of the raw materials, especially plant ash.     

Soils and Earthen Building Materials Used for the Buddhist Temple Complex

This article presents a comprehensive study of the local soils and historic earthen building materials used in Nako temple complex in Western Himalayas. On-site and laboratory investigations followed a holistic approach to characterize materials and identify historic manufacturing formulas. The interdisciplinary and novel methodology used for analysis of the earthen building materials combine geological, chemical, mineralogical, geotechnical, and mechanical approach. The results presented in this article enable a better understanding of material culture and advance the study of damage and decay processes found in the temple buildings. In addition, a suitable conservation and preservation strategy is presented.     

Current research on smoking pipe residues

This paper presents research into the identification of tobacco residues in ancient smoking pipes. Two techniques have been used so far: gas chromatography/mass spectroscopy (GC/MS), and Raman microscopy. GC/MS has been used successful in the past by the author to identify ancient tobacco residues, and the results of this round of analysis support prior research. Raman microscopy, which has the advantage of working on dry samples without solvents, was not successful. It appears that combustion products overwhelm any useful signal that would identify the substance smoked. We are pursuing the use of Raman in non-combusted samples.     

‘Nothing is Certain’: Czech Post-War Literature Between the Avant-Garde and Expressionism

The Czech post-war avant-garde is split between collective enthusiasm, the adoration of the masses, and the depiction of the lone individual in crisis. Interpretations of this period have until now been based on the opposition of Literární skupina (the ‘Literary Group’, with an expressionist, individualist platform) vs. Devětsil (with an avant-gardist, collectivist platform). This study examines how understanding of the terms ‘expressionist’ and ‘avant-garde’ changed in the period in which Literární skupina and Devětsil emerged, followed by literary historical reflections on this process during the 1960s and 1970s, when Literární skupina came to be seen as distinct from the avant-garde on the basis of its espousal of expressionism. By comparing theoretical discourse and literary texts — in particular, hitherto overlooked avant-garde short prose — the present article examines the extent to which these established oppositions are valid. This article argues that expanding the analysis to include the neglected genre of the short story brings greater nuance to the underlying opposition of ‘expressionism vs. avant-garde’ (and individualism vs. collectivism), and thereby challenges standard interpretations of the era in question.