9,056 research outputs found
The Liber Vitae of Durham (BL MS Cotton Domitian A. vii): a discussion of its possible context and use in the later middle ages
No full textThis thesis examines in detail the history and use of the Liber Vitae of Durham (BL MS Cotton Domitian A. vii). The manuscript is one of a small group of similar manuscripts created by different monasteries to record the names of associates of the monastery to be remembered during the round of monastic prayer. The Liber Vitae was first created in the mid-ninth century in Northumbria. Between c.1083 and c.1539 the monks of Durham used it to record the names of members of the monastic community together with large numbers of non-monastic names. In the first section of the thesis the history and development of the manuscript is explored through a detailed consideration of its codicology, supported by a discussion of the development of the lists of names over five hundred years. The phases of the development of the manuscript discovered by these means are then placed in their historical context, first in ninth century Northumbria and then in Durham between the eleventh and sixteenth centuries. In the second section the evidence for the way in which the book might have been used in the liturgy is examined. The possible uses of the book are particularly compared with the other evidence available from Durham for the ways in which friends and benefactors of the monastery were commemorated. In the final section the non-monastic names written into the manuscript after c. 1300 are examined in detail to try to define what group of associates of the priory of Durham are in fact commemorated in the Liber Vitae
The popular reformation in county Durham
No full textMuch recent historical writing has doubted whether the Reformation can be described as a genuinely popular movement, pointing out that in many regions the 'official’ reforms of 1529-1559 were simply imposed by the authorities from above, while Protestantism often made only slow and difficult progress at a popular level. The following study, therefore, aims at placing the unique and fascinating County Palatine of Durham within this debate about the causes, development and pace of religious change in the sixteenth century. It 'also aims, secondly, to examine the profound changes in the religious environment and popular mentalities brought about by the Reformation in Durham - with its defacement of protective symbols and abrogation of liturgical ceremonies - as the reformers attempted to displace the sacraments and ritualised visual effects of the old order with a Protestant emphasis on preaching and the word. In order to 6btain some purchase on the event, the opening chapter briefly examines the nature of the church and religious life in the diocese on the eve of the .Reformation, especially the bishopric's devotion to the cult of St. Cuthbert. The study proceeds by examining the region's response to the religious changes of the 1530s, and the county's unique and powerful contribution to the Pilgrimage of Grace with its peculiar blend of northern separatism, popular unrest, noble 'honour' and regional Catholicism. Subsequent chapters ~how in turn how Cuthbert Tunstal, Bishop of Durham (1530-1559) was able to maintain both conservative religious practices and the Catholic clergy during the latter part of Henry VIII's reign and that of Edward VI, by his political skill and careful use of patronage~ The penultimate chapter then explores the way in which Protestantism was imposed in the 1560s from London as a predominantly academic movement, through the efforts of a Calvinistically inspired cathedral chapter and reforming preachers like Bernard Gilpin. Finally, the study concludes by showing how the failure of the Northern Rising in 1569 enabled the crown to sweep away many of the forces that had preserved popular Catholicism during the previous decade - the Marian clergy, conservative local administration and bastard-feudal Catholicism of the Nevilles
Writing and the rights of reality: usurpation and potentiality in Derrida, Plato, Nietzsche, and Beckett
No full textThe thesis critically evaluates Jacques Derrida's conferral of the rights of reality on writing, focussing on his theory of an arche-text in light of the speculative nature of this theory. The theory is initially considered in the context of Derrida's elucidation of the usurpatory status of writing within the Platonic and Nietzschean texts. This consideration reveals an admission of writing's usurpatory status by both writers while at the same time demonstrating their awareness of the intrinsically speculative nature of this view, the significance of writing lying in its ability to exteriorise the radically indeterminate status of consciousness m relation to reality rather than its ability to displace consciousness or reality The analyses, therefore, not only bring the Derridean hypothesis of a repressive or phonocentric metaphysical episteme into question but also exhibit the historical and philosophical role of potentiality in relation to writing, writing's ultimate significance lying in its capacity to exteriorise our existence as a mode of potentiality. Accordingly, in the second half of the thesis the Derridean theory of writing is countered with a specifically Aristotelian theory of the text as it is exhibited in the prose of Samuel Beckett, an author whose significance lies in his close alignment with Derridean theory within contemporary criticism. It is demonstrated that this identification has obviated an awareness of the significance of potentiality within the Beckettian text, his work consequently being appraised in the previously neglected context of Aristotelian metaphysics
Recession and Recovery: the Economic History of Rural Society in Durham, c.1400-1640
No full textThis thesis explores how rural society adapted to the fifteenth-century recession, and how this affected the ability of their sixteenth-century counterparts to respond to inflation. It does so through three primary sections: the first explores how the Bishops of Durham and the monks of Durham Cathedral Priory responded differently to the fifteenth-century recession and analyses the subsequently divergent development of their estates. By the seventeenth century, all of the Dean and Chapter’s lands were consolidated holdings on 21-year leases, whereas a confused mixture of copyhold and leasehold land had developed on the bishops’ estate. The second section explores the balance of landed power in the Palatinate of Durham from the late-fourteenth to the mid-seventeenth century amongst the laity. This further explores whether the ‘crisis of the aristocracy’ and the ‘rise of the gentry’ are misnomers more adequately phrased in terms of land usage as the ‘rise of agricultural producers’ and the ‘crisis of rentier landlords’. The final section explores how the tenantry of the above estates survived this period, with the gradual stratification of landed society and the emergence of the yeomanry as a social group. It especially focuses upon how the divergent development of the two ecclesiastical estates impacted upon the opportunities and challenges facing the tenants of Durham. The overall conclusion reached by this thesis is that estate management and institutional constraints were often crucial factors in the transformation of the English countryside: these two neighbouring ecclesiastical estates faced broadly the same problems and yet the composition of their estates diverged significantly across this period. Institutional constraints had a profound effect not only on levels of rent, but also the tenure of holdings and ultimately their relative size; three of the most important factors in the formation of agrarian capitalism
Lecture: Author Susan Orlean
No full textShaker Library and the Shaker Schools Foundation present Susan Orlean, SHHS grad and author of The Library Book, who will speak about her love of libraries and the impact of books on her life.
Susan Orlean grew up in Shaker Heights and graduated from Shaker Heights High School in 1973, where she was editor in chief of the school’s yearbook, The Gristmill. She graduated with honors from the University of Michigan in 1976. She has written for the Boston Phoenix, the Boston Globe and has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1992. She is the author of seven books, including Rin Tin Tin, Saturday Night, and The Orchid Thief, which was made into the Academy Award–winning film, Adaptation. She lives with her family and her animals in upstate New York
Re-situating the body : history, myth, and the contemporary women's writings in English and Japanese
No full textThis thesis analyses contemporary literary attempts by Western and Japanese writers to defy patriarchal control over the female body. Situating the female body through myth, religion, and various forms of art as "grotesque" is Western culture's means of control over nature. Contrary to this, Japanese culture originally had more harmonious concepts of the mind and body, but was transformed into a similar pattern to that of the West. During the period of cultural transformation, one example of literary resistance by woman writers appeared as the Tale of Genji, arguably the first novel in the world, which uses an ambiguous narrative method and the concept of the grotesque body. Contemporary women's writings still employ similar strategies, though more direct and effective. From the beginning of the twentieth century and through the development of consumer society, more bodies are regarded as "grotesque" but there are also cultural exchanges in the world which seek to subvert such tendencies. Despite unmistakable cultural differences between western and Japanese representations, they often influence each other and draw on similar strategies. Both use the motif of the grotesque body to create a reverse discourse, and to re-situate the body, as the symbol of the retrieval of a "natural" and sexual body which is found in Japanese Myth. English and Japanese women writers also manoeuvre to strike a balance between fantastic and more conventional narrative modes. Though the majority of Japanese writers are still working within a broadly realistic mode, those writers analysed here use fantastic mode as a weapon of formal and ideological subversion. The writers analysed include Angela Carter (who lived in Japan), Margaret Atwood, Fay Weldon, Muriel Spark, Yuko Matsumoto, Rieko Matsuura, Yoriko Shono, Yumiko Kurahashi. Their work is situated in relation to earlier imaginative writing, myth, legend and examples of the Gothic mode
Religious Deviance in the Elizabethan Diocese of Durham
No full textSiiri Tenno
Religious Deviance in the Elizabethan Diocese of Durham
Abstract
This study explores the subject of religious deviance in its multiple forms in the Elizabethan diocese of Durham. Based on the information from the deposition books of Durham Consistory Court, dating from 1565 until the end of Elizabeth’s reign in 1603, the acts of deviance are divided into three categories, extending from the Northern Rebellion of 1569 to the occurrence of deviance in the daily life of Elizabethan parishioners and to the manifestation of beliefs in witchcraft and magic.
The outcome of this research testifies to deviant religious beliefs and practices having coexisted alongside orthodox Protestantism whilst the line between unorthodox and orthodox beliefs was often blurred. Regarding the attitudes towards religion and the nature of the acts of deviance, the material at hand did not allow to detect any significant changes over the time in focus. The acts of religious deviance with similar nature were noted throughout the diocese which is confuting the often presented assumption of remote and rural upland areas having been more superstitious and change resistant than urban and lowland areas. Moreover, the differences between educated and popular views were not as distinct as some of the previous studies have indicated. It has found proof that the popular and learned beliefs were more interwoven in the Elizabethan diocese of Durham than previously suggested
'Pilings of Thought Under Spoken': The Poetry of Susan Howe, 1974-1993.
No full textPhDThis thesis discusses the poetry published by contemporary American poet Susan
Howe over a period of almost two decades. The dissertation is chiefly concerned with
articulating the relationship between poetic form, history, and authority in this body
of' work. Howe's poetry dredges the past for the linguistic effects of patriarchy,
colonialism and war. My reading of the work is an exploration of the ways in which a
disjunctive poetics can address such historical trauma. The poems, rather than
attempting to reinstate voices lifted from what Howe has called "the dark side of
history", are a means of reflecting the resistance that the past offers to contemporary
investigation. It is the effacement, and not the recovery, of history's victims, that is
discernible in the contours of these highly opaque texts. Notions of authority are most
often addressed in the poetry through the figure of paternal absence, which has a
threefold function in the work, serving to represent social authority, an aporetic
conception of divinity and an autobiographical narrative. Alongside the antiauthoritarian
currents in the writing - critiques, for example, of the doctrine of
Manifest Destiny or of scapegoating versions of femininity - my thesis stresses Howe's
engagement with negative theology and with a strain of American Protestant
enthusiasm that has its roots in 17th century New England. The dissertation explores
the dissonance caused by the co-existence in the poetry of elements of political dissent
and religious mysticism. Finally, I consider Howe's engagement with literary history
and authors such as Shakespeare, Swift, Thoreau and Melville. The manner in which
Howe deploys the words of others in her work, I argue, allows for a mixture of textual
polyphony and a more conventional notion of authorial 'voice'
Breaking the conjugal vows : marriage and marriage breakdown in the north of England, 1660-1800.
No full textSIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre-DSC:DXN029014 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo
Liturgical theology: children and the city
No full textLiturgical Theology: Children and the City engages academic liturgical theology, contextual sensitivity and key challenges faced by the church in contemporary Britain. From its initial focus on the emphasis on congregational participation in the twentieth-century Liturgical Movement, and on the Church of England prayer-book Patterns for Worship (1989, 1993) as an example of a late twentieth-century liturgical resource that stresses participation, the thesis deepens perspectives on a number of related issues. As Patterns for Worship was intended especially to encourage participation in specific contexts - worship in 'urban priority areas', and in congregations seeking to include children - the thesis explores the themes of children and the city in order to suggest a range of challenges which need to be engaged by a contemporary contextually-sensitive liturgical theology. Then, as the discipline is largely neglected in Britain, it explores some North American expressions of liturgical theology and identifies a number of themes and features by which the arguments of Patterns for Worship might be strengthened, or questioned and recast on better foundations. Appreciation of the work of Gordon W Lathrop, Don E Saliers and James F White provides the basis for the thesis' contention that engagement with articulate theological perspectives on liturgy is necessary in order for Patterns for Worship to fulfil its potential. Conversely, however, the thesis also identifies issues with which the discipline of liturgical theology has by no means fully engaged, and so invites a more inclusive vision in liturgical theology. Towards the end of the thesis, the work attempts to initiate the kind of approach to liturgy that it claims is needed in order to fulfil the potential of Patterns for Worship. Using resources gleaned from North American liturgical theology it develops theological and practical ideas about how congregations in urban priority areas and seeking to include children can relate their celebration of liturgy to a sense of divine hospitality
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