5,176 research outputs found
The choral foundation of Durham Cathedral, c.1350 - c.1650
No full textThe muniments of Durham cathedral, city, and diocese have been explored in order to present and assess the contribution made by lay musicians to worship in the cathedral. By 1335-60 the boys and men had become sufficiently established to merit specific payments. Whether or not the lay Cantor dates back that far is uncertain, but in 1390 it was agreed that what was required was a Cantor-Instructor. No proof for the implementation of this earlier than 1415 has come to light, nor has any contract earlier than that made by the monastery with John steel in 1430. From it and those of his successors, and from Rites of Durham, a picture emerges of the Cantor's duties and of the part played by boys and men in the daily Lady Mass in the Galilee chapel and in the Mass of the Name of Jesus on Fridays in the nave. Following the suppression of its monastic arm in 1539 Durham was re-constituted a cathedral only in 1541 . The pattern of worship established c.1560 continued until the 1620s, when the innovations introduced by John Cosin caused Peter Smart (a Calvinist) to preach a vituperative sermon on 27 July 1628. From the litigation which ensued much emerges about whole ordering of worship in Durham since the 1560s. Produced whilst the ceremonialists held sway were several sets of new music books for the choir. Some 40% of these are still in Durham. such is the detail in the muniments that it has proved possible to suggest when the books were transcribed and by whom. It has also proved possible to identify the contributions of no fewer than eight Durham scribes to the music books at Peterhouse, Cambridge. That their work should be so far afield is explained by the fact that when John Cosin became Master of Peterhouse i n 1635 he re-established the post of College organist and drew heavily upon the Durham repertoire. The succession of Cantors and Masters of the Choristers provided the framework on which to interweave details of their lives, historical events and musical developments. Biographical information relating to the other members of the choir has been assembled in Appendix 1. This is followed other Appendices many of which present together all occurrences of certain fields of information
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
Simulation studies of the imaging atmospheric cherenkov technique using the Durham mark 6 and H.E.S.S. stand-alone telescopes
No full textThe subject of this thesis is the simulation study of the development of extensive air show ers produced by very high energy gamma-ray and hadronic cosmic rays with respect to the Cherenkov light they produce, and its imaging in ground based telescopes. Chapters 1-4 are introductory: Chapter 1 covers the mechanisms responsible for the production of very high energy gamma-rays, whereas, chapter 2 focusses on the development of extensive air showers and Cherenkov light production. Chapter 3 covers the instrumentation used to measure the Cherenkov light using the imaging atmospheric Cherenkov technique. Chapter 4 covers known and possible sources of very high energy gamma-rays. Chapters 5, 6 and 7 cover research performed by the author: Chapter 5 discusses some of the differences between three popular extensive air shower simulations codes, namely ALTAI, CORSIKA and MOCCA. Chapter 6 details the simulation of the response of two ground based imaging atmospheric Cherenkov telescope (the Durham Mark 6 and stand-alone H.E.S.S. telescopes), and in particular details the derivation of the flux of the x-ray selected BL-LAC PKS 2155-304 with the Durham Mark 6 telescope. This represents the refinement of a published measurement given an improved telescope simulation. The significance of the signal seen is 6.8o, and the integral flux derived above 1.5 TeV (assuming a differential spectral slope of-2.6) is {2.5±0.7stat ± (^0.5)(_1.6syst) x 10(^-7) photons m(^-2) s(^-1) Chapter 7 discusses the importance of the atmosphere, and the results of shower simulations under different atmospheric assumptions are presented, which indicate the importance of atmospheric calibration for the new generation of Cherenkov telescopes. The results of this chapter suggest that to first order large changes in the low level aerosol concentration have a much more significant effect on the trigger rate of a stand-alone H.E.S.S. telescope, than on the Hillas parameter distributions seen. Chapter 8 brings together the work done in this thesis, and highlights a final set of fluxes for the active galactic nuclei sources seen with the Durham Mark 6 telescope, many of which will form future sources to be measured with the H.E.S.S. system. The current status of the stand-alone H.E.S.S. system is also covered in chapter 8. The thesis concludes with a further brief discussion of the future prospects for imaging atmospheric Cherenkov astronomy
Home-education : rationales, practices and outcomes
No full textSIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre- DSC:DXN054580 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo
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
Monks and markets : Durham Cathedral-Priory, 1460-1520.
No full textSIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre-DSC:DXN039285 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo
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
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