The classification and analysis of spirals in decorative designs

Structure in decorative patterning has been used to identify perceptual preferences and broader social and cultural patterning of a society. This thesis proposes a new method of analysis and classification of decorative spirals as a test of whether the analysis of an individual type of geometric decorative motif in isolation can reflect social and cultural trends in a similar manner. The proposed analysis method, which takes a quantitative, bottom-up approach to classification, was compared with a topdown classification method used in previous studies based on mathematical spiral forms. Similarities were found across the two classification methods, both are clearly strongly influenced by the expansion rate of the spiral but the newly proposed method is felt to offer a more flexible approach to the classification of motifs which accommodates gradual variation and the decorative properties of the motifs beyond a simple mathematical curve. The proposed method was tested on four archaeological case studies: Egyptian scarabs of the Middle Kingdom and First and Second Intermediate Periods, Cypriot Bronze Age painted pottery and gold-work, Shang and Western Zhou Dynasty bronze vessels, and Japanese Jōmon Period pottery. Quantification and cluster analysis of spirals in these studies identified variation in motif shape that could be attributed to the production method but the chief finding was one of homogeneity across the four cultures and a limited range of forms of decorative expression which suggests an influence of natural spiral forms on decorative examples across the cultures sampled. An analysis of the possible influence of spiral optical effects arising from disturbances in the functioning of the visual cortex on decorative spirals did not yield significant results

Exploring Written Artefacts

This collection, presented to Michael Friedrich in honour of his academic career at of the Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures, traces key concepts that scholars associated with the Centre have developed and refined for the systematic study of manuscript cultures. At the same time, the contributions showcase the possibilities of expanding the traditional subject of ‘manuscripts’ to the larger perspective of ‘written artefacts’

Exploring Written Artefacts

This collection, presented to Michael Friedrich in honour of his academic career at of the Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures, traces key concepts that scholars associated with the Centre have developed and refined for the systematic study of manuscript cultures. At the same time, the contributions showcase the possibilities of expanding the traditional subject of ‘manuscripts’ to the larger perspective of ‘written artefacts’

Library Trends 36 (1) 1987: Recent trends in rare book librarianship

published or submitted for publicatio

Violence in the Behistun Monument: Construction and Cohesion of Achaemenid Imperial Rule under Darius I (522-519 BCE)

What are the challenges of studying violence in the ancient world? How should we define violence for historical studies? How do appeals to violent ability aid the establishment and maintenance of regimes of power? I explore these questions in my thesis through an analysis of the Behistun Monument, Darius I's memorial to his victories between 522-519 BCE. I investigate the king's use of psychological and figurative violence in the foundation of the Achaemenid regime of power, after violently suppressing the rebellions against him. In the first part of the thesis I outline the methodological principles of the study and examine the source basis. In Chapter One, I examine how definitions of violence arising from the social scientific debate can be applied to different ancient source material and studies. My methodological approach is based on a 'wide' concept of violence, which accounts for its non-physical aspects. In Chapter Two, I contextualise the Behistun Monument within the extant corpus of Teispid (550-522 BCE) and Achaemenid (522-331 BCE) artefacts. In the second part of the thesis, I conduct a case study of violence in the Behistun Monument. In Chapter Three I consider the monument's figurative aspects: the relief image and inscriptions on the mountainside. In Chapters Four, Five and Six, I consider the inscriptional content. This analysis relates primarily to the 'violent rhetoric': descriptions of the battles fought and punishments inflicted in the course of the crisis and what these reveal about Achaemenid imperial ideology. In the conclusion, I outline the benefits of using a 'wide' definition to examine historical violence revealed by the case study and propose further directions for stud

Animal visual culture in the middle ages

This PhD thesis presents an investigation of animal visual culture in the Middle Ages. The term animal visual culture is most simply defined (and intended to be understood as), visual material culture which demonstrates animal/creature-related images or material which becomes circulated in animal/creature forms. The thesis uses an archaeological approach to investigate visualisations of animals (as opposed to a purely zoo-archaeological, historical or art historical approach). Three main types of visual material culture were researched for the representation of animals: stained and painted glass, misericord carvings and portable material culture. The representation of animals in each data source was investigated to explore the extent to which species, chronological, and either geographical or artefact patterns could be established within a 500 year period of the Middle Ages. A number of species, chronological, and either geographical or artefact patterns could be established.It was concluded that the patterns of representations were linked to the ideas various organisations and individuals had about animals or wanted others to have about animals. Animal visual culture is a manifestation of medieval life and faith. It challenges our modern day understanding of the complex medieval issues influencing the creation and intended function of animal images in society

Distempered Visions: Reading Narratives of Specular Mourning in Victorian fiction

This thesis questions the phenomenological force and function of mourning in the fiction of Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot, bringing together models of contemporary visuality with modalities of loss, to emphasise a dialectic of affective pain as intimate vision. While Victorian visual culture has been substantially addressed by recent scholarship, there remains a paucity of investigation into what I read as an optic chiasmus of altered modes of seeing and modes of feeling. With a focus on two of the key novelists of the period, I have selected four novels that are fascinated by the nature of warped vision and blindness, questioning how literature might depict mourning in a world newly crowded by the visual. From this starting point, I examine the ways in which both novelists appropriated optical tropes to articulate the lived experience of a traumatised consciousness. The mourning subject becomes the site of specular, phantasmal inquiry in their works, and thus my own method follows the conditions of this connection. This particularised account of the themes of loss and mourning has not been significantly addressed in the scholarship, despite the fact that all four texts explicitly emphasise subjective trauma. How is the private and intimate altered by the fluid specularity of the new optics of the period? Weaving together nineteenth-century physics, optics, and visual technologies with changing notions of subjectivity and the experience of consciousness, my work foregrounds the phenomenological depictions of visualised suffering in the novels. Exploring the intersection of the technologized Victorian eye and the feeling, grieving subject, I draw out the transitivity of optical fragmentation that Brontë and Eliot manipulate to extend the textual scope of elegiac representation. By looking closely at the slippage of socio-cultural modes of vision and inner life, I argue that the precarious nature of the visual became a space in which both writers could articulate a phenomenology of loss. Taking Brontë’s fears for her father’s encroaching blindness as a point of departure, I begin with Jane Eyre (1847), conventionally read as a narrative of resolute visual authority. Through a series of close readings, I draw out the anxiety that shadows the novel’s depiction of the eye. I am interested in the ways the biographical meets the socio-cultural in Brontë’s discourse of vision, and Jane Eyre’s theme of blindness is a fruitful place of entry into that query. Villette (1853) was written after Brontë’s visits to London’s Great Exhibition and offers a distinct engagement with the Victorian visual culture, employing a more sophisticated and complex imbrication of the private and the social modes of visualised loss. This chapter explores how Brontë’s most devastating and final work accommodates the problem of the mourning subject in a hyper-visual sphere. In the second half of the thesis, I turn to Eliot’s The Lifted Veil (1859) andRomola (1862-3), two works which have traditionally garnered the least amount of critical attention, often described as misplaced in the author’s oeuvre. In The Lifted Veil the various epistemological crises of the mid-century moment find expression in Eliot’s horrifying first-person account of delimited, inescapable sensory experience. Contravening the established critical view of the tale, with an emphasis on the protagonist’s preternatural visionary capacities, I focus on Eliot’s use of the terms of Victorian lens culture to elucidate the blind spots of this first-person narrative. In Romola, Eliot depicts a heroine who imagines more profoundly than her counterparts what it might mean to live with the endlessness of mourning. Taking up Eliot’s exploration of phenomenal embodiment, which contrasts with the empirical, observational aesthetic of traditional realism, I point to the tension that defines the sensory life in the novel. Through being attentive to the correspondences of mourning and decentralized perspectival geographies, I argue for a closer look at the phenomenally descriptive in its own right as performing a different ontology of radical loss

Crafting the JFK legend: How the Kennedy story is constructed and retold

This thesis explores how the ambivalently multifarious Kennedy ‘stories’ of JFK as Icon or Myth are constructed and how its ‘telling’ has been profoundly influenced by authorial intent. In contrast with much of the Kennedy literature, that often blurs the two, the thesis therefore works with a strong distinction between ‘Icon’ as having wholly positive connotations and ‘Myth’ as a narrative which either falsifies or negatively debunks any pre-existing positive accounts of its subject matter.My focus on newspaper articles, in particular from The New York Times and The Dallas Morning News, arises from the familiarly powerful claim that journalists write ‘the first draft of history’, although the thesis also reaches beyond journalism. Crucial to the argument is E. H. Carr’s historiography and its contention that historical facts are selected and presented according to particular hypotheses utilized by historians of any stripe for their own particular purposes. The thesis uses J. L. Austin’s theory of speech acts to demonstrate how the telling of the Kennedy story has variously employed techniques not only supposedly just to describe his legacy (the locutionary speech act) but also a) to create a legacy (the illocutionary speech act) and b) to influence audience attitudes toward the legacy (the perlocutionary speech act).The malleability of the Kennedy story helps to explain the reason why there remains so many attempts to retell it. The thesis also opens up consideration as to why it is this particular story that so many still want to hear