Overview of the CCP4 suite and current developments.

The CCP4 (Collaborative Computational Project, Number 4) software suite is a collection of programs and associated data and software libraries which can be used for macromolecular structure determination by X-ray crystallography. The suite is designed to be flexible, allowing users a number of methods of achieving their aims. The programs are from a wide variety of sources but are connected by a common infrastructure provided by standard file formats, data objects and graphical interfaces. Structure solution by macromolecular crystallography is becoming increasingly automated and the CCP4 suite includes several automation pipelines. After giving a brief description of the evolution of CCP4 over the last 30 years, an overview of the current suite is given. While detailed descriptions are given in the accompanying articles, here it is shown how the individual programs contribute to a complete software package

Our friend in the north: the origins, evolution and appeal of the cult of St Duthac of Tain in later Middle Ages

St Duthac of Tain was one of the most popular Scottish saints of the later middle ages. From the late fourteenth century until the reformation devotion to Duthac outstripped that of Andrew, Columba, Margaret and Mungo, and Duthac's shrine in Easter Ross became a regular haunt of James IV (1488-1513) and James V (1513-42). Hitherto historians have tacitly accepted the view of David McRoberts that Duthac was one of several local saints whose emergence and popularity in the fifteenth century was part of a wider self-consciously nationalist trend in Scottish religious practice. This study looks beyond the paradigm of nationalism to trace and explain the popularity of St Duthac from the shadowy origins of the cult to its heyday in the early sixteenth century

Royal and Lordly Residence in Scotland c 1050 to c 1250: an Historiographical Review and Critical Revision

Academic study of eleventh to thirteenth century high status residence in Scotland has been largely bypassed by the English debates over origin, function and symbolism. Archaeologists have also been slow to engage with three decades of historical revision of traditional socio-economic, cultural and political models upon which their interpretations of royal and lordly residence have drawn. Scottish castle-studies of the pre-1250 era continue to be framed by a ‘military architecture’ historiographical tradition and a view of the castle as an alien artefact imposed on the land by foreign adventurers and a ‘modernising’ monarchy and native Gaelic nobility. Knowledge and understanding of pre-twelfth century native high status sites is rudimentary and derived primarily from often inappropriate analogy with English examples. Discussion of native responses to the imported castle-building culture is founded upon retrospective projection of inappropriate later medieval social and economic models and anachronistic perceptions of military colonialism. Cultural and socio-economic difference is rarely recognised in archaeological modelling and cultural determinism has distorted perceptions of structural form, social status and material values. A programme of interdisciplinary studies focused on specific sites is necessary to provide a corrective to this current situation

Outside the gate: sub-urban legal practices in early medieval England

Many aspects of English early medieval (Anglo-Saxon) legal landscapes can be discerned in archaeological and toponymic evidence, ranging from the locations of legislative councils and judicial assemblies to sites of capital punishment. Among the corpus of such sites a striking group can be detected at the periphery of urban spaces. Gates into a number of towns appear to have functioned as legislative meeting-places, and even gave their names to some legally constituted communities, while suburban locations also feature prominently as sites of gallows and public punishment. In this paper historical, archaeological and toponymic evidence is used to examine this phenomenon of suburban legal practices and to pose questions about the wider dimensions of the early medieval legal landscape

The CCP4 suite : integrative software for macromolecular crystallography

The Collaborative Computational Project No. 4 (CCP4) is a UK-led international collective with a mission to develop, test, distribute and promote software for macromolecular crystallography. The CCP4 suite is a multiplatform collection of programs brought together by familiar execution routines, a set of common libraries and graphical interfaces. The CCP4 suite has experienced several considerable changes since its last reference article, involving new infrastructure, original programs and graphical interfaces. This article, which is intended as a general literature citation for the use of the CCP4 software suite in structure determination, will guide the reader through such transformations, offering a general overview of the new features and outlining future developments. As such, it aims to highlight the individual programs that comprise the suite and to provide the latest references to them for perusal by crystallographers around the world

Partes, termini, confinia regnorum. Innere und Aussere Grenzen

This paper explores various aspects of the significance of frontiers in the empire of Charlemagne (768-814), highlighting the existence of communication networks that brought the empire's centre to the frontiers

Semper Fideles ?

Je commence par la fin. Le tableau de l’écroulement de l’autorité carolingienne peint par Réginon de Prüm est connu. L’arrivée des roitelets sur la scène politique lève le rideau sur le monde des principautés. Réginon, qui écrivait au commencement du Xe siècle, est le héraut d’un nouveau monde, un monde où l’autorité carolingienne est brisée. Mais les racines de Réginon remontent au IXe siècle, à l’époque du monopole carolingien sur la couronne. Le témoignage de Réginon nous renseigne donc su..

The palace complex

Wide-ranging discussion of the roles and representations of palaces in early medieval western Europe with some comparisons with the Byzantine and Islamic worlds

Making and Unmaking the Carolingians, 751-888

How does power manifest itself in individuals? Why do people obey authority? And how does a family, if they are the source of such dominance, convey their superiority and maintain their command in a pre-modern world lacking speedy communications, standing armies and formalised political jurisdiction? Here, Stuart Airlie expertly uses this idea of authority as a lens through which to explore one of the most famous dynasties in medieval Europe: the Carolingians. Ruling the Frankish realm from 751 to 888, the family of Charlemagne had to be ruthless in asserting their status and adept at creating a discourse of Carolingian legitimacy in order to sustain their supremacy. Through its nuanced analysis of authority, politics and family, Making and Unmaking the Carolingians, 751-888 outlines the system which placed the Carolingian dynasty at the centre of the Frankish world. In doing so, Airlie sheds important new light on both the rise and fall of the Carolingian empire and the nature of power in medieval Europe more generally

Strange eventful histories: the Middle Ages in the cinema

Movies can be dangerous for medievalists. In Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975) no sooner has a crusty tweed-jacketed professor of medieval history begun his lecture on the film’s lack of historical accuracy than he is cut down by a mounted knight in armour who gallops off, leaving the professor’s distraught wife to call the police to track down the villain from the age of chivalry. In The Fisher King (1991), the Robin Williams character finds that his obsession with the Middle Ages leads to him living rough on the streets of New York, streets filled with hallucinatory visions of medieval knights. Yet movies remain strangely seductive. No less a figure than Georges Duby hoped to see his book on the battle of Bouvines filmed and fretted on the problems of representing the daily lived reality of the distant past on the big screen. How would he be able to answer Gerard Depardieu’s questions on the horse-riding, eating and dating habits of Philip Augustus? How one relishes the prospect of the dapper professor encountering the great figure of Depardieu or the svelte Nastassja Kinski, whom Duby’s musings led him to see as Joan, countess of Flanders. Sadly, these encounters never took place; Bouvines remained unfilmed and Duby concluded that film did not yet possess a form or a language capable of transmitting historians’ ideas of past societies (Duby 1991: 185–6)