The Persistence Of Opportunistic Business Models In Health Care And A Stronger Role For Insurance Regulators In Containing Health Care Costs

While much is heard about new “value-based” payment models for health care, the reality is that old-fashioned business models emphasizing higher unit prices and discrete billable services still prevail and succeed in driving up health care cost

Canon before Canon, Literature before Literature: Thomas Pope Blount and the Scope of Early Modern Learning

Sir Thomas Pope Blount (1649–1697), an English essayist and country gentleman, published two major literary biobibliographies, Censura celebriorum authorum (1690) and De re poetica (1694). In this essay, Kelsey Jackson Williams discusses the texts within the genre of historia literaria and contemporary understandings of literature. In doing so, he engages with current debates surrounding canon formation and the shifts in disciplinary boundaries that followed in the wake of the Battle of the Books. Early modern canons and definitions of “literature” differed radically from their modern equivalents, and a close reading of Blount’s work offers a window onto this forgotten literary landscape.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Thomas Gray and the Goths: philology, poetry, and the uses of the Norse past in eighteenth-century England

In 1761 Thomas Gray composed two loose translations of Old Norse poems: The Fatal Sisters and The Descent of Odin. This article reconstructs Gray’s complex engagement with the world of seventeenth-century Scandinavian scholarship: recovering the texts he used, the ideologies contained within them, and the ways in which he naturalized those ideologies into his own vision of the history of English literature. Gray became aware of Old Norse poetry in the course of composing a never-completed history of English poetry in the 1750s, but this article argues that it was not until the publication of James Macpherson’s Fragments of Ancient Poetry (1760) that Gray became inspired to engage poetically with the Scandinavian past. Imitating Macpherson, he created his own ‘translations’ of what he understood to be the British literary heritage and, in doing so, composed a vivid and surprising variation on the grand myths of early modern Scandinavian nationalism.PostprintPeer reviewe

The network of James Garden of Aberdeen and north-eastern Scottish culture in the seventeenth century

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Training the virtuoso: John Aubrey’s education and early life

John Aubrey's contributions to antiquarianism and archaeology helped to shape the development of several disciplines in English scholarship. This paper looks at the educational milieu that produced his pioneering work, following him from his Wiltshire gentry background through school at Blandford Forum, Dorset, to Trinity College, Oxford, the Middle Temple, and beyond as a young gentleman with a scientific turn of mind in Commonwealth London. It substantially clarifies and revises previous estimates of the extent and nature of his education and offers a case study in the early training of a Restoration "virtuoso".PostprintPeer reviewe

A Genealogy of the Grand Komnenoi of Trebizond

The empire of Trebizond, founded by a grandson of emperor Andronikos I Komnenos in the chaos following the sack of Constantinople in 1204 and the last Byzantine state to fall to the Ottoman Turks (in 1461), occupied a unique position in the later middle ages as a focus for transcontinental commerce and as a state which had close ties with the Georgian and Turkomen polities to its east as well as the Byzantine, French and Italian states to its west. These ties were solidified by a series of astute dynastic marriages that make the Grand Komnenoi, the ruling dynasty of Trebizond for the period of its history as an empire, of particular interest to the genealogist and prosopographer. The present paper corrects the accreted errors of past generations and sets out, for the first time, a scholarly account of the genealogy of the Grand Komnenoi.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe