The \u27Desert\u27 Society in Languedoc (1686-1704) as Popular Culture and the Roots of French Quakerism

The \u27Desert\u27 society in Cevennes, Languedoc, was an offshoot of the persecution of French Protestants by Louis XIV. The clandestine assemblies that met in the ravines gave rise to lay ministry, as the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685) had forced professional ministers to flee abroad. At first, Predicants replaced ministers, then Prophets and Prophetesses in turn replaced the killed Predicants. The \u27Desert\u27 society gave birth to a popular culture. At the end of the seventeenth century, the Protestants\u27 resistance was peaceful, but as persecutions grew, the Camisard war broke out in 1702. But a minority of Prophets refused violence, even in self-defence, as a solution to the Protestants\u27 problems. They gathered in the Vaunage valley, around Congenies, near Nimes. Their spiritual descendants met British Friends in 1785, and joined the Religious Society of Friends in 1788. They also belonged to the popular culture of the \u27Desert\u27 society

Following Knots Down Their Energy Gradients

This paper details a series of experiments in searching for minimal energy configurations for knots and links using the computer program KnotPlot. The most interesting phenomena found in these experiments is the dependence of the trajectories of energy descent upon the initial geometric conditions of the knotted embedding.Comment: 18 pages, 13 figures, MsWord documen

Virtual Knot Cobordism

This paper defines a theory of cobordism for virtual knots and studies this theory for standard and rotational virtual knots and links. Non-trivial examples of virtual slice knots are given. Determinations of the four-ball genus of positive virtual knots are given using the results of a companion paper by the author and Heather Dye and Aaron Kaestner. Problems related to band-passing are explained, and a theory of isotopy of virtual surfaces is formulated in terms of a generalization of the Yoshikawa moves.Comment: 32 pages, 43 figures, LaTeX documen