let Her Be Taken: Sexual Violence In Medieval England

Rape and its impact on medieval women, as conceived by society and the law, have yet to receive extensive treatment. By analyzing not only rape cases, but evolving laws and the impact of the Church on views of sexuality and marriage and thus its influence on attitudes towards rape, this study shows that women were much more than victims and society, or the courts, reacted accordingly. Covering the years 1200 to 1250, this thesis examines secular court cases taken from the general eyre records of Yorkshire, Gloucestershire, Lincolnshire, Warwickshire, Berkshire, Wiltshire, Worcestershire and Staffordshire. Cases taken from the King\u27s Bench and canon courts, including Canterbury, also provide an illustration of the process of rape litigation. Legal treatises, both canon and secular, serve as the foundation for the procedures required in either court system and show that rape was a punishable offense. However, society had difficulty viewing rape as a personal crime against a woman as opposed to a crime against her family and that is when it actually thought that sexual violence occurred. While still available to them, women used the rape laws to push their agendas and concerns onto the court - revenge, choice of marriage, justice. In court records, the heavy burden of proof and the high rate of dismissals support this conclusion. Women persevered through the inherent disadvantages presented by a patriarchal system and achieved a measure of control over their lives. This is evidenced by the nearly equal success and failure rates in the records examined; 33 percent ended in acquittal or dismissal, while 31 percent provided women with some closure. The passage of the Statutes of Westminster, by removing a woman\u27s right to prosecute rape and marry the accused, also convincingly illustrated that women held a degree of power that was unacceptable to society

Construction of a Generic Program Representation for Automated Metric Computation

Software code metrics provide a quantitative and qualitative measurement of a software component\u27s ability to perform under a specific set of objectives. Different metrics have been developed for analyzing various aspects of the source code to gain insight into the overall quality of the code under study. There are a variety of open source tools available for computing metrics for applications coded in most of the popular programming languages. However, there is no single tool that computes software metrics for the popular programming languages in use today. To address this problem, we describe an approach to software metric computation that can be applied to the popular programming languages currently in use, including both compiled and interpreted languages. The approach entails leveraging existing parser tools to produce a generalized abstract syntax tree that captures the important syntactic categories required for metric computation. To demonstrate the utility of our approach, we exploit front-end parser tools for the Python and C++ programming languages to produce a generalized abstract syntax tree and then compute software metrics as a form of tree traversal. We describe our results for applying two commonly used metrics to three open source software projects and various code samples written in both Python and C++. The context of this process is then extended to computer programming education, with the specific goal of helping students and programmers improve the quality of their code

Vi et Armis: Londoners and Violent Trespass Before the Common Pleas in the Fifteenth Century

Civil litigation in early fifteenth-century England encompassed a variety of actions, but only one writ covered acts of violence: trespass vi et armis. These writs, all before the central Court of Common Pleas, detail a variety of violent torts, or wrongs, such as housebreaking, theft, imprisonment, abduction, and assault. The Londoners who entered pleadings in this court between 1405 and 1415 have left a fascinating glimpse into both interpersonal violence and the world of savvy litigators. Through a close examination of eighty-two cases, I demonstrate that Londoners were knowledgeable litigants who used the Court of Common Pleas and its procedures to pursue their agendas. However, two facts about the cases before the Court of Common Pleas indicate that plaintiffs had ulterior motives in going to law: cases rarely went to trial, and damages were hardly ever assessed. The narratives crafted by plaintiffs and defendants suggest complex motives which might include establishing property ownership, enforcing arbitration, as well as negotiating concepts of licit and illicit violence. Defendants might argue that certain acts, like violence in self-defense, were considered licit as the violence re-created order from the initial attack. These negotiations occurred not only between people and the crown, through the courts, but also among the people themselves, for example, during arbitration or during jury deliberations. Various layers of negotiations are perhaps best evidenced in the differences between using self-defense in a criminal proceeding and in a civil proceeding. Of particular importance in deciding something like the amount of money to request in damages was the status, occupation, and gender of the defendants. Knowing this information helped litigants assess the economic feasibility of obtaining damages that might have been awarded to them. Violence committed by or against women was, on average, assigned a monetary value that was less than violence by men against men. Similarly, litigants with an occupation or status listed in the records, resulted in damage requests that were twenty percent more than when litigants did not include occupation or status. In the last chapter, I place these eighty-two cases in the broader context of the fifteenth century. I examine a larger set of cases, including these eighty-two cases, statistically over a span of thirty-eight years in the fifteenth century and my findings reinforce the data from the smaller sample set; namely, that gender, occupation, and status influenced the amount of damages requested. This long-term data does hint at a change over time in what society and the courts felt was violence allowed by private parties against each other. As savvy litigants, Londoners would wield narratives of violence that might help their agenda, either as plaintiff or defendant, and they would also know when those narratives needed to match the changing societal concepts of violence

Sources of Error in Thermoluminescence Studies

Controlled sampling techniques were applied to a small block of limestone from which solid samples and three grain-size fractions were examined. Data from artificial and natural glow curves were analyzed graphically and statistically. The most satisfactory grain size for future thermoluminescence studies was found to range from 74 to 125 microns. Significantly more thermoluminescence was obtained from samples heated in a nitrogen atmosphere because the filtering effect of oxidized iron was eliminated. After elimination of the filtering effect, iron still inhibited thermoluminescence. The reliability of the nitrogen atmosphere glow curves was approximately equal to that of the normal atmosphere glow curves. Lateral and vertical variations exist in the limestone within short distances and are thought to be dependent primarily upon the trace element content of the material examined

Stabilizing a Molecular Switch at Solid Surfaces: A Density-Functional Theory Study of Azobenzene at Cu(111), Ag(111), and Au(111)

We present a density-functional theory trend study addressing the binding of the trans-cis conformational switch azobenzene (C6H5-N=N-C6H5) at three coinage metal surfaces. From the reported detailed energetic, geometric, and electronic structure data we conclude that the governing factor for the molecule-surface interaction is a competition between covalent bonding of the central azo (-N=N-) bridge on the one hand and the surface interaction of the two closed-shell phenyl (-C6H5) rings on the other. With respect to this factor the cis conformer exhibits a more favorable gas-phase geometric structure and is thus more stabilized at the studied surfaces. With the overall binding still rather weak the relative stability of the two isomers is thereby reduced at Ag(111) and Au(111). This is significantly different at Cu(111), where the cis bonding is strong enough to even reverse the gas-phase energetic order at the level of the employed semi-local electronic exchange and correlation (xc) functional. While this actual reversal may well be affected by the deficiencies due to the approximate xc treatment, we critically discuss that the rationalization of the general effect of the surface on the meta-stable molecular states is quite robust. This should equally hold for the presented analysis of recent tip-manipulation and photo-excitation isomerization experiments from the view point of the derived bonding mechanism.Comment: 10 pages including 4 figures; related publications can be found at http://www.fhi-berlin.mpg.de/th/th.htm