Dogging Cornwall’s 'secret freaks': Béroul on the limits of European orthodoxy

This piece argues that Béroul's version of the Tristan tale can be read as offering a discreetly veiled view of the sexual, ritual and ontological chaos associated with visions of the Celtic West such as figure in Gerald of Wales' History and Topography of Ireland as well as with accounts of heretical orgies found in continental sources such as Caesarius of Heisterbach. Drawing parallels between the poem’s fictional Cornwall and Gerald’s often hyperbolically lurid accounts of the perversions and peculiarities of Ireland, both religious and sexual, this essay targets the cultural voyeurism in which the world of King Mark appears to veil its kinship with the deviance and hybridity Gerald presents as characteristic of religious life across the Irish Sea. This relation can perhaps helpfully be characterised as a form of cultural 'dogging', the sociology of which is one of the methodological focuses of this paper and which mirrors Béroul's recurring focus on voyeuristic scenarios. Evidently, however, the disavowed investments underlying orthodoxy's voyeuristic fascination with what Gerald describes as the'secret freaks' nature spawns in Ireland also reflect a desire to render unintelligible the logics of othered practices. What gives Béroul’s text an edginess discernible even today is the clear implication that such ‘flawed’ societies operated on their own cultural terms and according to the

Solar concentrator

An improved solar concentrator is characterized by a number of elongated supporting members arranged in substantial horizontal parallelism with the axis and intersecting a common curve. A tensioned sheet of flexible reflective material is disposed in engaging relation with the supporting members in order to impart to the tensioned sheet a catenary configuration

The impact of the law on industrial disputes in the 1980s: report of a survey of public transport employers

This paper reports the results of one part of a research project which investigated the nature and extent of the impact of the labour legislation enacted between 1980 and 1990 on the conduct of the industrial relations and the processes by which this came about. Interviews were carried out with managers in three major public sector transport organisations. All three were subject to radical organisational change during the period under review and had quite extensive experience of dispute in this time. While they had made greater use of the law than employers in other sectors covered by the research project, there were mixed views on the results of this resort to the law. In general the law appeared to be a subsidiary part of, and influence on, the management of the process of change rather than an independent factor influencing management''s relations with trade unions and the workforce

A Panel Test of Purchasing Power Parity Under the Null of Stationarity

Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) is tested using a sample of real exchange rate data for twelve European countries. Acknowledging that Augmented Dickey Fuller tests have low power, we apply a Panel test that considers the null of stationarity and corrects for serial dependence using a non-parametric kernel based method