From disputatio to predicatio – and back again : dialectic, authority and epistemology between the Roman de la Rose and the Pèlerinage de Vie Humaine

Modern critics on the whole have found it rather difficult to account for the success of Guillaume de Deguileville's Pelerinage de Vie Humaine with medieval readers, and the poem is still widely misunderstood whenever it is not overlooked or dismissed out of hand. Things have begun to improve over the last decade, with the appearance of a number of studies on the circulation, translation, and reception of Deguileville. This is a welcome development, but it may also have distracted our attention from the internal workings of this influential, rich, and complex allegory, still insufficiently studied in terms of its place within multiple overlapping contexts – intellectual, literary, cultural, and political. The survival of two rather different versions of the poem, PVH1 from 1331, and PVH2 from 1355–6, further complicates the picture, but affords us the rare opportunity to trace the internal tensions, shifts, and transformations of an author's poetic vision over time

The inward crusade: the apocalypse of the Queste del Saint Graal

The Queste del Saint Graal is the most intensely spiritual of the medieval Arthurian romances, and in its combination of chivalric and religious material immediately calls to mind the contemporary phenomenon of the crusades. The text at once seems to resist the drive towards exteriorisation expressed in the crusading impetus, counterbalancing it by a mystical internalisation of the focus and objective of the quest. As such, through its use of apocalyptic imagery, the text redefines the eschatological expectations that contemporaries projected onto the crusades to the Holy Land. Redirecting such an eschatological focus inward, aimed towards the purification of the heart of each individual Christian in preparation for the imminent apocalypse, the Queste is nevertheless forced to confront yet another intensely real threat originating from within Christianity itself, that of the Cathar heresy. Cultivating a constant and uneasy ambiguity about the status of the text itself, swinging between lofty allegorisations and stark, physical realism, the author finally sees the repression of the Cathar heresy as part of a wider process of purification fulfilling a clearly eschatological function. The apotheosis of the text, with the companions' entirely peaceful recovery of the eschatological, ‘celestial city' of Sarraz, is thus seen as the result of a form of ‘inward crusade' that is at once physical and ideological, micro and macrocosmic but always directed towards the heart of Christianity itself rather than the infide

The sege of Melayne and the siege of Jerusalem

Two Middle English poems are placed within the context of the papal Schism of 1378-1415, itself framed by the rising tension between the nations of France and England during the Hundred Years’ War. Both poems imagine a fictional triumph of Christians over a religious Other—Saracens in the Sege of Melayne, Jews in the Siege of Jerusalem—and, through such crusading fantasies, seek to restore a sense of unified Christendom eroded by the papal Schism. Other contemporary developments also complicate the binarism of identity associated with the ideals of Holy War, notably the emergence of national crusades that encouraged contemporaries to view the largely dynastic and political conflict between France and England through a religious lens. Both poems thus attempt to imagine a unified Christian community regenerated by the experience of warfare, but because of the increasing difficulty in sorting out national and religious identities, they also exacerbate the internal fractures they set out to overcom

eXperimental geometry Zurich: Software for geometric computation

We propose a distributed dictionary that tolerates arbitrary single server crashes. The distinctive feature of our model is that the crash of a server cannot be detected. This is in contrast to all other proposals of distributed fault tolerant search structures presented thus far. It reflects the real situation in the internet more accurately, and is in general more suitable to complex overall conditions. This makes our solution fundamentally dierent from all previous ones, but also more complicated. We present in detail the algorithms for searching, insertion, and graceful recovery of crashed servers

State space description of national economies: the V4 countries

We present a new approach to description of national economies. For this we use the state space viewpoint, which is used mostly in the theory of dynamical systems and in the control theory. Gross domestic product, inflation, and unemployment rates are taken as state variables. We demonstrate that for the considered period of time the phase trajectory of each of the V4 countries (Slovak Republic, Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland) lies approximately in one plane, so that the economic development of each country can be assocated with a corresponding plane in the state space. The suggested approach opens a way to a new set of economic indicators (for example, normal vectors of national economies, various plane slopes, 2D angles between the planes corresponding to different economies, etc.). The tool used for computations is orthogonal regression (alias orthogonal distance regression, alias total least squares method), and we also give general arguments for using orthogonal regression instead of the classical regression based on the least squares method. A MATLAB routine for fitting 3D data to lines and planes in 3D is provided.Comment: 13 pages, 18 figure

Tracing back materialized ideas to embodied and verbal dialogues: Analyzing documents and videofootage of crafts and design lessons

This article discusses a case study combining the qualitative analysis of documents and videofootage. The data was collected during a short collaborative task within an ideation phase with9-10 year old pupils customizing a store-bought t-shirt. The combination of video and document analysis allows tracing back the emergence of some of the kernel ideas visible in prototypes and final designs. The analysis also shows that the pupils in the case study have developed a pool of ideas during several collaborative phases that they could draw back on for their final designs. The close observation of both verbal and embodied dialogue in video analysis shows that the individual, simultaneous and conjoint handling of materials in an exploratory way -– touching and examining, arranging and rearranging – as well as the verbal dialogue taking place during the design process plays an important role within the ideation phase in Crafts and Design lessons. Thus, the article supports previous studies in this area. This small-scale case study can also be taken as an example for how to practice studying subjectspecific learning and teaching for students in teacher education with documents and videofootage providing a rich resource. Additional materials available on an online-portal as of June 2020 serve as a starting point for this endeavor

Die Aussagekraft von Beispielen

Zusammenfassung: Der Mensch verfügt über die bemerkenswerte Fähigkeit, aus einem einzigen Beispiel universelle Regeln abzuleite