Construing the child reader: a cognitive stylistic analysis of the opening to Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book

Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book (2009) charts the story of Nobody Owens, a boy who is adopted by supernatural entities in the local graveyard after his family is murdered. This article draws on the notion of the “construed reader,” and combines two cognitive stylistic frameworks to analyse the opening section of the novel. In doing so, the article explores the representation and significance of the family home in relation to what follows in the narrative. The analysis largely draws on Text World Theory (Werth, 1999; Gavins, 2007), but also integrates some aspects of Cognitive Grammar (Langacker, 2008), which allows for a more nuanced discussion of textual features. The article pays particular attention to the way Gaiman frames his narrative and positions his reader to view the fictional events from a distinctive vantage point and subsequently demonstrates that a stylistic analysis of children’s literature can lay bare how such writing is designed with a young readership in mind

The economics of debt clearing mechanisms

We examine the evolution of decentralized clearinghouse mechanisms from the 13th to the 18th century; in particular, we explore the clearing of non- or limitedtradable debts like bills of exchange. We construct a theoretical model of these clearinghouse mechanisms, similar to the models in the theoretical matching literature, and show that specific decentralized multilateral clearing algorithms known as rescontre, skontrieren or virement des parties used by merchants were efficient in specific historical contexts. We can explain both the evolutionary self-organizing emergence of late medieval and early modern fairs, and its robustness during the 17th and 18th century

How to speak of God? Toward a postsecular apologetics

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Practical Theology on 11/04/2018, available online: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1756073X.2018.1460522Against most expectations religion has not vanished from Western culture. If anything, it exercises a greater fascination than ever before. Broadly, we might think of ourselves as occupying a new, 'postsecular' space between a renewed visibility of religion in public life, and a corresponding acknowledgement of the importance of religious values and actors; and persistent and widespread disillusion and scepticism towards religion, and objections to religion as a source of legitimate public discourse. In a world that is more sensitive than ever to religious belief and practice, yet often struggles to accommodate it into secular discourse, how do religious institutions justify their position in a contested and volatile public square? This article argues that the contemporary postsecular context requires a recovery of the ancient practices of Christian apologetics as a form of public, theological witness to the practical value of faith, articulated in both deed and word

From Antwerp and Amsterdam to London: The Decline of Financial Centres in Europe

Economic history, financial centres, N2, O1,

England Wills Project

This is the same data as number 1 in the series, but preserved as comma separated format, not Filemaker Pro.English Wills project, database of probate account records

England Wills Project

Filemaker Pro databaseDatabase of England probate accounts records

Les liens du crédit au village dans l'Angleterre du XVIIe siècle

Rural Credit in Seventeenth-Century England. Spufford has begun a large project on the 33000 surviving probate accounts exhibited by executors and administrators year or more after the corresponding probate inventories had been drawn up. From work done so far he has been able to show that, as well as the all pervasive amount of credit involved in buying and selling, already worked on by Dr Muldrew, there was also broad network of formal, long-term, interest-bearing loans on bonds which underpinned the development of agricul ture in seventeenth-century England. Many of these loans were provided by lenders whom historians can recognize as family and others by those known to the borrowers. However, brokers, such as money-scriveners were also used as intermediaries between investors and borrowers otherwise unknown to each other. It is not yet clear how far these loan-brokers were the precursors of country bankers.Spufford Peter, Taffin Dominique. Les liens du crédit au village dans l'Angleterre du XVIIe siècle. In: Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales. 49ᵉ année, N. 6, 1994. pp. 1359-1373