Creating and curating an archive: Bury St Edmunds and its Anglo-Saxon past

This contribution explores the mechanisms by which the Benedictine foundation of Bury St Edmunds sought to legitimise and preserve their spurious pre-Conquest privileges and holdings throughout the Middle Ages. The archive is extraordinary in terms of the large number of surviving registers and cartularies which contain copies of Anglo-Saxon charters, many of which are wholly or partly in Old English. The essay charts the changing use to which these ancient documents were put in response to threats to the foundation's continued enjoyment of its liberties. The focus throughout the essay is to demonstrate how pragmatic considerations at every stage affects the development of the archive and the ways in which these linguistically challenging texts were presented, re-presented, and represented during the Abbey’s history

Denmark in the Indian Ocean, 1616-1845 An Introduction

The Danish East Indian Company grew out of the ambitions of Christian IV, who in 1616 found himself with a new chancellor, Friis-Kragerup, less restraining than his predecessor. But if the ambition was Christian\u27s, the initiative came from two Dutchmen, Jan de Willum and Herman Rosenkrantz, who first put forward the idea in 1615 and won a circle of Copenhagen merchants to their side. In an open letter of March 17, 1616, King Christian gave permission for Danish subjects to establish an East Indian Company in Copenhagen in order to engage in trade with the East Indies, China and Japan

The Arrival at the Homestead A Mind-Film

After the jolt at the dry creek bed, and the turning of the red road through the straggling myall, part of the homestead came in sight. And the traveller knew it. Or perhaps did not quite know it, since it was any homestead at all in that part of the country, such as he could have drawn from memory or built like Meccano in his mind. Yet something made him slow down the car, something at last made him pull up and wait, in the soft red dust by the rotting gate through which he could see down the beaten earth to the house

Poems

The Rainbow Serpent Three Maltese Poems Playing With My Coronet Alof De Vignacourt Sits for HIs Portrait Simplicities of Summer Write ... Kabula Curio-Shop Requiem From Nudes: A Sequence of 14 Free-verse Sonnet

Clarity or confusion?: problems in attributing large-scale ecological changes to anthropogenic drivers

Ways of reducing the drivers of global biodiversity loss and degradation of ecosystem services are needed more than ever before. Policy options must be based on the best evidence of the role of multiple driving forces. Increasingly, a significant part of the evidence base comes from attributing signals of biological change detected in large-scale analytical surveys to a range of possible causal factors. We highlight a number of subtle difficulties that can beset the challenge of detecting such correlative relationships. These are as follows: (1) The Modifiable Area Unit Problem. (2) Incomplete explanatory variable data. (3) Lack of control over the replication and crossing of driving variables. In most cases these problems can be avoided by more careful specification of the scientific question and application of relatively new analytical techniques. Ignoring them can lead to mis-specification of hypothesised driver–state–impact relationships and flawed conclusions as to the most important causes of change