Monasticism and monasteries were important features of medieval religion in every English county. The monasteries of Dorset differ from surrounding countries in that the majority were pre-Conquest houses of the Benedictine order. Little is known about them in the late medieval period. Lacking much of the documentation available in other counties, this thesis, therefore, focuses particularly on the demography of the monks and nuns, ecclesiastical patronage, and the management of the estates. Ordination records identified Dorset monks and nuns and permitted an estimation of their ages. The names assumed by the monks on profession show that a high proportion of Dorset monks were locally recruited; a similar pattern to that reported for Devon and Somerset. The drop in numbers in the mid fifteenth century is in line with reported studies of other monasteries, but there was a recovery of numbers thereafter. Recruitment rates were consistent with a policy of limitation of numbers in the Dorset houses. Post Dissolution pension records, in giving a date of death, enabled simple studies of death rates, showing that life expectancy of former monks was no worse than experienced in a monastery. A close relationship existed between the heads of houses and landowners who subsequently obtained their lands. Spreadsheets of details of the clerics instituted into benefices of each of the Dorset monasteries were prepared. These show the monastic church of Shaftesbury Abbey was served by a community of clerics who were either instituted to local livings, or chantry chapels, or were appointed as vicars choral by their prebendaries. Each Benedictine house had a few rich livings wich attracted well-qualified clerics, who could act as potential advisors or lawyers for the abbeys. Alternatively they were appropriated to enhance the monastery’s annual income. Most livings were too poor for appropriation; these were filled predominantly by non-graduates; those in Shaftesbury livings, often serving in the abbey church. The proportion of graduate clergy instituted by the Dorset monasteries increased from the fourteenth century. Direct farming of demesnes generally ceased by the fifteenth century, but not by the Dorset monasteries. They maintained large numbers of sheep and directly cultivated their home farms, at least until the Valor assessments. Most of their estates were on the chalk downlands, which are part of the same chalk downlands of Wiltshire, where a similar tendency has been reported. Most of the estates of Sherborne Abbey lay away from this downland, and their farming pattern differed from that of the other houses. This study has revealed the state of the Dorset monasteries in the late medieval period, enabling comparisons with monasteries in surrounding counties.

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At a time when the Church of England was encouraging a greater variety of forms of professional ministry, but still retained selection criteria reflecting earlier organizational norms, my diocesan work with ordination candidates became a journey of exploration worth taking whatever the outcome. In this context, I collected rich life-story narratives using the Biographic-Narrative Interpretive Method, twenty-one of which later became the raw material for this study. As I began my research, I noticed in Michel Foucault's 1981-2 lectures at the College de France, published as The Hermeneutics of the Subject, significant correspondences between his concern with the relationship between the subject and truth, and the narratives of those with whom I had worked in the ministerial vocational context. I asked the central research question: Do these narratives of religious subjects show signs of a concern for the relationship between the subject and truth - of the subject progressively aligning itself with the truth that it thinks? I argued that, in spite of Foucault's assertion in his lectures that Western theology is fundamentally inimical to the survival of that 'spirituality' he sees as the progressive alignment of the self with truth, his extension of the term 'spiritual exercises' used by Pierre Hadot opens the way for a new theological appreciation of philosophy as a way of life. I found, by posing to the narrative material six questions designed to test the presence of 'spirituality' in the lives of ordination candidates, that the idea of the progressive alignment of the self with truth seemed to be alive and well in vocational theological discourse. This conclusion was reinforced at the institutional level by my discourse analysis of a vocational publication, Ministry in the Church of England. Having conducted semi-structured interviews with my subjects, which confirmed my findings further, I then discovered, in a detailed narrative analysis of all the interview material provided by four selected subjects, evidence for the self-constituting capability of narrative as a 'spiritual practice of the self'.

This study has been conducted under the direction of Middlesex University and through the good favor of the Frisco (Texas) Christian Alliance. The concern of this research has been whether the existence of a standing lay pulpit team increases measurably the preacher’s openness to feedback. This process of developing sensitivity to useful feedback is known as “closing the feedback loop.” Multiple case studies, triangulated with many other data collection instruments, have been the primary means of examining the hypothesis that a standing lay evaluation team closes the feedback loop. Further, existing studies and literature have been used to not only support this hypothesis but to convincingly establish that openness to feedback leads inevitably to improved teaching. The results clearly demonstrate the efficacy of a lay pulpit team in opening a preacher to feedback and thus increasing effectiveness. Thus, the theory herein tested, supported by this research and further validated by other work, may provide a simple means to achieve an end long sought in the preaching profession.

No description available.

Despite the centrality of monastic sources to debates about social and political transformation in post-Carolingian Europe, few studies have approached the political and economic status of monasteries and their saints' cults in this context, to which this thesis offers a comparative approach. Hagiography provides an interesting point of analysis with respect to the proposition of mutation féodale, and more importantly to that of the mutation documentaire and its relation to monastic 'reform', which Part I discusses. Parts II and III consider Bobbio and Conques, and their miracula (dedicated to San Colombano and Sainte Foy) within their respective socio-political environments, since the best of the recent scholarship concerning the millennial period has emphasized the specificity of regional experience. At Bobbio the closeness of the king physically and some continuity in royal practices between the tenth and eleventh centuries shaped monastic experience. It directed and sometimes restricted monastic discourse, which maintained an older tradition of general service to the kingdom, although innovations in relic usage helped monastic negotiations with the sovereign. At Conques, the waning of royal control created space for literary and cultic advances that served to bolster the monastery's position within local power structures. In this landscape older forms of public authority were purposefully minimized and hierarchy and landownership were negotiated between aristocrats, including Sainte Foy at the head of Conques. Whilst the categories of the 'feudal transformation' debate can offer a useful framework for the analysis of two very different monasteries and their local societies, the comparison demonstrates that placing monasteries at the centre of our debate is crucial to understanding the documents they produce, and therefore questions the potential that these have to shed light on wider societal change. Concerns over land and autonomy were central to both institutions, although these operated on different conceptual planes, because of different bases of landed patrimony dating back much further than the tenth century. Each monastery negotiated hierarchy and clientele through their miracula and according to local socio-political rules. Therefore, whilst related documentary and cultic transformations were inseparable from socio-political pressures, these were not necessarily pressures simply reacting to mutation féodale, but were formative processes in the direction and shape of social change.

Desmond Walter Posener. / "May 14, 1953." "Submitted to the Department of Physics on May 4, 1953, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy"--P. i. Errata inserted. / Bibliography: p. 155-156. / Army Signal Corps Contract DA36-039 sc-100 Dept. of the Army Project 3-99-10-022

Ce rapport personne-institution s’appuie sur une double notion : la personne humaine et le salut en Jésus-Christ. Le désir du salut dans l’histoire de l’Église a pris son essor dans l’anachorétisme pour s’épanouir dans le cénobitisme. Les grandes Règles monastiques ont mis au point tout une pédagogie spirituelle, à travers toute une législation où le rapport personne institution se révèle interactif et fécond pour la transformation spirituelle de la personne. La période qui va du Xe au XIIIe siècle, caractérisée par les grandes réformes monastiques de Cluny et de Cîteaux ainsi que l’émergence des Ordres mendiants a permis au rapport personne-institution de confirmer sa fiabilité même au creuset de l’épreuve que fut la Révolution de 1789. L’analyse du rapport personne-institution montre que la personne crée l’institution, lui donne sens et légitimité et l’institution favorise l’avènement de la personne comme être-en-relation, se construisant sans cesse par l’ouverture à l’altérité. / The relationship between the individual person and the religious institution is examined here all along the history of religious community life from the first cenobitc institution of saint Pacomus in the 4th century until the end of 18th century. The work is organised around two basic notions : the human person and salvation in Jesus Christ.With the apearance of monaticism, the notion of salvation clearly appears here in its objective, communal and universal dimension. The monastic reformation initiated in Cluny and Cîteaux, the appearance of the mendicant orders, and the French Revolution enabled the relation between the person and the institution to renew the meaning of religeous commitment. The analysis of the relationship person-institution shows that the person creates the institution, endowing it with meaning and legitimacy and that the institution works toward the advent of the human person seen as « a being in relation with » constantly developing by being open to otherness.

The purpose of this study was to analyze the dropwise condensation on a cylindrical surface including the sweeping effect theoretically. For this purpose, first the problem of the equilibrium shape and departure size of drops on the outer surface of a cylinder was formulated. The equations of the surface of the drop were obtained by minimizing (for a given volume) the total energy of the drop which consists of surface and gravitational energy by using the techniques of variational calculus. The departure size of the droplets on a surface at varies angle of inclinations were also determined experimentally. Drop departure size is observed to decrease up to as the surface inclination was decreased up to 90 degree and then it increased up to 180 degree. Mean base heat flux, drop departure rate, sweeping frequency, fraction of covered area, sweeping period, local heat flux and average heat flux for the dropwise condensation on a cylindrical surface including the sweeping effect is formulated and the resulting integral equation was solved by using the finite difference techniques. The results show that drop departure rate and sweeping frequency was strongly affected by the angular position and reached asymptotic value at large angular positions. Comparing the results of the average heat flux values at different diameters show that at larger diameters the average heat flux becomes larger. This is due to the increased sweeping effect at larger diameters.

A constraint is a formula in first-order logic expressing a relation between values of various domains. In order to solve a constraint, constructing a propositional encoding is a successfully applied technique that benefits from substantial progress made in the development of modern SAT solvers. However, propositional encodings are generally created by developing a problem-specific generator program or by crafting them manually, which often is a time-consuming and error-prone process especially for constraints over complex domains. Therefore, the present thesis introduces the constraint solver CO4 that automatically generates propositional encodings for constraints over structured finite domains written in a syntactical subset of the functional programming language Haskell. This subset of Haskell enables the specification of expressive and concise constraints by supporting user-defined algebraic data types, pattern matching, and polymorphic types, as well as higher-order and recursive functions. The constraint solver CO4 transforms a constraint written in this high-level language into a propositional formula. After an external SAT solver determined a satisfying assignment for the variables in the generated formula, a solution in the domain of discourse is derived. This approach is even applicable for finite restrictions of recursively defined algebraic data types. The present thesis describes all aspects of CO4 in detail: the language used for specifying constraints, the solving process and its correctness, as well as exemplary applications of CO4.