Thesis (D. Litt. et Phil. (Biblical Studies)) / The Fertile Crescent, due to its geographical characteristics, has always been an area troubled with conflict and warfare. The men who participated in these wars, from ca 2000 BCE to 1000 BCE operated from an ethos which was governed by a system of rules, all which were conceived to be the creation of divine will, to which kings and their warriors (keymen) were subject. The cuneiform texts from Mari, Ugarit, Ebla, Amarna and others, have not only thrown light on the political, social, religious and military aspects of those turbulent times, but have also given insight into the formation of armies as well as the commanders who led those armies and the royal officials who governed cities and provinces, all appointed by the monarch in order to effect the smooth running of his kingdom. They also shed light on the formation of coalitions and alliances in order to promote peace, arrange marriages to the daughters of other ruling powers and to promote trade relations. These were no easy tasks, considering the diversity of peoples, the birth and fall of kingdoms and empires, and the ever shifting and changes of loyalties of greedy kings and their men, to attain power and conquest for themselves.. However, these texts also give glimpses of the human side of the king and the close relationships between himself and his men of authority, whilst the women of the court also played their role in some areas of the social field. The responses, of these people towards matters and events, whether they were confrontations, marriage alliances, trade ventures or hunting expeditions, occurred within an ever changing world yet, it was also a world with an ethos of ancient traditions, which did not disappear but instead remained, albeit in adapted or altered form, to be a part of their contextual reality. / Biblical Studies

The cardiovascular system of bilaterians developed from a common ancestor. However, no endothelial cells exist in invertebrates demonstrating that primitive cardiovascular tubes do not require this vertebrate-specific cell type in order to form. This raises the question of how cardiovascular tubes form in invertebrates? Here we discovered that in the invertebrate cephalochordate amphioxus, the basement membranes of endoderm and mesoderm line the lumen of the major vessels, namely aorta and heart. During amphioxus development a laminin-containing extracellular matrix (ECM) was found to fill the space between the basal cell surfaces of endoderm and mesoderm along their anterior-posterior (A-P) axes. Blood cells appear in this ECM-filled tubular space, coincident with the development of a vascular lumen. To get insight into the underlying cellular mechanism, we induced vessels in vitro with a cell polarity similar to the vessels of amphioxus. We show that basal cell surfaces can form a vascular lumen filled with ECM, and that phagocytotic blood cells can clear this luminal ECM to generate a patent vascular lumen. Therefore, our experiments suggest a mechanism of blood vessel formation via basal cell surfaces in amphioxus and possibly in other invertebrates that do not have any endothelial cells. In addition, a comparison between amphioxus and mouse shows that endothelial cells physically separate the basement membranes from the vascular lumen, suggesting that endothelial cells create cardiovascular tubes with a cell polarity of epithelial tubes in vertebrates and mammals.

The history of western monasticism in the early middle ages has traditionally been viewed as a continuous process of development. Women religious have been excluded from this discourse, although early work which ‘rediscovered’ female communities has been built on to place them in the mainstream of thinking about monasticism. However, one way of approaching religious women has been largely overlooked. The production and circulation of normative works by and for female communities is of prime importance for evidence of interaction between male and female traditions of dedicated life. This thesis examines these issues through the works of Caesarius of Arles (470-542). Although his rule’s importance as the first western regula written specifically for women has long been recognised, the subsequent use of his monastic writings has never been adequately explored. In addition to being the inspiration for a number of later rules, his work was given a new purpose as part of the reforming activities of Benedict of Aniane in the opening decades of the ninth century. It is between these two vitally important figures that my thesis is framed. For the first time, this study shows that a core selection of Caesarian writings circulated between their composition in the early sixth century and the dates of the earliest existing manuscripts in the early ninth. This has unexplored implications for the understanding of the literary basis of dedicated life for both sexes. The thesis has significance for the study of female religious communities in two areas. Firstly, the relative popularity of Caesarius’ texts over time is of great interest as an indicator of values placed on different aspects of his work. The second area of investigation is the apparent fluidity of the texts’ gender, and how, in brief, texts written for women could be used equally effectively for men. This research opens up a new way of thinking about the relationship between female and male dedicated life. It is no longer possible to conceive of religious dedication along strictly gendered lines.

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Educational provision in Scotland was revolutionised in the fifteenth century through the foundation of three universities, or studia generale, at St Andrews, Glasgow and Aberdeen. These institutions can be viewed as part of the general expansion in higher education across Europe from the late-fourteenth century, which saw the establishment of many new centres of learning, often intended to serve local needs. Their impact on Scotland ought to have been profound; in theory, they removed the need for its scholars to continue to seek higher education at the universities of England or the continent. Scotland’s fifteenth-century universities were essentially episcopal foundations, formally instituted by bishops within the cathedral cities of their dioceses, designed to meet the educational needs and career aspirations of the clergy. They are not entirely neglected subjects; the previous generation of university historians – including A. Dunlop, J. Durkan and L. J. Macfarlane – did much to recover the institutional, organisational and curricular developments that shaped their character. Less well explored, are the over-arching political themes that influenced the evolution of university provision in fifteenth-century Scotland as a whole. Similarly under-researched, is the impact of these foundations on the scholarly community, and society more generally. This thesis explores these comparatively neglected themes in two parts. Part I presents a short narrative, offering a more politically sensitive interpretation of the introduction and expansion of higher educational provision in Scotland. Part II explores the impact of these foundations on Scottish scholars. The nature of extant sources inhibits reconstruction of the full extent of their influence on student numbers and patterns of university attendance. Instead, Part II presents a thorough quantitative and qualitative prosopographical study of the Scottish episcopate within the context of this embryonic era of university provision in Scotland. In so doing, this thesis offers new insights into a neglected aspect of contemporary clerical culture as well as the politics of fifteenth-century academic learning.

This thesis is a study of the norms and values of political culture during the 15th century.  The political culture gives the struggle for power in the Kalmar Union in the 15th century its characteristics.  The aim of this study is to identify the political culture and how it contributed to the political polarisation and disagreement within the Kalmar Union during the reign of King Karl Knutsson (Bonde) 1448-1470 and Regent Sten Sture 1470-1503. The theoretic approach is based partly on Eva Österberg’s definition of political culture, but mainly the theory is based on Harald Gustafsson’s thoughts and identified eight arguments for legitimising power used in political correspondence during the 16th century. These arguments are examples of how someone could express themselves to legitimise their power. The method used in this study identifies what non-vocal structures and values that are expressed in the official material of legal documents including treaties and open letters to or from the common people. Firstly, the context of the document is identified and information like who wrote it, when and why, secondly the study analyses how the operators’ addresses and use titles to one another. Thirdly the study identifies words and phrases that express positive values for legitimation. The values that has been found have been analysed in comparison to the law in order to identify if the values could be found in the laws as well. To conclude the study found that there are differences in how the operators expresses themselves and the emotional connection to the situation, although non-vocal structures like norms enforce the operators to apply a certain amount of respect. The political culture and the diplomatic mission creates the standards used in addressing their opponent. Therefore the choices of words are important and the study identifies five larger values that comes to light, they are law and justice, unity, assurances, commitments and duties and good characteristics. All of these can be identified during the entire research period and supported by the values expressed in the law.

This dissertation examines the role of "acceptable" feminine violence in Restoration and eighteenth-century drama and fiction. Scenes such as Lady Davers's physical assault on Pamela in Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1740) have understandably troubled recent scholars of gender and literature. But critics, for the most part, have been more inclined to discuss women as victims of violence than as agents of violence. I argue that women in the Restoration and eighteenth century often used violence in order to maintain social boundaries, particularly sexual and economic ones, and that writers of the period drew upon this tradition of acceptable feminine violence in order to create the figure of the violent woman as a necessary agent of social control. One such figure is Violenta, the heroine of Delarivier Manley's novella The Wife's Resentment (1720), who murders and dismembers her bigamous husband. At her trial, Violenta is condemned to death "notwithstanding the Pity of the People" and "the Intercession of the Ladies," who believe that although the "unexampled Cruelty [Violenta] committed afterwards on the dead Body" was excessive, the murder itself is not inexcusable given her husband's bigamy. My research draws upon diverse archival materials, such as conduct manuals, criminal biographies, and legal records, in order to provide a contextual grounding for the interpretation of literary works by women. Moving between contemporary accounts of feminine violence and discussions of pertinent literary works by Eliza Haywood, Susanna Centlivre, Delarivier Manley, Aphra Behn, Mary Pix, and Jane Wiseman, the dissertation examines issues of interpersonal violence and communal violence committed by women.

The reception of the Huguenot poet Guillaume de Saluste Du Bartas' Semaines (1578, 1584 et seq.) is an important episode in early modern literary history for understanding relations between Scottish, English and French literature, interactions between contemporary reading and writing practices, and developments in divine poetry. This thesis surveys translations (Part I), allusions and quotations in prose (Part II) and verse imitations (Part III) from the period when English translations of the Semaines were being printed in order to identify historical trends in how readers absorbed and adapted the poems. Early translations show that the Semaines quickly acquired political and diplomatic affiliations, particularly at the Jacobean Scottish Court, which persisted in subsequent decades (Chapter 1). William Scott's treatise The Model of Poesy (c. 1599) and translations indicate how attractive the Semaines' combination of humanist learning and sacred rhetoric was, but the poems' potential appeal was only realized once Josuah Sylvester's Devine Weeks (1605 et seq.) finally made the complete work available in English (Chapter 2). Different communities of readers developed in early modern England and Scotland once this edition became available (Chapter 3), and we can observe how individuals marked, copied out, quoted and appropriated passages from their copies of the poems in ways dependent on textual and authorial circumstances (Chapter 4). The Semaines, both in French and in Sylvester's translation, were used as a stylistic model in late-Elizabethan playtexts and Zachary Boyd's Zions Flowers (Chapter 5), and inspired Jacobean poems that help us to assess Du Bartas' influence on early modern poetry (Chapter 6). The great variety of responses to the Semaines demonstrates new ways that intertextuality was a constituent feature of vernacular religious literature that was being read and written in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Britain.

This thesis offers a reassessment of the political culture of Scotland in the later fifteenth century, from c. 1440 to c. 1490, through an examination of communitarian discourses and practices. It argues that the current understanding of political relations is limited by too great a focus upon personal relationships. While these were undoubtedly important, it is necessary also to consider the structures of law and governance which framed political interactions, and the common principles and values which underpinned action, in order to gain a fuller picture. In particular, it is argued that the current model, which assumes a more or less oppositional relationship between crown and ‘political community', ought to be replaced with a public domain in which claims to authority were asserted and contested. This approach allows the familiar political narrative to be firmly connected to the ideas expressed in contemporary advice literature, while also situating political authority spatially, by asking how it was experienced as well as how it was projected. The focus upon language and space allows for clear parallels to be drawn between different local political cultures, and allows connections and contrasts to be made between those cultures and the norms of kingship and lordship. It argues that reforms to civil justice made during James III's reign have played a far more important part in the turbulent politics of the time than has been appreciated, that both royal and aristocratic authority could be presented as acting both for the common good and for the interests of the crown, and that Scotland's towns not only had a vibrant political culture of their own, but were an important part of the politics of the realm.

A paleodemographic analysis was conducted using skeletal data from Jōmon period sites in Japan. 15P5 ratios were produced as proxy birth rate values for sites throughout the Jōmon period. Previous studies based on numbers of residential sites indicated a substantial population increase in the Kantō and Chūbu regions in central Japan, climaxing during the Middle Jōmon period, followed by an equally dramatic population decrease, somewhat resembling changes that occurred during a Neolithic Demographic Transition (NDT). The Jōmon are viewed as a relatively sedentary, non-agricultural group, and provided an opportunity to attempt to separate the factors of sedentism and agriculture as they relate to the NDT. Skeletal data showed fairly stable trends in birth rates, instead of the expected increase and decrease in values. This discrepancy calls into question the validity of previous studies. The stable population levels suggest that sedentism alone was not the primary driver of the NDT. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2017. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection