This thesis examines the thought of Joan of Arc for categories of identity paving the way to modern nationalism. The underlying model for this undertaking is Ernst Kantorowicz's theory of the increasing depersonalization or abstractness of power. With this model as a guide, this thesis proposes a set of categories of identity on which the process of change put forward by Kantorowicz can be tracked. The thesis then classifies, against this backdrop, the individual categories as either progressive, i. e. abstract, or concrete, i. e. dependent on the older ideas of power and kingship, arguing that the concrete categories may be associated with the principles of popular mentality as described by Aron Gurevich. It turns out, however, that clear-cut criteria distinguishing concrete and abstract categories are difficult to establish and, at the end of the day, we have to settle for a simplifying and not entirely satisfactory classification. The analytical part of the thesis then examines what instances of categories of identity can be found in the minutes of the interrogation of Joan of Arc. The overwhelming majority of these categories of identity, it turns out, fall under the 'concrete' label. Such a result seems to correspond very well with the Gurevichian idea of difference, although by no means an absolute...

In the Thesis, two important theoretical problems arising in the theory of one-dimensional defocusing nonlinear Schrödinger (NLS) flows are investigated analytically and numerically: (i) the resonant generation of dispersive shock waves (DSWs) in one-dimensional NLS flow past a broad repulsive penetrable barrier; and (ii) the interaction of counter-propagating DSW and a simple rarefaction wave (RW), which is referred to as the DSW refraction problem. The first problem is motivated by the recent experimental observations of dark soliton radiation in a cigar-shaped BEC by sweeping through it a localised repulsive potential; the second problem represents a dispersive-hydrodynamic counterpart of the classical gas-dynamics problem of the shock wave refraction on a RW, and, apart from its theoretical significance could also find applications in superfluid dynamics. Both problems also naturally arise in nonlinear optics, where the NLS equation is a standard mathematical model and the `superfluid dynamics of light' can be used for an all-optical modelling of BEC flows. The main results of the Thesis are as follows: (i) In the problem of the transcritical flow of a BEC through a wide repulsive penetrable barrier an asymptotic analytical description of the arising wave pattern is developed using the combination of the localised ``hydraulic'' solution of the 1D Gross-Pitaevskii (GP) equation with repulsion (the defocusing NLS equation with an added external potential) and the appropriate exact solutions of the Whitham-NLS modulation equations describing the resolution of the upstream and downstream discontinuities through DSWs. We show that the downstream DSW effectively represents the train of dark solitons, which can be associated with the excitations observed experimentally by Engels and Atherton (2008). (ii) The refraction of a DSW due to its head-on collision with the centred RW is considered in the frameworks of two one-dimensional defocusing NLS models: the standard cubic NLS equation and the NLS equation with saturable nonlinearity, the latter being a standard model for the light propagation through photorefractive optical crystals. For the cubic nonlinearity case we present a full asymptotic description of the DSW refraction by constructing appropriate exact solutions of the Whitham modulation equations in Riemann invariants. For the NLS equation with saturable nonlinearity, whose modulation system does not possess Riemann invariants, we take advantage of the recently developed method for the DSW description in non-integrable dispersive systems to obtain key parameters of the DSW refraction. In both problems, we undertake a detailed analysis of the flow structure for different parametric regimes and calculate physical quantities characterising the output flows in terms of relevant input parameters. Our modulation theory analytical results are supported by direct numerical simulations of the corresponding full dispersive initial value problems (IVP).