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This practical theological study draws on the theological method of Don S. Browning to implement a mutually critical correlation between the everyday experiences of people with disabilities depicted in six case study narratives and selected texts of two mystical authors, Julian of Norwich and Teresa of Avila. The study brings to light the harsh everyday reality of living with a physical disability, articulates disability as a practice, and outlines the operative effective history of the United States associated with physical disability. This operative history has long kept the harsh reality of embodied vulnerability hidden from view and thus has contributed to the marginalization of people with disabilities. The critical dialogue between the narratives of persons with disabilities and the selected mystical texts provides a new hermeneutical lens through which to read mystical theology and reveals insights into embodiment and marginalization that bear implications for spirituality studies, disability studies, and practical theology. This dissertation argues that scholars in disability studies neglect embodied vulnerability when they define disability only as a social construction. Chapter One proposes that disability is both a social construction and a biological reality. The next chapter illustrates that people with disabilities still experience existential absurdity and that predominant norms in the United States (however unconscious) continue to try to conceal or avoid the negative effects of embodied difference. The study then analyzes the themes of embodiment and marginalization in the mystical theologies of Julian of Norwich and Teresa of Avila. Chapter Three reveals that Julian’s relational conception of the Trinity and God’s immanence in the humblest of needs offer ways to establish dignity for people with disabilities. Chapter Four shows that mystical prayer provides impetus for Teresa’s work as a social reformer, which challenges sixteenth century Spain to welcome conversos and value women. The final chapter shows that the mutually critical conversation offers a starting point for building theological constructs of embodied spirituality to respond to the avoidance of embodied vulnerability and the challenges of living with physical disability.

The present dissertation attempts to follow and analyze each and every individual stage of food provisioning of a late medieval monastic community. Chapter One is an introductory survey, describing the topic, its status quaestionis, problems and methodology. Chapter Two establishes the geography of crops in the rural hinterland of Norwich, with each manor specializing in different crop. A close analysis of the crop geography partially supports the Von Thünen thesis. Chapter Three looks at the agricultural trends of the demesnes. Roughly speaking, the period between c. 1290 and 1370 was a history of wheat’s expansion at the expense of rye, on the one hand, and legume shrinkage at the expense of grazing land. Chapter Four discusses annual grain acquisition, its components and disposal. It shows that about eighty per cent of the total supply derived from harvest, while the remainder came in form of tithes, grants and purchases. Chapter Five deals with the human and equine interaction. The bovine population was certainly dominant, but the draught horses easily outnumbered the oxen. Each year,the Priory authorities saved a great deal of money, because of (virtually) free customary carting service. Chapter Six explores the space for storing and processing of the annual grain supply. The five adjacent buildings, namely the Great Granary, brewery, bakery, mill and staples, allowed most effective cooperation between dozens of Priory labourers working in victual departments, on the one hand, and decreased transportation costs. Chapter Seven attempts to establish the relation between the Priory population, its annual grain supply and demand. Conversion of the grain into approximate calorific and financial equivalent reveals that the supply must have exceeded the demand. Chapter Eight is deals with the actual consumption of the grain supply. As far as Norwich monks are concerned, their annual bread and ale supply has certainly exceeded their normal requirements and there is no hint about selling the surplus. Joining the bread and ale accounts with those of the cellar, we arrive at astonishing calorific figures. Chapter Nine discusses the charity activities of Norwich Priory, particularly connected to the distribution of bread and ale among the needy. There were three distinctive groups: hermits, prisoners and paupers. According to almoner’s accounts, the Priory allocated generous sums of loaves and ale to the paupers.

The present dissertation attempts to follow and analyze each and every individual stage of food provisioning of a late medieval monastic community. Chapter One is an introductory survey, describing the topic, its status quaestionis, problems and methodology. Chapter Two establishes the geography of crops in the rural hinterland of Norwich, with each manor specializing in different crop. A close analysis of the crop geography partially supports the Von Thünen thesis. Chapter Three looks at the agricultural trends of the demesnes. Roughly speaking, the period between c. 1290 and 1370 was a history of wheat’s expansion at the expense of rye, on the one hand, and legume shrinkage at the expense of grazing land. Chapter Four discusses annual grain acquisition, its components and disposal. It shows that about eighty per cent of the total supply derived from harvest, while the remainder came in form of tithes, grants and purchases. Chapter Five deals with the human and equine interaction. The bovine population was certainly dominant, but the draught horses easily outnumbered the oxen. Each year,the Priory authorities saved a great deal of money, because of (virtually) free customary carting service. Chapter Six explores the space for storing and processing of the annual grain supply. The five adjacent buildings, namely the Great Granary, brewery, bakery, mill and staples, allowed most effective cooperation between dozens of Priory labourers working in victual departments, on the one hand, and decreased transportation costs. Chapter Seven attempts to establish the relation between the Priory population, its annual grain supply and demand. Conversion of the grain into approximate calorific and financial equivalent reveals that the supply must have exceeded the demand. Chapter Eight is deals with the actual consumption of the grain supply. As far as Norwich monks are concerned, their annual bread and ale supply has certainly exceeded their normal requirements and there is no hint about selling the surplus. Joining the bread and ale accounts with those of the cellar, we arrive at astonishing calorific figures. Chapter Nine discusses the charity activities of Norwich Priory, particularly connected to the distribution of bread and ale among the needy. There were three distinctive groups: hermits, prisoners and paupers. According to almoner’s accounts, the Priory allocated generous sums of loaves and ale to the paupers.

Le but de ce travail était de modéliser le comportement de micropolluants en plus des polluants traditionnels dans une station d'épuration. Deux études de cas ont ainsi été réalisées. La première concerne une usine pilote de la station d'épuration de Lynetten à Copenhague, au Danemark. Un modèle tenant compte à la fois de la dégradation aérobie par une bactérie spécifique et de la sorption sur les matières en suspension a été développé afin d'y décrire le comportement de composés organiques xénobiotiques. Les expériences ont été effectuées avec un perturbateur endocrinien, le Bisphénol A. Les résultats démontrent que le modèle parvient à représenter adéquatement la dynamique d'enlèvement du Bisphénol A. Le processus utilisé pour évaluer l'adaptation de la biomasse afin de valider le modèle n'épouse pas parfaitement les données mesurées, mais il permet toutefois de prédire la structure générale du comportement du Bisphénol A. La seconde étude concerne la station de Norwich, au Royaume-Uni. Dans ce cas-ci, le modèle, qui considère la sorption des métaux lourds sur les matières en suspension comme processus réactionnel, a été évalué à partir de données recueillies à même la station. Les résultats démontrent la grande sensibilité du modèle face aux variations instantanées des concentrations de métaux lourds dans l'affluent. Il est néanmoins capable de prévoir l'évolution des concentrations des métaux lourds à l'intérieur de la station ainsi qu'à l'effluent.

This MA thesis explores one of the few religious vocations available to medieval women, that of an anchoress. Anchoresses, or recluses, exchanged their life in the world for a cell adjacent to a church, in which they spent the rest of their lives, keeping a daily schedule of prayers and meditations. As an aid in their daily life, several "rules" or "guides" were produced - one of them is Ancrene Wisse. This guide contains practical advice on running the anchorhold, as well as passages concerning spirituality. As a normative text written by a male author, it was compared with another text concerning spirituality, this time written by an anchoress -Julian of Norwich. Julian likely became an anchoress after receiving a series of visions when laying seriously ill; she later recorded these visions for profit of her fellow Christians. Both texts were analysed in connection to anchoritic spirituality and revealed several similarities - for instance, both tend to use the basic metaphors of enclosure as body, Christ as a mother, or Christ as a king or a knight. The image of spirituality that emerges from the two texts is often paradoxical, due to the incommunicability of the Divine, which makes both the anonymous author of the Ancrene Wisse and Julian utilise images with opposite meanings and often shift...

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One spring afternoon in 1631, the Norwich Society of Florists held a feast to celebrate and display its exquisite flowers. The celebration included an entertainment written just for the occasion—Ralph Knevet's quirky play about a war among flowers. Early modern florists were not the sort of people who sold cut flowers in shops; rather, they were experts in floriculture who applied this knowledge to cultivate new flowers. Norwich was already renowned for its gardens, but flowers soon became even more significant. Rhodon and Iris was performed just before tulipomania, a frenzy of tulip cultivation lasting from c.1634 – 1637. During this period, florists grew elaborate multi-coloured flower bulbs that sold for extremely high prices. In other words, the florists' feast and Knevet's play emerged when flowers were important to the economy and identity of Norwich. My thesis presents an open-access, digital critical edition of Rhodon and Iris encoded in TEI-P5. This edition offers an old-spelling transcription of the 1631 playbook, a modernized text with annotations, and a critical introduction. Responding to the need for more editions of non-canonical early modern plays, my research widens the otherwise Shakespeare-centric canon and helps make more early modern drama accessible to student readers. Rhodon and Iris also merits critical attention on its own grounds: an example of Caroline occasional drama, the play experiments with convention and offers a rare glimpse into the Society of Florists. My thesis approaches the play with special interest in editorial praxis, ecotheory, and the history of floriculture. The florists' feast delighted audiences and participated in a tradition of floral celebrations—one reaching, at least, from the ancient Roman ludi Florales to the modern Netflix series The Big Flower Fight. / Graduate / 2021-06-26

This thesis investigates whether institutional journalism should receive special treatment at the hands of the law. Special treatment encompasses the affording of benefits to and the imposition of liabilities on journalistic institutions and the individuals who work for them. The arguments against special treatment are pragmatic and theoretical: pragmatic arguments emphasise, inter alia, the difficulty of providing a definition of journalism, and theoretical arguments emphasise the difficulty in explaining why special treatment can be coherent. The former can be addressed by describing how special treatment is already afforded to institutional journalism, both liabilities and benefits, to individuals and institutions, and showing that some of the problems foreseen by the pragmatic arguments have not proved as difficult as they appear. The arguments that special treatment is incoherent can be addressed by arguing that the credibility and assessability of institutional journalism still provide a prima facie rationale for special treatment irrespective of the rise of public speech on the Internet, when combined with the integral nature of journalism to democracy. Two basic arguments are advanced why this is so. The first, the free speech values argument, is a consequentialist account that holds that special treatment is appropriate when (or because) institutional journalism contributes to free speech values. It is attractive, but presents difficulties, both when considered in the abstract and when applied to the free speech value of democracy. The second, a rights-based argument, based on the notion that freedoms of speech and of the Press are distinguishable, can be based on either on Dworkin’s theory of rights as trumps or Raz’s theory of rights as interests. Raz’s account is preferable, as it complements the free speech values thesis in explaining the coherence of special treatment.

Several earlier generations of historians described the later Middle Ages as an 'age of fear'. This account was especially applied to accounts of the presumed mentality of the later medieval layperson, seen as at the mercy of the currents of plague, violence and dramatic social, economic and political change and, above all, a religiosity characterised as primitive or even pathological. This 'great fear theory' remains influential in public perception. However, recent scholarship has done much to restitute a more positive, affective, incarnational and even soteriologically optimistic late-medieval vernacular piety. Nevertheless, perhaps due to the positive and recuperative approach of this scholarship, it did not attend to the treatment of fear in devotional and literary texts of the period. This thesis responds to this gap in current scholarship, and the continued pull of this account of later-medieval piety, by building an account of fear's place in the rich vernacular theology available in the Middle English of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. It takes as its starting point accounts of the role of fear in religious experience, devotion and practice within vernacular and lay contexts, as opposed to texts written by and for clerical audiences. The account of drede in Middle English strikingly integrates humbler aspects of fear into the relationship to God. The theological and indeed material circumstances of the later fourteenth century may have intensified fear's role: this thesis suggests that they also fostered an intensified engagement with the inherited tradition, generating fresh theological accounts of the place of fear. Chapter One begins with a triad of broadly pastoral texts which might be seen to disseminate a top-down agenda but which, this analysis discovers, articulate diverse ways in which the humble place of fear is elevated as part of a vernacular agenda. Here love and fear are always seen in a complex, varying dialectic or symbiosis. Chapter Two explores how this reaches a particular apex in the foundational and final place of fear in Julian of Norwich's Revelations, and is not incompatible even with her celebratedly 'optimistic' theology. Chapter Three turns to a more broadly accessed generic context, that of later medieval cycle drama, to engage in readings of Christ's Gethsemane fear in the 'Agony in the Garden' episodes. The N-Town, Chester, Towneley and York plays articulate complex and variant theological ideas about Christ's fearful affectivity as a site of imitation and participation for the medieval layperson. Chapter Four is a reading of Piers Plowman that argues a right fear is essential to Langland's espousal of a poetics of crisis and a crucial element in the questing corrective he applies to self and society. It executes new readings of key episodes in the poem, including the Prologue, Pardon, Crucifixion and the final apocalyptic passus, in the light of its theology of fear.