The setting of Milton’s great sequel is puzzling, being called a desert and a “waste wild” (IV. 523) repeatedly and at the same time including descriptions of protective oaks and woody mazes. These conflicting descriptions conjure up several questions: In which environment does the epic take place? Because Milton is so detailed in his adaptations of biblical narrative the inclusion of trees is quite perplexing. While he does tend to expand biblical narrative quite frequently – e.g. Paradise Lost – he rarely initiates a change without just cause. The crux of this particular change centers on what this just cause could be. How does the addition of a few trees change the overall effect of Milton’s brief epic? This thesis thus attempts to find further meaning in Paradise Regained’s setting by exploring three possibilities for this just cause while uncovering what the concept of a tree/forest means in early modern England.

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In this paper, I argue that Milton envisions a long view of education in which continual encounters with evil allow created beings to prove themselves and gradually approach a state like God’s—a state marked by constant righteous habits and by a dilation of subjective time with increased access to past and future knowledge. I discuss the roles of opposition in Miltonic education, illustrating how non-examples may result in apophatic revelation about the divine. Acts of rebellion in Paradise Lost demonstrate, however, that the timetable for introducing opposition proves complex, since created beings, the devil among them, act on their own initiative and tinker with the orchestration of Heaven’s agenda. Obedient beings, meanwhile, begin to approach God’s own course of time as they solidify holy habits and respond with constancy to persistent, recurring evils. By establishing a contrast of temporalities experienced between the wise faithful who grow toward God in reason and the foolish fallen who move against him at every turn, Milton’s epic poem suggests a spectrum model of Christian time—intricately ordered for those nearing God and utterly disorganized for those who distance themselves from him. I argue that in Milton’s work, those who obey develop toward the stability of eternity, participating in both cyclical and linear wholes: as the righteous obey with ever more precision, their lives revolve around their King more perfectly even as he marks a sure course onward. Those who oppose God, meanwhile, become subject to extremely chaotic and volatile experiences of time that resist organization into meaningful trajectories. My conclusion analyzes the way these claims might upset some constructions of Miltonic education in existing scholarship and outlines principles for ongoing improvement to the ways educators approach questions of challenge, assessment, repetition, and habit formation.

The Master's thesis is focused on research of the Italian academic discourse from the years 1891-2008 dealing with the influence of the visual culture of Ravenna on Dante's Divine Comedy. One of the scholars that can be placed in the context of Italian discourse is the philologist and aesthetician Jaroslav Hruban, the only Czech scholar who occupied himself with the relationship between Dante and Ravenna and continuously followed up the development of the interwar Italian Dantology. The thesis puts forward two questions: how the scholars of the Italian academic discourse and Jaroslav Hruban reflect the relationship of Dante and Ravenna, and if we can trace the influence of the visual culture of Ravenna (especially of the mosaics from the 5th and 6th centuries) in the text of Dante's Divine Comedy. The questions are solved by application of the historiographic methods that were used to examine Italian Dantology, the methods of literary studies and art history by which analysis and comparison of the text and imagery were performed, and also the methods of visual culture that were used to reconstruct the image of Ravenna during the time of Dante's stay in the town and his "period eye". The scholars believe that the inspirational influences of the Ravenna mosaics and visual culture on Dante's Divine...

We carry out non-invasive ambient noise investigation of rock structures in Bohemian Paradise (Bohemian Cretaceous Basin, Czech Republic). The study is focused on two key topics: 1) An in-situ elastic moduli estimate of competent, horizontally deposited sandstone layers. This is done by performing an ambient noise array measurement. The recording is processed with f-k array analysis, from which frequency-dependent Love and Rayleigh wave dispersion curves as well as the Rayleigh wave ellipticity are retrieved. The data are inverted for P- and S-wave velocity profiles, from which the Young's and shear modulus are successfully estimated. 2) Study of local response of Kapelník rock tower. We analyse a dataset of ambient noise recordings from the top of the tower and from its foot. Information about tower oscillation frequencies and directions, together with amplification ratios, are retrieved from particle motion polarisation analysis and from site-to-reference spectral ratios. The Euler-Bernoulli beam theory is finally used to interpret the measured data using the elastic moduli estimated from the noise array measurement. Keywords: Bohemian Paradise, rock tower, seismic ambient noise, seismic surface waves

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<p>High density sampling (n=50) was conducted in Cootes Paradise, a shallow wetland on the western shoreline of Lake Ontario near the city of Hamilton. Cootes Paradise is an urban wetland that has been affected by pollutants and nutrients and invasive carp. Thecamoebian analyses paired with site specific environmental measurements (depth, sp. conductivity, temperature, DO and pH) and substrate characteristics (textural and organic content -LOI) show relationships (R² = 0.6) with depth (0-1m) and corresponding sp. conductivity (0.5 to 0.65 mS/cm) and temperature (26.5 to 30.5 °C). Q-mode cluster analysis recognized two biofacies. Biofacies 1 samples (n= 26) are found in the deeper areas (0.70 ± 0.27 m) and dominated by <em>C. tricuspis</em> 36 ± 8% (1 std), <em>L. vas</em> 18 ± 13% and <em>D. protaeiformis “claviformis”</em> 14 ± 6%. Mean water temperature is 28.0 ± 0.6 °C and conductivity at 0.56 ± 0.04 mS/cm. This assemblage has low species diversity (SDI=1.9 ± 0.3) which indicates a transitional environment. Biofacies 2 contains samples (n= 24) which are found in shallower areas (0.38 ± 0.15 m) and the assemblage is characterized by <em>C. constricta “aerophila”</em> 25 ± 8%, <em>C. tricuspis</em> 18 ± 5%, <em>Cyclopyxis sp.</em> 9 ± 6 % and <em>L. vas</em> 9 ± 4 %. The SDI for Biofacies 2 is 2.2 ± 0.2 and like Biofacies 1 shows a transitional environment. The average temperature is and 29.0 ± 1.0 °C with mean sp. conductivity also slightly higher than Biofacies 1 at 0.6 ± 0.04 mS/cm.</p> / Master of Science (MSc)