Academic literature on the topic 'N-Town Plays'

In the late medieval N-Town Cycle Passion Plays, the trial of Jesus is presented in the context of a medieval courtroom, where Jesus is brought by Annas and Cayphas to be judged by Pontius Pilate. However, while the priests through abuses of the legal procedures attempt to ensure Jesus’s demise, Pilate opposes their intent by remaining true to his judicial duties, which presents him as a lonely Other in the presented world of legal misconduct. This paper explores the concept of otherness in a legal context of the plays, as well as the legal and social significance of Pilate’s actions.

Abstract Towns are of particular interest to geography which examines them in various objective and theoretical aspects. The concept of function is associated with the role which a particular town plays in the area, and this function is the entirety of socio-economic activity carried out in the town. The concept of the economic base of towns, which is used in this paper, distinguishes two groups of town inhabitants, namely such whose work directly contributes to the development of the town, the so-called primary builders (exogenous), and secondary builders (endogenous) who support the first group. This article presents the results of the study of changes in the function of 30 towns in the Silesian voivodeship in which coal mining is still carried out or has ended (18 mining towns and 12 post-mining towns). These towns have different sizes: small ones (up to 20,000 inhabitants; n=6), medium (20 to 100 thousand inhabitants; n=15), and large (with population of over 100,000 inhabitants; n=9). The study was conducted with the use of the indirect measurement of economic base method based on the location ratio, but in a modified form - i.e. the employee surplus rate. The analysis of functional changes in the mining towns of the Silesian voivodeship was performed in five aspects, in relation to: 1) the opening of the economy indicator, with the use of data concerning employment in the exogenous and endogenous group; 2) the employee surplus rate, determining the functional type of towns according to the dominant PKD [Polish Classification of Business Activities] section on the basis of the exogenous group; 3) the structure of exogenous functions of towns; 4) change of the exogenous function of towns; 5) the employee surplus rate, determining the share of section C (mining) in the exogenous function of towns. The analysis showed that in the period of 1996-2009 there has been a change in the functional type, from industrial to service type, in 8 towns; however, mining is still the primary branch of business activity in 11 towns studied, especially in small ones. Today, many service-based towns specialise in trade (n=7), and a small group of towns specialises in non-market services (n=4), which shows that the process of changes in this respect is still ongoing and the towns studied cannot be regarded as towns having a substantial share of higher-order services.

The Town Energy Budget (TEB) model coupled with the Regional Atmospheric Modeling System (RAMS) is applied to simulate the Urban Heat Island (UHI) phenomenon in the metropolitan area of Beijing. This new model with complex and detailed surface conditions, called TEB-RAMS, is from Colorado State University (CSU) and the ASTER division of Mission Research Corporation. The spatial-temporal distributions of daily mean 2 m air temperature are simulated by TEB-RAMS during the period from 0000 UTC 01 to 0000 UTC 02 July 2003 over the area of 116°E~116.8°E, 39.6°N~40.2°N in Beijing. The TEB-RAMS was run with four levels of two-way nested grids, and the finest grid is at 1 km grid increment. An Anthropogenic Heat (AH) source is introduced into TEB-RAMS. A comparison between the Land Ecosystem-Atmosphere Feedback model (LEAF) and the detailed TEB parameterization scheme is presented. The daily variations and spatial distribution of the 2 m air temperature agree well with the observations of the Beijing area. The daily mean 2 m air temperature simulated by TEB-RAMS with the AH source is 0.6 K higher than that without specifying TEB and AH over the metropolitan area of Beijing. The presence of urban underlying surfaces plays an important role in the UHI formation. The geometric morphology of an urban area characterized by road, roof, and wall also seems to have notable effects on the UHI intensity. Furthermore, the land-use dataset from USGS is replaced in the model by a new land-use map for the year 2010 which is produced by the Institute of Remote Sensing and Digital Earth (RADI), Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). The simulated regional mean 2 m air temperature is 0.68 K higher from 01 to 02 July 2003 with the new land cover map.

This discussion of the religious and other teaching in the 'N-Town' plays is supported by close examination of the complex manuscript. I show that the scribe who wrote most of the plays worked in three stages:- first the text from the start of the Passion to the Last Words, then the rest of the plays, and finally substantial revision of this initial recension; some decades later a reviser amended sections of text, apparently for performance. Catechetical teaching and exceptional Marian devotion feature in all stages of compilation and recension. After considering the state of the codex before the present binding, I argue that it comprised several subsidiary booklets until the later 17th century. The writers of individual plays are shown to have used a number of orthodox sources, two of which have not been identified before. The Ten Commandments follow a late 14th. century summa called Cibus Anime and the Passion uses an extended (rather than the original) version of the Northern Passion. The importance of Peter Comestor's Historia Scholastica is greater than previously noted, and anti-heretical features of Nicholas Love's Mirror of the Blessed Life of Christ may be specially significant. All the identified sources are discussed in general terms (including their respective availability), and I examine how in adapting them the compilers avoided material with no scriptural provenance. Considered as a whole the sources imply that those who worked on the plays were regular clerics. Features of the catechetical and other teaching are considered separately, i.e. the Trinity, the Seven Deadly Sins, the Decalogue, the Seven Sacraments (both as a theological concept, and individually in the case of Baptism, Confession, Matrimony, and Eucharist), Mercy, and lay obligations. The teaching is reinforced by the treatment of obedience which, although present in all but two of the plays, is treated differently in the Passion episodes which take a theological view of the authority to which obedience is due. In order to contextualise the findings evidence for location is reviewed. Whilst the results of dialect analysis are broadly consistent with the generally acknowledged scribal origins in southern Norfolk, previously unnoticed textual evidence links two sections of interpolated material with Norwich, where I suggest the Carmelite priory as a possible place of origin. After reviewing Lollardy in the region I conclude that the plays respond to known heretic positions only as part of a wider address to the lay community as a whole.

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.

This chapter sets out strategic implications for emerging city brand stakeholders wishing to leverage sport. Sport is already acknowledged as having a significant impact for city brands, particularly through the hosting of sport events, as a means of creating global awareness, improved image and differentiation. However, there has been little examination of the contribution of sport more broadly and especially within an emerging African city context. This chapter identifies the major challenges facing city brands and proposes how sport may provide solutions. It reveals the findings of an empirical study that assessed the strategic value of sport to the Cape Town city brand. The qualitative study featured semi-structured, in-depth interviews (n=12), conducted with definitive stakeholders. The chapter identifies the contribution of sport as a competitive differentiator for a city brand. It further reveals the contribution of the different sport elements to this brand benefit, namely: sport events and facilities (that can be used to showcase a city brand); teams/ franchises and personalities (that act as brand ambassadors for a city and contribute to the city brand identity); and sponsors and sport brands (that can be viewed as brand partners as they play a crucial role of supporting and enabling sport through their investment).

A cohort study is one in which the outcome (usually disease status) is ascertained for groups of individuals defined on the basis of their exposure. At the time exposure status is determined, all must be free of the disease. All eligible participants are then followed up over time. Since exposure status is determined before the occurrence of the outcome, a cohort study can clarify the temporal sequence between exposure and outcome, with minimal information bias. The historical and the population cohort study (Box 9.1) are efficient variants of the classical cohort study described above, which nevertheless retain the essential components of the cohort study design. The exposure can be dichotomous [i.e. exposed (to obstetric complications at birth) vs. not exposed], or graded as degrees of exposure (e.g. no recent life events, one to two life events, three or more life events). The use of grades of exposure strengthens the results of a cohort study by supporting or refuting the hypothesis that the incidence of the disease increases with increasing exposure to the risk factor; a so-called dose–response relationship. The essential features of a cohort study are: ♦ participants are defined by their exposure status rather than by outcome (as in case–control design); ♦ it is a longitudinal design: exposure status must be ascertained before outcome is known. The classical cohort study In a classical cohort study participants are selected for study on the basis of a single exposure of interest. This might be exposure to a relatively rare occupational exposure, such as ionizing radiation (through working in the nuclear power industry). Care must be taken in selecting the unexposed cohort; perhaps those working in similar industries, but without any exposure to radiation. The outcome in this case might be leukaemia. All those in the exposed and unexposed cohorts would need to be free of leukaemia (hence ‘at risk’) on recruitment into the study. The two cohorts would then be followed up for (say) 10 years and rates at which they develop leukaemia compared directly. Classical cohort studies are rare in psychiatric epidemiology. This may be in part because this type of study is especially suited to occupational exposures, which have previously been relatively little studied as causes of mental illness. However, this may change as the high prevalence of mental disorders in the workplace and their negative impact upon productivity are increasingly recognized. The UK Gulf War Study could be taken as one rather unusual example of the genre (Unwin et al. 1999). Health outcomes, including mental health status, were compared between those who were deployed in the Persian Gulf War in 1990–91, those who were later deployed in Bosnia, and an ‘era control group’ who were serving at the time of the Gulf war but were not deployed. There are two main variations on this classical cohort study design: they are popular as they can, depending on circumstances, be more efficient than the classical cohort design. The population cohort study In the classical cohort study, participants are selected on the basis of exposure, and the hypothesis relates to the effect of this single exposure on a health outcome. However, a large cohort or panel of subjects are sometimes recruited and followed up, often over many years, to study multiple exposures and outcomes. No separate comparison group is required as the comparison group is generally an unexposed sub-group of the panel. Examples include the British Doctor's Study in which over 30,000 British doctors were followed up for over 20 years to study the effects of smoking and other exposures on health (Doll et al. 1994), and the Framingham Heart Study, in which residents of a town in Massachusetts, USA have been followed up for 50 years to study risk factors for coronary heart disease (Wolf et al. 1988). The Whitehall and Whitehall II studies in the UK (Fuhrer et al. 1999; Stansfeld et al. 2002) were based again on an occupationally defined cohort, and have led to important findings concerning workplace conditions and both physical and psychiatric morbidity. Birth cohort studies, in which everyone born within a certain chronological interval are recruited, are another example of this type of study. In birth cohorts, participants are commonly followed up at intervals of 5–10 years. Many recent panel studies in the UK and elsewhere have been funded on condition that investigators archive the data for public access, in order that the dataset might be more fully exploited by the wider academic community. Population cohort studies can test multiple hypotheses, and are far more common than any other type of cohort study. The scope of the study can readily be extended to include mental health outcomes. Thus, both the British Doctor's Study (Doll et al. 2000) and the Framingham Heart Study (Seshadri et al. 2002) have gone on to report on aetiological factors for dementia and Alzheimer's Disease as the cohorts passed into the age groups most at risk for these disorders. A variant of the population cohort study is one in which those who are prevalent cases of the outcome of interest at baseline are also followed up effectively as a separate cohort in order (a) to study the natural history of the disorder by estimating its maintenance (or recovery) rate, and (b) studying risk factors for maintenance (non-recovery) over the follow-up period (Prince et al. 1998). Historical cohort studies In the classical cohort study outcome is ascertained prospectively. Thus, new cases are ascertained over a follow-up period, after the exposure status has been determined. However, it is possible to ascertain both outcome and exposure retrospectively. This variant is referred to as a historical cohort study (Fig. 9.1). A good example is the work of David Barker in testing his low birth weight hypothesis (Barker et al. 1990; Hales et al. 1991). Barker hypothesized that risk for midlife vascular and endocrine disorders would be determined to some extent by the ‘programming’ of the hypothalamo-pituitary axis through foetal growth in utero. Thus ‘small for dates’ babies would have higher blood pressure levels in adult life, and greater risk for type II diabetes (through insulin resistance). A prospective cohort study would have recruited participants at birth, when exposure (birth weight) would be recorded. They would then be followed up over four or five decades to examine the effect of birth weight on the development of hypertension and type II diabetes. Barker took the more elegant (and feasible) approach of identifying hospitals in the UK where several decades previously birth records were meticulously recorded. He then traced the babies as adults (where they still lived in the same area) and measured directly their status with respect to outcome. The ‘prospective’ element of such studies is that exposure was recorded well before outcome even though both were ascertained retrospectively with respect to the timing of the study. The historical cohort study has also proved useful in psychiatric epidemiology where it has been used in particular to test the neurodevelopmental hypothesis for schizophrenia (Jones et al. 1994; Isohanni et al. 2001). Jones et al. studied associations between adult-onset schizophrenia and childhood sociodemographic, neurodevelopmental, cognitive, and behavioural factors in the UK 1946 birth cohort; 5362 people born in the week 3–9 March 1946, and followed up intermittently since then. Subsequent onsets of schizophrenia were identified in three ways: (a) routine data: cohort members were linked to the register of the Mental Health Enquiry for England in which mental health service contacts between 1974 and 1986 were recorded; (b) cohort data: hospital and GP contacts (and the reasons for these contacts) were routinely reported at the intermittent resurveys of the cohort; (c) all cohort participants identified as possible cases of schizophrenia were given a detailed clinical interview (Present State examination) at age 36. Milestones of motor development were reached later in cases than in non-cases, particularly walking. Cases also had more speech problems than had noncases. Low educational test scores at ages 8,11, and 15 years were a risk factor. A preference for solitary play at ages 4 and 6 years predicted schizophrenia. A health visitor's rating of the mother as having below average mothering skills and understanding of her child at age 4 years was a predictor of schizophrenia in that child. Jones concluded ‘differences between children destined to develop schizophrenia as adults and the general population were found across a range of developmental domains. As with some other adult illnesses, the origins of schizophrenia may be found in early life’. Jones' findings were largely confirmed in a very similar historical cohort study in Finland (Isohanni et al. 2001); a 31 year follow-up of the 1966 North Finland birth cohort (n = 12,058). Onsets of schizophrenia were ascertained from a national hospital discharge register. The ages at learning to stand, walk and become potty-trained were each related to subsequent incidence of schizophrenia and other psychoses. Earlier milestones reduced, and later milestones increased, the risk in a linear manner. These developmental effects were not seen for non-psychotic outcomes. The findings support hypotheses regarding psychosis as having a developmental dimension with precursors apparent in early life. There are many conveniences to this approach for the contemporary investigator. ♦ The exposure data has already been collected for you. ♦ The follow-up period has already elapsed. ♦ The design maintains the essential feature of the cohort study, namely that information bias with respect to the assessment of the exposure should not be a problem. ♦ As with the Barker hypothesis example, historical cohort studies are particularly useful for investigating associations across the life course, when there is a long latency between hypothesized exposure and outcome. Despite these important advantages, such retrospective studies are often limited by reliance on historical data that was collected routinely for other purposes; often these data will be inaccurate or incomplete. Also information about possible confounders, such as smoking or diet, may be inadequate.

Historic-geographical and Typo-morphological assessment of Lefke town, North Cyprus Sanaz Nezhadmasoum¹, Nevter Zafer Comert² Department of Architecture. Eastern Mediterranean University. Famagusta. North Cyprus.Via Mersin 10. Turkey E-mail: sanaz.nezhadmasoum@gmail.com, nzafer@gmail.com Keywords: Historic-geographic approach, Typo-morphology, Urban form, Lefke town Conference topics and scale: Urban morphological methods and techniques Morphological analysis in cities have been employed to conduct the research on the urban form and fabric of the place, that helps to determine the conservation plans or strategies of towns that reveal clues to their own history (Whithand,2001). Such analysis methods are a process that reviews the evolution and evaluation of towns throughout history. This paper focuses on, Conzen’s and Caniggia’s ideas, MRG Conzen’s historic-geographical approaches (1968) on planning level and Caniggia’s typo-morphological process (2001) on architectural level. Those methodologies help to understand the transformation procedure of different regions of city throughout the years and recovering how the city elements and urban hierarchy are interrelated. Additionally, the focus of this paper is to study the town’s morphological transformations, regarding its spatial, geographical and historical combinations. Within this context, Geographical and historical surveys done on the whole town of Lefke, in north-west Cyprus, and a detailed explanation on the typo-morphological analyses of some particular regions will be given in this article. One of the significant character that makes the town unique is its historical background which lay down with an organic urban pattern from Ottoman period. Lefke town was first formed with a medieval character, and through centuries of functional and physical transformations, has been highly influenced by British extensions, which were either prearranged modifications affected by socio- natural, economic, and political situations, or instinctive and spontaneous changes. All these historical factors, along with its geographical features, make Lefke an interesting case to be studied with an urban typo-morphological approach. References Caniggia G, Maffei G., 2001, Interpreing Basic building Architectural composition and building typology Alinea editrice, Firenze, Italy Cömert, N. Z., & Hoskara, S. O. (2013) ‘A typo-morphological study: the CMC industrial mass housing district, lefke, northern cyprus’, Open House International, 38(2), 16-30. Conzen, M. R. G. (1968) ‘The use of town plans in the study of urban history’, in Dyos, H. J. (ed.) The study of urban history (Edward Arnold, London) 113-30. Larkham, P. J. (2006) ‘The study of urban form in Great Britain’, Urban Morphology, 10(2), 117. Moudon, A. V. (1997) ‘Urban morphology as an emerging interdisciplinary field’, Urban morphology, 1(1), 3-10. Whitehand, J. W. (2001) ‘British urban morphology: the Conzenion tradition’, Urban Morphology, 5(2), 103-109.