Academic literature on the topic 'Coastal gothic'

This article considers the question of whether the Roman state was thalassocratic during the period of the Gothic-Byzantine wars of 535–554. Based on the narrative sources from the fifth and sixth centuries, primarily, the information from the writings of Procopius of Caesarea, the author of the article studies data on the time of appearance, the size of the fleet, the types of ships that the Gothic tribes had in the mid-sixth century, as well as the methods of conducting naval battles the Goths used in the Mediterranean in the face of a lack of relevant experience and skills. The author concludes that even though before the start of the wars, the Goths had warships at their disposal, they were clearly not enough to compete with the Romans, therefore, during the reign of Vitiges, the war was predominantly waged on land. The maritime hegemony of the Romans was undeniable. According to Procopius of Caesarea, the fleet was most actively used in the conflict during the reign of the Gothic ruler Totila. For some time, he managed to compensate for the lack of experience in naval battles with thoughtful tactics. The Goths pursued a policy of establishing control over the most important ports and straits of the Mediterranean. Trying to avoid full-fledged clashes with the Romans, the barbarians successfully blocked the supply of food and additional contingents to Italy. However, the information provided by Procopius should be treated with caution, since his writings are full of elements of anti-Justinian propaganda and attempts to discredit the ruler. In fact, the Goths dominated the seas as much as the Romans allowed them to. In connection with the above, it is impossible to speak of the completion of the Roman thalassocracy in the Mediterranean in the mid-sixth century. The Romans retained control of the maritime and coastal regions of the Mediterranean.

The renovation of Adriatic towns under Venetian rule included all major urban settlements on the islands in the Quarnero Gulf. The size of Osor, the Roman centre of the Cres-Lošinj group of islands, radically decreased during this period. The scholarship holds that the town of Cres started to grow in the second half of the fifteenth century while Osor fell into disrepair. Apart from the new Renaissance Cathedral, other late Gothic and Renaissance buildings in Osor have never been thoroughly studied, partly because their state of preservation is modest and party because of the deep-seated opinionthat the fifteenth century was only an epilogue to Osor’s great past. As a consequence, no basic analysis of local architecture has ever been done and the urban layout of historic Osor is not very well known. The causes of Osor’s demise, on the other hand, are well known. The population was decimated by illness and the town itself was destroyed by wars in the fourteenth century. Furthermore, maritime navigation changed from coastal to that accustomed to the open sea and Osor lost the strategic importance it held when it came to sailing along the Adriatic. The relocation of the local Count to Cres, frequently underlined as one of the key moments in the history of Osor’s decline and dated to 1450, does not seem to be as fateful as the reduced numberof its inhabitants and the loss of naval and trading significance. The relocation created a dual government of sorts and a bimunicipal county was established. The historical importance of Osor as a traditional seat of power was paramount to Venice and the town maintained the prestige it had acquired during the Roman period as a town which controlled a large territory.In the mid-fifteenth century Osor was a building site: architectural structures were maintained, repaired and built anew. In the fourteenth century, a Gothic church of St Gaudentius was constructed on the main street and in the first half of the fifteenth century the Town Hall was built on the site of the ancient Roman curia. Until now, it was held that the reason for the construction of thenew cathedral was the bisection of Osor which occurred in the mid-fifteenth century when the new fortification walls – with a reduced catchment area –were erected and so excluded the old cathedral from the perimeter. However, the decision to reduce the circumference of the new walls was made only in the last quarter of the fifteenth century, that is, after the foundations for the new cathedral had been laid. This means that the plans drawn up in the second half of the fifteenth century covered a larger area than previouslt thought and that they were done during the pontificate of Bishop Antun Palčić who wasoriginally from Pag and who witnessed first-hand the building of the new town of Pag. A decree of 1581 records the construction of the town walls at Cres and Osor. The new fortification walls of Cres were being built throughout the sixteenth century and so it is likely that the transversal wall at Osor was constructed at the same time as the new walls at Cres, during thesixteenth century. The building of the new wall was not an ambitious feat of fortification construction but a simple encircling of the remodelled town centre. The new wall was just a consequence of urban reorganization and its directionwas determined by the pre-existing defence buildings which were utilised and incorporated in the new addition. In the late fifteenth century, the main town square was fully developed and surrounded by the most importantpublic and religious buildings. The Town Hall stood on the south-east corner and the new cathedral was built on the square’s south side. The Episcopal Palace extended along the entire west flank of the square. The Palace’s long andnarrow east wing, facing the square, connected the two main wings of the complex. Despite its modest role as nothing more than a link, the east front was the widest part of the Palace and closed the square’s west side, respecting the new, small-scale urban layout of Osor. The north-east corner of the complex is decorated with an engaged colonette topped by a leaf capital. Its counterpart can be found on a building at the opposite side of the square, which was subsequently heavily rebuilt. These corresponding engaged colonettes indicate that the architects wanted to create a meaningful urban space. The north side of the square no longer exists in its original shape. In the mid-fifteenth century, this area was occupied by religious buildings traces of which can be seen in the present-day modest houses. These traces are mostly elements of Gothic decoration and so it can be concluded that this side of the square featured Gothic structures. The analysis of the architecture on the main square demonstrates that it there were consecutive building phases and that the Cathedral was the last building to be built. There was no unifying stylistic concept; the buildings on the square were either Gothic or Renaissance. This does not reduce the importance of this feat of public building because the Episcopal Palace and Osor Cathedral were built at the same time, by the same master builders, for the same patron, the difference being that the former in the Gothic and the latter in the Renaissance style. This, in my opinion, means that the value of the main square at Osor should not be assessed throughstylistic unity but by considering the harmonious spatial relationships between its structures, the attention given to their design, their role as public buildings and the balance achieved by adapting the newly built structures tothe pre-existing ones. It is well known that the late fifteenth century was the time when traditional Gothic decoration was used alongside new Renaissance forms and so the stylistic inconsistency apparent in Osor’s main squarewas done in the spirit of time. The remodelling of the town centre lasted for the whole century and the town was also well maintained in the period that followed. Archival records tell us that a grain store was built inthe late fifteenth century but nothing is known about its location or appearance.Despite the efforts and large-scale building campaigns of public and religious architecture, the migration of able-bodied people looking for work continued and Osor was gradually transformed into an occasional dwelling place of the nobility and the clergy – a town of the Church and aristocracy. Today, Osor is a town with low-density architecture. The legacy of medieval town buildingcan be seen only in the row of houses that face the main street. They are huddled together and arranged around communal courtyards, which is a characteristic of local medieval town planning on the island of Cres. The mostprominent residential building is the palazzetto of the Draža family, an old noble family of Osor. The location of the Draža house and its spatial relationship with the surrounding, more modest houses, implies that it embodied the medieval concept of densely built town blocks dominated by a single aristocratic building. Other aristocratic houses at Osor are more isolated and surrounded by green spaces. These large green areas were once occupied by Roman and medieval houses and insulae. Following the late middle ages, the decaying architectural structures were not repaired butused to create gardens: their perimeter walls were neatly re-arranged and became the dividing walls between different gardens while the spaces they contained were filled with a layer of soil, as archaeological test pits have shown. Apart from large gardens and courtyards, the residential character of Osor as an aristocratic resort is attested by the Latin inscriptions on the building façades but also by the written records about noble familieswhich possessed estates in both Cres and Osor during the period that followed the formation of the bimunicipal county in the fifteenth century.All these events created a set of specific characteristics in Osor during the late fifteenth and the sixteenth century. Its importance as the seat of a commune and a bishop was reflected in the main town square which was planned in the spirit of the Renaissance and according to the redesign of towns under the Venetian rule. The medieval legacy is still evident in the buildings on the main street which are densely huddled around communal courtyards and which centre around dominant aristocratic houses. In contract to them, large gardens and the aforementioned historic circumstances indicate that Osor was a residential resort of the local nobility. From the fifteenth century onward, the most frequently recorded features of Osor were its decay and mala aria (bad air). Nevertheless, as late as 1771, Alberto Fortis described it as the only town on the island of Cres to have kept the legacy of its noble past. In addition to the aforementioned Gothic and Renaissance elements of architecturaldecoration, many more were rebuilt into later houses. They are as frequent as the Roman and early medieval spolia and were reused in the same manner. Their existence witnesses that Osor had had another important historic phase in its long life.

he renovation of Adriatic towns under Venetian rule included all major urban settlements on the islands in the Quarnero Gulf. The size of Osor, the Roman centre of the Cres-Lošinj group of islands, radically decreased during this period. The scholarship holds that the town of Cres started to grow in the second half of the fifteenth century while Osor fell into disrepair. Apart from the new Renaissance Cathedral, other late Gothic and Renaissance buildings in Osor have never been thoroughly studied, partly because their state of preservation is modest and party because of the deep-seated opinion that the fifteenth century was only an epilogue to Osor’s great past. As a consequence, no basic analysis of local architecture has ever been done and the urban layout of historic Osor is not very well known. The causes of Osor’s demise, on the other hand, are well known. The population was decimated by illness and the town itself was destroyed by wars in the fourteenth century. Furthermore, maritime navigation changed from coastal to that accustomed to the open sea and Osor lost the strategic importance it held when it came to sailing along the Adriatic. The relocation of the local Count to Cres, frequently underlined as one of the key moments in the history of Osor’s decline and dated to 1450, does not seem to be as fateful as the reduced number of its inhabitants and the loss of naval and trading significance. The relocation created a dual government of sorts and a bimunicipal county was established. The historical importance of Osor as a traditional seat of power was paramount to Venice and the town maintained the prestige it had acquired during the Roman period as a town which controlled a large territory. In the mid-fifteenth century Osor was a building site: architectural structures were maintained, repaired and built anew. In the fourteenth century, a Gothic church of St Gaudentius was constructed on the main street and in the first half of the fifteenth century the Town Hall was built on the site of the ancient Roman curia. Until now, it was held that the reason for the construction of the new cathedral was the bisection of Osor which occurred in the mid-fifteenth century when the new fortification walls – with a reduced catchment area –were erected and so excluded the old cathedral from the perimeter. However, the decision to reduce the circumference of the new walls was made only in the last quarter of the fifteenth century, that is, after the foundations for the new cathedral had been laid. This means that the plans drawn up in the second half of the fifteenth century covered a larger area than previouslt thought and that they were done during the pontificate of Bishop Antun Palčić who was originally from Pag and who witnessed first-hand the building of the new town of Pag. A decree of 1581 records the construction of the town walls at Cres and Osor. The new fortification walls of Cres were being built throughout the sixteenth century and so it is likely that the transversal wall at Osor was constructed at the same time as the new walls at Cres, during the sixteenth century. The building of the new wall was not an ambitious feat of fortification construction but a simple encircling of the remodelled town centre. The new wall was just a consequence of urban reorganization and its direction was determined by the pre-existing defence buildings which were utilised and incorporated in the new addition. In the late fifteenth century, the main town square was fully developed and surrounded by the most important public and religious buildings. The Town Hall stood on the south-east corner and the new cathedral was built on the square’s south side. The Episcopal Palace extended along the entire west flank of the square. The Palace’s long and narrow east wing, facing the square, connected the two main wings of the complex. Despite its modest role as nothing more than a link, the east front was the widest part of the Palace and closed the square’s west side, respecting the new, small-scale urban layout of Osor. The north-east corner of the complex is decorated with an engaged colonette topped by a leaf capital. Its counterpart can be found on a building at the opposite side of the square, which was subsequently heavily rebuilt. These corresponding engaged colonettes indicate that the architects wanted to create a meaningful urban space. The north side of the square no longer exists in its original shape. In the mid-fifteenth century, this area was occupied by religious buildings traces of which can be seen in the present-day modest houses. These traces are mostly elements of Gothic decoration and so it can be concluded that this side of the square featured Gothic structures. The analysis of the architecture on the main square demonstrates that it there were consecutive building phases and that the Cathedral was the last building to be built. There was no unifying stylistic concept; the buildings on the square were either Gothic or Renaissance. This does not reduce the importance of this feat of public building because the Episcopal Palace and Osor Cathedral were built at the same time, by the same master builders, for the same patron, the difference being that the former in the Gothic and the latter in the Renaissance style. This, in my opinion, means that the value of the main square at Osor should not be assessed through stylistic unity but by considering the harmonious spatial relationships between its structures, the attention given to their design, their role as public buildings and the balance achieved by adapting the newly built structures to the pre-existing ones. It is well known that the late fifteenth century was the time when traditional Gothic decoration was used alongside new Renaissance forms and so the stylistic inconsistency apparent in Osor’s main square was done in the spirit of time. The remodelling of the town centre lasted for the whole century and the town was also well maintained in the period that followed. Archival records tell us that a grain store was built in the late fifteenth century but nothing is known about its location or appearance. Despite the efforts and large-scale building campaigns of public and religious architecture, the migration of able-bodied people looking for work continued and Osor was gradually transformed into an occasional dwelling place of the nobility and the clergy – a town of the Church and aristocracy. Today, Osor is a town with low-density architecture. The legacy of medieval town building can be seen only in the row of houses that face the main street. They are huddled together and arranged around communal courtyards, which is a characteristic of local medieval town planning on the island of Cres. The most prominent residential building is the palazzetto of the Draža family, an old noble family of Osor. The location of the Draža house and its spatial relationship with the surrounding, more modest houses, implies that it embodied the medieval concept of densely built town blocks dominated by a single aristocratic building. Other aristocratic houses at Osor are more isolated and surrounded by green spaces. These large green areas were once occupied by Roman and medieval houses and insulae. Following the late middle ages, the decaying architectural structures were not repaired but used to create gardens: their perimeter walls were neatly re-arranged and became the dividing walls between different gardens while the spaces they contained were filled with a layer of soil, as archaeological test pits have shown. Apart from large gardens and courtyards, the residential character of Osor as an aristocratic resort is attested by the Latin inscriptions on the building façades but also by the written records about noble families which possessed estates in both Cres and Osor during the period that followed the formation of the bimunicipal county in the fifteenth century. All these events created a set of specific characteristics in Osor during the late fifteenth and the sixteenth century. Its importance as the seat of a commune and a bishop was reflected in the main town square which was planned in the spirit of the Renaissance and according to the redesign of towns under the Venetian rule. The medieval legacy is still evident in the buildings on the main street which are densely huddled around communal courtyards and which centre around dominant aristocratic houses. In contract to them, large gardens and the aforementioned historic circumstances indicate that Osor was a residential resort of the local nobility. From the fifteenth century onward, the most frequently recorded features of Osor were its decay and mala aria (bad air). Nevertheless, as late as 1771, Alberto Fortis described it as the only town on the island of Cres to have kept the legacy of its noble past. In addition to the aforementioned Gothic and Renaissance elements of architectural decoration, many more were rebuilt into later houses. They are as frequent as the Roman and early medieval spolia and were reused in the same manner. Their existence witnesses that Osor had had another important historic phase in its long life.

Abstract: The paper proposes to examine the tangled relationship between race and environment in the nineteenth-century American literary tradition by looking at the gothic representation of the three vagabond characters in relation to the Californian coastal landscape in Bret Harte’s “Three Vagabonds of Trinidad” (1900). Critically seen as a reworking of Mark Twain’s Adventures o f Huckleberry Finn (1884), Harte’s story continues the questioning of the civilization/wilderness dichotomy in Twain’s work, but the story complicates its racial-ecological dynamics by shifting the focus from a white boy and a black slave to a Chinese orphan, a Native American vagrant, and a dog, and relocating their tramping and foraging from the Mississippi river to the pine forest and marshland at the Pacific coast of a frontier town in California. Harte’s repositioning of racialized (as well as politicized) persecution at the western frontier articulates an ecogothic allegory on a transcontinental (as well as trans-global) scale, in which a seemingly ordinary western settlement is turned from what Leo Marx considers a pastoral-industrial “middle landscape” into a liminal haunting (as well as hunting) ground. The paper examines how Harte’s account of Trinidad topographies reveals a multi-layered ecological space and a haunted Romantic landscape that unsettles environmental as well as social order, reflecting racialized political exclusions during the course of the nineteenth century through legalized policies, such as the 1830 Indian Removal Act, the 1855 Vagrancy Act, and the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act restricting the spatial mobilities of Native Americans, Chinese immigrants, and other minority groups. The paper will focus on the intersection of orientalism, settler colonialism, and environmentalism, rethinking how the enmeshed race-environment relationship in Harte’s writing, informed by the social and political practices of westward expansionism and racial segregation of his time, might reveal a subtler process of ecological othering, unveiling the parasitical relationship between racial exploitation and environmental destruction.

AbstractThis article examines witchcraft, shape-shifting and other supernatural beliefs among the Talensi and neighbouring Gur-speaking peoples on the frontier of the Northern Territories Protectorate of the Gold Coast (Ghana) in the first half of the twentieth century. Its starting point is the succession of religious movements dedicated to the eradication of witchcraft that swept through the southern forest region of the Gold Coast in the inter-war period. Most of these movements were animated by exotic deities originating in the savanna zone, a cross-cultural passage in part propelled by the ambivalence with which the Akan peoples of the forests viewed the so-called Gurunsi of the remote north. While the ‘Gurunsi’ were generally regarded as primitive barbarians, they were also seen to have an intimate relationship with the spiritual realm and therefore to be free from the ravages of malevolent witchcraft. This intimacy with dangerous spiritual forces was most clearly manifested in the widely reported ability of ‘the grassland people’ to transmogrify into animals. Evidence suggests, however, that far from being free from witchcraft, stateless savanna societies had their own problems with malevolent occult powers. Moreover, their reputation for shape-shifting was not simply a lurid, fantastic stereotype of northern brutishness on the part of the Akan. Animal metamorphosis – and especially the ubiquity of were-hyenas – was widely reported in the northern savanna, where it was imbricated with ‘witchcraft’ and with notions of personhood and collective identities.

Senj’s heritage in general is historically and artistically extremely poorly researched and interpreted in the wider context of the heritage of the Eastern Adriatic coast. This is especially true of the monuments of the Middle Ages, hidden under completely different later architectural layers in the Early Modern Age of the militarised town. The examples analysed here are hypothetically interpreted in a new way, with suggestions for the dating and stylistic connections from the region of Kvarner, as well as from the wider Adriatic area. Along with the emphasis on the historical circumstances and the analysis of graphic and written sources, a proposal is presented for the dating and stylistic connection of the destroyed mediaeval tower (in the old Croatian Chakavian dialect - turan) in front of the façade of Senj’s cathedral. The possible closest twin and model to the Senj tower is probably located in Krk - insufficient data about the appearance of the Senj tower requires some speculation. All the circumstances that support such an interpretation, in the stylistic and chronological connection of the former Romanesque bell tower of the Krk cathedral from the end of the 12th century and the bell tower in front of Senj’s cathedral are explained exhaustively. It is assumed that, like the Krk bell tower, this one in Senj also had a communal status, so this may have been the reason for the construction of one more bell tower behind the rear of the cathedral, connected to the whole of the bishop of Senj’s historical residence. After this, two chronologically and epigraphically-palaeographically close inscriptions are compared with two churches from the first half of the 14th century, one which according to A. Glavičić was located on the site of the sacristy of Senj’s cathedral and the other which was located on the site of the sacristy of the Krk cathedral. The epigraphicallypalaeographically very close inscriptions, Senj’s "Imie od Raduča" and Krk’s which mentions the donors "Leonard" and "Bogdan", as well as the master craftsman "Mikel", are dated just four years apart. Finally, there is a comparative discussion about the process of urbanisation, architecture and the possible original name of Senj’s Mala Placa, the probable centre of the secular communal life of Senj in the late Middle Ages and the second focal point of the then already bicentrically organised town. Also discussed are the implications arising from the existence of such an urban focal point located next to the quay and completely separated from the most important public space in front of the cathedral. A proposal is presented for the dating of the town Loggia (the socalled "Kampuzija") to the 14th century. The term is interpreted as the name of the Loggia (Loža), but also as the name of the whole area regulated early as a square, in the sense of "campo" - like Krk’s Kamplin. The explicit Venetian method of the shaping of the brick-built Loggia, fitted with characteristic ground floor columns and Gothic monophores on the first floor part of the façade, stands out. One’s attention is drawn to its basement storage area which may have been a storeroom for salt. In this way, an early Venetian contribution (14th century) to the urbanisation of this part of the town located in the immediate vicinity of the quay stands out. For the Daničić house fitted with a luxurious late Gothic triforium, it is assumed that in the late Middle Ages it could have been a town hall and that it could, in fact, have been the town hall whose beauty was praised by J. W.Valvasor. A hypothesis is made about its original dimensions. With a little research luck, this could be confirmed by the conservation-restoration research of the inner face of the house’s masonry, especially the floors at the level of the skilfully carved Late Gothic triforium. The triforium is attributed to the work of Andrija Aleši from the 1550s.

The Church of St. Stephan, in this paper, belonged to a medieval residential complex above the confluence of the River Piva and the River Tara, in the extreme northeast of the present-day Republic of Montenegro. The central part of the complex consisted of Soko-grad, a castle with the court of the prominent, aristocratic, Kosaca family, which, at the end of the 14th century, right until the Turkish conquests in the sixties and seventies of the 15th century, ruled the regions later known as Hercegovina. At the foot of the castle, on Scepan polje, is the suburb with the Church of St. Stephan the endowment of the grand duke, Sandalj Hranic (+1345). At the foot of the northern slope, beneath the castle, in the area of Zagradja, is another church erected by the grand duke's successor, Herzeg Stefan Vukcic Kosaca (+1465). After the Turkish conquest, the complex of the Soko castle with its suburb was destroyed and the churches became deserted and were never renewed. The ruins of St. Stephan were discovered, investigated and then conserved from 1971-973, however, the results of this research have not been published until now. In reviewing the results obtained in the course of the archaeological excavations, it is possible, in a considerable measure, to comprehend the position and former appearance of the Church of St. Stephan and establish roughly, the time when it came into being. This was the largest church erected in the regions governed by the powerful, Kosaca noble family, during the 15th century. The total length of the church exceeded 25 metres and its width was approximately ten metres. In the preserved body of the construction, of which the remaining walls rise to a height of four metres one may see three basic stages of building. A narthex was later erected beside the church, and subsequently a small parakklesion was added, on the northern side. The original church had a single nave, a cruciform base and a gently, horseshoe-shaped apsis, facing east, flanked by rectangular choirs. The interior of the church, with two pairs of small pilasters, was articulated in three bays of almost equal dimensions. The altar, encompassing the apsis and the eastern bay, was separated from the naos by a constructed altar partition-wall, the essential appearance of which can be assumed on the basis of whatever was found. The entire surface of the constructed iconostasis was covered with frescoes. The floor of the naos was a step lower than the floor of the altar. Flooring made of mortar, like in the altar area also existed in the choirs. As opposed to these spaces, in the central and western bays, the floor was made of large, hewn stone slabs. The finds discovered in the debris, offered an abundance of data about the upper, now collapsed, structures of the church, and about the stonemasonry that decorated this building. The church did not have a dome but all three bays were topped by a single vault of carved calcareous stone, reinforced by two arches, resting on the pilasters. We may assume that the roof structure was of the Gothic type, and ribbed at the base. Above the choirs were lower semi-spherical vaults, perpendicular in relation to the longitudinal axis of the church. They were covered by gabled roofs that ended in triangular frontons on the northern and southern fa?ade, like the main vault on the eastern side above the altar apsis. The roof of the church was made of lead. A belfry, of unique construction, existed on the western side of the original church. It stood about one meter in front of the western wall and was linked by a vaulted passage to the main body of the building. All these parts were structurally inter-connected, indicating that they were built at the same time. The position and appearance of the original church windows can almost certainly be determined according to the preserved traces on the remaining sections of the walls, and the finds of the relevant stonemasonry. In the interior of the naos, along the southern wall of the western bay was the grave of the donor of the church of St. Stephan, Grand Duke Sandalj Hranic. This was the traditional position where the donor was buried, according to the custom or rather, the rule that had been practiced for centuries in the countries of the Byzantine Orthodox Christian world, and particularly in the Serbian lands. The duke's grave, marked by a stele in the form of a massive low coffin on a pedestal, was prepared while the church was being built given that it would have been impossible to install this large monolith that weighed approximately 2.5 tons in the church, later. Generally speaking, the donor's grave in the church of St. Stephan, is eloquent testimony of the donor's aspirations and beliefs. Besides the undoubtedly local feature of a funerary monument in the form of a stele, all its other characteristics emulate earlier models from the region of the Serbian lands. In front of the original church, at a later stage, which apparently followed soon after, a spacious narthex with a rectangular base was added on. Pylons of the belfry substructure were fitted into its eastern wall, which seems to have made that wall much thicker than the other walls of the narthex. This later erected narthex was not vaulted, which we concluded after analysing the preserved walls and the finds in the debris. Apparently, it had a flat ceiling construction, supported by massive beams that rested on consoles along the length of the northern and southern walls. The side entrances when the narthex was built were of the same dimensions as its western portal. However later, before installing the stone doorposts, both these entrances were narrowed down on their western, lateral sides, while the southern portal, in a later phase, was completely walled up. In the course of exploration, no reliable data was discovered regarding the position of the windows in the narthex. One can only assume that monophoric windows existed on the lateral walls, one or two on each side, similar to the monophores in the western bay. Apart from the narthex, another, later construction was observed next to the original church. On its northern side, along the western bay and the lateral side of the choir, a parakklesion, that is, a small funerary chapel was added on, in the middle of which a large stele once stood, of which now only fragments exist. The entire interior of the church of St. Stephan was deco-rated with frescoes. Rather small fragments of the wall painting were discovered in the debris, not only of the original church but also of the narthex, as well as of the northern funerary chapel. It was observed that they were all of the same quality, painted on mortar of a uniform texture which suggests that all the painting was done as soon as the additional buildings were finished. On the discovered fragments, one can recognise the dark blue back-ground of the former compositions, and the borders painted in cynober. On several fragments, there were preserved sections of or whole letters from Serbian Cyrillic texts. On several fragments that may have originated from the aureoles or parts of robes, traces of gold leaf were visible, which would indicate the splendour and representativeness of the frescoes that decorated the endowment of the grand duke, Sandalj Hranic. With the shape of the foundation of a single-nave church, divided into three bays and with rectangular choir spaces, the church of St. Stephan continued the tradition of the early Rascia school of Serbian architecture (13th beginning of 14th century), which represented a significant novelty at the time when it appeared. In Serbia, in the last decades of the 14th and the beginning of the 15th century, the predominant plan of the churches, the triconche, was based on the Holy Mount models. The decision by the donor, the grand duke Sandalj, to give his endowment the features of the earlier, Rascia heritage, in the times when the Serbian territories had been broken up and were exposed to pressure from external enemies, undoubtedly had a deeper significance. By relying on the earlier tradition, which is also reflected in the dedication of the church to St. Stephan, the patron saint of the state and of the Nemanjic dynasty, the donor expressed the aspiration to consolidate his authority more firmly in the regions that had previously formed part of the Serbian state. By erecting an endowment, and a funerary church that he wished to be his eternal resting-place, Sandalj was also demonstrating that he ranked among his predecessors, the Serbian rulers and nobility. One can see this from the choice of the traditional burial position, along the southern wall of the western bay, as well as from the tomb he had prepared for himself during his lifetime. Apart from the basic idea and plan of the church based on the Rascia tradition, the features of its architecture also exhibit other influences. Of crucial importance here was the choice of builders, who undoubtedly came from the coastal area, which is reflected both in the structural solutions, as well as in the decorative stonework. However, local master-craftsman undoubtedly took part in this achievement. One can see this particularly when observing the stonework which, besides some admittedly rather rare, better-carved pieces, consists of a great deal of carving by less experienced artisans. The assumptions about the origin of the architecture and the builders are substantiated by observing the preserved traces of the frescoes, which show that the decoration of St. Stephan's and the adjacent narthex was also entrusted to one of the coastal painters. Perhaps it was the well-known Dubrovnik painter Dzivan Ugrinovic, who is known to have been commissioned by the grand duke Sandalj in 1429. There is no direct or reliable record of the date when the endowment of the grand duke Sandalj Hranic or its later annexes were built. The stylistic analysis of the stonework makes it possible only roughly to attribute it to the first half of the 15th century. The year 1435 provides a slightly narrower span of time, which is the time of Sandalj's funeral, when it would appear that the church of St. Stephan was already finished. The data mentioned earlier regarding the engagement of builders from Dubrovnik and the possible later decoration, enables us to date it more exactly. Therefore, we may assume that the church itself was erected before the end of the second decade of the 15Lj century. The additional construction of the narthex may have followed soon after the completion of the church itself, as indicated by the stylistically uniform stonework. If we accept the possibility that the church was decorated at the end of the third decade of the 15S century, and that this was finished both in the church and the narthex at the same time the year 1429 would be the terminus ante quem for the completion of the additional construction. The Kosaca endowment, erected beside the Soko castle, offers new evidence about this prominent, noble or ruling family, and particularly about their religious affiliation. Historians, almost as a rule consider the Kosaca family to have been Bogumils, or people whose religious convictions were not particularly firm. Such views were based on the fact that Sandalj Hranic, the grand duke of Rusaga Bosanskog (of the Bosnian kingdom) and his successor, the duke and subsequently the herzeg, Stefan Vukcic, were tolerant towards the Bogumils and were often surrounded by people who upheld such religious beliefs, which was the political reality of the times in which they lived and functioned. On the other hand, the enemies of the Kosaca family made use of this to depict them to the Western and Eastern Christians as heretics, which was not without consequences. The distorted view of their religious conviction not only accompanied them during their lifetime but persists even today, not only in historiography but in present-day politics, as well, particularly after the recent wars in ex-Yugoslavia. The origin of the Kosaca family is connected with the region of the Upper Drina, that is to say, the region that had always been a part of the Nemanjic state, where there were no Bogumils, nor could there be. As owners of part of what had always been the Serbian lands, which went to Bosnia after the tragic division between Ban Tvrtko and Prince Lazar, the consequences of which are still felt today, the Kosaca very soon became independent rulers of this territory, forming a specific territory that later came to be known as Herzegovina. Another element that also bears weight in this respect is the fact that, in contrast to central Bosnia where the Bogumil heresy was influential, the population in the Kosaca lands was Orthodox Christian, with a certain number of Catholics in the western parts. The fact that the regions they ruled were nominally within the Bosnian kingdom, where the ruling class were predominantly Bogumils for a long time did not have any fundamental bearing on their religious affiliation. Significant records have been preserved of their unconcealed Orthodox Christian orientation. Without going into the details of this complex circle of problems, which requires a separate study, especially after the more recent discoveries and facts that have come to light, we shall dwell only on some facts. During the rule of Grand Duke Sandalj and his successor, Herzeg Stefan, which lasted almost seventy years, a whole series of Orthodox Christian churches were erected. During the first half of the 15th century, a kind of renaissance of the Rascia school of architecture came about in this area. In the words of V.J. Djuric, the endowments of the Kosaca family 'are different from the average buildings of their time by virtue of their size sometimes the unusual solutions, and the great beauty of form and proportions'. The wealth of the family and the continual relations with aitists from the southern Adriatic coastal cities imbued their architecture with buoyancy and significance. The western stylistic features of the churches of the Kosaca, and the Gothic language of the stonemasons, reveal the centres where these master craftsmen had learned their trade. With the erection of the endowment in the 'ruling seat' beneath Mt. Soko and the churches intended as their final resting-places, the Kosaca distinguished themselves as the last continuers of the Nemanjic tradition of earlier centuries, in the time that preceded the final Turkish conquest of the Serbian lands. The memory of their work is preserved in the church of St. Stephan and the nearby church at Zagradja, as well as in the rains of the Soko castle, which still lies waiting to be researched.

This practice-led thesis brings together creative writing practice with Gothic, spatial, postcolonial, feminist, and ecocritical theories to investigate Australia's east coast hinterlands as Gothic spaces in literature. It argues that the hinterland, literally the "land behind" or the region "lying beyond what is visible or known", functions as a liminal, heterotopic zone in which marginalised female, Indigenous, and ecological stories and histories are articulated through a Gothic "web of metaphor". Lush, fertile, and green, the hinterland disrupts dominant depictions of hostile, barren Australian landscapes with which Australian literary tradition and national identity have been bound up, unsettling dominant cultural narratives.

In this essay, the author analyzes the Gothic of Christina Rossetti in such poems as A Coast Nightmare, Shut Out, but also the well-known Goblin Market and the Prince's Progress. Interested in what the imagery of these poems convey, and intent on declaring Rossetti as a prominent example of Gothic poets, the author makes a strong case for the including of Rossetti among the great Gothics.

‘Oh, my God! to think of that kind-hearted, lovely young woman, who brings happiness with her wherever she goes, bringing terror to me! Terror when her pitying eyes look at me; terror when her kind voice speaks to me; terror when her tender hand touches mine!’ Porthgenna Tower on the remote western Cornish coast. Moments before her death, Mrs Treverton dictates a secret to her maid, never to be passed to her husband as she had instructed. Fifteen years later, when Mrs Treverton’s daughter, Rosamond, returns to Porthgenna with her blind husband, Leonard, she is intrigued by the strange and seemingly disturbed Mrs Jazeph’s warning not to enter the Myrtle Room in the ruined north wing. Strong-minded and ingenious, Rosamond’s determined detective work uncovers shocking and unsettling truths beyond all expectation. A mystery of unrelenting suspense and psychologically penetrating characters, The Dead Secret explores the relationship between a fallen woman, her illegitimate daughter, and buried secrets in a superb blend of romance and Gothic drama. Wilkie Collins’s fifth novel, The Dead Secret anticipates the themes of his next novel, The Woman in White in its treatment of mental illness, disguise and deception, and the dispossession of lost identity. Yet a series of comic figures offsets the tension, from the dyspeptic Mr Phippen to the perpetually smiling governess, Miss Sturch. Displaying the talent and energy which made Collins the most popular novelist of the 1860s, The Dead Secret represents a crucial phase in Collins’s rise as a mystery writer, and was his first full-length novel written specifically for serialization.

It was no easy matter to bring the Gamecock up to the island, for the river had swept down so much silt that the banks extended for many miles out into the Atlantic. The coast was hardly to be seen when...

Once upon a time there lived a little girl in Erfurt, a beautiful town in central Germany—a town that boasted a number of Gothic cathedrals and was a center of horticulture. The great medieval mystic Meister Eckhart had preached there; Luther had taken his vow to become a monk there and spent years in the Augustine monastery in its walls; and Goethe had met Napoleon in Erfurt, for the town’s distance from the centers of classical German literature, Weimar and Jena, was only a few hours by horseback or coach. The little girl loved reading and drawing but hated outdoor activities. As she was the only child, born rather late in her parents’ lives, they surrounded her with measureless love and care. Her father, hailing from central Germany, not far from the Erzgebirge, was an employee in the post and telegraph service; her mother, however, had grown up in the north not far from the Dutch border, daughter of a family with a centuries-long tradition of seafaring. The father was mild and gentle, and his love of mystical literature from all religions complemented the religious bent of the mother, grown up in the rigid tradition of northern German protestantism, but also endowed with strong psychic faculties as is not rare in people living close to the unpredictable ocean. To spend the summer vacations in grandmother’s village was wonderful: the stories of relatives who had performed dangerous voyages around Cape Horn or to India, of grandfather losing his frail clipper near Rio Grande del Sul after more than a hundred days of sailing with precious goods—all these stories were in the air. Mother’s younger sister was later to weave them into a novel and to capture the life in the coastal area in numerous radio plays. Both parents loved poetry, and the father used to read aloud German and, later, French classical literature to us on Sunday afternoons.

This chapter examines the neighborhood setting, which provided the immediate economic, social, and cultural contexts of the public markets. Through a case study of Catharine Market, it documents the piecemeal process by which the neighborhood marketplace was assembled, along with the consolidation of its economic agglomeration, internal social and spatial order, everyday functioning, formal and informal management, and daily relations to customers. By the early nineteenth century, Catharine Market served as one of Gotham's largest and most thriving food emporia. It functioned as the regular meeting point for diverse participants in the provisions trade: neighborhood food vendors, including butchers, hucksters, and peddlers; Long Island and other New York region farmers; fishermen harvesting the city's plentiful coastal and inland waterways; and, of course, the area's booming and diverse population of merchants, artisans, and laborers shopping daily at this marketplace.

Tidelands (2018), the first standalone Australian production in the Netflix Originals portfolio, imports the monstrous figure of the siren from Greek mythology to the South-East Queensland coast, unsettling not only the iconic Australian beach, but also the domestic television genres of the beachside soapie and crime drama. However, while Tidelands innovates in Australian Gothic, it also continues to engage with – or become entangled within – some of the genre’s oldest preoccupations: nation, inheritance, belonging, and colonial guilt. Tidelands’s spaces function as gothic heterotopias, reflecting tensions between multicultural, Indigenous, and Anglo-Celtic Australia which the series attempts to resolve by replacing First Nations peoples with the half-siren Tidelanders, imagining a future in which hybridity and assimilation erase the need for Reconciliation.

Since slaves are the chief currency on the coast, and the Banana islands were an important holding place prior to shipping, Smeathman starts trading in them, revealing in his letters the intertwining of natural history with the slave trade and the rise of racial science, the latter bolstered by Linnean classification. Most of this chapter is set on the slave factories of Bunce Island and the Isles de Los, where the Linnaean botanist Anders Berlin dies and where Smeathman further observes the ships’ captains, sailors and surgeons as they load their human cargoes. He also comments on the vicious guns-for-slaves cycle, composing a gothic set-piece on the horror of slavery, but including in this picture the trade’s orderly economy.

Abstract The Huns were one of the myriad of tribes that rode out of central Asia, but little can be determined of their origin. Probably they were the Huing-nu, who failed in wars against the Chinese and turned (or were forced) westward. Occasional early sources opine that they were the Nebroi mentioned by Herodotus as a semi-mythical people living on the fringes of territory controlled by the Scythians. Some of the earliest direct references come from clashes with the Goths around the area north of the Black Sea in the mid-fourth century A.O. The first Hun conquest was of the Alans, who were then used in the vanguard of Hun attacks against the Goths or emigrated into the Roman Empire. The Huns settled into Pannonia (roughly modern Slovenia) along the Adriatic coast. By 432 the Huns were well established and a force to be reckoned with. Emperor Theodosius II paid tribute to the Hun leader Ruas and gave him a general’s commission. Ruas’ sons Bleda and Attila renewed the treaty and fought for Constantinople in campaigns against Persia. Attila grew tired of doing another’s fighting and made war against the Eastern Romans. Between 441 and 443 he rampaged through the Balkans and defeated a Roman army out-side Constantinople, but could not capture the city. He finally stopped upon receiving an increase in tribute. Attila killed his brother and, in 447, reopened his war against the Romans. Although turned back from Constantinople again, Attila did manage to gain a threefold increase in tribute and cession of the eastern bank of the Danube. Theodosius’ successor stopped paying the tribute in 450, by which time the Huns were looking westward.

The influence of the great civilizations in antiquity reached far outskirts. The direct or indirect impact of the center of civilization on its periphery led to cascades of changes through chain reactions, migrations, changes in culture and language, and the emergence of new centers of power. Often such influences were exercised through trade along interregional routes. The emergence of the system of European fur trade, perhaps, refers to the heyday of Scythia and Celtica. According to Herodotus, the Boudini are engaged in the hunting of beavers. In the LT-B period, bracelets from the Danube region were imported into the forest zone, correlated with the common Slavic *grivьna (V. Kuleshov). The main role in their distribution in the forest zone is played by the Milograd culture, while they almost do not fall into the culture of hatched ceramics. In the III century after the end of Great Scythia, a decline in the fur trade is expected, reviving after the appearance of the Bastarns and the formation of the Zarubintsy culture in the south, and in the west due to the expansion of the Gallic Veneti on the Amber Coast. This will lead to migrations in the forest zone (hatched pottery, Milograd, brooches, enamels). The pressure of the Sarmatians and Goths on the forest zone will lead to an even deeper penetration of the fur trade into the very depth of the forest. The arrival of the Huns and the new fashion for furs catalyse this process, which will be expressed in the penetration of armed detachments from the Danube and Lithuania up to the zone of the Pskov long mounds.

Abstract GOTHIC 8.3(QA) includes capabilities for modeling advanced, non-light water cooled reactors. Important capabilities introduced in GOTHIC 8.3(QA) include fluid property tables for various molten salts, an enhancement to the tracer tracking module to allow radioactive decay energy to be released locally in the carrier fluid and other improvements to the neutron kinetics module. With these new capabilities in place, GOTHIC is used to benchmark steady-state and transient conditions in the Molten Salt Reactor Experiment (MSRE), which operated at Oak Ridge National Laboratory from 1965 to 1969. In this experimental reactor, UF4 fuel was dissolved in molten fluoride salt, and criticality could be achieved only in the graphite moderated core. An air-cooled radiator transferred fission and decay heat to the environment. The design thermal output of the MSRE was 10 MWt, but the radiator design limited the output to 8 MWt. The original design parameters neglected the impact of decay heat on system temperatures. GOTHIC is used to benchmark system operating parameters at both the 10 MWt design condition and the 8 MWt operating condition, both with and without decay heat. The cases that include decay heat apply 7% of the nominal thermal output using the eleven decay heat precursors from ASB 9-2 as tracers. The results of the benchmark exhibit good agreement with design and operating data and demonstrate heat-up due to decay heat in the fuel salt outside the core. In the MSRE, delayed neutron precursors are not confined to the core because the fuel and fission products flow through the system. As a result, there are different values for (effective) delayed neutron fraction with and without flow, and the decay of delayed neutron precursors outside the core under full-flow conditions reduces reactivity by 0.212 % δk/k. Zero power physics testing included fuel salt pump start-up and coast-down transients with a control rod automatically moving to maintain criticality. The control rod motion calculated by GOTHIC is a reasonable match to measured data from these transients. Low power testing included a natural convection transient with no control rod motion such that reactor power was responding to heat load demand from the radiator. The reactor power and fuel salt and coolant salt temperatures calculated by GOTHIC exhibit good agreement with measured data.

Digital technicals for the study of the Defensive Heritage: “Puerta de Almenara” and south walls of “Palacio del Gobernador” and “Plaza de Armas” of the Castle of Sagunto (Valencia)The use of digital documentation and registration techniques in Cultural Heritage is becoming more common every day, thanks to its ability to capture a large amount of data in a fast and efficient process. Its high geometric precision, thoroughness, performance retrieved and especially the generation of high fidelity and precision of architectural good assets make these tools optimal for the planimetric surveys. The work of intervention or conservation of cultural heritage requires a previous graphic registration using different techniques available. This article presents a combined method of implementation of various digital techniques that allow to achieve the most accurate graphic documentation possible. The different results obtained from the use of photogrammetry by drone or by manual camera are discussed. It is intended to seek the standardization and optimization of the process of documentation and value of the Cultural Heritage by combining these techniques. These techniques have been used in a real case: the three-dimensional modeling of various parts of the defensive set of the Castle of Sagunto (Valencia), called the “Puerta de Almenara”, which gives access to the square of the same name, on the eastern side and some walls of the fortification. The Castle of Sagunto is a mosaic of the different cultures who occupied it (Iberians, Romans, Goths, Arabs...). The fortification is located on top of a hill of the Sierra Calderona, controlling even the Mediterranean coastal road and the communication route with Aragon. During the last years, the castle has been immersed, for almost 20 years, in various works of consolidation and restoration to initiatives of the Institute of Cultural Heritage of Spain.