This study is about the multitude of early medieval children donated 'to God in the monastery'. It puts child oblation in the context of contemporary gift-giving practices, providing in-depth treatment of the oblation ritual and its social setting.

Why did parents give away their children? Were they driven by economic necessity?

For those who love New England, here is a matchless portrait by one of its most distinguished artists and observant admirers. Samuel Chamberlain photographed New England for more than forty years, examining it from every angle and capturing its unique spirit and enduring character with the lens of his camera. The image Mr. Chamberlain presents here is a distillation of his finest photographs of New England. From tall church spires rising above village greens to white farmhouses, secluded beaches, and historic harbors, Chamberlain reveals the secret of New England’s enduring beauty, strength, and pride.

The word 'northern' conjures plenty of stereotypical images; men in flat caps, cobbled streets, pies and rain. But beyond the clichés lies a region rich in its diversity, devilish in its humour and fertile in its culture, and it is these characteristics that iconic photographer Sefton Samuels has captured faithfully over four decades, and are compiled here in Northerners. Described by the Guardian as 'the photographic equivalent of Ken Loach', Samuels shot legendary figures of northern life, from Alan Bennett to Morrissey, LS Lowry to George Best and Sir Ben Kingsley, but most famously and vividly he captured the realities of everyday life across the north. With snatched shots of children cheekily mugging to his camera, pictures of the more grandiose members of society at the local hunt, photos of the bleaker side of life with the riots in Moss Side, and snaps of the young and fashionable posing as they hang around with nothing to do, Northerners reveals a photographer at one with his subject; and a region whose open character was meant to be captured through a lens.

Scholars studying the ANE have noticed that Canaanite kings ruled as a representative of their god and served in a priestly role. Yahweh allows Israel to have a king "like all the nations" (Deut 17:14), but he shapes the monarchy according to his covenant. A key question remains, does God's allowance for a king "like all the nations" include a king-priest model? This study presents a synchronic view of the king as a priest within the MT of Samuel, analyzing the motif and considering how the narrator heightens the hope for the coming anointed one, whom the narrator describes as both king (1 Sam 2:10) and priest (2:35-36). This study will argue that, from the monarchy's inception, Yahweh considered Israel's kingship a sacral task. My study examined the king as a priest through a synchronic literary-theological approach.

Samuel Beckett's work is deeply concerned with physical contact - remembered, half-remembered, or imagined. Applying the philosophical writings of Jean-Luc Nancy and Maurice Merleau-Ponty that feature sensation, this study examines how Beckett's later work dramatizes moments of contact between self and self, self and world, and self and other.

A major new history of medieval monasticism, from the fourth to the sixteenth century From the late Roman Empire onwards, monasteries and convents were a common sight throughout Europe. But who were monasteries for? What kind of people founded and maintained them? And how did monasticism change over the thousand years or so of the Middle Ages? Andrew Jotischky traces the history of monastic life from its origins in the fourth century to the sixteenth. He shows how religious houses sheltered the poor and elderly, cared for the sick, and educated the young. They were centres of intellectual life that owned property and exercised power but also gave rise to new developments in theology, music, and art. This book brings together the Orthodox and western stories, as well as the experiences of women, to show the full picture of medieval monasticism for the first time. It is a fascinating, wide-ranging account that broadens our understanding of life in holy orders as never before.

A reading of the philosophical idea of world as it relates to the posthuman subject in Beckett's short proseJonathan Boulter offers the reader a way of understanding Beckett's presentation of the human, more precisely, posthuman, subject in his short prose. These texts are notoriously difficult yet utterly compelling. This compelling difficulty arises from Beckett's radical dismantling of the idea of the human. His short texts offer instead an image of a being who may be posthumous, or ultimately beyond categories of life and death. And yet, despite this dismantling, the narrators of these texts still find themselves placed within material, recognisable, spaces. This book explores what the idea of 'world' can mean to a subject who appears to have moved into a material, even ecological, space that is beyond categories of life and death, being and world.Key Features:Provides a philosophical reading of Samuel BeckettRethinks Beckett in relation to the posthumanContributes to a relatively ignored aspect of Samuel Beckett's writing, the short prose

The representation and experience of embodiment is a central preoccupation of Samuel Beckett’s drama, one that he explored through diverse media. McMullan investigates the full range of Beckett’s dramatic canon for stage, radio, television and film, including early drama, mimes and unpublished fragments. She examines how Beckett’s drama composes and recomposes the body in each medium, and provokes ways of perceiving, conceiving and experiencing embodiment that address wider preoccupations with corporeality, technology and systems of power. McMullan argues that the body in Beckett’s drama reveals a radical vulnerability of the flesh, questioning corporeal norms based on perfectible, autonomous or invulnerable bodies, but is also the site of a continual reworking of the self, and of the boundaries between self and other. Beckett’s re-imagining of the body presents embodiment as a collaborative performance between past and present, flesh and imagination, self and other, including the spectator / listener.

This book re-evaluates the philosophical status of Samuel Taylor Coleridge by providing an extended comparison between his work and the phenomenological theory of Edmund Husserl. Examining Coleridge’s accounts of the imagination, perception, poetic creativity and literary criticism, it draws a systematic and coherent structure out of a range of Coleridge’s philosophical writing. In addition, it also applies the principles of Coleridge’s philosophy to an interpretation of his own poetic output.