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1 - The Minion and Its Travels: Sailing to Guinea in the Sixteenth Century
- Edited by James Davey, Richard Blakemore
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- Book:
- Maritime World of Early Modern Britain
- Published by:
- Amsterdam University Press
- Published online:
- 21 November 2020
- Print publication:
- 01 October 2020, pp 37-66
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Summary
The Minion was a ship of the Royal Navy, originally built in 1522, and named after the type of small cannon made of cast-iron or bronze frequently in use on Tudor and Stuart ships. Known as one of Henry VIII's favourites, referred to as ‘la Mignone’ by the French, ‘Mjinhona’ by the Portuguese, and ‘Minona’ by the Spanish, the Minion was rebuilt twice in the 1530s and included in an illustrated inventory of Henry's navy in 1546. Deployed initially in domestic and cross-Channel service, and involved in several skirmishes in Scottish, Irish, and European waters, it was later chosen as one of a small number of ships leased from the crown by London's overseas merchants in the 1550s and 1560s, when it was first used in the trade with Spain and, probably, the Canaries and/or the Azores, and later undertook travel to Africa and the West Indies on at least five separate occasions. Its last known voyage took the ship from the Caribbean to Cornwall, where it landed in Mount's Bay on 25 January 1569. Having already been the subject of complaints about its lack of deep-seaworthiness in 1561, it was condemned shortly after that final voyage, possibly in 1570, giving it a total lifespan of just under 50 years.
The Minion was neither the largest, nor the most widely travelled, nor the most famous ship in Tudor England. Instead it shares the characteristics of a range of other, hardly very remarkable vessels, which together formed the material base for the ‘maritime world of early modern Britain’ that is the subject of this volume. It is precisely its relative ordinariness, however, that makes it a particularly fitting example for the purposes of this essay. Taking my cue from recent explorations of ‘global microhistory’ as a theoretical model that integrates a focus on the local within a macro context, a close study of the Minion opens up a window on the master narrative of Britain's rise to a major sea power which allows local and individual stories to confirm or contest that explanatory framework. As we shall see, while the ship's move from domestic to European to global spheres of action signals a trajectory broadly compatible with the standard account of contemporary English maritime aspirations, the specific details of the Minion's travels reveal instead a series of unexpected historical alignments and social configurations.
7 - Maritime Olbion; or, ‘th'Oceans Island’
- Edited by Andrew McRae, Philip Schwyzer
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- Book:
- Poly-Olbion: New Perspectives
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 27 March 2020
- Print publication:
- 21 February 2020, pp 145-166
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Summary
Poly-Olbion is rightly known as a poem of the land, as a versified chorography that deals primarily with Britain's hills, valleys, rivers, and forests, with the histories and mythologies inscribed in them, and with the layers of civilization that the country's topography has since accrued. Notable throughout the poem is Drayton's ‘devotion to natural features of the land’, leading him to foreground the timeless, physical environment and mediate all human history through ‘topographical personifications’ such as river nymphs or speaking mountains. In a representative passage occurring early on in Song 2, the ‘Nature’ (9) or ‘varying earth’ the poet aims to approximate in the ‘varying vaine’ (8) of his pen is lightly glossed as ‘heere a hill, a vale there, there a flood, / A mead here, there a heath, and now and then a wood’ (13–14). Judged purely on its own terms as a register of Britain's key landscape features, the glaring omission in this poetic list is any reference to the sea. Given that sea coasts feature prominently on nineteen of the thirty maps illustrating the land captured poetically in the thirty songs of the poem, that choice leaves the rhetorically heightened landscape strangely unconnected to what is – historically and geologically – arguably Britain’s most important natural environment, the surrounding ocean.
This neglect of the maritime is no accidental feature of the poem but a shaping factor of Drayton's vision. Poly-Olbion is concerned primarily with the historical essence of the island nation or kingdom, whose outward geography (or hydrography) forms no constitutive part of the ‘Olbion’ celebrated in the poem. Yet the exclusion – or better, marginalization – of the maritime, I argue in this chapter, is instrumental in fostering sentiments of singularity and detachment that, however supportive of national encomium, ultimately undermine Drayton's own conviction of Britain's natural ‘greatness’. Oceans connect and facilitate contact across distance, but their relegation to the textual margins of Poly-Olbion offsets that work of connectivity, and foregoes the sea as the scene of history, trade, and cultural exchange. Instead, the poem promotes a narrative of British exceptionalism focused almost exclusively on the narrowly bounded island. A later commentator knew that such partial views only obscure wider structural links: without the sea, Marchamont Nedham noted in 1652, ‘the Land is nothing’.
Chapter 8 - Drama at Sea: A New Look at Shakespeare on the Dragon, 1607-08
- Edited by Claire Jowitt, University of East Anglia, David McInnis, University of Melbourne
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- Book:
- Travel and Drama in Early Modern England
- Published online:
- 21 September 2018
- Print publication:
- 11 October 2018, pp 150-168
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Contributors
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- By Jane E. Adcock, Yahya Aghakhani, A. Anand, Eva Andermann, Frederick Andermann, Alexis Arzimanoglou, Sandrine Aubert, Nadia Bahi-Buisson, Carman Barba, Agatino Battaglia, Geneviève Bernard, Nadir E. Bharucha, Laurence A. Bindoff, William Bingaman, Francesca Bisulli, Thomas P. Bleck, Stewart G. Boyd, Andreas Brunklaus, Harry Bulstrode, Jorge G. Burneo, Laura Canafoglia, Laura Cantonetti, Roberto H. Caraballo, Fernando Cendes, Kevin E. Chapman, Patrick Chauvel, Richard F. M. Chin, H. T. Chong, Fahmida A. Chowdhury, Catherine J. Chu-Shore, Rolando Cimaz, Andrew J. Cole, Bernard Dan, Geoffrey Dean, Alessio De Ciantis, Fernando De Paolis, Rolando F. Del Maestro, Irissa M. Devine, Carlo Di Bonaventura, Concezio Di Rocco, Henry B. Dinsdale, Maria Alice Donati, François Dubeau, Michael Duchowny, Olivier Dulac, Monika Eisermann, Brent Elliott, Bernt A. Engelsen, Kevin Farrell, Natalio Fejerman, Rosalie E. Ferner, Silvana Franceschetti, Robert Friedlander, Antonio Gambardella, Hector H. Garcia, Serena Gasperini, Lorenzo Genitori, Gioia Gioi, Flavio Giordano, Leif Gjerstad, Daniel G. Glaze, Howard P. Goodkin, Sidney M. Gospe, Andrea Grassi, William P. Gray, Renzo Guerrini, Marie-Christine Guiot, William Harkness, Andrew G. Herzog, Linda Huh, Margaret J. Jackson, Thomas S. Jacques, Anna C. Jansen, Sigmund Jenssen, Michael R. Johnson, Dorothy Jones-Davis, Reetta Kälviäinen, Peter W. Kaplan, John F. Kerrigan, Autumn Marie Klein, Matthias Koepp, Edwin H. Kolodny, Kandan Kulandaivel, Ruben I. Kuzniecky, Ahmed Lary, Yolanda Lau, Anna-Elina Lehesjoki, Maria K. Lehtinen, Holger Lerche, Michael P. T. Lunn, Snezana Maljevic, Mark R. Manford, Carla Marini, Bindu Menon, Giulia Milioli, Eli M. Mizrahi, Manish Modi, Márcia Elisabete Morita, Manuel Murie-Fernandez, Vivek Nambiar, Lina Nashef, Vincent Navarro, Aidan Neligan, Ruth E. Nemire, Charles R. J. C. Newton, John O'Donavan, Hirokazu Oguni, Teiichi Onuma, Andre Palmini, Eleni Panagiotakaki, Pasquale Parisi, Elena Parrini, Liborio Parrino, Ignacio Pascual-Castroviejo, M. Scott Perry, Perrine Plouin, Charles E. Polkey, Suresh S. Pujar, Karthik Rajasekaran, R. Eugene Ramsey, Rahul Rathakrishnan, Roberta H. Raven, Guy M. Rémillard, David Rosenblatt, M. Elizabeth Ross, Abdulrahman Sabbagh, P. Satishchandra, Swati Sathe, Ingrid E. Scheffer, Philip A. Schwartzkroin, Rod C. Scott, Frédéric Sedel, Michelle J. Shapiro, Elliott H. Sherr, Michael Shevell, Simon D. Shorvon, Adrian M. Siegel, Gagandeep Singh, S. Sinha, Barbara Spacca, Waney Squier, Carl E. Stafstrom, Bernhard J. Steinhoff, Andrea Taddio, Gianpiero Tamburrini, C. T. Tan, Raymond Y. L. Tan, Erik Taubøll, Robert W. Teasell, Mario Giovanni Terzano, Federica Teutonico, Suzanne A. Tharin, Elizabeth A. Thiele, Pierre Thomas, Paolo Tinuper, Dorothée Kasteleijn-Nolst Trenité, Sumeet Vadera, Pierangelo Veggiotti, Jean-Pierre Vignal, J. M. Walshe, Elizabeth J. Waterhouse, David Watkins, Ruth E. Williams, Yue-Hua Zhang, Benjamin Zifkin, Sameer M. Zuberi
- Edited by Simon D. Shorvon, Frederick Andermann, Renzo Guerrini
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- Book:
- The Causes of Epilepsy
- Published online:
- 05 March 2012
- Print publication:
- 14 April 2011, pp ix-xvi
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Design of Cerebellar and Nontegmental Rhombencephalic Microvascular Bed in the Sterlet, Acipenser ruthenus: A Scanning Electron Microscope and 3D Morphometry Study of Vascular Corrosion Casts
- Bernhard Stöttinger, Martin Klein, Bernd Minnich, Alois Lametschwandtner
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- Journal:
- Microscopy and Microanalysis / Volume 12 / Issue 5 / October 2006
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 23 August 2006, pp. 376-389
- Print publication:
- October 2006
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- Article
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The design of the microvasculature of cerebellum and nontegmental rhombencephalic areas was studied in eight adult Acipenser ruthenus L. by scanning electron microscopy of vascular corrosion casts and three-dimensional morphometry. Gross vascularization was described and diameters and total branching angles of parent and daughter vessels of randomly selected arterial and capillary bifurcations (respectively, venous mergings) were measured. With diameters ranging from 15.9 ± 1.9 μm (cerebellum; mean ± S.D.) to 15.9 ± 1.7 mm (nontegmental rhombencephalon; mean ± S.D.) capillaries in Acipenser were significantly (p ≥ .05) smaller than in cyclostomes (18–20 μm) but significantly thicker than in higher vertebrates and men (6–8 μm). With the exception of the area ratio β (i.e., sum of squared daugther diameters divided by squared diameter of parent vessel) of the venular mergings in the nontegmental rhombencephalon, no significant differences (p ≥ .05) existed between the two brain areas. Data showed that arteriolar and capillary bifurcations and venular mergings are optimally designed in respect to diameters of parent vessel to daughter vessels and to branching (merging) angles. Quantitative data are discussed both in respect to methodical pitfalls and the optimality principles possibly underlying the design of vascular bifurcations/mergings in selected brain areas of a nonteleost primitive actinopterygian fish.