Our systems are now restored following recent technical disruption, and we’re working hard to catch up on publishing. We apologise for the inconvenience caused. Find out more: https://www.cambridge.org/universitypress/about-us/news-and-blogs/cambridge-university-press-publishing-update-following-technical-disruption
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
To save content items to your account,
please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies.
If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account.
Find out more about saving content to .
To save content items to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org
is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings
on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part
of your Kindle email address below.
Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations.
‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi.
‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
ONE of the most striking developments in late medieval visual culture concerns the emergence of a new type of sculpted image of Christ Crucified towards the beginning of the fourteenth century. Known to modern scholarship as the crucifixus dolorosus, these objects display an obsessive and extreme attention to the wounding of Christ's body, almost to the point where the sheer number and variety of wounds threaten to overwhelm the surface and obliterate the skin, in other words, almost to the point at which the body is flayed. Such images appear to have enjoyed something approaching universal popularity throughout Europe, even though they sometimes met with official disapproval. In modern scholarship they have generally been marginalized because of the lack of secure information about their authorship and dating, although recent technical analysis has made significant contributions to our knowledge. Their reception has also been dogged by a tendency to interpret their remarkable features as a simple piling-up of gore. Again, recent analysis suggests a much greater level of sophistication, not only in their facture but also in their consumption by late medieval beholders. The multilayered and highly articulate surfaces of these works encourage the viewer to read through that surface, stripping off Christ's skin and flesh as though visually flaying his body in the process of devotional adoration. Indeed, flaying – mediated through the metaphors of the body as book and the flesh as fabric – offers a powerful framework through which to interpret the significance of these sculptures. Before applying that framework, however, we must begin by stepping back from the sculptures in order to address the meaning of wounding itself at the beginning of the fourteenth century.
We are in the pit of Hell, following as Dante the pilgrim descends through the infernal kingdom with his guide, the classical poet Virgil. He is making his way across the seventh circle, where the sin of violence is punished. The two men have just forded a river of blood, thick with boiling sinners, and they stand on the fringe of a trackless wood. The pilgrim is puzzled. The place echoes to cries of distress, but the source of these laments is nowhere to be seen. Virgil encourages him to reach out and pluck a branch from a thorn bush. In a poem full of shocking scenes, what follows is among the most disturbing and uncanny.
Skin is the parchment upon which identity is written; class, race, ethnicity, and gender are all legible upon the human surface. Removing skin tears away identity, and leaves a blank slate upon whichlaw, punishment, sanctity, or monstrosity can be inscribed; whether as an act of penal brutality, as a comic device, or as a sign of spiritual sacrifice, it leaves a lasting impression about the qualities and nature of humanity. Flaying often functioned as an imaginative resource for medieval and early modern artists and writers, even though it seems to have been rarely practiced in reality. From images of Saint Bartholomew holding his skin in his arms, to scenes of execution in Havelok the Dane, to laws that prescribed it as a punishment for treason, this volume explores the ideaand the reality of skin removal - flaying - in the Middle Ages. It interrogates the connection between reality and imagination in depictions of literal skin removal, rather than figurative or theoretical interpretations of flaying, and offers a multilayered view of medieval and early modern perceptions of flaying and its representations in European culture. Its two parts consider practice and representation, capturing the evolution of flaying as both an idea and a practice in the premodern world.
Larissa Tracy is Associate Professor, Longwood University.
Contributors: Frederika Bain, Peter Dent, Kelly DeVries, Valerie Gramling, Perry Neil Harrison, Jack Hartnell, Emily Leverett, Michael Livingston, Sherry C.M. Lindquist, Asa Mittman, Mary Rambaran-Olm, William Sayers, Christina Sciacca, Susan Small, Larissa Tracy, Renée Ward
The arterial switch operation has become the preferred procedure for surgical management of transposition, defined on the basis of concordant atrioventricular and discordant ventriculo-arterial connections. We conducted a retrospective evaluation of our experience in 61 infants with this segmental combination, seen from January, 1997, to July, 2003, in order to determine the factors that are associated with a prolonged postoperative course. Factors independently associated with a prolonged postoperative stay in the cardiac intensive care unit included prematurity, difficulty in feeding, capillary leak, need for preoperative inotropic support, and postoperative infectious complications. Future research is warranted designed to minimize the impact of capillary leak and postoperative infectious complications. In addition, based on these results, our practice has evolved to initiate enteral feedings in the preoperative period if feasible, with such enteral feedings resumed as soon as possible following surgery.
This paper introduces the concept of orbit-homogeneity of permutation groups: a group $G$ is orbit-$t$-homogeneous if two sets of cardinality $t$ lie in the same orbit of $G$ whenever their intersections with each $G$-orbit have the same cardinality. For transitive groups, this coincides with the usual notion of $t$-homogeneity. This concept is also compatible with the idea of partition transitivity introduced by Martin and Sagan.
Further, this paper shows that any group generated by orbit-$t$-homogeneous subgroups is orbit-$t$-homogeneous, and that the condition becomes stronger as $t$ increases up to $\lfloor n/2\rfloor$, where $n$ is the degree. So any group $G$ has a unique maximal orbit-$t$-homogeneous subgroup $\Omega_t(G)$, and $\Omega_t(G)\le\Omega_{t-1}(G)$. Some structural results for orbit-$t$-homogeneous groups, and a number of examples, are also given.
Recommend this
Email your librarian or administrator to recommend adding this to your organisation's collection.