Oxford University Press's Blog, page 505

Joan of Arc’s heresy

A month before Joan of Arc’s heresy was cleansed by fire on this day in 1431 CE, a spokesman for her Burgundian accusers railed against her: “O Royal House of France! You have never known a monster until now! But now behold yourself dishonored in placing your trust in this woman, this magician, heretical and superstitious.” Although these words identified “Joan the Maid” as a personification of evil, they said nothing about the particular act of heresy that required her to be executed. What was the act that justified her having been burned alive?

Joan claimed to have heard voices that guided her actions. They first spoke to her when she was just on the verge of womanhood. She said they told her of God’s great pity for the people of France and for His plan to go to their aid. According to her, St. Catherine of Alexandria, St. Margaret of Antioch, and St. Michael the Archangel had spoken to her. She even claimed that God himself had addressed her. Although rejected by her accusers as false, these claims were not the heresy for which she was condemned to death.

Then there was the charge of claiming divine status. During her imprisonment, Joan was visited by a Burgundian cleric by the name of Martin Lavenu, who attested that: “spontaneously and without being constrained to do it, she said and confessed that….[she] herself had been the angel who promised [Charles VII] that, if he put her to work, she would crown him at Reims.” This was not the heresy either for which she was burned alive.

Joan rallied the demoralized forces of the dauphin, Charles de Valois, against the English invaders and their Burgundian allies, inspiring a chain of military and political victories that would culminate in the coronation of the dauphin as King Charles VII at Reims in July of 1429. Though the Burgundians charged Joan with defying the Church Militant through these acts, they were not the deeds for which she was executed.

Joan of Arc’s Death at the Stake by Hermann Anton Stilke. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

When Joan was a child she was known to have visited a “Fairy tree” of which her accusers made much during her condemnation trial. Like other girls in her village, she had fashioned garlands and placed them on the tree and danced and sang in the tree’s vicinity. The clerics who tried her claimed that her garlands were actually offerings to “fairies” that inhabited the tree, and that her dancing and singing were incantations and spells. Even so, this was not the basis for the heresy of which she was convicted.

During her condemnation trial, Joan’s accusers challenged her with these transgressions, many learned clerics all at once, in a nightmarish interrogation of ecclesiastical ambiguities in the absence of a formal charge. Their intent was to confuse and trap her into admitting to acts that might dishonor and discredit her as well as her king. Failing to do so, they settled on cross-dressing as the basis for their accusation of heresy, citing Deuteronomy 22:5, which states: “The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman’s garment: for all that do so are abomination unto the LORD thy God.” Joan argued in vain that she had worn men’s clothes, simply because they were more appropriate for the work she performed among men-at-arms, and also because she was compelled to do so by a higher force.

Although deeply indebted to Joan for his crown, Charles VII made no effort to ransom her or to provide any other assistance after her capture. Joan died rejected and alone on a platform near the butchers’ market hall at the Vieux Marché, calling through the flames that consumed her to Jesus and to the saints of paradise for help. It took another eighteen years for Charles VII to come to Joan’s aid. In 1449, he petitioned the pope to authorize a new trial, which concluded its deliberations on 7 July 1456, after lengthy interrogations of one hundred fifteen witnesses. This second (nullification) trial declared the original (condemnation) trial procedurally flawed and therefore nullified. Although Joan is remembered primarily for her Voices and the deeds they inspired, her canonization in May 1920 was based on her “heroic virtues” and not on an acknowledgement by the Church that she had communicated directly with the heavenly host.

Feature image credit: Entrance of Joan of Arc into Reims in 1429, painting by Jan Matejko. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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Protecting prisoners’ rights: the case of Anders Breivik

In April 2016, Anders Breivik, the Norwegian mass murderer, successfully challenged the conditions of his confinement on human rights grounds. In 2011 Breivik killed eight people with a car bomb in the centre of Oslo and then shot sixty nine political activists at a summer camp on the island of Utoya. He was sentenced to twenty one years imprisonment, although he could be detained longer on preventive grounds.

In a hearing of the Oslo District Court held inside Skien prison, he argued that being held in solitary confinement for twenty two to twenty three hours a day and denied any contact with other prisoners, or with staff (other than through a glass barrier) constituted inhuman and degrading treatment prohibited by Article 3 of the European Convention. Being kept in solitary confinement, he said, was worse than the death penalty. Breivik’s lawyer argued the prolonged isolation was having a damaging effect on his client’s mental health although this was disputed by prison doctors. Breivik also complained of being woken up several times during the night, of female officers being present during searches of his person, and of being subject to excessive security when moving around the prison.

The District Court found that these deprivations did constitute inhuman and degrading treatment and ordered the state to pay his legal costs. The judge, Helen Sekulik, stressed that the right not to be subject to inhuman treatment was a fundamental value in democratic societies which applied to all, including terrorists (Anders Behring Breivik v Ministry of Justice, 20 April 2016).

The conditions in which he was being detained were excessive and were not applied to other prisoners convicted of very serious crimes. Breivik’s treatment had also been criticised by the Norwegian Prison Ombudsman who argued that he should be allowed to engage in more activities with prison officers. An Article 8 challenge relating to restrictions imposed on his contact with extremist political groups, including the Aryan Brotherhood, was rejected by the court.

The Government is appealing the Article 3 decision, arguing that his isolation is justified on security grounds, to prevent him influencing other prisoners and from harm from other inmates. The appeal would be heard in the Court of Appeal and could go then to the Supreme Court and ultimately the Strasbourg Court. Article 3 rights are non-derogable so the Court would need to consider whether the limits reach the threshold of inhuman treatment, although previous Strasbourg jurisprudence suggests the threshold is set quite high and in the case of Carlos the Jackal eight years of isolation did not reach that threshold and was ameliorated by the high number of visits (Ramirez Sanchez v France App. No. 59450/00, 4 July 2006). The view of the Strasbourg Court is that limited segregation is permitted but total isolation is not. The UN Rapporteur on Torture has argued that isolation should be used only in exceptional circumstances and for not more than fifteen days. Issues likely  to be considered further in Breivik’s case would be the duration of isolation, its impact on his physical and mental health, and whether the long term effects of isolation can be ameliorated by giving him access to the same facilities as other high security prisoners – matters  previously considered in the Ocalan case (Ocalan v Turkey  App. No. 46221/99,12 May 2005), Ocalan v Turkey No.2  (App. Nos. 24069/03, 197/04, 6201/06 and 10464/07, 18 March 2014).

The conditions in which he was being detained were excessive and were not applied to other prisoners convicted of very serious crimes.

It is worth noting that public opinion in Norway is much less hostile to prisoners’ rights than in the UK despite the magnitude of the crime and some survivors of the Utoya massacre take pride in their country’s respect for human rights and humane prison conditions. However, others take the view that by robbing others of life, Breivik forfeits the entitlement to respect for his rights and Prof Kjetil Larsen of the Norwegian Institute of Human Rights believes the treatment of Breivik does not violate the Convention.

The Breivik case, therefore, highlights the importance – and perhaps the limits – of rights protection for the most shocking and least popular offenders convicted of heinous crimes. It also clearly presents a challenge to the Norwegian prison system, which normally houses prisoners serving much shorter sentences, and which has a reputation for the most humane conditions in Europe. Breivik has the use of three cells, for living, sleeping, and exercising. He can cook his own meals, and has access to a television, X-box, and an electric typewriter without internet access, and to books and other materials. He has begun a politics degree while in prison and, unlike UK-sentenced prisoners, is allowed to vote. These conditions reflect the Norwegian penal system’s commitment to the principle of normalisation that, as far as possible, conditions should be similar to those outside and that the deprivation of liberty is the key element of custodial punishment and further imposition of suffering is not acceptable. Of course there may be practical problems and safety issues in allowing more contact with other prisoners or staff, but this is a problem with which prison managers are familiar and so solutions should be possible. It raises, however, the question of adequate staffing, and economic issues often cut across policy aims.

The Breivik case raises a number of issues relevant to the UK. It highlights the problems of reconciling prisoners’ rights with rival claims and the problem of managing offenders serving long sentences. In particular it leads us to consider justifications for any differential treatment, notably isolation as a preventive measure, of those detained for terrorist offences who may radicalise other prisoners. It also illustrates the relevance – not always welcomed – of human rights to the administration of punishment and to all prisoners regardless of their offence or length of sentence. Consequently, rights can provide a restraint on overzealous states and oppressive prison regimes, can emphasise the common heritage of prisoners and ordinary citizens, and can be a means to raise prison standards.

Rights jurisprudence has also benefited the lives of young offenders. In the UK the case of R (on the application of the Howard League for Penal Reform) v Secretary of State for the Home Department (2002) established that the duties of the local authority to children in need or at risk of serious harm do not end at the door of a prison service establishment. However, progress in relation to the use of restraint techniques has shown the limits of rights. In R(C) and Secretary of State (2008) the court made it clear that the use of restraint on children for good order and discipline in Secure Training Centres (STCs) engages Article 3 of the European Convention. The scenarios put to the court by the private company running the STC were not accepted by the court as sufficient to justify the use of force. Since then, despite reviews, reports and a new manual on ‘safe’ methods of restraint, there is still evidence of mistreatment and excessive use of force and it has been reported that Medway STC, run by G4S, will be taken back into public control. The situation has led Kate Gooch to state, “The Government appears to have given only scant regard to the possibility that the use of pain compliance techniques is in breach of international human rights law”. Rights for prisoners – adults and children, petty criminals and terrorists – do not automatically lead to improvements.

Featured image credit: Chain link, by Unsplash. CC0 Public Domain via Pixabay.

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Believing the unlikely

We often want to know how likely something is. I might want to know how likely it is that it will rain tomorrow morning; according to the Met Office website, at time of writing, this is 90% likely. If I’m playing poker, I might want to know how likely it is that my opponent has been dealt a “high card” hand. With no other information available, we can calculate the probability of this to be about 50%. There seems to be close link between likelihood and belief; if something is likely, you would be justified in believing it, and if something is unlikely, you would not be justified in believing it. That might seem obvious, and the second part might seem especially obvious – surely you can’t be justified in believing something that’s unlikely to be true? I will suggest here that, sometimes, you can.

Some philosophers and psychologists have argued that it can sometimes be a good thing for people to hold irrational beliefs. That may be right, but it’s not the point I want to make. I think that believing the unlikely can not only be a good thing, but can be fully rational. The reason has to do with testimony, and when we owe it to other people to believe what they say. So much of what we believe about the world is based on the testimony of others. And, while we don’t always accept what others tell us, disbelieving a person’s testimony is not something to be taken lightly. If someone tells me, say, that there’s a coffee shop nearby and, for no reason at all, I refuse to believe it, then this is not just about me – another person is involved, and I’m doing that person a wrong. If I refuse to believe what someone tells me, then I need to have a good reason for doing this.

What does this have to do with believing the unlikely? That’s best illustrated with an example: Suppose I rush back to my car one evening, after my parking has expired, expecting a ticket. When I arrive, however, I discover that some kind stranger has paid for additional parking. When I ask in a nearby shop, the shopkeeper tells me that he saw someone feeding the meter, and the person was wearing glasses. Naturally, I believe what the shopkeeper says, and it’s entirely rational for me to believe this.

Odd One Out by rawdonfox. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.

Suppose I then remember reading that contact lenses are really common in my town and only 1% of the population are glasses-wearers. This will lower the probability that the kind stranger wore glasses, but I wouldn’t stop believing this. I’d think “That’s good – the shopkeeper’s information could help me find this person” not “That’s bad – I shouldn’t believe the shopkeeper anymore.” If the shopkeeper’s testimony were false, there would have to be some explanation for this; if I discovered, for instance, that he suffers hallucinations, or has a memory problem, then that could provide an explanation and could make it legitimate to doubt the testimony. But I haven’t discovered anything like that. Furthermore, if the shopkeeper was telling me something far-fetched – that he’d seen aliens or could tell the future say – then, again, I might legitimately doubt the testimony. But there’s nothing far-fetched about what the shopkeeper is saying. Think about it this way: Suppose there are 100,000 people in the town, 1000 of whom wear glasses. One of these people is the kind stranger, and it might just as well be one of the glasses-wearers as one of the others. There’s nothing “hard to believe” about this.

Evidence about the proportion of glasses-wearers doesn’t affect the credibility of the testimony, but it will affect the probabilities – it’s what psychologists and statisticians would call “base rate” information. Let’s add some numbers: Suppose that, if the person wasn’t wearing glasses, there is a 1 in 50 chance that the shopkeeper would have mistakenly said s/he was, (because of a hallucination, false memory etc.). And suppose that, if the person was wearing glasses, then the shopkeeper would be sure to say that s/he was. We now have all we need to calculate the final probability that the person wore glasses – surprisingly, it comes to only about 33.5%. (For those who are interested, the probability can be calculated using Bayes’ Theorem and the Theorem of Total Probability.) It turns out I am believing the unlikely.

If I cared only about probabilities then I wouldn’t believe what the shopkeeper says – I might believe the exact opposite. But I don’t care only about probabilities. It’s still true that there would have to be some explanation if the shopkeeper’s testimony were false and, having no inkling of any such explanation, I owe it to him to accept it. The base rate information does not change this. Try to see it from the shopkeeper’s perspective – how would you feel if you had volunteered your testimony, only to have it dismissed because a low proportion of people wear glasses?

It’s well known that people tend to neglect base rates when estimating probabilities – something known as the base rate fallacy. In the example I’ve described, many people would downplay the base rate, and end up overestimating the probability that the person wore glasses. Maybe this example is just an illustration of the fallacy: We overestimate the likelihood that the person wore glasses and, because of the link between likelihood and belief, we (mistakenly) think that one should believe this. The base rate fallacy is a large topic and I won’t try to discuss it here but, suffice it to say, we could turn this kind of story on its head: Maybe one really should believe that the person wore glasses (as there’s credible testimony to that effect), and because we (mistakenly) think that there is a link between likelihood and belief, that partly leads us to overestimate the likelihood of this.

We often want to know how likely things are. We also want to know what we should believe. If I’m right, then answering the first question does not yet give us an answer to the second.

Featured image: Dice by Jacqui Brown. CC BY-SA 2.0 via Flickr.

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Fairies, demons, and ghosts: Shakespeare’s fascination with the supernatural [infographic]

Although there was hostility towards witchcraft and sorcery well before the 16th century, it is in this time period where we see religious and legal punishment juxtaposed with the increasing use and enjoyment of special effects in plays to convey magic and the supernatural. Laws and statues against witchcraft were passed, the popularity of witch trials was beginning to rise, yet such an atmosphere did not discourage Shakespeare and other playwrights from incorporating otherworldly elements in their works. Early modern drama involved Fairy Kings and Queens, devils and demons, human magicians, minor fairies and sprites, and ghosts and apparitions, all with different levels of power. Depending on the play, a being might have a number of abilities and serve a number of different purposes — be it corrupting humans, serving masters, prophesying, or casting spells. Discover more about Shakespeare and the supernatural via the graphic below.

Download the infographic as a PDF or JPG.

Featured image credit: “Oberon, Titania and Puck with Fairies Dancing”, by William Blake. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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“Never say ‘I like books’ in a job interview,” and other advice for librarians

It’s Australian Library and Information Week, so we asked Alison Bates, Library Resources and Access Manager at RMIT University in Melbourne, to fill us in on what motivated her to become a librarian in the first place, keeping her work/life balance, and how realising the impact you can have in your role is the key to job satisfaction.

What’s the first thing you do when you arrive at the library?

Greet the other early starters – 7:30am start to waste as little of the day as possible – then log on to check emails.  About half an hour later I stagger to the café downstairs to get coffee to deal with the effect the emails are having.

What made you want to become a librarian?

The best bit about studying was always going to the library and finding and collecting all the resources I’d need to write the essay.  I could do that all day – writing the essay was not so much fun.  Although I was warned never to say it in a job interview, I also like books.

What’s your first memory of a library?

Tuesday night, library night at the Ivanhoe Public Library.  Sometimes already in pyjamas and dressing gown I’d go upstairs to the third magical level where the Children’s books were.  I’d read as many as I could while the family were in the building to maximise value as I was only allowed to borrow a few to take home.

What projects are you currently working on?

I always seem to have a few projects on the go at once, but probably the most satisfying ones at present are making our processes simpler to make it easier for Academic staff and students to engage with our collections.  An example is reviewing our ‘suggest a purchase for the collection’ process, and removing as many barriers to receiving suggestions as possible.

What’s the most rewarding part of your job?

I really enjoy working with creative, energetic colleagues to make a better experience for our users.  I have always worked in the Technical Services side of library work, but you don’t have to be client-facing to be client-focused.  In fact, it is even more important to be aware of the impact of your work on customers if you are not face-to-face with them every day.  I also have a bit of a thing for streamlining workflows – any workflows.

What part of your job do you think people would find the most surprising?

The sheer number of books I don’t have time to read.  Probably not surprising to other librarians, but to anyone you meet socially who asks what you do, apparently astonishing.

What are your hobbies outside of work?

Running a small farm in my spare time means that every waking hour not given to librarianship is devoted to agriculture.  I am constantly on a steep learning curve that involves cutting and baling hay, fencing and with our first cows arriving next month, cattle management.  At least I know how to find information – it is the practical experience that is the harder teacher.

What has been your proudest moment as a librarian?

I went to the ALA conference in 2014 to present a poster session and did some other presentations along the way.  It gave me a strong sense of our potential to have an impact by sharing our experiences and evidence.   It is great to work in an industry where collaboration and sharing are the norm.

Featured image: Knowledge by Dariusz Sankowski, Public Domain via Pixabay.

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Listening where it matters

Today we return to our ongoing series in which we ask a variety of oral history professionals and practitioners how they ended up in the audio world and why they love oral history. Below, Jessica Taylor explains the power of oral history in her own work, and why she believes it offers endless possibilities for history teachers. Previous installments can be found here and here. To share your own story, contact our social media coordinator, Andrew Shaffer, at ohreview[at]gmail[dot]com.

We all have that one teacher who inspired us, guided us to our calling in our formative years, whose lectures and project assignments become a piece of our professional identities. So, here it comes: one of my history teachers was singularly, as my teenage self might put it, the pits. Just the worst. Entertainingly selfish, loud, manipulative, and borderline unethical, his was the perspective through which I learned about the humanities broadly defined. I cared a great deal about the subject matter (also, grades) and sought his approval. I learned how to form an argument and say it out loud and that Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin, but most of what I remember is my teacher’s sheer force of personality. I swore one day I would do better. When I bought graduation robes and started applying to scholarships for future North Carolina public school teachers, I felt the same anger I felt in class.

As unaware as any self-absorbed teenager, I didn’t notice the broader social processes that kept my butt nailed to the chair and kept a clearly incapable teacher at the podium. I had never heard of the idea of “privilege” even as it snuck in under the classroom door, and I had never considered how my own experience might even be more positive than that of the person next to me—maybe someone who couldn’t pay attention to the rattle of statistics in lecture after lecture, whose history wasn’t represented, or who had more reason to feel intimidated by our teacher or our classroom than me.

Jessica Taylor, SPOHP staff, and students head to an eighteenth-century plantation ruin in Gloucester County, Virginia after a long day of interviews. Photo used with permission.

I would do better as a teacher for students like me, the subtext ran, until I stumbled upon oral history as an undergraduate. I signed up as an intern at an archaeology nonprofit called the Fairfield Foundation in Gloucester County, Virginia and proposed interviewing residents living within the former bounds of an enormous seventeenth-century plantation. Descendants of royal grantees and enslaved workers alike, living sometimes in the literal shadows of a manor house ruin, cared deeply about how their history was told. That was the first time I saw more than one version of history operating at the same time, serving the people who retold their own version of the story. Black residents of the small community of White Marsh offered their church, founded in the post-emancipatory period, as a central place with histories important to them and their extended families. White residents nearby turned to their own colonial-era churches and the plantation homes as the drivers of economic progress and cultural achievement. By that logic, the latter sites were also hubs of greater historical and archaeological inquiry, made possible by finite amounts of money and effort that privileged some stories over others. Oral history dumped me out of the world of memorization and linear narratives and into politics and contingency, where history really matters.

Oral history dumped me out of the world of memorization and linear narratives and into politics and contingency, where history really matters.

During my first year in graduate school at the University of Florida (UF), a professor leaned back in his chair, smiled, and said, “You seem like you don’t know what you want to do.” I wanted to keep up with my oral history fieldwork in Virginia, but I wanted to write my dissertation about Virginia in the seventeenth century. Oral history taught me that our contemporary storytellers accentuate the continuity between those two contexts and their efforts to preserve those places gave earlier history meaning. But perhaps more importantly I wanted to spread the word. At the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program on UF’s campus, undergrad students grab recorders with alarming ease of access and head to places that interest them. It’s an undertaking that has at its core the idea the historical narrative is incomplete and could be bettered with new research; students and scholars together create what narrative does not already exist, acknowledging and rectifying earlier silences. I learned from Muslim students about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and from student activists about the Civil Rights Movement veterans they met. I had very little to do with it, only to teach them how to ask questions and to cheer them on. Oral history, with its accessible archives and methodologies, is how teaching history should be done: encouraging students to find meaningful, diverse, personal connections that give their own lives context.

My time at SPOHP came full circle when I loaded a bunch of students into a van and drove them to White Marsh. I learned so much more about Virginia alongside student interns, who, in fieldwork, grew confident in their own talents and formed bonds with the people and places I already loved. Jennifer, a student of Florida’s civil rights history, bonded with women who fight today to rehabilitate the segregated school they attended. Patrick found a new best friend in grumpy old fisherman AJ, and together they played guitar and sang classic country music—a skill and experience I could never replicate. Jes’s excellent photographs of crabbing methods were archived alongside of our interviews at SPOHP. The mission, putting these people on the record, made possible the teaching that I wanted to realize: selfless and rooted in love and reverence for place.

Featured image: Tea by Monoar, Public Domain via Pixabay.

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Mind This Space: The psychology of our embodied senses

We’re all quite familiar with having five senses: sight, touch, taste, smell, and hearing. These senses help us understand the world outside our body. The idea of five senses is so ingrained that having a ‘sixth sense’ is a clue that something isn’t right. But what about other physical sensations? Chris Eccleston, a psychologist at the University of Bath, is interested in this question. When talking to him, we found out that sensing is much more complicated than we’d thought.

As we go about our everyday lives in the world, it turns out that we use plenty of sensations other than the big five. The big five help us figure out what the world ‘out there’ is like. Sensations like balance, strength, breathing, fatigue, and pain help us understand how we are in relation to the world. We all live in a body through which we experience the world. This body sets possibilities and limits for how we can act and move in the world. Most of the time we can be unaware of sensations in our body, unless there’s a problem, or we’re trying to control it. Opera singers, yoga instructors, athletes, and free divers pay minute attention to their breath. And if you have a headache, it’s difficult to think of anything except the pain. These sensations help us make sense of how we can act in the world and the limitations on our activity.

In these three podcasts, Chris explores the often-hidden world of physical sensations, from appetite to sneezing. We encounter senses that disorient, confuse, embarrass, frighten, warn us of danger, and relieve discomfort. And we get answers to important questions.

What does perfect balance feel like?

Why is it so hard for people to continually do boring, repetitive tasks?

Why is farting funny?

 Featured image credit: Ballet stage lighting, by zaimoku_woodpile. CC-BY-2.0 via Flickr.

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A brief history of crystallography

Walking home from school at about the age of seven or eight I picked up a pebble and dashed it to the ground. It split into two and I saw that inside was a series of coloured bands. Thus begun my lifelong fascination with the world of crystals, and this led eventually to having the opportunity to work professionally in this field.  Many years ago I used to have my occupation ‘crystallographer’ on my passport: this often meant a long and sometimes tedious discussion with airport immigration officials. Eventually I changed it to ‘physicist’ as then I didn’t have to explain myself.

So, what is crystallography? Put simply, it is the study of crystals. Now, let’s be careful here. I am not talking about all those silly websites advertising ways in which crystals act as magical healing agents, with their chakras, auras, and energy levels. No, this is a serious scientific subject, with around 26 or so Nobel prizes to its credit. And yet, despite this, it remains a largely hidden subject, at least in the public mind.

Crystallography as a science has a long and venerable history going back to the 17th century when the sheer beauty of the symmetry of crystals suggested an underlying order of some kind. For the next three centuries, our knowledge of what crystals actually were was based on conjecture and argument, with a few simple experiments thrown in. From their symmetry and shapes it was argued that crystals must consist of ordered arrangements of minute particles: today we know them as atoms and molecules.

But it was the discovery of X-rays in 1895 that changed all that, for a few years later in 1912 in Germany, Max Laue, Walter Friedrich, and Paul Knipping showed that an X-ray beam incident on a crystal was scattered to form a regular pattern of spots on a film (we call this diffraction). Thus it was proved that X-rays consisted of waves and furthermore this gave direct evidence of the underlying order of atoms in the crystal. Hence Nobel Prize number 1 went to Laue in 1914. However, it was William Lawrence Bragg (WLB) who in 1912 at the age of 22 showed how the observed diffraction pattern could be used to determine the positions of atoms in the crystal, thus launching a completely new scientific discipline, X-ray crystallography. Working with his father, William Henry Bragg (WHB), they quickly determined the crystal structures of several materials starting with that of common salt and diamond. Both father and son shared Nobel prize number 2 in 1915. William Henry Bragg and William Lawrence Bragg went on to create world-class research groups working on a huge range of solid materials and incidentally they were active in encouraging women into science.

Since then X-ray crystallography, which today is used throughout the world, has been the method of choice for determining the crystal structures of organic and inorganic solids, pharmaceuticals, biological substances such as proteins and viruses, and indeed all kinds of solid substances. Crick and Watson’s determination of the double helix of DNA is probably the most well-known example of the use of crystallography, incidentally a discovery made in William Lawrence Bragg’s laboratory in Cambridge. Had it not been for X-ray (and later neutron and electron) crystallography we probably would not have today much of an electronics industry, computer technology, new pharmaceuticals, new materials of all sorts, nor the modern field of genetics. The Braggs left a huge legacy which today continues to make astonishing progress.

Feature Image: Protein Crystals Use in XRay Crystallography by CSIRO. CC BY 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons 

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Dead body politics: what counting corpses tells us about security

What happens when dead bodies crop up where they are not supposed to be? How can this allow us to reflect on how we understand security and insecurity? For example, mass graves can be indicators of crimes against humanity. Recent satellite evidence of mass graves analyzed by Amnesty International outside of Bujumbura has led to a focus on the political violence there, a result of turmoil after Burundian President Pierre Nkurunziza announced his intention to seek a third term. In these kinds of instances, the first step towards understanding the event is often the attempt to arrive at an accurate count of the dead.

Counting the dead is a key focus when the dead appear as a security issue, and is often equated with knowing the truth of what happened, and these numbers can be hotly contested. Debates over drone strikes in counterterrorism policy often take the form of disagreements over death counts. A high militant death toll is an indicator that the policy is successful, and the US government claims that drone strikes kill fewer civilians than conventional war, while critics argue that the civilian death toll of drone strikes is in fact higher than that from manned aircraft. For example, AirWars traces the number of civilian casualties in Iraq and Syria by coalition airstrikes. The US government confirmed 42 civilian deaths in 26 incidents from August 8, 2014, to April 27, 2016. In that same time, AirWars estimates that in these same 26 incidents, between 59 and 70 civilians died, and that there were 172 further incidents in which an additional 1113 to 1691 civilians died.

How dead bodies are counted and assigned value matters just as much as which dead bodies are counted. Critics of drone strikes argue that the US government is not accurately defining militants: a problem with the how of body counts. The current US policy, to count any military-aged-male who dies in a drone strike as a militant unless there is evidence otherwise, shows how a focus on the number of dead itself isn’t sufficient to think about dead body politics. Similarly, the focus on the number of dead has led to a bizarre equation governing the number of allowable civilian casualties. The NCV, non-combatant casualty cutoff value, started out at 0 at the beginning of air operations against ISIS, indicating President Obama’s unwillingness to allow any civilian casualties as part of operations without his express permission. That standard has now been increased to 10, some sources say, small compared to the standard in Iraq in 2003, which was 30, according to Wikileaks, but the real dilemma is how to count casualties in a war increasingly dependent on technology to distinguish friend from foe, and where achieving security is often equated with causing the deaths of others.

In conflict, the odds are already stacked against accurate counts. The Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG) has established a count of deaths in Syria, using a variety of on the ground reporting sources. By looking at multiple lists, they can examine the amount of overlap to get a sense of the probability that a death is unreported by any of the sources. This helps them to estimate the undercount of the death toll, and a more reliable death count overall, but it gives a sense of the difficulty of counting on the ground. How to count is up for debate, including whether incident reporting or retrospective mortality surveys give the most accurate counts of the dead, and which groups should be considered reliable incident-reporters. There are also potential bias issues that emerge in reporting and collating reports of casualties. One example of this is event size bias: an event involving larger numbers of people is more likely to be recorded than one involving fewer.

Relying on body counts to tell us something about our own security or insecurity is problematic, if only because of what counting leaves out. We tend to pay more attention to higher numbers of deaths; this constrains us from seeing the difficulties in accurate death counts, and from looking beyond counts altogether. Clearly, body counts are problematic, yet they remain potent symbols of security policy. Who is counted, and by whom, as well as the degree to which counting the dead is deemed of value, can shed light on the boundaries between political communities; deaths are more likely to be defined as security issues when the dead in question are deemed to hold value within cultural, social, and national identity groups.

Dead bodies are pieces in a larger assemblage of how political communities understand themselves via shared conceptions of how they live and die and how their deaths are remembered. They are often tools in a larger project of reconciliation after political violence, but there is some intangible sense that counting them matters for ending the insecurity associated with conflict, and that achieving global security will only come with an acknowledgement of death toll. However, not all bodies count the same way, and there is a power dynamic of what bodies are worth and who decides. Thus any agenda for future research that takes dead bodies seriously must do more than count them. The dead body is not simply the material aftereffect of violence, but also a complex political person that invokes ethical and moral questions.

Image credit: Machine gun-Iraq-War-Weapon by VentaRisk, CC0 Public Domain via Pixabay. 

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“Aery nothings and painted devils”, an extract from Fantastic Metamorphoses, Other Worlds

Human beings are subject to a continual process of bodily transformation, but shape-shifting also belongs in the landscape of magic, witchcraft, and wonder. Marina Warner, in her award-winning essays Fantastic Metamorphoses, Other Worlds: Ways of Telling the Self, explores this idea ranging from Ovid to Lewis Carroll. In the extract below she looks at Shakespeare’s use of magic and demons in his plays Macbeth and A Winter’s Tale.

Demonology, ghosts, projections, and photographs are bound up in the figure of the double through the deep association of the devil with conjuring illusion; this connection underlies the very principle of doubling as a variety of metamorphosis. When the first Christians discovered the rituals of the peoples in America, they identified them with classical and medieval witchcraft and divination; they also, as Richard Eden describes, identified the images of their gods with ‘the devyl, whom they paynt of the selfe same fourme and colour, as hee appeareth unto them in dyvers shapes and fourmes. They make also Images of golde, copper, and wood, to the same similitudes, in terrible shapes, and so variable, as the paynters are accustomed to paynt them at the feete of sainct Michaell tharchangell, or in any other place, where they paynte them of most horrible portriture.’ The devil’s image is not stable, and the images of Catholic worship were themselves a source of horror for many writers in these islands: Lady Macbeth, for example, taunts her husband, saying, ‘’Tis the eye of childhood | That fears a painted devil’ (II. ii).

In some senses, the painted quality of the devil revealed his fraudulence: he was master of deception and illusion, but also, as Lady Macbeth is saying, a manufactured bogey, a phantom of the sick brain. In one obvious sense, devils can only ever be ‘painted devils’, that is counterfeit, since they assume the forms they do in order to manifest themselves to humans. In the literature of doppelgängers, this question of the status of the double—is it real, or is it imagined?—and, if it is imagined, is it no less real for that?—returns insistently, and its undecideability, which gives many of its vehicles their narrative grip, finds expression through images of projections and images, artefacts and delusions; the story or play then tries to decide the images’ status with regard to the real.

Image magic frequently proceeds by mimesis and replication; verbal spells also use imitation and doubling to achieve their ends. The spectres that conjuring raises are related to embodied doubles because magical operations allegedly raised ghosts, conjured apparitions, projected the shadow not the substance, the double not the original. ‘Double double, toil and trouble,’ chant the witches in Macbeth over their cauldron (Macbeth, iv. i) Elsewhere, Macbeth rails against, ‘these juggling fiends … that palter with us in a double sense …’ (v. vii).

Shakespeare knew his demonology. Thomas Aquinas, following Augustine, had determined that the devil could not be capable of actually performing metamorphoses, or of being in two or more places at once (the divine gift of ubiquity), or of knowing the future, since these were the unique prerogatives of God. But the devil was an ape, a mimic, a deceiver, who could create the illusion of such feats. The condition of Shakespeare’s many apparitions is uncanny: Banquo’s ghost is both there and not there, visible but not palpable.

In The Winter’s Tale, Paulina, during the celebrated ‘resurrection’ of Hermione, play- acts bringing to life her statue, her eerie double. This tremendous scene also develops the relationship between ‘painted devils’ and ‘aery nothings’ in Shakespeare’s use of magic. For in order to bring Hermione back into the unfolding story, Paulina acts the priest-magician, turning to stagecraft, that is, pretence. The capacity of theatre to produce the illusion of real presence vexes Shakespeare, precisely because he is all too aware of its connections to diabolical illusion. The resulting ambiguity about the status of the image’s picture-flesh enhances the hallucinatory atmosphere of the play’s closing scene. Both Leontes and Hermione are poised between sleep and waking states; as the statue awakes, to Paulina’s command, Leontes still thinks it might be an illusion, as in a dream. He exclaims,

There is an air comes from her. What fine chisel

Could ever yet cut breath?

(v. iii. 78-9)

And then, as he touches her—embraces her, ‘O, she’s warm!’ here echoing Ovid’s Pygmalion. And then continues, ‘If this be magic, let it be an art | Lawful as eating.’

The paradoxes of ekphrasis—its material immateriality—relate to the illusions of presence in spectral conjuring. Because the scene is not magic—in the play, it really is Hermione; but Shakespeare’s art does enter the realm of magic: he takes us to places in make-believe where we could not otherwise go.

The first performances of Dr Faustus and of Macbeth may have used early magic lantern effects, projections on to smoke and through glass, to summon painted devils. When Prospero talks of his ‘insubstantial pageant’, it is hard not to imagine stagecraft of an optical variety. Indeed, when in his famous speech, he says, ‘We are such stuff as dreams are made on’ (The Tempest, iv. i. 14 ff.), could that ‘on’ suggest that dreams appear on something, on the screen of fantasy, the scrim on which shadow puppets play? Theatrical illusion offers an analogy to the spectral conjurings of enchanters as well as to the phantasms of haunted minds, to Goya’s nightmare of reason. In the Dream Theseus talks of ‘shaping fantasies’, ‘aery nothing’, to which ‘the madman, the lover, and the poet | Give a local habitation and a name …’ (v. i. 5—17). Reversing Prospero’s metaphor, Theseus also says that actors themselves are ‘shadows’; Puck repeats this in the play’s envoi (‘If we shadows have offended’, v. i. 423ff). These shadows will gather as projections of the internal world of spectres; concepts of the mind’s eye were reproduced in the devices of the magic lantern and the phantasmagoria or raree show.

To Theseus’ dismissals, Hippolita comes back, thoughtfully, challenging him for making too light of imagination’s power to shape reality:

But all the story of the night told over,

And all their minds transfigur’d so together,

More witnesseth than fancy’s images,

And grows to something of great constancy …’

(Dream, v. i. 23—6)

The experience of this Dream has been more than mere fancifulness can bring about, she says, admiringly, thus opening the way to Coleridge’s distinction between constitutive Imagination and playful Fancy.

Featured image credit: ‘A Midsummer Nights Dream, Act IV Scene I’ by Fuseli, Henry, 1741-1825, artist. Simon, John Peter, 1764?–c.1810, engraver. From the Library of Congress. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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