Wojciech z Bnina w krzyżackiej niewoli Dokumentacja epistolograficzna

This text publishes five letters relating to the period as a prisoner of war of the Castellan of Ląd, Wociech of Bnin, who was captured by the Teutonic Order in the Battle of Chojnice on 18 September 1454. The first letter, written in Poznań on 27 December 1454, relates to Wojciech’s own request to postpone the date of his return to captivity, which he had been released from on his word of honour as a knight, in connection with the need heal a wound or a blow that he had received in the abovementioned battle. Three subsequent letters are addressed to the Grand Master of the Order, Ludwik von Erlichshausen, all written on the same day (5 February 1455) in Warsaw. They contain the requests of two duchesses of Mazovia (Anna and Barbara) and of prominent magnates from their circle to free Wojciech from captivity in exchange for an unnamed notable of the order, who was then in Polish hands. The final letter, from 4 April 1455, was also written in Warsaw. In it, the Mazovian Duchess Anna once again requests the Grand Master to release Bniński from captivity. Wojciech personally delivered this letter to Malbork on 22 April 1455, and he was most likely released from captivity as a prisoner of war after that date.

The Correspondence with Arnauld

Leibniz’s correspondence with Antoine Arnauld took place in his so-called “middle period”: it began in February 1686 and ended in March 1690, when Leibniz wrote his final letter to Arnauld. The exchange was initiated by Leibniz, who sent Arnauld a short summary of his most recent philosophical composition, the “Discourse on Metaphysics”, and asked Arnauld for his opinion. The ensuing correspondence is an excellent source of information about Leibniz’s views in the middle period: it contains a thorough, clear, and surprisingly systematic presentation of many of his most important philosophical doctrines. This chapter focuses on what we can learn from these letters about Leibniz’s theory of complete concepts, his account of body and substance, his doctrines about causation, and finally his theory that minds have a special status in God’s plan.

I Thirst to Meet You in Bright Glory

On an ordinary spring morning in 1852, Ben Major and his wife Lucy are eating breakfast when they are interrupted by a frantic messenger. Ben’s only sister, Eliza Ann Davenport, is gravely ill with cholera. Ben rushes to her home, where he tries all his various botanical treatments for cholera, but to no avail. Eliza Ann dies, and within a short time it is clear that two of her sons and Ben are sick, too. All three of them die within a few days. With the deaths of Tolbert and Ben—six months apart—the remarkable correspondence between Bassa Cove and Walnut Grove ends, but the final letter from Liberia is not the last interaction between the Liberian colonists and the American Majors. Years later, Wesley Harlan travels from Liberia to pay his respects at Ben Major’s grave in Illinois.

After the Odes 1

This chapter focuses on the collection of twenty verse letters that Horace published roughly three years after the appearance of Odes 1–3. Because they profess to be exercises in moral philosophy, the letters can be seen as a kind of generic ascent following the lyrics of the Odes. Differences between the Epistles and Odes 1–3 are highlighted, including the persons addressed and the range of themes treated. Particular attention is devoted to the penultimate letter (19), in which Horace boasts of his transferral of Greek iambic and lyric poetry into Latin, and the final letter (20), addressed to the book itself, which dramatizes the tension between a desire to be read and a suspicion of popular approval.

Mendel and Darwin: untangling a persistent enigma

Mendel and Darwin were contemporaries, with much overlap in their scientifically productive years. Available evidence shows that Mendel knew much about Darwin, whereas Darwin knew nothing of Mendel. Because of the fragmentary nature of this evidence, published inferences regarding Mendel’s views on Darwinian evolution are contradictory and enigmatic, with claims ranging from enthusiastic acceptance to outright rejection. The objective of this review is to examine evidence from Mendel’s published and private writings on evolution and Darwin, and the influence of the scientific environment in which he was immersed. Much of this evidence lies in Mendel’s handwritten annotations in his copies of Darwin’s books, which this review scrutinises in detail. Darwin’s writings directly influenced Mendel’s classic 1866 paper, and his letters to Nägeli. He commended and criticised Darwin on specific issues pertinent to his research, including the provisional hypothesis of pangenesis, the role of pollen in fertilisation, and the influence of “conditions of life” on heritable variation. In his final letter to Nägeli, Mendel proposed a Darwinian scenario for natural selection using the same German term for “struggle for existence” as in his copies of Darwin’s books. His published and private scientific writings are entirely objective, devoid of polemics or religious allusions, and address evolutionary questions in a manner consistent with that of his scientific contemporaries. The image that emerges of Mendel is of a meticulous scientist who accepted the tenets of Darwinian evolution, while privately pinpointing aspects of Darwin’s views of inheritance that were not supported by Mendel’s own experiments.

A New Method to Estimate Skew Angle in Printed and Historical Document Images

In this paper, a new approach to assess the skew angle for scanned/printed documents and historical document images has been proposed. This is substantial for an automatic document processing system (as text and image segmentation) to avert errors in auxiliary stages. The proposed tactic is based on the statistical analysis of the slope of the connected lines in the document. The proposed technique detects skew and corrects it by initial letter (X1, Y1+200) from left margin of the resized (800X800) image and (X1+200, Y1) from top margin. Final letter (X2, Y2-200) and (X2-200, Y2) were chosen from right and bottom margins of the same image. The skew angle estimation is done for standard skewed dataset and effective correction of the same is performed with minimum errors

Katherine Mansfield and Elizabeth von Arnim

Recent scholarship on the complex relationship between Katherine Mansfield and her best-selling author cousin, Elizabeth von Arnim, has done much to shed light on the familial, personal and literary connections between these unlikely friends. Although their lives appeared to be very different (Mansfield’s largely one of penurious poor health, von Arnim’s chiefly one of robust privilege), we know that each of these women experienced the other as an influential presence. Moreover, Mansfield’s narrator in her early collection of short stories, In a German Pension (1911), bears marked resemblances with the protagonist of Elizabeth and her German Garden (1898), and von Arnim’s most radical novel, Vera (1921), was written at the height of her friendship with Mansfield. The final letter Mansfield ever wrote was to von Arnim and, following Mansfield's death in 1923, John Middleton Murry dedicated his posthumous collection of Mansfield’s poems as follows: ‘To Elizabeth of the German Garden who loved certain of these poems and their author’. This volume brings together contributions from leading scholars including Bonnie Kime Scott, Angela Smith and Andrew Thacker, including the prize-winning essay by Juliane Römhild and creative contributions from New Zealand writers Sarah Laing and Nina Powles.

The Predictability of {S} Abbreviation in Older Scots Manuscripts According to Stem-final Littera

This chapter presents an analysis of the spelling variation found in the Older Scots plural noun {S} morpheme. The realisation of this morpheme as <is> or <ys>, as in acctionis ‘actions,’ has been claimed to be a diagnostic of the “Scottishness” of a text (e.g. Kniezsa 1997: 41). In A Linguistic Atlas of Older Scots (LAOS), the most common realisation of {S} (61%) is in fact the scribal abbreviation <>; of non-abbreviated realisations, <is>/ys> in indeed the most frequent realisation, although it only accounts for 25% of all tokens. The abbrevation <> is often assumed to be functionally identical to <is/ys>, rather than to <(e)s>, in the literature. To test this assumption, the author uses generalised additive modelling. The Independent Variable that turned out to be the best predictor for the use of <> as opposed to a full form like <is> is the identity of the stem-final letter. The salient feature triggering <> is whether the stem-final letters terminates in a horizontal stroke or not. The realisation of the plural morpheme {S} in Older Scots legal texts, then, appears to be primarily motivated by palaeographical convenience.