Terra Australis - the southern land - was one of the most widespread concepts in European geography from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, although the notion of a land mass in the southern seas had been prevalent since classical antiquity. Despite this fact, there has been relatively little sustained scholarly work on European concepts of Terra Australis or the intellectual background to European voyages of discovery and exploration to Australia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Through interdisciplinary scholarly contributions, ranging across history, the visual arts, literature and popular culture, this volume considers the continuities and discontinuities between the imagined space of Terra Australis and its subsequent manifestation. It will shed new light on familiar texts, people and events - such as the Dutch and French explorations of Australia, the Batavia shipwreck and the Baudin expedition - by setting them in unexpected contexts and alongside unfamiliar texts and people. The book will be of interest to, among others, intellectual and cultural historians, literary scholars, historians of cartography, the visual arts, women's and post-colonial studies.

For a number of years scholars who are concerned with issues of poverty and the poor have turned away from the study of charity and poor relief, in order to search for a view of the life of the poor from the point of view of the poor themselves. Great studies have been conducted using a variety of records, resulting in seminal works that have enriched our understanding of pauper experiences and the influence and impact of poverty on societies. If we return our gaze to 'charity' with the benefit of those studies' questions, approaches, sources and findings, what might we see differently about how charity was experienced as a concept and in practice, at both community and personal levels? In this collection, contributors explore the experience of charity towards the poor, considering it in spiritual, intellectual, emotional, personal, social, cultural and material terms. The approach is a comparative one: across different time periods, nations, and faiths. Contributors pay particular attention to the way faith inflected charity in the different national environments of England and France, as Catholicism and Calvinism became outlawed and/or minority faith positions in these respective nations. They ask how different faith and beliefs defined or shaped the act of charity, and explore whether these changed over time even within one faith. The sources used to answer such questions go beyond the textual as contributors analyse a range of additional sources that include the visual, aural, and material.

Assessing fifty years of the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA), passed in 1966, this volume examines the impact of this key piece of legislation on heritage practices in the United States. The editors and contributing authors summarize how we approached compliance in the past, how we approach it now, and how we may approach it in the future. This volume presents how federal, state, tribal entities, and contractors in different regions address compliance issues; examines half a century of changes in the level of inventory, evaluation and mitigation practices, and determinations of eligibility; describes how the federal and state agencies have changed their approach over half a century; the Act is examined from the Federal, SHPO, THPO, Advisory Council, and regional perspectives. Using case studies authored by well-known heritage professionals based in universities, private practice, tribes, and government, this volume provides a critical and constructive examination of the NHPA and its future prospects. Archaeology students and scholars, as well heritage professionals, should find this book of interest.

For a number of years scholars who are concerned with issues of poverty and the poor have turned away from the study of charity and poor relief, in order to search for a view of the life of the poor from the point of view of the poor themselves. Great studies have been conducted using a variety of records, resulting in seminal works that have enriched our understanding of pauper experiences and the influence and impact of poverty on societies. If we return our gaze to 'charity' with the benefit of those studies' questions, approaches, sources and findings, what might we see differently about how charity was experienced as a concept and in practice, at both community and personal levels? In this collection, contributors explore the experience of charity towards the poor, considering it in spiritual, intellectual, emotional, personal, social, cultural and material terms. The approach is a comparative one: across different time periods, nations, and faiths. Contributors pay particular attention to the way faith inflected charity in the different national environments of England and France, as Catholicism and Calvinism became outlawed and/or minority faith positions in these respective nations. They ask how different faith and beliefs defined or shaped the act of charity, and explore whether these changed over time even within one faith. The sources used to answer such questions go beyond the textual as contributors analyse a range of additional sources that include the visual, aural, and material.

This book will be of interest to scholars in the field of medieval literature in general, and Piers Plowman in particular, as well as to cultural historians of poverty. It surveys the medieval understanding of poverty in its many manifestations, reviews modern historians' research into the experience of poverty and poor relief in the late fourteenth century, and shows, by close readings of Piers Plowman, how Langland both responds to and reflects his contemporary culture and ideology. Contrary to previous scholarship, it suggests that Langland never underestimates the realities of material poverty by offering only religious consolation for the poor. For him, care for the poor is the index of how a society shapes itself ethically. This book's subtle and penetrating account of the moral predicaments of both rich and poor is fully and freshly contextualized within accounts of medieval poor relief. This scholarly, compelling and humane study demonstrates that understanding the historical poor and the various religious and secular attitudes to medieval poverty, are crucially important in deepening a reader's understanding of this complex poem.