Dark Ages (dark + age)

Distribution by Scientific Domains


Selected Abstracts


Somatic Styles of the Early Middle Ages

GENDER & HISTORY, Issue 3 2008
Lynda L. Coon
,Somatic Styles' examines how classical modes of gender played significant roles in carving out competitive arenas between clerical and lay elites, c.600,900 CE. The paper explores the hermeneutical obstacles standing between the contemporary theorist of gender and the complex nature of the early medieval texts under scrutiny. The analysis reconstructs classicising techniques of gender deployed by early medieval churchmen, and it does so in a way that both challenges the stranglehold of the ,one-sex' model on pre-modern understandings of gender and heals the ,rupture' between the ,Ancient' and the ,Dark Age'. Finally, the essay maps early medieval somatic and gendered styles onto an architectural space where lay and consecrated bodies met , a ninth-century monastic basilica. [source]


Re-Forging the ,Age of Iron' Part II: The Tenth Century in a New Age?

HISTORY COMPASS (ELECTRONIC), Issue 9 2010
John Howe
The tenth century, once dismissed as an unpleasant ,Age of Iron', now receives increased attention as an important age of transition. Historians are attempting to understand how it fits into the broader narrative of Western Civilization. Although some scholars have identified it as the last act of the post-Roman world, others see it as a new age. Perhaps the High Middle Ages with its agricultural and demographic revolution, its new villages and parishes, its revived cities, its reformed churches and schools, and its medieval monarchs began in the tenth century? Or were those changes not novelties of the tenth century but rather manifestations of a ,take off' that had already begun back in the Carolingian Empire, and which, despite the problems posed by late Carolingian wars and invasions, was able to continue, spread, and blossom into the growth and prosperity of the High Middle Ages? New scholarly interest in the tenth century has made it much less of a ,dark age', but scholars still are not quite certain how to conceptualize its historical significance. [source]


THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY AND THE RHETORIC OF EXCESS

JOURNAL OF RELIGIOUS ETHICS, Issue 1 2007
Jeffrey Stout
ABSTRACT If militarism violates the ideals of liberty and justice in one way, and rapidly increasing social stratification violates them in another, then American democracy is in crisis. A culture of democratic accountability will survive only if citizens revive the concerns that animated the great reform movements of the past, from abolitionism to civil rights. It is crucial, when reasoning about practical matters, not only to admit how grave one's situation is, but also to resist despair. Therefore, the fate of democracy depends, to some significant degree, on how we choose to describe the crisis. Saying that we have already entered the new dark ages or a post-democratic era may prove to be a self-fulfilling prophecy, because anyone who accepts this message is apt to give up on the hard work of organizing and contestation that is needed to hold political representatives accountable to the people. This paper asks how one might strike the right balance between accuracy and hope in describing the democracy's current troubles. After saying what I mean by democracy and what I think the current threats to it are, I respond to Romand Coles's criticisms of reservations I have expressed before about rhetorical excess in the works of Stanley Hauerwas, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Richard Rorty. This leads to a discussion of several points raised against me by Hauerwas. A digression offers some of my reasons for doubting that John Howard Yoder's biblical scholarship vindicates Hauerwas's version of pacifism. The paper concludes by arguing that Sheldon Wolin's work on the evisceration of democracy, though admirably accurate in its treatment of the dangers posed by empire and capital, abandons the project of democratic accountability too quickly in favor of the romance of the fugitive. [source]


The halo mass function from the dark ages through the present day

MONTHLY NOTICES OF THE ROYAL ASTRONOMICAL SOCIETY, Issue 1 2007
Darren S. Reed
ABSTRACT We use an array of high-resolution N -body simulations to determine the mass function of dark matter haloes at redshifts 10,30. We develop a new method for compensating for the effects of finite simulation volume that allows us to find an approximation to the true ,global' mass function. By simulating a wide range of volumes at different mass resolution, we calculate the abundance of haloes of mass 105,12 h,1 M,. This enables us to predict accurately the abundance of the haloes that host the sources that reionize the Universe. In particular, we focus on the small mass haloes (,105.5,6 h,1 M,) likely to harbour Population III stars where gas cools by molecular hydrogen emission, early galaxies in which baryons cool by atomic hydrogen emission at a virial temperature of ,104K (,107.5,8 h,1 M,), and massive galaxies that may be observable at redshift ,10. When we combine our data with simulations that include high-mass haloes at low redshift, we find that the best fit to the halo mass function depends not only on the linear overdensity, as is commonly assumed in analytic models, but also on the slope of the linear power spectrum at the scale of the halo mass. The Press,Schechter model gives a poor fit to the halo mass function in the simulations at all epochs; the Sheth-Tormen model gives a better match, but still overpredicts the abundance of rare objects at all times by up to 50 per cent. Finally, we consider the consequences of the recently released WMAP 3-yr cosmological parameters. These lead to much less structure at high redshift, reducing the number of z= 10,mini-haloes' by more than a factor of two and the number of z= 30 galaxy hosts by nearly four orders of magnitude. Code to generate our best-fitting halo mass function may be downloaded from http://icc.dur.ac.uk/Research/PublicDownloads/genmf_readme.html. [source]


Probing the dark ages with redshift distribution of gamma-ray bursts

MONTHLY NOTICES OF THE ROYAL ASTRONOMICAL SOCIETY, Issue 2 2002
T. Roy Choudhury
Abstract In this article, we explore the possibility of using the properties of gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) to probe the physical conditions in the epochs prior to reionization. The redshift distribution of GRBs is modelled using the Press,Schechter formalism with an assumption that they follow the cosmic star formation history. We reproduce the observed star formation rate obtained from galaxies in the redshift range 0 < z < 5, as well as the redshift distribution of the GRBs inferred from the luminosity,variability correlation of the burst light curve. We show that the fraction of GRBs at high redshifts, the afterglows of which cannot be observed in the R and I bands owing to H i Gunn,Peterson optical depth can, at the most, account for one third of the dark GRBs. The observed redshift distribution of GRBs, with much less scatter than the one available today, can put stringent constraints on the epoch of reionization and the nature of gas cooling in the epochs prior to reionization. [source]