Review of periodical articles

[First Paragraph] There is only one true city, wrote St Augustine, and it is not of this world. The pessimistic Christian response to the fall of Rome in AD 410, epitomized in Augustine's City of God, affected the development of the later medieval city to a degree which has yet, even now, to be fully appreciated. In the Christian city of the Middle Ages the divinity was normally confined to the sanctuaries of his churches, whose topographical prominence and harmonious proportions made manifest an otherwise hidden spiritual order. Outside the cloister gates, disorder reigned: a general lack of planning revealed the meaninglessness of the outward, secular life. This dichotomy between an inner world of spirit and a public world of transient matter was embodied in the recurrent tensions between spiritual and secular space which ran as a motif throughout the history of medieval towns. Modern studies which have emphasized (not, of course, without reason) the secular political and economic power of ecclesiastical institutions in the medieval city have perhaps distracted attention unduly from the real differences of ethos which, within the town, distinguished religious space from that of the surrounding lay world

The politics of London air : John Evelyn's 'Fumifugium' and the Restoration

Historians have commonly described John Evelyn's pamphlet about London smoke pollution, Fumifugium, as a precocious example of environmental concern. This paper argues that such an interpretation is too simple. Evelyn's proposals are shown to be closely related to political allegory and the panegyrics written to welcome the newly restored Charles II. However, the paper also shows that Fumifugium was not simply a literary conceit; rather it exemplified the mid-seventeenth-century English interest in the properties of air that is visible in both the Hartlib circle and the early Royal Societ

Assessing the Strength and Effectiveness of Renewable Electricity Feed-in Tariffs in European Union Countries

In the last two decades, feed-in tariffs (FIT) and renewable portfolio standards (RPS) have emerged as two of the most popular policies for supporting renewable electricity (RES-E) generation in the developed world. A few studies have assessed their effectiveness, but most do not account for policy design features and market characteristics that influence policy strength. In this paper, we employ 1992-2008 panel data to conduct the first analysis of the effectiveness of FIT policies in promoting solar photovoltaic (PV) and onshore wind power development in 26 European Union countries. We develop a new indicator for FIT strength that captures variability in tariff size, contract duration, digression rate, electricity price, and electricity generation cost to estimate the resulting return on investment. We then regress this indicator on added RES-E capacity using a fixed effects specification. We find that FIT policies have driven solar PV and onshore wind capacity development in the EU. However, this effect is overstated without controls for country characteristics and may be concealed without accounting for the unique design of each policy. We provide empirical evidence that the interaction of policy design and market dynamics are more important determinants of RES-E development than policy enactment alone.Renewable energy, Feed-in tariff, Panel data models

Print Culture and the Rebuilding of London after the Fire: The Presumptuous Proposals of Valentine Knight

Histories of the Great Fire of London regularly mention and reproduce Valentine Knight's scheme for London's reconstruction, published in 1666, and note that he was imprisoned for his pains. His proposal, with new streets laid out on a rough grid and a canal through the heart of the city, has attained a walk-on part in longue durée histories of urban planning. However, Knight has remained a mysterious and little studied figure; the significance of his imprisonment and of the fact that his was the only scheme to be published remain unexplored. By reconstructing his biography and discovering the reason for his incarceration, and by relating his and the other proposals for the rebuilding of the capital after the fire to the history of public opinion, this article uses this episode to explore the tacit rules governing the discussion of public affairs in Restoration England. Further, by examining the publication history of all the immediate post-fire schemes for rebuilding London from 1666 to 1750, it traces how architectural plans gradually became objects for critical discussion in the worlds of print and periodical

Idalatry

The Palaeontology Newsletter contains a mixture of palaeontological news, book reviews, reviews of past meetings, details of forthcoming meetings as well as a series of regular discussion features. Copies of the Newsletter from Issue 27 onward are available online