VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Encounters with Christ in later Middle English pastoral and catechetic texts

This thesis explores believers’ encounters with Christ in the first half of the fifteenth- century, as portrayed in Middle English pastoral and catechetic writings circulating at the time. Scholarship to date has examined the christological nature of lyrics, eucharistic devotion, passion meditations, and mystical writings, while overlooking important pastoral and catechetic texts. This approach has propounded a religious landscape in England marked by personal and privatised piety, and results in an impoverished account of the fundamental locus of encounters with Christ: public worship.
This thesis addresses this inaccurate perception of fifteenth-century religious culture in England, and demonstrates that pastoral and catechetic texts—grassroot textual witnesses mostly neglected for their supposed lack of ‘literary merit’—were predominantly popular and common as variants indicate, thus shedding light on religious practices and beliefs centred on Christ and taking place within the social body of the Church. This thesis examines more than 250 manuscripts and contributes to scholarship by offering new taxonomies of three corpora of texts: Virtues of the Mass treatises, levation prayers, and creeds. It uses a substantial number of mostly unknown and unpublished archival material, indexes and classifies the texts, while also analysing their content, manuscript contexts, and affiliation to textual networks.
This taxonomic work is supplemented by an effort in contextualisation, so as to understand the writings in their historical, political, and cultural context. A significant argument of the thesis, supported by evidence in Chapters One, Three, and Four, is that encounters with Christ promoted within public worship resonated with and advanced the reformist agenda of Archbishop Henry Chichele’s church. Chichele’s agenda was implemented throughout and after the Council of Constance (1414–1418), and promoted unity and pastoral care, while advocating for a ‘wide’ church, in which diverging theological and ideological views could coexist through the unifying nature of public worship. The three corpora under scrutiny are very much embedded within the religious landscape of the Chichelean church. The thesis argues that these corpora demonstrate a symbiosis between Latin and vernacular writings, and between intellectual and parochial milieux, that reflect a pervasive and porous theological discourse across a religious ecosystem particular to the years 1420s to 1440s in England, centred upon encounters with Christ in public worship.

Keywords: pastoral literature
lay spirituality
catechism
Middle English literature
manuscript studies
Advisor: Gillespie, V
Abulafia, A
Dopaminergic signalling during goal-directed behaviour in a structured environment

During flexible behaviour, dopamine is thought to carry reward prediction errors (RPEs), which update values and hence modify future behaviour. However, in real-world situations where the statistical relationships in the environment can be learned, continuously adapting values is not always the most efficient way of adapting to change. Moreover, the environment is not always fully observable, and observations may provide only partial information about the current state of the world. In such partial observable structured environments, as is found in many real-world situations, it is not well understood what kind of information dopamine conveys or its causal role in shaping adaptive behaviour. To probe dopamine’s involvement in goal-directed behavioural flexibility in such environments, we measured and manipulated dopamine while mice solved a partially observable structured sequential decision task. In chapter 3 we show that mice solve such a task using state inference. In chapter 4, we recorded calcium activity from dopaminergic cell bodies in the ventral tegmental area and dopamine axonal projections in the ventral and dorsomedial striatum, as well as dopaminergic concentrations in the same striatal regions. Dopamine multiplexed a wide range of information. At different timescales dopamine signalling was consistent with carrying information about choice-specific RPEs, choice-independent reward history and lateralised movement signals. RPE computations were shaped by task structure and the inferred state of the task. Nonetheless, in chapter 5, we show that although dopamine responded strongly to rewards, optogenetically activating or inhibiting dopamine at the time of trial outcome had no effect on subsequent choice. However, in a different task context, we could show that the same stimulation had a substantial effect on animals’ choices. Therefore, we conclude that when inference guides choice, rewards have a dopamine-independent influence on policy through the information they carry about the world’s state.

Keywords: reinforcement learning
dopamine
striatum
midbrain
inference
reward
motivation
ventral tegmental area
Advisor: Walton, M
Akam, T
Behrens, T
Mutate & conjugate: a method for rapid in-cell validation of epigenetic targets

A bottleneck in the drug discovery process is target validation. Target validation is the process of demonstrating that engagement with a cellular target is linked to the desired therapeutic effect, confirming that the target has a key role in the disease phenotype. Incomplete or incorrect target validation can lead to costly failures at the later stages of drug development. Consequently, techniques that enable rapid and robust target validation are of great value to those seeking to discover new medicines. The advantage of using small molecule ligands over genetic knockdowns, in target validation, is the temporal control over the “knockdown”. In this approach, reactive covalent fragments have been combined with a cysteine mutant of the target protein. It was hypothesised that covalent inhibition would circumvent the need to optimise ligand affinity, accelerating probe development, while also offering increased residency times that could potentially act as a functional knockdown, thus providing information on the function of the target.
The BET bromodomain-containing protein, BRD4, was chosen for proof-of-concept studies. Bromodomains are epigenetic ‘reader’ modules that recognise and bind to acetylated lysines on histone tails, and signal for the recruitment of protein complexes responsible for gene regulation. Owing to the conserved nature of the BET bromodomains, the development of single-domain selective ligands has proved challenging. Consequently, development of ligands that enable the probing of single domain function are highly sought after. Herein, the application of a ‘mutate & conjugate’ approach to enable selective biological probing of BRD4(1) is reported. A structurally stable and functioning mutant, BRD4(1)L94C, was designed, expressed, and validated. Using a structure-guided, and a fragment-based approach, ~270 reactive fragments were screened for C94 labelling. Subsequent fragments were developed and exhibited selective inhibition of BRD4(1)L94C over BRD4(1)WT in an AlphaScreen™ assay. Clickable analogues were used to evaluate proteome-wide selectivity, leading to the discovery of a covalent fragment with exquisite in-cell selectivity for BRD4(1)L94C. Finally, a ‘mutate & conjugate’ strategy was applied to the development of selective protein degraders. This work shows that the combination of reactive fragments and site-directed-mutagenesis could be applied to rapidly develop chemical probes for target validation studies.

Keywords: covalent probes
chemical biology
target engagement
BRD4
target validation
HyTAG
covalent fragments
bromodomains
medicinal chemistry
covalent degraders
mutagenesis
PROTAC
protein pull-down
covalent ligands
Advisor: Conway, S
Bush, J
Old English front vowel orthography in the 7th and 8th centuries

This study examined the ways in which the three Old English front vowels /æ(ː)/, /øː/ and /y(ː)/ were orthographically represented in the 7th and 8th centuries. Data was collected from manuscripts, epigraphy and coin-legends; it was analysed first by Anglo-Saxon region before turning to consider wider, pan-Anglo-Saxon trends.
/æ(ː)/ was represented almost universally by ‹ae› in manuscripts. Allographic variation in the representation of this vowel was found to be systematic; it was suggested that the variation was symptomatic of the ecclesiastical background of scribes, with the ligature «æ» being disfavoured by scribes who had been trained in regions which had been reached first by Continental (rather than Irish) Christian missionaries. Despite the variety in allographs, an explanation for orthographic consistency was sought in the phonology of contemporary Latin, which contained a vowel acoustically very similar to Old English /æ(ː)/. In contrast, numismatic evidence returned significant variation between ‹AE› and ‹E›, some of which was understood to reflect limitations relating to the medium of writing.
The vowel exhibiting the most conspicuous orthographic variation was /øː/, for which ‹oe› and ‹oi› were both found to be common representations. While ‹oe› was used across Anglo-Saxon England, ‹oi› was limited to Northumbria, and was therefore considered to be a uniquely Northumbrian representation. The variation between ‹oi› and ‹oe› in Northumbria was associated, on the one hand, with competing traditions (Continental and Irish) in the teaching of Latin literacy, and the lack of a model in Latin orthography for the representation of /øː/ on the other.
The orthographic representation /y(ː)/ was discovered to be strikingly uniform both diatopically and diachronically. With very few exceptions, this vowel was represented by ‹y› in manuscripts and ‹Y› or ‹ᚣ› in epigraphy and coin-epigraphy. This uniformity in the use of ‹y›/‹Y› was attributed to the availability of Greek language education in the 7th century at Archbishop Theodore’s school in Canterbury.
Through the analysis of early Old English orthography, this study was also able to differentiate between related but separate Old English protothemes with important implications for our understanding of the Old English onomasticon.

Keywords: runes
historical linguistics
old English
Roman alphabet
orthography
historical orthography
historical graphemics
Advisor: Horobin, S
Lowe, J
Fully dynamic evaluation for conjunctive queries with free access patterns

We study the problem of answering conjunctive queries with free access patterns under updates. A free access pattern is a partition of the free variables of the query into input and output. The query returns tuples over the output variables given a tuple of values over the input variables.
We introduce a fully dynamic evaluation approach for such queries. It is fully dynamic in the sense that it supports both inserts and deletes of tuples to the input relations. Our approach computes a data structure that supports the enumeration of the output tuples and maintains it under single-tuple updates to the input data. We also give a syntactic characterization of those queries that admit constant time per single-tuple update and whose output tuples can be enumerated with constant delay given an input tuple. Finally, for triangle and hierarchical queries with free access patterns, we chart the complexity trade-oﬀs between the preprocessing time, update time and enumeration delay for such queries. The trade-oﬀs are strongly or weakly Pareto optimal for triangle and a class of hierarchical queries. Their optimality is predicated on the Online Boolean Matrix-Vector Multiplication conjecture.

Keywords: incremental view maintenance
databases
Advisor: Olteanu, D
Rehabilitation after ankle fracture treatment (RAAFT): facilitating safe weight-bearing after ankle fracture surgery

For as long as orthopaedic surgeons have treated patients with ankle fractures, surgical dogma has enforced weight bearing restrictions on patients postoperatively.
These restrictions have perpetuated patients’ fear of pain, falls and re-injury, with subsequent muscle wasting, stiffness and delayed return to work and hobbies. This thesis explored the behavioural influences which underpin this delayed return to weight-bearing and established the components of ankle fracture rehabilitation requiring advancement.
Firstly, a systematic review found that existing rehabilitation interventions to improve ankle fracture recovery lack a theoretical grounding. Some interventions employed “Education” and “Training” techniques, but few attempted to modify underlying beliefs and behaviour to improve adherence and engagement with recovery.
An exploratory analysis built on previous research in the upper limb, finding association between unhelpful pain beliefs and worse medium-term patient-reported outcomes after ankle fracture surgery.
The gaps, inconsistencies and needs in rehabilitation were explored through interviews with patients recovering from ankle fracture surgery and healthcare professionals who treat them. Patient anxieties, uncertainties, and variable quality interactions with healthcare professionals were among many deficiencies identified and targeted during subsequent intervention design.
The components of a novel rehabilitation package were developed and prioritised through a series of online workshops and surveys. The findings were triangulated to establish theoretically congruent behaviour-change interventions. Surprisingly, the uncertainties and desires of patients were relatively simple. A small amount of information around swelling, weight-bearing and managing pain could be delivered with minimal additional healthcare professional resource.
Overall, this thesis challenges the dogma of weight-bearing restrictions and rehabilitation methods after ankle fracture surgery. It proposes methods for patients to self-manage their recovery, while highlighting some remaining barriers to implementation.

Keywords: surgery
weight-bearing
ankle fracture
behaviour change
rehabilitation
Advisor: Griffin, X
Sandhu, H
Baird, J
Medicine, time, and fiction in Rabelais

In the prologue to Pantagruel, Rabelais’s narrator Alcofribas promises his readers that sufferers of toothache will find no better remedy than the book they have in their hands, once it has been infused with powder and pressed between hot linens. A reading influenced by the medical humanities might take Alcofribas’s hawking as indicative of Rabelais intentionally drawing a parallel between his professional identities of physician and writer, using his fiction as an alternative means of participating in the theoretical debates of his day or a vehicle for therapeutic laughter. This thesis, however, proposes that Rabelais’s fictions resist both an instrumentalist and biographical approach: reconsidering how medicine is represented across his works allows for reconsideration of the specific force of (his) fictional writing. It sets Rabelais’s fictions in relation to a range of early modern medical texts, written traces of Rabelais’s medical life, and critical histories of medicine. By focussing on different elements of the temporality of care and cure, it also proposes a new lens through which to understand the practice of medicine as a contingent and collaborative process, engaging not only the practitioner and the patient, but also the materials which mediate their encounter (including Alcofribas’s repurposed pages). Tracing Rabelais’s re-imagining of the stages classically involved in the medical encounter – Anamnesis, Diagnosis, Prognosis, and Cure – close readings will be supported by intertextual ‘suturing’ with classical and contemporary source texts, all in a bid to recover the specific animation (movement, energy, temporality) of Rabelais’s fictional writing, and the experimental, embodied, and interdisciplinary interpretative mode it prompts. This thesis is therefore an experiment in literary analysis, in the cultural history of medicine, and in the contemporary medical humanities: one in which Rabelais emerges as a powerful case study for reimagining the force of fiction from the early modern period to today.

Keywords: temporality
time
Rabelais
medical humanities
early modern literature
Advisor: Williams, W
The money multiplier and asset returns

In recent years, we have lived through times of unprecedented money and credit creation, which has prompted a new interest in the role of money and credit in the economy. In this work, I show that the money multiplier, the ratio of a broad monetary aggregate to a narrow monetary aggregate, captures the rate of money creation in the economy and robustly predicts stock, bond and currency returns. I link the predictive ability of the money multiplier to its economic interpretations as a measure of economy-wide leverage and an alternative measure of money velocity.
First, I look at U.S. stock and bond market and show that money multipliers robustly predict stock and bond excess returns over the period January 1959 - December 2015, and are priced in cross-section of stocks. These multipliers remain statistically significant after controlling for outside money growth and other well- understood predictors of stock and bond returns.
Then I extend my analysis to currencies. I investigate short-run and long-run relationships between bilateral exchange rates and broad money multipliers of ten countries. I motivate my analysis with the quantity theory of money and find a strong long-run relationship between the exchange rate, relative money velocities, relative money supplies of the two countries and their relative output. I argue that the money multiplier can be seen as an alternative measure for money velocity, as it accounts for propensity to spend money not only on real sector goods and services but on financial assets too.

Keywords: return predictability
macro finance
money multiplier
empirical asset pricing
Advisor: Piatti, I
Wilson, M
Social sharing of emotions and bivalent emotions

This thesis has two objectives: Investigating effects of sharing one’s own emotions with other people across different stressors and exploring bivalent emotions in interpersonal and intergroup contexts. Chapter One presents a general introduction to the theoretical foundation which my pursuit of the two lines of research stems from. Chapter Two presents Project 1, an online study (Study 1) that captured social sharing behaviour during a relatively early stage of the COVID-19 pandemic using prospective questionnaires. Results suggested that social sharing was associated with emotion-improving effects. Chapter Three presents Project 2, which involved two online experimental studies confirming that interpersonal encouragement of reconstrual, rather than of recounting, generally yielded more positive effects across stressors varying in time span (interpersonal conflicts vs. COVID-19 news; Study 2A) or induced specific emotion (angry vs. regretful conflicts; Study 2B). Chapter Four, switching the thesis’s focus to questions relevant to bivalent emotions, presents Project 3, an online study (Study 3) which explored motives for and affective outcomes of sharing this kind of emotional experience using prospective questionnaires. Results showed that motives and outcomes associated with sharing bivalent emotions were similar to those associated with sharing negative emotions. Chapter Five presents Project 4, an online experimental investigation of bivalent emotions (Study 4) that moved beyond into the framework of social cognition. Despite the new insights into the dehumanisation literature, this study failed to provide evidence that presenting outgroups’ bivalent, rather than univalent, emotions helped improve intergroup relations. Finally, Chapter Six presents a general discussion about the main findings from the above four projects, the limitations observed throughout my DPhil research, and the implications and future research directions indicated by the research reported in this thesis.

Keywords: social cognition
emotion regulation
bivalent emotions
emotional ambivalence
mixed emotions
coping
online communication
social sharing of emotion
dehumanisation
heuristic-systematic model
intergroup relations
intergroup bias
infrahumanisation
social support
COVID-19
mental health
Advisor: Parkinson, B
Hepach, R
Papers and people - ethnographic explorations of the passport paradigm

Passports, IDs, and related identification documents are powerful objects: redrawing borders on bodies and projecting states onto people, the documents we (do not) hold define how we become known in the public arena, which privileges and obligations we (do not) hold, and what our official status is in the societies in which we exist. This reality gives rise to what I call the passport paradigm, wherein the governance of basic rights, mobility, and belonging is enacted by identity qua documentary form. Yet why and how have documentary identifiers become so consequential? And what do those who use them and those who make them want from these documents? Drawing on a multi-scalar, object-oriented ethnographic approach, I trace these questions across the lifeworlds of various groups shaping and experiencing the documentary regime in Germany as well as on the supra-national level. The constituencies portrayed range from border guards and document experts, regulators and passport manufacturers, to normal people navigating the passport paradigm. Across these different groups the roles, meanings, and consequences of documents fluctuate, leaving us with the realisation that the devices we use to stabilise identity do not hold a fixed identity of their own. The only continuity to be found, it appears, is the inherent fallibility of the identificatory project itself. Notwithstanding, a consensus that identification documents do work persists among all studied groups. What to make of this? I suggest that the fluid quality of identification documents, reflected in their changing roles, renders them an effective Ersatz in the fulfilment of the often-contradictory desires pervading the administrative system. This Ersatz-quality – identification documents’ ability to stand in for a large number of wants and functions – is crucial to their long-term prevalence and intense consequentiality for it enables an identificational realism in which any identificatory failures – social, technical, political – are eventually absorbed and transformed by the system into a demand for more of it. In a world in which identification technologies, both documentary and digital, gain increasing currency in ever more dimensions of daily life and an abundance of scholars across the board of social science are engaged in their study, this realisation is crucial, for it may set us on a new path to formulating critiques and alternative visions more attuned to identification’s evasive nature and thereby the wider fields of activity, such as governance, policing, and state-making in which it is immersed.

Keywords: anthropology of bureaucracy
identification
passports
state-making