Wilby – författare

Traditional approaches to hydrology have favoured a reductionist perspective. This text argues that hydrologists of the 21st century must increasingly look beyond the traditional boundaries of river channel or river catchment areas to consider new questions: firstly, how water resources should be managed in an integrated and sustainable way with a growing appreciation of the global dimension to water resource problems; secondly, how the search for solutions to water pollution, flooding, drought and environmental degradation requires a broader understanding of transboundary connections between components of the hydrosphere across a range of spatial and temporal scales. In an emerging age of water shortage, increasing dependence will also be placed upon existing monitoring and water distribution networks. Advances in data gathering systems and hydrological modelling have created new opportunities for assessing and managing these water resources. Similarly ecohydrology and palaeohydrological techniques are generating new types of data for model development and testing. This text will provide an excellent overview for post-graduates and researchers studying hydrology, meterology, environmental science and related topics. It will also be useful as supplementary reading for 2nd/3rd year undergraduates in these areas. The ruins of the flooded Derwent village emerged from Ladybower Reservoir, Derbyshire UK in autumn 1995. This image highlights a number of issues pertinent to contemporary hydrology such as: winter droughts severely restrict the replenishment on upland communities; the uneasy relationship between forestry and water resources in water supply catchments; water quality problems associated with acidification, turbidity and sedimentation; the aesthetic and ammenity value of impounded waters

With their dramatic descriptions of black masses and cannibalistic feasts, the records generated by the Basque witch-craze of 160914 provide us with arguably the most demonologically-stereotypical accounts of the witches sabbath or akelarre to have emerged from early modern Europe. While the trials have attracted scholarly attention, the most substantial monograph on the subject was written nearly forty years ago and most works have focused on the ways in which interrogators shaped the pattern of prosecutions and the testimonies of defendants. Invoking the Akelarre diverts from this norm by employing more recent historiographical paradigms to analyze the contributions of the accused. Through interdisciplinary analyses of both French- and Spanish-Basque records, it argues that suspects were not passive recipients of elite demonological stereotypes but animated these received templates with their own belief and experience, from the dark exoticism of magical conjuration, liturgical cursing and theatrical misrule to the sharp pragmatism of domestic medical practice and everyday religious observance. In highlighting the range of raw materials available to the suspects, the book helps us to understand how the fiction of the witches sabbath emerged to such prominence in contemporary mentalities, whilst also restoring some agency to the defendants and nuancing the historical thesis that stereotypical content points to interrogatorial opinion and folkloric content to the voices of the accused. In its local context, this study provides an intimate portrait of peasant communities as they flourished in the Basque region in this period and leaves us with the irony that Europes most sensationally-demonological accounts of the witches sabbath may have evolved out of a particularly ardent commitment, on the part of ordinary Basques, to the social and devotional structures of popular Catholicism.