Papal pronouncements on legitimate lordship and the formulation of nationhood in early fourteenth-century Scottish writings
Early fourteenth-century Scotland produced some of the period's clearest expressions of nationhood, most famously with the so-called Declaration of Arbroath of 1320. Despite the letter's fame, its conceptual language and that of related Scottish texts has not hitherto been entirely recognised. The present article demonstrates that these writings are closely informed by contemporary legal ideas concerning lawful jurisdiction and just war. Their use of legal ideas can be shown to have been inspired by the concerns and outlook of the papacy, particularly with regard to its temporal lordship in Italy. It is this inspiration that can explain the clarity and force with which the Scottish texts of these decades present the kingdom as specifically Scottish and the nation as a political force, for which they have since become renowned.
The beginnings of royal pardon in Scotland
ABSTRACT The well attested (and comprehensively studied) animus that informed English attitudes towards the Gaelic-speaking peoples of the British Isles in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries has tended to obscure important developments in the legal landscape of contemporary Scotland. This article argues that soon after 1200, the king of Scots deliberately abandoned as barbaric, obnoxious and unbecoming a Christian prince the practice of mutilating high-status political enemies and ritually defiling their bodily remains. The transformation reflected influences from England and Europe in general, but the argument here is that ultimately the change reflected the maturation of the Scottish ideas about Christian kingship, royal justice and royal mercy.
Benchmark database for fine-grained image classification of benthic macroinvertebrates
Abstract Managing the water quality of freshwaters is a crucial task worldwide. One of the most used methods to biomonitor water quality is to sample benthic macroinvertebrate communities, in particular to examine the presence and proportion of certain species. This paper presents a benchmark database for automatic visual classification methods to evaluate their ability for distinguishing visually similar categories of aquatic macroinvertebrate taxa. We make publicly available a new database, containing 64 types of freshwater macroinvertebrates, ranging in number of images per category from 7 to 577. The database is divided into three datasets, varying in number of categories (64, 29, and 9 categories). Furthermore, in order to accomplish a baseline evaluation performance, we present the classification results of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) that are widely used for deep learning tasks in large databases. Besides CNNs, we experimented with several other well-known classification methods using deep features extracted from the data.