Ashgate Publishing Blog

Posted by Claire Percy, Senior Marketing Executive

The Halloween activities of pumpkin carving, trick-or-treating and fancy dress parties are well-known to most of us in Europe, North America and Canada, as well as parts of Asia. In Europe in particular, Halloween is the perfect excuse for some light relief before the onset of Winter, but how many of us know the origins of Halloween?

It’s debatable, but many historians believe it dates back to the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain, when the Celts celebrated their new year on 1st November.  They believed that on the night before new year, the boundary between the worlds of the living and  the dead merged, so on 31st October they celebrated Samhain when the ghosts of the dead were able to return.

The superstitious Celts, reliant on nature’s mercy to enable them to feed their families, were understandably superstitious, believing that ghosts allowed the Celtic Priests or Druids to predict the future, which if favourable would have comforted them through the dark Winter months. As we prepare to enjoy Halloween, considering whether to dress as witch or zombie (and will anyone notice the difference from a normal day), we know that the Celts dressed up for real and for completely different reasons, wearing animal masks and costumes to ward off evil spirits, sacrificing their crops and animals to the Pagan Gods in the hope their families would live to see the Spring.

Apart from a shared date, it’s difficult to imagine today’s Halloween has anything in common with Samhain. I’m sure there are other similarities, but I could find just one common thread. It was pagan tradition to leave food and drink outside to appease spirits and discourage them from coming in for food. This lead to the Christian tradition of beggars going to doors to  ask for ‘All-Souls Cakes’ in return for which the beggar promised to pray for the household’s dead. As with Trick-or-Treating, if cakes weren’t forthcoming, vandalism was often the result.

For historians and theologians, the origins of Halloween are fascinating and sometimes emotive. There’s much more to know about the history of Halloween and its traditions that almost certainly originated with the Celts, possibly with the Romans and later, its part in Catholic tradition; about how it was taken by immigrants to North America and the fact that it’s still revered or even banned in some parts of the world; and also how we went from All Hallows Day to Halloween. Historians of science may be interested to know that it was at some point believed that the laws of space and time were temporarily suspended, allowing the spirit world to intermingle with the living!

To coincide with 31^st October, Ashgate has published a new Death Studies catalogue covering all aspects of death, dying, immortality and commemoration. The books featured cover History, Literature, Religion, Law, Social Science and Philosophy. We hope that you find this compelling collection of books to be of interest.

We were sorry to hear about the death of Robin Alston, who founded Scolar Press in 1966.

Scolar Press is an important part of the Ashgate Publishing Group’s history, as it became one of our imprints back in 1986. At that time the list still had a handful of the original reprint series established by Robin Alston. These included the English Recusant Literature volumes and Caxton’s Chaucer; and we subsequently revived one or two of the original facsimile series, notably the Poems of Alexander Pope for the Pope Tercentenary in 1988.

Books from the Scolar Press list were part of the foundations of our current humanities publishing programme and, as many of our authors will remember, our Book History, Literary Studies, History, Music Studies and Art History books were published under the Scolar imprint up until 1996, when we combined our various academic imprints under the single Ashgate name.

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Email updates are sent out monthly (we don’t want to bombard you with emails!), and they include information about newly published books, together with news about conferences we’ll be attending, prizes and awards, and special offers.

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Posted by Heidi Bishop, on behalf of Ashgate’s UK and US Green Committees

At the end of 2010 our UK office engaged Carbon Footprint to conduct a ‘reduction and recycling survey’ and as at March 2011 information is being gathered in order to calculate our carbon footprint. The reduction and recycling surveys are now with us and will be analysed by the Ashgate Green Committee over the coming weeks and recommendations put forward to the management board for implementation.

100% of Ashgate and Gower books are printed on FSC paper and all our catalogues and other promotional literature are 100% recyclable, and also available electronically from our website. All paper used on work premises is recycled as well as some plastics. Overall, we currently recycle more than 60% of our company waste.

In 2010, the US office began composting—we’re up to roughly 50% of all food waste! Employees are happily using our appropriately bright-green durable plates and cutlery, from New England-based company Preserve Products, rather than throwing away countless paper plates and plastic forks. In 2011, we hope to do more to encourage alternative transportation options, and to collaborate with the City of Burlington’s Climate Action Plan workgroups to help “green up” our community.

For more information about our environmental credentials, please see the environmental initiatives section on our website.

Good article on Mashable.com with 4 key tips about how to avoid social media stress. The tips are:

1. Take time to disconnect

2. Breathe

3. Eat food that adds energy

4. Awaken the body: Move

All good tips, and you can read the full article here…

Their conclusion?

The challenge is finding a balance within the information stream. There is an old saying: “You cannot stop the waves, but you can learn to surf.” We are not likely to stop the waves of information coming at us today (nor would we want to), but we can find a balance; we can live consciously and connected, with an active social media life and a healthy body and mind.

I’m an interested observer of bird habits, so the article by Joe Moran in this week’s Times Higher caught my eye, and I really enjoyed the analogy. You can read the article on the THE website, but here’s a small taster..

I have come to see birdwatching as an enviable model of a scholarly community. Birdwatching developed almost entirely separately from academic ornithology, and birders, like trainspotters, are still occasionally caricatured as sartorially challenged, solitary males with poor social skills. Yet birdwatching is a world both spontaneously communal and good-naturedly competitive, with no formal hierarchy but a strong emphasis on credibility and peer approval.

The new managerialist approaches to universities, which emphasise the pursuit of greater productivity and growth aligned to abstract notions of excellence, assume that what drives us are “rational” incentives such as the desire for individual preferment, the coveting of higher positions in league tables and other markers of competitive prestige. The self-generating, self-policing scholarly networks of birdwatching suggest otherwise – that what motivates us most of all, apart from curiosity about the world, are these webs of informal mutual support and the desire for the respect and love of the people around us.

Joe Moran is reader in cultural history, Liverpool John Moores University. He blogs at joemoransblog.blogspot.com

This week’s Times Higher Ed includes an article by Patrick Stewart – known to many as Captain Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek – about being Chancellor at the University of Huddersfield, a position he has held since 2004.

My involvement with the University of Huddersfield has worked out just as I hoped. I am proud to be thought of as a hands-on chancellor – and to have been appointed professor of performing arts. I am proud of the way that the university, with its deep roots in local industry and technical education, has expanded both in terms of student numbers – they stand at a record 24,000 – and the range of its research.

Read the article here…

Another interesting story from the New York Times – Getting the Most Out of Twitter. You don’t have to have anything to say in order to find Twitter useful. 

If you’re already a Twitter user you probably knew that anyway! But if you haven’t yet tried Twitter out the article might help you understand why it has become so popular for so many people.

The truth is, you don’t have to post a message to get the most out of Twitter.

At its best, the social medium is a perpetual, personalized news service about topics of your choosing — whether health care reform, tech news or the latest episode of “Gossip Girl” — filtered and served to you by people who care a lot about what you care a lot about.

Even the most prolific users say Twitter has become more useful as a way to tap in to the discussions of the day than to broadcast their own thoughts.

Read more…