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Maximus and Captain Berkley

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St Sergius of Valaam

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Captain Laurence Reading to Temeraire in Madeira

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The Fighting Temeraires

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Shades of Camlann

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Sir Owain ap Urien

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Rust Knight

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The Suffering of Job

For context, I drew this while researching the ethics of disability and, more broadly, marginalisation for my thesis.

At present, Western academia has an unreflective bias towards a northern protestant ethos, and so its ethical assumptions are closely associated with ideas of utility and legalism. This means they are often unable to incorporate either the disabled or disenfranchised into their frameworks without presenting them as the other; moral subjects whose agency and value are overlooked. Even virtue ethics, which I personally ascribe to, is often unable to prevent itself from creating hierarchies of value, which lead to similar problems of parternalism and dehumanisation.

I was motivated to focus on this area because I was nolonger comfortable having my own experience and worth dictated to me by those whose experience is one of manifest moral privilege, and who seem incapable of internalising the inherent worth of the marginalised or acknowledge the dependency which is inherent to the human experience.

The figure of Job is important to me in this as he represents a paradigmatic case of one who is divorced from those aspects of himself which appear to give meaning and value to his life, and so is forced into a choice. Either he acknowledges the inherent worth of his humanity or he despairs.

He does not approach this issue with passivity or pious fatalism, but rages against the injustice of his experience; an injustice made worse by social exclusion and the pretentious moralising of his "friends".

Job does, however, refuse to accept that his misfortune is somehow a cosmic punishment, and he refuses to diminish himself because of the privation he experiences.

The book of Job can be read a number of ways, but, I would argue, it is, at its heart a meditation on the inherent value of human life in a way which is not dependent on external goods or social capital.

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Martin Septim

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How St Botolph (feast 17th June Gregorian) drave a devil from Ikanhoe (now Boston in Lincolnshire)

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St Columba of Iona (feast, 9th June Gregorian) blessing a dragon of the deeps

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The Cauldron Pair Dadeni

(Strictly speaking, those put in the Pair Dadeni are only described as being mute thereafter, however, I don't think one can stew a man in a cauldron without parts of them dropping off)

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The quest of Sir Peredur fab Efrawg

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Teyrnon returning Gwri Wallt Euryn (Pryderi) to Rhiannon, ending her penance

From the Mabinogion

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Chieftain Pwyll and his hounds

From the Mabinogion

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Sir Bredbeddle, the Greene Knight

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Sir Galahad and the Fisher King