We present an auditory biofeedback technique that may be used as a tool for stress management. The technique encourages slow breathing by adjusting the quality of a music recording in proportion to the user's respiration rate. We propose two forms of acoustic degradation, one that adds white noise to the recording if the user's breathing deviates from the target rate, and another that reduces the number of channels in a multi-track recording. Validation on a small user study indicates that both techniques are equally effective at reducing respiration rates while performing a secondary task, though user feedback indicates that additive noise is a more intuitive form of sonification.

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Paolo Giovio’s Descriptio Britanniae, Scotiae, Hyberniae et Orchadum presents several problems for the historian of early modern Ireland. Published in 1548, but composed for the most part during the early 1540s, it offered a comparatively detailed portrait of Irish geography, culture and politics to an international audience whose appetite for Irish affairs had been whetted by the recent Henrician Reformation. Yet the text offers scant commentary on Irish politics; its geographical information is often confused; its ethnography is evocative but rarely moralising; and its focus on Ulster and the lifestyle of Conn O’Neill is suggestive but tantalisingly so. The author’s sources are as obscure as his intentions. Nevertheless, Giovio’s text was still being read and cited by leading European and even Irish authors up to a hundred years later. It was a seminal treatment of Ireland and the Irish that found few parallels in international print-houses until the gradual emergence of the writings of Giraldus Cambrensis towards the end of the sixteenth century. This article sets the Descriptio in the twin context of early modern geographical humanism and the international fallout of the Henrician Reformation.

Reviews and short notices417 Michael Haren's lacks a conclusion. David Bates commits the strange tautology of referring more than once to 'the British Isles and Ireland'. But these are minor blemishes on a volume which will be a standard work on the subject in these islands for some time to come. VITA GRIFFINI FTUI CONANI: THE MEDIEVAL LATIN LIFE OF GRUFFUDD AP CYNAN. Edited and translated by Paul Russell. Pp xiv, 221. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. 2006. £50. THE arrival of this splendid edition of the medieval Life of Gruffudd ap Cynan has been long awaited. Already in 2001, at the D.I.A.S. Tionol, Paul Russell announced his intention to reconstruct the Latin source text of the biography through collation of the disparate manuscript corpus. His research entailed a level of philological analysis in both Welsh and Latin, accompanied by sophisticated codicological study, sufficient to earn him the Legonna Celtic Research Prize, awarded by the National Library of Wales in 2003. The eventual appearance of this critical edition reveals how justly deserved the award was.Russell has provided fifty pages of introduction in which he surveys the Welsh and Latin manuscripts of the text (offering two separate stemmata) and presents in dense but clear form his argument for the existence of a lost Latin source text and his reliance on Peniarth MS 434 to reconstruct it. He then concisely summarises the historical significance of his reconstructed text and explains the editorial conventions he has employed in his edition. Not only are we then presented with the text and facing-page translation, but also with thirty pages of textual apparatus followed by fifty pages of linguistic and historical commentary. There are also three appendixes: (1) a tabulation of the orthography of Welsh names; (2) a list of the names of countries and nationalities; and (3) a transcription of B.L., Cott. MS Vitellius C IX, which is a sixteenth-century fair copy of Peniarth MS 434 that belonged to John Dee. In addition to three indexes and a helpful bibliography, Russell provides a concordance of his edition with Peniarth MS 434, the Welsh edition Historia Gruffud vab Kenan, and the English edition A mediaeval prince of Wales (of which he also supplies the chapter headings). All in all, this is a well-organised and clear exposition of a complex argument in a manner which grants full space to analysis of technical matters of codicology and philology without obstructing the goal of accessibility to the student or general reader. It is also a magisterial demonstration of the value of philological scholarship for historians, and of the importance of text editions compiled through, and accompanied by, full linguistic and historical commentary.

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