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David Williams has recently argued that medieval representations of the monster give humans an image of divinity, but one which can never be totally understood or described. Positive theology, the via positiva, attempts to take what is known of divinity and then to derive more precise statements about the nature of God; it attempts to contain God in human thought and language. The via negativa, by contrast, forces humans to discard the idea of any positive knowledge about God, since reason and language are inadequate to the task of containing or describing a being so totally other to humans. Alexander the Great, the narrator of the Old English Letter of Alexander to Aristotle, experiences such a negation in his campaign in India; he attempts to describe the wondrous beings and races which he encounters with his army, and his narrative of conquest functions as a metaphor for containing the encountered world in thought, description and mental order. However, he is resisted at every turn by natives, monsters and classical divinities; he is forced to realize that his reason and his force are incapable of containing divine power as manifested in the natural world of India.

We report results from a proof-of-principle study investigating a technique for highresolution imaging of large fields of view (FOV). This is achieved through structured illumination of the sample from a laterally replicated spatial light modulator (SLM). By incorporating the SLM into the illumination path of an otherwise conventional microscopy imaging system, we can perform the sampling by using our illumination source instead of our areal detector (camera). The increased resolution is achieved through anti-binning or splitting of the charge-coupled device (CCD) pixels, and the extended FOV is obtained by a lateral replication technique applied to the whole illumination field. With anti-binning, we effectively exceed the sampling resolution limit set by the Nyquist theorem. Also, our lateral replication technique enables us to maintain the same FOV for the increased resolution without the need for adaptive optics or highly corrected lenses far from the optical axis. The two techniques of resolution enhancement and lateral replication of the illumination field could be employed independently, hence offering increased versatility and adaptability for specialized imaging applications. Different imaging modes can be accessed digitally, without the need to change objectives, stitch together individual frames, or move the sample. The resulting imaging modality of this system is quasi-confocal.

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