bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Headwinds from the North
Authors: Salomone Rosemary
Published: February 2022

This chapter looks at English-taught university courses and programs in the Netherlands, a country where English proficiency is high and the internationalization of higher education through English is longstanding and widespread. It begins with the1992 Higher Education and Research Act, which laid out parameters for using other languages and preserving Dutch in the universities. Addressing the pros and cons of English in internationalization, it continues up to the present with repeated manifestos posted by professors and students, a series of reports and public meetings, and a failed court challenge, all informing the debate. It weighs the arguments on each side, focusing on the benefits of English to student diversity and employability versus the harms to academic quality and access and to the Dutch language as a vehicle for intellectual engagement and knowledge production. It ends with pending legislative proposals to find a better balance and a national consensus among the competing interests.
The Ancient World Got Along Without It Until the Rise of Christianity
Authors: Cassedy Steven
Published: February 2022

How old is the concept of meaning, as used in such expressions as “the meaning of life”? This chapter and the next one make the point that it is of quite recent origin; there is nothing equivalent in the ancient world. The notion of meaning in the simple sense of “signification” or “thing signified,” as something to be investigated and explained, emerges in ancient Greece. The Jewish scriptures, lacking a verb that means “to mean” or “to signify,” speak exclusively of interpreting (Belshazzar to Daniel: “If you can read the writing and make known to me its interpretation . . .”). Ancient Greek features a verb that means “to give signs,” “to signify.” Both Plato and Aristotle elaborated fairly sophisticated theories of meaning, and their culture gave them rich terrain to explore, given the frequent references in Greek literature to oracles, divination, and interpretation. Aristotle used a participial form of the verb to denote “thing signified,” roughly equivalent to English meaning. But there is nothing equivalent to meaning as used in the expression “the meaning of life.”
Idealism and Romanticism
Authors: Cassedy Steven
Published: February 2022

This chapter introduces the earliest instance of a phrase equivalent to the English “meaning of life”—der Sinn des Lebens in German, where the reference for the first time is to a single, all-encompassing meaning. Johann Georg Hamann (1730–1788) reverted to the “book of nature” conceit to explain how God reveals truths to us: through his own creation (nature) as well as through men (Scripture). Nature allows us to discover Sinn in the world. A section of the chapter is devoted to this German word, often translated into English as meaning but differing considerably from that word. Sinn lacks the verbal quality of meaning and means also “sense”—as in the five senses and as in the “sense” of something. It tends to be vaguer than meaning and is more readily associated with mystery. Though it shows up plentifully in the works of Kant, the writer who most powerfully pushed it in the direction of its modern usage was the Romantic poet Novalis (1772–1801), probably the first to use the phrase der Sinn des Lebens (translated into English, misleadingly, as “the meaning of life”). In his works, we repeatedly find the world represented as containing signs or ciphers that invite us to discover a hidden sense or meaning. But the ambiguous and polyvalent word Sinn makes Novalis’s writing highly suggestive and challenges the reader who seeks a precise interpretation. Other figures in German Romanticism continue Novalis’s use of Sinn in ways that lack precision and suggest mystery.
Time, Grace, and Mythic Sensibility
Authors: Ward Graham
Published: February 2022

Examining how Christ is presented in Mark leads into developing further key leitmotifs and focus primarily on the nature of time and the relationship between mythos and logos. This chapter argues that Christ as Logos and Christ as Mythos are profoundly, and unavoidably, intertwined in all Christological reflection. Through Scriptural exegesis, the grace that flows from encountering Christ as both mythos and logos, can be recognized as omnidirectional with respect to time. This argument will be used throughout the book to deconstruct some of the linear understandings that have dominated Christian theology. It opens the interweave of kairos and chronos to a liturgical understanding of time (to which ecclesial architecture bears witness and cultivates). This liturgical understanding draws upon both myth and rhythm and is explored through a parable by Luis Borges. It renders complex the relationship between the mythical and the historical Jesus Christ.
Creation as Triune Joy
Authors: Ward Graham
Published: February 2022

The argument of this chapter is that creation is a Trinitarian event, and as such divine eloquence. Attention to paid to the liturgical canticle of Benedicite. In creation the intra-Trinitarian rhythm of gifted loving is expressed in its creaturely manner, all things communicating a doxology both to the divine Creator and to each other. This circle of endless prayer constitutes the order of love. There is a comparison between this account of creation and the one offered by process theology, bringing out the Christomorphic character of the dynamics operating in this account. Love is the basis for the interchange of acknowledgements in which and through which divine expression is taken up within human expression. Human communication, it is argued, emerges from the communicative relations between language and land: mimesis being written into all things. Hidden with Christ in God, human creativity is a continual longing to belong.
Introduction
Authors: Kerr Matthew P. M.
Published: February 2022

The Introduction sets out the book’s two key topics: (1) how prose writers in the nineteenth century turned to account the difficulties that attended writing about, and writing with, the sea, and (2) how their efforts enable a reassessment of marginalized literary techniques such as repetition and cliché. The Introduction explores the preference for marine materiality and literality over figurative representations of the sea in recent scholarship, noting its association with the idea that conventions such as the sublime, empty, or eternal sea took hold in the Romantic period. By contrast, a consideration of Romantic narratives of disappointment at sea shows a more self-conscious and critical approach to marine style and theme. The Introduction also offers an overview of how the authors discussed in the rest of the book fit together and summarizes the individual chapters.
Unsolved Seas and the Victorian Novel
Authors: Kerr Matthew P. M.
Published: February 2022

This chapter attends to nineteenth-century texts where the sea lurks in the background—as the context for a sojourn or a crossing or a memory, or as a figurative element. The first part of the discussion shows how the Victorian novel’s sprawl and supposed formlessness were sometimes negotiated through marine objects, experiences, and metaphor. Particular attention is paid to a sea-shell metaphor used by George Eliot. The other sections examine three canonical Victorian novels: William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield, and Charlotte Brontë’s Villette. These texts reveal a set of authors who were to varying degrees attracted by the sea, unsure about the depth of their commitment to it, and interested in making imaginative use of that same irresolution. The chapter also contains a short discussion of Victorian sea-poetry, in which the more rigorous formal structures of verse discipline marine vagueness.
How Do Rationalism and Empiricism Provide Sound Foundations?
Authors: Shneiderman Ben
Published: February 2022

The contrast between AI and HCAI is a continuation of the 2,000-year-old clash between Aristotle’s rationalism, based on logical analyses, and Leonardo da Vinci’s empiricism, based on sensory exploration of the world. Both are valuable and worthy of understanding. Both philosophies, rationalism and empiricism, offer valuable insights, so I apply rational thinking for its strengths, but I know that balancing it with an empirical outlook helps me see other possibilities, which use observational strategies. Watching users of technology has always led me to fresh insights, so I am drawn to usability studies, interviews, naturalistic observations, and repeated weeks-long case studies with users doing their work to complement the rationalist approach of controlled experiments in laboratory settings.
Intelligent Agents and Supertools
Authors: Shneiderman Ben
Published: February 2022

Those who pursue the science goal build cognitive computers that they describe as smart, intelligent, knowledgeable, and capable of thinking. The resulting human-like products may carry out narrow tasks successfully, but these designs can exacerbate the distrust, fears, and anxiety that many users have about their computers. The innovation goal community believes that computers are best designed to be supertools that amplify, augment, empower, and enhance humans. Supertools suggest human control of potent devices that amplify human performance. The combined strategy could be to design familiar HCAI user interfaces with AI technologies for services such as text messaging suggestions and internal operations to transmit optimally across complex networks.
Social Robots and Active Appliances
Authors: Shneiderman Ben
Published: February 2022

This chapter covers the many attempts by science goal advocates to build social robots over hundreds of years, which have attracted widespread interest. At the same time, active appliances, mobile devices, and kiosks are widespread consumer successes. Innovation goal champions prefer designs that are seen as steerable instruments, which increase flexibility or mobility, while being expendable in rescue, disaster, and military situations. The combined design could be to start with human-like services which have proven acceptance, such as voice-operated virtual assistants. These services could be embedded in active appliances which give users control of features that are important to them. Innovation goal thinking also leads to better than human performance in active appliances, such as using 4-wheeled or treaded robots to provide the mobility over rough terrain or floods, maneuverability in tight spaces, and heavy lifting capacity. Active appliances can also have superhuman sensors, such as infrared cameras or sensitive microphones, and specialized effectors, such as drills on Mars Rovers and cauterizing tools on surgical robots.
Summary and Skeptic’s Corner
Authors: Shneiderman Ben
Published: February 2022

The fifteen recommendations for governance structures to create reliable, safe, and trustworthy systems will enable designers to translate widely discussed ethical principles into professional practices in large organizations with clear schedules. These recommendations are summarized in the four levels of governance structures: (1) reliable systems based on sound software engineering practices, (2) safety culture through business management strategies, (3) trustworthy certification by independent oversight, and (4) regulation by government agencies. Global efforts promote HCAI thinking and encourage policy decisions by governments, regional alliances, and internationial bodies. However, massive retraining and rethinking will be necessary over several decades to achieve a new synthesis that preserves individual rights, encourages economic development, preserves the environment, and limits the impact of malicious actors.
Introduction: Driving HCAI Forward
Authors: Shneiderman Ben
Published: February 2022

The central ideas of this book are the HCAI framework, design metaphors, and governance structures. These ideas clarify how human-centered thinking will help bring the powerful AI algorithms into widespread use by way of reliable, safe, and trustworthy systems. AI’s expansion from a focus on algorithms to include user experience design methods is happening in practitioner and research communities, which now regularly discuss ethics, responsible AI, fairness, explainability, and other topics. New research directions include boosting citizen science, stopping misinformation, and finding new treatments and vaccines for major diseases. The growth of research groups, conferences, journals, and research funding is an indication of interest in HCAI.
Breach of Privilege
Authors: Berman Carolyn Vellenga
Published: February 2022

This chapter is devoted to parliamentary reform and the art of representing the People—two topics that engaged Dickens’s fervent interest as a writer and reporter. It emphasizes the role played by the media in the passage of the Reform Act of 1832. Reporting the parliamentary debates remained an official breach of privilege until after Dickens’s death, though it was tolerated. The chapter asks how the private is made public in fiction and journalism from The Mirror of Parliament to Dickens’s parliamentary sketches. It offers a history of parliamentary reform intertwined with Dickens’s own family history, while examining the pressures on Parliament to offer a “mirror” of the nation. Next, it returns to Gurney’s Brachygraphy, showing how the unconscious satire of its practice texts concerning legitimate rule reverberated in Dickens’s fiction. The chapter ends with Dickens’s first contracted novel, Barnaby Rudge, a tale of the Gordon Riots of 1780. It reads this historical novel as both a response to parliamentary history and a re-presentation of events Dickens witnessed: the anti-Catholic riots leading to parliamentary reform. These events produced the “breach” birth of Dickens as a writer.
Vagabonds
Authors: Berman Carolyn Vellenga
Published: February 2022

This chapter reads Oliver Twist (1837–9) as a tale of two Parliamentary Papers: the Poor Law Commission Report of 1834 and the Prisons Report of 1836. In so doing, it traces the convergence of domestic and colonial reform in Parliament in the period between the abolition of slavery in 1833 and emancipation in 1838—the period when British colonial slaves were controversially retained by their masters as “apprentices.” It begins with Stockdale v. Hansard, a case of libel arising from the Prisons Report, which was only resolved by the Parliamentary Papers Act of 1840. This trial coincided with the first installments of Oliver Twist in February 1837. To draw out connections between the blue books summarized in The Mirror of Parliament and Dickens’s emerging fiction, the chapter examines Oliver Twist in light of the parliamentary reports, with an eye for “vagabonds”: those who escaped their bonds as workers, prisoners, or slaves. It considers how Dickens’s disenfranchised characters are constructed from the tissues of parliamentary publications and brought to life by the novelist’s response to them. Finally, it stresses the transatlantic dimensions of Dickens’s early fiction—including the reference to cotton “twist” in Oliver’s name.
Introduction
Authors: Chi Man Kwong
Published: February 2022

The first chapter discusses the subject of the book, ‘Hong Kong servicemen’, and explains the topic’s importance. It first defines terms such as ‘Hong Kong servicemen’, ‘Chinese’, ‘Eurasians’, and ‘Hongkongers’, and suggests the use of the term ‘Chinese’ often risks omitting the diversity of Hong Kong Chinese. It also highlights the diverse ethnic, cultural, and social backgrounds of the Hongkongers, who had a distinctive historical experience during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This chapter then puts the Hong Kong servicemen in the context of the age of New Imperialism (1870–1914), when multi-ethnic and multicultural colonial armed forces were the norm. It explains the reasons for the colonial empires to enlist the subject people in their armed forces, although the primary purpose of such a force was to police the colonial population. It also discusses the experience of other colonial soldiers, stressing that while many faced a similar problem of split loyalties to the colonial power and their people, their experience could differ considerably and should be studied case by case. The chapter then puts the Hong Kong servicemen in the context of modern Chinese history and the Chinese diaspora. It points out that Chinese nationalist narratives that stress unification and homogeneity have often overshadowed the historical experience of Hongkongers.
The Precursors, 1860–1880
Authors: Chi Man Kwong
Published: February 2022

The second chapter covers the period from the establishment of the Canton Coolie Corps during the Second Opium War to the 1880s. The Canton Coolie Corps was the first unit of the British Army to be composed mainly of ethnic Chinese in Hong Kong. The coolies received some military training and served as porters for the British forces during the last phase of the Second Opium War, when the British forces operated in North China and eventually captured Peking. The performance of the Coolie Corps led to a discussion among the Hong Kong government, the War Office, and the Foreign Office over the feasibility of recruiting Hong Kong Chinese for military service from the 1860s to the 1880s. The discussion illuminates the contemporary British understanding of ‘Chinese’ from physique to mentality and reveals that the so-called ‘Sickman’ rhetoric did not exist among the British decision-makers when they discussed whether Chinese in Hong Kong should be recruited as colonial troops.
Hong Kong Resistance, 1942–1945
Authors: Chi Man Kwong
Published: February 2022

This chapter details the role played by the Hong Kong servicemen in the war against Japan after the fall of Hong Kong. It provides a brief discussion of the activities of the British Army Aid Group (BAAG), an underground resistance organisation that operated in Hong Kong and South China throughout the Pacific War. The BAAG helped communicate with the British Commonwealth prisoners of war in Hong Kong, and its intelligence allowed the Allied air forces in China to conduct a sustained air campaign against the Japanese in the area. The Hong Kong servicemen were of vital importance in the success of the BAAG, as they had the knowledge of the ground, the language, and the people in South China. The ex-servicemen were also essential in the running and administration of the organisation, as they were familiar with the British military organisational culture and were bilingual.
The Hong Kong Volunteer Company, 1944–1945
Authors: Chi Man Kwong
Published: February 2022

This chapter turns to the Hong Kong unit that fought in the Burma Campaign. After the fall of Hong Kong, around 700 Hong Kong Chinese servicemen reported to the BAAG, and 126 of them were organised as the China Unit and received additional military training. They were then flown to India and were renamed as the Hong Kong Volunteer Company, which became part of the Chindit Force that fought in Burma from March to July 1944. This chapter chronicles the experience of the unit using untapped Chinese, Japanese, and British archival sources. Also, it looks at the complex cultural, ethnic, and social backgrounds of the members of the unit, and discusses the tension between the men from such diverse backgrounds and the difficulty of commanding them in war. This chapter then discusses the Volunteer Company’s experience during the war’s final stage, when the unit was almost disintegrated because of the politics between Britain, the United States, and China over the war in China and Southeast Asia, as well as bureaucracy within the British military. The last section of the chapter looks at some of the veterans’ post-war lives.
Life for Service Personnel in Cold War Hong Kong, 1946–1997
Authors: Chi Man Kwong
Published: February 2022

This chapter discusses the life of soldiering in Cold War Hong Kong, discussing issues such as the source of recruitment, training, and terms of service. In particular, the issue of loyalty among the Hong Kong servicemen and the ways employed by the British to maintain it are discussed in detail. It points out that while the Hong Kong servicemen gradually achieved equality with their British colleagues, the British had always been careful in preventing the ranks of the Hong Kong servicemen from the infiltration of the Chinese Communists, Nationalists, and the triads (Chinese organised criminal gangs). The chapter then describes the experiences of the Hong Kong servicemen from the Korean War to the peacekeeping mission to Cyprus in 1993.
H. G. Wells’s ‘Theological Excursion’ and the Dialogue Novel
Authors: Hobson Suzanne
Published: February 2022

Chapter 2 presents H. G. Wells as the most famous case of a lapsed unbeliever in the interwar period and explores the impact of Wells’s ‘theological excursion’ on his wartime fiction. Wells conceived of an idiosyncratic version of ‘God’ that might explain, and offer consolation for, the existence of evil as seen in what would become its characteristic twentieth-century form in the First World War. Wells presented his theology in books of philosophy and novels which quickly became a target for Rationalist derision and ire. Wells responded in kind, answering his critics in letters to the Rationalist press and even including the most famous of his opponents as a character in The Undying Fire (1919). This chapter suggests that Wells’s argument with Rationalism gave direction and purpose to his literary experiments at this time. In Mr Britling Sees It Through (1916) and The Soul of a Bishop (1917) he moved decisively away from the example set by modernist fiction to a ‘spread-out’ form capable of addressing the paradox of evil. In The Undying Fire, he thought he had perfected both his fictional method and his theodicy. Described by Wells as a frank rewrite of the Book of Job, the novel presents Wells’s minimal theology in a form that no one could mistake for modernism.
The ‘Death of God’ in New Testament Biofiction
Authors: Hobson Suzanne
Published: February 2022

Chapter 3 examines the interwar revival and transformation of a genre that had a Rationalist agenda inbuilt: New Testament biofiction or, in Graham Holderness’s words, the Jesus-novel. Following in the wake of Higher Criticism, this enormously popular genre mixed biography and fiction in its retelling of the life and death of Jesus, a process that often reduced Christ to man rather than god, and the Gospels to literature rather than scripture. This chapter emphasizes the influence of George Moore’s The Brook Kerith (1916) on later versions of the Jesus-novel by D. H. Lawrence, H.D., Mary Borden, and Iwan Nashiwin. Moore’s version emphasizes the virtues of oral presentation as a means of getting the story straight; his vernacular approach sought to cut through the rhetorical tricks and literary seductions that disguised the truth of Jesus’s life and death on the cross. Lawrence and H.D. adopt a more heavily symbolic and stylized prose in their New Testament stories but do so with similar ends in mind. In engaging with the events of Jesus’s life, and especially those connected to the crucifixion and resurrection, these authors foreground questions of belief in a way that stories based on other historical and mythological lives do not. More pointedly, this chapter argues, they counter the popular view of unbelief as a recent or modern development by locating its origins at the very beginnings of Christianity itself.
Mary Butts and ‘Belief in Belief’ in Traps for Unbelievers and Supernatural Stories
Authors: Hobson Suzanne
Published: February 2022

Mary Butts is an outlier among the writers discussed in this book because of her deep-felt religiosity and equally deep-felt scepticism towards modern expressions of unbelief. Yet, of all these figures, she was the most knowledgeable in the contemporary literature of unbelief and the only writer to mention ‘rationalist press stuff’ explicitly in a work of fiction.⁠ This chapter argues that Butts made her own contribution to this literature in the form of Traps for Unbelievers (1932), a study of the error made by modern unbelievers when they insist on ‘truth’ as the minimum requirement for belief. It then moves on to Butts’s own ‘strong’ understanding of belief in belief and examines the working out of this concept in novels and short supernatural stories from the late 1920s and 1930s. Butts suggests that a weakening in the human belief system left by the failure of Christianity needed to be compensated for by a strengthening elsewhere. This chapter argues she used her fiction as a testing ground for possible sources of new conviction and for the nature and degree of belief that could be borne by modern fiction and, by extension, the modern world at large.
The One is Many and the Many are One
Authors: Rassi Salam
Published: February 2022

Chapter 3 (‘The One is Many and the Many are One’) explores ʿAbdīshōʿ’s writings on the Trinity, a key Christian tenet that many Muslim polemicists believed to be a form of tritheism. This charge was levelled repeatedly in the centuries leading up to ʿAbdīshōʿ’s lifetime, prompting Christian apologists to demonstrate that God was a unitary being without denying His triune nature. In line with earlier authors, ʿAbdīshōʿ begins by establishing the existence of the world and its temporal origins from a single, infinite cause, which he infers from the orderliness and composite nature of cosmos. He then argues that this cause must possess three states of intellection identical to its essence, while affirming the three Trinitarian Persons as essential attributes in a single substance. While these strategies owe much to earlier apologies, ʿAbdīshōʿ frames them in a technical language reminiscent of the Muslim philosophized theology (kalām) of his day, in particular, by making use of Avicennian expressions of God as a Necessary Being. But rather than simply borrowing from Islamic systems of thought to justify the Trinity, our author demonstrates that the issues raised by Muslims regarding the Trinity could be resolved internally, that is, through recourse to the works of earlier Christian authorities and to Christian scripture.
Parish
Authors: Highley Christopher
Published: February 2022

This chapter explores Blackfriars’ parochial identity as St. Anne’s Blackfriars. The parish became a stronghold of godly Protestantism in later sixteenth-century London, thanks to the efforts of the resident preachers Stephen Egerton and William Gouge, and their local lay supporters. Their powerful and sometimes provocative preaching attracted a wide audience, including many parish outsiders. The Blackfriars’ association with the religious avant-garde of puritan activism was reinforced by the many Huguenot residents from overseas who shared the desire of men like Egerton and Gouge for a more perfectly reformed church. The chapter makes special note of the many foreign-born stationers living in Blackfriars and their output of reformed religious works.
Remembering the Catholic Blackfriars
Authors: Highley Christopher
Published: February 2022

This chapter argues that although St. Anne’s was closely identified the godly, the local residents were not all puritan. In fact, several Catholic families also lived here among the remains of pre-Reformation London’s most prestigious religious house. Many Catholics revered the Blackfriars as a sacred space, whose very name conjured memories of better days and inspired loyalty to the Old Faith. The area’s continuing significance for Catholics is nowhere more evident than at the so-called “Fatal Vesper” in 1623, when dozens of people were crushed to death at an illegal Jesuit sermon. Memories of the pre-dissolution Blackfriars also intrigued playwrights like Shakespeare, Fletcher, and Webster. Their plays Henry VIII and The Duchess of Malfi evoke the history of the playing space and its surroundings to open up questions about the origins and results of England’s Reformation.
Being a Poet
Authors: Knox Philip
Published: February 2022

The Rose transformed ideas about the power and prestige of vernacular writing, forcing those who came in its wake to reimagine not only what it meant to claim a certain status for one’s writings, but also what it meant to write as oneself, to inscribe one’s identity in a text. This chapter explores these ideas, repositioning the Rose as a central force in a host of interlocking discourses that emerged in late medieval literary culture. Part of this exploration will involve thinking about how the Rose comes into contact with that privileged sphere of cultural activity associated with learned auctores, the famous classical poetae, and the newly crowned laureate poets of trecento Italy. It examines a key scene in the Rose, before turning to the Middle English translation known as the Romaunt of the Rose, and Chaucer’s House of Fame.
Distrust of Ecclesiastical Institutions
Authors: Levack Brian P.
Published: February 2022

This chapter deals with two separate developments that caused a loss of trust in established churches in England, Scotland, and America. The first was the long tradition of anticlericalism, which played a pivotal role in England’s break with the Roman Catholic Church in the 1530s and again in the growth of Puritan distrust of the English Church during the archiepiscopate of Archbishop William Laud in the 1630s, leading to the abolition of episcopacy in 1646. After the reestablishment of the Church in 1661, the persecution of Protestant dissenters sowed deep mutual distrust between them and the Church, which a limited grant of toleration in 1689 only partially remedied. The same was true in Scotland, where a reluctant toleration of Episcopalian dissenters in 1712 did little to restore trust in the Presbyterian Church established in 1690. In America, distrust of established churches in some of the colonies led to the separation of church and state in the First Amendment of the United States Constitution and the disestablishment of all churches in the individual states by 1818.
The Crisis of Institutional Trust, 1970–2020
Authors: Levack Brian P.
Published: February 2022

This chapter explores the crisis of trust in British and American political, legal, financial, and ecclesiastical institutions during the past fifty years. It compares the loss of institutional trust in the early modern period with that of the recent past, recognizing the much larger number and greater complexity of present-day political, legal, financial, commercial, and ecclesiastical institutions. It deals with the growing distrust of state and municipal as well as national institutions, the movement for jury nullification, the Bernie Madoff scandal, the widespread loss of confidence in American corporations, and the defection of Christians from mainstream churches. It also discusses the unprecedented distrust of the news media, which had no parallel in the early modern period. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the Trump administration’s distrust of fact-based knowledge, especially science, and its broader war on truth itself, which the eighteenth-century philosophers considered the main criterion for trusting other people.
Conclusion
Authors: Levack Brian P.
Published: February 2022

The Conclusion identifies four themes that link the loss of trust in early modern British and American institutions with the corresponding loss of trust in British and American institutions in the past fifty years. These themes are the abuse of power, corruption, ideology, and anti- elite sentiment. Resentment of elites is related to the growth of inequality and the loss of community in the United States in recent times. The Conclusion identifies periods in the history of both Britain and the United States when the government adopted policies that were fair, transparent, and efficient, and therefore fostered trust rather than distrust.
Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace
Authors: Goldman Lawrence
Published: February 2022

The polymathic Charles Babbage—mathematician, engineer, systems analyst, economist, computer pioneer—has rarely been associated closely with statistics. But he was so proud of his role in founding the Statistical Movement in 1833-4 that he left four published accounts of it, and he made contributions to the Statistical Society of London on several occasions over the next three decades. This chapter examines Babbage’s role in the movement and those contributions to statistics, and it links Babbage to his friend and confidant Ada Lovelace, who acted as the interpreter of his statistical ideas. As far back as 1822, when explaining his concept of a mechanical calculating engine, Babbage had seen the requirement for machines capable of processing very large sets of numbers, what we would now call ‘Big Data’. In her exposition of his work, published in 1843, Ada Lovelace returned to this theme, foreseeing an age when large-scale numerical analysis would require mechanization. The concept of the computer is not a direct outcome of the Statistical Movement, but must be related to Babbage’s interest in ‘number’ and his foresight in envisaging a future age when science would not be able to accomplish its aims without the means to analyse numbers on a grand scale. This chapter sets Babbage in a statistical context and shows how much he took from and contributed to the Victorian statistical movement.
Richard Jones and William Whewell
Authors: Goldman Lawrence
Published: February 2022

Richard Jones, Professor of Political Economy at the East India College, Haileybury, and William Whewell, Fellow and later Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, had been undergraduate contemporaries. They collaborated in the foundation of the Statistical Movement and in the development of an inductive economics, dependent on statistical data, that would challenge the rigid deductivism and a priori generalizations of Ricardo’s political economy, which held sway in the 1830s. They envisaged economics as a discipline built on the close observation of actual economic behaviour and its contexts, and on numerical evidence, rather than dependent on generalized assumptions about human behaviour as in Ricardianism. Jones published his Essay on the Distribution of Wealth and on the Sources of Taxation. Part 1. Rent in 1831; Whewell, whose role was largely to encourage Jones, made some of the first contributions to econometrics in the early 1830s. They looked upon the Statistical Movement as an intellectual enterprise but became disenchanted when it veered towards policy and politics. Their work was influenced by the Saint-Simonian movement in France at this time, and it influenced Karl Marx in turn, who greatly admired Jones’s Essay. Their inductivism and empiricism makes them founders of the historical school of economics in Victorian Britain, a critical intellectual movement which became more evident and influential later in the century.
Buckle’s Fatal History
Authors: Goldman Lawrence
Published: February 2022

This chapter examines one of the literary sensations of the mid-Victorian era, The History of Civilisation in England, written by Henry Thomas Buckle. Two volumes were published in 1857 and 1861, though the work was unfinished at the time of Buckle’s early death in 1862. Indeed, he had hardly begun to write about specifically English History. The work is famous for its opening chapters which argued, on the basis of social statistical regularities, that a scientific history was possible. Because birth, death, and marriage rates were steady year by year, and because rates of even criminal behaviour were also roughly invariable, Buckle jumped to the conclusion that human behaviour was predictable. History itself, rather than a collection of random events thrown together into a narrative, could be understood as the stately unfolding of clear and certain patterns in which superstition and religion were gradually surpassed by reason and science. Buckle’s ideas were strongly influenced by Adolphe Quetelet and the French sociologist Auguste Comte. But he had misunderstood the implications of the so-called Law of Large Numbers, and, over time, his deterministic approach was criticized and shown to be false by both historians and philosophers. By the 1880s Buckle was no longer fashionable, but had found many devotees among working-class autodidacts and socialists across Britain, Europe and the United States who were attracted to historical determinism, whether in a Marxist or some other guise.
Origins
Authors: Mark James , Marung Steffi
Published: February 2022

This chapter situates Eastern Europe within a global history of empires and their demise, exploring the region’s status as both part of an imperial Europe and, at times, its defying anti-imperialist periphery. It examines how states that had emerged from the wreckage of the Ottoman, German, Habsburg, and Russian Empires navigated a world dominated by powerful, yet declining, Western European empires. The Soviet Union, influenced by a diverse range of anti-colonial activists, founded the Comintern, and became the first major state to provide support for anti-colonial struggles. By the 1930s, however, the Soviets had retreated, and in the wake of the Second World War reverted to great power politics. Smaller non-Communist Eastern European states fought to survive in an international environment in which their sovereignty was still in question. Some elites struggled to consolidate their fragile new polities in the white imperial world of the interwar period. Both identifying with the continent’s expansionism, and highlighting their experiences of living under empires within Europe, some of these same elites viewed themselves as ‘superior colonizers’ who could redeem an imperial project degraded by violence. Such a ‘civilizing mission’ would be brought not only to the ‘backward’ peripheries of their new states, but also to territories in Africa and Latin America, the acquisition of which would, they hoped, ensure their recognition as fully sovereign European polities. Yet with the growing threat of Nazi imperialism, others developed solidarities beyond Europe. Thus the empathetic affinities between Eastern Europe and the anti-imperial movements beyond Europe were established well before the institutionalization of socialist internationalism under postwar Communist regimes.
The Procedure of Dispute Resolution in International Civil Aviation
Authors: Zhang Luping
Published: February 2022

This chapter explores the evolution of dispute settlement clauses in both multilateral air law treaties and bilateral air services agreements (ASA)s. In order to achieve such a goal, this chapter sets out the frameworks of dispute resolution mechanisms in international civil aviation under both multilateral and bilateral agreements. Section B will focus on multilateral air law treaties. It first examines the dispute settlement mechanisms for sanctions that are provided under the Chicago Convention before turning to other major multilateral air law treaties. It then focuses on the dispute settlement clauses found in other multilateral air law treaties, divided into two categories: conventions dealing with aviation security and conventions dealing with civil liability. Besides multilateral air law treaties, Section C will concentrate on bilateralism in air services. It first introduces bilateralism in air services and then offers an overview of the Bermuda I Agreement, the Bermuda II Agreement, and the Open Skies Agreement. An updated typological study of dispute resolution clauses in bilateral ASAs has manifested the preferences of State parties in the text of bilateral treaties and how these preferences evolve throughout time. On the basis of the data, Section D will identify three main models of dispute resolution clauses found in ASAs: the Arbitration Model, the Diplomatic Channel Model, and the ICAO Model. The empirical output from Chapter 2 will serve as the first cornerstone for proposals in Chapter 5.
Chants and Flags
Authors: Cohn, Jr. Samuel K.
Published: February 2022

From over a hundred chronicles, diaries, and the fifty-eight volumes of Marin Sanudo’s collections of reflections, mercantile letters, and diplomatic dispatches, this chapter presents rebels’ chants and their flags and other insignia unfurled during popular insurgency from 1494 to 1559. It then compares these chants and flags to those previously collected and analysed in my Lust for Liberty from the late thirteenth to the early fifteenth century. In contrast to the earlier period’s inventive cries and banners that extolled guild power, rallied to extend the political franchise, and decried new and regressive taxes, those of the Italian wars appealed to outside powers, almost invariably the enemies of their current regimes, to intervene. These included more simplistic chants such as ‘Franza, Franza’, for the French king, and most often, ‘Marco, Marco’ for the Republic of Venice. Moreover, popular rebels of the sixteenth century invented no new flags for their newly-minted causes or republics. These contrasted sharply with earlier flag making for popular movements in Naples, Rome, Florence, and elsewhere. The chapter ends by asking if the poverty of popular rebels’ chants and flags from 1494 to 1559 suggests that the social-science models of ‘pre-modern’ revolt had taken hold in Italy by the end of the fifteenth century. The remainder of the book rejects that hypothesis.
Varieties of Revolt (ii): Leaders, Hate, Nobles, Ritual, Children, the Popolo
Authors: Cohn, Jr. Samuel K.
Published: February 2022

First, as in late medieval Italy, popular revolt, 1494 to 1559, did not depend on leaders from outside their ranks—the clergy, mayors, or the nobility—as social scientists have asserted for ‘pre-modern’ revolts generally and may have become increasingly the case in seventeenth-century France. However, enigmatically, chroniclers and commentators named these Italian leaders from the rank-and-file of commoners less often than they had during the Middle Ages. Second, given the military occupation, the abuses of foreign troops towards residential populations, and the destructive billeting of troops, waves of foreign hatred rarely passed from resistance against foreign troops to massacres of foreign civilians and never approached the trans-territorial slaughter of the French during the Sicilian Vespers of 1282. On the other hand, popular strife among nonelites against their local nobilities was more frequent than in the Middle Ages. Yet these revolts did not manifest blind fury or a ‘negative class consciousness’ as R.H. Hilton has argued for late medieval Europe. Third, children and adolescents continued to appear in popular revolt but never comprised a prominent feature of these revolts. As seen with late medieval Italy, their appearance as rebels was not ‘something of a biological truism’ as some historians have alleged for early modern Europe. Finally, by 1494 the centre of gravity of popular revolt had shifted from what it had been in the late fourteenth century, away from the disenfranchised popolo minuto towards skilled, guild-based artisans, shopkeepers, and petty merchants but which also could include poorer even starving populations.
Johann Friedrich Herbart
Authors: Beiser Frederick C.
Published: February 2022

This book is an intellectual biography of Johann Friedrich, who was one of the most famous philosophers in early 19th century Germany. Herbart was trained in the German idealist tradition under Fichte, but he eventually broke with Fichte and major idealist doctrines. His own philosophy was opposed to the idealist tradition in important respects: he defended a dualism between the factual and normative; he was an ontological pluralist rather than monist; and he accepted crucial Kantian dualisms that had been rejected by the idealists (viz. the dualism between essence and existence, reason and sensibility). While Herbart still retained elements of idealism, he was more realistic than his idealistic counterparts, maintaining that elements of the sensible manifold were given rather than posited by the mind. Herbart was also an important forerunner of analytic philosophy, first in breaking with the idealist tradition, and second in insisting that the proper method of philosophy is the analysis of concepts rather than speculation about the universe as a whole.
Introduction
Authors: Larson Peter L.
Published: February 2022

Durham’s wealth came from more than coal. Yeomen were emerging in Durham shortly after the Black Death. Rather than being poor and backward, parts of rural Durham developed precociously, to be overtaken only centuries later. Not all shared in the growing prosperity, however, due to local conditions and institutions that shaped access to land. Durham’s agriculture supported the rapid expansion of the coal trade out of Newcastle, and was reflected in increasing quantities of imported and locally produced goods. The vitality of the north-eastern economy helps to explain how England overtook the Low Countries to be the dominant economy in Europe in the seventeenth century.
Agrarian Development
Authors: Larson Peter L.
Published: February 2022

There were four main periods of agrarian transformation. The first came in the decades following the Black Death, as stable holdings of 45–60 acres emerged. In the first decades of the fifteenth century, the practice of leaseholding of customary lands stabilized. At the end of the fifteenth century, each of the three villages settled into its own balance of copyhold and leasehold; farms larger than 60 acres began to emerge. At the end of the sixteenth and into the early seventeenth century, a new yeoman elite emerged that was able to set up its younger sons as yeoman farmers. The townfields began to be enclosed, the end of a longer process of piecemeal enclosure. Through all this, cottagers and husbandmen continued to be found with 12-, 15-, and 30-acre farms. Enclosure and the creation of large farms occurred without the dispossession of smaller tenants.
Conclusion
Authors: Larson Peter L.
Published: February 2022

The three villages experienced gradual but significant change over three centuries, growing in population and experiencing political, religious, and consumer evolutions. The early end of serfdom and adoption of copyhold tenure let men create larger holdings generations before southern England. Those men prospered; those with smaller holdings persisted but they and women did not share the same options. The steady low rents made it easy for those with land to profit either from agriculture or from letting out their holdings; surprisingly, the bishopric administration made few adjustments to rents unlike many other lords in Durham and throughout England, even though there were numerous opportunities. The region’s economy and agriculture supported growth in Newcastle, just as London’s surrounding counties did for the capital, although not to the same scale; and that helped bolster the national economy. In the end, however, these great economic changes were determined by the actions and choices of ordinary men and women in rural England.
Introduction
Authors: Kesselring K.J. , Stretton Tim
Published: February 2022

The introduction draws on secondary literature to trace the distinctive history of marriage in the medieval Christian West and the contours of the Reformation challenge to traditional teachings and practice. It examines the reception of the Reformation theology of marriage in England, exploring the failed attempts by reformers such as Archbishop Cranmer to introduce full divorce, along with other proposed changes to matrimony. It briefly narrates the depth and breadth of the confusion and disagreement that followed, as many people evidently thought themselves free to divorce and remarry, whatever the laws of the land might allow. The chapter then introduces the book’s second key subject—coverture—and explains some of its points of intersection with proposals for divorce. It ends with an overview of the chapters to come.