bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Religion
Authors: Kindt Julia
Published: February 2013

Religion as a subject of research is a product of modern times. With monotheistic religions such as Christianity, it is thought of as an autonomous and self-referential system with a large degree of inner coherence and a binding theology. The Greeks, however, had no word for religion as an abstract category. Religion did not exist outside the contexts in which it was lived. Greek religion lacks the defining features of most modern religions. Classical scholars have frequently stressed the ‘alien quality’ of Greek religious beliefs and practices. The study of Greek religion requires its own interpretative framework. Greek religion is the religious outlook and rituals specific to Greek culture. Reservations about the model of Greek religion as ‘polis religion’ concern its value for studying developments beyond the classical period. To be sure, religion during the Hellenistic and Roman periods evolved from archaic and classical Greek religion.
Games and Festivals
Authors: König Jason
Published: February 2013

The festivals of the Greek world demonstrate the power of Hellenism as a unifying ideal, together with the vitality and variety of local Hellenic practice. There is a vast array of complementary views of Greek festivals, which between them can help people to reconstruct the perspectives of spectator and competitor, citizen and foreign visitor, emperor and benefactor, cultural centres and cultural margins. That highly varied body of material makes the cultural history of Greek festivals a very rich one. This article focuses on two distinct areas. First, and at greater length, it looks at the variety of ways in which festivals were represented and experienced as manifestations of various types of community. Second, the article turns to the question of how people should read the experience and representation of athletic contest and the athletic body. Both areas raise vividly the question of links between experience and identity.
Just Visiting: The Mobile World of Classical Athens
Authors: Dougherty Carol
Published: February 2013

The classical period was a time of widespread travel throughout the Mediterranean, and Athens was but one city among many in which residents and visitors met and jostled up against one another in the streets, at festivals, and in the harbours. There are figures such as Ion of Chios and his contemporaries who regularly travelled in and out of Athens, and a very varied set of images emerges – the noisy harbour at Piraeus, the crowds at the Panathenaia, or the debut of an Aeschylean play in Syracuse. Rewriting classical Athens in terms of travel encounters reveals both sides of classical Athens – the enduring and the transient, the Parthenon and the port.
Greek Political Theory
Authors: Rowe Christopher
Published: February 2013

This article considers the theoretical perspective on the polis as the immediate context for an individual's flourishing. That ancient political philosophy has such strong roots in the Athens of Plato and Aristotle is no doubt part of the reason for the perpetuation of the polis as idea. The Cynics, and later, the Stoics, chafed against the artificial boundaries of the conventional polis; the Stoics in fact lived at a time when its political centrality was over. In championing the life of the ‘cosmic community’, what they call the ‘cosmopolis’, they from one perspective invite people to bring the ideals of the polis to bear on the universe as a whole. The number of Greeks for whom the polis was a lived reality was relatively small, then; but seen from this point of view, every Greek utopia was in the end a polis.
Comedy
Authors: Konstan David
Published: February 2013

Aristotle remarks in The Parts of Animals that ‘man is the only animal that laughs’, and comedy, the object of which is to produce laughter, is a particularly human phenomenon. As such, it is also deeply conditioned by culture: who laughs, what is laughed at, and why. These questions take on a special saliency, moreover, in the unusual context of a state-sponsored institution of comic drama that existed in classical Athens. This article suggests that interpreting these works may shed light on ancient Greek ideology and society. Modern performances, for example, may inform people not only about problems of staging, in itself an important and still-open area for scholarship, but also about the reception of ancient comedy, which in turn has very largely conditioned how the genre is perceived today, despite the ostensibly objective methods of modern philology.
Oratory
Authors: Rubinstein Lene
Published: February 2013

In a direct democracy such as that of classical Athens, even the most important political decisions were made as a result of debates conducted in mass meetings attended by ordinary citizens. The ability to speak coherently, engagingly, and persuasively was an important key to political influence. This article examines a related problem by asking how much people really know about ancient rhetoric. It discusses the relationship between the public speeches delivered in classical Athens and the textual remains available today, many of which survived because they were considered, in some respects at least, model speeches. The question here is how much the practice of oratory differed from its theory, and to what extent today's texts display the concerns and abilities of a narrow elite.
Low Philosophy
Authors: Desmond William D.
Published: February 2013

Philosophy in an Aristotelian vein speaks a language almost of its own making, with unusual words such as substance, accident, matter, form, actuality, potentiality, entelechy, and the like. The ideal here seems to be that philosophy speaks directly to the mortal devotee, who loses himself in that higher music. And yet there are other dimensions to ancient thinkers, even the systematic ones, which sit uneasily with such a high philosophy. This article sketches its opposite and calls a philosophy ‘low’ when it tends to focus not on a completed architectonic, but on the living thinker; not on necessary or universal thoughts, but on the lived particulars that inspire, ground, and transcend them; not on the eternal and objective, but on the immediate and subjective. What a thinker is, does, and says is more important than books, formal arguments, and system building. In brief, a low philosophy concentrates upon character and its perfection.
The Novel
Authors: Nimis Stephen A.
Published: February 2013

The novel flourished at a time when Greek identity was above all a matter of cultural affiliation. This article argues that the characters in the novels are fundamentally concerned with issues of gender, ethnicity, culture, and identity – and that their readers must have been too. However, the relationship between the world depicted in the novels and that in which they were written and read remains difficult to characterize: it is remarkable, for example, that Rome, the great imperial power of the time, is never so much as mentioned in the extant Greek novels.
Comparative Approaches to the Study of Culture
Authors: Lloyd G. E. R.
Published: February 2013

Appealing to Herodotus, who should perhaps be considered the father of cultural anthropology as much as of history, this article resists an extreme position which relativizes concepts of originality and authenticity out of existence. Nevertheless, it shows that the study of Hellenic culture always involves comparative anthropology: one can look harder and see more, but what one sees is always the view from where he is. Indeed, one must put himself in the frame by selecting the object of the study to begin with.
Postcolonialism
Authors: Greenwood Emily
Published: February 2013

This article discusses the ‘dialogue’ between postcolonial theory and Hellenistic studies. It highlights this by exploring the act of will and self-identification by which Greece is appropriated to a particular culture, made its history, and put to its service. One important point to which the discussion draws attention is the potentially universal significance that this gives Hellenic studies: just because the appropriation of ancient Greece is an act of will, it always remains available for counter-appropriation by other interests as well.
Gender Studies
Authors: Skinner Marilyn B.
Published: February 2013

This article examines the meaning given within different social structures to human individuals, whose relationship even with their own bodies is culturally determined. While ‘gender’ is widely understood to be a hermeneutic tool used in feminist research, its relationship to other feminist approaches is not altogether clear. Gender studies as a field is a relatively recent spin-off from ‘women in antiquity’. Investigation of ancient women, the realities of their lives and the representations of them in art and literature began in the early 1970s, as a project designed to supplement the existing historical record.
Commentaries
Authors: Graziosi Barbara
Published: February 2013

Commentaries are important research tools in the field of Hellenic studies: even those classicists who are most critical of them tend to use them frequently. More fundamentally still, commentaries seem to be inextricable from the very notion of classical literature. This article focuses on four fundamental issues that are likely to confront anybody who plans to use or write a commentary. The first section considers the historical relationship between classical commentaries and classical literature. The second section discusses the commentary both as an act of reading and as a text in its own right. The third section examines how commentaries establish relationships between texts and between readers. The final section raises some issues of value: the value of commentaries and of the texts they seek to elucidate, but also the valuable role played by readers of the classical commentary.
Translation Studies
Authors: Lianeri Alexandra
Published: February 2013

The decision to study Greece, to find it important, is on every occasion a decision to express oneself in a certain way. This is something illustrated by one activity which is so central to Hellenic studies that it can seem commonplace: translation. As this article notes, to see the need for translation is to recognize difference and distance, but at the same time to seek a means of making Greek culture our own. Translation approaches Greek rhetoric by mediating its survival in the shape of tradition and memory.
Film Studies
Authors: Michelakis Pantelis
Published: February 2013

Film studies provides the ideal field for further reflection on the issue of Greek culture. It involves the translation of Greek material into a new medium, as well as a new language, a medium furthermore that is characteristically modern. This article points out that this is the medium through which many moderns have their first or only self-aware encounter with ancient Greece. The stories of the Greek world have functioned as meta-narratives or metaphors for cinematic plots: from road movies to science-fiction films and westerns, cinema has persistently explored the themes of the journey, of homecoming, and of identity, whose archetypal force has come to be associated with Homer and Greek tragedy. Moreover, film theory has drawn on Greek philosophy, especially on theories of representation and perception, to articulate and debate phenomenological, cognitive, and narratological approaches to cinema.
Introduction
Authors: Doyle William
Published: February 2013

The idea of the Ancien Régime can be traced back to the French Revolution. As soon as it became clear, during the summer of 1788, that the structure and apparatus of authority in France was collapsing, people began to look forward to an era of change. Suddenly, it seemed, all their dreams of a better, juster, fairer, kinder, freer order of things might be made to come true. Nothing was exempt from these expectations, and they were only fanned in the spring of 1789 when all the King's subjects, prior to electing the Estates-General, which was expected to solve all the kingdom's problems, were invited to draw up lists of their grievances. Much of the Ancien Régime as the revolutionaries defined it is still accepted by historians as a meaningful framework for study. Revolutionary destruction sliced like a guillotine through its fabric, and exposed for posterity a vivid cross-section or snapshot of how things were before the cataclysm struck. But in condemning the Ancien Régime to death so comprehensively, the revolutionaries tended to erase the memory of its previous life, bequeathing a static version of the world before their own emergence which denied it vitality.
Armed Forces
Authors: Parrott David
Published: February 2013

In early 1645 Field Marshal Lennard Torstensson led a Swedish army of 9,000 cavalry, 6,000 infantry, and sixty cannon against a Habsburg-Imperial army of 10,000 cavalry, 5,000 infantry, and twenty-six cannon commanded by Melchior von Hatzfeld. Both armies were composed of regiments commanded by international colonel-proprietors, who had used their funds or credit to raise and maintain military units. Many of the soldiers in both armies had been in service for ten years or more. The colonel-proprietors and generals in both armies regarded the recruitment of their experienced veterans as a long-term investment, and both were supported in their enterprises by an international network of private credit facilities, munitions manufacturers, food suppliers, and transport contractors. In both cases this elaborate structure was funded through control of the financial resources of entire territories, largely extracted and administered by the military high command. The armies clashed at Jankow in Bohemia, and the Imperial forces, though superior in cavalry, were held and eventually defeated by the Swedes, in part thanks to their artillery.
Nobility
Authors: Shovlin John
Published: February 2013

Historians of the Ancien Régime long viewed the nobility as a holdover from a feudal age, an antiquated breed condemned to a slow, and ultimately terminal, decline. Nobles were regarded as the casualties of secular political and social transformations: the rise of the absolutist state, which stripped them of political power; and economic transformations, which increased the relative wealth of non-nobles, and empowered them to challenge the nobility's supremacy. Since the 1960s, however, revisionist scholarship has almost entirely jettisoned this view. The nobility is now widely seen as a social group that participated massively in the processes of modernization that transformed seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe. Through its economic role and values, its service to the monarchical state, its openness to new recruits, and its engagement in the public sphere, the nobility moved with the times.
Estates, Orders and Corps
Authors: Bossenga Gail
Published: February 2013

Estates, orders, and corps provided one of the most important means of conceptualizing and organizing society in the old regime. According to a long-standing, and not infrequently contested ideal, European society was composed of a series of hierarchically arranged social groups (estates, orders, and corps), each with a prescribed function and corresponding degree of honour and privileges. In its simplest form, society consisted of three basic groups: the First Estate, the clergy, who prayed; the Second Estate, the nobility, who fought; and the Third Estate, the common people, who worked. This hierarchy of superiority and inferiority was, according to some theorists of the period, inscribed in the order of the universe, so that the terrestrial human hierarchy participated in a greater, divinely sanctioned celestial hierarchy.
Gender
Authors: Hardwick Julie
Published: February 2013

The historiography of gender in the Ancien Régime has explored two sets of interrelated issues. One is the question of the changing nature of men's and women's experiences and the ways in which they related to each other. Another is the way in which gender had an integral role in shifting cultural, political, and—explored to a much lesser extent this far—economic patterns. In both cases, historians have debated whether gender hierarchy intensified and women's opportunities became more constrained, whether changing patterns reformulated gendered expectations but not in a way that a “better or worse” paradigm is appropriate, or whether new forms of gender relations created new opportunities. In the Ancien Régime, gender made a difference: for all social ranks whether peasants, artisans, or nobles, for economic matters as market practices intensified and a consumer revolution ushered in new fashions for Parisians and peasants alike, for cultural processes as traditional categories were problematized and new possibilities were debated, and for political debates as novel forms of politics as well as innovative ideas about sovereignty and authority emerged.
Slavery and Serfdom
Authors: Doyle William
Published: February 2013

Slavery and serfdom, together underpinning so much of the economic Ancien Régime, survived the challenges of revolution. Only serfdom in France (already a dwindling relic) and slavery in Haiti disappeared for good. Elsewhere, both systems of servitude reached their zenith. And although both had begun by then to come under attack, the initial impact of the French Revolution was to arrest or retard chances of emancipation as terrified governments and propertied elites witnessed what mayhem freedom could unleash. But for all the comparisons often made, then and since, between the two systems of subjection, they cannot be pressed too far. Despite the spectacular prosperity built on the backs of colonial slaves, revolts among them were relatively rare and did not threaten social structures in Europe.
Education
Authors: Outram Dorinda
Published: February 2013

The history of education is enmeshed with the growth and final crisis of the Ancien Régime. The rapid expansion of the state, and the vigour of international competition in the eighteenth century, interlocked with educational change. Struggles between church and state for the control of schools and pupils were vital for the making of well-trained armies and docile peasants. The vast and complex international intellectual movement known as the Enlightenment is incomprehensible without a history of education. It is from sectarian conflicts under the French Third Republic that the history of education has evolved many of its traditional themes: institutions, literacy, ideologies, religion, curriculum, personnel, and young and not so young learners.
Sociability
Authors: Beaurepaire Pierre‐Yves
Published: February 2013

The last century of the Ancien Régime brought new departures in sociability, akin to those in the circulation of free, direct, and useful information. Contemporaries sought to create frameworks for association less subject to the obligations required by the authorized sociability of rulers or the church. They still sought protection, for it vouchsafed autonomy in exchange for tribute paid in published form to the glory and generosity of the protector through dedications or other marks of honour, but the emphasis was on the principle of voluntary belonging. This meant that statutes and rules did not come from outside, as in a charter, but rather were planned, elaborated, and adopted from within. The members accepted them voluntarily: nobody had imposed them. This principle of individuals voluntarily joining a group marked a fundamental break from traditional sociability, but it kept within continuity in observing the rules and distinctions of the Ancien Régime, as was shown in the artificial equality of interpersonal relations found in the salons, and the respect given to outside titles and qualities within masonic lodges.
Patronage
Authors: Ledbury Mark
Published: February 2013

This article focuses on the last century and a half of the Ancien Régime. However, for art historians, one of the first and most important events in the history of the attempt to transfer the cultural sophistication of the Italian Renaissance courts to France, and in doing so to create a powerful sense of France as culture-state, occurred at an earlier moment with the policy of Francis I, first in the Loire valley and then, most intensely, at the hunting lodge/palace of Fontainebleau (1528 and after). At Fontainebleau, Francis enticed significant artists away from Italy and created the kind of complex architectural, decorative, and iconographic ensembles that he and his entourage knew from the grand courts of Renaissance Florence, thus setting a pattern for complex cultural–political intervention.
The Public Sphere
Authors: Kaiser Thomas E.
Published: February 2013

According to Habermas, there were two incarnations of the “public,” or as the English translation renders it “public sphere,” under the Ancien Régime. The first arose during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the royal state gradually absorbed powers and rights previously exercised by semi-public corporations, localities, and individuals. This institutional reshuffling, in Habermas's view, entailed a fresh division between the “public” and “private” realms. “Public,” according to Habermas, came to mean state-related and denoted the sphere occupied by a “bureaucratic apparatus with regulated spheres of jurisdiction” that exerted “a monopoly over the legitimate use of coercion.” “Private,” by contrast, denoted the sphere occupied by those who held no office and were for that reason “excluded from any share in public authority.” Beginning in the late seventeenth century, Habermas argued, a second “public sphere” took shape “within the tension-charged field between state and society” According to Habermas, the social nature of this new “bourgeois public sphere” allowed for the public articulation of previously private bourgeois family values in public settings.
Enlightenment
Authors: Munck Thomas
Published: February 2013

The Enlightenment, as a historical term, is intimately linked to the Ancien Régime: both describe historical constructs that once seemed more French than European, at least in origin, and although the term “Ancien Régime” acquired its meaning only in retrospect (from the perspective of 1790), both were originally used by historians to denote something which had come to an end by 1789. The Enlightenment was the intellectually innovative and emancipatory process which, depending on the definition of the Ancien Régime itself, either modernized the political and social structures of the early modern state, or helped to undermine it and to precipitate the upheaval of the French Revolution.
Technological Change
Authors: MacLeod Christine , Nuvolari Allesandro
Published: February 2013

During the eighteenth century Europeans embarked on a revolutionary phase of economic growth and social change, the full environmental costs of which are only just beginning to be recognized. Breaking free from an essentially subsistence economy to embrace the market and long-distance trade, they led the world into sustained economic growth. This has allowed the unprecedented phenomenon of long-term population increase in tandem with a rising standard of living; previously one type of gain had always been at the other's expense, as never before had it been possible to expand an economy fast enough to accommodate both. The causes of this shift into sustained (if ultimately unsustainable) economic growth are still debated, but there can be no doubt that the fundamental driver has been technological change. This article explores the nature of those new technologies and reasons why Europeans began to invest (literally and metaphorically) in technical innovation.
Reformed and Unreformed Britain, 1689–180
Authors: Hoppit Julian
Published: February 2013

Political society in Britain changed subtly yet profoundly from 1689 to 1801. But there was not much method to this. This gave Britain's regime a somewhat unsettled and uncertain disposition. Power could also be exercised very capriciously, while the high level of inequality made many feel oppressed and excluded. But a revolutionary moment akin to France in 1789 was avoided, despite the tremendous stresses and strains experienced in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, caused by dramatic population growth, mushrooming towns and cities, an infant industrial revolution, class formation, challenging new ideas, and two bloody, long, and expensive wars against revolutionary and Napoleonic France. As has been seen, British political society was far from poorly prepared to deal with those new challenges. And so the story of change continued.
Conclusion
Authors: Doyle William
Published: February 2013

In cultural terms the Ancien Régime began with the Renaissance and the Reformation. The monolithic authority of the medieval Catholic Church had gone, and the next three centuries were a time when extensive energies were devoted by anxious established churches to maintaining some authority by monopolizing education and persecuting dissent. By the eighteenth century, irreligion and “free thought” were coming to be seen as even more dangerous than the latter. Partly this was because the spread of literacy, and the growing desire of moneyed elites to invest in expensive education, gave increasing numbers access to media that might subvert faith or obedience if uncontrolled. The revolutionaries of 1789 condemned censorship and religious intolerance as cardinal vices of the Ancien Régime. They looked back on the growth of free thought or “philosophy” as the source of their reforming agenda.
Development of Comparative Law in the United States
Authors: Clark David S.
Published: February 2013

After reviewing the role for comparative law in the United States Supreme Court, this article examines the origins of comparative law activities during the formative era of the United States. The first 125 years of United States history saw some exportation of American laws and legal institutions, primarily to the newly independent Latin American nations in the 1820s. These included concepts from the Constitution of 1789, the 1791 Bill of Rights, and public law structures such as federalism, a presidential executive, and judicial review of legislative and executive action. By the twentieth century, American comparative law began to form as an organized activity, with its own journal and annual meetings. This process was uneven, but steady. When the Comparative Law Bureau folded into a more comprehensive ABA section, the American Foreign Law Association kept the flame alive. Comparatists dealt with more complex methods and issues, some debated in international meetings.
Development of Comparative Law in Central and Eastern Europe
Authors: Kühn Zdeněk
Published: February 2013

The region of Central and Eastern Europe covers many of the European nations east of Germany. The dominant nation of the region is Russia. Between Russia and Germany there are, first, a number of small nations composing the region known as Central Europe (Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia); second, the nations which formed the western part of the Soviet Union; and, third, the states on the Balkan peninsula. This article shows the rich history of comparative law before the installment of communist regimes, such as the era of Stalin, and then discusses comparative law under communism and the role and status of comparative law after the fall of communist rule.
Comparative Law as the Study of Transplants and Receptions
Authors: Graziadei Michele
Published: February 2013

The comparative study of transplants and receptions investigates contacts of legal cultures and explores the complex patterns of change triggered by them. The study of legal transfers offers considerable intellectual rewards. It shows that the law is a complex phenomenon and corrects simplistic views regarding what law is and how it develops. The spread of legal institutions, ideals, ideologies, doctrines, rules, and so on, is often in the hands of professional elites. The study of transplants and receptions demonstrates that the knowledge and standing of those elites comes from interactions between the local and non-local dimensions of the law, that is, between the national and international spheres. This picture is true in Berlin and in New York, in London and in Lima, but it is also true in less cosmopolitan environments.
Comparative Law and African Customary Law
Authors: Bennett T. W.
Published: February 2013

Customary law grows out of the social practices which a given jural community has come to accept as obligatory. It is a pervasive normative order, providing the regulatory framework for spheres of human activity as diverse as the family, the neighbourhood, the business of merchant banking, or international diplomacy. This article looks at the customary laws of sub-Saharan Africa. It deals with the preservation of the law in an oral tradition and how it has been influenced by certain social, economic, and political structures. This focus requires, in turn, that particular attention be paid to factors influencing the production of texts on customary law. Because information on the subject is limited, outdated, and somewhat subjective, readers must be made aware of how changes in the theories of jurisprudence and anthropology have affected ideas and preconceptions.
Comparative Sales Law
Authors: Huber Peter
Published: February 2013

The story of comparative law in the field of sales contracts is inextricably linked to Ernst Rabel. Rabel not only prepared the basis for any comparative study of the modern law of sales in his epochal treatise Das Recht des Warenkaufs, but also initiated the process of world-wide harmonization of the law of international sales. The close interrelation between comparative law and uniform law is also apparent in the life and the work of Ernst Rabel as his treatise on the law of sales developed from the preparatory work he had done for the UNIDROIT project to create a uniform law for international sales in the 1930s. The second section of this article outlines the most important projects in this area and their interaction with comparative law. The third section discusses selected characteristic features of the law of sales which are interesting from a comparative point of view.
Unjustified Enrichment in Comparative Perspective
Authors: Visser Daniel
Published: February 2013

Unjustified enrichment confronted both civil and common lawyers with thinking which was often completely outside the paradigm to which they had become accustomed. The recognition of unjustified enrichment as a cause of action in its own right in English law created a new arena of uncertainty between the systems. This article argues that comparative lawyers can make an important contribution to the future of the fractured and fractious world of unjustified enrichment. It may help to uncover the enormous wealth of learning of which both the common law and the civil law are the repositories, and so bring the same level of understanding to the law of unjustified enrichment which has, over the years, been achieved between the systems in regard to contract and tort.
Comparative Tort Law
Authors: Wagner Gerhard
Published: February 2013

Tort law has always been one of the major areas of comparative law. Whereas the law of property, even today, remains on the outskirts of comparative learning, the law of extra-contractual liability has attracted much interest from comparative law scholars. Endeavours in the comparison of the different systems of delict and tort have received a further boost from the objective of harmonizing European private law. This article consider general clauses versus a variety of individual torts, the scope of protection, the liability for fault, strict liability, and tort law and insurance. Regardless of whether one agrees or disagrees with the solutions offered, the principles and the commentaries thereon certainly provide a valuable starting-point for further scholarly efforts and critical discussion.
Comparative Antitrust Law
Authors: Gerber David J.
Published: February 2013

This article examines comparative competition law. It looks first at the current state of the literature. It envisions a path for comparative antitrust law scholarship that may allow it to realize more fully its potential value and respond more effectively to the challenges of economic globalization. Three main themes run through this article. One is that US law dominates the world of comparative competition law scholarship. A second is that the centrality of US law and experience divides the writing in the area and often distorts it. The third thread that runs through this article identifies the potential impact of economic globalization on the agenda of comparative competition law and the opportunities it creates for writers in the area to contribute to creating a sounder policy framework for transnational markets.
Comparative Constitutional Law
Authors: Tushnet Mark
Published: February 2013

This article examines the evolution of the field of comparative constitutional law and its relationship to politics and international rights; constitutionalism; constitutional foundings and transformations; constitutional structures; structures of judicial review; generic constitutional law; and national identity. Innumerable comparative studies address the ways in which different constitutions and constitutional systems deal with specific topics, such as privacy, free expression, and gender equality. However valuable such studies have been in bringing information about other constitutional systems to the attention of scholars versed in their own systems, their analytic payoff is sometimes questionable. Scholarship in comparative constitutional law is perhaps too often insufficiently sensitive to national differences that generate differences in domestic constitutional law. Or, put another way, that scholarship may too often rest on an implicit but insufficiently defended preference for the universalist approach to comparative legal study over the particularist one.
Comparative Administrative Law
Authors: Bell John S.
Published: February 2013

Comparative administrative law is a long-standing discipline. The study of other administrative law systems both in order to understand one's own system better and to find models for improvement has been occurring for over 150 years. This article describes the scope of the subject, the values served by administrative law, and influences shaping administrative law. It also compares the powers, organizations, and procedures of the administration, as well as legal redress.
Universale in music processing
Authors: Stevens Catherine , Byron Tim
Published: February 2013

This article outlines areas of musical processing that may be universal to humans. Music here refers to temporally structured human activities, social and individual, in the production and perception of sound organized in patterns that convey non-linguistic meaning. Music processing refers to the neural contribution in perception, cognition, and production of music. The universal music processes discussed are hypotheses that require investigation and falsification in as many and varied cultural contexts as possible. The discussion begins with processes of grouping and segmentation, then moves on to statistically universal features of musical environments, and ends with more general-purpose psychological processes. It illustrates some processes drawing on examples of production of song from particular Australian Aboriginal cultures.
The perception of musical timbre
Authors: McAdams Stephen , Giordano Bruno L.
Published: February 2013

This article discusses musical-timbre perception. Musical timbre is a combination of continuous perceptual dimensions and discrete features to which listeners are differentially sensitive. The continuous dimensions often have quantifiable acoustic correlates. The timbre-space representation is a powerful psychological model that allows predictions to be made about timbre perception in situations beyond those used to derive the model in the first place. Timbre can play a role in larger-scale movements of tension and relaxation and thus contribute to the expression inherent in musical form. Under conditions of high blend among instruments composing a vertical sonority, timbral roughness is a major component of musical tension. However, it strongly depends on the way auditory grouping processes have parsed the incoming acoustic information into events and streams.
Musical time
Authors: Jones Mari Riess
Published: February 2013

This article reviews psychological research on perception of metre and rhythm, focusing on the dynamics of attending to patterns in time. It considers how event timing, as outlined by salient accents in metre, rhythm, and even melodic structures, may guide attending in time and bootstrap learning, and how it may influence time perception.
Components of melodic processing
Authors: Schmuckler Mark A.
Published: February 2013

Melody is the most ubiquitous form of musical structure, with which listeners come into contact on a daily basis. Mirroring the prevalence and importance of melody, research in music cognition has focused extensively on the processes involved in perceiving and remembering melodic structure. Despite these years of study, however, our understanding of pitch structure in melody can be described simply, with respect to the two components of tonality and pitch contour. Although the importance of these two components has been recognized over the years, it is only recently that workable models of these components have been proposed. This article describes such models of tonality and melodic contour, and discusses the role of these components in listeners' perceptions of and memory for melody.
Emotional Responses to Music
Authors: Juslin Patrik N.
Published: February 2013

This article explores the question of why music touches us so deeply. While music philosophers, musicologists, and aestheticians have written a lot about musical emotions, psychologists have been slow to catch up due to both conceptual and methodological problems. Hence, the article focuses mainly on research carried out during the last decade. The study of music and emotions is fraught with considerable controversy and disagreement. Current debates in the field revolve around such questions as which emotions music induces, whether there are uniquely musical emotions, and what the relationship is between perceived and induced emotions. An important direction for future research is to consider how emotions might be one of several features of an aesthetic response to music – the appreciation of music as ‘art’.
Aesthetics
Authors: Huron David
Published: February 2013

Aesthetics is commonly defined as the study of beauty, and its opposite, ugliness. Some philosophers conceive of aesthetics as applying solely to the arts or to artistic experience. Beginning in the 1960s, the field of cognitive science became increasingly influential in the philosophy of mind. While much of this influence relates to the nature of thought, reasoning, and consciousness, the impact of cognitive science has expanded to other areas of philosophy, including aesthetics. This article focuses on how cognitive science influences modern thinking in musical aesthetics. It argues that cognitive neuroscience is poised to overtake philosophical aesthetics: rather than influencing aesthetic philosophy, aesthetic philosophy is receding to a sideline ‘advisory’ role, while cognitive science takes an unaccustomed leadership position.
Music, musicians, and brain plasticity
Authors: Schlaug Gottfried
Published: February 2013

This article reviews studies on the brains of musicians. Making music not only engages primary auditory and motor regions and the connections between them, but also regions that integrate and connect areas involved in both auditory and motor operations, as well as in the integration of other multisensory information. Professional instrumentalists learn and repeatedly practice associating hand/finger movements with meaningful patterns in sound, and sounds and movements with specific visual patterns (notation) while receiving continuous multisensory feedback. Learning to associate actions with particular sounds leads to functional but also structural changes in frontal cortices.
Music lessons from infants
Authors: Trehub Sandra E.
Published: February 2013

What can we learn about music and musicality from infants? Sceptics may question the possibility of deriving fruitful answers to such questions from immature beings whose hearing is deficient (relative to adults) and whose exposure to ‘good’ music, even conventional music, is limited. This article considers the possibility of nature making some contribution to our musical beginnings and to our subsequent development. The story that emerges from infancy involves a rich musical environment, with mothers delivering performances which match the inclinations of their infants. Moreover, infants have predispositions or inborn preferences for musical features that are common across the world's cultures. Because musical systems across the world differ in notable respects, it makes sense that infants are open to the available alternatives. With increasing exposure to music, they gain expertise as listeners, but that expertise comes at the cost of diminished sensitivity to features which are irrelevant or infrequent in their own musical culture.
Music in the school years
Authors: Lamont Alexandra
Published: February 2013

Music is ubiquitous in young children's experiences, but as they get older their experiences become more diverse. Defining the trajectories of musical development is thus complex; explaining them is still more challenging. This article begins by considering definitions of musical development. It reviews research on how children understand separate elements of music, individually (pitch/harmony, rhythm/metre, timbre) and in combination (structure, form, style), drawing on research that isolates and explores these experimentally and evidence from more ecologically valid tasks such as singing and composing. The article then evaluates our understanding of musical development in culture and context.
Motivation to learn
Authors: Hallam Susan
Published: February 2013

This article sets out a model that attempts to integrate the various theoretical approaches to understanding motivation, embedded within a broadly systemic approach as proposed by Bronfenbrenner (1979) which suggests that the process of human development depends on mutual accommodation which occurs throughout the life-course between an individual and the various systems that they or others close to them encounter in their environment. The model recognizes the importance of cognitive factors and self-determination in behaviour. A detailed account is provided of what we know about each of the elements outlined in the model as they relate to motivation in music.
Measurement and models of performance
Authors: Windsor W. Luke
Published: February 2013

This article describes and evaluates the ways in which both the measurement and modelling of performances have contributed to the emerging discipline of music psychology. What is intended is a tutorial guide covering major issues, techniques, and findings in this area, along with enough context and exemplification to meet this end. Measurement and modelling have provided the psychology of music with substantial insights into the processes underlying music performance. One can safely assume that these insights will be extended given the attention paid to this area by researchers. However, it is disappointing to note that work on expression in music is being simultaneously studied both by musicologists and psychologists, without much reference to each others' work.
Planning and performance
Authors: Altenmüller Eckart , Schneider Sabine
Published: February 2013

Making music is one of the most demanding tasks for the human central nervous system. It involves the precise execution of very fast and, in many instances, extremely complex physical movements that must be coordinated with continuous auditory feedback. Practice is required to develop these skills and carry out these complex tasks. This article discusses the neurobiological foundations of planning, motor learning, and practice. The first section introduces essential general information for musical readers concerning the organization of cortical, subcortical, and cerebellar motor systems in the brain. The second section addresses the brain processes during acquisition of skilled movements in music making and demonstrates the dynamics of neuronal networks. The third section reports new findings on practice strategies and performance quality. The fourth section presents the causes of degradation of skilled movements in professional musicians. The article concludes with some comments concerning the significance of results of brain research in order to improve practice habits and performance in musicians.
Sight-reading
Authors: Lehmann Andreas C. , Kopiez Reinhard
Published: February 2013

Sight-reading is defined as the execution – vocal or instrumental – of longer stretches of non- or under-rehearsed music at an acceptable pace and with adequate expression. Some people also label this ‘playing by sight’ or ‘prima vista’. Similar to improvisation, sight-reading requires the instant adaptation to new constraints, which places it among those that motor scientists refer to as open skills. This article briefly looks at how music notation is perceived and then moves on to the structure of sight-reading, taking into account the real-time conditions under which it takes place. This includes a discussion of perceptual and problem-solving issues. Finally, the article outlines the course of skill acquisition with its characteristic differences between novices and experts, and presents a model of sight-reading performance.
Research and evaluation in music therapy
Authors: Wheeler Barbara L.
Published: February 2013

This article discusses music-therapy research, which is an integral part of music therapy and has been since the beginning of the US music-therapy associations. Numerous journals, both in music therapy and related disciplines, include music-therapy research. Quantitative, qualitative, and other types of research are important in music therapy, each fulfilling different purposes.
Introduction Reaching this stage in studying the psychology of the Chinese people
Authors: Bond Michael Harris
Published: February 2013

This article brings out a study on Chinese psychology and its significance that makes it different from the other usual studies. The objective is to make an attempt to understand the culture and its impact of human socialization in Europe and, especially, America. It reveals that there are relatively few American-trained psychologists who practice cross-cultural psychology. It is the unique dissimilarities of China from the west that rooted the efforts of a study on Chinese psychology. There is a considerable demand for intellectual material on the psychology of the Chinese people. This curiosity was fueled by the fact that China is different from the west in all ways. This study aims to help with self-understanding, as individuals become more aware of their culture when they encounter another person of a different culture.