bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Task of World History
Authors: Bentley Jerry H.
Published: February 2013

This article argues that professional historical scholarship has suffered from a number of serious problems from its beginnings to the present day. Yet, in the absence of any alternative approach capable of achieving absolute objectivity or yielding perfect knowledge, professional historical scholarship, in spite of its problems, is the most reliable, most responsible, and most constructive mode of dealing with the past. The world's peoples have more commonly relied on myth, legend, memory, genealogy, song, dance, film, fiction, and other approaches as their principal and preferred guides to the past. Granting that these alternative ways of accessing and dealing with the past wield enormous cultural power, it is clear also that they do not readily open themselves to critique, revision, or improvement. Professional historical scholarship by contrast approaches the past through systematic exploration, rigorous examination of evidence, and highly disciplined reasoning.
Mediterranean History
Authors: Abulafia David
Published: February 2013

The first part of this article discusses the different approaches to Mediterranean history. People talk of the Mediterranean and refer to the waters that stretch eastward from the Straits of Gibraltar, linked to the Red Sea by the man-made channel of the Suez Canal and to the Black Sea by the natural channel of the Dardanelles and Bosphorus. The discussion insists that the study of Mediterranean history encapsulates many important aspects of world history: it involves the investigation of connections between societies separated by extensive physical space, focusing on commercial networks, the building of empires, and the movement of peoples, These phenomena can be traced across the surface of the sea across which Europe, Africa, and Asia meet one another and over which Christianity and Islam have vigorously competed for dominion. The second part of this article focuses on the development of the ‘classic Mediterranean’ over time.
The Formation of German Nationalism, 1740–1850
Authors: Jansen Christian
Published: February 2013

This article traces the growth of nationalism in Germany. Nation and nationalism shall be looked as modern phenomena whose roots can be traced back to pre-modern times. During the fifteenth and sixteenth century, this development intensified when the discourse on ‘nationes’ — the Latin term for nation — became more and more exclusive ‘modern’ nationalism emerged between 1740 and 1830. This period has long been known as a time of dramatic upheaval marked by the decline and disintegration of the old Holy Roman Empire, the development of civil society, the Enlightenment, and its mental, cultural, and political repercussions from the decreasing cohesion of the Christian confessions to the development of liberalism. This article traces the growth of nationalistic thoughts that shaped the growth of nationalism in Germany. The beginnings of nationalism followed by its dissemination are carefully chronicled in this article.
Race and World Politics: Germany in the Age of Imperialism, 1878–1914
Authors: Zimmerman Andrew
Published: February 2013

This article analyses the question of race in world politics in the backdrop of imperialistic Germany. Racism and concepts of race emerged from an unequal, regionally varying, and international division of labor inside Europe and the United States and in those regions around the world over which Europe and the United States came to exercise formal and informal imperial power. Germany developed a unique Central-European politics of race in the contested Polish provinces of the Prussian East, and they annexed in the eighteenth-century partitions of Poland. Many Germans regarded Poles as deficient in Kultur, a concept signifying everything from diligent work habits to a secular rationality supposedly absent among Catholic Poles. Early German racism was thus cultural rather than biological and was promoted by the progressive bourgeois. As a principle of social ordering, race functioned as a colonial kinship system, and thus depended ultimately on the control of sexuality. A comparative analysis between international racism and German racism concludes this article.
Piety, Power, and Powerlessness: Religion and Religious Groups in Germany, 1870–1945
Authors: Habermas Rebekka
Published: February 2013

An examination of eligion and religious groups that prevailed in Germany during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries form the essence of this article. Many citizens of the Wilhelminian Empire believed they were seeing an increasing decline in the importance of religion. This view was also shared by scholars at the time including August Comte and Max Weber. Not only Weber and his contemporaries held this view; subsequent generations of sociologists and historians likewise adhered to the notion that modernity was secular; indeed, this alone sufficed to make it ‘modern’. This article focuses on the idea that the stronger the critique of the secularization theory became, the more intently people searched for alternative ways to explain the perceived changes in piety and religious institutions from the nineteenth century onward. This article moves further to explain the topographies of the religious and the secular under the German empire and reconfigurations of the same. An analysis of the religion and religious groups at the political backdrop concludes this article.
Generations: The ‘Revolutions’ of the 1960s
Authors: Poiger Uta G.
Published: February 2013

This article traces the revolutions that raged Germany during the 1960s. This later part of the decade saw involvement of all and sundry in revolutions. The ‘Sixties’ — as a set of associations included greater autonomy of youth, anti-imperialist and anti-war activism, leftist aspirations to political revolt, sexual revolution, and women's emancipation. ‘1968’, in particular, functions as a myth, fostered by the participants in rebellion, their detractors, and the media. Both international connections and national politics shaped the 1960s rebellions — and the efforts to assess them ever since. This article presents the different manifestations of rebellions in East and West. It focuses on the relationship between reform and rebellion as a way of understanding the transformations and upheavals of the 1960s, especially in such areas as youth cultures and the entertainment industry, shifts in gender and sexual norms, challenges to the workings of political and educational institutions, and anti-colonialism.
Introduction
Authors: Skeates Robin , Carman John , McDavid Carol
Published: February 2013

This article reappraises the place of archaeology in the contemporary world by critically engaging with old and new debates in the field of public archaeology. It evaluates the range of research strategies and methods used in archaeological heritage studies by identifying and contributing to key debates in this dynamic field, and critically explores the history of archaeological resource management. The article also addresses the fundamental principles and practices through which the archaeological past is understood and used today. In doing so, it enters into the overlapping domains of: ‘public’, ‘community’, or ‘engaged’ archaeology; heritage, or cultural resource management; and heritage and museum studies; as well as a wide range of related fields within the social sciences. In recent years, this subject area has seen a proliferation of published texts aimed primarily at the academic market, particularly in the UK and USA.
Writing Histories of Archaeology
Authors: Murray Tim
Published: February 2013

This article critically reviews the different approaches adopted by archaeologists and other scholars in studying and writing the history of archaeology. Based on this, it places them within the broader context of the history of science, arguing for both radical and conservative roles for histories of archaeology, and stressing its great value in helping understand the social and cultural elements of archaeological knowledge. Histories of archaeology reveal a discipline in a ferment of change, but also in a ferment of self-discovery. Archaeology has touched and continues to touch everybody, and although much of it has become highly technical and arcane, the central elements of the quest for an understanding of the history of human beings have remained largely intact. In the late twentieth century, there remained a core of belief that only archaeology could reveal the evidence of the whole human story from prehistoric to historical times.
Agriculture, Environmental Conservation, and Archaeological Curation in Historic Landscapes
Authors: Trow Stephen , Grenville Jane
Published: February 2013

This article describes the complex and ever-changing institutional, legislative, and academic framework relating to the management of nature and culture in the English landscape. It highlights the current debate over future land use, which stems from the competing demands being placed upon it, particularly by agriculture, forestry, nature conservation, and archaeology. Under this, the article examines the interaction between the heritage and nature conservation sectors in the context of rural land use, particularly agriculture and forestry, drawing particularly on the situation in England. It also considers the institutional, legal, policy, and academic frameworks within which engagement takes place; the implications of policy changes driven by social, economic, and climatic change; and the increasingly radical debate on the future use of land. Finally, the article addresses the current attempts by archaeologists to respond to this agenda, the adequacy of the research base, and future challenges to achieving greater integration.
Public Benefits of Public Archaeology
Authors: Little Barbara J.
Published: February 2013

Public archaeology means something far broader than archaeology that is completed to comply with legal and regulatory requirements or paid for by public funds. Professional archaeologists practise at least three main categories of public archaeology: cultural resource management or cultural heritage management under public law; outreach and education with the intention of preventing looting and vandalism of archaeological places and to combat the illicit international trade in antiquities; and archaeology that aims to help communities or individuals in some way or to solve societal problems. Archaeology plays a large part in the growing worldwide heritage movement, which recognizes a broadening array of tangible places, including landscapes and very recent archaeological sites, as well as diverse stakeholders. Archaeology raises consciousness and awareness, and encourages different ways of seeing the world, thinking about it, and acting in it. The study of it has the potential to explain the contingency of all human endeavour.
Publicizing Archaeology in Britain in the Late Twentieth Century
Authors: Aston Mick
Published: February 2013

Archaeology attempts to examine, explain, and clarify three aspects. First, the relict monuments scattered about, which have no relation to contemporary life; second, the structures that turn up in the ground (which were unsuspected in many cases); and third, the finds that are found in the soil – again, often very different from things used in modern culture. Archaeology builds on what have always been fascinating aspects for the public, and tries to explain what they see and find in a systematic way. For archaeology to survive as an aspect of modern life, archaeologists must continue to interest the general public. The widespread interest in archaeology and the large number of part-time groups is a direct reflection of earlier extra-mural classes. Although archaeology is an academic subject, an intellectual pursuit, universities often do not consider their role to be investigators of the local archaeology of their region, or making it accessible to the public.
The Anthropology of Archaeology
Authors: LaRoche Cheryl Janifer
Published: February 2013

Archaeology occupies an important place in historicizing the African American experience – principally where little historical evidence survives. The nature of African American archaeology is such that archaeologists are continually challenged by the unexpected and hampered by the unknown. These are the qualities of the field that alternately inflame and inspire the public. This article examines the constructive outcomes, lasting societal benefits, and enduring commemorative legacies that arise when individuals act collectively to define historical value and meaning through archaeology. Public intervention-shaped research and eventual outcomes at the four sites are discussed, namely: The President's House in Philadelphia; the Henrietta Marie; the Freedmen's Cemetery in Alexandria, VA; and New York City's African Burial Ground. For each site, the public has played a major role in reclamation, scholarly and public interpretation, and, finally, monumental recognition.
Public Archaeology and Indigenous Archaeology
Authors: Watkins Joe
Published: February 2013

Public archaeology, as a method of involving public groups in the practice of archaeology, has a powerful possibility of benefiting tribal groups by allowing their full involvement. Indigenous archaeology utilizes the general elements of archaeological theory associated with cultural historical, processual, and post-processual approaches. This article discusses public archaeology and indigenous archaeology in terms of each branch's utility to Native American groups in the United States. It provides a brief history and description of indigenous archaeology, and then examines some of the intersections and divergences between public archaeology and indigenous archaeology. The article discusses how public archaeology can benefit tribal groups, some of its strengths and weaknesses, and some of the shortcomings within current public archaeology programmes and ideas. Suggestions are presented for making public archaeology better suited to Native American use, either as a part of a hybrid public indigenous archaeology, or as a means in and of itself.
Voluntary Private Health Insurance
Authors: Zweifel Peter
Published: February 2013

The purpose of this article is to examine the working of voluntary private health insurance works. While empirical evidence on the functioning of voluntary private individual health insurance markets is lacking, there is a large and well-developed theoretical literature describing the functioning of private insurance markets in other sectors. This article begins by discussing this extensive literature and the working of such markets if they exist in the health sector. It considers the functioning of the three common forms of voluntary insurance, namely, individual health insurance markets, voluntary private coverage, and voluntary private health insurance that are auxiliary to public systems. Finally, the article proposes that a political economy based explanation for the existence of the theoretically optimal market does not exist and it concludes with areas for future research.
Primary Care
Authors: Scott Anthony , Jan Stephen
Published: February 2013

The aim of this article is to review the evidence on the role of primary care in health care systems. It focuses on the key issues and evidence from both developed and developing countries and from an economics perspective. It defines the main features of primary care and how these are evolving across countries. It provides an overview of the evidence on whether an expansion or strengthening of primary care improve health outcomes, reduce costs, and improve access. This article also addresses issues around the financing of primary care and the remuneration of primary care workers. It examines the most cost-effective ways to ensure the adequate supply of the primary care workforce in the context of the labor market for primary care workers and global health workforce shortages.
Increasing Competition Between Providers in Health Care Markets: The Economic Evidence
Authors: Propper Carol , Leckie George
Published: February 2013

This article scrutinizes the empirical literature on competition between providers and finds that the outcomes are highly varied, and that competition generates winners and losers among patients as well as providers. It examines the theoretical and empirical economic evidence on the effect of greater competition between providers in health care markets. Most of the evidence focuses on a narrow set of outcomes, primarily the effect of competition on prices and quality of health care, sometimes with a focus on winners and losers. It discusses the impact of centrally fixed prices on competition and examines the role of information in increasing competition is also discussed. It examines the effects of using centrally set prices. This article concludes raising some issues that seem to be pertinent for policymakers interested in increasing competition in their health care systems.
Restitution
Authors: Smith Lionel
Published: February 2013

This article focuses on the unresolved debates and issues throughout the field of restitution. These include the organization of the subject, the interaction of restitution with other legal categories, and restitution for unjust enrichment when more than two parties are involved in the dispute.
Citizenship
Authors: Bosniak Linda
Published: February 2013

Common themes and common divides have come to organize citizenship discourse both within and beyond legal studies. Broadly speaking, questions about citizenship can be divided into three categories: those that concern the substance of citizenship (what citizenship is), those that concern its domain or location (where citizenship takes place), and those that concern the subjects of citizenship (who is a citizen). Each of these questions, in turn, has received a range of conventionally acceptable answers which have served to structure the citizenship debates. This article sketches out some of the main responses conventionally offered to each of these questions. It contends that citizenship is a flexible enough concept to take on new meanings, even some that appear sharply in tension with earlier understandings. The idea of citizenship contains enough universalist normative content that it can plausibly be used as a resource for challenging narrower and more exclusive understandings. In the end, however, arguments about citizenship are less about the scope and meaning of the term itself than they are about the value and legitimacy of the political practices and ideals the word is used to represent.
Human Rights
Authors: Ewing Keith
Published: February 2013

This article begins with a brief discussion of what human rights are. It then considers the international treaties which have emerged to protect human rights in national legal systems, focusing on aspects of the scholarship which has developed alongside the cascade of these rights from international law to constitutional law to ordinary municipal law. This is a process which has been controversial as human rights and democracy are seen by some to be mutually dependent, but by others to be engaged in an abrasive struggle for superiority on the battleground of ideas.
Health
Authors: Gostin Lawrence O. , Fennell Phil
Published: February 2013

Health law can be viewed as comprising several distinct, but overlapping, areas of interest: the health care system, the therapeutic relationship, and the public health system. These three spheres do not represent the entire range of issues dealt with by health law scholars, but they are among the most prominent. This article analyzes the major tensions and trade-offs that occur, explicitly or implicitly, in each of these three areas. The theory is that individual liberty interests often clash with collective interests in health and security. The law mediates between these two sets of interests. The article first examines the health care system — that is, the organization, financing, and delivery of personal medical services. Next it considers the therapeutic relationship — that is, the complex ways in which patients and health care professionals (principally doctors) interact. Finally, it discusses public health law, which principally involves government duties and powers to assure the conditions in which populations can be healthy.
Corporations
Authors: Cheffins Brian R.
Published: February 2013

This article has two essential objectives. The first is to provide a survey of corporate law's key theoretical themes. The second is to offer an assessment of the manner in which the literature has evolved over time. A key purpose of the enquiry is to identify potential future trajectories for corporate law scholarship. The bulk of the article is devoted to a chronological overview of the major themes dealt with in the theoretical literature on corporate law. It starts with a brief description of debates concerning corporate personality that captured a great deal of attention in the early decades of the twentieth century. Next, it summarizes the analysis influenced by a ‘separation of ownership and control’ thesis set down by Berle and Means. This is followed by an overview of the economically oriented ‘contractarian’ model of the company that has dominated theoretical analysis of corporate law from the 1980s onwards. Critiques of this approach and interdisciplinary work that takes economic analysis as a point of departure are outlined. The discussion here focuses primarily on US material since most of the theoretical contributions concerning corporate law have come from America. Nevertheless, an overview of input from academics in the UK, Canada, and Australia is also provided. Once the chronological overview is complete, the focus shifts to four potential trajectories for corporate law scholarship.
International Business and Commerce
Authors: Cass Deborah Z.
Published: February 2013

This article analyzes some recurrent themes in that portion of the field which is sometimes referred to as international economic law, namely public international law structures that regulate economic relations and exchange between states, with a primary emphasis upon trade. It suggests that six features characterize current legal scholarship on international economic law relating to business and commerce: a focus on institutions and on constitutions as a means to enhance the authority and legitimacy of the rule-making order; an interdependence with wider scholarship about globalization; a general consensus about the benefits of liberalization and the international economic law framework which supports it, punctuated by occasional critique; a concentration on regulation rather than ‘law’ in the traditional sense; a fixation with the problem of definition of its own scope; and a belief in its transformative nature capable of facilitating improvements in the legal order generally. The aim of this article is to describe and analyse the broad contours of each of these features before critiquing them and suggesting some possible avenues of future research.
Intellectual Property
Authors: Gordon Wendy J.
Published: February 2013

This article focuses on a group of doctrines that bear a family relation to each other, doctrines usually included under the rubric of ‘Intellectual Property’ (IP), and these include, among others, copyright, patent, trademark, trade secrecy, so-called ‘moral’ rights, rights in the topography of integrated circuits, rights in industrial design, plant breeder rights, rights of publicity, database rights, and rights against misappropriation. Not all nations recognize or enforce all the doctrines, but because of international obligations, most nations must recognize much of this list. Each doctrine involves restraining people from using or duplicating a pattern that is owned by, or associated with, another party. The article describes the primary areas of IP. This is followed by an outline of some of the dominant economic approaches, as economics provides the most developed line of systematic scholarship thus far.
A Century of Legal Studies
Authors: Duxbury Neil
Published: February 2013

This article focuses on developments in legal studies since 1960 in the United States and England (meaning England specifically, rather than the United Kingdom). As regards the United States, legal scholarship of the first half of the twentieth century forms an important backdrop to what happened during the second half of the century, and so it is almost inevitable that there is contextual work to be undertaken. English legal scholarship of the first half of the twentieth century has received less attention, perhaps because the study of law there remained — certainly in comparison with developments in the United States — a fledgling professional activity until after World War II.
Law as an Autonomous Discipline
Authors: Bix Brian H.
Published: February 2013

This article considers claims about the ‘autonomy of law’. These are that that legal reasoning is different from other forms of reasoning; that legal decision-making is different from other forms of decision-making; that legal reasoning and decision-making are sufficient to themselves, that they neither need help from other approaches nor would they be significantly improved by such help; and that legal scholarship should be about distinctively legal topics (often referred to as ‘legal doctrine’) and is not or should not be about other topics.
Word-Sense Disambiguation
Authors: Stevenson Mark , Wilks Yorick
Published: February 2013

Word-sense disambiguation (WSD) is the process of identifying the meanings of words in context. This article begins with discussing the origins of the problem in the earliest machine translation systems. Early attempts to solve the WSD problem suffered from a lack of coverage. The main approaches to tackle the problem were dictionary-based, connectionist, and statistical strategies. This article concludes with a review of evaluation strategies for WSD and possible applications of the technology. WSD is an ‘intermediate’ task in language processing: like part-of-speech tagging or syntactic analysis, it is unlikely that anyone other than linguists would be interested in its results for their own sake. ‘Final’ tasks produce results of use to those without a specific interest in language and often make use of ‘intermediate’ tasks. WSD is a long-standing and important problem in the field of language processing.
Sublanguages and Controlled Languages
Authors: Kittredge Richard I.
Published: February 2013

This article deals with the topic of sublanguage, the original language grammar subset, which informs various text outputs. Despite routine deviance from standard languages, quite often sublanguage grammatical patterns draw heavily from standard languages. Machine translation, database extraction from texts, and natural language generation are some ways of sublanguage processing. The definition of controlled language projects the difference between itself and sublangauge. The former is described as a restricted set of natural language, engineered to facilitate communication between expert native speakers and either non-expert natives or expert non-natives. However, the difference lies in the fact that controlled language is not a natural subset, unlike sublangauge. Unlike sublanguage that works like a general language in not restricting its sentences, controlled language sets an upper limit, typically around twenty-five. Contrast between controlled language and sublanguage assumes theoretical importance.
Text Summarization
Authors: Hovy Eduard
Published: February 2013

This article describes research and development on the automated creation of summaries of one or more texts. It defines the concept of summary and presents an overview of the principal approaches in summarization. It describes the design, implementation, and performance of various summarization systems. The stages of automated text summarization are topic identification, interpretation, and summary generation, each having its sub stages. Due to the challenges involved, multi-document summarization is much less developed than single-document summarization. This article reviews particular techniques used in several summarization systems. Finally, this article assesses the methods of evaluating summaries. This article reviews evaluation strategies, from previous evaluation studies, to the two-basic measures method. Summaries are so task and genre specific; therefore, no single measurement covers all cases of evaluation
Near Eastern Perspectives on the Greeks
Authors: Rollinger Robert
Published: February 2013

This article considers ways of approaching Hellenism from the perspective of non-Hellenes and invites the reader to rethink some of the fundamental tenets of Hellenism. It argues that ancient Near Eastern sources offer a contrasting picture of cross-cultural contact in comparison with the Greek. For example, several kinds of evidence from the era of the Persian wars point to Greek involvement in the workforce at Persepolis, Susa, and Pasargadae, and in the bureaucracy of the Achaemenids. The article does not suggest that the non-Greek sources are necessarily more accurate or less biased than the Greek; rather, it illustrates how Near Eastern sources, which have been relatively neglected in the study of the eastern Mediterranean, cast a complementary light on historical situations that are also described by or impinge upon Greeks.
The Athenian Empire
Authors: Low Polly
Published: February 2013

This article argues that problems of terminology also plague the study of the Athenian Empire, drawing attention to the many ancient Greek words that have been translated as ‘empire’. Arriving at the right terms to describe Athenian ‘imperialism’ would go hand in hand with the larger process of understanding other features of Athens' hegemony. For example, while the financial aspects of the Athenian Empire are heavily discussed, the cultural imperialism of the city-state still needs to be analysed more fully. Further study may well show that the major importance of the empire lies in its role as the transmitter of Hellenic culture during the period of Athens' dominance and not in its place as a decisive moment in the history of imperialism.
The Polis
Authors: Redfield James
Published: February 2013

This article reflects on changes in social structures from the eighth century BCE. It describes the rise of the polis and the different characteristics of the city-states that have formed at various times and places. The rise of the polis is an aspect of a more general history or it is an aggregate of many histories. The two poleis most famous in ancient as in modern times were also the two most atypical. Overall, the polis was not about equality but about stratification. The most egalitarian polis was Sparta: it achieved this by rigid controls and exclusions, and by making an exception for the twin kings. The greatest liberty, for citizens and non-citizens alike, was at Athens, but it achieved this only by keeping real political initiative in the hands of a very narrow circle, and by making an exception of the citizen women.
Economy and Trade
Authors: von Reden Sitta
Published: February 2013

This article argues that there is a risk of whiggery, of making the rise of the classical polis sound somehow inevitable. This may be the result of complex interactions between society as a whole and the individuals and interest-groups of various kinds of which it is made up. After a brief introduction to the ecological and climatic conditions under which economic activity took place, the discussion considers inter-state connections and markets, warfare, and monetary exchange. These institutions were linked to various forms of state (especially the polis and Greek monarchies), as well as to types of agricultural organization (peasant farms, tenancies, and temple domains).
The City as Memory
Authors: Ma John
Published: February 2013

This article shows how the work of physical construction of a city involved the creation of a history, an ideal past for the polis, which is owned by each individual citizen as much as the corporation. Its history is the citizen's ancestry. Since the citizen might be memorialized in inscription or statue, he might in his turn aspire to a kind of immortality as part of his city's historical identity. Within cities, the construction of memory may have been the means or the prize in power struggles or personal agendas. The story of Athens may bear rethinking in terms of competing political personalities. This should act as an invitation to consider that ‘collective memory’, like other products of the Greek city, may have to be read against the grain.
Slavery
Authors: DuBois Page
Published: February 2013

This article addresses the issue of slavery. Where society operates to give cultural shape to biological facts in the case of sexuality, it denies cultural identity or cultural significance to slaves, who become ‘mere’ bodies. Most of the written evidence from Greek antiquity comes from the perspective of slave-owners. People cannot know what ancient Greek slaves might have had to say about their experiences of enslavement. There are various ways to address this matter: one is by using the analogy of slaves from other historical circumstances who did write about such experiences, in the form, for example, of the slave narratives of ante- and post-bellum America. Other strategies for imagining or representing ancient slaves' experience involve extrapolating from silence, supplying the other side of a one-sided dialogue between master and slave.
Ethnic Prejudice and Racism
Authors: Benjamin Isaac
Published: February 2013

Slaves are ubiquitous, yet nearly invisible: central to the functioning of the polis, but ‘outsiders’ to it as well. In this sense, there is something else that they symbolize: the relationship between the polis and other peoples and races. This relationship is often conceived in terms of actual or potential hostility. This article deals with how the Greeks saw foreigners, and, in particular, the nature of their negative views of non-Greeks. It shows that the Greeks might not have known colour prejudice, a defining feature of modern racism, but were no less racist for that. The highly institutionalized character taken on by travel in the Greek world may be explained in part by this suspicion of foreigners and foreign lands. The article defines racism as an attitude towards individuals and groups of peoples that posits a direct and linear connection between physical and mental qualities.
Maritime Identities
Authors: Ayodeji Kim
Published: February 2013

This article describes maritime identities. The sea is a standpoint offering a neglected perspective on ancient Greek life, neglected partly because it symbolized for the city dwellers who dominate the evidence the threat of the foreign: a means of travel, yet a means that presented a constant danger to life and liberty. It has played a key role in shaping the physical and cultural identity of Greece over millennia. In the field of Hellenic studies, the impact of the sea on the culture of Greece has been investigated from several angles, and particular attention has been paid to seafaring, trade, and warfare.
Books and Literacy
Authors: Rösler Wolfgang
Published: February 2013

Undeniably, in the course of time, texts and readers became more prominent. Yet, as this article explains, all ancient texts remain part of a larger cultural context that is different from today's culture in many important ways. When that wider context is explored, our sense of closeness to the Greeks becomes less secure, and the impression of a Greek ‘miracle’ begins to fade. For instance, the Homeric poems are sometimes presented as a literary big bang: they are thought to have brought European literature into existence out of nowhere.
Epic Poetry
Authors: Haubold Johannes
Published: February 2013

The term ‘epic’, when applied to ancient Greek literature, refers to a set of texts that may be loosely defined as narrative poetry about the deeds of gods and heroes. To a very large extent, this is a reflection of Homer's authority as the most famous epic poet. This article argues that recent comparisons between early Greek epic and modern oral traditions, as well as the discovery and investigation of ancient Hittite and Near Eastern texts, place Greek epic in a much wider literary and historical context.
Music
Authors: Rocconi Eleonora
Published: February 2013

One area where it is particularly difficult to bridge the gap between text and performance is ancient music. This article notes that people today know very little about how ancient music sounded. It is much easier to relate ancient theories of music to other intellectual endeavours, such as the study of physics, mathematics, or ethics, than to investigate its connections with the work of practicing musicians. There is a paradox here, because ancient musical theories later inspired the development of musical forms on the part of performing artists. Modern opera, most famously, originated in an attempt at reconstructing ancient Greek music and drama. Greek musical theory laid the foundations for many aesthetic and theoretical speculations of later antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance.
Manuscript Studies
Authors: Tchernetska Natalie
Published: February 2013

Even when people have the objects created and handled by the Greeks, the insights into Greek life they provide us with are not transparent or unmediated. No more so are the ancient texts to which people might turn for commentary. The question of ‘originality’ arises when people are dealing with texts, especially when our possession of these relies on their transmission through a long chain of copyists. This article describes the copyists' work: manuscript studies. Manuscript studies includes palaeography, the study of scripts, and codicology, the study of the material properties of a manuscript, such as writing material and ink, manuscript format, and page layout. In defining the object of study as medieval books written on parchment and paper, manuscript studies is distinct from papyrology, which is concerned with books and documents written on papyrus. The key questions in manuscript studies are when a particular manuscript was written, and where.
Reception
Authors: Leonard Miriam
Published: February 2013

Collections of scholarly articles on aspects of the ancient world often end with a token article on the later ‘reception’ of the topic under discussion. This article also ends with a paper on reception, but for a different reason. It focuses on the theory of reception, and various examples of its practice within Hellenic studies. The article also notes that together with the preceding articles, ‘reception studies’ cannot be separated out as a methodology distinct from anything else conducted under the heading of Hellenic studies. Properly understood, it is what Hellenic studies is – to the extent that the emphasis is on us rather than the Greeks we study.
Absolute Monarchy
Authors: Campbell Peter R.
Published: February 2013

This article argues that in spite of absolute monarchy's success in seemingly rising above society it developed claims and practices that ran counter to long-term representative tendencies contained within its own structures. It was never able to suppress these, nor did it intend to, because they remained enshrined in corporate society itself, on which it was based. Although the corporate society of the old regime was very hierarchical, its elites retained a large measure of autonomy in their own spheres. This sense of independence and the continued vitality of privilege provided fertile ground for a revival of conciliarist and later commonwealth arguments, and a historical belief in an ancient constitution. These arguments in favour of limited royal power eventually empowered an opposition that was able to take advantage of the excesses and contradictions that characterized some of the practices of absolute monarchy, whose power to enforce its central will was somewhat illusory.
Feudalism
Authors: Crubaugh Anthony
Published: February 2013

Feudalism generally refers to a medieval system of political, social, and economic organization based on vassalage and the granting of a foedum (fief) that developed in western Europe with the collapse of authority following Germanic invasions. Medieval feudal contracts involved the establishment of a hierarchical but mutually supportive relationship among private individuals, cemented by a ceremony in which a vassal paid homage and promised material and military support to a lord in return for the lord's protection and the investiture of a fief. Although feudal contracts governed the reciprocal obligations among the noble military elite, the landed estates that served as the basis of the warrior class's economic power required the labour of peasants.
Commerce
Authors: Marzagalli Silvia
Published: February 2013

Although in the course of the eighteenth century there emerged in several European countries a desire to set the economy and trade free, in the French case it took the Revolution to sweep away a whole range of restrictions which weighed upon the circulation of goods. Even so, the gradual ending of the commercial system which had underpinned the prosperity of European ports under the Ancien Régime was also, in fact primarily, the consequence of structural changes in the European economy and in the apparatus of colonial domination in America. This article does not offer a complete picture of trade under the Ancien Régime, but rather attempts to bring out the distinctive characteristics which would disappear between the end of the eighteenth century and the middle of the nineteenth with the arrival of more modern systems of exchange.
Popular Religion
Authors: Briggs Robin
Published: February 2013

Popular religion, along with the wider field of popular culture, has only been a recognized subject for historical investigation for a relatively short time; the bibliography is virtually non-existent before 1970. Even so, a term that was at first accepted as comprehensible and useful has rapidly come to be seen as highly problematic. Among the multiple reasons for concern, two in particular stand out. Historians now recoil from any suggestion that there was a single or coherent phenomenon that could be labelled in this way, while detailed research has largely destroyed the notion of a clear frontier between “official” and “popular” beliefs and practices. These discussions have been particularly lively in the case of France, where the nature of religious change under the Ancien Régime raises important issues with wide relevance, and the documentation is unusually rich.
Jansenism
Authors: O'Connor Thomas
Published: February 2013

Jansenism was given a name only in the 1640s but originated as a sixteenth-century theological current in Spanish Flanders, where it was part of the Catholic response to the intellectual and pastoral challenges thrown up by the Reformation. It gradually outgrew its university origins and, by the 1640s, had come to represent a distinct and contested renewal tendency in Flemish and French Catholicism. Although Antoine Arnauld (1612–94), the greatest Jansenist so-called, claimed that Jansenism was the product of its critics' febrile imaginations, there was nothing illusory about its capacity to create enemies. Detractors distrusted its positive theological method and suspected its dogged determination to impose St Augustine as the church's unique theological yardstick.
Colonial America
Authors: Clark Christopher
Published: February 2013

The British American colonies embodied such social, economic, and political diversity that they did not, of course, constitute a single “old order” any more than Europe did. They had evolved from different origins: English, Dutch, and Scandinavian; and under an array of influences: Native American, French, African, Irish, Scottish, German. Even the two oldest areas of English settlement, the Chesapeake region and New England, differed markedly. In New England, where early settlement involved whole families, and where sex ratios quickly achieved a rough parity, seventeenth-century settlers set patterns for longevity and demographic robustness that were sustained throughout the colonial period.
Development of Comparative Law in Italy
Authors: Grande Elisabetta
Published: February 2013

Since Italy's unification in 1861, Italian law has mainly been a ‘context of reception’. In contrast to contexts of production, where legal scholarship tends to unfold in a self-centred mode, contexts of reception tend to search for legal innovation abroad. Italian legal culture has often copied legal ideas, norms, and institutions from foreign countries but only rarely produced original work of its own. The article begins the story of comparative law in Italy in the early part of the twentieth century. It distinguishes three fundamental layers: a commercial law branch, a reformist tradition, and a mainstream, ‘scientific’, approach. It discusses the current state of Italian comparative law resulting from the academic and cultural influence of these three layers. It also attempts to assess the impact of the more significant and original contributions of Italian comparative law at the European and global levels.
Comparative Law and the Study of Mixed Legal Systems
Authors: Du Plessis Jacques
Published: February 2013

Legal systems generally are ‘mixed’ in the sense that they have been influenced by a variety of other systems. However, this label traditionally is only attached to those systems which represent a mix between the common law and the civilian tradition. This article focuses on what studies of mixed legal systems reveal about the broader comparative themes of the classification of legal systems, whether and how borrowing can take place, the quality of the law to which borrowing gives rise, the connection between civil law and the common law in the European context, and the role which language can play in comparative analysis and legal development.
Comparative Law and its Influence on National Legal Systems
Authors: Smits Jan M.
Published: February 2013

This article assesses the scholarly state of affairs regarding the influence of comparative law in national systems. In so doing, emphasis is put on private law and constitutional law, as these are the two areas where comparative inspiration is discussed most vigorously. The second and third section distinguishes several types of use of comparative law by national legislatures and courts, providing the background for a critical evaluation of this influence in the subsequent sections. The fourth section discusses the legitimacy question and the question of how to categorize the different uses of foreign law. The fifth section addresses why a legislature or court actually refers to foreign law and is how to explain the different extent to which countries are open to foreign influence. The last section considers the exact influence of comparative law arguments on the legislature's or court's reasoning.
Comparative Law and the Europeanization of Private Law
Authors: Zimmermann Reinhard
Published: February 2013

The gradual emergence of a European private law is one of the most significant contemporary legal developments. Comparative law scholarship has played an important role in this process and will continue to do so. This article discusses the Europeanization of private law as a new and challenging task for comparative law. The second section considers the Europeanization of private law, describing the creation of the European Union and the role of the European Court of Justice. The third section discusses European legal scholarship. The fourth section cites the contributions of comparative law. The last two sections discuss current and future trends for the European private law.