bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Judicial Decision-Making: Judges and Arbitrators
Authors: Démare‐Lafont Sophie 
Published: February 2013

AbstractThis article examines judicial decision-making in ancient Mesopotamia. It explains that the Mesopotamian perception of justice combined the notions of stability and straightness and it was intended to reproduce cosmic order in the terrestrial world. It describes various people who served as judges and arbitrators. It discusses the individual stages and elements of a trial at court and argues that despite its apparent adversarial nature, Mesopotamian judicial practice was in essence conciliatory.
Sheep and Sky: Systems of Divinatory Interpretation
Authors: Koch Ulla Susanne 
Published: February 2013

AbstractThis article examines the systems of divinatory interpretation in ancient Mesopotamia. Based on the sustained transmission of the tradition as well as the sheer amount of textual evidence, this article suggests that divination must have played an important role in the second and first millennium cuneiform cultures of Babylonia and Assyria. It describes two of the major divinatory disciplines: extispicy and omen astrology as practised at the Neo-Assyrian court in the second quarter of the first millennium bc.
Making Sense of Time: Observational and Theoretical Calendars
Authors: Steele John M. 
Published: February 2013

AbstractThis article describes observational and theoretical calendars in ancient Mesopotamia. Some of the earliest cuneiform sources attest to calendar systems for the reckoning of days for administrative and cultic purposes. There were hemerologies which set out good and bad fortune days throughout the year and astronomical almanacs which contain the length of each month calculated for a coming year. This article suggests that Mesopotamian calendars extended into two other areas of astronomy that provide information on solstices, equinoxes, and the planets.
Tablets of Schools and Scholars: A Portrait of the Old Babylonian Corpus
Authors: Tinney Steve 
Published: February 2013

Abstract
This article describes the Old Babylonia corpus based on evidence from tablets of schools and scholars. It charts both well-established and yet untrodden paths through the realm of Old Babylonian literary and scholarly tablets and evaluates the entire corpus of Old Babylonian literary and learning regardless of language. It highlights the need to conduct more research to elaborate the nature and extent of the relationships between Akkadian and Sumerian corpora, and the mechanics of the transfer of knowledge within southern Babylonia.
Adapting to New Contexts: Cuneiform in Anatolia
Authors: Weeden Mark 
Published: February 2013

AbstractThis article focuses on cuneiform and scribal education in Anatolia. It attempts to trace some of the developments in the corpus of knowledge and training when it let the confines of its initial area of relevance and was received in Anatolia by the Hittites and to draw inferences about the semiotic and sociological context of the wholesale import of a large-scale technocratic apparatus from one culture into another. It discusses the institutional and social context of scribal education in Old Babylonian Mesopotamia and suggests that class composition among the Anatolian elite was not necessarily the same as that in Mesopotamia.
Observing and Describing The World Through Divination and Astronomy
Authors: Rochberg Francesca 
Published: February 2013

Abstract
This article examines observation and description of the world through divination and astronomy in ancient Mesopotamian scribal culture. It discusses observation-statements that stand in relation to the omen divination programme and the astronomical observations of the Babylonian Diaries focusing on their relationships and the formation of the empirical foundation of mathematical astronomy. It suggests that the modern reconstruction of the Babylonian mathematical astronomical texts has been of profound significance for the history of science because the foundation of Western astronomy is traceable in those sources.
History ∙ Plays ∙ Genre ∙ Games
Authors: Taylor Gary 
Published: February 2013

Abstract
This article asks: Did Middleton write any history plays? And if he did, are they any good? Behind those sceptical questions lurk two others. ‘What is the history play?’ And is Middleton really ‘our other Shakespeare’? The article suggests that while Middleton did not write history plays the way Shakespeare did, or as often as Shakespeare did, he did write two artful, thoughtful, original history plays – plays as dark and brilliant, as delightful and disturbing, as his comedies, tragedies, and tragicomedies. Those histories are important precisely because Middleton sees and shapes the past differently from Shakespeare. If history is indeed a battle between competing books, then analysing the difference between Shakespeare's histories and Middleton's is not just an idle game professors play.
Passionate Tunes For Amorous Poems: Middleton's Way With Music
Authors: Seligmann Raphael 
Published: February 2013

Abstract
This article focuses on Middleton's way with music. Middleton treats music consistently as a ‘thing indifferent’ – good or bad depending on use. This moral agnosticism allows him to concentrate on music's practical value in building (and sometimes disrupting) communities. In Middleton's plays, song performances and comments about music expose complex relationships between characters without pretending to disclose eternal truths. Thus, a singing academy can serve as a front for a brothel in one play, while in another, a prostitute can sing a lute song to show sincere repentance. Music making in Middleton brings people together for business, fighting, love, or sex because it is something that people do and enjoy, and consider important.
‘More Lies Than True Tales’:Scepticism In Middleton'S Mock-Almanacs
Authors: Hand Meredith Molly 
Published: February 2013

Abstract
This article explores the relationship between Middleton's scepticism as it appears in his mock-prognostications, including The Owl's Almanac (1618), and the classical scepticism described in Sextus's Outlines of Pyrrhonism, which appeared in translation and was embraced in early modern English culture. Middleton's and Sextus's scepticisms ostensibly differ a great deal. The Pyrrhonist scepticism espoused by Sextus encourages humans to apprehend opposing sides of a debate, or alternative but equally valid perspectives, with equipollence, and to suspend judgement, thus arriving at a state of tranquillity. Middleton's scepticism casts doubt upon dogma and oppressive doctrine and exposes the material reality and socio-economic relations of early modern English culture.
Middleton and the Theatre of Emergency
Authors: Glimp David 
Published: February 2013

Abstract
However much disasters threaten communities, strain them to their limits, or unravel them altogether in the course of any given emergency, disasters also create communities. They can do so in many ways: as a traumatic past event that generates a sense of belonging or attachment to a place, or group, or former state of affairs; as a present reality which brings into clarified focus the structure of collective life and the differentially distributed resources available for survival; or as a future possibility constituting a horizon of governmental reflection and activity, a focus of planning, knowledge production, and programmes of disaster preparedness, risk abatement, or risk management. The power of disaster to sponsor imagined communities was something early modern dramatists and theatrical entrepreneurs knew well, a knowledge embedded in and enacted through the artefacts they produced and from which they sought to turn a profit. Through political catastrophe, playwrights and the theatre companies that sponsored them undertook acts of world making in the paradoxical form of narratives of threatened or realized large-scale destruction. Thomas Middleton participated in this aspect of the Renaissance commercial theatre throughout his career. This article focuses on three of his later plays: The Old Law (1618 or 1619), Hengist, King of Kent (1620), and A Game At Chess (1624). Through close readings of these plays, it works to describe some of the primary resources Middleton employed to create states of emergency on stage, especially resources of plot, characterization, and language.
Middleton and Mimetic Desire
Authors: Engel Lars 
Published: February 2013

AbstractThomas Middleton's reputation is at an interesting stage, no longer confined to conversations among academic specialists on early modern drama, but not yet in any settled place in a larger canon of authors whom literate people are meant to know about. This article seeks to contribute to the emergence of a mythic Middleton whom we know to turn to for some particular kind of excellence. This mythic Middleton is a theatre-poet especially good at catching the generation and power of what René Girard has taught us to call mimetic desire: a great poet, that is, of the social energies of rivalry, comic and tragic.
The Emotions Of Tragedy
Authors: Budra Paul 
Published: February 2013

AbstractThe most regularly performed of Thomas Middleton's plays since its revival in 1961 has been The Changeling. The majority of productions, and the ones that received the best reviews, emphasize a romantic relationship between the characters Beatrice-Joanna and De Flores. Literary critics, too, have begun to assume a repressed sexual attraction in Beatrice-Joanna for the radical other of De Flores. Barker and Nicol take exception to this interpretation of the play, finding it questionable on contemporary feminist terms for its erotic treatment of the central scene, in which De Flores demands that Beatrice-Joanna reward his murder of Piracquo with sexual favours, which risks affirming that Middleton and Rowley's heroine actually desires a rape she pleads against in the lines they wrote for her. This article suggests that it is questionable for another reason: this romantic, or at least erotic, reading of the play may be emotionally ahistorical. It arises, at least in part, from an essentialization of the emotional registers of tragedy, a process which resulted from the domination of that dramatic genre by Shakespeare.
‘It's a Whole Different Sex!’: Women Performing Middleton On The Modern Stage
Authors: Bourus Terri 
Published: February 2013

Abstract
This article focuses on five actresses now stretching their Middletonian wings: two from Still's Revenger, one from Berger's, one from Elliot's Women Beware, and a fifth from an earlier promenade production of The Changeling, directed by Joanna Reed. Anyone interested in Middleton's art and Middleton's women can learn a lot from Barbara Flynn, Katherine Manners, Liv Rooth, Harriet Walter, and Louise Yates: five actresses, at very different stages in their careers, playing five very different roles in four very different productions on three very different stages.
‘The Lure Of A Taffeta Cloak’: Middleton's Sartorial Seduction in Your Five Gallants
Authors: Bly Mary 
Published: February 2013

Abstract
This article explores Middleton's Your Five Gallants. Your Five Gallants is manifestly a post-sumptuary law play, one obsessed with the effect and pleasure of wearing sumptuous clothing – but also with the difficulty of recognizing degree. It is torn between a depiction of the delights of sartorial splendour and acknowledgement that there is little besides the hidden quality of ‘blood’ which divides a husbandman from a nobleman. This is why the play opens with Frippery rather than Katherine. Most romantic comedies track illicit love affairs, but the focus here is on newly licit objects of desire, and its erotically invested encounters are not between women and men, but between bodies and fabric.
Africa and The Global Lives of Things
Authors: Prestholdt Jeremy 
Published: February 2013

Abstract
Inquiries into commodification, social distinction, and fashion have offered fresh perspectives on social relations and cultural formations in Africa. Imported consumer goods were both elemental to social relationships and a cornerstone of Africa's global interfaces. This article explores how the social dynamics of consumer demand in Africa were shaped by, and gave shape to, larger social, economic, and political relationships from the sixteenth to the early twentieth century. This approach underscores the interrelation of African cultural imperatives and histories of globalization. Focusing on East Africa in the late nineteenth century, the article begins with a snapshot of consumer trends before the nineteenth century. It then examines three dimensions of consumption in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century: marketing consumer objects, the social relations of consumption, and the ways manufacturers accommodated African consumer demand. Taken together, these themes augment our understanding of social change in Africa, contribute to wider reflections on consumption as a mode of trans-societal relation, and highlight how manufactured objects can be conceptually and physically transformed throughout their global life cycles.
Things Under Socialism: The Soviet Experience
Authors: Fitzpatrick Sheila 
Published: February 2013

Abstract
The unequal distribution of things was one of the basic iniquities of capitalism. Coupled with confidence in future abundance was the recognition that, for the short term, in the wake of the Russian Revolution and before the ‘building of socialism’ had been completed, things might be tough and goods scarce. So the immediate Revolutionary task was to ensure that those who had formerly been poor in goods became rich, and vice versa. The challenge for the Soviet Union was how to successfully accomplish that redistribution. The new phrase of Revolution – Joseph Stalin's ‘revolution from above’ – was a state-initiated great leap forward on the economic front, involving a rapid industrialization drive, collectivization of peasant agriculture, abolition of private trade in the towns, and the introduction of central economic planning. This article focuses on things under socialism in the Soviet Union and considers scarcity and privilege, the rediscovery of good taste, the promises of abundance under Nikita Khrushchev, Eastern Europe and ‘socialist modernity’, and access to Western goods after the collapse of communism.
Unexpected Subversions: Modern Colonialism, Globalization, and Commodity Culture
Authors: Burke Timothy 
Published: February 2013

Abstract
Scholars studying the history of modern colonialism have been more reluctant to make strongly contrarian claims about consumerism and commodification similar to those made by early modern Europeanists because they are more unsettled by some of the implications of their own studies. Modern consumer culture is strongly mapped to ‘Westernization’ and globalization. There is a very large class of scholarly studies that in some respect or another discuss the association between colonialism and consumption in nineteenth- and twentieth-century global culture. Even constrained to the Western European states that created or extended formal empires in Africa, Asia, and the Pacific after 1860, studies such as Anne McClintock's intricate reading of British commodity culture indicate the extent to which colonial meanings and images were circulating within metropolitan societies. This article discusses modern colonialism, globalization, and commodity culture. It first examines the middle classes, nations, and modernity, and then considers consumer agency in the context of globalization.
A Global Diaspora
Authors: Devine T. M. 
Published: February 2013

AbstractIn 2010, the Scottish government announced a ‘Diaspora Engagement Plan’ outlining an ambitious strategy for connecting with Scots emigrants overseas. The Scottish diaspora of the last 700 years or more has had several distinctive features. While it has been suggested that, by the later twentieth century, an estimated 15 million people of Scottish descent lived outside Scotland, the longevity of Scottish emigration, stretching back to the thirteenth century, might indicate that the estimate could still err on the conservative side. Considerable outward movement from Scotland, often on a substantial scale, occurred from the 1400s through to the 1990s. This article examines the Scottish experience of emigration, focusing on the great migrations between c.1830 and c.1939 and the reasons for movement. It also looks at the more recent outward movement since 1945.
The Early Modern Family
Authors: Ewan Elizabeth 
Published: February 2013

AbstractClan and family ties are among the most recognized aspects of ‘Scottishness’ around the world. But what do we know about the historic Scottish family, as opposed to images largely based on nineteenth-century traditions? Perhaps because of the popularity of clan roots among modern diaspora Scots and the resulting association with ‘tartanism’, most historians have tended to focus their research elsewhere. While family history has flourished in those other areas since the 1980s, Scottish studies, especially of the pre-modern family, have only recently begun to appear, despite earlier calls for such work. This article explores the family in early modern Scotland, focusing on the nuclear family unit of parents and children. It also examines the family's place in the wider context of kinship and society, and considers illegitimacy, divorce, marriage and marriage litigation, domestic abuse, and women's history.
The Stateless Nation and the British State since 1918
Authors: Cameron Ewen A. 
Published: February 2013

Abstract
The important role of the state in Scottish history since 1918 can be partly explained by historical forces arising from the speed of Scotland's economic development in the nineteenth century and the twentieth-century attempts to deal with the legacies of this process. These problems were too profound to be dealt with by private enterprise; only the mobilization of the resources of the state could eradicate the slums or improve the health of the nation. However, there is a problem in attempting to understand the state in a Scottish context. There is no doubt that sovereignty and authority are located at a United Kingdom level, even in a post-devolution context. Suggestions of Scottish autonomy or semi-independence are cultural or political, rather than constitutional or legal. This article discusses the links between the role of the state and the operation of the Union in Scotland since 1918. Although aspects of this topic – housing, economic development, the regeneration of the Highlands, education – have attracted a great deal of attention, there are big questions that remain to be examined by new research.
Linguistic Issues in Statutory Interpretation
Authors: Solan Lawrence M. 
Published: February 2013

AbstractIn legal systems throughout the world, legislatures write laws, and judges construe and apply them when a dispute arises over their interpretation. This article focuses on the nature of the language issues which cause problems in statutory interpretation, and the ways that courts tend to address them. It looks at American law, in part because American judges, who operate in the common law tradition, generally justify their decisions in written opinions, creating a body of information about interpretive arguments and techniques that makes this legal system a good laboratory for investigating these issues. After describing and illustrating some of the linguistic problems that make language inadequate to define rights and obligations without considering other values, the article discusses linguistic indeterminacies of different sorts, including syntactic ambiguity, semantic ambiguity, ambiguity of reference, and vagueness. It also examines laws whose meaning changes over time, creating a mismatch between the language and the goals of the enacting legislature, and concludes by focusing on legislative errors.
Challenges To The Legal Translator
Authors: Šarčević Susan 
Published: February 2013

AbstractFocusing on the link between law, language, and culture, J. B. White notes that legal translation is a ‘necessarily imperfect process’. This article focuses on challenges to legal translators caused by the inherent incongruity of legal systems, cultures, and languages. It attempts to ‘demystify’ the ‘miracle’ of legal translation, showing how skilled translators with legal expertise and cultural sensitivity use language effectively to compensate for conceptual incongruity by creating ‘terminological bridges’. The article then outlines some of the basics of legal translation, with the main emphasis on the special nature of legal texts, their function, and the degree of accuracy required to achieve intercultural communication for various purposes. It also considers the role of skopos (communicative purpose) in legal translation and considers terminological problems in legally binding instruments. Like comparativists, translators need to use methods of comparative law in their search for potential equivalents and to test their adequacy by comparative conceptual analysis. The article concludes by discussing considerations about the effectiveness of multilingualism.
The Language of Criminal Trials in an Inquisitorial System: The Case of the Netherlands
Authors: Komter Martha L. , Malsch Marijke 
Published: February 2013

AbstractThis article discusses the role of language in inquisitorial systems, also known as civil law systems. It focuses on the highly professionalized inquisitorial criminal justice system in the Netherlands, where the dependence on documentary evidence is noticeable the moment one enters a Dutch courthouse. Ushers can be seen pushing trolleys stacked with files and papers, on their way to the courtroom or to the archives. The prominent role of the case file is also evident inside the courtrooms, not only as a central source of information around which the events are organized, but also as material presence. The discussion starts by considering how adversarial systems differ from inquisitorial criminal justice systems, and then describes some typical features of Dutch criminal trials, positioning these in relation to adversarial and other inquisitorial criminal justice systems. It concludes by discussing the language of Dutch criminal trials focused on the central position of the case file for the activities of the judges.
Instructing the Jury
Authors: Marder Nancy S. 
Published: February 2013

AbstractIn the American legal system, a defendant in a serious criminal case and parties in certain types of civil cases are entitled to a trial by jury. In both criminal and civil jury trials, jurors are drawn from a ‘fair-cross-section’ of the community. Although they are usually untrained in the law, jurors provide the ‘common-sense judgment’ of the community. At the end of a jury trial, whether in a civil or criminal case, the judge instructs the jury on the relevant law. The jury is supposed to use the jury instructions in the course of its deliberations, although much of the empirical and anecdotal evidence suggests that juries have difficulty understanding these instructions. This article examines why jury instructions are so difficult to grasp, and what steps judges and committees can take to make them more accessible to jurors. After discussing the language of the instructions, it looks at how the instructions are presented.