This introduction briefly deals with the major orientations of this European Review Focus on ‘European crime fiction’. It first specifies what is meant by ‘Europe’ and which type of questions can be asked of crime fiction in view of a better understanding of Europe’s multiple and changing identities. It then presents the various contributions by linking them with the three fundamental questions of (1) circulation of crime fiction, (2) expansion of crime fiction in the broader cultural, social and economic field, and (3) the relevance of crime fiction for a thorough reflection on some properly European aspects of culture and society.

This paper explores the meaning behind the two methods of sword carry depicted in the iconography of Ashurnasirpal II. While the sword is regarded as a prestigious weapon tied to the owner's identity, the implications of how such an understanding of the sword in the Neo-Assyrian Empire might further delineate the underlying messages of the palace reliefs of Ashurnasirpal II remain unaddressed in secondary literature. As a result, through a combination of a cognitive analysis in regards to the significance of the sword's appearance in Neo-Assyrian texts and iconography as well as an analysis of visual formulas in the palace reliefs of Ashurnasirpal II as identified by Mehmet-Ali Ataç, this paper argues that the visual representation of the sword is intended to communicate not only the wielder's power and wealth but also the wielder's exercise or restraint of divine authority based on the carry method displayed.

The objection of horrible commands claims that divine command metaethics is doomed to failure because it is committed to the extremely counterintuitive assumption that torture of innocents, rape, and murder would be morally obligatory if God commanded these acts. Morriston, Wielenberg, and Sinnott-Armstrong have argued that formulating this objection in terms of counterpossibles is particularly forceful because it cannot be simply evaded by insisting on God's necessary perfect moral goodness. I show that divine command metaethics can be defended even against this counterpossible version of the objection of horrible commands because we can explain the truth-value intuitions about the disputed counterpossibles as the result of conversational implicatures. Furthermore, I show that this pragmatics-based defence of divine command metaethics has several advantages over Pruss's reductio counterargument against the counterpossible version of the objection of horrible commands.

This article argues for a new understanding of pantheism whereby God is a multi-located mereological simple which constitutes the cosmos. I argue that the traditional theist can more readily accept this version of pantheism than a version identifying God with the cosmos.1

The kingdom of Allada in the seventeenth century was an important supplier of slaves for the trans-Atlantic trade, and also an object of Christian missionary activity, but the earlier history of its interactions with Europeans is poorly documented. It has previously been assumed that the first direct Portuguese contact with the Allada area occurred in 1553. However, recently discovered documents in Portuguese archives correct this view. These comprise two petitions to the King of Portugal from an ambassador of the King of Allada currently in Lisbon: although undated, the content of one of them enables it to be dated to either 1544 or 1555, more probably the former; given the time which the ambassador had already spent in Portugal, his original dispatch from Allada occurred in 1540/1541 or 1551/1552. The petitions document the Allada king’s interest in the establishment of a Christian church in his realm, as well as commercial relations.

Using the Tensions of Empire volume as a pivot point, this article traces Frederick Cooper’s work in relation to trajectories of historical materialism and cultural history over the past forty years. Highlighting Cooper’s contributions to both approaches, it points to a generative tension between these strands of his scholarship – as well as between his oeuvre and the arc of broader historiography on empire. Specific features of Cooper’s approach were key to the success of the Tensions of Empire collaboration, and attention to them can help recapture aspects of these historiographies that have become obscured over time.