Anyone who knows Berlioz's music could probably guess the likely tone of his comparison between the two composers. But at least Berlioz has the honesty to doubt its value …

I don't think the review of this concert will occupy my readers for long (one always imagines one has readers). The concert was entrancing, it must be said, and the orchestra performed miracles, especially in Beethoven's First Symphony. You have to hear our violins and see them flying away in [the Trio of] the Scherzo, to believe in the possibility of such nuances being observed by thirty bows simultaneously. It's astonishing. I’m not talking about that pattern which wends its way through the wind section, as light and swift as a puff of wind: we know what our violinists are capable of technically. In any case, that in itself does not present any problems; it's the delicacy of the legato that calls for praise, because there are a score of ways of playing such a passage correctly, and a score of ways passably; this is the right, excellent, and marvellous way. The audience was thrilled and demanded an encore of the Scherzo. For Beethoven this symphony was the point of departure. Its form is smaller and its style less grand than in the symphonies that followed; that it even lacks the sublime aspirations that marked the composer's later works is beyond doubt. But such as it is, how far superior I find it to Haydn's G major Symphony (Opus 51) that we heard in the same concert!

I’m very far from lacking respect for Haydn's genius, and further still from belittling the admirable music in this same work, the Andante of which is delightful.

Paul Cullen’s final years saw the apparently inexorable rise of the Home Rule movement, his own reluctant accomodation to that movement, as well as his attempts to co-opt it, not least through high profile and contested events such as the 1875 centenary of the birth of Daniel O’Connell. These years also saw the final resolution of the Callan Schools Affair, which had plagued Cullen for a number of years, including through a high profile trial, as well as one final political victory at the unlikely hands of a Conservative government that proved willing to make significant education concessions not long before Cullen’s own death in late 1878.

The Appeal Court consisted of at least three Lords Commissioners from the following list: Lord President of Council; John Carteret 2nd Earl Granville; Earl Cholmondeley; Earl of Kinnoul; Lord Berkeley of Strathclyde; Lord Sandys; Lord Mansfield; Robert Nugent Esq.; and Welbore Ellis Esq.

The Lords Commissioners were advised by two experienced Council, men of the standing of Dr George Hay, of Doctors Commons, or William Murray when he was Attorney General. Between 1751 and 1766 the Lords Commissioners heard and determined 234 Prize appeals. Of these, 44 came from the English High Court of Admiralty, 88 came from Jamaica, 23 from New York, 19 from Antigua, and the remaining 19 from the other nine Vice Admiralty Courts.

A shared capture took place before war was declared, when William Gordon, St Albans (60), Hugh Palliser, Eagle (60), and Mark Milbank, Romney (50), were detached in May 1756 by Admiral Boscawen to cruise off Cape Ortegal. They took La Fidelle and jointly took Thisbe before they separated to chase three other French vessels, Triton, St Mark and Venus, successfully capturing them all while the British ships were in company although not always in sight. There was no contesting the fact that the Admiral was entitled to his eighth share. At the appeal before the Court, the first question was whether the crew of Admiral Boscawen's vessel and the other ships under his command were also entitled to a share of the prizes.

Around 1528, the Bruges playwright Cornelis Everaert (?–1556) started an autograph collection of his dramatic oeuvre in which he copied his plays and added several notes which allow us to situate some plays in their performance context. As a result, we know that he took considerable pride in the fact that some of his politically conformist plays were awarded prizes by the authorities. His Tspel van den Hooghen Wynt ende Zoeten Reyn (‘The Play of the High Wind and Sweet Rain’), which was composed ‘in honour of our Emperor Charles, when the King of France was taken prisoner at Pavia in the year 1525’ (ter eeren van Kaerle onsen Keyser, als den conync van Vranckerycke ghevanghen wiert voor Pavyen ao 1525: headnote), comes with a marginal annotation that states that it had won ‘the first prize awarded by the city, which was a silver tray’ (uppren prys van den stede upghestelt ende was een selveren scale). At the same time, he also chose to include in his collection two plays which he claims had been banned from being performed due to their controversial content. Everaert's collection therefore stands witness to the complicated relationship between plays and censorship, drama and authority in the sixteenth-century Low Countries and allows unique insight into both political critique and censorship in action.

Although scholars have acknowledged the inclusion of these two banned plays, they have nevertheless been at best tentative in acknowledging quite how critical the playwright could be. Jacob Wijbrand Muller labelled Everaert a ‘semi-revolutionary playwright’ (halfrevolutionnaire toneeldichter) whose ‘half-hearted criticism’ (halfslachtige critiek) is ‘smothered halfway’ (halverwege gesmoord) with the plays ending in praise.

‘All legislation needs clarification.’ The decrees on entry into marriage issued by Lateran IV (1215, canon 51) and by the Council of Trent (1545–1563, decree Tametsi) instantiate this dictum. The 1215 council failed to prevent clandestine marriages, and the more carefully framed decree Tametsi encountered unforeseen social complexities, which the Congregation of the Council was required to resolve.

Introduction

While initially piloted as the technology behind cryptocurrencies, the distributed ledger technology underlying Bitcoin, that is, blockchain, now extends to use cases beyond mere virtual currencies. Technologists and blockchain evangelists have been quick to overlook the excessive carbon footprint of Bitcoin, the world's first cryptocurrency, and have attempted to expand the use cases of blockchain to areas beyond virtual currencies, finance, and payments (Huang, O’Neill, and Tabuchi 2021). This technology that brings together characteristics of decentralization, peer-to-peer computing, hash functions, asymmetric public–private key cryptography, and consensus algorithms to form a shared, immutable, and non-repudiable database is considered to have tremendous potential in fields such as identity and access management, healthcare, supply chain tracking, climate change, and so on (De Filippi and Wright 2018). Therefore, unsurprisingly, blockchain technology is now touted as the Panglossian solution to a myriad of problems ranging from financial inclusion to aid and climate change (Marke 2018).

This chapter attempts to ascertain whether the claims of blockchain as a solutionist technology for climate change, in reality, reflect and entrench the incumbent power asymmetries and the global digital divide in the guise of disintermediation and collective capitalism. This chapter applies the extant concepts of techno-colonialism and data colonialism to critically examine blockchain-based initiatives in the climate change sector.

Abstract: This essay argues that Faust is no homo economicus in part one. He is not the self-interested, future-oriented, rational agent with stable preferences that he becomes in part two. Rather, he represents an error-prone human making risky decisions that are, in fact, gambles. Gretchen also makes a series of increasingly risky bets, but the stakes are very different for her. In Faust I, Goethe demonstrates insight into human behavior that aligns with and illustrates fundamental elements of behavioral economics, which studies how people act in the real world and thus human error. Combining economic and psychological methods, behavioral economics has identified heuristics—mental shortcuts or rules of thumb—and biases that do not conform to the model of the calculating, self-interested homo economicus long championed by economists. The tools of behavioral economics—prospect theory, nudging, and loss aversion—illuminate the all-too-human decisions made by Faust, Gretchen, and others in Faust I. Goethe exhibits an advanced understanding of decision-making that he embeds in the choice architecture of part one.

Keywords: behavioral economics, decision-making, loss aversion, nudging, choice architecture, gambling, homo economicus

Introduction

Homo economicus is a mainstay of economic theory. Economic historians credit John Stuart Mill with introducing the concept without naming it in “On the Definition of Political Economy; and on the Method of Investigation Proper to It” (1836).

Count Egon was as good as his word, and two days later, when the two friends returned from their midday stroll, they found two visiting cards, which had been delivered by a hired servant while the countess herself had waited by the veranda in an open carriage. Phemi turned her card this way and that in her hands and read, as she emphasized every single word, “‘Imperial Countess Judith von Gundolskirchen, nee Petofy.’ Marvelous. And when I’m back in Vienna, this is going on the top of my tray. I have no lack of counts—but by the same token, countesses are much rarer. Trust me, Franzl, this kind of thing doesn't just look nice; it's useful. And you have to make use of every favorable breeze … And in a carriage, you said, Hannah?”

“Yes, a carriage,” Hannah confirmed. “It was just the carriage from the hotel, but everything was fit for an aristocrat. The driver had gloves on. He looked so solemn that I had to laugh. And on top of that, that tall fellow Sepp as a hired servant, with a frock coat on. And it was all just for us, Fraulein Phemi, truly, just for us. Because I saw them turn around at the next corner, and before I could count to a hundred, they were drawing up at the King of Hungary again.”

Franziska was more dismayed than pleased. It was true that the winter evenings at the countess's were an entirely pleasant memory, but she had no wish to see a resumption of those earlier relations.

The Northumbian saint Cuthbert, bishop of Lindisfarne, who eventually abandoned the labor of ecclesiastical leadership to pursue his spiritual opus as a hermit, was known for ‘singing his psalms [while] he worked with his hands, and so by toil [driving] away the heaviness of sleep’ (inter psallendum operabatur manibus torporemque dormiendi laborando propellebat). Integrating his opus and labor as a dedicated ascetic, Cuthbert worked all his life, famously building his own hermitage on Farne Island. Bede's vita of Cuthbert supplies details about his process in ‘[building] a city fitted for his rule’ (condidit ciuitatem suo aptam imperio): on a round, sunken floor hewn from ‘the living rock’ (uiuam … rupem), Cuthbert built two structures of uncut stone, ‘an oratory and another habitation suitable for common uses’ (oratorium scilicet et aliud ad communes usus aptum habitaculum), roofing them with ‘rough-hewn timber and straw’ (de lignis informibus et foeno). While Bede's vita provides a somewhat rare account of an individual saint working alone to build a modest, humble dwelling, many such basic structures survive from the early medieval period, including many ‘sunken-featured buildings’ or Grubenhäuser and clocháin, stone beehive huts, at Skellig Michael and An Riasc, County Kerry (Figure 13). In undertaking such building projects in their vitae, saints like Cuthbert demonstrated their entanglement in a complex process of work that both provided necessary shelter for daily living and transformed the landscape with monumental structures, particularly churches.

Introduction

Water is a major natural resource because of its importance in human survival and society. Most importantly, water is both social and economic in scope; this is because it acts as a transport channel, provides irrigation systems for agriculture, and is useful for domestic uses, for instance, in drinking and food preparations. Countries with abundant water resources possess a significant strategic advantage on the global stage. They can leverage this advantage for political gain or economic benefits. Conversely, countries without adequate water resources or facing restrictions on access to water from neighboring nations may experience conflict or become dependent on other countries. A 2022 report from the WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Program estimates that 411 million Africans, or approximately one-third of the population, still lack access to safe drinking water. The water crisis in Africa, with its geopolitical implications, has contributed to a larger ongoing narrative of internal conflicts between different communities as well as a shaping of the political, economic, and sociocultural contexts in different regions. This chapter aims to usher in a conversation on African rivers and development, which could then inform discussions on hydro diplomacy on the continent. This chapter explores the geopolitical significance of African rivers and examines their role in shaping hydro-political discourse and development in African countries. It aims to analyze how African rivers influence geopolitics and contribute to hydro-political issues, which ultimately impact development.

Geopolitics of Water

Water as a natural resource is one of the most important because we humans cannot do without water, and it can help our society develop. Firstly, water as a natural resource plays both social and economic roles.

The transmission of Dalcroze ideas and practices to countries far from Europe in the southern hemisphere is a story of determination and idealism. The London School of Dalcroze Eurhythmics (LSDE) was founded in 1913 and offered the first year of training to prepare those who intended to study with Émile Jaques-Dalcroze in Hellerau, Germany. However, in 1914 when World War I broke out, he was in Geneva and did not return to Hellerau, and he soon approved a full three-year training course to be offered in London. He visited the LSDE each year to teach, examine, and present public demonstrations, developing a close friendship with the school's founder, Percy Ingham. As the only teacher training in English, the LSDE was central to the spread of the work in Australia and New Zealand. In the early days, enthusiasts from the Antipodes traveled by ship to London, and during the 1920s there was an active push to spread the method to the Dominions of the British Empire. This chapter surveys the four decades from 1919 to 1959.

Dalcroze teachers in Australia were inspired by a belief in the benefits of this holistic approach to education. At the forefront were the advocates of kindergartens who recognized its value for the musical, social, and physical well-being of young children. From the first demonstration in Perth in 1919 to the radio broadcasts of the 1940s and 1950s, the role of kindergarten colleges was crucial throughout the four decades from 1919 to 1959.

What is the role of psychotherapy in psychiatric practice, and should its practitioners still be offering it?

The news of a betrothal between the count and Franziska was much talked about. But a month later, when the double ceremony had taken place, first in the Augustinian Church and then in the Protestant church in Gumpendorfer Street, the excitement subsided, and all the more quickly because all that might be said in the way of spiteful bon mots had already been put into circulation in the days beforehand. In any case, none of it reached the ears of the noble couple, who had immediately left to spend several weeks in northern Italy. They took with them only Andras and Josephine, a freshly engaged lady's maid, Viennese through and through. Their return trip would take them directly to Arpa Castle; Hannah and several of the servants had already gone there as soon as the wedding was over. Franziska had found it hard to part from her, but, precisely because they were so very close, had judged this separation necessary.

The stay in Italy began at Lake Garda; then came a visit to Venice, which was even lovelier than the Venice of Franziska's thoughts and dreams. Nonetheless, after ten days of eating ice cream of every kind and feeding countless bags of peas to the pigeons in St. Mark's Square, she was happy on the eleventh day to see their sojourn end, especially since the count was prepared to make stops along the way back; most importantly, in Verona, his garrison town of more than fifty years ago, and the scene of his first triumphs.