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This Element represents the first systematic study of the risks borne by those who produced, commissioned, and purchased art, across Renaissance Europe. It employs a new methodology, built around concepts from risk analysis and decision theory. The Element classifies scores of documented examples of losses into 'production risks', which arise from the conception of a work of art until its final placement, and 'reception risks', when a patron, a buyer, or viewer finds a work displeasing, inappropriate, or offensive. Significant risks must be tamed before players undertake transactions. The Element discusses risk-taming mechanisms operating society-wide: extensive communication flows, social capital, and trust, and the measures individual participants took to reduce the likelihood and consequences of losses. Those mechanisms were employed in both the patronage-based system and the modern open markets, which predominated respectively in Southern and Northern Europe.
For most of its history, decision theory has investigated the rational choices of humans under the assumption of static preferences. Human preferences, however, change. In recent years, decision theory has increasingly acknowledged the reality of preference change throughout life. This Element provides an accessible introduction and new contributions to the debates on preference change. It is divided into three chapters. In the first chapter, the authors discuss what preference change is and whether we can integrate it into decision theory. In the second chapter, they present models of preference change, including a novel proposal of their own. In the third and final chapter, they discuss how we can rationally choose a course of action when our preferences might change. Both the transformative experience literature and recent work on choosing for changing selves are discussed.
The Element analyses the critical importance of elite women to the conflict conventionally known as the Italian Wars that engulfed much of Europe and the Mediterranean between 1494 and 1559. Through its considered attention to the interventions of women connected to imperial, royal and princely dynasties, the authors show the breadth and depth of the opportunities, roles, impact, and influence that certain women had to shape the course of the conflict in both wartime activities and in peace-making. The work thus expands the ways in which the authors can think about women's participation in war and politics. It makes use of a wide range of sources such as literature, art and material culture, as well as more conventional text forms. Women's voices and actions are prioritized in making sense of evidence and claims about their activities.
This Element looks at the art of the actress in the eighteenth century. It considers how visual materials across genres, such as prints, portraits, sculpture, costumes, and accessories, contribute to the understanding of the nuances of female celebrity, fame, notoriety, and scandal. The 'art' of the actress refers to the actress represented in visual art, as well as to the actress's labor and skill in making art ephemerally through performance and tangibly through objects. Moving away from the concept of the 'actress as muse,' a relationship that privileges the role of the male artist over the inspirational subject, the author focuses instead on the varied significance of representations, reproductions, and re-animations of actresses, female artists, and theatrical women across media. Via case studies, the Element explores how the archive charts both a familiar and at times unknown narrative about female performers of the past.
This Element reviews the varieties of capitalism approach (VoC) first developed by Hall and Soskice and subsequent extensions to emerging markets. The author suggests that by reinvigorating existing ideal types and creating new ones through an analysis of its five variables in a variety of countries VoC can be used to evaluate the viability of economic reforms across a wide range of countries. He argues that governments should base changes on lessons from other countries belonging to their ideal type. This Element illustrates the utility of VoC in understanding how reforms will differ across countries by examining how the future of work is likely to differ across nations depending on the degree to which the five institutions explored in this approach promote the standardization of tasks. It analyzes how these institutions shape degrees of standardization in the United States, Germany, and Brazil, offering suggestions for reforms in each of them.
Emergency neurosurgery encompasses serious and high-risk cranial and spinal conditions across all ages. The authors provide an overview of the changes occurring within emergency surgery to meet the challenges provided from unscheduled care. Considering the wider landscape of emergency surgery provides a context for the changes occurring within emergency neurosurgery. The delivery of emergency neurosurgery within the UK, the Republic of Ireland, the Netherlands, and the United States of America (USA) is then described to provide an overview of different models of care.
Construction Grammar has gained prominence in linguistics, owing its popularity to its inclusive approach that considers language units of varying sizes and generality as potential constructions – mentally stored form-function units. This Element serves as a cautionary note against complacency and dogmatism. It emphasizes the enduring importance of falsifiability as a criterion for scientific hypotheses and theories. Can every postulated construction, in principle, be empirically demonstrated not to exist? As a case study, the author examines the schematic English transitive verb-particle construction, which defies experimental verification. He argues that we can still reject its non-existence using sound linguistic reasoning. But beyond individual constructions, what could be a crucial test for Construction Grammar itself, one that would falsify it as a theory? In making a proposal for such a test, designed to prove that speakers also exhibit pure-form knowledge, this Element contributes to ongoing discussions about Construction Grammar's theoretical foundations.
This Element shows China has assumed a historical role in shaping a new turn in globalization. It has assertively engaged in the open globalizing process through its Belt and Road Initiative as well as in the clandestine process through its shadow networks. These networks have incorporated millions of common people who are unwitting agents of transnational exchange in a global shadow economy. In contrast to the neoliberal phase, the shadow turn in globalization is driven by a plurality of individual, corporate, and state actors with unique divisions of labour, hierarchies of control and domination, and modes of operation. By virtue of being a nodal centre for shadow operations, China is exerting its shadow power in regrouping global city networks, redefining global value chains, and reconfigurating state borders and power.
This Element discusses a medieval African urban society as a product of interactions among African communities who inhabited the region between 100 BCE and 500 CE. It deviates from standard approaches that credit urbanism and state in Africa to non-African agents. East Africa, then and now, was part of the broader world of the Indian Ocean. Globalism coincided with the political and economic transformations that occurred during the Tang-Sung-Yuan-Ming and Islamic Dynastic times, 600-1500 CE. Positioned as the gateway into and out of eastern Africa, the Swahili coast became a site through which people, inventions, and innovations bi-directionally migrated, were adopted, and evolved. Swahili peoples' agency and unique characteristics cannot be seen only through Islam's prism. Instead, their unique character is a consequence of social and economic interactions of actors along the coast, inland, and beyond the Indian Ocean.
Ludwig Lachmann is a central but underappreciated figure within the Austrian school of economics. Although his understanding of institutions, his appreciation of the heterogeneity of capital, his emphasis on subjectivity, and his focus on the dynamism and uncertainty of the real world have become dominant positions amongst Austrian economists, he is still viewed as something of an outsider. As such, the contributions of Lachmann's economics are arguably misunderstood. This Element attempts to tease out and discuss the critical contributions of Lachmann's economics. Arguably, one way in which to understand Lachmann's economics is by seeing it as unified in considering, in various ways, a single conceptual 'problem' – the apparent tension between the dynamic nature of social reality and the intelligible nature of the social world. Approaching Lachmann with this theme in mind allows us to put things together more coherently than other exegetical strategies.
We explain and document state-level fiscal developments in American Southern states from 1820–1910, focusing on their main source of revenue, progressive property taxes borne primarily by economic elites. The fourteen states in our analysis were characterized by severe economic exploitation of the enslaved and later politically repressed African-descended population by a small rural elite, who dominated the region both politically and economically. While rural elites are thought to be especially resistant to taxation, we offer a set of conditions that explains the emergence of progressive taxation and provides a coherent account of the fiscal development of these states over this period. Using an original, archival data set of annual tax revenues and select expenditure items, we show that the economic interests of these rural elites and the extent of their formal (over)representation played a critical role in shaping the observed fiscal patterns within and across these states over this period. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
What is Satanism? The word has functioned as a powerful indictment of one's rivals, an expression of rebellion against authority, and sometimes to describe the deliberate worship of dark, supernatural forces. This Element provides a concise overview of Satanism from its origins in early modern Europe through the present. It covers such topics as legends of the black mass, hell-fire clubs, the Romantic Satanism of Lord Byron and Percy Shelley, and nineteenth-century occultists who expressed reverence for Satan. It describes modern Satanic religions including the Church of Satan, The Temple of Set, The Order of Nine Angles, The Satanic Temple, and others. It also addresses contemporary Satanic Panic from the 1980s through QAnon. This Element should prove useful to anyone seeking to learn more about this complicated and frequently misunderstood tradition.
AI can assist the linguist in doing research on the structure of language. This Element illustrates this possibility by showing how a conversational AI based on a Large Language Model (AI LLM chatbot) can assist the Construction Grammarian, and especially the Frame Semanticist. An AI LLM chatbot is a text-generation system trained on vast amounts of text. To generate text, it must be able to find patterns in the data and mimic some linguistic capacity, at least in the eyes of a cooperative human user. The authors do not focus on whether AIs “understand” language. Rather, they investigate whether AI LLM chatbots are useful tools for linguists. They reframe the discussion from what AI LLM chatbots can do with language to what they can do for linguists. They find that a chatty LLM can labor usefully as an eliciting interlocutor, and present precise, scripted routines for prompting conversational LLMs.
New religious movements are often described as bizarre and sinister. Direct acquaintance, however, often gives a different impression from media portrayals and even from some academic writing. After decades of undertaking fieldwork, the author George Chryssides discusses his experiences, as well as studies by other scholars, and the issues that fieldwork involves. How do one's personal beliefs and lifestyle impinge on field research? How involved should a participant–observer become? How should we assess what we are told by insiders and ex-members? What ethical problems does field research create? How should we engage in online fieldwork, arising from the increasing use of the Internet, accelerated by the Covid pandemic? These are among the issues which this Element explores, and which will be of interest both to field researchers and to those who read about the fieldwork of others.
When it comes to what many of us think of as the deepest questions of existence, the answers can seem difficult to make out. This difficulty, or ambiguity, is the topic of this Element. The Element begins by offering a general account of what evidential ambiguity consists in and uses it to try to make sense of the idea that our world is religiously ambiguous in some sense. It goes on to consider the questions of how we ought to investigate the nature of ultimate reality and whether evidential ambiguity is itself a significant piece of evidence in the quest.
Is consciousness a purely physical phenomenon? Most contemporary philosophers and theorists hold that it is, and take this to be supported by modern science. But a significant minority endorse non-physicalist theories such as dualism, idealism and panpsychism, among other reasons because it may seem impossible to fully explain consciousness, or capture what it's like to be in conscious states (such as seeing red, or being in pain), in physical terms. This Element will introduce the main non-physicalist theories of consciousness and explain the most important arguments for them, and consider how they each respond to the scientific and other arguments in support of physicalism. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
This Element examines practices that occurred since the beginning of the Greek crisis and revisits the mnemonic canon of the Greek War of Independence. By focusing on the institution of the mnemonic canon of independence, and subsequently on its contemporary re-imaginings, this Element interrogates performance work vis-à-vis Greece's histories of colonial dependencies – histories that are integral to the institution of modern Greece. As such, the examples discussed here rehearse independence against and beyond national(ist) fantasies and, in so doing, attest to an emerging desire for decolonisation.
Intelligent electromagnetic (EM) sensing is a powerful contactless examination tool in science, engineering and military, enabling us to 'see' and 'understand' visually invisible targets. Using intelligence, the sensor can organize by itself the task-oriented sensing pipeline (data acquisition plus processing) without human intervention. Intelligent metasurface sensors, synergizing ultrathin artificial materials (AMs) for flexible wave manipulation and artificial intelligences (AIs) for powerful data manipulation, emerge in response to the proper time and conditions, and have attracted growing interest over the past years. The authors expect that the results in this Element could be utilized to achieve the goal that conventional sensors cannot achieve, and that the developed strategies can be extended over the entire EM spectra and beyond, which will produce important impacts on the society of the robot-human alliance.
Spoken threats are a common but linguistically complex language crime. Although threatening language has been examined from different linguistic perspectives, there is limited research which critically addresses how people perceive spoken threats and infer traits such as threat and intent from speakers' voices. There is also minimal linguistic research addressing differences between written and spoken threats. By specifically analysing threats delivered in both written and spoken modalities, as well as integrating perceptual phonetic analysis into discussions on spoken threats, this Element offers perspectives on these two under-researched areas. It highlights the dangers of assuming that the way in which someone sounds correlates with, for example, their intention to commit harm, and explores potential problems in assuming that written and spoken threats are equivalent to one another. The goal of the Element is to advance linguistic knowledge and understanding around spoken threats, as well as promote further research in the area.
This Element offers a comprehensive account of the unprecedented spread of English as a global language by taking historical, sociolinguistic, and pedagogical perspectives. To realize this mission, it opens with an accessible discussion of the historical trajectory of the English language with qualitative and quantitative connections to its contemporary diversity in terms of forms, roles, functions, uses, users, and contexts of English as a global and multilingual franca. Built upon this synchronic-diachronic symbiosis, the discussion is complemented by an overview of major analytical paradigms and trends that promote systematical scrutiny of the English language and its sociolinguistic and educational implications. It ends by showcasing instructional practices, recommendations, reflective questions, and future directions for language educators to revamp their beliefs, commitments, and practices considering the changing needs and realities of the present-day global sociolinguistic ecology and individuals therein.