Stendhal syndrome represents a compelling psychosomatic response, characterised by intense emotional and physiological reactions to viewing art, that intersects the fields of psychiatry, neurology and aesthetics. Despite lacking formal diagnostic recognition, a confluence of historical anecdotes and contemporary research underscores its validity as a unique neuropsychiatric phenomenon. This review endeavours to integrate insights from various scholarly domains to elucidate the syndrome's clinical manifestations, neurobiological foundations and its cultural and psychological relevance. Through an examination of historical contexts, clinical case studies and the underlying neurological mechanisms, this article aims to provide a comprehensive overview of Stendhal syndrome, thereby contributing to the broader discourse on neuroaesthetics and the profound impact of art on human emotion and cognition.

This paper comprises a brief study of a law firm library in Malaysia, which has utilized an automated library system to organize its collection. The paper aims to demonstrate how the automated library system was implemented and to identify the statistics that can be generated through that system. The particular software used is the Applied Library System (ALS).

Participants in the International Conference on Manding Studies, held at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in summer 1972, were contacted to share memories of the event in recognition of its fiftieth anniversary and while such recollections could still be gathered. An event in honour of fifty years of kora music at SOAS was also documented, bringing the project into the present. The result was a lengthy special feature in MANSA Kibaru, the newsletter of the Mande Studies Association (MANSA), in early 2023. Given the strong positive response from the MANSA community, which has historically looked back to the 1972 conference as a predecessor, it was decided to revise the newsletter’s special feature as a separate publication. This is an account of the process of bringing the commemoration together, the key contributors, and the timing and connections that shaped the outcome. It provides details that do not appear in the published commemoration. Some questions at the beginning of the project were cleared up by the evidence and accounts gathered. The Manding Conference’s ‘filiation’ or influence is touched upon, including the founding of MANSA. The selective and incomplete nature of this ‘memory making’ initiative is acknowledged.

This article discusses communicative strategies enacted by participants of Faveladoc, a documentary-making workshop that the first author attended in 2021. It examines how the participants, who are residents from Rio de Janeiro's Complexo do Alemão favelas, grappled with a shootout that broke out during a meeting. Based on textual analysis and our ongoing dialogue with participants, we unpack their semiotic and rhetorical work of avoiding despair by reorienting knowledge, building socialites, and pursuing resources. They mobilized generic resources (i.e. discursive and listening genres), pragmatic strategies (e.g. collective singling out of the area of risk), and metapragmatic moves (e.g. contextual recourse to humor) to assess security. Through further enacting a distributed embodiment—collective commitments beyond a bounded body—participants facilitated hope as a modality of action. Finally, their recourse to humor in spite of potential danger reflected an enactment of communal care that we call a poetics of hope. (Sociolinguistics of hope, favelas, distributed embodiment, generic resources, humor).

Whereas the earliest farces deal with human appetites on the most basic level, by the mid-nineteenth century these had been sublimated and incorporated into a newly mechanical format. Inaugurated by Eugène Labiche, and perfected by Alfred Hennequin and Georges Feydeau, these masterpieces of clockwork ingenuity would appear to be the inspiration for Henri Bergson’s theory of comedy. This article explores the evolution of this style of farce, and demonstrates how Bergson’s influential ideas were themselves influenced not only by the popularity of the boulevard theatre, but also by prevailing concepts of clinical psychology and a Symbolist aesthetic. It is further argued, however, that Bergson’s reduction of the comic butt to an automaton fails to account for the empathetic element: the heavy quantum of anxiety conveyed from character to spectator.

In premodernity, a time when human milk was the only safe means of infant nutrition, and in societies, such as those of classical antiquity and early Byzantium, where breastfeeding was considered servile work, wet-nursing was both a necessary and widespread occupation. Despite the social demand for the profession, public discourses around wet nurses were mostly negative, while their work was treated with both admiration and scorn. In an attempt to understand ancient and early Byzantine approaches to the wet nurse, this article takes a matricentric perspective. It investigates various discourses (rhetorical, moralist, philosophical, theological, hagiographical, medical and contractual) which establish the wet nurse as an essential part of the institution of motherhood, as a social and moral category whose work, way of life and behaviour are constantly defined, controlled and regulated. These discourses nevertheless tell us much more about the anxieties and preoccupations of the societies that produced them and much less about actual contemporary wet nurses. The choice of an investigation encompassing antiquity up to early Byzantium, an extension rarely seen in existing studies, further illuminates the mechanics and dynamics of the ideologies around the wet nurse, as these are preserved or evolve in time.