This article examines eleven communities of non-cloistered religious women in fifteenth-century Rome. These women, known as bizzoche, created a shared identity through their choice of clothing, which did not conform with their elite status, and their acts of piety, such as Eucharistic adoration and service to the poor. Such practices share similarities with the beguines in northern Europe, beatas in Spain and the Americas, and others, pointing to a broader women’s religious movement that transcended geographic space. However, scholarship often examines such communities of non-cloistered religious women in isolation, obscuring such connections. This article seeks to illuminate some of these commonalities and argues that late medieval, non-cloistered religious women across Europe used habit and pious practices to form a shared identity and navigate the gender- and class-based restrictions on publicly practicing their religion.

The formalisation of informal security-providers has important consequences for citizenship, the rule of law, and human rights. We examine these policies in Burkina Faso, where formalisation has led to concerns about vigilante justice and ethnic targeting. Although African governments' reliance on informal security provision is well-documented, less is known about the origins of formalisation policies. To advance theory-building in this domain, this paper examines the political logic of empowering self-defence groups through the study of Burkina Faso's 2022 junta government, with comparisons to two prior regimes. We argue that formalisation is not only a mechanism for overcoming vexing security challenges, but is a tool used by leaders to build legitimacy and strengthen the regime's grip on power. In doing so, the article contributes insights into the origins of governmental policies towards self-defence groups, with implications for the study of political legitimacy, security provision and citizen–state relations.

We investigate the Gross–Prasad conjecture and its refinement for the Bessel periods in the case of $(\mathrm {SO}(5), \mathrm {SO}(2))$. In particular, by combining several theta correspondences, we prove the Ichino–Ikeda-type formula for any tempered irreducible cuspidal automorphic representation. As a corollary of our formula, we prove an explicit formula relating certain weighted averages of Fourier coefficients of holomorphic Siegel cusp forms of degree two, which are Hecke eigenforms, to central special values of $L$-functions. The formula is regarded as a natural generalization of the Böcherer conjecture to the non-trivial toroidal character case.

The Glaisher snowflakes (1855) are amongst the most recognizable images of snow crystals produced in the nineteenth century. Made with the intent of compiling a comprehensive record of snow crystal forms, they also appeared in a variety of print publications, from popular magazines to scientific textbooks, and briefly circulated through various scientific and artistic societies. In a time when reliable images of these small, transparent, ephemeral objects were few and far between, the Glaisher snowflakes were widely praised for both their beauty and their fidelity to nature. But their origin has so far been little examined. This article sheds light on how James and Cecilia Glaisher went about making them, and invites readers to see them through three interconnected perspectives: as products of a domestic environment, as products of a husband-and-wife collaboration, and as products of iterative image making.

The Singapore Strait, as one of the busiest shipping waterways in the world, contains two chokepoints of the Straits of Malacca and Singapore. With an increasing number of large-sized ships passing through the Singapore Strait in recent years, its traffic capacity has undoubtedly been affected significantly. Therefore, this study aims to assess the traffic capacity of the Singapore Strait under various mixed vessel compositions including different vessel types, vessel sizes and traffic volumes. A ship domain-based method for the estimation of the strait capacity and its variance is derived by using the minimum distance to collision among various vessel types. Then, based on the Automatic Identification System data, the strait capacity and its variances are quantitatively estimated for the two chokepoints of this waterway. Our results confirm that the strait capacity is decreasing with an increasing proportion of large-sized ships. It is also found that this traffic capacity is directly affected by the width of the strait, the size, the composition and the speed of the ships.

We show that a virtually residually finite rationally solvable (RFRS) group $G$ of type $\mathtt {FP}_n(\mathbb {Q})$ virtually algebraically fibres with kernel of type $\mathtt {FP}_n(\mathbb {Q})$ if and only if the first $n$ $\ell ^2$-Betti numbers of $G$ vanish, that is, $b_p^{(2)}(G) = 0$ for $0 \leqslant p \leqslant n$. This confirms a conjecture of Kielak. We also offer a variant of this result over other fields, in particular in positive characteristic. As an application of the main result, we show that amenable virtually RFRS groups of type $\mathtt {FP}(\mathbb {Q})$ are virtually Abelian. It then follows that if $G$ is a virtually RFRS group of type $\mathtt {FP}(\mathbb {Q})$ such that $\mathbb {Z} G$ is Noetherian, then $G$ is virtually Abelian. This confirms a conjecture of Baer for the class of virtually RFRS groups of type $\mathtt {FP}(\mathbb {Q})$, which includes (for instance) the class of virtually compact special groups.

Virtue ethics tells us to ‘act in accordance with the virtues’, but can often be accused, for example, in Aristotle’s Ethics, of helping itself without argument to an account of what the virtues are. This paper is, stylistically, an affectionate tribute to the Angelic Doctor, and it works with a correspondingly Thomistic background and approach. In it I argue for the view that there is at least one correct list of the virtues, and that we can itemise at least seven items in the list, namely the four cardinal and three theological virtues.