In 1592, a group of English Catholics living in Continental exile commemorated the feast of Thomas Becket with local authorities in the Spanish city of Seville. Though surviving information about the event is sparse, this article reconstructs the complex design behind one of the most extraordinary elements in the celebration: a “devise” or visual poem featuring a representation of Elizabeth I confronted with a political and moral dilemma. The poem’s messages, intended to reach a mixed Anglo-Spanish audience, were displayed through multiple symbolic and rhetorical strategies to resignify the past and make it relatable to them—and to Elizabeth.

Specialization is a core concept in the study of flowering plants and their relationships with floral visitors. In recent decades, researchers have increasingly used bipartite floral interaction networks to study these relationships. Networks are typically built from simple observations of floral visitation and ignore which resources visitors acquire during visits. However, flowers can provide nectar, pollen, or both, and floral visitor species may only forage for one or the other on a given plant. Here, using data we collected which differentiates nectar from pollen foraging for floral visitors to 15 Bornean rainforest tree species, we investigate whether estimates of specialization change when multiple floral resources are accounted for. We find that the same visitors have different estimated values of specialization when calculated using the overall visitation data (the standard approach), versus only nectar or pollen foraging. Differences in specialization estimates for flower-visiting taxa scale up to affect estimates of specialization for the whole community of floral visitors, with greater specialization found in nectar than pollen foraging. Our findings highlight some important considerations when using resource-agnostic visitation data in network-based studies of plant-pollinator relationships. In addition, this study represents one of the first network analyses of plant-pollinator interactions in a tropical rainforest canopy.

An accident at a young age left Hendrick Goltzius (1558–1617), an engraver, draftsman, and painter, with scar tissue that affected the mobility of his hand. During Goltzius’s lifetime, the artist and historian Karel van Mander published a biography that positioned Goltzius as a pinnacle of artistic excellence comparable to Michelangelo. A reevaluation of Goltzius’s career through the lens of critical disability theory reveals that his engagement with the theme of the hand in his artworks, as well as its significance in his biography, framed his disability as a source of unique embodied knowledge and pride.

In this paper, we give a new geometric definition of nearly overconvergent modular forms and p-adically interpolate the Gauss–Manin connection on this space. This can be seen as an ‘overconvergent’ version of the unipotent circle action on the space of p-adic modular forms, as constructed by Gouvêa and Howe. This improves on results of Andreatta and Iovita and has applications to the construction of Rankin–Selberg and triple-product p-adic L-functions.

National genebanks offer diverse collections of locally adapted crops which can support farmers’ climate resilience, nutritional security and economic innovations, yet are often overlooked in climate adaptation strategies. Across much of the world, national genebanks are unknown to farmers, or poorly connected for varietal exchange. This paper examines the impacts of establishing ‘Germplasm User Groups’ (GUGs) across five African countries to connect farmers with genebanks as rapid responders to local agricultural challenges. GUGs conducted farmer participatory research to evaluate genebank materials and establish pathways for the exchange of knowledge and crop diversity in farming communities. Drawing on surveys and interviews from over 1,600 smallholders, we found GUGs increase farmer understanding of genebanks, improve access to crop diversity and increase farmer exchanges with national genebanks. As well as material exchange, smallholders welcome the learning opportunities from GUGs to address local farming challenges. On average, GUG members share genebank seed with four other farmers, demonstrating the potential spillover effects of this model for sharing crop diversity. We close with recommendations to improve the working of GUGs and offer guidance for other countries looking to adopt the system as a rapid approach strategy to build local resilience in the face of climate change.

Given two rational maps $f,g: \mathbb {P}^1 \to \mathbb {P}^1$ of degree d over $\mathbb {C}$, DeMarco, Krieger, and Ye [Common preperiodic points for quadratic polynomials. J. Mod. Dyn. 18 (2022), 363–413] have conjectured that there should be a uniform bound $B = B(d)> 0$ such that either they have at most B common preperiodic points or they have the same set of preperiodic points. We study their conjecture from a statistical perspective and prove that the average number of shared preperiodic points is zero for monic polynomials of degree $d \geq 6$ with rational coefficients. We also investigate the quantity $\liminf _{x \in \overline {\mathbb {Q}}} (\widehat {h}_f(x) + \widehat {h}_g(x) )$ for a generic pair of polynomials and prove both lower and upper bounds for it.

The established economic historiography asserts that Brazil’s per-capita GDP stagnated in the 19th century and that it grew extremely slowly in the period of the monarchy (1822–1889). We argue that these conclusions are based on inadequate methods, insufficient statistical evidence, and disregard for available historical evidence. Building on the methodology followed by one of us in a previous article, with the use of new databases, and a reasoned exploration of alternatives, our best estimate is that over the 1820–1900 period, Brazil’s per-capita income grew at a trend rate of 0.9% per year, a performance like Western Europe and other Latin America countries. Only a sharp economic contraction at the end of the period dulled Brazil’s performance in the 19th century.