On September 16, 2017, the then-thirty-three-year-old Afro-Cuban American artist Harmonia Rosales presented her oil painting Virtuous Woman at her first art gallery exhibition, called ‘Black Imaginary To Counter Hegemony (B.I.T.C.H.)’, at the Simard Bilodeau Contemporary in downtown Los Angeles. The work is based on Leonardo da Vinci's famous visualization of Vitruvius’ description of the homo bene figuratus, that is, of the ‘ideal’ or ‘well-formed’ human being on whose symmetry and proportions the construction of temples should be modeled (Vitr. De arch. 3.1; fig. 5.3). Rosales retains the presentation of a nude human figure in an interlocking square and circle on a background covered in handwriting. Yet Rosales’ rendition of the lettering is even less easily legible than the Italian paraphrases of, and expansions upon, Vitruvius’ Latin that the left-handed Leonardo had written in mirrored script around his sketch. Moreover, Rosales’ painting fills not the page of a book, but a large canvas damaged at the edges and marked by red-orange blemishes. Most importantly, the person at the center is no longer the stern and, to a modern viewer, White-presenting man of da Vincian fame. Instead, she is a Black woman (fig. 7.1).

Historical sunspot records provide piece by piece more information on solar variability on a centennial scale. In this work, we analyze sunspot observations from the archives of Georg Christoph Eimmart, which is the second-richest data set of the Maunder minimum after the archives of the Paris observatory. Comparing the dates of the blank solar disk from the database by Hoyt & Schatten (1998) with dates of observations at the Eimmart observatory, we find that spotless days reports originate from astrometric observations. A comparison of the observations by La Hire and Müller of 1719 suggests that the observations by La Hire were for astrometric purposes as well, rather than aimed at sunspot counting.

The octagonal prism of Sennacherib BM 103000, today in the Middle East collection of the British Museum, is well-documented as a purchase made from the antiquities dealer Ibrahim Elias Gejou. However, the circumstances that brought this object to London from Iraq, as well as the trial this acquisition triggered in France have not been explored in scholarship. Yet, several documents survive and preserve this history. The letters that Ibrahim Elias Gejou sent about the prism to E.A. Wallis Budge, Keeper of Assyrian and Egyptian antiquities at the time, still exist today in the archive of the British Museum. While in France, records of the court case brought against Gejou by Benjamin Minassian who accused Gejou of having sold the prism without his knowledge, are to be found in the Archives de Paris. Read together, these documents narrate a chronology of events that begins with the appearance of the prism on the antiquities market and go much beyond a French court of law. To reconstruct this long-forgotten part of BM 103000's biography, this case study examines a dispute over the ownership of an artefact illegally removed from Iraq specifically to be sold to the British Museum, and how it impacted the parties who sold it.

This article presents a study of seventeen cylinder seals discovered in the city of the Eshnunna (Tell Asmar), which was one of the most important cities during the Old Babylonian period in Mesopotamia; these pieces are part of a large group of finds, statues, pottery, metal pieces, cuneiform texts, as well as group of cylinder seals, all of which were found in the private houses in the southern part of the city, by the Iraqi excavations at the site, more than twenty years ago. They showed the social status of these houses' residents, their loyalties and their religious beliefs. Thus the discoveries shed light on the importance of this city and the necessity of continuing excavation work there.

In Kenya, the return to the multiparty democracy of the 1990s and the initiation of the Constitutional Review of the early 2000s were two critical junctures that catalysed reform momentum and the development of transnational reform networks. Transnational relations were developed between Kenyan professionals (lawyers and academics among others), their international counterparts, and the local activists representing rural constituencies, so as to influence policymaking during constitutional and land policy reforms. These transnational networks influenced content and shape of land policy narratives by vernacularising the international norms that promote formal recognition of customary land rights. These international norms were not straightforwardly imported into Kenyan policies and statues: intense negotiations amongst actors in policy arenas resulted in their vernacularisation. Kenyan translocal actors appropriated the community land narrative, hybridised and reinterpreted it. This paper documents and analyses how the notion of community land was enshrined in Kenyan policy and constitutional documents through transnational relations. I argue that this notion of community land was shaped to the Kenyan historical and political context, at times defeating the original goal of promoting a property rights model alternative to land privatisation, and at times echoing the colonial category of tribal land, and exclusive territorial control.

Nemavermes mackeei Schram, 1973, found in the Mazon Creek fossil site and the Bear Gulch Limestone, was described initially as a free-living marine nematode. Here we investigate 13 specimens of N. mackeei from the Mazon Creek to reassess its morphology and identity, and also two specimens originally identified as Gilpichthys greenei Bardack and Richardson, 1977. Based on the extensive morphological variation among these specimens, N. mackeei encompasses multiple species that are only distantly related. The holotype of N. mackeei is a proboscis of Tullimonstrum gregarium Richardson, 1966, making N. mackeei a junior synonym of T. gregarium. However, the other specimens that we investigated could not be attributed to T. gregarium. We name a new species from these specimens: Squirmarius testai new genus new species, a cyclostome. One specimen is likely a juvenile G. greenei. Other specimens were not identified during this study but represent a variety of vermiform bilaterians.

UUID: http://zoobank.org/d8c63f6a-0ef4-4a34-8dbd-c1d9099589cc

This article explores historical and legal approaches to past society, asking what each has to offer the other. Using early modern midwives’ oaths as a case study, it examines the extent to which the law shapes everyday life and society, and vice versa allowing us to situate early modern midwives at the intersection of a number of important and competing seventeenth-century institutions including state, church, society, and profession. We argue that a historico-legal approach to the practices of seventeenth-century midwives demands a reconsideration of the historiography of medical ethics and of the professions more broadly. It situates midwives as holders of formal office, and agents of the emergent early modern state and encourages reflection on the nature of ethical practice, and professional regulation within their social, cultural, and political context.

Vitruvius is a full-figured text. Bodies proliferate endlessly—as touchstones of measurement, as images of ideal proportions, as analogies for building, empire, discipline, or text—and they dance just as deftly around the scholarship. If we had to pick a metaphor by which Vitruvius lived in writing, we could do no better than corpus. He is perhaps antiquity's greatest embodiment of body. But what I would like to argue in this article is that the Vitruvian body is not uniform; not alone; not ideal; and as an instrument of scientific discovery, it is not enough. It is lacking—and it needs to lack.