The Dürr-i meknūn (The Hidden Pearl) is one of the most fascinating and enigmatic works of fifteenth-century Ottoman literature. It consists of a digest of Islamic cosmology and cosmography engaging with a wide array of subjects, beginning with the Creation and concluding with the Last Judgement. The Dürr-i meknūn has long been attributed to the mystic and scholar Ahmed Bīcān and has accordingly been dated to between 1453 and 1466. However, building on the most recent research, which shows that Ahmed Bīcān could not possibly have penned the Dürr and that the text is in fact anonymous, this article provides a critical reading and new dating of the text by focusing on the apocalyptic prophecies found in Chapter 16. Using a novel methodology that integrates contextual and historical reading, with computations of Arabic gematria, my analysis demonstrates that the Dürr was composed in 1472–73, in anticipation of the Ottoman–Akkoyunlu confrontation at the Battle of Başkent, when fears were running high that the end of Ottoman rule was at hand.

This essay argues that “experience” is an essential keyword for Victorian studies. The concept spiked in interest in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Causes for this spike include the division of humanistic knowledge into the modern disciplines, and the pressure that idealist philosophy put on British empiricist thought. Shadworth Hodgson's 1898 The Metaphysic of Experience is featured both as a text exemplifying the paradoxes of Victorian experience-talk and as an invitation to further study.

This essay focuses on the proliferation of diverse spiritualities in Victorian Britain in the second half of the nineteenth century, including Theosophy, neopaganism, spiritualism, and emerging occult practices. It makes the case that this proliferation of spiritual thought emerged not in opposition to, but rather in harmony with, the ascendancy of scientific naturalist frameworks in the wake of Darwinism, and that the flexibility of “spirituality” as a concept serves a crucial function for understanding this late Victorian religious landscape. As a (very brief) case study, it examines the fusion of the spiritual and scientific in Marie Corelli's late Victorian bestseller, A Romance of Two Worlds (1886). Her work, I suggest, highlights the key role of new popular genres of speculative fiction in navigating the boundaries between spirit and matter at the fin de siècle.

In this essay, I argue for the importance of employing the concept of the urban when analyzing Victorian Britain, given the status of the British Isles as the most urbanized place on the planet during the nineteenth century.

Focusing on the introduction of the word “journalism” to the British reader in the early 1800s demonstrates the growing importance of the so-called Fourth Estate and the newspaper press in British media history. The word is borrowed from the French journalisme, which had been introduced into France much earlier.

This entry posits the life-size as a form of “technology” for collapsing time and space and closes by suggesting some ways in which literary authors were inspired by the proliferation of life-size forms in culture.

This essay focuses on “abstraction” as an underresearched keyword in Victorian studies. I argue that the productive ambiguity of abstraction indexes contradictions and tensions in capitalist modernity, statistical thinking, and interdisciplinary mediations that trace significant parts of their histories to the nineteenth century and still heavily inform our current Victorian scholarships.

Diagnostic systems are not conducive to compassionate health-bringing psychiatric treatment. The systems were built around the fallacy that the politics of biomedicine could be reliably applied to the emergent properties of human psychological suffering and enable diagnosis-specific treatment packages. The resulting industrialised medicine, which reified people, failed to facilitate the compassion needed for healing. This article outlines an approach to psychiatric practice that involves understanding children's suffering and vulnerabilities in terms of their attachment strategies and adaptation to their context and takes a mindful approach to developing compassionate collaborative treatment goals (intelligent kindness). A shift towards mindful psychiatric medicine would encourage politicians to serve the people by addressing the contexts associated with human suffering and what makes people vulnerable, especially social inequalities. Healthy societies in which the psychiatric dis-ease of the population is adequately addressed will not be built with limited biomedical understanding of dis-ease.

English has been extensively integrated into various commercial contexts in Japan, infiltrating brand names, clothing, products, packaging (Dougill, 2008), shop signs (Backhaus, 2006; Inoue, 2005; MacGregor, 2003a), advertising copy (Seargeant, 2011; Takashi, 1990a, 1990b), television commercials (MacGregor, 2003b; Stanlaw, 1992), television programs (Jinnouchi, 2007), and Japanese popular music (Moody, 2001; Moody, 2006; Pennycook, 2003; Stanlaw, 2021). Scholars attribute this phenomenon to English's attention-catching effects (Bhatia, 2009) and its ability to stand out amidst predominantly Japanese scripts (Takashi, 1990b). While some argue that English is primarily used for decorative purposes, conveying positive imagery without necessarily prioritising communication (Dougill, 2008; Haarmann, 1989; Seaton, 2001), others contend that marketers capitalise on the public's superficial knowledge of basic English to achieve both decorative and communicative goals (Daulton, 2008). Previous studies have focused on English-based loanwords in the Japanese language system, overlooking the creative use of English wordplay in Japanese advertising texts (Inagawa, 2015; Scherling, 2016). This study aims to fill this gap by examining five instances of English wordplay in Japanese commercial texts that go beyond basic usage.

Accessory mitral valve tissue is a rare congenital cardiac anomaly that is typically discovered incidentally during echocardiographic evaluation prompted by an asymptomatic murmur. This pathology has characteristic echocardiographic elements and is usually associated with other CHD. The decision to perform surgical resection depends on factors such as the degree of obstruction, presence of symptoms, presence of other CHDs, and risk of thrombosis. The researchers hereby present a case of an asymptomatic paediatric patient with accessory mitral valve tissue that produced left ventricular outflow tract obstruction.

I read with interest the article by Haddad et al concerning the bench testing of BeSmooth peripheral tests, and I would like to share some thoughts and highlight few points.

BeSmooth stent is behaving like any pre-mounted stent available on the market. None can achieve the Holy Grail of being dilatable to adult size without losing their integrity. Until dedicated stents are available, pre-mounted stents are preferred to unmounted stents because of their better profile and deliverability. Technically, proper post-dilatation should be performed in order to avoid and extensive foreshortening and the formation of a ring that would limit further expansion of the stent. BeSmooth stent like other pre-mounted stents can also be used without restriction in situations where overexpansion is not required.

BeSmooth stent platform with the knowledge of its intrinsic properties is, in our opinion, a good add-on to the armamentarium of pre-mounted stents used in paediatric cardiology.

The literature on political participation has consistently found that protest positively and significantly correlates with voting. However, Chile can be considered a deviant case to this pattern. During the last decade, Chileans who participated in street demonstrations were unlikely to participate in elections. What explains this anomaly? We argue that this rupture between participation in protest and in elections results from an effective distancing between social-movement organisations (SMOs) and institutional politics. However, this distancing of SMOs from party politics has not been homogeneous. To examine this heterogeneity, we conduct a comparative design of two cases: the labour and student movements. Based on a mixed-methods study that combines interviews with movement leaders and surveys of protest participants in marches, we seek to highlight the mediating role of SMOs in the promotion of different forms of political participation.

This article makes a case to the effect that the free will vs. determinism dichotomy is relevant for Victorianists.

This short keyword essay begins by turning to the socially progressive “New Liberalism” of the decades around 1900 in order to think about the eclipse of certain traditions of liberal thought from the Cold War onward (this part of the essay takes its cue from Sam Moyn's recent Carlyle lectures on Cold War liberalism). The piece then considers how the (literary, political, social) legacies of this reconstituted liberalism might speak to our own current (“neoliberal” rather than “New Liberal”) moment when, in Bonnie Honig's words, “efficiency is no longer one value among others. . . . It has become rationality itself, and it is the standard by which everything is assessed.”

This essay argues that secular is an important keyword for Victorian studies because it foregrounds the particularity of universal concepts. Victorian narratives of secularization and colonial regimes of religious toleration can all be shown to have roots in the Protestant conception of religion as private individual belief and voluntary association. They therefore raise the question of how and whether such political conceptions might transcend their particularist origins. To make this point I begin by exploring the difference between secularism and secularization as critical terms. I then suggest how the recent wave of work on secularism has illuminated the link between the two—namely, by showing how attempts to imagine a secular world in fact depend upon specific ideas of what religion is and where it belongs.

This essay argues that “planet” has recently become an important concept for scholars of nineteenth-century literature and culture. Whereas concepts such as the “globe” or the “world” portray the Earth as a space subject to surveillance and political power, the concept of the planet emphasizes the alien, nonanthropocentric aspects of the Earth and its history.

We prove discrete restriction estimates for a broad class of hypersurfaces arising in seminal work of Birch. To do so, we use a variant of Bourgain’s arithmetic version of the Tomas–Stein method and Magyar’s decomposition of the Fourier transform of the indicator function of the integer points on a hypersurface.

Structures where we have both a contravariant (pullback) and a covariant (pushforward) functoriality that satisfy base change can be encoded by functors out of ($\infty$-)categories of spans (or correspondences). In this paper, we study the more complicated setup where we have two pushforwards (an ‘additive’ and a ‘multiplicative’ one), satisfying a distributivity relation. Such structures can be described in terms of bispans (or polynomial diagrams). We show that there exist $(\infty,2)$-categories of bispans, characterized by a universal property: they corepresent functors out of $\infty$-categories of spans where the pullbacks have left adjoints and certain canonical 2-morphisms (encoding base change and distributivity) are invertible. This gives a universal way to obtain functors from bispans, which amounts to upgrading ‘monoid-like’ structures to ‘ring-like’ ones. For example, symmetric monoidal $\infty$-categories can be described as product-preserving functors from spans of finite sets, and if the tensor product is compatible with finite coproducts our universal property gives the canonical semiring structure using the coproduct and tensor product. More interestingly, we encode the additive and multiplicative transfers on equivariant spectra as a functor from bispans in finite $G$-sets, extend the norms for finite étale maps in motivic spectra to a functor from certain bispans in schemes, and make $\mathrm {Perf}(X)$ for $X$ a spectral Deligne–Mumford stack a functor of bispans using a multiplicative pushforward for finite étale maps in addition to the usual pullback and pushforward maps. Combining this with the polynomial functoriality of $K$-theory constructed by Barwick, Glasman, Mathew, and Nikolaus, we obtain norms on algebraic $K$-theory spectra.