One of the tendencies among scribes who transmitted the corpus Philonicum was to divide treatises into smaller units. This article argues that Philo’s De gigantibus and Quod Deus sit immutabilis were originally a single treatise that scribes split in an effort to create thematic unities for each half. Two lines of evidence support this conclusion. There is significant evidence that the two treatises circulated as a single work in antiquity. The most important evidence lies in the titles. Eusebius knew a compound title for a single work and the eighth-century compilers of the Sacra parallela attributed fragments from Quod Deus sit immutabilis to De gigantibus. The second line of evidence is internal. De gigantibus is noticeably shorter than any other treatise in the Allegorical Commentary with the exception of De sobrietate that may be incomplete. More importantly, the work concludes with an internal transitional phrase that introduces the citation that opens Quod Deus sit immutabilis. While Philo creates a bridge between treatises, this is an internal transition marker. For these reasons, we should discontinue following the scribal tradition and reunite the two halves of Philo’s treatise.

To start: I thank the responding authors for their generosity and thoughtfulness in engaging in this debate about ‘Attending to unproof: an archaeology of possibilities’ (Frieman 2024) and also the journal's editors for facilitating this discussion.

The 9th Willi Steiner Memorial Lecture took place during the BIALL Annual Conference at the Queens Hotel, Leeds on Thursday 13 June 2024. David Wills delivered the lecture and looked back over the last three decades and reflected on the many changes and challenges, especially with regard to technological developments, that have impacted on the law library and legal information world. His focus then shifted to more recent times and developments in law at a global level and the associated challenges of curating resources and collections to match the wide variety of interests across legal scholarship. The lecture touched on the demands in legal education, changes to publishing models, the financial challenges facing higher education and, most recently, the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic that altered research and study patterns, and which accelerated the demand for digital resources. Finally, the lecture looked to the next 30 years and the unstoppable rise of artificial intelligence (AI), in order to determine what AI would mean for the future of law librarianship. The lecture identified the part law librarians and legal information professionals could play concerning AI and how they could help to protect academic integrity.

This piece takes as a given that we are stuck with our fragmented, inefficient, multi-payor health care system for at least the short run. It then analyzes the deficiencies of three payment mechanisms whereby regulators (including Congress) have invited private sector providers to help ameliorate perceived problems. The first concerns an inadequate supply of nursing home beds in the early ‘70s, the next focuses on Medicare Advantage as a supposedly superior cost containment alternative to traditional Medicare, and the final one involves the ‘devil’s bargain’ struck with the pharmaceutical industry to get prescription drug coverage added to Medicare. All three teach the same lesson: the government needs to be more vigilant not to give away the store when it invites the private sector in.

This note presents a new supplement for Euripides, Heracles 767.

What is the state of copyright in Africa today, when specialists in the field, notably in the USA, are sounding the alarm? Taking as its starting point a right that emerged in the West in the twilight of the nineteenth century, this article examines the ways in which copyright is discussed, established and experienced in sub-Saharan Africa. It questions the relevance of the vocabulary used and asks how Africa can be made intelligible in the context of a heterogeneous world. Since the 1990s, international organizations have promoted and imposed the economic notion of material goods, inventing a new tradition. The result is a heritage, the commons, that is reduced to a resource divorced from any historical or social context. How can we go beyond these rights, which are a source of a ‘promise economy’ for creators, to promote imprescriptible and inalienable human rights? How can experienced creators resist copyright that takes them back to the Middle Ages?

During the transition from the early to the modern era, the marginalization of astrology from the learned world marked a significant shift. The causes of this phenomenon are complex and still partially obscure. For instance, some sociological interpretations have linked it to a broader shift in mentality among the gentry and bourgeoisie, while other scholars attributed the decline to the emergence of the ‘new science’. Focusing on the case of Jean-Baptiste Morin (1583–1656), this paper examines the changing dynamics of patronage for what has been termed ‘the last official astrologer’. It demonstrates that Morin's appointment as professor of mathematics at the Collège royal and his prominence within the French court were expressions of a cultural politics in which his patrons were deeply invested. Conversely, Morin's efforts to restore astrology lent validation to the belief systems of his patrons. The paper further analyses Morin's fall from grace during his polemics with Gassendi and his circle, highlighting the political context of the Fronde and a growing public weariness regarding the relationship between politics and astrology. Ultimately, this case study reveals that in the French context, the marginalization of astrology was not solely determined within the ‘learned jurisdiction’. Instead, the shifting cultural and political investments of the ruling classes played a significant role.

This article provides an edition of a group of unpublished cuneiform tablets from the Old Babylonian period (c. 2003–1595 BCE) excavated at the archaeological site of Tall Ḥarmal, ancient Šaduppûm. The texts consist of economic accounts as well as one round school tablet. The former in particular highlight some aspects of agriculture and land use when the city was under the control of king Ibāl-pî-El II (1779–1765 BCE) of Ešnunna. Thanks to the systematic excavations, most of the Šaduppûm texts are stored in the Iraq Museum and can fortunately be associated with their archaeological context, which makes it easier to reconstruct their archival relationships.

Karolina Pavlova (1807–1893), Russia’s foremost female poet of the nineteenth century, was a polyglot writing in Russian, German, and French. Her native trilingualism facilitated a fluid and performative ethno-linguistic identity at odds with the tenets of monolingual nationalism that pervaded at the time. While Pavlova has received considerable attention from feminist critics, her multilingualism remains an understudied topic. This article addresses Pavlova’s polyglot upbringing, her multilingual romance with the Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz, the strategic stakes of her career as a trilingual poet and translator, the perception of her as a non-Russian by her Slavophile contemporaries, and her own conflicted attitude toward her Russianness revealed in the 1854 poem “Razgovor v Kremle” and her German adaptation of Mikhail Lermontov’s poem “Rodina,” published 1893 in Germany. In a wider sense, the article argues that the nineteenth century should be put on the map of the emergent field of literary multilingualism studies.

Since August 2020, during the Covid-19 pandemic, a time of bans against public gatherings and protests against Prime Minister Netanyahu, a hybrid clown-policewoman has attended political and social demonstrations in Jewish West and Palestinian East Jerusalem. Officer Az-Oolay places heart-shaped stickers on people’s foreheads as a radical political act and deconstruction of the coercive force of the Israeli police.