This study shows how authority can affect the reception of texts and ideas in Islamic history by tracing responses Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn al-Ṣafaḍī (d. 764/1363) received to a letter he had sent his contemporaries about a philological problem in the Quran. The response of the most well-regarded scholar, Taqī al-Dīn al-Subkī (d. 756/1355), gained renown, despite later scholars often disagreeing with its content. Al-Subkī’s answer went through a process of canonization: it was promoted by various scholars and in diverse genres of literature, alongside the concomitant sidelining of the contributions of other, lesser-known, correspondents, despite the recognized merit of their responses. The attention paid to al-Subkī’s answer is also contrasted with the lack of attention paid to exchanges al-Ṣafaḍī had with other scholars on similar philological problems. This study shows how al-Subkī came to be associated with a “well-known problem” to demonstrate how scholarly authority can shape the transmission of the past.

This article focuses on the Jesuits of the Missio castrensis (1587–1659), the military mission to the army of Flanders, the Spanish Catholic army that criss-crossed Europe between Flanders and Italy during the Eighty Years’ War and the Thirty Years’ War. A comparative analysis of unpublished sources allows us to trace the radical change in attitude of these men. These sources testify to a fundamental modification in the Jesuits’ pastoral and human priorities. If, at the beginning, the discourses and practices referred to the ‘holy war’ against the heretics, as the war continued, new attention was drawn to all bodies suffering from the war. This profound shift echoed a new attention to the poor, the sick and their needs. In the first part of the article, this alteration in the Jesuits’ priorities is contextualized by comparing it with the case of the Ministers of the Sick, founded in Rome in 1586 by Camillo de Lellis.

During the Seven Years’ War (1756–63), the Russian ‘Expeditionary Army’ fought against Frederick the Great in Prussia. As well as regimental priests, an Orthodox ‘chief priest’ Ioann Bogaevsky from Ukraine was appointed, who was tasked with organizing the spiritual care of the army. Alongside him, Pastor Christian Täge, whose memoirs survive, was commissioned as Protestant chaplain. Based on their personal testimonies and unpublished archival materials, this article aims to reconstruct the organization of the military clergy in the Russian Imperial Army of the eighteenth century, taking into account its multi-ethnic and multi-confessional character. With this army including Protestants, Roman Catholics, Muslims, Buddhists, and even pagans in addition to Orthodox Christians, this article also considers what religious coexistence looked like in practice, shedding light on forms of military religiosity. Contrary to perceptions of the irreligiousness of the military, not only is their active participation in church sacraments noted, but also the persistent tension between religious and rational attitudes to warfare, which were clearly evident in conflicts about adherence to traditional practices of piety.

This article uses the Lord Leycester Hospital in Warwick, named after its founder, Robert Dudley, earl of Leicester, as a case study to explore the complex relationship between the church and the military in Elizabethan England. It argues that Leicester conceived of his almshouse as a godly military political project. The earl stated that he wished for ex-soldiers to be among the groups of the poor prioritized for admission. The article situates Leicester’s hospital, with its puritan agenda and military identity, at the centre of two of the biggest sources of controversy within Elizabethan politics and society. It demonstrates that the Lord Leycester Hospital embodied a contested relationship between the church and the military by examining the context surrounding its foundation and the wider background of the Dudley ascendancy in Warwickshire; the hospital’s internal governance; and finally, the tenure of Thomas Cartwright, the prominent puritan theologian, who served as the master.

We construct an explicit family of finite-area, infinite-genus translation surfaces whose vertical translation flow is strongly mixing. This provides a positive answer to a question posed by Lindsey and Treviño [Discrete Contin. Dyn. Syst. 36(10) (2016), 5509–5553].

The exclusive economic zone (EEZ) is one of the most significant innovations of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. As a functional maritime zone rather than sovereign territory, it allocates sovereign rights and jurisdiction over natural resources and certain economic activities to coastal States, while preserving some high seas freedoms for all States. Among these freedoms, the conduct of foreign naval operations in the EEZs remains one of the most contested issues in peacetime, with some coastal States objecting while others accept such operations as lawful. These tensions are likely to intensify during international armed conflict, as naval hostilities could threaten neutral States’ vital interests, including fishing, shipping and the laying of submarine cables.

Central to this tension is whether belligerents remain bound by the “due regard” obligation when operating in neutral EEZs during armed conflict. By applying a decolonial lens, this article reframes due regard not as a mere peacetime provision to be discarded during armed conflict, but as a hard-won decolonial achievement that must be preserved to redress a global balance of power previously tilted toward imperial interests. Dismissing this obligation disregards the power asymmetries and colonial context in which the relevant rules were made. Belligerent-leaning interpretations that characterize due regard as lex ferenda for lack of State practice overlook structural asymmetries in whose practice counts toward lex lata and risk overstating the legal significance of State silence. Broader and more inclusive State engagement is therefore necessary to ensure that the development of the law of naval warfare reflects the interests of all States, not only those of dominant naval powers.

Ice sheets leave contact with the bed at grounding lines, beyond which floating ice shelves experience no friction at their base. In places where basal friction begins to decrease upstream of the grounding line, ice sheets respond more strongly to climate forcing. However, the spatial extent of zones of low grounding line friction is poorly constrained by observations. Here, we use a steady-state model of marine-terminating ice stream flow to show that the location where basal friction begins to weaken upstream of the grounding line is accompanied by a prominent surface slope break. We then use observations of grounding zone features around the Antarctic ice sheet derived from ICESat-2 laser altimetry to find the displacement between grounding line locations determined from SAR flexure measurements and such surface slope break points. We find widespread evidence of decreasing friction hundreds to thousands of meters upstream of grounding lines around the Antarctic ice sheet, indicating that grounding lines may be more sensitive to forcing than typically assumed in ice-sheet models, where friction does not decrease upstream of the grounding line. We suggest that such an observational approach should be used to parameterize grounding line friction interpolation schemes in ice-sheet models.

In 1715–16, Scotland played host to 6,000 Dutch and Swiss soldiers dispatched to defeat the Jacobites. These forces have been little studied in a historiography more concerned with the Jacobites than with their opponents, of whom few were stauncher than the Presbyterian Church of Scotland. This article aims to deepen our understanding of Scottish Hanoverianism by investigating a novel topic: confessional relations between Scots and the Dutch and Swiss forces. What is revealed is that, despite the presence of Roman Catholic soldiers amongst these forces, not only were the foreign forces welcomed as co-religionists amid confessional controversy with England, but they also played a role in local Presbyterian struggles against Episcopalians. Ultimately, the reception of these forces highlights the interplay between a church and a foreign, largely co-religionist military; reveals the importance of the church in supporting a foreign garrison; and testifies to an enduring supranational confessional identity among Scottish Presbyterians.

Americans have never had any direct say over the way their federal courts are structured or operate. As a result, we know little about their preferences on such matters. In contrast, through ballot measures, they have had many opportunities to weigh in on the way state courts function. I analyze 364 measures targeting state courts of last resort that appeared on ballots between 1792 and 2024. These propositions asked voters to make concrete choices about court structures and operations. By examining the debates that preceded votes on these measures, election results reveal the public’s preferences by showing which arguments voters found persuasive, which they rejected, and how their views evolved over time. I find that until the mid-twentieth century, voters grappled with questions about how many justices should sit on their courts of last resort and how much those justices should be paid. Voters slowly and grudgingly agreed to increase court sizes and to raise judicial pay. From the mid-twentieth century on, voter attention was redirected primarily toward judicial ethics rules and regulations and the methods used to put people on the bench. Ethics measures proved popular, but no consensus emerged on selection schemes.

An examination of the relationship between constructs of individual and collective memory and the realities of exile cannot be fully possible without an exploration of the exile media coverage of the various groups of refugees in the different countries where they pursued integration into the majority society. This paper explores the migratory experiences of refugees from Czechoslovakia in the second half of the twentieth century. It reflects on the issue of migration and memory by means of research into media coverage of the large-scale migration wave of refugees from the communist dictatorship between 1948 and 1989. The text develops the theory of an alternative or surrogate public sphere, in a wider conceptualisation, which was created by refugees in the West. The paper works with the concept of ‘will to memory’, in the narrower theoretical framework, which is applied to the exile situation and which reveals the more general principles and narratives shaping the exile collective memory.

Metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease (MASLD) was very common worldwide and was associated with metabolic syndrome, modifiable lifestyle factors and socio-economic status (SES). Although provitamin A carotenoid-rich foods have shown potential protective effects against MASLD, there was limited population-based evidence in this regard, and the mediating role of healthy lifestyle and SES in the association of carotenoids induced MASLD was still unclear. This study aimed to assess the association of provitamin A carotenoid-rich foods intake with MASLD risk and the mediating effects of healthy lifestyle and SES. Provitamin A carotenoid-rich foods intake was assessed using a 24-h recall data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. The USA Fatty Liver Index value ≥ 30 was used to define the MASLD status. SES (education/income) and healthy lifestyle (smoking/drinking/physical activity) were categorised via latent class analysis. Multivariable logistic regression and mediation analysis were used for analyses. A total of 6613 participants (mean (sd) age 50·8 (17·7) years; 53·6 % female) were included. Provitamin A carotenoid-rich foods intake was inversely associated with MASLD risk (adjusted OR, 0·684; 95 % CI: 0·532, 0·879). SES (mediation proportion, 12·92 %) and healthy lifestyle (16·84 %) exerted significant mediating effects. Subgroup analyses showed stronger associations in females (OR, 0·572; 95 % CI: 0·406, 0·805) and adults aged < 45 years (OR, 0·519; 95 % CI: 0·367, 0·734). Higher provitamin A carotenoid-rich foods intake was associated with lower MASLD risk, partially mediated by SES and healthy lifestyle. This provided a feasible dietary strategy for MASLD prevention, especially in females and younger adults.

Through a cluster randomised field trial, we evaluate the impact of an evidence-based, soft skills curriculum aimed at adolescents, referred to as Healthy Minds, that ran in 35 high schools in England over four years (2013/14 – 2017/18). We find supportive evidence that Healthy Minds positively augments the primary outcome of self-reported physical health in the treated adolescents. Treated pupils have global health attainment that is 0.235 standard deviations higher than children in the control group, resulting in a 10-percentile increase in their measured health status. We also find evidence of positive impacts on behaviour. There is no evidence of impacts on improved emotional wellbeing. We note significant gender differences in the effects found, strongly favouring boys. Overall, we provide strong evidence that a designed, taught life skills curriculum can improve related outcomes during the adolescent years, and that differential learning styles across visible aspects of diversity are worthy of consideration Healthy Minds.

The early Maastrichtian kossmaticeratid ammonite Gunnarites serves as an important biostratigraphic index fossil for correlating between localities within the James Ross Basin (JRB), Antarctica. The JRB is the highest southern paleolatitude marine sedimentary outcrop record of the Upper Cretaceous. Gunnarites is abundant within a relatively narrow stratigraphic interval in the JRB, and its presence in outcrops is used to recognize this specific interval, which is coeval with environmental disturbances including cooling temperatures and local sea level regression. Early taxonomic work on the genus (e.g., Spath, 1953) qualitatively described morphological differences between Gunnarites specimens from different locations within the JRB; if real, these location-based differences could have important implications for the utility of Gunnarites for biostratigraphy in the JRB and could contribute to our understanding of controls (e.g., environmental or temporal) on ammonite morphology.

To test whether JRB Gunnarites specimens exhibit location-based morphological differences, we collected morphometric measurements (conch morphology and ribbing parameters) from multiple ontogenetic stages on 118 specimens from seven distinct localities within the JRB. We used linear mixed models and generalized additive mixed models to quantitatively evaluate mean differences in morphological variables by location, while accounting for variation in specimen size (i.e., characterizing scaling relationships between size and shape). Every morphological variable except whorl radius expansion rate exhibited significant location-based differences, although patterns of variation across sites differed by morphological variable. These location effects on Gunnarites morphology may be a result of phenotypic variation along an environmental gradient (e.g., depth), a result of temporal effects (e.g., evolution), or a combination of both. Large magnitude morphological differences between nearby locations may also be due, in part, to the influence of stratigraphic repetitions produced by previously hypothesized structural features in the JRB such as faults or folds, which could disrupt spatial or temporal gradients in the basin. Untangling the exact mechanisms behind location-based morphological differences in Gunnarites must await more precise, independent, age-dating of each outcrop.

Sámi reindeer herders employ a snow taxonomy that challenges intellectual property law’s foundational distinction between natural phenomena and cultural creation. Terms like seaŋáš (granulated depth hoar, density 267 kg/m3, formed through constructive metamorphism) and čearga (wind-packed snow, density 250–450 kg/m3, creating impenetrable grazing barriers) represent systematic organization of environmental knowledge that extends beyond linguistic classification to describe snow conditions actively created through traditional herding practices. This article argues that traditional snow taxonomies deserve intellectual property protection as cultural artifacts created through sustained human–environment interaction. Analysis of Sámi terminology reveals systematic coordination of physical properties, temporal patterns, spatial distribution, and functional implications for reindeer herding—intellectual achievement that transforms continuous environmental variation into discrete cultural categories embedding sustainability ethics and practical wisdom. Three doctrinal extensions provide protection: database copyright for systematic knowledge organization under Feist Publications’ creativity standard; collective trademark protection for terminology functioning as cultural identifiers; and geographical indication protection for snow conditions created through traditional landscape management. Climate change strengthens these arguments by blurring natural–artificial distinctions as human activities increasingly influence Arctic conditions.

This article examines the All-Japan Students’ Photo Association’s (AJSPA) 1970 “Pollution campaign” as a pivotal intervention in photographic practice and public activism. Responding to industrial pollution across Japan, student photographers traveled to Minamata, Yokkaichi, and Ashio, documenting local communities’ lived experiences. Their photobook On This Land We Have No Country (1970) constructed a visual “pollution map” of the archipelago through photographs, historical documents, and data. Examining this work, I argue that students’ photographs framed pollution as a systemic, national crisis tied to Japan’s high-growth economic policies, rooted in historical patterns of treating humans as expendable under industrial capitalism.

The British painter Stanley Warren (1917–92) was a prisoner of war in Changi Camp between 1942 and 1945. While in captivity, he was commissioned to paint murals for the Anglican Chapel of St Luke, which was situated in the dysentery wing in Roberts Barracks. This article investigates how the murals came to be and places them in their wider artistic and religious contexts. I argue that these artworks participated in anchoring the POWs in their British Christian identity, especially in the Far East, and were even a sign of resistance. A commission from a padre, they were designed to care for the souls of the captives, keeping their dignity and humanity alive in the midst of extreme suffering. While the murals present similarities in the treatment of their subjects with contemporary artworks in Britain, they also hold a redemptive message whose value carries on to this day.