The question of the sources of legal normativity continues to haunt legal theorists to this day. While it is largely uncontroversial that modern legal systems claim to produce normative propositions, whether or not there are independent reasons to obey the law remains a contested issue. Those views, as varied as they may be, appear to largely agree that the law is a social phenomenon of definite ontological presence. In this article, I argue, through an analysis of the theories of three prominent ninth- to eleventh-century Muslim jurists, that early Muslim theories of lawmaking did not incorporate any ontologically coherent concept of law. Rather, lawmaking was understood as the case-by-case formulation of legal opinions by individual jurists who were presumed to be driven by the same moral drive, and therefore occupy the same moral order, as all subjects of law. In spite of this ad hoc epistemological view, Islamic jurisprudence conceived of legal pronouncements as fully normative. The normativity of those unstructured ad hoc individual pronouncements, I maintain, is the result of the centrality of moral purpose to early Muslim theories of law. It was the presumption of a common moral drive that gave the legal system structural coherence and allowed the advancement of those pronouncements as normative claims. Whereas recent historical and anthropological work shows that moral motivation was central to the manner in which sharīʿa operated as a system of social regulation, this article argues, along the same lines, that the pietistic drive was both conceptually and structurally indispensable for the normative coherence of early Islamic jurisprudence.

This article considers three science fiction films, released in 2013–14, featuring Scarlett Johansson: Her(dir. Spike Jonze), Lucy(dir. Luc Besson), and Under the Skin(dir. Jonathan Glazer). It suggests that to engage with the phenomenon of voice in imaginative and productive ways it is necessary to slide over a disciplinary divide and address more explicitly the musicality of speech. In my main example, Her, Johansson provides the voice of an operating system with which the film's protagonist falls in love. Central to their intimate connection is the establishment of what I call the ‘haptic voice’, which conveys a sense of physical proximity. A similar blurring of the boundaries between voice and body occur in the presentation of the alien characters Johansson plays in the other films.

Textured voices include both voices heard as interpolated into a musical texture and voices heard as having their own textured character, whether as a ‘voice’ with a ‘timbre’ or as a ‘collective voice’ with a ‘composite timbre’ made up of many voices, each textured itself. They have often been heard as performances of ethical life. Comparisons between these performances can be misleading because the contingencies characterizing the textured voice for a listener who listens in a particular way can make each performance irreducible. A pair of articles and cartoons in TV Guide from the summer of 1966 depict the making of a textured laugh track as a contradictory activity. Yet they seem to resolve contradictions into surface conflicts between individuated parties. Listening for textured voices in this case was itself a political activity because it was productive of more than one distinct form of ethical life.

Van Morrison's live version of his song ‘Cyprus Avenue’ on the 1974 album It's Too Late to Stop Now provides an example of the authority of the singer's voice and of how it leads and demands submission from musicians, songs, and audience. Morrison's voice constantly suggests that it is reflecting important experience and can be understood both as an attempt to capture something and as a post-hoc witnessing or testimony. Through the example of Morrison's work, and of It's Too Late to Stop Now in particular, this article explores the location of the voice in terms of the body and of particular places and histories. It then proceeds to a reflection on the relationship between the performing voice as producer of sound, noise, and music and the poetic voice that provides the words and visions upon which the performing voice goes to work. It concludes by focusing on a moment within ‘Cyprus Avenue’ where Morrison performs the act of being tongue-tied, discussing this as an example of ‘aesthetic stutter’. Throughout, attention is also paid to how other voices (particularly those of rock critics) connect to Morrison's voice by attempting to describe it, re-perform it, or explain it.

In this article, I propose that Steve Reich takes on the voice as a problem, and that his solutions to this problem are manifold, informing – perhaps driving – works from across his oeuvre. A close reading of his music and commentary indicates that he is motivated by reinvigorating what I call the ‘vocal imaginary’ of Western classical music, or the connection between melody, voice, and human presence. My argument unfolds in four parts. First, I read closely Reich's writings and interviews that illuminate this problem. Second, I turn an analytic lens on two works composed before and after Music for 18 Musicians, respectively – It's Gonna Rain and Tehillim – to see how it plays out in music. Third, I focus on a close reading of Music for 18 Musicians. Finally, I close with some thoughts about how Reich's relationship with the voice might complicate his professed relationship with modernism, calling into question his adversarial stance vis-à-vis modernist practice.

The present article seeks to fill a number of lacunae with regard to the study of the circulation and assimilation of different bodies of medical knowledge in an important cultural contact zone, that is the Upper Guinea Coast. Building upon ongoing research on trade and cultural brokerage in the area, it focuses upon shifting attitudes and practices with regard to health and healing as a result of cultural interaction and hybridisation against the background of growing intra-African and Afro-Atlantic interaction from the fifteenth to the late seventeenth century. Largely based upon travel accounts, missionary reports and documents produced by the Portuguese Inquisition, it shows how forms of medical knowledge shifted and circulated between littoral areas and their hinterland, as well as between the coast, the Atlantic and beyond. It shows that the changing patterns of trade, migration and settlement associated with Mandé influence and Afro-Atlantic exchange had a decisive impact on changing notions of illness and therapeutic trajectories. Over the centuries, cross-cultural, reciprocal borrowing contributed to the development of healing kits employed by Africans and non-African outsiders alike, which were used and brokered by local communities in different locations in the region.

This article examines a fifteenth-century remedy book, Oxford, Bodleian Library, Rawlinson c. 299, and describes its collection of 314 medieval medical prescriptions. The recipes are organised broadly from head to toe, and often several remedies are offered for the same complaint. Some individual recipes are transcribed with modern English translations. The few non-recipe texts are also noted. The difference between a remedy book and a leechbook is explained, and this manuscript is situated in relation to other known examples of late medieval medical anthologies. The particular feature that distinguishes Oxford, Bodleian Library, Rawlinson c. 299 from other similar volumes is the evidence that it continued to be used during the sixteenth century. This usage was of two kinds. Firstly, the London lawyer who owned it not only inscribed his name but annotated the original recipe collection in various ways, providing finding-aids that made it much more user-friendly. Secondly, he, and other members of his family, added another forty-three recipes to the original collection (some examples of these are also transcribed). These two layers of engagement with the manuscript are interrogatedin detail in order to reveal what ailments may have troubled this family most, and to judge how much faith they placed in the old remedies contained in this old book. It is argued that the knowledge preserved in medieval books enjoyed a longevity that extended beyond the period of the manuscript book, and that manuscripts were read and valued long after the advent of printing.

The voice has often been identified with the assertion of idiosyncrasy or exception (The Chanting Crowd: ‘We are all individuals!’ An Individual: ‘I'm not.’ Monty Python, The Life of Brian). This article explores why humans (though not uniquely them) feel urged to merge and magnify the individual voice through assimilating it to the voices of others. What are the powers, menaces, and satisfactions of these singular–plural megavoices, in choirs, collective chants, and other forms of what may be called chorality, that have become more familiar than ever in the mass spectacles (‘audicles’?) of sport, entertainment, and politics? I suggest that the chorus represents the challenge of the inchoate, in that it is the making manifest of what menaces music, the matter that must be made into form, a reservoir of unschooled energy that must be converted to information. I suggest that there may be an implicit relation between the individual voice and the collective voice it may seem to convoke, such that every individual vocality has a connection to a phantasmal chorality. Finally, I consider the political force of chorality, and the fantasy focused on and through the collective voice, and what this means in a world that seems to have moved from the dominion of the mass to that of the multitude.