On the afternoon of Friday April 20, 1883, attorney Kate Kane doused Judge James Mallory with a glass of water in a Milwaukee courtroom. Kane's frustrations were deep. That morning Mallory had reassigned one of her clients to another attorney, despite the fact that this client had specifically requested Kane. This time it was to Peter J. Somers, who had recently worked for Mallory's re-election. After the incident, Kane would announce, “Judge Mallory has been trying to drive me out of this court; he has continuously insulted and misused me, but I bore it.” “Today,” she explained, “I wanted to insult Judge Mallory just where he had insulted me—in open court.” She succeeded; Mallory was furious. Wiping the water from his brow, the irate judge shouted, “Arrest that woman,” and cited Kane for contempt of court. She was immediately apprehended and hauled off to the local jail, where she would stew for days. “I shall stay here for ten years before I pay that fine,” Kane vowed, defiantly. The incident, which imperiled Kane's legal career in Milwaukee, also reveals critical tensions in women's claims on full citizenship that were reflected in battles over professional membership, legal and sexual equality, and political inclusion.

Love him or loathe him, Silvio Berlusconi is widely assumed to be Europe's most remarkable politician of recent decades, one who has not only affected the nature of electoral competition or the shape of the party system in Italy, but one who has influenced the country's political agenda to the extent that he himself and his role in politics have for long periods been the most important issues around which party competition has taken place.

This essay empirically evaluates three aspects of Berlusconi's legacy for Italian political communication: his pioneering of political marketing and modern electioneering; his ability to appropriate and popularise his particular rhetorical formulae; and his approach to increasingly relevant digital media. Berlusconi skilfully imported professional televised-centric campaigning in Italy, opening a wide competitive gap that his centre-left opponents took two decades to close. He also managed deeply to influence political discourse by spreading his signature catchphrases among most journalists and politicians, including his opponents. He was, however, less innovative, and generally outperformed by his main competitors, in the use of digital media to inform and engage voters. These findings suggest that Berlusconi's impact on Italian political communication has been massive, but his legacy may be less lasting to the extent that media and electioneering are evolving towards models that differ from those dominated by Berlusconi.

In 1860 and again in 1864, Alexander Spiers appeared before the insolvency court in Sydney, endeavoring to explain his failure in business. He was described as a milliner in the records but he had never made a bonnet in his life. The real milliner and businesswoman was his wife, Ann Spiers, who had been running her business since her marriage in 1846. She made purchasing and pricing decisions, managed staff, was the front person in the shop, and advertised in newspapers. She told the insolvency court in 1860 that her husband “used to keep the books and attend to the house business but he never sold anything in the shop. He used to mark the goods occasionally.” Alexander Spiers similarly distanced himself. “My wife put the value upon the articles in our stock,” he said. “She is much better acquainted with their value than myself.” In spite of this, it was Alexander Spiers' name that was on the insolvency papers. Under the law of coverture, he was responsible for his wife's debts and her business legally belonged to him.

As the new editors of Modern Italy for the period 2015–2019, we are very conscious of the high bar set by our predecessors, Philip Cooke and John Foot. Together they guided the transition to ScholarOne's manuscript flow system, increased the journal's already dynamic range of publication, and further enhanced its international reputation among scholars of Italy as well as the academic publishing industry. They achieved all this during what their 2010 editorial rightly described as a ‘critical time for Italian studies in the UK’. We thank them and their editorial team warmly for handing over to us, and to ASMI, a journal in excellent form, despite the very real challenges of the times.