In the years 1803–1807, a dramatic triple murder case in Shouzhou, Anhui, convulsed officialdom in the Jiangnan region and drove the Jiaqing emperor to exasperation. At a time when many in power felt a sense of crisis as “High Qing” imperial ambitions receded, each stone turned over in this meandering investigation revealed another source of anxiety fitted to the age: incest, poisoning, negligent and corrupt officials, amoral and abusive local gentry, misbehaving yamen runners, pettifogging litigators, and, to top it all off, deadly serious rumors of a subversive opera. This article traces the investigations into both the murders and the theater rumor. What made the former so convoluted and vexing, while the latter was alarming yet easier to resolve? Surprisingly, the Imperial Household’s carefully cultivated relationship with the theater world of Jiangnan realized, in miniature, a level of state–society coordination Qing rulers wished for but which often escaped them elsewhere.

This article presents Bath as an urban crucible for global visitors, ideas and cultural brokers like Edmund Rack, a Quaker and former shopkeeper (1735/36–87). Rack seized opportunities to use his social networks to forge a scientific community in Bath. A study of members of Rack’s Bath Philosophical Society shows science was a pathway to social mobility for dissenters, physicians and men of marginal backgrounds. Scientific knowledge became the property of non-elites, whose interests over-rode socio-economic differences. The impact of knowledge brokers and Bath on eighteenth-century social and urban history is, thus, seen anew in its local, national and global contexts.

The idea that God must relate perfectly to our subjectivity is central to Linda Zagzebski’s work on omnisubjectivity. There is a hitherto undiagnosed tension, however, between different criteria one might use to judge what perfectly relating to our subjectivity consists in. God’s relationship to what Zagzebski calls ‘counteractuals’, individuals that do not exist but that could have, brings this tension into focus. On the one hand, if God does not know what the subjective experiences of counteractuals would be like, then God’s omnisubjectivity would appear to be unacceptably limited in scope. On the other hand, if God knows the subjectivity of actual creatures in the same way that God knows the subjectivity of counteractual creatures, then the motivation for omnisubjectivity ends up being undercut to a significant extent. This essay resolves this tension with a model that draws on interpersonal perception and divine introspection.

This study investigates teacher candidates’ transcultural awareness development in an English language teacher education program in Argentina. Baker’s recently revised model of intercultural and transcultural awareness was used retrospectively as theoretical and analytical foundation in an online project undertaken in 2013 between 100 Argentinian and 75 Italian language undergraduates who communicated online using English as Lingua Franca (ELF) to address the theme of mural art and graffiti. Data was comprised of recorded Skype conversations, collaboratively created murals and graffiti, the Autobiography of Intercultural Encounters, and civic action artefacts. Findings show that students deployed the various components of transcultural awareness in their intercultural encounters in fluid and dynamic ways. The study fills two gaps in the literature, namely the little existing research beyond the Asian Pacific region and Europe, and methodological limitations. Implications for the potential of Baker’s updated model in methodological and pedagogical terms are considered.

The letters exchanged between Ignatius Sancho and Laurence Sterne in 1766 have encountered considerable attention, as have those passages in Sterne’s works that seemingly engage with antislavery discourse. Some critics suggest these passages fail to address slavery directly; Sterne, in turn, has been viewed as readily capitalizing on his connection with Sancho to promote a philanthropic image that his writings do not support, and even to exploit it for financial gain. This article suggests a recalibration, partly based on the chronology of this exchange and its first public appearance in 1775. It argues that a richer understanding of Sancho’s and Sterne’s reception histories, and especially the role played by the eighteenth-century press in recirculating reviews of and excerpts from this exchange, helps to establish a more nuanced approach toward how the public image and the texts of both writers were subsequently incorporated into antislavery and Abolitionist debates.