The article examines a set of nouns which can be interpreted as questions on the degree to which some property holds and can be paraphrased by clauses introduced by how + Adjective, in some interrogative contexts. This subset of nouns is shown to clearly differ from (traditional) Concealed Questions. Nouns that allow the concealed degree reading (DCQ nouns) are argued to share specific semantic features: only nouns that can denote eventualities involving (intensional) gradable states can have degree concealed question readings. The concealed degree reading is shown not only to result from lexical semantic properties of nouns and from the semantics of the predicates that select them, but also to depend on contextual parameters, which can disambiguate concealed question readings.

This article examines Conor Cruise O’Brien’s ideas about historical objectivity and the craft of the historian. Drawing on a mix of published material and unpublished manuscript sources, it charts the evolution of the thinking of a key Irish public intellectual about how historians should write history and how their work should relate to their contemporary world. It identifies several unacknowledged intellectual debts O’Brien owed to influential twentieth-century thinkers — namely, the philosophers Michael Oakeshott and Maurice Merleau-Ponty and the sociologist C. Wright Mills. The article challenges the claim that O’Brien’s view of historiography underwent significant changes in response to the outbreak of violence in Northern Ireland during the late 1960s. On the contrary, it is argued that O’Brien’s thinking on these themes remained fundamentally unchanged from the mid 1950s until the end of his long career as a public intellectual.

The survival of the Jacobite court of Saint-Germain-en-Laye was largely dependent on subsidies from the Catholic courts, from favourable contacts in the British Isles or from the hands of businessmen and other private benefactors. This article will examine the strategies employed by one of its members, Lady Sophia Bulkeley (c.1650-c.1718), dame of honour to Queen Maria Beatrice d’Este, to gain access to part of the bequest of her distant relative Sir William Godolphin (1635-96), a former English ambassador to Spain and a Catholic convert resident in Madrid. From the outset, her aim was to stress the exceptional nature of her precarious financial situation, which stemmed from the constraints imposed by a forced exile in the convulsive geopolitical context following the Nine Years’ War. It will be argued that, ultimately, it was the confessional value of her case—that of a well-placed courtier whose husband had abjured Catholicism before his death—which convinced the Jesuit missionaries and, in particular, Edward Meredith (1648-1715), the trustee in charge of Godolphin’s Roman legacy, that she should be helped to become a proselytising instrument and to prevent attitudes like that of her late husband’s from permeating Saint-Germain.

An I.R.B. supreme council member and the I.R.A. 2nd Northern Division commandant, Charlie Daly was executed at Drumboe on 14 March 1923. Daly’s case shows how, through I.R.B. auspices, Free State G.H.Q. planned a joint northern offensive with republicans to avert civil war, while deploying the resources of the new state (and false promises) to engineer the support or at least neutrality of the Northern I.R.A. Eoin O’Duffy and Richard Mulcahy connived to remove Daly from his command because of his opposition to the Treaty, with events coming to a head at the ‘Beggar’s Bush inquiry’ on 2 March 1922. In due course, the Free State elite killed every senior republican brother party to the northern intrigue, including Joe McKelvey and Daly, the latter of whom was shot alongside Seán Larkin from Derry — a witness to GHQ ‘crookedness’ the previous March.

The article interrogates testimonies of sexual violence against women, like rape, abduction, forced conversion, and forced marriage, during the partition of India in 1947. Unlike sites of violence such as Rwanda, there were no commissions set up either by the successor governments in India or Pakistan or by international agencies to investigate the massacres. Partition violence does not easily fit into the usual frames of genocide or ethnic cleansing used in academic writing on conflict. In the absence of identifiable perpetrators and villains of the partition violence, members of a community were perpetrators wherever they dominated and victims where they were few. The archive for this article consists of statements by survivors and observers of the massacres to the local authorities; for example, army officers and social workers supervising the “recovery” of abducted women or running refugee camps. Interviews were conducted with survivors of the partition many years later, which are generally marked by silence about sexual violence. Questions arise about the meager testimonies and the bias in the archive regarding selection, collection, and publication. Ethical issues abound, including the selective appropriation of testimonies for political ends. Were women silent because disclosure would invite stigma, or is it that trauma is expressed by silence? And finally, how do survivors move toward closure?

This introduction to this special issue of Modern Italy explores how the emphasis on fascism in recent scholarship and public discourse risks its mythification and cultural rehabilitation, and urges a rebalancing of historiography to highlight the pivotal role of the Italian Resistance in shaping Italy’s democratic identity. Marking the eightieth anniversary of Italy’s liberation and the thirtieth anniversary of Modern Italy, the issue examines lesser-known aspects of the Resistance, such as marginal groups, gendered experiences and transnational perspectives. Contributions include studies on Roma Resistance fighters, the Catholic underground press, American soldiers of Italian descent, and women in the Liberal Party. The articles emphasise the liminality and creative potential of the Resistance as a transformative period that redefined political and cultural identities.

How should Jewish settlers live in the new environment? This question preoccupied early Zionist professionals, seeking to employ science in the service of Jewish “acclimatization.” This article focuses on the work of a specific man of science: nutrition scholar Moshe Wilbushewich, who lived and worked in Palestine since 1924 until his death in 1952. Much of Wilbushewich’s work in the interwar period was devoted to investigating the question, how to compensate for the physical inferiority of Jewish- compared to Arab workers, through nutrition and psychotechnics. As a scholar of nutrition, he performed scientific analyses of ingredients and dishes from the Palestinian kitchen and encouraged Jewish settlers to adopt some of them to make their nutrition more adjusted to the conditions of the land, and hence more “rational.” As I show, although Zionist experts embraced an environmental approach to “revitalizing” Jewish bodies, their perceptions were nonetheless shaped by assumptions about racial difference and hierarchy– between Arabs and Jews, and between Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews.

In the first half of the nineteenth century the Society of Jesus were responsible for some of the most significant new Catholic church-buildings in England since the Reformation. Jesuits were involved in all aspects of building, as active and informed patrons and sometimes as priest-architects who designed and even helped to build their buildings. They cared about architecture, architectural identity, and architectural style. Notwithstanding this, English Jesuit church-building is one of the least-developed areas within the field of global Jesuit studies. How architecturally and visually aware were the English Jesuits? How did they acquire the knowledge and skills to be active participants in building? What role did the Jesuits’ central House Libraries at Stonyhurst play in their architectural culture? This article considers how their academic studies and priestly formation gave the Jesuits the tools to build. It constitutes the first published research specifically focused on the architectural holdings of the Jesuits’ House Libraries. Consideration of the provenance, development, and contents of these libraries enhances our understanding of how the Jesuits were able to play an active and hands-on role in their building works. In so doing, it seeks to draw attention to the significance of the English Jesuits’ engagement with architecture.

This article focused on the erotic encounters between male characters in the Ottoman frontier epic of the Battalname that led to conversion to Islam. It argues that these moments of eroticism between two male warriors parallel other literary and cultural expressions wherein male-male eroticism was the norm. Romantic and erotic encounters in these frontier epics have focused on the much more limited cases of female-male interactions, obscuring the fact that these were more often the exception. While male-male eroticism has been largely studied for elite literary works, narratives considered to be expressions of folktale have been treated as if they belong to separate cultural worlds. I show that some of the language of eroticism and conversion had strong parallels between the two forms of cultural expression and thus highlight the normalized all-male space of eroticism both in the Ottoman frontier and in nascent Ottoman urban culture.

This article argues that antifascism began to acquire a new meaning in the early 1990s, making a vital contribution to the emergence of a national antiracism movement in Italy and the spread of an antiracist culture built on new foundations. This thesis is based on observations of Italian society. The first section reconstructs the operations of the association Senzaconfine and analyses the contents of its publication of the same name. The middle section describes an exhibition entitled La menzogna della razza, its connection to the ‘Pantera’ student protest movement and its continued travels around Italy until recent years. The final section is dedicated to the reaction of several segments of the youth population and political community to the neofascist Luca Traini’s attempted racial massacre in Macerata in 2018. The article concludes that although the new focus on antiracism is not the only way the Italian antifascist tradition is being remoulded, it remains one of the most important, given the issues we face in a globalised, postcolonial world.