This special issue draws on new research conducted by the PUblic REnaissance: Urban Cultures of Public Space between Early Modern Europe and the Present project, funded by the Humanities in the European Research Area (see: www.hiddencities.eu). The project considers how public spaces, from street corners to major city squares, were shaped by the everyday activities of ordinary city dwellers between 1450 and 1700. We have focused on the urban fabric, and the ways in which meanings are attached to specific sites in the city (and objects in museum collections) that are often overlooked – the material culture of public space. Our themes are familiar to urban historians – sociability, the circulation of knowledge, information or gossip, authority and its contestation – although by moving between textual sources, maps, the built fabric and museum artefacts, our interdisciplinary and cross-Europe approach is structured around material objects in the early modern period.

This article argues that Thomas Kuhn's landmark work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, has not been adequately explored by theologians and scholars in the field of science and religion. While many cite Kuhn to suggest that science and religion share structural similarities, I contend that his work is crucial in addressing current debates about the definitions of ‘science’ and ‘religion’ and the potential for intellectual progress between them. Kuhn's framework provides more than a justification for adhering to incommensurable worldviews; it offers a nuanced understanding of how science and religion interact and the significance of tacit knowledge in scientific practice. This article explains Kuhn's focus on exemplars in his philosophy of science, which underpin his argument for key differences between science and theological inquiry. The article concludes that Kuhn's pluralistic view of truth offers theologians an opportunity to engage more deeply with science, rather than sidestepping it entirely.

Histories of Third Worldism have received renewed attention from historians in the past decade. Much of the resulting scholarship has focused on the international to the exclusion of the national. This article addresses this relative neglect by focusing on a particular iteration of Third World nation-state-building: co-operative socialism in Forbes Burnham's Guyana. Refuting the argument that co-operative socialism was imitative and implemented for reasons of political expediency only, the article contends that Burnham's doctrine should be regarded as a meaningful attempt at remaking Guyana's society and economy through its core principles of self-sufficiency, self-reliance, and self-discipline. These principles gave rise to a specific conception of citizenship in 1970s Guyana, where the People's National Congress (PNC) sought to link political belonging and participation with a moral ethic premised on the notion of hard work in service of the nation. The article examines how this collectivist understanding of citizenship gave rise to a particular set of struggles at the turn of the 1980s, as the co-operative republic began to collapse. What emerged from these struggles was an alternate but parallel imagining of citizenship espoused by the Working People's Alliance (WPA), which rejected the PNC's vanguardism in favour of empowering the Guyanese people through the creation of non-hierarchical systems of collective authority. The article concludes by arguing that the failure of the WPA's attempt to overthrow the PNC through popular revolt signified the ends of decolonization and Third Worldism in the Caribbean, and the beginnings of new struggles against new forms of coloniality in the guise of the emerging neoliberal and good governance agendas.

This special issue is dedicated to the syntax-prosody interface in non-canonical questions and originated in the international workshop Non-Canonical Questions at the Syntax-Prosody Interface, organised at the Université Paris Cité and held online in November 2020. Recent research has demonstrated that the phonology-syntax relation cannot solely account for prosodic structure, prosody being closely intertwined with discourse organisation, information structure and focus structure (Gussenhoven 1983, Féry 2001). Questions are a case in point, as they crucially call on the addressee before a proposition may be added to the common ground.

Connections between northern Iberia and western France around the Bay of Biscay during the Chalcolithic, Early Bronze Age, and Middle Bronze Age are addressed in this article through a multivariate cluster analysis of a dataset of 1273 metal finds, comprising 4554 metal artefacts grouped into five multiregional clusters with distinctive distributions, chronologies, content, and contexts. Changes in distribution and chronology show that metalwork from faraway regions was deposited in similar ways, reflecting changing patterns of interregional connectivity. Changes in context and content suggest social transformations. The clustering method known as Latent Class Analysis is presented here in the hope that it will be applicable to other datasets elsewhere in the world.

Investor–state dispute settlement (ISDS) has been heavily criticized from the perspective of human rights. However, the potential adverse human rights impacts of ISDS and the responsibilities of businesses to avoid causing or contributing to those impacts under the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights have yet to be spelled out. Although states are currently reforming ISDS, progress has been slow, and businesses have an independent responsibility to ensure that their operations do not harm human rights. Against this background, this article unpacks how businesses might contribute to three non-exhaustive examples of potential human rights impacts of ISDS: namely, the chilling effect on human rights regulation, crippling mega-awards and direct impacts on third-party rights. This article breaks new ground by exploring how human rights due diligence could be a useful tool for businesses to identify and address these impacts.

The apostrophe was introduced into the English orthographic system by the mid sixteenth century as a printer's mark especially designed ‘for the eye rather than for the ear’ (Sklar 1976: 175; Little 1986: 15). Whereas the uses of the apostrophe today are limited to the Saxon genitive construction (the woman's book), to verbal contractions (you'll ‘you will’ or you're ‘you are’) and to other formulaic expressions (o'clock), its early uses also included other cases of elision and some abbreviated words (Parkes 1992: 55‒6; Beal 2010a: 58). Among this plethora of uses, perhaps one of the most distinctive functions of this symbol is the indication of the genitive construction, which has no full form in Present-day English after the progressive extinction of the genitive case affix. Such a development could have also happened in the regular past morpheme, but its outcome differed, as it continues to be spelled out today.

The present article is then concerned with the standardisation of the apostrophe in the English orthographic system in the period 1600–1900 and pursues the following objectives: (a) to study the use and omission of the apostrophe in the expression of the past tense, the genitive case and the nominative plural in the period; (b) to assess the relationship between the three uses and their likely connections; and (c) to evaluate the likely participation of grammarians in the adoption and the rejection of each of these phenomena in English. The source of evidence for this corpus-based study comes from A Representative Corpus of Historical English Registers (ARCHER 3.2, Denison & Yáñez-Bouza 2013), sampling language use in different genres and text types in the historical period 1700–1900. Additionally, the Early English Books Online corpus (EEBO, Davies 2017) has also been used as material to investigate the early uses of the possessive apostrophe in the late sixteenth century. A preliminary data analysis confirms the second half of the seventeenth century as the period that saw the definite rise of the genitive apostrophe in English, refuting the early assumptions which considered it to be an eighteenth-century development (Crystal 1995: 68; Lukač 2014: 3). The results also suggest that this phenomenon was to some extent associated with the decline of the apostrophe in other environments, more particularly in the expression of the regular past tense forms. Moreover, there seems to be no indication that standardisation emerged from linguistic prescription; instead, grammars seem to have been shaped after use.

Rereading Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved, this article explores how Morrison’s work at the limits of language performs the haunting ties between the Reconstruction era and the present day by offering readers a way to experience a rememory of their own. By repeatedly emphasizing the inadequacy of language in expressing traumatic experience, Beloved encourages its readers to, like its characters, look beyond language and seek out a kind of ineffable, embodied knowledge to better understand the lingering traumas of slavery. Through Morrison’s concept of “invisible ink,” which points to the inevitability that lived experience cannot be captured in language by the author alone but must be filled in by an active reader, this article makes a larger argument: that Beloved acts as both an invitation and a guide to read the ghostly, invisible ink of history that exists outside the novel, haunting our world itself.

Catalan nationalism had always supported Ireland in its struggle for autonomy or independence against the British Empire. The outbreak of the Irish Civil War, nevertheless, surprised Catalanism. This article discusses the difficulties of the main Catalanist political parties in that period—the Lliga Regionalista, Acció Catalana, and Estat Català—to explain the Anglo-Irish Treaty in the Catalanist milieu as well as the difficulties of differentiating dominion and federation and adopting a coherent position according to their own ideology and to Catalan internal political dynamics. Focusing on this study case, the objective of the article is to show the difficulties of stateless national movements to explain their own politics and objectives from external models. And, likewise, how the look toward an external nationalism can stop being useful or even raise unexpected questions within the movement that tries to explain itself by simplifying the contexts of others.

There is an ethics of blaming the person who deserves blame. The Christian scriptures imply the following no-vengeance condition: a person should not vengefully overtly blame a wrongdoer even if she gives the wrongdoer the exact negative treatment that he deserves. I explicate and defend this novel condition and argue that it demands a revolution in our blaming practices. First, I explain the no-vengeance condition. Second, I argue that the no-vengeance condition is often violated. The most common species of blame involves anger; anger conceptually includes a desire for vengeance; and there are many pleasures in payback. Third, I clarify that it is possible to blame non-vengefully in anger and highlight three good uses for anger in non-vengeful blame. Fourth, I offer two reasons that justify the divine command prohibiting vengeance, and I note that the Christian God is merely sufficient to make non-vengeance morally obligatory. Fifth, I defend the no-vengeance condition against four biblical objections.

In June 2023, the OECD published ‘targeted updates’ to the newly renamed OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises on Responsible Business Conduct. This piece examines some of the most significant updates from the perspective of civil society. The majority of the updates strengthen the authoritative international standards on responsible business conduct; for example, by addressing new and important topics, such as climate change, and clarifying expectations on established due diligence concepts. Meanwhile, the revised implementation procedures suggest progressive measures for governments to strengthen their National Contact Points, but largely do not require specific improvements. This piece discusses the strengths and shortcomings of these changes and assesses the impact of the updates on international norms.