Following the French example, the Meloni government has introduced the phrase ‘sovranità alimentare’ (sovereignty in food) into the title of the ministry of agriculture, and makes clear that it is engaging in a very determined effort to defend and promote the cultural heritage of Italian cuisine on all fronts, at home and abroad. But the origins of this impulse go back to the 1980s and the arrival of the McDonald’s hamburger chain, which gave birth to the Slow Food movement, now a global phenomenon. All this conceals several paradoxes: Italian cuisine has always been open to hybridised versions invented elsewhere (especially in America); production in key sectors, including wine, depends on large numbers of immigrant workers at a time when the government is trying to discourage immigration; and the ‘sovereignty in food’ concept unwittingly unites the government and some of its most radical opponents. But the very basis of this concept is challenged by the hyper-protectionist trade policy of the Trump administration.

This article analyses the relationship between Italian feminism and mental health in the 1970s, focusing on Turin. It explores the main theoretical debates that dominated feminist magazines and meetings during those years. In feminist groups and collectives, discussions about women’s wellness and illness began with the broader theme of health and knowledge of one’s body. However, they subsequently expanded to include personal, theoretical, clinical and political issues related to mental health. New experiences such as autocoscienza (consciousness-raising) and the practice of the unconscious allowed feminists to examine the effects of gender roles and models, existential contradictions, distress and intolerance, discomfort with doctors, psychiatric hospitalisation and the shortcomings of territorial services. The case of Turin shows that these experiences paved the way for subsequent interactions between feminism and the psychiatric reform movement.

This article explores the connection between the ecclesiology and the beliefs on church-state relations of Baptists in the mid-twentieth-century United States. The author analyzes white Baptists’ reactions to the US Supreme Court rulings in Everson v. Board of Education (1947) and McCollum v. Board of Education (1948), both of which inaugurated the modern era of strict separationist Establishment Clause jurisprudence. The author also traces the development of Baptist beliefs on how the institutional church relates to individual salvation—beliefs that distinguished Baptists from both Catholics and most other Protestants—and statements from US Baptist leadership supporting church-state separation. The author demonstrates that Baptists’ beliefs on the internal, individualistic, and non-sacramental nature of salvation induced them to see any government-sponsored religious activity as likely corrupting of a person’s genuine choice of salvation. Furthermore, Baptists’ origins as a persecuted minority in Europe and the United States reinforced their idea that government-sponsored religion would lead to the suppression of true Christianity. For both reasons, then, state-sponsored religion was not God’s design. Beginning with Everson and McCollum and continuing with later cases through the 1960s, Baptist’s strict separationism became the binding interpretation of the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause through Justice Hugo Black, who authored both the Everson and McCollum majority opinions. Although no longer a Baptist when the rulings were issued, Black retained his Baptist influence on church-state issues and enshrined strict separationism into American case law for decades, leading to a Baptist triumph that many Baptists themselves would later regret and attempt to reverse.

The fortified line known as the ‘Iron Belt’, a significant feature of the Spanish Civil War, was used for propaganda by both sides: the Republicans had blind faith in its ‘resistance’, while the Francoists emphasized its ‘invincibility’ when publicizing its conquest. The myth of the Iron Belt’s impenetrability, which has deeply permeated society, is being challenged by recent archaeological studies that explore this fortified line within the emerging context of Spanish Civil War archaeology. This article presents findings from archaeological interventions in four sectors along this line: Somorrostro, Muskiz, Mount Avril, and Mount Ollargan. Results show the lack of preparation of the Basque Army: the ammunition and the structures unearthed show that it was impossible to defend the line against the military power of the Francoists and air warfare. Today, the Iron Belt endures as a contested and fragile heritage landscape, illustrating how conflict heritage encapsulates societal tensions and unresolved historical legacies.

Modal concord refers to the phenomenon where the co-occurrence of two modal elements with the same flavor and force (e.g. may possibly, must certainly) gives rise to the interpretation of single modality. Given their (arguably) equivalent semantics, constructions with modal concord and single modal (e.g. may, must) can function as alternative choices in different contexts of use – how do speakers choose between them, and how is the choice perceived? In this article, we take a ‘Register’ approach and report an experimental study of MC in US English, addressing their linguistic and social meanings with versus without situational context. The results show that (i) modal concord constructions differ from single modal ones in linguistic meanings, which casts doubt on the concord assumption, and (ii) modal concord has distinct social meanings from those of single modal constructions. Our findings suggest a correlation between the meaning strength of a linguistic expression and the social perception about the speaker. Context, manipulated via the single situational parameter of interlocutor relation (close vs. distant), did not interact with the linguistic or social meaning of modal concord constructions, the implications of which are discussed in relation to the multidimensional nature of conversational situations and the method applied.

The extraction of salt from seawater is one of the most direct ways of exploiting the marine environment. In the historic period, the production of salt formed an important component of the global economy. In temperate locations such as Ireland, archaeological evidence of extracting salt from seawater comprises a range of expressions and locations dictated by the energy resource required. This article presents the results of the first archaeological excavations of a saltworks complex in Ireland, at two sites that produced salt from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. Partial excavation of a seventeenth-century complex at Ballyreagh Lower revealed a crude structure that was not capable of supplying all of the area’s needs. By contrast, the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century pan site at Broughanlea shows a step-change in scale, efficiency, and infrastructure that reflects new economic networks in a country predominantly relying on agricultural produce.

Performers have enacted Beethoven in ways that disclose overt similarities in the ways through which they conceptualize both the composer’s music, and their own ambitions in performing it. This article looks at the pianist Anton Rubinstein (1829–1894) who became known as ‘Van II’ not for his compositions but rather his performances. The focus the late nineteenth-century demand for autobiographic readings, and their blurring of boundaries between fact and fiction, sets the scene for Rubinstein’s role in the creation of a Russian obsession with the performance of Beethoven’s piano works. Rubinstein’s fame for being a ‘son born of Beethoven’ continued well beyond his death, and set a precedent for other pianists to look to his Beethoven legacy to fashion themselves as what Stefaniak has termed ‘revelatory interpreters’ of the composer. The resulting Beethoven–Rubinstein synthesis resulted in a counterpart obsession that peaked in the late-Soviet landscape of the mid-twentieth century. The article turns to the case of Heinrich Neuhaus (1888–1964) to give a sense of how this active myth-making reflected itself in the construction of a performance narrative by a pianist who had never seen or heard Rubinstein but who felt compelled to enact the language, metaphors, and physical trope of the Beethoven-Rubinstein synthesis. It suggests how, in Neuhaus’s case, enacting the Beethoven–Rubinstein synthesis perhaps underpinned aspects of his own pianism (such as the concept of intonirovaniye (a way of intoning sound) as a manifestation of revelatory interpretation) in Beethoven’s Piano Sonata in A-flat major Opus 110.

I explore and defend the unusual view that the replacement of matter taking place in the human body undermines egoistic reasons, and that we therefore have little or no basis for long-term egoistic concern. I begin by arguing that you should not have egoistic concern for a replica, i.e. a person resulting from a complete and sudden replacement of matter. I then argue that when it comes to egoistic concern, replication is not relevantly different from the slower and more gradual form of replacement found in human metabolism: if the former undermines egoistic reasons, so does the latter. I grant that the resulting view is, in some respects, hard to accept, but I conclude that we should at least treat it as a serious possibility.

This paper renews the contemporary and enduring salience of archaic and discredited concepts of spatiality and physical geographic determinism, but historicises, repurposes and reworks them: it is an essay in critical and decolonial palaeo-territorialisation. Concreteness may well have been misplaced, but place – and space – might not have been altogether mis-concretised. Rethinking the global is an opportunity to step back and think about macro-scales and macro-scalarity more broadly. This paper exhumes and decolonially/critically reappropriates Carl Schmitt’s Großraum concept (re-examining, along the way, if not quite rehabilitating the Meer und Land thesis and Mackinder’s ‘geographical pivot’ (Mackinder 1904)) as a heuristic device to explore the overlooked scales of continents and continentality in the genealogy of a global geographic imaginary that is as much geotectonic as geo-historical. ‘The Global’ would then come to signify pre-eminently – or perhaps has always signified – as the intercontinental rather than the international: a space or set of spaces in some ultimate sense conditioned by the configuration of the planetary crust yet nonetheless produced through historical processes. We may never have been global, but we have been (inter)continental for the last half-millennium. State sovereignty, (racial) capitalism, colonialism, imperialism, public international law, fascism, communism and neoliberal globalisation have all been projects or formations – directly or indirectly, by design or accident – producing, pursuing, exploiting, organising and ordering continental Großräume. Contemporary regional trade blocs, regional international governmental organisations, regional human rights systems, military alliances and even putative civilisational divides all reflect the perdurable continental horizons of our ostensibly global imaginary.