In modern jurisprudence, it is recognized that courts will engage in arbitration, often under the rubric of Alternative Dispute Resolution.1 Recourse to arbitration further back in the English past has often been perceived as extra-legal, taking place outside the system of courts, and sometimes intended specifically to avoid those courts. This research has concentrated on the avoidance of secular courts, in particular the king’s courts and common law (see below). By contrast, arbitration in ecclesiastical courts has received less detailed investigation, although many salient aspects have been approached (as indicated below).

This article re-examines the literature on the evidential uses of French tenses, and evaluates what distinguishes French from languages that are said to possess fully grammaticalized evidential systems. Based on corpus analyses, semantic testing, and crosslinguistic comparisons, this study argues that the French passé composé and imparfait do not carry any inherent evidential meaning, unlike the futur and conditionnel. The evidential interpretations of the former two tenses are simply conveyed by the context, while those of the latter two are indeed due to their intrinsic semantic make-up. We conclude that although French encodes evidentiality with verbal inflections only infrequently, it is no different from languages usually cited to illustrate advanced evidential paradigms from a formal and semantic standpoint.

Lorsque des locuteurs produisent des néologismes à l’écrit, ils peuvent utiliser des marqueurs typographiques ou linguistiques pour mettre en saillance ces derniers. Cette étude, centrée sur des néologismes dénominaux suffixés en -ien, -ique et -esque, combine une analyse de corpus et une étude expérimentale de type questionnaire en ligne afin d’examiner, d’une part, le type et la proportion de ces marqueurs et, d’autre part, leur influence sur les jugements de néologicité. En production, les locuteurs marquent environ 23 % des néologismes, principalement avec des guillemets, puis avec des motifs syntaxiques et enfin avec des commentaires. En réception, la présence de ces marqueurs (guillemets et commentaires) augmente les taux de détection des néologismes. L’identification des néologismes est influencée par le cotexte. De plus, d’autres éléments semblent expliquer les variations des jugements de néologicité, tels que le suffixe du néologisme lorsque ce dernier est morphologiquement dérivé, et l’âge des locuteurs.

In recent years, the emergence of both the spatial and spectral turns has meant a more intense focus on the importance of space in supernatural narratives, especially within modern, industrialized cities. Less has been said, however, about the importance of understanding the affective resonances of space in early modern tales. This article examines tales of ghost sightings in London and Southwark that appeared in print. It argues that these hauntings created affective topographies that had both individual and communal resonances. In turn, the article explores how these emotional responses contributed to conceptions of space, community and neighbourhood in early modern London. As such, it demonstrates how paying attention to supernatural narratives can reveal a hidden geography of the city, one that is shaped by supernatural storytelling, emotions and close conceptions of community.

The naming of cityscapes has never been a disinterested or straightforward affair. This article, which introduces the special issue on multifunctional urban toponymy in the Romanov Empire, opens by providing an overview of recent developments in critical place-name studies and bringing this field into dialogue with the historiography of the empire. It then delineates the main waves of toponymic changes in the empire from the eighteenth to the early twentieth century, and proposes a typology of the main categories of imperial toponyms used for (re)naming. Our main argument is that place names performed a wider array of functions, beyond just orientational and ideological, and were also used to gain socio-economic capital and enhance the social desirability and economic value of urban areas. Having introduced the contributions to the special issue, the article then outlines several avenues for future research.

In 1963, Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote Letter from Birmingham Jail in response to white clergy members who had urged him to cease demonstrating against segregation laws, follow the standards of law and order, and pursue change through official governmental channels. These remonstrations mirror arguments invoked to delegitimize dissent and provide support for legal but immoral governmental policies such as American slavery, Nazi atrocities, and apartheid. At the heart of religious justifications for such arguments is Romans 13:1–7, which endorses human government as God ordained but can be interpreted to require unqualified obedience to law. It is also the go to passage used by Christians to describe the role and authority of police officers in their law enforcement capacity. The way Romans 13 has often been interpreted and applied, however, is exegetically and theologically problematic. Most importantly, the passage is not describing the role of individual police officers as is often argued, but rather the operation of human government as an institution. This flawed starting point has led to a cascade of other interpretive errors, which include describing police officers as agents of God’s wrath and delegitimizing dissent against unjust laws. It also promotes some of the most pernicious features of American law enforcement, including the alienating idea of police as the thin blue line, the we-they mentality that demeans those being policed, the use of warrior to describe the policing role, the militarization of law enforcement, and the systemic racism that plagues U.S. policing. In this article, the author offers a more exegetically and theologically accurate reading of Romans 13, with very different implications for role of law enforcement, and gestures toward a much-needed Christian theology of policing.

This essay traces the rise of ginseng as a crucial commodity in the Qing Dynasty, focusing on its integration into the empire’s administrative and economic structures. Central to this transformation was Pierre Jartoux’s influential identification of ginseng, which reoriented its trade from inland markets to maritime routes. This shift not only enhanced its global circulation but also broadened its accessibility to diverse consumers. The essay speaks to multiple fields of study. It contributes to global commodity history by highlighting how ginseng’s changing trade routes shaped early modern commerce. It also emphasizes the entangled nature of cultural and economic exchanges across regions. Additionally, it advances scholarship in the history of medicine by examining how ginseng’s therapeutic uses and meanings developed as it moved across different social and geographic contexts.

Erected in 1502, the two Tangut dhāraṇī pillars in Baoding, Hebei, are the latest datable Tangut materials known to history. Scholars have generally focused almost exclusively on their recency, however, overlooking the historical contexts of their erection. Meanwhile, historians have long sought to understand the patterns of local societies in northern China following the fall of the Northern Song, yet the histories of minor ethnic groups, like the Tanguts, remain underexplored. By contextualizing the pillars within their historical setting, this study seeks to improve understanding of the material and offer a new perspective on the local history of post-Jin northern China. The article has three main parts, concerning 1) the historical information the pillars’ inscriptions provide; 2) the religious practice of the Tangut community and its historical origin; and 3) the varied social status of the pillars’ patrons and the power dynamics they reflect.

In this article, I explore the history of Bokaro Steel City – a planned industrial settlement conceived in the 1960s in the Indian state of Jharkhand as part of India’s post-Independence modernization programme. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and archival materials, I demonstrate the unique socially inclusive approach of tackling social inequalities, focusing specifically on how planners approached social reproduction. By foregrounding the distinctiveness of Bokaro’s urban design, I argue for a re-evaluation of modernist urbanities, delinking them from the exclusively Eastern European monotowns or Western superblocks and demonstrating how Indian planners adapted modernist ideas to meet their local objectives.