Some studies of the lived experience of religion in early Stuart England have argued for a historiographical overemphasis on doctrinal controversy, suggesting that attention to contemporary works of private devotion can dissolve categories of division in post-Reformation English Protestantism. However, in considering two such devotional texts—Daniel Featley's Ancilla Pietatis (1626) and John Cosin's Hours of Prayer (1627)—this article demonstrates the difficulty in separating devotion from polemic. Indeed, these prayer manuals cannot be understood outside of an extended interconfessional and intra-Protestant polemical exchange—a confessional conflict with powerful women, including Mary Villiers, Countess of Buckingham, and Elizabeth Cary, Viscountess Falkland, at the center. Here, attention to practical devotion does not elide categories of division within English Protestantism but rather highlights how such divisions were sharpened through competing devotional efforts aimed at court women in response to the theological uncertainty wrought by the Catholic dynastic matches of the 1620s. Finally, an extended examination of the activities and interests of Elizabeth Cary suggests that our understanding of the lived experience of religion for lay women must be expanded to include participation in theological controversy, offering a version of female religious agency that extends beyond private spaces of devotional practice.

This paper investigates Bentham’s declaration in an unpublished manuscript of the first chapter of Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789) that he “had” the “Principle of Utility” from, among other sources, the ancient Greek philosophers Epicurus and Carneades. The paper confirms Epicurus’ influence on Bentham’s development of the “Principle of Utility” by identifying deep connections and similarities in the philosophical doctrines expressed by Epicurus with Bentham’s views relating to three key issues: the goal in life and what has value for human beings; how human beings make choices to act; and what actions are right or just, and what is justice. The paper also shows that Bentham developed the “Principle of Utility” to satisfy Carneades’ three requirements for any ethical theory: a criterion for choices in every action, what constitutes a right action; grounded on a consideration external to the theory; and adapted to a motivating factor originally present in human nature.

Despite his support for the creation of the West Indies Federation in the late 1950s, the anticolonial activist and political thinker CLR James expressed severe reservations regarding the process that led to its creation. While his criticisms are brief, this paper reconstructs a Jamesian critique of the plebiscite as a means of anticolonial self-determination. Situating his discussion of the plebiscite in the broader arc of his political thought from the 1930s to the 1960s, I identify three lines of critique that revolve around broad questions of mass leadership and the reproduction of colonial domination. First, drawing on his discussion of the tragic flaw of Toussaint L’Ouverture’s leadership during the Haitian Revolution, James argued that the plebiscite enabled popular leaders to skirt their responsibility to effectively communicate with the revolutionary masses. Second, James feared that the plebiscite fixed the principle of territorial sovereignty in place in advance of the process of decolonization by tethering popular authority to clearly bound territorial constituencies. Third, by giving the people a simple choice between two options, James worried that the plebiscite would undermine radical processes of democratic self-constitution. Against conventional critiques of the plebiscite as a means of consolidating dictatorial power under the guise of vox populi, James reveals how ostensibly popular political forms, such as the plebiscite, undercut the enactment of popular agency in colonial contexts.

This article reconstructs the history of the ‘Centro per gli Studi sullo Sviluppo Economico’ created through a collaboration between the SVIMEZ (Associazione per lo sviluppo dell’industria nel Mezzogiorno) and the Ford Foundation and active between 1958 and 1969. Through the analysis of unpublished documentation from the SVIMEZ archives, the article shows how the ‘Italian laboratory’ of Southern Italy became an international case study in the context of the Cold War and the dawn of development economics. The Centre played a crucial role in training economists and officials and in disseminating the Italian experience at the Mediterranean and global levels, combining international theoretical approaches with the empirical legacy of policies for the ‘Mezzogiorno’. The paper highlights how this experience represented a meeting point between American philanthropy, Western modernisation and bottom-up development practices, contributing to the construction of transnational networks and the spread of development culture in the era of decolonisation.

The impact of imported firearms on Southeast Asian states has been a topic of much debate, but is often discussed in relatively general terms. This article uses the archive of the Dutch East India Company to analyse the importation of muskets into late seventeenth century Ayutthaya, which took the form of diplomatic gifting, as well as their intended uses. Muskets are found to have been used mainly for the suppression of internal popular revolts, which was aided by extremely strict gun control aimed at keeping firearms a royal monopoly. The importation of these guns was responsive to immediate need and stopped once revolts became less frequent. The volume of the trade between 1658 and 1709 is found to have been surprisingly low.

Light pollution – the use of artificial lighting at night (ALAN) – is a growing environmental problem. This article focuses on how the European Union (EU) governs light pollution. A few key points are made. At first glance, the regulatory situation appears to be straightforward: there is no explicit EU governance in this area, as no regulation has been adopted with specific targets to mitigate light pollution. Yet, many EU instruments indirectly affect the growth of light pollution without mentioning the term by name. This article discusses specific examples from the EU Habitats Directive and the Energy Labelling Regulation, amongst others. On the basis of these examples, the article argues that this web of instruments, when considered together, can be conceptualized as ‘shadow’ governance. It concludes that unless light is shed on regulatory spillovers, the current EU regulatory framework will continue to worsen, rather than address, light pollution.

This study investigates the interpretation of referring expressions in Korean – a discourse-oriented language in which referential resolution relies primarily on discourse context rather than morphosyntactic cues. Across three experiments, we manipulated the accessibility of potential antecedents by varying their grammatical roles and examined the effects on referential interpretation using naturalness ratings and antecedent choice tasks. Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrated that null pronouns function as the highest accessibility markers, yielding the strongest subject antecedent preferences and the highest naturalness ratings. In contrast, overt pronouns and full NPs displayed no clear interpretive bias in these contexts. However, Experiment 3 – featuring globally ambiguous sentences – revealed a clear three-way distinction: null pronouns were strongly associated with subject antecedents, while overt pronouns and full NPs favored object antecedents, with full NPs eliciting the strongest object bias. These findings support the key predictions of Accessibility Theory, particularly the form–function correlation linking referential form to cognitive accessibility. Notably, the accessibility distinction between overt pronouns and full NPs appears weaker and more context-sensitive, suggesting that referential form distinctions are not equally weighted across all categories. This work offers novel and comprehensive cross-linguistic support for Accessibility Theory by providing empirical evidence for the proposed hierarchy of the Accessibility Marking Scale.

This article examines Charles Bell’s experimental practices by drawing historiographical attention away from the priority disputes over the spinal nerve functions for which he was most famous. I argue that Bell’s primary research interest was the expression of emotions. To this end, he developed a programme of vivisection that explored the underlying mechanisms of emotion. However, this also resulted in a profound contradiction between his experimental practices and his worldview – conducting painful experiments on beloved animals despite moral revulsion towards animal experimentation. This opens up three interconnected areas. Firstly, it allows an exploration of disciplinary identity in medicine, particularly the way that disciplines demanded specific practices and behaviours. Secondly, vivisection more generally required methods and ethics that opposed the growing anti-cruelty voice. Here, a combination of animal choice and the importation of techniques from the slaughterhouses was critical. Thirdly, vivisectors navigated a complex emotional landscape between their professional obligations and broader cultural sensibilities. These three areas are linked together using Boddice’s concept of moral economies, the affective frameworks that structured feelings. Particularly important were the sentimental and Romantic economies, both of which impacted Bell and his research. At the same time, Bell always struggled to reconcile the tensions between his disciplinary identity and his sentimental and Romantic beliefs, ultimately leading him to abandon experimentation after his assistant John Shaw’s death. I conclude by identifying the guarantees provided by character for licensing ostensibly cruel behaviours, thus allowing for the maintenance of probity within competing moral economies.