Euphonia, or the Musical City: Tale of the Future, Hector Berlioz’s novella from 1844, is a testament to how the composer imagined a perfect city drawing from both the musical past and his autobiography. Euphonia envisions a community of artists striving for musical perfection, which is demonstrated during a recurring festival honouring Gluck, Berlioz’s first musical idol. Composers carefully monitor musical preparation, and only knowledgeable audiences attend concerts. Berlioz’s visionary, futuristic utopia is built on nostalgia for an alternate musical culture and recent musical heritage. This imagined city arose from the composer’s experiences in the urban locales where he lived. Euphonia is Berlioz’s dream to musically revisit La Côte-Saint-André, his native city, while it also expresses a desire to engage with the nostalgic aura of the German mountains. Nostalgia seeks to build alternative realities as a response to the bittersweet memories of times gone by and the perception that the culture of the present is declining. Rather than being solely directed at reminiscing about the past, the power of nostalgia relies on its ability to create the promise of a better future. Despite that Berlioz continued to enrich his artistic outlook in Paris, the composer also faced frustrations with the musical establishment in which he worked and about which he wrote. Berlioz considered that in Paris popular opinions and habits of the musical world had tarnished music’s integrity. As it became clear that his musical ideals were not met in the real world, he imagined a perfect city-conservatory, Euphonia, where Berlioz countered the artistic realities and hardships he faced in Paris and in exchange imagined new spaces where his ideas would flourish. The utopic yet so nostalgic city of Euphonia, like Berlioz’s music, commemorated the musical values of past eras and anticipated a future of creative possibility.

This article considers a curious document – Baker’s Australian County Atlas – which contains carefully illustrated maps of each of the 19 counties in the colony of New South Wales in the mid-1840s. The analysis seeks to bridge the gap between high-level geographical studies of the British invasion of New South Wales and historical analysis of settler colonial property formation. We argue that the Atlas reveals the mechanics of territorial accumulation and Aboriginal dispossession in nineteenth-century New South Wales in their historical and material specificity, locating instances of ‘improvement’ – clearing, fencing and the construction of temporary and permanent buildings – at the centre of settler colonial land administration and sovereignty. The article demonstrates that the legal obligation to improve ultimately regulated colonial urbanization, enacting a process in which buildings and other structures functioned less as ends in themselves than as discrete operations within a more pervasive and abiding process of dispossession.

This paper revisits the restrictive/appositive distinction with Mandarin relative clauses and argues against the commonly held view that their restrictive/appositive status directly correlates with their structural positions. We demonstrate that distinct uses of demonstratives constitute a relevant factor in establishing the correlation, such that the pre-/post-demonstrative position is relevant to the semantic status of a relative when the demonstrative is used deictically, but not when it is used anaphorically; and that this refined typology of RCs can be accounted for once existing analyses of strong definites (Elbourne 2005. Situations and individuals; Schwarz 2009. Two types of definites in natural language; Jenks 2018. Linguistic Inquiry 49. 501–536) are extended to Mandarin demonstratives.

Legal systems often suffer from what may be called legal inflation: an excess of laws that erodes legal compliance. The difficulty lies in identifyng which laws are responsible for this erosion. Democratic deliberation is poorly suited to the task. This paper advances an identification criterion: laws that generate both widespread non-compliance and inconsistent enforcement should be regarded as defective, because they fail to function as laws. I propose a new version of the rule of obsolescence to repeal defective laws. This framework clarifies the mechanisms by which legal inflation undermines institutional stability and offers guidance for legal reform.

An examination of the history of menageries in Ireland from 1790 to 1840 offers insights into how people related to and understood the animal world through exhibitions of exotic creatures. Menageries, featuring diverse collections of wild animals displayed in cages, were part of the broader entertainment scene at fairs and large social events in the early nineteenth century. Journeying across Ireland and Britain in horse-drawn caravans, these exhibitions evolved from modest attractions to significant commercial enterprises by the mid nineteenth century. While British menageries of the period have received considerable scholarly attention, Irish menageries have been largely overlooked. This article seeks to address that gap by exploring how the Irish public encountered exotic and rare animals in menageries during this period. Newspapers, advertisements for travelling menageries and contemporary accounts reveal that menageries played a meaningful role in bringing the wonders of the animal kingdom to the Irish populace, offering a glimpse into the exotic and the unknown.

Orenburg, a Russian border fortress on the Kazakh steppe founded in 1743, was the first city of the Tsarist Empire that was provided with a full set of official street names. While toponymic designations in empires have often been investigated in the context of the struggle of competing national groups for visibility, the case of Orenburg provides an example of how toponymic designations served to claim a newly conquered region as an integral part of the empire. As Orenburg’s street names were rarely in use in everyday life, this article argues moreover that both their orientation and representation functions were of little importance, and that their main purpose was to demonstrate the progressive governing techniques the administration had at its disposal.

Anton Rubinstein’s music has often been portrayed as a conservative, cosmopolitan foil to the progressive, nationalist compositions of the Balakirev circle. This is also how the Balakirev circle viewed it throughout the 1860s, but their opposition suddenly gave way to public adulation in 1869. Ostensibly, the reason for this about-face was musical, since with Ivan IV (1868) and Don Quixote (1870), Rubinstein finally produced two explicitly programmatic symphonic pictures. Yet the difference between Rubinstein’s symphonic pictures and his earlier works was not as radical as the Balakirev circle made it out to be, and at least part of the circle’s motivation for suddenly praising them seems to have originated in extramusical concerns. In 1869, Balakirev was dismissed as the director of the Russian Musical Society and threw himself into organizing the Free Music School concerts, which he intended as a competitive alternative to those of the RMS. In order to attract audiences, he became determined to secure the Saint Petersburg premiere of Ivan IV as well as Rubinstein’s performances as a soloist, and it was in this context that the Balakirev circle bombarded the press with glowing reviews of Rubinstein’s music. In the short run, this rapprochement even grew beyond a marriage of convenience and developed into regular meetings at which Rubinstein and the Balakirev circle presented their compositions for criticism. These meetings were ephemeral, but in later years most of the Balakirev circle maintained a polite relationship with Rubinstein. The exception was Vladimir Stasov, who erased the rapprochement from his memory and reverted to peddling the image of Rubinstein as the archconservative enemy of Russian music that he had already constructed in the 1860s. Alas, it was Stasov who shaped twentieth-century historiography of Russian music, and this is why the events of 1869–71 have remained obscured in modern scholarship.

This is a brief introduction to a special issue highlighting the relevance of philosophy of science to many core topics in theology and philosophy of religion. Several points of intersection between knowledge production in the sciences and knowledge production in philosophy and theology are discussed.

This article examines the interdependent relationship between the state, law, and market in early modern China. Focusing on usury statutes, it analyzes how the Chinese state in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries employed its legal framework to regulate a burgeoning money economy. The study underscores the critical role of law as an instrument of statecraft, essential for sustaining market functionality and social stability. Law’s multifaceted nature—encompassing legislation, specialist interpretations, adjudication, legal education, professional manuals, and popular knowledge—challenges the simplistic view of Confucian values as inherently anti-commerce. Instead, it shows how these values supported the uniformity and practicality of legal interpretations and judicial decisions. Moreover, the Chinese case points to a broader analytical framework with cross-cultural relevance: economic justice and market efficiency are not inherently opposed but can be mutually reinforcing when grounded in a shared set of values and legal regulations.

The 1893 Dorpat-to-Iur′ev (present-day Tartu) renaming law marks a key moment in the Romanov imperial government’s efforts to de-Germanize and Russify the Baltic provinces. This article brings legal perspectives to critical place-name studies by examining how the Romanov Empire used law to regulate and exert control over naming practices, and how local inhabitants leveraged their legal knowledge to spot ambiguities, exploit loopholes and defend naming rights in court, thereby engaging in various forms of toponymic resistance. By situating the 1893 renaming law within the broader imperial legal system, this article argues that even ideologically motivated changes to urban toponymy could be subject to legal checks and balances.

This article is a case study of the Kasarani Stadium in Kenya as a heuristic through which to understand President Daniel Arap Moi’s political style and priorities during the first decade of his regime. Drawing primarily from national and international newspapers, the archives of national and international sporting organizations and associations, records of the Kenyan government and biographies of Moi, I explore how Moi gave political meaning to sport to advance his populist politics at home and project Kenya on(to) the international stage. At home, he used sports to define himself as a leader of the ordinary mwananchi (citizen), in touch with the experiences, challenges, and visions of the common Kenyan. Internationally, he used sports to chart Kenya’s foreign policy and fashion himself as an international political personality. The article concludes that the study of sports and sporting infrastructure offers a productive way to write social, political, and cultural histories of postcolonial Africa.

This article examines the diachronic development of hedged performatives (HP) in spoken American English. HPs (e.g. I have to say, I must admit) combine a (semi-)modal verb and a performative verb, and were first analyzed by Fraser (1975). While subsequent research has investigated their discursive functions and established them as ‘constructions’, their diachronic development has not been analyzed within a Construction Grammar perspective. This article addresses this gap using three corpora: the TV Corpus, Movie Corpus and spoken COCA. We investigate fifteen HPs formed with three modals (have to, must, can), first sketching a constructional network with a macro-level ([I + MODAL + Vperf]), modal-specific meso-level (e.g. [I must Vperf]) and micro-level (e.g. [I must say]). Results show different diachronic trends at the meso-level: [I must Vperf] declines, [I have to Vperf] increases, and [I can Vperf] remains stable. These trends diverge from those of the base modals, confirming their constructional status. For must and have to HPs, change operates primarily at the meso-level, driven by evolving discourse norms. At the micro-level, must/have to HPs follow the meso-level trend, while can HPs show more variation. Finally, HPs are overrepresented in scripted speech, although diachronic trends remain consistent across registers.