This article examines the inflectional system of adjectives in Chaucer, Gower and Hoccleve, with particular reference to the adjectives ‘high’ and ‘sly’. Since these poets were careful metrists, scansion allows us to determine the syllabic status of adjectives in their verse. While in Chaucer and Gower, the grammatical system for the inflection of monosyllabic adjectives (final -e for weak and plural adjectives) is generally observed, there is good evidence to show that the system was breaking down in the case of ‘high’ and ‘sly’, which frequently appear without inflection in weak position. The article also shows that in Hoccleve's poetry inflectional -e had disappeared altogether in these adjectives, except at line ending. Editorial emendations that depend on this inflection are therefore incorrect. The explanation for the irregular behaviour of ‘high’ and ‘sly’ is probably related to the vulnerability of schwa after front vowels.

In the wake of the Civil War, Americans contested the relationship between the federal government and states. Conflict over federal authority played out in concrete and surprising terms in a controversy that erupted in 1868 surrounding regulation of international telegraphy. The debate, which has remained largely unexamined, centered on whether a state could authorize a foreign company to land a submarine telegraph cable on American shores without Congress’s permission. Scholars have scrutinized consequences of the revision of federalism for individuals’ rights but have devoted less attention to implications for the nation’s international relations and commerce. The regulation of foreign cables, however, proved a key testing ground for the federal government’s efforts to assert sovereignty before both state authorities and other nations during Reconstruction. The episode revealed varied alliances and sources of opposition that emerged amid attempts to project federal power. It also reflected many Americans’ growing expectations of an expanded role for the national government in commerce and the international sphere—a position the federal government realized only haltingly. Intractable problems of federalism contributed to congressional inaction. While undertaking the formidable work of reconstructing the Union, the United States government struggled to delineate the physical boundaries of its authority.

This essay suggests that the accountability trends explored by Stian Øby Johansen and Gisela Hirschmann in their respective monographs should be viewed as indicating the emergence of a right to justification in global governance. Both Johansen and Hirschmann seek to advance the interdisciplinary conversation about the accountability of international organizations—Johansen by developing a normative framework assessing the quality of IO accountability mechanisms, and Hirschmann by seeking to identify the variables that shape the evolution of what she calls pluralist accountability. Building upon their analyses, I put forward a set of hypotheses about the procedural and substantive dimensions of the right to justification as well as the conditions for its consolidation in global governance.

One late morning in June 2019 I sought refuge from the blazing sun within the magnificent structure of the 10th-century Church of the Holy Mother of God, better known as the cathedral of the medieval Armenian capital of Ani.1 The cathedral, the masterpiece of the celebrated architect Trdat, is located inside the walled city, today a sprawling site of ruins perched at the extreme edge of the modern Republic of Turkey on its still-closed border with neighboring Armenia. Despite having lost its dome to the ravages of time and to earthquakes, its edifice still stands monumental, with exterior and interior walls marked with hundreds of crosses and inscriptions in the distinct Armenian script, a history carved in stone. In its shade, I had stumbled into a group of two dozen Turkish tourists, who, visibly in awe of their surroundings, were attentively listening to their guide attribute the building to, and praise the splendors of, Seljuk architecture. The surreal experience took me right back to the travel writer Jeremy Seal's recollections of his visit, some twenty-five years prior, to the then-ruined (now renovated) Church of the Holy Cross on the island of Aghtamar (renamed Akdamar) near Van. Perplexed at the structure being described as Seljuk, Seal had confronted his companion-guide as to why the Seljuks, of Muslim faith, would have built themselves a church in that place, centuries before their arrival to the region. He recognized having been “taught a lesson in forgetting,” on how to airbrush “the awkward realities enshrined in this building.” “How had it come to this,” Seal wondered, “that decent Turks . . . could refashion the evidence of bricks and mortar so that their absolving view of national history might prevail?”2

At least since the middle of the eighteenth-century, salus populi (the people’s welfare) and sic utere (use your own without injuring others) have encapsulated alternative conceptions of regulatory power, with the former associated with continental police regimes and the latter with Anglo-American conceptions of limited government. This article finds the origins of this antithesis in the intersection of two landmark cases addressed by Coke in the fall of 1610: Aldred’s Case, sic utere’s foundational text, and the Case of Proclamations, where Coke disputed the legality of building and starch proclamations. The Crown had provided common-good justifications for these proclamations, but their beneficiaries had included the individual neighbors of smelly starch makers and obstructive new buildings who had been left unprotected by previously existing local law. Rather than acquiescing to centralized legislation enacted via proclamation or parliament, Coke hinted in Aldred’s Case towards common law nuisance adjudication based on the sic utere principle as the desired mechanism for overriding local law that had privileged injurious land uses. Like salus populi, sic utere served a centralizing function. But whereas the former invited expansive regulatory agendas, the latter conditioned interventions on a judicial finding of a nuisance. In this, Coke’s invocation of sic utere in Aldred’s Case presaged the maxim’s eventual role as a substantive limit on the police power.

This roundtable focuses on the marginalization of ethnicities or religious denominations within Middle East studies, and in the larger realm of history writing. Without a nation–state of their own to preserve their language and history, the Assyrian people and the Church of the East denomination of Christianity fell subject to repression in Turkey, only recently finding a voice. Marginalization in history books and educational curricula is one symptom of broken treaty commitments and lack of equal access to state institutions and funds. In our century, marginalization has given way to something perhaps even worse: vilification and expulsion even from countries outside of Turkey where the Assyrians reside, during a neo-Ottoman period in which parts of Iraq and Syria came to more closely resemble Turkey, a resemblance that included the presence of Turkish arms.

There were times – not so long ago – when it seemed that historical processes could be dissected as though human action did not matter. Those times have changed. Nowadays, scholarly biography is enjoying broad interest, also among social historians, as is shown in this issue of the IRSH, in which John D. French explains how biography can contribute to a better understanding of global labour history. This contribution addresses three issues. Firstly, the relationship between agency (subject) and structure, or the role of the personality in history and society; secondly, the question of charismatic leadership, and finally, the question of how to deal with issues of necessity and coincidence and with the selection of leadership.

Kuhn (1933) proposed that the evolution of Germanic syntax began with a need to restore acceptable sentence rhythm after a shift to fixed initial stress. Kuhn found support for his hypothesis in ‘laws’ for word placement that applied in alliterative poetry but not in prose. Kuhn assumed that his laws were syntactic rules of Proto-Germanic maintained by conservative poets. Here I argue that Kuhn's Laws were rules of poetic meter that obscured basic word order. Adopting the universalist approach in Russom (2017), I integrate Kuhn's Laws with the metrical constraints observed by Sievers (1893) and explore the interaction between meter and syntax. When there are no adverse metrical consequences, subject-object-verb order is employed with remarkable consistency in Beowulf, our most valuable source of poetic evidence. My analysis receives independent support from Smith (1971), a study of the earliest Germanic texts that focuses primarily on prose.

This article assesses Italy's participation in the Expo du Sahara in Paris in 1934, placing it within the framework of European colonial culture, exhibitions, and international relations during the 1930s. Hitherto, the Expo du Sahara has been largely ignored by historiography, but it offers important insights into Italo-French relations in the years immediately preceding Italy's invasion of Ethiopia, as well as the ways in which Fascist Italy sought national and international legitimacy through the medium of exhibitions. The Paris exhibition, staged by the European powers after years of clashes, was also a physical representation of the so-called ‘colonial concord’ and ‘peaceful’ partition of North Africa, processes in which Italy's role was fundamental.

This article examines the creation and early dissemination of John Field's nocturnes, tracing this œuvre through initial publications in St Petersburg by Dalmas (1812; H24–25) to the posthumous collected editions by Schuberth and Liszt first released in the 1850s. Inspired by discourse on music and environment, I take the peculiar qualities of Russian night landscapes as a key factor in understanding how these works were composed and then marketed internationally. Although little documentation remains of Field's Russian experiences as described in his own voice, it is possible to reconstruct the place in which he worked through his musical publications, related contemporary descriptions, images and recollections of friends and admirers. These sources shed fresh light on his shift in musical style on relocation from England to Russia. Viewing Field's nocturnes through the lens of this landscape, both real and as imagined by later promoters such as Liszt, offers the opportunity to reach a newly nuanced understanding of Field's array of national identities – Irish, English and Russian – and of his nocturne as a Russia-based idiom.

In this paper, I argue for the following points. First, all of us have a presumptive moral obligation to be organ donors if we are in the relevant medical circumstances at the time of death. Second, family members should not have the right to interfere with the fulfillment of that obligation. Third, the ethical basis for that obligation is reciprocity. If we want a sufficient number of organs available for transplantation, then all must be willing donors. Fourth, that likelihood is diminished if individuals are entirely free to refuse to be organ donors but still would demand to be organ recipients. Fifth, although individuals would be ethically obligated to be organ donors, we still need to permit them to refuse to be organ donors. Sixth, to encourage individuals to stay within the organ donation system, we should have as a just and ethically justified policy denying individuals an organ transplant in the relevant medical circumstances if they have chosen to exit the organ donation system. Individuals would not be permitted to be organ recipients if they were unwilling to be organ donors. This is what it means to be part of what Rawls in Political liberalism (15-22) would refer to as a “fair system of social cooperation.” We refer to this as the “reciprocity requirement.”