As I write this essay, the forty-fourth US President Barack Obama's autobiography titled A Promised Land is the best-selling book in Germany, in both the German and the English editions. This is his second autobiographical work, following Dreams from My Father in 1995. Given Obama's prominent place in our modern political culture, this is hardly surprising, but today's publishers seem to have no specific criteria for deciding whose life and career are worthy of an autobiography. Any moderately successful individual from any walk of life can publish an autobiography today. The popularity of the genre is certainly related to the extreme glorification of individual and personal success in modern society, but it also shapes how we view premodern self-narratives: as a window into an intellectual's individuality and Bildung. This essay questions this convention and explores the opportunities that self-narratives embedded in literary and narrative sources present to historians of 15th-century Iran and Central Asia. I will argue that autobiographies and self-narratives are much more than tools for refashioning the self in the early modern period. They open a window to a much wider network of weak ties and acquaintances, a closer scrutiny of which may allow us to reconstruct transregional networks, understand the connectedness of these intellectual networks, and delineate their collective identities in the early modern period. In my discussion I will focus on a selection of 15th-century texts, most prominently the self-narratives of the Timurid intellectual Saʾin al-Dīn Turka (d. 1432).

Veronica L., a woman with an intellectual disability, died of starvation in 1961 while the recipient of a Disabled Person's Maintenance Allowance (D.P.M.A.) from the Dublin Health Authority. Her death occured after a prolonged period of deficient care, a neglect that was exacerbated by flaws in statutory welfare. During the preceding decade the state intervened in disability provision to an unprecedented degree through the expansion of institutional care and social welfare reform. Yet, these services remained characterised by a chronic pressure on resources and a reluctance to intervene in potentially neglectful family situations, which allowed cases of failing care to go unaddressed. Drawing on contemporary documents, in particular the depositions collected for the coroner's court inquest into Veronica's death, this article offers an insight into the exigencies underlying the later life of one woman with an intellectual disability. In doing so, it explores the way in which this singular case provides a distinctive avenue for better understanding the experiences of the intellectually disabled more broadly, including the nature of community care and the operation of statutory welfare during the mid twentieth century.

Gienapp's critical move is to shift our attention from semantics to ontology. What is the Constitution? How was it conceived to exist in 1787, and how has that conception changed over time? These questions must be squarely addressed, he insists, before asking what the Constitution means. Does this whole text-focused enterprise rest on a mistake? Drawing on a wealth of primary sources and modern scholarship, Gienapp makes a strong and interesting case that it does. Boiled down, his main argument is that the founders were predominantly natural lawyers, and thus conceived of law quite differently than most originalists typically do.

This article concerns the place of late Ottoman Jews in Palestine on the eve of the 1948 War. It focuses on Israel Ben-Zeʾev (Wolfensohn), a Jerusalem-born educator and Nahda intellectual who led a movement of self-identified “native” Jews, including both “Old Yishuv” Ashkenazim and Sephardim, to combat their marginalization by the Zionist institutions. I examine his lifetime struggle to advance the study of Arabic and “Arab Jews” (yahud ʿarab) under early Islam by creating institutions of knowledge production and educational programs modeled on those he knew from his early academic career in Cairo. It was in the context of these struggles that demands for separate political representation for native Jews and for a specialized field of Arab Jewish studies coalesced as part of a broader project of a shared Arab-Jewish cultural modernization. They culminated in 1948, when Ben-Zeʾev finally realized his Arabic library project, ironically using looted Palestinian books, only to see its destruction four years later by Zionist leaders and Hebrew University professors.

Christine Desan's Making Money: Coin, Currency, and the Coming of Capitalism provides an authoritative answer to a fundamental question about medieval English money that has puzzled a few scholars, but that has been largely ignored by most: were medieval payments normally weighed or counted? The same question can be expressed differently as: were payments made by weight or by tale at face value; or again, was the value of money determined by its intrinsic content or by royal decree? But why might this curious distinction between counting payments and weighing them matter?

Research into ego-documents has being going on around the world for several decades, especially in continental Europe. The Dutch historian Jacques Presser, the inventor of the term, used “ego-document” to refer to materials such as diaries, memoirs, autobiographies, and personal letters. The term was first used in the English language by Peter Burke. Some groups of historians, such as the one in Berlin under the leadership of Claudia Ulbrich, prefer to use the term “self-narrative” instead. Kaspar von Greyerz, leader of the Basel team and a leading critic, considers the term “ego-document” an unfortunate one on account of its connotation of Sigmund Freud's concept of ego. He claims that early modern material does not reflect the inner psychological state of the writer but rather the formal, outward facade. Artificial periodization prevents us from understanding the nature and intellectual heritage of the human being. The question is, “What changed with the transition from premodern to modern when suddenly characters started to see themselves as historical figures worth talking about?”

This article considers the celebrated elegy by the classical 7th-century Arabic poet, Abu Dhuʾayb al-Hudhali — his ʿayniyya, which ends with ʿayn as a rhyming letter. Analyzing the poem's structure and comparing it with that of two poems composed by Abu Dhuʾayb's teacher, Saʿida b. Juʾayya al-Hudhali, leads to the conclusion that Saʿida's two poems were the main sources on which the pupil drew to create his poem. The sophisticated changes that Abu Dhuʾayb introduced in structure and content, however, made his poem more memorable than those of his teacher. The article raises another question, to which there is, as yet, no definitive answer: what was the true inspiration for Abu Dhuʾayb's poem? Was it the death of his sons, as is traditionally believed, or was it literary: to surpass his teacher in composing a more skillful poem?

A resolute modernist and socialist, Aziz Nesin (1915–95) was definitely an author of the republican period. Born Mehmet Nusret to poor parents, both migrants to Istanbul from the Black Sea coast, he adopted Nesin as his legal surname when surnames became obligatory in 1934. By the 1950s, his satirical short stories and plays had made him famous, but he faced political difficulties for much of his life; likely, it did not endear him to the authorities that he used his experiences with the police as inexhaustible material for his stories.