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.

The handling of infanticide in late medieval France offers modern audiences an underappreciated paradox: on the one hand infant murder was deplored as grave sin and crime, on the other hand, it was a pardonable offence, even the infanticidal singlemother who had killed to conceal her sin could obtain royal grace. This is far more than the usual story of law differing from practice. Christian ideology of mercy and forgiveness for sin played a central role in shaping the regulation of illegitimate births as well as abortions, stillbirths, and infanticide. Church and secular authorities alike sought to prevent as well as punish the death of infants, but they also created and implemented systems of justice with the explicit purpose of providing mercy to the repentant murderer, even an infanticide.

This article argues that the career and writings of the Ulster unionist propagandist and man of letters Hugh Shearman (1915–99) were influenced by his commitment to theosophy, which he saw as a logical extension of Protestant belief in private judgement. His work as a publicist echoed theosophist preoccupation with illusion and the perceptions accessible to initiates. Many of his writings displayed theosophist in-jokes, esoteric references and mental reservations. His apologias reflected theosophist belief in the breaking down of personality compartmentalisation in order to merge with the world-soul. Shearman saw the Irish republic as the ‘Pakistan of the West’, represented by him as embodying self-destructive insularity shaped by Catholic authoritarianism. In response to the 1940s anti-partition campaign, Shearman developed an apologia for the Stormont government as an essentially progressive technocracy, which he saw as culminating in the regime of Terence O'Neill. This article uses previously unexplored writings to track Shearman's life and career into the 1990s, when he is shown to have combined a view of the Irish question formed in the 1940s with a semi-conspiratorial unionist narrative of British betrayal.

Life is tough for many in the increasing precarity of today's academy. Despite all the degrees received, courses taught, grants awarded, conferences attended, articles published, resumes polished, and networks established, many people aspiring to a thriving academic career are now denied the opportunity to prosper in a stable position and to secure a settled life. Given the shrinking academic job market worldwide, especially for humanities and social science disciplines, it is no wonder that over the last two decades quit-lit written by disillusioned members of the academy has grown to such an extent that it now comprises a particular genre. From personal social media accounts to newspapers and websites circulating recent news about academics’ life across and beyond the United States, a wide array of platforms daily reveals the gloomy perspectives and emotional reactions of nontenured academic laborers overwhelmed by the uncertainties and insecurities that mark their professional and private lives.

This article examines the 1641 Irish rebellion through a neglected manuscript account from 1643, written by Henry Jones and three of his 1641 deposition colleagues. The ‘Treatise’ offers important insights into the rebellion, but also advances a broader understanding of the significance of the early modern efforts to civilise Ireland and the impact of these schemes, especially plantation, on the kind of conflict that erupted in the 1640s. It is an evaluation that brings together both the long pre-history of the rebellion, and what eventually unfolded, offering new perspectives into a crucial and contested debate within modern historiography. The ‘Treatise’ also presents the opportunity to interrogate the position of the settler community, and their careful construction and presentation of a religiously- and culturally-driven improvement of the country. While it was a period of crisis, the rebellion offered an important opportunity to reflect on the wider project of Irish conversion and civility. It was a moment of creation and self-creation, as the emerging ‘British’ community not only digested the shock of the rebellion, but sought to fashion narratives that underlined their moral claims to Ireland on the grounds of true religion and civility.

As Archbishop of Westminster, Henry Edward Manning had been much involved in negotiations over the Elementary Education Act of 1870 (Forster’s Act), which aimed at establishing a national system of elementary education. By the early 1880s, Manning was dissatisfied with the operation of the Act, because the secular board schools, financed from rates, had become substantial competitors with the voluntary denominational schools, which were supposed to be the backbone of the system. This established, in effect, a dual system of secular and denominational education, which Manning believed the Act had never envisioned. He lobbied for a Royal Commission to amend the Act, which Lord Salisbury granted in 1886 (the Cross Commission), with Manning as a member. In his work on the Commission, Manning was motivated by three principles, which he believed were critical for the engagement of religious bodies with the liberal state. The first was cross-denominational collaboration in support of religious education. The second was voluntarism so as to prevent state control. The third was localism as opposed to centralization, which was eventually realized with the creation of County Councils by the Local Government Act of 1888, upon whom the supervision of schools eventually devolved.