Charles I's Star Chamber prosecution of the lawyer William Prynne, the minister Henry Burton, and the physician John Bastwick generated both contemporary and historiographical controversy, mostly concerned with their writings, their trial, and their punishment in London. This article turns attention to their unusual offshore incarceration on the islands of Jersey, Guernsey, and the Scillies between 1637 and 1640. It examines the material, social, and spiritual circumstances of island detention, and shows how the “puritan martyrs”1 coped with separation from the world. Though the discourse of martyrdom invited a compilation of miseries, invoking scriptural comparisons, this triumvirate experienced isolation that did not necessarily incapacitate them. Prynne savored the hospitality of his jailers, Burton smuggled out polemical tracts, and all three found inspiration in the book of Revelation, written by St. John while a prisoner on the island of Patmos. Each returned to the fray in the 1640s, writing works of witness and justification. Their experience of island imprisonment provided a model and an inspiration for dozens more who were similarly confined during the Protectorate and the Restoration.

In 1941, thousands of Jews from the regions of Bukovina and Bessarabia were deported to ghettos and camps in Romanian-occupied Transnistria to join local Ukranian Jews and other deportees. This article is a case study of the Shargorod ghetto, one of the largest ghettos in Transnistria, that reveals how individuals interned there, and in similar ghettos, survived despite their different social, economic, and cultural backgrounds. An examination based on regions allows for a better understanding of the diverse Jewish communities in Romania and how these differences influenced the lives of local Jews and deportees during the formidable years in Shargorod. Their major successes, as well as their failures, present a picture of entangled community identity in the face of disease, starvation, and forced labor. The survival of the Jewish population of Shargorod from 1941 to 1944 is analyzed through the selection of leadership by the ghetto inhabitants (specifically, Meier Teich’s role as ghetto leader), the entrepreneurial actions and aid that arose, and the format and agenda adopted by the ghetto’s cultural institutions.

Pedro Galvão claims that, on the ideal rule-consequentialist code, all sentient humans have rights, whereas animals do not. Because agents are not impartial, total well-being would be lower if they were aware of a general disposition to harm in order to promote the good. Animals cannot be aware of that disposition, so it would be justified to harm them when that is best. Galvão also claims it is wrong to help an animal, even when optimific, if that harms another animal. I argue he is misguided. First, impartial agents would err in the moral calculus, causing falsely optimific harms. To compensate for that, all sentient individuals must have rights – though those protecting some humans may be stronger. Second, when helping is optimific, it is at least permitted. Moreover, since most sentient beings are wild animals with net negative lives, agents should be generally disposed to intervene in nature on their behalf.

Sometimes, agents do the right thing for the right reason. What's the normative significance of this phenomenon? According to proponents of the special status view, when an agent acts for the right reason, her actions enjoy a special normative status, namely, worthiness. Proponents of this view claim that self-effacing forms of consequentialism cannot say this plausible thing, and, worse, are blocked from having a perspicuous view of matters by the self-effacing nature of their consequentialism. In this article, I argue that this claim is based on an illicit assumption. I show that whatever version of the special status view proponents of that view prefer, self-effacing consequentialists can adopt a version of it. Moreover, I show that proponents of extant versions of the special status view have reason to prefer the specific version of that view I articulate on behalf of self-effacing consequentialists.