We used fossil Chironomidae assemblages and the transfer function approach to reconstruct summer air temperatures over the past 300 years from a High Arctic lake in Hornsund, Svalbard. Our aims were to compare reconstructed summer temperatures with observed (last 100 years) seasonal temperatures, to determine a potential climate warming break point in the temperature series and to assess the significance and rate of the climate warming trend at the study site. The reconstructed temperatures were consistent with a previous proxy record from Svalbard and showed good correlation with the meteorological observations from Bjørnøya and Longyearbyen. From the current palaeoclimate record, we found a significant climate warming threshold in the 1930s, after which the temperatures rapidly increased. We also found that the climate warming trend was strong and statistically significant. Compared with the reconstructed Little Ice Age temperatures in late eighteenth century cooling culmination, the present day summer temperatures are >4°C higher and the temperature increase since the 1930s has been 0.5°C per decade. These results highlight the exceptionally rapid recent warming of southern Svalbard and add invaluable information on the seasonality of High Arctic climate change and Arctic amplification.

Dans l’objectif de contraster deux sous-genres du roman contemporain, l’article analyse les réalisations lexicales, syntaxiques, sémantiques et discursives de 8 constructions lexico-syntaxiques (CLS) dans un corpus français constitué de romans historiques (HIST) et de romans de littérature blanche (GEN) postérieurs à 1950. Ces unités phraséologiques récurrentes ont été repérées grâce à la technique des ALR développée dans le Lexicoscope, un outil de linguistique de corpus créé pour fouiller des textes. Les 8 CLS retenues pour cette étude interviennent dans (ou initient) une interaction verbale. Notre propos est de démontrer que ces CLS représentent bien des motifs qui occupent des fonctions discursives (FD) précises dans chaque genre sous-romanesque qu’elles permettent de mieux définir. Nous verrons ainsi que ces motifs de l’interaction verbale peuvent occuper des FD narrative, descriptive et pragmatique dans HIST et GEN mais que seule la FD cognitive est représentée dans GEN.

The composition of the political elites in sixteenth-century Ghent, one of the political and economic centres of the county of Flanders, changed from a relatively open elite group that included representatives from the craft guilds into a compact, aristocratic class. This article analyses the reasons for this transformation. First, the number of office-holders in the city council declined and power was increasingly concentrated in the hands of a smaller political elite because of interventions in the urban political framework by the Habsburg authorities in the wake of a fiscal rebellion (1537–40) and a Calvinist takeover of power (1578–84). Secondly, the once dominant position of the craft guilds on Ghent's two benches of aldermen was weakened by institutional reforms, a Catholic backlash against Calvinism and an economic recession. Thirdly, the growing wealth gap between rulers and the ruled, coupled with an influx of noblemen into Ghent City Council, gave urban politics a more aristocratic character. Consequently, a series of interconnected changes gave rise to a trend towards oligarchy and aristocracy on the city's benches of aldermen.

Shortly before finishing his studies with Arnold Schoenberg, Roberto Gerhard composed Andantino, a short piece in which he used for the first time a compositional technique for the systematic circulation of all pitch classes in both the melodic and the harmonic dimensions of the music. He modelled this technique on the tri-tetrachordal procedure in Schoenberg's Prelude from the Suite for Piano, Op. 25 but, unlike his teacher, Gerhard treated the tetrachords as internally unordered pitch-class collections. This decision was possibly encouraged by his exposure from the mid-1920s onwards to Josef Matthias Hauer's writings on ‘trope theory’. Although rarely discussed by scholars, Andantino occupies a special place in Gerhard's creative output for being his first attempt at ‘twelve-tone composition’ and foreshadowing the permutation techniques that would become a distinctive feature of his later serial compositions. This article analyses Andantino within the context of the early history of twelve-tone music and theory.

This article provides a comparative analysis of four large towns in the Southern Low Countries between c. 1350 and c. 1550. Combining the data on Ghent, Bruges and Antwerp – each of which is discussed in greater detail in the articles in this special section – with recent research on Bruges, the authors argue against the historiographical trend in which the political history of late medieval towns is supposedly dominated by a trend towards oligarchy. Rather than a closure of the ruling class, the four towns show a high turnover in the social composition of the political elite, and a consistent trend towards aristocracy, in which an increasingly large number of aldermen enjoyed noble status. The intensity of these trends differed from town to town, and was tied to different institutional configurations as well as different economic and political developments in each of the four towns.

Critiques of animal sacrifice in India have become increasingly strident over the past fifteen years. In the state of West Bengal, many of these critiques center on Kālīghāṭ, a landmark Hindu pilgrimage site in Kolkata where goats are sacrificed daily to the goddess Kālī. However, while similar critiques of this practice have resulted in many Indian states pushing to ban it—or enforce previous bans of it—no such legal action has been issued in West Bengal. Instead, in 2006, the Calcutta High Court ruled that this practice must be visually concealed at Kālīghāṭ. Drawing on modernist notions of cleanliness and public space, the bench argued that the blood and offal produced by this practice creates an inappropriate visual experience for visitors at a major pilgrimage and tourist site in this city. In the act of concealing sacrifice, the Calcutta High Court follows suit with courts across India in deeming the practice unmodern. Yet the Court's orders are defied daily by practitioners at Kālīghāṭ who seek physical and visual access to sacrificed animals and their blood. They believe Kālī desires that blood, and bestows her power and blessings through it. Fault lines in Hindu conceptions of power are dramatized here. The power of the courts is pitted against the power of the gods as Hindus debate the potency, necessity, and modernity of this practice.

This paper, presented as the 2019 Cambridge Quarterly Neuroethics Network Charcot Lecture, traces the nosology of disorders of consciousness in light of 2018 practice guidelines promulgated by the American Academy of Neurology, the American College of Rehabilitation Medicine and the National Institute on Disability, Independent Living and Rehabilitation Research. By exploring the ancient origins of Jennett and Plum’s persistent vegetative state and subsequent refinements in the classification of disorders of consciousness—epitomized by the minimally conscious state, cognitive motor dissociation, and the recently described chronic vegetative state—the author argues that there is a counter-narrative to the one linking these conditions to the right to die. Instead, there is a more nuanced schema distinguishing futility from utility, informed by technical advances now able to identify covert consciousness contemplated by Jennett and Plum. Their prescience foreshadows recent developments in the disorders of consciousness literature yielding a layered legacy with implications for society’s normative and legal obligations to these patients.