This article examines the significance of geography at the Inns of Court in terms of community formation and its policing. It analyses Twelfth Night to explore how geographical references (especially to a ‘new map’) draw on the fraught atmosphere at the Inns in terms of ever-changing knowledge about the world.

This chapter distinguishes the work of thought experiments in exemplifying concepts from their role in aiding cognition of regulative ideas. Contemporary interest in thought experiments as a “method of cases” treats thought experiments as providing instances or exemplars. For regulative ideas as Kant understands them, however, no observable instances or exemplars are possible. Nevertheless, thought experiments can direct attention toward regulative ideas negatively (by distinguishing them from what is observable) or positively by indicating a direction for extrapolation or ongoing inquiry. These positive uses are forms of cognition. The distinction between regulative and constitutive concepts matters for thought experiments that deal with regulative ideas such as the self – for example, for thought experiments about personal identity, where a number of objections to the use of thought experiments have been raised. I argue in this chapter that some of these objections can be answered by distinguishing regulative from constitutive concepts.

Palmyra, the famous oasis city in the Syrian Desert, has long been a subject of study. It is often brought to the forefront as a case study on trade networks, elite culture and local religious life. However, over the course of the last decades the data available from the city now allows us to investigate new facets of the city’s life, its culture, and its social and religious structure. This contribution provides a short introduction to the history and archaeology of the city as well as the history of research, before turning to the ways in which Palmyra was not only unique in the sense that through its location in an oasis and as a major trade hub it came to hold a pivotal role in the region for a while in the Roman period but can also be studied in a unique light in its relation to the Mediterranean world through the evidence from the city.

This chapter explores the rich history and cultural significance of Czech beer, focusing specifically on the origins, evolution, and social practices surrounding beer consumption in the Czech Republic. It traces the beginnings of beer brewing in the region, highlighting the introduction of hops by Slavic settlers and the establishment of Pilsner as a dominant beer style in the nineteenth century, particularly through the pioneering work of brewers such as Josef Groll or Frantisek Poupe. The chapter delves into the socio-political impact of beer culture, noting how communal drinking practices, encapsulated in the phrase ‘jdeme na jedno’ (let us go for one), serve as a reflection of Czech identity and social cohesion. Furthermore, it examines the transition of the beer industry through various historical epochs, including the effects of World War II and Communist rule, leading to the contemporary craft beer movement and the resurgence of interest in quality brewing. Ultimately, the study positions Czech beer culture not only as a national treasure but also as a vital element of social interaction and community bonding in Czech society.

This chapter juxtaposes Palmyrene funerary portraiture with the portraiture of Egypt and Pannonia in the first three centuries AD to discern stylistic connections between the provincial centres as well as to the portraiture produced in Rome. Due to its inherently subjective (and hence, flawed) nature, the notion of style as an interpretative framework has fallen by the wayside in archaeology and art history. This chapter will return to the concept of style and evaluate its helpfulness in determining the significance of Palmyrene funerary portraiture in the context of Roman provincial portraiture. Is it appropriate to describe Palmyrene portraiture as ‘Roman’ in style, or perhaps, ‘eastern Mediterranean’, and at what point does it become ‘Palmyrene’? A better understanding of the place of this portraiture in terms of style, not only in antiquity but also in contemporary analyses of funerary portraiture in the Roman world, enhances our ability to interpret its significance at the local level.

If assessing the existence of a corporate entity is meaningless before establishing the presumed existence of its members, we should then first investigate what is supposed to make these members irreducible to begin with. I discuss two broad philosophical outlooks in that regard. The first understands individuals as naturally irreducible, organic or soulful, entities. The second treats individuals themselves as organizations of a miniature size, and in that sense as artificial entities. The first approach essentially poses an insurmountable barrier to the possibility of genuine corporate existence; the second is more accommodating. Rather than suggesting which approach is correct from a philosophical perspective, this chapter extracts from the aforementioned discussion a more nuanced way of thinking about the problem of corporate existence in general, setting the stage for revisiting how we theorize international organizations.

Kant thinks it is possible to achieve nonperceptual cognition in three ways: (1) through practical action, (2) by analogy, and (3) through construction. The type of cognition available depends on the kind of object or concept being cognized. The fact that cognition of nonperceptual objects is possible in some cases opens the way for thought experiments to provide cognition in ways that go beyond providing fictional examples and exemplifications. In this chapter, I describe these other possibilities for cognition and show how they are at work in different kinds of thought experiments in philosophy.

Having discussed the main limitations of current approaches in theorizing international organizations, this chapter goes on to investigate their core assumptions about the state. These are the notions that the state can be analogized to the ‘natural’ person of domestic law and that it forms an opaque and closed-off unitary actor. This chapter goes on to explain how this image may inadvertently distort how international organizations are theorized – from how we are to understand the relationship with their members to more technical questions of customary international law. Concluding this chapter, I suggest that theorizing international organizations should proceed from an altogether different premise. This is the idea the state itself is an artificial entity rather than a somehow naturally irreducible one.

This chapter examines courtroom documents, focusing on trials and depositions, which offer glimpses of spoken language of the past. Trials written in English, often in the form of questions and answers, are rare before the late sixteenth century. Depositions, the oral testimony of a witness recorded by a scribe prior to trial and used as evidence, become more available in English from the mid sixteenth century. Trials and depositions exist as manuscripts, contemporaneous printed texts and later printed editions, and have recently become accessible through corpora and modern linguistic editions. Manuscripts (already one step beyond the original speech event) are less susceptible to interference by editors, printers and so on, but even these texts should not be treated as verbatim records. Nevertheless, the texts supply valuable data for researchers taking historical pragmatic and sociolinguistic approaches and/or examining linguistic variation and change, and in a wide range of other areas.

Chapter 6 examines the Sectarians’ portrait of the end-time destruction of its enemies. The depictions of eschatological violence offer insights into how the Sectarians responded to their present overmatched position while simultaneously affirming their special status. Sectarian texts imagine an imminent end of days that would usher in a period in which all of its enemies – both foreigners and other Jews – would be vanquished in the end-time battle.

In this chapter, I argue for the importance of two models in explorations of orality in the history of English: communicative immediacy and ‘oral/conversational diagnostics’, within the framework of oral vs. literate/production styles. Based on the two models, I identify certain (sub)registers and genres as reference points for assessing the nature of orality reflected in historical linguistic data. In addition, I use the major conclusions of the ‘bad’ data debate, foundational for historical pragmatics, as a springboard for a selective survey of research focused on interjections, speech acts, and specific discourse domains and genres such as wills, courtroom discourse and letters. Potential directions for future research and new data sources are also provided to indicate gaps in the coverage of historical oralities in English.