What counts as scientific writing has undergone massive changes over the centuries. Medical writing is a good representative of the register of scientific English, as it combines both theoretical concerns and practical applications. Ideas of health and sickness have been communicated in English written texts for over a thousand years from the Middle Ages to the present, with different traditions and layers of writing reflecting literacy developments and changing thought-styles. This chapter approaches the topic from the perspective of registers and genres, considering how texts are shaped by their functions and communicative purposes and various audiences. Some genres run throughout the history of English: remedy books were already extant in the Old English period. Another core genre, the case study, mirrors wider scientific developments in response to changes in styles of thinking: medieval scholasticism is gradually replaced by a growing interest in increasingly systematic empirical observation. The establishment of learned societies from the seventeenth century onwards gives rise to new genres like the experimental report, and concomitant disciplinary advances and technological developments in the following centuries gradually pave the way for modern evidence-based medicine. Today medical advances are communicated in digital publications to a worldwide readership.

The chapter is focused on the Palmyrene Tariff (CIS II.3913), a lengthy bilingual text in Aramaic and Greek promulgated in the city in AD 137 to regularize local taxation, i.e. taxes on goods entering and leaving the city which originate within its immediate vicinity, and on trades being plied within the city, not taxes on long-distance trade. Attention is given to the book on the Tariff by Ilia Sholeimovich Shifman, published in Russian in 1980 and republished in English in 2014, and to the publications of Michał Gawlikowski (2012, 2014) on the original location of the Tariff stone opposite a shrine devoted to Rab-Asīrē and close to the Agora. The respective roles of Greek and Aramaic are explored, including the question of which had priority in the drawing up of the Tariff. The sources and composition of the text are analysed with reference to the role played by earlier Roman authorities. A final section considers the position of tax collectors in Palmyrene society and the light which the Tariff can throw on life in Roman Syria.

Radio and television were part of an ongoing narrative of technological innovation in the teaching of Shakespeare in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s. This article examines the voices of NCTE’s English Journal teachers in those decades who strived to weave the new technologies into student-centred, project-based curricula.

With this contract, Nicholas Mathew opens the final chapter of his recent book The Haydn Economy, which is simply entitled: ‘Work’. ‘For most of his life’, Mathew writes, ‘Haydn was constantly busy’. In the chapter, Mathew deftly traces the common origins of the musical work concept and the economic concept of work. As Mathew builds his argument, he delves into Haydn’s varying forms of labour and work, and Haydn’s reflections on them. Mathew places special emphasis on Haydn’s career after the death of Prince Nikolaus in 1790: Haydn’s new-found ‘freedom’ brought yet more labour as he entered the London marketplace.

This article discusses the ways audio versions of The Tempest convey the play’s visual spectacles through language and sound effects; in addition, it examines the actors’ voices, particularly the use of different accents and verbal tics that help the auditor visualize the characters and the action.

This chapter explores the personal letter in the history of English through textual and material conventions of letter-writing, community aspects of letter-writing and language, and the role of editors and the reliability of edited epistolary sources. Community context is viewed as contemporary letter-writing practices, the involvement and influence of social networks and social relationships in letter-writing and language use, and the human factor and community aspects inherent in editing letters and compiling corpora.

The Statute of Uses enacted radical reform which can still be felt across the common law world. It was from exceptions to the statute’s execution of uses to perform last wills that the modern trust emerged. Our understanding of the passage of the statute has been shaped by the survival of several draft bills and ancillary documents. It has been argued that a draft bill introduced in 1529 was rejected by the Commons in March 1532. This in turn inspired the landmark litigation in Dacre’s Case (1533–35), which paved the way for the subsequent enactment of the Statute of Uses. This chapter challenges that orthodox position by demonstrating that there were in fact three early drafts which were considered. It then considers what this tells us about the role of the crown, parliament and the courts during this pivotal period in our legal history.

Palmyra is usually studied for one of three reasons, either its role in the long-distance trade between Indian Ocean and Mediterranean, its distinctive cultural identity as visible in the epigraphic and material record from the city or its rise as an independent regional power in the Near East in the third quarter of the third century AD. While Palmyra was indeed a special place, with a private sorte, or destiny of its own, as Pliny famously expressed it (HN 5.88), the city’s ability to maintain its distinctiveness arguably rested on deep entanglements with her local and regional surroundings. This chapter addresses how the city engaged with its neighbours and its Roman imperial overlords. Actions, events and policies attested in the epigraphic record from the city and from the Palmyrene diaspora in the Roman Empire are discussed in light of theoretical insights from archaeology, sociology and economics. It is argued that Palmyra’s remarkable success built on the city’s ability to connect with the range of social networks that constituted the Roman Empire.

This chapter critiques private property on four grounds. First, private property pushes resources into the hands of those who have more at the expense of those who have less. This arises because wealthier people are willing to pay more for normal goods so they tend to bid successfully for them, and because their wealth allows them to hold out for a larger share of the gains from trade. Second, private property is, in fact, allocatively inefficient. This is because the use of willingness to pay as an allocational technology means that the allocation of property is partially driven by ability to pay rather than a purchaser’s greater productive efficiency. Private property is also allocatively inefficient due to the monopoly power that it places in the hands of owners. Third, the regressivity of private property creates a powerful propertied class that can come to dominate the political system. Finally, both the regressivity and the inefficiency of private property have become even more stark in the internet era because markets which already have strong network effects and are vulnerable to domination by monopolists exacerbate both features.

In 1974 Geoffrey Chew, building on work by H. C. Robbins Landon, established that Haydn quoted a melody that has come to be known as the ‘night watchman’s song’ on at least seven occasions. Most of these works date from the earlier part of the composer’s career – divertimentos and pieces with baryton, as well as Symphony No. 60, ‘Il Distratto’, of 1774. A canon from the 1790s, ‘Wunsch’, represents a late engagement with the tune, while it is also used in the minuet-finale of the Sonata in C Sharp Minor, one of a set of six sonatas published in 1780. The melody has been found in many sources dispersed over a wide area of central Europe, principally Austria, Bohemia, and Moravia, dating at the least comfortably back into the seventeenth century.