‘Adding to the Good Silver with Other Trickery’ : Purity and Contamination in Clement VII’s Emergency Currency

In early modern sites of smithing and minting, the point of flux – when solid metal became liquid – was always opportune for contamination and deceit. The reputations of metalworkers could turn on it. In chaotic, unregulated circumstances, the handling of molten gold and silver became even more suspect. This essay considers purity and contamination with respect to two acts of metallic transformation during the Sack of Rome in 1527, when papal treasures were melted down to consolidate financial assets and produce emergency currency. In addition to the expected anxieties surrounding the fineness of gold and silver in these circumstances, the two events also suggest an alternate conception of metallic purity that takes into account metal’s protean transit between forms.

Brain Transplant and Personal Identity

Should Christians support the view that one’s psychological continuity is the main criterion of personal identity? Is the continuity of one’s brain or memory states necessary and sufficient for the identicalness of the person? This paper investigates the plausibility of the psychological continuity theory of personal identity, which holds that the criterion of personal identity is certain psychological continuity between persons existing at different times. I argue that the psychological continuity theory in its various forms suffers from interminable problems. Then, I introduce an alternate account of personal identity, according to which personal identity is not further analyzable in terms of qualitative properties (“suchnesses”) of persons. Rather, persons are individuated by their primitive thisnesses (haecceities), which are nonqualitative properties of immaterial substances (or souls). This alternate conception of personal identity would be of particular relevance to those who believe in the immortality of the soul and are looking for a nonphysicalist account of personal identity.

Plant Societies and Enlightened Vegetality

This chapter investigates the emergence, in the form of an enlightened plant, of utopian theories of vegetal sociability in the eighteenth century, at a time that witnesses the proliferation of schemes for botanical classification and physiological inquiries into plant life. These theories both herald and resist the development of classificatory systems and a biopolitics modeled on vegetal life. Authors Ludvig Holberg (1684–1754) and Tiphaigne de la Roche (1722–1774) create new narratives of liberal and rationally-governed societies by peopling them with plants. Yet these utopian visions are not only hopeful, they also bring into view a plant that troubles the very concept of society by existing in a state of utter indifference to need and human desire. Thus these works also make visible the possibility of an alternate conception of modernity in which the plant delivers a powerful critique of enlightenment itself.

The Regenerative Founding

This chapter locates a vision of democratic self-constitution beyond origins within Thomas Jefferson’s concept of a regenerative founding. It traces this alternate conception of founding to Jefferson’s writings while minister of France on the eve of the French Revolution, particularly those surrounding his 1789 letter to James Madison. It reevaluates the letter’s central question—“Whether one generation of men has a right to bind another”—and Jefferson’s answer: “that the earth belongs in usufruct to the living.” Constitutional scholarship has traditionally turned to this letter to find in it a critique of constitutionalism and an invitation to ongoing revolution. This chapter makes the case for a third interpretation that turns our attention to issues of originary authority, revolutionary founding, popular sovereignty, and constituent power, and argues that Jefferson provides a compelling argument against singularly binding origins and for ongoing constituent change within constitutional democracies.

Writing at the Speed of Sound: Music Stenography and Recording beyond the Phonograph

Music shorthand systems devised by Michel Woldemar, Hippolyte Prévost, and August Baumgartner adapted the quill strokes of speech stenography to the seemingly analogous domain of music. Eschewing conventional staff notation in favor of cursive lines that indicated pitch, register, interval, and duration, music stenographers endeavored to record in real time instrumental improvisations and fleeting inspirations that would otherwise have been lost forever due to a lack of recording technology. To advocates of such methods, more efficient technologies of musical writing were indispensable for capturing fugitive musical thoughts and acts: music stenography aided Hector Berlioz, for example, in the composition of his Requiem. For others, including Rossini, Fétis, and contributors to the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, the claims and merits of stenography were a source of controversy as well as fascination. Grounded in a corpus of seventy music stenographies that have been largely ignored by musicologists and historians of technology alike, this article asks how musical intuitions became musical texts, thereby entering print-based networks of circulation. Although the importance of “genius” and “work” as historical concepts regulating the production, ontology, and reception of nineteenth-century music has long been acknowledged, the material basis of these concepts has been overlooked until recently. The efforts of musical stenographers demonstrate that the inscription and circulation of material texts provided the means by which musical inspiration could be registered and stored, constituting a material substrate on which such idealist concepts depended. Whereas historians of sound recording have focused on seismic historical and cultural shifts wrought by the introduction of the phonograph in 1877, the preoccupation with capturing music in the decades preceding and following this date suggests an alternate conception of text-based sound recording.

THE VATICAN AND THE RESHAPING OF THE EUROPEAN INTERNATIONAL ORDER AFTER THE FIRST WORLD WAR

ABSTRACTThe Vatican is often cast as a marginal player in the reshaping of the European international order after the First World War. Drawing on new archival material, this article argues for a reassessment of the content and consequences of papal diplomacy. It focuses on the years between 1917 and 1929, during which time the Vatican used the tools of international law and state-to-state diplomacy to expand its power in both eastern and western Europe. The Vatican's interwar activism sought to disseminate a new Catholic vision of international affairs, which militated against the separation of church and state, and in many contexts helped undermine the principles of the League of Nations’ minority rights regime. Thanks in no small part to the assiduity of individual papal diplomats – who disseminated the new Catholic vision of international affairs by supporting anti-communist political factions – the Vatican was able to claim a more prominent role in European political affairs and lay the legal and discursive foundations for an alternate conception of the European international order, conceived in starkly anti-secular terms.

Short Lesson Plan Associated with Increased Acceptance of Evolutionary Theory and Potential Change in Three Alternate Conceptions of Macroevolution in Undergraduate Students

Undergraduates commonly harbor alternate conceptions about evolutionary biology; these alternate conceptions often persist, even after intensive instruction, and may influence acceptance of evolution. We interviewed undergraduates to explore their alternate conceptions about macroevolutionary patterns and designed a 2-h lesson plan to present evidence that life has evolved. We identified three alternate conceptions during our interviews: that newly derived traits would be more widespread in extant species than would be ancestral traits, that evolution proceeds solely by anagenesis, and that lineages must become more complex over time. We also attempted to measure changes in the alternate conceptions and levels of acceptance of evolutionary theory in biology majors and nonmajors after exposure to the lesson plan. The instrument used to assess understanding had flaws, but our results are suggestive of mixed effects: we found a reduction in the first alternate conception, no change in the second, and reinforcement of the third. We found a small, but significant, increase in undergraduate acceptance of evolutionary theory in two trials of the lesson plan (Cohen's d effect sizes of 0.51 and 0.19). These mixed results offer guidance on how to improve the lesson and show the potential of instructional approaches for influencing acceptance of evolution.

Metalinguistic aspects of bilingual processing

This chapter examines differences in metalinguistic development between monolingual and bilingual children in terms of three subcategories: word awareness, syntactic awareness, and phonological awareness. In each case, some studies have reported advantages for bilingual children, but equally, other studies have found either no difference between the groups, or, in some cases, monolingual advantages. In the discussion of each of these areas, the kinds of tasks for which bilingual and monolingual children perform differently are identified. In none of these three subcategories of metalinguistic awareness do bilingual children exhibit a uniform and consistent advantage over monolinguals. An alternate conception of metalinguistic ability is proposed in which two cognitive processes, analysis and control, are directly responsible for task performance. These processes are involved in all metalinguistic tasks but to different degrees. Re-examining the results in this way reveals that bilingual advantages occur reliably on tasks that make high demands on control but are not evident in tasks that make high demands on analysis. The implications of this pattern for metalinguistic ability are considered.