‘In the hope to have judged a good sentence as merchants’

Summary Arbitration is a form of conflict resolution that was popular in commercial disputes in medieval times. Its informal nature and ability to mediate the shortcomings of the formal courts have made it the supreme example of merchants solving their own disputes. However, there has been relatively little inquiry into its actual practice. This article investigates the functions and practice of arbitration in medieval Bruges, where arbitration was frequently used as a form of conflict resolution. This was not because merchants preferred extra-judicial proceedings, but because arbitration was a necessary procedure to deal with the shortcomings of the judicial framework of the aldermen of Bruges. Arbitration was exercised as a specific consequence of the context in which Bruges found itself in the second half of the fifteenth century. This context, however, also undermined the procedure. The ambivalent attitude of the Bruges aldermen towards arbitration and its impossibility to appeal allowed some undertaking merchants to use the procedure to their own benefit, and not necessarily to the benefit of commerce.

Scripts in Rural Élites’ Attitude as Narrative Barriers in the Hungarian–Roma Interethnic Relations in Szeklerland (Romania)

Relying on an interview-based research conducted in Romania’s Szeklerland area, in settlements with a significant Roma population where the majority of the inhabitants are of Hungarian ethnicity, the present study investigates the non-Roma rural élites’ attitude towards the local Roma population. The regional relevance of the topic is indicated by the fact that the importance of the Roma population’s social integration is present in social publicity, while at the same time the three decades following the 1989 socio-political turn in Romania witnessed only a few attempts at the planning and launching of programmes aimed at the Roma population’s social integration. In the course of the past three decades, the regional institutions and élites have repeatedly shuffled off the professional thematization and practical addressing of this issue, whereas in principle they emphasized the importance of social integration. This study aims to explore some of the components making up the background of the above-outlined ambivalent attitude. With the script analysis method, we intend to look into what scripts rural elite actors adopt in building the narratives on the Hungarian–Roma attitude and what role this narrative creation has in the case of the élite belonging to the Hungarian ethnic majority.

In Modernist “School for Fools”: The Topics of Writing and Apprenticeship in German and Russian Fiction of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Century

The article suggests a comparative analysis of the modernist writing and apprenticeship topics in German and Russian fiction of the twentieth and twenty-first century. Writing is considered to be calligraphy, a writer’s craft, the character’s existence as a scriptor, a form of escapism, a (neo)mythological ritual of destruction and renewal of language and the world. Apprenticeship is explored in its connection with rhetorical culture of imitation and forms of rebellion against it, be it rebellion against the bourgeois society (R. Walser, H. Hesse, T. Bernhard) or the Soviet school and Social Realism (S. Sokolov, M. Shishkin). The literary tradition serves here as an object of imitation and/or deconstruction. This ambivalent attitude takes the form of irony, buffoonery, foolishness, schizophrenia and is rather often represented in the doppelganger motif. The study uses cultural-historical, comparative, narratological methods, leitmotif analysis, etc. The authors identifies new typological links between German and Russian literature.

More than voters: Parliamentary debates about emigrants in a new democracy

There is much research about how migrants engage with politics in their home countries and about how state institutions facilitate this involvement. Yet, we know little about how members of Parliament refer to, and debate, issues related to communities of emigrants. The ways in which legislators give voice to and represent the de-territorialized demos has broad implications for the functioning of contemporary democracies. This article analyzes the ways in which the Romanian parliamentarians refer to emigrants. We focus on the parliamentary speeches from the plenary sessions in the Chamber of Deputies in the two most recent terms in office (2012–2016 and 2016–2020). The study includes 239 parliamentary speeches and uses thematic analysis. Our results identify an ambivalent attitude toward emigrants that transcends political divides. The Romanian legislators express concerns related to the representation of emigrants and their needs and see them as a valuable pool of economic and electoral support.

Addison and France

Born in 1672 in a climate of strong anti-Catholicism and Francophobia in England, yet aware that France was a great source of intellectual and cultural inspiration, Joseph Addison had a complex relationship with the French nation. His works reflect the tensions between his admiration for the rival country and his hatred of the French political regime. This chapter argues that French influence on Addison’s writings and Addison’s ambivalent attitude to France are nowhere more perceptible than in his way of handling the French ‘battle of the books’, the famous ‘querelle des anciens et des modernes’. It also contends that Addison’s ambivalent attitude to the French was not lost on the eighteenth-century French intellectuals who, though they celebrated him as ‘a friend of mankind’, often borrowed his ideas without acknowledging them.

Social participation in the media: The dialogue of digital journalists with audiences

The emergence of social media altered the relation between journalism and the public in digital media and bequeathed the relationship a more active and collaborative role. As such, the general objective of this research is to characterise the dialogue between digital journalists and their audiences through social media and to describe how they perceive the consequences of this relationship. To this end, a survey was conducted with 73 digital journalists. The results display an ambivalent attitude on the part of the professionals regarding the use of social media as a tool for dialogue with their audiences. On one hand, they believe that using them is a priority need to maintain a fluid relationship with readers, although they mainly lean toward a majority one-way and limited use of them and believe that media managers have mainly perceived participation as a channel to garner audience loyalty and increase audiences.

Eugenic Concerns, Population Policies and Puericulture in Interwar Greece

The scientific origins and the development of eugenic and racial theoriesformulated by physicians, jurists and intellectuals since the early twentieth century have only recently attracted scholarly attention. However, the dissemination of eugenic measures regarding the social policy that Greek interwar governments implemented to protect the health of mothers and children still remains an underresearched topic. Our contribution presents the main points of the discussion about the relation of eugenics and puericulture and traces its development among paediatricians in the 1920s and 1930s. It further looks into the stakes, the ambivalent attitude and the eugenic proposals of both liberal and authoritarian governments concerning the protection of childhood and motherhood as well as into their respective demographic policies during the interwar period.

Paper Monument : The Paradoxical Space in the English Paper Peepshow of the Thames Tunnel, 1825–1843

A nineteenth-century optical toy, the paper peepshow is often considered to be the perfect medium to represent the Thames Tunnel. Yet, this perception overlooks the contradictory sentiments evoked by using the paper peepshow. This chapter, focusing on the period when the tunnel was under construction, seeks to analyze these paradoxes. Admittedly, various features of the paper peepshow can indeed render it a fitting medium to represent the tunnel. Yet, the expanded paper peepshow constitutes a space that is ephemeral, because of its brief existence and its fragility. While the ephemeral quality appears to contradict the monumental impression of the tunnel, this contrast would speak to the nineteenth-century English middle classes’ ambivalent attitude towards technological advancement, embodied in the tunnel.

Między lękiem a fascynacją. Pojęcie powietrza w dziejach polszczyzny .

This paper, which proposes a historical overview, is dedicated to the notion of <powietrze> (air) and its lexical equivalent in the Polish language. This notion has undergone numerous changes over time; it has formed through direct human experience on the one hand and through the Christian and Slavic traditions as well as scientifi c knowledge overlapping on the other hand. This notion has always been important to the human being, it has been commonly referred to in metaphors and similes. In the historical analysis, two basic senses of powietrze (air) were taken into consideration: ‘place’ and ‘substance’. In both cases, there has always been a clearly ambivalent attitude to the human being, who sees threats on the one hand and feels that air guarantees life on the other hand. Keywords: notion – semantic change – history of Polish – historical lexis