Explore the vast range of titles available.

This study explores the theory and practice of authority during the later sixteenth century, in the religious culture and political institutions of the city of Nantes, where the religious wars traditionally came to an end with the great Edict of 1598. The Wars of Religion witnessed serious challenges to the authority of the last Valois kings of France. Through detailed examination of the municipal and ecclesiastical records of Nantes, the author considers challenges to authority, its renegotiation and reconstruction in the city during the civil war period. The book surveys the socio-economic structures of the city, details the growth of the Protestant church, assesses the impact of sectarian conflict and the early counter reform movement on the Catholic Church, and evaluates the changing political relations of the city council with the population and with the French crown. Finally, Tingle focuses on the Catholic League rebellion against the king and the question of why Nantes held out against Henry IV longer than any other French city.

Since the 19th century, Protestant missionaries in Guangdong have extensively engaged in the translation and publication of religious texts, employing localized strategies in the illustration of Christian novels. Within the local cultural context of late Qing Guangdong, missionaries collaborated with local scholars, used Cantonese for writing, and designed novel illustrations to overcome barriers in doctrinal dissemination, thereby facilitating the spread of Christianity. The illustrations in missionary-published novels, such as The Pilgrim’s Progress in Vernacular and The Spiritual Warfare in Vernacular, adopted the stylistic features of Ming and Qing novel woodcuts in terms of lines, composition, character attire, and settings. Furthermore, they skillfully incorporated the Confucian moral framework of loyalty, filial piety, chastity, and righteousness, as represented in the Sacred Edict, into their narrative ethics, while integrating elements such as Buddhist causality and Daoist imagery into a “didactic” system. This localization strategy, combined with a “trinity” reading guidance model comprising images, text, and biblical annotations, visually elucidated the tenets of the Bible and encouraged the public to embrace Christianity. The localized practice of missionary novel illustrations served as a conscious and effective visual strategy aimed at bridging cultural divides and promoting the dissemination of the Gospel. It profoundly reflects the visual agency in modern Sino–Western cultural exchanges and significantly advanced the propagation of Christianity.

It is commonly held among scholars that Aśoka’s Minor Rock Edicts were the king’s first attempts at engraving his messages on stone, and as such, they represent the earliest evidence for writing in India. While this may be true, it has not been duly emphasised that the text of the Minor Rock Edicts, in several versions as we have it, shows considerable traces of influence by the Major Rock Edicts and Pillar Edicts. Particular instances for such an influence in the text are the intrusion of the key term dhaṃma or the use of a general formulaic language characteristic of the later edicts. In our discussion, we wish to bring out some of these “Major” trends in the Minor Rock Edicts, making proposals for new interpretations and reading in Minor Rock Edicts I and II. On a similar basis, we will propose placing the Greco-Aramaic edict from Kandahar in the context of the Minor Rock Edicts, and try to account for the elements which may be derived from the Major Rock Edicts by the same scribal procedure as can be supposed to have been at work in formulating the text of the Minor Rock Edicts.

Abstract The homeless population became a topic of interest to the Federal Supreme Court. In 2022, the Sustainability Network, the Socialism and Liberty Party, and the Homeless Workers’ Movement proposed a public audience, filling claim of non-compliance with a fundamental Precept (ADPF) 976 with the Brazilian Supreme Federal Court, asking it to order federal, state, and municipal executive institutions to adopt measures regarding the living conditions of the homeless population in Brazil. The audience took place in November 2022. Many participants considered it a historic session as the Supreme Court discussed the topic for the first time. This study will describe this audience to understand the construction of this political event and the main contemporary agendas of this population. Resumo A vida nas ruas foi alçada o tema de interesse do Supremo Tribunal Federal. No ano de 2022, uma audiência pública foi proposta pela Rede Sustentabilidade, o Partido Socialismo e Liberdade (PSOL) e o Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem Teto (MTST), que ajuizaram, no STF, a Arguição de Descumprimento de Preceito Fundamental (ADPF) 976. Nesta, pediu-se que a Corte determinasse aos Executivos federais, estaduais e municipais a adoção de providências em relação às condições de vida da população em situação de rua no Brasil. A audiência ocorreu em novembro de 2022 e foi considerada histórica por muitos participantes, por ser a primeira vez que o STF se abriu para a discussão do tema. Este artigo se debruçará em descrever essa audiência, com o intuito de compreender as principais pautas contemporâneas lançadas por essa população ao STF. Antes, porém, sistematiza um processo mais amplo de luta por direitos que alçou a população em situação de rua a agente de interlocução política. Argumento que o que passou permitiu a produção de demandas aos governos, com o intuito de avançar na proposição de articulação em nível nacional para políticas sobre o tema e tirar esse segmento social da invisibilidade jurídica e civil.

Since its enactment in AD 313, the Edict of Milan (sometimes referred to as ‘the Edict of Toleration’), an edict that freed Christianity from empire-wide persecution, Constantine’s declaration has received a significant amount of attention within Christendom. Most of the discussion has centered on Constantine’s conversion, the precursor to the actual edict (whether the conversion was real or insincere, as some have suggested), with many suggesting that Constantine was acting more as a politician than a Christian. While this line of inquiry is legitimate, perhaps a better approach to the question may be more helpful to present-day Christians. That is, while it is logical to deduce that every prudent politician will ignore the largest religious movement in his/her time at his/her own peril, Christians of every age will be better served if they critically evaluate their reception of each and every major policy that is clearly aimed at their benefit. With this background, this paper will attempt to critically examine the reception of Constantine’s edict by the Church in the years immediately following its enactment. Two early exhibits will be brought to bear here: the Donatist controversy and the Arian controversy. In so doing, the thesis that while Christians had every reason to celebrate the enactment of the edict, down the road, an uncritical adoption of the emperor’s policies and favors towards the church opened a door for an unhealthy marriage between earthly powers and the church that proved detrimental in the ensuing years, will be defended. As such, the Church’s reception of the Edict of Milan continues to be a lesson to Christians of every age in their relationship with the political leadership of their time.

Public health edicts necessitated by COVID-19 prompted a rapid pivot to remote online teaching and learning. Two major consequences followed: households became students’ main learning space, and technology became the sole medium of instructional delivery. We use the ideas of “digital disconnect” and “digital divide” to examine, for students and faculty, their prior experience with, and proficiency in using, learning technology. We also explore, for students, how household lockdowns and digital capacity impacted learning. Our findings are drawn from 3806 students and 283 faculty instructors from nine higher education institutions across Asia, Australia, Europe, and North America. For instructors, we find little evidence of a digital divide but some evidence of a digital disconnect. However, neither made a difference to self-reported success in transitioning courses. Faculty instructors were impacted in a myriad of diverse ways. For students, we show that closure and confinement measures which created difficult living situations were associated with lower levels of confidence in learning. The digital divide that did exist among students was less influential than were household lockdown measures in undermining student learning.

Against two extreme forms of thinking, which have influenced planning theory, this article argues, in the context of a looming amount of literature generated in a movement for private planning, that the distinction between private planning and public planning is a valid one, but one in need of tweaking. However, the plan–market dichotomy (i.e. the assumption that state and private planning is mutually exclusive) is fallacious. Informed by the neo-institutional economic assumption of rational decisions and the stance of contractual solutions, it rides on the surge in private planning by proposing a taxonomy of planning that combines two modes of planning with two types of planning agent and discusses their possible interrelationships using some neo-institutional economic reasoning informed by the ideas of Coase. Some pedagogical and theoretical implications are also discussed.

This article uses a large corpus of previously understudied documents—i.e., appointment edicts of medieval China—to reveal how real-time negotiation between the imperial court and its provincial officials gave rise to two sophisticated theories of political reciprocity that impose limits on the sovereign. The first, well-studied in existent scholarship, claimed that the ruler was obliged to appoint worthy officials to promote the well-being of the commoners. The second, which this article excavates, stated instead that the ruler, while enjoying the services of the employed officials, was obliged to repay the services properly, sometimes even at the cost of commoners.

This article focuses on the stone inscriptions ascribed to Ashoka, the 3rd century BC ruler of the Mauryan dynasty in ancient India. The locations of 29 known inscriptions and 8 environmental predictors at 1 km pixel resolution were entered into a species distribution model, that reliably predicted the distribution of known Ashokan edicts (AUC score 0.934). Geologic substrate (33%), population density in AD 200 (21%), and slope (13%) explained majority of the variance in the Ashokan edict locations. We have identified 121 possible locations in the Indian subcontinent that conform to the same criteria where yet undiscovered inscriptions may be found.

An inscription found in Aphrodisias in 2014 is recognized as a fragment of a dossier concerning Diocletian's currency regulation. This dossier, probably consisting of two edicts and a letter, was inscribed on two blocks of the civic basilica wall. The new fragment belongs to the letter that accompanied the edicts. The reference to the diocese suggests that the letter was addressed to the rationalis of the diocese of Asia. The new fragment belongs to the bottom right corner of the upper block. Thus, it provides new possibilities for the reconstruction of the fragments of the upper block.