THE ECONOMICS OF THE MANUSCRIPT AND RARE BOOK TRADE, ca. 1890–1939

The market for rare books has been characterized as unpredictable, and driven by the whims of a small number of rich individuals. Yet behind the headlines announcing new auction records, a range of sources make it possible to analyze the market as a whole. This book introduces the economics of the trade in manuscripts and rare books during the turbulent period ca. 1890–1939. It demonstrates how surviving sources, even when incomplete and inconsistent, can be used to tackle questions about the operation of the rare book trade, including how books were priced, profit margins, accounting practices, and books as investments, from the perspectives of both dealers and collectors

Protection for Venezuelans in the spirit of Cartagena? An analysis of the spirit of Cartagena and how the protection policies for displaced Venezuelans in Brazil, Colombia and Peru held up to the standard of the spirit of Cartagena

In the midst of the largest exodus in Latin America and months before the fortieth anniversary of the 1984 Cartagena Declaration on Refugees, a discussion of the Latin American regional refugee regime is timely. This study reviews the protection policies of three receiving countries in Latin America during the Venezuelan displacement crisis for the period of 2015-2021. It begins with an over-arching discussion of the role and importance of regional refugee regimes. It continues with a narrowed focus on the Latin American regional refugee regime, centred around the 1984 Cartagena Declaration on Refugees. Then, it seeks to close a knowledge gap by defining and attributing elements to the ‘spirit of Cartagena’, an emerging concept stemming from the Cartagena regime. This broader discussion is put into perspective with a case study on the Latin American response to the Venezuelan displacement. The case study focuses on the forms of protection offered to displaced Venezuelans in Brazil, Colombia, and Peru. Then, an analysis is conducted on whether, and in what ways, the varying policies acted in the ‘spirit of Cartagena’. The analysis uses the defining elements of the ‘spirit of Cartagena’ as a measuring stick against themes of the discussed protection policies. The aim is to evaluate some of the region’s responses to the Venezuelan displacement crisis in the context of the notion of the ‘spirit of Cartagena.’ The conclusion is that a harmonised response within the regional refugee regime was ideal, however the policies were generally ad hoc, complementary, and temporary. Despite this, the pragmatism of the protection measures still reflected some aspects of the ‘spirit of Cartagena’

COST Action Blog: A Legal Identity for All?

The History of Identity Documentation in European Nations (HIDDEN) network unites scholars in history, migration studies, geography, sociology, law, linguistics, postcolonial studies, human rights and more to look at the history of ID regimes in Europe and beyond, drawing connections between the past and present

Changing minds about climate change: a pervasive role for domain-general metacognition

Updating one’s beliefs about the causes and effects of climate change is crucial for altering attitudes and behaviours. Importantly, metacognitive abilities - insight into the (in)correctness of one’s beliefs- play a key role in the formation of polarised beliefs. We here aimed at investigated the role of metacognition in changing beliefs about climate change. To that end, we focused on the role of domain-general and domain-specific metacognition in updating prior beliefs about climate change across the spectrum of climate change scepticism. We also considered the role of how climate science is communicated in the form of textual or visuo-textual presentations. We asked two large US samples to perform a perceptual decision-making task (to assess domain-general decision-making and metacognitive abilities. They next performed a belief-updating task, where they were exposed to good and bad news about climate change and we asked them about their beliefs and their updating. Lastly, they completed a series of questionnaires probing their attitudes to climate change. We show that climate change scepticism is associated with differences in domain-general as well as domain-specific metacognitive abilities. Moreover, domain-general metacognitive sensitivity influenced belief updating in an asymmetric way: lower domain-general metacognition decreased the updating of prior beliefs, especially in the face of negative evidence. Our findings highlight the role of metacognitive failures in revising erroneous beliefs about climate change and point to their adverse social effects

Description, translation and process: Making the implicit explicit in digital editions of ancient text-bearing objects

Digital editions of ancient texts and objects follow the nineteenth–twentieth century tradition of academic editing, but are able to be more explicit and accessible than their print analogues. The use of digital standards such as EpiDoc and Linked Open Data, that emphasise interoperability, linking and sharing, enables—we shall argue, obliges—the scholarly editor to make the digital publication open, accessible, transparent and explicit. We discuss three axes of openness: 1. The edition encodes dimensions and physical condition of the inscribed object, as well as photographs and other imagery, and should include translations to modern languages, rather than assuming fluency. 2. Contextual and procedural metadata include the origins of scholarly work, permissions, funding, influences on academic decision-making, material and intellectual property, trafficking, ethics, authenticity and archaeological context. 3. The digital standards and code implementing them, enabling interoperability among editions and projects, and depend on consistency and accessible documentation of practices, guidelines and customisations. Standards benefit from training in scholarly and digital methods, and the nurturing of a community to preserve and encourage the sustainable re-use of standards and editions. Ancient text-bearing objects need to be treated as material artefacts as well as the bearers of (sometimes abstract or immaterial) strings of historical text. All elements of the publication of both object and text are interpretive constructs. It is essential that we not neglect any of the material or immaterial information in all of these components, in our scholarly quest to make them explicit, interoperable and machine actionable

A Monumental Price Tag: The Cost of Furnishing a Family Chapel in the Second Half of the Fifteenth Century

The artistic decoration of family chapels in the churches and private palaces of Renaissance Italy has received much scholarly attention over the years. Fresco cycles, altarpieces, and sculpted tomb monuments have been studied in great detail. What is lacking, however, is an overview of the complete ensemble of investments and commissions of which these art works were once a part, including the purchase of chapel rights, stained glass windows, vestments and liturgical array for the mass, and provisions to keep the chapel in operation in the long term. The present essay seeks to make a start at recreating this wider context of the surviving artwork by looking at the cost (absolute and relative) of the different elements involved in three prominent Florentine chapel projects of the second half of the fifteenth century: the Strozzi, Gianfigliazzi, and Tornabuoni chapels. There is a wealth of published documentation for each of these projects, which will be compared systematically to give an impression of the scope and scale of the enterprise of furnishing a family chapel in the upper echelons of mercantile society at a time of increasing public projection of social prestige

Mission littéraire en Angleterre: Paul Meyer and the Quest for Medieval French Manuscripts at the Ashburnham-Barrois Sale (1901)

In this article, I explore the medieval manuscripts pursued for the Bibliothèque nationale at the Ashburnham-Barrois sale at Sotheby's auction house, London, in 1901, and the influential role of Paul Meyer, romance philologist and Director of the École des chartes, alongside the librarians Léopold Delisle and Henri Omont. Meyer knew the contents of the Barrois collection better than most, having visited the library at Ashburnham Place on multiple occasions since 1865. His early trips to England form my starting point for analysing the manuscripts prioritised at the sale. The London dealer Bernard Quaritch acted on behalf of the French national library in the auction room and their commission book reveals all the items pursued as well as the maximum bids allotted. By considering the choice of lots and values attributed to them, along with the scholarly assessments of the texts and manuscripts, the potential motivations behind their pursuit emerge. Finally, I turn to the Barrois manuscripts acquired after the sale and the perceptions of those lost. Through this analysis, I demonstrate how Meyer not only influenced scholarship on French-language manuscripts, but also the contents of the Bibliothèque nationale. This case study thus foregrounds the symbiotic relationships between scholarship on medieval French literary heritage and the history of manuscript ownership, by engaging with the trade in and values attributed to medieval manuscripts in the early twentieth century

Millikan’s Consistency Testers and the Cultural Evolution of Concepts

Ruth Millikan has hypothesised that human cognition contains ‘consistency testers’. Consistency testers check whether different judgements a thinker makes about the same subject matter agree or conflict. Millikan’s suggestion is that, where the same concept has been applied to the world via two routes, and the two judgements that result are found to be inconsistent, that makes the thinker less inclined to apply those concepts in those ways in the future. If human cognition does indeed include such a capacity, its operation will be an important determinant of how people use concepts. It will have a major impact on which concepts they deploy and which means of application (conceptions) they rely on. Since consistency testers are a selection mechanism at the heart of conceptual thinking, they would be crucial to understanding how concepts are selected – why some are retained and proliferate and others die out. Hence, whether consistency testers for concepts exist, and how they operate, is an important question for those seeking to understand the cultural evolution of concepts, and of the words we use to express them

Imagining the future self through thought experiments

The ability of the mind to conceptualize what is not present is essential. It allows us to reason counterfactually about what might have happened had events unfolded differently or had another course of action been taken. It allows us to think about what might happen – to perform 'Gedankenexperimente' (thought experiments) – before we act. However, the cognitive and neural mechanisms mediating this ability are poorly understood. We suggest that the frontopolar cortex (FPC) keeps track of and evaluates alternative choices (what we might have done), whereas the anterior lateral prefrontal cortex (alPFC) compares simulations of possible future scenarios (what we might do) and evaluates their reward values. Together, these brain regions support the construction of suppositional scenarios

Skilled Refugees Integration into the UK Labour Market

War in the Middle East, especially Syria, recently led to a significant refugee increase in the United Kingdom. Almost 29,000 people were settled in the U.K., mainly from Syria. But the 2021 report shows that the number had dropped to around 12,000, thus making 43% of the refugees who were granted refuge in the United Kingdom in 2020. Therefore, as much as the numbers are dropping, it is clear that there are still Syrian refugees moving to the UK as of 2021 (House of Commons (2022). For these reasons, the research analyses the challenges influencing employment accessibility of skilled refugees in the UK, evaluates how the integration of skilled Syrian refugees impacts UK’s labour market and the economy, and determines how the failure of the UK government to recognize refugee credentials complicates their ability to get decent jobs. Skilled refugees, in this case, are Syrian refugees who are academically qualified, experienced, and also meet UK’s labour market requirements. The research used the quantitative approach, but there were some minimal instances where the qualitative research approach was applied. Information was gathered from 20 respondents from the UK’s skilled refugees, and the respondents were selected randomly through probability sampling to avoid biases. The primary data for this study was collected with the help of a questionnaire. The findings first provided a comprehensive conclusion that age, language, education, experience, gender, culture, length of stay, and social networks influence the employment accessibility of refugees. For instance, it was also found that skilled refugees’ age hindered refugees under 26 years old since they had not acquired the required experience, especially in medicine, engineering, and technology-related jobs. Besides, skilled refugees over 65 were also not considered in the labour market because the UK’s Employment Equality (Age) Regulations set the retirement age to 65. That notwithstanding, language was a hindrance because skilled refugees were good in Arabic and not English, the common language in the U.K., thus making it hard for them to secure professional employment (Jamil et al., 2012). Regarding gender, most skilled refugees were limited by the Islamic culture that does not allow women to work unless they are working from home. The length of stay and social networks also hindered skilled refugees from Syrian being absorbed into the UK’s labour market because of their limitations in personal relationships and social interactions. According to Hogan (2017), social interactions improve the ability of people to keep and find jobs meaning that skilled Syrian refugees will be limited in securing employment. Skilled Syrian refugees in the UK also faced challenges of accreditations from Syrian not being recognized in the UK and lack of job readiness skills and sponsorship. But it was also concluded that this was improvable through the government and relevant organizations identifying credentials from the former country, offering refresher courses in subjects like computers, developing programs that can assist refugees in getting jobs, the introduction of policies that can enable skilled refugees to get recognized as equals and offering adequate sponsorship especially when it comes to education and employment in professional jobs