Migrating Words, Migrating Merchants, Migrating Law

Migrating Words, Migrating Merchants, Migrating Law, edited by S. Gialdroni, A. Cordes, S. Dauchy, D. De ruysscher and H. Pihlajamäki, offers a transdisciplinary account of the connections between merchants’ journeys, the languages they used and the development of commercial law. ; Readership: Scholars interested in commercial law history, economic history, history of linguistics, translation and, more generally, in the lives and travels of merchants and the impact they had on the development of law

Migrating Words, Migrating Merchants, Migrating Law

Migrating Words, Migrating Merchants, Migrating Law, edited by S. Gialdroni, A. Cordes, S. Dauchy, D. De ruysscher and H. Pihlajamäki, offers a transdisciplinary account of the connections between merchants’ journeys, the languages they used and the development of commercial law. ; Readership: Scholars interested in commercial law history, economic history, history of linguistics, translation and, more generally, in the lives and travels of merchants and the impact they had on the development of law

Works in progress: early modern Lutheranism, labour, and the act of musical composition

Even now, some twenty-five years after the publication of Lydia Goehr’s The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works (1992), musicologists still have issues talking about composers’ activities in terms of ‘works’. Central to Goehr’s thesis was her assertion that J.S. Bach ‘did not compose works.’ However, a significant number of texts by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Lutheran German musicians and theorists explicitly depict composition as an act of working. For example, in Bach’s defence against the criticisms of Johann Adolph Scheibe, the Leipzig rhetorician Johann Abraham Birnbaum described how ‘the more industriously and painstakingly [the composer] works at the improvement of Nature — the more brilliantly shines the beauty thus brought into being.’ And the reception of Bach’s music in our own time is still inextricably bound up with the notion of work. This has never been more evident than in this year, 2017, which marks the 500th anniversary of the beginning of the Lutheran Reformation. There is a clear sense — both in eighteenth- century texts and in contemporary discourse — that the more difficulty involved in the process of a piece’s composition, the greater value it acquires. However, considerations of the act of composition as a labour process and the ethical implications of this have largely been absent in the discourse surrounding the musical work-concept. Taking into account the underlying cultural and theological tenets of Lutheranism, this dissertation seeks to explore why an emphasis on working was so pervasive in early modern German music, and how this was manifested in aesthetic terms. By assessing composers’ correspondences, theoretical writings, writings by both proponents of the contrapuntal aesthetic and its opponents, it seeks to better understand how thinking of the act of composition in terms of process aligns with our understanding of the work as a product — and ultimately examines what thinking about music in this way might tell us about some of our core contemporary musical and cultural values

Beyond Exceptionalism

While the economic involvement of early modern Germany in slavery and the slave trade is increasingly receiving attention, the direct participation of Germans in human trafficking remains a blind spot in historiography. This edited volume focuses on practices of enslavement taking place within German territories in the early modern period as well as on the people of African, Asian, and Native American descent caught up in them

Deductive Verification of Concurrent Programs

Verification of concurrent programs still poses one of the major challenges in computer science. Several techniques to tackle this problem have been proposed. However, they often do not scale. We present an adaptation of the rely/guarantee methodology in dynamic logic. Rely/guarantee uses functional specification to symbolically describe the behavior of concurrently running threads: while each thread guarantees adherence to a specified property at any point in time, all other threads can rely on this property being established. This allows to regard threads largely in isolation--only w.r.t. an environment constrained by these specifications. While rely/guarantee based approaches often suffer from a considerable specification overhead, we complement functional thread specifications with frame conditions. We will explain our approach using a simple, but concurrent programing language. Besides the usual constructs for sequential programs, it caters for dynamic thread creation. We define semantics of concurrent programs w.r.t. an underspecified deterministic scheduling function. To formally reason about programs of this language, we introduce a novel multi-modal logic, Concurrent Dynamic Trace Logic (CDTL). It combines the strengthes of dynamic logic with those of linear temporal logic and allows to express temporal properties about symbolic program traces. We first develop a sound and complete sequent calculus for the logic subset that uses the sequential part of the language, based on symbolic execution. In a second step, we extend this to a calculus for the complete logic by adding symbolic execution rules for concurrent interleavings and dynamic thread creation based on the rely/guarantee methodology. Again, this calculus is proven sound and complete

Beyond Exceptionalism

While the economic involvement of early modern Germany in slavery and the slave trade is increasingly receiving attention, the direct participation of Germans in human trafficking remains a blind spot in historiography. This edited volume focuses on practices of enslavement taking place within German territories in the early modern period as well as on the people of African, Asian, and Native American descent caught up in them