A targeted public: public services in fifteenth-century Ghent and Bruges

Though the phrase 'public services' is a nineteenth-century invention, which was supported by a developed rhetoric of political economy, this article shows that the concept, practice and supply of such services could also be found in the medieval city. It specifically analyses three areas of urban service provision: jurisprudence and legal security, infrastructure and finally health care and poor relief. Although the available sources tend to stress the involvement of municipal authorities in providing public services, it turns out that in fact the furnishing of services was highly multi-layered. In all three areas studied, a wide range of public and private institutions offered services to specific groups within late medieval urban society. In contrast to what the notion of 'public services' lets us presume, however, public services in the medieval city were not available to all inhabitants. Instead, the provision of services was usually quite restrictive, and targeted particular groups in society

Radiative tail from the quasielastic peak in deep inelastic scattering of polarized leptons off polarized He-3

The contribution of the radiative tail from the quasielastic peak to low order radiative correction to deep inelastic scattering of polarized leptons by polarized $^3$He was calculated within the sum rules formalism and $y$-scaling hypothesis. Numerical analysis was carried out under the conditions of HERMES experiment.Comment: 10 pages, 3 figure

Early modern consumption history: current challenges and future perspectives

Stimulated by wide-ranging theories on its cultural and economic significance, the history of early modern consumption in the Low Countries has received a remarkable amount of attention in historiography during the last three decades. During this period the growing body of empirical evidence, as well as shifting theoretical frameworks, have gradually altered our understanding of early modern patterns of consumption, their causes and consequences. The current article presents a review of the main tendencies in the field of early modern consumption history, and the challenges to this historiographical field these have presented. Based on these challenges, the article suggests new avenues for future research

Chapter Economic inequality in the rural Southern Low Countries during the Fifteenth century: sources, data and reflection

This chapter seeks to explore local and regional variation in levels of inequality in different types of rural localities and regions within the late medieval County of Flanders. Our research indicates that fiscal sources for the County of Flanders can produce reliable data on the distribution of income during the late medieval period. The analysis of these data shows that important local and regional differences can be observed in the distribution of rural income. To a large extent, these local variations can be explained by differences in access to local economic resources. Our results, however, also indicate that substantial regional differences in access to rural resources can produce similar income distributions

Economic inequality in the rural Southern Low Countries during the fifteenth century : sources, data and reflections

This chapter seeks to explore local and regional variation in levels of inequality in different types of rural localities and regions within the late medieval County of Flanders. Our research indicates that fiscal sources for the County of Flanders can produce reliable data on the distribution of income during the late medieval period. The analysis of these data shows that important local and regional differences can be observed in the distribution of rural income. To a large extent, these local variations can be explained by differences in access to local economic resources. Our results, however, also indicate that substantial regional differences in access to rural resources can produce similar income distributions

Q(2) dependence of nuclear transparency for exclusive rho(0) production

Exclusive coherent and incoherent electroproduction of the rho(0) meson from H-1 and N-14 targets has been studied at the HERMES experiment as a function of coherence length (l(c)), corresponding to the lifetime of hadronic fluctuations of the virtual photon, and squared four-momentum of the virtual photon (-Q(2)). The ratio of N-14 to H-1 cross sections per nucleon, called nuclear transparency, was found to increase (decrease) with increasing l(c) for coherent (incoherent) rho(0) electroproduction. For fixed l(c), a rise of nuclear transparency with Q(2) is observed for both coherent and incoherent rho(0) production, which is in agreement with theoretical calculations of color transparency

Higher twists in polarized DIS and the size of the constituent quark

The spontaneous breaking of chiral symmetry implies the presence of a short-distance scale in the QCD vacuum, which phenomenologically may be associated with the "size" of the constituent quark, rho ~ 0.3 fm. We discuss the role of this scale in the matrix elements of the twist-4 and 3 quark-gluon operators determining the leading power (1/Q^2-) corrections to the moments of the nucleon spin structure functions. We argue that the flavor-nonsinglet twist-4 matrix element, f_2^{u - d}, has a sizable negative value of the order rho^{-2}, due to the presence of sea quarks with virtualities ~ rho^{-2} in the proton wave function. The twist-3 matrix element, d_2, is not related to the scale rho^{-2}. Our arguments support the results of previous calculations of the matrix elements in the instanton vacuum model. We show that this qualitative picture is in agreement with the phenomenological higher-twist correction extracted from an NLO QCD fit to the world data on g_1^p and g_1^n, which include recent data from the Jefferson Lab Hall A and COMPASS experiments. We comment on the implications of the short-distance scale rho for quark-hadron duality and the x-dependence of higher-twist contributions.Comment: 8 pages, 4 figure