The Ages of Women and Men: Life Cycles, Family and Investment in the Fifteenth-Century Low Countries

Recent literature has suggested how late-medieval families may have used financial markets to navigate the life cycle. Precious little is known about the precise connections between the life cycle and family on the one hand and investments in financial instruments on the other, though. We analyse late-medieval investment behaviour using a new dataset of hundreds of life annuities. Our data give ages at purchase of annuitants as well as the pairings of investors in joint and survivor annuities and thus they allow us to link life-cycle events and family relationships to participation in financial markets. We demonstrate that the late-medieval public did not purchase single life annuities for children and argue this points to contemporaries having preferences other than for maximizing profits. We find that women were prominent investors in life annuities, but they also showed a preference for joint and survivor annuities, which were less profitable but provided insurance for (junior) family members. Finally, although the majority of joint and survivor annuities were purchased by family members, a substantial number were for people who appear not to have been related: we suggest godparenthood may help explain pairings of apparently unrelated adults and children

Onderwijs en subjectiviteit. Aandacht voor subjectiviteit in het onderwijsadvies van de Onderwijsraad: een documentanalyse

Dit onderzoek behelst een documentanalyse van het advies van de Onderwijsraad. Hierbij worden specifiek de visies op vorming, de beleidsadviezen voor vorming en de adviezen ten aanzien van de implementatie van dit beleid onderzocht op aandacht voor subjectificatie. Het concept 'subjectificatie' is ontwikkeld door de Nederlandse onderwijspedagoog Gert Biesta en verwijst naar het doeldomein binnen onderwijs dat gericht is op het worden van een subject in vrijheid, onafhankelijk van bestaande ordes. Om aandacht te kunnen geven aan subjectificatie moet aan een aantal randvoorwaarden worden voldaan. Deze randvoorwaarden zijn in dit onderzoek geformuleerd als pluraliteit, vertrouwen en verantwoordelijkheid. Het eerste doel van dit onderzoek is inzicht te geven in hoeverre de randvoorwaarden voor subjectificatie aanwezig zijn in het onderwijsadvies van de Onderwijsraad. Uit de resultaten blijkt dat de vormingsactiviteiten die door de Onderwijsraad worden beschreven, voornamelijk gericht zijn op de sociale en professionele vorming van de leerlingen. Dit wordt in dit onderzoek geduid met de begrippen 'socialisatie' en ‘kwalificatie’. De conclusie is daarom dat subjectiviteit nauwelijks aandacht krijgt in het onderwijsadvies van de Onderwijsraad. Het tweede doel van dit onderzoek is het leveren van een bijdrage aan de conceptualisatie van 'subjectificatie'. Dit is bereikt door vanuit de theorie van Biesta te komen tot een aantal kenmerken van subjectiviteit, te weten: verschijnen, uniciteit, emancipatie en verantwoordelijkheid. Vanuit deze kenmerken zijn de randvoorwaarden voor subjectificatie geformuleerd. Deze conceptualisering draagt bij aan de wetenschappelijke discussie over (persoonlijke) vorming in onderwijs

Cambium non est mutuum: exchange and interest rates in medieval Europe

A major gap in our understanding of the medieval economy concerns interest rates, especially relating to commercial credit. Although direct evidence about interest rates is scattered and anecdotal, there is much more surviving information about exchange rates. Since both contemporaries and historians have suggested that exchange and rechange transactions could be used to disguise the charging of interest in order to circumvent the usury prohibition, it should be possible to back out the interest rates from exchange rates. The following analysis is based on a new dataset of medieval exchange rates collected from commercial correspondence in the archive of Francesco di Marco Datini of Prato, c.1383-1411. It demonstrates that the time value of money was consistently incorporated into market exchange rates. Moreover, these implicit interest rates are broadly comparable to those received from other types of commercial loan and investment. Although on average profitable, the return on any individual exchange and rechange transaction did involve a degree of uncertainty that may have justified their non-usurious nature. However, there were also practical reasons why medieval merchants may have used foreign exchange transactions as a means of extending credit

No Effect of Microgravity and Simulated Mars Gravity on Final Bacterial Cell Concentrations on the International Space Station: Applications to Space Bioproduction

Microorganisms perform countless tasks on Earth and they are expected to be essential for human space exploration. Despite the interest in the responses of bacteria to space conditions, the findings on the effects of microgravity have been contradictory, while the effects of Martian gravity are nearly unknown. We performed the ESA BioRock experiment on the International Space Station to study microbe-mineral interactions in microgravity, simulated Mars gravity and simulated Earth gravity, as well as in ground gravity controls, with three bacterial species: Sphingomonas desiccabilis, Bacillus subtilis, and Cupriavidus metallidurans. To our knowledge, this was the first experiment to study simulated Martian gravity on bacteria using a space platform. Here, we tested the hypothesis that different gravity regimens can influence the final cell concentrations achieved after a multi-week period in space. Despite the different sedimentation rates predicted, we found no significant differences in final cell counts and optical densities between the three gravity regimens on the ISS. This suggests that possible gravityrelated effects on bacterial growth were overcome by the end of the experiment. The results indicate that microbial-supported bioproduction and life support systems can be effectively performed in space (e.g., Mars), as on Earth

Human anti-C1q autoantibodies bind specifically to solid-phase C1q and enhance phagocytosis but not complement activation

Autoantibodies directed against complement component C1q are commonly associated with autoimmune diseases, especially systemic lupus erythematosus. Importantly, these anti-C1q autoantibodies are specific for ligand-bound, solid-phase C1q and do not bind to fluid-phase C1q. In patients with anti-C1q, C1q levels are in the normal range, and the autoantibodies are thus not depleting. To study these human anti-C1q autoantibodies at the molecular level, we isolated C1q-reactive B cells and recombinantly produced nine monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) from four different healthy individuals. The isolated mAbs were of the IgG isotype, contained extensively mutated variable domains, and showed high affinity to the collagen-like region of C1q. The anti-C1q mAbs exclusively bound solid-phase C1q in complex with its natural ligands, including immobilized or antigen-bound IgG, IgM or CRP, and necrotic cells. Competition experiments reveal that at least 2 epitopes, also targeted by anti-C1q antibodies in sera from SLE patients, are recognized. Electron microscopy with hexameric IgG-C1q immune complexes demonstrated that multiple mAbs can interact with a single C1q molecule and identified the region of C1q targeted by these mAbs. The opsonization of immune complexes with anti-C1q greatly enhanced Fc-receptor-mediated phagocytosis but did not increase complement activation. We conclude that human anti-C1q autoantibodies specifically bind neo-epitopes on solid-phase C1q, which results in an increase in Fc-receptor-mediated effector functions that may potentially contribute to autoimmune disease immunopathology

Seeking Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Father : Pieter Bruegel the Eldest (†1566), Pensioner in Sint-Janshuis Retirement Home, Bergen op Zoom

In 1553-1554, one Pieter Bruegel retired to Sint-Janshuis, Bergen op Zoom: a home where former servants of the Marquises of Bergen could spend their old age. The main argument of the article is that this retiree, who was the former barber-surgeon of Marquis Jan IV (1541-1567), should be considered as the father of the painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder. The latter’s origins are almost completely unknown, yet heavily debated: was he the son of a peasant who painted scenes of life in the countryside, or was he born and raised in an urban environment and did he satirise peasants in his artistic work? An historical reconstruction of the background of the retired barber-surgeon, and the retirement home he spent his final years in, shows he is a strong candidate for having fathered the famous painter. Evidence from the discipline of art history provides further support for the claim that the painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder was the son of a barber-surgeon and came from an urban social-middling-group background with close ties to one of the most important courts and artistic milieus in the Low Countries, the Renaissance palace Markiezenhof in Bergen op Zoom