The Molyneux question asks: would a blind person, who knows spheres and cubes only from touch, be able to recognize these shapes visually immediately upon becoming sighted, without touching them? Molyneux himself answered no. Locke accepted Molyneux’s negative answer. However, Locke’s answer appears inconsistent with the doctrine of common sensibles, according to which some ideas are given in more than one sense modality. Motivated by alleviating this tension, philosophers have put forth several interpretations of Locke’s views on shape perception. Here, I motivate a novel interpretation of Locke that can better resolve the tension.

The Central Mediterranean Penal Heritage Project (CMPHP) employs remote-sensing techniques to study and preserve archaeological remains of human confinement. Within this larger project, digital photogrammetry was used to document part of the castle prison in Noto Antica to identify and digitally preserve graffiti depicting galleys and gameboards.

‘Anglo-Saxon’ is a term with a long and nuanced history. This study assesses where the word itself comes from, why it has been felt appropriate to separate the pre-Conquest epoch from later English history and why the Anglo-Saxons have taken on so many different meanings in subsequent times. Beginning with the deployment of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ in the eighth to tenth centuries, the focus then turns to how the period before 1066 was constructed as a formative time for English national and institutional identity. This process began in the later Middle Ages, but the term ‘Anglo-Saxon’ itself only began to be used again in the sixteenth century. It later took on powerful political and cultural resonance, which eventually gave rise to a racial understanding of ‘Anglo-Saxon’. The difficult legacy of these many layers of later usage, including developments since the Victorian peak of Anglo-Saxonism, is also assessed.

This study examines the credit market in seventeenth-century Stockholm, a rapidly growing city whose credit market is an early example of a market with both private and institutional actors. Using a sample of 1,500 probate inventories from 1679 to 1708, we focus on the practices and experiences of municipal and state servants, and we examine in detail the probate inventories of employees of the royal court. The latter group had their wages paid by the king in a world where being in arrears was the norm, and their spatial and social proximity to the Bank of the Estates made them potential pioneers in the movement towards an institutionalized and formalized capital market. The credit market has a mixed character, both in terms of the opportunities available to investors and in terms of their behavior. For people with a surplus of cash and good connections, money lending could be a way to increase their income. The court servants and many others moved seamlessly between institutional and private, as well as formal and informal, credit. The article shows that wage earners and state servants were central to the transformation of the early modern credit market. For them, the credit market and the bank offered investment opportunities that matched their skills and circumstances.

Civil War allegiance has long been a preoccupation of early modern British historians. They have weighed geographical, religious, political, and pragmatic reasons for British people to choose sides in 1642. A study of the changes of allegiance in the years that followed is just as important. Side-changing reveals the fractures and difficulties that war, regime change, and an uneasy peace created. Most scholarship has examined figures whose ideas and beliefs remained consistent as the world around them changed. This article argues that others changed their minds (and their side) because their ideas fundamentally shifted, through an engagement with oppositional literature, a royalist social environment, and relationships built with royalist agents. Through a case study of the parliamentarian Major-General Sir Thomas Myddelton it examines this process of change. The article takes the study of allegiance into the Interregnum and beyond to the Restoration, tracing the impact of Myddelton's reading, experiences, and actions upon his declared loyalty. To do this, the article proposes a methodology that cuts across historical approaches, using evidence from financial accounts, libraries, and legal cases alongside surviving correspondence and printed pamphlets to build a composite image of a changing mind.

I would like to thank Professor Ekirch for his reflections on ‘Have we lost sleep?’, which contain several points that I have already responded to within the paper following his peer review of my original submission to Medical History in 2023 (Professor Ekirch having voluntarily identified himself as a reviewer in a normally double-blind process). I acknowledge that the focus of my paper was on Ekirch’s original work from 2001; if I did not engage as he would have wished with his subsequent publications, this was simply because I do not perceive the same substantial developments in his thinking and research on the subject that he does. Indeed, the present critique by Ekirch amounts essentially to more of the same: a long list of references and quotes but little detailed discussion of any individual source. As my paper demonstrates, seemingly unambiguous evidence from a brief quotation can become less clear-cut when placed in context. I am sorry if I deploy the word ‘might’ more than Ekirch would like. This reflects, I hope, a healthy degree of uncertainty and intellectual humility in my approach to the complex issue of pre-industrial sleep. To extend Ekirch’s metaphor, if the jigsaw puzzle that both he and I are trying to assemble can take the form of a cat or a dog, it is possible that its true form is neither animal. The extent to which people woke in the night in pre-industrial Europe, the duration of such awakening, and the predominant cultural attitude towards this—concern, acceptance, or indifference—are topics about which it would seem wise to avoid sweeping statements and generalisations, given the relatively long period covered and the social, cultural, and individual diversity that must be taken into consideration. I can only repeat that I think amassing more brief references, and selectively citing relatively small physiological studies and anthropological evidence from global settings, is unlikely to provide much clarity, let alone definitive answers. I welcome Professor Ekirch’s contribution to this discussion as an indication that the question of segmented sleep in early modern Europe is by no means settled but is a matter of ongoing debate.

This article explores Naderid Iran's nature of statehood, position in international balance of power, and evolving diplomatic practice. It argues that from 1723 to 1747, the sovereign establishment in Iran remained fundamentally dynastic without giving way to territoriality, continued to acknowledge Ottoman superiority in hierarchy as well as power relations as a principle, and gradually began to adopt, for the first time, early modern specialized phenomena in diplomatic conduct. The study bases itself on the documentation produced by Iranian-Ottoman diplomacy from the Afghan overthrow in 1722 until the aftermath of Nāder Shah's murder in 1747, contextualizes these records in comparison to those of earlier centuries, and treats the Hotaki regime, the Safavid rump state, and Nāder's monarchy in Iran as a whole.