Around 1500 Spain and Portugal were among the most affluent nations in the world, and had income levels that were similar to those of other Western European countries. Three hundred years later the Iberian economies had lost their economic supremacy and fell behind all the main European powers. When did the first two global empires in history lose their hegemony to become secondary actors? What were the foundations of the collapse that explains the divergence from north-western Europe? This chapter addresses these issues and describes what is now known about the long-term trends of Iberian economies between 1500 and 1800.

This chapter describes the prevalence of prosimetrum – the alternation of narrative prose and skaldic verse – in the Íslendingasögur, with a brief consideration of prosimetrum in konungasögur and samtíðarsögur. A distinction is introduced between verses which are quoted as the dialogue of characters and those which appear to corroborate the narrative prose; it is explained that this distinction is established through the way the verses are incorporated in the prose, and is not inherent in the stanzas themselves. The aesthetic effects of verses representing dialogue in saga prose – additional content, the direct perspective and apparent voice of a character, control of narrative pace and ornamentation – are set out. The plausibility or otherwise of the impromptu recitation of skaldic verse is discussed, and a contrast drawn between the elaborate artificiality of skaldic verse and the ostensible simplicity of saga prose. The distinction between the two kinds of verse use is then problematized. A discussion of how and why the prose and verse first came together comes next, with speculation about how authors constructed their prosimetrical sagas and the literary effects achieved.

There are two human rights properties overshadowing academic discourse and policy documents in relation to automated systems and artificial intelligence which are operating in the digital realm. These properties are about the trust in artificial intelligence and automated systems, and secondly, of robustness. The latter appears in two aspects related to law governing the AI solutions and the AI itself. The degree of our trust in physical judges is related to our expectation that they are capable of distrusting the law. And our trust in automated systems and artificial intelligence is weaker because we assume that they completely trust the law. It could be said that we cannot find a better positivist than artificial intelligence. The moment artificial intelligence can independently exercise disavowal and intolerability formulas, that is, articulate a reasoned understanding that a specific legal norm or rule is profoundly unfair, then the non-coherence disappears. However, then we would no longer be dealing with artificial intelligence; perhaps we could term such a decision-maker an artificial brain.

Economic historians have placed commercialization at the centre of Europe’s early modern capitalism, emphasizing the importance of domestic and international trade, shipbuilding and concomitant manufactures, the financial sector, and urbanization. As the Iberian polities extended geographically to Africa, Asia and the Americas during the early modern period, trade, whether domestic, international or colonial, had a critical effect upon economic development. However, the economic impact of colonial expansion was uneven across Iberia. Iberia commercial exchange associated with the overseas empires produced surprisingly few backward and forward linkages in the European national economies. The question this chapter seeks to address is thus to what extent and how Iberian trade, especially colonial trade, supported or hindered economic development in the early modern period.

By the time Christianity reached Iceland, saints’ lives were already a vast and enormously popular genre of literature well-established across the medieval Christian world. This chapter discusses how Icelandic writers engaged with this genre, concentrating especially on translated saints’ lives in Old Norse. While rooted in and responding to the particular conditions of Icelandic society, these vernacular adaptations and engagements with Latin Christian culture also transported the readers and writers of Old Norse-Icelandic literature far beyond their immediate environs. Beginning with the earliest examples of saints’ lives from the twelfth century, this chapter outlines how the genre developed over time from relative simplicity to a more complex and rhetorically accomplished approach. It describes how saints’ lives intersected with other forms of literature being written in medieval Iceland, including romance and the family sagas, and addresses categories of saint’s life which have received less critical attention: the Marian corpus, the lives of virgin martyrs and Low German translations into Old Norse-Icelandic.

This chapter provides a chronological review of critical responses to Old Norse-Icelandic literature. The ‘book-prose vs free-prose’ debate is the starting-point for this overview, which then focuses on modern scholarship on sagas. The approach of the Icelandic school is discussed, followed by consideration of theoretical issues such as orality, structuralism, anthropological methods and the influence of non-Icelandic literary forms. Next come post-structuralism and narratology. The diversity of theoretical approaches which grew up towards the end of the twentieth century is documented, including post-colonialism and polysystem theory. Long-held generic distinctions are reviewed, and the development of gender studies with regard to Old Norse is described. Recent developments in the study of orality in prose and poetry are discussed, as are theoretical topics such as memory studies and the role of the paranormal. The chapter concludes with an account of the diversity of critical approaches to Old Norse-Icelandic literature and explains the need to employ integrated theories bringing in research from a number of disciplines, including archaeology, psychoanalysis and sociology.

This chapter considers the child’s right to identity. It is for good reason that the Convention on the Rights of the Child requires that core aspects of a child’s legal identity are in place soon after birth. A legal identity secures the child’s place in society, nation and family, providing the foundations for the child’s sense of self and relationships with others. The fact that these crucial aspects of identity are put in place when the child is an infant means that particular care must be taken to ensure that the child’s interests are not lost; not least because adults often have powerful interests in the way in which a child’s identity is determined and recorded. This chapter considers the formation of a child’s legal identity through recognition of parenthood and the challenges posed by changing reproductive technology and social norms such as the growth of international surrogacy arrangements. Further, a child’s knowledge of their genetic origins and the circumstances of their birth may be important to their sense of self and personal identity. The extent to which the right to identity incorporates a right to knowledge of origins is also considered.

This chapter focuses on one element of causal complexity: disjunctions, or equifinality. Using an example from applied research, it is explained which new SMMR principles and subtypes of cases need to be formulated to capture the consequences for descriptive and causal inference triggered by disjunctions. Learning goals: - Understand the inferential challenges triggered by disjunctions (equifinality) - Get acquainted with the additional sub-types of cases produced by disjunctive solution formulas - Understand how additional principles guide case selection in the presence of disjunctions - Learn if and how moving up the ladder of generality can be used to theorize away disjunctions and the inferential challenges it poses - Become more familiar with the smmr() function and the interpretation of its output in the presence of disjunctions

IN THE AMERICAN imagination of the early twentieth century, rare books and economic value were firmly united. With detailed accounts of lucrative library sales and front-page headlines, the press ensured that even lay audiences were aware of record-breaking book sales, particularly following the auction of the library of Robert Hoe III, which began in 1911. As book sales captured public interest, increased speculation in the early-twentieth-century rare book trade was probably inevitable. Such was the perceived profitability of rare books that unscrupulous sellers were prepared to take advantage of naïve buyers, and stories of rare book fraud surfaced in the press. In 1912, The New York Times reported that the Federal government had indicted eleven men for committing $5,000,000 worth of rare book fraud, stating that the “alleged fraud for which these men were indicted consisted in the deception of persons with more money than knowledge of books.” The swindle had been profitable for at least ten years, indicating that from the start of the twentieth century, the rare book trade had gained acceptance as a dazzling yet bewildering business, blending the satisfaction of material consumption with the lure of social pretensions.

The American press typically characterized the most successful collectors as investing heavily and swiftly when opportunities arose, recognizing that supplies were limited, and market values were only moving upwards—a narrative that left naïve buyers open to exploitation. The fact that fraudsters were able to extract large sums from victims with little or no prior trade experience, points to wider perceptions of the market’s dependability and profitability. Not all the victims were even bibliophiles. One man, named in the press as “Levingston of Saratoga Springs,” was simply looking to make a short-term investment, believing that the rare books he purchased “would be resold in a short time at a considerable profit to a millionaire who was nibbling at them.” Lev ingston reportedly lost $153,000. Contemporary collectors likely felt little sympathy for Levingston, and members of the trade could be openly critical of investment collecting. The dealer A. S. W. Rosenbach informed The New York Times that he “had no sympathy with collectors who purchase books primarily for speculation.” American Book-Prices Current responded to speculation in stronger terms: