Prescriptive Texts Research Articles

Norm enforcement on and of Reddit: Rules of engagement and participation

The social platform Reddit hosts a set of communities that denounce offensive behavior, invoking scrutiny and shame on (categories of) individuals. Despite varying in their targets, they all promote actionable content to an audience who can view, share and comment on it. These groups allow a global public to air grievances, enabling both accountability and abuse. Following high profile scandals, Reddit routinely sanctions and purges problematic ‘subreddits’. As a matter of self-preservation, subreddits that watch over the public also maintain heightened scrutiny of their own members. Group rules and other prescriptive texts are a means to instill this scrutiny among a broader audience. In analyzing rules and other content management practices in 68 shaming based subreddits, this paper considers how these groups temper platform-based denunciation.

Práticas de letramento e repertório compartilhado por professoras/es que ensinam matemática

ABSTRACT This article aimed to identify and describe engagement in teaching literacy practices in which teachers who teach mathematics participated. We used a qualitative approach and analytical tools from the Social Theory of Learning and literacy as a social practice to identify and describe interactions with the uses of reading and writing in study meetings and lesson planning held in a public school. The empirical material was produced through observations, interviews, and documents. The results suggest that members engaged in literacy events mediated both by prescriptive texts and by texts produced by the group itself to organize the repertoire. However, the constitution of the shared repertoire occurred through engagement in literacy practices recognized and valued in the group. Although prescriptive texts guide the practices, the repertoire was not limited to these prescriptions, passing through the various social engagements of those involved.

Jamie A. Gianoutsos. The Rule of Manhood: Tyranny, Gender, and Classical Republicanism in England, 1603–1660.

Thomas Hobbes famously lamented that a diet of “Greek and Latine authors” had given his contemporaries a taste for “tumults” and rebellion. Jamie Gianoutsos’s fascinating new book, The Rule of Manhood: Tyranny, Gender, and Classical Republicanism in England, 1603–1660, echoes Hobbes’ assessment and resituates classical republican discourse at the heart of English prerevolutionary and revolutionary political culture. She adds a twist, however. To fully understand republican thought, we must acknowledge how inextricably its core ideas—about tyranny and liberty, political virtue and resistance—were connected to ideals of manhood. Gianoutsos argues that educated Englishmen were deeply familiar with classical republican concepts of good and bad governance. Ancient histories and prescriptive texts valorized men whose virtus—masculine virtues of self-control, temperance, rationality, and military prowess—fitted them for public life, and denounced tyrants as “failed men” ruled by their passions, whose effeminacy corrupted the state. Gianoutsos argues further that these classical discourses of masculine virtue and unmanly tyranny had contemporary resonance, structuring critical perceptions and images of political misrule under the early Stuart kings. Overtly republican—and deeply masculinist—ideas thus played a key role in political discourse before the revolutionary events of the 1640s; and, as English republicanism flowered in the 1640s and 1650s, ideals of masculinity remained central to its meaning.

Bringing Refutation Texts Back to Their Literacy Roots: What do Critical Literacy and Culturally Responsive Pedagogy Have to Teach us About Students’ Conceptual Change?

Refutation texts are resurfacing as a suggested antidote to misconceptions and “fake news.” In a previous critical review of the refutation text literature, we, the author team, suggested further interrogation of the assumptions these texts imply: that learners share the same common misunderstanding about a topic, and that there is one “truth” that should replace the misconception. Building from Hynd’s feminist critique of refutation texts, we present in this essay a consideration of how these authoritative and prescriptive texts fit into an educational landscape being transformed by foci on students’ autonomy and funds of knowledge. In this position paper, we present the argument that refutation texts and their associated research may conflict with critical literacy perspectives and culturally responsive pedagogies. We examine these three perspectives for how they may view learning and literacy, and conclude the essay by proffering suggestions for future research on refutation text manipulations and for considering how refutational texts might be incorporated in classroom settings that enact culturally responsive pedagogy and critical literacy perspectives.

Blood Manipulation in Hezekiah’s Re-inauguration of the Temple in Chronicles

According to 2 Chronicles 29.20–24, Hezekiah’s re-inauguration of the temple involved a purification offering for all Israel in which the blood manipulation did not include the sevenfold sprinkling of blood in front of the veil (Lev. 4.17) or daubing blood on the horns of the incense altar (Lev. 4.18), as stated in the prescriptive text of P. This article proposes that the apparent inconsistency can be explained by examining the Chronicler’s conception of YHWH as cosmic God and global king. The location of the divine presence tends to be in heaven for the Chronicler rather than from within the tabernacle, as illustrated in P. The difference in perspective constitutes a decisive theological reason for the Chronicler’s particular depiction of the blood manipulation in Hezekiah’s re-inauguration of the temple.

Лингвистические особенности текстов гейм-инструкций

Modern computer games are gaining popularity in the cultural space. Due to them new modern types of discourse are appeared. The growing role of computer games in various aspects of modern life, the rapid process of complicating their technical parameters gives rise to a parallel process of improving and complicating the texts of game manuals that allow gamers to follow the most effective tactics of the game. The authors of the article, in a comparative manner, analyse foreign and domestic research correlated with the linguistic features of games, game slang, manuals as examples of prescriptive text and their specific features. The texts of game manuals are an important component of game discourse, their special functional specificity and the nature of the addressee predetermine a number of specific linguistic characteristics, which are still a poorly studied. The authors consider the linguistic characteristics of texts at various linguistic levels in their relationship with the informative elements of manuals that correspond to the most important elements of the game. The authors analyse the pragmalinguistic elements of the manuals. They describe stylistic and grammatical features of the developers’ appeal to the prospective players, try to trace the logic of the use of certain linguistic means in the context of the game manuals. The authors analyze game instructions in English and Spanish, which is based on fact that English has been and still remains the main language in which original game manuals are published. Spanish is one of the most widely spoken languages ​​on a global scale. Some language similarities and differences of manuals in Spanish and English are analysed. Specific characteristics of manuals regarding the use of techniques that are non-standard for this type of text, ensuring the maximum approximation to the social status and age of consumers are described. In addition, the authors provide examples of English-language game discourse penetration into the Spanish-language game discourse.

Science, Sexual Difference and the Making of Modern Marriage in American Sex Advice, 1920-40.

This article considers discussions of sexual difference in a range of popular prescriptive texts published between 1920 and 1940 in order to explore the relationship between science and American marital advice literature. It demonstrates the particular role science played in shaping, legitimising and enforcing changing discussions about what 'good sex' should look like in contemporary advice - supporting a hierarchy of sexual activities and desires that privileged a particular version of marital heterosexual expression. Through this, it also interrogates the 'popular' version of sexual science being consumed by the American public at this time. In addition to adding new perspectives to our understanding of contemporary advice and its relationship with science and medicine, it will also act as a provocation for further research into the ways the public engaged with sexual science in early twentieth-century America.

Alphabets and “Calligraphy” in the Section on Prayers, Special Characteristics of the Quran and Magic Squares in the Inventory of Sultan Bayezid II’s Palace Library

Abstract This essay is an attempt to read the section on invocations, prayers, the unique qualities of the Quran and magic squares of the palace library of the Ottoman Sultan Bayezid II (d. 918/1512) along with several works by ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Bisṭāmī (d. c. 858/1454 or 1455) to cast light on underexamined perceptions of calligraphic styles and alphabets/scripts employed to inscribe talismanic objects and manuscripts. Methodologically, the intention is to situate the inventory of the palace library in the intersection of prescriptive texts, on the one hand, and talismanic objects and manuscripts of invocations, on the other. By taking the inventory as a document of practice, the essay seeks to illustrate the importance of paying attention to other elements of the talismanic compound in general, and to the use of alphabets/scripts with their specific talismanic attributes in particular.

Sherman and His Historians: An End to the Outsized Destroyer Myth?

For years, scholars have viewed the career of William Tecumseh Sherman in light of an antiquated destroyer myth and neglected his memoirs, which were written as a military textbook. This essay reviews Sherman’s legacy and literature, both of which contributed to the advancement of modern military thought. His experiences may serve as a prescriptive text to servicemembers, providing critical lessons on military warfare and philosophy still relevant today.

EUROPEAN COURT OF HUMAN RIGHTS PRACTICE AS A SOURCE OF LAW

The urgency of the research is stipulated by the necessity to study the European Court of Human Rights practice as a source of law at the regional level, which affects the development of national legal systems. The purpose of the article is to elucidate the European Court of Human Rights practice as a source of law for member states to the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (on the examples of individual decisions). The research is based on the understanding of law as a dynamic social and cultural phenomenon having a specific content and is closely related to human dignity, human rights and justice. Legislation is only one form of law that can exist outside the prescriptive texts, which requires the use of the hermeneutic method and content analysis of the European Court of Human Rights decisions. The article finds out that the European Court of Human Rights is one of the most effective institutions for human rights implementation. Applying the provisions of the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, which was adopted in 1950, through a dynamic interpretation, the European Court of Human Rights ensures the effectiveness and efficiency of this international treaty, revealing the content in the aspect of modernity. States parties to the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms are obliged to comply with the European Court of Human Rights decisions, which (the court) always follows its practice, ensuring legal certainty and the rule of law. This allows considering the European Court of Human Rights a subject forming legal doctrines at both regional and national levels. The materials of the article can be used for scientific research of the European Court of Human Rights practice as a source of law at the regional level, which affects national legal systems. The main provisions of the article can be used to justify the study of ECHR practice by lawyers as well as law students and civil servants.

Continuity of Carolingian Judicial Institutions in Ottonian Lotharingia

Abstract The institution of the scabini, men from the pagus who served as legal fact finders in comital courts, was established by Charlemagne in the later eighth century and has received considerable attention from scholars for well over a century. Much of the early debate about the scabini focused on the origins of the institution, and whether Charlemagne was successful in replacing the previous ad hoc administration of justice with more formal procedures that followed more closely on the dictates of the royal court. A second important element in the historiography has focused on the fate of the institution of the scabini following the end of Charlemagne’s reign, and particularly after the division of the unitary empire following the death of Louis the Pious in 840. Many scholars, following the lead of F.L. Ganshof, have argued that the institution of the scabini, and governmental courts more generally, ceased to function at some point in the later ninth century, to be replaced by so-called feudal courts. The following study challenges this latter model by examining the institution of the scabini under the later Carolingians and their Ottonian successors in the region of Lotharingia, which gained a long-standing political coherence following the brief reign of King Lothair II (854–869). This region was the scene of intense political and military conflict throughout much of the period from the later ninth through the early eleventh century. Nevertheless, numerous private and royal charters of the Carolingians and Ottonians, as well as ostensibly prescriptive texts included in royal capitularies, point to the continuity of the institution of the scabini during the entirety of the Ottonian period from ca. 919–1024.

Francisco de Osuna's "Norte de los estados" in Modernized Spanish: A Practical Guide to Conjugal Life in Sixteenth-Century Europe ed. by Dana Bultman

Reviewed by: Francisco de Osuna's "Norte de los estados" in Modernized Spanish: A Practical Guide to Conjugal Life in Sixteenth-Century Europe ed. by Dana Bultman Elizabeth Rhodes Francisco de Osuna's "Norte de los estados" in Modernized Spanish: A Practical Guide to Conjugal Life in Sixteenth-Century Europe. Edited by Dana Bultman. AMSTERDAM UP / ARC HUMANITIES P, 2019. 360 PP. FRANCISCO DE OSUNA (1492?–1540) was one of several Observant Franciscans who codified their practice of recogimiento, a method of intense self-discipline and affective prayer. He is most known as the author of Tercer abecedario espiritual (1527), the book that Teresa de Ávila identified as her spiritual primer. Dana Bultman here presents another of his prescriptive texts, Norte de los estados, a guide to mid-sixteenth-century Catholic morality for secular men as defined by the male Catholic establishment that Osuna represents. The text is in the form of a dialogue between the author and the character Villaseñor, who stands "en persona de todo mancebo Cristiano" (76). Composed in Spanish, the treatise was first published in 1531 and appeared only twice again, in 1541 and 1550. Bultman attributes the book's failure to endure to its author's endorsement of relatively liberal views about marital behavior, views censored in Spain in the late 1500s. The fact that the author expresses overt support of the Franciscan nun Magdalena de la Cruz (1487–1560) in his treatise was perhaps another reason why his book met with limited publishing success, since Magdalena, who claimed to have had revelations and the stigmata, was discredited in 1546. The map of Francisco de Osuna's travels with which the book opens provides evidence of his itinerant life, which traced a triangle whose far points are Santiago de Compostela, Tripoli, and Antwerp. Opening her sixty-one-page introduction, Bultman provides a synopsis of the author's life and influence, detailing his military career, his subsequent education, and his residence in the spiritual hotbed in Escalona (Toledo) from 1526–28, where illuminists mingled with other reform-minded types such as Juan de Valdés (1509–41). Bultman follows a helpful review of other scholarly readings of the text with a detailed summary of its contents, but readers should not use that summary as an excuse to skip the text itself. In her introduction, she notes that Francisco de Osuna relied on Church fathers for many of his ideas, often [End Page 151] glossing Augustine's On the Good of Marriage and On Holy Virginity. Bultman characterizes the treatise as a reformist Catholic response to Protestantism for its emphasis on the sacramental nature of marriage and points to the author's high regard for monastic virtues such as chastity. I am less convinced than she that "Osuna's model of marriage was well outside the views that were later to become dominant in the Catholic Church" (2). His defense of women's inheritance rights and their subject status in the context of certain activities, such as their control of the household, might be considered moderately liberal. However, since Luis de León's La perfecta casada of 1583 takes a similar position on those topics, it is not clear that Osuna's ideas about marriage were later repressed, and cautious readers might not affirm their liberal slant in the first place. Although he defines the house as the wife's domain, he also states that her husband has the right to beat her behind its closed doors. More convincing is Bultman's insistence on the importance of monastic morality that clergymen such as Francisco de Osuna attempted to impose on secular Catholics, noting not only the twelve-chapter rulebook for married couples in the text, chapters that mimic those of the Franciscan rule itself, but also the text's insistence on the analogy of the married state to other sacred relationships, such as that of Christ to the Church. A two-page list of chapters precedes the edited text, making it easy to identify the embedded nondialogic sections, which, being long, anagogical lectures, make for slow reading. Those include a sermon for weddings, a rulebook for the good marriage, a sermon against adultery, a sermon...

The Qualified Right to Freedom of Religion: An examination of the limitations contained in Article 9 of the European Convention on Human Rights

The manifestation of religious beliefs under Article 9 of the European Convention on Human Rights is not absolute but may be subject to prescribed limitations. This article discusses the nature and extent of those limitations, as interpreted in the case law of the European Court of Human Rights from its decision in Kokkinakis v. Greece up to the present. It contrasts the prescriptive text of the Article with its loose and inconsistent interpretation by the Court in Strasbourg. Particular attention is given to the criteria of ‘prescribed by law’, ‘necessary in a democratic society’, ‘public safety’, ‘public order, health or morals’ and ‘the rights and freedoms of others’. This article seeks to extract clear principles from the contradictory and confusing jurisprudence, particularly at its intersection with the Court’s illusory doctrine of margin of appreciation.

Plague, Practice, and Prescriptive Text

Abstract This article studies the fate of a contradiction between practice and prescriptive text in 16th-century Ashkenaz. The practice was fleeing a plagued city, which contradicted a Talmudic passage requiring self-isolation at home when plague strikes. The emergence of this contradiction as a halakhic problem and its various forms of resolution are analyzed as a case study for the development of halakhic literature in early modern Ashkenaz. The Talmudic text was not considered a challenge to the accepted practice prior to the early modern period. The conflict between practice and Talmud gradually emerged as a halakhic problem in 15th-century rabbinic sources. These sources mixed legal and non-legal material, leaving the status of this contradiction ambiguous. The 16th century saw a variety of solutions to the problem in different halakhic writings, each with their own dynamics, type of authority, possibilities, and limitations. This variety reflects the crystallization of separate genres of halakhic literature.

Stammering, stuttering and stumbling: A transnational history of the pathologization of dysfluency in nineteenth-century Europe

The nineteenth century saw a rise in the categorization and systematic observation of manifestations of dysfluent speech. This article examines how, from the 1820s onward, different vocabularies to distinguish between different speech impediments were developed in France, Germany and Britain. It also charts how different meanings, categories and chronologies of ‘stammering’ knowledge were exchanged transnationally. The universalist medical models emerging around stammering were, despite this constant exchange, also closely connected to cultural imaginations of speech, the particular values assigned to one’s (national) language and political modes of belonging. Although the analysis is largely based on prescriptive texts, it also reveals how embodied experiences of dysfluency informed the medical and pedagogical work undertaken in the nineteenth century: a remarkable number of ‘experts’ on speech impediments claimed to be ‘former sufferers’. The history of dysfluency in the nineteenth century is therefore not one of linear medicalization and pathologization, but a continuous exchange of vocabularies between different actors of middle-class culture. Expertise on speaking ‘well’ was shared in medical treatises, but also on the benches of parliament, in cheap self-help pamphlets, in the parlour, or in debating clubs – suggesting that the model of ‘recovery’ was a manifestation of (middle class) culture rather than of a strictly medical discourse.

Tempo mítico nos fanzines de heavy metal

Resumo: O presente artigo tem como objetivo identificar e analisar narrativas míticas nos fanzines de heavy metal que circularam na cidade de Teresina no período entre 2000 Ã 2014. Pretendemos problematizar as técnicas de sujeição dos headbangers através dos fanzines. No trabalho os fanzines de heavy metal aparecem como “textos prescritivos” que configuram a década de 1980 como um tempo mítico provocando atrito com as técnicas de subjetivação no contexto do heavy metal. Para o estudo do objeto aqui proposto o trabalho se beneficiou das noções de José Carlos Reis (2007) sobre o conceito de tempo histórico e, bem como, das noções de sujeito presentes numa ampla literatura pós-estruturalista e notadamente em Michel Foucault (2017). A intenção do estudo é, a partir da leitura sistemática de fanzines, entender o papel do tempo mítico no contexto do heavy metal.

‘Back to the future’: The ‘new prescriptivism’ in twenty-first-century Britain

Most introductory textbooks on linguistics make a point of highlighting the distinction between descriptive and prescriptive approaches to the study of language: ‘linguistics is descriptive, not prescriptive” has long been a mantra. Although this is the consensus amongst professional linguists, prescriptivism is alive and well outside the academy. There is a huge market for prescriptive texts such as Lynn Truss’s Eats, Shoots and Leaves (2003), the best-selling non-fiction book in the UK in the year of its publication. The election of a Conservative-led coalition government in 2010 and a Conservative one in 2015 coincided with a further resurgence of prescriptive attitudes, most infamously in the reaction to a letter signed by 100 academics protesting against the education secretary’s reactionary policies and the introduction of the ‘‘SPaG” (spelling, punctuation and grammar) tests for eleven-year-old pupils. In this paper I examine the phenomenon of popular and institutional prescriptivism in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and consider why, far from receding in the face of descriptive linguistics it is, if anything, resurgent.

Etiology of Prohibitions and Regulations in the Mirror of Folk Legends and Beliefs

The author's task is to formulate some general statements on how prohibitions and regulations addressed to or attributed to the “other” (ethnic, religious) tradition are formed in the Slavic folk culture, and what cultural stereotypes affect the form and content of the prescriptive texts originating and existing in a multi-confessional cultural environment and in the cultural borderlands. We are interested in prohibitions and regulations in the context of folk legends that explain their appearance, and in connection with beliefs that play the role of a kind of fixator of certain prescriptive norms. In the etiological texts (legends, fairy tales) containing the interpretation of the ban / prescription, in addition to the motivation of the described ban / prescription (why something is prohibited or allowed), there may be a reference to the precedent, i.e. the etiology itself (what exactly was the reason, the impetus, the primary source of the ban / prescription).

Limitations on Freedom of Religion and Belief in the Jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights in the Quarter Century since Its Judgment in Kokkinakis v. Greece

Abstract The manifestation of religious beliefs under Article 9 the European Convention on Human Rights is not absolute but may be subject to prescribed limitations. This article discusses the nature and extent of those limitations, as interpreted in the case law of the European Court of Human Rights from its decision in Kokkinakis v. Greece up to the present. It contrasts the prescriptive text of the Article with its lose and inconsistent interpretation by the Court in Strasbourg. Particular attention is given to the criteria of “prescribed by law”, “necessary in a democratic society”, “public safety”, “public order, health or morals” and “the rights and freedoms of others”. It seeks to divine principles from the varied jurisprudence, particularly at its intersection with the Court’s illusory doctrine of margin of appreciation.

Order in the church: understanding councils and performing ordines in the Carolingian world

This article takes a fresh look at Carolingian councils through the prism of Ordines de Celebrando Concilio. Presenting themselves as instructions on how to hold councils, such ordines in part act as prescriptive texts aimed at ensuring that the liturgical framework around these meetings would guarantee the credibility of their conclusions – thus creating an image of ecclesiastical unity reflected both in the councils themselves and in their written records. By probing beyond these liturgical directions, it is here argued that the Carolingian ordines also aimed at maintaining an open, safe climate for holding debates that could actually push the agenda and effectuate useful correctio. The prescriptive nature of these texts not only enlarged the scale at which participants in individual councils saw themselves operate, but also served to ensure that the purity and pastoral authority of the discussants remained inviolate.