The ancient Anglo-Saxon and Germanic month names related to agricultural activities and meteorology have left traces in names still used in Germany, Holland and Denmark in the 19th century. Nowadays, in a number of East European languages (Croatian, Czech, Ukrainian, Polish, Byelorussian, Lithuanian, Finnish) the names of the months still refer to seasonal agricultural labours or meteorological conditions.

The article argues that the question of this Focus about national models versus local aspirations must be supplemented with the question of a European dimension. The question is whether a European social model is conceivable in parallel to or beyond the local, the regional and the national models. The article argues that the question of prosperity in Europe must have a reasonable dimension of political redistribution of the fruits of economic growth. The concept of prosperity does not only have a bearing on the economic but also on the social. The article critically discusses the concepts of model and path dependency. Model is seen as a stereotype emerging in the dynamics between reflection on Self and imagination of the Other. Path dependencies are seen as trajectories laid out towards the past for a better understanding of the present, as ex post mental constructions, but they have no or little prognostic value. The argument is for a soft version of path dependency as a heuristic tool as opposed to hard versions with an ambition of prediction. The problem with the concept as such is that it is inscribed in a long tradition of ideals of predictability in social sciences based on a structural instead of a constructivist view of history and society.

Was there a Scientific Revolution at any time between 1550 and 1800? The question comes to asking whether ‘revolution’ is a good metaphor for the course of natural knowledge during early modern times. According to the findings presented here, the metaphor is useful, that is, productive of insights, if it is taken in analogy to a major political revolution. It then suggests a later onset, and a swifter career, for the Scientific Revolution than is usually prescribed, and reveals Newton not as its culmination but as its counterpoise. The analysis also discloses an unexpected analogy between the universities of the thirteenth century and the learned societies of the seventeenth.

In this study, we first briefly review the basic properties of a particular set of neurons that discharge both when the individuals execute a specific action and when they observe another individual doing a similar action. These neurons are called mirror neurons. We then show that mirror neurons mediate our capacity to understand actions done by others. In the second part of the study we discuss the role of the mirror mechanism in intention understanding. We conclude with a review of recent data suggesting that a deficit in the mirror neuron mechanism may underlie some aspects of autism.

Attempting to combine cultural history with translation studies, this article examines translation between languages as a special case of a more general phenomenon, translation between cultures. It surveys printed translations made in Europe between 1500 and 1700, discussing which kinds of people translated which kinds of book from and into which languages. Particular attention is given to the reconstruction of the early modern ‘regime’ of translation, in other words the manner (free or literal, domesticating or ‘foreignizing’) in which translations were made.

Academics all over the world rightly desire to understand how modern science has come about. Indeed there was a time when historians of science had on offer a clear-cut conception of how that happened. But ongoing innovation in historiographical approaches has rendered the period from Galileo to Newton ever more elusive. Its monolithic coherence has been dissolved, a mood of sceptical resignation reigns in the profession over the very possibility of treating seventeenth-century science as more than a string of loosely connected episodes. I argue that, without returning to a historiographical past definitively behind us, coherence may be restored at a higher level of sophistication. Cross-cultural comparison, and unusual ways of dealing with historical concepts and causes, are proper tools to revitalize the issue and come up with partly novel answers to a question that in any case refuses to go away.

Globalization is placing European societies under pressure to change. In the 1990s, researchers identified particular national models of capitalism. These were argued to consist of integrated and reinforcing institutions that created specific rules of the game for economic actors. These rules favoured the development of globally competitive firms in particular sectors where the institutional characteristics of the home society facilitated the building of distinctive types of capabilities. In this view, a global division of labour was developing based on institutional differences. Thus, national policy makers needed to reinforce institutional advantage and institutional specialisation by incremental adaptations to globalization. Reforms needed to be consistent with the underlying model of capitalism. This paper challenges such a view. It argues that firms are highly innovative and use institutions not as constraints but as resources that enable them to build new capabilities. It further argues that institutions are more diverse, malleable and multi-levelled than the national models perspective recognizes. Thus, options for change are much broader than predicted by the path-dependent national models framework. Indeed, the main issue for European societies in response to globalization is to ensure diversity and experimentation rather than simply seeking to reproduce a dominant logic.

Modern societies are characterised by profound changes in both working conditions and family formation. Today's workplaces are marked by high flexibility, great job instability and variable working hours. A dual-earner family has replaced the traditional male-breadwinner family and the norm is two working adults. However, the pattern of women's involvement in employment differs in all labour markets depending on the gendered division of paid work, unpaid work and care obligations. These differences can be seen as the combined effect of the individual household strategies and the shape of family and labour market policies in the European welfare regimes. The article analyses household strategies in combining paid work, unpaid work and care in four European countries – Denmark, the Netherlands, Sweden and the United Kingdom. The main conclusion is that the division of paid work, unpaid work as well as caring obligations is gendered in all four countries. Compared with women, men tend to be more flexible, have more secure positions in the labour market and seem to be more involved in unpaid voluntary activities and seem thus more integrated in the society and have a higher level of civic participation. On the other hand, today, an increasing number of women are fully active in the labour market and their level of participation in civic activities becomes more and more similar to men's. However, the burdens of caring for children and other members of the household are still very unevenly divided between men and women, which makes the conflicts between obligations at work and in the households significantly more troublesome for women than for men.

Translation has probably become the dominant means of communication between European literatures and, in consequence, may be considered a privileged object of study for Comparative Literature. Yet the complex nature of translation has hardly been recognized as an interlingual as well as an intralingual and intersemiotic operation. Translation between literatures covers two possible directions and should be labelled accordingly as either ‘intranslation’ or ‘extranslation’. In order to understand the complex roles all these translation forms have played during the history of European literatures and of European interliterary contacts, an explanatory model is needed that links the study of literatures and of interliterary relations: according to systems theory, literatures are to be understood as complex networks of relations that regulate both their internal structure and relations with other systems. Examples of translation figures and of translation flows help to show how translations contribute to the establishment of macro-European literary networks.

Because of its clear-cut and logical narrative structure, the story of the Scientific Revolution from Copernicus to Newton is essential to an understanding of the shape of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century European History. Moreover, the crucial role of scientific discovery in helping to bring about the victory of the ‘moderns’ over the ‘ancients’ in the late seventeenth century provides a central reason for marking this period as the end of the age of the Renaissance. Regardless of problems of definition, therefore, the Scientific Revolution is of crucial importance to the enterprise of organizing the past into distinct and coherent periods.

In contrast to other animals, humans are good at mind-reading in the sense that they can represent the contents of the minds of others. In this article, the competence for inter-subjectivity is divided into representing the emotions, the attention, the intentions and the beliefs and knowledge of others. Recent attempts to exploit control theory for modelling various cognitive functions are discussed and it is outlined how this modelling approach can be combined with the analysis of inter-subjectivity.

In a survey of the writing of literary histories in Europe, it is first pointed out that, in classical Antiquity and in the early Christian period from the fourth to the 12th centuries, such histories were transnational. After the Middle Ages, in which we find only catalogues of particular libraries, the rise of the European nation states in early modern times motivated the writing of national literary histories. With a concentration on the development in Britain, it is then shown that this development reached its peak in the 19th century, yet is still very strong today. In comparison, some examples of histories of European literature show that such transnational histories may also be informed primarily by the principle of prodesse in presenting either written culture or only what seems favourable for the understanding of national literary history; they may, however, also give more attention to literature and the imagination than to nations or culture and in that way foster delectare.

George Francis Fitzgerald is known to most students of physics for his proposal of the Fitzgerald (-Lorentz) Contraction, but this is a minor episode in a remarkable life. Many of his ideas found expression through others. His powerful influence on the physics of his time has been reconstructed from his correspondence, as leader of the Maxwellians.

In every culture, man has used drugs to dispel anxiety, stimulate productivity, and to increase the feelings of joy and satisfaction. Drugs have also had an undeniable influence on art and culture. These substances become referred to as ‘drugs of abuse’ if their repeated consumption is triggered or induced by psychological or physical compulsion, often leading to conflict with society, either due to neglect of family or social duties, and also to criminal activities in order to obtain the materials. Drug abuse particularly affects young people and has become one of the most important and widely discussed issues in society. It is therefore an important task in medical science to find answers to how drugs exert their effect and what leads to addiction and permanent consumption.

The author starts from an observed increase in theoretical contributions to the debate on neurotheology, illustrated by the example of the moral implications of certain discourse types in the novel God's Brain (Johler and Burow). Central scriptural passages of the Judeo-Christian tradition are then interpreted; a crucial shared aspect of these is the implication of an eternal divine memory, the physiological dimension of which has fostered, not just in terminology, a general openness of theology from the ‘neuronal turn’ to the neurotheological diagnostics since the late 19th century. Once the question of a possible self-reflection by the neurologist is systematically excluded, it becomes obvious that the ‘twilight of neurosciences’ still contains a considerable ideological potential. This is particularly evident in light of the questions addressed since the 1970s, despite the most modern methods in imaging and measurement.

Travelogues on expeditions in the 1760s to Tahiti and Yemen among other places are part of the early reshaping of Europe. They display the features of a historical threshold or ‘Sattelzeit’ between the classical and the modern world. But these travelogues also demonstrate another paradigmatic shift with important impact on the conditions for thinking of Europe in present day literary history. Some travelogues inaugurate in their rhetorical practice and anthropological content a problematic cultural relativism and aestheticism in relation to the world outside Europe. Other texts express doubts and contradictions, hesitating without being relativistic, focusing on cultural processes and concrete specifics rather than on essences, and adopting a pluridimensional perspective on the customs the traveller is confronted with. While the former track leads to the dead-end of reductive schematism of 19th century Orientalism, the latter may serve as a relevant model for rethinking Europe as part of a globalised world today. In what follows, the travel writing on Tahiti by James Cook, Bougainville and Diderot, Carsten Niebuhr's travelogue from his expedition to Yemen, Flaubert's Voyage en É:gypte, and Gauguin's NoaNoa, are analysed.

Drawing on the traditions and perspectives of the author's own family and relatives, which included George Francis Fitzgerald, the society in which this notable physicist lived and worked in the late nineteenth century is sketched.