[Antonio de Saldanha da Gama's proposals to improve the slave trade "for humanitarian and economic reasons," Rio de Janeiro, 1810]. / As proposições de Antonio de Saldanha da Gama para a melhoria do tráfico de escravos, "por questões humanitárias e econômicas", Rio de Janeiro, 1810.

In 1808, Dom João VI issued an edict which regulated the shipping and treatment of slaves on the transatlantic crossing from Africa. Two years later, Antonio de Saldanha da Gama, a member of the Treasury Council, drafted a letter discussing some points of the resolution. This key figure in the Portuguese administration of Brazil argued that his respectful considerations concerning the determinations of His Royal Highness were designed to improve them "for humanitarian and economic reasons." Safeguarded in the archives of Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino, this letter is transcribed, annotated, and contextualized here, supplying an interesting perspective on the prevailing concerns and justifications about the trafficking of African slaves to Brazil.

The letter, the dictionary and the laboratory: translating chemistry and mineralogy in eighteenth-century France.

Eighteenth-century scientific translation was not just a linguistic or intellectual affair. It included numerous material aspects requiring a social organization to marshal the indispensable human and non-human actors. Paratexts and actors' correspondences provide a good observatory to get information about aspects such as shipments and routes, processes of translation and language acquisition (dictionaries, grammars and other helpful materials, such as translated works in both languages), texts acquisition and dissemination (including author's additions and corrections, oral presentations in academic meetings and announcements of forthcoming translations). The nature of scientific translation changed in France during the second half of the eighteenth century. Beside solitary translators, it also happened to become a collective enterprise, dedicated to providing abridgements (Collection académique, 1755-79) or enriching the learned journals with full translations of the most recent foreign texts (Guyton de Morveau's 'Bureau de traduction de Dijon', devoted to chemistry and mineralogy, 1781-90). That new trend clearly had a decisive influence on the nature of the scientific press itself. A way to set up science as a social activity in the provincial capital of Dijon, translation required a local and international network for acquiring the linguistic and scientific expertise, along with the original texts, as quickly as possible. Laboratory results and mineralogical observations were used to compare material facts (colour, odour, shape of crystals, etc.) with those described in the original text. By providing a double kind of validation - with both the experiments and the translations - the laboratory thus happened to play a major role in translation.

Belonging and community: understandings of "home" and "friends" among the English poor, 1750-1850.

This article is based on unique 'narratives of the poor', that is, letters from poor people to their parishes of settlement, petitions to the London Refuge of the Destitute, and letters from mothers to the London Foundling Hospital, with supportive evidence from newspapers. These display fundamental concepts among the English poor, who were often poorly literate, and who comprised the majority of the population. Discussion focuses upon their understandings of 'home', 'belonging', 'friends', and 'community'. These key concepts are related here to modern discussions, to set important concerns into historical perspective. 'Friends', valuably studied by sociologists such as Pahl, had a wide meaning in the past. 'Home' meant (alongside abode) one's parish of legal settlement, where one was entitled to poor relief under the settlement/poor laws. This was where one 'belonged'. Ideas of 'community' were held and displayed even at a distance, among frequently migrant poor, who wrote to their parishes showing strong ties of attachment, right, and local obligation. This discussion explores these issues in connection with belonging and identity. It elucidates the meaning and working of poor law settlement, and is also an exploration of popular mentalities and the semi-literate ways in which these were expressed.

[IPA secretary and patron--Freud's patient, financial administrator and friend. Anton von Freund's letters to Sigmund Freud (1916-1919)]. / IPV-sekretär und Mäzen--Freuds Patient, Vermögensverwalter und Freund: Die Briefe Anton v. Freunds an Sigmund Freud (1916-1919).

Although the letters, of which numerous and lengthy excerpts are presented in this paper, have repeatedly been used by scholars, they have so far remained unpublished. There are 45 items, written between 4. 1. 1916 and 13. 7. 1919. They indicate a passionate transference to Freud, unfolding against the background of two Hungarian revolutions. After suffering a relapse of his cancer, v. Freund had several stretches of analysis with Freud. While he was better, he established two major funds: one of them allowing the foundation of the psychoanalytic publishing house, the other destined to sponsor a psychoanalytic clinic in Budapest. V. Freund helped organize the Budapest IPA congress, became a member of the "secret committee" and started to actively conduct analyses. Freud was very attached to him and felt deeply shaken by the inexorable progression of v. Freund's disease and then death in January 1920.

Attitudes to abortion in the era of reform: evidence from the Abortion Law Reform Association correspondence.

This article examines letters sent by members of the general public to the Abortion Law Reform Association (ALRA) in the decade immediately before the 1967 Abortion Act. It shows how a voluntary organisation, in their aim of supporting a specific cause of unclear legality, called forth correspondence from those in need. In detailing the personal predicaments of those facing an unwanted pregnancy, this body of correspondence was readily deployed by ALRA in their efforts to mobilise support for abortion law reform, thus exercising a political function. A close examination of the content of the letters and the epistolary strategies adopted by their writers reveals that as much as they were a lobbying tool for changes in abortion law, these letters were discursively shaped by debates surrounding that very reform.

Living above the shop: home, business, and family in the English "Industrial Revolution".

This article explores the living arrangements and familial relations of small business households in northwest English towns between 1760 and 1820. Focusing on evidence from inventories and personal writing, it examines the homes that such households lived and worked in and the ways in which space was ordered and used: indicating that access to particular spaces was determined by status. This study suggests both the continuance of the "household family" into the nineteenth century (rather than its more modern, "nuclear" variant) and the existence of keenly felt gradations of status within households making it likely that the constitution of "the family" differed according to one's place in the domestic hierarchy.

Freud in Trieste: journey to an ambiguous city.

This article provides an insightful exploration of the relationship between Sigmund Freud and the city of Trieste. Through an analysis of the correspondence between Freud and his friend Eduard Silberstein, Gandolfi follows those places visited by the future father of psychoanalysis and analyses their link to Freud's life. The journey to Trieste is considered as an experience that played a fundamental role in his future decisions as well as in the development of some of his psychoanalytic theories. The article eventually relates the ambiguous nature of the city - a peculiar space in with North and South, East and West converge - to Freud's own Triestine experience, that not only remits to his initial scientific researches, but also symbolizes a first significant contact with the world of sexuality.

Botany and zoology in the late seventeenth-century Philippines: the work of Georg Josef Camel SJ (1661-1706).

Georg Josef Camel (1661-1706) went to the Spanish colony of the Philippine Islands as a Jesuit lay brother in 1687, and he remained there until his death. Throughout his time in the Philippines, Camel collected examples of the flora and fauna, which he drew and described in detail. This paper offers an overview of his life, his publications and the Camel manuscripts, drawings and specimens that are preserved among the Sloane Manuscripts in the British Library and in the Sloane Herbarium at the Natural History Museum, London. It also discusses Camel's links and exchanges with scientifically minded plant collectors and botanists in London, Madras and Batavia. Among those with whom Camel corresponded were John Ray, James Petiver, and the Dutch physician Willem Ten Rhijne.

Corresponding affections: emotional exchange among siblings in the Nassau family.

This article examines the nature of emotional exchange among the siblings who were the children of William the Silent, leader of the nascent Dutch Republic. Using evidence from extensive familial correspondence, it asks how the language of emotions could constitute forms of power within the family, by analyzing how actions and expressions of emotion were presented, discussed, and interpreted in epistolary form, to whom, and with what intention and impact. The article studies social, geographic, linguistic, and other distinctions between siblings in their use of affective discourses in correspondence and argues that attention to affective language can help to elucidate the agentive force of emotions in both reflecting and informing notions of power within the family.

Fraught relations in the letters of Laura Cereta: marriage, friendship, and humanist epistolarity.

Laura Cereta is unique among Quattrocento female humanists in directly addressing the position of women as wives and as friends in her substantial corpus of erudite Latin epistolary prose. Questioning the ideals that governed intellectual, social, and personal expectations of matrimony, Cereta's letters reflect her self-consciously double status as humanist and spouse. Her fierce critique of marriage as a site of female oppression and complicity implies an alternative that requires of humanists, husbands, and wives a radical rethinking of marriage in terms of friendship, as well as of the very project of humanist epistolarity.

In the name of the father: conceptualizing "Pater Familias" in the letters of William the Silent's children.

For much of their childhood and adult life, the twelve surviving children of William the Silent were separated linguistically and geographically. Many of the children forged important relationships with male primary carers who were not their biological parents. This paper explores the children's correspondence with their biological father William and with paternal figures to understand competing forms of familial authority among William's children. This paper places particular interest on analysis of the gendered negotiation of paternal bonds in the letters of William's sons and daughters, as they established multiple relationships with father figures during their childhood.

Correspondence of Charles Darwin on James Torbitt's project to breed blight-resistance potatoes.

The most prolific of Darwin's correspondents from Ireland was James Torbitt, an enterprising grocer and wine merchant of 58 North Street, Belfast. Between February 1876 and March 1882, 141 letters were exchanged on the feasibility and ways of supporting one of Torbitt's commercial projects, the large-scale production and distribution of true potato seeds (Solan um tuberosum) to produce plants resistant to the late blight fungus Phytophthora infestans, the cause of repeated potato crop failures and thus the Irish famines in the nineteenth century. Ninety-three of these letters were exchanged between Torbitt and Darwin, and 48 between Darwin and third parties, seeking or offering help and advice on the project. Torbitt's project required selecting the small proportion of plants in an infested field that survived the infection, and using those as parents to produce seeds. This was a direct application of Darwin's principle of selection. Darwin cautiously lobbied high-ranking civil servants in London to obtain government funding for the project, and also provided his own personal financial support to Torbit.