This book is a study of polyandry, wife-selling, and a variety of related practices in China during the Qing dynasty (1644-1912). By analyzing over 1200 legal cases from local and central court archives, Matthew Sommer explores the functions played by marriage, sex, and reproduction in the survival strategies of the rural poor under conditions of overpopulation, worsening sex ratios, and shrinking farm sizes. Polyandry and wife-selling represented opposite ends of a spectrum of strategies. At one end, polyandry was a means to keep the family together by expanding it. A woman would bring in a second husband in exchange for his help supporting her family. In contrast, wife sale was a means to survive by breaking up a family: a husband would secure an emergency infusion of cash while his wife would escape poverty and secure a fresh start with another man. Even though Qing law prohibited both practices under the rubric "illicit sexual relations," Sommer shows how magistrates charged with propagating and enforcing a fundamentalist Confucian vision of female chastity tried to cope with their social reality in the face of daunting poverty. This contradiction illuminates both the pragmatism of routine adjudication and the increasingly dysfunctional nature of the dynastic state in the face of mounting social crisis. By casting a spotlight on the rural poor and the experiences of both men and women, Sommer provides an alternative to the standard paradigms of women’s history that have long dominated scholarship on gender and sexuality in late imperial China.

Why do men abduct women? Are their motives sexual, economic, or social? How crucial is the use of violence? How important is the participation of others? What are the societal consequences of abduction? Answers to these questions can usefully be found in a historical case study of abductions as they occurred in Ireland between 1700 and 1850. Forcibly Without Her Consent describes in detail how abduction was a largely communally-sanctioned exercise in male violence against women, how it depended for success on a well established ritual, how it eluded suppression by the forces of law and order, and how it impacted class structure, marriage, and patterns of rural unrest. In fascinating detail, Thomas Power uncovers the causes and implications of abduction. Reading this book will give you a deep insight into the social origins of abduction.

This volume contains papers from the technical program of the 7th Extended Semantic Web Conference (ESWC 2010), held from May 30 to June 3, 2010, in Heraklion, Greece. ESWC 2010 presented the latest results in research and applications of Semantic Web technologies. ESWC 2010 built on the success of the former European Semantic Web Conference series, but sought to extend its focus by engaging with other communities within and outside Information and Communication Technologies, in which semantics can play an important role. At the same time, ESWC has become a truly international conference. Semantics of Web content, enriched with domain theories (ontologies), data about Web usage, natural language processing, etc., will enable a Web that p- vides a qualitatively new level of functionality. It will weave together a large network of human knowledge and make this knowledge machine-processable. Various automated services, based on reasoning with metadata and ontologies, will help the users to achieve their goals by accessing and processing infor- tion in machine-understandable form. This network of knowledge systems will ultimately lead to truly intelligent systems, which will be employed for va- ous complex decision-making tasks. Research about Web semantics can bene?t from ideas and cross-fertilization with many other areas: arti?cial intelligence, natural language processing, database and information systems, information - trieval, multimedia, distributed systems, social networks, Web engineering, and Web science.

Lady Psyche Veringham was a sharp-tongued bluestocking who had turned her attention to finding a match for her young protégé, Amanda. The Earl of Southdon appeared to her the perfect husband for Amanda—but he proved willfully uncooperative, pretending Psyche wished to win him for herself. The earl was having none of the pretty debutantes; he wanted a woman of wit and charm. Regency Romance by Nina Coombs Pykare writing as Nina Porter; originally published by Zebra