Feature Extraction

A characteristic feature of Wagnerian and post-Wagnerian opera is the tendency to link scenes with numerous and often surprisingly lengthy orchestral interludes, frequently performed with the curtain closed. Often taken for granted or treated as a filler by audiences and critics, these interludes can take on very prominent roles, representing dream sequences, journeys and sexual encounters, and in some cases becoming a highlight of the opera. Christopher Morris investigates the implications of these important but strangely overlooked passages. Combining close readings of individual musical texts with an investigation of the critical discourse surrounding the operas, Morris shows how the interludes shed light not only on the representational and narrative capacities of the orchestra, but also on the supposed 'absolute' realm of instrumental music, a concept to which many critics appealed when they associated the interludes with 'purely musical' and 'symphonic' qualities.

John Henderson explores three letters of Seneca describing visits to Roman villas, and surveys the whole collection to show how these villas work as designs for contrasting lives. Seneca's own place is ageing drastically; a recent Epicurean's paradise is a seductive oasis away from the dangers of Nero's Rome; once a fortress of the dour Rome of yesteryear, the legendary Scipio's lair was now a shrine to the old morality: Seneca revels in its primitive bath-house, dark and cramped, before exploring the garden with the present owner. Seneca brings the philosophical epistle to Latin literature, creating models for moralizing which feature self-criticism, parody and re-animated myth. Virgil and Horace come in for rough handling, as the Latin moralist wrests ethical practice and writing away from Greek gurus and texts, and into critical thinking within a Roman context. Here is powerful teaching on metaphor and translation, on self-transformation and cultural tradition.

Model order reduction (MOR) techniques reduce the complexity of VLSI designs, paving the way to higher operating speeds and smaller feature sizes. This book presents a systematic introduction to, and treatment of, the key MOR methods employed in general linear circuits, using real-world examples to illustrate the advantages and disadvantages of each algorithm. Following a review of traditional projection-based techniques, coverage progresses to more advanced MOR methods for VLSI design, including HMOR, passive truncated balanced realization (TBR) methods, efficient inductance modeling via the VPEC model, and structure-preserving MOR techniques. Where possible, numerical methods are approached from the CAD engineer's perspective, avoiding complex mathematics and allowing the reader to take on real design problems and develop more effective tools. With practical examples and over 100 illustrations, this book is suitable for researchers and graduate students of electrical and computer eng

Eilif Dahl, who died in 1993, had one of the most original and creative minds in plant geography. His approach went far beyond the description of distribution patterns and the establishment of correlations between distributions and particular climatic variables. His understanding of physiological mechanisms that influenced and controlled the observed distributional patterns was a key feature of his numerous ideas and hypotheses. He was also aware of the importance of history as an influence on present-day plant distribution, especially in arctic plants. In The Phytogeography of Northern Europe Dahl brings to bear his wide range of interests in physics, chemistry, geology, climatology, meteorology and mathematics, as well as plant ecology and plant systematics, to analyse and explain the distribution of individual plant taxa across north-western Europe. This book will stand as a testament to the ideas and inspiration of a fine scientist.

Testing matters! It can determine kids' and schools' futures. In a conference at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute, mathematicians, maths education researchers, teachers, test developers, and policymakers gathered to work through critical issues related to mathematics assessment. They examined: the challenges of assessing student learning in ways that support instructional improvement; ethical issues related to assessment, including the impact of testing on urban and high-poverty schools; the different (and sometimes conflicting) needs of the different groups; and different frameworks, tools, and methods for assessment, comparing the kinds of information they offer about students' mathematical proficiency. This volume presents the results of the discussions. It highlights the kinds of information that different assessments can offer, including many examples of some of the best mathematics assessments worldwide. A special feature is an interview with a student about his knowl

Testing matters! It can determine kids' and schools' futures. In a conference at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute, mathematicians, maths education researchers, teachers, test developers, and policymakers gathered to work through critical issues related to mathematics assessment. They examined: the challenges of assessing student learning in ways that support instructional improvement; ethical issues related to assessment, including the impact of testing on urban and high-poverty schools; the different (and sometimes conflicting) needs of the different groups; and different frameworks, tools, and methods for assessment, comparing the kinds of information they offer about students' mathematical proficiency. This volume presents the results of the discussions. It highlights the kinds of information that different assessments can offer, including many examples of some of the best mathematics assessments worldwide. A special feature is an interview with a student about his knowl

In the ancient Near East the God of Israel stands unique; he is the central character of the Old Testament. The collection of essays in this volume presents the historical background against which belief in him developed and discusses aspects of the topic that remain unresolved or largely unaddressed. What was he like? How does he differ from other gods of the ancient world? And what difference does the worship of this god make, both in the world of the Bible and now? The papers presented contribute to the continuing discussion about the God of Israel and other deities in the ancient Near East, and the emergence of monotheistic belief and worship. A multifaceted approach is adopted in which comparative, theological, historical, literary-critical, cultural, narratological, canonical, exegetical and ethical issues feature prominently.

Security has become a defining feature of contemporary public discourse, permeating the so-called 'war on terror', problems of everyday crime and disorder, the reconstruction of 'weak' or 'failed' states and the dramatic renaissance of the private security industry. But what does it mean for individuals to be secure, and what is the relationship between security and the practices of the modern state? In this timely and important book, Ian Loader and Neil Walker outline and defend the view that security remains a valuable public good. They argue that the state is indispensable to the task of fostering and sustaining liveable political communities in the contemporary world and thus pivotal to the project of civilizing security. This is a major contribution by two leading scholars in the field and will be of interest to anyone wishing to deepen their understanding of one the most significant and pressing issues of our times.

Security has become a defining feature of contemporary public discourse, permeating the so-called 'war on terror', problems of everyday crime and disorder, the reconstruction of 'weak' or 'failed' states and the dramatic renaissance of the private security industry. But what does it mean for individuals to be secure, and what is the relationship between security and the practices of the modern state? In this timely and important book, Ian Loader and Neil Walker outline and defend the view that security remains a valuable public good. They argue that the state is indispensable to the task of fostering and sustaining liveable political communities in the contemporary world and thus pivotal to the project of civilizing security. This is a major contribution by two leading scholars in the field and will be of interest to anyone wishing to deepen their understanding of one the most significant and pressing issues of our times.

Corruption has been a feature of public institutions for centuries yet only relatively recently has it been made the subject of sustained scientific analysis. Lambsdorff shows how insights from institutional economics can be used to develop a better understanding of why corruption occurs and the best policies to combat it. He argues that rather than being deterred by penalties, corrupt actors are more influenced by other factors such as the opportunism of their criminal counterparts and the danger of acquiring an unreliable reputation. This suggests a novel strategy for fighting corruption similar to the invisible hand that governs competitive markets. This strategy - the 'invisible foot' - shows that the unreliability of corrupt counterparts induces honesty and good governance even in the absence of good intentions. Combining theoretical research with state-of-the-art empirical investigations, this book will be an invaluable resource for researchers and policy-makers concerned with an

Foraminifera and thecamoebians are highly sensitive to environmental stress (natural or anthropogenic). This feature means that they can be used to biologically characterize a variety of freshwater and coastal marine environments. Due to their small size and hard shells, large quantities are also found fossilised in core samples, making them ideal for reconstructing past environmental conditions. This volume covers the specific environmental applications of these organisms and contains an introduction to the subject, detailed descriptions of methods and techniques and case studies. Written for non-specialists, this book will appeal to resource managers and consultants in the public and private sector who routinely work on coastal environmental problems. The book will also serve as a supplementary text for graduate students in many courses on environmental monitoring, ecological baseline studies and environmental science.

Lively political and public debates on war and morality have been a feature of the post-Cold War world. The Price of Peace argues that a re-examination of the just war tradition is therefore required. The authors suggest that despite fluctuations and transformations in international politics, the just war tradition continues to be relevant. However they argue that it needs to be reworked to respond to the new challenges to international security represented by the end of the Cold War and the impact of terrorism. With an interdisciplinary and transatlantic approach, this volume provides a dialogue between theological, political, military and public actors. By articulating what a reconstituted just war tradition might mean in practice, it also aims to assist policy-makers and citizens in dealing with the ethical dilemmas of war.

Lively political and public debates on war and morality have been a feature of the post-Cold War world. The Price of Peace argues that a re-examination of the just war tradition is therefore required. The authors suggest that despite fluctuations and transformations in international politics, the just war tradition continues to be relevant. However they argue that it needs to be reworked to respond to the new challenges to international security represented by the end of the Cold War and the impact of terrorism. With an interdisciplinary and transatlantic approach, this volume provides a dialogue between theological, political, military and public actors. By articulating what a reconstituted just war tradition might mean in practice, it also aims to assist policy-makers and citizens in dealing with the ethical dilemmas of war.

We view things from a certain position in time: in our language, thought, feelings and actions, we draw distinctions between what has happened, is happening, and will happen. Frequently, approaches to this feature of our lives - those seen in disputes between tensed and tenseless theories, between realist and anti-realist treatments of past and future, and in accounts of historical knowledge - embody serious misunderstandings of the character of the issues; they misconstrue the relation between metaphysics and ethics, and the way to characterize the kind of sense which tensed language has. David Cockburn argues that the notion of 'reasons for emotion' must have a central place in any account of meaning, and that the present should have no priority in our understanding of tense. This allows for a more satisfactory articulation of the place of past, present and future in our thought, and of the form which criticism of our thought might take.

From beginning to end of the Iliad, Agamemnon and Achilleus are locked in a high-stakes struggle for dominance based on their efforts to impose competing definitions of loss incurred and the nature of compensation thereby owed. This typology of scenes involving apoina, or 'ransom' and poine, or 'revenge' is the basis of Donna Wilson's detailed anthropology of compensation in Homer, which she locates in the wider context of agonistic exchange. Wilson argues that a struggle over definitions is a central feature of elite competition for status in the zero-sum and fluid ranking system characteristic of Homeric society. This system can be used to explain why Achilleus refuses Agamemnon's 'compensation' in Book 9, as well as why and how the embassy tries to mask it. Ransom, Revenge, and Heroic Identity in the Iliad thus examines the traditional semantic, cultural and poetic matrix of which compensation is an integral part.

In the late 1980s and 1990s, the advanced industrial countries considered replacing the existing analogue television infrastructure with a new digital one. A key common feature to the debates over digital TV (DTV) in the United States, Western Europe and Japan was the eventual victory of the ideas of digitalism (the superiority of everything digital over everything analogue) and of digital convergence (the merging of computing, telecommunications and broadcasting infrastructures made possible by digitalization) in public debates over standards. Jeffrey Hart's book shows how nationalism and regionalism combined with digitalism to produce three different and incompatible DTV standards in the three regions, an outcome which has led to missed opportunities in developing the new technologies. Hart's book contributes to our understanding of relations between business and government, and of competition between the world's great economic powers.

In Good Girls and Wicked Witches, Amy M. Davis re-examines the notion that Disney heroines are rewarded for passivity. Davis proceeds from the assumption that, in their representations of femininity,

Jesse Matz examines the writing of such modernists as Henry James, Joseph Conrad and Virginia Woolf, who used the word 'impression' to describe what they wanted their fiction to present. Matz redefines literary Impressionism, focusing on the way that impressions destroy standard perceptual distinctions between thinking and sensing, believing and suspecting. He argues that these writers favoured not immediate subjective sense, but rather a mode that would mediate perceptual distinctions. Just as impressions fall somewhere between thought and sense, Impressionist fiction occupies the middle ground between opposite ways of engaging with the world. Matz also argues that the resulting confusion becomes a basic plot feature of modernist fiction. This wide-ranging 2001 study addresses the problems of perception and representation that occupied writers in the early decades of the twentieth century.

The ancient novel, previously relegated to the margins of literary study, has recently taken its place at centre stage. Petronius' Satyricon, the oldest surviving work of prose fiction, is in many respects an arrestingly modern ancient novel but the inclusion within it of thirty short poems and two long ones introduces an alien feature in need of investigation. In this study, Catherine Connors draws on developments in Latin literary criticism to take a comprehensive approach to the Satyricon's poems, reminiscences of poetic texts, and the figure of the poet, assessing the ways in which they fragment and refashion established literary forms into a new amalgam of prose fiction. This book will be of interest to students of Latin literature, Neronian culture, and the early history of the novel. All Latin and Greek is translated.

Written by an international team of experts, this book brings together the fruits of recent research into all areas of Russian theatre history. Of particular interest are the chapters written by senior Russian academics, who not only reveal previously unpublished documentation but also offer alternative insights into their subjects. The History covers the whole range of Russian dramatic experience, from puppet theatre to ballet and grand opera, but its emphasis is on the practice of theatre, especially acting, and the final chapter puts Russian theatre into the wider context of Western performance and the stage. The History begins with the earliest endeavours, with rituals and entertainments, and moves through to the emergence of established drama in the eighteenth century. The history of twentieth-century Russian theatre is a special feature of the volume, with chapters following the progress of drama and performance from the revolution, through communism, up until recent years.

The control of vibrating systems is a significant issue in the design of aircraft, spacecraft, bridges and high-rise buildings. This 2001 book discusses the control of vibrating systems, integrating structural dynamics, vibration analysis, modern control and system identification. Integrating these subjects is an important feature in that engineers will need only one book, rather than several texts or courses, to solve vibration control problems. The book begins with a review of basic mathematics needed to understand subsequent material. Chapters then cover more recent and valuable developments in aerospace control and identification theory, including virtual passive control, observer and state-space identification, and data-based controller synthesis. Many practical issues and applications are addressed, with examples showing how various methods are applied to real systems. Some methods show the close integration of system identification and control theory from the state-space perspec

Inspired by the ideas of the Prague School, the theory of functional sentence perspective (FSP) is concerned with the distribution of information as determined by all meaningful elements, from intonation (for speech) to context. A central feature of FSP is communicative dynamism. Jan Firbas discusses the distribution of the degrees of communicative dynamism over sentence elements, which determines the orientation or perspective of the sentence. He examines also the relation of theme and rheme to, and implementation by, syntactic components. Special attention is paid to the relation between FSP and word order. The second part of the book deals with spoken communication and considers the place of intonation in the interplay of FSP factors, establishing the concept of prosodic prominence. It tackles the relationship between the distribution of degrees of communicative dynamism as determined by the interplay of the non-prosodic FSP factors and the distribution of degrees of prosodic promin

This collection of essays is a major contribution to the study of oral composition and ritual communication, and in particular to the use of 'parallelism' (the poetic ordering of words and phrases in alternative, duplicate form). The introduction by James J. Fox sets the topic in historical perspective, beginning with Robert Lowth's introduction of the term 'parallelism' in 1753 in his study of biblical language, demonstrating that what was once viewed as a form of composition unique to Ancient Hebrew is a feature common to many literatures around the world. The volume thus presents a remarkable picture of life in eastern Indonesia, which is both valuable in itself and useful for comparative analysis. All of the essays contain original texts with translations, together with detailed commentaries on their content and the context of their performance. The study of parallelism and its use in situations of formal communication has been receiving increasing attention from anthropologists, l

This collection addresses key issues in the historical struggle for civil rights, political rights and social rights in the United States and Germany from the late nineteenth century to the present. Using a cross-national comparative approach, this book presents national case studies that explore the similarities and differences of conceptualizing rights on both sides of the Atlantic. This book analyses the struggle for these rights by individuals and groups and how this struggle became an essential feature not only in political discourse but also in social and political practice and culture in both Germany and the United States. More specifically, the book examines the different ways rights have been denied due to race, ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation. Considerable attention is given to the impact of Nazism and the struggle for social rights during and after World War II.

How was Alexander Pope's personal experience of women transformed into poetry, and how in turn did he and his writing figure in the lives of the women he wrote about? How characteristic of his age was Pope's attitude towards women? What exactly was the role in his life of individual women such as his mother, Patty Blount and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu? Valerie Rumbold's is the first full-length study of these important issues. Making use of previously little-known manuscripts, she focuses both on Pope's own life and art, and on early eighteenth-century assumptions about women and gender. She offers readings of some of the well-known poems in which women feature prominently, and follows Pope's response throughout his writings in general. His own alienation from the dominant culture (through religion, politics and physical handicap) and his troubled fascination with certain kinds of women make this subject complex and compelling, with wide implications. Dr Rumbold brings to light new info

The lexicon is now a major focus of research in computational linguistics and natural language processing (NLP), as more linguistic theories concentrate on the lexicon and as the acquisition of an adequate vocabulary has become the chief bottleneck in developing practical NLP systems. This collection describes techniques of lexical representation within a unification-based framework and their linguistic application, concentrating on the issue of structuring the lexicon using inheritance and defaults. Topics covered include typed feature structures, default unification, lexical rules, multiple inheritance and non-monotonic reasoning. The contributions describe both theoretical results and implemented languages and systems, including DATR, the Stuttgart TFS and ISSCO's ELU. This book arose out of a workshop on default inheritance in the lexicon organized as a part of the Esprit ACQUILEX project on computational lexicography. Besides the contributed papers mentioned above, it contains a

This 1991 study deals with a specific set of institutions in nineteenth-century Athens. Relying on matrimonial contracts, travellers' accounts, memoirs and popular literature, the authors show how distinctive forms of marriage, kinship and property transmission evolved in Athens in the nineteenth century. These forms then became a feature of wider Greek society which continued into the twentieth century. Greece was the first post-colonial modern nation state in Europe whose national identity was created largely by peasants who had migrated to the city. As Athenian society became less agrarian, a new mercantile group superseded and incorporated previous elites and went on to dominate and control the new resources of the nation state. Such groups developed their own, more mobile, systems of property transmission, mostly in response to external pressures of a political and economic character. This is a persuasive piece of detective work which has advanced our knowledge of modern Greece. I

This 2006 introduction aims to share with readers the author's enjoyment of the turbulent 240-year history of a theatre that tried, often against the odds, to be 'modern'. In each of its five parts, it deals successively with history and cultural context, with the plays and the actors who caught the imagination of their era. Peter Thomson's text, always approachable, is enriched by quotations and carefully selected illustrations that capture 'the spirit of the age' under consideration. Beginning with the reopening of the playhouses under licence from Charles II, Thomson introduces the modern English theatre by breaking off at key dates - 1700, 1737, 1789 and 1843 - in order to explore both continuity and innovation. Familiar names and well-known plays feature alongside the forgotten and neglected. This is a reading of dramatic history that keeps constantly in mind the material circumstances that produced, and sometimes oppressed, a supremely popular theatre.

Video games have been a central feature of the cultural landscape for over twenty years and now rival older media like movies, television, and music in popularity and cultural influence. Yet there have been relatively few attempts to understand the video game as an independent medium. Most such efforts focus on the earliest generation of text-based adventures (Zork, for example) and have little to say about such visually and conceptually sophisticated games as Final Fantasy X, Shenmue, Grand Theft Auto, Halo, and The Sims, in which players inhabit elaborately detailed worlds and manipulate digital avatars with a vast—and in some cases, almost unlimited—array of actions and choices. In Gaming, Alexander Galloway instead considers the video game as a distinct cultural form that demands a new and unique interpretive framework. Drawing on a wide range of disciplines, particularly critical theory and media studies, he analyzes video games as something to be played rather than as texts to be

Bucchero is a very common type of fine pottery that was made by the Etruscans when their civilization was at its height, from the seventh to the fourth century BC. This study concentrates on the products of South Etruria, where the earliest and finest bucchero was made, and where the tradition lasts longest. Until recently bucchero has been little studied, and the aim of this book is to present a sequence of pottery from archaeological contexts, so that the development of the ware can be seen as a whole within a chronological framework. Many of the tomb-groups catalogued are published here for the first time. In studying the shapes careful consideration is given to the affinities with Greek and with other Etruscan wares. A full survey of the decorative techniques is included, and the pattern of distribution both within Etruria and further afield is discussed. An important feature of the book is a series of sixty pages of drawings of the profiles of every shape of bucchero pot studied.

Computers are one of the most important tools available to physicists, whether for calculating and displaying results, simulating experiments, or solving complex systems of equations. Introducing students to computational physics, this textbook, first published in 2006, shows how to use computers to solve mathematical problems in physics and teaches students about choosing different numerical approaches. It also introduces students to many of the programs and packages available. The book relies solely on free software: the operating system chosen is Linux, which comes with an excellent C++ compiler, and the graphical interface is the ROOT package available for free from CERN. This broad scope textbook is suitable for undergraduates starting on computational physics courses. It includes exercises and many examples of programs. Online resources at www.cambridge.org/0521828627 feature additional reference information, solutions, and updates on new techniques, software and hardware used in

In Eighteenth-Century Fiction and the Law of Property, Wolfram Schmidgen draws on legal and economic writings to analyse the description of houses, landscapes, and commodities in eighteenth-century fiction. His study argues that such descriptions are important to the British imagination of community. By making visible what it means to own something, they illuminate how competing concepts of property define the boundaries of the individual, of social community, and of political systems. In this way, Schmidgen recovers description as a major feature of eighteenth-century prose, and he makes his case across a wide range of authors, including Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, William Blackstone, Adam Smith, and Ann Radcliffe. The book's most incisive theoretical contribution lies in its careful insistence on the unity of the human and the material: in Schmidgen's argument, persons and things are inescapably entangled. This approach produces fresh insights into the relationship between law, lit

A primary problem in the area of natural language processing has been that of semantic analysis. This book aims to look at the semantics of natural languages in context. It presents an approach to the computational processing of English text that combines current theories of knowledge representation and reasoning in Artificial Intelligence with the latest linguistic views of lexical semantics. This results in distinct advantages for relating the semantic analysis of a sentence to its context. A key feature is the clear separation of the lexical entries that represent the domain-specific linguistic information from the semantic interpreter that performs the analysis. The criteria for defining the lexical entries are firmly grounded in current linguistic theories, facilitating integration with existing parsers. This approach has been implemented and tested in Prolog on a domain for physics word problems and full details of the algorithms and code are presented. Semantic Processing for Fi

What is Russia? Who are Russians? What is 'Russianness'? The question of national identity has long been a vexed one in Russia, and is particularly pertinent in the post-Soviet period. For a thousand years these questions have been central to the work of Russian writers, artists, musicians, film-makers, critics, politicians and philosophers. Questions of national self-identity permeate Russian cultural self-expression. This wide-ranging study, designed for students of Russian literature, culture, and history, explores aspects of national identity in Russian culture from medieval times to the present day. Written by an international team of scholars, the volume offers an accessible overview and a broad, multi-faceted introductory account of this central feature of Russian cultural history. The book is comprehensive and concise; it combines general surveys with a wide range of specific examples to convey the rich texture of Russian cultural expression over the past thousand years.

A Frequency Dictionary of German is an invaluable tool for all learners of German, providing a list of the 4,034 most frequently used words in the language. Based on a 4.2 million-word corpus which is evenly divided between spoken, fiction and non-fiction texts, the dictionary provides a detailed frequency-based list plus alphabetical and part of speech indexes.All entries in the rank frequency list feature the English equivalent, a sample sentence plus an indication of major register variation. The dictionary also contains twenty-one thematically organized lists of frequently used words on a variety of topics as well as eleven special vocabulary lists.A Frequency Dictionary of German aims to enable students of all levels to maximize their study of German vocabulary in an efficient and engaging way.

Rewriting rules, derivations and underlying representations is an enduring characteristic of generative phonology. In this book, John Coleman argues that this is unnecessary. The expressive resources of context-free Unification grammars are sufficient to characterize phonological structures and alternations. According to this view, all phonological forms and constraints are partial descriptions of surface representations. This framework, now called Declarative Phonology, is based on a detailed examination of the formalisms of feature-theory, syllable theory and the leading varieties of nonlinear phonology. Dr Coleman illustrates this with two extensive analyses of the phonological structure of words in English and Japanese. As Declarative Phonology is surface-based and highly restrictive, it is consistent with cognitive psychology and amenable to straightforward computational implementation.

Mechanisms are fundamental components of machines. They are used to transmit forces and moments and to manipulate objects in industrial machinery, robots, automobiles, aircraft, mechatronics devices and biomechanical systems. A knowledge of the kinematic and dynamic properties of mechanisms is essential for their design and control. This book describes methods and algorithms for the analysis of kinematic systems. Beginning with basic concepts, the book then discusses a variety of problem-solving approaches and computational techniques. Its distinctive feature is its focus on the contour equation as a powerful, computationally efficient tool that will help the reader to design complex spatial mechanisms. This handy text will be useful for senior or graduate students, researchers and practising engineers working in robotics, vehicle dynamics, mechatronics and machine design.

This book investigates the surprisingly large number of women who participated in the vast expansion of litigation in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. Making use of legal sources, literary texts, and the neglected records of the Court of Requests, it describes women's rights under different jurisdictions, considers attitudes to women going to court, and reveals how female litigants used the law, as well as fell victim to it. In the central courts of Westminster, maidservants sued their masters, widows sued their creditors, and in defiance of a barrage of theoretical prohibitions, wives sued their husbands. The law was undoubtedly discriminatory, but certain women pursued actively such rights as they possessed. Some appeared as angry plaintiffs, while others played upon their poverty and vulnerability. A special feature of this study is the attention it pays to the different language and tactics that distinguish women's pleadings from men's pleadings within a national equity