Kevin Lewis November 18, 2025 The Political Limits of the Patriarchy: Women’s Rights in Early Representative Institutions Carissa Tudor Perspectives on Politics, forthcoming Abstract: Political scientists often assume that women had no political rights before the twentieth century. Archival records show that this is not the case and reveal an unlikely group of politically active women: Catholic nuns. Using novel data for more than 150 assembly meetings between 1493 and 1789, I demonstrate that ecclesiastical women exercised political rights systematically across France, despite a patriarchal church and monarchy. Ecclesiastical women had political rights because they were economic actors with a stake in state finances and local affairs. Theoretically, I argue that early representative practices ought to be viewed as a tool used by rulers to increase compliance with governance activities. Accordingly, rulers had an incentive to afford rights of representation to those actors on whose compliance they depended: most often, these were economic actors, including some women. From this perspective, select women’s inclusion should have been the default in many early representative institutions. This logic extends beyond ecclesiastical women in France, turning on its head the taken-for-granted assumption of women’s historical political exclusion. The Medieval Origins of Spousal Consent Clara Piano & Ennio Piano University of Mississippi Working Paper, October 2025 Abstract: This paper examines the medieval origins of spousal consent, the norm requiring that marriages be contracted willingly and free from pressure from third parties. We argue that this norm resulted from the Catholic Church’s consolidation of legal authority over marriage in Western Europe in the 11th-12th centuries. Committed doctrinally to the belief that marriages could not be dissolved and that remarriage was therefore impermissible (i. e., marriage indissolubility), the Church was compelled to enforce high consent requirements to the formation of new unions. Using a simple theoretical model, we show that the Church’s optimal level of spousal consent is higher when remarriage is not allowed. Higher consent requirements mitigate the negative effect of indissolubility on the number of marriages contracted. The development of a theory of spousal consent marked a sharp break from pre-Christian practice, which gave parents substantial control over the choice of spouse. It also contrasted with Eastern Orthodoxy and Protestantism, both of which permitted remarriage after divorce. Our analysis suggests that the Church’s insistence on free consent was a necessary institutional complement to its unique stance on indissolubility, shaping marriage law and family structure in ways that reverberated throughout European history. Antisemitic hate crimes in New York City: An analysis of administrative data, 2019-2024 Janet Rosenbaum Journal of Public Health Policy, December 2025, Pages 816-829 Abstract: The Israel-Hamas war that began on 7 October 2023 may have spurred anti-Jewish hate crimes, which are associated with measurable health harms including worsened cardiometabolic biomarkers. This study evaluated whether anti-Jewish hate crimes in New York City increased during the Israel-Hamas war using administrative data representing 3255 hate crimes between 2019 and 2024. In 26 of 72 observed months, anti-Jewish hate crimes outnumbered the combined total of all other hate crimes. Compared with other hate crimes, anti-Jewish hate crimes were more likely to be felonies (63% versus 38%, p https://www.nationalaffairs.com/blog/detail/findings-a-daily-roundup/in-the-image-of-god
In the Image of God
