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For many years I have kept on my writing desk the statuette of a holy woman warrior. Clad in a wrap-around cloak, looking intently into infinity through slightly downcast eyes, she cuts a rather sad but awe-inspiring figure. She is resting her left hand on a mighty down-turned sword, while holding up a book in her right. I choose to believe it is just any book, though it shows clear signs of bring the book of books – the holy scripture of the Christian faith. This statuette is very special as it was given to me by someone I love and lost. We bought it during a day trip to Antwerp and when I first got it, I did not know who she was. Not many people know about Dympna.

Protestant missionaries have recently been praised for their comparatively benign features concerning their support of women’s education in Africa. Using a novel dataset of 5,202 Protestant brides born between 1880 and 1945 from urban and rural Uganda, this paper offers a first pass at analysing empirically the role of mission education on African women’s socio-economic position within the household. The paper finds that although mission education raised the sampled brides’ literacy skills way above female national levels, they were largely excluded from participating in the colonial wage labour market. In this context, the missionary society presented an almost exclusive source of female wage labour in areas of religious service, schooling and medical care. While literacy per se did not affect women’s marriage behaviour, women who worked for the missionaries married significantly later in life and married men closer to their own age, signalling a shift in the power balance between parents and daughters and between husband and wife. On average, daughters of fathers deeply entrenched in the missionary movement had the highest chances to access wage employment, emphasizing the importance of paternal mission networks for Protestant women’s work outside the household during colonial times.

This paper discusses the way the newly formed political entities and the local militias engage in statebuilding practices during Libya's transitional period of 2011–12. Focusing on the encounters between these actors in the security field, it provides insight into the capacity and strategy of national actors to build state structures and to develop the political arrangements that they deem necessary. It does so by identifying the key actors involved, as well as the interactions between them and the constantly evolving relations of control, power and authority. It shows how actors in the security field engage with each other in their efforts to expand and to institutionalize networks and influence, and the competition and alignments with other security actors that are active in the transitional phase and thereafter.

In South Africa, the frequent positioning of men's sexual behaviours as a prime driver of the HIV epidemic has generated much interest in men's sexuality. However, the relational nature of dominant male norms that exacerbate the risk of HIV transmission is inadequately understood. This study used sexual biographies to explore how men and women negotiate gendered norms and how this affects their sexual and reproductive health (SRH). A total of 50 sexual-history interviews and 10 focus group discussions were conducted with men, and 25 sexual-history interviews with women, with participants sampled from three age categories (ages 18–24, 25–55 and 55+years), a range of cultural and racial backgrounds and urban and rural sites across five provinces in South Africa. The narratives illustrate that men and women's SRH is largely dependent on the type and quality of their relationships. Men's sexuality was regularly depicted as being detached from intimacy and uncontrollable, which was premised as being opposite from and/or superior to women's sexuality and could justify men's high-risk sexual behaviours. Yet many participants also supported gender equitable relationships and endorsed accountable and healthy SRH behaviours. The narratives reveal that HIV-risky dominant male norms should be addressed relationally for the sake of better SRH outcomes.

There is now a general scholarly consensus that the concentration of rural people into settlements in Western Europe (as opposed to dispersed or scattered habitations across the countryside) occurred in various stages between the eighth and twelfth centuries, though with regional divergences in precise timing, speed, formation, and intensity. What is clear from the literature is that a “one-size fits all” model for settlement development across Western Europe is not possible. Concentrated settlements appeared in certain parts of Europe for different reasons. This article discusses the strengths and limitations of four of the most influential frameworks for explaining patterns of medieval settlement concentration and their relation to social and economic change. The frameworks under analysis emphasize, respectively, power, coercion and lordship; communalism and territorial formalization; field systems and resource management; and urbanization and market-integration.

Central and Eastern Europe is a region with widely divergent development paths. Until World War II, these countries experienced comparable growth patterns. Whereas Austria and West Germany remained part of the capitalist West and underwent periods of rapid growth, other countries, under state socialist regimes, experienced, on average, far lower growth rates. The lack of data, however, often limits the possibilities of a detailed, quantitative analysis. In this paper, we use a new data set on physical and human capital in seven Central and East European countries for the period 1920-2006 to calculate their effect on economic growth. In addition, we analyze the effect of including the quality of education in human capital. This allows us to perform a growth accounting analysis with the several production factors for Central Europe between 1920 and the present. The difference in growth path across countries is partly explained by differences in technical efficiency.

Migration always played an important role in Dutch society. However, little quantitative evidence on its effect on economic development is known for the period before the twentieth century even though some stories exist about their effect on the Golden Age. Applying a VAR analysis on a new dataset on migration and growth for the period 1570-1800, we find that migration had a positive effect on factor accumulation during the whole period, and a positive direct effect on the per capita income during the Golden Age. This seems to confirm those studies that claim that the Dutch economy during its Golden Age at least partially benefitted from immigration.

Our article aims to detect differences in behaviour towards the capital and land market of households of different sizes and levels of income. Participation in markets for real estate, capital, and ships was considerable, not only among middling and elite groups but also among the poor. Large households were most active in markets, incurring significantly greater debt. Poor households with a low supply of labour were relatively active, purchasing houses and ships, and incurring debts, possibly in order to cope with a lack of parental support. Middling-group households with a low supply of labour primarily sold houses and invested in the capital market, adjusting capital assets to declining labour supply at the end of their life cycle, thus creating cash rents to be able to survive old age. © 2013 © European Historical Economics Society. (Less)

Spoils of Truce: Corruption and State-Building in Postwar Lebanon

Karen Barad's work distinguishes itself as a diffraction pattern of quantum physics, feminist/queer thought and/as philosophy. In order to gauge the ethico-onto-epistemological impact that the shift toward 'quantum' has on theorizations of what we call 'world' and 'Being'—those 'big' philosophical questions—it helps to relate her thought to other philosophical endeavors that also work on this foundational level. In this contribution I propose to read Barad's quantum ontology alongside Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's urgent quest of immanence. It is this concern for immanence, according to their final collaboration What is Philosophy?, which still has to be seen as "the burning issue of all philosophy".

Negotiating the Asiatic Route: Financing the Dutch East India Company, Enkhuizen Chamber, 1602-1622During its first twenty years the Dutch East India Company, or voc, struggled with the disadvantages of operations being spread over six local chambers, as imposed by its 1602 charter. Mirroring the Dutch Republic’s urban particularism, this operational fragmentation effectively bankrupted chambers if ships failed to return. Using the ledgers of Enkhuizen, one of the smaller chambers, we detail the difficulties with which it grappled and chart the slow process of overcoming them through the harmonisation of administrative procedures and other trust-building measures. These culminated in the company directors claiming limited liability for debt, which until now they were generally thought to have possessed from the start.

Songs aimed at the Dutch youth became a booming business in the Dutch Republic. In contemporary Western culture, such popular songs constitute an important vehicle for expressing youth identities. With regard to the Low Countries, it is this article’s hypothesis that in the booming business of songs composed by and for youngsters – loosely defined here as ‘unmarried young people’ – early stages of these modern processes of identity formation are visible. By exploring this vast and unique corpus and its functionality in the context of the NWO research project ‘Dutch Songs On Line’, this article aims to contribute to the international debate on youth identities, more specifically to the much debated question when ‘adolescence’ as a category was discovered: in the 19th century, or in the early modern era? Building on several trends in the existing literature the first part of this article will offer a framework for the analysis of the identity formation function of the songs for the early modern Dutch youth. The second part is dedicated to a case study: focusing on songs about and for students the potential of this type of research is explored.

In this article I elaborate on the potential role of the arts in the becoming post-apartheid of South Africa. As the close readings of discursive and visual artefacts such as Country of my Skull (Antjie Krog), The Man who Sang and the Woman who kept Silent (Judith Mason), and Indlovukati (Nandipha Mntambo) underline, articulating the memory of trauma in order to be able to create something new is not a linear and finite process but a cycle that has to be reiterated, time and again. Art’s dialogical character, materiality, and medium specificity allow it to perform contested truths and articulate complexities, in such a way as to help constitute new and multilayered communities.

Public acts of remembrance are as much about shaping the future as about recollecting the past. This interplay between recollection and future-building has been implicit in much of the work done in the field of cultural memory in the last years. It has been explicitly at the core of the burgeoning field of transitional justice, informed as it is by the belief that future peace and stability depends crucially on finding ways of ‘coming to terms’ with past violence. This special issue, brought together by three editors from different disciplines, aims to bring debates within memory studies and in the field of transitional justice into a more intense dialogue. A central concern is with critically analysing, from a multidisciplinary perspective, the interplay between the many practices of public remembrance in post-conflict societies in relation to their impact on social relations and individual subjects. 1 The mnemonic practices examined include the cornerstones of discussions in transitional justice – legal tribunals, truth commissions, official apologies, reparations – but go beyond these cornerstones to include other, less-codified forms of commemoration (memorials, museums, street performances and the arts) that operate sometimes in conjunction, sometimes in tension, with legal procedures and that are often initiated by non-governmental actors. By exploring the interplay between these various forms of remembrance in relation to the fault-lines dividing particular societies, this special issue gives fresh insight into the multilayeredness of memory and the complex socio-cultural dynamic between remembrance and present-day alliances. Taken together, moreover, the articles also reveal some of the fault-lines within the reconciliation scenario itself, by addressing not just the practices and outcomes of reconciliatory acts of remembrance, but also the discourses surrounding them. In his famous essay ‘What is a Nation?’ (1947–61[1882]) Ernest Renan already linked national solidarity to overcoming past divisions through selective remembrance. Since all nations have known periods of conflict, Renan argued, it is necessary for people not only to be able to remember their common past but also to forget divisive events (such as the Saint-Barthelemy massacre in France) whose memory would only serve to reproduce old conflicts in present-day society. Since Renan, and certainly since the emergence of memory studies as a field of research, we have learned that collective forgetting and collective remembering are equally complex processes. 2 But the idea that the mediated production of common memory narratives can and should be ‘engineered’

Until quite recently, GDP growth between ca. 1 ce and the late Middle Ages was considered non-existent or even negative. Recently, largely on account of increasing interest in historical national accounting, the late-medieval figures have been revised upward, in line with an upward adjustment in the estimated shares of manufacturing and pasture. Leaving GDPs dating from the ancient world unaltered would consequently generate figures indicating increased economic growth during the first millennium ce. A considerable number of studies of the late-medieval period (the object of increasing attention on the part of specialists in early economic history) have caused estimates for the ancient one to be revised upwards, essentially leaving estimates of the changes in economic development over time unaltered. These studies, however, have focused on the Roman Empire and Italia while there is a consensus in the literature that it was quite unrepresentative of all ancient societies with its relatively high share of GDP from the manufacturing sector of the economy. We therefore estimate a new per capita income for another contemporary agrarian society: ancient Mesopotamia. In addition, by examining manufacturing and pasture—the two main reasons for higher income which have been identified in the literature—we have found a tentative explanation for the fact that ancient Mesopotamia's per capita income deviated from that of Rome.

Ideas about the future of Europe have been articulated from the late 1940s in tandem with ideas about the European past and the need to overcome its violence. This has led to the gradual emergence of a master-narrative that found expression in the Nobel Peace Prize of 2012 as well as in the planning of a "European House of History" in Brussels, which sees the European Union as the outcome of an ability to overcome the divisions of the past. Despite the availability of such a master-narrative, however, policy-makers continue to express their concern about the failure of citizens to identify with the European project. This article builds on recent developments in cultural memory studies to engage critically with these ongoing public debates. While sharing their underlying premise that collective memory is a key resource in promoting present and future solidarity, it challenges the prevailing concept of memory, modeled on nineteenth-century nationalism, that sees it as a common legacy exclusively inherited by a pregiven group. It proposes instead a dynamic, performative, and affiliative model of memory production based on its capacity to renegotiate the borders of communities rather than merely express and enshrine old ones. This transformative view of memory is more appropriate when conceiving of new forms of citizenship within a rapidly changing European Union than the ethnic-nationalist models inherited from the nineteenth century.

Although the importance of New Institutional Economics and the institutional approach for understanding pre-industrial economic development and the early growth of markets are widely accepted, it has proven to be difficult to assess more directly the effects of institutions on the functioning of markets. This paper uses empirical research on the rise of markets in late medieval Holland to illuminate some of the factors behind the development of the specific institutional framework of markets for land, labour, capital and goods, and some effects of these institutions on the actual functioning of the markets. The findings are corroborated by a tentative comparison with the functioning of markets in Flanders and eastern England.

In this paper, we analyse the functioning of private capital markets in Holland in the late medieval period. We argue that in the absence of banks and state agencies involved in the supply of credit, entrepreneurs' access to credit was determined by two interrelated factors. The first was the quality of property rights protection and the extent to which properties could be used as collateral. The second was the level of interest in borrowing money at the time as well as such borrowing compared with the interest rates on risk-free investments. For our case study, the small town of Edam and its hinterland, De Zeevang, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, we demonstrate that properties were used as collateral on a large scale and that interest rates on both small and large loans were relatively low (about 6 percent). As a result, many households (whether headed by men or women) owned financial assets and/or debts, and the degree of financial sophistication was relatively high. Copyright , Oxford University Press.

À travers l’histoire, peu de territoires ont été célébrés autant que les anciens Pays-Bas pour leur créativité artistique et leur esprit d’innovation. Aujourd’hui encore, cette tradition artistique et culturelle particulière, dont les origines remontent au début de l’époque moderne, reste associée aux territoires actuels de la Belgique et des Pays-Bas. Il suffit de penser à Jan van Eyck, qui stupéfia les Italiens par une utilisation unique de la peinture à l’huile ; aux tapisseries flamandes, qui conquirent en un rien de temps l’Europe de l’époque ; aux architectes amstellodamois du xviie siècle, qui jouissaient alors d’une grande renommée dans les pays baltes ; aux nus de Rubens, devenus proverbiaux ; ou encore aux fijnschilders de l’école de Leyde, recherchés aujourd’hui encore par de riches industriels américains. Toutefois, aussi unique et frappante que fût cette qualité partagée par les Pays-Bas du Nord (grosso modo les Pays-Bas actuels) et les Pays-Bas du Sud (grosso modo la Belgique actuelle), le phénomène n’a guère été étudié dans sa globalité : sur le comment et le pourquoi de cette caractéristique commune, la recherche est quasiment inexistante. Les raisons sont à rechercher notamment dans le nationalisme du xixe siècle, qui a introduit une forte opposition identitaire entre la Belgique et les Pays-Bas. Depuis lors, l’historiographie affiche une constante : le maintien d’une stricte distinction entre les deux territoires et, par conséquent, l’étude séparée de leur production artistique. 2Ces dernières années, des voix se sont élevées, çà et là, pour réclamer une nouvelle approche qui dépasse cette division artificielle et abandonne le point de vue nationaliste. L’adoption de nouvelles perspectives permettrait d’aboutir à une conception historiquement plus correcte. Partant de là, plusieurs questions se posent : quels sont les angles d’approche possibles ? Sur la base de quelles sources ? Quelle vision renouvelée peut-on attendre ?

The existing studies into Dutch translations of German religious texts suggest that literary-religious culture in the Dutch Republic did not undergo significant transformation during the course of the seventeenth century as a result of German-Dutch exchange. There is even more reason to assume that German illustrated religious literature remained out of the focus of Dutch audiences: visual additions to religious texts, popular in German publications as a result of the Lutheran approach to word-image interaction, encountered resistance in the Dutch Republic where the development of illustrated religious literature was restricted and delayed compared to the Republic’s neighbouring countries. A closer look at two cases of German-Dutch literary exchange in the field of religious emblematics suggests that the restrictive Dutch visual practices were at times stimulated and innovated by the import of German models. The two cases discussed in this article give us reason to advance the very tentative hypothesis that the German-Dutch contact was at times critical to the growth of the use of religious imagery in Dutch religious literature. Finally, a case is made in favour of attending more to the international exchange of religious imagery in order to chart the impact of the Reformation in Northern Europe.

Comparative analysis of the markets for land, labor, and capital in north-central Italy and the Low Countries in the late Middle Ages and the early modern period reveals that urbanization in itself was not the crucial variable in the quality and effect of developing factor markets. More important was the counterweight offered in this process by territorial lords and rural interests to the influence of urban elites. Without this counterweight, urban elites could exploit factor markets to their own ends.

This paper connects current studies of post-socialist nostalgia to the issue of feminist genealogies in the contemporary European context. Studies of post-socialist nostalgia can prove significant not only for the former socialist East - to which they have traditionally been limited - but also for the “former West”, that is post-Cold War Western Europe. In the first part of my paper I draw a connection between feminist genealogies and post-socialist nostalgia in the former East, looking in particular at the phenomenon of Yugonostalgia from a gendered and feminist perspective, and taking my research on the 1978 Belgrade feminist conference Drugarica Zena/Comrade Woman as a point of departure. The narrative about Yugoslavia being closer to Western Europe and to Western European feminist movements in the 1970s, in comparison to today’s marginalization of post-Yugoslav successor states, indicates that changes in gender regimes are deeply connected to shifts in ideological and geopolitical relations, including the shifting boundaries of Europe after 1989. In the second part of this essay I transpose the study of post-socialist nostalgia to the former West. When looking more closely at Western European countries, particularly at those who had significant communist parties such as Italy and France, it is clear that even in the West certain articulations of post-socialist nostalgia for radical pasts have emerged, helping us to unravel women’s and feminist movements’ genealogies that have been made invisible. I take the case of the recent Italian movie Cosmonauta as a symptom of post-socialist nostalgia in the former West.

The article focuses on the contested notion of the (new) Europe from the vantage point of migrant cinema. The aim is to explore how cinematic language offers alternative modalities of representation and subjectification in relation to migration, gender and identity. The emphasis of this analysis is on the politics of encounter: how the presumed strangers to Europe are figurations of Europe's othered self while also embodying the material practices of exclusion. The politics of encounter is explored in three films made by European filmmakers in which the main female character struggles to negotiate her identity in between colonial legacies and global terror, as in the British-Pakistani Yasmin (Kenneth Glenaan, UK, 2004), between transsexual and transnational politics, as in the case of the Iranian refugee in Unveiled (Angela Maccarone, Germany, 2005), or in between trafficked bodies and renewed citizenship as in the case of the Eastern European immigrant prostitute in The unknown woman (Giuseppe Tornatore, Italy, 2006). These visual and ideological commentaries participate in the redefinition or abolition of the notion of Europe by proposing the representations of the strangers within not from original and unexpected positions but by highlighting the transformation of the ‘European subject’ through the politics of encounter. The article furthermore raises questions about the agency of Muslim women who opt for religion in the midst of the self-professed secular Europe, explores debates on homophobia and the refugee's state of exceptionalism and offers a feminist reading of the phenomena of trafficking of women.

The centenary celebrations of Robert Burns on January 25, 1859, took the form of more than eight hundred meetings across the English-speaking world at which participants celebrated both the memory of the poet and, especially through the use of the telegraph, their own present-day inter-connectedness. This article situates this extraordinary event within the larger context of the nineteenth-century culture of artistic commemorations and uses the case to critically reexamine the view of literature's role in nation building that has been generally accepted since Anderson's influential Imagined Communities (1983).

In this paper, we revisit the question whether inequality in education and human capital is closely related to income inequality. Using the most popular functional forms describing the relationship between, first, output and human capital and, second, education and human capital, we find that the effect of inequality in schooling on income inequality is very low, even insignificant in an economic sense. This is confirmed by our empirical analysis, since we find that the Gini coefficient of education yields an insignificant coefficient. If we take care of the possible simultaneity using a two-stage least-squares (2SLS) analysis, we find that there is no relationship in the case of non-OECD countries, but a positive relationship is found in the case of OECD countries. Also, we cannot confirm that a more equal distribution of education leads to higher income per capita, even though this result is sensitive to the choice of data.

Then, sooner, I give credence to the tale: on some narrative texts by Martinus Nijhoff With short lyrical poems being the poetical standard nowadays, long story-telling poems can be seen as a provocative genre. Characteristics of modern epic poems can be explored by examining a brief and a story-telling poem by Martinus Nijhoff.

This article argues for the need to identify and grapple with the complexities of the relation between xenophobia and neoliberalism. In the case of the Netherlands, the rise of xenophobia is part of a larger process of a mostly market-controlled reclaiming of symbolic forms of collectiveness in an increasingly atomized society. The 2004 murder of Dutch filmmaker-provocateur Theo van Gogh played a crucial role in cementing a “culturalist,” anti-Islam regime of truth. The analysis of the van Gogh murder informs about how, in the atomized market society, the search for new forms of togetherness has translated, in the Netherlands, into a turn to the ethnos, with fantasies of purity and the moralization of culture and citizenship. Where the neoliberal project has, largely unnoticed, abolished the collective standards and solidarities of the post-World War II era, the faces of immigrants have served as ideal, identifiable flash points for new repertoires of belonging and othering.

This text seeks to rethink the relationship between literature and the gendered construction of national boundaries. It does so by proposing a reconsideration of the terms singularity, difference and literariness while analysing two talked-about and best-selling postcolonial novels, Disgrace (1999) by J.M. Coetzee and Agaat (2004) by Marlene van Niekerk.

In this article, I examine the changing emblematic genre of the eighteenth century. Once functioning as complex riddles for a learned audience, emblems came to be direct moralisations for a large audience during the Enlightenment. The textual and visual allegories which, in combination with the iconological tradition, once served as vehicle for the transfer of knowledge were replaced by different structures of meaning. This process is being studied in the Dutch emblematics of the eighteenth century, revealing various strategies used by poets to apply the literary allegory in a changing context.

In the era of globalisation, technological mediation, live coverage and endless connectivity, we may be embarrassed to catch ourselves thinking that time is out of joint. The speed and complexity o...

This article examines how perceiving concealment in close relationships influences marital well-being. It suggests that the perception of concealment from a partner signals separateness from one's partner and contributes to feelings of perceived partner exclusion. These feelings of exclusion, in turn, should negatively affect relational quality. These predictions are tested in a prospective study among 199 newlywed couples. Results suggest that perceiving concealment reduced marital adjustment and trust and increased conflict over time. Importantly, change in perceived partner exclusion mediated these effects. This article demonstrates that the perception of concealment (a) has deleterious effects on relational well-being in the long run and (b) is harmful in part because it elicits feelings of exclusion. © 2009 by the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Inc.

En este trabajo se discute la construcción posesiva con artículo indefinido y pronombre posesivo antepuesto al nombre (un su amigo) frente a la construcción con posesivo pospuesto al nombre (un amigo suyo) en dos corpus periodísticos de Guatemala y México. Se compara la posición del posesivo con la del adjetivo y se argumenta que el posesivo antepuesto expresa subjetividad o afecto por parte del poseedor hacia el objeto poseído. Si bien la construcción se daba en el español antiguo, no constituye un arcaísmo sino que se trata de la explotación de una vieja estructura para un nuevo fin comunicativo.

Although the co-occurrence between adolescent depression and delinquency has been well-studied, the nature of the longitudinal associations is not yet clear. To clarify this we examined whether personality type is a moderator in the longitudinal co-occurrence of depression and delinquency. A total of 338 young and middle adolescents completed questionnaires about depression, delinquency and personality in 3 yearly waves of the CONflict And Management Of RElationships (CONAMORE). We found that the stable overcontrollers showed the highest mean level on depression and that the stable undercontrollers showed the highest mean level on delinquency. Furthermore, we demonstrated that the longitudinal co-occurrence between depression and delinquency was best described by means of a stability model, in which personality type membership proved to be an important moderator. The three personality types differed significantly on the rank-order stability of both depression and delinquency. Copyright#2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Key words: co-occurrence; depression; delinquency; person-centred approach; personality prototypes

In the Netherlands, about 20% of children do not have any contact with their non-resident parent after parental divorce. There are often many reasons underlying the broken contact, but one might well be the process of parental alienation, when the child denigrates and excludes the non-resident parent. This article presents the results of two studies conducted among divorce experts and divorced, non-resident parents. A total of 138 respondents co-operated in our studies. Of the respondents, 58% thought PAS either does not, or rarely occurs in the Netherlands, and 42% thought it does occur. The extent of parental alienation was classified as mild (33%) or moderate (9%). From our factor analysis, it became clear that Gardner's classification of eight separate symptoms of parental alienation was not evident in our research data. We were able to distinguish four separate aspects: two of them concerning alienation due to the resident parent and two concerning alienation due to the child. Our results underpin th...

At the end of postmodernism, in an era that experts fail to define in any meaningful manner because it swings between nostalgia and euphoria, in a political economy of fear and frenzy,1 new master ...

This paper argues that true optionality does exist. It is even inherently tied up with the procedure of parameter setting in child language [Kampen, J. van, Proceedings of the Workshop on Optionality (1995), OTS, Utrecht University]. The marked value of a parameter is set by adding a grammatical feature to a lexical category. The enriched category requires a mere specific licensing and will in general block its initial less specified default variant. The default variant survives sometimes, leading to optionality. Two clear cases of optionality are presented here. The first case is pied-piping in Polish adult and in Dutch child language, the second case is long reflexives in Dutch. The two cases show how the optionality may be due to an independently existing licensing possibility within the same grammar. The alternative explanation by Kroch [J. Lang. Variat. Change 1.3 (1989) 244], Roeper [Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 2(3) (1999)] and Yang [Oxford University Press (2002)] of two co-existing grammars is rejected by the present proposal.