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In the last decade, historians have paid renewed attention to the idea of honor in early modern Europe and elsewhere, but until now, the focus has been primarily on individuals. However, this issue seeks to explore the idea of institutional honor and the question of whether a government could possess a sense of honor and what that would mean for its workings and its impact on its subjects. The themes that emerge in these essays are abduction and sexual misbehavior—where honor and sexual crime could be touchstones for the legitimacy of power. If everyone felt honored, then the hierarchical distribution of power could seem fair; but if the subjects of empire felt humiliated, the power that acted on them would become illegitimate. All of these articles see honor, not as a structure, but as a resource that both state and subject could invoke in a crisis.

Based largely on the findings of anthropologists of the Mediterranean in the twentieth century, the traditional understanding of honor in early modern Spain has been defined as a concern for chastity, for women, and a willingness to protect women's sexual purity and avenge affronts, for men. Criminal cases from Castile in the period 1600-1650 demonstrate that creditworthiness was also an important component of honor, both for men and for women. In these cases, early modern Castilians became involved in violent disputes over credit, invoking honor and the rituals of the duel to justify their positions and attack their opponents. Understanding the connection between credit, debt, and honor leads us to update the anthropological models that pre-modern European historians employ, on the one hand, and to a new appreciation for the way seventeenth-century Castilians understood their public reputations and identity, on the other.

Honor in early modern Castile has been seen as a code that determined social behavior, notably by defining women's identities in terms of sexuality and by limiting their behavior. Examining criminal cases that feature nonelite women from Yebenes, a small town near Toledo in Castile, shows that in practice honor was a rhetoric that women used to make their way through the social relations of their communities as they asserted themselves and protected their interests. Through their speech and actions, women defined their own honor in broader terms than just sexuality, incorporating aspects like creditworthiness and the defense of their families. Further, women did not always rely on their male kin to defend their honor. Instead, they deployed slander, physical violence, and even the rituals of the duel-just as men did when defending male honor-to articulate and defend their social position in their communities.

The osteoconductive properties of hydroxyapatite (HA)-coated titanium implants are well documented, but eventual coating degradation may result in HA particles adjacent to the substrate, and if the particles were to migrate into the joint space then accelerated polyethylene wear might be expected. As an indirect indication of third-body wear, the authors used laser interference microscopy to measure and compare surface roughness on modular heads from 15 clinically retrieved HA-coated femoral components, with heads from 15 retrieved uncemented (porous) and 15 cemented implants. The results showed increased median surface roughness over initial manufacturer specifications in all groups, but the cobalt-chrome heads from the HA-coated group showed significantly less surface roughness and less deep scratches than the heads from either the porous or uncemented group. Three-body wear appears to be a common problem, but evidence available suggests that it is no more of a problem with HA-coated devices than porous or cemented.