bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Robert Baron’s Metaphysica generalis on the Nature of Free Judgment
Authors: Broadie Alexander
Published: March 2020

This chapter expounds the concept of ‘judgment’, a concept deployed by seventeenth-century Scottish philosophers in their philosophy of mind. Close attention is paid to the discussion on judgment in the Metaphysica generalis of Robert Baron, where he addresses the idea of judgment as a free act. A notable feature of Baron’s treatment of judgment is his contrast between, on the one hand, the logician’s concern with judgment as a bearer of truth in inferences in which canons of inference are deployed that ensure that if the judgments serving as premises are true then so also must be the judgment drawn as a conclusion from those premises; and, on the other hand, a judgment that is passed by an arbiter, a person agreed upon by two parties in dispute who undertake to accept the judgment he makes as to which party is in the right.
James Dalrymple, 1st Viscount of Stair, on Legal Normativity
Authors: Jaffro Laurent
Published: March 2020

The chapter concentrates on Stair’s understanding of laws, whether human-made or divine. Scots law is a particular application of a rational legislation, which ultimately rests upon God’s perfections. However, positive law cannot be entirely derived from natural law, mainly because of the Fall and also for pragmatic reasons. One important aspect of Stair’s contribution to legal and moral philosophy is his distinction between conventional and obediential obligations (from the will of God only), and his account of the principle of ‘engagement’ at work in conventional obligations. Also, Stair’s view that a promise is binding per se, without acceptance by the promisee, deserves attention.
Human Nature, the Passions, and the Fall
Authors: Maurer Christian
Published: March 2020

This chapter offers an overview of some major themes and developments in academic and non-academic moral philosophy in seventeenth-century Scotland, and it addresses several points of comparison between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It includes a discussion of the strong presence of themes from Reformed theology in the ethical sections of academic theses philosophicæ, the characterization of different paths of reception of classical philosophers and schools, and the analysis of reactions to major seventeenth-century figures such as Descartes, Hobbes, and Henry More. The chapter closes with a discussion of George Mackenzie’s moral essays, which are an exceptional attempt to combine Christian and Stoic themes.
William Chalmers (Gulielmus Camerarius) (1596–c.1678)
Authors: Broadie Alexander
Published: March 2020

William Chalmers (1596–c.1678), who wrote under the name Gulielmus Camerarius Scotus, has long since sunk into obscurity, and his philosophy seems to have been the subject of just one sustained examination, which principally concerns a single passage just a few pages long in one of his many books. This chapter begins with a few words about his career and then focuses on aspects of his moral philosophy and moral psychology. It deals with two discussions in the Disputationes, first, on the concept of happiness and the relation of happiness to the role played in its production by the faculties of intellect and will; and secondly, on the concept of doing evil for evil’s sake, a concept that Chalmers believes to be instantiated by the actions of persons of several different sorts: the devil, those who are damned, and those who are very perverse wayfarers on their pilgrimage through this life.
Introduction
Authors: Muessig Carolyn
Published: March 2020

Medieval and early modern theologians grappled with the implications of bearing the stigmata since the reports of Francis of Assisi’s five miraculous wounds spread across Western Europe in the thirteenth century. It was only during the second half of the seventeenth century, however, that a systematic historical and theological study of stigmata arose. This historiography, which started in the midst of religious reassessment in the aftermath of the Protestant and Catholic Reformations, reveals trends that have come to shape stigmatology, that is, the study of religious stigmata in a Christian context. The Introduction considers, therefore, the authors and their theories that came to define the meaning of stigmata and stigmatics.
Bearing the Stigmata
Authors: Muessig Carolyn
Published: March 2020

Chapter 1 traces the patristic and early medieval exegesis of Galatians 6:17. It assesses how language and imagery were appropriated and developed by eleventh- and twelfth-century monastic theologians (especially Peter Damian) into a soteriological system of penance and redemption that focused on Christ’s wounds. Significantly, it looks at examples of stigmatization before Francis of Assisi. These cases vary in their form; they gradually move from stigmata being almost exclusively associated with the sacerdotal order in the early Middle Ages to being linked to the laity by the early thirteenth century as with the cases of Peter the Conversus and Mary of Oignies.
Francis of Assisi
Authors: Muessig Carolyn
Published: March 2020

Chapter 2 looks at the stigmatization of Francis of Assisi in the thirteenth century and how his reception of the stigmata was mainly understood as a miraculous event. The chapter also traces how the miracle met with acceptance and resistance during the following centuries. Some theologians argued that the cause of the wounds was strictly divine, while others emphasized that Francis’s love for Christ initiated the stigmata. The power and function of prayer, however, featured in most explanations that sought to understand the nature of Francis’s wounds. A series of papal bulls promulgated by a number of thirteenth-century popes, which secured widespread support for the Franciscan claim of stigmatic supremacy, are also considered in this chapter.
Catherine of Siena
Authors: Muessig Carolyn
Published: March 2020

Chapter 4 examines theories of stigmatology that emerged during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The works of the Franciscan Bartolomeo of Pisa (d. 1401) and the Dominican Tommaso Caffarini (d. 1434) established categories of stigmatization that provide insight into the devotional, theological, philosophical, and cultural implications of the phenomenon and the place it held in late medieval religious life. In several theological and devotional circles stigmatization could be a diverse experience, far from being a unique miracle related to Francis of Assisi alone. Catherine of Siena emerges as the most charismatic stigmatic of the fourteenth century, whose invisible wounds became the insignia for Dominican reform and female authority. The fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries were crucial moments in the history of stigmatology when a diversity of stigmatic realities was robustly defended and promoted.
Snapshot Stories
Authors: Hanna Erika
Published: March 2020

During the twentieth century, men and women across Ireland picked up cameras, photographing days out at the beach, composing views of Ireland’s cities and countryside, and recording political events as they witnessed them. Indeed, while foreign photographers often focused on the image of Ireland as a bucolic rural landscape, Irish photographers—snapshotter and professional alike—were creating and curating photographs of Ireland which revealed more complex and diverse images of Ireland. Snapshot Stories explores these stories. It examines a diverse array of photographic sources, including family photograph albums, studio portraits, and the work of photography clubs and community photography initiatives, alongside the output of those who took their cameras into the streets to record violence and poverty. It shows how Irish men and women used photography in order to explore their sense of self and society, and examines how we can use these images to fill in the details of Ireland’s social history. Through exploring this rich array of sources, it asks what it means to see—to look, to gaze, to glance—in modern Ireland, and explores how conflicts regarding vision and visuality have repeatedly been at the centre of Irish life.
Plays and Playwrights
Authors: Griffiths Emma M.
Published: March 2020

The arguments of previous chapters are applied to individual plays. Differences between the work of individual playwrights are explored. Euripides’ interest in children is shown to be not a simple question of domestic/pathetic intent, but rather a reflection of his more subtle philosophical ideas, and a development of generic patterns. Emphasis is given to individual plays where the roles of children can now be understood with greater subtlety, and where attention to children can challenge existing scholarly views, such as questions of the political role of tragedy, and the attitudes towards military action. The question of generic status for Euripides’ Alkestis is reconsidered.
Investigating Organizational Deviance from Standards in Depth
Authors: Langer Sarah , Gey Ronny , Karadzhova-Beyer Diana
Published: March 2020

In this chapter, Sarah Langer, Ronny Gey, and Diana Karadzhova-Beyer introduce how empirical investigations of organizational deviations from standards can be conceptualized. They suggest a focused ethnography approach to explore the organizational members’ view on the enactment of standards. The applied research strategy includes qualitative interviews, field observations, diaries, the analysis of documents, and questionnaires. The authors present the studies’ empirical premises and the sampling approach, as well as the process of data gathering and analysis. The chapter prepares methodological ground for the case studies CraneSolutions, MedTech, and MetroEngineers. In this way, the authors also provide guidelines and lessons learned, for instance, for replication studies on organizational deviance from standards in other industrial sectors, for other standards, and for the non-profit sector.
Challenges and Opportunities of Health Protection in the Twenty-First Century
Authors: Chan Emily Ying Yang
Published: March 2020

Globally, changes of macro-determinants of health occur as consequences of population movement, urbanization, globalization, technology advancement, and globalized living environments in the twenty-first century. Rayner and Lang (2012) argue that these transitions have changed the dynamics among humans, their activity patterns and the living eco-system. Regardless of development status, these health transitions change the human health determinants and outcomes. One of the latest frontiers in public health protection is to understand how these macro transitions might affect human health risks, disease outcomes, and the ecosystems that support and sustain living creatures. This chapter discusses current understanding of how some of these transitions, including globalization, demographic, epidemiological, economic, ecological, energy, technological, nutrition, and urban transitions, may be associated with health and well-being.
Butchering the Body Politic
Authors: Walters Brian
Published: March 2020

Chapter 3 explores images of wounding, dismemberment, and violence against the state in republican oratory. Cicero’s speeches of the 50s are sometimes argued to be unusually gruesome in their claims about violence to the body politic. Cataloguing references to the republic’s mutilation and trauma in surviving oratory, this chapter puts the images of these speeches in context and reveals that such violent imagery is in fact prevalent in all periods. Violent imagery is shown to have been persuasive for tapping into anxieties about disability, social status, and liberty. Cicero’s references to the body politic’s wounds in the speeches of the 50s are remarkable only insofar as they refer to the orator’s exile, a fact which highlights the self-serving character of such imagery in general.
Outliving the Republic
Authors: Walters Brian
Published: March 2020

Chapter 4 examines claims in republican oratory and letters that the body politic was dead, dying, or would have died, if not for some timely intervention. To some degree, invocations of the republic’s death overlap with the images of wounding and disease explored in earlier chapters, to which at least a few are directly connected. The suggestion of urgency and permanence and the complex emotional resonances evoked by death, however, also often impart meanings of their own. References to the body politic’s demise are particularly common not only in invective but also in consolatory contexts, as Cicero’s letters to and from friends in the period of the civil wars (from 49 to 45 BCE) and Caesar’s dictatorship poignantly show. Common assumptions that Rome’s republic ought to have been undying lent further significance to statements about the political body’s death.
Murdering the Fatherland
Authors: Walters Brian
Published: March 2020

Examining claims about “parricide” and “murdering the fatherland” in the wake of Caesar’s assassination, chapter 5 historicizes the discussions of earlier chapters by turning its attention to a single controversial image. The struggles of Cicero and his allies to paint Caesar and Antony as parricidae patriae (against opposing assertions about “murdering the parens patriae”) reveal the full panoply of body-political imagery being marshalled for a specific cause. Evocations of “parricide” are enjoined with images of disease, violence, and murder to strengthen their persuasiveness and drive the point home. Conflicting attempts to control the meaning of “parricide” mark the last traceable instance when imagery of Rome’s afflicted body was used to persuade in such a way, thus making the conflict a fitting end to the inquiry as a whole.
Introduction
Authors: Erdkamp Paul , Verboven Koenraad , Zuiderhoek Arjan
Published: March 2020

Investment in capital, both physical and financial, and innovation in its uses are often considered the linchpin of modern economic growth, while credit and credit markets now seem to determine the wealth—as well as the fate—of nations. Yet was it always thus? The Roman economy was large, complex, and sophisticated, but in terms of its structural properties, did it look anything like the economies we know today? Through consideration of the allocation and uses of capital and credit and the role of innovation in the Roman world, this volume explores how capital in its various forms was generated, allocated, and employed in the Roman economy; whether the Romans had markets for capital goods and credit; and whether investment in capital led to innovation and productivity growth.
Population, Technology, and Economic Growth in the Roman World
Authors: Erdkamp Paul
Published: March 2020

Archaeological data that show radically increased levels of consumption are combined with economic theory regarding population, technology, and economic growth. The purpose of this exercise is to understand both the scope and constraints of per-capita income, living standards, and consumption in a context of population growth. Malthusian models on economic and demographic developments in preindustrial societies have been fiercely debated by economic historians working on later periods. The fixity of land and the diminishing returns to labour were indeed constraining factors, but the more important factor was the ability of the economy to respond positively to the stimulus of population growth. The role of technological changes should not be overestimated, though. The most important technological progress in the Roman world does not concern new inventions, but the wider implementation of knowledge that had been available for centuries. Investment in human capital and innovation were no obstacles, as they were responses to rather than causes or preconditions of economic growth. An increase in output in the Roman economy can to a large extent be explained by the transfer of underemployed agricultural labour to more intensively utilized urban and rural non-agricultural labour. Against prevailing Malthusian views, it is argued that a significant rise in per-capita income in the Roman world resulted in higher average living standards and different consumption patterns, which in turn significantly changed the conditions not only of manufacturing and trade, but also of investment and innovation.
The Archaeological Perception of Capital and its Transformations in Urban Occupations
Authors: Monteix Nicolas
Published: March 2020

This chapter explores the notions of capital, innovation, and investment in urban occupations during the Roman period, viewed through archaeological data. With regard to these three factors, it focuses not upon macroscopic changes in the entire technological system but on ‘microscopic’ variations in urban occupations, based on a thorough analysis of the chaînes opératoires involved in the various urban crafts and trades. Leaving aside the difficulty of any attempt to draw a realistic synthesis, it shows that the quantitative and qualitative diversity of shops and workshops should be understood as a performant indicator of the urban economy: when added together, the different forms of real capitalization would appear to be a generative force.
Funding Irrigation
Authors: Ronin Marguerite
Published: March 2020

Although there is good evidence that irrigation played an important role in Roman agriculture, it has so far received too little attention. This paper seeks to address the subject of its funding at different scales. Among the different choices landholders had to make, investments in hydraulic infrastructure were guided by their particular needs for cultivation and breeding, the environmental context, and the management of a natural and sometimes limited resource. The attention is here turned towards the financial, human, and material nature of the investment required. The cross-reading of archaeological sources with literary and legal texts shows that the costs of irrigation in single estates varied according to the technical constraints (length and construction of the conduit, necessity to store water, etc.), but the efforts made to invest also reflect the profits expected. A key element concerning investments towards irrigation, in any case, lies in the access to water. In that respect, Roman law played an essential role through servitude rights.
Labouring for God
Authors: Underwood Norman
Published: March 2020

The Christianization of late Roman society had a profound impact on the Roman economy. Alongside the surfeit of funds and properties, which passed into ecclesiastical coffers, the proliferation of churches brought hundreds of thousands of Romans into the employ of the Christian clergy. The past forty years of prosopographical research has revealed that the bulk of the late ancient clergy had much more modest social origins than traditional scholarship presumed. The majority were sub-elite Romans far below the true senatorial aristocracy; many also laboured in secular occupations in order to supplement their clerical stipends. As this chapter explains, socio-legal proscriptions against the ordination of noble, servile, and occupation-bound populations as well as demographic constraints largely limited the recruitment of the clergy to ‘middling’ tradesmen and urban professionals such as doctors, lawyers, and educators. More importantly, such occupation-holders usually exceeded the basic literacy mandatory for biblical study and liturgical performance. This chapter attempts to quantify the difficulties which bishops encountered in stocking their clergies. It argues that bishops deliberately targeted free plebeians and curiales who had already escaped their onerous civic burdens through exemptions granted to certain profession-holders such as educators, physicians, and architects. In identifying these ‘free agents’, churches gained access to a sizeable portion of the empire’s available human capital, especially in regard to administrative, legal, and medical training. The admission of such men promoted the appropriation of their prior occupational practices within the Church, which drove institutional innovations from nascent ecclesiastical bureaucracies to ecclesiastical hospitals.
Capital and Investment in the Campanian Tablets
Authors: Andreau Jean
Published: March 2020

This chapter is devoted to capital and investments in the three groups of tablets found in the Vesuvian cities: the tablets of L. Caecilius Iucundus in Pompeii; those of Herculaneum; and the tablets of the Sulpicii (also known as the Murecine tablets) which have to do with transactions carried out in Puteoli. These contain almost no evidence of innovation; on the contrary, they bear witness to a wide range of economic activities and give much information on capital and investments. Among these investments, it is necessary to distinguish two categories: firstly, investments that involve lending money and charging interest, without the lender being directly involved in a given production process or business (this type of investment is discussed in the second part of the chapter); and secondly, investments that are to the contrary accompanied by direct involvement of the lender in production or in commercial activity (investments discussed in the third part of the chapter). The first part of the chapter studies the ways in which a group of freedmen might manage to amass a certain capital and to have investments. The final part is devoted to the dealings which Caecilius Iucundus had with the city of Pompeii.
Credit and Financial Capital in Roman Egypt
Authors: Haklai Merav
Published: March 2020

Roman Egypt sets an example of a monetized society in which credit was widely used in both monetary and in-kind transactions. During the first two and a half centuries of Roman rule, interactions between the three main legal systems in Egypt—Demotic, Greek, and Roman—gradually created a coherent institutional environment that structured credit and financial capital. In this environment, Greek law gained the upper hand as the most frequently used system of law for conducting economic interactions. The administrative, fiscal, and financial conditions set up by Roman governance, and above all the new and reduced maximum Roman legal interest rate, affected the development of credit-related mechanisms. Legal structures that enabled the creation of credit went through a slow and gradual change, in which available legal formats were adjusted to accommodate for somewhat different activities. Παραθήκη‎ formulae, originally used for making deposits, increasingly were being used in de facto loans, thereby casting new content in an existing formula. While this practice is commonly attested in transactions between private individuals, using παραθήκη‎ agreements seems not to have served as a common financial tool for Roman Egypt’s banking sector.
Second-Generation European Data Protection Regulation and Professional Journalism
Authors: Erdos David
Published: March 2020

Drawing on the results of both a questionnaire and a public domain website review, this chapter explores the enforcement stance and track record of European Data Protection Authorities (DPAs) vis-à-vis the professional journalistic media under the Data Protection Directive. Approximately 80 per cent of DPAs accepted that they possessed regulatory powers in this regard and over 60 per cent reported having undertaken some enforcement. However, the number who conceptualized their powers to be partial was far higher than that set out in statutory law and half the DPAs which did report enforcement had only intervened in relation to one or two often quite diffuse areas of data protection. The website review verified enforcement for 40 per cent of the DPAs and confirmed that activity had often focused on data linked either to specific privacy interests (especially where sensitive data was involved) and/or data whose safeguarded treatment underpinned critical socio-economic relationships (e.g. national identification numbers). In general, action had been very patchy, with a notable absence of intervention even in relation to issues that only raise limited free speech concerns such as avoiding or rectifying significant inaccuracies. This patchiness could not be fully explained by statutory law (which often remained quite prescriptive), the general need for contextual rights balancing, limited resourcing, or the need for an interface with self-regulation. Nevertheless, enforcement was strongly and positively correlated with the stringency of local law. Relationships with DPA resources were more mixed although there was a significant positive association between enforcement and the per capita human resources available to a regulator.
Third-Generation European Data Protection Law and Professional Journalism
Authors: Erdos David
Published: March 2020

This chapter explores the legislative interface between data protection and the professional journalistic media under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Like the Data Protection Directive (DPD), the GDPR mandates that States adopt derogations ‘necessary’ for reconciling two competing fundamental rights. However, broadly mirroring the situation under the DPD, there remain considerable differences at local level. Northern European countries have tended to set out wide and deep derogations for journalism, whilst Southern and Eastern Europe have often stipulated that this activity adhere to strict data protection standards. These differences map on to broader cultural fissures as regards attitudes to individualism, uncertainty avoidance, and power differences in society. Nevertheless, these outcomes are slightly more balanced than under the DPD. In particular, almost half the States have set out partial statutory limits to the supervisory powers of the Data Protection Authority here. Approximately one-third of States also continue to formalize a co-regulatory connection between statutory and self-regulation. However, a widespread problem has emerged concerning the statutory treatment of media/news archiving. In sum, although the GDPR mandates derogations here, only around one-third of European Economic Area (EEA) States have explicitly provided that the journalism regime can apply to public interest archiving which is subject to its own default regime in the GDPR.
The Future Shape of European Data Protection Regulation and Professional Journalism
Authors: Erdos David
Published: March 2020

This chapter explores the approach European Data Protection Authorities (DPAs) should take to their role vis-à-vis the professional journalistic media under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Such an approach must take into account the contextual trend within European Court of Human Rights case law, the growth of a stricter Court of Justice of the European Union data protection jurisprudence, and continuing severe resource constraints. In the area of standards, DPAs should endorse a broad construction of the journalistic derogation that encompasses news/media archives but should also promote a specific and structured approach to contextual balancing within this derogation. Such detailed standard-setting raises acute sensitivities. Therefore, guidance should be formulated through a co-regulatory process which adopts the GDPR’s code of conduct provisions as a broad guideline. Enforcement remains even more delicate, potentially very expensive, but nevertheless vital. A strategic co-regulatory approach is appropriate here too. DPAs should encourage self-regulatory monitoring mechanisms and, in cases where these meet the criteria laid down in the GDPR, should defer to them other than when particular systematic or serious issues arise. If such criteria are not satisfied, DPAs need to deploy their powers proactively across the board. Finally, where no self-regulatory mechanism exists, DPAs must independently ensure a proportionate response to all complaints and issues that arise. Media regulation rightly remains largely within State jurisdiction. Therefore, the European Data Protection Regulation should avoid coercive intervention here. Nevertheless, it should play a valuable ʻsoftʼ role through drafting non-binding guidance and promoting information exchange, dialogue, and cooperation.
The Moral Heart of Vatican II
Authors: Barnes, SJ Michael
Published: March 2020

The background of Vatican II’s pastoral and missionary concerns cannot be separated from what is arguably the Council’s most unexpected and far-reaching document, Nostra Aetate, the Declaration on the relationship of the Church to non-Christian religions. While very often interpreted as changing, not to say reversing, traditional Church-centred soteriology, this chapter argues that Nostra Aetate needs to be understood primarily as an event, a moment of self-understanding on the part of the Church which provokes a radical conversio morum. By calling the Declaration the ‘moral heart of the Council’, the chapter focusses specifically on its original purpose. That the Declaration has opened up a broader interreligious perspective to which all the major religions of the world can relate is testament less to the power of particular theological ideas than to its central conviction that the Church finds its own origins not apart from but through the faith which it shares with the people of the Sinai Covenant.
Keeping Faith in a post-Shoah World
Authors: Barnes, SJ Michael
Published: March 2020

Christians share with Jews the conviction that, after Auschwitz, any approach to theology that extracts people from their concrete history is no longer possible. The challenge for both traditions is to find ways of narrating memories which keep faith with the past and generate hope for the future. There is more to the task of ‘re-membering’ than repeating the old story with as much exactness as possible. When the links with the past are challenged by trauma and silence, there is also a crucial role for the religious imagination; the challenge is not to conjure up a more consoling vision but to find ways of staying with the very brokenness of things. This chapter engages with the thought of J.B. Metz and his evocative theme of ‘dangerous memory’ and with the iconic witness of Edith Stein, born a Jew and murdered in Auschwitz in 1942, who shows how in times of crisis memories become more not less intense.
Learning New Vocabularies
Authors: Barnes, SJ Michael
Published: March 2020

This final chapter begins by contrasting the opening sketch of Jewish-Christian relations as practised in the London East End of the 1930s with the very different multiculturalism of today. It seeks to apply lessons learned from the ‘new dialogue’ between Jews and Christians to further dialogues and conversations. In the light of the forces of secularization and globalization which have created a ‘post-Christendom’ world, all theology—and a fortiori theology of dialogue—has to be what David Tracy calls ‘public theology’. If Martha Nussbaum teaches us to take seriously the all-too-limited efforts of human beings to build just and cohesive communities with love and compassion, Simone Weil takes us more deeply into the experience of loss and affliction and thus to confront the sheer messy reality of human living with confidence and equanimity. She acts as an icon of patience and empathy for all persons of faith as they wait upon the movements of grace in a contested pluralist world.
Conclusion
Authors: de Stefano Carlo
Published: March 2020

The conclusions encapsulate one of the central messages of the book, namely its emphasis on the logical, technical, and ‘objective’ tenets of the international rules of attribution of conduct to States. Such a peculiar nature is held to justify their pedagogic role and influence in the treatment under international law of the ‘State’ (i.e. its organs, instrumentalities, and ‘private’ agents) somehow independently of the design of a given dispute settlement system or of the proper law applicable to the objective element of liability, so as to ensure coherent resolutions of attribution issues by different international law adjudicators.
Introduction
Authors: Scholz Luca
Published: March 2020

In the politically dense and fractured landscape of the Holy Roman Empire, safe conduct provided a key framework for negotiating freedom of movement and its restriction. The introduction sets out how the book uses safe conduct to approach the Holy Roman Empire in a spatial rather than diachronic perspective. It describes how authorities in the Empire restricted, promoted, and channelled different forms of mobility for political, fiscal, and symbolic reasons. Spatially these efforts were rarely concentrated at borders, which challenges anachronistic assumptions about the functioning of early modern borders. Conflicts around the enclosure of movement led to controversial debates around the rulers’ right to interfere with human mobility, adding a new chapter to the history of free movement. Drawing on manuscript, visual, and printed sources as well as self-designed maps, this book offers a new perspective on the unstable relation of political authority and human mobility in the heartlands of old-regime Europe.
Theatres of Transit
Authors: Scholz Luca
Published: March 2020

Deputies of territorial rulers often escorted foreign persons of rank, merchants, prisoners, or corpses when they moved through their dominions. This physical form of safe conduct was a way of honouring or protecting travellers, but it also offered a means of signalling a ruler’s claims over a thoroughfare. When several parties disputed the right to escort a traveller, the escorts attempted to gain the vanguard of the processions. It was not uncommon for these encounters to escalate into violence, leading to protest, absenteeism, and outright mutiny among subjects, travellers, and officials, as in the small County of Wertheim where the processions often assumed a warlike character. In a world where processional rankings and symbolic gestures were regarded as authentic indicators of social and political realities, these theatres of transit offered a means through which to express and broker profound dissensions over the politics of mobility.
Conclusion
Authors: Scholz Luca
Published: March 2020

The enclosure of movement in the Holy Roman Empire, studied here through the lens of safe conduct, engendered a highly contingent interplay of obstructive and accelerating factors that affected the geography and temporality of different forms of movement in different ways. Spatially, these efforts were not concentrated at territorial borders but at settlements, toll stations, and other choke points, indicating that late modern border talk is unsuitable for understanding the ordering of movement before the mid-eighteenth century. The fact that early modern freedoms of movement, however poorly enforced, did not exist by default but by deliberate design challenges the image of the early modern ‘state’ as a preventer of mobility. This conclusion places the book’s findings in a broader perspective and argues that the history of the Holy Roman Empire offers an alternative framework not just for understanding other parts of the early modern world but also for appreciating ambiguities inherent in the late modern border regime.
The Nature of Contingency
Authors: Wilson Alastair
Published: March 2020

Contingency is everywhere, but what is it? This book defends a radical new theory of contingency as a physical phenomenon. Drawing on the many-worlds approach to quantum theory and on cutting-edge metaphysics and philosophy of science, it argues that quantum theories are best understood as telling us about the space of genuine possibilities rather than as telling us solely about actuality. When quantum physics is taken seriously in the way first proposed by Hugh Everett III, it provides the resources for a new systematic metaphysical framework encompassing possibility, necessity, actuality, chance, counterfactuals, and a host of related modal notions. The framework is a modal realist one, in the tradition of David Lewis: all genuine possibilities are on a par, and the actual world is simply the one that we ourselves inhabit. It departs from Lewisian modal realism in that quantum possible worlds are not philosophical posits but scientific discoveries. Contingency and other modal notions have often been seen as beyond the limits of science. Rationalist metaphysicians argue that the metaphysics of modality is strictly prior to any scientific investigation: metaphysics establishes which worlds are possible, and physics merely checks which of these worlds is actual. Naturalistic metaphysicians respond that science may discover new possibilities and new impossibilities. This book’s quantum theory of contingency takes naturalistic metaphysics one step further, allowing that science may discover what it is to be possible. As electromagnetism revealed the nature of light, as acoustics revealed the nature of sound, as statistical mechanics revealed the nature of heat, so quantum physics reveals the nature of contingency.
The Ethics of Contemplation in ‘Wordsworth’
Authors: Lee Adam
Published: March 2020

Through the study of Plato, Pater was instrumental in changing the way Aristotle was read in Oxford’s Literae Humaniores as evident in his essay ‘On Wordsworth’ (1874). The more ideal elements of Aristotle’s Ethics are emphasized, particularly its passages on contemplation and energeia, in keeping with the image of the divine philosopher in Plato’s Theaetetus. Comparing Pater’s essay to Matthew Arnold’s essay on Wordsworth, it is discovered that it is their diverging views of Platonism that determine whether or not they view Wordsworth as a philosopher. Pater ascribes the ideal teaching of Aristotle to the mysticism of Wordsworth, particularly the ethical importance of contemplation, in being over doing, a preference which in turn affects Oscar Wilde and the values associated with aestheticism.
Voice and Subjectivity in Les Planches courbes
Authors: McLaughlin Emily
Published: March 2020

This chapter analyses Bonnefoy’s experimentation with sound in Les Planches courbes, published in 2001. Offering a close reading of the eleven-poem sequence ‘La Voix lointaine’, it investigates how Bonnefoy uses the motif of listening to a distant voice to present self-presence as a space of resonance. It examines how the poet critiques visual tropes that present subjectivity as a scene of self-reflection and instead uses the rhythms of poetic voicing to explore how consciousness emerges from the reverberations between linguistic, sensual, and material forces. Analysing how Bonnefoy and Nancy both present resonance as an originary dynamic, this chapter investigates how they both use this larger conception of resonance to explore how human subjectivity emerges from an endlessly mobile and relational physical world.
Conclusion
Authors: McLaughlin Emily
Published: March 2020

This conclusion will explore how the late poem ‘L’Heure présente’ (2012) rearticulates the conception of ontological performance that Bonnefoy first develops in ‘La Terre’ (1975). It will analyse how Bonnefoy argues that poetry becomes an ontological performance when, having experienced the loss of any form of metaphysical absolute, and having been intimately exposed to the negativity of finite existence, we perceive value and sense in dynamic terms as the very praxis by which existence endlessly dissolves and opens itself up anew. Examining how Bonnefoy and Nancy both embrace this dynamic of opening and seek to make it felt within their writings, this conclusion will explore how the inherently ecstatic conception of textual performance that they develop resists the anthropocentrism of Heideggerian phenomenology and anticipates the turn towards the body and the material real that has occurred in recent French and Francophone poetry and philosophy.
Innovation in Byzantine Medicine
Authors: Bouras-Vallianatos Petros
Published: March 2020

Byzantine medicine is still a little-known and misrepresented field not only in the wider arena of debates on medieval medicine but also among Byzantinists. Byzantine medical literature is often viewed as ‘stagnant’ and mainly preserving ancient ideas; and our knowledge of it continues to be based to a great extent on the comments of earlier authorities, which are often repeated uncritically. This book presents the first comprehensive examination of the medical corpus of, arguably, the most important late Byzantine physician John Zacharias Aktouarios (c.1275–c.1330). The main thesis is that John’s medical works show an astonishing degree of openness to knowledge from outside Byzantium combined with a significant degree of originality, in particular, in the fields of uroscopy, pharmacology, and human physiology. The analysis of John’s edited (On Urines and On Psychic Pneuma) and unedited (Medical Epitome) works is supported for the first time by the consultation of a large number of manuscripts. The study is also informed by evidence from a wide range of medical sources, including previously unpublished ones, and texts from other genres, such as epistolography and merchants’ accounts. The contextualization of John’s works sheds new light on the development of Byzantine medical thought and practice, and enhances our understanding of the late Byzantine social and intellectual landscape. Finally, John’s medical observations are also examined in the light of examples from the medieval Latin and Islamic worlds, placing his medical theories in the wider Mediterranean milieu and highlighting the cultural exchange between Byzantium and its neighbours.
Medical Epitome
Authors: Bouras-Vallianatos Petros
Published: March 2020

This chapter examines John’s Medical Epitome. The focus here is on the first four of its six books. In contrast to the established view that this work was intended for physicians, it is argued that it was primarily written for philiatroi, intellectuals who were deeply interested in medicine, but not practising physicians themselves. The Medical Epitome, unlike John’s other two works, mainly consisted of material from earlier sources. The analysis of the text starts with a close reading of John’s proem and a discussion of the background of his dedicatee, the Byzantine statesman Alexios Apokaukos. It then shifts to an examination of the work’s structure with the aim of emphasizing John’s intentions in putting together his material. The analysis proceeds by way of a number of case studies focusing on diagnosis and therapy, and goes on to show that John intentionally condensed his material, removing specialized advice, so as to make it appeal to non-expert readers. Thus it is shown, for example, that the absence of details on invasive operations is consistent with the character of his intended readers, who were only able to use non-invasive techniques, such as phlebotomy and arteriotomy. Finally, the particular attention John paid to differential diagnosis, especially as regards eye affections, which is often supplemented with his own advice, is highlighted.
On Psychic Pneuma
Authors: Bouras-Vallianatos Petros
Published: March 2020

This chapter offers a critical examination of John’s third medical work, On Psychic Pneuma. The first section deals with John’s audience, contextualizing his relationship with his dedicatee, Joseph Rhakendytes. John describes the psychic pneuma as the vehicle and first instrument of the soul; consequently, the purified state of this pneuma, achieved through an appropriate regimen, is essential to keeping Joseph’s bodily and spiritual health in good condition. It is then shown that, unlike earlier Greek and Byzantine theories on human physiology in which authors identified three kinds of pneumata, John identified four distinct pneumata: in the stomach, liver, heart, and brain, respectively. Furthermore, John introduced an innovative theory in which each of the four pneumata is correlated with two primary qualities (unnamed, ‘gastric’ pneuma: cold and moist; natural pneuma: warm and moist; vital pneuma: warm and dry; psychic pneuma: cold and dry). A close reading of John’s text unveils the major importance that is given throughout the treatise to the psychic pneuma, which is dispersed throughout the body via the nerves and is responsible for sensory and motor activities. Any disturbance in the quality, for example, of the psychic pneuma may affect its flow and can thus be a cause of impairment. Finally, it is pointed out that John made a direct connection between the quality of pneuma and one’s daily regimen, including diet, physical exercise, bathing, and sleep, thus providing a systematic introduction to the qualitative change in pneuma as an object of treatment.
Scientific Cosmologies
Authors: Kurki Milja
Published: March 2020

This chapter introduces a number of perspectives on cosmology from within debates in scientific cosmology. It aims to show that while there are important differences between perspectives in the scientific study of the cosmos, there have also been important developments in how the cosmos has been understood and engaged with. New discoveries about the nature and structure of the cosmos have precipitated not only new facts and tools to probe the universe but have also generated new philosophical attempts to conceptualize the significance of these discoveries for our understanding of the cosmos and our role in it. It is these debates in scientific cosmology that relational cosmology, examined in the chapter that follows, emerges from.
Stretching Situated Knowledge
Authors: Kurki Milja
Published: March 2020

This chapter, first of three to develop relational cosmology in conversation with critical social theory and IR theory, argues that at the heart of relational cosmology lies a commitment to situated knowledge. This perspective on knowledge production is similar in some regards to standpoint epistemology but also diverges from it in key respects. The chapter argues that IR scholarship can benefit from close engagement with relational cosmology suggestions as to how our knowledge is limited and how we might need to ‘deal with it’, especially in the social sciences, where there is a tendency to glorify the role of the human in knowing the human.
Ethics, in Relations?
Authors: Kurki Milja
Published: March 2020

This chapter argues that the implications of relational cosmology reach beyond reorienting our ontological and epistemological perspectives in IR. From them emerge also different, and rather difficult, set of conversations with those IR scholars concerned with normative or ethical theorizing or decision-making in IR. The relational perspective does not easily conform to classical orientations of ethical thinking in the field as it avoids commitment to general rules and moral norms. Yet, with the help of Karen Barad and Florence Chiew it is argued in this chapter that there is a distinct ‘ethical’ impetus, involving responsibility in intra-actions, inbuilt in the kind of orientation suggested by relational cosmology as it is developed here. From this perspective we are concerned to widen our concerns to ‘beyond the human’ but also to reflect on the limits of ‘ethics’ itself.
Conclusion
Authors: Kurki Milja
Published: March 2020

This chapter summarizes the aims and conclusions of the work. In addition, this concluding chapter sets out five ‘light’ challenges, and related propositions, for development of IR theory, propositions reflective of the sensibility relational cosmology, as translated here via critical humanism, might direct us to adopt. Many challenges remain, but we should not feel weighed down by them but explore new ways of thinking, being, and becoming as we ‘loosen’ ourselves into the ‘mesh’ and the complex negotiations of human and non-human relations residing there requires. IR of the future will likely be more open, more interdisciplinary, and hopefully more cosmologically aware, and it has the opportunity to develop new ways of thinking and doing co-existence and politics.