bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Defending the State in Ireland
Authors: Smuts R. Malcolm
Published: March 2023

In addition to England, Elizabeth’s council presided over a second, much more fragile, state in Ireland. The chapter surveys the topographical conditions and forms of seigneurial power that impeded the consolidation of centralized government in Ireland; efforts by English state servants to overcome these obstacles; and the opposition that those efforts aroused not only among Gaelic Irish but Old English populations of the Pale and the towns. It then examines the role of Catholicism in potentially providing a unifying bond between resistance to English rule in different parts of the island, and the ferocious reactions that this threat provoked among some captains and government servants. As Catholic resistance hardened, many English began to regard the “civil” Irish of the Pale and Irish towns as even more dangerous enemies than the “wild” Irish inhabiting remote areas, precisely because they possessed more sophisticated tools of resistance, including knowledge of the common law. This perception contributed to an increasingly adversarial relationship between the Protestant, English-dominated state and the island’s inhabitants, regardless of their ethnic background, and to a pattern of state violence that helped provoke the great rebellion led by Hugh O’Neill earl of Tyrone.
Dynastic Politics, Confessional Polarization, and the Challenge of New Religious Wars
Authors: Smuts R. Malcolm
Published: March 2023

The chapter examines James’s pursuit of dynastic alliances and examines why his opportunistic policies toward Europe collapsed after 1618. In negotiating marriages for his children, James attempted to avoid diplomatic isolation and extend his influence, by securing alliances with both Protestant and Catholic states. A projected marriage alliance with Savoy failed through Prince Henry’s unexpected death, but James continued to encourage Duke Charles Emmanuel of Savoy to challenge Habsburg power in Italy, and to cooperate with the German Protestant Union, led by the Elector Palatine Frederick V, who had married his daughter Elizabeth. For a time, the king sought a French bride for Prince Charles but shifted to the pursuit of a Spanish match by 1616. While cooperating with Spain in seeking to prevent conflicts in the Rhineland and North Italy from escalating into major wars, he continued to pose as defender of European Protestantism and to foment trouble for the Habsburgs. His equivocal policies continued as fresh confessional conflicts erupted in France and then Bohemia, but failed either to prevent the outbreak of a new religious war in Germany or to provide his Protestant allies enough support to avoid defeat.
Sexualizing Intellectual Modernity
Authors: Psomiades Kathy Alexis
Published: March 2023

The final modernity story in this book is the story of the development of modern knowledge, of a modern scientific way of seeing the world. This story is told primarily in the anthropology of myth and ritual. The chapter shows how James Frazer’s sexualized theory of cultural production emerged out of the intersection of anthropological and literary writing in the 1880s, specifically around figures like Andrew Lang and H. Rider Haggard, who anthropologized the distinction between realism and romance. It reads novels without traditional marriage plots—Haggard’s She (1886–7) and Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891)—that were self-consciously written with reference to a newly anthropologized theory of romance that recasts the relationship between myth and realism. The sexual plots of these novels situate themselves as explicitly “other” to the marriage plots of realist domestic fiction, and yet also as historically and causally related to them. Ultimately, the sexualized modernity story of myth becomes part of a literary modernity story.
Conclusion
Authors: Psomiades Kathy Alexis
Published: March 2023

Victorian anthropologists looked for the origins of culture in rules governing sexual relations. In the twentieth century, with modern anthropology’s disproval and repudiation of Victorian cultural evolutionism, the set of concerns that made up primitive marriage theory were split up between the new anthropology and the new discipline of psychoanalysis. This conclusion describes that process, showing how Sigmund Freud brought the theory of the totem and Oedipus complex together in Totem and Taboo. It argues that twentieth-century feminists needed both psychoanalysis and structural anthropology to inquire into the origins of marriage.
Operator Theory by Example
Authors: Garcia Stephan Ramon , Mashreghi Javad , Ross William T.
Published: March 2023

Operator Theory by Example is aimed at graduate students just getting started in operator theory. Rather than discuss the subject in the abstract, this book covers the subject through twenty instructive examples of a wide variety of operators. For each operator, we discuss its norm, spectrum, commutant, invariant subspaces, and interesting properties that are particular to that operator. An important feature of this book is dozens of exercises at the end of each chapter (over 600 in total) along with hints. These problems are designed to give the reader an opportunity to master the topics covered in the chapter as well as give them an opportunity to further explore the vast operator theory literature. Each chapter also contains well researched historical facts which place the chapter in context so the reader can see the development of the field.
Constructions with the Shift Operator
Authors: Garcia Stephan Ramon , Mashreghi Javad , Ross William T.
Published: March 2023

This chapter explores three operators created from the unilateral shift S and its adjoint S*: the sum S + S*, the direct sum S ⊕ S*, and the tensor product S ⊗ S*. We give Hilbert’s spectral representation of the selfadjoint operator S + S*. The operator S ⊕ S* on H2 ⊕ H2 is complex symmetric. We examine its invariant subspaces and spectral properties. The operator S ⊗ S* on H2 ⊗ H2 is also complex symmetric. We discuss its reducing subspaces and spectral properties.
Hankel Operators
Authors: Garcia Stephan Ramon , Mashreghi Javad , Ross William T.
Published: March 2023

These operators generalize the Hilbert matrix and connect to several problems in function theory such as the Nehari, Carathéodory–Fejér, and Nevanlinna–Pick problems.
Composition Operators
Authors: Garcia Stephan Ramon , Mashreghi Javad , Ross William T.
Published: March 2023

We cover representative results concerning the boundedness, compactness, and spectral properties of composition operators.
Plea Deals, Coercion, and Systemic Testimonial Injustice
Authors: Lackey Jennifer
Published: March 2023

The aim of this chapter is to examine the normative status of plea deals in the criminal legal system, with particular attention paid to the plea-bargaining process. Despite the powerful images of the courtroom in the criminal legal system, the reality is that convictions in the United States are rarely the result of trial by jury, with 97.4% of federal felony convictions obtained through guilty pleas and the rate of state felony convictions not far behind. The chapter begins with how to best understand coercion. After raising objections to existing accounts, it develops a new view according to which coercion involves an unfair offer or threat that closes a person out of a reasonable decision-making space. This notion is then applied to the practices in the criminal legal system, showing that plea bargaining often involves the extraction of guilty pleas that are not only coercive but also manipulative and deceptive.
Conclusion
Authors: Lackey Jennifer
Published: March 2023

This conclusion shows that an attack on epistemic agency is therewith an attack on autonomy, dignity, and ultimately on personhood. Suspects, defendants, witnesses, and victims who find their words, actions, and even feelings subjugated to the will of the State are not only wronged as epistemic agents, they are significantly violated as persons. While various reforms to the criminal legal system are recommended throughout this book, at its core, there is a prior, deeper, and far more fundamental transformation that is needed: the recognition and respect of the personhood of all of those who enter its doors. It is only through the hope and promise of respecting the personhood of each participant in the criminal legal system that we can truly grasp what justice demands and, in so doing, to reimagine what is possible.
Principles of Statutory Interpretation
Authors: Calnan Richard
Published: March 2023

The interpretation of legal texts is of a different order from most other legal topics. It is essentially a question of judgement, but that judgement cannot be exercised arbitrarily. It must be exercised in accordance with the rule of law. Words take their meaning from their context, and the nature of the process of interpretation means that it is not susceptible of detailed rules. But there are principles of interpretation. The ability to state principles at a higher level of generality enables them to guide the interpreter in the right direction whilst acknowledging the ultimately judgemental nature of the exercise. It is the aim of this book to explain those principles and to provide examples of their application in practice. The principles are not a series of self-contained precepts that can be applied independently of each other. They need to be understood as a whole, which is why this book is relatively brief. It is intended to supplement the longer practitioner texts.
Intercreditor Equity in Sovereign Debt Restructuring
Authors: Iversen Astrid
Published: March 2023

The book provides a comprehensive legal study of intercreditor equity—rules providing for equal and differential treatment of creditors—in sovereign debt restructurings. The question of intercreditor equity is one of the most conflictual issues in debt restructuring, both historically and today. It is paramount to creditors in the unfortunate event of a debt restructuring and it is equally important to debtor states so that they can manage restructuring processes as efficiently as possible and ensure a sustainable debt crisis resolution. The first aim of the book is to map and establish the content of intercreditor equity rules and analyse how they influence restructuring processes. This helps creditors improve their prediction of their legal rights and calculate the returns on their investments. It also improves a sovereign debtor’s understanding of the boundaries within which its debt restructuring offer must be designed and is instructive when drafting future sovereign debt instruments. Second, and equally important, the book sheds light on the functioning of the legal framework governing sovereign debt more broadly. It raises the question of whether intercreditor equity rules and the surrounding legal framework of sovereign debt restructuring are compatible with a debtor state’s possibility to ensure monetary and financial stability and establish sustainable debt burdens. In sum, the book seeks to go beyond the common platitude that ‘equal treatment’ is the crux of a successful debt restructuring process by showing that equal treatment is an ambiguous concept that is context- and rule-specific, and does not necessarily guarantee a sustainable debt restructuring.
The Role of Intercreditor Equity in Sovereign Debt Restructuring
Authors: Iversen Astrid
Published: March 2023

Chapter 1 places the topic of intercreditor equity in the broader debate on sovereign debt restructuring. In a situation where there is no general insolvency framework, which is the case for sovereign debtors, disparate rules govern the restructuring process. Since this process is only binding for the creditors who voluntarily accept it, there are no clear answers as to what role equal and preferred treatment play in the restructuring. The effect of these rules can vary depending on the specific facts of a case, such as the type of creditors involved and the underlying factors of the economic crisis of the sovereign debtor. The chapter discusses the key roles that equal and differential treatment of creditors may have in sovereign debt restructuring, including how it affects the likelihood of reaching a sustainable debt burden.
Systemic Challenges and the Future of Intercreditor Equity Disputes
Authors: Iversen Astrid
Published: March 2023

Chapter 7 discusses intercreditor equity and systemic challenges. More specifically, it discusses whether intercreditor equity rules and the surrounding legal framework of sovereign debt restructuring are compatible with public policy considerations, defined as a debtor state’s need to reach a sustainable debt burden and ensure monetary and financial stability. Only a couple of the rules would be considered as problematic in this regard. The number of different and uncoordinated intercreditor equity rules that a sovereign debtor state is typically bound by, combined with the scope of the rules, may restrict the debtor state’s room for manoeuvre to such an extent that it becomes difficult to implement a sustainable debt restructuring. Sufficient room for manoeuvre for debtor states to provide preferential treatment to certain creditors may allow for targeted measures that help the crisis-struck economy to recover faster. The described risk—that the parties involved in a debt restructuring are not able to reach a sustainable debt restructuring due to a narrowed policy space—is exacerbated under the current ad hoc system for debt crisis resolution. This system is heavily dependent on voluntary participation from creditors and contractual restructuring tools, and the state has limited freedom to use its sovereign powers to solve a debt crisis. Last, the chapter discusses good faith as a general principle of international law and whether it has a role to play as a cohesion tool reducing the fragmentation of intercreditor equity rules.
The Outlook for Broader Systemic Reform
Authors: Iversen Astrid
Published: March 2023

Chapter 8 discusses the outlook for broader systemic reform and concludes the book. The chapter argues that by clarifying the content and scope of core intercreditor equity rights and obligations applicable in the context of sovereign debt restructuring, the book may contribute to easing the level of conflict in future sovereign debt restructuring and improving the chances of achieving sustainable debt restructuring. It also suggests that the book should be read as cautioning against the shortcomings of the ad hoc contract-based regulatory framework governing sovereign debt and a call for reform. The increase of unsustainable debt burdens across many jurisdictions in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and the lack of effective debt crisis resolution measures is one example of how the current regulatory framework is flawed. Although there is a growing consensus that the current system of sovereign debt restructurings has several flaws, there is no corresponding agreement on how it should be improved. Resistance to reform of the legal framework governing sovereign debt is particularly strong with respect to initiatives that go beyond a voluntary contractual approach, especially in jurisdictions of economic importance. This resistance lacks justification. Important progress on the regulatory framework governing sovereign borrowing and lending has already been made by institutions such as the IMF, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, and the UN General Assembly. Future reform should build on and learn from these processes.
Music at the Close
Authors: Tregear Ted
Published: March 2023

This chapter presents a reading of a single play, and a single scene, that both Englands Parnassus and Bel-vedére found irresistible: John of Gaunt’s dying moments in Richard II. Both anthologies gather the sententiae he bequeaths to his onlookers; Englands Parnassus also includes his paean to England, ‘This sceptred Ile’, making it the first collection to anthologize this perennial anthology-piece. This chapter explores the particular resonance, and extractability, of dying words, known for their proverbial truthfulness, and implicated in complex ways with the idea of dramatic character. It traces the parallel notions of nation-building in Shakespeare’s history and the anthologies in which it featured, while also observing the temporal syncopations of the political and the aesthetic. And it observes the affinity between anthologies and dying words, its passages picked like flowers from their first settings and wilting in their readers’ hands.
Differentiation: The Amplitwist Concept
Authors: Needham Tristan
Published: March 2023

This chapter evaluates the amplitwist concept. To know the graph of an ordinary real function is to know the function completely, and so to understand curves is to understand real functions. The key insight of differential calculus is that if one takes a common or garden curve, places it under a microscope, and examines it using lenses of greater and greater magnifying power, each little piece looks like a straight line. When produced, these infinitesimal pieces of straight line are the tangents to the curve, and their directions describe the local behaviour of the curve. Despite the fact that one cannot draw the graph of a complex function, it is still possible to describe the local behaviour of a complex mapping by means of a complex analogue of the ordinary derivative-the “amplitwist”. The chapter then looks at local description of mappings in the plane, before considering the complex derivative as amplitwist. It also explores conformal mapping and the Cauchy-Riemann equations.
Justice and Feasibility
Authors: Gilabert Pablo
Published: March 2023

It is common in political theory and practice to challenge normatively ambitious proposals by saying that their fulfilment is not feasible. But there has been insufficient conceptual exploration of what feasibility is, and not enough substantive inquiry into why and how it matters for thinking about social justice. This chapter provides a systematic treatment of these issues, and proposes a dynamic approach to the relation between justice and feasibility that illuminates the importance of political imagination and dynamic duties to expand agents’ power to fulfil demanding principles of justice. The ambitious profile of dignitarian justice is thus vindicated, while the specific link between dynamic duties, dynamic power, and dynamic virtue are articulated.
Introduction
Authors: Meyer James H.
Published: March 2023

The introduction to this book opens with a personal vignette from the author’s life in Istanbul in the 1990s, then segues into a brief discussion of Nâzım Hikmet’s continued importance as a cultural figure in Turkey. It outlines some of the most significant differences between this biography of Nâzım and previous ones, including the research undertaken for this book in Russia, Istanbul, Amsterdam, and Washington, DC. Another important difference relates to context, as this book does not treat Nâzım Hikmet’s life in isolation. Rather, it situates him within the broader story of his generation of late imperial “border-crossers,” i.e., individuals whose lives were significantly impacted by the cross-border experiences of their younger years. The introduction ends with a pledge to “breathe life” back into a literary and historical figure who, while the subject of much biographical attention, has usually been treated in one-dimensional terms.
Up for Grabs in Anatolia
Authors: Meyer James H.
Published: March 2023

Chapter 3 recounts Nâzım and Vâlâ’s activities in Ankara and Bolu in the spring and summer of 1921. Its earliest sections focus primarily upon broader developments occurring in the region. These include the efforts of ex-Young Turk officials to resurrect their political careers after the Ottoman Empire’s defeat; the Congress of Peoples of the East that was held in Baku, Azerbaijan; and Mustafa Suphi’s ill-fated return to Anatolia. The chapter then focuses more closely upon Nâzım and Vâlâ’s activities, discussing their experiences in Ankara, the months they spent in Bolu working as teachers for the Ankara government, and their subsequent decision to leave Bolu for Tbilisi, Georgia.
Closing Doors
Authors: Meyer James H.
Published: March 2023

Chapter 8 discusses events in Turkey and the USSR during the years 1934–38. It begins with an examination of the Soviet–Turkish frontier in the 1930s, the tightening of which coincided with the emergence of increasingly violent regimes in both states. Nâzım was released from prison in 1934, and soon after returned to his pugnacious public persona. In Moscow, meanwhile, İsmail Bilen was consolidating his power over Turkish communists in the USSR during an era of purges. The chapter then turns to a discussion of Nâzım’s writing in the mid-1930s, which marked the last of his last legal publications to appear in Turkey during his lifetime. Comparing Nâzım’s career with that of another Futurist by the name of Ercümend Behzad (Lav), this chapter concludes with an examination of the nature of literary fame in early republican Turkey.
Descending into Darkness
Authors: Meyer James H.
Published: March 2023

Chapter 9 discusses Nâzım Hikmet’s life between 1938 and 1948. In 1938, Nâzım was arrested on charges of inciting mutiny in the army and navy, trumped up claims which nevertheless resulted in a prison sentence of twenty-eight years and four months. During the early years of this term, Nâzım believed that he would be released soon. As time passed, however, and it became clear that his sentence would not soon be commuted, Nâzım began to focus more upon survival for himself and Piraye, taking on menial jobs as a means of supporting his family. Other sections of this chapter take place in Moscow, and trace İsmail Bilen’s career in the Soviet capital. The chapter concludes with a discussion of Nâzım’s writing during these years, including his initial work on Human Landscapes from My Country, which would later go on to be considered his masterpiece.
In Stalin’s USSR
Authors: Meyer James H.
Published: March 2023

Chapter 11 looks at Nâzım’s early months and years in the USSR and Eastern Bloc, up until Stalin’s death in March 1953. It begins with a discussion of the twelve days Nâzım spent in Romania while he awaited a decision from Moscow regarding his future. This chapter then examines Nâzım’s early days in the Soviet capital, looking specifically at his relationship with İsmail Bilen, an old friend dating back to their days at KUTV. Subsequent sections discuss Nâzım’s involvement in the International Youth Festival in East Berlin, his undertaking of a mission to Bulgaria, and the unearthing in Moscow of old party files denouncing Nâzım as a “Trotskyite.” The chapter concludes with a discussion of Nâzım’s new writing in the Soviet Union during the last years of Stalin.
In Quest of Female Power in the Medieval Near East
Authors: Simonsohn Uriel
Published: March 2023

The introduction offers the reader the principal theoretical premises of the book. It begins by drawing attention to the possibilities and pitfalls entailed in working with religion as a frame of analysis, noting its employment in this book for marking communal affiliations or as a social ordering category. Another central frame of inquiry in this book is kinship, specifically kinship ties among members of different religious affiliations. These rendered the family a space of intersecting convictions and sentiments and facilitated a cultural hybridity that bore noteworthy consequences for matters pertaining to identity formation, faith, social hierarchies, and normative arrangements. Within these arrangements, women were able to exercise an agency that derived from their positions within the limitations of patriarchal authority. The choice to focus on women has been motivated by the relatively unexplored perspective of female agency in the context of Muslim–non-Muslim ties in general, and kinship ties in particular. In order to appreciate instances in which women displayed relative power we are called upon to identify some of the main restrictions that were imposed on them. These cast light on the normative order in which women operated, thus allowing for an assessment of their ability to maneuver within that order. At the same time, we are rightly reminded that for the most part our informants are male, specifically male authors, who were often guided by a gender bias that should be carefully looked out for. The introduction concludes with an overview of the main literary genres from which the book draws for its analysis, namely biographical narratives and legal discourse, noting their utility, yet at the same time, limitations.
The Paradox of Female Religious Power
Authors: Simonsohn Uriel
Published: March 2023

The principal arguments resulting from this book rest on the perception of the family as a social space in which women held considerable capital. Mothers were seen as the source of life and as holding a key role during the formative stages of their children; wives were assigned managerial responsibilities in the household and moral agency vis-à-vis their husbands; a daughter required her father and brother’s guardianship; and siblings remained in a life-long bond of mutual commitments. These relationships were for the most part reciprocal and consequently rendered a woman’s position active, in contrast to her place in the public sphere. The fact that women were at the center of kinship and communal tensions is discerned through the elaborate treatment they receive in legal regulations and edifying narratives. An acknowledgment of the complexity of female agency, its resilience, and its adaptation to changing circumstances within the constraints of patriarchal conventions and religious ideals, is pertinent to an inquiry into the place of women in moments of religious change. Through it we may learn to appreciate the often silent, yet highly decisive, role of these women in the religious transformations that informed the Near East and adjacent lands in the centuries following their takeover by Islam.
The Literary Process and the Social Imaginary
Authors: Raveendran PP
Published: March 2023

This chapter critically examines the evolution of twentieth-century Malayalam poetry as providing a prototype for the history of modern Indian literature. The chapter indicates that the successive stages of nationalist-progressive writing, modernist writing, and postmodernist writing, which are stereotypically represented as following one after the other in literary history are to be viewed in fact as expressions of contests and contradictions within the social imaginary surrounding the Indian bhasha imagination. Further, critical terms imported from overseas literary cultures will often fail to reflect the ‘true’ spirit of bhasha cultures, which demonstrate vast heterogeneities in terms of trends, forms, and structures of response. There is an imaginative surplus in serious bhasha writing which standard literary histories fail to recapture. The chapter illustrates this argument with the help of examples from the literary historical statements made by Malayalam critics and historians of literature, such as P. Sankaran Nambiar, Joseph Mundasseri, M. Leelavathy, K.P. Appan, Ayyappa Paniker, and O.N.V. Kurup.
Translation and Literary History
Authors: Raveendran PP
Published: March 2023

The principles underlying translation in Indian literary history are debated in this chapter, which also charts the epistemological connection between modernity and translation. Although translation is understood today as a matter concerning the transmission of truth across cultures, it is unlikely that it had any such connotation in pre-modern India. The idea of literature in pre-colonial times, one might suggest, was broad enough to encompass the practice of translation which was considered a legitimate form of re-writing. It is this fact that accounts for the large presence of re-written literature in Indian bhasha writing of the past. For bhasha writing, even the idea of an ‘original’ text seems to have been far-fetched. The chapter examines how the rewriting of an earlier text with little regard for fidelity to the original in Indian literary traditions gives way in the period of modernity to the idea of a stable truth that gets carried across cultures in translation. This is examined in detail with reference to the works of the Niranam poets and Ezhuthachan and other Malayalam writers of the medieval times on the one hand and the early novels and prenovelistic narratives of the nineteenth century on the other.
Decolonizing Translation
Authors: Raveendran PP
Published: March 2023

This chapter continues the examination of the epistemological connection between modernity and translation proposed in the previous chapter. Translation practice in the twentieth century, at a time when the translator begins to recognize the social power of translation, is the focus of attention here. Three major Malayalam writers form the pivot of the analysis: Kesari Balakrishna Pillai, Nalapat Narayana Menon, and Changampuzha Krishna Pillai. Their writings, especially their translations from European languages, created the impression that through their choice of non-British writing they were also expressing their discomfort with the colonial cultural domination. In the context of the perception that the early Indian novels and prose translations arguably were translating western modernity for the colonized, the work of these writers appeared to promise a magnificent role for translation, which is to lead individual bhashas towards an expansion of the universe of literary experience. The decolonizing effect demonstrated by the specimens of twentieth-century translation from non-English languages into Malayalam examined in the chapter can only be explained in terms of such an expansion of experience.
The Bilingual Everyday in Bhasha Literature
Authors: Raveendran PP
Published: March 2023

The chapter examines the element of bilingualism in relation to Indian literatures as they attempt to articulate questions concerning the everyday. The chapter has a special focus on Indian English literature, as it is with reference to this branch of Indian writing that bilingualism is often raised as a point of debate. The chapter also deals with the schism in modernity, as crucial to the debate carried out here is the identification of a maimed language that is directly connected to English’s emotional aloofness from Indian bhashas. The argument in the chapter is illustrated with the help of two specimens of Indian writing: Mulk Raj Anand’s social realist novel, Untouchable, and Vaikom Muhammad Basheer’s short story on the everyday, ‘Janmadinam’.
Rajelakshmy
Authors: Raveendran PP
Published: March 2023

This chapter about the Malayalam fiction writer Rajelakshmy, whose creative life lasted only for about 10 years spread over the decades of the 1950s–1960s, seeks to unravel her position as a sober representative of the tradition of women’s writing that was slowly emerging in Malayalam literature in that decade. Rajelakshmy’s writings, which consist of twelve short stories, two completed novels, and the fragment of a third novel, are important both for their value as literary artifacts and for the way each of them lays bare the working of women’s minds and women’s subjectivity at a time when the public sphere in Kerala was far from contemplating any serious restructuring of society’s gender relations.
Epilogue
Authors: Raveendran PP
Published: March 2023

Under the Bhasha Gaze, in the previous chapters, charted the trajectory of Indian literatures after the country came into contact with European colonialism, and discussed the regional strengths of the bhasha imagination that has been wedded to a uniquely constituted indigenous variant of modernity. If the general argument in the book described secularism, multilingualism, internationalism, and respect for the Other characterizing the polyphonic literary mind in India as major components of Indian modernity, the political and cultural situation in India today, anchored as it is on parochialism, irrationalism, hypernationalism, and a mistrust of the Other can only be described as posing a serious threat to the continuance of modernity in India. The chapter discusses issues related to the crisis in Indian modernity in the context of the re-emergence of bhasha nationalism.
Ben Jonson Joins the University
Authors: Blank Daniel
Published: March 2023

This chapter explores the motivations for and the significance of Ben Jonson’s bid to become a part of university culture. Although he lacked a university degree, Jonson’s bid was successful: he spent time in residence at Christ Church, Oxford, and received honorary degrees from both Oxford and Cambridge. The chapter attributes Jonson’s academic aspirations to his disapproval of the public stage and his belief that the university dramatic tradition shared his classical priorities. The chapter begins with a discussion of Jonson’s conflicts with his fellow commercial playwrights John Marston and Thomas Dekker, and subsequently with the Oxford-educated poet and playwright Samuel Daniel. These conflicts provide context for Jonson’s desire to join the university community. The chapter then explores how Jonson’s Volpone, the printed text of which was dedicated to Oxford and Cambridge, engages with university drama and the controversy surrounding it. The chapter’s final section suggests that the university stage Jonson encountered at Oxford was much more like the public stage than he had realized. Jonson’s university connections, this chapter argues, illuminate not only the convergence between university drama and the commercial stage, but also between the universities and the world beyond their walls.
Herrick’s Players and Prayers
Authors: Hokama Rhema
Published: March 2023

In Chapter 3, I further my exploration of the porous relationship between religious and erotic devotional culture through a reading of Robert Herrick’s Hesperides and His Noble Numbers. While past readers of Herrick have portrayed him as a royalist poet and have interpreted his lyrics as purveyors of a conservative Caroline orthodoxy, I argue that recent scholarship on the redating of Herrick’s lyric output compels us to recognize Herrick as a poet of the 1610s and 1620s—rather than one of the 1640s. Herrick’s vision of erotic devotion is illuminated by topoi from the English theaters as well as a distinctly reformist experiential devotional practice—in particular, the practical divinity popularized by the cleric Joseph Hall. In doing so, my goal is to elevate the inherently materialist and embodied nature of Herrick’s devotional expression, in his love poems to his girlfriends and to his ultimate erotic interest: Christ.
Greville’s Iconoclastic Desire
Authors: Hokama Rhema
Published: March 2023

For much of the twentieth century, the scholarly tradition has described Greville narrowly—as orthodox in both his theology and his poetics, and of interest only in his capacity as a satellite figure within Sidney’s orbit. This reputation is one for which Greville himself was partly responsible, due to his understated self-presentation in The Life of Sir Philip Sidney, his biography of his friend. However, Greville’s self-deprecation was more guise than reality, and his self-fashioning gave him license both to reimagine the boundaries of Reformed devotional culture and to critique aspects of Sidney’s poetics. In Chapter 5, I argue that Greville’s treatment of lost Paradise in his lyric sequence Caelica provided ways for him to describe precarious devotion—to girlfriends, to the young man Cupid, to God, and to his friend Sidney.
Introduction
Authors: Raven James
Published: March 2023

The opening chapter describes the extraordinary historical and geographical range of the contributions to the history of books. The first and most critical question is to ponder what we mean by a book. Perhaps we think this is obvious: a book has words, a cover, and a spine, and might carry images, and we instinctively think that it will be printed. But the fourteen essays of this volume challenge traditional understanding of what a book is. Recent digital innovations encourage us to think beyond the codex, the form mostly associated in the West with a book, but as this introductory chapter makes clear, books, defined as graphic, legible, transportable, and replicable, have ranged from cuneiform tablets to digital tablets, of a succession and a simultaneity of forms, of scrolls and codices, of Inca quipus, Chinese and East Asian bamboo books and woodblock printing and xylography, Buddhist thanka scrolls, Javanese, Balinese, and Singhalese leaf books, and Dakota buffalo hides, and many more forms besides. Above all, we live today with a diversity of book forms capable of very different textual composition, handling, encounter, and reading experience. Historically, comparisons range across different technologies, from clay imprinting to different scribal practises to the encoding of printed, electronic, telegraphic, and then digital data. In all cases, the use and reading of books results from very different motivations and leads to very different consequences, both predicted and unintended.
The Ancient World
Authors: Robson Eleanor
Published: March 2023

This chapter tracks the diverse creative and practical solutions to the need to store, transport, and retrieve written knowledge and information in antiquity. Every literate society of antiquity supported a class of professional scribes who were not obviously economically productive. All saw value in books and the bookish for managing assets and debts, preserving knowledge and culture, communicating with the divine and the spiritual, and creating imaginative worlds far beyond the everyday. Books served universally to transport community memory through time and space and did so in a multiplicity of physical forms. From East Asia to the Middle East, the Mediterranean world, and in the Americas, most books were formatted as rolled or folded sheets. Scrolls and codices are extensible in ways that Mesopotamian clay tablets were not, while offering legibility through colour contrast between text and surface that neither tablets nor Andean khipus provided. Choices of material, whether plant fibres (papyrus, hemp, and tree barks especially) animal hair and skin, or mineral clays and terracottas, invariably emerged from already well-established manufacturing technologies. Soot was the universal default base for ink the world over, chosen for its easy availability, intensity of colour, and erasability when needed. Mineral-based pigments, whether for colour or durability, always came second. The exact material manifestation of the book depended on a balance of factors: cost, portability, robustness, durability, reusability, prestige, and sanctity, among many others. All of these choices had sound economic and cultural bases, and the paper codex has been but one possible outcome.
Renaissance and Reformation
Authors: Raven James , Proot Joran
Published: March 2023

Opening with the famous, rediscovered description of the ‘marvellous man’ who introduced printing by moveable type to Europe in the mid-fifteenth century, this chapter surveys the development of that printing over two centuries, centuries in which the activities of the printing press contributed critically to fundamental religious, scientific, political, and cultural transformation. Detail is given of the block book and relief printing and of the variety of contributions to further new processes including type design, woodcuts and intaglio, composition and print runs, of the relationship between image and text, of the consequences of new replicability, and developing trade and market practises. Much printing was jobbing work, much of which is disproportionately lost to us because of its ephemerality, while the burdensome costs of paper, labour, and press required the management of risk and resulted in book editions of modest numbers of copies. Printed books, however, from vernacular Bibles and prayer books, to scientific treatises and popular chapbooks, varied hugely in size and quality. Total production figures are difficult to assess, but the geographical spread of printing and print distribution, including to European colonies, can be traced with some accuracy, allowing a social penetration of print which while limited by literacy and the high price of most printed books, promoted intellectual revolutions and transformative reading practises. A further measure of the effectiveness of printing was the responses of political and religious authorities, varying from state to state and denomination to denomination, but all determined to exercise censorship and new controls over publication.
Enlightenment and Revolution
Authors: Freedman Jeffrey
Published: March 2023

This chapter surveys the development and consequences of European and North American printing and publishing from the early eighteenth century until the mechanization of printing starting in the 1820s. Although the technologies of book making changed little, the economic organization and political and legal framework of the book trade underwent fundamental transformation, as did relations between authors and readers. An increasingly capitalist market, characterized by cut-throat competition and widespread piracy, led to the enactment of the first modern copyright laws. The market as a whole expanded, with new print genres, and notably the newspaper and the novel, gaining in popularity. Readers developed intensely emotional and intimate connections both to the characters depicted in novels and to their authors, prompting conservative critics to worry about the malign effects of ‘reading addiction’—especially on women. By contrast, for leaders of the French Revolution print appeared as an agent of political and social liberation. Freed from censorship and restrictive guild regulations, printing in revolutionary France expanded to meet a voracious demand for news and opinion, now dominated by political journals and short topical works. In the wake of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic eras, a sharp distinction emerged between popular print genres, including the periodical press which came under close surveillance from the conservative Restoration regimes, and books which were generally exempt from censorship and protected by copyright. In post-Revolutionary Europe a veritable culture of the book took shape, organized around the figure of the author and supported by the power of the state.
Scenarios of Inequality
Authors: Hartmann Martin
Published: March 2023

The chapter spells out the various distances that make it difficult to empathize with differently situated and located individuals. The chapter explains what kinds of distance are important; it begins by delineating the “phenomenology of empathy gulfs” by sketching scenarios that reveal such gulfs. In doing these things, it follows a relational theory of equality. The scope of what such a theory might look like is broadened. To do so, it will be necessary to concentrate on the various distances that shape our capacity to empathize with others. These distances are mostly distances that are created or upheld by inequality. The scenarios introduced are mostly “real” scenarios of inequality. Literature by Ian Shapiro, Luc Boltanski, Pierre Bourdieu, and Jon Krakauer is discussed and integrated into the account. This literature is meant to create a certain sensitivity to various forms of research-based imputation processes.
The Materiality of Moral Distance I
Authors: Hartmann Martin
Published: March 2023

The notion of objectivized or materialized social distance is introduced. Objectivization of social distance suggests that spatial distances, architectural structures, or marriage and tax regimes can facilitate or impede empathic stances across class divides. The approach is distinguished from the more ideological ways of encouraging or discouraging empathy also discussed in the study. To introduce the perspective adopted, Tocqueville’s reflections on pre-revolutionary France in his The Ancien Régime and the French Revolution are drawn upon. Tocqueville is highly aware of the material basis of inequality; he attaches it to specific emotional registers that help to locate individuals and groups on the social scale of a hierarchical society.
Algorithm and Demonstration in the Sixteenth-Century Ars Magna
Authors: Kaplan Abram
Published: March 2023

This chapter is a study of the use of algorithms, by sixteenth-century French and Italian algebraists, to persuade and to prove. It argues that practitioners of the ars magna saw the generality and persuasiveness of demonstrations in the repeatability of procedures. The crucial locus of persuasion was the worked example, which played a key role in both arithmetical and geometrical demonstration in the mid-sixteenth century. Discussing examples from Girolamo Cardano, Guillaume Gosselin, and Simon Stevin, the chapter shows how mathematicians of the late sixteenth century assimilated algorithms to regnant literary forms of geometrical demonstration so that worked examples could take the argumentative place of diagrams. François Viète, in turn, employed the range of persuasive techniques offered by his predecessors.
Inference Rituals
Authors: Phillips Christopher J.
Published: March 2023

Modern algorithms are often based on some form of statistical processing, mechanical methods derived from statistical models that reveal patterns or make inferences based on huge amounts of data. This chapter historicizes algorithms by showing how statistical tests themselves became algorithmic, applied by rote rule-following to ascertain whether a measured difference was “significant” or whether a particular effect was unlikely to have arisen by chance. For decades, practitioners in fields such as psychology and education have lamented the “ritualistic” and “mechanical” use of statistical tests. At the start of the twentieth century, however, statistics was neither algorithmic nor mechanical: statisticians claimed their tests needed careful attention and judgment to deploy. This chapter traces how inference testing became algorithmic at mid-century by reconnecting statistics to the history of Cold War science and to a shift in statistics from the realm of observation to that of experiment. Statistical testing became a tool for objective decision-making, particularly in fields like psychology where subjective judgments were unavoidable. While computers have played an important role in facilitating the dissemination of algorithms, algorithmic notions of decision-making through statistical testing predated electronic computers. Long before computer algorithms became commonplace, statistics itself—despite the opposition of professional statisticians—had been made algorithmic.
“You Have to Hear What’s Being Said to You”
Authors: Beard Lisa
Published: March 2023

This chapter examines a linked set of appeals by civil rights and Black Lives Matter activists addressing the urgency of ending anti-Black violence. Specifically, the chapter turns to James Baldwin’s May 1963 telegram to Robert Kennedy; the May 1963 summit they convened with prominent Black civil rights advocates (with a focus on Lorraine Hansberry’s remarks at the meeting); and an August 2015 encounter between Hillary Clinton and Black Lives Matter activists Daunasia Yancey and Julius Jones—first, to elucidate the ways in which appeals to boundness intervene in distancing practices of white identifications, and second, to theorize the point of entry presented in these exchanges for a politics of responsibility to and identification with the work of ending anti-Black violence. In reading the activists’ confrontations with state officials, the chapter also examines the relationships between hearing, feeling, knowledge production, and action in political identification.