bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Life and Death in the Roman Suburb
Authors: Emmerson Allison L. C.
Published: July 2020

A Roman city was a bounded space. Defined by borders both physical and conceptual, the city stood apart as a concentration of life and activity that was divided from its rural surroundings not only physically, but also legally, economically, and ritually. Death was a key area of control, and tombs were relegated outside city walls from the Republican period through Late Antiquity. Given this separation, an unexpected phenomenon marked the Augustan and early Imperial periods: Roman cities developed suburbs, built-up areas beyond their boundaries, where the living and the dead came together in environments that could become densely urban. Life and Death in the Roman Suburb examines these districts, drawing on the archaeological remains of cities across Italy to understand their character and to illuminate the factors that led to their rise and decline, with a particular focus on the tombs of the dead. Work on Roman cities still tends to pass over funerary material, while research on death has concentrated on issues seen as separate from urbanism. This book aims to reconnect those threads, considering tombs within their suburban landscapes of shops, houses, workshops, garbage dumps, extramural sanctuaries, and major entertainment buildings to trace the many roles they played within living cities. It argues that tombs were not passive memorials, but active spaces that both facilitated and furthered the social and economic life of the city, where relationships between the living and the dead were an enduring aspect of urban life.
Three Suburbs
Authors: Emmerson Allison L. C.
Published: July 2020

“Three Suburbs” examines the three best-preserved Roman suburbs—located at Pompeii, Ostia, and in a recently excavated neighbouhood of Rome itself—to find patterns in their form and development, as well as to understand the forces that first shaped and later dismantled them. Alongside comparative evidence drawn from cities across the peninsula, the case studies indicate that suburbs emerged under Augustus and continued to grow through the early and mid-Imperial periods, before declining in the third and fourth centuries CE. The chapter argues for various factors that determined their rise and fall—not limited to changing population sizes, waxing and waning prosperity, and vicissitudes in Italy’s security—but above all identifies the primary role of changing ideals: inspired by the capital, the ideal city of the Augustan period was open and expansive, while that of the Late Empire was ornamented and defended by impressive fortifications.
Death in the Suburb
Authors: Emmerson Allison L. C.
Published: July 2020

“Death in the Suburb” aims to understand tombs as urban phenomena in Roman cities. Focusing on Rome itself, the only site where a detailed and diachronic examination is possible, it charts the relationship of the city with its tombs as it grew from a settlement of scattered villages into the bustling capital of a vast empire. Above all, the investigation indicates complexity; at no point were the dead clearly separated from the living city. Past work has emphasized the residual nature of suburban funerary monuments, arguing that they had been present outside the wall before the city expanded and so recalled vigilant separation even as they stood in the midst of developing suburbs. This chapter finds a different situation: monumental tombs emerged along with suburbs, with buildings for the living and the dead growing side by side to create districts that assumed the presence of both life and death.
Shops, Workshops, and Suburban Commercial Life
Authors: Emmerson Allison L. C.
Published: July 2020

“Shops, Workshops, and Suburban Commercial Life” focuses on the commercial structures that proliferated in Italy’s suburbs in the Augustan and early Imperial periods, with case studies highlighting Rome, Pompeii, Patavium, and Puteoli. Echoing a pattern also evident inside city walls, shops and workshops arose in the busiest areas of suburbs, where they took advantage of traffic to attract customers. At the same time, the chapter identifies suburban resources that encouraged commercial investment and distinguished the zone from the center. Suburbs brought opportunities for profit and display, not least due to the presence of tombs, which were absent in the center. Placed alongside funerary monuments, shops and workshops benefited from incorporation into prestigious neighborhoods that stimulated traffic and activity while also encouraging visitors to linger. Moreover, a location among tombs invited owners and workers to participate in types of communication and monumentalization that often were unavailable to them in other parts of the city.
Life and Death, City and SuburbThe Transformations of Late Antiquity
Authors: Emmerson Allison L. C.
Published: July 2020

“Life and Death, City and Suburb: The Transformations of Late Antiquity” is a brief epilogue considering urbanism of the fifth century CE and beyond. As Rome’s population shrank, the city reoriented itself into a constellation of small settlements, scattered within the Aurelian Wall and surrounded by cultivated land. The residents of these settlements buried their dead within the wall, a development that has been seen to represent a sea change in mentality, but which is better read as a result of the city’s new topography and demography. Suburbs, furthermore, did not disappear in this period. Late Antique suburbs grew up around the suburban shrines of Christian martyrs, not only at Rome, but also in other Italian cities like Mediolanum and Nola. This period was marked by both continuity and change, but through it the dead remained present in urban life, continuing relationships carried through all stages in the history of Italy’s cities.
The Twilight of Utilitarianism
Authors: Weale Albert
Published: July 2020

Social contract theory arose as a response to the twilight of utilitarianism. For many years utilitarianism had been seen as a political philosophy of human emancipation. Like social contract theory, utilitarianism was a critical and rationalistic morality. However, it was judged incapable of recognizing the separateness of persons, the claim by each person to be treated with justice. Utilitarianism defined the good in terms of pleasure, conceived in a naturalistic way. It regarded pleasure as the guide to choice. It promised to provide an intellectual framework within which everyday intuitive morality could be rendered consistent. And it sought to ground action in practical reasoning about the promotion of the good. However, these distinctive elements came under challenge. With the rise of modern utility theory, pleasure was no longer thought of as the guide to choice. Pleasure was no longer conceived as the sole good. Doubts were raised about the extent to which the principle of utility could explicate the principle of justice. And even utilitarianism had to concede the dualism of practical reason. One response was the rise of intuitionism in the early part of the twentieth century. Another response was the rise of social contract theory, as discussed in this book.
Contractual Constructions
Authors: Weale Albert
Published: July 2020

Social contract theory can be understood as a form of constructivism. Constructivism is the view that the content of morality can be defined by a procedure, the results of which define principles of actions. Constructivism can be understood as directed both to the normative question of what principles are justifiable and to the meta-ethical question as to the logical status of such principles. In respect of the latter, constructivism holds to a procedure-dependent conception of practical reason rather than a truth-directed view. In the case of social contract theory, the procedure is made up of three elements: an original position; the reasoning of the contracting parties; and the contents of the agreement that those contracting parties conclude with one another. Some contract theorists can be thought of as aspiring to a form of ethical reductionism, involving the defining of moral notions in non-moral terms by means of the constructed procedure, but this is not true of all. In this connection, there is a dispute as to whether rationality is to be defined in terms of self-interest. Constructivism is offered as an alternative to intuitionism, in which it is assumed that principles are in some sense self-evident.
Contractual Rationalities
Authors: Weale Albert
Published: July 2020

Modern contract theories differ from one another along one principal dimension, namely the account of practical rationality that they employ. One class of theories draws upon modern expected utility theory; a second conceives of rationality in terms of deliberative reasoning. The purpose of this chapter is to offer an exposition of these two approaches. Modern utility theory is built upon the idea of imposing consistency conditions on the choices that agents make over alternatives. Utility is understood as a numerical representation of a consistent rank-ordering by individuals over alternatives. Utility theory been applied to studies of the interactions of individuals defined as rational in the required sense, in the form of game theory. Two types of game have been of particular interest to social contract theorist: positive sum bargaining games and the prisoner’s dilemma. By contrast with utility theory, there is no orthodox theory of deliberative rationality. However, there are some important formulations that shape the deliberative form of contract theory. One is the idea of the practical syllogism. Another is the distinction between agent-relative and agent-neutral reasons. A third is the distinction between internal and external reasons. Both utility theory and deliberative theory should be thought to be normative. The principle of universalizability offers a distinctive conception of practical rationality that contrasts with contract theory.
Constitutional Uncertainties
Authors: Weale Albert
Published: July 2020

The Calculus of Consent by Buchanan and Tullock was the first book to apply the contract method to questions of public choice, particularly in respect of voting, in the modern era. Their contractual construction imagines individuals in an original position of a laissez-faire economy, where the individuals have to determine rules for the making of collective choices in respect of the reduction of economic externalities and the provision of public goods. Those individuals calculate the costs and benefits of different decision rules. Faced with proposals with which they disagree, individuals would prefer a high threshold of agreement; faced with proposals with which they agree, individuals would prefer a low threshold of agreement. The constitutional question such individuals confront is to determine a general decision rule when they are uncertain about the future stream of choices the members of their community will face. Buchanan and Tullock are defended against the criticism that their original position lacks justification and that it presupposes a requirement of unanimity to secure change. However, they are less convincing in their attack on the simple majority principle, and in their attempt to show that supermajority decision-making does not give too much power to minorities. Indeed, sometimes the supermajority devices they support should be used to protect minorities, as shown in the literature on consociational democracy.
Veiled Deliberation
Authors: Weale Albert
Published: July 2020

Rawls’s theory of justice has been the centre-point of modern social contract theory over decades. Given the breadth and extent of Rawls’s work, there are many problems in treating the arguments in limited space. However, points of comparison with other contract theorists are interesting and his theory is treated as being a continuous, if evolving, whole. Rawls seeks to achieve deductive rigour—a moral geometry—in the presentation of his principles of justice, which cover both the political liberties and the distribution of economic resources. Rawls hold that a maximin form or reasoning underlies his two principles of justice. That form of reasoning is reconstructed and it is shown that it is not as decisive in giving the deductive rigour to his conclusions as he requires. The basic liberties and their priority can be defended in broadly Rawlsian terms, assuming that the contracting parties use the practical syllogism of deliberative rationality. However, that form of reasoning cannot deal with cases where the liberties conflict, despite Rawls’s attempt to avoid a balancing test. Rawls’s argument for the difference principle fails outside of a simply two-group economy, and its failure reflects a deeper tension in his thinking between individualism and collectivism. There is a way of reconstructing his account of rational choice so as to be consistent with his collectivism, but it involves abandoning the claim that the rationality of the contracting parties should be consistent with the axioms of utility theory.
Living Together Reasonably
Authors: Weale Albert
Published: July 2020

Scanlon offers a distinctive contract theory in which the parties to the contract reason in the light of the values they share within an ongoing society. His central propositon is that an act is wrong if it would be disallowed by principles for the general regulation of behaviour that could be reasonably rejected as the basis for informed and unforced general agreement. His theory of reasons is an external one, and the parties to the moral contract are envisaged as being engaged in substantive discussion about the merits of different solutions to shared problems. The reasoning is said to reject calculations of net balance of advantage and disadvantage. To be persuasive, the test of reasonable rejection should be neither too stringent, rejecting any feasible principle, nor too permissive, allowing too many conflicting principle. The example of physician-assisted dying is used to show that the reasonable rejection test cannot meet these two conditions. However, the criticism that Scanlon’s contractualism is viciously circular is rejected.
The Limits of Liberty
Authors: Weale Albert
Published: July 2020

James Buchanan argues that it is rational for persons to agree to restrain their liberty by rules in order to advance their interests. This view has been influential within the theory of constitutional political economy. If the view were valid, then it would answer the question of how agents can have a motive to behave justly. However, there are several problems with the argument. In the first place, it is inconsistent with the subjectivist methodology that Buchanan habitually employs, since within the subjectivist framework there is no way of knowing if people are better off constrained. In particular, within such a methodology, there is no reason for privileging supposedly long-term interests over short-term ones. The economics of temptation cannot be used appropriately to solve the problem of motivation.
Constraining Maximization
Authors: Weale Albert
Published: July 2020

Gauthier takes his starting point for a theory of obligation the prisoner’s dilemma. That dilemma illustrates the problem of providing the rationale for obligation, since without a rational precept that agents have to keep their word, no social contract is credible. Gauthier’s aim is to show that duty overrides advantage, so that the acceptance of duty is truly advantageous. His key insight is that agents can escape the trap of the prisoner’s dilemma, provided that they think of their individual choices as a fair optimizing response to the choices of others. This distinguished straightforward maximizers, who would defect in a prisoner’s dilemma, from constrained maximizers, who would cooperate. Constrained maximizers have a disposition to cooperate, because they recognize the importance of being admitted into society. However, to make his solution work, Gauthier requires a heterodox distinction between choice and preference. Of itself, this is reasonable. However, the argument falters at the point at which it infers from the need for contractual association that such association will be coextensive with society at large, when it may be more restricted than that. Moreover, the strategy of a fair response is incompatible with Gauthier’s claim that his theory is non-tuistic, as well as the claim that affective morality can be internal and disposition, rather than requiring governance.
Fairness, Goodness, Reasonableness
Authors: Weale Albert
Published: July 2020

The study of obligation in Rawls raises a number of interpretative questions about the way in which A Theory of Justice relates to Political Liberalism. The interpretation offered here is that the two are concerned with distinct problems. The problem of congruence is the problem that exemplifies the problem of moral duty. In Theory, Rawls’s aim is to show how a rational plan of life supports and affirms a person’s sense of justice. In approaching this problem, Rawls offers two sorts of arguments: the conditional and the non-conditional. The unconditional arguments rely upon balance of motives considerations, but are insufficient to reconcile a sense of a person’s good with the duties of justice. The non-conditional arguments eventually fall back upon a controversial philosophical position. In Political Liberalism the argument is transformed into one of reasonable agreement among those who share a conception of the good. However, in substituting the potential alienation of churches or sects from society at large for the alienation of individuals from moral norms, Rawls has substituted one problem for another.
Justification to Others
Authors: Weale Albert
Published: July 2020

Prichard posed the question of whether there was a reason for persons to take on the obligations of morality. Scanlon offers a distinctive contractualist answer to this question, which is based on the notion of what it is reasonable for persons to act on as moral duties. It is useful to contrast Scanlon’s theory will John Stuart Mill’s conception of sanctions. For Scanlon, by contrast with Mill, there is no need to appeal to a special psychological element to explain how a person could be moved to moral action. The motivation is adequately captured in the idea of external reasons, which derive from the social relations in which persons stand to one another. This is not intended as a reply to the egoist, but as an account of what moves people to act morally. Scanlon has to assume a thesis of ‘purity of heart’ akin to that of Rawls, and this is implausible. A useful way of understanding Scanlon’s approach is via the idea of relative necessity, where the necessity is relative to the code of a particular society. However, understood in this way, Scanlon’s thesis is vulnerable to the fact that some societies have deep divisions, in which there is no coherent and agreed moral code. Yet, there can still be justice between strangers.
Contractual Reconstructions
Authors: Weale Albert
Published: July 2020

In the twilight of utilitarianism contract theorist sought to respond to the problems that utilitarianism had thrown up. How successful were they? Our review of contract theory has shown that it is not possible to base a contract theory on a utility theory of rationality, even though some have claimed that such a theory states the essential elements of rational behaviour. The axioms of utility theory are controversial in themselves, and do not give an account of prudence. To have an account of prudence, we need to turn to the deliberative account of rationality, and the idea of intelligibility. The practical syllogism will only take us so far, however, and will not deal with cases where interests conflict. There is no need to make a sharp distinction between contract theories in which there is a plurality of agents, without a veil of ignorance, and a single agent behind a veil of ignorance. The singular veil of ignorance construction can be regarded as a more abstract thought experiment in situation of moral perplexity. Similarly, the distinction between mutual advantage theories, which involve essential reference to a baseline of non-cooperation, and baseline independent theories is not clear, since much depends on the character of the baseline. The problem of obligation remains unresolved, but its lack of resolution underlines a conclusion of Hart to the effect that coercion is an essential element of a large-scale society.
Contractual Constitutions
Authors: Weale Albert
Published: July 2020

Arendt pointed out that social contract theory identified some elementary truths of democratic politics. What might be those elementary truths? The first is the need for public goods; the second the role of a two-level theory; and the third is the essential role of government in providing the conditions for social cooperation. Democratic contracts need to respect the requirements of political equality. However, this still leaves us with the problem of knowing what could be agreed among agents reciprocally situated. The empirical method suggests that we need to look to social conditions that embody the circumstances of impartiality. One such set of conditions is found in common property resource regimes, where power is roughly equal. Such regime exhibit various forms of equality, but they also suggest the need for participation as well as monitoring and sanctions. Large-scale societies need to incorporate conditions of open representation and effective deliberation if they are to exhibit the circumstances of impartiality. International contracts are best understood if the Grotian norms of traditional international relations are regarded as equivalent to the individualistic minimum of a domestic order, which needs a social contract to deal with externalities and provide international public goods. It is plausible to think that, in an interdependent world, mutual advantage may exhibit the logic of a universalization to humanity as an end in itself.
Communities under Fire
Authors: Dowdall Alex
Published: July 2020

Communities under Fire rewrites the history of the Western Front from the perspective of its civilian inhabitants. Between 1914 and 1918, the fighting passed through some of Europe’s most populated and industrialised regions. Large French towns including Nancy, Reims, Arras, and Lens lay at the heart of the battlefield. Their civilian inhabitants endured artillery bombardment, military occupation, and considerable material hardships. Many fled for the safety of the French interior, but others lived under fire for much of the war, ensuring the Western Front remained a joint civil-military space. Communities under Fire explores the wartime experiences of civilians on both sides of the Western Front, and uncovers how urban communities responded to the dramatic impact of industrialized war. It discusses how war shaped civilians’ personal and collective identities, and explores how the experiences of military violence, occupation, and forced displacement structured the attitudes of civilians at the front towards the nation. It argues that that the direct experiences of war shaped both personal and collective identities, placing civilians at the Western Front at the forefront of a broader process of wartime militarization. This development had wide-ranging social impacts, as civilians in towns at the Western Front felt their experiences marked them out as members of ‘communities under fire’ inhabiting distinct positions within wartime French society, and entitled them to privileged treatment. This book explains the multiple ways by which urban residents responded to, were changed by, succumbed to, or survived the enormous pressures of life in a warzone.
Digging the Dirt in the Pursuit of Cleanliness
Authors: North Susan
Published: July 2020

The introduction outlines the historiography on cleanliness and the influence of Georges Vigarello on early modern social history and history of the body. It reviews both the philosophical and the practical aspects that make researching cleanliness so challenging. On one hand, the prejudices of contemporary observers and commentators are acknowledged and, on the other, the practice of cleanliness is so habitual it goes unnoticed and unrecorded. The methodology for the book is described, first to use traditional documentary sources from a variety of media to elucidate what advice was given about cleanliness in early modern England. In order to determine whether such advice was followed, a study of the material culture of cleanliness is proposed and outlined, acknowledging that it may be more successful for linen than for bodies. Finally the drawing together of these various strands of research is emphasized.
Clothing and Disease
Authors: North Susan
Published: July 2020

Chapter 3 examines early modern English medical literature that discusses theories of contagion. Three fatal diseases—plague, smallpox, and typhus—and a host of minor ones were thought to be transmitted through dirty textiles and clothing. Only strict attention to clean clothing and domestic textiles could prevent their contagion. Another strand of medical theory involved the theory of insensible perspiration—a physiological function that was considered essential to good health. The best way to encourage this function was by wearing flannel underwear instead of linen. At one point, the implications of insensible perspiration led physicians to believe that changing a fever patient’s linen would be fatal. These theories came into conflict, for wool was thought to harbour contagions far more easily than linen fabrics, and doctors worried about the ‘putrid effluvia’ harbouring in a patient’s linens.
Owning Linens
Authors: North Susan
Published: July 2020

Chapter 6 surveys a range of different types of inventories to establish which of the visible and invisible linens and how many of each English people of various status and wealth owned between 1550 and 1800, and of their quality. Household and probate accounts provide valuable information on how frequently new linens were acquired. These documents reveal that almost everyone in early modern England owned some linen. Social class is clearly defined through linen—the best quality and most owned associated with royalty. However, even those on the parish had the linens—visible and invisible—that were necessary for propriety.
More Washing
Authors: North Susan
Published: July 2020

The story of laundry continues in Chapter 10 with the labour of washerwomen and the economics of the service. There were several strategies that could be used to get the washing done: employing full-time laundry maids as part of the household, sending the linens out to be washed, or engaging a washerwoman to come in to do the work. Washing was considered an essential service, arrangements were made to ensure that orphans, apprentices, those ‘on the parish’ and in workhouses had laundry services provided. The necessity of washing for baby clothes is examined in the payments of ‘soap and candle’ for wet nurses. Finally, frequency of washing in analysed in relation to the numbers of linens people owned.
Washing Bodies
Authors: North Susan
Published: July 2020

The material culture of washing bodies is not as rich as that for clean linens. Chapter 11 uses a range of evidence to examine how widely it was practised by looking for basins, kettles, and towels which are ubiquitous but multi-purpose in inventories and household accounts. The consumables are more reliable; recipes for wash balls (soap explicitly for the skin), washing, and bath waters appear in household manuals and personal collections. These products were also sold by apothecaries, country mercers, and chapmen. The Old Bailey proceedings reveal a range of cleanliness practices—how frequently people washed themselves and sometimes exactly what parts—as well as standards and expectations. New literature on the early modern urban provision of water suggests it was widely available for washing bodies and clothes in all but the poorest neighbourhoods.
Genesis of Development Macroeconomics and National Accounts in Developing Countries
Authors: Cornia Giovanni Andrea
Published: July 2020

The chapter discusses the reasons whycKeynesian policies and development macroeconomics in low-income countries received any attention relatively late, as well as the factors that led to a gradual acceptance of demand-side measures. It also discusses the data, conceptual, and accounting problems encountered when measuring economic performance in low-income countries, including the importance of self-consumption, barter, unilateral transactions, and unrecorded monetary transactions in the informal economy. All this reduces the impact of monetary and fiscal policies and underline the importance of structural policies. The chapter also discusses the accounting conventions and practices used to overcome such problems, and the impact all this has on the estimates of the main macroeconomic aggregates and the evaluation of the impact of public policies.
Institutions, Investment, and Growth in Developing Countries
Authors: Cornia Giovanni Andrea
Published: July 2020

Many analyses of long-term development neglect the importance of formal and informal political and economic institutions in developing countries. This chapter discusses the nature of such institutions, their endogeneity and persistence over time as well as their impact on growth, inequality, and political stability. The chapter places particular attention on the institutions that build the market and facilitate economic exchange, and on the public organizations mandated with their enforcement. It then discusses their impact on growth and macroeconomic stability as well as the role played by informal institutions in developing countries where formal institutions are often perceived as a costly obstacle to economic development.
Lifeblood and Deathblood
Authors: Secunda Shai
Published: July 2020

This chapter demonstrates how the Babylonian Talmud and Zoroastrian Middle Persian texts developed a neo-Galenic notion of menstruation as closely related to a productive, bloody female seed emitted during intercourse. At the same time, these literatures claimed that menstruation originated in primordial evil or sin. Similarly, menstruation was seen as potently dangerous in Babylonian Jewish magical texts. This compound set of beliefs largely reflect a male perspective, in which menstruation was seen as an unusual, and even threatening, physiological phenomenon, and thus highly marked.
The Sasanian Queen-mother and Her Bloodstains
Authors: Secunda Shai
Published: July 2020

This chapter shows how the Babylonian Jewish practice and Talmudic discourse of menstrual impurity developed within the space of the Sasanian Empire. It considers evidence of imperial persecutions that may have impinged on the observance of the Jewish menstrual rituals. The chapter then considers evidence of Babylonian Jewish awareness of the importance of menstrual impurity in neighboring, non-Jewish religious life, and how the shared similarity may have led to some tension. It surveys a series of Talmudic strategies for competing with the parallel Zoroastrian system. And it shows how the need to emphasize Jewish expertise may have led to the devolvement of the rabbinic diagnostic approach to bloody discharges.
She Counts for Herself
Authors: Secunda Shai
Published: July 2020

This chapter looks at three halakhic topics concerning female initiatives and assertions of privacy in the menstrual practices: (1) the regular regiment of menstrual examinations, which is essentially done away with in the Babylonian Talmud; (2) a surprising Talmudic claim that husbands should not second-guess the purity status of their wives; and (3) the well-known and now controversial practice of counting seven days towards purification after the cessation of menstrual flow. The latter practice is attributed by the Talmud to the initiative of Jewish women, initially encouraging a reading of it as a legacy of female enterprise. Notably, the custom of counting seven “clean days” is entirely a Babylonian development, and might be related to similar trends in Zoroastrian and Mandaean practice. Yet, a close examination of the sources demonstrates how fundamentally unstable the texts are, as they occasionally attribute the practice of counting seven “clean days” to rabbinic enactment, rather than female initiative. This leads to close with the admission that the texts do not enable us to peer over the “red fence” of menstrual impurity practices to access Babylonian Jewish culture as it really was.
Making an Ass of Yourself in Narrative
Authors: Spencer Jane
Published: July 2020

Through close readings of literary asses in Sterne, Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Clare, this chapter argues that the development of sympathetic animal representation is marked by an ambivalence emblematized by the figure of the donkey. The chapter outlines the donkey’s ambiguous cultural status, discussing narratives from two different traditions: the Judeo-Christian tradition in which the meek ass is revered for its lowliness, and the classical tradition in which it is scorned. The biblical story of Balaam’s ass, in which the ass speaks against her master’s cruelty, is interpreted literally in the eighteenth century as teaching compassion to animals. In Apuleius’ ancient novel The Golden Ass the narrator, transformed into an ass, is a low, lustful, stupid beast. Both narratives influence the eighteenth-century donkey representations discussed here. The writers’ tonal complexities are traced to the fear that to sympathize with animals is to be transformed, like Apuleius’ narrator, into an ass.
The Innovative Animals of Children’s Fiction
Authors: Spencer Jane
Published: July 2020

This chapter discusses the animals of early children’s fiction, showing that their didactic and affective purposes are rooted in the period’s conception of childhood as a time of special closeness to animal being. Children’s writers teach children to grow away from animality, but also use animals to encourage the child reader’s sympathy. The fiction’s message of kindness to animals depends both on reminding children of feelings they share with nonhuman creatures and on explaining human superiority. The chapter argues that children’s writers make a distinct contribution to a developing literature of animal subjectivity. They make significant innovations in narrative techniques for representing nonhuman viewpoints, not only in their use of animal narrators but in third-person narrative access to non-linguistic animal minds. Writers include Dorothy Kilner, Thomas Day, Sarah Trimmer, Anna Letitia Barbauld, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Blake, Dorothy Wordsworth, Maria Edgeworth, and Edward Augustus Kendall.
Woman and Brute in Feminism
Authors: Spencer Jane
Published: July 2020

This chapter treats 1790s feminist writing by Mary Wollstonecraft, Catharine Macaulay, Mary Hays, and Mary Robinson, tracing conflicts in their thought created by the question of the animal. Faced by the animalization of women based on their identification with the sexual and reproductive body, feminists appealed to a disembodied reason to argue for their equality with men; but their sympathy with nonhuman animals as sharing in their victimization by men encouraged some revaluation of animality. Wollstonecraft’s foundational work on the rights of woman makes an anthropocentric commitment to unique human rationality, and reveals anxieties attributable to her reading of natural history discourses that naturalized the subordination of women. Robinson shows greater confidence in disembodied reason as guarantor of gender equality. The chapter traces the development of sympathetic responses both to human animality and nonhuman animals in Macaulay, Hays, and in Wollstonecraft’s own later work.
The Orang-outang System: Animals and Abolition
Authors: Spencer Jane
Published: July 2020

This chapter examines the effects on abolition debates of racial theories positing a special closeness between African and ‘orang-outang’ or ape, and shows how Ignatius Sancho, Ottobah Cugoano and Olaudah Equiano deployed literary animals to underscore their own humanity and consider the implications of freedom. Firstly it considers writing on the ‘orang-outang’, arguing that anatomical and behavioural observations with the potential to challenge human exceptionalism were diverted into support for emergent racialist theories. The orang-outang was rhetorically used to create the starkest animalization applied to any human group. Secondly it considers comparisons between slaves and cattleo, invoked both in pro- and anti-slavery arguments to characterize the institution and practices of slavery. Thirdly it discusses the complex use of literary animals in Afro-British writing, including Sancho’s Sternian sympathy with donkeys, Cugoano’s revaluation of common animal metaphors, and Equiano’s exploration of the relation between human freedom and trade in nonhuman animals.
Learned Pigs
Authors: Spencer Jane
Published: July 2020

Considering both writing and visual propaganda, this chapter argues that nonhuman animals were central to the 1790s political reform movement both as sources of metaphor and as fellow creatures also demanding freedom from oppression. Several species of animals are treated, the pig being the most important. Firstly the chapter shows how Burke’s characterization of revolutionaries as a swinish multitude, combined with the reputation of the performing animal known as the learned pig, made the pig the radicals’ emblem, defiantly adopted by Thomas Spence, Daniel Isaac Eaton, Richard Porson, and others to energize their campaign. Secondly, the question of sympathy for real-life pigs within radical discourse is raised through a discussion of Southey’s pig poems. Thirdly, the chapter considers the extension of the rights of man to nonhuman animals in the work of John Oswald and Joseph Ritson, who combined a commitment to vegetarianism with revolutionary politics.
The Rights of Beasts in the Early Nineteenth Century
Authors: Spencer Jane
Published: July 2020

This chapter argues that the parliamentary animal welfare campaign of the early nineteenth century, culminating in Martin’s Act (1822), was the heir to the radical movements of the 1790s. The literary representation of animals as feeling subjects, and the complex relationship between human and animal rights, both had profound effects on the anti-cruelty debate. Focusing on contributions by John Lawrence, an early exponent of legal rights for animals, Thomas Erskine, who introduced an unsuccessful Cruelty to Animals bill in 1809, and Margaret Cullen, who brought the debate about animals into the domestic novel, I show how they used and adapted radical political ideas in the service of animal welfare. The literature of animal subjectivity underpinned the anti-cruelty campaign and helped achieve legislation; but success depended on melding new attitudes with old hierarchies and turning away from the more radical implications of the reassessment of animal life.
Conclusion
Authors: Spencer Jane
Published: July 2020

Drawing together the threads of the previous chapters, these pages reflect on the way the entangled development of the concepts of human rights and animal rights made the human–animal border a site of political tension. During the eighteenth century people were exploring the similarities between human and nonhuman animals in new ways, encouraged by developments in natural history and the cultural spread of sympathy. The concept of animal rights was an almost inevitable (if uncertain) extension of the concept of human rights, and made the borderline between human and animal a site of great political tension. That animals are like humans, and that humans are (like) animals, were propositions brought together, two sides of the same coin, but what that might mean for human politics and for human–animal relations was debatable and debated, then as now. As we have seen, both the possibility that human–animal kinship could inspire greater kindness, and the danger that the animalization of human groups could be used to rationalize oppression, were realized during the period. The work concludes with a brief consideration of the legacy of eighteenth-century writing in contemporary animal representation, highlighting the continuing importance of storytelling to the creation of respect for nonhuman animals.
Navigating
Authors: Sawyer Daniel
Published: July 2020

This chapter explores navigation in the reading of later Middle English verse, examining how readers entered books of poetry and how they moved around within poems. The chapter explores the varying fates of the navigational apparatus in different poems, and discusses the use and, sometimes, creation by readers of summaries, tables of contents, and indexes to English poems. A quantitative survey of fixed bookmarks offers a new method for recovering readers’ movements. Finally, the chapter examines how navigation could obscure the distinctions between individual texts and whole books, and could sometimes be used by later-medieval readers to manipulate attribution and canonicity. Past discussions of navigation in reading have often used a distinction between continuous and ‘discontinuous’ (out of order) reading; this chapter concludes that considerably more fine-grained gradations are visible within these two categories.
Wider Reading
Authors: Sawyer Daniel
Published: July 2020

This chapter summarizes the conclusions of the book, and explores some possible implications for future study in various manuscripts and texts. The manuscript presentation of Piers Plowman for reading is compared to the presentation of The Prick of Conscience, and the resulting similarities and differences illustrate the value of studying the filtration of formal choices through habits in book production. The chapter considers the presence and absence of the marking of rhyme in copies of The Canterbury Tales, and then closes by examining the work of the compiler Robert Thornton as a case study which draws together many of the book’s themes.
Origins
Authors: Tasić Dmitar
Published: July 2020

Chapter I presents the story of origins of modern Balkan paramilitaries which was shaped during the late 19th—early 20th century nation and state building processes in the Balkans. Existing traditions of guerrilla warfare were used during the struggle between Greece, Bulgaria and Serbia over Ottoman Macedonia when all three countries initiated sending of small armed bands to Macedonia in order to protect their own and intimidate rivals followers. It also describes appearance of Albanian national movement and how Balkan countries used their respective paramilitaries during the Balkan Wars 1912-1913 and the First World War. It also shows how during the Toplica uprising in 1917 against Bulgarian and Austro-Hungarian occupation regimes in Serbia happened yet another bloody encounter of Serbian, Bulgarian and Albanian paramilitaries. Situation after the First World War was characterised by adjusting to new realities, by creation of new organizations and by arrival of non-Balkan actors—‘White’ Russians émigrés and former participants in Russian revolutions. Both groups brought their own experiences, visions and rivalries.
Conclusion: Balkan Paramilitaries
Authors: Tasić Dmitar
Published: July 2020

It summarises previous chapters and their conclusions about very alive legacies of paramilitarism in the Balkans, and how it is possible to invoke paramilitary traditions and embed them into contemporary context. By the rule these attempts proved to be simple misuse either by political or structures close to the secret services. Up to now modern paramilitarism and its relations with Balkan paramilitary traditions didn’t attract public attention apart of several journalists who published several works and one documentary on different Serbian paramilitary formations during the wars of Yugoslav succession. What is raising concerns and can be qualified as alarming is that paramilitaries were perpetrators of most horrible war crimes and different violent acts against civilian population especially during the latest wars in former Yugoslavia during the 1990’s, and that during that period some of them created strong ties with the world of international organized crime.
The Ethical Demand and the Sovereign Expressions of Life
Authors: Løgstrup K. E. , van Kooten Niekerk Kees , Lykke Cobos Kristian-Alberto , Fink Hans , Rabjerg Bjørn , Stern Robert
Published: July 2020

Løgstrup introduces two key ethical concepts: the ethical demand and the sovereign expressions of life. Løgstrup argues that we know the truth of the commandment to love the neighbour not only from Jesus’s proclamation, but also from the basic conditions of our existence. He goes on to introduce the sovereign expressions of life, such as trust and compassion. These phenomena are part of human existence and enable life to flourish. Løgstrup suggests that only when these possibilities for the flourishing of life are prevented from being realized does the ethical demand arise that one now ought to do out of duty what one failed to do out of spontaneity. This leads him to discuss Nietzsche, agreeing with Nietzsche’s anthropological claims regarding human egoism, but criticizing him for not recognizing that this is due to our distortion of the sovereign expressions of life, which he illustrates with our distortion of trust.
Norm and Spontaneity
Authors: Løgstrup K. E. , van Kooten Niekerk Kees , Lykke Cobos Kristian-Alberto , Fink Hans , Rabjerg Bjørn , Stern Robert
Published: July 2020

In this chapter, ‘Norm and Spontaneity’, Løgstrup starts by drawing a distinction between morality (rules and norms which can be applied and utilized) and the sovereign expressions of life (which cannot be applied or utilized, but can only be realized in the concrete situation). He then goes on to discuss conflicts between duty and temptation and also the possibility of situations where there is a conflict of duties, drawing in Kant and Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Sharer in the discussion.
Politics and Ethics
Authors: Løgstrup K. E. , van Kooten Niekerk Kees , Lykke Cobos Kristian-Alberto , Fink Hans , Rabjerg Bjørn , Stern Robert
Published: July 2020

The first problem discussed in this chapter is whether politics and ethics are somehow related or if they are to be treated as completely separate areas. This leads Løgstrup to discuss the golden rule which he sees as a tool for connecting politics and ethics through the reversal of roles it involves. There are two separate pitfalls here, which involve either seeing the golden rule as a mere rule of reciprocity, or indulging in Schwärmerei, i.e. indulging in an overly optimistic conception of human good-hearted nature. This then again leads to a discussion of how the good Samaritan actually acts in a loving way out there on the road, whereas a political Samaritan could be conceived of as someone who tries to transpose love into the field of politics.
Duty
Authors: Løgstrup K. E. , van Kooten Niekerk Kees , Lykke Cobos Kristian-Alberto , Fink Hans , Rabjerg Bjørn , Stern Robert
Published: July 2020

This chapter focuses on the concept of duty, which Løgstrup connects to thinkers such as Kant, Nowell-Smith, and the Stoics, and which he sees as originating from the different kinds of relationships human beings are in with each other, e.g. friendships, marriage, parent–child, employer–worker, etc. Løgstrup argues against Kant that his crude opposition between inclination and duty cannot accommodate the sovereign expressions of life; the latter are more fundamental than duty and duty only enters into the relationship when the sovereign expressions of life somehow fail to be realized.
Responsibility
Authors: Løgstrup K. E. , van Kooten Niekerk Kees , Lykke Cobos Kristian-Alberto , Fink Hans , Rabjerg Bjørn , Stern Robert
Published: July 2020

This very short chapter discusses the concept of responsibility. Responsibility is connected with concrete situations and relations in which we are placed. Løgstrup also discusses the difference between responsibility and duty through their opposites: irresponsibility and neglecting one’s duty. Referring to Luther, Løgstrup describes ‘responsibility’ as a two-sided relation involving a person who is responsible for someone while being held responsible by a third party.