bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The International Dignitary Caps a Distinguished Career
Authors: De Santis Christopher C.
Published: September 2022

Hughes was highly regarded throughout the world in the final years of his career, and although he was the subject of critiques by some younger writers, who perceived his later work as lacking in complexity and, at times, out of step with Black nationalist political commitments and aesthetics, he was frequently sought after for his perspectives on art, race, politics, and the role and responsibilities of Black writers. In the 1960s, his fifth decade working as a professional writer, Hughes still perceived himself primarily as a propaganda writer, and he retained a belief in the power of literature to effect some change in prevailing problems of racial intolerance, bigotry, and discrimination. Hughes emphasized the importance of cross-cultural and transnational exchange among artists and writers, but he never lost sight of—or stopped speaking boldly about—the specific struggles of Black people in the United States against entrenched systems of racial oppression and the racist violence that continued even in the context of the gains achieved during the Civil Rights Movement.
Transparency and Power
Authors: Koivisto Ida
Published: September 2022

The chapter discusses the interconnections between transparency, legitimacy, and power. It is argued that according to the popular perception, transparency promises to make power visible, and as such, controllable. To question this premise, different dimensions of power are discussed. The chapter suggests that the illusion of the verticality of power is important. The legitimacy of power is typically a concern in the state, in which two different rationalities and concomitant citizen roles come into play: transparency in ‘democratic rationality’, enabling citizens to influence the state, and transparency in ‘public law rationality’, making citizens aware of the power to which they are subjected. It is argued that transparency can make only certain aspects of power visible: some aspects of power may be unfit for representation, while other aspects may be consciously concealed. This makes the two rationalities incomplete. Additionally, it is argued that we may not always want to see power.
Communion Theories in Catholic Theology
Authors: Cross Richard
Published: September 2022

This chapter describes the way in which Cajetan’s account of the Incarnation was developed in later Dominican circles. It discusses the contributions of four theologians: Diego Álvarez (the first theologian to attempt a response to Suárez’s innovations), Giovanni Paolo Nazario, João Poinsot, and Jean-Baptiste Gonet. The question for these theologians lay in working out what kind of ground was required for categorial union relation held by Aquinas to exist between the human nature and the divine person. Their answer was that the relation is grounded simply on the immediate communication of the divine subsistence and existence to the human nature. One worry had by Suárez is that no action can be simply unitive, as the communication of the divine subsistence to the human nature seems to be. Nazario responded by attempting to give an account of such an action in terms of a created efflux mediating between action and passion. Poinsot maintains that subsistence might count as a mode; the other thinkers reject this.
The Genus Maiestaticum (1)
Authors: Cross Richard
Published: September 2022

This chapter examines various problems and issues associated with the Lutheran claim that certain divine attributes can be predicated of Christ’s human nature. It opens with the question of semantics, showing some of the different senses of predication in abstracto accepted by Balthasar Meisner and Johann Gerhard. After a brief discussion of early Lutheran treatments of the essence–energies distinction, it shows how the genus maiestaticum depends on divine activity being performed through the human nature. The chapter offers three distinct analyses of the nature of divine activity: those of Ägidius Hunn, Johann Gerhard, and Abraham Calov. It shows how Calov borrows an account of divine activity from Francisco Suárez, one that turns out to be inconsistent with Calov’s insistence that predicating divine attributes of the human nature is not a case of mere extrinsic denomination—a position that Calov reports and rejects from the Colloquy of Kassel (1661) between the theologians of Marburg and Rinteln. The chapter includes discussion of the disagreement between the theologians of Tübingen and those of Giessen. Both sides agree that the genus maiestaticum requires special divine activity in the human nature; but the former date this activity from the Incarnation, whereas the latter date it from the exaltation. The Decisio saxonica effectively decided in favour of the Giessen theologians. A final section considers differences between the two groups of theologians on the question of divine omnipresence, and consequent differences between the two on the nature of bodily omnipresence.
Britain’s Catholics
Authors: Clements Ben , Bullivant Stephen
Published: September 2022

Chapter 1 focuses on some important foundational issues relating to the academic study of Catholics as a religious community in Britain. The chapter discusses how precisely the study does, and does not, define ‘a Catholic’ in the first place and connects this to the Roman Catholic Church and to considerations in the scholarly literature. Since self-identification as a Catholic is the foundational category for all other analyses in the book, the strengths and limitations of this measure are discussed. Significant attention is paid to the issue of survivorship bias. The chapter then provides a detailed contemporary profile of who Britain’s Catholics are in terms of demography—overall numbers, age, sex, geographical distribution, national and ethnic background, and education.
Social Morality Issues
Authors: Clements Ben , Bullivant Stephen
Published: September 2022

Chapter 4 provides a detailed analysis of the shifting terrain of Catholics’ attitudes on social issues across recent decades. This is done in the context of the Catholic Church’s long-standing teachings on social morality. The chapter first reviews the long-term attitudinal data on moral debates, based on analysis of long-running social surveys. This shows how there has been a substantial and wide-ranging liberalization of Catholics’ attitudes on abortion, assisted suicide, sexual relations before marriage, gender roles, and same-sex relations. Based on in-depth analysis of the new ‘Catholics in Britain’ survey, the chapter then shows the liberal stances that many British Catholics hold on these issues and explore some of main sources of attitudinal variation, based on sex, age, education, religious socialisation, and levels of religious commitment.
Universalism and the Universe of Death
Authors: Foley Hugh
Published: September 2022

This chapter examines Amiri Baraka’s interrogation of the idea of universality, particularly in his early work in The Dead Lecturer (1964). It begins by discussing the attempts by avant-garde writers, chiefly Charles Olson, to ground the universality of the poem in biology, and the ways that they saw this as a rejection of the lyric, which they viewed as limited, conformist, and traditional. This chapter makes the case that as Baraka became radicalized following his experiences in Cuba and increasingly questioned the white supremacism of liberal society, such universality became suspect. Reading the poem ‘Betancourt’, the chapter argues that Baraka used the resources of the lyric exchange to stage this failure of universality. It then discusses how this failing was connected to Baraka’s understanding of American liberalism. It concludes by reading the poem ‘Rhythm and Blues’ to show how Baraka offers a critique of racialized exclusion at the heart of the liberal idea. In order to do this, the poem uses the lyric exchange as a way of thinking about death, and the deadliness underlying both American society and the lyric’s work of animation. In revealing the limits of the liberalism of Olson, the chapter argues that Baraka demonstrates a different aspect of the critical powers of lyric.
‘Freedom that has turned into a painting’
Authors: Foley Hugh
Published: September 2022

This chapter discusses John Ashbery’s poetry as it poses the question of autonomy. It argues that Ashbery’s poetry is concerned with distinguishing the autonomy of art and the individual conceived like a work of art from a social claim for the value of individual autonomy. He thus constantly portrays autonomy as a kind of receding or fictional image, a work of art, which returns our attention to the particularities of individuals, rather than their universal nature. Beginning with a reading of his work in The Double Dream of Spring, the chapter argues that this formulation can be read historically as a response to the homophobic invasion of privacy during the Cold War, but also through his own investments in aestheticism and the idea of the avant-garde. By looking at Ashbery’s art criticism and his conception of art in the long poem ‘Fragment’, as well as others, the chapter traces a concatenation of thoughts about autonomy in relation to American politics. The chapter argues that for Ashbery the lyric exchange functions as a way to posit an autonomy that is as provisional as the individual’s projections onto the external world. It concludes by making the case for John Ashbery’s work, and ‘Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror’ (1975) in particular, as an attempt to achieve apolitical poetry. The chapter considers what it means to take that seriously, rather than simply saying that Ashbery decentres or deconstructs the liberal subject of rights.
New Approaches to Old Questions
Authors: Rubio-Campillo Xavier , Coto-Sarmiento María
Published: September 2022

Recent years have seen an increasing use of quantitative approaches in Roman studies. The growing amount of openly available archaeological datasets provides a wealth of information that could be used to inform current debates. One of the most interesting aspects of this Open Data approach to archaeology is the capability of integrating evidence collected across thousands of different sites. This trend can be very useful to understand large-scale patterns such as trade and market structure, but are more data enough? The newly available datasets will be useful if we can use them to assess the plausibility of our ideas about the economic dynamics of the Roman Empire. This comparison between working hypotheses and data is particularly challenging in the Humanities due to the fact that ideas are traditionally expressed as natural language instead of mathematics. This difference between the language used to define evidence and ideas does not allow us to quantify the error between collected data and what our explanations would predict, thus inhibiting our ability to directly assess and compare competing hypotheses. In other words, if we do not translate our explanations into formal models then it will be very difficult to know if we are wrong, and no amount of data will help us decide. We discuss here this challenge by exploring two different hypothesis-testing frameworks in the context of Roman studies: (a) null-hypothesis significance framework and (b) model selection. The benefits and limitations of both systems are discussed through a range of case studies linked to the production and distribution of olive oil. Results suggest that the combination of new data and hypothesis-testing methods can help us inform traditional debates of Roman studies as long as these quantitative approaches are able to tackle the complexities of archaeological research, including multiscalar dynamics, data fragmentation or high levels of uncertainty.
Afterword
Authors: Stolte Tyson
Published: September 2022

This Afterword makes the case for extending the insights of Dickens and Victorian Psychology beyond nineteenth-century psychology and beyond the fiction of Charles Dickens. Dickens was not unique among his contemporaries in using first-person narration to insist upon the immateriality of the mind; the centrality of introspection to so much nineteenth-century psychology offers a key context for other first-person fiction in the period, too. Readings of the way introspection in Victorian fiction is inflected by Victorian psychology, this Afterword argues, will thus necessarily call further attention to the soul’s place in nineteenth-century conceptions of the self, offering a valuable alternative to critical accounts of the embodied mind in the period. The case made in this book for Dickens’s immersion in and contribution to Victorian psychological debate, moreover, ought to serve as a model for further exploration of Dickens’s engagement with the other sciences. Taking Dickens more seriously as a thinker, the Afterword suggests, will no doubt force us to radically revise how we read his fiction.
The Argument from Ignorance
Authors: Zimmerman Michael J.
Published: September 2022

This chapter presents a case in which a preventable tragedy occurs and raises the question of who, if anyone, is to blame for it. Many of those who contributed to the tragedy were ignorant of the fact that they were doing so, and it is clear that some of these people therefore have an excuse for their behavior. But it is not so clear that this is true of others who were similarly ignorant, and so the question arises: Under what conditions, precisely, does ignorance afford an excuse for wrongdoing? Pursuit of this question results in a first formulation of the Argument from Ignorance, whose conclusion is that, to be blameworthy for one’s behavior and its consequences, one must at some time in the history of that behavior have known that one was engaged in wrongdoing—a thesis that threatens to undermine many everyday ascriptions of responsibility.
Moral Responsibility
Authors: Zimmerman Michael J.
Published: September 2022

This chapter investigates the nature of moral responsibility. Several different kinds of responsibility are distinguished with a view to highlighting and focusing on that particular kind, moral blameworthiness, with which the Argument from Ignorance is concerned. The ensuing discussion examines the relation between blameworthiness and wrongdoing, the relation between blameworthiness and quality of will, the relation between blameworthiness and the reactive attitudes, the nature of blame, what it is to be worthy of blame, the ethics of blame, and degrees of blameworthiness. Included in this chapter is a reformulation—a refinement—of the Argument from Ignorance.
Control
Authors: Zimmerman Michael J.
Published: September 2022

This chapter investigates the nature of volitional control, the kind of control exhibited when one does something at will. Such control involves both the general ability to do the thing in question and the general ability to refrain from doing it, and it also involves the opportunity to exercise these abilities. Volitional control has several dimensions, two of which are particularly important in the context of moral responsibility and are examined in detail: the simple-intentional dimension, and the direct-indirect dimension. Also addressed are the questions of whether and how it is possible to have and exercise control over one’s omissions, what it is for control to vary in degree, and whether and how it is possible to have and exercise control over one’s beliefs.
Negligence
Authors: Zimmerman Michael J.
Published: September 2022

This chapter investigates the nature of negligence and the question of whether and how it is possible to be blameworthy for negligent behavior. It proposes a definition according to which negligent behavior is wrongful behavior to whose wrongfulness one does not, but in some sense ought to, advert. Given that such inadvertence entails that the wrongdoing is committed unwittingly, the Argument from Ignorance implies that no one can be directly blameworthy for negligent behavior. The question is then raised whether this implication can be resisted, either on the grounds that inadvertence does not entail unwittingness, or on the grounds that one can incur direct blameworthiness simply in virtue of the fact that one ought to have known better than to behave as one did. Included in this chapter are two further reformulations of the Argument from Ignorance.
Varieties of Blameworthiness
Authors: Zimmerman Michael J.
Published: September 2022

This chapter addresses several objections to two key premises in the Argument from Ignorance: Premise 2, according to which one is to blame for ignorant behavior only if one is to blame for one’s ignorance, and Premise 4, according to which one is to blame for something only if one was in control of that thing. The examination of Premise 2 involves revisiting the question of blameworthiness for negligent behavior and the relation between blameworthiness and quality of will, and it includes a discussion of agent-regret and remorse. The examination of Premise 4 also involves further consideration of the relation between blameworthiness and quality of will, and it includes a discussion of doing something for the right reason and the distinction between caring for morality de re and caring for it de dicto. It is argued that whether Premise 4 is to be rejected depends on what form of blame is at issue and, furthermore, that only those forms that comport with Premise 4 are such that the worthiness of them constitutes a form of moral responsibility. Included in this chapter is a final reformulation of the Argument from Ignorance.
Establishing a Division of Agential Labor
Authors: Bazargan-Forward Saba
Published: September 2022

Chapter 3 discusses how we establish divisions of agential labor via promises, requests, agreements, and, finally, commitments in shared action. Though there are several accounts on offer for these social phenomena, the argument for authority-based accountability applies to all of them. With respect to promises, in this chapter normative-power accounts, conventionalist accounts and expectationalist accounts are considered; each is compatible with the view that promises confer protected reasons, and thus, divisions of agential labor. Requests do so as well, even though, unlike promises and agreements, requests are not binding. In discussing shared action, the chapter considers Margaret Gilbert’s and Michael Bratman’s accounts. The result is that those engaged in shared action will typically (if not necessarily) bear authority-based accountability for what they together do. What about immoral promises, requests, agreements, and shared actions? They also confer protected reasons, albeit practical rather than moral ones. The chapter ends by noting that this picture can help make sense of accountability in the context of group agency.
Accomplice Liability
Authors: Bazargan-Forward Saba
Published: September 2022

Chapter 6 addresses how authority-based accountability can help ground the doctrine of accomplice liability. According to this doctrine, I am legally “complicit” in a wrongdoing which you committed and for which you are accountable when I am also liable for that wrongdoing by culpably contributing to your wrongful conduct. All the accounts on offer state that an individual counts as complicit in a wrongdoing only if she contributes to that wrongdoing or otherwise causally influences the wrongdoer. Such accounts have difficulty accommodating complicity in cases of overdetermination. The chapter argues that we can accommodate such cases by interpreting complicity as a species of vicarious liability. I am vicariously liable for what you wrongfully do provided we are in the right kind of formal relationship with respect to each other—such as the relationship between a deliberator and an executor. The upshot is that authority-based accountability succeeds to accommodate complicity where “contributory” accounts fail.
Linguistic vs. Behavioural Communication
Authors: Jary Mark
Published: September 2022

This chapter proposes a diagnostic for distinguishing linguistic communication proper from behavioural communication, each of which is then modelled in the subsequent two chapters. According to the diagnostic, if there is a reasonable inference between from what is said to an implicature, then that is a case of linguistic communication proper. In behavioural communication, by contrast, an initial premise is required to the effect that the speaker said that P, in order to relate what is said and the implicature. The status of these two types of communication as Gricean is considered, and the case is made that not all Gricean communication requires the reflective capacity and folk psychology that behavioural communication relies on.
What Is Said and Behavioural Communication
Authors: Jary Mark
Published: September 2022

This chapter puts forward a reflective notion of what is said, and proposes that this is employed in behavioural communication, as defined in chapter 2 and modelled here. Literature on the development of the child’s ability to characterise an utterance in terms of what is said is reviewed, and it is shown that this ability does not develop fully until around age seven, a good while after competence in basic linguistic communication has been achieved. A developmental model of implicature comprehension is proposed, and this is shown to accord with empirical findings. The two-tier model of communication that results from this and the previous chapter is compared with Recanati’s dual-system approach.
Assertion When Nothing Is Said
Authors: Jary Mark
Published: September 2022

Assertion is typically thought to involve undertaking a commitment to the truth of what on says. How, then, can assertion be accounted for in the current model, according to which nothing is said? This chapter answers that question by showing how, on the current account, an utterance can express a proposition, despite saying nothing. Assertion can then be analysed in terms of an undertaking of commitment to the proposition explicitly expressed. The consequences of this approach for the distinction between lying and otherwise deceiving are discussed, as is the difference between asserting and presupposing.
The Barbarous Country People
Authors: Cressy David
Published: September 2022

This chapter exposes the canard that shipwrecks occasioned gross disorder among coastal inhabitants, who were guilty of ‘barbarous spoils and rapines’. It advances and modifies historiographical discussion about the ‘moral economy’ of ‘wreckers’. It reviews hostile rhetoric from a variety of historical sources and finds it mostly exaggerated, self-serving, and misleading. Those who denounced coastal countryfolk as ‘barbarous’, ‘cruel’, and ‘inhumane’ did not so much demonstrate their charge as assert it; they did not so much describe the competition for shipwrecked goods as take sides in it. The denunciation of salvagers as ‘savage’ belonged to a rhetoric of denigration that divided English subjects between dutiful and disorderly sorts. Close inspection of recorded episodes finds minimal evidence of violence and greed and shows that ordinary scavengers worked as much in harness with mariners, local proprietors, and officials as against them. It is argued here and in subsequent chapters that shipwrecks may have stressed the social order, but its architecture remained intact.
Catholic Responses
Authors: Roy Louis
Published: September 2022

This chapter introduces the prominent Catholic responses to the challenge of the Enlightenment during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The author confines his exposition to the Catholic treatment of the issue of revelation, and therefore does not include other aspects of modern Catholicism. The chapter begins with such responses in France and, more at length, in Germany. Following this, the chapter presents the thought of John Henry Newman on the development of doctrine. Thereafter, the chapter expounds Hans Urs von Balthasar’s remarkable construal of revelation. Finally, the chapter comments on the input of the First and the Second Vatican Councils.
Programmes, Soft Power, and Public Diplomacy
Authors: Potter Simon J.
Published: September 2022

This chapter examines the programmes produced by international broadcasters for distant listeners. It relates these to ideas about persuasion, propaganda, soft power, and public diplomacy. It examines news broadcasting, but focuses on the other content carried by international radio services, notably music, ‘media events’, technically complex international relays, and user generated content. It looks at the schedules of early international broadcasters including the BBC and Germany’s Zeesen station, and also at Radio Bari. It assesses the use of soap opera by the BBC during the Second World War, and rock ’n’ roll music by Western broadcasters during the Cold War. It considers who was able to speak on-air, and who was not, paying particular attention to the attempts of international broadcasters to harness a diverse range of voices to their purposes. Case studies examine dramatic and literary programming on the BBC Arabic Service, and Eddy Startz’s Happy Station show.
Introduction
Authors: Colla Marcus
Published: September 2022

This introduction sets out the contours of the book by situating the aftermath of Prussia in its wider post-war political and cultural contexts. It begins by addressing the widespread post-war impression that ‘Prussianism’ was essentially the historical engine of Nazism. It then provides an outline of why the GDR’s ‘Prussia-Renaissance’ in the 1970s and 1980s was perceived at the time as a significant cultural event. Following this, it offers a theoretical overview of how the book employs the concept of ‘historical culture’, as well as the analytical value of the term more generally. The Introduction concludes with a summary of each of the book’s five chapters.
Intellectuals
Authors: Colla Marcus
Published: September 2022

This chapter explores how the political and cultural authorities of the GDR were highly reliant on the role played by professional historians in forging a new set of intellectual perspectives on the Prussian past. Not only did historians render the ‘Prussia-Renaissance’ possible in the first place, it argues, they also furnished it with intellectual legitimacy. Investigating in particular the influential works of the historians Ingrid Mittenzwei and Ernst Engelberg, the chapter argues that the production of ‘revisionist’ works about Prussian history was not a result of party decree, but instead emerged organically and logically out of the research paradigms of East Germany’s academic establishments. In addition, the chapter addresses the mixed reception of the GDR’s new works on Prussia among historians in Poland.
Time, Heritage, and Nostalgia
Authors: Colla Marcus
Published: September 2022

This final chapter argues that the GDR’s ‘Prussia-Renaissance’ must be understood within a wide European context. The broadest contextual dimension of the ‘Prussia-Renaissance’ was the vast transformation in temporal awareness that pulsated through East German culture and society from the late 1960s onwards. This brought with it a thorough change in how the relationship between past, present, and future was expressed in East German cultural practices, with history coming to play a visibly more important role as the decades unfolded. The chapter accordingly argues that the ‘Prussia-Renaissance’ was one manifestation of a broader shift in ‘historicity’ that can be identified in Eastern and Western Europe alike throughout the 1970s. It is this shift that provides the chapter’s overarching narrative in tracing the political and cultural transformation that Prussian history underwent throughout the forty-odd years of the GDR’s existence.
Homer and the Heroic Ideal
Authors: Kirichenko Alexander
Published: September 2022

The chapter begins by showing that the essentialist ideal embodied by Achilles is constructed against the backdrop of the symbolic interactionism of conventional politics (the exercise of power by means of emotionally effective symbolic substitutions). Analysing the funeral games for Patroclus in Iliad 23, it shows that the institution of athletic contests constituted a social context in which the heroic ideal not only becomes a means of credibly transforming aristocratic privilege into an incontrovertible sign of inner superiority but also evolves into a virtual centre of the geographically dispersed Greek world. Turning to the Odyssey, the chapter reads its portrayal of the homecoming of an Iliadic hero as a reflection on the mechanism whereby poetry itself secures local rulers’ status as embodiments of the Panhellenic heroic ideal and lends a sense of purpose and cohesion to the otherwise amorphous political space of archaic Greece.
The State in the Everyday: Conceptual and Methodological Challenges
Authors: Chinigò Davide
Published: September 2022

The chapter situates the problematic of this book alongside ongoing discussions in African studies around methodological nationalism—the tendency of theory to restrict the analytical scope of social and political change against the lens of the nation-state—and descriptive empiricism—the tendency of theory to provide cultural explanations of state power by reifying micro empirical realities. It contends that the lens of the everyday allows for an empirical approach to map the mutual, and yet largely undetermined, constitution of state and society over time, departing from depictions of state formation in Africa that rely on meta-historical narrations, as well as the reification of micro analyses that have little scope for generalization. The chapter interrogates the everyday state by engaging with questions about the temporality of state formation, the spatial configurations of state-society relations, and the problem of subject formation in relation to state power. In particular, it critically engages with three bodies of literature addressing state formation and state-society relations in EPRDF Ethiopia in terms of centre-periphery relations, the developmental state, and authoritarianism and political culture. The chapter elaborates an approach to study the Ethiopian developmental state as a scalar project. It also suggests that a focus on the formation of the political subject allows us to revisit discussions about authoritarian governance away from political culture. This requires an empirical approach to study how state power both acts and enacts the subject into being through performative practices of recognition.
Returning from Resettlement: Rural Modernization in Waag Himra
Authors: Chinigò Davide
Published: September 2022

This chapter discusses the case of a resettlement programme in Waag Himra (Amhara region) that the Ethiopian government implemented in the course of the 2000s. Intended to relocate rural households to less densely populated areas for humanitarian purposes, the programme entailed an increased deployment of the state apparatus in rural areas under a new political impulse on productivism. While the programme generated considerable initial expectations—despite the controversial legacy of resettlement during the Derg—most beneficiaries returned home within months after facing conflict, drought, and a lack of basic infrastructure. The chapter describes the ways in which returnees tried to make the most of limited opportunities, diversify risk, and reconstitute themselves as social, economic, and political subjects. Resettlers tried to navigate the limited opportunities offered by the programme facing significant strains both in the relocation sites and then when they returned home. The chapter conceptualizes resettlement as a form of development-induced displacement, which is one of the defining features of state-society interactions under EPRDF. By categorizing the rural population in groups based on relative wealth, and hence creating a group of ‘chronically food insecure’ people to relocate, resettlement generated significant dynamics of rural social differentiation, which contributed to further marginality, inequalities, and socio-economic exclusion.
Conclusion
Authors: Head Dominic
Published: September 2022

The emphasis on textual paradox throughout this book requires interpretive effort in a mediated route to interaction with nature, a brand of ecomimesis that makes textual difficulty both the catalyst of transformation and a source of hope, as evidenced in the work of the writers considered throughout this book. The precise vehicle of transformation is often that familiar literary trope, the moment of revelation or epiphany. Taken at face value, such moments constitute a strategy aimed at the perceived alienation of modern citizens from nature, in which the marvellous otherness of the nonhuman is easily laid bare. But the contemporary nature epiphany emphasizes the difficulty of the transformative experience and serves to heighten awareness of the complexity in the human relationship with the nonhuman. To illustrate these effects, Nature Prose concludes with a discussion of apparently transformative moments in the growing literature about the wild and ‘rewilding’, a mode which often posits a radical transformation of both environment and consciousness: some of these texts represent perhaps the most significant test of the claim that culture can be embraced as a conduit, not a barrier to productive understanding of nonhuman nature.
The Dulcis Iesu memoria Tradition and the Devotion to the Name of Jesus
Authors: Renevey Denis
Published: September 2022

The twelfth-century hymn Dulcis Iesu memoria, which was attributed to Bernard of Clairvaux in the late medieval period and beyond, underwent several adaptations and appropriations in different devotional contexts. The sheer number of invocations to the name ‘Jesus’ that it contains made it an appealing text to boost the devotion. Furthermore, vernacular versions of the hymn in Anglo-Norman and Middle English played a significant role in shaping the devotion. Concurrently to this literary phenomenon, the promulgation of the veneration of the Name at the 1274 Second Lyon Council led to further attention being paid to the Name of Jesus. The Franciscan Guibert of Tournai, a significant agent at the council, wrote a series of sermons in the form of meditations, the Sermones de nomine Iesu (De laude melliflui nominis domini nostri), as a means of encouraging the veneration of the Name within Franciscan houses. Other thirteenth-century texts, in Latin, Anglo-Norman, and Middle English, notably by John of Howden—who worked on Li rossignos—demonstrate the emerging liveliness of the devotion.
Rollean Afterlives
Authors: Renevey Denis
Published: September 2022

The way in which the material devoted to the Name of Jesus by Rolle is appropriated and reconfigured in devotional compilations attests to the liveliness of the devotion. The Chastizing of God’s Children, Disce Mori, and Pore Caitif contribute to the circulation of material on the Name to a larger public. They also give an added emphasis to the therapeutic virtues of the Name expressed through a well-chosen medical vocabulary. Some fifteenth-century manuscripts represent Rolle as the English equivalent of Henry Suso, with the monogram of Jesus on his chest. It seems that fifteenth-century devotional practitioners, such as Richard Methley, strongly associated the devotion to the Name of Jesus with Rolle.
Relativism about Obligation?
Authors: Owens David
Published: September 2022

The chapter opens by considering and rejecting the universalist idea that the authority of the various rules around (for example) the relationship between guest and host that prevail in different societies can all be based on some pre-conventional duty to express respect for other people. My Moderate Relativism denies that our obligation to behave conventionally can be derived from any pre-conventional principle requiring conformity to prevailing social practices of a certain type. Moderate Relativism does not collapse into any form of universalism and must be distinguished from certain more familiar forms of social relativism, making room for conflict between conventional obligations. The chapter concludes by demonstrating that both Modest Conventionalism and Moderate Relativism allow for both reasonable social criticism and incremental social change whilst recommending a cautious attitude to radical transformation.
The Dark Bible
Authors: Knight Alison
Published: September 2022

The Dark Bible explores early modern England’s interactions with difficult aspects of the Bible. For the early modern reader, although the Bible was understood to be perfect, sufficient, and transcendent (indeed, the Protestant Reformation required it), it was not always experienced as such. While traditional interpretive precepts, such as the claim that all dark passages could be read in the light of clear ones, were frequently recited by early modern commentators, their actual encounters with the darkness of the Bible suggest that writers, commentators, and translators were often deeply uncomfortable with the disjunction between how (as they thought) the Bible should be, and how it was. The Dark Bible investigates writers’ and translators’ attempts to explain, accommodate, circumvent, and repair problematic texts across a range of genres and contexts. In doing so, it charts English use of biblical scholarship in vernacular culture and investigates how vernacular writing in various genres could give voice to questioning and confused biblical interactions. This book demonstrates that early modern writers and critics engaged extensively with the Bible’s difficulties, attempting to work around and rectify problematic texts, and otherwise reconcile the darkness of the Bible with theories of the Bible’s perfection and clarity.
Ambiguity
Authors: Knight Alison
Published: September 2022

Chapter 2 explores the difficulties arising from the fact that words can mean more than one thing at a time, and indeed many scriptural verses can support diametrically opposed readings. The fact that language is capable of ‘double-speak’, and of speaking entirely against itself, elicited enormous contention between Catholic and Protestant controversialists, as the polarized world of polemic was particularly sensitive to verses that seemed capable of being read both for and against each side. The capacity for verses to carry multivalent meanings became particularly explosive in the equivocation controversies of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and this chapter explores this linguistic and cultural moment, with attention to the poetry of Robert Southwell, who introduced the concept of equivocation to England in his 1595 treason trial. It also explores the linguistic features of the Hebrew Bible that make it particularly prone to double meanings, placing particular emphasis on Donne’s attempts to accommodate the Hebrew Bible’s ‘doubleness’—its tendency toward linguistic forms which allow manifold, at times irreconcilable, meanings.
Idiom
Authors: Knight Alison
Published: September 2022

A perennial question of translators was whether it was more faithful to render the text as closely as possible to the original wording, or to render its meaning as accurately as possible in natural vernacular. But how could translators render the meaning of words that seemed inseparable from foreign linguistic contexts? In the preface to the King James Bible, translator Miles Smith states ‘we desire that the Scripture may speake like it selfe, as in the language of Canaan, that it may bee vnderstood euen of the very vulgar.’ This desire is, on the face of it, something of a contradiction in terms when applied to highly idiomatic verses. How can the Bible at once speak ‘like itself’, as if it were in the language of Canaan, and still be understood in simple English? This chapter explores the approaches of England’s major vernacular translations, contrasting translators’ claims in prefaces with their actual practice in translating idiom, paying attention to the ways that ‘natural English’ emerges in difficult verses. It considers methods of circumventing idioms, such as marginal annotation and foreign loan-words.
Figures
Authors: Knight Alison
Published: September 2022

The difficulties presented by figurative meaning in the Bible are extensive and pervasive. Early modern Protestant writers generally defined the literal sense as the principal meaning intended by the author, allowing significant space for figurative language within that meaning. But enfolding metaphor, simile, metonymy, and other figurative linguistic forms within the literal sense brought its own range of problems. This chapter explores Protestant–Catholic debate regarding how to tell if a biblical verse was intended to be read as figurative or as literal, before examining approaches to biblical enigma: figurative language in which the intention of the biblical author seemed entirely opaque. Focusing on approaches to the enigmatical figurative use of manna in the Bible by a range of writers including Richard Crashaw and George Herbert, this chapter explores what early modern writers and readers did with scriptural metaphors that seem to mean almost anything.
Legal History and Comparative Law
Authors: Clark David S.
Published: September 2022

Legal history and comparative law overlap in important respects. This is more apparent with the use of some methods for comparison, such as legal transplant, natural law, or nation building. From the perspective of this book, any of the commonly accepted methods of comparative law that American lawyers have used with foreign law to understand another legal system or to formulate, evaluate, or implement new legal rules or institutions qualifies as comparative law. Chapter 1 divides the historiography of American law into four periods. The first part covers 1771 to 1900, describing early studies about establishing an American system of legal rules, especially the debate between proponents of codification and historical jurisprudence. The second period, from 1900 to 1950, includes James Carter, Roscoe Pound, and Max Radin as examples of the dominance of intellectual legal history. For 1950 to 2000, Perry Miller represents the last attempt at that genre. More significant are Willard Hurst and Lawrence Friedman, avatars for a social legal history of American law. Finally, the twenty-first century initiated a partial return of intellectual legal history, illustrated by eclecticism and an emphasis on culture and thick description.
Between Globalization and Nationalism: A History of the Future after 1990
Authors: Clark David S.
Published: September 2022

Chapter 8 presents the 1990s as a decade of opportunities for comparative law, reacting to accelerated globalization following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Law firms and law schools became global. Scholars offered various views about the end of the Cold War ranging from characterizing it as the end of history and triumph for Western liberal democracy to maintaining that the West’s power was at its peak compared to other civilizations, which would continue to present challenges to the Western view of law. The tenacity of cultures, with their embedded notions of law, as well as nationalism, meant that world security required acceptance of global multiculturality. In the United States, many more jurists—including government officials and lawyers—engaged in comparative activities often unaware of the difficulties of achieving successful legal transplants. Rule of law was a common theme. Most U.S. comparatists now rejected the idea of legal convergence and universalism and argued instead for an emphasis on exploring differences among legal traditions and national legal systems. Besides traditional research on foreign legal rules and institutions, there was new interest in legal cultures and contextual interdisciplinary treatment of legal topics. Geographically, there were more studies about Asian and Latin American law. The renamed American Society of Comparative Law expanded its institutional membership to around 100, welcomed younger comparatists, and continued to improve the academic value of its meetings. New subfields emerged, such as comparative constitutional law. After 2005, earlier optimism faded as authoritarian rule replaced democracy and nationalism rose again.
“An Excellent & Healthfull Situation”
Authors: Johnston Katherine
Published: September 2022

This chapter argues that white colonial residents in the Caribbean and the Southern lowcountry thought of their environments in highly localized and nuanced ways, and that these differences played a role in determining patterns of settlement. Colonists noted local environmental conditions when considering the placement of towns, plantations, and hospitals as they tried to locate places of residence in healthy spots. This awareness of healthy and unhealthy places extended across racial lines. Crucially, the chapter demonstrates that rather than considering Black bodies to be healthier than white bodies in dangerous environmental conditions, white people perceived the suffering of Black people in hazardous environments. Thus, the placement of Black bodies in these conditions, including plantation labor, was a form of environmental racism.
Atlantic Bodies
Authors: Johnston Katherine
Published: September 2022

Chapter 4 demonstrates that far from relying on a sense of racial difference in susceptibilities to disease, eighteenth-century physicians and laypeople alike understood bodies as products of their environments, constantly subject to change. In other words, for colonists, health was environmental, not racial. Just as Britons understood that their own bodies needed to adjust to the unfamiliar environment on plantations, so too did planters believe that Africans would need to adapt to the climate in the Americas because it was significantly different from that in Africa. This need for African bodily adjustment reveals the deep contradictions between planters’ private beliefs about bodies and the public claims they made in hearings over the slave trade.
The Place of Black Americans
Authors: Johnston Katherine
Published: September 2022

Chapter 6 shows some of the ways the climatic rhetoric operated in the United States. A variety of people, both Black and white, drew upon the theory of Black people’s bodily suitability for hot places to promote different causes. They made cases for and against emigration out of the country; they argued about the westward expansion of slavery; and they theorized about bodily differences between Black and white people. Black activists both used and condemned the racialized language of climate as they fought against a tide of racism that questioned their place in the country. Ultimately, the chapter shows how pervasive the idea about race, labor, and climate had become by the nineteenth century.
Two Faces of Trust
Authors: Norris Pippa
Published: September 2022

What is “trustworthiness”? This introductory chapter sets out the conceptual and theoretical framework and provides a road map for the rest of the book. This book distinguishes between trust as a quality of the individual and trustworthiness as a feature of dyadic relationships. The study focuses on “trustworthiness,” defined as an informal social contract where principals authorize agents to act on their behalf in the expectation that the agent will fulfill their responsibilities with competency, integrity, and impartiality despite conditions of risk and uncertainty. This conceptualization emphasizes that trustworthiness is not about you or me—it is about us. The chapter goes on to provide a summary of the remainder of the book.