bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Summary of ‘Telling the world’ *
Authors: Wahls T. L.
Published: January 2025

This chapter compiles six articles that provide a window into the varied experiences of those with multiple sclerosis (MS). Article 1 discusses a young postgraduate student in psychology grappling with the progressive form of MS, a variant less common than the typical relapsing–remitting type. Article 2 tells the story of a doctor who works as both an oncologist and a haematologist, and whose long history with MS intersects poignantly with personal loss. Article 3 is about a young lady who has a master’s in public health and works in a university setting. She describes the unique challenges in facing MS as a Pakistani-American, providing insights into the challenges of having a condition more prevalent in Western countries. Article 4 reveals how an obstetrician and gynaecologist navigates her professional duties while managing MS symptoms. Article 5 presents a physician’s account of living with MS and the complexities of treatment. Finally, Article 6 features a medical researcher’s reflections on the profound impact of good communication, or the lack thereof, in the journey with MS.
The Birth of Our Free Imagination
Authors: Tse Peter Ulric
Published: January 2025

The brain’s capacity to imagine is the fundamental basis of human free will. Laws of physics need not apply in our internal simulations, so virtually anything is possible there. Since some of our actions can follow from that which we imagine our actions inherit the freedom of our imaginings. The creative power of the human imagination may have evolved as a consequence of the demodularization of neural circuitry associated with volitional attentional operations and virtual hand and body actions over operands downloadable into a mental workspace where, virtually, anything could be combined with anything else. This new cognitive architecture bifurcated consciousness into a base of perception and a metaconsciousness of imaginative apperception, giving rise to the danger of psychosis. Our schizotypal form of imagination, arising from the promiscuous, generative, and iterative combination of disencapsulated operators and operands in a mental workspace, may have evolved only in humans by exapting from existing motoric and other operations involved in volitional hand dexterity to a domain of pre-motoric simulation.
On French que, quoi, ce que, and clefts
Authors: Pollock Jean-Yves
Published: January 2025

The main goal of this final chapter is to solve an (apparent) contradiction between the claim made in all previous chapters that interrogative que is a clitic, on the one hand, and the fact that que occurs felicitously in questions like Qu’est-ce que c’est? (‘What is this that this is?’ = ‘What is that?’) and Qu’est-ce que c’est qu’il a dit? (‘What is this that it is that he said’ = ‘What was it that he said?’). The inputs of such questions either involve sentences of the type C’est quoi? (‘This is what?’ = ‘What is this?’) or clefts such as C’est quoi qu’il a vu? (‘This is what that he saw?’ = ‘What was it that he saw?’). Both ban clitics in their focus positions: **C’est que/le? vs. C’est quoi/lui, *C’est que/le qu’il a vu? vs. C’est quoi/lui qu’il a vu?. So one would expect Qu’est-ce que c’est? and Qu’est-ce que c’est qu’il a dit? to be severely deviant too. The analysis of Qu’est-ce que questions in Chapters 4, 5 and 6 provides one half of the solution to the conundrum: what follows Qu’est in such questions is a free relative and Qu’est is a question about the entity denoted by the free relative in which que never occupies a focus position. The second half of the solution relies on the idea that lexical quoi—the strong form of que—is merged in, or moved to, the focus positions of the relevant constructions before being deleted, as already suggested in Obenauer (1976). If so one unexpected property of French headless relatives obtains: despite the massive syntactic difference between ‘what’ and ce que in ‘What you say is unikely’ and Ce que tu dis est improbable, French free relatives have the null counterpart of ‘What’—QUOI—licensed by ce in their surface structures.
Corporate-Goal Deviance Cases
Authors: Gottschalk Petter
Published: January 2025

This chapter presents four case studies of deviance to achieve ambitious business goals. The Samherji seafood company in Iceland expanded to the coast of Africa off Namibia by means of corruption. The Swedish bank Swedbank did not implement anti-money-laundering measures. The British Petroleum company ignored dangers when exploiting oil in the Gulf of Mexico. The social housing enterprise Obos in Norway ignored the business idea of normal housing for normal people. These companies all violated their social license to operate by lack of conformance to norms and values. Convenience theory illustrates motive, opportunity, and willingness for deviance among business executives in the companies. All four cases are explained in the motive dimension of possibilities by ambitious organizational goals and objectives. Possibilities for enterprises include reaching business objectives by ignoring whether the means to reach goals are considered acceptable by stakeholders and the community. Ends simply justify means that might represent deviance.
Personal-Greed Deviance Cases
Authors: Gottschalk Petter
Published: January 2025

This chapter presents four cases of crisis management for the recovery of the social license by corporate conformance. In the perspective of convenience theory, all four cases are explained by the motive dimension of possibilities because of ambitious personal goals and objectives. Greed is the most acknowledged motive for financial misconduct by white-collar offenders. Greed involves socially constructed needs and desires that can never be completely fulfilled. Greed can be a very strong quest to get more and more of something; it involves an obsession to maximize wealth. To outsiders it may seem strange that rich people have such a strong desire to become even richer that they are willing to break the law. However, as the definition indicates, greedy individuals are never happy with what they have, as they desperately want more all the time. Prosperity is not a means, but a goal for greedy individuals. Greed can grow when an organization does not have an adequate reaction.
Maintaining the Social License
Authors: Gottschalk Petter
Published: January 2025

Firms that have never violated their social license by staying conformant must nevertheless work to sustain and maintain the license. Threats to the corporate social license can occur both internally and externally. This chapter presents case studies of firms that were proactive in avoiding violations to their social license to operate. For example, during the Nordic biker war between Hells Angels and Bandidos, the clubhouse of Bandidos in the city of Drammen outside the capital Oslo in Norway was damaged by a bomb in 1997. Police investigation revealed that the bomb had been placed in front of the building by members of rival gang Hells Angels. When the convicted Hells Angels members were released from prison, insurance firm Gjensidige attempted to recover some of its loss from the convicted Hells Angels members. This was in an effort to maintain the social license.
Crisis-Management Readiness
Authors: Gottschalk Petter
Published: January 2025

Crisis management is a matter of recovering a social license by corporate conformance. A crisis refers to a fundamental threat to an organization; it is often characterized by ambiguity of cause, effect, evolution, and means of resolution. Being prepared and ready to handle a crisis is thus quite a challenge, since these ambiguities cause a perception of randomness, where nobody seems to know what happens next. Yet it is common knowledge that a scandal is typically the cause of a crisis, where a scandal refers to an unexpected, publicly known, and harmful event that has high levels of initial uncertainty, interferes with the normal operation of an organization, and generates widespread, intuitive, and negative perceptions externally. A corporate scandal forces executives to give an account; this account refers to a statement made by the scandalized entity to explain negative behavior that has become subject to inquiry by stakeholders and outsiders. Crisis-management readiness serves the purpose of being able quickly to recover a social license by being in control.
Crisis-Management Situations
Authors: Gottschalk Petter
Published: January 2025

There are no one-size-fits-all solutions to recovery of a social license. For example, the Methodist Church needed an approach suitable for the situation. Religious organizations such as the Methodist Church are often based on trust. Do members often betray trust in terms of white-collar crime in religious institutions? Most white-collar crime incidents are exploitations of trust, where trust may originate from a shared religious identity between the victim and the perpetrator. Are social religious networks an attractive arena for white-collar criminals? Is the morale of not acting illegally blinded by a chance perspective when an attractive opportunity arises? Do shared religious beliefs lead to less acceptability of white-collar crime? The sacred occupies a central location in institutional value spheres, and, as such, influences a number of purposes and forms that might prevent control and compliance efforts. People within religious organizations are not subject to much surveillance or many accountability mechanisms.
Introduction
Authors: Jubb Robert
Published: January 2025

This introduction sets out the problem this book addresses, as well as the approach it takes. It also provides an outline of the rest of the book. The problem the book addresses is that most contemporary political theory and philosophy cannot explain plausible judgements about different levels and forms of authority in different societies. Most contemporary political theory and philosophy is committed, deliberately or otherwise, to binary theories of political authority, which hold that governments are either fully authoritative or without any authority at all. Yet most governments seem to have less than full authority, but more than none, as a comparison of Presidents Putin and Trump illustrates. A realist approach can avoid these problems by taking seriously the need to manage the political conflicts societies actually have, rather than the ones they would have, if they were more morally appealing.
The Distinction Between Content and Force
Authors: Hanks Peter
Published: January 2025

The concepts of content and force are two ways of distinguishing speech acts. Content has to do with what a speech act is about, the information and subject matter that it concerns. Force characterizes what the speaker is doing by performing that act, for example making an assertion, asking a question, giving an order, and so on. The distinction between content and force is the idea that these two dimensions for characterizing speech acts are entirely independent of one another. This chapter reviews arguments for and against the content–force distinction and argues that the weight of the arguments tilts heavily against it.
Contemporary Foundational Accounts of Propositions
Authors: Manolakaki Eleni
Published: January 2025

This chapter is concerned with recent attempts to account for the nature of propositions. The main question is what propositions are. Such a question follows the reaction to the dominating accounts of propositions that took propositions to be sets of possible worlds or some sort of n-tuples. While those accounts might offer well-elaborated models or sophisticated representations of propositions, they do not seriously engage with the question of what propositions are. Sets of worlds or some sort of n-tuples could not be the fundamental bearers of the attributes assigned to propositions. Putting aside a primitivist and a deflationary stance on propositions, the chapter critically examines some recent attempts to offer a foundational account of propositions. These are (a) propositions as certain sorts of facts, (b) propositions as properties or relations instantiable by worlds, (c) versions of act-theoretic accounts of propositions, and (d) propositions as products of acts.
Multiple-Intensions Semantics
Authors: Glüer Kathrin , Pagin Peter
Published: January 2025

This chapter surveys semantic frameworks working with more than one non-extensional semantic value. It starts with some ideas for distinguishing between relevant sorts of semantic values. Next, a number of possible reasons for adding additional semantic values to a semantic theory are reviewed. Chief among them are the forces of both linguistic and extra-linguistic context dependence, the former typically relating to issues of compositionality and various kinds of embedding behavior. The multiple intension systems presented on this basis offer a representative range of reactions to these forces: starting with Fregean semantics, dynamic semantics, Kaplanian semantics, two-dimensionalism, post-semantics, and switcher semantics are surveyed.
A Plea for Innocence
Authors: Sosa David
Published: January 2025

Frege’s introduction of the notions of indirect sense and indirect reference is a striking feature of his seminal (1892) “Ueber Sinn und Bedeutung.” But a careful examination of the sources of Frege’s indictment of indirect contexts is elucidatory, and it enables an alternative response to the situation Frege confronted. Frege did not need to forsake semantic innocence. The key observation concerns the condition imposed by compositionality. Other treatments, including those advanced by Barwise and Perry and by Davidson, introduce additional issues. And then Frege’s view has a difficulty that has been insufficiently appreciated (since Russell)—a difficulty avoided by the alternative developed in this chapter. So, first, Frege need not have forsaken innocence; second, he should not have done so.
One Word, Many Concepts
Authors: Pietroski Paul M.
Published: January 2025

Polysemy tells against the familiar assumption that human linguistic meanings determine extensions. On the view proposed here, meanings are instructions for building special concepts from concepts that can be accessed via lexical addresses, where a single address can be shared by a family of concepts that are not coextensive. Sentences like ‘The window they had cut in the wall was nicer than the one they installed’ can help motivate this proposal. A speaker can use ‘window’ and the anaphoric pronoun ‘one’ to express distinct concepts from her ‘window’-family. One might hope to salvage the familiar assumption by saying that extensions include mappings from contexts to senses that determine more classical extensions, and that ‘window’ can express an aperture-sense while still serving as the antecedent for a pronoun used to express a pane-sense of ‘window’. But this chapter argues that the meaning of a polysemous expression like ‘window’ does not determine a mapping from contexts to senses.
Report and Content
Authors: Cumming Samuel
Published: January 2025

This chapter reconsiders the case for a semantic level of content—one that is more fine-grained than reference and based on the truth-conditions of indirect reports of speech and thought. While alternatives like descriptivism and relationism are also considered, the main rival to a content-based account is one where the truth-value of an indirect report depends on mental syntax or, at any rate, on psychological features that are unique to particular agents rather than shared in the manner of content. Three arguments—from misrecognition, from isolation, and from innocence—are discussed in detail and the consequences for content laid out.
Scribal Culture and Literary Sociability
Authors: Dzelzainis Martin
Published: January 2025

The scribal culture of the Restoration was in large measure the literary expression of sociability as well as productive of that sociability. While strongly associated with milieux such as coffee houses, the Inns of Court, and, above all, the Court, it was not an exclusively metropolitan phenomenon but was also a feature of literary communities such as those at Oxford, Mildenhall in north-west Suffolk, and along the axis of London and Ratisbon. The chapter surveys these contexts through the lens of state satire (particularly in its epigrammatic form) and its principal exponent, Andrew Marvell, and the verse epistle as practised by Sir George Etherege and his correspondents—especially Etherege’s exchanges with Lord Buckhurst, the Earl of Middleton, and John Dryden.
The Body Politic in the Literary Imagination
Authors: Allsopp Niall
Published: January 2025

The body politic was a familiar yet contested model for the state. The manipulation of rival versions of the trope can be illustrated with the example of responses to Shakespeare’s Coriolanus. The belly fable and related tropes from Shakespeare’s play echo in tragedies of the Exclusion crisis by Nathaniel Lee, Nahum Tate, and Thomas Otway. These texts are haunted by sublime individuals who destabilize the social bonds that unite the state; a particularly central concern was the subversive impact of libertinism. The body politic trope should therefore be read in conjunction with marriage as a metaphor that described the forming of composite bodies in binding unions based on mutual promises. As Shakespeare’s Coriolanus is confronted and mollified by his wife and mother, so symbolism of marriage and family offered a repository of highly emotive, normative imagery for political fidelity. Yet marriage proves an ambivalent and contested value in Restoration tragedy.
Restoration Science and Literary Representation in a Global Context
Authors: Thompson Helen
Published: January 2025

This chapter locates Robert Boyle’s hydrostatic experimentation in the context of the mercantile world-economy. Boyle invented a hydrostatic scale that he promoted for its utility to English traders for West African gold. His defence of this instrument shows the importance of corpuscular chemistry, climate theory, and an alchemical ontology of gold’s kinds to both Restoration science and mercantile trade. By examining travel narratives and letters penned by traders and Royal African Company factors, this chapter argues that they uphold core tenets of Restoration-era chemistry while, reciprocally, Boyle’s hydrostatics reflect travellers’ accounts of West Africa. The chapter suggests that these authors use non-mimetic or anti-realist representational tactics to evoke the existence of chemical micromatter. This representational mode may also evoke the craft of West African traders and artisans whose skill with metal impels Boyle’s claim for the utility of his hydrostatic instrument.
Celebrity and the Restoration Actress
Authors: Fawcett Julia H.
Published: January 2025

The Restoration left an indelible mark on English theatre history by introducing two innovations to the public stage: changeable scenery and ‘real, beautiful Women’ (in the words of Colley Cibber). This chapter argues not only that these innovations were related, but also that they provided the necessary conditions for the rise of celebrity by inventing the backstage as a three-dimensional space imbued with the potential for narrative. The separate tiring rooms required for actresses and the additional spaces needed for the construction, operation, and storage of scenery demanded purpose-built theatres with larger backstages. Actresses were quick to capitalize on such demands: by advertising their sexual availability to those willing to pay the price of admission, they transformed the backstage from the non-space of the early modern theatre into a space of privilege, sex, and mystery—all the makings of a good narrative. This chapter examines the narrative possibility of the Restoration backstage as revealed in the use of technical innovations like the discovery scene, particularly in its deployment in The Rover: the most famous play by the first professional female playwright on the English stage, Aphra Behn.
Language, Ritual, and Colonialism
Authors: Tavárez David
Published: January 2025

This chapter provides a condensed overview of the cultural and intellectual history of ritual language from classical antiquity to the nineteenth century, with a focus on how the regimentation of ritual speech became intertwined with colonial rule and Christian indoctrination between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries as part of the emergence of colonial dynamics of knowledge in the Americas and Asia. It focuses on a central property of ritual speech, defined here as inscriptibility, and on lexicographic hegemony and lexical invention as two important processes that structured colonial understandings of ritual language.
The Chronotopic and Sonotopic Work of Ritual
Authors: Wirtz Kristina
Published: January 2025

Ritual is a good category with which to think about the spatiotemporal structuring of social action, because chronotopic work is required to enact (some aspect of) macrocosmic order in the microcosm of the interactional event. Chronotopic regimentation is evident in major ceremonies and brief moments of ritualized action alike. Three dimensions of chronotopic regimentation are: producing the ritual itself as an event, situating the ritual event in interdiscursive relations, and producing a trajectory for ritual performativity. Interplay across the three dimensions constitutes ritual action, which is inevitably tied to reflexivity over ritual form, including spatiotemporal frames. Ritual poetics and participation frameworks often are expressed in the distinctive soundscape or sonotope marking ritual time-space. Examples of ritual sonotopes in three distinct domains—politics, education, and religion—demonstrate how sonotopic organization draws reflexive attention to ritual forms and drives ritual’s chronotopic work.
Affectivity and Repetition in Amazonian Ceremonial Welcoming Dialogues
Authors: Surrallés Alexandre
Published: January 2025

The study of the affective dimensions of ritual has become an unavoidable task for anthropologists. However, anthropology encounters a methodological difficulty in describing what is unique to affect, that is, its intensive and therefore fluctuating character. The few attempts to address this problem have not succeeded in proposing convincing solutions. By taking up several studies about Amazonian welcome and greeting ceremonial dialogues—which are indeed characterized by being a delicate exercise of emotion modulation—this chapter proposes a methodological approach to the description of the fluctuating character of affectivity in ritual. The main argument is that a close consideration of repetition, which sets apart ceremonial dialogues, provides an important tool for assessing the affective intensity of ritual.
The Capabilities Approach and Economic and Social Rights
Authors: Anderson Elizabeth
Published: January 2025

The capabilities approach offers an important perspective for economic and social rights. The capabilities approach takes human capabilities as the fundamental metric of distributive justice, in contrast with approaches to justice that take subjective metrics such as happiness or utility, or resourcist metrics such as income and wealth. This chapter argues that the capabilities approach is a superior perspective for economic and social rights, because it focuses on ends rather than means, can better handle discrimination against the disabled and other variations in functioning, and helps guide the delivery of public services, especially in health and education. In addition, this chapter argues that the capabilities approach offers a realistic account of economic and social rights that is compatible with recognizing the necessity of trade-offs, practical limits to perfect fulfillment, and imperfect correlative obligations to support their fulfillment.
Criminal Literature
Authors: Rogers Pat
Published: January 2025

The literature of crime in the period was affected both by the evolution of genres (notably in prose fiction and biography) and by changes in the theory and practice in law and penology. This chapter considers various forms of narrative, including rogues’ tales and quasi-picaresque novels; biographies and autobiographies; court reports and execution speeches of those involved in state trials as well as common criminal proceedings. Attention is given to the treatment of women criminals. All these are set against the background of contemporary thinking about crime and punishment within society at large. An attempt is made to show how these stories contributed to the debate on crime, and also how they made a lasting contribution to the literary forms they inhabit.
Diaries
Authors: Smyth Adam
Published: January 2025

The term ‘diary’ jostles, in this period, with an array of other descriptors, including memorial, journal, daybook, diurnal, diet-book, and ephemeris. This chapter will keep this generic messiness in mind by working with an expansive sense of form, both in terms of genre and materiality, in order to convey a wider range of diaries than has previously been described, including texts by non-elite and women writers. It will pay particular attention to three central tensions that inform many diaries from this period: the need to adhere to a set of formal conventions, while at the same time marking out an individual life; the attempt to express some version of inwardness, alongside a commitment to the inventorying of objects and the external world; and the challenge of representing the life from within the life, of simultaneously observing and being observed.
Fables and Fairy Tales
Authors: Lewis Jayne Elizabeth
Published: January 2025

It is remarkable that a subgenre that has come to epitomize the prosaic in the sense of the ordinary, the pedestrian, the obvious, and even the modern should have entered English print culture as a marker of the exotic, the courtly, the devious, the aberrant, the extraordinary, and the antique. This chapter explores this paradox so as both to describe and account for the consolidation of the English prose fable as a distinct literary form—one whose story is intimately interwoven with the eighteenth-century emergence of English letters as both a privileged and a popular communicative medium. With an eye on an oft-stated preference for prose in the period, the chapter both describes and analyses the rising tide of prose fable collections, periodical fables, and didactic examples of what Joseph Addison would term ‘the fairy way of writing’ that at once instituted and ironized that preference.
Learned Wit and Mock-Scholarship
Authors: Power Henry
Published: January 2025

The last year covered by this volume, 1714, witnessed the brief flourishing of the Scriblerus Club—but well before its members met there was an established tradition of ‘learned wit’ writing, whose chief exponents were Lucian and Rabelais. This kind of satirical prose acquired a particular edge as battle lines were drawn in the dispute between the ancients and moderns; works such as William King’s Dialogues of the Dead (1699) and Jonathan Swift’s A Tale of a Tub and The Battel of the Books (1704) are at the centre of this chapter. The Scriblerians were not by any means the first authors to exploit the idea of the mock-book in order to land a satirical blow. What set them apart from previous satirists was the way in which their mock-books were animated by a particular distrust of developments in scholarship in the final decade of the seventeenth century. This chapter looks at the way in which Scriblerian satire exposes scholars and critics who focus on the particularities of a literary work while failing to grasp its broader meaning and value: a particular target is the Cambridge classicist Richard Bentley. It also examines the way in which Scriblerian routines find their way into the work of authors more receptive to modern developments in scholarship: the example discussed is Joseph Addison’s Dialogues upon the Usefulness of Ancient Medals (c. 1702–7, published 1721).
Letters
Authors: Barnes Diana G.
Published: January 2025

Over the 1640s a number of cabinets of private (friendship and love) letters were published, many without the permission of the authors. These publications divided traditional loyalties and established new ones. In the 1650s, during the Interregnum, the letter’s association with classical stoicism (Cicero and Seneca) provided the ideal foundations for articulating covert royalism. At the Restoration, print letters served to document recent history with a personal twist. Over the 1670s and 1680s love letters came into vogue. These novelistic and digressive collections rework the passionate terms of the verse epistle to address contemporary political scandal. From the 1690s, letters in serialized journals drew readers into a public sphere of debate, and modelled their responsibilities within it. The following chapter surveys the epistolary subspecies that dominated the print marketplace. In closing, it spotlights three epistolary agents: a publisher (Humphrey Moseley), an author (Margaret Cavendish), and a reader (of the Tatler).
Literary History
Authors: Hardy Nick
Published: January 2025

This chapter takes the ‘Discourse concerning the original and progress of satire’ that prefaced John Dryden’s translations of Juvenal and Persius (1692) as the starting point for a consideration of the relationship between two kinds of criticism: the vernacular English criticism of the early Enlightenment, and the Latinate scholarship of the late Renaissance. Dryden’s later critical prose, and particularly his ‘Discourse’, was self-consciously erudite and historical, based on heavy documentation provided by Dryden’s deep reading in the late humanist commentary tradition, such as Lipsius, Isaac Casaubon, and Daniel Heinsius. Studying Dryden’s uses of late humanist models can therefore help us to answer broader questions about post-Restoration literary criticism. In what ways would it have seemed innovative to contemporary readers? How much did it owe to continental precedents, both past and present? And what uses did it make of new intellectual movements that had challenged the hegemony of humanist scholarship?
New World Writing and Captivity Narratives
Authors: Armstrong Catherine
Published: January 2025

The three-quarters of a century following 1640 represent a crucial turning point in the exploration and settlement of the so-called ‘New World’. Correspondingly a new type of prose literature was produced in this period, reflecting England’s growing confidence in conceptually controlling the region, which accompanied her uncertainty about what colony and empire would mean for the mother country. This chapter will discuss two ways of understanding the New World literature written in English, during this period: firstly, the domestic versus imperial discourse and secondly, the flowering of the use of the trope of racial difference used by authors confronting the ‘others’ in the region. During the late seventeenth century, English understanding of native life and culture was greatly influenced by the captivity narrative genre. This chapter shows how captivity narratives occupy a complex position in American and British print culture of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.
Periodical Literature
Authors: Cowan Brian
Published: January 2025

The periodical journal was an invention of the later Stuart period. Although related to the invention of the newspaper and news writing, periodical writing evolved as a slightly different species. Periodical prose did not just report on the news of the day, it offered commentary on the news. This chapter argues that periodical prose writing emerged out of the exigencies created by the partisan political divisions of the later Stuart era, and that periodicals increasingly shaped the contours of political debate after the Glorious Revolution. It is divided into three sections. It begins by tracing the emergence of periodical prose writing from its origins in civil war era publications. The middle section addresses the efflorescence of periodical writing in the Restoration era from the 1660s through the 1680s. The final section covers the transformation of the English periodical in the decades after the Glorious Revolution.
Pornography
Authors: Gladfelder Hal
Published: January 2025

The word pornography is a faux-classical coinage of the nineteenth century. But if the word was unknown to seventeenth-century authors and readers, the Restoration period, and in particular the years 1679–85 during which the Licensing Act was allowed to lapse, saw the emergence of what even at the time was recognized as a modern pornographic canon. Formally, thematically, and linguistically these were hybrid, heterodox works. It was precisely this hybridity, as this chapter argues, that enabled these foundational texts of the new pornographic canon to engage with questions of difference: boundaries between native and foreign, female and male, private and public experience. While many authors of the period, from ballad-mongers to courtier rakehells, continued as in earlier decades to treat erotic and obscene subjects in verse, the modern prose dialogue form offered new ways of thinking about the relationship between subjectivity and sex.
Heresiography and Religious Controversy
Authors: McDowell Nicholas
Published: January 2025

The religious and political conflicts of the English Civil Wars remained live issues for Jonathan Swift and his contemporaries, and they returned obsessively to the events, arguments, and also texts of the 1640s and 1650s to fight their ideological battles. The distinctiveness of Swift’s narrative mode in his satires on enthusiasm comes into sharper focus if we compare them with superficially similar examples of polemical prose narrative of the 1640s, when heresiographical writing became one of the most common literary modes of a newly unregulated polemical print culture. A voluminous collection of supposedly ‘real’ anti-sectarian narratives from the 1640s that Swift collected was the most notorious of all the Civil War heresiographies: Gangraena, published in three parts in 1646 by the Presbyterian divine Thomas Edwards. A comparison of Swift’s satires with the best-known English heresiography of the seventeenth century offers another perspective on their provocative and perplexing form.
Continental Influences
Authors: Tadié Alexis
Published: January 2025

While the respective developments of English and French prose in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries have been mapped out, little attention has been paid to the interactions between the two worlds. This chapter argues that in assessing the nature of English prose it is crucial to consider its close connections, contacts, interchanges, and mixing with other parts of Europe at the time, in particular with France. The chapter shows the distinctly European character of English prose. While it first acknowledges attempts to construct a specifically national tradition through difference from and rejection of Continental practices, it then emphasizes the circulation of European, and mainly French, texts in the British Isles in the seventeenth century. The chapter further analyses the constitution of networks of booksellers, translators, writers, and émigrés of one kind or the other, which rested on individuals on both sides of the Channel, who circulated news and publications in different languages. Such complex activities emphasize the importance of cross-Channel exchanges, the interactions between languages, literary circles and traditions, and the extent to which political and social circumstances affected the developments of literary endeavours, the careers of writers, and indeed the language in which they wrote. Finally, these exchanges and contacts were sometimes built on quarrels—as indeed was much of literary life in the early modern period.
Amatory Fiction
Authors: Sanchez Melissa E.
Published: January 2025

This chapter argues a key affordance of amatory fiction was precisely its ability to call into question the line between truth and fiction, a quality that offered vicarious (contemporary critics would say pornographic) enjoyment in conjuring up otherwise inaccessible private pleasures. Some of the most popular works of the seventeenth century were written, or said to have been written, by women. These works signify a shift from earlier romances in that they not only stress women’s authorial and sexual agency, but also proclaim their status as factual narratives rather than fantastic tales. This attention to the complexity of women’s desires has important implications for our histories of gender, sexuality, genre, and form. In emphasizing female authorship, experience, and readership, as well as in the erotic content of their narratives, amatory fiction challenges cultural ideals of female silence, passivity, and sexual innocence.
Astrophil and Stella
Authors: Bates Catherine
Published: January 2025

This chapter considers the way in which Astrophil and Stella draws out the scandal of Petrarch’s Canzoniere. In the fourteenth century, Petrarch had rejected the ideal, Christian model of language inherited from Plato and Augustine as fundamentally antipoetic, presenting in his lyrics an alternative model of language as ‘fallen’, human, and desirous. By the time Sidney was writing, this scandalous aspect of lyric—its propensity to idolatry, its tendency to elevate human art over divine creation, to prioritise the beauties of poetic language over meaning, form over content, wordplay over God’s Word—had been greatly intensified by the Reformation. Sidney meets this challenge head on. If the antipoetic sentiment of his time regarded lyric as foolish, wanton, and vain, he proves them right in the persona of Astrophil, and demonstrates that the language of desire has a beauty, truth, wit, and intelligence all its own.
The Defence of Poesy
Authors: Brljak Vladimir
Published: January 2025

Sidney’s Defence of Poesy is the best known and most lastingly influential, yet also the most elusive and contested, work of premodern English literary criticism. Received opinion favours a forward-looking, representatively ‘Renaissance’ or ‘early modern’ Defence, in which a ‘humanist’ Sidney deals a decisive blow to the ‘puritan’ attack on the literary imagination. By contrast, this chapter argues that such readings suppress or misconstrue some of the essay’s key positions and sever it from important segments of its wider intellectual and cultural context. Aimed primarily at the student and the non-specialist, the chapter attempts to provide them with an overview of the work’s critical tradition and a balanced appraisal of Sidney’s often insightful but also deeply conflicted argument, exemplary of the extraordinary ferment as well as the ultimate limitations of European and English literary thought at this important juncture in its history.
Education and Pedagogy
Authors: Knight Sarah
Published: January 2025

This chapter discusses the education Sidney received at Shrewsbury School and then at Christ Church, Oxford. Individual tutors and scholars such as Thomas Ashton, as well as networks and friendships formed at school and university, were of great importance throughout Sidney’s career, as were his continental travels and correspondence with a broad range of European scholars after leaving Oxford. The chapter explores how Sidney represents educational processes and contemporary humanist preoccupations throughout his writing, including The Defence of Poesy and The Lady of May, and offer evidence for his language-learning processes, especially in French and Latin, and how such multilingualism helped shape his English writing and polyglot correspondence with scholars such as Camerarius, Clusius, Dorsett, Languet, and Lipsius. It shows how frequently Sidney drew on his humanist education throughout his writing life, not only for imaginative and intertextual sustenance, but also for rhetorical and dialectical structure.
Early Publication
Authors: Davis Joel B.
Published: January 2025

This chapter traces the early printing history of Philip Sidney’s works, 1586–99, arguing that conflicts within the Stationers’ Company influenced the Sidney canon more than has been recognised and arguably more than the efforts of Mary Sidney Herbert and Fulke Greville. A small network centred on printers John Charlewood and James Roberts and publisher Richard Smith printed unauthorised editions of Sidney’s works, which catalysed William Ponsonby to publish ‘authorised’ editions of Sidney’s works. The competition to print Philip Sidney’s works tangentially influenced efforts by the Stationers’ Company of London and the crown and Court of the Star Chamber to regulate the print trade.
Lyric
Authors: Alexander Gavin
Published: January 2025

The five instances of the term lyric in the Defence sketch what Sidney considered to be lyric’s domain; concordances with classical and early modern literary theorists such as Scott help flesh out his theory. The chapter also looks at twenty-first century lyric theory, seeing both what it can tell us about Sidney, and what Sidney can tell us about it. The particular looking backwards and forwards that characterises the European Renaissance made for a dynamic location for the evolution of lyric poetics and practice, and Sidney was at its heart. The chapter looks across the range of Sidney’s poetry (song, sonnet, psalm translation, neoclassical poem), asking questions about its origins, nature, and aims, and examining the ways in which it explores fundamental questions about the nature of lyric genre, music, form, voice, address, persona, authorship, and reading. It focuses in particular on lyric’s intertextuality and lyric theory’s emphasis on dyads and dichotomies.
Prosody
Authors: Stagg Robert
Published: January 2025

This chapter tells the story of one of Sidney’s prosodic roads not taken: his experimentation with quantitative verse, i.e., a way of organising the metrical line according to relative syllable-length (as the poets of classical antiquity had done) as opposed to accent or stress (as English poets had typically done). In telling this story, the chapter shows how Edmund Spenser and Gabriel Harvey worked to usher Sidney into the quantitative cause, hoping that, by imitating the ancients in this way, English poetry might gain greater cachet. This served the greater purpose of securing courtly approval for a verse form that could, if followed, have changed the history of English versification altogether.
Sidney and Religion
Authors: Lockey Brian C.
Published: January 2025

Scholars have traditionally emphasised the Anglocentric and Calvinist influences on what would become Philip Sidney’s so-called Protestant poetics. In contrast, this chapter shows that, while Sidney subscribed to the anti-papal and anti-Spanish views of his uncle Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, his perspective on sectarianism and Christian unity was more complex and nuanced than once was thought. Sidney’s religious perspective was predominantly shaped by his friendships with such continental luminaries as Hubert Languet and Philippe Du Plessis-Mornay, both of whom were influenced by the post-Lutheran ecumenical approach of Philip Melanchthon. This chapter shows that Sidney’s Protestant outlook was both ecumenical and cosmopolitan and that, despite his deep antipathy for the papacy and the Church of Rome, his fictional writings betray a grudging respect for traditional Roman Catholic conceptions of Christendom and Christian unity.
Sidney and Philosophy
Authors: Mack Michael
Published: January 2025

In the Defence, Sidney satirises contemporary moral philosophy but shows great esteem for ancient philosophers, Plato and Aristotle in particular. Sidney argues that their doctrines, properly understood, support his own theory of poetic making. This chapter examines Sidney’s understanding of Plato and Aristotle and shows how it is shaped by classical intermediaries such as Cicero, Plutarch, and Renaissance interpreters including Pietro Bembo and Julius Caesar Scaliger. This analysis of his philosophical sources brings Sidney’s own Christian Neoplatonism into sharper focus. In Astrophil and Stella, Sidney incorporates Castiglione’s account of Platonic love as a subtext for the sequence’s extended presentation of the psychology of akrasia. While the limitations of Sidney’s knowledge of Plato and Aristotle are evident in both the Defence and Astrophil and Stella, they are overshadowed by Sidney’s innovative genius in these monumental landmarks of literary theory and practice.
Sidney and Logic
Authors: Luis-Martínez Zenón
Published: January 2025

The role of logic in Sidney’s works must be understood in light of his meeting with Petrus Ramus in 1572 and the Ramist innovations undertaken by Cambridge scholars like Abraham Fraunce and William Temple in the early 1580s under Sidney’s aegis. This chapter traces that context to appraise William Temple’s commentary of the logical shortcomings of The Defence of Poesy as a critique of Sidneian aesthetics that fails to recognise Sidney’s refusal to take formal logic entirely seriously. It then moves to the uses of logic in Sidney’s literary practice, ranging from parody in The Lady of May, playful inquiry into ideas of natural reasoning in the Old Arcadia, or blatant distortions of syllogistic disposition in Astrophil and Stella, to more serious treatments of Ramist method in the metaphrases of the Psalms and the New Arcadia. The chapter closes by imagining William Scott’s The Model of Poesy (c.1599) as a post-Sidneian synthesis of the encounters between logic and poetry.
Sidney and Politics
Authors: Crowley Timothy D.
Published: January 2025

Philip Sidney’s life cannot be separated from international politics of the 1570s and 1580s. This chapter surveys and reassesses diverse scholarly approaches to Sidney’s political career in relation to the question of political theory implicit within his Arcadia. On Sidney’s political activity, dominant biographical premises of the late twentieth century need to be reconciled more precisely with documentary evidence of royal favour and with current historiography regarding the foreign policy of Elizabeth I and her inner regime. On political theory, the hermeneutic terms of a long-standing debate should be adjusted regarding law and religion, so as to identify more precisely intellectual convergence and divergence between specific sixteenth-century theories associated and dissociated with Sidney’s thought in modern scholarship. Here new analysis of the Arcadia’s texts focuses on their nuanced representations of sovereignty and rebellion, whereby Sidney’s fiction conveys a political perspective that extends the Lutheran legacy of Philip Melanchthon while both qualifying and complementing it with a legal particularism reminiscent of Jean Bodin’s political thought.
Sidney and the Colonies
Authors: Hadfield Andrew
Published: January 2025

As the son of the Lord Deputy of Ireland and Lord President of Wales, Philip Sidney spent his life immersed in the culture of colonial expansion and colonial government and he was involved in a number of high profile and important colonial ventures. However, although he understood the arguments for colonialism and was able to deploy them in his writings, it is likely that his interest in establishing colonies was of secondary importance to his conviction that the main issue for English Protestants in the late sixteenth century was the need to combat the power of Spain and the Spanish Empire. This chapter outlines relevant events in Sidney’s life; explores the signs of colonial thought in Sidney’s writings; and provides a more sustained analysis of his ‘Discourse of Irish Affairs’, as well as Fulke Greville’s recollections of Sidney’s interest in colonialism in ‘A Dedication to Sir Philip Sidney’.