bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Agro-Processing and Horticultural Exports from Africa
Authors: Fukase Emiko , Martin Will
Published: December 2018

Sub-Saharan African exports of horticultural and processed agricultural products are growing in line with the major shift towards these products in world markets. Continued growth in these exports may be vitally important for expanding returns from African agriculture and for increasing its overall exports. Policy reforms such as reductions in the tariff escalation facing Africa, improvements in the productivity of agricultural processing, and reductions in trade barriers within Africa and beyond would all further stimulate exports of processed agriculture. While essential, expansion of these exports should be regarded as complements to—rather than substitutes for—development of other dynamic export sectors.
Trade in Services
Authors: Hoekman Bernard
Published: December 2018

This chapter reviews some of the literature on trade in services, with an emphasis on recent analyses of services trade policies and their effects. African trade is heavily concentrated in agricultural and natural resource-based commodities; the agricultural sector continues to be a major source of employment and economic activity. Trade volumes have risen since the 1990s and exports of some industrial and processed products have been increasing, however, intra-regional trade remains well below potential and the challenge of diversification continues to prevail. There are encouraging prospects for accelerating trade growth as a result of policy reforms. A premise of this chapter is that a precondition for leveraging trade opportunities is a substantial reduction in trading and transaction costs for African firms beyond the current focus on actions to facilitate trade and focus more on improving the performance of a variety of services, including transport, logistics, and related services.
Industries without Smokestacks
Authors: Gebreeyesus Mulu
Published: December 2018

Although the manufacturing sector is known to have a unique role in structural transformation, the industries without smokestacks that include tradable services (e.g. IT, tourism, and transport), horticulture, and agro-industry can provide new opportunities for export development in low-income countries and in turn drive economic growth. With vast natural and man-made tourist attractions and diversified agroecological advantage, Ethiopia is particularly well positioned to exploit the opportunities in industries without smokestacks. This study takes the case of Ethiopia and examines the current state and contribution of the industries without smokestacks to the economy and exports with the aim of improving our understanding of the major bottlenecks and solutions to unlocking the potential of these industries. It gives special attention to the horticulture and tourism industries, given the huge unexploited potential of these sectors in Ethiopia.
The Agro-Processing Industry and its Potential for Structural Transformation of the Ghanaian Economy
Authors: Owoo Nkechi S. , Lambon-Quayefio Monica P.
Published: December 2018

The chapter examines the role of the agro-processing economy as a crucial engine for structural transformation in Ghana. We first discuss the evolutionary process of policies that have been enacted to promote the activities of the agricultural sector, and how these may have affected the agro-processing sector, given existing linkages. We also provide a discussion of the evolution and structure of agro-processing firms in Ghana, with some emphasis on their performance and constraints. We describe value chain activities of four key agro-processing subsectors in Ghana, in addition to case studies of firms in the fruit and fruit juices and nuts and oils subsectors. We emphasize the potential of the Ghanaian agro-processing industry in contributing to sustained growth and development.
Prospects for Information and Communications Technology-Enabled Services in Kenya
Authors: Ngui Dianah , Kimuyu Peter
Published: December 2018

Kenya is the largest economy in East Africa. It is also the most diversified when the ratio of agriculture to other sectors is compared. Services form a small but fast-growing sector; however, national income and export revenue are dominated by agriculture. Kenya has experienced tremendous growth in ICT which drives economic growth. This growth can be ascribed to the embrace of technology for the distribution of information and service delivery improvement. Kenya shows it has the potential to become a global leader in ICT services. In addition to contributing to GDP, ICT enables innovation, production, and efficiency gains across several sectors key to Kenya’s economic growth. ICT services-led innovations such as M-PESA, the pioneering mobile money platform, have led to financial inclusion. Kenya’s overall ranking within the African region as measured by the International Telecommunications Union ICT Development Index is higher than Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda, and Ethiopia.
Employment and Productivity Growth in Tanzania’s Service Sector
Authors: Ellis Mia , McMillan Margaret , Silver Jed
Published: December 2018

During 2002–12, Tanzania’s economy grew more rapidly than at any other time in its history. More than three-quarters of its labour productivity growth is accounted for by structural change; the remainder is largely attributable to within-sector productivity growth in agriculture. The growth attributable to structural change is almost entirely explained by a rapid decline in the agricultural employment share and an increase in the non-agricultural private sector employment share—with 11.4% of employment growth in the private non-agricultural economy due to the expansion of the formal private sector; the remaining 88.6% occurred in the informal sector. This chapter assesses the role that services have played in Tanzania’s recent growth and the role that they could play in its economic future.
Industries without Smokestacks in Uganda and Rwanda
Authors: Spray John , Wolf Sebastian
Published: December 2018

In this chapter, tax administration data is used to map the characteristics of ‘industries without smokestacks’ in Uganda and Rwanda, and assess their potential to drive economic transformation and growth. The authors find that industries without smokestacks feature prominently among the top thirty most productive industries in both countries. The authors single out three firm characteristics that most high-productivity industries without smokestacks in the data sets share, and distil policy lessons. Then it is examined whether these industries also exhibit cross-industry spillovers in economic performance. The authors find that all of the top ten most interconnected industries of the economy are either in manufacturing or services. Finally, the authors show that growth in output and productivity in these industries is a strong indicator of overall economic growth.
(Dis)connected Empires
Authors: Biedermann Zoltán
Published: December 2018

(Dis)connected Empires takes the reader on a global journey to explore the triangle formed during the sixteenth century between the Portuguese empire, the empire of Kōtte in Sri Lanka, and the Catholic Monarchy of the Spanish Habsburgs. It explores nine decades of connections, cross-cultural diplomacy, and dialogue to answer one troubling question: why, in the end, did one side decide to conquer the other? To find the answers, this book explores the imperial ideas that shaped the politics of Renaissance Iberia and sixteenth-century Sri Lanka. It argues that, whilst some of these ideas and the political idioms built around them were perceived as commensurate by the various parties involved, differences also emerged early on. This prepared the ground for a new kind of conquest politics, which changed the inter-imperial game at the end of the sixteenth century. The transition from suzerainty-driven to sovereignty-fixated empire building changed the face of Lankan and Iberian politics forever, and is of relevance to global historians at large. Through its scrutiny of diplomacy, political letter-writing, translation practices, warfare, and art, (Dis)connected Empires paints a troubling panorama of connections breeding divergence and leading to communicational collapse. It explores a key chapter in the pre-history of British imperialism in Asia, highlighting how diplomacy and mutual understandings can, under certain conditions, produce conquest. It also connects the histories of Asia, Africa, and the Americas. This is a timely intervention in the current debate on the future of Global History.
(Dis)connecting Empires
Authors: Biedermann Zoltán
Published: December 2018

Chapter 1 drafts a roadmap for a critical connected history of empires in the early modern world. It asks where exactly ‘connections’ sit with regard to the global and the local. For an understanding of global connections, local contexts remain key. There, we can seek out the ‘cultural history of the political’ and examine the role played by communication and translation. The notion that unfolding European-Asia dialogues can be sliced up into rigid ‘phases’ (e.g. ‘commerce’ to ‘conquest’) is reductive. At the heart of all interactions is the possibility of violence. Violence is not a monopoly of states in the modern sense of the word, but of polities that entertain a complex relationship with space, through layered suzerainties translatable across Eurasia, Africa, and the Americas. The ‘Imperial Theme’ identified by Frances Yates calls to be made to work across the globe. It could foment the formulation of a general theory of the imperial in the early modern world.
The Matrioshka Principle and Its Discontents
Authors: Biedermann Zoltán
Published: December 2018

Chapter 3 explains on what grounds Lankan rulers remained committed to the idea of co-opting the Portuguese through tributary diplomacy, against the backdrop of a growing regional conflict involving the Muslim Mappilas of South India. Negotiations culminated in 1542 with the reception in Lisbon of an embassy sent by king Bhuvanekabāhu VII of Kōṭṭe to John III of Portugal. In addition to a magnificent ivory casket, significant archival materials survive today to give us a detailed picture of how the inter-imperial deal was imagined in the Lankan capital along the lines of the principle of nesting empires, the ‘Matrioshka principle’. These papers also show the limitations of the conversation. A picture emerges that is at once astounding in the way it contains two very different but commensurable imperial models, and ominous in the way these two models do not quite talk to each other in the way the elite of Kōṭṭe expected.
Moving into the Native Ground
Authors: Biedermann Zoltán
Published: December 2018

Much of the second half of the sixteenth century was spent, even after the brutal looting in 1551 of the most sacred site of Lankan Buddhism at Kōṭṭe, in wars during which Portuguese troops followed Lankan orders. If comparisons with the New World can be made, then it is not so much with reference to the ‘Middle Ground’ paradigm coined by Richard White, as to the ‘Native Ground’ identified by historians such as Kathleen DuVal and Pekka Hämäläinen in other parts of North America. The kingdom of Kōṭṭe itself was constantly besieged by rival Lankan forces. In Colombo, an increasingly complex Mestizo society appeared, especially after this city absorbed the royal court of Kōṭṭe in 1565. The new capital remained politically dependent on the old imperial project of Kōṭṭe, but also became a potential breeding ground for plans of conquest—some inspired by Spanish deeds—that could not be controlled indefinitely by the Lankan elite.
History, Abolition, and the Ever-Present Now in Antebellum American Writing
Authors: Insko Jeffrey
Published: December 2018

The Ever-Present Now examines the meaning and possibilities of the present and its relationship to history and historicity in a number of literary texts of the past; specifically, the writings of several familiar figures in antebellum U.S. literary history—some, but not all of whom we associate with the period’s Romantic movement. Anchored by the impatient temporality of immediatist abolitionists, the book recovers some of the political force of Romanticism, which becomes clear when we foreground time, especially the time of now. Through close readings of texts by figures as different as Washington Irving, John Neal, Catharine Sedgwick, Frederick Douglass, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Herman Melville, the book argues that these writers, some explicitly and others implicitly, practiced forms of literary historiography that treat the past as neither simply a reflection of present interests nor as an irretrievably distant “other,” but as a complex and open-ended interaction between the two. In place of a fixed and immutable past with unidirectional movement, these writers imagine history as an experience rooted in a fluid, dynamic, ever-changing present. The political, philosophical, and aesthetic disposition Insko calls “romantic presentism” insists upon the present as the fundamental sphere of human action and experience and, hence, of ethics and democratic possibility.
Diedrich Knickerbocker, Regular Bred Historian
Authors: Insko Jeffrey
Published: December 2018

Chapter 1 analyzes the self-consciousness—and uncanny postmodernity—of Washington Irving in the various works attributed to his historian alter ego Diedrich Knickerbocker, particularly A History of New York and “Rip Van Winkle.” I argue that Irving’s Knickerbocker writings inaugurated an under-recognized tradition of antebellum writing devoted less to the creation of a coherent national past than to theorizing “history” itself. Irving’s A History of New York (1809) forms a kind of practical illustration of the dismantling of history writing in our own time. Irving’s metahistorical discourse, I claim, cannot be adequately accounted for by conventional historicist contextualization, by confining his works to a particular moment in time, much less one that has been superseded by or that is irretrievably distant and distinct from the critical present. Working in tandem with A History of New York’s disquisition on the mutability of historical knowledge is the experience of history “Rip Van Winkle” offers to its readers. A story of temporal dislocation, “Rip Van Winkle” exploits and critiques Rip’s—and the reader’s—desire to settle upon an orienting present and locate that present within a chronological sequence (before, during, and after the war).
Emerson’s Strong Present Tense
Authors: Insko Jeffrey
Published: December 2018

Chapter 3 considers this question: why, when Ralph Waldo Emerson thinks of history, does he so often think of the present? Emerson’s various rejections of the past seem to suggest that he had no real interest in history, despite the fact that a persistent engagement with the value and meaning of history provides a certain continuity to his career from beginning to end. This chapter argues that Emerson’s subordination of the past to the present is anything but unhistorical. I read Emerson’s major essays of the 1840s in relation to his antislavery addresses of the 1850s. His ruminations on history, philosophical and political, reveal that he was already an immediatist well before he was an abolitionist. For Emerson, as for immediatist abolitionists, the dynamic, fluid nature of the present moment is that which gives rise to historical consciousness and what makes history and (historical) experience possible in the first place.
Preaching Christology in the Roman Near East
Authors: Forness Philip Michael
Published: December 2018

Preaching formed one of the primary, regular avenues of communication between ecclesiastical elites and a wide range of society. Clergy used homilies to spread knowledge of complex theological debates prevalent in late antique Christian discourse. Some sermons offer glimpses into the locations in which communities gathered to hear orators preach. Although homilies survive in greater number than most other types of literature, most do not specify the setting of their initial delivery, dating, and authorship. This book addresses how we can contextualize sermons devoid of such information. The first chapter develops a methodology for approaching homilies that draws on a broader understanding of audience as both the physical audience and the readership of sermons. The remainder of the monograph offers a case study on the Syriac preacher Jacob of Serugh (c.451–521), whose metrical homilies form one of the largest sermon collections in any language from late antiquity. His letters connect him to a previously little-known Christological debate over the language of the miracles and sufferings of Christ through his correspondence with a monastery, a Roman military officer, and a Christian community in South Arabia. He uses this language in homilies on the Council of Chalcedon, on Christian doctrine, and on biblical exegesis. An analysis of these sermons demonstrates that he communicated miaphysite Christology to both elite reading communities as well as ordinary audiences. This monograph thus demonstrates a new methodology for working with late antique sermons and discloses the range of society that received complex theological teachings through preaching.
Homilies and the Spread of Christological Doctrine
Authors: Forness Philip Michael
Published: December 2018

This chapter examines two of Jacob of Serugh’s exegetical homilies that use the pairing of miracles and sufferings to defend a miaphysite view of Christology. A homily on the promise of a future prophet in Deuteronomy 18:15–18 features typological exegesis that explores similarities between Moses and Christ. Homilists in late antiquity regularly used typological exegesis to express their views on Christology through familiar biblical stories. In another homily, Jacob offers a Christological interpretation of Peter’s confession of Christ in Matthew 16:13–20 and encourages his audience to imitate Peter in confessing Christ in a way that agrees with the miaphysite view of Christology. Jacob’s contemporaries Philoxenos of Mabbug and Severos of Antioch had similarly used this passage to support miaphysite Christology. The examination of these two homilies solidifies Jacob’s participation in debates over Christology through preaching and his use of homilies to communicate these ideas to broad audiences.
Exorbitant Enlightenment
Authors: Regier Alexander
Published: December 2018

Exorbitant Enlightenment offers new ways to think about eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century literature and culture. It brings into focus a constellation of relatively unknown, pre-1790s Anglo-German relations in Britain, many of which are so radical—so exorbitant—that they ask us to fundamentally rethink the way we do literary and intellectual history, especially when it comes to Enlightenment and Romanticism. This polyglot book delivers two of the great, untold stories of the eighteenth century. The first story uncovers a forgotten Anglo-German network of thought and writing in Britain between 1700 and 1790. From this Anglo-German context emerges the second story: a set of radical figures and institutions that are exorbitant, they leave the specified tracks of literary history and present us with a literary history that explodes the difference between the Enlightenment and Romanticism. These figures and institutions include the Moravians in 1750s London, Henry Fuseli (1741–25), and Johann Caspar Lavater (1741–1801), but also the two most radical, notorious, and most exorbitant figures: William Blake (1757–1827) and Johann Georg Hamann (1730–88). Over eight comparative chapters, the book presents a constellation of case studies that show how these figures and institutions shake up our common understanding of British literary and European intellectual history. Exorbitant Enlightenment takes seriously, and pays particular attention to, the exorbitant dimensions of Blake and Hamann and how once we take them seriously, these exorbitant figures allow us to uncover and address some of our own critical orthodoxies.
Unexpected Connections
Authors: Regier Alexander
Published: December 2018

This chapter establishes the historical background for the book. By drawing on previously little-used materials (from unpublished archival manuscripts to court records, book history, philosophy, belles lettres, and travelogues) it shows that, contrary to common belief, there was a wide-ranging, significant Anglo-German community in pre-1790s London in which German literature had a considerable presence. Drawing on archival and cross-disciplinary work, the chapter establishes the importance of German figures and communities, especially ecclesiastical, for London’s literary circles, most of which are either forgotten or never discussed and do not fit into generally accepted literary history. The recovery is important for literary-historical reasons, but also in order to lay the ground for a study of the exorbitant figures, such as Blake, Hamann, Fuseli, or Lavater, that emerge from it.
Blake and Hamann
Authors: Regier Alexander
Published: December 2018

This chapter contextualizes Blake’s and Hamann’s radical propositions about language and reason. For them, language is both ‘the mother of reason and revelation’ but ‘also the centre point of the misunderstanding of reason with itself’. In contrast to the emerging Lockean philosophical status quo of the times, they reject any functional account of language, and instead argue that poetry lies at the origin of all creative thinking (‘poetry is the mother-tongue of the human race’). Blake and Hamann create an account of language (the ‘uterus of thought’) that presents poetic expression as the most concentrated and truthful way of generating meaning, not just in the past, but also today. Crucially, for Blake and Hamann, language and reason are inextricably connected, suggesting that thinking itself is poetical. In their exorbitant epistemology and ontology, Blake and Hamann emerge as two major critics of the eighteenth-century linguistic thinking and philosophy.
Every Letter Has a Body
Authors: Regier Alexander
Published: December 2018

In this chapter the discussion turns to Blake’s and Hamann’s understanding of the inextricable link between language and sexuality. Both Blake and Hamann believed that language is always bodily and physical. Since the most direct way to describe the body is through its sexuality, they argue that language is also ultimately sexual. Other than most Christian thinkers, Blake and Hamann both believe that this sexual aspect is something to be celebrated, and any attempt to purify language from its corporeality is misguided. Language, down to particular letters, turns out to be the locale where the physical and the metaphysical ultimately intersect. This chapter provides comparative readings across their works, and a detailed reading of Hamann’s New Apology of the Letter h. Taken together, these readings situate the two authors as new, critical voices in the study of sexuality and language in eighteenth-century thinking and writing.
Introduction
Authors: Regier Alexander
Published: December 2018

The Introduction to the book lays out the aims of the project, formulates its major contributions, and explains its structure. It introduces the category of the ‘exorbitant’ as an important new way of a multilingual way of studying the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries allows us to reconceptualize the Enlightenment, Romanticism, and modernity. It also discusses why the book chapters function as ‘constellations’, rather than sequentially, a methodological background that is inspired by Walter Benjamin. This chapter gives two concentrated examples of the main contributions of the book. It shows the need for our recovery of a rich yet unknown Anglo-German context in pre-1790 Britain by offering a new reading of Robinson Crusoe in this light (Crusoe’s original name is ‘Kreutznaer’; he is a second-generation German immigrant). Correspondingly, it introduces some of the main historical and theoretical affinities between William Blake and Johann Georg Hamann.
The double life of gender and its structural consequences
Authors: Kučerová Ivona
Published: December 2018

Chapter 6 investigates variation in the domain of gender in Italian. The Standard Italian nominal system morphologically marks two distinct genders, three distinct nominal classes (idiosyncratic nominal endings), and two numbers, a combination which lends itself to a theoretical investigation of complex gender interactions. Crucially, Italian nominal inflection also distinguishes between grammatical, i.e. idiosyncratic, and natural, i.e. context-dependent, gender. The chapter argues that while some nouns come with gender determined from the lexicon, others may get their gender valued only via the context. Such a contextual valuation may arise only at the phase level, with D being the locus of such a valuation. Evidence comes from agreement and derivational morphology.
Plural marking on mass nouns
Authors: Kouneli Maria
Published: December 2018

Mass nouns are generally incompatible with plural morphology in number-marking languages. Greek mass nouns, though, can freely pluralize. Chapter 11 shows that the meaning of plural mass nouns in Greek is that of ‘spread over a surface in a disorderly way’. The author argues that plural morphology on mass nouns in the language is the spell-out of number features on the nominalizing head n, unlike plural morphology on count nouns, which spells out the head of the functional projection NumP. She extends this analysis to other languages with plural marking on mass nouns, and argues that plural morphology on mass nouns is never the spellout of features on Num, which can only have the meaning associated with regular plural morphology on count nouns cross-linguistically.
Productivity vs predictability
Authors: Quinn Conor McDonough
Published: December 2018

The nominal gender distinction in Algonquian languages known as Animate versus Inanimate has long been observed to correlate closely with semantic animacy, even as superficially ‘unpredictable’ Animates at first suggest an ultimately formal and rote-lexicalized character. In Chapter 12, drawing on data from four Northeastern-area Eastern Algonquian languages, the author shows that Animate assignment is neither purely formal-lexicalized, nor based on a single elusive shared semantic feature, but instead is an emergent phenomenon: a mutable, ongoing lexicon-structuring process that builds up a set of lexical-semantic ‘families’ to which AN status is assigned. This is seen most strikingly in Passamaquoddy-Maliseet and Mi’kmaw speakers’ robust knowledge of the gender assignment of novel items and foreign words, with similar patterns seen in Penobscot and Western Abenaki corpora. Language-internally, the phenomena of ‘dual animacy’ and ‘variable animacy’ also support this view, as does the observation that Animate assignment appears to change diachronically across Algonquian by semantic cluster, i.e. by ‘family’, rather than by individual lexeme. Establishing that the phenomenon is dynamically synchronically productive (and far more predictable than not), the author aims to encourage further research in this heretofore neglected area, and so also presents preliminary questions about the falsifiability of the model and what adequate semantic and syntactic accounts would require, and finally observes how this new line of investigation might substantially help Algonquian language reclamation/revitalization efforts.
How to phraseologize nominal number
Authors: Armoskaite Solveiga
Published: December 2018

Lithuanian nouns inflect for singular and plural. However, a subset of deverbal nouns with nominalizer –yb- deviate from the pattern. Some nouns inflect just for singular. Other nouns inflect just for plural. The contrast in these deverbal nouns is due to (i) heterogeneity of the verbs that -yb- attaches to; (ii) idiomaticity of inflectional nominal number. Chapter 13 argues that the fixed number specifications on the non-ambiguous cases are instances of morpheme level idiomaticity. The data and the discussion bear on whether the commonly assumed distinction between derivation and inflection holds.
Imitation and ‘Infinite’ Will
Authors: Jayasekera Marie
Published: December 2018

This chapter investigates Descartes’s conception of the imago Dei, that it is above all in virtue of the will that human beings bear the image and likeness of God. The chapter begins by illuminating his understanding of the doctrine—how he conceives of the relation between human beings and God. It is argued that Descartes is alluding not to Scholastic conceptions of analogy but instead to the Augustinian–Thomistic tradition on the nature of image. Turning to Descartes’s conception of the likeness between the human will and God’s will, the chapter argues that he thinks the likeness is that both are infinite in ‘extent’. This means that human will can ‘extend itself’ to things that can be the object of God’s will, notable because Descartes famously thinks that absolutely anything can be the object of God’s will. An explanation is offered for why this interpretation is not implausible, contrary to first appearances.
Descartes on the Ethical Reliability of the Passions: A Morean Reading
Authors: Kisner Matthew J.
Published: December 2018

This chapter considers Descartes’s view on whether the passions are ethically reliable in the sense of informing us of the value of things with respect to the ethical ends of virtue and happiness. The answer to this question is unclear, first, because the passions could not inform us in this way unless they were contentful mental states, which has been a contested issue. Secondly, even if the passions are contentful, it is not clear that Descartes regarded their contents as ethically reliable. Descartes often claimed that the passions are only reliable guides to animalistic aims and bodily survival. The chapter draws on Henry More’s reading of Descartes to show that Descartes did regard the passions as ethically reliable, with some qualifications. The chapter also shows that Descartes was a likely influence on More’s boniform faculty and, by extension, on the tradition of moral sentimentalism.
Spinoza on Turning the Other Cheek
Authors: Green Keith
Published: December 2018

Spinoza rejects ‘turning the other cheek’ where humans live in civic community, and denies that piety ever requires it under those circumstances. Yet he argues that Jeremiah and Jesus counsel it under the exceptional circumstances where civic community collapses, and one is exposed to oppression. Spinoza defends his view by appealing to the love command—one must love one’s neighbor as one loves oneself. This chapter shows how turning the other cheek when one cannot count on others to do likewise can be rational on Spinoza’s terms and how he resolves the apparent tension of his claim that one must not turn the other cheek when one lives under the rule of civil law with his claims that hatred is always bad, and that anyone who ‘lives by the guidance of reason’ endeavors to ‘repay another’s hatred with love or nobility’.
Locke’s Succeeding Ideas
Authors: Stuart Matthew
Published: December 2018

Locke holds that there is a constant succession of ideas in the mind of each waking person. Section 1 asks whether Locke thinks of each succeeding idea as something that might persist for a while. The evidence pulls in two directions, and the puzzle is solved by distinguishing claims about idea tokens from claims about idea types. Section 2 unearths Locke’s fascinating account of why the rate at which our ideas succeed one another keeps us from seeing slow motions. Section 3 considers his views about our knowledge of the rate of idea succession. Finally, section 4 looks at Locke’s claim that we get the idea of succession by attending to the succession of our ideas and takes issue with Gideon Yaffe’s account of this.
Introduction
Authors: Bishop Caroline
Published: December 2018

The introduction contextualizes Cicero’s decision to strive for a permanent position in the Roman canon as a classic. First, it demonstrates that Cicero used his literary works innovatively in order to extend his political self-fashioning across both space and time. It then discusses the flourishing of classicism in Greek intellectual culture of the second and first centuries BCE, the routes by which this culture came to Rome, and the ambivalent Roman response to Greece in this period. The chapter concludes by arguing that the Hellenized educational system at Rome had a powerful impact upon Roman canon formation, and meant that Roman authors could quickly become classics. For a new man like Cicero who had staked his career on his abilities with Latin prose—and who had learned to use writing and publication to further his career—this was an attractive prospect.
Aratus
Authors: Bishop Caroline
Published: December 2018

This chapter considers the importance of Cicero’s Aratea, a translation of Aratus’ Phaenomena, to his classical ambitions. It argues that while Cicero likely translated the poem as part of his training as an orator, his creative incorporation within the translation of Aratus’ Hellenistic reception is a sign that he also had lofty plans for it. The Phaenomena was an instant classic in the Greek world: praised for its Hellenistic aesthetic, used as the primary source text in the instruction of astronomy, and appropriated by Stoics, who considered it a poetic reworking of their cosmology. Cicero’s savvy use of Aratus’ diverse commentary tradition allowed him to not just display his facility at turning Greek into Latin, but also produce an even better version of the Phaenomena that could itself become a canonical teaching tool for astronomy at Rome.
Plato
Authors: Bishop Caroline
Published: December 2018

This chapter demonstrates how Cicero’s adaptation of Plato in his three dialogues De Oratore, De Re Publica, and De Legibus (as well as his translation of the Timaeus) reflects his desire to become a similar model of classical prose. An overview of Plato’s Hellenistic reception shows that he had become a weighty authority who could be used to support even discordant philosophical systems. Cicero learned this fact at first hand in the bitter quarrel between his two instructors (and members of Plato’s Academy) Philo of Larissa and Antiochus of Ascalon. But it was not just Academics who haggled over Plato: as classicism began to take hold in the Greek world, Plato became an important authority for Stoics and Peripatetics too. For Cicero, who desired to become a figure of similarly classical authority as the founder of Roman philosophy, Plato was the only logical choice of model.
Letters
Authors: Bishop Caroline
Published: December 2018

This chapter hypothesizes about the nature of Cicero’s planned but never published letter collection, and argues that Cicero was inspired both by Greek epistolary theory and by Greek letter collections of classical figures like Plato and Demosthenes. Many of these letters were elaborate self-defences whose authenticity was vouched for by epistolary theory, in which letters were taken as unmediated glimpses of the sender’s true character. For this reason, this chapter argues that Cicero likely planned to publish a collection of his letters about the civil war. Many of these letters portray Cicero as an ideologically consistent statesman who foresaw the outcome of the war but joined the losing side out of a sense of duty. A version of this account published in letter form would have had a unique air of authenticity, and been an important component in the literary legacy of a classic.
Cicero
Authors: Bishop Caroline
Published: December 2018

This chapter investigates Cicero’s desire to enshrine himself as a classic from a different perspective than the rest of the book. It analyses Cicero’s appropriation not of a classical Greek figure but of himself, by examining his self-quotation of his earlier poetry (primarily the Aratea) within his late philosophical dialogues De Natura Deorum and De Divinatione. While Cicero likely found the Greek source for his poem, Aratus, quoted within the Greek philosophical works he used as sources for these dialogues, quoting his own poetry obviously carried a different charge. The chapter concludes that by staging the reading of his earlier works within these dialogues, Cicero was modelling the proper way to read his corpus: namely, as a set of works every bit as authoritative as the Greek classics he had adapted throughout his literary career.
Aristotle’s Rhetoric in the Schoolroom
Authors: Raylor Timothy
Published: December 2018

This chapter considers the conception of rhetoric implied by Hobbes’s use of Aristotle for teaching his pupil, the third Earl of Devonshire, in the early 1630s. Given the dominance of a Roman and, more specifically, Ciceronian understanding of rhetoric at the time, this was an unusual decision. But a neo-Aristotelian understanding of the art had begun to take shape by the early seventeenth century: an understanding visible in Hobbes’s prime source, Theodore Goulston’s bilingual edition of Aristotle’s Rhetoric, De Rhetorica seu arte dicendi (1619). Hobbes is shown to have been working with an understanding of rhetoric as a means of understanding what will serve to persuade a given audience on a given occasion: an understanding centred on the enthymeme and largely free from Ciceronian humanist notions of the moral value, civic necessity, and philosophic utility of the art.
Conclusion
Authors: Raylor Timothy
Published: December 2018

The Conclusion summarizes the main claims advanced in the book. There was in Hobbes’s thinking no early commitment to a (Ciceronian) optimism about the value of rhetoric in which he first lost and then regained faith. Hobbes was, from first to last, committed to a limited, Aristotelian understanding of rhetoric, and was consistently concerned about the dangers it posed to civil society. His embrace of a reformed logical method involved an attempt to purge philosophy of the approximations of rhetorical reasoning. And although his definition of philosophy underwent some adjustments, Hobbes did not back away from his effort to liberate it from rhetoric. The Conclusion briefly sketches the lineaments of a new understanding of Hobbes’s humanism, establishing its Aristotelian character and pointing to the possible role played by Hobbes’s study of Aristotle’s Rhetoric in the establishment of his new method.
Homosocial Masculinities
Authors: Evans Gareth Lloyd
Published: December 2018

This chapter uses the concept of homosociality to discuss attitudes to, and representations of, relationships between men. Examining masculinities and masculine characters from each of the forty sagas of Icelanders, this chapter constitutes the first comprehensive study of masculinities in this genre. It investigates the interpersonal dynamics of masculinity in the sagas, thereby demonstrating how masculinity inflects homosocial relationships (and thus virtually all aspects of saga texts). By focusing on the actions of male characters, this chapter touches upon, elucidates, and articulates many facets of saga society, and the representation of men within it, which are generally taken for granted and consequently not usually formulated in saga scholarship. The conclusions drawn about the operation of homosociality in saga society are concurrently used to think through some of the implications that Old Norse material might hold for Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s model of homosociality.
Conclusion
Authors: Evans Gareth Lloyd
Published: December 2018

The conclusion brings together the book’s major findings, summarizes its arguments, and underscores the significance of its contributions to the field. It highlights the ambiguous representation of masculinity in the sagas, drawing attention to the frequently critical stance that saga authors take towards notions of masculinity. This, it is argued, has important implications for our understanding of the sagas of Icelanders as a genre. Finally, the conclusion suggests avenues for further research into Old Norse masculinities: hypotheses are given for what we might expect in terms of other genres’ treatment of masculinity, as are some potential directions for further research into masculinities in the sagas of Icelanders.
Adulthood and Other Fictions
Authors: Edelstein Sari
Published: December 2018

While the field of childhood studies has blossomed in recent years, few scholars have taken up the question of age more broadly as a lens for reading American literature. Adulthood and Other Fictions shows how a diverse array of nineteenth-century writers, thinkers, and artists responded to the rise of chronological age in social and political life. Over the course of the century, age was added to the census; schools were organized around age groups; birthday cards were mass-produced; geriatrics became a medical specialty. Adulthood and Other Fictions reads American literature as a rich, critical account of this modern culture of age, and it examines how our most well-known writers registered—and often resisted—age expectations, particularly as they applied to women and people of color. More than simply adding age to the list of identity categories that have become de rigeur sites of scholarly attention, Adulthood and Other Fictions argues that these other measures of social location (race, gender, sexuality, class) are largely legible through the seemingly more natural and essential identity defined by age. That is, longstanding cultural ideals about maturity and development anchor ideologies of heterosexuality, race, nationalism, and capitalism, and in this sense, age rhetoric serves as one of our most pervasive disciplinary discourses. Writers including Louisa May Alcott, Frederick Douglass, and Henry James anticipated the ageism of our moment, but they also recognized how age norms structure, and limit, the lives of individuals at all points on the age continuum. Ultimately, Adulthood and Other Fictions argues for an intersectional understanding of age that challenges the celebration of independence and autonomy imbricated in US fantasies of adulthood and in American identity itself.
Introduction
Authors: Edelstein Sari
Published: December 2018

The introduction makes the case for age as a crucial—and overlooked—analytic for reading nineteenth-century American literature. It offers a brief historical overview of how chronological age became a key rubric in the organization of social and political life. Over the course of the century, age was added to the census; schools were organized around age groups; birthday cards were mass-produced; geriatrics became a medical specialty. The chapter argues that American literature serves as a rich, critical account of this modern culture of age, demonstrating how our most well-known writers registered––and often resisted—age expectations, particularly as they applied to women and people of color.
Little Women, Overgrown Children, and the Problem of Female Maturity
Authors: Edelstein Sari
Published: December 2018

The third chapter exposes the exclusionary status of adulthood and the disciplinary work of age from a gendered perspective. Women were, in the words of one historian, “perpetual minors,” and this uneven distribution of rights perverted female development and preoccupied one of the most celebrated novelists of the century. Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1868) reveals the rhetoric of age as a core disciplinary idiom in the lives of girls and women, who must constantly calibrate their behavior and appearance to their chronological age. In Work: A Story of Experience (1873), she ventures that numerical age might serve as a viable measure of maturity for women, but she denaturalizes the seeming inevitability of gendered norms and the developmental teleology that underwrites them. For Alcott, it was essential to envision alternative versions of female maturity, departing from linear models of aging as decline.
Tiberius the Autocrat
Authors: Shannon-Henderson Kelly E.
Published: December 2018

This chapter shows how Tacitus’ treatment of the early principate of Tiberius in Annals books 1–2 lays the foundation for the problems of Roman religion that will shape the rest of his account. The deification of Augustus is an important part of Tiberius’ consolidation of his political position, but also encourages the living emperor’s subjects to treat him in ways that approach worship. Religious flattery of Tiberius and his family becomes a growing problem. The consequences of Augustus’ deification are further tested in early maiestas trials. Tiberius takes an autocratic position when he sets himself up as the sole arbiter of important religious questions (whether the flooding of the Tiber is an omen; in what cases a triumphal ritual can be celebrated), allowing no room for debate even as his interpretations conflict with traditional practice.
Divine Wrath and Annals 4
Authors: Shannon-Henderson Kelly E.
Published: December 2018

Book 4 is examined at a turning point in the discussion of religious material in the Annals. At the start of the book, the rise of Sejanus is attributed to the savageness of fortuna and the wrath of the gods; Tacitus for the first time explicitly introduces the possibility of divine punishment for the decline in cultic memory shown in previous books. Episodes such as godlike honors for the deceased Drusus, the form of marriage ritual appropriate for the flamen Dialis, and the revisiting of temple asylum rights show that the problem of cultic amnesia persists. It is interwoven with notices about the proposal of temples in Asia (4.15.2–3) and Spain (4.37–8) to be dedicated to the worship of Tiberius himself. Tiberius’ rejection of the Spanish temple, which rests on his alleged wish to keep such honors the province of the deified Augustus alone, shows his fundamental misunderstanding of the principle of cultic memory and earns him the ire of his critics as showing an insufficient concern with his own posthumous commemoration, of which emperor cult is now presumed to be the best form. Tiberius comes into conflict with Agrippina the Elder over the proper way to commemorate divus Augustus, and Tiberius’ withdrawal from Rome allows for new abuses of ritual to be performed in his absence.
Fate, Astrology, and the End of Life
Authors: Shannon-Henderson Kelly E.
Published: December 2018

This chapter examines Annals 5–6, in which Tiberius’ life draws to a close and the issues of fate and divine punishment are linked to the decline in religious memory that has characterized his principate. Commemorations of Sejanus, Livia, and Agrippina the Younger show the Senate’s tendency to use cult practice for the flattery of the Imperial house. Episodes such as the appearance of a phoenix in Egypt and Tiberius’ own predictions of the future, made with the help of astrology, give Tacitus’ reader the impression that Rome will be punished for its actions.
Claudius and the Failure of Tradition
Authors: Shannon-Henderson Kelly E.
Published: December 2018

After a brief assessment of how the lost portions of the Annals covering the reign of Caligula might have affected our understanding of the importance of religion within the work, this chapter considers the reign of Claudius as described in Annals 11–12. Claudius is depicted as an antiquarian-minded reformer whose attempts to revive Rome’s cultic traditions are nevertheless destined to fail to improve Rome’s poor relationship with its gods. Claudius revives the augurium salutis and the college of the haruspices, celebrates a lustrum to conclude his censorship, and holds the Secular Games. Yet none of these changes is enough to restore a true spirit of cultic memory to Rome, since Claudius’ reign also sees the abuse of rituals by his wives Messalina and Agrippina the Younger that threaten to anger the gods. It is also during his reign that the gods first send prodigies to convey their anger explicitly, an anger that Claudius’ attempts to revive tradition cannot mitigate.