bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Shakespeare’s Dramatic Genres
Authors: Danson Lawrence
Published: November 2023

Oxford Shakespeare Topics provides students, teachers, and interested readers with short books on important aspects of Shakespeare criticism and scholarship. Each book is written by an authority in its field, and combines accessible style with original discussion of its subject. Notes and a critical guide to further reading equip the interested reader with the means to broaden research. The history of the genres, or kinds, of drama is one of contradictory traditions and complex cultural assumptions. The divisions established by the original edition of Mr. William Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies (the First Folio, 1623) give shape to whole curricula; but, as Lawrence Danson reminds us in this lively book, there is nothing inevitable, and much unsatisfying, about that tripartite scheme. Yet students of Shakespeare cannot avoid thinking about questions of genre; often they are the unspoken reason why classrooms full of smart people fail to agree on basic interpretative issues. Danson's guide to the kinds of Shakespearian drama provides an accessible account of genre-theory in Shakespeare's day, an overview of the genres on the Elizabethan stage, and a provocative look at the full range of Shakespeare's comedies, histories, and tragedies.
Epilogue
Authors: Danson Lawrence
Published: November 2023

WHAT has become of the genres? I go to my video store and find a whole section called Comedy. But none called Tragedy or Satire or History or Tragicomedy. Instead there’s a huge undifferentiated section called Drama. For tragedies I have to look in a small section called Classics: mostly what I find there are Shakespeare’s tragedies, mixed up with some of his comedies and some BBC adaptations of Victorian novels. There are a few tragedies by modern playwrights-Eugene O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra, Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire, Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman; but they strike me as attempts to revive a category no one in the video store believes in any more. Where did it go, the whole elaborate structure of genre-theory and its related practice from Aristotle to Alexander Pope?
Introduction
Authors: Shakespeare Critics Theatre
Published: November 2023

The art of theatre is notoriously ephemeral, yet anyone who believes that Shakespeare wrote primarily to be performed must also believe that we can increase our enjoyment and understanding of the texts that have come down to us both by seeing them performed and by knowing about how they have been performed in the past. Ben Jonson wrote of one of his masques ‘only the envy was that it lasted not still, or, now it is past, cannot by imagination, much less description, be recovered to a part of that spirit it had in the gliding by.” But this is over-pessimistic.
[c.1738 ], Thomas Davies (c.1712-85) on Colley Cibber (1671-1757) at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, London, as Justice Shallow in Henry the Fourth, Part Two, from Dramatic Micellanies [sic], 3 vols. (1784), i. 306-7.
Authors: Shakespeare Critics Theatre
Published: November 2023

Thomas Davies was an actor turned bookseller and publisher whose Dramatic Micellanies, consisting of critical observations on several plays of Shakespeare, with a review of his principal characters and those of various eminent writers, as represented by Mr Garrick and other celebrated comedians, appeared first in 1784. Justice Shallow in Henry the Fourth, Part Two was one of Cibber’s best roles. He ostensibly retired from the stage in 1733 but reappeared later, playing Shallow with great success at Drury Lane in the 1738 season. Davies’s account suggests how Cibber capitalized on his own appearance to create an impression of individual character.
[1774-5], Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742-99) on David Garrick as Hamlet in his own adaptation at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, London, from the Deutsches Museum, translated in Lichtenberg’s Visits to England, edited by M. L. Mare and W. H. 01iarrell (Oxford, 1938), pp. 9-n, 15-17-
Authors: Shakespeare Critics Theatre
Published: November 2023

Georg Lichtenberg, German scientist and philosopher, paid two visits to England towards the end of Garrick’s career, in 1770 and 1774”““““5; his accounts of visits to the theatre in letters written in October and November 1775 for publication in a literary periodical, the Deutsches Museum, provide some of the most vivid and detailed descriptions of individual stretches of action in Shakespearian performances ever written. They may be supplemented by entries from Lichtenberg’s diary for 2 and 12 December 1774, on which the letters are based, translated with a commentary by R. B. Sutton, ‘Further Evidence of David Garrick’s Portrayal of Hamlet from the Diary of Georg Christoph Lichtenberg’, Theatre Notebook, 50 (1996), pp. 8-14.
21 December 1817, John Keats (1795-1821) on Edmund Kean as a Shakespearian actor, and John Hamilton Reynolds (1796-1852) on Kean at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, London, as Richard, Duke of York in the play of that name adapted by John Herman Merivale (1779-1844) from Henry the Sixth, Parts One, Two, and Three; from The Champion, reprinted in The Poetical Works and Other Writings of john Keats, ed. H. Buxton Forman, revised with additions by Maurice Buxton Forman (Hampstead edition), 8 vols. (New York, 1939), v. 227-46.
Authors: Shakespeare Critics Theatre
Published: November 2023

The first of the reviews cited here was written by the poet Keats to help out his friend Reynolds, who at the time was reviewing for The Champion. A great admirer of Kean, Keats wrote a play, Otho the Great, in collaboration with his friend George Brown, and started another, King Stephen, in 1818, hoping that Kean would play the central roles in both; they abandoned King Stephen on hearing that Kean was planning an American tour.
18 March 1838, John Forster on W. C. Macready as Coriolanus at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden, London, from The Examiner, reprinted in Dramatic Essays by John Forster, George Henry Lewes, ed. William Archer and Robert W. Lowe (1896), pp. 54-65.
Authors: Shakespeare Critics Theatre
Published: November 2023

Macready’s first Coriolanus is reviewed on pp. 5cr-61. By the time he came to present the play under his own management, in 1838, historically based pictorialism had begun to exert the influence on Shakespeare production that was to dominate the rest of the century and beyond. The opening paragraph of Forster’s review helps to explain the growing appeal of this kind of staging.He presentation of this play at Covent Garden Theatre on Monday night last may be esteemed the worthiest tribute to the genius and fame of Shakespeare that has been yet attempted on the English stage. We have had nothing to compare with it, even in Mr. Macready’s management. Magnificent as the revivals of Hamlet, Othello, Lear, and Macbeth have been, this of Coriolanus surpasses them all, in the opportunity it has afforded of presenting together upon the stage those striking characteristics,
21 October 1854, Henry Morley on Samuel Phelps’s production of Pericles at the Sadler’s Wells Theatre, London, in his The journal of a London Playgoer (1866; repr. 1891), pp. 78-84.
Authors: Shakespeare Critics Theatre
Published: November 2023

Phelps’S production of Pericles illustrates his missionary zeal; the play had remained unperformed since 1738, when it had been given with little success in a heavily adapted version, Marina, by George Lillo (1693-1739). As Morley’s account makes clear, Phelps, too, considerably altered the play, adding passages of his own composition, and making the most of the opportunities for spectacle. I omit Morley’s lengthy summary of the plot.
10 April 1875, Joseph Knight (1829-1907) on Tommaso Salvini (1829-1915) as Othello, from his Theatrical Notes (1875), pp. 19-25.
Authors: Shakespeare Critics Theatre
Published: November 2023

Knight was appointed theatre critic of The Literary Gazette in 1860, and wrote for The Athenaeum from 1867 until he died. He edited Notes and Queries from 1883 until 1907. Salvini was a great Italian actor who won international acclaim as, especially, Hamlet and Othello. He toured extensively, usually (as in the produc vided additions as the rupture of a bladder of blood, which the actor might place within reach, the exhibition of a bleeding. throat, and a stream of blood serpenting upon the floor, to reach the limits of attainable realism. Tendencies in the direction of this kind of so-called art were seen in Signora Ristori, and marred her marvellously artistic impersonations. In the present case ·their effect is singularly detrimental to the artistic value of the performance.
6 July 1895, Bernard Shaw (1856-1959) on The Two Gentlemen of Verona, produced by Augustin Daly (1838-99) at Daly’s Theatre, London; from The Saturday Review, reprinted in Shaw on Shakespeare, pp. 192-7.
Authors: Shakespeare Critics Theatre
Published: November 2023

The piece founded by Augustin Daly on Shakespear’s Two Gentlemen of Verona, to which I looked forward last week, is not exactly a comic opera, though there is plenty of music in it, and not exactly a serpentine dance, though it proceeds under a play of changing colored lights. It is something more old-fashioned than either: to wit, a vaudeville.
4 December 1899, C. E. Montague (1867-1928) on Frank Benson (1858-1939) as Richard II, reprinted in The Manchester Stage I880-I900: Criticisms reprinted from ‘The Manchester Guardian’ (n.d.), pp. 76-87, and in Specimens of English Dramatic Criticism, ed. A. C. Ward (1945), pp. 223-32.
Authors: Shakespeare Critics Theatre
Published: November 2023

Benson was a touring actor-manager, talented and athletic, especially associated with the Stratford Festival. He was knighted in 1916. His company provided a valuable training ground for young actors, who were especially welcome if they displayed talent as sportsmen.
8 April 1905, Max Beerbohm on H. B. Irving (1870-1928) as Hamlet at the Adelphi Theatre, London; from The Saturday Review, reprinted in his Last Theatres (1970), pp. 147-52.
Authors: Shakespeare Critics Theatre
Published: November 2023

It is hardly too much to say, in reference to this latest production of what is perhaps the masterpiece of our great national poet, that the ghost of Hamlet’s father is the most impressive within our recollection. Heartiest commendation is due to Mr Maskelyne for having contrived in co-operation {as the programme informs us) with the Committee of the Society for Psychical Research, an illusion so abundantly convincing. The vague diaphanous form scarcely palpable to the audience, and the faint twittering sounds emitted through it by Mr Horne,2 the well-known ventriloquist-sounds in which, most rightly, only a word here and there was distinguishable-combined to make for the first time credible to us the hitherto somewhat disconcerting scene between the youthful prince and his much-wronged parent.’ ... This is a fragment of dramatic criticism in a morning newspaper which has somehow been wafted to me from the year 1924 It is interesting, as a document.
6 December 1991, Paul Taylor on As You Like It, directed by Declan Donnellan (born 1953) for the touring company Cheek by Jowl; from The Independent.
Authors: Shakespeare Critics Theatre
Published: November 2023

The odds against a strapping 6ft black male actor being able to create not just a convincing but a captivating Rosalind are, you might have thought, fairly formidable. Adrian Lester1 makes short work of this assumption, however, in Cheek By Jowls delightful all-male production of As You Like It now to be seen at the Lyric, Hammersmith. The company’s director, Declan Donnellan, has always been mischievously alert to the sexual politics that are in play in the disguise-conventions of Shakespearean comedy. At the end of his version of Twelfth Night,2 for example, Viola wisely forced Orsino to feel her breasts, as if to remind him that this person he has fallen in love with (but oddly enough never seen except in male costume), is no boy.
The Latin West
Authors: Reynolds L D , Wilson N G
Published: November 2023

The sixth century saw the final collapse of what remained of the Roman empire in the West. In Italy the relatively enlightened rule of Theodoric (493-526) was given distinction by the two most notable figures of the transition period from the ancient to the medieval world, Boethius and Cassiodorus; but it was followed by the destruction of the Ostrogothic kingdom by the Byzantines and a spectacular cultural decline. The provinces were to fare little better. North Africa, now in Vandal hands, was soon to pass beyond the pale of Western culture; some of its literary achievement, such as the Latin Anthology, was transmitted in time to Europe and so to posterity. Spain, prey to external attack and internal strife, was to see a revival ofVisigothic culture in the later sixth and early seventh centuries, reaching a modest peak in Isidore of Seville, but it too was to succumb in the early eighth century to the Moslem invaders. Though traces of the older Roman culture lingered on among the upper classes in Gaul, the Frankish Merovingian dynasty founded by Clovis (481-5II) was grotesquely ill-suited to foster any cultural continuity.
Some Aspects of Scholarship Since The Renaissance
Authors: Reynolds L D , Wilson N G
Published: November 2023

The progress of scholarship in the sixteenth century was hampered by continuing religious controversy. Although Bessarion had been stimulated by such controversy to write two short books of great importance for the development of critical method, it is not easy to discover equally fruitful controversies among the contemporaries of Erasmus or in the next generation. Erasmus himself, though he had exploited the work of Valla and Bessarion for his edition of the New Testament and was aware of Politian’s eminence as a scholar, did not possess the palaeographical skill that might have led to further advances; and as he settled at Basie, while most of the best working libraries with manuscript collections were still at that date to be found south of the Alps, he could scarcely hope to add greatly to his experience in dealing with manuscripts. Religious disputes took up much of his time and energy in later years, and in 1524 we find him complaining (Epist. 1531) that the struggle between Luther and his opponents had become such a preoccupation in literary circles that the book trade was affected, and in the German-speaking parts of Europe it was hardly possible to sell books on any other topic.
Title
Authors: Harding Phillip
Published: November 2023

Atthis or The Atthis is the name given in the great majority of our sources to the local history of Attica. It denotes both the work (i.e. as so-and-so says in the Atthis) and the material covered in the work (i.e. what is sometimes referred to as the Atthidographic tradition). ‘Atthidography’ is a modern term that denotes the writing of an Atthis, or the genre. ‘Atthidographer(s)’ is, likewise, the name given by modern scholars to the individual authors of an Atthis, or, collectively, to the whole group that wrote Atthides. In antiquity the collective form of reference was used in the periphrasis ‘those who composed (or organized) the Atthides’ (see Schwartz, RE (1896) col. 2182 for references).
Form
Authors: Harding Phillip
Published: November 2023

Despite the originality of its name, it is quite clear from both its subject matter and the known approach to historiography of its originator, Hellanikos, that the Atthis belongs to the genre of historical writing called. Local History (horographia, ‘annals’) that had been invented in Ionia in the mid-fifth century (Jacoby, Atthis, 68-70; Text, 1-2.). Furthermore, we have the explicit testimony of Dionysius of Halicarnassus (Ant. Rom. 1. 8. 3) to the fact that the Atthides were chronicles. To this can be added the statement that is specifically about Philochoros, that he ‘encompasses the deeds of the Athenians and their kings and their archons’ (Souda s.v. Philochoros). And this point becomes all the clearer from study of the fragments, where we can see that (from 683/2. onwards) the list of annual magistrates (the eponymous archon) forms the backbone of the Atthis. From the evidence available (largely from Philochoros, but see comm. on F44) we can be sure that each year’s heading began with the name of the archon, attached to which was some identification (in our extant examples, his demotic‑deme-name). This was followed by a series of short entries for the events of that administrative year, organized chronologic ally. The first entry for each year was introduced by the formula, ‘in the time of this man … ’ (see F44). We might call this part of the Atthis the ‘historical part’, because it dealt with a period for which records could be available, though obviously the entries became more detailed and more factually accurate for events after about the beginning of the fifth century (see below, §6 Sources).
Content
Authors: Harding Phillip
Published: November 2023

Whilst politics was a major component, as one would expect in the local history of any polis, and international affairs and warfare took a prominent place, which is also not surprising because Athens became an imperial power, one finds in the fragments a great interest in local cult and festival, in family tradition, in eco nomics, geography, and ethnography; in short the whole range of subject matter one would usually associate with a chronicle of local affairs such as the Atthis was (see Commentary, passim; Harding, 1977, 158-9).
Character of the Atthis
Authors: Harding Phillip
Published: November 2023

The first exploration of the character of the Atthides was that of Wilamowitz. As we have seen he perceived it as an essentially democratic medium, based upon a kind of documentary source, the pre-literary chronicle of the exegetai (Ar.u.Ath. i. 260-90). His view has been replaced, as far as modern scholarship goes, by Jacoby’s great study of the genre in his Atthis. There Jacoby put forward his theory of the ‘political conception of the Atthis’, the idea that ‘political war was waged from the fifties of the fourth In sum, we have a man who, while he was not a great historian, was not without intelligence, concern for detail, or experience in the affairs he was most concerned to describe. His account of fourth-century Athenian history, especially the years 360-340, would have been of great value.
Relationship Of Androtion’S Atthis To Other Works
Authors: Harding Phillip
Published: November 2023

In this final section I will review briefly the use made by later writers of Androtion’s Atthis to see what this might tell us about the character and quality of his work. I shall not, consequently, be wasting any time on the unfounded theory of G. de Sanctis, that Androtion was the author of the so-called Hellenika Oxyrhynchia (first advanced in 1908). This was decisively refuted by Bloch (1940, 328-34; cf. Harding, 1987b, 101).
Akharnians
Authors: MacDowell Douglas M
Published: November 2023

Akharnians was performed at the Lenaia in 42 5 B c , and won the first prize. It is a play about war and peace. The Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta was already in its sixth year and there was no prospect of an early end to it. The chief character of the play, Dikaiopolis, hates the war, but he fails to persuade the other Athenians to consider how peace can be made. He therefore, by fantastic means, makes a separate peace treaty for himself and his family, to the horror of the warlike old men of Akharnai who form the chorus.
Wasps
Authors: MacDowell Douglas M
Published: November 2023

Two slaves are on watch in front of a house. The door is barred and nets cover the windows. A man, who turns out to be the master of the house, is sleeping on the flat roof. The slaves, whose names are Xanthias and Sosias, are inclined to doze off, but one wakes the other, and each recounts the dream he has just had. The dreams are comic allegories about Athenian politicians: Kleonymos and Kleon, Theoros and Alkibiades. These political jokes serve to ‘warm up’ the audience before the main story of the play begins, and also imply that political themes will be prominent in it. Soon Xanthias turns and speaks directly to the audience to explain the situation.
Birds
Authors: MacDowell Douglas M
Published: November 2023

Two men are wandering along in some remote spot. Most of Aristophanes’ plays are set in Athens (or at least begin there), but Birds is in a far-off rocky place, and the travellers seem to be lost.
Frogs
Authors: MacDowell Douglas M
Published: November 2023

Euripides died in 406 BC, and in Frogs, performed at the Lenaia in 40 5, Dionysos, the god of drama, has come to the conclusion that there are no good tragedians left alive. So he decides to go down to the underworld and fetch Euripides back. Naturally he has never made the journey to Hades before, and he knows that most people who make it never come back.’ One of the few who have successfully made the return journey is Herakles, who as one of his famous labours stole away Kerberos, the terrible three-headed hound which guarded the entrance to Hades. So Dionysos has disguised himself as Herakles (his own brother, since both are sons of Zeus), and begins the journey by calling at Herakles’ house to ask his advice about the route. With him goes his slave Xanthias, who is riding on a donkey and carrying the luggage.
Women at the Assembly
Authors: MacDowell Douglas M
Published: November 2023

An interval of more than ten years separates Fro9s from Women at the Assembly,, the longest gap among the eleven plays we have. It was one of the hardest and most humiliating periods in the history of Athens. The defeat and loss of the navy; the loss of the Empire and its tribute; the siege and the capitulation to Sparta; the suppression of democracy; the oligarchic regimes of the Thirty and the Ten, followed by counter-revolution and the restoration of democracy, with the executions, exiles, and recriminations that these changes involved: all these events must have had a devastating effect, both materially and psychologically, even on ordinary Athenians who took little part in politics. Then came a slow recovery, with the rebuilding of the town walls and the navy; but from 395 onwards Athens became embroiled in hostilities with Sparta once again, as an ally of Thebes in the Corinthian War.
Wealth
Authors: MacDowell Douglas M
Published: November 2023

Wealth was first performed in 408 BC. Twenty years later Aristophanes revised it, and it was performed again in 388. A scholiast, who annotated the version which we have, believed that this was the earlier one. At 1 1 5 and 1 1 9 he comments that these two lines are changed ‘in the second’, and he quotes the other version of 1 1 5, which is a rewording giving the same sense. This shows that he had both versions in front of him when he was writing his note. It also shows that the two versions were very similar, at least in this part of the play; for he was able to identify which line in one version corresponded to which line in the other, and noticed that there was a change of wording without a change of sense. But further on, at 173 and 11 46, he is puzzled by references to events which occurred later than 40 8 B c , and suggests that these two lines have been erroneously transferred from the second version; yet it appears that he did not bother to check the other version to see whether these lines were in it too, or perhaps for some reason the other version was no longer available to him when he came to write these notes. In fact he has missed the obvious explanation, that the version on which he is commenting, and which we have, is in fact the revised version of 388. This is confirmed by other topical references which we can date but the scholiast probably could not, especially in a passage where Karion (addressing Khremylos) and Khremylos (addressing Wealth himself) are listing the advantages that Wealth confers.
France Since the Popular Front
Authors: Larkin Maurice
Published: November 2023

In this new edition, Professor Larkin extends his analysis of French history since the Depression to 1996. He examines the factors that have shaped the evolution of French social, economic, and political life, from the short-lived ministries of the Third and Fourth Republics to the greater stability of the Fifth Republic. In addition to his lively portrayals of the principal figures and events of the period, Professor Larkin puts France in its broad international context, comparing the country's economic performance and social record with those of its European neighbours. `The first textbook to cover its period in one volume...An enormous amount of material is presented with clarity and elegance...a volume which cannot fail to become a standard textbook.' English Historical Review 'a superb contribution to the literature on contemporary France' Journal of Social History 'A remarkable achievement based on massive research and usefully illustrated with tables and other statistical details...This will undoubtedly become an important reference for all those working in the field...' Modern and Contemporary France 'lively and often amusing narrative...Larkin's concern is with "the interaction of people, government and material change"...This interaction is set most illuminatingly in its comparative, international context, with much useful statistical data.' Times Higher Educational Supplement
Challenge and Response 1968-1974
Authors: Larkin Maurice
Published: November 2023

THB events of May 1968 were a legend in their own time. Within months they had engendered a torrent of books, with such titles as French  Revolution, chronicling and numbering the days of the opening moves as though they were the start of a new revolutionary calendar. In R. W.Johnson’s words: For many, especially the young, it had indeed been bliss to be alive through that utopian spring. Everything, suddenly, had seemed possible. A handful of laughing radicals had created a sort of joyous anarchy and … the system had trembled … How to be a political leader after May, when all politicians and all authority had been so decisively challenged, so hilariously mocked? How could any mere party programme compare with dream world slogans such as ‘L’imagination au pouvoir’? How could one go back to the mundane tedium of electoral politics?
L’Avant-Fin-de-Siècle
Authors: Larkin Maurice
Published: November 2023

Things could admittedly be worse. Average household take-home pay had gone up by more than 10 per cent in real terms between 1985 and 1993. But some had done better than others. Disparities between the top and bottom salary brackets had widened by roughly 10 per cent for men, while women were still paid on average 30 per cent less than their male counterparts—not much of an improvement on their 35 per cent shortfall in the early eighties. As in the past, the main obstacles to their achieving greater equality continued to be the smaller range of top jobs open to women—plus the interruptions to their incremental patterns created by maternity, or by following husbands to appointments in other regions. But if disparities in earned income had increased, differences in family savings and property had widened at double the rate-nearly 20 per cent. Moreover the overall total of family savings had dropped by several per cent in the last decade, although it rose anew in the first half of the 1990s.
Expert Discourses and the Governance of Audiences
Authors: Oswell David
Published: November 2023

Since the mid-1980s a growing body of research has emerged which looks at the way television institutions represent and regulate their audiences (Ang 1991; Hartley 1987; Allor 1988; Ettema and Whitney 1994; Paterson 1987). Most notably, John Hartley, in an early polemical essay, has argued that: Moreover, Hartley has argued that the figure of the ‘child’ has played an important role in the governance of television. Television audiences are, he argues, either addressed as if they were childlike or regulated according to the possibility that children might be watching. Television programmes are thus pitched, not to a lowest common denominator, but to an imagined universal childhood. Such a universal notion of childhood allows audiences, Hartley observes, to attach themselves to a form of address which is seen to pre-exist the sociological differences of class, race, and gender (differences which might lead to a greater segregation of audiences and to a diminishing of audience size): ‘a fictional version of everyone’s supposed childlike tendencies which might be understood as predating such social groupings’ (1987: 130).
Postscript: Production, Markets, and Expertise
Authors: Oswell David
Published: November 2023

By the early 1960s, the child television audience had become a substantial and material entity. It could be invoked as a matter of concern by parents and the press alike; it could be addressed and differentiated by broadcasters; it could be researched and under stood by academics; and it could become an important figure in regulatory and governmental thinking. Moreover, the distribution of responsibility, and the terms and conditions of its thinking and enactment, had been carefully demarcated between parents, broad casters, and government. None of this, however, is to say that the child television audience was not problematic, that it stopped being the site of innovation and change, a site of new questions and solutions, but that the relations and languages of care and responsibility had become congealed in such a way that any innovation necessarily rested and leaned upon the child television audience’s status as already being a recognizable object of concern.
Introduction
Authors: Sugirtharajah R S
Published: November 2023

The trouble with texts, especially if they are ancient and sacred, is that they can be summoned and assigned meanings to prove or legitimize any cause, theory, or perspective. Interpretative history is littered with such examples. When European colonialism was at its peak, biblical texts were taken out of context to prove biblical sanction for such a venture. Let me extract a gem from colonial history. When, for instance, Britain gradually gained power and expanded its territorial control in the north, south, east, and west, such an expansion was seen as the fulﬁlment of biblical expectation. New Foundland, Britain’s ﬁrst colony in the West, was acquired in 1583. Territorial gains were made in the East in the sixteenth century. The most northerly of Britain’s possessions, Canada, was added in the eighteenth century and its southern dominions—Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa—were colonized in the early nineteenth century. Such a territorial acquisition was perceived by Bernard Bateson as Britain fulﬁlling the prediction of Gen. 28: 14: ‘Thou shalt spread abroad to the west, and to the east, and to the north, and to the south’ (Bateson 1947: 63). What this volume attempts to do is to go beyond such a facile reading of texts and to look deeply at the way colonialism interconnects with texts and interpretation.
Was Jesus God?
Authors: Swinburne Richard
Published: November 2023

The orderliness of the universe and the existence of human beings already provides some reason for believing that there is a God - as argued in Richard Swinburne's earlier book Is There a God ? Swinburne now claims that it is probable that the main Christian doctrines about the nature of God and his actions in the world are true. In virtue of his omnipotence and perfect goodness, God must be a Trinity, live a human life in order to share our suffering, and found a church which would enable him to tell all humans about this. It is also quite probable that he would provide his human life as an atonement for our wrongdoing, teach us how we should live and tell us his plans for our future after death. Among founders of religions, Jesus satisfies uniquely well the requirement of living the sort of human life which God would need to have lived. But to give us adequate reason to believe that Jesus was God, God would need to put his 'signature' on the life of Jesus by an act which he alone could do, for example raise him from the dead. There is adequate historical evidence that Jesus rose from the dead. The church which he founded gave plausible interpretations of his basic message. Therefore Christian doctrines are probably true.
God Atoned for Our Wrongdoing
Authors: Swinburne Richard
Published: November 2023

Humans suffer — and, I claimed in the previous chapter, for that reason God needed to become incarnate, in order to share that suffering. But humans have also greatly wronged God. Wronging God is called ‘sinning ‘. God needed to react to human sin. There is more than one way in which he could do this; but one way in which he could react is by providing atonement for that sin. It is in this way, Christianity claims, that he did react.
Science, Complexity, and the Natures of Existence
Authors: Ellis George F R
Published: November 2023

This chapter looks at complexity from a functional viewpoint, considers the nature of causation in the light of this discussion, and comments on the view we need to take as to the nature of existence in order to comprehend the existence of emergent structures (including the human mind). I conclude that physics gives a causally incomplete view of the world, and hence does not by itself provide an adequate ground for metaphysical speculations.
Adamgirk ‘ 2
Authors: Stone Michael E
Published: November 2023

Necessary stories and useful counsels concerning the great first ones, Adam and Eve, spoken in diverse forms in verse by Lord Aṙak’el of Siwnik’, in a suitable measure, for the pleasure of men and the sustenance of minds, revealing hidden secrets concerning the beautiful adornment of the first ones both as prophecies of the holy Mother of God and as praise of the commandment of the Lord and concerning the rib’s mystery998 compared with the cross and the resurrection of Christ. Divided into eight chapters, it contains 320 stanzas.
‘Concerning the First Ones, Adam and His Wife’
Authors: Stone Michael E
Published: November 2023

Being without the quantity, Existence without quality,1149Increate and endless and unbounded, Unity of Three. Paternally begotten Word, Spirit sprung of Father, By person, distinct from one another, but not divided. He created first the bodiless genera, The luminous skies and the angels, on the first day. Again the fourfold elements1150 were distinguished, The watery arch and this earth, on the second day.
Who’s in Charge Round Here?
Authors: Hansell Mike
Published: November 2023

The Petronas Twin Towers, when erected in Kuala Lumpur in 1998, were—at 452m (1483ft) and eighty—eight stories high—the tallest buildings in the world, and remained so until 2003. The matching towers are shaped a bit like two giant telescopes looking straight into the ground, their diminishing segments ascending skywards. They look futuristic in a slightly old-fashioned way, the slender horizontal skybridge that links them at levels 41 and 42 somehow reinforcing this impression. In spite of their undoubted elegance, they would be comfortable in the cityscape of Fritz Lang’s visionary 1927 film Metropolis.
Beautiful Bowers?
Authors: Hansell Mike
Published: November 2023

I’ve no hesitation in calling it a work of art, even though it is an illustration in a bird book. The very size of this illustration does, however, suggest that this is a rather special bird book; it is 54cm high and 68cm across, covering a whole double-page spread. It is Plate 8 in Volume 4 of John Gould’s Birds of Australia, published in 1848. It shows a male and female of the spotted bowerbird (Chlamydera maculata) (Figure 8.1).
Ratzinger and Contemporary Theological Circles
Authors: Rowland Tracey
Published: November 2023

The Second Vatican Council (196I–1965) is often presented as a historic battle between ‘progressive’ bishops and their theological advisors who wanted to change Catholic teaching to more closely harmonize it with the social movements of the 1960s and ‘conservatives’ who remained wedded to the spirit of the Counter-Reformation era and who, at their most extreme, wanted no engagement at all between the Church and the world beyond her cloisters. According to a popular reading, both Karol Wojtyla (John Paul II) and Joseph Ratzinger (Benedict XVI) started out on the progressive side but had second thoughts after the cultural revolution of the late 1960s. They began bravely but did not have the courage to carry through the progressive agenda. According to this reading, these two pontificates therefore reXect a kind of neo-conservatism in the sense of the bon mot that a neo-conservative is a liberal with a teenage daughter.
Schizophrenia and Related Psychotic Disorders
Authors: Brüne Martin
Published: November 2023

The term ‘schizophrenia’ refers to a group of clinically highly heterogeneous psychotic disorders characterized by the presence of delusion, hallucinations, thought disturbances, disorganized behaviour, catatonic symptoms, and affective flattening or inappropriate affect. Schizophrenia is associated with marked occupational or social dysfunction. Even though it would be more appropriate to speak of the ‘schizophrenias’ for several reasons, the singular is kept throughout this chapter for convenience.
Anxiety Disorders
Authors: Brüne Martin
Published: November 2023

Anxiety disorders share psychological symptoms of subjectively highly distressing and excessive worry, and anticipation of impending danger with the feeling of little chance to escape. At the physiological level, these symptoms are accompanied by tachycardia, hyperventilation, dizziness and nausea, and sweating. Duration and intensity of these symptoms vary greatly between different forms of anxiety disorders, from relatively short periods of time with the greatest intensity in panic disorder (PD), to enduring worrying of minor intensity as in generalized anxiety disorder (GAD). Moreover, there are differences with regards to the situational circumstances that may elicit symptoms of anxiety. In phobic disorders, the precipitating situational context is part of the definition, whereas in PD and GAD these situations are less well determined or absent.
Introduction
Authors: Hansen Mogens Herman
Published: November 2023

Polis is the ancient Greek word for ‘city’,1 ‘state’2 and the combination of city and state, the ‘city-state’.3 It has often, quite rightly, been said that the polis, as a form of state and society, was the basis of the whole of Greek civilisation; and the implication of that is that one can only understand Greek civilisation if one understands the form of the society the Greeks lived under, i.e. the polis. However, this illuminating truth is, regrettably, seldom followed up by a description of what a polis actually is (or rather was, for the form of city-state culture that dominated Greece in antiquity no longer exists anywhere in the world). We have lacked comprehensive, fundamental studies of the polis both as a concept and as an actual phenomenon: earlier investigations have been subjective, and the examples chosen were mostly taken from sources that dealt with Athens.
Cities, States, City-States and City-State Cultures
Authors: Hansen Mogens Herman
Published: November 2023

In the very long perspective there are three milestones in the history of mankind before the Industrial Revolution: (1) the change from hunting and fishing to agriculture and herding as the most important mode of getting a living, (2) the change from dispersed to nucleated settlement, first in villages and later in true cities, the change in social structure from looser, family-based groups to institutionalised communities with first the tribe and later the state as the dominant political unit. In our part of the world the ‘agrarian revolution’ began c.8000 bc, i.e. in the Neolithic period and in the Near East between Asia Minor and Mesopotamia.
A Sketch of the Thirty-Seven Identified City-State Cultures
Authors: Hansen Mogens Herman
Published: November 2023

The oldest known city-state culture is that of the Sumerians in Mesopotamia, with Uruk, Ur and Lagash as three of the bestknown city-states. They were city-states from c.3100 to c.2350 bc, when Sargon of Akkad conquered Sumer. The city-states arose again briefly after the collapse of the Akkadian dynasty c.2150, but the third dynasty of Ur (c.2100–2000) changed the city-states again into provinces within a larger kingdom. When the third dynasty of Ur collapsed, there was yet another city-state period from c.2000 to 1850 bc1 In Syria in the third millennium bc there was a set of citystates, the best known being Ebla. They were destroyed and disappeared c.2300, but turned up again as city-states in the Middle Bronze Age (c.2000–1700) and a third time in the early Iron Age (c.1000).x
The Rise of the Ancient Greek City-State Culture
Authors: Hansen Mogens Herman
Published: November 2023

Modern historians are still in conflict over the chronology of the Greek city-states. Can the polis be traced back to the Mycenean Age? Or did it arise in the Geometric period? And if one settles for the latter view, one still has to take a position about whether it began as early as c.900 bc or as late as 700. No consensus has yet been reached as to where and when the earliest poleis are to be found; and there is even less agreement still as to when the later ones died out. In what follows I shall argue for the now widespread opinion that the Greek polis was not destroyed by the Macedonians at the end of the Classical period but continued as the leading form of state and society all through the Hellenistic Age and through most of the Roman Imperial period. The polis died out only in late antiquity after a period of decline of several hundred years: its disappearance was gradual and imperceptible, as had been its arrival on the scene more than 1,000 years earlier.
What is a Polis An Investigation of the Concept of;Polis
Authors: Hansen Mogens Herman
Published: November 2023

After our detailed investigation of the chronologyof the Greek citystate culture and its expansion, it is time to return to the question: what was a polis? The answer depends on whether the questioner wants to look at the Greek polis with the eyes of a modern historian or to find out what the Greeks themselves thought a polis was.1 I have chosen the second approach. What follows is, therefore, about the Greeks’ understanding of themselves, and in such an investigation the written sources must take centre-stage, and an attempt must be made to analyse the words and concepts that the Greeks used to describe the institution.
Relationships between Poleis
Authors: Hansen Mogens Herman
Published: November 2023

At the beginning of this book I stressed the interaction between all the Greek poleis that resulted from migrations, trade and various interstate social activities. I shall conclude with a short sketch of the relationships between the city-states in war and in peace. Diplomatic ties between poleis were maintained not by a class of ambassadors but by envoys sent ad hoc when two or more citystates wanted to declare war or peace or enter into an alliance. In the Classical and Hellenistic periods envoys were called presbeis or presbytai, i.e. old men and quite often only citizens over 50 could be chosen for the task;3 for the cities wanted to have men of experience to carry out the negotiations. All social communication between city-states at war was carried on through heralds (kerykes).4 The pan-Hellenic festivals and sporting contests were proclaimed a year in advance by special envoys (theoroi), who called upon the city-states all over the Greek world to take part in the festival and to respect a cessation of hostilities that protected the polis hosting the festival for the period when it was held.
The Circulation of Texts: Publishers and Readers
Authors: Toulalan Sarah
Published: November 2023

It is often suggested that pornography in England appeared in any quantity only following the Restoration of Charles II in 1660 and the embracing of a culture of libertinism at the new court. However, material of this nature was being produced well before 1660, throughout this and previous centuries. The Crafty Whore published in 1658 was modelled on Aretino’s dialogue ‘The Lives of Whores’ from the Ragionamenti, and the English adaptation of Sinibaldus’ Geneanthropeia entitled Rare Verities, a pseudo-medical treatise on sexual matters, appeared in the same year. John Taylor was producing short works that fit into the genre of whore literature much earlier in the century with his A Bawd and A Common Whore (reprinted in his collected works in 1630).
Introduction
Authors: Macrides Ruth
Published: November 2023

The thirteenth century has always been treated as separate and different—not to say, detachable—in Byzantine historiography as in Byzantine history. One turns the page, one starts a new chapter. No one can deny that the Latin conquest of Constantinople, the ‘cosmic cataclysm’, as one contemporary called it, brought enormous change to Byzantium, change which was in many ways irreversible. For more than half a century Constantinople was not the centre of the Byzantine world. The ‘rich men’ of the city, in Robert of Clari’s words, left the Queen of Cities and scattered, joining new centres which arose in Epiros and in Asia Minor. Unity was never again to be a characteristic of the empire. These structural changes were accompanied, it is said, by the growth of a sense of Hellenic identity and a weakening of Roman institutions, notably Roman law. Apparently new practices were introduced, it is thought, as a result of Latin contact in the thirteenth century, the anointing of emperors, and trial by ordeal.
George III
Authors: Cannon John
Published: November 2023

Definitive, concise, and very interesting... From William Shakespeare to Winston Churchill, the Very Interesting People series provides authoritative bite-sized biographies of Britain’s most fascinating historical figures—people whose influence and importance have stood the test of time. Each book in the series is based upon the biographical entry from the world-famous Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
Sellarsian Picturing
Authors: Rosenberg Jay F
Published: November 2023

Linguistic picture-making is not the performance of asserting matter-of-factual propositions. The criterion of the correctness of the performance of asserting a basic matter-of-factual proposition is the correctness of the proposition qua picture, i.e. the fact that it coincides with the picture the world-cum-language would generate in accordance with the uniformities controlled by the semantical rules of the language. Thus the correctness of the picture is not defined in terms of the correctness of a performance but vice versa. (
The Emergence of Empire Rome and the Surrounding World in Historical Narratives from the Late Third Century bc to the Early First Century ad
Authors: Yang Huang , Mutschler Fritz-Heiner
Published: November 2023

The phenomenal expansion of the Roman Empire in the two centuries from the second Punic War (219–202 bc) to the reign of Augustus (27 bc–ad 14) coincided with the beginnings, development, and (Worst) Powering of Roman historical narrative. It is the purpose of this paper to describe, at least for two important periods, the ways in which the respective prose and verse works reflected the political process and to explore the extent to which ‘imperial thought’ can be apprehended in these texts. The two periods to be dealt with are from the late third to the mid-second century bc, which witnessed the decisive expansion of Roman power to the eastern part of the Mediterranean, and from the century bc to early century ad, which saw a renewed dynamism of imperial expansion and a lasting (re)organization of the administrative structures of the empire. They represent the formative phase of literary narrative in Rome and the one richest in works of Roman self-representation. The works of the two periods will be dealt with in the main sections of the paper (2 and 3). As, however, Roman historical consciousness began to take shape prior to the literary narratives and since its non-and proto-literary forms already reflected Rome’s relationship.