bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Hagiography
Authors: Neil Bronwen
Published: June 2019

The selection of various biblical tropes adopted in early Christian hagiography depended greatly upon its subjects, whether bishops, monks, nuns, martyrs, or confessors. In reading the lives of these model Christians, early Christian hagiography reflected the mind and values of its society. What mattered most to Late Antique hagiographers was how the personal sanctity of their subjects reflected their continuity with biblical times, in a correspondence of type and antitype. From Moses to Elijah to Christ or John the Baptist, from Antony to Augustine to Maximus the Confessor, hagiographical narratives—deeply rooted in Scripture—made both their subjects and their devotees part of a seamless continuum of holiness. To this end, hagiographers interwove themes and topoi from a range of texts calculated to edify, from the lives of Hellenistic philosophers to the Hebrew Scriptures; from classical narratives of exile and loss to the letters of the Apostle Paul, celebrating suffering and persecution for the sake of the Gospel; from the canonical Gospels to the apocrypha. This multi-layering produced a rich vibration beneath the surface of the text, giving off a complex series of signals to which every early Christian was alert.
Christianity and Judaism
Authors: Carleton Paget James
Published: June 2019

This chapter examines the ancient evidence for interaction between Jews and Christians on the Bible. It begins by noting how the motivation behind the investigation of this subject has changed over the past century. Questions relating to sources and problems of method are then addressed. An examination of the evidence follows. Initially an attempt is made to show how Christians in particular were influenced by Jewish interpretative traditions, Bible versions, and canon. Such evidence might be taken to imply contact between Jews and Christians but this is difficult to show. In fact there are very few references to such contact in the relevant literature and what evidence does exist is difficult to interpret. Relevant Christian texts, often of a polemical kind, are generally too repetitive and formulaic to prove contact; and the Jewish evidence is at best minimal, in spite of the efforts of some to show that on occasion exegetical traditions in rabbinic sources could be taken to imply opposition to alternative Christian interpretations. Instinctively, however, a reading of a work like John Chrysostom’s Sermons against the Judaizing Christians makes us think that interest in Jewish understandings of the Bible amongst Christians must have persisted, even if there is perhaps less evidence of such interest on the part of Jews.
Marcion and his Critics
Authors: Ward H. Clifton
Published: June 2019

Marcion of Sinope was active in Rome in the middle of the second century ce. Marcion’s views on Scripture and hermeneutics led to a separation from the Church in Rome and the creation of a concurrent Marcionite community. This chapter examines Marcion’s legacy within subsequent early Christian biblical interpretation, seen most clearly in his role as an early practitioner of philological reading techniques to interpret Scripture. This chapter considers Marcion’s conception of the diversity of two gods—the Creator and the unknown God—in light of contemporary philosophy, and it suggests that Marcion’s literary-critical methods were deployed to confirm this philosophical understanding of deity. After an analysis of Marcion’s philology, seen in both his hermeneutical stance towards the Jewish Scriptures and his editorial work on the New Testament, this chapter concludes by arguing that writers like Tertullian and Epiphanius rejected Marcion’s philosophical conclusions while coming to terms with the validity of the methods of philology for biblical interpretation.
Scripture in the Trinitarian Controversies
Authors: Ayres Lewis
Published: June 2019

This chapter considers how Christian thinkers in the fourth century engaged the text of Scripture. It begins by considering how fourth-century readers were shaped by the Church’s adaptation of ancient literary-critical practices in the late second and early third centuries. Then treatment of an extended example—the reading of Proverbs 8.22, and especially in Athanasius—enables us to draw out ways in which Scripture generated, bounded, and interrupted Christian thought. Scriptural terminology and phrasing generates reflection, the same also pushes Christian thought in particular directions, and the same also forces Christian thinkers to confess divine mystery, interrupting the speculative gaze. Turning to another example, from later in the second century—the reading of John 5.19—confirms this analysis and enables us to see the exegesis of this period as highly creative, but within an exegetical culture formed in the first two centuries of the Church’s life.
Exodus
Authors: Graves Michael
Published: June 2019

Christian writers of the second and third centuries adopted the figurative interpretation of the Exodus presupposed by the New Testament, adding new figural readings and articulating a theology of the Exodus as spiritual salvation. Tertullian in particular follows the lead of 1 Corinthians 10 and connects Israel’s crossing the sea to baptism. Origen creates a coherent allegorical interpretation of the entire Exodus story by filling out details in the rest of the narrative in keeping with the theme of Christian salvation. Later authors who devote significant exegetical attention to the Exodus include Gregory of Nyssa, Ephrem the Syrian, Theodoret of Cyrus, and Augustine of Hippo. Key points of discussion include the Passover, baptism through the sea, and the hardening of Pharaoh’s heart. By the fourth century, a standard Christian reading of the Exodus appears in a wide variety of sources, depicting Israel’s exodus from Egypt as a figural representation of salvation from the devil and sin, towards virtue and communion with God.
Commentaries
Authors: Lössl Josef
Published: June 2019

This chapter offers an introduction to the origins, main characteristics, and some main representatives of the early Christian biblical commentary. It outlines the emergence of the biblical and Late Antique philosophical commentary from the context of the late Hellenistic and early post-Hellenistic study of grammar and rhetoric (e.g. in Homeric scholarship), and discusses the role of Origen of Alexandria as the main theorist and practitioner of the early Christian biblical commentary, including Origen’s treatment of commentary topics (topoi) and his conceptualization of his commentarial activity as a form of Christian philosophy, or science. It then continues with an overview of the history of the early Christian biblical commentary after Origen, touching upon the history of the Antiochene school of exegesis and upon the Latin commentary tradition culminating in Jerome of Stridon and Augustine of Hippo.
Core Principles for Evolutionary Medicine
Authors: Nesse Randolph M.
Published: June 2019

New interest in evolution and medicine arose late in the twentieth century from the recognition that there are several possible kinds of evolutionary explanation for aspects of the body that leave it vulnerable to disease, in addition to the inevitability of mutations. Investigations of related hypotheses have led to rapid growth of evolutionary medicine, and its expansion to integrate demographic, phylogenetic, and population genetic methods. Evolutionary approaches to understanding disease are part of a major transition in biology, from viewing the body as a designed machine to a fully biological view of the body’s organic complexity as fundamentally different from that of designed machines.
Brain, Spinal Cord, and Sensory Systems
Authors: Brüne Martin
Published: June 2019

The central nervous system (CNS) comprising the brain and the spinal cord is the control system of bodily functions and processes incoming information from the external environment via diverse sensory systems. Incoming information from the body (interoception) and from the environment (exteroception) is integrated and utilised in complex patterns of action and re-action (allostasis) to maintain homoeostasis and ensure survival and reproduction. The brains of primates are larger than expected for their body weight, whereby the human brain is not exceptional in terms of the number of neurons. However, connectivity and cross-talk between different brain areas has increased during human evolution. The adult human brain consumes about 20% of total energy intake, which is needed to maintain complex excitatory and inhibitory mechanisms with the aid of glia cells and microglia. Abnormal amounts of stress during different stages of development may expose the CNS to an excess of toxic and inflammatory metabolic products, which may cause neuropsychiatric disease and disorders. Such stressors may include, among other factors, adverse events such as abuse or neglect during childhood, immunological mismatches between ancestral and current environments, and a plethora of social challenges related to ‘modern’ cultural peculiarities. Gene–environment interactions involved in CNS disease processes are far from being fully understood. Preventive measures to protect the CNS from premature functional deterioration may include safe-guarding child development, a reduction of toxic waste products, and mental and physical exercise.
Genetics and Epigenetics
Authors: Ewald Paul W. , Ewald Holly A. Swain
Published: June 2019

Genetic influences on human disease can be understood in the context of essential and exacerbating causes. Alleles are essential causes when they are required for these diseases to occur. Severe diseases with essential genetic causes are rare unless they provide a compensating benefit in evolutionary fitness (accrued through increases in survival and/or reproduction) that offsets their fitness costs. Duchenne’s muscular dystrophy illustrates that upper limit of incidence for diseases that kill before reproduction and have essential genetic causes that provide no compensating benefit: about one death per 10,000 births. Sickle cell anaemia exceeds this limit in many populations because the causal allele confers a compensating benefit: protection against falciparum malaria. Alleles that contribute to common, severe diseases such as atherosclerosis and Alzheimer’s disease tend to be exacerbating causes, which act by increasing vulnerability to environmental causes. Inferring genetic causation from familial patterns is not straight-forward because genetic associations may be correlated with environmental exposures. Relatively high monozygotic twin cooncordances for schizophrenia, for example, are associated with in utero exposure to the parasite Toxoplasma gondii, which appears to cause a substantial portion of schizophrenia. Epigenetic contributions to disease involve relatively long-term but reversible modification of genetic influences that may occur in response to micro- or macroenvironmental exposures. Integration of these aspects of disease causation can be of practical use in the health sciences by clarifying interventions that can prevent, cure, or strongly ameliorate disease.
Growth and Development
Authors: Bernstein Robin M. , Bogin Barry
Published: June 2019

An evolutionary and biocultural approach is taken to the study of human growth and development. The evolutionary perspective focuses on the unusual process of human postnatal growth and development, a process that takes two decades to complete and traverses the stages of infancy, childhood, juvenility, and adolescence. Human childhood and adolescence are highly unusual even compared to our closest living relatives, perhaps unique. The biocultural perspective of human development focuses on the constant interaction taking place during all phases of human development between genes and hormones within the body and the sociocultural environment that surrounds the body. While humans are often considered to be cooperative breeders, depending on social group helpers to successfully rear offspring, it may be more accurate to understand humans as practising biocultural reproduction as an adaptation to minimise risks to health.
Nutrition, Energy Expenditure, Physical Activity, and Body Composition
Authors: Caldwell Ann E. , Eaton Stanley Boyd , Konner Melvin
Published: June 2019

An imbalance of energy intake, expenditure, and storage substantially increases the risk of chronic, deadly conditions, including heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM), certain cancers, and depression. Our understanding of the physiological, lifestyle, and environmental factors that contribute to poor energy regulation and balance can be informed in meaningful ways in the context of evolutionary medicine. There is a substantial mismatch, or discordance, between ancestral environments (environments of evolutionary adaptedness (EEAs)) and most modern environments with regards to the availability and accessibility of food, and the connection between physical activity energy expenditure and energy acquisition. Evolutionary medicine can inform research and approaches to reduce the disease burden associated with an imbalance of energy based on the discordance model for diet and activity, and further applying life history theory to understand physical activity. Challenges to the evolutionary approach to chronic disease are thought-provoking, but they do not negate its value. Novel approaches incorporating insights that consider human evolutionary history and integrate across Tinbergen’s levels of analysis can lead to the development of interventions that are more compatible with evolved physiology and psychology and environments that are more conducive to lifestyles that reduce the risks of chronic diseases.
Musculoskeletal System
Authors: Häusler Martin , Bender Nicole , Aldakak Lafi , Galassi Francesco M. , Eppenberger Patrick , Henneberg Maciej , Rühli Frank
Published: June 2019

This chapter on the musculoskeletal system aims to give an overview of the evolutionary implications for health and diseases of this body system. Using specific examples, the chapter shows how musculoskeletal diseases develop from an evolutionary point of view, with a specific emphasis on mismatches between the evolved human body and the modern environment, as well as on consequences of human bipedal gait. The chapter discusses the evolutionary aetiology of common musculoskeletal disorders as a consequence of mismatch to the modern world, such as carpal tunnel syndrome, flat feet, osteoporosis, and impacted third molars. As a consequence of the passage to bipedalism, the evolutionary background of low back pain, and knee and hip arthritis is examined. The chapter concludes with a discussion of implications for treatment and prevention of musculoskeletal diseases, focusing on the life course approach to health. In fact, every life stage shows specific needs and asks for specific interventions in order to optimally maintain musculoskeletal health up to old age.
Humane Markets
Authors: Otteson James R.
Published: June 2019

Markets are often criticized for being amoral, if not immoral. The core of the “political economy” that arose in the eighteenth century, however, envisioned the exchanges that take place in commercial society as neither amoral nor immoral but indeed deeply humane. The claim of the early political economists was that transactions in markets fulfilled two separate but related moral mandates: they lead to increasing prosperity, which addressed their primary “economic” concern of raising the estates of the poor; and they model proper relations among people, which addressed their primary “moral” concern of granting a respect to all, including the least among us. They attempted to capture a vision of human dignity within political-economic institutions that enabled people to improve their stations. Their arguments thus did not bracket out judgments of value: they integrated judgments of value into their foundations and built their political economy on that basis.
The Moral Status of Profit
Authors: Heath Joseph
Published: June 2019

There is a common fallacy, among critics of capitalism, that because firms are licensed to pursue profits, the purpose of the economic system as a whole must be to facilitate the realization of such profits. This is manifestly not the case, because the design of markets, including the insistence on competition between firms, is intended to bid profits down to zero. The lure of profit is what leads firms to compete with one another, which creates an institutionally enforced collective action problem that drives prices toward the level that allows for a more efficient allocation of labor, resources, goods, and services. The achievement of these “market clearing” prices is the actual purpose of the system. This explains why many people find the profit orientation of firms to be morally counterintuitive. Most of everyday morality is aimed at getting people to act more cooperatively, whereas profit-maximization is essentially a free-rider strategy.
Ethics and, in, and for Labor Markets
Authors: McPherson Michael S. , Satz Debra
Published: June 2019

The fact that labor markets have endogenous effects, that labor contracts are incomplete, and that workers and owners have some conflicting interests, distinguishes them from other types of markets such as markets in wheat or gadgets. In this chapter, we explore the consequences of the special nature of labor markets for three specific issues: unemployment, the rise of the gig economy, and the nature and organization of work in a just society. Each of these issues involves the complex interplay of economic considerations with ethics, which implicate considerations such as freedom and coercion, inequality and fairness, and efficiency and productivity.
Deontological Morality and Economic Analysis of Law
Authors: Zamir Eyal , Medina Barak
Published: June 2019

Welfare economics—the normative branch of economics—is a consequentialist moral theory. Unlike deontological morality, at least in its basic form it attributes no intrinsic value to prohibitions on active or intentional harming of other people, lying, or promise-breaking, and does not allow people to prioritize their own interests over the overall good. The chapter critically examines several methods of incorporating deontological constraints and options into economic analysis of law and into welfare economics more generally. These methods include an analysis of the long-term and indirect effects of apparently efficient infringements of deontological constraints; a move from act- to rule-consequentialism; incorporating deontological concerns into the definition of good outcomes that should be maximized; and the treatment of moral judgments as preferences whose fulfillment should be maximized along with any other. In addition to these indirect ways, the chapter also examines the integration of thresholds constraints and options into economic analysis of law.
The Normative Economics of Social Risk
Authors: Fleurbaey Marc
Published: June 2019

Social decisions in risky contexts raise a number of difficult questions. Should social decisions be more or less risk averse than the average person? Should we try to avoid large catastrophes more than frequent but limited harms with similar expected impact? Should social decisions be ambiguity-averse or stick to the expected-utility canon? This chapter reviews the normative economics of risk and uncertainty and examines possible answers to these questions, based on the pros and cons of utilitarianism, ex ante egalitarianism, and ex post egalitarianism. The divide between ex ante and ex post approaches reflects a deep trade-off between rationality (embodied in the key properties of the expected utility approach), respect for individual risk attitudes (embodied in the ex ante Pareto principle), and priority for the worse off (or aversion to inequality).
Economic Ethics and the Capability Approach
Authors: Binder Constanze , Robeyns Ingrid
Published: June 2019

This chapter introduces the capability approach and discusses its role in economic ethics. More specifically, we discuss the concept of well-being and freedom underlying the general capabilitarian framework and argue that a number of characterizing features of the capability approach, such as its focus on ends instead of means or the conception of freedom employed in it, makes it particularly well suited for the evaluation of institutions and economic systems in economic ethics. The article concludes by pointing to a number of limits and constraints of the capabilitarian framework in economic ethics.
On the Evolution of Ethics, Rationality, and Economic Behavior
Authors: Rose David C.
Published: June 2019

The neoclassical view of human behavior emphasizes the rational pursuit of self-interest, aptly described as Max-U by Deirdre McCloskey. Most economists today are not aware that leading thinkers in the classical period had a very different view of decision-making. In the classical view most behavior is driven by people doing what they think they are supposed to do under various circumstances. This chapter proposes a framework that captures the spirit of the classical approach to decision-making. This framework is then used to explore how behavior that is better described by Max-U likely evolved in response to the continuing development of the market economy and the evolution of prevailing moral beliefs. Employing ideas from cognitive science, this exercise sheds new light on several persistent puzzles in experimental economics, most notably several shortcomings of expected utility theory. It also explains how new habits of mind increased both creativity and individuality.
Incident-Based Methods for Studying Expertise
Authors: Militello Laura G. , Anders Shilo
Published: June 2019

Incident-based interview methods are powerful tools for studying expertise in context. They provide insight into expert cognition that cannot be obtained with other methods. They complement performance measures that show what an expert can do, by providing insight into what is going on in the interviewee’s head. These methods facilitate description of expertise in the context of work and aid in developing testable hypotheses. They can be used to uncover cognitive requirements to support acquisition of skill via decision support design and training. Findings can also be used to inform the design of tools to support expertise and descriptive models to inform basic research. This chapter discusses four types of incident-based interview methods, examines analysis strategies, and provides examples of products resulting from this type of research and their influence on applications. Practical issues associated with the use of incident-based interview methods are considered, and future directions are discussed.
Cognitive Flexibility Theory and the Accelerated Development of Adaptive Readiness and Adaptive Response to Novelty
Authors: Spiro Rand J. , Feltovich Paul J. , Gaunt Aric , Hu Ying , Klautke Hannah , Cheng Cui , Clemente Ian , Leahy Sean , Ward Paul
Published: June 2019

This chapter examines expertise in complex and ill-structured domains from the perspective of cognitive flexibility theory (CFT). The emphasis is on adaptation under conditions of “ordinary novelty.” An approach to situational novelty via meta-features of an adaptive mindset that generalizes across cases in ways that content does not, and that fosters the skill of novel rearrangement of previously encountered case features in ways that are adaptive to new situations, is presented. The chapter describes CFT’s theoretical and empirical approach to combating rigidity and oversimplification, and to accelerating expertise in assembling “schemas of the moment” with learning based on the principled development and application of computer-supported case-based environments. Receiving special emphasis are many new modes of deliberate practice of adaptive flexibility. The chapter concludes with societal implications for today’s rapidly changing and increasingly complex world.
National Education Systems
Authors: VanderVen Elizabeth
Published: June 2019

This chapter focuses on the rise of national education systems in Asia during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It draws on five countries by way of example: Japan, China, Iran, India, and Malaysia. The chapter examines, in turn, the particular circumstances in each country that propelled it toward the establishment of national education, as well as the myriad actors, on both the national and the local level, who had a hand in implementing educational reform. It emphasizes the universal concerns and challenges faced by each country, in particular how to incorporate foreign models of education with indigenous, including local religious, values and methods in its quest for modernization, self-determination, and the creation of a citizenry with a common ethos. Finally, the chapter points out that countries that were colonized had a somewhat different trajectory of educational reform than countries that were not.
Higher Education in Modern Europe
Authors: Carpentier Vincent
Published: June 2019

This chapter explores the history of higher education in Europe by considering three intersected dimensions: the global, national, and local spaces or geography of higher education; the contours of the higher education system regarding access, participation, and institutional differentiation; and the cultural, political, social, and economic rationales driving its expansion. Four historical periods are considered: the emergence of the medieval universities and their spread in the feudal order; the demands posed to universities by nation-states and the Enlightenment during the early modern period; the impact of the political and industrial revolutions; and the crisis of mass higher education since 1918. Overall, articulation among the rationales, shapes, and spaces of higher education has changed periodically across history.
Inequality in Education
Authors: Kafka Judith
Published: June 2019

This chapter reviews research on the history of inequality in education. Across the globe and since the advent of formal schooling, children from wealthier families have had access to more education, and more costly education, than their less affluent peers. More physically and intellectually advantaged children have also, on average, had greater educational opportunities than their less fortunate peers. Yet within this general historic truth lies considerable variation in terms of how, to what extent, and by what political justification educational inequalities have existed and persisted. Historians have sought to explain variations in inequality in education across time and place and to situate those inequalities within a larger sociohistoric context. One overarching finding from this large and varied body of research is that reform of school systems’ organization and practices is frequently a necessary but insufficient strategy in reducing inequalities in education.
Education and the African Diaspora
Authors: Span Christopher M. , Sanya Brenda N.
Published: June 2019

Countless historians have studied the African diaspora, but one topic that has been significantly understudied is education. This chapter documents how Africans in the diaspora came to learn, attend school, and advance their knowledge, both during enslavement and in the years thereafter, and how those educational experiences impacted Africans on and off the continent. It is a remarkable narrative. From the earliest schooling considerations in African kingdoms, to Haiti, the first black republic, and the Caribbean and the Americas, this chapter details how Africans used literacy and schools well into the twentieth century as a means to liberate themselves from enslavement and segregation by law and advance themselves as citizens in their new homelands and for uplift around the world.
Religion and the History of Education
Authors: Fraser James W. , Moore Diane L.
Published: June 2019

This chapter describes how the historic development of different nation-states around the world, as well as the diverse understandings of the term “religion” in different places at different times, shape the understanding of the proper role of religion in the public and government schools of different countries. From indigenous practices where oral traditions and ritual observances first transmitted cultural values, to formal schooling in religious and vocational education, and to the development of education for elites and the earliest universal education up to the present day, religion has been an influential force in formal and informal decisions about education. Examining the religious, educational, and political histories of select countries in Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, and North America, the chapter explores the complex interaction of history, religious influences, and assumptions about schooling, all of which lead to a great diversity of practices in the schools of the twenty-first century.
The History of Nonformal and Informal Education
Authors: Grunzke Andrew
Published: June 2019

Despite being older and more pervasive than formal education, the history of nonformal and informal education is less fully examined by historians of education. This chapter explores the unique opportunities and challenges experienced by historians studying nonformal and informal education. The spectrum of nonformal and informal education is incredibly diverse and includes the set of all social institutions that serve to shape an individual’s knowledge and values. It spans museums and libraries, popular media, and even casual relationships between young people and more experienced members of their communities. The study of the history of nonformal and informal education brings to the fore ontological questions about educational history, including what counts as an educational institution, the differences between education and entertainment, and whether the same research methods that apply to the study of formal educational institutions can be applied to the study of their less formal counterparts.
The History of Transnational and Comparative Education
Authors: Caruso Marcelo
Published: June 2019

This chapter offers an overview of transnational and comparative education as a specific research perspective in the field of the history of education. Since the late twentieth century, historical scholarship in general and the history of education grew skeptical about the analytical value of the nation as a focus for researching the educational past. The older historiographical tradition of comparative studies in the history of education, heavily relying on nations and national states, showed in this context its shortcomings. The immediate impact of this development was a new trend in historical research related to transnational history focusing on entanglements and border crossing. The analysis shows theoretical and methodological assumptions of both research directions, discusses their respective thematic emphasis, and proposes to change the collaborative culture of historians of education as a means of coping with the challenges of transnational and comparative histories of education.
National Education Systems
Authors: Morrison Heidi
Published: June 2019

The history of education in the Middle East is diverse in pedagogical and philosophical approaches, intellectual contributions, and institutions. The politics of power have played a key role in shaping education throughout the region. In the medieval period, wealthy individuals financially endowed schools based on their Islamic law affiliations. In the Ottoman era, the sultans centralized schools to disseminate a common identity across the empire. Colonial powers in the modern era used education to serve their own ends. The contemporary era has witnessed the development of state-sponsored schools to support nation-building. Since the 1970s, education has been at the heart of four critical social issues in the Middle East: neoliberalism, dictatorship, war, and patriarchy.
Education in Greek and Roman Antiquity
Authors: Joyal Mark
Published: June 2019

The conventional approach to the study of Greek and Roman education has emphasized the elements in it that are most familiar to people who approach the subject from the perspective of the Western tradition. These elements include formal curricula, literary canons, pedagogical methods, teaching and learning materials, and schools. An expansion in what is understood as “education,” together with the influence of social history and anthropology on traditional classical studies, has since the 1970s led to the intensive examination of other features of Greek and Roman childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood (for both males and females), such as rites of passage, initiation, and civic education. Taking recent research into account, this chapter considers the role that the familiar, traditional elements played in Greek and Roman education, but it also surveys other widespread practices that are of broad social and historical interest for modern research.
‘Worke it into one relish, and savour’: Jonson’s Discoveries
Authors: Blaine Marlin E.
Published: June 2019

This chapter analyses Ben Jonson’s Timber, or Discoveries, in terms of its genre as a prose miscellany and its concentration on interrelated Jonsonian themes of ethics, politics, and rhetorical style. In particular, it locates Discoveries within the classical and Renaissance miscellany traditions and argues that Jonson’s imitations, borrowings, and adaptations of others’ works in this piece are characteristic of his authorial practice in multiple ways. The purpose of Discoveries, it is argued, is to represent Jonson’s humanistic process of self-fashioning through creative assimilation of texts by other authoritative writers. A governing trope in this discussion is that of the ‘Senecan bee’ that goes from flower to flower, taking nectar from each and assimilating it all into something sweet, nourishing, and new. Jonson’s approving invocation of this metaphor makes it an apt emblem of his own approach to composition. The chapter also surveys critical opinion on the degree to which Discoveries is a finished work, and on Jonson’s intentions for it.
Clara Howard
Authors: Barnard Philip
Published: June 2019

This chapter on Charles Brockden Brown’s 1801 romance Clara Howard traces critical responses from the early nineteenth century to the present and argues that this long fiction marks a crucial transition in the author’s literary career. If Howard was long regarded as a minor or “failed” fiction, recent work suggests that its complex turns on epistolarity and sentimentality reflect on the generic formats he utilized earlier in the 1790s and articulate a critical response to the shifts in literary culture that occur in the 1800s, as the aestheticized culture of bourgeois liberalism supplants the late-eighteenth-century “republic of letters.” As the last composed of the long-form romances of Brown’s much-studied 1797–1801 period, this text stands not as a marker of decline but as a turn toward narrative experimentation, a certain “proto-modernism,” and an analytical perspective on the cultural forces and institutions of the new liberal dominant.
Letters
Authors: Hewitt Elizabeth
Published: June 2019

Epistolary writing finds expression everywhere in Charles Brockden Brown’s career. We see it in his praxis, as he writes epistolary novels, periodical essays, and letters. We also see Brown articulate a theoretical explanation for his devotion to the form in his actual correspondence and his fiction. A letter writer, unlike a narrator, self-consciously constructs identity as a textual performance. And letters, unlike prose narratives, draw conspicuous attention to communicative exchange and to the ways that communication links (and fails to link) individuals and groups across time and space. This chapter focuses on two longer sequences in Brown’s correspondence and the epistolary fragment the “Henrietta Letters” as source material for Brown’s epistolary praxis and theory.
Brown and the Woldwinites
Authors: Smith Stocker Abigail
Published: June 2019

The Woldwinites, the group of British writers centered around Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, were a key influence on Charles Brockden Brown’s writing. From them, he drew a coherent set of political and artistic ideas concerning fiction writing. This chapter outlines the major aspects of that influence. Brown read the Woldwinites in the context of the Friendly Club circle with his fellow club members Elihu Hubbard Smith and William Dunlap. By the mid-1790s, Brown had adopted Woldwinite fiction as a model for his own and espoused well-known Woldwinite tenets such as the duty to struggle for justice, deference to general utility, and reliance on patience and time to generate change. Brown adopted a more nuanced account of Godwin’s views of marriage after the appearance of the latter’s Memoirs of Wollstonecraft and articulated a systematic critique of the excessive sensibility often associated with Wollstonecraft in his novels and essays.
Brown, the Illuminati, and the Public Sphere
Authors: Galluzzo Anthony
Published: June 2019

This chapter explores Charles Brockden Brown’s fictionalized depictions of the anti-Jacobin conspiracy theories that drove the Illuminati scare that gripped the United States in the 1790s, as exemplified in Wieland, Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist, and Ormond. These visions of global conspiracy refer to John Robison’s 1799 Proofs of a Conspiracy against all the Religions and Governments of Europe and Abbé Barruel’s Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism, in which the authors reduce the French Revolution and the subsequent radical convulsions to the machinations of a German secret society known as the Bavarian Illuminati. Brown satirically appropriates these counterrevolutionary theories of a worldwide conspiracy. The chapter presents Brown’s imaginative juxtapositions of Jacobin and anti-Jacobin discourse in the three novels as an incipient attempt to map a conflict-ridden 1790s public sphere, while retaining a version of radical political and social commitment—in coded form—during a period of counterrevolutionary backlash.
Brown and Physiology
Authors: Rachman Stephen
Published: June 2019

This chapter discusses Charles Brockden Brown’s literary investment in physiology, medicine, and disease as a crucial knowledge base for his Gothic fictions. The instances of somnambulism, spontaneous combustion, ventriloqual psychosis, and yellow fever that populate Brown’s fictions are the signature pathological and quasi-pathological conditions that mark its inherently para-physiological literary terrain. Situated as cultural pathologies and quasi-clinical conditions, these diseases or diseaselike conditions function as triggers for his plots and as engines of sociocultural critique. This chapter traces Brown’s intellectual investments in medical knowledge as part of the shared border between the mental/moral and the bodily/natural and how these investments led him to situate his fiction in the interstices between the social, medical, and mental and the categories of knowledge that regulate understanding of these domains.
Brown and the Yellow Fever
Authors: Ellis Scott
Published: June 2019

This chapter explores the potential causes of and responses to the yellow fever outbreaks in Philadelphia and New York during the late eighteenth century. Disrupting routines, halting commerce, and endangering the health and welfare of residents of these areas, the outbreaks also play a central role in the writings of Charles Brockden Brown, who used them to frame some of his novels and tales and to position his characters in moments of crisis. Moreover, this chapter connects the dilemma in the “Man at Home” series to the founding father and debtor Robert Morris, and through this connection we see how Brown positions debt alongside yellow fever as social crises that his characters must navigate. By exploring how Brown used yellow fever in his writing and how scholars have interpreted this use, this chapter explains the multifaceted roles that the disease had on Brown and our understanding of his work.
Brown, the Visual Arts, and Architecture
Authors: Boyd Sarah
Published: June 2019

This chapter concerns Charles Brockden Brown’s engagement with the visual arts. It explores Brown’s early adaptations of contemporary aesthetic categories, tracing his transition between the neoclassical and early-Romantic movements in his journalistic essays as well as his four Gothic novels. These early aesthetic concerns are linked to discursive cultivations of the American landscape, variously connected to the period’s expanding interest in picturesque tourism and early American boosterism or to Brown’s interest in constructing the American landscape symbolically or allegorically by adapting the new vocabularies of the Gothic and picturesque to explore the tensions of settler-colonial spaces in the new nation. It also touches on Brown’s ongoing fascination with visionary architecture, providing an overview of his unpublished juvenile architectural drawings. Finally, it expands on Brown’s fascination with the social, symbolic, and economic functions of portraiture in his fiction, registering early American anxiety about identity.
Brown’s Literary Afterlife
Authors: Tawil Ezra
Published: June 2019

Charles Brockden Brown’s stature among elite writers in English during the Romantic era was significant from his death in 1810 until the late nineteenth century, though it was initially far more robust abroad than at home. In the United States during the first two decades after Brown’s death, his work tended to be treated with a certain critical condescension or outright neglect. Meanwhile, his major novels saw several reissues in England before 1820, during which time they drew the fascination and praise of now-canonical authors. In the end, with this mark made on transatlantic literary culture, an enriched understanding of Brown and his literary importance made the return trip, resulting in Brown’s elevated stature among later generations of American writers. This chapter moves back and forth across the Atlantic to reimagine the circulation of ideas, influences, and aesthetic norms that first framed Brown’s work for a transatlantic readership.
Brown’s Philadelphia Quaker Milieu
Authors: Battistini Robert
Published: June 2019

Charles Brockden Brown’s Philadelphia Quaker upbringing was one of many influences on his work. Over the course of the eighteenth century, Philadelphia Quakers went from a dominant to a persecuted minority. Quaker treatment of Native American and Scots-Irish neighbors was the source of internal and external strife, especially in the aftermath of the Paxton Boys uprising. Aspects of this history can be discerned in Brown’s writing on Quakers. Brown directly discussed Quakers in a number of periodical pieces after 1800, and he made imaginative explorations of religious and Quaker issues in his novels Arthur Mervyn, Wieland, and, in particular, Edgar Huntly. While the mature Brown retained an acute sense of Quaker history and practice, he denied Quakers any particular regard or advocacy.
Wieland; or, The Transformation of American Literary History
Authors: Faherty Duncan
Published: June 2019

By considering the centrality of Wieland in the development of American literary history, this chapter moves to reaffirm its importance for students of US literature. The chapter begins by surveying the major editions of Wieland, from the first modern edition in 1926 through the scholarly editions in the early twenty-first century. In so doing, the chapter charts how scholars have often recursively positioned Wieland as a bellwether text in the formation of narratives about the development of American literary history, a practice that is often predicated on positioning the text as either the first or the first noteworthy early American novel. In tracing the evolution of the critical reception of the text, the chapter moves to underscore how Wieland’s enduring contribution to our understanding of the development of American literature and culture remains Brown’s insistence on the fallibility of isolationist narratives to register accurate genealogies or histories.
Ormond; or, The Secret Witness
Authors: Miller Nicholas E.
Published: June 2019

This chapter traces the critical history of Charles Brockden Brown’s Ormond; or, The Secret Witness from its early reception as a formally flawed novel through more recent scholarship that reads the novel through the lenses of gender and sexuality, revolutionary politics, and the birth of Gothic fiction in America. However, by focusing on narratives of contagion and conspiracy in Ormond, this chapter also argues that scholars should embrace the novel’s transgressive form not as flawed but as a radical commentary on the possibility of political and biological indistinction. Set in a young nation besieged by pestilence and revolutionary ideals, Ormond invites readers to contemplate the impossibility of maintaining rigid physical (or ideational) boundaries in a transatlantic world bound together by bodies (and ideas) in perpetual contact.
Arthur Mervyn; or, Memoirs of the Year 1793
Authors: Drexler Michael J.
Published: June 2019

The novel Arthur Mervyn; or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 by Charles Brockden Brown challenges its readers with its multiple plot lines, a dizzying array of characters, and its formal complexity. It rewards them with the energetic effort of one writer to place in relation to one another the most pressing issues of his era, issues concerning race, gender, and political revolution. In the novel, Brown leverages one of the oldest forms of storytelling, the fairy tale, to describe a most modern predicament: how to adapt to a world that is constantly changing and within which once stable certainties are unraveling.
Medical Care of Voice Disorders
Authors: Sataloff Robert T. , Hawkshaw Mary J.
Published: June 2019

Voice disorders are common and may be particularly troublesome for singers, actors, and other serious vocalists. Since the 1980s, the standard of medical care for patients with voice disorders has improved dramatically. Techniques of history-taking and physical examination have become much more sophisticated over the last few decades. The consequences of systemic disorders upon voice function has been recognized, and interdisciplinary voice teams have evolved to provide comprehensive voice care. Medical interventions and surgical techniques have improved substantially, and new instruments have allowed more precise surgery. Understanding and treatment of vocal aging has improved markedly. This chapter provides an overview of state-of-the-art diagnosis and treatment.
This American Voice
Authors: McEnaney Tom
Published: June 2019

Over the past seventeen years This American Life has functioned, in part, as an investigation into, and representation and construction of an American voice. Alongside David Sedaris, Sarah Vowell, Mike Birbiglia, and the panoply of other odd timbres on the show, Glass’s delivery, pitch, and tone have irked and attracted listeners. Yet what began as a voice on the margins of public radio has become a kind of exemplum for what new radio journalism in the United States sounds like. How did this happen? What can this voice and the other voices on the show tell us about contemporary US audio and radio culture? Can we hear the typicality of that American voice as representative of broader cultural shifts across the arts? And how might author Daniel Alarcón’s Radio Ambulante, which he describes as “This American Life, but in Spanish, and transnational,” alter the status of these American voices, possibly hearing how voices travel across borders to knit together an auditory culture that expands the notion of the American voice?