bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Islamic Manuscripts of Late Medieval Rum, 1270s-1370s
Authors: Jackson Cailah
Published: May 2021

This book is the first in-depth survey of illuminated manuscripts from late medieval Anatolia (Rum) before the rise of the Ottoman Empire. Between the Mongol invasions in the mid-thirteenth century and the emergence of Ottoman domination in the late fourteenth century, the Lands of Rum were marked by instability and conflict. Despite this, a rich body of illuminated manuscripts from the period survives, explored here and fully illustrated in colour with many unpublished or hard-to-find images. Meticulously analysing fifteen beautifully decorated Arabic and Persian manuscripts, including Qur’ans, mirrors for princes, historical chronicles and Sufi works, such as the Masnavi of Jalal al-Din Rumi, the author traces the development of calligraphy and illumination in late medieval Rum. She shows that the central Anatolian city of Konya, in particular, was a dynamic centre of artistic activity and that local Turcoman princes, Seljuk bureaucrats and Mevlevi dervishes all played important roles in manuscript production and patronage. The volume also includes a detailed catalogue that is comprised of codicological data and numerous translations of new and unpublished primary sources, including manuscript colophons, dedications and endowment notes.
Saūtıū ibn Hḥ asan: A Mevlevi Patron of Erzincan
Authors: Jackson Cailah
Published: May 2021

The fourth and final chapter focuses on the patronage of one individual, who emerges from surviving material as the most prolific manuscript patron of late medieval Rum. The three manuscripts discussed in this chapter were commissioned by Sharaf al-Din Sati ibn Hasan, an amir, history writer and Mevlevi devotee. The key manuscripts are a copy of the Masnavi of Sultan Walad from 1366, a two-volume Divan-i Kabir from 1368 and a 1372 copy of the Masnavi, both by Jalal al-Din Rumi. Several manuscripts belonging to Sati’s son, Mustanjid, are also considered. Although a production centre is not named in the manuscripts, the patron and his family were based in Erzincan. This chapter outlines and contextualises the political and cultural activities of Sati and Mustanjid and considers where the manuscripts may have been produced. Moreover, the distinctiveness of the manuscripts’ illumination, and the patron’s connection to the Jalayirids, generates a discussion concerning the relationship between the arts of the books of Rum and the Mongol successor states.
Restitution and the Politics of Repair
Authors: Zolkos Magdalena
Published: May 2021

This book develops a political philosophic approach to restitution and repatriation of objects, by arguing that the development of restitutive norms in the West has been auxiliary to the emergence of modern state sovereignty. It draws on critiques of international law of cultural heritage return, and of its Western humanistic underpinnings, including the ontological binary distinction between things and persons. Rather than accept the restitutive goals of politics and law seeking to do justice for the past and to ‘undo’ the expropriations and dispossessions that have occurred, and are still occurring (be it in contexts of coloniality or war), this book looks at the limits and aporias of restitution in texts of philosophy, literature and social theory. As such, it identifies figures and objects situated beyond the possibility of restitution and repair. This includes analysis of the social fantasies and imaginaries that ‘prop’ our contemporary reparative politics—making the past ‘unhappen’, or cancelling out the occurrence of wrongs. What the analysed texts have in common is that they articulate restitution through the motifs of undoing and making-unhappen, as a reparative and curative procedure, and a prelapsarian return to a place, time or condition prior to the event of violence. Insofar as this reading uncovers the mythical-religious ‘substrate’ of the restitutive tradition, and illuminates the political and affective allures of prelapsarianism, this book also offers insights into Western secularism, not as disappearance of religious thought in the public domain, but as its ‘repression’ (in a psychoanalytic sense).
Introduction: Imagining Restitution
Authors: Zolkos Magdalena
Published: May 2021

Simon Curtis’ 2015 film Woman in Gold narrates the struggle of Maria Altmann, a Jewish war refugee from Austria (played by Helen Mirren), to reclaim her family’s property confiscated by the Nazis in a protracted court battle with the Austrian state (Republic of Austria...
In dominum pristinum statuere: Hugo Grotius’ Theory of Restitution and the Return of the Former Condition of Things
Authors: Zolkos Magdalena
Published: May 2021

This chapter focuses on the theory of restitution in Hugo Grotius’ writings on the conduct of war and on conditions of ante bellum in his 1604/1605 De Iure Praedae and in the 1625 De Iure Belli ac Pacis. It looks closely at three aspects of Grotius’s restitution theory: first, its association with corrective, compensatory and expletive justice response to wrongdoing; second, its understanding as an expression of a uniquely human desire for social community; and, third, its relation to the broader imaginary of the law of postliminium. This elucidates different, though overlapping, meanings of return at play in the modern restitutive discourse, including the return of expropriated objects to their previous owner; the subject’s return as home-coming and repatriation; and the subject’s return to a previously occupied position or condition.
Émile Durkheim’s Restitutive Humanitarianism: from Organic Solidarity to the ‘Solidarity of Things’
Authors: Zolkos Magdalena
Published: May 2021

This chapter analyses the legal-sociological trope of restitutive justice in Émile Durkheim’s 1893 The Division of Labor in Society, as well as in his later anthropological studies on punitive institutions and laws. It shows that Durkheim theorizes restitution in terms of the social effects of intensified division of labour in industrial societies, which is identifiable within the domain of law, and which consists of corrective and remedial response to wrongdoing that aims to do justice for, and to repair, the consequences of wrongdoing for the social fabric. This is expressed in the metaphor of a clock that is turned back, as if expressing the underlying desires of the restitutive law to ‘restore the past’ to ‘its normal state’. It is situated as a binary opposite to the categories of ‘repressive law’ or ‘punitive law’, which are said to characterize traditional societies, and which aim at making the wrongdoer suffer. In turn, in his later writings Durkheim makes a conceptual and philosophic link between restitution and humanitarianism. This shows that the corrective and remedial workings of modern law operates upon activation of humanitarian affects: what sets restitution in motion, is the extent to which such wrongs coincide with sites of suffering.
Politics, Shamelessness and the People of Ressentiment
Authors: Arditi Benjamin
Published: May 2021

Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan, former US Senator

Honestly, people are definitely dumber. They just keep passing stuffaround. Nobody fact-checks anything anymore—I mean, that’s how Trump got elected. He just said whatever he wanted, and people believed everything, and when the things he said turned out not to be true, people didn’t care because they’d already accepted it. It’s real scary. I’ve never seen anything like it....
Public Space, Public Time: Constitution and the Relay of Authority in Arendt’s On Revolution
Authors: Zakin Emily
Published: May 2021

In On Revolution, Hannah Arendt addresses the central conundrum of legitimacy: the source of authority to found a new political form. On Arendt’s account, for revolutionary founding to evade the twin dangers of an infinite regress or a vicious circle, and to succeed in the constitution of a political body, it must enact and invoke both a worldly and a temporal component. To understand the bond between authority, constitution, and constituent power, Arendt thus analyzes the exchange between political space and political time. For the inauguration of a stable and secure public space, the events of founding must permit the independence of what it founds, unbinding the founding deed from the worldly object. For the inauguration of enduring public time, the constitutional document must contain a principle of self-preservation or endurance, allowing the present to appeal to both the past (ancestors) and the future (descendants). By thus distinguishing the authority of a constituted document, which maintains jurisdiction through time, both from the public theater within which the people’s plurality, creativity, and power can flourish, and from inaugural violence, the authoritative relay between space and time also sustains a politics of inheritance that moves between binding and unbinding.
The People: Ethnoracial Configurations, Old and New
Authors: Brännström Leila
Published: May 2021

In recent years the Sweden Democrats have championed a clarification of the identity of the ‘the people’ in the Instrument of government. The reference, they argue, should be to the ethnic group of Swedes. This chapter will take this ambition to fix the subject of popular sovereignty as the point of departure for discussing some of the ways in which the contemporary anti-foreigner political forces of Northern and Western Europe imagine ‘the people’ and identify their allies and enemies within and beyond state borders. To set the stage for this exploration the chapter will start by looking at Carl Schmitt’s ideas about political friendship, and more specifically the way he imagines the relationship between ‘us’ in a political and constitutional sense and ‘the people’ in national and ethnoracial terms. The choice to begin with Schmitt is not arbitrary. His thoughts about the nature of the political association have found their way into the discourse of many radical right-wing parties of Western and Northern Europe.
Hannah Arendt and the Glimmering Paradox of Constituent Power
Authors: Lukkari Hanna
Published: May 2021

This chapter presents a reading of Hannah Arendt’s constitutional thinking from the perspective of the paradox of constituent power. The paradox at issue here is that, on the one hand, in order to exercise its constituent power, ‘the people’ needs some kind of representation, but on the other hand, all forms of representation are determinations of collective existence and held, in a constitutional democracy, to derive their power from ‘the people’. At stake in constitutional democracy is the contingency of representations of ‘the people’ and the possibility of their modification in response to claims that exclusion from or inclusion within ‘the people’ is violent and alienating. This chapter argues that the paradox ‘glimmers’ in Arendt’s work: it almost crystallizes into an account of the tensions present in ‘the act of founding’, but the ambiguities are again obscured by her republican ideal of constitutio libertatis. The chapter also traces an implication of this ‘glimmering’ in Arendt’s work that is problematic from the perspective of political pluralism: her ‘civilisationalism’.
Constituent Power and Constitutive Exceptions: Carl Schmitt, Populism and the Consummation of Secularisation
Authors: Wittrock Jon
Published: May 2021

This chapter considers the role of the people in Carl Schmitt’s theorizing on democracy, and invokes the concept of constitutive boundaries as a way of understanding how communities are reproduced by way of territorial borders as well as criteria for membership and cultural markers, e.g. symbols, rituals, and holidays. The chapter suggests that the latter constitute instances of a larger logical space of constitutive exceptions, that, Schmitt implies, reproduce existing orders, but also threaten to replace them with new ones; thus, such exceptions may be surrounded by protective boundaries of the sacred, concretely as well as abstractly. Ultimately, we may visualize an entire topology of the exceptional, which is subject to fierce contestation, since it points to the possibility of new orders beyond existing ones, which may be interpreted in terms of different trajectories of highly ambiguous processes of secularization.
Indigenous Elsewhere: Lord Selkirk and Native Memory and Resettlement
Authors: McNeil Kenneth
Published: May 2021

The third chapter explores reconceptualisations of the ‘aborigine’ in the writing of a pivotal figure in British immigration and settlement history, Thomas Douglas, Earl of Selkirk. Selkirk’s proposals to solve the problem of dispossession in the Highlands through planned Highland settlements in the New World brought about a radical transformation in British attitudes to Highland emigration and, in the process, helped reshape a national and imperial geography, in large part through a reimagining of ‘native’ folk memory. This chapter examines Selkirk’s published and unpublished writing, in which he lays claim to the value of an ‘aboriginal’ people, arguing for the preservation of a Highland way of life in ethnically pristine ‘National Settlements’ that would serve as a bulwark for British interest in the New World. Selkirk’s schemes for wholesale transatlantic resettlement of dispossessed Highlanders reset the terms for the Clearance debate in Scotland; at the same time, these ideas – and those on the future of indigenous people in North America – also helped to set the parameters of state policy on native removals and resettlement in the Atlantic world in the nineteenth century.
‘We’ in Scotland or ‘She’ in Scotland? Scottish Conservative Manifesto Discourse during the Davidson Era
Authors: Leith Murray Stewart
Published: May 2021

This chapter, by Murray Stewart Leith, considers the rhetoric of the Scottish Conservative Party through the lens of party manifestos issued for Scottish, UK and European elections between 2010 and 2017. It begins with a short consideration of why Scottish Conservatism slipped from its historical high point after the Second World War, then goes on to illustrate the importance of both ideology and identity on party fortunes. The chapter then considers the importance of leadership before considering both rhetorical changes and continuities within the party. It argues that while the Scottish Conservatives clearly differentiated their Scottish discourse, they also remained wedded to wider UK Conservative Party rhetoric.
‘A lesbian with family values’: Gender and Sexuality in Ruth Davidson’s Leadership of the Contemporary Scottish Conservative Party
Authors: Thomson Jennifer
Published: May 2021

This chapter focuses on Ruth Davidson’s position as a gay female political leader, looking at how gender and sexuality have figured in her media coverage, self-presentation and her own political positions from her election as leader of the Scottish Conservative Party in 2011 to her resignation in 2019. It moves chronologically from her election as leader to 2019, focusing on key moments – primarily the passage of same-sex marriage in Scotland; the Conservative-DUP confidence-and-supply arrangement following the 2017 general election; and the publication of Davidson’s 2018 book, Yes She Can. The chapter argues that Davidson can be seen as part of a broader trajectory within contemporary British conservatism concerning attitudes towards women in the party and politics on sexuality.
Scottish Conservatism and Northern Ireland: Mapping an Ambivalent Relationship
Authors: Evershed Jonathan
Published: May 2021

This chapter explores shifting and often contradictory dynamics which have manifested themselves in the relationship between Scottish Conservatism and Ulster Unionism. It provides a brief historical overview of this relationship which, it argues, has been highly salient in the consolidation of Conservatism as a political force in Scotland during the twentieth century, but which has become more ambiguous as understandings of ‘Union’, processes of secularisation, patterns of integration and differentiation, as well as the nature of centre-periphery relations in Northern Ireland and Scotland have increasingly diverged. The chapter also looks at how this relationship has continued to be reshaped into the twenty-first century by a potent mix of political forces which has included the Irish peace process, the Scottish independence referendum and Brexit.
Labour Leaders and Socialist Saviours: Individualism and Collectivism in Margaret Harkness’s George Eastmont, Wanderer
Authors: Robertson Lisa C.
Published: May 2021

This chapter examines Margaret Harkness’s novel George Eastmont, Wanderer (1905). It focuses on the tensions between individualism and collectivism in the novel’s representation of the late nineteenth-century socialist and trades union movements. It demonstrates how such tensions are evident in the novel’s representation of the City of London Corporation Buildings, and explores how the novel’s radical departure from generic conventions offers a suggestion of ways to address such tensions.
‘Twenty girls in my attic’: Spatial and Spiritual Conversion in L. T. Meade’s A Princess of the Gutter
Authors: Robertson Lisa C.
Published: May 2021

This chapter examines L.T. Meade’s A Princess of the Gutter (1895). This novel integrates generic conventions of romance and realism in order to engage in contemporary debates about the settlement movement for its juvenile audience. In its representation of the protagonist’s experience living and working in various forms of settlement housing in London’s East End, the novel explores the degree to which a commitment to religious philosophy was necessary to effect meaningful social change.
Epilogue
Authors: Robertson Lisa C.
Published: May 2021

This short section establishes the consonances between the representation of London’s nineteenth-century housing crisis, and its modern-day housing crisis. It emphasises the shared use of language in journalistic representations of urban poverty, but also attends to key differences: while the modern-day housing crisis is preoccupied with the number of homes available and their value as a market commodity, the nineteenth-century housing crisis focused on what new forms of housing could address urgent social need.
The Poetics of Friendship in Early Modern Spain
Authors: Gilbert-Santamaria Donald
Published: May 2021

This book posits the Aristotelian-Ciceronian notion of perfect male friendship as an independent poetic force within the development of Spanish literature in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Through a re-examination of Spanish critic Juan Bautista Avalle-Arce’s notion of the “tale of two friends” tradition, the book shows how the poetics of friendship evolves in relation to other key concepts from the period—most notably exemplarity and imitatio—in a series of carefully selected examples from several important genres including the pastoral novel, the picaresque, and the Spanish comedia. Particular attention is given to the trajectory whereby the highly formalized narrativization of the traditional Aristotelian paradigm for friendship gives way to representations of personal intimacy grounded in a recognition of the idiosyncratic particularity of human experience in the world beyond the text. This alternative modality for representing friendship, which encompasses a variety of relationships beyond the Aristotelian paradigm—between women, erstwhile lovers, and pícaros, to take just three examples—reaches its fullest expression in the depiction of the evolving intimacy that grows up between the two unlikely companions, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, whose shared experiences provide the main focus for Cervantes’s most important work.
Staging Intimacy in Guillén de Castro
Authors: Gilbert-Santamaría Donald
Published: May 2021

Guillén de Castro’s dramatic rewriting of “El curioso impertinente” provides a unique window onto the formal differences between prose narrative and theatrical approaches to the representation of perfect friendship. Key to the analysis of this chapter is the inherent hybridity of the Spanish early modern comedia, the tendency within one and the same work to engage in hyperbolic displays of emotional excess alongside more muted representations of feeling that feed an emerging interest in verisimilitude, especially as the basis for a new kind of audience identification within the theater. In practice, Castro´s play dramatizes the stark contrast between the exaggerated discourse of perfect friendship and other modes of personal intimacy not so much as a mode of critique of the Aristotelian ideal, but rather as two strategies that function simultaneously within the same work of dramatic literature.
Music, Mousike, Muses (and Sirens)
Authors: Hickmott Sarah
Published: May 2021

The first chapter opens with a famous excerpt from Sartre’s La Nausée where the musical ‘object’ is positioned as resolutely independent of the material props upon which the reproduction of its sounding depends (the gramophone/record), whilst also mapping specific identities (the Jew and the Negress) and their attendant sufferings onto nothing more than its sounding. Thus Sartre, via Roquentin, highlights the way music seems to be both material and immaterial, mediated and autonomous, real and ideal, and deeply and viscerally human but also beguilingly transcendental. It develops this issues that arise from this well-known passage to sketch out some of the key issues in any thinking about music, introducing crucial tropes and associations as well as drawing on the musicological literature that has sought to deconstruct in critical and political ways what it is we mean (or often do not mean) when we think or speak about ‘music.’ Key considerations include music’s essence, definition and location, as well as its emotional and psychological impact (its effect and affective capacity more broadly), its similarities and differences with language, and the roles of composers, performers, listeners and, of course, technology, alongside music’s relationship to identity, society, culture and politics.
Midwives and Madams: Mus(e)ic, Mediation and Badiou’s ‘Universal’ Subject
Authors: Hickmott Sarah
Published: May 2021

The focus of this chapter is largely on Badiou’s delimitation of what counts as music: he insists on an a priori commitment to an understanding of music that locates its essence (or more accurately for Badiou, its ‘truth’) not in its sounding, the experience of listening or playing, or in its effects, but only in its formal procedures – a move that derives from a specific historical construction of music which makes the actual happening of music (whether live, recorded, imagined, etc.) irrelevant to philosophy. As a result, Badiou’s playlist of musical ‘truths’ runs from the architectonic innovations of Haydn and sonata form at the end of the c18th through to the post-tonal continuation of Schoenberg’s legacy: truth, musically speaking, exists in Europe between about 1780 and 1950. Consequently, this chapter argues that it is more specific than simply validating the musical products of elite Western culture; it is specifically limited to those produced under the ideology of ‘absolute music’. Finally, though Badiou never identifies music with any feminine essence, the chapter traces the subterranean misogyny embedded in his philosophy of ‘truth’, and argues that his musical – and broader – thinking remains problematic from a feminist perspective.
The Volunteers
Authors: Raeburn Fraser
Published: May 2021

Of the many ways that Scots responded to the war in Spain, those who joined the International Brigades have always been at the centre of historical and popular memory. This chapter seeks to establish exactly who these volunteers were and what connections they shared before coming to Spain, offering detailed new evidence and analysis regarding their collective identities. Instead of viewing them as a relatively small, disparate collection of individuals, it is shown that the Scottish volunteers were heavily clustered along the lines of geography, class and political affiliations. Rather than understanding these volunteers as the representatives of Scotland, or even the Scottish left, it is argued that they are best understood as a more concentrated mobilisation of quite narrow socio-political sphere, defined by formal and informal links to the Communist Party of Great Britain.
‘He wants to know if it hurts!’: Suffering beyond Redemption in Waiting for Godot
Authors: Simpson Hannah
Published: May 2021

Although the characters in Waiting for Godot exist in near-constant states of physical pain, Beckett’s play repeatedly emphasises obstacles to any shared or empathetic experience of suffering, both onstage and across the auditorium space. Waiting for Godot does not offer any clear model of compassion as a means of relieving another being’s distress. Rather, by delineating its characters’ indifference to each other’s pain, and by foregrounding the spectator’s own impassivity and even recoil in the face of suffering, the play highlights just how narrow these bounds of human compassion seem to be. This chapter draws on contemporary pain studies to read the unsettling charge of Waiting for Godot’s interrogation of pain’s incomprehensibility, resisting previous determinedly optimistic, humanist-inflected reading of suffering as redemptive in Beckett’s play.
The Problem of Indifferents
Authors: Čelkytė Aistė
Published: May 2021

This chapter is focused the Stoic value theory. The Stoics notoriously claim that only virtue is good, while the only vice is bad and everything else, including health, wealth, beauty and life itself, are mere indifferents. The inclusion of beauty in this list seems to show that the Stoics were not interested in theorising beauty. A thorough reading of the material shows that beauty is not treated as if it was of no interest in general; the evidence only shows that it is an inferior value to virtue. This interpretation is supported by other evidence, including the texts of later Roman Stoics, such as Epictetus. Most importantly, this interpretation shows that the Stoic value theory and aesthetics are not mutually exclusive areas of study.
‘The wise man is no true Scotsman’: The Stoics on Human Beauty
Authors: Čelkytė Aistė
Published: May 2021

This chapter is dedicated to the so-called Stoic paradox stating that only the wise man is beautiful, while young, conventionally attractive youths, are not. Plutarch’s testimonial and critique of these views imply that they commit what in contemporary terms is sometimes called the ‘No True Scotsman’ fallacy, that is, an arbitrary redefinition of aesthetic terms. The chapter builds an argument that this criticism is not entirely fair by presenting a more charitable interpretation of these claims. The interpretation involves the notion of aesthetic functionality, that is, the idea that an object’s aesthetic value is determined in reference to the kind of an object it is. This reading of the Stoic wise man paradox is consistent with the central Stoic tenets about virtue and happiness.
“Thinking White”: Performing Racial Tension in Blue Collar
Authors: Balcerzak Scott
Published: May 2021

By most accounts, as Paul Schrader’s first film as director, Blue Collar was a tension-filled production with the three leading actors coming to blows on multiple occasions. This chapter, will explore the performance styles of Harvey Keitel, Yaphet Kotto, and Richard Pryor with particular focus paid to the latter’s identity as a stand-up comic and movie star during the mid- to late- 1970s. Through casting Pryor, Schrader does not fundamentally alter this comic persona but rather captures a dramatic variation of it, employing it as a defying signifier against the midcentury “realist” acting styles of Keitel and Kotto, who both trained on the New York stage. Through a fostering and challenging of Pryor’s persona and style, Schrader produces a tension between his performers that feels acutely aware of the comedian’s “territorialized” black identity as well as his ability to challenge racial boundaries through his humor. The contrasting styles of Keitel, Kotto, and Pryor provide a dramatic tension attuned to the complicated racial conflicts found in the more integrated work spaces of the 1970s.
Schrader’s Women: Cat People and Patty Hearst
Authors: Brems Brian
Published: May 2021

Paul Schrader’s connection with director Robert Bresson is often explored through his male characters, the ‘man in his room’ of Light Sleeper and American Gigolo, but Taxi Driver before them and First Reformed most recently. However, Schrader’s two primary experiments with female characters, Cat People (1982) and Patty Hearst (1988), also follow a similar Bressonian trajectory and end with each female character incarcerated, yet finding a kind of spiritual freedom that helps them realize their identities. This chapter explores Schrader’s women primarily through close examination of Cat People’s Irina (Nastassja Kinski) and Natasha Richardson’s eponymous heroine in Patty Hearst, but use his representation of women in the male-driven films for points of comparison and contrast. In addition, this chapter approaches Schrader’s women as reflections of his male characters, many of whom are driven by existential anxiety that motivates them to seek self-actualization in redemptive violence.
Leaning on the Everlasting Arms: Love and Silence in First Reformed
Authors: Ribera Robert
Published: May 2021

This chapter reads First Reformed as an embodiment and fulfillment of Paul Schrader’s career, a capstone that serves as a meditation on our responsibilities toward each other, our earth, and god. The transcendental style, the quest for redemption, a sense of restraint punctuated by violent action--these qualities have dominated Schrader’s career since the publication of Transcendental Style
in Film until 2017, when he updated that text while writing and directing a film about a struggling pastor in a small church in upstate New York. First Reformed also contains nods to his filmic influences, including Robert Bresson, Ingmar Bergman, and his own work on Taxi Driver. This chapter surveys these many influences and self-references to read Schrader’s most recent film as a culmination of his life in film.
Introduction
Authors: McLeod Wilson
Published: May 2021

WRITING IN 1958, THE distinguished linguist Kenneth Jackson, Professor of Celtic at the University of Edinburgh, expressed his ‘belie[f] that Scottish Gaelic will be quite extinct by the middle of the next century, unless some new factor is introduced which radically alters the present situation’ (...
Metalepsis in Film and Its Implications
Authors: Lash Dominic
Published: May 2021

This chapter concentrates on the rhetorical figure of metalepsis as an important example of the ways that the two senses of confusion distinguished in the prospectus can intersect in narrative films. In film, metalepsis refers to situations in which ontological layers that "should not" be able to intersect nevertheless do so, such as when Buster Keaton enters the cinema screen in Sherlock Jr. (1924). The theory of metalepsis, and what it helps reveal about the ontology of fiction, are explored largely by means of French theory and philosophy (Genette; Souriau). Finally, it is argued that metalepsis can serve as an important reminder that questions about a film's rhetoric – the way it addresses the viewer – can not always be neatly separated from its diegesis. Diegetic status (e.g. whether an event is "real" within the fictional world, or instead a dream, fantasy, or memory) is not a "fact" but a product of a film's rhetoric.
Shakespeare's Essays
Authors: Platt Peter G.
Published: May 2021

This revisionist study argues that the Essais of Montaigne—made available to Shakespeare and the English-reading world via John Florio’s translated Essayes in 1603—were a crucial factor in the composition of later Shakespearean drama. While the change in monarchy, the revived interest in judicial rhetoric, and the alterations in Shakespeare’s acting company undoubtedly helped shape plays such as Measure for Measure, King Lear, and The Tempest, this book contends that Shakespeare’s reading of Montaigne is an under-recognized driving force. Both authors quest for approaches to self, knowledge, and form that stress fractures, interruptions, and alternatives. Indeed, Montaigne himself claimed, in his “Of the Force of the Imagination,” that “Some writers there are, whose ende is but to relate the events. Mine, if I could attaine to it, should be to declare, what may come to passe….” In testing—essaying—Montaigne’s writing, Shakespeare, like his French forebear, focuses on possibility, multiple selves, and brave new worlds—what has not been but might yet be.
‘Were my mind settled, I would not essay but resolve myself’
Authors: Platt Peter G.
Published: May 2021

The chapter examines the critical history of the Shakespeare-Montaigne connection from its first appearance in the eighteenth century to current discussions today and provides an outline of the book’s argument and structure.
Knowing and Being in Montaigne and Shakespeare
Authors: Platt Peter G.
Published: May 2021

The chapter explores the two authors’ relationship to skepticism and knowing on the one hand and to selfhood and being on the other. It draws on key-texts of classical skepticism and on examples from both Montaigne and Shakespeare to examine their shared interests in the fragility of knowledge and the instability of selfhood. It also suggests how these topics relate to current discussions in current literary-critical discourse on knowing (epistemology) and being (ontology).
‘A little thing doth divert and turn us’: Fictions, Mourning, and Playing in ‘Of Diverting or Diversion’ and Hamlet
Authors: Platt Peter G.
Published: May 2021

The chapter first explores the multiple versions of Shakespeare’s play and of the Montaignian nature of the versions of Hamlet after Montaigne can be seen to have a shaping effect. It then argues that Montaigne’s ambivalence towards diversions—at times he sees them as essential, even beautiful, and at other times highly misleading, illusory, and escapist—aligns nicely with similar ambivalences in Hamlet’s thinking, especially in his meditations on mourning and theatricality in the first two acts.
George Strachan of the Mearns
Authors: McInally Tom
Published: May 2021

This book examines the life of George Strachan (1572-1635), early 17th century Scottish humanist scholar, Orientalist and traveller. Drawing on a wealth of newly discovered archival material to offer new insights into Strachan’s life and work, it also utilises recent scholarship on the relationship between the cultures and religions of East and West.
Tom McInally explains the voyages that the Catholic exile took to many of the Catholic courts of Europe as a scholar and spy before turning eastwards to embark on a 22-year journey around the Ottoman, Safavid and Mughal empires. By becoming fully literate in Arabic and Farsi, Strachan was able to gain a unique knowledge of Eastern societies. His collection of Arabic and Farsi texts on Islam, philosophy and humanities – which he translated and sent to Europe for the advancement of European knowledge of Islam and Islamic societies – became Strachan’s real intellectual legacy.
Heritage
Authors: McInally Tom
Published: May 2021

This chapter outlines the Strachan of Thornton family’s networks with ties of loyalty and religion to Mary Queen of Scots. George’s early education at home and subsequent training at Jesuit colleges in France is explained along with the difficulties that following a Catholic education abroad caused his family.The Strachan family’s involvement in the affair of the ‘Spanish Blanks’ and the threat of financial ruin which this caused, forced them to convert to Calvinism. This incident is used to exemplify the political dangers faced by noble families in late 16th-century Scotland. George Strachan’s options of jeopardising the family fortunes or adhering to Catholicism shows the problems of the divided loyalties in Scottish society of the time.
Exile
Authors: McInally Tom
Published: May 2021

Using the numerous entries in his album amicorum, this chapter describes Strachan’s peregrinations around the universities and courts of Europe in search of a patron. His meeting with Bishop William Chisholm of Vaison succeeded in his gaining employment as an intelligencer and courier between the bishop, James VI and the Jesuit missionaries who were resident in Scotland. In turn these contacts led Claudio Aquaviva, general of the Society of Jesus, to use Strachan for a similar purpose in 1602. On contacting his family, he was arrested by the Kirk authorities and arraigned before the Privy Council on charges of espionage and treason.
The account of his trial gives insight into the tensions within the Calvinist Church as well as its attitude to Catholics. Strachan was cleared of the capital charges but permanently exiled by the king for his refusal to renounce Catholicism.
The Ḥusaynābādī Scholiasts
Authors: McInally Tom
Published: May 2021

The excellence of the teaching that Strachan received while with Feyyād was due to the presence of distinguished exiled Iranian Sunni scholars to whom the emir had given refuge. This chapter outlines the Islamic heritage of Iran and the political and Sunni/Shia sectarian tensions that had led to the scholars’ exile by Shah Abbas. Their renown within the Sunni Islamic world is noted. The chapter also explains how, while gaining intimate knowledge of Islamic doctrine and tradition, Strachan’s discussions with these scholars led them to believe that he fully accepted their arguments and assured Emir Feyyād of his conversion. Strachan had not converted and, despite his comfortable life-style, he saw no option but to flee the emir’s camp and seek refuge in Baghdad.
‘Stracan our Infernall Phesition’
Authors: McInally Tom
Published: May 2021

Strachan spent two years as a servant of the East India Company during which the merchants were bitterly divided due to their lack of success in silk trading. This period saw the first of his recurring attacks of malaria. By contrasting accounts in the company archives with Della Valle’s journal, the chapter describes how unfounded accusations of murder against Strachan brought about his dismissal for incompetence as a doctor.
Strachan spent months teaching the Carmelite friars Arabic and saving for onward travel to India but was secretly reemployed by the governor of the EIC in Iran, Edward Monnox, to act as interpreter and company representative during the negotiations with Shah Abbas for EIC naval involvement in the Iranian army’s capture of Hormuz in 1622. In this way he became intimate with the Shah’s court.
Hoary Monuments, Residual Bodies: Senescence in the City
Authors: Aghacy Samira
Published: May 2021

The second chapter centers on novels by Naguib Mafouz, Alaa al-Aswany and Khalid Khalifa. The focus is on Cairo and Aleppo whose features are disappearing as a result of modernization, an anarchic urbanization, and demographic, political and social changes.In a new world, an elderly appearance in the street becomes synonymous with mockery, invisibility and erasure. The city is invaded by the new, and the old terrain of youth is gradually disappearing with the timeworn edifices peering through the cracks of modernity. The mutations taking place in the urban abode are synchronized with the alterations taking place within the physique of ageing individuals. The past remains predominant and is poignantly juxtaposed with the present, and the result is alienation and escape through memory.
Yarns of Later Life: Transgressive Strategies
Authors: Aghacy Samira
Published: May 2021

This chapter presents works by Nazek Yared, Randa Khalidy and Abbas Baydun that, rather than focusing exclusively on public achievement, they present semi-autobiographical accounts. They are related by older individuals who focus on their personal idiosyncratic experiences of senescence, and aspects of their lives that have hitherto been overlooked. Their aim is to challenge erasure, re-evaluate their lives, make new decisions, concentrate on their daily quotidian lives and reveal their capacity for growth, even at a late age. Despite the inevitable movement towards a future in close proximity with death, the works are concerned with a revaluation of the past in its interaction with the present.
Soviet Defectors
Authors: Riehle Kevin
Published: May 2021

This book identifies 88 Soviet intelligence officers who defected from 1924 to 1954 and provides an aggregate analysis of their information to uncover Soviet strategic priorities and concerns. When intelligence officers defect, they take with them privileged information and often communicate it to the receiving state, and thereby they open a window into a closed national security decision making system. The book provides the most comprehensive list of Soviet intelligence officer defectors compiled to date representing a variety of specializations. Through the information they provided in now-declassified debriefings, documents they brought with them, and post-defection publications and public appearances, this book shows the evolution of Soviet threat perceptions and the development of the "main enemy" concept in the Soviet national security system. It also shows fluctuations in the Soviet recruitment and vetting of personnel for sensitive national security positions, corresponding with fluctuations in the stability of the Soviet government. The shifting motivations of these officers also reveals the pressures that they were experiencing at the time, leading to their choice to break with the Soviet Union.
Biopolitics, Materiality and Meaning in Modern European Drama
Authors: Fraunhofer Hedwig
Published: May 2021

Mapping the -- not always chronological -- trajectory from representationalist-naturalist theatre (Strindberg, Sartre) to the theatre of the historical avant-garde (Brecht, Artaud), this book puts milestones of modernist theatre in conversation with new materialist, posthumanist philosophy and affect theory. Arguing that existing modernization theories have been unnecessarily one-sided, Biopolitics, Materiality and Meaning in Modern European Drama offers a rewriting of modernity that cuts across binary methodologies – nature and culture, mind and matter, epistemology and ontology, critique and affirmative writing, dramatic and postdramatic theatre. Going beyond the exclusive focus on questions of identity, representation and meaning on the one hand or materiality on the other hand, the book captures the complex material-discursive forces that have shaped modernity and modern theatre. In powerfully prescient readings of modern anxiety, contagion and performance, the volume specifically reworks the biopolitical, immunitarian exclusions that mark Western epistemology leading up to and beyond modernity’s totalitarian crisis point.
The book reveals the performativity of theatre in its double sense -- as theatrical production and as the intra-activity of an open and dynamic system of relations between multiple human and more-than-human actants, energies, and affects. In modern theatre, public and private, human and more-than-human, materiality and meaning co-productively collapse in a common life.
Conclusion
Authors: Fraunhofer Hedwig
Published: May 2021

Inspired by the work of Niels Bohr, the quantum physicist and philosopher Karen Barad refers to apparatuses as “device[s] for making and remaking boundaries”. Although theatrical performances are not necessarily the same as the performative enactments Barad describes, theatre as an apparatus is in a prime position for such boundary work. This book has specifically followed how the modern stage has generated and challenged the immunitary, biopolitical boundaries of nineteenth and twentieth century European society. Given that Bruno Latour as well has advised us to think of objects not in terms of substances but rather as performances, theatre is in a more than advantageous position to benefit from the insights of the recent material turn in philosophy and culture– and the material turn from theatre.
The Framework of Islamic Rhetoric: The Ritual of the KhuṬba and its Origin
Authors: Retsö Jan
Published: May 2021

The Friday sermon in the mosque (which is not explicitly referred to in the Qur’an) has a structure that has been practiced at least since the beginning of the 8th century. Several scholars have pointed out that its structure with a two-part sermon as the basic element can be derived from the Jewish (or Judaeo-Christian) sabbath service with its supplications, Torah-reading and subsequent supplications. Sources indicate, however, that the Islamic ceremony may have been quite different in the first Islamic century. The word minbar originally designated the throne of a ruler and has many parallels in the ancient Middle East and Ethiopia from where the word actually comes. It can be argued that the Friday sermon in the beginning was a proclamation of the ruler seated on a throne, a custom which was discarded by circles opposed to the Umayyads.
How Poetry Matters
Authors: Kosick Rebecca
Published: May 2021

This chapter opens a discussion of how language’s vitality registers in and as material. It assesses the reception of material poetics in late twentieth century North America and compares the examples featured in this book with other investments in poetic materiality. The chapter offers a discussion of the term ‘concrete poetry’ which has lost some of the contextual specificity that historically adhered to it. This history is proved as a way of situating Brazilian concretism and as a way of distinguishing the term’s use from other names for sympathetic forms such as ‘visual poetry’. This chapter makes the case for the term ‘material poetics’ and demonstrates how many of the hybrid linguistic-material practices in the Americas built on early theorisations of language’s matter, which were undertaken with notable depth by the so-called ‘noigandres’ group of Brazilian concrete poets. Literary studies’ adoption of theories of objects and matter are explored along with debates within literary studies that investigate how we read. The introduction takes this book’s featured artists and poets to be its primary theorists and works to test and reframe contemporary thinking on objects by positing the matter of language as its object of study.
MODERN ASPECTS OF DIFFERENTIAL DIAGNOSIS OF ACANTOLYTIC PEMPHIGUS
Authors:   SE «Institute of Dermatology and Venerеology of NAMS of Ukraine», Abdalla A.E.-S.E.-S.
Published: May 2021

The article presents clinical, cytological, laboratory, histological and immunohistochemical signs of acantholytic pemphigus (AP). Differential diagnostic criteria of dermatoses of various genesis are specified. The data of domestic and foreign authors with the description of clinical cases of AP are presented. Own clinical examples are given. Emphasis is placed on the need for timely diagnosis and appointment of a treatment regimen, which will reduce the proportion of complications, improve the prognosis of the disease and life.