bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Religious Resiliency and “Soft” Security
Authors: Omer Atalia
Published: June 2023

This chapter shows that the securitizing of religion is not only a function of urgent countermessaging. It also depends on the long-term cultivation of meaningful intercommunal bonds through the mechanism of interreligious governance. The latter amounts to the practices of peace as “getting along.” The underlying theory of change is that knowledge of one another (which also entails an intrasubjective and intrafaith/communal process), plus economic incentives over time, can reduce fatalism and the potential for violence. This security apparatus foregrounds children and youth as target demographics for investment and as a relatively obvious site (like poverty) for “moral” interventions or mobilizations of religious actors. Religious literacy as a peacebuilding mechanism becomes a form of knowing through relationship building (doing) rather than mastery of religious sources, hermeneutical traditions, and learning methodologies. The chapter shows that a focus on relationships consolidates and spiritualizes, but also exceeds and transgresses, the confines of a neoliberal peace discourse because the realness of the connections does not necessarily dissipate with the drying up of funds or the conclusion of neoliberal time frames.
Unrevolutionary Decolonial Love
Authors: Omer Atalia
Published: June 2023

Within the landscape of Mindanao, the deployment of religion as peace and love becomes a mechanism for overcoming hate, fear, and a false sense of superiority through the concretized creation of peace islands. The peace islands, whether in people’s hearts or through the formal negotiation of geographical parameters of the ceasefire, become sacred spaces whose maintenance depends on individuals’ spiritual formation to resist hate through reciprocal appreciation and the active promotion of pluralism. The latter operates in tandem with the securitization of religion through the same tools synergizing peacebuilding and development practices. Yet the friendships themselves are interpreted as sacred, pushing the analysis of religion and the practice of peace beyond its neoliberal utilitarian agenda or, at the very least, exposing its boundaries. Intersubjective transformation depends on being open to decolonial love—a praxis and an instrument of social transformation emerging from the underside of Western modernity or the lived realities of coloniality with an aspiration for imagining an ethics of plurality. This amounts to a form of political praxis of resistance, even if this resistance is mere existence expressed through survivalist piety, survivalist love, and nonpolitical friendship.
John Sullivan Dwight
Authors: Faucett Bill F.
Published: June 2023

John Sullivan Dwight (1813–1893) was for much of the nineteenth century America’s leading music critic. Born into a musical family and educated at premier Boston schools, he fell under the spell of New England Transcendentalism and befriended Ralph Waldo Emerson, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Margaret Fuller, George Ripley, and others of a similarly progressive mindset. Dwight resided at the socialist/utopian community of Brook Farm, where he learned about journalism and publishing while writing for The Harbinger. He wrote on many topics—Transcendentalism, of course, but especially music and musical performance. Dwight was a skilled communicator, and he conveyed ideas powerfully, persuasively, and constantly in language that had recently been given verve by German Romanticism and Emersonian Transcendentalism. When Brook Farm collapsed, Dwight’s professional prospects ran desperately low. After several years as a journeyman writer, he launched in 1852 Dwight’s Journal of Music: A Paper of Art and Literature, a newspaper that firmly established him as a serious music critic. The Journal was published regularly until 1881. It was and remains an important periodical. In its own time, it spoke to America’s growing appetite for art music; today it is indispensable for research into nineteenth-century American classical music, especially in Boston. This biography follows Dwight’s life as he meets and writes about some of the era’s most significant intellectuals and musicians. His enormous body of essays, reviews, and translations, much of it illuminated here, leads to the conclusion that Dwight the music critic and Dwight the Transcendentalist are inseparable.
Dwight at Brook Farm
Authors: Faucett Bill F.
Published: June 2023

With few professional prospects, Dwight settled at the socialist-utopian community of Brook Farm, located near Boston. The community attracted all sorts of personalities, and part of its lure was the arts, which were an important component of Brook Farm’s educational project. The arts were considered essential to the Farm’s success—for enjoyment, for moral uplift, and for simply keeping boredom at bay. Dwight was appointed as lead organizer of the Farm’s entertainments and designated “Chief of the Festal Series.” Given his own enthusiasms, many of the activities inevitably involved music; Dwight emphasized homegrown performances, classical repertoire, and guest artists. Dwight’s journalistic passions also emerged as he began to write essays about Beethoven’s symphonies, Handel’s Messiah, Mozart, and Haydn for James Russell Lowell’s literary periodical The Pioneer and New York’s U.S. Magazine and Democratic Review. All the while, Dwight was honing a new, personal literary style.
The Harbinger, Beethoven, and the End of Brook Farm
Authors: Faucett Bill F.
Published: June 2023

Dwight’s ascendant literary fortunes improved when Brook Farm launched The Harbinger, a weekly newspaper “devoted to social and political progress.” It addressed timely social issues, and its contents included a hefty section on music, including concert and book reviews, assessments of newly printed music, feature articles, and biographical sketches. Beethoven was a topic of special interest, and Dwight interpreted the composer by taking into account Carlyle’s Great Man Theory and the then-current phenomenon of reading a composer’s life from his works. Dwight was eager to share with curious Bostonians the personal odyssey of Beethoven, whose music, the critic believed, laid bare his inner self. Dwight also admired the teachings of the French utopian philosopher and social scientist Charles Fourier and wrote constantly about Fourierism. Brook Farm’s always rickety finances were worsened when fire ravaged a main building. Its collapse portended the end of Brook Farm and dreams of a better social organization.
Years in Days
Authors: Faucett Bill F.
Published: June 2023

Dwight regained a modicum of freedom when Ditson took over management of Dwight’s Journal, and he took the opportunity to make a Grand Tour of Europe. No sooner did he arrive than he learned of the death of his wife, who had remained in Boston. Dwight consoled himself with incessant travel but was paralyzed when it came to writing. Once back on track, he kept Journal readers abreast of his activities via letters that detailed his adventures. Dwight sought to hear plenty of music, but he was also determined to identify musical trends in European music education, tour conservatories, and inventory innovative undertakings. Along the way, he met and conversed with famous musical personalities. Dwight boarded the steamship Great Eastern—“the greatest ship ever built by man”—bound for home. Two days into the voyage, storm gales severely damaged the ship. Dwight recounted his personal harrowing tale of fear, anguish, and ultimately salvation.
Fiction
Authors: Cohen Edward E.
Published: June 2023

Through the peculium (a fund that a slave held for use in his or her own commercial pursuits), some skilled Roman slaves were able to accumulate assets that even the law implicitly recognized as effectively their own, and were able to continue to hold these assets as they emerged after manumission as free and affluent business persons. This is an element of economic reality that Roman law, as a consequence of the existential centrality of its doctrinal commitment to the legal nullity of slaves, could not explicitly embrace. But because of the importance to the Roman economy of servile enterprise and servile wealth, a jurisprudential mechanism had to be found to accommodate this reality. Voilà: the Roman legal fiction (fictio), which reconciled legal dogma and commercial actuality by attributing to an enslaved individual practical ownership of his or her peculium while continuing to deny slaves’ capacity to “own” anything. The Roman “legal fiction” with which this chapter deals is the factual falsity of the juridical framework governing slaves’ business activity, and the casuistry through which Roman jurisprudents skillfully preserved a legal framework seemingly confirming a fictitious world in which slaves are absolute nullities, while simultaneously creating legal methodologies and rules facilitating a commercial reality utterly in conflict with the fundamental juridical precepts that should have governed servile business activity.
Opportunity
Authors: Cohen Edward E.
Published: June 2023

This chapter discusses the phenomenon of free persons entering voluntarily into slavery, in order toe pursue commercial opportunities unavailable to the non-enslaved—and who, after garnering economic success through the Roman institution of the peculium, regain their freedom through “self-purchase” with “their own funds” (suis nummis), emerging economically and socially enhanced as “freedmen.” The cycle is complete: from impoverished freedom to slavery—from slavery to a prosperous freedom. The chapter also considers protections against the wrongful sale into slavery of a free person or of a person of impaired capacity, including minors. Consideration is also given to contractual arrangements between slave and master, including those providing for the ultimate self-purchase of liberty by originally free individuals who had voluntarily entered into slavery pursuant to agreements governing the terms of their enslavement. Finally, the chapter evaluates the motivations, terms, and rates of manumission at Rome.
Investment Crowdfunding
Authors: Schwartz Andrew A.
Published: June 2023

Investment crowdfunding is one species of the broader genus known as “crowdfunding,” a word recently added to the dictionary and defined as “the practice of obtaining needed funding (as for a new business) by soliciting contributions from a large number of people especially from the online community.” Historical examples of crowdfunding include church collection plates and the March of Dimes, but the concept really took off when widespread internet access allowed groups of people to connect in ways previously thought impossible. Thus, multiple varieties of crowdfunding have developed since the turn of the millennium, including “reward” crowdfunding (as on Kickstarter), “donation” crowdfunding (as on GoFundMe), and “investment” crowdfunding (the present subject). This chapter defines investment crowdfunding as “the public offering of unregistered securities through an independent online platform.” It works like this: an entrepreneur seeking to raise funds for her business begins by applying to one or more investment crowdfunding platforms, which are websites available on the internet. If a platform accepts the application and agrees to list a company, the latter posts information on the platform, describing the business and the investment opportunity on offer. The offer is posted for a limited amount of time, and the company must meet or exceed its pre-announced target funding amount by the deadline to get the money. Vitally, an investment crowdfunding offering is specifically exempt from the usual legal obligation to “register” securities before offering them to the public, making the process much simpler and less expensive than a traditional IPO (initial public offering).
Challenges
Authors: Schwartz Andrew A.
Published: June 2023

Investment crowdfunding, like all systems of entrepreneurial finance, must confront three fundamental challenges in order to embolden investors to take a chance and invest in a startup company: (1) uncertainty: the future performance of any company is uncertain, but this is especially so for a startup company, making it hard for investors to evaluate its prospects and assign it a reasonable valuation; (2) information asymmetry: entrepreneurs necessarily know much more than investors about their business—causing investors to worry that they might unknowingly select a “lemon” of an investment; (3) agency costs: once they get the money, entrepreneurs will be tempted to shirk and enrich themselves at the investors’ expense, enjoying themselves while spending other people’s money. If these three challenges are not addressed effectively, investors will pick up their ball and go home, and the whole market will collapse.
Private Ordering
Authors: Schwartz Andrew A.
Published: June 2023

Private ordering—the actions of individuals and private organizations—provides a number of key methods for governing and policing the investment crowdfunding market. Platforms serve as “gatekeepers” that only allow legitimate and promising companies to list on their sites. Entrepreneurs voluntarily provide investors with information about their companies, have their reputation on the line, and everything they say and do is recorded in a “digital trail”—all of which keeps them honest. Investors work together via the “wisdom of the crowd,” employ their own expertise, share their views with one another on investment crowdfunding platforms, and follow large “lead” investors in a practice called “syndication.”
American Law and Practice
Authors: Schwartz Andrew A.
Published: June 2023

The United States authorized investment crowdfunding in the federal JOBS Act of 2012 and associated regulations, known as Regulation Crowdfunding, by adding a new exemption to the registration requirement of the Securities Act of 1933. This chapter reviews and critiques the many components of this regulatory regime, including its provisions on mandatory disclosure, platform licensing, the issuer limit (a dollar-value cap on the amount a company may raise via crowdfunding), the investor cap (a limit on how much each individual may legally invest via crowdfunding), the all-or-nothing model (whereby the company must reach a self-selected funding target for the deal to go through), special purpose vehicles (which allow the crowdfunding investors to be grouped under a single name on a company’s “cap table”), gatekeeping, advertising, resale, and more.
Introduction
Authors: Heersink Boris
Published: June 2023

This chapter presents the main theory of the book. It argues that political science research has thus far failed to acknowledge an important role of the Democratic and Republican National Committees (DNC and RNC): engaging in party branding activity on behalf of their parties. The chapter introduces the DNC and RNC as political institutions, existing literature on their role in American politics, and the importance of party brands to politicians. It then argues why the DNC and RNC are set up to engage in party branding, and under which conditions they are likely to engage in more or less branding activity. This is discussed specifically with regard to differing demands from incumbent presidents as party leaders.
Examining DNC and RNC Party Branding Quantitatively
Authors: Heersink Boris
Published: June 2023

This chapter uses a new quantitative data set measuring Democratic and Republican National Committee (DNC and RNC) branding and service activity across time to assess conditions under which national committees increase or decrease their activities. The chapter first introduces the data set and the coding mechanism. The data set is based on analysis of over 40,000 New York Times articles mentioning the DNC, RNC, or its chairs between 1913 and 2016. Subsequently, the data is used to test a core prediction of the branding theory of national committees: that national committees should engage in less branding activity when their party is in the White House. The results suggest this is true: New York Times coverage of DNC and RNC branding is considerably lower when the incumbent president is from their party.
National Committees and the New Deal, 1933–1952
Authors: Heersink Boris
Published: June 2023

This chapter assesses the activities of the Democratic and Republican National Committees (DNC and RNC) during the presidencies of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry Truman. During this period, the DNC saw a clear institutional decline in large part because FDR did not believe that DNC branding would help him in his re-election efforts. Under Truman, the DNC became much more active in the run-up to the 1948 presidential election but declined again afterward. In contrast, the RNC throughout the New and Fair Deal years struggled to help the GOP find an alternative message. While RNC chairs were unable to produce a winning Republican argument in this period, they did push the party to embrace specific policy positions—including ending its isolationism during World War II.
Managing Mixed-Ideological Parties, 1969–1980
Authors: Heersink Boris
Published: June 2023

This chapter assesses the activities of the Democratic and Republican National Committees (DNC and RNC) during the presidencies of Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Jimmy Carter. The chapter shows that as the out-party in this period, the DNC faced major economic difficulties but nonetheless tried to use its limited resources to engage in party-branding activities. The image that the Democratic Party tried to promote in this period was mostly one of unity despite major ideological cleavages within the party. This strategy reached its zenith during the chairmanship of DNC chair Bob Strauss, who avoided policy debates and simply tried to promote conservative and liberal Democrats as being unified. The RNC while under Nixon and Ford promoted these presidents extensively. After the 1976 election, committee chair Bill Brock invested heavily in the party’s publicity division and prioritized outreach to Black voters. Meanwhile, the DNC saw a major decline in its branding role as Carter saw little use in the organization and largely ignored it during his time in office.
The Evolution and Gestalt of the Austrian Constitution
Authors: Wiederin Ewald
Published: June 2023

The Austrian Constitution is the oldest constitution of a republic in Europe. It was adopted in 1920 after the lost First World War for the small remnant of the defunct monarchy and replaced already in 1934 by an authoritarian constitution. After the Second World War, however, the democratic constitution of 1920 was granted a second life: it was re-enacted and has since proven its worth as the legal foundation of Austrian statehood. The chapter describes how the constitution came into being, what influences shaped it, and how it has evolved; it traces the peculiarities of democracy, fundamental rights, the federal state, the rule of law, the separation of powers, and constitutional jurisdiction in Austria; it elaborates on what makes Austria’s constitutional identity.
The Evolution and Gestalt of the French Constitution
Authors: Tusseau Guillaume
Published: June 2023

France’s chaotic constitutional history may have ended with the Constitution of 1958. Because of the strong constitutional constructivism that emerged with the Revolution, every constitution was connected to a specific ideology. Political conflict could hardly be internalized, so that great instability resulted (high-energy constitutionalism). Constitutional rigidity only offered a parchment barrier to political movements, while the rejection of constitutional review of legislation contributed to the lack of a popular constitutional culture (low juridicity constitutionalism). As constitutions passed, legicentrism made ordinary statutes addressing the organization of private relations, as well as setting the administrative and judicial structure of the country, the building blocks of the French polity. Whatever kind of separation of powers was established, the principle of political representation dominated the rival principle of direct democracy (delegative constitutionalism). This went hand in hand with the constant proclamation of several generations of fundamental rights (human rights constitutionalism). Although it has borrowed from this heritage, the constitution of the Fifth Republic has transformed it considerably. It has replaced parliamentary sovereignty with a unique combination of semi-presidentialism and semi-direct democracy. The creation of the Constitutional Council led to an unforeseen judicialization of French constitutionalism. As a broad consensus has emerged regarding the Gestalt of the French constitution, one may wonder whether, precisely because it managed to avoid the pitfalls of French history, this text has not killed constitutional debate.
The Evolution and Gestalt of the Italian Constitution
Authors: Ragone Sabrina , D’Amico Giacomo
Published: June 2023

The chapter provides a syncretic analysis of the Italian ‘constitutional reality’, starting from the origins of the Constitution, which came into force in 1948. The first part addresses the debate that preceded the drafting of the text, with particular attention to both previous Italian and foreign experiences which inspired the founding fathers. The political consensus reached within the Constituent Assembly is explained as well, alongside the fundamental choices and the key figures of the constituent debate. Then, the evolution of the Italian Constitution is analysed with particular reference to those areas that, more than others, have undergone significant changes (form of government, regional arrangements, and constitutional adjudication). The following section examines the core concepts and structures of the constitutional order, such as the principle of the separation of powers, democracy, and the connected principle of popular sovereignty, rule of law and protection of fundamental rights. Finally, the chapter examines the Italian ‘constitutional identity’ through constitutional case law dealing with the so-called ‘counter-limits’ to European integration.
The Evolution and Gestalt of the Lithuanian Constitution
Authors: Jarukaitis Irmantas
Published: June 2023

The chapter addresses the main stages of evolution of the Lithuanian constitutionalism and the basic features of the 1992 Constitution currently in force. First, it describes the Middle Age origins of the Lithuanian Constitutionalism and its development between the two World Wars. Further, it describes the historic context of the re-establishment of Lithuania’s Independence on 11 March 1990 and adoption of the 1992 Constitution. Second, the chapter analyses the central role of the Constitutional Court of the Republic of Lithuania in ensuring the effectiveness of and developing the Constitution, the gradual shift of its approach to the interpretation of the Constitution. It addresses and describes the important horizontal impact of both the ECHR and EU law on the perception and further jurisprudential development of the 1992 Constitution. Third, it deals with the basic principles and structures of the 1992 Constitution. The basic constitutional principles, especially the rule of law and protection of fundamental rights, and their interaction is explained. Further, the constitutional organs of the Republic of Lithuania, their powers and mutual functioning are addressed. Finally, the Chapter deals with the question of constitutional identity. Both EU and national constitutional perspectives are analysed in the light of academic discourse and the jurisprudence of the Constitutional Court.
The Evolution and Gestalt of the Dutch Constitution
Authors: Besselink Leonard F M
Published: June 2023

The constitutional system of the Netherlands and its Constitution (Grondwet) are, contrary to most continental European countries, not of the revolutionary type, but are typically evolutionary in character. They can be viewed as the product rather than merely the source of the political order. In combination with the geopolitical place of the Netherlands on the map, and the loss of its major colony (present-day Indonesia), opened up the constitutional system to internationalization and Europeanization in a manner that has made it possible to consider the international and European legal orders to be part of the national constitutional make-up. Its social system strongly characterized as a ‘pillarized’ society with neo-corporatist traits, based on permanent minorities that defined themselves in political and religious denomination until the last quarter of the twentieth century—which prevented viewing the constitutional order in overarching ideological terms—this chapter sketches the main developments of the constitutional order of the Netherlands, as well as its basic structures and concepts.
Ebenezer Howard
Authors: Knight Frances
Published: June 2023

Ebenezer Howard (1850–1928) is famous worldwide for founding the Garden City movement, and interest in him remains strong. This is the first full-scale biography to be published since the 1980s. It explains the remarkable sequence of events that led from the publication of his ideas to the foundation of Letchworth as the world’s first Garden City, just five years later, and it explores other neglected aspects of Howard’s life, particularly his religious views. Shaped in the world of London Congregationalism, he became a keen seeker after unity and peace. He grafted new religious ideas, particularly from Spiritualism, and later from Theosophy, into his biblically informed, Protestant faith. Prone to spiritual epiphanies, he believed that he had been raised up to preach the ‘gospel of the garden city’ and to tackle the housing crisis by beginning to build the New Jerusalem in the Hertfordshire countryside. Although he sometimes appeared naïve, he was astute, and highly skilled at combining different, and sometimes conflicting, ideas in a way that built consensus and gained support from people across the social and political spectrum. Howard wanted his garden cities to be places of spiritual exploration, and as this book shows, early Letchworth certainly lived up to those expectations.
Laying the Foundations 1876–1889
Authors: Knight Frances
Published: June 2023

The chapter explores Howard’s return to London, years in which he began work as a parliamentary stenographer, married his wife Lizzie, had a family and began his experiments with typewriter modifications. It discusses his deepening interest in Spiritualism, which he first encountered through the influence of Cora Richmond, and how this eventually brought him back from the Freethought positions that had influenced him in America, to a version of Christianity. The final section discusses the impact on Howard of various intellectual and religious influences, including the social gospel, older traditions of radical dissent, science fiction, and his membership of Rectory Road Congregational Church in Stoke Newington.
Howard in Letchworth 1905–1914
Authors: Knight Frances
Published: June 2023

The chapter discusses Howard’s private and public life in the years after he moved to Letchworth. He became increasingly well-known both nationally and internationally, reaching the height of his fame around 1912, but he was sometimes also a somewhat isolated figure, not always able to conceal his radical views. The chapter investigates the design and building of Letchworth in the Arts and Crafts style, and the influence of its principal architects Barry Parker and Raymond Unwin. The difficulties of the town’s early years are also discussed, particularly its inability to harness support from the co-operative movement, and the failure to build sufficient affordable working-class housing, and the critiques of some influential observers, including H.G. Wells. Letchworth’s experiments with cooperative housekeeping are discussed, particularly at Homesgarth, where Howard lived for about a decade. Howard’s internationalism and enthusiasm for learning Esperanto are discussed. The meaning of Letchworth’s annual May Day and Arbor Day festivals is also teased out.
Howard and Welwyn – the Second Garden City 1919–1928
Authors: Knight Frances
Published: June 2023

This chapter considers the fortunes of the Garden City movement in the immediate post-First World War period. It explains how Howard’s younger disciples, Frederic Osborn and C.B. Purdom ‘refreshed’ the concept of the Garden City in the years after the War, and the circumstances that led to the building of the second Garden City at Welwyn, from 1919. It discusses the design of the town by Louis de Soissons, and the development of religious institutions during the first decade of Welwyn’s development. The chapter examines the final decade of Howard’s life, as he became less involved in the life of the Hertfordshire Garden Cities, and more preoccupied with the International Garden Cities and Town Planning Association, as well as with his lifelong project to build a reliable stenography machine. The chapter concludes by discussing the circumstances of his death, and the debate about who should write his biography.
The Poetic Field, I
Authors: Dance Richard
Published: June 2023

The ‘Middle’ phase in the story of English often impresses us as a period of enormous change and diversity. This chapter introduces the continuities as well as the differences between Old and Middle English, and explores some of the ways in which Middle English varied—through time and across space, and in the range of origins represented by its word forms. The main focus is on texts at the so-called ‘transition’ from Old English to Middle English, with case studies of the linguistic resources and expressive choices of two twelfth-century poems from opposite sides of England, the Soul’s Address to the Body and the Ormulum. The chapter then moves forwards in time and asks what an examination of language means for our appreciation of the poetic qualities of two famous literary monuments of the later fourteenth century, the works of Geoffrey Chaucer and of the Gawain-poet.
The Poetic Field, II
Authors: Echard Siân
Published: June 2023

This chapter explores Latin poetry written or circulating in medieval Britain, with a particular emphasis on works from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Each writer exemplifies a particular strand of Anglo-Latin writing: classical epic, satire, religious writing, and writing ‘in place’—that is, writing that concentrates on English spaces and an imagining of Englishness. The writers dealt with are Joseph of Exeter, Walter of Châtillon, Nigel Whiteacre, Reginald of Canterbury, John of Garland, Lawrence of Durham, and Henry of Huntingdon. The chapter opens and closes with consideration of what it meant to write in the Latin tradition for poets who were conscious of the authority of the classical past and the challenge of the multilingual present.
The Poetic Field, III
Authors: Busby Keith
Published: June 2023

After a brief discussion of the terms ‘Anglo-Norman’, ‘the French of England’, ‘Anglo-French’, and ‘insular French’, this chapter offers perspectives on the ways in which both insular and Continental texts in French provided models for poetry in Middle English. The demise of English as a literary vernacular following 1066 has been exaggerated, but the establishment by colonisation in the islands of French-speaking aristocrats, ecclesiastics, and an associated clerical class opened up French verse as a medium for all kinds of literature and introduced new genres and modes to the islands. Many early texts in Old French verse are of insular origin and English authors writing in Anglo-Norman may be regarded as ‘precocious’ and even as ‘English literature in French’. Continental literature in French was also read in England and influenced poets writing in Middle English throughout the Middle Ages. The linguistic situation in England was multilingual, with some manuscripts containing texts in French, English, and Latin.
The Poetic Field, IV
Authors: Flood Victoria
Published: June 2023

This chapter offers an overview of the Welsh poetic field as it intersects with the English in the centuries following the Edwardian conquest of 1282–3. From the early-fourteenth-century Harley lyrics, to English Arthuriana, and late-medieval Welsh and macaronic poetry, it explores the evidence for cross-cultural and cross-linguistic interaction, noting the mediating role of Latin and French material in the circulation of Welsh names and thematic content in English-language literary culture. It suggests that during this period we find the clearest evidence of the direct influence not of Welsh poetry on English but of English language and literature on Welsh, in the English vocabulary and apparent familiarity with the English popular lyric in the writings of Chaucer’s contemporary, Dafydd ap Gwilym, as well as in the English–Welsh macaronic dialogues of the fifteenth century and the writing of English poetry in Welsh orthography.
Poetry in Its Age
Authors: Bertolet Craig E.
Published: June 2023

This chapter surveys a few mostly anonymous fourteenth-century poems outlining a specific grievance and identified by scholars as satires or complaints. Some poems, such as those by Laurence Minot and the anonymous Richard the Redeless, address a grievance originating either from a specific individual or event. Others, such as The Simonye, Wynnere and Wastoure, and Pierce the Ploughmans Crede, broadly condemn certain socioeconomic practices adversely affecting society. The chapter also surveys some poems from the British Library MS Harley 2253, which contains works that fall into either category. Although all these works are historical poems, they do not record historical events. Instead, they are poetical reactions to, or impressions of, the individuals and practices seen to be influencing their poet’s world.
Doctrine and Learning
Authors: Yeager Stephen M.
Published: June 2023

This chapter examines didacticism in Middle English poetry, which both occasioned and shaped poetic forms and narratives developed for the purposes of knowledge production. ‘Poetic’ uses of language like metre, rhyme, and alliteration are pleasing in part because they are easy to remember, so poetic forms have long served to literally encode memorialised cultural authority in the contexts of their use. Though modern readers tend to prioritise personal expression as a source of formal innovation, in Middle English these innovations are more typically occasioned by the pressures of maintaining cultural continuity. This chapter applies this claim to homiletic compendia such as The Orrmulum, The Prick of Conscience, Handling Synne, and Physiologus; to documentary poems such as The Charter of Christ; and to proverb collections such as The Proverbs of Alfred. It concludes with readings of formal self-consciousness in the innovative debate poems The Owl and the Nightingale and Parlament of the Thre Ages.
Religious and Didactic Lyrics
Authors: Renevey Denis
Published: June 2023

This chapter addresses the concepts of form and performance in religious and didactic lyrics written between c 1150 and 1400. It also considers the emergence of themes such as the Passion events and the praise of the Virgin Mary, as well as moral and penitential topics. After a brief discussion of St Godric’s hymns, the chapter addresses in greater detail verse from the ‘Wooing Group’—more particularly ‘On god ureisun of ure lefdi’—assessing the specific function of verse as part of meditative practice. It also explores how some of the religious lyrics of BL MS Harley 2253 would be read in the context of a whole book-reading experience. The didactic function of lyrical religious poetry is explored further in some of the para-liturgical lyrics of William Herebert and the insertion of lyrics in epistolary tracts of religious guidance by Richard Rolle.
Non-Cyclic Romances of Love
Authors: Purdie Rhiannon
Published: June 2023

This chapter looks at a selection of romances that do not belong to one of the traditional ‘matters’, but which are instead united by a genre-signalling focus on passionate love. It investigates how this is reconciled with romance’s broader concerns with social order and the kinds of personal bonds which either reinforce or threaten it, considering love that is variously pre-pubescent, homosocial, platonic, or passionate, from the viewpoints of men and women. It also considers the interaction of some of these texts with the great ‘matters’, and what could be called their ‘prosody of emotion’, or exploitation of poetic and narrative form.
The Matter of Britain
Authors: Archibald Elizabeth
Published: June 2023

When English writers translated and adapted French Arthurian romances, and created new ones of their own, they used a strikingly wide range of verse forms. There are many local variations in stanza structure (number of lines, rhyme schemes); and alliterative writing, derived from the Old English tradition, requires a complex vocabulary of many synonyms, including unusual words often found only in these texts. Chaucer mocked many aspects of romance style in his ‘Tale of Sir Thopas’, but Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is not the only Middle English Arthurian romance to show considerable sophistication in both style and content. Texts discussed include the tail-rhyme Sir Percyvell of Galles, the alliterative Awntyrs of Arthur, the Alliterative Morte Arthure, and the Stanzaic Morte Arthur.
The ‘Matter of England’
Authors: Johnston Andrew James
Published: June 2023

This chapter is concerned with the so-called ‘Matter of England’-romances. As opposed to much previous criticism that tended to rate these romances’ literary quality low and focused primarily on political and thematic issues, this contribution seeks also to provide an outline of the specific aesthetic choices that shape the texts. Using Horn, Havelok, and Guy of Warwick as principal examples, the chapter examines the romances’ central structural and rhetorical characteristics, touches briefly on their perspective on history, and highlights aspects such as their feigned orality, their capacity for fabliau-like humour, and their generic flexibility. Among other things, this chapter argues that (some of) these romances cultivate a deliberately anti-courtly stance and exploit their seemingly naïve traditionalism for meta-poetic purposes.
The Gawain-Poet
Authors: Cooper Helen
Published: June 2023

This chapter outlines what can be known, deduced, or guessed about the Cotton Nero manuscript, the language of the poems, their likely poet, and their possible patronage context. The poetics of the four poems are analysed for their different qualities: Pearl for its complex artistry and its code-switching between human and divine language; Cleanness and Patience as homiletic works, but containing much human sympathy and some fine storm scenes; and Sir Gawain for its subtle narratology and deployment of a rhetoric specific to alliterative poetry. The poems display a wide etymological range of vocabulary, from Old Norse to Latin; a close familiarity with the text of the Bible; and wide reading in French.
Chaucer’s Courtly Poetry
Authors: Lawton David
Published: June 2023

For all the many shifts in Chaucer’s career (of audience, literary models, and sources), he remains a courtly poet throughout, not least in his allegiance to the Roman de la Rose, his constant probing of love, memory, and pain, and his commitment to the perfection of poetic craft. A key movement is from a dominant structure of complaint in his dream poetry, in which narrative is arrested in the emotional state of the speaker, to a poetics of narratorial complicity developed in Troilus and Criseyde, itself linked to a philosophical and Boethian engagement with cultural memory and foreknowledge. The chapter also explores the classicising depth Chaucer is concerned to provide for Troilus, and in his invention of Alcestis in the Prologue to the Legend of Good Women.
John Gower
Authors: Yeager R. F.
Published: June 2023

John Gower composed poetry for readers literate in French, Latin, and English. Accordingly, this chapter approaches his work as a trilingual oeuvre, stressing that any understanding of Gower’s poetics cannot be based solely on his Middle English verse. Rather, an accurate assessment properly requires familiarity with his Anglo-Norman and Latin work as well, as his artistry devolves from, and interconnects with, each in interaction with the other poetries. The chapter is arranged in three sections, according to language, and as far as possible chronologically within each section. Matters of rhyme, metre, diction, imagery, influences, and sources are examined throughout, the latter in a limited way, insofar as they find relevance for better comprehension of Gower’s poetic practice.
Beginnings of Historical Criticism
Authors: Legaspi Michael C.
Published: June 2023

The beginnings of historical criticism in academic German theology of the early eighteenth century coincided and merged with developments in the study of church history, specifically those arising from the church-critical perspective of Johann Arndt and, more proximately, the publication and reception of Gottfried Arnold’s ground-breaking Unparteyische Kirchen- und Ketzer-Historie (1699–1700). The civil philosophy of Christian Thomasius programmatized a different, though related, approach to understanding the Christian past. Fresh historical contextualizations of the biblical writings in this period arose from a contemporary theological crisis concerning the relation of the established Lutheran Orthodox churches to ‘true Christianity’. It is in the space between these two things, one a sociopolitical reality and the other a theological ideal, that we may note the emergence of new perspectives and, correspondingly, new attempts to re-examine the history of the churches and, eventually, the sacred history found in Scripture itself.
Translation, Bildung, and Dialogue
Authors: Franks Paul
Published: June 2023

A distinctively German version of Judaism developed between 1783, when Mendelssohn and his associates began to publish their German translation of the Pentateuch, and 1938, when Jewish communal life was extinguished. This version of Judaism focused on Bildung, which it construed as a modified version of tikkun: the reparation of the divine image in which the human was created. In the nineteenth century, Bildung-based Judaism developed into two branches, one focusing on ethical monotheism, the other on Torah im derekh erets (Torah along with the way of the land). Both emphasized that Bildung was a project shared by Jews and their non-Jewish neighbours, but the former branch expressed this project in universalist terms, while the latter chose a particularist mode of expression. In the twentieth century, a third development emerged, also with kabbalistic roots, emphasizing the role of dialogue in Bildung, and promising to unite what was best in the two branches. The concepts of ethical monotheism, Torah im derekh erets, and dialogical Bildung, emerging from the German-Jewish experience, have remained central to post-Holocaust Jewish thought.
The Early Theological Reception of Kant’s Religious Philosophy
Authors: Hunter Ian
Published: June 2023

The early theological reception of Kant’s religious philosophy is usually depicted as a process in which biblical ecclesiastical religions were forced to adapt to a philosophy that had uncovered their inner rational foundations. This chapter shows to the contrary that while Kant and his followers saw his religious philosophy in this way, leading Lutheran and Catholic theologians received it quite differently: not as the inner rational truth of their faiths but as an external religious rival. This meant that the theological reception of Kantian religious philosophy did not take place as the progressive unfolding of a rational philosophy within historical ecclesiastical religions. Rather, it assumed the form of an unpredictable series of conflicts, adaptations, and repudiations that occurred when a novel philosophical religion was resisted by the public ecclesiastical faiths that it sought to supplant.
The Pantheism Controversy in the 1780s
Authors: Bienenstock Myriam
Published: June 2023

The publication in 1785 of the ‘Letters on the Doctrine of Spinoza’ triggered in Germany a powerful Spinoza cult which had not been willed by F. H. Jacobi, their editor: he had perceived the growing enthusiasm for Spinoza, also manifested by Herder and Goethe, and wanted to react. Rather than waging war on Spinoza himself, he targeted Mendelssohn the Jew and the Berlin Aufklärung, also other famous contemporaries whom he summoned to choose between reason and faith. Many preferred to declare themselves ‘Spinozists’. Kant resisted, but Fichte evolved an influential form of pantheism disparagingly called by Herder ‘transcendental Spinozism’. Herder’s own aesthetical pantheism developed into a highly successful yet much criticized philosophy of history. The figure of Spinoza also marked the life and works of Goethe, the ‘great heathen’, and of ‘the great heathen No. 2’ Heinrich Heine, who gave a social and political meaning to pantheism, that ‘clandestine religion of Germany’.
Historical Introduction
Authors: Ravenscroft Ruth Jackson
Published: June 2023

This survey chapter examines how theological assumptions and ideas contributed to the formation of German nationalist ideas during the cultural and political upheavals of the Napoleonic Wars, in the period between the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806, and the founding of the Deutscher Bund in 1815. In doing so, it considers significant emergent historiography and scholarship on the cultural and political developments in the period. The chapter outlines how intellectuals including Friedrich Schleiermacher, Wilhelm von Humboldt, and G. W. F. Hegel contributed to the notion of a unified German nation. It explores the genesis of discourse around the notion of a German Kulturnation, and considers Johann Gottfried von Herder’s influence on conceptions of national identity. It also introduces subsequent chapters in this part of the volume by making connections between the theological agenda of the early German nationalists and contemporary views on the place of theology in the university.
Theology and Early Historicism
Authors: Zachhuber Johannes
Published: June 2023

This chapter explores the historical turn in German intellectual life at the turn of the nineteenth century and its impact on theology. Two aspects are pivotal: the revolutionary social changes of the time create a sense of rupture between past and present; and radical criticism calls into question the reliability of historical sources. Historicization seeks to address both through a transformation of history into a rigorously methodical science while drawing on contemporaneous philosophy for models of reintegrating past reality into the contemporary horizon. Theologians played an active part in this development, but their work cannot be understood without their wider context. The chapter discusses Lessing and the Fragment Controversy; philosophies of history in Kant and Schelling; and the theological adaptation of these ideas in Schleiermacher, Marheineke, and de Wette.