bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
From Neoliberalism to Democratic Liberalism
Authors: Holden Richard , Dixon Rosalind
Published: April 2022

This chapter proposes a new approach to liberalism, which is distinctly democratic as opposed to neoliberal in approach. It outlines the four key defining principles of this approach, namely: (i) guaranteeing access to a public baseline of core goods, or access to a generous social minimum to all citizens, regardless of market outcomes; (ii) ensuring equality of access to certain “relative goods”; (iii) regulating market power or sources of monopoly power; and (iv) responding to or “internalizing” negative externalities or social costs associated with private market behavior. It argues for an approach based on these principles as preferable to either a more radically democratic socialist or economic nationalist response to the weaknesses inherent in neoliberalism. It also explores how these principles call for democratic input and judgments, and thus connect to ideas about both democratic equality, dignity, and self-government. It shows how governments’ responses to Covid-19 could be seen as providing support for at least a proto-democratic liberal approach of this kind.
A Public Baseline: Toward a Green Jobs Guarantee
Authors: Holden Richard , Dixon Rosalind
Published: April 2022

This chapter explores how liberalism can effectively respond to the long-run decline in work and wages in certain sectors, and the challenge of providing decent, well-paid work to all, which can guarantee access to a generous social minimum. It suggests that the most promising path is not a “universal basic income” (UBI), but rather an approach that continues to value work—and the sense of purpose and economic prosperity it generates—through the creation of a universal jobs guarantee (UJG). The authors also explore in some detail what the design of a democratic liberal UJG should look like—and it should be flexible, focused on projects with social meaning (such as environmental projects), offer decent wages and opportunities for promotion, but with terms and conditions that still encourage private sector employment. A UJG of this kind, we argue, dominates a UBI both on the grounds of realism and effectiveness. And, the authors suggest that policies such as a UJG can usefully be supplemented by front-door as opposed to backdoor attempts to boost wages and benefits, including through a (more) generous earned income tax credit and incentives for wage-earner equity.
Bias and Responsiveness in Nonpartisan Maps
Authors: Goedert Nicholas
Published: April 2022

This chapter discusses the benefits and drawbacks of the primary alternatives to partisan gerrymandering, again filtered through the lens of historically weighted bias and responsiveness. It highlights contrasts between maps drawn by nonpartisan commissions and maps drawn through bipartisan agreement among legislative parties through five case studies of states that use commissions: Arizona, California, Iowa, New Jersey, and Washington. It finds consistently low bias under normal conditions for maps drawn by commissions, with varying levels of responsiveness. Iowa and Arizona achieve exceptionally high competitiveness under normal conditions, while California shows lower competitiveness across all conditions, in exchange for achieving higher descriptive and discursive representation of an exceptionally diverse population. These examples are contrasted with maps drawn through bipartisan compromise showing no consistent bias but generally lower levels of responsiveness.
Introduction
Authors: Allen Hilary J.
Published: April 2022

This introduction includes an explanation of the term “driverless finance,” which is used not only to describe the financial industry’s use of technological innovations, but also as a metaphor that conveys the dangers that use of that technology can create for innocent bystanders. The introduction also provides working definitions of the terms “fintech” and “financial stability,” and explains that critiques of fintech thus far have focused on consumer protection issues to the exclusion of financial stability concerns. The introduction then provides an overview of the rest of the book, outlining at a high level the different financial stability concerns that may arise from the increasing prominence of fintech business models, firms, and technologies.
The Case for Precaution
Authors: Allen Hilary J.
Published: April 2022

This chapter explains why policymakers should take a precautionary approach to fintech innovations. It devotes considerable time to exploring the catastrophic consequences of the financial crisis of 2008, and the financial innovations that helped cause it. It also engages in a thought experiment, imagining how distributed ledgers and smart contracts could have made the last crisis even worse had they existed in the mid-2000s. The purpose of this historical review and thought experiment is to vividly demonstrate the potential harms associated with new financial technologies: as a society, we tend to support precautionary regulation of pharmaceuticals and self-driving cars because we recognize their potential to threaten human lives, but we’re less comfortable with precautionary regulation intended to protect our financial system. To help overcome this reluctance toward precautionary regulation of new financial technologies, this chapter demonstrates that the costs of financial crises are not just economic, but also tear at the fabric of our society.
Fintech and Payments
Authors: Allen Hilary J.
Published: April 2022

This chapter uses mobile payments and distributed ledger business models and technologies as case studies to demonstrate how operational problems in the payments system can trigger and transmit financial distress. It also examines proposals for central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) and proposals to use distributed ledger technology for post-trade processing, concluding that while there are strong use cases for these types of fintech innovations, they are not without financial stability risks. This chapter therefore stresses the need for a new type of “macro-operational” regulation that responds to the potential systemic interactions of operational problems. Finally, this chapter considers the risks associated with increased reliance on a small group of third-party technology vendors (particularly cloud computing vendors).
The Bigger Picture
Authors: Allen Hilary J.
Published: April 2022

The rise of fintech is an inflection point that invites engagement with many big picture questions about the fusion of finance and technology. This chapter therefore considers several big picture questions about the roles that we expect finance and technology to play in our society, and what our expectations of government should be (whether as a regulator or market participant). These questions invite further discussion about the role of expertise and the government’s capacity to innovate. This chapter also engages with some challenging jurisdictional issues, and the slice of the broader debates about competition, privacy, and cybersecurity that relates to financial stability. This chapter doesn’t provide concrete policy recommendations—instead, it furthers debate about these issues as the rise of fintech makes them ever more urgent.
Falling Bodies and the Rise of Variational Mechanics
Authors: McDonough Jeffrey K.
Published: April 2022

This chapter discusses Leibniz’s efforts with respect to the famous problem of the brachistochrone—that is, the problem of determining the shape of the path of quickest descent between two points in a vertical plane. After setting the historical stage, the chapter argues that the rational mechanics of the eighteenth century and beyond—developed by the likes of Leonhard Euler, Joseph-Louis Lagrange, and William Rowan Hamilton—served to vindicate Leibniz’s optimality approach to problems in optics, mechanics, and statics. The chapter thus aims to show that Leibniz’s Principle of Optimality has proven itself to be a miracle creed not only in virtue of its odd epistemological standing—in its being fully grounded neither in reason nor experience—but also in having “been borne out to an amazing extent by the development of science.”
The Puzzle of Morality
Authors: Krebs Dennis L.
Published: April 2022

This chapter examines a set of complex questions that need to be answered in order to unravel the mystery of morality. What is morality? Where does it come from? How is it affected by nature and nurture? Are we born bad, or have moral traits evolved in our species? In what ways are moral decisions influenced by environmental factors such as social interactions and culture? What purposes do moral traits serve—why do people behave in moral ways? What kinds of psychological mechanisms endow us with a capacity for morality? Why are we able to make moral decisions in both emotional and rational ways, and are some forms of moral decision-making more primitive than others?
What Is a Moral Animal?
Authors: Krebs Dennis L.
Published: April 2022

This chapter identifies the qualities that an animal would need to possess in order to be considered moral. Those who would argue that we are a moral animal could present evidence that all humans possess a set of mental mechanisms that generate moral knowledge and moral emotions, that induce them to behave in ways that they classify as moral, and that enable them to control their immoral urges most of the time. Although these mechanisms fall short of making us purely moral or preventing us from behaving in immoral ways, they endow us with a stronger sense of morality than that displayed by any other animal.
The Evolution of Complex Moral Strategies and Maladaptive Mistakes
Authors: Krebs Dennis L.
Published: April 2022

This chapter reviews research by evolutionary game theorists demonstrating that certain conditionally cooperative strategies can defeat selfish strategies in simulations of social evolution; however, it argues that the models created by these theorists fail to capture the complexity of strategic interactions in our everyday lives. Blessed with higher order cognitive abilities, we are able to avail ourselves of an array of complex strategies that we can tailor to strategies invoked by others during the give and take of social exchanges. Although we may inherit genes that incline us to invoke different strategies from those who inherit different genes, the strategies that we end up invoking are affected by a wide array of developmental, environmental, and cultural factors. The laws of evolution do not imply that all evolved strategies are adaptive in modern environments.
The Emergence of Morality Through Strategic Interaction
Authors: Krebs Dennis L.
Published: April 2022

This chapter identifies six ways that strategic social interactions can induce individuals to behave in moral ways. First, others may make it in our vested interest to make moral choices by rewarding us when we behave in moral ways and punishing us when we behave in immoral ways. Second, morality may emerge during the process of moral argumentation when we negotiate fair resolutions to conflicts of interest. Third, others may manipulate us into behaving morally by outplaying us in social games. Fourth, we may behave morally in order to induce others to select us as exchange partners and to treat us right. Fifth, we may persuade ourselves that it is right to behave in moral ways in the process of attempting to persuade others. Finally, morality may emerge when we take the perspective of others in order to predict their moves in social games.
Primate Morality and the Evolution of Moral Norms
Authors: Krebs Dennis L.
Published: April 2022

This chapter examines evidence that our early primate ancestors possessed proto-moral traits such as the capacity to care for offspring, to experience moral emotions, to exert self-control, to respect authority, to conform to implicit social norms, to cooperate in hunting and defense against predators, and to pass judgment on others, and it tracks the evolution of such traits in early human hunter-gatherer groups. In contrast to the hierarchical social order of relatively small ape groups, the social orders of the larger hunter-gatherer groups formed by early humans were egalitarian. To identify the causes of this transformation, we must perform a cost-benefit analysis of cooperative and selfish social strategies. Intelligence, language, and the capacity to develop and transmit culture have been nominated as primary determinants of the evolution of moral norms.
The Cultural Evolution of Morality
Authors: Krebs Dennis L.
Published: April 2022

This chapter examines the role that culture played in the transformation of human societies during the past 100,000 years from cooperative hunter-gatherer groups to larger tribes and nation-states regulated by broadly based moral norms. It reviews evidence that such changes were mediated by a runaway process such as cumulative cultural evolution in which individuals transmit information to others who improve on it and transmit it to others who improve on it, and so on. It describes gene-culture coevolution theories that posit that early humans who inherited genes that enabled them to create, transmit, and refine cultural norms upholding complex systems of cooperation fared better than those who did not. It argues that culturally acquired moral traits and moral norms spread rapidly throughout populations when groups that adopt them fare better than groups that adopt more selfish traits and norms. It reviews evidence that culturally evolved traits did not replace more primitive, biologically evolved instincts, but rather evolved in concert with them.
Psychological Accounts of Morality
Authors: Krebs Dennis L.
Published: April 2022

This chapter reviews and evaluates the three main theories of morality advanced by psychologists: social learning theory, cognitive-developmental theory, and dual-process theory. Social learning theory focuses on learning morals from others. Cognitive-developmental theory focuses on the growth of moral reasoning. Dual-process theory asserts that people make moral judgments in emotional-intuitive and rational ways. This chapter argues that each approach helps explain some aspects of morality but fails to explain others. It argues that what is missing in psychology is a framework, or overriding umbrella, equipped to integrate psychological accounts in coherent ways, explain how we acquired more than one way of making moral decisions, and offer an explanation for why.
Reframing Psychological Theories of Morality
Authors: Krebs Dennis L.
Published: April 2022

This chapter explains how evolutionary theory supplies a basis for expanding and refining psychological approaches to morality such as those espoused by social learning theorists, cognitive-developmental theorists, and dual-process theorists. Evolutionary theory offers an explanation for how the mental mechanisms featured in these theories, such as those that mediate social learning and rational and emotional forms of moral decision-making, originated and why they are designed in particular ways. Viewing the psychological mechanisms that give rise to moral judgments and moral behaviors as adaptations that helped early humans propagate their genes casts them in a light that helps explain why humans acquired them and why they change as children develop.
Self-Control
Authors: Krebs Dennis L.
Published: April 2022

This chapter identifies biological sources of our susceptibility to temptations such as those in the Seven Deadly Sins and examines psychological sources of virtues that enable us to resist such temptations, to delay gratification, and to manage our antisocial urges. It suggests that although the primitive strategies that we consider immoral may have been adaptive for our ancient ancestors, they are often, but not always, maladaptive in modern environments. It argues that although primitive brain mechanisms that evolved in ancient environments may dispose us to behave in immoral ways, they can be overridden by later-evolved and later-developing mental mechanisms that enable us to exert enough self-control to promote our long-term interests in modern environments. It reviews evidence that the ability to exert self-control tends to increase in children as they acquire increasingly advanced cognitive abilities.
Purity
Authors: Krebs Dennis L.
Published: April 2022

This chapter explores the moral implications of purity and sanctity. It offers an explanation for why people throughout the world consider purity virtuous, suggesting that the moral value of purity stemmed from the adaptive value of cleanliness and the avoidance of pathogens in early human environments. It argues that our ancient ancestors reacted positively to members of their groups who kept themselves clean and heathy, and negatively to those who failed to maintain personal hygiene and displayed symptoms of disease. It reviews evidence showing that we tend to find disgusting things immoral and that feelings of disgust increase the harshness of some moral judgments. It suggests that as early humans acquired higher-order cognitive abilities, their conceptions of physical purity generalized to moral purity, or pureness of heart, and that norms upholding purity strengthen the cooperative moral order of groups.
Fairness and Honesty
Authors: Krebs Dennis L.
Published: April 2022

This chapter explains how fair and honest strategies can evolve, and how we and other animals deal with unfairness. It describes research by evolutionary game theorists showing that fair strategies such as Tit for Tat can evolve under certain conditions, and it reviews evidence from biologists that such strategies have evolved in species such as vampire bats and apes. It offers explanations of why fair strategies are rare in the animal kingdom and outlines the conditions that favor its emergence. It suggests that honesty evolved to extend the benefits of cooperation and that in order to evolve, fair and honest strategies must contain ways of counteracting the benefits of unfair and dishonest strategies, such as reaping revenge and sullying the reputations of cheaters.
Biological Sources of Altruism
Authors: Krebs Dennis L.
Published: April 2022

This chapter asserts that biologists have accounted for the evolution of altruism in two overriding ways—by explaining how it can help individuals propagate their genes and by attributing it to evolved mental mechanisms that induce individuals to behave in maladaptive ways. It describes three evolutionary processes equipped to select altruistic traits: sexual selection (diminishing one’s chances of survival in order to increase one’s chances of reproducing), kin selection (helping those who possess copies of one’s genes), and group selection (helping members of one’s group. It suggests that maladaptive forms of altruism may stem from deficiencies in the design of evolved mental mechanisms that regulate social behaviors and from changes in environments that diminish the biological benefits of previously evolved strategies. It argues that we are evolved to prey on the imperfections in others’ evolved mechanisms in order to induce them to behave in altruistic ways.
Human Nature and the Nature of Morality
Authors: Krebs Dennis L.
Published: April 2022

This chapter summarizes the main conclusion of this book: that we are evolved to invoke the kinds of moral and immoral social strategies that helped our early human ancestors survive, reproduce, and propagate their genes. It argues that we are not selfish by nature because we can optimize our biological and genetic success by behaving morally and reaping the benefits of cooperative social relations. It suggests that the biological analysis of morality advanced in this book is most consistent with utilitarian and functional approaches to ethics. To evaluate the morality of acts and people, we need to determine how well they uphold the systems of cooperation that contribute to the welfare of those who participate in them. It closes by suggesting that the best way to construct a moral society is to create conditions that ensure that those who adopt moral strategies fare better than those who do not.
Defining the Corporation and Corporate Law
Authors: Bruner Christopher M.
Published: April 2022

This chapter opens with a brief exploration of general challenges of legal taxonomy, focusing on the tension between internal and external views of law and the dynamic relationship between legal doctrine and social context, and then assesses three prevailing approaches to defining the domain of corporate law. These include frameworks emphasizing core constituencies, which describe corporate law as the body of law governing relations among constituencies thought to represent the central corporate actors; core features, which describe corporate law as the body of law providing features thought to be central to the corporate form’s utility; and core theories, which describe corporate law as the body of law reflecting the central purposes and goals of corporate activity. In light of the inconsistencies and limitations revealed, the chapter closes with a brief discussion of the conceptual shift toward corporate governance as a predominant framing device, which Bruner characterizes as a trans-doctrinal lens through which to think about corporate power relations.
Enduring Controversies in Corporate Law
Authors: Bruner Christopher M.
Published: April 2022

This chapter explores the emergence of the modern public corporation in the United Kingdom and the United States. Anglo-American scholars, in particular, often approach this topic with a singular archetype in mind—widely dispersed ownership of freely transferable stock by passive investors; highly centralized management through a powerful board of directors; fiduciary obligations strongly emphasizing shareholders’ interests; and substantial insulation from liability exposure for boards and shareholders alike. Bruner’s analysis, however, emphasizes the flux and dynamism that in fact characterized the historical emergence of the modern public corporation, suggesting that the attributes of the corporate form are less static and rigid than contemporary accounts suggest. Bruner then turns to long-standing controversies in corporate governance that remain hotly contested today—notably, who ought to have the last word in corporate decision-making, whose interests ought to guide corporate decision-making, and how much risk-taking is desirable. The fact that such fundamental issues remain unsettled underscores the need for a re-conceptualization of the corporate form and corporate law.
Corporate Pathologies and Corporate Sustainability
Authors: Bruner Christopher M.
Published: April 2022

The prior chapter argues that the corporate form is better conceptualized as a flexible legal technology, and subsequent chapters explore several alternative calibrations of the corporate form. This chapter establishes some baselines for evaluating those alternative calibrations. First, it explores the concept of sustainability—increasingly regarded as an imperative for our long-term survival—and assesses the merits of sustainability as a normative metric relative to alternative concepts that emphasize corporate responsibility. Second, it explores some of the principal corporate pathologies that have impeded the achievement of corporate sustainability, further informing assessment of how and when alternative calibrations of the corporate technology might prove advantageous. Finally, it explores the potential for disclosure strategies and novel accounting systems to reflect the impacts of corporate production more fully, whether through narrative supplements or by bringing them directly to bear upon a corporation’s financial statements.
Clearing the Path
Authors: Halamish Lynne Dale , Cassell Eric
Published: April 2022

Real-life parables illustrate practical communication tools that can be used by both caregivers and the recipients of that care. This is a companion volume to The Weeping Willow: Encounters with Grief (OUP, 2007), and it presents more complex encounters and nuanced emotions, based upon additional years of experience. Each chapter contains a vignette, with teaching notes frequently embedded in the story as “aside” comments. They also contain “Notes to the Practitioner” and conclusions. The Notes section specifically address preparedness for common end-of-life situations with professional directives, but most of the book teaches by examples gleaned from hands-on counseling experience.
Legacy
Authors: Halamish Lynne Dale , Cassell Eric J.
Published: April 2022

This chapter examines the question of significance, or the need for humans to make important or noteworthy contributions that have consequences, relevance, valuable content, and/or historic merit. It explores the concept of legacy of personal values or offering a dying patient the chance to write their own history. Whatever form a legacy takes, the search for it and expression of it are part of some people’s final journey.
Last Respects
Authors: Halamish Lynne Dale , Cassell Eric J.
Published: April 2022

This chapter explores the scarcity of time in two case examples where the period between admission and death was relatively short. Discusses how mental health professionals, social workers, psychologists, and/or spiritual counselors can help have short conversations and segment time to adequately address all of the issues a patient may want to discuss at the end of their life.
Denial
Authors: Halamish Lynne Dale , Cassell Eric J.
Published: April 2022

This chapter examines the importance of stories and narratives, as well as how to interpret stories heard from a patient or from a family member. It acknowledges that when meeting a patient or client, especially one who has not initiated the meeting, it is important to hear their story directly and not rely on one someone else has said. It also explores issues of control, as well as conflict of interests that may arise between the patient and family members.
The Ripple Effect
Authors: Halamish Lynne Dale , Cassell Eric J.
Published: April 2022

This chapter explores how well-meaning family members can try to shield a child from the pain a grief, and how this often does the child a disservice and can alienate children from their support system, which is usually the immediate or extended family. It considers how a more effective protection for a child is inclusion, not only in times of joy but also in times of family difficulty, pain, and sorrow.
Surviving Death
Authors: Halamish Lynne Dale , Cassell Eric J.
Published: April 2022

This chapter discusses the “natural order” of family deaths (i.e., grandparents dying before parents, parents dying before children, etc.) and what happens when a premature loss (for example, a child dying before their parents) occurs in a family. It explores the two most common responses of bereaved parents: abandonment and suffocation.
The Life and Works of Niścaldās
Authors: Allen Michael S.
Published: April 2022

This chapter focuses on the life and works of Niścaldās, examining how a member of a devotional (bhakti) order steeped in vernacular traditions came to write an authoritative exposition of Advaita Vedānta, which is usually viewed as a Sanskrit tradition. The chapter focuses on three institutions—the Dādū Panth, the system of traditional education in Banaras, and a Rajput court—and their role in shaping Niścaldās’s works. Using details from Niścaldās’s life, the chapter argues that Advaita Vedānta already enjoyed considerable popularity in North India prior to the British colonial period, contrary to a widespread scholarly view that the “privileging” of Vedānta can be traced to the work of orientalist scholars and Hindu reformers.
Niścaldās and Hindi Vedānta
Authors: Allen Michael S.
Published: April 2022

This chapter shows how Niścaldās’s choice to write in the vernacular is more significant than it might seem, entailing issues of scriptural authority, the path to liberation, claims to the uniqueness of Sanskrit, śāstric prohibitions of vernacular works, and the connections between language and community. The chapter also argues that the widely accepted “Sanskrit vs. vernacular” binary is too limiting. In fact, Niścaldās was heir to two classical traditions: a classical Sanskrit tradition and a classical Hindi tradition, both of which can be contrasted with the ordinary vernacular of Niścaldās’s day. Finally, the chapter traces sources and models for The Ocean of Inquiry, drawing attention to a much wider, largely unexplored tradition of Hindi Vedānta to which Niścaldās was responding.
Concept and Copula
Authors: Wiggins David
Published: April 2022

This chapter begins from the diagram that Frege drew for Husserl to show his (Frege’s) doctrines of sense and reference. The chapter explains and further develops the doctrines that the diagram illustrates, demonstrating their continuing usefulness and applicability, and suggests how a fair number of contemporary doctrines can be accommodated within Frege’s picture. Then the chapter seeks to show how the doubts and difficulties that Frege himself expressed concerning concept and object can be answered by a reading of the copula which assimilates it to what Alonzo Church calls an “improper symbol”. The chapter ends with a suggestion, following on from Frege’s idea of a concept, about the best way of understanding the idea of a property, not least its use in evolutionary theory as Elliott Sober among others construes that.
Peirce: Reflections on Inquiry and Truth arising from his Method for the Fixation of Belief
Authors: Wiggins David
Published: April 2022

This chapter begins from Peirce’s essay ‘On the fixation of belief’ and shows how it leads outwards into a large body of Peircean claims concerning inquiry, the ‛secondness’ of experience, abduction, hypothesis, perception, and truth. It stresses the importance of Peirce’s insistence that, when any belief of ours is found to be determined by a circumstance extraneous to the facts, that belief is weakened or abandoned. Only abduction, as Peirce characterized it, can expand our understanding from the known to the unknown. In conclusion the chapter offers a Peircean critique of Hume’s understanding of “the problem of induction”. Another conclusion is that Peircean pragmatism, properly construed, is consistent with a full-blooded realism. That which is distinctive in Peircean pragmatism is rather Peirce’s insistence that truth and inquiry are correlative notions, intelligible only as correlative with experience.
Introduction
Authors: Pryce Huw
Published: April 2022

The Introduction explains the aims and scope of the book as the first substantial survey of historical writing about Wales and the Welsh, including how it both builds on and challenges previous studies. Welsh history writing owed much of its coherence to the significant continuity in approaches from the early Middle Ages to the modern period, including the focus on the origins of the Welsh and their history down to the Edwardian conquest in the late thirteenth century and an enduring preoccupation with the place of Wales and the Welsh in Britain. However, it was also characterized by considerable variety and the book adopts a broad definition of what Welsh history writing consisted of. A fundamental premise is that accounts of Welsh history written in the centuries before the professionalization of historical study from the late nineteenth century onwards throw significant light on the cultural and intellectual history of Wales, and on ideas of Welsh identity, at the time they were produced. They therefore should not be viewed merely as an amateur prelude to modern academic history writing, although they helped to inform the content and preoccupations of the latter.
Prologue
Authors: Pryce Huw
Published: April 2022

This chapter assesses key themes in medieval Welsh understandings of the past and summarizes the political history of medieval Wales and the contexts in which historical texts were written. The themes are introduced with reference to the historical works that open the Red Book of Hergest, a major compilation of Welsh-language texts commissioned towards the end of the fourteenth century by Hopcyn ap Tomas, a cultured member of the Welsh gentry also known for his expertise in political prophecy. The chapter emphasizes the importance of the idea that the Welsh were descendants of the Britons who had once held sovereignty over the island of Britain, and were thus believed to be ultimately descended from the Trojans. One central question addressed is how far this British dimension, together with the political divisions of Wales and the impact of English domination and conquest, complicate the claims of medieval Welsh history writing to be regarded as an example of national history comparable with medieval histories of the Irish, English, and French.
Curating the Past in a Conquered Land, 1282–1540
Authors: Pryce Huw
Published: April 2022

This chapter assesses the significance of the unprecedented growth in Welsh historical writing, mostly in the Welsh language, in the period from the Edwardian conquest of Wales to the Reformation and Acts of Union. This consisted mainly of curating and consolidating works produced earlier in the Middle Ages rather than the composition of new texts. For scribes and patrons, the history that mattered most concerned the Britons and their Welsh successors under the princes whose rule had ended in 1282. By contrast, accounts of the period after the Edwardian conquest were few, brief, and focused on events in England more than those in Wales. The first part of the discussion surveys the main Welsh historical texts composed from the late thirteenth to early sixteenth centuries, with particular attention to the efforts, deeply influenced by Geoffrey of Monmouth, to give the history of the Welsh canonical form in a sequence of texts which between them narrated events from the Trojan War to 1282. The second part focuses on the poet, genealogist, and scribe Gutun Owain (fl. c.1451–1499), the most prolific writer of history in medieval Wales, including his borrowings from the first printed edition of the Middle English prose Brut chronicle published by William Caxton in 1480. These borrowings reflect how, for Gutun Owain, the history of the Welsh in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was inextricably linked to the kingdom of England and predicated on loyalty to its monarch, while nevertheless retaining a distinctively Welsh inflection.
Refurbishing the Past
Authors: Pryce Huw
Published: April 2022

This chapter discusses and contextualizes writing about the Welsh past, which was predominantly antiquarian in nature, from the 1620s to the early eighteenth century. It begins by outlining some important general characteristics of that writing, including the continuing preoccupation with the antiquity of the Welsh and their Christianity, as evidenced, for example, by Charles Edwards’s Y Ffydd Ddi-Ffuant (‘The Unfeigned Faith’; third edition 1677). The second part focuses on the antiquarian writing of Robert Vaughan (1592–1667) of Hengwrt, a member of the Welsh gentry famed for his extensive knowledge of genealogy, heraldry, history, and literature, the third on Percy Enderbie’s Cambria Triumphans (1661), the first work since the Middle Ages to relate Welsh history straight through from the arrival of Brutus in Britain to the author’s own day. The fourth part analyses William Wynne’s History of Wales (1697), a revised version of David Powel’s Historie reissued down to the nineteenth century. Lastly, the fifth part assesses how far Edward Lhuyd (1659/60?–1709), keeper of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford and an antiquary also famous for his pioneering work in natural history, palaeontology, and the Celtic languages, adopted new approaches to Welsh history. In addition, it considers what he reveals of the Welsh historical culture of his day, including popular understandings of the past also reflected in Welsh almanacs.
Civilization, Liberty, and Dissent, 1770–1820
Authors: Pryce Huw
Published: April 2022

This chapter discusses writing on Welsh history in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It assesses the significance of four main strands in particular. The first is the Romantic reinvention of the Welsh past by Edward Williams (1747–1826), better known by his bardic name Iolo Morganwg, that marked a further development of antiquarian approaches that portrayed the Welsh as heirs to an ancient civilization, transmitted through a native learned tradition termed bardism that Iolo ultimately derived from the Druids, uniquely accessible through texts in Welsh. The second strand is the new genre of historically informed topographical writing, including Thomas Pennant’s Tour in Wales (1778–83) and the first Welsh county histories. The third is The History of Wales (1786) by the Revd William Warrington, an English author who, though conventionally ending his narrative at the Edwardian conquest, broke new ground in the writing of Welsh history in his conception and approach, notably by portraying the history of medieval Wales as a struggle for liberty. Lastly, the chapter appraises another new genre, namely Nonconformist histories, written in both Welsh and English, that emphasized the making of a modern Welsh people defined by its adherence to Puritanism and Dissent.
‘Living in the Past’ and the Challenges of Modernity, 1848–80
Authors: Pryce Huw
Published: April 2022

This chapter analyses the responses of writers in the mid-Victorian period to the challenge of interpreting the Welsh past in a manner fit for a modern Welsh people. It begins by contextualizing these responses with reference especially to continuing demographic growth and industrialization in Wales and to efforts, notably by Henry Richard, to make Nonconformity a political force by claiming that it represented the Welsh people against an alien Anglican elite. There follows, second, a discussion of differing views on where to draw a line between legend and history in interpreting the ancient and medieval Welsh past. After considering the defence of legendary interpretations by the Revd John Williams (Ab Ithel) and others, the discussion focuses on works that sought, in varying degrees, to adopt a critical approach, including the histories of Wales published in English by B. B. Woodward (1853) and Jane Williams (1869) as well as, above all, The Literature of the Kymry (1848) and other writings of the Merthyr pharmacist Thomas Stephens and the substantial Welsh-language history of Wales edited, and mostly written, by R. J. Pryse (Gweirydd ap Rhys) (1872–4). Third, attention turns to another kind of historiographical response to modernity, namely the greater emphasis on post-medieval history in histories of Nonconformity, Welsh-language histories of Great Britain, and histories of the Welsh in the United States.
Scientific History and National Awakening, 1880–1920
Authors: Pryce Huw
Published: April 2022

This chapter situates writing about the Welsh past produced between 1880 and 1920 in the contexts both of the increasing professionalization of historical study and of what contemporaries called a ‘national revival’ in Wales. The first part analyses two works aimed at a wide readership that combined a conventional focus on the origins of the Welsh and their history down to 1282 with a celebration of an enlightened modern Wales created since the eighteenth century: The Welsh People (1900) by John Rhys and David Brynmor-Jones, and O. M. Edwards’s Wales (1901). The second part examines specialized studies of aspects of medieval and early modern Welsh history that exemplified new scholarly approaches. This is followed, third, by an assessment of the work of J. E. Lloyd (1861–1947), widely regarded as having played a crucial part in establishing the history of Wales as a modern academic subject thanks especially to his seminal A History of Wales from the Earliest Times to the Edwardian Conquest (1911). It is argued that, while the work broke new ground through its combination of unprecedented critical rigour and analytical coherence, its ‘scientific’ approach served to legitimize long-held assumptions that the history of Wales was above all a story about the making of the Welsh and the medieval centuries in which they had come closest to enjoying political independence.
Conclusion
Authors: Pryce Huw
Published: April 2022

The Conclusion summarizes some long-term developments in Welsh history writing. It considers why master narratives focused on the centuries down to the Edwardian conquest of the late thirteenth century proved so enduring, with reference to the changing historical contexts of the medieval and early modern periods. Comparison with Breton and Scottish historiography serves to underline how the conceptualization of Welsh history as national history was complicated by a failure to achieve a substantial degree of dynastic and regnal unity in medieval Wales, combined with a strong and enduring identification with Britain. By contrast, historical writing in Ireland provides closer parallels with Wales, as there, too, a strong sense of shared ethnic identity, anchored in the remote past, flourished in a context of political fragmentation. The Conclusion also emphasizes the variety of Welsh history writing, which extended well beyond the master narrative constructed in the Middle Ages, influential though that was, and how all that writing was informed by external historiographical, cultural, and intellectual influences.
How to Evaluate Policies
Authors: Hassel Anke , Wegrich Kai
Published: April 2022

As we have seen throughout the previous chapters, public policy is about addressing societal problems by way of targeted interventions, i.e. policies. Having an impact on the perceived social problem—improving education, increasing road safety, reducing poverty, or cutting emissions—is the raison d’être of public policy, and the question ‘did it work’ is therefore key. Evaluation is both the stage of the policy process answering this question and a subfield of policy analysis dealing with the scientific methods and approaches for evaluating public policies. This chapter discusses what good evaluation entails, and which challenges policy-makers face when designing policy evaluations in a context where the demand for evidence is growing but its role is often shaped by political logics.
Conclusions
Authors: Hassel Anke , Wegrich Kai
Published: April 2022

Public policy is much more than adopting a specific measure. It is a complex process of creating new norms or reinforcing existing ones, liaising with other stakeholders, and securing support and legitimacy for a particular path of action. It aims not only to steer the behaviour of individuals, businesses, and stakeholders, but also of policy-makers themselves. Effective policy-making is based on complementary norms, instruments, and actors that all reinforce each other. Policy-makers aim to align policy instruments with the institutional context and the stakeholders at hand. Because the context and actors vary across policy fields and countries, solutions to wicked problems need to be tailor-made; one-size-fits-all solutions seldom exist. In this final chapter, we first summarize the key messages of the book. We consolidate our general approach to the policy process and combine the key components: process, policies, and capacity. Returning to the Paris Agreement and climate change policies we began with in Chapter 1, we illustrate how our understanding of public policy can be applied to a specific yet wicked policy issue. We discuss how the concept impacts the notion of evidence-based policy-making and propose a broader understanding of the policy process. Finally, we illustrate what kind of skills a policy analyst needs in today’s policy world.
Odyssean and Herodotean Threads in the Tainia of Heliodorus’ Opening Chapters (1.1–5)
Authors: Bowie Ewen
Published: April 2022

This chapter revisits the Aethiopica’s début, noting its imprecise time-frame implies Persian control of Egypt, eventually confirmed by Oroondates’ introduction (2.24.2). Persian threads are first visible in Charicleia’s mnēstērophonia-like slaughter, evoking Polygnotus’ painting described by Pausanias in an Athena-temple constructed from Plataean spoils won at Marathon, and fostering expectations of Greek–barbarian polarities, Athenian aretē and Persian kakia—expectations Heliodorus subverts. The scene also heralds Herodotean intertexts and writing competing with visual arts—competition that resurfaces when the Delphic procession’s painterly ecphrasis resonates with Charicleia’s bridegroom’s name, Alcamenes, evoking the Alcamenes who sculpted Procne, Persinna-like, contemplating infanticide, and a Charicleia-like Aphrodite (both in Pausanias). Heliodorus’ repeated term αἰγιαλός‎ (from the fish-simile, Odyssey 22.385) reinforces mnēstērophonia intertextuality, as do his swamp-dwellers’ sun-baked fish. Their child-tethering to prevent drowning is Herodotean (as too αἰγιαλός‎): but Heliodorus transposes this to the context of women giving birth, foreshadowing Persinna’s maternal attachment to Charicleia.
Epic into Drama (7.6–8)
Authors: Hunter Richard
Published: April 2022

This chapter considers the race between Calasiris’ two sons, Thyamis and Petosiris, around the walls of Memphis; the race is modelled on that between Achilles and Hector around the walls of Troy in Iliad 22, but there is also a significant debt to other texts, notably Euripides’ Phoenissae. This scene is a prime example of how Heliodorus explores and negotiates the boundaries between epic and drama, both tragedy and comedy, and the chapter considers Heliodorus’ debt, not just to Homer and the classical dramatists, but also to the critical tradition, notably the Aristotelian tradition and the exegetical modes best known to us from the Homeric scholia. Calasiris’ sudden arrival deepens the sense of the intersection and fusion of epic and drama; as so often, recognition marks the approach of a narrative conclusion.
History
Authors: Schwyzer Philip
Published: April 2022

Elizabethan poets and literary theorists tended to draw a sharp distinction between poetry and history. Whereas history was, in Philip Sidney’s terms, ‘captived to the truth of a foolish world’, poetry offered its practitioners greater scope and imaginative liberty. Yet, despite the persistence of this dichotomy, some of the most distinctive achievements of late Elizabethan verse are constructed on the shaky fault line of history and poetry. The challenges involved in finding a poetic mode that could convey essential truths about the past are provocatively explored in Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene and lie behind the formal innovation and anxious affectivity of works like Michael Drayton’s Robert Duke of Normandy and England’s Heroical Epistles.
Scots Poetry
Authors: Maley Willy , Heijnsbergen Theo Van
Published: April 2022

When Scots poetry of the sixteenth century is read within its own tradition, evolving late medieval beginnings with its own cultural–historical features, a body of work becomes visible that is attractive in its variety and its different emphases from English poetry. These differences interrogate received critical narratives of sixteenth-century poetry in English in the British Isles, for example, in terms of its periodisation (particularly through Scotland’s late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century humanist Renaissance); its different relationship between oral, printed, and manuscript transmissions; and its contrarian encounter with Petrarchan sonneteering. A sophisticated degree of metafictional engagement manifests itself throughout the century that, in its application of reason to affect, indicates that sixteenth-century authors position identity through an engagement with their rhetorical art rather than directly through their overflowing heart.