bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Magister Equitum
Authors: Konrad C. F.
Published: September 2022

The Magister Equitum receives his powers (imperium and auspices) through appointment by the Dictator; unlike other magistrates, he does not validate his own auspices upon taking office (the Dictator does it for him). He does not hold his office from the People, and thus can—and must—be dismissed by the Dictator. In the Dictator’s presence, his auspices are inactive; but when acting separately, they become his own, although still tied to those of the Dictator: if the latter’s auspices are vitiated, the flaw also affects the Master’s (and probably vice versa). Nothing in theory prohibits the Magister Equitum from celebrating a triumph, since, when commanding separately from the Dictator, he does so under his own auspices. The office could be held jointly with a lower magistracy, but cumulation with the consulship (as in the case of Lepidus under Caesar) was deemed improper. Despite Caesar’s dominance in the years 49–47 bc, the majority of the Augural College refused to bow to political pressure and continued to render its decisions in accordance with augural law; they refused Caesar’s demand to authorize his appointment as Dictator by a Praetor. The augural objection to Antonius remaining in office as Magister Equitum for longer than six months in 48/7 bc was based on the particulars of his appointment, which unlike Caesar’s as Dictator had not been made for a whole year, but only for six months.
Drowning the Chickens
Authors: Konrad C. F.
Published: September 2022

Three instances of resistance to the auspices during the final years of the First Punic War suggest an undercurrent of opinion questioning the practice among the Roman nobility. The drowning of the pulli by the Consul P. Claudius Pulcher in 249 bc occurred not at his departure from Rome, but immediately before the Battle of Drepana in Sicily; it raises a highly technical question of how auspices functioned at sea. The other Consul, L. Iunius Pullus, sailed in spite of prohibitive auspices in an attempt to save the supply convoy he was guarding from enemy attack, and lost the entire fleet in a storm. Both were subsequently tried on a charge of treason (perduellio), clearly not for the loss of their fleets but their violation of the auspices. In 242, the Consul C. Lutatius Catulus (or possibly his brother, Lutatius Cerco, in 241) sought to substitute a consultation of the oracle of Fortuna Primigenia at Praeneste for the traditionally required auspices, but desisted in the face of strong senatorial opposition.
Rabelais, Cervantes, and Libraries in Fiction
Authors: Crawford Robert
Published: September 2022

The most influential depictions of libraries in fiction are those of Rabelais in Gargantua and Pantagruel and of Cervantes in Don Quixote. These works and their reception in English-language literature are discussed. Stretching from the Middle Ages to the present, this chapter ranges across English and some American literature. Particular attention is paid to the notion of the library as a site of tension between order and subversive disorder, and to the library as a place associated with madness, especially the madness of scholars. Among the authors discussed are John Donne, Sir Thomas Browne, writers about women and eighteenth-century circulating libraries, Gothic novelists, and James Joyce. Though many novels are considered, more detailed consideration is given to Walter Scott’s Waverley, George Eliot’s Middlemarch, and G. K. Chesterton’s The Return of Don Quixote.
M. R. James’s Libraries
Authors: Jones Darryl
Published: September 2022

M. R. James is the pre-eminent ghost story writer in English. He was also the pre-eminent manuscript scholar of his day. This chapter argues that these two activities were, for James, intimately linked. His ghost stories are, in fact, a kind of imaginative surplus or by-product of his formal scholarship, which was largely made up of cataloguing the manuscripts of numerous ancient libraries, including most of the libraries of the Cambridge colleges. In James’s stories, scholarly and archival research unleashes terrible supernatural entities, very often various kinds of Old Testament demons, or else a variety of unappeasable ghosts. The chapter looks at a section of James’s stories in which library researchers uncover more than they had bargained for, and closes with an extended reading of James’s most librarianly story, ‘The Tractate Middoth’, which has deep roots in both the catalogue and the physical architecture of Cambridge University Library.
Borges’s Libraries
Authors: Williamson Edwin
Published: September 2022

This chapter considers a series of libraries—both real and imagined—as stages in Borges’s thinking about the scope and power of the creative imagination. While claiming his father’s library was ‘the chief event in his life’, Borges also ‘felt ashamed’ to be ‘a bookish kind of person and not a man of action’. This disjunction gave rise in his youth to a romantic-expressionist poetics through which he hoped to transcend the spectral ‘unreality’ symbolized by the library in order to capture something vital, unique, and true with his pen. His disillusionment is traced through texts such as ‘Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote’ (anticipating Roland Barthes’s ‘The Death of the Author’), ‘The Total Library’, ‘The Library of Babel’, ‘Poem of the Gifts’, ‘The Other Tiger’, and ‘Borges and I’, concluding with a sequence of late poems identifying with Alonso Quijano, Cervantes’s bookish hidalgo, who dreamt of escaping from his library to become ‘a man of action’ but whose thwarted dream, paradoxically, won immortality in the figure of mad Don Quixote, an ‘unreal’ character in a famous book.
Fantastic Books and Where to Find Them
Authors: Lodge Sara
Published: September 2022

In Fantasy, libraries are often labyrinthine, like the brain itself; they are attractive repositories of magical power and secrets, but also dangerous zones where characters can become trapped. Books are frequently imaged as living forms that may fly, bite, or shriek. Authors of Fantasy sometimes stage conflict in the library between a conception of texts as static, orderly, authoritative repositories of predominantly male knowledge and a more fluid conception of texts as organic, generative bundles of cells whose implicitly female corpus revels in perpetual flux and multivalent modes of knowing. These authors stage metatextual debate between the genres of History and Fantasy in the library that asserts the power of Fantasy and its status within the Academy. In this genre, the book one finds in the library typically relates to one’s inner life: a text that can transform the dead language of knowledge into the living dialogue of action.
Introduction
Authors: Cross Richard
Published: September 2022

This chapter introduces two key Christological theories that guide the discussion through the book. The first, associated with Duns Scotus, maintains that the union of human nature and divine person requires some kind of created relational tie. The second, associated with Thomas Aquinas, denies this, and holds that the intrinsic metaphysical structure of the two components, so to speak, means that, once joined, the human nature and the divine person cling together without any further explanation. The chapter introduces a series of models to capture the distinction: two pieces of Velcro (Aquinas) as opposed to two pieces of cloth buttoned together (Scotus), or a mortise and tenon joint (Aquinas) as opposed to two blocks glued together (Scotus). Scotus’s theory is an example of what the book labels ‘union theories’, and Aquinas’s an example of what the book labels ‘communion theories’. The chapter introduces further subdivisions to communion theories. They might be, for example, explanatory, specifying the relevant features of the divine person and human nature in virtue of which they are apt to cling together, or non-explanatory. And they might be maximalist, such that a feature of the divine person (for example, existence or subsistence) becomes some kind of internal feature of the human nature, or minimalist, such that this characteristic does not obtain.
Union Theories in Catholic Theology (2)
Authors: Cross Richard
Published: September 2022

This chapter shows how Suárez’s account of both subsistence and the union of divine person and human nature as modes was adopted in much of Iberian Thomism: first of all Pedro de Cabrera, and then two Salamancan Dominicans, Francisco Araújo and Pedro Godoy, and finally in the Cursus theologicus of the Discalced Carmelites at Salamanca, the so-called ‘Salmanticenses’. These thinkers fundamentally conceptualize the issues in terms of the requirement for a foundation for the categorial relation between human nature and divine person affirmed by Aquinas. The relation requires a permanent foundation, for which they borrowed Suárez’s mode of union. But they combined with this Cajetan’s view that the subsistence of a nature is what makes it apt to be the subject of existence. So they held that the nature both lacked its proper subsistence and proper existence, and that the place of these was taken by the divine subsistence and existence. In both cases, this communication of divine subsistence and existence to the human nature is explained by the created mode of union that the human nature has to the divine person: a reductionist account of the communication of divine subsistence and existence to the human nature.
Union Theories in Reformed Theology
Authors: Cross Richard
Published: September 2022

This chapter discusses the universal acceptance of Scotus’s union theory of the Incarnation by Reformed theologians. This theory is sometimes formulated in terms of the anhypostasia–enhypostasia binary. Generally, Reformed theologians (unlike Lutheran ones) are happy to affirm the anhypostasia: that the human nature lacks proper subsistence. But they are more hesitant about the enhypostasia, since they associate the term with the claim that the human nature subsists—and they dislike this latter claim, since it suggests to them that the human nature is a person, and thus that Nestorianism is true. Some even reject the enhypostasia tout court for this reason. The Reformed theologians generally affirm that subsistence is a mode. A final section discusses the semantics of personal predication in terms of identical predication, about which the Reformed theologians disagree strongly with the Lutheran theologians.
Communion Theories in Protestant Theology (1)
Authors: Cross Richard
Published: September 2022

The view that the union consists in a relation between the divine person and a human being—a homo assumptus—(as opposed to a human nature) soon came to predominate in seventeenth-century Lutheran theology. This chapter describes the views of some Protestant theologians who accepted the immediate communication of divine subsistence to the human nature, but rejected this Lutheran view. The chapter begins with the sole Reformed theologian to accept this communication theory: Amandus Polanus, who quotes Thomas Aquinas to the effect that the divine esse is immediately communicated to the human nature. (In a long footnote, it is shown how Polanus was expressly followed in this by the most significant twentieth-century theologian, Karl Barth, and thus that Barth’s Christology is quite atypical of Reformed theologians.) The chapter then considers two Lutheran theologians, Leonhart Hutter and Georg Calixt, both of whom accept communion theories and combine them with a semantics of personal predications such as ‘God is man’ according to which subject and predicate both supposit for the divine person (rather than the divine person and a human being).
The Genus Idiomaticum
Authors: Cross Richard
Published: September 2022

This chapter examines the varied accounts theologians give of the semantics of those Christological predications in which divine and human properties are predicated of the person. It begins with an analysis of Francisco Suárez’s account of the issue, and then examines the view of the Reformed theologian Bartholomäus Keckermann. The chapter shows that the great point of division between Lutheran and Reformed theologians of the sixteenth century—whether or not the divine person bears human accidents—was no longer a point of disagreement in the seventeenth. Both sides agree that the divine person does indeed bear these attributes. The main part of the chapter focuses on Lutheran semantics: first, that of Hutter and then that of the Brenzian theologians. The initial problem for such theologians was that Brenzian Christology on the face of it requires the human being to be the subject of divine attributes. Given that there are some attributes that the human being cannot be the subject of (e.g. eternity), Brenzian Christology is on the face of it incompatible with the teaching of the Council of Chalcedon. Hafenreffer, in 1603, manages to come up with a semantics that solves this issue, and he is then followed by the later Lutheran theologians. The chapter includes a lengthy consideration of the claim of the Tübingen theologians, here represented by Theodor Thumm, that the divine nature may be said to be the subject of human attributes. It is argued that there is no sense in which this should constitute a genus tapeinoticum.
Pragmatist Quietism
Authors: Sepielli Andrew
Published: September 2022

Pragmatist Quietism argues that there are objective ethical truths that neither require nor admit of a vindication or foundation from domains outside of ethics—metaphysics, semantics, epistemology, and so on. First, it argues that normative-ethical debates are similar in important ways to debates that philosophers call ‘merely verbal’; the key difference is that the former influence action and affect in a way that the latter do not. It then uses this set of features to explain why there are objective ethical truths that don’t need or allow for extra-ethical vindication, but also why it can sometimes seem as though ethics is not objective. This explanation of ethical objectivity without foundations is a distinctly pragmatist one, where pragmatism is the approach to inquiry and explanation on which we endeavour to guide our beliefs by considerations of value rather than by the accurate representation of the world. The meta-ethical outlook is then applied to issues in moral epistemology, including disagreement, and debunking arguments.
Objectivist Quietism about Ethics, Part One
Authors: Sepielli Andrew
Published: September 2022

This chapter fashions the ‘raw materials’ from Chapter 2 into an explanation of why ethics admits of objectively right answers, and why the claims within what we call ‘normative ethics’ can neither be vindicated nor undermined by metaphysics, semantics, and the like. First the notions of ‘truthy’ value and its constituent values (predictive, general-practical, and representational) are explained. Then it is argued that the relevant ethical disputes, in virtue of being superficial, do not afford truthy values. It is further argued that fields like metaphysics and semantics could bear on ethics only by bearing on the truthy value enjoyed by an ethical belief; it follows that these fields are irrelevant to the ethical disputes in question. However, the chapter distinguishes a set of values called ‘specifically ethical’ values, and shows how: (a) superficial ethical disputes can afford these, largely in virtue of the disputes’ influence on action and affect, and (b) a conception of truth in ethics can be constructed out of the specifically ethical values, such that these disputes can admit of truth. The chapter concludes with some arguments that the truths available in these disputes are sometimes objective, or mind-independent.
Introduction
Authors: Clements Ben , Bullivant Stephen
Published: September 2022

The Introduction sets out how the study contributes to and advances existing scholarship on the Catholic community in Britain and on wider processes of religious change and secularization. It sets out the core research questions animating the study and the range of topics analysed in depth. It then delineates the key findings and how they advance theoretical perspectives and debates in existing scholarship. It discusses the new ‘Catholics in Britain’ survey on which the book is based. It i provides important information about the study’s methodology, the survey fieldwork, and the scope and content of the questionnaire. It also provides an outline of the book’s overall structure, including summarizing the aims and thematic focus of each chapter.
Behaving and Belonging
Authors: Clements Ben , Bullivant Stephen
Published: September 2022

Chapter 2 focuses on religious behaving and belonging. It emphasizes the primacy of religious practice for Catholics, the primary measures for which are Mass attendance, frequency of prayer, and regularity of Confession. For ‘belonging’ the analysis looks at the type of Mass most frequently attended (noting the wide liturgical diversity on offer within British Catholicism), and where they attend it (in their own parish or elsewhere), on the assumption that the specific worshipping community attended is a salient signal of certain subtypes of Catholic identity. The chapter presents new data on the social bondedness of British Catholics and show how this differs according to age and religious practice. It also discusses a significant youth effect within our data, in light of three possible explanations: survivorship bias, immigration, and a ‘creative minority’ effect.
Epilogue
Authors: Clements Ben , Bullivant Stephen
Published: September 2022

The Epilogue consider the overall significance of Catholicism within the ambit of British religion. It offers some cautious thoughts on the Catholic community and how it engages with its faith in the context of the current Covid pandemic, which began in early 2020. It reflects on the impact the Covid pandemic is likely to have on the study’s main findings in the future. While offering some informed speculation, it stresses that the more significant long-term effects of the pandemic will likely emerge gradually. Finally, this Epilogue emphasizes that the new survey provides a solid benchmark against which to judge the lasting effects of the pandemic on Catholics in living Britain.
Introduction
Authors: Foley Hugh
Published: September 2022

The introduction begins by discussing how and why liberal American poets have connected the subject of the lyric poem to liberal ideas of what the subject of rights looks like. The introduction sets out the book’s approaches to this connection, laying out the rationale for examining what it calls, after Paul de Man, the ‘lyric exchange’ as a set of techniques that poets can self-consciously use to respond to the critique of liberalism inside their poems. After discussing how recent scholarship has thought about the concept of lyric, it discusses the way that political critiques of lyric share a gestural pattern. It is argued that this pattern can be incorporated into poems. The introduction finishes by reading Walt Whitman’s ‘Crossing Brooklyn Ferry’ in order to show how the terms of the argument can be brought to bear on an individual poem.
Tradition and the Individual Dissent
Authors: Foley Hugh
Published: September 2022

This chapter discusses the work of Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop. It explores how the influence of both the Southern New Critics and other forms of right-wing modernism, as well as the particular historicist tendency in Marxism, structure an anxiety about individual expressive lyric and liberal individualism. It argues that these criticisms granted Lowell and Bishop the perception of a double bind, in which dissent articulated from an individual perspective might be seen as endorsing liberalism as it existed. New critical arguments against capitalism, and the later vision of Cold War liberalism, presented a similar problematic in which support for a liberal society depended on conformity. The chapter demonstrates that Lowell and Bishop use the lyric exchange with the external world as a way of staging dissent from Cold War conformity without endorsing a kind of ahistorical view of the individual. The chapter concludes by reading ‘The Armadillo’ (1957) and ‘Skunk Hour’ (1958), arguing that these represent an attempt to test the capacities of the individual, and that this capacity speaks against the enlistment of conscience in the great power struggle.
Poetic Priesthood in the Seventeenth Century
Authors: Prakas Tessie
Published: September 2022

Poetic Priesthood reads seventeenth-century devotional verse as staging a surprising competition between poetry and the established church. The work of John Donne, George Herbert, Richard Crashaw, John Milton, and Thomas Traherne suggests that the demands of faith are better understood by poets than by priests—even while four of these authors were also ordained. While recent scholarship has tended to emphasize the shaping influence of the liturgy on the verse of this period, this book argues that verse instead presents readers with a mode of articulating piety that relies on formal experimentation, and that varies from the forms of the church rather than straightforwardly reproducing them. In offering their readers this poetic aid to devotion, these authors shape an alternative and even more ample form of ministry than in their ecclesiastical activities. While they do not often theorize their verse practice explicitly in these terms, that practice is continuous with their definitions of ministerial behavior both in their verse and in the other writings this book considers, including sermons, prose treatises, and polemical pamphlets. In a historical moment when some literary writing began to define itself as a discursive arena separate from theological or doctrinal considerations, these authors complicate that picture: they claim the work of priesthood for poetry—but they do so by critically interrogating the forms of the church, through the unique formal affordances of verse.
“O let thy blessed Spirit bear a part”
Authors: Prakas Tessie
Published: September 2022

Where Donne advocates an attitude to liturgical worship that is shaped by the act of engaging with figured speech, Chapter 2 proposes that Herbert’s poetics take the inverse approach. By reading The Temple alongside the multivocal music-making that was gaining increasing attention in the liturgy of the late-sixteenth-century English church, the chapter argues that Herbert’s verse presents such musical occasions both as communal prayers to be heard and as attempts to figure forth God’s response. In so doing, however, Herbert hints that these attempts can be devotionally self-defeating, making worshippers less able to appreciate the complex nature of their union with God amidst the loud noise of their music of praise. By contrast, the language on the poetic page more boldly brings God into the vocal mix, often by dismissing the distracting potential of literal music.
“One friendly flood”
Authors: Prakas Tessie
Published: September 2022

Richard Crashaw’s verse points less to the limitations of specific liturgical forms than to those of strictly defined confessional belonging. Critics have tended to read his vivid descriptions of religious fervor as signifiers of a uniquely Catholic aesthetic, and sometimes as specifically intended to encourage denominational conversions in their readers. Chapter 3 instead examines these stylistic traits as Crashaw’s attempt to generate a poetics that is available and appealing across confessional boundaries. This reading takes a cue from Crashaw’s verse account of baptism as a rite that “blends” Christians “into a blood” rather than dividing them. The chapter argues that this notion of baptism shapes both his symbols and his verse form, as Crashaw’s lineation “baptizes” into more ecumenical devotional experience both the trope of the tear and the female figures who often produce it.
Coda “A Pulpit in my Mind”
Authors: Prakas Tessie
Published: September 2022

Poetic Priesthood ends with a coda on Thomas Traherne, who died in the same year as Milton, but whose personal and literary trajectory did not obviously resemble his. Traherne embraced the public responsibilities of ministerial vocation and remarked on them in both prose and verse. Yet perhaps most extensively of the poets in this study, Traherne also describes communion with the divine as an individual experience, one best achieved in “retirement” rather than in company with other mortals. In a reading of “Dumnesse,” the coda examines how Traherne uses the form of the catalogue to locate that retirement in verse.
Probabilities, Indicatives, and Relevance
Authors: Berto Francesco , Özgün Aybüke
Published: September 2022

This chapter combines topic-sensitivity and probabilities to provide an account of the acceptability conditions of (simple) indicative conditionals, i.e. indicatives with no further indicatives embedded in the antecedent or consequent. The account is in the spirit of the so-called Adams’ Thesis, in that the acceptability of a simple indicative is tied to the corresponding conditional probability; and in line with the Ramsey Test, whereby we assess conditionals by evaluating the consequent on the supposition of the antecedent. But it fixes the empirical and theoretical shortcomings of Adams’ Thesis by adding a relevance constraint for acceptability, where relevance is understood, again, as topic-sensitivity: we accept a simple indicative ‘If φ, then ψ’ to the extent that p(ψ|φ), the conditional probability of ψ given φ, is high, provided ψ is fully on-topic with respect to the topic of φ, plus that of background assumptions which matter for getting the consequent. The chapter presents a probabilistic logic for simple indicatives in terms of Popper functions, arguing that its (in)validities are both plausible and in line with empirical results on how people reason with conditionals.
Why Simulate Roman Economies?
Authors: Brughmans Tom
Published: September 2022

This introductory chapter explores the question of why a book on the topic of simulating Roman economies is needed at all. It aims to provide the common ground that simulation studies of the Roman economy need in order to contribute constructively to our understanding of this complex past phenomenon. It does this by describing and supporting seven claims, illustrated by using the chapters of this book as examples. Claim 1: formal modelling and computational simulation are necessary techniques for explicitly representing (aspects of) our complicated theories, and for testing them against historical and archaeological evidence. Claim 2: complex systems simulation is the only suitable approach for identifying emergent properties in complex systems. Claim 3: the Roman economy was a highly complex system. Theories describing this system are necessarily extremely complicated. Claim 4: building complicated models is a step-by-step cumulative process, where simplification is key. Claim 5: simulation should be integrated as one of our tools of the trade. This is an addition to and enrichment of current practice; it is not in conflict with current practice. Claim 6: there are many different and competing views on the nature of the Roman economy. Simulation studies will enhance constructive multivocality of these theoretical debates. Claim 7: good simulation studies of the Roman economy necessarily rely on collaboration across specialisms (where simulation is a specialism in the same way as ceramology or osteology). Encouraging this means integrating the basics of simulation approaches into education in classical studies.
Simulating Roman Maritime Trade
Authors: Warnking Pascal
Published: September 2022

To determine ancient shipping routes and travel times, a specialized navigation software program was used to simulate ancient voyages. Originally aimed solely at allowing a better understanding of the business model of a Roman trader in the first century ad by making a reliable estimate of the travel time on the main trading routes, this new method makes a contribution to a number of related debates, such as providing new aspects on the actual routes taken, the sailing capabilities of Roman merchantmen and the explanation of the shipping rates in Diocletian’s Edict on Maximum Prices. The computer permits simulating the complex interaction of a Roman sailing boat with the dynamic weather systems it encountered on its route and calculates the route under real weather conditions by virtually simulating a journey. The results obtained through this formal modelling and computational simulation, and further work on the technical sophistication of the model by adding more performance data from reconstructed ships and more ship types, such as warships, allow us to address a wider range of research questions, even beyond the Roman economy. Shipping shaped antiquity. The better we understand shipping, the better we understand antiquity. The method presented in this paper contributes to that goal.
The Antonine Plague
Authors: Vlach Marek
Published: September 2022

Since the beginning of discussions about the ‘third-century crisis’, the famous epidemic called the Antonine Plague has often been argued to be a key causal factor. During the crisis period, different segments and regions of the Roman world underwent various forms of turmoil (social unrest and uprising, economic problems, political instability, etc.) or external incursions (warfare, barbarian raids). Our current knowledge of the period suggests considerable ranges of the estimated death toll of the epidemic. The main intention of this chapter is to test the plausibility of these different estimated impacts on the basis of emulative digital modelling and simulation. A geographically explicit context, with a cellular framework, represents a workspace for spatio-temporal quantitative simulations to test various scenarios. Model input data include a reconstructed distribution of population density, infrastructural density, historical clinical data on the disease, and other factors. The vital part of simulation dynamics is defined through epidemiology mathematics (a compartment model with dynamics driven by differential equations). Coping with a large array of input variables, which are known only to a limited extent, has constrained our ability to test scenarios for assessing possible quantitative and spatial aspects of the epidemic impact within the demographic structures of the Roman Empire. Nevertheless, on the basis of simulation results it was possible to put the general plausibility of some existing estimates into a new perspective.
Settlement Scale and Economic Networks in the Roman Empire
Authors: Hanson J. W. , Brughmans Tom
Published: September 2022

The demand created by city populations for food, water, building materials, fuel, and other commodities must have had a tremendous impact on their immediate surroundings and the functioning of the Roman economy. But what effect did the population sizes of settlements have on trade, the flow of economic information, and the degree of economic integration in the Roman Empire? This chapter explores this question from the perspective of settlement scaling theory using computational modelling, which is made possible thanks to two important recent developments: (1) the development of sophisticated computational models for how the attributes of settlements change as the numbers of individuals who reside in them increase, and (2) the development of credible estimates of the numbers of residents in settlements for the Roman world in the imperial period, including the Eastern Mediterranean. By using simulation to test a wide range of hypothetical scenarios against archaeologically observed tableware distribution patterns, we are able to propose a new viable theory for tableware trade in the Roman East for this period. This consists of two elements: (1) commercial actors and businesses active in the tableware trade followed a sublinear scaling relationship known from commercial sectors such as transportation, warehousing, and retail, confirming our impression that traders were more akin to middlemen; and (2) a tableware production capacity reflective of the population size of a major urban centre was a crucial factor determining the shape of the tableware’s inter-regional distribution.
Copying of Economic Strategies in Eastern Mediterranean Inter-regional Tableware Trade
Authors: Carrignon Simon , Brughmans Tom , Romanowska Iza
Published: September 2022

Ceramic tableware evidence from the Roman East reveals clear evidence of influence of tablewares on each other (through distributions, stamps, and morphologies), suggestive of a competitive market. In this chapter we evaluate the plausibility of a theory describing this influence and possible competition: did tableware traders have limited or abundant access to each other’s tableware buying strategies, and did they use this information to their advantage by letting it guide their own commercial strategies? To explore whether this is a viable theory, we formulate three hypotheses using an agent-based model (H1, no access to economic information and individual learning; H2, limited access and unbiased learning; H3, complete access and success-biased learning) and statistically compare their simulation results to the archaeological data using approximate Bayesian computation. The individual modification of tableware traders’ buying strategies without access to others’ economic information is revealed as the most plausible hypothesis (H1), whilst copying the most successful trader’s buying strategy enabled through complete access to all traders’ buying strategies was the least plausible hypothesis (H3). Although these results confirm the need for inter-regional tableware traders to innovate their buying strategies individually, they firmly reject the idea that this innovation was driven by copying from other traders or having access to others’ strategies. We discuss how this result is complementary with previous work that did not conceptualize wares as distinct products and showed the need for access to information about supply and demand at markets (rather than about traders’ strategies). We believe this important insight lends further support to theories of product differentiation and producer-level mechanisms.
A Model of Grain Production and Trade for the Roman World
Authors: Dermody Brian J. , Chiu-Smit Alexander , van Beek Rens (L. P. H.)
Published: September 2022

Agriculture was the dominant sector of the Roman economy, with grain being the main source of calories for most of the population. In order to sustain growing urbanization and its armies, Rome maintained a stable grain supply in two principal ways: an impressive trade network, and agricultural intensification through rainfed and irrigated cultivation. Using a purpose-built Grain Production and Trade Model of the Roman World, we demonstrate how formal modelling approaches can be applied to examine the interplay between modes of agricultural production, interannual climate variability, and trade networks. This chapter argues that stable irrigated agricultural output, regional grain surpluses, and effective grain trade within and between provinces facilitated the empire?s resilience to interannual climate variability and were crucial for facilitating the high levels of urbanization during the early imperial period.
Modelling the Basics of Roman Demography
Authors: Verhagen Philip
Published: September 2022

In this chapter, an introduction is given to palaeodemographic simulation modelling and its application to Roman archaeology. This is illustrated by the case study of the Dutch limes region. It is often assumed that this area could not provide the number of recruits demanded by the Roman army when compared to the available evidence for settlement numbers and sizes. Simulation models based on modern and palaeodemographic data and assumptions on mortality and fertility were set up in NetLogo to test hypotheses on the effects of recruitment on population growth. If it is assumed that soldiers were not allowed to have families, the models show that recruitment of soldiers can have strong negative effects on population size in the longer run. The models were then extended to better understand the effect of marriage strategies and mortality crises such as epidemics on population dynamics. From this, it became clear that the population could have applied various strategies to influence population growth. Also, mortality crises will only seriously curb population growth when they occur frequently. These models, while relatively simple to construct and analyse, are useful to experiment with different socio-cultural, biological, and environmental factors, and can be easily transferred to different settings. We thus see a large potential for this and similar models to be used as heuristic tools that can help to understand the development of population characteristics through time and to assess the importance of the different factors contributing to population growth and decline.
Positioning Computational Modelling in Roman Studies
Authors: Wilson Andrew
Published: September 2022

This final discussion chapter attempts to set out a way forward for the use of computational models in studies of the Roman economy, and more widely. In 2016 Greg Woolf correctly identified a lack of useful datasets for Social Network Analysis (SNA) as one of the limitations of that field. But for modelling the Roman economy, many more datasets are available than for SNA, and recent years have seen an increase in their numbers and comprehensiveness. This trend will only be helped by the Open Access movement, by moves towards Open Archaeology Data, and by the development of Linked Open Data protocols which allow cross-searching across multiple databases from different sources. Model libraries are available not only to enable researchers to test other modellers’ claims but also to encourage model re-use, improvement, adaptation, and extension. Computing power, accessible software, a growing array of datasets, and model libraries all combine to lower the barriers to getting into this kind of research. Computational modelling of important aspects of the Roman economy is already possible, as the chapters in this volume show, and the field offers a powerful set of tools to analyse an array of variables with a bearing on questions of movement, distribution, connectivity, production, trade, coin circulation, etc. The purpose of the discussion here is not to attempt to summarize the findings of earlier chapters but to sketch some avenues for how some of these questions might be pursued further, especially under the headings of: agriculture; transport, distribution, connectivity, and trade; demography; and epidemiology. A review of useful source datasets is given, together with a discussion of desiderata.
Mind Reading
Authors: Stolte Tyson
Published: September 2022

This chapter traces Charles Dickens’s development of the introspective mode as a means to insist on the immateriality of the mind in two early novels, Nicholas Nickleby and Martin Chuzzlewit. In the first chapters of Nicholas Nickleby, Dickens frequently has his omniscient narrator narrate the thoughts of characters in the language of a dualist psychology. The novel is also explicitly dismissive of physiognomy, the idea that the body might serve as an index to the mind, yet Dickens’s characterization seems dependent on key tenets of that body of thought, such as its alignment of beauty and virtue. In Ralph Nickleby’s last moments, however, Dickens moves more definitively away from the outward depiction of consciousness and toward something approaching an introspective perspective. This shift toward introspection continues in Martin Chuzzlewit: Dickens offers a more skeptical assessment of the potential legibility of the body in that novel, eliding the distinction between physiognomy and phrenology and constructing the latter as a distinctly American belief, in line with the other expressions of materialism that so troubled Dickens in the United States. In an effort to cordon off mind from the (potentially legible) body, Martin Chuzzlewit ends with its own extended introspective representation of a character’s interiority, that of the murderer Jonas Chuzzlewit. But Dickens’s depiction of Jonas’s beastliness presents its own problems for a dualist psychology, seeming to erode the essential distinction between humans and animals on which such a psychology insisted.
“An Earthy Flavor Throughout”
Authors: Stolte Tyson
Published: September 2022

This chapter traces Dickens’s engagement in The Mystery of Edwin Drood with the nineteenth-century psychological concept of double consciousness, a condition in which individuals seemed to possess two discrete mental lives. According to John Forster, the novel was to conclude with the enigmatic John Jasper’s relation of the murder of his nephew “as if, not he the culprit, but some other man, were the tempted”; Jasper, in other words, was apparently to be plagued by a psychic split that would render introspection largely useless as a means to know the mind. But this chapter suggests that the novel finally seeks to dismiss the notion that Jasper’s mind is so rigidly divided, precisely because of the way double consciousness had been explained by 1870 through both the double brain theory—thereby offering the condition as evidence of the physiological basis of mind—and through theories of reflex thought that narrowed the bounds of consciousness and called into question the agency that might be exerted through any such immaterial entity as the will. Such material explanations of double consciousness, this chapter suggests, equally shed light on the efforts of physical theorists to redefine “soul” so that the word became no more than a synonym for consciousness. But because of Drood’s unfinished state, Dickens’s position in relation to psycho-physiology in this novel is never made entirely clear to most readers, and the concept of double consciousness consequently only imports into the novel the various physical meanings that Dickens sought to refute.
Type and Individual
Authors: Østermark-Johansen Lene
Published: September 2022

The chapter traces the origins of Pater’s oscillation between the specific and the generic in the period from 1864 to 1878, comparing his portraits to Francis Galton’s composite portraits. Both Galton and Pater were interested in the transferral of mental images onto material form. The emergence of Pater’s portraits alongside the birth of psychoanalysis and Galton’s experiments with memory and composite portraiture needs addressing. Slicing out a brief moment of people’s lives, photography freezes youth in art, as do the imaginary portraits. In his ‘Diaphaneitè’ essay (1864) Pater began his pursuit of the ideal type, devoid of physicality, a person without narrative or background. Pater’s Leonardo essay (1869) is discussed as a case study of one such transparent hero, displaying a transparency of vision, mind, and technique. Leonardo’s concern with optics and mirrors casts a long shadow through Pater to Freud and Galton: the mediated self, concerned with androgyny, male procreation, and splittings into recognizable types became a mark of modernity. As constructed images intended to correspond to an abstract mental image of different human types, Galton’s composite portraits challenged contemporary conceptions of photography as mimetic. Galton saw the composites as a mental image made manifest in physical form, emanations on the photographic glass plate of types stored in the mind of someone with particular visionary powers. Like Pater, he was challenging conventional notions of likeness, while aiming at an elusive type, at a face representing ‘no man in particular’.
Advertising and Art
Authors: Rosenberg Anat
Published: September 2022

Chapter 3 examines the hoarding—the advertising surface for posters. Towards the mid-nineteenth century, billposting companies started to create new property rights in space by renting or buying display surfaces. They quickly learned that their rights required an aesthetic justification, because the mass exhibition of images in the public sphere attracted criticism. The heated debate that followed drew a polyphony of voices: the National Society for Checking the Abuses of Public Advertising (SCAPA), state and local lawmakers, citizens, and the organized billposting trade. Participants used a variety of legal powers and concepts to address the boundaries between economic and aesthetic categories: advertising and art, capital and beauty, commerce and culture, revealing another facet of the role of law in boundary work. The advertising industry resorted to private law practices to monopolize spaces while claiming to introduce rational aesthetics to the public sphere. Its success only accentuated the sense of threat to art. As the industry’s private law efforts reached a cultural height in the 1890s, known as the golden age of the poster, critics of advertising promoted licensing regimes through public laws. Bound by the earlier achievements of the industry itself, public laws privileged the hoarding over competing advertising forms. However, they also established it as aesthetically inferior in relation to ideals of beauty, which were characterized by being detached from commerce. The aesthetic hierarchy created in this process was driven by anxieties about the power of print images. Yet, it adopted a rationalist approach that did not conceptualize images’ enchanting powers, nor even the limited question of visual persuasion.
Advertising and Science
Authors: Rosenberg Anat
Published: September 2022

Chapter 4 examines the relationship between advertising and science in the historical debate about medical quackery. Tensions escalated in the second half of the nineteenth century, as regular medicine sought closer imbrications with science, while the market for quackery expanded and its imperatives for doctors and patients intensified and put pressure on regular medicine. Boundary anxieties were addressed by a legally supported cultural division of labour between the market and science, which we can find in medical ethical codes as well as libel and fraud litigation that dealt with advertising. In this conceptual division, science was defined by ideals of restraint that typified scientific method, logic, and subjectivity, while their negation—leading to exaggeration—defined advertising and the consumer market. Chapter 4 shows how claims to scientific value lost in seriousness as advertising was associated with exaggeration. Quack adverts were construed less as frauds than jokes, the medicines they marketed less dangerous than useless, and the medical choices they encouraged more embarrassing to consumers than interesting for scientific knowledge. Advertising was explicitly disparaged in the ongoing comparison with science, and the consumer market was rendered epistemologically inferior. However, the markdown in cultural capital was also a form of license, for it implied liberation from rationalist restraints. The history examined in this chapter revises a prevalent interpretation of quackery in which law is absent or failing. This interpretation implies that quack advertising was a free-market phenomenon and therefore distorts the ways in which it was encouraged and shaped with legal means.
Ignorance
Authors: Zimmerman Michael J.
Published: September 2022

This chapter investigates the nature of ignorance. It is argued that, insofar as moral responsibility for ignorant wrongdoing is concerned, what is of central importance is whether one believes that one is engaged in wrongdoing. This observation prompts an inquiry into the nature of belief, one that focuses in particular on the distinction between belief and acceptance, the distinction between occurrent and dispositional belief, degrees of belief, and conflicts of belief. Also addressed are the distinction between acting from ignorance and acting in ignorance and the question of whether there can be blameworthiness without wrongdoing. Included in this chapter are three further reformulations of the Argument from Ignorance.