bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
‘If we cannot laugh like that, then how can we laugh?’
Authors: Toropova Anna
Published: August 2020

Elaborating an appropriate form of Soviet laughter was one of the most pressing tasks faced by the film industry in the 1930s. Increasingly sensitive to the ideological perils of failing to deliver more Soviet comedies to the public, industry bosses turned the development of this genre into a high priority. Such efforts, however, were persistently hindered by anxieties about facilitating the ‘mindless’ laughter of comic gags rather than the ‘meaningful’ laughter of triumphant celebration or satirical condemnation. Drawing on psychoanalytic readings of the comic, this chapter explores how the play with process of signification and disruption of habitual sense-making patterns became increasingly difficult to reconcile with the objectives of socialist realism. The thorny debates surrounding Konstantin Iudin’s two pre-war comedies, A Girl with Character (1939) and Hearts of Four (1941), are used to demonstrate the ways in which the project of creating film comedy based on Soviet material had come to a standstill by the beginning of the 1940s. The war against ‘mindless’ and ‘mechanical’ laughter pushed filmmakers to abandon the comic mode that had been so central to early Soviet cinema in preference for ego-affirming humour. The new paradigm of realistic comedy purged from the ‘excess’ of comic devices, however, little satisfied the expectations of Soviet audiences. Whilst the stultifying demands previously placed on the genre briefly eased as the Soviet public’s right to the ‘laughter of victors’ was granted after the end of WWII, the onset of the Zhdanovshchina brought post-war concessions in the sphere of comedy to a halt.
Pathos, Powerlessness, and the Persistence of the Melodramatic Mode
Authors: Toropova Anna
Published: August 2020

This chapter uncovers the new generic guises assumed by the melodramatic mode after the cultural revolution—the ‘literary adaptation’ and the ‘bytovaia drama’ (the drama of everyday life). From the late 1930s, the Stalin-era screen saw an influx of films about the problems of contemporary byt which set new standards of gender relations, ethics, and morality in Soviet society through melodramatic unmasking of discrepancies between seeming and being, public duty and private desire. Offering tear-jerking portrayals of gender and social exploitation of the pre-revolutionary era, screen adaptations of literary classics similarly deployed the melodramatic mode to articulate the new contours of Soviet morality. Whilst the melodrama’s moral Manichaeism was highly amenable to Stalinism’s inquisitorial drive to unmask the ‘true’ essence of the individual, filmmakers struggled to fully align the affective structures of melodrama with the new demand for ‘optimistic tragedies’ that would inspire confidence in the power of the human will and arouse a desire to fight injustice. Even as Stalinist melodramas took on obligatory happy endings, their pathos continued to rest on the representation of insurmountable conflicts. The imperative of establishing an emotionally direct mode of address during the Great Patriotic War secured the continued release of dramas that drew audience tears by staging the dislocation of desire and fulfilment and placing the spectator in a position of powerlessness. The leniency towards melodramatic pathos did not persist into peacetime; in the post-war period, the ideological task of moral education came to dwarf the considerations of emotional effectiveness. Yet industry discussions reveal that even as post-war Stalinist cinema experienced a ‘waning of affect’, pressures to make Soviet cinema more emotionally resonant were steadily mounting behind the scenes.
Epilogue
Authors: Toropova Anna
Published: August 2020

The epilogue probes the anxieties at the root of Soviet cinema authorities’ distrust towards ‘excessive’ emotionality. Contemporary discussions and reviews repeatedly conflated bourgeois filmmaking with the cultivation of ‘thoughtless’, ‘mechanical’, and ‘empty’ affective responses. Soviet cinema, by contrast, emerged as the cinema of reasoned emotion and a sense of measure. Examining the writings of Leonid Sobolev and Béla Balázs on sentimentality, as well as the psychologist Pavel Iakobson on ‘meaningful’ aesthetic emotions, the epilogue shows how the Stalin-era suspicion of ‘unruly’ forms of emotional response was fuelled by affective life’s uncoupling from the domain of the body and its investment with social and political significance.
Fiction Institutions
Authors: Abell Catharine
Published: August 2020

This chapter explains what fiction institutions are and what it is for a work to be fiction rather than non-fiction. It outlines Guala’s account of institutions as systems of regulative rules that represent equilibrium solutions to coordination problems. It characterizes fiction institutions as those institutions whose rules represent equilibrium solutions to coordination problems of communicating imaginings. It explains both why the communication of imaginings poses coordination problems, and why the coordination problems it poses are distinct from those posed by the communication of beliefs. By elucidating the relation between works of fiction and the institution of fiction, it then explains what distinguishes works of fiction from works that are not fiction and identifies the relation between fictive utterances and works of fiction. Finally, it explains what makes a certain feature of a work of fiction a good or a bad feature of that work, considered as fiction.
Fictional Entities
Authors: Abell Catharine
Published: August 2020

This chapter addresses the existence and nature of fictional entities. It identifies two distinct conditions sufficient for the existence of fictional entities, each of which is grounded by a reference-fixing rule of fiction institutions. One of these rules describes conditions sufficient for the existence of fictional entities that are not constituted by anything, while the other describes conditions sufficient for the existence of fictional entities that are constituted by other things. It identifies the metaphysical dependence base for the existence of fictional entities and argues that this does not include anything metaphysically mysterious. It then describes the nature of fictional entities and their identity and individuation conditions. Finally, it compares the account fictional entities provided with that of Amie Thomasson and argues that, despite obvious similarities, there are fundamental differences between the accounts.
Procedural Justice and Narrow Instrumentalism
Authors: Watson Gabrielle
Published: August 2020

One persistent aspect of accounts of procedural justice relates to the role and value of ‘respect’ in citizens’ encounters with the police. In privileging procedures over outcomes, procedural justice—as standardly conceived—provides an optimistic view of the capacity of the police to bridge differences, interests, and values through respectful practices and decision-making. This chapter reflects on that familiar narrative and proposes that respectful relations have become—however unintentionally—a subsidiary concern of policing scholars and practitioners alike. Crime control outcomes increasingly occupy a central place on the intellectual agenda and, in practice, there is evidence of procedural justice being pursued on largely pragmatic ‘law and order’ grounds. When these instrumental concerns are not held in their proper place, we risk the erosion not only of respect but also of a range of other intrinsic values—transparency, neutrality, fairness, recognition, voice—that, taken together, comprise the very idea of procedural justice itself.
Hegel and the Ancient World
Authors: Desmond Will D.
Published: August 2020

Hegel is one of the most influential thinkers of modernity. Less recognized, but equally significant is his life-long engagement with ancient Greek and Roman civilizations. As a student of the Stuttgart Gymnasium, sometime headmaster of the Nürnberg Gymnasium, contemporary of philhellenes like Goethe and Hölderlin as well as seminal classical scholars like August Wolf and Niebuhr, Hegel developed his encyclopedic system at a time when classical scholarship was being institutionalized as Altertumswissenschaft, and when Hellenic studies in particular were experiencing a ‘renaissance’, especially in Germany. This chapter surveys Hegel’s life, education, publications, and persistent ideas, placing these in their immediate context in the revolutionary era after 1776. Hegel’s persistent and many-faceted return to antiquity—to the Romans as well as the Greeks—is clear in his Berlin lecture series on politics, art, religion, philosophy, and history. These themes form the core of Hegel’s philosophy of ‘spirit’, and are here outlined as the focus of subsequent chapters.
Beautiful City, Lawful Empire, Rational State
Authors: Desmond Will D.
Published: August 2020

Hegel’s exposition of the ‘rational’ state in The Philosophy of Right draws on ancient ethics, politics, and history, and cannot be fully understood without reference to his Lectures on the Philosophy of History. This chapter seeks to explore the many ‘moments of antiquity’ in the Philosophy of Right, when ancient practices or ideas infiltrate Hegel’s more abstract analysis of ethico-political phenomena. It does so by following the tripartite division of the Philosophy of Right: for example, the analysis of property in ‘Abstract Right’ is incomplete without appreciating Hegel’s response to ancient forms of slavery and the Roman ‘law of things’; the second section on ‘Morality’ is primarily Kantian, yet is also implicitly in dialogue with Socratic thinkers for its evaluation of virtue, the Good, and conscience; finally, Hegel’s innovative concept of ‘Ethical Life’ is significantly indebted to his understanding of the Greek and Roman families, ancient constitutional arrangements, and Justinian’s Code. Turning from these and other ‘moments of antiquity’, the chapter then offers a more continuous presentation and evaluation of Hegel’s understanding of Greek and Roman histories, explaining how his concept of the ‘beautiful’ Greek polis and ‘lawful’ Roman empire were for him the two historically necessary stages in the development of the modern ‘rational state’.
Postverbal negators in Gallo-Romance
Authors: Paoli Sandra , Bach Xavier
Published: August 2020

This chapter offers a diachronic investigation of the Occitan post-verbal negators pas and ges through the analysis of a selection of narrative texts covering the eleventh to fifteenth centuries. Addressing an area that has received little attention in the literature, this chapter identifies the first occurrences of these negative markers and discusses in detail their characteristics, their development and, for ges, its decline. The data suggest that while the minimizer pas possibly started off as a marker of emphatic negation, becoming also a negator of discourse-old propositions, the generalizer ges followed the inverse path, starting as a negator of a presupposition and gradually moving to be an emphatic negator. In the case of pas, its presence in negative polar questions may hold the key to understanding the reasons behind its establishment as the generalized negative marker in modern Languedocian.
Mainland and insular Norman
Authors: Jones Mari C.
Published: August 2020

Although, as Winford (2003) states, ‘There are in principle no limits […] to what speakers of different languages will adopt and adapt from one another’, it is generally accepted that open class items such as nouns and verbs are more easily borrowed than closed class items, such as pronouns, which are generally considered to be embedded at a ‘deeper’ level of the linguistic system. This chapter presents a case study of four different varieties of Gallo-Romance spoken in Mainland and Insular Normandy, which are in contact with two different superstrates, respectively French and English. It explores whether contact with its typologically different superstrates is causing change within the pronominal systems of Mainland and Insular Norman. Specifically, it examines whether we find ‘pronoun sharing’ (where borrowed surface forms are integrated ‘wholesale’ into the Norman utterance) or ‘pronoun sparing’ (where, despite the intensive contact, the pronouns of Norman remain ‘intact’).
Syncretism and metamorphomes in northern Occitan (Lemosin) varieties
Authors: Esher Louise
Published: August 2020

By detailed comparative study of data from historical and descriptive grammars, this chapter traces the source of pervasive syncretism patterns in Occitan varieties of the Limousin region (‘Lemosin varieties’). The majority of these patterns are shown to result from regular sound change causing mergers of previously distinct forms; subsequently, speakers are able to infer a morphological generalization that the forms realizing a given pair of cells are identical, and exploit the patterns as productive templates for morphological analogy. The behaviour of these patterns, and their interaction with established ‘metamorphomes’ (abstract templates for the paradigmatic distribution of inflectional exponents), is captured by treating the rise of syncretism as an example of ordinary change to metamorphomes, in which paradigm cells are reassigned from one metamorphomic template to another: this approach facilitates principled predictions about the susceptibility of metamorphomes to change in diachrony.
Democracy Under Siege?
Authors: Hellwig Timothy , Kweon Yesola , Vowles Jack
Published: August 2020

For the worlds democracies, the Global Financial Crisis of 2008–9 was catalyst for the most precipitous economic downturn in eight decades. This book examines how the GFC and ensuing Great Recession affected the workings of mass politics in the established democracies. The initial wave of research on the crisis concluded it did little to change the established relationships between voters, parties, and elections. Yet, nearly a decade since the initial shock, we are witnessing a wave of political changes, the extent to which has not been fully explained by existing studies. How did the economic malaise bear on the political preferences of citizens? This book pushes against the received wisdom by advancing a framework for understanding citizen attitudes, preferences, and behaviour. We make two main claims. First, while previous studies of the GFC tend to focus on an immediate impact of the crisis, we argue that economic malaise had a long-lasting impact. In addition to economic shock, we emphasize that economic recovery has a significant impact on citizens assessment of political elites. Second, we argue that unanticipated exogenous shocks like the GFC grant party elites an opening for political manoeuvre through public policy and rhetoric. As a result, political elites have a high degree of agency to shape public perceptions and behaviour. Political parties can strategically moderate citizens economic uncertainty, mobilize/demobilize voters, and alter individuals political preferences. By leveraging data from over 150,000 individuals across over 100 nationally representative post-election surveys from the 1990s to 2017, this book tests these research claims across a range of outcomes, including economic perceptions, policy demands, political participation, and the vote.
The Democratic Politics of Military Interventions
Authors: Wagner Wolfgang
Published: August 2020

According to a widely shared notion, foreign affairs are exempted from democratic politics, i.e., party-political divisions are overcome—and should be overcome—for the sake of a common national interest. This book shows that this is not the case. Examining votes in the US Congress and several European parliaments, the book demonstrates that contestation over foreign affairs is barely different from contestation over domestic politics. Analyses of a new collection of deployment votes, of party manifestos, and of expert survey data show that political parties differ systematically over foreign policy and military interventions in particular. The left/right divide is the best guide to the pattern of party-political contestation: support is weakest at the far left of the spectrum and increases as one moves along the left/right axis to green, social democratic, liberal, and conservative parties; amongst parties of the far right, support is again weaker than amongst parties of the centre. An analysis of parliamentary debates in Canada, Germany, and the United Kingdom about the interventions in Afghanistan and against Daesh in Iraq and Syria shows that political parties also differ systematically in how they frame the use of force abroad. For example, parties on the right tend to frame their country’s participation in the US-led missions in terms of national security and national interests whereas parties on the left tend to engage in ‘spiral model thinking’, i.e., they critically reflect on the unintended consequences of the use of force in fuelling the conflicts with the Taliban and Daesh.
Conclusions and Outlook
Authors: Wagner Wolfgang
Published: August 2020

Summarizing the various findings from the empirical chapters, this chapter concludes that party politics does matter for external relations and that democratic politics does not stop at the water’s edge. However, the concluding chapter discusses a number of caveats and qualifications to this general finding: first, party-political contestation over foreign affairs is often less intense than over domestic politics; second, party positions do not simply translate into state policy when parties enter government; third, party positions develop in interaction with external events, especially if parties are in government. Altogether, party politics is best understood as an independent and thus far understudied factor in explanations of foreign policy that interacts with other domestic politics variables, such as a state’s institutional structure, and international ones, such as a state’s international position or exposure to threats. The conclusion closes with suggestions for further research. (Populist) far-right parties and parties in the ‘Global South’ are identified in particular as areas for future research, as both have barely been studied systematically and both are very likely to have an impact on the liberal international order and world politics more broadly.
On Hospitals
Authors: Watson Sethina
Published: August 2020

This book offers a fundamental reconception of the place of welfare institutions in the medieval church, and so of the significance of welfare in Western Christianity. It takes as its subject the treatment of hospitals, xenodochia, almshouses, and leprosaria in church law from the late antique period to the fourteenth century, when the council of Vienne issued its so-called ‘magna carta of hospitals’. The place of hospitals ‘between church and world’ has long caused confusion, not least because popes, canonists, and bishops seem not to have cared about their wayward state. This book charts the legal development of a distinctively Western form of welfare. It goes beyond the councils, collections, and commentaries that made up canon law, into Carolingian capitularies, Justinian’s Code and Novels, and late Roman testamentary law. In so doing, it identifies new legislation and legal initiatives in every period, the contradictory products of law-makers who were working without legal precedent. Here, at the fringes of law, pioneers worked, and forgers played. Their efforts shed light on councils, both familiar and forgotten, and on major figures, including Abbot Ansegis of Saint Wandrille, Abbot Wala of Corbie, the Pseudo-Isidorian forgers, Pope Alexander III, Bernard of Pavia, and Robert de Courson. A new and fundamentally European history of the hospital emerges, which reveals the central place, across a thousand years, of caritas in medieval Christianity. It also charts the rise of a Christian institution that belonged not to bishops and canon law but to any of the faithful.
Introduction
Authors: Watson Sethina
Published: August 2020

This chapter redefines the problem of hospitals in the medieval church. It surveys the spread of welfare foundations to the West and, especially, the intensive foundation of welfare houses, in many forms, during the ‘charitable revolution’ of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. This messy picture of hospitals on the ground, ‘between church and world’, has never conformed to the legal model that historians have long held for hospitals, as ecclesiastical houses under the bishop (a model that rests fundamentally on the sixth-century laws of Justinian, the East Roman/Byzantine Emperor). This gap between the ‘theory’ and ‘practice’ of hospitals, so familiar in scholarship, has long been attributed to lax enforcement—and a general lack of concern—by bishops, popes, and canonists. This chapter redefines the problem as the model itself, which was established by early twentieth-century historians. It unpicks this model, identifying the national agendas that produced it and the frameworks that have continued to shape the field. It argues for canon law as a European question and for the place of welfare at the heart of medieval Christianity. The overall approach and structure of the book is then introduced.
Carolingian Lombardy (780–860)
Authors: Watson Sethina
Published: August 2020

It was not in Francia but Lombardy that councils turned their attention to xenodochia, in what was to be the only sustained effort by Western law-makers to engage with welfare houses. This chapter explores their activity, which was the product of local concern, given voice through a new forum, the Carolingian council. It identifies a programme of reform initiated under Pope Hadrian I and then Charlemagne: restauratio, a call to restore the material inheritance of the landscape, especially buildings and public infrastructure. In Lombardy, the call brought xenodochia to the attention of councils who, over time, developed language and strategies by which to address these facilities. The Lombard capitularies offer a clear definition of xenodochia, one distinct from monasteries, which the chapter then teases out. It argues that a xenodochium was not a community but a material endowment, a gift dedicated in perpetuity to a specific task or tasks of Christian welfare. To councils, the central issue was its dispositio or institutio: the directives of a will-maker as enshrined in his or her testament. This provided a fixed constitution, particular to each xenodochium. A final section explores the implications for these findings on the character of a xenodochium’s endowment.
Canonists and Commentators at the Edges of Canon Law (1100–1260)
Authors: Watson Sethina
Published: August 2020

Part III returns to the high and later middle ages to explore the efforts of law-makers to confront what they could not simply claim in law. This chapter uncovers the legal work of popes, canonists, and commentators, as they navigated the problem of hospitals in canon law and, eventually, built a modest corpus in law to define (and develop) these foundations. The rare initiative by early canonists, notably Anselm of Laon and Ivo of Chartres, was succeeded by silence in Gratian and by the frustrated efforts of decretists to discuss a subject without law. Their lack was ended with the creation of Si hospitale, a statement crafted from a decretal of Alexander III, Ad petitionem (reconstituted in Appendix A), originally a rule for the Italian order of Cruciferi (c.1170). Its appearance was part of a wider concern with hospitals, brought to a head by Bernard of Pavia, who emerges as the unexpected radical of hospital law. The nature and consequences of Bernard’s activities form the substance of the final section. His cause was rejected, although the new category of ‘religious house’, which he created to redefine hospitals as belonging to the church, passed from his Breviarium extravagantium (Compilatio prima antiqua) to the Liber extra. The defining statement in law is discovered to be Urban III’s Ad haec (X 3.36.4), which found an ingenious means to dedicate a hospital in perpetuity to its own charitable duties.
Robert de Courson and the Northern Reformers
Authors: Watson Sethina
Published: August 2020

This chapter, the first study of hospital reform under papal legate Robert de Courson, offers a new picture of the legation in preparation for Lateran IV. Courson’s hospital decree is well-known from his councils of Paris (1213) and Rouen (1214). The chapter begins by exploring the origins of the decree, finding that it did not emerge from Courson’s own moral theology, nor from the Parisian theological circle of which he was a leading member. Documentary evidence reveals an earlier iteration of the same decree and unearths a lost first council under Courson, at Reims (1213). Further investigation reveals that the legation was not launched at Paris, as has always been assumed, but with a preaching tour of Flanders and Brabant in June 1213, followed by the council at Reims. The new geography offers a new source for the hospital reform, which is explored through the spread of hospital rules, westward out of Brabant, in the late twelfth and early thirteenth century. It argues, finally, that the reform was closely tied to the beguine movement and, especially, to Jacques de Vitry. After Courson’s council at Rouen (1214), it was not adopted at any other council, including Lateran IV.
Conclusion
Authors: Watson Sethina
Published: August 2020

The conclusion reflects on some of the main findings from the book, especially its implications for a view of the relationship between church and world. It considers the changing efforts of law-makers to engage with welfare across a millennium, stressing what is most significant in their diverse responses: a consistent understanding of the character and role of a xenodochium or hospital, as something imagined and made by any of the faithful. It was a model not merely recognized but cultivated by law-makers and prelates. Welfare was an obligation incumbent on any Christian, not merely to see, but to recognize the humanity in even the most wretched stranger. This obligation, fundamental to salvation, lay at the heart of Christian society and so medieval Christianity itself.
Art, Craft, and Theology in Fourth-Century Christian Authors
Authors: Ludlow Morwenna
Published: August 2020

Ancient authors commonly compared writing with painting. The sculpting of the soul was a common philosophical theme. This book takes its starting-point from such figures to recover a sense of ancient authorship as craft. The ancient concept of craft (ars, technē) spans ‘high’ or ‘fine’ art and practical or applied arts. It unites the beautiful and the useful. It includes both skills or practices (like medicine and music) and productive arts like painting, sculpting, and the composition of texts. By using craft as a guiding concept for understanding fourth-century Christian authorship, this book recovers a sense of them engaged in a shared practice which is both beautiful and theologically useful, which shapes souls but which is also engaged in the production of texts. It focuses on Greek writers, especially the Cappadocians (Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Gregory of Nyssa) and John Chrysostom, all of whom were trained in rhetoric. Through a detailed examination of their use of two particular literary techniques—ekphrasis and prosōpopoeia—it shows how they adapt and experiment with them, in order to make theological arguments and in order to evoke an active response from their readership.
Toward an Analytic Theology of Liberation
Authors: Yadav Sameer
Published: August 2020

This chapter attempts to diagnose and critique the relative lack of interest in liberation theology as a research programme in analytic theology. After offering analyses of what constitutes ‘analytic theology’ and ‘liberation’ theology respectively and showing that the two are compatible, I argue that the epistemic good theology seeks—that of producing true explanatory theories—is subject to pragmatic and moral encroachment by other sorts of goods, including the good of serving the needs of the oppressed in society. Accordingly, I conclude that Christian theology ought to recognize liberatory interests as a norm of theological inquiry, and that instances of Christian analytic theology that are not also instances of liberation theology ought to be regarded as instances of bad theology.
Non-deference to Religious Authority
Authors: Merrick Teri
Published: August 2020

In Epistemic Authority, Linda Zagzebski argues that members of long-standing religious communities are rationally justified in deferring to the authority of their tradition when asserting certain beliefs or deciding on a course of action. Deferential trust in religious authority, on her account, is a proper expression of a member’s intellectual humility. In this chapter, I argue that Zagzebski has not sufficiently considered the fact that religious traditions may be vehicles of epistemic oppression. Christian communities have a history of hermeneutically marginalizing those whose bodies and gender identities deviate from the so-called ‘able-bodied’ male type. Drawing on the work of Kristie Dotson, Miranda Fricker, and Hermann Cohen, I show that wholesale deference to traditional religious authority would merely perpetuate this marginalization and the ensuing epistemic oppressions. On my account, non-deference to some traditionally authorized beliefs is not indicative of member’s arrogance, but rather an attempt to cultivate the virtue of epistemic justice.
Shattered Faith
Authors: Cockayne Joshua , Efird David , Warman Jack
Published: August 2020

In this chapter, we argue that it’s possible to lose your faith in God by the actions of other people. In particular, we argue that spiritually violent religious trauma, where religious texts are used to shame a person into thinking themselves unworthy of God’s love, can cause a person to stop engaging in activities that sustain their faith in God, such as engaging in the worship of God. To do this, we provide an analysis of faith, worship, and love on which to have faith in God is to have an attitude of worship to him; to have such an attitude of worship to God is to love him; and to love God is to desire union with him. We apply this analysis particularly to the case of LGBT Christians and their experience in the church today.
The Shape of Trans Afterlife Justice
Authors: Hereth Blake
Published: August 2020

Trans persons endure terrible injustices in this life: They are bullied, murdered, forced to conceal their identities, and denied opportunities that would be available to them if they were cis. This chapter offers grounds for theological hope—in particular, hope that the afterlife would be better for trans persons. I argue that we should view trans identities as worthy of respect and that, as a matter of justice, their gender identities should be preserved in the afterlife. I focus specifically on trans persons with interests in transitioning and argue that they are owed an opportunity to transition in the afterlife. Moreover, the parties responsible for their earthly abuse are principally responsible for any transitioning costs and must participate directly in the process. Finally, trans persons should be provided opportunities to procreate and enter romantic unions they were denied during their earthly lives because of their trans identities.
Defiant Afterlife
Authors: Timpe Kevin
Published: August 2020

Many Christian theologians have struggled with how people with disabilities could be perfectly united to God in the afterlife. For some, union with God requires that those with disabilities will have their disabilities ‘cured’ or ‘healed’ prior to heavenly union with God. Others have suggested that certain disabilities preclude an individual’s ability to be united with God, thus suggesting, even if only implicitly, that such individuals have no eschatological place in the Body of Christ. In this chapter, I develop an argument for the possibility of individuals retaining their disabilities in the eschaton and nevertheless enjoying complete union with God (and through God to others). While I don’t think that the argument I develop here applies equally well to all disabilities, I think it gives us good reason to consider heavenly disability as a plausible part of speculative theology.
Introduction
Authors: Gaudern Mia
Published: August 2020

Etymology has been linked to poetry in various ways since the start of the twentieth century. Beginning with theory—from formalist understandings of etymology’s role in ambiguity through the contested place of philology in modern literary criticism to poststructuralist interpretations of etymology as a purely rhetorical category—this chapter surveys the use of etymology in critical practice. It also introduces the ‘etymological poetry’ of Auden, Prynne, and Muldoon through examples of their ‘self-inwoven etymologies’. Finally, a version of Paula Blank’s theory of the ‘quasi-disciplinarity of etymological desire’ is proposed: for poets who suspend its force between critical discovery and poetic invention, etymology can address profound tensions that lie at the heart of the use of language as an artistic medium.
Paul Muldoon the ‘Etymological Junkie’
Authors: Gaudern Mia
Published: August 2020

‘Who knew forensic derives from forum?’, Muldoon asks in a recently published poem. His compulsive etymologising challenges audiences to see both the relevance and the irrelevance of etymology to interpretation, thereby accepting that they are the ultimate arbiters of Muldoon’s linguistic forensics. Following an analysis of how audience responses to etymologies are cued in his criticism, this chapter reflects on the connection that seems to exist between etymologising and elegising in Muldoon’s poetry to characterise the effect of what Paula Blank calls the ‘“etymological moment” in contemporary critical practice’ when it occurs in the poetry itself.
Reading J. H. Prynne with ‘Mental Ears’
Authors: Gaudern Mia
Published: August 2020

In 1973, Donald Davie attributed the famous difficulty of Prynne’s poetry to its etymological ‘logic’. More recently, Prynne himself proposed that we read poetry with ‘mental ears’, listening for latent etymological connections. This chapter considers how etymology can be used to read Prynne’s poems, focusing specifically on morphological patterns such as the splitting of words across line endings and the repetition of roots or affixes. Such patterns are consistent across Prynne’s large and varied oeuvre; detailed readings are given here of The White Stones (1969), Unanswering Rational Shore (2001), and Kazoo Dreamboats (2011). These readings find that Prynne’s poetic language communicates on the boundary between meaningfulness and meaninglessness, where every word disrupts and is disrupted by its history.
W. H. Auden’s Paysages Etymologisés
Authors: Gaudern Mia
Published: August 2020

Adapting contemporary psychological, sociological, and religious theories of human consciousness, Auden repeatedly tells the story of how the invention of language radically altered our relationships with the natural world. These contexts are used to examine the role of etymology—and specifically the concrete etymologies of abstract words—in Auden’s moralised landscapes, which are the settings for his stories about the origin of language. Etymological analyses identify dialogues between past and present meanings—for example, of the words ‘rival’ and ‘savage’—that illuminate Auden’s concern with ‘the relation of man as a history-making person to nature’.
Lyric Diction in J. H. Prynne
Authors: Gaudern Mia
Published: August 2020

Pearls That Were is an anomaly in Prynne’s oeuvre; it whole-heartedly adopts a Romantic lyric diction that is only used in a fragmentary way elsewhere in his poetry. Such a characteristic diction—a ‘lightness ready-made’, as Prynne once wrote—raises questions of inheritance, and there are many echoes of the Romantic poets in the collection. This chapter considers the different ways in which sustained and fragmentary lyricism (in both poetry and criticism) can avoid the manoeuvre that Clifford Siskin termed the ‘lyric turn’, which exploits a ‘lightness ready-made’. Instead, Prynne reclaims this diction by giving it back its historical weight.
Paul Muldoon’s Onomastics
Authors: Gaudern Mia
Published: August 2020

This chapter explores Muldoon’s use of names, of both people and places, in the contexts of Northern Irish conflict and traditional Irish name lore. It addresses the political and poetic implications of Muldoon’s commitment to the proverb nomen est omen, focusing on instances of dinnseanchas, charactonymy, prosopopoeia, the transferral of names, and name translation. Naming is an etymological event in the sense that names are chosen from a language for a new purpose; their subsequent relationship to that language is paradoxical, as Derrida shows in ‘Des Tours de Babel’. In Muldoon, any temptation to interpret names from within the language—to see names as omens—is itself ominous.
Origins and Early Years
Authors: Walker Greg
Published: August 2020

This chapter sketches what is known of Heywood’s early life and career, taking him from Coventry in the early 1500s to the royal household in the 1520s, setting out both what is known about these early years and what is not. It offers close readings of two short interludes which it is suggested were produced for performance within the humanist circle around John Rastell and Thomas More, possibly on Rastell’s newly built domestic stage at his house in Finsbury Fields. It identifies elements of these early plays that would become characteristic of Heywood’s later dramaturgy, with its subtle, innovative approach to audience engagement.
Speaking in Parables
Authors: Walker Greg
Published: August 2020

This chapter looks at Heywood’s most enigmatic and critically divisive text, the long, allegorical narrative poem, The Spider and the Fly. Against prevailing notions that it is a parable of the Reformation, in which the flies are oppressed Catholics and the arachnids persecuting Protestants, it argues, through a close reading of the poems many twists and turns, that it began as a gentle parody of lawyers’ quibbles, designed for the More circle in the 1520s. This was revisited in the aftermath of the popular rebellions in Cornwall and East Anglia in 1549, and finally repurposed for publication in the mid-1550s, at which point a short ‘conclusion’ was added, which represented the Maid’s last-minute intervention to save the Fly and crush the Spider as a reflection of Mary Tudor’s ‘merciful’ treatment at her accession of those who had conspired to place Jane Grey on the throne. It suggests how the discussion of Mary’s accession is crafted to offer counsel to Mary to take a similarly merciful approach to religious dissenters in the bloody final years of her reign.
‘His own life and nature’
Authors: Walker Greg
Published: August 2020

The conclusion addresses the themes of Erasmianism, identity, comedy, and survival that have run through the book as a whole, suggesting both the achievements and the limitations of Heywood’s life-long attempt to use drama, music, and poetry to address issues of Church and State and to remain true to the idea that writing should always be for the benefit of the commonweal. It offers a summation of the argument of the book as a whole, and makes the case again for the significance of Heywood as a writer, performer, and creative artists, and as a valuable witness to the turbulent history of the Tudor century.
Local Development Agents
Authors: Jakimow Tanya
Published: August 2020

Local development agents are critical to the practices and outcomes of development interventions and influential actors in local political economies, yet their experiences are relatively under-explored. This chapter argues for the distinctiveness of local development agents as an object of study in development studies, a term used to describe people engaged in delivering ‘development’ who share a close socio-economic and geographical location with the recipients. It maps out six characteristics of the diverse group of actors that fall into this category, of which greater susceptibility to be affected is one. The chapter introduces the local development agents that are the focus of this book and provides an overview of the conditions in which they operate. It makes a case for the importance of comparative ethnographies of such actors, and proposes a ‘research approach of affection’ to capture the emotional and affective dimensions of their experiences.
Servitude
Authors: Jakimow Tanya
Published: August 2020

Women municipal councillors in Dehradun, India, represent themselves as social workers, in affectionate relationships with their constituents. Yet often they are positioned as servants, required to undertake petty work on behalf of an ungrateful citizenry. This chapter argues that collective forms of affect make possible, if not probable this positioning. Affective practices of supplication during election campaigns resonate in the relationships between constituents and elected representatives, making durable what is most often considered only a temporary inversion of social hierarchies on election day. A moral atmosphere of clientelism makes political actors susceptible to engendering suspicion and disdain in others, further emboldening an assertive citizenry to make demands that far exceed their entitlements. These collective conditions shape the possibilities for self of women municipal councillors; becoming a ‘servant’ reveals the limits of their self-authorship.
The Epistemic Costs of Politeness
Authors: Goldberg Sanford C.
Published: August 2020

This chapter aims to assess the distinctly epistemic costs of politeness. These include not only the loss of opportunities to acquire true beliefs when knowledgeable people self-censor owing to politeness, but also the loss of silence’s epistemic significance as a signal. The chapter does not claim that these costs should prompt us to give up our commitment to politeness; only to recognize the cost, in the spirit of an honest accounting.
Conjunctions
Authors: Graham Florence Lydia
Published: August 2020

This chapter addresses the use of Turkish conjunctions—conjunctive, concessive, disjunctive, purpose, subordinating—in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Bosnian and Bulgarian texts. It briefly discusses conjunctions in relation to borrowing hierarchy.
The Prosthetic Fantasies and Fallacies of Claude Wheeler
Authors: Shaheen Aaron
Published: August 2020

The chapter frames Willa Cather’s 1922 novel One of Ours within the context of the US government’s concern about wartime production’s depletion of American forests. Government rehabilitationists and foresters alike sought to place disabled soldiers in forestry-related vocations, which would provide employment and spiritual renewal in nature. These concerns mirror those of Cather’s protagonist Claude Wheeler, who suffers a spiritual amputation at age five when his father cuts down a tree with which Claude had developed an Emersonian kinship. In war he finds spiritual wholeness by offering himself as the prosthetic limbs for those intellectually and artistically superior individuals whom the war has physically and spiritually amputated. Claude’s wholeness comes, ironically, in seeing himself as the trees being cut down for the matériel needed to win the war and civilization to the western world. This self-conceptualization puts him in close company with Italian Futurism, which praises both human mechanization and violence.
Disagreement, Semantics, and Meta-Semantics
Authors: Dunaway Billy
Published: August 2020

Moral Twin Earth thought experiments appear to show that practical language is highly stable, and that many possible users of practical language are capable of having genuine disagreements with each other. This chapter clarifies a tempting generalization of this idea, which is that the members of every pair of possible users of moral language are capable of having a genuine disagreement. This is the Universal Disagreement thesis. It then shows how this thesis can be adapted to a contextualist semantics for ‘ought’ and other practical terms. It concludes by arguing that, for the realist, the central explanatory target is a claim about the stability of practical language.
Failures of Stability
Authors: Dunaway Billy
Published: August 2020

This chapter argues against the Universal Disagreement thesis. Some possible communities use moral language, but do not have substantive disagreements with others who use their moral language differently. These are cases where the parties both use their terms with a moral role, but instead of differing over which substantive theory they follow when applying their moral terms (as in the original Moral Twin Earth cases), they differ in which additional roles they use these terms with. This is consistent with intuitions about Moral Twin Earth cases, but shows that they can lead to overgeneralizations about the semantic effects of a moral role. Instead, what needs to be explained by a meta-semantics for moral language is a more limited claim. Realists will have to show that moral terms are highly stable, but that it is possible to use a term such as ‘right’ with a moral role without referring to moral rightness.
Reference Magnets: How Do They Work?
Authors: Dunaway Billy
Published: August 2020

Reference magnetism is a promising and easily motivated thesis in meta-semantics. It has a metaphysical component: that some properties are elite, or metaphysically privileged. And it has a linguistic component: that elite properties are easier to refer to than non-elite properties. This chapter clarifies the notions of “use” and “eliteness” that characterize the elements of reference-determination, according to reference magnetism. Reference is determined, on this view, not only by our linguistic dispositions, but also by metaphysical facts, which concern the significant parts of reality. The chapter closes with a development and defense of the thesis in light of recent criticisms. This sets the stage for explaining some central features of practical language which were outlined in Chapters 1 and 2.
Introduction
Authors: Bloxham Donald
Published: August 2020

Against majority opinion within his profession, Donald Bloxham argues that it is legitimate, often unavoidable, and frequently important for historians to make value judgements about the past. History and Morality draws on a wide range of historical examples, and its author’s insights as a practising historian. Examining concepts like impartiality, neutrality, contextualization, and the use and abuse of the idea of the past as a foreign country, Bloxham’s book investigates how the discipline has got to the point where what is preached can be so inconsistent with what is practised. It illuminates how far tacit moral judgements infuse works of history, and how strange those histories would look if the judgements were removed. Bloxham argues that rather than trying to eradicate all judgemental elements from their work, historians need to think more consistently about how, and with what justification, they make the judgements that they do. The importance of all this lies not just in the responsibilities that historians bear towards the past—responsibilities to take historical actors on those actors’ own terms and to portray the impact of those actors’ deeds—but also in the role of history as a source of identity, pride, and shame in the present. The account of moral thought in History and Morality has ramifications far beyond the activities of vocational historians.