bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Gossip and the value of social knowledge
Authors: Roth Carla 
Published: February 2022

Abstract
This chapter argues that although gossip was condemned in theory as an inherently disruptive and primarily female form of communication, in practice it provided essential and highly valued information for anyone who sought to navigate St Gall’s social world. The chapter explores how male and female gossipers of all social levels—from St Gall’s Protestant reformers to Rütiner’s most frequent female informant, the elderly midwife Anna Bösch—used gossip to present themselves as bearers of privileged social knowledge and to raise ‘communicative capital’. The chapter then turns to gossip about crime to show that where such talk survives, it can also shed new light on well-known early modern sources.
Introduction
Authors: Hobson Suzanne 
Published: February 2022

Abstract
The introduction summarizes the background to the formation of the National Secular Society and the Rationalist Press Association in the nineteenth century and looks in more detail at their interests in publishing and the dissemination of serious literature in the twentieth. It explains the bottom-up methodology of the book which uses the journals associated with these organizations, The Freethinker and Literary Guide and Rationalist Review, to identify a list of writers whose work was seen as particular interest to an unbelieving readership. The introduction also asks why modernism is often seen as the ideal literature for a secular age in spite of the fact that its chief representatives rarely appear in these journals and, when they do, are often seen as peddling a form of literary irrationalism. It suggests that modernism’s alignment with the secular depends on a contingent interpretation of both as an age and a literature that discourages overt expressions of belief and unbelief. Modernism is not, then, the best place to look for unbelief in interwar literature because, paradoxically, its secular frame excludes the avowedly secularist and does so more thoroughly than the religious or the spiritual which can always be accommodated in sublimated form. The introduction sets the parameters for the rest of the book which includes well-known writers alongside those neglected as writers of mass-market or genre fiction. Some of them would not look out of place in an expanded modernist canon, but some, it suggests, were anti-modernist by design.
Conclusion
Authors: Hobson Suzanne 
Published: February 2022

Abstract
The conclusion describes the development of secularist publishing since the Second World War, noting significant points of intersection with debates over literature and free speech. It looks at the afterlife of the modernist secular-sacred compromise and shows how for some post-war writers and intellectuals faith found renewed purpose in fiction while unbelief did not. The conclusion revisits some of the rich fictional experiments seen in previous chapters to challenge the modernist idea still active in these contexts—that unbelief is necessarily monologic, unironic, and thereby fundamentally unliterary.
Blackfriars in Early Modern London
Authors: Highley Christopher 
Published: February 2022

Abstract
Blackfriars: Playhouse, Church, and Neighborhood in Early Modern London is a cultural history of an urban enclave best known in the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries for its playhouses and its godly preachers. As the former site of one of London’s great religious houses, the post-Reformation Blackfriars was a Liberty free from mayoral control. The legal exemptions and privileges it conferred on its residents helped attract an unusual mix of groups and activities. Zealous preachers and puritan parishioners mingled with playhouse workers and playgoers, as well as a sizable community of immigrant “strangers.” The book focuses on local playhouse-church relations and asks how a theatrical culture was able to flourish in a parish dominated the preachers Stephen Egerton and William Gouge. Physically, the church of St. Anne’s and the playhouse were virtually next-door, but ideologically they seemed poles apart. Yet despite the occasional efforts of some residents to close the playhouse, godly religion and commercial playing managed to coexist. In explanation, the book examines the conflicting economic and ideological priorities of residents and the overriding desire to promote order and neighborliness. More provocatively, I argue that the Blackfriars pulpit and stage could be mutually reinforcing sites of performance. Preachers as well as playwrights exploited the Liberty’s vexed relations with authority to air satirical and subversive views of the established church and state. By examining Blackfriars sermons and plays side by side, the book reveals a synergy between two institutions usually considered implacable enemies.
Precinct
Authors: Highley Christopher 
Published: February 2022

Abstract
This chapter maps the Blackfriars, surveys its major streets and buildings, and introduces its principal residents. Henry VIII granted much of the dissolved friary to Sir Thomas Cawarden who built his own great house on the site of the friars’ church. He sold or leased other parts to fellow aristocrats as well as to humbler artisans who put the old cloisters to various domestic and work-related uses. Contrary to received opinion, the early modern Blackfriars was not an exclusively aristocratic enclave, but home to a diverse mixture of social groups, occupations, and activities. All these were closely interconnected in a physical environment of often jarring juxtapositions.
Beginnings
Authors: Highley Christopher 
Published: February 2022

Abstract
This chapter argues that the Blackfriars early association with the Revels Office and Royal Wardrobe established a local tradition of play and performance-related activities. The first commercial playhouse that opened in 1576 was a multi-purpose space in part of the old friary where royal choirmaster Richard Farrant lodged, educated, and “staged” his boys for paying customers. This short-lived playhouse is best understood not as an isolated venture but as part of a cluster of popular recreational venues, including bowling alleys, tennis courts, and fencing schools. Collectively, they made the Blackfriars into London’s premiere entertainment area north of the river.
“Glauncing or girding at the present government”
Authors: Highley Christopher 
Published: February 2022

Abstract
This chapter explores the synergies between two venues that in their physical form and the experiences they cultivated were surprisingly alike. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, plays and sermons in Blackfriars might share the same ideological ground in the way they questioned the authorities of church and state. While Egerton’s sermons denounced an imperfectly reformed church and the mistreatment of allies like the Earl of Essex, Blackfriars playwrights also exposed political iniquities and derided an unpopular Scottish King in plays like Eastward Ho and The Ile of Guls. Egerton was punished for his transgressions and the boy actors evicted from the playhouse, but together their dissident activities helped solidify the Blackfriars’ standing as an oppositional space in London’s cultural geography.
“Sober, Scurvy, (and) Precise Neighbours”
Authors: Highley Christopher 
Published: February 2022

Abstract
This chapter returns to Jonson and his attachment to the Blackfriars stage and neighborhood, as both playwright and as parishioner of St. Anne’s. Jonson lived with patrons in the parish and so developed an intimate knowledge of local religious politics and personalities. The chapter focuses on The Alchemist, a play both performed and set in the precinct. In this most localized of plays, Jonson vents his grievances about what he sees as his interfering godly neighbors. At the same time Jonson celebrates Blackfriars’ standing as a liberty at the very moment its privileges were threatened with extinction by James I’s Second Charter of Incorporation.
The Roots of Normativity
Authors: Raz Joseph 
Published: February 2022

Abstract
This book concerns one of the most basic philosophical questions: the explanation of normativity in its many guises. It lays out succinctly the view of normativity that Raz has sought to develop over many decades and determines its contours through some of its applications. In a nutshell, it is the view that understanding normativity is understanding the roles and structures of normative reasons which, when they are reasons for actions, are based on values. The book aims also to clarify the ways in which normative reasons are made for rational beings like us. It brings the account of normativity to bear on many aspects of the lives of rational beings, most abstractly, their agency, more concretely their ability to form and maintain relationships, and live their lives as social beings with a sense of their identity.
Intention and Value
Authors: Raz Joseph 
Published: February 2022

Abstract
In previous writings, Joseph Raz joined those who take the view that action with an intention is an action for (what the agent takes to be) a reason, where whatever value there is in the action is a reason for it. This chapter sketches the role of reasons and intentions in leading to action with an intention. Section 1 explains that though belief in the value of the intended action is not an essential constituent of intentions, nevertheless when humans act with an intention they act in the belief that there is value in the action. Section 2 explains the relative role of value and intention in ‘producing’ the action, and relates their role to that of motivation.
Value and the Weight of Practical Reasons
Authors: Raz Joseph 
Published: February 2022

Abstract
Assuming that the value of options constitutes the proximate reason for pursuing them, some considerations encourage doubts whether we have reason to promote or to maximize value. A proper argument would require establishing a negative. Raising doubts is less demanding: it consists in explaining some aspects of the relation between values and reasons that enable us to dispense with the doubtful thesis, by illustrating alternative relations between values and reasons. Theses such as that value should be promoted show how to determine the strength of reasons. Abandoning the thesis reopens the question of how to do this. The doubt about promotion of value is not merely terminological. Even though the value of things and of activities is a reason to engage with them there are cases in which there is not always a reason to choose the best. The conclusion touches on the limits of the argument, and its importance.
The Guise of the Bad
Authors: Raz Joseph 
Published: February 2022

Abstract
The chapter considers the possibility of acting in the belief that the action is bad and for the reason that it is, as the agent believes, bad. Besides, can agents, without having any relevant false beliefs, perform actions motivated by their badness? The worry is the compatibility of action for the sake of the bad with the thesis of the Guise of the Good (intended actions are undertaken because agents see them as good in some respects). How can reason explanations and the more widely understood normative explanations explain actions, in light of the conditions for the rationality of actions and the bearing of masking beliefs on the explanation of their actions? Various conceptual mistakes are possible. Given the variety of human motivations, the chapter focuses on the interpretation of one case: the Luciferian motive, understood, roughly, as the drive to defy the limits of thought or of rational thought.
Normative Powers
Authors: Raz Joseph 
Published: February 2022

Abstract
The chapter provides an analysis of normative powers as the ability to change a normative condition, and distinguishes and analyses several kinds of such powers. It distinguishes between wide normative powers possessed by any act that non-causally results in a normative change, and narrow normative powers, which are the main topic of the chapter. The most important theses of the chapter are: First, the distinction between basic normative powers and chained normative powers (the latter being powers created by the exercise of other powers) and second, defending the apparently surprising claim that people have narrow powers when and because there is undefeated value in their existence. The account explores the relations between the normative powers and the values which explain and justify their existence. It ends by showing the connection between the thesis that values depend on human nature and culture, and the dependence of normative powers on justifying reasons.
The Role of Well-Being
Authors: Raz Joseph 
Published: February 2022

Abstract
‘Well-being’ signifies the good life, the life which is good for the person whose life it is. I defend and slightly modify my view of well-being, as a wholehearted and successful pursuit of valuable relationships and goals, The chapter considers the role of well-being in practical thought: in particular, a suggestion that when we care about people, and when we ought to care about people, what we do, or ought to, care about is their well-being, regardless of who cares and who is cared for. People may care, perhaps ought to care, about themselves, and about people with whom they have, or ought to have special bonds, and about other people generally. The chapter argues that the suggestion is misleading: the role of well-being in both personal and ethical life is much more nuanced and more modest.
Attachments and Associated Reasons
Authors: Raz Joseph 
Published: February 2022

Abstract
The chapter unfolds in five sections dealing with five questions: first, does the partiality of attachments present an obstacle to their being or giving practical reasons? Second, given a value-based approach to practical reasons, can universal values generate reasons that are specific to their subjects, reasons—say—towards my friends that only I have? Third, do attachments affect what we do independently of any reasons that they provide? Fourth, in what ways do attachments constitute or provide normative reasons, and briefly, how do attachment-related reasons relate to other practical reasons? Finally, the chapter turns to the question of the nature of and justification for partiality to oneself.
The Romance of the Rose and the Making of Fourteenth-Century English Literature
Authors: Knox Philip 
Published: February 2022

Abstract
This book examines the place of the French love allegory the Romance of the Rose in fourteenth-century English literary culture. The Rose had a transformative effect on the multilingual literary culture of fourteenth-century England, leaving more material evidence for late medieval English-speaking readers than any other vernacular literary work from mainland Europe. In an ongoing series of encounters both within and beyond the territorial boundaries of Britain, continuously reshaped by new ideas and attitudes from across fourteenth-century Europe, the Rose in England became a cultural artefact of huge significance for a wide range of readers—men and women, clerics and laypeople, those at the centre and those on the fringes of the aristocratic courts. The central assertion of this book is that by tracing the radically plural afterlife of the Rose as it moves through a series of distinct but related cultural spheres in fourteenth-century England, it is possible to reveal the poem’s decisive importance in shaping the terms in which literary value was produced and contested. The book examines three different but related spheres of literary culture: aristocratic reading communities, Latinate philosophical poetry, and ideas about poetry and the role of the poet derived from classical literature. In each of these areas, the Rose is revealed to be both a generative and a disruptive text for the English poets who followed in its wake, making possible the newly ambitious writing that emerged in the generation that included Geoffrey Chaucer, William Langland, John Gower, and the Gawain-poet.
The Opposition to Statistics
Authors: Goldman Lawrence 
Published: February 2022

Abstract
The enthusiasm for numbers of the early and mid-Victorian eras was not universal. This chapter examines those writers and cultural leaders who mocked the passion for statistics. Disraeli practised a type of performative politics in which detail and accuracy were immaterial. His calculations were often wrong. He also opposed the grant of any further state funds for Babbage’s Calculating Engine when Chancellor of the Exchequer. In Hard Times (1854), Dickens’s only novel set in the industrial north, he mocked the statistical and utilitarian outlook in the shapes of Bounderby, Gradgrind, and M’Choakumchild. In Ruskin’s most important statement of his principles, his chapter on ‘The Nature of Gothic’ in The Stones of Venice (1853), he warned against seeking exactitude for its own sake and turning men, thereby, into machines. But the most caustic of all the critics was Thomas Carlyle who, in his essay on Chartism (1838) devoted a chapter to ‘Statistics’ and satirized the passion for counting while people starved and the investigators came no closer to answering ‘the Condition of England’ question. These writers, and other instances of opposition to the intrusions of those sent out to count and register the people, are employed in this chapter to demonstrate the existence of a counter-culture to statistics, hostile to the numbering of the people, to the anti-social purposes to which the resulting numbers might be put, and to the mechanistic spirit thus engendered in society.
Conclusion
Authors: Goldman Lawrence 
Published: February 2022

Abstract
The conclusion examines several conceptual issues. Far from dispensing with the need for a God and hastening the decline of faith, for many Victorian statisticians the patterns discoverable in the data were evidence of design in nature, confirming a theological view of the world. Against the arguments of Michel Foucault, and with the example of artisans from the 1820s and 1880s in mind, it is contended that statistics were used to liberate and emancipate social groups as well as to constrain and control them. Against a binary view of numbers as either ‘phenomenal descriptors’ or intrinsically ideological, it is argued that we must approach their use with sensitivity to each historical statistical project and appreciate the different ways they were collected and deployed. Continuities in the history of statistics are emphasized. The ‘data revolution’ today is one of a number of such changes in the nature of information since the late-seventeenth century. In 1822 Babbage saw that the importance of numbers to science, and the scale of calculation required for their analysis, necessitated mechanical computation. Two centuries later, the era of Big Data, based on electronic technology, makes it possible to store and process information at such scale. Babbage projected a research project to collect all the numerical ‘constants of nature and art’, key data and indicators across the natural and social worlds. Today this is realizable, bringing us closer to the original intentions and methods of the founders of the Victorian statistical movement than we may realize.
The World Bank and the Global Rule of Capital
Authors: Cammack Paul 
Published: February 2022

Abstract
The World Bank was charged when it was founded in 1944 with the task of encouraging the development of productive facilities and resources in less developed countries. The Bank has always seen and continues to see the maximum development of global capitalism as the solution to poverty in the developing world. Over more than forty years, it has published policy proposals to this end in annual World Development Reports. These and related initiatives show a consistent focus on proletarianisation—the creation of a healthy, educated, and productive working class in the developing world, along with the construction of an institutional framework conducive to its participation in global value chains and indigenous capitalist development. In the present century, its policy advice has shifted away somewhat from macro-structural and macro-institutional reforms to focus on micro-level reforms that are intended to bring about changes in individual activity and behaviour that will facilitate increased engagement with competitive markets. Most recently, this orientation has been reflected in the priority the Bank attaches to shifting workers in the developing world, and especially women, from the informal into the formal sector, with an emphasis on the creation of productive jobs linked to the world market. This makes it a strong supporter of ‘gender equality’, understood as equal opportunity for women in education and work.
Development
Authors: Burton Eric , Mark James , Marung Steffi 
Published: February 2022

Abstract
Histories of development commonly highlight its western origins: yet Eastern Europe, alongside central and southern America, and East Asia, played an important role in conceptualizing and organizing development from the periphery. During the Cold War, Eastern Europe went from the margins to the centre of debates about overcoming dependency and alternative world-making. Communists drew on the longer-term Eastern European experiences of being both an object of western improvement and the emerging subject of its own economic advancement. Such ‘inbetweenness’ informed a developmental project that coalesced into a postwar progressive solidarity between peripheries that had, it was claimed, been held back by an imperial world system. This commitment was often half-hearted, however: Communists’ struggle to define appropriate partners, commit fully to anti-colonial world-making, and overcome the nationalizing impulses of their own systems all undermined attempts to build alternative global economic projects. By the late Cold War, although economic connections between Eastern Europe, Africa and Asia were still growing, new ideological conditions pulled the region back to the periphery of Euro-Atlantic capitalism. Indebtedness shattered anti-colonial economic solidarity. Eastern European experts learnt from the world it had once sought to instruct, drawing lessons from other more successful peripheral developmentalisms, whilst gaining knowledge of financialized capitalist practices in the Middle East and East Asia. In this sense, the late twentieth-century reorientation of the region was partly precipitated and informed by encounters in the extra-European world.