This chapter uses the first Italian bibliography – Anton Francesco Doni’s La libraria (1550) – to reflect on the process of compiling literary history, and analyse approaches and attitudes to poets and poetry in the Cinquecento. It considers the degree to which current critical interest in the concept of social communities in poetry, especially in relation to Petrarchism, correspond to Cinquecento concerns. Petrarchism is ubiquitous in Doni’s work, and especially visible in praise for Tuscan and eminent models like Pietro Bembo, Iacopo Sannazaro and Vittoria Colonna, but it co-exists alongside poets who overtly reject the Tuscan model and/or satirise the obsessive fascination with a narrow set of rules for writing lyrics. Listing authors by name rather than genre emphasises the extent to which most Cinquecento writers composed in a variety of modes and reveals a more expansive conceptualisation of authorship not yet constrained by Romantic notions of individual genius.

The chapter introduces the intellectual programme for the volume as a whole. The opening analysis explores the category of ‘poetry’ as a form of cultural production pertinent to each of the single topics addressed in the individual chapters, emphasising a consistent concern with questions not only of literary form but also of materiality, performance and transmission, conceptions of authorship, cultural context and more. A second section turns to locating how poetry was discussed during the centuries 1200-1600, beginning with how poets and commentators conceptualised the craft of making poetry itself. This is followed by a review of places where poetry could be found, in its written form and also in performance and discussion around the peninsula. Finally, the chapter discusses how Italian intellectuals and theorists investigated definitions of poetry and its cultural importance, and constructed their own histories of poetry from the viewpoint of their own times.

The CPC presides over a large state-owned economy, which is a key pillar of China’s state capitalist model and a critical source of Party power. The party has adapted its governing strategies of the state-owned sector to maintain its economic dominance without stifling growth and innovation – largely by learning from outside. We highlight the importance of the international system as a source of both policy inputs and pressures to change. We find that in the early phases of China’s marketization process during the 1980s, Chinese policymakers looked to Japan and the World Bank as they restructured state-owned enterprises. In the 1990s, American, European, and Japanese policymakers’ pressure on China to downsize its state sector as a condition of WTO accession was a key consideration in Chinese policymakers’ efforts to build “national champions” capable of competing with foreign multinationals in domestic and international markets. We analyze Chinese leaders’ responses to successive challenges in the state-owned economy, and the resilience of state capitalism which buttresses party rule.

On December 6, 2023, the Indonesian Parliament passed Indonesia’s Criminal Code. The new Criminal Code replaces the Dutch-language colonial-era Penal Code and after fifty years of debate marks a milestone in Indonesian law. However, the new Code is controversial. It continues to criminalize interpersonal relations such as adultery and cohabitation. The framing of those offences is an accommodation of conflicting preferences among a wide range of domestic and international actors including those from the Islamic world, notably Saudi Arabia. This chapter examines the new Code as an arena of contestation, among inter-regional influences and between secular and religious actors seeking to shape Indonesian state law. It highlights three under-studied phenomena in Asia: inter-regional religious networks; their intersection with colonial legal legacies; and the migration of legal values, not only geographically or jurisdictionally, but also across internal domains within pluralist legal systems.

During the Quattrocento and Cinquecento, the Italian peninsula saw a boom in the production of poetry written in Latin, under the impetus of the humanists’ reframing of the relationship between the contemporary and ancient worlds as new texts, authors, artworks and other evidence about the Roman and Greek worlds came to be known in Western Europe. The chapter evaluates how cultivation of ancient models by Neo-Latin (and Neo-Greek) authors reconfigured relationships to the past, while also taking account of how classical studies and the use of Latin had persisted throughout the Middle Ages. It also discusses how Italian poets writing in Latin used the ancient language to express themselves on key cultural themes and debates of their own day. The chapter stresses the abundance and variety of poetic production in Latin produced in every region of Italy, and in genres covering lyric, pastoral, epic, satire, epigrams and didactic verse.

From Marxist revolution and the rejection of Chinese cultural tradition through market reforms and the embrace of Chinese cultural traditions, the party has repeatedly reinvented itself and maintained its monopoly of political power. Four decades after it abandoned communes and centrally planned economics, the party now sits atop a system of state capitalism and steers the world’s second largest economy. Confident in its success, the party now promises it will lead the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation – the restoration of China to advanced economy and great power status. This chapter reviews the multiple sources of the party’s strength and resilience in the second decade of the twenty-first century. It argues that the party’s strength lies in its adaptiveness and inventiveness across three dimensions: ideology, organization, and public policymaking. In doing so, the chapter provides a conceptual framework for the book and a launchpad for subsequent chapters which examine the multiple sources of CPC strength in greater depth.

This chapter explores how judicial mechanisms employed by apex courts have migrated across South Asia and Southeast Asia, using India, Pakistan, and Malaysia as examples. The chapter focuses on two case studies – Pakistan and Malaysia – to examine how judicial mechanisms, like the basic structure doctrine articulated by the Indian Supreme Court, have been strategically adapted by courts in Pakistan and Malaysia to strengthen their institutional power. This chapter considers the use of judicial rhetoric and constitutional comparativism in crafting opinions of popular salience by examining the distinct ways in which these Asian courts have engaged with foreign and comparative case law.

The performance of poetry across the sixteenth century was often curated and received as a multimedia experience. Verse might be written down by hand or published in print, but this did not exclude its oral performance, as poets and performers read aloud from the text, spoke from memory or combined memory and invention in varying degrees to create improvised or semi-improvised performances. This chapter takes a deliberately long view of the sounds and spectacle of poetry in order to explore the ways in which elements of performance could be shared and contrasted across and between ‘high’ and ‘low’ contexts and settings, from professional street singers aiming to earn a living from their performances of canonical authors in the piazza to elite gatherings of humanists performing erotic verse in private interiors and to women poets singing on stage in a recreation of the classical pastoral tradition.

Chapter 5 focuses on two biographical compilations of Afro-Argentines who are considered role models for the community. These biographies not only present a written portrait of each individual but also include a corresponding visual portrait, a feature that enriches the compilations. They were an attempt to construct an Afro-Argentine memory and imaginary, and the construction of this collective memory implied affection, bonds of proximity, and even intimacy The inclusion of portraits shows how important images were to the promoters of the publication in their role as mentors of the community. On the one hand, the inclusion of engravings was a way of complying with the precepts of progress and civilization, given the growing development of illustrated publications at the time. On the other hand, the possibility of seeing and recognizing the faces of notable people implied an affective dimension of which Afro-Porteño intellectuals were aware. This was because, in addition to being individuals who enjoyed a certain prestige (to a greater or lesser extent) not only within the group but also in the rest of Buenos Aires society, the members of the community were in almost daily contact with them and their relatives, often as friends.

In the first part of Chapter 5, Goodman considers some basic affinities of Emerson and Montaigne that are evident even before Emerson published “Montaigne, or the Skeptic”: their use of the essay form to register spontaneity and contingency, their critique of books and travel, their discussions of the play of moods, their attention to themselves. The second part of Chapter 5 considers the shape of Emerson’s Montaigne essay, which has its own moods and its own architecture, and which concludes by taking what the critic Barbara Packer calls “a miraculous act of levitation” outside the play of moods to the moral sentiment that “outweighs them all.” In evaluating this leap, Goodman deploys Emerson’s own skepticism against his more metaphysical and dogmatic tendencies. “Why so talkative in public,” he writes, “when each of my neighbors can pin me to my seat by arguments I cannot refute?”

In the nave of Sant’Apollinare in Classe stands what, by the time it was constructed, had come to be called an altar (Figures 13 and 14). By the sixteenth century, not only the name but also the matter, the form, and the composition had come to provoke thousands of Christians, some to call for their replacement with wooden tables, some to singular physical violence, bringing sledgehammers to smash into rubble what had, for generations, stood in choirs, apses, and chapels and against columns. Even those who left them in place no longer accorded them the same role in the Mass. For Lutherans, they were the surface for the celebration of the Eucharist. For Catholics, they were more, but no longer what they had been. Even the great Jesuit scholar Joseph Braun, whose study of altars remains foundational, defined the altar as “that liturgical instrument [Gerät] on and at which the Eucharist was celebrated.” It was for him a thing. He accorded some six pages in a 756-page volume to the “symbolism” of the altar. For him, meaning was given to the altar by texts: commentators, liturgists including Durand, canon lawyers, popes, and theologians. The altar itself was mute.