This chapter grapples with the question of what has historically been admitted to the literary canon, via a consideration of comic poetry. Traditionally omitted from literary and language debates, comic poetry flourished especially in Florence, but was also produced in other centres. The chapter begins with Domenico di Giovanni, Burchiello, whose poetry satirised intellectuals and scholarly pursuits while demonstrating a virtuoso command of language, including Latinised poetic forms. It then discusses comic literature in Medici Florence, where poets including Lorenzo de’ Medici, Poliziano and Pulci refined this style, generating cultured parodies, and creating new genres such as Pulci’s mock-heroic epic, the Morgante, and allegorical and double-entendre Carnival songs. The final section considers comic poetry beyond Florence, including bilingual macaronic Latin-vernacular verse in Padua, post-Burchiello verse in Rome and Aretino’s pasquinades. The comic-burlesque mode is shown to be coterminous with more prized genres and produced by authors across the class spectrum.

This chapter examines the introduction of new lay participation systems in Asian countries. Focusing on Russia, South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan, I explore the social and political contexts and goals of the policymakers that motivated the incorporation of citizen decision-making into the legal systems of these countries. In each of the four countries, the adoption of new systems of lay participation occurred during periods of political democratization. Those who argued in favor of citizen involvement hoped that it would promote democratic self-governance, create more robust connections between the citizenry and the government, and improve public confidence in the courts. Policymakers drew on the experiences of other countries, including other Asian nations, to develop a distinctive model that incorporated some features of lay participation systems elsewhere, and modified them to suit the specific circumstances of their own countries.

This chapter analyzes how social policy in China has contributed to the well-being of the middle class and their trust of the government. The author argues that if we examine not just China’s earlier reform period (1978–2003) and the fast-growing era (2003–2012), but also the sharp Left Turn in recent years (2012–present), it is hard to fit China’s social policy into the theories of productivism or developmental welfare state that are often associated with the East Asian countries. China’s welfare system is an instrumentalist model which is centered on maintaining the leadership of the Communist Party of China. With this in mind, social policies have been actively used in the past few years to support two mutually independent but intersecting intermediate goals: maintaining economic development and social stability. Both are vital to the party’s authority.

Between 1499 and 1502, Florentine explorer Amerigo Vespucci surveyed unknown lands across the Atlantic, sparking European interest in new territories. His letters, describing a gigantic island, reached cartographer Martin Waldseemüller, who named the landmass "America" on a 1507 map. This story highlights the power of early modern maps to create realities through naming and representation. The Introduction to Connected Cartographies contrasts this model of discovery with the understanding of China, which was not "discovered" in the same way. Instead, knowledge about China emerged through cross-cultural cartographic exchanges, involving translations and synthesis of Chinese and European maps. These exchanges began in the late sixteenth century and continued into the nineteenth century. This process resulted in translated maps that combined features from both traditions, challenging the traditional narrative of exploration and emphasizing the importance of translation in shaping global geography.

Chapter 9 considers Emerson’s first revolutionary book of 1836, Nature. Even in this first book, Goodman argues, Emerson presents a nascent epistemology of moods. The discussion then turns to the moody swings of “Nature,” from the Essays, Second Series, in which Emerson finds the natural world either bountifully present or just missed, and as taking two opposing forms: a stable finished form he calls natura naturata, and a dynamic form he calls natura naturans. At the end of the essay, Emerson abandons this main set of oppositions in a leap to a metaphysical conclusion. The Coda considers Emerson’s attraction to Michael Faraday’s idea that “we do not arrive at last at atoms, but at spherules of force.”

In the genre of images known as the Mass of Saint Gregory the central drama is the living body of Christ on the altar. To one side of that drama, if one looks closely, can be found a single book, opened but not legible (Plate 6). By the fifteenth century, depending on the church, one might find a range of different kinds of books for the liturgy in its library, its choir stalls, or sacristy: antiphonaries, graduals, psalters, hymnals, or breviaries. Only one liturgical book, the missal, the book for the celebrant of the Eucharist, would have been found on the altar. That object is the focus of this chapter.

With the invasion and conquest of Beijing by the Manchus the very same barbarians that the wall was meant to keep out, the limitations of the Ming state were superseded. Now the Manchu founded Qing dynasty sought new ways to understand where to draw the borders of their state to the North and West.The chapter covers the back and forth in cartographic translation between China and Europe during the eighteenth century, from the Kangxi era to the end of the Qianlong reign. This back and forth, it is argued, led to the creation of the Qing geo-body and the idea of the borders of China. The chapter shows that a notion of China’s borders first appeared as a result of cartographic exchanges between China and Europe.

The new nationalism of the Xi Jinping era, which has brought together political nationalism and cultural nationalism – two largely opposing streams between 1919 and 1989 – has redefined the CPC and the PRC. On paper, the party is a class organization while the PRC is a class dictatorship that sanctions class sovereignty rather than popular sovereignty. Since 2001, the party has been represented as a national party as well as a class organization. Representing the nation entails the promotion of national culture, and a major component of the Chinese Dream is cultural revival. Consequently, the CPC and the PRC are nationalized in a shift from Marxist classism to synthesized Chinese nationalism. Their class identities appear to be at odds with their national identities, but the tension is minimized as the party turns Marxism into an empty signifier and sinicizes it out of existence.

Emerson describes a range of experiences that constitute friendship: titanic battles between beautiful enemies; conversational brilliance and expansion; a joyful solitude, as if someone has departed rather than arrived; a generalized benevolence toward people in the street to whom one does not speak; the warm sympathies and household joy one shares with a familiar friend; the disappointment of a friend outgrown. His account shows an intense focus on moral perfection – on our unattained but attainable self, alone and with others – but an equally intense awareness of what he calls in “Experience” “the plaint of tragedy” that sounds throughout our lives “in regard to persons, to friendship and love.” The chapter’s coda charts the opposition in “Love” between love as the experience of being “swept away” and a skeptical vision of marriage as a prison, from which sex, person, and partiality have vanished.

How does law travel in Inter-Asia? This chapter focuses on traveling law as an empirical event and does so to reflect on prevailing theories in comparative law that explain how law moves from one jurisdiction to another. The dominant paradigm in comparative law for traveling law is legal transplants, a concept that has generated a sprawling literature. The point of this chapter is not to say that Inter-Asia is aberrational regarding legal transplants; instead, the perspective is to use the Inter-Asian Law material, and specifically the fraught movements of Chinese law in Inter-Asia, to critically reflect on comparative law conventions. Whereas Inter-Asia is embedded within global trade and migration routes, it has also been populated by outsiders – pirates or jihadis – whose participation within those circuits creates contrast and distance, elements that are prerequisites to critical reflection. Chinese law may also be such an outsider that permits reflecting on taken-for-granted paths.