Chapter 4 focuses on acts of charity with reference to an explicitly exemplary parable: in Luke’s Gospel, Jesus concludes the Good Samaritan story by telling his audience to ‘go and do likewise’ (Luke 10:37). Yet for more than a millennium, patristic and medieval exegetes interpreted the parable as an allegory of redemption, encouraging audiences to identify with the wounded man who received charity rather than with the Samaritan who gave. Although medievalists predominantly read the parable allegorically, this chapter provides evidence for a dynamic vernacular tradition of interpreting it morally. With reference to Middle English sermons and lives of Christ, it highlights disagreement about whether the story enjoins indiscriminate charity or giving according to merit. The chapter then shows how Langland presents moral and allegorical readings as mutually dependent in Piers Plowman: although he advocates indiscriminate charity in reference to the parable, he rejects the idea that imitation of the Samaritan is the ideal ethical response. Instead, he encourages readers to work collaboratively with the Samaritan/Christ by performing their diverse vocations. In doing so, he characterises social responsibility as a means of participating in the Redemption.

Some Middle English narratives juxtapose representations of hunting and histories of aristocratic loss. The Book of the Duchess and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight redirect anxieties about the contingency and precariousness of lordly advantage in a world that sometimes seems to be ruled by Fortune. Though produced in different formal traditions and different circumstances, the two poems display comparable features of a broader sense of ‘seigneurial poetics’ in late medieval texts.

Infamous for an ambivalence that riles some and charms others, the domestic cat’s relationship with humans is now the subject of extensive zooarchaeological study. The point at which domestication took place is the subject of a debate that is complicated by the interbreeding of domestic and wild cats. The complexity of the cat’s domestication goes some way toward explaining the sparse literary and linguistic evidence for this animal in early medieval England, where they seem to have existed largely without human interference. Despite this lack, Aldhelm’s fascinating Anglo-Latin riddle, Enigma 65, Muriceps, explores the role of the mouser in vivid detail. This chapter provides a close reading of Aldhelm’s riddle, after discussing the cat’s pathway to domestication and surveying comparative evidence from early medieval sources. It argues that the semi-domesticated nature of early medieval cats shines through in Aldhelm’s poem, which employs both positive imagery of the mouser’s domestic role (faithfulness, vigilance and guardianship), and negative imagery drawn from the biblical tradition (secretiveness, snare-laying and tribal enmity). Aldhelm’s cat is both a welcome cohabiter and diabolical presence in the human household, an ambiguity that is juxtaposed with the more thoroughly domesticated dog with whom the riddle-cat refuses to cooperate.

Although the main focus of the dialogue is practical deliberation rather than political and legal theory, it has over time provided stimulus to such theorizing. In this dialogue, the bond between citizen and state is portrayed as one of personal commitment. Strikingly, Plato does not invoke natural law, divine law, Kantian generalizations, or consequentialist theories where he might have done.

This essay examines the oracular responses of the oracle of Dodona portrayed in fifth-century BCE Attic tragedies. This analysis explores the wording of the oracular answers, characterized by extreme conciseness and clarity, and the topic of the queries, on household security, family matters, and final journeys. The evidence from the lead tablets at Dodona corroborates this focus, showing that while the oracle addressed various concerns, a significant number of private queries dealt with family, health, marriage, and travel. Additionally, the responses from Dodona were brief and straightforward, in contrast to the cryptic nature of Apollo’s oracles at Delphi.

An analysis of the main deliberative argument of the dialogue, showing how the speech of the laws provides premises needed for that argument. The argument between Socrates and Crito that one must in no circumstances do wrong needs to be completed by establishing that it is wrong to break an agreement and that an agreement exists beween Socrates and the city, and this is what the speech of the laws provides. The dialogue contains a single main argument, a practical deliberation. Socrates’ determination to follow the argument whereever it leads is thus dramatically illustrated by his willingness to die for this principle (which he construes as the path on which the god leads him).

Psamtek I successfully resisted an incursion by western tribesmen in his early years, and by the end of his reign he was successfully campaigning in the Levant against the Babylonian Empire, the new powerful force in the east. During his fifty-four-yearreign Psamtek reformed the political landscape of Egypt, politically reunifying the country and reforming the administration. This reforming spirit of times was also reflected in art and architecture, and one of the most salient features of the culture of this period is archaism. Standards of workmanship in the visual arts, particularly in sculpture, was high. There was a nationwide temple-building and renovation programme, and monumental elite tombs were now being constructed, such as that of Montuemhat, Mayor of Thebes. Changes in funerary practices were evident and the cult of divine animals underwent a considerable degree of development and proliferation.

At the end of the discussion with Crito, Socrates invokes the Corybantic ritual, which does not stand for an irrational or emotional force, as shown by careful consideration of the nature of that ritual. As the dialogue ends, Socrates remains open to new arguments, as always, but Crito has none to offer and time has run out.

Chapter 4 looks at the late twelfth- or early thirteenth-century Acallam na Senórach, medieval Ireland’s longest piece of literature at 8,000 lines. Set in the fifth-century past, the Acallam resurrects both Saint Patrick and the pagan hero Caílte to lead a pilgrimage through a reimagined Irish topography, merging sacred and secular to posit a revalorized, sanctified Ireland for a post-conquest audience. The Acallam advocates walking and physical movement through a green Ireland as knowledge-creating, while also promoting the benefits of imaginative engagement with a storied environment. The Acallam furthermore deploys a geospatial poetics to ‘naturalize’ Patrick: as in the Irish legends of kingship and sovereignty, Patrick is endorsed by the land. His actions show an increasingly harmonious relationship with the environment and culminate in his composition and delivery of Irish-language topographical poems. Patrick becomes a saintly practitioner of the Irish poetics of place, and the British-born foreigner is by the end of the text embraced as Ireland’s patron saint. By modeling Irish spatial practices through a range of characters transformed over the course of the narrative, the Acallam shows the diverse members of Irish (and English) society how to engage with Ireland as a richly storied, sanctified nation.