Chapter 1 conceptualizes a primary form of racial doubt: questioning the equation of blackness with slavery. It is built around the testimony of Ben Newton, who declared he was born free in the United States, kidnapped at the age of ten, and subsequently enslaved in Cuba for several decades. It explores the degree to which racial doubt was intrinsic to the tension between racist agnosia (the social practice of actively ignoring exploited, racialized people) and anti-racist recognition (whereby some of these people could make themselves seen or heard). As Ben Newton pointed out when he reached the US consulate in 1853, “almost everybody” knew his story, but neither his owners nor the local authorities had felt pressured to liberate him. When he told this same story in a new context, recognition and freedom became less elusive. Through a focus on Ben’s testimony, the chapter charts the legal, practical, and linguistic terrains in which captives challenged their enslavement.

Gulliver’s Travels is one of the landmarks of world literature. Gulliver’s adventures with the tiny but spirited Lilliputians, the giant inhabitants of Brobdingnag, the flying island of Laputa, and the rational horses of Houyhnhnmland have become globally famous for their satirical wit and visionary creativity. Early editions credited Gulliver himself as the author, and many readers believed him to be a real person. Later commentators have variously described the work as proto-science fiction, as inspired children’s literature and as a forerunner of the modern novel. The editor’s introduction to this celebratory anniversary edition contextualises Gulliver’s Travels in Swift’s life and work as a whole while exploring its rich and remarkable afterlife. All the original illustrations and maps are included, as are the frontispiece portraits. Generous annotation explains textual details which might now seem obscure, and appendices contain additional documents and images to enhance contemporary understanding and enjoyment.

Chapter 2 examines abolitionist texts that engaged the conventions of the theatrical genre of farce to denounce the illegal slave trade. By analyzing how captives and abolitionists mocked the generalized awareness of pretense that helped slavery flourish under prohibitions, it foregrounds the role that farce played in processes of racialization. Henry Shirley, a kidnapped man who requested help from British authorities, pointed out that a large range of people were complicit in the illegal slave trade, thereby making the rule of law look like a farce. The chapter concludes by tracing how captives turned the logic of pretense to their advantage, using forged documents or new names in the cities of Havana and Santiago. Enslaved people, it shows, could sometimes partake in the benefits of pretense by assuming new names and passing as free.

This chapter investigates Pindar’s construction of the relationships by which communities are constituted: relationships between families, individuals, and the polis; between the inhabitants of the polis and their past; and between different polis communities.  It surveys civic values, as well as the passages where Pindar discusses specific constitutional forms.  Because Pindar’s lyric expresses political issues through the lens of poetic concerns, assimilating civic and military conflict to vicissitude, it maps some of the strategies by which Pindar subsumes the political into the poetic.  A final focus is the nature of Pindar’s Panhellenism and the connection of Panhellenism to elite mobility.  Pindar’s Panhellenism projects competitively local claims for eminence into a broad Greek arena and characterises the mythico-historical past of Greek cities as one of migration and elite movement. The interaction of local identity with the Panhellenic arena is thus driven by the mobility of heroic and then athletic elites.

In recent years, as material culture has become more central to the study of all aspects of the ancient Mediterranean and new materialism has gained greater traction across a variety of academic disciplines, growing numbers of scholars have begun to explore how material objects and notions of materiality feature in Pindar’s work. This chapter offers an introduction to some of the main tendencies of such work. It discusses Pindar’s propensity to speak about his songs in terms normally applied to material crafts, such as weaving or carpentry; the role of tools and instruments in Pindar’s conception of composition and creation, both as applied to song and in a broader sense; the materials of the built environment; Pindar’s relationship with the contexts of his musical performances, real and imaginary; and the earth itself as a significant facet of Pindar’s conception of the material world.

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book considers how biblical women were read, appropriated and debated in a wide range of early modern texts. It considers the complex ways in which biblical women were positioned as both positive and negative exemplars. The book investigates the 'intersection' by unravelling the rhetorical potential of the Bible's women across political, cultural, gendered and theological discourses. It seeks to build on the developing corpus of work by locating the Bible's more familiar women, such as Eve, Mary and Mary Magdalene, alongside their less familiar but nonetheless significant, counterparts such as Zipporah, Michal and Esther. The book addresses a particular biblical woman or archetype of femininity. It offers a purview of the diverse ways in which the women of the Old and New Testaments were read and represented in early modern England.

This introduction briefly glances at Pindar’s poetry and its later reception so as to set the scene for the volume that follows. Before outlining the shape of the book and its chapters, it surveys the recent history of Pindaric criticism so as to provide the reader with a sense of its wider intellectual context.

References to Ignatius Sancho’s wife, children, and family life are interweaved throughout his letters. Sancho often wrote to his friends, briefly updating them on his family’s well-being and activities. When these brief references are collated and analyzed, an underrepresented perspective of Sancho’s family as a middling Black family emerges, where the Sanchos each embody the ideal representation of husbands, fathers, wives, mothers, and children. These references to the Sancho family in the Letters help make the Sancho family one of eighteenth-century London’s most well-documented Black families. More importantly, the family’s representation in the Letters answers essential questions about how the Black family were perceived in society and the role class, race, and gender play in shaping childhood, parental relationships, and family life. This chapter details the representations of Blackness, fatherhood, motherhood, and childhood observed in the Sancho family.

Greek melic poetry is characterized by its pragmatic features. It is thus natural to find strong differentiation within it: this is what we mean by the word genre in this context. Pindar’s genres are distinguished by their occasion, whether ‘secular’ or cultic; by their mode of performance; and by the identity of the chorus. These distinctive elements could overlap to produce hybrids. When Pindar’s oeuvre was gathered and catalogued during the Alexandrian period, each ode needed to be sorted into a ‘genre’, as indicated by its dominant characteristics. Of the seventeen books into which Pindar’s work was subdivided, the four books of epinicians have reached us practically intact by way of medieval transmission; of the other books, fragments of various lengths come from the papyri or indirect transmission, posing very different problems. In the case of the papyri, the main difficulty lies in the material conditions of fragmentation and legibility. When it comes to indirect transmission, we must consider the intentions of the quotation and the reliability of the witnesses, which is greater if stylistic or grammatical in nature, lesser if philosophical or otherwise ideological.

Gulliver’s Travels is one of the landmarks of world literature. Gulliver’s adventures with the tiny but spirited Lilliputians, the giant inhabitants of Brobdingnag, the flying island of Laputa, and the rational horses of Houyhnhnmland have become globally famous for their satirical wit and visionary creativity. Early editions credited Gulliver himself as the author, and many readers believed him to be a real person. Later commentators have variously described the work as proto-science fiction, as inspired children’s literature and as a forerunner of the modern novel. The editor’s introduction to this celebratory anniversary edition contextualises Gulliver’s Travels in Swift’s life and work as a whole while exploring its rich and remarkable afterlife. All the original illustrations and maps are included, as are the frontispiece portraits. Generous annotation explains textual details which might now seem obscure, and appendices contain additional documents and images to enhance contemporary understanding and enjoyment.