In 1066 a scribe and illustrator at the Stoudios Monastery named Theodore worked on a psalter, now in the British Library. Next to a verse about God raining down destruction from Psalm 20, he painted Sodom and Gomorrah engulfed in flames while Lot and his daughters flee and Lot’s wife is turns into a pillar of salt. Theodore had fled the sinful world to enter the monastery, like Lot leaving Sodom. But the monastery turned out to be riskier than he thought, no freer of the threat of male-male love. In the same scriptorium, not so many desks away, Niketas had edited Symeon’s works and composed his life. Theodore and his work were products of a monastic culture that held celibacy, homoeroticism, and the love God in a nearly untenable tension.

The earth’s shadow darkens the initial Heavens of Dante’s ascent, the shadow waning the nearer a Heaven is to that of the Sun.The inhabitants of the last earth-shadowed Heaven turn to that Heaven hoping to be free from the imperfections of terrestrial existence.But these Heavens’ vestigial earthiness exerts an effect.Each focuses on a particular imperfection: the fragility of moral vows; the defect of human law as a vehicle of justice; and the reign of “mad love.”These produce an urge to transcend this region.

But Dante has readers assess the losses as well as the gains that accrue when we leave our world behind.This assessment puts reason on trial, its inadequacies seeming to sanction reason’s subordination to faith as provided in the vision that beckons above.But these Heavens ask not only whether that’s possible but desirable.Reason’s inadequacies are shown to be inseparable from moral responsibility, from more just politics, and from the desires that generate the Comedy.Asking whether the transcendence of terrestrial existence makes for a happier life, Dante gives readers cause to consider the possibility that these earth-shadowed Heavens are more than merely a necessary step on the way to perfection.

The chapter, along with a discussion on India’s population size, and estimates of mortality based on the decennial censuses from 1872 to 1951, reviews at length the factors that explain virtual stagnation in population size during most of the decades. Lack of growth in India’s population from 1872 to 1921 was a result of high mortality due to the spread of epidemics such as cholera, plague and malaria. Their etiology and spread were not fully understood. As a result, the measures taken by the British Raj could not bring deaths under control. Also, recurrent famines – widespread or localized – caused food shortages that resulted in starvation deaths and the spread of water-borne infections during post-famine periods when rains arrived. The period between 1921 and 1951 witnessed modest population growth and the onset of slow but steady decline in death rates. The decline is attributed to control over famines, mass vaccination against smallpox, some improvement in sanitation and an increase in health facilities, mostly in urban areas. However, malaria and diarrheal diseases continued to take a heavy toll when India became independent in 1947.

Scholars have noted that many of the surviving tablets from Dodona pose agriculturally related questions of a general manner. My essay suggests this is because agricultural resources were religiously framed in the ancient Greek world. In this context, I argue that oracles functioned as sites where material practices of daily life could be negotiated with the gods in a ritual as well as communal context. Oracles, in other words, presented a way of communicating with the natural world. On the other hand, they were also places where the individual could present himself (or herself) in relation to this world: how he or she depended on its fruits for survival; but also how he (or she) could make or remake the resources it had to offer so that it would flourish. As I want to show, this particular interrelationship between agricultural labour and oracular consultation relied as much on the performative act of enquiry as it did on practical knowledge. In order to illustrate these interconnections, the essay draws on recent trends in environmental history and in resilience studies. It will reconsider the ancient evidence of the Zeus Oracle at Dodona in light of these approaches.

This Introduction frames the volume’s contents by parsing the two closely aligned categories “gay” and “autobiography.” It suggests that the notion of genre is key to unpacking the political and conceptual possibilities and difficulties inherent in these categories. Drawing on social semiotic and pragmatic accounts of genre, according to which genres are important not so much for what they are as for what they do, the Introduction suggests that gay autobiography constitutes a vital resource in which what it means to be gay has been and continues to be negotiated. Relating the emergence of both secular autobiography and gay identity to Foucault’s argument about modern liberal society’s deployment of biopower, the Introduction argues that although gay autobiography characteristically takes the form of a confession that indicates our ensnarement in biopower’s categories, it also importantly acts as a counterdiscursive connection between writers and communities of readers. The Introduction then summarizes the volume’s chapters, indicating the ways in which they engage with these general points of discussion as well as attending to the specificities of their analyses.

Legislation and state policies aimed at addressing racism have evolved differently in the two Irelands. In the Republic both grew out of anti-racist activism concerned since the 1980s with anti-Traveller prejudice and, as immigration rose, out of NGO pressure upon the Irish state to address its responsibilities under the UN Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. In Northern Ireland, legislative and institutional responses to racism were informed by UK practices, particularly as NGO advocates of anti-racism were influenced by mainland UK norms and debates. However, responses were later and weaker than elsewhere in the UK as gridlock in Northern Irish politics imposed limits on progressive social policy. This chapter traces the institutional failures to respond adequately to experiences of racism in both jurisdictions, the effectiveness of civil society responses to racism, and the leverage of international accountability to make progress. The chapter draws particular attention to the shape and strength of the NGO sector and its ability to effect change in the face of institutional resistance, as well as the impact of ‘hate crime’ frameworks.

Extreme political violence of the ‘Troubles’ in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s forced radical changes in the use of public space. The Twelfth of July, formerly an unchallenged part of civic ritual, now came to be seen as problematic. The Lord Mayor’s Show, a celebration of commerce and unionism, dwindled before being revived as an apolitical, carnival-style event. St Patrick’s Day, formerly associated solely with Nationalism, was promoted, with mixed success, as a cross-community festival.

‘From Jolly Jack and Moll to proletarian Jack and Jill’ explores how Victorians turned to the apparent moral failings of the sailors and women in Ratcliffe Highway to explain the district's perceived slide into depravity and violence. On making contact with the populace of the sailortown district, social explorers searched in vain for Charles Dibdin's ‘Jolly Jack and Lusty Moll', characters who had been celebrated in the age of sail. Social explorers were instead confronted with a modern, urbanised, waterfront people who were at the forefront of the transition from sail to steam in the maritime industry. The chapter interrogates the nostalgic texts from a range of social commentators who recast the sailors and the women they met from benign eighteenth-century caricatures to a dangerous urban proletariat immersed in crime and immorality.

Chinese Daoism contains unexpected affinities with Irish spirituality. The identifications with nature in the Song of Amergin and ‘St Patrick’s Breastplate’ are comparable to principles that pervade works by Laozi and Zhuiangzi. Oscar Wilde, the first major Irish writer to read a Daoist text, was drawn to the concept of wuwei, which to Wilde was a mischievous commitment to inaction. Yeats’s work indicates wider reading on translated Daoist texts, and it is probably from Yeats (if not direct influence) that Daoist parallels occur in such canonical Irish texts as Finnegans Wake and Waiting for Godot. More recent writers Michael Hartnett and Thomas Kinsella turn their reading of Daoism back to the ancient Irish connection to nature.