Focusing on the third-person formulation of many of the texts on the question tablets, and drawing on psychological and narratological research, this essay explores the mind-set of those who came to consult Zeus, asking if these texts reveal a sense of the self as fragmented in the face of crisis – which may also suggest how processes of consultation at an oracle could have provided psychological relief to pilgrims. Using analytical approaches from cognitive linguistics, this essay examines these texts for what they may reveal in terms of a cognitive blending of Viewpoints – both mortal and divine – aiding self-integration and, thus, decision making. Finally, this essay argues that awe in the face of the divine may have been a key component of the experience of consultation, with significant impacts on our brain and body.

This chapter proposes ‘epistemography’ as a methodology for investigating and writing about technical and scientific objects and systems of expertise of relevance in contemporary and past societies. I use the presentation of the four methodological principles establishing the appropriate conduct of a sociological, anthropological and historical epistemography to introduce the features of the book. The four principles of conduct of an epistemography are: ‘situated impartiality’; ‘knowledge as collective practices’; ‘formation stories’; and ‘meta-epistemography’. This book is an epistemography of climate change, which means that it holds no preconceptions of what ‘climate knowledge’ is nor any ambition to resolve disputes about the reality of climate change; instead, it seeks to explain a set of climate knowledge-making practices and the formation of an epistemic object representing the evolution of climate in Scotland. To do so, I explored the scientific community in question from the inside, unafraid to get involved in their working lives and to help them with their credibility struggles. This book also makes epistemographic knowledge amenable to empirical analysis in fundamentally the same way as any other form of expertise, and offers a meta-analysis of the making of this book.

Following Allen Wood, Leibniz’s theodicy can be seen as both totalitarian – it claims that divine wisdom informs every single part of creation – and wholesale – it proves this only in general terms. This chapter explores the criteria Leibniz considers to be criteria of goodness and how he argues, in wholesale fashion, for their instantiation. Leibniz’s criteria can be divided into two categories: metaphysical, which concern properties and features of being as such, and anthropocentric, which bear on the morality and happiness of human beings. What unites them is an overarching conception of goodness as rational intelligibility: a maximally good world provides a maximal number of actual opportunities for rational creatures to appreciate its goodness and thereby perfect themselves. Closer attention to Leibniz’s handling of criteria, however, reveals a danger that anthropocentric ultimately dissolve into metaphysical criteria, the practical into the theoretical. As a result, Leibniz’s project is threatened with dialectical contradiction: the existential concerns that govern his theodicy’s underlying motivation cannot be articulated in the theoretical terms of its execution.

Why is God as well as justice called the truth? How does truth relate to deserts and the conatus, to beauty, generosity and grace toward others and toward all beings – be they persons, animals, plants, species, econiches, ecosystems, and the monuments of nature and culture?

This chapter performs a careful reading of the entire text of John’s Confessio theologica in order to define the nature of John’s affective piety. This reading clarifies the historical record, which often only highlights selections from John’s Confessio theologica rather than systematically analyses the whole thing. The chapter details John’s affective prescriptions to his reader, and also uses manuscript evidence to show how these were particularly aimed at monastic readers in Fécamp’s network. The examination provided here will satisfy historians of emotion, who will be interested in the contours of devotional emotion in this eleventh-century context; it also provides a basis for the remaining analyses in the book.

Access to resources and conflicts over resources provide many of the contexts for collective action by local groups. This chapter investigates the evidence for collaboration in basic agricultural tasks and other economic activities, as well as that for more political forms of cooperation, for instance in jointly building churches, running local courts, attesting land transactions; and it looks at the evidence for the role of conflict in defining discrete groups. Our focus examines how collective action brought together people of widely varying wealth, social standing and even different legal status. The chapter also considers the labels people used of themselves and those that others used of them, as well as attitudes to outsiders, such as non-residents, people culturally marked as foreign, and those excluded from the social group for lack of conformity or otherwise, as well as the conscious identification of some within the group, such as Jews, as 'other'.

Nekau II, Psamtek I’s son, inherited the throne in 610 BC and continued the Egyptian policy of campaigning against the Babylonians in the Near East. After initial victories, Nekau was defeated at Carchemish in 605 BC and the Egyptians withdrew back to Egypt, losing all their possessions in the Levant. Nekau then concentrated on building up a navy, and Herodotus records that he built a canal to the Red Sea and sent a naval expedition around Africa. Nekau was succeeded by his son, Psamtek II, who sent an army to Nubia to crush the Kushites and undertook a seemingly peaceful expedition to Syria–Palestine, possibly in an attempt to reassert Egyptian claims to Syria–Palestine. Early suggestions that Psamtek directed a damnatio memoriae against his father, Nekau, for surrendering Egyptian territorial possessions in the Levant appear unsubstantiated and probably more a policy of usurpation of some of Nekau’s monuments to promote his own rule.

The chapter focuses on HE engagement with communities. It provides some historical examples of this kind of engagement from minority and majority world contexts and targeted at different types of learners. It also outlines a number of steps that can be taken to render this engagement democratic, symbiotic and a catalyst for change within the communities and HE institutions involved. Due attention is reserved for different meanings attached to the term ‘community’. The importance of embracing subaltern epistemologies is underlined. A Freirean approach is adopted throughout.

The siege of Ostend was undoubtedly one of the most stirring episodes of the Revolt in the Low Countries. From July 1601 to September 1604, an army of about 20,000 royal troops continuously confronted a garrison of about 5,700 defenders. This chapter provides an in-depth analysis of the siege of Ostend in successive published sources. It demonstrates how the facts of the siege could be manipulated in printed media in order to change the outcome of the events. Texts were able to convert a defeat into a victory, and in this case it was the translation of a text that changed the meaning of the original narrative. Translations are often taken for granted by historians, but it is worth analysing how the meaning of texts could be changed in the process, and how the translation was presented to the new public.