This chapter establishes Hannah Arendt as a biopolitical thinker particularly attuned to the powers and implications of modern technology. The chapter identifies and articulates the two key trajectories that Arendt associates with modernity. The first is a growing prioritisation of life processes within politics. The second is a politicisation of such life processes through the use of new calculative technologies. In discussing each of these trajectories, the chapter argues that biological life and technological reason are best viewed as two distinct but related aspects of modern politics. It also suggests that these are always in tension with one another as the cyclicality of life processes runs up against linear projections of human progress.

This chapter looks at the role of covenanting in the early modern Scottish presbyterian tradition in establishing ideas of Scotland as a godly nation. The chapter argues that the Scottish understanding of covenanting, based on deep roots in the Reformed theology of the Scottish Reformation, was deployed by clergy and theologians to argue that the Scots were a people in covenant with God similar to that of the biblical Jews. Such arguments were applied to argue that, even if not all Scots were the elect of God, the nation was still a godly nation. The chapter traces this idea through the Scottish Reformation into the Covenanter revolution of the late 1630s and 1640s. It explores the decline of the idea of national covenanting in face of the Cromwellian conquest and the Restoration of the Stuart monarchy and episcopal forms of church polity in the later seventeenth century.

Harriet Fletcher argues that The Vampyre uses vampirism as a vehicle for critiquing Lord Byron’s literary celebrity, specifically by drawing out the Gothic qualities of Byronic fan culture and the mutual relationship of consumption between Byron and his readers. In doing so, Polidori reconsiders the parameters of the Gothic; by attaching celebrity to the vampire, he reshapes the image of this Gothic trope in Western culture. Fletcher identifies the early nineteenth century as the advent of modern celebrity culture due to the emergence of mass culture, within which the role of Byron and the rise of industrial print culture is paramount. She combines Gothic studies, celebrity studies, and fan studies to develop what she calls ‘a Gothic celebrity reading’ that draws inspiration from Romantic literary culture. Lord Ruthven is a model of Byron, and in turn Aubrey is a model of the Byron fan or ‘Byromaniac’.

This chapter maps out how an unwillingness to provide concrete leadership goods has created resistance to Brazil's leadership. The nature of this resistance paradoxically suggests that key elements of the consensual hegemonic project have been internalized throughout the region resulting in a sustained challenge to prevailing structural power frameworks in the Americas and the wider South. Latin America with a special emphasis on South America thus becomes the central launching pad for the Brazilian foreign policy of challenging not just regional, but also global structural power realities. In South America the Bolivarian project was advanced through the vocally anti-neoliberal bloc ALBA, which attracted membership from Bolivia and Ecuador, as well as curious glances from a Paraguay contemplating an opportunity to play Brasília off against Caracas. As Luiz Alberto Figueiredo noted in his summary of long-standing Brazilian diplomatic strategy, Brazil's neighbourhood is the foundation for its inward and outward success.

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This chapter focuses on a book of financial accounts from the mid-sixteenth century and looks outwards from the static lists of payments to the surrounding lively and animate web of social and interpersonal relations. It asks what might be revealed to us about the objects and persons named in its monetarised lists and what gendered power dynamics might arise. Early modern financial accounts have often been underestimated as sources – mined as quarries of facts within the biographical tradition – but this chapter is concerned with the ways in which they can reward analyses of their language, materiality and archival afterlife. It is concerned with how these conventional texts could be customised to serve the agendas of individuals or to accommodate the requirements of particular communities. It asks how and why a person might draw up a set of financial accounts, but also considers the implications of choices made over scribes, handwriting, presentation, personal spelling system and linguistic scripts. Financial accounts had communicative functions related to their moment of production, but could also carry meanings across time and between generations.

Nick Groom develops his earlier work on the influence of The Vampyre on Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein. Both were conceived at the Villa Diodati during the summer of 1816, and Frankenstein has deep affinities with the vampire lore that was evidently aired during conversations between Lord, Byron, Percy Shelley, Mary Godwin (later Shelley), Claire Clairmont, and Polidori. But the influence was also reciprocal, and Frankenstein echoes through Polidori’s tale in unexpected ways. The character Aubrey has often been seen as a self-portrait of Polidori while it is generally accepted that the vampire Lord Ruthven is an audacious attack on Byron, who employed Polidori as his personal physician. However, in this chapter Groom presents a radical and unsettling close reading of the character of Aubrey, informed by Mary Shelley’s presentation of Victor Frankenstein, arguing that the relationship between Aubrey and Ruthven is far more complex and uncanny than has hitherto been recognised.

Ana Bigotte Vieira and André Silveira examine Un autre livre rouge, an artist book made by the Portuguese artists Lourdes Castro and Manuel Zimbro while they were living in Paris. The two-volume book alluded to Mao’s Little Red Book and was entirely devoted to the contradictory meanings and psychological associations that red conveyed. The work was crafted mostly between 1973 and 1975 at a time of radical political change in Portugal. The Carnation Revolution and the PREC (Período Revolucionário Em Curso, Ongoing Revolutionary Period) informed Un autre livre rouge, which was, however, both less and more than a political book.