The Phaistos Disk is an enigmatic object, imprinted with a text in a script found on no other object, though the script does contain a number of signs in common with Linear A. In Chapter 8, the text on the Disk is analyzed against Linear A in an effort to determine whether the two scripts encode the same language. As a control, a Cypriot Syllabic text analogous in size to the one on the Disk is analyzed against Linear B in the same way, with the results demonstrating an overwhelming probability that both scripts encode the same language (which we know they do, as both scripts are deciphered: they both encode Greek). The Cypriot Syllabic text is also analyzed against Linear A, demonstrating an overwhelming probability that the two scripts encode different languages—that is, that Linear A (for a second time) does NOT encode Greek. The analysis of the text on the Disk against Linear A, however, demonstrates a similarly overwhelming probability that both scripts do encode the same language.

This chapter analyses theatricality/performativity in relation to photos from Abu Ghraib prison, published in 2004. The trauma depicted in the Abu Ghraib images is explicit although identifying the theatricality of it requires a slightly deeper reading. For the viewer of the photograph, the punctum of the images is contained in the recognition of the not-realness of the image and hence understanding of the event as functionless. The chapter focuses on the theatre event through the specific lens of the 'traumatic' phenomena of corpsing and drying. The soldiers demonstrated their seemingly absolute power by using captives as playthings, as props in a gratuitous theatre of trauma. The chapter addresses what we might think of as an economy of trauma which can be identified in the structures and mechanisms of theatre and performance.

This chapter begins with an analysis of the poor law system as it evolved in Ireland and moves on to examine the role of central government in overseeing the system's operation. The rationale of the new English poor law of 1834 and thus of the Irish poor law derived from the perceived distinction between poverty and pauperism. The belief that Irish property should be made to support Irish poverty was a key factor in T.W. Russell's support for the poor law. This belief also was to unite liberal Whigs and humanist Tories behind the Irish Poor Relief Bill. The immediate post-Famine period saw a return to low levels of workhouse occupancy and of relief distribution generally. The Irish Local Government Board possessed significantly greater sanctions, but it too pursued a cautious strategy aimed at educating local administrators in the art of government, and relied more on persuasion than coercion.

Chapter 6 further explores Blake’s anti-historicist inclinations in the contexts of his artistic theory and practices. During the late eighteenth century, the injection of organicist language into neoclassical aesthetics produced a new cult of original genius. This chapter examines discussions and depictions of statuary, particularly the famous Laocoön fragment, as well as debates around copying and imitation (involving, notably, Sir Joshua Reynolds and others) to demonstrate how Blake used preformationist ideas to resist the adulation of self-sufficiency, formal autonomy, and cultural autochthony in late eighteenth-century criticism. This chapter situates Blake in opposition to Johann Joachim Winckelmann, whose highly influential developmental history of art relied heavily on organic metaphors of autopoiesis. Winckelmann encouraged the modern artist to become, like the Greeks, ‘inimitable’, original. This chapter, however, shows Blake turning the emerging Romantic discourse of originality (found in Goethe and Herder) on its head. The artist’s task is not one of creation but regeneration, not of producing something wholly new but of giving new life to the preformed visions found in works of old.

British military intervention in Cyprus reached a crescendo in the major counter-insurgency campaign fought by the island's Security Forces between 1955 and 1959. The terrorist group EOKA, led by Colonel George Grivas, immediately embarked on enosis (union with Greece) through an armed campaign. EOKA was backed politically by Archbishop Makarios III, leader of the Cyprus Orthodox Church, who, while not taking an active part in the terrorist campaign himself, ‘hinted that the Church would not shrink from violence if necessary’. Makarios had been making inflammatory anti-British speeches in public for some time, which were designed to push the issue of British occupation to the forefront of public attention in Cyprus and across the world. Thus, Grivas's aim was ‘not to expel or to defeat the British, but to draw the attention of international public opinion by harassing them’. The whole idea was to feed into Makarios’ plan – with the backing of Greece – to lobby hard on the world stage for the liberation of Cyprus by forcing the United Nations to apply pressure on Britain to withdraw. This chapter details the duel that ensued between Cyprus Governor Field-Marshal Lord Harding and Colonel George Grivas throughout the emergency.

Cretan Hieroglyphic has so far proven especially resistant to decipherment, because its corpus is rather small, and most inscriptions consist of just a word or two. In Chapter 9, the Cretan Hieroglyphic corpus is analyzed against Linear A in an effort to determine whether the two scripts encode the same language. As a control, a set of Cypriot Syllabic inscriptions analogous in size to the Cretan Hieroglyphic corpus is analyzed against Linear B in the same way, with the results demonstrating an overwhelming probability that both scripts encode the same language (which we know they do, as both scripts are deciphered: they both encode Greek). The set of Cypriot Syllabic inscriptions is also analyzed against Linear A, demonstrating an overwhelming probability that the two scripts encode different languages—that is, that Linear A (for a third time) does NOT encode Greek. The analysis of the Cretan Hieroglyphic corpus against Linear A, however, demonstrates a similarly overwhelming probability that both scripts do encode the same language.

The development of trauma theory is underpinned by a history of theatricality, and performativity is inherent within the structure of trauma. The author of this book suggests that Herbert W. Page's arguments align the genealogy of trauma with a sense of performativity or theatricality. The discourse of theatricality within trauma's history continues with Jean-Martin Charcot and the theatrics of his infamous Lecons du Mardi. The author also suggests that there are two ways in which mimesis might be working. Firstly, the repetitive nightmares amount to an internal mimetic, representational restaging of the trauma-event. Secondly, mimesis constitutes a second wound, or co-constitutes the double wound of the trauma-event. This double and repeating wound instigates and perpetuates a collapse of narrative time, and re-presents the trauma-event in the mind of the survivor-sufferer ensuring they are kept in stasis, unable to live in either the past or the present.

This chapter explores the place of polite and ornamental learning in the social self-fashioning of the late eighteenth-century medical gentleman. It presents three case studies of local practitioners whose interests and publications spanned the spectrum of polite learning from what might be called 'natural' forms of knowledge, including botany and agricultural improvement. The chapter begins with Alexander Hunter, whose botanical and agricultural publications shaped his identity as a patriotic Whig of refined sensibilities. It considers how medicine intersected with the cultural politics of place in the work of his friend and fellow physician, William White. Hunter is portrayed not as a working practitioner but as a refined gentleman of letters and leisure. The chapter concludes with the work of Charles and James Atkinson, exploring how comedic writing could present medical practitioners as men of wit and literary imagination, at ease with the droll discourse of men and manners.

This chapter explores in detail structural constructivism as a theory of European integration. Pierre Bourdieu's structural constructivist theory of politics offers powerful instruments for a critical analysis of political power. In Bourdieu's theory of the political field, politics is a game. In many ways, Bourdieu's pessimistic analysis of politics is reminiscent of Plato's critique of the Sophists. The political reality of the European Union is Janus-faced. On the one hand, it is an emergent system of governance that is networked, not hierarchical, and open, not closed. On the other hand, the European Union is far from being a power-free institutional and discursive space. Compared to other approaches in European integration studies, one of the advantages of structural constructivism as an alternative to social constructivism is that it does not commit itself to either a state-centric or a supranational point of view.

The chapter demonstrates for the first time that silversmiths served as the arbiters of value in Mexico City. They persuaded officials to trust them, to allow them to govern their affairs, by preserving the silver standard. It was their way of protecting the crown’s money, reals minted at the House of Coins that served as a global currency during the seventeenth century. Examining the lives of silversmiths shows how residents used silver locally in an economy that operated on credit and with cash. Silversmiths made objects that had intrinsic and monetary value, so residents relied on them for investment advice and to understand the crown’s complicated fiscal policy.