This chapter draws on the work of many canonical art historians and weighs their contribution, implied or explicit, to an ecocritical art history. It looks at the standard introductions to art historical theory and method that are in circulation, mining them for ecological potential and seeking out a positive case for environmental concerns of various types nascent within the discipline. Yet is also problematises the fact that none of these introductions explicitly asserts ecological imperatives. The conclusion of this chapter is that art history is well placed to expand into a critical environmental humanities whilst drawing selectively on existing work in the discipline.

The introduction provides a general overview of the book and its main ideas. It details three specific concepts. First, it argues that Carter’s human rights diplomacy should be understood in the bipolar context. Second, it points out that détente and human rights intertwined and overlapped in unexpected, ambiguous and contradictory ways. In particular, it argues that the Carter administration tried to develop a human rights policy that was complementary and functional to détente: through a firm stance on Soviet violations of human rights, Carter sought to legitimate détente within the United States, where it was increasingly questioned. Finally, it explains that Carter’s political balance between détente and human rights soon revealed itself unable to simultaneously satisfy both the Soviets and the American public.

This section opens with More’s popular image of the 1950s and how he embodied a form of male screen identity defined as ‘the chap’. It goes on to argue that this persona was the creation of a stage and film actor of considerable dramatic range. Genevieve, the picture, that established Kenneth More as a box office attraction, is discussed with reference to the end of rationing and the early signs of the affluent society. The actor’s skill at depicting immaturity is also covered with especial reference to The Deep Blue Sea and Reach for the Sky is discussed in terms of its evocation of wartime heroism. The latter sections of the chapter detail the end of More’s contract with the Rank Organisation and how The Greengage Summer marked a transition to leading character actor. Particular attention is focused on The Comedy Man as representing the finest screen work of More’s later years and as a deconstruction of his familiar cinematic image.

The final stages of the life cycle witnessed the ageing of the individual to the point where he or she would be identified as 'old' or 'aged'. In twenty-first-century Britain, chronological age has a key role in defining the entry into senior citizenship. Sixty-five is the official age for retirement and pension entitlement. While medieval writers employed chronological age markers, they preferred identifying an old person in terms of appearance, or by mental and physical capabilities. With the introduction of state pensions in the twentieth-century Britain, old age became associated with retirement, and a clear distinction is drawn between the working, active young and the inactive old. There were no state pensions or universal work benefits in medieval Europe. The chapter also shows that the elderly in medieval society were stereotyped as physically weak, and exemptions from war and administrative responsibilities imply that some old people were given age-related assistance.

Medieval and early modern historiography had encouraged the integration of biblical and Gaelic chronologies, and throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Irish antiquarians, poets and romantic nationalists began to think of themselves as ‘Milesians’, the displaced descendants of a wandering Phoenician tribe. This chapter focuses on the British Israelites, a loose Protestant sect united by their belief that the Anglo-Saxon race was descended from the Lost Tribes of Israel and that biblical prophecies on the future of ‘Israel’ referred to the British Empire. The British Israelites argued that the ancient Irish king, Ollamh Fodhla, was actually the Hebrew prophet Jeremiah. This myth-history was deployed in support of the British-Israel claim that the Anglo-Saxons were the true heirs to the biblical Kingdom of David. Yet despite their fascination with the mysteries of pre-Christian Ireland, most British Israelites were arch-imperialists, staunch anti-Catholics and opponents of Irish Home Rule. The chapter explores shifting notions of British and Irish racial identity in relation to scriptural genealogy, and argues that Old Testament narratives were co-opted to serve conflicting political and religious agendas.

David Owen opens his response by observing that, for Rainer Forst, the first question of justice is the question of power. In any scheme of rule, what matters is that those subject to power are able to contest and shape the relations of rule by demanding justifications. Moving on to Forst's concept of morality, Owen observes that this is rooted in a Wittgenstenian 'seeing' of other human beings as human. He agrees with Forst about this fundamental form of moral recognition, but charges Forst with making it appear that seeing another biological human being as human means seeing all other biological human beings as human. Owen also argues that, contrary to what Forst suggests, overcoming soulblindness is not a matter of being provided with additional facts or normative reasons but of 'soul-dawning', of coming to see an aspect that one could not see before. The basis of Forst's error here is his treatment of the power exerted by structures (such as patriarchy) that configure the general space of reasons. In separating this area from his broader discussion of power, Forst embraces a narrower definition in which justificatory reasons are the normative medium though which power is exercised. Owen ends his response by reflecting on Bernard Williams's distinction between justification and vindication, and whether Forst's account is capable of explaining how far political violence may be used in the pursuit of establishing the right to justification.

In the first volume of Capital (1867), Karl Marx sarcastically turns the concept of ‘fetishism’, a concept with which defenders of bourgeois capitalist modernity including Hegel, Comte and Tyler classified (and denigrated) non-European civilizations, against modern civilization itself. In his description of the ‘commodity-fetish’ as the basic structure of the form and dynamic of modern society Marx unfolds what all subsequent sociology would address as the complex play of structure and agency.

This chapter explores the question of why crimes within families and in society at large are, and have been, laid at the door of stepmothers, whereas the slur of wickedness has never clung to stepfathers to anything like the same extent. Widowers had socially acceptable options if they wanted to maintain their households and provide care for their children, and they were able to evade the problem of giving their children a stepmother. Stepmothers are mentioned in the legal evidence in the context of two distinct areas: incest and remarriage. Ecclesiastical marriage legislation, including the establishment of the prohibited degrees, and the prohibition of incest, in conciliar decrees, capitularies and penitentials, has been very thoroughly studied for the Frankish Empire. Widow remarriage, taken for granted in the late Roman legal codes, was frowned on in public opinion, both in pagan Roman society and in the views of the Church Fathers.