International investment law is a regime in search of its identity. At the core of this search, a central role is played by ‘comparativism’ (or comparative reasoning) as a method of interpretation employed by investment tribunals. It explores how comparative reasoning fits into the theory of sources, and how this method is used by arbitral tribunals to convince their audience. The chapter finds that arbitral tribunals regularly rely on customary international law, general principles of law, as well as previous judicial decisions, when interpreting IIAs provisions. However, in doing so, arbitral tribunals display a selectivity in the choice of domestic rules or systems considered for this purpose. Relatedly, when relying on previous judicial decisions, they do not always enquire sufficiently into the similarity (or lack thereof) between the past judicial decisions and the present issue at hand. The chapter concludes that arbitral tribunals rely on comparative reasoning to strengthen or justify the choices made in the course of interpretation.

This chapter focuses on the composition and Islamic reception of the Sasanian Zīj al-Shāh, an astronomical handbook apparently first composed at the court of the Sasanian king Khusrō I in the sixth century. The Zīj al-Shāh’s Indian and Greek sources are investigated, as well as the versions in which it was available to Islamic-era scholars, and the role this work and others played in transmitting Indian learning to the Sasanian and early Islamic Middle East. The possibility that the reports regarding the Zīj al-Shāh and other works shed new light on the history of astral science in India is also explored.

This chapter qualifies Randall Jarrell’s assertion that all of Bishop’s poems have ‘written underneath it, I have seen it’ by examining those similes which simultaneously enable and defy visualisation. Drawing especially on Murray Krieger’s Ekphrasis, it examines similes in Bishop’s ekphrastic poems that are at once moving and still. This chapter also considers her use of self-reflexive, paradoxical similes, which are often used in metaphysical poems, and goes on to demonstrate how Bishop’s use of this simile would influence subsequent American and Northern Irish poets. Also considered are: the effects of psychologising similes in her dramatic monologues; Homeric similes in her poems of war and violence; and her use of what C. S. Lewis, in an essay on Dante, described as similes that work by dint of their ‘unlikeness’. Criticism of simile often stresses the likeness made between tenor and vehicle; here, the view is proposed that, conversely, many of Bishop’s similes rely on a marked unlikeness for their effects.

The range of methods that courts can use for the interpretation of customary law is in principle no different than that applicable to other sources of international law, and these methods roughly correspond to those enumerated in articles 31-33 VCLT. At the same time, not all these methods are suitable for the interpretation of customary rules of international environmental law (IEL). Most environmental rules have by their inception an inherent constraint with regards to teleological interpretation as they yield to a number of considerations beyond simply the protection of the environment. In light of this, international courts and tribunals have interpreted customary environmental rules in expansive as well as regressive ways, oscillating between these two tendencies. When interpreting expansively, courts take into account developments that appear to affect the rule in question and push it to catch up with these developments. In contrast, regressive interpretation involves а backward looking approach where the courts are content with offering an interpretation that diverges from the standards surrounding the rule and renders a more conservative version of it.

Renaissance male writers such as Philip Sidney, George Puttenham and John Milton aligned the male poet to an alchemist because of his ability of create ‘golden’ worlds. This chapter proposes that the manuscript writings of the Hertfordshire gentlewoman Hester Pulter (c. 1605–78) offers crucial new evidence for constructing a more inclusive and expansive understanding of the tradition of the poet-maker-alchemist. It argues that Pulter’s manuscript verse (which was composed from c. 1645 to 1667) inventively engages with hegemonic male Renaissance poetic theory to formulate a divinely inspired, female poetic-alchemical identity.

Bishop censures the use of clichés in several letters, yet they often appear in her work. To some critics, this makes her work ‘chatty’, ‘plain and direct’; to others, it produces an effect of ‘mere mannered fussy prattling’. Yet in Bishop (and others), a heightened and reflective use of clichés can create profounder effects than simply mimicking speech. Drawing on dictionaries of cliché and commonplace books (including George Herbert’s Outlandish Proverbs), this chapter examines Bishop’s creative use of clichés and compares her to other mid-century American poets (Robert Lowell, John Berryman), and to very different writers (Geoffrey Hill, Samuel Beckett, James Joyce) who also use clichés imaginatively. This chapter focuses particularly on: methods to enliven clichés; Bishop’s debt to French writers on cliché (Baudelaire, Flaubert and Proust); cliché’s relation to mechanisation; religious clichés; surrealism; and the relationship between cliché and women’s writing.

While Chapters 1–5 of this monograph focus on how individual women writers were innovatively reshaping male-authored alchemical ideas to establish the authority of the woman chymical writer, Chapter 6 proposes that during the seventeenth century we witness the development of a female alchemical literary tradition in which women writers did not exclusively respond to their male predecessors and male peers, but to their female precursors and female contemporaries. By identifying the conceptual and linguistic alchemical connections between six women writers – Aemilia Lanyer (1569–1645), Katherine Philips (1632–64), Anne Finch (1661–1720), Eleanor Davies (1590–1652), Jane Lead (1624–1704) and Ann Bathurst (c. 1638–1704) – this chapter unearths a genealogy of chymical knowledge that does not place male alchemical authors at its centre, but privileges the ideologies of women alchemical authors and female chymical practitioners.

Since the publication of C. G. Jung’s Psychology and Alchemy (1944), scholars have argued that early modern alchemy not only anticipated modern chemistry, but was a precursor to contemporary psychology, too. These scholars posit that alchemical discourse offered early moderns a means by which to articulate their inward psychological states. This chapter analyses how one seventeenth-century woman writer, Lucy Hutchinson (1620–81), appropriated alchemical language and symbolism to delineate a distinctively female mentality: that of the grieving melancholic widow and the woman poet-healer. By adding Hutchinson’s poetic corpus to the history of psychological alchemy, this chapter aims to prove that early modern psychology was not a solely male-authored discipline centred on men’s consciousness, but could be used by a woman writer to trace the contours of a specifically female mindset.