This chapter concludes the book with an extended discussion of ‘Crusoe and England’, Bishop’s longest, most ambitious, and perhaps greatest poem. This final chapter outlines ‘Crusoe in England’s use of all the features of style considered in this book, and demonstrates its importance to Bishop’s allusive art. The relationship between ‘Crusoe in England’, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Charles Darwin’s The Voyage of the Beagle is examined in detail. Critically negative readings of the poem are explored, and the poem is read in relation to William Wordsworth, loneliness in Bishop’s life and work, and the modernist and New Critical legacy of the evaluative term ‘self-pity’.

This chapter focuses on the historical accounts dealing with the Sasanian empire’s physicians and medical institutions, and their relationship to the Sasanian dynasty. These accounts’ contents and the fact of their circulation reflect the proliferating and strengthening ties between Sasanian rulers and their realm’s physicians in the sixth and seventh centuries, which both parties viewed as beneficial and made efforts to make known. My analysis also yields a somewhat reconfigured understanding of Gondēšāpūr’s medical-historical importance, which builds on arguments advanced by Vittorio Berti: that while Gondēšāpūr’s broader region of Khuzestan was already home to a well-known tradition of medical learning by the time of Khusrō I (and possibly substantially earlier), the emergence of Gondēšāpūr as the region’s preeminent medical center was a comparatively late development, which may have only occurred in the waning decades of Sasanian rule.

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) is the guardian of international law. Therefore, the Commentaries to the Geneva Conventions produced by the ICRC present an authoritative guidance on how these treaties are to be interpreted. In this sense, the ICRC represents an actor whose interpretation is authoritative on its substantive merit. A study of the interpretative methodology behind the Commentaries of the ICRC reveals that although the methodology has evolved it has done so apace with the evolution of the rules of treaty interpretation in general public international law – culminating in the adoption of the VCLT. This is argued to be decisive proof that the rules of international humanitarian law are subject to the same interpretive rules as other international rules.

International law, like any other legal system, must ensure legal certainty. This task is all the more important for international law in light of the constant criticism advanced towards the nature of this legal system. One of the key tools to ensure legal certainty is a consistent and coherent application of rules based on a method of interpretation, where that method serves as the backbone of a judgement. The legal system and an act of application of a specific rule gain persuasiveness and legitimacy where the use of the method of interpretation of a rule is consistent from one case to another. Judges are the guarantors of the resilience of law in the sense that it is in their power to ensure its impartial and uniform application, which in turn counters allegations of inefficiency or bias of that system of law. All these considerations about the systemic features of interpretation and the role of judges as interpreters play toward at least a perception of the rule of law in the legal system. Therefore, the general rule of interpretation of international law is a central element in the international rule of law.

The muse of alchemy was often rendered in male-authored texts as a female figure: Lady Alchymya. This chapter begins by exploring how Lady Alchymya is configured in early modern male-authored printed works such as John Hester’s The First Part of the Key of Philosophie (1580) and Sir John Davies’s Nosce teipsum (1599). It then analyses how the woman philosopher and writer Margaret Cavendish (1623?–73) utilises Lady Alchymya’s shape-shifting potential to celebrate the protean nature of the authoress-alchemist’s female ‘making’ mind. The chapter builds on recent work on Cavendish and literary chymistry and breaks new ground in this area by examining a key (but overlooked) feminocentric alchemical motif in Cavendish’s oeuvre.

Bishop – like Tennyson before her – was professedly ambivalent about, and sometimes antipathetic to, critics who sought ‘literary references’ in her poems. Tom Paulin takes Bishop’s lead when he writes that she ‘avoids recondite allusion’, and many recent critics have followed him. In this chapter, Bishop’s poetry is shown to be profoundly and variedly allusive. This chapter examines Bishop’s relation to the burgeoning knowledge industry of the 1960s and ’70s, and showcases the wide range of authors – including Luis de Camoes, Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Robert Frost – to whom she alludes. This chapter considers in particular Bishop’s relationship to T. S. Eliot, as both an alluded-to source text and as a model of allusive practice. The chapter uses and then complicates Eliot’s distinction between allusions that confirm their sources’ effects, and those which are used in contexts that are ‘pointedly diverse’. John Hollander’s distinction between quotation, allusion and echo also frames the discussion of Bishop’s allusions in relation to loneliness, identity, posterity, and artifice.