This chapter examines the reception of the Meditations in early modern Europe, focusing primary on the period from the first publication of the Meditations in 1559 to the end of the eighteenth century. In particular it discusses the way in which the text was read as either a generic source of ancient moral maxims or a serious work of Stoic philosophy. Key figures in the early modern debate include Isaac Casaubon, his son Meric, Thomas Gataker, the Cambridge Platonists Henry More and Ralph Cudworth, Anthony Ashley Cooper, the third Earl of Shaftesbury, Francis Hutcheson, and on the Continent Joannes Franciscus Buddeus and Johann Jakob Brucker.

Begins by considering the visual discrepancy between the earliest photographs of the dancers from the original production of The Rite of Spring (taken by Charles Gerschel) and the sketches made by art student Valentine Gross during rehearsals and first performances: a discrepancy between a dissonant, harsh geometry and an art-nouveau-inspired, impressionistic beauty. Explores how this disjunction reflects a broader cultural anxiety of the period – as apparent in some of the first press reviews of the ballet – about dancing bodies, an aesthetics of ugliness and the grotesque. Describes how Nijinsky’s choreography and its obvious bodily deformity evoked parallels with the avant-garde practices of Futurism, Cubism and primitivism, as well as with a lineage of established ballet traditions (character dance and grotesque ballet). A final section explains how Nijinsky managed to re-frame his dancers on stage so that they could invert the power dynamics of the standard Orientalist gaze.

This chapter addresses an alternative history of The Rite of Spring: principally, as a meme of modernity within popular culture and cinema. Stravinsky’s score, we learn, has inspired countless jazz practitioners and film directors: who, how, when and why are important questions raised, giving the reader a clear sense of the contemporary currency of Stravinsky’s music with an audience of listeners and musicians for whom the original ballet has taken on new life and meaning.

With a focus on Stravinsky’s score and thus the ballet’s musical aspect, this chapter explores several waystations on The Rite of Spring’s journey from ballet to instrumental work – in concert, on record and, most recently, online. Rather than offering a complete history, this account explores a few of the key transformations that took place over the twentieth century as The Rite was re-imagined as a composition for symphony orchestra, allied not with choreography, costumes and décor but with the creative vision of a conductor, the practical skills of a sound editor and the promotional machine of a record label.

Focusing solely on the musical output of composer Igor Stravinsky, this chapter explores the evolution of what would become a characteristic compositional process – so-called ‘block form’ – in later works including Concertino, Symphony in Three Movements and Introitus T. S. Eliot in Memoriam. Close analysis of scores for these works, as well as a 1943 revision of the ‘Sacrificial Dance’ from The Rite, shows how Stravinsky crafted an idiomatic compositional technique that could produce both textural variation and structure coherence, while, in some cases, supporting a musical narrative.

This chapter explores a handful of the many new productions of The Rite of Spring that have been staged since the ballet’s original performance in 1913. Introducing the topic by way of critical reflection on the challenges facing scholars and students of such choreographic reinterpretations, this account describes three of the most canonical revisions of the ballet (by Léonide Massine, Maurice Béjart and Pina Bausch) before dwelling principally on two more recent and seemingly self-reflexive versions: Yvonne Rainer’s RoS Indexical (2007) and Nora Chipaumire’s rite riot (2014).

Offers a wide-ranging yet nuanced account of the articles and reviews of The Rite of Spring that emerged in the Parisian press – the daily newspapers and specialist music and theatre journals – around the time of the premiere in May 1913. In doing so, this chapter seeks to chip away at some of the myth-making and exaggerated rhetoric that has contributed to our (mis)understanding of the supposedly riotous first night at the newly built Théâtre de Champs-Élysées, Paris. Close examination of the press reveals what, or rather who, most angered or else stupefied spectators and how choreography, music, decors and costumes were regarded by a select audience. Broader social and political tensions come to the fore as reports in the press are read in the context of a wider cultural history of the period.

This chapter uses Diogenes Laertius’ doxographical overview of Stoic natural philosophy as a starting point to examine the role of physics in Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations. Contrary to a common misconception, all the central aspects of Stoic physics, except for some more technical issues, are well represented. The chapter discusses Marcus Aurelius’ treatment of the telos-formula of ‘living according to nature’; the two fundamental Stoic principles of reality, god and matter; the scale of nature; and the relation between Providence, fate, necessity, change, human action, and freedom. Marcus Aurelius’ distinctive touch comes through in certain areas of emphasis, such as the centrality of sociability, human and divine, or the many implications of the view that the processes of change that also entail human mortality actually constitute the order of the universe.

Situates the original 1913 production of Sergei Diaghilev’s The Rite of Spring in its local theatrical context, exploring the scheduling and significance of the ballet within the Parisian calendar. Recounts the popular reception of the Ballets Russes’s annual ‘Saisons Russes’ in the French capital, focusing on the pre-war period but also offering a broader history of the troupe and its activities until its dissolution in 1929. Describes the principal stylistic characteristics of the troupe’s productions in terms of music, choreography and visuals (decors and costumes), suggesting historical developments and trajectories that aligned with broader strands of cultural influence during the first decades of the twentieth century. Also explores the nineteenth-century background of theatrical dance in Russia and Western Europe.

This chapter argues that Augustine preaches on the Trinity both in sermons devoted particularly to particular trinitarian questions, and throughout his homiletic corpus insofar as Augustine’s understanding of creation and salvation as a whole is founded on his understanding of the inseparability and co-equality of Father, Son and Spirit. Through these different types of sermons Augustine also consistently emphasizes both the importance of accepting in faith knowledge handed on to us, but which we cannot yet comprehend, and the importance of struggling to think of God in terms beyond the material and the temporal. It is also noticeable that Augustine makes little use of the language of persona and natura in his preaching, preferring to define his belief through a series of Nicene principles (such as the inseparability of the divine three in their acts), and through presenting Nicene exegeses of key verses as hermeneutical keys.

Parallel to the anti-Jewish policy of the National Socialists that culminated in mass murder, so-called “Judenforschung” was established in the Third Reich as an independent field of study, outside traditional disciplines, through a number of institutions, publications, and public events. In Nazi “Judenforschung,” antisemitism was the leading principle, and the antisemitically constructed “Jewish Question” was the focus of research activity. Thereby, contrary to the tradition of German academia, themes of Jewish history became in themselves respectable subjects of research. The chapter gives an overview of the different institutions for “Judenforschung” in the Third Reich and the dynamics of the field from the mid 1930s until the end of the Second World War; presents different responses to and perceptions of Nazi “Judenforschung” during and after the Second World War; analyzes the relationship between scholarship and antisemitism in Nazi “Judenforschung” that is crucial for the whole research field and its practice in the Third Reich; discusses the role of scholarship in the Holocaust; and finally explores the role of scholars in perpetrating Nazi crimes.

This chapter examines how the Holocaust affected thinking about the humanities and social sciences throughout the West. It offers an intellectual history of key responses to the Holocaust, with an emphasis on political philosophy and social theory. Major intellectuals (Arendt, Adorno, Agamben), as well as less well-known thinkers (Günther Anders, Moishe Postone) are considered. The trajectory of post-Holocaust thought forms the throughline. In the first postwar decades, the Jewish genocide was considered as part of a broader eruption of war and totalitarian violence, while more recent thinkers have tended to subsume the entire history of Western violence, perhaps even “the West” itself, under the sign of the Holocaust.