This chapter explores the perceptual acts modelled by John Clare’s poetry, especially in encounters with the more-than-human world. Rather than foregrounding the ways a perceiving ego shapes a landscape, Clare details situations and perspectives readers can imaginatively enter and emphasizes the ways that the situations themselves invite receptivity. He normalizes ecologically attuned modes of perception by presenting them as enabled by the places, plants, and animals his speakers encounter more than the speakers themselves. Focusing on poems that place speakers among or beneath birds and weeds, including ‘To an Insignificant Flower’, ‘The Fens’, and some shorter bird poems, Falke describes the poetic means through which Clare encourages epistemological humility and other-directedness. She then articulates a mode of reading Clare’s poetry based on these same perceptual habits.

Lucian’s In Praise of the Fly offers a delightfully wry encomium of the humble house fly. While the speech engages wittily with sophistic traditions by praising this troublesome insect, it also raises important questions about social marginality and the workings of power, and about the mechanisms through which value is conventionally assessed and reinforced. This chapter examines scale, social status, and literary self-consciousness in Lucian’s representation of the fly as a creature of immense cultural importance. The encomium, it is argued, plays with conventional associations between size and value, revelling in comic juxtapositions of scale, and in the mismatch between ambition and achievement. It also exploits traditional modes of discourse that present animals as models for the socially disenfranchised, and draws on the vocabulary of literary criticism and composition in order to evoke and challenge the symbolism traditionally attributed to other insects and to represent the fly provocatively as the new emblem of a refined literary and cultural aesthetic.

Lucian is a master of ekphrasis – the art of rhetorical description and notably the vivid verbal evocation of works of art. One particular aspect of Lucian’s art historical enterprise is a comparative aesthetic. This extends beyond the comparison of artworks with other things or people (in texts whose titles signal such comparison) to some of the forms in which Lucian chose to write, notably dialogic media (whether dramatic of reported). This comparative game knowingly plays with the inevitable competition of art and text that inheres in the verbal description of the visual. Beyond this, Lucian takes synkrisis or comparison – a central trope in the rhetorical handbooks – and exploits it so as to give voice to the marginal, to elevate the alien and to emphasise questions of multiplicity and diversity within empire. This ideological exploitation of description is what in part has made Lucian so attractive and controversial since the era of Renaissance Humanism. The apparently unproblematic arena of visual aesthetics is brilliantly seized – not only by Lucian but also many of his modern readers – as a site within which to reveal the place, voice, and importance of cultural, ethnic and subaltern identities not always in simple harmony with the hegemonic status quo of the Roman empire.

This chapter examines Lucian’s Erotes to explore qustions of authorship and agency. It explores how questions about authorship operate differently for erotic and non-erotic works and the ways in which erotic discourse is more amenable to anonymous or masked authors. The chapter shows how according Lucianic authorship to this text enriches our understanding of other texts by Lucian. It examines how the Erotes functions to critique normative sexual discourse and suggest that in the comparison between men and women as love objects the text underlines the tiredness and conventionality of this debate and the rhetorical tropes that are employed in it. By contrast, this reading of the Erotes seeks to locate the critical frisson of the text (its ‘kink’) in its discussion of the magnitude of male appetite and the way the text correlates sex and the divine.

By purpose and design The Cambridge History of International Law is situated at the forefront of the drive towards more global perspectives on the history of international law. This chapter accounts for the foundational choices and general architecture of the series. It does so by, first, surveying the broad outline of the evolution of the historiography of international law as an academic discipline since its first emergence in the latter half of the nineteenth century in terms of gradually overcoming the many self-imposed epistemological and mental constraints of the traditional state-centric and Eurocentric historiography. Second, the chapter assesses current methodological debates among historians of international law hailing from different disciplines – primarily law and history – within the broader contexts of general legal-history debates. The third section of the chapter indicates how the architecture of the series is purported to advance the agenda of the globalisation of the field, through a focus on the diverse histories of international law in various regions of the world.

Brennan Breed’s “The Reception History of Isaiah: Unsealing the Book” takes a single theme attested in just a few verses (Isa 8:16; 29:11; and 30:8) and shows how it has been reinterpreted by readers ceaselessly across the centuries, all the way from later biblical authors to modern times, in response to everything from sectarian divisions to African-American slavery to the trauma of the Holocaust. These verses refer to the words of the prophet being sealed, especially to those who are ignorant, until the time comes for their meaning to be revealed. This theme brings into focus the ways in which Isaiah has been used polemically, and it also points to the text’s power as a seemingly inexhaustible well of meaning.

Simulating religion through computer modelling can demonstrate how fragmentary theories relate, untangle individual lines of causal influence, identify the relative importance of causal factors and enable experimentation that would never be possible (or ethical) in the real world. This chapter reviews the application of computational modelling and simulation to religion, presents findings from specific simulation studies and discusses some of the philosophical issues raised by this type of research. Social simulations are artificial complex systems that we can use to study real-world complex systems. The best of these simulation models are carefully validated in relation to real-world data. Multilevel validation justifies confidence that the causal architecture of the simulation reflects real-world causal processes, thereby delivering an invaluable proxy system into the hands of researchers who study religion.

Some of the earliest witnesses to the Book of Isaiah are translations into Greek and Syriac. Sometimes the translators offered not simply basic equivalents to Hebrew words but shaped their translation of passages to accord with understandings of them that were current in their Jewish communities. Although this can make the window to their Hebrew text opaque, sometimes their differences from today’s standard Hebrew text preserve alternative wordings found elsewhere in early Hebrew texts, while in other cases they include wordings that have not survived in any other Hebrew witnesses. The chief question such differences raise is whether the translator tailored his version to the readers’ pre-understanding or if they reflect different Hebrew words in the manuscript he used. In “Early Versions of Isaiah as Translations and Interpretations,” Ronald L. Troxel cites examples of these conundrums, and illustrates how scholars attempt to reason about their origins.

Histories of international law more or less follow the epistemic position of the jurisdiction in which they arise. The parochial anglophone student of the comparative literature in the history of international law instantly sees a version of this phenomenon in action. With notable exceptions, even sophisticated work in the history of international law in the US is importantly different from English-language work in the same field that has begun to pour out from scholars based in the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and elsewhere. In this chapter, I propose that this is because US scholars since at least the Second World War have taken up the history of international law through a set of questions and presuppositions structured by a standpoint inside the leviathan. The most powerful player on the international stage – the United States – has exerted a gravitational pull on scholars writing the history of international law and on the functions that such histories serve.  In recent years, however, the cross-border professionalisation of the field is helping produce histories increasingly further afield from, or at least in a newly complex relationship with, the epistemic domination of the hegemon.

The art and craft of writing history are inherently linked with international-law scholarship. Finding precedents and doctrinal authority and reading the political compromises underpinning institutions are typical purposes. Lawyers, academics and political actors have all been receptive to a historical narrative. The structure and arguments used in international law are closely linked with Western legal culture and the reception of Roman law. This setting is at the same time broader and more restrictive than that of professional academic historians, who developed theoretical standards to distinguish their thought-through production (historia rerum gestarum) from the rendering of brute facts (res gestae) or from a purely literary product. This chapter starts with German and French eighteenth-century visions of the law of nations, before passing to the nineteenth-century passion for history. The ‘men’ of 1873 (Institute of International Law) and twentieth-century evolutions led to the recent boom in scholarship. The ‘turn to history’ in international law not only continues past traditions, but also reflects broader transformations in the social sciences and humanities. Conversely, we witness a contemporary ‘turn to law’ in intellectual, political, cultural and social history, which leads to a stimulating process of cross-fertilisation.

With its many voices that are joined together, Isaiah is akin to a massive choir or symphony, and it sometimes strikes dissonant notes. Matthew R. Schlimm, in “Theological Tensions in the Book of Isaiah,” looks at a number of different themes on which the book contains contrasting testimonies: God is portrayed as both a loving savior and a wrathful punisher; God is said to be a mighty sovereign, and yet humans frequently do not act according to his will; God is universal and transcendent, and yet is also portrayed as intimate with his people, particularly Zion; humans are sometimes seen as pervasively sinful, but are exhorted to do good; the creation, too, is sometimes good and blessed, and yet elsewhere seen as corrupted; and the same leaders and empires are alternately condemned and used as divine agents. Schlimm reflects on the way in which these complexities press readers beyond simple answers.

This chapter traces John Clare’s unusual lifelong sympathy with plants. The bard of wildflowers wrote about the botanical world again and again, not only drawing on plants for numerous poems, but also recording his observations in botanical lists and Natural History Letters. Other men’s flowers, which he came across in his reading, cross-fertilized with his own habitual experience of local flora, to create poetry of startling freshness. The chapter draws primarily on Clare’s writings on flowers, trees, and grass but is also indebted to the work of key botanical critics and writers such as Molly Mahood and Richard Mabey, as well as recent environmental trends in Clare studies. Clare’s closely observed, celebratory, and elegiac poetry of plants demonstrates his vital importance for the twenty-first century, by alerting us to the irreplaceable value of the natural world.

In “The Book of Isaiah at Qumran,” Jesper Høgenhaven offers a concise overview of the texts related to Isaiah that were discovered among the Dead Sea Scrolls. The book’s importance for the Qumran community is attested not only by the large number of copies that survived, but also by various other genres of sectarian literature that drew from and reflected on the book, including the pesher commentaries and even the Community Rule (1QS). The Great Isaiah Scroll (1QIsaa) is the longest biblical scroll found at Qumran. It is an important witness for reconstructing the oldest text of the book, and also subtly reflects some of the earliest interpretive decisions about it.

This chapter describes Clare’s attitude to form and surveys the various forms in which he writes. It emphasizes the variety of Clare’s formal achievement, showing how across his career he adopts different prosodic and generic conventions, including those of the sonnet, ballad, lyric, couplet, and ode. Running through all Clare’s poems, the chapter suggests, is a wariness of imposing excessive order upon the patterns of experience. The irregular beauty and emotional clarity of Clare’s poems emerge out of an effort to find a balance sympathetic to nature over artifice, spontaneity over control, and existing tradition over individual embellishment.

In “Divine and Human Plans of God in the Book of Isaiah,” J. Todd Hibbard follows the occurrences of a Hebrew root that means “to plan, advise, counsel” through the whole book, bringing to light one of its central themes. He shows how Isaiah’s theological rhetoric begins with a plan against Judah that involves foreign nations, but eventually undermines the plans of those nations as well. As with feminine imagery in the book, it is possible to identify a kind of episodic narrative running through the book in relation to certain themes in a way that animates the development of the book and holds it together despite its lengthy formation. The divine plans for Judah and nations eventually come together and culminate with the summoning of Cyrus as messiah and the appearance of the Persian empire.