The role of Christian worship and devotional practices in making the gospels come alive in ever-changing historical circumstances and across ecclesial traditions is explored. Among the arts, attention is paid to the signal contribution of music (J. S. Bach, Black gospel music, and hymns) to the appreciation and appropriation of gospel texts.

While noting John’s several differences from the synoptics, Christopher Skinner shows how John is particularly interested in narrating the life of Jesus within the eternal life of God. It is Jesus’ unique relationship with God which shapes John’s distinctive portrayal of Jesus as the one through whom the hidden God is known.

This chapter describes Gadamer’s initial understanding of the nature and significance of Platonic philosophy in terms of dialogue and dialectic. It then provides a brief account of Gadamer’s own interpretive method as presented in Truth and Method. The chapter then shows how Gadamer changed his understanding of Plato, particularly in relation to Aristotle. The chapter shows how this new understanding of Plato provides the ontological foundation for Gadamer’s own “hermeneutics.” Finally, we see how Gadamer’s readings of ancient philosophers constitute a fundamental challenge and correction to the mode of interpretation still dominant in Anglo-American philosophy.

This chapter traces the establishment, and evolution of military slavery in north India between ca. 1000-1500. It will moreover investigate the interaction between war and society when it involves enslavement of captured civilians. Lastly, it will argue that the expansion of agriculture and the rise of a large peasant population that served as a potential source of mercenaries that eventually competed with slaves as a source of recruitment.

While captivity was the product of the violent confrontation between Jews, Christians, and Muslims, this essay uses Latin, Arabic, and Romance sources to argue that ransoming was also a phenomenon that intimately linked these communities. Grounded in a shared Roman inheritance, the tradition of ransoming brought Jews, Christians, and Muslims into a dialogic and reciprocal relationship with one another, one that depended on mutual understanding and expectations. It provided a channel to share ideas and institutions. Ransomers also helped pave the paths for commercial and diplomatic relations. Nevertheless, if ransoming drew these communities together, it also tore them apart. The physical and emotional cost of captivity, although shared, became the ground of separation.

In 1960 Hans-Georg Gadamer, then a sixty-year-old German philosophy professor at Heidelberg, published Truth and Method ( Wahrheit und Methode). Although he had authored many essays, articles, and reviews, to this point Gadamer had published only one other book, his habilitation on Plato in 1931: Plato’s Dialectical Ethics. As a title for this work on a theory of interpretation, he first proposed to his publisher, Mohr Siebeck, “Philosophical Hermeneutics.” The publisher responded that “hermeneutics” was too obscure a term. Gadamer then proposed “Truth and Method” for a work that found, over time, great resonance and made “hermeneutics” and Gadamer’s name commonplace in intellectual circles worldwide. Truth and Method has been translated into many languages, including Chinese and Japanese. It found and still finds a receptive readership, in part, because, as the title suggests, it addresses large and central philosophical issues in an attempt to find a way between or beyond objectivism and relativism, and scientism and irrationalism. He accomplishes this by developing an account of what he takes to be the universal hermeneutic experience of understanding. Understanding, for Gadamer, is itself always a matter of interpretation. Understanding is also always a matter of language.

The study of pre-modern (i.e. pre-sixteenth century) systems of enslavement and slave trading in sub-Saharan Africa have relied heavily on textual, especially Arabic, sources. By contrast, there have been few archaeological studies of these phenomena, although reference is often made to the Trans-Saharan and Red Sea/Indian Ocean slave trades in archaeological studies of early state formation and globalisation on the continent. This chapter provides a brief review of some of the key written sources concerning the presence of slaves in different regions of sub-Saharan Africa between c. 500-1500 CE, and what these can tell us about prevailing systems of enslavement. This is followed by discussion of the limited number of archaeological studies of enslavement during this same period across the continent, their main findings and the key interpretative challenges faced when trying to detect the presence of slaves from material evidence alone. The chapter concludes with suggestions for the direction of future work, laying emphasis on the need for multi-sited projects that aim to reconstruct landscapes of enslavement and how slave-based economies were organised and functioned.

The origins, social function, and the legitimacy of law were life-long preoccupations for Judith Shklar. She was one of the first political philosophers in the Anglo-American tradition after World War II to devote intense attention to the role of law in liberal-democratic societies. In this respect, her work is more in line with European thinkers such as Max Weber, Franz Neumann and Harold Laski, and, of course, her adviser, Carl Friedrich, who was the first to recommend to her that she consider the topic of legalism.

Is there an “international rule of law movement”? Undoubtedly there exists a network of international bodies claiming to “work on” what are often called rule of law “issues,” many of whom use this term and do so self-referentially.2 These groups are not concerned with an “international rule of law,” whatever that might be, or indeed with international law more broadly. They are “international” in the sense that they comprise cross-border networks, and in that they approach the “rule of law” in a quasi-constitutional sense, abstracted from any specific (national) polity.

What is the rule of law, and under what conditions does it become a self-reinforcing, stable order? Missing from the various literatures that have attempted an answer is a coherent attempt to create a satisfying account of the microfoundations of the behaviors that generate and sustain a distinctively legal order. Whether philosophical or applied, existing approaches to the rule of law have neglected the question of what, exactly, is distinct about law’s rule. We do not yet know enough about what sets legal ordering apart from other strategies of ordering, be they economic, political, or violent.1 This chapter responds to this lacuna. In so doing it gives an account of the kinds of things required for a positive theory of the rule of law.

This chapter provides an overview of slavery as practiced in the Iberian Peninsula over the course of the medieval period, from the era of the Visigoths up until the era of the Catholic Kings, and in both Muslim and Christian-controlled territories. While traditionally scholars have paid attention to medieval Iberian slavery almost exclusively for the purposes of exploring how it laid the groundwork for the Atlantic-World slave system, this chapter argues that the study of slavery in this particular time and place merits scholarly interest for a wealth of other reasons, in particular, it illuminates how gender and the law had a profound impact on both the experiences and trajectories of the enslaved.

With the publication of his lectures on constitutional law in 1885, A. V. Dicey introduced an account of the rule of law that would have, for better or worse, a powerful influence. His book, Law of the Constitution, is an extended essay on how the law of the English or British constitution is the expression of two basic principles, the rule of law and parliamentary sovereignty. These ideas were not new to English legal writing, but Dicey succeeded with impressive literary flourish to elevate them to the status of the organizing principles of the constitution.

As composite polities, empires were plural legal orders. Conquest, settlement, and rule depended on elaborate arrangements to manage the relation of imperial law to local or indigenous law. Calls for impartial justice in empires emerged in the context of intricate legal conflicts over order and rights, with varied institutional trajectories as the result. The rule of law in empires must be approached as part of the history of legal politics in fluid, fragmented systems of law.