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'Witness' is not merely an etymological trace but central to late ancient Christian understandings of martyrdom. Drawing on dual traditions of elite parrhesia, or free speech, and the torture of enslaved witnesses, martyrs testified through their suffering and deaths to their own worthiness, the tyrannical violence inflicted upon them, and the possibility of a more just world. Literature became the medium of this threefold witness. This study offers close readings of well-known martyrdom accounts from the period before the Great Persecution, including Acts of the Scillitan Martyrs, Acts of Justin, Letter of the Martyrs of Vienne and Lyons, Passion of Perpetua and Felicitas, Martyrdom of Polycarp, and Acts of Thecla. It highlights recurring themes of interrogation, torture, contest, sacrifice, and sexual violence, showing how these texts reflect on questions of power and agency, and concludes with an exploration of their contemporary relevance through the art of Kehinde Wiley.
Contemporary Nigerian English offers an engaging empirical exploration of Nigerian English in the twenty-first century, highlighting its historical development, present-day usage, and emerging linguistic features. Drawing on multiple sources of evidence, including naturally occurring language data, online corpora, social media discourse, and survey findings, the Element investigates how multilingualism, cultural diversity, and digital communication continue to shape the variety. It analyses salient features of Nigerian English across lexico-semantic, phonological, morpho-syntactic, and pragmatic domains, while also considering the language ideologies and attitudes that inform its perception and use. By integrating structural linguistic analysis and sociolinguistic perspectives, the Element reveals how Nigerian English reflects the cultural identities, communicative practices, and cognitive worlds of its speakers. In doing so, it advances scholarship on World Englishes and contributes to broader discussions of linguistic variation and change in contemporary global contexts.
The year 2024 marked a century since socialist leader Giacomo Matteotti's assassination. Widely commemorated in Italy, he's often remembered within a national narrative of antifascist resistance. But how was this narrative built and how has the far right responded? This Element traces the construction and mobilisation of Matteotti's memory over the last century, analysing the role of grief in the early antifascist movement, and identifying the role memory played in bringing together Allies, partisans and political parties during the construction of the democratic Republic. Based on primary sources from international archives, it also adds a transnational lens to the study of a figure so often thought of in national terms. The Element closes by examining how far-right parties whose lineage traces back to Mussolini's regime have engaged with the afterlife of a man whose murder is an evergreen reminder of the centrality of violence to Fascism in its earliest days.
Egypt and the Levant witnessed complex transformations across the Bronze Age. Beyond the rise and collapse of powerful cities and states were the long-distance connectivities that enabled the movements of people and animals, and the interlinked exchanges of commodities and ideas. By the Late Bronze Age, these connectivities exhibited markers of globalisation. This Element considers how such markers emerged and developed in the preceding centuries. Focusing on the third to mid-second millennium BCE, it brings together recent research on socio-political developments and cross-cultural interactions to give an overview of the transforming networks linking Old to early New Kingdom Egypt and EB III to LB I Levantine communities. In doing so, the Element incorporates approaches that move away from imperialist structures of exchange to consider how dynamic networks were negotiated and maintained across periods of socio-political change.
Through the life-story of its eloquent but depressive narrator, Bogle Corbet links the industrial revolution in Scotland to the French Revolution, Jamaica’s plantation economy to the settlement of English Canada. A pioneering industrial novel, colonial novel, and world systems novel, Bogle Corbet also offers an early psychological portrait of emigrant experience. Galt’s vivid vignettes show Britain and key British colonies at moments of political unrest and transition, and explore the ambivalences of a world newly governed by industrialism, capitalism, globalisation, and mass displacement. Galt’s novel thus remains a work for our own times, even as it offers important transcontinental insights into a key historical juncture. It has inspired eloquent champions (both nineteenth- and twentieth-century) and continues to spark critical debate.
Co-management has been adopted internationally, across all types of natural resource settings, bringing resource users and others into governance with government. Multiple aspects of co-management have been studied, from power-sharing to social networks and accountability, identifying a wide range of concepts that form the foundations of co-management. By bringing together and interrogating a wide range of concepts, from all natural resource sectors, including forests, fisheries and grazing land, this book identifies how each concept contributes to the understanding and practice of co-management. Concepts such as collaboration, participation, institutions, power, community, cohesion, representation, accountability, trust, legitimacy, scale, rights, justice, values, identity and adaptation are reviewed. Each chapter reviews foundational literature and identifies key implications for co-management. These are brought together in a concluding chapter that identifies recurring themes from across the chapters and develops a social relational definition and conceptual framework for the understanding and practice of co-management.
Over his four-decade long career, Abel Ferrara has built himself a reputation as one of the most audacious and unconventional filmmakers in contemporary cinema. After his beginnings in the exploitation circuit of the late 1970s he become one of the central figures in the indie wave of the 1980s and 90s and is now an established arthouse director whose versatile oeuvre crosses the boundaries of cult, independent and Hollywood cinema.
ReFocus: The Films of Abel Ferrara offers a comprehensive critical survey of the director’s work. The volume brings together a broad range of methodological, theoretical, historical and philosophical perspectives on Ferrara’s work, and case studies include Ms 45, The Driller Killer, Bad Lieutenant, Pasolini and Welcome to New York.
What are the main similarities between new cohorts of Gaelic speakers in Nova Scotia and Scotland, and what key differences distinguish them? In Scotland, public policy to support and maintain the language has increased substantially in the past 40 years. In addition to Scotland’s 57,602 speakers, however, Gaelic has persisted in Nova Scotia since the 18th century and a third of Nova Scotians are descended from families who spoke the language historically.
As a response to policymakers’ language planning priorities in both polities and drawing on three years of ethnographic research in Scotland and Nova Scotia, this book presents a comparative analysis of new speaker motivations, identities and linguistic ideologies. An innovative approach to examining bilingual discourses is employed to demonstrate key distinctions and commonalities among new Gaelic speakers, with a view to informing future policy to generate greater numbers of proficient speakers on both sides of the Atlantic.
Tawātur is the concept that information yields certainty if acquired through a sufficient number of independent channels. Tawātur in Islamic Thought is an attempt to unravel the twisted historical threads of the conception and usage of tawātur across diverse Islamic disciplines, in light of both Western academia and debates within Muslim scholarship.
In the process, numerous salient questions in Islamic thought are tackled, such as epistemic certitude, scholarly consensus (ijmāʿ), and the rationalism–traditionalism relationship. The study culminates in the question of the extent to which tawātur was used by Muslim scholars to define the boundaries of Islam and of orthodoxy.
Tawātur in Islamic Thought shows that the majority voices in Muslim scholarship, across sectarian boundaries, reached a steady-state conception of a two-tiered orthodoxy, corresponding to two tiers of tawātur—an outer tier that includes all who affirm a definitive kernel of Islam and an inner tier that is more exclusive.
David Foster Wallace and the Question of Scepticism examines the role of scepticism and doubt in Wallace’s work, showing that they are of fundamental importance to his writing in its form and its themes. Wallace’s work articulates a deep ambivalence about the value of scepticism, on the one hand presenting practical and moral arguments for the value of conviction and belief, while on the other hand being committed to a sceptical project of opposing certainty and dogma. On a formal level, Wallace’s writing both solicits the reader’s trust and provokes the reader’s scepticism. This dynamic is responsible for the polarised responses of absolute trust and dissenting scepticism that characterise the work’s reception. By putting these responses into dialogue with the work’s internal treatment of the question of scepticism, this book illuminates the core philosophical investments that drive the work, and the dynamics that have so far governed its reception.
The scholars of the Sasanian empire-the late antique superpower whose extensive territories encompassed much of Mesopotamia, the Iranian plateau, and the Caucasus-played a pivotal role in world intellectual history. They developed a distinctive synthesis of Indian and Greco-Roman learning, which would have a formative impact on Islamic civilization in the wake of the empire's fall to Arab armies in the 7th century CE. Drawing on a wide range of texts in languages including Arabic, Middle Persian, Syriac, Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit, Thomas Benfey closely examines these scholars, their contributions, and the shifting contexts in which they lived and worked. From the court of the sixth-century King of Kings Khusrō I to early Abbasid Baghdad, this book explores key developments in philosophy, medicine, and astral science and the institutional and historical contexts in which they took place. Benfey highlights the distinctive features of this decisive era, tracing intellectual continuity and change into the early Islamic period.
What does it mean to be in the world with others? To what degree is sociality a dimension of our experience? This Element explores the social aspects of our experience as shared and common, focusing on Heidegger's thought on this theme in the period surrounding the publication of Being and Time. It begins by situating Heidegger's position in contrast to alternative phenomenological conceptions of the relations between self and others. From there, it continues to address a key challenge to Heidegger's approach: the problem of Dasein's individuation. Finally, in response to this challenge, the work reframes Heidegger's conception of sociality through the prism of part-whole relations. As social, Dasein emerges as a dependent part of an unfolding shared whole, yet as part of a complex social context, it retains its relative wholeness.
The seventeenth-century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan or the Matter, Forme and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil, commonly known as Leviathan, has fascinated, alarmed, and challenged readers ever since its publication in 1651. Both a modernization of natural law theory and an early and influential contribution to social contract theory, Leviathan offers a powerful, systematic theory of the rights and duties of sovereigns and subjects, governors and citizens. This Critical Guide provides scholars, students, and anyone curious about Hobbes's political theory access to the latest research into Hobbes's views of philosophical method, human psychology, morality, law, liberty, governance, power relations, obligation, agency and responsibility, the requisites of social stability, pride, honor, theism, and organized religion. In fourteen original essays by many of today's leading Hobbes scholars, the volume provides overviews and in-depth investigations into those aspects of Hobbes's thinking in Leviathan that are of greatest interest today.
In Nahua Singers, Peter Bjorndahl Sorensen provides a more than 300-year long history of the Aztecs from their departure from the Seven Caves (Chicomoztoc) to the close of the sixteenth century-centering Indigenous voices as they narrate their own past. Nahua singers preserved their histories in the form of popular song lyrics that have long been misunderstood. Sorensen employs a new approach to the lyrics, bringing them to life by spotlighting their performative elements, offering new and accessible translations, and explaining the lyrics' historical significance in a comprehensive yet concise way. Through fourteen complete translations and dozens partly translated, the songs featured cover topics including precolonial kings, the conquest of Mexico, and early examples of the adaption and adoption of Christian imagery.
Since Wittgenstein's death in 1951, readers have advanced numerous claims about his philosophy's political significance. Some take his philosophy to have a conservative or reactionary bent; others take it to have a relativistic leaning; yet others associate it with classical liberalism, neo-liberalism, or Marxism. The Political Wittgenstein surveys this terrain in four chapter-length narratives about the development of distinct views of the political significance of Wittgenstein's thought. This Element offers a thorough introduction to the question of a Wittgensteinian approach to political thought. It simultaneously makes a case for reading Wittgenstein's philosophy as, at base, political, liberating and pressingly pertinent.
The methodology of metaphysics has come under severe scrutiny from critics who claim that, while metaphysics aims to uncover deep non-conceptual truths regarding reality, its standard methodology is incapable of giving us justified beliefs regarding which metaphysical theses are true. In this Element I investigate whether this criticism of metaphysics is on the right track, by way of an opinionated introduction to the methodology of metaphysics. I give an overview of recent debates concerning the methodology of metaphysics, with special attention paid to the epistemic credentials of appeals to intuitions and non-empirical theoretical virtues. I also examine alternative proposed aims of metaphysics other than that of uncovering deep non-conceptual truths, and with what sorts of methodologies those aims might be associated. These alternative proposed aims of metaphysics include achieving practical benefits, achieving understanding, discovering stable equilibria among possible metaphysical views, and analyzing and/or engineering our concepts.
As China-United States competition over critical minerals intensifies, interest in deep-sea mining (DSM) in areas beyond national jurisdiction grows rapidly. However, who governs it? This Element offers a pioneering study of the relationship between global and national governance of DSM. Using a constructivist-interpretive approach, it unpacks the international DSM regime established under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), which posits that the deep seabed is the 'common heritage of humankind', and contrasts it with the USA's preference for 'freedom of the high seas'. It explores how the International Seabed Authority (ISA), the USA and China interpret these social constructs' meanings when developing the DSM Mining Code. Although Washington's unilateral action to pursue DSM may speed up the finalisation of the Mining Code, the future of DSM remains uncertain due to mounting concerns about its commercial viability. A moratorium is emerging as the mainstream direction.
William Whitehead's The Roman Father (1750) was the most prominent Roman play in late eighteenth-century Britain, and highly revealing of how Britons engaged with Roman history. This Element begins by surveying all eighteenth-century Roman plays, and shows that they focused on what it calls 'the transhistorical Roman character', typically set against a more historically-specific depiction of Rome. It proceeds to explore The Roman Father's text, reviews, performance history, and links to other aspects of historical culture. It argues that, of the three attitudes to history present in eighteenth-century Britain – the exemplary, historicist, and sentimentalist – all three were active in the theatrical context, but took genre-specific forms. Nonetheless, the changing attitudes visible in the theatre between 1750 and 1800 testify to changing attitudes to Roman history outside the theatre too: the decline of the exemplary attitude and the transhistorical Roman character, and the increasing prevalence of historicism and sentimentalism.