After the death of their beloved dog Whym Chow, Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper, who write collectively as Michael Field, underwent a radical spiritual and poetic shift by converting to the Roman Catholic Church. Each partner viewed this shift differently. Bradley focused on the ways in which Whym Chow’s death represented a rupture in their domestic Trinity, while Cooper focused on the sacrificial aspects of euthanising the dog as an act of their own will. Converting to the Roman Catholic Church impacted both Bradley and Cooper’s relationship with one another and their poetic creativity and dominated the final years of their shared life.

James’s modernism is based directly on the psychology he founded, and specifically on his recognition that the self is malleable (or “plastic”), aggregate, distributed, and capable of mental reform. Yet James’s outspoken critique of US imperialism and the lynching of African Americans reflected his understanding of the dangerous potential of conversion – namely, that revolutions in belief carry a measure of uncertainty and risk, not just to individual believers but to the very fabric of democratic thought. Jamesean conversion therefore dramatizes the processes by which consent is staged from within and from without. The self enacts the drama in the form of an internal dialogue in which one imagines one’s “self” inhabiting a particular temporo-spatial location, as if fulfilling the role of a protagonist in a work of fiction. Against that background, Henry James’s What Maisie Knew and Harold Frederic’s The Damnation of Theron Ware dramatize the processes through which individuals become plastically transformed under the manipulations of powerful “pattern-setters” of public opinion. By fracturing and fragmenting imperial forms of selfhood, these psychological Bildungsromane inaugurate a reform modernism that registers dissent from the imperial sway of groups, demonstrating the strenuous effort required by individuals to transform oppressive systems from within.

Ezra Pound launches the book as a dramatic “case study” illustrating William James’s theory of “conversion” as a cognitive process by which individuals become converts to a cause, be it artistic, religious, or political. Even as recent scholars have revitalized our understanding of James’s politics and his philosophical engagements with the social, they nonetheless underscore a conspicuous gap: none have investigated how James’s understanding of the social realm is indebted to his pioneering work as a psychologist and, more specifically, to his theorization of conversion as a cognitive phenomenon that impacts not just individuals but larger groups. At one extreme, conversion can yield blind commitment to doctrine, or, more productively, can fracture such monolithic narratives to achieve productive disagreement with, or “dissent” from, repressive or demagogic systems. Literary modernists after James can be understood as mind scientists because they deploy the psychodynamics of conversion both formally and thematically. By making the psychodynamics of conversion visible, their writings encourage readerly dissent from rigid points of view and authoritarian ideological frameworks.

Although the term ‘lexeme’ is of increasing importance in linguistics, the term is often not defined in a way which allows for firm decisions about where its boundaries lie. Various points of contention are illustrated, and it is shown that French and anglophone traditions on the nature of the lexeme differ.

The distinction between coercion and conversion is not always clear, and it is suggested here that this is because both are types of metonymy and it is not always clear when there is a shift from one word-class to another and when there is not.

There is evidence that the elements that take part in word-formation, whether as a derivational base, in conversion or in compounds, are adverbs rather than prepositions. Even then, the irregularity and restricted productivity of forms involving these elements is striking, and hard to understand.

There are many traditions about Patrick, the priest who was born in Roman Britain during the late fourth century and as a young boy came to live in Hibernia, now the modern island of Ireland. The text below survives in several manuscripts, the earliest from the seventh century, and it tells the story of Patrick’s life from his perspective. Though in the manuscript tradition it often bears the generic label of “letter,” it is also titled a Confession and, like the Confessions of Augustine of Hippo, justifies the narrator’s career to detractors, explaining how his work, however different from expectations, is still pious work, made possible by (and thus sanctioned by) the will of God.

Augustine of Hippo (354–430) was astonishingly prolific, writing sermons, letters, dialogues, a monastic rule, treatises on a variety of subjects, and works of scriptural exegesis, with Genesis and the Psalms being his special interests. Among his best-known works is the Confessions, which is sui generis in ancient literature: an autobiography laced with plaintive prayer, philosophical speculation, and raw self-examination. It relates a journey both spiritual and geographical, one that follows a path of lust and ambition toward conversion and baptism and from the North African countryside where Augustine was born to Carthage, Rome, and Milan, great cities of the western Roman Empire. Written in a gorgeous, protean Latin into which are woven myriad references to classical and biblical texts, the Confessions is a literary masterwork.

Gregory of Nazianzus (ca. 330–390) was one of the famous “Cappadocian Fathers” (along with Basil of Caesarea and Gregory of Nyssa). Gregory was not only an important ecclesiastical leader – indeed, he acted as bishop of several cities and briefly presided over the second Council of Constantinople in 381 – but also an innovative theologian. His understanding of the Trinity helped to articulate and publicize pro-Nicene theology in the 370s and 380s, and his Christological ideas had enduring effects on later Christian thought. Perhaps the most underappreciated aspect of Gregory was his literary genius. Highly trained in classical texts, he was an accomplished epistolographer (more than 240 of his letters survive) and poet (nearly 20,000 lines of his verse survive).

In his autobiographical Confessions, Augustine (354–430) recounted his own circuitous path to Christianity. When he later became bishop of Hippo in North Africa, Augustine oversaw the reception of converts into the church. So Augustine was intimately aware of dynamics of conversion and the many forms it could take from both personal and pastoral experience. In Sermon 279, which was preached in Carthage on Sunday, June 23, 401, Augustine touches upon several facets of conversion to Christianity.

In this final chapter, I explore how the experience of democratic conflict might be conceptualized by religious traditions in theologically and ethically meaningful ways. I return to the Augustinian tradition and its understanding of love as a resource for thematizing agonism theologically. First, I consider the role of love in Augustine’s moral psychology and political theory, showing how pluralist politics can be understood as a practice of discovering and pursuing “common objects of love” amidst difference. Next, I analyze the notion of political friendship in Augustine and Aristotle in order to show how social relations around these common objects of love might incorporate forms of conflict, disagreement, and parrhesia that are ordered to tending these common goods. I conclude by looking at two figures who extend Augustine’s political theology of love in distinctly liberative directions under the notion of enemy-love. Gustavo Gutiérrez and Martin Luther King, Jr., I argue, develop accounts of the imperative to love the enemy in ways that encompass forms of confrontation, opposition, and conflict in seeking to convert enemies to friends.

The relations between medieval and early modern Jews and the popes rested on consistently applied canonical and Roman law principles, alongside Pauline theology, which was itself bifurcated. These principles were fundamentally restrictive, and the restrictions became tighter over time. To speak of a mild early Middle Ages, driven by Augustinian principles, which turned radically hostile after the First Crusade, is a distortion. Nobody mentioned Augustine until Innocent III. There were forced conversions even in the early Middle Ages. Similarly, the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 was not a turning point, but a culmination. Subsequent attacks on literature were new, but not papally initiated. Beginning with Benedict XIII in 1415, a move to press conversion – without ignoring old limits, theoretically – began to grow, which culminated in Paul IV’s foundation of the Roman ghetto in 1555, intended be a cauldron of conversion achieved through repression. The policy failed.

Utility models fall within the definition of “Industrial Property” provided for by Art. 2 of the Industrial Property Code (IPC) enacted by legislative decree 30/2005. Accordingly, their protection follows the general rules established by the Code for all industrial property rights (Art. 1-6; Art. 117 ff.), the provisions specifically dedicated to utility models (Art. 82-86), as well as the rules governing patents to the extent they are compatible with the specificities of utility models. Of limited relevance appear Articles 2592 and 2594 of the Civil Code, which offer a summary of the basic rules governing this intellectual property right.

In Germany, the utility model is a type of intellectual property right that provides protection for novel and useful inventions. It is governed by the German Utility Model Act (“Gebrauchsmustergesetz” – GebrMG) which was enacted in 1891, making it the oldest still-existing utility model system in the world. Utility models grant the right holder exclusive control over the use and commercialisation of an invention for a period of ten years from the date of filing, subject to the payment of annual renewal fees. In a way, the utility model is the “little sister” of a full-fledged patent (also called a “petty patent”), protecting the same type of subject matter (technical inventions) with a more limited scope.

Our infrastructure and production is based on fossilized carbon feedstock. This fossil carbon used was once biogenic carbon that has undergone a natural thermochemical conversion and very similar products can be produced from biomass via thermochemical processing; enabling the utilization of the existing infrastructure. The thermochemical processes; pyrolysis, gasification, and combustion, are commercially available for coal but their adaption to biomass is lagging. Understanding both the chemical and physical differences and considering the process chemistry can, however, mitigate this. This chapter talks the reader though the carbon and process chemistry in the thermal and hydrothermal processing of biomass.