The Introduction maps out the historical and theoretical context of Weeping Eyes, and is organised into three parts that each focus on a different ocular function. The first concentrates on crying eyes, comparing literary and scientific conceptions of tears in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and unpacking these through the contemporary theoretical lens of affect studies. The second part focuses on seeing eyes, outlining the key theoretical foundations of vision studies, and problematising long-standing associations that persist between seeing and knowing, and seeing and power. The final section takes up reading eyes, asking what sentimental texts and tears can teach us about the role feeling plays in our engagement with books. Taken together, these sections sketch out the alternative epistemologies and agencies of the eye that are elaborated throughout the rest of the study.

Luke’s prologue presses the question raised in Part I (“What is a Gospel?”) into new territory: what about the many other writings that variously recorded Jesus’s life and/or teachings not included in the New Testament canon? Many of them also accrued the title “Gospel,” generally conformed to the definition outlined in Part I, and populated the literary landscape of early Christianity into Origen’s own day. This chapter considers how, in Origen’s view, one may distinguish the four received Gospels from the many others, and how he understands Luke (in particular) to have participated in this process of discernment in the way he hands on the traditions he receives. Origen cannot accept that Luke’s own language allows one to reduce his intent with these narratives to matters of plain facticity. Something, as Luke says, had “come to pass among us,” something of which he and his tradents had become fully convinced, something that had made of them all servants of its proclamation: “attendants of the word.” In other words, the very writing of these stories becomes, in Origen’s view, a form of “spiritual reading” of Jesus’s early life.

This chapter explores aspects of individual visions and visionaries that increase the traction to create social change. It begins by examining epistemic gaps – knowledge deficits that inspire visionary ideas – and the role of imagination in addressing these gaps. The chapter then focuses on compelling narratives, discussing the importance of storytelling, relatable characters and moral alignment in crafting transformative visions. It continues by discussing the factors that enable a vision to be spread, such as social identity and network positions that bridge social divides. The chapter also considers how visionary ideas interact with group dynamics and system attributes that facilitate or hinder change. Case studies of William Shakespeare, Martin Luther, and Karl Marx are presented: transformative visions arise from unmet needs; are effective when they offer innovative social relationships; are marked by clear, moral narratives; are more likely to emerge in societies with diverse, autonomous subgroups; and spread via networks of higher trust.

This chapter distinguishes various sorts of rudimentary spatial structure and particularity that are present in our visual experience, in a kind of palimpsest. It develops a modal structuralist understanding of the neurophysiology that roots this type of experience.

The healthcare sector is continually confronted with the issue of how to manage with less. In response, health leaders and managers must explore and use new ways to face such challenges. These issues ultimately affect the quality and safety, and the productivity and efficiency, of the health services delivered. Within each organisation, the effectiveness of the leadership and culture directly affect the quality of patient care delivered. To effectively address such challenges, leaders have begun to adopt new strategies and roles that focus on visioning and creativity.

The conclusion summarises the main argument of the book: that the mirror-image, as an object and as a metaphor, was critical to the mimetic definition of painting that we recognise as the key pictorial development of Renaissance art. If perspective was painting’s means, the mirror was its exemplum. Tracing the conceptual elaboration of the reflective image, it concludes that the prolific representation of the inset-mirror motif within early modern painting was both the rebus and matrix of its own pictorial representation.

What is the threshold that intervenes between one mind and another, across which the act of looking takes place?

This essay addresses this question, in relation to the work of Samuel Beckett, W. G. Sebald and J. M. Coetzee. All three writers are centrally concerned with what I here call the ‘threshold of vision’ – and for all three writers, to think this threshold requires an act of ethical imagination. This is the case for the exchange of any look between one consciousness and another; but for all three writers this exchange becomes particularly charged when it is shared between human and animal. The essay reads the act of looking through this relation between human and nonhuman, to produce a critical account of the politics of shared life, as this exceeds our given taxonomies for imagining consciousness.

Felix wrote his life of St. Guthlac also during the zenith of Latin writings in Anglo-Saxon England, namely in the early eighth century. In vivid, distinctive Latin Felix tells of the experiences of this solitary who went off into the fens of East Anglia to devote himself to God at Crowland, including his dramatic encounters with the demons of hell and various unusual miracles, including the retrieval of a parchment folio carried off by a thieving magpie.