During the second and third centuries AD, recruitment in the Roman army brought many Palmyrenes from their home city to various parts of the Roman Mediterranean and its hinterland. Military recruitment brought them to Dacia and Numidia in particular, but a famously well-documented unit of Palmyrenes was stationed at Dura-Europos on the Middle Euphrates. Most Palmyrene soldiers served in units of the auxilia or numeri, and many of these then settled in the regions in which they had served. Their descendants could be found in the same regions generations later. As Palmyrene soldiers and their descendants faced varied degrees of dispersal and isolation from their compatriots, they endured diverse pressures to assimilate. They also witnessed their ancestral divinities being adopted by fellow soldiers, military collectives or networks and local populations. Did Palmyrenes maintain social or cognitive links to their ancestral homeland under such circumstances? Did they conceive of themselves as part of a broader, dispersed Palmyrene community even as they became enmeshed in local ones? This chapter address such questions.

9.1 [603] So then, by taking up our shield a longside the doctrines of the truth with the utmost endurance, so it seems to me, we have held our own against the nonsensical words of those who know only how to disparage our doctrines.1 But because our opponent bears down upon the ineffable glory with all his sails unfurled and dares, as it were, to lead forth his profane ideas in unbearable assaults, expending his most effective resources on the task of stripping the nature of God the Father of his progeny and stripping the true Son, who came from his nature, of his hypostasis2 (for he does away with his existence and engages in such extremely perilous undertakings), come now, “putting on the breastplate of justice,” while also lifting up “the shield of faith” and whetting against him “the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God,”3 let us show that he is a liar and in his extreme arrogance all but kicks against the goads4 and leaps down into the deep pit of destruction.5 [604]

Czech-language music criticism first became prominent in the 1860s, and its authors often used their musical discussions to explore then-emerging political conversations, especially ethnocentric concepts of identity. Still, they drew their models from earlier, predominantly Germanophone music critics, historiographers, and aestheticians – writers who did not yet subscribe to such ethnocentric views. This chapter focuses on Germanophone writers, specifically Franz Xaver Niemetschek, Anton Müller, and August Wilhelm Ambros examining their perspectives on canonic composers of the past – particularly Mozart and Gluck – to illustrate the ideological underpinnings of Bohemian music criticism. Compounding the complexity of these critics’ ideas, twentieth-century scholars like Mirko Očadlík and Tomislav Volek reinterpreted both their writings and identities once again to reflect still new political goals.

Chaucer’s works were written during the late fourteenth century, a period which saw considerable changes in the functions of the English language as it came to replace French and Latin as the languages of written record. As well as being an important source for the scholarly understanding of late Middle English, Chaucer’s works shed light on the status of English and its variety of registers and dialects, enabling scholars to gain a deeper awareness of the sociolinguistic connotations of its different forms and usages. The Canterbury Tales, with its array of pilgrims drawn from a variety of professions, social classes and geographical regions narrating a series of tales reflecting a wide range of genres, is a valuable source of evidence for historical pragmatics. This chapter shows the way in which Chaucer’s text offers insights into the conventions of social interaction, including forms of address, politeness and verbal aggression, and the use of discourse markers.

1 The successes of your holy empire are noteworthy, remarkable, and cannot be expressed in words, and the incomparability of your piety, which is like an inheritance come to you from above, you have successfully defended from the arrows of envy, thanks to the skill in all things excellent that you received from your father and also your grandfather,1 as is obvious in this instance.2

In the 1890s and 1900s, theologian and activist Jabez T. Sunderland became a keen follower of the Brāhmos, conceding that the Brāhmo movement and the Unitarian movement to which he belonged form parallel tracks in the reconstruction of religion. These parallel tracks manifest in both the rise of Indian religious reformers in the USA from the second half of the nineteenth century as well as North American religious reformers and theorists deepening their interest, and commitment, to, Indian religion. One of these Indian reformers who visited the United States was none other than the Brāhmo missionary and intellectual P.C. Mozoomdar, who lectured and wrote a great deal about Jesus, social service as a form of service to God, as inspirations for the new, Brāhmo religion. Mozoomdar argued that this new religion, keeping in faith and standards of worship, born out by the comparative method. The linkages between the USA and India in the realm of religion continued through the end of the century, with the rise of one Narendra Nath Datta, known from the 1890s as Swami Vivekananda in the USA in 1893. This final chapter includes a variety of critical engagements after the death of Keshab Chandra Sen and the appreciation of his ideas by the American parallel to the Brāhmo Samaj, the Free Religious Association, which began in the 1870s. These new conceptions of Indian religion preceded and paralleled the rise of Vivekananda by the 1890s. This chapter ends with a consideration of Vivekananda, a figure whose definitions of religion become dominant by the end of the century.

This chapter explores the role of central aspects of cognition in historical linguistics. After describing and discussing the cognitive commitment and its theoretical background, this chapter highlights the relation to cognitive archaeology as well as historical psychology and explores the methodological prerequisites for cognitive approaches to the history of English, particularly the quantitative turn in cognitive linguistics. Case studies from different periods of English illustrate how cognitive factors can shed light on synchronic historical language stages and diachronic developments, and how these in turn can help us to further explore the cognitive commitment. Finally, we argue for a feedback loop, where modern cognitive linguistic theories feed into and guide historical enquiries, but are also checked and modified, if necessary, on the basis of historical findings.

This chapter lays out the ways in which Hans Christian Ørsted (1777–1851) influenced the development of the concept of thought experiment. Ernst Mach (1838–1916) is currently more often credited with laying the foundations of contemporary views, and he is sometimes thought to have been little (if at all) influenced by Ørsted. Against these standard accounts, I will show that Ørsted’s and Mach’s descriptions have key features in common. Both thinkers hold that thought experiments: (1) are a method of variation, (2) require the experimenter’s free activity, and (3) are useful in educational contexts for guiding students to arrive at certain conclusions on their own (i.e., to genuinely appropriate new concepts). The process of variation is guided by the search for invariants, some of which do not directly appear in experience. Since it is important that teachers and students be able to bring the same ideal objects to mind, thought experiments play a key role for both Ørsted and Mach in math education. While Ørsted’s emphasis on the role of thought experiments in math has been proposed as a reason why his descriptions are not relevant for contemporary use of thought experiments, I will show how their role in mathematical thinking – stemming from Kant’s descriptions of the method of construction in geometry – are part of a wider account of thought experiments that encompasses their role in the sciences and also philosophy.

Drawing on postcolonial and decolonial theory developed since the 1990s for the study of socialist and post-socialist East Central Europe, this chapter approaches opera as a crucial cultural site for (re)negotiating the relationship with “the West,” Soviet hegemony, and the Global South after 1948. It focuses on the ambivalence in representations of the racialized Other in Czech opera, which highlights the specific, lateral relationship between what was formally known as the Second and Third worlds. The chapter offers a close reading of the opera Jezero Ukereve (“Lake Ukerewe”) by Otmar Mácha, premiered in 1966. Featuring Black and mixed-race characters, the opera generally expresses empathy for and solidarity with the colonized populations, informed by the Czechs’ experience with German oppression, yet it unavoidably reproduces the colonial ideology of a civilizational mission. The opera is interpreted in relation to Czechoslovakia’s official Africa policy and the aesthetic debates about Czech New Music.