This chapter deals with the cardiac system that underpins animal vitality that is more complex than the vegetative one discussed in the previous chapter. The central activity of this system is breathing, and the chapter outlines different types of breathing posited by Galen, the anatomy underpinning them, and his explanation of why the deprivation of breath leads to the loss of life. The chapter also focuses on the three types of pneuma theorized by Galen, discussing their proper activities and properties enabling these activities. The focus on pneuma also brings attention to yet another Galenic division of parts into solids, fluids and pneumata. This division of tissues according to their texture and speed of movement offers an important glimpse into how Galen conceives of interaction between parts. Moreover, the rapid alterations in the pneumatic tissues underpin the physiological understanding of animal vitality.

This chapter analyses the relationship between population growth and resource constraints in European history, focusing on the Malthusian theory, which posits that population growth leads to stagnation due to finite resources. The chapter challenges this view by examining how technological innovations, agricultural improvements and changes in fertility strategies affected population dynamics. It explores how societies adapted to resource constraints and avoided the Malthusian trap through mechanisms such as the demographic transition. The chapter also uses case studies such as the decline of the Roman Empire to discuss the relevance of simple models for interpreting historical processes and presents nuanced insights into the complex interplay between population, resources and economic development.

This chapter explores Christ’s cry of dereliction as an access point to important theological issues related to the passion of Christ. Several historic and contemporary proposals are summarized and evaluated.

This chapter critically engages Assata: An Autobiography by former Black Liberation Army operative and political exile Assata Shakur. The argument examines how Shakur develops psychologically and politically as both a Black revolutionary and a Black revolutionary woman. The chapter offers close readings of the political messages shared throughout Assata then contextualizes Shakur’s frameworks by turning to her experiences as a runaway teen in the Village in New York City. Her story – from childhood until her time being held as a political prisoner – compels attention to how blackness and gender collide and at times collapse. This chapter illustrates how her political communiqué “To My People,” broadcast by Shakur while incarcerated, was informed by the lessons on Black gender and sexual vulnerability she learned from Miss Shirley, a transgender woman who was her surrogate caregiver during her time living in the Village.

This chapter explores the repertoire of minuets composed around the end of the eighteenth century specifically for dancing, considering them particularly in relation to the needs (perceived and real) of the dance. The research is based on an in-depth study of 319 minuets (and trios) composed for the annual balls of the Gesellschaft bildender Künstler at the Hofburg Redoutensaal. Certain defining features of the repertoire are identified, such as the two-bar grouping necessary for the dancers’ enactment of the minuet step. Larger-scale features are explored, such as the perceived need by music theorists (and possibly some composers) for eight-bar phrases to accommodate the choreography – even though the choreography does not actually dictate this – and the extent to which this might be considered a key structural feature of the minuet genre. The minuet choreography (established in Chapter 2) is set against the structure of a typical minuet composition, revealing that, while on the small scale there is considerable coherence between step and two-bar groupings, on the larger scale there is little correspondence between dance figure and musical phrase lengths. Compositional creativity, noble musical expression and musical anomalies are considered.

Chapter 5 evaluates the leading theories of agreement attraction by comparing their ability to explain key empirical findings. The chapter examines four major effects: the markedness asymmetry, grammatical asymmetry, timing asymmetry, and attraction beyond number agreement dependencies. Through detailed comparisons, the chapter highlights how retrieval-based accounts provide the broadest empirical coverage, successfully explaining each effect, while representational-based accounts mainly capture the markedness asymmetry. The chapter also introduces evidence from studies on semantic and morphosyntactic attraction, showing that retrieval-based models offer a more unified explanation of these effects across linguistic domains. Additionally, the chapter discusses evidence of number misinterpretation, which is uniquely predicted by representational accounts, but suggests that these effects may be task-specific artifacts of metalinguistic processes. This theoretical arbitration provides a comprehensive overview of the strengths and limitations of both accounts and emphasizes the need for further research to fully understand the cognitive mechanisms underlying attraction phenomena.

Mandates may cover several mediators in the same conflict. This may result in questions of coordination, notably of who should be in the lead. This becomes particularly difficult if great powers are significant actors – for instance, if conflicts are close to them – or for other reasons of strategic significance. There is also a problem of forum shopping, where the warring parties attempt to find mediators that are closest to their interests. Furthermore, there can be rivalries between regional and international organizations. Some of the Nordic experiences are recounted as well as ways to manage these issues.

Realist narrative genres, such as memoir and autobiography, are the most prevalent women’s prison writing. Contemporary readers rely on these narrative elements in order to believe stories. However, when the writer disassociates during a traumatic event and does not remember details that would ground their telling in recognizable details, their narratives cannot reliably reference them. As incarcerated women authors grapple with what they’ve suffered and what they’ve done, their narratives inevitably intersect with social realities that form the background violence that created the conditions for the discrete, traumatic events of harmdoing. While carceral culture essentializes people into stagnant categories of worth – good/flawed, criminal/victim, innocent/guilty – incarcerated women’s stories show how facile these conceptions are, how much harm they cause, and that incarceration does nothing to address these issues and often actively prohibits healing.

The Persian material in this chapter is first and foremost to be considered in the light of the larger evolution of Islamic traditions of travel-writing from the 8th century onwards. The Muslim tradition of rihla – the Arabic term that designates both the travel and its account – is intimately related to the ideal of talab al-‘ilm – seeking (religious) knowledge – developing as the Islamic empire spread in the early centuries of Islam. Travel-writing gradually takes shape in this context through records of transmission of hadîths and khabars – collected sayings and actions of the Prophet and holy figures – reported and discussed by lineages of mediators sought after in the course of the scholar’s journey and inventoried by him. The early genres of the risâla – epistle – and mu‘jam – (mostly geographical) dictionary – also offer glimpses of individual experiences gathered from journeys of pilgrimage, scholarly study, or trade over the vast physical expanse of the dar al-islâm – land of faith. The genre of individual travel account in Arabic is generally considered to have reached its full autonomy by the 12th century.

This fourth chapter begins by exploring one of the central problems with the description of conscience outlined in Chapter Two. If conscience is really a broad concept, then there is the possibility it can be used to severely limit patient choice. Chapter Four attempts to resolve this difficulty by arguing that conscience should not be protected as a right. Instead, it is an interest, and its protection should be based on whether the person claiming conscience acts responsibly in doing so. Three responsibilities of conscience are set out – humility, universality, and reciprocal respect. Each is shown to be crucial to the protection of conscience.

Unlike rabbinic literature or medieval Jewish philosophy, travel writing has rarely been considered part of the Jewish canon and, as a result, has merited little discussion and analysis by modern scholars until fairly recently. Hebrew travel writing as a literary genre, broadly defined, first emerged in the context of the crusades, when the increase in maritime traffic between Western Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean also facilitated a renewed Jewish pilgrimage to Jerusalem and other holy places in the Levant. The fact that the social context of this genre was the medieval European pilgrimage movement is the reason that most of its authors turned to Hebrew instead of Judeo-Arabic, which was the preferred written language of Jews in the Islamicate world. It also explains the closeness in form and some of the content between these Hebrew travel accounts and contemporaneous Christian-authored texts, such as the itinerarium or peregrinatio. At the same time, medieval Hebrew travel writings include place-specific information and lore similarly known from Arabic (Muslim-authored) literature of travel and geography.