A wealth of primary sources documents Vasari’s meticulous planning for his posthumous commemoration, his death, and his heirs’ execution of his final wishes. This final chapter explores Vasari’s death and the fate of his earthly remains, as well as the unique place his high altar for the Pieve occupies within the tradition of funerary monuments and chapels made by and for early modern Italian artists and architects. As the largest and principal altar of one of Arezzo’s most prestigious churches and the site of Vasari’s burial, it is nothing less than the most personal work of his long and prolific artistic career. Its alienation in the nineteenth century from the church for which it was made and nearly all of the other works with which Vasari intended it to be seen, however, has long obscured its significance.

The sixth chapter details the sudden appearance of Mary in the Subura’s landscape during the fifth century with Sixtus III’s construction of S. Maria. It argues that Sixtus used the basilica to proclaim his support for the new orthodox belief in Mary as theotokos, to condemn the heretical beliefs against her, and to invalidate Jews and Judaism, which would have been present in the Subura itself, among other areas of the city. After its construction, the basilica of S. Maria sparked the emergence of a new local significance based on the ideal Christian woman.

The introduction sets out how to investigate precarity, defined as uncertainty emerging from structural inequalities. A qualitative approach is needed to capture not just inequality’s depth but people’s lived experiences. The introduction positions the book in relation to current macroeconomic approaches to the Roman world, and to prior attempts at writing bottom-up history. It shows the need to humanize and historicize inequality, addressing its human-scale impacts specifically in the Roman world, and it defines a conceptual toolbox derived from feminist studies, development economics, and the material turn.

This chapter examines a series of court cases in Hong Kong in which a number of newly elected legislators were disqualified from taking office in part because the ways in which they took their oaths during the swearing-in ceremony were deemed too flamboyant, too extravagant and too theatrical to be taken seriously. Implicit in the legal and political objections to their oath taking is the view that theatre has no place in the hallowed chambers of the law courts or the legislature, a view that is all the more surprising given the intertwined histories and representational strategies between law and theatre. Taking these cases as a starting point, I explore what may be at stake in this legal anti-theatricality, and argue that law’s determination to expurgate the theatrical could be read as part of an attempt to render invisible its own performative nature.

In addition to different dynamics in different bundles of trajectories (competition and prestige or wealth differentiation are strongly developed in some, cooperation in others), a few commonalities crosscut multiple bundles. Complexification almost always occurs in conditions of demographic growth, although the population levels vary enormously. Residential density regularly plays an important role in shaping interaction patterns related to productive differentiation, integration of local economies, and wealth accumulation on the one hand or attenuated interaction, and ritual and prestige differentiation, on the other. Such forces operate in the same way in all parts of the world, overriding supposedly typical cultural patterns.

Chapter 3 explores A. C. Swinburne’s intermedial engagement with Milton. In Swinburne’s republican poetry, Milton emerges as a significant figure associated with virtue and freedom; both poets link questions of liberty to bodily violence. The chapter discusses Milton’s Areopagitica, the divorce tracts and the Piedmont sonnet alongside Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads, before turning to Paradise Lost. The chapter draws on queer readings of Milton’s epic to argue that Milton’s erotic, androgynous universe informs Swinburne’s anti-theistic poetic project, particularly in its treatment of bodily indeterminacy and the figure of the hermaphrodite. Swinburne’s reading of Milton is considered alongside his reading of Sappho and Charles Baudelaire, as well as William Blake: Swinburne alludes to erotic moments in Paradise Lost at the same time as he transforms William Blake’s illustrations of the poem, in an act of commingling presented as an example of Swinburne’s ‘intermedial ekphrasis’.

Reviewing evidence from suburban workers’ cemeteries in Rome, tombstones of gladiators in Roman Gaul, and pottery from Roman York, this chapter asks what care for certain people and bodies reveals about what people living precariously cared about. Whereas most studies that chart non-elite social worlds in the Roman empire have highlighted the vertical relations of patronage or have reproduced the normative frameworks of family and work, this chapter traces alternative, horizontal social formations emerging from lives lived in precarity.

The study of law suggests that its performances, largely through the format of trials, take place behind the closed doors of courtrooms. Little of the exterior would seem to intrude upon its routines and, vice versa, little of what might constitute law’s performativity occurs outside of its bounded architectural habitat. Yet this has not always been the case. Numerous examples of outdoor performances provide a rich study into the siting of legal performance. The argument presented in this chapter is that it was initially the outside that provided the primary stage and staging of law. Asserting the presence of law across the various and remote parts of the realm required performances of its majesty on the very surface of the earth. It required acts heralding, inscribing and publicising common law as the law of the land and so it was the land that had to become the physical platform and the scene of its delivery. The evolution of common law depended upon the rudiments of landscape, on the plotting of the countryside, and on the elemental matter of the earth. Such features formed a stage on which the emergence of common law not only took place but was very much performed.

Introduction

While initially piloted as the technology behind cryptocurrencies, the distributed ledger technology underlying Bitcoin, that is, blockchain, now extends to use cases beyond mere virtual currencies. Technologists and blockchain evangelists have been quick to overlook the excessive carbon footprint of Bitcoin, the world's first cryptocurrency, and have attempted to expand the use cases of blockchain to areas beyond virtual currencies, finance, and payments (Huang, O’Neill, and Tabuchi 2021). This technology that brings together characteristics of decentralization, peer-to-peer computing, hash functions, asymmetric public–private key cryptography, and consensus algorithms to form a shared, immutable, and non-repudiable database is considered to have tremendous potential in fields such as identity and access management, healthcare, supply chain tracking, climate change, and so on (De Filippi and Wright 2018). Therefore, unsurprisingly, blockchain technology is now touted as the Panglossian solution to a myriad of problems ranging from financial inclusion to aid and climate change (Marke 2018).

This chapter attempts to ascertain whether the claims of blockchain as a solutionist technology for climate change, in reality, reflect and entrench the incumbent power asymmetries and the global digital divide in the guise of disintermediation and collective capitalism. This chapter applies the extant concepts of techno-colonialism and data colonialism to critically examine blockchain-based initiatives in the climate change sector.

Quintilian suggests that law be learned in significant part a comicis, from the usages, customs and comedies of everyday life. Starting out from the theatrical and foundational form of a legal dialogue between sovereign and philosopher on pedagogy, the body, letters and images, this chapter examines the fabrication of common law in terms of what the barrister Blount coined as comediography (comœdiographus). In whirl and jig, lawyers and playwrights of comedies share a trajectory from conflict to resolution, disruption to decision, that provides a harmonious conclusion for the audience if not necessarily the actors.