The eighth and final chapter focuses on the restoration of residential occupation to the Argiletum – absent since Domitian – and Paschal I’s investment in the area during the eighth and ninth centuries. Paschal explicitly tied S. Maria to the flanking sister churches of S. Praxedis and S. Potentiana, unifying them in a physical and conceptual hierarchy of virginity and virtue. Several welfare centers attest to renewed foot traffic along the valley, while the construction of several elite houses within Domitian’s old forum shows a desire among elites to be connected to the Subura’s processional thoroughfare.

In conversation with Peters’s Law as Performance, I suggest paying closer attention to dialogue as one central element of performance itself. In this contribution, I analyze the configuration of affective spaces based on the characteristics of dialogue in legal settings, from legislation to inquisitorial cases.

The Epilogue reflects on the ways that nineteenth-century texts consistently acknowledge the post-lapsarian state of human existence. The literary works discussed in this book all, to some extent, either recreate the events of Milton’s epic in a world that is fallen or tell the story of what happens after the expulsion. Drawing on Christopher Ricks, the Epilogue identifies a single word – ‘error’ – as emblematic of Milton’s nineteenth-century legacy. ‘Error’ points to its post-lapsarian meanings even when used to describe Eden before the Fall. After opening with the 1790 disinterment of Milton’s corpse, the Epilogue turns to another disturbing anecdote to illustrate the complexity of Milton’s nineteenth-century reception: the history of a Victorian edition of Milton’s poetry, bound in tanned human skin. The skin in question belonged to George Cudmore, executed for murder in the 1830s. This instance of anthropodermic bibliopegy reveals that Milton’s works, while revered and respected by the Victorians – his body parts were treated as relics – were also open to disruption and reinterpretation.

Chapter 1 examines faith in Lancelot Andrewes’s preaching. It shows that his discussions of religious belief frequently draw on the methods used in early modern England of evaluating forensic testimony. After a survey of Andrewes’s interest in religious belief and witness evidence, it turns its attention to discussions of faith and epistemology in his lectures from the 1580s. The chapter then shows how Andrewes’s interest in religious belief is reframed in explicitly legal terms in his seventeenth-century Easter sermons at court. Andrewes valued legal evidence for its ability to establish the Resurrection as an attested matter of fact. Yet these sermons also trace the limitations of legal methods of proof. For Andrewes, a true faith in the Resurrection involves a more diverse set of epistemic resources – bodily participation in the Eucharist, for instance. These mysterious aspects of faith are nevertheless articulated through the framework of legal proof and evidence.

This chapter begins with a brief overview of Arezzo’s history, particularly as it pertains to Vasari and his family, as well as that of the Pieve prior to Vasari’s interventions there. It then considers an initiative Vasari and Bishop of Arezzo Bernardetto Minerbetti devised to reconfigure the east end of Arezzo Cathedral in the 1550s that in part inspired his renovation of the Pieve. It concludes with an extended discussion of Vasari’s acquisition of patronage rights to the St. Mustiola chapel in the Pieve’s left aisle and his graphic designs for the chapel he intended to build there.

Chapter 2 establishes an intermedial, transatlantic connection between John Milton, Herman Melville and J. M. W. Turner. Building on the work of Erik Gray and Robert K. Wallace, it identifies in Melville’s and Turner’s work a shared investment in Miltonic ‘passive power’. This concept is spatially rendered in the work of all three figures as a vortex: a dynamic form with a still, potent centre. In Milton, vortical passive power is depicted most clearly in Satan circling the immovable Christ in Paradise Regained. Melville’s engagement with Miltonic passivity is evidenced in his annotated reading of Milton and given vortical form in the violent silence of the white whale in Moby-Dick and in the maddening refusals of Bartleby in ‘Bartleby, the Scrivener’. In Moby-Dick, Melville’s ekphrastic engagement with Milton’s sublime chaos also draws on the visual language of Turner’s paintings, in turn informed by Milton. The chapter ends by examining Turner’s self-mythologising anecdotes, arguing that he constructs himself as a Miltonic figure, positioned as the still, commanding centre of the elemental vortex.

Climate change has been duly recognized as a common concern of humankind (UNGA 1988). Nevertheless, its effects are not commonly shared. Instead, marginalized individuals, especially women in the Global South,1 have been primarily acknowledged to bear the brunt of climate degradation despite being less responsible for its advancement than individuals and nations in the Global North (UNGA 1992, Principle 7; Kakota et al. 2011; Singh, Feroze, and Ray 2013; Pearse 2017; MacGregor 2017). Against this background, efforts for addressing the differentiated impacts of climate change on the lives and livelihoods of Southern women have been mobilized at the international level, including through the issuing of dedicated decisions and programmes for action under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) (see, among others, COP of the UNFCCC 2010, 2017, 2021).

Within this broader debate, however, feminists have been wary that a disproportionate focus on the specific vulnerability of women to climate change can produce inadvertent effects in terms of policy discourse, negotiation, and design (see MacGregor 2009; Arora-Jonsson 2011; Resurreccion 2013; MacGregor 2017). For instance, feminist scholars have highlighted that this narrative has limited feminist transnational activism on climate change by fixating the frames of reference for women as poor subjects more vulnerable to the impacts and risks of climate change (MacGregor 2009; Arora-Jonsson 2011; Resurreccion 2013; MacGregor 2017).

Chapter 2 focuses on discussions of faith in John Donne’s religious prose. Donne often addresses such questions by turning to legal discourses. Processes of evaluating forensic testimony provide useful structures for measuring probability or certainty in evidence and the assent that it generates. This is exemplified in Donne’s Pseudo-Martyr, which relies on widely recognised rules about forensic testimony to discuss pressing questions regarding belief and its legitimacy in post-Reformation England. The chapter then shows how Donne adapts this legal handling of belief to address questions about salvation and certainty for a variety of audiences. To lawyers at Lincoln’s Inn, Donne uses the technicalities of civilian law to support and critique post-Reformation understandings of soteriology. To a broader congregation at St Paul’s, he deploys common law evidentiary procedures to show that, to a limited but helpful extent, the evidence of salvation can be apprehended through legal methods.

This book’s Introduction sets out the key intellectual and historical contexts for its argument. It shows that religious belief gained an important cultural emphasis after the Reformation and that it was considered to be distinct from other kinds of belief or assent. Engaging with scholarly discussions of belief, this introduction suggests that the period from around 1580 to the 1650s witnessed an attempt to investigate what was particular about a specifically religious kind of belief. Its certainty and spiritual origin were compared to, and contrasted with, other kinds of assent that were generated by probable forms of argument. An important and widespread way of effecting this comparison involved considering religious belief alongside the kinds of assent generated in legal settings – when witness evidence is evaluated for its credibility. The introduction roots this discursive method in contemporary legal culture, before surveying recent scholarship on literary culture, law and religion.

Chapter 3 considers Francis Bacon’s use of legal evidentiary procedures and the important role they play in his discussions of religious belief. Its first half is given over to a wide-ranging account of Bacon’s philosophical prose. It sets out to establish that Bacon uses his knowledge of Romano-canon law and its evidentiary practices to shape his methodological reforms for natural philosophy. This chapter applies the findings of this survey to Bacon’s prose fiction narrative, New Atlantis. Requirements for credible legal testimony are, on the one hand, shown to shape the style of Bacon’s narration. On the other, though, Bacon’s discussion of evangelical conversion shows that, as a spiritually derived form of assent, religious belief transcends such legally derived criteria for credibility. New Atlantis thus develops Bacon’s philosophical distinctions between faith and knowledge. It also asks probing questions about religious belief and intercultural encounters in early modernity.

Risk and uncertainty were structural to the Roman world, as was the case for other preindustrial empires. But their impact was not distributed equally. Social, economic, political, legal, military, and other inequalities pervaded Roman society and generated conditions of precarity. Precarity was experienced as a new relation to the Roman object world; as an impetus for experimentation but a brake on innovation; as a state of constant anticipation; as a troubled relation to place; and as a negotiation of horizontal and vertical relations of care.