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In their trenchant panoramic overview – ranging from antiquity to the present-day – John and Anna Rist write with authority and ennui about nothing less than the loss of the foundational culture of the West. The authors characterize this culture as the 'original tradition', viewing its erosion as one which has led to anxiety about the entire value of Western thought. The causes of the disintegration are discussed with an intensity rare in academe. Critics of modernity ordinarily concentrate on the Enlightenment and the book certainly offers deep analysis of Enlightenment thought. But it goes further. Thus the cruelty of modern totalitarianism is now depicted as in the spirit of the French Revolution and its implacable hostility to a vanished primordial heritage, while scientism, bureaucracy and consumerism appear as the only rivals to a threatening nihilism. The book argues that Western thought has created a set of conflicting moral and spiritual customs: to the detriment of coherence, in individual minds as in society and culture.

Generations of Christians, Janet Soskice demonstrates, once knew God and Christ by hundreds of remarkable names. These included the appellations 'Messiah', 'Emmanuel', 'Alpha', 'Omega', 'Eternal', 'All-Powerful', 'Lamb', 'Lion', 'Goat', 'One', 'Word', 'Serpent' and 'Bridegroom'. In her much-anticipated new book, Soskice argues that contemporary understandings of divinity could be transformed by a return to a venerable analogical tradition of divine naming. These ancient titles – drawn from scripture – were chanted and sung, crafted and invoked (in polyphony and plainsong) as they were woven into the worship of the faithful. However, during the sixteenth century Descartes moved from 'naming' to 'defining' God via a series of metaphysical attributes. This made God a thing among things: a being amongst beings. For the author, reclaiming divine naming is not only overdue. It can also re-energize the relationship between philosophy and religious tradition. This path-breaking book shows just how rich and revolutionary such reclamation might be.

An understanding of Dante the theologian as distinct from Dante the poet has been neglected in an appreciation of Dante's work as a whole. That is the starting-point of this vital new book. In giving theology fresh centrality, the author argues that theologians themselves should find, when they turn to Dante Alighieri, a compelling resource: whether they do so as historians of fourteenth-century Christian thought, or as interpreters of the religious issues of our own times. Expertly guiding his readers through the structure and content of the Commedia, Denys Turner reveals – in pacy and muscular prose – how Dante's aim for his masterpiece is to effect what it signifies. It is this quasi-sacramental character that renders it above all a theological treatise: whose meaning is intelligible only through poetry. Turner's Dante 'knows that both poetry and theology are necessary to the essential task and that each without the other is deficient.'

This is a complete basic course in English phonetics and phonology. Since its first publication, this course has established itself as the most practical, comprehensive text in the field and become widely used in universities and other HE institutions. This fourth edition takes into account recent developments in the teaching of phonology. It includes updated references, fuller coverage of intonation, and a new chapter on different varieties of English. Each chapter includes notes on further reading, discussion of the more challenging issues, written exercises and, where appropriate, suggestions for teachers. Accompanying audio and a full answer key are also provided. Audio files, additional exercises and other supporting material are available online.

In his famous argument against miracles, David Hume gets to the heart of the modern problem of supernatural belief. 'We are apt', says Hume, 'to imagine ourselves transported into some new world; where the whole form of nature is disjointed, and every element performs its operation in a different manner, from what it does at present.' This encapsulates, observes Peter Harrison, the disjuncture between contemporary Western culture and medieval societies. In the Middle Ages, people saw the hand of God at work everywhere. Indeed, many suppose that 'belief in the supernatural' is likewise fundamental nowadays to religious commitment. But dichotomising between 'naturalism' and 'supernaturalism' is actually a relatively recent phenomenon, just as the notion of 'belief' emerged historically late. In this masterful contribution to intellectual history, the author overturns crucial misconceptions – 'myths' – about secular modernity, challenging common misunderstandings of the past even as he reinvigorates religious thinking in the present.

Bringing to life the interaction between America, its peoples, and metropolitan gentlemen in early seventeenth-century England, this book argues that colonization did not just operate on the peripheries of the political realm, and confronts the entangled histories of colonialism and domestic status and governance. The Jacobean era is reframed as a definitive moment in which the civil self-presentation of the elite increasingly became implicated in the imperial. The tastes and social lives of statesmen contributed to this shift in the English political gaze. At the same time, bringing English political civility in dialogue with Native American beliefs and practices speaks to inherent tensions in the state's civilizing project and the pursuit of refinement through empire. This significant reassessment of Jacobean political culture reveals how colonizing America transformed English civility and demonstrates how metropolitan politics and social relations were uniquely shaped by territorial expansion beyond the British Isles. This title is also available as Open Access.

This Element argues that it was not just the application of medieval texts by Richard Hakluyt that made them relevant for England's budding colonial ideology; rather, it shows that these premodern texts already conveyed the essence of the expansionist mercantilism and colonialist imperialism that would characterise early English exceptionalism and the Elizabethan reach for the Americas. The upshot of the author's argument is threefold. First, Hakluyt and his contemporaries were much better and closer readers of medieval travel texts than we give them credit for; second, the ideology behind English colonialism was shaped in the late medieval period, not in Elizabethan England; and third, another facet of periodisation, with its epistemological emphasis on rupture rather than continuity, comes under pressure.

Organisms are central for biology. However, conceptualizing the unit of the organism is not easy. This Element discusses challenges to base biological reasoning and practice on the concept of organism. After many decades dominated by the paradigm of the gene, the organism is making a comeback in the bio- and biomedical sciences. It is again recognized as a causally efficacious, autonomous, and active unit that transcends the properties of genes and affects its own development and evolution – especially in fields like epigenetics, niche construction theory, and evolutionary developmental biology. This Element investigates these developments from a perspective of integrated history and philosophy of science. It focuses on conceptual, biotheoretical, and historical dimensions, as well as sociopolitical and anthropological aspects of today's 'return of the organism.' In particular, it discusses solutions for challenges of organism-centered biosciences in the 21st century. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

The African Heritage of Latinx and Caribbean Literature unearths a buried African archive within widely-read Latinx writers of the last fifty years. It challenges dominant narratives in World Literature and transatlantic studies that ignore Africa's impact in broader Latin American culture. Sarah Quesada argues that these canonical works evoke textual memorials of African memory. She shows how the African Atlantic haunts modern Latinx and Caribbean writing, and examines the disavowal or distortion of the African subject in the constructions of national, racial, sexual, and spiritual Latinx identity. Quesada shows how themes such as the 19th century 'scramble for Africa,' the decolonizing wars, Black internationalism, and the neoliberal turn are embedded in key narratives. Drawing from multilingual archives about West and Central Africa, she examines how the legacies of colonial French, Iberian, British and U.S. Imperialisms have impacted on the relationships between African and Latinx identities. This is the first book-length project to address the African colonial and imperial inheritance of Latinx literature.

In this book, Rachel Teubner offers an exploration of humility in Dante's Divine Comedy, arguing that the poem is an ascetical exercise concerned with training its author gradually in the practice of humility, rather than being a reflection of authorial hubris. A contribution to recent scholarship that considers the poem to be a work of self-examination, her volume investigates its scriptural, literary, and liturgical sources, also offering fresh feminist perspectives on its theological challenges. Teubner demonstrates how the poetry of the Comedy is theologically significant, focusing especially on the poem's definition of humility as ethically and artistically meaningful. Interrogating the text canto by canto, she also reveals how contemporary tools of literary analysis can offer new insights into its meaning. Undergraduate and novice readers will benefit from this companion, just as theologians and scholars of medieval religion will be introduced to a growing body of scholarship exploring Dante's religious thought.

The Freedom of Words is for anyone interested in understanding the role of body and language in cognition and how humans developed the sophisticated ability to use abstract concepts like 'freedom' and 'thinking'. This volume adopts a transdisciplinary perspective, including philosophy, semiotics, psychology, and neuroscience, to show how language, as a tool, shapes our minds and influences our interaction with the physical and social environment. It develops a theory showing how abstract concepts in their different varieties enhance cognition and profoundly influence our social and affective life. It addresses how children learn such abstract concepts, details how they vary across languages and cultures, and outlines the link between abstractness and the capability to detect inner bodily signals. Overall, the book shows how words – abstract words in particular, because of their indeterminate and open character – grant us freedom.

Esoteric Orientalism studies Victorian esotericism and academic Orientalism as the nineteenth century's most significant comparative frameworks for understanding global religions, languages, and cultures. Occultist formations like the Theosophical Society (led by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky) and Orientalist disciplines like philology and comparative religion (as exemplified by Friedrich Max Müller) both believed in the essential kinship of East and West, routed through the Aryan family hypothesis—generating new visions of race and caste even while expanding the category of self. Still, theosophy and philology shared a contentious relationship. Blavatsky's writings anticipate postcolonial commentary in critiquing Orientalist scholarly presumption; her fantastical citational practices hold a mortifying mirror to academic Orientalism. Ultimately, this study traces how heterogeneous, riven, and powerfully consequential the larger discourse of Orientalism could be. Esoteric Orientalism combines broad historical narrative with literary close reading, recasting Theosophy as a speculative and imaginative construct through which to read Orientalist discourse more broadly.

This volume examines 1 Corinthians 1-4 within first-century politics, demonstrating the significance of Corinth's constitution to the interpretation of Paul's letter. Bradley J. Bitner shows that Paul carefully considered the Roman colonial context of Corinth, which underlay numerous ecclesial conflicts. Roman politics, however, cannot account for the entire shape of Paul's response. Bridging the Hellenism-Judaism divide that has characterised much of Pauline scholarship, Bitner argues that Paul also appropriated Jewish-biblical notions of covenant. Epigraphical and papyrological evidence indicates that his chosen content and manner are best understood with reference to an ecclesial politeia informed by a distinctively Christ-centred political theology. This emerges as a 'politics of thanksgiving' in 1 Corinthians 1:4-9 and as a 'politics of construction' in 3:5-4:5, where Paul redirects gratitude and glory to God in Christ. This innovative account of Paul's political theology offers fresh insight into his pastoral strategy among nascent Gentile-Jewish assemblies.

Bringing together perspectives from the histories of medicine, sexuality, and the book, Sarah Bull presents the first study of how medical publications on sexual matters were made, promoted, and sold in Victorian Britain. Drawing on pamphlets, manuals, textbooks, periodicals, and more, this innovative book illustrates the free and unruly circulation of sexual information through a rapidly expanding publishing industry. Bull demonstrates how the ease with which print could be copied and claimed, recast and repurposed, presented persistent challenges to those seeking to position themselves as authorities over sexual knowledge at this pivotal moment. Medical publishers, practitioners, and activists embraced allegations of obscenity and censorship to promote ideas, contest authority, and consolidate emergent collective identities. Layer by layer, their actions helped create and sustain one of the most potent myths ever made about the Victorians: their sexual ignorance.This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.

What was life like for ordinary people who lived in Roman Egypt? In this volume, Anna Lucille Boozer reconstructs and examines the everyday lives of non-elite individuals. It is the first book to bring a 'life course' approach to the study of Roman Egypt and Egyptology more generally. Based on evidence drawn from objects, portraits, and letters, she focuses on the quotidian details that were most meaningful to those who lived during the centuries of Roman occupation. Boozer explores these individuals through each phase of the life cycle – from conception, childbirth, childhood, and youth, to adulthood and old age – and focuses on essential themes such as religion, health, disability, death, and the afterlife. Illuminating the lives of people forgotten by most historians, her richly illustrated volume also shows how ordinary people experienced and enacted social and cultural change.

Metaontology is the branch of philosophy that focuses on questions that naturally arise when doing ontology. This Element offers the reader (some of) the elements of metaontology by way of an opinionated overview of (some of) its central arguments and positions. The first section of this Element focuses on whether there are nonexistent objects. It discusses historical figures such as Suarez, Brentano, Twardowski, and Meinong, as well as contemporary figures such as Lewis, van Inwagen, Thomasson, and Zalta. The second section focuses on whether ontological questions are trivial to answer and whether ontological debates are merely verbal debates. Can there be different concepts of existence or different meanings of 'exists' or other ontological expressions? If ontological questions are nontrivial, are they nontrivial only if a substantive metaphysical view is true? Even if there aren't different senses of 'exist,' might there be different modes of being or ways to exist?