This chapter introduces the main theorists associated with ecological hermeneutics, their objectives and strategies. It demonstrates how an ecological approach can be applied using a specific story from the book of Judges as a case study.

Although Mongolian literature features many enslaved characters, slavery as punishment, and slavery as metaphor, the nature of slavery and the identity of the enslaved is rarely mentioned. At the same time, the language of slavery was varied and changed over time in different literary contexts. Focusing on two terms of slavery, boġol and kitad, this essay argues that occupational hierarchies informed the language of slavery in Mongolian from the thirteenth to the nineteenth centuries. The terms boġol and kitad originally indicated servants or dependant people but came to mean slave in general. In historical literature, Buddhist didactic texts translated from Tibetan, and epic literature the usage of terms of slavery reflects the multivalent nature of the terminology which defies rigid, formalistic analysis. However, in the twentieth century, Mongolian scholars reinterpreted slavery as it appears in literary texts through the theory of Marxist historical materialism. The Marxist approach compared Mongolian slavery with formalistic Greco-Roman legal definitions of slavery and thus obscured the historical and literary significance of slavery and enslaved characters in the Mongolian literary tradition.

This chapter explores the ways in which the relationship between contemporary exegesis and the history of interpretation has been changing, to admit greater influence from premodern practice than was often allowed during modern times. Premodern interpretation is considered with examples from Augustine and Hugh of St, Victor, and then contemporary examples of reading the parable of the Good Samaritan and Psalm 137 are discussed to sample the issues.

This chapter explores ways in which interpreting literature might inform biblical interpretation through the metaphors used to describe the relationship between the two and reading in general.

This chapter considers more popular and experiential receptions of the Bible, in its various canonical and material manifestations, in faith communities. It examines communal engagement with biblical texts in liturgy and prayer, actualizations of the Bible in the praxis of believers and faith communities, and how the Bible functions in ecumenical dialogue and in wider interfaith conversations.

Rather than regard texts primarily as repositories of ideas or as resources for historical reconstruction, rhetorical interpretation reads them as dynamic interventions in the lives of social groups. This chapter uses the epistle to Philemon as a case study.

This chapter analyses the shape of liberation interpretation, emphasizing an alignment between the factors that constitute a liberationist hermeneutic of contemporary reception and the factors that constitute a liberationist hermeneutic of biblical text production.

Enslavement and punitive deportations from the south to the north of what is today the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (in northwest China) have been a feature of this region’s history. This chapter considers various reflections of captivity at the hands of both the Junghar Mongols (ca. 1690–1750) and the Qing Dynasty (from the 1750s onward) in literature produced by the Muslims of the Tarim Basin, that is, today’s Uyghurs. Enslavement by the infidel is a common trope of local hagiographic literature, which taps into Quranic narrative models of exile and deliverance. Alongside these narratives of charismatic male figures, folk songs mourning the experience of captivity also produced a set of popular female heroines in Uyghur literature. The most widely disseminated of these victim narratives, that of Nazugum, circulated in various forms in the late Qing, and after the dynasty’s fall became an important allegory of nationalist resistance among Uyghurs in both China and the Soviet Union.

In his Memoirs, the Italian playwright Carlo Goldoni describes the performance of a French opera he attended in Paris at the Académie Royale de Musique in 1763. There is much to admire in this unnamed work, from the technical ability of the dancers to the sumptuous décors, machines, and costumes. But soon, all this spectacle wears him out.

By the end of the sixteenth century, attempts to recover Greek tragedy led to the new genre of the dramma per musica. For the Florentine Camerata de Bardi, it meant the reinstatement of the antique melopoeia of the Greeks, that is, declamation emphasizing the word and its correct prosody. The Camerata promoted the excellence of monody, echoing the antique doctrine of the ethos proposed by the Pythagoricians, according to which modes could elicit different emotional responses in the listener: viewed as natural to man, monody was thus appropriate for the expression of affect. Later, also, Claudio Monteverdi would emphasise monody alongside polyphony, as he would argue in the preface to the Scherzi musicali of 1607. There, Monteverdi would define ‘Seconda prattica’ as a style that asked the music to amplify the affections already expressed by the poem and, in practice, to serve this latter.

Despite its utterly inhumane contours, slavery is a wholly human endeavor, an exploitative relationship between an extractor of labor and a producer of labor. At the same time, as an institution endemic to capitalism’s expansion, it suffuses global systems of exchange, consumption, and desire that are so often and so ironically touted as inherently liberatory. As an expression of power and control, in the sphere of both the market and the intimate, slavery appears to have existed for all of human history and may very well continue to exist as long as humans continue to commodify labor. Indeed, despite it being considered morally reprehensible and legally illegitimate in practically every society today, slavery still infects our global supply chains, our battlefields, and our domestic spaces.

The essay begins by discussing the debatable relationship between narratives of Black Atlantic chattel slavery and discourses of contemporary slavery in a global context. While some scholars are wary about conflating two different historical experiences, others see a useful link between past slavery and current trafficking. Uwem Akpan’s story “Fattening for Gabon” invokes the earlier trajectory of chattel slavery to the Americas but insists on a specific, local history of enslavement within Nigeria that locates it within a growing literature revealing West African internal involvement in past and present slave trade and trafficking. By restricting a global trafficking route to one origin in Nigeria, Akpan emphasizes local conditions of poverty and societal breakdown that lead to child trafficking in Nigeria and other African countries. I argue that even if Akpan ultimately borrows from the conventional slave narratives of the Black Atlantic, his attention is not solely or even primarily on the Middle Passage but on the First Passage when Africans captured other Africans to bring them to the coast for trade. Past and present are brought together in a continuum rather than as the rupture of the Middle Passage.