Although initially associated with English forms of horror and Gothic culture, as interest in folk horror has intensified over the past decade it has become apparent that the subgenre’s scope transcends national boundaries. It has also become obvious that there is a distinctive – and evolving – North American folk horror tradition. This chapter has three strands. The first establishes that the powerful North American suspicion of the community in the wilderness owes much to anxieties spawned during the English colonization of North America, as underlined by Robert Eggers’ 2015 film The Witch: A New-England Folk Tale. In the second section the author briefly surveys some of the most prominent post–World War II American folk horror texts. Finally, several recent folk horror texts are discussed in which the recent feminization of American folk horror is placed at the forefront, concluding with a discussion of Ari Aster’s Midsommar (2019).

This chapter examines natural philosophy in the early modern period (roughly 1600-1800), focusing on three areas: 1) the so-called mechanisation of nature, which presents a rival understanding of the natural order to that of medieval Aristotelianism; 2), the rise of experiment and laws of nature as tools for the knowledge of nature; 3) the emergence of new theologies of nature and new methods of biblical interpretation, which develop in concert with wider changes in natural philosophy. The chapter demonstrates how early modern thinkers inherit and transform the natural philosophy of the medieval Latin tradition, producing new philosophical and theological accounts of nature that are sufficiently comprehensive to rival the Christian-Aristotelian framework of the Middle Ages.

The premise of this chapter is that an examination of the Cuban son provides important insights into Cuban history and society, into Caribbean race relations, and ongoing processes of cultural fusion involving Afro-descendant and Euro-descendant practices, among others. The chapter focuses primarily on early son history, its antecedent forms, the African-influenced aesthetic sense that gave rise to it, and the popularization of the music and dance in the early twentieth century. Later it briefly considers changes to son music in the 1930s and beyond.

This chapter reviews the evidence from the Greek world for tribute and taxation. It begins with some comparative considerations about tributary regimes and the impact of Achaemenid imperialism on the fiscal development of the Greek city-states, including the Delian League and the Hellenistic kingdoms. The transition from tribute to taxation is cast as a significant indicator of state formation. A fundamental theme in ancient Greek taxation is the relationship between coercion and consent, especially how political institutions facilitate the sharing of communal burdens by the rich. Extraordinary levies on property and persons were a common feature of city-states, which Macedon and the Hellenistic kingdoms also adopted. Finally, the chapter treats indirect taxes, which are thought to provide a much larger and more regular portion of state revenue in the Greek world.

The conquest of Egypt and Asia, leading to new urban and fiscal infrastructures and new forms and levels of elite consumption, increased the scale of trade and exchange in the Hellenistic economy. Complex institutional changes that were spurred by both fiscal-military demand and local responses to this demand changed agrarian and commercial patterns, with likely positive effects on local markets. This chapter argues that the Hellenistic period was one of moderate economic growth both in the Greek poleis of the Aegean and in the core regions of Hellenistic Asia and Egypt. The greater presence of Roman traders in the Hellenistic East from the second century onwards is also likely to have had positive effects on market exchange and monetary circulation. Yet there is reason to assume that in the final decades of the Hellenistic period, all Hellenistic regions to some extent, but particularly the Aegean and Asia Minor, suffered from the destructive forces of the Roman military presence and subsequent tributary exploitation. Only after the Roman civil wars came to an end and fiscal practices were better regulated did the economies of the East begin to recover and to expand along the pathways that had developed in the Hellenistic period.

This chapter introduces the drum, song and dance tradition gwoka, from Guadeloupe, tracing its evolution and development through an analysis of gwoka’s most celebrated musicians. By presenting gwoka as a model for unravelling Guadeloupe’s complicated colonial past, the chapter indicates the critical contributions intangible cultural objects like gwoka can make alongside written sources as tools for research.

The concepts of the sublime and wonder have a long and significant history in philosophy, literature and the arts, religion, and the history of science. These concepts identify kinds of human attitudes and responses to the natural world and to cultural practices and artifacts. This chapter will focus on the contemporary relevance of the sublime and wonder to questions and issues within the context of nature, environment, aesthetics, and religion. I begin with a brief, recent history of sublimity before examining the contemporary sublime in relation to environmental thought and “other-regarding attitudes” toward nature. I then consider recent cross-disciplinary discussions of the varieties of wonder and show how this attitude invites receptivity in relation to the more-than-human world. In the concluding section, I offer a comparison of the sublime and wonder to show, further, the different ways in which they may support sympathetic, ethical attitudes toward nature.

Distinguishing between kinds of anthropocentrism and of biocentrism helps to disclose that White’s critique of theistic religions as anthropocentric and despotic miscarries, as does the different critique on the part of Passmore of ‘Greco-Christian arrogance’. The longstanding stewardship tradition of Christianity, Judaism and Islam facilitates an eco-friendly approach to the environment, particularly in its biocentric versions, and can be defended against criticisms from Palmer and Lovelock. Southgate, who misunderstands biocentrism as synonymous with Deep Ecology, favours both co-creation and stewardship; these approaches can be combined with each other and with Bauckham’s theme of the community of God’s creatures. Northcott does well to trace back modern ecological problems to seventeenth-century anti-communal and possessive individualism and the attitudes and practices emerging therefrom, but his communitarian and nature-friendly approach, while rightly understanding humanity as ‘dependent rational animals’ (MacIntyre), needs to become more cosmopolitan if these global problems are to be solved.

The relationship between religion and concern for the environment has not always been an easy one. Theological ascription of ultimate value to God, rather than to creatures, has been said to underlie ecological destruction, exacerbated also by religious notions of human uniqueness. Conversely, some religious groups have feared that concern for nature will risk deflecting attention from God. Faced with such a stand-off, we turn to the idea of ‘participation’ – of partaking from, or sharing in – which offers common ground between these two domains, with its sense of dependence and derivation. From a theological perspective (here concentrating on the Christian tradition), particular emphasis will fall on the idea of creation as good gift, and on the derivation of all things from God, in all of their aspects. From the side of biology, themes of participation appear both in the form of ecological dependence in the present and of evolutionary relations of derivation and reception running down biological history. Approached in these terms, the theologian conviction that creation is not ultimate need not degrade it, nor need attention to creation stand in competition with religious devotion.

The oldest cave paintings yet discovered are in a cave in Sulawesi, Indonesia. The paintings depict other animals in symbolic forms as participant agents, alongside early humans. Such conceptions of co-agency endured throughout human history in indigenous religions, particularly culturally isolated groups dwelling in deserts, forests, islands, and mountains. This ‘original’ ontology was taken up from indigenous religions into world religious traditions first in the Vedas and then in ‘axial age’ traditions including those of classical Greece, Judaism and, under their influence, Christianity. However in Latin Christianity the cultural imaginary of participation in a shared realm of being declined in favour of a new religious narrative focused on human souls. The subsequent rise of Enlightenment rationalism and personalism conferred on modern humans a sense of control and dominance in their agency of Earthly habitats in which they have progressively sought to eradicate the agency, and diversity, of the other beings. In this chapter I outline the original participative ontology in indigenous and world religious traditions; I examine the reasons for and impacts of its decline; and I discuss ways in which it may be recovered.