This chapter investigates the Latin interpretations of the last book of the Christian Bible, the Apocalypse or Revelation to John, up to the end of the ninth century, with a focus on the ways in which—and the reasons why—these interpretations (unlike later medieval and many modern readings of this book) are largely historical rather than focused on the end of the world.

The Bible’s Primary History – the great history of the Israelite people extending from Genesis to Second Kings – contains within it a remarkable set of ideas about government and law. The work touches on nearly all of the great themes of political theory in the modern era – the necessity of government, the problem of anarchy, the moral basis of obligation, the distinguishing features of good and bad leaders, and the analysis of optimal government structure and design. Associated with these political ideas is a remarkably insightful exploration of the basic problems of jurisprudence: the nature of law, the justifications for constitutions, and the articulation of specific legal norms in legislations and principles of customary law.

Jerusalem and Dabiq are two centers for Muslim apocalyptic events connected in both classical apocalypses, and now in the Salafi-jihadi apocalypse of the Islamic State (ISIS).

The essay explores the contribution of a literary analysis to interpretation of the canonical Gospels – Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. The author begins by analyzing historical tendencies to read the biographies of Jesus atomistically, before moving to describe recent narrative approaches that focus greater attention on the overarching picture of how each story is told by means of plotting, characterization, and thematic development. The body of the essay involves two close, narrative readings, the first focused on Matt 4:23-9:38, which highlights the role of the Sermon on the Mount (Matt 5-7) and the miracle chapters (Matt 8-9) in this part of the first Gospel. The second reading addresses John’s Gospel and the ways that author deploys allusions and echoes from Gen 1-2 to accent the theme of the renewal of creation in the person and ministry of Jesus of Nazareth.

Milton’s command of the Bible in the original languages (Hebrew, Greek, etc.) as well as in English created the resonance of Paradise Lost, notably in such passages as the catalogue of the devils in Book One and the summary of the entire Bible in Books Eleven and Twelve. Milton focused, however, on the myth of Eve and Adam to seize upon the Bible as a whole and to emphasize that universal humanity is his subject. But Milton is free and original in how he uses the Bible, scaling up small things to giant proportions, as with Sin and Death, and downplaying or ignoring traditional Christian themes, such as the personal nature of our relation to God. Milton reads the Bible as a Christian humanist: for political ends in this world. The “paradise within” prophesied by the angel Michael at the end of Paradise Lost is the political ideal for “mankind” as a whole, for humanity, at the end of Paradise Regained.

Apocalyptic literature of the early fifth century demonstrates renewed awareness of impending catastrophe, divine judgment, and a wide variety of possibilities for sociopolitical and cosmic transformation or restoration (apokatastasis). This chapter focuses on specific cases of systems-collapse in North Africa and southern Gaul.

This chapter argues that in order to properly appreciate the complexities of Donatist eschatology, we must situate it within its fourth- and fifth-century context. When we do so, we find that Donatist apocalypticism is far more contiguous with the eschatological expectations of the Christian communities that ringed the western Mediterranean in late antiquity than previously expected, yet also capable of significant innovation in how such apocalyptic tropes were deployed.

This chapter surveys the body of ancient Gnostic apocalypses, works that differentiate God from the creator of the world and identify humanity as divine. These apocalypses are important for our understanding of Greek, Jewish, Coptic, and Manichaean literature, as well as early Islam, but a brief look at two such apocalypses—the Apocryphon of John and the Apocalypse of Paul—reminds us that their use of visionary motifs and pseudepigraphy also served diverse ends in the world of early Christianity.

Matters of cultivation, cuisine, and alimentary carnality constitute the very marrow of the material, aesthetic, and ethical cultures of empire and of postcoloniality; No history of modern empire can be thought without passing through the mouth, or through the question of consumption in general. This chapter showcases the alimentary longings, primarily but not solely for spices, sugar, and tea, that drove colonial expansion across the world, and the transformation of metropolitan palates and meals that resulted from this expansion. It examines the dialectic between metropolitan appetite and the production of deprivation in the colony, focusing in particular on slave hunger in plantations and on recurrent famine as one of the features of colonial rule and the market-driven order it institutes. It underlines the significance of hunger as a still resonant form of anti-imperial protest. Above all, it parses the ways in which postcolonial writers mobilize an ecology of alimentation to speak to experiences of colonialism, decolonisation, postcoloniality, and late capitalist globalisation.

“Black Power in the Kitchen” excavates African American women’s culinary writing, which has been relegated to the margins of the US and African American literary canon. This chapter provides an overview of key developments in the black female-authored cookbook from the nineteenth to the twentieth century. It examines early cookbooks that exploited the “Jemima Code” for their authors’ individual advancement, the community cookbook that served the larger goals of racial uplift, and the experimental and diasporic aesthetic of soul food writing. Authors under discussion include Malinda Russell, Abby Fisher, Freda DeKnight, and Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor, among others. What emerges from this account is a new understanding of how black feminist politics underwrites these literary texts, and opens up possibilities for understanding how these texts, in turn, bare on wider aesthetic practices in the United States – specifically, by reconfiguring the kitchen table as a writing table.

Much scholarship on food blogs has turned attention to new forms of domesticity. This chapter focuses instead on men and masculinities, examining how US bloggers navigate gendered dynamics of power on food blogs, particularly when they approach a highly gendered genre: dude food. After defining and situating this genre within the broader US foodscape, this chapter analyzes the text and visuals on four dude food blogs: the professionally produced Men’s Health food blog, two amateur blogs written by men (Dude Food and Buff Dudes), and one female-authored blog (Domesticate Me!), which includes a “Dude Diet” section. This chapter examines the different ways that these bloggers communicate the culinary characteristics and paradoxical concerns of dude food through a variable set of authorial personae and narrative styles fashioned through prose, recipes, and food photography. Whether produced by men or women, calorie-laden or macronutrient-centric, oriented positively or negatively around fat and muscular male bodies, dude food – and dude food blogs – demonstrate the contradictions of performing masculinity in the twenty-first century, in the blogosphere and beyond.

This chapter connects the art and science of eating well known as gastronomy to the literary and social histories of modernism. It foregrounds how modernist writers both advance and satirize gastronomic principles of good taste and refined dining, and in doing so prompt explorations of popular versus high culture and nationalism versus cosmopolitanism. The analysis compares Italian avant-garde artist and writer F.T. Marinetti’s The Futurist Cookbook (1932), Wisconsin poet Lorine Niedecker’s New Goose volume (1946), and California culinary figure M.F.K. Fisher’s cookbooks from the 1940s. The Futurist Cookbook implicitly adapts the nationalism of nineteenth-century French gastronomy to the ideology of twentieth-century fascism by promoting technologically fabricated dishes and steel-like Italian citizens. In contrast, Niedecker’s New Goose uses lyric poetry to expose the hunger of small-scale farmers during the Second World War, a period when affluent gourmands continued to patronize urban restaurants. Finally, Fisher’s cookbooks employ modernist narrative techniques in the cookbook genre while expressing dissent with the broader status of gastronomy during wartime.

In nineteenth-century Britain, a new relationship developed between eating and reading: the cookbook emerged as a commercial form; realist novelists described meals in detail; written menus appeared on dining tables in both the public and domestic spheres. The fashion in dining style also shifted, from service à la Française, in which dishes were all served at once, to service à la Russe, in which meals were served to diners in courses. Dinner had become serialized. As this chapter reminds us, Victorians consumed much of their literature in serial form, and now mealtimes mirrored the apportioned, segregated, and suspenseful qualities of serialized fiction. Because service à la Russe was timed and choreographed by servants, the serialization of the meal played a role in the privatization of social and libidinal life. This chapter also traces nineteenth-century interests in civilized and uncivilized ways of eating, and the crucial role that diet and dining played in political protest. Industrialization had produced an era of grand excess and grisly deficits; when Charles Dickens compared capitalist and cannibal appetites he exposed the end-logic of consumer culture.

Beginning with Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland (1865) and ending with Levi Pinfold’s Greenling (2015), this chapter contends that children’s literature provides an imaginative map for navigating the global industrial food system, superimposed on colonial circuits of yore. Several narrative dynamics dramatize the appetite and vulnerability of the child’s body. For example, the racialized child is the object of predation in late nineteenth-century US fiction, and then Harlem Renaissance literature repurposes this trope to cherish the black child. In The Secret Garden (1911) and The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (1950), white English children demonstrate and defend their virtue with hearty English repasts. In the postwar period, Green Eggs and Ham (1960) and Where the Wild Things Are (1963) imagine eating as an expression of childhood agency and rebellion. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, picture books reveal the enmeshment of the human and the nonhuman through the ecological intimacies of eating.

This chapter employs the example of the first American Thanksgiving, its facts and fictions, to explore the origins of a national sense of taste in the USA. It traces this sense of taste, equal parts gustatory and aesthetic, to a philosophy that linked personal taste to the expression of republican values and ideals which was mobilized well into the nineteenth century, as writers including Sarah Josepha Buell Hale and Lydia Maria Child employed characters who exhibited republican taste – especially at the Thanksgiving table – in order to illustrate appropriate political behavior. This chapter places Hale’s political advocacy concerning Thanksgiving, as articulated in Godey’s Lady’s Book and to the government directly, against Child’s more imaginative – and more liberatory – evocation of Thanksgiving in her story “Willie Wharton,” so as to show how Child more fully connected the symbolism of food and eating to the cultivation of personal taste. It argues, moreover, that Child demonstrates a more inclusive conception of the USA, even as it remains limited by her inclination to subsume indigenous cultural influences within an already dominant Anglo-American national identity.

This chapter surveys food and food practices in a variety of medieval texts, including Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Havelok, and the mystic visions of Julian of Norwich, as well as recent scholarship in the field of medieval food studies. It argues that literary depictions of medieval eating, feasting, and mealtime decorum offer us crucial, if often overlooked, commentaries on political power and social pretensions as well as religious practice and hypocrisy, while also revealing key aspects of medieval food culture otherwise glossed over or omitted in culinary texts from the time, including the centrality of meat carving and the multi-sensory scale of medieval banquets.