This chapter explores the relationship between Christianity and ecology in Clare’s poetry, letters, and biblical paraphrases. Critics tend to secularize Clare’s writing and so overlook its biblical, religious, and metaphysical content. The chapter redresses this by assessing Clare’s early Christian faith, his relationship to Wesleyan Methodism and the Ranters, his distrust of organized religion, and his divine ecology as an expression of rural Christianity. Clare looks beyond pantheism and natural religion to identify an interwoven and sacred creation inseparable from the parish. As such, Clare valued Christianity as a ‘religion that teaches us to act justly to speak truth & love mercy’, a social and ecological politics embedded in prayer, mystery, scripture, and faith.

This chapter investigates the crucial significance of Lucian for early modern Italian literature and culture. From the late fourteenth century, Lucian’s writings were employed by Italian humanists to learn Greek and contributed considerably towards sparking a remarkable interest in the ancient Greek-speaking world. From Italy, Lucian’s fame travelled to the rest of Europe. During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Lucian’s fictional dialogues and paradoxical encomia deeply informed the oeuvre of many prominent writers, among them Leon Battista Alberti, Erasmus of Rotterdam, and Lodovico Ariosto. Moreover, this study aims to shed light on the variety of different roles played by Lucian within the Renaissance. By taking into account unexplored matters, such as the impact of vernacular translations, it is possible to distinguish between a ‘didactic-moral’, a ‘useful and delightful’, and a ‘heterodox-heretical’ understanding of Lucian in early modern Italy. On the one hand, such differentiation allows to finesse the connections between the reception of his oeuvre and the political, cultural, as well as religious transformations of that time (e.g. the printing revolution and the Counter-Reformation). On the other hand, it shows that some features of Lucian’s poetics – especially humour, satire, and parrhesia – acted throughout the Renaissance as frameworks that influenced the early modern comprehension of fundamental issues, such as literary imitation and fictionality.

This chapter explores issues for Islam in relation to religious themes arising from developments in artificial intelligence (AI), conceived both as a philosophical and scientific quest to understand human intelligence and as a technological enterprise to instrumentalise it for commercial or political purposes. The monotheistic teachings of Islam are outlined to identify themes in AI that relate to central questions in the Islamic context and to addresses nuances of Islamic belief that differentiate it from the other Abrahamic traditions in consideration of AI. This chapter draws together the existing sparse literature on the subject, including notable applications of AI in Islamic contexts, and draws attention to the role of the Muslim world as a channel and expositor of knowledge between the ancient and modern world in the pre-history of AI. The chapter provides foundations for future scholarship on Islam and AI and a resource for wider scholarship on the religious, societal and cultural significance of AI.

This chapter investigates the reception of Lucian in Voltaire’s works and Giacomo Leopardi’s Operette morali. I argue that Lucian’s contamination of codified genres, especially clear in his Prometheus es in verbis, into a new satirical genre provided the two modern authors with a useful tool to innovate the literary conventions of their times and to create a hybrid, polemical, humorous prose – a previously uncanonised form of philosophical critique. Voltaire is influenced, directly and indirectly, by Lucian not only in his dialogues, but also in the creation of his conte philosophique as a form of mélange and in the use of defamiliarising devices such as cosmic travel and the dialogue of the dead. In Leopardi’s works, where Lucian is the most present ancient author and his influence is openly acknowledged, the imitation of Lucian is clearly part of a global effort by Leopardi to reform Italian culture and its literary conventions. Nevertheless, together with the problematic status of Lucian, the canonical status and literary reception of Voltaire and Leopardi in their national cultures helped eclipse Lucian’s model, as the two modern authors took his place in exerting their influence, while absorbing and innovating on Lucian’s hybridised writing.

One of the poetic features of Isaiah is its intertextuality. The authors of the later portions of the book worked with attention to the existing Isaianic texts, so that the book as a whole is woven together by common themes and vocabulary. Furthermore, the book is full of allusions to other biblical books, and was itself eventually a touchstone for later biblical authors. (Sometimes it is even uncertain which text came first!) Hyun Chul Paul Kim, in “Isaiah in Intertextual Perspective,” analyzes the book at each of these levels, and then looks forward to “points of intersectionality” between Isaiah and the modern world.

This essay revisits the relationship between Clare’s mental and physical health and his writings by considering the importance of taking him on his own terms. Appraising the critical history of diagnostic approaches towards Clare’s mental and physical distress, it suggests that such categoric approaches to the poet’s psychophysiological life are unsatisfactory. It turns instead to a key term that Clare used repeatedly to describe his varied forms of disorder – his ‘indisposition’ – and argues that it remains important to Clare and to us as readers of him because of its dislocating and indecisive potential. Considering his unsettled position within the medical and literary culture in which he lived, and broadening the range of his medical encounters and vocabulary beyond the narrow context of the asylum, the essay discuss Clare’s symptoms and his poetic representations of them as entangled with his mobility across, and unstable status within, different places, social worlds, and identities.

Hanne Løland Levinson’s “Gendered Imagery in Isaiah” looks at one of the most significant and striking features of Isaiah: its repeated use of feminine imagery for God. She begins with an advanced yet accessible discussion of how metaphors work, then goes on to analyze how the use of imagery comparing God to a pregnant woman, a midwife, and a breastfeeding mother—alongside more widespread masculine imagery—combine to challenge and transform the ways in which readers perceive God. In conclusion, she points out the importance of female god-language in a world in which gender continues to be a basis for inequality and exclusion.

This chapter looks at Lucian’s intervention on the genre of comic dialogue through a discussion of one of the Dialogues of the Gods. In the dialogue between Aphrodite and Selene, Lucian imagines a sexy conversation between Aphrodite and Selene. The story of Selene and Endymion is well known, but in antiquity is almost always told in the barest of forms. Lucian tries to fill in the gaps by having Selene tell Aphrodite about her affair, but leads the reader towards the moment of revelation of what Selene does with Endymion only to pull shut the curtain at the last moment. Through this narrative, Lucian plays with the tradition of myth, with the reader’s sense of knowledge and knowingness, and with the erotics of the visual – in a way that amusingly makes the reader complicit with the author’s satiric fun.

Contrary to some accounts, particularly older ones, which portray Clare as a lonely, isolated, and somewhat misanthropic figure, he was a man with a rich social life who had many friends, including literary figures, antiquarians, ornithologists, entomologists, botanists, and artists. Through these friendships, he was abreast of contemporary thought and techniques, and, if only at second hand, he was in touch with the activities of some of the leading naturalists in this country and abroad. This obviously led to an increased knowledge and sophistication in Clare’s understanding of nature, as well as leading to subtle changes in his attitude to the natural world. In particular, it meant that he no longer regarded a love of nature as something to be rather ashamed of, but instead as something which he was able to celebrate.

This chapter addresses the repeated appearances of the sublime in Clare’s verse – including his deployment of the word itself – as well as the ambivalent relationship Clare’s understanding and practice of the sublime has to eighteenth-century and Romantic aesthetic discourse. This entails consideration of major theorizations of the sublime in the period prior to Clare and the reception in the English tradition of classical conceptions of literary sublimity or ‘grandeur’. The example of Milton is significant here, as is the genre of epic and Clare’s apparent aversion to it. A number of examples from Clare’s poetry and prose are considered in detail. The chapter concludes with a reading of Clare’s famous ‘I am’ poems, suggesting that they do in fact continue the tradition of Milton’s Satan, his resistance to oppression, and ambivalent insistence on the power of the mind.