This chapter assesses priority arguments against intervention in nature. First, on the Exclusion Approach, intervention is not a priority because equality and priority reasons simply do not apply to wild animals. Second, on the Deflation Approach, since nonhuman animals have a lower capacity for well-being, increasing wild animal well-being produces less value than increasing human well-being. Third, on the Perfectionist Approach, increases in nonhuman well-being cannot compensate for the loss of “the best things in life,” only attainable by human activity. We should, thus, give priority to increases in human well-being that ensure the existence of excellent goods. It is argued that all approaches have highly unacceptable results, particularly on the negative scale of well-being. Finally, the chapter considers the Domesticated Animals First objection, according to which priority should be given to alleviating the harms suffered by domesticated animals. It is argued that taken either as a substantive or as a strategic objection, it cannot soundly succeed.

Sir William Alexander’s tragedies on classical themes include two relating to Alexander the Great: one is about the latter’s defeat of Darius III and the other follows the fortunes of the successors after Alexander’s death. (It begins with a long speech by Alexander’s ghost). This chapter aims to combat the prevailing critical contempt for these plays by demonstrating the high level of scholarship that went into their composition and the thematic unity to the Alexandraean Tragedie conferred by the series of chorus meditations on Fortune and mutability. Sir William’s educational background and classical reading are explored, as well as his connections with the stage, and his work is compared with earlier Elizabethan plays on classical themes, including the comparable play by Samuel Daniel, Philotas.

Throughout history, a person’s rank and status significantly influenced his or her material world. It is no surprise, then, that palace affiliation impacted the material world of Ottoman subjects. Chapter 5 examines the wealth and possessions of palace-affiliated women in different periods of the eighteenth century, based on estate registers, and explores how it compared to the material world of contemporary women who were not related to the imperial palace. Comparing the material world of palace women to contemporary askeri status women who represented the privileged segment of society offers an opportunity to uncover the degree to which palace affiliation affected the material wealth and consumption habits of former members of the harem. It also allows us to uncover their socio-economic positions in society. Based on this profile, the chapter demonstrates how their affiliation with the imperial court generally brought these slave-origin women a level of material wealth that placed them within a particular position in society. A small group of these manumitted female palace slaves accumulated tremendous wealth and enjoyed the possession of commodities rarely encountered, even among contemporary women of free and high status. This situation lent them status as some of the most prominent people in society and as representatives of high culture.

Courtship behaviour varied not just across social class but also depended on individual inclination and disposition.There were agreed patterns of behaviour, particularly in middle-class society, that signalled to family, friends and the wider community that a couple were courting and the expectation was that the courtship would end in marriage. Not everyone observed or followed the rules of courtship, particularly around the issue of pre-marital sex.Courtships sometimes broke down and led to breach of promise to marry cases.While impossible to quantify, one of the facts to emerge from a study of breach of promise cases is the prevalence of sex as part of courtship. While the Presbyterian church authorities were tolerant, if not approving, of couples who consummated their relationship before marriage, the statistical evidence slowly emerging from scattered sources also indicates a significant number of pregnant Catholic brides.The single mother may have been shunned by society but there was less shame attached to the birth of children within seven or eight months of marriage.There is evidence in middle-class urban society of changing attitudes to courtship in the early decades of the twentieth century with more men and women anxious to make their own choice of spouse.

Piero’s life has been a missing chapter in the history of Florence during its transition from republic to principate, considered irrelevant, except by its failings, to the crisis of Italian states at this time. As with any biography, the importance of his life lies in providing a witness to events as they happened – in his case the threat to Italy’s, and especially Florence’s, stability in the face of foreign invasions. Piero was very articulate in expressing himself and the pressure he suffered in his unofficial role as Florence’s capo, neither powerful enough to rule nor free enough to indulge his talents and pleasures as a prince. He enables us to appreciate the situation faced by republics like Florence that had become territorial states without the military power or the permanent leadership to withstand foreign armies – except at risk of being accused of tyranny. This, of course, was Piero’s fate, and it again raises the question of whether he was the ambitious tyrant that his reputation suggests or whether, instead, his temperament and experience would have qualified him to be the new type of civilian ruler that political realists like Machiavelli, Francesco Vettori and Guicciardini were proposing for Florence after the unexpected death of Piero’s son in 1519.

Sometimes called the ‘last of the Romans, first of the Scholastics’, Boethius (c.475–c.525) was among the most influential writers in medieval Europe. He devised a grand scheme to harmonize Aristotelian and Platonic thought, but he was best known for his prosimetric De consolatione philosophiae, which describes a dialogue between an imprisoned Boethius, falsely accused and awaiting execution, and the figure of Lady Philosophy. In alternating sections of prose and verse, she explains the transitory nature of earthly goods like wealth and fame and assures Boethius of the universe’s just, hierarchical order. Translated as the Boece by Chaucer, who drew on a French translation and Latin commentary sources as well as the Latin original, the Consolation and its ideas pervade his poetry, especially the Knight’s Tale and Troilus and Criseyde.

Thomas Hoccleve referred to Chaucer as the ‘firste fyndere of our faire langage’. The word fyndere is carefully chosen, as a modified translation of the first ‘canon’ of classical and medieval rhetoric, the ancestor of present-day English invention. Any assessment of Chaucer’s ‘poetic art’ requires us not just to identify the linguistic choices available to him, it also requires us to ask how those choices relate to his broader poetics. Chaucer’s use of ‘pronouns of power’, for example, do not only characterise particular choices from the linguistic resources of London Middle English, they are also a matter of style, a notion for which classical and medieval literary theoreticians had their own terminology, distinguishing high, middle and low styles, widely recognised as having distinct functions relating to social status and roles. It is conceivably as a metrist, however, that Chaucer’s skill as a ‘finder’ is perhaps most subtly demonstrated, as examples from his works show.