The many years of service evident in the careers of some ladies-in-waiting who received annuities for decades while continuing to complete responsibilities in the royal household demonstrates that the opportunities of court service were valued by many. Such service offered one of the only salaried professional positions available to women in later medieval England, and for many was a true career. Families sought to promote their daughters at court because female servants could seek to gain not only remuneration but also intangible patronage opportunities for themselves, their families, and their associates. Employment in elite households enhanced servants’ loyalty, built and deepened relationships, and also heightened the status of the royals and nobles who bestowed rewards. Including gender in the analysis helps us to recognize the porous boundary between domestic life and political life at the royal court, and, in an era when politics was all about access to the decision-making monarch, female courtiers enjoyed and benefitted from such informal routes to access. Although in service, and always answerable to the needs and commands of their queens and aristocratic employers, understanding the history of ladies-in-waiting underscores how they nevertheless found ways to exercise agency and access political power in medieval England.

This chapter develops a rudimentary theory of glory. Glory is a particularly elevated form of honor, a kind of “super recognition.” It is more exclusive and longer lasting than honor, and it is typically connected with promises of immortality and an “upgrade” of one’s reputation. We distinguish between political (or Periclean) and personal (or Achillean) glory. Personal glory is competitive by definition, political glory is not. We also discuss the scope of the term and suggested that determining the proper objects of glory (military, political, cultural, or even everyday pursuits) turns on the social role the concept is supposed to play. The status and role of glory change during different stages of a conflict. Early on (typically before a war starts) glory helps motivate people to fight for a cause. During the conflict, the preoccupation with glory usually fades among those who actually do the fighting, and after the conflict, the question of bestowing glory becomes subject to bureaucratic and social decisions. Furthermore, we argue that often those who actually do the fighting are not the ones who get glorified. We note the tension between positing that someone has a duty to fight and the practice of glorifying them for fulfilling that duty, and we also argue that glory is subject to both internal and external explanations. We conclude by tracing the relationship between glory and death, and examining the normativity of both Periclean and Achillean glory.

Although no comparable preoccupation with freedom developed in any other part of the world, each region had its own experiences of it. This was true of Africa, but the difficult conditions of survival promoted a reliance on other values, such as courage, honor, and loyalty. The widespread presence of slavery, only rarely as harsh as in the West, and sometimes entered into voluntarily to ward off some crisis, impeded the diffusion of liberty as a value for society as a whole. Islamic society was pervaded by an egalitarian spirit based on the universal submission of everyone to God, but political rule was absolute once established, and only justice, not liberty, set limits to what rulers could do. Formally an empire, Mughal India displayed many forms of local independence, but those who exercised local authority regarded themselves as channels of sovereign power rather than as barriers to it. In China imperial authority was formally absolute but in practice people enjoyed much freedom of action, even against state officials. As in India, however, these limits on imperial authority were not conceived as liberties, chiefly because the state was regarded as essential to providing the moral order on which stable civilized life depended.

This chapter examines how, particularly in response to their growing middle-class population, the Inns of Court relied on their architectural spaces and social practices to ensure that all members of the bar embodied the ideal of the gentlemanly professional. In the absence of required classes, the societies stressed fraternization with older generations to inculcate new members with legal knowledge and the values appropriate to British barristers. The societies emphasized affective bonds and tried to cultivate fraternal relationships between their members. Yet in the mid-nineteenth century, the category of gentlemanliness was itself in flux, subject to divergent ideas of who could be a gentleman and how a gentleman should behave. Competing ideas of who belonged at the societies or what counted as gentlemanly behavior could result in unanticipated affective registers, including anger, indignation, and shame.

Tocqueville is shown to be an able student and adversary of Machiavelli.

The focus on cosmopolitan humanitarianism obscures the totality of morality in international politics, leaving the empirical study of morality in IR with two central blindspots. First, it focuses on moral conscience – our desire to do good for others – to the neglect of moral condemnation, our response to the perceived unethical behavior of others, not only against third parties but also against ourselves. In both everyday life and IR, the response is generally to morally condemn, and often to punish and retaliate. Second, the IR ethics and morality literature have not come to terms with moral principles that operate at the group level, binding groups together. When “our” group is engaged in conflict with another, we owe the group our loyalty and defer to group authorities out of moral obligation. These “binding foundations” are particularly important for IR since foreign affairs are a matter of intergroup interaction. Together this means that groups, bound by moral commitment, do not compete with others in an amoral sphere in which ethics stops at the water’s edge. Once we cast our moral net more widely, we realize that morality is everywhere, more striking in the breach than the observance.

Chapter 4 consists of an introduction to the discourses and ideologies of patronage and benefaction and to the ways in which they are appropriated throughout the Apocalypse. Across ancient Mediterranean societies, one of the primary functions of the king consisted of distributing benefits to subjects, material and otherwise, in order to establish loyalty amongst subjects as well as power that accrued therefrom, a pattern which is best understood within broader systems of patronage and benefaction. A survey of the general contours of personal, imperial, and divine patronage and benefaction reveal how some of the most basic discursive strategies, attending socio-cultural-economic realities, and underlying ethical frameworks not only appear in Revelation but constitute the primary means of depicting the relationship between God, Lamb, and the followers thereof. In sum, Revelation depicts the Lamb as a royal benefactor who dispenses divine benefits on behalf of God.

A gift of a patron necessitated a response on the part of the recipient, which most often took the form of loyalty and other honors befitting the gift. Especially magnanimous benefactions were considered “divine” and compelled “divine” honors, including festivals, processions, priesthoods, crowns, and hymns. Chapter 5 presents a survey of the honors-for-benefits system inherent in systems of patronage and benefaction in the ancient Mediterranean world, with attention to the varieties of “divine” rewards requited for “divine” gifts, including especially divine hymns. This survey contextualizes the divine honors requitted to the Lamb, namely, allegiance to the point of death and hymns of praise, which befit his divine gifts as God’s royal vicegerent.

Chapter 4 consists of an introduction to the discourses and ideologies of patronage and benefaction and to the ways in which they are appropriated throughout the Apocalypse. Across ancient Mediterranean societies, one of the primary functions of the king consisted of distributing benefits to subjects, material and otherwise, in order to establish loyalty amongst subjects as well as power that accrued therefrom, a pattern which is best understood within broader systems of patronage and benefaction. A survey of the general contours of personal, imperial, and divine patronage and benefaction reveal how some of the most basic discursive strategies, attending socio-cultural-economic realities, and underlying ethical frameworks not only appear in Revelation but constitute the primary means of depicting the relationship between God, Lamb, and the followers thereof. In sum, Revelation depicts the Lamb as a royal benefactor who dispenses divine benefits on behalf of God.

A gift of a patron necessitated a response on the part of the recipient, which most often took the form of loyalty and other honors befitting the gift. Especially magnanimous benefactions were considered “divine” and compelled “divine” honors, including festivals, processions, priesthoods, crowns, and hymns. Chapter 5 presents a survey of the honors-for-benefits system inherent in systems of patronage and benefaction in the ancient Mediterranean world, with attention to the varieties of “divine” rewards requited for “divine” gifts, including especially divine hymns. This survey contextualizes the divine honors requitted to the Lamb, namely, allegiance to the point of death and hymns of praise, which befit his divine gifts as God’s royal vicegerent.

This chapter distinguishes between and discusses the validity of different kinds of demand for recognition, which are often conflated in the literature on populism. While “equal respect” is central to democracy, not all demands for recognition are demands for equal respect. In particular, the type of respect that citizens and government must display should not be confused with esteem for people’s merits, identity, or way of life, but must consist in respect for citizen status. Demanding and granting esteem for particular traits or ways of life, as populists do, is incompatible with a pluralistic society. Further, demands for respect among populists tend to be bound up with a hierarchical idea of honor, which should be confronted with the democratic idea of respect for dignity. Although democracy is a society of equality of respect and cannot supply equal esteem for everyone, inequality of esteem can still pose a moral and democratic problem. This is because inequality of esteem under some conditions can convert into inequality of respect. Therefore, the second part of the chapter argues that democratic respect depends on a form of solidarity that counteracts the ever-present danger of inequality of esteem turning into inequality of respect.

Aldama, Quintero, and Blanco must have felt a deep and unbearable contradiction whenever they reflected on their lives. From birth, each could claim many of the essential traits of honorable men. In theory, all three murderers possessed the ideal masculine qualities of their era. All of them enjoyed the honorific title “don,” as did members of their families. Even for poverty-stricken Spaniards, the titles don and doña suggested status above the plebeian mob. But in 1789, in contrast to their inherited status, each of these men lived as a poor and dishonorable criminal. The escalating daily tension that they experienced between their privileged birth as white male Spaniards and their experience as outcasts ramped up in the summer and fall of that year as they struggled to find money and to defend themselves from the repercussions of their previous crimes. Finally this painful internal conflict motivated them to kill. From their point of view, only a windfall of cash could end their struggle between who they believed themselves to be and their actual existence as rogues.

Not just embraced by reactionaries, aristocrats, or committed duelists, the idea of honor had widespread cultural and sociopolitical purchase in the Romantic era. As a master value – or a value so prolific that it is becomes the hidden assumption of a range of different theories and practices – honor, this introduction argues, addresses three major developments in modernity: the growing split between private and public selves, the development of new kinds of civic virtue, and the ascendent place of affect in cultural production. Placing Keats, Coleridge, Equiano, Wollstonecraft, Burke, Kant, and Hegel in conversation with contemporary critics such as Wai Chee Dimock, Kwame Anthony Appiah, and Achille Mbembe – all of whose recent work is concerned with honor and mutual recognition – this introduction further reveals Romantic cultures diagnosis of the limits of liberal republican notions of liberty when faced with the social necessity of material forms of dignity.

In the early nineteenth century, honor and disrepute were increasingly synonymous with terms like credit and debt. In Austen’s Emma, credit becomes a primary figure for the broader speculations about the inhabitants of Highbury. Long affiliated with a Whiggish ideology of commerce and its supposed levelling effects, credit, in Austen’s representation, turns out to be an elitist phenomenon, something made available only to those who already have honor, members of a “neofeudal” vanguard such as George Knightley, who can distribute credit at their discretion. However, Scott’s Rob Roy seems to rebuff Austen’s approach to credit and honor. Featuring a young protagonist who throws himself into the 1715 Jacobite uprising, rescues errant bills of credit from his father’s stock-brokerage, redeems family honor, and tries to impress his love interest, the novel at first appears to be an ideal neofeudal text, blending chivalric romance with modern commerce. But Rob Roy himself challenges the merger of these two paradigms. By decoupling honor from credit and disrupting the financialization of social value, the highlander becomes an unlikely scourge of incipient global finance capitalism.

Addressing a chronology of texts – the Advertisement to Lyrical Ballads, the Preface to its second edition, the ballad Michael, and the “Residence in France” sections of the 1805 Prelude – this chapter reconsiders Wordsworth’s great decade as a struggle between two types of honor: a commercial value of hierarchy that operated within the day’s market for “dignified” literary productions, and a social value of egalitarianism that allowed poetry to appeal to the “native and naked dignity” inherent in all humankind, regardless of economic status. Addressing a legacy of criticism on Wordsworth’s canonicity and self-fashioning, this chapter demonstrates how honor refigures Romantic cultural capital, inasmuch as Wordsworthian honor pits society against commerce. Such a tension between honorable egalitarianism and commercial success reframes the poet’s politics. Addressing claims that Wordsworth became more conservative as his career progressed, this chapter shows how he also stages a classic paradox inherent in liberalism: the conflict between market distinction and social equality.