This chapter discusses dedicatory epigrams accompanying donor representations in monumental painting. The dedicatory inscription in the Vytoumas monastery (1161) in Thessaly is used to reconstruct the iconography of ktetoric compositions. The now-lost representation of Tarchaneiotes with his wife Zoe and the sebastos Andronikos, probably in a patronal Deesis composition, is reconstituted for the first time. The second epigram, surrounding the mosaic representation of the Deesis in the Vatopedi monastery on Mount Athos, is used to propose a new interpretation of the relationship between the hegumen Ioannikios and the monk Sophronios, probably the second patron, who completed the dedicatory composition started under Ioannikios. For the last epigrams, from the church of Saints Anargyroi in Kastoria (1180/90), the relationship between the poetic text, the symbolism of the space and the iconography is presented as a whole. These two epigrams are important for understanding the ideology of patronage and some of the problems that dedicatory inscriptions pose, namely the nature of the patron’s involvement in the creation of an epigram and the patron’s interaction with the painter.

This chapter provides an overview of the early history of the Celtic languages. The first part offers a tour of Britain and Ireland, pausing at key points, both historical and geographical, from which we may consider the development of the Celtic languages. The second part of the chapter then goes on to examine a number of features of the Celtic languages in greater detail: the stress accent, lenition and mutations, the loss of final syllables, and the verbal system.

This chapter sets out to identify key conceptual resources available for exploring power in the social construction of global environmental degradation for collective response. The chapter begins with the epistemic community model, which illuminates the role that transnational communities of scientists have in identifying issues like climate change and informing political action. This approach has been important for documenting the origins and establishment of the IPCC in 1988. However, empirical accounts informed by discursive and normative frameworks in other issue areas challenge the centrality of scientists in treaty formation. The studies reviewed identify the emergence of environmental issues as the source of new institutions; however, they also highlight how problem diagnosis has to converge with prevailing political and economic orders. Revisiting the IPCC’s emergence through the idiom of co-production at the end of the chapter, reveals how climate change had to be transformed into a global problem to fit with the existing remit of international organisation.

This chapter provides an overview of the process of conceiving, researching, editing, and publishing dictionaries, both synchronic (or commercial) and historical. Discussed methods and tools for making dictionaries range from traditional hand-copying of citations from print books and paper-and-pencil editing to sophisticated electronic technologies like databases, corpora, concordances, and networked editing software. The chapter shows how editorial conception of the needs and sophistication of the end user largely determines the dictionary’s length and headword list as well as the format, defining style, and level of detail in entries. The chapter goes on to examine how the pressures of commercial publishing, with its looming deadlines and pressing need to recoup investment by profits from sales, affect the scope of dictionaries and the amount of time editors can devote to a project, and how these pressures differ from those affecting longer-trajectory, typically grant-funded historical dictionaries. Assessing the consequent challenges for managing and motivating people working in these two very different situations, what may be the most important factor in a project’s success, concludes the survey of dictionary editing.

Copyeditors and proofreaders are some of the heaviest users of dictionaries, consulting them regularly in the course of their work, though little has been written on the influence of dictionaries on editors or of editors on dictionaries. Editors consult dictionaries on matters of spelling, capitalization, compounding, meaning, end-of-line hyphenation, and more. They may also disallow new forms or senses not found in a dictionary. Further, style manuals typically dictate not only which dictionary to use but how to use it, particularly on matters of spelling variants. Dictionaries thus become prescriptive tools in the hands of editors, despite lexicographers’ descriptive approach. There may also be something of a feedback loop between editors and lexicographers: because editors are gatekeepers of publishing, they have an outsized influence on what appears in print and thus what is recorded in dictionaries and therefore regarded as correct. Through dictionaries, copyeditors may therefore play an underappreciated and largely unexplored role in shaping standard English.

The Isles of Scilly are an archipelago twenty-eight miles off the south-west coast of England, with a population of c. 2,000 people. The current indigenous population is believed to have descended from 1571, when the islands were repopulated by a member of the aristocracy who leased the islands from the British Crown. The islands’ leasing continued until 1920, when all but one island reverted to the Duchy of Cornwall. Metalinguistic commentary from the sixteenth century onwards suggests that Scillonians are perceived as more cultured, better educated and better spoken than their mainland counterparts. By drawing on oral history data, this vignette will explore the accuracy of these perceptions. To do so, it examines the extent to which phonetic features of Scillonian English relate to traditional varieties of Cornish English, on the one hand, and standard English, on the other. In explaining the patterns of linguistic variation found on the islands, consideration is given to the presence (or not) of the Cornish language on the islands, dialect contact, the ‘feudal-like’ system of governance, the peculiarities of education practices, and the identity factors that affect how and why different groups of Scillonians use distinctive linguistic variants.

This chapter explores the rationales of the paratexts accompanying John Tzetzes’ commentary on Hermogenes in the bespoke copy contained in the Vossianus Gr. Q1. Besides clarifying the circumstances prompting that specific copy of the commentary, these paratexts scaffold Tzetzes’ authorial agency as well as his social role in a cultural economy based on patronage. The chapter also shows how they speak to the way Tzetzes exploits the inherent ambiguities of language and tradition, by looking at them as examples of enacted ἀμφοτερογλωσσία, resting on dialectic.

The applied psychology of religion takes information from the knowledge base developed by psychologists of religion and uses this information for some social, psychological, or spiritual/religious purpose. When we seek to apply research and theory in this field we must first answer questions about our objectives, and it is unlikely that we will arrive at much agreement on ultimate goals. Still, it is possible that some consensual objectives and applications can emerge among researchers and those who seek to apply what researchers have learned. This chapter lists and discusses a broad range of potential applications. One major domain of application concerns clinical psychology, counseling psychology, psychiatry, social work, and related fields. We see that in recent decades, there have been many proposals – partly driven by the findings of empirical research – to integrate religious and spiritual approaches into mainstream psychotherapy. As with nearly everything else in the psychology of religion, these proposals can be controversial. In addition, the chapter discusses proposed spiritual and religious competencies for psychologists.