The mobility of elite secular women due to marriage, exile, or ambition is often a key feature of genealogical narratives in medieval chronicles and genealogical rolls. The thirteenth and fourteenth centuries saw a particular literary interest in the political consequences and legacies attached to women’s movements, evinced by the prevalence of mobile female founders, such as Albina, Inge, and Margaret of Scotland. This chapter examines how transregional genealogies are constructed in the relationship between text and diagram in works associated with Queen Eleanor of Provence; her mother, Beatrice of Savoy; and her granddaughter Mary of Woodstock. It focuses first on female ancestors and strands of matrilineage in royal genealogical rolls, including the prominent ribbon between Margaret of Scotland and Edith/Matilda. It then turns to Nicolas Trevet’s little-studied Les Cronicles, dedicated to Mary, to discuss an unusual story of Margaret of Scotland’s mother, Agatha of Hungry, accompanied by a matrilineal diagram.

The notion of noetic perception may be expanded in relation to the role of the imagination in revelatory experience. Here, the expansion of neo-Platonic perspectives in the understanding of Samuel Taylor Coleridge is significant, as are the notion of the imaginal developed by Henry Corbin and the understanding of the role of the human imaginative faculty in religious visionary experience, as explored by Karl Rahner and Hans Urs von Balthasar. This kind of analysis has implications for solving certain puzzles inherent in the New Testament accounts of visions of the risen Christ. However, questions arise in relation to this understanding, and these may be tackled in part through recent Christian thinking about the notion of revelation, in which the focus is no longer on ‘information about God’ but on what Yves Congar has called an orientation towards salvation. This suggests an understanding akin to the perennialist separation of exoteric and esoteric aspects of religious traditions in the sense of suggesting a two-component, psychological-referential model of revelatory experience.

This chapter considers processes of political centralization, hierarchy building, and social differentiation that were initiated and sustained by agents who, from CE 600–800, operated in realms that were not in direct contact with representatives of the Copán state. In general, the creation of sociopolitical complexity in each case involved the selective acquisition and use of goods and ideas from various sources, including but not limited to the Maya lowlands, in strategies designed to advance the interests of a few elites over those of their immediate subordinates. The latter, in turn, transformed their domestic arrangements as they sought to maintain as much autonomy as they could in the face of these threats. The resulting changes often involved increased involvement in craft production and possibly market exchanges as those facing onerous elite demands for tribute sought novel means to counter them. The outcome was a dynamic set of political relations that operated at multiple spatial scales and which were animated by people of all ranks who mobilized diverse resources secured through overlapping social networks from various sources to exercise power in all its forms.

This chapter covers the publishing context of seven of Pirandello’s novels and argues for the importance of analyzing this landscape to delineate key turning points in the evolution of the Italian publishing world and in the canonization of a national author. This context reveals that if the playwright achieved international recognition while allowing himself and his theatre to become more and more experimental, the novelist instead followed a more conventional path. It shows how Pirandello’s choice of publishers and of their responses to his works reflects the development of the Italian publishing industry: His recognition as a national author proceeds alongside his narrative experimentations. The chapter also details the ascending trajectory of Pirandello’s publishing career and illustrates the strategies through which Pirandello was consecrated as a national author with the Mondadori Omnibus, including the blessing of Minister for Popular Culture Dino Alfieri in 1937.

This chapter summarizes the diverse natural environments from which Southeast Mesoamerica’s inhabitants variably drew the resources they used in forging their distinct but interrelated histories. We then review how archaeologists have approached the study of those histories. In particular, we relate the relative lack of interest that researchers exhibited in the area’s ancient inhabitants to trends in anthropological and archaeological theory that pertained throughout much of the twentieth century. Especially important were the efforts of investigators to define the borders of lowland Maya civilization and the relegation of those living beyond those limits in the Southeast to a frontier or periphery whose residents were largely enthralled and dominated by the accomplishments of their lowland Maya neighbors. Ancient Southeast Mesoamerican developments were, thus, understood as pale reflections of, and largely inspired by, events instigated by lowland Maya rulers. The legacy of this approach for our understanding of Southeast Mesoamerica’s Pre-Columbian past is long and pervasive, an issue that is also addressed within this section.

This essay considers religion in Pirandello’s oeuvre from a historical point of view, that is to say, as firmly anchored in a post-Copernican modernity in which, as philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche famously proclaimed, “God is dead,” and relativity came to be understood as scientific fact in the wake of Albert Einstein’s investigations. The essay asks whether a consistent meditation on religion can be found in Pirandello’s oeuvre and therefore considers several works, among them, The Late Mattia Pascal; Shoot!; Lazarus; and One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand. Particular focus is given to the ways in which these writings demonstrate Pirandello’s interest in mysticism, a non-dogmatic Catholic Modernism, and his rejection of any transcendent God, a belief which corresponded to his humoristic view of life more generally, tied as they both were to his uneasiness over life’s lack of certainty.

This chapter is a broad account of the experiences of the printmaker’s family home-cum-workshop in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England, focusing on the role and status of women within these families and spaces. Weaving key examples throughout, it highlights the centrality of the family workshop in framing and encouraging women’s printed productions. However, it also exposes the gendered mechanisms at play within these overlapping commercial and domestic spaces.

Despite the degree to which the printmaking family facilitated and often encouraged women’s work, the small body of literature specifically focusing on printmaking families in the eighteenth century has often obscured the role of women within these workshops. Printmaking apprenticeships were largely closed to women in this period, and this chapter reveals that the family workshop gave many women an invaluable social and economic opportunity to work, to earn money, to create prints, and to forge an artistic identity. In turn, their labour was often crucial for the running of the family workshop, providing income but also enabling other relatives to fashion their own artistic identities in turn.

This chapter considers how Confucian values constitute constitutional identity in three Confucian-influenced countries in Asia: China, South Korea, and Singapore. Drawing on Professor Gary Jacobsohn’s framework for the comparative study of constitutional identity, this contribution argues that Confucian commitments are embodied in the formal and/or prescriptive constitutions in the three Asian jurisdictions. The constitutions’ Confucian heritages are continuously dynamic. Disharmony provokes a change in Confucian constitutional identity. The change involves not only judicial but also social and political activities.

In this chapter, I mount a sustained argument against Friedman’s claim that one is agnostic about whether P if and only if one is in an inquiring state of mind about whether P. I reject the claim that an inquiring state of mind entails agnosticism on the grounds that it fails to accommodate cases in which an agent inquires with the aim of ratcheting up an instance of (justified) believing to the status of knowledge or an instance of knowledge to the status of complete certainty. I reject the claim that agnosticism entails being in an inquiring state of mind on the grounds that it fails to accommodate cases in which a subject is agnostic towards P but are unmotivated to inquire about whether P because they believe or know that the question of whether P is unanswerable.

Today, only twenty signed etchings by Laura Piranesi, daughter of the famous printmaker Giovanni Battista, are known. Her work has never been assessed independently from that produced by her father and brother. Documents newly discovered in Roman archives bring to light fresh biographical details and important milestones including her education in her father’s studio making vedute (cityscapes or vistas), a genre much appreciated by foreign tourists. In this chapter, her prints held in museum collections are, for the first time, catalogued separately from those of her family members. Showing great ability as an etcher, her small views of ancient and modern Roman monuments are in keeping with the subjects of larger views by her father; conversely, her picturesque style is very different.