This chapter traces the maturation of Palermo’s architectural idiom across a network of local churches in the Kalsa and Loggia districts. Designed in collaboration with itinerant architects from southeastern Sicily and the Iberian Mediterranean, these early sixteenth-century monuments bear the mark of local builders and craftsmen fluent in ornamental and structural solutions inherited from the Normans. In Palermo’s contested cultural environment, building sites became laboratories for the development of a speculative architecture that tested the limits of architectural revivalism. Local practices of vernacularization and historicization developed against the backdrop of the city’s rich humanistic tradition, which creatively reimagined Palermo’s proximate and distant pasts.

At least ninety symphonies were written by English composers between c. 1920 and 1945. Given the number of compositions and composers, this chapter provides a broad overview of the range of symphonies, including general influences and trends. It is divided into three sections representing predominant approaches to the symphony and focuses on three case studies: choral symphonies (Gustav Holst’s First Choral Symphony), symphonies inspired by landscape (Granville Bantock’s Pagan Symphony) and ‘traditional’ symphonies (Arthur Bliss’s A Colour Symphony). All English symphonies composed during this time embrace experimentation and exploration, whether it be playing with late romanticism or exploiting new techniques and approaches. Some composers sought to create an English symphonic tradition, whereas others simply wanted to make their own mark on the genre. It is argued that given the number of symphonies composed during this time, coupled with the breadth of approaches, English symphonic writing not only endured but actively flourished during this period; furthermore, this body of work deserves to be more rigorously and carefully considered in scholarship.

This chapter critically examines the existence and conceptualisation of ‘international law’ in the Greek and Roman world from 600 BC to AD 650. It challenges traditional minimalist views that exclude antiquity from the history of international law and proposes a recalibrated approach grounded in conceptual history. By analysing legal practices, treaties and philosophical notions such as jus gentium and dikaion koinon, the chapter explores how ancient societies regulated interpolity relations. It introduces eight analytical dichotomies – such as inside/outside, city state/empire, and law/non-law – to frame the discussion. Through case studies on war, diplomacy, trade and dispute resolution, the chapter argues that while ancient international law did not exist in a modern sense, it functioned as a prototype for legal norms governing relations between autonomous entities. The chapter concludes that international law in antiquity was not merely a precursor but a meaningful legal system in its own right, shaped by the need to structure a complex and often hostile world.

Chapter 1 opens the book’s section on “Catholic antiquities,” which addresses Borromeo’s interactions with the diverse images he encountered in the churches of the Milanese diocese. It examines archival records of Borromeo’s church inspections, or visitations, to show that his reform of the church interior focused on the physical integrity of the images he encountered, sacred by virtue of their objecthood as well as their representational value. His emphasis on the sacred objecthood of images had implications for their perceived historicity. Borromeo folded Renaissance Raphaels, miraculous medieval mosaics, and contemporary artworks into the same long arc of ancient custom. If Giorgio Vasari wrote in his 1568 Lives of the Artists that antiquity ended with the fourth-century reign of Constantine, Borromeo’s definition of antiquity was far more flexible in its parameters. Borromeo’s views on the history of sacred images coalesced in a time of intense confessional debate, offering a decidedly Catholic understanding of the image’s antique authority.

This chapter describes and analyzes the role that medicine has historically played in relation to broader cultural attachments to the idea of progress. It offers a historical overview of how the interest – or disinterest – in progress is entangled with contemporary understandings of what it means to be healthy or ill and the medical priorities of the time. Improved medical care had very different meanings depending on the respective value ascribed to individual and societal well-being, attitudes toward death, and the role of physicians. While contemporary ideas about medical progress rest on very different understandings of the human from other cultural and historical contexts, their emergence from a combination of scientific knowledge and ethical preoccupations recurs throughout history. Even as the capacity and desire to intervene in the human body with technological means has increased, both utopian and modest visions of progress in medicine have historical antecedents. The historical overview that follows is crucial for understanding how answers to the question “What is progress in medicine?” have always been contested and historically contingent.

This chapter reviews the ancient Greek, Roman and Jewish evidence to discern the marriage practices the early Christians would have known. It lays the foundation for tracing the antiquity of customs attested in the later Byzantine sources. In addition to ancient texts, this chapter examines Roman artistic depiction of marriage in frescoes and funerary art.

Chapter 3 begins the conceptual history of the nation where our current vocabulary originates, in classical Greece and Rome. It examines the conception of cultural-linguistic communities in the context of the two principal alternatives to the nation-state – city-state and empire. The chapter moves from Greek conceptions of ethnicity as depicted in Herodotus’ Histories to Cicero’s reflections on the relationship between national and political communities in the Roman Empire and concludes with an examination of the idea of the nation in the Vulgate, the late fourth-century translation of the Bible. The analysis shows that ethnos, gens, and natio referred to communities defined by descent, language, and geographical homeland but were not understood in a political sense. Moreover, Roman thinkers were not only acutely aware of the twofold loyalties to nation and polity; they also sought practical arrangements for accommodating diverse national groups within a single political order. The chapter discusses Roman ideas on citizenship, administrative subsidiarity, and legal pluralism.

Chapter 13 examines the development of Weimar Classicism, from the impact of Goethe’s own experiences in Italy to his collaboration with Friedrich Schiller. A crucial factor in any classicism, including that of Goethe and Schiller, is the absence of the ancients, and the chapter argues that Weimar Classicism was far from the settled, canonical project for which it is often taken. Rather, it emerged from historical crisis, above all the French Revolution, and it is characterised by internal tensions, between antiquity and modernity, desire and restraint.

This chapter explores Michel Foucault’s impact on the history of sexuality by emphasizing the disparate and evolving nature of his work and its often-controversial influence on the history of sexuality as a field. The essay begins by summarizing the arguments of the four volumes of Foucault’s History of Sexuality, while recalling the project’s turbulent history. The first volume maintained that sexuality’s history in the West was characterized by an “incitement to discourse” (rather than repression) which sealed the “Faustian pact” between sexuality and the pursuit of truth, while also drawing sexuality into power relations. Yet Foucault’s interest in early Christian sexual practices led him to reorient his project towards an exploration of classical antiquity and the role played by sexuality in practices of subjectivity. The essay’s second part examines how historians of sexuality have drawn on Foucault’s insights, focusing on the divergences between historians influenced by Foucault’s first volume (dealing with knowledge and power) and those inspired by the latter volumes (prioritizing subjectivity). After examining Foucault’s impact on feminism and queer theory, the essay concludes by noting that many historians of sexuality have made productive use of Foucault’s work without concurring with his philosophical conclusions.

This chapter looks into the constitutions of Antiquity, notably those of the Greek city states - the (old) constitution of Dreros and Athens (the Draconian and Solonian constitutions), and Rome - the twelve tables. Aristotle claims to have had access to 158 city state constitutions: every respectable city state had on. For the first time in history we see evidence that communities (cities) try to learn from examples set by other city-states. Rome, for example, sends out envoys to learn from (and copy) the Athenian constitution before enacting the laws in their own Twelve Tables

Victorian sculpture is less well-served by the scholarship than Victorian painting, and biblical sculpture ignored comparative to pieces inspired by Greco-Roman mythology. Rather than treat these as two separate strands, or, alternatively, assume that statues of Old Testament figures such as Eve and Rebecca were interchangeable with those of Venus and Psyche, this chapter thinks harder about how they relate. Looking first at free-standing sculpture, then at religious works in the private house, and finally at sculpture in the church, it hones in on affect to determine how the classical and biblical and the interactions and discrepancies between the two spoke to nineteenth-century British society, gender, belief and so on. As well as revisiting artists such as Thomas Woolner and John Gibson, it puts an emphasis too on women sculptors such as Emmeline Halse and on female representation, patronage and response to show that sculpture was as important in sermon-making as pictures.