Chapter 2 considers the story of the prophet Samuel, God’s relationship with his mother Hannah, the way God related to people at the shrine at Shiloh, Samuel’s family relationships and God’s relationship with his family, and the significance of the call of Samuel.

This chapter focuses on the ways in which English infantrymen understood duty and how their perceptions of their military role drew both on military and civilian culture. It underlines the differences between officers’ and other ranks’ understanding of their obligations. The army itself defined duty, like morale, as a set of ‘moral’ criteria. Officers’ duties were defined in their commissions and the King’s Regulations; their duty, at least to their men, was of an infinite nature. In contrast, the rank-and-file’s ‘contract’ with the military was finite and secular. In 1914, regulars viewed their job with a clinical and professional eye. However, for reservists and the civilian soldiers that followed them, the idea of ‘doing one’s bit’ came to dominate their perception of duty. Importantly, though, the cultural pressure of ‘respectability’ (drawn from both the military and civil society) informed their rationalisation of service. ‘Military cultures’ were also influential, particularly those of cheerfulness and obedience, which informed men’s actions, attitudes, and performance. What is more, the need to maintain ‘good character’ also exerted its own pressures. Men’s wartime record would influence their prospects once peace returned. Significant, too, was the soldiers’ perceived duty to England. After all, they were the defenders of the homeland.

This chapter considers the ritual laws in the latter part of Exodus and throughout much of Leviticus and Numbers, which cover sacrificial activities, consecration of and rules for priests, permitted/forbidden foods, matters of purity, religious festivals, types of sins, the handling and disposal of blood, and vows and donations to the cult of Yahweh.

This chapter develops the topic of blood as a figure of species identity in readings of late Victorian anthropological writing on totemism and on blood brotherhood. The totem, according to its first theorist, is always a species, and totemism is a theory of species identity. Besides anthropology, the chapter discusses Kipling’s Jungle Book and Stoker’s Dracula. It closes with a return to Freud, to the species concept in psychoanalysis, and to species identity as constituted by diet.

Chapter 2 reads the late medieval romance of the spendthrift knight as an exemplum of economic faith. A character borrowed from folklore, the spendthrift knight falls into debt through excessive largesse, and consequently into exile from the aristocratic community. The plot of the spendthrift romance is organized around the protagonist’s debt recovery and eventual social triumph when newfound wealth allows him to reclaim the status he lost through penury. I argue that what makes these romances amenable to and generative of commercial values is their valorization of credit, typically expressed in the narratives as honour, trouthe, and faithfulness. Such faithfulness is manifest primarily in a willingness to take economic risks, variously extending and accepting credit, in cycles of exchange that end up generating profit for the knight and for his community. Belief as such in relations of social and material exchange, belief that defies strict rationality and that makes risk and sacrifice both possible and profitable, motivates gifts and market transactions alike, and binds individuals in creditor–debtor relationships that are both reciprocal and hierarchical.

This chapter explores meat-eating as an important way by which humans define themselves and explores it as part of a broader ‘anthropology’ of food and eating. It tells the story of a boastful consumption of a wild boar at a (fictional) Roman dinner party to show that in the ancient world (as in the modern), what you eat is who you are.

In the era of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, writers across a range of political opinions had to reconcile their approval of martial ardour with their dread of popular violence. As a result, attempts to imagine patriotic ardour often coincided with, or coalesced with, attempts to encourage peace. This resulted in a melancholy call-to-arms. Writers linked collective support for war, or protest against it, with tranquilising communal mourning, or else focused on the wars of a lost past that preceded modern commercial and industrial relations, or else pushed the prospect of collective armed struggle for social justice stoically into an indefinite future. These strategies provided forms of moral insulation for like-minded communities. The discussion includes works by Anna Barbauld, Walter Scott, Helen Porter and Lord Byron, among others.

This chapter explores how the idea of sacrifice was used to render death in war acceptable – the death of enemies as well as of compatriots and allies – and how this public ideal was reconciled with the private sorrow of bereavement and mourning. Drawing on a distinction between sacrificing to (atonement) and sacrificing for (on behalf of the nation), it compares the response to death encouraged by the Church with the more classical ideal of heroic sacrifice promoted by Shaftesbury, by Addison, by the Patriot Bolingbroke and by Richard Glover in his epic poem Leonidas. And it considers how the sacrifice of the hero was brought into relation with the mourning of the bereaved, looking at examples in Glover, in funeral monuments, and in poems by Mark Akenside and William Collins.

It remains surprising to never see Heidegger pose the question What is literature? In this sense, our interrogation will revolve around why Heidegger never applies the “fundamental question” to the very specific form of logos at work and in play in literature. And thus, why Heidegger never overtly enquires into the heading which literature could provide for and in the “History of Being.” Does something lie in literature – a secret – which impedes its grasp in the ontological horizon of the “History of Being”?

This chapter describes the emergence of a new kind of sacrificial military hero, rooted in Christian rather than classical precedents. This development appears in the context of wars involving supposedly savage peoples--the Scottish Highlanders encountered in the Jacobite rebellion of 1745, and the indigenous peoples encountered as allies and enemies in North America and Canada. The figure of the devout Colonel Gardiner, killed at the Battle of Prestonpans, and looted by Highlanders, is compared with the brutal figure of the Duke of Cumberland (the victorious hero and butcher of Culloden). And responses to the death of General Braddock, killed in an ambush in the American wilds, and believed to have been left unburied, are compared with responses to the death of General James Wolfe, who died victorious at the Battle of Quebec (and who was sometimes represented as a Christian martyr). The hero-as-martyr was used to justify violence as part of a civilizing and Christianizing project.

Romantic-era writing affirms the ideal of a bond between human and animal, while often showing this bond destroyed by the killing of the nonhuman animal. This chapter explores the treatment of such bonds, and their destruction, in the light of Mark Payne’s argument that literary representations of dying animals incorporate a sacrificial logic by which the nonhuman animal’s death enables the development of the fully human subject and the expression of that humanity in writing. In Samuel Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancyent Marinere, William Wordsworth’s Hart-Leap Well, Lord Byron’s Mazeppa, and William Blake’s "The Fly," I argue that elements of this "humanizing" process can be traced, but that the poems are characterized by ambivalence: too troubled by animal death, too uncertain about the efficacy of the message they attempt to draw from it, or in the case of “The Fly,” too wedded to the radical equivalence of all beings to be fully committed to a story of progress through sacrifice. The chapter ends with a discussion of John Clare’s badger poems and “To the Snipe,” in which there is a radical refusal of sacrificial logic.

Cyprian of Carthage is the most fulsome and direct user of sacrificial language in relation to Christian worship and organisation up to his own time, even though his community experienced persecution under the emperor Decius via a decree of universal sacrifice. Cyprian’s De lapsis and his Letter 63 both use common knowledge about sacrificial ritual shared between Jews, Christians, and other Romans to make more specific points in controversies over reconciliation of apostates and use of wine in the Eucharist. Cyprian’s use of shared assumptions about ritual helps reveal shared ancient understandings about sacrifice, centred not on altruism or violence but on gift. His formulations also reflect how he, like Decius, was seeking to use older ideas of tradition and communal solidarity in the service of new challenges.

This chapter shows how the Laudians conceived the history of the church as a succession of sacrifices and altars stretching from Adam or Abel through the actual sacrifices of the Jews, under first natural, and then Mosaic law, and then through the spiritual sacrifices offered up by and in Christian churches. Where there were sacrifices there also altars and priests, and so the history of the church was conceived as a succession of consecrated persons and spaces, centred on altars, and then on episcopal chairs, stretching from the apostles to the present. The chapter shows the Laudians attempting to trace the presence in the primitive church, and then in the church of England, of the basic triad of priest, sacrifice and altar. They encountered some issues in so doing in the post-reformation church of England and the chapter shows some of their critics, most notably Bishop Williams, pointing that out and the Laudians responding with difficulty to those criticisms.

This chapter describes how romantic partners navigate the disagreements that necessarily result from their interdependence and how partners recover when they intentionally or unintentionally hurt each other. Specifically, it reviews the ways in which goals and desires conflict to produce disagreements and how disagreements provide a diagnostic situation in which people make inferences about their partner’s thoughts, feelings, and commitment. Next, it describes typical conflict topics, how conflicts tend to be experienced, and typical conflict prevalence over the course of a romantic relationship. Next, the chapter covers how people manage interpersonal conflicts and highlights specific conflict behaviors that are typically destructive (e.g., hostility, withdrawal) and specific conflict behaviors that are typically constructive (e.g., intimacy, problem solving), as well as how the adaptiveness of conflict behaviors can change depending on the situation. Finally, this chapter reviews how partners can recover from destructive conflicts and other relationship transgressions by accommodating rather than retaliating, sacrificing, and forgiving.

This chapter offers a broad overview of the dominant views of personhood and selfhood in ancient Mesoamerica. It begins with a discussion of the conception of social personhood, then turns to the issue of essence and selfhood, finally culminating in the “embedded identity” theory of personal identity that relies on these previous views.

In this chapter, we look at Mesoamerican views on human activity and life. How did precolonial Mesoamerican philosophers think about proper or right action, in the case of the individual and the wider community? This includes issues such as the role of the state, the ruler, and the individual’s duties toward each. The chapter focuses on key ethical concepts and views in Mesoamerican traditions, such as those concerning humility, sacrifice, and the situational and temporary nature of goodness.