Chapter 1 recovers the history of an Iberian family involved in royal service across Portugal and Spain during the first decades of the Iberian Union (1580–1640). It shows how family memory and political loyalty became professional assets for young, university-trained jurists. By moving back and forth between courtly and university stages across the two monarchies, some of these young letrados came to think of themselves as political polymaths. Ultimately, they found opportunities to reach out and receive support from transnational networks of neo-stoic thinkers and practitioners which was fundamental for articulating the composite social and political life of the Iberian monarchies within and beyond the Iberian Peninsula.

Following his return from Brazil to the Iberian Peninsula and then his journey to Rome, Nogueira continued to experience displacement while always looking for an opportunity to settle down. Upon arrival in Rome, he encountered a global city within which knowledge functioned as a currency to access patronage. In this highly competitive environment, populated by many other mercenaries of knowledge, Nogueira sought support across the city while trying his luck in other places such as the English monarchy. Aware of the difficulty of making a living in Rome, Nogueira followed a new patron to Bologna. There, he familiarized himself with the politics of the papal states in northern Italy, learned from the intense intellectual life around the university, and became involved in political negotiations between papal authorities, the Republic of Venice, and the Grand Duchy of Tuscany. In the midst of these negotiations, he put his historical expertise to work by getting involved in an episode of forged Etruscan archaeology connected to rivalries between the Medici and Barberini families. As a ghostwriter for one of the reports concerning this forgery, he made a case for himself as someone who could serve back in Rome in a multitude of capacities, including legal courts and libraries.

The rising price of literature after the Black Death incentivized the invention of movable-type printing. An example of technological overshooting, the printing press turned an acute shortage of literature, and of human capital, into a sudden abundance. Cheaper literature encouraged wider literacy; new grammar schools and universities further multiplied human capital. That expansion sorely threatened the earlier Latinate elite, both clerical and secular, and led directly to the Reformation. Southern Catholic Europe invoked censorship; northern Protestant Europe censored only lightly. European publishing migrated northward. The divergent responses to printing are explained by: (a) the growth of Atlantic commerce and (b) the rise in Northern Europe of absolutist states. Both commerce and state-building required, and depended on, newly abundant human capital. In northern, Protestant Europe, rapidly multiplying human capital led to prosperity and technical progress; in southern, Catholic Europe, censorship constricted human capital and imposed persistent backwardness.

Chapter 5 gives a detailed account of the trial and execution of Thomas Aikenhead in Edinburgh in 1696–7. The statements that Aikenhead was accused of making are itemised, and their incendiary and openly blasphemous quality is clear. It is also noteworthy that he made such statements in public and seemed reluctant to retract them. This explains the harsh penalty to which he was subjected, which was the subject of much comment at the time. The case also attracted interest in England, not least from John Locke, who preserved various key documents relating to it. Here, Aikenhead’s sources are investigated, including the dangerous books to which he had access in the university library and elsewhere, and his ingenuity in constructing an irreligious ‘system’ from them is asserted.

Late modernism in the US, lasting roughly from 1945 to 1960, is characterized by two simultaneous yet contradictory developments. In one, the techniques and, to a lesser extent, themes of international literary modernism continued to infuse America’s literary bloodstream, diversifying, spreading, and becoming part of the common artistic vocabulary, particularly for underground or countercultural movements. But at the same time, the major institutions of elite culture in the US such as publishers, universities, book-review magazines, and even foundations and the government gradually and then wholeheartedly adopted it in the 1950s and rewrote its history to create a kind of “official” modernism. If late modernism was a set of techniques bereft of a mission, Cold War modernism then voided the modernist project of any urgency or sociopolitical critique, reframing it as the highest expression of the self-satisfied liberal society that avant-garde modernism had always reviled.

From the local color boom to university multiculturalism, the minority short story has been central to transformations bringing new classes of writers and content into American letters. This chapter outlines the promises and failures of the form to racially democratize the literary marketplace. It highlights the possibilities minority writers developed within these limitations. Zora Neale Hurston, Zitkála-Šá, and Winnifred Eaton deflected White audiences and their ethnographic expectations. Their frame tales challenged framings by White gatekeepers. Their feints force scholars to rethink autoethnographic fictions as savvy ethnographies of White audiences. These strategies persist in the multicultural era with writers such as Rattawut Lapcharoensap and Edward P. Jones. However, the short story has shifted from a commercial to an educational form: the easily teachable nugget of diversity. Meanwhile, audiences for ethnic authenticity now include many highly educated minorities. Sandra Cisneros, Nam Le, and others navigate this shifting map, revealing new freedoms and constraints.

This chapter considers the history of serialism in the United States and Canada. After exploring US-based ultramodern composers that used series in their writing and early engagement with Schoenberg’s methods, this chapter contemplates the contexts for the significantly increased interest in serialism that occurred in these countries after the Second World War. Many factors were at play in this development, including the role of serialist giants who arrived as émigrés from Europe as teachers and role models, the influence of US-originating modernist movements, the changing university scene, and the cultural politics of the Cold War. While European serialist exiles like Schoenberg and Krenek were highly influential, this influence was not always direct. Moreover, while US composers using highly systematic approaches have drawn most attention, the majority of Americans and Canadians using serial methods combined them with other musical techniques to produce highly original, individualistic musical languages.

Chapter 7 tackles what is by far the most diffuse and difficult arena in which to describe our theme of the social transformation of competition. Here the focus is on contestation in the arena of knowledge, ideas, beliefs, and truth claims. My narrative concentrates on the gradual emergence of the modern university out of its medieval forebearers, the disruptive impact of the Enlightenment, and the broader emergence of associational life in civil society. Here the range of corporate actors is more complex and varied, and interacts closely with those in the economic and political spheres. But competition is different here, because while economics and politics involve competition over more clearly limited resources (capital, market share, political office, administrative structures), truth claims can be, and are, produced cheaply and in abundance. The peculiarly pungent atmosphere of current social media-driven public debates is just the latest expression of this.

With the new millennium, papal power sought to restore Christian rule in the Holy Land through a series of eight crusades, but these campaigns were military and political failures, especially at the expense of the Papacy. However, they did succeed in opening the way for the scholarship of the Islamic world to enter western European intellectual life. With the founding of universities, new scholarship slowly emerged. The pioneering teachings of Pierre Abélard, Roger Bacon, and Albertus Magnus led to a revival of interest in the ancient writers with their emphasis on rational thought to secure human knowledge. This movement, called Scholasticism, reached its pinnacle with the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas who sought a reconciliation of Aristotle’s rationalism and Christian theology. A major implication of Aquinas’ success was the acceptance by scholars within the universities and the Church that both reason and faith serve as sources of human knowledge. William of Ockham extended the Scholastic movement and his predecessor Roger Bacon by presented a law of parsimony in scientific explanation, which in turn laid the foundation of empirical science.

This chapter examines careers in and the structure of, academic archaeology – that based in universities, museums, and related educational organizations. The chapter includes discussion of specialist and technical roles in this area of employment.

This chapter explores skills and training in archaeology, especially university-level training opportunities. It includes pre-university and school-level training opportunities and fieldwork opportunities, and it addresses accessibility and equality issues in archaeology.