Although no direct claim for the autonomy of spheres was advanced in the scholastic speculations discussed in Chapter 5, such notions would be put forward in the circles where humanism and the artistic renewal pursued in contact with it emerged in Renaissance Italy. A powerful example was Giorgio Vasari’s assertion that what caused art and architecture to decline from its ancient heights was the substitution of religious values for aesthetic ones by Christianity as it became established under the Roman Empire. This defense of aesthetic autonomy would become more general and explicit as the expansion of the audience for painting and sculpture and the display of art objects in locations specifically dedicated to them – museums and galleries instead of churches or princely and noble residences – confronted viewers with “art as such,” and it would be theorized in Kant’s aesthetics at the end of the eighteenth century, which removed both religious and social value from judgments about art. But this development was singularly European. No similar move toward attributing autonomy to the aesthetic sphere would take place in India, China, or Muslim territories, despite the many beautiful objects produced in all of them and the exalted position attributed to artists in some.

The second chapter places Walter Pater, the widely acknowledged founder of British aestheticism, in conversation with mathematician and philosopher W. K. Clifford in order to illuminate the overlapping development of aestheticism and evolutionism in the 1860s and 1870s. Around the same time that Pater made the case for “art for art’s sake,” Clifford laid out a sweeping secular humanism that reaffirmed an anthropocentric and pseudo-religious view of the cosmos. Clifford’s optimistic reinterpretation of evolutionary science, this chapter argues, reinforced and drew on Pater’s contemporary conception of the aesthetic temperament: a discriminating, tasteful personality capable of transforming, in Pater’s words, the “ghastly spectacle of the endless material universe” into the “delightful consciousness of an ever-widening kinship and sympathy.” The chapter concludes with an analysis of the work of Mathilde Blind, who synthesized Clifford’s and Pater’s ideas in a poetic oeuvre that sought to inculcate readers into reverent ways of experiencing an otherwise atheistic world.

In the 1920s and 1930s the Darwinian selection theory was linked to genetics, providing it with a secure foundation, although wider dissemination of this initiative was limited until the 1940s. Historians note that the ‘evolutionary synthesis’ was a rhetorical device to create an impression of unity, leaving the various disciplines involved still functioning independently. Radio now became an important means of disseminating science news, as in the 1959 celebrations of the centenary of the Origin of Species. The new version of Darwinism eroded the plausibility of eugenics and race theory, although these ideologies remained active in less visible forms. Popular accounts of evolutionism now stressed its open-endedness and played down the old assumption that humanity must be the inevitable outcome of progress. Julian Huxley tried to give the synthesis a moral dimension by linking it to his philosophy of humanism, but creationists saw the new initiative in science as a continuation of Darwinian materialism and renewed their attacks.

This chapter traces the publication history and animating ideas of Luciani Opuscula, a set of translations of Lucian begun as a collaboration between Thomas More and Desiderius Erasmus. I examine the volume’s contents, which grew over time as Erasmus kept adding to them, and the letters with which both translators prefaced their own selections, explaining to fellow humanists how the works are to be read. These interpretive letters tell us much about how the two great northern humanists understood Lucian and what role he played in their own evolution as the foremost ‘Lucianists’ of their age.

George Eliot and Mary Ward explicitly reject orthodox Christianity and hold a prominent place in standard accounts of Victorian doubt. However, their professed unbelief and yet simultaneous interest in liturgy reveals once again the problem with excarnated accounts of religion. To reduce religion merely to interior belief is to miss how Eliot and Ward use ritual forms to embody their post-Christian ethics. In Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876), Jewish ritual galvanizes Daniel’s own ethical aspirations, and Christian liturgy frames key scenes in Gwendolen Harleth’s moral progress. Similarly, the protagonist of Ward’s Robert Elsmere (1888) is more than just a moral exemplar who imitates a purely human Jesus by working for social justice. Rather, he founds a new religion with its own liturgical forms, some of them borrowed directly from traditional liturgies. Thus, even the unorthodox Eliot and Ward feel the threat of excarnation and the attraction of ritual.

This chapter challenges historiographical claims that the theatre created before the seventeenth century was a mere prelude to the symphony of the neoclassical age. French-language plays written between 1550 and 1600 under the aegis of the Pléiade poets, who were charged with renewing the French language by looking back to classical Greek and Roman writings, form the focus of their study. Despite their classical credentials, these plays are best understood not by categorizing them as ‘humanist’, but instead by ‘situating’ them within the history within which they were written: the denominational split brought about by the Protestant Reformation of Christianity in Europe, which provoked a seismic upheaval and called into question representation on social, political and even cosmological levels. Whether Protestant or Catholic, explicitly militant or seemingly apolitical, literal or analogical, these plays were inevitably affected by this crisis, otherwise known as the Wars of Religion. Bouteille and Karsenti conclude that by returning to classical antiquity, Renaissance playwrights sought as much to garland their work with greater prestige as to innovate devices capable of recounting their anguished, conflicted and traumatic world.

Childhood is a critical period in terms of growth and development regarding cognition, language, social, emotional, and physical competence. This takes place within the context of different and varying social environments, which can impact on children’s learning and understandings of the worlds in which they live and how they fit into them. Childhood is a critical period in terms of addressing issues of discrimination and inequality that exist in society — discrimination that children and their families from minority cultures, and from other points of difference, can encounter, including in educational contexts. However, it is also a critical time in which to address the discrimination that children perpetuate in their daily interactions with others. Research shows that children are aware of and participate in, for example, racial, gendered, classed and (dis)ablist based discriminatory practices early, perpetuating the power relations that exist in the broader society around difference. However, much of this practice can go unnoticed or rationalised by adults through discourses of childhood, child development, and childhood innocence.

While the connections between commonplace books, miscellanies, and essays have long been recognised, and the significance of the commonplace methodology for early essayists noted, we still lack a comprehensive account of the genres’ enmeshing. Drawing on the work of prominent early essayists (Michel de Montaigne, John Florio, William Cornwallis), as well as the collections of Joshua Baildon and Francis Osborne, this chapter fills that gap. It shows how the commonplace method helped to generate the early essay by providing essayists with their raw materials, and also demonstrates how commonplace books and miscellanies modelled the practices of notation, citation, and imitation that made the form possible. Early essays were made from citations, but they also transformed those citations. Thus, early essays were grounded in both the humanist imitative tradition, from which the culture of commonplacing emerged, and a longer tradition of miscellaneous writing, reaching back to late antiquity.

This chapter explores how Black writers link the subjects of racial inequality and what it means to be human. This linking prompts a perennial question for critics and students alike: when it comes to examining African American literature’s long memory, do we examine the history of racial inequality to find out more about what it means to be human, or do we look to rich humanistic social relations in fiction to reimagine and/or resolve any remaining concepts of racial inequality? For this chapter, I examine the terms of the debates over how to represent Black humanity, and I claim that the debate has produced only ongoing and unanswered questions. Hence, I posit that it is in fact the irresolvable human conflict that asks and re-asks questions about Black humanity, and I claim that it is this ongoing instability or tension that defines race’s seminal role in African American literature.

Chapter 1 begins with Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy by analysing the mimetic ethical exercise inherent to Kyd’s design. In particular, this chapter analyses the onstage uses in The Spanish Tragedy of disrupted missives, purloined letters and misquoted texts as offering the necessary space for the emergence of a new ‘counterfeiting’ theatrical ethic which eschews moral meaning beyond the immediate effects of what the staged performance can display. As this chapter shows, such mimetic ethical entanglement is often enacted through the theatrical translation of humanist ethical values of Christian Erasmian virtue into an epistolary emblem of writing, sending and intercepting letters. These letters and emblems of writing, in failing to arrive at their destination, frame a moral void in which the excesses of revenge unfold onstage in surprising and unpredictable ways.

First, I argue that the aspiration to become like a god is an inescapable part of the human condition and is as common among atheists as among theists. I set aside the whole question of the existence of the gods and treat theology as a guide to anthropology. Ideas of the divine reveal essential truths about human beings. Second, I explore the ambivalence about this aspiration to divinity – an ambivalence found both in philosophy and in biblical religion. Third, I discuss the relation of philosophy to religion by showing that the great philosophers, especially the Socratic philosophers, have attempted to think through the presuppositions of religious thought. Fourth, I argue that common attempts to contrast Athens and Jerusalem as reason and faith are absurd. I show that the true differences between Greek philosophy and biblical religion emerge only against the background of the common project of attempting to become divine in both Athens and Jerusalem.

In the later nineteenth century, British scholars were ambivalent about their nation’s state as part of Europe, but they were certain that it had participated in one of the staging-posts of European civilization’s history, the Renaissance. In the early modern period, something closer to the opposite was the case. Those earlier authors did not have recourse to the term ‘Renaissance’ and they talked more specifically of a revival of good letters, meaning being able to write Latin and Greek as the best ancient authors did; to those studies they also added knowledge of Hebrew. In Italy, this revival was sometimes seen as a local phenomenon, which they had to export to the rest of Europe, including far-off Britons. In England in the second quarter of the sixteenth century, John Leland constructed a different vision in which compatriots from the preceding hundred years were instrumental in the revival’s success. There were, then, competing models, one of centre and periphery, another of collaboration diffused across Europe. Both these models, however, came under extreme strain when faced with the divisions created by the Reformation.

In our contribution to the debate on African ethics and education, this chapter provides the reader with some insights into the interplay between African ethics and education through the fundamental principles of Ubuntu. Despite some of the criticism raised against Ubuntu as moral philosophy, this chapter shows how the principles of Ubuntu influence character formation in education in Southern Africa. It is through education that morally appropriate behavior is transmitted from one generation to the other. To avoid generalization on a culturally diverse continent like Africa, the chapter makes specific reference to the sub-Saharan countries of Zimbabwe and, to a lesser extent, Botswana and Zambia. The chapter claims that Ubuntu, as a conduit for moral development, has not been given adequate attention in the field of education. Ubuntu is important in creating the kind of citizens Africa needs, individuals who are critical thinkers, whose allegiance is to humanity rather than to personalities and localities. Transmitted through education, Ubuntu helps citizens to embrace democracy and diversity. Ubuntu principles of communalism, justice, love, humility, tolerance, and honesty can be used to address challenges besetting education in Africa and society in general and to promote national and human development.

This chapter conceptualises the Confucian legal tradition as a historically extended and legally embodied Confucian argument. The Confucian legal tradition has three features. First, it is jurisprudentially founded on a set of Confucian concepts and principles justifying the importance of good men. Second, the Confucian argument is embodied in structural institutions and legal codes in premodern and modern East Asia (China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam). Third, legally embodied Confucian concepts and principles are historically extended for thousands of years from formation, consolidation, and transnationalisation to modernisation.

This chapter takes a snapshot of the field of Neo-Latin with a view to opening it up to curious classical Latinists. What sorts of texts do neo-Latinists study? How do their concerns and approaches differ from those of mainstream classicists and modern linguists? What is the disciplinary position of Neo-Latin across Europe, the United Kingdom and the Americas? Is it forever condemned to be the handmaiden of intellectual history, the history of scholarship, religion, rhetoric, science and medicine, or do neo-Latin authors and texts merit attention for their Latinity? This chapter describes the rise and fall of the neo-Latin idiom from the Italian Renaissance through to the present, with attention to questions of authority, alterity, plurilingualism, genre hybridity and the distinctive modalities of neo-Latin intertextuality. It confronts the bugbear of neo-Latin poetry’s supposed lack of authenticity from a history of emotions perspective. Finally, the problem of a Neo-Latin ‘canon’ is raised in the context of indicating authors suitable for teaching to Classics undergraduates, as well as prospects for the future digital dissemination of neo-Latin editions and commentaries.

The parallel chart is a novel medico-literary practice, invented by Dr Rita Charon as part of her creation of narrative medicine. It is a form that both innovates in the domain of medical humanities practice and works to subvert the traditional balances of power in the clinical setting. Despite its widespread inclusion in the repertoire of narrative medical techniques, there has been little consideration of the form’s development in the context of its historical antecedents and the many forms into which it has subsequently evolved. The design and structure of the parallel chart practice inform its goal of training clinicians in narrative competence and bolstering their clinical skills. The practice descends from and innovates upon several notable trends in the history of medical training. The various forms that have evolved from it are utilized as pedagogical tools in a multitude of present-day medical educational and clinical arenas.

Social work stands for the values of humanity. Such a statement would go unchallenged by social workers throughout the world. Yet in this chapter we consider the values of humanity in some detail, recognising that they are both complex and contested, and that humanity is not to be idealised but can be brutally destructive. In pursuing this discussion, we show how a deeper and wider exploration of humanity can be an important source of inspiration for creative social work and can enhance social work’s advocacy of the values of humanity in the contemporary context, where much that seemed to be settled has become unsettled and where people often feel less like rational decision-making beings optimising their wellbeing and more isolated, bewildered and uncertain in a world of paradox and confusion.

In Chapter 4, I address humanism as a moral foundation for capitalism by discussing the lives and writings of Karl Polanyi and John Maynard Keynes. The narrowing of political economy by nineteenth-century classical economists was challenged on two fronts. Some economists fought to maintain a broad social and moral perspective, but some economists turned the narrowing theory of classical economists into a stinging rebuke of capitalism itself. I begin by discussing the rising influence of humanism in the twentieth century. Next, I discuss the Hungarian-Austrian political economist Karl Polanyi and his critique of capitalism based on humanism. Although he was initially attracted to Marx’s moral critique, Polanyi eventually rejected Marxism on similar grounds as Tawney. In his search for a moral foundation for capitalism, Polanyi rediscovered the moral theory behind Adam Smith’s writings. I then discuss the British political economist John Maynard Keynes. Similar to Polanyi, Keynes rejected the narrow utilitarianism of both Marx and the classical economists in forming his moral foundation for capitalism based on responsibility and duty. This sets up a discussion of humanism as a moral foundation for capitalism based on Polanyi’s and Keynes’s seminal works.