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.

Industrialization and the concomitant growth in populations and economic activity happened in parallel with changes in everyday life, both material (hygiene, diet, mobility) and immaterial (literacy, law, values and ideas about political order and human life). It is associated with Enlightenment, the emancipatory stream of Modernity. It meant changing roles and relations between the major institutions: (nation-)state, church and (community-)market. The outstanding hallmark was and is the idea of Progress, exemplified in the characteristics of the scientific worldview and its claim to ’objective Truth’. Another feature lies in the new ideas about good and evil, as propounded in Industrial Era ethics of liberalism and utilitarianism and in Enlightenment ethics.

The Epilogue examines the failure of red secularism to reassert itself after 1945 due to the political climate in East and West Germany. It examines the further decline of Freethought as a consequence of lessening of confessional tensions in German society and the secularization and de-churching of German society in the 1960s.

The conclusion makes the case for Faulkner as an anti-ideological thinker, an artist engaged in attempting to disentangle image-making from propaganda as a key ingredient of his larger Yoknapatawpha project. I interpret Faulkner’s Stockholm Nobel address in this context, as a humanistic counter to modern disenchantment, an affirmation of human interiority in the face of scaling social systems in the process of becoming all-encompassing.

The second chapter will focus on the depiction of Clovis I, the first Christian king of the Franks. The inflation of the Clovis myth in the medieval chronicle tradition has been treated exhaustively, primarily in French historiography. This is why this chapter proceeds along an alternate route. Instead of interrogating the evolution of Clovis from Fredegar and the LHF to high- and late-medieval works of history, it will compare the story found in Gregory of Tours with that found in the sixteenth-century De rebus gestis Francorum [DRG] by Paolo Emilio. The reason for this choice is that, to a large degree, Emilio bypassed the intermediate sources, relying primarily on Gregory for this section of his opus. The DRG is thus only once removed from the Histories, although the differences in the two authors’ attitude toward character-building and in their stylistic approach are glaring, for reasons that will be elaborated upon in the chapter.

When Weber insists that scholars must choose between Stories, he is promoting what he calls an ethics of responsibility. Nowadays, liberal scholars are hard pressed to make such choices, because they do not share Stories of their own. They are humanists but, unlike the Founders, they are not united by commitment to, for example, a framework of natural law principles. In these circumstances, Judith Shklar proposed that instead of favoring a particular Story, liberals should make common cause by opposing instances of cruelty and tyranny. In this sense, they should be “philosophes” rather than philosophers.

The progressive thinkers of the Enlightenment rejected Christian Europe’s standard Stories which justified rule by monarchs, aristocrats, and clergy. They promoted instead reason rather than tradition and science rather than theology. Their faith in human agency, as expressed by thinkers such as Voltaire, Diderot, Jefferson, Madison, and Hamilton, amounted to a project based on Humanism. Later, Max Weber pointed out that this part of the Enlightenment amounted to an onset of disenchantment.

This chapter takes up the mid-century politics of the Australian novel enacted in the terms dictated by the Cold War. Replicating the broader bipolar model of the cultural Cold War, the divide in Australia, mapped between modernism and realism, was complexly transnational, with vaunted stakes in the hot wars of the decolonising Asia Pacific and deconstructive receptions behind the Iron Curtain. The ideological debates of the cultural Cold War in Australia recall a faith in realism as a liberatory mode that is in danger of becoming unreadable. Australian post-war realism reached out to Indigenous issues, new migrants, women and working-class readers in structured and inclusive ways. Blurring into popular genres and facing strict federal censorship, realism’s traditional interest in the quotidian was mediated by its attention to topicality, or to the defining mid-century social issues motivating readers. This chapter is bookended by the scandalous court case of communist Frank Hardy for his Power Without Glory (1950), prosecuted for criminal libel in Australia’s McCarthyite moment, and Gerald Glaskin’s No End to the Way (1965), Australia’s first out gay novel, banned by the censors and marketed as ‘penetrating – honest – telling it like it is’.

Scholars have long debated the origins of John Skelton’s idiosyncratic form of verse, the so-called “Skeltonic.” In this chapter, I suggest that the action and effect of Skeltonics are best understood through the lens of one of Skelton’s long-standing preoccupations: the attempt to simulate, in writing, the presence of a living thing. During the early sixteenth century, Humanist intellectuals argued over the proper way to represent liveliness in verse, particularly in their discussions of imitatio and enargeia. Where Skelton differs from his contemporaries, however, is in his conviction that proper imitatio requires the use of copia, an abundant style that (in his hands) aims to depict a physical thing, not merely as it appears frozen in a single moment, but as it moves and breathes through time. After putting Skelton’s work into conversation with contemporary theories of imitatio and copia, I turn to two of his best-known poems, “Speke Parott” and “Phyllyp Sparowe,” which attempt to replicate living bodies in predcisely this way while also expressing some skepticism towards the politics of this procedure.