The post-Frederician Prussian army cultivated the glory of the past, but also experienced continuous debates and reforms intending to optimize the army according to the principles of enlightened rationalism. The confrontation with the French revolutionary armies activated intensive discussions, but for the military authorities, the experiences did not call for principal doubts about the suitability of the army. The defeat of 1806, however, did. The following reforms had to handle elementary needs to re-establish the armed forces, but also took the opportunity to create new organisational frameworks and to introduce new principles for recruitment, military justice and officers’ careers. From a quantitative perspective, the important measures converged on the implementation of a general conscription, and from a qualitative perspective, they especially targeted reconciling the educated middle-class with military service. When the break with France in 1813 effaced the previously existing restrictions, the plans resulted not only in an augmentation of the standing army, but in the establishment of complementary military formations of own characters. Their coexistence reflected organisational constraints, as well as different aspects of the previous debates. Although not without improvisations, the authorities were able to increase the armed forces more than sevenfold within about nine months.

Writing about serialism by its earliest practitioners tended to underline its evolutionary qualities, something made easier by the baroque and classical connections of early examples from the 1920s like Schoenberg’s Suite for Piano op. 25 and Wind Quintet op. 26. Such an emphasis did not prevent more conservative critics from condemning twelve-tone music as ‘mathematical’. But by the early 1950s, there was more cogent criticism from younger composers, claiming that Schoenberg and Berg had failed to understand the innovative implications of twelve-tone methods. Boulez and Stockhausen in Europe and Babbitt in the United States were among those who explored a more systematic, stylistically radical serialism. But in the later Stravinsky, and in Boulez’s music after 1970, this avant-garde spirit gave way to techniques that were able to make productive compromises with more traditional ideas about musical materials and structures; at the same time, writing about serialism turned increasingly pedagogical, offering academic models for analysis and composition.

As seen from the two previous chapters, Eusebius of Caesarea is the one author who had produced the master narrative of the beginnings of Christainity. In his 10 books of the history of the church, he chronologically developed a world history, in which Christianity is and always has been the ultimate goal of God’s creation. Already before time, God had conceived the Logos and through the Logos created this world which, despite the fall, was to come to its restauration and final perfection through the guidance of the Logos, his incarnation, presence on earth and him being alive in his community, called the Church, finally recognized by the first Christian Emperor Constantine.

This introductions sets out the key notions underlying a systematic analysis of Roman emperorship over six centuries. It focuses on the sources available for such an analysis and the pitfals in using them. Much attention is paid to the way Roman emperors were remembered, and how these expectations influenced the actions of later emperors.

This chapter argues that natural law duties and corresponding human rights require attention to moral and metaphysical frameworks, and education into moral traditions sustaining those frameworks. If such traditions are eclipsed, or lost for a time, there will be deformations in our understanding and language concerning the relationship between the self and the moral universe around us; and, thus, to our understanding and application of human rights. In particular, the chapter examines the shift in language from ‘virtue’ to ‘values’ and ‘person’ to ‘individual’. It explores how the abstracted concepts of ‘values’ and ‘individual’ create confusions in the application of human rights. Instead, it is argued that the moral language supporting human rights application should be sustained within a metaphysical tradition. And, for such traditions to thrive, they require subsidiarity for what Habermas calls ‘life-worlds’ – the many and varied voluntary associations that make up human life in community. Without commitment to subsidiarity, the pursuit of mere techné will undercut the moral sources embedded within those life-worlds, which nourish understanding of and respect for human rights.

This chapter outlines three positions on the desirability of a marriage of the natural law and natural rights traditions: (i) that natural law and natural rights may be united without any recourse to revelation; (ii) that natural law and natural rights may be united but only by recourse to revelation; and (iii) that any form of union between natural law and natural rights should be avoided as contrary to the common good and the well-being of the City of God. It is argued that the third position is the preferred on the grounds that the natural rights tradition is difficult to translate into a non-individualistic, communitarian framework. Social bonds and civic ties revolve primarily around mediating institutions such as the family and cultural, educational, and sports associations, not around the machinery of the state and abstract concepts. Unlike Bills of Rights that enumerate rights attached to individuals, the alternative Common Law tradition presupposes that human persons live in communities, that human life is relational, and that conflicts arise for adjudication when a clash of claims occur that need to be resolved with reference to some higher common good.

In Chapter 5, I look at how revelation is understood in Catholic theology. There are two fundamental approaches to understanding this concept: the propositional ('static') and the relational ('dynamic'), which are sometimes at odds with one another. While propositional accounts provide the conditions of possibility (and impossibility) for conversations about God’s revelation to take place, and provide principles against which the discernment of truth can be evaluated, propositions can harden and become brittle as they are brought into new contexts. When this happens, the symbolic nature of all talk of God is forgotten, and the literal sense is brought to the fore. Propositions are weaponised and used in authoritarian ways to resist difference and change. This alienates the church from the culture/s in which it is embedded, making some of its choices and actions inexplicable and others indefensible. I then consider the relationship between revelation and tradition more closely. I argue that the proper work of developing tradition is not to defend propositions that have ceased to promote authentic reflection on revelation in dialogue with the context, but to renew what lies at its heart.

Known for her detective fiction, Dorothy L. Sayers – having received early training in medieval continental romance and languages –dedicated the final decade of her life to her true passion project: her Penguin translation of The Divine Comedy. Her Dante, read by millions, was a fellow master of story-telling: funny, self-deprecating, passionate. In her letters and lectures, she constructed vivid fantasies of Dante as a living man, centering particularly around her readings of a controversial erotic canzone. This chapter reads these fantasies not as transparent escapism from a troubled personal life but, in conjunction with her feminist essays and treatment of the complex sexual politics of Dante’s ‘Terrible Ode’, as a performance of self-authorization, mitigating the audacity of a detective novelist ‘doing’ Dante by modelling alternative relations with medieval authority. This chapter thus reveals a feminist function of fantasies of the Middle Ages in the modern scholarly imaginary.

This introductory chapter discusses the contents of the volume with its focus on genres and text traditions of medical discourse in a diachronic perspective. Variability of medical language with its conventions and traditions of writing is a leading theme in several chapters and surfaces in others as well. The social and cultural contexts of production and use as well as meaning-making processes of written texts as communicative events receive attention. All contributions take context in textual production and use into account. Another point of emphasis is variation in discourse forms in texts that were removed from the original settings and repurposed for new readerships. Texts circulating in Britain are at centre stage, but medical discourses reflecting common ideological assumptions had a broad currency and English writers shared profoundly in the pan-European medical culture.

Throughout human history, societies have had to solve three economic problems. The first is to ensure that enough goods are produced. The second is that enough of the right goods are produced. The third is that these things are distributed fairly to everyone. The first two are problems of production and the third is a problem of distribution.

How did societies in the distant past solve the problems of production and distribution? John Hicks, in A Theory of Economic History, proposes three ways humans have done so. The first is through custom (sometimes also known as tradition). Imagine a San hunter-gatherer or Nguni farmer: the decision about what to produce and how to distribute that production was almost entirely determined by beliefs or customs that had been handed down from generation to generation. Tasks and occupations, titles and hierarchies were inherited.

The opening chapter sets out the various meanings of tradition that are commonly used. These include at least three that the study will consider. First, there is the sense of tradition as a historical trajectory. In this meaning, one might speak of the Augustinian tradition, or the exegetical tradition of interpreting a particular passage. One might argue about details of this, but the sources and evidence would be open to all observers. Second, there is the sense of tradition as the Catholic magisterial tradition as defined by the ecclesiastical hierarchy. This sense of tradition did not accept that those outside certain circles could truly know what was in the tradition – the material handed down was not written. Finally, the modern world has seen an enormous growth in the sense of tradition as considered by philosophical hermeneutics. This sense argued that any act of understanding or interpretation necessarily stood within a stream of tradition that made sense of the foreground structures that allowed sense to be made of reality. The era of the Reformations was heir to a rich landscape of considerations of both the historical trajectory and ecclesiastical hierarchical claims. Their struggles within that historical context necessitate this study.

The fourth chapter considers an area where the intuitive mind would guess that Calvin would eschew tradition. This is the area of his work to create vernacular language resources for believers. Calvin was part of the efforts to make doctrine more readily available for those who could not read Latin, the language of the universities, scholars, and the church. In planning to translate a series of sermons by John Chrysostom, a fourth- and fifth-century Greek writer, into French for the edification of laypeople, Calvin designed an entire project to put the early exegetical tradition before his flock. While Calvin never finished this project, he did take on another, that bore more significant fruit. Calvin translated his Institutes of the Christian Religion into French several times. It would seem that this would have provided Calvin the excuse to cleanse his work of allusions to the tradition. Certainly, his French-reading audience would not know that a certain text from Peter Lombard was a regular feature of an argument on grace. But instead of doing so, Calvin kept a large number of references and discussions of the orthodox tradition in his work, even for his vernacular readers.

The second chapter engages an area that should not exist, according to the traditional historiography. If Calvin, as a good evangelical reformer, avoided all entanglements with the tradition by maintaining his sole focus on the scriptures, a chapter that considers tradition and exegesis should be impossible. But the evidence demonstrates that is far from the case. In examinations of Calvin’s Commentaries on Romans and II Corinthians, and his Lectures on Genesis and Daniel, the readers will see an extraordinary array of considerations of the orthodox exegetical traditions. Further, evidence is presented to show moments when Calvin turned away from the plain sense of scripture in order to pursue the “fuller sense” that would allow him to provide the stronger doctrinal teaching – even at the cost of less-strict maintenance of the doctrine of the scriptures. This was carried out across his considerations of both testaments, and in both the earlier and later stages of his career.

The fifth chapter establishes Calvin’s dependence upon tradition in two different manners. First, it does so by examining those theologians upon whom Calvin relied. The chapter considers Calvin’s use of John Chrysostom, Bernard of Clairvaux, and Augustine of Hippo. Each case shows the earlier theologian’s authority for and influence upon Calvin. Then the chapter turns to three different doctrinal loci. These are the establishment of infant baptism, the Trinity, and predestination. In each instance, Calvin had to place his confidence in traditional sources, either to bolster his biblical work, or to replace what was impossible to produce biblically, as in the case of infant baptism.

The concluding chapter renarrates the history of the Christian just war tradition in a way that better accounts not only for the ongoing interactions between the political and the natural but also for the ironies, disjunctions, and ambiguities that arise as the tradition transitions out of one social imaginary and into another. Along the way, it suggests a way of interpreting traditions as formed around a particular set of questions – which in the case of Christian just war thinking are those of theological anthropology – which exert centripetal, cohering, forces even as answers to those questions exert centrifugal forces which shape the tradition’s contextual engagements within a particular social imaginary. The moral foci of traditions do not, therefore, drive them forward through time so much as exist as moral precipitates arising out of those contextual answers. Including environmental history within narratives of the history of the Christian just war tradition does more than enrich that tradition, though. It helps shape it to address wars in a warming world as we exit the Holocene and enter the Anthropocene.

Nigeria remains a traditional culture, and religion is an inextricable part of society, permeating political, familial and socio-economic life. Young Nigerians are beginning to rebel against traditional roles. Empowered by the anonymity and strength in numbers that a megacity like Lagos provides, a growing feminist movement, led by young women, is seeking greater gender equality across work and family life. A small but vocal LBGTQ+ community is also emerging, particularly in the creative industries, and is using social media to speak out and challenge deeply rooted homophobic assumptions.