This chapter surveys a range of engagements with religion in the modernist theatre, from T. S. Eliot’s vision for a new Christian drama to Bertolt Brecht’s fascination with the Bible, and from Sylvia Wynter’s staging of Afro-diasporic ritual practices to Rabindranath Tagore’s dramatisation of Buddhist legend. Such works, this chapter shows, tend to favour syncretic and heterodox expressions of religious subjects, frequently drawing together multiple doctrinal or ritual traditions within a single performance. These modern dramas of religion are examined across four sections: ‘Modernist Iconoclasms’, on dramatists who sought to dismantle religion’s influence; ‘Temples of a Living Art’, on artists who sought to remake theatre in the image of religion; ‘Ritual and Sacrifice’, on theatre and metaphysics; and ‘Allegories and Parables of Renewal’, on the intersection of religious allegory with social change. Throughout these sections, the chapter illustrates the plural and paradoxical roles for religion assigned on the modernist stage.

This chapter draws the attention to systems of thought other than international law and that are similarly articulated around a postulation of the necessary presence of some content or substance deemed to be hidden in some way (what is called here the necessity of secret content) and/or the necessary performance of an act of revelation of some content or substance previously unknown (what is called here the necessity of revelation). The attention is drawn on the epistemologies of the secrets at work in Greek logocentric thought, in the Christian governance of the mind, in modern thought, in the idea of critique inherited from modern thought, in bourgeois literature, in Freudian psychoanalysis, in structuralist thought, and in poststructuralist thought.

To be compassionate is to care about others specifically in opposition to their suffering or deficiency. While the distress of compassion is paradigmatic of the virtue, a wide range of emotion types – gratitude, anger, fear, joy, and so forth – can express it. Aristotle offers an analysis of the emotion of compassion as entailing propositions (1) that the other is suffering, (2) that the other doesn’t deserve the suffering, and (3) that oneself is vulnerable to the kind of suffering one sees in the other. In dialogue with Martha Nussbaum’s exposition and adaptation of Aristotle’s analysis of the emotion of compassion, this chapter compares Aristotelian compassion with the compassion that is commended in the New Testament. Differences between the two turn on differences in the concept of suffering, in the presence of a concept of forgiveness, and in the locus of commonality.

Kant presents his conception of the highest good as steering a path between Epicureanism and Stoicism. However, in spite of his differences with Stoicism, namely, his rejection of the ideal of the sage as unattainable for human beings and his insistence upon a conception of freedom of the will that is absent from the ancient doctrine, Kant’s position, especially in the 1790s, ends up being closer to original Stoicism than he recognizes, or at least lets on. Contrary to Kant’s interpretation, the Stoics did not reduce happiness to consciousness of one’s virtue, but allow for the pursuit of happiness as ordinarily conceived within the limits of nature – and so does Kant. Yet Kant’s later conception of the highest good as happiness to be realized in the natural history of the human species, thus in nature, is close to the Stoic doctrine. And, contrary now to some commentators, while Kant still thinks that the possibility of the highest good on this conception needs a theistic underpinning, this is definitely not a specifically Christian position, because it involves no salvific role for Christ.

This chapter defines the theoretical terms – networks, nodes, and nuclei – explains the choice of dates between two revolutions in communication (print and the internet), and gives some concrete historical examples of the tangible benefits of looking at the history of Christianity through transnational flows and networks. This approach allows us to cross national and denominational boundaries and borders and to think more deeply about the underlying social and cultural conditions promoting or resisting adaptation and change. It also enables us to explore the crossroads or junction boxes where religious personnel and ideas encountered different traditions and from which something new and dynamic emerged.

Historians of Christianity, even when innovative in theory and method, have mostly written within national, denominational, or institutional frameworks. Yet many of the most important changes and developments within Christianity have been transnational in scope, trans-denominational in character, and not easily contained within institutional or hierarchical structures. What difference would it make to reimagine the history of Christianity in terms of transnational networks, nodal junction boxes of encounter and transmission, and a greater sense of the core memes and messages of religious traditions and expressions? That is the principal question to be explored in the following chapters.

O’Casey was born into a Protestant family and his father worked as a clerk for the Irish Church Missions, an evangelical society that aimed to convert Catholics. This chapter argues that O’Casey radically reimagined Christianity, depicting characters that inadvertently travesty or re-enact Christianity’s meanings. More broadly, however, he treats the love of the divine as parallel to the love of freedom and country; rather than a strict code, such love is a life-affirming source of inspiration akin to art and poetry. O’Casey’s sophisticated understanding of the value of Christianity has little to do with sectarian differences or superstition, but inheres in caring actions, love of life, and a determination to feed the spirit along with the body.

This chapter explores the keju system – the imperial examination system, and Confucianism as essential components of imperial governance and societal structure in China, examining their origins, evolution, and impact on the development of China's imperial system. The keju system, which persisted from 124 bce to 1905 ce, served as an institutional gene that fused Confucian ideology with state governance, thereby solidifying the emperor’s absolute ideological dominance. It established a societal hierarchy and unconditional obedience that suppressed individual rights and paved the way for the introduction of totalitarianism. In contrast, the Church in Western Europe, while influential, preserved a clear separation from state functions.

The Epilogue draws together the various threads of the book by evaluating the pseudo-Ovidian De vetula, a thirteenth-century forgery of Ovid which claims to be written by Ovid in exile. The Epilogue asks whether, in the light of this book’s previous chapters, De vetula constitutes an ‘authentically exilic Ovid’. Menmuir shows that Ovidian exile facilitates the forgery of De vetula, underpinning its very existence and authenticating an array of blatantly medieval features as genuinely Ovidian. However, having used Ovid’s exile and his exile poetry as a springboard, the poem subsequently departs from Ovid in exile, framing the Ovid of the last book of the poem as a thirteenth-century scholar and a budding Christian to boot. Each chapter of the book is relevant to this fraudulent Ovidian transformation. De vetula is framed as the first response to both Ovid’s exile and his exile poetry, fictitiously bridging the gap between Ovid’s responses (discussed in Chapter 1) and the scholarly and literary responses covered in Chapters 2 and 3. As a forgery of Ovidian exile, the author ‘becomes the exile’ but pushes the second part of this book to extremes by replacing the genuine Ovid’s exilic poetry and life.

The Introduction establishes the primary arguments and scope of the book. It defines ‘Ovidian exile’ in two related ways: firstly, as the poetry written by Ovid in exile, namely the Tristia, Epistulae ex Ponto and Ibis; and secondly, as Ovid himself as the figure of the exiled poet. Ovidian exile in these terms had a vast influence across medieval culture, informing teaching, preaching, reading and writing – among a host of activities Menmuir terms ‘responses’ – in the later Middle Ages, offering a mode of voicing exile, marginalisation and poethood itself. After describing the circumstances of Ovid’s exile and the primary concerns of the exile poetry, Menmuir introduces the Ovid, or Ovids, of the Middle Ages, including the common perception of Ovid as the tripartite mythographer, lover and exile. Ovid and his works were deemed ethical, and even Christian, in medieval exegesis: the fact of his exile created a penitential arc which enabled Ovid’s transformation into Ovidius ethicus. Menmuir defines ‘responses and respondents’, where ‘response’ comprises a more active expression of ‘reception’. The book’s scope primarily includes responses between the twelfth and the fifteenth centuries and focuses on England, albeit as linked to the continent in several ways.

Chapter 3 examines the consanguinity of Ovid’s two bodies, or corpora: his body of work (his textual corpus) and his physical body, which here represents his living body, corpse, tomb and biographical life. Medieval commentators took great interest in the relationship between Ovid’s bodies, responding diversely to the opportunities – and challenges – posed by Ovid’s insistent focus on the relationship. Their responses illuminate the mechanisms by which Ovid was transformed from an immoral, salacious poet to a moral, edifying one. A surprising element of that metamorphosis is that the pagan Ovid became a justifiably Christian poet for the medieval age. The chapter discusses Ovid’s presentation of his corpora in the exile poetry and the medieval obsession with Ovid’s tomb, before focusing on three medieval case studies: the Nolo Pater Noster anecdote, a medieval Latin narrative where two clerics are visited by the spirit of Ovid; Guillaume de Deguileville’s Le pèlerinage de la vie humaine and John Lydgate’s English rendering of the text, The Pilgrimage of the Life of Man, where a figure on pilgrimage encounters Ovid’s exilic revenant; and Christine de Pizan’s Le livre de la cité des dames, in which Ovid is resurrected only to be castrated.

This chapter explores the coherence, evolution, and national specificity of antisemitism. It introduces and contrasts the different categories of antisemitism scholars have deployed to provide an explanation for violence (political, racial, eliminatory, redemptive, and so on.)It explores questions of contrast and continuity, and particularly the role of the First World War and its aftermath, and the relevance for understanding Nazi violence against Jews of the unprecedented lethality of the anti-Jewish pogroms in the Russian Civil War.

Chapter 6 sets the book’s four detailed case studies within broader patterns of public discourse around Jamaica’s 1865 Morant Bay rebellion. Jamaican Jewish newspaper editor Sydney Levien, White American abolitionist Lydia Maria Child, Black American Baptist missionary Samuel Ward, White English Baptist leader Edward Bean Underhill, Black American abolitionist and physician Sarah Parker Remond, and dozens of others this chapter mentions appealed to biblical slogans as they discussed race relations in Jamaica and their implications for the United States. The chapter illustrates the range of opinions expressed and affirms the importance of the Bible to debates about race relations after emancipation.

This final chapter summarises the book’s substantial contribution to our interpretation of Aristides’ works and figure, as well as to our picture of ancient lyric reception and imperial Greek culture more widely. Besides looking backwards, however, this conclusion also adds some reflections on how the approach developed and deployed in this study may be productively applied to other imperial genres and writers, both pagan and Christian, down to Late Antiquity.