This chapter distinguishes various sorts of rudimentary spatial structure and particularity that are present in our visual experience, in a kind of palimpsest. It develops a modal structuralist understanding of the neurophysiology that roots this type of experience.

The healthcare sector is continually confronted with the issue of how to manage with less. In response, health leaders and managers must explore and use new ways to face such challenges. These issues ultimately affect the quality and safety, and the productivity and efficiency, of the health services delivered. Within each organisation, the effectiveness of the leadership and culture directly affect the quality of patient care delivered. To effectively address such challenges, leaders have begun to adopt new strategies and roles that focus on visioning and creativity.

The conclusion summarises the main argument of the book: that the mirror-image, as an object and as a metaphor, was critical to the mimetic definition of painting that we recognise as the key pictorial development of Renaissance art. If perspective was painting’s means, the mirror was its exemplum. Tracing the conceptual elaboration of the reflective image, it concludes that the prolific representation of the inset-mirror motif within early modern painting was both the rebus and matrix of its own pictorial representation.

What is the threshold that intervenes between one mind and another, across which the act of looking takes place?

This essay addresses this question, in relation to the work of Samuel Beckett, W. G. Sebald and J. M. Coetzee. All three writers are centrally concerned with what I here call the ‘threshold of vision’ – and for all three writers, to think this threshold requires an act of ethical imagination. This is the case for the exchange of any look between one consciousness and another; but for all three writers this exchange becomes particularly charged when it is shared between human and animal. The essay reads the act of looking through this relation between human and nonhuman, to produce a critical account of the politics of shared life, as this exceeds our given taxonomies for imagining consciousness.

Felix wrote his life of St. Guthlac also during the zenith of Latin writings in Anglo-Saxon England, namely in the early eighth century. In vivid, distinctive Latin Felix tells of the experiences of this solitary who went off into the fens of East Anglia to devote himself to God at Crowland, including his dramatic encounters with the demons of hell and various unusual miracles, including the retrieval of a parchment folio carried off by a thieving magpie.

Of all the Merovingian kings who came after Clovis, none has received more accolades than Dagobert I, considered to have been the last effective Merovingian, succeeded by increasingly less capable kings until the dynasty’s demise. Dagobert as a literary convention nevertheless had to be constructed, a process that began in the Chronicle of Fredegar. Fredegar’s portrayal is favorable up to a point, beyond which the chronicler singled out the king for reproof. The idealization of Dagobert reached new heights with the ninth-century Gesta Dagoberti I regis Francorum, which accentuated the king’s monastic patronage, particularly regarding Saint-Denis, where the composition was penned. In the early tenth century, Regino of Prüm used the Gesta Dagoberti to narrate the life ofDagobert in his Chronicle. The character Regino extracted from the Gesta Dagoberti was remolded to serve different aims. This chapter follows the story as it was related in Fredegar and the transformations it underwent in the Gesta Dagoberti. It then turns to the adaptation of the hagiographically inflected Dagobert narrative back into historiography in the tenth-century Chronicle of Regino of Prüm.

While Ambrose of Milan was a major actor on the ecclesiastical and political stage of late antiquity, he was also a devoted catechist and theologian. This chapter focuses on how Ambrose trained the spiritual senses of catechumens throughout Lenten and Eastern catechesis. In Lenten sermons on the patriarchs, Ambrose focused on baptism as a death to physical ways of seeing. In Holy Week sermons (On the Hexameron and Explanatio symboli), he sought to restructure catechetical knowledge by offering pro-Nicene accounts of God and creation. In mystagogical sermons (De mysteriis and De sacramentis), he gave neophytes instruction on how to perceive the spiritual meaning of the Christian rites.

This introductory essay to the volume sets out the volume’s form and purpose, and then provides advance introduction of each of its component essays in turn. Since the volume comes together as a tightly organised and cumulative introduction to David Tracy, this essay forms its own concerted introduction to Tracy parallel to the performance of the book as a whole.

The chapter explores translation between images and language through the practice of audio description for blind and partially sighted theatre audiences. This practice exceeds analytical models such as ekphrasis or intersemiotic translation because of the particular circumstances in which the texts are received: they are performed live alongside their sources (set, costume, lighting, gestures), and in dialogue with other performance modalities (such as live and recorded sound). The embodied nature of the practice affects how the describer constructs a spectatorial ‘gaze’, particularly in relation to performers’ bodies. Examples are drawn from two performances that foreground bodies and the gaze: Beauty and the Beast (Julie Atlas Muz and Mat Fraser, 2013), and a short cabaret act, Scarf Dance by Amelia Cavallo. The latter performance suggests ways in which attention to the gaze in burlesque might help to develop a ‘critical audio description’.

Vision science combines ideas from physics, biology, and psychology. The language and ideas of mathematics help scientists communicate and provide an initial framing for understanding the visual system. Mathematics combined with computational modeling adds important realism to the formulations. Together, mathematics and computational tools provide a realistic estimate of the initial signals the brain analyzes to render visual judgments (e.g., motion, depth, and color). This chapter first traces calculations from the representation of the light signal, to how that signal is transformed by the lens to the retinal image, and then how the image is converted into cone photoreceptor excitations. The central steps in the initial encoding rely heavily on linear systems theory and the mathematics of signal-dependent noise. We then describe computational methods that add more realism to the description of how light is encoded by cone excitations. Finally, we describe the mathematical formulation of the ideal observer using all the encoded information to perform a visual discrimination task, and Bayesian methods that combine prior information and sensory data to estimate the light input. These tools help us reason about the information present in the neural representation, what information is lost, and types of neural circuits for extracting information.