The first set of chapters operates at the level of patrons and their communities—imperial and local—to grapple with architectural rebuilding as a mechanism through which shared pasts, presents, and futures were articulated and substantiated. Chapter 1 examines architectural rebuilding as an ideological virtue. In particular, it looks to evidence from Roman and late antique histories, coins, and inscribed statue bases to chart the place and shape of architectural rebuilding (in comparison with and juxtaposition to new construction projects) within the broader commemorative landscape of honor and virtue in cities across the Mediterranean.

Chapter 4 examines a test case for the book’s account of Milton’s political priorities: Milton’s view of the Cromwellian Protectorate. The Protectorate presents a test case because it was a monarchy, and it has often been alleged that Milton grew more disaffected with Cromwell’s government as it grew more monarchical in its later phase. The findings here cast doubt on this view. While the Cromwellian religious settlement fell short of the disestablishment Milton wanted, Cromwell favored religious toleration more strongly than his parliaments did, and Milton supported him in foreign affairs. The chapter’s upshot is to reinforce a claim made in the Introduction: not that Milton lacked principles, but that his firmest principles were not constitutional ones.

Chapter 7 defends the view that Milton intended his hero as a hero, morally superior to his various interlocutors and divinely favored at the end. It examines prominent counter-arguments in recent criticism: the argument from source modification, the argument from multiple traditions, and the argument from contrast with Christ. Its final section considers the poem’s politics, and whether it is anachronistic to call Samson Agonistes a work in praise of terrorism.

Sets out the book’s main themes: Milton’s anticlericalism; his enduring concern to maximize liberty of conscience for heterodox godly lay intellectuals; Milton’s republicanism and its relatively minor place amongst his priorities; his political writing to be understood as partisan and polemical, not as philosophy; “follow the particular”; Milton’s multifarious, unsystematic liberty-talk; “strenuous liberty;” Milton’s tolerationist thought as proceeding from the lower ground; Milton’s poetry and prose not politically at odds, but differing in subject matter, audience, and purposes; unrepentant politics of the late poems. Brief discussion of archive and methods; summary of chapters.

Chapter 3 provides a case study in Milton’s strategic self-positioning. It argues against the hitherto prevailing view that Milton attempted to reclaim the terms “heresy” and “heretic.” It is shown here that he never did. Milton did however develop an unusual understanding of these terms, and the chapter describes how and why he did so. In so doing so it considers the role that Milton’s view of heresy played in his broader thinking about religion, and considers what this matter tells us about Milton’s sense of his own relation to his audience.

Epilogue reflects on the recent public discussions in Poland about ways to dismantle the legacy of rightwing authoritarian populist legalist rule and to “restore” democracy and the rule of law. These discussions raise critical questions about political strategy that has wide resonance beyond the national borders of Poland. In particular, they bring into focus the relationship between law, authoritarianism, democracy, and transitional justice, at the alleged ends of rightwing authoritarian rule from an international and historical perspective. In light of these discussions and the insights accumulated in this study, the epilogue suggests an alternative way of conceiving the means and ends relationship and formulating the question of social transformation and justice beyond the imaginary of “restoration” of democracy and the teleological vision of transition.

What is a counterrevolution? And how often do they occur? Chapter 2 is devoted to answering these foundational questions. According to this book, a counterrevolution is an irregular effort in the aftermath of a successful revolution to restore a version of the pre-revolutionary political regime. The chapter begins by explaining and contextualizing this definition. It reviews the various alternative understandings of counterrevolution that have been invoked by both scholars and activists. It then explains the decision to adopt a definition of counterrevolution as restoration and shows how this definition was operationalized in building the original dataset. The second half of the chapter lays out the main high-level findings from this dataset. About half of all revolutionary governments have faced a counterrevolutionary challenge of some type, and roughly one in five of these governments was successfully overturned. Moreover, these counterrevolutions have been distributed unevenly: the vast majority have toppled democratic revolutions, rather than ethnic or leftist ones. And counterrevolutions had for years been declining in frequency, until the last decade when this trend reversed. These descriptive findings provide the motivation for the theory developed in Chapter 3.

Rules for regulatory intervention aim to ensure that cumulative impacts remain or fall below thresholds of acceptable cumulative harm. A rule has two key dimensions: (1) its strategy – how it changes cumulative harm by reducing impacts, offsetting impacts, restoring, or facilitating coping with impacts; and (2) its approach – how it influences actions that cause impacts by using mandates (sticks), incentives (carrots) or information and persuasion (sermons) to influence adverse actions, or by using direct state action (state rescue). Each strategy and approach has strengths and weaknesses in addressing cumulative harms, and a cumulative environmental problem will likely need a carefully designed mix. In designing this mix, important challenges are ensuring connected decision-making so that actions are not considered in isolation; ensuring comprehensiveness, to avoid overlooking actions, including "de minimis" actions that could cause cumulatively significant impacts; managing costs related to intervention; and adapting interventions to accommodate changes to impacts and new information. Real-world examples illustrate legal mechanisms that include features designed to address these challenges.

At the core of regulating cumulative environmental impacts is understanding and articulating what and who we want to protect or restore from conditions of unacceptable cumulative harm. This central thing being protected or restored is the "matter of concern." Rules have an important role to play in articulating and formalizing the matter of concern. This chapter begins by analyzing how matters of concern vary, from an individual species, to a sacred site, to environmental justice, and how this variation affects how difficult it is to conceptualize the matter of concern. Addressing cumulative environmental problems requires rules to help in conceptualization by providing for articulating the environmental and human aspects of the matter of concern; describing its spatial boundaries; specifying cumulative threshold conditions, any further change from which would be unacceptable; and providing for adapting these things while avoiding "shifting baselines" that mask cumulative harm.

Regulatory systems can be designed to surmount barriers and promote conditions for dealing with cumulative environmental problems using legal mechanisms that deliver four integrated functions: conceptualization, information, regulatory intervention, and coordination (the CIRCle Framework). Analyzing how a set of laws provides for these functions helps identify important weaknesses and gaps for improving laws. This chapter sets out a step-by-step guide to applying the CIRCle Framework and key design features for each function. It also highlights common themes that emerge from the book’s case studies, which center on environmental justice concerns related to groundwater in California’s Central Valley; cumulative impacts to the biodiversity of the Great Barrier Reef, Australia; and grasslands as biocultural landscapes in South Tyrol, Italy. Key themes point to the value of taking a wide view of relevant laws and available regulatory approaches and strategies and the importance of local factors, regardless of the governance scale of the problem. They show that integrating laws and functions can take time, but that evolution and improvement is possible.

Chapter 2 overviews local methods for inpainting, also referred to as geometric methods, starting in 1993. These approaches are typically based on the solution of partial differential equations (PDEs) arising from the minimisation of certain mathematical energies. Geometrical methods have proven to be powerful for the removal of scratches, long tiny lines or small damages such as craquelures in art-related images.

Chapter 4 describes the rise of deep learning inpainting methods in the past ten years. These methods learn an end-to-end mapping from a corrupted input to its estimated restoration. In contrast with traditional methods from the previous chapters, which use model-based or hand-crafted features, learning-based algorithms are able to infer the missing content by training on a large-scale dataset and can capture local or non-local dependencies inside the image and over the full dataset and exploit high-level information inherent in the image itself. In this chapter we present the seminal deep learning inpainting methods up to 2020 together with dedicated datasets designed for the inpainting problem.

Chapter 3 provides a historical view of non-local inpainting methods, also called examplar-based or patch-based methods. These approaches rely on the self-similarity principle, i.e. on the idea that the missing information in the inpainting domain can be copied from somewhere else within the intact part of the image. Over the years. many improvements and algorithms have been proposed, enabling us to offer visually plausible solutions to the inpainting problem, especially for large damages and areas with texture.

Chapter 5 focuses on specific strategies to addess inpainting in real-life cultural heritage restoration cases, such as the colour restoration of old paintings, the inpainting of ancient frescoes, and the virtual restoration of damaged illuminated manuscripts.

Chapter 1 presents a brief overview of the book and the basics on inpainting, visual perception and Gestalt laws, together with a presentation of the Fitzwilliam Museum dataset of illuminated manuscripts, selected to represent different types of damage and consequent restoration challenges, which will be used throughout the book.