This chapter examines the development of illuminated manuscripts in Late Antiquity, focusing on their origins, evolution and cultural significance. It argues that illumination was not merely decorative but played a navigational, didactic and symbolic role, aiding text comprehension while reinforcing religious and political authority. Tracing the transition from papyrus scrolls to the codex, the chapter emphasises how the Christian adoption of the codex format facilitated the rise of manuscript illumination. It documents how the earliest illustrated Christian manuscripts emerged in Egypt, influenced by pagan scroll traditions, magical texts and the Book of the Dead. These manuscripts incorporated symbolic elements such as the ankh cross and interlace designs, which later became defining features of Coptic and Byzantine carpet pages. The study then shifts focus to early biblical illustration, highlighting works such as the Vienna Genesis, Quedlinburg Itala and Rabbula Gospels, which reflect the growing role of visual storytelling in Christian texts. The chapter concludes by emphasising the imperial patronage of illuminated books, noting Constantine’s commissioning of grand scriptural manuscripts and the development of treasure bindings adorned with ivory and gold. Ultimately, the study demonstrates how manuscript illumination evolved as a medium of authority, devotion and intellectual transmission across Late Antiquity and the early medieval world.

Should judges and other legal decision-makers follow the literal meaning of applicable legal rules even if there are compelling reasons to do otherwise? The question of the primacy of plain meaning in legal interpretation is one of the oldest and most persistent problems in the philosophy of law. In this chapter, we argue that new arguments are available in this debate, emerging from recent developments in experimental jurisprudence. We posit that legal interpretation is, to some extent, an exercise in coordination: Judges seek to interpret rules in a way that would match interpretations of their peers, of other legal officials, and of society at large. In such a strategic context, the plain meaning of law often constitutes a focal point around which different legal actors can coordinate – allowing them to promote the uniformity and predictability of law and, ultimately, to sustain the rule of law.

Rules are ubiquitous. They figure prominently in all kinds of practical reasoning. Rules are especially important in jurisprudence, occupying a central role in answers to the question of “what is law?” In this chapter, we start by reviewing the evidence showing that both textual and extratextual elements exert influence over rule violation judgments (Section II). Most studies about rules contrast text with an extratextual element identified as the “purpose” or “spirit” of the rule. But what counts as the purpose or the spirit of a rule? Is it the goal intended by the rule maker? Or is purpose necessarily moral? Section III reviews the results of experiments designed to answer these questions. These studies show that the extratextual element that’s relevant for the folk concept of rule is moral in nature. Section IV turns to the different explanations that have been entertained in the literature for the pattern of results described in Sections II and III. Finally, in Section V we discuss some other extratextual elements that have been investigated in the literature. We conclude with a brief discussion of future directions.

This chapter establishes what it means to do discourse analysis. This is done by defining discourse analysis and providing examples of discourse. The chapter offers a practical overview of how the discourse in discourse analysis fits within the research process. The examples of discourse that are introduced in this chapter are grammar, actions and practices, identities, places and spaces, stories, ideologies, and social structures. After reading the chapter, readers will know what discourse analysis is; understand that there are many types of discourse; know that discourse is an object of study; and understand how an object of study fits within a research project.

This chapter offers a survey of the principal Merovingian narrative sources. It covers the key chronicles: Gregory, the Chronicles of Fredegar, and the Liber historiae Francorum, plus their relatives. It also offers a guide to the production of hagiography in the period. Throughout the emphasis is on how we might read the stories in these sources, drawing on the competing arguments that have been put forward by scholars about the nature of the texts. Only by understanding some of the strengths and weaknesses of the common approaches to the narrative sources can readers be armed to approach the complexities of Merovingian history.

What is a book, really? In tracing the passage of a single work from the alleys of Lahore to online retail and the author’s bookshelf, this chapter argues against idealism. In transmission, ideational content sediments within specific material contexts. In this way, ideas become objects. Consequently, the same idea can take shape by drastically different forms, affecting the practice of interpretation. The affordances of the object – what can be done with it, how, and where – affect our practices of interpretation.

In this chapter we treat law as inextricably connected to a text. We examine the ways in which laws and other elements of the legal process, including documents, procedural records, and judicial opinions and commentaries, are produced, preserved, transmitted and communicated to various audiences in ancient Greece and Rome, the ancient Near East and Egypt, ancient India and ancient China. We include discussions of when and how texts first emerged in these societies, the materials on which they were written and preserved, and other special features of their written texts, such as language, syntax, degree of precision, and organization and codification. We also examine these aspects of secondary legal texts, including historical accounts and reports, literature, philosophical, religious and other intellectual works, non-legal documents, instructional materials and visual ‘texts’, to see how these contributed to the understanding of law as text.

Despite the fact that the Vienna Convention prescribes a holistic approach to treaty interpretation, it is widely believed that the dominant interpretive approach in international law is textualism. Textualism is premised on the distinction between what is inside and what is outside the text of a treaty and assumes that it is possible to interpret a text without reference to factors that are extraneous to it. This chapter situates the preference for textualism in the intellectual history of the discipline. Building on philosopher John Searle’s work, it argues, however, that no treaty interpreter is or can be a textualist. It also introduces the concept of intertextuality and discusses the tension between the official functions of textualism and the practice of treaty interpretation.

This chapter has two parts. Adopting an accretionist perspective on the Sun Tzu text – regarding it as developing over an extended period with no single author – the first part provides basic background on the Warring States era in which the text took shape. It analyzes an early Chinese battle illustrating Sun Tzu principles, then ends with discussion of logistics aspects of Warring States warfare. Shifting from battlefields to texts, the second part provides comparative overview of different extant copies of the Sun Tzu text, some traditionally transmitted, one archaeologically recovered. Some textual issues aside, the Sun Tzu text is in relatively good shape for a text of its antiquity. The second part ends with overview of a set of eleven traditional commentators on the text; perspective on the sprawling modern Sun Tzu literature; and brief orientation to the Sanguo yanyi (Romance of the Three Kingdoms), one of China’s great pre-modern vernacular novels. Although this novel of Ming dynasty vintage is not properly part of the Sun Tzu tradition, in modern times many Chinese have been exposed to Sun-Tzu-esque thinking through the Sanguo’s vivid, albeit fictionalized, stories.

This chapter has two parts. Adopting an accretionist perspective on the Sun Tzu text – regarding it as developing over an extended period with no single author – the first part provides basic background on the Warring States era in which the text took shape. It analyzes an early Chinese battle illustrating Sun Tzu principles, then ends with discussion of logistics aspects of Warring States warfare. Shifting from battlefields to texts, the second part provides comparative overview of different extant copies of the Sun Tzu text, some traditionally transmitted, one archaeologically recovered. Some textual issues aside, the Sun Tzu text is in relatively good shape for a text of its antiquity. The second part ends with overview of a set of eleven traditional commentators on the text; perspective on the sprawling modern Sun Tzu literature; and brief orientation to the Sanguo yanyi (Romance of the Three Kingdoms), one of China’s great pre-modern vernacular novels. Although this novel of Ming dynasty vintage is not properly part of the Sun Tzu tradition, in modern times many Chinese have been exposed to Sun-Tzu-esque thinking through the Sanguo’s vivid, albeit fictionalized, stories.

The introduction recounts the life and writing career of Jonathan Swift, centred on his authorship of Gulliver’s Travels (1726). It provides an overview of the action of Swift’s masterpiece, placing the adventures of Lemuel Gulliver in parallel to the events of Swift’s life: his education, early career as secretary to William Temple, forays into satire, political writings during Anne’s reign, and Irish writings in the decade before he published Gulliver. The introduction establishes the circumstances of its publication, the different states of the text (and its paratexts), and some of the main critical attitudes to the work. It summarises the chapters within the volume.

This penultimate chapter introduces two complete editions of the Lives. The first was published in 2006 by Oxford University Press and the second in 2010 by Yale. The value of these editions is the attention they bring to the textual details of Johnson’s critical writing; they promote accuracy in dealing with his terminology. Evaluating Johnson’s criteria depends on such detail. The editions invite us to look more closely at the implicit meanings within the overall structure. They are of course very different and suggest different editorial cultures. The Oxford is very ample in its commentary; the Yale annotation is leaner and conforms in editorial style to the Works to which it belongs. Different users will find merits in both approaches, and a final preference is difficult to determine given the different ways in which Johnson’s critical and biographical writings are read or used. But both editions, in their ambition and magnitude, suggest the persistent presence of Johnson’s critical writing and are crucial to its reception.

One way to study agreement-making and its actors, processes, sites, and how they shape global order is through texts produced along the way. In any given multilateral environmental negotiation, there are implementation reports, decisions, resolutions, statements, newsletters, and other technical reports that are often written in a language all of their own. They contain phrases that have a long history and may indicate more than they appear at face value. Choices of words, phrases, and qualifying language often tell part of the story of how governments and other delegates at conferences compromised and reached agreement. This chapter examines the importance of understanding documents at multilateral environmental negotiations in context and what they can and cannot tell you. First we explain why studying negotiations through the documentation is important. We then give a brief overview of the different types of documents you encounter at a COP or other negotiating session, then turn to the question of context, and show how social norms and institutional settings can influence the creation of texts, which in turn could influence research that relies on those texts. Finally, we utilize a case study to show how to consider context when using documents for research.

The edition of all the papyri, with introduction, critical text, translation and line-by-line commentary. The manuscripts are grouped chronologically and not according to typology, from sub-chapters 5.1 to 5.8, 5.7. including the papyri of uncertain date, and 5.8. the unpublished items I inspected at the Beinecke Library.

The version of 2 Henry VI most people know, read, and study is the play printed in 1623 Folio edition of Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories & Tragedies. There is, however, an early alternative version of the play, about one third shorter in length, that was printed in quarto format in 1594, entitled The First Part of the Contention Betwixt the Two Famous Houses of York and Lancaster, and reprinted in 1600 and 1619. The provenance of this shorter text, and its relationship to the Folio text, has provoked much debate. First focusing on the variant versions of a speech about lineage in early quartos and Folio, while drawing in consideration of practices of coauthorship and revision, the chapter then turns to how the death of Gloucester is represented in the various versions. The chapter considers how the different textual versions of this English history play convey also a different emotional register that affects both character and situation.

This chapter argues for an integration of American theater produced across generic and institutional lines during the postwar decades into our understanding of theatrical modernism. It models thinking about theater across traditional divisions of textual drama from non-textual performance, Broadway from Off- and Off-Off-Broadway, and the avant-garde work of the 1960s from what preceded it. Theater in the midcentury was drawn toward both medial specificity and the strategic incorporation of other media, particularly film, and accordingly deployed two key formal strategies: improvisation and citation. Although important to theater in diverse ways before modernism, these became widespread, self-conscious tactics of postwar theater across generic lines, and expanded and developed over the 1950s and 1960s. The chapter closes with a reading of The Living Theatre’s 1959 production of The Connection as an exemplary case study.

This chapter introduces the broad and multidisciplinary field of referring and reference, including perspectives from philosophy, psychology, linguistics, and computer science. In this chapter we review some of the key contributions from these disciplines to explain the main background of influences that are still relevant to our understanding of reference and acts of referring. We then discuss traditional approaches to reference from the perspectives of text and discourse, focussing on the concepts of coreference and anaphor, and how these accounts have helped shape but also, to some extent, have limited text-based reference. Contributions from cognitive perspectives, including the role of shared information and the concept of givenness is shown to enrich our understanding of reference. The chapter establishes the reasons why reference must be viewed as addressee orientated, collaborative, and context-dependent. In doing so, we set out the reasons why an integrated approach to reference is needed.

[7.1] The aims of this chapter are to state, elaborate on and illustrate the context principle: the duty to have regard to the context of the text whose meaning is in issue. It is not the purpose of this chapter to examine each of the individual contextual aids. Later Parts (Parts IV–VIII) elaborate on the contextual aids that may be considered.