Chapter 9 considers Emerson’s first revolutionary book of 1836, Nature. Even in this first book, Goodman argues, Emerson presents a nascent epistemology of moods. The discussion then turns to the moody swings of “Nature,” from the Essays, Second Series, in which Emerson finds the natural world either bountifully present or just missed, and as taking two opposing forms: a stable finished form he calls natura naturata, and a dynamic form he calls natura naturans. At the end of the essay, Emerson abandons this main set of oppositions in a leap to a metaphysical conclusion. The Coda considers Emerson’s attraction to Michael Faraday’s idea that “we do not arrive at last at atoms, but at spherules of force.”

In the genre of images known as the Mass of Saint Gregory the central drama is the living body of Christ on the altar. To one side of that drama, if one looks closely, can be found a single book, opened but not legible (Plate 6). By the fifteenth century, depending on the church, one might find a range of different kinds of books for the liturgy in its library, its choir stalls, or sacristy: antiphonaries, graduals, psalters, hymnals, or breviaries. Only one liturgical book, the missal, the book for the celebrant of the Eucharist, would have been found on the altar. That object is the focus of this chapter.

With the invasion and conquest of Beijing by the Manchus the very same barbarians that the wall was meant to keep out, the limitations of the Ming state were superseded. Now the Manchu founded Qing dynasty sought new ways to understand where to draw the borders of their state to the North and West.The chapter covers the back and forth in cartographic translation between China and Europe during the eighteenth century, from the Kangxi era to the end of the Qianlong reign. This back and forth, it is argued, led to the creation of the Qing geo-body and the idea of the borders of China. The chapter shows that a notion of China’s borders first appeared as a result of cartographic exchanges between China and Europe.

The new nationalism of the Xi Jinping era, which has brought together political nationalism and cultural nationalism – two largely opposing streams between 1919 and 1989 – has redefined the CPC and the PRC. On paper, the party is a class organization while the PRC is a class dictatorship that sanctions class sovereignty rather than popular sovereignty. Since 2001, the party has been represented as a national party as well as a class organization. Representing the nation entails the promotion of national culture, and a major component of the Chinese Dream is cultural revival. Consequently, the CPC and the PRC are nationalized in a shift from Marxist classism to synthesized Chinese nationalism. Their class identities appear to be at odds with their national identities, but the tension is minimized as the party turns Marxism into an empty signifier and sinicizes it out of existence.

Emerson describes a range of experiences that constitute friendship: titanic battles between beautiful enemies; conversational brilliance and expansion; a joyful solitude, as if someone has departed rather than arrived; a generalized benevolence toward people in the street to whom one does not speak; the warm sympathies and household joy one shares with a familiar friend; the disappointment of a friend outgrown. His account shows an intense focus on moral perfection – on our unattained but attainable self, alone and with others – but an equally intense awareness of what he calls in “Experience” “the plaint of tragedy” that sounds throughout our lives “in regard to persons, to friendship and love.” The chapter’s coda charts the opposition in “Love” between love as the experience of being “swept away” and a skeptical vision of marriage as a prison, from which sex, person, and partiality have vanished.

How does law travel in Inter-Asia? This chapter focuses on traveling law as an empirical event and does so to reflect on prevailing theories in comparative law that explain how law moves from one jurisdiction to another. The dominant paradigm in comparative law for traveling law is legal transplants, a concept that has generated a sprawling literature. The point of this chapter is not to say that Inter-Asia is aberrational regarding legal transplants; instead, the perspective is to use the Inter-Asian Law material, and specifically the fraught movements of Chinese law in Inter-Asia, to critically reflect on comparative law conventions. Whereas Inter-Asia is embedded within global trade and migration routes, it has also been populated by outsiders – pirates or jihadis – whose participation within those circuits creates contrast and distance, elements that are prerequisites to critical reflection. Chinese law may also be such an outsider that permits reflecting on taken-for-granted paths.

In rejecting allegory, Martin Luther rejected far more than a verbal technique of biblical interpretation. He rejected a conception of the nature of revelation and the modes by which God communicated with humankind. He rejected William Durand’s sense of the interreferentiality of Scripture and Creation. Luther, Huldrych Zwingli, Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt, Martin Bucer, Uly Anders, and Claus Hottinger all rejected an understanding of revelation as mediated through the made world. In so doing, they also rejected Durand’s sense of the made world mediating time. And in doing that, they reconceived just what worship was and what it did.

The second part of this book opens with a title page (Figure 21). In itself, a title page marks one of the many changes that lie between William Durand’s Rationale and the sixteenth century. It belongs to book markets: something that a passer-by might see in a printer’s shop and decide to purchase. Durand’s Rationale was first a manuscript; it, too, came to be printed – in 1459 – one of the earliest medieval works to be printed using moveable type. Print, as we shall see, is also very much a part of our story.