The final chapter entitled Conclusions contains a summary of the findings of the study, explaining the key motivations and claims behind the Galenic understanding of bodily unity.

This chapter looks at the ways in which Galen posits the theoretical unity among the discrete physiological system, especially with a reference to tripartition. Unlike Platonic, the tripartition that is motivated by psychological conflict, Galen’s tripartition of physiological domains shows the three domains to be highly cooperative and co-dependent on each other. The respective material fluxes they control are together necessary for continued functioning. The chapter looks at Galen’s adoption of the popular philosophical idea that identity persists because of the form, and at his analysis of different causes, strongly influenced by the ideas of his contemporary Middle Platonists. While more popular analyses of causes explain that the body is unified in its design, it is the notion of cohesive cause, the chapter argues, that accounts for unified physiological functioning.

The Mongol Empire became a chief destination for European travellers in a very specific moment of the medieval period, roughly framed by two events: Ögedei Khan’s European campaign of 1240−41, and the formal fall of the last Yuan Mongolian emperor in 1368, which marked the takeover of the Chinese Ming dynasty and the opening of a new social and political paradigm in Asia. Between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, Mongol rule brought about an unprecedented geopolitical stability across Eurasia, traditionally referred to by historians as Pax Mongolica. The general safety of the roads and the relatively smooth administrative system of the Mongol khanates allowed for a productive period of economic and cultural interconnections between Europe and the Far East, whose protagonists were traders, diplomats, missionaries, and adventurers. While merchants exploited the safety of the Silk Road to reach territories both within and beyond the Mongol area, the Mongol Empire was the express destination of several diplomatic and missionary expeditions, carried out by Franciscan and Dominican friars.

As gold prices have soared, the Amazon and its inhabitants have had to bear the brunt of a rampant, environmentally destructive gold-mining rush. Small and medium-sized illegal, informal, and other irregular forms of so-called artisanal gold mining, as well as large-scale corporate gold mines, cause major and multifaceted socioenvironmental–health–human rights crises. The dynamics of the gold-mining boom are important to understand the key political economic sectors behind forest degradation and deforestation and to highlight how RDPEs work. The overall situation in the Amazon is presented, analyzing the causes of gold mining and the violence, especially in Peru, Brazil, and other key regions. The triple frontier between Colombia, Venezuela, and Brazil is also analyzed as the irregular gold-mining RDPE is one of the most important drivers of deforestation. In this region, gold-mining operations are led by ex-guerilla groups in Venezuela, paramilitaries and other armed groups in Colombia, and, increasingly, by the First Capital Command and other drug factions from southeastern Brazil in Roraima’s Yanomami Indigenous lands.

Travel is a prominent feature of every cycle of medieval Irish literary tales with roots in the pre-Christian narrative tradition, as well as in the majority of stories that originated in the Christian era, including lives of saints and legends about historical figures that took shape in this period. Underlying early Irish society and culture was a tension between competing movements, one attracted by the conceit of centripetal stability and the other fueled by a centrifugal dynamic. A reassuring ideology of cultural and linguistic unity, cultivated by tradition-bearers such as poets and clerics, sought to balance out the instabilities of a volatile social order that frequently experienced realignment, fission, and reconfiguration. Related to this underlying tension was the paradox that, even though the typical person’s status, sphere of activity, and safety were circumscribed within the same social space from birth to death, medieval Irish storytelling and even Christian Ireland’s religious culture glorified travel—that is, the heroic going-forth well beyond the realm of the familiar, and the leaving-behind of one’s safety zone.

That Jesus Christ is sinless is utterly uncontroversial within orthodox Christianity. But the modality of that sinlessness (whether it is necessary that Christ was without sin) and the explanation of that sinlessness (why it is the case that Christ did not sin, and perhaps even could not have sinned) have been the objects of intense christological controversy. This chapter considers and evaluates multiple explanatory models for Christ’s sinlessness, which lead to different accounts of whether and why Christ is impeccable.

This chapter focuses on foundational grammatical concepts, first discussing the basic difference between content and function lexical categories before moving on to morphological language type, grammaticalization, and inflectional marking. The information investigated in this and the next four chapters is so interconnected that the material, as it is presented, is a bit like a spiral. One section will introduce you to a specific concept with a handful of other concepts and then a later section will return to that initial concept while discussing other related concepts. This material will continue to be presented using a spiraling method, linking the major grammatical concepts of this and the next four chapters. The grammatical decisions you will make at the end of this chapter focus on how much grammatical information is packaged within a single word unit and how constituents beyond the subject, object, and verb are typically ordered in clauses.

In the terms of the present volume, ‘Rus’’ is an anachronism. The Land of Rus’ was a collection of principalities united (or frequently disunited) under the Rurikid dynasty and owing at least theoretical allegiance to the senior prince with his seat at Kyiv, to which some of the other princes could aspire to succeed. The people of the land were nevertheless united not only by a vague Rus’ identity, but by their Orthodox Christian faith and by their use of an East Slavonic vernacular; it is this cultural community that will be the subject of the present chapter. Nor was ‘travel literature’ a concept with which this community was familiar, and the texts grouped under this heading from a modern perspective are very disparate. The tradition of embedding geographical or anthropological information in works of history goes back to Herodotus, and was maintained by the Byzantine chroniclers, some of whose works were translated into Slavonic and formed the model for native historiography. The chronicles, therefore, provide a frequent context for descriptions of travel of all kinds. Unusually for Slavonic literature, this was the limit of Byzantine influence.

Research in political science, economics, and public policy has primarily examined two types of government housing programs. The first involves low-income public housing in advanced industrialized nations like the United States, United Kingdom, and Japan, where beneficiaries receive subsidized rental housing or housing benefits without property rights. In contrast, research from cities in Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, and South Asia has focused on policies that grant land titles to residents of slums and informal settlements, providing property rights without additional housing benefits. I focus on a third type of program, understudied yet prevalent in low- and middle-income countries, including India: subsidized homeownership. It is theoretically distinct from rental programs or those accommodating informal settlements because it involves a large in-kind transfer and property rights. I argue that these initiatives uniquely influence how citizens invest in the future, escape poverty, develop agency (or what I call dignity) in social relationships, and wield power in local politics. To support this theory, I outline a multi-method study across three different programs.

Those interested in questions of new diplomacy, foreign aid and regionalism in decolonizing Asia gain much from analysis of the Colombo Plan’s laboratory of development internationalism. In addition to the three components of development internationalism outlined, namely, state-making harnessed to growth, internationalism and experimental regionalism, each of the chapters in this book features common threads underpinning the ‘laboratory’ nature of the Colombo Plan.