The relevance of Christian liturgy can hardly be underestimated. Christians are present in most of the world’s cultures and societies today. Sometimes they are only tiny minorities. Sometimes these minorities are well respected, but the opposite can be equally true. Sometimes they are suppressed and even persecuted. In other cases Christians occupy a majority position, which enables them to celebrate and live their faith in the public realm. This position, which can but may not necessarily go back several centuries, also allows them to be in power and to staff the decision-making bodies at many levels of socio-economic and political life. Still other historical circumstances cause Christians to look back on an influential past and a lost impact. This often results in a fragmented situation with an uncertain outcome, which obviously comes with many challenges, not least for Christians themselves. This scenario is particularly the case in so-called secular cultures, characterized by sometimes dramatically rapid processes of pluralization and detraditionalization.

Chapter 10 considers how descendants of nineteenth-century Africans remember their forebearers. It builds on Chapter 6’s discussion on the distinctiveness of liberated Africans by recovering some individual biographies, exploring how they constructed alternative narratives of return, and how the individuals remained close to Africa through their awareness of indentured histories and cultural traditions. These memories form a diasporic consciousness, shared with the descendants of a liberated African ancestor who was the great-grandfather of Malcolm X.

Use Case 2 in Chapter 5 examines the regulation of MDTs in the context of commercial advertising under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive (UCPD), and the Audiovisual Media Services Directive (AVSMD). An analysis under the Digital Services Act (DSA) and the Artificial Intelligence Act (AIA) will follow in Chapter 6, alongside a use case focused on political advertising. In the realm of commercial advertising, MDTs intensify long-standing concerns from consumer perspectives. The UCPD serves as a crucial reference point for related laws. Including the processing and inference of mind data in the blacklist outlined in Annex I of the UCPD would have significant implications, akin to the proposed introduction of a sui generis special category of mind data within the GDPR. Importantly, a blanket ban on the processing and inference of mind data for commercial practices under Annex I UCPD would automatically prohibit these practices under the DSA.

Political and industrial changes during High Imperialism produced social anxiety. Journalists sought explanatory symbols to narrate these changes in the form of short news messages and photographs. Publicity politicians fulfilled this symbolic function. Journalists used celebrity politicians as ‘communicative anchors’, to which they attached overlapping identities of nationalism, imperialism, and modernism. These personae even embodied industrial progress and a ‘business-like’ politics – novel and transparent compared to traditional secretive politics. The politician as a strong ‘captain of industry of the nation-state’ appealed to anxious audiences. The communicative anchor moored individuals to their imagined community. Communicative anchors formed recognizable reference points people could relate to; as projections, journalists infused these anchors with changing meanings. Journalists used these anchors as protagonists to simplify and narrate the complexity of a changing world order. Journalists invoked the power of images, and both technologically and figuratively it was easier to visualize a story about eccentric politicians than about abstract parliaments or bureaucracies. Path dependency followed: the more journalists used anchors to narrate politics, the more useful these anchors became for continuing stories. Consuming these narratives, citizens ‘participated’ in political meaning-making. The politician’s communicative anchoring peaked around 1900, amidst a pervasive press but before further diffusion of institutional power.

The Shepherd does not merely depict believers as enslaved persons, rather the very writtenness of the Shepherd itself – its composition, transmission, and readership – is inflected by the discourse of enslavement. I explore the Shepherd’s portrayal of Hermas as an enslaved person expected to copy the book given to him by the Church, to write and disseminate the Shepherd’s commandments to God’s enslaved persons, and to read aloud the visions and revelations he experienced to others. I put the Shepherd in conversation with Cicero and Pliny the Younger, who exemplify the use of enslaved persons for literary labor and the production of a “creative genius” or “sole author” through the labor of others. I note how the Shepherd, in line with other Christian revelatory literature like Revelation, is more explicit about the use of enslaved literary labor than many Roman texts and provides a rare avenue for exploring how ancient writers conceptualized and portrayed enslaved scribes. The Shepherd’s own composition and dissemination by Hermas is, I argue, inflected by its participation in the ancient Mediterranean discourse and logics of enslavement.

This chapter discusses the centuries-old discourses that condemned merchants as greedy, duplicitous, and usurious predators and damned commerce as a threat to the common good. It also, however, introduces the arguments that emerged during the Middle Ages (mostly from Scholastics) in defense of commerce and merchants themselves, and it traces the signs of a lightening of the attacks on merchants as we enter the period of study in this book.

This chapter discusses the problem that most of the information we have about merchants’ character in this period comes from sources written not by merchants, but by critics of various kinds, many of them churchmen, but others secular poets and playwrights whose texts circulated among ordinary people. It also reviews two studies that have tried to discover and analyze merchants’ “self-perception” using, for the most part, sources produced by non-merchants.

Use Case 3 in Chapter 6 examines the regulation of MDTs in the context of political advertising under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the Regulation on Transparency and Targeting of Political Advertising (TTPA), the Digital Services Act (DSA), and the Artificial Intelligence Act (AIA). The prohibition on advertising based on profiling with special category data in both the DSA and the TTPA does not adequately reflect the capabilities of modern data analytics. Both the DSA and the TTPA fall short in addressing MDTs as stand-alone techniques or as complements to online behavioural advertising and political microtargeting. The AIA’s prohibition of subliminal, manipulative, and deceptive techniques requires a complex set of criteria to be met, with the outcome still uncertain.

Bridget Nichols shows how important the bodily dimension of the liturgy is, especially because it is steadily associated with mental and cognitive activities. In this context, she pays particular attention to the role of the senses, which impacts greatly how not only big celebrations and ceremonies but also small gestures are experienced.

Chapter 5 begins a tour of the variety of work in early modern England by examining the neglected topics of housework and carework. To correct misconceptions, it focuses on the location of these tasks, who performed them, and whether they were paid. This demonstrates that much of this work took place outside the home; housework was most commonly undertaken by young unmarried women rather than married women; and carework was more often skilled healthcare than childcare, was undertaken predominantly by women, and was typically paid work.

Descartes and Kant strike us as the necessary poles of a historical and philosophical process that has constantly put the deaf at the center of theories of language. While Descartes grants the deaf intellectual abilities that match other men’s, Kant pronounces in 1798 a radical verdict, asserting that the deaf from birth are bound to remain deprived of any rational capacity. Why does Kant pronounce such a verdict, at the very time when l’Abbé de l’Epée trains with success the deaf and dumb to talk in Paris, when Samuel Heinicke also succeeds through others paths in Leipzig? I shall argue that this radical shift paradoxically stems from a philosophical breakthrough within the philosophy of language, that is, the unprecedented claim that language is decisively involved in the exercise of crucial mental capacities. Because language was deemed by Cartesians to have secondary and accessory functions, its correlation with the exercise of mental capacities had to be reclaimed by anchoring the conditions of all intellectual performances in the material properties of the phonic medium. This principle provides us with a tool to rationally explain Kant’s claims in the Anthropology.

This introduction lays out a core argument of the book: that social movements mobilize law and legal institutions to unsettle expert consensus and alter the distribution of material resources. This chapter describes how feminist activists concerned about women and AIDS sought to reset public health practice on surveillance, diagnosis, risk, and treatment to effectuate feminist goals, including access to public health resources and welfare benefits.

Chapter 8 considers commerce and money management, the largest category of work in the work-task database. This provides a detailed view of petty commerce, the typically small transactions that took place every day across the country, with women and men almost equally involved. Markets remained the most common locations of commerce, but transactions took place everywhere including the home, the street, and occasionally, the specialist retail shop. Evidence of administering debts and pawning goods demonstrates the significant role played by married women in these activities.