Critics have long argued over Beatrice Cenci’s guilt and moral responsibility in relation to her murder of her father and rapist, as Shelley himself anticipated they would. Far less attention has been paid, however, to Count Cenci’s program for corrupting his daughter and turning her, at least in part, into a mirror version of himself. Count Cenci engineers a perverse kind of empathic identification, one that Shelley calls, in Prometheus Unbound, “loathsome sympathy.” This chapter presents “loathsome” sympathy in turn as an extreme or inverted form of the sympathy that plays so crucial a role in Shelley’s poetic and ethical theories, theories he develops from passages in various eighteenth-century moral philosophers including Hume, Rousseau, Burke, and Adam Smith. Twenty-first-century research on empathy and “mirror neurons” provides a number of partial and provocative analogies with eighteenth-century sympathy theory that are used heuristically to provide a novel perspective on the tradition that leads from Hume to Shelley. The chapter looks especially at how mirror neuron research emphasizes the embodied, visual, intersubjective, and unconscious workings of empathy. Shelley, the chapter argues, develops a comparable sense of sympathy, one that, in its “perverse” version, informs The Cenci.

This chapter discusses how issues of spirituality present in forensic psychiatric practice, and especially in the treatment of offenders with mental health disorders. The context of the work of forensic psychiatric services is described. Then three domains of forensic psychiatric practice (the medico-legal, secure psychiatric care and existential forensic psychiatry) are explored, and the ways in which issues of spirituality arise are considered. The chapter concludes with some comments about the importance of the forensic psychiatrist keeping an open mind that can change, in order that his or her patients may experience change. The work draws on the author’s experience of forensic and prison services in England and Wales; prisoners are referred to mainly as ‘he’ because the majority of both offenders and prisoners are male.

This chapter explores the late 20th/early 21st century historical roots and reasoning of the animal protection movement’s efforts to strengthen animal anti-cruelty laws. With that backdrop, the chapter then discusses the essential need for data narrowly focused on anti-cruelty investigation and prosecution outcomes as advocates today consider criminal justice reform policy developments, and how recent legal and social advances can help support animal victims in the future.

Chapter 6 shifts the focus from animals exploited for clothing and scent to exotic pets – living fashion accessories. The chapter charts the growing trade in monkeys, parrots, tortoises and other foreign species and explores the practicalities and emotional dynamics of keeping exotic species. It highlights the significant ecological implications of the exotic animal trade and the uncertain legal status of exotic pets, which were not formally protected from abuse until 1900.

Scott’s attention to endangered animals, birds and plants as well as to processes of extinction is explored in this chapter. Discussion evaluates how awareness of the precarity attending reduced biodiversity in the nineteenth century, as represented in Scott’s historical fiction, can inform understanding of the drivers of similar crises in our own time. The case studies address problems arising from fetishized or idealistic views of Scotland’s ‘wilder’ environments. Enquiry also focuses on ecologies in places that are marginal to, or remote from, urban centres, while endangered human communities such as those of the Highlands before the late eighteenth-century clearances and others that followed are shown to be integral parts of threatened environments. Wolves, beavers, raptors, wild cattle and wild cats are among the species considered. The problems that attend rewilding and conservation strategies are discussed with attention to what is not, or cannot be, preserved or replaced.

Rorty’s liberalism strays so far from its classical form that one might wonder why we cluster him together with thinkers such as Locke, Kant, or even more recent writers such as Rawls. Clarifying the particulars of Rorty’s political philosophy – his particular liberalism – requires one to enter into a set debates about metaphysics, epistemology, and social thought that go beyond liberalism, veering into literary criticism, critical theory, and Marxism. This chapter begins by laying out the contours of Rorty’s political commitments, beginning with how they first came together in what he calls his “postmodernist bourgeois liberalism.” It then shows how his liberalism finds its fullest expression in the “ideally liberal society” set out in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. It goes on to examine how, in subsequent work, Rorty revised his description of that society in response to criticisms from feminist theorists. It concludes that his later writings indicate that Rorty’s position is potentially more radical than he, or his readers, recognize.

This chapter is framed by Charles Darwin's unwavering support for physiologists in their battle against the antivivisectionists, detailing his public writings on the subject, his private sentiments and his funding of the defensive cause. It covers the formation of the Physiological Society, the organization of the first public strategies of defence, the trial of David Ferrier and the formation and acitvities of the Association for the Advancement of Medicine by Research.

This chapter argues that the period is marked by creative legal solutions designed to undermine ecclesiastical control of marital dissolution.The civil courts had begun to consider marriage cases which in 1660 would have been deemed the business of the consistory courts.The canon law prohibition on remarriage after divorce was undermined by private parliamentary acts which dissolved marriages and permitted those involved to remarry.The increasing use of formal and informal private deeds of settlement in which spouses agreed to live apart also weakened strict adherence to church regulations.While these changes did not represent a complete secularisation of Irish marriage law and regulations, they do suggest that men and women were willing to be flexible in their interpretation of church guidelines, particularly when they were considering how to end a problematic union.According to canon law, which guided both the ecclesiastical and civil courts in determining marriage litigation, there were two types of divorce.The first, a vinculo matrimonii(i.e. from the chains of marriage) was, in effect, a judgment that the marriage was null and void because it had never existed in the first place.Far more common in the consistory court and its secular successor were applications for divorce a mensa et thoro or from ‘bed and board’.This was essentially a request for a judicial separation rather than a divorce.Unlike a vinculo matrimonii, a divorce a mensa et thoro did not permit either partner to remarry.

Just how violent was medieval Europe? Traditionally, historians have depicted the Middle Ages as an era of brute strength and underdeveloped empathy, leading to high rates of violence. Yet, the evidence to support this interpretation is highly flawed. While we cannot measure medieval rates of violence with enough accuracy to draw medieval-modern comparisons, we do know that medieval Europeans deemed some forms of violence as not only necessary, but laudable. God’s wrath was the archetype of principled violence wielded by a righteous authority. Spectacles of justice in the form of staged executions, shaming rituals, or torture procedures, when enacted by the church or the state, fell neatly in line with this view of violence as a purgative, removing sin from society before it infected others. This ideology was imposed also on the family, where communities urged patriarchs to govern their dependents with a firm hand. Nevertheless, violence also had its limits. As king in his own home, a patriarch’s conduct might still cross the line between chastisement and cruelty. The law generally sided with figures of authority, but in practice the courts protected both ends of the social and familial hierarchy from abuse.

Chaucer’s God considers how characters invoke God, both in terms of the everyday language of late medieval England and in the ways that the idea of God is reflected in Chaucer’s fiction. Conventional, non-theological utterances of the names for God by Chaucer’s characters as part of their, by turns, outwardly pious and unthinkingly impious phraseologies are discussed in the opening section, God Woot – ‘God knows’. Under the heading God Forwoot – ‘God foreknows’, some of the more challenging invocations of God are considered, such as the implications of divine foreknowledge and predestination on human free will in the Knight’s Tale, the Nun’s Priest’s Tale and Troilus and Criseyde. The concluding section, God in a Cruel World, asks whether in the Clerk’s Tale and the Franklin’s Tale, if Chaucer allowed his tales to reflect, and characters to reflect upon, the heretical notion of a God lacking in compassion for humanity.

Chaucer’s God considers how characters invoke God, both in terms of the everyday language of late medieval England and in the ways that the idea of God is reflected in Chaucer’s fiction. Conventional, non-theological utterances of the names for God by Chaucer’s characters as part of their, by turns, outwardly pious and unthinkingly impious phraseologies are discussed in the opening section, God Woot – ‘God knows’. Under the heading God Forwoot – ‘God foreknows’, some of the more challenging invocations of God are considered, such as the implications of divine foreknowledge and predestination on human free will in the Knight’s Tale, the Nun’s Priest’s Tale and Troilus and Criseyde. The concluding section, God in a Cruel World, asks whether in the Clerk’s Tale and the Franklin’s Tale, if Chaucer allowed his tales to reflect, and characters to reflect upon, the heretical notion of a God lacking in compassion for humanity.