Of the duties, offices, and jurisdictions of the pope, few responsibilities were as crucial and esteemed as charity. This chapter surveys papal concern for and response to charity (500–1800 CE). The initial direction, speed, and efficacy of papal charity depended largely on individual popes and the contexts in which they operated. Charity became more regular with early Church councils and with the personal efforts of certain popes, but these endeavors remained informal until the Gregorian Reform and the Lateran Councils of the high Middle Ages. By the later Middle Ages, centralized charitable care emerged under the charge of the papacy: popes approved the creation of hospitals, protected pilgrims and prostitutes, and made regular charitable donations in kind and in coins. These efforts continued during the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, despite significant changes for the Church. Papal concern for charity never waned: from its beginnings to the modern period, the papacy embodied the Christian tenant to love one’s neighbor.

Perhaps it’s because I came to Pride and Prejudice through the Karamazov brothers and Heathcliff that I saw darkness in Mr Darcy. Or perhaps I allowed him to be darkened by a context unfair to foist on the nation’s favourite romance. However it happened, many years ago, I looked for a shadow and found it. Embedded in the light and sparkling novel I saw traces of an attraction to something – how can I put it? – deeply masculine, violent and powerful, which, if acted out rather than contemplated from an armchair, would be, at the least, disturbing.

Not long after I emigrated to America I encountered Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics. I read the book with eyes and mouth wide open. I couldn’t imagine anyone English, anyone I’d ever met, writing anything like this. I was looking into a mirror for the first time and seeing myself and my surroundings together. The Cambridge of Leavis and Williams seemed very far away.

Usage of the title “Vicar of Christ” and the extent of powers implied in it supposedly peaked with Innocent III (r. 1198–1216) and Boniface VIII (r. 1294–1303); the image of popes as monarchic hegemons suited the attempts of legal, political, and constitutional historians to portray the growth of royal power, bureaucracy, and “nations” in competition with other forms of identity. More recently, the medieval papacy has been characterized as responsive and dialogic. Popes’ multiple roles as leader of the universal Church, Bishop of Rome, and ruler of the Papal States meant continual dialogue between center (Rome) and periphery in terms of appeals and petitions presented to the papal curia. Papal opinion and legal rulings mattered precisely because they were sought by regional churches and by secular rulers, and popes relied heavily on the College of Cardinals, judges delegate, and papal legates to represent papal decision-making. While the papal claim to the vicariate of Christ was often challenged by secular powers, this typically occurred in instances where earthly powers sensed that the vicariate of Christ was being wielded to intervene in matters critical to a definition of overlapping and occasionally competing spheres of government.

Here I bring together the arguments from the previous chapters of the book. My reading of Young’s work on structural injustice leads us to an uncomfortable political realisation. The usual tools deployed for addressing social harms and injustices – the tracing of liability in contextual moral or legal terms – are not useful for structural injustice, which is much more complex and amorphous in shape, not least in the context of AI and Repro-tech. Even though no simple political solution is apparent, I argue that one essential approach is to focus specifically on the question of whose interests are at play in the governance of transformative technologies as they operate in the background conditions of structural injustice. Thinking back to the arguments made in Chapter 3 about the functioning of regulators, I argue that the macro-level coordinating powers of a state can be redeployed to address background conditions of structural injustice through the direct reweighting of private and public interest within the mechanisms of governance itself. This is an alternative to current attempts in the context of tech governance to deploy a politics grounded in tracing fault or leaving structural patterns outside of political focus altogether. I advocate for a radical reshaping of large-scale regulatory public body landscapes in which a new form of lay-centric governance can be incorporated to deliver the sorts of decisions that a state defined by its current relationship with tech industries cannot.

In this chapter, I examine fictional and real-life examples of the double, in which there is no identifiable independent other. Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is the principal example of this approach. It provides the basis for discussing the real-life examples of Deacon Brodie and William Sharp. Here, the complexity of personality and the possibility of distinct but contradictory aspects of personality are examined.

This chapter presents the main themes that emerge from a survey of the scholarly work that has been undertaken on the history of papal involvement with music. Seven centuries of papal pronouncements on music in the liturgy show a remarkable consistency of concerns, which could be summed up in the word “decorum.” Liturgical music must serve the Word, it must be solemn, it must be serious, it must not be there simply to be enjoyed, and it must not remind the congregation of secular matters. Yet it is striking how limited and how ineffective most papal decrees were. While popes consistently claimed global authority over all sorts of religious matters, only two issued decrees on music addressed to the entire Church. Even the papacy’s greatest contribution to the history of music, the creation of the plainchant repertory, was for the popes a local matter.

Ethical decisions must be made at every phase of a research study. Codes of ethics provide guidance on behaviors that are permissible or nonpermissible for research investigators. In contemporary science, investigators are required to have regular training on the responsible research conduct relevant to studies involving human subjects and animals. Despite this training, ethical lapses occur. This chapter explores some of the basic issues, including ethical mandates on what should be done, what must be done, and what must not be done. We consider the history of serious ethical concerns, such as the Tuskegee experiment. The chapter also reviews historical milestones such as the Belmont report, the Declaration of Helsinki, and the establishment of the Common Rule that is applied for research funded by US federal agencies. Further, the chapter explores challenges relevant to the reporting of conflicts of interests, imperfections in institutional review boards (IRBs), and ethical challenges in studies that use placebos. Among a range of research methods, randomized controlled trials tend to encounter the greatest number of ethical concerns.

The sources mention many Athenians who settled abroad during the troubles to quietly go about their business, or remained in the city, secluded in their oikos, without joining either camp. To take an interest in these ‘nonaligned’ individuals is to give their place in history back to the many protagonists who resisted the all-encompassing logic of the stasis and the contradictory injunctions that it gave rise to: Choose your side, comrade! But not everything is political in the same way and with the same intensity, either today or in the past: Even in the midst of turmoil, politics does not invest all spheres of existence and all the different layers of society in equal measure. Indeed, orators readily stigmatized the Athenians expelled by the Thirty who, instead of rallying to the democrats in Piraeus, had preferred the comfort of exile; symmetrically, many Athenians who remained in the city tried to demonstrate that they had not participated in any way in the exactions of the oligarchy. Socrates represents in this respect a case that is both common and exceptional: common, in that he was far from being the only one not to take sides during the civil war; exceptional, in that he declared this neutrality loud and clear, even if it meant arousing suspicion on both sides. A final question remains: Did all these ‘neutral individuals’ form a chorus in their own right? What links can be established between people who have remained outside the field of political confrontation – strangers to the ‘bond of division,’ to paraphrase Nicole Loraux? To put it another way: Is it possible to ‘make community’ out of abstention, even if it is an active choice?

The College of Cardinals is a key constituent organ within the papacy, its members being charged with electing the pope and with advising him. Cardinals were originally priests and deacons who assisted the pope in his liturgical and charitable duties around the city of Rome during the first millennium and also the Bishops of Rome’s neighboring “suburbicarian” dioceses. These three orders of clerics cohered into a single College during the Gregorian reform of the eleventh and twelfth centuries: their status and role in papal affairs has waxed and waned in the centuries since. Today the College is more diverse and representative of global Catholicism than at any point in the past. However, it is also a larger and a less cohesive body, whose members are less familiar with each other – or with the pope – than their predecessors were.

Freeze frame: It’s Boedromion 12, 403. With his troops, Thrasybulus is marching up the Acropolis to make a sacrifice to Athena, after several month of exile. At first sight, we can only distinguish men: On one side stand the people of the town, frightened spectators of this intimidating procession; on the other, the victorious democrats – citizens, foreigners, slaves and freedmen – who are already preparing to forgive. As the Athenian civil war comes to an end, women appear absent, as if erased from the picture. But their presence can be sensed in the background, not only among the anonymous crowd who has come to watch, but also on the Acropolis itself. In a majestic role, the priestess of Athena Polias was necessarily present at Thrasybulus’ side, since she was to help him accomplish his sacrifice in the honor of the goddess. In all likelihood, the priestess of Athena played a central role in this ritual sequence, embodying the very specific participation of Athenian women in the resolution of the conflict. Her name – Lysimache – is known to us thanks to an extraordinary piece of evidence: After her death a few decades later, the priestess was commemorated with a bronze statue erected on the Acropolis, the work of a famous sculptor. But how did he manage to flesh out this fleeting and evanescent figure? Erased from history as written by men, she was nevertheless a central figure of the community; it is only necessary to take the trouble to read the ancient sources between the lines, being as attentive to what they express as to what they conceal. By means of some inscriptions and, especially, thanks to a play by Aristophanes performed in 411, it is possible to give back to Lysimache her full human dimension and to restore her singular mode of action within the city that went against the clichéd view of Athenian women as passive and legally in the minority. Better still, if we listen carefully, we can give voice to all those who surrounded her – not only the women directly involved in the cult of Athena, but more widely all Athenian women, including the foreigners to whom the priestess served as a mouthpiece in these ‘dark times.’

The cooperative relationship between pope and city is the subject of this chapter. First, this chapter examines the political maneuvers necessary to execute change in Rome’s built environment and traces the conflict over jurisdiction between civic and papal polities, particularly over matters of urban improvements, licensing, and taxation. The papacy has long been a catalyst for transformation in Rome’s complex and layered urban landscape. Second, this chapter considers the ideology of the cityscape and the tradition of pilgrimage, historically and in our global age. From Martin V’s return in 1420, the papacy aimed to establish Rome as the epicenter of Christendom through its temporal and spiritual authority. As Christendom expanded through exploration and missionary efforts, so too did its capital. Popes continued to influence public space during the tumultuous period after the Unification of Italy, when fierce political rivalry materialized in the spaces of the city.

Misinformation has shown itself in recent years to be an incredibly complicated and thorny societal problem. While most academic work on the subject looks at the largest and scariest examples of misinformation, it largely ignores the fundamental reality that to misinform is to be an imperfect person also known as a human. In this Introduction to the edited volume, Governing Misinformation in Everyday Knowledge Commons, the editors briefly explain the three scholarly traditions (The Everyday, Misinformation, and Governing Knowledge Commons) that are the nexus of each chapter in this tome. We also present several illustrative examples to highlight the thesis of this work, that misinformation is incredibly commonÊand only through addressing the context and risk around it can we create nuanced and culturally specific solutions.