The chapter outlines key principles in Cognitive CDA, which inherits its social theory from CDA and from cognitive linguistics inherits a particular view of language and a framework for analysing language (as well as other semiotic modes). In connection with CDA, the chapter describes the dialectical relationship conceived between discourse and society. Key concepts relating to the dialogicality of discourse are also introduced, namely intertextuality and interdiscursivity. The central role of discourse in maintaining power and inequality is described with a focus on the ideological and legitimating functions of language and conceptualisation. In connection with cognitive linguistics, the chapter describes the non-autonomous nature of language, the continuity between grammar and the lexicon and the experiential grounding of language. The key concept of construal and its implications for ideology in language and conceptualisation are discussed. A framework in which construal operations are related to discursive strategies and domain-general cognitive systems and processes is set out. The chapter closes by briefly introducing the main models and methods of Cognitive CDA.

Chapter 3, ‘God on Earth’, argues that, for John, Jesus’s body is the place where one may see God. It opens with John’s association of Jesus with the tabernacle and the temple, the most comprehensive descriptions of Jesus’s flesh and body in the Gospel, and asks whether one can read Jesus’s body as the literal ‘house of God.’ Evidence for this reading comes from an overview of Israelite and Early Jewish theologies that portray a God who can be in two places at once. John evidences a corresponding understanding of God’s dual presence in his association of the flesh and body of Jesus with the tabernacle and temple and in the Farewell Discourse. The chapter concludes that God can be on earth in Jesus’s body as well as in heaven.

The introduction raises the question of how one ought to understand the challenge of God’s invisibility/visibility in the Fourth Gospel with regard to its stated purpose: ‘These things are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God.’ Scholars and theologians have often taken God’s invisibility to be ‘absolute’, in the sense that it describes an immaterial, eternal God whose deity is invisible by nature. While John claims that no one has ever seen God, it also describes God as incarnate in Jesus Christ, the one in whom the Father may be seen. The introduction shows that scholars have not yet satisfactorily defined the nature of divine invisibility in John nor reckoned with the import of this important theme for John’s purpose. It proposes that, according to John, God must become physically visible in Jesus in order for belief to obtain.

Avowing that love awakens one’s attention to the material world and to one another, Corinne provides a theory for establishing human–nonhuman connection, the energizing and curative praxis of belonging with. The heroine’s thing therapy positively associates women with materiality and, while exercising her right to connect with things, she sustains her élan vital. This chapter argues that she harnesses her feminist thing theory to teach her lover to respect the female body’s integrity and rights and to challenge his repressive politics: If Oswald could belong with materiality by sensuously responding to things, he could remedy his commitment to abstraction and his nationalistic gender proscriptions. Diagnosing Oswald’s melancholy as also emerging from his identification with “modern” (post Renaissance) art, associated with Napoleon’s tyranny and a self-absorptive grief that paralyzes creative potential, Corinne offers a remedy: companionship with classical art. Her thing theory has political ramifications, for it provides a workshop for practicing an embodied cosmopolitanism that itself ameliorates nationalism’s intolerances.

This chapter examines how the Venus de Medici entered the historical storylines of eighteenth-century models of gender, and – once plundered by Napoleon and whisked to Paris – the narrative of artistic restoration and political liberty. The statue generated complex thing–human interactions, for viewers collapsing boundaries between marble and human flesh imagined the Venus as both a withdrawn ideal yet intimately connected to them: touching her, they measured her proportions and gauged her sexual “motives” while debating whether she met British standards of female modesty. Belinda, which alludes to the Venus, also engages in these activities as characters “measure” each other; the novel, however, incorporates those travelers’ debates about the Venus’s modesty, sexuality, and virtue to emancipate female characters from calculating standards that produce negative consequences such as racism and gender stereotyping. Embedded in Belinda, the Venus obliquely restores the right for Lady Delacour to her body and to invoke nonperfection and nonconformity as a just privilege.

With animal embodiment, the project of Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature comes full circle: The opening selection of text on space and time end with twin terms – place and movement – and in animal embodiment we finally get the natural phenomenon that does justice to both. The animal body is the first physical body to have three properly distinguished dimensions, and it is only in virtue of those qualitative, organic dimensions that we can abstract away a three-dimensional Euclidean space in which such bodies are taken to appear and to move. Hegel divides his discussion of the animal into discussions of its formation, assimilation, and species-process, and the chapter adopts that categorization as its structure. As a first pass, it says that form (die Gestalt) gives us the special point 0 for time and the step from the plane to an enclosing surface for space; assimilation gives us the order of time and the step from line to plane for space; and the species process (Gattungsprozeß) gives us the linearity of time and the step from point to line for space. These combinations display the animal body as the spatio-temporal object par excellence, and thus the object by reference to which all spatiality and temporality is understood.

Chapter 1 offers a radical reinterpretation of the gender of Michael Psellos, one of Romanía’s most well-known scholars as well as one of few figures from the Middle Byzantine period to have received extensive gender analysis. The chapter starts with biographical information about his education and personal life. It continues with the role that learning played in his self-definition and his depiction of others, especially in his many encomia. It argues that, in his writings, education and learning could act as ‘masculine capital’, which, when accumulated, could be used to allow for less masculine behaviours in other areas of life, both propping up and subverting hegemonic ideals of physical strength. Finally, it considers the implications of this for Psellos’ work, from his descriptions of hunting and warfare to his emotional life.

Nineteenth-century studies has – like other fields – sought to move beyond the notion of progressive secularization in which religious beliefs disappear in modernity. But what will replace this paradigm? A compelling alternative emerges when we attend to how the Romantics and Victorians resist what Charles Taylor calls “excarnation” – the modern construal of religion primarily as inward belief unhooked from material reality and ritual forms. The Romantics’ and Victorians’ liturgical fascinations signal a suspicion of excarnation and an attempt to re-poeticize religion. The full significance of this use of liturgy, however, only appears in light of a much deeper genealogy of modernity stretching back to the late-medieval rise of voluntarism and nominalism. Such a genealogy reveals the theological origins of so many modern bifurcations (natural/supernatural, reason/faith, etc.) – bifurcations that nineteenth-century texts challenge and rethink by way of liturgy. Examples from Keats, Hopkins, Carlyle, Arnold, Dickens, and others forecast the book’s main arguments.

This chapter explores the perceptual acts modelled by John Clare’s poetry, especially in encounters with the more-than-human world. Rather than foregrounding the ways a perceiving ego shapes a landscape, Clare details situations and perspectives readers can imaginatively enter and emphasizes the ways that the situations themselves invite receptivity. He normalizes ecologically attuned modes of perception by presenting them as enabled by the places, plants, and animals his speakers encounter more than the speakers themselves. Focusing on poems that place speakers among or beneath birds and weeds, including ‘To an Insignificant Flower’, ‘The Fens’, and some shorter bird poems, Falke describes the poetic means through which Clare encourages epistemological humility and other-directedness. She then articulates a mode of reading Clare’s poetry based on these same perceptual habits.

• Practicing self-compassion – kindness towards ourselves, an understanding of our common humanity, and mindfulness – can be an important contributor to the development of a positive body image.

• There are many ways to practice self-care that extend beyond grooming practices and may include nurturing our social relationships.

• Examining what it is that adds meaning to our lives and working to enhance our eudaimonic well-being can also enhance our body image.