In this chapter, I introduce and explain my community commitment signaling framework and its inner workings. Despite the strong preference that scholarship explains Black voters have for politicians with roots in the Civil Rights Movement, those politicians are leaving office, making way for a newer crop of representatives. Does this mean the expectations of Black voters have shifted? If they have not, how do these younger politicians communicate that same commitment their predecessors did? I argue that they have to provide evidence of this commitment through the use of signals that convey their willingness to prioritize the group's interest above their own individual prestige. Those politicians who can provide strong, tangible evidence of this commitment are more likely to be viewed positively by Black voters.

This chapter relies on a large-scale experimental test with approximately 4,200 Black respondents. The experiment is designed to assess whether certain kinds of signals from politicians influence the information Black voters glean about the politician and their subsequent evaluations. This chapter looks at the aggregate effect of the signals for the purposes of seeing what if anything certain signals do regardless of who employs them. The consistent finding from this chapter is that signals of personal sacrifice are the most effective at communicating commitment to the Black community. However, questions remain about whether the race and/or gender of the politician informs these results. Taken together, Black voters' preference for costly signals is apparent here, setting the stage for the nuance discussed in the next two chapters.

Following a brief historical overview of the birth of the organised movement, Chapter 1 introduces literary figures and texts promoted by antivivisection periodicals such as the Zoophilist, the Home Chronicler, and the Animals Guardian. Adopting a literary-critical approach offers a fresh perspective on the movement’s association pamphlets and periodicals which have, thus far, largely been examined as historical documents. Poems, stories, and ‘humane words’ from notable writers were sourced and deployed to shape a common antivivisectionist identity, articulate the movement’s ideology, and mobilise activists. Analysis of antivivisection poems by Christina Rossetti, Robert Browning, Alfred Tennyson, and Robert Buchanan is complemented by attention to the framing and reception of these works in antivivisection publications and the wider press.

This chapter analyses the richness and relevance of epic scenes of sacrifice. The detailed descriptions of animal sacrifice found in Homer not only stand out for their rich diction and complex narrative resonance, but they are also unique for the dominant referential role that they continued to play in Greek representations of sacrifice, most notably in later epic poetry. After a quick review of the major sacrifices in Iliad 1, Odyssey 3 and Odyssey 14, Gagné turns to the sacrifice of a cow to Athena in Book 5 of Nonnus’ Dionysiaca, the only detailed sacrificial scene in that massive poem, and the double sacrifice to Apollo in Book 1 of the Argonautica, one of the most emphatic sites of engagement with the verses of Homer in Apollonius. One puzzling verb of Homer, ὠμοθετεῖν, serves as a guiding thread throughout this study on the shifting language of ritual representation. By assessing the traditional language of Homeric sacrificial scenes, and these dramatic examples of its reception in later epic, Gagné demonstrates the enduring, canonical presence of Homeric sacrifice in the development of a tradition of poetic reference, in what he terms ‘the ritual archive’ of Greek epic.

Lucian’s position as a commentator on religion has been debated intensely since late antiquity: for most of the last two millennia, it has been the main focus for commentators. This is primarily due to Lucian teasing Christians in a couple of places (although in fact they get off relatively lightly); but he is also, and indeed much more insistently, scathing about aspects of Greco-Roman ‘paganism’. This chapter begin by unpicking some of this reception history, and showing how modern scholarly perspectives remain locked into nineteenth-century cultural-historical narratives (which were designed to play ‘Hellenism’ off against ‘Christianity’, in various forms). It then argues that we should set aside the construct of Lucian’s status as a religious ‘outsider’— a legacy of nineteenth-century thinking — and consider Lucian instead as an agent operating within the field of Greek religion, and contributing richly (albeit satirically) to ongoing, vital questions over humans’ relationship with the divine. He should be ranged, that is to say, alongside figures like Aristides, Pausanias, and Apuleius as keen observers of the religious culture of the time.

The concluding chapter reflects on how re-materializing worship and elevating a plurality of localized little pictures over the colonial big picture of Africa in antiquity can contribute to decolonizing North African studies. The chapter synthesizes evidence for how stelae participated in and shaped changing worship practices, and how these recursively reproduced imperial hegemony.

The new conceptualization of molk-style rites shown in Chapter 7 led to shifts in how sanctuaries were structured and in the entailments these new structures had for the communities who used them. While past studies have focused on the movement from open-air stele fields to monumental sanctuaries as evidence of “Romanization” or the creation of “Romano-African” temple-types, this chapter argues that these new built temples instead participated in wider civic-style practices of benefaction and spectacle in ways that sought to foreground sacrificer-benefector figures. At the end of the second century CE, a number of stele-sanctuaries were rebuilt in monumental forms that privileged central altars, the spectacle of animal offering, and dining. This shift in the spatial dimension of worship afforded new possibilities of practice and social ordering that closely resemble those of the wider imperial world, creating a “sacrificial compromise” where local forms of authority were predicated on being central to the pageantry of sacrifice.

Even if the chaîne opératoire of molk-style rites may have changed little between the eighth century BCE and the second century CE, how worshippers and communities wove significance around these ritualized gestures underwent a marked transformation. Focusing on the tophet of Hadrumetum, this chapter shows how stelae shifted emphasis from the molk as part of an individual, verbal relationship between worshipper and deity to a communal act that foregrounded and elevated a single sacrificant at an altar. Although these scenes of sacrifice-at-altar have been seen as simple calques on the iconography of Roman historical reliefs, worshippers in North Africa instead created new imagery that shared social dynamics and priorities rather than iconographies.

Chapter 2 considers the story of the prophet Samuel, God’s relationship with his mother Hannah, the way God related to people at the shrine at Shiloh, Samuel’s family relationships and God’s relationship with his family, and the significance of the call of Samuel.

This chapter focuses on the ways in which English infantrymen understood duty and how their perceptions of their military role drew both on military and civilian culture. It underlines the differences between officers’ and other ranks’ understanding of their obligations. The army itself defined duty, like morale, as a set of ‘moral’ criteria. Officers’ duties were defined in their commissions and the King’s Regulations; their duty, at least to their men, was of an infinite nature. In contrast, the rank-and-file’s ‘contract’ with the military was finite and secular. In 1914, regulars viewed their job with a clinical and professional eye. However, for reservists and the civilian soldiers that followed them, the idea of ‘doing one’s bit’ came to dominate their perception of duty. Importantly, though, the cultural pressure of ‘respectability’ (drawn from both the military and civil society) informed their rationalisation of service. ‘Military cultures’ were also influential, particularly those of cheerfulness and obedience, which informed men’s actions, attitudes, and performance. What is more, the need to maintain ‘good character’ also exerted its own pressures. Men’s wartime record would influence their prospects once peace returned. Significant, too, was the soldiers’ perceived duty to England. After all, they were the defenders of the homeland.

This chapter considers the ritual laws in the latter part of Exodus and throughout much of Leviticus and Numbers, which cover sacrificial activities, consecration of and rules for priests, permitted/forbidden foods, matters of purity, religious festivals, types of sins, the handling and disposal of blood, and vows and donations to the cult of Yahweh.

This chapter develops the topic of blood as a figure of species identity in readings of late Victorian anthropological writing on totemism and on blood brotherhood. The totem, according to its first theorist, is always a species, and totemism is a theory of species identity. Besides anthropology, the chapter discusses Kipling’s Jungle Book and Stoker’s Dracula. It closes with a return to Freud, to the species concept in psychoanalysis, and to species identity as constituted by diet.

Chapter 2 reads the late medieval romance of the spendthrift knight as an exemplum of economic faith. A character borrowed from folklore, the spendthrift knight falls into debt through excessive largesse, and consequently into exile from the aristocratic community. The plot of the spendthrift romance is organized around the protagonist’s debt recovery and eventual social triumph when newfound wealth allows him to reclaim the status he lost through penury. I argue that what makes these romances amenable to and generative of commercial values is their valorization of credit, typically expressed in the narratives as honour, trouthe, and faithfulness. Such faithfulness is manifest primarily in a willingness to take economic risks, variously extending and accepting credit, in cycles of exchange that end up generating profit for the knight and for his community. Belief as such in relations of social and material exchange, belief that defies strict rationality and that makes risk and sacrifice both possible and profitable, motivates gifts and market transactions alike, and binds individuals in creditor–debtor relationships that are both reciprocal and hierarchical.