A committed student of vernacular literatures alongside classical ones, Shelley matured a deeply integrated vision of European literature as a transnational conversation including the English-language tradition. This conception informs his literary and theoretical writings, his reflections about and practice of translation, and his appropriations and recreations of foreign forms and modes, such as Dante’s terza rima or Petrarch’s Trionfi. His interests focused especially on the Renaissance (in France, Italy, and Spain) and the eighteenth century and Revolutionary period (especially in France) and on figures such as Michel de Montaigne, Pedro Calderón de la Barca, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, or Madame de Staël and the members of her salon at Coppet. Shelley’s engagements with modern European literatures confirm him as a poet and thinker poised between classical and post-classical cultures, harnessing them to support his revolutionary approaches to versification and poiesis, political and philosophical reflection, and cultural-social activism, against the backdrop of an incessantly evolving modernity.

This chapter examines Shelley’s engagement with early-nineteenth-century science. It explores Shelley’s interest in chemistry at Oxford, his interest in contemporary developments in science (such as galvanism), and his reading of canonical and contemporary writers in science. Humphry Davy, the foremost man of science in Britain in the early nineteenth century, emerges as an important contemporary influence on Shelley; this chapter discusses the influence of Davy’s Elements of Chemical Philosophy (1812) and Elements of Agricultural Chemistry (1813) on Shelley’s writing, specifically in Bodleian MS Shelley adds. e. 6, Queen Mab (1813), and ‘The Cloud’ (1820).

By exploring issues of energy, efficiency, growth and systemic resets, the reader is able to see the trajectory humanity is currently on and how it needs to change in order to survive and thrive moving forwards.

This chapter looks at the most recent climate science and starkly sets out the severity of the problems ahead. It gives the reader all the knowledge needed to broadly understand the critical issues of our day from a technical perspective, including systems of production and consumption for energy and food, biodiversity loss, pollution (including plastics), disease threats and population levels. It then looks at ways in which we can technically transfer to a sustainable way of living.

Protestant attacks against papal corruption of the cult of saints and falsification of miracles led the Post-Tridentine Church to reform the processes of saint-making through an intensified collaboration with medical science. The alignment of faith and science at the nexus of the human body culminated in the eighteenth century under Benedict XIV Lambertini (r. 1740–58). Benedict published a monumental treatise, still influential today, that codified canonization proceedings on the basis of modern medical expertise, and he was a preeminent patron of scientific and medical institutions and practitioners for the advancement of medical knowledge and public health. The imperatives of the Counter-Reformation, canon law, experimental science and medicine, and the burgeoning Enlightenment coalesced, albeit uneasily, in his vision of a reformed Church, for which natural and saintly bodies became primary emblems in defense of the authority of the Catholic Church in a world increasingly resistant to it.

This book is about the science and ethics of clinical research and healthcare. We provide an overview of each chapter in its three sections. The first section reviews foundational knowledge about clinical research. The second section provides background and critique on key components and issues in clinical research, ranging from how research questions are formulated, to how to find and synthesize the research that is produced. The third section comprises four case studies of widely used evaluations and treatments. These case examples are exercises in critical thinking, applying the questions and methods outlined in other sections of the book. Each chapter suggests strategies to help clinical research be more useful for clinicians and more relevant for patients.

This chapter develops an account of prolific Indian author and peace activist Wahiduddin Khan in terms of his approach to exegesis, his apologetics in relation to the natural sciences, his Islamocentric conception to historical teleology, his approach to political quietism, and his valorisation of the principle of strategic concession.

This chapter surveys both the rich tradition of Renaissance botanical literature and some of the critical strategies currently developing around them: ecocriticism, ecofeminism, and critical plant studies. It focuses on the co-existence of myth and science in Renaissance botanical texts and the capacity of Renaissance literature to clarify the advantages and drawbacks of bestowing personhood on plants. Renaissance literature reveals the socio-political, intellectual, and aesthetic processes by which plants became hostage to two separate cultures: the scientific and aesthetic. The chapter also argues that a properly historicised view of Renaissance plant writing might in some respects make early modern texts more relevant to the present by reviving pre-Enlightenment worldviews and pre-Industrial notions of ecological enmeshment.

The artes, in the sense of systematic treatises on various disciplines of specialized knowledge, are not well understood today because they are usually studied in isolation from one another. This book argues that the artes of the early Roman Empire—the period of the greatest flourishing of this kind of literature—belong to a common intellectual culture and ought to be studied together. Their unity stems ultimately from a shared preoccupation with relating theory to practice vis-à-vis disciplinary expertise. Within the artes, the theory–practice problem stimulated the emergence of theories of knowledge and theories of nature embedding Roman specialized knowledge in a broader understanding of the world. Indeed, the artes crystallize a uniquely Roman scientific culture that has not been previously recognized as such. The aim of this book is to study this scientific culture.

The artes of the early Roman Empire are much more than manuals or handbooks intended to communicate the elements of practical expertise: they are vehicles for the articulation of Roman understandings of nature, knowledge, and society. This intellectual culture is premised on a theoretically sophisticated notion of ars that developed in the late Republic. It deserves to be regarded as a scientific culture because inter alia the artes elaborate different theories of nature and knowledge, draw upon many branches of ancient scientific inquiry, and employ methods characteristic of ancient scientific thought and practice. The artes Romanize specialized knowledge insofar as they plot their scientific contents along the geographic and temporal axes of Roman power. Ultimately, the artes constitute a unified intellectual phenomenon and should be studied as a part of the scientific culture to which they belong.

This chapter argues that, throughout the 1870s, literary understandings of voice were transformed by, and also helped to shape, acoustic technologies and sciences. Developments in physics and physiology, and the invention of the telephone and the phonograph at the decade’s end, offered new ways of describing how the human voice was formed, transmitted, and heard. However, these developments also reimagined voice as something not exclusively human, continuous with a wide spectrum of inarticulate and non-human sounds. This dehumanisation threatened to undermine established definitions of literary voice, but literary and scientific writers also identified similarities between their respective theorisations of speech and sound, and ‘voice’ became a keyword that was frequently used to examine the wider relations between science and literature. After discussing George Eliot’s views on the possible implications of new vocal technologies for prose fiction, the chapter turns to the sonnets of Emily Pfeiffer, which examine how scientific models of voice might complicate and reimagine poetry’s conventional status as the most essentially vocal of literary forms.