Since the early nineteenth century, critics have noted John Clare’s unusually attentive eye for animals. From his earliest published pieces to the final poems transcribed from manuscripts in Northampton Asylum, Clare’s poetry is packed with animal life. This piece closely reads two sonnets from the middle of his career to investigate the breadth and complexity of his engagement with multiple non-human modes of being. It then turns to a representative range of other examples from his work and touches briefly upon critical analogies drawn between the poet and the non-human creatures about which he writes. The piece focuses repeatedly on the variety in Clare’s representations of animals and the consequent difficulty of drawing singular critical conclusions from them. In the process, it explores tensions in Clare’s poetry between themes of interconnection and alienation, freedom and confinement, profusion and scarcity, resilience and fragility, and exposure and agency.

Using the question – Can humans naturally infer a creator from created things? – I explore examples of Hellenistic Jewish thinking that hybridizes the Hebraic philosophical style with the Hellenist. Wisdom of Solomon and Philo are compared to Paul's treatmetn of this question in Athens (Acts 17; Rom 1–2). Paul takes a distinctively Hebraic approach while Wisdom and Philo show signs of significant hybridity.

This chapter discusses the evidence for the existence of creeds before Nicaea and the purpose for which they might have been employed. The rival accounts of the origin of the Nicene formula are compared, together with the variants in the wording and the different accounts of its origin. The biblical texts that lie behind each verse of the creed are examined, and Beatrice’s argument for a pagan origin of the term homoousios is weighed against other theories. The anathemas require particular study, since the anathema on the term ktiston (“created”) is not preserved in all sources, but is crucial to the argumentation of Athanasius, who claims that it has the authority of Eusebius. The chapter then asks how the Nicene Creed was regarded after the end of the council, and whether subsequent creedal formulations were meant to reinforce or supersede it, and how it attained the form that is now regularly employed in churches.