Martial Poirson foregrounds France’s greatest writer of comedy and the most widely read, performed and translated French-language playwright in the world, Molière. Highlighting the myths that have thrived around this national treasure, Poirson notes that almost nothing is known about the biography and history of this national treasure. Inseparable from the nation’s narration of itself and of its status at the centre of colonial empire, Molière has been celebrated for his supposedly republican values, and his language – ‘la langue de Molière’ – has become foundational in France and exported, sometimes aggressively, across la francophonie, or the French-speaking world. Notably, Poirson provides insights into how Molière’s language and oeuvre fared in colonized Indochina. With astonishing constancy and unparalleled resilience, Molière has persisted in the French and international cultural subconscious for over four centuries.

The Poet’s Voice is an intervention in the field of classics and is committed to the slow, close reading of Greek texts. The testing of how critical activity could be transformed by theoretical reflection is to be found in how the texts of antiquity were opened to a transformative exploration of their meaning. The practice of the discipline – how texts are read and understood, what questions are authorized, what sorts of answers countenanced – is what is at stake in such an enterprise. The Poet’s Voice is written from within the discipline of classics, to transform it from within, and hence its focus is on critically reading the texts of the discipline, both the ancient literature and its modern critics. That is how its theoretical commitment is embodied and enacted.

Historical revivalism has proved to be an ever-constant thread in the reception of Vaughan Williams and his contemporaries. Question of cultural heritage and national history were pressing ones during Vaughan Williams’s lifetime, both as topics of academic study and subjects of popular appeal. England in this period drew enormous pride from its literary and artistic history, and this history in turn fuelled a national image that helped create a sense of a unique national destiny. For the period’s perceived musical ‘renaissance’, similarly, the important influence of English heritage and the nation’s historical musical canon on new English works was a persistent trope.

It is important, however, to create more nuanced accounts of how historical revivalism figured in English musical modernism. In this chapter, I focus on three main elements in English musical revivalism during Vaughan Williams’s lifetime. First, I explore contemporary attitudes towards history, English musicological writing during the period, and new attitudes towards manuscripts and archival research. I then outline how the products of music historians and archival researchers created actual performances of early music via editions and concerts. Finally, I note the expansion of this ‘sounding’ early music into spaces where historical music could be marketed as an element of mass culture.

In Chapter 5, the focus is on the development of arithmetical operations. I review empirical literature and argue that addition has plausibly developed as a direct continuation of counting procedures, which in turn made it possible to develop other arithmetical operations (multiplication, subtraction, and division). After that, reviewing literature on different cultures, I show the importance of arithmetical applications for the development of arithmetic – or the lack of it. While arithmetical operations have developed in similar ways in different cultures (when arithmetic was indeed developed), in the final section I show how some aspects of Western arithmetic – for example, proofs, axiomatisations and infinity – are more culturally specific.

In Chapter 6, I discuss the way knowledge and skills evolve culturally. Starting from the notion of cumulative cultural evolution, I show how the emergence of arithmetical knowledge and skills can be understood as the product of trans-generational cultural evolution. Cumulative cultural evolution, however, requires a particular type of social learning, called cultural learning in the literature. To make sense of this problematic notion, I propose the non-circular characterisation of cultural learning as learning that takes place through processes of passing information that are clearer, less ambiguous and more enduring than other forms of social learning. I also present an account of how innovation of new contents is possible in the framework of cultural learning and cumulative cultural evolution. Finally, I evaluate the five predictions made in Chapter 3 from the perspective of phylogeny and cultural history.

In Chapter 4, I move the focus from ontogeny (the level of the individual) to phylogeny and cultural history (the level of communities). Starting from the question of which came first, numerals or number concepts, I review literature (e.g., Overmann) applying the material engagement theory of Malafouris, according to which numeral systems developed as the result of interactions with our environment. Following the work of dos Santos and Wiese, I then demonstrate how the most plausible explanation of the development of number concepts is that they co-evolved alongside numeral word systems. Therefore, I show how number concepts can be explained as cultural developments, which goes against nativist accounts of numbers.

This chapter considers the impact of Greek on Latin Literature. Unlike the expectations of modern post-colonial theory, the imperial Romans were captured by Greek culture. Latin literature’s relation to Greek becomes a key moment in the cultural self-definition of Rome. This cultural history is explored first through Cato the Elder as a figure who publicly was scornful of the impact of Greek culture on Rome, and who became thus for later Romans an icon of conservative opposition to cultural change. The chapter then considers how much Latin Greek writers might be presumed to know and, conversely, how Romans explicitly paraded their adaption and adaption of Greek material and Greek language in their writings. Third, the chapter considers the politics of code-switching between Greek and Latin. Fourth, the chapter looks at how this cultural conflict becomes a matter of Christian ideology as part of a politics of translation between Hebrew, Greek and Latin: what changes when God’s word is transformed between languages? Finally, the chapter asks what is known by Latin literature that Greek does not know (and vice versa)? What boundaries should we place between Greek and Latin literature?

In the last thirty years, the historiography of Spanish-American independence has emphasized the paradoxical centrality of the Spanish revolutionary process, with the key role of the Cortes of Cadiz, in the general economy of emancipation. It also emphasized the role of Saint-Domingue/Haiti as a factor of regional destabilization. As a consequence of these revisions, the French Revolution is no longer considered as the intellectual and political source of these movements. Nevertheless, they allow us to rethink the Franco-Hispanic relationship, and beyond that, the Atlantic revolutionary cycle, by reformulating two classic issues. The first is the re-evaluation of the impact of the French and Haitian revolutions in Spanish America. The second is concerned with the forms of their appropriation by the actors of independence.