A succinct account of the author’s mature constructive theological investment in a metaphysics of the Infinite. The opening section of this essay indicates a determination to weave metaphysical and soteriological concerns together without any implied separation of these from each other, or, alternatively, any premature collapse of one into the other. Latter parts of the essay then focus on how ‘Infinite Perfection’ came to prominence in Duns Scotus as the principal Christian thought-name for God, to ‘help theologians understand the positive (cataphatic) possibilities for naming God in the Bible and in philosophy as well as the negative (apophatic) limits of our knowledge’. Scotus’s confidence in abstract conceptual analysis and in ‘the power and ability of our finite minds’ helped to lead the Franciscan to crown ‘Infinity’ (above ‘Being’) as the highest name of the divine perfection. In this Scotus is also an ancestor of Descartes’s later modern discovery of the excessive idea of the Infinite within the human mind.

This chapter documents Old Comedy’s presentation of alcoholic consumption, both in a sympotic context and elsewhere, and to bring out how different was the perception of the consumption of wine by discerning citizens in a symposium, mixed with water and in moderation, from that by women or slaves, typically indiscriminately, neat and to excess

This final chapter explores mirror-writers’ diagnoses of political and social ills, and their proposed remedies for them. They range from kings’ propensities to indulge to excess in food, drink and sex, to the hazards of abandoning well-established and highly regarded practices, to external enemies’ seizing advantage at moments of internal weakness. The three extracts show shared concerns, especially with heterodoxy, portrayed as a mask for political dissent, as well as idiosyncratic concerns. Many of the narratives are presented as cautionary examples. Collectively, the texts convey the precarious nature of royal power and its limits. They are drawn from al-Thaʿālibī, Ādāb al-mulūk; Niẓām al-Mulk, Siyar al-mulūk; and al-Ṭurṭūshī, Sirāj al-mulūk.

It is a struggle to hold society together. Historically, that task has fallen both to law and religion. Sovereignty, the source of law’s binding power, like the miracle in Carl Schmidt’s political theology, lies outside law itself. That origin coincides with the kenotic excess of the sacred.

This chapter explores that strange excess through a visual genealogy of shifting sovereign imaginaries. They range from early modern legal emblems picturing the transcendental body of the King, to modern and late modern paintings and films depicting a metaphysical shift to the sacred body of the People. The question this visual history confronts is not whether the sacred binds the nomos of law, but how? The corporeal image goes beyond conceptual abstraction. It is a site from which desire (what Freud calls the cathexis of libido) binds us to values, rituals, and institutions. Libidinal investment ties us to a shared symbolic identity; disinvestment, by contrast, invites psychic and political-legal collapse.

As the contemporary crisis in liberal democracy deepens, we ask: what sovereign imaginary will break the pall of collective anxiety and unrest, and will it come in the service of human flourishing?

Mark Ford’s chapter on the prose style of Thomas Hardy’s fiction discerns something involuntary and dishevelled about Hardy’s style. Early reviewers lamented its bad taste and haphazard manner. But this chapter shows that therein lies a source of the novels’ power. Moments of scenic description and unexpected encounters are reviewed to reveal that the achieved faltering of Hardy’s style suggests the prose recognizing its own struggling efforts to come to terms with overmastering nature and fate.

Comic prose has much in common with other genres and styles; timing and balance, for example, are integral to its effects. Jonathan Greenberg and David Galef offer an examination of many different techniques in comic writing that build upon and depart from familiar strategies, many of them relying on upending expectations. The chapter enumerates various techniques, including reversal, elaboration, soundplay, excess (and restraint) and parody.

Chapter 3 considers the representation of the food gift in Shakespeare’s Pericles and Timon of Athens, and Massinger’s The Unnatural Combat. It argues that attention to hunger enables recognition of the role played by use value in gift exchange and places this in the context of the declining significance of traditions of hospitality in the period. It considers the recurrence of figures such as the discharged soldier and suggests that the soldier’s hunger constitutes a key means by which contemporary texts commented on the policies of pacifism carried out by monarchs such as James I. It emphasises the nostalgic dimension to representations of hospitality, but argues that this nostalgia frequently marks the system itself as untenable. It demonstrates that these plays manifest anxiety not simply at the scarcity and want which was produced by the nascent capitalist mode of production, but also at the problems of plenty and excess.

This chapter recapitulates the book’s core themes and arguments, opening with George Curzon 1907 lecture on ‘Frontiers’. Drawing on the famous American ‘frontier thesis’ of Frederick Jackson Turner, Curzon positioned imperial frontiers as spaces of excess and threat that held out the promise of national and racial salvation for Britain. By the age of high empire, agents of empire in India widely conceived of frontiers as spaces of productive tension between closure—in the form of clearly delineated borders, normalised and bureaucratised administration, and authoritative knowledge of people and space—and openness—in the form of spatial, epistemic, and administrative indeterminacy. They laboured to render the outskirts of empire ‘other spaces’, requiring distinctive types of knowledge and government under the unfettered guidance of ‘men on the spot’.

Roman elegy makes frequent use of themes of ugliness and disfigurement, juxtaposing them with images of ideal beauty and sentiment. In order to overcome the obstacles to his erotic relationship, the poet–lover repeatedly represents his rivals and opponents in such a way as to ridicule their appearance and to degrade their social standing. My purpose in this study is to explore the theme of corporeal, intellectual, and social degradation from a perspective attentive to the aesthetic significance of the grotesque imagery with which such degradation is accomplished. I undertake to show that the grotesque plays a significant role in the self-definition of the genre in which it is least expected. Grotesque and idealizing imagery constitute the polarities of a dialectic that lies at the core of elegy. Classical scholars have long been interested in the use of grotesque imagery in such genres as comedy, invective, and satire. There is a sophisticated discussion of the grotesque in these areas of classical literature, which are concerned in part with themes of transgression and excess. Grotesque imagery occurs frequently also in elegy, a genre that foregrounds love and beauty.

This chapter considers the intersection of Gothic and Orientalism in the long eighteenth century from the joint perspective of its origins and ideological relevance. Having traced the influence on Gothic of literary materials imported from the East, it examines the terrifying effects of commercial and imperial concerns in works such as William Beckford’s Vathek, Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya, Matthew Gregory Lewis’s ‘The Anaconda’, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Charles Robert Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer. The relevance of this commercial and imperial imaginary for figurations of subjectivity, the body and sexuality is then explored with reference to George Colman’s Blue-Beard, Robert Southey’s The Curse of Kehama, Byron’s ‘Turkish Tales’, Walter Scott’s ‘The Surgeon’s Daughter’ and the anonymous novel The Lustful Turk. Through its double focus, the chapter argues that, if the East is a foundational feature in early Gothic, the troubling power of Orientalist Gothic depends on distance and alienness, though also, and more perturbingly, on the proximity and contact promoted by an expanding commercial and territorial imperialism.

The Romans had a difficult relationship with the kind of luxury and excess that we think of as indicators of moral and social decadence. But in many ways they revelled in such luxury. Readily accepting the financial rewards of empire, they spent huge sums on their own benefits. Whether in the colossal public games in the amphitheatre and the circus, in the opulent imperial bath complexes, or in extravagant private villas, Romans of all social levels delighted in the very best that life was thought to offer. Chapter 1 examines how far the evidence supports this somewhat melodramatic view of Rome by looking at the ways in which luxury spread in the Roman world. It also looks at the ways this growth in luxury compelled the Romans to create new concepts to understand the phenomenon. Luxury was almost never seen as a simple index of increased wealth. Rather, it raised all manner of moral issues among Rome’s ruling classes, many of which long outlived the end of the Roman empire itself.

The Romans had a difficult relationship with the kind of luxury and excess that we think of as indicators of moral and social decadence. But in many ways they revelled in such luxury. Readily accepting the financial rewards of empire, they spent huge sums on their own benefits. Whether in the colossal public games in the amphitheatre and the circus, in the opulent imperial bath complexes, or in extravagant private villas, Romans of all social levels delighted in the very best that life was thought to offer. Chapter 1 examines how far the evidence supports this somewhat melodramatic view of Rome by looking at the ways in which luxury spread in the Roman world. It also looks at the ways this growth in luxury compelled the Romans to create new concepts to understand the phenomenon. Luxury was almost never seen as a simple index of increased wealth. Rather, it raised all manner of moral issues among Rome’s ruling classes, many of which long outlived the end of the Roman empire itself.