This chapter extends philosophical comparison to Montaigne, whose first translator, Florio, was Shakespeare’s friend. The chapter focusses on likenesses and unlikenesses, but brings out a common wisdom. There are confluences of nature and taste. Both find pleasure the central motivation for literary study. Their essays take different forms but assert Reason’s instability; Montaigne’s array of topics remains prescient of Johnson’s. Thus, the “ondoyant et divers” qualities of Montaigne are reflected in the “mingled” drama Johnson attributed to Shakespeare; likewise, the Johnsonian flux of experience links Johnson’s Rasselas with Montaigne’s “Of Experience.” The tendency of Imagination to dominate reason recalls, similarly, Montaigne’s “Apology for Raimond de Sebonde.” The effort to live according to nature is defeated by nature. The chapter concludes with discussion of the Lives. Montaigne’s sense of the random and various ways by which life comes to an end anticipates Johnson’s accounts of the deaths of the poets.

This penultimate chapter introduces two complete editions of the Lives. The first was published in 2006 by Oxford University Press and the second in 2010 by Yale. The value of these editions is the attention they bring to the textual details of Johnson’s critical writing; they promote accuracy in dealing with his terminology. Evaluating Johnson’s criteria depends on such detail. The editions invite us to look more closely at the implicit meanings within the overall structure. They are of course very different and suggest different editorial cultures. The Oxford is very ample in its commentary; the Yale annotation is leaner and conforms in editorial style to the Works to which it belongs. Different users will find merits in both approaches, and a final preference is difficult to determine given the different ways in which Johnson’s critical and biographical writings are read or used. But both editions, in their ambition and magnitude, suggest the persistent presence of Johnson’s critical writing and are crucial to its reception.

Sources that contain testimonies regarding the part of the Mongol Empire known to the Rus′ can be divided into three broad genre categories: chronicles, tales and saints’ lives, and documents. Rus′ sources from the first encounter of the Rus′ with the Mongols in 1223 through the seventeenth century concerning the Ulus of Jochi and its successor khanates can be divided into three chronological phases: 1223−1252, 1252−1448, and post-1448. Those written during the first phase, 1223−1252, initially express bewilderment about who the Mongols are and simply explain their presence as God’s punishment for the sins of the Rus′. Soon, however, they begin to disparage the Mongols and their Tatar subjects. Between 1252 and 1448, the Tatars are presented in neutral (non-disparaging) terms. After 1448, church writings revert to the pre-1252 pejorative terminology about the Mongol–Tatars and expand on the slurs and denigrations. State documents, in contrast, maintain neutral verbiage.

The chapter is divided into three sections. In the first section I discuss Plutarch’s life and work in the general context of the first century CE. Following this, I provide a short analysis of six of Plutarch’s Lives, Lycurgus, Numa, Alexander, Caesar, Antony and Phocion, to demonstrate the key themes highlighted by scholars of his thought, and to introduce readers to accounts which figure among the most prominent as references in Western intellectual traditions. In the concluding section I offer a comparison and contrast between Cicero’s On Duties and the themes of Plutarch’s Lives and his moral essays devoted to questions of public life. This comparison highlights what distinguishes Plutarch’s contribution and signals his unique contribution to traditions of political reflection on public life and public service.

In and after 1819, particularly after Peterloo, support for radical change among disfranchised Londoners broadened.The conspirators themselves were ‘ordinary Britons’.In no senses part of the ‘mob’, they were craftsmen with families who were losing craft status and income in the worsening post-war economy. Many had the common disabilities of the poor, but Wivell’s extraordinary prison portraits show their common humanity. Most were shoemakers, a craft that was famously literate, thoughtful, and radical.

This chapter explores the competing memories about the transmission of Sir Thomas More’s hair-shirt – the penitential garment he wore beneath his clothing for most of his adult life – the object’s significance to More’s descendants, and its devotional and memorial function within the religious communities they founded or patronised between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. At the heart of the hair-shirt story are two Margarets: his blood daughter, Margaret Roper (1505–44), and his adopted ward, Margaret Giggs (1508–70). Different historical accounts claim each Margaret as uniquely aware of More’s asceticism, and that they each received the hair-shirt from him when he died. These claims suggest each woman had a superlative connection to More’s spirituality and beliefs. The hair-shirt symbolises More’s deep commitment to God throughout his political career and service to Henry VIII, a commitment that would cost him his life. More’s state execution both literally and figuratively exposed the hair-shirt and his largely private devotional practices. The hair-shirt became a new surface on which memories of the Reformation, and the construction of English Catholic identity have been formed from the sixteenth century to the present day.