Opening with Leon Battista Alberti’s celebrated definition of painting as a reflection on the surface of the water according to the ancient myth of Narcissus, the introduction elucidates the analysis of the inset-mirror motif in Renaissance painting as a form of mise-en-abyme that was central to the conceptualisation and reception of early modern art.

This chapter considers the early modern artist’s use of mirrors, along with other visual aids, in both art theory and artistic practice, to argue that the mirror was a critical instrument of artistic mimesis. The mirror reflection became an acknowledged method of Renaissance artistic training because it united theory with practice. This is manifest above all in the efflorescence of the self-portrait c. 1500, then identified by the instrument of its making, as a ‘portrait made by a mirror’. The chapter concludes with Velazquez’ Las Meninas as the defining early modern mirror-image, comprising both the self-portrait and the inset mirror motif.

Children’s first words are remarkably consistent over languages and over time: They first talk about people (dada, mama), food (juice), body-parts (eye), clothing (sock), animals (dog), vehicles (car), toys (ball), household objects (key), routines (bye), and activities (uhoh, up). Their first productions emerge between 12 months and 24 months, and they attain some 50 words in production about 6 months later. Earlier claims about a vocabulary spurt may rather reflect increased motor skill that aids production. Do children learn to produce nouns before verbs? The proportions of nouns and verbs differ by context, e.g., toy play versus book reading. Spontaneous speech samples and parental checklists of vocabulary often differ. Overall, production lags behind comprehension. This leads to communicatively driven overextensions in production until 2;6 or so, as well as reliance on general purpose terms (do, go, that). As children add more words, they stop using earlier overextensions. Early word meanings are based on children’s existing conceptual and perceptual categories, based on their experience of the world so far. And as they take different perspectives, they begin to use of different words for the same referent (animal, dog, pug; do, mend).

“Gulliver has been a regular inspiration for film-makers since the earliest days of cinema. This chapter considers the various reasons for his popularity on screen and the challenges inherent in adapting Swift’s text. Among the latter are its lack of narrative unity and the discrepancies between what people think they know of the book and how it actually conducts itself. From silent French films to groundbreaking animations and Hollywood blockbusters, such concerns have always informed the kinds of Gulliver presented to the world. At the same time, each adapter of Gulliver’s Travels explicitly or implicitly considers its relevance for cinema as form and spectacle. Swift’s capacity to disorientate, both in the shifting physical proportions of his characters and in the questionable literary dignity of his text, helps to align him with the experience of cinematic audiences and innovators worldwide. When we assess not only the changing figure of Gulliver but also the different varieties of otherness encountered through his screen afterlives, we can better appreciate the adaptation process as one in which our ideas of history and literature are themselves subject to interrogation.”

Using several examples, I discuss the features of Byzantine icons as a form of representational art. In addition to tensions which can occur within the image itself, I point out tensions between the expression of a glory which surpasses the limitations of the aesthetics alone (through the use of gold, perspective, and the mandorla) as well as an impoverishment which falls well beneath what images are capable of (the submission of the painting to prescribed word, in content, style, and name). This paradoxical inclusion of highs and lows, straining against the limits of representation on both sides, hints that the icon is aiming to express a meaning greater than the image alone.

This chapter picks up on the puzzle raised in the previous chapter and attempts in detail to vindicate the unity of the dialogue as a Platonic vehicle for critical engagment by the reader. Focussing on the Charmides section, it lays out and discusses a series of key themes and contrasts which, it is argued, both prepare the reader for Socrates’ discussion with Critias to come and are illuminated on subsequent reading by that discussion. It argues that the way these themes and contrasts are presented is designed to induce readers into occupying a stance of enquiry that orients us towards critical engagement with the Critias section. The chapter ends with an analysis of how the final section of the dialogue, in which Charmides reappears, plays a role in sustaining this critical stance on the reader’s part.

Story of escaping the Holocaust and concentration camps. Becoming refugees. Lessons of adaptation. As we age, change is inevitable. Those who are successful are willing to make the necessary alterations to their current lifestyle. It’s all about adaptability. Two types of people as they age: Denialists and Realists. Anticipating and planning adjustments to your everyday way of doing things can make a tremendous difference in well-being. Ultimately, happiness comes from the inside, not the outside. It is understanding that each of us is a precious human life. If we can learn to adapt as we grow old, and be grateful, it allows us to find a new fullness of joy.

The history of the English Dominicans has been too little studied, in part because much documentary evidence has been lost. The present book is the first comprehensive history of the Province for a century. Its value lies not only in covering developments that have taken place since 1921, and in drawing on recent research for its account of earlier periods, but in offering a critical re-evaluation of the evidence from a fresh perspective. The book adopts an inclusive approach where earlier studies were often weakened through being limited to a particular region or individual, or by focussing more on the earliest growth of the Province than on later developments, by inattention to opponents of the friars, or by neglect of their relations to lay supporters.

This paper offers a provocative re-reading of the passage about the sizes of the sun, moon, and stars late in Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura (5.564-613). Attention to not only details of argumentation but also shades of meaning and contorted syntax shows a more complex, ambiguous presentation than generally acknowledged. This paper suggests that Lucretius' narrator—rather than merely parroting wrong, ridiculed doctrines—pulls student-readers into the process of inquiry. It becomes the didactic audience’s task to receive data from sense-perception and use lessons learned earlier in the poem in making correct judgments based upon that data. In Epicurean and Lucretian accounts of reality, the senses themselves are infallible; so the Lucretius-ego’s assertion that the sun as big as perceived by our senses must also be infallible. But our interpretation of what that assertion entails about the sun’s actual size is a matter of judgment, and thus fallible and uncertain indeed.

This chapter continues the discussion of Second Style paintings, concentrating on prominent examples at Pompeii and in Rome on the Palatine Hill. Paintings from the ‘House of Augustus’ and the adjacent House of Livia are examined and analysed in detail. The focus is upon examples of theatricalism and more overt theatricality evident in such works. Particular attention is drawn to stage-like structures and the suggestion of scenic facades (including depictions of townscapes) which feature prominently in several of the frescoes. There is also a close analysis of the systems of perspectival depiction deployed in these works.

In Chapter 3, Herbert’s verse is read in the context of another collaborative enterprise, the Stuart court masque. These playful and extravagant secular entertainments are an unusual context against which to set Herbert’s often modest devotional poetic, though Herbert can hardly have been ignorant of the genre: members of Herbert’s family – including the Earls of Pembroke, their wives and children, and Herbert’s own brother Sir Henry Herbert (c.1594–1673), sometime Master of the Revels – were involved in their performance and production. This chapter offers the court masque as a particularly vivid contemporary genre that engages with the possibilities of interdisciplinary expression. These entertainments alert us not only to the interplay between words and music, but also to the ways in which musical ideas of harmonious proportion might be expressed visually through the stage’s elaborate perspectival sets, and through the moving human medium of dance.

We examine a previously undiscussed interaction between tense and predicates of personal taste (PPTs). While disagreements involving delicious or fun are generally considered faultless – they have no clear fact of the matter – we observe that, in joint oral narratives, this faultlessness varies with tense: if the narrative is told in the historical present, disagreements involving a PPT are not faultless. Drawing on narrative research in psychology and discourse analysis, we propose that this contrast reflects a pragmatic convention of the narrative genre that participants construct a consensus version of what happened from a unitary perspective. To link this pragmatics with the semantics, we adopt a bicontextual semantics, where the perspectival parameters for both PPTs and tense are located in a context of assessment (and not context of utterance). We show that when these contextual parameters are constrained by the unitary perspective of narratives, the present tense leads to nonfaultless disagreements, as its semantics tightly binds the temporal location of an event to the parameter relevant for appraisal. The past tense, by contrast, enables both faultless and nonfaultless disagreements. We derive this flexibility by revising the existing semantics for past tense, engendering a new perspective on crosslinguistic variation in tense usage.

This chapter defines the gaze of modernity, a way of seeing and understanding the world that began during the Renaissance and continued during the Cold War in Latin America. It presents three key moments in the development of this gaze: Brunelleschi's invention of perspectiva artificialis in the 1400s, and its multifaceted consequences in the arts and sciences. Bentham's notion of panopticon in 1787, and its connection to the concept of surveillance. Robert Barker's creation also in 1787, the panorama. Finally, the chapter examines the relevance of the archive in theoretical terms, highlighting the connections to the panopticon and panorama, and discussing some of the archive's fundamental contradictions.