This chapter traces the publication history and animating ideas of Luciani Opuscula, a set of translations of Lucian begun as a collaboration between Thomas More and Desiderius Erasmus. I examine the volume’s contents, which grew over time as Erasmus kept adding to them, and the letters with which both translators prefaced their own selections, explaining to fellow humanists how the works are to be read. These interpretive letters tell us much about how the two great northern humanists understood Lucian and what role he played in their own evolution as the foremost ‘Lucianists’ of their age.

Some of the earliest witnesses to the Book of Isaiah are translations into Greek and Syriac. Sometimes the translators offered not simply basic equivalents to Hebrew words but shaped their translation of passages to accord with understandings of them that were current in their Jewish communities. Although this can make the window to their Hebrew text opaque, sometimes their differences from today’s standard Hebrew text preserve alternative wordings found elsewhere in early Hebrew texts, while in other cases they include wordings that have not survived in any other Hebrew witnesses. The chief question such differences raise is whether the translator tailored his version to the readers’ pre-understanding or if they reflect different Hebrew words in the manuscript he used. In “Early Versions of Isaiah as Translations and Interpretations,” Ronald L. Troxel cites examples of these conundrums, and illustrates how scholars attempt to reason about their origins.

Chapter 1 presents my “alternative fieldwork,” how I make sense of my predecessors’ fieldwork and fieldnotes. I introduce Xia Xizhou in its historical cultural context, including its colonial history and changing kinship, economy, and schooling system. I contextualize the multiple boundaries, identities, and relationships between the researched and the researchers and highlight children's agency. I recover the experience of native research assistants, not just as mediators between anthropologists and children, but as lively characters participating in children’s moral development journey. I expose the challenges of reconstructing this ethnography and the puzzles I encountered. I reveal the inherent ethical dimension of actions and interactions that made ethnographic knowledge possible. I also draw from my own experience and expertise to discern the voices, silences and voids in this archive. Throughout this chapter, I connect my discussion of reinterpreting historical fieldnotes to children's developing social cognition and moral sensibilities, which provides the foundation for intersubjectivity and communication in the original fieldwork and in the making of fieldnotes.

The introduction sets the book’s agenda: to offer a novel account of crusade culture from the Mamlūk reconquest of Acre (1291) to the Ottoman siege of Constantinople (1453) drawing on Middle English romances and their contexts in various literary, historical, and legal documents (in English, French, Occitan, German, and Latin). The political culture to which post-1291 crusade romances belonged, I argue, was ambivalent, self-critical, and riddled with anxieties. These anxieties were about issues as fundamental and diverse as God’s endorsement of the crusading enterprise, the conversion of crusaders to Islam, sinfulness and divisions within the Christian community, and the morality of violence. After situating the book’s key claims within debates on Edward Said’s Orientalism and crusade literature, I present its methodology: engaged historicism, attention to how romance writers adapted their sources, and analysis of emotional rhetoric. The book’s contributions to the history of emotions and Middle English studies are discussed, as are the new insights it provides into the historical dimensions of the genre of romance.

This article examines the relationship between the late antique and medieval Dyothelete Chalcedonian community of the Middle East–commonly referred to as the Melkites or Rum–and surveys the evidence for the use of Syriac by these communities. Because Melkites have more commonly been associated with the use of Greek and Arabic, an argument is made that a number of factors–among them the Monothelete/Dyothelete split in the Middle Eastern Dyothelete church, liturgical Byzantinization, and the destruction of manuscripts–have distorted more recent understandings of the relationship of this church with the Syriac language and obscured the reality that a number of medieval Melkites used Syriac for Christian purposes.

Transnational networks were significant in the production of musical theatre in 1923 and 1924. Musicals created in one country transferred to another (Stop Flirting, Little Nellie Kelly), composers were writing works specifically for different countries (Jerome Kern: The Beauty Prize for the United Kingdom, Stepping Stones for the USA), and some musicals told a story about a different country (Wildflower, Il paese dei campanelli (The Land of the Bells)). New stars such as Adele and Fred Astaire appeared on marquees, as did established ones such as Fred Stone. Works originating in one place, such as Maurice Yvain’s Ta bouche, from Paris, came to the USA as One Kiss in an adaptation by Clare Kummer. This vibrant co-existence of the old and the new, the established and the emerging, was a key part of musical theatre in 1924.

Many of the musicals that opened in 1923 and played into 1924 hearkened back, somewhat nostalgically, for simpler times, though the stories were often fraught with deceit and sometimes could be a bit salacious. The lead female characters in such works ranged from a young waif who ends up travelling with a circus (Poppy) to a Russian empress (Catherine), a royal mistress (Madame Pompadour) and a young Spanish woman who finds herself in a complex labyrinth of romantic entailments (Doña Francisquita).

This chapter covers the complete life cycle of microRNAs, from start to finish. Beginning with their location in the genome, how they are transcribed and some of the factors that switch microRNAs on and off, it moves next to the biochemical steps involved in the step-wise processing of the precursor RNA by the enzymes Drosha and Dicer, before the microRNA is eventually loaded into a pocket in the Argonaute protein ready to carry out gene silencing. For some steps, a deeper look is taken into the atomic structures of these biological nanomachines and how they pivot and adjust to join together proteins and RNA as they perform their functions. This includes the remarkable search strategy by which the gene silencing complex containing a microRNA probes for binding sites on mRNA targets. Finally comes the molecular decision-making behind how much protein is reduced and by what mechanism. The when and how a microRNA knows its work is done and what finally extinguishes its effects. Again, the chapter conveys the intense competition among scientists vying to answer the next question and the one after that, which was a potent accelerant for discovery.

The process of how we get from gene to protein is one of the most intensely studied and best understood in biology. The reading of DNA, the generation of a messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) and the translation of that transcript into a protein through assembling chains of amino acids. But what we thought we knew about the gene pathway changed forever in 1993, when Gary Ruvkun and Victor Ambros discovered microRNAs. This chapter begins by explaining the basic biochemistry of genes and proteins before moving on to the seminal work of 30 years ago. The objective of those experiments was to understand which genes controlled the timing of animal development in a worm called Caenorhabditis elegans. That led to the realisation that a gene called lin−4, crucial for worms to transition from juvenile to adult stages, did not code for a protein; instead, its RNA acted by sticking to the mRNA of a protein-coding gene. Lin−4 was a gene silencer, working to lower the amounts of protein in cells. The finding of a new step on the journey from gene to protein would go on to transform our understanding of the biology of living organisms.

Although maternal, newborn, child, and adolescent health is a well-established determinant of health across the lifecourse and across generations, the underpinning concept of DOHaD has not had significant impact on policymaking. This chapter identifies some of the barriers involved and how DOHaD researchers may overcome them. Policymaking is a complex process that is influenced by many factors other than science. Translating evidence to policy requires brokerage that explains the implications of science in a clear, frank way, accompanied by impactful solutions. Yet, the largely preventive approach advocated by DOHaD science does not inherently offer simple, high-impact interventions but rather a broad shift in thinking within the policy community. DOHaD advocacy will need to demonstrate short- and medium-term, as well as long-term, benefits. A complementary approach is to engage with communities to adjust scientific ideas to local knowledge and expertise.

The chapter contains a brief summary of what transformations are and how we understand symmetry.

Peripheral-patronage states have several ways in which they can respond to the bind outlined in Chapter 2. These strategies – recruiting, concealing and insulating – are usually selected according to the state’s possession or lack of domestic capacity and autonomy from outside interference. Some states fail to strategize, finding themselves in the unusual position of being granted autonomy, but lacking the capacity to use the space it provides. Concealing, which involves an invitation of outside scrutiny with the intent to manage the process that follows, is the most interesting strategy because, when successful, it can erode the international norms its users invoke. Successful concealing is possible when the concealing state is both illegible to outsiders and capitalizes on an asymmetrically interdependent relationship with its larger partner in which each has the capacity to harm the other’s reputation. As a result, the concealing state receives the larger actor’s seal of approval for conduct that actually undermines the latter’s chosen norm.

This chapter traces the emergence of the fairy tale as a generically defined form in Britain in the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and argues that this process of generic consolidation was the product of a series of fruitful creative and commercial interchanges of narrative tradition with the continent of Europe. To make this argument, the chapter focuses upon the importance, for British approaches to the fairy tale, of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French vogues for literary fairy tales, and the revolution in approaches to traditional storytelling spearheaded in nineteenth-century Germany. It is also proposed that the work of the Scottish fairy-tale collector and anthologist Andrew Lang in consolidating and popularizing these continental traditions at the end of the nineteenth century was instrumental in giving shape to British ideas about the fairy tale at the cusp of the twentieth century. Writers, translators, and collectors considered in this chapter include Marie Catherine d’Aulnoy, Charles Perrault, Jean-Marie Leprince de Beaumont, Jacob Grimm, Wilhelm Grimm, and Robert Samber.

The blockade has been a long-standing economic and military tactic to isolate enemy nations and force them to endure siege conditions. This chapter examines how British or pro-British cultural actors managed to disseminate propagandized cultural texts and information via secret channels of communication, smuggling in the cultural capital of the enemy nation(s). The first example is the Bibliothèque britannique, the Geneva-based journal which commissioned and published many translations of British scientific and literary works during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars; second, the translation activity during 1914–18 with poetry as case study; third, the role played by the pro-European group, the Federal Union and finally the internationalism and human rights discourse of writing advocated by PEN in London during the Second World War. The chapter concludes with a Cold War section examining soft diplomacy in the use of literature and art to disseminate liberal thinking behind the Iron Curtain. How far do these blockade moments articulate federal and internationalist aims and projects while risking isolationist rhetoric in the construction of liberal ideals in wartime?