The so-called Holiness Code of Leviticus highlights the importance of ethical living if Israel is to be holy as God is holy. This chapter discusses the historical-critical arguments around the composition of the Holiness Code but focuses mainly on bridge Leviticus creates between the holiness of Israel’s tent and God’s tent. Ethical purity is as important as ritual purity in Leviticus and requires holiness in every aspect of Israel’s life.

This chapter explores the economy of the later Roman Empire, with special emphasis on resource management, economic structures and regional variations. It highlights how land, labour and capital functioned within a largely agrarian system, with agriculture serving as the primary economic driver and tax base. The chapter examines diverse sources, including archaeological surveys, historical texts, coinage and environmental data. It analyses the effects of political instability, regional differentiation and resource distribution on economic trends. Case studies from North Gaul, Iberia, Italy and the Eastern Mediterranean reveal that economic activity was influenced by both local conditions and imperial policies. The study also incorporates ecological data, such as pollen analysis and lead pollution levels, to assess economic fluctuations. A central argument is that the later Roman economy was not a uniform system but a collection of interconnected regional economies. While political fragmentation led to economic contractions in some areas, others adapted through local specialisation and changing trade networks. This study thus challenges the view of economic collapse, instead emphasising resilience and adaptation, and calling for an interdisciplinary approach to better understand the complexities of late Roman economic life and its long-term transformations.

Not all eighteenth-century mock-arts were satires. The long, mixed blank-verse poems modelled on Virgil’s Georgics that were popular throughout the period always dealt positively with the practical, mechanical world. Georgic poems followed oblique strategies, coded into the genre by their ancient models: their paradoxically rational appeal to slow, unconscious experience and their characteristic swerves into digressive anecdote, haptic description and mythography. Georgic (like satire) is interested in the processes by which people sharpen their wits, not through the exercise of raillery, but through the ‘labor improbus’ of skilled work. Like the Scriblerian mock artists, Georgic writers applied representations of the mechanical arts to political contexts. Comparison between satirical mock arts and georgic poems is fruitful because of what they have in common: a rhetoric of indirection, a psychology focused on extended cognition and tacit knowledge and a fascination with the mechanics of commercial production.

Farming has modified the natural dynamic of soil erosion/redistribution in significant parts of landscapes, triggering high rates of soil loss and accelerating sediment connectivity. This chapter provides a review of sediment connectivity in grassland, herbaceous and woody crops from knowledge to management. The first section explores the extension of farmland at a global scale and the process of agricultural land expansion. Regarding herbaceous crops, the second section highlights the importance of cropping intensity (one or two crops per year), water supply (rainfed or irrigated), and crop rotation on the sediment-connectivity magnitude. In the section of woody crops, studies done in vineyards, olive groves and citrus orchards describe the processes of sediment connectivity with and without soil conservation practices (e.g., cover crops). The section of sediment connectivity in grasslands includes examples in alpine hillsides, valley bottom and lakes, emphasizing their role as sediment-trapping features. The last section deals with sediment dis-connectivity in farmland due to soil erosion control practices and governmental programs, with examples from Europe and China.

To what extent is the political commitment of the Athenians in 403 explained by their economic condition, regardless of whether they were owners of land and workshops or simply workers in a precarious situation? The character of Eutherus invites us to consider the role played by forms of collective identification based neither on adherence to a political camp – that of the democrats, neutrals, oligarchs or moderates – nor on membership of a statutory group, but on ‘work status.’ In fact, Thrasybulus’ army, in Samos in 411, as in Piraeus in 404/3, included misthōtoi citizens and metics, as well as former slaves, and one might be tempted to recognize in them the coalescence of free and nonfree individuals forming a chorus of precarious workers. At the same time, one cannot underestimate the elitist dimension of the policy conducted by the socalled moderates, such as Archinus, who, when democracy was restored, took care to destroy any possible alliance between workers brought together by the shared experience of battle.

Thirty-two attorneys joined the Rural Attorney Recruitment Program in South Dakota. This chapter explores their backgrounds and why they chose to practice law in rural areas. Beginning with these lawyers’ childhoods, the chapter explains the characteristics of the rural lawyers and explores which characteristics made lawyers more likely to stay.

This chapter concerns environmental relationships between Europe and the rest of the world. Europe and Europeans, and Europe’s flora and fauna, altered environments on other continents. The content of other continents’ biotas, and their soils, seas, and mineral veins, affected Europe too. These sorts of connections, involving animals, plants, microbes, minerals – and many other components of the natural world – had occasionally powerful impacts on European and indeed world history. They began many millennia ago. This chapter begins with an overview of Europe’s distinctive environmental features. It then turns to four broad and overlapping categories, all considered only as regards European connections to other world regions: Europe’s history of biological exchanges, beginning with the arrival from Southwest Asia of the Neolithic complex of domesticated plants and animals; its imperial environmental history, which began in the fifteenth century; its industrial environmental history, which began in late eighteenth century; and the intellectual environmental history of Europe’s interactions with the wider world, mainly between 1700 and 1950.

Introduces complexity of western ranching through the fictional Dutton Yellowstone Ranch, exploring the historical evolution of law and policy of western agricultural operations.

Columella wrote his Res rustica (c. AD 60/1–5) in the wake of a well-developed Roman tradition of agricultural writing. His approach to the ars distinguishes him from Republican predecessors such as Cato and Varro, however, and reflects the scientific culture of the artes of the early Empire. Columella presents agriculture as an august discipline requiring broad, interdisciplinary knowledge and theoretical understanding of nature. Depreciatory views of agriculture, imputed to other Romans, are explained as resulting from moral decline that has led to ignorance of correct technique. Columella’s discussions of manuring (Book II) and vine propagation (Book III) are shaped by his scientific conception of ars, as he argues that close appreciation of the principles of plant life provides the foundation for good agronomy. Columella’s treatise is not only the preeminent work of agronomy from Greco-Roman antiquity but also witness to the vibrant scientific culture of the artes.

This chapter argues that what Gerard Manley Hopkins termed the “rural scene” provided a focal point in the 1870s for profound changes in the Victorian understanding, valuation, and transformation of the natural world. British writing at this time demonstrates a shift from viewing the rural scene as picturesque landscape, as evidenced in provincial novels such as George Eliot’s Middlemarch, to conceiving of it as an environment encompassing human and nonhuman nature, notably in Richard Jefferies’ nature writings and Thomas Hardy’s first Wessex novels. Grasping the full scope of Victorian responses to the rural scene in the 1870s also requires looking to the expanding pastoral industries of the settler empire. Writing in and about the settler colonies of Australia and New Zealand, by Lady Barker, Rolf Boldrewood, and Anthony Trollope, highlights how a perceived absence of rural aesthetic values helped render colonial nature available for transformation and subsequent economic exploitation.

Wedderburn’s final pamphlet, Address to the Lord Brougham and Vaux, contributed to the early nineteenth-century political “war of representation” about whether Black people in the West Indies would be willing to work for wages after emancipation. Although seeming to reiterate the proslavery claim that enslaved people in the West Indies had better living conditions than European wage laborers, Wedderburn’s vision of dwelling on the land outlined a nuanced, speculative decolonial future. The Conclusion finally argues that narratives of the Romantic revolutionary age should include Black abolitionist geographies, a revolution cultivated on common land with pigs, pumpkins, and yams.