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This chapter discusses the work of Richard Heinze on Virgil's Aeneid. It provides a fascinating and well-informed analysis of Heinze's work in his epoch-making ‘Virgil's Epic Technique.’ This does not merely present Heinze's well-known role as the founder of the modern study of the poem's subjectivity, but most effectively sets his concerns and critical stance in the German intellectual context of his time. This chapter notes the ‘carve-up’ of Virgilian topics between Heinze and his friend Norden, simultaneously engaged on his great edition of Aeneid 6, but more importantly shows how Heinze was fundamentally concerned to rebut the German Romantic criticism of Virgil as artificial and derivative. Wilhelm Dilthey's hermeneutic historicism and the view that the interpretation of literature is ‘recreation’ is brilliantly shown to be an animating principle of Heinze's view on the Aeneid's recreation of Homer.

This chapter argues that accounts of Nordic states as ‘good states’, or as ‘norm entrepreneurs’, pay insufficient attention to the politics of transforming the institutional structures of the Nordic empires from the turn of the 20^th century to welfare states since the 1930s. To provide a novel, institutionalist alternative, the chapter provides a historical narrative of the Nordic model as a scientific internationalist project. The chapter contrasts existing accounts of the birth of the Nordic model focused on the model being a victory of ‘labour power’ over industries, business and state elite in showing all the above shared a commitment to scientific planning of organisational arrangements in global politics. Not only were these ideas shared nationally, but they emerged from liberal internationalist transnational networks focused on economic reform and the building of international organizations from the late 19^th century to the 1960s. These networks were distinct from the development of the nationalist projects in different Nordic countries, and were importantly American in origin. In turn, scientific internationalist projects could only have been successful in the context of the strong Nordic state infrastructures and organizations which result from past empires, the early unison of the state and the church, and the limited experience with constitutional liberal democracy in the region.

Interest in Egypt, nurtured during the Renaissance, took firmer root within the context of the Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, with its interest in different and exotic cultures, past and present, and its more critical approach. A number of notable travelers appeared on the Nile, the best prepared and the most acute being the Jesuit Father Sicard. Unfortunately, most of Sicard's records were lost, but others like Paul Lucas, Frederik Ludwig Norden, and James Bruce, to mention only some, left important records of their journeys. European governments sponsored research expeditions to Egypt. Coptic studies continued to advance. Claude Etienne Savary and Constantin Volney surveyed the country with incipient imperialist assessments.

This introduction describes the strategic bombing mission of the US Army Air Forces’ Eighth Air Force against the Fock-Wulfe plant at Bremen, Germany, on April 17, 1943, assessing the use of high-altitude daylight precision bombing,. The introduction then reviews American strategic bombing theory from its origins in World War I to the thinking of three great interwar air power theorists―the Italian Giulio Douhet, the Briton Hugh Trenchard, and the American Billy Mitchell―to the founding of the Air Corps Tactical School (ACTS), the development of the Norden bombsight and B-17 bomber, and the genesis of HADPB theory at the Air Corps Tactical School.

This chapter focuses on the rise and fall of the use of the Florunner in peanut butter. The Florunner was developed by Al Norden, a peanut breeder and professor of agronomy at the University of Florida's main campus in Gainesville. Runners historically were thought of more as a hog peanut; a lot of them were planted just for feeding hogs. When Florunner came on the scene, there had been a significant improvement in oil chemistry and flavor, as well as yield and grade aspects. Despite the cruel and abusive remarks directed at runners by partisans of Spanish, Virginia, and Valencia peanuts, the Florunner and runner varieties that followed in its wake would increasingly become the stuff peanut butter was to be made of. But the Florunner would eventually wind up on the ash heap of peanut butter history, due in large part to the tomato spotted wilt virus. The fact that Florunners were grown in virtual monoculture may have contributed to their demise.

Taking its cue from William Sly’s performance of a disoriented playgoer in the Induction to John Marston’s The Malcontent, this chapter puts theatrical performance in dialogue with two other modes of thinking through place in the early modern period: first, what Mary Carruthers has termed the “architectural” model of the arts of memory, and, second, chorography, or the practice of describing a region in terms of its topographical features and history. It argues that these modes resemble one another in depicting place as a kind of phenomenological assemblage, one that comes into being as the disparate features of an ambient environment are perceived and organized within embodied thought. This resemblance reveals the intimate relationship between environment and embodied thought within the early modern English playhouse, and it thereby suggests that theatrical performance was less a form of spatial abstraction than a means of transforming the way that playgoers perceived, experienced, and navigated their surroundings.

This chapter focuses on the emergence of ‘Norden’ (which includes the Scandinavian countries Sweden, Norway, and Denmark plus Iceland and Finland) as a European region from the first half of the nineteenth century onwards. It argues that Nordic identification is based on the same external pressures responsible for the canalisation of the language of modernity. Both external and domestic pressures during the 1930s created a distinct profile of Europe and Norden in relation to the debates about how to deal with the Great Depression and the conflict unfolding in Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany. Nineteenth-century ‘Scandinavianism’ failed to achieve its stated goals, particularly regional unification, but nevertheless played an important role in the more gradual demarcation of the region.

The Introduction sets out the aims of the present book and explains its position in current scholarship. While an influential study by Eduard Norden (1913) argued, on the basis of a very limited corpus of texts, that early Greek religious poetry differed fundamentally from similar compositions in the ancient Near East, the current academic view is that early Greek literature was in fact pervaded by influence from Mesopotamian texts. Both positions are, however, based on questionable methods, and the Introduction explains that the present book aims not only to bring new primary sources to the debate but also to propose a better way to study possible contacts. The Introduction also describes the criteria that have been used to select the corpus of sources on which this study is based.

This chapter briefly reviews the early Greek sources that form the basis of the comparison with the corresponding Near Eastern material. Unlike the Sumerian, Akkadian, and Hittite texts discussed in Chapters 1–3, early Greek religious poetry is well known and has frequently been analysed by modern scholarship. The present chapter generally follows the work of Eduard Norden and subsequent scholars, although it rejects the widely accepted distinction between ‘cult hymns’ and ‘literary (or: epic) hymns’. Based on the Homeric Hymns, Hesiod, various lyric poets, as well as passages taken from tragedy and comedy, the overview presented here describes the main formal aspects and commonplaces in early Greek religious poetry. Some comparative remarks serve to introduce the second part of the book, which is devoted to detailed case-studies on the basis of the text compiled in Chapters 1–4.

Chapter 2 contrasts Spenser’s affinity for the miniature with Samuel Daniel’s denigration of it. In his laureate poems, Daniel attempted to undermine the cheap county maps that provided an alternative geographic imaginary to James I’s royal unification of England with Scotland. To do so, he borrowed from the language of the survey, a privileged testing-ground for translating the national topography into a broadly comprehensible set of signifiers. Daniel’s chapbooks the Panegyrike Congratulatorie (1603) and the 1607 Funerall Poem both reject the egalitarian principles of practical surveying to instead map for James a magisterial imperial state. This interpretation offers a corrective to existing scholarship on the poet as a populist nationalist by arguing that his works articulated a deeply hierarchical view of the realm. I contrast Daniel’s geographical elitism with John Norden’s accessible pocket-sized guides and surveying manuals circulating in the commonwealth culture of the Inns of Court.

Chapter 3 turns to Ben Jonson’s first laureate chapbook, His Part (1604), written for James I’s first royal entrance into London. Here, Jonson imagines the Inns of Court as a lodestone that disrupts the imperial compass marking the king as the pole star of the state. Instead, Jonson points to the ordinary people at the center of the king’s newly conjoined realm. Jonson’s poems measure the commonwealth according to the standards of civic identity in ways that anticipate the practicality of the numeric distance tables in Norden’s Intended Guyde (1624). An archival discovery of King James’s personal copy of the Guyde also shows the presence of popular cartography at the highest spheres of British governance, and offers a fresh perspective on the kinds of geographical knowledge shaping the intersections of space, place, and national identity in the early seventeenth century.

The Introduction argues that in early modern Britain maps of sovereign power jostled against geographies of mundane resistance in ways that could marginalize bastions of social control. This spatial incongruity sprang from the practice of everyday life, through which consumers appropriated informational media in opportunistic ways. This chapter sets the scene for the rest of the book by showing that laureate poetry by writers such as Jonson and Spenser circulated alongside pocket maps and other forms of cheap print in public markets. Together, these texts inspired new paradigms of collectivity for a British society on the cusp of transitioning into a modern nation-state.

This chapter argues that Virgil was a poet not only of cosmos and of empire, but also of individuals. It analyzes, by turns, the solitude of figures, of language, and of literature in the Georgics and the Aeneid. It argues that the Georgics is a poem for humans, but not of them, culminating in the story of Orpheus and in the mannered circularity suggested by the Georgics’ revolutionary envoi. The chapter looks to Virgil’s adaptation of Homer’s Shield of Achilles as a touchstone for the poet’s solitary model of poetic composition and of reading, testing it against the poem’s narrative joints. From scenes of soliloquy to dream scenes, solitude, it shows, is a characteristic quality of the poem’s settings, figures, form and its poet’s persona, that last of which, the chapter argues, contributed to the biographical tradition’s Lives of Virgil from antiquity to the Renaissance.