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One of the more puzzling historical questions of this study is why no organised order linked to an Upper-Egyptian tarīqa developed during this period. Given the facts– that Sufism was well established there by the Mamluk period, that there were numerous Sufi masters who maintained ribā†s across the landscape, and that these masters enjoyed widespread fame and recognition– it is surprising that not a single initiatic lineage was institutionalised and organised around one of these masters. Some of the early circles in Qinā would seem to have been ripe for such a development, but in each case the collectivity of Sufis around a particular master ceased to exist in the first or second generation after his death. We find instead that the master’s charismatic authority was itself institutionalised rather than any socially reproducible doctrine or praxis (i.e. a †arīqa). In terms of Blumer’s symbolic interactionism, we might say that these Sufi masters became the objects of veneration and not emulation. Thus, instead of organised (informally or otherwise) collectivities linked to an eponymous †arīqa, localised shrine cults emerged at the physical site of interment. The fact that a Sufi’s tomb would become the object of regular veneration and visitation was certainly not unusual or unique to Upper Egypt; this happened with most Sufi masters across Egypt during this period. But the specific form of Upper-Egyptian Sufism in this period seems to have completely displaced or foreclosed the possibility of other potential social formations. The answer to why this should be the case is inextricably linked to the way in which the Sufis of Upper Egypt produced.

This chapter argues that education was a key arena for spreading the influence of psychology. This is not a novel view, but it is argued that too much emphasis has been placed on the role of psychology in mental testing and child guidance as a tool of regulation, and too little on its significance for a more progressive pedagogy. It is argued that the latter reached well beyond the pioneering activities of figures like Montessori, the Russells, and A. S. Neill, and highlights the excitement about psychology among teachers exposed to the new ideas through teacher training. The role of psychological advice in childcare is considered, downplaying the influence of behaviourism and highlighting the ambivalence of psychologists towards popularization.

The political encouragements in the Physikalische Blätter reflected the budding awareness among German scientists of their social responsibility. This awareness is specifically articulated in the revised statutes of the German Physical Society (DPG). It later bore fruit in the — perhaps apologetically motivated — Mainau and G öttingen manifestos for responsible nuclear armaments policy. The popularization of science was seen as an effective antidote to socially blind over-specialization in science.

This chapter opens with novels by Mme de Staël and George Sand featuring women singers, together with a thematic opposition between north and south. Xavier Marmier’s description of Mignon as a fragile, ethereal being is then shown to inaugurate a popular image which is typecast in Ary Scheffer’s widely distributed pictures, perpetuated in Saint-Germain’s sentimental Catholic novel Mignon, and endorsed in Ambroise Thomas’s enormously successful opera. Mid-century lyric poetry (Nerval and Baudelaire) also carries an important memory of Mignon. The Mignon craze that swept through French culture of the late nineteenth century is traced through popular dramas and novels; however, a strand of parody apparent in Balzac’s Modeste Mignon is seen to recur in Zola’s Nana, and Mignon’s name is associated with corruption and sexual abjection in a number of fictions of this era.

This chapter focuses on the popularization of literature and historiography and the development of the bourgeois trend during the Mamluk period. It first considers the factors behind the popularization of culture and cultural production in the Mamluk sultanate before discussing the collective experiences of urban dwellers and their cultural manifestations, along with the link between social mobility and the bourgeois trend. It then examines changes in Mamluk culture, the rise of new types of patronage and new audiences for popular poetry, the spread of literacy, the emergence of middling classes and of new audiences for written literature, and the increased importance of Sufism. It also describes various manifestations of popularization in written cultural and literary production and compares the Egyptian and Syrian schools of medieval historiography. Finally, it looks at the so-called “civic interest” that connects many of the late Mamluk and early Ottoman historical writings.

In addition to and connected with its fresh metaphysics and philosophy of religion, the British Idealist school put forward a radically new kind of moral theory; one which might be called the idealist ethic of social self-realization. Rapidly gaining popularity, its re-construal of the moral problem came to be the dominant mode of thought in ethics for twenty years, and a major force for twenty more after that. This chapter examines that system of ethics, through detailed consideration of the theories of Bradley, Green, and Edward Caird. Particular attention is paid to the concepts of self-realization, the common good, ‘My Station and its Duties’, and the social conception of the self. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the various textbooks and manuals which popularized this conception of ethics.

This chapter contains an analysis of the changing rhetorical role of science in UK broadsheet newspapers from 1993 and 2005, and conclude that there have been noteworthy changes. First, science, and more specifically, the formulation the science, is increasingly employed as a model of authority, appealing to ethos rather than logos; the authority is asserted but relatively rarely justified, and this may be considered the most significant change in that it drives several others. At the same time, there has been a popularisation of the science in the newspapers as it becomes an ‘add on’ to popular stories. Furthermore, there is evidence that science is being progressively fitted into the news story format, which demands recency as a news value, as opposed to features-style reports. Finally, science appears to have shifted from its earlier place in opposition to art and culture, to a paradigm in which its primary alter, or opposition, is religion.

A favorite gendered cliché, the midlife crisis conjures up images of male indulgence and irresponsibility—but it was first successfully presented as a concept about women’s rights. This chapter introduces the feminist definition of midlife change put forward by the New York journalist Gail Sheehy in the 1970s. It examines Sheehy’s place in existing origin stories and disciplinary histories of the midlife crisis and challenges the dominant narrative of science popularization. Pointing to the focus on men in contemporary tales about midlife crisis, it highlights instead the particular relevance of life-choices and midlife reassessments for women. Lastly, it discusses the gendered double standard of aging and the literature on menopause, gender, and science, drawing attention to the relevance of feminist contributions and critical and liberating concepts of middle life and aging. In the course of the discussion, the chapter also gives an overview of the book.

For all the success, Passages was not to everybody’s liking—and if Sheehy’s feminist framework and engagement with social science made her concept of midlife crisis popular, they also constituted a critical target. The most influential criticism came from psychologists, psychiatrists, and psychoanalysts. Rather than rejecting the idea of middle life reinvention, they appropriated and reversed it. Chapter 5 makes visible the anti-feminist politics that motivated the redefinition of the midlife crisis and shows how the notion of popularization was weaponized to silence Sheehy. In the wake of Passages, the psychologist Daniel Levinson and the psychiatrists George Vaillant and Roger Gould advanced a male-centered definition of midlife rejuvenation that echoed Playboy fantasies and barred women from changing their lives. Demarcating “professional” from “popularized” science allowed them not just to discredit Sheehy’s authority, as other instruments of boundary work would have done; it also created expert competence over a concept of popular culture: Levinson, Vaillant, and Gould cast Sheehy’s bestseller as a watered-down version of their own research. This was successful: anti-feminism was allowed to parade as better science and the term “midlife crisis” was now primarily connected to men and corroborated, rather than abolished, traditional gender hierarchies.

The nineteenth century saw the scientific revolution come sweeping through the common culture, not just as technology or worldview, but more intimately, as a personal standard of truth. The Victorian "crisis of faith" finds its authenticity in this space of private conscience, as the new premium on evidence undercut belief without proof. But rather than a war between science and religion, most Victorians were battling over the terms of the peace. Institutional defenders sought an amicable division between clerical and academic authority, upholding what they could of social norms. Reformers pushed for a harder reconciliation between science and spirituality, dissatisfied with the status quo. Victorian spiritualism arrived on cue in 1852. Inside the séance circle, evidence and belief could advance together, letting faith rise with the fortunes of positivism. While spiritualism was highly customizable, it was still one overarching movement, hoping for a truth that could be shared. That convergence never came, but aspects of its epistemological project (proof of the unseen) carried forward with psychical research in the scientific idiom of consciousness. The Society for Psychical Research (1882) was the culminating effort by Victorian intellectuals to heal divided knowledge, putting synthesis not separation at the heart of modernity.

More than any other scientist of his day, Sir William Crookes's career traversed the spectrum of science’s many cultural localities. He was at once a poster boy of vocational science, a ringmaster of scientific spiritualism, a pioneer of the commercial scientific press, a national celebrity, and a professional disgrace who eventually raised himself up to rule the institutions that once held him down - and all the while hobbled by what would appear to have been an act of career suicide: his notorious promenade with the ghost of Katie King “immortalized” in his own spirit photography. Or is this episode better understood as a brilliant career gambit gone wrong? The recent report of the London Dialectical Society had left the country hanging. As of 1874, the im/possibility of “scientific spiritualism” had yet to be clarified, even for intellectuals. Crookes decided the question with his own spectacular downfall. Yet, by the end of the decade, his scientific reputation rose to new heights with the gasses glowing in his Crookes tube. “Radiant matter” was fully scientific, yet it subtly affirmed a spiritual substance. Crookes's discovery was so celebrated by physicists that William Carpenter accused them of having their own “dangerous theological prepossessions.”

This chapter examines works on meditation by Ledi Sayadaw to show his vision of meditative practice, grounded in features described in earlier chapters. Ledi popularizes practice for all people, whatever their station in life. He uses basic Abhidhamma study as the basis for meditation, stressing fundamental doctrinal categories, particularly the four elements of earth, fire, water, and wind. This approach simplifies practice, because such learning is sufficient for “dry insight meditation” (sukhavipassanā) that requires no prior “calming meditation” (samatha). Meditation becomes a practice that one can do in the midst of lay life. Abhidhamma emerges in the analysis as the factor that explains the birth of mass insight practice in Burma as nowhere else. In Ledi’s vision, the pursuit of awakening is part of modern lay life, and this fact reflects a Buddhist modernity that sees no conflict between religion and the modern world.

Schools are not the only places where scientists' knowledge of race makes its way to a lay audience. Formal education is just one of many institutions that reflect and convey scientific notions of racial difference to the public. Textbooks and course lectures are not the only vehicles for spreading scientists' concepts of race: laws, regulations, news reports, bureaucratic practices, and commercial goods and services also embody and communicate notions of racial difference. This chapter aims to enlarge the theoretical perspective on racial conceptualization by broadening the range of institutions that readers understand as channeling scientific thinking about race. Scholarship on science popularization usually focuses on organizations and texts with explicitly communicative or educative functions, such as textbooks, “popular science” magazines, or mass media science reporting.

This chapter examines the popularization of the Gilgamesh epic and the broadening of its thematic use from 1959 to 1978. It discusses the many novels, stories, plays, poems, operas, drawings, readings, performances, and new interpretations of the Gilgamesh theme in countries extending from Italy to Poland, in both Europe and North America. These works demonstrate that by the late 1970s Gilgamesh had emerged from what had been primarily a German and English cultural context to become an increasingly familiar name and story in the world at large. The story's appeal had moved beyond the initially more somber attraction of immediate postwar audiences because of its message of consolation after death and depression. During the 1960s, such social themes as homosexuality were coming to the fore along with the philosophical-psychological recognition of the archetypal significance of the epic's figures, the representation of the shift from matriarchy to patriarchy, the struggle between titanic action and humanistic contemplation, science fiction, and questions of religion.

This chapter traces the key shifts in the ney’s modern history, from its de-legitimization in the early Republican period, its survival in the transitional years of its learning through the master-disciple pedagogic system (meşk), to its re-invigoration in the 1990s. These episodes underline how the meanings informing the ney are context-bound and socially constructed. The chapter also sketches out the incredibly rich sonic landscape of the city of Istanbul with which the ney interacts. Attention is given to the creation and consumption of new forms of ‘Sufi music’, and the popularization of Sufism sponsored by both private and state actors in Turkey, including the implications of these processes on the re-contextualization of the ney as a ‘spiritual sound.’

This chapter explores how the powerful association between radium and life first “came to life”: in the earliest biological metaphors and metaphysics of early radioactivity research; in pre-existing discursive traditions and popularization practices relating heat, light, electricity, thermodynamics, and notions of a “living atom” to life (all of which were easily subsumed under the new radioactive umbrella); in the popular radium craze of the first decade of the twentieth century; and in the aftermath of controversy regarding other types of rays supposedly produced by living things. Radium, in short order, became the living element: the element of choice not only for biological metaphors in a new realm of physics, but even for biological application.