Out of Our Minds

by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto

  64. Needham, Science and Civilisation in China, ii, p. 179.

  65. C. P. Fitzgerald, China: A Short Cultural History (London: Cresset, 1950), p. 86.

  66. P. Mathieson, ed., Epictetus: The Discourses and Manual (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1916), pp. 106–7; Russell, History of Western Philosophy, p. 251.

  67. A. A. Long, Hellenistic Philosophy (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1974), is particularly good on Stoicism. J. Annas and J. Barnes, eds, The Modes of Scepticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), collects the major Western texts. J. Barnes, The Toils of Scepticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), is an engaging interpretative essay.

  68. J. Legge, ed., The Chinese Classics, 5 vols (London: Trubner, 1861–72), ii, p. 190.

  69. Needham, Science and Civilisation in China, ii, p. 19.

  70. A. MacIntyre, After Virtue (London: Duckworth, 1981), is a fine introduction. E. O. Wilson, On Human Nature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), is one of the most materialist works on the subject ever written. The most defiantly optimistic is probably M. J. A. N. C. de Condorcet’s Progrès de l’esprit humain (1794), written while he was awaiting execution by guillotine.

  71. H. Wang and L. S. Chang, The Philosophical Foundations of Han Fei’s Political Theory (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1986).

  72. C. Ping and D. Bloodworth, The Chinese Machiavelli (London: Secker and Warburg, 1976), is a lively popular history of Chinese political thought. Detail and context appear in B. I. Schwartz, The World of Thought in Ancient China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), and Y. Pines, Envisioning Eternal Empire: Chinese Political Thought of the Warring States Era (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2009). A. Waley, Three Ways of Thought in Ancient China (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1939), is a classic introduction. S. De Grazia, ed., Masters of Chinese Political Thought (New York: Viking, 1973), also prints essential texts in translation.

  73. Republic, 473d.

  74. K. Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, vol. 1 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1945), is the classic critique of Plato’s theory. C. D. C. Reeve, Philosopher-Kings ((Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), is a historical study of the ancient phenomenon. M. Schofield, Saving the City (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), studies the notion of philosopher-kings in ancient philosophy.

  75. The Book of Mencius, 18.8; Legge, ed., The Chinese Classics, v, p. 357. On Mencius, K. Hsiao, History of Chinese Political Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), i, pp. 143–213, is especially good.

  76. Aristotle, Politics, 4.4.

  77. P. Pettit, Republicanism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), is a useful introduction. A. Oldfield, Citizenship and Community (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), and R. Dagger, Civic Virtues (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), take broad looks at modern republicanism.

  78. R. Cavendish, ‘The abdication of King Farouk’, History Today, lii (2002), p. 55.

  79. The ancient context is well covered in T. Wiedemann, Greek and Roman Slavery (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981). A. Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), sets in context the early modern evolution of the doctrine – on which the classic work is L. Hanke, Aristotle and the American Indians (London: Hollis and Carter, 1959).

  80. A. Loombs and J. Burton, eds, Race in Early Modern England: A Documentary Companion (New York: Palgrave Macmillan), p. 77; Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man, pp. 38–41.

  81. F. Bethencourt, Racisms: From the Crusades to the Twentieth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013).

  Chapter 5: Thinking Faiths: Ideas in a Religious Age

  1. M. A. Cook, Early Muslim Dogma (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), is an extremely important study of the sources of Muslim thought. M. A. Cook, The Koran: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), is the best introduction to the text. The work of G. A. Vermes, in, for instance, Jesus in His Jewish Context (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003), though much criticized as overdrawn, makes Christ intelligible as a Jew.

  2. S. Rebanich, Jerome (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 8.

  3. Augustine, Confessions, ch. 16.

  4. R. Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians: In the Mediterranean World from the Second Century AD to the Conversion of Constantine (London: Viking, 1986).

  5. N. G. Wilson, Saint Basil on the Value of Greek Literature (London: Duckworth, 1975), pp. 19–36.

  6. Gregory the Great, Epistles, 10:34; G. R. Evans, The Thought of Gregory the Great (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 9.

  7. B. Lewis, ed., Islam (New York: Harper, 1974), ii, pp. 20–1; W. M. Watt, The Faith and Practice of Al-Ghazali (London: Allen and Unwin, 1951), pp. 72–3.

  8. S. Billington, A Social History of the Fool (Sussex: Harvester, 1984), is a brief attempt at a conspectus. V. K. Janik, Fools and Jesters (Westport: Greenwood, 1998), is a bibliographical compendium. E. A. Stewart, Jesus the Holy Fool (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998), offers an entertaining sidelight on Christ.

  9. W. Heissig, The Religions of Mongolia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980).

  10. M. Rithven, Historical Atlas of the Islamic World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004).

  11. R. Bultmann, Theology of the New Testament (London: SCM Press, 1955), ii, p. 135.

  12. See E. Leach and D. A. Aycock, eds, Structuralist Interpretations of Biblical Myth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), especially pp. 7–32; J. Frazer, The Golden Bough (New York: Macmillan, 1958), i, pp. 158, 405–45.

  13. M. Moosa, Extremist Shi‘ites: The Ghulat Sects (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1988), p. 188.

  14. G. O’Collins, Incarnation (London: Continuum, 2002), is a straightforward but stimulating account of the doctrine. B. Hume, Mystery of the Incarnation (London: Paraclete, 1999), is a touching meditation. S. Davis et al., The Trinity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), is an outstanding collection of essays.

  15. Patrologia Latina, v, pp. 109–16.

  16. W. H. Bright, ed., The Definitions of the Catholic Faith (Oxford and London: James Parker, 1874), is a classic work. H. Chadwick, The Early Church (London: Penguin, 1993), is the best historical survey, while J. Danielou, A History of Early Christian Doctrine (London: Darton, Longman, and Todd, 1977), gives the theological background.

  17. J. Emminghaus, The Eucharist (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1978), is a good introduction. R. Duffy, Real Presence (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1982), sets the Catholic doctrine in the context of the sacraments. M. Rubin, Corpus Christi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), is a brilliant study of the Eucharist in late-medieval culture.

  18. C. K. Barrett, Paul (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox, 1994), and M. Grant, Saint Paul (London: Phoenix, 2000), are excellent readable accounts of the saint. A. F. Segal, Paul the Convert (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), is particularly good on the Jewish background. Readers can now rely on J. G. D. Dunn, ed., The Cambridge Companion to St Paul (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

  19. The Fathers of the Church: St Augustine, the Retractions, trans. M. I. Brogan, R.S.M. (Washington, DC: Catholic University Press, 1968), p. 32.

  20. Augustine, Confessions, ch. 11.

  21. W. Hasker, God, Time and Knowledge (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), is a good introduction. See also J. Farrelly, Predestination, Grace and Free Will (Westminster, MD: Newman Press, 1964), and G. Berkouwer, Divine Election (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1960), for the theological implications.

  22. G. Filoramo, Gnosticism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990); E. Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1980), and M. Marcovich, Studies in Graeco-Roman Religions and Gnosticism (Leiden: Brill, 1988), are equally indispensable guides.

  23. Contra Haereses, 1.24.4; H. Bettenson and C. Maunder, eds, Documents of the Christian Church (Oxford: Oxford U
niversity Press, 2011), p. 38.

  24. Augustine, Confessions, ch. 2.

  25. J. Goody, The Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 49–60, 146. P. Brown, The Body and Society (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), is a brilliant investigation of the early history of Christian celibacy. P. Ariès and A. Bejin, Western Sexuality (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985), has something like classic status, though it concentrates on challenges to conventional morality.

  26. J. N. D. Anderson, Islamic Law in the Modern World (New York: New York University Press, 1959).

  27. G. Fowden, Qusayr ‘Amra: Art and the Umayyad Elite in Late Antique Syria (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).

  28. L. Komaroff and S. Carboni, eds, The Legacy of Genghis Khan: Courtly Art and Culture in Western Asia (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2002), pp. 256–353.

  29. R. Cormack, Painting the Soul (London: Reaktion, 1997), is a lively introductory survey. The same author’s Writing in Gold (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985) is an excellent study of icons in Byzantine history. T. Ware, The Orthodox Church (London: Penguin, 1993), is the best general book on the history of orthodoxy.

  30. S. Gayk, Image, Text, and Religious Reform in Fifteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 155–88.

  31. Plotinus, Enneads, 2.9.16; J. S. Hendrix, Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Spirit (New York: Lang, 2005), p. 140.

  32. On Aquinas’s doctrines, I rely on Turner, Thomas Aquinas.

  33. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, 7.1.

  34. C. H. Haskins, ‘Science at the court of the Emperor Frederick II’, American Historical Review, xxvii (1922), pp. 669–94.

  35. S. Gaukroger, The Emergence of a Scientific Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 59–76.

  36. C. H. Haskins, The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century (New York: Meridian, 1957), was the pioneering work on the subject; A. Crombie, Robert Grossteste (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953), is a controversial and engaging study of a major figure; D. C. Lindberg, The Beginnings of Western Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), admirably sets the general context.

  37. E. Gilson, History of Christian Philosophy in the Middle Ages (New York: Random House, 1955), is the classic work; J. A. Weisheipl, Friar Thomas d’Aquino (New York: Doubleday, 1974), is still perhaps the best life of Aquinas, though now rivalled by Turner, Thomas Aquinas, which is insuperable on Aquinas’s thought; M. M. Adams, William Ockham (Indianapolis: University of Notre Dame Press, 1987), is the best overall study of Ockham.

  38. E. L. Saak, Creating Augustine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 164–6.

  39. Augustine, Confessions, 11.3.

  40. R. H. Nash, The Light of the Mind (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1969), is a clear and shrewd study of Augustine’s theory; D. Knowles, What Is Mysticism? (London: Burns and Oates, 1967), is the best short introduction to mysticism.

  41. D. Sarma, Readings in Classic Indian Philosophy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), p. 40.

  42. H. Dumoulin, Zen Buddhism: A History, 2 vols (Bloomington: World Wisdom, 2005), i, p. 85.

  43. Dumoulin, Zen Buddhism, and T. Hoover, Zen Culture (New York: Random House, 1977), are good introductions; R. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (London: Vintage, 2004), is the classic story of the author’s trans-American pilgrimage in search of a doctrine of ‘quality’.

  44. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, p. 278.

  45. Ambrose, Epistles, 20:8.

  46. B. Tierney, The Crisis of Church and State 1050–1300 (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1964), p. 175; Bettenson and Maunder, Documents of the Christian Church, p. 121.

  47. J. Maritain, Man and the State (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1951), is the classic musing of a seminal modern thinker on Church–state relations. R. W. Southern, Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages (London: Penguin, 1970), is the best introduction to medieval Church history. A. Murray, Reason and Society in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), takes a fascinatingly oblique approach. O. and J. L. O’Donovan, From Irenaeus to Grotius: A Sourcebook in Christian Political Thought (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), prints the most important sources with excellent commentary.

  48. P. Brown, ‘The rise and function of the holy man in late antiquity’, Journal of Roman Studies, lxi (1971), pp. 80–101.

  49. Bettenson and Maunder, Documents of the Christian Church, p. 121.

  50. W. Ullmann, The Growth of Papal Government in the Middle Ages (London: Methuen, 1970), and A History of Political Thought: The Middle Ages (Middlesex: Penguin, 1965), distil the work of the greatest authority. E. Duffy, Saints and Sinners (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), is a lively, well-grounded history of the papacy.

  51. G. E. R. Lloyd, Aristotle: The Growth and Structure of His Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), p. 255.

  52. Aristotle, Politics, 4.3.

  53. J. H. Burns and T. Izbicki, eds, Conciliarism and Papalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), is an important collection. J. J. Ryan, The Apostolic Conciliarism of Jean Gerson (Atlanta: Scholars, 1998), is excellent on the development of the tradition in the fifteenth century. A. Gewirth, Marsilius of Padua (New York: Columbia University Press, 1951), is the best study of this thinker. The same author and C. J. Nedermann have produced a good translation and edition of Marsilius’s Defensor Pacis (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001).

  54. J. Mabbott, The State and the Citizen (London: Hutchison’s University Library, 1955), is a good introduction to the political theory involved. J. Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), is an impressive attempt to bring social contract theory up to date.

  55. See P. S. Lewis, Essays in Later Medieval French History (London: Hambledon, 1985), pp. 170–86.

  56. Ibid., p. 174.

  57. J. R. Figgis, The Divine Right of Kings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922), and M. Wilks, The Problem of Sovereignty in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), are outstanding studies. Q. Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), is an invaluable guide to all major themes of late-medieval and early modern politics.

  58. M. Keen, Chivalry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984).

  59. P. Binski, The Painted Chamber at Westminster (London: Society of Antiquaries, 1986), pp. 13–15.

  60. F. Fernández-Armesto, ‘Colón y los libros de caballería’, in C. Martínez Shaw and C. Pacero Torre, eds, Cristóbal Colón (Valladolid: Junta de Castilla y León, 2006), pp. 114–28.

  61. F. E. Kingsley, ed., Charles Kingsley: His Letters and Memories of His Life, 2 vols (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2011), ii, p. 461. M. Girouard, The Return to Camelot (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), is a fascinating and stimulating account of the revival from the eighteenth century to the twentieth.

  62. Keen, Chivalry, is the standard work; M. G. Vale, War and Chivalry (London: Duckworth, 1981), is an impressive investigation of the context in which chivalry had its greatest impact.

  63. B. Lewis, The Political Language of Islam (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), pp. 73–4.

  64. C. Hillenbrand, The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), and K. Armstrong, Holy War (New York: Anchor, 2001), are both highly readable and highly reliable. G. Keppel, Jihad (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), is an interesting journalistic investigation of the holy-war idea in contemporary Islam. J. Riley-Smith, What Were the Crusades? (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), is the best account of what crusaders thought they were doing.

  65. Helpful essays by Maurice Keen are collected in M. Keen, Nobles, Knights and Men-at-Arms in the Middle Ages (London: Hambledon, 1986), especially pp. 187–221. The quotation from Marlowe is from Tam
burlaine the Great, Act I, Scene 5, 186–90.

  66. M. Rady, Customary Law in Hungary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), pp. 15–20.

  67. P. O. Kristeller, Renaissance Thought and Its Sources (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979), is an unsurpassed brief introduction. R. Black, Humanism and Education in Medieval and Renaissance Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), is an exhaustive and powerful revisionist study, which should be set alongside R. W. Southern, Scholastic Humanism and the Unification of Europe (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2000).