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This fascinating books provides a contextual analysis of the constitution of the European Union which, unlike most constitutions, does not belong to a state.

Offering an insight into 19th- and early 20th-century medical school dissecting rooms and anatomy museums, this book explores how collected human remains have shaped western biomedical knowledge and attitudes towards the body over the past 200 years. Focusing on specimens collected in Australia, Pacitti asks how and why anatomists and medical students obtained human body parts, and explores the role Australia played in the global narrative of western medical development. Interrogating the relationship between colony and metropole in the circulation of knowledge, it shows how Australia formed a distinct identity as a nation; wanting to conform to established norms in Britain and overseas, but simultaneously pushing against them. Pacitti sheds new light on our understanding of western medical networks, fresh insights into the ongoing challenges historic specimen collections pose, and reveals how these collections remain active pedagogical tools in the present day. The Body Collected in Colonial Australia is a cultural history of collectors and the collected that deepens our understanding of the ways the living have used the dead to comprehend the intricacies of the human body in illness and health.

Exploring how legacies of British colonialism have shaped modern life narrative, this book offers comparative studies of four white life writers - Penelope Lively, J. G. Ballard, Doris Lessing and Janet Frame - who wrote and rewrote their childhoods in colonies, international settlements, and protectorates of the British Empire across numerous autobiographical texts. By drawing on their life writings, frequently side-lined for their fiction, Emma Parker illuminates hitherto unrecognized connections between these authors after they travelled from their respective childhood homes in Egypt (Lively), Shanghai (Ballard), Southern Rhodesia (Lessing) and New Zealand (Frame), arriving in London across a twelve-year period from 1945-1957. With their autobiographies intersecting at a crucial historical juncture when colonial rule was being dismantled, this book asks what it means to be 'at home' in the former British Empire, scrutinizing the spaces of habitation and the everyday details through which all four authors remember colonialism, from settler mansions and African farms, to empty swimming pools, heirlooms and photograph albums. Rounding off with an examination of material cultures at the end of empire, Parker emphasizes how four particular artefacts (a tallboy, a suitcase, a traveller's trunk and a duchesse dresser) emblematize and unlock the legacies of colonialism for Lively, Ballard, Lessing and Frame. When read together, these autobiographical texts reveal how empire and its aftermath seeped into everyday life, and that imperialism functioned as part of a given world both during and after colonial rule. Also coining the term 'speculative life writing', describing the practice wherein an author rewrites their previous memoirs or autobiographies with an alternative outcome, this book advances rich readings and new conceptual insights into these esteemed authors and the fields of life writing and postcolonial studies.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Isfahan, the capital of the Safavid Empire, hosted Catholic missionaries of more diverse affiliations than most other cities in Asia. Attracted by the hope of converting the Shah, the missionaries acted as diplomatic agents for Catholic rulers, hosts to Protestant merchants, and healers of Armenians and Muslims. Through such niche activities they gained social acceptance locally. This book examines the activities of Discalced Carmelites and other missionaries, revealing the flexibility they demonstrated in dealing with cultural diversity, a common feature of missionary activity throughout emerging global Catholicism. While missions all over the world were central to the self-fashioning of the Counter-Reformation Church, clerics who set out to win over souls for the "true religion" turned into local actors who built reputations by defining their social roles in accordance with the expectations of their host society. Such practices fed controversies that were fought out in newly emerging public spaces. Responding to the threat this posed to its authority, the Roman Curia initiated a process of doctrinal disambiguation and centralization which culminated in the nineteenth century. Using the missions to Safavid Iran as a case study for "a global history on a small scale," the book creates a new paradigm for the study of global Catholicism.

The statesman and scholar Theodore Metochites was one of the most important personalities of the fourteenth-century Byzantine Empire. A close advisor to the emperor Andronikos II and restorer of the famous monastery of Chora in Constantinople, Metochites left various writings including orations, poems, essays and commentaries on classical and religious texts, in which he discusses the numerous problems that troubled him and his contemporaries, such as the decline of the state and the tension between public life and that of the philosopher.In this book, Ioannis Polemis provides the first in-depth study of Metochites' oeuvre, revealing the complex way he represented the authorial self to critique the politics and mores of his day, whilst at the same time shielding himself from potential criticism. Polemis details the way Metochites deftly manipulated figures and tropes from classical antiquity and early Christianity to justify his role in public life, which was traditionally shunned by scholars in the pursuit of 'logos'. The book provides unique insights into one of the late Empire's most important figures, as well as more widely deepening our understanding of classical reception in Byzantium and the social, political and intellectual climate of Constantinople in the fourteenth century.