Livy not Polybius is the main source for Roman religion; Carthaginian is less easily grasped. Literary traditions represented Hannibal as an impious perjuror, whereas Scipio enjoyed divine help (Neptune) and privileged access (Jupiter). Neither picture is true. Both made youthful vows, Hannibal never to befriend Rome, Scipio (after Cannae) to continue the fight. Neither was regularly accompanied by seers on campaign; Hannibal was his own diviner and personally executed one violent animal sacrifice. He buried defeated enemy commanders respectfully, unlike Nero after Metaurus. Scipio, unlike Hannibal, took impious advantage of a truce. Hannibal was a priest only in the sense that ancient generals conducted campaign rituals. Scipio had been a Salian priest of Mars for many years (special dress, ceremonies, obligations). There was a Hannibalic legend (advice or warnings in dreams from Jupiter and Juno) as well as the famous Scipionic legend (supernatural snake-birth and Neptune’s help at New Carthage).

The chapter discusses the period from the loss of communication with Greenland until the mid-seventeenth century. During this time Greenland existed primarily as a cultural memory negotiated in European texts. The focus is on the most central texts that established what we may call Greenland’s discursive terrain. It is examined how a dualistic perception of Greenland came to dominate European representations. These were the themes of wealth and violence. Central to the account of early colonial Greenland is the mid-fourteenth-century report by the church official Ívar Bárdarson, to which the chapter pays particular attention. There is also a discussion of how Inuit legends negotiated a memory of the European colonists. These legends may appear to provide an Indigenous account of the violent clashes between peoples in Greenland. Yet the Inuit legends were not only solicited and written down by missionaries, they were also disseminated by Europeans in print – in effect co-opting Indigenous tales as part of the West’s repertoire.

An ‘in context’ biography. What is available to a biographer when he is deprived of all correspondence and personal papers and is reduced to working on impersonal documents and archives? What can he do if his subject lived at a time when it was unthinkable to reveal anything about oneself in a work of fiction? What remains if he wants to eliminate all the invented tales and imaginary anecdotes contained in the first ‘lives of Molière’? What is left is to contextualise Molière. There is the historical, documentary (and thereby sociological) contexualisation that, over the last century, has radically transformed the traditional image of Molière the homme du théâtre; the aesthetic contextualisation made possible by the last fifty years of studies of galanterie, which can only be fully understood when linked to its socio-literary context; the recontextualisation of the conditions in which Molière’s plays were created; the contextualisation of theatre practices; the contextualisation of his sources in connection with their aesthetic context… Contextualising Molière, is to leave behind the vicious circles (the misanthropic Molière), legends (the jealous Molière) and errors (the sick Molière and medicine) to capture as best one can one of the most extraordinary comic dramatists of all time.

This chapter provides a cultural history of the wicked advocate from the tenth to the nineteenth centuries in order to argue that advocates’ corrupt practices of justice and protection reflect deep-rooted problems in the history of local administration. It starts with monasteries’ miracle stories about advocates suffering in death as punishment for their crimes in this life. It then turns to the Swiss legend of William Tell and analyzes the earliest versions of the legend in order to demonstrate that Tell’s rival, the wicked advocate Gessler, abused his position in ways similar to those of other advocates. This chapter then discusses Friedrich Schiller’s play Wilhelm Tell to show that concerns about corrupt practices of justice and protection extended into the early nineteenth century. Local legends about bad advocates, some of them preserved today on the Internet, provide additional evidence for the enduring value of stories about wicked advocates who are punished for their bad deeds.

This chapter considers Defoe’s profound interest in the language and mores of popular culture. It illustrates the way that the Tour uses the speech and activity of the people to show how each region contributes to the diverse culture of the nation, as a means to evoking the variety of Britain. The “talk and activity” of the people, as G.A. Starr puts it in an important article, help to flesh out this evocation of Britain. Defoe had a special penchant for proverbs, which he used in the title of several works, and which are scattered through the text of his major books in both fiction and non-fiction. Proverbial usages reflect not just habits of mind among the population at large, but also the outlook of those who live in particular corners of the kingdom. The treatment owes much to his keen ear for speech patterns, evident in the dialogues found elsewhere in his oeuvre. Moreover, in a number of places within the Tour, Defoe cites local customs, often related to tales and legends, that he generally treats with obvious scepticism. Apart from all else, he was a pioneer in the literary use of folklore.

The image of the Persian king is of a leader who rules the known world with justice and safe-keeping. The warrior aspect of the Persian king is the quality of the ruler to emerge victorious in battle with honor. A large part of a warrior-king’s duty was to subdue the presence of evil in the world. Persian kings and heroes of legend were tested through their conflict with the forces of chaos and savagery. In conquest, the hero demonstrated his courage and bravery by defeating monsters, devils, and ferocious beasts. Muslim intellectuals writing about the conquest of India embellished their histories with the ornamentation of Persianate heroic lore that civilized the untamed forces of nature and the demonic realm.

Borges came to know Buddhism from a European perspective filtered through Schopenhauer and other philosophers, and his interest in it was ultimately concerned with the extent to which it coincided with Western ways of thinking. Together with Alicia Jurado, he co-authored What is Buddhism?, and he wrote with clarity of understanding about karma, nirvana, suffering, and nothingness, concepts that find their way into stories and essays such as ’The Garden of Forking Paths’, ’The Library of Babel’, ’The Cult of the Phoenix’, and ’The Writing of the God’. Borges showed greater enthusiasm for the fables and legends of Buddhism than for the spiritual truths of its doctrine. The chapter proposes a Buddhist-inflected reading of ’Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’ and a more fully developed one of ’The Circular Ruins’, which it concludes is Borges’s consummate ’Buddhist fiction’.