Swift was personally acquainted with many women writers. During his London years in the reign of Queen Anne, he repeatedly encountered Delarivier Manley and Anne Finch. Later, over the course of daily life in Dublin, he formed his own female ‘senate’ of writers, including Mary Barber and Laetitia Pilkington. However, this chapter focuses on two underexplored aspects of Swift and women writers. The first section reconsiders Swift’s earliest and longest collaborative relationship with a woman writer, Esther Johnson, whom Swift had taught as a child. The second section looks at his later reception by women writers, including Maria Edgeworth and Margaret Atwood.

This chapter explores Swift’s relationship with the Church of Ireland. Despite hopes for a clerical preferment in England, in 1714 Swift was appointed dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin. As dean, Swift occupied one of the highest positions in the Church of Ireland. This chapter outlines the history of the Church of Ireland and its troubled relationship with the Church of England in the seventeenth century, before addressing its constitutional and political position during Swift’s tenure.

Rarely accorded the economic perspicacity of his contemporary and sometime antagonist Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift nevertheless offers his readers a clear vision of the rise of finance in Britain and Ireland during the first decades of the eighteenth century. This chapter opens with a section outlining the Financial Revolution of the late seventeenth century. The second section looks into Swift’s private finances and his interest in material wealth. The third section focuses on Swift’s responses to the bursting of the South Sea Bubble. And the fourth and final section focuses on the Wood’s Halfpence controversy of 1722–24, which provoked Swift’s most concentrated period of economic writing.

This chapter will focus on the analysis of the available traces of ancestor cults in the ancient Near East from prehistoric periods to the first millennium BC, with a specific focus on the cult of plastered skulls of the prehistoric Levant and the stone circles of southeastern Turkey.

This chapter considers Swift’s uses of philosophy – his use of the word, and the uses to which philosophy can be put, good and (mostly) bad. It looks at Swift’s uses of the term ‘philosophy’, its cognates, and some related terms (‘speculative’), and at his references to philosophers, to suggest he can use the term in a restricted positive sense as well as a more definitively negative sense, particularly in A Tale of a Tub, where hubristic claims towards systematic description characterise philosophical speculation allied with natural philosophy. The chapter concludes with a reading of Gulliver’s Travels, suggesting that Swift’s capacity for fable and invention enabled him to practise a literary philosophy.

In several Latin American countries, the state has to consult impacted Indigenous communities before approving new hydrocarbon and mining development, in accordance with regulations that govern these “prior consultation” processes. However, when navigated by extractivist states, these formal norms have blocked the very participation they were intended to encourage and have facilitated state disregard of both Indigenous territorial rights and the environmental destruction caused by large-scale development. These unanticipated outcomes stem from the measures the state must take to determine whether a hydrocarbon or mining project directly impacts an Indigenous community and therefore requires prior consultation. To make this determination, the state must define lands to which Indigenous communities hold rights, and the area impacted by the proposed development. State agencies that are eager to approve new extraction have overlooked – and in some cases actively dismissed – both the impacts of mining and hydrocarbons, and the geographical reach of Indigenous authority, in contexts in which communities claim, but lack title to damaged lands. This chapter demonstrates how prior consultation has encouraged the state to overlook, and even actively deny, Indigenous territorial rights and environmental impacts of extraction through analysis of three important Indigenous mining and hydrocarbon conflicts in Bolivia, Colombia, and Peru.