In Rome the original late antique model of celibacy was still the default assumption.

Volume II charts European urbanism between 700 and 1850, the millennium during which Europe became the world’s most urbanised region. Featuring thirty-six chapters from leading scholars working on all the major linguistic areas of Europe, the volume offers a state-of-the-art survey that explores and explains this transformation, how similar or different such processes were across Europe, and how far it is possible to discern traits that characterise European urbanism in this period. The first half of the volume offers overviews on the urban history of Mediterranean Europe, Atlantic and North Sea Europe, Central and Eastern Europe, and European urbanisms around the world. The second half explores major themes, from the conceptualisation of cities and their material fabric to continuities and changes in the social, political, economic, religious and cultural histories of cities and towns.

By the end of the twentieth century, the forms of economic information had multiplied. The trust problem that the early credit-rating agencies such as R. G. Dun had tried to address – how could creditors trust debtors? – had a new solution: the Credit Bureau, established in 1994. Those who languished on its infamous Black List were excluded from the credit economy and denied new loans. Debtors fared poorly within the new economic order, as it was more common to discipline delinquent debtors than to police predatory creditors. The power dynamics had been transformed, and many debtors faced dispossession through paperwork. Chapter 5 examines how people understood their debt troubles at the turn of the millennium while showing that the debtor–creditor relationship had become one of individual borrowers and institutional lenders. It examines what happened to people who did not pay their debts and analyses how citizens explained their situations, attributed blame, and asked for help. Mexican citizens with unpaid debt in the early twenty-first century were often left feeling vulnerable and isolated amidst the ups and downs of the global economy.

The ‘Blockade’ of Leningrad lasted from September 1941 to January 1944. It was one of the most tragic events of the war, especially with the mass starvation of the early months of 1942. Leningrad had been exposed to attack from the west, due to the Red Army’s rapid collapse in the recently annexed Baltic states, and it was potentially threatened by a Finnish attack from the north. The ability of the Russian forces to hold the city was based on other geographical and political factors, including the enemy’s inability to block Lake Ladoga to the east and the unwillingness of the Finnish government to take part. Starvation was the main weapon; the Germans bombarded Leningrad with artillery and aircraft with only limited effect, and little fighting took place inside the city itself. However, once the Germans had achieved their position near Leningrad from the south, it was difficult for the Red Army to mount successful counterattacks from the ‘mainland’, or from within the encircled city. Fortunately, after winter 1941–1942 the Germans were committed to other parts of the Russian front and there was little likelihood Leningrad would fall, but fighting in the surrounding countryside would be deadly for many months. The final end of the blockade came in January 1944, remarkably late in the war.

Accounts of African letters have been riven by debates about who owns modernism and revelations about covert CIA sponsorship of African cultural institutions. Rather than relitigating the question of whether modernism in Africa is always (covertly) Euro-modernist, this chapter treats modernism as inherently dialectical. It considers African literary modernism in relation to the modernist aesthetics of Uche Okeke, who illustrated Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, to the Cold War-era criticism of Es’kia Mphahlele and performed poetry of Atukwei Okai, and to the chimeric category of modernity as figured in Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi’s Kintu. At the end of the day, untethering modernism from the chimera of modernity may well enable more persuasive analyses of each. The chapter concludes with Yvonne Vera’s fiction to sketch how modernism emerges as a historical discourse and stylistic repertoire that some African writers continue to make part of practices of freedom.

This chapter examines the planning of the German invasion of the Soviet Union. It sketches Hitler’s long-term economic and ideological motives for seeking to conquer the country, before examining the strategic considerations that determined the invasion’s particular timing in June 1941. Wehrmacht planners’ confidence was boosted by intelligence assessments that overlooked the less-than-overwhelming superiority of the German armed forces and underestimated Soviet military and economic potential. It was also boosted by their identification with the invasion’s ideological goals. Thus were the Panzer divisions and their air support, on which success depended more than anything else, committed to too many targets simultaneously, and the risk grew of a lengthy war in which superior Soviet resources would be increasingly likely to prevail. The chapter also sketches the peripheral roles played by Germany’s Axis allies in the invasion and the under-strength forces that the planners of Barbarossa would commit to rear area security. This underpowered occupation force would be compelled to cooperate closely with the SS and police in its efforts to control the occupied territories. This relationship, together with the Wehrmacht’s own ideological proclivities and harsh perception of military necessity, would help precipitate its deep involvement in Nazi crimes in the East.

The Latin mistakes in a tenth-century papal document converge with other evidence for the abysmal education of the papal staff.