Great writers find their characters and themes and the scenes they needed to convey and illustrate ideas in the world around them. John McGahern was a storyteller who found in personal experience and in the quiet world around him the raw material he needed to explain the conflict, cruelty and the comedy, absurdity and beauty of existence. For both Seamus Heaney and Sorley MacLean, the poetry inspired by large historical events and philosophical ideas found expression in the voices that filled the silences and spaces in their memories of growing up remote. MacLean was burdened for his entire life by the disintegration of his boyhood island culture and his native language, a lifelong mourning over lost love and a recurring theme of personal failure for having skipped the Spanish Civil War.

This chapter argues that 'art' and 'ecology' are terms with broad meanings which, when combined in the concept of 'eco-art', create an overwhelming array of possibilities, and make the problem of categorisation fundamental to eco-art. It considers attempts to classify the field, and suggests that, while they can be helpful, the full force of the problem of categorisation is better addressed by turning to the position given to aesthetics by phenomenology. Drawing on phenomenology, the chapter provides a way of understanding aesthetics as ecology. It looks at two examples of interested signification. First one indicates how aesthetics of ecology can critique and present alternative possibilities in response to a work that is already considered eco-art; the other shows how an artist might start given the infinity of possibilities available.

This chapter examines the conversion of seventeenth-century Vietnamese women to Catholicism and the narration of their conversions in the accounts of European missionaries. In Annam (as early-modern Europeans called the two polities Tonkin and Cochinchina), missionaries from the Jesuit order and from the French Missions Étrangères de Paris converted tens of thousands of women and men during the seventeenth century and composed narratives of their most notable converts. In the accounts women stand out for two reasons: a number were from high ranking court families, including members of the royal families, and a number of the lower-ranking women converts suffered from demonic possession. The most spectacular conversion cases concerned women spirit-mediums, who played an important role in Annamese religious observances as oracles. The missionaries described them as possessed by demons. Once converted, these former spirit-mediums became miracle workers, and thus fit into another category recognizable to European readers. But the Catholic Reformation had ambivalent feelings at best about such women playing an important role in the evangelization campaign. Thus missionaries seeking credibility and narrating conversions by working with what Annamese culture offered them stretched the limits of what was acceptable to their audience at home.

Best-loved of all English composers, Edward Elgar occupies a higher position in the world of classical music than anyone imagined even at the zenith of his popularity in the Edwardian era. The superego controlling Elgar's musical consciousness insisted that in the end the forces of control, order and nobility must triumph. This is the link between Elgar's public personality, his politics and his music. Caractacus had played with parallels between the ancient Roman Empire and modern Britain shortly before Elgar first proposed a Gordon symphony. Reproducing 'the Gordon markings' became something of a craze among late Victorians. A more direct connection to the life and death of General Charles Gordon is suggested by Elgar's unmistakeable allusion to Parsifal in the stately motto theme that opens and closes the symphony. Parsifal's mission is to restore sanctity and tranquillity to Monsalvat, sanctuary of the knights who guard the Holy Grail.

The landscape of John McGahern's novels and short stories is remarkable for the quality of its descriptive prose. McGahern's attention throughout his work to lakes, rivers and their banks is suggestive of the liquid landscape of historical motion. Until McGahern's treatment, the midlands were the landlocked heart of Irish culture. Amongst Women was McGahern's fifth novel and follows the fate of the Moran family over twenty years. Exam results are the measure of many of McGahern's stories, and an important register of change in Amongst Women. Education is the one uncontrollable element in the independent State's machine of measurement and control. The critical focus on Amongst Women has concentrated on the social construction of the novel and its implications for mid-twentieth-century Irish society. McGahern's continuing use of water as a symbol of flexibility in an otherwise fixed, and recurrent, world.

A thorough understanding of New Place encourages to think about William Shakespeare more as a resident and representative of Stratford-upon-Avon than as a citizen of London. In relation to Shakespeare's life, New Place represents his social status and aspirations more than any other aspect of it. Shakespeare's taste in a home reflects his literary sensibilities as a writer. Archaeological remains will never reveal anything about their effect on Shakespeare's own intellect, imagination and feelings. This is the task of a Sir Thomas Browne, or a sympathetic biographer. The cultural reputation of New Place after Shakespeare, until the demolition of the second house in 1759, is worthy of more consideration, as, too, are the life and legacy of his granddaughter, Elizabeth, Lady Barnard. In later years the relationship between the New Place and Nash's House becomes significant, and the shared ownership and questions about their boundaries are interesting.

Hugh Clopton was a wealthy mercer, benefactor and public official. He was the youngest son of John and Agnes Clopton and was born near Stratford-upon-Avon at Clopton House, his ancestral home, in 1440. The earliest reference to a building on this plot is Clopton's own will of 1496: 'my grete house in Stratford'. Archaeological evidence suggests that it is likely that Hugh Clopton used the frontage range as shops. The upper floor of the front range probably contained bedchambers and additional storage rooms. Wells were the most efficient and practical source of water. Three wells are known to have existed on the site, although only two seem to date from Clopton's New Place. A passageway ran along the northern side, between New Place and the neighbouring buildings, from Chapel Street in an easterly direction. Hugh Clopton's New Place is known to have been built of brick and timber.

Writing imaginative literature about India as an imperialist enabled Rudyard Kipling to explore a whole universe of perverse and forbidden pleasures without blowing the top off the volcano. Understanding Kipling's imperialism requires reading his political beliefs in the round and in context. For a man so good at hating, it is remarkable how rarely Kipling injects the spirit of racial hatred in his work. The conundrum posed by Kipling's work is to explain how a man who flew his hatreds, prejudices and his imperialism boldly from the masthead wrote as well as he did about India under colonial rule. Kipling loathed evangelical Christians, especially missionaries. Edward Said marvelled that Kipling wrote so well about India in Kim while maintaining the historically untenable position that 'Indian reality required, indeed beseeched British tutelage more or less indefinitely'.

This chapter examines the steps by which Herbert Baker advanced from experiments in picturesque historical idioms to a commanding, even crushing deployment of European classicism in rugged, elevated situations. A most literary architect, Baker went on to write on Cecil Rhodes and an account of his own life in Architecture and Personalities. Through Rhodes' patronage Baker learned how to project ideas of imperial power by making his neo-classical buildings interact theatrically with the dramatic South African landscape. Baker's South African career climaxed with the Union Buildings at Pretoria, a commission that launched him on a further trajectory as the foremost architect of Empire. Baker's Secretariat Buildings in New Delhi are generally regarded as inferior to Lutyens' viceregal palace. The classical site that impressed Baker most of all, and from which he drew the basic form of Rhodes Memorial, was the late Hellenistic complex of Pergamos in Asia Minor.

This chapter explores how female authority is connected to the reproduction of religious experience in The Spirituall experiences of sundry beleevers, the first anthology of conversion narratives to appear in print when it was published in 1653. Arguing that the employment of authorial anonymity, coupled with the preponderance of female gender signifiers, foregrounds female experience in such a way as to frame the Experiences as a reproductive object, this chapter identifies how the text encourages a gendered hermeneutics: the reader goes looking for the gender of the convert and more often than not finds a woman. In order to explore the reproductive effects of this gendered bias the chapter looks firstly at how the use of authorial anonymity confers a feminised moral authority upon the text. It moves on to examine the importance of fertility as a spiritual trope for radical Protestants, before considering in detail how the Experiences utilises the symbolic associations of motherhood in a number of narratives composed by women.

This chapter examines, in the significant contexts of contemporary plot mentalité and plot literature, a supposed plot to stage an armed rising on 12 October 1663, a rising in North-East England that would begin across the counties of Yorkshire, Durham and Westmorland, and erupt into a nationwide rebellion. It raises questions as to whether the 1663 plot was — as it has been frequently depicted — a dangerous threat to the government by some ‘desperate men’, supporters of the ‘good old cause’, who wanted to bring back the English Republic. Or, can it be seen as a mere folie du jour from a few scattered and disgruntled dissenters? Or was it, as some thought at the time, a conveniently manufactured and exaggerated affair designed for public consumption by a government who were scaremongering for their own reasons? In effect, the chapter asks just how serious was this plot and its potential Northern rebellion.

There was only one ceremony or blessing in the late Medieval Catholic rite that was reserved for laywomen -- the ritual purification or churching of a woman after childbirth. Despite the vulnerability of the traditional ceremony to charges of superstition, churching was retained in or reintegrated into early Protestant practices, including Lutheran, Calvinist, and Anabaptist ceremonies. Although churching provides a rare opportunity to connect music to a central aspect of early modern women’s lives, there has as yet been no study of the soundscape of churching ceremonies nor any exploration of how this soundscape was converted for early Protestant practice. This chapter explores how these ceremonies and rituals were adapted, with controversial elements, like blessed candles, expunged or reinterpreted. How can blessed candles illuminate the gradual conversion of the churching rite and the process of negotiation? And what can study of the persistence, use, alteration, and reuse of settings of the plainchant sequence Inviolata, integra et casta es Maria contribute to our understanding of the struggle of women for continuity in ritual and musical expressions of female reproductive power?

This chapter examines the narratives and counter-narratives about the Civil War that developed after the Restoration. The most contested figure in these narratives was Archbishop William Laud, regarded by Thomas Hobbes and others as personally responsible for the outbreak of the conflict in the 1630s. Laud’s legacy – embraced by the so-called neo-Laudians at Oxford – was debated in a pamphlet exchange between two of the period’s major satirists: Andrew Marvell and Samuel Butler. Their disagreement was at its sharpest concerning a pre-Civil War controversy over licensing a sermon in favour of the Forced Loan by an absolutist cleric, Robert Sibthorp. Marvell’s version of events in The Rehearsal Transpros’d (1672) proved influential in opposition Whig circles, eventually being taken up by the Earl of Shaftesbury and John Locke.