The importance of successful, legitimate birth and childrearing to the health of early modern society, from the monarch to the lowest orders, created a strong corollary between the processes of generation (procreation, birth, parenting) and social order. Supernatural influence on these processes, whether divine or malignant, raised cultural anxieties about the limits of supernatural power. From the extra-ordinary but still ‘natural’ process of maternal impression, via the specific malignancy of witchcraft or fairy-taking, to the calamitous monstrosity of personal sin or political upheaval, early modern generation was construed as a natural process intimately entwined with and susceptible to outside influence. This chapter explores how Shakespeare constructs the limits of supernatural power on generation in relation to social, legal, medical, and theological norms familiar to an early modern audience, using Richard III as a central example.

Using the findings of the Royal Historical Society’s Race, Ethnicity & Equality in UK History: A Report and Resource for Change, published in 2018, this chapter considers how anti-racist action has been undertaken in history higher education in the UK. The report found that undergraduate-level history was overwhelmingly white in terms of students, that the numbers were even lower when it came to postgraduate-level history and that ‘history academic staff are less diverse than H&PS student cohorts’. Taking stock of these findings, many history departments across UK universities reviewed, strengthened or created anew their equality, diversity and inclusivity agendas. Ranging from efforts to diversify curriculum content to improving mechanisms to report racial abuse, this chapter will reflect on the effectiveness of these proposals. As the postdoctoral fellow funded by the Past and Present Society to embed the impact of the Race Report, the author offers a critical perspective on how the race equality work so clearly envisioned in the report not only mirrors but is reinforced by the equality work taking place in wider Britain. The museum and heritage sector, those working with schools and the curriculum and those producing history for the public are working in a mutually constitutive set of structures to engender anti-racist action and behaviour. By tracing the intellectual development of the RHS’s equalities work as it ties to the anti-racist work we can see in Britain more broadly, the chapter reflects on the extent to which meaningful change can occur in history higher education.

This chapter aims to consider how Dans Ma Peau frees the female werewolf from the status of the body to allow it to be considered as a mode of embodiment. Dans Ma Peau has been classed among a large number of films emerging from France that are aggressively difficult to watch. The chapter discusses similarities between Dans Ma Peau and werewolf narratives, such as the split-self, the split world within the film, representations of transformation, and how each have severe limitations for theorising female subjectivity. In the case of Dans Ma Peau, the entire film is arguably a transformation scene for Esther as she slowly and irreversibly loses herself to her desire for self-harm, yet there is one particular scene where she significantly represents the shape-shifter. A dominant werewolf and shape-shifter narrative is that of the split-self.

The ‘cellarage scene’, which follows Hamlet’s interview with the Ghost, stages the latter in a very ambiguous and disconcerting way. This chapter turns to more popular, medieval, intertextual antecedents of Hamlet’s ghostly figure, arguing that this sequence looks back towards medieval stage traditions that survived into the late-sixteenth century, not only because the couple formed by the subterranean Ghost and Hamlet is reminiscent of that of the Devil and the Vice in morality plays, but also because of other, more specific elements like the plurality of the oath, Hamlet’s disrespectful tone and the nicknames given by Hamlet to the Ghost. The whole sequence may be seen both as a living tableau on the stage and as comic relief, part of Hamlet’s wider propensity for puns.

The Introduction begins by placing the present volume in the context of previous and current work on the subject of medieval knowledge. It goes on to give an outline of medieval perspectives on the meaning, value and transmission of knowledge, noting the influence of classical authors and tracing the development of ideas about knowledge through the writings of key Christian thinkers. Isidore of Seville is identified as the key influence of the medieval encyclopaedic tradition and particular attention is paid to the authoritative work of Augustine, Bede and Aquinas. The introduction relates aspects of these medieval perspectives to specific chapters of the book and also highlights the relationship between religious and secular traditions. It ends with a succinct outline of each chapter.

The introductory chapter of Practising Shame lays out the problem of female honour in later medieval England: namely, its problematic reliance on a characteristic (sexual continence) that was revered in women, but also subject to suspicion. This chapter introduces the practices that underpin medieval understandings of female honour, and literature’s role in shaping and articulating those practices in later medieval England. In placing such emphasis on emotion as a practice, and in writing of shamefastness as a practice, Practising Shame contributes to a body of scholarship that is attempting to effect a theoretical shift away from the notion that emotions are something that we ‘have’ (or do not have) and towards the idea that emotions are something that we do. The book’s introduction outlines how shamefastness might be said to constitute an emotional practice and concludes with chapter synopses.

Thomas Kyd's overdue re-emergence on to the stage faces recurring practical challenges. Modern directors preparing an acting text of The Spanish Tragedy must somehow 'simplify' a play whose immense popularity meant that the accumulating texts pose unique problems. And not only must Kyd's directors confront fundamental editorial questions; unlike editors they have to resolve them, without footnotes or equivocations. This chapter examines the four major twentieth-century revivals: Robert David MacDonald's at Glasgow Citizens Theatre; Michael Bogdanov's for the National Theatre; Alan Drury's BBC Radio 3 version; Michael Boyd's at the RSC's Swan Theatre. It touches on the play's surprising reappearances since then, from an actual performance in a disused factory in London's main Turkish district to a fictional performance in a Turkish border town.

This chapter analyses how the Macbeth narrative first appeared (in terse accounts a few decades after the historical Macbeth’s death in 1057 CE) without any hint of witchcraft; accounts of Duncan’s death – in battle, not in a secret murder – emphasised his weakness as a king. The story gradually acquired witches and their prophecies through the imaginations of early Scottish chroniclers, especially in Hector Boece’s 1527 Historia Gentis Scotorum. After Shakespeare’s masterful representation of the ‘wayward sisters’ in Macbeth, the witches began to multiply in number, sing, and become semi-comic figures in Restoration adaptations (including a parody of them as early as 1674). Whatever their nature originally, the witches are now always connected to prophecy and dream.

Emily Wingfield’s chapter examines treatments of Queen Margaret of Scotland (d. 1093), beginning with the Life written by Turgot, prior of Durham, at the request of Margaret’s daughter the English queen Matilda, a work that highlights Margaret’s literacy and learning; Margaret’s role as reader and writer is shown to be emphasised also in later treatments. The subject of this chapter is thus not a branch of knowledge but the perceived learning of an important female individual and the significance of that learning in constructions of her as a saint. The chapter examines the way in which books function as vehicles for Margaret’s sanctity and political power and suggests that the Life itself is designed to model the life of a learned and holy queen for Margaret’s daughter, Matilda. Wingfield then considers how later verbal and visual accounts of Margaret develop this tradition so that she comes to function as an advisor of princes as well as princesses, her sanctity being shown to inhere ‘quite specifically, in her literacy’.

In this chapter Denis Renevey examines the ways in which writers in the Greek world and, later, western religious teachers used the name of ‘Jesus’ in contemplative practices, and offers ‘answers as to the way in which knowledge of the power of the name “Jesus” was appropriated for different purposes in the two differing Christian traditions, and according to distinct spiritual ideologies’. Renevey discusses the influence of Origen in the development of knowledge about the powerful potential of the name of Jesus and goes on to highlight the attachment to the name in Orthodox liturgical practice from about the ninth century, an attachment that in the fervency of its language anticipates western traditions of affectivity. Among western writers, Renevey focuses on Anselm of Canterbury and Bernard of Clairvaux, the former promoting affective use of the name in personal devotion, the latter in a communal monastic context, as part of a well-conceived devotional scheme.

This chapter is largely retrospective and looks at the work the author has done on Thomas Kyd since the preparation for his edition of The Spanish Tragedy. Both Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy and William Shakespeare's Hamlet have the same theme: the responsibility of the individual and the responsibility of the gods in carving out the future. In Shakespearian tragedy as a whole, there is, apart from the Ghost in Hamlet, a remarkable absence of supernatural structures. Whatever the influence of Kyd there may be in Shakespeare's Ghost, there is no doubt about the parallels between the two dramatists in a major point of the plot in their most famous plays. The chapter emphasises the distance in time between the busy unavailing efforts of the human characters in the sixteenth-century Spain and Portugal, and the overarching supernatural control symbolised by the presence of Andrea's Ghost and the figure of Revenge.