Evidence suggests that Mandeville's Travels was written between 1351 (the date of completion of Jean Le Long's translations) and March 1357 (the date of the signing of the treaty between England and France after the battle of Poitiers). This chapter presents a summary of the evidence concerning the dissemination and readership of Mandeville's Travels in England before the appearance of Pynson's print c. 1496. Mandeville's Travels, written while hostilities still plagued the countryside, was sent to Paris, the major book-producing centre of Europe, possibly by the author anonymously very early on, and by c 1360 was part of the staple of the Parisian stationers. Three other Latin manuscripts of Travels are recorded in the book- lists of the Cluniac priory of Monks Bretton, Yorkshire, the Premonstratensian house at Titchfield, Hampshire, and the Augustinian abbey at Leicester. The chapter shows that Travels was known and read by gentry and clergy alike.

Shortly after civil partnerships came into effect the coalition government collapsed. This chapter outlines how the general election of 2011 helped progress the campaign for marriage equality. This was a time ripe for political reform. Each of the main political parties recognised a need for constitutional change which was reflected in their election manifestos.

This chapter lays out in graphical form the results of word searches for ‘philanthropy’ and ‘philanthropist’ in the Burney Collection of Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Newspapers and the British Library Newspapers Archive on Gale NewsVault and the collections on British Periodicals available on ProQuest. I have also carried out in-depth work on The Times and the Observer and Manchester Guardian and on the Daily Mail from its start in 1896. The results show the growth of use of the words in the second half of the eighteenth century, a slight dip in the early nineteenth century, followed by exponential growth in the 1830s and 1840s to reach a plateau of high usage through to the end of the century. There is then sharp decline through to the 1940s, followed by increasingly rapid growth from the 1980s.

Max Horkheimer’s essay ‘Critical and Traditional Theory’ (1937) is the most explicitly programmatic statement of the Critical Theory of the ‘Frankfurt School’. It addresses the interrelations between the mode of how to organize social research and the nature of the social reality that is being researched. He rejects what both empiricism and rationalism share, namely a conceptual separation of facts and theories. For both, empiricism and rationalism, facts are to be collected like books in a library and theories are like the catalogue that organizes them. Horkheimer’s critique affects our understanding of what ‘facts’ are and what ‘theories’ are. Critical Theory is presented as neither ‘deeply rooted’ in any existing reality, nor detached from societal interests, but committed to the ‘obstinacy of fantasy’ that must be in conflict also with views prevailing amongst the oppressed.

Although society maintains that ‘woman is always woman’, it also complains that ‘woman is losing her ways’. Apparently not every female human being is a woman – the latter requires possession of a mysterious something called ‘femininity’. In The Second Sex (1949), one of the emblematic texts of the feminist tradition, Simone de Beauvoir argues that ‘civilization as a whole’ produces ‘woman’. To be this or that means to have become, though, and thus not necessarily to remain, this or that. One must actively become what society has set out in advance, and thereby one may also change it (sometimes more, sometimes less).

This chapter shows how the Victorian era can be credited with ushering in reforms in childhood developmental disorders, including but not limited to problems with language acquisition. These early steps in recognising age as a factor of clinical importance were responsible, in large part, for eventual legislation in Great Britain, Europe and the United States that provided equitable treatment of children and adults alike. The authors explore Victorian attitudes to childhood disability by focusing on how physicians attempted to describe and explain these newly identified developmental disorders of language. Focusing primarily on childhood aphasia, they highlight the haphazard ways in which the medical profession made breakthroughs to give greater understanding of the condition. This required abandonment of early ideas, which had often been without empirical foundation, in order to embrace fresh perspectives and understanding, notably about the long-held and dubious linkage made between deafness and ‘dumbness’.

This chapter looks at an essay published in 1912 by Marianne Weber, a key representative of liberal feminism, ‘Authority and Autonomy in Marriage’. Weber explores the contradictory character of marriage as both diminishing individual autonomy and making a meaningful, ethically autonomous life possible for the individual. She is particularly interested in the idea that the spiritual deepening of monogamy has disciplined men.

In the Middle Ages the status of women in the Jewish community underwent a real and fundamental change. Rabbi Solomon ben Isaac had recognized that women conducted business within the community and with Christians, and in his opinion this did not present a problem. The economic activities of Jewish women in northern France and Germany centred on small loans, made on the basis of pledges, to Christian women, who used the money to finance their routine household expenses. Licoricia of Winchester's saga illustrates how the favourable economic status of a Jewish woman in the Middle Ages could also affect her social status in England in general and in the Jewish community in particular. Another Jewish woman, Chera of Winchester, cooperated economically with the Bishop of Winchester, Peter des Roches.

It has often been asserted that as a result of 'new discoveries' the factual credibility of Mandeville's description of the world evaporated towards the end of the sixteenth century . The main contention in this chapter is that this is simplistic. Far more complex combinations of factors were at work, and perceptions of Mandeville. The chapter explores how and in what form did people in sixteenth- and early seventeenth- century England encounter Mandeville's Travels, and, in what way, or ways, might they read it. Although the chapter concentrates on printed texts from English presses, people ought not to forget that texts printed on the Continent did circulate in England, and the Continental input into the English printing tradition of Mandeville is clear. A summary diagram explains the descent from the lost original to very free reworkings, the Continental and Insular versions.

To examine the battle of the sexes in Jewish society and to follow the male struggle against the power of women in the family unit, this chapter examines three types of women. First type is the woman who attempts to free herself of a husband while retaining what she has achieved and the property she has acquired during the marriage by claiming that he is impotent. Second is the childless widow who attempts to free herself from the extended family of her dead husband. Third type is the woman who finds her husband repulsive and decides to withhold the enjoyment of sexual relations from him or to desist from the work she has undertaken to do for him. The dayanim had a strong desire to help women when they believed there would be some social or communal benefit.

From the beginning of the twelfth century, Jewish society was threatened by the Christians. The Jews felt that there could be a recurrence of attacks by Christians as well as attempts to force them to convert to Christianity. Despite its popularity, the Midrash had less impact on the Jews of the Middle Ages than the story of 'the mother and her sons', a well known example of Jewish martyrdom. While the attitude towards the anusot is not positive, Rabbenu Asher ben Yechiel does give them the chance to come back into the fold of Judaism without calling attention to their non-fulfilment of the obligation to kill themselves al kiddush haShem or making this an obstacle to their return. All the genres of Jewish writing in the Middle Ages retain the central role of women in the acts of mavet al kiddush haShem, even though they were all written by men.

This chapter presents two main objectives: to show that texts modelled upon the Mandevillian mode were not only published and read in early modern England, and they were fascinatingly excluded from the collections of travellers' tales. Balanced against those are two perhaps equally intriguing silences: about the motivations that spurred writers as well as publishers, and about whether or not readers could make distinctions between volumes of the kind categorised as 'Mandevillian' and those based upon actual travels. While early modern tellers of tales might be excused because they could not distinguish between camel meat and beef, no such qualification can be made for those recent and current critics, because attempts at separating travels from 'travel lies' simply highlight the questionable ideological mainstays that underpin their literary and critical foundations. People should celebrate the intellectual skills of the forgers of these texts that continue to have a Mandevillian afterlife.

In this chapter the author narrates his direct and personal insights into the continuity of Victorian values and practices relating to the welfare and education of blind people that were maintained well into the twentieth century. Using his novella, The Panopticon, which is based on his lived experiences of growing up in a residential blind school in the 1950s, the author argues that residential institutions for disabled people acted similarly to prisons in some aspects of their treatment of those in their care, particularly in relation to how personal relationships between pupils were regulated and the ways in which transgressions of the strict moral code of the institution were punished. He also illustrates how these places of education failed to prepare their pupils for the sexual challenges of adolescence and adult life, while acknowledging the benefits that communal living with contemporaries could provide.