The subjects of queens and queenship have figured prominently among Janet Nelson's publications. She has analysed both the women and the contexts within which they acted across a broad chronological range and in different kingdoms. The subject of the representation of queenship in charters across the period from 1066 to 1135 does merit special treatment. First, it bridges the chronological gap between the reigns of the three queens who were the central subjects of Pauline Stafford's and Lois Huneycutt's books. Secondly, the specific focus on representation in the manuscripts of original charters and in the texts of charters provides sufficient evidence to say something new about the scripts, norms and special contingencies which defined queenly activity and agency in this period. Thirdly, it deepens knowledge of the gendered and, in this specific case, largely collaborative, role of women and men.

‘Passing’ was an objective of the prosthetic limb developed by Benjamin Franklin Palmer. Palmer produced the first patented leg in New Hampshire and he gradually developed a worldwide following for a device that became a must-have accessory for those who wished to blend back into society following the loss of a limb. Palmer aligned his invention with medical progress, but he was also adept at marketing the benefits of his prosthetics in both practical and aesthetic terms. The prosthesis was able to merge with the body, making the wearer ‘whole’ again, physically and mentally, and it could facilitate masculine ideals of sociability, labour and business success. International marketing of his invention created a following for a device that was ‘conspicuously inconspicuous’ and demonstrated that Victorian values and ideals were not limited to Britain and its empire.

The chapter commences with an overview as to how John Mills did not accord with the standard image of the post-war male film star and how his popularity derived from his apparent ‘ordinariness’. The sheer scale of the actor’s career is discussed, together with how he achieved major stardom as the archetypal ‘Everyman’ during the Second World War. The October Man is considered in terms of post-war British film noir and showcasing Mills’s talent for conveying barely suppressed angst. By the 1950s Mills was frequently cast as officers and towards the end of the decade Town on Trial and Ice Cold in Alex displayed his authority figures as flawed, complex individuals. Tunes of Glory is evaluated as possibly the actor’s definitive performance and the chapter ends with When the Wind Blows, as an ironic reflection of Mills’s wartime pictures.

Once at the White House, Carter moved swiftly to give human rights high priority in America’s foreign policy. The chapter recognizes that Carter’s human rights campaign was almost global but it focuses on its impact on bipolar détente. It argues that Carter conceived human rights and détente as interdependent and mutually reinforcing. Conscious that the American public’s attitude towards détente represented a major obstacle to bipolar dialogue, the White House hoped to build a domestic consensus on détente through a firm stance on Soviet violations of human rights. At the same time, through the continuation of détente, it tried both to ideologically challenge the Soviet Union and to promote human rights there.

This chapter presents the concepts discussed in this book, which is a collection of scholarly essays related to John Mandeville's Travels by scholars in England and France who produce a complex and sometimes contradictory view of the book as an important object of early modern attention, as well as a feature of early modern literary context. The first part of the book provides accounts of the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century travels of the Travels' variable text in its English or 'Insular' versions, along with some account of the epistemological considerations that accompanied its travel to the more pragmatic economic and colonial concerns of the Tudor and Jacobean periods. The second examines the historical discourse on the Turks and Islam in early modern England, Mandevillian geography, and the importance of medieval culture to the understanding of a European Renaissance. The last section is concerned with the invented medium of the commercial theatre.

The highest level of Jewish religious expression is the performance of the mitzvoth, the divine Commandments. This chapter relates to those Commandments that the sages define as inherently 'male'. It describes how the sages attempted to dictate to women the manner of their observance of mitzvot set aside for women alone. The chapter shows that during the Middle Ages, women found a way of their own to relate to the world of mitzvot and keep the Commandments. It also describes the performance of the mitzvot by women and the manner in which they defined and differentiated their femininity by means of the Commandments. Women's exclusion from learning implies that they would not be well versed in the language of prayer in the synagogue. The understanding developed in the consciousness of women that they were the ones who initiated the rituals of the Sabbath and sanctified the holy day.

The introduction begins by positioning the volume in relation to current debates and developments in a number of related fields: religious history, biblical studies, postcolonialism, literary studies, imperial history and histories of scholarship and the book. Making a claim for the centrality of biblical narratives to the shaping of modern notions of race, nation and empire in the nineteenth century, the introduction discusses some of the reasons why this aspect has been downplayed in accounts of ‘scientific racism’ on one hand and the emergence of European empires on the other. Introducing the two interlinked sections of the book, we stress the importance of biblical ideas of exile, peoples and ‘lands’ to notions of identity and belonging in a variety of nineteenth-century contexts. Furthermore, we explore the explosion of textual transmission and translation in the period, which allowed these tropes and themes to be transmitted across global networks of transport, power and print.

The historical discussion about the Soviet famine of 1932–33 has become one of the most hard-fought historiographical debates in the twenty-first century. In Ukraine, the interpretation of the famine as a deliberate genocide directed against the Ukrainian nation has become a touchstone of national consciousness. In Russia, the same interpretation is denounced as Russophobic. Outside the former Soviet Union, old positions from Cold War days still inform much of the discussion. This chapter traces the transnational history of the debate about the famine, from its inception at the time, through war and Cold War, into today’s post-Soviet situation.

The French Revolution was generally welcomed by those of a philanthropic disposition. The chapter opens with a cameo role for William Wordsworth who planned a politically radical journal to be called ‘The Philanthropist’. Robert Southey, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Godwin also engaged closely with philanthropy and with how it could transform society. The government’s repressive measures had effectively silenced them by 1795. Friendly Societies and trade unions built the word ‘philanthropic’ into their titles – and continued to do so through the nineteenth century, testimony that philanthropy and mutualism might have cohered. In the 1790s, however, the tide turned against philanthropy. With Britain at war from 1793, it was no time to be saying that you should love all humanity or be a ‘citizen of the world’. The Anti-Jacobin Review and William Cobbett were philanthropy’s most outspoken opponents. They broadened their attack on radicals to turn it against William Wilberforce and others, strongly evangelical, who were campaigning for an end to the slave trade. The clash between supporters and opponents of the slave trade forged a powerful link between evangelicals and philanthropy, their opponents extending their wrath to suggest that evangelical philanthropists were undermining key characteristics of the nation.