This part introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The part identifies features of the relevant historiography that often relate to or respond to the major shifts in our understanding of the medieval peasantry. Some of these developments reflect an intensification or a deepening of research in relation to more general theories regarding the functioning of medieval rural society and economy. Much of the discussion of medieval peasant culture has emerged in relation to discussion of peasant agency, be that in terms of politics and the political engagement of the peasantry, in or beyond the manor, or in commercial exchanges involving peasants, as producers and consumers. Historical investigation of themes relevant to our understanding of the medieval peasantry has been conducted by historians working, for the greater part, in other areas and often responding to other agendas.

Driving was an aspect of female war service that did not fit within the discourse of nurturing and care, roles traditionally attributed to women. The pot-holed roads of France present a useful terrain – both literal and contextual – in which to theorise the female ambulance driver-mechanic as a symbol of gender modernity. The chapter begins by examininng the motor car as a symbol of modern femininity. It unpicks the censored accounts of FANYs’ letters home, reports published in the Corps’s magazine and newspaper articles, the embellished tales of daring told during the war to publicise the unit’s activities, and retrospective accounts captured in print and on tape, in order to reveal both the thoroughly modern pleasures and the perils of driving and car maintenance. It considers media attitudes toward the female driver and the establishment opposition they slowly eroded. While the war enabled the performance of new configurations of female masculinity, providing a space where women could play with their gender identities, protected by their class background, there is little evidence of a wish to overturn existing gender relations or of expressions of a long-lasting transformation to their gendered subjectivities. They pushed the bounds of convention but stayed within its limits.

This chapter explains the relationship between the Historia of the influential but resolutely static Bede and a set of scholars whose physical movement defined them as peregrini, the ninth-century Irish expatriate scholars who made their careers in the Carolingian world. Within that community, it focuses on one in particular, Sedulius Scottus. The lives of such men - 'scotti who die in foreign lands' in the self-conscious words of a marginal comment found in the ninth-century manuscript Bern 363 - are a reminder that Bede's monastic stabilitas was not the only mode of early medieval scholarly life. Experienced as a continuous piece of prose, the Bern Bede offers a compressed account of British history from Caesar to Augustine's mission, with a noticeable slackening of interest in late imperial history and a sustained moment of collapse in interest when dealing with the life and career of St Germanus.

When Richard II, disguised as a priest, arrived at Conway castle in August 1399 the army he had brought back from Ireland had dwindled to a band of about fifteen companions. Among those who accompanied him were three commoners: Sir Stephen Scrope, under-chamberlain of the household; William Ferriby, the king's notary; and an esquire of the household, Janico Dartasso. Janico's own identity as a Basque, a people without a territory, and his early experience of Navarre, where a fluid ethnic mix of servants gathered around the French-born ruler of a multiple kingdom, inclined him towards a looser pattern of lordship. He sought to maintain the integrity of his lands on the western edge of English rule by expedients that used to the full his cosmopolitan contacts and experience: frequent trips to the English mainland; military service in France; commercial ventures to Aquitaine; a projected marriage into the Scottish aristocracy.

This chapter finds support for a cultural politics of nonhierarchies, networks and flows in writings that follow from early anarchist and social ecology contributions and in more general works on green political thought. The chapter calls attention to the resurgence of nonhierarchical political formations from various perspectives and how they have shaped artistic practices and art historical methodologies. What ends up foregrounded are the transversal, interlinked and mutually influencing parts of our social body. Drawing on some of the content in Part I and the Conclusion, this chapter analyses these approaches methodologically and speculates on how the discipline of art history might productively continue to adopt scholarly rich, egalitarian political positions, and inform a fully ‘green’ political ideology.

Hawkins’s popular screen image as possibly the ultimate British cinematic patriarch of the 1950s is discussed, together with his background as a child actor and a pre-war juvenile lead. His rise to stardom is chartered via The Small Back Room and State Secret to the actor’s status as one of the key figures associated with Ealing Studios. Mandy and The Cruel Sea are debated in terms of Hawkins’s ability to convey anger and vulnerability and The Man in the Sky is discussed as an example of the more overtly flawed heroes of the late 1950s. The independently produced The League of Gentlemen marked a transition into leading-character player, often specialising in genially untrustworthy roles. The chapter concludes with an assessment of Hawkins’s performance in The Prisoner.

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’.

Turning to the American perspective, Chapter 7 examines the role of modern mass media and information technology in American foreign policy during the Vietnam War. The conflict was not only the first television war; it was also defined by the application of high-tech surveillance, used to detect and contain an unconventional enemy fighting an irregular style of warfare. These modern techniques of mass surveillance and spectacle defined both the reach and limits of American power. If policymakers could employ spectacular means to deceive the American people, their decisions were also subordinated to the power of public opinion, which was increasingly shaped by mass communications and culture. In such events as the Tết Offensive in 1968, a military defeat for the Communist forces that would become their greatest spectacular victory, the image of the war in the media would become more decisive than its reality in determining American policy. On the other hand, the deployment of high-tech surveillance in the war of attrition would result in a “quagmire of quantification.” Based upon the reduction of reality to statistical data, the figures compiled on the rates of attrition yielded a distorted representation of the war on the ground, misleading policymakers and analysts.

Amid considerable debate within modern societies about whether or not there ought to be limits to freedom of speech, this introductory chapter argues that historical perspectives have been all too lacking, and all too simplistic. This chapter sets the book in its modern context – in terms of the challenges that have emerged to Western liberalism as a result of religious pluralism and the challenge of hate speech – and highlights the rather simplistic ways in which freedom of speech has conventionally been anchored in ideas and developments that emerged in early modern Britain. It surveys the historiographical debates that have seen this ‘Whiggish’ narrative subjected to critical scrutiny, and sets up the volume by demonstrating both continuity and change across the early modern world. This means recognising the centrality of religious issues as well as secular concerns, and the complex ways in which contemporaries grappled with the theory and practice of freedom of speech and freedom of the press. It means acknowledging the complex relationship that existed between regulation, restraint and liberty, and the dynamic interplay that can be observed between rights and duties, truth and error, genre and audience.

This chapter considers the moral choices made by men at war when they decided either to kill their enemies or to spare them. It deals only with the battles of the Carolingian civil wars and of subsequent struggles between Frankish/French princes - that is, between enemies who unquestionably shared a common culture. The battle of Fontenoy, about which Janet Nelson has written often and always illuminatingly, is by far the most famous of these battles, and by far the best recorded. Two of the combatants, Nithard and Angelbert, fighting on opposing sides, wrote about it, one in a remarkable prose history, the other in a remarkable poem. It figures not only in contemporary and near-contemporary accounts by the annalists of St Bertin, Fulda and Xanten, but also in two histories composed south of the Alps by Andreas of Bergamo and Agnellus of Ravenna.

The feminist literary criticism of today is the direct product of the 'women's movement' of the 1960s. In feminist criticism in the 1970s the major effort went into exposing what might be called the mechanisms of patriarchy, that is, the cultural 'mind-set' in men and women which perpetuated sexual inequality. This chapter looks at three particular areas on which debates and disagreements have centred on about feminist criticism: the role of theory; the nature of language; and the value or otherwise of psychoanalysis. It includes a STOP and THINK section to help readers ponder over anti-essentialism which has for some years now been a dominant concept in critical theory. The chapter describes some critical activities of feminist critics and presents an example of feminist criticism by taking the account of Wuthering Heights by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, from their book The Madwoman in the Attic.

Pearl is a religious dream-vision in which the dream is largely taken up by dialogue between the narrator or dreamer, as a figure in his dream, and a woman who is a fount of divine wisdom. It does not engage significantly with the fourteenth century. Its interest lies rather in relating Christian doctrine to universal life-experience, and particularly in the problem that some of the basic tenets of that doctrine fly in the face of basic human instincts and attitudes. The narrative of Pearl is multi-layered, with the poet creating a dreamer-figure separate from himself whose attitudes differ significantly before, in, and after his dream. If the dreamer is to be taken as a representative figure for all humanity then the poem demonstrates that the ways of God can never be justified to men, for the distance between God and man is too great to be bridged.