The first phase of European integration was followed by a period of institutional stagnation lasting through the 1970s. This chapter argues that this Eurosclerosis was the result of a counter-narrative brought to the fore by Charles de Gaulle, who sought to return the state to the centre of political and economic power in Europe. The expansion of Europe beyond its Franco-German core reinforced the Gaullist challenge by forcing Europe to confront new understandings of the past. This was reinforced by the accession of the United Kingdom, whose differing, more triumphalist memories of the war meant that the British took a fundamentally different view of the European project from the start. However, by the mid-1980s a new group of leaders reacted against this challenge to what the chapter refers to as the classic narrative by building on their own childhood memories of the Second World War. Commission President Jacques Delors, French President François Mitterrand, and German Chancellor Helmut Kohl set the second phase of integration in motion with a series of initiatives that once again combined the economic logic of prosperity with the moral logic of cooperation across borders.

The first decade of the twentieth century saw anti-Qing insurrection culminate in the 1911 Nationalist Revolution. But the new Nationalist government of the Republic of China had neither the power nor the means to manage the country. Revolutions of different kinds, from ideological to literary, from feminist to cultural, were also taking place and it was these that were really changing the country.

This chapter asks how it is possible to determine what works. Policy-makers need to know whether the nudge and think measures they introduce can achieve their desired effects or not. It seems obvious to say that policy should be based on sound research, but in reality governments and public agencies often intervene without good evidence. This chapter argues that policy-makers and others should adopt an experimental approach when they do not know how to achieve their goals. It introduces the randomized controlled trial and its qualitative cousin, the design experiment, which provide robust methods for ascertaining whether interventions designed to change citizen behaviour work or not.

This chapter is about the changing reputation of Richard II during the seventy years or so after his death. It starts with Walter Somery's testimony because the testimony serves as a reminder that personal memory and oral testimony would have played a part in shaping that reputation. The chapter is concerned with the social memory of Richard's reign, and investigates the memories of Richard II preserved during the Lancastrian England. One issue the chapter considers is the way in which historical memories can be structured by the characteristic narrative lines of different literary genres; another is how far the changing predilections for particular narrative conventions can be related to the social and cultural contexts that produced them. Distinction is drawn as required between the production of historical narratives and their reception, between 'authoring', and 'authorising', which is a social and communal activity.

This chapter examines a chapter from one of the founding texts of feminist socialism, The Workers’ Union (1843) by Flora Tristan. She made the case that workers have to constitute themselves as a class in the form of an internationalist organization, and that equality of women had to be one of its priorities.

At the heart of the medieval peacemaking process stood the face-to-face meeting. Conferences between rulers are frequently mentioned in the sources of the period, yet chroniclers often tell more about where these parleys took place than they do about what was decided. There are various pieces of evidence that indicate that there may have been more conferences held at or near the elm tree. The evidence of the elm tree and the ford of St Remigius clearly shows that meeting places were a statement by medieval princes that those two sites were regarded as forming part of the border at the time of meeting. Bridges are another example of specific sites of conferences that are visible in the landscape, of which there are some well-known and justifiably famous meetings that date from the later medieval period.

The film career of Margaret Rutherford is an object lesson in how whimsy and eccentricity are traits that need not descend into indulgence. The key of Rutherford’s screen performances was her Madame Arcati in Blithe Spirt, whose beliefs are entirely real to her. The actress was at her finest in roles that saw her applying her own codes of conduct to a world her characters increasingly found unrecognisable, such as I’m All Right Jack and The V.I.P.s. Her Jane Marple and Mistress Quickly are equally vital figures, both staving off boredom and convention.

This chapter explores an element of the historiography of the medieval English peasantry, culture. There are two important strands in the historiography of the medieval peasantry which, in terms of their core assumptions, have supposed the presence of a peasant culture at least capable of being posited and, in part at least, examined. The first of these is the examination of peasant engagement with the market, especially in terms of peasants as consumers, and the second is that aimed at exploring peasant agency, especially as regards politics, be that at the level of the manor and estate or on a national scale. The chapter considers each of these in turn before turning to some other, related, features of peasant culture, including relatively new initiatives, typically issuing from beyond studies directed at the medieval peasantry per se, and examines aspects of culture related to and encompassing the medieval peasantry.

Building on canonical, largely male writers thus far discussed, this chapter shows the rich vein of theory, political philosophy and activism in ecofeminism and queer theory. It explores the relatively under-discussed intellectual boundary between the major scholars in ecofeminism and those in feminist art history. Pioneering work in ecofeminism becomes powerful in understanding the themes of domination and hierarchy that lie at the heart of The ecological eye. Queer theory too stands as a productive extension of the challenge to domination and hierarchy that runs throughout the book and so helps to delineate rich territory for supporting a transversal ecological imaginary in art history.

This chapter considers the forms that vocational training took and the options available to the growing child in the years 1300-1500. The period 1300-1500 witnessed a growing number of voices expressing the value of literacy skills and formal education to individual, familial, spiritual and commercial development. The Church had made the provision of schooling a canonical requirement. For both sexes and across social groups, education was directed at providing them with the skills required for adult life. Since the nineteenth century, the fundamentals of a child's early education in Western Europe have been reading, writing and arithmetic. Schools are the main forums for this training, as well as providing common cultural and social experiences for five-to-fourteen-year-olds. For the aristocratic boy, later childhood saw him move out of the domestic sphere and the world of women, be that nursery or nunnery, and into the public arena for training among men.

The procedure that the British call compulsory purchase, though it is really compulsory sale, and that Americans call 'eminent domain', also a slightly misleading name, is in the civil-law tradition simply 'expropriation', or an equivalent word (espropriazione, Enteignung, etc.). This chapter argues that an immanent sense of the common good may have allowed both rulers and local communities to take land from individuals for the sake of that common good even before the Carolingians and outside the kingdoms of the Franks and Anglo-Saxons. The most striking example in the early Middle Ages of what looks like a modified form of expropriation is what has traditionally been seen as the plundering, spoliation or secularization of Church land by Charles Martel and his descendants, the Carolingian kings and emperors.