The task in writing about Charles Martel is to set the record straight. It is thus necessary to unpick both sides of his reputation and to confront the massive implications of the Heinrich Brunner thesis, which means examining very carefully the grounds on which this period is seen as a watershed. On all three counts, the work of Susan Reynolds can never be far from mind. Where Charles Martel is concerned, her work is the spur to revisit even the most familiar sources to check the terminology of landholding, lordship and clientage to see whether early medieval authors used the words and terms associated with 'feudalism', which modern historians read into them. This chapter aims to point to areas in which our understanding of the career of Charles Martel has changed significantly, that is, to draw attention to the recent refutation of old views and misunderstandings.

Chapter 1 examines the development of a Vietnamese national culture. This culture was a result of the advent of mass reproduction and print capitalism, which were introduced in the colonial era as instruments of surveillance, used by the French in order to monitor the political activity of their colonial subjects. In deploying modern print media as a means of surveillance, however, the state would also create the conditions for a new “imagined community” of the nation. During the 1920s and ’30s, the new media would be instrumental in spreading the modern mythology of a 2,000-year history of resistance to foreign invaders. This modern tradition was the result of an anti-colonial interpretation of the precolonial past, based on a European conception of sovereignty as the right of a “people” (dân tộc) possessing a distinct national culture. In the new national history, the Vietnamese people (who had previously appeared in the old imperial records only as subjects (dân) of the emperor) would become the foundation of a new “sovereignty of the people” (dân quyền). Projecting this modern conception of sovereignty into the precolonial past, writers working in the vernacular media produced a new national history of the Vietnamese people.

The memory of twentieth century conflict is the ‘third pillar’ on which Anglosphere thinking rests and a major point of intersection between Englishness and Euroscepticism, but one that again occludes England. It positions Anglosphere countries on the side of ‘right’ in the pivotal conflict of the twentieth century against Nazism, totalitarianism and militarism; a conflict remembered as a straightforward contest between good and evil compared to the more complicated memories of conflicts of the Cold War era and afterwards. In the Anglo-British memory, the Second World War also serves as a point of difference between the EU narrative of ‘never again’ and an English worldview which represents ‘1940’ as the apogee of Britain’s greatness. If in the ‘European’ narrative the Second World War represents a catastrophe followed by a renaissance, then in the dominant English narrative it represents an apogee followed by a decline: a decline, moreover, institutionalised in the form of the European Union.

This chapter examines the earliest attempts, in terms of a modern historiography dating from the second half of the nineteenth century, to discuss the medieval English peasantry. It begins with one of the most resilient of the themes in the historiography of the medieval English peasantry: lordship. The chapter explores the following main themes from this early period: economy, population and demography, and the village community. One of the more vibrant themes in later nineteenth-century historiography of the medieval peasantry was the nature and development of the village community. Political theorists and historians in the middle decades of the nineteenth century sought to identify long-term continuums and the interconnectedness of village communities over time. Studies of the village community by H. S. Maine, F. Seebohm and G. L. Gomme identified the organisation of the farming landscape as a major factor in the regulation and nature of the village community.

This chapter brings three principal French intertexts (and some secondary ones) to bear on A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It first argues that Dream evokes a recent play comically adapting Italianate pastoral conventions, La Diane, by Nicolas de Montreux (1594). The next key intertext explored is Le proumenoir (1594), by Marie de Gournay, which offers a feminist slant on the histoire tragique as exemplified by her source, the Champs faëz of Claude de Taillemont. Gournay’s novel presents love as tragic, particularly for women as victims of male inconstancy, as in the legend of Theseus and Ariadne. Gournay introduces this exemplum through the Epithalamium of Catullus, where it counterpoints celebration of a mythical marriage – an effect matching the intrusion of sombre overtones on Shakespeare’s representation of marriage as comic fulfilment. Finally foregrounded is the relation between the burlesque ‘tragedy’ of Pyramus and Thisbe staged by Shakespeare’s Mechanicals and an anonymous Moralité, which illuminates the Mechanicals’ absurd approach to theatrical challenges. Also considered is a poetic reworking of Ovid’s narrative by Antoine de Baïf, which anticipates Shakespeare’s embellishment of this material with humanist trappings. These intertexts highlight the parodic potential Shakespeare exploited in insinuating the fragility of generic boundaries.

The chapter zooms in on the place of human rights during the 1976 American presidential elections. It argues that Jimmy Carter was a latecomer to the new human rights language. Beyond his deep religious and moral beliefs, the chapter points out three major issues for Carter’s human rights commitment. First, the creation of many transnational groups monitoring Soviet compliance with the human rights provisions of the CSCE and the establishment of a specific Congressional Commission on this issue contributed to putting human rights under the spotlight. Second, the chapter argues that a strong commitment to the promotion of human rights abroad offered an opportunity to unify Carter’s Democratic Party, which at the time was split over foreign policy issues. Finally, the chapter narrows its focus on Carter’s advisers for foreign policy during the electoral campaign, Cyrus R. Vance and, especially, Zbigniew Brzezinski.

This chapter provides an overview of the origins of material culture studies and the disciplinary specialisms that have had the strongest bearing on their development. The theoretical underpinning of material culture studies will be elucidated through a clear and concise discussion of the work of philosophers and social theorists – making clear that 'things' have agency. The chapter demonstrates that by viewing the objects of the past as inanimate and inactive as compared with the living, breathing humans who made, exchanged, and used them - researchers can miss the dynamism of the object-person interactions that took place many decades or centuries ago. Moving on from the theoretical principles that have shaped the study of material things, the chapter discusses the circumstances that brought about historical material culture studies. It also considers the particular place of historical work within this context and the many potentialities material culture history offers for future research.

The chapter narrates the internal politics of the French right in 2016 to 2017, from the promise of virtually assured victory following François Fillon’s nomination as presidential candidate in November 2016 to the depth of despondency less than six months later, as Fillon failed to win through to the second round. Most of the analysis centres on the figure of Nicolas Sarkozy, one of the most influential politicians of his time. As the campaign gathered pace, Sarkozy appeared as a ‘has been’, as did Alain Juppé, the former premier whose welfare reforms had brought the country to a standstill in 1995. The fate of Sarkozy, Juppé and Fillon gave an early indication of the wide-scale rejection in 2017 of the old – both parties and politicians – who had outstayed their welcome. To add insult to injury, the Fillon scandal (which involved the candidate employing family members as political advisors) ran against the grain of the public’s demand for more transparency and honesty in its politicians.

This chapter looks at how public authorities can use media technology (in this case a DVD) to raise the profile of excluded voices as part of a decentralization initiative. Democracy rests on the principle of political equality, but studies show that few citizens actually engage regularly in political action, and that participation is strongly positively correlated to income, wealth, and education. The design experiment presented in this chapter highlights the crucial, but difficult, role of facilitation, in particular the impact it can have in creating more inclusive dialogue.

This chapter presents the story of literary theory by centring it upon a series of ten key events which constitute its public history. The key events are the Indiana University 'Conference on Style', 1958; the Johns Hopkins University international symposium, 1966; the publication of Deconstruction and Criticism, 1979; the MacCabe affair, 1981; and the publication of Eagleton's Literary Theory: An Introduction, 1983. The events also include J. Hillis Miller's MLA presidential address, 1986; the Strathclyde University 'Linguistics of Writing' conference, 1986; the scandal over Paul de Man's wartime writings, 1987-1988; Jean Baudrillard and 'The Gulf War never happened', 1991; and the Sokal affair, 1996. The advantage of doing this is that many of the underlying themes are thereby brought to the fore, so that the trajectory of theory becomes strikingly apparent. The chapter explains the apex of the rise of theory and the beginnings of its decline in the mid-1980s.

This chapter examines an essay by Ferdinand Tönnies that serves as the ‘Introductory Article’ to the English edition of his famous Community and Association (originally 1887; more often rendered Community and Society). Tönnies proposes to examine societies under the perspective of how their members will and want things, and distinguishes between ‘natural’ and ‘deliberate will’, from which he derives his two ideal-types of society-as-community and society-as-society (or association). Tönnies is on the one hand nostalgic about a lost world of (village-type) communal life, on the other hand describes modern society merely as a temporary form of appearance of what still remains its essence – community life.