This chapter focuses on Judith, a poem that describes the eponymous Hebrew heroine’s successful decapitation of the evil Assyrian king Holofernes. Holofernes’s head provides a literal example of plunder. Unlike her biblical inspiration, Judith accepts the Assyrian’s gore-smeared armour as an offering from her people. The irony of this instance of spolia increases because the woman whom Holofernes wishes to claim as his plunder in the end plunders him. Two sets of opposing methods surface regarding spolia and similar objects. Certain passages in Judith feature zooming out and quickening of the narrative pace, while in others zooming in and slower rhythm predominate. The narrative allows us neither to neglect the dangerous, seductive detail (often a type of spolium) nor to linger too long on it. The foreshortened narrative itself invites and resists appropriation through allegorisation, whether religious (as a Christian typological exercise) or political (as a statement about the Viking attacks). The chapter argues that Judith thus complicates two common, contrasting theoretical approaches to it: the psychoanalytical criticism emphasising the heroine’s subversion and the exegetical interpretations that contain the protagonist and her actions within orthodox medieval belief.

The conclusion discusses La Motte’s life from the 1930s until her death in the 1961. The Great Depression forced her and Emily Chadbourne to return permanently to the United States, where they settled in Washington, DC and New York State. La Motte’s publications slowed in the early 1930s, then ceased as she turned her attention to investing in real estate in the Georgetown area of Washington, DC and pursuing intellectual interests, such as business affairs or working for a brief time with the National Woman’s Party, while enjoying her circle of friends. It also offers a final summative reflection on the significance of her long career.

This chapter offers new translations of some of the most fire-damaged riddles of the Exeter Book, accompanied by a translator’s note discussing the process of translating Old English fragments. While many translators attempt to smooth over missing language, the author is fascinated by the ways in which Old English poetry allows him to walk through its bones, and part of his translation instinct is about paying respect to gaps in these poetic remains, rather than attempting to force a seeming wholeness onto them. Old English poems already exist as sites of multiple kinds of loss. Given that these few remaining poems are in a language no longer spoken, are often damaged, and that many of them are considered without literary merit, it seems crucial to engage them in a way that honours their losses, instead of attempting to offer them ‘accessibility’. This place of loss and temporal and textual scarring is where these translations intervene and build. The translations presented in this chapter do not attempt to find answers to fragmented riddles. Instead, they communicate their words and their syntax, while preserving, rather than hiding, their damage.

Chapter 2 offers a necessary account of the film’s narrative contentand how this is structured. It also deals with Coward’s uncreditedcontribution to the screenplay. Though the war is not mentioned, andthe period of the film is unspecified, its resonance in relation tothe months near the end of the war is considered here in a generalatmosphere of emotions being submitted to more than usual strain.Matters of class, the casting of Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard andthe critical reception are also raised here against the 1945background. When it was first released, the film did not attractuniversal plaudits, but it did find some national and internationalcritical favour.

This chapter analyses lollard views of the priesthood and tithing found in Foxe’s Acts and Monuments. It begins by looking at the nature of the lollard critique of clergy, revealing that despite the nuanced categories modern scholars have given to ‘anticlericalism’ (including distinctions between ‘literary anticlericalism’, ‘hyperclericalism’, and ‘antisacertodalism’), Foxe’s portrayal of the priesthood is dominated by calls for an abolition of a separate priestly class. It then hones in on two radical concepts in the lollard narratives: clerical disendowment and the notion of temporal possessions more generally, and the idea of episcopacy. Beyond the ministers themselves, Foxe’s book describes a range of opinions concerning the tithes which maintained them, from scepticism to outright denunciations. It confirms that these ideas, preserved by Foxe’s tome, offered historical precedents for separatists and puritans as well as conformists in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

The Oldham group sought to defend ‘freedom’ by avoiding either what it saw as the ‘atomistic’ forms of individualism encouraged by liberal capitalism or the violent Gleichschaltung of political totalitarianism: their middle way was a ‘true’, ‘Christian’ freedom based upon a holistic, organic and community-oriented ‘personalism’. It shared a broader intellectual scepticism about whether the freedoms of laissez-faire ‘liberalism’ could survive in the conditions of ‘mass’ society; however, despite some claims that Oldham and his companions advocated ‘Christian totalitarianism’, the group clearly rejected this option at an early stage in its discussions and remained committed to maintaining (and even strengthening) ‘liberal’ civil rights and parliamentary government. Despite stressing political decentralisation and active citizenship, however, the group members’ vision of freedom assumed that democracy would take a more constrained form that was not untypical in post-war political reconstruction across Western Europe.

The revolt of 1916 in Russian Central Asia was an important part of the First World War and the crisis of imperial globalization. Despite this, it remains little-known and understudied in Anglophone and Francophone scholarship. While there is a rich legacy of Soviet-era publications on the revolt in Russian, these usually bear the strong ideological imprint of the period when they were produced. The post-Soviet period has seen a flowering of new scholarship from Central Asia itself, some of it in Central Asian languages. While much of this continues to use paradigms and terminology inherited from the Soviet period, and interprets the revolt in a series of narrow national frameworks, some of it is also making use of new types of sources, and uncovering voices that were often silent in earlier scholarship – most notably those of the rebels themselves, and the revolt’s many victims. This introduction will give a brief overview of the overall course of the revolt, review the existing historiography, suggest some of the unanswered questions that remain, and explore the new approaches found in the most recent publications and among the contributors to this volume.

A quarter of all casualties at Peterloo were women, even though they comprised only 12% of those present. This apparent victimisation of women by the Manchester Yeomanry Cavalry resulted in the widespread use of the motif of mother and child across a range of poems, other print media and cultural artefacts produced in response to Peterloo, leading to an intensification of impact rather than a dilution through repetition. The introduction traces the involvement of female reformers, particularly in the North West and their representation in graphic satire. Even though this section comprises only eight poems, the trope of woman and child as victims is present in many of the other poems in this collection as well as newspaper articles, graphic satire and other artefacts, resulting in a powerful discourse due to the sense of collectivity engendered by its repeated use. The introduction provides examples of how the representations of Peterloo depicted women and children, illustrating that the poems should be read alongside the caricatures of George Cruikshank and images printed on handkerchiefs, illustrated here by the work of John Slack, and pottery in order to fully understand the power and resonance of this single trope.

Andrew Lynch recuperates an overlooked aspect of Chaucerian reception in the nineteenth century: Chaucer’s Catholicism. By the nineteenth century, to be Catholic meant to be un-English, even unpatriotic. Lynch reviews the different strategies employed by literary critics to dilute the idea of Chaucer as a Catholic believer. Chaucer’s Catholicism was subjected to processes of infantilisation in order to promote his status as the father of English poetry.

Brian Moore’s novel The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne is set in a boarding-house in early 1950s Belfast, but it is quite a few pages before Judith Hearne’s drinking habit is revealed. The novel then portrays the effect on an individual when belief in God disappears. Alienated through ostensibly social causes such as her ‘odd duck’ physical appearance and family responsibility, the character’s dulling of reality through drink is also her response to the kind of bleak truth that Jack London identifies in John Barleycorn. Hearne’s society, family, and upbringing are powerfully infused with Catholicism, and as her experience of apostasy becomes stronger so does her recognition that she is completely free to behave how she wishes, which includes more socially unacceptable drinking. The chapter places the novel’s thematic concerns within the wider context of Existentialism’s focus on how to respond to a world which is now deemed to have been abandoned by a God who, nevertheless, cannot be entirely shaken off. These difficulties are partly filtered through the secular and religious meanings of ‘passion’.