When mentioning the lollard legacy in the work of Coverdale, Foxe and others, nearly all modern scholars, assert that these medieval heretics provided historical evidence of God’s approval. But remarkably few lollard deaths conformed to the literary tropes and exemplary models of the early church. Although several high-profile lollards were executed, they had been condemned as traitors, and many lollard records were cut off after trial, leaving evangelical chroniclers unsure how these so-called heretics had died. This chapter addresses this tension, and demonstrates how Foxe moulded the lollards into martyrs – whether they died suffering or not. By recounting in excruciating detail the trials, imprisonments, abjurations, and penance of the lollards, Foxe shifted focus away from the constancy of the martyr and towards the cruelty of the bishops who interrogated them. In particular, it shows how Foxe perceived the ecclesiastical oath to be an abuse of power, especially the ex officio oath. Due largely to Foxe’s success in establishing the lollards as true martyrs, post-Reformation Protestants rarely questioned their martyrological value, and this paved the way for discontented religious advocates to appropriate the lollards in line with the trials of their own religious traditions.

This part focuses on prescriptive rather than descriptive treatments of history, using the neoclassical ideal of formal historical narrative as a foil for genres like satire and secret history. Like all literary works, Roger North's and John Oldmixon's narratives demonstrate a range of potential literary influences. But both the Examen and the Stuart history provide for a relatively uncomplicated analysis in that each of them can be associated very clearly with a particular subgenre of historical literature.

The Hélène cycle, strictly speaking, comprising La Femme infidèle, Que la bète meure, Le Boucher, La Rupture and Juste avant la nuit, sees Stéphane Audran cast repeatedly in the central role as the often inscrutable Hélène. It is characteristic of Claude Chabrol, particularly in the carefully crafted Hélène cycle, to include in his films miniature versions of the main narrative. Barely used before Chabrol's period of technical experimentation in the mid-1960s spy films, zooms are central to his film style in the Hélène cycle. L'Express, Le Nouvel Observateur and Cahiers du cinéma all remained blind to the sly critique of the bourgeoisie in films such as Les Biches and La Femme infidèle. They chose instead to detect in Chabrol's work a celebration of the middle classes. La Rupture crystallises the melodramatic tendencies of the Hélène cycle and the inter-class tensions implicit in Les Biches and Le Boucher.

Riddles alter their audiences’ perceptions of familiar objects and phenomena through precisely true yet entirely foreign descriptions. Riddles can be accused of a topsy-turvy inversion of high and low subject matter or of falsely raising the low to the level of the high through so-called inappropriate diction. However, riddles can also be read as meditations, albeit often humorous ones. These short poems force readers to meditate on the wonders of the natural and constructed worlds. This chapter explores how the obfuscation inherent in the genre of the riddle and its poetic diction allows a shift in perspectives so that the wondrous nature of what appears quotidian becomes suddenly, if laughably, visible. Following a discussion of the cultural work of wonder, the chapter focuses on the ‘obscene’ riddles Womb wæs on Hindan (R.37), Wrætlic Hongað (R.44), Banleas (R.45), and In Wincsele (R.54), solved as ‘bellows’, ‘key’, ‘bread dough’, and ‘butter churn’. By insistently resisting the reader’s expectations of what merits poetic description, these riddles create space in which to appreciate the mundane and see past simple ubiquity to these things’, and their makers’, deep and foundational worth to society as a whole.

Historians have resorted to a language of mystery and metaphor when they come to grapple with the great structural changes which underpin the array of contributory causes of migration. The British Isles was the prototype case of agrarian transformation associated with industrial growth and mass migration. Frank Thistlethwaite in the early 1960s re-shaped the subject by insisting on linking the two sides of the Atlantic into a connected explanation of the migratory turmoil. There were links along the chain of causation towards the migration of millions of the British people in their confusing permutations. Migration history comes in three main schematic forms: first the individual account, second the general narrative of migratory behaviour, and third the grand theories of migration. International emigration has depended on the basic facilities of migration. The British case was the prototype of modern rural-urban migration and has been replicated, with important variations, across the world.

This chapter identifies A. L. Kennedy’s novel Paradise as having many of the elements of the Existential-drinker text – a protagonist, Hannah Luckraft, who commits to drinking, coupled with questions around how to exist in an essentially meaningless universe – yet also shows signs of surrendering this understanding to a hedonism that eventually becomes indistinguishable from complete oblivion. A distinctive feature of the novel is that it presents the reader with two drinkers who are in love with each other and for large portions of the novel remain committed to their drinking. Another feature of the novel is its paralleling of events with the Stations of the Cross and associated meanings, usually treated in ironic fashion. Throughout the novel, notwithstanding the potential for love and religion to provide purposefulness for Hannah, this is another novel which ultimately eschews any meaning-making framework.

The overriding purpose of the United Nations is the preservation of peace. When states have agreed to second forces to the United Nations either for enforcement or for peacekeeping activities, they do so through agreements which specify the administrative, financial and disciplinary arrangements that are to apply, although supreme authority rests with the Secretary General. While the decisions of the Security Council are legally binding upon all members, it must be borne in mind that the Council is made up of the representatives of the member states, who act according to instructions received from their governments. Even with North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), the problems which confront the United Nations, including command, discipline, rules of engagement and the like, are of equal significance. In both the former Yugoslavia, especially in relation to Kosovo, and in Afghanistan, NATO took over the military operations against the 'terrorists'.

This chapter investigates the role of European Union (EU) institutional actors at the treaty level in the process of constructing an Area of Freedom, Security and Justice (AFSJ). It deals with the main advances of the Constitutional Treaty which resulted in the Lisbon Treaty. The Lisbon Treaty amends two separate bodies of treaties: the Treaty on European Union (TEU), and the Treaty on the Functioning of the Union (TFEU). The chapter analyses the role of the European Commission, acting to initiate and push for a process of normative change among EU decisionmakers, as well as concrete institutional change, which is both part of its role as a supranational policy entrepreneur (SPE). While the Commission developed the so-called 'Plan D' to improve communication between the EU and its citizens, the European Council Summit of 17 and 18 June 2005 decided that a 'reflection period' lasting until 2007 was necessary.

This chapter begins with John Ashbery's 1994 work: 'The Ridiculous Translator's Hopes'. What Ashbery's poem allows one to make out are Avery Gordon's ghosts. It allows one to wonder if one is already among them, or at the very least what one is doing here or there. There is nothing in the poem itself, the biography of the poet, or the literary commentary on his work to say that the Ridiculous Historian cannot do this. This is not the case with W. H. Auden, or his poetry, his life, or his commentators. One has to reckon with books like 'Auden and Christianity', many accounts of his God, and his contributions to theology. In 'Reflections on Aristotle's Treatise of Poesie', Thomas Rymer has much to say about Ridiculous Poets whose verse was more History than Poesie.

The author establishes a discursive context in which to read the orphan figure as embodying a difference within the family. To do so, she details the figure of Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights against a number of discourses, namely, those of the foundling, the orphan as foreigner, and the orphan as criminal. Heathcliff embodies the difference within which plays a pharmaceutical function disrupting yet ultimately reinforcing notions of family and nation. Throughout Heathcliff remains unknowable and unassimilable: a racialised foreign figure with no known origins who attempts to dispossess the indigenous families. The author further details Heathcliff in light of a strand of popular writing which narrativises the orphan figure as embodying difference within Victorian culture. She finally offers a representative example of a few types of popular orphan narratives in order to explore the concern with the orphan figure in these types of popular writing.

Chapter 1 examines the milieu in which La Motte studied, the Johns Hopkins Training School for Nurses, where she began a curriculum that reflected the school’s desire to professionalize nursing and teach the latest nursing standards. Many of the women associated with the nursing school in its early years were also involved in social reform, and the models they provided of socially engaged nursing practitioners undoubtedly had a profound effect on La Motte as she eventually found her place in the anti-tuberculosis campaign in Baltimore, first as a visiting district nurse and then as an executive in the Health Department. It also discusses her development as a writer and speaker after her graduation from nursing school and examines her writings, such as her published articles about the best approaches to tuberculosis nursing, to see how she positioned herself in the debates about the most effective ways to combat tuberculosis as she developed her public voice as a nurse and reformer in these years. Through an examination of these issues, the chapter builds a picture of how La Motte progressed professionally through her work as a vocal advocate for public health.

Debates about Irish history were not confined to academia. Some of the most damning criticism of republican ideas was published by the Kerryman newspaper in the weekly columns of schoolteacher Con Houlihan. Much of Houlihan's critique was based on seeing Irish history through the prism of class. Some accounts suggest the term 'revisionism' itself was introduced 'into Irish debate by Desmond Fennell'. Fennell was a Catholic intellectual, living in the Connemara Gaeltacht when the northern crisis began. The northern crisis shaped much of the debate in southern Ireland during the 1970s. It was far more than an academic discussion and driven as much by confusion as by a desire to refute old mythologies. People could agree with aspects of the revisionist argument but recoil from others, while many retained a basic republicanism but were disillusioned by the ongoing war.