The missionary encounter between Ireland and Africa is complex and evolving, withongoing reverberations in both societies. The Irish missionary movement in the earlytwentieth century echoed the discourse of British imperialism, and was part of theproject of establishing the Irish as ‘white’.  Irish literature complicates this narrative:missionaries in the work of Brian Friel, Mary Lavin, and John McGahern are figuresof ambivalence and isolation. Nigerian writers such as John Munonye and S. O.Mezu detail this intercultural contact from the African perspective.  The genesis ofcultural diplomacy and trade relationships between Ireland and Africa can be foundin these earlier missionary encounters. Irish NGOs are active in historical missionarylocations, replicating the discourse of the missionaries who came before them.Growing immigration and falling vocations has led to a reversal in the relationshipbetween the countries, whereby African priests come to Ireland to re-evangelize aChurch reeling from clerical abuse scandals.

This chapter describes the decentralized and inefficient administration of the British army medical department. The department was a civilian, rather than a military department, which meant the doctors had no authority over their patients and orderlies and could only make recommendations to the military High Command. The position of hospital nurses in the British hierarchical class structure placed them at the very bottom; they were very much looked down upon, while their social behavior sometimes merited censure. This made it especially difficult to introduce them into army hospitals. The ideology of the domestic and public spheres in Victorian society, and how this affected the lady nurses, is explored in the chapter. Furthermore, it explains how Nightingale, who saw her government-directed mission to the East as a mystical religious commitment, was placed under severe political constraints. She had to accept women whom she considered unqualified, and 25 percent of the nurses had to be Roman Catholic at a time when anti-Catholicism was rampant. The chapter also describes the impossible situation of the orderlies, who were the principal nurses.

Bertrand Brier's work is distinctive, innovative and highly original in modern French cinema. His consistent attention to the more banal elements of social exchange reveals a considered devaluation of the accepted material of cinematic culture, together with an explicit rejection of its norms and conventions, and demonstrates a commitment to formulating, in form as well as content, alternative processes of filmic narration. The subversive ethos of all authentically popular cultural expression is the second defining feature of Blier's approach to filmmaking, further emphasising his artistic and ideological marginality, and his consistency with wider French positions in cultural discourse and practice. His dramatic conception is original in its attention to structural forms which depend on circularity, subversion of physical and psychological consistency of character, narrative incoherence, and manipulation of register, and the films are striking in their intention to be non-reconciliatory in content and form.

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book presents the reader with a coherent picture of the main narrative, thematic, stylistic and representational trends which have characterised recent cinema produced in Spain. It seeks to explore the obsession of Spanish cinema with the past and its role as part of a wider recuperation industry. The book examines the varied forms of historical cinema ranging from literary adaptation and period drama to retro thriller and musical. It offers an analysis of other main forms of genre cinema which have dominated the commercial industry and the popular imagination in Spain since the 1970s. The book explores constructions of gender and sexuality across a wide range of examples taken from a variety of contemporary movies. It also focuses on cinema in the autonomous communities, mainly Catalonia and the Basque Country.

Spanish cinema is known for producing more explicit images (of both sex and violence) than most other contemporary European cinemas. Francoism operated on the basis of highly traditional and retrograde concepts of gender and sexuality. This chapter seeks to explore representations in the context of post-Franco cinema. It considers the impact of the so-called Movida on cultural and cinematic trends. The chapter focuses particularly on the increased profile of women both behind and in front of the camera. It attempts to deal with representations of patriarchy and masculinity and the contradictory images these can produce. The chapter explores the evidence of a more radical questioning of traditionally-erected gender boundaries and the promotion of a more eclectic range of models for sexual orientation and personal and family relationships.

In the 1880s, Alexander Graham Bell feared that deafpeople’s intermarriage might lead to a deaf race. Inthe early 2000s, geneticist Walter Nance feared, onthe contrary, that genetic technology might begenocidal for Deaf culture. These two figures markthe beginning and the end point of this culturalhistory of hereditary deafness research. In thecentury between, scientists made immense progress inidentifying the genetic mechanisms underlying theinheritance of deafness. They uncovered that therewere not only one or two responsible genes, buthundreds of different forms and syndromes. Yet thereis a twist in this simple story of progress. What itmeans to carry one of the genes for deafness, andwhat should be done about it, differed and differsgreatly. What has influenced these perceptionsduring the past century and what is at stake inresearching genetic deafness? How, during the pastcentury, have ideas about disability, difference,and citizenship changed, where did eugenics end,and, perhaps, neo-eugenics begin, and what do genesmean for our identity?

This chapter discusses the historiography of ports, and maritime and urban history. It explores the concept of the ‘contact zone’ and how this helps us understand the cultural dynamics of sailortown. The introduction concludes by explaining the rationale and structure of the book and identifies the parameters and sources employed.

This chapter provides basic orientation, with essential information on the physical geography and political history of the period 750–1000, outlining the main political trends in Francia, Italy, England and Spain. Though a period of extreme political instability at the highest levels of kings and emperors, complicated by the long-term impact of invaders from outside, many of the regions within kingdoms sustained an identity over many centuries. The chapter continues with a brief survey of available primary source material for the study of local societies (which is extended in the Appendix). It surveys charters, estate records, narratives (including annals, chronicles and hagiography), capitularies, law texts and liturgy.

Chapter 6 outlines three embodied systems – schema, image, and global – in order to explain the nature of systemic dissonance in the human body, along with the signal generated by this dissonance. The chapter discusses a number of religious cases of embodied dissonance, including spirit possession in India, body modification in the United States, the Hindu Kavadi practitioner in Southeast Asia, and the complicated bodily phenomena that characterize the life of the twelfth-century mystic, Bernard of Clairvaux. Systemic theory allows us to understand some embodied religious practices as complex responses to an internal body-self dissonance rather than the effect of a single cause.

At the end of the discussion with Crito, Socrates invokes the Corybantic ritual, which does not stand for an irrational or emotional force, as shown by careful consideration of the nature of that ritual. As the dialogue ends, Socrates remains open to new arguments, as always, but Crito has none to offer and time has run out.