Dodona is among the best-known Greek oracles, with thousands of lead lamellae relating the questions asked to Zeus. But understanding how they were used, relying on epigraphy, with the literary tradition and its usual stereotypes about oracles, proves impossible. Literary sources emphasise the ambiguity of questions and answers, while the engraved questions, ignored by the literary tradition, are obviously formulated to be answered by ‘yes’ or ‘no’. From this basis, this essay explores when these questions (and the answers that we do not possess) were written and used in some ritual way(s). This could have been at the beginning or the end of the consultation, or somewhere in between. We do not know if the texts transpose the question asked orally verbatim, nor if all the consultants were following a strict procedure. Most of the questions are too short to be understood by the officials, and the consultation was partly if not fully oral. Some detours about quasi-identical questions, abecedaries and lot oracles clarify this picture, but this enquiry highlights our ignorance about the procedure and warns against simplistic interpretations drawn from incomplete documentation.

The highly politicized government-imposed system of nursing was the hardest to apply; Florence Nightingale faced the greatest challenge of any of the nursing directors and did well under the circumstances. As a whole, the religious nursing sisterhoods consistently provided the best nursing, but it was doctor-directed nursing in Russia that developed the most innovative and efficient system. The Crimean War demonstrated that nursing was becoming a knowledge-based practice. The barely literate British working-class nurses were aware of this and demanded recognition of their expertise and body of knowledge, but a persistent theme in the story of nurses is the way the upper classes looked down on them and what they considered their menial and repulsive domestic service. The most outstanding feature of the war’s nursing experience was the transnational humanitarianism of nurses who came from all classes and such different cultural backgrounds. Despite all the restrictions and obstacles these men and women faced, all managed to relieve some of the sufferings of their patients. However, the nursing services which were most successful, the Russian, French, and Piedmont-Sardinian, were those in which the nurses transcended gendered constructions, and their competencies rather than their sex determined their roles.

Northern Ireland is shifting from a Province focused on ethnic conflict and community polarisation to an increasingly diverse society. The scope for multiple or intersectional identities, however, is limited in the political sphere. This chapter examines the role that political division and power-sharing have played in the lack of significant progress in mainstreaming responses to new migrants (European migrant workers, refugees and asylum seekers), as well as long-established groups (British Asian and Chinese) within social policy in the region, and the political integration of groups outside of the ‘two communities’ in Northern Ireland. The construction of political parties along sectarian lines in Northern Ireland, and a power-sharing system which sees political advantages given to parties which designate as ‘green’ or ‘orange’, validate the fears held by many migrants that they cannot participate in the political process without choosing sides. This compounds the disengagement of minorities in the region and further reduces the accountability of political leaders to them. The social and institutional reinforcement of the two-community narrative inhibits integration and the mainstreaming of minority identity into public policy, which has a deleterious effect on provision of health and social care services, education, employment and social mobility for these groups.

The ninth-century Chronicle of George the Monk reveals the history of Byzantine attitudes toward male homoeroticism. George’s retelling of the emasculation of two sixth-century bishops accused of pederasty triggers a long rant against men who have sex with men and the confusion of gender categories caused by eunuchs. George draws on patristic sources and biblical interpretation of the fate of Sodom, revealing the overlapping and contradictory elements of his opprobrium against men who have sex with men. George’s quotation of earlier historians, sermons on the letters of Paul by John Chrysostom, and a diatribe against eunuchs by Cyril of Alexandria offers a genealogy of Byzantine homophobia, charting the history of civil and ecclesiastical laws that shifted from an honor culture that impugned men who were penetrated to a legal rhetoric that punished penetrators, that is, from shaming bottoms to criminalizing tops. George was himself a monk, suggesting that monks also desired the eradication of same-sex desires and the punishment of the men who experienced them.

This chapter discusses the employment of poor and labouring women between the mid-nineteenth century and the mid-twentieth. In this period, they suffered first a loss of their independent occupations in manual manufacturing and then exclusion from mechanized large-scale industry. This marks the beginning of a persistent and long-term pattern of low female workforce participation in India. The discussion is organized around multiple themes of marginalization, quantitative and qualitative: first, the question of numerical decrease in household industry, craft production and the small-workshop sector; second, the ideological exclusion from mills and mines, which were emerging as preserves of adult men earning family wages; third, resistance to women’s long-distance employment on contracts in plantations, which was perceived as a challenge to familial control over their labour; fourth, commercialization of women’s reproductive work in sectors such as midwifery, domestic work and sex work, providing increasing employment but under stigmatized conditions. These themes are linked to questions of regulation by family, caste, community and the state.

This chapter helps readers make sense of the array of activities that can be considered as irregular warfare. As an umbrella term for a particular form of warfare, its methods consist of terrorism, insurgency, revolution, coup d’état and civil war. The chapter compares and contrasts these methods according to the level of resources they employ, their respective centres of gravity, strategic and tactical orientations, mechanism for success and duration. It provides a useful taxonomy for students seeking to better comprehend irregular warfare but narrows down subsequent study to its two most prevalent methods: terrorism and insurgency.

This chapter demonstrates that John’s emotional reform priorities were not solely acted upon within the walls of the monastic community at Fécamp, but also coloured his interactions with the secular world. As the abbot of the most prominent abbey in Normandy, John regularly interacted with lay lords and dukes of Normandy and Holy Roman Empresses, among others. Using charters, letters, and chronicles, this chapter shows how John’s particular brand of piety was not restricted only to the contemplative moments he had inside the monastery, but also motivated John’s wider responsibilities as a politically, socially, and economically involved abbot. This chapter thus argues against the historiographical narrative that abbots were either spiritual recluses who resented their worldly activities or political players who relished their worldly power. Instead, this chapter shows that an abbot’s worldly activity could be part and parcel with his spiritual goals, aiming to erode our modern notion that worldly activity could not also be spiritual behaviour in medieval Europe.

This chapter focuses on the representation of cultural tensions, and the issues of colonialism, identity and difference. Issues relating to colonialism and postcolonialism, to exile and alienation, always at play in Claire Denis' work, are central to the films discussed in the chapter. Chocolat's lush natural and historical setting and Beau travail's stunning open landscapes on the one hand, and S'en fout la mort's claustrophobic atmosphere and spare mise en scène, and J'ai pas sommeil's unusual portrayal of a noir Paris on the other, seem like aesthetic antinomies. After Chocolat, the shooting of the documentary Man No Run brought Denis back to France. S'en fout la mort, like Chocolat, was selected to represent France, this time at the Venice Festival. J'ai pas sommeil is set almost solely in the eighteenth district of Paris, one of the oldest parts of the city and a hybrid space.

Dante’s two reports of his looks back to earth frame this section. After the first, Dante has a vision of Christ himself.Despite this theophany, Dante must undergo an examination of his Christianity, testing him on the Christian virtues of faith, hope, and love.The eager “bachelor” answers the masters’ queries with definitions memorized from authoritative texts.The test, however, exceeds rote memorization.The question of the texts’ truth, which concern the most significant matter of our happiness, moves the participants to inquire more deeply.

Dante rethinks the Christian virtues as he rethought the sins in Purgatorio.His reassessment reconsiders Adam, the figure most intimately connected with the meaning of Scripture’s supremacy, namely, its discouragement of philosophic inquiry. Through this conversation, Dante reinterprets the text that originates the faith in which he’s tested. He recurs to that origin to direct it onto an alternative path, one that encourages rather than prohibits the philosophic life.

This alternative way of life requires an alternative divinity. In this realm of the fixed stars, to which he traces his origins as man and poet, Dante undertakes the ultimate poetic act, that of theopoiesis. Dante’s vision of Christ, he writes, prepared him to see Beatrice.

After the death of Alexander Korda, for whose London Films he had made five films, Reed was keen to try his hand again in Hollywood. His last two films for Korda had been major disappointments both critically and commercially, so it was something of a surprise that he was commissioned by Hecht-Lancaster to direct Trapeze. This chapter demonstrates that even what are on balance rightly considered flawed films contain many remarkable moments. The Last Warrior and Follow Me brought his career to an end with a whimper in a final phase that was not without merit. Reed's next offer came from MGM, the chance to re-make Mutiny on the Bounty. Of all Reed's later films none has attracted as much patronising commentary and laboured humour as The Agony and the Ecstasy. Reed was offered The Agony and the Ecstasy after first choice Fred Zinnemann turned it down.

This chapter explores how the mutinies of the army of Flanders were narrated by contemporary witnesses, historians and participant actors. In addition to revisiting the repertoire of collective actions of the mutineers themselves, it attempts to analyse their imaginaries, as well as the tropes and emplotment strategies that shaped the documents they produced. The chapter focuses on a long epic poem written by Cristóbal Rodríguez Alva, who had been active in the military both in Italy and in the Low Countries. This unknown manuscript text, consisting of more than 18,000 verses, is used to analyse the language of the mutineers, as the author of the poem was an eyewitness and a participant in mutinies in the Low Countries.

Chapter 3 takes us through Fanon’s complex relations with French society as a kind of ‘family romance’. The chapter engages with the interplay of language, gender and colonial politics, critiquing along the way simplistic, non-intersectional analyses which privilege, say, gender (e.g. Bergner) to the exclusion of racial difference. The chapter concentrates on Fanon’s reading of Capécia and Maran, exploring the ways in which both language and sexuality are marked by the dimension of colonial ideology. The chapter engages with the elements of this family romance, analysing how the notion of race traverses gender and sexual politics.