The physical, built environment could be used as a transformative agent, making Germans into happy, cooperative citizens who embraced modernity and modernization. This chapter deals with two processes: a process of increasing intellectual confidence, and a process by which material, physical spaces came to be used more vigorously to assert and enforce policy decisions. It examines how contemporaries at the turn of the century in Germany constructed the uncooperative, truculent citizen. The chapter looks at the space which, before the Great War, was considered the most resistant to penetration by the expert gaze of the state: the interior of the home. It explores the dominant kitchen designs of the 1920s by examining the question: Would woman be modern, rational and individual or would she be traditional, elemental and social? The chapter shows how space might be used to coerce women into answering this question, which contemporaries developed.

In this chapter, European novels and other relevant texts are looked at, both as descriptions and embodiments of the zeitgeist - in them are discerned 'cartographies of disenchantment', vying accounts of the causes, consequences and agents of rationalisation. The reductionism of John Gray's approach is evident from his conflation of the Enlightenment's heirs with religious fundamentalists, all of whom are understood to be utopians, and hence quintessentially 'modern'. Traits identifiable with the three continua are listed under the following headings: 'Counter-Enlightenment', 'Cynical Enlightenment' and 'Conservative Enlightenment'. The chapter disputes Gray's conclusions, finding them a useful foil for Jürgen Habermas's more sophisticated account. Antimodernism was discussed by Habermas in the early 1980s. The chapter concludes with a diagrammatic representation of tendencies and configurations critical of modernity.

Mary Bridges Adams's social action took place in what the generality of people considered a rather bohemian setting. This kind of habitat mapped out in the extracts with which we start is taken from memoirs of growing up around the time of the First World War. This chapter sets Mary in a network of comrades at a particular time and place. It begins with the narrative of Gas Workers' leader Will Thorne. After the loss of her elected status on the London School Board (LSB) and the collapse of the National Labour Education League, Mary's unyielding advocacy of Marxist education classes knit her together with Noah Ablett, Ethel Carnie and John Maclean. With her faith in Parliamentary Socialism eroded, she campaigned for independent socialist MP Victor Grayson. The chapter concludes with the single case of dissident Liberal Edward Lyulph Stanley, fourth Baron Stanley of Alderley.

In the robust and expanding field of Gothic studies, William Blake remains a spectral, marginal figure. Bundock and Effinger’s Introduction opens by exploring Blake’s prominence in contemporary Gothic art and culture, a fact made ironic given the relative dearth of scholarly work on Blake’s Gothic sensibility. Bundock and Effinger suggest how the Gothic as an historiographical, affective, and aesthetic concept might inform Blake in several substantial ways. The Introduction then expands in four directions. The first considers terror, horror, and the ‘Gothic body’ in Blake. The second considers the intersection of Blake and the Gothic in terms of visual art and iconography. The third surveys extant criticism on Blake and the Gothic to illustrate the hitherto missed opportunity this collection attempts to take. The fourth and final section is a ‘descriptive catalogue’ of the chapters that follow, offering summaries of each contribution and explaining the order of presentation.

The doctrine of transubstantiation was presented formally in Canon 1 of the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, which was presided over by Innocent III. Transubstantiation, as explained explicitly in the canon, involved the replacement or transformation of one substance (the bread or the wine) by another (the body or the blood of Christ). This formal record of ‘orthodox’ eucharistic doctrine was the implicit target of much of Wyclif’s criticism of contemporary conceptions of material change in the host. It entailed necessarily for him that the substances of the bread and the wine had to have been annihilated, and that their accidents had therefore to exist without subjects. Many theologians had published versions of this theory, including Thomas Aquinas, but Wyclif’s metaphysical system could admit neither the possibility of annihilation nor the possibility of accidents existing without substantive subjects. He outlined his position in a late philosophical treatise, On the Externally Productive Power of God (1371/2), but its controversial potential ostensibly went unnoticed.

Philip D. Morgan shows in his chapter on ‘Atlantic Studies today’ how in recent years, studies on the early-modern Atlantic World have become global and multi-faceted, giving rise to comparative and entangled histories. Atlantic History tackles themes that are prevalent in twenty-first-century history at large: ecology, port towns and cities, multinational and religious societies, networks, scientific revolutions, families, and the individual.

Teaching Transnational History in an environment still formed by a national history agenda poses many challenges, as Thomas Adam contemplates in his chapter. He develops an alternative approach to defining Atlantic History. He explains how we ought to think of the Atlantic no longer merely as a geographical space but conceive of it through the methodological approach of intercultural transfer. According to this premise the Atlantic World becomes ‘a space created through human activity’, namely the transfer, exchange of people and goods as well as the modification, re-interpretation, and sometimes rejections of cultural practices, ideas, and concepts in the process. Transatlantic relations in this context are treated as one example of transnational interaction. This framework not only allows for an interdisciplinary but also an inter-epochal exploration of the field.

Public health promotion has received critical attention from a wide range of academic scholars and disciplinary approaches. It has also received attention from social science scholars that explicitly addresses the social and political norms, forces, and consequences of the contemporary quest for public health promotion. This chapter provides an overview of existing critical social science studies of health promotion. It reviews and discusses the potential and limitations of three general approaches for conducting critical analysis of health promotion, namely health policy process analysis, political economy, and sociological critique. The chapter focuses on the Foucauldian-inspired analytical framework used in the empirical analyses of this book. It discusses the analytical framework's potential and limitations. The chapter explains the ways in which we adopt key analytical principles and concepts from Foucault's work in order to analyse power-knowledge relations and unquestioned norms in the contemporary politics of health.