St. Guthlac's life is first recorded in the early eighth-century Vita Sancti Guthlaci written by a monk named Felix. This chapter argues that Felix's Vita Sancti Guthlaci and the anonymous Old English poem Guthlac A are evidence for a mixed Anglo-Welsh culture in the borderlands in the eighth century. The importance of warfare to Guthlac's identity is famously reflected in his name. Guthlac's role as the leader of a warband whose members are of mixed ethnicity is a further testament to the mixed Anglo-Welsh culture of the borderlands. Although Guthlac's battles with demons have been understood to reflect Anglo/Welsh ethnic division, Guthlac A displays a far more ambivalent attitude, reflecting the fluid boundaries of the Welsh borderlands. Postcolonial critics have understood Guthlac's legend as reflecting a nascent sense of Anglo-Saxon colonial aspiration, with the Mercian saint a successful embodiment of Anglo-Saxon land conquest over native British resistance.

In the nineteenth century, limited Irish independence was thwarted on several occasions by corruption through the patronage of Irish political representatives. The civil service was as loyal to new political masters as they had been under British rule. The administrative legacies of British rule set in train the conditions for probity. The enduring impact of the meritocracy policy led to a professionalised and competent civil service, defined by rule based behaviour, and detached from local and national political considerations. J. J. McElligott noted that the beneficial effect of Ministerial inexperience and distraction by the Civil War was that it enabled senior civil servants to construct the administrative fabric of the Free State without political interference. The vivacity by which one of the most influential pieces of legislative reform was prosecuted in these turbulent Civil War years of the young state was striking.

Some 20th and 21st century literary critics treat allegoresis as a project fraught with psychological and philosophical complexity and The Faerie Queene as deliberately obscure or ironic. Most early marginal comments demonstrate that Spenser’s first readers found the poem’s allegorical message accessible and mainstream. Sermons, aspiring like Spenser (in this work) to orthodoxy, are similarly didactic. When a preacher addressed a public audience, biblical types of Elizabeth like Moses, David, and Hezekiah, appeared without reference to unedifying details. The implication for The Faerie Queene (though not for all of Spenser’s work): ostensible praise and blame may be taken at face value.

There are references to the anxieties of unaccompanied child refugees about the fate of their parents. This is, in fact, a theme in refugee history most often marginalised by those who wish to emphasise the humanity of the British state in the rescue of refugees. This chapter measures the concessions government sanctioned against the desperation of those seeking entry from Germany, Austria and, Czechoslovakia after March 1938. From afar, with their family lives already disrupted, child refugees became the vulnerable and inappropriate witnesses to tragic chains of events which they could do little or nothing to control and which overtook parents who persisted, against all the odds, in roles of distant care and in the hope of a future reunion.

This chapter suggests that Van Sant's film Psycho extracts, exteriorises, and diffuses gender onto the surface of consciousness. The film is less of a romantic secret to be penetrated through shadowy hints and cloaks of anxious ambiguity and more a uniform topography of social fact, presence, utility, and kinesis. If it was earlier a catafalque and chrysalis for desire, it is now a banality, like weather. The rainstorm through which Marion Crane drives to the motel, once pathetic fallacy, is now nothing more than a realistic setting. There is realism, too, as Marion packs to take flight in underwear that is money green. The film brings to the surface of awareness and attention a stash that was earlier a guilty secret. Dying a second death, Marion is not packaged in guilt or gender, but is only and pathetically a passer-by in the wrong place at the wrong time.

This chapter explores the relationship between social distinction, migrant subjectivities and the quest for a better way of life. Authenticity acts as a lens through which to examine this relationship. On the one hand, it becomes clear that the migrants' ideologies about life in the Lot are characterized by their desire for a more authentic way of living; migration had offered them self-realization precisely because of the promise that this would be available in the Lot. However, migration is not as transformative as originally imagined, with the result that the quest for authentic living continues until long after migration. As the ethnography presented in this chapter demonstrates, there is also a self-referential element to these judgements, as the migrants reflect on the ways that their practices have changed over time. Importantly, it emerges that processes of social distinction and the quest for a better way of life are mutually reinforcing.

Occasional liturgies are scripts for religious services which respond to specific occasions: emergencies like plague (in 1563), Muslim invasions in Europe (in 1565 and 1566), bad weather (in 1571), the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, the London earthquake of 1580, the Spanish invasion (expected from 1586 through 1588), or plots against the queen like Dr. Parry’s in 1585 and Babington’s in 1586. Two occasional liturgies from 1576 and 1585 offer readings and prayers for November 17, signalling that, like Pentecost and Christmas, Accession Day was part of the church year. Identifying England with Israel, liturgists treated Elizabethan current events and public figures as interchangeable with events and characters described in the Bible. Elizabethan churchgoers thus had abundant training in decoding allegorical narratives—a facility they could bring to a reading of The Faerie Queene.

In the period from the 1900s until the later 1930s, the Jewish population of Southampton more than tripled. According to the Jewish Year Book in 1905 there were twenty Jewish families in the town and in 1934 this had grown to sixty-five—a growth from around 100 individuals to over 300. Most of this increase was due to inward migration from other parts of Britain, most notably the East End of London. It reflected, as a pull factor, the growth of Southampton whose population increased from just over 100,000 to over 175,000 from 1901 to 1931. It also represented the push factor—the economic misery and intense competition within primary immigrant settlement areas such as the East End. While the fledgling Jewish communities of Basingstoke and Aldershot struggled to survive in the inter-war period, elsewhere in Hampshire those in Portsmouth and Bournemouth followed Southampton in receiving further influxes of east European origin Jews, many of whom had initially settled in London. It was Southampton Jewry, however, because of the late settlement of these new arrivals, that was particularly and perhaps uniquely transformed in the inter-war years. It is for this reason that the chapter focuses on this dynamic and unique south coast community.