This chapter re-examines the relationship between the Protestant religion and the politics of English overseas expansion, and looks at how confessional concerns entered into debates over colonisation. It argues that although English plantation may not have followed the coherent Protestant strategy mapped in early scholarship, the debate over the dominions was nevertheless inflected with spiritual, theological and ecclesiastical concerns. Debates occurred over whether to Christianise indigenous populations or reconstruct the ecclesiastical order of the domestic realm. It also argues that the relationship between overseas expansion and the reformed religion became problematic not because colonial policy was secularised, but because Protestants found no consensus over the sweeping moral, pastoral and political questions provoked by ventures outside Europe.

Recent puppet theory engages with how this ancient form exists in dialogue with contemporary digital technologies. In 2017, the Royal Shakespeare Company mounted an ambitious production of The Tempest in which Mark Quarterly’s performance as Ariel was rendered alongside a digital puppet through the use of live motion capture technology. This chapter examines how the hardware and software used by the RSC and Intel to render Quarterly’s ‘Double Ariel’ engages with The Tempest’s themes of liminality, and specifically Ariel’s liminal textual status as a supernatural entity. By deconstructing the technical systems used to render Ariel’s avatar in this production, the chapter also explores processes of iterative ‘technodramaturgy’ – the interplay between traditional dramaturgies and the innate, often concealed dramaturgies of technical systems themselves (software, hardware or mechanical). In the RSC Tempest, this technodramaturgy heightened the wonder and spectacle of Shakespeare’s sprite, leading to theatrical discoveries around rendering the supernatural through digital puppetry.

This chapter explores the conceptual planning,organisation and reception of the exhibition FromSamoa with Love? Samoan Travellers in Germany,1895–1911 at the Museum Fünf Kontinente in Munich,2014. It does so by taking into considerationcompeting obligations among the Samoan descendantsand community, the responses of mainstream museumvisitors in Munich with no prior knowledge of fa’aSamoa (the Samoan way) and the expectations of theBavarian government, who strictly controlled costsbut wanted large audiences. Museums are not as freeto create, or as powerful, as is often assumed byoutsiders and critics. Being the curator responsiblefor this exhibition meant juggling positions,demands and interests in a setting affected bySamoan perspectives and claims, German audiences’pre-knowledge and viewing habits, structuralconstraints imposed by the Bavarian museumadministration system, and even the Foreign Officeand diplomatic agendas. For the curator, trying tomeet these contradictory demands and reconcilingthem with her own academic and ethical ideas ofcuratorship indeed meant walking a fine line.

This chapter calls for a move beyond technologically informed conceptions of ethics, making the case for a more proactive engagement with the possibility for an ethics of responsibility. In so doing, it returns to Arendt’s notion of politics proper, arguing that its constituents – uncertainty, plurality, vulnerability – are the sine qua non of ethics proper, and that with a properly political form of biopolitics we might be able to restore some ethicality to contemporary ethics. The chapter ends by mapping out the broad contours of what an ethics beyond technics might look like, as well as making the normative case for freeing our ethical deliberations over killing from the machine logics we use to take lives.

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This chapter provides an analysis of the early modern Burgundian werewolf trials. It focuses on contemporaneous ecclesiastical and political circumstance to explain the relative frequency with which female werewolves were accused and tried in this particular area of France. The brutal killing of Perrenette Gandillon as a supposed she-werewolf is indicative of the atmosphere in the mountains of Franche-Comté, a territory in Burgundy, France. The werewolf panics and the comparatively large numbers of werewolf trials in Franche-Comté represent a relatively unique phenomenon in Europe, with the exception of Latvia and Estonia. The werewolf trials began in 1521, with the death sentences for heresy pronounced by the Inquisition courts, and ended in 1663 with acquittals before secular courts. The concept of the werewolf nevertheless remained particularly alive in the inaccessible regions of the Jura, where several cases of alleged lycanthropy came before the courts.

This chapter questions early modern conceptions of the supernatural from a linguistic perspective: can language produce supernatural effects? How is the supernatural expressed through language? First, it considers the context of early modern theatre in which prophecies were problematic, as church and state tried to avoid the spread of seditious rumours. The evocative power of prophecy resisted these regulatory efforts, and monarchs recognised the close link between prophecies and poetry, attested since antiquity in the figure of the poet-prophet. Then the chapter discusses how the language of prophecy (in Julius Caesar, Macbeth, Richard II or Richard III) could trick audiences into believing in the supernatural power of prophecies, despite the fact that the language used turns out to be non-performative. Instead, prophecies make language ‘stutter’ (a concept borrowed from Gilles Deleuze), rather than advance the plot. Prophecies posit a number of hypothetical futures, questioning our interpretation of historical narratives and supernatural phenomena. By producing the supernatural through language, rather than through characters or special effects, prophecies challenge our interpretations of Shakespeare’s plays.

The Epilogue charts the career of Georges Rémon, artistic grandchild of Pierre-Luc Cicéri. Rémon was an inventor of interior designs that took the historicist, themed aesthetic to a new level. Equally well-versed in revivalist and Art Nouveau interiors, Rémon also invented interior decorating schemes that paid lip service to the more recent political regimes of the nineteenth century (Second Republic style, Louis-Philippe style, Napoléon III style) as well as decorative settings in what would later become the Art Deco style. His workshop designed not only period rooms for the 1900 universal exhibition but also interiors of several ocean liners that brought the French aesthetic to America. His career is thus a perfect example of how the artistic output of upholsterers, cabinet-makers, architects, stage designers, illustrators, collectors and department store managers, directed towards the private interior, invented a “system,” which saw that unity and harmony, as expressed through one main theme and coordinated by the same person, would guide the design of each interior. Without the invention of this “system,” the twentieth-century profession of the interior designer might never have been born.

This edited volume focuses on knowledge production in higher education in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) and Europe. Its twelve contributions shed light on how academics have deliberated the immensely politicised nature of institutions of higher education and their practices – be these in the context of colonialism, decolonialism, nation-building or political transformation. Cognisant of fragmenting labels in constructions of ‘the MENA’ and of ‘Europe’, our contributors supersede such logics by immersing themselves as subjects and objects of the study at hand, making themselves simultaneously ‘scholar’ and ‘subject’. Therefore, this volume explores the politics of institutes of higher education in view of the scholarly practices that are characteristic of the ways in which the MENA is taught at European universities and how Europe – or increasingly, the European Union (EU) – is discussed at institutions of higher education in the MENA. A reflexive understanding of how we teach and study Europe/the EU at MENA universities and how we teach and study the MENA in Europe is needed to help overcome existing divisions between the Global North and the Global South in knowledge production.

This chapter takes up the problematic relationship between female shamefastness and the model of hardy masculinity and considers its disturbing implications for female exemplarity founded on shamefastness. As Chaucer’s adaptations of the narratives of Virginia and Lucretia demonstrate, women’s shamefast chastity is not only under threat from masculine hardiness, but can even provoke that threat, either by stimulating masculine desire or by inviting men to prove their manhood. The chapter begins by exploring how Chaucer represents the irreconcilability of shamefast femininity and forceful masculinity elsewhere in his work. It then continues to the stories of Virginia and Lucretia, and shows that Chaucer and his contemporary, John Gower (c. 1330–1408), approach the theme of ‘manly force’ from very different angles. Whereas Gower invites readers to consider what might have happened in a Rome that was justly governed by chaste rulers, Chaucer engages readers in a deeply uncomfortable experiment in counterfactual thinking about female honour, an experiment that threatens to reopen the question of whether the binary of death or dishonour need exist in the first place.

Chapter 1 provides an overview of this study of how election news reporting in Ireland has changed over the last half-century involving a unique dataset of twenty-five million words from newspapers as well as radio and television coverage.The authors examine reporting in terms of framing, tone, and the distribution of coverage. They also focus on how the economy has affected election campaign coverage as well as media reporting of leaders and personalities, gender, and the effect of the commercial basis of media outlets.The authors evaluate three broad hypotheses about Ireland’s election coverage since 1969: the extent to which the norms of critical impartiality have survived, whether the media has shifted towards hypercritical infotainment, and the extent to which content has been influenced by exogenous factors, i.e. political, social, and economic factors outside the media itself.