Allison Myers discusses the strange marriage of Greenbergian formalism with Maoist militancy that characterised the work of the French artists’ collective known as Supports/Surfaces. By looking at its journal, Peinture: Cahiers Théoriques, she demonstrates how the group used Mao’s theory of contradictions to rejuvenate both the avant-garde and French painting via an expanded concept of materialism.

This chapter seeks to analyse the debates between presbyterian political theology and the Long Parliament in the mid-1640s. It sets the background of this debate in continental Reformed theology and argues that the clash between parliamentary ‘Erastianism’ and the presbyterian perspective of two-kingdom theory reveals some of the underlying contradictions within the parliamentarian project of godly rule. The slightly different version of two-kingdom theory held by the congregationalists is also explored. The chapter shows how the Long Parliament grasped its way to an ‘Erastian’ solution by reference to differing ideas of the church–state relationship found within the Reformed tradition. In conclusion, the chapter looks at how the presbyterian clergy conceded to Parliament and how interregnum governments retreated from a fully Erastian position.

This chapter focuses more closely on the place of violence within techno-biopolitical regimes. It begins by excavating the linkages between Arendt’s biopolitical analysis and her writings on power and violence. It then argues that the anti-political essence of contemporary biopolitics opens up a pathway for instrumental violence, enabling violent practices to appear as expedient tools in the administration of humanity. Finally, it suggests that such an understanding of violence-as-politics overlooks the futility of violence as a political practice in important but rarely acknowledged ways.

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The conclusion draws together the key themes addressed in the study and reflects on Garrel’s standing in French film culture today. Comparisons are drawn with the careers of Chantal Akerman and Jean Eustache.

The importance of successful, legitimate birth and childrearing to the health of early modern society, from the monarch to the lowest orders, created a strong corollary between the processes of generation (procreation, birth, parenting) and social order. Supernatural influence on these processes, whether divine or malignant, raised cultural anxieties about the limits of supernatural power. From the extra-ordinary but still ‘natural’ process of maternal impression, via the specific malignancy of witchcraft or fairy-taking, to the calamitous monstrosity of personal sin or political upheaval, early modern generation was construed as a natural process intimately entwined with and susceptible to outside influence. This chapter explores how Shakespeare constructs the limits of supernatural power on generation in relation to social, legal, medical, and theological norms familiar to an early modern audience, using Richard III as a central example.

This chapter discusses Bess’s use of language. It is based on seventy-eight letters, both scribal and holograph, that Bess wrote to various correspondents throughout her life. With a particular focus upon her spelling and grammar, it places Bess’s use of English within the context of what we already know about how women were using the language in Tudor and Stuart England, and the changes taking place in the language over the early modern period, defined here as 1500–1750.

This chapter reads Bess’s life and achievements in the light of a poem written about her by her great-granddaughter, the playwright Lady Jane Cavendish. It offers an account of her significance and of the areas in which she is of interest. It concludes with a brief glance at what the essays in the collection contain.

Throughout the Pacific, interpersonal encounters arecharacterised by a deep level of physical intimacyand engagement – from the honi/hongi, theface-to-face greeting, to the ha‘a/haka wero, actsof challenge that also serve as a celebratoryacknowledgement of ancestral presences. In thesephysical exchanges, relationships are built, tendedand tested through an embodied confirmation ofvalues, practices and ethics. For museums holdingPacific collections, the importance ofrelationships, and their physicality, persists. Theincreasing acknowledgement of, and interaction with,communities of origin, whose works reside in museumsthroughout the world, is thereby not a new practicebut the current stage of a continuum of relationsthat have ebbed and flowed over centuries. Thischapter involves the interdisciplinary work of threescholars whose research, interests andcollaborations coalesce around concepts ofindigenous curatorial practice. Kahanu focuses onBishop Museum’s E Kū ana ka paia exhibition (2010),which featured important Hawaiian temple imagesloaned from the British Museum and the Peabody EssexMuseum, as well as the Nā hulu ali‘i exhibitionwhich gathered Hawaiian featherwork from around theworld (2015/2016). She highlights how the Hawaiianpractice of he alo ā he alo in cross-culturalcontexts facilitated these exhibitions, therebyultimately enabling extensive community engagement.Nepia discusses two recent programmes at theUniversity of Hawai‘i, ARTspeak and the Binding andLooping: Transfer of Presence in ContemporaryPacific Art exhibition, as a means of examining howPacific Island artists articulate contemporarycreative practice, particularly as it relates tophysical and bodily encounters. Schorch concludesthe volume with a coda which historicises Curatopiaand its underpinning relations and engagements healo ā he alo / kanohi ki te kanohi / face toface.

This chapter draws upon oral history interviews conducted with members of Wiltshire’s Muslim migrant communities. Through the interviews, migrants’ narratives and histories, and thus the ‘human’ side of the migration process, are detailed, and subjective perceptions and important events and themes in the interviewees’ migratory experiences emerge. A number of insights into Muslim migrant integration in rural Britain are offered, as are interviewees’ experiences, views and observations across a range of areas. These include migration histories and stories of settlement in Wiltshire, and post-settlement experiences in relation to identity formation, employment, housing, education, racism and discrimination, cross-community relations, and religious practices and recognition. Overall, the oral history interviews complement the archival material, reconstructing parts of the county’s post-war history of Muslim minorities’ settlement, experiences and integration that are simply not captured in written sources.

This speculative comment considers the potential worthof raising questions that appear simple but may berewardingly complex. It asks whether routine aspectsof curatorial work, such as captioning objects andjuxtaposing them in displays, may not have moresuggestive dimensions than has been recognisedpreviously. It asks what the implications of aconception of ‘the museum as method’ might have forcurrent approaches to public exhibition.

Using the findings of the Royal Historical Society’s Race, Ethnicity & Equality in UK History: A Report and Resource for Change, published in 2018, this chapter considers how anti-racist action has been undertaken in history higher education in the UK. The report found that undergraduate-level history was overwhelmingly white in terms of students, that the numbers were even lower when it came to postgraduate-level history and that ‘history academic staff are less diverse than H&PS student cohorts’. Taking stock of these findings, many history departments across UK universities reviewed, strengthened or created anew their equality, diversity and inclusivity agendas. Ranging from efforts to diversify curriculum content to improving mechanisms to report racial abuse, this chapter will reflect on the effectiveness of these proposals. As the postdoctoral fellow funded by the Past and Present Society to embed the impact of the Race Report, the author offers a critical perspective on how the race equality work so clearly envisioned in the report not only mirrors but is reinforced by the equality work taking place in wider Britain. The museum and heritage sector, those working with schools and the curriculum and those producing history for the public are working in a mutually constitutive set of structures to engender anti-racist action and behaviour. By tracing the intellectual development of the RHS’s equalities work as it ties to the anti-racist work we can see in Britain more broadly, the chapter reflects on the extent to which meaningful change can occur in history higher education.

Chapter 3 will consider how Conservative strategy towards opposing and undermining Labour evolved during the Cameron era. The chapter will demonstrate how initially when in opposition, the Conservatives set about nullifying the ‘investment under Labour or cuts under the Conservatives’ narrative, which had been so successful for New Labour and Blair in the era of economic prosperity between 1997 and 2007. It will then identify how, in the aftermath of the financial crash, Cameron abandoned this strategy of converging on Labour to neutralise the economy as an electoral issue. The chapter will then explore how the Conservatives set about establishing their narrative of the financial crash – i.e. it was the fault of a profligate Labour government. Apportioning blame was thus central to electoral strategy in 2010, and establishing risk about Labour regaining power was central to electoral strategy in 2015. The chapter will also identify how, alongside emphasising perceptions of economic competence, Conservative strategy also came to revolve around emphasising perceptions of leadership credibility, as Cameron was seen by voters as a more credible political leader than either Brown or Miliband.