Although I am a strong advocate for access tocollections in museums and although I see newtechnologies as a necessary part of this goal, I donot think that technology and its associated impactsand benefits should be the end goal. Rather, theyshould exist collaboratively with physical museumsthat mirror the robust developments in digitaltechnology. The physical museum needs to betransformed so that their material collections canstimulate cultural production by living artists andcultural practitioners. This juxtaposition of thepast and the present, the dead and the living,ensures that museums remain vibrant and vital spacesfor the multicultural communities around them.

The introduction provides a brief overview of Garrel’s life and career, and a review of some of the key literature published on him. It argues for the need to provide a more nuanced analysis of his relationship with the New Wave and for a careful consideration of the director’s relationship with the political and artistic climate fostered by May 68. It also proposes to consider Garrel’s work in light of its intersection with other avant-gardes. The Introduction provides a summary of various chapters in the study.

This chapter explores the extent of bastardy among the nobility and gentry, using a variety of sources, especially wills, property transactions and court records. It compares numbers of births and rates of bastardy among the elite with overall and non-elite bastardy rates, suggesting that although there are some correlations with levels of bastard-bearing among the poor, the peaks of activity in the mid-sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries do not correlate clearly. There are also clear regional and sub-regional variations to be observed, in particular of north versus south, and within the north in the north west and far north east, although any attempt to see the developments of the period as producing a clear distinction between a bastard-prone north and west, and a non-bastard-prone south and east is not supported by the evidence.

Emily Wingfield’s chapter examines treatments of Queen Margaret of Scotland (d. 1093), beginning with the Life written by Turgot, prior of Durham, at the request of Margaret’s daughter the English queen Matilda, a work that highlights Margaret’s literacy and learning; Margaret’s role as reader and writer is shown to be emphasised also in later treatments. The subject of this chapter is thus not a branch of knowledge but the perceived learning of an important female individual and the significance of that learning in constructions of her as a saint. The chapter examines the way in which books function as vehicles for Margaret’s sanctity and political power and suggests that the Life itself is designed to model the life of a learned and holy queen for Margaret’s daughter, Matilda. Wingfield then considers how later verbal and visual accounts of Margaret develop this tradition so that she comes to function as an advisor of princes as well as princesses, her sanctity being shown to inhere ‘quite specifically, in her literacy’.

In this chapter Denis Renevey examines the ways in which writers in the Greek world and, later, western religious teachers used the name of ‘Jesus’ in contemplative practices, and offers ‘answers as to the way in which knowledge of the power of the name “Jesus” was appropriated for different purposes in the two differing Christian traditions, and according to distinct spiritual ideologies’. Renevey discusses the influence of Origen in the development of knowledge about the powerful potential of the name of Jesus and goes on to highlight the attachment to the name in Orthodox liturgical practice from about the ninth century, an attachment that in the fervency of its language anticipates western traditions of affectivity. Among western writers, Renevey focuses on Anselm of Canterbury and Bernard of Clairvaux, the former promoting affective use of the name in personal devotion, the latter in a communal monastic context, as part of a well-conceived devotional scheme.

A key – some might even say the key – curatorial roleis to decide what to collect. What, that is, shouldbe preserved for the future? In this chapter, wepresent ethnographic research with curators ofcontemporary everyday life. As we show, thesecurators struggle with a profusion of things,stories and information that could potentially becollected. Moreover, they widely report the struggleto be intensifying. Exploring their perceptions andwhat these mean in practice in their work, we arguethat while neo-liberal and especially austeritypolitics has an important role in intensifying theirsense of anxiety, their experience cannot be reducedto this. On the contrary, their intimation ofdystopia is as much a function of other – in someways utopian – aspirations and politics, as well asof a relativisation of value. These all contributeto transforming the nature of curatorship morewidely.

This chapter explores the failure of congregationalist ideas to penetrate into the Mersey Basin area of Lancashire and Cheshire in the late 1630s and early 1640s. The chapter focuses on the network of godly clergymen around local aristocratic magnates, the earls of Derby and particularly Lord Strange. These clerics, led by Charles Herle, the future prolocutor of the Westminster assembly, would organise against attempts from New England ministers such as Samuel Eaton and Richard Mather to introduce congregationalist ideas into the region. As civil war broke out, both presbyterians and episcopalians would act together to protect their vision of a cohesive national Church of England from congregationalism.

This chapter is largely retrospective and looks at the work the author has done on Thomas Kyd since the preparation for his edition of The Spanish Tragedy. Both Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy and William Shakespeare's Hamlet have the same theme: the responsibility of the individual and the responsibility of the gods in carving out the future. In Shakespearian tragedy as a whole, there is, apart from the Ghost in Hamlet, a remarkable absence of supernatural structures. Whatever the influence of Kyd there may be in Shakespeare's Ghost, there is no doubt about the parallels between the two dramatists in a major point of the plot in their most famous plays. The chapter emphasises the distance in time between the busy unavailing efforts of the human characters in the sixteenth-century Spain and Portugal, and the overarching supernatural control symbolised by the presence of Andrea's Ghost and the figure of Revenge.

This chapter introduces the county of Wiltshire. It offers an insight into the county’s intrinsic rurality, its economic history and political structure, and the reasons why it constitutes a pertinent case study for an assessment of Muslim migrant integration in rural Britain across the post-1960s period. It provides an overview of the county’s history of migration and its previously unexplored Muslim migrant communities, including the Moroccan community in and around Trowbridge, and Bangladeshis, Pakistanis and Turks in Bradford on Avon, Calne, Devizes, Melksham and Salisbury. In doing so, it reveals the inherent and multifaceted heterogeneity that emerges when studying Muslims in Wiltshire, and it introduces the small body of existing research that this book builds upon.