This chapter examines changes in the religious culture of Scottish towns between 1350 and 1560 that were not early Protestant or crypto-Protestant or even proto-Protestant, but rather Catholic. Sections on new devotional and educational approaches, the Council of Trent, public worship, and social discipline together portray a religious culture that was dynamic and responsive to international trends. In placing this religious culture of Scottish towns in the context of wider European currents, it becomes clear that urban Scots were participating in a deep social movement into early modernism. Since reforming momentum in Scotland began in an early modern Catholic environment and before the official Protestant Reformation, it may be necessary to reconsider an important question of causation in Scottish history: what the role of the Protestant Reformation was in bringing about social change. Specific social changes often thought to be the result of the Protestant Reformation in Scotland actually started before the Protestant Reformation, and therefore the Protestant Reformation cannot have been their trigger. Instead, it may be the case that the social changes described in this chapter and arising in a Catholic context actually helped ease the adoption of Protestantism in Scottish towns.

This chapter discusses the significance of referendum campaigns as an increasingly used form of direct democracy and explores the role of the mass media in determining how referendums are understood in the public sphere. It introduces the idea of media framing and sets out the research questions addressed in this book.

As in Gothic literary studies, it is possible to produce an initial taxonomy of Gothic television in order to distinguish the genre from the other generic categorisations which are applied to its texts. A study of Gothic fiction on television in the UK and US which attempted to be encyclopaedic in its coverage would include consideration of the some programmes, such as A Ghost Story and The Night Stalker. The uncanny is located in the moments in Gothic television in which the familiar traditions and conventions of television are made strange, when television's predominant genres and styles are both referred to and inverted. The chapter presents some key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book aims to construct what Umberto Eco might call a 'model viewer' by reading the Gothic television drama's modes of address and by scrutinising its semantic and syntactic elements.

Art seeks to control art in those scenes where Rembrandt's name or Wouvermans' is invoked. Even in the apparently superficial and immediate world of Brandon Hall, the narrator of Wylder's Hand had experienced in sleep the projective violence of art. In Guy Deverell and Wylder's Hand, the incidents apparently reactivating pictures are finally explained in mundane terms; in contrast, the short stories remain generally cryptic in their introduction of pictures. Explanation of a picture's significance or apparent power in the novels goes hand-in-hand with their rationalisation of the supernatural. In contrast, the short work is gnomic as to demons, ghosts and vampires as well as to painters' names. Sheridan Le Fanu's use of painting provides the opportunity to consider the problem of classification of literary genre. Words associated with painting and the depiction of lighted scenes proliferate, 'perspective', 'shade', 'dusky light', 'shadow', 'shadow' again, 'dark', and even perhaps 'lightly'.

In quality of writing, the contrast between novels and tales in Sheridan Le Fanu's last years was stark. The demonstration of seriality provided by Jean-Paul Sartre looks strikingly ill-suited to the needs of Le Fanu's readers. In the late nineteenth century, writers sought to protect literature from the effect of seriality by a kind of pure writing, which would reflect back to each isolated reader, each solipsistic consciousness. Le Fanu's particular instance of serial displacement from one character on to another lies not so much on the axis of pain/pleasure but rather in the ethical domain of guilt/innocence. Whether one turns to Jurgen Habermas and his theory of 'the bourgeois social sphere' or to Sartre's idea of urban alienation as 'serial unity', a radicalised view of the modern city is wholly compatible with this reading of Le Fanu's late fiction.

This chapter tracks the War Office's response to the recruitment of men of 'enemy' origin. It also tracks the ways in which its policy of exemption from liability for overseas service for those who had 'family connections with the enemy' shifted and evolved throughout the course of the war. The accommodation of difference within a military setting encouraged the formulation of a distinctive dual identity that rested on identification with both Britain and Italy, a dimension to military service which has been completely overlooked in the existing historiography. The chapter recovers the memories of the 'consenters', second-generation Italians who served overseas with the British Army. Whilst the stereotype of the cowardly and incompetent Italian soldier was certainly prevalent in the wartime period, it was an image largely shunned in the self-representations of Italian Scottish veterans six decades on.