According to McAuliffe, “The ‘hard graft’ of feminist activism continued into the twenty-first century, where new challenges arose and old unfinished battles continued”. Access and the right to safe abortion, equal representation in politics and positions of decision making, same-sex marriage, and action to combat male violence, sexism, racism, and discrimination are all examples of continued battles in twenty-first-century Irish society. To prohibit discrimination in the provision of goods, services, accommodation, and education, The Equal Status Acts were enacted from 2000–2018. In terms of significant political milestones, in the same year Mary McAleese began her second term as Uachtarán na hÉireann in 2004, Mary Coughlan became the first woman to become Minister for Agriculture, demonstrating changing attitudes towards women in an otherwise very traditional field. Four years later, during the start of a major economic recession and depression in 2008, Mary Coughlan went on to become Ireland's second female Tánaiste, succeeding Mary Harney, who was first elected in 1997.2 In 2010, the “50/50” campaign was launched to help change the demographic of Dáil Éireann. And, before President Mary McAleese finished her second term in office, she welcomed Queen Elizabeth II on her first ever state visit to Ireland in May 2011. This was a defining moment in Irish history, evidencing significant sociocultural and political progress since the enactment of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998.

Members of the eighteenth-century navy were accustomed to using agents. Officers were paid a year or more in arrears, and their crews were also often kept waiting even longer for their wages. There had to be a mechanism, at every level within the vessel, for keeping families, households or estates solvent. Mariners at all levels appointed agents to work for them on shore, whether or not they were in the additional capacity of prize agent. Acting for another in business was a profession in its own right. Naval agents collected wages or half-pay; bought for ready cash the ‘tickets’ which entitled the possessor to collect pay in the future; lent money to the wives of crew members and kept track of where the ships and their crews were. The captains’ agents communicated to their clients if a problem had occurred with passing accounts through the Navy Board, for instance. The young captain John Elliot explained to his family that he needed to have credit advanced him when he was sent to the Mediterranean:

… I have some time ago appointed Innes and Clerk my agents in the city so if you think it proper to give me a credit on them or Messrs Campbell and Coutts the bankers in the Strand or in what other manner you propose … they have had a great deal of trouble about my wages etc when I was in the India Service and since I’ve been in the Navy and have served me well.

In this case Innes and Clerk had financed the young man in expectation of his receiving the pay due to him from the Navy Board: they were acting as unofficial bankers, and providing an essential service to the navy while doing so.

This chapter traces Paul Cullen’s invovlement in the extra-European church, first in the United States and then the Caribbean, Nova Scotia, India, and Gibraltar.

The judge delegate system continued throughout the late Middle Ages and into the early modern period. The documents examined in the chapter reveal it in operation in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries: a marriage case; a request for the dispensation required for ordination; a dispute between an exempt monastery and the local bishop; a case in which the plaintiff feared violence if the trial were held in his home town; an administrative innovation designed to facilitate demand for delegated justice; and the system of synodal judges established by the Council of Trent.

The Instituto de Cultura Física (ICF, Institute of Physical Culture) was created in Porto Alegre in 1928 for the purpose of offering physical activities for women. The founders, Leonor (Nenê) Dreher Bercht (1895–1965) and Philomena (Mina) Black Eckert (1904–79), were descendants from immigrant German families. As young women Bercht and Black traveled to Germany, where they encountered Jaques-Dalcroze's Rhythmic Gymnastics, the name he originally used for his teaching of music and body movement. The ICF, during its nine-year existence from 1928 to 1937, provided instruction in Rhythmic Gymnastics, other forms of gymnastics, and dance. Influenced by the eugenics and hygienist discourses of the early twentieth century, the ICF initiative to develop physical culture appropriate to modern women found a positive reception amongst Porto Alegre's society. Our chapter analyzes the practices offered by the ICF to understand how the Dalcroze method was applied and adapted in this specific context. We aim to map the trajectory of Bercht and Black, who introduced Dalcroze-based teaching in southern Brazil, and to trace the role of their successor, Eliane (Lya) Clotilde Bastian Meyer (1911–2005). Meyer, who also was of German descent, both studied and taught at the ICF early on in her long career.

Porto Alegre, the capital of Rio Grande do Sul, was founded in 1772 by Portuguese immigrants.

This chapter examines Paul Cullen’s arrival in Armagh, the subsequent Synod of Thurles and its reforms of the discipline and devotions of the Irish Catholic Church, the appalled reaction of the British government, and Cullen’s successful defence of the synod against British complaints to Rome.

This chapter mediates on the creation and afterlives of enslaved and formerly enslaved people’s emotional testimonies. Engaging with debates over archival silences, this chapter argues that power has entered the production of knowledge relating to US slavery, limiting access to sources that emphasise enslaved people’s complex emotional lives. Revealing how racist attitudes shaped the creation and evaluation of the Works Progress Administration interviews produced by Black interviewers, this chapter also notes that these sources were archived as part of a white institutional project at the Library of Congress. In contrast, Lorenzo Dow Turner’s interviews, papers and photographs, which emphasise the complex emotional legacy of slavery, are scattered across various archives, limiting historians’ access to the emotional narrative portrayed within them. Despite the silences in relation to slavery and emotion, this chapter argues that the archive is still rich for researching enslaved people’s emotional lives if we privilege Black source producers, explore smaller repositories, use sound and image archives, utilise imaginative methodologies, and recognise and utilise our own emotions in our research.

When the count had risen and taken cordial leave of her, Franziska walked from the sofa to the window. The fresh air flowing in did her good, and she sat on the sill and looked at the goings-on in the street. But images of a far different kind passed before her mind's eye: a castle and a lake, broad steps and corridors, hunting parties, forest and plains, and fine gentlemen with their ladies, who were whispering and laughing discreetly. They looked each other up and down, and she met their haughtiness with an equally haughty gaze of her own.

She was still lost in such visions when Hannah approached from the doorway. She smoothed Franziska's hair back with a familiar gesture, and then said, “So: it's going to happen.”

“Were you listening?”

“No. I never listen. My late father wouldn't tolerate it and said that of all the minor sins, that was one of the worst. If you’re not meant to hear something, then you ought not to hear it, and you shouldn't wish to. I saw the count as he was leaving and could tell from his face.”

“And what do you say to it?”

“Well, Franzl, what should I say?”

“Everything that you’re thinking.”

“I think all kinds of things.”

“Don't hold anything back. I can see that you don't approve—so you can start right in with the ‘why.’ Or are there so many reasons?”

“Yes, Franzl, there are many reasons.”

This chapter explores Ngugi wa Thiong’ o’s literary responses to detention and exile, focusing on the Devil on the Cross (1982) and Wrestling with the Devil (2018). Ngugi articulates his experiences of dislocation and ideological resistance, denouncing oppression and oppressors in explicit ways. The chapter argues that Ngugi’s adoption of allegorical aesthetics and memoir forms is a direct response to the dislocating effects of detention and exile. Physical confinement and psychological anguish often lead writers to adopt pre-set aesthetics and rigid literary forms. Despite the formulaic nature of allegory and the memoir, Ngugi subverts them to articulate a specific ideological vision for a transformed Kenyan society. The memoir and the allegorical novel testify to intellectual resistance against his detractors, and his determination to create despite adversity. Devil on the Cross, conceived and written in prison, exemplifies the allegorical turn, inhabiting and defying his unjust incarceration. Ngugi’s experiences in detention and exile predict the writing he would produce during this period, blurring the lines between physical and psychological confinement. By exploring the intersection of politics, literature and personal experience, this chapter sheds light on Ngugi’s unique literary trajectory and the ways in which adversity can shape artistic expression.

It is difficult today to imagine the impact of the medieval religious landscape on city life. Whether you were pious or not, in medieval Bristol, you were surrounded by religious spaces wherever you went. The Map of Medieval Bristol only features a few of the city's religious institutions. From chapels to parish churches, from hospitals to sprawling compounds like St. Augustine's Abbey, monastic offices and masses were sung and bells rung all over the city many times every day. By the later Middle Ages, you yourself likely attended mass each week, and may have informally spent even more time in parish churches, as they functioned as community spaces in which a wide range of business might be transacted. Each of these religious spaces required a number of books simply to function, and most of them contained a more diverse and specialised collection than minimum needs demanded. While early medieval monks were charged with copying many kinds of text, these most fundamental books, the bible and books of the mass, were highest priority.

Moreover, these were texts that stood the test of time, and individual books could be used and reused for centuries. Yet, this same enduring utility meant that sometimes mass books were used so frequently that they required repair, replacing, and even more occasionally, updating with new liturgical feasts or practices. When chapels and altars multiplied in the late Middle Ages, each of these needed to be fitted out with its own complement of books. Whereas earlier in the Middle Ages, monks copied most books, production secularised in the later Middle Ages, and there was enough demand that some commercial scribes and artists even specialised in religious volumes.

Adolphe Nourrit had taken his own life on 8 March by jumping out of his hotel window in Naples. Despite his successful showing in Bellini's Norma in that city, there were criticisms that his voice was not loud enough, which he took very much to heart; and he was in some despair at having been eclipsed by Gilbert Duprez in major roles at the Paris Opéra.

The sad death of Adolphe Nourrit has filled our whole artistic world with grief and shock, and it's the third catastrophe of this kind we have had to mourn in the last few years. But if the deaths of Louis Robert and Antoine Gros were tragic examples of the power imagination can exercise on unbalanced, unworldly minds, the suicide of our celebrated singer has shown also how the noblest and most legitimate pride can prove fatal when it has developed and grown without any outward sign, until the moment when the shield that was protecting it is removed.^# Nourrit embarked on his career without encountering any of the difficulties of initiation which have proved daunting and persistent for so many others. He was to know them, however; but too late, when his soul had lost the moral strength to resist them and to emerge from them sharper and stronger. Sadly, he was well aware of the dangers of his mentality, leading to a struggle the outcome of which could be predicted in advance. An unbalanced person who recognises his lack of balance accentuates it by thinking about it. Once he learns that he's liable to feel fear, he fears the fear, and at the first storm reason deserts him.

By 1849, Berlioz had turned his long-standing proclivity for sarcasm into a fine art, again at the expense of the ‘Droit des pauvres’ and its collector: the poortax levied on income, not only profits, payable by organizers of entertainments including concerts (see also article 34).

‘Why do people go on making instruments?’ you will ask. – Because we’re still teaching musicians in Conservatoires and elsewhere. – But why, you will add, do we persist in teaching music to these poor wretches? – Good Lord, because the habit has been around a long time, because certain music venues still keep their doors open, because a small number of people are determined not to abandon the pleasure they get from music, and still indulge more or less in this excellent art. No doubt the time will come when these eccentrics will be quite rare in France, when all the opera houses will be shut, when Conservatoires no longer exist, and when those musicians who haven't died of hunger will have taken up a useful trade. But the time for this triumph of positive ideas over the empty dreams of poetry and art has not yet arrived; nothing is as tenacious as ancient habits. In any case Athens, Babylon, and Memphis were not demolished in a day. Everything takes time.

Besides, the Opéra is already closed and, if one is to believe the general rumour, its future doesn't look rosy even if it gets to open this winter. We don't know whether the Théâtre-Italien will manage to put on some operas.

The focus of this chapter is monumental, freestanding altar Vasari built after his patronage rights shifted from the St. Mustiola chapel to the Pieve’s high chapel in 1560. Consecrated in 1564, the high altar was the first and largest of Vasari’s four chapels for the Pieve. This chapter considers its history and design and materiality and precedents, as well as its multiple functions as a high altar, a relic altar, a sacrament tabernacle, and, to a lesser extent, Vasari’s family funerary chapel.