The symbolism of ‘bigamy’ – the remarriage of a widower or marriage to a widow – remained a social force into the sixteenth century, though the system for interpreting it changed. From 1139 clerics had enjoyed a privileged status, including immunity from secular justice. This applied even to clerics in minor orders who were married and had no intention or prospect of proceeding to major orders. It is hardly surprising that many men sought tonsure and minor orders. Often their conduct did little credit to the clerical state. Neither popes nor kings approved, and the Council of Lyons of 1274 sought to alleviate the problem by easing out at least one category of clerics in minor orders, the ‘bigamists’. Did the new conciliar ruling also apply to monks and friars, whose way of life differed markedly from that of the men whom the Council was prepared to strip of clerical status? A distinguished jurist argued that it did not. After Trent, the Congregation of the Council resolved such uncertainties with even greater authority than the most eminent canon lawyer.

Émile Jaques-Dalcroze's eurhythmics had a significant influence on art forms involving movement in Russia before and after the 1917 Revolution, a period of intensive artistic experiment. Jaques-Dalcroze sought to teach musicianship through developing sensitivity to rhythm and pitch, using movements of the whole body and aiming to make the musical experience open to all. Rhythmic gymnastics or rhythmics, as the work was usually termed in Russia, contributed to mainstream and avant-garde arts developments, then the revolutionary project of arts for the masses. Rhythmics fermented experiment in dance, stage-movement work, and musicality in theatre, as excitement grew about the potential for rhythm to be applied to all arts as a principle uniting internal and external phenomena, verifiable by natural science. Rhythmics, as artistic expression through movement, was important to the rejection or deconstruction of the “word” that characterized the modernist era, in the context of ideas such as Friedrich Nietszche's questioning of the idea that “truth” could be expressed by language, and Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure's assertion of the existence of a science of signs going beyond verbal language. In the wake of Charles Darwin's theory of a universal expression of emotions, claims were made for universality of meaning in gesture. This underpinned the work of François Delsarte (1811–71), whose codification of gestural signs as emotional and spiritual expression, based in his experience of singing and oratory, became influential in theatre and dance in Europe, America, and Russia and was known to Jaques-Dalcroze.

Subscribing to the belief that languages of the body could express what had previously been inexpressible, Prince Sergei Volkonsky (1860–1937) was a key figure in developing rhythmics in actor training.

This chapter traces Cullen’s adaptation to the reign of Pius IX, his opposition to Sir Robert Peel’s proposal to found three non-denominational ’Queen’s College’s’ in Ireland, and finally his own and his family’s invovlement in attempts to relieve suffering during the Great Famine.

Introduction

Climate change poses a formidable challenge in the 21st century, giving rise to complex issues of justice and equity within and between generations, as well as across global and economic divides (Doussa, Corkery, and Chartres 2007). Those least responsible for climate change often suffer the most from its impacts, with the world's poorest and lowest carbon-emitting countries facing heightened vulnerability. This exacerbates existing inequalities and disproportionately affects the poor, the disadvantaged, indigenous people, immigrants, and women—groups that are among the first to be impacted and the least equipped to adapt to a changing climate (Klein and Stefoff 2021; Kaur 2020).

The consequences of climate change manifest in more erratic and extreme weather patterns, resulting in chronic water, food, and financial insecurity for millions. This crisis further propels individuals into poverty, enflames conflict over depleting natural resources, forces migration, and compounds pre-existing gender discrimination (Matekair and Carey 2022).

Women, in particular, experience severe impacts on their livelihoods due to existing gender relations, including increased tensions within families and increased instances of gender-based violence. Droughts and flooding resulting from climate change contribute to food insecurity, pushing women and girls further into poverty and exposing them to transactional sex for goods, human trafficking for commercial sexual exploitation, and child and forced marriages (Njikho 2020).

We are reaching the end of what we may call the “essential” life of Las Casas that earned him – without a doubt – the title of iconic figure of his generation. He lived to 1566 and his life from the end of the Great Debate of 1550 to then is filled – as his life always seemed “filled” – with many other activities. But they were all defined, more or less, by what he had done or lived to then in defense of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas. Let's briefly examine his activities to do justice to an immensely full life, and, as you will see, still then intensely engaged to make things right in his world even as he faced death.

He wrote with a passion, everywhere he went, it sometimes seemed, especially in the Indies, with a small army of followers carrying his papers and documents across the mountains and deserts of the viceroyalty of New Spain. His principal work, no doubt, was his Brief History of the Destruction of Indies. His multivolume History of the Indies, composed as he traveled and worked in the Indies and Spain, was a grand expression of the overall history of the region in the age of the Conquest. These writings are covered below in Writings and Biographies: “The Multiple Personalities of Bartolomé de las Casas, or a Tour of His Biographies and Biographers.”

Perhaps the earliest notice of Las Casas by scholars other than those from Spain and the colonies of the New World was with respect to his early recommendation to import some African slaves from Spain to relieve the killing demands on the Taíno Indians of Hispaniola. Las Casas has been pilloried ever since by his critics for advocating one form of slavery to relieve another.

In the wars of southern Iberia in the late Middle Ages, urban sites played an especially important role. As centers of economic activity, defensive fortification and political power, cities were of course critical strategic targets for Castilians and Granadans fighting in the hoy wars of Andalucía. Beyond such concrete military qualities, though, the cities of Andalucía also carried significant cultural and social meaning as centers of chivalric memory and meaning. The leading knights of Andalucía in the fifteenth century thought of particular cities as being especially associated with the martial valor and accomplishments of themselves, their family and their ancestors and, as such, cities such as Gibraltar, Alhama and Cardela became conceptual receptacles of chivalric honor. Knights not only sought to conquer cities which had special meaning for the honor of their families, but also defined themselves and their martial worth partly through their experience fighting for and conquering the cities of Iberian Islam. This article will examine the conquest of several cities of Andalucía from the perspective of the noble Guzmán family and from the self-fashioning of Rodrigo Ponce de León, one of the premier knights of his age. In doing so, it will emphasize the ways in which chivalric memory transformed urban spaces into nodes of personal and familial honor.

Juan de Guzmán, duke of Medina Sidonia, hovered before the promise of indescribable glory and honor in August of 1462. Castilian troops were about to capture the city of Gibraltar from the Muslim enemy once and for all and for Juan de Guzmán this was more than simply the Christian reconquest of Muslim territory.

Setting the Scene: Context in Snapshots from 2022, 2023, and 1900

Badin, Sindh, September 2022: She slaps her scrawny toddler across the face while she balances an infant on her frail hip. Tempers are running high in this building—sounds of shouting, slapping, screaming, and crying are recurring. It is a government school in the district of Badin, Sindh province, Pakistan. The school building serves as a shelter for flood affectees. Meals, medicines, and other aid are distributed sporadically by philanthropic initiatives, military men, political workers, religious groups, local landlords, or civil administrators. The food often arrives stale and causes illness. Approximately a thousand people seek refuge in a building whose sanitation facilities cannot keep pace. Some wish they had died instead of ending up here, while others choose to pick cotton from flooded fields, standing in toxic water for a higher wage, to try and escape this shelter.

Karachi, Sindh, August 2023: She works in the Korangi Industrial Area at a factory producing garments for a global clothing brand. She lives with her family in the Ibrahim Hyderi area of Karachi. Many of her neighbours are fisherfolk (Idrees, 2021). She also comes from a fishing community in Badin. Her family has not been fishing for over a generation. Water is either syphoned off by canals, barrages, and dams upstream, or polluted by untreated industrial waste. Fish are dying. Meanwhile, intimidation by Rangers, the Coast Guard (Shah 2005) and the Fisheries Department (Ahmad 2021) are thriving. In search of a livelihood, her family moved to Karachi years ago.

The priest appeared the next morning for his lesson as usual; he pronounced himself satisfied with Franziska's translation and was amused by her horror at the content of the ballad. At the same time, he used it as an occasion to play the role of literary historian: the tale of Barcsai, he explained, had been a favorite ballad since olden times, and its subject was no more gruesome than many others. Such was the prerogative of ballads, at least in Hungary. There was scarcely a single old folksong that did not include unfaithfulness and betrayal, for songs were a reflection of life. But popular sentiment demanded that these should be followed by expiation, and indeed, was quite firm on this point, usually allowing only two choices: being walled up alive or set on fire. The latter was preferred, though, as it was more vivid and lively.

Thus the conversation flowed, and its facetiousness had quite banished the terrors of the ballad from her mind by the end of the lesson, when the count picked her up to go for a drive.

These drives, mostly into the mountains, but sometimes round the northern inlets of the lake, were Franziska's special joy, not surprisingly. Here was where the count was at his most talkative, as he chatted about his childhood and youth, of his brotherly love for Countess Judith, and how beautiful and ravishing she had once been, until old Gundolskirchen, a dull Styrian who might have been born into the world with riding boots on, had replaced her native Magyar grace with German dignity, or in plain language, ponderousness; the church then did the rest.

The chapter gives a brief outline of a variety of random processes associated with networks. It begins with a short introduction to properties of finite Markov chains, including an ergodic theorem and the notion of reversibility, that are useful for understanding networks. Next, the simple vertex random walk is discussed, together with the random walk with restart. The non-backtracking random walk is also introduced, as are some random walks on sets of networks, such as the switching chain and Glauber dynamics. The chapter concludes with a discussion of epidemic models, and of some dynamical systems, such as opinion formation models, on networks.

Women working in the music industry face limitations in opportunity, a lack of support, gender discrimination, and sexual harassment and assault, as well as the persistent issue of unequal pay in a sector dominated by self-employment and gendered power imbalances. Despite increases in representation, these issues are endemic and are intensified for women faced with intersectional barriers, particularly racial discrimination.

Despite the urgency of these issues alongside significant evidence and recommendations laid out in the 2024 Misogyny in music report, the UK Government rejected all recommendations to protect and support women in the music industry. In relation to the wider arts sector in Ireland, the Irish Theatre Institute report launched in October 2021 also highlighted the level of change needed across the arts, with 70% of practitioners having experienced harmful behaviour. In July 2024, Safe to Create published their AMPLIFY report, which evidenced that of more than 500 disabled, LGBTQIA+, and ethnically diverse artists and arts workers involved in the music, film, theatre, literature, visual arts, and other arts scenes in Ireland:

respondents said they had experienced racial micro-aggressions, and a further 40% indicated they had experienced racial discrimination in their workplaces.

Further findings from Safe to Create's report highlighted that “56% of disabled respondents have been excluded from the workplace due to a lack of care/accommodations/ableist attitudes to their disability”.

The two concerts reviewed here were given in the Salle Érard on 21 March and 13 April 1841.

No one had ever dared put on these kinds of concert in Paris, and at such a price; to wit, seven pieces by Liszt filled the whole programme, with tickets at twenty francs. It makes one tremble! Many people found this project unseemly, extravagant, overweening! But the public came, not once but twice, and with even more eagerness the second time than the first. It found the seven pieces short, to the point of encoring one and demanding another which was not in the printed programme. His marvellous talent casts such a spell on people who are not particularly musical, his prestige is so great, he charms, he dazzles, he sweeps along with such grace, brilliance, and energy, that even those artists whose attitudes are almost hostile to him nevertheless go to hear him, applauding him with all their might, leaving the hall convinced of his vast superiority, regaining their settled opposition two hours later, and rushing again to hear him and applaud at the next opportunity.

It would certainly be pointless to look to an analysis of mechanical procedures for the secret of his power; even if in the domain of difficulty and the astonishment he engenders by his victories over it, Liszt is truly unrivalled, it seems obvious that the greatest power does not lie there. I find it in an intelligence that one might call divinatory, in an exquisite sensitivity, carried sometimes to excess, and which, if not kept under control, can, it's true, damage the rigorous performance of certain works which merely demand firm, broad-based, rectilinear execution, but which is also unique in lifting the artist to the heights of great, poetically inspired works.

Whoever is willing to be attentive to good stories can often learn things that are much to their benefit. When listening to amusing tales and accounts of events that took place in times long ago, it's possible to hear both foolishness and wisdom – but let's set the foolishness aside, for it's much better to talk about wisdom! If someone possesses wisdom, then they can never be entirely destitute. But there are some people so disposed that in no circumstances would they ever want to share the benefits of their knowledge with anyone else. I think that whoever behaves so secretively is a fool, for what good will all his wisdom do him once he has been taken from this world? After he is dead, there will be no more talk of him – unless he has done some good deed for the sake of God. All his wisdom will disappear off to who knows where, for neither he nor anyone else will ever get any benefit from it! I am amazed that all these wise clerks who know so many languages have neglected this particular story, and not kept it in circulation. I wouldn't say that anyone who tells it in Latin is going about it wrongly, but there are many more unlearned people than learned ones. If the Latin is not translated, then they will hardly be able to understand it. Therefore, I am going to write in French, as succinctly as I can, so that both clerks and the laity will be able to make sense of it. Hugh of Rotelande,10 who wrote out this story for you, tells you this:11 that nobody who wants to translate from Latin into French should be blamed if he can't decline all the nouns or conjugate all the verbs.

D.H. Lawrence and Joseph Conrad – along with the broader spectrum of early twentieth-century European literature – have profoundly influenced the literary oeuvre of Ngugi wa Thiong’o. This influence is not unexpected, considering that Ngugi’s exposure to written literature during his formative years within the context of colonial Kenya led him to perceive it predominantly as fiction authored by Europeans or individuals of European descent – and predominantly articulated in the English language. The focus of this chapter is on Ngugi’s literary works that, following Gérard Genette’s theory of ‘transtextuality’, are hypertexts of early twentieth-century European hypotexts. It is demonstrated that these hypotexts serve as templates that were occasionally adhered to with considerable fidelity, while at other times, they were subject to substantial reworking. Even as Ngugi broadened the array of hypotextual sources for his literary compositions by engaging with non-European literary traditions in the latter part of his career, he did not forfeit the aesthetic opportunities that early twentieth-century European fiction and narrative construction methodologies provided him in his endeavour to tell his stories.

Post-colonial constitutions are often born in riven and unequal societies, marked by histories of violence and dispossession. Transformative constitutions seek to address the burdens of those histories. But constitutions are not inked upon a tabula rasa. The new constitutional order is a palimpsest, carrying enduring traces of the social and economic institutions of the past. The success of the transformative project depends on how the constitutional order engages with those institutions.

For all the mutations that it experienced in different parts of the world, colonialism has always cleaved to a certain logic: the logic of material dispossession, often accomplished by imposing capitalist forms of legal property over indigenous systems of community tenure and landholding. Land-grabbing by invoking notions of ‘productivity’, turning people into tenants on their own land, introducing capitalist agriculture, and forcing precarity as a method of maintaining social control have all been defining features of modern coloni- alism. Furthermore, within the colonial context, patriarchy has invariably intensified dispossession and inequality along gendered lines, overseeing both the visible – and often invisible – subordination of women.

It is therefore scarcely surprising that demands for land justice constituted a core part of twentieth-century independence struggles. Once independence had been accomplished, landlessness and deeply skewed patterns of land ownership were some of the major problems that confronted the framers of post-colonial constitutions.

Liberal constitutions framed in the ‘first wave’ of decolonisation often chose to avoid directly addressing this issue: that is, they excluded the ‘social question’ from the purview of constitutionalism.

INTRODUCTION

The trial of Janet Sawyer took place in 1658, during the English military occupation of Scotland. Sawyer was a middle-aged woman in Ayr, married to John McAdam. Her husband was a messenger, and had stables. The years 1658 and 1659 saw a considerable number of witchcraft trials in Scotland, with a total of eighty-two in 1658 and 100 in 1659. Several of the alleged witches came from parishes in the south and west of Scotland. Whereas the bulk of Scottish witchcraft trials took place in the south-eastern part of the country, the trials of Sawyer and some others took place in Ayr, on the west coast. Circuit courts played an important role in carrying through the trials.

Both Janet Sawyer and her husband had previously been mentioned in the Ayr kirk session minutes in December 1643. They were accused of flyting (quarrelling), and her husband was accused of abusing his spouse. Both had previously been privately admonished by the kirk session. They both confessed, and were publicly admonished to behave better. Then, in January 1647, Sawyer was again brought before the kirk session, this time accused of slandering another woman for theft and harlotry. She denied the accusation, and a group of five elders were appointed to investigate the case and report.

Janet Sawyer was first accused of witchcraft by another witch, Helen Garven. She was in prison in Ayr on 7 October 1651 together with three other women: Janet Crawford, Janet Sloan and Elizabeth Cunningham. This is briefly mentioned in the records of Ayr burgh council. Pricking was used to provide circumstantial evidence.

However, no witchcraft trials were held in 1651, which was a time of warfare and political turmoil. The English army invaded Scotland in 1650, and had largely completed its conquest by the end of 1651.