Women are almost entirely absent from the Codex Calixtinus, barring the odd misogynistic aside as in the interpretation of the woman with the skull. Even female saints play only a minor role in the list of recommended holy sites in the Pilgrim's Guide. Churches with Marian cults feature rarely, perhaps because they lack the whole-body relics that the author privileges. St Foy of Conques receives merely a brief mention, despite being celebrated so visibly in the ambulatory chapel dedicated to her at Santiago de Compostela cathedral. Only the cult of the Magdalene at Vezelay is given an enthusiastic recommendation. Women are also notably absent as direct beneficiaries in the miracle collection of St James. On the one hand, this is in sharp contrast to the Iberian women who occupied prominent political positions in the early twelfth century, most obviously Urraca, queen of Leon and Castile from 1109 to 1126, but also her halfsister, Teresa, countess of Portugal who ruled as ‘queen’ from 1117 to 1128. On the other hand, it tallies with threats to another, more ambiguous, structure available to royal women, the infantado. The nature and function of the infantado have been much debated, as it was, as Patrick Henriet has said, a malleable institution.

Introduction

To the visitor, one African township looks much like another. Under apartheid, townships were dormitories for the African workforce. Despite many being the size of cities, there is no central business district or centre, no central square, and few parks or open spaces beyond dusty football fields and empty wasteland. Only the occasional building rises more than one story. One street looking much like another, it is easy for the visitor to become disorientated.

Yet beyond this monotony of form, townships are varied and complex places. This chapter describes the contemporary township. The following section looks at evidence on how many people live in South Africa's townships before the differences and divisions within townships’ racially homogeneous population are explored.

This is followed by a description of the formal governance of townships under democracy and the state's approach to their economic development. There are, however, other dimensions to the township beyond its governance and economy.

Culture is made and remade as social norms are enacted and, over time, changed. To attempt to describe the culture of the township risks overgeneralisation and simplification. What is attempted is a description of three dimensions of the township that contribute to understanding the lex lokasi – the de facto law of the township described in the following chapter. First, the extent to which African systems of law and belief, with their origins in pre-colonial society, continue to operate in urban townships, contributing to the plurality of residents’ beliefs. Second, the configurations of private and public space and how secrets can be maintained. Third, the importance of consumption for social status; social success measured by money.

This book explores Kent's history from the mid-fifteenth to mid-seventeenth centuries, emphasising its relationship with Europe. The main concerns of the volume's chapters are often, like those of so many of the region's inhabitants ‒ then as now ‒ affixed on the sea. As an appeal to Elizabeth I, in search of a reduction in their contribution to the support of the royal household, articulated in 1593:

The twin features of Kent and its environs are clearly expressed here: that this was a hotly contested frontier zone, while ‒ simultaneously ‒ also being a dynamic thoroughfare. It is a duality that permeates this book: which, first and foremost, seeks to explain how such a perplexing situation could have functioned. What were the connections across the Channel and adjacent North Sea, the so-called ‘Narrow Seas’? How did they change? Most importantly, it asks: how was this experienced by those at the time? What roles did people from Kent's towns and villages, and their European counterparts, perform in them? How did they impact their lives? To answer such questions, this book focuses on the reciprocal movement of people and goods through the county's ports, the merchant fleets and the maritime workforce that facilitated this interchange, as well as the military communities that defended it.

Affect, Morality, and Society

This book, through a detailed analysis of four key affective values, aims to throw new light on the history of affect, cultural norms, elite governance, and English society. By unraveling the understanding and practice of love, gratitude, repentance, and obedience in the landed ranks in England from circa 1580 to 1700, it uncovers the prevalent system of affective morality. Academic research on emotions, ethics, and early modern English social history has been compartmentalized, different disciplines working according to different assumptions, asking different questions, and addressing different historiographical debates. This book brings disparate disciplines into conversation with each other. It merges social, cultural, and intellectual history, explores how ideals and concepts were rendered in daily life by actual people, emphasizes the importance of the domestic, familial world for the understanding and exercise of public authority, and insists on the centrality of the passions and affections to early modern ethics. It contributes to the history of emotions by reconnecting affect and ethics, arguing that the passions and affections were crucial components of the good life. Early modern individuals may not have looked at life through rose-colored glasses, but they certainly did so through an affective lens. Passions, affections, and ethics were intertwined and must be understood together: feelings enabled ethical conduct, constituted the enacted value, and were often mandated obligations, while cultural norms were based on affective concepts. I sought, also, to advance the history of English society by showing how authority was based on affect, thus demonstrating the relevance of emotion to larger historical issues. The passions and affections were central to the construction, enactment, and navigation of the moral frameworks of the English elite.

The sociable world of the Bluestockings is especially associated with the behavioural formations of the city, such as the world of sociable and yet intellectual pleasures found in assembly rooms, salons, theatres and domestic houses, described by Elizabeth Montagu as ‘visiting the Beau monde, & conversing with the Beau esprits of the Academies’. At the same time, though in a different place, Montagu also considered herself as a person engaged in agriculture: she was a farmer, or, as she termed it, with ironic modesty, a ‘farmeress’. Bluestockings and Landscape in Eighteenth-Century Britain: The Prospect of Improvement addresses how these seemingly disparate self-perceptions found some consistency through a discourse of improvement in which Montagu might both be farmer and intellectual, an agricultural reformer and a philanthropist, concerned as much with the plight of her crops as that of her tenant farmers. These competing interests are in evidence in a letter to her sister-in-law, Mary Robinson, in 1772:

We have had the finest weather I ever saw for any long continuance; as a Farmer I have some fault to find with it. Our Wheat, & barley, & turnips, have all sufferd by drought. We had not any reason to complain of our Hay, but the Grass is now much burnt. The dearness of all kinds of provision have reduced our poor Neighbours to a state of wretchedness which I never saw before in England.

When Ernst Lubitsch's Sumurun (released in the US as One Arabian Night) premiered at Berlin's famed Ufa-Palast am Zoo on September 9, 1920, it was one of the hottest tickets in town: one reporter complained that he had become “the most frequently called person in Greater Berlin” because so many people wanted him to get them into the sold-out screening.

Little wonder: Sumurun was the latest film by Ernst Lubitsch, who was already famous at home and abroad, and featured an international cast that included stars in both major and minor roles. The material had proven successful before: the film was based on a Max Reinhardt pantomime, with a story by Friedrich Freksa and music by Viktor Hollander, which premiered in 1910 and enjoyed a multi-year run in Germany, as well as performances in London, Vienna, Paris, and New York. Sumurun is especially interesting as an example of how German culture in the 1920s imagined “the Orient,” which is the setting for the rather elaborate story. Sumurun begins with a group of traveling entertainers— a hunchback (Lubitsch), an old crone (Margarete Kupfer), a young man, a seductive (and unnamed) dancer (Pola Negri), and an enslaved African (Louis Brody)—arriving in Baghdad, where a villainous sheik (Paul Wegener) wields despotic control over the city and his harem.

Successor to the dime novel, pulp fiction is cheap, paperback, pocket-sized novels with colorful, lurid covers. It includes many genres: crime and detective stories, horror, westerns, science fiction, romance. Pulp fiction reshaped literature from an intellectual pastime into fantasies packaged for laborers to read anywhere, anytime. Frequently banned or censored, pulp’s reputation as depraved, sexually promiscuous stories only made them more popular. Pulps also presented stories of African Americans or gay and lesbian heroes in a culture that suppressed these groups. Their popularity drew Hollywood’s attention, and many titles became movies with cross-media advertising and images. These portable fantasies were among the few entertainments available to American GIs deployed on ships and at the front during World War II. After the war, soldiers left behind millions of copies in foreign countries, where postwar pulp publication became a global phenomenon. Pulps convey American values to a mass, international audience.

In light of the criticism that the first seasons of HBO's Game of Thrones received, reacting to the objectification of its female characters and the numerous instances of sexualised violence against women, it seems surprising at first that the later seasons of the same series were celebrated as feminist. Whereas the quantity of nudity and sexualisation would indeed only diminish slightly in the subsequent seasons of Game of Thrones, the female characters evolved from disregarded pawns in the fight for the Iron Throne to some of its main players, leading to celebrations of a perceived feminist agenda on many websites and in critical literature. It is precisely this group of characters that begin ‘to dominate the scene, leading to the point where matriarchs and female claimants, rather than men, fight each other for the control of the Iron Throne’. One example of this development is the young Daenerys Targaryen who, in the show's first season, is married against her will and is thus initially objectified as a political bargaining chip in her brother's plans and as the birth mother of her husband's future heir. Over the course of the series, she becomes a leader who fights for her claim to the Iron Throne. At the end, two women, Daenerys Targaryen and Cersei Lannister, compete as the final season's main contenders for sovereignty over Westeros.

The great majority of the common stock annals up to c.892 were written as simple and ostensibly objective records of important events in either the history of Britain, early Christianity or the English people. These annals vary greatly in length, but they mostly share the same brief style, narrating events in straightforward syntax, with only the rare use of adjectives or adverbs, or the development of any relationship between events in terms of cause and effect. This does not mean that they do not tell a story or stories, though even their wider narrative almost always prioritizes the recording of events over an interrogation of the role of personality, motivation or causation within or across them. Nevertheless, even among the briefest annals the choice to include certain events while ignoring others reflects a range of authorial assumptions about their historical and ideological significance, in such a way that all the entries contribute to the common stock annals’ overarching narrative. Nevertheless, elements of more reflective historical writing are not entirely absent, and occasionally emerge in the few longer annals among the common stock. Many of these variations can be identified with the change of authorship between the first compiler and the revising chronicler described in the preceding chapter.

A consistent trend towards more detailed entries begins with the annal for 825 (A(B)CDE823), though these are generally written in the same terse style as shorter entries.

Brahms's Triumphlied, op. 55, celebrates the great historical turn that occurred in the center of Europe in the years 1870–71. With the decisive German military defeat of France at Sedan and the subsequent proclamation of King William I of Prussia as German Emperor, the German Question was at last given its definitive Prussian-dominated Smaller German solution. What mattered most to Brahms and to the liberal bourgeoisie in general, the social stratum most enthusiastic about the turn, was that Germany, the land of poets and philosophers, had at last emerged from its particularism and political impotence to become a nation-state possessed of power and influence in the world commensurate with its long-recognized achievements in the cultural sphere.

With its at times jubilant, not to say exultant, mode of expression, the Triumphlied seems designed to turn the page on the very idea of German political impotence. The text is taken from the apocalyptic Book of Revelation and given a powerful setting for double chorus, baritone solo, and grand orchestra, the largest array of forces to be found in any work by Brahms. Each of the three relatively short movements features a brief orchestral introduction marked by propulsive dotted rhythms and jumping octaves.

Bestiaries supply knowledge required, in Saint Augustine's view, to read and understand God's word and works. Two metaphorical books, the Book of Beasts and the Book of Nature, correspond to each other and each responds to Holy Scripture. So the first aspect of biblical encounter to explore in this chapter concerns the character of the meeting arranged by a third-century Greek author between animal lore from ancient sources and a large variety of biblical verses. Physiologus, identified only by his role as Naturalist, brings them into relationship in order to explain how knowledge of animals may illuminate Christian understanding of God's word and world. When we pay close attention to the overlap between the Book of Books and the Book of Beasts, we also discover the bestiary as a borderland space where Jews and Christians intersect by virtue of their shared link to the Hebrew Bible, transformed into the Old Testament and read through the typological lens of the New. This second facet of bestiaries as biblical encounter is combative and polarizing, as Jewish-Christian contrasts extend the play of animal-human others and re-stage disputed claims for authority over sacred text and sanctioned gloss. By highlighting the nature of the bestiary's Scriptural connections, with the resulting potential for Christian-Jewish polemics, I will argue for reading bestiaries as a contact zone par excellence for Jewish-Christian interaction, contestatory and exegetical.

In 1917, a small group of women, some of whom had just come out of purdah, began to meet regularly for Red Cross work in Birbhum, Bengal. Called upon by Saroj Nalini Dutt (1887–1925), a Bengali social reformer and early rural development activist, the members of the Birbhum Mahilā Samiti (Birbhum women's group) sewed garments and made dātuns (teeth-cleaning sticks) made from the neem tree as well as pacīsī boards (an Indian game) for Indian soldiers fighting in the First World War. Dutt, who was honoured for her activities after the war by the British Red Cross Society (BRCS), also sent a monthly consignment of sweets, condiments, and newspapers to soldiers serving in Mesopotamia. The Birbhum group, which normally focused its activities on the social and educational ‘progress’ of Bengali women, is only one of the many examples of Indian non-state humanitarian initiatives organised during the First World War. Given that these initiatives were embedded in the British imperial context and contributed to the empire's war effort, they are examples of a larger phenomenon that historians before me have labelled ‘imperial humanitarianism’.

Two decades later, Jawaharlal Nehru (1889–1964), the future prime minister of independent India, and by then, President of the Indian National Congress (INC), became involved in propagating and organising Indian nationalist humanitarian activities. During the Spanish Civil War (1936–39), Nehru swayed the Indian national movement to create its own humanitarian programme, which saw the collection of funds and food items in favour of Republican Spain.