The Oldham group were British Christian intellectuals, with each term locating it in a key sphere: a national (British) context with specific identities and assumptions; a religious (Christian) context defined against ‘secularism’; and a public (intellectual) context marked by certain forms of cultural authority. After a long period of neglect, there is increasing interest in Christian responses to the Second World War, the crises that preceded it and the social rebuilding that followed. The concept of ‘middle ways’ is introduced to describe the group’s recurring intellectual approach, referring either to taking a moderate position between perceived extremes or constructing a synthesis of different – even contradictory – elements. Middle ways reflected the intellectual content of the group’s ideas or also strategies for implementing them. Various kinds of ‘betweenness’ were involved and define the chapters that follow: paths were sought between Protestantism and Catholicism, faith and secularity, laissez-faire capitalism and collectivist socialism, rootless internationalism and nationalism, freedom and order, and egalitarianism and elitism.

The chapter considers the novels and non-fiction of Anne Enright, winner of the Man Booker Prize in 2007 for The gathering. It traces the trajectory of her fiction towards a revamped version of Irish realism, with a focus on her most recent novel, The Green Road. It considers Enright’s evolving attitudes towards the nation and Irish literary traditions. The chapter discusses her memoir of motherhood and some of her other reflections on her development as a writer. It is argued that Enright belongs to a later moment than the other women considered here, as a person upon whom the burden of the Irish past appears to sit more lightly. Nevertheless, she engages with recognisably Irish themes such as emigration, child abuse, the Celtic Tiger boom/bust and rural life.

The relative success of Sebastiane encouraged Jarman, Whaley, and Malin to attempt the impossible and make another independently financed feature film. By 1977, the year of the Queen's Silver Jubilee, punk had spread beyond a handful of clubs and bands in London and New York and was starting to look like a complete new youth culture in the making. The starting point for Jubilee was Jarman's fascination with Jordan, a girl who worked at the King's Road clothes shop. Jarman's ambivalence about where all this violent youthful energy was heading resulted in an extremely interesting film, deliberately ugly in places, and very uncomfortable to watch, a film which, he tells us in the published script, 'always upset people' and who embodied the emerging punk style it was busy promoting. The authentic artistic individuality which he asserted so strongly against the sell-out represented by punk could be found within punk itself.

Dialectical histories – histories organised in terms of oppositions between the spiritual and material, the transcendental and the empirical, ideas and social existence – first appeared in 1820s Protestant Germany. Their appearance was marked by a conflict between dialectical historians and empirical or contextual historians, as exemplified in the clash between Heinrich Leo and Leopold von Ranke. This chapter explores the degree to which this conflict was shaped by the cultivation of two mutually opposed intellectual personae: that of the philosophical historian who envisaged a self in which humanity achieved historical self-consciousness by reconciling the oppositions; and that of the empirical historian who envisaged a self capable of impartial openness to historical events through a practice of source criticism. How were these divergent personae cultivated? And what sorts of cultural and intellectual sources – drawn from religion, philosophy, philology, biblical criticism, legal and ecclesiastical history – informed this cultivation? By investigating these questions, the chapter sheds light on the appearance of two different ways of writing history and being an historian, whose mutual hostility has yet to disappear.

How did the Fulbright Program evolve in relation to the challenge of racial diversity? For the first several decades of the Fulbright Program Australia had a mass immigration program and a White Australia policy of racial exclusion. This influenced the fields of research in which Fulbright awards were made. Aboriginal Australians were the objects of research by visiting American scholars but did not themselves begin to win awards until the 1970s. In the mid-1960s many of those who were leading the call for change in immigration laws were Fulbright scholars. Australians travelling to the United States on educational exchange observed racial segregation and some became politically active and influenced movements on behalf of Aboriginal people. The first recipient of the Distinguished Visitor Award under the Fulbright Program was African-American historian John Hope Franklin. A special category of award for Aboriginal Australians was initiated in 1992.

Book Four continues the history of the monastery from the death of Theodoric to the author’s own time with an eclectic collection of colorful stories continuing many of themes introduced in Books Two and Three – conflicts with bishops and lay patrons, internal politics, relations with daughter houses, and various miracles. Twice the bishop-proprietor Ulrich I of Constance attempts to intervene in the election or abdication of an abbot, spurring the monastery to assert its libertas in active resistance. Hints of profound troubles in the wake of reform are introduced, including violence in the abbey, economic mismanagement, and failed attempts to found and reform other houses. The monastery is miraculously spared from fire on multiple occasions.

Donne’s Holy Sonnet ‘This is my Playes last Scene’ opens with an allusion to the stage, the ‘last scene’ of the play that is the speaker’s life in the theatrum mundi. The perspective of life as a stage is merged with the inner stages on which the separate parts of the speaker appear in a manner reminiscent of medieval allegorical plays. The speaker reflects on death and the separation of body and soul – but adds a third element to his self and this separation: his sins. All will go to their place of origin eventually, which allows the speaker to hope for his redemption. The chapter also shows how, in the final couplet, Donne avoids making a denominational statement about the imputation to righteousness that can be unequivocally attributed to Catholicism or Protestantism but rather uses ambiguity to reflect on the dependence of human beings on the grace of God. He thus prepares the happy ending of the speaker’s play in a double discourse: by talking about the event of death and what happens after dying, the speaker links religious and dogmatic terms with reflections on drama.

From the earliest manuscript images through to cinematic depictions, Chaucer’s ‘persone’, that is his face and body, has been a key focus in the pursuit of transhistorical intimacy with the author. Chaucer’s physical self has been portrayed repeatedly across subsequent centuries in an array of media. Drawing upon the hermeneutic concept of Einfühlung (‘feeling into’) to examine the long ‘empathetic afterlife’ enjoyed by Chaucer’s ‘persone’, D’Arcens explores what Chaucer’s face and body have come to mean to post-medieval audiences; she traces how these differences intersect with the constantly changing nature of Chaucer’s legacy, especially as he and his work have been deemed to reflect national literary and comic traditions.