The heading of Chapter 17 of the Pilgrim's Guide reads: “Concerning the stonecutters of the church and the beginning and end of its work” (De lapicidibus ecclesie et de primordio et fine operis ejus). These master stonecutters, in the sense of teachers (didascali), are named as Bernard the Elder, mirabilis magister, and Robert, along with another fifty or so anonymous stonecutters.1 These are not the twelfth-century masons, but rather those who worked on the foundations of the basilica during the reign of Alfonso VI. It has long been concluded from the names and the architectural form of the east end of the building that these stonemasons were from north of the Pyrenees.2 More recently it has been suggested that they came from Conques.3 However, the author of the Guide gives no information on their origin or on the means of their arrival in Compostela. Unfortunately, this is typical of medieval sources, and this void has left room for a variety of debates and assumptions. Although few scholars today would argue for the importance of the pilgrimage roads as active conduits for the spread of artistic ideas, the concept of itinerant masons and sculptors continues to appear as an assumption underlying other arguments. In the popular romantic version, masons and sculptors travelled from site to site seeking patronage or work, sometimes even along the pilgrimage roads and in the company of troubadours. Yet no evidence exists for such a model in any text or image.

The all-women compilation album A Woman's Heart was released in 1992 during a period of increased change and continued conflict in Irish society, particularly in relation to the role, status, and recognition of women and women's rights. Even with significant positive advancements and legislative reform, 1990s Ireland remained a sometimes oppressive place, with continued violence toward and mistreatment of women and girls. Notable examples include the “X case”, where the High Court prevented a fourteen-year-old rape victim from going to Britain for an abortion, and the findings of the “Making the Link” study, which showed that out of 677 women surveyed, 18% had been subjected to male violence in intimate relationships and 51% knew of another woman who had similar experiences. Parallel to these statistics, according to Connolly and O’Toole, “for many commentors, the 1990s signalled the onset of a postfeminist era or, at best, a third wave of feminism more characterised by political fragmentation and identity politics than feminist solidarity. Young women are considered to have rejected feminism and the women's movement”.

Despite a possible backlash toward feminism and the continued prevalence of male violence, there were also some indications of positive change in relation to the treatment and role of women in Ireland.

During this time, there was an increase in “locally based (mainly working-class) women's groups concerned with women's poverty and with empowering women in their families and communities”, and “‘femocrats’ or bureaucrats committed to advancing a feminist agenda” who positioned themselves within several professional and political arenas, including:

For a little over one hundred miles, the Anglo-Scottish border wends its way west to east from the head of the Solway Firth to just north of the River Tweed. This line roughly follows the one that was legally fixed in 1237 when Alexander II of Scotland (1214–49) and his brother-in-law, Henry III of England (1216–72), signed the Treaty of York. Its process of becoming and what it has symbolised is rather more complicated. In the eleventh century, the kingdom of Alba expanded south, acquiring Lothian and Strathclyde; in the twelfth century, Galloway became part of the kingdom; in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, several attempts were made to fix a definite boundary between the two kingdoms. G.W.S. Barrow has suggested that by 1092, the ‘new castle of Carlisle … paralleling the New Castle upon Tyne of 1080, constituted the essence of the Border’ from the Norman perspective, with the actual border delimited along a line between the Solway and the Esk.2 David I (1124–53) took Carlisle in 1136 and agreed with King Stephen (1135–54) at Durham to restore the border to the Rere Cross at Stainmore, which had served as a boundary marker between the two kingdoms in the mid-tenth century. The Scots held Carlisle for two decades, before Henry II (1154–89) compelled Máel Coluim IV (1153–65) to surrender the city, along with Cumberland and Westmorland, in 1157. The late twelfth century saw the Scottish kings seeking to assert claims over Northumberland and other territories, and, in 1174, William I (the Lion, 1165–1214) was captured at the Battle of Alnwick during a French-backed invasion of northern England.

Words are at the heart of the matter. Words spoken and written, then as now. What words say and what they do, who speaks or hears, and above all, who interprets what words are meant to do and say. Words taken from the Bible are especially fraught when two faith communities coexist in unequal tension. In the world of northern France from the latter twelfth through the thirteenth centuries, Jews are increasingly perceived by Churchmen, moralists, and monarchs as an unwelcome, even threatening Other whose persistent disbelief calls for condemnation, conversion, and expulsion. In such a context, speaking with biblical words took place in a hotly contested arena, a place of encounter, a contact zone.

This study examines how biblical material is encountered in a variety of French works, in order to follow how claims to authority, hence correct and incorrect reading, are enmeshed with competing approaches to interpretation and intimately tied to the way different levels of literal and figurative meanings are defined. In this epilogue, I briefly put into dialogue key turning points to “come to terms” with a range of Jewish representations within Christian texts that engage the question of how we might appropriately characterize their stance.

What is deader than drab, glossier than gold, and bad all over? Answer:Lazarus haud procul hinc Bethanes regna tenebat Dives opum, clarus, genus alto a sanguine regum. (Not far from there, Lazarus of Bethany ruled his kingdom – rich in resources, famous, descended from the high blood of kings.)

The only poetry that comes off worse than ‘drab’ in C. S. Lewis's study of English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama is neo-Latin. Lewis denied that his use of the term ‘drab’ was ‘dyslogistic’ (although, he confessed, ‘[t]here is more bad [drab] than good’). He would have owned, however, that his characterisations of neo-Latin verse certainly were dyslogistic. Vida's Christiad, a sixteenth-century Virgilian epic on the life of Christ, was, for Lewis, ‘the supreme example’ of neo-Latin's entirely original, unrivalled and unprecedented kind of badness, ‘which no man could incur by sheer defect of talent but only by “endless labour to be wrong”’. If Lewis is to be believed, an ‘unchanging and unmeaning glossiness’, a ‘varnish and stucco’, spreads across Vida's lines above on Lazarus, the influence of which was ‘deadly’ and threatened to destroy the likes of Milton. It is not just that Vida ‘polishes up the lowness’ of the biblical story, giving Lazarus a lustre he lacks in the gospel; it is also (we might add) that this polishing is achieved by stitching together fragments of a pathologically, meaninglessly Virgilian language, with the result that, beyond the dazzling, glossy surface, this still-living Lazarus is no less clothed in strips of graveclothes than when he is later resurrected: ‘regna tenebat’; ‘dives opum’; ‘genus alto a sanguine’.

On 4 June 1630 the Privy Councillors and chief justices who reconvened as judges in Star Chamber pronounced verdict and sentence against Alexander Leighton (c.1568/70–1649), a Scottish-born minister, medical doctor, and controversialist charged with ‘framing, publishing and dispersing a scandalous book against king, peers, and prelates’, a book the court found to be ‘full of most pestilent, devilish and dangerous assertions’. By writing, printing, and distributing this ‘seditious’ work (An Appeal to the Parliament: or Sions Plea against the Prelacie, 1629) Leighton had ‘committed a most odious and heinous offence, deserving the severest punishments the court could inflict’. Being a prerogative court, based on the royal will rather than statute or the common law, Star Chamber could not impose death, but had a versatile range of sanctions in its armoury. It used them to the full against Leighton.

This review is followed by another on Ambroise Thomas's Carmagnola, ultimately premiered on 19 April, but this latter is not included here.

The new work [Carmagnola] would have been staged much earlier if the numerous rehearsals of [Mozart’s] Don Giovanni had not caused its postponement for several weeks. It's annoying that these prolonged sessions delayed the performance of the new opera without any advantage to the ancient masterpiece; we know that twice in a few days Don Giovanni was announced to no avail as Barroilhet, feeling hoarse during the first performance, which was consequently abandoned, was replaced by the overture and a trio from Guillaume Tell. He was then indisposed shortly before the second performance, which did not take place at all.

If Barroilhet doesn't give up this celebrated role, which seems to terrify him, it's worth making some observations about the way he seemed to me, on the basis of a few scenes, to understand the Mozartian style. Barroilhet clearly belongs to that class of singers, so abundant in Italy, for whom the music, words and the plot of an opera are merely more or less plausible vehicles for his personal success. Everything, if we are to believe these people, must lend itself to the demands and even the characteristics of their talent. If they’re dealing with a living composer, they oblige him to change a host of passages in their roles according to their own ideas.

The First World War generated multiple state and non-state humanitarian replies, encompassing not only material and financial donations, but also different forms of voluntary work. In colonial India, one of these relief activities was the formation and working of the ambulance corps. Staffed with (Indian) volunteers, the corps assisted wounded and sick soldiers of the British Indian Army in Great Britain, Mesopotamia and India. Corps members worked closely with, or as part of, the military. Their duties not only included the transportation of war victims but also comprised other tasks, such as nursing them, dressing their wounds, providing medical care as doctors, and interpreting and cooking for them. The male volunteers came from all over India, and depending on the nature of the corps, their religious, caste, educational and class backgrounds varied substantially.

Sources suggest that at least four Indian volunteer ambulance initiatives existed: the Indian Field Ambulance Training Corps (IFATC), the Indian Branch of the St. John Ambulance Association (ISJAA), the Bengal Ambulance Corps (BAC) and the Benares Ambulance Transport Corps. In Chapter 1 we have already read about the work of the ISJAA. This chapter sets out to analyse the Indian Field Ambulance Training Corps. Established in Britain in autumn 1914, the unit was, as far as I know, the only relief initiative organised by colonial subjects back in the metropole during the war. This does not mean that it was the only humanitarian endeavour organised by non-Westerners.