Women, historically and today, have given birth to foetuses, infants, children. This is of course an obvious statement, and something that goes without saying, for without such history none of us would be here. What is less obvious, and has received much less cultural attention, are the other objects that are produced in people's bodies, and are expelled by the body, or removed through therapeutic or medical intervention. Women, gender diverse, and intersex people do not only have the capacity to conceive foetuses: their bodies can also create a range of other things, including molar pregnancy, fibroids, uterine tumours, ovarian tumours, menstrual lumps, and so forth. These uterine productions and not-quite-pregnancies are parts of reproductive experience. They have a history, and quite a long one, as I have shown in this book. Despite this, non-foetal pregnancies, pregnant-like embodiment, and uterine expulsions have been little researched in historical scholarship. Subjects such as infertility and miscarriage are gaining scholarly and public attention, yet much less is given to women's experiences of conditions which produce non-foetal pregnant embodiment or uterine expulsions, such as molar pregnancy, placental disease, uterine tumours, or false pregnancy. Similar to miscarriage and infertility, these experiences have often been silenced, overlooked, or considered too ‘taboo’ for discussion in public forums. This is gradually beginning to change with stories of peoples’ experiences appearing in newspapers and particularly on social media. There is growing public recognition that many of these experiences are often felt, physically and emotionally, as a type of pregnancy loss.

Introduction

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries farming in the North Sea Lowlands reached its zenith. Following the difficult years of the first half of the eighteenth century, characterised by economic depression, devastating floods and cattle disease, a period of prosperity began that extended until the 1870s, with only one interruption between c. 1817 and 1835. The numerous large, imposing farms that can still be found in the lowlands mostly date from this predominantly prosperous period. In the advanced regions, farming stabilised at a high level of productivity, holding size tended to increase further and as a result social inequality also increased. The regions that were relatively ‘backward’ started catching up. By 1870 Groningen and the English fenlands were among the most prosperous and productive areas in the Lowlands. The late nineteenth-century agricultural depression brought an end to this period of prosperity, prompting the beginning of a new period, in which the lowlands were no longer in the vanguard, but instead had trouble keeping up with the uplands. Signs of the beginning of stagnation could already be observed before 1880 in the coastal regions from Flanders up to and including Friesland, and it is these regions which will be the subject of the next section. This is followed by a section on regions that still had potential for further development and which were catching up (or not): the English Fens, Groningen, and the Frisian fens. The third section reveals how north-west Germany fared after the devastating Christmas Flood of 1717. Finally, the regions that had not been transformed will be discussed.

Louth St James Churchwardens: 1500–70

In his seminal history of two millenniums of interlacustrine Africa, Jean-Pierre Chrétien argues that the region is characterised by a diversity of cultures, and political systems in constant flux: it is impossible to map out the region to separate it from neighbouring regions or societies. This chapter argues that interlacustrine Africa is in itself a region. It makes three arguments: as shared identity, a competition between rival kingdoms over the hegemony in the region, and interactions between the elites as part of that competition. Regions are not eternal and unchangeable monuments of civilisations, but spaces of interactions shaped by shared understandings, identities and histories. Many of the region's political communities share historical narratives of their origin and past. Notably, the elites developed a regional identity and culture; they often belonged to clans and family networks that crossed the borders of their political communities. This shared history was constantly redefined because these communities were bound in mutual relationships; sometimes these were rather violent, but often also shaped by cooperation and exchange. Historians of Eastern Africa have often highlighted the many similarities in the patterns of kinship and settlement, the emergence of kingdoms as a predominant feature of political organisations and the many cross-references in the oral traditions of the societies in the region. Religious cults like the nyabingi (one of several millennial cults which centred on the myth of a ancient or rightful ruler who once embodied the norms of the community) transcended the political boundaries for centuries.

The Protests (five cases)

On 1 December 1803 Captain Willem Verhaage of the private Dutch brig Carolina protested at Malacca against the seizure of his vessel by HMS Rattlesnake.

The events leading up to the arrest illustrate the political circumstances operating in the area at the time.

The British had occupied Dutch Amboina in 1796 under the same conditions as they occupied Malacca, that is to forestall a French occupation. Under the Treaty of Amiens of 1802 the British-held Dutch possessions in the East Indies were to be returned to the Dutch and, in spite of an unofficial British policy of procrastination, Amboina was restored to Dutch rule on 28 February 1803 by the Resident, Colonel James Oliver. Under Oliver's authorisation (on behalf of the EIC) the Carolina sailed for Madras on 6 May as a cartel ship carrying British troops. Captain Verhaage was also authorised to purchase goods at Madras (which he accordingly did, taking on board a load of cotton and copper) and to return to Amboina under the protection of a ‘Cartel Pass’ dated 2 September 1803. The Carolina embarked for Batavia on 5 September intending to travel via the Sunda Strait, but bad weather around Aceh dictated a route down the Malacca Strait. The brig arrived at Malacca to take on provisions on 30 October. It departed again on 3 November only to meet with a number of pirates around the Carimons and the Strait of Dryon on the 10th, which convinced the captain to return to Malacca, where he anchored in the Roads on the 16th.

Heptisax and hæftmēce are both unique words for weapons, the first in Grettis saga, the second in Beowulf, works divided by five to six hundred years and by nearly two thousand miles. A giant wields the heptisax, Beowulf the hæftmēce, yet their blades have a haft in common and both are swung in a cave. That each word is unique to its context only adds to the mystery. Could the stories be related?

No answer to this question is generally accepted. Common origin, coincidence, loan: solutions fall into three groups. Many now give these cave fights a common origin in folktale, attributing them to a ‘common narrative paradigm’. That is a popular solution, somewhat diminished by the hepti-hæft correspondence for which the explanation ‘term for a cave-fighting weapon’ presumes that fighting in caves across the ages will turn up the same item, whether in England or Iceland. The second option, coincidence, was argued nearly thirty years ago along the lines of ‘salmons in both’ by Magnús Fjalldal, who took a common origin to be unprovable, though plausible. The third idea, a loan from the epic to the saga, has not been ventured for more than a century. Fjalldal declared this idea to be not only unprovable, but also contentious and naïve, calling it ‘the English hypothesis’, as if to highlight the burden of proof. But calling it a hypothesis was actually a good idea. Whereas little more than likeness is required to show that one myth or legend is related to another, the claim of a loan refers necessarily to literary history from which it must supply chapter and verse.

One of the most prolific medical authors in Imperial Rome, Galen of Pergamon (AD 129–c. 216), wrote exclusively in Greek during the reigns of three successive emperors. Of Galen's vast corpus, one work is outstanding in its popularity in a Latin translation available before what is often called the long twelfth century, specifically his Ad Glauconem de methodo medendi, which is dated to the fifth century and was attested at the monastery of Vivarium in Italy by the sixth century.

The Ad Glauconem was not the only Galenic or pseudo-Galenic work to survive in Latin translation from late antiquity, and can be joined by authentically Galenic texts such as his De simplicium medicamentorum facultatibus (On the properties of simple medicines) as transmitted in the Euporista of Oribasius, adaptations of his work and pseudo-Galenic works such as the Liber tertius.2 As pointed out by Cameron, the Ad Glauconem was indeed used directly in the compilation of Bald's Leechbook, though the source has often been misidentified, along with the Liber tertius, as the work of the eleventh-century compiler Gariopontus of Salerno.

This chapter will consider the evidence for the use of the ensemble of texts which grew around Galen's Ad Glauconem, as well as the Ad Glauconem itself, in early medieval England. The earliest manuscript witnesses of Galen's Ad Glauconem in Latin saw its chapters interspersed with a supposed ‘third book’ which is called, for want of a better title, Liber tertius (the third book).

By the eve of the Spanish invasion, Mesoamerican societies had developed distinctive frameworks of religious thought that intimately connected human beings to nonhuman animals and the natural world. For the Nahuas of central Mexico or the bènizàa (commonly known as Zapotecs) of Oaxaca, boundaries between humans and other animal species, as well as between the temporal and divine, were porous. Humanity was merely one form of sentient actor within a broadly animate world where deities, spirits, and cosmic forces interacted dynamically with human beings, as well as animals, plants, and other natural phenomena (Basset 2015: 13–14; Carrasco 1990; López-Austin 1988). In turn, animals acted as messengers and conduits between (sub)terrestrial and celestial planes, deities materialized in human and animal forms, and certain human beings could even adopt different animal figures (Clendinnen 2014; Jansen 1997; Lind 2015: 22–3; Martínez González 2011). The missionaries who followed swiftly on the tail of Spanish military conquests brought their own theological perspectives, which distinguished humanity from other creatures by their uniquely immaterial, eternal, and rational soul. Indigenous ideas that animals could share similar spiritual potency, agency, and even mutability with humans, were not only fantastical to the colonial priesthood, but affronts to the Christian order of nature. In response, the churchmen of New Spain sought to sever Indigenous identifications with nonhuman animals, which they classed as idolatry, superstition, and witchcraft, and impose Catholic divisions between man and beast.

A crucial method for instructing Indigenous populations in proper Christian faith and behavior was the translation of catechisms, confessionaries, and other Christian teaching materials into Native languages.

Even in the 1850s, Hungarian bands in Vienna were nothing new. Although Hungary was an independent kingdom within the wider Habsburg Empire, there were still strong historical and cultural ties with Austria. The old imperial structure meant that travel between them remained straightforward and besides, Budapest was only 240 km away, manageable even then and directly connected by a busy steamboat trade along the mighty Danube river. Schubert's familiarity with Hungarian music as expressed in his own style hongrois compositions has been attributed to the presence of Hungarian musicians in Vienna in the early 1800s rather than his own relatively brief stay at the Esterhazy court, and there is no record that he ever went to Budapest.

If the Duchy of Courland was a politically fragile territory, the same goes for its nominal vassal master, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, a unique confederation of Poland and Lithuania. Indeed, as we have seen in Chapter 3, the fates of the two realms were connected. In 1790, just before the Second Partition, Elisa von der Recke and Dorothea von Kurland travelled to the Polish court to negotiate the political future of the Duchy of Courland with King Stanisław II August Poniatowski. The conflict that the two women and indeed the duchy was facing, smouldered on several fronts. The duchy was threatened with annexation by Russia in the light of a Second Partition of Poland. At the same time, a politically ineffective Duke of Courland, Peter von Biron, battled with opposing internal conflicts during his rule, the demands of the Old German Knights, the emerging German bourgeoisie, and the demands of the ethnic Courlanders for equal rights and the abolition of serfdom. He required the support of the Polish king to regain authority. The two women returned twice to Warsaw on their diplomatic missions. The last tour in 1791 lasted seven months and was ultimately successful – until the Third Partition of Poland, which also resulted in the annexation of the duchy by Russia.

Though ruled by a monarch in real union, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was a ‘democracy of the nobility’, certainly from the mid-eighteenth century onwards, in a state of political flux and reform. The szlachta ‘accounted for about seven percent of the population of up to fourteen million (in 1772)’. The nobility elected the parliament and the monarch, and thus held all the political power across the commonwealth.

In the late 1670s and early 1680s, a series of interrelated events dramatically altered the state of both the English book trade and the lives of Catholics in England and Wales. This, in turn, had an impact on the scope, production, and circulation of English Catholic books. Anxieties surrounding the king's heir apparent had been simmering since James revealed his conversion to Catholicism in 1673. However, Israel Tongue and Titus Oates's 1678 revelation of an alleged Catholic plot to assassinate the king in favour of his brother, followed by an armed Catholic uprising and massacre of Protestants, ignited a number of crises surrounding popery and arbitrary government that persisted for years. One consequence, the Exclusion Crisis, resulted in Charles II dismissing parliament before the Licensing Act could be renewed. Thus, in mid-1679, the principal law that regulated print in the Restoration expired. The changes in censorship altered what Catholic works the government targeted, from devotional texts to critiques of its handling of the Popish Plot. Catholics faced recriminations for their attempts to defend their innocence, while anti-popish proclamations created new obstacles and risks for Catholics and those sympathetic to them. At the same time, Catholic print benefitted from the lack of press regulation. Charles continued to focus his attention on suppressing anti-monarchical attacks, particularly dissenting and Whig propaganda, while the Tory Party welcomed the loyalist rhetoric English Catholics had been invoking for decades. The events playing out reoriented the attention of not only the government and authors but the bookmen as well.

Philanthropy is under the spotlight. On both sides of the Atlantic, a paradox is emerging: societal pressures, of various types, mean that private sources of funding are more important than ever for civil society. At the same time, this sits – often uncomfortably – alongside increased scrutiny and criticism of major donors. As David Cannadine showed in a lecture in 2024, criticism of philanthropy is at an unprecedented level, while the demands that donors are making are also intensifying. This trend towards great scrutiny, he suggested, makes it ‘more difficult both for those giving money away and for those seeking gifts and awards and grants’.

Cannadine has become a valued expert within this complex and sometimes fraught world – and is well placed to help guide the sector through its present dilemmas. He has played a distinctive (indeed unique) role: first, as a thinker and commentator, not least in adding a much-needed historical context to debates; and, secondly, as a practitioner, helping institutions to navigate increased complexity. And that role as practitioner has successfully spanned both sides of the Atlantic, and both sides of the fence: as fundraiser as well as an advisor to, and trustee of, philanthropic organisations.

That interest in philanthropy, by his own admission, was not particularly planned. Municipal philanthropy formed part of the backdrop to his childhood in Birmingham, a cityscape shaped by families like the Cadburys and Chamberlains. His time at Columbia (1988–98) – on a campus overflowing with facilities named after philanthropists – opened his ‘eyes to a different way of resourcing universities … much more attuned to philanthropy and less dependent on the state’.