When the readers at the Colegio Jesuita de Zaragoza (Jesuit College of Zaragoza) highlighted the most striking passages in their reading of Jaume Roig's misogynist Catalan work, the Espill (The Mirror, ca. 1460), the miracle of the profaned Host was sure to figure among them (vv. 3502–3816, pp. 171–175). Set in the city of Zaragoza itself, the story recounts the prodigious transformation of the sacred Host (the bread or wafer consecrated in the Eucharist) into a human baby and the baby's return to their original form. In the Espill, the episode's entire chain of events begins when a domestically abused Christian woman seeks the help of a Muslim sage to increase her abusive husband's love. The sage agrees to help, but on the condition that the woman pay him and bring him the sacred Host. The woman complies but, upon delivering the Host to the sage, they find that the Host had miraculously transformed into a baby. The woman tries to kill the child by immolation, thus confirming her evil nature for nonmodern audiences. After a series of subsequent events, the woman dies in the end, miraculously struck and killed by a bolt of lightning, although nothing is said about the fate of the Muslim sage.

March 1719

During 1718, Spanish ambitions to recover former Habsburg territories in the Mediterranean area led to the creation of a quadruple alliance of Britain, France, Austria and the United Provinces, and in August to the defeat of a Spanish fleet by British forces at the battle of Cape Passaro. In retaliation, the Spanish government decided to support the Jacobites and mount an invasion of Britain. In March 1719, one force led by the 2nd duke of Ormond aimed to land in the south-west of England, and a second diversionary force led by George Keith sailed to Scotland.

The government and other authorities in London were aware of the danger by 10 March. Archbishop Wake evidently suggested to the earl of Sunderland, first lord of the treasury, that there should be some religious response: he may have suggested a fast day. On 16 March, Sunderland reported that the king considered that it would be ‘sufficient to have some Prayers appointed to be said on the litany days’ (Sunday, Wednesday and Friday), in the same style as the three prayers issued for the earlier Jacobite rebellion (1715–E). Sunderland enclosed a copy of this form of prayer with his own proposed amendments, and enquired about the correct manner of signifying the king's order for the issue and use of the prayers.

INTRODUCTION

Michael Erskine, a miller at Newbyres Mill in Newbattle, was accused of witchcraft and sodomy and investigated by the presbytery of Dalkeith. He was arrested at some point after 15 October 1629 in response to an order that had also named two other men and two women. On this occasion, the presbytery referred to a warrant for arrest which had previously been issued by the privy council. The later documents write of Erskine alone, so it is not clear what happened to the other four suspects.

Erskine was kept in prison in Newbattle for six weeks. He seems to have been tortured with sleep deprivation until he confessed to all the crimes. Then, on 17 December, the presbytery petitioned the privy council, asking for him to be transferred to Edinburgh tolbooth because people in the parish refused to continue guarding him, and the house in which he was imprisoned was insecure. He was then moved to the tolbooth of Edinburgh.

More than three months later, on 2 April 1630, Erskine's trial came up in the central court of justiciary in Edinburgh. The prosecutor was Joseph Miller, substitute to the king's advocate. Dittays from 31 March 1630, based on depositions before the ‘Lord Justice’ (Alexander Colville, justice depute, who was the judge in charge of the trial), and likewise from the presbytery, were read in the presence of the assize. Erskine denied the crimes. The assize unanimously found him guilty, with the exception of witchcraft committed against Robert Hogg. Whether this was the only witchcraft charge, or whether there were other witchcraft charges of which he was found guilty, was not specified. He was sentenced to be strangled and burned in Newbattle.

An early leader in the girls’ Young Christian Workers (YCW) in England, Lancastrian Mary Lyons recalled in old age how the Movement had shaped her life, including her choice of husband and how they celebrated their wedding in 1942. She married a fellow YCW, Austin Lyons, and at their wedding, she wrote, ‘We sang “Rouse Up” and had the YCW badge as decoration on the wedding cake’. “Rouse Up” was the rallying song of the Movement, shared by both boys and girls, but the girls also had their own songbook. ‘Be proud to be a worker girl, like Christ your worker King; for carry on the world could not, save you your labour bring’ ran the chorus of one of the songs, set to the tune ‘Boys of Wexford’. Another began ‘What's that badge, what's that badge, O my brave Jocist girl’, and ended with a call to action typical of the YCW spirit:

Whilst sentiments of this kind were not unusual in the defensive and somewhat triumphalist culture of the English Catholic community in the 1940s and 1950s, the specific depiction of the status, dignity and mission of girls, and particularly of worker girls, was distinctive and rare.

To begin indirectly: any Irish person of my generation (I was born in 1958) who has read even a fraction of the commission reports and commentaries that have issued from Ireland in the past fifteen years on the record of pervasive child sexual abuse (much of it perpetrated by priests and religious and lay teachers), on the complicity between the Irish State and the Roman Catholic Church in the confinement and forced labour of young women and girls, on the systematic humiliation and punishment of unmarried mothers within institutions in which their children either died as infants or were forcibly taken from them as a matter of course, or on the incarceration of children within the vast and terrifying apparatus of industrial schools, will realise that the Irish story has been hollowed out. We are not as we once seemed to be.

1.1Como la comunidad de Pisa, toda Italia y casi todo el mundo os consideran extraordinario, invencible y victorioso señor Alfonso, rey por la gracia de Dios de Castilla, Toledo, León, Galicia, Sevilla, Murcia y Jaén, como el más distinguido de todos los reyes que viven o que vale la pena recordar […] y además saben que Vos amáis sobre todo la paz, la verdad, la piedad y la justicia, que vos sois el más cristiano y más fiel […] sabiendo que descendéis de la sangre de los duques de Suabia, una casa a la que pertenece el Imperio con derecho y dignidad por decisión de los príncipes y por entrega de los papas de la Iglesia […] Bandino di Lanzia's speech

Meta-analysis of previous VAR studies shows that QE multipliers can differ by a factor of 100. But it is unknown if this wide dispersion arises from the use of different QE measures or different VAR modelling approaches. This chapter examines this question

This appendix records the evidence for forms of prayer used by the main nonconforming denominations in Britain on the occasions of special worship appointed by the state or the established churches. In Scotland, the use of set forms was opposed by the established church until the early twentieth century, but congregations of the Episcopal Church adopted the use of the BCP and special forms of prayer from the early eighteenth century. In England and Wales, the position was reversed. In contrast to the Church of England's prolific production of special forms, the dissenter chapels and later the nonconformist and the free church denominations did not publish forms of prayer until the early twentieth century. It should, however, be noted that some dissenters undertook occasional conformity with the Church of England in order to qualify for public office, and so would sometimes be present at church services which used the BCP and perhaps special forms of prayer.

The Episcopal Church in Scotland

As explained in volume 2, pp. lxxvii–lxxviii, cxxiii–cxxiv, an act of toleration in 1712 (10 Anne c. 7) legalized use of the BCP in Scotland, and protected the worship of those members of the Episcopal Church in Scotland who took oaths of loyalty to the crown. From 1714, the always small number of these ‘qualified’ chapels received further official recognition, in being specified together with the Church of Scotland in the orders in council that were issued for alteration of names in prayers for the royal family.

From a sixteenth-century Republic of Letters confined mostly to Europe and centered on practices associated with the recovery, study, and wider use of Greco-Roman antiquity, eighteenth-century learned culture acquired a more global geography, expanding its remit to include critical scholarship about a greater variety of subjects: civic virtue, sentiment, commerce and political economy, natural philosophy, natural rights, and the normative sphere of equality. In ways that are of increasing interest to eighteenth-century intellectual and cultural historians, as well as to historians of early modern cultures’ scholarly practice, aspects of late humanism remained vital as the midwife of the eighteenth-century scholarly culture that begat the Enlightenment. But exactly how the culture of late humanism evolved into one that produced the spectrum of Enlightenment practices and reformist imaginaries remains a fruitful and understudied avenue of inquiry. As I argue in what follows, the articulation of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth century learned cultures emerges into sharpened focus when the origins of the ‘secular Enlightenment’ – and indeed, the full spectrum of Enlightenment practices and reformist imaginaries that flourished by the middle eighteenth century – are historicized as contingent outcomes of a longer-term process by which participants in the expanding early modern republic of letters injected humanist methods and textual erudition into confessionally- driven religious debates, and extended their application to the study of non- European textual traditions.

Theodor Fontane's Graf Petöfy, presented here for the first time in English translation as Count Petöfy, was originally published serially, in weekly installments, in the summer of 1884, with the first book edition appearing just a few months later. The novel's namesake character is Austro-Hungarian count and theater enthusiast Adam Petofy. Set in the year 1874, the story begins in Vienna, where Petofy, seventy years old and a lifelong bachelor, has decided to propose marriage to the young Prussian actress Franziska Franz. Friends and family on both sides express misgivings and urge caution; they predict that the marriage could be unhappy or even end badly. The two marry anyway and leave Vienna for Arpa Castle in Hungary, where it doesn't take long for things to go badly.

Even from this brief summary, one could make an educated guess and attribute the novel to Fontane. It begins with an ill-advised marriage and ends with the consequences that come of it. The characters make plans and try to carry them out, but things don't work out the way they had planned. It is a book in which not much happens, and what little does happen comes as no surprise. There is an almost tragic element to how things come to pass in the novel, as the characters, despite their best efforts, eventually live out and realize the pessimistic predictions expressed at the outset.

Previous chapters have framed the scope of the Alfonsine interest in the imperial dream and demonstrated that the ideological project pursued by Alfonso X permeated all aspects of his reign. Whilst in a, theoretically, ideal position, the Learned King faced the opposition of the papacy and his own kingdom. His response was to develop an ideological apparatus that could, on paper, explain the reasons why his aspirations were not just fair, but also unquestionable by any earthly powers.

This cultural production ranged from poetry and music to science and games and from political treaties to lengthy chronicles that would go back to the moment of creation. All these works had a place within the ideological universe of Alfonso X and served a purpose: for instance, the legislative works mentioned in the previous chapter exhibited, profusely, the new Alfonsine organization of the kingdom/empire, and the Setenario developed, amongst other topics, the relationship between the monarch with his own past, and with God and religion.

Hence, Alfonso X's cultural programme materialized as the embodiment of the ideological underpinnings of the Castilian-Leonese monarchy during the latter half of the century. These literary creations served to rationalise and bolster Alfonso X's endeavours in pursuit of the imperial crown. While this political aspect is more discernible in select works promoted by Alfonso X – like the Siete Partidas and the Setenario – all of the compositions overseen by the erudite monarch played a role in shaping the ideological architecture of his reign. Together with these legislative works, those within the historiographical genre proved to be key for the Castilian-Leonese monarch's ambitions.

Loosely translated as ‘random drawings or sketches’, manga (漫画) and its derivative media can still be frowned upon as an unhealthy subculture, but there is no denying their economic, social, and cultural impact on both domestic and global levels. To begin with, the manga media are a multi-million-dollar industry, in which a single series – often spanning decades – generates countless jobs and income, not only through the traditional sale of books and magazines but also by branching out into animation, merchandise, video games, and collaborations in other forms. Take Berserk as an example: during the past thirty-six years of its serialisation and despite its lack of an ending, the manga has been made into two animated series (1996–97, 2016–17), one animated film trilogy (2012–13) which was re-versioned into a memorial series (2022), and three video games (1999, 2004, 2016), while an exhibition has been touring Japan since 2021. It even has a collaboration cafe in Tokyo where fans can enjoy character- themed snacks and purchase limited edition household items. Nor should the vigorous fan culture be ignored: in addition to staging iconic scenes through cosplay, fans also participate in the process of creation by producing fanart and dōjinshi – that is, self-published print works exploring the manga's narrative world as the fans see fit. On the global level, the manga industry has steadily expanded into international markets since the early 2000s.

In this article, I explore the Angevin royal family's role in the Guelf and Ghibelline conflict that engulfed late medieval Italy. More specifically, I identify the extent of Angevin involvement in Tuscan warfare in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and I explain how the success or failure of monarchs in that conflict shaped contemporary narratives surrounding several monarchs, including Charles I, Robert I, Louis I and Duke Otto of Braunschweig. So, through a close reading of chronicles, letters and epic poetry, I suggest it was this factional violence as much as any other event that shaped the legacy of not only individual rulers but also the Angevins more generally in Italy.

Often did the sounds and cries of war echo around Tuscan cities during the later Middle Ages. Without fear of hyperbole, it is clear that factional warfare, and warfare's terrifying violence, was a common reality for many Tuscans. In fact, the violence was so ubiquitous that medieval chroniclers and other literary voices often framed notable events, ranging from the torture of an abbot to a fire that destroyed half of Florence in 1304, within the light of this great conflict. Dino Compagni (c. 1255–1324) calls the factions an “evil” (mali). Giovanni Villani (c. 1276–1348) writes that “Italy was stained and almost all of Europe, and many ills and perils, and destructions and changes have followed thereupon to our city and to the whole world.”

As often happens in my experience, this project has grown by design from earlier work and accidentally by chance. In Chrétien Continued: A Study of the Conte du Graal and its Verse Continuations, I analyzed the peculiar character of the first Grail romance as represented in the manuscript tradition: unfinished despite its atypical length and followed by four narrative expansions in a variety of combinations. Chrétien's enigmatic romance thus functioned as “mother text” initiating a dialogue with successive continuations which resembled a series of commentaries on their model, not unlike Jewish midrash whose narrative stories aim to expand, explain, and fill in gaps in the biblical text. When I was subsequently invited to participate in a multidisciplinary graduate course by responding to a talk by my art historian colleague on the representation of Judges 19 in the earliest Bible moralisée (Vienna, ÖNB 2554), I once again found myself engaged with biblical issues of interpretation and authority. Intrigued by this serendipitous encounter with one of the most repellent but fascinating episodes in the Bible, I decided to embark on a new project that would be bookended by further analysis of Vienna 2554, its spectacular images accompanied by paraphrase and gloss in French, and a study of Chrétien's Conte in relation to Jewish and Christian exegesis. For a conference at Fordham University on rethinking romance across disciplines, I had already planned to grapple with suggestions, as yet unsubstantiated, that Chrétien's narratives reflected the exegetical turn toward the literal among biblical scholars of the twelfth century. Hence the conception of Jewish- Christian Dialogue in Medieval French Literature: Inscribing Biblical Encounters in the Vernacular.

In the historiography of the fiscal-military state, much emphasis is placed on whether the bureaucratic apparatus of the Customs was equal to its tasks of raising revenue, enforcing trade regulations, and policing revenue crimes. Analysed in a framework that evokes comparisons with the Excise and introduces numerical ‘efficiency’ as a yardstick, the Customs are largely seen to fall short of these tasks. As it is corruption and smuggling in particular that tend to be seen as responsible, much blame is heaped on either the outdated bureaucratic structure of the Customs as giving ample opportunity for sinecurism, collusion and negligence or the branches concerned with coastal policing as responsible for large-scale Customs evasion. Chapters 3 and 4 are an attempt to approach the administrative setting of the Customs from a different angle, with the aim of challenging the straightforward, but misleading assumption of fiscal efficiency typically adopted in modern scholarship.

The present chapter is aimed at a better understanding of the bureaucracy. It is argued here that an undue focus on fiscal efficiency misrepresents the purpose of this branch of service. To make this point, it is necessary to reintroduce a number of administrative complexities that characterised the mechanics of coastal policing in the eighteenth century but have subsequently been obscured by modern notions of bureaucracy. Even at the centre of the executive, different ideas about the purposes of coastal officials prevailed. Nominally part of the Customs, other departments regularly imposed their own agendas on these officials.

The most important evidence for the formation of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles in the early Middle Ages is their extant manuscripts and witnesses that testify to now-lost versions. Seven manuscript versions of the Chronicle survived from the Middle Ages into the early modern period. Not all have survived to the present day complete. Since 1848 each of these has been known by one of the first eight letters of the alphabet (A–G); to these have since been added the single leaf fragment H and I, a set of Easter Table annals extending from 988 to 1268, discussed in the following chapter. The manuscript of the G text, made at the beginning of the eleventh century, was largely destroyed in the Cotton Library fire of 1731. The same fire at Ashburnham House caused the leaves of the B manuscript to shrink. The D version was already missing a number of folios (probably two quires, covering the years 261–693) by the sixteenth century. Remarkably, the surviving manuscript copies of the Chronicle come very close to encompassing its life as a text in early medieval England: A's Scribe 1 wrote his annals c.900, about a decade after the common stock entered circulation c.892; the final entries in E were made in the mid-1150s at Peterborough, after which no version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle was continued. The first section of this chapter first describes these manuscripts and identifies their scribes, many of whom also appear in later chapters where their roles in the making of the Chronicles are discussed in further detail.