The history of the Catholic Worker movement (CW) within Britain dates from 1935, just two years after the founding of the first community in America. Despite this, relatively little attention has been paid to the movement within the British context, and it is still treated as a distinctly American phenomenon. Whilst swathes of literature abound attesting to the significance of the CW for American lay Catholicism, the way the movement has impacted British Catholicism has been neglected. There is some documentation on the early years of the British movement, but a complete history from its inception until the present day remains lacking. In part, charting a complete history of the CW in Britain is made difficult due to there being very little written documentation; the years 1959-–1993 in particular hold almost no written account. Where the movement has received attention during this period, it is mostly mentioned only in passing during the exploration of other lay societies. Focus on the contemporary movement has also been somewhat atomised, focusing on select activities of the CW, such as their involvement in Ploughshares activism, or Christian anarchism. The present chapter will seek to redress this by offering a holistic history of the movement within Britain, exploring also its impact on lay social Catholicism. Whilst literature on the movement in Britain is limited, archives of the CW newspaper have been well preserved; this chapter heavily relies on these primary sources, as well as oral histories taken from those involved with the CW, to provide a coherent narrative.

This review needs to be read in the shadow of the disastrous failure of Benvenuto Cellini at the Opéra the previous year, and of Berlioz's caustic letter to the Opéra director Duponchel of March 1839, informing him that ‘I withdraw my opera Benvenuto. I am perfectly convinced that you will receive this news with pleasure’. The director of the Théâtre de la Renaissance, Anténor Joly (1799–1852), had planned to open a new Paris opera house, something until then forbidden by a decree of 1807. This plan was widely supported by the intelligentsia, including Meyerbeer. The final boost came from Victor Hugo, who persuaded the relevant minister to expand ‘la petite salle Ventadour’ into a theatre that would accommodate his recently completed drama Ruy Blas, which ran for some fifty performances. The French version of Lucia di Lammermoor followed. The phrase ‘lively intelligence, courage, and patience’ is surely as much a dig at Duponchel as a tribute to Joly.

The administration of the Théâtre de la Renaissance has made great efforts to supply us with a third opera house. For a long time, I must confess, these efforts seemed to me futile, but the striking success of their last attempt is beginning to soften my conviction. An enterprise which, without a grant or active, powerful support, has managed to reach the point where we find it, must possess a greater vitality than one imagined, and secrets of success one hadn't expected. They consist to a considerable degree in the lively intelligence, courage, and patience of the director. I have heard him reproached, it's true, for having chosen an Italian opera as the first major score to be performed in his theatre.

The range of short Middle English poems in Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, MS Brogyntyn ii.1, in keeping with the miscellaneous nature of the collection as a whole, is strikingly wide. The twenty-four short poems dispersed across the manuscript offer moral, spiritual and practical instruction, together with prompts to diversion and celebration, and bring a multiplicity of voices into play. Generically diverse, they include examples of carol, chanson d’aventure, dialogue, epistle, and refrain poem; formally, they are constructed in couplets, tail-rhyme, and the favourite fifteenth-century ballade and rhyme royal stanzas. Both their number and diversity, when compared with the short poems included in other fifteenth-century all-purpose miscellanies, invite scrutiny. What attractions might this range of items have had for the compilers (and, by implication, the likely readers) of MS Brogyntyn ii. 1? In what forms might the poems have been available to them, and what principles or practical considerations might have determined the selection of short poems that they made?

The disposition of short poems in the manuscript

Across the manuscript as a whole the disposition of short poems sheds a little light on the principles that determined their placement (the following analysis maps their occurrence onto the structure of the manuscript according to Daniel Huws's collation, and numbers the items in bold according to the contents list in the appendix to this volume).

October 1940

German Listeners!

A German author speaks to you, whose work and person are outlawed by your rulers, and whose books—even when they deal with the most German matters, with Goethe for example—can only speak to foreign, free peoples, in their languages—while they must remain silent and unknown to you. My works will return to you someday, this I know, even if I myself no longer can. As long as I live, however, and even as a citizen of the New World, I will be a German, and will suffer under the fate of Germany, and under everything that Germany has inflicted on the world for the past seven years, morally and physically, through the will of criminal, violent brutes. During these years, the unshakeable conviction that this can come to no good end has time and again inspired me to deliver words of warning, some of which, I believe, have reached your ears. In the present state of war it has become impossible for the written word to penetrate the rampart that tyranny has erected around you. Therefore, I gladly embrace the opportunity offered to me by the British authorities to report to you from time to time on what I see here, in America, the great and free nation in which I have found a home.

This chapter documents how the Bank of England’s thinking on the various transmission channels of QE changed over time through an analysis of quotes from policymakers and members of Bank staff.

In the photograph that adorns the cover of this volume, two young girls are shown peering at a giant window display advertising Richard Eichberg's 1938 film Der Tiger von Eschnapur (The Tiger of Eschnapur). The scene is from July 1949, when Eichberg's film was being rescreened in the newly established Federal Republic of Germany, and the location is the Atrium Theater in Essen. The advertising shown in this image is imbued with cultural symbols of the “exotic” East: a Hindu goddess, Indian royalty in traditional regalia, and a wild tiger threatening to devour the white German hero. This exquisite photograph immediately touches on questions of Orientalism and spectatorship central to transnational cinema in general and Asian German film history in particular: what was so tantalizing about Asia, in this case, South Asia, that drew curiosity from (young) Western viewers? How can archival sources on production history and audience reception elucidate the enduring popularity of Orientalist tropes in German cinema from the Weimar era through the Third Reich and the Cold War to the present? How can contemporary filmmakers and scholars reinterpret the often problematic but also fruitful entanglements between Asia and the German-speaking world?

To answer such questions, film scholars have attempted to remap world cinema through the critical lens of postcolonialism and migration studies.

The tribute attempts to locate Ngugi as a major player within the African literary revolution. It draws attention to how writers like Ngugi used literary imagination to challenge colonial systems of thought, while offering decolonial alternatives and a powerful sense of newness, including the need to privilege writing in African languages. In a sense Ngugi was at the forefront of challenging the mythology of Englishness. For him, literature offered a platform for the critique of dominant ideologies. The tribute argues that Ngugi’s late career was, however, defined by exile and with it the challenge of writing about Africa away from Africa. In his last days, his writing wrestles with the idea of home – its politics and poetics.

The art historian Serafin Moralejo once described a group of twelfthcentury Spanish ivories as “erratic, strange and isolated”. These adjectives are equally apt for other works – from buildings to manuscripts – produced in northern Iberia in the middle decades of that century. These artefacts frequently lack both evident local formation and a clear legacy. In some circumstances a high rate of loss could account for this effect, but intent also is at play here. Above all, this art is eclectic, not in a merely derivative sense but as an expression of experimental collecting. The importation of diverse styles and techniques, sometimes within one work of art, sits alongside the re-display of material from archives and the re-deployment of earlier pieces. This body of work delights in varietas, in jarring juxtapositions, and in playful rhetorical approaches. It can also be remarkable for the quality of its invention and execution. It rarely yields to familiar categorisations and yet offers tantalising resonances. The difficulty in classifying these works is perhaps one reason why these decades of the twelfth century are rarely the focus of art historical studies.

The range of the corpus requires this study to stretch geographically across the north of the Peninsula, from Portugal to Catalunya, and over the Pyrenees into modern-day France and Italy. Chronologically, it will cover the period c.1110 to c.1170. These decades are bracketed by instability: at the beginning, civil war between Leon-Castile and Aragon; at the end, uncertainties engendered by minority reigns in both Castile and Aragon- Catalunya. In the middle of this were two relatively settled reigns: those of Alfonso VII (r.1126–57), son of Count Raymond of Burgundy and Queen Urraca, in Leon-Castile, and Ramon Berenguer IV (r.1131–62) in Catalunya and, from 1137, in Aragon.

INTRODUCTION

Jean Brown's case began when she moved into the parish of Penninghame, north of Newton Stewart, as a servant, and the kirk session heard that the newcomer claimed to have extraordinary visions of spirits. The session’s investigation began in January 1706. The resulting narrative of Brown's past doings and sayings gave few dates, but the earliest events mentioned had occurred in Kirkinner, to the south of Wigtown, and she herself may have grown up there. Her spirits had told her in Kirkinner that all who took the Test would go to hell. This referred to the anti-presbyterian Test Act of 1681, which remained in force until the revolution of 1689 – an unusual example of national political and religious controversy being recorded in popular discourse. Brown herself may have learned of this controversy only after the revolution. She seems to have been a young woman, having first encountered her spirits either ten or sixteen years earlier, when she had apparently been in her early teens. As an adult she had moved north to Colmonell in southern Ayrshire, where she had a quarrel that was alleged to have led to the death of Robert MacCaw. Other places in Wigtownshire referred to include Kirkcowan.

The case is remarkable for Brown's visions of spirits, and for her insistence on her interpretation of the spirits even when the minister and others told her repeatedly that she was wrong. She said that her spirits were her ‘maker’; she later added that they were God, and then that they called themselves the Father, Son and Holy Ghost. Yet she also insisted throughout that these spirits had sex with her, and gave many further idiosyncratic and unorthodox details.

This final volume of National prayers contains three main sections and a series of appendices, together with biblical and general indices for all four volumes. The first two sections describe and provide edited versions of the main texts for the anniversary commemorations. First are the early modern anniversaries that began in England and Wales, Ireland and Scotland during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, most of which continued to be observed until the mid-nineteenth century and in one case was still being reordered in the twenty-first century. The second section is concerned with the annual commemoration dating from the early twentieth century, remembrance day – more strictly, armistice day, armistice Sunday, and remembrance Sunday – as it has been observed in the Church of England and the Church of Scotland, and at the national and imperial (later commonwealth) ceremony held at the Cenotaph in London.

The third section is a continuation of the texts and commentaries for particular occasions of special worship described in the first three volumes, which ended in 2016. This section adds the calls for prayer during the Covid pandemic of 2020–1, and the special forms and worship resources provided for general use to mark the close succession of royal events from 2021 to 2023. In the Church of England, the clergy were – in contrast to the practice of previous centuries – encouraged to compile and print their own forms of prayer.

Introduction

In this final chapter of the book, I return to the conundrums I started with in the Introduction and discuss the insights that have emerged from the three cases across southern Africa. The main question I started with is: why is there no open revolution by local people regarding their dispossession around forests? Why have rights that were taken away from local people by states during colonial times not been restored in the post-colony? So many decades after the attainment of independence, for Zimbabwe, and the charting of a democratic dispensation for South Africa, technical arms of the state are still confused, unsure, and are caught in between regarding the best ways to resolve communities’ demands for rights to their land and resources around protected areas. In other words, they find themselves in situations of ‘chronic liminality’ (Cliggett, 2014). Despite many decades of waiting and engaging in various forms of struggle and articulating their claims against state exercise of power over nature, local people are yet to realise their ambitions of having their rights restored. As much as states are stuck and unsure what to do next, local people on their part are equally in various conditions of chronic liminality regarding what action to take regarding their plight around protected forests.

Luigi (Carlo Zanobi Salvadore Maria) Cherubini, born in Florence in 1760, had died on 25 March 1842.

The life of this great composer can be offered as a model for young artists in almost every particular. Cherubini's studies were long and patient, his compositions numerous, his enemies powerful. To the inflexibility of his character and the tenacity of his convictions must be added a real dignity that kept him always respectable, and which, sad to say, one does not often find in even the most eminent of artists. He was born in Florence towards the end of 1760, was taught from the age of nine by Bartolomeo and Alessandro Felici, and later by Bizzari and Castrucci, all composers nowadays forgotten. He didn't complete his musical education until around his twentieth year under Sarti. The Grand Duke of Tuscany [later Holy Roman Emperor Leopold II] then took him under his special protection, and Sarti, as payment for his lessons, was happy to get his pupil to write a large number of works which he inserted among his own, unscrupulously keeping all the honour of them for himself. Ultimately however, the teacher had to decide on launching his pupil's career, and Cherubini, finally free to see his music applauded under his own name, wrote several scores for Italian theatres, the success of which soon led to him being invited to London. It was there that he wrote La finta principessa and Giulio Sabino.

This chapter questions the explanatory validity of the term “Enlightenment” to understand intellectual and religious change in early modern England and the Dutch Republic. Not only do both countries claim to be the cradle of the Enlightenment, but their intellectual, political and religious developments were so deeply entangled during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that terms such as ‘Anglo-Dutch context’, ‘Anglo-Dutch moment’, ‘Anglo-Dutch sphere’, and ‘Anglo-Dutch connections’ are now of common usage in modern scholarship concerning the relations between these neighbouring nations.

According to Roy Porter, ‘England's special role’ in the development of the Enlightenment ‘was that in many areas – freethinking, empiricism, utilitarianism – she came first’, while Frederick Beiser affirmed that ‘although England … never had a self-conscious intellectual movement called ‘the Enlightenment’, it has a strong claim to be ‘cradle’ of such an intellectual movement. England was therefore the country most responsible for the emergence of the Enlightenment, and specifically of a strand of Enlightenment that characterised itself as ‘Christian’ on the basis of the idea – developed by the so-called ‘Cambridge Platonists’, Locke, and moderate Anglicans such as William Warburton (1698–1779) – that the Christian religion was an eminently reasonable religion and that reason and revelation could be reconciled by identifying the moral essentials of the Christian faith. Furthermore, at variance with the long persistent commonplace that the Enlightenment was essentially a revolt against established religion and ‘priestcraft’, researchers have recently shown that English apologists adopted arguments which incorporated assumptions they shared with their critics.