Preferential attachment models yield graphs that are generated as the result of a growth mechanism. Whenever a vertex is added to the graph, it is joined by edges to a number of the vertices already present in the graph, and these vertices are chosen with reference to their current popularity, as measured by their current degree. Models reflecting this general principle can be formulated in many different ways, some of which are discussed in the chapter. A useful property, observed when popularity is a linear function of degree, is that the degree distribution exhibits a power law decay in the tails, as the number of vertices in the graph increases. Other possible scenarios are also briefly discussed.

Sigismond Thalberg made triumphant tours round Europe between 1837 and 1848. For some musicians he was ‘the greatest pianist’, but for others Liszt was ‘the only pianist’. For the first concert on 12 April, his contributions were three of his own Fantasias on themes from Mozart's Don Giovanni, Donizetti's Anna Bolena, and Rossini's Mosè in Egitto. For the second , on 21 April, he played Fantasias on Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor and Rossini's Semiramide, and a ‘Grand Duo’ for two pianos on themes from Bellini's Norma.

After a three-year absence, Thalberg has returned both powerful and calm, as in the days of his earliest triumphs and, if possible, even happier. He in fact belongs to the small number of artists for whom everything succeeds, even success. It's not held against him that he has great talent, that he is favoured by glory and fortune; and were he to possess, together with Beethoven's genius, the name of Napoleon, and the wealth of the Banque de France, he would not be loved any the less. Does he take the trouble to become famous and rich? Not in the slightest. Before leaving for Paris, he writes to a friend (he has them) to announce his forthcoming arrival and a concert. The friend duly hires the Théâtre-Italien, orders a printer to put up notices: ‘Tuesday … April, first concert by M. Sigismond Thalberg’ and organises a wretched little orchestra, rickety, knock-kneed, peevish, made for playing overtures no one will listen to and accompanying singers who will hardly be heard. The day before the concert, the virtuoso arrives, puts together his programme in a few hours, looks in at the theatre for a few minutes to reassure himself that the beautiful ladies who dream of him will be there on his return, and next day, hey presto!, the house is full of them.

On Advent Sunday in December 1636 the eccentric aristocrat Lady Eleanor Davies, with female companions, arrived early for the communion service at Lichfield cathedral in south-east Staffordshire. Diocesan officials welcomed her to their recently redecorated church, with its ‘hangings of arras behind the altar, the communion table handsomely railed in, and the table itself set out in the best manner, and the bishop's seat fairly built’. The reverence of the occasion and the setting was shattered when Lady Eleanor approached the sanctuary with

News of this exploit went round the country, as the latest outrage by a disorderly visionary. The newswriter Edward Rossingham followed his New Year letter to Sir Thomas Puckering with an update a month later

The unwritten context of Ngugi’s writing, alternately called oral literature or oral traditions, is embedded in his creative works, particularly the seminal ones. In most of them, he exploits his native mythologies, history and belief systems to steer the narratives, but also communicate messages to his intended audience. He is conversing with his readers and therefore produces what may be called ‘taking narratives’ in which those readers are involved.

Most of what historians understand about medieval pilgrim souvenirs and similar devotional ephemeralia has been gleaned from a study of the surviving objects themselves. Many thousands of devotional badges, ampullae, and other trinkets in tin, lead, or pewter have been discovered in various archaeological contexts, for which contemporary documentary evidence is almost entirely lacking. Art historians and archaeologists have thus attempted to reconstruct the history of these items, what material culture studies would call the ‘object biography’, largely working backwards from the form and context in which they have been preserved. One notable debate about the object biography of pilgrim badges, for example, is why so many ended up in rivers: whether they were disposed of as trash or meaningfully placed as votive objects. The latter is an idea which Jennifer Lee has persuasively countered, although the idea of ritual deposition still has a strong attraction for many scholars. The wish to find, or at least to suggest, a certainty and strength of argument is often prominent in the analysis of these otherwise context-light objects.

The Middle Ages are omnipresent in contemporary culture. People encounter it daily in the form of popular cultural products that refer to the real historical period, such as the film The Last Duel by Ridley Scott. Other points of contact are neomedieval fantasy products such as House of the Dragon, which draw on popular notions of the Middle Ages to enrich their fantastic secondary worlds. Feature films, series, documentaries, novels, YouTube videos take up existing knowledge about the Middle Ages, expand, contrast, popularise it, and make it part of everyday life. Video games are a relatively young medium and have become a global phenomenon, played every day. Among a wide range of games using the Middle Ages as their historical backdrop is the hugely successful and popular neomedieval fantasy video game The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt released in 2015, referred to in this chapter as The Witcher 3. This includes numerous references to ideas about the Middle Ages.

Even though some scholarship on the staging of the Middle Ages in video games and on The Witcher 3 exists, research into players’ response to these productions is sparse. This chapter therefore focuses precisely on the aspect of reception. More specifically it examines statements from interviews conducted with players of The Witcher 3. It draws attention to how and why the game's neomedieval fantasy world is perceived by players as a depiction of the Middle Ages. In a first step, the interview method and the sample are presented in more detail. This is followed by a short overview of the game The Witcher 3.

This Middle Ages is expanding and all-consuming. It devours the Renaissance/ Early Modern, the Baroque, and the Classical – all periods which do not speak to the popular imaginary. One day it may well be The Past, the only historical past aside from the Bible and the American Revolution, in that imaginary.

William Calin penned these lines a few years ago relating to what he saw as an unwelcome trend in (predominantly) US popular culture. Calin's critique first and foremost targeted media such as film, television, and literature, and not so much – if at all – digital games. Yet it may seem, even at a cursory glance, that his verdict is all the truer of video games that use history as their subject matter. The medievalist imaginary features prominently in such games, so prominently that it prompts the question whether this leaves any space for the depiction of other historical periods. So, in this chapter, I ask this question specifically about Early Modernity: is it devoured by the Middle Ages within digital games?

To pursue this enquiry, I employ a reception-centred approach focusing on the perceptions of these games by their audiences – players, reviewers and travellers within the paratextual ecosystem surrounding digital games – and not primarily on the character and content of the games themselves. In this respect it is not crucial whether the game in question utilises historical entities in sufficient depth and coherence to be labelled a historical game according to a more production-side centred approach, so I do not consider the matter here.

During the late Middle Ages in France, like the rest of Europe, the prosecution of war grew dramatically in scale and complexity. Nowhere is this more regularly evident in the historical record than in the various municipal registers that towns kept to manage and account for their own defense and to support their lord's passing armies. Much important work on urban fortifications and finances has been done to help us better gauge the shift to bastioned enceintes during the age of gunpowder weapons and the growth of public authority that made them possible. Yet as a subject of historical investigation, municipal account registers remain little studied in terms of their genesis, purposes and use as instruments of negotiation and control. They proved decisive during the initial decades of the Hundred Years’ War, where towns suddenly assumed more responsibilities over local military affairs, above all their enceintes, along with the financial means to fulfil them. This shift reflected a new stage of development for the bonnes villes as they scrambled after the 1340s to provide for common defense and other needs. The accounting practices they used enabled them to enhance the warmaking roles of towns. As towns undertook more ambitious goals, rudimentary bookkeeping practices gave way to more sustained and sophisticated forms of managerial accounting; while not planned, these changes led to the development of a culture of planning and a permanent, professional municipal administration. The monarchy and territorial lords created oversight authorities but tended for practical reasons to concede a good amount of fiscal autonomy to their towns. Common accountancy standards developed organically and then intentionally with the establishment of Chambres des comptes in the fourteenth century.

INTRODUCTION

This case is from the regality court of Broughton, like that of the ‘Leith Witches’ of 1579 edited above. As with that case, here we have the minutes of the court, summarising the accused's offence and the court's deliberations, but no full dittay.

The case illustrates the overlap found occasionally between witchcraft and beneficial magic. William Murray's crime is categorically stated to have been ‘witchecraft and sorcerie’, but he was treated basically as a magical practitioner. His first offence was the use of magic to heal John Hutson's child, and there was also mention of the healing of the son of the goodwife of Wariston ( Jean Livingston, a member of the elite who later became notorious). Murray was not said to have committed malefice, nor was there any mention of a demonic pact. Nevertheless, this was a criminal court, not a kirk session, and he received a criminal sentence rather than being made to do penance.

The interrogators were John Brand, minister of the Canongate, and Robert Pont, minister of St Cuthbert’s, both veteran ministers who had taken leading roles in the church. Pont was also a noted intellectual with an interest in quasi-magical topics.2 Brand's role is natural, as the court was attached to the burgh of the Canongate, but the reason for Pont's involvement does not appear. It would be interesting to know whether it was Brand and Pont who employed the words ‘witchecraft and sorcerie’ to describe Murray's offence, but this cannot be ascertained for certain from the record as we have it.

Murray's healing rituals, involving the blood of a cat, a bannock with special ingredients, and a Gaelic incantation, are of interest.

The Yoruba of Southwestern Nigeria have a deep-rooted tradition of entrepreneurship and mobility. This trait is inherited from the pre-colonial economy, where families held distinct economic specializations and controlled various occupational guilds. During the early years of colonial rule, the Yoruba emerged as one of the primary craft masters in Nigeria and across West Africa. Their long-standing tradition of migration to places like Ghana and Kano took on new dimensions under British colonial rule.

The central theme of this book revolves around the economic and social history of the Yoruba diaspora in Kano and Tamale, focusing on how diaspora identity evolved within the ever-shifting landscapes of colonial and post-colonial contexts. It revisits the scholarly discourse on the tensions between political structures, identity construction, unequal citizenship, and the dynamics of social exclusion and inclusion. It is reminiscent of Frantz Fanon's cautionary observations regarding the nationalisms of exclusion in countries like Côte d’Ivoire, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ghana, and Senegal in the early 1960s where “nationals” incited against “foreigners” while advocating for opportunities to be reserved exclusively for “authentic” citizens.

Following the declaration of independence, migrant communities found themselves subjected to hostile actions by the native populations. This hostility forced migrants to evacuate, while their shops and properties fell victim to arson or looting. For example, Senegalese attacked Sudanese migrants, and Senegalese migrants in Congo underwent similar ordeals as they were compelled to abandon their settlements in Leopoldville and Elizabethville.

In an article headed ‘Germany wants more Irish culture. Why can't we deliver?’ published in the Irish Times on 23 October 2010, Derek Scally begins:

If the bust of Felix Mendelssohn had feet they would have been tapping along with the music echoing through the vaulted hall below the Irish Embassy in Berlin. In the old home of the Mendelssohn Bank, the new traditional Irish music group Cirrus give it their all and soon even the German junior minister in row two is jiggling his foot in time with the music.

The evening is a welcome distraction from the doom and gloom about Ireland in the German media, but it's not quite what it seems…

Government agencies do tremendous work promoting Ireland abroad but, looking in from outside, there appears to be a worrying gap between the reality and the lip service the State pays to promoting what makes Ireland uniquely Irish.

Scally goes on to explore the contrast between traditional Irish music in Germany, ‘where the hunger for Irish culture is almost insatiable’, and the ‘apathy’ of Irish government initiatives at home in the enterprise of promoting and indeed selling traditional music for a ready market abroad. He makes a persuasive case for traditional music as a commodity whose commercial potential has been underdeveloped in Europe (and above all in Germany), notwithstanding a more general assent to traditional music as a flagship of Irish culture, so that as a living expression of Irish culture and history it remains under-resourced as a means of attracting European tourists to Ireland.

Witchcraft was a statutory offence in Scotland between 1563 and 1736, and the authorities held many trials and executions for witchcraft in this period. This book presents a selection of the records of these trials.

Witch-hunting was intense in Scotland, but every European country executed witches, and witch beliefs shared broad similarities all over Europe. Peasants believed that witches could harm them, their families and their livelihoods. Witchcraft accusations often originated in quarrels between women, and women's curses seem to have been feared more than men’s. About 85 per cent of Scottish witches were women. One typical pattern of accusation was that someone would suffer a misfortune which they would then link back to a quarrel that they had had with someone else; they would conclude that the other person was getting their revenge through witchcraft. However, people usually sought to end such quarrels through reconciliation; peasants rarely seem to have taken the initiative in demanding the execution of their local witches. Numerous reconciliations, successful at the time, are recorded in the documents below.

Educated people shared some of the beliefs of the common folk, but they also developed a set of distinctive views about witchcraft, which can be collectively described as demonology. In this, witches were held to make personal pacts with the Devil, entering his service and gaining from him the power to do harm. One particular power they received was the power to fly, and they could also inflict illness and death. Witches met collectively to worship the Devil. Thus, the beliefs of the peasants and the elite were compatible with each other, but still distinct. For the peasants, the crime was practising witchcraft, while for the elite, it was a thought crime: the crime of being a witch.

Toleration, Union, and the Protestant Enlightenment

Proposals for union between the churches of Europe were mainstream at the turn of the eighteenth century. For all the scholarly concern with the emergence of toleration in the Enlightenment, pluralism resulted from the failure to fashion united confessional polities whether they were comprehensive of diversity or uniform. Early modern Europeans took a divided Christendom to be scandalous. The logic of the peace of Westphalia (1648), a stalemate that ended the seventeenth-century wars of religion, was to fashion a gospel imperative into a geopolitical desideratum. The memory of those wars and the fear that history might repeat itself haunted the eighteenth-century European imagination. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz sought rapprochement between Catholics and Protestants with Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, bishop of Meaux, the Franciscan Christoval Royas de Spinola, bishop of Wiener Neustadt, and Gerhard Wolter Molanus, Lutheran abbot of Loccum. Uniting the Church of England with the Gallican Church was the central theme of the correspondence between William Wake, archbishop of Canterbury, and the likes of Louis Ellies Dupin and Piers de Girardin. Lutheran syncretists like Molanus and John Ernest Grabe, influenced by Georg Calixtus, looked to reconcile Catholics,

Lutherans, and Calvinists by removing differences about adiaphora. Once the challenges of reconciling doctrine with Tridentine Catholicism proved insurmountable, Leibniz turned to unity among Protestants.

The canon of Irish traditional music, which was largely dominated by white heterosexual middle class ethnically Irish men, was primarily constructed within a nationalist framework during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with the help of nationalist organisations such as the Gaelic League and Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann. As a consequence, Irish traditional music became, in Smyth's words:

one of the principal cultural signifiers of Irish identity… Traditional music's position as an easily recognizable sonic representation of Irishness was consolidated by the development of a complex infrastructure throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (including various amateur and academic initiatives) which guaranteed it a crucial role within Irish cultural life.

As nationalist ideologies such as historical symbolic representations of Ireland in place in the eighteenth century reinforced patriarchal hegemonic beliefs, Irish traditional music's connection with nationalism ultimately contributed to the exclusion of women from the Irish traditional music scene. Adding to this, songs and poetry which depicted such representations of Ireland as a woman were mostly performed by men and therefore women were largely silenced from the image and sound of Irish traditional music to begin with.

With the establishment of the Free State, Irish traditional music became of even more critical importance to the new Irish identity as it represented Ireland's Gaelic past, bolstered notions of “Irishness”, and was inherently foregrounded in ideas of authenticity, ethnicity, and nationalism.