In the year 1373, a young woman in the burgeoning city of Norwich fell dangerously ill, during which illness she experienced visions of the crucified Christ. Some twenty years later, this woman, Julian of Norwich, withdrew into a local anchorhold, a sealed cell attached to a church, in order to live a solitary life devoted to God. There she wrote and rewrote her meditations on her earlier visionary encounters. In the second of her two texts especially, Julian forged a witnessed theology in which God's divine love manifested as a devoted mother nurturing the whole of humanity. For Julian, this feminised apparition of divine love was ultimately ‘oure lords mening’ and, moreover, ‘made alle things profitable to us’.

Such a vision of God, while hardly mainstream during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, nevertheless chimed readily with what has been termed by scholars the ‘affective turn’ within late medieval spiritual practices in England and beyond. Indeed, in Bishop's Lynn near Julian's hometown of Norwich, another local woman, Margery Kempe, who would later spend six weeks in Bristol mixing with the town's wealthy and literate merchant community, was also experiencing visionary encounters with God, which she too would eventually translate into written text. Driven in part by these experiences, in the year 1413 (some four years before her Bristol sojourn), this mercantile wife and mother to fourteen children visited Julian in her Norwich cell, keen to receive guidance and draw on the older visionary's experience in order to make sense of her own visions and the intensely somatic and uncontrollable bodily and spiritual ecstasies they incited.

In 1486, when nine-month-old Miles Frebrygge was playing with a Thomas Becket pilgrim badge given to him by an older boy, he ‘eventually put it in his mouth, as is the custom of such [children]’. The badge, too large to fit down young Miles's throat began to choke the child. His panic-stricken father desperately tried to help his son but could not remove the badge; unable to breathe, the signs of life left poor Miles. The father turned to prayer and repeatedly called upon ‘the most distinguished King Henry’ and ‘the most compassionate Mary’ to help his child, whereupon Miles, through the miraculous power of the dead king, suddenly spat out the badge and was able to breathe again.

Throughout this book, we have journeyed into the world of Alfonso X's imperial ambitions and their profound imprint on the Estoria de Espanna. Alfonso's reign, marked by cultural efflorescence, also bore the weight of his relentless pursuit of the crown of the Holy Roman Empire. This dream, born from his familial ties to the Staufen emperors, and the legacy of the Imperium Hispanicum that his father Fernando III had tried to revive, faced formidable challenges. From papal opposition to the reticence of Castilian-Leonese nobles, Alfonso's quest was fraught with obstacles from the very beginning.

Yet, Alfonso X's determination never wavered: why would a king so stubbornly pursue an aspiration that the papacy had denied from its very inception? In the context of the fight for both imperial and Peninsular hegemony, Alfonso X leveraged his privileged position to reinforce his dominant role in the Iberian Peninsula, a legacy inherited from the unification of Castile and Leon by his father, Fernando. This, combined with the rapid advance of the Christian kingdoms against Islam in the thirteenth century, and the enduring imperial idea linked to the kingdom of Leon – embodied by monarchs such as Alfonso VII, the emperor – made Alfonso X's connection to the Staufen family the final element necessary to consolidate his imperial ambitions.

Given these circumstances, the arrival of the Pisan emissaries could not have been timelier. The proposal to crown Alfonso X as Holy Roman Emperor provided the perfect opportunity to assert his Iberian superiority. At this point, Alfonso inherited two imperial strands: the legacy of the Imperium Hispanicum from Fernando III and his predecessors, and his Staufen lineage through his mother, Beatriz of Swabia. This convergence fuelled his concentrated effort to claim the German imperial crown, traditionally known as the Fecho del Imperio, one of Alfonso's most significant and costly endeavours.

The random geometric graphs considered in this chapter are derived from a configuration of points that are independently placed in an underlying Euclidean space, according to some distribution. Each pair of points that are separated by a distance less than some given threshold is joined by an edge, and the graph then consists only of vertices, corresponding to the points, and of the edges between them, with the positional information discarded. In this model, the edges are no longer independent, and the neighbourhood structure is quite different from the tree-like neighbourhoods in Chapters 11–14; for instance, the average local clustering coefficient is not typically close to zero, even in sparse graphs. A giant component is shown to be unlikely to exist if the density of points is low enough, and to be almost certain to exist if the density of points is high enough, with the ratio of the critical densities fixed as the number of points grows. A subgraph threshold theorem is established, complemented by a number of distributional approximations to the counts of subgraphs; the independence of the positions of the underlying points simplifies this discussion. Under suitable asymptotics, typical shortest path lengths are shown to grow like a power of the number of points, rather than logarithmically, as was the case for the models in Chapters 11–14.

His last voyage across the Atlantic was pleasant, but his reception in Spain was convoluted. His rules for confession and absolution in Chiapa had preceded him home, and the encomendero class across the Indies and those back in Spain campaigned to make the encomiendas perpetual, handed down from father to son and heirs forever. A flag no redder could be waved before the still bishop of Chiapa. He fought this new challenge for the rest of his life.

Everyone, it seemed, was offering money re the life of the encomiendas. The encomenderos in Spain offered to pay the Crown an immense gift for recognizing perpetuity. The Dominicans in Peru, especially one of Bartolomé's brothers, Father Domingo de Santo Tomás, “organized the Indians [in Peru] to authorize Las Casas to offer Philip II a large sum of money to deny perpetuity.” There appeared to be some proto-modern capitalism at work here.

“It was,” one of Las Casas's most astute modern students, Lewis Hanke, wrote, “in fact a blank check, for Las Casas was authorized to offer as much cash as would be necessary to outbid the encomenderos, no matter how much they offered for the privilege of perpetuity.” While the battle with the encomenderos grew warmer, in the meantime, in 1549, Las Casas pounced on another adversary, this time in his very own Dominican camp.

One of the most antagonistic Dominicans towards the Indians was Domingo de Betanzos, who opposed, for example, the training of Indians for the priesthood.

Thomas Churchyard's 1587 volume, The Worthines of Wales, composed predominantly in verse, is a description and celebration of Wales, loosely based on the author's journey through parts of the province. As the title-page declares, with a degree of bookseller's exaggeration, it is ‘enterlarded with many wonders and right strange matter to consider of: All the which labour and device is drawn forth and set out by Thomas Churchyard, to the glorie of God, and honour of his Prince and Countrey’. It is purportedly unfinished, since Churchyard's travels were curtailed by illness, and functions as something of a miscellany, since the topographical passages are accompanied by the transcription of historical material, digressions on subjects such as gentility and mountains, and reflections on the author's life. But this is by no means a rough or unconsidered book. Indeed the Worthines is Churchyard's longest poetic work; produced when he was in his early sixties, it also stands as the work of a self-consciously mature author. Churchyard is indeed remarkable for his longevity: probably first writing while in the service of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, in the 1540s; having his earliest work in print in the 1550s; and publishing his final poem, an elegy on Elizabeth, in 1604. Looking across this career, The Worthines of Wales stands as arguably his greatest and most representative work.

Churchyard has not been greatly appreciated by literary historians. For C. S. Lewis, he is broadly typical of the ‘drab age’; while Lewis concedes that Churchyard may occasionally produce ‘a pleasing line’, this is, he concludes, ‘probably accidental’. Churchyard is ultimately a poet with ‘no standards’.

While working on the English queen's household in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, Johnstone devised a framework that outlines three categories for the methods used to provide for a late medieval queen consort. In this framework, one of the queen's primary sources of revenue was a traditional payment to the queen that seems to have first been mentioned in a treatise from the twelfth century. This treatise, concerned with matters relating to the Royal Exchequer and commonly known as the Dialogus de Scaccario, was written during the reign of Henry II (c.1133–89; r. 1154–89) by the king's treasurer, Richard FitzNigel. In his discussion on the obligations and fees due to the king, FitzNigel stated, as in the above quotation, that whoever owed certain payments to the king was also bound to pay a requisite sum to the queen as her prerogative. This sum was set at one mark of gold to be paid to the queen for every one hundred marks of silver to the king. Proportionally, since a mark of gold was understood to be equal to ten marks of silver, this meant that a 10 per cent levy was imposed on the payer in addition to what was already payable to the king. This payment was known as queen's gold and may well have been enjoyed only by medieval queens in England and its neighbours in the British Isles.

St Thomas Becket’s great popularity throughout medieval England and Europe is reflected in ubiquitous references to his feasts in medieval calendars appearing in books of hours, psalters, breviaries, and other manuscripts. However, calendar illustrations of the saint are relatively rare and are also rarely studied. In part, this may be because most of these images occur in books of an unusual, folded format, rather than in codices. These accordion, or concertina, folded almanacs survive in around thirty copies but probably once were much more numerous. The nine known English examples (eight manuscript and one printed) typically contain three representations of Becket. In date the manuscripts are mainly fifteenth century, although the latest manuscript example is dated 1535, and sixteenth-century xylographic versions, printed using woodblocks, exist up to 1554 (see Appendix).

Three and a half years after the assassination of Thomas Becket, Henry II performed a public penance at Becket's church, Canterbury Cathedral, on 12 July 1174. The ceremony included the king's confession and his receipt of several hundred blows administered by members of the clergy using a rod. As part of Henry II's penance, the cult of the newly canonised saint was supported beyond England by Henry's daughters. This paper will examine Becket's cult in Castilla, where the king's daughter Leonor married Alfonso VIII only three months before Becket was assassinated in 1170 [Fig. 6.1]. Once he was canonised in 1173, the clergy actively promoted his cult by means of art and architecture, with the backing of the Crown. Although these works have previously been enumerated, they merit further analysis, along with closer attention to the roles of the clergy and Castilian magnates in addition to the king and queen. These monuments to Becket, produced in various media and for different sponsors, share the iconography quickly established throughout Europe upon the saint's canonisation. Whether figural, architectural, or verbal, they attest to the breadth of his cult in Castilla while Castilla and England were bound by marriage and common interests. It was a golden age. The cult appears to have declined during the fourteenth century when relations between Spain and England became less amicable.

This chapter describes the period between the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century where the Bank of England used excess reserve creation (in the form of banknote issuance) to help fund a burgeoning fiscal deficit.

INTRODUCTION

Marion Pardoun, also known as Marion Peebles, was accused of witchcraft in Shetland in 1644. She was denounced by Janet Fraser, who had recently been executed for witchcraft, and she herself was tried along with Margaret Guthrumsdochter. The records of the other women's cases have not survived, but for Pardoun's own case a copy was made, both of the pre-trial and the trial records. It contains many details of neighbourhood quarrels and bewitchments, as well as some more unusual elements – shape-shifting into the form of a porpoise, and the ritual of cruentation or corpse-touching as a means of determining guilt or innocence.

Marion Pardoun lived in Hillswick in Northmavine. She was said to be over sixty years of age. Her husband was Svend Iverson, and she had adult children. She also had a servant, so she apparently was no poor woman. She was well known in the local community. Her neighbours testified that she had caused many bewitchments in connection with quarrels – but most of these bewitchments had been followed by successful reconciliations, and most of her alleged victims seem to have recovered successfully. There are instances of transference of disease from one person to another, and from a human to an animal. The cures all seem to have followed previous allegations of bewitchment; a few of them involved actions resembling healing rituals, but Pardoun does not seem to have practised as a healer.

Pardoun was initially investigated by members of the presbytery of Shetland. This investigation mainly involved questioning her neighbours, and dealt with harmful magic that had resulted in various misfortunes, particularly human sickness and animal sickness and death. A draft dittay produced after this investigation was presented to the presbytery on 15 March 1644.

Das heilige Ziel (The Holy Goal; released in Japan as 国民の誓 [The People's Oath], Nomura Kōshō, 1938) is a feature-length sports film about two Japanese ski jumpers and their German coach, devised as a German-Japanese co-production and shot in Japan by star cinematographer Richard Angst. While 国民の誓 (Kokumin no chikai) is sometimes used to translate the official “oath to the nation,” in the film's context it denotes the firm intention of the Japanese characters (and, by extension, the Japanese people) to sacrifice everything for the nation's success in international sports (and also in the political arena). The German title Das heilige Ziel also refers to athletic success and national prestige as a literal “goal” and adds the notion of “holiness” in the sense that it takes precedence over all other, especially individual, concerns. Since both Japan and Germany considered the nation to be “sacred” in the 1930s and 1940s, the two titles are very close in meaning. This film is one of a number of German-Japanese co-productions from the interwar period that, like many international projects, display a complex tension between the national and the transnational. Indeed, these cinematic undertakings demonstrate pronounced aspirations to further intercultural understanding while promoting respective national causes. At the same time, the individual participants in this co-production pursued their own artistic and professional goals.

While it is easy to dismiss Dyngley's patristic books as typical fifteenth-century miscellanies, close reading uncovers back-stories about their production. These stories are told by non-verbal clues: signage systems for numbering leaves and quires; an end-of-quire tally entered on the verso of the last folio in each quire, a scriptorium system in operation for centuries; and assembly marks used to authenticate the final order of leaves and blocks of quires before binding. This chapter explores the stories of eight works-in-progress, which in turn demonstrate how thoroughly Dyngley was in charge at every stage of manuscript production. Dyngley was not a commissioner of books, so a commercial scenario in which he engaged a stationer must be disallowed. The case studies will show that Dyngley performed many of the activities commonly ascribed to stationers. He acquired the exemplars, he worked in liaison with his main text scribe, he provided the guard quires, and he gathered loose quires into anthologies. Peterhouse was the control centre for Dyngley's patristic project.

It is possible to define limiting objects that can approximate dense networks, as the number of vertices tend to infinity, in much the same way that the normal distribution approximates that of a sum of independent random variables. In this way, properties of dense graphs can be approximated by those of a suitably chosen limit. A network on n vertices is associated, via its adjacency matrix, with a symmetric function on the unit square that takes values of either 0 or 1, constant over squares of side 1/n, unique up to permutation of the vertex labels. This representation of a network belongs to the larger space of equivalence classes of symmetric, measurable functions on the unit square taking values in the unit interval, with two functions equivalent if one can be obtained from the other by a measure-preserving transformation of the axes; the equivalence classes are called graphons. A metric is defined on the space of graphons with the property that a sequence of ever larger dense networks converges, with respect to this metric, to a limiting graphon W, if, for each k, the distribution, over the set of possible subgraphs of size k, of a randomly chosen induced subgraph of size k in the network converges to a corresponding distribution derived from W.