Birthing rooms, chambers within elite houses specifically designated for childbirth, are the setting for evocative and important scenes in a number of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century French and Middle English romances. This chapter will consider how women created the space of the birthing room, and how romance texts uphold its importance by showing the consequences of it being breached. As these chambers were an accepted and protected female space, their use in romance can tell us much about women, mothers, and gendered interactions. As already stated, lineage, identity, and destiny are key concerns of the romance genre, and showing the birth of the hero is not only often crucial to the narrative, but also communicates how medieval audiences thought about succession, identity, and gender roles. Gail McMurray Gibson argues that women's power was concentrated in and emanated from the birthing room:

The power dynamic surrounding women's essential involvement in reproduction was complicated by a patriarchal desire to deny the importance of the female bloodline to lineal succession.

By 1709 Dublin was second in importance only to London in the burgeoning British Empire. An ever increasing number of ships from Europe, Jamaica and elsewhere, transiting through Irish ports, brought with them luxury goods such as wines, spirits and lemons. In an effort to get around one inconvenience of the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–13), French wine was sometimes rebranded as ‘Irish wine’ before being sent on to London. Another thriving industry was linen production, largely controlled by traders from northern counties, although Dublin retained its position as the chief marketplace for linen that was whitened. Yet the city's wide streets and gracious buildings belied the poverty of many of its residents. Charity remained largely in the hands of local churches and David Dickson suggests that the Protestant poor may have been better catered for than Catholics, as parishes had systems in place to raise taxes to support them. In 1706 the workhouse in St James's opened its doors, but here the focus was on work, with little provision for healthcare, and while in 1710 Dr Richard Steevens left money to fund a hospital ‘for maintaining and curing from time to time such sick and wounded persons whose Distemper and Wounds are curable’, it was another decade before anything resembling a voluntary hospital would be operational in the city.

This book chronicles the great Palatine migration of 1709, the descendants of which are scattered throughout Ireland, Britain, America, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and elsewhere. It is also a book about identity, and specifically the difficulty which arises from ascribing identities to groups of migrants. Such imputations can prove difficult to shake off, which happened with the ‘poor Protestant Palatines fleeing persecution’, as they are still recalled three hundred years later. Perhaps this is not surprising given that, in an eighteenth-century public relations exercise, the pens of luminaries such as Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift and Joseph Addison were set to work framing and reframing Palatine identity, following the arrival of at least 13,500 migrants in London in one six-month period.

This book highlights overlapping social and religious networks which enabled the Palatine migration to take place in the first instance. It explains how, in an era of rapid colonial expansion, plans were afoot as early as 1705 to move large groups of European migrants to the New World. But issues surrounding religious dissent informed the welcome afforded to Palatines in both Britain and Ireland and help to explain why the numbers of Palatines remaining in Ireland is underestimated.

The Palatines were not the only large group to depart Europe in a thirty-year timeframe. Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 by King Louis XIV saw an estimated 200,000 Huguenots flee France with an estimated 40,000 settling in England, while it is estimated 10,000 Huguenots settled in Ireland.

Open City and The Other Crucifix explore another component of flight—the frustrations that come with unrealized dreams. This chapter examines the American Dream as one of the motivating factors for flight and its inaccessibility by the migrant upon arrival in America. What emerges in these two novels is that, regardless of the promise of freedom and liberty, the realities are different. Julius in Open City and Jojo in The Other Crucifix struggle to overcome social exclusion and the economic barriers to improvement. The references to similar migrant experiences in the scenes in Brussels in Open City again speak to a broader conception of fragility and brokenness in migrant life abroad. While Jojo arguably achieves his dream, the novel's end suggests that the upward climb to social integration has only just started.

Teju Cole's Open City can be read as a prologue to The Other Crucifix in terms of the promise of migration and the subsequent reversal of the migrant's expectations. Its protagonist, Julius, is from Nigeria, on a psychiatric fellowship conducting a clinical study of affective disorders in the elderly. Based in New York City, a place that can be characterized as an “open city” with endless possibilities and where dreams are accomplished, Julius goes through a process of psychological turmoil as he comes face to face with the realities of life in the West. Like Jojo Badu, Julius's sense of migration is based on the ideologies associated with the promise of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” which they would have read about back home in Ghana and Nigeria and are now striving to achieve in the United States.

Peter the Deacon, hagiographer, chronicler, classical scholar, forger, and serial liar, is not as familiar to Anglophone medievalists as other similar (if perhaps less outrageous) figures such as Abbo of Fleury and Osbert of Clare. Yet he is hardly unknown to the wider world of medieval scholarship. It was indeed more than a century ago that the German historian Erich Caspar published a brilliant pioneering monograph that revealed his many-sided, if seemingly bizarre, intellectual activity. More recently, if still some considerable time ago, the Harvard classicist and medievalist Herbert Bloch devoted a number of studies over half a century to aspects of Peter's work, as well as to the wider intellectual and religious environment of the abbey of Montecassino in the early and central Middle Ages. Other distinguished scholars have also made significant contributions to our understanding of Peter the Deacon, notably Paul Meyvaert, Hartmut Hoffmann, Jean-Marie Martin, and my own doctoral supervisor John Cowdrey. Why then might this be a good moment to attempt a reassessment of this interesting, if in the last resort perhaps relatively peripheral, figure in the history of medieval monasticism?

First, because for all the fine studies devoted to the various works that Peter produced during some twenty-five or so years of busy – one might almost say compulsive – writing, there has been no real attempt since Caspar's book of 1909 to draw these threads together in a summary that places his career in its proper context.

This article examines hagiographical evidence for medieval Brittany's rich culture, in particular its traditions about Arthur: legends that attest to the region's connections with Tatlock's ‘great world’ and yet are distinctively Breton. The Arthurian Latin-Breton Saints’ Lives considered here are rarely discussed in medieval scholarship, and the larger argument that they support – that they testify to a vibrant medieval Breton culture – is seldom advanced. Indeed, the disparaging remark in the epigraph to this article still represents widespread attitudes towards medieval Brittany, which both British and French historians have characterised as ‘peripheral, backward, and, because of its Celtic history, different and atypical’. This stance towards modern Brittany appears to exist even at a national level. The French state's aggressive attempts to promote (French) linguistic uniformity in previously predominantly Breton-speaking areas, thus promoting ‘an internalised sense of inferiority and shame’, may be viewed as just one example. The history of such perceptions of Brittany as far-flung and rustic goes back much further. It is telling that the region's westernmost department is called in French ‘Finistère’, derived from the Latin finis terræ, meaning ‘the end of the earth/land’. However, historian Caroline Brett's recent work indirectly challenges conceptions of medieval Brittany as a cultural backwater through demonstrating heavy Breton involvement in English and French political and dynastic affairs between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries, and close cultural ties between Brittany and Wales. The present examination of Arthur's hagiographical characterisation reinforces the case for medieval western Brittany's cultural sophistication.

The appendices may be found online at https://tinyurl.com/palatinelists.

Appendix A: Conforming Irish Palatines.

Appendix B: Young Single Men.

Appendix C: SPG/SPCK/Commissioners for Palatines.

Appendix D: Shipping Lists.

Appendix E: Churchmen’s Lists.

Appendix F: Main Database.

Book VI is most usefully perceived as a discussion of government considered in its three functions: judicial, legislative, and executive. It is further testimony to Gower's growing sense of the inadequacy of the three estates as a device for a socio-political analysis of England in the late fourteenth century. The book begins with a scathing account of legal practitioners, starting with the pleaders, the experts of the common law consulted by individuals involved in suits brought before the royal courts. Supposedly guarantors of the king's justice which his judges are obligated to deliver, corrupt lawyers are driven by avarice and concerned primarily with the acquisition of property, twisting the law through sophistry and trickery. The judges, sheriffs, bailiffs, and witnesses, who likewise share responsibility for the failure of justice in the realm, are attacked in their turn for their own avaricious misconduct. Although Gower's major judicial concern is the common law, he also evidences knowledge of the other legal codes – customary, civil and canon – present in fourteenthcentury England.

The legislative branch is assailed in its expression as king's councils, in which his counsellors presumably advise the monarch of the best courses of action. Although parliament was becoming increasingly important, Gower does not include it in his discussion. Legislatures were not seen in his day as the inevitable outcome of a government's perceived need for guidance from constituent assemblies. The history of the papacy, which mirrors imperial and regal courts, offers a fruitful comparison.