In the summer of 1570, the earl of Derby's younger sons, Sir Tomas and Sir Edward Stanley, together with Sir Tomas Gerard of Bryn, formed a conspiracy to liberate the queen of Scots, assert her claim to both kingdoms, and thereby transform the religious settlement across the British Isles. The signifcance of the conspiracy, and the role it cast for the Stanley afnity, can be understood only by locating it in the major invasion crisis the English government faced in mid-1570, a set of internal and external pressures whose extent and gravity are missed in established narratives of the period, despite the abundant evidence in the state papers. Rather than a minor peripheral disturbance, the conspiracy was central to a crisis both of the English state and the British archipelago.

The Northern Crisis Mutates

The crisis of the north did not end with the cross-border fight of the rebel earls in December 1569. In the new year the English crisis mutated into a crisis of the three British kingdoms, and by the summer of 1570 a full-scale invasion crisis. Unravelling post-rebellion politics requires a pan-British meta-narrative, linking component conficts to the threat of international intervention.The artifcial separation of the calendars of state papers – domestic, domestic addenda, foreign, Spanish, Roman, Scottish, Irish, and Border – hinders an integrated understanding of the 1570 crisis and is perhaps the major reason it has been passed over.

Almost without exception, 1931 had been a disappointing year for Holst. The three great works composed during the previous year either had missed their mark with audiences or were awaiting premiere performances. There were continued anxieties connected with the revisions, rehearsals, and performances of Hammersmith. A Choral Fantasia had received a cold reception from both audiences and critics, and no performance of his chamber opera The Tale of the Wandering Scholar was on the horizon. Holst was also concerned about the release of The Bells, the motion picture for which he had composed incidental music.

Third North American Trip

It is no wonder, then, when offered the position of Horatio Appleton Lamb Foundation lecturer in composition at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, starting in February 1932, Holst enthusiastically accepted. His salary for one semester's work was $3,000, more than the average American family income for an entire year and an especially hefty sum considering that the world was in a deep economic depression. On the heels of this invitation, he also received one from Serge Koussevitzky, music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, to guest-conduct a series of three concerts that January. Koussevitzky, who had been in Boston since 1924, routinely took a two-week break following the holidays, bringing in guest conductors who were often also composers. Among the orchestra's previous guest conductors were Sir Thomas Beecham, Maurice Ravel, and Arthur Honegger.

Curiosities and Games

One of the odder texts of the late Middle Ages is a meditational and pedagogical dialogue, an education for princes [regimen principis] concerning Godhead, Creation, the nature of free will (divine and human), and the virtuous life, structured in terms of playing a “game of bowls” [ludus globi]. Its author, Nicolas of Cusa (Nikolaus Cusanus, 1401–64), was a learned cardinal- bishop, but not a university-centered academic. His career was spent in papal administration, moving easily between Germany and Italy during a notably contentious period in the western Church. He was also possessed of one of the most inquisitive philosophical intellects of the notably inquisitive fifteenth century, thoroughly learned in medieval philosophy as well as in the Ancients. In this Dialogue, composed (1462–63) towards the end of his life, he imagines conversing with two young princes of Bavaria, John (in Book I) and Albert (in Book II) on a field laid out for playing bowls. Cusanus imagines himself seated alone on the sidelines, tired out from the game he has taught to them, the one which the younger princes are now actively playing. Prince John asks him to explain the rationale of this new (to him at least) delightful game [ludus iocundus]:

John: All of us are fascinated with this delightful new game – perhaps because in it there is the figuration [=figuratio] of a kind of cosmic contemplation that we beg to have explained.

Cardinal: Not a bad move for us to make [non male movemini], various sciences have their instruments and games: arithmetic has its rithmomachy; music has its monochord; and even the game of chess does not lack for concealed ethical knowledge [mysterio moralium].

Introduction

During the century between 1880 and 1980 most local communities in the North Sea Lowlands relinquished control over water management to the state. Therefore, this chapter is almost entirely dedicated to the increasing grip of the state on water management. This was achieved through reorganisations of water authorities and through the implementation of enormous infrastructural projects that went far beyond the capacities of the traditional water authorities, but also through smaller yet still substantial improvements in drainage. Because of the ever-increasing role of the state, the regional approach of the previous chapter will be abandoned here. In this period it was the state which determined the development of water management and its organisation. First we will take a short look at the general history of the North Sea area during this period. The period ends in 1980, when doubts about the environmental sustainability of modern agriculture began to influence government policy, leading to the introduction of environmental legislation. Then a period of transformation began, which will be addressed in the epilogue.

This book explores how religious experiences intertwine with emotions in modern European women's lives. Its authors uncover how religious norms and expectations, as channeled through emotions, shaped women's roles and lives. From the fiery Norwegian religious missionary Marie Monsen to the grieving young German Jewish woman Anna Bauer, from servant women in Bavaria to nineteenth-century kindergarten teachers, this book takes up the stories of women to try to understand how religion and the emotions guided women's understandings of themselves and their roles in their communities.

The authors of these chapters, which had their origins at a 2022 conference at the Indiana University Gateway in Berlin, include scholars from history, religious studies, Jewish studies, gender studies, German studies, and folklore. The volume centers primarily on Germany but it also includes contributions that focus on Belgium, Norway, England, and Ireland. Adding a transnational dimension to the exploration of women, religion, and emotions that looks beyond the borders of Germany enriched all participants’ work because so many religious phenomena crossed national borders. Mysticism, Marian apparitions, spiritualism, and occultism were also widespread across Europe and invite comparative study and conversation. The Catholic Cult of the Sacred Heart, for instance, was inaugurated by a French nun in the seventeenth century, from where it spread across Europe, and Síle de Cléir writes about its manifestation in twentieth-century Ireland in this volume. In general, the authors in this book aim to explore the unique historical experiences of specific women as well as a wide variety of women's lives and contexts. It is our hope that this volume spurs new research to bring in the voices of women omitted from this volume, for example Muslim women, members of the free churches, as well as adherents of various forms of non-traditional spiritualism.

On 6 October 2022, a student in the all-male college dorm Elías Ahúja yelled at those living in the all-female dorm, Santa Mónica, across the way at University Complutense of Madrid in Spain: “¡Putas! ¡Salid de vuestras madrigueras como conejas! ¡Sois unas putas ninfómanas! ¡Os prometo que vais a follar todas en la capea!” (Hedgecoe 2022: 2–5). The chant, part of a rite of passage for university newcomers, ignited a mass, choreographed catcalling, whereby fellow students across the men's residence pulled open their blinds and started shouting and making animal noises. The scream, part and parcel of rape culture on university campuses, was rife with zoomorphic images that equated women with bunnies and their halls of residence with burrows (Anderson and Gonick 2021: 52–7; Muller 2015: 1–12). This imagery oozes sexuality, since furry animals are common euphemisms for female genitalia and for attractive women – as the Playboy Bunnies demonstrate (Chamizo and Sánchez 2000: 92–7; Hines 1999: 9–11; López-Rodríguez 2009: 88). Besides calling them whores and nymphomaniacs, the chant refers to their imminent sexual encounter at the school's annual bullfight (capea), an event traditionally associated with masculinity and violence in Spanish culture (Brandes 2009: 779–86). In addition, the animal sounds made by the male students functioned as a sort of mating call that recreated a hunting scenario where the male acts as a sexual predator awaiting its female prey.

Far from being an isolated instance, faunistic tropes like these ones permeate hate speech against women (Bock and Burkley 2019: 263–7; Piñeiro-Otero and Martínez-Rolán 2021: 8). There are, indeed, numerous cases of genderbased violence through which the female victim is reduced to an irrational and sexualized beast. This chapter aims to explore the animalization of the female victim in literary and real episodes of gender violence in contemporary Spain.

The outraged comments from Napoleon Bonaparte and Friedrich von Gentz (1764–1832) condemning the political interventions of Germaine de Staël and Dorothea von Kurland and her daughters Wilhelmine von Sagan (1781–1839) and Dorothea (Dorothée) von Sagan (1793–1862) are indicative of the tensions round elite women's political agency in this period. Whilst older historiography has argued that women were marginalised from areas of politics in the eighteenth century, and identified 1832 as a turning point, current research has corrected this argument. Recent scholarship has also adjusted the Habermasian theory of separate spheres (see Introduction) which underpinned some of these assessments. As I have shown through my analysis of Dorothea von Kurland, Friederike von Brun, Anna Paulina Jabłonowska, and Izabela Czartoryska, amongst others, women were playing important roles in international political debate across Europe. They were crucial political and cultural agents of change in the eighteenth century.

However, it is important to remember that my study concentrates on elite women who were part of wider transnational kinship and social circles that made political interventions possible. The case studies draw from a range of noble women, from members of the gentry to the aristocracy. Their rank, direct and indirect influence, and their hard and soft power cannot be separated.

In May 1922 tenants, employees and the wider community of Nanteos in Cardiganshire congregated for a communal event centred on the heir to the estate. The occasion was not one of celebration but of condolence and commemoration: the unveiling of a memorial, in the form of a Celtic ring-cross, erected at Southgate, Aberystwyth, by public subscription. Its bilingual inscription records that this was funded ‘by tenants and employees of the Nanteos estate’ in memory of Lieutenant W. E. Powell of the Welsh Guards, heir to the estate, ‘who fell in action’ in France in November 1918 – five days before the Armistice. He died before the attainment and celebration of his coming of age and was his parents’ only son. Their deaths in 1930 and 1952 brought an end to the long line of Powell of Nanteos.

The erection of public memorials across the villages and towns of Wales shows that the First World War took a heavy toll in most communities and on all parts of Welsh society. It was also a significant milestone in the demise of the estates systems. Many of the young heirs to Welsh estates who celebrated their majorities in the years preceding the conflict threw themselves into the service of their country and did not return home. Lieutenant Walter de Winton of Maesllwch in Radnorshire died in 1914 having celebrated his coming of age in June of that year.

In mid-sixteenth-century London, a very wealthy married woman started to believe that she was pregnant. This woman, under great pressure to bear an heir, felt her body, particularly her abdomen, changing and growing. After some time, around the fourth month of her pregnancy, she thought that she felt her foetus quicken, or move. Later, the woman and her ladies began preparing for the imminent birth of her infant. They organised her lying-in room, and necessities for the newborn such as a cradle and swaddling clothes. Her due date arrived and passed, and her pregnancy continued. In fact, her pregnancy continued for many months past this date, yet no foetus ever appeared. The woman and her husband were greatly disheartened by this experience. Some observers of the event even ridiculed them for mistakenly believing in the pregnancy. A few years later, the woman experienced another pregnancy, which again did not result in the birth of an heir. She died a few months later.

The above account recalls the events of Queen Mary Tudor's pregnancies, in 1555 and again in 1558. False Pregnancy begins its story at this mid-sixteenthcentury moment, to show that Mary I's experience of appearing and feeling pregnant, but not giving birth to a baby, was common in the early-modern world. Mary I's experiences were, of course, significantly different to most women. For one, Mary was presumably the wealthiest woman in England at this time. Moreover, her non-pregnancies played out under intense public and international scrutiny. The Queen and her husband, Prince Philip II, were subject to immense pressure to legitimise their rule through the birth of an infant. While at the beginning of Mary's apparent pregnancy this birth seemed inevitable, as the last potential time for her delivery passed some observers believed that she might have miscarried her foetus. Others declared that she had instead experienced dropsy, a form of abdominal swelling, or perhaps a ‘false conception’, ‘mole’ or ‘mola’.

The revisionist historiography of the English Reformation brings a change of optics in relation to ‘the north’. A north-south divide, with the north backward and papist, disconnected from a supposed Protestant mainstream, has become a ready historical cliche. In an infuential study, A.G. Dickens presented the religious struggle as efectively over with the triumph of the Protestant party in 1559, leaving only a ‘residual problem’, a ‘Catholic threat’, in a region, the north-west, whose religious ‘backwardness’ made it a prime reception zone for external Catholic intervention. Dickens pictured the nightmare of Elizabeth's principal minister, William Cecil, as ‘a map of western Europe, with one arrow stretching from Spain to Ireland, a second from Ireland to Lancashire, and a third from Lancashire to London’.

In 1975, contrary to Dickens’ thesis of rapid Protestant triumph, a seminal study by Christopher Haigh expressed the suspicion that the real contrast was not ‘between Lancashire and what actually took place in the rest of England’ but ‘between Lancashire and what the conventional wisdom tells us happened’ in the rest of England. Haigh's work fattened the contours and developed into a far-reaching revisionist project. A post-Dickens consensus casts doubt on the wider, nationwide, purchase of Protestantism by Elizabeth's accession and sees protestantisation, across all counties, as a slow and contested process, a longue durée which only began in 1558–9. As Michael Questier puts it, in relation to Elizabethan Sussex, many English counties were more like Lancashire than everyone thought: the split between a supposedly backward ‘Catholic north’ and a supposedly progressive ‘Protestant south’ has been overdone. The north-west has ceased to be an atypical papist backwater, a ‘dark hole’ outside the national fow. Tere were ‘dark holes’ everywhere.

This chapter focuses on the psychological depression and violence that come with unfulfilled dreams. Imbolo Mbue's Behold the Dreamers is crucial to exploring this aspect of the migrant experience upon arrival abroad. The novel tells the stories of two families: Jende and Neni Jonga, African migrants from Cameroon; and Clark Edwards, a wealthy Wall Street banker in the United States, and his wife, Cindy. The intersection of the stories of these two families comes when Jende is hired by Edwards as his personal chauffeur. Jende's employment creates an invaluable opportunity for crossexamination of each other's situations. Jende is given a window seat into the workings of the capitalist system in America. In this way, he is brought face to face with the dynamics of a system that he will have to navigate if his dream is to be accomplished. In working with Jende, Edwards comes to see the realities behind the operation of the immigration system in his own country. In this way, he understands the restrictions of the system that produces migrant labor from which he benefits. As the story unfolds, Jende realizes that his perception of the dream was misconstrued and that capitalism was a stumbling block to its achievement. He sees the realities of the capitalist system in the lives of Clark and Cindy and recognizes the contrast between the superficial attractions and the profound realities. Jende concludes that the cost to achieving his dream is too high and returns home with his family at the end of the novel.

In the opening sections of the novel, Mbue focuses on the dream of the migrant. By dissecting the story of Neni and Jende, she provides a framework for defining both dream and dreamer. Neni's story is a clear illustration of the conflict between the dream and the systems that work to thwart its achievement. At the opening of the novel, she is celebrating a year and a half of residency in New York City. She is depicted as living the American dream, satisfied and fulfilled, even at this early stage in her journey.

This chapter concentrates on the different ways in which hermits shaped the political and religious culture of seventeenth-century England. Through a series of case studies, it examines the boundaries at which an eremitic existence could be regarded by early modern contemporaries as acceptable and the point at which it tipped into something concerning, perhaps even extreme or dangerous. The marginality of hermits and their frequent connection to religious and political dissent picks up on threads that span much of Bernard Capp's scholarship. The gestation of this research, connected to a broader project on early modern solitude, is in no small part owing to Capp, who has supplied a constant stream of archival titbits over the years. The hermits whose stories are documented here – Thomas Parkinson, Roger Crab, Henry Welby, Thomas Bushell, John Bigg and Benjamin Lay – are testament to Capp's eclectic interests in the people who formed part of the radical social and cultural fabric of the age. As this chapter shows, the solitude of those who chose to live outside society had an important place in shaping the values, norms and ideals of those who remained within.

Collectively, these cases will reveal the unexpected contribution that hermits made to early modern life. They also underscore important themes in how individuals became hermits and how others responded to their lifestyles. First, they emphasise that, for the hermitic life to succeed, it needed to be a voluntary state.

Ó DÁLAIGH's SURVIVING POEMS AND SPENSER's PROXIMITY TO GAELIC POETS

As with most professional poets of early modern Ireland, little biograph¬ical information survives about Domhnall Ó Dálaigh. We do not have much information about his life beyond that which we can glean from the manuscripts containing his surviving poems; we know neither the year of his birth or his death, if or whom he married, where he lived or where precisely he was educated. We know, based on the patrons for whom Domhnall composed his works, that he was alive and active in Munster around the turn of the seventeenth century. He lived through turbulent and transformative years in Irish history when the social and political landscape of the country was turned on its head. The dominance of Gaelic institu¬tions, including the poetry schools from which he derived his education and livelihood, would soon become a thing of the past. Despite the violence and socio-political chaos that surrounded him, Ó Dálaigh found himself in a privileged position as he was the recipient of patronage from the Gaelic and Anglo-Norman aristocracy in Munster, most notably Dáibhíth de Barra (fifth Viscount Buttevant) and his sons. Of the seven surviving poems attributed to Ó Dálaigh, four are addressed to members of the de Barra family. The fifth and sixth are addressed to members of the Mac Cart¬haigh Riabhach dynasty of Carbery, and the seventh to Dáibhíth de Róisde (seventh Viscount Roche of Fermoy).

INTRODUCTION: MAN 1, MAN 2–TELOS MAN

In the Caribbean theory landscape, spanning from Aimé and Suzanne Césaire to Menil, from Fanon to Wynter to Walcott to Glissant, one central question persists: What does it mean to be black? How can we understand what we are or who we are in this world? What is our place and space? Who holds space for us and how do we plant ourselves in this place? Can black people exist free from the enduring consequences of colonialism and slavery? We believe that the answer to these questions is simple – we need stories. To understand what we are as black people, from our genealogy up until this point, we need stories. We need stories of our birth, stories of those who came before us, stories that speak about how we moved or were moved, and lastly stories that complicate the stories that have previously given us identity. The legacy of exploitation, slavery, and colonialism, which has been reinforced through imperialist fiction, cannot be erased, and its effects are still evident today in various ways. While black people have undeniably lost much in their encounters with Europeans, there are pathways through which remnants of their identity can be reclaimed, particularly within creative spaces. In these environments, we can witness the transformative power that occurs when marginalized individuals assert their agency, position themselves in these spaces, and begin to narrate their own stories. Chinua Achebe put it brilliantly in Things Fall Apart when he said, ‘until the lion learns how to write, every story will glorify the hunter’. Similarly, David Soyka in an interview with Science Fiction Weekly addresses the impact and poses the following questions: