Within the repertoire of classic monstrous figures in Gothic literature (vampires, the undead, witches, and doppelgängers, among others) the werewolf is one of the most challenging to approach critically. The monstrous nature of the werewolf lies in the possibility of finding a hidden, bestial, animalistic space, guided purely by instincts of destruction, in the personality of individuals who in other social circumstances may seem charming. The contemporary werewolf cannot be thought of solely in terms of a physical representation of change, although there are obviously countless narratives in which this is seen explicitly, but rather as the product of a psychic split within a character that engenders a complex and multiple personality, where attachment to social norms and behavior of the most absolute animal bestiality can coexist.

In line with the proposals of critics such as Chantal Bourgault du Coudray, “The more psychologized werewolf … would not necessarily undergo a literal transformation, but it would certainly exhibit lupine behaviour, indicative of an interior disturbance” (55). An approach to the figure of the werewolf that only contemplates narratives where the physical transformation of the subject into a beast is explicit can lead to the assumption that there are practically no iterations of this monster in contemporary Latin American literature. On the contrary, if we take a broader view of the monster, we can observe that contemporary Mexican narrative offers numerous examples of lycanthropic narratives.

The three narrative works that I will analyze in this chapter have the werewolf (and the were-woman) as a common thread. I will argue here that the appearance of this figure is not a mere coincidence but a determined attempt to use the classic figure of horror and Gothic fiction as a means to develop a popular representation of a series of complex political, economic, and social changes that have swept through Mexico during the past three decades.

For a decade the position of Catholic politicals may be described as attentisme, waiting for events in the hope of a turn in their favour, possibly the queen's marriage or, as almost happened in October 1562 when she contracted smallpox, death.1 But in the last months of 1568 conservative magnates, outraged by what they saw as the mounting excesses of the Protestant camarilla at home and abroad, made a concerted attempt to stage a peaceful coup to overturn the regnum Cecilianum and reverse the regime's religious policies. Tis was the beginning of a political crisis which, as Wallace MacCafrey recognised, was the frst – and last – great Catholic attempt ‘to shift the whole policy of state’ and re-determine England's dynastic and religious future.2

We may distinguish three overlapping projects into which Catholic nobles played in changing, often confusing, combinations. The frst, beginning in late 1568, was an attempt to stage a palace revolution which would remove Cecil and ‘restore religion’. The second, gaining momentum when the frst failed, was a project to settle England's religious and dynastic religious future through the marriage of the queen of Scots to the duke of Norfolk. And the third, an underlying, covert, scenario continuously envisaged by some if other means failed, was rebellion supported by papally approved intervention by Catholic monarchs, empresa. The most dramatic expression of the politicoreligious crisis, the Northern Rebellion of 1569 or ‘Rebellion of the Northern Earls’, was, as we shall see, a partial, premature, and strangulated attempt at the insurrectionary, invasionary project. Beginning as a defensive refex, the northern rising aimed to liberate Mary and set of a wider Catholic revolt with external support.

Coming of age events were celebrations of dynastic continuity. They were loaded with a symbolism which glorified in the preservation and hereditary characteristics of the estates system. It was the ownership of land which underpinned the social, political and economic power of the gentry, squirearchy and aristocracy, and their claimed position as ‘natural leaders’ of their communities and the country at large. At local levels these occasions actively promoted the perpetuation of ‘landlordship’ and its associated markers of status, influence and authority into the next generation. Continuity was the key characteristic. However, Welsh coming of age celebrations emerged and then proliferated across a period infused with significant change: shifts and transformations which in several ways disturbed and threatened the traditional hierarchies, world views and form of society attached to the operation of landed estates. The time frame covered by this book, c.1770–1920, saw the British aristocratic class transition from a position of immense collective power, influence and security, to one of decline – evinced in Wales by the political rejection of landowners at the ballot box from the late nineteenth century, followed in succeeding generations by the mass sale and break-up of their estates and country houses. Despite assertions of stability, landed society was in a continual state of flux across this entire period, characterised by multiple failures of patrilineal succession and the establishment across all parts of Wales of several essentially new aristocratic entities.

The tradition of Eusebius–Jerome and Sigebert was particularly successful within the monastic landscape of twelfth-century Normandy. The projects carried out at Savigny and Mortemer produced histories intended for the consumption and, significantly, the self-description of the local monastic communities, while matching their political networks. However, the Norman textual community of this chronicle tradition extended beyond the boundaries of Normandy. A significant case for analysis is provided by the Continuatio Ursicampina, a twelfth-century anonymous continuation of Sigebert’s chronicle produced at Ourscamp, a Cistercian abbey on the Oise in Picardy. Although the abbey was not territorially in Normandy, it received the Beauvais manuscript as edited at its Norman daughter-house Mortemer. The Ourscamp scriptorium prepared a continuation up to 1155, bringing forward an ambitious project of textual re-elaboration. While joining Eusebius–Jerome’s tradition, like Robert of Torigni, the Ourscamp chronicler thoroughly interpolated the text of Sigebert’s chronicle with extracts of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s De Gestis Brittonum.3 Because of the uncertain reliability and political character of the DGB, his approach to the Galfridian past bears witness to a compromise which was not entirely different from Robert’s. Although the Ourscamp chronicler was critical of the DGB, he made a more extensive use of the Galfridian past than Robert of Torigni, carefully including it in continuity with the English royal line. However, for most of its history, the abbey of Ourscamp stood on the other side of the Norman and Angevin fence, establishing important connections with the network supporting Thomas Becket and the French monarchy.

The initial impetus for administrative reforms arose in the winter of 1779/80 from a sense of general crisis. The almost constant warfare of the eighteenth century had caused the tax burden and national debt to skyrocket, and the American War of Independence further added to that strain. Fighting a war on the other side of the world was an unprecedented logistical and financial challenge for the already struggling fiscal-military state. As a civil war, it was also an unprecedented ideological challenge for the government and the Crown. The resisters’ arguments resonated with the public in England and added momentum to opposition interests in Parliament. The arguments resonated even more with radicals outside of Parliament who, since the 1760s, had increasingly organised themselves into political societies and associations. That the public offices were becoming a political issue was due to the dire financial and logistical situation and it followed from ideological polarisation. The topic was brought up by the extra-parliamentary Yorkshire Association Movement, which hoped to use the administrative deficits as a lever to pressure for tax cuts and parliamentary reform. The opposition in Parliament took the issue up and launched a fierce attack against the ailing ministry of Lord North.

Public offices added focus to a discourse on corruption that had been a constant feature of the political debate since George III ascended to the throne in 1760. Debates revolved around the ‘corrupt influence of the Crown’, i.e. the idea that the country was in the clutches of a corrupt power elite that was shamelessly enriching itself at the expense of the general public.

Early medieval objects told stories that were embedded in the cultures that made and used them, whether these were always the same or changed throughout the object's life. These societies used their understanding of the senses to help them navigate their worlds and, by extension, objects were a part of this. Textiles were components of everyday and ceremonial life and their uses were influenced by the sensory and physical worlds they inhabited.

Textiles can be used in performative ways and no matter how they are deployed, for example as clothing or display, they interact with the human body through the senses. These interactions are cultural, learned through social norms, but they can also change over time. As a result, textiles and humans create bonds—relationships that speak to each other through their sensory interactions—whether from a distance or up close and personal. Within these parameters choices are made about what each textile means, how it can and should be used, whether it is considered culturally correct or subversive, and what messages and stories are projected. As a result, the approach known as sensory archaeology is a good vehicle for probing these choices. This theoretical approach uses the human sensory experience to help researchers understand how people in past societies understood, conceptualised, and engaged with their worlds. Despite the criticism that people today can never really know or share how past individuals experienced their world(s), sensory archaeology has become a popular way of probing how artefacts, sensory-scapes, and people interrelated. A second criticism, that senses should be treated as a group, not individually—because this is how they work in reality to create multisensory encounters—is now being addressed.

Sadly, Colmán Etchingham died prematurely on 7 June 2023, as this book was going through the press. He had submitted a typescript in February of that year, and while he would undoubtedly have suggested changes informed by his ongoing voracious research and added updated references, of necessity the volume remains substantially as it left his hands. It presents his interpretation of the Viking Age in Ireland, framed by his perspective on Viking activities elsewhere.

In facilitating the publication of this volume, the Publisher and the Series Editors are indebted to Professor Lesley Abrams, Balliol College, Oxford, as well as to Colmán's former colleagues in Maynooth University, Prof. Terence Dooley, Head of the Department of History, and in particular Dr Elizabeth Boyle, the Department of Early Irish, who provided crucial academic and practical support. Lydia Hursh, of the Department of Early Irish, offered expert assistance with the Figures, redrawing a number of them, and both the Department of History and the Department of Early Irish contributed financially to the publication of the book. Generous financial support towards this volume was also made possible by a gift to the University of Cambridge in memory of Dorothea Coke, Skjaeret, 1951. Caroline Palmer, Editorial Director at Boydell and Brewer, guided the volume deftly through its final stages and the Series Editors are grateful for her input and advice. The support of Colmán's family is much appreciated, including that of his brother, Fiachra Etchingham, and especially of his wife, Carmel Gaynor McKenna.

With an ecocritical and plant-focused perspective, this essay considers how Oliva Vieweg's 2018 graphic novel Endzeit (meaning “End Time” but published with the English title of Ever After) documents the trauma and impact of climate change on both human and nonhumanvegetal beings. Additionally, it is a traumatic zombie story of humans transformed into the wandering dead via a species-crossing plant infection. The tale traces two girls, Eva and Vivian, on a journey through a heat-hazed, post-apocalyptic German landscape emptied of people. The girls escape from brutal situations in Weimar with fairy-tale hopes of a better life in Jena while facing the constant horror of needing to flee from zombies whose orifices sprout roots, leaves, and eventually even flowers. The plants that we see in the comic are flourishing but have themselves become agents of infection. While we know that much vegetation has been negatively impacted by human activities and their consequences, such as climate change, industrial toxins, deforestation, and expanding urban zones, some invasive, pesticide-resistant, or hardy weed plants are actually thriving in our ever hotter and radiated world. Plants have not (yet) become such a disease vector, though their partners in root collaboration, the fungi, certainly have infected other species, such as the sporesprouting ants of the rain forest whose brains are controlled by a fungal infection.

Seafarers were among the most instantly recognisable occupational groups in early modern Europe. According to contemporary popular culture, they possessed their own distinctive way of walking, dressing, talking – and perhaps singing. They behaved in a rude and outlandish fashion featuring excessive drinking, casual violence, and promiscuous sex. In England these characteristics became most closely associated, by the end of the seventeenth century, with the figure of Jack Tar, a stereotype appearing in popular print, song and drama which grew ever more well-established thereafter. Scholars working on the social history of seafaring have tended either to take that stereotype at face value or, more recently, to critique it as a misleading caricature, seeking instead to uncover the realities of life among maritime communities.

This chapter focuses on what this stereotype meant to seafarers themselves, by examining representations of the sea and maritime workers in early modern ballads. My chapter combines prominent themes from Bernard Capp's work: naval and maritime history, social and cultural identity, and the significance of popular print, which are reflected in Capp's emphasis on the sense of community among seafarers aboard naval ships – a ‘floating commonwealth’, in the context of the 1650s – although he acknowledged discordant elements as well. It is this sense of community, and what ballads can tell us about it, that I wish to focus on here.

Two mortuary rolls compiled between 1215 and 1230, to commemorate senior religious women, allow scholars access to a world of quotidian scribal endeavours that is normally occluded by standard palaeographical and book historical studies. Between them, the mortuary rolls contain almost 500 examples of handwriting from different religious houses around Britain. They constitute an exceptional resource for analysis of letterforms and scribal practices such as punctuation, abbreviation and correction; and they illustrate what preference and capability there was in the religious houses visited for particular forms of script, like textura (also labelled ‘text hand’, littera textualis or ‘Gothic’) and particular levels of formality in writing. This scribal evidence comes at a time when new features in documentary hands were developing; and when what one might call ‘scribal presence’ was more prevalent socioculturally than it had been previously.

London, British Library, Egerton MS 2849, Parts 1 and 2, is a mortuary roll with 122 entries from religious houses, who each wrote an individual titulus to commemorate Prioress Lucy de Vere of Castle Hedingham, in Essex, who died in 1225. To acknowledge Lucy's death, the new prioress, Agnes, sent a messenger – possibly a lay brother – out to other religious houses in the south of England to request that they enter a short memorial (the titulus) for Lucy. The roll was created over a span of time, presumably within a few years of Lucy's death. The slightly earlier mortuary roll of Prioress Amphelisa of Lillechurch, who died sometime between 1208 and 1214, is Cambridge, St John's College, MS N. 31; it is extensive and contains 378 scribal entries. Both rolls are in good condition overall: Egerton 2849 is 7-foot long; while St John's N. 31 is 37-foot long, and contains entries on the front of the membrane as well as on the dorse at membranes 2, 3 and 18.

The town of Cheltenham is situated along the western fringes of the Cotswold Hills, about ninety-seven miles west of London. It had been known throughout England as a health resort since about 1716, with the discovery of its mineral springs, but it was only after the visit of King George III in 1788 that Cheltenham became very fashionable. Members of the Victorian upper classes, largely the royalty and nobility who had inherited their titles and wealth, as well as those of the upwardly mobile middle classes flocked to the town on their holidays. This sense of splendor is reflected in the town's stunning Regency architecture.

As might be expected of a Regency spa resort, Cheltenham had gained the reputation for being a center of musical activity. As early as 1783, music was being provided for balls held during the summer season, and in 1826, the Montpellier Rotunda, an extension of the Montpellier Spa, was constructed as a permanent place for musical performance. By the 1830s, a band consisting of two flutes, four clarinets, a bassoon, a horn, a trumpet, two trombones, a serpent, and an ophicleide—an instrumentation corresponding closely to that of many British military bands of the era—was engaged for regular performances there. By 1846, the band, now consisting of twenty musicians, performed every morning plus three evenings per week for Cheltenham's Musical Promenades.

In addition to band concerts, there were many other musical performances taking place in Cheltenham. A series known as “Mr. Woodward's Grand Concerts” attracted the finest virtuosi from the European continent.

Mothers in romance texts – in the built environment, the managed environment, and ostensibly natural spaces – are shown to negotiate, adapt, and appropriate these locations for their own uses, though often in the interests of both their children and seemingly patriarchal concerns. This final chapter builds upon representations of mothers in these spaces and focuses on instances where mothers create physical buildings. In the Middle English Octavian and the French Roman de Melusine, mothers are presented as overseeing physical construction for specific purposes connected with lineage and empire-building. These romances emphasise particular privileged behaviours, such as religious patronage, or invite comparisons with elite historical figures, like Melisende of Jerusalem, to explore the connections between construction and motherhood and to comment upon fourteenth-century noblewomen's contribution to lineage and dynasty. Women's building, then, is both figurative and literal: construction of physical edifices, such as abbeys and castles, patronage of arts and religious communities, and lineages in the form of patrilineal heirs and female networks all contribute to their legacy as builders of people and places.

These two late fourteenth-century romances are, as far as I can ascertain, the only Middle English or French romances that foreground women as builders of physical buildings. It is particularly significant, then, that these two romances share so many other features and concerns. The female characters in these two texts are mothers and their building activities are intricately connected with their motherhood.

Duringthe early nineteenth century Gotthold Ephraim Lessing rode a wave of interest in German culture to prominence in several areas of endeavor in the United States. As Americans sought to develop their own national culture, they looked beyond England particularly to France and Germany for inspiration, recognizing in the Germany of the eigh¬teenth century conditions much like those that prevailed in contemporary America. Influenced by the reputation of higher education in Germany, a number of young Harvard graduates including Edward Everett, George Bancroft, and Joseph G. Cogswell traveled to Göttingen in the second decade of the century for further study and returned convinced of the beneficial role that what they had learned and experienced there could play in their own country. This sense led during the 1820s and in 1840 to the issuance of a review and two extensive and comprehensive review essays devoted entirely or partly to Lessing. Though a few pieces on indi¬vidual texts and themes had appeared before these publications, it is prob¬ably safe to say that the work especially of Bancroft and Cogswell served as impulses or points of reference for the growing number of writings of a specialized or more limited general nature that came out from the 1830s through the 1850s.

Several factors created conditions for the proliferation of writing on Lessing that began after the Civil War. The great expansion of the periodical industry produced far more outlets for writing on all subjects than existed in the first half of the century. It bears repeating here that the periodical press was at the same time the critical press.