In Central and Eastern Europe Arthurian literature was associated with chivalric values. Already present in the byliny tradition of the Kievan Rus’, Arthurian elements cannot be traced to a specific origin/text. The fourteenth-century Old Czech Tristan, also known as Tristan a Izalda, derived from specific German Arthurian texts. This was also the case with the Old Czech Tandariuš (Tandariàš a Floribella). The Tristan tradition appears in Bulgarian (or Bulgarian-Macedonian-Serbian) songs. The sixteenth-century Belarusian Tristan had Italian sources. Polish literature includes only short references to the Arthurian tradition. The so-called Artus Courts (curiae regis Artus) became highly popular in the Hanza towns of the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and they showed that Arthurianism still stood for high moral values at the time.

This chapter explores methods of concentration that do not rely on independence. We introduce the isoperimetric approach and discuss concentration inequalities across a variety of metric measure spaces – including the sphere, Gaussian space, discrete and continuous cubes, the symmetric group, Riemannian manifolds, and the Grassmannian. As an application, we derive the Johnson–Lindenstrauss lemma, a fundamental result in dimensionality reduction for high-dimensional data. We then develop matrix concentration inequalities, with an emphasis on the matrix Bernstein inequality, which extends the classical Bernstein inequality to random matrices. Applications include community detection in sparse networks and covariance estimation for heavy-tailed distributions. Exercises explore binary dimension reduction, matrix calculus, additional matrix concentration results, and matrix sketching.

The literary tradition where Arthur first appeared belongs to Welsh language, the immediate descendent of the Brittonic Celtic language spoken across most of the island of Britain before the subsequent arrivals of the Romans, then the Angles, Saxons and Jutes, and the Normans. At the turn of the sixth century, which marks the moment associated with the Arthur of history, the landscape and cultural outlook of Wales and northern Britain offered an anchor to what were probably oral stories in circulation. The earliest surviving Welsh Arthurian poems and narratives furnished the essence and the pathways for the later transmission and adaptation of the legends into other languages and territories throughout the Middle Ages and beyond. The Cambridge History of Arthurian Literature and Culture (henceforth CHALC) acknowledges the longue durée of Arthuriana, from the origins of the Arthurian story to an exploration of its impressive reach across medieval Europe, then into the global world.

In a time of great contest and confusion over the future of democracy as a governing principle, the example of Abraham Lincoln continues to provide encouragement and direction about democracy’s viability in the face of immense challenges. In The Political Writings of Abraham Lincoln, Allen Guelzo brings into one volume Lincoln’s most famous political documents and speeches from his earliest days as a political candidate under the banner of the Whig Party, to his election and service as the first anti-slavery Republican president, from 1861 to 1865, and the nation’s leader in the fiery trial of civil war. While many anthologies of Lincoln’s political documents routinely concentrate on his presidential years or only on his anti-slavery writings, Guelzo concentrates on documents from Lincoln’s earliest political activity as an Illinois state legislator in the 1830s up through his presidency. The result is an accessible resource for students, researchers, and general readers.

In a time of great contest and confusion over the future of democracy as a governing principle, the example of Abraham Lincoln continues to provide encouragement and direction about democracy’s viability in the face of immense challenges. In The Political Writings of Abraham Lincoln, Allen Guelzo brings into one volume Lincoln’s most famous political documents and speeches from his earliest days as a political candidate under the banner of the Whig Party, to his election and service as the first anti-slavery Republican president, from 1861 to 1865, and the nation’s leader in the fiery trial of civil war. While many anthologies of Lincoln’s political documents routinely concentrate on his presidential years or only on his anti-slavery writings, Guelzo concentrates on documents from Lincoln’s earliest political activity as an Illinois state legislator in the 1830s up through his presidency. The result is an accessible resource for students, researchers, and general readers.

In a time of great contest and confusion over the future of democracy as a governing principle, the example of Abraham Lincoln continues to provide encouragement and direction about democracy’s viability in the face of immense challenges. In The Political Writings of Abraham Lincoln, Allen Guelzo brings into one volume Lincoln’s most famous political documents and speeches from his earliest days as a political candidate under the banner of the Whig Party, to his election and service as the first anti-slavery Republican president, from 1861 to 1865, and the nation’s leader in the fiery trial of civil war. While many anthologies of Lincoln’s political documents routinely concentrate on his presidential years or only on his anti-slavery writings, Guelzo concentrates on documents from Lincoln’s earliest political activity as an Illinois state legislator in the 1830s up through his presidency. The result is an accessible resource for students, researchers, and general readers.

This chapter traces the role of folk music in the changing mediascape in North America from the 1940s to the 1960s. Beginning from Jürgen Habermas’s well-known notion of the ‘public sphere’, the essay locates the folk revival at the intersection of new spaces (Greenwich Village) and new media (the long-playing record). It shows how the technology of the LP made possible juxtapositions of songs from all over the world. With the Weavers, the Kingston Trio, and Peter, Paul and Mary, we see the emergence of folk music for a largely white college-educated public. This history shifts with the emergence of folk ‘stars’ Joan Baez and then Bob Dylan. At the same time the manipulation of the recording studio, in the work of Paul Simon and the Byrds, gives folk a new relationship to rock music. We then see how the comedy duo of the Smothers Brothers picks up on the political energy of folk music and blends it with the new medium of television at the end of the 1960s. These technological developments shape folk music as a force in the political culture of the era, from Martin Luther King to the Women’s Movement.

This chapter interprets Tocqueville’s thought in the context of the political discussions that took place during the French July Monarchy (1830–1848). It begins by exploring how the ruling liberal elite, including figures like François Guizot and Adolphe Thiers, responded to the radical republicans’ arguments about direct popular sovereignty and democracy. This confrontation sets the stage for understanding Tocqueville’s arguments about the people’s two powers in Democracy in America (1835–1840). In that text, Tocqueville criticized the idea of government by public opinion, which was advocated by his liberal contemporaries. Meanwhile, he rehabilitated direct popular sovereignty, as exercised at the local level in the New England township, interpreting it as the beating heart of political democracy and a source of “public spirit.” The concluding section considers how, faced with the impossibility of recreating the American township in France, Tocqueville began to look for alternative sources to foster “public spirit” in his home country, including the colonization of Algeria and the creation of great opposition parties.

The notion of political compromise in party democracy is a cornerstone of Kelsen’s democratic theory. In the legislative, he argued, one party (or several parties) constituting a majority need(s) to somehow get along with a party (or several parties) in the minority if democratic government is to work and last. However, this vision goes against common sense understandings of what it means to have a democratically elected majority; it is also likely to raise some eyebrows among majoritarian theorists of democracy. This chapter explores whether Kelsen’s central idea can possibly be redeemed. Unlike Kelsen’s multiple critics in contemporary democratic theory, it argues that his account of compromise rests on numerous ambiguities that leave it underdetermined on both normative and institutional levels. It also argues and demonstrates that the most plausible understanding of Kelsen’s imperative to compromise rests on the notion of respecting the members of parties in the minority as co-rulers – an intuition derived from a Rousseauian conception of democracy as collective self-rule and adapted to societies characterised by persistent conflicts of interest and moral disagreements. It concludes that, despite its shortcomings, Kelsen’s valorisation of political pluralism, in the legislative and in the public arena, remains an important source of arguments for a time often characterised as a ‘crisis of democracy’ and in the face of rampant anti-partyism.

This chapter explores the earliest insular texts featuring the prophet Merlin, and his Welsh original, Myrddin. From the uses of the name ‘Myrddin’ as a prophetic authority in early Welsh prophecy, to the appearance of ‘Merlin’ in Latin histories and hagiographies in the twelfth century, this chapter details the early literary life of the foremost prophet of the Arthurian tradition. It acknowledges the development of the Arthurian Merlin as the product of multiple, and potentially multidirectional, lines of influence between insular languages, centring on two related figures first conflated by Geoffrey of Monmouth: a northern wild man prophesying in the Caledonian Forest a generation after the age of Arthur, and the child prophet from Carmarthen who interprets the mystery of the red and white dragons in the age before. This is read in relation to wider insular traditions concerning prophecies of national deliverance, and early Welsh references to the prophet ‘Myrdidn’, whose own early legendary biography remains obscure.