This article explores the third edition of William Habington (1605-1654)’s lyric poems, Castara (1640). This final edition of Castara—originally published in 1634 as a series of love poems to his wife, Lucy Herbert—was transformed by a prose sketch of ‘A Holy Man’ and twenty-two devotional poems. The article draws on Habington’s recusant roots and his engagement with French, Counter-Reformation Catholicism emanating from Queen Henrietta Maria’s court circle, and argues for an early modern Catholic poetics. It explores why these poems were published in 1640 and argues that this edition of Castara, by one of the ablest Catholics of his generation, offers a unique glimpse into, and understanding of, English Catholicism at the volatile political moment prior to the outbreak of the English Civil War.

This article examines the role of English Catholics in 1560s Counter-Reformation Rome. Working with the methodologies of micro-history, it focuses on their feast of St Thomas of Canterbury, celebrated at the English Hospice in the city in December 1569. It brings together diverse strands of social and cultural enquiry—on inventory records, the urban environment and culinary history—to highlight the interconnections between the feast and the faith-based practices of this influential group of men, at a crisis moment in relations between England and the Holy See. This examination highlights how the material and spiritual practices associated with contemporary food cultures shaped post-Reformation English Catholic piety. Two different celebrations were invoked at the dinner commemorating St Thomas’s martyrdom: one was a secular hybrid meal of English and Mediterranean cultures, the other the sacred, but now disputed commemoration of the eucharist, as it was contested by Protestants. The article argues that these forms of lived religion had political consequences, by tracing a number of the celebrants beyond the meal itself and into the papal deliberations that resulted in Elizabeth I’s excommunication.

In this article we trace a biography of vacuum aspiration in Spain between the 1960s and 1980s. Analysing the local but transnationally connected history of vacuum aspiration during late Francoism and the democratic transition, we argue that this technology was since the mid-1960s reincarnated in mainstream medical discourse as vacuum curettage, presented as a major medical innovation in diagnosis and therapy. While abortion activists working at the end of the 1970s emphasized the group and political components of a technique they called the ‘Karman method’, doctors performing illegal abortions within the family planning network defined vacuum aspiration in terms of safety and medical innovation. As we demonstrate, this technique embodied meanings that at times overlapped, at others conflicted, contingent on whether aspirations were linked to medical innovation, pro-abortion activism, or social justice.

This article attempts to map some of Vietnam’s national identities that were constructed in the early twentieth century (1900s-1930s). Instead of treating Vietnamese national identity either as a monolithic entity or as too fragmented to be considered a useful concept, it shows that at least three interactive and overlapping national identities emerged, each with its own political significance and state institutionalisation. To map them, this article re-traces several key nationalists in the early twentieth century. It situates each of their national imaginations within interconnected global relations, namely, Civilisational relations of hierarchy, cultural relations of equality, and radical relations of exploitation and oppression. This analytical approach to mapping national identity offers a framework that may prove valuable for cross-national comparative studies.

In this paper, we present two corpus-based case studies which cast doubt on the postulation of a distinction between complements and modifiers in pre-head position in the English noun phrase. Based on examples such as medical student, the paper focuses on ordering patterns as an easily observable criterion, rather than more difficult or less reliable criteria such as anaphoric replacement or stress patterns. The conclusion is that the pre-head dependents treated as complements in, for example, the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (Huddleston & Pullum et al. 2002), should rather be treated as type-dependents. This conclusion, at least as far as ordering patterns are concerned, is in line with the postulation of a “classifier” function in approaches to English noun phrases such as Feist (2009).

The Liber Lynne, a fifteenth-century manuscript in the archive of the City of London Corporation, is a puzzle. Catalogued among the City of London’s collections of written custom (formerly Guildhall MS Cust. 15), it is generally defined as a cartulary. In this article, I study the Liber Lynne as a book that was both about family and for family. Its chance survival, a consequence of its acquisition by the Hanseatic Steelyard in London before the end of the fifteenth century, offers an unusual opportunity to explore the concept of family in the medieval English town. I situate the Liber Lynne in a distinct place and time, and argue that the book is a distinctively urban manuscript, the outcome of urban interests, ambitions, and anxieties. It also reveals the persistent and ubiquitous presence of plague, which exposed the fragility and precarity of families, but helped to give them different shapes. These shapes, or structures, were fluid because of the mutable nature of ideas about family and its voluntaristic qualities. Family, the Liber Lynne suggests, was a choice and a practice.

This article examines the heritagization of nuclear urbanity as a distinctive form of Soviet industrial urbanism. The research focuses on the satellite settlement of the Ignalina Nuclear Power Plant in Lithuania, which exemplifies the ‘presentism’ characteristic of Soviet heritage – an entanglement of multiple temporalities alongside goals of propaganda and preservation. We argue that local engagements with nuclear cultural heritage are rooted in the fact that commemorative practices were embedded from the inception of the atomic town’s development. This early transformation of nuclear urbanity into heritage ensured that the former Soviet atomic town preserved not only material traces but also a lasting infrastructure of social memory and urban imagery, mobilized by various actors for identity building and future negotiations.