Naval culture is inseparable from British identity. Yet, the navy's place in the national consciousness has drastically changed in many respects over the last 70 years. The decline and disintegration of the British Empire after the Second World War reshaped global geopolitics and the navy had to adapt to new maritime threats. The coming of the ‘nuclear age’, alongside events such as the Suez Crisis, the Cold War, the Falklands Conflict, and significant changes to defence policy and national budgets, naturally impacted naval policy, strategy and construction. The Royal Navy, although still highly revered and a prominent part of national identity and heritage, by the latter decades of the twentieth century was no longer the omnipresent institution it had once been.

That being said, naval pageantry retained a firm place in the experience and memory of many communities. Navy Days, held between the 1970s and early 2000s, were still extremely popular events. Highly reminiscent of the ships’ visits and Fleet Reviews of years prior, ‘Navy Days had a big impact on the public perception of the service.’ A key event in the calendar for Portsmouth, Chatham, Plymouth and other dockyards, civilians were welcomed aboard ships with a host of celebratory events, boosting the local economy through increased tourism and inspiring fresh interest in the navy. These are often fondly remembered and formative moments for those living in dockyards and port towns. Childhood trips to Navy Days harked back to train rides to the seaside or Fleet Reviews, with the last events taking place in 2010.

A general survey of the settlement of Bretons in Lincolnshire after the Norman Conquest together with an account of the development of the honour of Richmond in the county, held for some two-thirds of the period to 1399 by the dukes of Brittany or their cadets, has recently been published. In it attention was drawn to some manuscript material, now housed at Nantes in the departmental archives of Loire-Atlantique, relating to late fourteenth-century Boston and other Lincolnshire estates of the honour, which has not been seriously exploited by previous scholars. The opportunity to offer a short contribution to this volume of essays for Nicholas Bennett, who has spent so much of his life making available to others through his own published research and as general editor of the Lincoln Record Society the wealth of documentary evidence available for the historic diocese of Lincoln, is an appropriate one to further highlight the value of this evidence for the social and economic history of medieval Lincolnshire.

The immediate political context explains why these documents are now to be found in Nantes. Following renewal of the general Anglo-French war in 1369, to cement a new alliance with his former ward, John IV, duke of Brittany (1364–99), in 1372 Edward III returned to him the earldom and honour of Richmond that had traditionally been held by his ancestors since shortly after the Norman Conquest. They had last been held briefly by the duke's father, John de Montfort, some thirty years earlier at the beginning of the Breton War of Succession (1341–65), but then used, following Montfort's capture by the French and subsequent early death (1345), to maintain Queen Philippa's household and provide the king's third son, John of Gaunt, with an earldom.

In addition to sailing through a region of turbulent monsoonal weather and somewhat uncharted seas, the country traders operating in the Malay region and between India and China had to pass close by countries with a variety of cultures, ethnicities, languages, societies and values. Robert J. Antony has described the South China Sea, for example, as ‘a maritime melting pot’. Thus, when the route went through the Malacca Strait, through the Malay Archipelago and through the South China Sea and the country traders came into contact with the peoples of these regions they were often faced with social customs outside of their own European-based value systems.

One such traditional custom involving the sea was that generally described in modern studies as maritime raiding. In island Southeast Asia during the late eighteenth century there was ‘an upsurge in Maritime raiding’. ‘Piracy’ – the term formerly applied by the British to the hostile and unauthorised seizure of goods or ships by the local people in a maritime setting – covered a variety of activities intrinsic to local indigenous societies. It could, for instance, be considered a part of legitimate trading, a section of the informal economy, an extension of state power (privateering), opposition to foreign traders or simply a means of increasing labour supply by capturing slaves. It came in many forms by a variety of people, including mutiny by indigenous crews.

Descriptions of particular ‘piratical’ attacks on British shipping have been included in various studies of trade and traders in the Malay Archipelago.

In Christian Petzold's Phoenix (2014), Lene, a friend who helps Nelly (Nina Hoss), the protagonist and a concentration camp survivor, back on her feet after the war openly expresses her anger at Nelly. Coming in response to Nelly's naive insistence on her love for her former husband, Johnny (Ronald Zehrfeld), and her conviction that he neither betrayed nor stopped loving her despite all information to the contrary that Lene provides, Lene's anger returns viewers to the site of Germany's genocidal treatment of the Jews that Nelly suppresses. After listening to Nelly for a while, she arises agitatedly from the sofa, marches over to her desk and lights a cigarette. Slamming the lighter down on the table, she nervously rolls her cigarette between her fingers, and slowly and tensely turning toward Nelly, declares: “Weist du, was mich wirklich anwidert? Wir Juden haben geschrieben, gesungen, und malocht. Manche sind fur Deutschland in den Krieg gezogen. Und die einen wie die anderen wurden vergast. Und jetzt kommen die Uberlebenden zuruck und verzeihen. Die Gaskammern horen auf zu arbeiten und wir verzeihen…jede Feigheit, jeden Verrat. Ich spiele das nicht mit, Nelly.” (Do you know what disgusts me? We Jews wrote, sang, and slogged away. Some went to war for Germany. And regardless of what they did, they were gassed. And now the survivors come back and forgive. The gas chambers stop working and we forgive…every cowardice, every betrayal. I won't play along with that, Nelly.) Lene's anger emerges in response to Nelly's denial of systemic injustice and personal betrayal. Directing it toward Nelly in this moment, she reacts against implicit albeit unintentional participation in a return to normal that elides systemic and individual acts of racism and genocide.

The hardest thing for all of us was the silence of speech and movement…. After many months, many errors, and many patient instructions from our Novice Mistress, we are beginning at last to settle into a more quiet way of living.

Sister Mary (b. 1941), recollecting her recent experience in the novitiate of a Catholic convent in 1960s Wales, wrote of her difficulties in adjusting her everyday bodily movements and auditory practices to conventual ways of movement and speech. Since the foundation of the Sisters of Charity of Our Lady, Mother of Mercy in 1832, Sister Mary and generations of sisters had been schooled in this “more quiet way of living.” This was not a process unique to this religious institute. From the nineteenth century, the formation of a religious sister included being educated in the novitiate, as a postulant and later as a novice, on the aims of the religious institute as well as its spirituality, ministries, customs, and practices. The surge of interest in religious life in the nineteenth century resulted in dramatic increases in the numbers of sisters and nuns particularly in Europe, North America, and the Antipodes. In Catholic France, according to historian Claude Langlois, the number of women religious increased tenfold from 1808 (12,343 members) to 1901 (128,315 members). In Protestant Britain, the nineteenth-century surge in numbers of female religious was more modest, but still significant nonetheless: from a handful of women religious before the 1790s to likely ten thousand sisters and nuns by 1900. The majority of female religious into the twentieth century were sisters who taught, nursed, and engaged in social welfare.

After the Economical Reform Debates of 1779/80, administrative reform became a major political issue. The potential consequences of this reform impulse were at first unclear. When debating reforms, Parliament and the political public mostly concentrated on general issues such as the military and political crisis, national debt, and corruption. With the reports of CEPA, public administration also became a specific subject. Even though few appreciated the minutiae of state administration, administrative reform was in demand. The prospect of reform aroused great expectations, but also great fears.

Prior to the end of the eighteenth century, five ministries dealt with the call for reform: the ministries of North (1770–82), Rockingham (1782), Shelburne (1782–3), Portland (‘Fox–North’, 1783) and, finally, Pitt the Younger (1783–1801). Of these five ministries, the Shelburne ministry and the Pitt ministry provided crucial stimuli for administrative reform. Shelburne announced a ‘general and grand reform’ and took this promise seriously. His ministry sent out a wave of information requests to the departments in order to amend the lack of knowledge about the administrative system. At the same time, Shelburne commissioned a number of agents to prepare reform recommendations for various departments. Although a reform of the Treasury was the only one to be completed, the impetus of the ministry's information gathering effort and reform activity extended far beyond the Treasury. During the Shelburne ministry, administrative reform began to take concrete shape. Pitt also had the reputation of a reformer. After his initial efforts, however, Pitt shifted the issue out of the political limelight, as it proved to be an issue which was vulnerable to attacks from the opposition.

It seems to me that to finish in any definitive manner a book that is about Beginning, with a neat wrap-up in which the great detective Explains All, or that other classic nineteenth-century linear plot in which the characters’ later lives are each summed up would be perverse. True lines in the geometry this book describes do not end, but explicate outward infinitely from their creating dimensionless point, often “kissing” others to form the angles that shape all the specific forms in Nature.

So instead of a formal Conclusion, I will end this study by examining a work that in many ways mirrors, though imperfectly, the one I began with, the fifteenth-century Cardinal Nicolas of Cusa's “On a bowling game” (De ludo globi). Nicolas used geometry as a dynamic structuring device to teach some important virtues of governance, both of self and state, to young princes of a royal household. The work I want to examine now is also by a cleric teaching novices. But this short work is Victorine, from the later twelfth century, and entirely monastic in its intended audience. It addresses not the ways of secular rulers but the ways of contemplative composing and preaching. It is an ars predicandi of a sort but intended for a particular audience, the Augustinian community of St. Victor in Paris, located a short distance away from the precincts of the University that was then just coming into being, although in spirit and institutional mission they seemed far apart.

Elke Schmitter's 2000 novel Frau Sartoris (Mrs. Sartoris, 2003) begins and ends with the same scene: a hit-and-run accident, in which the eponymous protagonist deliberately kills her sixteen-year-old daughter's abusive lover, the nightclub owner and pimp Willroth. For the main character, the murder is an act of female self-assertion and an attempt at establishing agency in a male-dominated society. Reading Schmitter's novel through a lens offered by works that trace the gendered history, psychology, and moral dimension of anger, through Sara Ahmed's and Audre Lorde's notions of anger as a possible catalyst for social change, and through Amia Srinivasan's concept of “apt anger,” highlights the diverse societal and emotional factors that fuel and shape Margarethe Sartoris's anger. These include gender normativity and double moral standards for men's and women's sexualities, motherhood, class, and competing notions of marriage and love, as well as feelings of guilt, vulnerability, helplessness, and humiliation effected by these circumstances. Set in West Germany during the decades following the Second World War, Margarethe's development from romantic young woman to middle-aged adulterer and eventually murderer pinpoints the frustrations and emotional distress the period's gender inequality evoked in many women— an inequality on which second-wave feminism shed light at the time and that despite continued efforts has affected German society to this day. An analysis of the transformation of Margarethe's emotional state from selfdestructive, ineffectual depression to the kind of fury that enables murder contributes to the ongoing debates about the effects of gender inequality on women and the social, psychological, and existential conditions necessary for female subjectivity and authenticity. At the same time, Schmitter's novel raises the question of the legitimacy of a sense of female subjectivity achieved through a kind of vengeful fury that drives the furious individual to suspend moral considerations.

With these lyrics, written by poet and writer Emanuel Harussi (1903–1979) and set to music by composer and pianist Nahum Nardi (1901–1977), the satirical theater Ha’Matate (The Broom) debuted in Tel Aviv in April 1928. This frisky song served as the theater's anthem and manifest. As performances progressed, new stanzas were added while the last lines were retained as the refrain.

Even now, almost a hundred years later, the song's satirical message still stings and bites. The verses from the third program criticized the vagaries of the municipality of Tel Aviv, where the right went left, and the left went right, and circumcision was compulsory; the lyrics of the fourth program refer to the Land of Israel as “occupied territory”; and the final verses scolded local theater critics, who were rich in pretense and poor in talent. Between the 1920s and 1950s, a unique and diverse arena of theaters and theatrical companies evolved in the Jewish community in Mandatory Palestine, known as the Yishuv. Among these, theaters that were called “cabarets,” “light stage,” or “satirical theaters” were Ha’Kumkum (The Kettle), the literary cabaret Tevat Noaḥ (Noah's Ark), or cabaret-cafes such as Semadar (Grape Blossom).

In 1862, fifteen-year-old Dorothea Bernecker applied to become a deaconess at the Kaiserswerth Institute near Düsseldorf, where Protestant women from across Europe had been trained as teachers and nurses for vocational and missionary work since 1836.1 After being rejected on account of her young age and fragile health, she applied again four years later. In the Lebenslauf, or curriculum vitae that she submitted the second time, she wrote of how the initial rejection had made her look at her weakened body with sadness. Then, she went on to describe how she had learned to accept her weakness and find happiness in knowing that her Redeemer lives. This time, she was admitted and began her training on October 31, 1866 (Reformation Day).

The crux of Dorothea's emotional testimony is uncomplicated: physical and worldly despair could be cured through religious piety and redemption. Following the theological arc of Lutheran redemption narratives, it is only when Dorothea accepts her state of helplessness that God's grace can transform the emotional experience of her life. Her writing conveys the basic emotions of sadness and happiness, which perhaps is a reflection of her youth and inexperience, though other Lebensläufe draw upon a broader range of lived experiences to develop more complicated feelings of suffering and grief, familial and Christian love, humility and pride. Dorothea's real life, like those of many deaconess probationers, did not reach an idealized or miraculous state of grace.

The repertoire of the London season 1734 to 1735