Birthing rooms, chambers within elite houses specifically designated for childbirth, are the setting for evocative and important scenes in a number of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century French and Middle English romances. This chapter will consider how women created the space of the birthing room, and how romance texts uphold its importance by showing the consequences of it being breached. As these chambers were an accepted and protected female space, their use in romance can tell us much about women, mothers, and gendered interactions. As already stated, lineage, identity, and destiny are key concerns of the romance genre, and showing the birth of the hero is not only often crucial to the narrative, but also communicates how medieval audiences thought about succession, identity, and gender roles. Gail McMurray Gibson argues that women's power was concentrated in and emanated from the birthing room:

The power dynamic surrounding women's essential involvement in reproduction was complicated by a patriarchal desire to deny the importance of the female bloodline to lineal succession.

Perhaps because he had no children of his own, Francisque was intimately linked to the lives and careers of his siblings’ children. During his retirement in Nantes (which may not have been complete), he could have observed their careers benefitting from what contemporaries recognised as an explosion of enthusiasm for the theatre. The years 1740 to 1770 saw an enormous expansion in the construction of permanent theatre buildings and in the public demand for entertainment. In particular, the prestige of French culture meant competition for the best French performers, and the next generation of the Moylin-Sallé-Cochois family, at least six of whom became actors and/or dancers, were pursuing careers that carried their uncle's legacy to every corner of Europe.

When war broke out in September 1939, prior fears over the strength of the destroyer fleet would soon be realised with aggressive and unrestricted submarine warfare. Britain relied so heavily on imported goods that gaining control of the Atlantic and keeping merchant vessels flowing freely was critical because, if merchant ships could be readily sunk and imports disrupted in a successful blockade, Britain would be forced into starvation. It could take just one lone U-boat to wreak havoc, picking off vessels, destroying thousands of tons of supplies and killing hundreds of men. Convoying was effective as long as there were enough escorting ships for the task – especially corvettes and destroyers – and this aspect has come to characterise the Second World War at sea. The initial stages of the Battle of the Atlantic proved nearly disastrous when the large number of merchant vessels being sunk, accompanied by the diversion of destroyers to other duties – such as protection against an invasion and losses in individual campaigns – created a shortage of naval escorts, prompting several crucial efforts to bolster the destroyer fleet over the next few years.

By 1709 Dublin was second in importance only to London in the burgeoning British Empire. An ever increasing number of ships from Europe, Jamaica and elsewhere, transiting through Irish ports, brought with them luxury goods such as wines, spirits and lemons. In an effort to get around one inconvenience of the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–13), French wine was sometimes rebranded as ‘Irish wine’ before being sent on to London. Another thriving industry was linen production, largely controlled by traders from northern counties, although Dublin retained its position as the chief marketplace for linen that was whitened. Yet the city's wide streets and gracious buildings belied the poverty of many of its residents. Charity remained largely in the hands of local churches and David Dickson suggests that the Protestant poor may have been better catered for than Catholics, as parishes had systems in place to raise taxes to support them. In 1706 the workhouse in St James's opened its doors, but here the focus was on work, with little provision for healthcare, and while in 1710 Dr Richard Steevens left money to fund a hospital ‘for maintaining and curing from time to time such sick and wounded persons whose Distemper and Wounds are curable’, it was another decade before anything resembling a voluntary hospital would be operational in the city.

This book chronicles the great Palatine migration of 1709, the descendants of which are scattered throughout Ireland, Britain, America, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and elsewhere. It is also a book about identity, and specifically the difficulty which arises from ascribing identities to groups of migrants. Such imputations can prove difficult to shake off, which happened with the ‘poor Protestant Palatines fleeing persecution’, as they are still recalled three hundred years later. Perhaps this is not surprising given that, in an eighteenth-century public relations exercise, the pens of luminaries such as Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift and Joseph Addison were set to work framing and reframing Palatine identity, following the arrival of at least 13,500 migrants in London in one six-month period.

This book highlights overlapping social and religious networks which enabled the Palatine migration to take place in the first instance. It explains how, in an era of rapid colonial expansion, plans were afoot as early as 1705 to move large groups of European migrants to the New World. But issues surrounding religious dissent informed the welcome afforded to Palatines in both Britain and Ireland and help to explain why the numbers of Palatines remaining in Ireland is underestimated.

The Palatines were not the only large group to depart Europe in a thirty-year timeframe. Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 by King Louis XIV saw an estimated 200,000 Huguenots flee France with an estimated 40,000 settling in England, while it is estimated 10,000 Huguenots settled in Ireland.

Open City and The Other Crucifix explore another component of flight—the frustrations that come with unrealized dreams. This chapter examines the American Dream as one of the motivating factors for flight and its inaccessibility by the migrant upon arrival in America. What emerges in these two novels is that, regardless of the promise of freedom and liberty, the realities are different. Julius in Open City and Jojo in The Other Crucifix struggle to overcome social exclusion and the economic barriers to improvement. The references to similar migrant experiences in the scenes in Brussels in Open City again speak to a broader conception of fragility and brokenness in migrant life abroad. While Jojo arguably achieves his dream, the novel's end suggests that the upward climb to social integration has only just started.

Teju Cole's Open City can be read as a prologue to The Other Crucifix in terms of the promise of migration and the subsequent reversal of the migrant's expectations. Its protagonist, Julius, is from Nigeria, on a psychiatric fellowship conducting a clinical study of affective disorders in the elderly. Based in New York City, a place that can be characterized as an “open city” with endless possibilities and where dreams are accomplished, Julius goes through a process of psychological turmoil as he comes face to face with the realities of life in the West. Like Jojo Badu, Julius's sense of migration is based on the ideologies associated with the promise of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” which they would have read about back home in Ghana and Nigeria and are now striving to achieve in the United States.

Peter the Deacon, hagiographer, chronicler, classical scholar, forger, and serial liar, is not as familiar to Anglophone medievalists as other similar (if perhaps less outrageous) figures such as Abbo of Fleury and Osbert of Clare. Yet he is hardly unknown to the wider world of medieval scholarship. It was indeed more than a century ago that the German historian Erich Caspar published a brilliant pioneering monograph that revealed his many-sided, if seemingly bizarre, intellectual activity. More recently, if still some considerable time ago, the Harvard classicist and medievalist Herbert Bloch devoted a number of studies over half a century to aspects of Peter's work, as well as to the wider intellectual and religious environment of the abbey of Montecassino in the early and central Middle Ages. Other distinguished scholars have also made significant contributions to our understanding of Peter the Deacon, notably Paul Meyvaert, Hartmut Hoffmann, Jean-Marie Martin, and my own doctoral supervisor John Cowdrey. Why then might this be a good moment to attempt a reassessment of this interesting, if in the last resort perhaps relatively peripheral, figure in the history of medieval monasticism?

First, because for all the fine studies devoted to the various works that Peter produced during some twenty-five or so years of busy – one might almost say compulsive – writing, there has been no real attempt since Caspar's book of 1909 to draw these threads together in a summary that places his career in its proper context.

Introduction

The Westernisation efforts during the late Ottoman Empire and early Turkish Republic heavily influenced the cultural and social landscapes of the time, with the piano emerging as a significant symbol of this shift. Women were encouraged to learn the piano as a reflection of modernity, aligning with Western ideals promoted by both the state and elite families. Piano proficiency among women was considered a marker of social respectability and a desirable trait for marriage, symbolising an educated and modern lifestyle. These motivations led to the popularisation of piano education among upper-class women, intertwining their musical pursuits with cultural expectations and reinforcing their roles as representatives of Western modernity within a traditionally Eastern society. This chapter examines the historical significance of piano education for Turkish women, focusing on its role in the Westernisation process and its reflection in the lives of Ottoman and Republican-era women. It begins with an account of music in the Imperial Palace, before turning to literary representations of women at the piano. Finally, it considers the role of women pianists in Turkish musical life today.

The relationship between women and the piano in the Tanzimat (Reorganisation, 1839–76) and post-Tanzimat (Edebiyat-ı Cedide or New Literature, 1896–1901) periods provides a lens through which to observe societal shifts towards Westernisation in Turkish society.

Part 3 focuses on strategies of spatial structuring within multi-movement sonatas. Tracing a broadly chronological path across Beethoven's sonata oeuvre in the following chapters, I explore the evolving aesthetic and dramatic response to strategies of shaping pitch and keyboard space. A developing awareness of the largescale possibilities of shaping peaks and wide spans becomes increasingly evident in Beethoven's use of the full potential of expanding keyboard space for emphasis and goal-directed motion, a growing response to the poetic aspects of extreme sonorities, both low as well as high, explored within each original design. We begin with one of the most innovative sonatas of Beethoven's first decade, Sonata in C minor Op. 13, Pathétique.

Composed in 1798, at the cusp of the nineteenth century, the Grande Sonate Pathétique Op. 13 displays forward-looking Romantic tendencies in its radical use of formal, tonal and thematic processes, as well as its spatial design, unifying elements interwoven with narrative elements. Its ‘Sturm und Drang’ character is inspired, as Kinderman has suggested, by the Schillerian concept of pathos as moral resistance to the ‘reality’ of suffering nature, a dialectic of reason and emotion. Deployment of local registral contrasts may be seen to evoke such ‘resistance’, for instance rising lines over pedal points or falling bass progressions, expansions and contractions. The following analysis illuminates the way in which Beethoven's strategy of deploying registral structures responds to the formal divisions within each movement's design, whether sonata, rondo-variation, or sonata-rondo. Using both pitch-space maps (PSMs) and registral graphs (RGs) we explore large-scale connections and processes as well as gestures at the micro-level including registral bridges, expansion and contraction, and registral shifting.

The Carolingian period occupies a unique place in the history of biblical commentary. Many of the earliest and best manuscripts of Latin patristic commentaries stem from this period, part of an apparent uptick in manuscript production and preservation. Our sense of the early tradition depends on how it was received in the eighth and ninth centuries: the Carolingians were ‘the first great audiences for the church fathers’, collecting, gathering, and editing their texts. Moreover, it was a time in which many new commentaries were written. The 150 years before the accession of Charlemagne witnessed the composition of relatively few complete commentary texts except those written by Bede, Isidore of Seville, and various anonymous commentators, not least in Ireland. But for the next period, from the mid-eighth century through to the first millennium, there was an explosion of exegesis, which would leave a defining mark on the Western commentary tradition. John J. Contreni suggests that at least 220 biblical commentaries were produced in the Carolingian period (750–1000), compared to about 70 between 500 and 750.The achievements of this time would set the stage for later biblical commentary in the Middle Ages.

My hypothesis is that the key element for the development of exegetical publishing was the flourishing of scholarly patronage under Carolingian rulers. They seemed aware of the unique time in which they ruled, and praised the learning of those who served them. In the middle of the ninth century, the Emperor Lothar I lavishly poured out his praise: God gave to past generations the likes of ‘Jerome, Augustine, Gregory, and Ambrose, among many others’.