In England William Young had assumed responsibility for ordering the affairs of the poor as a magistrate in the Buckinghamshire parishes in which he lived and for the county and, as a member of parliament, he took a keen interest in the state of the poor throughout the kingdom. In the Caribbean, from his succession to his father's estates in 1788 until he relinquished most of his property to his creditors twenty years later, he claimed ownership of up to 1000 enslaved people in Antigua, St Vincent and Tobago. From 1807 until 1815, as governor of Tobago, he felt that he had a particular responsibility for the poor of the island. ‘During the twenty-three years I sat in the Parliament’, he then wrote, ‘I was much employed in the Service of the Poor’; he pledged himself that he ‘would now do service to the lower class here of whatever colour or condition’. With a very few exceptions, the lower class in Tobago were, of course, enslaved Africans.

Young's views on the management of the English rural poor and on slavery can be reconstructed from a considerable body of writing and reported speeches. As Chapter 1 has shown, he frequently spoke in the House of Commons on rural poverty and published pamphlets on it. Particularly after his visit to his estates in 1791–2, Young spoke about slavery in parliament on numerous occasions and wrote about the enslaved on his own estates in the extracts of the journal of his trip that were published in 1801. As governor of Tobago he reported on the condition of the enslaved in his despatches to London and had collected much material about them which he communicated to the House of Commons in 1811 in a long reply to questions circulated to West Indian governors.

Curiosities and Games

One of the odder texts of the late Middle Ages is a meditational and pedagogical dialogue, an education for princes [regimen principis] concerning Godhead, Creation, the nature of free will (divine and human), and the virtuous life, structured in terms of playing a “game of bowls” [ludus globi]. Its author, Nicolas of Cusa (Nikolaus Cusanus, 1401–64), was a learned cardinal- bishop, but not a university-centered academic. His career was spent in papal administration, moving easily between Germany and Italy during a notably contentious period in the western Church. He was also possessed of one of the most inquisitive philosophical intellects of the notably inquisitive fifteenth century, thoroughly learned in medieval philosophy as well as in the Ancients. In this Dialogue, composed (1462–63) towards the end of his life, he imagines conversing with two young princes of Bavaria, John (in Book I) and Albert (in Book II) on a field laid out for playing bowls. Cusanus imagines himself seated alone on the sidelines, tired out from the game he has taught to them, the one which the younger princes are now actively playing. Prince John asks him to explain the rationale of this new (to him at least) delightful game [ludus iocundus]:

John: All of us are fascinated with this delightful new game – perhaps because in it there is the figuration [=figuratio] of a kind of cosmic contemplation that we beg to have explained.

Cardinal: Not a bad move for us to make [non male movemini], various sciences have their instruments and games: arithmetic has its rithmomachy; music has its monochord; and even the game of chess does not lack for concealed ethical knowledge [mysterio moralium].

Catherine de Baune had paid such a high price for her opéra-comique licence that her company was almost bankrupt by the time of the 1718 Foire Saint- Germain, while the unlicensed Saint-Edme troupe were reduced to advertising a flying donkey before their performances of Lesage's Le Château des Lutins. Crowds flocked to see a poor donkey sliding down a rope, and it was lampooned in a contemporary satirical song, ‘L’Âne de la Foire’:

Introduction

During the century between 1880 and 1980 most local communities in the North Sea Lowlands relinquished control over water management to the state. Therefore, this chapter is almost entirely dedicated to the increasing grip of the state on water management. This was achieved through reorganisations of water authorities and through the implementation of enormous infrastructural projects that went far beyond the capacities of the traditional water authorities, but also through smaller yet still substantial improvements in drainage. Because of the ever-increasing role of the state, the regional approach of the previous chapter will be abandoned here. In this period it was the state which determined the development of water management and its organisation. First we will take a short look at the general history of the North Sea area during this period. The period ends in 1980, when doubts about the environmental sustainability of modern agriculture began to influence government policy, leading to the introduction of environmental legislation. Then a period of transformation began, which will be addressed in the epilogue.

Throughout his career, the British monarchy has been a major theme in David Cannadine's work. From the Silver Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II in 1977 down to the coronation of King Charles III in 2023, he has commentated in some way on all the major royal occasions of the last half-century. He has written in detail about every sovereign or heir to the throne since Queen Victoria, and also reflected on earlier dynasties such as the Tudors, Stuarts and Hanoverians. In two long essays, published in the 1980s, he set out a new approach to writing the history of modern monarchy, one which has proved influential on the subsequent historiography of the topic. And latterly he has become a royal biographer, of George V (2014), and, for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, of which he is editor, of the late Prince Philip, the duke of Edinburgh.

This short appreciation aims to describe what amounts to a considerable oeuvre on monarchy, and to chart the changing tone of Cannadine's understanding of the institution, from pioneer of a new historical approach in the 1980s, to critic of royalty in the 1990s, to elder statesman of court history and go-to royal observer since the 2010s.

Reinventing the history of monarchy

‘The Context, Performance and Meaning of Ritual: The British Monarchy and the “Invention of Tradition”’ is the second most widely cited of David Cannadine's works, surpassed only by Ornamentalism: How the British Saw their Empire (2001), which itself includes a chapter on ‘Monarchs’.

This book explores how religious experiences intertwine with emotions in modern European women's lives. Its authors uncover how religious norms and expectations, as channeled through emotions, shaped women's roles and lives. From the fiery Norwegian religious missionary Marie Monsen to the grieving young German Jewish woman Anna Bauer, from servant women in Bavaria to nineteenth-century kindergarten teachers, this book takes up the stories of women to try to understand how religion and the emotions guided women's understandings of themselves and their roles in their communities.

The authors of these chapters, which had their origins at a 2022 conference at the Indiana University Gateway in Berlin, include scholars from history, religious studies, Jewish studies, gender studies, German studies, and folklore. The volume centers primarily on Germany but it also includes contributions that focus on Belgium, Norway, England, and Ireland. Adding a transnational dimension to the exploration of women, religion, and emotions that looks beyond the borders of Germany enriched all participants’ work because so many religious phenomena crossed national borders. Mysticism, Marian apparitions, spiritualism, and occultism were also widespread across Europe and invite comparative study and conversation. The Catholic Cult of the Sacred Heart, for instance, was inaugurated by a French nun in the seventeenth century, from where it spread across Europe, and Síle de Cléir writes about its manifestation in twentieth-century Ireland in this volume. In general, the authors in this book aim to explore the unique historical experiences of specific women as well as a wide variety of women's lives and contexts. It is our hope that this volume spurs new research to bring in the voices of women omitted from this volume, for example Muslim women, members of the free churches, as well as adherents of various forms of non-traditional spiritualism.

On 6 October 2022, a student in the all-male college dorm Elías Ahúja yelled at those living in the all-female dorm, Santa Mónica, across the way at University Complutense of Madrid in Spain: “¡Putas! ¡Salid de vuestras madrigueras como conejas! ¡Sois unas putas ninfómanas! ¡Os prometo que vais a follar todas en la capea!” (Hedgecoe 2022: 2–5). The chant, part of a rite of passage for university newcomers, ignited a mass, choreographed catcalling, whereby fellow students across the men's residence pulled open their blinds and started shouting and making animal noises. The scream, part and parcel of rape culture on university campuses, was rife with zoomorphic images that equated women with bunnies and their halls of residence with burrows (Anderson and Gonick 2021: 52–7; Muller 2015: 1–12). This imagery oozes sexuality, since furry animals are common euphemisms for female genitalia and for attractive women – as the Playboy Bunnies demonstrate (Chamizo and Sánchez 2000: 92–7; Hines 1999: 9–11; López-Rodríguez 2009: 88). Besides calling them whores and nymphomaniacs, the chant refers to their imminent sexual encounter at the school's annual bullfight (capea), an event traditionally associated with masculinity and violence in Spanish culture (Brandes 2009: 779–86). In addition, the animal sounds made by the male students functioned as a sort of mating call that recreated a hunting scenario where the male acts as a sexual predator awaiting its female prey.

Far from being an isolated instance, faunistic tropes like these ones permeate hate speech against women (Bock and Burkley 2019: 263–7; Piñeiro-Otero and Martínez-Rolán 2021: 8). There are, indeed, numerous cases of genderbased violence through which the female victim is reduced to an irrational and sexualized beast. This chapter aims to explore the animalization of the female victim in literary and real episodes of gender violence in contemporary Spain.

The outraged comments from Napoleon Bonaparte and Friedrich von Gentz (1764–1832) condemning the political interventions of Germaine de Staël and Dorothea von Kurland and her daughters Wilhelmine von Sagan (1781–1839) and Dorothea (Dorothée) von Sagan (1793–1862) are indicative of the tensions round elite women's political agency in this period. Whilst older historiography has argued that women were marginalised from areas of politics in the eighteenth century, and identified 1832 as a turning point, current research has corrected this argument. Recent scholarship has also adjusted the Habermasian theory of separate spheres (see Introduction) which underpinned some of these assessments. As I have shown through my analysis of Dorothea von Kurland, Friederike von Brun, Anna Paulina Jabłonowska, and Izabela Czartoryska, amongst others, women were playing important roles in international political debate across Europe. They were crucial political and cultural agents of change in the eighteenth century.

However, it is important to remember that my study concentrates on elite women who were part of wider transnational kinship and social circles that made political interventions possible. The case studies draw from a range of noble women, from members of the gentry to the aristocracy. Their rank, direct and indirect influence, and their hard and soft power cannot be separated.

In May 1922 tenants, employees and the wider community of Nanteos in Cardiganshire congregated for a communal event centred on the heir to the estate. The occasion was not one of celebration but of condolence and commemoration: the unveiling of a memorial, in the form of a Celtic ring-cross, erected at Southgate, Aberystwyth, by public subscription. Its bilingual inscription records that this was funded ‘by tenants and employees of the Nanteos estate’ in memory of Lieutenant W. E. Powell of the Welsh Guards, heir to the estate, ‘who fell in action’ in France in November 1918 – five days before the Armistice. He died before the attainment and celebration of his coming of age and was his parents’ only son. Their deaths in 1930 and 1952 brought an end to the long line of Powell of Nanteos.

The erection of public memorials across the villages and towns of Wales shows that the First World War took a heavy toll in most communities and on all parts of Welsh society. It was also a significant milestone in the demise of the estates systems. Many of the young heirs to Welsh estates who celebrated their majorities in the years preceding the conflict threw themselves into the service of their country and did not return home. Lieutenant Walter de Winton of Maesllwch in Radnorshire died in 1914 having celebrated his coming of age in June of that year.

Writing his ‘Musical Sketches from Old Vienna’ in 1861–3, Viennese lawyer and amateur bass singer Leopold von Sonnleithner foregrounds the agency of dilettantes in the German-speaking lands in the early nineteenth century. The sketches were penned around thirty-five to forty-five years after the Viennese salons he describes, in the period 1814–25, which we would now call the early Vormärz or Biedermeier era. Like Hanslick (see Chapter 1), who draws on Sonnleithner’s account, Sonnleithner paints this era in Viennese history as a kind of quiet revolution, of talented men and women within the confines of the salon who ‘speak’ through their voices and instruments. In France and Italy, dilettantes are apparently more passive. Reacting to performances with enthusiasm, to be sure, they remain essentially ‘silent’: they do not take part.

Sonnleithner certainly underestimates French and Italian dilettantes in this account of the salon in the German-speaking lands. But drawing on the evidence of many handwritten programmes from Viennese salons in the era, and his own notes and memories and those of family and friends, he was nonetheless in a good position to account for the uniquely participatory character of the early nineteenth-century Viennese salon.

In mid-sixteenth-century London, a very wealthy married woman started to believe that she was pregnant. This woman, under great pressure to bear an heir, felt her body, particularly her abdomen, changing and growing. After some time, around the fourth month of her pregnancy, she thought that she felt her foetus quicken, or move. Later, the woman and her ladies began preparing for the imminent birth of her infant. They organised her lying-in room, and necessities for the newborn such as a cradle and swaddling clothes. Her due date arrived and passed, and her pregnancy continued. In fact, her pregnancy continued for many months past this date, yet no foetus ever appeared. The woman and her husband were greatly disheartened by this experience. Some observers of the event even ridiculed them for mistakenly believing in the pregnancy. A few years later, the woman experienced another pregnancy, which again did not result in the birth of an heir. She died a few months later.

The above account recalls the events of Queen Mary Tudor's pregnancies, in 1555 and again in 1558. False Pregnancy begins its story at this mid-sixteenthcentury moment, to show that Mary I's experience of appearing and feeling pregnant, but not giving birth to a baby, was common in the early-modern world. Mary I's experiences were, of course, significantly different to most women. For one, Mary was presumably the wealthiest woman in England at this time. Moreover, her non-pregnancies played out under intense public and international scrutiny. The Queen and her husband, Prince Philip II, were subject to immense pressure to legitimise their rule through the birth of an infant. While at the beginning of Mary's apparent pregnancy this birth seemed inevitable, as the last potential time for her delivery passed some observers believed that she might have miscarried her foetus. Others declared that she had instead experienced dropsy, a form of abdominal swelling, or perhaps a ‘false conception’, ‘mole’ or ‘mola’.

The two Sonatas that we now know as Opp. 23 and 24 were first published together in 1801 by Mollo of Vienna, under the heading ‘Deux Sonates pour le Piano Forte avec un Violon, Op. 23.’ Curiously, this edition contained two separate parts for the violin, printed in portrait for ‘Sonata I’ and landscape for ‘Sonata II’. Possibly because it was therefore impossible to bind the two violin parts together, the two Sonatas were re-published separately the following year under the opus numbers that we now know. In the light of the immediate and enduring popularity of Op. 24 in F Major (the Spring, as it has come to be known), it is surprising that Op. 23 in A Minor has been somewhat neglected by performers and almost entirely overlooked by scholars to date. There are compelling reasons to consider the two Sonatas as a pair, both critically and in performance; indeed, Szigeti sensed this in 1965 when he wrote that the two Sonatas ‘should be given together’, despite conceding that ‘this is never done.’ Why was he so convinced? Complete Beethoven opuses that contain multiple works are rarely performed complete, except for the final triptych of Piano Sonatas, Opp. 109–11, although even these are far more often played individually. These days, I almost always programme Opp. 23 and 24 in the same concert, thus congruent with Szigeti.

The most prominent reason for pairing the two Sonatas is to be found in the tonal/thematic relationships that bind the two together; the harmonic and structural stability of Op. 24 ‘completes’ Op. 23, which is far more volatile in character and construction, with a particularly enigmatic and unsettled ending. A further impetus for the coupling of the two Sonatas will be offered via gendered readings, particularly of Op. 23, which reveal a Sonata of considerable gender instability, resolved, via Op. 24, in a triumph of the feminine principle.

The revisionist historiography of the English Reformation brings a change of optics in relation to ‘the north’. A north-south divide, with the north backward and papist, disconnected from a supposed Protestant mainstream, has become a ready historical cliche. In an infuential study, A.G. Dickens presented the religious struggle as efectively over with the triumph of the Protestant party in 1559, leaving only a ‘residual problem’, a ‘Catholic threat’, in a region, the north-west, whose religious ‘backwardness’ made it a prime reception zone for external Catholic intervention. Dickens pictured the nightmare of Elizabeth's principal minister, William Cecil, as ‘a map of western Europe, with one arrow stretching from Spain to Ireland, a second from Ireland to Lancashire, and a third from Lancashire to London’.

In 1975, contrary to Dickens’ thesis of rapid Protestant triumph, a seminal study by Christopher Haigh expressed the suspicion that the real contrast was not ‘between Lancashire and what actually took place in the rest of England’ but ‘between Lancashire and what the conventional wisdom tells us happened’ in the rest of England. Haigh's work fattened the contours and developed into a far-reaching revisionist project. A post-Dickens consensus casts doubt on the wider, nationwide, purchase of Protestantism by Elizabeth's accession and sees protestantisation, across all counties, as a slow and contested process, a longue durée which only began in 1558–9. As Michael Questier puts it, in relation to Elizabethan Sussex, many English counties were more like Lancashire than everyone thought: the split between a supposedly backward ‘Catholic north’ and a supposedly progressive ‘Protestant south’ has been overdone. The north-west has ceased to be an atypical papist backwater, a ‘dark hole’ outside the national fow. Tere were ‘dark holes’ everywhere.

This chapter focuses on the psychological depression and violence that come with unfulfilled dreams. Imbolo Mbue's Behold the Dreamers is crucial to exploring this aspect of the migrant experience upon arrival abroad. The novel tells the stories of two families: Jende and Neni Jonga, African migrants from Cameroon; and Clark Edwards, a wealthy Wall Street banker in the United States, and his wife, Cindy. The intersection of the stories of these two families comes when Jende is hired by Edwards as his personal chauffeur. Jende's employment creates an invaluable opportunity for crossexamination of each other's situations. Jende is given a window seat into the workings of the capitalist system in America. In this way, he is brought face to face with the dynamics of a system that he will have to navigate if his dream is to be accomplished. In working with Jende, Edwards comes to see the realities behind the operation of the immigration system in his own country. In this way, he understands the restrictions of the system that produces migrant labor from which he benefits. As the story unfolds, Jende realizes that his perception of the dream was misconstrued and that capitalism was a stumbling block to its achievement. He sees the realities of the capitalist system in the lives of Clark and Cindy and recognizes the contrast between the superficial attractions and the profound realities. Jende concludes that the cost to achieving his dream is too high and returns home with his family at the end of the novel.

In the opening sections of the novel, Mbue focuses on the dream of the migrant. By dissecting the story of Neni and Jende, she provides a framework for defining both dream and dreamer. Neni's story is a clear illustration of the conflict between the dream and the systems that work to thwart its achievement. At the opening of the novel, she is celebrating a year and a half of residency in New York City. She is depicted as living the American dream, satisfied and fulfilled, even at this early stage in her journey.