This chapter describes the contrasting portrait of the Protestant Virgin Mary as an ordinary and even erring woman whose maternal role was very limited. Catholics most often defended Marian devotion on religious grounds. They argued that, sanctioned by Scripture and tradition, it promoted a close relationship with God. This woman, who was a more negative figure than the woman envisioned by the reformers, also emerged beginning in the 1830s, partly as a response to the Catholic Virgin Mary. This Virgin Mary was an expression of Protestants' religious beliefs, particularly the emphasis on sola Scriptura and a direct relationship between the divine and the devout, yet it also had a polemical purpose. In promoting this figure and denouncing the Catholic Virgin Mary, Protestants could argue that Catholicism was a corrupt form of Christianity and that Protestantism was the biblical religion. In addition, by describing a woman whose motherhood gave her no special prerogatives, Protestants could counteract the popular perception that women were innately maternal and that this characteristic gave them an influence over the public sphere.

This chapter traces the ways in which a number of key Marxist theoreticians have attempted to marry the structural and agential aspects of Karl Marx's theory of history. It argues that neither the extremes of Louis Althusser's structuralism nor Jean-Paul Sartre's individualism were able to provide a defensible reinterpretation of historical materialism. The chapter argues that while Edward Thompson scored many direct hits against the schematism of structural history, his own positive alternative was ultimately unpersuasive. It suggests that the attempt to synthesise structure and subject into a Marxist theory of agency, suggested by Perry Anderson and present in the early work of Alasdair MacIntyre, and developed by Alex Callinicos, is the most powerful reinterpretation of historical materialism to date. The emergence of the modern anti-capitalist movement suggests that Marx was right to argue that the struggle for freedom can never be extinguished because it is written into our nature.

The epilogue reflects on the close relationship between Spenser’s sense of humour and his authorship of allegory. It argues that allegory does not merely facilitate humour (through irony, naïveté, incongruity, and so forth); it also focuses us on what Spenserian humour is, in a far-reaching sense, ‘about’. Readers of The Faerie Queene are not simply asked to see through a story to its moral applications; they are asked to engage with a mode of representation whose secondariness, limitations, and pleasurability are philosophically and theologically suggestive. This concluding piece reviews the strategies by which Spenser accentuates these suggestive traits, in effect pulling together the foregoing chapters’ key observations regarding the intersection of allegory and humour.

This chapter contains translated and annotated sources discussing the period July 1397 to May 1399 during the reign of Richard II.

This chapter moves Spenser to the centre of the comic Renaissance. It documents the wealth of influences operating together during the Elizabethan period, and engages with the wider Spenser canon in order to demonstrate the breadth of his engagement with, and contribution to, comic literary culture. This survey emphasises the period’s humanist preoccupation with linguistic play and wit; its ‘rediscovery’ of classical authors such as Lucian, Apuleius, and Ovid; and its love of jestbooks and mock-encomia. It also represents medieval traditions of humour, both secular and religious, as typified by the semi-parodic chivalric romance tradition and the comic dimensions of religious drama. Erasmus’s Praise of Folly is considered for its profound and influential fusion of medieval and humanist traditions. The energy of the Elizabethan period’s comic literary culture is contextualised by entrenched patterns of hostility to humour and laughter and the intensification of these after the Reformation. The humour of The Faerie Queene – a national epic with canonical aspirations – emerges as both typical of the period’s generic freedoms and notably provocative.

The Second International of socialist parties was the undoubted custodian of Marxist 'orthodoxy' from its formation in 1889 until its de facto collapse at the outbreak of the First World War. For the interpretation of historical materialism associated with the sophisticated Second International thinkers in their best works, Karl Kautsky was much more powerful that either Perry Anderson or Steve Rigby. Like Lucio Colletti, Anderson had interpreted the shift from Second to Third International Marxism as including a 'voluntaristic' break with 'fatalistim'. Colletti suggested the evolutionary interpretation of Marxism, which he likened unfavourably to the 'voluntarist' Marxism of the Third International, was born out of Friedrich Engels's crude systemisation of Marx's thought and reached its zenith in Kautsky's theory of history. Kautsky was the dominant intellectual within the Second International, while the works of Georgi Plekhanov and Antonio Labriola informed the best historiography produced by the succeeding generation of Marxists.

The broader conceptual context within which the twin vocabularies of history and of memory take on meaning is that of discourse on the relationships of past to present in human societies. John Lukacs writes of history as 'the remembered past', Peter Burke of 'history as social memory', Patrick Hutton of 'history as an art of memory'. Tensions can arise at the point between the idea of history as memorialization or witness and other conceptions of what history ought to be about. Shifting conceptions of the history-memory relationship form part of broader shifts and contests in cultural values. The 'historical past', R. G. Collingwood concluded, is 'not a remembered past, nor a sum of remembered pasts', but an 'ideal past', a past that has been organized through the workings of a constructive analytical imagination.