This chapter looks at forms of uncertainty that occur at different stages of married life. A central question here is what does uncertainty produce? The chapter focuses partly on Malay protagonists and on two particularly fragile moments in Malay marriage: during betrothal and, counterintuitively, much later on, after several decades, when one might expect marriages to be highly stable. The former was a pattern familiar from earlier research. But some older Malay women spoke of a more recent trend – for husbands of many years to marry a younger woman polygamously. Meanwhile, other, non-Malay, couples have adopted unconventional living arrangements or have taken unusual paths to suit their particular circumstances. In considering how different kinds of marital uncertainty play out, the significance of expectations about marriage and the registers of temporality through which they are calibrated and recalibrated are illuminated. The force of unanticipated events stimulates the reflection of protagonists and their consociates – as readers may recognise from their own experiences – reformulating ideas of what is appropriate or acceptable behaviour, and precipitating new ethical stances.

The aim of this book is to provide evidence to inform the development and implementation of suicide prevention globally. It covers a range of topics that are relevant from local to national levels. It has an unapologetic emphasis on social determinants of suicide and a global perspective, with utility across the world as a primary resource by practitioners and policymakers. It aims at accessibility, with an emphasis on what can be achieved given the current knowledge base.

A central message of this book is the importance of using rigorous evidence to guide suicide prevention, whilst recognising that the best evidence is always partial. Key research is cited in the text and readers are, in places, directed to public-domain digital resources. The book aims to have relevance in low- and middle-income countries, as well as in high-income countries. It is not a country-by-country international overview.

By the early 1930s, the Nazi movement had been dramatically transformed. The medical profession, for example, became heavily influenced by the Nazi movement. Michael Kater estimated that doctors were over-represented in the Nazi Party by a factor of three by the end of Weimar and that 45 per cent joined during the Third Reich. Republican contemporaries were, understandably, scathing critics of National Socialist ideology, but they were mistaken to write off the Nazi movement as being driven solely or even primarily by crassly wrongheaded utopianism or millenarianism. The Republic's welfare system, upgraded as recently as 1927, was in complete disarray from mid-1930 onwards. A contributory system, it was hit by falling receipts and simultaneously rising expenditure once unemployment in Germany began to surge. Forced auctions and dispossessions had become commonplace in rural Germany.

Bastardy is condemned by the highest moral authority, divine law, which is incorruptible. Religious authority formed the backbone of patriarchal order in Renaissance England so the spiritual condemnation of bastardy had important economic and social dimensions. In short, bastardy was ideal to create a humanised version of the morality Vices in a secular play while maintaining an easily identifiable evil 'type'. The majority of Renaissance plays linking bastardy and the Church do so to criticise Catholicism. The Bible's exclusion of illegitimates from the kingdom of heaven is a starting point for characters who, instead of being allied with satanic powers, are utterly detached from religious doctrine, unnervingly atheistic in outlook. These characters make an outright rejection of the moral order which labelled bastardy as the accursed share. Fears about new rational thinking were actually exacerbated by the Protestant culture.

Robert Schumann’s health issues have prompted sustained debates amongst physicians, historians, and musicologists. Proposed etiologies for his decline span bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, neurosyphilis, vascular disease, alcoholism, and personality disorders. Because his final years were spent in a psychiatric asylum, a retroactive narrative of inexorable decline has too often prevailed. Yet this reading reduces a richly textured life into pathology, overlooking Schumann’s literary imagination, resilience in the face of numerous personal losses, and unwavering devotion to music that persisted – often flourished – despite illness. This chapter discusses the diagnostic spectrum and its historiographical contexts from Richarz’s nineteenth-century ‘overwork exhaustion’ to Möbius’s dementia praecox, through contemporary arguments for bipolar disorder with psychotic features and tertiary neurosyphilis. It shows how shifting medical paradigms and cultural frameworks shape our understanding of genius, suffering, and the enduring interplay between creativity and illness.

The introductory chapter introduces the contemporary challenge of immigration from a psychological perspective. The focus is on how host society members and immigrants feel about and perceive the situation. In the twenty-first century, at least some host society members in Western and non-Western countries perceive immigration as a threat. This perceived threat can be economic (e.g., they are coming here and taking our jobs) and/or cultural (e.g., they are not adapting to our way of life and language, but continuing to live in their own ways). Central to the controversy of immigration is national identity, and the threat of immigrants against “who we are.” The plan of the book and the major psychological themes underlying immigration are described.

This contribution retells the familiar story of the international tax regime from an unconventional perspective, revealing how racial fears have burdened communities around the globe. It explores the impact of anti-Black racism on the international tax regime, tracing the evolution of international tax rules that have impoverished vulnerable states and eviscerated social safety nets in wealthier ones. Decolonisation granted political power and economic autonomy to erstwhile possessions only to watch it be stripped away by treaties designed to constrain fiscal sovereignty.

In the first part of Chapter 5, Goodman considers some basic affinities of Emerson and Montaigne that are evident even before Emerson published “Montaigne, or the Skeptic”: their use of the essay form to register spontaneity and contingency, their critique of books and travel, their discussions of the play of moods, their attention to themselves. The second part of Chapter 5 considers the shape of Emerson’s Montaigne essay, which has its own moods and its own architecture, and which concludes by taking what the critic Barbara Packer calls “a miraculous act of levitation” outside the play of moods to the moral sentiment that “outweighs them all.” In evaluating this leap, Goodman deploys Emerson’s own skepticism against his more metaphysical and dogmatic tendencies. “Why so talkative in public,” he writes, “when each of my neighbors can pin me to my seat by arguments I cannot refute?”

In the nave of Sant’Apollinare in Classe stands what, by the time it was constructed, had come to be called an altar (Figures 13 and 14). By the sixteenth century, not only the name but also the matter, the form, and the composition had come to provoke thousands of Christians, some to call for their replacement with wooden tables, some to singular physical violence, bringing sledgehammers to smash into rubble what had, for generations, stood in choirs, apses, and chapels and against columns. Even those who left them in place no longer accorded them the same role in the Mass. For Lutherans, they were the surface for the celebration of the Eucharist. For Catholics, they were more, but no longer what they had been. Even the great Jesuit scholar Joseph Braun, whose study of altars remains foundational, defined the altar as “that liturgical instrument [Gerät] on and at which the Eucharist was celebrated.” It was for him a thing. He accorded some six pages in a 756-page volume to the “symbolism” of the altar. For him, meaning was given to the altar by texts: commentators, liturgists including Durand, canon lawyers, popes, and theologians. The altar itself was mute.