When the curtain rises in Die Walküre, we see a primitive house built around a huge ash tree. A storm is dying down and a warrior unlatches the door and stumbles in, wounded and weaponless; Wagner says that “he has the appearance of someone overwrought by excessive struggle; his clothes and the way he looks suggest he is a fugitive.” This is Siegmund, the great hero that Wotan has fathered and raised and the key player in the god's “great idea” for snatching the Ring from Fafner and ensuring that Alberich never regains it. His part in Wotan's plotting has all but destroyed him.

A moment later a woman enters from a back room: Sieglinde. Her life, too, has been torn from her thanks to her unasked-for role in Wotan's scheme. Motherless, lost to the rest of her family, forced into a marriage that is little more than legally sanctioned rape, she can barely acknowledge her own existence. When Siegmund asks her name she “wants to give an honest answer, but thinks better of it.” She exists in the third person: this house and this woman are Hunding's own, she tells him.

Die Walküre has always been the popular favorite of the Ring dramas, but, as Dahlhaus writes, its “overwhelming spell … emanates less from the whole, for it is no whole, than from individual acts, the first and the third.” That spell is even more selective than Dahlhaus suggests; what remain most vividly in memory from the first act, which is often and effectively presented by itself as a concert piece, are the matchless delicacy of its evocation of dawning love and the theatrical grandiosity of its climax, the door's opening to let spring flood into the hall, Siegmund's heroic but tender Winterstürme, and his drawing the sword from the tree.

The phrase “Gods and mortals” conventionally refers to two distinct classes of beings: gods who live forever and humans who do not. This concept of divine immortality is so embedded in Western views of divinity that imagining gods without eternal life feels almost inconceivable. In Abrahamic religions, immortality is central to the conception of God, who may be invoked as ‘the Living One’, ‘the Everlasting God’, and ‘the eternal God’. Humans, in contrast, have faced death since their expulsion from the Garden of Eden.

The gods of ancient Greece, too, are depicted as immortal. The Iliad emphatically stresses Aphrodite's everlasting nature when she is wounded by Diomedes’ spear:

In ancient Greek, the gods are known as a-thanatoi, the un-dying or immortal ones, and the ichor in their veins is a-m-brotos, un-dead or immortal. Similarly, the gods of the Vedas are called the ‘immortal gods’, and Zoroastrian tradition speaks of the Aməša Spəṇta, ‘the bounteous immortals’ emanating from Ahura Mazdā (already mentioned in the Old Avestan Yasna Haptaŋhāiti, Yasna 35.1). Meanwhile, humans are consistently labeled as mortal: when the Dawn rises from her slumber in the Homeric epics, she does so to bring light to mortals (brotoi) and immortals (athanatoi) alike (Il. 11.2; 19.2). The contrast also appears in Roman tradition. For example, the celebrated epitaph of the Old Latin Roman poet Naevius opens with the words: “If it were right for immortals to weep over mortals, the divine Camenae [i.e. Muses] would weep for Naevius the poet.”

This book investigates the transformations that occurred in English religious and intellectual culture from at least the 1650s to the early eighteenth century in light of the triangular circulation and reception of books and ideas between England, France and the Dutch Republic made possible by the attainment of centrality in the history of mediation by print culture and by the peculiar dynamics of the book market in that transnational context. I argue that such a process of intellectual and textual exchange, which involved not just Latin-speaking educated readers but also those in England who were versed in modern European languages, was a decisive factor in enabling a process of ‘destabilization’ and ‘reconfiguration’ of English culture. Contemporaries largely perceived these processes as a consequence of the spread of ‘atheism’, ‘deism’ and ‘scepticism’, and largely cognised change by setting it within the broader cultural framework of the confrontation between ‘ancients’ and ‘moderns’.

Unlike scholarly attempts to square such a process within the spatial- temporal coordinates either of the ‘crisis of the European mind’ or of the Enlightenment, what I dubbed the ‘crisis of English mind’ would be better understood as a period in which various long-term and short-term national and transnational disrupting dynamics – spanning the agony of ‘Christianised’ Aristotelianism and the inter-confessional religious conflicts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries – concurred to generate a set of debates that tackled some fundamental issues of early modern culture, religion and society.

What sort of mythology is Old Norse mythology and how can one best characterize it? As it turns out the constructedness of the category means that these questions are more difficult to answer than to pose, and one must approach them from two different directions. The first, typological, question requires generalization and abstraction. To answer it, one would, as a starting point, need a typology of mythologies and then proceed by comparing Norse mythology with the kinds of mythologies included in the typology and, based on commonalities, situate Norse myth within this framework. However, commonly recognized typologies of mythologies are rare. The most popular typology, perhaps the only widely recognized one, uses culture as a basis for classification and sees a close relationship between culture and language or even language families. Within this typology one recognizes Greek mythology, Babylonian mythology, Egyptian mythology, Mayan mythology, etc. as distinct mythologies. Using this approach, the mythology we find reflected in Old Norse sources would be classified as Scandinavian, Germanic or Indo-European mythology, depending on the level of abstraction. This perspective emphasizes similarities and commonalities, making it less suitable for addressing the second question, which relates to characterization and highlights distinguishing features rather than commonalities, or at least characteristic combinations of common features.

The question of characterization can be answered descriptively by listing and analyzing features of the texts we know, such as the names of the gods and the various classes of mythological beings, and perhaps their relations to one another as a discrete system. Regardless of whether the material is studied in its entirety as a system or the study focuses on a particular aspect of the system, this appears to be the most common approach to Norse myth and mythology within Old Norse studies. Many past studies have shown that this can be a fruitful approach to the material at hand.

In Ingmar Bergman's 1957 film The Seventh Seal, set in fourteenth-century Sweden, Mia advises her husband Jof that they should travel with a knight for company when they venture into the woods. In the ninth century, the Frankish monk Lupus of Ferrieres wrote to a friend to advise him to gather a band of protectors before setting out to visit him. Both the movie and the medieval letter imply that there is a need for groups of strong men in dangerous times. Indeed, the “band of brothers” is one of the most popular images of male friendship. We need only think of Jaime and Bronn in Game of Thrones, or the Fellowship of the Ring, or the numerous depictions of the Knights of the Round of Table. As scholars of medievalism have argued, these men-atarms project an image of medieval masculinity founded upon strength and violence. While gender theorists emphasize that concepts of masculinity and femininity have varied across time and space, this construction of manliness is not without medieval precedents. As Antiquity gave way to the Early Middle Ages, martial valor became one of the defining images of masculinity, but, as Guy Halsall has written, it derived its acceptability from the service of warriors to the holders of imperial and royal authority.

INTRODUCTION

The Manx landscape today presents a wide range of physical evidence for its history. The presence of long-standing habitat types within the ‘natural’ vegetation demonstrates a varied response to human agricultural activity. The field boundaries shown first in full on the first edition of the Ordnance Survey (1867–70) can mostly still be explored. From their form and composition, from earthen banks to stone walls, they represent an evolving, organic system. The same applies to the routes between farms and settlements. Mining, quarrying, peat and marl digging also represent major human impacts on the wider landscape that remain visible today.

Apart from the castles and abbey, there is little within the modern landscape that can be securely dated to the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Nevertheless, using the evidence of field archaeology and surviving architecture together with what few documentary sources are available, a broad overview of what is both likely and possible can be offered. The main documentary sources are the thirteenth-century limites, the rent books, the 1417 Sheading Roll, the 1428 Garrison Roll, the statutes, especially the 1422 code, the 1505 confirmation of church liberties and the 1540 Dissolution accounts. For the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the statutes continue to be a vital written source, augmented by informed observers like Chaloner and Blundell.

Just days after Charles Gordon's death in Khartoum at the end of January 1885, White accepted an offer to serve as a staff officer in Wolseley's expedition in the Sudan and immediately proceeded to Cairo. But, as noted in the Introduction, Gladstone's Second Ministry quickly lost interest in pursuing the campaign and Wolseley was directed to bring the expedition to a halt. White expected as much after conversations with Wolseley's brother George and, later, Evelyn Wood, who were both heading home, just as he continued to make his way up the Nile River. White was furious when he heard the news and considered Gladstone's decision to abandon the Sudan a great betrayal. He wrote to his brother John, ‘I cannot say I am sorry to leave this beastly desert but next to a possible abandonment of the Irish Roman Catholic Loyalists of Ireland to Home Rule perhaps the very cowardliest and falsest abandonment ever made is that your humble servant now is aiding in.’ After reaching Camp Tani (Hetani), White learned from the elder Wolseley that he had been selected to command a brigade at Quetta. Happy to leave the ‘beastly desert’ behind, White headed towards Alexandria to catch a steamship to bring him to his new posting. Along the way, however, he learned that there had been an error and he had been ordered to return to camp. White angrily dashed off telegrams and letters to Wolseley, Sir Donald Stewart, Lord Ripon, and Lord Roberts; seemingly to no avail. Growing increasingly frustrated with the mission and feeling restricted by the limits put on his staff work by his commanding officer, White put in a formal request to go home. It was granted 31 May.

Across Africa, Asia, and the Americas, commercial coffee growing has involved a range of farm sizes, land ownership and tenure arrangements, and labour relations. Variations in land and labour regimes existed between coffee economies but, crucially, also within them. From a global perspective, therefore, the coexistence in Angola during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries of African smallholders using family and village labour and European settler estates supported by coerced labour was hardly exceptional. Nevertheless, in the African context, Portugal's persistent support of the estate sector with land concessions and labour supplies distinguished Angola from other coffee economies under colonial rule. Smallholding was the norm in coffee farming throughout the continent, to which even notable settler-elite colonies such as Cote d’Ivoire, Madagascar, and Kenya eventually yielded.

In Angola, Africans were recruited for unpaid or low-paid plantation labour through extra-economic means since the first coffee estates were established during the 1830s. Tis initially took the form of slavery, replaced in 1869 by the liberto apprenticeship regime, which from 1875 onward gave way to a system of contract labour. Coercion was both cause and corollary of the planters’ refusal to attract workers through wage incentives. In this regard, the plantation sector differed from the diamond-mining company Diamang, which compensated coercion with material and health gains in line with developments on the African Copper belt.