This chapter argues that the Victorian army, so frequently depicted by historians as peripheral to 'mainstream' culture, was in fact instrumental in shaping late Victorian British popular culture. It shows how the ideology of martial races could be transformed from a military policy in India to a popular sentiment that included Scottish Highlanders. Through the multiple cultural interventions of General Frederick Roberts, the chapter argues that Victorian officers frequently gained privileged access to the Victorian media, and that they used this access to forward their own interests. In Roberts's case, this access allowed his fascination with 'martial' Highlanders, Sikhs and Gurkhas to enter public discourse on a mass scale. Roberts seemed determined to use the popular example of the 'martial races' to forward his own interests in reforming the army and focusing attention on India's northwest frontier.

This chapter focuses on Winterson's seventh novel, Gut Symmetries (1997), the story of three narrator-characters, Alice, Jove and Stella, the first of whom is a Cambridge postgraduate student of New Physics who has just won ‘two years of research funding at Princeton’. Consequently, at the beginning of the novel, we find her on board the QE2, giving a lecture on Paracelsus as a way of paying her passage from Southampton to New York. During the cruise she meets and falls in love with a fellow lecturer, Jove, the middle-aged, second-generation Italian-American Professor of Superstring Theory at ‘the Institute for Advanced Studies, Princeton’, where she is also going to work. Jove is at that time married to Stella. This meeting is one of the many coincidences that pins the lives of the three characters to each other and to other characters in the novel, including their ancestors. The whole novel is structured by means of similar random coincidences into a complex web of ‘symmetries’ comparable to the chaotic arrangement of elements in fractals.

The chapter provides an annotated translation of the Chronicon Regum Legionensium, or Chronicle of the Kings of Leon, attributed to Bishop Pelayo of Oviedo. It is a brief history of the Leonese monarchy from the accession of Vermudo II in 982 to the death of Alfonso VI in 1109. The Chronicon forms part of a compilation of historical works, the Liber Chronicorum, which was put together in the scriptorium of Oviedo cathedral some time before 1132. The Liber Chronicorum itself belongs within the voluminous collection of writings that was assembled under Bishop Pelayo's supervision, today known as the Corpus Pelagianum.

The rise of capitalism in the nineteenth century defined wage labour as a male prerogative. The breadwinner was expected to be competitive and self-seeking, while his female counterpart was characterised as nurturing and self-sacrificing, and these differences were naturalised as biological. By the forties, the social realities of female employment and changing patterns of production and consumption were increasingly challenging the traditional complementary sex roles. This chapter discusses the concept of equality and how the role of career women is portrayed in Hollywood comedy films. Insisting upon the naturalness of conventional gender roles, the career woman comedy disrupts and even disproves the logic of gender essentialism. It presents a more contradictory pattern by examining the figure of the career woman more closely—not only at the textual level of plot, but also at the extratextual levels of cultural and star discourses.

This chapter explores the murder of Thomas Becket and his subsequent martyrdom.

This chapter, published by the journal Asian Ethnology, is a theoretical exercise, inspired by Mary Douglas’s classic anthropological text Purity and Danger, that sets out to clarify the wide range of relationships between religions and humanitarian traditions as ideological movements, taking Islam as an instance. It postulates that the concept of the "sacred" is a special case of boundary maintenance or "purism". Metaphorically, "puripetal force" (a neologism) is defined as a tendency common to all ideological systems, a resistance to social entropy or anomie. An explanatory model is proposed that accommodates forms of concentrated purism such as (within Islam) Wahhabi-Salafism and (within humanitarianism) the legacy of Henry Dunant, founder of the International Committee of the Red Cross. Specific Islamic charities and welfare organizations interact differentially with both religious and humanitarian traditions. Meanwhile, US government policy towards charities sometimes seems dominated by an urge to peer into purity of motives. Finally, it is suggested that the model could equally be applied to Christian and other religious traditions, with the concluding thought that the common ground between the institutions of international humanitarianism and religious traditions is currently expanding.