In fourteenth-century Sweden, the depositions of several kings (Birger Magnusson in 1318, Magnus Eriksson in 1364 and Albrekt av Mecklenburg in 1389) were followed by the production of literary depictions of those monarchs’ reigns, pointing out their many faults, the wickedness of their advisors or the tyrannical nature of their rule. Some of these texts used allegorical imagery or satirical commentary to criticise kings such as Magnus Eriksson (r.1319–64) and Albrekt (r.1364–89), or employed other literary devices to present preceding or succeeding periods as more peaceful, prosperous or righteous. Thus, both Latin and vernacular literary works could serve a legitimating function, presenting the actions of the rebels as well as the succeeding regime as lawful and legitimate. In doing so, they can serve as valuable sources to describe the ongoing opposition and resistance to fourteenth-century Swedish kings.

Parts of the Revelations of St Birgitta (Birgersdotter, c.1303–73) and the text Qualiter Regnavit Rex Magnus (also known as the Libellus de Magno Erici Rege) depict the misrule of King Magnus Eriksson in similar ways, criticising his tendency to use foreigners in his service and his failure to heed the advice of the native nobility.

The fnal words about Dyngley's perpenditur preface can only be written when other witnesses are found. Although attempts to locate them have so far failed, I am grateful to Livia Visser-Fuchs and Farley P. Katz for directing me to a footnoted citation for the preface as transcribed by James in his 1899 Catalogue. The footnote appears in an article by Arthur Landgraf on textual criticism in the twelfth century. The note is important because Landgraf connected Dyngley's preface to the centuries-long tradition of linking exegetical styles with individual patristic authors. In the Peterhouse preface he noticed words that the canonist Huguccio had used in a section dealing with guidelines for distinguishing corrupt from authentic readings.

In 2025 at a landmark African Union meeting in Nairobi, dubbed ‘the Africa we want’, peace, security and financial independence were tabled as the strategy to secure future development and stability. It came in the wake of a UN Resolution to fund African-led peace efforts, to create a ‘peace infrastructure’. Kenya is a major North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) and major non-NATO (MNNA) US ally, a designation that might partially explain Kenya’s ill-advised interventions in Haiti, a Pan-African symbol of resistance to slavery and colonialism, and the Sudan, an ancient African kingdom now fractured by civil war. Bound by common origins and a shared if imagined destiny, fragmented interests have seen peace and stability remain elusive at both national and Pan-African levels, against the powerful and persistent idea of a united ‘Africa’. Pan-Africanism was always about African peoples, not states. This chapter examines the ways in which a dynamic Pan-Africanism nonetheless provides a crucial political and creative framework within which key aspects of Ngugi’s work take shape, from Kenya as nascent national project, to Ngugi’s concerns with issues of language and identity. Frantz Fanon, whose political theories on decolonisation left an enduring mark on Ngugi and an entire generation of scholars and activists, underscores the power and promise of this legacy.

The three days had passed monotonously. Egon and Franziska avoided each other, and only met at meals and tea-time. In the hours that used to be filled with lively chat, there was now silence, as if the two had nothing to say to each other. Judith paid no attention to this on the first day, but on the second day, she noticed it, and on the third she remarked on it openly, so that Egon and Franziska changed tack again and struck up a conversation that was lively, witty, and seemingly just as before. But no one laughed. The words they exchanged were devoid of all spontaneity.

Early on the fourth day a telegram arrived from Gruz, in which the count announced that he’d arrive, not that morning as planned, but late in the evening.

They passed the piece of paper from hand to hand, with no one commenting. But then Franziska withdrew to her room and when she was upstairs in her room, she gazed into the flames burning cheerfully in the hearth. Hannah emerged from the adjacent room to add another log, but really because she saw that her mistress and friend was troubled and wanted to talk.

“Sit down on the cushion here,” Franziska said after a while. “There; good. And now stay here and tell me something nice, something kind, and something to comfort me. I need it so badly. I’m longing for Vienna, for society and people, and I only wish we were gone from here.”

Chapter 3 identifies and explores the devil’s names. While modern theologians have questioned the reality of the devil, premodern thinkers such as Basil and the Gregories felt no need to prove his existence. Instead, they sought to shine a light on the one who operates undercover and in plain sight, tempting and deceiving the human race. This chapter argues that by referring to the devil by his name(s) repeatedly, a practice inherited from Origen, the three leaders teach their communities how to recognise the activity of the enemy of salvation. Our theologians employ at least fifty names for the devil, both new and established. These names for the most part identify the devil’s activities in salvation history and demonstrate that he is antithetical to God and humankind. In effect, I propose, the Cappadocians teach the church to know the devil by his name(s).

Chapter 5 investigates whether learning economic concepts can make people more patient, rather than simply attracting already patient students to economics. Building on the link between economic knowledge and lower discount rates identified in Chapter 4, it proposes that understanding ideas like compound interest and the time value of money reduces subjective discount rates (SDRs), fostering greater willingness to accept short-term costs for future benefits. Using a classroom experiment at the University of Washington, the chapter finds that undergraduates who received economics instruction had significantly lower SDRs by the semester’s end, while those enrolled in political science classes showed no similar change. Furthermore, both groups exhibited comparable SDRs at the start, ruling out self-selection of inherently more patient individuals into economics. These findings underscore a causal relationship between economic education and time preferences, with implications for public policy and intertemporal decision-making on issues ranging from retirement planning to climate change.

The history of Émile Jaques-Dalcroze's eurhythmics is in fact a history of personality. The creative biographies of exceptional musicians and rhythmists are a continuation of the history of the method itself. The fragment of the Polish history of eurhythmics discussed in this chapter concerns the work of Maria Wieman (1911–93), who for over thirty years created programs for kindergartens on Polish Radio, thereby becoming an ambassador for, and icon of, eurhythmics for the youngest learners. It is thanks to her activity that the Dalcroze method is present in Polish kindergartens to this day. Wieman's programs were broadcast from 1948 to 1976. The circumstances in which they were created, the way the programs were prepared, the types of rhythmic exercises presented, and the specific nature of eurhythmics used for longdistance musical education are addressed in the first part of the chapter, below.

Maria Wieman and the Beginning of Eurhythmics Radio Broadcasts in Poland

The beginnings of eurhythmics in Poland date back to 1912, when a student of Jaques-Dalcroze, Janina Mieczyńska, founded a Eurhythmics School in Warsaw. After World War I, the school resumed its activity as the School of Eurhythmics and Artistic Dance. Its graduates included prominent future Polish educators, such as Maria Cukierówna, Jadwiga Grafczyńska, Janina Batawia, and Maria Wieman, who considered this stage of her education to be the most important. Encountering the eurhythmics method changed Wieman's life, and Mieczyńska had a considerable influence on her.

Writing to Viscount John Scudamore on 7 April 1632, the newswriter John Pory reported ‘a prodigious act, such as I suppose no story can parallel. For when was it ever heard that a governor of a university laid violent hands upon himself? But so it happened’. Another commentator asked rhetorically, ‘Who hearing only that the vice-chancellor of Cambridge had hanged himself… resteth not astonished, or who will not be amazed?’ Networks of gossip and information noted this Cambridge tragedy, and wondered what brought it about. The news spread to London and across England, even reaching Massachusetts, though diarists and correspondents offered different explanations. The Oxford scholar Thomas Crosfield was shocked to hear ‘of Dr Butts his hanging or murdering himself at Cambridge’. The Suffolk cleric John Rous recorded that the vice-chancellor ‘did hang himself… something gave occasion’. The gloomy London artisan Nehemiah Wallington noted Butts's suicide as yet another case of distressed ministers laying ‘violent hands on themselves’. The Dorchester diarist William Whiteway also digested the news by noting that ‘about the same time many in London and thereabouts destroyed themselves… in a very fearful manner’.

Historians too may reflect on this Cambridge suicide, and ponder its background and significance. The episode illuminates the stresses of academic administration, the ambitions of college heads, and the cultural history of the early modern English university, as well as the build-up of pressure that led to a desperate act. Though there was much to be depressed about in 1630s England, particular local experiences lie behind this grim development. The life and death of Henry Butts (1575–1632) displays a ferment of anxieties, offering insight into the social, cultural and psychological history of the age of Charles I.

On Joyce's desk they found two books, a Greek Lexicon and Oliver Gogarty's I follow Saint Patrick. Frau Giedion-Welcker arranged, with Nora's consent, for a death mask of Joyce by the sculptor Paul Speck. A Catholic priest approached Nora and George to offer a religious service, but Nora said, ‘I couldn't do that to him.’

Richard Ellmann's poignant account of the hours immediately following the death of James Joyce on 13 January 1941 softly ingathers the preoccupations of the writer's life: Ireland, Europe, Catholicism, family, friends, enemies – and music. Ellmann records that Monteverdi's ‘Addio terra, addio cielo’ (from L’Orfeo) was sung after the burial speeches were delivered and the ‘fabulous artificer’ was laid to rest. Singleminded, incorrigibly selfish and endemically self-preoccupied as Joyce was throughout his life, his art attests and relies upon a communion of intelligible interest between writer and reader which he privileged in Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses, and which he stubbornly endangered in Finnegans Wake. Notwithstanding this perplexing development, which has entailed a subdued and vastly reduced readership for his last novel, Joyce persisted with music all his working life. As a mode of remembrance, as a source of structural paradigms and – finally – as an unsettling rival to language itself, music exerted a foundational claim on Joyce's imagination. To adapt a Joycean usage, it fretted his soul.

This collection of essays originated from a series of conversations between the editors at Ushaw College, Durham. In 2019, Power was a Holland Fellow researching the Catholic Women's League, and Bush was the archivist of the collection. During these conversations, we noted that notwithstanding the Catholic Church's vibrant history of lay Catholic activity both before and after the Second Vatican Council, and archival material being available, the history of British lay Catholic societies remains largely unwritten. This collection of essays is an attempt to meet that need. It seeks to showcase the scope of existing research and inspire further research into all areas of lay activity in Britain. The fact that this history can be written at all is in no small part due to the greater accessibility of lay society archive collections to researchers, a phenomenon predominantly facilitated by the expanded acquisition policies of various archival repositories. These endeavours have notably focused on rescuing endangered Catholic collections, many of which faced imminent loss. Prominent members of these societies have recognised the pivotal role played by lay societies in the broader context of the twentieth-century Catholic Church. Consequently, they have demonstrated a commendable willingness to entrust their valuable collections to archival repositories, with the stipulation that these resources be made readily available for historical research. Despite these efforts, the proportion of lay society collections in archival repositories remains negligible. Many collections continue to languish in the garages, attics or spare rooms of private houses, posing a genuine risk of neglect or destruction. It is our aspiration, therefore, that the dissemination of this collection of scholarly essays will serve to heighten public awareness regarding the crucial role played by Catholic lay societies and underscore the imperative of preserving these records for the benefit of future generations.

In the introduction to Volume V of the new Oxford History of British and Irish Catholicism, the editor, Alana Harris, describes the twentieth century as ‘a century of the laity’. Such a characterisation calls attention not only to the increased importance of the laity within the Catholic Church itself, but also to the flourishing of lay societies which ‘were established to address pressing moral issues, ameliorate challenging social conditions, and work for the “rechristianisation” of society. Speaking to concerns spanning the “Catholic Family”, politics and economics, working-class unrest, and middle-class movement into the professions’, these organisations demonstrated the increased confidence of the Catholic community in Britain resulting from social mobility and growth brought about by mass immigration from traditionally Catholic countries such as Ireland, Poland and Italy. Further ‘the First World War accelerated public toleration of Catholicism, putting any vestigial suspicions of Catholic disloyalty to rest, and with this heightened sense of being part of the national community came a greater confidence and assertiveness on the part of its leaders’. As early as the turn of the twentieth century,