An American seaman usually became a prisoner of war in France because of the judgment on the nationality of the vessel on which he was captured; his possible release would depend upon the judgment on his own nationality and, later, on the reason for his presence on the prize vessel. What was documented about him at every point was referred to repeatedly by the French when making a decision concerning him. Each case was decided individually and depended upon a range of documentation originating with and held by a range of French ministries. This chapter looks at those ministries, at how those decisions were made and at the men who made them.

The Ministry of Marine and Colonies documented a seaman's initial disembarking in France from a prize vessel or his crawling onto a beach from a wrecked vessel. The Ministry of Police General held him in a local jail while a prize was being judged. Once he became a prisoner of war, he was escorted to a depot and detained there by the Ministry of War. Depending upon his fortunes and behaviour, other authorities touched his life. If he broke a civil law (committed murder, theft or affray, for example) it was the Ministry of Police General that pursued him, the Ministry of Justice that prosecuted him, the Ministry of the Interior that jailed him. If he escaped, it was the Gendarmerie that pursued him and the Ministry of War that sent out bulletins with his description to the authorities in the coastal cities (the destinations of most escapees, who hoped to get onto a vessel leaving France).

There was a time when ‘Berlioz the critic’ would have been the title of a lesser chapter in the larger biography of the composer. Now that his complete literary works have become available in modern critical editions, however, it has been possible to wonder, with more than a modicum of seriousness, whether Berlioz displayed his greatest talents as a musician or as a writer. For Berlioz himself, this was not a question. Setting down words, he often said, as in chapter 21 of his Memoirs, was ‘work’, while setting down notes was a ‘delight’. Many are the passages in his letters where he tells of the thrill of musical ideas coming to him so fast as to be unmanageable: ‘To tell you the truth, for several days I have been unable to sleep, I’ve lost touch with reality, so absorbed have I been by my work [Roméo et Juliette]’; ‘the music settled readily upon the words like a bird on a ripe fruit [the love scene from act 4 of Les Troyens]’; ‘the music is crowding my brain; I cannot even tell which number I prefer [in Béatrice et Bénédict]’. Years earlier, at the very moment he veered away from the medical study prescribed by his father in order to embrace harmony and counterpoint, he expressed extraordinary confidence in his musical future: ‘I am involuntarily drawn to a magnificent career’, he wrote in 1824; ‘I am certain that I shall distinguish myself in music […]; I should like to make a name for myself; I should like to leave upon this earth a trace of my existence’.

On returning to Deal from Eastry in October 1786, Elizabeth Carter wrote to Elizabeth Vesey describing the view from the churchyard: I took a solitary walk one evening to a church about two miles distant, and sat myself down upon the pedestal of a dial, to survey a prospect with which I think you would have been charmed. Before me was a most beautiful landscape of hill and dale, woodland and open field. Opposite to this the spires of a distant town, terminated by a long extent of calm blue sea, and the white cliffs of the isle of Thanet. On another side was a rough romantic mount, which sunk abruptly into a deep woody dell.—Now do not think I have been playing one of your tricks, and describing places and things formed only in your own brilliant imagination; for I really and truly did see all that I have endeavoured to describe. I wish I could complete it by sending you an epitaph, much beyond the common style of church-yard poetry, but it required more time than the setting sun would allow me to make out some of the lines, which were almost effaced by time.

Revealing an encompassing prospect, the churchyard forms the centre of a rural landscape. The topography is briefly sketched, but its specific locality and status as a ‘real’ place is mapped through Carter's two-mile walk to the churchyard, permitted by fine weather.

The representation and reinterpretation of hospitality in Judges 19 invite analysis through multiple dimensions: linguistic and textual, religious and philosophical, social, political, and sexual. All these domains intersect and inevitably link together from the perspective of hospitality. When we follow the links, risks and possibilities come into view. “Lethal differences”3 arise, often to be subtly undermined, as we move around a circuit connecting books and bodies: from textual bodies, metaphorical bodies, and real bodies made of flesh and blood, to books open or closed, held high and falling down, scroll or codex on parchment skins scraped clean of flesh and blood. In Vienna 2554 bodies become books and books bodies. As we shall see, these biblical encounters cover the gamut of possibilities explored in previous chapters – opposition and conflict, dialogue and relationship, experience and contamination, all in play in the struggle between Judaism and Christianity, Jews and Christians. In this chapter, hosting quarrels continue, adding new dimensions to the contact zone, as Hebrew Tanakh meets Old Testament and New through translatio, and encounter as confrontation hides in the rivalry between Ecclesia and Synagoga.

Emerging during the Celtic Tiger period, Riverdance first debuted as an interval entertainment act during the 1994 Eurovision Song Contest and was developed as a full-length stage show the following year. Following a dispute with producers, Michael Flatley, the lead man dancer in the original interval act, left Riverdance to produce his own show Lord of the Dance (1996), and subsequently created numerous follow-up shows including Feet of Flames (1998), Celtic Tiger (2005), and Lord of the Dance: Dangerous Games (2014). Since then, Flatley's Lord of the Dance has been seen by over 60 million people in 60 different countries, “making it one of the most successful dance productions in the world”. His total number of productions are said to have grossed more than $1 billion dollars. Since its debut, Riverdance has also sold over 11,000 shows across 46 countries and has been seen live by over 25 million people.

With this resounding success, both Riverdance and Flatley's dance shows provided a new world-wide platform for Irish traditional music and dance, ultimately aiding the commercial music industry expansion and consumer consumption of Irish culture. Bearing in mind the number of platforms provided by these shows, particularly for women, the implications and the roles available to performers are significant.

“The Rolling Hills of Ireland”: Understandings of Irishness

Emerging during the Celtic Tiger period, Riverdance and Flatley's Irish dance shows capitalised on and benefited from the “Celtic Tide” and the increased consumption of Irish culture. In doing this, they reinforced the correlation between Irishness and Celticity through the use of Celtic imagery displayed on the dancer's costumes, wigs, staging, and music.

It is a story as old as it is familiar. The tides of change compel the political elite to accept, whether grudgingly or enthusiastically, a constitution that places significant constraints upon their power. However, once the new settlement comes into force, they realise quickly that it is much more of an inconvenience than they had bargained for. The People – who were supposed to vanish after their ceremonial invocation in the Preamble – are invoking the constitution to make all sorts of claims against state power. The newly transformed courts are too often upholding these claims, and dealing serious setbacks to the government. The constitution is ‘taming Leviathan’.

Stung into action, the political class – in turn – devises various stratagems to tame the recalcitrant constitution, the contumelious courts, and the impudent People. The simplest method: use parliamentary super-majorities (easiest in countries dominated by a single party, often the party of the independence struggle) to change the constitution, and remove the provisions that are proving to be a thorn in the government's side. In small doses, this is often effective, and the political cost can be borne. Equally often though, the government's vaulting ambition overleaps itself, and it becomes clear that what is dressed up as constitutional change is actually constitutional evisceration.

Chapter 7 closes the study by focusing on a single source: Gregory of Nyssa’s homilies On the Song of Songs. Through them, he weaves his most comprehensive and sustained account of the history, ontology, and activity of the devil and his army of demons. Only Christ is victorious over this army of hostile powers in the proper sense. Christians participate in Christ’s victory by journeying with Gregory through On the Song of Songs. The way of victory begins with baptism and continues with prayer, pure thoughts, and self-knowing. Like those sources examined in the previous chapters, the homilies undertake a journey toward victory, bringing to the fore the eschatological nature of spiritual warfare. This chapter, along with the previous ones, demonstrates that in addition to his other accolades, Gregory of Nyssa was an erudite homilist and skilled teacher on spiritual warfare.

In this chapter, the mathematically simplest random graph, the Bernoulli random graph, is introduced. Each of the possible edges is present, independently, with the same probability, so that the model is one of a network entirely without structure. To start with, the structure of the graph in the neighbourhood of a point is investigated and is shown to be very similar to that of a branching process with Poisson-distributed offspring numbers. Explicit bounds on the accuracy of the approximation are derived, using the Poisson approximation techniques derived in Chapter 7. The classical threshold theorem for the existence of a giant component is then established; the precision of the neighbourhood approximation simplifies the proof. The counts of small subgraphs are then investigated, and a subgraph threshold theorem is proved. Finally, the distribution of the length (in graph distance) of the shortest path between two vertices is investigated. These grow logarithmically with the number of points, if the expected degree of a vertex is kept constant. Once again, the approximation of the neighbourhood structure is a key element in the proofs, and the statement of the main theorem involves the Laplace transform of the distribution of the limit random variable associated with the approximate branching process.

Introduction

This chapter delves into the ways in which migration contributed to the betterment of local communities in the absence of colonial development initiatives. It sheds light on how the development of one's hometown became a crucial aspect of migrants’ interaction with the concepts of citizenship and belonging. Through the establishment of township associations, migrants served as symbolic intermediaries between the colonial state and local society.

The chapter takes a close look at the pivotal role played by remittances from Ghana and northern Nigeria in fostering local development within select Yoruba towns. Specifically, we focus on two towns, Ogbomoso and Inisa, which witnessed significant waves of mass migration to Ghana and northern Nigeria. Here, we meticulously analyze the developmental endeavors initiated by diaspora organizations, with a special emphasis on areas of human development, including education, infrastructure, and religious institutions.

This exploration reveals the profound impact of migration on local communities, highlighting how it became a catalyst for socio-economic advancement and transformation, particularly in regions where colonial development was lacking. By investigating the role of remittances and the contributions of diaspora organizations, this chapter offers valuable insights into the intricate interplay between migration, citizenship, and local development in colonial Yorubaland.

Yawning Gaps in Colonial Development

Britain recognized that the economic development of its politically dependent territories was a shared responsibility between the metropole and the indigenous colonized peoples. In the case of British colonies in West Africa, they were expected to be self-financing. This meant that funding for public projects and administrative expenses had to come from various sources, including taxes (which stood at 3s. 6d. per head before World War II) levied on the subject population, revenues generated from mining and mono-crop exports, communal or forced labor, and even prison labor.

Many of the Espill's readers and owners from the sixteenth century on were men who belonged to conservative religious communities or to political parties that were aligned with the Church's orthodoxy and antifeminist morality. They left a range of glosses that coincided with their conservative professional, leisure, and political affiliations, demonstrating the compatibility of misogyny and religion, and the general preservation of the status quo. Readers’ annotations upheld the Espill's criticisms of nuns and male clergy, which further sustained antifeminist Christian morality without questioning its tenets, unlike Isabel de Villena's Vita Christi (VCV), which presented a version of Christian morality that supported all women, whether secular or holy, through trinitarian dogma and theology. The VCV was solidly ensconced in Valencia's sixteenthcentury patriarchal religious organization, although the work forges a path for ordinary women's vindication within that patriarchal structure through its treatment of maternity and the body. The ideological and sociohistorical implications of the Espill's annotations come into sharper focus when examined in relation to the larger fifteenth- and sixteenth-century panorama of Villena's VCV and prevailing discourse on women, called the querella de las mujeres.

The Espill's juxtaposition to the VCV starkly illustrates the choice that someone as knowledgeable, educated, and socially integrated as Roig would have had with regard to his representation of women and gender relations.