Throughout the period, baptism generated problems of interpretation in which dogma and discipline were intertwined. An essentially disciplinary question concerned the application of the Council of Vienne’s ruling that baptisms should not be conducted in private residences, except in the case of ‘princes’. But who counted as a ‘prince’? After the Reformation a more fundamental issue arose: was Calvinist baptism valid? The Congregation of the Council decided that it was. A troubled Capuchin, however, remained unconvinced and pressed the Inquisition, after prolonged discussion and investigation at the highest level, to permit his re-baptism and re-ordination. The Inquisition did not question the validity of Calvinist baptism as such, but an additional issue emerged: had he in fact been baptised in rosewater?

Abstract: This article examines the comparison Jean Paul draws between his notetaking practices and a game of cards in an often-cited footnote to the Vorschule der Ästhetik (Preschool of Aesthetics). Setting out from the knowledge that the footnote's description of a “collection of notes” that could be shuffled together like cards does not reflect the material reality of Jean Paul's literary estate, the article reads the passage instead as a hypothetical reflection on the roles of chance and witty combinatorics in the author's work. It does so by setting its focus on a series of intertexts, including Hegel's critique of Jean Paul, Lessing's accounts of the role of chance in his bibliographic and literary work, and a parallel description of note-taking in Jean Paul's own short text “Die Taschenbibliothek.” These texts, which focus in various ways on the relationship between information management and the aleatoric, pave the way for an appraisal of Jean Paul's poetics as a playful yet risky way of engaging with the overwhelming amount of information made available by industrial modes of production—a problem that has only increased in relevance in the centuries since Jean Paul.

Keywords: Jean Paul, Cards, French Revolution, Vorschule der Ästhetik, Hegel, Lessing, Media, Materiality

Introduction In 1790, the French National Assembly formed a committee to oversee the creation of a national bibliography. The project aimed to catalogue every book belonging to the newly formed republic, among them many books that had recently been seized from the church.

Three questions have usually been asked about the French Revolution: why did it happen?; why was it so violent? and what was its legacy? At first sight all three questions seem to beg other, more conceptually ambitious questions, whether about causation, violence or legacies. The aim of this short book is to answer both sets of questions by bringing together events with ideas. Combining the two actually helps to make the answers to the second, more conceptually oriented set of questions more historically and analytically focussed. It does so because the French Revolution owes much of its complexity to ideas and, more particularly, to the range and multiplicity of appearances and temporalities that ideas can lend to events. Complexity, not only in France and not only at the time of the French Revolution, is more than an effect of large numbers of people living in different circumstances with different, sometimes antagonistic, interests. It is also an effect of the range of occasionally compelling, but occasionally competing, emotional responses, moral evaluations and causal assessments made by, or of, people living in similar circumstances with similar, overlapping or complementary interests.

The preceding chapter concluded with an exploration of the divine dimension inherent in the lessons imparted by the Estoria de Espanna. Indeed, the presence of God and the influence of divinity in matters of governance have, in various forms, been a recurring theme throughout this book. The last two chapters have explored the dual systems of legitimation that the chronicle builds around the concept of rightful succession, which underscores the continuity of the process outlined in Chapter 4, namely, the Translatio Imperii. However, as we have seen throughout this study, the binding agent between these ideological tools built by the Alfonsine scriptorium was the presence of divinity within the historical account, always necessary to secure the transmission of the imperium. In this chapter, I will explore how this divine legitimisation worked hand in hand with the principles described previously: the use of kin-right to legitimise succession and an elective system based on the personal traits and merits of the candidate. The involvement of the divine in these inheritance mechanisms secured, according to the Alfonsine ideological framework, the progression of the Translatio Imperii. The figure of God acted as an overseeing agent, supporting the position of the aspiring emperor.

The following pages will therefore explore the relationships established between divinity, the monarchs, and the Christian Church in the Alfonsine ideological framework, with a particular focus on how these are represented in the Estoria de Espanna. To fully grasp the ideological significance of the divine in the chronicle, this chapter will start by tracing the evolution of the Castilian monarchy's sense of sacrality during the medieval period. This topic has sparked considerable debate in academic circles.

Many of the more lurid predictions of the course of the French Revolution, such as the forecast of ‘torrents of blood’ made by Mably’s executors to Thomas Jefferson in 1791, or the warning about ‘fire and blood’ famously issued by Edmund Burke in his Reflections on the Revolution in France of 1790, or the scenario set out much earlier by the comte de Guibert in 1772, now look quite prescient. Other predictions of revolution, however, simply failed to materialise. Two, in particular, slowly faded from the sequence of events that began to unfold in France between 1787 and 1789. One set of predictions was centred on opposition to the royal government by the French Parlements, while the other focussed on the idea of a patriot king. Despite their disappearance, however, both are still relevant to the sequence of events that gave rise to the French Revolution partly because they were canvassed very widely at its beginning, but mainly because they also throw real light on the tangle of different and often competing assessments or evaluations of social, economic, moral and political conditions in late-eighteenth-century France. To some, like Voltaire, France was significantly backward, or not modern enough. To others, however, France was far too modern and possibly at a tipping point. One looked forward to the future, while the other looked backwards to the past. Both, however, converged on finding fault with the present.

Poststructuralist theory and postcolonial criticism represented the first major challenge to the institution of literary criticism as it had taken root in Britain and had been transported to Africa through the colonial university. This chapter discusses how the theories of literature, writing, and identity were geared toward a critique of the assumed relationship between language and identity and unsettled older forms of criticism and how this unsettling depended on the adoption of Africa as the quintessential zone of difference. A key question here is whether the notions of difference espoused by the new, poststructuralist criticism could rescue Africa from the old colonial accounts of the continent in which positioned Africa and Africanness as unmodern. Overall, the poststructuralist deconstruction of European systems of thought compelled intellectuals to rethink the location of Africa in global conceptual systems, leading to the rise of postcolonial criticism, a mode of thinking and reading whose goal was to question both the authority of English and American literary criticism and the nationalist foundations of earlier accounts of African literary criticism.

Francisco Franco's authoritarian regime continues to be the main focus of Spanish historians and foreign Hispanists. The Spanish Civil War of 1936–1939 and subsequent dictatorship, which only came to end with the Caudillo's death in 1975, is rightly seen now as an anomaly in the history of twentiethcentury Spain. The military uprising of July 1936 initiated a long parenthesis in Spanish political development that was characterized by liberal monarchy and a democratic republic, before the fratricidal conflict, and a parliamentary monarchy, following the transition to democracy and the promulgation of the 1978 Constitution.

Yet it is also true that Francoism is inseparable from the broader history of Spain and the international context in which the dictatorship emerged. The enormous and ever-growing historiography on the Spanish Civil War shows that it maintains an extraordinary presence in the imaginations of Spaniards and foreigners alike. While some prominent historians – Stanley Payne, Paul Preston, Edward Malefakis, Santos Juliá, and Hugh Thomas – have written about the war and the long dictatorship in general, others – for example, Joan María Thomàs, Enrique Moradiellos, Julius Ruiz, Fernando del Rey, Manuel Álvarez Tardío, and Mercedes Peñalba – have penned empirically based monographs on specific aspects of the sad story of the collapse of Spanish democracy in the 1930s. Unsurprisingly, there is no historiographical consensus on the subject, and these debates have resonated far beyond the ivory towers of academia as the meaning and legacy of the war remain high on the contemporary Spanish political agenda. Certainly, the recent, controversial Law of Democratic Memory has kept these difficult years firmly in the public eye.

The abundant similarities between the English and Frisian languages either side of the North Sea, especially in the Old and Middle English and Old Frisian periods, were observed and described very early in antiquarian scholarship. From nineteenth-century Stammbaum philology through to contemporary historical sociolinguistics, we are the heirs to some two centuries of scholarship that has been devoted to the goal of producing a satisfactory explanatory ‘model’ of the relationships between these branches of the Germanic language family. An important facet of this endeavour in recent decades has been recognition of the contribution that can be made by archaeological evidence, contextualising the history of populations not only within specific regions but also in terms of their connexions and interactions with neighbours and more distant groups. While maintenance of the critical methods intrinsic to the individual historical, philological and archaeological disciplines remains essential, there is no disputing that only an integrated cross-fertilisation of all such relevant specialisations can now be considered a proper basis for understanding relationships in the relatively distant past.

The scholarly study of the runic script has become sufficiently well founded now for ‘runology’ to be claimed as the name of a field of specialist knowledge. Here, too, a distinct ‘Anglo-Frisian’ branch of the runic writing system has long been argued for, even though it was a later arrival on the scene than the concept of an anglofriesische Sprache. In the early 1930s, Otto von Friesen, Professor of Swedish Language at Uppsala University, used the term anglofrisiska runor, and he declared ‘I have named them thus because they occur only in English lands besides also in Frisian areas’ [author's translation].

Old Toldy, having changed his role from gardener to gallery attendant, was already waiting at the entrance ramp. With him, Andras.

“Is everything ready, Toldy?” asked the count.

Toldy nodded.

“Fine. But we’re not going up this way, not the grand staircase. I want to show the countess the old tower.”

With these words he took Franziska's arm and, as Andras went ahead and Toldy followed, he led her to an ancient fieldstone tower, now incorporated into the newer castle building. Within it was a spiral staircase that ascended two stories. The only light came in through narrow openings, no wider than a hand, which pierced the thick stonework every five steps. At one of these, the count paused and pointed to the landscape, which was particularly beautiful from this angle. In the far distance the lake shimmered, while to its right there arose a tall, sharply profiled rock formation known as “the Bishop,” since people professed to see in it a bishop's miter and crosier.

A few steps higher, and instead of these apertures there was a low door with a pointed arch, leading to the newer part of the castle, and here Andras stood, to show them the way through the tunnel-like passage. The count bent down and reached his hand back to Franziska.

Cooking shows historically aired on American radio/TV but transformed in the 1990s into leisure entertainment. In the 1950s, cooking shows were local, cheap, live daytime fare. Aimed at housewives, they advertised new kitchen products and often incorporated ready-made ingredients. In the 1960s, cooking shows became national educational PBS-TV shows, due to Julia Child’s The French Chef, 1963–1973. Child facilitated cooking’s shift from a female domestic duty to a creative leisure outlet. By the 1990s when cable TV targeted niche audiences, the Food Network introduced masculine chefs, travelogues, and sporting competition formulas to attract male viewers and expand its audience beyond the home cook. Food TV entered another new era when social media and streaming services expanded cooking TV subgenres as well as their cultural diversity. Social media also created opportunities for amateur producers, although demands for high production values privilege some producers, even on popular apps Instagram and TikTok.