The Irish Constitution combined with the power of the Catholic Church sought to define Irish women within a patriarchal society, her role within the home as a mother and a wife. Historical symbolic representations of Ireland in addition to legislations and sexist attitudes further enforced this idealised role, deterring and restraining women from actively pursuing a career. These challenges for women in Irish society were likewise reflected in the Irish traditional music scene as “many married women put aside their instruments altogether, unless they taught their children to play”. For the women who continued to play after having children, Slominski refers to these musicians as “tradition bearers”:

mothers like Molly Morrissey (no relation to the piper), Margaret O’Callaghan, and Pearl O’Shaughnessy. Many of these women rarely played outside their homes, but motherhood allowed them to pass on the tradition in time-honoured and politically supported ways. Today their names most often appear in connection with their sons.

While much has changed since twentieth-century Ireland, recent studies have shown that women still face significant challenges when pursuing a career and being a mother. According to a study of 1200 adults in 2021 by Matrix Recruitment (a national recruitment company with offices in Dublin, Waterford, Athlone, Galway and Carlow):

77% of those surveyed this year said they believe motherhood impacts a woman's career progression with 63% of respondents connected it to the assertion that women are still considered primary carers. Over half (57%) said they believe employers have an unconscious bias towards women who may be considering starting a family, suggesting discrimination starts even before a woman becomes a mother.

Christ’s defeat of the devil poses theological difficulties for the Cappadocians, which they navigate in different but equally creative ways. Gregory of Nazianzus and Gregory of Nyssa preach that God is truth, and yet their use of the Christ-as-fishhook motif suggests that the devil is deceived by God, for Christ uses his mortal flesh as bait to lure and catch the devil. Gregory of Nazianzus sees no need to justify his use of the fishhook motif, but Gregory of Nyssa provides a comprehensive defence, going so far as to describe the crucifixion as ‘a kind of deceit’. This chapter, then, draws on Greek philosophical, cultural, and biblical thought to investigate how the Gregories tackle complications arising from Christ’s defeat of the devil.

My sense of intimacy with the legend that was Ngugi came from the strong emotional response I had on first reading his A Grain of Wheat while studying English at the University of Ghana. Reading it gave me a sense of the immense emotional power of his writing. This piece uses A Grain of Wheat as a starting point to think through Ngugi’s work in general, tracing the ways in which it took an increasingly satirical turn from the late 1970s after his exile from his native Kenya. This overview of his work is both celebratory and critical, and I try to speculate on why he was not awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in his lifetime.

This chapter focuses on the contribution of archaeology to investigate and recognize the diversity of agricultural strategies and land-use patterns in the Roman world. It focuses on arable cultivation and arboriculture, also stressing the role of watery lands and the link between demography and agricultural developments.

In the 1930s, American comic books switched from reprinting newspaper cartoons to original content. They imitated pulp fiction and introduced superhuman crime fighters. In World War II, these patriot heroes boosted sales. By 1950, comic books featured sensationalistic content and tamer adventures but became the target of concerns that they were unhealthy for children. A 1954 Senate subcommittee even took testimony about comic books’ impact on teenagers. Fearing censorship, the comic book industry created an internal regulatory system. But by the late 1960s, they again struggled, and so they fashioned more relevant stories, more superheroes, new distribution networks, and specialty retail outlets that spawned a fan culture of adult readers. By the early 2000s, comic books regularly provided material for movies and TV. They introduced gender and racial diversity. Today, comic book culture thrives as a fan-driven industry, and annual conventions or “Comic-Con’s” attract hundreds of thousands.

The importance of Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain for the development of Arthurian literature is well documented. Geoffrey situates Arthur in the line of legendary British kings extending back to Brutus. He raises Arthur's status from king to emperor with widespread conquests on the continent. He introduces motifs that echo through medieval and later literary history, including the story of Arthur's marvelous birth, the account of the battle with the Giant of Saint Michael's Mount, and the fleshed-out story of Mordred's treachery. He also virtually creates the Merlin figure as we have come to know him. In the course of doing so, Geoffrey constructs: a series of prophecies of Merlin that have inspired works whose plots depend on Merlin's prophetic powers; almanac predictions (a practice parodied by Jonathan Swift in ‘A Famous Prediction of Merlin, the British Wizard, Written Above a Thousand Years Ago and Relating to This Present Year 1709’); and poems in which Merlin predicts some future event, usually the triumphs of a future monarch (as in George Darley's ‘Merlin's Last Prophecy’, in which he foretells the glories of Victoria and the British Empire). Geoffrey also establishes the narrative of Arthurian pre-history, the period preceding Arthur, which includes the Saxon invasions that his uncle Aurelius Ambrosius and his father Uther must resist even before Arthur himself rules.

In the annals of Iberian history, few figures loom as large as Alfonso X of Castile and Leon. Known as ‘el Sabio’ or ‘The Learned’, Alfonso's reign from 1252 to 1284 marked a period of remarkable cultural and intellectual efflorescence. Yet, amongst his numerous contributions to science, law, and literature, it is his ambitious but ultimately unrealised imperial dream that has fascinated scholars for centuries.

Imagine a king, not merely content with his dominion, but yearning to revive the glory of a bygone empire in order to legitimise his rule. Alfonso X's quest for the imperial crown of the Holy Roman Empire, a pursuit filled with political manoeuvring, ecclesiastical intrigue, and cultural innovation, stands as a testament to his visionary, albeit quixotic, ambition. This book delves into the heart of Alfonso's imperial dream, exploring not only the historical and ideological contexts of his ambitions but also how his aspirations for the Holy Roman Empire were intricately woven into the fabric of his cultural projects.

Embark on a journey into the heart of Alfonsine imperial ideology, seeing how it manifested in the cultural efforts of the Learned King. The following pages will contextualise Alfonso and his work, placing him at the centre of this study, and will explain the development and methodology of this research, which has endeavoured to unravel Alfonso X's imperial dream.

The Learned King and his work. The Estoria de Espanna.

The chapter introduces some of the statistics most commonly used to describe networks. These can be seen as analogues, in a network context, of quantities such as mean and standard deviation for a sample of real numbers. They can be roughly divided into two categories: topological summaries, such as the collection of degrees of the vertices of the network, that could be derived from a picture of the network, and spectral summaries, such as the eigenvector centrality, that are derived from the spectral decomposition of the adjacency matrix of the network (or of one or more related matrices). Many of them, such as clustering coefficients, can be formulated as local summaries, computed at each vertex of the network and can then be combined to yield a global value characteristic of the entire network. The results of a number of the summaries are compared with one another, using the Florentine marriage network as an example.

If sexual intercourse itself began—thus Philip Larkin—“in ninety sixty-three … between the end of the ‘Chatterley’ ban and the Beatles’ first LP,” it arguably took another thirty years to reach the field of musicology, when Susan McClary published her Feminine Endings in 1991 and Philip Brett went a-Queering the Pitch three years later. Yet, McClary and Brett were hardly the first to observe the confluence of sex, desire, and music. It would have required a particularly obtuse mindset to ignore the correlation between musical and sexual climax that is implicit in Isolde's Liebestod and made fully explicit by Richard Strauss in the orchestral prelude to Der Rosenkavalier fifty years after. And as McClary, Brett, and their peers among the “New Musicologists” of the early ‘90s readily admitted, they owed many debts to others—most obviously to Sigmund Freud and the psychoanalytical literature of the earlier 20th century, and more recently to Michel Foucault and his Histoire de la sexualité of 1976, which remains to this day a seminal work in the field. Issues of gender in music and musicology had also already been thematized by Eva Rieger in Germany in the early 1980s.

Nor was sex utterly in its infancy in the music faculty of Cambridge when I studied there from 1981 to 1984, though when a serious lecturer announced that the closing lines of a dull madrigal “symbolized orgasm,” eyebrows were raised and little else (“Really?” said our college's director of music afterwards about the piece, “it sounds rather more detumescent to me”).

State of the Art

The global Second World War caused major humanitarian catastrophes that necessitated relief for soldiers, military and civilian prisoners of war, as well as for other victims of the war, including refugees and displaced persons in Europe and in non-European war zones, particularly in Asia. To assist the ever-increasing needs of these diverse groups became a major task for established humanitarian actors, such as the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), various national Red Cross Societies, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and the Quakers. They could resort to organisational knowledge and experienced staff, and professionalised more and more their war-related relief work in the course of the ongoing conflict. However, just like during, and in the aftermath of, the First World War, the present global conflagration also saw the emergence of new humanitarian organisations, such as Oxfam and the Catholic Relief Service, that mobilised for special concerns or helped to facilitate potential political alliances. Regardless of whether the humanitarian organisation was an established or a new one, non-state relief agencies entered into close, often co-dependent relationships with states during the war. States understood aid as significant due to moral concerns, but also to safeguard their political, economic and strategic interests, and hence strove to control, guide and coordinate humanitarian activities during and in the aftermath of the war