This appendix records the evidence for forms of prayer used by the main nonconforming denominations in Britain on the occasions of special worship appointed by the state or the established churches. In Scotland, the use of set forms was opposed by the established church until the early twentieth century, but congregations of the Episcopal Church adopted the use of the BCP and special forms of prayer from the early eighteenth century. In England and Wales, the position was reversed. In contrast to the Church of England's prolific production of special forms, the dissenter chapels and later the nonconformist and the free church denominations did not publish forms of prayer until the early twentieth century. It should, however, be noted that some dissenters undertook occasional conformity with the Church of England in order to qualify for public office, and so would sometimes be present at church services which used the BCP and perhaps special forms of prayer.

The Episcopal Church in Scotland

As explained in volume 2, pp. lxxvii–lxxviii, cxxiii–cxxiv, an act of toleration in 1712 (10 Anne c. 7) legalized use of the BCP in Scotland, and protected the worship of those members of the Episcopal Church in Scotland who took oaths of loyalty to the crown. From 1714, the always small number of these ‘qualified’ chapels received further official recognition, in being specified together with the Church of Scotland in the orders in council that were issued for alteration of names in prayers for the royal family.

From a sixteenth-century Republic of Letters confined mostly to Europe and centered on practices associated with the recovery, study, and wider use of Greco-Roman antiquity, eighteenth-century learned culture acquired a more global geography, expanding its remit to include critical scholarship about a greater variety of subjects: civic virtue, sentiment, commerce and political economy, natural philosophy, natural rights, and the normative sphere of equality. In ways that are of increasing interest to eighteenth-century intellectual and cultural historians, as well as to historians of early modern cultures’ scholarly practice, aspects of late humanism remained vital as the midwife of the eighteenth-century scholarly culture that begat the Enlightenment. But exactly how the culture of late humanism evolved into one that produced the spectrum of Enlightenment practices and reformist imaginaries remains a fruitful and understudied avenue of inquiry. As I argue in what follows, the articulation of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth century learned cultures emerges into sharpened focus when the origins of the ‘secular Enlightenment’ – and indeed, the full spectrum of Enlightenment practices and reformist imaginaries that flourished by the middle eighteenth century – are historicized as contingent outcomes of a longer-term process by which participants in the expanding early modern republic of letters injected humanist methods and textual erudition into confessionally- driven religious debates, and extended their application to the study of non- European textual traditions.

Chapter 8 synthesizes the book’s theoretical and empirical findings, arguing that partisan inclusion is a critical, but often overlooked, mechanism for building de facto autonomy in electoral management bodies. The conclusion reflects on how Mexico, Ghana, Venezuela, and Kenya illuminate different pathways through which consultation, transparency, and institutional design shape electoral integrity and democratic stability. It outlines the broader implications for policymakers, international organizations, and scholars seeking to strengthen election administration worldwide. The chapter also identifies future research avenues, including the role of technology, decentralization, and evolving party systems. Ultimately, it highlights the importance of designing electoral management bodies that balance independence with engagement, ensuring institutions that can withstand political pressure and earn public trust.

Do psychiatrists have a mandate to recommend how society could be made less stressful for vulnerable people?

Theodor Fontane's Graf Petöfy, presented here for the first time in English translation as Count Petöfy, was originally published serially, in weekly installments, in the summer of 1884, with the first book edition appearing just a few months later. The novel's namesake character is Austro-Hungarian count and theater enthusiast Adam Petofy. Set in the year 1874, the story begins in Vienna, where Petofy, seventy years old and a lifelong bachelor, has decided to propose marriage to the young Prussian actress Franziska Franz. Friends and family on both sides express misgivings and urge caution; they predict that the marriage could be unhappy or even end badly. The two marry anyway and leave Vienna for Arpa Castle in Hungary, where it doesn't take long for things to go badly.

Even from this brief summary, one could make an educated guess and attribute the novel to Fontane. It begins with an ill-advised marriage and ends with the consequences that come of it. The characters make plans and try to carry them out, but things don't work out the way they had planned. It is a book in which not much happens, and what little does happen comes as no surprise. There is an almost tragic element to how things come to pass in the novel, as the characters, despite their best efforts, eventually live out and realize the pessimistic predictions expressed at the outset.

Previous chapters have framed the scope of the Alfonsine interest in the imperial dream and demonstrated that the ideological project pursued by Alfonso X permeated all aspects of his reign. Whilst in a, theoretically, ideal position, the Learned King faced the opposition of the papacy and his own kingdom. His response was to develop an ideological apparatus that could, on paper, explain the reasons why his aspirations were not just fair, but also unquestionable by any earthly powers.

This cultural production ranged from poetry and music to science and games and from political treaties to lengthy chronicles that would go back to the moment of creation. All these works had a place within the ideological universe of Alfonso X and served a purpose: for instance, the legislative works mentioned in the previous chapter exhibited, profusely, the new Alfonsine organization of the kingdom/empire, and the Setenario developed, amongst other topics, the relationship between the monarch with his own past, and with God and religion.

Hence, Alfonso X's cultural programme materialized as the embodiment of the ideological underpinnings of the Castilian-Leonese monarchy during the latter half of the century. These literary creations served to rationalise and bolster Alfonso X's endeavours in pursuit of the imperial crown. While this political aspect is more discernible in select works promoted by Alfonso X – like the Siete Partidas and the Setenario – all of the compositions overseen by the erudite monarch played a role in shaping the ideological architecture of his reign. Together with these legislative works, those within the historiographical genre proved to be key for the Castilian-Leonese monarch's ambitions.

Over the course of the nineteenth century, the violin—hitherto a simple but successful and popular musical instrument—underwent a significant metamorphosis. By 1900 it had become a fetishized art object, an icon of classical music, and a prominent symbol of Western civilization. Developments in the composition and practice of classical music can account for much of this transformation, but the shadow cast by the Industrial Revolution with its overwhelming influence on commerce, consumption, class relations, workplaces, leisure, education, transportation, and communications calls into question a strictly musical explanation. The full account of this fascinating transfiguration includes a number of important factors and a diverse mix of characters. The “sacralization” of the listening experience certainly contributed to the consecration of the violin, but the ways in which these instruments were made, maintained, bought, sold, referred to, collected, exhibited, and—most importantly—identified, were collectively of greater consequence. With the demise of the patronage system, the status of cultural objects—especially art and antiques—suddenly became ambiguous. They were thrust into a state of flux. In the art market that emerged to fill this void in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the destinies of such objects were now determined by broader sociocultural developments external to the objects themselves. Violins, like other cultural artifacts in this new economic environment, became commodities whose value was calculated, not in terms of labor and materials but according to abstract concepts like “authenticity,” “purity,” and “genius.”

Loosely translated as ‘random drawings or sketches’, manga (漫画) and its derivative media can still be frowned upon as an unhealthy subculture, but there is no denying their economic, social, and cultural impact on both domestic and global levels. To begin with, the manga media are a multi-million-dollar industry, in which a single series – often spanning decades – generates countless jobs and income, not only through the traditional sale of books and magazines but also by branching out into animation, merchandise, video games, and collaborations in other forms. Take Berserk as an example: during the past thirty-six years of its serialisation and despite its lack of an ending, the manga has been made into two animated series (1996–97, 2016–17), one animated film trilogy (2012–13) which was re-versioned into a memorial series (2022), and three video games (1999, 2004, 2016), while an exhibition has been touring Japan since 2021. It even has a collaboration cafe in Tokyo where fans can enjoy character- themed snacks and purchase limited edition household items. Nor should the vigorous fan culture be ignored: in addition to staging iconic scenes through cosplay, fans also participate in the process of creation by producing fanart and dōjinshi – that is, self-published print works exploring the manga's narrative world as the fans see fit. On the global level, the manga industry has steadily expanded into international markets since the early 2000s.

In this article, I explore the Angevin royal family's role in the Guelf and Ghibelline conflict that engulfed late medieval Italy. More specifically, I identify the extent of Angevin involvement in Tuscan warfare in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and I explain how the success or failure of monarchs in that conflict shaped contemporary narratives surrounding several monarchs, including Charles I, Robert I, Louis I and Duke Otto of Braunschweig. So, through a close reading of chronicles, letters and epic poetry, I suggest it was this factional violence as much as any other event that shaped the legacy of not only individual rulers but also the Angevins more generally in Italy.

Often did the sounds and cries of war echo around Tuscan cities during the later Middle Ages. Without fear of hyperbole, it is clear that factional warfare, and warfare's terrifying violence, was a common reality for many Tuscans. In fact, the violence was so ubiquitous that medieval chroniclers and other literary voices often framed notable events, ranging from the torture of an abbot to a fire that destroyed half of Florence in 1304, within the light of this great conflict. Dino Compagni (c. 1255–1324) calls the factions an “evil” (mali). Giovanni Villani (c. 1276–1348) writes that “Italy was stained and almost all of Europe, and many ills and perils, and destructions and changes have followed thereupon to our city and to the whole world.”

Chapter 7 examines Kenya’s electoral institutions from the era of the Electoral Commission of Kenya through the post-2007 crisis reforms that created the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission. It explores how the breakdown of party consultation, unilateral appointments, ethnic tensions, and administrative failures contributed to the 2007 electoral disaster. The chapter evaluates the post-crisis reforms that sought to strengthen autonomy through constitutional redesign and professionalization, while also documenting persistent challenges related to capacity, trust, and inclusion. Through interviews and secondary reports, the chapter assesses how Kenya’s evolving institutional design influenced the country’s ability to manage contentious elections and highlights the importance of sustained, structured engagement with political actors.

As often happens in my experience, this project has grown by design from earlier work and accidentally by chance. In Chrétien Continued: A Study of the Conte du Graal and its Verse Continuations, I analyzed the peculiar character of the first Grail romance as represented in the manuscript tradition: unfinished despite its atypical length and followed by four narrative expansions in a variety of combinations. Chrétien's enigmatic romance thus functioned as “mother text” initiating a dialogue with successive continuations which resembled a series of commentaries on their model, not unlike Jewish midrash whose narrative stories aim to expand, explain, and fill in gaps in the biblical text. When I was subsequently invited to participate in a multidisciplinary graduate course by responding to a talk by my art historian colleague on the representation of Judges 19 in the earliest Bible moralisée (Vienna, ÖNB 2554), I once again found myself engaged with biblical issues of interpretation and authority. Intrigued by this serendipitous encounter with one of the most repellent but fascinating episodes in the Bible, I decided to embark on a new project that would be bookended by further analysis of Vienna 2554, its spectacular images accompanied by paraphrase and gloss in French, and a study of Chrétien's Conte in relation to Jewish and Christian exegesis. For a conference at Fordham University on rethinking romance across disciplines, I had already planned to grapple with suggestions, as yet unsubstantiated, that Chrétien's narratives reflected the exegetical turn toward the literal among biblical scholars of the twelfth century. Hence the conception of Jewish- Christian Dialogue in Medieval French Literature: Inscribing Biblical Encounters in the Vernacular.

In the historiography of the fiscal-military state, much emphasis is placed on whether the bureaucratic apparatus of the Customs was equal to its tasks of raising revenue, enforcing trade regulations, and policing revenue crimes. Analysed in a framework that evokes comparisons with the Excise and introduces numerical ‘efficiency’ as a yardstick, the Customs are largely seen to fall short of these tasks. As it is corruption and smuggling in particular that tend to be seen as responsible, much blame is heaped on either the outdated bureaucratic structure of the Customs as giving ample opportunity for sinecurism, collusion and negligence or the branches concerned with coastal policing as responsible for large-scale Customs evasion. Chapters 3 and 4 are an attempt to approach the administrative setting of the Customs from a different angle, with the aim of challenging the straightforward, but misleading assumption of fiscal efficiency typically adopted in modern scholarship.

The present chapter is aimed at a better understanding of the bureaucracy. It is argued here that an undue focus on fiscal efficiency misrepresents the purpose of this branch of service. To make this point, it is necessary to reintroduce a number of administrative complexities that characterised the mechanics of coastal policing in the eighteenth century but have subsequently been obscured by modern notions of bureaucracy. Even at the centre of the executive, different ideas about the purposes of coastal officials prevailed. Nominally part of the Customs, other departments regularly imposed their own agendas on these officials.

This chapter begins with a brief overview of Arezzo’s history, particularly as it pertains to Vasari and his family, as well as that of the Pieve prior to Vasari’s interventions there. It then considers an initiative Vasari and Bishop of Arezzo Bernardetto Minerbetti devised to reconfigure the east end of Arezzo Cathedral in the 1550s that in part inspired his renovation of the Pieve. It concludes with an extended discussion of Vasari’s acquisition of patronage rights to the St. Mustiola chapel in the Pieve’s left aisle and his graphic designs for the chapel he intended to build there.