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England is ruled directly from Westminster by institutions and parties that are both English and British. The non-recognition of England reflects a long-standing assumption of ‘unionist statecraft’ that to draw a distinction between what is English and what is British risks destabilising the union state. The book examines evidence that this conflation of England and Britain is growing harder to sustain in view of increasing political divergence between the nations of the UK and the awakening of English national identity. These trends were reflected in the 2016 vote to leave the European Union, driven predominantly by English voters (outside London). Brexit was motivated in part by a desire to restore the primacy of the Westminster Parliament, but there are countervailing pressures for England to gain its own representative institutions and for devolution to England’s cities and regions. The book presents competing interpretations of the state of English nationhood, examining the views that little of significance has changed, that Englishness has been captured by populist nationalism, and that a more progressive, inclusive Englishness is struggling to emerge. We conclude that England’s national consciousness remains fragmented due to deep cleavages in its political culture and the absence of a reflective national conversation about England’s identity and relationship with the rest of the UK and the wider world. Brexit was a (largely) English revolt, tapping into unease about England’s place within two intersecting Unions (British and European), but it is easier to identify what the nation spoke against than what it voted for.

Studies of the fate of Judiciaries in post-Communist Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) have been rare and attempts at causal explanation rarer. This study found that interlocked transnational networking empowered a minority of elite Judiciary revisionists to entrench their institutional template in Eastern European constitutions, setting these transitional democracies on a trajectory toward a global trend of the judicialization of politics. The first, crucial step in that process is traced: the formal disempowerment of democracy through Judiciary revisions that ordinary people and politicians in Central and Eastern Europe little heeded. The causal nexus converging on this outcome is explained. Why it matters is because the revisionist template reorients that most venerable of non-majoritarian institutions beyond adjudication of the guilt or innocence of subjects of state power under legal certainty – the classical role of modern courts – toward the improvisation of public policy, with or without the consent of the majority of the governed, by ‘finding’ it in constitutions; the unique legitimacy of which derives from the prior ratification of a supermajority. The question of who shall have the final disposition of contested constitutional meaning – the Executive, Legislature, Judiciary, the People, or All of these – implicates sovereignty itself and whom it shall rest on: the last word is sovereign for practical purposes. The interdisciplinarity of this study will appeal to a wide audience: scholars of law and politics and socio-legal studies, social scientists researching elite transnationalism and European integration beyond the EU, even institutional design practitioners.

Growing up in Diverse Societies provides a comprehensive analysis of the integration of the children of immigrants in England, Germany, the Netherlands, and Sweden, based on the ‘Children of immigrants longitudinal survey in four European countries’ (CILS4EU), including harmonised interviews with almost 19,000 14- to 15-year-olds. The book studies the life situation, social relations, and attitudes of adolescents in different ethnic minority groups, and compares these systematically to majority youth in the four countries. The chapters cover a wide range of aspects of integration, all addressing comparisons between origin groups, generations, and destination countries, and elucidating processes accounting for differences. The results challenge much current thinking and simplified views on the state of integration. In some aspects, such as own economic means, delinquency, and mental health, children of immigrants are surprisingly similar to majority youth, while in other aspects there are large dissimilarities. There are also substantial differences between ethnic minority groups, with the economic and cultural distance of the origin regions to the destination country being a key factor. For some outcomes, such as language proficiency or host country identification, dissimilarities seem to narrow over generations, but this does not hold for other outcomes, such as religiosity and attitudes. Remaining differences partly depend on ethnic segregation, some on socioeconomic inequality, and others on parental influences. Most interestingly, the book finds that the four destination countries, though different in their immigration histories, policy approaches, and contextual conditions, are on the whole similar in the general patterns of integration and in the underlying processes.

‘Communal’ property is an important mechanism for allocating natural resources and regulating their use – whether for economic exploitation, recreational use or the promotion of biodiversity and nature conservation. The form which communal property regimes take, however, and their relationship to private property structures, varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction and is poorly understood. Nevertheless, the importance of communal property, transcending the public/private divide in property rights, is increasingly apparent globally. Contributions to this volume focus on legal strategies for the development and protection of communal property and how these strategies ‘map’ over different jurisdictions (England and Wales, Scotland, South Africa, Cameroon, Italy, Israel and China) and jurisprudential approaches. They look at property beyond the traditional, individualist, and exclusive ownership model, engaging with communal property ‘practices’ in different jurisdictions to explore the theoretical grounding of communal property, not only linking theory with practice but also linking the local with the global.

Pelagius is the first known British author, important because of his persuasive advocacy of two ideas: that human nature was inclined to goodness, and that man had free will. After a campaign to vilify him, he was excommunicated in AD 418 for allegedly inventing a new heresy, and his name was made synonymous with arrogance. This book shows that Pelagius defended the contemporary ascetic account of Christianity and that, far from being the leader of a separatist group, he was one of many propagandists for the ascetic movement which swept through Christianity at this time and generated medieval monasticism. Textual analysis proves that Pelagius did not teach the ideas attributed to him or propose anything new. It is impossible to differentiate between Pelagius’ writings and other ascetic literature, and there was no separate group of ‘Pelagians’. This book also examines how and why the myth was created, setting this process in its historical context and in the context of scholarship on the function of heresy in religion and sociological analysis of the creation of deviance. Finally, manuscript evidence supports the argument that ‘Pelagianism’ was a deliberately created myth. Travelling under false attributions, Pelagius’ writings were staples of monastic book collections because they contained the same ideas as other texts promoting the ascetic version of Christianity. In the fourteenth century, when Christians once more sought a confident anthropology, it was Pelagius’ works to which they turned. This book presents a paradigm shift in our understanding of the history of Christianity in the West.

Since the rise of analytical philosophy, the relation of philosophy and its past is more hotly debated among philosophers than ever. Some scholars analyse historical texts without reference to current debates and their terminology, while others pursue first-order philosophy by focusing on problems instead of doxography—that is, without reference to their predecessors. A growing group, though, doubts that philosophy can be studied effectively on the basis of this sharp division. But does the study of the history of philosophy contribute to current philosophy? And, if it does, what precisely is the contribution? Does making such a contribution depend on using a specific method which determines how the historical perspective is related to systematic philosophy and philosophy in general? More generally, how do our assumptions about the relationship between historical and systematic perspectives affect our methodology and metaphilosophy or philosophy of philosophy? This volume presents and debates answers to these questions, which deserve to be addressed in their own right and not just as an adjunct to other discussions. The contributors of this volume provide diverse answers based on historical references, stretching from ancient philosophy to the most current debates, and also refer to various philosophical sub-disciplines.

This volume investigates the relationship between archives and information in the early modern world. It explores how the physical documentation that proliferated on an unprecedented scale between the 16th and 18th centuries was managed in the context of wider innovations in the sphere of communication and of significant upheaval and change. The chapters assess how archives were implicated in patterns of statecraft and scrutinise critical issues of secrecy and publicity, access and concealment. They analyse the interconnections between documentation and geographical distance, probing the part played by record-keeping in administration, governance, and justice, as well as its links with trade, commerce, education, evangelism, and piety. Alive to how the contents of archives were organised and filed, the contributors place paper technologies and physical repositories under the microscope. Extending beyond the framework of formal institutions to the family, household, and sect, this volume offers fresh insight into the possibilities and constraints of political participation and the nature of human agency. It deepens our understanding of the role of archives in the construction and preservation of knowledge and the exercise of power in its broadest sense. Above all, it calls for greater dialogue and creative collaboration to breach the lingering disciplinary divide between historians and archival scientists.

Fighting for France is the first book to examine the violent confrontations between political groups in interwar France. A range of groups at the political extremes employed physical aggression against their enemies and threatened to bring about the violent demise of the democratic regime. The scale of confrontations ranged from encounters between individuals to large clashes involving hundreds of activists. Until now, historians have denied and downplayed the frequency and seriousness of French political violence in favour of an interpretation that emphasises France's weddedness to democracy. Fighting for France demonstrates that the democratic culture of the late Third Republic co-existed with a culture of violence in which the physical punishment of rivals and opponents was considered acceptable. Drawing on the narratives constructed around outbreaks of violence, the book reconstructs the lived experience of fighting and the sense that contemporaries made of conflict. It examines violence in a variety of settings, from the street to the factory floor. A range of actors come under investigation, including fascists, communists, and the police. Fighting for France forces us to reconsider the place of political violence in a democratic society. It transforms our understandings of the course of interwar France and Europe.

Literary and cultural-historical debate about the First World War has focused on whether the conflict inaugurated a new modernity (in Paul Fussell’s terms, a specifically ironic consciousness) or whether it revealed deep continuities, particularly in the area of memorialization. The debate can productively be widened by expanding the scope of critical attention to include, not only English trench poetry, but also the creative production of women, non-combatants, civilians, and writers and artists from Europe and the then British Empire. This enlarged canon, which in this book ranges from the British combatant poets Wilfred Owen and David Jones to the writers and nurses Mary Borden and Enid Bagnold, the civilian novelists H. G. Wells and Virginia Woolf, and the international authors Robert Service, Berta Lask, Claire Studer Goll, Ricarda Huch, Gertrud Kolmar, Anna Akhmatova and Rabindranath Tagore, enables us to rethink the very meanings of terms such as ‘modernity’ and ‘modernism’. Literature itself is illuminated through juxtaposition with film, photography and fine art. Three areas in particular reveal the ways in which literature, culture and the war coalesce in a putative modernity: the unfathomable, intensity and ‘cosmopolitanism’. These emerge via investigation of issues such as shellshock, sacrifice, death, aerial bombing, resistance, empire and race.

The focus of the book is on the seven rounds of parliamentary elections that have taken place in Russia since 1993. After the chaos that followed the collapse of the USSR, a new Russian political system has been forged in the early twenty-first century that has consolidated around high support levels for its president, Vladimir Putin. Russia’s legislature – the Federal Assembly, including the State Duma – forms an integral part of the machinery of governance. Successive changes to the electoral and party systems have moved the country from the chaos of early post-Soviet years toward a stable executive-dominated system propped up by a four-party ‘cartel’ – dominated by the pro-Kremlin United Russia party – in the legislative sphere. A common perception has grown that Russian elections are predictable, controlled and pointless to examine in a comparative context. But real voters cast real ballots, and this book is the story of how the electoral system has evolved, how the campaigning strategies of the political parties have developed, and how the voting behaviour of Russians has changed across the first quarter-century of Russian independence. The most comprehensive long-term study to date of Russian elections, it utilises a combination of official data, new primary material and in-depth analysis to assess the electoral arena of the Russian Federation from the end of the Soviet Union to the start of Putin’s fourth term.

The radio programme Desert Island Discs has run almost continuously since 1942, and represents a unique record of the changing place of music in British society. In 2011, recognising its iconic status, the BBC created an online archive that includes podcasts of all programmes from 1976 on, and many from earlier years. Based on this and extensive documentary evidence, Defining the Discographic Self: ‘Desert Island Discs’ in Context for the first time brings together musicologists, sociologists, and media scholars to reflect on the programme’s significance, its position within the BBC and Britain’s continually evolving media, and its relationship to other comparable programmes. Of particular interest are the meanings attributed to music in the programme by both castaways and interviewers, the ways in which music is invoked in the public presentation of self, the incorporation of music within personal narratives, and changes in musical tastes during the seven decades spanned by the programme. Scholarly chapters are complemented by former castaways’ accounts of their appearances, which give fascinating insiders’ views into how the programme is made and how its guests prepare for their involvement.

This book tells the story of Durgā, the buffalo-demon-slaying deity dear to Indic rulers, between the 3rd and the 12th centuries CE, as she transformed from a Vaiṣṇava, to a Śaiva and finally to a supreme deity, a concentrated power-source Śakti, in whom all divinities and dualities were thought to inhere and also to transcend. Reconstructed through mythology, liturgy, the belles lettres, ritual instructions, epigraphy, local legends of kingship, sculptural evidence and anthropological studies, the stages of this story illuminate an entire belief system concerning political power: warrior-centric goddess worship called heroic Śāktism in the book. The belief that a good king and a true warrior must worship the goddess Durgā, the form and substance of kingship, heroic Śāktism formed the bedrock of ancient Indian practices of cultivating political power. Wildly dangerous and serenely benevolent at one and the same time, the goddess's charismatic split nature promised rewards for a hero and king and success in risky ventures. Fundamentally, the slow development of this deity cannot be disentangled from the narrative of the state in pre-modern India. Heroic Śāktism unfolded within a social landscape of conquest and competition, dependent on a monsoon economy in which harvests were unreliable and the appeasement of gods in control of environmental crises, foremost among whom was the goddess, was paramount. Its emergence is imbricated with the imperatives of state: military expansion, especially after the demise of the Gupta empire, the rise of local lineages, the assertion of regional cultic identities, the authorization of territorial ownership and the development of the regular ritual life of kingdoms. All these political processes involved Durgā at their very core. She was the prime symbol that communities used to articulate the shifts they underwent during the fluctuations of expansion and consolidation. This story of the Goddess and political power is shown in three discrete but related parts. The first ‘Beginnings’ tracks a historical process by plotting the development of her cult from its early form in the Gupta period to its mature phase in the 11th century CE, when it had secured more robust patronage, and by showing the sectarian appropriations and consequent conceptual and ritualistic amplifications in the understanding of the deity along the way. In the second part, ‘Synthesis’, focused on the 12th century CE, Heroic Śāktism is seen as a social phenomenon representing diversified state-power, arising when the single monolithic Durgā transformed into a deity incorporating regional authorities that partook of her larger identity in order to consolidate and integrate themselves into a pan-Indic network. In the third part, ‘Belief Systems and rituals’, Heroic Śāktism is explored through its matrix of ideas, beliefs and stories, and the ritual enactments, coalescing during the Navarātra, during which this idea-matrix was enlivened through hymn, offering and prayer, whereby the cult acquired meaning and purpose in society and culture. For without ritual, without the enmeshing of goddess into relationships with people, the cult and its notion of power were incomplete and without effective connection to the world.

The pragmatist approach to philosophical problems focuses on the role of disputed notions—for example, truth, value, causation, probability, necessity—in our practices. The insight at the heart of pragmatism is that our analysis of such philosophical concepts must start with, and remain linked to, human experience and inquiry. As a self-conscious philosophical stance, pragmatism arose in America in the late nineteenth century, in the work of writers such as Charles Peirce, William James and John Dewey. While popular wisdom would have it that British philosophy thoroughly rejected that of its American cousins, that popular view is coming into dispute. Many distinguished British philosophers have also taken this practical turn, even if few have explicitly identified themselves as pragmatists. This book traces and assesses the influence of American pragmatism on British philosophy, with particular emphasis on Cambridge in the inter-war period (for instance, the work of Frank Ramsey and Ludwig Wittgenstein), on post-war Oxford (for instance, the work of Elizabeth Anscombe, P. F. Strawson and Michael Dummett), and on recent developments (for instance, the work of Simon Blackburn and Huw Price). There is a comprehensive introduction to the topic and the history of pragmatism, and Price and Blackburn, in their contributions, add their most recent thoughts to the debates.

The Middle Ages continue to provide an important touchstone for the way the modern West presents itself and its relationship with the rest of the globe. This volume brings together leading scholars of literature and history, together with musicians, novelists, librarians and museum curators in order to present exciting, up-to-date perspectives on how and why the Middle Ages continue to matter in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Presented here, their essays represent a unique dialogue between scholars and practitioners of ‘medievalism’. Framed by an introductory essay on the broad history of the continuing evolution of the idea of ‘The Middle Ages’ from the fourteenth century to the present day, chapters deal with subjects as diverse as: the use of Old Norse sagas by Republican deniers of climate change; the way figures like the Irish hero Cú Chulainn and St Patrick were used to give legitimacy to political affiliations during the Ulster ‘Troubles’; the use of the Middle Ages in films by Pasolini and Tarantino; the adoption of the ‘Green Man’ motif in popular culture; Lady Gaga’s manipulation of medieval iconography in her music videos; the translation of medieval poetry from manuscript to digital media; and the problem of writing national history free from the ‘toxic medievalism’ of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

This volume of essays provides an overview of the transformation that the study of Russian music since 1917 has undergone since glasnost’, both in Russia itself and outside it. Prior to this, scholars on both sides of the Iron Curtain confronted formidable practical difficulties. In the USSR, the operation of strict censorship and ideological constraints seriously hindered the development of scholarship. In the West, ideological perspectives engendered by the Cold War hindered an objective appraisal of many aspects of Soviet cultural life. The changed climate of the post-Soviet period has obviated many of these difficulties, and acted as a powerful stimulus to the development and expansion of the discipline. The seventeen chapters are grouped under six thematic headings. Those in Part I explore the most conspicuous trends and changes in emphasis in recent scholarship, as well as assessing the extent to which pre-glasnost’ ideological perspectives continue to hinder progress. Part II focuses on reappraisals of Socialist Realism and other important topics pertaining to music and musical life of the Stalinist era. Part III examines the damaging effects of censorship on Soviet musicology, and Part IV on recent developments in Shostakovich studies, an area which has been the locus of particularly fierce controversies. Part V focuses on the Russian musical diaspora. The three essays in Part V are concerned with the ways in which the difficult transition to the post-Soviet era has affected Russian compositional activity.

This book challenges commonplace conceptions of musical conservatism during Germany’s Weimar Republic (1918–33). Its primary goal is to offer scrutiny of uncritical links often made by musicologists and historians between musical conservatism and cultural-political conservatism of the era, and the accompanying tendentious vocabulary of the ‘anti-modern’. It does so chiefly by means of a critical and nuanced application of the term ‘conservative revolution’, as used in the Weimar era and popularized in its historiography after 1945. The introduction introduces the time-honoured notion of ‘Weimar culture’ and its tendency to obscure parts of the contemporary cultural landscape, not least in their relation to modernity and modernism. Chapter 1 considers the problematic status of the term ‘conservative revolution’. Four contrasting studies are then presented, each focused on a particular ‘conservative’ musical figure or movement, and informed by readings of a complex discourse drawn from contemporary journals, speeches, letters, scores, and archival sources. Chapters 2 and 3 address Thomas Mann and his relationship with Hans Pfitzner in the aftermath of the First World War, and Alfred Heuss’s 1920s tenure as editor of Schumann’s Zeitschrift für Musik. Chapters 4 and 5 turn to the so-called ‘Bruckner cult’ of the Weimar era and its representations of its central composer as medieval mystic, and the work of August Halm—another dedicated Brucknerian—within the German youth movement, as defined and proclaimed by the radical pedagogue Gustav Wyneken. An extended epilogue considers advocacy for these Weimar-era musical conservatisms under the Nazi regime after 1933.

This volume brings together anthropologists, historians and literary scholars in order to explore how societies represented and used the past. Case studies range from the seventh century to the twenty-first, and from Africa, America and Asia to Europe. All the means and media by which societies, groups and individuals engaged with the past and expressed their understanding of it are addressed, and contributions treat not only professional historians, but also clerics, poets, novelists, administrators, political activists, and journalists as well as the consumers of their works. The utility of the past proved almost as infinitely variable as the modes of its representation. It might be a matter of learning lessons from experience, or about the legitimacy of a cause or regime, or the reputation of an individual. Rival versions and interpretations reflected, but also helped to create and sustain divergent communities and world views. With so much at stake, manipulations, distortions and myths proliferated. But given also that evidence of past societies was fragmentary, fragile and fraught with difficulties for those who sought to make sense of it, imaginative leaps and creativity necessarily came into the equation. Paradoxically, the very idea that the past was indeed useful was generally bound up with an image of history as inherently truthful. But then notions of truth proved malleable, even within one society, culture or period. Concerned with what engagements with the past can reveal about the wider intellectual and cultural frameworks within which they took place, the book is of relevance to anyone interested in how societies, communities and individuals acted on their historical consciousness.

It has become common to build an opposition between prudish Victorian England and permissive nineteenth-century France. The lack of a full-length study of nineteenth-century Anglo-French literary relations means that both English reserve and French license have been greatly exaggerated, as French writers frequently met with far greater support in England than at home. French Novels and the Victorians aims to shed new light on these relations by exploring the enormous impact of French fiction on the Victorian reading public. The work considers the many different ties built between the two countries in the publishing industry, identifying how French novels could be accessed and by whom, as well as who promoted and who resisted the importation of Continental works in England and why. The book reflects on what ‘immorality’ meant to both critics and the readers they sought to warn, and how the notion was subjected to scrutiny through censorship debates as well as the fictional representations of readers. It also tackles the contemporary preoccupation with literary influence, and explores how the extensive circulation of French fiction in England affected the concept of a ‘national’ literature. Rather than a study of the (considerable) influence of novelists such as Balzac, Hugo, Dumas, or Sand on individual works of English literature, this book uncovers the networks and mediums that enabled French novels to cross the Channel, and looks at how the concept of the ‘French novel’ was elaborated, interpreted, and challenged.

This book offers an introduction to one of the most fascinating and little-known song traditions in Europe, the Breton gwerz or ballad. These narrative songs, collected in Western Brittany from the 19th century to the present day, recount a wealth of stories based on tragic local events (shipwrecks, abductions, accidents and murders) or legends (miraculous rescues, penitent souls, strange journeys). Two of the foremost scholars in the field present a selection of thirty-five ballads in the original Breton with English translations and musical notation. An accompanying CD showcases some of the most famous Breton traditional singers, and a comprehensive introductory essay explores the nature of the songs and the contexts in which they have been performed. These are strikingly dramatic, often deeply moving stories of violence, love and grief, which will touch listeners and readers of all interests.

This collection considers key issues arising from the use of Medieval Latin in Britain from the 6th to 16th centuries. Although in this period Anglo-Latin was not the native language of its users, it was nevertheless used extensively for a wide variety of functions from religion, literature, and philosophy to record-keeping and correspondence. It existed alongside a number of everyday native spoken languages, including English, Anglo-Norman French, and Welsh. The chapters examine Latin with regard to the many multilingual contexts in which it was used, looking beyond narrow comparisons with its Roman ancestor to see what medieval users did with Latin and the diverse effects this had on the language. The fifteen chapters are divided into three parts. The first part considers important examples of Latin usage in Britain during four successive periods, pre-Conquest, the 12th, long-14th, and 15th and 16th centuries. In the second part, examples of different spheres of use are examined, including the law, the church, music, and science (and its assimilation of Arabic). In the final part the use of Latin is considered alongside the many native languages of medieval Britain, looking at how the languages had different roles and how they influenced each other. In all the many contexts in which Latin was used, its use reveals continuity matched with adaptation to circumstance, not least in the development of new vocabulary for the language. Between these two poles users of Latin steered a course that suited their own needs and those of their intended audience.