During the palatial period there was a significant increase in the living standards of the Mycenaeans. The strengthening of certain rulers led to the kingship and, along with other various factors, to the creation of palaces, which were the economic and administrative centres characterized by feudal elements but mainly by a bureaucratic organization. Cyclopean walls assured protection and power. Greece was divided into hegemonies, each palace controlling apparently a large area. There was no subordination of the different regions to one powerful king. The ‘Catalogue of ships’ in the Iliad somehow reflects the topography of Mycenaean Greece. Commercial activities and seafaring developed significantly, taking advantage of neighbouring peaceful conditions. A network of contacts and interactions was created between areas previously closed to each other, like the Hittite kingdom. Cyprus, Egypt, the Near East and by the end of the period also with Italy, from where new weapons and burial customs arrived.

Based on an evaluation of extensive primary and secondary sources, ’Gendered Journeys’ interprets, through the lens of gender studies and in relation to the tradition of ’Bildungsreisen’, the impact of Felix and Fanny Mendelssohn’s European travels on their artistic creativity.  Their respective trips to Rome were especially important.  Italy inspired them both to increasing self-reflection, and to further personal and professional development.  Nevertheless, the opportunities and experiences offered to each of them were significantly different, owing to the relatively strict delineation of gender roles during the nineteenth century, but also to their personal choices.

Mendelssohn’s ten visits to England made the country easily his most important foreign destination. Although he was consistently feted by British audiences both as composer and performer, he privately expressed dissatisfaction with the state of music making he encountered, which compared unfavourably in many respects with that in Germany, especially with regard to rehearsals. Nevertheless, he kept on returning, in part because it provided a truly international shop window for his major new works. He was also honest enough to admit enjoying his reception, while he was also able to renew the many personal friendships he formed over the years. At the same time, his early death can be attributed in part to the exhaustion caused by his incessant activity during his final visits to the country, which was posthumously set to honour him publicly more than Germany.

Modern scholarship has in general portrayed Mendelssohn as a composer held in high regard during his lifetime but posthumously downgraded. This chapter presents a more complex picture, arguing that his reception during his life moves through three distinct phases. It examines the themes present in the earliest reviews of his works (1824–9) revealing how German reviewers emphasised the young composer’s dependence on models. In contrast, English reviewers from the start acclaimed him as one of the leading composers of the age. It then explores the upturn in Mendelssohn’s critical fortunes in the 1830s and responses to key works such as the Piano Concerto in G minor and St Paul. It concludes by exploring negative assessments by Hegelian critics such as Franz Brendel in the 1840s, comparing Mendelssohn’s mixed reception in Germany with the continuing effusive praise he received from English critics such as George Macfarren.

Chapter 3 considers T. S. Eliot and Lynette Roberts together as authors who develop major long poems in response to the violence and mechanization of World War II. While Eliot and Roberts carried on significant correspondence during this period, almost nothing has been written about the relationship between their poetry. In the face of wartime desolation, both offer fragmentary images of a submerged national past: the spiritual sanctuary of Little Gidding for Eliot; the buried dragon of the Welsh nation for Roberts. Alongside these images of potential national revival, both consider the possibility of transcendence, while still identifying with the political disarray of their chosen nations.

The boundary disputes between rival metropolitan jurisdictions functioned to enhance papal authority.

Given the privileged position of anglophone literature, medieval travel writing from England has been covered more extensively than that originating in other literatures and traditions. This chapter will try to balance English and Scottish travel writing, while omitting three writers in particular that feature elsewhere in this volume: Sir John Mandeville, Margery Kempe, and William Wey. There is no shortage of travel writing situated in England and Scotland: Ohthere, The Stacions of Rome, or the General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales are only some instances. English and Scottish pilgrims to the Continent and Palestine have left numerous accounts, the most striking early example of which is Saewulf’s voyage to Jerusalem in 1102. This chapter will offer an overview of several central and remarkable English and Scottish travel texts. Furthermore, I will look at texts for which travel is central yet that have not been typically considered as travel writing. In this sense, I continue the theme of this volume in embracing a capacious definition of ‘travel writing’ as not only texts that make travel their express subject, but that contain and offer accounts of multiple journeys.

Voyages of discovery and their accounts in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries have rarely been considered in the context of periodising ideas of ‘medieval’ and ‘early modern’. Though once such voyages are read not with the hindsight of the twenty-first century but from within the tradition of prior travel, the newness of the New World emerges as a modern construct with limited historical purchase. Texts and maps that verbalise voyages beyond the boundaries of what was known are situated as much in individual experience as in collective perspective; they are often more invested in their own reception than in measurable objects and dateable events.

In chapter two, Helen O’Connell explores the idea of cultural repression as an unintended consequence of a program of language and cultural renewal. Too often, the early Irish Revival promoted the rewards of cultural renewal without at the same time emphasizing the hard work of education and social improvement that such renewal entailed. Revivalists such as Douglas Hyde and D. P. Moran attempted to reverse social and cultural decline by creating resources out of the cheerless forbearance, that is to say, the suffering of ancestors, all in the name of an Ireland free of any debased and debasing foreign culture. Hyde and Moran were dedicated to the Irish language and the importance of elevating Irish culture and Irish industries and both advocated the rejection of deleterious English influences. But each occupied a different position: one was an Anglo-Protestant and the other a Catholic, one minimized politics and ideology, the other amplified both.

This chapter begins by acknowledging punitive damages’ status as the paradigmatic proof of punishment’s place in the law of torts. A brief overview of current punitive damages practices around the world first shows that the place of punishment in tort law is no longer debated only by common law scholars. Then a detailed description of the understanding, scholarly treatment, and judicial availability of punitive damages focuses on two major common law jurisdictions (England and the United States) and various civil law legal traditions (mainly Latin America and Continental Europe). This map of the unique contours and idiosyncratic features of the scholarly debates and judicial availability of punitive damages of those jurisdictions reveals a common pattern that begs further inquiry: in most jurisdictions, the tendency is to frame the debate around the place of punishment in tort law such that the root problem becomes finding a way to circumvent the fundamental punitive quest instead of addressing it head-on.

While Shelley produced many of his most important works in self-imposed exile from Great Britain, various locales in England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales played an important role in his personal and poetic development. Attending to Shelley’s experiences across Great Britain and Ireland, and to local sociopolitical dynamics in the places where he lived and worked, this chapter traces some formative influences upon his later poems and essays. It finds that Shelley’s political and aesthetic maturation owed much to his geographical and institutional surroundings and illuminates how these surroundings contributed to his alienation, radicalisation, and visionary zeal.

Chapter 2 covers the period from 1960 to 1980 and analyses how teachers’ unions emerged as the most powerful force in education policy, often at the expense of other interest groups – most notably the private school associations and parental groups. The chapter investigates how this shift in influence shaped major education reforms of that era. It explains how governments found it relatively easy to expand secondary education to an entirely new generation, as teachers’ unions stood to gain substantial material benefits. In contrast, governments faced extraordinary difficulties in integrating the selective education systems into comprehensive school types aimed at promoting social inclusion, largely due to strong union opposition. Additionally, the chapter analyses how teachers’ unions, in fierce competition with other interest groups, consolidated and extended their influence at local levels across the case countries and the European Union.

Regardless of the intellectual coherence of hierocratic theory and the pope’s formal status as head of the universal Catholic Church and lynchpin of its central administration, the practical reality of papal monarchy had to reconcile that curial centralism with the logistical impossibility of exercising and enforcing direct control over all of Catholic Europe. Configured by local variables and interests, the integration of regional churches and polities within the papal network rested insecurely on a delicate balance combining delegation of authority, administrative decentralization, and local acquiescence. Incomplete subjection left space for local agency to exploit the perceived benefits of papal authority and obstruct its unwelcome intrusions. Using England as a case study, this chapter considers various manifestation of those complex ties (the activities of papal emissaries, and responses to and exploitation of the legal, fiscal, and dispensatory claims and structures), emphasizing the bottom-up perspective on medieval papal monarchy.