This book will have two primary aims of analysis: the migration of Flemings and their settlement. The first will be to identify systems and build models of migratory movements within a long-term perspective, i.e. understanding migration paths and causes, networks, strategies and migrants’ personalities. The second will focus on what is commonly known as ‘integration’, that is, the immigrants’ settlement, acculturation and acquisition of their social, economic and political position in the host country. In addition to a detailed treatment of these two aims, the book attempts to evaluate the economic impact of the immigrant community on a specific industry. I will argue that the success of the immigrants was not solely reflected in the rise of their average earnings, but also in the fact that their skills and human capital acquired prior to emigration contributed to the development of the English textile industry in the fourteenth century.

The introduction leverages the insights and interventions of world, global, and transnational histories to bring a rich world of interaction between China and the Philippines in the early twentieth century to life. After overviewing the layered connections that formed the Sino–Philippine link, which is the subject of the book, the introduction turns toward methodological approaches that best expose and explore the depths of those connections. It starts this endeavor by highlighting some limitations of world, global, and transnational history, such as their tendency to be prescriptive rather than responsive, their tendency to privilege actors and institutions from the Global North, and the high cost of entry for new scholars to the field. It argues that, while these limitations are important to recognize, transnational, global, and world histories still have much to offer if they can become more accessible, flexible, and representative. Finally, the introduction outlines the approach of the book, which adopts an interdisciplinary, decolonial, connected approach to world history that pays attention to disintegration as well as creation, implements selective silences, centers cultural and discursive flows between peoples of the Global South, and explores unencumbered articulations of race, modernity, and gender.

The Introduction sets the scene for a reassessment of the transformative reigns of Henry VII and Henry VIII (1485–1547). It addresses recent treatments of this period as the threshold between the late-medieval and early modern worlds, associated only with the growth of monarchical power. As this book reveals, a formalised system for dispensing royal justice emerged under the first two Tudor monarchs. The engagements between sovereign and subjects it facilitated provide insight into how a vulnerable regime was legitimised. Analysis of this point of contact in the following chapters proceeds through three frameworks. First is the administrative-history approach central to mid-twentieth-century scholarship on this period, which this study revives but also revises. Second is the emphasis on litigation to the Crown as a means of state–society cohesion in histories of the Elizabethan and Stuart ages, projected into earlier decades and given greater practical definition in this book. Third is the overlooked presence of contention within royal justice, given full assessment in the present study and crucial to understanding why this jurisdiction was dissolved in 1641.

The Introduction sets out the historiographical and theoretical grounding for this study on old age in slavery, and provide information on the demographic conditions of slavery appertaining to old age. This book challenges narratives of solidarity between enslaved people and their elders, and shows how far age affected the performance of mastery and shaped white southerners’ interactions with one another. In examining how individuals, families, and communities felt about the aging process and dealt with elders, it emphasizes the complex social relations that developed in a slave society. Showing how old age ran through the arguments of Black activists, abolitionists, proslavery propagandists, and enslavers, the book reveals how representations – and the realities of aging – spoke to wider debates on the politics of paternalism and resistance. Ultimately, by illuminating age as a crucial aspect of the complex web of relations that bound together enslavers and enslaved, the book asks readers to rethink existing narratives relating to networks of solidarity in the American South and emphasizes the all-encompassing violence and exploitation of American slavery.

This chapter follows Baeck’s thought after his arrival to Theresienstadt Ghetto in January 1943, and his relationship with Germany and the Germans in the aftermath of the Holocaust. The chapter reconstructs Baeck’s imperial imagination while in the ghetto. Despite the harsh conditions, Baeck insisted that hope was possible and in fact necessary. He made this point by contrasting the prophets with the Western historiographical tradition, which he identified as espousing historical pessimism. Evil empires that thrived only on power and violent means, he comforted his audience in the camp, would eventually collapse and be left in ruins. Following liberation, Baeck returned to earlier ideas, identifying Marcionism as well as the historical pessimism as giving rise to Nazism. Baeck initially expressed skepticism about the possibility of a re-emergence of Germany, later he seemed to have slightly amended his position, leaving space for a tentative reopening of the conversation between Jews and Germans.

This chapter details the rapid and radical changes experienced by Jews in Nazi Germany, focusing on the ways in which Baeck reacted to the annexation of Austria, the November Pogrom (Kristallnacht), and the German genocidal politics. Besides detailing Baeck’s political activities, this chapter is the first to offer a full analysis of his most contested work, a 1200-page unpublished manuscript he co-authored with Leopold Lucas and Hilde Ottenheimer. Although Baeck claimed it was produced for the conservative resistance, archival documents suggest it was written at the command of Nazi officers. Baeck’s discussions of race and Jewish colonization throughout history as they appear in this text reveal that he is treading very cautiously, citing Nazi scholarship on the one hand, while insisting on the rights of Jews on the other. This ambiguity is best explained by treating this manuscript as forced intellectual labor, an understanding that sheds light on Baeck’s imperial imagination at a time when the organization he headed came under Nazi supervision. Now named the Reich Association of Jews in Germany, needed to make difficult choices, including regarding deportations.

When the German national parliament, the Bundestag, held a ceremony to commemorate the seventieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War on 8 May 2015, the historian Heinrich August Winkler was asked to deliver the main address. In his speech, Winkler confirmed the central role of National Socialism and the Holocaust for German national identity. Germany’s responsibility for genocide and war meant, seventy years after the events, a special responsibility toward Israel, and for the states of east-central and eastern Europe, which had suffered most terribly under German occupation, and for the European Union project as a project of peace and reconciliation in a continent where German hypernationalism had brought destruction on a hitherto unprecedented scale.

The Conclusion first assesses whether there is a unified history of religious toleration in colonial America to be told. There is not because the colonies were all too different. Next, the Conclusion discusses what the sum of the individual chapters of the book, by focusing on law, contributes to the historiography of colonial America. As this book has endeavored to demonstrate, important lessons about history—including about religious history—can be learned by spotlighting law, just as they can by concentrating on economics, politics, and the like.

The introduction outlines the scope and parameters of the study and evaluates the historiography of child servitude in Senegal while pointing to the daunting challenges that researchers face in tackling this subject due to fragmented and spotty data. It begins by explaining the meaning of tutelle – a system of guardianship or wardship that emerged after 1848 when slavery ended in the French colonial empire. It associates guardianship with slavery and other forms of coercive labor systems such as engagement à temps or indentureship to which enslaved people, including children, were often subjected through the process of rachat or ransom from slavery. It posits that guardianship in Senegal was institutionalized servitude sanctioned by the colonial administration which spearheaded the distribution of liberated and orphaned children, formerly enslaved and free, to habitants – African and European merchants, traders, and residents, primarily in Saint-Louis – the most important and vibrant economic entity in urban Senegal. Of the habitants, the signares – mixed-race women (métis) – played a major role in shaping guardianship that subsequent chapters explore. The introduction ends with an outline of the chapters that encompass the social condition of children in tutelle in colonial Senegal from 1848 to 1910.

Chapter 6 considers the two earliest motets known to have been composed for Venetian ceremony: Ave corpus sanctum gloriosi Stefani (1329–39) and Marce, Marcum imitaris (ca. 1365), both anonymous. Situating these works within Andrea Dandolo’s midcentury chancery, this chapter argues for music’s embeddedness in the chancery’s most significant historiographical enterprises. I show how the same chancellors and scribes who copied and organized legal and diplomatic texts oversaw the production of historiographic, literary, and musical works as well. As readings of these motets bear out, the collapsing of chancery functions had aesthetic consequences; the rhetoric on display in both works straddles the humanist–conservatist divide for which the chancery—the engine of Venetian historiography—was known. My readings of Ave corpus sanctum and Marce, Marcum imitaris reveal them working in tandem with the chancery’s most significant historiographical enterprises. Not only do they bear strong thematic links to the topics most heavily elaborated within the midcentury chancery, but they exemplify an approach to history that matched the explicit charge of the chancery: to make the state sensible through the organization of its sundry items and documents.

Chapter 5 shows how the text–music relationships in the Matins office for the feast of Saint Mark’s Apparition supported the construction of narrative history. Unlike the public-facing office of Vespers, the night office of Matins—an enormous and lengthy complex of readings, psalmody, and chant—offered a robust formal structure on which narrative history could be built up and elaborated. An analysis of the chants and readings from the Matins office reveals the composer’s careful curation of source material and inventive use of the conventional melodic features of mode and melody, showing just how much craft went into the representation of miraculous history in a liturgical format. The composer’s reliance on the technical and medium-specific tools of chant to make Mark “appear” within the office suggests that such formal devices served as viable substitutes for, or representations of, the miraculous. The office itself seems to argue that good storytelling, whether accomplished on the page or in plainchant, could produce miracles merely at the level of form and technique.

The Introduction sets out the methodological approach of the book, and the major themes to be addressed. It is a ‘history in art’, a notion that provides for a primary focus on the evidence adduced from material culture (archaeology, standing remains and their decoration, surviving objects including manuscripts) integrated with information derived from written sources (in this instance primarily the series of papal biographies known as the Liber pontificalis, supplemented by other documents such as the Ordines Romani and the chronicles of Frankish and Italian historians). The two other overarching themes are the gradual decline of the Roman economy, and the resulting impoverishment of the Roman Church over the course of the ninth century and its effects on papal patronage, and the continuing adherence of Roman artistic production to the broader context of Mediterranean Christian visual culture. A historiographical survey/analysis is also included.

This chapter offers an overview of selected linguistic approaches to writing and writing systems, mainly to alphabetic orthographies, with special emphasis on the English language. The survey starts with the ancient views on the relationship between speech and writing, as they constitute the foundation of premodern and modern perspectives. Since the debate between the relational and autonomistic approaches took several decades in the twentieth century, an important part of the chapter covers their main tenets and representatives. The author argues that, over time, one can observe growing convergence between the previously opposite perspectives, which testifies to the increase in the awareness of the complexity of interrelations between alphabetic writing systems and the other language subsystems. Eventually, scholars, especially those focusing on English in their research, have widened their interest in writing systems to a variety of extralinguistic aspects interrelated with the patterns of orthographic variation. These interrelations are presented and illustrated in the last part of the chapter, which is devoted to the historical sociolinguistic approach.

Metalcore is a slippery concept. A relatively new genre category, dating from the early 2000s, it provokes wide disagreement about what counts as metalcore and arguments within metal scenes about its legitimacy. This chapter provides an overview of metalcore as an ‘abject genre’, a useful shorthand term for nu metal, screamo, and a variety of core subgenres that have been widely criticised by metal fans. Beginning with commonalities that metalcore shares with other abject genres – some mass popularity, stylistic alterations of traditional metal traits that detractors view as simplified dilutions, quotidian rather than supernatural lyrics, and associations with marginalized categories of identity – I then outline diverse historical accounts by other authors to argue for a more complex view of chronological and conceptual boundaries than an individual narrative might allow. Finally, an analysis of Currents’ ‘Silence’ (2017) provides an example of metalcore as an amalgamation of stylistic qualities from multiple sources. I conclude with thoughts on the utility of abject genres as a concept for reception histories and the potential for metalcore’s complexity as a genre to teach broad lessons about genre in popular music.