The interview with Maggie Smales explores the approach and directorial decisions taken in her all-female production of Henry V at 41 Monkgate, York in 2015. Smales set the production at a munitions factory operated by women during the First World War in order to focus on the home-front perspective of female war workers and their sacrifices, drawing on the history of a local factory and the lives of local women who worked there. The women’s enactment of the text is the device used for a re-examination of Henry V’s significance in the context of the First World War.

This chapter looks at the cultural turn in historical writing since the 1980s and how it changed the established traditions of cultural history writing which had existed since the beginnings of professional history writing. The strong influence of poststructuralist theories led to a growing attention to questions of representations and constructions as well as to hidden meanings. It also traces the increasing desire to embed discourses in social practices. The chapter argues that an emphasis on the situational and relational processes in which humans acted remained often linked to an emancipatory agenda. A concern for human agency united with an interest in forms of creolisation and hybridity. Theories of alterity and studies of cultural transfer moved to the fore in many sub-fields of history, e.g. in LGBT history. The chapter explores in particular a range of promising new avenues in the new cultural history: the history of the senses, the history of emotions, the history of the body, the history of violence, nationalism studies. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how the new cultural history contributed to greater self-reflexivity about the role of historical writing in collective identity formation. In particular Stuart Hall’s theory of ‘identification’ is used to describe the way in which a commitment to an engaged history writing can be squared with reflexivity about identity formation through historical writing.

Gender has always shaped rights in particularly visible ways, from the supposedly abstract, universal and gender-neutral civil and political rights articulated in the French Revolution of 1789, to the twenty-first century, where rights are claimed on the basis of membership in specific groups. Throughout this long period of over two-and-a-quarter centuries, sexual difference has complicated concepts of rights and how they have been recognised and put into practice. This chapter explores these complexities and questions the very category of ‘socio-economic’ rights.  Examining the place of sexual difference in conceptualising rights and duties demonstrates that whereas employers and the state acknowledged economic rights and social rights for men, economic rights did not automatically accompany social rights for women. Indeed, these two sets of rights were often at odds, as women’s problematic economic citizenship in France illustrates.

This chapter introduces readers to philology, defined as “making sense of texts,” and argues that it is a good way to view how certain thinkers in the Italian Renaissance read, interpreted, and worked their way through texts. It introduces the main themes of the book: that the available technologies of reading and writing – whether these are quills and animal skins or screens and the cloud – have great impact on what thinkers conceive as possible when it comes to their work; that authorship can be conceived as collective; that the use of the Latin language by Renaissance thinkers opened up meaningful possibilities even as it circumscribed their thinking within limits they did not always recognize; and that, especially for Renaissance thinkers, philosophy – defined as the search for wise way of life – and philology were inextricably linked. This chapter also suggests that recent work on history of women in the Renaissance – especially on women’s authorship – opens up new windows onto the intellectual history of the period. Finally, this chapter sets out one of this book’s guiding principles: to relate the episodes under consideration to problems in the humanities that have relevance today.

The Carolingian period (750–900) was a time of exceptional cultural and intellectual vitality that saw the production of many new works, and included amongst these were many new visions or voyages to the afterlife.Following the earlier example of Wilhelm Levison, scholars like Paul Dutton and Claude Carozzi have hitherto considered these texts mainly in light of their supposed political aims, often to critique the policies and behaviour of prominent political and ecclesiastical figures. While this perspective is not invalid, it tends to obscure other interesting elements found in afterlife accounts from this era.This chapter explores two: first of all, the use of vision texts to stake out positions on important doctrinal questions, particularly arguing for and against the efficacy of intercessory prayer, and even offering collective solutions in the case of the latter; second, Carolingian afterlife visions are innovative for their inclusion of women in prominent roles for the first time.The truth of the Carolingian world – that it was more feminine and more fractious than we might think – was darkly reflected in its otherworld.

The chapter addresses marginalisation and invisibility based on sex and gender in the histories of international criminal law. Two microhistories are sketched, starring contrasting types of individuals: the first a professional of international law, Katherine B. Fite; the second an intellectual with no legal background, Rebecca West. The chapter discusses ways by which an absence in the collective narratives of a significant past, in this case the ‘intellectual origins of international criminal law’ as an academic discipline and a political cause, can be countered. It reflects on the choices that matter in representing the rare presence against the canvas of an overwhelming absence. It interrogates the problematic aspects of representing individuals as ‘women’, deviant from a normative understanding of an ‘international criminal lawyer’. Analysing representations of Fite and West, it points to frequent tropes in narrating the ‘first and only’. Further, it inquires about the expectations with regard to ‘women’s’ participation and attitudes they may (not) have held towards current feminist causes, and concludes with reflections on why one asks the question on sex and gender of those who figure in our intellectual histories – what figures behind the act of asking.