Over the past several decades, there has been a variety of narratives associated with the American Capital One credit card “What's in your wallet?” commercial campaign, and one of them (lasting from roughly late 2000 to 2013) features the medieval men of northern Europe invading contemporary United States. The campaign's central question “What's in your wallet?” is coy – almost seductively sexy – but also invasive and aggressive. Merging that slogan into a bizarre, medievalish, comic allegory to represent empowerment – not to mention male virility – creates a strange sort of message that emphasizes financial empowerment of male right to privilege that ultimately concludes with a belittling of gender identities. Whether this sexism represents medieval practices and/or perceptions does not matter. In fact, inauthenticity allows for increased humor, and humor (sexist or not) sells. The issue instead becomes a question of whether medievalist perceptions of gender have shaped contemporary perceptions of gender or have contemporary perceptions of gender shaped medievalist perceptions of gender. The answer to this chicken-and-egg question can be quite simple: yes. However, the complexities of that “yes” reveal the complexities of gender identity.

There is no question as to the inauthenticity of these commercials. While Pam Clements argues that authenticity “has great significance for medieval studies and medievalism,” it rarely holds significance for commercials, which have a long history of making disingenuous statements, such as Trident chewing gum's “Four out of five dentists surveyed recommend sugarless gum for their patients who chew gum.” Capital One randomly mixes cultural identities of Vikings, Visigoths, and Huns to make a new culture of northern European identity. “Each time the real raiders emerge on screen,” observes Alison Tara Walker, “the advertisement overstates their violent tendencies – showing their ‘authenticity’ when they run the less-believable versions of themselves off screen.” In response, Jeffrey J. Cohen addressed a letter to “Capital One Marketing Gurus” with tongue planted firmly in cheek: “I ask you to grant these groups their full complexity, a first step toward which might be having the spokes-barbarian no longer declare the tagline ‘What's in your wallet?’ in a seriously poor Cockney accent.”

Grail quests, silly or otherwise, meaningful or not, are almost always homosocial male endeavors. Grail Knights – Lancelot, Bors, Perceval, Gallahad, and others – go out on the quest. Grail Maidens attend the Grail, or reverently carry the Grail, sometimes along with other assorted associated sacred objects, in processions around throne rooms and banquet halls when it makes one of its infrequent, unannounced, or mysterious appearances. The quest itself generally follows a set pattern:

The Peacock Network's eight-part mini-series, Mrs. Davis, presents a reworking of the Grail quest that is not unlike what one would expect if one were to combine Monty Python and the Holy Grail, David Lynch's Blue Velvet, The Book of Margery Kempe, and The Showings of Julian of Norwich.

Hwat – so goes the very first word of the famous Old English poem Beowulf. Translated variously as “Indeed,” “What ho,” “Listen,” and, humorously, “Bro” by Maria Dahvana Headley, among many other possible translations, it serves as a way for the speaker to “introduce or call attention to a statement,” in this case the tale of the heroic deeds and death of the poem's hero, Beowulf.

Hwat, or “Listen,” is also the first word and name of the first section of Headley's novel The Mere Wife, a modern re-interpretation of Beowulf that centers on the experiences of the women in the story: Dana Mills, the mother of Gren(del); Willa Herot, whose husband Roger is the heir of Herot Hall, the gated community that takes the role of Hrothgar's hall in the original; and the matriarchs, particularly Diane and Tina, the mothers of Willa and Roger, respectively. Besides shifting the focus from the men to the women and transporting the characters from the past into the present, Headley also introduces other changes that put the story into a new light and make it particularly interesting from not only a literary studies or feminist lens, but also an intersectional approach. This essay will apply the concept of intersectionality to the main characters of The Mere Wife, focusing particularly on Gren, but also extending the analysis to some of the others, namely Dana, Willa, Dylan, the mothers, and Ben Woolf, the novel's version of Beowulf. Before doing so, however, it is necessary to first define what intersectionality means.

Even though the term itself was coined in 1989 by Kimberle Crenshaw to give a name to the ways that Black women were (and still are) erased by the US government and legal system because of their race and gender, the concept of “multidimensional” oppression has been an integral part of Black women's theoretic thinking for much longer, going back at the very least to 1892. At its core, it refers to the fact that despite the tendency to view the categories of race and gender as completely separate, they are actually closely entwined. According to Crenshaw, Black women are discriminated against not only on the basis of their gender or race but also because of both factors in combination. Their experiences as Black women differ significantly from those of non-Black women on the one hand, and Black men on the other.

In preindustrial Europe, the family was the production unit in crafts and agriculture, particularly while production was on a small scale and the producers were the owners of the means of production. Even in sectors like mining where families hired themselves out to others, the tasks were divided between family members and together one earned a ‘family wage’. The capitalisation of agriculture in southern and eastern England and the gradual change of textile production into protoindustrial activity, where those who did the work only owned their skill and ability to work, went hand in hand with the disintegration of the family as a work unit. Over the nineteenth century, the mechanisation not only affected the opportunities of women but an increasing share of women and men became paid workers learning to tend machines rather than skilled craftsmen/women. An issue voiced with considerable concern by William Morris and the members of the Arts and Crafts movement. In Britain, the lack of statistical series registering economic activity before the mid-nineteenth century prevents us from pronouncing anything about the number of women who worked side by side with their husbands in craft shops or even mining. Considering the tendency of statisticians in other countries to only register the occupation of the household head, it is unlikely that we would have been provided with information about the activity of the wife and children even if there were data.

The advent of the mechanisation process and the opportunities to employ women and children only, and not together with a male household head, resulted in the rise of new problems and eventually the decision that the state needed to intervene and create protective legislation. Why? Because when these groups were no longer supervised by a father/husband, his replacement, the factory overseer, became the person with the right to disciplinary action. In addition, the factory owners introduced such a multitude of economic sanctions that only the lack of other feasible options could make such work attractive. With a population short of land or capital, a factory system of an unpleasant nature could be the only option for survival for members of the proletariat.

Central to our conception of the First Crusade's launch as a carefully stagemanaged papal enterprise are four letters of Pope Urban II written after 1095. These are some of the most important and intensively studied sources for the early gestation of the crusade and scholars have used them to attempt to glean insights into how Urban called for the crusade, how he justified it, and what his ‘intellectual conception’ (‘geistige Konzeption’) of the expedition was. They are vital to the standard interpretation, popularised by Jonathan Riley-Smith, that the papacy launched a carefully controlled campaign of preaching and recruitment and organised a central muster. Arguably, however, traditional approaches push the letters slightly too far as evidence of Urban's crusade conception and in constructing a grand overarching papal plan for the crusade. There are also indications that, in the form in which we now have them, two of the letters have been modified, probably through the excision of material. As a result, scholarly interpretations of the pope's plans for the expedition need to be re-evaluated. This chapter explores the letters afresh in the attempt to provide a more cautious understanding of the launch of the crusade and to set the scholarship on a more secure evidential footing regarding Urban's documents.

Urban II's letter to Bologna

The first of Urban's letters concerning the crusade to have survived down to the present day is that sent to the faithful of Bologna on 19 September 1096. The text is preserved in an early twelfth-century manuscript in the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana (as well as an eighteenth-century copy). The twelfth-century witness, which has been dated between 1101 and 1125, was made in northern Italy. Its codex contains primarily the sermons of Augustine, to which Urban's constitutions from the Council of Melfi (1089) and two of his letters to Bologna are appended. The other letter to Bologna in the codex, which is dated 17 April 1097 or 1098 and addressed to the bishop, shares with the crusade document the theme of reinforcing ecclesiastical authority there.

THE Victorian mandarins formed and re-formed themselves in the spirit of Clapham Sect morality, thoughts on the government of India, the repeal of the Test Acts, Catholic emancipation, the removal of Jewish political disabilities, and the Northcote–Trevelyan Report. This book is about the interactions of ideas and institutions which shaped British civil life after 1815.Whatever is “modern” about “modern” Britain emerged from the rubble of the wars of the French Revolution. The rather standard account of the period following 1815 is one of growing stability, progress, and improvement into an age of equipoise. This story is enshrined in a Whig interpretation of history written by the likes of Thomas Babington Macaulay; a story of confidence and self-satisfaction. This is, however, to forget the period's rubble and disor¬ganization: Peterloo, Chartist disruptions, famine in Ireland, Continental revolutions in 1848, the emergence of another Napoleon, and mutiny in India. It was an age in which ruling elites, so far as they could rule at all, felt the anxieties of revolutionary terrorism. As Henry James said at the time he was writing The Princess Casamassima (1886), Britain “is gloomy and London reflects its gloom.” He noted the increase of terror: “Westminster Hall and the Tower were half blown up two days ago by Irish Dynamiters” and that there was a “general sense of rocks ahead.”

The nineteenth century was a “Victorious Century,” but, as its historian makes clear, its “victory” was deeply ironic and uncertain and there was nothing preordained or inevitable about its stability

As Kishonna L. Gray notes, there is a pervasive cultural script of gaming culture that holds whiteness and masculinity at its center. This cultural script is upheld by marketing, character creation, narrative inclusions and exclusions, storylines, and more. Ready Player One, inspired in part by knight-poet Wolfram von Eschenbach's thirteenth-century German Arthurian romance Parzival, is a 2011 novel by Ernest Cline with a subsequent 2018 movie adaptation directed by Steven Spielberg and written by Cline and Zack Penn. As intellectual property, the backbone of Ready Player One and the entire basis of its plot revolve around late twentieth-century nerd-core gaming culture, including and exceeding its cultural scripts.

Ready Player One is also, as scholars like Susan Aronstein, Jason Thompson, Kevin Moberly, and Brent Moberly point out, fundamentally structured by Arthurian romance. Both the novel and the film follow a white teenage boy named Wade Watts. In a dystopian near-future characterized by economic turmoil, mass inequality, and environmental collapse, Wade, like most people on earth, spends as much time as possible in the OASIS, the “Ontologically Anthropocentric Sensory Immersive Simulation” (48). A video-game designer named James Halliday created the OASIS, “a massively multiplayer online game that […] gradually evolved into the globally networked virtual reality most of humanity now used on a daily basis” (1). With no heirs, on the day of his death Halliday released a video challenging the OASIS's population – virtually everyone on earth – to embark on a Grail Quest to find the Easter Egg that will give them Halliday's fortune and ownership rights to the OASIS. This Grail Quest is a series of in-depth interactive puzzles within OASIS that are highly informed by Halliday's personal infatuation with 1980s nerd and gamer culture; his tastes, by virtue of their pervasiveness in his creation, the OASIS, have dictated the tastes of billions of others.

Along with this Egg Hunt/Grail Quest, Halliday releases a personal diary chronicling his favorite texts, his “canon” (40), as a clue for the questers trying to find the Egg-Grail. When this worldwide Grail Quest begins within OASIS, Wade builds an avatar who, in the movie, has digitally exaggerated white skin, and he chooses the username Parzival, “after the knight of Arthurian legend who found the Holy Grail” (28).

Stanford matriculated at Queens’ in October 1870. From the beginning he felt at home since many of his old Dublin friends were students at the same university. As one of Cambridge's first organ scholars he applied himself with customary vigour to his duties in chapel (a building which now houses the Library). Special services and performances of sacred music soon began to attract attention across the university. The young Irishman was not only a fine organist but a notable choir-trainer. The Cambridge University Musical Society (CUMS) was also quickly aware of his presence. Stanford was elected a member of the society at a meeting of 25 October with his debut as a pianist occurring shortly afterwards on 30 November. This performance, warmly applauded by the audience, was to signal his rapid rise to prominence within the hierarchy of Cambridge music.

During his first term at the University there was little opportunity for composition, but he did find time to complete a setting of Thomas Campbell's ‘To the evening star’ (dated 18 December 1870) whose harmonic world seems haunted by Schumann's Frauenliebe und Leben. He also finished a Pater Noster for Stewart and the Dublin University Choral Society which was performed on 19 December. The Christmas vacation was spent largely socialising among old friends. He joined a populous gathering at Adare Manor, Lord Dunraven's country seat in Co. Limerick and later visited the Graves family at Parknasilla where he took part as pianist and composer in a satirical sketch on Darwinism concocted by Alfred, Charles and Arnold.

Back at Cambridge in early 1871, Stanford continued to make his mark as the most promising musician the university had seen in decades. The CUMS programmes for the year show that he was already dominating events. In March he appeared as pianist in Beethoven's Piano Trio Op. 3 No. 1 and in June he was the soloist in a concerto by Weber. In fact Stanford's speedy rise to fame occurred at an opportune moment in the history of the society. It so happened that the health of the society's conductor, John Larkin Hopkins, had begun to fail. In February 1870 he had tendered his resignation to CUMS with the promise that George Garrett, the organist of St John’s, would take over his responsibilities. Hopkins’ resignation was rejected by the CUMS committee, but it still left the society with an uncertain future.

Stanford's career as a conductor had enjoyed a modest revival with his appointment in 1906 as conductor of the Sunday Concert Society, but owing to considerable financial losses on the concerts, the Society decided to give up its contract with the LSO and hand the entire operation over to Henry Wood and the Queen's Hall Orchestra. Visits to provinces were now a rarer event. Apart from invitations to conduct at the Three Choirs Festival, he made one visit to Birmingham in March 1908 and another to Liverpool in March 1909 to conduct his ‘Irish’ Symphony. The following year he was invited to conduct the Ode to Discord at the rapidly expanding Brighton Festival and, as a guest of the Dover Musical Festival, he was asked to direct a revival of The Battle of the Baltic. However, with more established works, Stanford was increasingly willing to attend performances of his music rather than take the baton. He was, for example, happy to stand by while Hamish MacCunn (as part of the Beecham Opera Season) undertook the direction of Shamus at His Majesty's Theatre in May 1910, and George Bennett (organist of Lincoln Cathedral) conducted the Stabat Mater at the Lincoln Festival in June. He was also ready to fulfil other roles, whether in the capacity of accompanist to Plunket Greene (who remained the foremost interpreter of his Irish song cycles and folk-song arrangements), or as President of the Cheltenham Choral Society and the Rodewald Concert Society in Liverpool.

Henry Wood continued to promote his music; his wife Olga Mikhailov sang two of Stanford's songs from The Triumphs of Love – ‘I think that we were children’ and ‘O flames of passion’ – specially orchestrated for her to sing at a Promenade Concert on 23 October 1909. It was her last public appearance. In great pain she managed stoically to perform with her usual professional deportment, but soon after she was removed to a nursing home, underwent an operation, but died on 20 December. Landon Ronald, who had made his name as an assistant conductor with the LSO, and would soon establish his reputation with the New Symphony Orchestra, conducted Stanford's First Irish Rhapsody in Amsterdam and Rome to great acclaim and revived the Sixth Symphony at Queen's Hall on 2 December 1909.

On 16 February 1882 Stanford received an official letter from the Prince of Wales inviting him to a meeting at St James's Palace on 28 February in order to discuss the establishment of a new college of music to replace the National Training School. The very issue of a new Royal College of Music had been the subject of debate for some time, for which there were delicate political matters to resolve. The Royal Academy of Music had once been the target of Henry Cole's aspirations for a new, enlarged national conservatory of music; but after the plan was rejected by Sterndale Bennett, who wanted the RAM to remain independent, Cole decided to push ahead with his own plans for a National Training School of Music with royal support.1 The project of the NTSM, opened in 1876 under the direction of Arthur Sullivan, was brought to a close under the leadership of John Stainer in 1882. Though moderately successful in its aims, the NTSM had never been more than a preliminary foundation for a more socially progressive institution initially conceived by the Prince Consort after the Great Exhibition in 1851.

Momentum for the new college began to gather during 1881, and in 1882 discussion of its constitution, accommodation and concomitant finance, with George Grove at the helm, was ubiquitous in the musical press. Stanford, anxious to be included in the new venture – he had been too young and inexperienced for the NTSM – accepted the Prince of Wales's invitation to attend the first meeting at St James's Palace in February 1882 with alacrity. Privately he expressed his views on the matter with Hudson, and there was even the suggestion that, if London did not want the new conservatoire, then it might be situated in Cambridge:

Ill-health cut short Stanford's final stay in Berlin. ‘I am happily nearly all right again now,’ he wrote to Joachim, ‘and looking forward with tremendous excitement to the 8th.’ The Lent Term of 1877 was, as usual, a busy one. Stanford returned to take up his more permanent duties with the chapel choir at Trinity, though it was not until Lady Day (25 March) that he was officially confirmed in his position as Chapel Organist. Conditions for the post included a stipend of £250 together with rooms and Commons, though it was still for the Choir Committee to draw up a new set of conditions. Though these proved to have some advantages, notably sanction to be continuously absent from college during all weeks in the year when there was no choral service, they were also a source of irritation, particularly since the Precentor still retained the responsibility for the selection of music.

The ‘Wednesday Pops’ proceeded with increased vigour. Of the six scheduled concerts in February and March, Stanford appeared in the first four as pianist with members of the ‘Stanford Quartet’, as a duettist with Fuller Maitland in Schumann's Bilder aus Osten Op. 66 (21 February) and in his own ‘Andante and Scherzo from a Serenade’ (7 March) which were most probably two movements of his later Serenade Op. 18 for orchestra. February also saw the completion of Three Ditties of the Olden Time which consisted of two settings of Sir John Suckling's well-known lyrics (‘Out upon it’ and ‘Why so pale and wan’) and one by Herrick (‘To carnations’); they were published by Stanley Lucas.

The high point of the term for CUMS was of course the choral and orchestral concert of 8 March given at the Guildhall in aid of Addenbrooke's Hospital. After a morning rehearsal of the fifty-piece, London-based orchestra (an expenditure for the Society of £217/-/10d) and chorus of 150, Joachim received his degree in the afternoon. The concert in the evening proved to be a major social occasion attracting the likes of Lord Leighton, Robert Browning, George Lewes, Edward Dannreuther, August Manns, Manuel Garcia, Ebenezer Prout and the usual fraternity of critics: Bennett, Grüneisen, Hueffer and Davison. A concert in Manchester prevented Hallé from attending, and the up-and-coming Parry was in Cannes, detained by the necessity of his wife's convalescence.