Chapter 3 focuses on the kinds of domestic duties expected of women in gentle, noble, and royal establishments and thus offers an understanding of everyday life in a late medieval elite household. The range of activities required of highborn household servants was broad, encompassing both public and private obligations. They saw to their queens’ or noblewomen’s personal needs in terms of apparel, entertainment, and piety. They traveled when duties demanded it and assisted their queens and ladies with medical care. To perform these tasks, they were entrusted with significant household resources and also, sometimes, care and custody of royal and noble children. Over years of service, through daily serving the needs of their employers, some serving women and their mistresses developed affectionate relationships as they shared literary tastes and devotional practices. Their employment provided opportunities for elite female servants to live a sumptuous lifestyle surrounded by luxury and entertainments, and also to network with other courtiers. I argue that investigating the domestic duties and daily lives of these often-overlooked women completes our understanding of courts and great households by showing the importance of female employment in the Middle Ages.

Chapter 4 explores the kinds of extraordinary situations experienced in the lives of royal ladies-in-waiting, asserting their prominent roles in coronations, marriages, christenings, and other ceremonies designed to cement and further dynastic prestige, such as Order of the Garter tournaments and the Field of Cloth of Gold extravaganza. Serving the queen at important life-cycle rituals, seasonal events, and diplomatic spectacles contributed to the monarchy’s propaganda program, thereby bolstering royal authority and encouraging dynastic loyalty. When kings dispatched their daughters and sisters to foreign lands, their entourages signaled the wealth and status of the English monarchy. Highborn female attendants not only assisted the queen and female royals, but also reinforced hierarchical order by their very placement in these rituals, order that was displayed, I argue, both in processions and their particular assigned responsibilities. This chapter reveals how the spectacle of such pageantry had significant political dimensions, even if such was not always recognized by the subjects who witnessed royal processions.

This chapter focuses on a novel transnational governance initiative which was developed after the 2013 Rana Plaza crisis: the Bangladesh Accord on Fire and Building Safety. We focus on one particularly novel aspect of the Accord, which is the nature of the collective action created through the collaboration of over 200 signatory brands with global labour actors. We first identify the institutional design features including transnational co-determination, industry-wide, pre-competitive collaboration, legally enforceable commitment, developing worker voice, leverage through collective action, accountability through collective oversight, pooling of resources and, finally, the highly focused approach. While successful in improving safety in the industry, we also highlight the political nature of collective private regulation and the political backlash from national actors which ultimately ended its regulatory power.

The Conradian fauna range from the albatross to the yearling and contain more than 150 different species of nonhuman animal. Despite the biodiversity, it is easy to overlook Conrad’s animals because they most frequently appear in metaphors and similes: at first sight, they lack agency, physical presence and independent meaning. But contrary to an articulated evaluative ideal of animal studies, Conrad’s animal metaphors invite reflection on human–animal relations, and demonstrate that an author can write attentively, sympathetically and thoughtfully on animals, despite primarily mentioning them in metaphors. The unreality effect, which I argue unites Conrad’s unconventional animal metaphors, confronts the reader to question the reality of the fictional construct. The unconventional sayings that produce this unreality effect all say: we have the appearance of a marginal, incidental detail but we are one of the most complicated structures in the text.