During the Tokugawa period, commoners developed increasingly sophisticated methods of challenging what they perceived as unjust government policies or unethical behavior by the wealthy. Popular movements coalesced around petitions that stated grievances. They typically took the form of mass demonstrations that required preparation, organization, and leadership. Even urban food riots had a logic to them. In many cases, they erupted after women had called on merchants to feed the poor, and they followed a code for conduct that cautioned against stealing. In the early nineteenth century, farmers created village leagues that employed representatives to manage issues with regional implications and make their case for commercial policies. In some instances, they argued that all human beings are equal, an argument made unsuccessfully by outcaste villagers. Villagers commemorated popular movements in chronicles and tales, mixing fact and fiction in the interests of a good story, and they remembered their fallen leaders in memorial services.

Chapter 4 examines the relationship between Giovanni Amendola and Nelia Pavlova, born 1895. This complex love story has been all but entirely ignored by Italian scholarship on Giovanni and in the national memory. Apparently, the couple had a son who died of meningitis at the age of six in 1929. In Giovanni’s papers there is evidence of the love affair but no acknowledgement of the child. Since Nelia also claims on occasion to have been ‘married’ to Giovanni, some doubt must remain about the veracity of her account. She was a young woman who resembled Eva Kühn in quite a few ways: foreign, multilingual, independent, from her country’s leading political classes, intellectually able. Nelia was one the three people at Giovanni’s deathbed in Cannes (Giorgio was another). Over time, however, the Amendolas, as they put it, ‘lost contact’ with her. Yet she made for herself a distinguished career as a Paris journalist, an expert in Eastern Europe. While the Amendola sons became communists, she remained a liberal democrat, as well as a woman who always remembered Giovanni as her man. Her death probably occurred in 1940. She should not have been forgotten as easily as she has been.

Sherman argues that Marvell contributes to the secularization of the ars moriendi by exploring problems of taste in scenes of death. Sherman situates Marvell’s interest in taste by glancing at French and Italian forays into literary aesthetics and by Marvell’s own disquisitions on offensive style in his prose polemics. It is no surprise then to find Marvell experimenting with problems of good and bad taste in poems describing death like 'An Horatian Ode', 'The Unfortunate Lover', 'The Nymph Complaining for the Death of her Fawn', and in the tableaus featuring the demise of Captain Douglas. Sherman suggests that Marvell taps into Catholic iconography associated with the arts of dying to overstep the bounds of aesthetic and rhetorical decorum. He appropriates the sensuality of the Counter-Reformation’s aesthetic exalting the martyred body and the literature of tears (ars lachrimandi). With his focus on moments of sudden death, Marvell casts doubt on the value of preparing for a good death, instead preferring to observe how beauty is cut down in its prime. In this way, Marvell’s poetry of memorialization aestheticizes mortality and the work of mourning.

This chapter historically contextualises the Kurdish women’s movement and traces the trajectory of its organisational structures and knowledge production from 1978 to the present. It situates the Kurdistan Freedom Movement and its local political and armed branches in the regional and international matrices of domination: Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran. It zooms in on the main internal rupture points where the women resisted and fought against their male comrades in order to build their autonomous ranks within the larger liberation movement.

Chapter 2 examines how the claim of difference and sustainability was organised and implemented by the Kurdish women’s movement in the political sphere of Diyarbakir, where the movement has a long-standing history of organising women according to party ideology and structures. I analyse how this struggle for space unfolded once the urban wars started in mid-2015, mapping out the tools and mechanisms of resistance used by the movement as a whole and the women’s structures in particular. This chapter gives space to the critical voices, residents not organised behind party lines, as they were caught in the frontlines between the PKK and the Turkish army.

This chapter explores the theatre’s interest in the intersection of religion and emotion by focusing on two characters from Shakespeare’s history plays—Falstaff and Joan la Pucelle—who reference the real-life martyrs Jeanne d’Arc and John Oldcastle. Martyrdom was a cultural phenomenon with the potential for considerable dramatic impact on the stage, but the act of transforming it into theatrical representations had to be handled with exceptional care. Accordingly, the history plays walk a kind of tightrope, evoking Jeanne and Oldcastle through patterns of strategic indirection, including substituting minor characters for more controversial ones and killing characters off stage rather than on. Such techniques create crucial layers of distance that protect the audience from staring too closely at events already overloaded with meaning. Feelings of sympathy transmitted to the audience were thus carefully detached from real-life martyrs, interrupting and redirecting the cycle of religiously-charged emotional identification.