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After many years at the margins of historical investigation, the late medieval English gentry are widely regarded as an important and worthy subject for academic research. This book aims to explore the culture of the wide range of people whom we might include within the late medieval gentry, taking in all of landed society below the peerage, from knights down to gentlemen, and including those aspirants to gentility who might under traditional socio-economic terms be excluded from the group. It begins by exploring the origins of, and influences on, the culture of the late medieval gentry, thus contributing to the ongoing debate on defining the membership of this group. The book considers the gentry's emergence as a group distinct from the nobility, and looks at the various available routes to gentility. Through surveys of the gentry's military background, administrative and political roles, social behaviour, and education, it seeks to provide an overview of how the group's culture evolved, and how it was disseminated. The book offers a broad view of late medieval gentry culture, which explores, reassesses and indeed sometimes even challenges the idea that members of the gentry cultivated their own distinctive cultural identity. The evolution of the gentleman as a peer-assessed phenomenon, gentlemanly behaviour within the chivalric tradition, the education received by gentle children, and the surviving gentry correspondence are also discussed. Although the Church had an ambivalent attitude toward artistic expression, much of the gentry's involvement with the visual arts was religious in focus.
This book introduces a discussion of a fundamental paradox concerning contemporary society and government in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (UK). There is strong evidence of continuing trends towards a more secular and less religious society and pattern of social behaviour. At the same time, religious doctrines, rituals and institutions are central to the legitimacy, stability and continuity of key elements of the constitutional and political system. Outlining the thesis of secularization, the book attempts to account for the failure of secularisation theory. The oaths of the accession and of the coronation of the monarch are the central affirmative symbolic acts which legitimate the system of government of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (UK) and the place of the monarchy at the apex of the political system. The book explores some remote and dusty corners of the constitution of the UK that might be of some importance for the operation of the UK political system. The 1953 coronation ad many features of the 1937 coronation on which it was modelled. The religious rituals of the UK Parliament appear to be much more fixed and enduring than those devised in the context of devolution since 1999 to resolve tensions between the religious and political spheres in the 'Celtic' regions. A profound limitation of Anglican multifaithism as a doctrine for uniting the political community is its failure to connect with the large secular population.
Introduction It has been maintained that each ‘society, at each moment, elaborates a body of social problems taken to be legitimate, worthy of being debated, of being made public and sometimes officialized and, in a sense guaranteed by the state ’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 2004 : 236, original emphasis). In the Republic of Ireland the ‘moment’ of the ‘social problem’ labelled ‘anti-social behaviour’ arrived when Anti-Social Behaviour Orders (ASBOs) were included in the Criminal Justice Act (2006). From 1 January 2007, these orders could be
process. The experiment focuses on arguably the most common form of online engagement: asynchronous discussion forums. The aim of the experiment was twofold. First, to understand the extent to which giving citizens the opportunity to debate controversial policy issues (in this case youth anti-social behaviour and community cohesion) led to changes in policy knowledge and preferences. And second, to analyse the extent to which citizens actually deliberate online and whether their interactions are inclusive and informed. What do we know about online engagement
This chapter focuses on social housing as a particular domain where exclusions of migrants and ethnic minorities are prevalent. Everyone has a right to feel safe 1 in their own home and neighbourhood yet, between 2013 and 2014, there was a noticeable increase in the number of reports of individuals and families in Ireland experiencing racism in housing, either in the home or in its vicinity. While offering insights into immigrants’ experience of racism and racially motivated anti-social behaviour in social housing in the Republic of
equally strong inclination to subject social behaviour to systematic explanation. This reconciliation led him to oscillate rather ambivalently between ‘realist’ and ‘nominalist’ accounts of social phenomena. He argued against the prevailing structuralism, most represented in the anthropological work of Lévi-Strauss, on the grounds that it imposed a detached, objectivist interpretation of the actions of others which was essentially an expression of the ‘nominal’ dispositions of the interpreters. On the other hand, he did not want to subscribe to a subjectivist
product of a post-abolition society whose preference for European immigrant labour sidelined Afro-descendents from the job market, compelling many to live off illegal activities, or their wits. This culture of roguery encompassed a gamut of anti-social behaviours, such as womanising, illegal gambling, street fighting and petty crime. The malandro ’s dissolute lifestyle was completely unacceptable to the officially promoted work
of, and influences on, the culture of the late medieval gentry, thus contributing to the ongoing debate on defining the membership of this group. It considers the gentry’s emergence as a group distinct from the nobility, and looks at the various available routes to gentility. Through surveys of the gentry’s military background, administrative and political roles, social behaviour, and education, it
rights to the point of worthlessness. Second, they object that rights encourage individualistic and anti-social behaviour. People stand on their rights to avoid obligations to others. Such attitudes are justified when society makes unreasonable demands on people. But they can also appear at odds with, or indifferent to, such necessary social virtues as compassion, civility and charity. This chapter addresses these two standard
the deliberate, multiple, and ‘forced’ pun – increasingly signifies in this period what I call ‘cognizant deliquency’, a kind of self-conscious disinhibition that knowingly plays on the boundaries between social and anti-social behaviour. As such, the pun is a loaded trope, well-suited to highlighting other areas of social ambivalence and attempted repression. Hood’s puns are not always political, but his commitment to punning is. Hood’s love of punning and his attachment to other kinds of pluralism are inseparable. I hope, by looking at puns in Hood’s work, to