Paganism Persisting is a history of revivals of pagan religion in Europe from late antiquity to the 20th century. It explores the motives, beliefs and circumstances behind a series of attempted revivals in antiquity, the Byzantine empire, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Victorian era, and the twentieth century.

Strange tales from many medieval genres prove that experience, not fiction, underlay fairy beliefs. Supernatural beings took on similar forms whether they were supposed to be ghosts or goblins, saints or demons. First-person oral testimony is backed up by place-names which show how wells, pools and hills were known locally as haunted locations.

This companion gives an exhaustive overview of how screen censorship touches our lives, from historical studies to today's intrusions into how screen content is controlled, made available, or taken away. The cases studies range from the forbidden over politically 'subversive' materials, to plain mainstream fare-all within censorship's reach.

Piskies, mermaids, giants, and a revenant bridegroom: the stuff of legend. In the hands of skilled storytellers - the famed droll tellers of Cornwall - the result was magical. Considered in the context of narratives throughout Northern Europe, enchantment can be understood as well as enjoyed in this new way to look at Cornwall. 10b&w illus.

For centuries, Europeans believed in a parallel world of the 'social supernatural'. The social supernatural realm mirrored and interacted with our own, causing disasters and providing fertility. Bringing together eighteen experts, this book explores how diverse cultures across Europe envisioned their social supernatural neighbours.

Devon has a long and rich folkloric heritage which has been extensively collected over many years. This book consolidates more than a century of research by eminent Devon folklorists into one valuable study and builds on the vital work that was undertaken by the Devonshire Association, providing insightful analysis of the subject matter and drawing comparisons with folklore traditions beyond the county. The first major work on Devon's folklore since Ralph Whitlock's short book published by the Folklore Society in the 1970s, this volume brings the subject into the twenty-first century with consideration of internet memes and modern lore, demonstrating that 'folklore' does not equate to 'old rural practice'. With chapters covering the history of Devon's folklore collecting, tales from the moors, the annual cycle, farming and the weather, the devil, fairies, hauntings, black dogs, witchcraft and modern lore, this will remain the standard work for many years to come.

This edited volume investigates how Gulf women negotiate spaces of dissent through their writing. The focus on women's narratives offers critical perspectives on how Gulf women construct themselves as gendered selves and authors, how they exist in public and private spaces, and how voice and agency are part of their conversations.

This book introduces the story of the 'Green Children' and how it has been interpreted, retold, and reworked. Analysing the two accounts, and offering fresh translations from the Latin originals, it considers what the historians tell us happened, and then the children's own story of their homeland.

This book combines film studies with environmental history and politics, aiming to establish a cultural criticism informed by 'green' thought. David Ingram argues that Hollywood cinema has largely perpetuated romantic attitudes to nature and has played an important ideological role in the 'greenwashing' of ecological discourses.

This book is the first sustained and dispassionate study of the role of Freemasonry in everyday social and economic life: why men joined, what it did for them and their families, and how it affected the development of communities and local economies.

The story of the migration of the Cornish people throughout the world is an epic, told here by one of the world's leading scholars of the movement of Cornish people. Accessible narrative includes the US, Canada, Australia, and S Africa. Fully revised and updated with almost two decades of additional research undertaken by historians worldwide.

The little-studied and once much-feared boggart is a supernatural being from the north of England. Using long-forgotten sources as well as social media surveys and personal interviews, this ground-breaking book reveals that almost everything we thought we knew about the boggart is wrong.

Honourable mention for The American Folklore Society's Wayland D. Hand Prize for outstanding book combining historical and folkloristic methods and materials.

Runner up for The Folklore Society's 2022 Katherine Briggs Award for most distinguished contribution to folklore studies.

The little-studied and once much-feared boggart is a supernatural being from the north of England. Against the odds it survives today, both in place-names and in fantasy literature-not least the Harry Potter universe. This book pioneers two methods for collecting boggart folklore: first, the use of hundreds of thousands of words on the boggart from newly digitized ephemera; second, about 1,100 contemporary boggart memories from social media surveys and personal interviews relating to the interwar and postwar years.

Combining this new data with an interdisciplinary approach involving dialectology, folklore, Victorian history, supernatural history, oral history, place-name studies and sociology, it is possible to reconstruct boggart beliefs, experiences and tales. The boggart was not, as we have been led to believe, a 'goblin'. Rather, 'boggart' was a much more general term encompassing all solitary supernatural beings, from killer mermaids to headless phantoms, from black dogs to shape-changing ghouls.

The author shows how in the same period that such beliefs were dying out, folklorists continually misrepresented the boggart, and explores how the modern fantasy boggart was born of these misrepresentations. As well as offering a fresh reading of associated traditions, The Boggart demonstrates some of the ways in which recent advances in digitization can offer rich rewards.

Child and Adolescent Migration, Mental Health, and Language, focuses on migration and the socio-affective significance of language. It examines how this influences children's and adolescents' development, subjectivity, identifications, and identity formations. By taking a thorough approach to the intricacy of migrancy, this timely publication examines the many challenges that young economic migrants, environmental migrants, refugees, irregular migrants, and asylum seekers encounter prior to and following their geographic, sociocultural, and linguistic relocations. While not disregarding the benefits that can stem from international relocations, Carra-Salsberg also addresses contemporary concerns influencing young migrants' socio-affective experiences. As part of the book's discussion on the subjective significance of language, it takes a semiotic, pedagogic, and psychoanalytic approach to study the effects of foreign-language immersions and significant language learning, and how these can add to pre-existing traumas. The developmental importance of language is considered through theory, the analysis of memoirs, and the author's depiction and understanding of her own experiences between languages. Written for academics, psychologists, psychiatrists, pedagogues, counsellors, human rights advocates, and policy-makers, this book highlights the intricate connections between language, migration, and mental health. The restorative significance of language is also reflected upon in relation to migrants' natural need to grieve, testify, and find meaning within their past and present sense of self.

Since The Théâtre du Grand-Guignol closed its doors forty years ago, the genre has been overlooked by critics and theatre historians. This book reconsiders the importance and influence of the Grand-Guignol within its social, cultural and historical contexts, and is the first attempt at a major evaluation of the genre as performance.

Widely regarded by historians of the early moving picture as the best work yet published on pre-cinema, The Great Art of Light and Shadow: Archaeology of the Cinema throws light on a fascinating range of optical media from the twelfth century to the turn of the twentieth.

A new edition of Philip Payton's modern classic Cornwall: A History, published now by University of Exeter Press, telling the story of Cornwall from earliest times to the present day. This edition incorporates the latest research and brings the story of Cornwall right up to date, examining the events and debates of the early twenty-first century.

The first edition of the devotionary composed by Constanza de Castilla. Comprising a variety of prayers and liturgical offices in Spanish and Latin, the book provides evidence of the beliefs, experience, and expression of religious women in Spain of the later Middle Ages.

This volume is a study of popular behaviour during the English Civil War, in particular the way in which regions and cities allied themselves with either side and the social and cultural roots of this choice.

This is a new critical edition of an unjustly forgotten drama by Alphonse de Lamartine, written in the early 1840s. It draws a compelling image of Toussaint Louverture, the father of Haitian Independence.