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The mythic ideal that animates the neo-Anabaptist position is the ideal of true and authentic New Testament Christianity and the primitive church of the apostolic age. Constantinianism is a multifaceted heresy that surfaced and resurfaced throughout history. The archetype of neo-Constantinianism is the founding of the American republic, which has a strong view of the church and a separatist impulse. While the neo-Anabaptists attempt to reject it, they are also defined and depend upon it.

By the second half of the 16th century, the extension of English power across most parts of the island was reflected in the growth of new institutions of central and local government, in particular by the creation of counties. Attempts to assimilate Gaelic lordships into a social hierarchy modelled on that of England continued. But there were also attempts to plant colonies of English on land seized from native rulers. Meanwhile, attempts to persuade the nobility of English descent to abandon their private armies sustained by feudal levies encountered violent resistance. The chapter looks critically at claims that the 1560s and 1570s saw a clear shift from a vision of reform to a policy of colonization backed by physical force. The career of the Ulster warlord Shane O'Neill — involving constant shifts in alliance between English, Scots, and competing Gaelic lords — illustrates the primacy of short term expediency over ideology.

This chapter, beginning in Edward's reign and concluding in Elizabeth's last years on the throne, explores what may be Cecil's most important legacy with regard to Ireland: his role in the formulation and oversight of Tudor political policy and the operation of government there. It shows that Cecil's influence with Elizabeth and his unparalleled knowledge of Ireland combined to make him the key to the functioning of Tudor government in the kingdom in the later sixteenth century; and though policy for Ireland never originated from him, his support was essential to see it pursued and implemented. William Cecil, this chapter argues, presided over every step of Tudor policy in Ireland until his death in 1598.

Though a staple of the Western canon, George Stevens’s 1953 Shane has been criticized for its self-conscious mythologizing. Perhaps because of this mythic framing, Shane’s connections to the epic tradition are pervasive. This chapter begins by examining the overlapping concern in both with the guest-host relationship, constructions of male honor, and property rights as they relate to masculine identity. Turning next to the Iliad, this chapter expands on Carl Rubino’s examination of Shane as an Achilles figure by looking at the complicated psychological identification between hero, companion, and enemy present in both works. Next, Shane is connected to Homer’s Odyssey in its focus on a hero torn between lust for action and longing for home, its concern with a boy’s coming-of-age, and its anxiety about women’s sexual integrity. Finally, this chapter examines Shane’s close kinship with Virgil’s Aeneid through their focus on nation-building, with each including a significant acknowledgement of the antagonist’s perspective, in effect calling the justice of the hero’s cause into question, along with related notions of divine impetus and Manifest Destiny.

The introductory chapter opens the book by positioning Shane Meadows in the landscape of contemporary British filmmaking before moving on to provide a brief career overview which emphasises the continuity in certain practices and themes throughout Meadows' development from DIY local filmmaker to BAFTA-winning director. The importance of memory and nostalgia to Meadows' work is also examined in detail, as is his engagement with issues of class representation. The introduction concludes by outlining the content of the chapters to follow.

This chapter takes a political economy approach to understand Shane Meadows' development as a filmmaker. By focussing on the institutional-industrial contexts of regional production, it is argued that Meadows and his collaborators benefitted from a complex regional filmmaking infrastructure that has its roots in the 1970s film workshop movement and the cultural industries approach to regional development in the 1980s. The chapter explores a number of different production strategies utilised by Meadows, from larger-budget attempts to reach broad and even international audiences, to more innovative low-budget, niche approaches which suggest a workable strategy for the future of regional film. It is noted, however, that these fragile regional media ecologies are dependent on public funding which makes them particularly vulnerable to austerity.

This chapter seeks to locate Shane Meadows work within broader traditions of British social realism. With references to the British documentary tradition of the 1920s and 1930s, the British New Wave cycle of the late 1950s and early 1960s, and the work of prominent realist directors such as Ken Loach, Meadows' films are explored in light of their similarities to and departures from established trends in British cinema. The chapter makes the case that Meadows and his contemporaries such as Andrea Arnold, Duane Hopkins, Pawel Pawlikowski, Samantha Morton and Joanna Hogg can be seen to move towards a more poetic form of realism that rejects didacticism and explicit explorations of social issues, in favour of a more ambiguous image-led narration. Contemporary British realism is characterised by a focus on young, marginalised protagonists searching for meaning in poetically charged urban and suburban environments. As such, the representation of landscape, space and place is a persistent source of interest within the films. Works from across Meadows' oeuvre are explored in relation to these areas, drawing parallels with the aesthetic and thematic emphases adopted by his contemporaries.

Shane Meadows' films are preoccupied with bodily functions, scatological humour and themes of social abjection. Rather than dismiss these bawdy comical interludes as deviations from the director's more ostensibly serious themes, the consistently grotesque terrain of Meadows' worldview is best understood in political terms as a form of resistance to neoliberal ideology. Meadows's films consistently valorise mutuality and working-class commonality through recourse to corporeal terrain: the political is thus significantly embodied in Meadows' oeuvre. In rejecting the self-regulating fictions of neoliberal individualism, Meadows' grotesque themes function as a form of oppositional ‘dirty protest’ against the hegemonic interpellations of middle-class social normalcy. This is exemplified by the bodily excesses of Tomo (Thomas Turgoose) in Somers Town (2008), a character who typically embodies a distinctly Meadowsian form of ‘excremental heroism’ which systematically rejects the atomised individualism of neoliberal culture.

In this chapter it is argued that both This is England and Twenty Four Seven (1997) engage with themes of political disenchantment, thus speaking to the political zeitgeist of time and place. The spectre of Thatcherism haunts Twenty Four Seven while This is England centres on the main protagonist's brush with the extremist fringe of British politics. It is further argued that the preoccupation with the margins and fringes of British political life has everything to do with the marginality of the social group who are the main focus of Meadows work-young, working class men/youths in England's post-industrial heartlands.

Twenty Four Seven and Dead Man's Shoes share a temporal structure; both films span three distinct time frames: a distant past, that is symbolised by childhood memory and signified by degraded film stock, a more recent past that is often violent and shocking and a meaningful present that attempts to come to terms with the pain and the anguish of encysted trauma. This chapter argues that this temporality is both a structural and a thematic trope and that it feeds into, what are important elements in both works, trauma and loss. Using Freud's celebrated paper ‘Remembering, Repeating and Working-through’ (Erinnern, Wiederholen und Durchar- beiten), I suggest that both films can be seen as explorations of the compulsion to continually re-enact painful events born out of repressed or inaccessible memories. For Freud, trauma that cannot be consciously remembered is doomed to be forever repeated until it is worked through in psychoanalysis or until it ceases at death. Such theory allows us not only to view Twenty Four Seven and Dead Man's Shoes as films primarily concerned with mourning and coming to terms with loss but offers us insights into the films' structure and the specific avenues of catharsis open to the director and the audience.

This chapter explores Shane Meadows's approaches to genre, arguing that hybrid forms of film type are employed in order to underscore the elements of myth which are evident in his work. In particular, it looks at how evocations of the monster weave through the homosocial romances of the male characters and the way in which they exchange women, or their images, as a means to sure up those relationships. Drawing upon Sedgwick's notion of the erotic triangle and its homosocial dynamic, the chapter looks closely at the vengeance narrative of Dead Man's Shoes, arguing how tropes drawn from Jacobean theatre and genres such as the horror and the western, are particularly employed to question existing models of relationships, whether fraternal, paternal or the modern construct of the nuclear family. Through an examination of the different manifestation of violence in Meadows's work, the chapter suggests that rape, assault and murder are acts which make explicit the underlying homoerotophobia of the texts, with the figure of the monster as a liminal bridge between unconscious desire and physical action. It concludes that Meadows eventually abandons his generic conceits, offering instead a deliberate equivocation which dissolves any fixed notions of style.

This chapter details how Shane Meadows' This Is England mediates the 1980s through a nostalgic rendering of subcultural resistance via key iconographic and musical cues. In so doing, the film and the subsequent television series engender an idealised image of skinhead subculture – or more accurately subcultures – that recall the romanticized sociological accounts of Birmingham University's Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies from the 1970s and early 1980s. Reproducing these early subcultural scholars' focus upon the ‘magical realms' of ritual and style, Meadows juxtaposes the lush colours, dreamlike slow motion and the joyful non-diegetic soundtrack of the skinhead gang – at least before its ideological infiltration by far right extremism – to the ‘colourless walls of routine’ of Thatcher's Britain. However, this chapter provides neither a purely textual nor auteurist approach to the film. Instead it situates the textual strategies and authorial signature of This is England within their wider historical contexts of production, mediation and consumption, through analysis of its key intertexts – chiefly the music and sociological literature it draws upon – and a range of pre and post-production reception materials such as interviews with the director, publicity material, reviews from mainstream and niche presses.

This chapter offers an analysis of two Shane Meadows films, This is England and Somers Town, in terms of their representation of space (physical, social and mental), engaging with psychogeography and the spatial theory of De Certeau and Lefebvre. In comparing the two films, the chapter suggests a positive development between the films' depiction of hybridised national identity from the darker violent vision of This is England to the more fully integrated hybrid community of Somers Town.

This chapter explores Le Donk and Scor-Zay-Zee as a comic film that uses documentary form. The film is a mockumentary, in which Meadows plays himself, but other performers play fictional characters. A key assumption in analyses of mockumentary is that the form is used to explore the idea of performance in everyday life, and the ways in which individuals attempt to manage how they are perceived by others. This aspect of examined throughout analysis of Le Donk in the film. ?This is related to debates about masculinity and the surveillance society. The chapter also explores Meadows role – both in front and behind the camera – and interrogates what we can understand about a filmmaker known for the autobiographical element of their work adopting a format in which they appear as themselves, but primarily behind the camera. The chapter also questions why this film has received less attention than others of Meadows, and suggests its comic tone has meant it has been categorised as less significant than his more ‘serious’ works.

A preoccupation with real or symbolic father-figures is perhaps the dominant thematic trope in Shane Meadows' films. Often associated with the so-called ‘crisis of masculinity’, this emphasis on flawed fathers and diminished patriarchal authority in popular cinema is invariably viewed by critics as a dubiously recuperative strategy. Yet while androcentric interrogations of fractured male identity and post-patriarchal angst are at the epicentre of Meadows' oeuvre to date, this essay contends that his work is far from masculinist in its socio-political outlook. Examining the role of fatherhood from The Gypsy's Tale (1995) through to the bleak patricidal nightmare of This is England ‘86 (2010) and ’88 (2011), the authors contend that the ambivalence and psycho-social complexity of Meadows' work renders it considerably more sophisticated and politically progressive than the majority of British films dealing with similarly paternal terrain.

This essay analyses the complex thematic patterning of This is England '88, where Meadows explores crises in the lives of his central characters Lol, Woody and Shaun. He uses music, montage and symbolism to juxtapose Shaun's adolescent growing pains, Woody's increasing desperation as the trap of a well-paid job and a lovingly conventional girlfriend close around him, and Lol's spiritual torment when she is haunted by the demonic ghost of her murdered father. Meadows weaves these disparate strands into a satisfyingly dramatic structure in a way which displays his increasing sophistication and ambition as a film-maker.

This chapter provides an examination of the Variae of Cassiodorus in three main parts. First, the chapter outlines the historical context of the letter collection, noting the social and political circumstances of Cassiodorus' public career that may have influenced the production of the collection, with particular attention to what Cassiodorus' prefatory statements reveal about the aims of the collection. The chapter then develops a profile of the collection's relationship to other related 'genres' of writing-particularly epistolography, legal writing and a tradition for encyclopedic writing. The third section explores in more detail the content of the letters, weighing the administrative functionality of the letters against their literary content. The conclusion suggests directions for further study, including the manuscript tradition and the codicological context of the various recensions of the Variae.

This chapter discusses the importance of decision making in the art and science of investing. It begins by looking at Shane Frederick's research on cognitive reasoning, and in particular how readily people could override the brain's reflexive decision-making center—what is commonly called intuition. For years, psychologists have been interested in the idea that our cognitive processes are divided into two modes of thinking, traditionally referred to as intuition and reason. Today, these cognitive systems are known as System 1 and System 2. The chapter then examines Daniel Kahneman's ideas about decision making, articulated in his book Thinking Fast and Slow, and proceeds by explaining how to construct a new latticework of mental models. It also describes the art of achieving what Charlie Munger calls “worldly wisdom” and concludes by asserting that descriptions based solely on finance theories are not enough to explain the behavior of markets; we need to accurately describe a phenomenon in order to understand how markets behave and thus make better investment decisions.