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The article focuses on history of popular culture of England. Topics discussed include innovative elements and necessity of distinction of culture's theoretical approaches; definition of culture in terms of historical development; and views of Raymond Williams on different approaches of cultural needs.

In the early eighteenth century, the Duchess of Queensberry arrived at the Bath Assembly wearing a white apron, only to have it torn from her person by a Master of Ceremonies who declared that only a lady's maid would appear dressed so. This article looks at the apron as a garment worn by elite women in eighteenth-century England in order to consider some of the questions raised by this encounter. Aprons were closely linked with the labouring classes in contemporary representation, and elite women wearing them were therefore accused of imitating the dress and behaviours of their inferiors. While emulation from below has received due attention from scholars, this apparent imitation from above remains underexplored. Elite women certainly did masquerade as country girls at times; however, the apron as an item of elite dress was not as transformative as contemporaries feared. Instead, it became subject to expectations and conventions governed by the rhythms of elite everyday life. Though the Duchess of Queensberry became infamous, elite women wearing aprons were most likely to provoke censure when they defied these conventions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The premodern past was desired and deployed in a myriad of different ways in sixteenth-century England. The period of the English Reformations produced a generative, complex, and paradoxical range of feelings for the premodern. Many sixteenth-century texts were multiply medievalist, making use of literary figures, generic forms, and cultural phenomena in unexpected ways. Various senses of temporality — understandings of the shapes and nature of cultural time — were often foregrounded. Reformation historiography was often sectarian and combative, but also sought tangible contact with the textual remains of the past. These feelings for the premodern were then unavoidably present in the 1590s but were subject to use in nascent literary forms that were self-consciously avant-garde in different ways. Antiquity and archaism were brought together with a heightened sense of contemporaneity. In prose fiction, the premodern could be used in different forms of scandalously risqué, comic, and autobiographical narratives. In historical poetry produced in the same decade, a new literary mode made poetic capital out of a heightened emotional discourse associated with premodern history and culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The expanded use of patrás is among the most salient features of US Spanish and commonly attributed to English influence. For Lipski (1986), it constitutes a syntactic calque from English constructions with back; Otheguy (1999) maintains it shows cultural but not linguistic influence; Villa (2005, 2010) ascribes patrás to grammaticalization processes internal to Spanish. Previous studies lack a detailed account of the semantics of the spatial adverbial in its historical and contemporary usage. Applying Talmy’s (1983) typology of motion events to corpus data, this paper traces a grammaticalization path for patrás from its historical use to its contemporary use in Nuevomexicano Spanish. Patrás has shifted from primarily atelic backwards motion meanings to primarily telic return meanings. This shift is evident across Germanic languages for adverbs deriving from the noun back and in the Romance prefix re- from Latin adverb retro. This study proposes contact with English led to an increased frequency of satellite-framed constructions in Nuevomexicano Spanish, creating the frequency conditions for innovations in the form and meaning of para atrás to conventionalize and lead to systematic linguistic change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the 80th anniversary of the Spanish Civil War in 1936-1939. It discusses British influence on Spanish historical writing. It also explores the five areas of contention to some of this writing which include the explanations for the failure of the Second Republic, the reasons behind General Francisco Franco's victory, and Franco's role in the modernization of Spain.

Christians’ experiences of anti-Christian prejudice are relatively unexplored in sociological research. This article analyses perceived anti-Christian prejudice reported by Christian adolescents in England. Rich interview data were collected regarding Anglican, Baptist, and Catholic adolescents (N=26) over a five-month period in churches and church youth groups in an English city. The young people reported incidents of anti-Christian name-calling (slurs), bullying, labelling, and aggressive questioning about their faith by non-Christian peers, indicating that anti-Christian prejudice may affect the status of Christians in adolescent peer-group hierarchies. They also perceived formal aspects of schooling to be biased against Christian beliefs and practices. These episodes suggest that, like prejudice against other religious groupings, anti-Christian prejudice has historical negative tropes and stereotypes based upon perceived inferiority. However, unlike other kinds of religious prejudice, the analyses also suggest that anti-Christian prejudice may sometimes be related to philosophical objections to religious beliefs rather than perceived negative racial or ethnic attributes. These findings are discussed with reference to the debate about secularisation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper explores religious adolescents' reported experiences of secondary schools. Fifty-four qualitative interviews were conducted in places of worship in three cities in England with Christians (n=46), Jews (n=38) and Muslims (n=15). Secondary schools of a religious and non-religious character were reported as not providing a suitable environment for religious observances, nor as a place to act and behave according to participants' religious principles. Religious adolescents reported prejudice and criticism of their beliefs or religious affiliations from their peers and sometimes from teachers. They also perceived their religious traditions to be distorted, inaccurately or unfairly represented in some lessons. The focus of this paper is the identity choices religious adolescents reported in response to these challenges. Three groups of identity choices are theorised and explored: religious identity seeking, religious identity declaration and religious identity masking. The findings are discussed in view of religious identity construction theory, good practice for teachers and also the potential concerns of faith communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most studies of Irish recruitment to the British forces during the Second World War have identified a desire for adventure as one of the principal motives. While this motive has existed throughout history, this article argues that its prominence among Irish recruits was due to the image of war that was diffused in independent Ireland. The interwar market for children’s literature and cinema was dominated by British boys’ weeklies and war films, which portrayed British soldiers as glamorous heroes participating in wars that were exciting and just. For some Irish youths this influenced their perception of British military service. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article explores the significance of weeping in the lives of late medieval English bishops ( c.1100− c.1400). It considers the lachrymose devotions of saintly bishops alongside tears of grief, friendship and self-pity, and asks how such displays of emotion were understood by contemporary onlookers. It is argued that a bishop's tears were key to perceptions of his masculinity, sexuality and physical body, which in turn had significant implications for his reputation both as a prelate and as a potential saint. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this guest editorial the author offers his opinions on the outcome of the Brexit referendum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]