The thesis focuses on the chronological identification and detection of the discursive analogies between the category of 'the nation‘ and those of 'the West‘, 'Europe‘, 'democracy‘ and 'independence‘ in the Kosovo Albanian ethnonationalist narrative. The study represents a multi-dimensional exercise analysing the ethnonationalist discourse from a wide array of sample text which was produced during two relevant historical periods: the period between 1870-1930 and the period between 1980-2000. The first interval covers the period which is known in the Albanian history as the 'National Rebirth‘. The second deals with the recent history of political resistance of Kosovo Albanians and their 'sudden‘ discursive shift, from the narrative of 'unification with the Motherland Albania‘ (the unificationist/irredentist discourse) to the narrative of 'the independent Kosovo‘ (the independentist discourse) The main theoretical pillars of the study focus on the theories about the nation (specifically, its ethnic variation) and its narrative, the nationalism—as well as the representational systems of orientalism and balkanism (Said, 1978; Todorova, 1997). The study demonstrates that the discourse about the nation and national identity among Albanians is produced primarily through the internalisation of the external, orientalist approach in defining and understanding the social reality of the Balkan societies. Such internalisation is analysed through the prism of local adoption of the sociocultural and sociopolitical hegemonizing discourse that constituted the Western orientalist 'knowledge‘ about the Balkans—and, specifically, Albanians. The study notes that such discursive strategy of internalisation of orientalist traits within the ethnonationalist narrative is not limited to the Albanian societies (in both Albania and Kosovo) but appears as common feature in most of the societies/nations of the former Yugoslavia. In time, the study highlights, such process of 'nesting orientalisms‘ (Bakic-Hayden, 1996) was coupled with the phenomenon of the regional, exclusionist and competing ethnonationalist narratives which was aimed at constituing a nation‘s 'westernness‘ and 'Europeanness‘ through denying it to the other.

This thesis interweaves the lives and works of three Latin American women writers – Victoria Ocampo, Alfonsina Storni and Gabriela Mistral – into a travel narrative undertaken as part of a research project. The journey begins in Glasgow, Scotland and takes the reader as far as Buenos Aires, Montevideo and Santiago, exploring the legacies left by Ocampo, Storni and Mistral. Through a variety of interviews, encounters and experiences, against the backdrop of political unrest of 2002/3, a colourful tapestry unravels to reveal why and how these three women made such a profound impact on their people and countries. The researcher/traveller was able to explore culture, custom and history through the generous hospitality of local artists China Zorrilla, Monica Ottino and Eduardo Paz Leston. The narrative recalls relationships shared between Victoria Ocampo and Virginia Woolf, Jorge Luis Borges and Graham Greene. Questions of class, society and the after effects of Argentina’s Dirty War are considered, and Chile’s past is investigated through the open testimonies of present day Chileans. The researcher/traveller learns 9sometimes the hard way) valuable lessons about how to survive as a twenty-something woman travelling on her own and reflects on the changes time has imposed, not only on south America but also on herself. The focus on the ‘inner journey’ is vital to the overall theme of women and the sense of self. By staying in youth hostels an element of the backpacker’s subculture is incorporated into the overall story, which in turn surfaces as a parallel theme. The narrative is broken up into forty-one chapters which are divided into two separate sections; one relating to Argentina and Uruguay, the other to Chile. The section on Argentina and Uruguay makes up the majority of the text, while the section on Chile can be interpreted as an extended epilogue. Both sections are completely unique in terms of circumstance and material but complement each other in their preoccupations with the troubled terrain of gender, writing and travel.

Knox has seldom been taken seriously as a literary figure; in fact it is often assumed that he was hostile to `art' of any kind. Most British literary critics who have examined his work have done so superficially and have concluded that his prose was plain or unadorned and that its most important feature was a drift towards anglicisation. In the introductory section, `The Myths, the Writer and the Canon', it is argued that, on the contrary, the latter assessment cannot be made definitively for textual reasons and is, in any case, irrelevant to literary criticism. Moreover, the study suggests that Knox was one of the most highly rhetorical of all the sixteenth-century prose writers, although his rhetoric was never decorative. Chapter one traces the beginnings of Scottish literary prose from 1490 onwards, examining such texts as John Ireland's The Meroure of Wyssdome, John Gau's The Richt Vay to the Kingdom of Hevin, The Complaynt of Scotland and so forth, and establishes that works before Knox reflect religious belief even at the levels of lexis and syntactic structure, but generally speaking, do not consistently and convincingly reveal the personalities of their authors (with the possible exception of the Complayner). Chapter two illustrates that Knox's prose is always double-edged; its rhetorical aims are both offensive and defensive, it is often psychologically self-expressive and simultaneously revealing of his fundamental religious beliefs. The remaining chapters attempt to identify the range of rhetorical devices through which Knox manifests his own character and his religion, to assess how they may have affected his audience, to establish his sources, and whenever possible, to set them within pre-existing literary traditions, Scottish or otherwise. Chapters one and five are concentrated especially on the historiographical milieu in mid-sixteenth century Scotland and beyond, in order to set The Historie of the Reformatioun, the first great work of Scots prose, in its proper context. Chapter five itself consists of a number of generic divisions which are isolated to facilitate detailed analysis of disparate literary strands in Knox's magnum opus. Thus, according to the author, as far as prose is concerned, Knox's rhetoric and literary works represent the culmination of homiletic and historiographical traditions, the maturation of incipient religious forces in the sixteenth century, and the earliest establishment in Scotland of a fully-rounded literary personality.

My purpose in the researching and the writing of this thesis has been to investigate, and to try to explain, Frank Ankersmit's curious shift from his well expressed and firmly held narrativist position of "Narrative Logic", to an arguably contradictory, yet passionately held counter belief in the plausibility of a form of direct (sublime) historical experience - an authentic unmediated relationship with the past. I am, accordingly, presenting here what I believe to be the most adequate explanatory account of/for Ankersmit's intellectual journey. A journey which, in essence, constituted a substitution of his earlier representational, language centred philosophy of history for what might be taken as a new and mystical non-representational theory. This alternative theory of Ankersmit' s (let it be called this for now), lacking cognitive foundations, works on the basis of sensations, moods, feelings and therefore a consciousness deemed to be received directly from the past itself, and therein - for this thesis - lies its fatal weakness as a historical theory. Belief in the mystical may be all right at some level, if this is what is wanted, but a mystical experience itself cannot produce a historical re-presentation which (tautologically) is the only way that the past can be presented historically. Thus, I argue that Ankersmit's journey from language to (historical) experience - the latter phenomenon being more appropriately situated within the field of sociology/social theory and memory studies - is, in the end, a lost historical cause.

This dissertation argues that the period 1900-1963 may be seen as one in which various models for the governance of roads and their users were developed. Demands for governance came from road campaigners and governmental bodies; these various groups called for, and attempted to implement, such governance in various ways. Of all these methods, scientific governance, via experiment and road network architecture, came decisively to supervene. The development of centralised and localised forms of governance, channelled through the civil and traffic engineering implemented by its County Surveyors, facilitated the state governance of Britain's road network and its users. The co-operation of road users was vital to the success of this state governance. Previously a law unto themselves, road users (most especially motorists) were self-governed by a gentlemanly code of tacit rules of the road. Overhauling the mindset and behaviour of road users first required the reform of the systematic structures of highway administration, along with legislative enforcement. This, however, was dependent upon the premise of central governance and thus government acceptance of roads as a national responsibility. This state of affairs brought with it two important factors. First, the financial means to fund road improvement measures was provided. Second, centres of scientific investigations were established, and credible methods developed, to explore advanced methods of construction and systems of traffic control. Understanding the interaction of roads, vehicles, and users was fundamental to the successful implementation of scientific governance. Roads were a socio-technical problem that required a scientific solution, both in terms of their physical construction and in terms of the ways in which they were used, and used safely. Science was in-built into in the driving experience through such innovations as the use of white lines, the implementation of speed limits, road layouts and road signs. Together, these and other developments constructed the British road network, and worked as means of governing user behaviour. The result of all these factors and developments was the State-based, scientific governance of British roads and their users.

This thesis investigates the historical geographies of the Pan-European Union, and its founder and leader Count Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi, focusing in the main on the period from 1923 to 1939. A mixed-race Austrian aristocrat, philosopher and writer who made it his life’s mission to see Europe politically united, Coudenhove-Kalergi’s was a singular life, which he used to his advantage by weaving his life story into his political campaigning. The thesis opens by investigating the relationship between a life lived and a life told, and about the consequences for researchers attempting to recover his biography. The bulk of the thesis looks at the ways in which Pan-Europeanism both responded and itself contributed to shaping three broad sets of spatial and temporal ideas, each revolving around the notion of a supranational European polity. First, it confronts the way history was invoked both to bring into being a ‘literature’ that would add prestige to its arguments, and to craft a narrative arc that would add the force of apparent inevitability to its arguments. Second, it looks at the way in which Pan-Europeanism employed a form of spatial reasoning that shared many points of reference with the German school of geopolitik, despite a fundamentally incompatible view of international politics. And third, it analyses the Pan-European invention of ‘Eurafrica’ as a neo-colonial system that would offer a ‘third path’ internationalism that fell between the imperialism of the British Empire, and the Mandate-based theory of international governance advocated by the League. Each of these sets of ideas, I argue, persisted both outside the bounds of the Pan-European Union, and after its eventual marginalisation.

Although entitled The Marketing of Agricultural Produce in Eighteenth Century Oxfordshire, because of problems with source material, this thesis is primarily an examination of the organization of the open market, the marketing of corn and the period 1750-1800. Chapters II and III concentrate on public marketing institutions in Oxfordshire; II being an account of where markets and fairs were held and the relative importance of the different market towns, and III an investigation of who owned public markets; the type of facilities provided and the charges for using them. Chapter IV is on the corn trade; each section covering a different aspect. Section I is a discussion of sources; II and III an investigation of the role of the open market in the sale of corn; II concentrating on the local trade and III the long distance; IV is a summary of the alternative ways corn might be dispersed; v an investigation of the use of barley as a bread-corn and VI an examination of the assize of bread. Chapter V is on the marketing of products other than corn and VI is on the regulation of marketing and internal trade. Both chapters are very largely surveys of problems connected with the survival and interpretation of evidence, which is then displayed in tabular form. Finally, Chapter VII is an account of Oxfordshire food rioting, included both because material on riots is used throughout to illustrate many points and because the enforcement of marketing laws was often a product of crowd action.

This thesis develops a reading of Montaillou, un village occitan de 1294 à 1324 (1975) by Emmanuel LeRoy Ladurie in parallel with a theory of possibilities in history. It is argued that possibilities are fundamentally involved in the semantics of sociological concepts, in the nature of historical judgements, and in the way actions feature in historiography. The thesis addresses a variety of literature in historiography, sociological theory, the philosophy of social science, and the philosophy of history. The thesis is split into a Preface and 5 parts containing between them 24 chapters of varying lengths. The Preface defines the topic in relation to the work of Max Weber. Part 1 is the Introduction, and approaches the topic of possibilities in history through classical texts in sociology and the philosophy of history. Part 2 is an extended commentary on Montaillou and raises puzzles about how it works as a text. Part 3 analyses sociological concepts and historical judgements in terms of possibilities. Part 4 analyses action in history in terms of possibilities. Part 5 brings the theoretical apparatus developed in parts 3 and 4 back to Montaillou to offer commentaries which solve the puzzles raised in part 2. The strategy of the thesis is to grasp the role of possibilities in history by giving equal weight to theoretical analysis and historiographical commentary.

This thesis examines the censorship of philosophy in Italy in the period 1450-1600, seeking to establish how the scrutiny of ideas was affected by the religious crisis of the sixteenth century. One of the primary aims of this thesis is to revise older accounts of censorship, dominant in the literature of both the history of science and Italian intellectual history traditions. These historiographies suggest that the Counter- Reformation triggered the emergence of a new and repressive attitude towards the censorship of philosophy, which grievously affected Italian intellectual and scientific culture in the seventeenth century. My thesis challenges this received view by drawing upon the insights produced by historians working in other disciplines, especially institutional historians of the Inquisition and the Index of Forbidden Books, and historians of the Church who have challenged the older monolithic view of the „Counter-Reformation Church‟. It seeks to show that while there were indeed significant changes to the apparatus of censorship during the sixteenth century, notably the re-organisation of the Inquisition and creation of the Index, they did not signal an entirely new approach towards the censorship of philosophy, nor did it have the cataclysmic impact suggested by earlier historians. I argue that the attitudes towards philosophy maintained within these institutions represent a specific formulation of the relationship between philosophy and revealed faith, which was in fact consistent with ideas elaborated within the mendicant orders during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. I argue that the implementation of these ideas as the basis for censorship can only be understood by understanding complex power struggles within the Church.

This thesis explores the infrastructure and mechanics of Latin Christian pilgrimage to the Holy Land during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Jerusalem was an important religious site for Christians, though it did not gain large-scale popularity among pilgrims until the capture of the city by the crusaders in 1099. Despite the vast and ever expanding quantity of literature on the topic of medieval pilgrimage in Europe and to the Holy Land, the infrastructure and mechanisms for pilgrims has received little attention. This thesis addresses the following core questions: How did pilgrims maintain themselves en route to the Holy Land in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries? How important were pilgrimage infrastructure and mechanisms for pilgrims? How did the infrastructure develop over the course of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries? What impact did the changing political situation over the course of the crusades have on this network? Medieval pilgrim and travel narratives, canon law, cartularies, charters and other legal documents, chronicles, exemplars, hagiography, liturgical texts, and papal records are analysed to answer these questions. The thesis follows the pilgrim’s journey to the Holy Land, starting with mechanisms of protection associated with preparations for pilgrimage, continuing on to investigate those who provided infrastructure and mechanisms to pilgrims along the way, before focusing on infrastructure within the Holy Land itself. It demonstrates the scale of the infrastructure, showing the intertwining nature of real world mechanisms of protections with those of a spiritual kind, and how everyone from every level of society could participate and benefit from providing aid to pilgrims. This network is ultimately reflective of concepts such as poverty and charity associated with twelfth-century western Christian spirituality. Indeed, charity was at the heart of pilgrimage infrastructure.