Books in the British Academy Monographs Series series

The highly dramatic Breton ballad tradition is relatively little-known. This volume explores the nature of the songs and the contexts in which they have been performed. A selection of songs is presented here in the original Breton with English translations and musical notation. The accompanying CD provides examples sung by traditional singers.

St Margaret, known for her confrontation with a dragon-shaped devil, was one of the most famous medieval saints, depicted in manuscript illuminations, sculptures, panel paintings, and stained glass. This handbook is the first comprehensive interdisciplinary study of the legend, providing an account of the trajectory of the story over 1,000 years.

The Weimar Republic is often seen as an era of progress for the arts, but strands of pessimism and conservatism also developed rapidly. In this cultural atmosphere, music and musical scholarship could provide forms of protest and resistance to modernity. Attfield's concentration on continuity challenges the received historiography of this period.

Despite the warnings of critics and moral leaders, French novels were widespread in Victorian culture. How did Victorian readers gain access to them? How were the novels' supposed immorality debated and challenged? And how far did the influx of French novels raise questions and anxieties about the literary and commercial value of the English novel?

The first expansive historical treatment of the development of the cult of the Indian warrior goddess Durga, from the 3rd to the 12th centuries CE, as she transformed from a wild, antinomian deity to a respectable, classical symbol of kingship.

Fighting for France is the first book to examine violence between political extremists in interwar France and the ways in which contemporaries understood it. This has important implications for understanding twentieth-century French politics, not least the French experience of collaboration with the Nazis during the Second World War.