A strange dream, I woke up with a head full of sweat, and then the unceasing mischief, always feeling that there was a person standing behind me, looking back to see nothing. From time to time, my stomach would give out, either in a heart-wrenching pain, or it would suddenly swell up like a three-to-five month pregnant woman.

Because print publishing was often neither possible nor desirable for women in the early modern period, in order to understand the range of writing by women and indeed women's literary history itself, it is important that scholars consider women's writing in manuscript. Since the body of critical studies on women's writing for the most part prioritizes print over manuscript, this essay collection provides an essential corrective. The essays in this volume discuss many of the ways in which women participated in early modern manuscript culture. The manuscripts studied by the contributors originated in a wide range of different milieux, including the royal Court, the universities, gentry and aristocratic households in England and Ireland, and French convents. Their contents are similarly varied: original and transcribed secular and devotional verse, religious meditations, letters, moral precepts in French and English, and recipes are among the genres represented. Emphasizing the manuscripts' social, political and religious contexts, the contributors challenge commonly held notions about women's writing in English in the early modern period, and bring to light many women whose work has not been considered before.

The novels of Charles Dickens (1812-70), with their inimitable energy and their comic, tragic and grotesque characters, are still widely read, and reworked for film and television. Dickens himself had the original manuscripts of his works bound and presented them to his friends. That of Great Expectations was given to Chauncy Hare Townshend, with whom Dickens shared an interest in mesmerism and the occult. Townshend bequeathed his library (including the manuscript), together with collections of paintings and objects, to the Wisbech and Fenland Museum in 1868. The manuscript has been newly photographed and is here reproduced in colour and at actual size. The Cambridge Library Collection is also reissuing the serialised version of Great Expectations (1860-1) and the first book edition (1861, in three volumes). Dickens scholars and enthusiasts can now study the work-in-progress, with all its deletions and revisions, alongside the first two published versions.

How can we make religious equality a reality for those on the margins of society and politics? This book is about the individual and collective struggles of the religiously marginalised to be recognised and their inequalities, religious or otherwise, redressed. It is also about the efforts of civil society, governments, multilateral actors, and scholars to promote freedom of religion or belief whatever shape they take. The actors and contexts that feature in this book are as diverse as health workers in Israel, local education authorities in Nigeria, indigenous movements in India, Uganda, or South Africa, and multilateral actors such as the Islamic Development Bank in Sudan and the World Bank in Pakistan. Some of the case studies engage with development discourses and narratives or are undertaken by development actors, while other cases operate completely outside the international development paradigm. These case studies present some important insights, which while highly relevant for their contexts also draw out important insights for academics, practitioners, activists, and others who have an interest in redressing religious inequalities for socioeconomically marginalised populations.