Yoruba Pentecostalism and Child Witchcraft Accusations
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An exploration of Yoruba Pentecostalism's role in child witchcraft accusations, examining migration, leadership, and collective responsibility to address faith-based child abuse globally.
What drives communities to accuse children of witchcraft, and how do religious beliefs and leadership dynamics perpetuate this phenomenon across borders? Claire Ayelotan delves into the involvement of Yoruba (Nigerian) Pentecostal leaders in accusations of child witchcraft in Nigeria and the UK. Using a multidisciplinary approach, her research examines the theological, cultural, socioeconomic, and legal influences that drive such behaviours. Ethnographic studies and interviews with pastors and practitioners reveal how power dynamics, gender roles, and international migration intersect to perpetuate these harmful beliefs. The book uncovers gaps in current literature and presents original insights on the collective responsibility, shared beliefs, and complexities of Pentecostal leadership in this context. By focusing on the global aspects of child witchcraft accusations, it sheds new light on how migration impacts these practices and the negative consequences they have on vulnerable children.
An important read for academics, policymakers, and child welfare professionals, this book challenges assumptions and urges immediate action to combat faith-based child abuse in all its manifestations.
The Study of Medieval Chant
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Comparative studies of medieval chant traditions in western Europe, Byzantium and the Slavic nations illuminate music, literacy and culture.
Gregorian chant was the dominant liturgical music of the medieval period, from the time it was adopted by Charlemagne's court in the eighth century; but for centuries afterwards it competed with other musical traditions, local repertories from the great centres of Rome, Milan, Ravenna, Benevento, Toledo, Constantinople, Jerusalem, and Kievan Rus, and comparative study of these chant traditions can tell us much about music, liturgy, literacy and culture a thousand years ago. This is the first book-length work to look at the issues in a global, comprehensive way, in the manner of the work of Kenneth Levy, the leading exponent of comparative chant studies. It covers the four most fruitful approaches for investigators: the creation and transmission of chant texts, based on the psalms and other sources, and their assemblage into liturgical books; the analysis and comparison of musical modes and scales; the usesof neumatic notation for writing down melodies, and the differences wrought by developmental changes and notational reforms over the centuries; and the use of case studies, in which the many variations in a specific text or melodyare traced over time and geographical distance. The book is therefore of profound importance for historians of medieval music or religion - Western, Byzantine, or Slavonic - and for anyone interested in issues of orality and writing in the transmission of culture. PETER JEFFERY is Professor of Music History, Princeton University. Contributors: JAMES W. McKINNON, MARGOT FASSLER, MICHEL HUGLO, NICOLAS SCHIDLOVSKY, KEITH FALCONER, PETER JEFFERY, DAVID G.HUGHES, SYSSE GUDRUN ENGBERG, CHARLES M. ATKINSON, MILOS VELIMIROVIC, JORGEN RAASTED+, RUTH STEINER, DIMITRIJE STEFANOVIC, ALEJANDRO PLANCHART.
Bedrich Smetana
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An insightful and engaging biography of Czech composer Bedřich Smetana, originally written in the 1940s and meticulously reconstructed and updated for twenty-first-century readers.
Czech-Jewish lawyer and music historian Jan Löwenbach (1880–1972) wrote this biography of nineteenth-century Czech composer Bedřich Smetana (1824–1884) while living in New York in the 1940s, after fleeing the Nazi occupation of his homeland. Intended to highlight Czech cultural achievements and promote national independence, the book remained unpublished following the 1948 Communist coup in Czechoslovakia. Unlike later English-language biographies of Smetana, Löwenbach's work explicitly engages major early twentieth-century Czech scholarship on the composer and offers a uniquely informed perspective. As a "native informant," Löwenbach dispels long-standing nationalistic myths, while providing insightful commentary on Smetana's complete oeuvre, an engaging narrative of his life, and a thoughtful account of the broader social and cultural context. This edition, based on several Czech and English typescripts preserved at San Diego State University, presents a meticulous reconstruction and new translation of Löwenbach's text. With added references to recent scholarship, it stands as both an essential primary document and a rich resource for anyone interested in Czech music—scholars and general readers alike.
Holst and the Winds
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A detailed exploration of the works for winds by Gustav Holst, the renowned composer of The Planets, aided by musical analysis and rich historical documentation.
Gustav Holst (1874–1934) was an English composer and music educator whose work spanned four decades. Though he remains most widely known for his orchestral suite The Planets, his works for band or wind ensemble are also performed frequently, yet have rarely been studied in such systematic detail. They vary widely in genre (from chamber music to military and brass-band works) and in form (from sonata cycle to suite to symphonic poem).
As author Jon Mitchell shows, Holst's works for winds give plentiful evidence of the many influences on him, both musical (including Wagnerian romanticism, English folk song, and Baroque polyphony) and nonmusical (e.g., Sanskrit literature, William Morris, and Walt Whitman). The book gives careful attention to these influences and to the evolution of the works through analysis of sketches and full manuscript scores.
Holst and the Winds makes use of a wide array of primary sources, including Holst's personal papers, written correspondence, programs, and periodical reviews. Music educators, performers, conductors, and anybody who loves Holst's music will enjoy the insights provided herein.
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and Nineteenth-Century America
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Surveys the considerable nineteenth-century American discourse on and response to the writings of the German dramatist, critic, art theorist, and theological thinker.
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-1781) was a leading figure in the humanist revival in German culture that culminated in Weimar Classicism. His plays and drama criticism mark the rise of middle-class forms and values and influenced contemporaries and successors alike. His work in art theory still stimulates discussion, while his liberal theological writing has had a perhaps even greater impact. In the US, Lessing first drew major attention during the German craze of the early nineteenth century and achieved his greatest fame during the third quarter of the century. His drama criticism and views on theology and the arts became entrenched in a robust American discourse about those subjects. Many Americans thought of him less as a historical figure than as a virtual contemporary. This book surveys critical commentary on Lessing published in prominent journals and periodicals from 1796 to the end of the nineteenth century, a period before the professionalization of literary scholarship in America, when individuals of varying professional backgrounds routinely assessed foreign writers in the context of their own national experience. Chapters focus on the unfolding of Lessing's presence in the US, on broad assessments of his life and work, and, respectively, on American responses to his fables and epigrams, his plays and drama criticism, his art-historical and -theoretical writing, and his theological work.
Companion to the Hispanic Romances of Chivalry
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The first comprehensive overview of Hispanic chivalric romance in English.
Hispanic romances of chivalry dominated Spanish and European fiction between the fifteenth and the seventeenth centuries. They became a cultural sensation which had a crucial influence on the development of modern narrative and other art forms. This companion, written by experts from Mexico, Italy, Spain, the UK, and the USA, provides a comprehensive introduction to this highly successful early modern genre, covering its origins, characteristics, canonical texts, circulation, and origins. This book also considers the relationship between chivalric romance and other literary genres, for instance, sentimental romance and Arthurian literature, as well as the publishing context and readership. Thus, it considers the main narrative, cultural, and literary aspects that defined Hispanic chivalric romances and provides an up-to-date literature review. Additionally, it includes an overview of its scholarly reception, as well as chapters on the recreations of these romances in other art forms, such as plays, ballads, music, children's literature, and the decorative arts. Ultimately, this book seeks to make these romances accessible, in all their variety and complexity, to scholars and students alike.
British Statecraft and the Baltic Sea Region
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Offering editorial commentary and interpretation while presenting wide-ranging sources from the early modern period to the present day, the book chronicles how British statecraft has functioned in the Baltic as a geopolitical space.
British Statecraft and the Baltic: A Documentary History chronicles how British statecraft has functioned in the Baltic as a geopolitical space and shows how Britain's relationship with the region has shaped the evolution of British political economy. Bringing together a carefully selected variety of variety of sources, it begins in the early modern period, with the rise in diplomatic and commercial engagement with the Baltic Sea region and continues to the present day, engaging with the consequences of Brexit and increased Russian hostility. Britain's relationship with the Baltic has always been defined by its proximity firstly to the European geopolitical struggle centred on Germany, and secondly to a 'Eurasian hinterland' that has long provided Europe with crucial natural resources, from the grain, potash and naval stores that passed through the Danish straights, to oil and natural gas, and that gives Russia huge influence over the region. In light of these proximities, British statecraft in the Baltic has been fundamentally shaped by the challenges of preventing imperialism in Europe. From the role of neutrality in economic coercion to the question of whether, and how, Britain should commit to defending the sovereignty of European states, the Baltic is where Britain has always wrestled most acutely with the meaning of sovereignty.
Outside the European Union, Britain's relationship not only with 'Europe' as a single, increasingly integrated geopolitical area, but with different European geopolitical spaces and states has become even more important. The Baltic remains one of the key areas of geopolitical interest for Britain today, with British troops deployed to Estonia and Poland, and longstanding commercial and political relationships with states across the region established. The authors take a clear view: that Britain must continue to commit to its commitments under Article 5 to preserve liberty and democracy at home. However, by engaging with the historical documents that chart British statecraft over 300 years, British Statecraft and the Baltic allows specialist and non-specialist readers alike to form their own understanding of British statecraft.
Historical Performance in Baroque Music
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A practical and scholarly guide to performing Baroque music with historical insight and artistic confidence.
This is an in-depth guide to the performance of Baroque music for musicians, listeners, undergraduate and graduate music students, and conservatory and university instructors. Rigorously scholarly, yet readable by non-specialists, it is designed to serve not only as an introduction to historical performance for those new to the subject, but also as a reference book for those experienced in the field, and as a course book in early music performance practice. Part 1 covers essential topics such as historical voices and instruments, articulation, and ornamentation and improvisation. Part 2 turns to particular performance issues in selections ranging from vocal chamber music by Strozzi, Handel, Jacquet, and Bach to instrumental compositions by Castello, Corelli, Couperin, and (again) Bach. The book draws on the author's broad experience as a performer, teacher and writer on Baroque music. It can serve as a general handbook on historical performance practice that also addresses specific questions raised by commonly performed recital and concert repertoire.
Women, Money and Markets, 1770–1914
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A rich exploration of the many ways women shaped the economic and cultural life of the eighteenth and nineteenth century.
This collection redefines the role of women in the development of modern capitalism, revealing their active participation as investors, entrepreneurs, theorists, and cultural producers between 1770 and 1914. Drawing on archival research and literary analysis, the essays uncover how women shaped financial systems, navigated market constraints, and leveraged sentiment, education, and capital to assert economic agency.
Bridging literary studies with social and economic history, Women, Money and Markets challenges the conventional portrayal of the marketplace as a purely rational domain, highlighting instead the emotional and relational dynamics that underpinned women's economic lives. From shareholder lists to fictional representations, contributors explore how women influenced the financialisation of the economy and contested their marginalisation in both historical records and cultural narratives.
Featuring fresh readings of authors like Wollstonecraft and Gaskell alongside lesser-known voices, this volume offers a plural and nuanced account of women's economic engagement, and its representation, across diverse contexts. It is essential reading for scholars of literature, history, gender studies, and anyone interested in the invisible hands that helped shape the modern world.
EMMA NEWPORT is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Sussex. JOYCE GOGGIN is Associate Professor of Literature at the University of Amsterdam.
Constructing Polish Musical Identities outside Poland since 1880
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Examines music's role in political and cultural images of Poland during a period in which Poland regained independence, suffered cruelly in warfare, was a member of the Soviet bloc, then overthrew communism and joined the European Union.
This collection analyses the function of music in twentieth and twenty-first century constructions of 'Polishness' by non-Polish, or Polish emigré, musicians, writers, critics, film and TV makers. Musicological studies are interleaved with collaborations from scholars in related disciplines (literature and film studies) to generate new understandings of music's role in political and cultural images of Poland during a period in which Poland regained independence, suffered cruelly in warfare, was a member of the Soviet bloc, then overthrew communism and joined the European Union.
During this eventful period the musical images of 'Poland' made beyond its boundaries have taken fascinating turns. Music has played a key function in how constructions of 'Polishness' in artistic work, media and critical discourse made outside Poland have inflected Poland's international image and standing. Essays examine diverse musical styles and sources and their roles in composition, performance, cinema, television, literature, poetry, politics, the writings of history, and constructions of biography. Together, they contribute significantly to furthering the broader debates on ideas of Polishness. Contributors have diverse relationships with Poland. This diversity complements the disciplinary range represented. Musical figurations of 'Polishness' are therefore illuminated from multiple angles.
A Companion to Basque Culture
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A comprehensive account of modern Basque cultural life, written from an insider's perspective.
Euskal Herria-the Land of the Basque Speakers-is a paradox: a nation without a state, a people divided between France and Spain, and a culture at once ancient and avant-garde. Long regarded as an anomaly, with a language unrelated to its neighbours and a population often imagined as rooted in prehistory, the Basque Country was, until recently, known internationally above all for the bombing of Gernika-immortalized by Picasso-and for the political violence of ETA. Yet in the twenty-first century, it has re-emerged as a vibrant cultural hub, drawing millions of visitors each year and projecting a distinctive image onto the global stage. A Companion to Basque Culture offers a comprehensive account of modern Basque cultural life. Opening with an introduction to the region's origins, geography, and historical trajectories, subsequent chapters explore language, literature, improvisational singing, the visual arts, festivals, cuisine, gender and the notion of a matriarchal culture, migration, and the dynamics of the Basque "brand." Written from an insider's perspective, this volume challenges fossilized and exoticized representations of Basque identity, examining instead how contemporary Basques negotiate the tensions between cultural distinctiveness and the pursuit of global recognition.
English Benedictine Kalendars after 1100
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This book provides new editions of liturgical calendars from thirteen English Benedictine monasteries, with extensive commentaries. It complements the editions by Francis Wormald published between 1934 and 1946.
This volume complements and completes the edition of English Benedictine Kalendars edited by Francis Wormald and published by the Henry Bradshaw Society between 1934 and 1946. It provides editions of liturgical calendars from thirteen institutions, with extensive commentaries on the manuscripts consulted and on those saints whose cult is particular to each house. It will be followed by an edition of calendars from nunneries, Cluniac houses and various addenda, and then by a commentary volume with comprehensive indexes. The completed project represents almost a century of work by two of the foremost experts on the liturgy of medieval England.
Media and Marginals in India
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A critical exploration of how Indian media construct, negotiate and reshape the meanings and identities of marginalised communities.
The book highlights the role of media in comprehending the marginals with reference to medium, message, and meaning. The book addresses the consortia between the communication process, the economic, political and ideological structures of Indian society, and its relationships with marginals, particularly at structure and meaning levels. It presents new and emerging analyses about the representation, production, consumption of message, and meaning relating to caste, gender, minority, and disability question in the Indian media. This book also examines how the mediated phenomena have shifted the discourse on studies of marginals in India. The book focuses on several new dimensions in sociology and media research and addresses conceptual and methodological questions related to the social positioning of the marginal in media. The book provides new perspectives on the sociology of media covering aspects such as, memory, consciousness and Ashrāfiya morality; Dalit to Disability; agitation and workers; feminism to representation; and commodification to ideological domination.
Slaves From the Tamil Coast and European Trade Around the World
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A detailed study of Tamil participation in and subjection to the global slave trade, tracing transcontinental journeys, labour and social networks.
This book explores the lives of individuals who were enslaved, bought, sold and forcibly transported across continents from the Tamil coast. It argues that the region was deeply entangled in the global slave trade through European commercial networks. Tracing the journeys of Tamil slaves to destinations such as Melaka, Manila, Macao, Mexico City, Colima, Cape Town, Mauritius, Réunion, St. Helena and beyond - including in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Europe and North America - this study explores their social interactions, labour experiences and forced migrations. By drawing on underutilised yet richly detailed archival sources, this volume offers new insights into transnational and global history, focusing on merchant networks, global markets and intercontinental shipping.
Medieval Clothing and Textiles 20
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The best new research on medieval clothing and textiles, drawing from a range of disciplines.
The essays collected here continue to showcase the Journal's wide-ranging and eclectic tradition. The topics addressed are a technical analysis of a fragment of the Bayeux Tapestry that was cut from the hanging and later restored; the inner workings of a fifteenth-century Lucchese cloth business; the luxurious textiles used and re-used for the Field of Cloth of Gold; the wardrobe of Kateryn Parr, Henry VIII's last queen, and how she manipulated clothing and textiles for political ends; Henry Stewart, Lord Darnley's use of sartorial strategies during his short reign as king of Scotland; and a detailed investigation of the textile known as the "Bacton Altar Cloth" that reconsiders its history and uses.
An Ipswich Man’s War
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Diaries of a First World War soldier.
The First World War diaries of the Ipswich man, George Punchard, are published here for the first time. They not only give a detailed account of his experiences in France, Belgium and on home service, but also reveal the inner thoughts of an extraordinary working man who served for the entire length of the war. In 1919 Punchard wrote out the diaries and supplemented them with photographs taken during his service, postcards he had bought, and some sketched plans, from which a selection illustrate this volume. He also casts light on his fellow territorial soldiers from Ipswich and East Suffolk who fought with him in the 4th Battalion of the Suffolk Regiment.
Indian Christians
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A compelling exploration of Indian Christianity's identity, history and challenges within the nation's vibrant pluralistic landscape.
Religious traditions from both Indic and non-Indic backgrounds have significantly contributed to shaping India's rich and diverse religious culture. While there have been occasional challenges, most religious communities work to uphold the country's pluralistic values. Although the majority of Indians are religious, their faith does not lead to communal division. That said, religious communities in India face both shared and unique challenges, which they address according to the theological and ethical principles of their respective traditions. This book delves into Indian Christianity, examining the specific challenges it faces in today's socio-political and religious context. Though often regarded as a foreign religion, Christianity has been present in India for over two thousand years. It is fundamentally Indian because its followers are Indians who have the right to practice their religion within the republic. The national identity of Christians aligns with the broader Indic identity of Christianity.
The Collected Works of Thomas Kyd
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First, complete, integrated corpus of this major Elizabethan writer and first critical edition of his collected works in over one hundred years, with major new discoveries of authorship and attribution.
Thomas Kyd (1558-94) is best known as author of The Spanish Tragedy, the first revenge play, hugely influential on Shakespeare and other dramatists. He also wrote another love tragedy, Soliman and Perseda, and Cornelia, a classical tragedy translated from the French. This is a small canon for a dramatist described as "industrious". Kyd worked between 1585 and 1594, when the instability in the London theatre caused by the plague led to companies breaking up and plays being published anonymously. For over a century scholars have been searching for Kyd plays, the most frequently attributed being Arden of Faversham.
Uniting accepted methods with modern electronic data processing, Brian Vickers has endorsed Kyd's authorship of Arden and added two other plays: King Leir, Shakespeare's main source, and Fair Em, a comedy - justifying Jonson's reference to "sporting Kyd". His research has also identified Kyd as co-author with Nashe of 'harey the vi', which became 1 Henry VI after Shakespeare adapted it to his "Wars of the Roses" sequence. The evidence suggests that Kyd and Shakespeare co-authored Edward III.
The Collected Works of Thomas Kyd brings together for the first time his dramas, poetry, translations, and letters in accurate modernized editions, each text edited by one of a team of internationally renowned scholars, accompanied by commentaries, collation notes, and introductions. Kyd emerges as a pioneering playwright of much greater generic range than has been hitherto recognized. His newly defined canon will stimulate a fresh evaluation of English drama in this crucial period.
Decoding Ambedkar
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Revealing Dr. B.R. Ambedkar's enduring impact on sociology, social justice, and political thought.
The book sets out a discourse on Dr. B.R. Ambedkar's vast horizon of knowledge production. Through the essays in the book, the author has tried to deconstruct the reductionist approach adopted by mainstream academia, intelligentsia, and the Indian media to understand Ambedkar. It has recorded his erasures from various academic texts on sociology, history, literature, and creative fields like feature films. Juxtaposing this process of reductionism and erasure of Ambedkar, the book probes how he has been received and appreciated by international institutions and academicians; how, on the one hand, they have engaged with his writings on various aspects of society, polity, democracy, and social justice, and on the other, how they have hailed his academics in their writings. Further, the book maps the original and unique theoretical and philosophical insights provided by Babasaheb on Hindu social order with the place of an individual, varna, the genesis of caste, graded inequality, and the annihilation of caste, etc. Additionally, taking clues from the essential elements of social justice delineated by Plato and Rawls, this book has tried to search for the aspects of social justice in Ambedkar's thoughts. His refutations of thoughts of social scientists, such as Senart, Nesfield, and Risley, and recognition of thoughts of Ketkar, Jefferson, Durkheim, Weber, Marx, Tarde, Renan, and Acton, to name just a few, prove the point that Ambedkar should be regarded as one of the pioneers of Indian Sociology and treated at par with any national and international academics. In this sense, the book has underlined that Dalits are not engaged only in producing and analysing empirical data. Instead, they can evolve theoretical and conceptual propositions to deconstruct and reconstruct various social realities.
Studies in Medievalism XXXV
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Essays exploring the intersections of politics and theory through medievalism in film, literature, gaming, and political movements.
Two vital, increasingly intertwined areas of interest are addressed by this collection: politics and theory. The volume begins with a general discussion of how the Middle Ages have been particularly mediated by subsequent artifacts. The essays then address: the motivations and machinations behind Joan of Arc AI in Michael Anderson's 1989 film Time Gate; medievalist historiography in Salman Rushdie's 1983 novel Shame; medievalist identity in Rome's contemporary far-right movement; Viking imagery in and around the Make America Great Again campaign; Robin Hood avatars in mid-twentieth-century B-westerns; medievalism by the Young German Order during the 1920s and 30s; the visibility of race in David Lowery's 2021 film The Green Knight; Orientalism and race in the 1974 game Dungeons & Dragons; manifestations of Chaucer's Pardoner in Kim Zarins' 2016 novel Sometimes We Tell the Truth; gender performance and sexuality in Maria Dahvana Headley's 2020 translation of Beowulf; and the term "Anglo-Saxon," particularly relative to the Ansax-1 and ANSAXNET online communities.
'"Donald the Orange": Vikings in and around the Maga Movement' is made Open Access under the Creative Commons licence CC BY-NC-ND.
Conflict, Peace and Human Security in South Asia
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Revealing the forces driving conflict, peace, and human security in South Asia.
Conflict, Peace and Human Security in South Asia explores the region's complex socio-political landscape through nine insightful chapters by diverse scholars. From Nepal's shifting political dynamics and the rise of communism to gender inclusion in post-conflict governance, the volume addresses urgent questions of justice, empowerment, and democratic stability. It examines legal reforms for crime victims, the ethical underpinnings of historical legal texts like the Muluki Ain, and the challenges posed by fragmented social unions in capitalist contexts. The book also discusses the plight of Bhutanese asylum seekers in Nepal and analyses China's expanding role in South Asia - particularly its impact on Nepal-U.S. relations. This interdisciplinary volume offers fresh perspectives on the intersections of conflict, peacebuilding, and human security. A timely resource for scholars, policymakers, and students, it sheds light on the region's evolving challenges and the pathways toward more inclusive governance and sustainable peace.
The East German Novel of Socialist Construction
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Examines an important novelistic genre of the early German Democratic Republic for what it tells us about the country's aspirations to remake labor affectively and thus to build a socialist society.
In a series of socialist realist novels written in the early 1950s, East German authors sought to capture "the new feeling of work" under socialism, to portray the collective enthusiasm of building a new world out of the ruins of fascism and war. In the GDR, this construction literature received an ambiguous reception even at the time; in the West it was dismissed as propaganda; and it is now largely forgotten. Why revisit it now? Drawing on the theorization of living labor elaborated in Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge's work, particularly their monumental treatise History and Obstinacy, and on contemporary Marxist feminist accounts of social reproduction theory, this book argues that East German construction literature provides us with a set of case studies in the social reorganization of work and the emotions and infrastructures that attend to it, even as these novels attempt to contain these transformations through socialist realist aesthetic strategies. The much-bemoaned awkwardness of these novels, then, is perhaps not only to be found in their didacticism but in the limits of that didacticism, where they seek both to portray and to disavow the transformation of work and the working class in the GDR. This book confronts the question: what was socialist affective labor and what could it have been?
New Medieval Literatures 26
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This volume continues the series' engagement with intellectual and cultural pluralism in the Middle Ages, showing the best new work in the field.
Essays in this volume cover a rich and diverse range - in chronological terms, from the ninth to the fifteenth century, and across linguistic traditions from Old and Middle English to medieval Latin and Middle French. Using varied conceptual tools and detailed explorations of social, cultural, and intellectual contexts, they offer new interpretations of key works from the central and late Middle Ages. Contributors explore the educational background of the Middle English "Ricardians" - Geoffrey Chaucer, William Langland, John Gower, and the Gawain-poet - through the novel perspective of versification; the intellectual context for the poem St Erkenwald, where a poem about the miraculous salvation of a pagan reflects a detailed engagement with contemporary theology that tests the limits of theological orthodoxy; and the social background of the Gawain-poet, via examples of household hierarchy. A form of textual analysis known as "ergodics" is deployed to offer a way of making sense of the unique challenge of the Old English Maxims, and their position in monastic reading cultures. The Middle English Titus and Vespasian, which tells the story of the siege of Jerusalem, is shown to contain a complex and conflicted form of anti-Judaism, traversed in complex ways by anxieties about gender as well religion and race. Finally, in a linked suite of essays, late medieval heraldry is illuminated from a range of unexpected perspectives drawn from the study of literary form, examining heraldic miscellanies, the creativity of the heraldic imaginary, and the community-building work of the late medieval poetic society known as the Cour Amoureuse.
The Church of England’s Western Schism
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Examines one of the most significant events in the history of the late Georgian church, and revises accepted notions of Evangelical and Anglican ecclesiology and identity.
This study examines the establishment and progress of the Western Schism, which occurred between 1815 and c.1825-the first group secession from the Church of England since the Nonjurors during the late seventeenth century. As such, the Schism proved to be one of the most significant events in the history of the Church between the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the enactment of the 'Constitutional Revolution' of 1828-32. Despite the fears of many inside and outside the Church that the Schism would produce a wave of Evangelical secessions throughout England and Ireland, its influence was largely confined to London and the counties of Devon, Dorset, Gloucestershire, Hampshire, Somerset, Sussex and Wiltshire. Its leadership was comprised of a comparatively small group of clergy and laity drawn from prominent and influential commercial and clerical families (especially those from the Baring banking tribe) and bound by close ties of kinship, friendship and ideology. These factors, along with the Schism's heretical pronouncements and unusual ecclesial practices, its inclusion of women's ministry, and its secretive nature, generated considerable sensationalism and novelty value. The same factors also provoked a sustained period of criticism in which numerous leading religious figures, journals and newspapers participated. Surprisingly, while this criticism of the Schism emerged from every point on the religious compass, including High Churchmen, liberals and Nonconformists, it was the Evangelicals who quickly emerged as the Schism's principal critics. Evangelicals denounced not only the heretical nature of the Schism, but also its inclusion of women in leadership, its abandonment of the Established Church and its attempts to tarnish the reputation of the 'gospel party' by calling into question its adherence to apostolic fidelity and the Reformed heritage of the English Church. This work, the first extensive examination of the Western Schism, revises accepted notions of Evangelical (and Anglican) ecclesiology and identity during the late Georgian period. It discloses how a prominent and small, but influential, group of clergy and laity, alarmed by the Church's failure to respond adequately to the disruptive social and spiritual events of the day, set out to establish a rival ecclesial body which, despite the investment of significant energy and financial resources, ultimately failed to coalesce into a viable and lasting alternative to the Established Church.
FGM/C in Africa and the Diaspora
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A nuanced, interdisciplinary examination of female genital mutilation/cutting (FGM/C) that challenges dominant health and human-rights narratives by situating the practice within its social, ritual, and cultural contexts, and foregrounding the voices of affected communities.
Few issues arouse as much controversy as female circumcision, also called a variety of terms including female genital cutting, female genital mutilation/cutting (FGM/C), and female genital modification. The very terminology is contentious, reflecting polarised ideological stances. This book discusses, critiques, and analyses contemporary issues around female circumcision in Africa and the diaspora, campaigns and legislation against it, and alternatives to it. It traces historical continuities in anti-FGM/C campaigns and examines how certain hegemonic narratives have developed as initiatives, legislation, and protocols were rolled out. The book argues that FGM/C is not 'just' a health, human-rights, and gender-violence issue but is multi-faceted and intersectional.
Moving away from a focus on the physical 'cut', chapters examine FGM/C in terms of social relations, asserting that FGM/C must be situated and understood in deeper ritual context and that external interventions aimed at ending the practice are doomed to fail unless external actors listen to and truly engage with the communities concerned. At the same time, FGM/C is discussed in parallel with male circumcision, as both mark ritual initiation into adulthood, raise people's status, and underpin the structure of age-organised societies. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, including perspectives from anthropology, history, political science, medicine and zemiology, the book includes a range of voices, importantly, those of community members as well as scholars, development practitioners and public health professionals, with a view to promoting constructive dialogue between sectors.
Gender, Science and Sociability in the Diary of Jane Ewbank of York (1778-1824)
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Examines the newly-discovered diary of Jane Ewbank as a vital site of knowledge-making, illuminating women's intellectual lives in Enlightenment York, where science, cultural criticism and sociability intersected.
Between 1803 and 1805, Jane Ewbank of York kept a fascinating diary which chronicled her place within the lively Enlightenment world of northern England. Written in engaging prose, the diary offers a rare, richly textured account of a provincial woman's engagement with science, cultural criticism, and sociability in York and beyond.
This interdisciplinary volume includes an annotated transcription of Ewbank's 34,000-word diary alongside essays situating it within the gendered knowledge networks of northern England. Exploring her participation in scientific lectures, women's writing and the arts in York, contributors interrogate the diary as a media technology, a cognitive tool, and an emotionally informed thinking device. Ewbank's encounters with figures such as the novelist and educationalist Maria Edgeworth, the scientific lecturer Henry Moyes, and the philanthropist Catherine Cappe are explored throughout. Intersecting topics ranging from natural theology and scientific education to literature, theatre and music are all discussed.
The essays variously engage with historiographies of early modern life-writing, Enlightenment sociability, and the emotional economies of medicine, while offering reflections that challenge colonial silences and foreground global entanglements. Drawing on recent work in the history of science, literature and feminist theory, this volume redefines the diary as a critical artefact of Enlightenment culture and offers a compelling model for studying gendered intellectual life in regional contexts.
MATTHEW DANIEL EDDY is Durham University's Professor and Chair in the History and Philosophy of Science and Co-Director of the Institute for Medieval and Early Modern Studies.
RACHEL FELDBERG is a doctoral candidate at the Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies, University of York.
JANE RENDALL is an Honorary Fellow of the Centre for Eighteenth Studies and the History Department at the University of York.
Contributors: Michael Brown, Matthew Daniel Eddy, Rachel Feldberg, Corinne Fowler, Joanna de Groot, Roseanna Kettle, Karen Lipsedge, Jon Mee, Jane Rendall, Gillian Russell, Millie Schurch.
Granville Bantock and the Orchestral Refiguring of Literature
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Illuminates Bantock's experimentation with musical structure to create effective representations of literature, while offering new notions of the modern in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century music.
Granville Bantock (1868-1946) remains one of the most significant British composers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. This book provides an in-depth exploration of a series of orchestral compositions by Bantock based on different forms of literature (the poem, the drama, the novel) penned by a wide range of authors including Robert Browning, Samuel Butler, Dante, Ernest Dowson, Thomas Moore, Percy Shelley, Sophocles and Robert Southey. The majority of the musical works discussed date from Bantock's most successful period as a composer (c.1899-1911), when his music was perceived to be 'modern'. Although critics were struck by his skills in orchestration, central to his modernist credentials is his distinctive approach to musical structure. The book's in-depth analyses, drawing on a wide range of literary scholarship, demonstrate a more meaningful way to appreciate these designs as individual responses to the literary texts on which they are based. As well as tackling the vexed issue of programme music, the book also highlights Bantock's association with orientalism. As the first major study of Bantock's orchestral music, this book not only demonstrates the composer's experimentation with musical structure to create effective representations of literature, but its findings also have a wider significance in terms of notions of the modern and the interdisciplinary potential of music-literature studies in general.
British Merchant Seafarer Training and Education
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The first overview of merchant seafarer training and education in a single volume, outlining the development of training and education from the earliest time to the present.
Because merchant seafarers practise their occupation largely out of sight of the general population ashore, there persists a widespread ignorance of seafaring and seafarers, which has been labelled "sea blindness". Moreover, much writing on seafarers and seafarer training is dispersed in journal articles, which tend to be restricted in scope. This book presents the first overview of merchant seafarer training and education in a single volume. It outlines the development of training and education from the earliest time to the present, examines the different aspects of training and education, and covers the numerous and differing policies and training structures put in place by various shipowners. Despite national state regulation merchant shipping is not a single organisation like the Royal Navy. In addition to being a contribution to maritime studies and maritime history, the book also reveals a great deal about vocational training and education in general.
Lloyd George and the Coalition Liberal Party
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Key documents from around the time that the Labour Party replaced the Liberals as the main opposition to the Conservatives.
The Scovell papers provide previously unseen insights into the Coalition Liberal party: a party created to support David Lloyd George, prime minister 1916-1922, and his allies who had split from the main Liberal party during the First World War. They document the evolution of British politics at the point when the Liberals were giving way to Labour as the opposition to the Conservatives. They also document Lloyd George's failure to achieve a fusion of the Conservatives and Coalition Liberals to create an anti-socialist centre right party to stem the rise of Labour. The documents, at the intersection between the party at Westminster and the wider party in the country, make a significant contribution to debates about the relative primacy of the higher level versus the lower level within the evolution of British political system in this period. They show that the Coalition Liberal party had genuine substance at the local level,built up with painstaking spadework by Scovell and others, sufficiently strong to strike local deals in the 1922 election, thereby raising Lloyd George's hopes, falsely as it turned out, that he would be a key power broker and potentially still prime minister in the new parliament.
Richard Wagner: My Life [Two Volume Set]
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The first fully annotated scholarly edition and masterful new translation of Wagner's autobiography, revealing the composer's self-fashioning and mythmaking.
Richard Wagner's life was as tempestuous as his music and in his own retelling it constitutes a gripping narrative. His autobiography, My Life, matters if one wants to understand the composer's life or the way in which he himself saw that life. And yet, it has a flawed publishing history: Bayreuth published the first commercial edition in 1911, but it was not until 1963 that the full text appeared in an annotated German edition. An anonymous English translation was published in 1911, the work of a translator unfamiliar with the subject. A second translation, published in 1987, is notable for its wayward style and many inaccuracies. Until this day, no edition published in any language has risen to the challenge of providing adequate annotation. This new scholarly edition and translation by Stewart Spencer is the first edition to do so.
Annotations provided here explain references and allusions that Wagner himself took for granted and correct lapses of memory that the text contains. The edition highlights various strategies of concealment as far as Wagner's love life and revolutionary activities were concerned. Crucially, as this edition illuminates, by the 1860s Wagner was anxious to portray himself as Beethoven's natural successor, and his life in defence of art as a bulwark against the decline of Western civilization. This new critical edition and translation of Richard Wagner's autobiography is a response to one of the most pressing needs in the entire Wagner bibliography. It will be widely welcomed by a substantial Wagner community of readers.
The British Army, Society and Soldiering in Ireland, 1699-1793
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A comprehensive overview of the British army in Ireland in the eighteenth century and the army's relationship with the local population.
The eighteenth-century army in Ireland, which consisted of 12,000 to 15,000 men, and which was its own quasi-independent "Establishment", paid for, housed by, and commanded from Dublin, represented a significant proportion of overall British military forces. This book, based on extensive original research, presents an overview of army life in Ireland in the period. It covers the administration of the Irish Establishment, recruitment, desertion, criminality, drunkenness, everyday routines, soldier-civilian relations, the response of soldiers to growing revolutionary unrest, and more. It overturns much established thinking, demonstrating for example that desertion in the army in Ireland was no different from desertion in the army elsewhere, that the army in Ireland was well-trained and efficient, and that Irish soldiers were far more common in British service than previously thought. In addition, the book discusses ideas of masculinity, the army's place in the defence of Ireland against foreign invasion, in securing the ascendancy regime and in suppressing unrest, and the unusual situation of Ireland as both subject and participant in the development of the British empire.
Scotland, the Wars of the Roses, and European Politics
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Traces Scotland's involvement in the increasingly dynamic international relations of the fifteenth century.
In 1461 the eyes of much of Europe were trained on Scotland. King Henry VI of England had fled into exile there following his defeat by Edward of York at Towton. This attention may have been exceptional, but it demonstrates that despite its location, Scotland was an integral part of the European political world and, in particular, between the 1450s and 1490s, a key external player in the Wars of the Roses. However, although Scotland's role in these decades was never confined to Britain, scholarship has tended to downplay its continental connections. This book demonstrates the extent to which the Scots were active and engaged participants on a wider stage. Military, dynastic, and economic contacts meant that during the fifteenth century, Scotland was a recognised factor in the diplomacy of rulers from Italy to Scandinavia. It shows the importance of maintaining external relationships for the Scots, the fluctuating value of these relationships to other rulers, and how English political events were also bound up with wider patterns abroad.
The Importance of Elgar
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A landmark celebration of Edward Elgar's life, music and enduring influence, bringing together leading voices from across the musical world.
Of the many biographies and other books published about Edward Elgar few have brought together as many composers, performers, and writers as this anthology, in celebration of his art and life. Published to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the Society which bears his name, The Importance of Elgar brings together both executant musicians and others who share their love and appreciation of his music and what it means to them and, more widely, his place in the canon of western music. With a foreword by the Society's President, Sir Mark Elder, the more than 60 contributors include Dame Janet Baker, Sir Stephen Hough, Sir James MacMillan and Christian Tetzlaf. The choice of the word 'importance' ensured that those who contributed to this volume would write something personal. The Elgar Society's first President, Sir Adrian Boult, was one of the great interpreters of Elgar's music and his commitment remains an inspiration to many today. It was Sir Adrian who suggested the formation of The Elgar Society during a series of concerts in Malvern in 1950. Four months later, in January 1951, what became the largest composer society in Britain was formed. Edited by David Morris, The Elgar Society's Secretary, and Andrew Neill a former Society Chairman, this book offers the practising musician and music lover alike some fresh insights into Elgar's music and his importance beyond the shores of Britain.
Apartheid, Thought Crime and South Africa’s New Left
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Of all the groups charged in the early 1960s under apartheid security laws in South Africa, the National Liberation Front was the only one whose members did not engage in violence. Yet six months after its launch, its founding members were arrested and then sentenced to between five and ten years in prison. Why?
A Cape Peninsula offshoot of the Non-European Unity Movement, the NLF was explicitly socialist and part of the long 1960s New Left. Although the NLF challenged South Africa's racial and capitalist orders, it has scarcely appeared in the liberation movement historiography. This book recovers the NLF's lost history, tracing its perspectives on colonialism, apartheid, political education and guerrilla struggle. The book examines the NLF in its international and national contexts, exploring its relationships with both the transnational New Left and the South African left, and evaluating the conditions producing and then smashing South Africa's New Left. Debates about apartheid focus on race, political economy, and state and institutions. But apartheid also strove to control thought through unequal education and censorship. While bringing the NLF's critique of racial capitalism to life, the book also uncovers the NLF's unique educational approach and the state's attempt to contain its thinking.
Agricultural Modernisation and the Green Revolution in the Twentieth-Century World
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An overarching history of the origins, development, and application of agricultural innovation in the past, and of the paradigms and institutional frameworks in which they were developed throughout the twentieth century.
From the late nineteenth century onwards, rural societies and agrarian production across the world were profoundly transformed. Prior to the Second World War, technological innovations developed within an intensive organic framework and advanced largely in dialogue with existing producers. After the war, social engineering became the prevailing model in agricultural and rural policies almost everywhere. Modernisation was imposed from above, targeting so-called "archaic" or "anti-modern" peasants and farmers, who were pushed to produce ever-greater quantities of food, timber, and other raw materials through the expanded use of industrial and inorganic resources. Applied as a USA political programme in Asian, Latin American and African countries, this strategy became known as the "Green Revolution". Although it undermined rural societies and eroded the sustainability of agricultural production, it remained central to political agendas, leaving a difficult legacy for future generations.
This book analyses agrarian change and agricultural policies before and after 1945, highlighting the socio-economic and environmental consequences of these two very different periods in global agrarian history. Its diverse case studies span continents and political systems, considering topics from post-war reconstruction in the UK and Denmark to development policies in the Belgian Congo and post-fascist Ethiopia; from production projects in communist Hungary to agricultural transformations across the Southern Cone and India.
Chapter 6 is available as Open Access under the Creative Commons licence CC BY-NC-ND
Democracy in Sub-Saharan Africa, 2000-2025
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Is democracy surviving in Africa? Despite the continuance of multiparty elections, in the face of unmet expectations for greater freedom, social justice, and inclusive development, an increasing authoritarianism is spreading across the continent.
Although most African states continue to use some form of multiparty elections according to the formal rules of liberal democracy, the reality is that people's expectations for greater freedom, social justice, and inclusive development have not been met. The result is a growing number of African states where power relations are increasingly authoritarian - a trend seen in the West as well.
Bringing together contributors from Africa, Europe, and North America, this volume seeks to analyze democracy in sub-Saharan Africa beyond the mere examination of the elements that determine its impasse, the political factors that hinder the proper functioning of democratic institutions or even the models through which a country's level of democratic status is "indexed." Instead, the goal is to address current states of "democracy" in Africa within a larger, global history.
Given the post-colonial histories of most African nations, the current demise of democratic governments on the continent cannot be interpreted as a new phenomenon without precedent. The volume presents a longer-view perspective to explain more specifically how history can explain the current crises in democracy and development, exploring how negotiations between external and internal interests have always contested their meanings in Africa, and arguing that these struggles continue to create new conditions for new democratic spaces.
Drawings in Books in Medieval Britain from the Ninth Century to the Reformation
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The first broad and long study of a major aspect of British medieval art, examining the historical relationships between medieval drawings and books.
The art of drawing and its products had a determining relationship to the visual arts of the Middle Ages. They also had other purposes, which if understood, help one to grasp the broader availability and usefulness of the medium. This groundbreaking study deals particularly with the historical relationships between medieval drawings and books. Using a wide range of material and documentary evidence, it explains how book-bound drawings may be defined, classified, and understood in relation to their physical settings and the ends they were made to serve. In orientation, the study is primarily art historical: most of its arguments emerge from curiosity about the psychology and experience of making drawn images. As such, it tackles a surprisingly neglected field. Because it deals with a pervasive aspect of book-design, it also makes a basic contribution to medieval codicology. There are six substantial chapters, the first two dealing with the definition of drawings, existing scholarly approaches to them, and issues of artistic status and agency. These lay the groundwork for the rest of the study, which analyses the placement of drawings at the fronts and backs of books (chapters 3, 4), and drawings embedded in the bodies of manuscripts that were mainly devoted to text (chapters 5, 6). Drawing emerges as an accessible, flexible medium of expression to rank with writing.
Destroyers, Naval Culture and British Identity
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An overview of what destroyers were and how their capacity for heroic deeds captured the popular imagination.
Destroyers, first developed over the course of the late 1880s and 1890s, were fast, manoeuverable warships intended to escort larger vessels and defend them against a wide range of threats. In Britain their speed, nimbleness and capacity for heroic deeds captured the popular imagination, and they became symbolic vessels, encapsulating the fortitude and ingenuity which contemporaries felt characterised the British navy. Based on extensive original research, this book provides both an overview of destroyers' operational roles and how these developed over time and also a detailed examination of destroyers' place within British culture, society and identity. Considering a wide range of sources including news reporting, pageantry, literature, film, art and more, the book reveals how the destroyer as symbol was used as propaganda, fitted in to popular, civic and artistic cultures and affected naval policy, British people's morale and outlook, and international views of Britain's naval power. One striking example of the depth of British people's attachment to destroyers was the scheme during the Second World War for individual towns to each adopt their own destroyer, a scheme which achieved astonishing success, with many small towns raising huge sums sufficient to fund entirely the building of their own destroyer.
Global Perspectives on Women Pianists
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Pathbreaking study that explores the piano as an instrument of globalism, colonialism and mobility and what this meant for women pianists from around the world.
This book surveys women pianists around the world. It focuses on the mid-nineteenth to the late-twentieth centuries, an era that witnessed sustained interest in piano performance against a backdrop of technological and socio-political transformation. The authors range from emerging to established scholars, from the Americas, Europe, Africa, and Asia. They take diverse approaches to the piano as an instrument of globalism, colonialism, class, and mobility, within women's lives. These include explorations of mapping, networks, and cultural transfer; feminist examinations of archival traces; the implications of distinctive geographies and socio-political conditions; and the links between gender and genre, including contemporary and experimental musics. The volume offers a bold account of global approaches to women in music and encourages innovative ways of rethinking piano culture.
Global Perspectives on Women Pianists will be an exciting contribution to the growing landscape of global music history. This book will also contribute to the fields of gender studies, historical musicology, and material history.
The editors have curated a volume that achieves a genuine spread of "global" essays (and commendably, one that includes the "West" as simply another part of the globe).
JOE DAVIES is a faculty member in the Arts and Humanities Division at New York University Abu Dhabi. He previously held research and teaching positions at Maynooth University, the University of California, Irvine, and the University of Oxford.
NATASHA LOGES is Professor of Musicology at the Hochschule für Musik Freiburg. She was previously Head of Postgraduate Programmes at the Royal College of Music, London.
Liberty in France and Britain, 1159–1789
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Documents the influence Britain and France had on the ideas of liberty and human rights from the twelfth century to the French Revolution.
Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, the motto of the French Republic, encapsulates the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man. The authors trace the history of each article in that Declaration to the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries. That period saw the invention by the French-speaking Norman rulers in England of the common law based on reason and natural rights, of limited monarchy and habeas corpus; and in both France and England the replacement of trials by ordeal and battle with the right to a fair trial or due process, the disappearance of chattel slavery, and the development of the rule of law and republican government. The authors show that the ideas that the French and British held in common from that period were deployed to justify the rebellions and revolutions in the Netherlands and Britain in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and in France and the USA in the eighteenth century. That in turn led to the adoption of human rights declarations, treaties and laws in the twentieth century. The authors trace these ideas from the Policraticus (1159) of John of Salisbury, the Englishman educated in France who dedicated his work to his patron Thomas Becket, through (among others) Thomas More's Utopia (1516), Jean Bodin's Six Books of the Republic (1576), John Locke's Treatises on Government (c.1689), Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws (1748) and William Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765-69) that was widely cited in France and propounds the natural rights of mankind listed in the 1789 Declaration.
Weird Music: Reading John Ireland and Arthur Machen
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Using John Ireland's fascination with Arthur Machen as case study, this book challenges our perception of the correspondence between music and literature in twentieth-century Britain.
The composer John Ireland (1879-1962) declared repeatedly that no one could understand his music until they had first read the work of his favourite writer, Arthur Machen (1863-1947). This book is the first study to take Ireland at his word. Revolving around Machen's classification as a founding figure of 'weird fiction', it uses weird aesthetics as an interpretative lens with which to understand Ireland's notoriously cryptic life and music. Its four chapters deal respectively with Machen's and Ireland's parallel explorations of weird art's relationship with eroticism; with fin-de-siècle London; with the English pastoral tradition; and with unsettling implications of alternative historiography.
The resulting portrait reveals Ireland to be one of Britain's pre-eminent 'weird artists', placing Ireland in the aesthetic context with which he wished to be associated. It therefore fills a significant gap in British musicology, while at the same time contributing to a growing appreciation of Machen as a major figure in British culture, one whose influence exceeds far beyond the literary sphere to which he is traditionally confined. Using Ireland's fascination with Machen as its case study, this book makes a timely and necessary connection between the literary weird and its musical doppelgänger, enriching and challenging our perception of the correspondence between music and literature in twentieth-century Britain.
The Victoria History of the Counties of England: A History of Northamptonshire, volume VIII
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Long-awaited volume for the Victoria County History of Northamptonshire covers the 6 parishes in Towcester Hundred including the historic market town of Towcester.
This contribution to the Red Book series is the eighth volume of the Victoria County History of Northamptonshire. It provides accounts of Towcester hundred, encompassing 6 parishes including the historic market town of Towcester. The rolling landscape is punctuated by dispersed villages that form the hundred with each settlement linked to the Roman Watling Street that traverses the full length of the hundred. Towcester's history is inextricably linked to this transport corridor, with an important coaching trade emerging in the 17th and 18th centuries. The hundred had a notable range of localised industries by the 1800s, including shoemaking, lacemaking and framework knitting. Its predominantly agricultural landscape was interrupted by the coming of the Grand Union Canal and railway in the 19th century, bringing industry, manufacture and expansion.
Smuts and Mandela
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Compares how, as individuals, Smuts and Mandela shaped key aspects of the making of South Africa, moving beyond sweeping condemnation of the first and uncritical reference of the second to provide a more rounded assessment of their significance in the history of the nation.
South Africa has produced two leaders who achieved global recognition and renown in their respective eras: Jan Christiaan Smuts (Prime Minister, 1919-24 and 1939-48) and Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela (President, 1994-99). The former was much celebrated for playing a significant role in reconstructing international architecture after both world wars; the latter remains globally admired for his leading part in drawing South Africa back from racial war and becoming a democracy. As a result, both have attracted multiple biographies. Today, however, whereas Mandela remains a much-admired global icon, Smuts' reputation is much diminished, with contemporary historians citing his racism and role in constructing the foundations of apartheid South Africa.
In this controversial book, Roger Southall provides a re-evaluation of Smuts' hugely contradictory career by proposing fascinating parallels with the life and political trajectory of Mandela. Both came to maturity as political leaders as freedom fighters - Smuts against the British and Mandela against the apartheid regime. Both played a pre-eminent in founding a new South Africa, the first made for whites at Union in 1910 and the second for all South Africans in 1994. Both aspired to be nation-builders, but while Smuts' hoped-for South African nation was white, Mandela aspired to bring all of South Africa's people together. Both came to stride on the international stage, albeit in very different ways and for various reasons.
Smuts' career failed, and he was ejected from office. Mandela retired gracefully from office and continued to be lauded for his well-earned retirement, yet South Africa's contemporary travails reveal his hopes and policies as unfulfilled. This book makes the case that we cannot fully understand Mandela without first understanding Smuts and how South Africa continues to struggle with the legacy he left behind.
The Military Papers of Field Marshal Sir George White, 1885–1900
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Key documents relating to White's service in Burma, India, and South Africa as well as important background and analysis of some of Britain's most significant small wars during the Victorian period.
After graduating from the Royal Military College, George Stuart White was posted to India where he served in the Rebellion. Twenty years later, he fought in the Second Afghan War, where he was decorated with the Victoria Cross for gallantry in action. After a brief stint in the Sudan campaign, White returned to India, where he solidified his reputation, eventually rising to the position of Commander-in-Chief. During those years he commanded field forces in Burma and Baluchistan, sent expeditions to the North-West Frontier, and oversaw the end of the Presidency Armies. As war loomed on the horizon in South Africa in 1899, White was selected to command the Natal Field Force. This force was besieged for 118 days in the town of Ladysmith. Despite continuous Boer shelling, disease, and limited supplies, White managed to maintain the force and the civilian population in good order until its liberation. He was christened the "Defender of Ladysmith." In 1903, he was promoted to Field-Marshal.
The Brewers’ Book, Part 2, 1429-40
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This book presents the second part of William Porlond's Brewers' Book, 1429-40. It provides a fascinating glimpse of this craft and fraternity, and the gaining of the company's Royal charter in 1438.
This is the second part of William Porlond's Brewers' Book, for the years 1429-40, until the clerk's death. After a gap, his records resumed, listing income, expenditure, entries to the freedom of the craft, to the fraternity and matters concerning the Brewers of London. Many payments were recorded in pursuit of the Brewers' Royal charter, which King Henry VI granted in 1438. Costs for making the commonalty seal were also recorded. At this time of change, when beer, rather than ale, was being made and sold in London, the clerk questioned the virtue of beer. He recorded the annual feasts, some important guests, and the purchase and distribution of livery cloth. The clerk gave insight into national events, with lists of the Brewers' contributions towards waging soldiers in Calais. Inventories of the goods of three Brewers' almsmen give glimpses of their lives. Porlond's records, kept mostly in English in this part of the book, illustrate the developing role of the company clerk.
Lexicography
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Articles on Xhosa language and folklore
Robert Godfrey's major contribution to Xhosa-language studies is his revised and expanded edition, published in 1915, of Albert Kropf's classic Kafir-English Dictionary (1899). As a member of the staff of the Blythswood Institution, Godfrey edited the Blythswood Review, and in 1924, in preparation for a third edition of the Dictionary, he commenced an extended series of articles under the title Lexicography. Through these columns he invited his readers to supply him with the Xhosa names for birds and animals. The scope and range of the articles expanded, and he increasingly incorporated into his column quotations from pupils' essays on Xhosa lore and language. Selections from these articles comprise Godfrey's Bird-lore of the Eastern Cape Province (1941), now long out of print, and an article that Godfrey wrote on John Bennie (1934), but the articles as originally printed and as assembled here contain considerably more information, on a wider range of topics, and demonstrate the development of his knowledge.
Godfrey's contributions to the Blythswood Review contain invaluable knowledge on aspects of the domestic lives and language of the Xhosa-speaking peoples, much of it expressed in the Xhosa words of his informants, information on proverbs and riddles and taboos, on children's games and bird-lore, on hlonipha words and the Xhosa words for flora and fauna, on the months of the year and place names, on Xhosa grammar and the linguistic achievements of John Bennie, whose transcription of the Xhosa language became the earliest standard spelling system. Also included in this volume is an extensive collated list of lexical definitions intended for inclusion in the third edition of the Dictionary, which in the event was never published.
Altogether, this collection of Godfrey's articles constitutes a significant source of information on the folklore of the Xhosa-speaking peoples and the state of their language in the early decades of the twentieth century.
University of KwaZulu-Natal Press: Southern African Development Community
African Futures in the Making
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What lies ahead for rural Africa, given a rapidly increasing population, climate change, poverty, inequality and projections of an increasing vulnerability to natural hazards and food shortages?
Bringing together scholars in ecology, agriculture, economics, human geography and cultural anthropology, from Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, Germany, The Netherlands and the UK, this book focusses on social-ecological transformation and future-making in rural Africa, especially in areas of rapid land-use change following the establishment of development corridors, conservation areas, and large-scale infrastructure projects. In Africa, discussions on the way forward are particularly conflict-ridden because people do not agree about desirable goals, because the gap between winners and losers seems to be bigger than elsewhere, and because the struggle for desirable futures is embedded in a problematic history of foreign domination and exploitation.
Focussing on eastern and southern Africa, topics examined range from the history of conservation initiatives and wildlife protection to visions of green development, from the gender implications of extreme climate events on pastoral economies to the use of information and communication technologies on farms and mobile money in geographically remote territories, from large-scale energy infrastructure projects and growth corridors to local ways of managing risk. The volume opens with reflections on African utopic registers of the future and conceptual decolonization in African futurity.
Published in association with the Collaborative Research Centre FUTURE RURAL AFRICA, funded by the German Research Council (DFG).
The Accounts of Two Westminster Fraternities, 1474-1540
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An edition of the surviving accounts of two important religious fraternities, one based at St Margaret's Westminster, the other at the Chapel of St Mary Rounceval at Charing Cross.
These organisations drew their membership from across the social spectrum, from nobles and senior clergy, to local parishioners and merchants. They formed a key focus of social and religious life, and their accounts throw light on the regular activities of Westminster inhabitants.
Mola, False Conception, and False Pregnancy in British Medicine, 1550–1850
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When reproduction defied certainty, it unsettled medicine, law, and belief. This book reveals how ambiguous pregnancies reshaped knowledge, emotion, and the cultural meaning of conception across centuries.
Across the long durée of the early-modern period, British medical practitioners and society at large were preoccupied with the elusive phenomenon of "false generation"-a term encompassing false conceptions, molae, moles, and spurious pregnancies. These non-foetal pregnancies, often indistinguishable from true gestations, generated profound uncertainty in medical, legal, and theological thought. Drawing on sources ranging from anatomical treatises and midwifery manuals to women's letters, diaries, and court records, Donaghy traces how false generation shaped reproductive knowledge and understandings of the embodied experience. Through case studies such as Mary I and Joanna Southcott, the book highlights how reproductive ambiguity was not merely a private ordeal but a public and intellectual crisis. Engaging with figures like Galen, Jean Fernel, François Valleriola, and Frederik Ruysch, the book situates British debates within wider contemporaneous European contexts as well as a transhistorical development of medical knowledge.
By foregrounding uncertainty as both an emotional and conceptual force, this monograph contributes to the history of emotions, knowledge, and the body. It offers a field-defining account of how false generation unsettled assumptions about life, conception, and pregnancy, and how these ideas evolved into modern categories such as molar pregnancy. The book speaks directly to current debates in reproductive justice and healthcare, while presenting a compelling case for the historical contingency of reproductive knowledge and the diverse ways it has been shaped by cultural, scientific, and experiential factors.
Skaldic Poetry as Christian Propaganda
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A detailed literary study of fourteenth-century poetry composed in honour of a controversial thirteenth-century bishop.
Vernacular poetry was a powerful influence in fourteenth-century Icelandic elite literary culture, even to the extent of providing the means of elevating a local bishop, Guðmundr Arason, to sainthood. Three Icelandic poets, Abbots Arngrímr Brandsson and Árni Jónsson, and Lawman Einarr Gilsson, composed impressive encomia of Guðmundr, with the intention of recording the holy bishop's sanctity in the language of contemporary religious devotion and to persuade Church authorities in both Scandinavia and the wider Christian world to canonize him. While the local campaign ultimately failed to sway the Catholic Church, it did succeed in producing a significant corpus of vernacular religious poetry, unmatched in combining the traditional diction and metres of Old Norse skaldic verse with the vernacular poetics of affective piety and Christian hermeneutics.
This important group of poems is examined here for the first time as literary works. The manuscript context of the Guðmundr poetry is investigated in the first chapter. The next three chapters offer a detailed analysis of the poems themselves while the final chapters situate the Guðmundr poetry within the milieu of the vernacular learning that flourished particularly in mid-fourteenth-century Icelandic bishoprics and monasteries. They also explore the relationship between contemporary prose sagas of Guðmundr Arason and the poetry composed in his honour, which, it is argued, offers figural interpretations of the substance of the prose texts.
Medieval Commentary and Exegesis
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Interdisciplinary study of the medieval commentary tradition, covering a range of sources from the Wycliffite Bible and French Marian Lyric to John Lydgate and Anselm of Canterbury.
Textual and material survivals from across medieval Europe testify to a pervasive commentary culture on Scripture. The biblical text becomes a central object of explication and comment, generating a variety of interpretive texts and genres. But precisely because it is so ubiquitous, medieval commentary can also prove elusive, requiring perspectives from different disciplines. How can we define commentary, and how does it develop and function in different linguistic and geographical areas? What role do commentaries play in the formation and reformulation of personal and national identities across the period? How can contemporary scholars best approach this fundamental genre of the medieval world?
Exploring these among many other questions, this volume revises and refines our current understanding of the intellectual, cultural, and literary dynamics of the medieval commentary tradition. Contributors consider matters such asauthority, patronage, readership, textual genesis, and material contexts of commentary, as well as the absences and lacunae in our knowledge, and how we might take these into account from today's perspective. Expansive in their chronological, methodological, and disciplinary scope, the chapters here illuminate the origins and forms of commentary from Late Antiquity to the late medieval period in Western Europe, extending across Hebrew, Latin and vernacular texts, and examine a wide range of literary and cultural artefacts, from single-authored works to manuscript compilations.
Scottish Witchcraft Narratives and Tracts
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This book is a scholarly edition of primary sources for witch-hunting and demonic possession in Scotland. It contains narratives of remarkable witchcraft prosecutions, and tracts expounding witchcraft theory.
The narratives provide the intense emotional drama, eye-catching colour and nightmarish horror that made witchcraft such a compelling idea. The accused witches' own voices are sometimes heard, under the harrowing circumstances of interrogation under torture. Meanwhile, educated ministers and lawyers develop their theoretical ideas about witches and the Devil. Not every theorist agrees with the prosecutions, and doubts arise that would eventually lead witch-hunting to lose its credibility. The book's most detailed narrative concerns the Bargarran witches of 1697, in which seven witches were executed for the demonic possession of the 11-year-old Christian Shaw. The book shows how this was connected with the sensational witchcraft panic in 1692 at Salem, Massachusetts.
The Register Of Thomas Hatfield, Bishop Of Durham, 1345-1381
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The full record of diocesan administration under Bishop Hatfield. This edition completes the publication of the surviving medieval episcopal registers from the diocese of Durham.
Thomas Hatfield was a member of the inner circle of Edward III, who advanced him as his candidate for election to the chapter of Durham and for provision to the pope after the death of Richard Bury in April 1345. As a trusted administrator, his choice was no doubt attractive to the king, in part because along with the diocese came the palatinate of Durham. He was involved in the early stages of the war with France and was present at the battle of Crécy. For most of his episcopate, however, he struck a balance between remaining in his diocese and the palatinate most of each year and staying near the centre of national affairs in London. The first wave of the Black Death struck England in June 1348 and spread throughout the country in 1349. The long-term effects can be seen at several points in the register in respect of shortage of priests and declining revenues of religious houses, parish churches, and chantries. Primarily a document of diocesan administration, the register is chiefly composed of the transfer of benefices, but there are ample letters concerned with discipline of the clergy and the laity, and the rare example of a detailed record of a trial, that of an archdeacon of Northumberland for the killing of a layman.
This edition completes the publication of the surviving medieval episcopal registers from the diocese of Durham.
Catholic Print Networks in Restoration London, 1660-1688
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Uncovers the hidden networks behind Catholic publishing in Restoration London, where politics, religion, and print intersected in unexpected ways under Charles II, James VII/II, and Queen Catherine of Braganza.
In the politically volatile decades following the Restoration, the Catholic book trade in London remained a vibrant and adaptive force. This study reconstructs the networks-commercial, familial, and religious-that sustained the production and circulation of Catholic texts between 1660 and 1688. These networks operated within and across confessional boundaries, drawing in Protestants and Catholics alike, and were shaped by shifting legal frameworks, urban patronage, and the ambiguities of what constituted a 'popish' text.
Focusing on the lived experience of printers, booksellers, and readers, the book challenges the notion of Catholic isolation in Protestant England. It reveals how Catholic print culture was embedded in the broader English print economy and public sphere, often sharing tools, spaces, and strategies with dissenting and loyalist traditions. From Somerset House to the streets of London, Catholic actors navigated censorship and suspicion with ingenuity, contributing to a paradoxical print culture that was both illicit and integrated.
Engaging with the fields of Catholic history, book history, and Restoration studies, this monograph offers a new framework for understanding religious identity, toleration, and the mechanics of clandestine publishing. It brings to light the agency of overlooked figures and repositions Catholic print as a central, rather than marginal, feature of early modern English society.
Early Medieval Sculpture in Stone
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Multidisciplinary scholarship showcasing innovative methods for working with sculptural material - with essays ranging from Merovingian funerary art to Old English and Scandinavian runic inscriptions.
The stone sculptures surviving across Europe from the early medieval period are an exceptional resource for understanding the communities that created them. Found at waysides, in architectural settings, and graveyards - standing crosses, inscribed stones, runestones and grave-markers are just some of the highly varied forms that attest to the art, technologies and beliefs of both Christian and non-Christian societies. The new approaches to sculpture studies found in this volume range from rethinking late antique influences to exploring how sculpture was used and encountered in a variety of political and cultural contexts; contributors also draw out the dialogues inherent in form and decoration within and across temporal and national boundaries. These fresh perspectives on iconographies, narrative art, sculpture and nature and the power of sculpture in multi-media environments, alongside studies of sourcing, production and portability, and the afterlives of carved stones, reflect the vibrancy of current research and the way in which it now integrates digital, scientific and spatial methods.
The introduction and chapters 26 and 27 are available as Open Access under the Creative Commons licence CC BY-NC-ND. This work was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council [AH/R003556/1] and the British Academy [AQ2324\240012].
Chapter 17 is Open Access under the Creative Commons License CC BY-NC-ND with funding from the Swedish National Heritage Board.
Animal Symbolism in Hispanic Literature
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Whether unicorns, phoenix, and chimera, or axolotl, jaguars, and giant snakes, animals have often had the human experience grafted onto them, in a conscious or unconscious reflection of a society's beliefs, ambitions, and inequalities.
This volume seeks to explore different representations of real and imaginary animals across Hispanic literary production from the early modern era to the present day in order to gain a better understanding of how they serve as projections of human identities, knowledge, values, and vices. How do beasts enable the colonizing gaze and its reaches? How might beasts offer a means of decolonizing the Hispanophone world? And how do beasts articulate social unrest and a desire to resist inequality, poverty, and other ills of the modern world that collectively reinforce the status quo?
Working to better understand how Spanish and Latin American authors, illustrators, and graphic artists have understood animals and beasts, and how they interacted with them, contributors from the United States, Canada, Mexico, and Spain shed light on the use of animals as symbols and emblems, as well as how they have been employed to construct others as monstrous and less human.
Spenser and the Filidh in Early Modern Ireland
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Uncovers a vibrant literary culture often overlooked by colonial historiography and Anglocentric critical traditions. Reimagines Spenser's Munster through multilingual networks, bardic poetry, and digital methodologies.
Long dominated by Anglocentric narratives, early modern literary studies have often cast Ireland as a backdrop to English self-fashioning. This volume reorients that perspective by foregrounding the multilingual, polyvocal literary culture of Munster in the late sixteenth century, situating Edmund Spenser not as an isolated colonial voice but as one writer among many-Gaelic, Old English, and New English-engaged in a contested cultural landscape. Drawing on archival, digital, and geospatial methodologies, the essays presented here explore bardic poetry, deep mapping, and the politics of language in texts by and about Spenser and his contemporaries. Case studies of bardic poetry, manuscript culture, and poetic networks reveal a vibrant and dynamic Gaelic literary tradition that responded to colonial violence.
By integrating perspectives from Irish-language literature, English studies, and digital humanities, this collection offers a vital corrective to monolingual historiographies and opens new pathways for understanding the cultural entanglements of Spenser's Munster. It reconceptualises the idea of Spenser in Ireland by highlighting the region's cultural complexity and multilingualism, demonstrating how attention to this richness deepens our understanding of one of the most fraught and fateful periods in the shared history of Ireland and England.
Miscellany XVII
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The seventeenth volume in the Scottish History Society's Miscellany series, showcasing editions of unpublished short texts.
Volume XVII of the Scottish History Society's Miscellany includes editions of nine unpublished short texts dating from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries. These include a rich range of legal, economic, and intellectual documents ranging from an "Essay on Resistance to Magistrates" (c.1637-38), to a poem on the appointment of a judge at Melrose in 1682, to new material on the (in)famous physician and philosopher Archibald Pitcairne. This volume continues the Society's programme of making previously unpublished and unedited primary sources for Scotland's history available in scholarly and accessible forms.
Robert of Torigni's Chronography and the Universal Chronicle Tradition
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Offers a reassessment of universal chronicle-writing and its ideological implications in the twelfth century.
The Chronography of Robert of Torigni is a key source for the political landscapes of twelfth-century Normandy, England, and wider Western Europe. Robert was at the heart of the Norman political network that revolved around Empress Matilda and her son Henry II, and so a crucial witness to the intense political transformations occurring in the Anglo-Norman world.
This book places his chronicle within its wider textual community, casting new light on the social practices, intellectual rationale, and ambitions of the chroniclers who followed the historiographical traditions of Eusebius of Caesarea, Jerome and Sigebert of Gembloux. Along with Torigni's Chronography, the book examines how independent chroniclers and continuators at Savigny, Mortemer, Ourscamp as well as John of Salisbury adapted the chronicles of Eusebius-Jerome and Sigebert, openly engaging with - or reacting against - their understanding of time, empire and power. It demonstrates how textual traditions and ideological discourses can move across geopolitical boundaries, illuminating the specific circumstances that made the Eusebius-Jerome and Sigebert tradition of chronicle-writing successful in this period.
The Art of Musical Ciphers, Riddles and Sundry Curiosities
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Offers the first comprehensive account of a centuries-old tradition of encrypting covert messages into music, from the Middle Ages to the present day.
Question: What do J. S. Bach, beef cabbage, coffee, the SATOR Square, and Marlene Dietrich have in common?
Answer: Composers have enciphered these and many other words into music.
Since time immemorial riddles have intrigued us, partly for their mirthful manner of connecting incongruous ideas, partly for their arresting way of opening fresh perspectives on our shared human condition. When we think of riddles, we normally recall verbal conundrums from cultures around the globe. But riddles can penetrate non-verbal aspects of our existence as well. Masking messages in music so that they lurk beneath the sonorous surface is an august Western tradition spanning the Middle Ages to the present. Known as musical cryptography, these puzzling pursuits form the subject of this book, construed broadly enough to capture not just musical ciphers and codes but also a curiosity shop of related techniques, which arguably can advance the greater virtue. They entertain, edify, and enthral, but also bewitch and bewilder, and, when unsolved, perplex and perturb.
Hadi waseluhlangeni
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All the clearly identifiable writings of Jonas Ntsiko, the 'national harp' of South Africa, in English and in isiXhosa
In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Xhosa literature was dominated by two writers: William Wellington Gqoba and Jonas Ntsiko. Gqoba's status and reputation are today assured, and he is well known and recognised by authorities who have written on the early history of Xhosa literature. In sharp contrast, Ntsiko's contribution to Xhosa literature is almost entirely overlooked. Very little is known about him and his substantial contribution to early Xhosa literature; not one of the items included here has subsequently been republished. Ntsiko is a ghostly presence, defined by his absence, an ancestral shade invoked by none.
Ntsiko (1850-1918) wrote under the pseudonym 'Hadi waseluhlangeni', the National Harp. This volume contains two substantial essays, by Marguerite Poland and Jeff Opland, that offer an account, for the first time, of Ntsiko's life and times, his early schooling in Grahamstown, his three years of study in England, his ordination as a deacon in the Anglican Church and his ten-year career in church service, ending abruptly in the termination of his licence. Thereafter, he grew progressively blind and ended his working life serving the magistrate in the rural village of Tsolo.
This book assembles for the first time all the clearly identifiable writings of Ntsiko in English and in Xhosa: journals, narrative and lyrical poetry, obituaries and polemical articles on the bible translation, politics and church affairs. It seeks to claim recognition for him as a major voice in the history of Xhosa literature, as an outspoken social critic and as a leading intellectual in the early formulation of African nationalism.
University of KwaZulu-Natal Press: Southern African Development Community
Xhosa literature
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Essays examining isiXhosa oral literature, novels and journalism and the interconnections between them in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
Xhosa Literature: Spoken and Printed Words consists of fourteen essays addressing Xhosa literature in three media - the spoken word, newspapers and books. Literary critics tend to focus on Xhosa literature published in books; some attention has been paid to Xhosa oral poetry and tales, but by and large the contribution of newspapers to the development of Xhosa literature has been overlooked. This book explores aspects of Xhosa literature in all three media, and their interconnections.
Six of the essays treat historical narratives (amabali) and praise poetry (izibongo), setting out the social and ritual function of poetry and the poet (imbongi), mapping changes in the izibongo of three poets as South Africa moved towards democracy in the 1990s, and analysing recordings of two poems recited by S.E.K. Mqhayi. Three essays are devoted to the first Xhosa novel, Mqhayi's U-Samson (1907), to the publication of the greatest novel in Xhosa, A.C. Jordan's Ingqumbo yeminyanya (1940), and to the first published poem in praise of Nelson Mandela, D.L.P. Yali-Manisi's 'UNkosi Rolihlahla Nelson Mandela' (1954). There follow accounts of Xhosa literature in the nineteenth century and the appropriation of the press by Xhosa editors towards the end of that century, of Nontsizi Mgqwetho's fiery poetry published in Umteteli wa Bantu and of poems by Mgqwetho and Mqhayi published in Abantu-Batho, two Johannesburg newspapers. The volume concludes with an exposition of an imaginative response to David Yali-Manisi and his poetry.
University of KwaZulu-Natal Press: Southern African Development Community
Umoya wembongi
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All 65 of John Solilo's poems from Izala, now out of print, with an additional 28 first published in newspapers, in isiXhosa and English translation, with a comprehensive introduction
John Solilo (1864-1940) was a prolific contributor to Xhosa-language newspapers. He submitted letters and articles on a variety of issues, local news reports from Cradock and Uitenhage, and a considerable body of poetry. His major literary contribution was his collection of poems entitled Izala (A Rubbish Dump), published in 1925, the earliest volume of poetry by a single author in the history of Xhosa literature.
Solilo's literary reputation today, however, is at variance with his prominence as a major author in the first four decades of the twentieth century: he is hardly mentioned, if at all, by literary historians, Izala has long been out of print, and copies can no longer be located. In restoring to the public domain the 65 poems that made up Izala and adding an additional 28 that were published in newspapers both before and after the appearance of Izala, the editors hope to revive John Solilo's reputation as a poet, and to establish his status as a pre-eminent Xhosa author.
In his poetry, Solilo urged passivity and opposed political revolt, but he could also be scathing in his denunciation of black indignities suffered under white control, inspired as he was by umoya wembongi, the spirit of the imbongi, the praise poet whose stirring declamations roused his audiences to action or contemplation.
University of KwaZulu-Natal Press: Southern African Development Community
Iimbali zamandulo
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Recollections of ordinary people, in isiXhosa and English translation, of daily life and historical events in the nineteenth century
Iimbali zamandulo - 'Stories of the Past' - is a selection of historical testimonies produced by Xhosa-speaking residents of the Eastern Cape between 1838 and 1910. These narratives offer fresh insights into the history of the Xhosa-speaking peoples, providing their own perspectives on their own past.
The volume contains recollections reaching back to seventeenth-century dynastic disputes, to a period preceding the southward migrations in the early nineteenth century into territories settled by Xhosa-speaking peoples. It passes on through those migrations, the clashes and resettlement of peoples and of individuals, the contest for land throughout the century, and on to the struggle for social control and the assertion of cultural identity by the century's end.
To a remarkable extent, we are lent intimate access here to the lives of ordinary people, seeking better pastures for themselves, their families and their livestock; hunting, fighting and, above all, confronting personal conflict in their choices between mission Christianity and ancestral beliefs; between support for their chiefs or the colonial authorities; between active or passive resistance to encroachment on their territory; and between colonial distortions purveyed in the schools and their receding grasp of their own sustaining histories.
University of KwaZulu-Natal Press: Southern African Development Community
Xhosa Poets and Poetry
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Essays examining the poetry and leading poets of the Xhosa-speaking peoples in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
The Xhosa-speaking peoples who settled along the south-eastern seaboard of South Africa promoted traditions of praise poetry (izibongo), poetry produced orally by men and women, adults and children, about people, clans, ancestors and animals. Throughout the nineteenth century, authors who used the Xhosa language gradually developed the craft of composing poetry for publication in newspapers, and expanded this process in the twentieth century, when books containing secular literature appeared, but the practice of oral poetry persists, flourishing now as it did before the incursion of colonial settlers. The dominant poet in the community is the imbongi, who continues to produce poetry praising or criticising figures of authority on occasions of local and national significance.
Xhosa Poets and Poetry (Iimbongi nezibongo) contains fourteen essays originally published between 1974 and 1996. Based on fieldwork conducted between 1969 and 1985, and on extensive archival research, the first six essays examine the social function of poetry in the community, the element of improvisation in the production of poetry, especially in the poetry of the imbongi, and the structural principles of his poetry. Individual poets are then presented, among them D.L.P. Yali-Manisi, Melikaya Mbutuma, Peter Mtuze and Nontsizi Mgqwetho, the first woman to produce a substantial body of poetry. The concluding four essays are thematic, treating issues introduced by the medium of print: the role of newspapers in fostering literature; censorship and control of the press; the damaging effects of changes in Xhosa spelling and the demand for books for school prescription; and, finally, the suspicion in which Xhosa poets held books and writing.
This second edition updates the bibliographical references and amplifies some of the arguments. Xhosa Poets and Poetry offers a keen engagement with its subject, enlivened by extracts from conversations with poets and copious examples of their poetry in Xhosa and in English translation. It offers a cultural context for the volumes in this series.
University of KwaZulu-Natal Press: Southern African Development Community
Izibongo zoogxa
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33 poems by Samuel Edward Krune Mqhayi, in isiXhosa and English translation, with a comprehensive introduction
Samuel Edward Krune Mqhayi is renowned and justly celebrated as the most accomplished writer in the Xhosa language, the author of collections of poetry, novels, biographies, monographs, translations and an autobiography in book form. Mqhayi's Izibongo Zoogxa is a collection of 33 poems about persons and personages who lived during his lifetime (1875-1945). Originally published in ephemeral newspapers, none of the poems has subsequently been republished; all appear here in more permanent form for the first time.
Mqhayi's poetry was directed at readers of the Xhosa language (isiXhosa) and sought to encourage them, instil in them pride and hope, and sway them towards a more humane disposition. One of the striking features of the poems in this collection is the range of subjects, not just Xhosa but also Zulu, Sotho and Tswana; not just black leaders but white as well; male and female; South African as well as British and German; close friends as well as foreign politicians; chiefs and commoners.
Samuel Mqhayi was a much-admired, much-celebrated poet, a true man of the people, who lived his life, as he signed himself, enkonzweni yesizwe (in the service of the nation). The poems assembled here offer insights not only into their subjects but also into the life and thought of Mqhayi himself, Imbongi yesizwe jikelele (Poet of the entire nation), a cultural icon, humane patriot and passionate inspiration to his people.
University of KwaZulu-Natal Press: Southern African Development Community
Iziganeko zesizwe
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Samuel Edward Krune Mqhayi's occasional poems, in isiXhosa and English translation, with a comprehensive introduction
Samuel Edward Krune Mqhayi (1875-1945) was the most prominent South African imbongi of his day, a Xhosa oral poet who declaimed his impromptu poetry on occasions of significance to his people. The author of numerous works of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, biography, autobiography and translation, Mqhayi's contributions to Xhosa-language newspapers remains unparalleled in scope and volume.
This book reclaims and assembles a chronological sequence of Mqhayi's occasional poems, for the most part now unknown - 60 poems celebrating significant events in the calendar, on occasions of national or international importance. They constitute Iziganeko zesizwe, a chronicle of the nation, between 1900 and 1943: poetic responses to events from the perspective of the greatest figure in Xhosa literature. Wars feature prominently in these occasional poems - the Boer War, the First World War, the invasion of Abyssinia, the Second World War - as do political deputations to England, visits from British princes and the death of British kings, the appearance of Halley's Comet and meetings with Ministers of State. Running through the collection is Mqhayi's proud and fierce determination to maintain an identity rooted in custom and history in the face of territorial dispossession, the loss of title deeds and the vote, and the steady erosion of human rights.
Throughout these years, Mqhayi remained constant in offering praise and encouragement to his people, in celebrating their achievements, and in expressing Christian consolation and an unflinching faith in the future liberation of South Africa's black population from foreign control.
University of KwaZulu-Natal Press: Southern African Development Community
Iimbali zamanyange
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Eight of David Livingstone Phakamile Yali-Manisi's narrative poems, in isiXhosa and English translation, with a comprehensive introduction
David Livingstone Phakamile Yali-Manisi (1926-99) was a Thembu imbongi, the most powerful exponent of the art of praise poetry in the Xhosa language, in the second half of the twentieth century. His literary career, however, was blighted by circumstances beyond his control, and he died in total obscurity. Manisi was obliged to seek his audiences throughout the lifetime of South Africa's reviled policy of apartheid, and the poet's reputation, initially full of promise, waned as a consequence. He was a lifelong supporter of Nelson Mandela and the author of the earliest poem in praise of Mandela (1954), but he was never able to fulfil his ambition of performing a poem in honour of Mandela in a liberated South Africa.
Manisi exhibited a marked penchant for extending the panegyric mode of the imbongi into explicit narrative; he also displayed an astonishing capacity to compose poetry in the act of performance. This volume presents eight of his narrative poems in isiXhosa and in English translation. Four of them are drawn from his earliest published books, together with the complete text of his epic poem on the War of Mlanjeni, published in 1983; also included are three remarkable spontaneous poems produced with little forethought. The poems address events in the first eighty years of the nineteenth century, and feature blunt assessments of figures such as Ntsikana, Ngqika, Nonesi, Sandile, Sir Harry Smith, Nongqawuse and Sir George Grey. David Yali-Manisi ardently anticipated the restoration of black control under those imprisoned on Robben Island, fighters for liberty quite as heroic as the crane-feathered warriors of the nineteenth century. His poetry, both written and performed, plumbed the past to inspire resistance to present injustices.
University of KwaZulu-Natal Press: Southern African Development Community
North, South, East and West in Twelfth-Century Thought
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Considers how twelfth-century authors used the four cardinal points as a conceptual system to make sense of and construct their world.
From the Great White North to the West End or the Global South, we frequently carve up our world according to the cardinal points. These divisions are rarely mere geographical conveniences; they bring with them a host of ideas about regions and their inhabitants.
This book examines how this phenomenon operated in the Middle Ages, drawing on sources from the Ordinary Gloss on the Bible to the geographies of Hugh of Saint Victor and Honorius Augustodunensis. It begins by tracing the consolidation of the cardinal points as a foundational spatial vocabulary in the Middle Ages and looks athow these terms accumulated new meaning and significance in biblical exegesis, geography and history writing over the twelfth century. It pays particular attention to the ways in which authors actively engaged with and manipulated this tradition, showing how authors like Sigebert of Gembloux, Romuald of Salerno and Orderic Vitalis made use of these ideas to underscore the broader narrative agendas of their universal histories. Subsequent chapters focus on the role of space in narratives of identity formation, using as case studies histories of the First Crusade, the duchy of Normandy and the abbey of Cluny.
Musical Amateurs as Artistic Citizens in Schubert’s Vienna
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Details the wide, integral and influential role played by 'amateur' participants in early nineteenth-century Vienna's musical life.
During Franz Schubert's lifetime in early nineteenth-century Vienna, amateurs and dilettantes were a vital part of the music scene, so much so that Eduard Hanslick considered it the high point of musical dilettantism in Vienna. Schubert himself participated extensively in this rich world of domestic music-making. Around 1800 terms such as "amateur" and "dilettante" had broader and more positive connotations than today, and "amateurs" could indeed often portray a high skill level. The book considers the amateurs' and dilettantes' identities and motivations for making music, and their various roles in the musical life of early nineteenth-century Vienna. It dives deeply into contexts, performance practices and spaces, as well as instruments that have so far been little explored. Musical Amateurs in Schubert's Vienna uncovers new key agents in early nineteenth-century Viennese musical life who have so far remained invisible.
Beowulf and Grettis saga
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Investigates the relationship between two texts separated by hundreds of years and nearly two thousand miles.
In the saga, Grettir fights a giant who wields a hepti-sax; in the poem, Beowulf uses a hæft-mēce on Grendel's mother. These two unique words for "hafted blade" appear to be related. Can the same be said for the works that surround them? This book says yes, arguing not that the weapons have a common origin, nor that their likeness is a coincidence, but that Grettis saga has borrowed from Beowulf.
The case for a textual loan begins in the context of England's connection with Denmark in the reign of Cnut the Great (1016-35). This book argues that Cnut took an interest in Scyld and the Scyldings of Beowulf and that his skalds transformed these names into "Skjǫldr" and the "Skjǫldungar". The Beowulf manuscript is placed in Lichfield in 1017, with the suggestion that it was commissioned by Eadric Streona as a gift for Earl Thorkell of Skåne. It is proposed that in 1159 a copy of Beowulf was brought from Lincoln to Iceland to serve the interests of a family that claimed descent from Skjǫldr, that in the 1180s the poem influenced Skjǫldunga saga, and that in the 1190s Beowulf went north to Þingeyrar abbey, where Oddr the Monk, author of Grettis saga, used it to enhance Grettir's fights with Glámr and the trolls of Bárðardalr. This is a daring book that sheds new light on the circulation of Beowulf, on questions of dating and patronage, and on the authorship of Grettis saga.
British Choral Singing
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Charts choral traditions in Britain, evolution, sociological composition, engagement with and place within cathedrals and secular spaces.
Choirs are living organisms and ever changing. This book tells the story of British choral singing (not choral music) and deals with both sacred and secular choirs and institutions from the medieval era through to the Covid pandemic and its aftermath. A series of different choral traditions has emerged over the centuries. The oldest is that of the all-male cathedral choir, while the secular choral society evolved from the eighteenth century onwards. Although there are many histories of individual cathedrals and choral societies, this is the first general history of British choral traditions. While English matters predominate, those of Scotland, Wales and Ireland are also considered. Even though British choral traditions have penetrated many parts of the world, there has also been much cross-fertilization of late with the rich choral cultures of other nations in Europe and beyond. Choral singing inevitably involved matters of social class, and a much more nuanced story is told here than the current view of choirs as being a largely middle-class phenomenon might suggest.
Scholarly in method while highly readable, the book offers invaluable background to choral practitioners. When choral activity is reviving healthily after the Covid 19 pandemic, such a volume appears timely, reminding the reader of the essentially communal and social nature of the choral experience.
Motherhood and its Spaces in Medieval Romance
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Discusses the spaces occupied and used by mothers in French and English medieval romance of the twelfth to fourteenth centuries.
Mothers have tended to be overlooked in romance scholarship, in favour of fantastical adventures, courtly love stories, and connections with historical events. Yet they are often central to the action in these narratives, whether in a birthing chamber, a royal court, a forest or the Otherworld. This book focuses on the spaces occupied and utilised by mothers in French and English medieval romance of the twelfth to fourteenth centuries. Analysing mothers' use of social space shows how these texts intervene in contemporary social, cultural, legal, and medical debates on motherhood and its place in elite society and families. In examining the presence and contributions of maternal figures in such narratives as the Roman de Melusine, Emaré, Chrétien de Troyes' Perceval and Chaucer's Man of Law's Tale, it demonstrates how romance distorts and subverts gendered roles in order to reveal the complexities of medieval selfhood and social interaction. Recognising the importance of these figures not only sheds a new light on how we may read these romances but on the role of elite mothers in society more generally, presenting a model in which motherhood is central to the construction of not just lineage, but of alliances, communities, cities and nations.
Gabriel Fauré: Influences and Influence
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Presents Fauré not as a solitary figure, but part of a vibrant continuum of nineteenth- and twentieth-century composers and the first member of a French musical 'trinity', with Debussy and Ravel.
A composition professor at the Paris Conservatoire since 1896, and its director from 1906 to 1920, Gabriel Fauré (1845-1924) was said to have created no school as Cesar Franck had before him, encouraging originality among his students rather than emulation. This collection portrays Fauré, influenced by Wolfgang Mozart, Fryderyk Chopin, and Felix Mendelssohn, plus the poetry of Charles Baudelaire and Paul Verlaine, as an early Modernist who provided a reference point for Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel, and Francis Poulenc. Casting a wide net, it explores Fauré's influence on his younger contemporaries Lili Boulanger and Frederick Delius, as well as on the later twentieth-century American composers Aaron Copland, Walter Arlen, Robert Helps, and Ned Rorem. Fauré no longer appears as a solitary figure, but part of a vibrant continuum of nineteenth- and twentieth-century composers, and the first member of a French musical 'trinity' that included Debussy and Ravel.
Science and the Romantic Vision in Early Nineteenth-Century Opera
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An interdisciplinary study of how early nineteenth-century science and opera articulated a transnational romantic vision of harmony between self and nature, and how this ideal gave way to mid-century realism and social conflict.
The end of the Napoleonic era ushered in a transnational outlook for Europe, where the traditional boundaries that separated people, ideas and things were blurred in favour of a unified and cosmopolitan vision for society. The result of this shift created a 'romantic vision', a new way to perceive the imagined potential of the self in correspondence with the infinite reality of the natural world. Early nineteenth-century scientists such as Alexander von Humboldt (earth sciences), Franz Anton Mesmer (mesmerism), Johann Wilhelm Ritter (galvanism) and Frédéric Dubois d'Amiens (hysteria) are explored in this context to see how the romantic vision was reflected in their work and received by society. Seeing opera as a confluence of all the arts and encompassing a similar romantic vision, this book examines three paradigmatic operas that contend with the forces of nature: Weber's Der Freischütz (1821), Meyerbeer's Robert le diable (1831) and Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor (1835). In these three highly successful works from separate operatic traditions, the unseen, inner world of nature reveals a wholeness of the self with the divine, showcasing a healthy optimism for society. The book concludes by discussing Gounod's Faust (1859), a work that highlights the struggle of an early-16th-century scientist and places it against the context of the social revolutions of 1848 and the seminal publication of Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species in 1859. In this post-1850 era, the potential of the unseen reality of nature is cast aside and replaced with the certainty of the everyday-the violence of man against man, the struggle for power and the destruction of nature itself.
Isizwe esinembali
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Edition and translation of all of William Wellington Gqoba's clearly identifiable writings in isiXhosa and English, with a comprehensive introduction
William Wellington Gqoba (1840-88) was prominent among the African intellectuals emerging in the Eastern Cape region of South Africa towards the end of the nineteenth century.
By trade he was a wagonmaker, licensed preacher of the Free Church of Scotland, teacher, historian, poet, folklorist and editor. For much of his brief life he served on mission stations as a catechist, and ended his career as editor of the Lovedale newspaper Isigidimi sama-Xosa, to which he contrived to contribute subversive poetry outspokenly critical of Western education, the European administration of black people and the discrimination suffered by colonised blacks. Gqoba fashioned the figure of the Xhosa man of letters. Unrivalled in his time in the generic range of his writing, he was the author of letters, anecdotes, expositions of proverbs, histories and poetry, including two poems in the form of debates that stood for over fifty years as the longest poems in the Xhosa language.
This book assembles and translates into English all of William Wellington Gqoba's clearly identifiable writings. They offer an insider's perspective on an African nation in transition, adapting uncomfortably to Western mores and morality, seeking to affirm its identity by drawing on its past, standing on the brink of mobilisation to resist white control and to construct its social, political and religious independence of European colonialism.
University of KwaZulu-Natal Press: Southern African Development Community
Popularising the Middle Ages in Modern Fantasy
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Examines the development, nature, and significance of gritty (neo)medievalism in popular culture, from Assassins Creed: Valhalla and Berserk to Robert Eggers' The Northman.
Twenty-first-century popular culture has a fascination for the medieval. Its imagery, tropes and settings have become an integral part of the epic fantasy genre across different media, demonstrated by and following the success of such globally acclaimed television shows as Game of Thrones and Vikings. This volume studies this phenomenon, aiming to establish a broader understanding of why the Middle Ages have become so popular in an era of transmedia productions; it argues that concepts of accuracy and "authenticity" are key to this popularity, alongside engagement with contemporary debates about identity, race and gender, and agile responses to fan-community and media critiques. The essays address a variety of topics, from worldbuilding and narrative structures to female agency and the reception of Vikings, across a wide range of media, including film, television, literature, video games and manga. It also explores how contemporary fantasy engages with both academic knowledge and developments in imagination more widely, responding to ever-changing ideas about how an "authentic" Middle Ages may be created.
Janáček's Sinfonietta
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A definitive study of Janáček's Sinfonietta, tracing its creation, reception, and rise to international prominence.
This book provides a musical 'biography' of Leoš Janáček's (1854-1928) most famous orchestral piece - his Sinfonietta - by analysing its sources, composition, reception history, recordings and musical component parts. The most up-to-date research on the genesis and performance history of the work, it considers in detail Janáček's orchestral writing, the inspiration and genesis of the Sinfonietta, a documentation of all the surviving sources for the work, the work's performance history during Janáček's lifetime and following his death until the end of the Second World War, including press reviews and relevant correspondence.
The book also examines the growth in the worldwide popularity of the Sinfonietta. This evolved from cautious and hostile critical responses to the premiere recording in 1946 to its gradual acceptance as one of the key works of the 1920s, largely thanks to the advocacy of conductors whose work is considered in detail, alongside other significant recordings. Questions of performance, rehearsal, interpretation and the musical text are considered in a wide-ranging interview with the conductor Jakub Hrůša, and a concluding chapter provides a detailed commentary on the music itself. The book includes a valuable appendix describing the annotated scores used by conductors such as Otto Klemperer, František Neumann and Henry Wood, as well as a comprehensive discography.
Thirteenth Century England XIX
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Essays addressing Anglo-German connections and comparisons across the period from 1190 to 1300, with particular attention to the economic, social and personal aspects of an entangled transregnal connection.
A wide range of topics are covered in this significant collection. It begins with an examination of macro-economic developments, together with comparative studies of serfdom, and the record-keeping of English and German towns. Personal contacts are the subject of articles on the hostages delivered by Richard the Lionheart following his release from captivity by the Emperor Henry VI, the diplomatic initiatives of 1227, the subsequent marriage of Henry III's sister Isabella with the Emperor Frederick II, Richard of Cornwall's German itinerary, and relations between England and Cologne. Another article investigates what happened if foreigners travelling in England came into conflict with the law. Turning from people to manuscripts, three articles analyse in turn the English reception of Oliver of Cologne's Historia Damiatina, the representation of English kings in Gervase of Tilbury's Otia imperialia, and Matthew Paris's attempts to depict royal emotion.
Inventing Percy Grainger
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Investigates the dialogue and tensions between Percy Grainger's public biography and his self-conscious autobiographical construction via his own writings and autobiographical museum.
The Australian-American composer Percy Grainger (1882-1961) described himself as an 'all round man': composer, pianist, artist, inventor, linguist, ethnographer, essayist, and more. He also went to great lengths to shape his own biographical narrative, developing an eccentric public persona in the press, writing extensive autobiographical texts and establishing a vast autobiographical museum. But what happens when this self-fashioned narrative meets writers, scholars, and creatives in the decades since his death? This book traces the construction and negotiation of Grainger's biography on page, stage and screen through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, exploring the tensions and dialogue between these and Grainger's autobiographical self.
Through a series of case studies, with a focus on works created in Australia, the book explores how Grainger's public persona and received biographical narrative were developed then transformed by other writers, playwrights, filmmakers, and performance artists to suit the changing needs of their own time and place. Examining a variety of texts, from celebrity profiles, obituaries, and traditional academic studies, to film, theatre, opera and poetry, the book offers a biography of an afterlife: a study of how Grainger set up a series of mechanisms to control how his life would be remembered, then tests these against a succession of works that engage directly with those sources.
Hanns Eisler and His Circle in Republican Spain
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Studies the development and impact of Hanns Eisler's music and Marxist activism in the tensions of 1930s Spain, revealing the interplay of varied influences, ideology and antifascist propaganda.
Hanns Eisler in Republican Spain is the first comprehensive study to explore the political, artistic, and intellectual engagements of Hanns Eisler and his circle of Marxist musicians - including the singer Ernst Busch and the musicologist Otto Mayer-Serra - in relation to Spain between 1931 and 1939. The book reconstructs Eisler's collaborations with a broad range of Spanish antifascist organisations, examines the reception of his compositional and theoretical work in Republican Spain, and assesses the deep impact of the Spanish civil war on his vocal and symphonic music. It highlights the influence of key local, national, and international communist structures - notably the Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia (PSUC), the Communist Party of Spain (PCE), and the Comintern (Third International) - on the musical and political projects of Eisler and his circle. Grounded in detailed analysis of an extensive corpus of textual, musical, and press materials - primarily preserved in archives in Spain, Germany, Russia, France, and the United States - this study offers new critical frameworks for understanding the role of Western modernist music in contexts of ideological conflict and war. It provides a fresh perspective on the complex entanglements between antifascist propaganda and musical modernism in the interwar period. Hanns Eisler in Republican Spain makes a vital contribution to scholarship at the intersection of music, exile, propaganda, communism, and antifascism, and more broadly, to the study of how political ideologies shaped music, aesthetics, and musical thought across national boundaries during a pivotal era in twentieth-century European history.
On publication this book is available as an Open Access ebook under the Creative Commons license CC BY-NC.
Slave Owner and Paternalist
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An account of the life and ideas of Sir William Young, a leading opponent of the abolition of slavery, who used the rhetoric of paternalism to argue that slavery could be ameliorated to become a benign system.
This book charts the life and ideas of Sir William Young, owner of enslaved people on Antigua, St Vincent and Tobago and a leading opponent of the abolition of slavery. It outlines how he used the rhetoric of paternalism to argue that slavery could be ameliorated to become a benign system, akin to the paternalism which he worked towards in rural England, and contrasts his aims width his failure to implement them. It considers his place in the British elite - country gentleman, active back-bench MP and a man of learning - and examines his activity in attempting to improve conditions for the rural English poor. It explores his eventual financial failure, which included the loss of both his West Indian and his English estates, and his last years as Governor of Tobago. William Young was a considerable figure in both the world of the Caribbean, source of his wealth, and the world of London and the English countryside, where he spent that wealth. Young's doctrines of paternalism, unreal and self-serving as they may have been, were widely accepted by the British upper classes.
Early Medieval Medicine in Context
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Fresh perspectives on how medical texts, broadly construed, were recorded, perceived and utilised.
The past few decades have witnessed significant shifts in the scholarly investigation of early medieval medicine and its texts, moving far beyond outdated stereotypes of stagnation and superstition, not least via close study of the manuscript evidence, which has enabled a better appreciation of the processes involved in the recording and transfer of medical knowledge and healing practices. This book builds on these recent developments. With a particular focus on transmission, translation and transformation, the essays collected here offer detailed explorations of sources, contexts, producers and uses, examining material ranging from Bald's Leechbook and continental Latin recipe collections to Old Norse sagas and a Byzantine Greek treatise on venomous animals (Book V of Paul of Aegina's Pragmateia). Several contributors explore Old English's multifarious connections with the Latin tradition, discussing charms, obstetric and gynaecological texts, as well as the Peri didaxeon. The volume concludes with an afterword by Peregrine Horden on future directions of study, inviting further research into this vibrant and growing field.
Chapter 3 is available as Open Access under the Creative Commons licence CC BY-NC-ND. The article received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement no. 101018645.
Old English Biblical Prose
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Provides the first in-depth study of the earliest attempts to make the sacred words of the Bible available to English readers, clerical and lay, in prose writing.
"This is a hugely valuable study - deeply informative about an important tradition of biblical translation from the early medieval period, bringing together material that has previously been considered in isolation, and drawing out a big-picture account of the ebb and flow of biblical translations into the vernacular. Will be a useful point of reference for any interested reader and includes surprises and delights for even the most specialist readers." Professor Jonathan Wilcox, University of Iowa
The story of the English Bible begins not with the King James Version or Wycliffe but in the Old English period. Between the ninth and eleventh centuries, a remarkably diverse corpus of biblical translations, paraphrases, adaptations and summaries were produced in Old English. Yet while Old English biblical verse has been extensively studied, the much larger corpus of vernacular biblical prose remains neglected by historians of the Bible and medievalists.
This book provides the first in-depth study of the genre. Dispelling the notion that access to the Bible was restricted to the Latinate clergy in the early medieval period, it demonstrates how Old English biblical prose made key elements of Scripture available and meaningful to laypeople. Through case studies of the Prose Psalms, Mosaic Prologue to the Domboc, Wessex Gospels, Heptateuch and Treatise on the Old and New Testaments, as well as many other works, it highlights the crucial contributions of well-known figures such as King Alfred and Ælfric of Eynsham while also showcasing the work of anonymous authors who translated, adapted and interpreted the Bible, sometimes in creative and surprising ways. Cumulatively, these case studies show how vernacular biblical prose played a central role in the emergence of English national identity before the Norman Conquest.
This book is available as Open Access under the Creative Commons licence CC BY-NC-ND.
The Philosopher’s Ring—Wagner as Thinker and Dramatist
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Presents Wagner as a serious philosopher and offers a fresh perspective on the Ring and its unique fusion of myth, human drama, and philosophical insight.
Few figures of the nineteenth century were more influential than Richard Wagner, and few works of art have the scope and historical significance of The Ring of the Nibelung. Wagner himself said that it expressed his entire philosophy of life. Yet little attention has been paid to him as a philosopher, aesthetic theories aside. Instead, the Ring has been viewed in the light of Schopenhauer, Feuerbach, or even Hegel. Wagner's own ideas do not deserve this neglect, and this book addresses that omission. It starts with the more widely read philosophers of his day, such as Fichte; in their context Wagner's often fragmentary thoughts reveal a coherent "materialist idealism" that constitutes a late but significant contribution to Classical German philosophy. His acute social and psychological insights are still relevant, and so is the philosophical history that he saw prefigured in Greek tragedy.
Wagner's philosophy also illuminates the structure of the Ring and offers fresh insights into the characters and conflicts of that endlessly interpretable work. Approachable and engagingly written, balancing narrative, philosophical analysis, and a detailed consideration of the Ring's four music dramas, The Philosopher's Ring shows the cycle to be a work of unparalleled philosophical depth, one reason that it continues to challenge audiences even now, a century and a half after its premiere.
Music in Fifteenth-Century Bohemia
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A long-needed reassessment of the musical culture of fifteenth-century Bohemia, liberating it from nineteenth- and twentieth-century nationalist agendas and reassessing its position in European music history.
What was musical culture like in a country in fifteenth-century Central Europe where theologians tried to restore the values of the early church—including through musical practices‐only to be branded "heretical"?
Bohemian theologians tried to return to Christianity's "roots" by promoting frequent bread-and-wine communion for all (including children) and by encouraging lay participation in worship through translations into the vernacular. Unlike in many other European lands, monophonic chant and sacred songs were primarily used (though some advanced contemporary polyphonic settings circulated as well). These religious and musical developments formed part of the seedbed that would develop more fully during the European Reformation through the work of Martin Luther and others.
Music in Fifteenth-Century Bohemia: Between Reform and Identity Building contains essays on liturgy, song, and the influence of the Hussite movement. The book resists both nationalistically tinged narratives and the marginalization that has long resulted from an emphasis on the disparities between Czech and Western European musical traditions. One chapter demonstrates how a fifteenth-century song was employed in the revival of Czech culture in the nineteenth century.
Taken as a whole, the essays in this important collection illustrate the distinctive and often effective ways in which fifteenth-century Czech culture dealt with the dichotomy between religious reform and cultural identity.
The Lives and Deaths of the Norse Gods
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A comprehensive study of the mortality of Norse gods, with close readings of the Prose Edda, Poetic Edda and Saxo Grammaticus' Gesta Danorum.
Divinity usually implies immortality. The very phrase "gods and mortals" highlights an ontological gap between two distinct categories of existence: immortal deities and transient humans. This divide, however, does not hold true in the Scandinavian mythological tradition, where the gods themselves are mortal. This mortality is central to myths such as those of Baldr and of Ragnarøk, and affords the Norse gods narrative potential, that is unparalleled in other traditions, such as those inherited from antiquity.
The first half of this study explores some salient consequences of this attribute, highlighting the striking anthropomorphism of the gods. The second half takes a more diachronic approach, examining the prehistory of the group of gods who became known as the Æsir and arguing that they developed from non-anthropomorphic divine forces shaped by and mobilized in ideologies of leadership and warfare in pre-Christian Northern Europe. By examining how divine mortality not only drives Norse mythic narratives but also reflects wider patterns of thought and belief, including early medieval theories of rulership and the sacralization of human excellence, this book reconsiders the boundaries between godhood and humanity in pre-Christian Scandinavia and, in doing so, questions what it means to be a god.
The Early Parliaments of Henry VIII, 1510-1523
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An administrative study of Henry VIII's early parliaments (1510 to 1523), which systematically explains and analyses every aspect of parliament in the early sixteenth century.
This book is an administrative study of Henry VIII's early parliaments (1510 to 1523). It systematically explains and analyses every aspect of parliament in the early sixteenth century, from legislative procedure to the composition of the House of Lords and the House of Commons. Some of the matters under discussion include statutory litigation - how parliamentary legislation was actually applied in the king's courts - and the rules of precedence and inheritance of title in the Upper House. The book's main purpose is to explain how parliament worked - what parliament did, how it was done and who was involved in doing it. It forms part of a burgeoning academic movement known as the New Administrative History, which seeks to restore a knowledge of administrative processes to its rightful place of importance in the historiography of early modern England. The book will be essential reading for anyone wishing to understand the early history of parliament.
The Third Crusade (1189-1192)
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Fresh perspectives on one of the largest and most complex crusades ever launched, covering all aspects of the expeditions - from preparation and commencement to results and consequences.
Saladin's victory at the Battle of Hattin in 1187 produced three profound results: a shattered Jerusalem army, a pope falling dead from the news, and the launching of the Third Crusade in response. Under the banners of renowned rulers like Richard the Lionheart, Philip Augustus, and Frederick Barbarossa, men and women from across Latin Christendom took the Cross and joined in the largest western military expedition since Urban II's call to arms in 1095 for the First Crusade.
Long dormant in the renewal of crusade studies in the twenty-first century, the Third Crusade has in recent years begun to attract increased scholarly attention. Adopting a cross-cultural focus that examines both western and eastern societies, this book offers a substantial and timely reappraisal. Chapters shed light on the crusade's causes, context, organization, participants, preparations, commencement, military progress, and short and long-term consequences, and scrutinise well-known sources through new lenses. They also engage with communication theory, the history of emotions, textual criticism and textuality, historiography, archaeology, and topography. Together, they provide both a fresh view of this complex and multifaceted war and a useful survey of its major contours.
Women, Transnational Networks and Patriotism in Northern and Central Europe, 1763-1814
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A gateway to the complex world of eighteenth-century sociability of elite women and of their lasting impact on modern concepts of national identity and community.
In the dynamic intellectual and social landscape of eighteenth-century Northern Europe, the interplay between patriotism, nationalism, and cosmopolitanism was pivotal in shaping the era's cultural and political discourse. This study delves into the intricate networks of elite women who navigated and influenced these concepts through their participation in salons and literary circles. By examining figures such as Anna Amalia of Weimar, Dorothea von Kurland, members of the Bluestockings, Friederike Brun and the grande Dame of eighteenth-century salon world, Mme de Staël, the narrative uncovers how these women fostered transnational dialogues and cultural exchanges that were crucial in redefining public spirit and national identity.
Grounded in extensive archival research and touching on the lives of over twenty-five individuals, the work highlights the nuanced roles these women played as cultural mediators and agents of change across national borders, challenging the traditional male-dominated historiography. The exploration of their contributions offers fresh insights into the interconnectedness of European intellectual life and the critical role of gender in shaping historical discourses. This book not only broadens our understanding of the Enlightenment but also provides a rich, interdisciplinary perspective on the socio-political transformations of the era.
Imagining Franco
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Is Spain really still tied - culturally, politically, and emotionally - to the dictator Francisco Franco? What was (and is) his place in the public imaginary? What remains today of the man and his legacy?
This book examines the public image of Franco and the social construction(s) of his public biography over four different periods: the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), the post-civil war period (1939-1949), the rest of the dictatorship (1950-1975), and the democratic period and recent times (1975-2020). Delving into biography, narratives, and public and political motivations, it analyses the role that the idea of Franco has played and continues to play in contemporary Spain. It argues that the multiplicity of narratives that have existed in Spain and abroad regarding the figure of Franco are closely related to both the rhetoric and images generated by those in power and a sort of popular 'banal Franco' which takes in multiple stereotypes. This latter concept is central to understanding not only Franco's importance in contemporary Spain but also the fervent allegiance to his figures by a substantial part of Spanish society. Providing a complex picture of how the public image of the dictator has been constructed over time, the book addresses how ordinary Spaniards have imagined Franco and what their sources for doing so were.
Land and God: the City, County and Diocese of Lincoln over Nine Centuries
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Land and God, is a volume of essays in his honour draws together research from the twelfth to the twentieth century and across the eight counties of the ancient diocese.
For over 50 years Dr Nicholas Bennett has been one of the lynchpins of academic research in Lincolnshire as archivist, academic and general editor of the Lincoln Record Society. This volume of essays in his honour consists of contributions from Dr Bennett's colleagues on the Council of Lincoln Record Society. It draws together research from the twelfth to the twentieth century and across the eight counties of the ancient diocese of Lincoln. The volume includes editions of previously unpublished records as well as reanalyses of more familiar texts, as the contributors exam medieval secular and ecclesiastical records, nineteenth-century accounts and twentieth-century magazines. The articles demonstrate how the concerns and challenges of Church and State remain remarkably similar over 800 years. As well as addressing familiar themes though the volume allows the reader to engage with the lives of great men and of those who are otherwise unknown, including bishops and rectors, justices and criminals, and widows and suffragettes.
Charlemagne in the Francophone World and Occitania
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Explores the transmission and reception of the medieval legends of Charlemagne in the literatures of the French-speaking areas of France, Burgundy and England, and Occitania.
The spread of Charlemagne's myth after his death was even more extensive than the empire he ruled during his life. This volume turns to the birthplace of many of these myths, and to the languages of the North (langue d'oïl) and South (langue d'oc) of that land. The first chapter traces the presence and development of his legend the diverse political and cultural areas south of the Loire generally known as Occitania. The two following chapters analyse the often contradictory representations of Charlemagne in northern French-speaking regions in the twelfth to fourteenth centuries, through a careful selection of chansons de geste and chronicles. Using ethnographic theories, they consider his roles as warrior, secular ruler and conduit to the divine. The fourth and fifth chapters examine the exploitation of those images among readers of French in England and in French-speaking provinces ruled by the Dukes of Burgundy. Finally, the epilogue traces the continued vibrancy of Charlemagne stories in popular and high culture through to the twentieth century.
Diplomacy, Trade and Imperialism in East Africa, 1850-1900
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A detailed overview of East African diplomacy at the end of pre-colonial era, which provides a corrective to the commonly held view that African diplomats were inexperienced, naïve and parochial.
This book traces the history of an elite group that rose to power and wealth in the interlacustrine kingdoms of East Africa at the end of the eighteenth and over the course of the nineteenth century. Katikiro played a major role in shaping the history of their societies at a time of profound change. Royal administrators, chief advisors, envoys - these influential men navigated and directed shifts in the balance of power as old hegemons like the kingdom of Bunyoro stumbled, new contenders like Buganda and Rwanda emerged, the region opened up to trade with the East African Coast and Egypt, and Europeans arrived, first as explorers and missionaries and then as colonial rulers.
Katikiro were in midst of these changes: as politicians they shaped them; as diplomats they mediated them; and as wealthy businessmen they profited from them. Their rise in the nineteenth century offers a unique inside into the agency of Africans in these events and highlights the many continuities of pre-colonial and colonial histories in the region.
The Diary of W. G. Footitt
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W. G. Footitt was an architectural draughtsman in the office of Charles Hodgson Fowler, architect to Durham, Lincoln and Rochester Cathedrals. His diary illuminates the professional practice and daily life of an individual immersed in the production and restoration of ecclesiastical architecture during the last years of the Gothic Revival. Significantly, it highlights the important contribution made by draughtsmen, whose names rarely appear in published histories of architecture. Their meticulous work, essential to the realisation of architectural visions, translated concepts into detailed plans and drawings, supporting the creative process and enabling craftspeople to execute designs with precision. A talented artist with a passion for antiquities, Footitt produced many drawings to illustrate the publications of leading archaeologists in County Durham and Northumberland, thus playing a crucial role in bringing archaeological discoveries to a wider audience. He was also a keen observer of the world around him, travelling widely across Britain and recording holidays in Ireland and Switzerland. His first-hand impressions of social, cultural and technological change make the diary a vivid chronicle of modernity.
Feminist Anger in German-Language Cultural Production
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Essays by feminist scholars of German Studies looking at how women-particularly women of color-have put their anger to use in German-language cultural production and how they themselves might do so in their scholarship.
In Germany and in Western culture more broadly, women experience anger in response to misogyny, racism, and other injustice, but open expression of that anger is often considered unwomanly. Yet a rich tradition of feminist thinkers of color-including Audre Lorde, Brittney Cooper, Amia Srinivasan, and Sara Ahmed-understands anger as energizing and imperative for structural change. How might we cultivate an anger that is affirming, inclusive, legitimate, creative, animating, and most of all, feminist?
This volume of essays by feminist scholars of German Studies-writing in dialogue with such thinkers while acknowledging their own largely white, privileged positionalities-looks at how women have put their anger to use in German-language cultural production and how they themselves might do so in their scholarship. The eleven contributions approach the topic of female anger intersectionally and transnationally. They examine angry women in the contexts of politics, activism, philosophy, economics, race, nationality, sexuality, illness, and humour. Covering a wide array of genres and discussing works from the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries, they explore creators including writers, filmmakers, comedian/activists, musicians, and journalists. They investigate the tensions between the emotion of anger and the practice of being an angry woman, global responses to anger, and artistic representations of angry women in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.
Dance, Embodied Politics and Court Culture in Early Modern Spain
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Does dance tell a story? What, if anything, is it intended to represent? How was it conceived in the early modern period?
This book examines the theories and political uses of dance in Spain during the period preceding and following the 'Poetics turn', which coincided with the rule of Philip III (1598-1621), also known as the Dancing King, and the onset of the reign of Philip IV. While this turning point finalised the definition of dance as an art form, it was also paradoxical. Indeed, this development saw the emergence of an aesthetic thought of dance within Aristotelian poetics, thanks to a common court culture, yet it never led to the formulation of a poetics of ballet.
By recontextualising this turning point, the book examines the relationship between dance and representation during Spain's Golden Age. It revisits the initial codifications of dance in Italy and figurative experiments at the Burgundian court during the second half of the 15th century, as well as their influence on subsequent practices and humanist theories of dance at the courts of Charles V and Philip II. Subsequently, it focuses on the various shifts in court dance as it became a scenic art at the beginning of the seventeenth century, interrogating the possibility of the king performing dance himself. The book concludes that, in Spain, neo-Aristotelian ideas enabled a shift from an ethical to an aesthetic problematic, which saw dance, whether symbolic or purely kinetic in nature, as a legitimate art form to be placed at the service of the monarchy.
The Epic Modernist Alfred Döblin
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Provides the English-speaking reader with a comprehensive guide to the fiction of Alfred Döblin, a major figure in German and European literary modernism.
Alfred Döblin was born into a Jewish family in 1878 and grew to become a leading German literary figure before he had to flee from the Nazis in 1933. His big-city novel Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929) is often compared to Joyce's Ulysses, but Döblin had been exploring modern narrative techniques since the early 1900s, and his themes were entirely his own. In view of the highly diverse character of his fictions and their settings-ranging from Europe to China and South America, and from the sixteenth century to the twenty-seventh-the first four chapters of this book present them according to broad thematic concerns-Person, Power, Nature and Culture-rather than chronological sequence. The aim is to encourage readers to identify aspects of his writing that they would like to investigate further for themselves. The introduction provides initial orientation in Döblin's early thinking and the way he conceived the writer's task, and that is followed by a concise description of his family background and his subsequent personal biography. The final two chapters focus respectively on the development of his skill in the deployment of specific narrative techniques and on how historical circumstances affected his philosophical and religious orientation in the course of his adult life, from the language skepticism of his early years and his professed agnosticism in the 1920s to his late conversion to Catholicism.
Bartolomé de las Casas
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A deep look at the impact of Christian scripture on Bartolomé de las Casas, one of the first and strongest critics against Spanish colonialism of the New World and for Indigenous rights.
Theologian, activist, reformer, political philosopher, historian and anthropologist Bartolomé de las Casas, OP (1484-1566) was a polarising figure in his own time and continues to provoke debate today. Arriving in Hispaniola as a settler and friend of conquistadors, in time las Casas became the official "Protector of the Indians" and a zealous advocate for their rights. His writings, in particular the History of the Indies and Brief History of the Destruction of the Indies, today constitute the best source for the first three decades of Spanish exploration and conquest in the Americas.
This book provides an accessible account of las Casas's life, achievements, teachings and legacy. Importantly, it underscores the tremendous influence of Christian scripture on las Casas, a surprisingly overlooked aspect in previous biographies, considering his status as a churchman and missionary. The book places him in his socio-political and religious context and traces the evolution of his thought, showing how his ideas on freedom, just war, natural law, social justice, and evangelisation frequently put him at odds with most of his contemporaries and especially the secular and ecclesiastical elites. Two centuries before Thomas Jefferson announced that "all men are created equal," las Casas proclaimed that "all mankind is one" and wielded the principle of government by consent in defence of Indigenous rights.
How the Holy Cross came from Antioch to Brogne
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The first critical edition, with facing-page English translation, of a thirteenth-century source, offering insights into crusading, material culture, and aristocratic-monastic relations.
In 1152, a knight from the southern Low Countries named Manasses of Hierges returned home after eleven years spent crusading in the Holy Land. He carried with him a precious relic, said to be a fragment of the True Cross that had belonged to the princes of Antioch. Nearly sixty years later, a writer associated with a nearby monastery composed a new Latin narrative, hagiographical, and liturgical textual programme known as Quomodo Sancta Crux ab Antiochia allata sit in Broniense cenobium (How the Holy Cross Came from Antioch to the Monastery of Brogne). It tells the story of Manasses, his career in Europe and the Near East, and of the conflict that broke out over possession of the relic after his death.
This volume provides the first critical edition and English translation of a source that contributes greatly to our knowledge of the medieval world, from crusading to material religion to relations between the lay aristocracy and religious communities. The work of a learned author with ambitions to a high literary and homiletic style, it offers a fresh perspective on the question of what motivated crusaders and on the history of the Holy Land under crusader occupation, providing critical new details to the story of the civil war between Queen Melisende of Jerusalem and her son, King Baldwin III. The sustained account of the conflict over a relic provides a window into the importance of sacred objects, and competing notions of sacrality, legal possession, and value. Previously unknown to historians, this work provides a rich illustration of the place of crusading in the memory of a local community. A detailed critical apparatus establishes what can be known about the work's composition and the author's reliance on Classical, Patristic, and Scriptural authorities, while an introduction gives an account of the work's political, cultural, and intellectual context.
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