Benjamin Rush, Civic Health, and Human Illness in the Early American Republic
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Benjamin Rush (1745-1813) casts a long shadow over American medicine as well as over the social and political history of the American republic. The Philadelphia physician involved himself in numerous social, political, and scientific projects while maintaining a busy practice and lecturing to thousands of students over his career. As a result, attempts by historians to make sense of Rush and his world have been complicated and contradictory. Nevertheless, it is within that mixed narrative of the social, medical, and political that Rush's story becomes its most compelling.
At the end of the Revolutionary War, new American citizens found themselves in a new country. For Rush and his colleagues, that newness extended beyond a change in political structure. They believed that the physical challenges of growing cities and western expansion and the psychological challenges of new identities came together in ways that could help or hurt American health. From his vantage point at one of the nation's few medical schools, located in its intellectual capital, Rush developed a reputation as America's physician—while mixing social and scientific ideas for the "improvement" of the country as a whole. Putting Rush in this context, Benjamin Rush, Civic Health, and Human Illness in the Early American Republic goes beyond biography to explore his social and scientific networks and their role in the development of a distinctly American medical profession.
Laurence W. Mazzeno
The Critical Reception of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
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Examines both academic and popular assessments of Conan Doyle's work, giving pride of place to the Holmes stories and their adaptations, and also attending to the wide range of his published work.
Twenty-first-century readers, television viewers, and moviegoers know Arthur Conan Doyle as the creator of Sherlock Holmes, the world's most recognizable fictional detective. Holmes's enduring popularity has kept Conan Doyle in the public eye. However, Holmes has taken on a life of his own, generating a steady stream of critical commentary, while Conan Doyle's other works are slighted or ignored. Yet the Holmes stories make up only a small portion of Conan Doyle's published work, which includes mainstream and historical fiction; history; drama; medical, spiritualist, and political tracts; and even essays on photography. When Doyle published - whatever the subject - his contemporaries took note. Yet, outside of the fiction featuring Sherlock Holmes, until recently relatively little has been done to analyze the reception Conan Doyle's work received during his lifetime and since his death. This book examines both academic and popular assessments of Conan Doyle's work, giving pride of place to the Holmes stories and their many adaptations for print, visual, and online media, but attending to his other contributions to turn-of-the-twentieth-century culture as well. The availability of periodicals and newspapers online makes it possible to develop an assessment of Conan Doyle's (and Sherlock Holmes's) reputation among a wider readership and viewership, thus allowing for development of a broader and more accurate portrait of Doyle's place in literary and cultural history.
Erica Siegel
The Life and Music of Elizabeth Maconchy
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The first full-length biographical study of Elizabeth Maconchy (1907-1994).
The British-born Irish composer (Dame) Elizabeth Maconchy (1907-1994) is best known today for her cycle of thirteen string quartets, composed over five decades. And yet, her oeuvre ranges from large scale choral works, to ballets, operas, and symphonic scores. Having studied with Charles Wood and Ralph Vaughan Williams at the Royal College of Music, many of her compositions also garnered accolades from peers and established musical figures such as Gustav Holst, Donald Francis Tovey, and Henry Wood, among others.
With access to a wealth of documentation previously unavailable, this book explores Maconchy's life and music within a greater consideration of the social and political context of the world in which she lived. While the influence of Bartók has been well documented, this book reveals the equally potent influence of Vaughan Williams on Maconchy's musical idiom. This book also discusses Maconchy's foray into administration and her advocacy of young composers through her work as the first woman to be elected Chairman of the Composers' Guild of Great Britain in 1959 and President of the Society for the Promotion of New Music following the death of Benjamin Britten in 1976. It will be required reading for those interested in the lives of women composers, twentieth-century British music, and musical modernism.
Brian Yothers
Why Antislavery Poetry Matters Now
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This book is a history of the nineteenth-century poetry of slavery and freedom framed as an argument about the nature of poetry itself: why we write it, why we read it, how it interacts with history.
The poetry of the transatlantic abolitionist movement represented a powerful alliance across racial and religious boundaries; today it challenges the demarcation in literary studies between cultural and aesthetic approaches. Now is a particularly apt moment for its study. This book is a history of the nineteenth-century poetry of slavery and freedom framed as an argument about the nature of poetry itself: why we write it, why we read it, how it interacts with history. Poetry that speaks to a broad cross-section of society with moral authority, intellectual ambition, and artistic complexity mattered in the fraught years of the mid nineteenth century; Brian Yothers argues that it can and must matter today. Yothers examines antislavery poetry in light of recent work by historians, scholars in literary, cultural, and rhetorical studies, African-Americanists, scholars of race and gender studies, and theorists of poetics. That interdisciplinary sweep is mirrored by the range of writers he considers: from the canonical - Whitman, Barrett Browning, Beecher Stowe, DuBois, Melville - to those whose influence has faded - Longfellow, Lydia Huntley Sigourney, John Pierpont, John Greenleaf Whittier, James Russell Lowell - to African American writers whose work has been recovered in recent decades - James M. Whitfield, William Wells Brown, George Moses Horton, Frances E. W. Harper.
Edited by Amélia P. Hutchinson, Juliet Perkins, Philip Krummrich and Teresa Amado
The Chronicles of Fernão Lopes
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Volume III of the first complete English translation of the chronicles of Fernão Lopes chronicles the War of Succession (1383-1385), the rise of the House of Avis under João I, and his acclamation by the Cortes in Coimbra.
Until now, the chronicles of Fernão Lopes (c.1380-c.1460) have only been available in critical editions or in partial translations. Comparable to the works of Froissart in France or López de Ayala in Spain, the chronicles provide a wealth of detail on late fourteenth-century politics, diplomacy, warfare and economic matters, courtly society, queenship and noble women, as well as more mundane concerns such as food, health and the purchasing power of a fluctuating currency. Lopes had a keen eye for detail and a perspective especially attuned to the common people, and his chronicles provide an invaluable source for the history of Western Europe in the later Middle Ages.
Andrew Ollerton
The Crisis of Calvinism in Revolutionary England, 1640-1660
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This book investigates a puzzling and neglected phenomenon - the rise of English Arminianism during the decade of puritan rule.
Throughout the 1650s, numerous publications, from scholarly folios to popular pamphlets, attacked the doctrinal commitments of Reformed Orthodoxy. This anti-Calvinist onslaught came from different directions: episcopalian royalists (Henry Hammond, Herbert Thorndike, Peter Heylyn), radical puritan defenders of the regicide (John Goodwin and John Milton), and sectarian Quakers and General Baptists. Unprecedented rejection of Calvinist soteriology was often coupled with increased engagement with Catholic, Lutheran and Remonstrant alternatives. As a result, sophisticated Arminian publications emerged on a scale that far exceeded the Laudian era. Cromwellian England therefore witnessed an episode of religious debate that significantly altered the doctrinal consensus of the Church of England for the remainder of the seventeenth century.
The book will appeal to historians interested in the contested nature of 'Anglicanism' and theologians interested in Protestant debates regarding sovereignty and free will. Part One is a work of religious history, which charts the rise of English Arminianism across different ecclesial camps - episcopal, puritan and sectarian. These chapters not only introduce the main protagonists but also highlight a surprising range of distinctly English Arminian formulations. Part Two is a work of historical theology, which traces the detailed doctrinal formulations of two prominent divines - the puritan John Goodwin and the episcopalian Henry Hammond. Their Arminian theologies are set in the context of the Western theological tradition and the soteriological debates, that followed the Synod of Dort. The book therefore integrates historical and theological enquiry to offer a new perspective on the crisis of 'Calvinism' in post-Reformation England.
Stephen K. Roberts
The History of Parliament: The House of Commons 1640-1660 [9 Volume Set]
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The most comprehensive and complete study ever compiled about the turbulent period of the English and British Civil Wars and their aftermath.
The work of more than thirty years and multiple authors, the long-awaited nine volumes and more than 8,000 pages of The History of Parliament: The House of Commons 1640-1660 make up an enormous resource that historians will regard as the most comprehensive collection of information and analysis ever compiled of the politics of perhaps the most critical and dramatic period of English and British history. During it, a political crisis became a civil war in which the Westminster Parliament confronted, and ultimately defeated King Charles I, putting him on trial and executing him in 1649. Over the following eleven years, the struggle to establish a stable and legitimate government saw the young Republic displaced in 1653 by the army under Oliver Cromwell, Cromwell's assumption of the title of Lord Protector, and, after his death a contest for power that ended with the collapse of the revived Republic and the ultimate Restoration of the monarchy under Charles II.
The work's main component is the 1,800 biographies of everyone was elected to the House of Commons between these years, including substantial reinterpretations of the lives of all of the major figures - Cromwell, Pym, Hampden and many others - as well as members of Oliver Cromwell's 'Other House', the second chamber of 1658-9. There are also accounts of the politics and elections of each constituency that returned members to the House of Commons - including the Scottish and Irish counties and towns that did so under the short-lived union constitution of 1653, the Instrument of Government. There are studies of the series of executive committees that were set up by Parliament to manage the enormous tasks of raising money for the war, directing its forces, maintaining its relationships with its allies (especially the Scots), and negotiating with foreign powers. And, finally, there is an introductory survey, summarising and analysing all this material as well as providing an essential political narrative of the period.
These volumes contain huge amounts of previously unknown information about the personalities and backgrounds of those involved in politics, and fresh and authoritative interpretation of their manoeuvrings and motivations. They include the lives of the many lesser-known, lower-status figures who came to prominence and entered national politics through service in the military or administrative roles in the parliamentarian war effort, as well as the grander gentry figures who were more familiar at Westminster. They include the charismatic and powerful men who were the backbone of the parliamentary regime such as Henry Marten, or the younger Sir Henry Vane; front-rank soldier-politicians like John Lambert, Henry Ireton or George Monck; and key polemicists such as William Prynne or Edward Hyde. The committee articles for the first time expose the administrative machinery of Parliament's war effort, together with the factional struggles of those involved. Given the detail and comprehensiveness of the biographies, the work will be vital not only for political historians, but for military, literary, social and economic historians of the period; while the constituency histories make a major contribution to local histories across the British Isles.
The History of Parliament: The House of Commons 1640-1660 constitutes an essential resource that will transform the way in which we study and think about the English and British Civil Wars.
George J. Ferencz
The Music for Victory at Sea
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This long-awaited study explores the creation of NBC-TV's landmark 1952-53 WWII documentary series, with particular attention to its evocative Rodgers-Bennett score.
Victory at Sea, NBC-TV's innovative 1952-53 WWII documentary, was eventually broadcast to more than 100 million viewers worldwide. Its episodes chronicled the war's conflicts while highlighting the US Navy's contributions, NBC having sourced footage from the military, governments, and newsreel agencies of fourteen nations. Victory's special distinction was its music, with each episode's nonstop score recorded by the acclaimed NBC Symphony Orchestra. The music was credited to Richard Rodgers-then at the height of his fame-as composer, and Robert Russell Bennett as arranger and conductor. In fact, Rodgers composed twelve piano themes; Bennett developed these endlessly for orchestra and, in addition, composed many hours of the score outright.
Part One chronicles Victory's gestation and production at NBC, its reception, the series' afterlife in syndication and home video, and the score's "Gold Record" sales success on RCA records. Part Two examines each episode in turn, focusing on how the Bennett-scored music pairs with screen action. Every transformation of the much-used Rodgers themes is cited, along with the episodes' musical inter-relationships. The hundreds of musical examples generously sample the score's 11½ hours of music.
NBC's Victory has been neglected by Richard Rodgers's biographers and by film historians. As the series celebrates its 70th anniversary, the Rodgers-Bennett score here finally receives recognition for its artistry and power.
Edited by Harriet Lyon and Alexandra Walsham
Nostalgia in the Early Modern World
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How can the concept of nostalgia illuminate the culturally specific ways in which societies understand the contested relationship between the past, present, and future?
The word nostalgia was invented in the late seventeenth century to describe the debilitating effects of homesickness. Now widely defined as a sense of longing for a lost past, initially it was more closely linked with dislocation in space. By exploring some of its many textual, visual and musical manifestations in the tumultuous period between c. 1350 and 1800, this volume resists the assumption that nostalgia is a distinctive by-product of modernity. It also forges a fruitful link between three lively areas of current scholarly enquiry: memory, temporality, and emotion.
The contributors deploy nostalgia as a tool for investigating perceptions of the passage of time and historical change, unsettling experiences of migration and geographical displacement, and the connections between remembering and forgetting, affect and imagination. Ranging across Europe and the Atlantic world, they examine the moments, sites and communities in which it arose, alongside how it was used to express both criticism and regret about the religious, political, social and cultural upheavals that shaped the early modern world. They approach it as a complex mixed feeling that opens a new window into individual subjectivities and collective mentalities.
Daniel Trocmé-Latter
The Strasbourg Cantiones of 1539: Protestant City, Catholic Music
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Schöffer's Cantiones tell a fascinating story of South-North, Catholic-Protestant co-operation.
The Cantiones quinque vocum selectissimæ (Strasbourg: Peter Schöffer the Younger, 1539) are a collection of 28 Latin five-voice motets by composers including Gombert, Willaert, and Jacquet of Mantua. This was Schöffer's first book of Latin motets as well as his last ever musical publication; he was granted an imperial privilege to print it by King Ferdinand I. The pieces had been sent to Schöffer by Hermann Matthias Werrecore, the choirmaster of the Duomo of Milan. However, this was at a time when no liturgical Latin choral singing took place in Strasbourg, following one of the harshest reformations - musically-speaking - across Europe.
This book comprises a critical study of the anthology in terms of the circumstances of its assemblage and printing, its confessional significance, and the music itself. It considers the nature of the connection between Schöffer and Werrecore, and why a Protestant publisher based in Protestant Germany would try to sell Latin music that was endorsed by a Catholic monarch and emphatically had no chance of being performed in church in its place of publication. In addition, the monograph includes considerations of the motets themselves, brief biographical details of the composers - including the lesser-known ones (e.g. Ferrariensis, Sarton, Billon) - and a full list of all concordant sources. It will be of interest to performers and scholars alike, combining elements of historical research, musical criticism and - via the transcriptions hosted online - performance.
Edited by Amélia P. Hutchinson, Juliet Perkins, Philip Krummrich and Teresa Amado
The Chronicles of Fernão Lopes
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Volume V of the first complete English translation of the chronicles of Fernão Lopes, containing the general bibliography and a comprehensive index containing all people and place names mentioned in the chronicles
Until now, the chronicles of Fernão Lopes (c.1380-c.1460) have only been available in critical editions or in partial translations. Comparable to the works of Froissart in France or López de Ayala in Spain, the chronicles provide a wealth of detail on late fourteenth-century politics, diplomacy, warfare and economic matters, courtly society, queenship and noble women, as well as more mundane concerns such as food, health and the purchasing power of a fluctuating currency. Lopes had a keen eye for detail and a perspective especially attuned to the common people, and his chronicles provide an invaluable source for the history of Western Europe in the later Middle Ages.
Helen Finch
German-Jewish Life Writing in the Aftermath of the Holocaust
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Shows how Adler, Wander, Hilsenrath, and Klüger intertwine transgressive political criticism with the shadow of trauma, revealing new perspectives on canon formation and exclusion in postwar German literature.
How did German-speaking Holocaust survivors pursue literary careers in an often-indifferent postwar society? How did their literary life writings reflect their postwar struggles? This monograph focuses on four authors who bore literary witness to the Shoah - H. G. Adler, Fred Wander, Edgar Hilsenrath, and Ruth Klüger. It analyzes their autofictional, critical, and autobiographical works written between the early 1950s and 2015, which depict their postwar experiences of writing, publishing, and publicizing Holocaust testimony. These case studies shed light on the devastating aftermaths of the Holocaust in different contexts. Adler depicts his attempts to overcome marginalization as a writer in Britain in the 1950s. Wander reflects on his failure to find a home either in postwar Austria or in the GDR. Hilsenrath satirizes his struggles as an emigrant to the US in the 1960s and after returning to Berlin in the 1980s. Finally, in her 2008 memoir, Ruth Klüger follows up her earlier, highly impactful memoir of the concentration camps by narrating the misogyny and antisemitism she experienced in US and German academia. Helen Finch analyzes how these under-researched texts intertwine transgressive political criticism with the shadow of trauma. Drawing on scholarship on Holocaust testimony, transnational memory, and affect theory, her book reveals new perspectives on canon formation and exclusion in postwar German literature.
Edited by Amélia P. Hutchinson, Juliet Perkins, Philip Krummrich and Teresa Amado
The Chronicles of Fernão Lopes
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Volume IV of the first complete English translation of the chronicles of Fernão Lopes chronicles the Battle of Aljubarrota (1385), which secured the throne for João I, his marriage to Philippa of Lancaster, and his reign up to 1411.
Until now, the chronicles of Fernão Lopes (c.1380-c.1460) have only been available in critical editions or in partial translations. Comparable to the works of Froissart in France or López de Ayala in Spain, the chronicles provide a wealth of detail on late fourteenth-century politics, diplomacy, warfare and economic matters, courtly society, queenship and noble women, as well as more mundane concerns such as food, health and the purchasing power of a fluctuating currency. Lopes had a keen eye for detail and a perspective especially attuned to the common people, and his chronicles provide an invaluable source for the history of Western Europe in the later Middle Ages.
Miguel Hué y Camacho
El ferí de Benastepar, o los moros de Sierra Bermeja
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Combining a rich depiction of historical customs with genuine admiration for the Muslim legacy of Andalucia, El ferí de Benastepar is a previously unknown novel by Spanish writer José Miguel Hué y Camacho (1803-1841) that relates the doomed romance between Castilian lady Elvira de Castro and the eponymous ferí de Benastepar, Abenamet, a morisco chief.
This book provides an annotated edition of El ferí de Benastepar, based on the two surviving manuscripts of the novel. The introduction provides an up-to-date biographical and critical assessment of Hué y Camacho and contextualises El ferí de Benastepar both as a product of Romantic orientalism - a 'local' orientalism directed by Andalusian writers towards the past of their own lands - and as part of the Romantic revival of the early modern 'Moorish novel' that took place in the first half of the nineteenth century, both in Spain and abroad. Notes provide clarification on lexical issues well as on the medieval and early modern sources of the novel.
El ferí de Benastepar es una novela histórica inédita del escritor español José Miguel Hué y Camacho (1803-1841). El texto combina una rica descripción de usos y costumbres con una admiración genuina por el legado musulmán de Andalucía. La novela relata el malhadado romance entre la dama castellana Elvira de Soto y el caudillo morisco Abenamet -el "ferí" de Benastepar-, con la primera Rebelión de las Alpujarras (1499-1501) como telón de fondo.
Este libro ofrece una edición anotada de El feri de Benastepar, basada en los dos manuscritos que se conservan de la novela. La introducción ofrece una valoración biográfica y crítica actualizada de Hué y Camacho, y contextualiza la novela tanto como producto del orientalismo romántico -un orientalismo "local" dirigido por los escritores andaluces hacia el pasado de sus propias tierras- como en el marco de la recuperación romántica de la "novela morisca" en la primera mitad del siglo XIX, tanto en España como en el extranjero. Las notas aportan aclaraciones sobre cuestiones léxicas y sobre las fuentes medievales y modernas del texto.
Edited by Jerzy Gawronski
Hidden under the Amstel
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Urban stories of Amsterdam told through archaeological finds from the riverbed Amstel.
The construction of a new metro line through the heart of Amsterdam in 2003-2018 - the North/South Line - gave us access to a unique archaeological site: the riverbed of the Amstel. Almost 700,000 archaeological finds were made there, all of which are linked with the history of Amsterdam between 1300 and 2000. In 2018, a photographic catalogue of 13,000 finds entitled Stuff was published, telling the visual story of the objects and materials that have been used in Amsterdam over the centuries. This book is a follow-up to Stuff, and adds a narrative element to a selection of those archaeological discoveries. These remains are tangible and they reveal something of the day-to-day reality of the past. In combination with historical accounts and images, they sometimes lead us to actual historical events, buildings and institutions - and on occasion even to specific individuals who lived in Amsterdam in the past. In Hidden under the Amstel, 31 authors - historians, archaeologists, materials experts, journalists, curators and researchers - embark on a historical and archaeological quest that has resulted in 107 different stories, each based on a specific find or group of finds. The result is a richly varied anthology of the many stories behind the archaeological discoveries made during the excavation of the North/South Line. (JG)
Maria Hayward
The Great Wardrobe Accounts of Henry VII and Henry VIII
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Accounts providing details of the quantities and cost of clothing and other items manufactured for the first Tudor kings.
By the late fifteenth century the Great Wardrobe, the section of the royal household that supplied the king and his household with clothing and furnishings, was well established in the London parish of St Andrew by the Wardrobe (many of the suppliers of fabric to the Great Wardrobe and many of the individuals who worked for it lived and worked in the city). This volume provides an edition and calendar of the accounts for 1498-99 and 1510-11, as wellas the section of the 1544 account relating to Henry VIII's campaign in France. In addition there are two appendices listing the recipients of livery in the extant Great Wardrobe accounts and warrants and an extensive glossary. The Introduction to the edited texts discusses the patterns of supply to the Great Wardrobe and assesses the significance of a small but influential group of Italian merchants who traded alongside the Londoners.
Professor Maria Hayward teaches in the Department of History, University of Southampton.
Leo Samama
Alphons Diepenbrock
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The music of the Dutch composer Alphons Diepenbrock (1862-1921) is one of the glories of European late-Romantic culture, although is hardly known outside his native Netherlands. This translation makes Leo Samama's masterly study of Diepenbrock available to non-Dutch readers for the first time.
The music of Alphons Diepenbrock (1862-1921) is one of the glories of European late-Romantic culture. But it is hardly known outside his native Netherlands - a situation this book hopes to change. Diepenbrock's life and his music are deeply intertwined: self-taught as a composer, he was a classics tutor by profession, a Catholic with a fondness for religious mysticism and one of the leading Dutch intellectuals of his day, with Mahler, Schoenberg and Richard Strauss among his circle of friends. In his 'Overture' to this book Robin Holloway describes Diepenbrock's music - most of which involves the voice - as a 'wondrous fusion of Palestrina and Wagner (with Debussy thrown in, and a dash of Mahler)' and praises its 'visionary serenity'. It is that balance between classical clarity and Romantic passion that gives Diepenbrock's compositions their unique character - and their emotional power. Leo Samama's richly illustrated study of Diepenbrock sets him and his music in the context of their times, this translation opening up an important chapter of European history to non-Dutch-speaking readers for the first time.
Tom Dixon
Music, Nature and Divine Knowledge in England, 1650-1750
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During a period of tumultuous change in English political, religious and cultural life, music signified the unspeakable presence of the divine in the world for many.
What was the role of music in the early modern subject's sensory experience of divinity? While the English intellectuals Peter Sterry (1613-72), Richard Roach (1662-1730), William Stukeley (1687-1765) and David Hartley (1705-57), have not been remembered for their 'musicking', this book explores how the musical reflections of these individuals expressed alternative and often uncustomary conceptions of God, the world, and the human psyche. Music is always potentially present in their discourse, emerging as a crucial form of mediation between states: exoteric and esoteric, material and spiritual, outer and inner, public and private, rational and mystical.
Dixon shows how Sterry, Roach, Stukeley and Hartley's shared belief in truly universal salvation was articulated through a language of music, implying a feminising influence that set these male individuals apart from contemporaries who often strictly emphasised the rational-i.e. the supposedly masculine-aspects of religion. Musical discourse, instead, provided a link to a spiritual plane that brought these intellectuals closer to 'ultimate reality'. Theirs was a discourse firmly rooted in the real existence of contemporary musical practices, both in terms of the forms and styles implied in the writings under discussion and the physical circumstances in which these musical genres were created and performed.
Through exploring ways in which the idea of music was employed in written transmission of elite ideas, this book challenges conventional classifications of a seventeenth-century 'Scientific Revolution' and an eighteenth-century 'Enlightenment', defending an alternative narrative of continuity and change across a number of scholarly disciplines, from seventeenth-century English intellectual history and theology, to musicology and the social history of music.
Rebecca Schmid
Weill, Blitzstein, and Bernstein
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The first study to explore the crucial influence of Kurt Weill on operas and musicals by Marc Blitzstein and Leonard Bernstein.
Theodor Adorno famously proclaimed that the model of Kurt Weill could not be repeated. Yet Weill's stage works set an inescapable precedent for composers on both sides of the Atlantic. Rebecca Schmid explores how Weill's formal innovations in particular laid the groundwork for operas and musicals by Marc Blitzstein and Leonard Bernstein, although both composers resisted or downplayed his aesthetic contribution to American tradition. Comparative analysis based on Harold Bloom's Anxiety of Influence and other modes of intertextuality reveals that the principles of Weill's opera reform would catalyze an indigenous movement in sophisticated, socially engaged music theatre.
Weill, Blitzstein, and Bernstein: A Study of Influence focuses on works that represent different phases of Weill's mission to renew the genre of opera, evolving from Die Dreigroschenoper to the musical play Lady in the Dark and the Broadway Opera Street Scene. Blitzstein and Bernstein in turn defied formal boundaries with The Cradle Will Rock, Regina, Trouble in Tahiti, Candide, and West Side Story - part of a short-lived movement in mid-twentieth century America that coincided with a renaissance for Weill's German-period works following the premiere of Blitzstein's translation, The Threepenny Opera, under Bernstein's baton. The unpublished A Pray by Blecht, for which Bernstein rejoined Stephen Sondheim and Jerome Robbins, his collaborators on West Side Story, deepens the connection of Bernstein's aesthetic to Weill.
Nigel Bryant
The New Reynard
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A translation of three works from the second half of the 13th century: Rutebeuf's Renart le Bestourné, the anonymous Le Couronnement de Renart and Jacquemart Gielée's Renart le Nouvel. These savage and highly entertaining satires are in a league of their own, and Renart le Nouvel contains important music which is reproduced in the text.
Rarely can a medieval work have resonated with the mood of the present as uncannily as do these three satires. Acerbic, raging and finally apocalyptic, these poems from the second half of the thirteenth century, richly entertaining and wickedly comic though they are, express a vision of the world and its descent into corruption and disaster which mirrors our own state of rampant alarm. The animal tales of the 12th- and 13th-century Roman de Renart - the Romance of Reynard the Fox - were immensely popular. Any satire in those original tales was generally light of touch, but the characters created in them, fox and wolf and ass and lion to name but four, were an open invitation to anyone of a more scathing satirical bent. The poet Rutebeuf, in his short but startling Renart le Bestourné ('Reynard Transformed'), deploys the beasts to make a venomous attack on the mendicant orders and on 'Saint' Louis IX of France. The anonymous Le Couronnement de Renart ('Reynard Crowned') then has the Fox crowned king, establishing a reign of every vice. And most ambitiously of all, Jacquemart Gielée in his Renart le Nouvel ('The New Reynard'), gripped by an increasingly pervasive sense of apocalypse, ends his poem with the Fox, the epitome of deceit and lying, not merely crowned king, but seated in permanent, malign control of the world atop a chocked, unturning Fortune's Wheel. The New Reynard is of special interest not only to students of medieval literature but also to musicologists. Music, in the form of numerous songs, plays an important part in Renart le Nouvel's satirical and apocalyptic message, and the poem is renowned as the most abundant source of late medieval refrains. The notations have survived, and the music is edited in this volume by Matthew P. Thomson.
Julie Hotchin
Women and Monastic Reform in the Medieval West, c. 1000 – 1500
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New approaches to understanding religious women's involvement in monastic reform, demonstrating how women's experiences were more ambiguous and multi-layered than previously assumed.
Over the last two decades, scholarship has presented a more nuanced view of women's attitude to and agency in medieval monastic reform, challenging the idea that they were, by and large, unwilling to accept or were necessarily hostile towards reform initiatives. Rather, it has shown that they actively participated in debates about the ideas and structures that shaped their religious lives, whether rejecting, embracing, or adapting to calls for "reform" contingent on their circumstances. Nevertheless, fundamental questions regarding the gendered nature of religious reform are ripe for further examination.
This book brings together innovative research from a range of disciplines to re-evaluate and enlarge our knowledge of women's involvement in spiritual and institutional change in female monastic communities over the period c. 1000 - c. 1500. Contributors revise conventional narratives about women and monastic reform, and earlier assumptions of reform as negative or irrelevant for women. Drawing on a diverse array of visual, material and textual sources, it presents "snapshots" of reform from western Europe, stretching from Ireland to Iberia. Case-studies focussing on a number of different topics, from tenth-century female saints' lives to fifteenth-century liturgical books, from the tenth-century Leominster prayerbook to archaeological remains in Ireland, from embroideries and tapestries to the rebellious nuns of Sainte-Croix in Poitiers, offer a critical reappraisal of how monastic women (and their male associates) reflected, individually and collectively, on their spiritual ideals and institutional forms.
Edited by Robin Darwall-Smith and Susan Wollenberg
Music in Twentieth-Century Oxford: New Directions
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The first book-length study of musical education and culture in twentieth-century Oxford.
Music has always played a central role in the life of Oxford, in both the city and university, through the great collegiate choral foundations, the many amateur choirs and instrumentalists, and the professional musicians regularly drawn to perform there. Oxford, with its collegiate system and centuries-long tradition of musical activity, presents a distinctive and multi-layered picture of the role of music in urban culture and university life.
The chapters in this book shed light on music's unique ability to link 'town and gown', as shown by the Oxford Bach Choir, the city's many churches, and the major choral foundations. The twentieth century saw the emergence of new musical initiatives and the book traces the development of these, including the University's Faculty of Music and the University Opera Club. Further, it explores music in the newly-founded women's colleges, contrasted with the musical society formed in 1930 at University College, an ancient men's college. The work of Oxford composers, including George Butterworth, Nicola Lefanu, Edmund Rubbra, and William Walton, as well as the composer for several 'Carry on' films, Bruce Montgomery, is surveyed. Two remarkable figures, Sir Hugh Allen and Sir Jack Westrup, recur throughout the book in a variety of contexts.
The volume is indispensable reading for scholars and students of musical life in twentieth-century Britain, as well as those interested generally in the history of Oxford's thriving cultural life.
Edited by John F. H. Smith
Stukeley and Stamford, Part II
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A series of drawings of medieval buildings in Stamford, made in the 1730s by William Stukeley, provide important new evidence for the history of the town, while documents relating to the bitterly contested parliamentary election of 1734 demonstrate the contemporary vitality of this Georgian town.
The buildings and institutions of medieval Stamford have long fascinated historians and antiquaries, not least in the light of the claim that the fourteenth-century migration to the town of students from Oxford constituted the establishment of the 'third university of England'. The first history of the town, that of Richard Butcher, was published as early as 1646. So, when in 1730 the antiquary William Stukeley became Vicar of All Saints' Church in Stamford, he found a fruitful field for his historical studies. His manuscript history, 'Stanfordia Illustrata', has recently been published by the Lincoln Record Society. Now in this companion volume, the drawings which he produced to accompany that history, Designs of Stanford Antiquitys, are reproduced in full for the first time. Many of the buildings that Stukeley sketched no longer survive and his drawings form a valuable record of what has been lost. They are accompanied by a detailed commentary, the fruit of many years of research into Stamford and its buildings.
Stukeley was a sociable antiquary and enjoyed the company of like-minded scholars, men such as Samuel Gale and William Warburton, taking them on elaborate tours of historic Stamford. But some of his fellow townspeople were not so friendly. As a Whig in a strongly conservative town, dominated by the Tory Cecils at nearby Burghley House, Stukeley was often involved in local disputes, sometimes over ecclesiastical appointments, such as the wardenship of Browne's Hosital, sometimes even over scientific matters, such as the treatment of gout. A notable struggle occurred over the Stamford election of 1734, both Tories and Whigs throwing mutual accusations of corruption and bribery, culminating in the 'battle of Friary Gate', an attack on the house of the major Whig candidate. Stukeley's account of the election, submitted to Prime Minister Sir Robert Walpole, the subsequent Tory counter-petition and other related documents, are published in this volume.
By the 1740s, and the publication of his major works, Stonehenge and Avebury, Stukeley had put such tribulations behind him and had reintegrated himself into Stamford society, eventually leaving the town early in 1748 to seek pastures new in London. The drawings and documents reproduced in this volume help us to see early eighteenth-century Stamford through Stukeley's eyes, providing new insights into an important phase of his life and into the history of a Lincolnshire market town in the reign of George II.
Caitriona McCartney
The Sunday School Movement in Britain, 1900-1939
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Demonstrates the vital role Sunday schools played in forming and sustaining faith before, during, and after the First World War for British populations both at home and abroad.
Sunday schools were an important part of the religious landscape of twentieth-century Britain and they were widely attended by much of the British population. The Sunday School Movement in Britain argues that the schools played a vital role in forming and sustaining the faith of those who lived and served during the First World War. Moreover, the volume contends that the conflict did not cause the schools to decline and proposes that decline instead set in much earlier in the twentieth century.
The book also questions the perception that the schools were ineffective tools of religious socialisation and examines the continued attempts of the Sunday school movement to professionalise and improve their efforts. Thus, the involvement of the movement with the World's Sunday School Association is revealed to be part of the wider developing international ecumenical community during the twentieth century.
Drawing together under-utilised material from archives and newspapers in national and local collections, The Sunday School Movement in Britain presents a history of the schools demonstrating their lasting significance in the religious life of the nation and, by extension, the enduring importance of Christianity in Britain during the first half of the twentieth century.
Edited by Ricardo Fernández Romero
Ramón Gómez de la Serna
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A celebrity in his own day, who gave lectures dressed as Napoleon or seated on the back of an elephant, Ramón Gómez de la Serna is the most representative writer of the interwar Spanish avant-garde.
This book explores Gómez de la Serna's art and his quest to break down the barriers between literature and life, addressing two elements - already present in his work - of radical relevance in today's cultural debates: the relation of humans to the material world and the reduction of all experience to a singular individuality. Bringing Gómez de la Serna to an Anglophone audience, it reveals him to be the embodiment of a new kind of art on both sides of the Atlantic.
Rosemary Horrox
The Parliament Rolls of Medieval England, 1275-1504
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A major contribution to the history of Parliament, to medieval English history, and to the study of the English constitution. ENGLISH HISTORICAL REVIEW
The rolls of parliament were the official records of the meetings of the English parliament from the reign of Edward I (1272-1307) until the reign of Henry VII (1485-1509), after which they were superseded by the journals of thelords, and, somewhat later, the commons. This volume contains the only parliament of Richard III - an essential source for his accession in 1483 and for his response to the subsequent rebellion. Henry VII's assertion of his title in 1485 is strikingly different, as is his long act of resumption (a roll in itself) that reveals not only which Yorkist grants he was prepared to continue but also which early grants of his own he was willing to abandon. The1487 parliament shows the new regime continuing to try and establish itself in the face of continuing opposition. The rolls from the period are reproduced in their entirely, complemented by a full translation of all the texts from the three languages used by the medieval clerks (Latin, Anglo-Norman and Middle English).
Dr Rosemary Horrox is Fellow and Director of Studies in History, Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge.
Paul Brand
The Parliament Rolls of Medieval England, 1275-1504
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A major contribution to the history of Parliament, to medieval English history, and to the study of the English constitution. ENGLISH HISTORICAL REVIEW
The rolls of parliament were the official records of the meetings of the English parliament from the reign of Edward I (1272-1307) until the reign of Henry VII (1485-1509), after which they were superseded by the journals of thelords, and, somewhat later, the commons. The rolls presented here cover the second part of Edward I's reign. Under his rule parliament gained a new importance and centrality in the lives of the king's subjects - in part a result of the king's decision to encourage his subjects to submit written petitions to parliament, in part because of the role parliament played in the drafting and approval of a major programme of legislative change, in part because it was largely in parliament that the king obtained consent to the levying of the taxation that was required for his major military expenditure. This new edition of the documents is presented with the first ever translation, together with related materials; it also includes a discussion of all the known parliaments of the reign.
Professor Paul Brand is Senior Research Fellow and Senior Dean, All Souls College, Oxford
Ryan Lavelle
Alfred's Wars: Sources and Interpretations of Anglo-Saxon Warfare in the Viking Age
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Collection of source material and crucial interpretations, offering a comprehensive guide to Anglo-Saxon warfare.
WINNER: 2012 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title Award
The warfare of the late Anglo-Saxon period had momentous consequences for the development of the English state following Alfred the Great's reign. This book provides a comprehensive guide, with extracts in translation from the principal sources for our knowledge, accompanied by the most important interpretations by scholars through the ages, and new introductions by thepresent author. It looks at every aspect of the topic, from land and sea forces to logistics and campaigning, from fortifications and the battlefield to the final peacemaking. In so doing, it highlights the significance of warfareand its organisation for the late Anglo-Saxon state, and the multitude of ways in which it was recorded and remembered.
Dr Ryan Lavelle is Senior Lecturer in Medieval History at the University of Winchester.
Kirk Ambrose
The Marvellous and the Monstrous in the Sculpture of Twelfth-Century Europe
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Richly-illustrated consideration of the meaning of the carvings of non-human beings, from centaurs to eagles, found in ecclesiastical settings.
Representations of monsters and the monstrous are common in medieval art and architecture, from the grotesques in the borders of illuminated manuscripts to the symbol of the "green man", widespread in churches and cathedrals. These mysterious depictions are frequently interpreted as embodying or mitigating the fears symptomatic of a "dark age". This book, however, considers an alternative scenario: in what ways did monsters in twelfth-century sculpture help audiences envision, perhaps even achieve, various ambitions? Using examples of Romanesque sculpture from across Europe, with a focus on France and northern Portugal, the author suggests that medieval representations of monsterscould service ideals, whether intellectual, political, religious, and social, even as they could simultaneously articulate fears; he argues that their material presence energizes works of art in paradoxical, even contradictory ways. In this way, Romanesque monsters resist containment within modern interpretive categories and offer testimony to the density and nuance of the medieval imagination.
KIRK AMBROSE is Associate Professor & Chair, Department of Art and Art History, University of Colorado Boulder.
Rosemary Horrox
The Parliament Rolls of Medieval England, 1275-1504
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$190.00
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A major contribution to the history of Parliament, to medieval English history, and to the study of the English constitution. ENGLISH HISTORICAL REVIEW
The rolls of parliament were the official records of the meetings of the English parliament from the reign of Edward I (1272-1307) until the reign of Henry VII (1485-1509), after which they were superseded by the journals of thelords, and, somewhat later, the commons. The three parliaments of Edward IV's second reign are strikingly unbalanced. The first, which lasted from 1472-75, was from the king's point of view mainly concerned with financing theprojected war against France, but also sees the final settlement of the Yorkist regime with former Lancastrians making their peace and a further act of resumption reconsidering earlier royal grants. The last two parliaments weremuch briefer and, again from the king's perspective, mono-causal. That of January 1478 was called to try Edward's brother the duke of Clarence, although this is barely reflected in the roll itself. Five years later Edward was in search of funding for his Scottish war. The rolls from the period are reproduced in their entirely, complemented by a full translation of all the texts from the three languages used by the medieval clerks (Latin, Anglo-Normanand Middle English).
Dr Rosemary Horrox is Fellow and Director of Studies in History, Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge.
Thijs Porck
Old Age in Early Medieval England
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First full-length study of the notion and concept of old age in early medieval England.
How did Anglo-Saxons reflect on the experience of growing old? Was it really a golden age for the elderly, as has been suggested? This first full survey of the Anglo-Saxon cultural conceptualisation of old age, as manifested and reflected in the texts and artwork of the inhabitants of early medieval England, presents a more nuanced and complicated picture. The author argues that although senescence was associated with the potential for wisdom and pious living, the Anglo-Saxons also anticipated various social, psychological and physical repercussions of growing old. Their attitude towards elderly men and women - whether they were saints, warriors or kings - was equally ambivalent. Multidisciplinary in approach, this book makes use of a wide variety of sources, ranging from the visual arts to hagiography, homiletic literature and heroic poetry. Individual chapters deal with early medieval definitions ofthe life cycle; the merits and drawbacks of old age as represented in Anglo-Saxon homilies and wisdom poetry; the hagiographic topos of elderly saints; the portrayal of grey-haired warriors in heroic literature; Beowulf asa mirror for elderly kings; and the cultural roles attributed to old women.
THIJS PORCK is Assistant Professor of Medieval English, Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society, Leiden University.
Nick Holder
The Friaries of Medieval London
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A lavishly illustrated account of the buildings of the friars in the middle ages, bringing them vividly to life.
with contributions from Ian M. Betts, Jens Röhrkasten, Mark Samuel, and Christian Steer.
Nominated for the Current Archaeology Book of the Year Award 2019
The friaries of medieval London formed an important partof the city's physical and spiritual landscape between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries. These urban monasteries housed 300 or more preacher-monks who lived an enclosed religious life and went out into the city to preach. The most important orders were the Dominican Black friars and the Franciscan Grey friars but London also had houses of Augustine, Carmelite and Crossed friars, and, in the thirteenth century, Sack and Pied friars. This book offers an illustrated interdisciplinary study of these religious houses, combining archaeological, documentary, cartographic and architectural evidence to reconstruct the layout and organisation of nine priories. After analysing anddescribing the great churches and cloisters, and their precincts with burial grounds and gardens, it moves on to examine more general historical themes, including the spiritual life of the friars, their links to living and dead Londoners, and the role of the urban monastery. The closure of these friaries in the 1530s is also discussed, along with a brief revival of one friary in the reign of Mary.
NICK HOLDER is a historian and archaeologist at English Heritage and the University of Exeter. He has written extensively on medieval and early modern London.
IAN M. BETTS is a building materials specialist at Museum of London Archaeology; JENS ROHRKASTEN was Lecturer in Medieval History at the University of Birmingham; MARK SAMUEL is an independent architectural historian; CHRISTIAN STEER is an independent historian, specialising in burials in medieval churches.
Allen J. Frantzen
Food, Eating and Identity in Early Medieval England
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A fresh approach to the implications of obtaining, preparing, and consuming food, concentrating on the little-investigated routines of everyday life.
Food in the Middle Ages usually evokes images of feasting, speeches, and special occasions, even though most evidence of food culture consists of fragments of ordinary things such as knives, cooking pots, and grinding stones, which are rarely mentioned by contemporary writers. This book puts daily life and its objects at the centre of the food world. It brings together archaeological and textual evidence to show how words and implements associated with food contributed to social identity at all levels of Anglo-Saxon society. It also looks at the networks which connected fields to kitchens and linked rural centres to trading sites. Fasting, redesigned field systems, and the place offish in the diet are examined in a wide-ranging, interdisciplinary inquiry into the power of food to reveal social complexity.
Allen J. Frantzen is Professor of English at Loyola University Chicago.
Theodore Albrecht
Beethoven's Conversation Books Volume 3
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A complete new edition of Beethoven's conversation books, now translated into English in their entirety for the first time. Covering a period associated with the revolutionary style of what we call "late Beethoven", these often lively and compelling conversations are now finally accessible in English for the scholar and Beethoven-lover.
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) is recognized the world over as a composer of musical masterpieces exhibiting heroic strength, particularly in the face of his increasing deafness from ca. 1798. By 1818, the Viennese composer hadbegun carrying blank booklets with him, for his acquaintances to jot their sides of conversations, while he answered aloud. Often, he himself used the pocket-sized booklets to make shopping lists and other reminders, including occasional early sketches for his compositions. Today, 139 of these booklets survive, covering the years 1818 up to the composer's death in 1827 and including such topics as music, history, politics, art, literature, theatre, religion, and education as perceived on a day-to-day basis in post-Napoleonic Europe. An East German edition, begun in the 1960s and essentially complete by 2001, represents a diplomatic transcription of these documents. It is a masterpiece of pure scholarship but is difficult to use for anyone who is not a specialist. Moreover, Beethoven scholarship has moved on significantly since the long-ranging genesis of the German edition. These important booklets are here translated into English in their entirety for the first time. The volumes in this series include an updated editorial apparatus, with revised and expanded notes and many new footnotes exclusive to this edition, and brand new introductions, which together place many of the quickly changing conversational topics into context. Due to the editor's many years of research in Vienna, his acquaintance with its history and topography, as well as his familiarity with obscure documentary resources, this edition represents an entirely new venture in source studies - vitally informative for scholars not only in music but also in a wide variety of disciplines. At the same time, these often lively and compelling conversations are now finally accessible for the English-speaking music lover or history buff who might want to dip into them and hear what Beethoven and his friends were discussing at the next table.
Andrew Wareham
A History of the County of Cambridge and the Isle of Ely
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400 articles on the history of East Cambridgeshire, the four hundreds of Cheveley, Flendish, Staine and Staploe.
The contributions of ordinary men and women, as well as gentry, clergy, farming dynasties, merchants and manufacturers, to the history of the towns, village, hamlets and streets of East Cambridgeshire, and to theworking of fens, fields and farms, are clearly revealed in the histories of the twenty-three parishes which make up the four hundreds of Staploe, Staine, Flendish and Cheveley. The region is diverse in character: fenland dominates the north of theregion; to the south lies open field arable and heathland, and in Cheveley hundred in the south-west there are hills, a continuation of the East Anglian heights. Major themes include the economy and drainage of the fens, the development of horse breeding around Newmarket, and the growth of industry and communications around Cambridge. The comprehensive history of each parish is fully referenced, illustrated with at least one map, which is complemented by four hundredal articles and an introduction setting out general themes and issues.
D.A. Crowley
A History of Wiltshire
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Chalke and Dunworth hundreds are in south-west Wiltshire on the Dorset border. The parishes of Chalke hundred were united by being part of Wilton abbey's estate before the Norman Conquest, but most of the hundred is homogeneous. Long and narrow parishes lie north and south across the river Ebble and are characterized by extensive chalk downs. Until farmsteads were built on the downs in the 19th cen-tury, nearly all settlement was in small riverside villages. From the Reformation to the 19th century the earls of Pembroke owned most of the eastern parishes. Sheep--and-corn husbandry and more recently arable and dairy farming was the pattern of agriculture in all the parishes except Semley where there is a remarkable survival of common pastures. Dunworth hundred is largely in the Vale of Wardour, and land in most of its parishes belonged to the Barons Arundell of War-dour as successors to Shaftesbury abbey. It is an area of broken landscape and mixed farming in which only Tisbury has grown larger than an ordinary village. Except at Tisbury, there has been little manufactur-ing in the area, but Portland stone has been extensively quarried at Chilmark, Teffont Evias, and Tisbury, and greensand stone has been quarried at the Donheads. Partly because of its stone, Dunworth hundred is notable for its secular buildings. The castle at Wardour is the only one to survive in Wiltshire; Fonthill Abbey in Fonthill Gifford was the most remarkable house of its day in England. Among the many farm-houses of local stone which survive from the Middle Ages is Place Farm at Tisbury, which was frequently visited by the abbess of Shaftesbury and has the largest medieval barn in England. Except for Sedgehill parish and part of Donhead St. Mary parish both hundreds are in an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty: the exceptions are in aSpecial Landscape Area.
K.J. Allison
A History of the County of York East Riding
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The volume covers a large area at the southern end of the Yorkshire Welds, lying west of the city of Hull and the town of Beverley. It is concerned with the history of fourteen parishes which comprise the greater part of the Hunsley Beacon division of Harthill wapentake. Though the rolling chalk hills of the wolds dominate the area, several of the parishes extend into the low- lying ground of the Hull valley to the east and the Vale of York to the west. InSouth Cave parish the reclamation of Broomfleet Island from the river Humber adds further variety to the agricultural history of the area. There are several deserted medieval villages. Much of the countryside described here is still wholly rural in character, but some of the settlements lying on the eastern slopes of the welds, like Cherry Burton and Skidby, have become commuter villages for the near-by towns. The large medieval vil-lage of Cottingham became a popular place of residence for Hull merchants in the late 18th century, and much of the parish has since been absorbed within the city; the village now houses many of the students of the University of Hull. Notable country houses described in the volume include Dalton Hall and Houghton Hall, and the churches include an outstanding Norman building at Newbald. Many of the villages consist of brick houses of the 18th century and later, but 17th-centurytimber-framed houses survive at South Dalton and Cot-tingham. In other villages, however, much use is made of the local Jurassic limestone which outcrops below the wolds escarp-ment. At Leconfield there survives the moated site ofa seat of the Percy family, earls of Northumberland, and it was from Rowley that the rector emigrated in the 17th century to found a town of the same name in Massachusetts.
Dr Kathryn Loveridge
Women's Literary Cultures in the Global Middle Ages
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Initiates a wider development of inquiries into women's literary cultures to move the reader beyond single geographical, linguistic, cultural and period boundaries.
Since the closing decades of the twentieth century, medieval women's writing has been the subject of energetic conversation and debate. This interest, however, has focused predominantly on western European writers working within the Christian tradition: the Saxon visionaries, Mechthild of Hackeborn, Mechthild of Magdeburg, Gertrude the Great, for example, and, in England, Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe are cases in point. While this present book acknowledges the huge importance of such writers to women's literary history, it also argues that they should no longer be read solely within a local context. Instead, by putting them into conversation with other literary women and their cultures from wider geographical regions and global cultures - women from eastern Europe and their books, dramas and music; the Welsh gwraig llwyn a pherth (woman of bush and brake); the Indian mystic, Mirabai; Japanese women writers from the Heian period; women saints from across Christian Europe and those of eleventh-century Islam or late medieval Ethiopia; for instance - much more is to be gained in terms of our understanding of the drivers behind and expressions of medieval women's literary activities in far broader contexts.
This volume considers the dialogue, synergies, contracts and resonances emerging from such new alignments, and to help a wider, multidirectional development of this enquiry into women's literary cultures.
Eitel Timm, Kenneth Mendoza, Dale Gowen
Textuality and Subjectivity
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Reveals strikingly the fundamental problem of translating oral poetry into a written literature.
Joseph Mainzer, Bernarr Rainbow
Music and Education (1848)
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Published by Boydell & Brewer Inc.
Walter Sinclair Thomson
Lincolnshire Assize Roll for 1298 (PRO Assize roll no. 505)
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Published by Boydell & Brewer Inc.
Craig D Taylor
The Chivalric Biography of Boucicaut, Jean II le Meingre
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First English translation of the chivalric biography of one of France's leading figures of the middle ages.
Jean le Meingre, Maréchal Boucicaut (1364-1421), was the very flower of chivalry. From his earliest years at the royal court in Paris, he distinguished himself in knightly pursuits: sorties against seditious French nobles, ceremonial jousts against the English enemy, crusading in Tunisia and Prussia, the composition of courtly verses, and the establishment of a chivalric order for the defence of ladies, the Order of the Enterprise of the White Lady of theGreen Shield. He was named Marshal of France at the age of only 27. His chivalric biography, finished in 1409, is one of the most important accounts of the life of a knight from the Middle Ages. Whilst full of praise, it isalso highly partisan and carefully selective; it glosses over the darker, much less successful, side of his career - in particular his participation in the catastrophic Nicopolis crusade (1396) and his governorship of Genoa, whichcame to an end shortly after the completion of the biography, when a rebellion forced him to leave the city, five years before his capture at the battle of Agincourt in 1415 and death in England in 1421. This first English translation makes available to a wider audience a text that sheds light on the history of France, on crusading in Prussia and the Mediterranean, and on the complicated politics of Italy and the papacy during the Great Schism. It isa highly important contribution to our understanding of chivalric mentalities and attitudes in late-medieval France. It is presented with an introduction and notes.
Dr CRAIG TAYLOR is Reader in Medieval History at theUniversity of York; JANE H.M. TAYLOR is Emeritus Professor of French at Durham University.
Marina Frolova-Walker, Jonathan Walker
Music and Soviet Power, 1917-1932
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The book offers unprecedented access to primary sources that have been unavailable in English, or which lay unknown on archival shelves. Music and Soviet Power offers cultural history told through documents - both colourfuland representative - with an extensive commentary and annotation throughout.
The October Revolution of 1917 tore the fabric of Russian musical life: institutions collapsed, and leading composers emigrated or fell into silence. But in 1932, at the outset of the "socialist realist" period, a new Stalinist music culture was emerging. Between these two dates lies a turbulent period of change which this book charts year by year. It sheds light on the vicious power struggles and ideological wars, the birth of new aesthetic credos, and the gradual increase of Party and state control over music, in the opera houses, the concert halls, the workers' clubs, and on the streets. The book not only provides a detailed and nuanced depiction of the early Soviet musical landscape, but brings it to life by giving voice to the leading actors and commentators of the day. The vibrant public discourse on music is presented through a selection of press articles, reviews and manifestos, all suppliedwith ample commentary. These myriad sources offer a new context for our understanding of Shostakovich, Prokofiev and Myaskovsky, while also showing how Western music was received in the USSR. This, however, is only half the story.The other half emerges from the private dimension of this cultural upheaval, traced through the letters, diaries and memoirs left by composers and other major players in the music world. These materials address the beliefs, motivations and actions of the Russian musical intelligentsia during the painful period of their adjustment to the changing demands of the new state. While following the twists and turns of official policies on music, the authors also offer their own explanations for the outcomes. The book offers unprecedented access to primary sources that have been unavailable in English, or which lay unknown on archival shelves. Music and Soviet Power offers cultural history told through documents - both colourful and representative - with an extensive commentary and annotation throughout.
MARINA FROLOVA-WALKER is Reader in Music History at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge; JONATHAN WALKER, who has a PhD in Musicology, is a freelance writer, teacher and pianist.
Marcus Bull
The World of Eleanor of Aquitaine
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A revisionist approach to Eleanor of Aquitaine and the political, social, cultural and religious world in which she lived.
Eleanor of Aquitaine (1124-1204) is one of the most important and well-known figures of the Middle Ages; she exercised a huge influence on both the course of history, and on the cultural life, of the time. The essays in this collection use her as a point of entry into wider-ranging discussions of the literary, social, political and religious milieux into which she was born, and to which she contributed; they address many of the misconceptions that have grown around both Eleanor herself and the medieval Midi in general, and open up new areas of debate. Topics explored include the work of the troubadours and the importance to them of patronage; perceptions of southern France and itsinhabitants by outsiders; the early history of the Templars in southern France; cultural contacts between the Midi and other parts of the Latin world; the uses of ritual and historical myth in the expression of political power; and attitudes towards women.
Contributors: Catherine Léglu, Marcus Bull, Richard W. Barber, Daniel F. Callahan, Malcolm Barber, John B. Gillingham, Linda Paterson, Ruth Harvey, Daniel Power, Laurent Macé, William Paden.
Professor Sean M. Ireton
Heights of Reflection
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Examines the lure of mountains in German literature, philosophy, film, music, and culture from the Middle Ages to the twenty-first century.
Mountains have always stirred the human imagination, playing a crucial role in the cultural evolution of peoples around the globe and becoming infused with meaning in the process. Beyond their geographical-geological significance,mountains affect the topography of the mind, whether as objects of peril or attraction, of spiritual enlightenment or existential fulfillment, of philosophical contemplation or aesthetic inspiration. This volume challenges the oversimplified assumption that human interaction with mountains is a distinctly modern development, one that began with the empowerment of the individual in the wake of Enlightenment rationalism and Romantic subjectivity. These essays by European and North American scholars examine the lure of mountains in German literature, philosophy, film, music, and culture from the Middle Ages to the present, with a focus on the interaction between humans and the alpineenvironment. The contributors consider mountains not as mere symbolic tropes or literary metaphors, but as constituting a tangible reality that informs the experiences and ideas of writers, naturalists, philosophers, filmmakers,and composers. Overall, this volume seeks to provide multiple answers to questions regarding the cultural significance of mountains as well as the physical practice of climbing them.
Contributors: Peter Arnds, Olaf Berwald, Albrecht Classen, Roger Cook, Scott Denham, Sean Franzel, Christof Hamann, Harald Höbusch, Dan Hooley, Peter Höyng, Sean Ireton, Oliver Lubrich, Anthony Ozturk, Caroline Schaumann, Heather I. Sullivan, Johannes Türk, Sabine Wilke, Wilfried Wilms.
SEAN IRETON is Associate Professor of German at the University of Missouri. CAROLINE SCHAUMANN is Professor of German Studies at Emory University.
Edited by Paul Acker
The Index of Middle English Prose: Handlist XXIV
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Handlist to the rich collection of manuscripts contained in five major libraries across New York, giving a full account of their provenance.
This volume provides detailed descriptions of Middle English prose materials found in the Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscripts Library, The Pierpont Morgan Library, The New York Public Library, The New York Academy of Medicine Library, and New York University Bobst Library (Special Collections). The manuscripts tend to be less well known than those in English libraries, with overlooked texts such as the Pseudo-Hildegard Anti-Mendicant Prophecy; The Book of Palmistry; a subject index of legal statutes; culinary and medical recipes; and English instructions to Latin prayers in Books of Hours. Other manuscripts of note include Trevisa's translation of De proprietatibus rerum by Bartholomaeus Anglicus, used as a copy-text for Wynkyn de Worde's first edition printed ca. 1495; and deluxe illustrated manuscripts of The Pilgrimage of the Soul and Ordinances of Chivalry.
The introduction to the volume highlights the particular interests of the various collectors and the influences and characteristics underpinning their acquisitions. All but one of the manuscripts described from Columbia University were acquired by George A. Plimpton (1855-1936), whose firm, Ginn and Co., published spelling books. His collection records an interest in the history of education, with MS 258, a primer probably compiled for an English schoolchild, being a highlight. John Pierpont Morgan (1837-1913) specialized in expensive, illustrated manuscripts, aided in his purchases by Belle da Costa Greene, who became the first director of the Morgan Library as a public institution under J.P. Morgan, Jr. Curt F. Bühler became the Keeper of Printed Books at the Morgan in 1934, bequeathing to the Library the manuscripts that he had bought over the years. James Lenox and John Jacob Astor established the New York Public Library, with Lenox donating two Wycliffite Bibles and Astor a third. The New York Academy of Medicine owns two manuscripts relating to the work of the French surgeon Guy de Chauliac.
Edited by Megan G. Leitch and K.S. Whetter
Arthurian Literature XXXVIII
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Arthurian Literature has established its position as the home for a great diversity of new research into Arthurian matters. It delivers fascinating material across genres, periods, and theoretical issues. TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT
WINNER: The James Randall Leader Essay Prize WINNER: The James Randall Leader Essay Prize in the 'Fair Well-Known' Category
This issue offers stimulating studies of a wide range of Arthurian texts and authors, from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century, among which is the first winner of the Derek Brewer Essay Prize, awarded to a fascinating exploration of Ragnelle's strangeness in The Weddyng of Syr Gawen and Dame Ragnelle. It includes an exploration of Irish and Welsh cognates and possible sources for Merlin; Bakhtinian analysis of Geoffrey of Monmouth's playful discourse; and an account of the transmission of Geoffrey's text into Old Icelandic. In the Middle English tradition, there is an investigation of material Arthuriana in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, followed by explorations of shame in Malory's Morte Darthur. The post-medieval articles see one paper devoted to the paratexts of sixteenth-century French Arthurian publishers; one to eighteenth-century Arthuriana; and one to a range of nineteenth-century rewritings of the virginity of Galahad and Percival's Sister. Two Notes close this volume: one on Geoffrey's Vita Merlini and a possible Irish source, and one on a likely source for Malory's linking of Trystram with the Book of Hunting and Hawking in an early form of The Book of St Albans.
Meike G. Werner
Germany's Other Modernism
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Demonstrates, contrary to conventional wisdom, that European modernism developed not only in the great metropolitan centers, but also in provincial cities such as Jena.
The conventional wisdom is that the cultural sea change that was European modernism arose in urban centers like Berlin, Paris, Munich, and Vienna. Meike G. Werner's book, now in English translation, is a study of modernism in the provinces. Taking the small provincial city of Jena as a paradigmatic case, it re-creates the very different social and intellectual framework in which modernist experimentation occurred beyond the metropolitan centers. Invented traditions, social and spatial "liminality," and new ideas of social and aesthetic transformation combined in Jena to create a unique moment of cultural innovation. In the years leading up to the First World War, the Jena publisher Eugen Diederichs envisioned and guided the development of this alternative modernism. Taken up by young writers including Diederichs's wife Helene Voigt-Diederichs, numerous intellectual outsiders from across Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, and members of the Free Student movement and of Jena's Sera Circle, this "other" modernism was above all a youth movement, full of energy and bold optimism. Figures such as Rudolf Carnap, Wilhelm Flitner, Hans Freyer, Karl Korsch, and Elisabeth Busse-Wilson emerged from this Jena paradigm. Werner pieces together the story of Jena's modernism in its full richness, complexity, and inner contradictions.
Jessica Wax-Edwards
Documenting Violence in Calderón’s Mexico
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An analysis of how artists, filmmakers and affected citizens in Mexico attempted to navigate, articulate and contend with the unparalleled escalation in brutality during the presidency of Felipe Calderón (2006-2012).
In Mexico, during the presidency of Felipe Calderón (2006-2012) and as a direct result of his 'war' on drugs, at least 60,000 people were killed, tens of thousands were 'disappeared' and countless more were subjected to kidnapping and sexual violence. This book analyses how artists and filmmakers, alongside affected citizens, attempted to navigate, articulate and contend with this unparalleled escalation in brutality.
The texts studied here provide a critical visual archive of this first phase in the drug war and show how artists including Pedro Pardo, Fernando Brito, Mónica González and Natalia Almada attempted to challenge official narratives, foster emerging nodes of resistance and seek justice for citizens. Bringing together works of photography, photojournalism, documentary and short fiction cinema, the book argues for the vital role of cultural production in documenting institutional corruption, human rights abuses and narco-related violence in Mexican society and providing a space to grieve and remember the victims.
As Mexico's socio-political landscape continues to deteriorate, the book shows how its visual cultural legacy provides a means of understanding and responding to the violence.
Edited by Sidra Lawrence and Michelle Kisliuk
intimate entanglements in the ethnography of performance
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Honourable Mention for Society for Ethnomusicology - Ellen Koskoff Edited Volume Prize
Offers expansive and intersecting understandings of erotic subjectivity, intimacy, and trauma in performance ethnography and in institutional and disciplinary settings.
Focused on research within Africa and the African diaspora, contributors to this volume think through the painful iterations of trauma, systemic racism, and the vestiges of colonial oppression as well as the processes of healing and emancipation that emerge from wounded states. Their chapters explore an acoustemology of intimacy, woman-centered eroticism generated through musical performance, desire and longing in ethnographic knowledge production, and listening as intimacy. On the other end of the spectrum, authors engage with and question the fetishization of race in jazz; examine conceptions of vulgarity and profanity in movement and dance-ethnography; and address pain, trauma, and violation, whether physical, spiritual, intellectual, or political.
Authors in this volume strive toward empathetic, ethical, and creative ethnographic engagements that summon vulnerability and healing. They propose pathways to aesthetic, discursive transformation by reorienting conceptions of knowledge as emergent, performative, and sonically enabled. The resulting book explores sensory knowledge that is frequently left unacknowledged in ethnographic work, advancing conversations about performed sonic and somatic modalities through which we navigate our entanglements as engaged scholars.
Jeremy L. Smith
Tallis and Byrd’s Cantiones sacrae (1575)
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What did Tallis and Byrd mean to convey by their use of the word "argument" in their title, Cantiones, quae ab argumento sacrae vocantur?
Thomas Tallis's and William Byrd's Cantiones, quae ab argumento sacrae vocantur (songs, which by their argument are called sacred) of 1575 is one of the first sets of sacred music printed in England. It is widely recognized as a landmark achievement in English music history. Dedicated to Queen Elizabeth I to mark the seventeenth year of her reign, each composer contributed seventeen motets to the collection, which proved to be greatly influential among the era's composers.
But what did Tallis and Byrd mean to convey by their use of the word "argument" in their title? The current view is that they treated their project as an opportunity to pull together a grand compendium of musical accomplishment that drew on the past, but looked to the future, and that the texts functioned as mere vehicles for musical display. In contrast, this book claims that these very texts were chosen by the composers to develop a theme, or argument, on the topic of sacred judgment. In offering a new interpretation of the song collection Smith employs a carefully constructed musical, literary, theological, and political argumentation. The book will encourage new ways of approaching and interpreting Tudor and Elizabethan sacred music.
Robert W. Jones
A Cultural History of the Medieval Sword
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The sword is an important and multi-faceted symbol of military power, royal and communal authority, religion and mysticism. This study takes the sword beyond its functional role as a tool for killing, considering it as a cultural artefact, and the broader meaning and significance it had to its bearer.
It should be on the bookshelf of anybody who claims to be interested in the importance of the sword in medieval life and thought and their cultural significance in the past - and present. Robert Woosnam-Savage, Royal Armouries.
We see the sword as an object of nobility and status, a mystical artefact, imbued with power and symbolism. It is Roland's Durendal, Arthur's Excalibur, Aragorn's Narsil. A thing of beauty, its blade flashes in the sun, and its hilt gleams with opulent decoration. Yet this beauty belies a bloody function, for it is also a weapon that appears crude and brutal, requiring great strength to wield: cleaving armour, flesh, and bone.
This wide-ranging book uncovers the breadth of the sword's place within the culture of high medieval Europe. Encompassing swords both real and imagined, physical, and in art and literature, it shows them as a powerful symbol of authority and legitimacy. It looks at the practicalities of the sword, including its production, as well as challenging our preconceptions about when and where it was used. In doing so, it reveals a far less familiar culture of swordsmanship, beyond the elite, in which swordplay was an entertainment, taught in the fencing school by masters such as Lichtenauer, Talhoffer, and Fiore, and codified in fencing manuals, or fechtbücher. The book also considers how our modern attempts to reconstruct medieval swordsmanship on screen, and in re-enactment and Historical European Martial Arts (or HEMA), shape, and have been shaped by, our preconceptions of the sword. As a whole, the weapon is shown to be at once far more mundane, and yet just as special, as we imagine it.
O.S. Pickering, V.M. O'Mara
The Index of Middle English Prose
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Handlist to manuscripts in one of Britain's major medieval repositories.
Lambeth Palace Library, which dates from a bequest by Archbishop Bancroft in 1610, is one of England's major repositories of medieval manuscripts. More than half of the ninety-six manuscripts and documents containing items of Middle English prose were already present when the library was temporarily transferred to Cambridge in 1647. In the succeeding centuries further manuscript materials have continually been added, and within the last few years the library has become home to the older part of Sion College Library, an event that has added a further seven manuscripts to the present handlist. The collection at Lambeth is large enough to be fully representative of the corpus of Middle English prose: the Brut, the Wycliffite Bible, and Love's Mirror, for example, are all present, in some cases in multiple copies, as are writings by Hilton and Rolle. There are sermon cycles (including an almost complete set of Wycliffite sermons), medical recipes, historical works, and anthologies of religious treatises. Altogether the current handlist indexes almost 800 separate items, ranging from the veterinary to the liturgical. O.S. PICKERINGis Senior Assistant Librarian and Associate Lecturer in English at the University of Leeds; V.M. O'MARAis Lecturer in English at the University of Hull.
Phillip Reid
A Boston Schooner in the Royal Navy, 1768-1772
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Uses rare surviving records, including fully intact logbooks, to situate the customs-enforcement interceptor Sultana within the wider picture of the British Atlantic in this crucial period.
HONORABLE MENTION: 2023 Lyman Book Award for North American Naval History
The small Boston-built schooner Sultana served as a customs-enforcement interceptor on the North American eastern seaboard in the period leading up to the American Declaration of Independence, when British taxation of American trade was a hugely contentious issue. As a typical workaday British American merchant ship taken into naval service, Sultana offers a rare opportunity to understand a technology of paramount importance to this world, where records for merchant ships are scarce, but where in this case a wealth of information, from plan drawings to the fully-intact logbooks, has survived. The book provides a detailed narrative of the ship's activities, and reveals the nature of life on board and the day to day business of operating a small sailing ship. It explores the technology of the ship and her sailing qualities as revealed by the ship's logs and also by the performance of a modern replica. In addition, the book situates Sultana's role within the wider picture of the British Atlantic in this crucial period. It is thereby both naval microhistory and also Atlantic history for all scholars interested in the formation and development of the British Atlantic world.
Karin A. Wurst
Imaginaries of Domesticity and Women’s Work in Germany around 1800
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Examines a variety of texts from late Enlightenment Germany to provide a nuanced rethinking of women's roles as wives, mothers, and housekeepers, creators of the cultural spaces of the home.
Domesticity, a set of practices, emotions, and values culminating in a nourishing emotional and physical ambience - the "feel" of being at home and belonging - connects one's subjective experience to the material environment. In late Enlightenment Germany, writers from Joachim Heinrich Campe and Theodor von Hippel to Sophie La Roche imagined the home as a space where true "humanity" would be realized. The high-stakes cultural formation of domesticity was part of a complex discourse on the pursuit of happiness as a life well lived. As domesticity became a surrogate for the lost religious certainties of the vanishing pre-modern world, an obsessive anxiety concerning its delineation in discourse suggested its importance but also its fragility and the consequences of its failure.
Karin A. Wurst examines didactic novels by female authors, autobiographical texts, popular philosophy, advice literature, periodicals, pedagogical tracts, and household manuals in pursuit of a nuanced rethinking of the relationship between women's roles as wives, mothers, and housekeepers and as creators of the cultural spaces of the home. She finds that the high-value imaginary of domesticity encouraged women's agency insofar as they were tasked with turning theoretical ideals into everyday practice. At the same time, her book shows the under-illuminated contribution of women's work to social and political change from within the patriarchal structures of eighteenth-century Germany.
Edited by Laura L. Gathagan, William North and Laura E. Wangerin
The Haskins Society Journal 33
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This volume continues the Society's commitment to historical and interdisciplinary research from the early and central Middle Ages, demonstrating its belief that the close interrogation of primary documents yield new insights or important revisions into our understanding of the past.
Volume 33 of the Haskins Society Journal continues the Society's commitment to historical and interdisciplinary research from the early and central Middle Ages and demonstrates its belief that the close interrogation of primary documents yield new insights or important revisions into our understanding of the past. After an investigation of the role of Anglo-Saxon bishops in the provision of coastal defense, the subsequent articles explore different dimensions of the Anglo-Norman period: the place of sex at the royal court, the penitential sensibilities of Anglo-Norman prelates and their geographical expression, the complexity of using Anglo-Norman land surveys as evidence for the nature of and changes in peasant labor and obligations, and the office of sheriff and its place in the developing common law. The Denis Bethell Prize winning essay, through its close analysis of Denis Piramus' French translation of the Life of Edmund, king of England, explores the role of translated texts in the formation of Anglo-Norman elite identity. Essays on Queen Ingeborg of Denmark's conception and expression of her role as a Capetian queen. and on the use and meaning of direct and metaphorical references to art and artists in French sermons in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, round out the volume.
Contributors: Yaoling Dai, Gabrielle Faundez-Rojas, P.D.A Harvey, Charles Insley, Tom Licence, Sara Lipton, Anne C. Schlender, Nigel Tringham.
Gordon Cameron Sly
Britten’s Donne, Hardy and Blake Songs
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Presents a first analytical study that looks at the overarching designs of Benjamin Britten's John Donne, Thomas Hardy and William Blake solo song cycles.
By questioning when a group of songs ought to be understood not merely as a collection, but as a cycle, Sly shows that Britten's personal selection and arrangement is indispensable to understanding these cycles' extra-musical communication.
The Holy Sonnets of John Donne, Winter Words (poems by Hardy) and Songs and Proverbs of William Blake - composed in 1945, 1953 and 1965 respectively - each represent a philosophical exploration. The terrains set out by the three poets are distinct, but also engage one another in important and unexpected ways. Their cyclic architectures are expressed not only in their poetic arrangement, but in their musical settings. Key relationships and motive remain central for Britten. Keys convey a network of interconnections, create groupings of songs, and establish levels of tonal affinity or distance. Motive - often intervals that can fit into any melodic, harmonic or rhythmic context - is used to create aural affinities between or among individual songs.
This book also offers a broader narrative revealing Britten's evolving philosophical convictions in post-war Britain. While it may not be the case that Britten intended any broader philosophical comment, the works together outline the cold and brittle state that emerges from loss and aligns with their composer's increasingly stark outlook on humanity.
Katharina Clausius
Opera and the Politics of Tragedy
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A curated collection of Enlightenment operas, paintings, and literary works that were all marked by the "Telemacomania" scandal, a furious cultural frenzy with dangerous political stakes.
Imaginatively structured as a guided tour, Opera and the Politics of Tragedy captures the tumultuous impact of the so-called Telemacomania crisis through its key artifacts: literary pamphlets, spoken dramas, paintings, engravings, and opera librettos (drammi per musica). Prominently featured in the gallery are two operas with direct ties to this aesthetic and political war: Mozart and Cigna-Santi's Mitridate (1770) and Mozart and Varesco's Idomeneo (1781).
Reading and listening across the Enlightenment's cultural spaces (its new public museums, its first encyclopedias, and its ever-controversial operatic theater), this book showcases the Enlightenment's disorderly historical revisionism alongside its progressive politics to expose the fertile creativity that can emerge out of the ambiguous space between what is "ancient" and what is "modern."
Karl Fugelso
Studies in Medievalism XXXII
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Though manifestations of play represent a burgeoning subject area in the study of post-medieval responses to the Middle Ages, they have not always received the respect and attention they deserve. This volume seeks to correct those deficiencies.
Though manifestations of play represent a burgeoning subject area in the study of post-medieval responses to the Middle Ages, they have not always received the respect and attention they deserve. This volume seeks to correct those deficiencies via six essays that directly address how the Middle Ages have been put in play with regard to Alice Munro's 1977 short story "The Beggar Maid"; David Lowery's 2021 film The Green Knight; medievalist archaisms in Japanese video games; runic play in Norse-themed digital games; medievalist managerialism in the 2020 video game Crusader Kings III; and neomedieval architectural praxis in the 2014 video game Stronghold: Crusader II. The approaches and conclusions of those essays are then tested in the second section's six essays as they examine "muscular medievalism" in George R. R. Martin's 1996 novel A Game of Thrones; the queering of the Arthurian romance pattern in the 2018-20 television show She-Ra and the Princesses of Power; the interspecies embodiment of dis/ability in the 2010 film How to Train Your Dragon; late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century nationalism in Irish reimaginings of the Fenian Cycle; post-bellum medievalism in poetry of the Confederacy; and the medievalist presentation of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's 2020-21 Covid inoculation.
Simon John
Medievalism in Nineteenth-Century Belgium
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This study of the monument of Godfrey of Bouillon offers new insights to the political uses of public monuments devoted to figures from the past, modern uses and appropriations of the Middle Ages, and the role of historical culture in the creation of national identity.
On 15 August 1848, a bronze equestrian statue of the crusading hero Godfrey of Bouillon (d.1100) was unveiled in the Place Royale in Brussels, Belgium's capital. Conceived and largely funded by the national government, its creation was a major element in a programme of political and cultural consolidation put into place after the Belgian Revolution (1830-1831) and the consequent establishment of the nation's independence. From the outset, the monument was designed to transmit ideas about history and nationhood, and functioned as a focal point in discussions of politics, language, religion and identity.
This book sheds new light on a range of dynamics in nineteenth-century Belgium, using the statue as a prism; it investigates responses to it both home and abroad, and traces broader national interest in the commemoration of Godfrey, adopted as a national hero despite being born almost 800 years before the emergence of the state. Above all, it reveals that Belgian politics and culture in this period were profoundly shaped by a sustained interest in the Middle Ages, and by efforts to shape a historical narrative that traced Belgian nationhood back to that era, and beyond.
Neil Murphy
Henry VIII, the Duke of Albany and the Anglo-Scottish War of 1522-1524
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The first comprehensive study of this war helps us understand how each country to defend the frontier, and the political issues which drove the Anglo-Scottish wars of the 1520s.
The Anglo-Scottish War of 1522-1524 saw the mobilisation of tens of thousands of men and vast amounts of resources in both England and Scotland. Beyond its British context, the war had a European significance: it formed an element in the wider Valois-Habsburg struggles over Italy, with the complex systems of alliances spreading the repercussions of this struggle far across the continent and to the borders of England and Scotland.
Recent years have seen the emergence of a renewed debate around the status of the Anglo-Scottish frontier and the wider political and social conditions which predominated in the borderlands of each kingdom. Although there has been a move to present the Anglo-Scottish border as a porous frontier where the populations on either side were closely connected, these neighbourly links imploded rapidly in wartime when frontier populations were co-opted into a national struggle. It is significant that borderers were responsible for inflicting the heaviest violence on each other during the war.
Drawing on an unprecedented access to English and Sottish sources of the conflict, this book offers an important new contribution to both Scottish and English history as well as the wider military history of late medieval and early modern Europe. Aspects of military mobilisation, logistics, the defence of frontiers, the use of violence against civilians and wartime espionage feature prominently.
Monica A. Hershberger
Women in American Operas of the 1950s
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The first feminist analysis of some of the most performed works in the American-opera canon, emphasizing the voices and perspectives of the sopranos who brought these operas to life.
In the 1950s, composers and librettists in the United States were busy seeking to create an opera repertory that would be deeply responsive to American culture and American concerns. They did not break free, however, of the age-old paradigm so typically expressed in European opera: that is, of women as either saintly and pure or sexually corrupt, with no middle ground. As a result, in American opera of the 1950s, women risked becoming once again opera's inevitable victims.
Yet the sopranos who were tasked with portraying these paragons of virtue and their opposites did not always take them as their composers and librettists made them. Sometimes they rewrote, through their performances, the roles they had been assigned. Sometimes they used their lived experiences to invest greater authenticity in the roles.
With chapters on The Tender Land, Susannah, The Ballad of Baby Doe, and Lizzie Borden, this book analyzes some of the most performed yet understudied works in the American-opera canon. It acknowledges Catherine Clément's famous description of opera as "the undoing of women," while at the same time illuminating how singers like Beverly Sills and Phyllis Curtin worked to resist such undoing, years before the official resurgence of the American feminist movement. In short, they ended up helping to dismantle powerful gendered stereotypes that had often reigned unquestioned in opera houses until then.
Elizabeth L'Estrange
Anne de Graville and Women's Literary Networks in Early Modern France
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First detailed reconstruction of Anne de Graville's library, establishing her as one of the most well-read and erudite poets of the period.
WINNER: 2024 Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and Gender Book Award
In the 1520s, the French noblewoman Anne de Graville composed two poetic works, based on older, canonical, male-authored texts: Giovanni Boccaccio's Teseida and Alain Chartier's Belle dame sans mercy. The first, the Beau roman, she offered to Claude, queen of France and wife of Francis I, and the second, the Rondeaux, to the king's mother, Louise of Savoy. With the pro-feminine spin of her rewritings, Anne developed the legacy of another woman writer from 100 years earlier, Christine de Pizan, by entering the on-going debate known as the querelle des femmes. Like Christine, Anne sought to redress the negative view of women found in much contemporary popular literature and to offer role models for both men and women at the court of Francis I.
This book is the first detailed reconstruction and interpretation of Anne's library and her collecting practice, showing how they relate to her own writings and her literary milieu. It also teases out her links to other women writers of the time interested in the querelle, such as Catherine d'Amboise and Margaret of Navarre. Paying close attention to literary, manuscript, and artistic sources, it establishes Anne's reputation as one of the most erudite poets of the period, and one keenly attuned to the position of women in society as well as to the political sensitivities of the French court.
Philip Knox
New Medieval Literatures 23
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Annual volume on medieval textual cultures, engaging with intellectual and cultural pluralism in the Middle Ages, showcasing the best new work in this field.
New Medieval Literatures is an annual of work on medieval textual cultures, aiming to engage with intellectual and cultural pluralism in the Middle Ages and now. Its scope is inclusive of work across the theoretical, archival, philological, and historicist methodologies associated with medieval literary studies, and embraces the range of European cultures, capaciously defined. Essays in this volume engage with widely varied themes: law and literature; manuscript production, patronage, and aesthetics; real and imagined geographies; gender and its connections to narrative theory and to psychoanalysis. Investigations range from the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries, from England to the eastern Mediterranean. New arguments are put forward about the dating, context, and occasion of Geoffrey Chaucer's Boece, while the narrative dynamics of Chaucer's "Franklin's Tale" and "Tale of Melibee" are examined from new perspectives. The topography of the Holy Lands appears both as a set of emotional sites, depicted in the Prick of Conscience in its account of the end of the world, and as co-ordinates in the cultural imaginary of medieval the wine-trade. Grendel's mother emerges as the invisible and unavowable centre of male heroic culture in Beowulf, and the fourteenth-century St Erkenwald is brought into contact with the community-building project of the medieval death investigation. Finally, the late medieval Speculum Christiani is revealed to be a work with deep aesthetic investments when read through the framework of how its medieval scribes encountered and shaped that work.
Edited by William Collins Donahue, and Martha B. Helfer
Nexus 6
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Features a new section on the institutional settings of German Jewish Studies, a Film Forum on Shahar Rozen's 1998 documentary Liebe Perla, and interviews with Paul Mendes-Flohr and Barbara Honigmann, among other contributions.
Nexus is the official publication of the biennial German Jewish Studies Workshop at the University of Notre Dame. Together, Nexus and the Workshop constitute the first ongoing German Jewish Studies forum in North America. Because the locus of scholarship is never incidental, Nexus 6 introduces a new section, "Contexts," to examine, in this case, what it means to pursue German Jewish Studies at a Catholic university, Notre Dame. And because research is never static, it inaugurates a series in which scholars revisit their own prior scholarly publications. Robert Smith launches this initiative by revising his view of Dietrich Bonhoeffer as a source for post-Holocaust Christian-Jewish dialogue. The volume also offers conversations with the legendary Paul Mendes-Flohr on his understanding of the German Jewish "legacy" and with Barbara Honigmann on her distinctive prose style and what it means to her to practice Judaism. The popular Film Forum section returns, this time focusing on Shahar Rozen's 1998 documentary Liebe Perla. Nexus 6 also presents new scholarship on Babi Yar Holocaust memorials, Freud's famous Moses essay, Primo Levi's translation of Kafka, and an introduction to and first English translation of the 18th-century philosopher Salomon Maimon's understudied essay History of His Philosophical Authorship in Dialogues.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Duino Elegies
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A new translation of Rilke's great work with close readings of each of the ten elegies elucidating how their poetic attributes constitute their meaning.
Rilke continues to be the most read and discussed German poet of the modern period. The Duino Elegies, together with the Sonnets to Orpheus, remain his greatest achievement. The themes of the ten elegies - and the conceptual world unique to Rilke from which they emerge - can best be understood through their poetic form: their imagery and neologistic formations, their angular syntax, their abrupt changes of tone and linguistic register, their use of multiple personae and speaking voices, and the often-ironic self-presentation of the author. Commentators, however, have often treated these features as mere formal devices that we can somehow see through to get to what really matters, that is, to what Rilke has to say about the human condition or the meaning of life, to his philosophy or worldview. On the contrary, they are constitutive of meaning in the elegies, and understanding them is crucial to our experience of reading Rilke's work. The purpose of this book is to make such features visible and to explain them to the reader as clearly as possible. This is the first full-length book in English devoted to the elegies in over thirty years. It offers an entirely new translation of each elegy, paired with the original German text, and a close reading of each.
Anne-Marie Storrs
The Spiritual Consciousness of Carmen Martín Gaite
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An exploration of Spanish writer Carmen Martín Gaite's religious outlook through the inner journeys of five female characters.
For Martín Gaite, a truly religious, or spiritual, perspective requires conscious attention to the products of the unconscious (dreams, images, memories, premonitions), followed by reflection and action, as well as a similar attentiveness and responsiveness to external events both large and small. This reconnection of the supernatural and day-to-day worlds also involves descent to the unconscious - the way to wholeness - as depicted in so many myths and fairy tales, including those which Martín Gaite used to retell or enhance the works analysed in this book: Sleeping Beauty, The Little Mermaid, Amor and Psyche, Demeter and Persephone, and the Descent of the Goddess Inanna.
Looking at the extent to which these female characters attend to, reflect on, and respond to their dreams, images, memories and events, the analysis suggests that Martín Gaite uses her stories to try to communicate both the road to her own enlightenment and warnings about paths that lead away from this.
Edited by Vivienne Aldous
Monks Eleigh Manorial Records, 1210-1683
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Monks Eleigh was one of the principal units of medieval administration, providing a legal framework for land tenure, the prosecution of crimes and misdemeanours and social control.
The manor was one of the principal units of medieval administration, providing a legal framework for land tenure, the prosecution of crimes and misdemeanours and social control. For the lord of a manor it was a source of supplies and income for the maintenance of his status and power. For the tenants the manor formed the everyday focus of their working lives, because they typically owed work services on his land and were subject to the manorial court for wrong doings, the settlement of disputes, the holding of their lands and payment of various feudal dues. Manors were the standard unit of land tenure for centuries, but they changed and developed over time and differed in their administration according to the particular custom of each manor. The records of the manor of Monks Eleigh are typical of those which still exist for hundreds of manors across England. They allow us to glimpse some of the details of the people who lived and worked there over a period of some four centuries. In the earliest extents and accounts we see a concentration on the work services which the unfree tenants were obliged to do on the lord's lands in lieu of rent, including ploughing, sowing, harrowing, harvesting, carting, ditching, hurdle-making and working in the manor vineyard. Accounts list the lord's stock of animals including oxen, horses, cattle, sheep, geese, ducks, peacocks and doves. They detail repairs to manorial buildings such as the hall, barns, mill, dovecote, sheep-cotes and gates. Court rolls record admissions of tenants to land-holdings as well as fines for misdemeanours such as trespass on growing crops, assaults and thefts. By the sixteenth century the rentals show that an increasing number of tenants were using their manorial land-holdings as investments by living elsewhere and sub-letting them.
In more general terms, these records can throw light on the development of manorial administration over time, the changing forms of land tenure, place name and surname studies, the decline in serfdom, popular unrest and social mobility.
Gretchen Walsh
The Media in Africa and Africa in the Media
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Published by Boydell & Brewer Inc.
Tomek Grabowski
Individualism and the Rise of Democracy in Poland
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A fascinating story of the rise of individualism in the formerly German Western Territories of Poland after World War II and how this new culture powered Poland's democratic-capitalist development.
What does it take for a traditional society based on the primacy of the group over the individual to change into one where the autonomous individual is the most valued actor? How does this individualism in turn shape the possibilities of democratic politics? In this provocative book, author Tomek Grabowski argues that for liberal democracy to be sustainable, a prior breakthrough to individualism is often necessary, but that individualist revolutions are among the rarest in history. They require an unlikely confluence of three distinct historical processes-a large-scale uprooting of society, a frontier experience, and a process of civic nation building-in order to succeed.
Grabowski illustrates this logic of a cultural breakthrough by focusing on the fascinating case of Poland, a country that was transformed, in the span of seventy years, from an archaic and peripheral polity into a vital component of the liberal-democratic West. The little known but central building blocks of Poland's individualist revolution included the uprooting of populations induced by the World War II, the chaotic frontier conditions that accompanied mass resettlement of the formerly German Western Territories, and the subsequent civic-educational efforts by the Catholic Church among the Polish settlers in the region. Drawing on a wealth of sources, from settlers' memoirs to contemporary interviews, Individualism and the Rise of Democracy in Poland breaks new ground with respect to both Poland's recent history and a larger cultural history of the West.
Enrico Veneziani
The Papacy and Ecclesiology of Honorius II (1124-1130)
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A complete reappraisal of the papacy of Honorius II, highlighting the strategies to which this pontificate turned in order to govern ecclesiastical institutions and to deal with secular matters.
The papacy of Honorius II (1124-1130) has often been overlooked by historians, usually considered uneventful, transitional and colourless. This book offers a complete reappraisal, drawing on a detailed examination of the surviving letters produced by the papal chancery to show that conversely, it was a vital and innovative pontificate. It argues that during what was a stabilising period for the papacy in an era of peace, Honorius and the chancery were able to enact the instruments and ecclesiological claims dictated by external threats and produced during previous papacies. In particular, it shows that by adapting the content and form of the letters it issued, Honorius's chancery, led by the official Haimeric, played a decisive role in extending the ecclesiological thinking of the papacy. Furthermore, these years paved the way for ideas which were further developed later in the twelfth century, especially the arguments created by the warring parties in the Schism of 1130 to legitimise their respective popes. This study thus presents a different view of Honorius' administration, highlighting the strategies to which the papacy turned in order both to govern ecclesiastical institutions and to deal with secular matters, when previous protocols and routines could no longer be relied upon.
Edited by Mary Boyle
International Medievalisms
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Identifies and investigates international medievalism through three distinct strands: "Internationally Nationalist", "Someone Else's Past?", and "Activist Medievalism".
Medievalism - the reception of the Middle Ages - often invokes a set of tropes generally considered 'medieval', rather than consciously engaging with medieval cultures and societies. International medievalism offers an additional interpretative layer by juxtaposing two or more national cultures, at least one of which is medieval. 'National' can be aspirational: it might refer to the area within agreed borders, or to the people who live there, but it might also describe the people who understand, or imagine, themselves to constitute a nation. And once 'medieval' becomes simply a collection of ideas, it can be re-formed as desired, cast as more geographically than historically specific, or function as a gateway to an even more nebulous past.
This collection explores medievalist media from the textual to the architectural. Subjects range from The Green Children of Woolpit to Refugee Tales, and from Viking metal to Joan of Arc. As the contributors to each section make clear, for centuries the medieval has provided material for countless competing causes and cannot be contained within historical, political, or national borders. The essays show how the medieval is repeatedly co-opted and recreated, formed as much as formative: inviting us to ask why, and in service of what.
Valentina Glajar
The Secret Police Dossier of Herta Müller
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An in-depth investigation of the Romanian secret police's file on Müller, winner of the 2009 Nobel Prize for Literature, re-creating a "file story" of her surveillance.
"Herta Müller should share her Nobel with the Securitate." This comment by a former officer in the Romanian secret police, or Securitate, was in reaction to hearing that Müller, a German writer originally from Romania, had won the 2009 Nobel Prize for Literature. Communist Romania's infamous secret police was indeed a protagonist in Müller's work, though an undesired and dreaded one: most of her writings are deeply and explicitly anchored in Ceaușescu's Romania and her own traumatic experiences with the Securitate. Müller's file traces her surveillance from 1983 until after she emigrated to West Germany in 1987. She has written extensively in reaction to reading her file, but primarily addresses its gaps, begging the question what information the file does in fact contain. This book is an in-depth investigation of Müller's file, and engages with other related files, including that of her then-husband, the writer Richard Wagner. Valentina Glajar treats the files as primary sources in order to re-create the story of Müller's surveillance by the Securitate. In such an intrusive culture of surveillance, surviving the system often meant a certain degree of entanglement: for victims, collaborators, and implicated subjects alike. Veiled in secrecy for decades, these compelling and complex documents shed light on a boundary between victims and perpetrators as porous as the Iron Curtain itself.
Edited by J.P.T. Slevin; translated by L. Lockyer
The History of Alfred of Beverley
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The first modern edition of a text which shows the suspicion with which Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain was received two decades after it first appeared.
The history of the Yorkshire secular clerk, Alfred of Beverley (c.1148 x c.1151), an important primary source in Anglo-Norman historiography, supplies a history of Britain from its supposed foundation by Brutus down to the death of Henry I in 1135. Alfred's history is of particular interest in that it is the first Insular Latin chronicle to incorporate the legendary British history of Geoffrey of Monmouth (published c.mid 1130s) within a continuous account of the island's past. In attempting to fuse the radically new Galfridian account of the past with that of the conventional twelfth-century (Bedan) view, Alfred's use and manipulation of his sources is highly revealing and suggests a quite critical reception of Geoffrey's history, a mindset which by the end of the twelfth century appears almost entirely to have disappeared amongst chroniclers.
Alfred's history is also an important, and presently undervalued, witness to the reception and dissemination of three of the most important Anglo-Norman histories: Symeon of Durham Historia Regum, The Chronicle of John of Worcester and Henry of Huntingdon, Historia Anglorum, from which works it borrows extensively. In the manner of use of these sources, the author tells us much about the ecclesiastical and intellectual interests and outlook of the period.
Edited by Agnieszka Pasieka and Pawel Rodak
Rethinking Modern Polish Identities
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A critical examination of the category of "Polishness" - that is, the formation, redefinition, and performance of various kinds of Polish identities - from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives.
Inspired by new research in the humanities and social sciences as well as recent scholarship on national identities, this volume offers a rigorous examination of the idea of Polishness. Offering a diversity of case studies and methodological-theoretical approaches, it demonstrates a profound connection between national and transnational processes and places the Polish case in a broader context. This broader context stretches from a larger Eastern European one, a usual frame of comparison, to the overseas immigrant communities. The authors, renowned scholars from Europe and the United States, thus demonstrate that an understanding of modern Polish identity means crossing not only historical but also geographical boundaries.
Consequently, the narrative on Polish identity that unfolds in the volume is a personalized and multivocal one that presents the perspectives of a wide range of subjects: peasants, workers, migrants, ethnic and sexual minorities-that is, all those actors who have been absent in grand national narratives. As such, the examination of Polishness sheds light on the identity question more broadly, emphasizing the interplay of pluralizing and homogenizing tendencies, and fostering a reflection on national identity as encompassing both sameness and difference.
Edited by Helen Fulton and Sif Rikhardsdottir
Charlemagne in the Norse and Celtic Worlds
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Essays bringing out the richness of the hitherto neglected Charlemagne tradition in medieval Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Iceland, Wales and Ireland.
The reception of the Charlemagne legends among Nordic and Celtic communities in the Middle Ages is a shared story of transmission, translation, an exploration of national identity, and the celebration of imperialism. The articles brought together here capture for the first time the richness of the Charlemagne tradition in medieval Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Iceland, Wales and Ireland and its coherence as a series of adaptations of Old French chansons de geste.
Emerging from the French sources is a set of themes which unite the linguistically different Norse and Celtic Charlemagne traditions. The ideology of the Crusades, the dichotomy of Christian and heathen elements, the values of chivalry and the ideals of kingship are among the preoccupations common to both traditions. While processes of manuscript transmission are distinctive to each linguistic context, the essential function of the legends as explorations of political ideology, emotion, and social values creates unity across the language groups. From the Old Norse Karlamagnús saga to the Irish and Welsh narratives, the chapters present a coherent set of perspectives on the northern reception of the Charlemagne legends beyond the nation of England.
Contributors: Massimiliano Bampi, Claudia Bornholdt, Aisling Byrne, Luciana Cordo Russo, Helen Fulton, Jon Paul Heyne, Susanne Kramarz-Bein, Erich Poppe, Annalee C. Rejhon, Sif Rikhardsdottir, Hélène Tétrel.
Edited by Janet H. Stevenson
The Register of Richard Praty, Bishop of Chichester, 1438-1445
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A rare survival among Chichester registers, this gives a full and rounded picture of the diocese during a period when many other church records are thin and formulaic.
This is one of only three surviving Chichester bishops' registers, and the last to be published. It gives a full and detailed picture of church life during the middle years of Henry VI's reign, and so presents a valuable corrective to the period as one dominated by political strife. Richard Praty was an Oxford-trained theologian, an expert on the treatment of heretics, and a conscientious resident diocesan who worked hard to uphold standards, to ordain clergy, and yet to fulfil his obligations to the crown. It is among the richest and fullest of any bishop's register of the fifteenth century, and paints a true picture, warts and all, of the late-medieval English church.
Edited by Christopher Dyer
Changing Approaches to Local History: Warwickshire History and its Historians
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Develops an understanding of Warwickshire's past for outsiders and those already engaged with the subject, and to explore questions which apply in other regions, including those outside the United Kingdom.
Published to mark the one hundredth anniversary of the Dugdale Society, which publishes Warwickshire's records, this book brings together a range of scholars - early career researchers, tenured academics, independent scholars and an archivist - all with records of excellence in research and writing, who cover a range of political, social, economic, cultural, architectural and religious subjects from the eleventh to the twentieth centuries. Besides providing original and well-researched interpretations of Warwickshire's past, the book goes further to discuss and analyse the ways in which writing of local history has changed over the last hundred years, paying particular attention to meanings and explanations that have emerged in recent times, from which future developments can be expected. As such the book will appeal not just to those interested in the local history of Warwickshire, but also to everyone concerned with local history in general, and how it should be studied and written.
Luis A. Medina Cordova
Imagining Ecuador
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How are contemporary authors reimagining the idea of 'Ecuador' following the worst financial crisis in the nation's history, and how do countries on the periphery of the global literary market challenge and enrich World Literature?
Winner of the 2020-21 AHGBI-Spanish Embassy Publication Prize
In March 1999, in an effort to stave off financial collapse, the Ecuadorian government suspended all banking operations and froze all bank accounts in the country for a period of five days. This episode, the Feriado Bancario, represents the peak of the worst financial crisis in the nation's history and one which had far-reaching and long-last effects on society, politics, the economy, and cultural production. The very idea of 'Ecuador' was transformed, as Ecuador became a country marked by constant interaction with the world beyond its borders.
This book explores how contemporary Ecuadorian authors are reimagining the nation following the Feriado Bancario. Starting from a rereading of Ecuador's national novel, Jorge Icaza's Huasipungo (1930), which saw the nation as rooted in the land, the book examines post-crisis fiction which offers an image of Ecuador as a transnational space. It posits that these novels - Eliécer Cárdenas' El oscuro final del Porvenir (2000), Leonardo Valencia's Kazbek (2008), Carlos Arcos' Memorias de Andrés Chiliquinga (2013), and Gabriela Alemán's Humo (2017) - both reflect and explain the new reality of Ecuador as a nation that can no longer be defined by its territory. At the same time, the book uses the Ecuadorian case to challenge the conceptualisation of Latin American literature as 'post-national' and to show how countries on the periphery of the global literary market can, from the very fact of their minoritarian position, enrich and better define World Literature.
Lisa Elena Fuchs
A Political Ecology of Kenya’s Mau Forest
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A timely and important examination of the environmental crises, investigating their biophysical, political, economic, and socio-cultural aspects, that reveals why previous conservation efforts failed.
The eastern part of the Mau Forest, the most important closed-canopy forest in East Africa, has come under severe threat since the 1990s. In this political ecology Lisa Fuchs exploring the failure of the government-led forest restoration and rehabilitation initiative to 'Save the Mau', launched in 2009, the author examines two of the most contentious issues in Kenya since colonial times: land and the environment. She sheds light on the structural factors and the role of individuals in the forest's destruction and of non-protection and traces the colonial legacy of post-independent environmental conservation policies and practices. In doing so, Fuchs demonstrates that the Mau crisis is more than an environmental crisis: it is also a political, an economic, and a socio-cultural crisis. Though a detailed empirical analysis, the author shows that the 'Mau crisis' led to the near collapse of landscapes and livelihoods in the Mau Forest ecosystem. She traces the implementation of insufficient conservation programmes, which resulted from historical path-dependency and the adoption of global environmental governance blueprints, forest allocation and benefits, and exposes a forest management system that prioritises commercial forest production over biodiversity conservation. Access and entitlements to the highly fertile forest land, and the amalgamation of forest rehabilitation with the reclamation of grabbed public forest are emphasised as a further core contributor to the crisis. The socio-cultural dynamics within and among various forest-dwelling communities, including the indigenous hunting and gathering Ogiek and 'in-migrant' groups, are also analysed. The book highlights that local types of environmentalism are caught between the 'invention of traditions' and 'perverse modernisation' and shows the contradictory effects of the celebrated, highly anticipated but poorly executed 'Save the Mau' initiative, and how the presence of political will to maintain the crisis conditioned its perseverance. Finally, the book proposes realistic alternatives to sustainable forest management in politicised environments, whose relevance and applicability are considerable in this age of anthropogenic 'environmental' crises and conflicts.
Published in association with IFRA/AFRICAE
Christina Kenny
Reimagining the Gendered Nation
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Explores the complex and intersecting dimensions of gender, ethnicity, and culture on women in the Global South, as well as the central roles of women in resisting colonial rule, and their foundational contributions to post-independence constitutional reform and nation building.
For all the effort and attention women across the Global South receive from the international human rights community and from their own governments, human rights frameworks frequently fail to significantly improve the lives of these women or their communities. Taking Kenya as a case study, this book explores the reasons for this, emphasising the need to understand the effects of the legacy of local colonial and postcolonial histories on the production of gendered identities and power in modern Kenyan cultural and political life. Drawing on interviews with women in Nairobi and rural areas around Lake Victoria in Kenya, the author examinestheir access to, and experiences of, civil and political rights and citizenship, beginning with the colonial encounter, following these legacies into modern times, and the promulgation of the 2010 Constitution. In four thematic chapters, Kenny discusses women as victims and objects of cultural violence, the myths of the sorority of African women, women as victims of political and state violence, and women as actors in national political processes. In revealing that international human rights interventions have in fact reproduced the very patterns, structures, and hierarchies which are at the core of women's disenfranchisement and marginalization, the book provides new insights into the difficulties women face in accessing their rights and will be invaluable for scholars and NGOs working in developing states.
Published in association with the British Institute in Eastern Africa.
William Hepburn
The Household and Court of James IV of Scotland, 1488-1513
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Offers a fresh perspective on the role of the court in late medieval Scotland, framing it within the wider field of court studies, highlighting its centrality to the effective government for which James IV is renowned.
James IV is regarded by many historians as the most charismatic and politically successful of Scotland's rulers, with his royal court, and the institution of the royal household which underpinned it, at the heart of his reign. This book, the first comprehensive examination of the subject, takes the structures and personnel of the household - from councillors to stable-hands - as the foundation for its study of the court and its role.
Beginning by looking at the distinction between household and court and the structures imposed by the household on the court, Hepburn utilises this framework to explore the lives of the people moving within it, both in terms of their duties as royal servants and their broader social and political worlds. The book argues that these people were both audience and performer in the court, receiving and producing messages about the king, royal government and the status of groups and individuals. Association with the household also became a feature of life for people away from the court, through the household-related terms in which they were described and through the lands they held. Overall, it highlights the central role of the court in the effective conduct of royal government for which James IV is renowned.
Edited by Donal Cooper and Beth Williamson
Late Medieval Italian Art and its Contexts
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Joanna Cannon's scholarship and teaching have helped shape the historical study of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Italian art; this essay collection by her former students is a tribute to her work.
The essays collected here form a tribute to Joanna Cannon, whose scholarship and teaching have done so much to shape the historical study of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Italian art. Her teaching lies at the heart of this book, as its chapters are all written by those who gained their doctorates under her supervision. The reach of her interests and expertise is also reflected in its range of subjects. The book is unified by its concentration on Italian art, history, and material culture, spanning the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries; but within that scope the individual essays focus on an impressive variety of subjects, across many media, including panel painting, wall painting, architecture, sculpture, metalwork, manuscripts, and gilded glass. Ranging across Italy, from Bologna, to Siena, to Assisi, to Florence, they address key themes in the field, such as artistic patronage, sainthood and sanctity, the visual culture of the mendicant orders, devotional practice, and civic religion. Some essays bring fresh approaches to familiar material (Ambrogio Lorenzetti's Saint Nicholas panels, the frescoes in Siena's Palazzo Pubblico, Simone Martini's Holy Family), while others illuminate objects and images that are less well known (the central panel of the Santa Chiara triptych in Trieste, and the statue of Saint Francis in San Francesco in Siena). As a collection they combine to make an important contribution to the study of Early Italian art, seeking thereby to echo the extraordinary contribution of Joanna Cannon's own work to that field.
Maria Stehle
Plants, Places, and Power
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Examines portrayals of plants and landscapes in recent German novels and films, addressing the contemporary forms of racism, nationalism, and social and ecological injustice that they expose.
Plants, Places, and Power is a study of plants and landscapes in and beyond contemporary German-language literature and film. Stories and images of plants and landscapes in cultural productions are key sites for exposing the violent legacies of German colonialism and Nazism and for addressing contemporary forms of racism, nationalism, social and ecological injustice, and gender inequity. The novels and films discussed in this book address these key political issues in contemporary Europe and propose alternative ways for people to live together on this planet by formulating more inclusive and sustainable concepts of belonging. The book has two main objectives: to offer new approaches to contemporary literature and film from an intersectional, ecological perspective, and to form a canon. All of the works focused on, from Mo Asumang's documentary film Roots Germania (2007) through Faraz Shariat's Futur Drei (2020) and from Yōko Tawada's novel Das nackte Auge (2004) to Saša Stanišić's Herkunft (2019), are by female artists, artists of color, artists who have experienced forced displacement, and/or queer artists. In five chapters, Maria Stehle reads artworks in reference to ecological systems, develops forms of eco- and social criticism based on art, and intertwines ecological and critical thinking with questions of form, affect, and aesthetics.
Carl Kears
MS Junius 11 and its Poetry
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A fresh close reading of the texts of one of the four surviving major manuscripts of Old English poetry, reappraising Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Junius 11 to discover some of the preoccupations of its compliers.
Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Junius 11 is one of the four major manuscripts of Old English poetry to survive and the only one of these to have had a planned sequence of illuminations. Junius 11 is made up of different poems - Genesis A, Genesis B, Exodus, Daniel and Christ and Satan - compiled to resemble a long narrative that represents salvation history from its violent origins to its Last Days. While the poems draw inspiration from biblical, apocryphal and commentary traditions, they combine in the manuscript to create powerful effects that can also be understood through an appreciation of the distinctive craft and complexity of early medieval vernacular verse. But can the language of the poetry within the manuscript tell us anything about the aims of the Junius 11 project, or the preoccupations of its compilers?
This book approaches Junius 11 as an ambitious poetic endeavour that was designed to offer counsel through the medium of Old English verbal art. Tracing thematic language across and between the poems, and offering close readings of them in their manuscript context, MS Junius 11 and its Poetry argues that it is early medieval political ideas represented by the Old English words ræd (good counsel) and unræd (ill counsel) that emerge as the key components underlying the central conflicts of the history of humankind the makers of this manuscript sought to create. The poems themselves, by giving us many examples of rulers and leaders falling to ruin, have the potential to offer their own ræd to those who may have found themselves in relatable positions. But Junius 11 demands work for such gifts. Its poems generate impressions cumulatively and collectively, offering instruction to those who might build connections across pages, demanding audiences become attentive and active readers so that they might find solace and advice in a world that moves towards destruction.
Rose A. Sawyer
The Medieval Changeling
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The first comprehensive study of medieval changelings and associated attitudes to the health and care of children in the period.
The changeling - a monstrous creature swapped for a human child by malevolent powers - is an enduring image in the popular imagination; dubbing a child a changeling is traditionally understood as a way to justify the often-violent rejection of a disabled or ailing infant. Belief in the reality of changelings is famously attested in Stephen of Bourbon's disapproving thirteenth-century account of rites at the shrine of Saint Guinefort the Holy Greyhound, where sick children were brought to be cured. However, the focus on the St. Guinefort rituals has meant some scholarly neglect of the wealth of other sources of knowledge (including mystery plays and medical texts) and the nuances with which the changeling motif was used in this period.
This interdisciplinary study considers the idea of the changeling as a cultural construct through an examination of a broad range of medical, miracle, and imaginative texts, as well as the lives of three more conventional Saints, Stephen, Bartholomew and Lawrence, who, in their infancy, were said to have been replaced by a demonic changeling. The author highlights how people from all walks of life were invested in both creating and experiencing the images, texts and artefacts depicting these changelings, and examines societal tensions regarding infants and children: their health, their care, and their position within the familial unit.
Edited by Stephen M. Hart and Alexander Samson
Philip IV and the World of Spain’s Rey Planeta
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Did Spain fall into decline or flourish in the seventeenth century?
This edited collection looks at perceptions and representations of Philip IV, Spain's 'Planet King', and his government against the backdrop of the seventeenth-century General Crisis in Europe, wars, revolutions and a sovereign debt crisis. Scholars often associate Philip's reign (1621-1665) with decline, decadence, crisis, stagnation and adversity (as did many contemporaries); yet the glittering cultural and artistic achievements (enhanced by his patronage) of the period led it to be dubbed 'the' Golden Age. The book analyses these contradictions, examining Philip's own understanding of kingship and how he and his courtiers used art and ceremony to project an image of strength, tradition, culture and prestige, while, at the same time, the empire grappled with revolts in Europe and falling trade with its New World colonies.
Edited by Jane E. Everson
Charlemagne in Italy
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An exploration of the many depictions of Charlemagne in the Italian tradition of chivalric narratives in verse and prose.
Chivalric tales and narratives concerning Charlemagne were composed and circulated in Italy from the early fourteenth to the mid-sixteenth century (and indeed subsequently flourished in forms of popular theatre which continue today). But are they history or fiction? Myth or fact? Cultural memory or deliberate appropriation? Elite culture or popular entertainment? Oral or written, performed or read? Beginning in the age of Dante with the earliest tales composed for Italians in the hybrid language of Franco-Italian, which draw inspiration from the French tradition of Charlemagne narratives, the volume considers the compositions of anonymous reciters of cantari and the prose versions of the Florentine Andrea da Barberino, before discussing the major literary contributions to the genre by Luigi Pulci, Matteo Maria Boiardo and Ludovico Ariosto. The focus throughout is on the ways in which the portrait of Charlemagne, seen as both Emperor and King of France, is persistently ambiguous, affected by the contemporary political situation and historical events such as invasion and warfare. He emerges through these texts in myriad guises, from positive and admirable to negative and despised.
Amy Faulkner
Wealth and the Material World in the Old English Alfredian Corpus
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WINNER: 2025 Beatrice White Prize
A new, materialistic reading of the Alfredian corpus, drawing on diverse approaches from thing theory to Augustinian principles of use and enjoyment to uncover how these works explore the material world.
The Old English prose translations traditionally attributed to Alfred the Great (versions of Gregory's Regula pastoralis, Boethius' De consolatione philosophiae, Augustine's Soliloquia and the first fifty Psalms) urge detachment from the material world; but despite this, its flotsam and jetsam, from costly treasures to everyday objects, abound within them.
This book reads these original and inventive translations from a materialist perspective, drawing on approaches as diverse as thing theory and Augustine's principles of use and enjoyment. By focussing on the material, it offers a fresh interpretation of this group of translations, bringing out their complex, often contradictory, relationship with the material world. It demonstrates that, as in the poetic tradition, wealth in Alfredian literature is not simply a tool to be used, or something to be enjoyed in excess; rather, in moving away from these two static binaries, it shows that wealth is a current, flowing both horizontally, as an exchange of gifts between humans, and vertically, as a salvific current between earth and heaven. The prose translations are situated in the context of Old English poetry, including Beowulf, The Wanderer, The Seafarer, the Exeter Book Riddles and The Dream of the Rood.
Tomasz Gałuszka and Paweł Kras
The Beguines of Medieval Świdnica
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Documents recording the interrogation of sixteen women and the nature of their unusual spiritual practices, now available in a full edition and, for the first time, a full English translation.
In September 1332, in the town of Świdnica, an important economic and communication centre of what was then Silesia, a group of sixteen women stood before the Dominican inquisitor, John of Schwenkenfeld, to testify about the local community of beguines, who called themselves the Hooded Sisters or the Daughters of Odelindis. We are fortunate that the original records of this heresy interrogation have survived, preserved as a notarial instrument drawn up shortly afterwards, eventually transferred to the Papal Curia, and now kept in the Vatican Library. The documents provide unique insights into the everyday life and spirituality of this group of lay women, as they attempted to adopt the ideals of vita apostolica. They lived in the strict poverty they thought necessary for spiritual perfection, and took part in austere ascetic practices, including regular flagellation and a strict diet regime, aiming to mortify sinful flesh and help them achieve mystical union with God.
Using this evidence, the authors of this book piece together a sense of who these interrogated beguines were and the nature of their spiritual practices. Were they pious illiterates, or self-trained theologians, keenly interested in debates around the doctrine of such intellectuals as Master Eckhart, John Duns Scotus and Thomas Aquinas? The book also addresses the nature of their interrogation and the conduct of Friar John of Schwenkenfeld. And it contains a full edition and, for the first time, a full English translation of the documents themselves.
Pablo Bradbury
Liberationist Christianity in Argentina (1930-1983)
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How did liberationist Christianity develop in Argentina between the 1930s and early 1970s? And how did it respond to state terrorism during the Dirty War?
Understanding the movement to be dynamic and highly diverse, this book reveals that ecclesial and political conflicts, especially over Peronism and celibacy, were at the heart of the construction of a liberationist Christian identity, which simultaneously internalised deep tensions over its relationship to the Catholic Church. It first situates the rise of a revolutionary Christian impulse in Argentina within changes in society, in Catholicism and Protestantism and in Marxism in the 1930s, before analysing how the phenomenon coalesced in the late sixties into a coherent social movement. Finally, the book examines the responses of liberationist Christians to the intense period of repression under the presidency of Isabel Perón and the rule of the military junta between 1974 and 1983.
By exploring these distinct responses and uncovering the heterogeneity of liberationist Christianity, the book offers a fresh analysis of a movement that occupies a major role in the popular memory of the period of state terror, and provides a corrective to narratives that depict the movement as monolithic or as a passive victim of the dictatorship.
Mario Higa
Machado de Assis
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A lively and accessible introduction to Machado de Assis and his work
Machado de Assis (1839-1908) is a world-class writer and arguably the greatest of Brazilian literature. Susan Sontag deemed him "the greatest writer ever produced in Latin America," and Harold Bloom, "the supreme black literary artist to date." John Updike called him a "master," and Carlos Fuentes, a "miracle." This book guides the reader through Machado's biography, times, and critical reception and examines his various personas - the translator, poet, playwright, critic, cronista, short story writer, and novelist - paying particular attention to his fictional prose, which most clearly conveys his acerbic criticism of Brazilian society and his deft view of the human condition. The book closes with an updated list of Machado's works available in English translation and a selection of further critical studies.
Edited by Anya Adair and Andrew Rabin
Law, Literature, and Social Regulation in Early Medieval England
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Valuable new insights into the multi-layered and multi-directional relationship of law, literature, and social regulation in pre-Conquest English society.
Pre-Conquest English law was among the most sophisticated in early medieval Europe. Composed largely in the vernacular, it played a crucial role in the evolution of early English identity and exercised a formative influence on the development of the Common Law. However, recent scholarship has also revealed the significant influence of these legal documents and ideas on other cultural domains, both modern and pre-modern. This collection explores the richness of pre-Conquest legal writing by looking beyond its traditional codified form. Drawing on methodologies ranging from traditional philology to legal and literary theory, and from a diverse selection of contributors offering a broad spectrum of disciplines, specialities and perspectives, the essays examine the intersection between traditional juridical texts - from law codes and charters to treatises and religious regulation - and a wide range of literary genres, including hagiography and heroic poetry. In doing so, they demonstrate that the boundary that has traditionally separated "law" from other modes of thought and writing is far more porous than hitherto realized. Overall, the volume yields valuable new insights into the multi-layered and multi-directional relationship of law, literature, and social regulation in pre-Conquest English society.
Rebecca Brackmann
Old English Scholarship in the Seventeenth Century
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Old English scholars of the mid-seventeenth century lived through some of the most turbulent times in English history, but the upheaval inspired them to produce landmark texts in early Old English studies.
England in the 1640s and 1650s experienced civil wars, regicide, and unprecedented debate over religious and social structures, but it also saw several milestones in the field of early medieval English studies. This book argues that the scholars of Old English who produced these works did so not in spite but because of the intense political upheaval surrounding them. The opening chapters examine the book collecting and lexicographic endeavors of the Parliamentarian Simonds D'Ewes, sponsor of the professorship of "Saxon" at Cambridge University, and Abraham Wheelock's pro-Stuart "Old English" poetry and the puritan overtones of his edition of the Old English Historia Ecclesiastica. It then moves on to consider the constitutionalist Roger Twysden's depiction of early English laws as the cornerstone for English identity in his edition of Archaionomia and the Leges Henrici Primi; and the royalist and Laudian bent of both William Somner's chorographic work and his Dictionarium Saxonico-Latino-Anglicum, the first printed dictionary of Old English. It concludes by an exploration of the way in which William Dugdale deployed early medieval events to comment on his present day in his monumental county history, Antiquities of Warwickshire. The volume as a whole suggests that the crises through which these scholars lived and worked spurred their research to engage with both the past and present, using Old English texts as a lens through which to view understand and contribute to contemporary debates about the English church and state.
Richard Rastall with Andrew Taylor
Minstrels and Minstrelsy in Late Medieval England
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A major new study piecing together the intriguing but fragmentary evidence surrounding the lives of minstrels to highlight how these seemingly peripheral figures were keenly involved with all aspects of late medieval communities.
Minstrels were a common sight and sound in the late Middle Ages. Aristocrats, knights and ladies heard them on great occasions (such as Edward I's wedding feast for his daughter Elizabeth in 1296) and in quieter moments in their chambers; town-dwellers heard and saw them in civic processions (when their sound drew attention to the spectacle); and even in the countryside people heard them at weddings, church-ales and other parish celebrations. But who were the minstrels, and what did they do? How did they live, and how easily did they make a living? How did they perform, and in what conditions? The evidence is intriguing but fragmentary, including literary and iconographic sources and, most importantly, the financial records of royal and aristocratic households and of towns. These offer many insights, although they are often hard to fit into any coherent picture of the minstrels' lives and their place in society. It is easy to see the minstrels as peripheral figures, entertainers who had no central place in the medieval world. Yet they were full members of it, interacting with the ordinary people around them, as well as with the ruling classes: carrying letters and important verbal messages, some lending huge sums of money to the king (to finance Henry V's Agincourt campaign in 1415, for instance), some regular and necessary civic servants, some committing crimes or suffering the crimes of others. In this book Rastall and Taylor bring to bear the available evidence to enlarge and enrich our view of the minstrel in late medieval society.
Jacqueline M. Burek
Literary Variety and the Writing of History in Britain's Long Twelfth Century
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A survey of the different literary forms adopted by history writers after the Conquest, exploring why and for what effects they were used.
Histories of Britain composed during the "twelfth-century renaissance" display a remarkable amount of literary variety (Latin varietas). Furthermore, British historians writing after the Norman Conquest often draw attention to the differing forms of their texts. But why would historians of this period associate literary variety with the work of history-writing? Drawing on theories of literary variety found in classical and medieval rhetoric, this book traces how British writers came to believe that varietas could help them construct comprehensive, continuous accounts of Britain's past. It shows how Latin prose historians, such as William of Malmesbury, Henry of Huntingdon, and Geoffrey of Monmouth, filled their texts with a diverse array of literary forms, which they carefully selected and ordered in accordance with their broader historiographical aims. The pronounced literary variety of these influential histories inspired some Middle English verse chroniclers, including Laȝamon and Robert Mannyng, to adopt similar principles in their vernacular poetry. By uncovering the rhetorical and historiographical theories beneath their literary variety, this book provides a new framework for interpreting the stylistic and organizational choices of medieval historians.
Edited by Michael Snape and Stuart Bell
British Christianity and the Second World War
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Examines the role of Christianity in British statecraft, politics, media, the armed forces and in the education and socialization of the young during the Second World War.
This volume presents a major reappraisal of the role of Christianity in Great Britain between 1939 and 1945, examining the influence of Christianity on British society, statecraft, politics, the media, the armed forces, and on the education and socialization of the young. Its chapters address themes such as the spiritual mobilization of nation and empire; the limitations of Mass Observation's commentary on wartime religious life; Catholic responses to strategic bombing; servicemen and the dilemma of killing; the development of Christian-Jewish relations, and the predicament of British military chaplains in Germany in the summer of 1945.
By demonstrating the enduring -even renewed- importance of Christianity in British national life, British Christianity and the Second World War also sets the scene for some major post-war developments. Though the war years triggered a 'resacralization' of British society and culture, inherent racism meant that the exalted self-image of Christian Britain proved sadly deceptive for post-war immigrants from the Caribbean. Wartime confidence in the prospective role of the state in religious education soon transpired to be ill-founded, while the profound upheavals of war -and even the bromides of 'BBC Religion'- were, in the longer term, corrosive of conventional religious practice and traditional denominational loyalties.
This volume will be of interest to historians of British society and the Second World War, twentieth-century British religion, and the perennial interplay of religion and conflict.
Neil Cartlidge
Medieval Marriage
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Evidence for medieval thinking about marriage, drawn from a number of literary texts.
This book uses literary texts to trace the development of medieval thinking about marriage in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, taking into account not only important developments in theological and legal thinking about marriage during this period, but conventions such as `courtly love', which affect its portrayal in literary texts. The focus of this study is upon England, and specifically three groups of texts linked together by English manuscripts -the `AB'-Group, containing the Ancrene Wisse; The Owl and the Nightingale and its companion-pieces; and finally the Life of St Christina of Markyate and the Chanson de Saint Alexiswhich she once owned. The author demonstrates the continuity of these texts in their attitude towards marriage, along with continental works such as the letters of Abelard and Heloise, and Chrétien de Troyes' Erec et Enide. Throughout, the volume clearly and accessibly shows how the imaginative literature of the period participated in the evolution of a new and enduring ideology of marriage. Dr NEIL CARTLIDGEis a Research Fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford.
Adrian Wright
Melody in the Dark
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A comprehensive reassessment of British musical films 1946-1972 including King's Rhapsody, Beat Girl, The Tommy Steele Story, Rock You Sinners, The Golden Disc, and Oliver!
Acting as a sequel to Adrian Wright's Cheer Up! British Musical Films, 1929-1945 (Boydell, 2020), Melody in the Dark offers the first major reassessment of the British musical film from the end of Second World War up to the beginning of the 1970s. In the immediate post-war world, British studios sought to reflect fast-changing social attitudes as they struggled to create inventive diversions in an effort to rival American competition. Hollywood stars Errol Flynn, Vera-Ellen, Jayne Mansfield and Judy Garland were among those brought in to provide Hollywood glamour.
Embedded in the British consciousness, the operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan were represented in three productions. Studios occasionally attempted adaptations of British stage musicals, among them King's Rhapsody and Expresso Bongo, and sexploitation movies turned musical via Secrets of a Windmill Girl and Beat Girl. It was left to minor studios to acknowledge the impact of rock'n'roll on social change in three early films, The Tommy Steele Story, Rock You Sinners and the iconic The Golden Disc. Through the sixties, British cinema seemed intent on flooding the market with entertainments promoting pop singers and rock groups such as Cliff Richard, Billy Fury and The Beatles. Towards the end of the period, it aspired to more grandiose projects such as Oliver! and Oh! What a Lovely War.
Edited by David Pratt
English Coronation Ordines in the Ninth and Early Tenth Centuries
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New editions and translations of the two earliest texts for the rite of royal anointing in Anglo-Saxon England.
This volume provides new editions and translations of the two earliest texts for the rite of royal anointing in Anglo-Saxon England. The First Ordo, believed to go back to the ninth century, perhaps even a little before, is the earliest surviving coronation liturgy from anywhere in the West. The compilation of the Second English Ordo has been assigned to the late ninth or early tenth century. David Pratt's edition and translation presents this extremely important material in a scholarly but fully accessible way for the first time. New editions are desirable, not only for the intrinsic value of scrutinizing the text and transmission history of both ordines, but for the light which can be cast on the early history of the rite of royal anointing in England. That history is a subject which unfortunately cannot be studied with reference to any single, authoritative manuscript, but must rather be explored comparatively, by looking across the manuscript record of later Anglo-Saxon and Frankish pontificals, and by identifying patterns of development.
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