Key book in Whiteness Studies that engages with the different ways in which the last white minority in Africa to give way to majority rule has adjusted to the arrival of democracy and the different modes of transition from "settlers" to "citizens".
How have whites adjusted to, contributed to and detracted from democracy in South Africa since 1994? Engaging with the literature on 'whiteness' and the current trope that the democratic settlement has failed, this book provides a study of how whites in the last bastion of 'white minority rule' in Africa have adapted to the sweeping political changes they have encountered. It examines the historical context of white supremacy and minority rule, in the past, and the white withdrawal from elsewhere on the African continent. Drawing on focus groups held across the country, Southall explores the difficult issue of 'memory', how whites seek to grapple with the history of apartheid, and how this shapes their reactions to political equality. He argues that whites cannot be regarded as a homogeneous political grouping concluding that while the overwhelming majority of white South Africans feared the coming of democracy during the years of late apartheid, they recognised its inevitability. Many of their fears were, in effect, to be recognised by the Constitution, which embedded individual rights, including those to property and private schooling, alongside the important principle of proportionality of political representation. While a small minority of whites chose to emigrate, the large majority had little choice but to adjust to the democratic settlement which, on the whole, they have done - and in different ways. It was only a small right wing which sought to actively resist; others have sought to withdraw from democracy into social enclaves; but others have embraced democracy actively, either enthusiastically welcoming its freedoms or engaging with its realities in defence of 'minority rights'. Whites may have been reluctant to accept democracy, but democrats - of a sort - they have become, and notwithstanding a significant racialisation of politics in post-apartheid South Africa, they remain an important segment of the "rainbow", although dangers lurk in the future unless present inequalities of both race and class are challenged head on.
African Sun Media: South Africa
Emily Kesling
Medical Texts in Anglo-Saxon Literary Culture
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Winner of the Best First Monograph from the International Society for the Study of Early Medieval England (ISSEME) 2021.
An examination of the Old English medical collections, arguing that these texts are products of a learned intellectual culture.
Four complete medical collections survive from Anglo-Saxon England. These were first edited by Oswald Cockayne in the nineteenth century and came to be known by the names Bald's Leechbook, Leechbook III, the Lacnunga, and the Old English Pharmacopeia. Together these works represent the earliest complete collections of medical material in a western vernacular language. This book examines these texts as products of a learned literary culture. While earlier scholarship tended to emphasise the relationship of these works to folk belief or popular culture, this study suggests that all four extant collections were probably produced in major ecclesiastical centres. It examines the collections individually, emphasising their differences of content and purpose, while arguing that each consistently displays connections with an elite intellectual culture. The final chapter considers the fundamentally positive depiction of doctors and medicine found within literary and ecclesiastical works from the period and suggests that the high esteem for medicine in literate circles may have favoured the study and translation of medical texts.
Norris J. Lacy, Martha Asher
Lancelot-Grail: 9. The Post-Vulgate Cycle. The Quest for the Holy Grail and The Death of Arthur
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The revised version of The Quest of the Holy Grail gives a greater role to Perceval, and introduces a number of knights not found in the Vulgate; but the largest change is that much of the story of Tristan (and of his rivalPalamedes) is incorporated into the story. The achievement of the Grail quest centres on Galahad's healing of Pellehan, which has to be accomplished before the knights can reach the Grail itself. The Death of Arthur is little more than a relatively brief postscript, bringing the story of the adventures of the kingdom of Logres to an end; Lancelot and Guenevere are revealed as lovers, and Arthur fights both Lancelot and then the Romans. Despite thisvictory, he is betrayed and killed by Mordred, as has been foreshadowed from the outset of the new material. The romance ends with king Mark of Cornwall's death when he attempts to kill Lancelot and Bors at the hermitage to whichthey have retreated. For a full description of the Post-Vulgate Cycle see the blurb for the complete set.
Stephen M. Hart
A Companion to Latin American Literature
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The evolution of Latin American literature.
A Companion to Latin American Literature offers a lively and informative introduction to the most significant literary works produced in Latin America from the fifteenth century until the present day. It shows how the press, and its product the printed word, functioned as the common denominator binding together, in different ways over time, the complex and variable relationship between the writer, the reader and the state. The meandering story of the evolution of Latin American literature - from the letters of discovery written by Christopher Columbus and Vaz de Caminha, via the Republican era at the end of the nineteenth century when writers in Rio de Janeiro as much as inBuenos Aires were beginning to live off their pens as journalists and serial novelists, until the 1960s when writers of the quality of Clarice Lispector in Brazil and García Márquez in Colombia suddenly burst onto the world stage- is traced chronologically in six chapters which introduce the main writers in the main genres of poetry, prose, the novel, drama, and the essay. A final chapter evaluates the post-boom novel, testimonio, Latino and Brazuca literature, gay, Afro-Hispanic and Afro-Brazilian literature, along with the Novel of the New Millennium. This study also offers suggestions for further reading.
STEPHEN M. HART is Professor of Hispanic Studies, UniversityCollege London, and Profesor Honorario, Universidad de San Marcos, Lima
Ramon Muntaner
The Catalan Expedition to the East
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Ramon Muntaner's account of the bloody adventures of the Almogaver army under Roger of Flor in the eastern Mediterranean in the early fourteenth century, one of the most spellbinding narratives of medieval European literature.
Before its definitive fall into Turkish hands, the Byzantine Empire was the target of adventurers of many nations. Outstanding among these groups was the Almogaver army led by Roger of Flor, composed of mercenaries hardened in thewar between the Catalan and Angevin dynasties for domination of Sicily. The Catalan presence in Constantinople aroused suspicion among the Greek nobility who assassinated Roger of Flor and tried to exterminate his men. The devastating reaction of those who escaped the slaughter led to Catalan control of broad swathes of the Empire, including Athens. Ramon Muntaner, one of the ringleaders of the expedition, recounted the adventures of the Almogaver army inthe eastern Mediterranean in the fascinating section of his Chronicle translated here. The preface is by N. D. Hillgarth.
Dr. Robert D. Hughes is a translator and researcher with particular expertise in the fields of fine art, the history of ideas and Catalan culture.
Published in association with Editorial Barcino
Ciaran Arthur
'Charms', Liturgies, and Secret Rites in Early Medieval England
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A re-evaluation of the mysterious "charms" found in Anglo-Saxon literature, arguing for their place in mainstream Christian rites.
Since its inception in the nineteenth century, the genre of Anglo-Saxon charms has drawn the attention of many scholars and appealed to enthusiasts of magic, paganism, and popular religion. Their Christian nature has been widely acknowledged in recent years, but their position within mainstream liturgical traditions has not yet been fully recognised. In this book, Ciaran Arthur undertakes a wide-ranging investigation of the genre to better understand how early English ecclesiastics perceived these rituals and why they included them in manuscripts were written in high-status minsters. Evidence from the entire corpus of Old English, various surviving manuscript sources, and rich Christian theological traditions suggests that contemporary scribes and compilers did not perceive "charms" as anything other than Christian rituals that belonged to diverse, mainstream liturgical practices. The book thus challenges the notion that there was any such thing as an Anglo-Saxon "charm", and offers alternative interpretations of these texts as creative para-liturgical rituals or liturgical rites, which testify to the diversity of early medieval English Christianity. When considered in their contemporary ecclesiastical and philosophical contexts, even the most enigmatic rituals, previously dismissed as mere "gibberish", begin to emerge as secret, deliberately obscured texts with hidden spiritual meaning.
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.
Jennifer Battaglia
The Reflector
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Incorporates etymology, history, art, drawing, and reflective writing to support medical students in the integration of the science and humanity of anatomy.
A comprehensive and holistic understanding of human anatomy is foundational to the care of patients. The Reflector is an innovative and interdisciplinary approach to the learning of human anatomy; it incorporates etymology, history, art, drawing, and reflective writing to integrate the learning of anatomical structures with the nonanatomical curriculum of the anatomy lab, thus establishing the foundation for a biopsychosocial approach to medicine. To develop visual skills, this work features drawings that illustrate the original inspirations for anatomical terminology while also providing the space to artistically reimagine these structures. Together, these activities enhance the comprehension and retention of anatomical information for application in medical sciences. The Reflector employs thought-provoking questions that emphasize humanity in anatomy, in order to prompt consideration of the anatomical structures beyond basic science. Reflecting on the experiences of anatomical dissections, specifically in relation to development of habits of mind necessary for patient- and family-centered care, continually connects students to the purpose of their studies - to become a knowledgeable, compassionate, self-aware, reflective, and skilled member of a healing profession. Edited by a medical student with a Master's of Science degree in Medical Humanities; an anatomical science faculty member dedicated to the holistically educated medical provider; an expert in visual learning and self-reflection; and a bioethicist, The Reflector is a valuable resource for all who want to understand the human in human anatomy.
Mical Raz
The Lobotomy Letters
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Drawing from original correspondence penned by lobotomy patients and their families as well as from the professional papers of lobotomy pioneer and neurologist Walter Freeman, The Lobotomy Letters gives an account of the widespread acceptance of this controversial procedure.
The rise and widespread acceptance of psychosurgery constitutes one of the most troubling chapters in the history of modern medicine. By the late 1950s, tens of thousands of Americans had been lobotomized as treatment for a host of psychiatric disorders. Though the procedure would later be decried as devastating and grossly unscientific, many patients, families, and physicians reported veritable improvement from the surgery; some patients were even considered cured. The Lobotomy Letters gives an account of why this controversial procedure was sanctioned by psychiatrists and doctors of modern medicine. Drawing from original correspondence penned by lobotomy patients andtheir families as well as from the professional papers of lobotomy pioneer and neurologist Walter Freeman, the volume reconstructs how physicians, patients, and their families viewed lobotomy and analyzes the reasons for its overwhelming use.
Mical Raz, MD/PhD, is a physician and historian of medicine.
Peter Jeffery
The Study of Medieval Chant
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Comparative studies of medieval chant traditions in western Europe, Byzantium and the Slavic nations illuminate music, literacy and culture.
Gregorian chant was the dominant liturgical music of the medieval period, from the time it was adopted by Charlemagne's court in the eighth century; but for centuries afterwards it competed with other musical traditions, local repertories from the great centres of Rome, Milan, Ravenna, Benevento, Toledo, Constantinople, Jerusalem, and Kievan Rus, and comparative study of these chant traditions can tell us much about music, liturgy, literacy and culture a thousand years ago. This is the first book-length work to look at the issues in a global, comprehensive way, in the manner of the work of Kenneth Levy, the leading exponent of comparative chant studies. It covers the four most fruitful approaches for investigators: the creation and transmission of chant texts, based on the psalms and other sources, and their assemblage into liturgical books; the analysis and comparison of musical modes and scales; the usesof neumatic notation for writing down melodies, and the differences wrought by developmental changes and notational reforms over the centuries; and the use of case studies, in which the many variations in a specific text or melodyare traced over time and geographical distance. The book is therefore of profound importance for historians of medieval music or religion - Western, Byzantine, or Slavonic - and for anyone interested in issues of orality and writing in the transmission of culture. PETER JEFFERY is Professor of Music History, Princeton University. Contributors: JAMES W. McKINNON, MARGOT FASSLER, MICHEL HUGLO, NICOLAS SCHIDLOVSKY, KEITH FALCONER, PETER JEFFERY, DAVID G.HUGHES, SYSSE GUDRUN ENGBERG, CHARLES M. ATKINSON, MILOS VELIMIROVIC, JORGEN RAASTED+, RUTH STEINER, DIMITRIJE STEFANOVIC, ALEJANDRO PLANCHART.
Richard Barber
Myths and Legends of the British Isles
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Tales from the dawn of Christianity to the age of the Plantagenets reveal a mythology in its time as potent as that of the classical world.
The British Isles have a long tradition of tales of gods, heroes and marvels, hinting at a mythology once as relevant to the races which settled the islands as the Greek and Roman gods were to the classical world. The tales drawntogether in this book, from a wide range of medieval sources, span the centuries from the dawn of Christianity to the age of the Plantagenets. The Norse gods which peopled the Anglo-Saxon past survive in Beowulf; Cuchulainn, Taliesin and the magician Merlin take shape from Celtic mythology; and saints include Helena who brought a piece of the True Cross to Britain, and Joseph of Arimathea whose staff grew into the Glastonbury thorn. Tales of the British Arthur are followed by legends of later heroes, including Harold, Hereward and Godiva. These figures and many others were part of a familiar national mythology on which Shakespeare drew for Lear, Macbeth and Hamlet, creating the famous versions that are known today. Here the original stories are presented.
RICHARD BARBER's other books include and The Knight and Chivalry.
Kidane Mengisteab
The Crisis of Democratization in the Greater Horn of Africa
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Analyses the structural and institutional obstacles to democratization in transitional societies - fractured societies, fragmented economies and institutions of governance, weak or deformed state structures - and how to overcome these.
In the early 1990s, a wave of democratization swept through many African countries, but its prevailing election-centred liberal approach failed to result in sustainable democracies. Why should this be and what can be done about it? This multi-disciplinary work on the Greater Horn investigates the impact on the efforts to bring greater democratization of the characteristically complex socio-economic state structures of the countries of the Greater Horn of Africa and, importantly, suggests an alternative, more effective, approach. Detailed studies of Ethiopia, Somaliland, Djibouti, Eritrea, Kenya, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan and Uganda reveal the difficulties posed by institutional structures that are often weak and lack accountability; fragmented economies - which range from modern capitalist to subsistence farming and pastoral systems; and governance marked by differing conceptions of property rights and conflict adjudication practices and varied resource allocation systems. Chronic violent ethnic-based civil wars and social conflicts and deep-rooted ethnic divisions only exacerbate the states' ability to foster democratic governance, or even to manage diversity properly. The contributors examine why the countries of the Horn have been unable to overcome these obstacles to democratization and explore how and why an alternative approach is more likely tobe compatible with the socioeconomic realities and cultural values in transitional societies.
Kidane Mengisteab is Professor of African Studies and Political Science at Pennsylvania State University. He is co-editor ofRegional Integration, Identity and Citizenship in the Greater Horn of Africa (James Currey, 2012) and, most recently, Traditional Institutions in Contemporary African Governance (2017).
Ernest N Emenyonu
ALT 36: Queer Theory in Film & Fiction
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ALT 36 turns a "queer eye" on Africa, offering provocative (re-)readings of texts to position formerly erased sexualities and contemporary sexual expression among Africans on the continent, and abroad.
Debates on the future of the African continent and the role of gender identities in these visions are increasingly present in literary criticism forums as African writers become bolder in exploring the challenges they face and celebrating gender diversity in the writing of short stories, novels, poetry, plays and films. Controversies over the rights of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, Intersex, Queer (LGBTIQ) communities in Africa, as elsewhere, continue inthe context of criminalization and/or intimidation of these groups. Residual colonial moralizing and contemporary western identity norms and politics vie with longstanding polyvalent indigenous sexual expression. In addition to traditional media, the new social media have gained importance, both as sources of information exchange and as sites of virtual construction of gender identities. As with many such contentious issues, the variety of responses to the"state of the question" is strikingly visible across the continent. In this issue of ALT, guest editor John Hawley has sampled the ongoing conversations, in both African writing and in the analysis of contemporary African cinema,to show how queer studies can break with old concepts and theories and point the way to new gender perspectives on literary and cinematic output.
This volume also includes a non-themed section of Featured Articles anda Literary Supplement.
Guest Editor: John C. Hawley is Professor in the Department of English, Santa Clara University Series Editor: Ernest N. Emenyonu is Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Michigan-Flint, USA. Reviews Editor: Obi Nwakanma
Edited by Philip Knox, Caroline Batten, Wendy Scase and Laura Ashe
New Medieval Literatures 26
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This volume continues the series' engagement with intellectual and cultural pluralism in the Middle Ages, showing the best new work in the field.
Essays in this volume cover a rich and diverse range - in chronological terms, from the ninth to the fifteenth century, and across linguistic traditions from Old and Middle English to medieval Latin and Middle French. Using varied conceptual tools and detailed explorations of social, cultural, and intellectual contexts, they offer new interpretations of key works from the central and late Middle Ages. Contributors explore the educational background of the Middle English "Ricardians" - Geoffrey Chaucer, William Langland, John Gower, and the Gawain-poet - through the novel perspective of versification; the intellectual context for the poem St Erkenwald, where a poem about the miraculous salvation of a pagan reflects a detailed engagement with contemporary theology that tests the limits of theological orthodoxy; and the social background of the Gawain-poet, via examples of household hierarchy. A form of textual analysis known as "ergodics" is deployed to offer a way of making sense of the unique challenge of the Old English Maxims, and their position in monastic reading cultures. The Middle English Titus and Vespasian, which tells the story of the siege of Jerusalem, is shown to contain a complex and conflicted form of anti-Judaism, traversed in complex ways by anxieties about gender as well religion and race. Finally, in a linked suite of essays, late medieval heraldry is illuminated from a range of unexpected perspectives drawn from the study of literary form, examining heraldic miscellanies, the creativity of the heraldic imaginary, and the community-building work of the late medieval poetic society known as the Cour Amoureuse.
KellyAnn Fitzpatrick
Neomedievalism, Popular Culture, and the Academy
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The medieval in the modern world is here explored in a variety of media, from film and book to gaming.
Medievalism - the ways in which post-medieval societies perceive, interpret, reimagine, or appropriate the Middle Ages - permeates popular culture. From Disney princesses to Game of Thrones, medieval fairs to World of Warcraft, contemporary culture keeps finding new ways to reinvent and repackage the period. Medievalism itself, then, continues to evolve while it is also subject to technological advances, prominent invocations in political discourse,and the changing priorities of the academy. This has led some scholars to adopt the term "neomedievalism", a concept originating in part from the work of the late Umberto Eco, which calls for new avenues of inquiry into the wayswe think about the medieval. This book examines recent evolutions of (neo)medievalism across multiple media, from Tolkien's Lord of the Rings to the film Beowulf and medieval gaming. These evolutions can take the form of what one might consider to be pop culture objects of critique (art, commodity, amusement park, video game) or academic tools of critique (monographs, articles, lectures, university seminars). It is by reconciling theseseemingly disparate forms that we can better understand the continual, interconnected, and often politicized reinvention of the Middle Ages in both popular and academic culture.
Grayson Carter
The Church of England’s Western Schism
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Examines one of the most significant events in the history of the late Georgian church, and revises accepted notions of Evangelical and Anglican ecclesiology and identity.
This study examines the establishment and progress of the Western Schism, which occurred between 1815 and c.1825-the first group secession from the Church of England since the Nonjurors during the late seventeenth century. As such, the Schism proved to be one of the most significant events in the history of the Church between the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the enactment of the 'Constitutional Revolution' of 1828-32. Despite the fears of many inside and outside the Church that the Schism would produce a wave of Evangelical secessions throughout England and Ireland, its influence was largely confined to London and the counties of Devon, Dorset, Gloucestershire, Hampshire, Somerset, Sussex and Wiltshire. Its leadership was comprised of a comparatively small group of clergy and laity drawn from prominent and influential commercial and clerical families (especially those from the Baring banking tribe) and bound by close ties of kinship, friendship and ideology. These factors, along with the Schism's heretical pronouncements and unusual ecclesial practices, its inclusion of women's ministry, and its secretive nature, generated considerable sensationalism and novelty value. The same factors also provoked a sustained period of criticism in which numerous leading religious figures, journals and newspapers participated. Surprisingly, while this criticism of the Schism emerged from every point on the religious compass, including High Churchmen, liberals and Nonconformists, it was the Evangelicals who quickly emerged as the Schism's principal critics. Evangelicals denounced not only the heretical nature of the Schism, but also its inclusion of women in leadership, its abandonment of the Established Church and its attempts to tarnish the reputation of the 'gospel party' by calling into question its adherence to apostolic fidelity and the Reformed heritage of the English Church. This work, the first extensive examination of the Western Schism, revises accepted notions of Evangelical (and Anglican) ecclesiology and identity during the late Georgian period. It discloses how a prominent and small, but influential, group of clergy and laity, alarmed by the Church's failure to respond adequately to the disruptive social and spiritual events of the day, set out to establish a rival ecclesial body which, despite the investment of significant energy and financial resources, ultimately failed to coalesce into a viable and lasting alternative to the Established Church.
Edited by David Morris and Andrew Neill
The Importance of Elgar
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A landmark celebration of Edward Elgar's life, music and enduring influence, bringing together leading voices from across the musical world.
Of the many biographies and other books published about Edward Elgar few have brought together as many composers, performers, and writers as this anthology, in celebration of his art and life. Published to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the Society which bears his name, The Importance of Elgar brings together both executant musicians and others who share their love and appreciation of his music and what it means to them and, more widely, his place in the canon of western music. With a foreword by the Society's President, Sir Mark Elder, the more than 60 contributors include Dame Janet Baker, Sir Stephen Hough, Sir James MacMillan and Christian Tetzlaf. The choice of the word 'importance' ensured that those who contributed to this volume would write something personal. The Elgar Society's first President, Sir Adrian Boult, was one of the great interpreters of Elgar's music and his commitment remains an inspiration to many today. It was Sir Adrian who suggested the formation of The Elgar Society during a series of concerts in Malvern in 1950. Four months later, in January 1951, what became the largest composer society in Britain was formed. Edited by David Morris, The Elgar Society's Secretary, and Andrew Neill a former Society Chairman, this book offers the practising musician and music lover alike some fresh insights into Elgar's music and his importance beyond the shores of Britain.
Edited by Lotte Hughes, Mark Lamont, Katy Newell-Jones, and Damaris Parsitau
FGM/C in Africa and the Diaspora
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A nuanced, interdisciplinary examination of female genital mutilation/cutting (FGM/C) that challenges dominant health and human-rights narratives by situating the practice within its social, ritual, and cultural contexts, and foregrounding the voices of affected communities.
Few issues arouse as much controversy as female circumcision, also called a variety of terms including female genital cutting, female genital mutilation/cutting (FGM/C), and female genital modification. The very terminology is contentious, reflecting polarised ideological stances. This book discusses, critiques, and analyses contemporary issues around female circumcision in Africa and the diaspora, campaigns and legislation against it, and alternatives to it. It traces historical continuities in anti-FGM/C campaigns and examines how certain hegemonic narratives have developed as initiatives, legislation, and protocols were rolled out. The book argues that FGM/C is not 'just' a health, human-rights, and gender-violence issue but is multi-faceted and intersectional.
Moving away from a focus on the physical 'cut', chapters examine FGM/C in terms of social relations, asserting that FGM/C must be situated and understood in deeper ritual context and that external interventions aimed at ending the practice are doomed to fail unless external actors listen to and truly engage with the communities concerned. At the same time, FGM/C is discussed in parallel with male circumcision, as both mark ritual initiation into adulthood, raise people's status, and underpin the structure of age-organised societies. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, including perspectives from anthropology, history, political science, medicine and zemiology, the book includes a range of voices, importantly, those of community members as well as scholars, development practitioners and public health professionals, with a view to promoting constructive dialogue between sectors.
Edited by Matthew Daniel Eddy, Rachel Feldberg and Jane Rendall
Gender, Science and Sociability in the Diary of Jane Ewbank of York (1778-1824)
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Examines the newly-discovered diary of Jane Ewbank as a vital site of knowledge-making, illuminating women's intellectual lives in Enlightenment York, where science, cultural criticism and sociability intersected.
Amid the vibrant intellectual culture of the 'transpennine Enlightenment', Jane Ewbank's diary, written between 1803 and 1805, offers a rare, richly textured account of a provincial woman's engagement with science, cultural criticism, and sociability in York and beyond. This interdisciplinary volume includes an annotated transcription of Ewbank's 34,000-word diary alongside essays situating it within the gendered knowledge networks of northern England. Exploring her participation in scientific lectures, women's writing and the arts in York, contributors interrogate the diary as a media technology, a cognitive tool, and an emotionally informed thinking device. Ewbank's encounters with figures such as the novelist and educationalist Maria Edgeworth, the scientific lecturer Henry Moyes and the philanthropist Catherine Cappe are highlighted throughout, and emphasise the intersection of topics ranging from natural theology and scientific education to literature, theatre and music. The essays variously engage with historiographies of early modern life-writing, Enlightenment sociability, and the emotional economies of medicine, while offering reflections that challenge colonial silences and foreground global entanglements. Drawing on recent work in history of science, literature, and feminist theory, this volume redefines the diary as a critical artefact of Enlightenment culture and offers a compelling model for studying gendered intellectual life in regional contexts.
Michael Allis
Granville Bantock and the Orchestral Refiguring of Literature
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Illuminates Bantock's experimentation with musical structure to create effective representations of literature, while offering new notions of the modern in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century music.
Granville Bantock (1868-1946) remains one of the most significant British composers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. This book provides an in-depth exploration of a series of orchestral compositions by Bantock based on different forms of literature (the poem, the drama, the novel) penned by a wide range of authors including Robert Browning, Samuel Butler, Dante, Ernest Dowson, Thomas Moore, Percy Shelley, Sophocles and Robert Southey. The majority of the musical works discussed date from Bantock's most successful period as a composer (c.1899-1911), when his music was perceived to be 'modern'. Although critics were struck by his skills in orchestration, central to his modernist credentials is his distinctive approach to musical structure. The book's in-depth analyses, drawing on a wide range of literary scholarship, demonstrate a more meaningful way to appreciate these designs as individual responses to the literary texts on which they are based. As well as tackling the vexed issue of programme music, the book also highlights Bantock's association with orientalism. As the first major study of Bantock's orchestral music, this book not only demonstrates the composer's experimentation with musical structure to create effective representations of literature, but its findings also have a wider significance in terms of notions of the modern and the interdisciplinary potential of music-literature studies in general.
Alston Kennerley
British Merchant Seafarer Training and Education
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The first overview of merchant seafarer training and education in a single volume, outlining the development of training and education from the earliest time to the present.
Because merchant seafarers practise their occupation largely out of sight of the general population ashore, there persists a widespread ignorance of seafaring and seafarers, which has been labelled "sea blindness". Moreover, much writing on seafarers and seafarer training is dispersed in journal articles, which tend to be restricted in scope. This book presents the first overview of merchant seafarer training and education in a single volume. It outlines the development of training and education from the earliest time to the present, examines the different aspects of training and education, and covers the numerous and differing policies and training structures put in place by various shipowners. Despite national state regulation merchant shipping is not a single organisation like the Royal Navy. In addition to being a contribution to maritime studies and maritime history, the book also reveals a great deal about vocational training and education in general.
Nigel Simeone and Jiří Zahrádka
Janácek’s Sinfonietta
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A definitive study of Janáček's Sinfonietta, tracing its creation, reception, and rise to international prominence.
This book provides a musical 'biography' of Leoš Janáček's (1854-1928) most famous orchestral piece - his Sinfonietta - by analysing its sources, composition, reception history, recordings and musical component parts. The most up-to-date research on the genesis and performance history of the work, it considers in detail Janáček's orchestral writing, the inspiration and genesis of the Sinfonietta, a documentation of all the surviving sources for the work, the work's performance history during Janáček's lifetime and following his death until the end of the Second World War, including press reviews and relevant correspondence.
The book also examines the growth in the worldwide popularity of the Sinfonietta. This evolved from cautious and hostile critical responses to the premiere recording in 1946 to its gradual acceptance as one of the key works of the 1920s, largely thanks to the advocacy of conductors whose work is considered in detail, alongside other significant recordings. Questions of performance, rehearsal, interpretation and the musical text are considered in a wide-ranging interview with the conductor Jakub Hrůša, and a concluding chapter provides a detailed commentary on the music itself. The book includes a valuable appendix describing the annotated scores used by conductors such as Otto Klemperer, František Neumann and Henry Wood, as well as a comprehensive discography.
Edited by G. H. Bennett
Lloyd George and the Coalition Liberal Party
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Key documents from around the time that the Labour Party replaced the Liberals as the main opposition to the Conservatives.
The Scovell papers provide previously unseen insights into the Coalition Liberal party: a party created to support David Lloyd George, prime minister 1916-1922, and his allies who had split from the main Liberal party during the First World War. They document the evolution of British politics at the point when the Liberals were giving way to Labour as the opposition to the Conservatives. They also document Lloyd George's failure to achieve a fusion of the Conservatives and Coalition Liberals to create an anti-socialist centre right party to stem the rise of Labour. The documents, at the intersection between the party at Westminster and the wider party in the country, make a significant contribution to debates about the relative primacy of the higher level versus the lower level within the evolution of British political system in this period. They show that the Coalition Liberal party had genuine substance at the local level,built up with painstaking spadework by Scovell and others, sufficiently strong to strike local deals in the 1922 election, thereby raising Lloyd George's hopes, falsely as it turned out, that he would be a key power broker and potentially still prime minister in the new parliament.
Ralph Moffat
Medieval Arms and Armour: A Sourcebook. Volume III: 1450-1500
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Authoritative reference guide, using the documents in which arms and armour first appeared to explain and define them.
Medieval arms and armour are intrinsically fascinating. From the smoke and noise of the armourer's forge to the bloody violence of the battlefield or the silken panoply of the tournament, weapons and armour - and those who made and bore them - are woven into the fabric of medieval society. This sourcebook will aid anyone who seeks to develop a deeper understanding by introducing and presenting the primary sources in which these artefacts are first mentioned. Over seventy original documents are transcribed and translated, including wills, inventories, letters and chronicle accounts, from a period which saw rapid advances in military technology. The book also includes an extensive glossary, and is lavishly illustrated with images of both extant armour and weapons from the period, and contemporary artistic depictions from illuminated manuscripts and other sources. This book will therefore be of interest to a wide audience, from the living history practitioner, crafter, and martial artist, to students of literature, military history, art, and material culture.
Stewart Spencer
Richard Wagner: My Life [Two Volume Set]
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The first fully annotated scholarly edition and masterful new translation of Wagner's autobiography, revealing the composer's self-fashioning and mythmaking.
Richard Wagner's life was as tempestuous as his music and in his own retelling it constitutes a gripping narrative. His autobiography, My Life, matters if one wants to understand the composer's life or the way in which he himself saw that life. And yet, it has a flawed publishing history: Bayreuth published the first commercial edition in 1911, but it was not until 1963 that the full text appeared in an annotated German edition. An anonymous English translation was published in 1911, the work of a translator unfamiliar with the subject. A second translation, published in 1987, is notable for its wayward style and many inaccuracies. Until this day, no edition published in any language has risen to the challenge of providing adequate annotation. This new scholarly edition and translation by Stewart Spencer is the first edition to do so.
Annotations provided here explain references and allusions that Wagner himself took for granted and correct lapses of memory that the text contains. The edition highlights various strategies of concealment as far as Wagner's love life and revolutionary activities were concerned. Crucially, as this edition illuminates, by the 1860s Wagner was anxious to portray himself as Beethoven's natural successor, and his life in defence of art as a bulwark against the decline of Western civilization. This new critical edition and translation of Richard Wagner's autobiography is a response to one of the most pressing needs in the entire Wagner bibliography. It will be widely welcomed by a substantial Wagner community of readers.
Andrew P. Dorman
The British Army, Society and Soldiering in Ireland, 1699-1793
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A comprehensive overview of the British army in Ireland in the eighteenth century and the army's relationship with the local population.
The eighteenth-century army in Ireland, which consisted of 12,000 to 15,000 men, and which was its own quasi-independent "Establishment", paid for, housed by, and commanded from Dublin, represented a significant proportion of overall British military forces. This book, based on extensive original research, presents an overview of army life in Ireland in the period. It covers the administration of the Irish Establishment, recruitment, desertion, criminality, drunkenness, everyday routines, soldier-civilian relations, the response of soldiers to growing revolutionary unrest, and more. It overturns much established thinking, demonstrating for example that desertion in the army in Ireland was no different from desertion in the army elsewhere, that the army in Ireland was well-trained and efficient, and that Irish soldiers were far more common in British service than previously thought. In addition, the book discusses ideas of masculinity, the army's place in the defence of Ireland against foreign invasion, in securing the ascendancy regime and in suppressing unrest, and the unusual situation of Ireland as both subject and participant in the development of the British empire.
John Bulaitis
The Tithe War in England and Wales, 1881-1936
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Brings to life a fascinating page of history in a scholarly but highly readable account of the "tithe war".
Co-WINNER: 2025 Thirsk Prize (British Agricultural History Society)
During the 1930s, farming communities waged a campaign of "passive resistance" against Tithe Rentcharge, the modern version of medieval tithe. Led by the National Tithepayers' Association, farmers refused to pay the charge, disrupted auctions of seized stock and joined demonstrations to prevent action by bailiffs. The National Government condemned their "unconstitutional action", ruled out changes in the law and mobilised police to support the titheowners. Meanwhile, the Church of England and lay titheowners - including Oxford and Cambridge colleges, public schools and major landowners - sought to vindicate their right to tithe; in a particularly shameful episode, the Church established a secret company to buy taken produce and remove it from farms.
This "tithe war" was fought outside farms, in the courts, in the press and in the wider arena of public opinion. It posed problems for the Church, legal system, and every political party; split the National Farmers' Union; and provided opportunities for the British Union of Fascists and other sections of the extreme right to cause disturbance.
Drawing on extensive archival research, accounts in local newspapers, and private papers, John Bulaitis traces the evolution of what has been described as this "curious rural revolt", from the late nineteenth century to its climax in 1936, when the Tithe Act brought an end to this form of tax.
Edited by Alexandra Lester-Makin and Gale R. Owen-Crocker
Textiles of the Viking North Atlantic
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An examination of the uses, meanings, and social impact of Viking Age textiles.
This volume offers the first full study of archaeological fabrics and their decoration found in the North Atlantic region and dating broadly from the Viking or Norse period. With contributions from both academic scholars and practitioners, it shows how approaching early medieval textiles from archaeological, historical and literary contexts, and through the processes of learning and employing the traditional skills of making them, brings about a more nuanced understanding of early medieval cloths: their creation, use and meanings within their respective societies.
The book is divided into two parts. The first, "Textiles and their Interpretation", takes the reader on a journey from how wool was processed in the Viking Age, and the conservator's role in preserving and interpreting archaeological textiles, to different types of analyses that researchers use to understand and explain textiles from across the wide area of the Viking-influenced North Atlantic region. The second, "Understanding through Replicating", investigates the results of practical experiments in the reconstruction of surviving medieval fabrics and the resulting empirical conclusions that can be made about their manufacture and wider cultural implications.
Ralph Moffat
Medieval Arms and Armour: A Sourcebook. Volume II: 1400–1450
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$41.95
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Authoritative reference guide, using the documents in which arms and armour first appeared to explain and define them.
Medieval arms and armour are intrinsically fascinating. From the smoke and noise of the armourer's forge to the bloody violence of the battlefield or the silken panoply of the tournament, weapons and armour - and those who made and bore them - are woven into the fabric of medieval society. This sourcebook will aid anyone who seeks to develop a deeper understanding by introducing and presenting the primary sources in which these artefacts are first mentioned. Over a hundred original documents are transcribed and translated, including wills and inventories, craft statutes, chronicle accounts, and challenges to single combat. The book also includes an extensive glossary, lavishly illustrated with forty-six images of extant armour and weapons from the period, and contemporary artistic depictions from illuminated manuscripts and other sources. This book will therefore be of interest to a wide audience, from the living history practitioner, crafter, and martial artist, to students of literature, military history, art, and material culture.
Michael Brown
Scotland, the Wars of the Roses, and European Politics
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Traces Scotland's involvement in the increasingly dynamic international relations of the fifteenth century.
In 1461 the eyes of much of Europe were trained on Scotland. King Henry VI of England had fled into exile there following his defeat by Edward of York at Towton. This attention may have been exceptional, but it demonstrates that despite its location, Scotland was an integral part of the European political world and, in particular, between the 1450s and 1490s, a key external player in the Wars of the Roses. However, although Scotland's role in these decades was never confined to Britain, scholarship has tended to downplay its continental connections. This book demonstrates the extent to which the Scots were active and engaged participants on a wider stage. Military, dynastic, and economic contacts meant that during the fifteenth century, Scotland was a recognised factor in the diplomacy of rulers from Italy to Scandinavia. It shows the importance of maintaining external relationships for the Scots, the fluctuating value of these relationships to other rulers, and how English political events were also bound up with wider patterns abroad.
Chassica Kirchhoff
The Thun-Hohenstein Album
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The first extensive study of the depiction of the armour in the Thun-Hohenstein Album against the vibrant artistic and cultural contexts that created it.
In late medieval and early modern Europe, armour was more than a defensive technology for war or knightly sport. Its diverse types formed a complex visual language. Luxury armour was fitted precisely to a wearer's body, and its memorable details declared his status. Empty armour could evoke an owner's physical presence, prompting recollection of knightly personae, glittering pageantry, and impressive feats of arms. Its mnemonic power persisted long after the battle had ended, the trumpets had gone silent, and the dust had settled in the tournament arena.
Previously believed to contain preliminary designs sketched by master armourers, the Thun-Hohenstein album is a bound collection of drawings by professional book painters depicting some of the most artistically and technologically innovative armours of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Like a paper version of the princely armories that first formed during the 1500s, the album's images offered rich sites of meaning and memory. Their organization within the codex suggests the images' significance to their compiler. At the same time, the composition and details allow the reader to trace the transmission of recognizable armours, and the memories they embodied, from the anvil to the page.
This book is the first to examine the album, and the armor it depicts, in their vibrant artistic and cultural context. In five thematic chapters, it moves from case studies of these drawings to explore the album's complex intersections with the genres of martial history, material culture, and literature. It also reveals the album's participation in cultures of remembrance that carried mythic, knightly personae constructed around powerful Habsburg princes forward in time from the Middle Ages into the early modern era, from the courts of the Holy Roman Empire to emerging urban audiences.
Edited by David Morris and Andrew Neill
The Importance of Elgar
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A landmark celebration of Edward Elgar's life, music and enduring influence, bringing together leading voices from across the musical world.
Of the many biographies and other books published about Edward Elgar few have brought together as many composers, performers, and writers as this anthology, in celebration of his art and life. Published to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the Society which bears his name, The Importance of Elgar brings together both executant musicians and others who share their love and appreciation of his music and what it means to them and, more widely, his place in the canon of western music. With a foreword by the Society's President, Sir Mark Elder, the more than 60 contributors include Dame Janet Baker, Sir Stephen Hough, Sir James MacMillan and Christian Tetzlaf. The choice of the word 'importance' ensured that those who contributed to this volume would write something personal. The Elgar Society's first President, Sir Adrian Boult, was one of the great interpreters of Elgar's music and his commitment remains an inspiration to many today. It was Sir Adrian who suggested the formation of The Elgar Society during a series of concerts in Malvern in 1950. Four months later, in January 1951, what became the largest composer society in Britain was formed. Edited by David Morris, The Elgar Society's Secretary, and Andrew Neill a former Society Chairman, this book offers the practising musician and music lover alike some fresh insights into Elgar's music and his importance beyond the shores of Britain.
Allison Drew
Apartheid, Thought Crime and South Africa’s New Left
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Of all the groups charged in the early 1960s under apartheid security laws in South Africa, the National Liberation Front was the only one whose members did not engage in violence. Yet six months after its launch, its founding members were arrested and then sentenced to between five and ten years in prison. Why?
A Cape Peninsula offshoot of the Non-European Unity Movement, the NLF was explicitly socialist and part of the long 1960s New Left. Although the NLF challenged South Africa's racial and capitalist orders, it has scarcely appeared in the liberation movement historiography. This book recovers the NLF's lost history, tracing its perspectives on colonialism, apartheid, political education and guerrilla struggle. The book examines the NLF in its international and national contexts, exploring its relationships with both the transnational New Left and the South African left, and evaluating the conditions producing and then smashing South Africa's New Left. Debates about apartheid focus on race, political economy, and state and institutions. But apartheid also strove to control thought through unequal education and censorship. While bringing the NLF's critique of racial capitalism to life, the book also uncovers the NLF's unique educational approach and the state's attempt to contain its thinking.
Edited by Juan Pan-Montojo, Lourenzo Fernández Prieto and Miguel Cabo
Agricultural Modernisation and the Green Revolution in the Twentieth-Century World
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An overarching history of the origins, development, and application of agricultural innovation in the past, and of the paradigms and institutional frameworks in which they were developed throughout the twentieth century.
From the late nineteenth century onwards, rural societies and agrarian production across the world were profoundly transformed. Prior to the Second World War, technological innovations developed within an intensive organic framework and advanced largely in dialogue with existing producers. After the war, social engineering became the prevailing model in agricultural and rural policies almost everywhere. Modernisation was imposed from above, targeting so-called "archaic" or "anti-modern" peasants and farmers, who were pushed to produce ever-greater quantities of food, timber, and other raw materials through the expanded use of industrial and inorganic resources. Applied as a USA political programme in Asian, Latin American and African countries, this strategy became known as the "Green Revolution". Although it undermined rural societies and eroded the sustainability of agricultural production, it remained central to political agendas, leaving a difficult legacy for future generations.
This book analyses agrarian change and agricultural policies before and after 1945, highlighting the socio-economic and environmental consequences of these two very different periods in global agrarian history. Its diverse case studies span continents and political systems, considering topics from post-war reconstruction in the UK and Denmark to development policies in the Belgian Congo and post-fascist Ethiopia; from production projects in communist Hungary to agricultural transformations across the Southern Cone and India.
Chapter 6 is available as Open Access under the Creative Commons licence CC BY-NC-ND
Edited by Marloes Janson, Kai Kresse, Benedikt Pontzen, and Hassan Mwakimako
Religious Plurality in Africa
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Grounded in ethnographic and historiographic research and taking a cross-regional approach, this book explores the complex dynamics of similarity and difference, rapprochement and detachment, and divergence and competition between practitioners of Christianity, Islam, and African religious traditions.
Across Africa, Muslims, Christians, and practitioners of African religious traditions live in shared settings, demarcating themselves in opposition to one another and at times engaging in violent conflicts, but also being entangled in complex ways and showing unexpected similarities and mutual cross-overs. However, while encounters and entanglements of African religious traditions with either Islam or Christianity have long been a central research issue, the configuration as a whole has barely been taken into account, even though Muslims, Christians, and practitioners of African religious traditions have long co-existed - and still co-exist - more or less peacefully in many settings in Africa. Building on recent interventions to move beyond the compartmentalization of the study of religion in Africa, this edited volume will spotlight why and how an integrated approach to Islam, Christianity, and African religious traditions is important. Bringing together stimulating case studies from Kenya, Nigeria, Zanzibar, Ghana, and Mozambique that offer new directions for ethnographic and historical research, the volume will not only shed light on an important phenomenon out there in the world - the long-overlooked ways in which Muslims, Christians and practitioners of African religious traditions interact with one another in various majority-minority configurations - but will also engage with a critical rethinking of the study of religion in Africa (and beyond).
Edited by Timothy Scarnecchia and Corrado Tornimbeni
Democracy in Sub-Saharan Africa, 2000-2025
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Is democracy surviving in Africa? Despite the continuance of multiparty elections, in the face of unmet expectations for greater freedom, social justice, and inclusive development, an increasing authoritarianism is spreading across the continent.
Although most African states continue to use some form of multiparty elections according to the formal rules of liberal democracy, the reality is that people's expectations for greater freedom, social justice, and inclusive development have not been met. The result is a growing number of African states where power relations are increasingly authoritarian - a trend seen in the West as well.
Bringing together contributors from Africa, Europe, and North America, this volume seeks to analyze democracy in sub-Saharan Africa beyond the mere examination of the elements that determine its impasse, the political factors that hinder the proper functioning of democratic institutions or even the models through which a country's level of democratic status is "indexed." Instead, the goal is to address current states of "democracy" in Africa within a larger, global history.
Given the post-colonial histories of most African nations, the current demise of democratic governments on the continent cannot be interpreted as a new phenomenon without precedent. The volume presents a longer-view perspective to explain more specifically how history can explain the current crises in democracy and development, exploring how negotiations between external and internal interests have always contested their meanings in Africa, and arguing that these struggles continue to create new conditions for new democratic spaces.
Matthew J. Christensen
Anglophone African Detective Fiction 1940-2020
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Providing a survey of Anglophone African detective fiction, from the late 1940s to the present day, this study traces its history both as a literary form and a mode of critical exploration of the fraught sovereignties of the African state and its citizens.
Since the late 1940s, African writers including Cyprian Ekwensi, Arthur Maimane, Adaora Lily Ulasi, Hilary Ng'weno, Unity Dow, Parker Bilal, and Angela Makholwa have published over 200 murder mysteries, police procedurals, spy thrillers, and other fictional narratives of investigation and discovery in English-language newspapers, magazines, and novels. Distributed widely across the continent's diverse cultural and political geographies, these texts share aesthetic characteristics and thematic preoccupations that reflect transnational networks of production, circulation, and influence. Anglophone African Detective Fiction, 1940-2020 surveys this literary history and examines how African writers have repeatedly harnessed the detective story to interrogate postcolonial realities of selfhood and the state. It argues that African writers have turned the detective story into a highly productive, while at the same time suspense-filled and entertaining, mode of social and political critique, first of colonialism and the independence era and latterly of neoliberal governance. Offering an overview of paradigmatic texts, from Ghana to Kenya and Sudan to South Africa, the book traces the contours of the history of Anglophone African detective fiction that is at once a cultural history of a uniquely African assessment of the ongoing problematics of sovereignty and decolonization.
Julian Luxford
Drawings in Books in Medieval Britain from the Ninth Century to the Reformation
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The first broad and long study of a major aspect of British medieval art, examining the historical relationships between medieval drawings and books.
The art of drawing and its products had a determining relationship to the visual arts of the Middle Ages. They also had other purposes, which if understood, help one to grasp the broader availability and usefulness of the medium. This groundbreaking study deals particularly with the historical relationships between medieval drawings and books. Using a wide range of material and documentary evidence, it explains how book-bound drawings may be defined, classified, and understood in relation to their physical settings and the ends they were made to serve. In orientation, the study is primarily art historical: most of its arguments emerge from curiosity about the psychology and experience of making drawn images. As such, it tackles a surprisingly neglected field. Because it deals with a pervasive aspect of book-design, it also makes a basic contribution to medieval codicology. There are six substantial chapters, the first two dealing with the definition of drawings, existing scholarly approaches to them, and issues of artistic status and agency. These lay the groundwork for the rest of the study, which analyses the placement of drawings at the fronts and backs of books (chapters 3, 4), and drawings embedded in the bodies of manuscripts that were mainly devoted to text (chapters 5, 6). Drawing emerges as an accessible, flexible medium of expression to rank with writing.
Jayne Friend
Destroyers, Naval Culture and British Identity
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An overview of what destroyers were and how their capacity for heroic deeds captured the popular imagination.
Destroyers, first developed over the course of the late 1880s and 1890s, were fast, manoeuverable warships intended to escort larger vessels and defend them against a wide range of threats. In Britain their speed, nimbleness and capacity for heroic deeds captured the popular imagination, and they became symbolic vessels, encapsulating the fortitude and ingenuity which contemporaries felt characterised the British navy. Based on extensive original research, this book provides both an overview of destroyers' operational roles and how these developed over time and also a detailed examination of destroyers' place within British culture, society and identity. Considering a wide range of sources including news reporting, pageantry, literature, film, art and more, the book reveals how the destroyer as symbol was used as propaganda, fitted in to popular, civic and artistic cultures and affected naval policy, British people's morale and outlook, and international views of Britain's naval power. One striking example of the depth of British people's attachment to destroyers was the scheme during the Second World War for individual towns to each adopt their own destroyer, a scheme which achieved astonishing success, with many small towns raising huge sums sufficient to fund entirely the building of their own destroyer.
Edited by Joe Davies and Natasha Loges
Global Perspectives on Women Pianists
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Pathbreaking study that explores the piano as an instrument of globalism, colonialism and mobility and what this meant for women pianists from around the world.
This book surveys women pianists around the world. It focuses on the mid-nineteenth to the late-twentieth centuries, an era that witnessed sustained interest in piano performance against a backdrop of technological and socio-political transformation. The authors range from emerging to established scholars, from the Americas, Europe, Africa, and Asia. They take diverse approaches to the piano as an instrument of globalism, colonialism, class, and mobility, within women's lives. These include explorations of mapping, networks, and cultural transfer; feminist examinations of archival traces; the implications of distinctive geographies and socio-political conditions; and the links between gender and genre, including contemporary and experimental musics. The volume offers a bold account of global approaches to women in music and encourages innovative ways of rethinking piano culture.
Global Perspectives on Women Pianists will be an exciting contribution to the growing landscape of global music history. This book will also contribute to the fields of gender studies, historical musicology, and material history.
The editors have curated a volume that achieves a genuine spread of "global" essays (and commendably, one that includes the "West" as simply another part of the globe).
JOE DAVIES is a faculty member in the Arts and Humanities Division at New York University Abu Dhabi. He previously held research and teaching positions at Maynooth University, the University of California, Irvine, and the University of Oxford.
NATASHA LOGES is Professor of Musicology at the Hochschule für Musik Freiburg. She was previously Head of Postgraduate Programmes at the Royal College of Music, London.
Steven Zohn
The Telemann Compendium
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The first guide to research on Telemann in any language.
The 'Telemann Renaissance' is now more than half-century old. The veritable explosion of performances, both live and recorded, of the composer's music in recent decades has won him an ever-increasing following among musicians and concert-goers worldwide. This book presents a much-needed gateway for further study. As with other books in the Composer Compendia series, the book includes a brief biography, dictionary, works-list, and selective bibliography.
Michael Tugendhat and Elizabeth De Montlaur Martin
Liberty in France and Britain, 1159–1789
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Documents the influence Britain and France had on the ideas of liberty and human rights from the twelfth century to the French Revolution.
Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, the motto of the French Republic, encapsulates the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man. The authors trace the history of each article in that Declaration to the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries. That period saw the invention by the French-speaking Norman rulers in England of the common law based on reason and natural rights, of limited monarchy and habeas corpus; and in both France and England the replacement of trials by ordeal and battle with the right to a fair trial or due process, the disappearance of chattel slavery, and the development of the rule of law and republican government. The authors show that the ideas that the French and British held in common from that period were deployed to justify the rebellions and revolutions in the Netherlands and Britain in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and in France and the USA in the eighteenth century. That in turn led to the adoption of human rights declarations, treaties and laws in the twentieth century. The authors trace these ideas from the Policraticus (1159) of John of Salisbury, the Englishman educated in France who dedicated his work to his patron Thomas Becket, through (among others) Thomas More's Utopia (1516), Jean Bodin's Six Books of the Republic (1576), John Locke's Treatises on Government (c.1689), Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws (1748) and William Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765-69) that was widely cited in France and propounds the natural rights of mankind listed in the 1789 Declaration.
Eric McElroy
Weird Music: Reading John Ireland and Arthur Machen
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Using John Ireland's fascination with Arthur Machen as case study, this book challenges our perception of the correspondence between music and literature in twentieth-century Britain.
The composer John Ireland (1879-1962) declared repeatedly that no one could understand his music until they had first read the work of his favourite writer, Arthur Machen (1863-1947). This book is the first study to take Ireland at his word. Revolving around Machen's classification as a founding figure of 'weird fiction', it uses weird aesthetics as an interpretative lens with which to understand Ireland's notoriously cryptic life and music. Its four chapters deal respectively with Machen's and Ireland's parallel explorations of weird art's relationship with eroticism; with fin-de-siècle London; with the English pastoral tradition; and with unsettling implications of alternative historiography.
The resulting portrait reveals Ireland to be one of Britain's pre-eminent 'weird artists', placing Ireland in the aesthetic context with which he wished to be associated. It therefore fills a significant gap in British musicology, while at the same time contributing to a growing appreciation of Machen as a major figure in British culture, one whose influence exceeds far beyond the literary sphere to which he is traditionally confined. Using Ireland's fascination with Machen as its case study, this book makes a timely and necessary connection between the literary weird and its musical doppelgänger, enriching and challenging our perception of the correspondence between music and literature in twentieth-century Britain.
James Ross
Robert de Vere, Earl of Oxford and Duke of Ireland (1362-1392)
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The first full-length study of one of the most controversial figures of later fourteenth century England.
Robert de Vere was a close friend of the young King Richard II. He was accused of a wide range of political crimes and private vices by his opponents, the Lords Appellant. Defeated by them at the battle of Radcot Bridge in 1387, he died abroad in exile aged only 30. He was, in the eyes of many contemporaries - most notably the hostile chroniclers Walsingham and Froissart - and modern historians, a typical royal favourite: unmartial, immoral, self-seeking, and promoted and enriched far beyond what he deserved.
But what was a royal favourite, and what were the accusations made against them? This book investigates these questions across late medieval England, and assesses de Vere against contemporary criteria. Based on extensive archival research, this book shows there was more to de Vere than a grasping courtier. He had been Earl of Oxford since the age of nine, heir to a large landed estate, and had twice served in foreign wars. He also made a serious attempt to govern the English lordship in Ireland given to him by Richard. The findings here show him to be a far more rounded and complex figure than previously assumed.
Nigel Simeone
The Janácek Compendium
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Leos Janácek (1854-1928) occupied a pre-eminent position in Moravian (and wider Czech) culture, not only as a composer but also as a folksong collector, journalist, educator and nationalist.
One of the greatest and most original composers of the early twentieth century, Leos Janácek (1854-1928) occupied a pre-eminent position in Moravian culture, not only as a composer but also as a folksong collector, journalist, educator and nationalist. His friends and associates included artists, writers, ethnographers and politicians, as well as conductors, singers and instrumentalists. Janácek's many pupils included the conductor Bretislav Bakala and thecomposer Pavel Haas. He had important associations with publishers in Vienna and Prague and with the earliest years of Czech Radio. Janácek was strongly attached to particular places - Hukvaldy, Brno, Luhacovice - and had professional links with Prague, Berlin, London and beyond. The Janácek Compendium includes nearly 300 entries on every aspect of Janácek's life and works, with detailed notes on all his significant compositions - above all the operas - providing the latest information to emerge about some of his most famous pieces. An extensive bibliography supports the entries, which are cross-referenced to enable wider exploration of particular topics.
Edited by Stephanie Carter with principal contributions by Karen Averby, Stephanie Carter, Hannah Ingram, Mark Page and Charlotte Young
The Victoria History of the Counties of England: A History of Northamptonshire, volume VIII
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Long-awaited volume for the Victoria County History of Northamptonshire covers the 6 parishes in Towcester Hundred including the historic market town of Towcester.
This contribution to the Red Book series is the eighth volume of the Victoria County History of Northamptonshire. It provides accounts of Towcester hundred, encompassing 6 parishes including the historic market town of Towcester. The rolling landscape is punctuated by dispersed villages that form the hundred with each settlement linked to the Roman Watling Street that traverses the full length of the hundred. Towcester's history is inextricably linked to this transport corridor, with an important coaching trade emerging in the 17th and 18th centuries. The hundred had a notable range of localised industries by the 1800s, including shoemaking, lacemaking and framework knitting. Its predominantly agricultural landscape was interrupted by the coming of the Grand Union Canal and railway in the 19th century, bringing industry, manufacture and expansion.
Roger Southall
Smuts and Mandela
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Compares how, as individuals, Smuts and Mandela shaped key aspects of the making of South Africa, moving beyond sweeping condemnation of the first and uncritical reference of the second to provide a more rounded assessment of their significance in the history of the nation.
South Africa has produced two leaders who achieved global recognition and renown in their respective eras: Jan Christiaan Smuts (Prime Minister, 1919-24 and 1939-48) and Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela (President, 1994-99). The former was much celebrated for playing a significant role in reconstructing international architecture after both world wars; the latter remains globally admired for his leading part in drawing South Africa back from racial war and becoming a democracy. As a result, both have attracted multiple biographies. Today, however, whereas Mandela remains a much-admired global icon, Smuts' reputation is much diminished, with contemporary historians citing his racism and role in constructing the foundations of apartheid South Africa.
In this controversial book, Roger Southall provides a re-evaluation of Smuts' hugely contradictory career by proposing fascinating parallels with the life and political trajectory of Mandela. Both came to maturity as political leaders as freedom fighters - Smuts against the British and Mandela against the apartheid regime. Both played a pre-eminent in founding a new South Africa, the first made for whites at Union in 1910 and the second for all South Africans in 1994. Both aspired to be nation-builders, but while Smuts' hoped-for South African nation was white, Mandela aspired to bring all of South Africa's people together. Both came to stride on the international stage, albeit in very different ways and for various reasons.
Smuts' career failed, and he was ejected from office. Mandela retired gracefully from office and continued to be lauded for his well-earned retirement, yet South Africa's contemporary travails reveal his hopes and policies as unfulfilled. This book makes the case that we cannot fully understand Mandela without first understanding Smuts and how South Africa continues to struggle with the legacy he left behind.
Edited by Stephen M. Miller
The Military Papers of Field Marshal Sir George White, 1885–1900
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Key documents relating to White's service in Burma, India, and South Africa as well as important background and analysis of some of Britain's most significant small wars during the Victorian period.
After graduating from the Royal Military College, George Stuart White was posted to India where he served in the Rebellion. Twenty years later, he fought in the Second Afghan War, where he was decorated with the Victoria Cross for gallantry in action. After a brief stint in the Sudan campaign, White returned to India, where he solidified his reputation, eventually rising to the position of Commander-in-Chief. During those years he commanded field forces in Burma and Baluchistan, sent expeditions to the North-West Frontier, and oversaw the end of the Presidency Armies. As war loomed on the horizon in South Africa in 1899, White was selected to command the Natal Field Force. This force was besieged for 118 days in the town of Ladysmith. Despite continuous Boer shelling, disease, and limited supplies, White managed to maintain the force and the civilian population in good order until its liberation. He was christened the "Defender of Ladysmith." In 1903, he was promoted to Field-Marshal.
Edited by Caroline Anne Metcalfe
The Brewers’ Book, Part 2, 1429-40
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This book presents the second part of William Porlond's Brewers' Book, 1429-40. It provides a fascinating glimpse of this craft and fraternity, and the gaining of the company's Royal charter in 1438.
This is the second part of William Porlond's Brewers' Book, for the years 1429-40, until the clerk's death. After a gap, his records resumed, listing income, expenditure, entries to the freedom of the craft, to the fraternity and matters concerning the Brewers of London. Many payments were recorded in pursuit of the Brewers' Royal charter, which King Henry VI granted in 1438. Costs for making the commonalty seal were also recorded. At this time of change, when beer, rather than ale, was being made and sold in London, the clerk questioned the virtue of beer. He recorded the annual feasts, some important guests, and the purchase and distribution of livery cloth. The clerk gave insight into national events, with lists of the Brewers' contributions towards waging soldiers in Calais. Inventories of the goods of three Brewers' almsmen give glimpses of their lives. Porlond's records, kept mostly in English in this part of the book, illustrate the developing role of the company clerk.
Robert Godfrey, Edited by Jeff Opland
Lexicography
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Articles on Xhosa language and folklore
Robert Godfrey's major contribution to Xhosa-language studies is his revised and expanded edition, published in 1915, of Albert Kropf's classic Kafir-English Dictionary (1899). As a member of the staff of the Blythswood Institution, Godfrey edited the Blythswood Review, and in 1924, in preparation for a third edition of the Dictionary, he commenced an extended series of articles under the title Lexicography. Through these columns he invited his readers to supply him with the Xhosa names for birds and animals. The scope and range of the articles expanded, and he increasingly incorporated into his column quotations from pupils' essays on Xhosa lore and language. Selections from these articles comprise Godfrey's Bird-lore of the Eastern Cape Province (1941), now long out of print, and an article that Godfrey wrote on John Bennie (1934), but the articles as originally printed and as assembled here contain considerably more information, on a wider range of topics, and demonstrate the development of his knowledge.
Godfrey's contributions to the Blythswood Review contain invaluable knowledge on aspects of the domestic lives and language of the Xhosa-speaking peoples, much of it expressed in the Xhosa words of his informants, information on proverbs and riddles and taboos, on children's games and bird-lore, on hlonipha words and the Xhosa words for flora and fauna, on the months of the year and place names, on Xhosa grammar and the linguistic achievements of John Bennie, whose transcription of the Xhosa language became the earliest standard spelling system. Also included in this volume is an extensive collated list of lexical definitions intended for inclusion in the third edition of the Dictionary, which in the event was never published.
Altogether, this collection of Godfrey's articles constitutes a significant source of information on the folklore of the Xhosa-speaking peoples and the state of their language in the early decades of the twentieth century.
University of KwaZulu-Natal Press: Southern African Development Community
Edited by Detlef Müller-Mahn and Michael Bollig
African Futures in the Making
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What lies ahead for rural Africa, given a rapidly increasing population, climate change, poverty, inequality and projections of an increasing vulnerability to natural hazards and food shortages?
Bringing together scholars in ecology, agriculture, economics, human geography and cultural anthropology, from Ghana, Kenya, South Africa, Tanzania, Germany, The Netherlands and the UK, this book focusses on social-ecological transformation and future-making in rural Africa, especially in areas of rapid land-use change following the establishment of development corridors, conservation areas, and large-scale infrastructure projects. In Africa, discussions on the way forward are particularly conflict-ridden because people do not agree about desirable goals, because the gap between winners and losers seems to be bigger than elsewhere, and because the struggle for desirable futures is embedded in a problematic history of foreign domination and exploitation.
Focussing on eastern and southern Africa, topics examined range from the history of conservation initiatives and wildlife protection to visions of green development, from the gender implications of extreme climate events on pastoral economies to the use of information and communication technologies on farms and mobile money in geographically remote territories, from large-scale energy infrastructure projects and growth corridors to local ways of managing risk. The volume opens with reflections on African utopic registers of the future and conceptual decolonization in African futurity.
Edited by Lisa Jefferson
The Accounts of Two Westminster Fraternities, 1474-1540
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An edition of the surviving accounts of two important religious fraternities, one based at St Margaret's Westminster, the other at the Chapel of St Mary Rounceval at Charing Cross.
These organisations drew their membership from across the social spectrum, from nobles and senior clergy, to local parishioners and merchants. They formed a key focus of social and religious life, and their accounts throw light on the regular activities of Westminster inhabitants.
Paige Donaghy
Mola, False Conception, and False Pregnancy in British Medicine, 1550–1850
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When reproduction defied certainty, it unsettled medicine, law, and belief. This book reveals how ambiguous pregnancies reshaped knowledge, emotion, and the cultural meaning of conception across centuries.
Across the long durée of the early-modern period, British medical practitioners and society at large were preoccupied with the elusive phenomenon of "false generation"-a term encompassing false conceptions, molae, moles, and spurious pregnancies. These non-foetal pregnancies, often indistinguishable from true gestations, generated profound uncertainty in medical, legal, and theological thought. Drawing on sources ranging from anatomical treatises and midwifery manuals to women's letters, diaries, and court records, Donaghy traces how false generation shaped reproductive knowledge and understandings of the embodied experience. Through case studies such as Mary I and Joanna Southcott, the book highlights how reproductive ambiguity was not merely a private ordeal but a public and intellectual crisis. Engaging with figures like Galen, Jean Fernel, François Valleriola, and Frederik Ruysch, the book situates British debates within wider contemporaneous European contexts as well as a transhistorical development of medical knowledge.
By foregrounding uncertainty as both an emotional and conceptual force, this monograph contributes to the history of emotions, knowledge, and the body. It offers a field-defining account of how false generation unsettled assumptions about life, conception, and pregnancy, and how these ideas evolved into modern categories such as molar pregnancy. The book speaks directly to current debates in reproductive justice and healthcare, while presenting a compelling case for the historical contingency of reproductive knowledge and the diverse ways it has been shaped by cultural, scientific, and experiential factors.
Margaret Clunies Ross
Skaldic Poetry as Christian Propaganda
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A detailed literary study of fourteenth-century poetry composed in honour of a controversial thirteenth-century bishop.
Vernacular poetry was a powerful influence in fourteenth-century Icelandic elite literary culture, even to the extent of providing the means of elevating a local bishop, Guðmundr Arason, to sainthood. Three Icelandic poets, Abbots Arngrímr Brandsson and Árni Jónsson, and Lawman Einarr Gilsson, composed impressive encomia of Guðmundr, with the intention of recording the holy bishop's sanctity in the language of contemporary religious devotion and to persuade Church authorities in both Scandinavia and the wider Christian world to canonize him. While the local campaign ultimately failed to sway the Catholic Church, it did succeed in producing a significant corpus of vernacular religious poetry, unmatched in combining the traditional diction and metres of Old Norse skaldic verse with the vernacular poetics of affective piety and Christian hermeneutics.
This important group of poems is examined here for the first time as literary works. The manuscript context of the Guðmundr poetry is investigated in the first chapter. The next three chapters offer a detailed analysis of the poems themselves while the final chapters situate the Guðmundr poetry within the milieu of the vernacular learning that flourished particularly in mid-fourteenth-century Icelandic bishoprics and monasteries. They also explore the relationship between contemporary prose sagas of Guðmundr Arason and the poetry composed in his honour, which, it is argued, offers figural interpretations of the substance of the prose texts.
Massimiliano Bampi
A Critical Companion to Old Norse Literary Genre
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A comprehensive guide to a crucial aspect of Old Norse literature.
We cannot read literary works without making use of the concept of genre. In Old Norse studies, genre has been central to the categorisation, evaluation and understanding of medieval prose and poetry alike; yet its definition has been elusive and its implications often left unexplored. This volume opens up fundamental questions about Old Norse genre in theory and in practice. It offers an extensive range of theoretical approaches, investigating and critiquing current terms and situating its arguments within early Scandinavian and Icelandic oral-literary and manuscript contexts. It maps the ways in which genre and form engage with key thematic areas within the literary corpus,noting the different kinds of impact upon the genre system brought about by conversion to Christianity, the gradual adoption of European literary models, and social and cultural changes occurring in Scandinavian society. A case-study section probes both prototypical and hard-to-define cases, demonstrating the challenges that actual texts pose to genre theory in terms of hybridity, evolution and innovation. With an annotated taxonomy of Old Norse genres and an extensive bibliography, it is an indispensable resource for contemporary Old Norse-Icelandic literary studies.
Edited by Cosima Clara Gillhammer and Audrey Southgate
Medieval Commentary and Exegesis
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Interdisciplinary study of the medieval commentary tradition, covering a range of sources from the Wycliffite Bible and French Marian Lyric to John Lydgate and Anselm of Canterbury.
Textual and material survivals from across medieval Europe testify to a pervasive commentary culture on Scripture. The biblical text becomes a central object of explication and comment, generating a variety of interpretive texts and genres. But precisely because it is so ubiquitous, medieval commentary can also prove elusive, requiring perspectives from different disciplines. How can we define commentary, and how does it develop and function in different linguistic and geographical areas? What role do commentaries play in the formation and reformulation of personal and national identities across the period? How can contemporary scholars best approach this fundamental genre of the medieval world?
Exploring these among many other questions, this volume revises and refines our current understanding of the intellectual, cultural, and literary dynamics of the medieval commentary tradition. Contributors consider matters such asauthority, patronage, readership, textual genesis, and material contexts of commentary, as well as the absences and lacunae in our knowledge, and how we might take these into account from today's perspective. Expansive in their chronological, methodological, and disciplinary scope, the chapters here illuminate the origins and forms of commentary from Late Antiquity to the late medieval period in Western Europe, extending across Hebrew, Latin and vernacular texts, and examine a wide range of literary and cultural artefacts, from single-authored works to manuscript compilations.
Edited by Julian Goodare
Scottish Witchcraft Narratives and Tracts
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This book is a scholarly edition of primary sources for witch-hunting and demonic possession in Scotland. It contains narratives of remarkable witchcraft prosecutions, and tracts expounding witchcraft theory.
The narratives provide the intense emotional drama, eye-catching colour and nightmarish horror that made witchcraft such a compelling idea. The accused witches' own voices are sometimes heard, under the harrowing circumstances of interrogation under torture. Meanwhile, educated ministers and lawyers develop their theoretical ideas about witches and the Devil. Not every theorist agrees with the prosecutions, and doubts arise that would eventually lead witch-hunting to lose its credibility. The book's most detailed narrative concerns the Bargarran witches of 1697, in which seven witches were executed for the demonic possession of the 11-year-old Christian Shaw. The book shows how this was connected with the sensational witchcraft panic in 1692 at Salem, Massachusetts.
Edited by Richard K. Rose
The Register Of Thomas Hatfield, Bishop Of Durham, 1345-1381
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The full record of diocesan administration under Bishop Hatfield. This edition completes the publication of the surviving medieval episcopal registers from the diocese of Durham.
Thomas Hatfield was a member of the inner circle of Edward III, who advanced him as his candidate for election to the chapter of Durham and for provision to the pope after the death of Richard Bury in April 1345. As a trusted administrator, his choice was no doubt attractive to the king, in part because along with the diocese came the palatinate of Durham. He was involved in the early stages of the war with France and was present at the battle of Crécy. For most of his episcopate, however, he struck a balance between remaining in his diocese and the palatinate most of each year and staying near the centre of national affairs in London. The first wave of the Black Death struck England in June 1348 and spread throughout the country in 1349. The long-term effects can be seen at several points in the register in respect of shortage of priests and declining revenues of religious houses, parish churches, and chantries. Primarily a document of diocesan administration, the register is chiefly composed of the transfer of benefices, but there are ample letters concerned with discipline of the clergy and the laity, and the rare example of a detailed record of a trial, that of an archdeacon of Northumberland for the killing of a layman.
This edition completes the publication of the surviving medieval episcopal registers from the diocese of Durham.
Chelsea Reutcke
Catholic Print Networks in Restoration London, 1660-1688
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Uncovers the hidden networks behind Catholic publishing in Restoration London, where politics, religion, and print intersected in unexpected ways under Charles II, James VII/II, and Queen Catherine of Braganza.
In the politically volatile decades following the Restoration, the Catholic book trade in London remained a vibrant and adaptive force. This study reconstructs the networks-commercial, familial, and religious-that sustained the production and circulation of Catholic texts between 1660 and 1688. These networks operated within and across confessional boundaries, drawing in Protestants and Catholics alike, and were shaped by shifting legal frameworks, urban patronage, and the ambiguities of what constituted a 'popish' text.
Focusing on the lived experience of printers, booksellers, and readers, the book challenges the notion of Catholic isolation in Protestant England. It reveals how Catholic print culture was embedded in the broader English print economy and public sphere, often sharing tools, spaces, and strategies with dissenting and loyalist traditions. From Somerset House to the streets of London, Catholic actors navigated censorship and suspicion with ingenuity, contributing to a paradoxical print culture that was both illicit and integrated.
Engaging with the fields of Catholic history, book history, and Restoration studies, this monograph offers a new framework for understanding religious identity, toleration, and the mechanics of clandestine publishing. It brings to light the agency of overlooked figures and repositions Catholic print as a central, rather than marginal, feature of early modern English society.
Edited by Sarah Semple and Jane Hawkes
Early Medieval Sculpture in Stone
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Multidisciplinary scholarship showcasing innovative methods for working with sculptural material - with essays ranging from Merovingian funerary art to Old English and Scandinavian runic inscriptions.
The stone sculptures surviving across Europe from the early medieval period are an exceptional resource for understanding the communities that created them. Found at waysides, in architectural settings, and graveyards - standing crosses, inscribed stones, runestones and grave-markers are just some of the highly varied forms that attest to the art, technologies and beliefs of both Christian and non-Christian societies. The new approaches to sculpture studies found in this volume range from rethinking late antique influences to exploring how sculpture was used and encountered in a variety of political and cultural contexts; contributors also draw out the dialogues inherent in form and decoration within and across temporal and national boundaries. These fresh perspectives on iconographies, narrative art, sculpture and nature and the power of sculpture in multi-media environments, alongside studies of sourcing, production and portability, and the afterlives of carved stones, reflect the vibrancy of current research and the way in which it now integrates digital, scientific and spatial methods.
The introduction and chapters 26 and 27 are available as Open Access under the Creative Commons licence CC BY-NC-ND. This work was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council [AH/R003556/1] and the British Academy [AQ2324\240012].
Chapter 17 is Open Access under the Creative Commons License CC BY-NC-ND with funding from the Swedish National Heritage Board.
Edited by Lauren Beck, Ailén Cruz, and Samantha Penina Ruckenstein
Animal Symbolism in Hispanic Literature
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Whether unicorns, phoenix, and chimera, or axolotl, jaguars, and giant snakes, animals have often had the human experience grafted onto them, in a conscious or unconscious reflection of a society's beliefs, ambitions, and inequalities.
This volume seeks to explore different representations of real and imaginary animals across Hispanic literary production from the early modern era to the present day in order to gain a better understanding of how they serve as projections of human identities, knowledge, values, and vices. How do beasts enable the colonizing gaze and its reaches? How might beasts offer a means of decolonizing the Hispanophone world? And how do beasts articulate social unrest and a desire to resist inequality, poverty, and other ills of the modern world that collectively reinforce the status quo?
Working to better understand how Spanish and Latin American authors, illustrators, and graphic artists have understood animals and beasts, and how they interacted with them, contributors from the United States, Canada, Mexico, and Spain shed light on the use of animals as symbols and emblems, as well as how they have been employed to construct others as monstrous and less human.
Edited by Evan Bourke, Deirdre Nic Chárthaigh, and Philip Mac a’ Ghoill
Spenser and the Filidh in Early Modern Ireland
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Uncovers a vibrant literary culture often overlooked by colonial historiography and Anglocentric critical traditions. Reimagines Spenser's Munster through multilingual networks, bardic poetry, and digital methodologies.
Long dominated by Anglocentric narratives, early modern literary studies have often cast Ireland as a backdrop to English self-fashioning. This volume reorients that perspective by foregrounding the multilingual, polyvocal literary culture of Munster in the late sixteenth century, situating Edmund Spenser not as an isolated colonial voice but as one writer among many-Gaelic, Old English, and New English-engaged in a contested cultural landscape. Drawing on archival, digital, and geospatial methodologies, the essays presented here explore bardic poetry, deep mapping, and the politics of language in texts by and about Spenser and his contemporaries. Case studies of bardic poetry, manuscript culture, and poetic networks reveal a vibrant and dynamic Gaelic literary tradition that responded to colonial violence.
By integrating perspectives from Irish-language literature, English studies, and digital humanities, this collection offers a vital corrective to monolingual historiographies and opens new pathways for understanding the cultural entanglements of Spenser's Munster. It reconceptualises the idea of Spenser in Ireland by highlighting the region's cultural complexity and multilingualism, demonstrating how attention to this richness deepens our understanding of one of the most fraught and fateful periods in the shared history of Ireland and England.
Kelsey Jackson Williams
Miscellany XVII
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The seventeenth volume in the Scottish History Society's Miscellany series, showcasing editions of unpublished short texts.
Volume XVII of the Scottish History Society's Miscellany includes editions of nine unpublished short texts dating from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries. These include a rich range of legal, economic, and intellectual documents ranging from an "Essay on Resistance to Magistrates" (c.1637-38), to a poem on the appointment of a judge at Melrose in 1682, to new material on the (in)famous physician and philosopher Archibald Pitcairne. This volume continues the Society's programme of making previously unpublished and unedited primary sources for Scotland's history available in scholarly and accessible forms.
Gabriele Passabì
Robert of Torigni's Chronography and the Universal Chronicle Tradition
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Offers a reassessment of universal chronicle-writing and its ideological implications in the twelfth century.
The Chronography of Robert of Torigni is a key source for the political landscapes of twelfth-century Normandy, England, and wider Western Europe. Robert was at the heart of the Norman political network that revolved around Empress Matilda and her son Henry II, and so a crucial witness to the intense political transformations occurring in the Anglo-Norman world.
This book places his chronicle within its wider textual community, casting new light on the social practices, intellectual rationale, and ambitions of the chroniclers who followed the historiographical traditions of Eusebius of Caesarea, Jerome and Sigebert of Gembloux. Along with Torigni's Chronography, the book examines how independent chroniclers and continuators at Savigny, Mortemer, Ourscamp as well as John of Salisbury adapted the chronicles of Eusebius-Jerome and Sigebert, openly engaging with - or reacting against - their understanding of time, empire and power. It demonstrates how textual traditions and ideological discourses can move across geopolitical boundaries, illuminating the specific circumstances that made the Eusebius-Jerome and Sigebert tradition of chronicle-writing successful in this period.
R. Larry Todd, Katharina Uhde
The Art of Musical Ciphers, Riddles and Sundry Curiosities
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Offers the first comprehensive account of a centuries-old tradition of encrypting covert messages into music, from the Middle Ages to the present day.
Question: What do J. S. Bach, beef cabbage, coffee, the SATOR Square, and Marlene Dietrich have in common?
Answer: Composers have enciphered these and many other words into music.
Since time immemorial riddles have intrigued us, partly for their mirthful manner of connecting incongruous ideas, partly for their arresting way of opening fresh perspectives on our shared human condition. When we think of riddles, we normally recall verbal conundrums from cultures around the globe. But riddles can penetrate non-verbal aspects of our existence as well. Masking messages in music so that they lurk beneath the sonorous surface is an august Western tradition spanning the Middle Ages to the present. Known as musical cryptography, these puzzling pursuits form the subject of this book, construed broadly enough to capture not just musical ciphers and codes but also a curiosity shop of related techniques, which arguably can advance the greater virtue. They entertain, edify, and enthral, but also bewitch and bewilder, and, when unsolved, perplex and perturb.
Martin Carver
The Experimental Sutton Hoo Ship
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Unearthed from its burial mound, the Sutton Hoo ship offers a profound window into the political, cultural and technological world of seventh-century East Anglia.
On the eve of war in 1939 the remains of a wooden ship nearly 90 feet long were excavated beneath a mound at Sutton Hoo in Suffolk. Only the lines of iron rivets that secured the planking were still in place. This is the largest ship so far recovered from north-eastern Europe in the pre-Viking period. Now this great vessel is being reconstructed by the Sutton Hoo Ship's Company on the Woodbridge waterfront.
In this book - the first of three - Martin Carver pictures the people that created the ship in the seventh century, and explores their world of beliefs, burial, ornamental metalwork, clothes, and carpentry. The treasure found in the ship marks the high point of the kingdom of East Anglia, a realm linked with continental Europe, the Mediterranean and the Byzantine empire. This coincided with the creation of great timber halls and great clinker-built wooden ships. In order to see what influenced the design and construction of the Sutton Hoo ships, we have to look at the surviving evidence for seventh century boats from a wide variety of countries.
This roll-call of broadly contemporary boats is followed by a description of how our ship came to be reconstructed today, through the initiatives of Sutton Hoo's researchers and custodians and the people of Woodbridge, how it was designed and made a reality, concluding with an overview of what we can learn from this kind of recreation of a major archaeological discovery.
Louise Green
ALT 38 Environmental Transformations
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Investigates what literary strategies African writers adopt to convey the impact of climate transformation and environmental change.
This special issue examines the ways fiction and poetry engage with environmental consciousness, and how African literary criticism addresses the implications of global environmental transformations. Does environmentalist literature offer new possibilities for critical thinking about the future? What constitutes environmentalist fiction and poetry? What kind of texts, themes and topics does climate writing include? Does any text in which the environment features become available to environmentalist criticism? In their engagement with the diverse genres, themes and frameworks through which contemporary African writers address topics including urbanisation, cross-species communication, nature and climate change, contributors to this special issue help to define African environmental writing. They look at the literary strategies adopted by creative writers to convey the impact of environmental transformationin narratives that are historically informed by a century of colonialism, nationalist political activism, urbanisation and postcolonial migration. How does environmental literature intervene in these histories? Can creative writers, with their powerfully post-human and cross-species imaginations, carry out the ethical work demanded by contemporary climate science? From Tanure Ojaide's and Helon Habila's attention to environmental decimation in the Niger Delta through to Nnedi Okorafor's and Kofi Anyidoho's imaginative cross-species encounters, the special issue asks how literature mediates the specificities of climate change in an era of global capitalism and technological transformation, and what the limits of creative writing and literary criticism are as tools for discussing environmental issues.
Guest Editors: Cajetan Iheka (Associate Professor of English, Yale University) and Stephanie Newell (Professor of English, Yale University) Series Editor: Ernest N. Emenyonu (Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Michigan-Flint) Reviews Editor: Obi Nwakanma (Fellow, Department of English University of Central Florida)
Mary Bateman
Local Place and the Arthurian Tradition in England and Wales, 1400-1700
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The first in-depth study of Arthurian places in late medieval and early modern England and Wales.
Winner of the 2024 Dhira B. Mahoney Prize for Outstanding Scholarly Book in Arthurian Studies
Places have the power to suspend disbelief, even concerning unbelievable subjects. The many locations associated with King Arthur show this to be true, from Tintagel in Cornwall to Caerleon in Wales. But how and why did Arthurian sites come to proliferate across the English and Welsh landscape? What role did the medieval custodians of Arthurian abbeys, churches, cathedrals, and castles play in "placing" Arthur? How did visitors experience Arthur in situ, and how did their experiences permeate into wider Arthurian tradition? And why, in history and even today, have particular places proven so powerful in defending the impression of Arthur's reality?
This book, the first in-depth study of Arthurian places in late medieval and early modern England and Wales, provides an answer to these questions. Beginning with an examination of on-site experiences of Arthur, at locations including Glastonbury, York, Dover, and Cirencester, it traces the impact that they had on visitors, among them John Hardyng, John Leland, William Camden, who subsequently used them as justification for the existence of Arthur in their writings. It shows how the local Arthur was manifested through textual and material culture: in chronicles, notebooks, and antiquarian works; in stained glass windows, earthworks, and display tablets. Via a careful piecing together of the evidence, the volume argues that a new history of Arthur begins to emerge: a local history.
Lisa Elena Fuchs
A Political Ecology of Kenya’s Mau Forest
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A timely and important examination of the forest's 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
R. Larry Todd
The Art of Musical Ciphers, Riddles and Sundry Curiosities
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$190.00
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Offers the first comprehensive account of a centuries-old tradition of encrypting covert messages into music, from the Middle Ages to the present day.
Question: What do J. S. Bach, beef cabbage, coffee, the SATOR Square, and Marlene Dietrich have in common?
Answer: Composers have enciphered these and many other words into music.
Since time immemorial riddles have intrigued us, partly for their mirthful manner of connecting incongruous ideas, partly for their arresting way of opening fresh perspectives on our shared human condition. When we think of riddles, we normally recall verbal conundrums from cultures around the globe. But riddles can penetrate non-verbal aspects of our existence as well. Masking messages in music so that they lurk beneath the sonorous surface is an august Western tradition spanning the Middle Ages to the present. Known as musical cryptography, these puzzling pursuits form the subject of this book, construed broadly enough to capture not just musical ciphers and codes but also a curiosity shop of related techniques, which arguably can advance the greater virtue. They entertain, edify, and enthral, but also bewitch and bewilder, and, when unsolved, perplex and perturb.
Sara Elin Roberts
The Growth of Law in Medieval Wales, c.1100-c.1500
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2022 Hywel Dda Award (University of Wales Literary Awards)
A ground-breaking study of the lawbooks which were created in the changing social and political climate of post-conquest Wales.
The Middle Ages in Wales were turbulent, with society and culture in constant flux. Edward I of England's 1282 conquest brought with it major changes to society, governance, power and identity, and thereby to the traditional system of the law. Despite this, in the post-conquest period the development of law in Wales and the March flourished, and many manuscripts and lawbooks were created to meet the needs of those who practised law. This study, the first to fully reappraise the entire corpus of law manuscripts since Aneurin Owen's seminal 1841 edition, begins by considering the background to the creation of the law from the earliest period, particularly from c.1100 onwards, before turning to the "golden age" of lawmaking in thirteenth-century Gwynedd. The nature of the law in south Wales is also examined in full, with a particular focus on later developments, including the different use of legal texts in that region and its fourteenth- and fifteenth-century manuscripts. The author approaches medieval Welsh law, its practice, texts and redactions, in their own contexts, rather than through the lens of later historiography. In particular, she shows that much manuscript material previously considered "additional" or "anomalous" in fact incorporates new legal material and texts written for a particular purpose: thanks to their flexible accommodation of change, adjustment and addition, Welsh lawbooks were not just shaped by, but indeed shaped, medieval Welsh law.
Uhuru Portia Phalafala
Keorapetse Kgositsile & the Black Arts Movement
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Key study on writer and activist Kgositsile that presents a new approach to studying the radicalism of Africa and its diaspora and makes a major contribution to the histories of Black lives, gender studies, jazz studies, politics, and creativity.
The cultural configurations of the Black Atlantic cannot be fully understood without recognising the significant presence of writers and artists from the African continent itself. Among the most influential was South African poet laureate Keorapetse Kgositsile, or 'Bra Willie', as he was affectionately known. Yet, until now, there has been no full-length study of his work.
Uhuru Phalafala's wide-ranging book reveals the foundational influence of Kgositsile's mother and grandmother on his craft and unveils the importance of the oral/aural traditions, indigenous knowledge systems, and cosmologies he carried with him into and after exile. It illuminates a southern African modernity that was strongly gendered and deployed in anti-imperialist, anti-colonial, anti-apartheid, and civil rights struggles. Using the original concept of 'elsewhere', the author maps the sources of Kgositsile's transformative verse, which in turn generated 'poetics of possibility' for his contemporaries in the Black Arts and Black Power Movements and beyond - among them Maya Angelou, Larry Neal, Gwendolyn Brooks, Tom Dent, members of The Last Poets, Otabenga Jones & Associates, and rapper Earl Sweatshirt - who all looked to his work to model their identities, cultural movements and radical traditions.
Jonas Ntsiko, Edited by Jeff Opland and Pamela Maseko
Hadi waseluhlangeni
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All the clearly identifiable writings of Jonas Ntsiko, the 'national harp' of South Africa, in English and in isiXhosa
In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Xhosa literature was dominated by two writers: William Wellington Gqoba and Jonas Ntsiko. Gqoba's status and reputation are today assured, and he is well known and recognised by authorities who have written on the early history of Xhosa literature. In sharp contrast, Ntsiko's contribution to Xhosa literature is almost entirely overlooked. Very little is known about him and his substantial contribution to early Xhosa literature; not one of the items included here has subsequently been republished. Ntsiko is a ghostly presence, defined by his absence, an ancestral shade invoked by none.
Ntsiko (1850-1918) wrote under the pseudonym 'Hadi waseluhlangeni', the National Harp. This volume contains two substantial essays, by Marguerite Poland and Jeff Opland, that offer an account, for the first time, of Ntsiko's life and times, his early schooling in Grahamstown, his three years of study in England, his ordination as a deacon in the Anglican Church and his ten-year career in church service, ending abruptly in the termination of his licence. Thereafter, he grew progressively blind and ended his working life serving the magistrate in the rural village of Tsolo.
This book assembles for the first time all the clearly identifiable writings of Ntsiko in English and in Xhosa: journals, narrative and lyrical poetry, obituaries and polemical articles on the bible translation, politics and church affairs. It seeks to claim recognition for him as a major voice in the history of Xhosa literature, as an outspoken social critic and as a leading intellectual in the early formulation of African nationalism.
University of KwaZulu-Natal Press: Southern African Development Community
Jeff Opland
Xhosa literature
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Essays examining isiXhosa oral literature, novels and journalism and the interconnections between them in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
Xhosa Literature: Spoken and Printed Words consists of fourteen essays addressing Xhosa literature in three media - the spoken word, newspapers and books. Literary critics tend to focus on Xhosa literature published in books; some attention has been paid to Xhosa oral poetry and tales, but by and large the contribution of newspapers to the development of Xhosa literature has been overlooked. This book explores aspects of Xhosa literature in all three media, and their interconnections.
Six of the essays treat historical narratives (amabali) and praise poetry (izibongo), setting out the social and ritual function of poetry and the poet (imbongi), mapping changes in the izibongo of three poets as South Africa moved towards democracy in the 1990s, and analysing recordings of two poems recited by S.E.K. Mqhayi. Three essays are devoted to the first Xhosa novel, Mqhayi's U-Samson (1907), to the publication of the greatest novel in Xhosa, A.C. Jordan's Ingqumbo yeminyanya (1940), and to the first published poem in praise of Nelson Mandela, D.L.P. Yali-Manisi's 'UNkosi Rolihlahla Nelson Mandela' (1954). There follow accounts of Xhosa literature in the nineteenth century and the appropriation of the press by Xhosa editors towards the end of that century, of Nontsizi Mgqwetho's fiery poetry published in Umteteli wa Bantu and of poems by Mgqwetho and Mqhayi published in Abantu-Batho, two Johannesburg newspapers. The volume concludes with an exposition of an imaginative response to David Yali-Manisi and his poetry.
University of KwaZulu-Natal Press: Southern African Development Community
John Solilo, Edited by Jeff Opland and Peter T. Mtuze
Umoya wembongi
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All 65 of John Solilo's poems from Izala, now out of print, with an additional 28 first published in newspapers, in isiXhosa and English translation, with a comprehensive introduction
John Solilo (1864-1940) was a prolific contributor to Xhosa-language newspapers. He submitted letters and articles on a variety of issues, local news reports from Cradock and Uitenhage, and a considerable body of poetry. His major literary contribution was his collection of poems entitled Izala (A Rubbish Dump), published in 1925, the earliest volume of poetry by a single author in the history of Xhosa literature.
Solilo's literary reputation today, however, is at variance with his prominence as a major author in the first four decades of the twentieth century: he is hardly mentioned, if at all, by literary historians, Izala has long been out of print, and copies can no longer be located. In restoring to the public domain the 65 poems that made up Izala and adding an additional 28 that were published in newspapers both before and after the appearance of Izala, the editors hope to revive John Solilo's reputation as a poet, and to establish his status as a pre-eminent Xhosa author.
In his poetry, Solilo urged passivity and opposed political revolt, but he could also be scathing in his denunciation of black indignities suffered under white control, inspired as he was by umoya wembongi, the spirit of the imbongi, the praise poet whose stirring declamations roused his audiences to action or contemplation.
University of KwaZulu-Natal Press: Southern African Development Community
Edited by Jeff Opland and Peter T. Mtuze
Iimbali zamandulo
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Recollections of ordinary people, in isiXhosa and English translation, of daily life and historical events in the nineteenth century
Iimbali zamandulo - 'Stories of the Past' - is a selection of historical testimonies produced by Xhosa-speaking residents of the Eastern Cape between 1838 and 1910. These narratives offer fresh insights into the history of the Xhosa-speaking peoples, providing their own perspectives on their own past.
The volume contains recollections reaching back to seventeenth-century dynastic disputes, to a period preceding the southward migrations in the early nineteenth century into territories settled by Xhosa-speaking peoples. It passes on through those migrations, the clashes and resettlement of peoples and of individuals, the contest for land throughout the century, and on to the struggle for social control and the assertion of cultural identity by the century's end.
To a remarkable extent, we are lent intimate access here to the lives of ordinary people, seeking better pastures for themselves, their families and their livestock; hunting, fighting and, above all, confronting personal conflict in their choices between mission Christianity and ancestral beliefs; between support for their chiefs or the colonial authorities; between active or passive resistance to encroachment on their territory; and between colonial distortions purveyed in the schools and their receding grasp of their own sustaining histories.
University of KwaZulu-Natal Press: Southern African Development Community
Jeff Opland
Xhosa Poets and Poetry
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Essays examining the poetry and leading poets of the Xhosa-speaking peoples in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
The Xhosa-speaking peoples who settled along the south-eastern seaboard of South Africa promoted traditions of praise poetry (izibongo), poetry produced orally by men and women, adults and children, about people, clans, ancestors and animals. Throughout the nineteenth century, authors who used the Xhosa language gradually developed the craft of composing poetry for publication in newspapers, and expanded this process in the twentieth century, when books containing secular literature appeared, but the practice of oral poetry persists, flourishing now as it did before the incursion of colonial settlers. The dominant poet in the community is the imbongi, who continues to produce poetry praising or criticising figures of authority on occasions of local and national significance.
Xhosa Poets and Poetry (Iimbongi nezibongo) contains fourteen essays originally published between 1974 and 1996. Based on fieldwork conducted between 1969 and 1985, and on extensive archival research, the first six essays examine the social function of poetry in the community, the element of improvisation in the production of poetry, especially in the poetry of the imbongi, and the structural principles of his poetry. Individual poets are then presented, among them D.L.P. Yali-Manisi, Melikaya Mbutuma, Peter Mtuze and Nontsizi Mgqwetho, the first woman to produce a substantial body of poetry. The concluding four essays are thematic, treating issues introduced by the medium of print: the role of newspapers in fostering literature; censorship and control of the press; the damaging effects of changes in Xhosa spelling and the demand for books for school prescription; and, finally, the suspicion in which Xhosa poets held books and writing.
This second edition updates the bibliographical references and amplifies some of the arguments. Xhosa Poets and Poetry offers a keen engagement with its subject, enlivened by extracts from conversations with poets and copious examples of their poetry in Xhosa and in English translation. It offers a cultural context for the volumes in this series.
University of KwaZulu-Natal Press: Southern African Development Community
Jeff Opland
Izibongo zoogxa
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33 poems by Samuel Edward Krune Mqhayi, in isiXhosa and English translation, with a comprehensive introduction
Samuel Edward Krune Mqhayi is renowned and justly celebrated as the most accomplished writer in the Xhosa language, the author of collections of poetry, novels, biographies, monographs, translations and an autobiography in book form. Mqhayi's Izibongo Zoogxa is a collection of 33 poems about persons and personages who lived during his lifetime (1875-1945). Originally published in ephemeral newspapers, none of the poems has subsequently been republished; all appear here in more permanent form for the first time.
Mqhayi's poetry was directed at readers of the Xhosa language (isiXhosa) and sought to encourage them, instil in them pride and hope, and sway them towards a more humane disposition. One of the striking features of the poems in this collection is the range of subjects, not just Xhosa but also Zulu, Sotho and Tswana; not just black leaders but white as well; male and female; South African as well as British and German; close friends as well as foreign politicians; chiefs and commoners.
Samuel Mqhayi was a much-admired, much-celebrated poet, a true man of the people, who lived his life, as he signed himself, enkonzweni yesizwe (in the service of the nation). The poems assembled here offer insights not only into their subjects but also into the life and thought of Mqhayi himself, Imbongi yesizwe jikelele (Poet of the entire nation), a cultural icon, humane patriot and passionate inspiration to his people.
University of KwaZulu-Natal Press: Southern African Development Community
S.E.K. Mqhayi, Edited by Jeff Opland and Peter T. Mtuze
Iziganeko zesizwe
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Samuel Edward Krune Mqhayi's occasional poems, in isiXhosa and English translation, with a comprehensive introduction
Samuel Edward Krune Mqhayi (1875-1945) was the most prominent South African imbongi of his day, a Xhosa oral poet who declaimed his impromptu poetry on occasions of significance to his people. The author of numerous works of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, biography, autobiography and translation, Mqhayi's contributions to Xhosa-language newspapers remains unparalleled in scope and volume.
This book reclaims and assembles a chronological sequence of Mqhayi's occasional poems, for the most part now unknown - 60 poems celebrating significant events in the calendar, on occasions of national or international importance. They constitute Iziganeko zesizwe, a chronicle of the nation, between 1900 and 1943: poetic responses to events from the perspective of the greatest figure in Xhosa literature. Wars feature prominently in these occasional poems - the Boer War, the First World War, the invasion of Abyssinia, the Second World War - as do political deputations to England, visits from British princes and the death of British kings, the appearance of Halley's Comet and meetings with Ministers of State. Running through the collection is Mqhayi's proud and fierce determination to maintain an identity rooted in custom and history in the face of territorial dispossession, the loss of title deeds and the vote, and the steady erosion of human rights.
Throughout these years, Mqhayi remained constant in offering praise and encouragement to his people, in celebrating their achievements, and in expressing Christian consolation and an unflinching faith in the future liberation of South Africa's black population from foreign control.
University of KwaZulu-Natal Press: Southern African Development Community
D.L.P. Yali-Manisi, imbongi entsha, Edited by Jeff Opland and Pamela Maseko
Iimbali zamanyange
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Eight of David Livingstone Phakamile Yali-Manisi's narrative poems, in isiXhosa and English translation, with a comprehensive introduction
David Livingstone Phakamile Yali-Manisi (1926-99) was a Thembu imbongi, the most powerful exponent of the art of praise poetry in the Xhosa language, in the second half of the twentieth century. His literary career, however, was blighted by circumstances beyond his control, and he died in total obscurity. Manisi was obliged to seek his audiences throughout the lifetime of South Africa's reviled policy of apartheid, and the poet's reputation, initially full of promise, waned as a consequence. He was a lifelong supporter of Nelson Mandela and the author of the earliest poem in praise of Mandela (1954), but he was never able to fulfil his ambition of performing a poem in honour of Mandela in a liberated South Africa.
Manisi exhibited a marked penchant for extending the panegyric mode of the imbongi into explicit narrative; he also displayed an astonishing capacity to compose poetry in the act of performance. This volume presents eight of his narrative poems in isiXhosa and in English translation. Four of them are drawn from his earliest published books, together with the complete text of his epic poem on the War of Mlanjeni, published in 1983; also included are three remarkable spontaneous poems produced with little forethought. The poems address events in the first eighty years of the nineteenth century, and feature blunt assessments of figures such as Ntsikana, Ngqika, Nonesi, Sandile, Sir Harry Smith, Nongqawuse and Sir George Grey. David Yali-Manisi ardently anticipated the restoration of black control under those imprisoned on Robben Island, fighters for liberty quite as heroic as the crane-feathered warriors of the nineteenth century. His poetry, both written and performed, plumbed the past to inspire resistance to present injustices.
University of KwaZulu-Natal Press: Southern African Development Community
Eric Wolever
North, South, East and West in Twelfth-Century Thought
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Considers how twelfth-century authors used the four cardinal points as a conceptual system to make sense of and construct their world.
From the Great White North to the West End or the Global South, we frequently carve up our world according to the cardinal points. These divisions are rarely mere geographical conveniences; they bring with them a host of ideas about regions and their inhabitants.
This book examines how this phenomenon operated in the Middle Ages, drawing on sources from the Ordinary Gloss on the Bible to the geographies of Hugh of Saint Victor and Honorius Augustodunensis. It begins by tracing the consolidation of the cardinal points as a foundational spatial vocabulary in the Middle Ages and looks athow these terms accumulated new meaning and significance in biblical exegesis, geography and history writing over the twelfth century. It pays particular attention to the ways in which authors actively engaged with and manipulated this tradition, showing how authors like Sigebert of Gembloux, Romuald of Salerno and Orderic Vitalis made use of these ideas to underscore the broader narrative agendas of their universal histories. Subsequent chapters focus on the role of space in narratives of identity formation, using as case studies histories of the First Crusade, the duchy of Normandy and the abbey of Cluny.
Edited by Des Atkinson
The Lands of a Medieval Devon Nunnery: the Extents of Canonsleigh Abbey
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Translates the medieval land records of Canonsleigh Abbey in East Devon, offering a window into agriculture and daily life in medieval England.
This book publishes the fourteenth-century survey of the lands of a medieval nunnery. The records describe the landscape, crops, tenants, and labour services performed by ordinary men and women that supported the abbey, across its lands in Devon, Essex (including the town of Manningtree) and Suffolk. With a substantial introduction by the editor, it offers a window into the abbey's finances, agriculture, and daily life in the late Middle Ages, showing how the abbey withstood a period of agricultural and climatic crisis.
The book makes these vivid Latin records accessible to readers interested in the history of medieval peasants, farming, and religious houses, as well as the local history and landscape of Devon and of the abbey's Essex and Suffolk manors.
Nancy November and Imogen Morris
Musical Amateurs as Artistic Citizens in Schubert’s Vienna
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Details the wide, integral and influential role played by 'amateur' participants in early nineteenth-century Vienna's musical life.
During Franz Schubert's lifetime in early nineteenth-century Vienna, amateurs and dilettantes were a vital part of the music scene, so much so that Eduard Hanslick considered it the high point of musical dilettantism in Vienna. Schubert himself participated extensively in this rich world of domestic music-making. Around 1800 terms such as "amateur" and "dilettante" had broader and more positive connotations than today, and "amateurs" could indeed often portray a high skill level. The book considers the amateurs' and dilettantes' identities and motivations for making music, and their various roles in the musical life of early nineteenth-century Vienna. It dives deeply into contexts, performance practices and spaces, as well as instruments that have so far been little explored. Musical Amateurs in Schubert's Vienna uncovers new key agents in early nineteenth-century Viennese musical life who have so far remained invisible.
Peter Ward Jones
British Choral Singing
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Charts choral traditions in Britain, evolution, sociological composition, engagement with and place within cathedrals and secular spaces.
Choirs are living organisms and ever changing. This book tells the story of British choral singing (not choral music) and deals with both sacred and secular choirs and institutions from the medieval era through to the Covid pandemic and its aftermath. A series of different choral traditions has emerged over the centuries. The oldest is that of the all-male cathedral choir, while the secular choral society evolved from the eighteenth century onwards. Although there are many histories of individual cathedrals and choral societies, this is the first general history of British choral traditions. While English matters predominate, those of Scotland, Wales and Ireland are also considered. Even though British choral traditions have penetrated many parts of the world, there has also been much cross-fertilization of late with the rich choral cultures of other nations in Europe and beyond. Choral singing inevitably involved matters of social class, and a much more nuanced story is told here than the current view of choirs as being a largely middle-class phenomenon might suggest.
Scholarly in method while highly readable, the book offers invaluable background to choral practitioners. When choral activity is reviving healthily after the Covid 19 pandemic, such a volume appears timely, reminding the reader of the essentially communal and social nature of the choral experience.
Richard North
Beowulf and Grettis saga
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Investigates the relationship between two texts separated by hundreds of years and nearly two thousand miles.
In the saga, Grettir fights a giant who wields a hepti-sax; in the poem, Beowulf uses a hæft-mēce on Grendel's mother. These two unique words for "hafted blade" appear to be related. Can the same be said for the works that surround them? This book says yes, arguing not that the weapons have a common origin, nor that their likeness is a coincidence, but that Grettis saga has borrowed from Beowulf.
The case for a textual loan begins in the context of England's connection with Denmark in the reign of Cnut the Great (1016-35). This book argues that Cnut took an interest in Scyld and the Scyldings of Beowulf and that his skalds transformed these names into "Skjǫldr" and the "Skjǫldungar". The Beowulf manuscript is placed in Lichfield in 1017, with the suggestion that it was commissioned by Eadric Streona as a gift for Earl Thorkell of Skåne. It is proposed that in 1159 a copy of Beowulf was brought from Lincoln to Iceland to serve the interests of a family that claimed descent from Skjǫldr, that in the 1180s the poem influenced Skjǫldunga saga, and that in the 1190s Beowulf went north to Þingeyrar abbey, where Oddr the Monk, author of Grettis saga, used it to enhance Grettir's fights with Glámr and the trolls of Bárðardalr. This is a daring book that sheds new light on the circulation of Beowulf, on questions of dating and patronage, and on the authorship of Grettis saga.
Peter Ward Jones
British Choral Singing
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$170.00
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Charts choral traditions in Britain, evolution, sociological composition, engagement with and place within cathedrals and secular spaces.
Choirs are living organisms and ever changing. This book tells the story of British choral singing (not choral music) and deals with both sacred and secular choirs and institutions from the medieval era through to the Covid pandemic and its aftermath. A series of different choral traditions has emerged over the centuries. The oldest is that of the all-male cathedral choir, while the secular choral society evolved from the eighteenth century onwards. Although there are many histories of individual cathedrals and choral societies, this is the first general history of British choral traditions. While English matters predominate, those of Scotland, Wales and Ireland are also considered. Even though British choral traditions have penetrated many parts of the world, there has also been much cross-fertilization of late with the rich choral cultures of other nations in Europe and beyond. Choral singing inevitably involved matters of social class, and a much more nuanced story is told here than the current view of choirs as being a largely middle-class phenomenon might suggest.
Scholarly in method while highly readable, the book offers invaluable background to choral practitioners. When choral activity is reviving healthily after the Covid 19 pandemic, such a volume appears timely, reminding the reader of the essentially communal and social nature of the choral experience.
Kirsty Bolton
Motherhood and its Spaces in Medieval Romance
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Discusses the spaces occupied and used by mothers in French and English medieval romance of the twelfth to fourteenth centuries.
Mothers have tended to be overlooked in romance scholarship, in favour of fantastical adventures, courtly love stories, and connections with historical events. Yet they are often central to the action in these narratives, whether in a birthing chamber, a royal court, a forest or the Otherworld. This book focuses on the spaces occupied and utilised by mothers in French and English medieval romance of the twelfth to fourteenth centuries. Analysing mothers' use of social space shows how these texts intervene in contemporary social, cultural, legal, and medical debates on motherhood and its place in elite society and families. In examining the presence and contributions of maternal figures in such narratives as the Roman de Melusine, Emaré, Chrétien de Troyes' Perceval and Chaucer's Man of Law's Tale, it demonstrates how romance distorts and subverts gendered roles in order to reveal the complexities of medieval selfhood and social interaction. Recognising the importance of these figures not only sheds a new light on how we may read these romances but on the role of elite mothers in society more generally, presenting a model in which motherhood is central to the construction of not just lineage, but of alliances, communities, cities and nations.
James William Sobaskie
Gabriel Fauré: Influences and Influence
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Presents Fauré not as a solitary figure, but part of a vibrant continuum of nineteenth- and twentieth-century composers and the first member of a French musical 'trinity', with Debussy and Ravel.
A composition professor at the Paris Conservatoire since 1896, and its director from 1906 to 1920, Gabriel Fauré (1845-1924) was said to have created no school as Cesar Franck had before him, encouraging originality among his students rather than emulation. This collection portrays Fauré, influenced by Wolfgang Mozart, Fryderyk Chopin, and Felix Mendelssohn, plus the poetry of Charles Baudelaire and Paul Verlaine, as an early Modernist who provided a reference point for Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel, and Francis Poulenc. Casting a wide net, it explores Fauré's influence on his younger contemporaries Lili Boulanger and Frederick Delius, as well as on the later twentieth-century American composers Aaron Copland, Walter Arlen, Robert Helps, and Ned Rorem. Fauré no longer appears as a solitary figure, but part of a vibrant continuum of nineteenth- and twentieth-century composers, and the first member of a French musical 'trinity' that included Debussy and Ravel.
Mark A. Pottinger
Science and the Romantic Vision in Early Nineteenth-Century Opera
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An interdisciplinary study of how early nineteenth-century science and opera articulated a transnational romantic vision of harmony between self and nature, and how this ideal gave way to mid-century realism and social conflict.
The end of the Napoleonic era ushered in a transnational outlook for Europe, where the traditional boundaries that separated people, ideas and things were blurred in favour of a unified and cosmopolitan vision for society. The result of this shift created a 'romantic vision', a new way to perceive the imagined potential of the self in correspondence with the infinite reality of the natural world. Early nineteenth-century scientists such as Alexander von Humboldt (earth sciences), Franz Anton Mesmer (mesmerism), Johann Wilhelm Ritter (galvanism) and Frédéric Dubois d'Amiens (hysteria) are explored in this context to see how the romantic vision was reflected in their work and received by society. Seeing opera as a confluence of all the arts and encompassing a similar romantic vision, this book examines three paradigmatic operas that contend with the forces of nature: Weber's Der Freischütz (1821), Meyerbeer's Robert le diable (1831) and Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor (1835). In these three highly successful works from separate operatic traditions, the unseen, inner world of nature reveals a wholeness of the self with the divine, showcasing a healthy optimism for society. The book concludes by discussing Gounod's Faust (1859), a work that highlights the struggle of an early-16th-century scientist and places it against the context of the social revolutions of 1848 and the seminal publication of Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species in 1859. In this post-1850 era, the potential of the unseen reality of nature is cast aside and replaced with the certainty of the everyday-the violence of man against man, the struggle for power and the destruction of nature itself.
William Wellington Gqoba, Edited by Jeff Opland, Wandile Kuse and Pamela Maseko
Isizwe esinembali
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Edition and translation of all of William Wellington Gqoba's clearly identifiable writings in isiXhosa and English, with a comprehensive introduction
William Wellington Gqoba (1840-88) was prominent among the African intellectuals emerging in the Eastern Cape region of South Africa towards the end of the nineteenth century.
By trade he was a wagonmaker, licensed preacher of the Free Church of Scotland, teacher, historian, poet, folklorist and editor. For much of his brief life he served on mission stations as a catechist, and ended his career as editor of the Lovedale newspaper Isigidimi sama-Xosa, to which he contrived to contribute subversive poetry outspokenly critical of Western education, the European administration of black people and the discrimination suffered by colonised blacks. Gqoba fashioned the figure of the Xhosa man of letters. Unrivalled in his time in the generic range of his writing, he was the author of letters, anecdotes, expositions of proverbs, histories and poetry, including two poems in the form of debates that stood for over fifty years as the longest poems in the Xhosa language.
This book assembles and translates into English all of William Wellington Gqoba's clearly identifiable writings. They offer an insider's perspective on an African nation in transition, adapting uncomfortably to Western mores and morality, seeking to affirm its identity by drawing on its past, standing on the brink of mobilisation to resist white control and to construct its social, political and religious independence of European colonialism.
University of KwaZulu-Natal Press: Southern African Development Community
Edited by Carolyne Larrington, Hans Rudolf Velten and Helen Young
Popularising the Middle Ages in Modern Fantasy
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Examines the development, nature, and significance of gritty (neo)medievalism in popular culture, from Assassins Creed: Valhalla and Berserk to Robert Eggers' The Northman.
Twenty-first-century popular culture has a fascination for the medieval. Its imagery, tropes and settings have become an integral part of the epic fantasy genre across different media, demonstrated by and following the success of such globally acclaimed television shows as Game of Thrones and Vikings. This volume studies this phenomenon, aiming to establish a broader understanding of why the Middle Ages have become so popular in an era of transmedia productions; it argues that concepts of accuracy and "authenticity" are key to this popularity, alongside engagement with contemporary debates about identity, race and gender, and agile responses to fan-community and media critiques. The essays address a variety of topics, from worldbuilding and narrative structures to female agency and the reception of Vikings, across a wide range of media, including film, television, literature, video games and manga. It also explores how contemporary fantasy engages with both academic knowledge and developments in imagination more widely, responding to ever-changing ideas about how an "authentic" Middle Ages may be created.
Nigel Simeone and Jiří Zahrádka
Janácek’s Sinfonietta
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A definitive study of Janáček's Sinfonietta, tracing its creation, reception, and rise to international prominence.
This book provides a musical 'biography' of Leoš Janáček's (1854-1928) most famous orchestral piece - his Sinfonietta - by analysing its sources, composition, reception history, recordings and musical component parts. The most up-to-date research on the genesis and performance history of the work, it considers in detail Janáček's orchestral writing, the inspiration and genesis of the Sinfonietta, a documentation of all the surviving sources for the work, the work's performance history during Janáček's lifetime and following his death until the end of the Second World War, including press reviews and relevant correspondence.
The book also examines the growth in the worldwide popularity of the Sinfonietta. This evolved from cautious and hostile critical responses to the premiere recording in 1946 to its gradual acceptance as one of the key works of the 1920s, largely thanks to the advocacy of conductors whose work is considered in detail, alongside other significant recordings. Questions of performance, rehearsal, interpretation and the musical text are considered in a wide-ranging interview with the conductor Jakub Hrůša, and a concluding chapter provides a detailed commentary on the music itself. The book includes a valuable appendix describing the annotated scores used by conductors such as Otto Klemperer, František Neumann and Henry Wood, as well as a comprehensive discography.
Edited by Jörg Peltzer and Nicholas Vincent
Thirteenth Century England XIX
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Essays addressing Anglo-German connections and comparisons across the period from 1190 to 1300, with particular attention to the economic, social and personal aspects of an entangled transregnal connection.
A wide range of topics are covered in this significant collection. It begins with an examination of macro-economic developments, together with comparative studies of serfdom, and the record-keeping of English and German towns. Personal contacts are the subject of articles on the hostages delivered by Richard the Lionheart following his release from captivity by the Emperor Henry VI, the diplomatic initiatives of 1227, the subsequent marriage of Henry III's sister Isabella with the Emperor Frederick II, Richard of Cornwall's German itinerary, and relations between England and Cologne. Another article investigates what happened if foreigners travelling in England came into conflict with the law. Turning from people to manuscripts, three articles analyse in turn the English reception of Oliver of Cologne's Historia Damiatina, the representation of English kings in Gervase of Tilbury's Otia imperialia, and Matthew Paris's attempts to depict royal emotion.
Sarah Kirby
Inventing Percy Grainger
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Investigates the dialogue and tensions between Percy Grainger's public biography and his self-conscious autobiographical construction via his own writings and autobiographical museum.
The Australian-American composer Percy Grainger (1882-1961) was a true polymath: composer, pianist, ethnographer, essayist, folk-song collector and more. This book considers the construction of Percy Grainger's biography on stage and screen, exploring the tensions and dialogue between these and Grainger's self-conscious autobiographical construction through his own writings and autobiographical museum.
The book explores biographies of Grainger published during his lifetime and considers the ways in which Grainger was depicted in the years following his death, from immediate laudatory tributes to the first academic biographical studies and the first appearance of Grainger as a character in Ken Russell's 1968 Song of Summer. It explores the significant shift in constructions of Grainger's biography that occurred in the 1970s with the expansion of access to the Grainger museum's archive (Grainger himself began documenting his everyday existence and creative practice), public awareness of Grainger's sadomasochism, and the publication of John Bird's import biography in 1976. Further case studies of plays, films and performance art pieces explore how Grainger and his music have been understood in the changing political and social climate of twentieth and twenty-first century Australia. In examining (semi)fictionalised representations of Grainger through the work of other artists the book considers questions of identity, meaning and representation in Australian society and culture.
Qinna Shen
Jiny Lan and the Art of Subversion
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Examines the career and message paintings of the feminist conceptual artist Jiny Lan, analyzing a cross-section of works that invite literary, historical, socio-political and transcultural interpretations.
Jiny Lan is an avant-garde Chinese artist based in Germany. A founding member of the feminist art collective "Bald Girls," she infuses astute, politically charged, and iconoclastic criticism into her conceptual and visual art. Jiny Lan and the Art of Subversion provides a hermeneutic and critical analysis of Lan's idiosyncratic, provocative, and ingenious artwork. "Subversion" refers not only to her political and cultural subversiveness but also to her iterative technique of reproduction and repainting, which she uses to create a series of genealogically related "sub-versions" of her own paintings.
As an émigré and immigrant artist, Lan is profoundly influenced by both eastern and western cultures and traditions. Her immersive experience and extensive knowledge of two contrasting national histories, cultures, and political systems endows her with a unique intersectional positionality. Her artwork is at once figurative and abstract, realistic and fantastic, chaotic and logical, appropriative and creative. It interrogates serious issues such as censorship, authoritarianism, democracy, human rights, sexism, racism, war, migration, and Covid-19, but in a dynamic and often humorous manner. This book lays a foundation for evaluating Lan as an artist whose work invites discussions about portraiture, power, temporality, space, corporality, and sex.
This book is available as Open Access under the Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND.
Diego Alonso Tomás
Hanns Eisler and His Circle in Republican Spain
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Studies the development and impact of Hanns Eisler's music and Marxist activism in the tensions of 1930s Spain, revealing the interplay of varied influences, ideology and antifascist propaganda.
Hanns Eisler in Republican Spain is the first comprehensive study to explore the political, artistic, and intellectual engagements of Hanns Eisler and his circle of Marxist musicians - including the singer Ernst Busch and the musicologist Otto Mayer-Serra - in relation to Spain between 1931 and 1939. The book reconstructs Eisler's collaborations with a broad range of Spanish antifascist organisations, examines the reception of his compositional and theoretical work in Republican Spain, and assesses the deep impact of the Spanish civil war on his vocal and symphonic music. It highlights the influence of key local, national, and international communist structures - notably the Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia (PSUC), the Communist Party of Spain (PCE), and the Comintern (Third International) - on the musical and political projects of Eisler and his circle. Grounded in detailed analysis of an extensive corpus of textual, musical, and press materials - primarily preserved in archives in Spain, Germany, Russia, France, and the United States - this study offers new critical frameworks for understanding the role of Western modernist music in contexts of ideological conflict and war. It provides a fresh perspective on the complex entanglements between antifascist propaganda and musical modernism in the interwar period. Hanns Eisler in Republican Spain makes a vital contribution to scholarship at the intersection of music, exile, propaganda, communism, and antifascism, and more broadly, to the study of how political ideologies shaped music, aesthetics, and musical thought across national boundaries during a pivotal era in twentieth-century European history.
On publication this book is available as an Open Access ebook under the Creative Commons license CC BY-NC.
P. J. Marshall
Slave Owner and Paternalist
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An account of the life and ideas of Sir William Young, a leading opponent of the abolition of slavery, who used the rhetoric of paternalism to argue that slavery could be ameliorated to become a benign system.
This book charts the life and ideas of Sir William Young, owner of enslaved people on Antigua, St Vincent and Tobago and a leading opponent of the abolition of slavery. It outlines how he used the rhetoric of paternalism to argue that slavery could be ameliorated to become a benign system, akin to the paternalism which he worked towards in rural England, and contrasts his aims width his failure to implement them. It considers his place in the British elite - country gentleman, active back-bench MP and a man of learning - and examines his activity in attempting to improve conditions for the rural English poor. It explores his eventual financial failure, which included the loss of both his West Indian and his English estates, and his last years as Governor of Tobago. William Young was a considerable figure in both the world of the Caribbean, source of his wealth, and the world of London and the English countryside, where he spent that wealth. Young's doctrines of paternalism, unreal and self-serving as they may have been, were widely accepted by the British upper classes.
Diego Alonso Tomás
Hanns Eisler and His Circle in Republican Spain
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$36.95
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Studies the development and impact of Hanns Eisler's music and Marxist activism in the tensions of 1930s Spain, revealing the interplay of varied influences, ideology and antifascist propaganda.
Hanns Eisler in Republican Spain is the first comprehensive study to explore the political, artistic, and intellectual engagements of Hanns Eisler and his circle of Marxist musicians - including the singer Ernst Busch and the musicologist Otto Mayer-Serra - in relation to Spain between 1931 and 1939. The book reconstructs Eisler's collaborations with a broad range of Spanish antifascist organisations, examines the reception of his compositional and theoretical work in Republican Spain, and assesses the deep impact of the Spanish civil war on his vocal and symphonic music. It highlights the influence of key local, national, and international communist structures - notably the Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia (PSUC), the Communist Party of Spain (PCE), and the Comintern (Third International) - on the musical and political projects of Eisler and his circle. Grounded in detailed analysis of an extensive corpus of textual, musical, and press materials - primarily preserved in archives in Spain, Germany, Russia, France, and the United States - this study offers new critical frameworks for understanding the role of Western modernist music in contexts of ideological conflict and war. It provides a fresh perspective on the complex entanglements between antifascist propaganda and musical modernism in the interwar period. Hanns Eisler in Republican Spain makes a vital contribution to scholarship at the intersection of music, exile, propaganda, communism, and antifascism, and more broadly, to the study of how political ideologies shaped music, aesthetics, and musical thought across national boundaries during a pivotal era in twentieth-century European history.
On publication this book is available as an Open Access ebook under the Creative Commons license CC BY-NC.
Eric Morier-Genoud
The War Within
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A fresh analysis of the post-colonial war in Mozambique that contributes to debates about conflict, peacebuilding, development and nationalism and offers insights into the nature of contemporary politics and the current conflict.
The 1976-1992 civil war which opposed the Government of Frelimo and the Renamo guerrillas (among other actors) is a central event in the history of Mozambique. Aiming to open up a new era of studies of the war, this book re-evaluates this period from a number of different local perspectives in an attempt to better understand the history, complexity and multiple dynamics of the armed conflict. Focusing at local level on either a province or a single village, the authors analyse the conflict as a "total social phenomena" involving all elements of society and impacting on every aspect of life across the country. The chapters examine Frelimo and Renamo as well as private, popular and state militias, the Catholic Church, NGOs and traders. Drawing on previously unexamined sources such as local and provincial state archives, religious archives, the guerrilla's own documentation and interviews, the authors uncoveralternative dimensions of the civil war. The book thus enables a deeper understanding of the conflict and its actors as well as offering an explanatory framework for understanding peacemaking, the nature of contemporary politics,and the current conflict in the country.
Eric Morier-Genoud is a Lecturer in African history at Queen's University Belfast; Domingos Manuel do Rosário is Lecturer in electoral sociology and electoral governance at Eduardo Mondlane University, Maputo, Mozambique; Michel Cahen is a Senior Researcher at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) at Bordeaux Political Studies Institute and at the Casa de Velázquez in Madrid.
Caroline Potter
Erik Satie
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Satie's music and ideas are inextricably linked with the City of Light. This book situates Satie's work within the context and sonic environment of contemporary Paris.
Sunday Times Classical Music Book of the Year
Erik Satie's (1866-1925) music appeals to wide audiences and has influenced both experimental artists and pop musicians. Little about Satie was conventional, and he resists classification under easy headings such as "classical music". Instead of pursuing the path of a professional composer, Satie initially earned a living as a café pianist and moved in bohemian circles which prized satire, popular culture and experiment. Small wonder that his music is fundamentally new in conception. It is music which is not always designed to be listened to attentively: music which can be machine-like but is to be played by humans. For Satie, music was part of a wider concept of artistic creation, as evidenced by his collaborations with leading avant-garde artists and in works which cross traditional genre boundaries such as his texted piano pieces. His music was created in some of the most exciting and creatively stimulating environments of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century: Montmartre and Montparnasse. Paris was the artistic centre of Europe, and Satie was a notorious figure whose music and ideas are inextricably linked with the City of Light. This book situates Satie's work within the context and sonic environment of contemporary Paris. It shows that the influence of street music, musicians and poets interested in new technology, contemporary innovations and radical politics are all crucial to an understanding of Satie. Music from the ever-popular Gymnopédies to newly discovered works are discussed, and an online supplement features rare pieces recorded especially for the book.
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