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 Emeritus Professor of English at Loyola University Chicago.
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.
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.
In 1440, Dean Richard Caudray of the royal free chapel of St Martin le Grand in London oversaw the compilation of a cartulary or register for his collegiate church, now Westminster Abbey Muniment Book 5. More than a simple record of St Martin's charters from its eleventh-century foundation onward, the manuscript was a carefully curated legal dossier meant to demonstrate the church's bold claims to its jurisdictional independence from any secular or ecclesiastical authority saving the king himself.
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.
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 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, Katharina Uhde
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
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
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
Jeff Opland
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
S.E.K. Mqhayi
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
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
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.
Desmond 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 these weapons have a common origin, nor that the 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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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
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 John D. Hosler and Stephen Bennett
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.
CAROLINE POTTER is Reader in Music at Kingston University London. A graduate in both French and Music, she has published widely on French music since Debussy and was Series Advisor to the Philharmonia Orchestra's Paris 2014-15 season.
Edited by Debby Banham, Claire Burridge and Lea Olsan
Early Medieval Medicine in Context
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Fresh perspectives on how medical texts, broadly construed, were recorded, perceived and utilised.
The past few decades have witnessed significant shifts in the scholarly investigation of early medieval medicine and its texts, moving far beyond outdated stereotypes of stagnation and superstition, not least via close study of the manuscript evidence, which has enabled a better appreciation of the processes involved in the recording and transfer of medical knowledge and healing practices. This book builds on these recent developments. With a particular focus on transmission, translation and transformation, the essays collected here offer detailed explorations of sources, contexts, producers and uses, examining material ranging from Bald's Leechbook and continental Latin recipe collections to Old Norse sagas and a Byzantine Greek treatise on venomous animals (Book V of Paul of Aegina's Pragmateia). Several contributors explore Old English's multifarious connections with the Latin tradition, discussing charms, obstetric and gynaecological texts, as well as the Peri didaxeon. The volume concludes with an afterword by Peregrine Horden on future directions of study, inviting further research into this vibrant and growing field.
Chapter 3 is available as Open Access under the Creative Commons licence CC BY-NC-ND.
Francis Leneghan
Old English Biblical Prose
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Provides the first in-depth study of the earliest attempts to make the sacred words of the Bible available to English readers, clerical and lay, in prose writing.
"This is a hugely valuable study - deeply informative about an important tradition of biblical translation from the early medieval period, bringing together material that has previously been considered in isolation, and drawing out a big-picture account of the ebb and flow of biblical translations into the vernacular. Will be a useful point of reference for any interested reader and includes surprises and delights for even the most specialist readers." Professor Jonathan Wilcox, University of Iowa
The story of the English Bible begins not with the King James Version or Wycliffe but in the Old English period. Between the ninth and eleventh centuries, a remarkably diverse corpus of biblical translations, paraphrases, adaptations and summaries were produced in Old English. Yet while Old English biblical verse has been extensively studied, the much larger corpus of vernacular biblical prose remains neglected by historians of the Bible and medievalists.
This book provides the first in-depth study of the genre. Dispelling the notion that access to the Bible was restricted to the Latinate clergy in the early medieval period, it demonstrates how Old English biblical prose made key elements of Scripture available and meaningful to laypeople. Through case studies of the Prose Psalms, Mosaic Prologue to the Domboc, Wessex Gospels, Heptateuch and Treatise on the Old and New Testaments, as well as many other works, it highlights the crucial contributions of well-known figures such as King Alfred and Ælfric of Eynsham while also showcasing the work of anonymous authors who translated, adapted and interpreted the Bible, sometimes in creative and surprising ways. Cumulatively, these case studies show how vernacular biblical prose played a central role in the emergence of English national identity before the Norman Conquest.
This book is available as Open Access under the Creative Commons licence CC BY-NC-ND.
Susan Haynes
Charles Bridgeman (c.1685-1738)
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An examination of the garden plans of eighteenth-century landscape architect Charles Bridgeman, shedding light on his artistic vision and contributions to English garden history.
Charles Bridgeman was a popular and highly successful landscape architect in the first part of the eighteenth century. He was Royal Gardener to George I and George II, designing the gardens at Kensington Palace for them and working for many of the ruling Whig elite, including Sir Robert Walpole at Houghton Hall in Norfolk. His landscapes were audacious and monumental, but he is barely known outside the world of academic garden history; most of his gardens have disappeared, changed out of all recognition to chime with later tastes shaped by Lancelot Brown's vision of a more "natural" landscape, or buried under housing developments and golf courses; and there is little archaeological or written evidence of his work.
This book aims to redress this injustice and rescue his legacy. It draws on the only significant body of evidence which survived him: an extensive but wildly heterogenous corpus of garden plans. Close examination of them reveals an artistic vision heavily influenced by the late seventeenth-century geometric garden but deeply rooted in the "genius of the place", and working methods that include a proto-business model which prefigures the gentleman improvers who followed him. The volume brings him from obscurity to demonstrate his skill as an artist, a manipulator of space on a grand scale and a consummate practitioner, a deserved member of the canon of famous and revered English landscape gardeners.
Michael Steinberg
The Philosopher’s Ring—Wagner as Thinker and Dramatist
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Presents Wagner as a serious philosopher and offers a fresh perspective on the Ring and its unique fusion of myth, human drama, and philosophical insight.
Few figures of the nineteenth century were more influential than Richard Wagner, and few works of art have the scope and historical significance of The Ring of the Nibelung. Wagner himself said that it expressed his entire philosophy of life. Yet little attention has been paid to him as a philosopher, aesthetic theories aside. Instead, the Ring has been viewed in the light of Schopenhauer, Feuerbach, or even Hegel. Wagner's own ideas do not deserve this neglect, and this book addresses that omission. It starts with the more widely read philosophers of his day, such as Fichte; in their context Wagner's often fragmentary thoughts reveal a coherent "materialist idealism" that constitutes a late but significant contribution to Classical German philosophy. His acute social and psychological insights are still relevant, and so is the philosophical history that he saw prefigured in Greek tragedy.
Wagner's philosophy also illuminates the structure of the Ring and offers fresh insights into the characters and conflicts of that endlessly interpretable work. Approachable and engagingly written, balancing narrative, philosophical analysis, and a detailed consideration of the Ring's four music dramas, The Philosopher's Ring shows the cycle to be a work of unparalleled philosophical depth, one reason that it continues to challenge audiences even now, a century and a half after its premiere.
Michael Steinberg
The Philosopher’s Ring—Wagner as Thinker and Dramatist
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Presents Wagner as a serious philosopher and offers a fresh perspective on the Ring and its unique fusion of myth, human drama, and philosophical insight.
Few figures of the nineteenth century were more influential than Richard Wagner, and few works of art have the scope and historical significance of The Ring of the Nibelung. Wagner himself said that it expressed his entire philosophy of life. Yet little attention has been paid to him as a philosopher, aesthetic theories aside. Instead, the Ring has been viewed in the light of Schopenhauer, Feuerbach, or even Hegel. Wagner's own ideas do not deserve this neglect, and this book addresses that omission. It starts with the more widely read philosophers of his day, such as Fichte; in their context Wagner's often fragmentary thoughts reveal a coherent "materialist idealism" that constitutes a late but significant contribution to Classical German philosophy. His acute social and psychological insights are still relevant, and so is the philosophical history that he saw prefigured in Greek tragedy.
Wagner's philosophy also illuminates the structure of the Ring and offers fresh insights into the characters and conflicts of that endlessly interpretable work. Approachable and engagingly written, balancing narrative, philosophical analysis, and a detailed consideration of the Ring's four music dramas, The Philosopher's Ring shows the cycle to be a work of unparalleled philosophical depth, one reason that it continues to challenge audiences even now, a century and a half after its premiere.
Francis Leneghan
Old English Biblical Prose
Regular price
$36.95
Save $-36.95
Provides the first in-depth study of the earliest attempts to make the sacred words of the Bible available to English readers, clerical and lay, in prose writing.
"This is a hugely valuable study - deeply informative about an important tradition of biblical translation from the early medieval period, bringing together material that has previously been considered in isolation, and drawing out a big-picture account of the ebb and flow of biblical translations into the vernacular. Will be a useful point of reference for any interested reader and includes surprises and delights for even the most specialist readers." Professor Jonathan Wilcox, University of Iowa
The story of the English Bible begins not with the King James Version or Wycliffe but in the Old English period. Between the ninth and eleventh centuries, a remarkably diverse corpus of biblical translations, paraphrases, adaptations and summaries were produced in Old English. Yet while Old English biblical verse has been extensively studied, the much larger corpus of vernacular biblical prose remains neglected by historians of the Bible and medievalists.
This book provides the first in-depth study of the genre. Dispelling the notion that access to the Bible was restricted to the Latinate clergy in the early medieval period, it demonstrates how Old English biblical prose made key elements of Scripture available and meaningful to laypeople. Through case studies of the Prose Psalms, Mosaic Prologue to the Domboc, Wessex Gospels, Heptateuch and Treatise on the Old and New Testaments, as well as many other works, it highlights the crucial contributions of well-known figures such as King Alfred and Ælfric of Eynsham while also showcasing the work of anonymous authors who translated, adapted and interpreted the Bible, sometimes in creative and surprising ways. Cumulatively, these case studies show how vernacular biblical prose played a central role in the emergence of English national identity before the Norman Conquest.
This book is available as Open Access under the Creative Commons licence CC BY-NC-ND.
Edited by Hana Vlhová-Wörner and Jan Ciglbauer
Music in Fifteenth-Century Bohemia
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A long-needed reassessment of the musical culture of fifteenth-century Bohemia, liberating it from nineteenth- and twentieth-century nationalist agendas and reassessing its position in European music history.
What was the musical culture like in a country in fifteenth-century Central Europe that tried to restore the values of the early church, only to be branded "heretical" and that needed to defend its identity politically, militarily, and intellectually?
Bohemian theologians tried to return to Christianity's "roots" by promoting frequent bread-and-wine communion for all (including children) and by encouraging lay participation in worship through translations into the vernacular. Unlike in many other European lands, monophonic chant and sacred songs were primarily used (though some advanced contemporary polyphonic settings circulated as well). These religious and musical developments formed part of the seedbed that would develop more fully during the European Reformation through the work of Martin Luther and others.
Music in Fifteenth-Century Bohemia: Between Reform and Identity Building contains chapters on liturgy, song, and the influence of the Hussite movement. The book resists both nationalistically tinged narratives and the marginalization that has long resulted from an emphasis on the disparities between Czech and Western European musical traditions. One chapter demonstrates how a fifteenth-century song was employed in the revival of Czech culture in the nineteenth century.
Taken as a whole, Music in Fifteenth-Century Bohemia illustrates the distinctive and often effective ways in which fifteenth-century Czech culture dealt with the dichotomy of religious reform and cultural identity.
Jonas Wellendorf
The Lives and Deaths of the Norse Gods
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A comprehensive study of the mortality of Norse gods, with close readings of the Prose Edda, Poetic Edda and Saxo Grammaticus' Gesta Danorum.
Divinity usually implies immortality. The very phrase "gods and mortals" highlights an ontological gap between two distinct categories of existence: immortal deities and transient humans. This divide, however, does not hold true in the Scandinavian mythological tradition, where the gods themselves are mortal. This mortality is central to myths such as those of Baldr and of Ragnarøk, and affords the Norse gods narrative potential, that is unparalleled in other traditions, such as those inherited from antiquity.
The first half of this study explores some salient consequences of this attribute, highlighting the striking anthropomorphism of the gods. The second half takes a more diachronic approach, examining the prehistory of the group of gods who became known as the Æsir and arguing that they developed from non-anthropomorphic divine forces shaped by and mobilized in ideologies of leadership and warfare in pre-Christian Northern Europe. By examining how divine mortality not only drives Norse mythic narratives but also reflects wider patterns of thought and belief, including early medieval theories of rulership and the sacralization of human excellence, this book reconsiders the boundaries between godhood and humanity in pre-Christian Scandinavia and, in doing so, questions what it means to be a god.
Jonathan McGovern
The Early Parliaments of Henry VIII, 1510-1523
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An administrative study of Henry VIII's early parliaments (1510 to 1523), which systematically explains and analyses every aspect of parliament in the early sixteenth century.
This book is an administrative study of Henry VIII's early parliaments (1510 to 1523). It systematically explains and analyses every aspect of parliament in the early sixteenth century, from legislative procedure to the composition of the House of Lords and the House of Commons. Some of the matters under discussion include statutory litigation - how parliamentary legislation was actually applied in the king's courts - and the rules of precedence and inheritance of title in the Upper House. The book's main purpose is to explain how parliament worked - what parliament did, how it was done and who was involved in doing it. It forms part of a burgeoning academic movement known as the New Administrative History, which seeks to restore a knowledge of administrative processes to its rightful place of importance in the historiography of early modern England. The book will be essential reading for anyone wishing to understand the early history of parliament.
Edited by John D. Hosler and Stephen Bennett
The Third Crusade (1189-1192)
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Fresh perspectives on one of the largest and most complex crusades ever launched, covering all aspects of the expeditions - from preparation and commencement to results and consequences.
Saladin's victory at the Battle of Hattin in 1187 produced three profound results: a shattered Jerusalem army, a pope falling dead from the news, and the launching of the Third Crusade in response. Under the banners of renowned rulers like Richard the Lionheart, Philip Augustus, and Frederick Barbarossa, men and women from across Latin Christendom took the Cross and joined in the largest western military expedition since Urban II's call to arms in 1095 for the First Crusade.
Long dormant in the renewal of crusade studies in the twenty-first century, the Third Crusade has in recent years begun to attract increased scholarly attention. Adopting a cross-cultural focus that examines both western and eastern societies, this book offers a substantial and timely reappraisal. Chapters shed light on the crusade's causes, context, organization, participants, preparations, commencement, military progress, and short and long-term consequences, and scrutinise well-known sources through new lenses. They also engage with communication theory, the history of emotions, textual criticism and textuality, historiography, archaeology, and topography. Together, they provide both a fresh view of this complex and multifaceted war and a useful survey of its major contours.
Nicole Pohl
Women, Transnational Networks and Patriotism in Northern and Central Europe, 1763-1814
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A gateway to the complex world of eighteenth-century sociability of elite women and of their lasting impact on modern concepts of national identity and community.
In the dynamic intellectual and social landscape of eighteenth-century Northern Europe, the interplay between patriotism, nationalism, and cosmopolitanism was pivotal in shaping the era's cultural and political discourse. This study delves into the intricate networks of elite women who navigated and influenced these concepts through their participation in salons and literary circles. By examining figures such as Anna Amalia of Weimar, Dorothea von Kurland, members of the Bluestockings, Friederike Brun and the grande Dame of eighteenth-century salon world, Mme de Staël, the narrative uncovers how these women fostered transnational dialogues and cultural exchanges that were crucial in redefining public spirit and national identity.
Grounded in extensive archival research and touching on the lives of over twenty-five individuals, the work highlights the nuanced roles these women played as cultural mediators and agents of change across national borders, challenging the traditional male-dominated historiography. The exploration of their contributions offers fresh insights into the interconnectedness of European intellectual life and the critical role of gender in shaping historical discourses. This book not only broadens our understanding of the Enlightenment but also provides a rich, interdisciplinary perspective on the socio-political transformations of the era.
Javier Rodrigo
Imagining Franco
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Is Spain really still tied - culturally, politically, and emotionally - to the dictator Francisco Franco? What was (and is) his place in the public imaginary? What remains today of the man and his legacy?
This book examines the public image of Franco and the social construction(s) of his public biography over four different periods: the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), the post-civil war period (1939-1949), the rest of the dictatorship (1950-1975), and the democratic period and recent times (1975-2020). Delving into biography, narratives, and public and political motivations, it analyses the role that the idea of Franco has played and continues to play in contemporary Spain. It argues that the multiplicity of narratives that have existed in Spain and abroad regarding the figure of Franco are closely related to both the rhetoric and images generated by those in power and a sort of popular 'banal Franco' which takes in multiple stereotypes. This latter concept is central to understanding not only Franco's importance in contemporary Spain but also the fervent allegiance to his figures by a substantial part of Spanish society. Providing a complex picture of how the public image of the dictator has been constructed over time, the book addresses how ordinary Spaniards have imagined Franco and what their sources for doing so were.
Paul Dryburgh
Land and God: the City, County and Diocese of Lincoln over Nine Centuries
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Land and God, is a volume of essays in his honour draws together research from the twelfth to the twentieth century and across the eight counties of the ancient diocese.
For over 50 years Dr Nicholas Bennett has been one of the lynchpins of academic research in Lincolnshire as archivist, academic and general editor of the Lincoln Record Society. This volume of essays in his honour consists of contributions from Dr Bennett's colleagues on the Council of Lincoln Record Society. It draws together research from the twelfth to the twentieth century and across the eight counties of the ancient diocese of Lincoln. The volume includes editions of previously unpublished records as well as reanalyses of more familiar texts, as the contributors exam medieval secular and ecclesiastical records, nineteenth-century accounts and twentieth-century magazines. The articles demonstrate how the concerns and challenges of Church and State remain remarkably similar over 800 years. As well as addressing familiar themes though the volume allows the reader to engage with the lives of great men and of those who are otherwise unknown, including bishops and rectors, justices and criminals, and widows and suffragettes.
Philip E. Bennett and Marianne Ailes
Charlemagne in the Francophone World and Occitania
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Explores the transmission and reception of the medieval legends of Charlemagne in the literatures of the French-speaking areas of France, Burgundy and England, and Occitania.
The spread of Charlemagne's myth after his death was even more extensive than the empire he ruled during his life. This volume turns to the birthplace of many of these myths, and to the languages of the North (langue d'oïl) and South (langue d'oc) of that land. The first chapter traces the presence and development of his legend the diverse political and cultural areas south of the Loire generally known as Occitania. The two following chapters analyse the often contradictory representations of Charlemagne in northern French-speaking regions in the twelfth to fourteenth centuries, through a careful selection of chansons de geste and chronicles. Using ethnographic theories, they consider his roles as warrior, secular ruler and conduit to the divine. The fourth and fifth chapters examine the exploitation of those images among readers of French in England and in French-speaking provinces ruled by the Dukes of Burgundy. Finally, the epilogue traces the continued vibrancy of Charlemagne stories in popular and high culture through to the twentieth century.
Michael Pesek
Diplomacy, Trade and Imperialism in East Africa, 1850-1900
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A detailed overview of East African diplomacy at the end of pre-colonial era, which provides a corrective to the commonly held view that African diplomats were inexperienced, naïve and parochial.
This book traces the history of an elite group that rose to power and wealth in the interlacustrine kingdoms of East Africa at the end of the eighteenth and over the course of the nineteenth century. Katikiro played a major role in shaping the history of their societies at a time of profound change. Royal administrators, chief advisors, envoys - these influential men navigated and directed shifts in the balance of power as old hegemons like the kingdom of Bunyoro stumbled, new contenders like Buganda and Rwanda emerged, the region opened up to trade with the East African Coast and Egypt, and Europeans arrived, first as explorers and missionaries and then as colonial rulers.
Katikiro were in midst of these changes: as politicians they shaped them; as diplomats they mediated them; and as wealthy businessmen they profited from them. Their rise in the nineteenth century offers a unique inside into the agency of Africans in these events and highlights the many continuities of pre-colonial and colonial histories in the region.
Michael Johnson
The Diary of W. G. Footitt
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W. G. Footitt was an architectural draughtsman in the office of Charles Hodgson Fowler, architect to Durham, Lincoln and Rochester Cathedrals. His diary illuminates the professional practice and daily life of an individual immersed in the production and restoration of ecclesiastical architecture during the last years of the Gothic Revival. Significantly, it highlights the important contribution made by draughtsmen, whose names rarely appear in published histories of architecture. Their meticulous work, essential to the realisation of architectural visions, translated concepts into detailed plans and drawings, supporting the creative process and enabling craftspeople to execute designs with precision. A talented artist with a passion for antiquities, Footitt produced many drawings to illustrate the publications of leading archaeologists in County Durham and Northumberland, thus playing a crucial role in bringing archaeological discoveries to a wider audience. He was also a keen observer of the world around him, travelling widely across Britain and recording holidays in Ireland and Switzerland. His first-hand impressions of social, cultural and technological change make the diary a vivid chronicle of modernity.
Edited by Julia K. Gruber and Regina Range
Feminist Anger in German-Language Cultural Production
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Essays by feminist scholars of German Studies looking at how women-particularly women of color-have put their anger to use in German-language cultural production and how they themselves might do so in their scholarship.
In Germany and in Western culture more broadly, women experience anger in response to misogyny, racism, and other injustice, but open expression of that anger is often considered unwomanly. Yet a rich tradition of feminist thinkers of color-including Audre Lorde, Brittney Cooper, Amia Srinivasan, and Sara Ahmed-understands anger as energizing and imperative for structural change. How might we cultivate an anger that is affirming, inclusive, legitimate, creative, animating, and most of all, feminist?
This volume of essays by feminist scholars of German Studies-writing in dialogue with such thinkers while acknowledging their own largely white, privileged positionalities-looks at how women have put their anger to use in German-language cultural production and how they themselves might do so in their scholarship. The eleven contributions approach the topic of female anger intersectionally and transnationally. They examine angry women in the contexts of politics, activism, philosophy, economics, race, nationality, sexuality, illness, and humour. Covering a wide array of genres and discussing works from the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries, they explore creators including writers, filmmakers, comedian/activists, musicians, and journalists. They investigate the tensions between the emotion of anger and the practice of being an angry woman, global responses to anger, and artistic representations of angry women in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.
Florence d’Artois
Dance, Embodied Politics and Court Culture in Early Modern Spain
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Does dance tell a story? What, if anything, is it intended to represent? How was it conceived in the early modern period?
This book examines the theories and political uses of dance in Spain during the period preceding and following the 'Poetics turn', which coincided with the rule of Philip III (1598-1621), also known as the Dancing King, and the onset of the reign of Philip IV. While this turning point finalised the definition of dance as an art form, it was also paradoxical. Indeed, this development saw the emergence of an aesthetic thought of dance within Aristotelian poetics, thanks to a common court culture, yet it never led to the formulation of a poetics of ballet.
By recontextualising this turning point, the book examines the relationship between dance and representation during Spain's Golden Age. It revisits the initial codifications of dance in Italy and figurative experiments at the Burgundian court during the second half of the 15th century, as well as their influence on subsequent practices and humanist theories of dance at the courts of Charles V and Philip II. Subsequently, it focuses on the various shifts in court dance as it became a scenic art at the beginning of the seventeenth century, interrogating the possibility of the king performing dance himself. The book concludes that, in Spain, neo-Aristotelian ideas enabled a shift from an ethical to an aesthetic problematic, which saw dance, whether symbolic or purely kinetic in nature, as a legitimate art form to be placed at the service of the monarchy.
Edited by Elena Pnevmonidou and Markus Wessendorf
The Brecht Yearbook / Das Brecht-Jahrbuch 50
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The Brecht Yearbook, published by Camden House on behalf of the International Brecht Society, is the central scholarly forum for the study of Brecht's life and work and of topics relevant to him.
Volume 50 begins with a conversation about the recently published collection of interviews with Brecht and a personal chronicle of the publication history of the 30-volume edition of Brecht's works. The contributions featuring new research cover a wide range of topics related to Brecht, including his use of "pastology"; racialization in his early plays; the 1932 production of The Mother as a women's counter-campaign against Nazi misogyny; the first English-language productions of Señora Carrar's Rifles in 1938; an unrealized African-American production of The Threepenny Opera in the early 1940s; the first French translation of the Short Organon for the Theatre in 1955; and the connection of his ideas to a pedagogy of revolution, Mark Fisher's concept of "capitalist realism," and interreligious dialogue.
Edited by Elena Pnevmonidou and Markus Wessendorf. Book reviews edited by Noah Willumsen. Contributors: Martin Brady, Laura Ginters, Helen Hughes, Torben Ibs, Liam Johnston-McCondach, Sabrina Kanthak, Sabine Kebir, Jan Knopf, Sean Larson, Jakob Ribič, Hanife Schulte, Vera Stegmann, and Noah Willumsen.
David R. Midgley
The Epic Modernist Alfred Döblin
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Provides the English-speaking reader with a comprehensive guide to the fiction of Alfred Döblin, a major figure in German and European literary modernism.
Alfred Döblin was born into a Jewish family in 1878 and grew to become a leading German literary figure before he had to flee from the Nazis in 1933. His big-city novel Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929) is often compared to Joyce's Ulysses, but Döblin had been exploring modern narrative techniques since the early 1900s, and his themes were entirely his own. In view of the highly diverse character of his fictions and their settings-ranging from Europe to China and South America, and from the sixteenth century to the twenty-seventh-the first four chapters of this book present them according to broad thematic concerns-Person, Power, Nature and Culture-rather than chronological sequence. The aim is to encourage readers to identify aspects of his writing that they would like to investigate further for themselves. The introduction provides initial orientation in Döblin's early thinking and the way he conceived the writer's task, and that is followed by a concise description of his family background and his subsequent personal biography. The final two chapters focus respectively on the development of his skill in the deployment of specific narrative techniques and on how historical circumstances affected his philosophical and religious orientation in the course of his adult life, from the language skepticism of his early years and his professed agnosticism in the 1920s to his late conversion to Catholicism.
Lawrence A. Clayton
Bartolomé de las Casas
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A deep look at the impact of Christian scripture on Bartolomé de las Casas, one of the first and strongest critics against Spanish colonialism of the New World and for Indigenous rights.
Theologian, activist, reformer, political philosopher, historian and anthropologist Bartolomé de las Casas, OP (1484-1566) was a polarising figure in his own time and continues to provoke debate today. Arriving in Hispaniola as a settler and friend of conquistadors, in time las Casas became the official "Protector of the Indians" and a zealous advocate for their rights. His writings, in particular the History of the Indies and Brief History of the Destruction of the Indies, today constitute the best source for the first three decades of Spanish exploration and conquest in the Americas.
This book provides an accessible account of las Casas's life, achievements, teachings and legacy. Importantly, it underscores the tremendous influence of Christian scripture on las Casas, a surprisingly overlooked aspect in previous biographies, considering his status as a churchman and missionary. The book places him in his socio-political and religious context and traces the evolution of his thought, showing how his ideas on freedom, just war, natural law, social justice, and evangelisation frequently put him at odds with most of his contemporaries and especially the secular and ecclesiastical elites. Two centuries before Thomas Jefferson announced that "all men are created equal," las Casas proclaimed that "all mankind is one" and wielded the principle of government by consent in defence of Indigenous rights.
Nicholas Paul and Wolfgang Müller
How the Holy Cross came from Antioch to Brogne
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The first critical edition, with facing-page English translation, of a thirteenth-century source, offering insights into crusading, material culture, and aristocratic-monastic relations.
In 1152, a knight from the southern Low Countries named Manasses of Hierges returned home after eleven years spent crusading in the Holy Land. He carried with him a precious relic, said to be a fragment of the True Cross that had belonged to the princes of Antioch. Nearly sixty years later, a writer associated with a nearby monastery composed a new Latin narrative, hagiographical, and liturgical textual programme known as Quomodo Sancta Crux ab Antiochia allata sit in Broniense cenobium (How the Holy Cross Came from Antioch to the Monastery of Brogne). It tells the story of Manasses, his career in Europe and the Near East, and of the conflict that broke out over possession of the relic after his death.
This volume provides the first critical edition and English translation of a source that contributes greatly to our knowledge of the medieval world, from crusading to material religion to relations between the lay aristocracy and religious communities. The work of a learned author with ambitions to a high literary and homiletic style, it offers a fresh perspective on the question of what motivated crusaders and on the history of the Holy Land under crusader occupation, providing critical new details to the story of the civil war between Queen Melisende of Jerusalem and her son, King Baldwin III. The sustained account of the conflict over a relic provides a window into the importance of sacred objects, and competing notions of sacrality, legal possession, and value. Previously unknown to historians, this work provides a rich illustration of the place of crusading in the memory of a local community. A detailed critical apparatus establishes what can be known about the work's composition and the author's reliance on Classical, Patristic, and Scriptural authorities, while an introduction gives an account of the work's political, cultural, and intellectual context.
Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner
Jewish-Christian Dialogue in Medieval French Literature
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Examines a range of vernacular works within the context of Jewish and Christian exegetical traditions.
Just as Jews and Christians encounter each other in unequal power relations in the "contact zones" of medieval cities, so the Hebrew Bible meets two Christian Testaments in dynamic tension. Vernacular literature mirrors that confrontation whenever it integrates biblical material, whether quotations and images, translation and paraphrase, people, events or practices. In whatever shape or form, the use of biblical matter introduces vital questions, as competing claims to possession and authority are enmeshed with new approaches to interpretation. Christians and Jews, Judaism and Christianity, meet each other figuratively around the reinvention of their shared sacred texts to define and dispute their identities.
This study examines how biblical material enters into a variety of twelfth- and thirteenth- century French works by following the way literal and spiritual meanings are intimately entwined. In examples ranging from the romances of Chrétien de Troyes and bestiaries to theatre and moralized bibles, biblical citation serves as an expression of belief, a tool of persuasion, and a weapon of aggression. As current debates on antisemitism intensify, a brief epilogue considers what this study can contribute to Jewish-Christian dialogue when medieval and modern, past and present, challenge each other to deepen knowledge and expand possibilities.
Edited by Lisandra Estevez and Jim Pearce
Renaissance Papers 2024
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Renaissance Papers collects the best scholarly essays submitted each year to the Southeastern Renaissance Conference.
The 2024 volume features essays from the conference held at The Citadel, as well as essays submitted directly to the journal. The opening essay focuses on an idiosyncratic strategy used for fundraising by the English Crown: Queen Elizabeth's "poetry" lottery. Five essays on Shakespeare probe the complexity of his plays. The first is a Jungian analysis of how the archetype of the dragon manifests itself in King Lear. It is followed by a study of how early modern exercise culture constructs masculinity and health in As You Like It. A provocative reinterpretation of A Midsummer Night's Dream then illuminates the culturally subversive way in which Shakespeare portrays his fairies. The fourth and fifth essays examine the implications of female political agency in Measure for Measure..
Nigel Bryant
Four Musical Romances
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Influential medieval romances are translated, with the accompanying music and an absorbing explanatory introduction.
The thirteenth century saw the flourishing of a vibrant new literary genre in France: the romance with musical interpolations. The four works translated here are outstanding examples. Their authors incorporate songs in highly inventive ways, not simply for embellishment or atmosphere. They explore the potential of song to advance narrative, create jeopardy, to reveal their characters' inner lives and even to provide ironic comment. Jean Renart, in his Guillaume de Dole, declared himself the originator of the genre. If the innovation was his, it inspired many works that followed. The most notable include the other three in this collection: Le Roman de la Violette (The Romance of the Violet) by Gerbert de Montreuil (almost certainly the Gerbert who wrote arguably the most accomplished Continuation of Chrétien de Troyes' Perceval), Le Roman de la Poire (The Romance of the Pear) by Tibaut and LeDit de la Panthère (The Panther of Love) by Nicole de Margival. Together these works raise absorbing questions about how medieval romances were performed, to the point where Le Roman de la Poire is very nearly a play, understandable only as a piece to be delivered by multiple voices. They will be of great interest not only to literary scholars and musicologists but to all those interested in the performance of romance. All the songs and refrains for which the music has survived are translated into singable form, and all the surviving notations are included in the text, edited by Matthew P. Thomson.
Toyin Falola and Victor Angbah
African Rivers
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The Nile, Congo, Niger, Chad and Zambezi are names that evoke watershed periods in Africa's history. Yet, until now, scholars have paid little attention to Africa's riverine environment or how it has shaped the continent's civilizations.
African rivers are not only part of the ecosystem but also hold immense ecological, political, economic, and sociocultural significance. At the same time, there are numerous challenges to their exploitation and sustainability due to human activities, transboundary conflicts, and climate change.
This book explores major thematic preoccupations with the study of African rivers. The first section discusses the epistemology of rivers in Africa, reviewing historical perspectives and identifying associations of rivers with identity and spirituality in Africa. The second section turns to the economy of African rivers, namely their commercial and economic benefits, political perspectives and dimensions, ecological and hydrological impacts, as well as their impacts on agricultural management and food security in the continent. In the third section, challenges associated with the exploitation, management, and sustainability of African rivers are discussed including geopolitics, dam construction, eco-tourism, transboundary disputes, and water scarcity. Beyond merely pointing out these challenges, however, the authors also propose solutions for the future of sustainable river resources in Africa. Ultimately, the book aims to promote knowledge of African rivers to help governments, corporations, and communities define and address their future needs
Rose Walker
Art and Artifice in Twelfth-Century Iberia
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"This innovative, wide-ranging and erudite book illuminates the sophistication of artistic exchange at this time and place. " Costanza Beltrami, Stockholm University.
Sculptors and painters produced exceptional, and sometimes eccentric works of art in the middle decades of the twelfth century in Iberia. The high-level artistic expertise needed to produce such works could be gifted, loaned, and even stolen in the same way as other precious items. It could be moved, like a commodity, across networks forged by reforming churchmen and rulers that traversed the Pyrenees and the Peninsula. Much of this sculpture and wall-painting shows an ability to play with the different repertoires that emerged from these established routes of exchange.
The pilgrimage roads of the Codex Calixtinus have had a strong imaginative pull and even been invoked to explain such artistic production. By contrast, this book argues that the more playful and satirical aspects of that manuscript - the pseudonyms, exaggerated claims, and pointed selections - resonate not only with a wider culture of forged charters and re-invented institutional histories but also with the imaginative, eclectic, and sometimes ludic art of these decades. This art encompasses sculpted church façades, painted interiors, illuminated missals and cartularies, as well as carved Atlas figures that encapsulate the complex status of the artists who made them.
David Dickinson
South Africa’s Constitution and the Law of the Township
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How are residents of South Africa's townships responding to socio-economic inequality and a pervasive sense that the country's democratic transition has not delivered on its constitutional promises of social justice?
Based on extensive fieldwork, this book challenges beliefs that the agency of township residents is limited to waiting for handouts or demanding delivery from the state, showing how they are instead assisting themselves by taking advantage of the opportunities, menyetla, available. In the kasi, or urban townships, where almost half of the urban population lives, there is limited state-enforced order; while the lex constitutional may be the law of the land, the lex lokasi governs day-to-day life in the township. The book opens with a description of life in townships and the interconnected crises facing the country before examining commonly practiced township menyetla to illustrate how the lex lokasi operates: stealing electricity, informal charges to access the Social Relief of Distress grant, fare evasion on the Metrorail, the illicit sale of alcohol during COVID-19 prohibition, medical aid scams, and looting.
Exploring how this looting from below protects those looting from above, it provides a different perspective to the view that state capture is the primary cause of the country's current entropic trajectory and that the application of the much-vaunted constitution can bring South Africa back on track.
Edited by Ana Cláudia Suriani da Silva and Tania Regina de Luca
Women Journalists in the Brazilian Mainstream Press
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A nuanced and complex portrayal of female voices which have long been silenced, offering a fresh perspective on the history of Brazilian journalism and restoring women's rightful place in Brazil's cultural memory.
This book examines the groundbreaking contributions of Maria Amalia de Carvalho, Júlia Lopes de Almeida, Emília Moncorvo Bandeira de Melo (pseudonym Carmen Dolores), and Maria Benedita Bormann (pseudonym Délia) in Brazil's mainstream press, focusing on their writings in the influential newspaper O País between 1884 and 1912. Employing psychoanalysis, gender studies, media theory and literary criticism, the chapters in this book reveal how these four writers cultivated a collective intellectual network and how their columns became sites of resistance, challenging dominant narratives and asserting women's voices in a male-dominated public sphere. Yet despite their significant influence, their legacies have been marginalised in traditional literary histories. This book not only restores their rightful place in Brazil's cultural memory but also interrogates the exclusionary mechanisms that have long obscured women's contributions to the nation's literary system. A vital reassessment of press history, this book demands a more inclusive understanding of Brazil's journalistic and intellectual heritage, one that properly recognises women as active participants in shaping the Brazilian literary system.
Anna Marie Roos
Taking Newton On Tour
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This volume provides a critical edition of an exceptional example of the 'Scientific Grand Tour' taken by Martin Folkes. Martin Folkes (1690-1754) was Newton's protégé, antiquary, mathematician, and the only simultaneous president of the Royal Society and the Society of Antiquaries. In 1733-5, he went on Grand Tour as a scientific ambassador for the Royal Society, demonstrating Newtonian optics to Italian virtuosi. He also measured ancient and Renaissance buildings to understand past architectural engineering and design. His 97-page illustrated diary (in the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford, shelfmark MS Eng. misc.c.444) also challenges the long-standing, mistaken impression among scholars that the Royal Society was in decline in the eighteenth century. Analysing Folkes's activities abroad and creating an edition from this source tracing his Italian route provides a novel reading of Newtonianism and the purpose of the Grand Tour as a vehicle for scientific research and statesmanship.
Edited by Malcolm Miller
Classical and Popular Music in Israel
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Original historical and analytical research into the Israeli music scene, composers as well as broader issues such as Jewish-Arab encounters, Holocaust memorialization and post-October 7th soundscapes.
Does a nation's music reflect its distinctive, definable spirit and aspirations? As this wide-ranging volume demonstrates, Israel's pluralistic musical scene offers a unique crucible in which to study transcultural processes and encounters. Through the nineteen essays by established and younger scholars and musicians, what emerges is a vivid picture of a dynamic musical culture balancing regional and global tendencies. The essays touch on a wide range of classical and popular musics. Micro-histories of individual composers highlight Arnold Schoenberg's relationship to Israel, Josef Tal's and Mordecai Seter's Israeli modernism, the neglected genius of Verdina Shlonsky, and the postmodernism of Mark Kopytman and Oded Zehavi. Broader surveys address musical responses to Jewish and Arab traditions, Holocaust memorialization, satirical cabaret, prog rock, nationalistic "folk" songs, and the soundscape of a country at war since October 7, 2023.
Further insight is offered in chapters devoted to composers' perspectives, including Palestinian Arab creativity, composing in a time of war, and the inspiration of the Bible. For the scholar, performer, and music lover interested in exploring new repertoire, as well as for students of Jewish and Middle Eastern culture, the volume provides an authoritative and thought-provoking account of Israeli music in its varied guises, enhancing appreciation of the aesthetic quality and significance of a still-evolving, thriving musical culture.
W. G. Miller and Ann G. Smith
Maritime Misadventures in Early Modern Southeast Asia
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An analysis of the misadventures which befell British, Danish and Portuguese merchant mariners in Southeast Asia between 1790 and 1820, a time when British trade and imperialism were expanding.
This study describes and analyses the misadventures which befell British, Danish and Portuguese 'country traders', that is, merchant mariners who operated independently of but with the approval of the English East India Company, in Southeast Asia between 1790 and 1820, a time when British trade and imperialism were expanding. It is based on hitherto un-utilised first-hand accounts by captains and crew members as given to authorities at the major port of Malacca. These accounts, required by insurance companies, were a statement of the events which had occurred and a declaration by the declarant of non-culpability. The misadventures ranged from typhoons, groundings and piracy to fire, mutiny and collisions with other vessels.
The work places the misadventures in the context of the contemporary knowledge of navigation of the area's seas, current awareness of the local climatic conditions, the local indigenous societies and the contemporary European rivalry between the imperial powers. The analysis of the reporting is seen against the background of local administrative arrangements in Dutch-ruled Malacca, whereby the British, in control from 1795-1818, nevertheless maintained the continuity of Dutch procedures and Dutch personnel. Overall, the book provides rich information about everyday life in the eastern seas in the period.
Edited by Ernest Cole
ALT 43: Afrifuturism
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This issue of ALT provides content narratives, critical frames and theoretical constructs to read and critique writings in the emerging genre of Afrifuturism.
In contrast to Afrofuturism, which explores the intersection of primarily Diaspora Black culture with Western technology and hence perpetuates, to some extent, a colonial mindset, Afrifuturism looks to imagine an African and global Black future beyond industrial, technological and capitalist terms, one rooted in African cosmologies and history. Contributions in this issue seek to interrogate, contest, and reformulate some aspects of its convention by suggesting alternate frames, shifts in focus, changing perspectives of history and points of view, new narrative methods, new epistemological structures, thematic concepts and pedagogical praxis that offer new ways of defining the African and for imagining alternative futures for African peoples. Together, they shed further light on the complexities of Afrifuturism and offers alternative models for thinking about the past and the future of African people, with important implications for diaspora and postcolonial literature.
Elena Caetano Álvarez
Alfonso X, the Dream of Empire, and (Re)Writing History in the Estoria de Espanna
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Why did Alfonso X of Castile-Leon-Galicia relentlessly pursue his claims to the imperial thrones of the Holy Roman Empire and the Iberian 'empire', despite the high costs and probability of failure?
This book examines how the concept of imperium shapes the structure and ideology of the Estoria de España, the first major history of Spain in the vernacular, written under Alfonso's patronage. Through a detailed analysis of its Roman section, it explores how Alfonso's scriptorium translated, adapted, and expanded sources to bolster his imperial claim. More than a chronicle, the Estoria served as propaganda, reinforcing Alfonso's legitimacy by challenging papal authority in imperial elections and appealing to both the Castilian-Leonese nobility-whose financial support was crucial-and other Iberian monarchs.
Alfonso's imperial vision drew not only on the Imperium Hispanicum of his father, Fernando III, but also on his Staufen lineage through his mother, Beatriz of Swabia, whose ties to the Holy Roman Empire likely influenced the historiographical models of the Estoria. By blending Iberian and European traditions, Alfonso positioned Castile as heir to both the Roman and Hohenstaufen legacies, setting a new standard for Iberian historiography that endured for centuries.
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.
Dr Sara Ayres
The Grand Tour of Prince George of Denmark in England, 1669
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This annotated diary describes the politics, cultural richness and practicalities of elite educational travel in England during the early reign of Charles II.
Prince George of Denmark is best known to Anglophone historiography for having married Queen Anne of Great Britain, in 1683. This critical edition of the diary detailing the Prince's Grand Tour in England, which took place in the summer of 1669, sheds light on the critical complexity of George's role within Stuart political history, a role that commenced during his youthful, incognito travels. The Grand Tour was an important rite of passage introducing young princes to the European political stage, and the ongoing political, ceremonial and multilingual exchanges characterising Baroque diplomacy.
From his base in York House, London, Prince George's itinerary ranged from Canterbury Cathedral, to the fleet at Chatham to Whitehall Palace, from Hampton Court to Windsor Castle, from the Tower of London to the Pall Mall laboratory of Robert Boyle, from the Tradescant Museum to the University of Oxford. The diary describes these experiences in astonishing detail.
This edition puts England on the map as a Grand Tour destination, and shows how the Restoration court acted as an important hub for a host of seventeenth-century European princelings undertaking all-important educational travel.
The edition is enhanced and contextualised by hitherto unpublished archival sources, including the Tour's financial accounts.
David Cressy
Careers and Crises in the Age of Charles I
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Examines a selection of Charles I's people, exploring their aspirations and discontents, their engagement with kindred and colleagues, and central authority, in an age they recognized as 'troubled'.
This book examines the lives and circumstances of a variety of English men and women in the decades before the English Civil War, and follows some of them to the Restoration. It introduces a selection of Charles I's people, some of them previously undocumented, and explores their aspirations and discontents, their engagement with their kindred, their colleagues and central authority. These were members of the clerical, professional and commercial classes or from the minor gentry and aristocratic fringe - the backbone of the political nation - engaged, in various ways, with military, governmental, ecclesiastical or commercial affairs.
Most feature little in previous historical studies, but key moments in their lives are reconstructed here from scattered references or rare collections. They are shown negotiating the shoals of ambition and opportunity, kinship and patronage, religious anxiety and personal distress, in an age they recognized as 'troubled'. Preoccupied by their own careers and comforts, and driven by personal anxieties and ambitions, Charles I's subjects coped with the pressures of public occurrences and the business of church and state. In that regard they shared some stresses with our own age, though theirs eventuated in civil war and revolution.
Frank Matose
Forests and the Power of Marginalised People in Southern Africa
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Decades after independence and the end of apartheid, why have forest communities in Zimbabwe and South Africa not been able to recover the land and resource rights they lost under colonialism?
This book explores the politics of conservation in southern Africa through the lens of chronic liminality, a 'state of in-betweenness' or 'waiting', to explain the status quo in local people-state forest relationships and why progress has been so slow. Using the Dwesa-Cwebe Nature Reserve, the Gwayi Forest and Mafungabusi Forest as cases studies, it examines the consequences on people living in and around protected areas of neoliberal approaches to conservation and of the legacy of colonial property relations.
The book asks why local communities have not engaged in collective or rebellious action against the government and how they have instead found themselves in a liminal position, caught between waiting for conditions to change and advancing their rights through violent action. It also asks why states have likewise pursued a politics of liminality and continue to prevaricate about whether to restore local rights or maintain the status quo around forest preserves. Overall, the book advances scholarship around conservation in Africa and other postcolonial regions by providing a different perspective on the continued marginalisation of local people and arguing for a need to rethink forest ownership and management.
Translated with notes by Robert J. Meindl, Mark T. Riley and R.F. Yeager
Vox Clamantis by John Gower: "The Voice of One Crying"
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The first English translation into verse of the full Vox Clamantis, with explanatory notes.
John Gower's Vox Clamantis is one of the major poetic achievements of the Middle Ages. Its subject matter ranges from his dream-vision account of the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 to sharp critiques of the clergy, merchants, and lawyers, all with the intention of teaching the lessons of the past as a guide to the present. In Gower's view, everything that is and happens must be read and interpreted for the guidance God provides: history, Scripture and nature are replete with auguries sent by God to guide rulers if they but learn to read them. Ultimately for Gower, rulers - and we ourselves - are responsible for our own choices, for good or ill.
This line-by-line translation from the original Latin into Modern English is intended for a wide audience, and to be easily readable by scholars and non-scholars alike. It replicates Gower's Latin meter as closely as possible in English, uses straightforward language, and clarifies many difficult points of medieval legal theory, Classical allusion, and theological interpretation heretofore left unexplained in any previous attempts, full or partial, to translate the poem. Extensive notes trace Gower's sources, from Ovid to Peter Riga's Aurora to Alexander Nequam's De Naturis rerum to Nigel Wireker's Speculum Stultorum and the Bible, among many others. Classical and Biblical allusions are identified and fully but succinctly explained. This book also includes the "Letter to Arundel", translated in verse for the first time.
