I. The Lay of the Land

“God loveth the gladde giver,” taken from 2 Corinthians 9:7, was, as Felicity Heal describes it, one of the “predictable sentiments” of early modern English culture, so commonplace that historians merely note before passing on. We should dwell a moment. There were so many adjectives that could have been chosen: God could have loved a generous giver or a pious giver, or even a frequent giver, for example. But the phrase that found purchase in early modern England was an emotive one: God loved the glad giver. God also, according to John Donne, and perhaps more surprisingly, loved “a cheerful taker.” The coupling of emotive terms with social norms was a striking feature of early modern English culture.

How ought one to live? An easy question to ask, but much more difficult to answer satisfactorily and responses will vary according to culture, era, and writer. The answer in the modern Western world might well be: one ought to be happy. Early modern society might agree but their understanding of what happiness meant was not the same and the answer would be phrased differently. Happiness, in the sense of denoting joy, pleasure, and contentment, is a modern concept. The ancient concept of eudaimonia, usually translated as happiness or well-being, referred not to pleasure but to a condition of living well that could not be achieved without virtue. Early modern society was heavily influenced by the model of eudaimonia, ensuring that happiness was conceived of as an ethical, rather than solely an affective, state, produced by a virtuous life.

After the sale or sales of the prize the agent had to make two public notifications of the distribution of shares in the London Gazette or, if in a Vice Admiralty Court, in the newspaper of most authority in the island or place where the condemnation had taken place. The notification had to be made at least three days before the initial distribution and contain the address of the agent, and the precise day of the month and year in which the further distributions would take place. If these conditions of advertisement were not met, there was a penalty of £500 payable to Greenwich Hospital.

The prize agent had further responsibilities: if the captured ship was thought fit to be brought into the navy once it had been condemned as a prize, a bill for her value, together with that of her ‘stores, apparel, guns, and furniture’, had to be made out within fifteen days ‘according to the course of the navy’ to be distributed and divided as laid down. ‘And for the further encouragement of such officers, seamen and others who shall actually serve on board’ the distribution was made without fee or reward. The amazing number of deductions for legal fees and charges had of course already been made, but the morale of the men concerned was maintained.

Admiralty and Parliament were anxious that the Prize Acts after 1739 achieved their goal of encouraging seamen, and that payments of prize and bounty money were made promptly, accurately and publicly in order to do so.

INTRODUCTION

Janet Irvine was one of over a dozen people to be tried for witchcraft in Orkney and Shetland in 1615 and 1616. These trials were evidently connected with the new regime being established in the islands in this period. The royal government had imprisoned the last autonomous earl of Orkney, Patrick Stewart, in Edinburgh in 1609. Royal authority was tightened after the defeat in 1614 of a rebellion led by the earl's illegitimate son Robert Stewart; father and son were executed early in 1615. These political events were important, not just for the prosecutors, but for Irvine herself.

Irvine seems to have lived in the town of Kirkwall, latterly at least, but when we see her working for a living it is in rural occupations: being employed to herd and milk cattle, carrying a load of corn, stacking her own peat, and gathering shellfish on the shore. She was clearly an older woman. There is no mention of a husband or children.

Most of the evidence against Irvine came from her own confession, but several instances of harm to named individuals were mentioned, and these people may have given information against her. She was twice evicted or threatened with eviction, so she had difficulties with neighbours, and she was stated to have a reputation as a witch. She herself related that the Devil had taught her a ritual to obtain ‘hir heartis desyre’ (vengeance) upon people with whom she had quarrelled. Usually, she was said to have inflicted illness. She was also alleged to have sunk a boat coming from Westray, drowning several people, but she denied this. The assize acquitted her of this charge, but they convicted her of the other charges, and she was executed.

Irvine confessed to a relationship with the Devil that contained a mixture of stereotypical and idiosyncratic elements.

In the Translatio of Edith of Wilton, daughter of the English King Edgar, Goscelin of St-Bertin (d. 1099 C.E.) includes a tale about three goldsmiths commissioned by King Cnut to craft a shrine for Edith's relics in the monastery's church. Though Cnut paid the smiths generously for their materials and labor, they were consumed by greed: ‘the workmen's clawing hands’ (aduncas manus artificum), which should have honored the saint with their skill, instead grasped for profit, using only a small amount of the king's ‘pure gold’ (auro puro) and presumably pocketing the remainder. In ‘their colossal avarice’ (auaricie uastitas), Goscelin says, the smiths ‘made [the reliquary] with silver with a thin gilding’ (uix argento deaurato confecere), both breaking their ‘royal vow’ (regium uotum) and insulting Edith, a saint and princess of Wessex. As punishment for their crime, all three craftsmen were struck blind, so that ‘together with the coveted light of the metal they lost the light of the world’ (cum cupidinea luce metalli perdiderunt lucem mundi), begging to survive after stealing from the king and the saint. Their names, ‘Ælfmær, Winstan, and Wulfstan, formerly famous for their skill’ (prius arte clari), thereafter lived in infamy, like that of another dishonest goldsmith, Spearhafoc, abbot of Abingdon, who would disappear in 1051 with Edward the Confessor's gold.

Music and Performers

The violin emerged at a time when musical activities were connected to an assortment of institutions and locales (courts, the church, markets, inns, and families) and for the most part served their social and cultural requirements. Toward the end of the eighteenth century, however, music managed to break free of the gilded cage of patronage and began to generate its own institutions. Indeed, one of the most significant features of musical life in nineteenth-century London and other European capitals was its autonomy from official functions of any kind, be they courtly or governmental.

At the height of the fierce political infighting among Jacobins, royalists, Girondins and an assortment of French but also British, Italian and German political conspirators that took hold in France before Napoleon Bonaparte seized power in 1799, Sieyès was accused by his supporters of not showing enough firmness towards the Jacobins. ‘There is a sect that is even more redoubtable than the Jacobins’, he was reported to have replied, ‘it is the sect of those who are impatient’.1 It is a revealing comment not only because it captures something long-lasting in Sieyès’s view of how events in France had unfolded over the past decade but also because it highlighted the mixture of blindness and insight that was one of the abiding characteristics of his political vision. Sieyès had a plan, based in large measure on Rousseau’s political thought and, more specifically, on Rousseau’s advice to his Polish interlocutors about how to prevent Poland from falling off the political map.

When we think of a medieval manuscript, we often picture an illuminated prayer book or bible. We might think of a massive book, hundreds of leaves of smooth, off-white parchment, often illuminated with gold leaf. Such deluxe manuscripts made up a small number of medieval books, being for the most part luxury items rather than those intended for frequent use. The most common working manuscripts were religious, and the most common of these were liturgical. A liturgical book might be illustrated and illuminated if it came from a well-endowed religious establishment like a monastery or cathedral, and then might subsequently serve as a ‘hand me down’ to a parish church. More often, liturgical books were less lavishly illustrated (on which, see Chapter 3). Another common type of working manuscript was that containing works designed to aid clergy in pastoral care.

In the Christian tradition, the pastor is an ordained clergyman who looks out for the needs of other Christians, primarily in the domain of the spiritual, but also in feeding the poor, ministering to the sick, and the like. Throughout the Middle Ages, learned churchmen had drawn up treatises to help clergy with the major components of pastoral care: moral guidance and the hearing of confession, teaching Christian morals and doctrine, and administering the other sacraments, those rituals like communion through which the Church administered the visible grace of God through physical processes. The sense of a need to look out for the spiritual needs of laypeople went back to the early days of the Church. Writers such as St. Augustine of Hippo (354–430) and Pope Gregory the Great (r. 590–604) had composed guidebooks for giving laypeople moral and spiritual guidance.

Things now moved quickly. In November, the South German states of Bavaria, Württemberg, Baden, and Hesse were joined by treaty to the North German Confederation. In December, the Confederation was renamed the German Reich. On January 18, 1871, in an august ceremony held in the Hall of Mirrors of the Versailles Palace, King William I of Prussia accepted the title of German Emperor. Ten days later Paris capitulated, an armistice was signed, and hostilities ceased. On February 26, the armistice was solidified through the signing of the preliminary Treaty of Versailles, and on May 10, a formal peace treaty was concluded in Frankfurt. This called for substantial reparations to be paid, but its most controversial provision required France to cede to Germany most of Alsace and a smaller portion of Lorraine, regions on the west bank of the Rhine that had long been the subject of dispute. There was much for the liberals to like about the unification that their one-time nemesis Bismarck had brought about. The boundaries of the Reich were now firmly decided (at least until 1919). Germany had a constitution (largely taken over from that of the North German Confederation), with a parliament elected by universal male suffrage (although with a three-tier voting franchise in Prussia that gave disproportionate representation to large-estate owners and the wealthy) and a German chancellor (albeit one appointed by and answerable only to the emperor).

In one of the cross streets that lead from the Graben to the Josephsplatz and Augustiner Street stood the town residence of the counts of Petofy: a mansion built in the days of Prince Eugene, with a half-hipped roof, and two side wings extending forward. A main floor raised above the ground, in the old-fashioned manner, a central courtyard, and enclosing all this in the front, a somewhat dilapidated iron fence. If one walked directly along this fence on a dark day and looked at the graveled courtyard through its rusted bars, one would have the impression that everything here was long dead and deserted; but from the other side of the street, an abundance of small clues, not least the muted glow of light which in the evenings came through the not quite fully drawn curtains, suggested that the building was occupied—if not in its entirety, at least in the two projecting wings.

And so it was. The last two Petofys were Count Adam and his sister Judith, a long-widowed Countess von Gundolskirchen; they lived in the mansion, keeping separate households, and only shared the use of the opulent public rooms in the corps de logis.

The company that would assemble in these rooms varied greatly, depending on whether the invitations had come from the brother or the sister. Both siblings took satisfaction in the generous patronage they extended, but while the count's patronage was for the world of art, that of the countess was for the church.

This volume focuses on American popular culture’s historical and cultural power as a transformative agent shaping national and world histories, values, and societies. Popular culture is broadly construed herein as “commercialized leisure,” a definition derived from social theories about work/leisure and the nature of industrialized societies. Not to be confused with folklore, it makes several supportive assumptions: popular culture is driven by mechanization, it defines audiences as consumers, it is a conduit for group identities, it is transnational, and it is always actively interpreted by its varied audiences. American popular culture is dependent on technological developments, from the 1820s print revolution to the 1869 completion of the transcontinental railroad to the domination of mass-media technologies ending with the rise of the Internet. The book is organized into three sections: nineteenth century, twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and case studies where popular culture has been weaponized for sociopolitical domination or resistance.

This chapter interrogates two misconceptions about Ngũgĩs early life and shows how his early years informed Ngũgĩ’s early writing. Ngũgĩ’s parents were not ahoi (tenants-at-will), as he once claimed. Drawing upon his recent memoirs and the ‘autobiographical moments’ in his later essay collections, I foreground Ngũgĩs birth ‘in a large peasant family’ and parse their diminishing property rights, from peasants with reasonably large land-holding to land-poor peasants who hired out their labour. I parse the family dynamics that inform Ngũgĩ’s investment in equity and communitarian values, and his emerging interest in oral storytelling and performance, coupled with a motivation to escape the trap of poverty through Western education. While Kamĩrĩĩthũ defined much of Ngũgĩ’s later work, it was not his birthplace. The dislocation to Kamĩrĩĩthũ during the Emergency (1955–9) anchored him in the primal scene of postcolonial Gĩkũyũ identity, but also nurtured an interest in theatre as a tool for community-building and carceral institutions more generally. Both the colonial school and the Emergency village became major settings for his early works. Ironically the recursive image of the train station at Limuru in A Grain of Wheat occurred to Ngũgĩ while on a train ride from Leeds to Scotland, uniting two planes of coloniality.

This chapter discusses a number of generalizations of the Bernoulli random graph. The first is to Erdős–Rényi mixture models, in which each vertex belongs to one of a small number of distinct types, and the probability of an edge between two vertices being present depends on the types of the two vertices. Much as for the Bernoulli random graph, the neighbourhood structure is approximated by a multitype branching process. A threshold theorem for the existence of a giant component is derived, and the asymptotic proportions of the vertices in the giant component that belong to the different types is determined. Finally, the distribution of the length of the shortest path between two vertices of given types is approximated. The properties of some special network models of this kind, vertex weighted random graphs and bipartite networks, are examined. Another set of models considered is that of directed Bernoulli random graphs, in which there may be edges in either (or both) directions between any pair of vertices. Finally, Poissonized Erdős–Rényi mixture models for multigraphs are introduced, in which edges may be present between any pair of vertices, and the number of such edges has a Poisson distribution, with mean depending on the types of the vertices, the numbers being chosen independently. The extent to which these models differ from the standard Erdős–Rényi mixture models in the sparse regime is discussed.

This chapter considers reprints as new editions and insists that they offer the clearest indication of an author or play’s popularity. I explore the accessibility of Shakespeare’s plays between 1660 and the turn of the century, place quarto playbook publication in the context of late seventeenth-century politics, and highlight how traditional periodization, folio-centric scholarship and attitudes toward abbreviated and altered playtexts have distorted our view of the print history of Renaissance drama. I argue that Shakespeare’s unaltered plays were not recognised as marketable print commodities until c. 1681, a development reflected in publishers’ willingness in the 1680s and 1690s to not just publish his plays but also risk facing the consequences associated with pirate printing ventures. The chapter intervenes in long-standing debates about the causes and measurability of Shakespeare’s popularity and his relationship to authorship, genre, and the canon in the late seventeenth-century book trade.

Hustling movement, crowded thoroughfares, furtive exchanges: these are fleeting images that emerge as traffic collides with trafficking in the twelfth-century Ordo representaciones Ade, an astounding “Play of Adam” that trades in religion openly and under cover. Biblical encounters tucked into metaphors of traffic and trafficking carry along a variety of Jewish- Christian interactions with potential for positive and negative results. When polemical contestation between Old Law and New leads to figurative meetings between Jews and Christians, their dialogue and disputations make rival claims on who has the right of way – and the right way – to interpret sacred texts. This traffic in Paradise plays out across the Jeu d’Adam's three acts in which biblical and exegetical traditions, Jewish and Christian, masterfully intertwine. First, two dramatic re-enactments offer Adam and Eve's life in the Garden of Eden leading to their Fall (1–590), followed by Cain murdering Abel in a quick demonstration of original sin (591–744).