Chapter 6 outlines the ways different practitioners of peithō’s arts managed her ambiguity through expressions and performances of piety toward her divinity. The chapter examines diverse figures from ancient Greek comedy and oratory who used prayerful reverence toward Peithō to bolster their own ēthos and secure success for their rhetorical projects. The chapter surveys the persuasive work of characters from the Aristophanes’ Lysistrata and Menander’s Epitrepontes as well as historical speeches from Demosthenes and Isocrates. Each of the orator-like figures examined reveals both the advantages and pitfalls of partnering with Peithō and the degrees to which the coercive or corrupting qualities of her influence might be deflected. These performances offered the ancient audience a variety of educational models for how one might productively harness Peithō’s assistance in rhetorical speech: by cultivating respectful deference toward her divinity and reconciling oneself to a lack of complete control before her power.

How do books circulate in times of crisis? The first edition of the Complete Works of Voltaire, printed in Kehl, in Germany, between 1781 and 1789 is a good example of what war can do to books, and how our comprehension of Enlightenment fluctuates depending on the approach chosen. This book history is strongly anchored in the Enlightenment project as defined by Diderot and D’Alembert in the Discours préliminaire of the Encyclopédie. The aim is to spread to a wider public Voltaire's texts thanks to a new edition whose classification and presentation help the non-specialist reader to apprehend these vast and complex works. Voltaire is not only an exceptional writer, but his complete works are encyclopedic, spanning history, politics, society, culture, literature, arts, etc. It seems more than ever relevant to study real circulation of books and ideas related to the Enlightenment project, and to situate this concept as it is, nowadays, challenged by decolonial thought. Enlightenment is neither a static concept nor a permanent phenomenon. It is the contrary, and intrinsically dynamic. It is a permanent movement of books, ideas, and people, a constant reemergence of commitment, of synergies, of resistances. Book history's political background and social conditions can allow us to pull together how contingent this experience could be.

Beaumarchais's project of this posthumous edition was developed precisely at the time when France was once again at war with Great Britain. On February 6, 1778, France signed a treaty of trade with the Insurgents of America, thereby recognizing, implicitly, their United States.

In the field of architectural history, few primary sources offer as intimate and comprehensive an insight as the diary of a practitioner. While architectural plans and drawings can explain what was designed and when, personal accounts such as diaries can help us understand why. William George Footitt (1865–1936) was an architectural draughtsman in the office of Charles Hodgson Fowler. As architect to the Dean and Chapter of Durham Cathedral, Fowler had a successful practice specialising in the design and restoration of churches. Between 1897 and 1914, Footitt kept a diary to document his professional and personal life and to record his impressions of a rapidly changing world. This manuscript passed to his son John and eventually came down to the present Lord Shipley of Gosforth, the nephew of John's wife Elizabeth. By kind permission of Lord Shipley, this volume publishes the full text of Footitt's diary for the first time.

This unique text illuminates in rich and compelling detail the workings of an important architectural practice during a transformative period in history. Spanning nearly two decades, the diary is a fascinating record of the professional practice, creative challenges and daily life of an individual immersed in the production and restoration of ecclesiastical architecture during the later stages of the Gothic Revival.

The introduction focuses on how modern African writing has challenged the central categories that have shaped intellectual debates on the nature of literature and criticism in the twentieth century with particular attention to the problem of modernity and the narrative of decolonization. The chapter identifies the key moments and contours of African literature from the early twentieth century to the great period of decolonization in the second half of the century and identifies the critical traditions that have determined the nature of this literature and its relation to global cultural movements. Rejecting the idea of an African literary tradition that is either a prisoner of Euro-American critical traditions or one isolated from global treads, the introduction summarizes the key arguments in the book to show how, at a distinct moment in the twentieth century, African imaginaries were codified into a set of practices that changed theories and histories of modern literature.

This chapter interrogates how shifting contexts profoundly impacted Ngugi’s notion of history and his overall vison. Over the years Ngugi’s oeuvre has largely betrayed the conviction that African writing could intervene in the continent’s historiographical pursuits, and also in the actual determination of historical experience. As a result of complications in context, one sees in Ngugi’s later writing an attempt to reinvent himself in the process of interpreting and reinterpreting a perennially confounding postcolonial world in which the writer has been hewn from his history by the realities of migration, exile and globalisation. His later work is characterised by self-reflexivity as he wrestles with and casts doubt on the nature of narratives, especially their position, role or intervention in Africa’s historiography in a context that continues to defy logic. The act of writing is problematised and depicted as emblematic of a contemporary world where the increasing fluidity and unreliable nature of narratives call into question the very notion of historiography. Overall, Ngugi’s later major writing emerges as an epic journey of loss of faith that simultaneously questions, indicts and deconstructs the act of writing in a world where history seems contrived, concocted, deliberately chaotic and even stranger than ever before.

On 29 December 1170, Archbishop Thomas Becket was brutally murdered in Canterbury Cathedral. Accounts of the horrific event spread rapidly throughout England and Europe, fostering the development of a cult that encouraged widespread veneration and engendered a fascination with the Canterbury martyr that has lasted until the present time. Soon after the murder, visual imagery depicting Thomas Becket and his martyrdom began to appear. As Richard Gameson has remarked, these early depictions were ‘simultaneously a byproduct of his cult, and a major catalyst for its development’. Some of the first works portraying the saint were mosaics and wall-paintings created in Sicily and France, and during the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries images of the saint appeared in other genres, including manuscript illuminations, stained-glass windows, sculptures, seals, pilgrim tokens, and enamel reliquary caskets from Limoges.

INTRODUCTION

In Shetland, there were several late witchcraft cases, unlike Orkney, where the bulk of trials seem to have finished in the 1640s. Shetland had seven cases during the years 1673–5 and six from 1700 until 1725. In comparison, Orkney may have had only one case after 1675, in 1708.

On 9 June 1708, two sisters and one brother of the Ratter family from Collaster (‘Colvaseter’) in Sandness, Andrew, Katherine and Elspeth (or Elizabeth), were brought before the presbytery of Shetland. They were accused of witchcraft, sorcery and deluding the people – phrases from the 1563 witchcraft act. They were questioned, and a series of witnesses, mainly neighbours, were cited, men and women. The witnesses testified that the Ratters went to their neighbours’ houses, begging for food and other items. If they were refused, they cursed the people involved. Shortly afterwards, sickness and death occurred, allegedly as a result of the curse. There were also several successful reconciliations in which a sick person recovered. The Ratters argued against these allegations, and seem to have claimed some healing powers.

The three Ratters did not always agree, since Elspeth accused Andrew and Katherine of bewitching her. A further sister, Christian Ratter, was also mentioned, but does not seem to have been under suspicion. The presbytery’s enquiries also identified another witchcraft suspect, Margaret Watson, who was also interrogated. One of the neighbours, James Jeromson, gave information both about the Ratters and about Watson, but this is the only recorded connection between their cases. Watson was investigated again in 1724–5, and all the documents relating to her case are edited below in the present volume. The story of Katherine Ratter has lived on in oral tradition, giving information about her trial. It is rare today to find oral tradition about individual witchcraft trials from around 1700.

This appendix brings together all the songs in the above-translated texts for which there exists a thirteenth-century notation that unequivocally indicates a fixed rhythmic pattern in line with the rhythmic modes. For more details, see ‘Rhythm’ in the ‘Songs and Music’ section of the Introduction (pp. 34–6).

This chapter is about hospitality, literal and figurative, and the difficulties of disentangling the difference as represented in the first of the moralized Bibles produced for the Capetians in the early thirteenth century. Through the lens offered by the final, horrific story told in the book of Judges, it addresses the fusion of hospitality and hostility, its only apparent opposite – hostipitality, as Jacques Derrida phrases it – represented in the words and images of Vienna, ÖNB 2554. Hosting quarrels arise in the Bible moralisée not only when Sodomites (in 2554's French vernacular) come to claim li Dyakenes (the Deacon), a guest under his host's protection. They arise not only when the rape and death of the Deacon's wife lead to war between men of the city and the tribes of Israel. In the moralizing images and text, hosting quarrels also engage the sacraments, specifically figured as the Eucharist threatened by heretics (populicanz and mescreanz), and pagan philosophy protected by Jerome and Augustine against the rise of Aristotelianism at the university of Paris. All this is made explicit in two slim columns of texts lined up with their corresponding biblical and commentary images.

Theme parks are a post-World War II refabrication of the old-fashioned amusement park for middle-class family leisure. Walt Disney’s Disneyland in Anaheim, California (1955), was the model for subsequent theme parks and zoological or animal theme parks that have flourished in American suburbs as well as in vacation destination zones. They bear similarities to shopping malls and borrow the scale and extravagance of world’s fairs. These tourist sites, especially Disney World and Universal Studios parks, often celebrate fantasies of immersion in modern movies and TV. One scholar labels them “utopias of leisure,” offering a cleansed homogeneity and managed social control. Disney and other park companies have also brought the media fantasy vacation to Asian and European cities while generating imitation by sites like the Las Vegas strip, now a commercial mix of entertainments that simulate exotic and fantasy locales and incorporate animal habitats, thrill rides, and overwhelming electrified visual effects.