The concept of rebellion was ubiquitous across medieval Europe both geographically and chronologically. All European polities witnessed numerous armed revolts that varied in scale and success. Such insurrections were not in themselves evidence of a disorderly and chaotic society, but rather a symptom of a political culture that viewed violent resistance as a legitimate option for redressing grievances. The fifteen essays in this collection examine rebellions from across Europe, highlighting the various forms that this active resistance could take. In one respect, the coverage of this collection is very broad, both in terms of its geographical scope – ranging from Sweden in the northern Baltic to the Reconquista kingdoms of the Iberian Peninsula and from the British Isles in the north-eastern Atlantic to Hungary and Slovakia in Central Europe – as well as its chronological span, encompassing some four centuries from twelfth-century Sicily to late fifteenth-century Ireland. In another respect, the essays in this collection are connected in a number of ways. Catholicism was the dominant religion in the all the rebellions being discussed and those societies were ruled predominantly by kings and landed elites.

His last voyage across the Atlantic was pleasant, but his reception in Spain was convoluted. His rules for confession and absolution in Chiapa had preceded him home, and the encomendero class across the Indies and those back in Spain campaigned to make the encomiendas perpetual, handed down from father to son and heirs forever. A flag no redder could be waved before the still bishop of Chiapa. He fought this new challenge for the rest of his life.

Everyone, it seemed, was offering money re the life of the encomiendas. The encomenderos in Spain offered to pay the Crown an immense gift for recognizing perpetuity. The Dominicans in Peru, especially one of Bartolomé's brothers, Father Domingo de Santo Tomás, “organized the Indians [in Peru] to authorize Las Casas to offer Philip II a large sum of money to deny perpetuity.” There appeared to be some proto-modern capitalism at work here.

“It was,” one of Las Casas's most astute modern students, Lewis Hanke, wrote, “in fact a blank check, for Las Casas was authorized to offer as much cash as would be necessary to outbid the encomenderos, no matter how much they offered for the privilege of perpetuity.” While the battle with the encomenderos grew warmer, in the meantime, in 1549, Las Casas pounced on another adversary, this time in his very own Dominican camp.

One of the most antagonistic Dominicans towards the Indians was Domingo de Betanzos, who opposed, for example, the training of Indians for the priesthood.

Thomas Churchyard's 1587 volume, The Worthines of Wales, composed predominantly in verse, is a description and celebration of Wales, loosely based on the author's journey through parts of the province. As the title-page declares, with a degree of bookseller's exaggeration, it is ‘enterlarded with many wonders and right strange matter to consider of: All the which labour and device is drawn forth and set out by Thomas Churchyard, to the glorie of God, and honour of his Prince and Countrey’. It is purportedly unfinished, since Churchyard's travels were curtailed by illness, and functions as something of a miscellany, since the topographical passages are accompanied by the transcription of historical material, digressions on subjects such as gentility and mountains, and reflections on the author's life. But this is by no means a rough or unconsidered book. Indeed the Worthines is Churchyard's longest poetic work; produced when he was in his early sixties, it also stands as the work of a self-consciously mature author. Churchyard is indeed remarkable for his longevity: probably first writing while in the service of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, in the 1540s; having his earliest work in print in the 1550s; and publishing his final poem, an elegy on Elizabeth, in 1604. Looking across this career, The Worthines of Wales stands as arguably his greatest and most representative work.

Churchyard has not been greatly appreciated by literary historians. For C. S. Lewis, he is broadly typical of the ‘drab age’; while Lewis concedes that Churchyard may occasionally produce ‘a pleasing line’, this is, he concludes, ‘probably accidental’. Churchyard is ultimately a poet with ‘no standards’.

After my mother's death in 2005, when we were clearing out her apartment, I found in her dresser five light-blue international envelopes held together by a thick rubber band. They were addressed to my parents in my handwriting. Here are the contents of the first one:

This chapter concludes the book with a discussion of the implications of the findings for political scientists and policymakers. I consider particularities of decision-making across African RIOs and which results are likely to generalize beyond Africa, as well as open questions that remain for future research.

Though K.B. McFarlane would rebuke historians for too often and too eagerly taking the part of ‘king's friends’, one might occasionally feel a twinge of sympathy when considering the scale of the challenges faced by twelfth-century rulers of Sicily. The Norman (Hauteville) monarchy was a newly-made one; Ruggero II (r.1130–54) had only upgraded his title from count to king in 1130, taking advantage of papal schism to contrive the blessing of one of the rival contenders to the papal throne. Norman control in southern Italy (which included much of modern Puglia, Calabria, Basilicata and Campania) was imposed on a landscape with its own complex political frameworks. Ruggero II's coronation was only the latest step in attempts to embed Hauteville power in the region. The eleventh century had seen strategic marriages into Lombard families as a way of enmeshing the Hautevilles within local princely hierarchies. Rival princes and counts were not the only other sources of political power in the region; as Paul Oldfield has demonstrated, the towns and cities of southern Italy had their own traditions of long-standing, which were not erased by the presence of Norman upstarts. Finally, there was a long history of mistrust and competition within the house of Hauteville itself, as different branches of the family competed for the spoils on offer in southern Italy.

While working on the English queen's household in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, Johnstone devised a framework that outlines three categories for the methods used to provide for a late medieval queen consort. In this framework, one of the queen's primary sources of revenue was a traditional payment to the queen that seems to have first been mentioned in a treatise from the twelfth century. This treatise, concerned with matters relating to the Royal Exchequer and commonly known as the Dialogus de Scaccario, was written during the reign of Henry II (c.1133–89; r. 1154–89) by the king's treasurer, Richard FitzNigel. In his discussion on the obligations and fees due to the king, FitzNigel stated, as in the above quotation, that whoever owed certain payments to the king was also bound to pay a requisite sum to the queen as her prerogative. This sum was set at one mark of gold to be paid to the queen for every one hundred marks of silver to the king. Proportionally, since a mark of gold was understood to be equal to ten marks of silver, this meant that a 10 per cent levy was imposed on the payer in addition to what was already payable to the king. This payment was known as queen's gold and may well have been enjoyed only by medieval queens in England and its neighbours in the British Isles.

St Thomas Becket’s great popularity throughout medieval England and Europe is reflected in ubiquitous references to his feasts in medieval calendars appearing in books of hours, psalters, breviaries, and other manuscripts. However, calendar illustrations of the saint are relatively rare and are also rarely studied. In part, this may be because most of these images occur in books of an unusual, folded format, rather than in codices. These accordion, or concertina, folded almanacs survive in around thirty copies but probably once were much more numerous. The nine known English examples (eight manuscript and one printed) typically contain three representations of Becket. In date the manuscripts are mainly fifteenth century, although the latest manuscript example is dated 1535, and sixteenth-century xylographic versions, printed using woodblocks, exist up to 1554 (see Appendix).

Steeped in African American traditions, jazz frequently invites conversations about race, Black artistry, and White commercialization of Black culture. To illustrate jazz’s slippage between art and the popular, this chapter considers jazz’s characterization and definition in advertising, movies, and popular music. These categories represent jazz as a cultural form through the embodiment and performance of jazz musicians. Companies like Nike, Honda, and Apple Computers intertwined a cultural aura around jazz with their merchandise. Hollywood movies in the post-World War II era conferred new authority on White swing musicians and erased anxiety about appropriation of Black culture by offering both White and Black jazz musicians’ performances. Late twentieth-century musicians — Steely Dan, Sting, Joni Mitchell — explicitly engaged jazz and jazz musicians for albums that aspired to artistic status rather than that of pop music. Throughout, definitions and separations between jazz as art and as the popular get blurred and remade.

This chapter is on novelistic discourses and the project of cultural translation in African literature from the perspective of Comparative Literature. The chapter begins with an analysis of debates on translation from both a linguistic and cultural perspective focusing on how, in comparative literature, debates about translation are caught in a conceptual impasse between critics who insist on the impossibility of translation and those who claim that nothing is untranslatable. The key argument in this chapter is that African literature in European languages complicates this division by calling into question the notion of an original or source language. In African fiction produced in the twentieth century, what appeared to be the source language was already a translation. More significantly, linguistic translation could not be separated from the project of cultural translation; in order for novels to perform significant cultural work, writers had to make African idioms and speech forms intelligible to outsiders without reaffirming the forms of colonial knowledge.

Three and a half years after the assassination of Thomas Becket, Henry II performed a public penance at Becket's church, Canterbury Cathedral, on 12 July 1174. The ceremony included the king's confession and his receipt of several hundred blows administered by members of the clergy using a rod. As part of Henry II's penance, the cult of the newly canonised saint was supported beyond England by Henry's daughters. This paper will examine Becket's cult in Castilla, where the king's daughter Leonor married Alfonso VIII only three months before Becket was assassinated in 1170 [Fig. 6.1]. Once he was canonised in 1173, the clergy actively promoted his cult by means of art and architecture, with the backing of the Crown. Although these works have previously been enumerated, they merit further analysis, along with closer attention to the roles of the clergy and Castilian magnates in addition to the king and queen. These monuments to Becket, produced in various media and for different sponsors, share the iconography quickly established throughout Europe upon the saint's canonisation. Whether figural, architectural, or verbal, they attest to the breadth of his cult in Castilla while Castilla and England were bound by marriage and common interests. It was a golden age. The cult appears to have declined during the fourteenth century when relations between Spain and England became less amicable.

This chapter describes the period between the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century where the Bank of England used excess reserve creation (in the form of banknote issuance) to help fund a burgeoning fiscal deficit.