INTRODUCTION

Marion Pardoun, also known as Marion Peebles, was accused of witchcraft in Shetland in 1644. She was denounced by Janet Fraser, who had recently been executed for witchcraft, and she herself was tried along with Margaret Guthrumsdochter. The records of the other women's cases have not survived, but for Pardoun's own case a copy was made, both of the pre-trial and the trial records. It contains many details of neighbourhood quarrels and bewitchments, as well as some more unusual elements – shape-shifting into the form of a porpoise, and the ritual of cruentation or corpse-touching as a means of determining guilt or innocence.

Marion Pardoun lived in Hillswick in Northmavine. She was said to be over sixty years of age. Her husband was Svend Iverson, and she had adult children. She also had a servant, so she apparently was no poor woman. She was well known in the local community. Her neighbours testified that she had caused many bewitchments in connection with quarrels – but most of these bewitchments had been followed by successful reconciliations, and most of her alleged victims seem to have recovered successfully. There are instances of transference of disease from one person to another, and from a human to an animal. The cures all seem to have followed previous allegations of bewitchment; a few of them involved actions resembling healing rituals, but Pardoun does not seem to have practised as a healer.

Pardoun was initially investigated by members of the presbytery of Shetland. This investigation mainly involved questioning her neighbours, and dealt with harmful magic that had resulted in various misfortunes, particularly human sickness and animal sickness and death. A draft dittay produced after this investigation was presented to the presbytery on 15 March 1644.

Das heilige Ziel (The Holy Goal; released in Japan as 国民の誓 [The People's Oath], Nomura Kōshō, 1938) is a feature-length sports film about two Japanese ski jumpers and their German coach, devised as a German-Japanese co-production and shot in Japan by star cinematographer Richard Angst. While 国民の誓 (Kokumin no chikai) is sometimes used to translate the official “oath to the nation,” in the film's context it denotes the firm intention of the Japanese characters (and, by extension, the Japanese people) to sacrifice everything for the nation's success in international sports (and also in the political arena). The German title Das heilige Ziel also refers to athletic success and national prestige as a literal “goal” and adds the notion of “holiness” in the sense that it takes precedence over all other, especially individual, concerns. Since both Japan and Germany considered the nation to be “sacred” in the 1930s and 1940s, the two titles are very close in meaning. This film is one of a number of German-Japanese co-productions from the interwar period that, like many international projects, display a complex tension between the national and the transnational. Indeed, these cinematic undertakings demonstrate pronounced aspirations to further intercultural understanding while promoting respective national causes. At the same time, the individual participants in this co-production pursued their own artistic and professional goals.

While it is easy to dismiss Dyngley's patristic books as typical fifteenth-century miscellanies, close reading uncovers back-stories about their production. These stories are told by non-verbal clues: signage systems for numbering leaves and quires; an end-of-quire tally entered on the verso of the last folio in each quire, a scriptorium system in operation for centuries; and assembly marks used to authenticate the final order of leaves and blocks of quires before binding. This chapter explores the stories of eight works-in-progress, which in turn demonstrate how thoroughly Dyngley was in charge at every stage of manuscript production. Dyngley was not a commissioner of books, so a commercial scenario in which he engaged a stationer must be disallowed. The case studies will show that Dyngley performed many of the activities commonly ascribed to stationers. He acquired the exemplars, he worked in liaison with his main text scribe, he provided the guard quires, and he gathered loose quires into anthologies. Peterhouse was the control centre for Dyngley's patristic project.

It is possible to define limiting objects that can approximate dense networks, as the number of vertices tend to infinity, in much the same way that the normal distribution approximates that of a sum of independent random variables. In this way, properties of dense graphs can be approximated by those of a suitably chosen limit. A network on n vertices is associated, via its adjacency matrix, with a symmetric function on the unit square that takes values of either 0 or 1, constant over squares of side 1/n, unique up to permutation of the vertex labels. This representation of a network belongs to the larger space of equivalence classes of symmetric, measurable functions on the unit square taking values in the unit interval, with two functions equivalent if one can be obtained from the other by a measure-preserving transformation of the axes; the equivalence classes are called graphons. A metric is defined on the space of graphons with the property that a sequence of ever larger dense networks converges, with respect to this metric, to a limiting graphon W, if, for each k, the distribution, over the set of possible subgraphs of size k, of a randomly chosen induced subgraph of size k in the network converges to a corresponding distribution derived from W.

Although book historians have tended to date the beginnings of an established market for printed plays to the mid 1590s, the first year of play publication, 1584, saw four plays printed, two of them in multiple editions. More plays were printed in this year than the rest of the decade combined; it would be another sixteen years before a play went into multiple editions in a single year. This chapter asks what this strange year tells us about plays as printed, reprinted, and revived commodities. The four plays discussed are John Lyly’s Campaspe and Sappho and Phao, Robert Wilson’s The Three Ladies of London, and George Peele’s The Arraignment of Paris. All four plays have things to say about reviving stories and performance, and three went on to be reprinted. Attending to them as a kind of corpus, this chapter investigates their place in the histories of revival, reprinting, and dramaturgy.

From 1747 to 1750, Charles Lennox, the 2nd Duke of Richmond, pursued one of the severest anti-smuggling campaigns in English history. It led to the execution of over forty individuals. And it was triggered by a particularly heinous crime. In 1747, a gang of smugglers had broken into the Customhouse at Poole to rescue a seizure previously taken by the Customs. When an informer attested to the identity of the offenders, he, along with a Customs officer, was abducted, tortured, and killed by the gang. The episode is one of the best-known smuggling stories of the eighteenth century. In large part, this is due to Richmond seeking to publicise the events to garner support for his campaign. Historiography, too, has paid close attention to the campaign and it has since been a central theme in the discussion of eighteenth-century smuggling and the debate on the “crime wave” of the 1740s.

Much as we know about the campaign, there remain gaps in how it has been studied. Traditional accounts have depicted the events as a confrontation between agents acting for the common good – the duke, the magistrates, the Customs men – and the villains – the smugglers and murderers. In a recent discussion, the events are seen as a “classic confrontation between public terror on the one hand and a Christian conscience with its wish for law and order, and justice, on the other”.

In African Literature in the World, Simon Gikandi asks: Why do debates on language continue to inform and haunt African writing? What happened when writing replaced orality as the primary form of creative expression? When, how, and why did the novel come to occupy such a dominant role in African literary history?

This is a comprehensive study of the histories and theories of African literature in the twentieth century and shows how African writers adopted and transformed the English language and its traditions to account for African identities and experiences. Concerned with writing and reading as forms of mediation, Gikandi provides examples of how imaginative works shaped the public sphere in Africa in relation to decolonization and the politics of language. He explores how the emergence of a modern tradition of African writing has generated new forms of criticism in relation to the form of the novel, modernity, and modernism.

9 June is also the date given for the inauguration itself. The statue was by Antoine Etex (1808–88), whom Berlioz had known in Rome in 1831–2. The concert consisted of the following, all by Rossini: the overtures to Il barbiere di Siviglia and Guillaume Tell, the Stabat Mater, act 2 of Guillaume Tell, an aria from Maometto II (the Italian opera revised as Le Siège de Corinthe for Paris), a cavatina and a duet from Il barbiere, the final aria from La Cenerentola, the prayer from Moïse, and the ‘divertissement’ from act 3 of Guillaume Tell.

Arguments about the statue had been going on for two years. Decades later, they were reactivated with respect to the plan in 1907 to erect a statue of Saint- Saëns in Dieppe. ‘There were some satirical comments by those who thought a statue to the living composer premature. The monument to Gounod had only recently been put up in St Cloud. In spite of, or perhaps because of the erection of one to Marshal Macmahon in his lifetime, a law forbade the inauguration of statues to the living. But significantly, government intervention enabled the ceremony to take place in the foyer of the Dieppe Theatre. “Since one only puts up statues to the dead, it follows that I am now counted among their number” [Saint-Saëns] remarked. “You will excuse me therefore from making a speech.”

There's been much discussion about the expediency of this homage being made to a man who is still alive; the majority are against it. We accept as tolerable statues to men who are dead, while the other arrangement is generally rejected. I confess this is a matter beyond my capacity.

Sports and the media first became co-dependent when Thomas Edison made boxing spectacle integral to early cinema’s success. In the 1920s–1930s, sports journalism’s dramatic storytelling made it key for both newspapers’ and radio’s popularity. When 1950s television added a visual dimension, sports industry leaders worried that TV was competition for live attendance. But professional football, a marginal sport, used the medium to create a fan base. ABC-TV developed a dramatic, intimate televisual style exemplified in their 1964 Olympics broadcasts, an unparallelled media spectacle and commercial success. ABC’s major role continued through Monday Night Football, coverage of the 1972 Munich Olympics terrorist attack, and other events. With cable TV’s arrival in the 1980s, all-sports channels like ESPN made coverage available 24/7, a strategy recently extended by digital platforms that now supply sports entertainment on-demand.

Introduction

The South African Metrorail was built to provide cheap transport in large urban areas. There are four systems in the country with some 470 stations and over 2,200 kilometres of track. Other than the Eastern Cape lines, the system operates electric trains powered from overhead cables. The lines follow the geography of apartheid, running between townships and historically white urban areas: industrial estates, suburbs, and town centres. The trains are used by township residents commuting to and from work, college students, those going to shop in “town,” and job seekers. Or at least this will be the case when the system is rebuilt following its destruction in 2020.

The Metrorail's destruction was the result of a three-part tragedy of corruption, fare evasion, and looting during the COVID-19 lockdown. Corruption at the Passenger Rail Authority of South Africa (PRASA) that runs Metrorail, was carried out by what Jacques Pauw describes as the PRASA Nostra. This looting of PRASA from above has been documented by the Public Protector, the Commission of Enquiry into State Capture, or Zondo Commission, the Auditor General, the National Treasury, and others and shows no sign of letting up. This chapter, however, concentrates on fare evasion or, in township lingo, riding mangober. The lockdown looting is the subject of a later chapter.

Fare evasion is a long running problem on the Metrorail. In August 1996, fifteen people were killed in a stampede at the Tembisa Township Metrorail Station, northeast of Johannesburg, when security staff used electric prods as they attempted to prevent mangobers from accessing trains.

A week later they were back in Vienna.

On the same day as his conversation with Judith, the count had announced his decision to travel ahead of the others as quartermaster, to look after things in the mansion, where a suite of new rooms had been prepared. The truth, though, was that he just wanted to avoid sharing a railway compartment with Egon. He felt distinctly that he would fail to strike the right note, and might be unable to resist his tendency to sarcasm which, if unjustified, would seem simply insulting, and if justified, would make his questioning appear like that of an old gossip. He wished to remove the possibility of both the one and the other. In Vienna, encounters between them could be kept within limits, even assuming, which seemed doubtful, that such encounters were desirable. In any case the diversions of the metropolis were the best means of granting him a clearer view and restoring his unbiased judgment.

These diversions did indeed have an effect on him; all the more easily since his powers of observation, keenly acute despite an outward casualness, met with nothing which might feed the suspicions in his mind. Egon, when he appeared in the evenings in the old countess's salon, was more serious and taciturn than usual, but in his conduct toward Franziska there was neither any special reserve nor special intimacy. And so it was no wonder that the old uncle regained, if not a sense of complete trust, then a certain mid-ground of feeling, with just enough hopefulness to justify his marking the start of the season with a musical soiree, followed by a festive ball.

Though much published material has been used for this research, it was more helpful in researching vessels, politics and historiography, not individual American seamen. Newspapers, histories and prisoners’ memoirs, as explained below, provide limited information on American prisoners. It is the original, archival material that reveals who they were, their plight, and the diplomatic efforts to help them.

Contemporary newspapers of all nations, viewed on various online databases of historic newspapers, are invaluable in tracing and identifying a vessel. Their daily reports of shipping arrivals in and departures from ports helped to track voyages. Their regular reports of vessels captured by privateers also helped to confirm information found in other sources and the captives’ own accounts. La Gazette nationale ou le Moniteur Universel, the French government's mouthpiece, published reports of captures by French privateers. In many cases, these reports give more information than those about the same captures in the British Lloyd's List or the various American papers. However, they only rarely mention a ship's master and never the seamen by name.

Nineteenth and early twentieth century works about privateers of the War of 1812, such as Maclay's A History of American Privateers and Coggeshall's History of the American Privateers and Letters of Marque During the War with England in the Years 1812, ‘13 and ‘14, are filled with mistakes about the privateers sailing from France.