This article begins with a simple but hitherto unexplored premise: for nearly three centuries the most famous speech in Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte Darthur was attributed to the wrong speaker. Malory's eulogy for Lancelot at the end of the tale is universally accepted as belonging to Lancelot's halfbrother, Ector de Maris, hence the more oft-quoted title for the speech, Ector's threnody. In every modern edition of the Morte, the eulogy is both contextually and verbally assigned to Ector because, upon his arrival at Joyous Garde, Ector is told of Lancelot's death by his fellow Round Table knight Sir Bors de Ganis, at which time he ‘threwe hys shelde, swerde, and helme frome hym [. …] And whan he waked it were harde for ony tonge to telle the doleful complayntes that he made for his brother’.2 If the context of this passage is not enough (and it should be) to support attribution of the eulogy to Ector, then the double-quotative Malory introduces in the ensuing clause unambiguously affirms attribution of the eulogy to Lancelot's half-brother: ‘“A, Launcelot!”, he sayd, “thou were hede of al Crysten knyghtes! And now I dare say”, sayd Syr Ector, “thou Sir Launcelot, there thou lyest, that thou were never matched of erthely knyghtes hande”’ (my emphasis). Here I am quoting directly from P. J. C. Field's 2013 edition, but attribution of the speech to Ector remains the same in all editions going back the last two centuries.

Yoruba Pentecostalism and Child Witchcraft Accusations emerged from a personal and professional need to address a troubling yet persistent societal issue: witchcraft accusations and their intersectional impacts. The stories and voices included here are both painful and urgent, representing experiences that often go unheard or misunderstood. This book seeks to shed light on these realities and to provide a framework for understanding, challenging, and ultimately correcting the structures that perpetuate such violence and marginalization.

The journey to this book began with my second master's and then doctoral research, where I sought to understand the interplay of culture, religion, and societal norms in shaping perceptions of witchcraft. While my academic training provided a foundation, it was the voices of the participants—women and children accused of witchcraft—that gave this work its direction and purpose. Their courage and willingness to share their experiences transformed this project from a scholarly endeavor into a call for systemic change.

Building upon years of qualitative research, this book invites readers to engage deeply with the lived experiences of accused women and children. It challenges surface-level discussions, advocating for systemic change and offering insights grounded in a cultural and historical understanding of Nigerian Pentecostalism.

I refer to Yoruba Pentecostalism instead of Nigerian Pentecostalism because approximately 70 percent of the founders and megapastors of Yoruba Pentecostalism are from diverse Yoruba ethnic groups. They have shaped this movement nationally and internationally with their liturgical emblems, practices, and teachings, which are deeply interwoven with their cultural backgrounds. Today, many Pentecostal movements in other regions and ethnicities across Nigeria and the diaspora have imitated these Yoruba pastors and fine-tuned their respective practices and tenets in their languages and cultures.

Both Alison Weir and Jeanette Lucraft have written about the ‘huge influence’ on modern perceptions of Katherine Swynford exerted by the publishing sensation that is Anya Seton's Katherine.3 Nevertheless, despite exhaustive studies, both writers – as well as Anthony Goodman4 – have struggled to find a convincing historical figure behind Seton's romantic heroine. Lucraft draws attention to Katherine's exploitation of heraldry as evidence that she was well able to assert her personal identity. This detail exemplifies Katherine's capacity to ‘play the game’; it is evidence that she had the necessary skills and accomplishments of diplomacy, learning and personality, Lucraft supposes, to convince John of Gaunt that she could be a credible wife for him, and not just a discrete mistress.

The British Brass Band Movement

It is not surprising that Gustav Holst would compose and arrange for the British brass band. During Holst's lifetime, aside from ceremonial functions, the military bands entertained primarily the middle classes in their park concerts. The musicians were entirely from the military, though it must be pointed out that there existed a few civilian bands of military band instrumentation. The brass bands, however, were (and still are) an entirely different matter. Their clientele was the working class, a much broader spectrum of the population. For many, these bands represented a mode of existence, one that was not aligned with British mainstream musical events and societal happenings for at least three-quarters of a century.

Origins of the British brass bands are not difficult to identify. Violet Brand comments,

Gustav Holst (1874–1934) is always worth visiting and revisiting. The musical experiences of his lifetime extended from the omnipresent parlor soirées and spa concerts of the Victorian era to the electronic recording, radio broadcasting, and sound motion pictures of the Great Depression. As a composer, Holst followed his own path. His compositional technique developed over the course of more than forty years during a time that witnessed traditional Romanticism being challenged, and sometimes overtaken, by a variety of twentieth-century “isms,” including Impressionism, Expressionism and Neoclassicism. Yet, Holst didn't particularly favor any one of these styles; he was an original. Whereas his earliest works were composed in the expected Romantic vein, over time his lifestyle and his music took on the influence of such diverse entities as the poetry of Walt Whitman, Sanskrit literature, English folk tunes, North African music, Greek mythology, and of course, astrology. When he adopted twentieth-century techniques, such as polytonality and mixed meters, he did so not to call attention to the fact that he was using them but simply for supportive purposes.

The present volume, while focusing on Holst's wind works, is holistic. The narrative takes into account the continuum and trajectory of the composer's life and works.

Holst's body of works can generally be divided into either three or four periods of creativity. His wind works appear in all of them. The self-contained first period, lasting until about 1905, would include all of his student compositions and those works composed shortly thereafter, when Holst was under the spell of the German romantic Richard Wagner. The early works for chamber winds were written during this period. The second period, lasting until about 1913, displays a more linear approach, embracement of the ancient modes, and includes works that either make use of folk tunes directly or display his ability to create folklike melodies. The military band suites fall into line here.

Chapter 3 has sketched out Dorothea von Kurland's precarious personal and political life in the Duchy of Courland. In 1790, Peter von Biron tasked her with petitioning the court of Poland on behalf of Courland, nominally a vassal state of Poland but under threat from Russia. As Poland itself suffered internal conflicts, any settlement or alliance between Courland and Poland remained inconsequential. As a result of the Third Polish Partition in 1795, the Duchy of Courland fell to Russia. During these difficult times, Dorothea and her husband became increasingly estranged and the correspondence between the couple indicates a growing discord about the education and upbringing of their children. After Duke Peter abdicated in 1795, he left for the Duchy of Sagan (Żagań) in Silesia – a fief that he purchased in 1786.

In 1794, Johann Friedrich von Medem (1763–1838), Dorothea von Kurland's brother, bought the estates of Löbichau and Tannenfeld in the Duchy of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg for his sister, and transferred the property of Löbichau to her in 1796. The estate of Tannenfeld was let to Dorothea's then lover, Aleksander Benedykt Batowski (1760–1841), the Polish royal commissioner to the Duchy of Courland. As the manor house at Löbichau was partially destroyed by fire in 1766, von Kurland used the opportunity to rebuild and extend the house between 1798–1800 under the direction of the classical master builder and professor of architecture of Leipzig, Carl August Benjamin Siegel (1757–1832), financed by extensive loans in 1798 and 1800 which von Kurland had to take on. The gardens were designed in the contemporary fashion of English gardens with a small Comodienhaus amidst them.4 Kurland's general agent was Georg Gottlieb Leberecht von Hardenberg (1732–1822), the poet Novalis's uncle.

This chapter considers the reception of a text called the Tereoperica in the Old English medical corpus. The most substantial evidence for the reception of this text is a partial translation of it into the late Old English Peri didaxeon. The Peri didaxeon is significantly later than the other Old English medical texts discussed in Chapter 1, and most likely dates to the twelfth century. The text is also an outlier insofar as the earliest extant Latin witness of the text in England pre-dates the translation of the Peri didaxeon: London, BL, Sloane MS 2839 preserves the text known as the Tereoperica and most likely reached England before the Tereoperica was translated into English as the Peri didaxeon. This is the opposite trend we have observed in the preceding chapters of this book. The contention of this chapter is that, although the Tereoperica did not reach England until relatively late, probably the eleventh century, it nevertheless did leave a mark on the vernacular record in the form of Peri didaxeon.

Due to an abundance of similarities between the Tereoperica and the older pre-Gariopontean ensemble, the text has been suggested as a possible source for Bald's Leechbook. However, it was established in Chapter 4 that Bald's Leechbook is generally closer to the text of the pre-Gariopontean ensemble than either the so-called Practica Petrocelli Salernitani (i.e. the Tereoperica) or the Passionarius Galieni by Gariopontus of Salerno.

Agenda

Raids are of the essence of Viking activity, using Viking in the restricted sense of a pirate or marauder. In Ireland, such raids targeted churches especially. However, since the remarkable archaeological discoveries at Dublin and other cities and towns, beginning in the 1960s, accounts of the Vikings have cast them chiefly as pioneers of urban settlement in Ireland. A case has also been made for more widespread – including rural – settlement than was previously imagined. A dramatic impact on the economy of Gaelic Ireland has been attributed to increased circulation of silver mediated by Vikings, especially in the tenth century. Early pre-urban Viking bases – for which the term longphort has come to be used by many archaeologists as defining a monument type – have even been seen as having a trading as much as a raiding function. Towns and trade are widely seen as the enduring historical legacy of the Vikings to Ireland.

These assessments doubtless have merit, but it is a commonplace that contemporary preoccupations shape historical perception. Before the second half of the twentieth century, in an Ireland the prevailing ethos of which was nationalist and pious, Vikings were perceived chiefly as pagan assailants of Christian culture and as foreign invaders over whom, however, the Irish achieved a national and Christian triumph at the battle of Clontarf in 1014. Impressive new archaeological evidence and reassessed documentary evidence prompted, from the 1960s, a re-evaluation that is without doubt academically valid.

In 1780, the British Parliament tasked a group of experts with providing a clearer picture of state finances and uncovering malpractice in the fiscal offices. In the fifteen reports they laid before Parliament until 1787, these Commissioners for Examining the Public Accounts (CEPA) shifted the perception of administrative problems from isolated instances of corruption to a recognition of structural inadequacies. Where others had seen only individual offices and customary practices of accounting, the Commissioners defined offices in reference to a ‘system of economy’ that fulfilled the duties of state in order to further the public good. The Commissioners opened up a new perspective on the state by describing a system of offices and procedures that could and should be fundamentally reformed to fulfil the duties of state in a better and, ideally, cheaper way.

When reading the reports, the contrast between the Commissioners’ analysis of administrative issues and earlier sources compels attention. As a consequence, research literature has presented the Commissioners as heralds of modernity who created the principles of modern bureaucracy ex nihilo. A prime example for such an appraisal is John Binney's study of late eighteenth-century British public finance and administration.

For many people, life revolves around responsibility and compassion for their pets. Pets demonstrate an important human-animal relationship that exists across cultural borders. In this chapter, I investigate this relationship in two contemporary Spanish works of literature, Ana María Matute's short story, “Fausto” (1956), from her collection El tiempo, and Carlos Ruiz Zafón's novel, Marina (1999). In both works, the reader experiences a young girl accompanied by a pet cat. As Naama Harel underscores, “nonhuman animal figures in literature have been interpreted first and foremost allegorically, that is, as representing something else” (2020: 3). In these literary works, cats symbolize the sickness and death surrounding the protagonists, two young girls struggling in the post-Spanish Civil War and post-dictatorship era, respectively, in Spain. I have chosen these works as they both contribute to the literary trend focused on the social implications for Spaniards living in the second half of the twentieth century in Spain: a life filled with trauma from the past, political oppression, and economic devastation for many who were not in support of the regime. Indeed, Matute was writing during the dictatorship and Ruiz Zafón in the post-dictatorship era, which means that the latter author's work has not been subjected to the same scrutiny as the former, who wrote under the dictatorship's censorship policies. The authors’ personal experiences and opinions become evident in their respective works: Matute processing the events in real time and Ruiz Zafón as a means to recuperate the past. As Katherine O. Stafford notes, the death of Franco in 1975 allowed for authors to process the war and dictatorship within their works in a new way (2015: 133). Other scholars, such as Salvador Cardús i Ros (2000), Matthew John O’Neill (2011), and Sebastiaan Faber (2018), also reflect on the concepts of memory and trauma within Spanish society and literature, highlighting the trend that persists in the twenty-first century.

Semper ubi sub ubi is an old joke among Latin students that translates as “always where under where,” but is, of course, heard as “always wear underwear.” It is a cute joke and recalls the motherly adage that one should always wear clean underwear in case of an accident. Embedded in such sayings are powerful cultural ideas about protection, modesty, and cleanliness—all of which can be afforded to an individual through the wearing of undergarments.

Undergarments, despite being an often humble and usually hidden piece of apparel, are foundational, both physically and ideologically. Underwear worn by male-presenting figures (referred to as braies or braga in French, Italian, English, and Spanish medieval literature) appears in both secular and sacred images. By focusing on a selection of Northern European illuminations and panel paintings created between 1140 and 1450, I examine the metonymic nature of visual representations of braies: underwear as a stand-in for the body and ideas about the body.

The verism predominant in Northern European images also allows for a close examination of stylistic as well as ideological evolutions of braies as they appear on depictions of male figures. The garment reveals and reinforces ideas of constructed masculinity, male prowess, cleanliness, sanctity, shame, and lack of shame. Braies also serve to emphasize the voyeuristic nature of looking at images: the viewer, gazing at scantily clad men, can encounter didactic lessons on humility, admire the outline of shapely buttocks, or both.

This book is about Beethoven as a visionary space explorer, shaping the boundaries of sonic space and the physical space of the piano keyboard through the artistic use of register. Whilst space and register are generally recognised as salient aspects of musical structure, there have been no systematic approaches for analysing them. Beethoven scholars often mention important aspects of register, individual ‘moments’, structural climaxes, or poetic highpoints, registral links across sections. Yet these fall short of a theory of register as an independent structuring element. This book aims to fill the gap with a theoretical and analytical approach to the topic of space and register, as experienced in Beethoven's piano works. As in so many instances, Beethoven's music offers the possibility of testing theoretical concepts which then turn out to be more generally applicable. It follows that any analytic and theoretical model for analysing space and registral in Beethoven's works may offer a useful basis to develop an approach relevant for the wider corpus.

I have chosen to focus on solo piano works for several reasons; firstly, since Beethoven was a pianist–composer, the piano and its materiality was at the centre of his creative concept. As Charles Rosen has written, ‘It has been noted that when Beethoven struck out on a new path, he began with a piano sonata, then turned to the symphony and consolidated his experiment with the string quartet.’

As it emerged at the end of the eleventh century, the chronicle tradition of Eusebius–Jerome and Sigebert of Gembloux hinged on the meaningful inter¬action between chronographia and political order. The historiographical practice of adding to these chronicles was not a neutral act, exhausting itself in passively supplying monastic, regional or national history to the universal framework devised by Sigebert. My study has questioned such a tenet by taking seriously the ideological discourse of universal history-writing in the tradition of Eusebius–Jerome and Sigebert, and investigating the efforts that twelfth-century Norman chroniclers made in acquiring, revising and distributing their works specifically as continuations of this chronicle tradition. The politics of time underpinning this authoritative tradition functioned within Christian exegetical thinking to legitimise the providential ebb and flow of empires. However, once the imperial character was partly reduced, the ideological bundle connecting chronographia and political order became available to twelfth-century Norman chroniclers who wrote in the political landscape dominated by Henry II. On the one hand, chroniclers like Robert of Torigni, along with the anonymous authors of Ourscamp and Mortemer, approached the chronicle tradition to reconstruct Norman, English and British history as a unitary past for the Angevin dynasty in Normandy and England. On the other, the Savigny chronicler and, more explicitly, John of Salisbury acknowledged the political impact of Robert's and Sigebert's chronicles respectively and devised radical revisions. What all these writers have in common is active engagement with the texts and, thus, with the ideological implications of Eusebius–Jerome's and Sigebert's chronicles. By circulating revised, abridged and interpolated continuations of Eusebius–Jerome and Sigebert, chroniclers acquired and, moreover, propagated political narratives of Salvation history that supported their specific designs.

Q. You not only recreate the music that others have already composed but you also bring to life new music as an improviser, arranger/transcriber, and composer. So, let's talk about those roles. Which one came first?

A. I think that the first was improvising, because when a guitar is put in your hands, you just start doing whatever comes to you. I have been around many composers and have noted that every composition starts out as an improvisation. And then the composer takes an idea and develops it until it becomes a composition. So, I think improvising came to me first, especially when I fell in love with flamenco, in which one has to improvise a lot. I early on noted that the great flamenco artists immensely valued the art of improvisation. When I was a young fellow and before we left Spain, improvising in flamenco was regarded as living proof that the duende (spirit) had descended on you.

Nowadays, flamenco seems much more thought out and rehearsed, less spontaneous. A flamenco piece now seems almost like a composition, though it is not written out because many flamenco guitarists have not been trained to read and write music. But improvisation is still a central component of the art form, no matter how well-thought-out and rehearsed a number may be. But for me, whether one is playing classical or flamenco, there has to be the spontaneous feeling of an improvisation.

Birgit Weyhe is a key figure in contemporary German-language comics and her work has sparked a number of conversations on race and representation in recent years. Her graphic novels include Ich weiß (2008), Im Himmel ist Jahrmarkt (2013), Madgermanes (2016), and German Calendar No December (2019). Dr. Priscilla Layne is a Black professor of German at the University of North Carolina. This following conversation between Weyhe and Layne took place in the Goethe-Institute Montreal on October 6, 2023, as part of the GSA Comics Studies Network's programming at the 47th Annual Conference of the German Studies Association in Montreal, Canada. The hybrid discussion, which was moderated by comics scholar and UBC professor Dr. Biz Nijdam, provides insights into the lives of these two women, their lived experiences, and how they came to work together on a comic about Layne's life as a Black woman living and working in predominantly White spaces. It also sheds light on Weyhe's creative process and issues around race and representation in her comics.

This hybrid public event was cosponsored by the Goethe-Institut Montreal, the German Studies Association's Comics Studies Network, and the UBC Comics Studies Cluster. Weyhe and Nijdam participated on site in Montreal and Layne participated via Zoom from Italy.

Introductory Remarks by Biz Nijdam

Biz Nijdam: In 2018, Birgit Weyhe joined a room of German Comics scholars at a GSA panel on diversity and inclusion in German-language comics to bear witness to a presentation that openly criticized her graphic novel Madgermanes for its representation of Blackness.

In the period before Francisque's next visit to London, information on his family and company is relatively scarce. I have already suggested that Marie Sallé may have come to London via Brussels in 1733, and in 1735 she was still more in need of the support of her extended family, since her Covent Garden season, despite its moments of triumph, had ended prematurely and unhappily. It seems clear therefore that Sallé and Francisque's entire company left London together in June 1735. When Sallé arrived in France, she was clearly unwell: on 15 July Voltaire wrote to Sallé's ardent but frustrated admirer, Nicolas- Claude Thieriot, ‘Vous voilà donc vengé de votre nymphe; elle a perdu sa beauté’ [So, you are avenged; your nymph has lost her beauty].’ Her unhappiness and illness may have led her, or her family, to seek out a companion for her. Emile Dacier was the first to identify this companion as Rebecca Wick, and I have found more details in her naturalization papers in the Archives Nationales. Born in London in 1703, and raised an Anglican, Wick was brought to France at the age of sixteen (for reasons never explained) and placed in an institution known as ‘Les Nouvelles Catholiques’, a religious society devoted to the conversion of non-Catholic women.