After the arrival of the Spanish conquistadors in the Americas, the spiritual beliefs of pre-Columbian civilizations and European communities blended together in a melting pot of new practices that still form part of Latin American culture today. This process of syncretism or cultural fusion led to the formation of a unique pantheon of supernatural entities from both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, which enchanted the imagination of the populations of colonial America. Although “the Spanish policy of conversion to Christianity,” as Pedro Carrasco states, attempted to “extirpate the pre-Hispanic religion” from the minds of the original populations through the systematic destruction of temples and statues, or the persecution of cults and practitioners who continued to venerate and perform ancestral rituals contrary to Catholic precepts, many of these ceremonies and practices survived clandestinely, in the shadow of the Catholic Church and its inquisitorial process (1975: 198). Thus, a complex symbiosis of pre-Columbian and European rituals arose, “a double religious system” where familial and intimate rites of Indigenous communities dialogued with the public ceremonies of Catholicism, where ancient goddesses and gods representing elemental forces of nature had to be disguised under the image of Catholic saints on occasion (199–200).

It was during this process of colonization that Mesoamerican entities, such as nahuals and other tonal animals, were displaced from the cultural imaginary. Nahuals are witches or supernatural beings from Mesoamerican folklore whose main attribute is the ability to transform into an animal or change form at will. The etymology of this Nahuatl word – as scholars of pre-Columbian Mexico, such as Alfredo López Austin or Alfonso Villa Rojas, claim – attests to this unique quality: the one who hides, the one who disguises himself.

INTRODUCTION

The document edited below relates to the trials of twelve accused witches in 1659, part of a wider panic in the Alloa area. It belongs with a much larger group of documents that were published in the companion volume to this one, Scottish Witchcraft Trials. It was omitted from that volume because the National Records of Scotland regarded the manuscript as in a fragile state, ‘unfit for production’, and the editors were unable to consult it. However, the NRS have since conserved it and made it available. The edition below should thus be read alongside the other documents about this case in the companion volume.

The context for these trials was a local panic over witchcraft that arose in Alloa, near Stirling, in May 1658. Numerous witches were accused, and there were four executions in Edinburgh in August 1658. A second phase of the panic began shortly afterwards, and drew in further suspects from the town of Stirling and from the parish of Kippen to the west of the town. This second phase led to twelve trials in a circuit court in Stirling in March 1659. The document edited below was written in connection with these trials.

The document is a long roll of paper, endorsed ‘Sterling Dittayes 1659’. A ‘dittay’, or indictment, listed the accused person's alleged crimes. The roll contains complete or fairly complete dittays (in order of appearance) for Bessie Stevenson, Isobel Bennett, Magdalen Blair and Katherine Black, and summary dittays for Elizabeth (Elspeth) Black, Barbara Erskine, Elizabeth Crockett, James Kirk, Isobel Keir, Margaret Gourlay, Margaret Harvie and Janet Miller.

Nach uns das all––Das innere Team kennt keine Pause (After Us, the Universe––The Inner Team Never Quits, premiere 2017) is the final installment of German Swiss feminist author and playwright Sibylle Berg's wildly energetic and derisive anti-heroine theatrical trilogy, preceded by Es sagt mir nichts, das sogenannte Draußen (The So-Called Outside Means Nothing to Me, premiere 2014) and Und dann kam Mirna (And then came Mirna, premiere 2016). Directed by Sebastian Nubling and choreographed by Tabea Martin, all three plays celebrated their premiere at the Maxim Gorki Theater in Berlin. Broadly, these are plays about three young women––intelligent, independent, and ambitious––who cannot find success in their various endeavors, no matter how much they try. Despite this premise, their failure is for the most part comical rather than tragic (or even melodramatic). In Nach uns das All the protagonists, Lina, Minna, and Gemma, have had enough of this world and its AfD-Trump- Putin-Orban fascist, patriarchal nightmare-turned-reality and decide to join a mission to Mars where they will build a new matriarchal society. In chorus, they scoff: “Auf Wiedersehen Dings, ah, Patriarchat!” (Goodbye to that thing there, um, patriarchy!). But trouble ensues when they must find male partners to join them in order to secure the future of their new civilization on the Red Planet. Was not the very aim of their escape to Mars to live peacefully without men? The play unravels as a drawn-out casting event for new male partners. In the end, these women are once again unsuccessful, and the space shuttle blasts off without them.

Put simply, a universal chronicle is a history of the world, usually beginning with Creation or the Incarnation and continuing up to the most recent time. Described in these terms, a universal chronicle may not sound particularly exciting. It is not exactly a new form of historiography, for it belongs to a tradition reaching back to antiquity. Moreover, it may not be especially useful, since no account of history with such breadth can ever be truly complete or exhaustive. However, chroniclers in twelfth-century Normandy did not see it this way. In a remarkable passage at the end of book III of the Historia Ecclesiastica, the Norman historian Orderic Vitalis did not restrain his enthusiasm for the tradition of chronographia – the term contemporaries often used to describe universal chronicle-writing. Orderic reported having seen the Chronicon of the monk John of Worcester during a visit to the abbey at Worcester in England. In addition, Orderic recalled that, while at Cambrai, Fulbert, abbot of Saint-Sépulcre, showed him a copy of the Chronographia of Sigebert of Gembloux (c. 1030–1112) whom Orderic mistakenly called Englebertus Gemblacensis. Orderic marvelled at the rigour and scale of John's and Sigebert's chronicles. In these works an interested reader could find information ranging from the kings and judges of the Hebrews, to the consuls and emperors of the Romans, up to the deeds of the Germans, the Franks and the English since the first Saxon kings Hengist and Horsa and the first missionaries Augustine and Mellitus. Similarly, the chronicle of Sigebert of Gembloux reported the history of the Goths, Huns, Persians and many other peoples while omitting, however, the deeds of the ‘islanders of the western ocean’ – an evocative periphrasis for the English. Orderic concluded: ‘I am happy to mention these books in this record so that would-be readers may seek the manuscripts out for themselves, for they are the fruits of great learning and are hard to come by. They have been written by men of this age and are not yet widely circulated.’

A limited body of work attributed to the late sixteenth-century Clare poet Domhnall (mac Dáire) Mac Bruaideadha is found in manuscripts dating from the sixteenth century and later. His poems were composed in the classical bardic style for members of the Gaelic and Old English (Anglo-Norman) aristocracy and bear witness to some of the events of the turbulent period during which they were composed. They are addressed to a variety of patrons and often exemplify the type of bardic poetry Edmund Spenser must have had in mind when he wrote that it was a ‘greate pittye to see soe good an ornament abused, to the gracinge of wickednes and vice’. This essay aims to give an account of Domhnall mac Dáire's work, focusing especially on a number of poems that have not yet been published with translations into English.

Clann Bhruaideadha were a prominent learned family located in County Clare, with several branches and landholdings in different parts of the county. Domhnall was the second son of Dáire Mac Bruaideadha, whose chief residence and landholding of some 900 acres was at Knockanalban, south-west of Slieve Callan in west Clare. The patronymic mac Dáire (son of Dáire) is often used with reference to both Domhnall and his better-known older brother, Tadhg, who initiated the voluminous poetic disputation between southern and northern poets known as Iomarbhágh na bhfileadh [The contention of the poets] (c. 1616–24). Tadhg mac Dáire also had a special affinity with Donnchadh Ó Briain, fourth earl of Thomond, composing several poems for him, including a poem of advice beginning Mór a-tá ar theagasg flatha [Much is dependent on the instruction of a prince] and an elegy following the earl's death in 1624. From the brothers’ grand-nephew, Antonius Bruodinus, we know that Domhnall mac Dáire was married to ‘Maria Fitzgerald, daughter of the illustrious knight Master John of Ballynamona, in County Kerry’. Aside from this, little is known of the particulars of his life.

Introduction

Júlia Lopes de Almeida, born Júlia Valentina da Silveira Lopes and known to her admirers as Dona Júlia, was born in Rio de Janeiro on 24 September 1862. In 1902, a journalist from the Gazeta de Notícias (Rio de Janeiro, 1875–1956) wrote of her novel A falência (1901): ‘frankly, we really cannot see anyone at the present time who surpasses her in the genre to which she is most dedicated, except Machado de Assis, the master’. The story of Júlia Lopes de Almeida effectively illustrates the exclusion of women from the Brazilian Academy of Letters (ABL). Although she was considered for the inaugural list in 1896, her name was disregarded due to the ban on including women in the institution. According to Venâncio Filho, Lúcio de Mendonça, who sought national representation for the Academy, advocated for the inclusion of Almeida, as well as other prominent female authors like Narcisa Amália de Oliveira Campos and Francisca Júlia da Silva, the latter proposed as a correspondent. In a series of articles titled ‘Cartas Literárias’, he presented a list of forty names deemed worthy of being founders of the ABL, including Almeida. However, only men were accepted as founders. In another article titled ‘As três Júlias’, published in the newspaper República in 1897, Mendonça lamented the exclusion, highlighting the literary quality of Júlia Lopes de Almeida, Júlia Cortines, and Francisca Júlia, and expressing sadness over the lack of space for female voices in the Academy.

In 1242–43, the monks of Spalding priory recalled how ‘Lucy, countess of Bolingbroke’ had granted them twelve carucates of land in Pinchbeck in pure alms more than a century earlier, together with further properties in Spalding, Weston and Moulton. By the thirteenth century, there was a long tradition of prominent secular female landholders in Lincolnshire and its neighbouring counties. Pauline Stafford's seminal study, The East Midlands in the Early Middle Ages, highlighted the importance of women landowners in this region in the ninth, tenth and eleventh centuries, who successfully laid claim to shares of paternal inheritances, transferred estates to others and acted as valued benefactors of religious houses, especially as widows. There were also strong associations between the East Midlands and royal women before and after the Norman Conquest. Domesday Book recorded how Edward the Confessor's wife, Queen Edith, held land in dower in Lincolnshire in Gayton le Wold, Grantham, Great Ponton, Horncastle, Nettleham, Stamford and Torksey in 1066. Property in Rutland, located immediately to the south of the county, was routinely assigned to Mercian, and later, English queens, including Ælfthryth, Emma, Edith, Matilda of Scotland, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Berengaria of Navarre and Isabella of Angoulême. Local heiresses also came to prominence in the immediate aftermath of the invasions of Cnut of Denmark (1016) and William of Normandy (1066), when incoming Danish and Norman lords married Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Scandinavian women as a means of legitimising their English conquests.

The jaguar (Panthera onca) once roamed the Americas, from the Grand Canyon to Patagonia. It is now a vulnerable species due to overhunting. Because of its widespread habitat and its role as a large, powerful top-feeder, this feline historically occupied a unique cultural place. In many Amerindian and Latin American contexts, from pre-Columbian to contemporary times, the jaguar was revered as a magical, mythical animal. Traditional Indigenous stories in the Amazon often tell of shamans who don jaguar pelts to transform into the animal. Other tales explain how the body, under the semblance of a jaguar, contains a human soul.

Such figurations have also made their way into written, non-Indigenous literary texts, and their representations reveal the presence of Amerindian beliefs regarding this animal as mythical and significant for understanding the connection between humans and nature. In this chapter, I draw on Amerindian approaches to the human/animal divide to read modern and contemporary jaguar-themed texts from Spanish America and Brazil from an ecocritical perspective. I consider pre-Columbian beliefs in tonalli (animal souls) and naguales (companion animals) as notions that illuminate the connections between humans, animals, and destiny in Mesoamerican thought. Akin to tonalismo and nagualismo in the southern hemisphere, the Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro discusses “perspectivism” as an Amazonian notion that unsettles Western definitions of a “fixed” human nature.