The clergy of medieval Western Europe got away with murder: both in spiritual terms, through their neglect of the souls of their parishioners, and literally, by using the privilegium beneficii (known more often in England as ‘benefit of clergy’) to escape capital punishment, even when secular courts declared them guilty of a felony. This was, at least, the claim of their contemporaries, and the belief of later historians. Thirteenth-century episcopal and papal legislation (as well as that later and earlier) spoke anxiously of the absence and ignorance of many of the parish clergy who were responsible for guiding their parishioners towards Heaven, and sought ways to remedy these failures. The secular courts knew that they must hand over felonious clergy to the Church courts. They were, equally, certain that in doing so, they allowed many guilty men to be found innocent, by undergoing the simple process of compurgation in which the accused swore to their own innocence, supported by others who testified, on oath, to their good reputation.

However ‘bad’ or ‘good’ the clergy were – the assessment of which depends very much on the values held, and filters applied to them, by their contemporaries and historians – one thing is usually taken for granted: that the ‘clergy’ were regarded as, and thought of themselves as, part of a separate caste from the laity, answerable to ecclesiastical, rather than secular, jurisdiction and that contemporary secular administrations shared this view. There are some exceptions.

In his essay “Photography in Nineteenth-Century Latin America: The European Experience and the Exotic Experience,” Boris Kossoy charts the arrival of photography in Latin America. In it, one can clearly observe that the history of photography is a global story of the advancement of this technology. Within a year of Louis Daguerre's 1839 presentation of the Daguerreotype to the French Academy of Sciences in Paris, Daguerreotypists had already reached the shores of Latin America, and Daguerre's predictions of the tropical sun being better suited for photography were being put to the test (Kossoy 20). However, Kossoy's research underlines that while Europe and the United States have contributed greatly to the global story of photography, the flow of technology is not unidirectional. Kossoy's work on the history of Latin American photography, The Pioneering Photographic Work of Hercule Florence, identifies Hercule Florence (a French immigrant living in Campinas, Brazil) as making a successful independent discovery of photography in the Americas several years before the daguerreotype would arrive there (as well as being the first in the world to use the word photographie in relation to what we now call photography) (Kossoy “Photography in Nineteenth-Century Latin America” 25).

Kossoy notes that Florence founded his ideas on some of the same European studies of light and image that helped lead to Daguerre's and others’ discoveries in Florence's native continent (The Pioneering Photographic Work of Hercule Florence 92–103). As this scholar charts the arrival of photography in Latin America, he clarifies that Europeans from a variety of countries came with the intention of becoming daguerreotypists.

The revolt which erupted in November 1569, rather than a rebellion of the entire north or all of its earls, was a rebellion of the two north-eastern earls without the engagement of the wider Catholic political front. Pushed by the assertive Catholic gentry of North Yorkshire and the Palatinate of Durham, and jumped into premature action by the queen's summoning them to court, the earls of Northumberland and Westmorland took to the feld behind the banner of the Five Wounds of Christ. Tey did so without the support of their already detained southern allies, Arundel and Lumley, or the military backing of the north-western Catholic magnates, Derby, Cumberland, and Dacre. Cumberland made no move, Dacre moved too late, and Derby held back, which both the regime and the rebels acknowledged as decisive. The changing intentions of the English magnates through October 1569 are difcult to track. As Spes put it, ‘afairs here are like the rising and the falling tide, fuctuating from one moment to another. Tis is why I write so diferently in my various letters’.

The fourth-century physician Oribasius is perhaps one of the more colourful personalities associated with late antique medicine. He is said to have hailed from the island of Pergamum before receiving his medical training in Alexandria. His notoriety stems far less from his medical writings than his implication in the apostasy of an ordained Christian deacon by the name of Julian, who was later to become emperor in AD 361 and has been known to posterity as ‘the Apostate’, having renounced Christianity and attempted to restore Imperial pagan observance to the Empire. Sifting for objectivity in his biography is difficult, as details such as his reception of the final utterance of the Delphic oracle seem most likely fictitious, at least according to Baldwin. What is certain is that he and his lifelong friend Julian sought to restore state paganism to its former glory, and, in their relationship of patronage, perhaps hoped to emulate the relationship between Marcus Aurelius and Galen of Pergamum. On Julian's death in 363, Oribasius was exiled, but he was recalled by the Emperor Valens (r. 634–78) some time after 364.

While Oribasius himself was certainly a colourful character, his surviving corpus of work has been somewhat neglected, in no small part due to its turgidity. Reviewing Joseph Raeder's edition of the surviving works of Oribasius for the Corpus medicorum Graecorum in 1934, W. H. S. Jones went so far as to say that he ‘is an author that nobody wishes to read through, though many may want to consult him about some special point’.

Leechbook Fragment (Harley 55)

To better demonstrate the ways in which Old English texts were compiled from multiple sources, a discrete text is presented from London British Library Harley 55, the ‘Leechbook Fragment’, which preserves text closely matching the capitulary entry for Bald's Leechbook ii.59, which is now lost. The Old English text draws from two principal sources: the Liber tertius and the Synopsis of Oribasius, but this is augmented with long digressions from other sources, such as the procedure for administering a radish emetic from Synopsis I, alongside a recipe for oxymel which is possibly adapted from Dioscorides, De materia medica. Where Oribasius offers only the most perfunctory dietetic advice, the Old English text lists those foods with the required qualities, quite possibly relying on Synopsis II for that information. There are further resonances of the Liber Esculapii in other passages, such as the use of aromatic pine resin.

Because it is obvious that the Leechbook was drawn from the New Latin text of Oribasius, that is the text which was chosen. The text is not without its problems, however. What is presented is based on Stuttgart, Wurtembergische Landesbibliothek HB XI 8, fol 201v–202r. While this reading is superior to Molinier's transcript of Laon 424, it is nevertheless quite difficult to make sense of the text as it stands. The presented translation therefore also takes account of the Old Latin reading and the Greek. The surviving portion of Leechbook ii.56 on dysentery then follows, supplemented by its probable sources, illustrating a similar compilation technique from multiple sources.

This short chapter features restorative justice at its peak when the monarch controlled the provinces, and the authority of the emperor ensured that there was but one set of memory-keepers to ensure that those who challenged the state and were defeated were brought to justice according to spelled-out principles. The Zemene Mesafint had shown the faults of “forgive and forget.” Going back to the Bible, restorative justice was revamped in such a way that forgiveness was realigned with the understanding that forgiveness involves both the forgiver, empowered to set the conditions upon which forgiveness is given, and the forgiven who agrees to abide by those conditions to show their contrition. “Conditional forgiveness” increased the chances for durable peace and reconciliation between rival parties because it unequivocally announced the winner and the loser; moreover, it communicated consequences for either living according to the stipulations which could mean lenient revision of the terms, or more punitive terms added if they were abused.

Using the honor and shaming ceremonies of Menilek, before he became emperor, and that of Ras Alula, this chapter gives historical weight to Ethiopian traditions of restorative justice described in detail in Chapter 1. In short, the years 1868, after Emperor Tewodros's death, to 1896 and the Battle of Adwa was the period in which restorative justice worked smoothly. However, the analysis picks up in 1855 where the administration of justice veers to an extreme during the reign of Tewodros II, before settling upon its reasonable middle course.

Introduction

Women pianists were instrumental in transforming China's cultural landscape, establishing a foundation for piano education and performance, and fostering a new era of Western classical music appreciation. Although the first clavichord had arrived in China in 1601, it was not until the first half of the twentieth century that the piano truly developed as a cultural phenomenon, with ‘a Chinese audience for Western music beginning to emerge’. Subsequently, China has experienced significant growth in this industry, with millions of children taking piano lessons, numerous concert halls built, and a thriving market for pianos.2 My perspective as a pianist and scholar with experience in both the West and East allows me to observe and analyse aspects of this ongoing piano sensation.

This chapter examines the careers and performance styles of a cohort of first-generation pianists whose work contributed significantly to the popularisation of the piano in China.

Introduction

The D-version of Guðmundar saga (GBpD) is a very different work from Arngrímr Brandsson's Guðmundardrápa (Gd), although the aims of each of them, to honour Bishop Guðmundr Arason and present his case for sainthood, are congruent. A comparative analysis of the working methods of their author, presumed in each case to be Arngrímr, throws considerable light on what he hoped to achieve by these compositions. In the three previous chapters of the present study I have investigated what are likely to have been Arngrímr's guiding principles of composition of his Guðmundardrápa in the context of both conventional expectations of the skaldic drápa form and of fourteenth-century religious poetry of personal devotion. Here I undertake a short analysis of the authorial ideology and methodology of GBpD and compare it with that of the drápa.

There have been several recent studies of GBpD concerned with the question of the saga's authorship and sources and, in particular, with whether or not this Icelandic life of Guðmundr was a translation of a now-lost Latin Vita that Arngrímr had already composed. It is commonly assumed that some kind of document in Latin in support of Guðmundr's sanctity would have been necessary for the campaigners to present to the papal authorities, because the latter would not have understood a document in Icelandic. Opinion has veered between considering a lost Latin Vita the primary composition and GBpD its translation into Icelandic, and an alternative position in which GBpD is viewed as an independent work, which may have been partly based on one or more documents in Latin, but need not have been a word-for-word translation of them. My own opinion favours the latter possibility for reasons discussed below.

By the turn of the nineteenth century European country traders were well established in the East Indies.

British trade in the Malay Archipelago had increased dramatically during the second half of the eighteenth century as a result of Britain's expanding trade with Canton (now Guangzhou). Tea was the main product purchased by Europeans from the Chinese and, in the case of the British, paid for increasingly by the sale of opium and cotton from British India, together with tin and the ‘exotic’ products of the islands of the East Indies. This trade between England, India and China was dominated by the English East India Company (EIC) within an arena of commercial rivalry with other European nations and Americans, inter-Malay altercations and ‘piracy’. From 1792 until the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, which itself prompted further interest in commercial activities, much of the business was complicated by war with France.

British private or ‘country’ traders, also referred to as free mariners, were quite distinct from EIC employees. Independent, risk-takers and pioneers, they were among the leading seamen who collected and carried the opium, cotton, tin and exotica to Canton under licence from the EIC whose own vessels could not keep up with the demand nor openly carry illegal cargoes of opium. Not all country traders sailed to China; many confined their trade to the archipelago, dealing in Indian rice and textiles, pepper, spices, betelnut, benzoin, dammer, tin and opium. Sometimes a country trader would load a cargo for China onto another ship en route to Canton.

‘Sire,’ fait il, ‘qu’est mere? Et s’on le mangera? Samble oisiel u beste? Nel me celes vous ja.’ ‘Fuis, ains est une fame qu’en ses flans te porta.’

‘Sire,’ the boy asks, ‘what is a mother? Is it something you eat? Like a bird or a beast?’ ‘Son, a mother is a woman who carried you in her womb.’

This scene, from the Old French La Naissance du Chevalier au Cygne (c. 1192), directly asks the question at the heart of this book – what is a mother in medieval romance? The question is asked by a young man who has been raised by a hermit and a doe, isolated from any human society, let alone the civilised environs of the court. The fact that it is asked at all shows that not only did the question concern romance writers and audiences of the period, but that the answer is not obvious. The hermit's answer to his foster son is reductive and fails to address the complexities of motherhood within that very text, let alone within a genre that, embroiled as it is with issues of lineage, dynasty, and human relationships, presents many varied and sometimes unexpected facets of motherhood.

In the summer of 1570, the earl of Derby's younger sons, Sir Tomas and Sir Edward Stanley, together with Sir Tomas Gerard of Bryn, formed a conspiracy to liberate the queen of Scots, assert her claim to both kingdoms, and thereby transform the religious settlement across the British Isles. The signifcance of the conspiracy, and the role it cast for the Stanley afnity, can be understood only by locating it in the major invasion crisis the English government faced in mid-1570, a set of internal and external pressures whose extent and gravity are missed in established narratives of the period, despite the abundant evidence in the state papers. Rather than a minor peripheral disturbance, the conspiracy was central to a crisis both of the English state and the British archipelago.

The Northern Crisis Mutates

The crisis of the north did not end with the cross-border fight of the rebel earls in December 1569. In the new year the English crisis mutated into a crisis of the three British kingdoms, and by the summer of 1570 a full-scale invasion crisis. Unravelling post-rebellion politics requires a pan-British meta-narrative, linking component conficts to the threat of international intervention.The artifcial separation of the calendars of state papers – domestic, domestic addenda, foreign, Spanish, Roman, Scottish, Irish, and Border – hinders an integrated understanding of the 1570 crisis and is perhaps the major reason it has been passed over.

Almost without exception, 1931 had been a disappointing year for Holst. The three great works composed during the previous year either had missed their mark with audiences or were awaiting premiere performances. There were continued anxieties connected with the revisions, rehearsals, and performances of Hammersmith. A Choral Fantasia had received a cold reception from both audiences and critics, and no performance of his chamber opera The Tale of the Wandering Scholar was on the horizon. Holst was also concerned about the release of The Bells, the motion picture for which he had composed incidental music.

Third North American Trip

It is no wonder, then, when offered the position of Horatio Appleton Lamb Foundation lecturer in composition at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, starting in February 1932, Holst enthusiastically accepted. His salary for one semester's work was $3,000, more than the average American family income for an entire year and an especially hefty sum considering that the world was in a deep economic depression. On the heels of this invitation, he also received one from Serge Koussevitzky, music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, to guest-conduct a series of three concerts that January. Koussevitzky, who had been in Boston since 1924, routinely took a two-week break following the holidays, bringing in guest conductors who were often also composers. Among the orchestra's previous guest conductors were Sir Thomas Beecham, Maurice Ravel, and Arthur Honegger.

In 1814 William Young, then living as governor in the West Indian island of Tobago, privately published and circulated to his friends what he called ‘A Few Poems’. These included verses on the happiness that he had enjoyed living as the benevolent patriarch of the community in rural Buckingham¬shire around Hartwell House, a great house which he leased. In 1803, how¬ever, a ‘calamity’ – that is, the threat by the London merchant firm that handled his West Indian business that they were about to cease trading and, as a consequence, would have to sell off his property mortgaged to them at well below its actual value – had forced him to renounce the pleas¬ures of English rural life to live as economically as possible in London and to consider emigrating to the Caribbean, which he was eventually to do as governor of Tobago.

In England William Young had assumed responsibility for ordering the affairs of the poor as a magistrate in the Buckinghamshire parishes in which he lived and for the county and, as a member of parliament, he took a keen interest in the state of the poor throughout the kingdom. In the Caribbean, from his succession to his father's estates in 1788 until he relinquished most of his property to his creditors twenty years later, he claimed ownership of up to 1000 enslaved people in Antigua, St Vincent and Tobago. From 1807 until 1815, as governor of Tobago, he felt that he had a particular responsibility for the poor of the island. ‘During the twenty-three years I sat in the Parliament’, he then wrote, ‘I was much employed in the Service of the Poor’; he pledged himself that he ‘would now do service to the lower class here of whatever colour or condition’. With a very few exceptions, the lower class in Tobago were, of course, enslaved Africans.

Young's views on the management of the English rural poor and on slavery can be reconstructed from a considerable body of writing and reported speeches. As Chapter 1 has shown, he frequently spoke in the House of Commons on rural poverty and published pamphlets on it. Particularly after his visit to his estates in 1791–2, Young spoke about slavery in parliament on numerous occasions and wrote about the enslaved on his own estates in the extracts of the journal of his trip that were published in 1801. As governor of Tobago he reported on the condition of the enslaved in his despatches to London and had collected much material about them which he communicated to the House of Commons in 1811 in a long reply to questions circulated to West Indian governors.