Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109) wrote no biblical commentaries. There is something striking about this, given that the majority of his adult life was spent reflecting upon scripture. From his arrival as a young man at the Norman monastery of Bec in 1059 to his death as archbishp of Canterbury fifty years later, Anselm would hardly have encountered scripture at all without being called upon, in one way or another, to gloss it.

Commentary was embedded in Anselm's monastic vocation. Eleventhcentury Bec, a young foundation whose monastic school would make it famous, put a newly-tonsured Anselm immediately to work in its classroom, where oral commentary would have formed the backbone of his teaching. Following the pattern of his older colleague Lanfranc (c.1010–89), the logician ‘whose lofty fame’, Anselm's biographer Eadmer reports, ‘had resounded everywhere and had drawn to him the best clerks from all parts of the world’, Anselm's pedagogical strategy would have matched that of other eleventh- and twelfthcentury monastic educators. To teach was to model commentary. Teachers would offer line-by-line expositions of texts for their students to copy down and imitate, whether glossing a Psalm text to teach elementary Latin, a hymn text or other liturgical text for theological and grammatical training, or one of the standard classical textbooks for training in the trivium, such as Priscian's Institutiones grammaticae, the logical works of Boethius or his commentaries on Cicero's Topica and Aristotle's De interpretatione. Like many other medieval educators before and after him, it was in modelling commentary to his monastic students that Anselm equipped them with the staples of their education, and it was from the lecture notes those students took that written commentaries would usually be expected to issue.

NoViolet Bulawayo's We Need New Names provides insight into the motivations for flight and the precarity surrounding life in the country of origin. The novel is situated at the intersection of motivations for departure and the uncertainty of the conditions to be encountered in the migratory country. While the novel spells out the reasons for departure, it subtly hints at the possibility of dreams unaccomplished. The above lament is double-edged: it articulates both the pain at the sight of people leaving the country and the terrible reality of getting stuck in a foreign land. The lament presents the migrant with a choice that is seemingly a conundrum: the suffering at home or the privations in a foreign land.

Cinta azul

azul y naranja,

con el fleco verde limon

En la cinta azul, azul y naranja,

vaya escrito este nombre:

Rosa Garcia Ascot

Federico Garcia Lorca

Blue ribbon

blue and orange,

with a fringe of lime green.

On the blue ribbon, blue and orange,

let this name be written:

Rosa Garcia Ascot.

Rosa Garcia Ascot (1902–2002), pianist, composer, and only student of Manuel de Falla (1876–1946), could be regarded as both a symbol and touchstone of the great promise of modern Spanish musical-intellectual society before the Spanish Civil War, and of its great losses during and immediately after the Franco regime. Elegant and brilliant, acknowledged muse of the Residencia de Estudiantes, a cultural institution in Madrid founded in 1910 for scientific and artistic exchange, Garcia Ascot was the only female member of the Grupo de los Ocho. She was on the cusp of a promising career in 1930–5, just before the tragedy of the war (1936–9). Among her friends was Garcia Lorca, a founding member of the Generation of ‘27, a parallel group devoted to Spanish poetry and literature at the Residencia.

In early 2017, white supremacist Richard Spencer was publicly punched in the face by an unknown activist. Spencer's supporters decried the act as an attack on freedom of speech, an assault on democracy. Even liberal news outlets, who generally do not favor Spencer and his ilk, produced a slew of articles with titles such as “Is it ok to Punch a Nazi in the Face? Leading Ethicists say: ‘no’” (Newsweek), “When is it ok to Punch a Nazi?” (Haaretz), “Why you shouldn't Punch a Nazi” (Boston Globe), and “Attack on alt-right Leader has Internet asking: is it ok to punch Nazis?” (New York Times). At a time when authoritarian worldviews are becoming more mainstream and de rigueur by the day, the debate on dealing with the so-called “alt-right” and their extreme views may feel tenuous, frustrating, and at times infuriating.

Over fifty years ago, human rights activist and Nazi-hunter Beate Klarsfeld came up with her own way of dealing with Nazis. On November 7, 1968, the then twenty-nine-year-old publicly slapped German chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger to express her outrage about his Nazi past and subsequent rise in post war German politics. She found herself the subject of similar debates: was there not a better way to express her anger, was it necessary to become physically violent? While Klarsfeld's activism encompassed much more than the slap, to critics, even to some sympathizers, her act of anger seemed to nullify all her other accomplishments, such as her archival research, her writing, her speaking engagements and public lectures, and her petitions to parliament.

To celebrate the centenary of the publication of El gaucho Martín Fierro, in 1972, the Argentine writer Victoria Ocampo was asked to pay homage to her relative José Hernández. In “Las mujeres y el Martín Fierro,” the intellectual excuses herself by claiming that her reluctance to participate is due to the way in which women are represented in the poem, and for that reason, she accompanies Hernandez's verses, “Tuve en mi pago en un tiempo / hijos, hacienda y mujer” with the following comment in parentheses: “(The order in which he lists these three possessions indicates their importance)” (Ocampo 2001: 999). In response, Ocampo revisits the verses uttered by Cruz about his partner's infidelity (“Cuando la mula recula, / señal que quiere cosiar …”) to display a masterful lesson in irony: “I feel like a mule, and I recoil from the subject. I cannot pay tribute to someone who deserves it while kicking at the same time. I leave Hernández to you” (1000, emphasis in the original). Many years later, when the Argentine writer Gabriela Cabezón Cámara (b. 1968) is interviewed, she also refers to the absence of female voices in Hernández's work and repeats Ocampo's remark: “Pay attention to the fact that it states: ‘Tuve en mi pago en un tiempo / hijos, hacienda y mujer.’ In that order!” (Viola).

It is no coincidence that the protagonist of the novel Las aventuras de la China Iron (2017) by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara similarly climbs onto the wagon of the Scottish Elizabeth with “menos modales que una mula” (2020: 14) to begin an individual journey, propelled by and intertwined with the animal imaginary of gaucho literature (Hamed 1996: 14; Ludmer 2002: 131), which ends in an alternative sociopolitical community. In this chapter, I examine how in Las aventuras de la China Iron the category of “animal” operates as a matrix that articulates a counter-hegemonic epic, anchored to a plural experience of bodies and desires, to outline a “Nosotros engordado” that harmoniously brings together humans and non-humans (Cabezón Cámara 2020: 176).

Introduction: Follow the Arts

Early in her prose romance, The Unfortunate Florinda, Hester Pulter reveals that she expects her audience to have read – or at least seen – a specific book. Pulter describes Alonso, who is in love with the Florinda of the title, “walking (just like the picture in the frontispiece of Democritus Junior), with his hat over his eyes, as if no object was worthy of his view but his admired Florinda.” As Alice Eardley notes in her 2014 edition of The Unfortunate Florinda, this passage references Robert Burton's 1628 The Anatomy of Melancholy, in which the title page includes an illustration of a man with a large hat pulled over his eyes. Pulter thus assumes her audience is familiar enough with Burton's book that the frontispiece can be a shortcut to a character description. Although Pulter likely did not disperse her writing outside her family circle, this reference to Burton hints at Pulter's attitude toward reading and her readers in particular. Hero Chalmers writes of The Unfortunate Florinda that it “foreground[s] the need for a discerning reader whose ethical capabilities will be honed in the process of questioning their response to the conventions of romance.” In this essay, I explore how Pulter envisions that “discerning reader” through her portrayal of reading and study.

In the mid-nineteenth century matching tombstones were erected by an Irish emigrant family of Youngs in St Patrick's Anglican cemetery, Stafford township Ontario, Canada and in Nantinan graveyard in Co. Limerick, Ireland. Both stones contain a verse from Scripture reflecting the Lutheran origins of the Young family, while the stones also provided the Canadian branch of the family with a sense of place and identity in Ireland. But for those familiar with the landscape, mention of Nantinan, an area of known Palatine settlement, also hints at the origins of the Young family among a group of early eighteenth-century immigrants to Ireland. A narrative has evolved that the Palatines were religious refugees, fleeing persecution by the French on the continent. The word refugee hinges on a 1690 definition of the French word refuge as a ‘place of retreat where someone who is persecuted goes to seek his safety’. The word refugee was used in the eighteenth century to describe people fleeing religious persecution and traditionally was used to describe French Protestants forced to seek asylum in other countries. There is little evidence to support such claims in relation to the Palatines, who arrived in large numbers in London in the spring of 1709. Exceptions to this were Baptists and Anabaptists, originating in Bern in Switzerland, among the Palatines, who were regularly sent to the galleys for failing to recant. Their presence among the Palatines in London is confirmed by mention of a Ritter camp there in 1709. As early as 1705 the Ritter Company put forward a proposal to the Board of Trade in London for the settlement of a group of Anabaptists and landless poor in the New World.

This chapter is concerned with the attempted administrative reforms in Ireland in the wake of the parliamentary union of 1801. By means of the union, Westminster hoped to gain control of the critical situation in Ireland. The Irish Rebellion of 1798 and simultaneous French invasion attempts showed that Britain was vulnerable through its western flank. Moreover, a revolt spreading throughout the Irish troops would pose an existential threat to the entire Empire. The Acts of Union settled the integration of the Irish Peers and Commons into the Parliament of the United Kingdom in London. The acts did not settle the integration of the executive, i.e. of government and administration. In the aftermath of the union, the divergent administrative discourses of Britain and Ireland clashed.

The administrative history of the union is connected to the history of economical reform in Britain through its protagonists. In 1798, Charles Cornwallis went to Ireland as Lord Lieutenant to end the Irish Rebellion and to secure approval for the union in the Irish Parliament. Acting against his economical convictions, Cornwallis pulled all the patrimonial stops and bartered away offices on a grand scale among the Irish Ascendency, the Protestant elite that was the cornerstone of the British dominion over Ireland. The following year, Charles Abbot became Chief Secretary and received a mandate to implement the union by means of sweeping administrative reforms based on the principles of the Finance Committee.

In 1797 and 1798, a parliamentary Finance Committee brought a fresh impetus to the reform discourse. This impetus was not what the Pitt ministry had intended. Against the backdrop of the ongoing wars, the ministry was still trying to keep the lid on economical reform issues. For Pitt, the Finance Committee constituted a small concession to the independents on whose votes he depended. That the Committee started a thorough stocktaking of the administrative reform process in Britain and pressured the government for new reforms resulted from the unexpected agency of Charles Abbot, the Committee's chairman. Abbot was a staunch reformer who was not afraid to provoke resistance.

Under Abbot's leadership, the Finance Committee set itself the task of examining to what extent the recommendations of the Accounts and Fees Commissioners had been implemented. The Finance Committee also updated the recommendations of the earlier reform commissions and adopted their principles. It expanded the approach to administrative reform in two ways. First, it further developed the reform principles, in particular by introducing statistical methods. The large-scale collection of standardised data in tabular form clarified the differences between the departments and opened up new questions. Second, the Finance Committee broadened the scope of the administrative reform principles to include the judiciary. The Finance Committee examined the courts of justice, and also included the judiciary in a broader sense, namely law enforcement and the prison system.

In the twenty-one months between May 1896 and December 1897, there was a tailing-off in advertisements for Hungarian music in the Vienna press.