The 1688 Revolution, much like the accession of Elizabeth I, the regicide, the Interregnum, and the Popish Plot, did not halt the Catholic book trade. It did not stop the presence of Catholics in England or erase the appetite of Protestants for Catholic works. There remained a consistent presence of a Catholic book market based in London that serviced the city, the country, and even the continent. While statistically this market might have comprised only a minor part of the greater English book trade, its impact was extensive. ‘Popish books’ represented both a great source of anxiety and a common commodity explored by many Protestants and Catholics. In London, these books were produced through cross-confessional networks of bookmen, often linked to urban-based Catholic patrons, including Catherine of Braganza, which increasingly coalesced around the Lincoln's Inn Fields area. These networks utilised contemporary methods of production, circulation, and obfuscation, and understood the political, literary, and financial realities that shaped the Restoration market. At the same time, they engaged in older, established Catholic systems of survival based around missionaries and recusant communities. Religious bonds merged with associations formed around commercial and social ties. The print trade survived through the combination of these methods and networks and owed much of its success to the involvement, for various reasons, of Protestants. These demonstrably adaptable networks persisted even through moments of intense anti-popery and continued to evolve during James VII/II's short-lived experiment in royally legitimised Catholic print. As a result, these networks manage to capture both elements of the classic Catholic divide between the ‘inward’ needs of a Catholic religious group and its ‘outward’ engagement with a Protestant majority.

Eighteenth-century perspectives on judicial modernity

It is always an interesting exercise to observe how the Enlightenment culture projected its idea of modernity onto European institutions – political, legal and social – of preceding centuries, an idea to which we are still deeply attached. The administration of justice, and thus the governing of violence and conflict, concerns the most fundamental dynamics of communal living, and the Enlightenment was able to grasp the centrality of peace in laying the foundations of legal institutions arising from the dissolution of the ancient world. In the eighteenth-century debate, from France to Scotland, the formation of Roman–barbarian realms, with the consequent emergence of feudal institutions, was generally identified as the birth of Europe, as is well known.

In the XXXth book of the Esprit des lois (The Spirit of Laws), in chapter XIX, when addressing the issue of the Compositions chez les peuples barbares (On Compositions among the Barbarous Nations), Montesquieu provides very precise coordinates useful for conceptually placing peace in the development of European civilisation. Just before, in the XXVIIIth book, the great French philosopher had outlined the main differences between Salic law and the laws of other barbarian peoples regarding compositions (financial settlements), the judicial evidence required (such as duelling), and the point of honour. Now, drawing on Tacitus, Montesquieu reminds us that among the Germans hatred was quenched through a composition, as only two types of criminals were punished with death: traitors (by hanging) and cowards (by drowning).

Este libro quizá se empezó a escribir antes de que tú y yo estuviéramos vivos. Tal vez podría situarse hace 15 000 años, cuando personas cruzaron el estrecho de Bering (Rutherford 2016); cuando los grupos mesoamericanos se enfrentaron en batallas y tuvieron intercambios interoceánicos (Duverger 2008; Borrell 2007) o cuando se realizó la peregrinación de la mítica Aztlán hasta Tenochtitlán, tal como representa la Tira de la peregrinación del códice Boturini (INAH 2014). Este libro quizá se empezó a escribir cuando Malinalli Tenépat —“La Malinche”— jugó un rol fundamental como traductora entre los españoles, nahuas y mayas (Franco 2004); cuando los escritos de sor Juana Inés de la Cruz se publicaron en España y fueron cimiento del intercambio cultural atlanticista de la época colonial (Glantz 1994) o cuando Francisco Xavier Mina y Servando Teresa de Mier se reunieron en Inglaterra y Estados Unidos con el propósito de llevar a cabo acciones en favor de la independencia mexicana (Herrera y Santa Cruz 2011).

There are diverse opinions about when and where cryptography arose. It was an inevitable by-product of writing, originating after the florescence of early recorded languages, whether Mesopotamian cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphs, Minoan tablets transmitting early Greek (Linear B) or Old Germanic runic futhark. Balancing the desire to communicate ideas through written symbols was the countervailing need to restrict them to the need-to-know few.

Probably to most Egyptians, hieroglyphs remained shrouded by veils of secrecy, even though their original purpose was not necessarily to conceal. Thus, funerary inscriptions on the pharaohs’ tombs were commemorative, celebrating nobility who had entered the afterlife. But in 391 ce, when the Christian Roman emperor Theodosius closed Egyptian temples, the need for hieroglyphs abruptly declined, and they ceased to be understood. In 1823 Jean-François Champollion cracked the ‘code’ of the Rosetta Stone, a granite slab recovered by Napoleon's engineers during the Egyptian campaign of 1799 in the western delta. Chiselled into the stele were fragments of a text in three tiers: at the top, hieroglyphs; in the middle, the same rendered in a cursive form known as demotic; and, near the base, the same in Greek letters, key to unlocking the meaning. Now a prized possession of the British Museum, the Stone revived the Western fascination for Egyptology, and spurred cryptanalysts to expose secrets of antiquity.

Naija, the colloquial name for Nigeria, is known for its resilience, relentless drive, creativity, and hustle spirit. This vibrant energy, aptly captured in pidgin ‘Naija no dey carry last’ is undoubtedly a microcosm of the city Lagos. As the former capital of Nigeria, Lagos represents the beating heart of the country. From the yellow rickety Danfos to the aggressive vendors in the bustling streets of Ikoyi or third mainland bridge, and the notorious gridlocked traffic, Lagos encapsulates the complexities of the country's untapped potential. Therefore, it is not surprising that many authors have depicted this resilient city in their works across various literary genres. This focus on Lagos persists even within the Africanfuturist genre, as seen in the works of four notable authors. Within the Africanfuturist genre, Nnedi Okorafor reimagines Lagos in her first novel Lagoon as a space that aliens invade, while Suyi Okungbowa in his novel, David Mogo, Godhunter, situates Lagos as a mystical, fantastical space where Yoruba deities battle for power and control. Like Okorafor, Tade Thompson envisions an alien spaceship, what he calls a ‘biodome,’ invades Nigeria, settling somewhere around Lagos. Also, Wole Talabi, depicts Lagos as a dystopian, post-apocalyptic city in his short story titled ‘The Last Lagosian.’ That these four authors choose Lagos as a setting in their narratives, suggests that the city is an appropriate site for science-fictional engagements. Badagry, Lagos was the first part of Nigeria to become a British colony – also where slave traders did their trade.

The aim of this chapter is to analyse the contributions of the Portuguese Maria Amália Vaz de Carvalho to the Brazilian newspaper O País (Rio de Janeiro, 1884–1934). In order to understand the writer's trajectory, we must reflect on the technical and social transformations that marked the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century. On the other hand, her refined education, her family's social standing, the constant support she received at home, and her marriage to an intellectual are some of the aspects that supported her inclusion in the world of writing, though it should be noted that her work was always reviewed by her peers under the shadow of the clearly expressed gender hierarchies of the time. Her favourite themes can be ascertained from a careful reading of her contributions to the widely circulated Brazilian daily: her conservative stance towards the feminist demands that were gaining strength at the time, but also her role as a cultural mediator, since she introduced and commented on myriad writers, philosophers, legal experts, historians, scientists, and visual artists, be them contemporary or classic figures.

Technical innovations and social changes in the late nineteenth century

Having lived from 1847 to 1921, the writer witnessed the profound transformations that marked the turn of the twentieth century. Her professional career was made possible by technical innovations and the consequent opportunities, starting with railroads and steamships, that not only allowed people to cross continents and oceans in a much shorter time, but also brought a new pace to daily life, due to set routes and predictable schedules, in so far as overcoming long distances was no longer an undertaking shrouded in risk and uncertainty.

In her essay “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” Audre Lorde writes that women have been taught that to be strong, they must suppress the erotic. According to Lorde, this strength is an illusion as it was created in the context of patriarchal models of power. In Lorde's view, the erotic is not “the confused, the trivial, the psychotic, plasticized sensation” found in pornography, but instead “a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings.” Lorde explains that the word erotic is derived from the Greek word eros, “the personification of love in all its aspects—born of chaos, and personifying creative power and harmony.” Lorde understands the erotic as “an assertion of the lifeforce of women; of that creative energy empowered, the knowledge and use of which we are now reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives.”

In his work An Account of the State of England in Anno Domini 1600, which included details of England's economy in 1600, Thomas Wilson wrote that in Norwich, children between the ages of six and ten years earned ￡12,000 sterling annually towards their keep, chiefly by knitting fine jersey stockings. He also stated that “every child being able at or soone after seven yeares to earne 4 shillings a week att that trade, which the marchants uttered [i.e. put for sale] att London; and some tradeing with France and other parts.”

Hand knitting in England was a domestic employment in this period, with no structure or regulatory body, which means no systematic records exist. A wide range of archival records, including household accounts and national and local government documents, shows that knitted jersey stockings were well known in England at this date. Wilson's comments are a very rare thing: information on the work of child textile workers in a specific area of England in 1600, and the markets for their product, complete with numerical data. Although other evidence shows that Wilson's estimate of earnings of four shillings a week for children is far too high, other sources confirm the existence of child knitters in Yarmouth and Norwich and a trade in jersey stockings in the late Tudor period. These include Yarmouth export port books, which detail both the trade in jersey stockings and their traders who can be linked to Norwich, and the 1570 census of the poor in Norwich, which records child knitters.

Since time immemorial riddles have intrigued us, partly for their mirthful manner of connecting incongruous ideas, partly for their arresting way of opening fresh perspectives on our shared human condition. When we think of riddles, we normally recall verbal conundrums from cultures around the globe. But riddles can penetrate non-verbal aspects of our existence as well. Masking messages in music so that they lurk beneath the sonorous surface is an august Western tradition spanning the Middle Ages to the present. Known as musical cryptography, this puzzling pursuit is the subject of this book, construed broadly enough to capture not just musical ciphers and codes but also a curiosity shop of related techniques, which arguably can advance the greater virtue. They entertain and edify, but also bedevil and bewilder, and, when unsolved, perplex and perturb.

To illuminate our question, let us begin with Johann Sebastian Bach. For many the epitome of the Baroque, he applied two methods of enciphering ‘Bach’ into his scores, in effect ‘signing’ them, ‘as in paintings where the partially concealed name of the artist appears’.1 The first involved translating the four letters into pitches (ex. 1.1), so that B, A, C and H mapped onto B-flat, A, C and B-natural (in German musical nomenclature, B=B-flat, while H=B-natural).

Ehu, oh Ehu, my bride

I love you with pride

Adorned by the stones

That line up your thrones

Have my allegiance

Paid to your radiance

Brightening every day

In no staggered way

Oh the waist that shook

When my eyes did look

From the shoulders on

To your face like Zion

How you made me strong

I’ll do you no wrong

My courage, I’ll try!

I will throw Akpai

Kpo…kpo…kpotimgba

Og’ Amamgbala

Is full with viewers

And atamajas

I will throw Akpai

To create you and I

Just me and Ehu

My sweet sweet Ehu

When Akpai is down

And I have the crown

When the gong will sound

Your voice will resound

Dancing with radiance

Your nipples shooting

To me-ward pointing

Bleaching, beckoning

To my reckoning

I shall pick your face

Beholding your grace

Eyeball to eyeline

I shall read the line

The pleasant parting

The most precious thing

Oh your pair of lips

That of longing drips

And a pair of eyes

That all the truth tells

Solemnly piercing

Sweetly tingling

My thin blood has heard

My muscle is hard

Even in this state

I shall know to state

And know to adore

Your priceless glamour

My truly pure one

Till your heart I’ve won

And your price I’ve paid

I shan't have you laid

I shall not shame you

My beloved Ehu

Nor shall I abuse

Nor shall I use

Your innocence to play?

Your waiting delay?

Nor your loving mock?

No no I won't mock!

I won't mock my bride

In my bride I’ll pride

On my Ehugbo

I’ll build my ugbo

In Chapter One, I quoted from a profile published in the New York Times in 1915 shortly after Grainger's American debut. The author concluded that, for an audience member, after a few moments in the presence of Grainger's ‘sweetness and light … you are his – or, to put it another … way, you feel he is yours’. The idea that a performer might belong to their audiences is hardly new, and much recent celebrity studies research has identified the ways in which fans claim ownership over their favourite artists. But throughout the research and interviews I have conducted, it seems that, for Grainger, even long after his death, questions of ownership arise again and again. Legalities and copyright questions aside, who does Grainger, his life and works, ‘belong’ to? Who gets to tell his story, or to say which elements of his life should be discussed, or for what purposes they should be used? These questions have influenced the direction of the works I have considered here, and the ways their creators interacted with Grainger's established life-narrative and the institutions that preserve it.

Questions of ownership over Grainger and his legacy might begin with his physical body. As we have seen, the final version of Grainger's will, signed in 1959, included a clause that directed ‘that my flesh be removed from my bones and the flesh destroyed’ as he bequeathed his ‘skeleton to the University of Melbourne … for preservation and possible display in the Grainger Museum’.

The fairies of Shakespeare's plays are not typical of the fairies of early modern belief. While the fairies in Shakespeare's most famous play, A Midsummer Night's Dream, are portrayed as relatively benign, and ultimately good, the fairies of early modern England were almost universally viewed as evil spirits. The darker opinion of fairies in early modern England is attested to in a variety of sources, including literary, religious, legal, and contemporary works of scholarship. The early modern English material on fairies establishes two things: first, that fairies were considered real, in the sense that they were believed to be real beings who really inhabited the English countryside, and second, that they were pernicious.

In A Discourse Concerning Devils and Spirits, first appearing in print as an appendix to the 1665 edition of Scot's Discovery of Witchcraft, the anonymous author discusses the abodes of fairies and like creatures:

Subordinate unto these of the Air, are the Terrestrial Spirits, which are of several degrees according to the places which they occupy, as Woods, Mountains, Caves, Fens, Mines, Ruins, Desolate Places, and Ancient Buildings, called by the Ancient Heathens after various names, as Nymphs, Satyrs, Lamii, Dryades, Sylvanes, Cobali … And more particularly Faeries …

All of these locales are places that would be found in the countryside, and all are the sorts of ordinary places that English villagers would be familiar with in their area.

Pede Hollist's So the Path Does Not Die is the culmination of the migration process. The novel accomplishes two distinct objectives in this chapter: first, it extends the conversation on the theory of the new hybridity in Americanah in the previous chapter. It uses the hyphenated identity of Dimusu-Celeste, the child born to Cammy and Finaba, to explore this construct. I use Sten Moslund's concept of a globalized society as context to situate this hypothesis.

Second, the novel introduces the concept of constructive liminality as a pathway to navigating dual identities in the migrant's homeland. I posit an aesthetic of liminality to examine returned migrants with dual nationalities trying to make sense of the demands of the in-between space this identity offers them. Liminality as a framework to explore the possibilities to return migration posits that the migration process has not come to an end. Rather, it creates a space where the process for reconciling cultural opposites can be enacted. By its duality, the space allows for an embrace of Indigenous identity while also retaining some indications of Western acculturation as symbolized by the American passport. Constructive liminality posits that this brand of returned migrants occupies a liminal space that is both productive and ambivalent, an opposition with possibilities for a synthesis. Finaba can still embrace her Sierra Leonean identity while also keeping her American passport. Dimusu-Celeste can reclaim her African ancestry while still keeping her Caribbean one. This ability to reconcile seemingly opposing identities creates the context for understanding the benefits that a liminal framework to theorizing return provides.

This book began as a follow-up to a little monograph of fewer than eighty pages, published in 1996 as Viking Raids on Irish Church Settlements in the Ninth Century: a Reconsideration of the Annals. It was originally my intention simply to expand that close, mostly quantitative analysis of Viking raiding to cover the tenth century, up to the era of the battle of Clontarf in 1014, after which church-raiding is of little significance and all but disappears from Irish annalistic records. That is what is presented in the shorter first part of this book, comprising about one-third of the whole. Inasmuch as the book is a follow-up to the essay of 1996, it has been long in the making, its completion delayed by numerous distractions. Not least of these has been the pursuit, over more than twenty years, of shorter pieces of research, several on wholly unrelated topics, but many concerned with Vikings.

Apart from a survey (in French) of the annalistic evidence for the Vikings, these extended beyond Viking raiding of churches to other aspects: political relations between Vikings in Ireland, north Wales, Man and the Scottish Isles; the location of the Viking polity/polities designated Laithlinn/Lochlann, the first of which intervened in Ireland in the mid-ninth century; the terminology used for Vikings in the Irish annals, notably the controversial usages ‘Dark Foreigners’ and ‘Fair Foreigners’; the location and military significance of the crucial battle of Cenn Fúait in 917; the impact of the Vikings on the church of Glendalough; the light shed by the Hiberno-German-Latin Vita Findani on early Viking captive taking in Ireland and on the date of Viking settlement in northern Scotland; the historical significance of the early Viking base at Linn Dúachaill/Annagassan, in the context of Viking strategies in England and Francia in the first half of the ninth century; Viking-Age ships and fleets as reflected in the Irish annals; a review of the military and general historical significance of the famous battle of Clontarf; a further study of Viking captive taking and the relative importance of a slave trade in Ireland and beyond.