The fnal words about Dyngley's perpenditur preface can only be written when other witnesses are found. Although attempts to locate them have so far failed, I am grateful to Livia Visser-Fuchs and Farley P. Katz for directing me to a footnoted citation for the preface as transcribed by James in his 1899 Catalogue. The footnote appears in an article by Arthur Landgraf on textual criticism in the twelfth century. The note is important because Landgraf connected Dyngley's preface to the centuries-long tradition of linking exegetical styles with individual patristic authors. In the Peterhouse preface he noticed words that the canonist Huguccio had used in a section dealing with guidelines for distinguishing corrupt from authentic readings.

In 2025 at a landmark African Union meeting in Nairobi, dubbed ‘the Africa we want’, peace, security and financial independence were tabled as the strategy to secure future development and stability. It came in the wake of a UN Resolution to fund African-led peace efforts, to create a ‘peace infrastructure’. Kenya is a major North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) and major non-NATO (MNNA) US ally, a designation that might partially explain Kenya’s ill-advised interventions in Haiti, a Pan-African symbol of resistance to slavery and colonialism, and the Sudan, an ancient African kingdom now fractured by civil war. Bound by common origins and a shared if imagined destiny, fragmented interests have seen peace and stability remain elusive at both national and Pan-African levels, against the powerful and persistent idea of a united ‘Africa’. Pan-Africanism was always about African peoples, not states. This chapter examines the ways in which a dynamic Pan-Africanism nonetheless provides a crucial political and creative framework within which key aspects of Ngugi’s work take shape, from Kenya as nascent national project, to Ngugi’s concerns with issues of language and identity. Frantz Fanon, whose political theories on decolonisation left an enduring mark on Ngugi and an entire generation of scholars and activists, underscores the power and promise of this legacy.

The three days had passed monotonously. Egon and Franziska avoided each other, and only met at meals and tea-time. In the hours that used to be filled with lively chat, there was now silence, as if the two had nothing to say to each other. Judith paid no attention to this on the first day, but on the second day, she noticed it, and on the third she remarked on it openly, so that Egon and Franziska changed tack again and struck up a conversation that was lively, witty, and seemingly just as before. But no one laughed. The words they exchanged were devoid of all spontaneity.

Early on the fourth day a telegram arrived from Gruz, in which the count announced that he’d arrive, not that morning as planned, but late in the evening.

They passed the piece of paper from hand to hand, with no one commenting. But then Franziska withdrew to her room and when she was upstairs in her room, she gazed into the flames burning cheerfully in the hearth. Hannah emerged from the adjacent room to add another log, but really because she saw that her mistress and friend was troubled and wanted to talk.

“Sit down on the cushion here,” Franziska said after a while. “There; good. And now stay here and tell me something nice, something kind, and something to comfort me. I need it so badly. I’m longing for Vienna, for society and people, and I only wish we were gone from here.”

Writing to Viscount John Scudamore on 7 April 1632, the newswriter John Pory reported ‘a prodigious act, such as I suppose no story can parallel. For when was it ever heard that a governor of a university laid violent hands upon himself? But so it happened’. Another commentator asked rhetorically, ‘Who hearing only that the vice-chancellor of Cambridge had hanged himself… resteth not astonished, or who will not be amazed?’ Networks of gossip and information noted this Cambridge tragedy, and wondered what brought it about. The news spread to London and across England, even reaching Massachusetts, though diarists and correspondents offered different explanations. The Oxford scholar Thomas Crosfield was shocked to hear ‘of Dr Butts his hanging or murdering himself at Cambridge’. The Suffolk cleric John Rous recorded that the vice-chancellor ‘did hang himself… something gave occasion’. The gloomy London artisan Nehemiah Wallington noted Butts's suicide as yet another case of distressed ministers laying ‘violent hands on themselves’. The Dorchester diarist William Whiteway also digested the news by noting that ‘about the same time many in London and thereabouts destroyed themselves… in a very fearful manner’.

Historians too may reflect on this Cambridge suicide, and ponder its background and significance. The episode illuminates the stresses of academic administration, the ambitions of college heads, and the cultural history of the early modern English university, as well as the build-up of pressure that led to a desperate act. Though there was much to be depressed about in 1630s England, particular local experiences lie behind this grim development. The life and death of Henry Butts (1575–1632) displays a ferment of anxieties, offering insight into the social, cultural and psychological history of the age of Charles I.

On Joyce's desk they found two books, a Greek Lexicon and Oliver Gogarty's I follow Saint Patrick. Frau Giedion-Welcker arranged, with Nora's consent, for a death mask of Joyce by the sculptor Paul Speck. A Catholic priest approached Nora and George to offer a religious service, but Nora said, ‘I couldn't do that to him.’

Richard Ellmann's poignant account of the hours immediately following the death of James Joyce on 13 January 1941 softly ingathers the preoccupations of the writer's life: Ireland, Europe, Catholicism, family, friends, enemies – and music. Ellmann records that Monteverdi's ‘Addio terra, addio cielo’ (from L’Orfeo) was sung after the burial speeches were delivered and the ‘fabulous artificer’ was laid to rest. Singleminded, incorrigibly selfish and endemically self-preoccupied as Joyce was throughout his life, his art attests and relies upon a communion of intelligible interest between writer and reader which he privileged in Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses, and which he stubbornly endangered in Finnegans Wake. Notwithstanding this perplexing development, which has entailed a subdued and vastly reduced readership for his last novel, Joyce persisted with music all his working life. As a mode of remembrance, as a source of structural paradigms and – finally – as an unsettling rival to language itself, music exerted a foundational claim on Joyce's imagination. To adapt a Joycean usage, it fretted his soul.

This collection of essays originated from a series of conversations between the editors at Ushaw College, Durham. In 2019, Power was a Holland Fellow researching the Catholic Women's League, and Bush was the archivist of the collection. During these conversations, we noted that notwithstanding the Catholic Church's vibrant history of lay Catholic activity both before and after the Second Vatican Council, and archival material being available, the history of British lay Catholic societies remains largely unwritten. This collection of essays is an attempt to meet that need. It seeks to showcase the scope of existing research and inspire further research into all areas of lay activity in Britain. The fact that this history can be written at all is in no small part due to the greater accessibility of lay society archive collections to researchers, a phenomenon predominantly facilitated by the expanded acquisition policies of various archival repositories. These endeavours have notably focused on rescuing endangered Catholic collections, many of which faced imminent loss. Prominent members of these societies have recognised the pivotal role played by lay societies in the broader context of the twentieth-century Catholic Church. Consequently, they have demonstrated a commendable willingness to entrust their valuable collections to archival repositories, with the stipulation that these resources be made readily available for historical research. Despite these efforts, the proportion of lay society collections in archival repositories remains negligible. Many collections continue to languish in the garages, attics or spare rooms of private houses, posing a genuine risk of neglect or destruction. It is our aspiration, therefore, that the dissemination of this collection of scholarly essays will serve to heighten public awareness regarding the crucial role played by Catholic lay societies and underscore the imperative of preserving these records for the benefit of future generations.

In the introduction to Volume V of the new Oxford History of British and Irish Catholicism, the editor, Alana Harris, describes the twentieth century as ‘a century of the laity’. Such a characterisation calls attention not only to the increased importance of the laity within the Catholic Church itself, but also to the flourishing of lay societies which ‘were established to address pressing moral issues, ameliorate challenging social conditions, and work for the “rechristianisation” of society. Speaking to concerns spanning the “Catholic Family”, politics and economics, working-class unrest, and middle-class movement into the professions’, these organisations demonstrated the increased confidence of the Catholic community in Britain resulting from social mobility and growth brought about by mass immigration from traditionally Catholic countries such as Ireland, Poland and Italy. Further ‘the First World War accelerated public toleration of Catholicism, putting any vestigial suspicions of Catholic disloyalty to rest, and with this heightened sense of being part of the national community came a greater confidence and assertiveness on the part of its leaders’. As early as the turn of the twentieth century,

The chapter collects the information obtained in the earlier chapters about network summary statistics under some of the best-studied models. The statistics considered are the degree distribution, the numbers of vertices of given degree, counts of subgraphs, the structure of neighbourhoods, the numbers of vertices of different types in the giant component and shortest path lengths.

The aim of this article is to call attention to two exceptionally important portrayals of pilgrims at Becket's tomb and shrine, both of them in panels of stained glass. The first, a panel from window nV, one of the Becket miracle windows of Canterbury Cathedral, depicts a crowd of pilgrims behind, alongside, and in front of Becket's tomb in the cathedral's crypt [Fig. 2.1]. Becket was hastily buried in the crypt on 30 December 1170, the day after his murder. Becket's first pilgrims flocked to this tomb in the crypt: it is here where his relics were first revered. In 1174, a fire badly damaged the eastern arm of the cathedral. While it was being rebuilt and filled with stained glass, Becket remained in his tomb in the crypt. The nV panel was executed in the mid-1180s, during this period of rebuilding and reglazing. It was made for one of the ambulatory windows in the grand upper chapel, now known as the Trinity Chapel, which was built to house Becket's shrine. Due to disputes and delays, Becket's translation from the crypt to a shrine in the Trinity Chapel did not occur until 7 July 1220. The tomb in the crypt remained a stopping point for late medieval pilgrims, as we know from donations made to it, but the shrine was the great object of a Canterbury pilgrimage. The hundreds of thousands of medieval pilgrims who visited the Trinity Chapel to see the shrine only needed to look up to see window nV and its panel portraying earlier Becket pilgrims at the crypt tomb.

In Ngugi wa Thiong’os works, Agĩkũyũ cultural history is almost always perceived through its tensions and contestations with the British colonial enterprise. This is unsurprising because Ngugi is a product of these two cultures. In his early works, it is the powerful image of the mother that calls our attention to Ngugi’s rootedness in the Gĩkũyũ cultural foundation. Still, it is his mother, Wanjiku – herself a victim of dislocation that came with the chaos and violence of colonial occupation – who becomes the conduit to Ngugi’s new identity as a Western-educated colonial subject. Wanjiku is to Ngugi what Nyokabi, in Weep Not, Child, is to Njoroge: an adjuvant of assurance and hope during moments of crisis. One of these crises is a demand by modernity for Ngugi to shun the past in which his mother and all she represents reside. The past, however, resists complete erasure because its marginalisation enables the rise of a new and modern order. In wrestling with this crisis, Ngugi’s life of writing has been characterised by an unceasing search for a form that can create new cultural mythos. In this chapter, I argue that Ngugi’s unending search is now manifested in his new translation project.

Previous scholarship has demonstrated that the Fuller Brooch, one of the most intriguing possessions of the British Museum dating from early medieval England, must be considered as one of the objects stemming directly from King Alfred's cultural milieu. As I have argued elsewhere, part of the iconography of the brooch also shows tight connections with King Charles the Bald's court and cultural circle, and is therefore very revealing of the intense ongoing cultural exchanges between England and the Continent in the ninth century. The brooch testifies to cultural links, influences and appropriation. This essay intends to explore and discuss one further aspect of this appropriation process: the possibility that the iconography of the inluminatio, of ultimately Continental origin, was used, on the brooch, to create a visual kenning, that is a material counterpart, on an art object, of the poetic compounds so typical of Germanic verse.

The Figurative Meaning of Sight in the Fuller Brooch

The iconography of the Fuller Brooch is part of an ongoing open debate. The brooch, which had originally been found in the possession of a London bric-à-brac dealer, under mysterious circumstances, was at some point declared a fake and retired from the Ashmolean Museum, where it had been exhibited on loan for some time. Eventually, it was recognised as a genuine ninth-century English brooch and acquired from Captain A. W. F. Fuller by the British Museum in 1952.

Land was highly prized by the nobility and gentry of England and was central to their lifestyles and livelihoods. Many noble families reached the heights of power and influence almost solely on the back of their landed resources, which were of great importance and not to be squandered. To be sure, as the above anonymous advice shows, there were many pitfalls that could trip up a premodern investor and purchaser of land. Land could carry with it many encumbrances and defective land title was a major hazard in the land market of the fifteenth century. Nevertheless, K. B. McFarlane, in his study of the investments made by Sir John Fastolf, views such encumbrances as posing insufficient risk to discourage would-be landowners; advantages aplenty, it was inferred, awaited the judicious investor in land. As McFarlane points out, ‘land had for [Fastolf] immaterial attractions…it brought him vexation but prestige, and the sheer joy of ownership’.

As long as the Welch continued under their own Princes […] solemn Assemblies were held once in three years, in whch the […] Bardd cadeirjawg, or the inthroned Bard, was elected […] his residence in Court was assign’d him in the houshold of the hereditary Prince, & he had the privilege of sitting at the King (or reigning Prince’s) Table

Thomas Gray, Commonplace Book II (c.1758), ff. 809–11.

The suicidal Snowdonian of Thomas Gray's ‘The Bard’ (1757) remains the most famous Welsh bardic character in eighteenth-century literature. Stood on his rock above ‘Conway's foaming flood’, bereft of one ruler and pursued by another, this bard seems at one with the peripheral mountains he inhabits – an early indication that the idea of bardism was becoming entwined with ‘remote’ landscapes, attractively distant from the centres of British power. Gray was well aware (as the quotation above suggests) of another kind of bardic figure: seated at his ruler's table, honoured at court as an important functionary, and central to the workings of the state. His poem, however, is in many ways a deliberate inversion of this role: Gray's bard is exiled from a courtly setting by the overthrow of his prince, execrates rather than praises the Anglo-Norman ruler at his feet, and seeks to ruin the royal house he addresses.3 This bard is allowed, through prophecy, to praise more recent British monarchs, but (as many commentators have argued) he remains significantly detached from the literary and courtly culture of Gray's own time, unable to hear the ‘distant warblings’ of ‘long futurity’.