Special Sundays became common in the Church of England during the early twentieth century. These are particular Sundays each year on which the sermon and prayers during church services might be directed towards a specific ecclesiastical, moral or social cause, and in most but not all cases a financial collection made to assist the organization or organizations that promoted this cause. These special church collections have often provided a substantial part of the annual income of the sponsoring charitable association or church society. Special Sundays are distinct from the Church of England's annual round of religious festivals and commemorations, given in the calendars of the BCP and the church's later service books. They are not prescribed, but are approved or commended by the archbishops, church assemblies or collectively by the bishops: decisions on whether to observe them in particular dioceses and places of worship are a matter for individual bishops, cathedrals and parishes. Although these occasions came to be known generically as ‘special Sundays’, because most were initially or eventually observed on a Sunday, a number of anniversary appeals were or are observed on weekdays or for a whole week or octave (from one Sunday to the next).

Special Sundays and other church anniversaries differ in two respects from the national anniversary and particular acts of special worship that are the main focus of this edition.

This chapter discusses how quantitative tightening is conducted and the arguments surrounding the pace at which it is undertaken as well as how to gauge when to stop.

On Friday 4 May 1638 Thomas Harrison (1595–1649), rector of the country parish of Crick, Northamptonshire, pushed his way through the crowds at the Court of Common Pleas in Westminster Hall on an urgent but foolhardy mission. He was accompanied by his servant John Bodington and his curate Nathaniel Harrison (both apparently kinsmen), who later explained that they had no idea what was about to happen. Unconcerned by the disputes of property and debt that brought petitioners by the hundred to Westminster, the rector had more consequential matters in mind. Approaching the bench where Justice Sir Richard Hutton was presiding, Harrison was stopped at the bar where officers ‘bade him forebear; if he has anything to move the court in, it must be done by his counsel’. Undeterred, he planted himself before the judge and declared ‘in a rude and uncivil manner … with a loud or high voice [other sources say ‘falsely and ambitiously… furiously, boldly, audaciously, and maliciously… in undue and boisterous manner’], I do accuse Mr. Justice Hutton of High Treason’.

This was sensational, scandalous, and disruptive. It undercut the dignity of the court, violated the solemnity of proceedings, and defamed one of the king's most senior judges. The Court of Common Pleas, like other high courts of law, dealt justice with gravity and decorum, but Harrison's outburst caused confusion.

30 November: 1555–8 (England & Wales)

Mary Tudor, proclaimed queen of England on 19 July 1553, was determined to overturn the break of the English church from Rome made by her father, Henry VIII, and the protestant reformation undertaken during the reign of her half-brother, Edward VI. Her marriage on 25 July 1554 to Philip of Spain, son of the emperor Charles V and titular king of Naples and Sicily, cemented the international alliances needed to consolidate the restoration of relations with the papacy, and on 24 November of that year the queen and king received the papal legate, Reginald, Cardinal Pole. On the 28th, Pole addressed both houses of parliament in the presence of Mary and Philip on the terms of reconciliation; afterwards, the lord chancellor, Stephen Gardiner, bishop of Winchester, on behalf of the queen and king, exhorted the two houses to accept reunion with the Church of Rome and to repeal the laws directed against the papacy and catholicism. On the 29th, the two houses prepared a joint petition expressing repentance for the schism, their renewed submission to papal authority and their readiness to abrogate the offending legislation. After this supplication had been presented to the queen and king and then to Pole at Whitehall on 30 November, St Andrew's day, Pole, by authority of Pope Julius III, with the lords and MPs on their knees, absolved them and the kingdom of their sins of disobedience towards the papacy, and formally announced the reconciliation of England and Wales with the catholic church.

Je ne parle allemand qu’a mes chevaux: ‘I only speak German to my horses.’ This frequently quoted bon mot, attributed to King Frederick II of Prussia, is likely apocryphal, but the fact that the king had poor written and spoken German is well documented: his personal correspondence, notably with his sister Anna Amalia, was in French, and he only read books in that language. Voltaire, one of the King's favourite guests at Sanssouci, famously digressed about the Francophile atmosphere at the Prussian court that allowed him to hear Frederick's siblings, Anna Amalia and Prince Friedrich Heinrich Ludwig, declaiming French theatre ‘without any accent and with much grace. […] I find myself here in France. Only our language is spoken. German is for soldiers and horses; it is only necessary on the road.’

Such anecdotes highlight the disdain the eighteenth-century Germanspeaking cultural elite had for their own language and its literature. A prestigious equivalence equated French with the language of philosophy, literature, and theatre, making it the idiom of the German Hof-Kultur, the courtly culture. And yet, by the 1800s, there would barely be any reason left for the Germans to deride their own language. During the 1770s, the long-awaited re-evaluation of German was finally underway, prepared by the renewed interest for its historical origins that culminated with the works of the philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder, who himself owed much to the Swiss philologist Johann Jakob Bodmer, one of the founding fathers of medieval literary studies through his pioneering exploration of the Minnesang.

It was in this climate, driven by a resistance against French cultural supremacy, that poetic recitation emerged.

Introduction

As a scholar, Fiona Tolhurst was an astonishingly careful and discerning close reader; her attention to detail in a passage under consideration and her explication of said passage – its wording, nuance, inflection, pacing – calls to mind the skill of a surgeon in combination with the perception of a poet. Indeed, she often shared with friends the story about how her entire career as a medievalist began because of a single word in Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia regum Brittanie that caught her attention because she suspected that it was a mistranslation from the Latin. (Spoiler: she was right.) Even more impressive than her rigorous and judicious skills as a close reader, however, is the ability – repeatedly on display in her research – to shift her focus from the carefully specific to the importantly general. In her scholarship, she is able to speak confidently about large swathes of medieval literary tradition with discernment that is precise – never vague – and which insight is also illuminating, revelatory, and original.

For example, in an article from 2004 Tolhurst notes that: ‘Historiographers … tend to assume that judging the historicity of medieval sources is a relatively straightforward process. [Antonia] Gransden, for example, distinguishes between “reliable” and “unreliable” literary sources. However, she identifies a third term – “romance history” – that acknowledges the existence of hybrid texts that perform both literary and historical functions’.

The starting point of this chapter came from a scene in the Bayeux Tapestry which has long troubled the author. The Bayeux Tapestry is an embroidered narrative frieze, believed to date to the 1070s or 1080s, which depicts events, or alleged events, from about 1064 to October 1066. At Scene 14 (Fig. 3.1), Harold, Earl of Wessex, is depicted in vehement conversation with William, Duke of Normandy, at William's palace. Scholarly attention on this scene has chiefly taken the form of speculation about the subject of their conversation. Here we bypass that matter, and indeed the veracity of Harold's journey which is not mentioned in any English source, to consider one simple issue: the plausibility of this international dialogue. We must question if it is possible that Harold, a literate Anglo-Scandinavian, could have conversed face to face with William, a Norman, in the mid-eleventh century. An attempt to answer this question requires consideration of evidence for multilingualism and international communication in the ruling classes of England and Normandy.

Multilingualism in England

In the introduction to her recent discussion of multilingualism in early medieval Britain Lindy Brady asserts that

Early medieval Britain was a multilingual space: a place where multiple languages were in use simultaneously. Britain's various tongues did not merely coexist alongside one another, but also frequently overlapped within the same spheres: religious, intellectual, political, economic, and visually, whether on the pages of manuscripts or inscribed on stone monuments for passers-by to see.

This chapter sets out to ask difficult questions and to explore how the context of writing, for example exile in the USA, overdetermines how a writer like Ngugi engages his craft. Has Ngugi’s audience shifted during his stay in the USA and what kind of publics is he seeking to hail in his fiction, essays and memoirs? Who reads him? Ngugi’s forced exiled in Europe and the USA has complicated Ngugi’s writing and especially his return to English. Deprived of direct contact with his target audience and working outside the institutions of learning in Africa, Ngugi has been forced to repurpose his works for a new audience.

Beginning with Wizard of the Crow, I argue that Ngugi radicalises the original concept of the novel by situating oral performance at the centre of the scribal narrative genre. The consequence is an epic that is at once the globalisation of an African artistic practice through the appropriation and reinvention of the novel tradition, while addressing critical issues around the politics of dictatorship, rumours, exile and globalisation. By exploiting his childhood and youth memory through a trilogy, Ngugi demonstrates aliveness to the cause of total artistic rendition. This is dramatised by the sense in which wider insights into his oeuvre attain sophisticated vent between fact and fiction in the recollection of the tensions between colonial violence and growth. Although The Perfect Nine is a commitment to myth-making and remaking, it doubles as an treatise on the necessity of environmental conservation. Anchored to multi-species justice, it illustrates mythology’s relevance in the present and justifies its amenability to continual reinvention. Taking Globalectics as representative, the chapter reflects on Ngugi’s transition from the discourse of nationalism to dismantling hierarchies in the production, circulation and reception of world literature by writing against linguistic feudalism. Central to the apparent shift is the primacy of context as informed by the dynamics of the twenty-first century.

The introduction seeks to provide bold outlines of Ngugi’s complex contexts and point to how these offer new paths to his fiction. While acknowledging that scant attention has been paid to the context in which Ngugi’s works are produced, we are also seeking to understand how this context has been mediated by Ngugi’s discourse. To do this is to suggest that Ngugi as a writer of praxis also generates his context and enters into dialogue with familial and historical events, intellectual climate and other layers of institutional practices that have helped him disrupt received knowledges and histories. The contexts, far from offering some objective and reified source of knowledge, are an engagement with a society and historical moment in flux and in need of reinterpretation. One aim of this introduction is to displace our notion of context as a reified site of retrieval; another is to see how context offers readers a handle on new and disruptive ways of rereading Ngugi’s texts. I argue that contexts, whether one is thinking of family, mission education or Mau Mau emergency and related colonial experiences, are not muted sites of knowledge, nor are they self-evident sources of meaning and meaning-making, but a seething site of creativity and meaning-making.

In December 1808, Joseph Atkinson published verses in the Cyclopaedian Magazine to mark the season of ‘Private Theatricals’ held in Kilkenny during the previous October. Atkinson duly acknowledged both the participation of Thomas Moore in these theatricals and the nascent fame of Moore's Irish Melodies, the first volume of which had appeared in April that year:

The girls and the boys of Kilkenny have long Tun’d Erin's sweet harp and enraptur’d her song… Then Moore came the lyre of Apollo to string, And give us pure draughts of the Helicon spring; And the banks of the Nore shall long echo the lays That his melodies breathe to record Erin's praise.

Atkinson's poetic vein may have been slight (not to say ephemeral and metrically cumbrous), but the compound of classical and Irish metaphors engaged in these lines to celebrate Moore is striking nevertheless: the ‘sweet harp’ of Erin and the ‘lyre of Apollo’ are in close apposition, and so too (by extension) are the ‘banks of the Nore’ (in Kilkenny) and the slopes and springs of Mount Helicon (in Greece). Although the Melodies had only recently begun to appear (their serial publication would continue until 1834), Moore in these lines is all but the Bard of Erin already, at least to judge by the enthusiastic tone of Atkinson's encomium and the fame it predicts for the songs themselves.