On 11 April 1689, the Dutch stadtholder William of Orange and his wife Mary Stuart, James II's daughter, were crowned William III (r. 1689–1702) and Mary II (r. 1689–94) in Westminster Abbey. But this was not the end of the grand drama of England's Glorious Revolution of 1688–9. Within ten days of their coronation, the Parliament of England passed the ‘Oaths of Allegiance and Supremacy Act’, abrogating the old oaths of allegiance to James II and imposing an obligation to swear to the new joint monarchs as a condition for holding civil or ecclesiastical offices. This piece of legislation kindled the fire of the Nonjuring schism, the clerical counterpart of Jacobitism. Believing that their oath of allegiance to James II was valid during his lifetime despite his absence, nine bishops, including Archbishop of Canterbury William Sancroft (1617–93), and some four hundred lower clerics defied the law. The ensuing conflict culminated in the deprivation of their offices on 1 February 1690. Besides failing to subdue these recalcitrant priests, this punishment drove them to declare that ‘the Established Church born of the Revolution of 1689, was as illegitimate as the new political regime’ and to maintain a separate ecclesiastical system. Yet the Nonjuring clergymen, as well as members of their congregations, dealt with their relationship with the post-revolutionary Church of England in diverse ways. Some continued to attend services at local or regional churches. Others broke communion with the Williamite Church and worshipped in private chapels.

The ‘revolution’ that transformed the Department of English at the University of Nairobi was sparked by a short paper by three African staff members, among them Ngugi wa Thiong’o. They argued for its replacement by a Department of Literature centring works by Africans in the first year and proceeding in the next two years through concentric circles of world literature; ‘African literature’, crucially, was construed to include oral tradition. When Ngugi published this document – which was already locally famous – it took on global cultural significance. Makerere was also reconsidering its colonial-era literature syllabus, and the new University of Dar es Salaam was developing a syllabus aligned with the country’s socialist values. All three countries were nation-building in a highly politicised environment that problematised the free expression of ideas advocated by the literature revolutionaries. At Nairobi, a path towards the revolution had been opened by the expatriate department head, and the revolution itself was shepherded by his expatriate successor. Although success seemed inevitable when Ngugi became department chair in 1973, President Jomo Kenyatta and his allies felt threatened by the spread of ideas, and the government’s suppression ultimately drove him into lifelong exile. His call for ‘decolonising’ the African mind still rings out, not yet achieved.

In this chapter, I focus on the Gwayi Forest case in Matebeleland, North Province of Zimbabwe. A forest that has a long history of settlement by local people who were allowed to continue to reside inside to serve as a cheap labour reserve pool for the timber industries that were linked to the rail economy envisioned by Cecil John Rhodes at the beginning of the 20th century (Kwashirai, 2009). While there is also a history of resisting dispossession and some of the tenets of conservation practices during the heart of colonisation in the mid-1950s–1960s (Alexander et al., 2000), this chapter focuses on the conservation practices and struggles of the 1990s to the present that I witnessed and that form part of the lives of local forest populations. This chapter therefore traces the politics that peaked at the height of the pursuit of neo-liberal dictates in forestry conservation in Zimbabwe, for conservation to pay for itself. As already highlighted in chapter 1, the Forestry Commission of Zimbabwe (FC) needs to maximise the commercial potential of Gwayi Forest in a climate of diminished state funding that was ushered in the 1990s with the Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP). This chapter provides material evidence of the complexity of the chronic liminality of populations living inside protected forests, unlike the other two cases in the book. Complex in the sense that while the people won their battles to continue to live in the forest valleys they have farmed for generations, these rights are neither secure nor accompanied by full benefits of access to social services provided to other rural citizens of Zimbabwe. Such services include schools, health facilities, and access to protected water.

According to a famous story published in 1830 in the memoirs of the comte de Montlosier and repeated a year later in a biography of the duc de la Rochefoucauld-Liancourt written by his son, Louis XVI was said to have asked the duke on 12 July 1789 whether the popular insurrection then underway in Paris was a revolt. ‘No, sire’, came the reply, ‘it is a revolution’.1 It is still usual to take the story to be indicative, first, of the categorical difference between a revolt and a revolution; second, of the new meaning imposed by the events of 1789 on earlier concepts of revolution; and third, of Louis XVI’s characteristic failure to keep up, both with conceptual innovations and with events in France. Before the French Revolution, it is said, the concept of revolution meant something circular and referred standardly to a process closer to the literal meaning of a revolution. In this usage, a revolution meant reverting to origins, going back to first principles, reviving something original by, in keeping with the same metaphor, reforming root and branch or, more simply, doing something radical.

VALUES, GOOD AND BAD

It would be hard to argue that the question of value haunts the humanities at the moment; that it has been a source of anxiety for some years; and that those who study literature feel the problem most keenly. On the one hand there is the issue of whether the humanities have any real and widespread value in modern society. On the other, there is the question of whether professional critics and general readers have abandoned the vexed issue of evaluating literature at all. Does it actually matter if we read The Odyssey in the same way as ‘Meet the Kardashians’, or argue that Taylor Swift's songs are as profound as War and Peace? Isn't ‘value’ simply a relative construct that has been appropriated by the Establishment (or even the ‘deep state’) to impose standards on the rest of us?

Possibly. And, of course, anyone who has studied or worked in a literature department in the last fifty years will have heard such arguments rehearsed many times. The problem has become especially acute when not only are humanities student numbers in decline across Europe and North America, but people are reading less literature than they did some years ago from childhood onwards. If any form of writing is as good as a literary classic then it is little wonder that people are not persuaded to read works of literature. For Stanley Fish, writing over thirty years ago, the concomitant problem is that literary criticism compensates by over-reaching itself.

An additional contributing factor to impact the role, status, occupation of, and attitudes toward, women in Irish traditional music was the increased commercialisation of the genre and use of the “Celtic music” label during the 1990s. As discussed, the 1970s was a key period of change as well as a time of increased learning and experimentation in terms of innovation and creativity in the tradition. During this time, Irish traditional music bands such as Planxty, Bothy Band, Dé Danann, and the Chieftains all achieved legendary status, due not just to their musical excellence, but because they emerged during a period of rapid social, cultural, and economic development. By the 1980s, the commercialisation of the Irish traditional music scene reached new heights on account of the growing globalisation of the music industry. Prior to this, for much of the twentieth century, many of the major international record labels seldom recorded local folk musicians – as Taylor recalls: “it was not thought to be economically viable to scour small countries looking for a promising musician who might sell enough recordings in the major markets to justify the expense of production, marketing, and distribution”. However, by the 1980s, non-Western and traditional musicians increasingly became noticed in Western society, with African popular music growing in popularity. In order to categorise this new genre of ethnic non-Western music for the retail market, the category of “World Music” was coined.

The count arrived at Arpa Castle in the late evening, as his telegram had announced; but only the next morning did they all gather to greet each other. The count was jovial and relaxed, and had a wealth of incidents to relate. His fine sense of the comic lent color and life to all his stories.

“And now I’m eager to know,” he continued, “what has happened here in the meantime, here and in the wider world. I haven't had a newspaper in my hands for four days, and don't even know if Gambetta has taken his revenge or not. I suspect not, but I’d be glad to have it confirmed. And this I would like to hear, if possible, from sister Judith. Yes—Judith shall read; after all, she's had the paper in her hand for a quarter of an hour, waiting for me to stop talking. I didn't let her silent criticism interrupt me in mid-speech; all the same, I constantly felt that her impatience and her long face were sucking the marrow out of my account of the sessions at Gruz. So, as a punishment, Judith, read, and start with France. That's always the most interesting. Even their squabbles are full of life.”

He continued to talk and gave the impression that his wish to hear about the wider world was none too pressing. But at length he recollected himself and said, “Well, what have you found? Give us the essentials.”

The Irish Constitution combined with the power of the Catholic Church sought to define Irish women within a patriarchal society, her role within the home as a mother and a wife. Historical symbolic representations of Ireland in addition to legislations and sexist attitudes further enforced this idealised role, deterring and restraining women from actively pursuing a career. These challenges for women in Irish society were likewise reflected in the Irish traditional music scene as “many married women put aside their instruments altogether, unless they taught their children to play”. For the women who continued to play after having children, Slominski refers to these musicians as “tradition bearers”:

mothers like Molly Morrissey (no relation to the piper), Margaret O’Callaghan, and Pearl O’Shaughnessy. Many of these women rarely played outside their homes, but motherhood allowed them to pass on the tradition in time-honoured and politically supported ways. Today their names most often appear in connection with their sons.

While much has changed since twentieth-century Ireland, recent studies have shown that women still face significant challenges when pursuing a career and being a mother. According to a study of 1200 adults in 2021 by Matrix Recruitment (a national recruitment company with offices in Dublin, Waterford, Athlone, Galway and Carlow):

77% of those surveyed this year said they believe motherhood impacts a woman's career progression with 63% of respondents connected it to the assertion that women are still considered primary carers. Over half (57%) said they believe employers have an unconscious bias towards women who may be considering starting a family, suggesting discrimination starts even before a woman becomes a mother.

My sense of intimacy with the legend that was Ngugi came from the strong emotional response I had on first reading his A Grain of Wheat while studying English at the University of Ghana. Reading it gave me a sense of the immense emotional power of his writing. This piece uses A Grain of Wheat as a starting point to think through Ngugi’s work in general, tracing the ways in which it took an increasingly satirical turn from the late 1970s after his exile from his native Kenya. This overview of his work is both celebratory and critical, and I try to speculate on why he was not awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in his lifetime.

The importance of Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain for the development of Arthurian literature is well documented. Geoffrey situates Arthur in the line of legendary British kings extending back to Brutus. He raises Arthur's status from king to emperor with widespread conquests on the continent. He introduces motifs that echo through medieval and later literary history, including the story of Arthur's marvelous birth, the account of the battle with the Giant of Saint Michael's Mount, and the fleshed-out story of Mordred's treachery. He also virtually creates the Merlin figure as we have come to know him. In the course of doing so, Geoffrey constructs: a series of prophecies of Merlin that have inspired works whose plots depend on Merlin's prophetic powers; almanac predictions (a practice parodied by Jonathan Swift in ‘A Famous Prediction of Merlin, the British Wizard, Written Above a Thousand Years Ago and Relating to This Present Year 1709’); and poems in which Merlin predicts some future event, usually the triumphs of a future monarch (as in George Darley's ‘Merlin's Last Prophecy’, in which he foretells the glories of Victoria and the British Empire). Geoffrey also establishes the narrative of Arthurian pre-history, the period preceding Arthur, which includes the Saxon invasions that his uncle Aurelius Ambrosius and his father Uther must resist even before Arthur himself rules.

In the annals of Iberian history, few figures loom as large as Alfonso X of Castile and Leon. Known as ‘el Sabio’ or ‘The Learned’, Alfonso's reign from 1252 to 1284 marked a period of remarkable cultural and intellectual efflorescence. Yet, amongst his numerous contributions to science, law, and literature, it is his ambitious but ultimately unrealised imperial dream that has fascinated scholars for centuries.

Imagine a king, not merely content with his dominion, but yearning to revive the glory of a bygone empire in order to legitimise his rule. Alfonso X's quest for the imperial crown of the Holy Roman Empire, a pursuit filled with political manoeuvring, ecclesiastical intrigue, and cultural innovation, stands as a testament to his visionary, albeit quixotic, ambition. This book delves into the heart of Alfonso's imperial dream, exploring not only the historical and ideological contexts of his ambitions but also how his aspirations for the Holy Roman Empire were intricately woven into the fabric of his cultural projects.

Embark on a journey into the heart of Alfonsine imperial ideology, seeing how it manifested in the cultural efforts of the Learned King. The following pages will contextualise Alfonso and his work, placing him at the centre of this study, and will explain the development and methodology of this research, which has endeavoured to unravel Alfonso X's imperial dream.

The Learned King and his work. The Estoria de Espanna.

The chapter introduces some of the statistics most commonly used to describe networks. These can be seen as analogues, in a network context, of quantities such as mean and standard deviation for a sample of real numbers. They can be roughly divided into two categories: topological summaries, such as the collection of degrees of the vertices of the network, that could be derived from a picture of the network, and spectral summaries, such as the eigenvector centrality, that are derived from the spectral decomposition of the adjacency matrix of the network (or of one or more related matrices). Many of them, such as clustering coefficients, can be formulated as local summaries, computed at each vertex of the network and can then be combined to yield a global value characteristic of the entire network. The results of a number of the summaries are compared with one another, using the Florentine marriage network as an example.

If sexual intercourse itself began—thus Philip Larkin—“in ninety sixty-three … between the end of the ‘Chatterley’ ban and the Beatles’ first LP,” it arguably took another thirty years to reach the field of musicology, when Susan McClary published her Feminine Endings in 1991 and Philip Brett went a-Queering the Pitch three years later. Yet, McClary and Brett were hardly the first to observe the confluence of sex, desire, and music. It would have required a particularly obtuse mindset to ignore the correlation between musical and sexual climax that is implicit in Isolde's Liebestod and made fully explicit by Richard Strauss in the orchestral prelude to Der Rosenkavalier fifty years after. And as McClary, Brett, and their peers among the “New Musicologists” of the early ‘90s readily admitted, they owed many debts to others—most obviously to Sigmund Freud and the psychoanalytical literature of the earlier 20th century, and more recently to Michel Foucault and his Histoire de la sexualité of 1976, which remains to this day a seminal work in the field. Issues of gender in music and musicology had also already been thematized by Eva Rieger in Germany in the early 1980s.

Nor was sex utterly in its infancy in the music faculty of Cambridge when I studied there from 1981 to 1984, though when a serious lecturer announced that the closing lines of a dull madrigal “symbolized orgasm,” eyebrows were raised and little else (“Really?” said our college's director of music afterwards about the piece, “it sounds rather more detumescent to me”).