1066: Norman Conquest. Bristol recently a burh, or town, with a mint under Cnut, noted for its trade in enslaved people with Ireland and Norway until the twelfth century.

1140s: St. Augustine's Abbey founded by Robert FitzHarding (later the Berkeley family), supporter of Matilda and Prince Henry (Henry II), and promoter of development of Redcliffe.

1150s: Henry II marries Eleanor of Aquitaine, opening access to French ports, and Bristol's international shipping shifts to wine. Bristol port also launches the English colonisation of Ireland, and Anglo-Irish Dublin's (and then Waterford’s) liberties were modelled on Bristol's (confirmed by first extant charter in 1155).

1183: Bristol Castle moves into royal hands, and active rebuilding continues into Edward I's reign, after which its importance diminishes.

1256: Carmelites establish a friary in Bristol, and prove key in piping fresh water into the city.

1337: Edward III claims French throne, beginning the Hundred Years’ War. Bristol becomes the primary English cloth exporter for the rest of the century. This wealth, together with Bristol's material support for Edward's war, eventually earns Bristol its county charter in 1373.

1346: Battle of Crecy results in major English victory against French forces.

1348-49: The Black Death pauses, but does not stop, Bristol's economic expansion as a port city.

1356: Battle of Poitiers results in major English victory against French forces.

1373: Ending its split between two different jurisdictions, Gloucester and Somerset, Bristol is chartered as a county, the only town other than London to be granted such a franchise.

In England, the Lollards frequently represented priests as illegitimate performers who relied on ‘signs’ to disguise their fleshly and indolent natures. The second of the Lollard ‘Twelve Conclusions’ of 1395 reads:

Oure usuel presthod, the qwich began in Rome, feynid of a power heyere than aungelis, is nout the presthod the qwich Cryst ordeynede to his apostlis. This conclusion is prouid for the presthod of Rome is mad with signis, rytis and bisschopis blissingis, and that is of litil uertu, nowhere ensample[d] in holi scripture.

Some Lollards also condemned the rituals of the church, including the sacrament of the altar, as ‘feigned miracles’, the ‘practice of necromancy’, and ‘idolatry’.

For the Lollards, the church was entirely too much tied up with theatre and in fact depended upon the very same mechanisms as did theatre to beguile the populace. In his antifraternal polemic, De novis ordinibus, Wyclif contrasts a ‘summer game’ (ludum estivum) played by laypeople, with the ‘game’ (ludum) of the religious, arguing that the latter is more harmful because it is closer to the mockery of God. In other words, the laity's summer game will be understood as just that, as a game, whereas the games of the religious also deploy ‘signs’ (signa ypocritica) and illusion, but they claim to contain authentic spiritual value. Wyclif proceeds to cite the example of John the Baptist, who wore nothing but a leather girdle and coat of camel hair while he baptised and preached the word of God, in order to accentuate the hypocritical apparatus of the friars – namely, their habits and their rules – which had no scriptural authority but made claims to containing sacred meaning.

INTRODUCTION

Barbara Napier was one of the high-profile witches accused during the so-called ‘North Berwick’ witchcraft panic of 1590–2. She was married to an Edinburgh burgess, Archibald Douglas. Both Napier and Douglas were related to aristocratic families. Napier had been a lady in waiting to Jean Lyon, countess of Angus, whose name came up from time to time during the proceedings. Her prosecution arose from the confessions of Agnes Sampson and Richard Graham, two accused witches with whom Napier had had various dealings. The text below consists of the minutes of her trial, held on 8 May 1591.

Napier's trial caused a legal sensation when the assize acquitted her of witchcraft, but convicted her of consulting with witches. The badly-drafted witchcraft act of 1563 declared that both witchcraft and consulting witches were capital offences, but the clause on consulting witches had not been implemented in any trials before this date. The judge, Humphrey Blindseil, hesitated to pass sentence on Napier – quite possibly he intended to free her – and the pyre that had been built for her in advance was dismantled.3 However, King James intervened on 10 May, ordering the judge to sentence Napier to death for the crime of consulting with witches; clearly he did not share the legal consensus that this should not be a capital crime. Blindseil duly pronounced the sentence, only for Napier to claim that she was pregnant and to demand a delay.

James may have begun to realise at this point that he was not going to get Napier executed. He took another unusual initiative, ordering twelve of the fifteen members of her assize to be prosecuted for ‘wilful error’ – the crime of wrongfully acquitting an obviously guilty person.

A number of methods for finding communities in networks are introduced, and their performance on two benchmark networks is compared. The chapter begins with methods of comparing classifications and for assessing the quality of a classification. Then, a number of classification algorithms that use modularity as a measure of quality are presented. An alternative approach is to fit a stochastic blockmodel to a network. Methods for doing so include a Bayesian approach based on the Gibbs sampler, and a variational method that makes use of the EM algorithm; estimation of the number of blocks is also considered. Spectral classification methods are described, including those based on the spectral decomposition of the non-backtracking matrix. The performance of the algorithms on two benchmark data sets is encouragingly consistent. The chapter concludes with two methods designed to find overlapping clusters, and with a discussion of the theoretical detectability threshold.

Two nations are in your womb, Two separate peoples shall issue from your body; One people shall be mightier than the other, And the older shall serve the younger.

encounter, v.

• 1. a. transitive. To meet as an adversary; to confront in battle, assail. Sometimes absol. with reciprocal sense. Also figurative. …

• 2. a. transitive. To go counter to, oppose, thwart; to contest, dispute. Also absol. Obsolete. …

• †3. a. transitive. To be placed opposite, or in opposite directions, to (each other). Obsolete. …

• 4. a. To meet, fall in with (a person or thing), esp. casually. Sometimes absol. Also figurative. …

• 5. a. To meet with, experience (difficulties, opposition, etc.). Also with notion of 1: To face resolutely. …

The use of biblical material in vernacular French literature of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries is the guiding thread through each of the chapters included in Jewish-Christian Dialogue in Medieval French Literature: Biblical Encounters, where Judaism and Christianity, Christians and Jews, meet each other figuratively, around the treatment and reinvention of their shared sacred texts. That thread weaves through a series of works chosen from a variety of genres, including Grail romances, bestiaries, miracles, and moralized Bibles, verse and prose, narrative and dramatic art, verbal and visual, which I have invited into this encounter so they may dialogue with me and each other.

INTRODUCTION

The document edited below as Source 1, with the contemporary title ‘Names of the Witches 1658’, is a list of names of 113 accused witches connected with the witchcraft panic of 1658–9. It covers eight counties, of which six are in the south-west, and two (Stirlingshire and Perthshire) are in central Scotland. These counties probably represent one of the ‘circuits’ of the regional circuit courts that tried serious crimes in this period. It is printed below alongside two documents edited as Source 2 and Source 3, for Ayrshire alone, listing forty-two almost identical names for that county but giving additional contextual information.

‘Names of the Witches 1658’ does not state what purpose its list is intended to serve, but some physical details may help to elucidate this purpose. The manuscript is a single booklet with sixteen pages, neatly written in three different hands. Once written, the booklet has been folded up very small. The outside leaves are dirty, showing that it has been much used, probably by a messenger or messengers on horseback. Messengers sometimes carried such documents in their riding boots, where dirt could enter.

The three different hands often relate to specific counties or groups of counties. Perhaps different administrators took responsibility for certain areas within the region covered by the court. However, the different hands may also or instead indicate that different parts of the list were written at different times. The first writer may have co-ordinated the document's production; he certainly took a continued interest in it, since he made edits to later parts of the document (as also did the second writer). More study of these hands might well be revealing. The first writer, for instance, was also the clerk who minuted the circuit court trials of March 1659, on which more in a moment.

The emperor, as head of the empire, holds the ultimate responsibility for the destinies of its people and the survival of the institution. As suggested in the previous chapter, this theme recurs throughout the Estoria de Espanna, especially in its Roman section. It serves to impart lessons and justifications concerning the succession of the empire, thereby bolstering Alfonso X's claim to the throne of the Holy Roman Empire. Chronicles in general, in their expositive nature, were the perfect space for the construction of complex narratives in which genres and purposes combine. In the case of the Alfonsine Hispanic chronicle, this resulted in a multifaceted text that reinforced the ideological vision crafted by the Castilian-Leonese monarch and his scriptorium in pursuit of the imperial crown. The Estoria de Espanna, aside from constructing and defining the idea of what an empire is, and how it transcends time, was also very detailed when it came to discussing the ways of succeeding to the imperial throne. In this sense, the chronicle justifies the existence of an imperial lineage and reinforces the idea that the emperor should be chosen within said linna. As we have also explored previously, this system of succession showed more complexity and acknowledged that lineage on its own did not provide sufficient legitimisation for imperial succession, and that an emperor was defined and valued by the nature of his actions. By using different emperors as role models and object lessons, the Estoria de Espanna builds a didactic dimension into the chronicle that exploits its moral lessons on the legitimisation of empire, becoming a sort of Speculum – mirror – in which rulers should find themselves reflected.

The case of the Estoria de Espanna is paradigmatic in its use of the didactic genre, in the sense that it consolidated previous traditions, both peninsular and continental, and created a new account of moral history, in which the borders between pedagogy and justification became blurred.

We have become used to the sophistication of Jane Austen and the subtle analysis of landscape that she provided at the end of the eighteenth century. Terms central to this volume – prospect, improvement, landscape – are central also to her novels; but if the term Bluestockings is notable largely for its absence in her work, their influence upon her, and on a generation of writers in the early years of the nineteenth century, was profound. By the 1810s, with so many of Montagu and her circle's letters coming into print for the first time, a Bluestocking aesthetic had become available to readerships far beyond their tight social coterie.

Two things are of note here. One is that the flood of letters appearing after the deaths of Montagu and Carter stand to challenge any lazy assumptions that we might have about ‘nature’ and landscape as the domain of men in the Romantic period. The other – as this volume repeatedly demonstrates – is that Bluestocking authors from across the eighteenth century engaged in, and offered their shared readership, highly sophisticated models of landscape as a mode of self-reflective analysis. That mode – of intense reflection on the natural world – might draw inspiration from the late seventeenth-century sermons of Bishop Tillotson, or from James Hervey's mid-century Reflections, but it was used repeatedly by the Bluestockings with an understanding that landscape has metaphysical expectations, expectations that place their subjects in a dynamic space between the physical and spiritual world. Indeed, we might argue that this mode of analysis was practiced by women in ways far less often seen amongst male letter writers.

Bartolomé de las Casas is alive and well today, if not in body, most certainly in spirit. He wears, as usual among his many students and admirers over the past five hundred years, many hats.

Years ago the U.S. historian Lewis Hanke wrote a pathbreaking study of Las Casas, whom he labeled a pioneer in “social justice.” My own colleague David Lantigua and I, in Bartolomé de las Casas and the Defense of Amerindian Rights, labeled him a political philosopher, canon lawyer, and reformer both within and outside the church.

When approached by the publishers for a book on the “iconic” Las Casas, I wondered “which one?” And I quickly deferred to the dictionary for an official meaning of a word which has become popular among scholars today.

Iconic. What exactly does iconic mean? Our handy dandy Merriam Webster's states that it is of, or relating to, or having the characteristics of an icon, widely recognized and well-established, and/or widely known and acknowledged especially for distinctive excellence. The first definition for an icon is a person or thing widely admired, especially for having great influence or significance in a particular sphere.

Was Bartolomé de las Casas iconic? He fits the bill in virtually all instances of iconic, or, to state it simply, is one of the best recognized of all Spaniards in the conquest of the New World, and, secondarily but no less important, widely admired today for what he did with respect to justice, truth, the Christian faith, and equality of all people, to name just a few areas, in the Spanish conquest. And, to be fair here, he was also reviled as a defender of pagans and such a severe critic of his own Spanish nation as to be a traitor to his country.

Traditionally, investigations of Sir Thomas Malory's adaptation and rewriting of the Arthurian stories he inherited from French and English sources have provided original insights into his Le Morte Darthur. In this chapter I propose to re-examine the literary legacy of Malory's sources in his work, in particular his characterisation of Lancelot and Guenevere. Specifically, I examine his approach to rewriting Arthur's end in the light of historical writing of his day, including the importance granted to ‘fair speech’ and good governance in both highly charged situations in the Morte Darthur, particularly in the last Tale, and the Middle English Brut chronicles. Rather than read fifteenth-century political events into the Morte, I suggest that his writing reflects the political outlook of his generation and, what is more, contributed to the flourishing of English prose at a key juncture in the history of its development.

Malory's Lancelot is usually predominantly considered in terms of his literary legacy as a romance hero, characterised by his impressive chivalric stature and his response to the limitations of courtly love. The literary legacy Guenevere brings to Malory's text, on the other hand, draws on both romance elements from the French tradition and the English chronicle tradition going as far back as Geoffrey of Monmouth. In small but significant ways, Malory presents new facets to Lancelot and Guenevere that enhance their potential to leave a literary legacy as political actors – as opposed to only romance-derived characters, acting in a chivalric world of a golden age in the Morte Darthur.

Reconciling Ton and Rhythmus

In his 1874 doctoral thesis ‘Ueber Sprache und Vortrag’, Rudolph Genee lamented how theories on declamation had come to be exceedingly close to the laws of Tonkunst. By this he did not mean that declamation had erred in adopting the melodic scale, which would have amounted to a late nineteenth-century revamping of Seckendorff's argument. Instead, Genee reminded his readers that the attention should primarily focus on rhythm, the role of which is to provide the ‘foundation for the two forms of expressions of feelings: the linguistic [sprachliche] and the musical’. Genee's claim benefitted from a retrospective view on the state of declamatory theories as they had been unfolding during the nineteenth century. Perceived along a vocalic and melodic continuum, declamation had started to move away by the 1800s from its more holistic eighteenth-century theorisation, which was still perceptible in the ‘rhythmic song and musical declamation’ that Reichardt had evoked to Goethe (Chapter 3, p. 96). Genee deplored such a move: therefore, by reinviting rhythm into the declamatory debate, he marked a decisive return to Goethe's rule and to eighteenth-century concepts that posited the primacy of rhythm as the first element to have appeared in music, prior to melody, and as the common denominator between music and poetry.

Genee's return to rhythm was even more apparent in that nowhere did his thesis mention any of the early nineteenth-century theorists who had dealt with a melodicised approach to declamation: Kerndorffer, frequently quoted in nineteenth-century treatises, is absent, as is Schocher, who had entered progressive oblivion since the first part of the century. The culprit behind this melodic approach to declamation was the separation between melody and rhythm, which Genee viewed as the ‘two fundamental conditions’ (Grundbedingungen) of poetry and music.