This chapter is interested in the politics of publication and how it shapes what writers are likely to publish. But the chapter is also interested in the role publishers have in promoting a public culture and establishing a genealogy of writing – in this instance a genealogy of African writing in ways that the Heinemann African Writers series has done. tblished his first novel, Weep Not, Child (1964), under the editorship of the then series editor, Chinua Achebe, and would soon follow it with the publication of The River Between (1965). He was part of that inaugural moment and the consolidation of the African Writers Series, in 1962. Ngugi in his collection of essays, In the Name of the Mother, celebrates Heinemann African Writers series for its role in creating what is truly a ‘Pan-African common literary inheritance’ and for ‘enabling a dialogue among readers and writers from the three main colonial traditions: Portuguese, French and English’, and in addition, enabling dialogue between Africans of the continent and the diaspora.

Elizabeth Harcourt was born Elizabeth Venables-Vernon at Sudbury Hall in Derbyshire in 1746. In 1765 she married George Harcourt, Viscount Nuneham (1736–1809) who, on his father's death in 1777, became the second Earl Harcourt. Following a tour of the Continent in 1766, the couple spent much of their time between Nuneham Park in Oxfordshire and Harcourt House in London. In 1778 George Harcourt commissioned Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown to remodel the grounds and the house at Nuneham, planting trees, creating ‘Brown's Walk’ through woodland and enlarging the kitchen garden. From 1784 until 1817 Harcourt was Lady of the Bedchamber to Queen Charlotte. George Harcourt died in 1809, and the title and estate passed to his brother William. Harcourt herself died in 1826. Over the course of her married life, Harcourt wrote and collated a body of correspondence and documents relating to the management of her and her husband's estates as well as hundreds of manuscript poems. Many of these poems are copied from print or are the original work of members of the Harcourts’ social network but Harcourt herself was the author of over one hundred poems. Her verses take in an array of themes, people, events and genres; Harcourt experimented thoughtfully with form and style. Many of her poems demonstrate the love and affection in which she held her husband and her mother; many more are written to relatives and friends, including two to Elizabeth Montagu.

With the founding of the German Reich came initiatives to establish an annual national holiday and to raise funds for the erection of a suitable national monument. Much of this activity originated in the overlapping spheres of Culture Protestantism and National Liberalism. Already in September 1870 the liberal Bremen pastor Jacob Kradolfer proposed an annual popular festival—what he called a youth festival (Jugendfest)—to be celebrated in conjunction with a church service. Through such a celebration, he hoped, the feeling of national unity engendered by the recent Battle of Sedan might be inculcated in what remained a German society divided by many social differences. Kradolfer chose this day, not, as he stressed, out of a desire to exalt German military power, but rather because he understood the capitulation of the French emperor before the Prussian king on September 2 as “as an act of divine and human justice, as the shining finger of God in world history.” As such, he reasoned, it should be celebrated as a “day of joy over the salvation of our people.”

Kradolfer's proposal came to nothing, but the idea of establishing a festival by means of which to foster a sense of national identity was soon taken up again.

No Corpus Christi play text survives from the town of Beverley, but the extensive civic accounts of the town record an active tradition of such plays from at least 1377 until the early sixteenth century. The records especially concern the role of the civic authorities in governing the plays, but from them it is possible to discover a good deal about a theatrical tradition apparently similar to and contemporary with that of its betterknown neighbour, York. As well as the Governors’ ordinances and central oversight of the guild performances, the records offer evidence of the Banns, the route taken by the pageants, the maintenance of standards of performance by sanctions against individuals and guilds, and even the content of some of the plays.

The Governors of the Play

Governance of the town of Beverley from 1320 was principally determined by the election of twelve ‘Keepers’ whose role in governing the town was instituted by the Magna Carta Communitatis (‘The Great Charter of the Community’) in 1359. Before 1320, the town had been represented by an alderman and two chamberlains, a system that appears to have taken some forty years to reform. The Keepers (custodes) were also known as the Governors (gubernatores) and they were charged with duties of the kind that we might today recognise as those of a town council. Initially, the Magna Carta Communitatis stipulated that tota communitas (‘the whole community’) should name eighteen potential Keepers from whom twelve should be selected to represent the town for three years.

By the 1980s, the practice of appointing special prayers and services for general use in the established churches of England and Scotland had become diffuse, as is explained in volume 3, pp. 687–90. It is straightforward to record special services and prayers for royal events: these are continued below, for the last years of the reign of Elizabeth II and the coronation of Charles III. For more general national and international events, the provision became complex and difficult to define. Church leaders were now more conscious that in practice calls to prayer had meaning only for regular churchgoers, rather than for the nation as a whole. Together with the ease of modern communications, this made them less discriminating than in the past about the type of event for which they issued calls to prayer, with the result that these became much more frequent. Now, too, appeals for prayers were often not accompanied by texts of special services or prayers; and when texts were suggested these commonly consisted of selections from the liturgical resources of Common worship, rather than the provision of new prayers. As these calls to prayer were now rarely reported in national newspapers (and recent records of church leaders are not yet open for research), the evidence is often elusive.

Consequently, for the period from the 1980s to 2014 only a few of these occasions were briefly noted.

INTRODUCTION

Margaret Watson was the last person to be formally accused of witchcraft in Shetland, and one of the last in Scotland as a whole. Her name came up several times in the Shetland presbytery minutes: in 1708, 1724 and 1725. She was first brought before the presbytery at the same time as the Ratter family in 1708 (the previous case edited in the present volume), but her case was not followed up. She was discussed by the presbytery again in 1724 and 1725, accused of cursing and being a deluder of the people.

Watson was a vagabond, living in the neighbouring parishes of Sandness and Walls. She apparently came into conflict with people and cursed them when she was refused lodgings or food. When brought before the presbytery in 1708, she was suspected of witchcraft and deluding the people, and accused of gross and continual cursing. She denied all accusations of witchcraft, and asked how she could be a witch and not know it. However, she admitted that she did curse and would continue to do so if wronged. Her case in 1708 ended with the presbytery asking the heads of the local families about Watson's life, and they all declared that she was a great curser.

In September 1724, the presbytery received a reference from Sandness about Watson. She was mentioned as an ‘alledg’d witch’ whose case should be laid before the civil magistrate (secular criminal court) by George Duncan, the minister of Sandness and Walls. Her case came up again four times at the presbytery in 1725. In March there was a complaint about her from Walls, and in May there were complaints from both Walls and Sandness.

INTRODUCTION

The documents transcribed below comprise the pre-trial interrogations and trial records of four women and one man from the presbytery of Dalkeith, to the south and east of Edinburgh. This area suffered from severe witch-hunts in 1649–50 and in 1661–2. These five witches all received death sentences on the same day, 29 July 1661. They were Janet Daill in the parish of Inveresk, and David Johnstone, Agnes Loch, Janet Lyle and Margaret Ramage, all in the parish of Newton. Early interrogations were carried out at Woolmet and Edmonstone in Newton parish, but after a while the suspects were imprisoned in the tolbooth of Musselburgh, where they were all eventually tried together.

The judges included not only the veteran Alexander Colville, but also George Mackenzie, beginning a legal career that would lead him in 1678 to the post of lord advocate and a role in discouraging witchcraft prosecutions in Scotland. Mackenzie may well have learned his scepticism about harsh legal procedures from these trials. In the witchcraft chapter of his book Laws and Customs of Scotland in Matters Criminal (1678), Mackenzie wrote of having interviewed a condemned witch who told him that she had confessed, not because she was guilty, but because the prosecution had destroyed her reputation and livelihood, so that she wished to be out of the world. Anna Cordey, who has conducted a detailed study of the Dalkeith prosecutions, has argued that this woman was Janet Daill.

The five accused witches in this group formed only a small part of the panic as a whole.

To understand their properties, networks can be compared with those randomly generated from one or more network models. The network models introduced in this chapter, many of which are discussed at greater length later in the book, include the Bernoulli random graph, Erdős–Rényi mixture models, Chung–Lu graphs, small world networks, the configuration model, random geometric graphs, preferential attachment models, exponential random graph models, stochastic blockmodels, latent space models, random intersection graphs, graphon models, models for directed graphs and duplication–divergence models. Some basic properties of the models are considered, such as the distribution of the degree of a randomly chosen vertex and typical values of the clustering coefficient.

Knighted by Charles I in 1640, and active on the king's behalf in the ensuing troubles, Sir Nicholas Crispe (1599–1666) wanted posterity to remember him as ‘a loyal sharer in the sufferings of his late and present majesty’, who ‘first discovered and settled the trade of gold in Africa and built there the castle of Cormantine, by which he lost out of purse above £100,000 above all returns from thence’. Mourners at his funeral in 1666 could read a paper to that effect, and a more permanent version was inscribed on his marble monument at Hammersmith, surmounted by a bust of Charles I. He was confident, Crispe wrote in his will, that ‘my nation, when I am dead, will make compensation or amends to my family for so great a service done to my country at my so great loss, which will be better understood in the future’. There was much more to Crispe than bluster, but he would face eternity as a royalist, a slaver, and an unrewarded benefactor to his nation. His career stands out among the speculators and investors who dominated London's African and Atlantic trade in the age of Charles I.

Concerned for his legacy, and eager for posthumous recognition, Crispe instructed his executors ‘to collect my papers together of my doing and proceeding in that business in Africa, and deliver them to my cousin Andrew Crispe, who at his convenience I desire to draw such a narrative as he and my executors shall think fit to be put in print and published’. Alas, no such history materialized. Cousin Andrew, a fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, failed to deliver, died in 1669, and Crispe's papers disappeared.

A number of methods of estimation are introduced, and are applied in the context of networks. Maximum likelihood estimation is applied to Bernoulli random graphs and to Erdős–Rényi mixture graphs. The EM algorithm, used later in fitting stochastic blockmodels, is also introduced. Both maximum likelihood and the (generalized) method of moments are used in the context of estimating the exponent of power law decay in degree distributions. Bayesian methods are presented, and the choice of prior discussed; they are applied to Erdős–Rényi mixture graphs and to their Poissonized variants. Further general methods introduced include Approximate Bayesian Computation, as well as Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods, for which both the Metropolis–Hastings algorithm and the Gibbs sampler are presented. Some specific models are given special attention. In exponential random graph models, MCMC methods offer an approach, though convergence to equilibrium can be very slow. The estimation of latent space models is discussed both from a frequentist and from a Bayesian point of view. Estimating the underlying dimension of a random geometric graph is also touched upon.

INTRODUCTION

Alexander Drummond was an elderly man, aged eighty-one, living in the parish of Auchterarder in Perthshire. He was a healer with a large number of clients, including gentlemen and even ministers, and had a reputation for having practised healing for about fifty years. He charged money for healing, and was respected for his knowledge. He was transported to Edinburgh for investigation and trial. Numerous clients, in various localities throughout east-central Scotland, were questioned about his practices; the dossier edited here includes some correspondence about how ministers organised this investigation. The full minutes of Drummond's trial do not survive, but there is a list of assize members, and a summons to the assize. He was evidently tried and executed in 1629.

Most of the documents preserved in the dossier are records of this process of pre-trial interrogation. From 28 September 1628 until 8 July 1629, Drummond was questioned about his performance of healing and about his clients. He cured both physical and mental illness, and adults as well as children. He recited two charms that he used for healing, and the scribe carefully wrote down the words, placing the records in a middle position between written and oral. He also knew some words that he would not repeat during interrogation.

Otherwise, the clerk departed from Drummond's own way of describing his practice. The written record stated that he had long been suspected of witchcraft; he was suspected and challenged for sorcery and witchcraft; suspected of unlawful and supernatural healing, and devilish practice, and abusing his majesty's lieges; ‘ane witch and sorcerer’; ‘crymis of sorcerie witchcraft and divilish chearmingis’; ‘curing be diabolical and unlawful meanis’. The depositions are marked ‘Alexander Drummond Warlock’. The word ‘witchcraft’ was frequently used by the interrogators to describe how an unexpected illness came to afflict a person.