When Ernst Lubitsch's Sumurun (released in the US as One Arabian Night) premiered at Berlin's famed Ufa-Palast am Zoo on September 9, 1920, it was one of the hottest tickets in town: one reporter complained that he had become “the most frequently called person in Greater Berlin” because so many people wanted him to get them into the sold-out screening.

Little wonder: Sumurun was the latest film by Ernst Lubitsch, who was already famous at home and abroad, and featured an international cast that included stars in both major and minor roles. The material had proven successful before: the film was based on a Max Reinhardt pantomime, with a story by Friedrich Freksa and music by Viktor Hollander, which premiered in 1910 and enjoyed a multi-year run in Germany, as well as performances in London, Vienna, Paris, and New York. Sumurun is especially interesting as an example of how German culture in the 1920s imagined “the Orient,” which is the setting for the rather elaborate story. Sumurun begins with a group of traveling entertainers— a hunchback (Lubitsch), an old crone (Margarete Kupfer), a young man, a seductive (and unnamed) dancer (Pola Negri), and an enslaved African (Louis Brody)—arriving in Baghdad, where a villainous sheik (Paul Wegener) wields despotic control over the city and his harem.

In light of the criticism that the first seasons of HBO's Game of Thrones received, reacting to the objectification of its female characters and the numerous instances of sexualised violence against women, it seems surprising at first that the later seasons of the same series were celebrated as feminist. Whereas the quantity of nudity and sexualisation would indeed only diminish slightly in the subsequent seasons of Game of Thrones, the female characters evolved from disregarded pawns in the fight for the Iron Throne to some of its main players, leading to celebrations of a perceived feminist agenda on many websites and in critical literature. It is precisely this group of characters that begin ‘to dominate the scene, leading to the point where matriarchs and female claimants, rather than men, fight each other for the control of the Iron Throne’. One example of this development is the young Daenerys Targaryen who, in the show's first season, is married against her will and is thus initially objectified as a political bargaining chip in her brother's plans and as the birth mother of her husband's future heir. Over the course of the series, she becomes a leader who fights for her claim to the Iron Throne. At the end, two women, Daenerys Targaryen and Cersei Lannister, compete as the final season's main contenders for sovereignty over Westeros.

The great majority of the common stock annals up to c.892 were written as simple and ostensibly objective records of important events in either the history of Britain, early Christianity or the English people. These annals vary greatly in length, but they mostly share the same brief style, narrating events in straightforward syntax, with only the rare use of adjectives or adverbs, or the development of any relationship between events in terms of cause and effect. This does not mean that they do not tell a story or stories, though even their wider narrative almost always prioritizes the recording of events over an interrogation of the role of personality, motivation or causation within or across them. Nevertheless, even among the briefest annals the choice to include certain events while ignoring others reflects a range of authorial assumptions about their historical and ideological significance, in such a way that all the entries contribute to the common stock annals’ overarching narrative. Nevertheless, elements of more reflective historical writing are not entirely absent, and occasionally emerge in the few longer annals among the common stock. Many of these variations can be identified with the change of authorship between the first compiler and the revising chronicler described in the preceding chapter.

A consistent trend towards more detailed entries begins with the annal for 825 (A(B)CDE823), though these are generally written in the same terse style as shorter entries.

Brahms's Triumphlied, op. 55, celebrates the great historical turn that occurred in the center of Europe in the years 1870–71. With the decisive German military defeat of France at Sedan and the subsequent proclamation of King William I of Prussia as German Emperor, the German Question was at last given its definitive Prussian-dominated Smaller German solution. What mattered most to Brahms and to the liberal bourgeoisie in general, the social stratum most enthusiastic about the turn, was that Germany, the land of poets and philosophers, had at last emerged from its particularism and political impotence to become a nation-state possessed of power and influence in the world commensurate with its long-recognized achievements in the cultural sphere.

With its at times jubilant, not to say exultant, mode of expression, the Triumphlied seems designed to turn the page on the very idea of German political impotence. The text is taken from the apocalyptic Book of Revelation and given a powerful setting for double chorus, baritone solo, and grand orchestra, the largest array of forces to be found in any work by Brahms. Each of the three relatively short movements features a brief orchestral introduction marked by propulsive dotted rhythms and jumping octaves.

Bestiaries supply knowledge required, in Saint Augustine's view, to read and understand God's word and works. Two metaphorical books, the Book of Beasts and the Book of Nature, correspond to each other and each responds to Holy Scripture. So the first aspect of biblical encounter to explore in this chapter concerns the character of the meeting arranged by a third-century Greek author between animal lore from ancient sources and a large variety of biblical verses. Physiologus, identified only by his role as Naturalist, brings them into relationship in order to explain how knowledge of animals may illuminate Christian understanding of God's word and world. When we pay close attention to the overlap between the Book of Books and the Book of Beasts, we also discover the bestiary as a borderland space where Jews and Christians intersect by virtue of their shared link to the Hebrew Bible, transformed into the Old Testament and read through the typological lens of the New. This second facet of bestiaries as biblical encounter is combative and polarizing, as Jewish-Christian contrasts extend the play of animal-human others and re-stage disputed claims for authority over sacred text and sanctioned gloss. By highlighting the nature of the bestiary's Scriptural connections, with the resulting potential for Christian-Jewish polemics, I will argue for reading bestiaries as a contact zone par excellence for Jewish-Christian interaction, contestatory and exegetical.

The interest in kings and royal power in all the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles is their one enduring and binding theme. At some moment around the middle of the tenth century the rhetorical register of the annals with regard to kings shifted, moving from the selective reporting of their deeds to outright praise. Among the surviving OE versions, Scribe 3 of the A Chronicle is the earliest to make this move with the inclusion of a copy of a poem in praise of King Æthelstan and his brother Edmund as annal 937. It is not known if the poem known as The Battle of Brunanburh was expressly written for inclusion in a Chronicle, though it is evident that later poetic annals were. The employment of verse in the annals continued into the eleventh century, an extended moment when the character of traditional OE verse itself was undergoing a radical transformation and new verse forms, such as those based on rhyme, developed in English. The challenge of defining a boundary between verse and prose in the Chronicle is not always an easy one. In his edition, Plummer formatted seventeen passages as verse, while Elliott van Kirk Dobbie included only six poems from the Chronicle in the Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records, on the criterion that only these have ‘sufficiently regular meter’. This chapter takes a broad view when discussing verse in the Chronicle, though not all those passages read as verse by Plummer are discussed in detail. While formal aspects of some of these passages are a matter of discussion, they are united in the way they establish the genre of OE political poetry.

The mixture of the possible and the actual is particularly applicable to the thought of Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès because much of his political and intellectual life was made up of a sequence of largely unsuccessful attempts to bridge the gap between the two. Sieyès’s intellectual abilities have come to be widely recognised and his thought has been associated with a surprisingly wide variety of earlier political thinkers, from Thomas Hobbes, Baruch Spinoza and James Harrington in the seventeenth century to Montesquieu, Rousseau and Adam Smith in the second half of the eighteenth century. ‘Among the crowd of men of wit and talent who adorned the Constituent Assembly’, wrote one of his recurrent political opponents, Antoine-Joseph Barnave, ‘only two seemed to me able to aspire to the title of a creative mind: the abbé Sieyès and Dupont (de Nemours)’.1 But, notwithstanding this unforced complement and the generally impressive intellectual pedigree associated with his thought, only a very unusual combination of circumstances formed the context that, in 1789, gave Sieyès’s ideas a sudden and almost entirely unexpected prominence.

There is a moment in Book Two of The Faerie Queene when the text mixes up two important names. It's disorientating and we’re not sure who to blame, so we move on. Then there is a more serious challenge about mid-way through the tournament cantos of Book Four (cantos iv and v), when things get simultaneously chaotic and lacklustre and an impatient reader thinks ‘well if you can't be bothered, Spenser, neither can I’. Emboldened and inspired by Catherine Nicholson's brilliant inversion of The Faerie Queene's reception history towards a reading of the poem itself (especially large sections of that history in which readers have complained about reading it or refused to continue doing so), this chapter considers these two moments at greater length. Are they signs of badness? If so, what kind of badness, and where is it located?

The theme of ‘bad poetry’ threatens a collision of aesthetics and morality; it is in part for fear of this collision that value judgments have long been eschewed by those professionally involved with literary interpretation. We may find a middle way in ethics, which could permit a value judgment that is somehow aware of its own prejudices and still of use to other people. This middle way, I argue, can be found by way of accident and necessity, the key terms of this chapter. Accident and necessity sit athwart the question of bad or good; ‘it was an accident’ can work in some circumstances as a defense against moral and/or aesthetic condemnation because they raise but do not answer each other as questions, and this crisscrossing of fields, I will argue, makes a complex ethical awareness possible.

In about 1000 C.E. Norse people planted small colonies at places they called Vinland, Markland and Hop, on the north-east coast of the North American continent. According to the thirteenth-century Icelandic sagas The Saga of Eirik the Red and The Greenlanders’ Saga, and other textual historical evidence, the Norse meant to stay, as they did for a few centuries in Greenland and permanently in Iceland. The settlements were, however, by the saga accounts and evidence from the sole archaeological site discovered to date at L’Anse aux Meadows in Canada, comparatively short-lived. There are, at most, possible traces in the oral histories of First Nations peoples of the north Atlantic coast of North America. Memory of the Norse settlements in North America lasted longer than the colonies but seems to have ‘faded into oblivion in the fourteenth century’ in Iceland and continental Europe.

By the post-medieval period written references in historical documents faded to ‘erratic and even cryptic’ scattered mentions until ‘Vinland fever’ took hold in western nations in the nineteenth century. That fever has never subsided. In twenty-first- century western popular culture, the Vinland colonies loom curiously large.

There are countless novels, films, television shows and video games that feature Norse people in North America. Few, if any, major productions focussed on Vikings fail to feature what is most commonly called ‘Vinland’. The History Channel's seven- season show Vikings (2013–21) makes its colonisation a major narrative arc, while Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed Valhalla (2020) places significant plot development of both the game and the franchise it is part of there.

Every now and then Berlioz let fly with his armoury of denigration and sarcasm, when he felt especially strongly that his subject had shown laziness, incompetence or poor taste.

This Jessonda belongs to the family of the Coras and Amazilys and the rest, who love a handsome stranger, almost always Spanish or Portuguese, whom a cruel priest wants to murder, and who, at the moment of climbing the stake or lowering themselves alive into the tomb, are rescued by their faithful lover. Jessonda has in addition a sister, whose charms have inspired a culpable passion in a young Brahmin; and he, moved by the prayers of the girl he loves, joins forces with the Portuguese and gives them the wherewithal to save Jessonda from the stake. Add some dancing girls who pretend to dance, some soldiers and priests who pretend to sing, and you’ll have a reasonably good idea of the interest and details of this drama, in which we find echoes of Fernand Cortez, Le Sacrifice interrompu, and Die Zauberflöte.

The score of Jessonda enjoys a certain reputation in Germany, but it's far from being Spohr's best work. On the whole, the Paris audience found it dull, lacking in character, short on excitement, contrast, and variety, short on ideas that are fresh, grandiose, or out of the ordinary, short on what ultimately gives life to music, especially to musical drama. The structure of scenes here often seems indecisive and truncated; we don't know when they start or when they stop; voices are frequently overpowered by the orchestra, and we especially find, to an irritating degree, the fault (with which Spohr has so often been taxed) of piling up disparate harmonies in the shortest space possible, in such a way as sometimes to place four or five different harmonies under a single note of the melody.

INTRODUCTION

Anna Wood's case arose in the small seaport town of Carriden. It involved elaborate fantasy, and fears of witches aboard ships.

Wood's initial accuser was a young seaman, Robert Nimmo. He reported a terrifying hallucinatory experience: he was coming home one night when he was followed by uncanny cats that threatened to kill him, carried him into the air, and then changed into birds and finally into women – one of whom was Wood. He feared her because, two years before, he had refused to carry out a ‘commission’ for her ‘to Holland’ – presumably to buy or sell some goods for her there – whereupon she had threatened him.

Once he had the session's attention, Nimmo added to his story, telling of further detailed visions of Wood, including one aboard his ship that may have arisen from an episode of sleep paralysis. This vision was seconded by another seaman, James Linlithgow. The session ‘admonished’ Linlithgow ‘to take heed quhat he said’, although they do not seem to have said this to Robert Nimmo. Perhaps they suspected that Nimmo was deluded, but that Linlithgow was backing him up with deliberate deception. Nevertheless, a third witness, the skipper James Steedman, contributed a further story: he had seen a vision of Wood in the cabin of his ship in port in the Netherlands in the previous year.

The kirk session elders may have been cautious, but they clearly thought that they might be onto something. They investigated Wood's whereabouts at the time of Nimmo's visions. They also asked Wood herself about her dreams, evidently hoping that she would come up with a dream or visionary experience that matched those of the accusers. However, she denied everything. She admitted that she had visited the Netherlands, but not, she said, for the last twelve years.

On the last day of the cure, which she had never actually begun, Phemi had left Oslau with a touching quotation on her lips and returned to Vienna. But life on the veranda remained the same. The old count appeared every day to pay his visit, and only the countess was again rather more reserved.

As much as Franziska had felt drawn to the kind old lady, on their first acquaintance and even more since its resumption, she nonetheless accepted this change with ease and equanimity, as she had that of the past winter, and adapted to it without inquiring curiously into its cause. It seemed to her that it was the ancient privilege of the upper classes to be changeable in their moods: sunlight would be followed by clouds, and the clouds by sunlight again.

This moment of “sunlight again” arrived even sooner than expected and was the result of a letter of Father Fessler’s, at the end of which these words appeared:

“Taken all in all, my dear Countess, the outcome, whose possibility now fills you with such care, might not be for the worst, and for this reason: it would put an end to fears—which, if one dwells on them constantly, are almost more unpleasant and certainly more unsettling than when one sees them come to pass. It is easier to deal with facts than with possibilities. Furthermore, if I am not mistaken, it is a happy choice in more ways than one, and the young lady's soul is of an alloy which may become a ringing bell.”