If you must love

love completely –

so the migrant

feels no nostalgia –

except the nostalgia

of the new home;

if you must hate

take your time –

for the migrant

also contributes

to the success

of the new home;

if you must tell –

tell how much

the migrant gives

without your asking

for he takes less

from the new home

as he strives to feel

home in the new home;

if you must ask

ask not the migrant

to go back home

for He was also one

and never returned

but in the Second Coming;

if you must tell

tell it as it is

we are all migrants

migrating into and out of

walls that always wall us

from the womb to the grave;

if you must represent

represent them well

that live in your home –

for they are also human

in the humanity of us all –

the homes we do not choose

as in the homes we choose;

if you must give –

give love, give hope

enlighten those

empower those

that seek what you have

so you can be great.

Women, historically and today, have given birth to foetuses, infants, children. This is of course an obvious statement, and something that goes without saying, for without such history none of us would be here. What is less obvious, and has received much less cultural attention, are the other objects that are produced in people's bodies, and are expelled by the body, or removed through therapeutic or medical intervention. Women, gender diverse, and intersex people do not only have the capacity to conceive foetuses: their bodies can also create a range of other things, including molar pregnancy, fibroids, uterine tumours, ovarian tumours, menstrual lumps, and so forth. These uterine productions and not-quite-pregnancies are parts of reproductive experience. They have a history, and quite a long one, as I have shown in this book. Despite this, non-foetal pregnancies, pregnant-like embodiment, and uterine expulsions have been little researched in historical scholarship. Subjects such as infertility and miscarriage are gaining scholarly and public attention, yet much less is given to women's experiences of conditions which produce non-foetal pregnant embodiment or uterine expulsions, such as molar pregnancy, placental disease, uterine tumours, or false pregnancy. Similar to miscarriage and infertility, these experiences have often been silenced, overlooked, or considered too ‘taboo’ for discussion in public forums. This is gradually beginning to change with stories of peoples’ experiences appearing in newspapers and particularly on social media. There is growing public recognition that many of these experiences are often felt, physically and emotionally, as a type of pregnancy loss.

Introduction

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries farming in the North Sea Lowlands reached its zenith. Following the difficult years of the first half of the eighteenth century, characterised by economic depression, devastating floods and cattle disease, a period of prosperity began that extended until the 1870s, with only one interruption between c. 1817 and 1835. The numerous large, imposing farms that can still be found in the lowlands mostly date from this predominantly prosperous period. In the advanced regions, farming stabilised at a high level of productivity, holding size tended to increase further and as a result social inequality also increased. The regions that were relatively ‘backward’ started catching up. By 1870 Groningen and the English fenlands were among the most prosperous and productive areas in the Lowlands. The late nineteenth-century agricultural depression brought an end to this period of prosperity, prompting the beginning of a new period, in which the lowlands were no longer in the vanguard, but instead had trouble keeping up with the uplands. Signs of the beginning of stagnation could already be observed before 1880 in the coastal regions from Flanders up to and including Friesland, and it is these regions which will be the subject of the next section. This is followed by a section on regions that still had potential for further development and which were catching up (or not): the English Fens, Groningen, and the Frisian fens. The third section reveals how north-west Germany fared after the devastating Christmas Flood of 1717. Finally, the regions that had not been transformed will be discussed.

Louth St James Churchwardens: 1500–70

In his seminal history of two millenniums of interlacustrine Africa, Jean-Pierre Chrétien argues that the region is characterised by a diversity of cultures, and political systems in constant flux: it is impossible to map out the region to separate it from neighbouring regions or societies. This chapter argues that interlacustrine Africa is in itself a region. It makes three arguments: as shared identity, a competition between rival kingdoms over the hegemony in the region, and interactions between the elites as part of that competition. Regions are not eternal and unchangeable monuments of civilisations, but spaces of interactions shaped by shared understandings, identities and histories. Many of the region's political communities share historical narratives of their origin and past. Notably, the elites developed a regional identity and culture; they often belonged to clans and family networks that crossed the borders of their political communities. This shared history was constantly redefined because these communities were bound in mutual relationships; sometimes these were rather violent, but often also shaped by cooperation and exchange. Historians of Eastern Africa have often highlighted the many similarities in the patterns of kinship and settlement, the emergence of kingdoms as a predominant feature of political organisations and the many cross-references in the oral traditions of the societies in the region. Religious cults like the nyabingi (one of several millennial cults which centred on the myth of a ancient or rightful ruler who once embodied the norms of the community) transcended the political boundaries for centuries.

The Protests (five cases)

On 1 December 1803 Captain Willem Verhaage of the private Dutch brig Carolina protested at Malacca against the seizure of his vessel by HMS Rattlesnake.

The events leading up to the arrest illustrate the political circumstances operating in the area at the time.

The British had occupied Dutch Amboina in 1796 under the same conditions as they occupied Malacca, that is to forestall a French occupation. Under the Treaty of Amiens of 1802 the British-held Dutch possessions in the East Indies were to be returned to the Dutch and, in spite of an unofficial British policy of procrastination, Amboina was restored to Dutch rule on 28 February 1803 by the Resident, Colonel James Oliver. Under Oliver's authorisation (on behalf of the EIC) the Carolina sailed for Madras on 6 May as a cartel ship carrying British troops. Captain Verhaage was also authorised to purchase goods at Madras (which he accordingly did, taking on board a load of cotton and copper) and to return to Amboina under the protection of a ‘Cartel Pass’ dated 2 September 1803. The Carolina embarked for Batavia on 5 September intending to travel via the Sunda Strait, but bad weather around Aceh dictated a route down the Malacca Strait. The brig arrived at Malacca to take on provisions on 30 October. It departed again on 3 November only to meet with a number of pirates around the Carimons and the Strait of Dryon on the 10th, which convinced the captain to return to Malacca, where he anchored in the Roads on the 16th.

One of the most prolific medical authors in Imperial Rome, Galen of Pergamon (AD 129–c. 216), wrote exclusively in Greek during the reigns of three successive emperors. Of Galen's vast corpus, one work is outstanding in its popularity in a Latin translation available before what is often called the long twelfth century, specifically his Ad Glauconem de methodo medendi, which is dated to the fifth century and was attested at the monastery of Vivarium in Italy by the sixth century.

The Ad Glauconem was not the only Galenic or pseudo-Galenic work to survive in Latin translation from late antiquity, and can be joined by authentically Galenic texts such as his De simplicium medicamentorum facultatibus (On the properties of simple medicines) as transmitted in the Euporista of Oribasius, adaptations of his work and pseudo-Galenic works such as the Liber tertius.2 As pointed out by Cameron, the Ad Glauconem was indeed used directly in the compilation of Bald's Leechbook, though the source has often been misidentified, along with the Liber tertius, as the work of the eleventh-century compiler Gariopontus of Salerno.

This chapter will consider the evidence for the use of the ensemble of texts which grew around Galen's Ad Glauconem, as well as the Ad Glauconem itself, in early medieval England. The earliest manuscript witnesses of Galen's Ad Glauconem in Latin saw its chapters interspersed with a supposed ‘third book’ which is called, for want of a better title, Liber tertius (the third book).

By the eve of the Spanish invasion, Mesoamerican societies had developed distinctive frameworks of religious thought that intimately connected human beings to nonhuman animals and the natural world. For the Nahuas of central Mexico or the bènizàa (commonly known as Zapotecs) of Oaxaca, boundaries between humans and other animal species, as well as between the temporal and divine, were porous. Humanity was merely one form of sentient actor within a broadly animate world where deities, spirits, and cosmic forces interacted dynamically with human beings, as well as animals, plants, and other natural phenomena (Basset 2015: 13–14; Carrasco 1990; López-Austin 1988). In turn, animals acted as messengers and conduits between (sub)terrestrial and celestial planes, deities materialized in human and animal forms, and certain human beings could even adopt different animal figures (Clendinnen 2014; Jansen 1997; Lind 2015: 22–3; Martínez González 2011). The missionaries who followed swiftly on the tail of Spanish military conquests brought their own theological perspectives, which distinguished humanity from other creatures by their uniquely immaterial, eternal, and rational soul. Indigenous ideas that animals could share similar spiritual potency, agency, and even mutability with humans, were not only fantastical to the colonial priesthood, but affronts to the Christian order of nature. In response, the churchmen of New Spain sought to sever Indigenous identifications with nonhuman animals, which they classed as idolatry, superstition, and witchcraft, and impose Catholic divisions between man and beast.

A crucial method for instructing Indigenous populations in proper Christian faith and behavior was the translation of catechisms, confessionaries, and other Christian teaching materials into Native languages.

Even in the 1850s, Hungarian bands in Vienna were nothing new. Although Hungary was an independent kingdom within the wider Habsburg Empire, there were still strong historical and cultural ties with Austria. The old imperial structure meant that travel between them remained straightforward and besides, Budapest was only 240 km away, manageable even then and directly connected by a busy steamboat trade along the mighty Danube river. Schubert's familiarity with Hungarian music as expressed in his own style hongrois compositions has been attributed to the presence of Hungarian musicians in Vienna in the early 1800s rather than his own relatively brief stay at the Esterhazy court, and there is no record that he ever went to Budapest.

If the Duchy of Courland was a politically fragile territory, the same goes for its nominal vassal master, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, a unique confederation of Poland and Lithuania. Indeed, as we have seen in Chapter 3, the fates of the two realms were connected. In 1790, just before the Second Partition, Elisa von der Recke and Dorothea von Kurland travelled to the Polish court to negotiate the political future of the Duchy of Courland with King Stanisław II August Poniatowski. The conflict that the two women and indeed the duchy was facing, smouldered on several fronts. The duchy was threatened with annexation by Russia in the light of a Second Partition of Poland. At the same time, a politically ineffective Duke of Courland, Peter von Biron, battled with opposing internal conflicts during his rule, the demands of the Old German Knights, the emerging German bourgeoisie, and the demands of the ethnic Courlanders for equal rights and the abolition of serfdom. He required the support of the Polish king to regain authority. The two women returned twice to Warsaw on their diplomatic missions. The last tour in 1791 lasted seven months and was ultimately successful – until the Third Partition of Poland, which also resulted in the annexation of the duchy by Russia.

Though ruled by a monarch in real union, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was a ‘democracy of the nobility’, certainly from the mid-eighteenth century onwards, in a state of political flux and reform. The szlachta ‘accounted for about seven percent of the population of up to fourteen million (in 1772)’. The nobility elected the parliament and the monarch, and thus held all the political power across the commonwealth.

In the late 1670s and early 1680s, a series of interrelated events dramatically altered the state of both the English book trade and the lives of Catholics in England and Wales. This, in turn, had an impact on the scope, production, and circulation of English Catholic books. Anxieties surrounding the king's heir apparent had been simmering since James revealed his conversion to Catholicism in 1673. However, Israel Tongue and Titus Oates's 1678 revelation of an alleged Catholic plot to assassinate the king in favour of his brother, followed by an armed Catholic uprising and massacre of Protestants, ignited a number of crises surrounding popery and arbitrary government that persisted for years. One consequence, the Exclusion Crisis, resulted in Charles II dismissing parliament before the Licensing Act could be renewed. Thus, in mid-1679, the principal law that regulated print in the Restoration expired. The changes in censorship altered what Catholic works the government targeted, from devotional texts to critiques of its handling of the Popish Plot. Catholics faced recriminations for their attempts to defend their innocence, while anti-popish proclamations created new obstacles and risks for Catholics and those sympathetic to them. At the same time, Catholic print benefitted from the lack of press regulation. Charles continued to focus his attention on suppressing anti-monarchical attacks, particularly dissenting and Whig propaganda, while the Tory Party welcomed the loyalist rhetoric English Catholics had been invoking for decades. The events playing out reoriented the attention of not only the government and authors but the bookmen as well.

There are nine stanzas attributed to Arngrímr in MS Holm perg 5 fol, three in dróttkvætt metre and six in hrynhent. They are identified as his work in that version of the prose GBpD but are not part of the continuous Guðmundardrápa on fols 46v–47v. In the forthcoming edition of Arngrímr's poetry in SkP IV, these nine stanzas, edited by Soffía Guðný Guðmundsdóttir, are treated as separate lausavísur, by contrast with the decision taken by two previous editors, Finnur Jónsson in Skj A and B and E. A. Kock in Skald, to integrate the six hrynhent stanzas into the drápa and treat the three stanzas in dróttkvætt as parts of a separate poem.

There is no reason to doubt the claim by the medieval editor of MS 5 that Arngrímr was the composer of these nine stanzas, some of which bear a strong resemblance to stanzas in the drápa, but equally there is no reason to incorporate them into it. In fact, by doing so, the balanced division of the sixty-stanza drápa into upphaf, stefjabálkr and slæmr is spoiled, as both Jón Helgason and its present editors have observed. A more interesting issue, discussed here, is why these nine stanzas did not form part of Arngrímr's completed drápa.

But I Live: Three Stories of Child Survivors of the Holocaust (New Jewish Press, 2022), a collection of three graphic novellas, renders oral testimonies into distinct visual narratives. For each of the three novellas, a Holocaust survivor was paired with a graphic artist to co-create a graphic narrative drawing on the survivors’ lived experience before, during, and after the Holocaust (in one case: one artist was paired with two brothers who survived together in hiding in the Netherlands). The testimony-gathering sessions between artists and Holocaust survivors took place both in-person and online between late summer 2019 and early 2022. The graphic novelists and survivors were supported by an arts-based participatory action research project (https://holocaustgraphicnovels.uvic.ca) that included scholars from various disciplines, archivists, and community partners from six countries (Canada, Germany, Israel, the Netherlands, the UK, and the US). In close creative partnership with the survivors, Miriam Libicki, Gilad Seliktar, and Barbara Yelin developed preliminary sketches, storyboards, and, ultimately, published an award-winning collection of three graphic narratives (2022), honoring the testimonial voices of Emmie Arbel (Kiryat Tiv’on, Israel), Nico and Rolf Kamp (Amsterdam, the Netherlands), and David Schaffer (Vancouver, Canada). Given the project's focus on research creation, the three artists were also invited to document their artistic practice reflecting on their collaborative work with the survivors, scholars, filmmakers, and community partners.