The prevalent focus on the emergence of the public and mandatory criminal trial within the judicial institutions of Western Europe from the Middle Ages to the early modern era has overshadowed parallel developments, which have generally been portrayed as contradictory and dissonant or, at best, minor; residues of the past, as has often been noted in these pages. New investigative methodologies have instead shown that the paths traced by law and the mechanisms for sanctioning crime and resolving conflicts were not linear, were not necessarily oriented towards progress and institutional strengthening, and also how arbitrary it can be to draw an abstract line of demarcation between modernity and archaism. About twenty years ago, Simona Cerutti and Renata Ago brought to the attention of the scientific community the issue of judicial procedure, too often neglected by a historiography traditionally much more focused on social conflict and the institutional control exercised over it. A few years later Simona Cerutti, in particular, would dedicate a research project to the topic, centred on the spread of summary procedure in eighteenth-century Turin, aiming to investigate the ‘demand for justice formulated by men and women to a wide range of legal institutions’ and the ‘ways in which these different institutions acted in response to these demands and to those formulated by their own members’. The success of the summary procedure in commercial disputes is a story that can open up highly interesting perspectives on conceptions of justice from a viewpoint that rejects folkloric readings and socio-historical approaches that are scarcely, or not at all, interested in the doctrinal and intellectual dimension.

On her travels to Silesia in 1816, Izabela Czartoryska visited the Cathedral of St John the Baptist in Wrocław and remarked that, ‘[there] was a time when all this belonged to Poland. The Piasts ruled here for a long time. I had not realized tears were running down my cheeks. In this moment, I lived entirely in the past’.

Czartoryska's travels through Silesia were foremost a journey to Bad Warmbrunn (Cieplice Śląskie-Zdrój), near Hirschberg (Jelenia Góra), a famed spa in Lower Silesia. Czartoryska went there for health reasons, yet also travelled around the area, visited towns and country estates, evaluated garden designs, and took in the sublime landscape of the Giant Mountains (Karkonosze). Her evocation of a glorious Polish past, ruled by the Polish dynasty the Piasts, displayed her nostalgic patriotism.

Yet, to conjure up the heritage of the Piasts in Silesia would have been contentious. With her evocation, Czartoryska harked back to a historical period where the Silesian and Polish Piasts were united as rulers of Poland. The Piasts were the first sovereign Polish dynasty. However, their rule in Poland was not long lasting; they emerged in the tenth century and died out with Kazimierz III (1310–70). Yet Silesian Piast dynasties continued into the seventeenth century in different territories and under different rulers. The legend of the first dynast, Piast, the peasant king, was recorded by the chronicler Gallus Anonimus (Gall Anonim) in his Gesta principum Polonorum (c. 1113). Gesta gained popularity at the end of the eighteenth century in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, particularly in the context of the Partitions.

1839 Mug, plate and jug, ‘In commemoration of the Viscount Clive attaining his majority …’, featuring a view of Powis Castle, Montgomeryshire.

1841 Plate and dish, ‘In commemoration of Sir W. W. Wynne Bart, Wynnstay, attaining his majority …’, featuring the family crest and motto. Wynnstay, Denbighshire.

1841 Lithograph print of Sir Watkin Williams-Wynn, ‘published on the 22 of May 1841, the day on which the Honourable Baronet attained his Majority …’. Published by Edward Parry of Chester. Wynnstay, Denbighshire.

1858 Mug, plate and jug, ‘In commemoration of the majority of Richard Myddelton Biddulph Esq of Chirk Castle …’, featuring a view of Chirk Castle, Denbighshire.

1868 Mug commemorating the coming of age of ‘Hon. C. H. Wynn, Rhug …’. Rhug, Merionethshire.

1868 Medals ×2 versions [?], commemorating ‘John Patrick Crighton Stuart born Sep 12 1847 / Marquis of Bute, Earl of Windsor, Baron Mountstuart, Baron Cardiff, came of age …’, featuring his profile. Bute estate, Cardiff, Glamorganshire.

1869 Medal, ‘Presented on the coming of age of George W. Duff Assheton Smith Esqr …’, featuring his profile. Faenol/Vaynol, Caernarfonshire.

1870 Mug and plate, ‘In commemoration of the coming of age of Philip Yorke Esq, Erddig …’. Erddig, Denbighshire.

1872 Mug, ‘In commemoration of the coming of age of G. Hampton Whalley Esq, Plasmadoc, Ruabon …’. Plas Madoc, Denbighshire.

This statement about God concluded a fictional conversation between a rebel army soldier and his wife broadcast on Spain's Radio Nacional in 1963 as part of the annual commemoration of the 1st of October, which was celebrated as ‘Caudillo Day’ because on that day in 1936 Francisco Franco was proclaimed the military and institutional leader of ‘National’ Spain in Burgos. ‘God wants us to win’, meaning God wanted Franco to win, a victory which belonged to ‘us’ because ‘we’ was Franco, and God wanted him to win, which is to say that God wanted ‘us’ to win. This is no tongue twister. The association of personalist leadership with collective identity and transcendence (in the religious sense of the term) is a fundamental element in the construction of regimes which are based on charismatic power. Franco's in Spain was one of the most characteristic of such regimes. It was also the longest-lasting of those which emerged in Interwar Europe.

Francisco Franco, a military officer and politician born in Ferrol in 1892, was Spain's Head of State, a title that has not been revoked by any subsequent law or regulation, from 1 October 1936 until his death on 20 November 1975. His regime was neither a republic in the strict sense of the term nor an ordinary monarchy, in that it had princes who were heirs to a throne that remained unoccupied.

The most common misadventures recounted by country traders at Malacca in the period under consideration were caused by bad weather in the Bay of Bengal and the South China Sea. While bad weather accidents were also common in the seas off the Coromandel and Malabar coasts these were not often the subject of Malacca Protests. Such cases, especially when related to coastal shipping, were presumably more likely to be recorded at Bombay (now Mumbai), Calcutta or Madras. Mishaps could also be caused by stormy conditions in the Malacca Strait, but the Protests recorded at Malacca by ships in trouble in the Strait were usually associated with the destructive force of reefs, rocks or sandbanks rather than with bad weather alone: these incidents are listed in Chapter 2. Many of the ships reporting storm damage were from Calcutta and on their way to or returning from China. Bombay country ships feature less commonly, perhaps because there were fewer of them in the first place. Nevertheless, several Bombay ships did report storm damage, particularly on the outward voyage to China. Whether these ships sailed through the Bay of Bengal and down the Malacca Strait or used the alternative route to China down the west coast of Sumatra and through the Sunda Strait, Malacca would still be their port of recourse.

The weather patterns were all-important to the maritime traders of India and the Archipelago. The mariners were dependent on the southwest monsoon winds to convey them ‘to the East’ and the northeast monsoons to bring them back home again and had to take their chances with the accompanying storms, planning their voyages to avoid the worst of the typhoon months in the South China Sea and preparing to battle hurricanes in the Bay of Bengal.

From 1967 onwards, various plans were developed for the future of the small island of Tiengemeten in the south-western Dutch delta: it was to become a recreation park, or an airport, or a depot for polluted soil, or factories were to be built on the island, or residential neighbourhoods. Eventually, in 1997 the island was sold to the Dutch Society for the Preservation of Natural Monuments and changed into a nature reserve.1 One thing was never considered by the planners: to continue to use the land on Tiengemeten for agriculture, the reason why it had been reclaimed during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This oversight had nothing to do with the quality of the land. The young friable marine clay soils of Tiengemeten are among the most fertile soils in the world. It was instead caused by the changed position of agriculture in the Dutch economy, and by the changed position of lowland agriculture within the Dutch agricultural sector.

According to Otto Knottnerus, the Lowlands on the Wadden coast have become peripheral areas. Firstly, transport over sea is no longer that important, and new traffic infrastructure is leading traffic inland and to the south, where the economic and cultural centre is now situated.2 What Knottnerus writes about the Wadden area can be applied to most of the North Sea Lowlands. Only Holland is situated in the economic, cultural and political heart of the Netherlands, but agriculture does not profit very much from that location. The farming sector in Holland is squeezed between growing cities. Haarlemmermeer, for instance, once a prosperous arable district, is now mostly covered by residential neighbourhoods, business parks and Schiphol Airport. Secondly, due to continuing mechanisation, employment in agriculture was reduced enormously.

In Chapter 9 of The Prince, Machiavelli makes an observation that identifies common political tendencies in a way that is both succinct and profound. He notes the conflicting interest of the nobles (“i grandi”), who want to oppress the common people and the common people (“il popolo”), who want not to be oppressed. When first we see Isabella in Measure for Measure asking for greater restrictions as a nun, she might seem an unlikely representative of Machiavelli's liberty-loving “popolo,” but I wish to make just that argument. Following the important work by Melissa Sanchez on the female as political subject, I propose to consider Shakespeare's Isabella as a model of the political subject beleaguered and oppressed by worldly political forces. Isabella's struggles as she is summoned from the convent's sanctuary and dispatched into the licentious world of Vienna mirror recent Tudor politics and evoke general issues of freedom and oppression. Isabella's expulsion from the convent reflects the dissolution of convents and monasteries throughout England in the mid-sixteenth century. As the Tudor state expanded its reach at the expense of competing institutions and at the cost of disrupting the infrastructure traditionally provided by the church, it limited the life choices available to its subjects, particularly its female subjects, for whom the religious life had hitherto offered an alternative to marriage or prostitution.

The expropriation of convents by the Tudor state, which provides one historical backdrop for Measure for Measure, epitomizes a general pattern of appropriating the trappings of religious authority by the secular state described by the term political theology.

INTRODUCTION

This is the first of three texts in this volume about the witchcraft trials that arose from the alleged demonic possession of Christian Shaw, daughter of the laird of Bargarran in Renfrewshire. Christian was aged 10 when in August 1696 she began to experience convulsions (‘fits’) and other bizarre behaviour. Over the next several months she named several people who were ‘tormenting’ her through witchcraft. Judicial investigations began early in 1697; eventually seven witches were brought to trial at Paisley in April and May. All were convicted, and executed on 10 June; an eighth suspect had previously committed suicide in prison. A more detailed discussion of the case is given in the introduction to the third and longest of the texts, the True Narrative of the Sufferings and Relief of a Young Girle (1698), below. The trial records themselves have been published in the companion volume to the present one, where a further discussion of the case will also be found. The present introduction, meanwhile, focuses on the specific features of the Relation of the Diabolical Practices itself, and the ways in which it resembles, and differs from, the two texts that follow it in the present volume – the ‘Bargarran Witches’ manuscript and the True Narrative.

The Relation is much shorter than the better-known True Narrative, but it has its own independent value. It deals mainly with two specific early phases in the proceedings: the gathering of evidence against the suspects in February 1697 at Bargarran and Renfrew, and the beginning of the trial proceedings in April 1697 at Paisley. After seven or eight months, Christian Shaw's possessed behaviour was now coming to an end. The bulk of the Relation consists of copies of documents produced in February. The Relation then skates much more briefly over the later trial proceedings, though it does mention the convictions in May and the seven executions that ensued in June.

The eighteenth century can be characterised by its increasing emphasis on reason, methodical analysis, and empiricism. Discussions on the significance of ‘the Enlightenment’ aside, there was a trend towards a critical scrutiny of all spheres of activity. Savants sought to understand the world and the human condition hoping to improve them, and the ideas of these thinkers increasingly affected reform practices. In the seventeenth century, scientific knowledge revolutionised natural philosophy with its mathematical and experimental methods. However, the ‘scientific revolution’ remained mostly confined to a small elite of experimental philosophers within the Republic of Letters. The process of consolidation and dissemination of scientific knowledge happened mostly in the eighteenth century and the effects of this process were, arguably, just as revolutionary. Scientific knowledge entered public knowledge because it was more widely applied than before. In this process, the division of scholarship into natural and moral philosophy and the cogency of related vocabularies lost their appeal. Instead, intellectual practices slowly began to emerge as distinct disciplines. This epistemic transformation did not happen overnight, but through a slow process: especially in the second half of the eighteenth century, scholars increasingly employed historical and empirical methods to identify the fundamental principles of complex phenomena and analyse them as ‘systems’. Designations as ‘science’ or ‘scientific’ implied the questioning of self-evident, customary notions and reflected the growing self-confidence in such approaches.

Introduction

The ‘Railway Mania’ is a term used primarily for the period 1844–46 when investment in railway projects became an all-consuming passion for a significant portion of the population. A bubble developed and eventually burst (or at least deflated). Many investors lost money. Nevertheless, a high proportion of the country's railway routes were promoted and commenced in those hectic years. There were no railways at all in Lincolnshire prior to 1844. By 1847, almost half the county's route-mileage had been authorised by Parliament.

Contemporary accounts alleged that many of the projects floated in those years were fraudulent. Railways were promoted, it is said, with no possible prospect of success, merely so that their promoters could allocate shares to themselves and sell them at a profit after their price had risen. Lawyers and even surveyors, it is said, arranged for lines to be promoted for the sake of the fat fees they could charge. Parliament had introduced certain Standing Orders on railway bills to act as a check on the powers of compulsory purchase that railways were granted in their Acts. By 1845, the House of Commons was enforcing these rigidly, as a way of throwing out a small proportion of the bills which threatened to swamp its sessions. Crooked promoters, it is alleged, would deliberately introduce certain errors in the plans they were obliged to deposit as a convenient way of killing their projects: they had made their money and had no wish to proceed further.

These allegations have been repeated in more modern accounts of the Railway Mania.

It is no secret that, for every puzzle of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight solved, another host of mysteries lift aloft their enigmatic (and possibly severed) heads. This epistemological illusiveness is, I contend, nonaccidental and significant to the poem's larger pedagogical and illustrative project. As a both deeply human and unflinchingly cosmic work, Sir Gawain draws on the characteristic caprice and otherworldly positionality of its fairies, presenting its readers and hearers1 with an engaging representation of what it is to live as a human in a transitory world that is also and always encompassed by a planned and orderly cosmos. In what follows, I will show that Sir Gawain is a poem formed and functioning in the image of the medieval cosmos. Influence, in this work, is multiple, interlinked, and tiered, with each fairy mover acting on and moving not only their own sphere of the narrative but also all the levels below and encompassed by their own. In this way, Sir Gawain becomes a poetic microcosm, mirroring both the structure and the order of the universe (as it was generally understood in late-medieval natural philosophy). As with the cosmos, form and arrangement are linked to and vital for understanding the content and lesson of this poem, acting, as a whole, to communicate the shape of the Divine order and to evoke the attendant theological and moral truths infusing both the cosmos and Gawain's moral journey. The poem's shape is thus inseparable from its message of reclamation and its emphasis on process and the perfecting of the soul over time.