In 1275, a set of regulations and fines on women's apparel was passed in the city of Montauban. Included was a clause requiring that the edicts be revisited fifteen years later. Accordingly, they were reviewed and updated in 1291. Comparison of these two documents offers fascinating information on apparel styles, modes of conspicuous consumption, and approaches to moral attitudes over two decades. There are enumerations of terms which clearly denoted sufficiently distinct styles to compel the authorities to distinguish between them, a signal that a fashion culture was at work in the town. A study of the sumptuary laws’ vernacular Occitan terminology can serve as an important contribution to the little-studied history of dress and consumption in the medieval Midi, the south of France. Enacted early in the timeline of medieval European sumptuary laws, these edicts also represent a possible model for later ones. Laws in vernacular Occitan (and adjacent Catalan, as well) share certain traits with those emerging in France, Spain, England, and Italy in this period and later, but other characteristics demonstrate that they deserve a place in the comparative work that has justly been called for by Laurel Wilson.2 Montauban's social and legal context was unique. The dress prohibitions need to be understood within the economic and political framework of this town in the last quarter of the thirteenth century as well as within the broader trend for issuing edicts intended to regulate consumption that was beginning to sweep European municipalities. The first part of this study will place the laws in the context of the town and their codicological transmission.

In Salvaging Spenser, Willy Maley asks, ‘What would the act of reading Ireland in the Faerie Queene entail’? For those scholars who have engaged with this question, as exceptions to the general ‘blithe disregard for any Irish dimension’ in Spenser's poetry, the recent answer has been important ‘historicist’ and ‘materialist’ explorations of the ‘cultural specificity of Ireland’. For Thomas Herron, the Irish context enlivens readings of ‘all six Books (and the fragmentary seventh) of the epic as well as many of Spenser's later, shorter poems’: Herron's use of Irish contexts when exploring the allegorising of Walter Raleigh as Timias in Book VI, exemplifies the procedure. Similarly, Richard McCabe uses political tracts as a means to uncover the Irish context of each Book's virtue, including how the virtues of Books IV–VI are intrinsically tied to Spenser's anxiety around colonial reform in Ireland. For these scholars the historical context provides fruitful ground for explorations of Spenser's colonial experiences in Ireland, whom he supported and celebrated, whom he fought against and denigrated, and how all of this is allegorised throughout his poetry and in the View in order for him to strive towards his ideal Irish colonial society.

Maley answers his own question by considering Ireland as a geographic space, applying the approaches of literary geography to consider how Spenser represents, engages with, and allegorises the spaces and places of Ireland in his works; evidenced through discussions of how the Faerie Queene's closing sequence is set on Spenser's Kilcolman estates, and by highlighting how ‘our knowledge of Spenser's familiarity with Ireland centres on the poignant allusion to the Fens of Allen in Book II, the river schemata of Book IV, Colin Clouts Come Home Againe, and the Mutabilitie Cantos’.

As the first book that explicitly argues, as Malcolm Miller does in the introduction, for Israeli music's rarely explored and gradually growing international significance, this book is groundbreaking. A collection of highly diverse chapters, Classical and Popular Music in Israel paints an unprecedented panoramic overview, illuminating characteristic traits of Israeli culture that are known to local musicians and have repeatedly proven to be inspiring to outsiders.

A list of the graves of the Olympians appears in the poet Gilla in Chomdid Úa Chormaic's eleventh-century composition on world history, A Rí richid, réidig dam:

Satuirn ra commuid a chlais mac Polluir i sleib Chucais. adnacht Mercuir ri lecht lia i nErmopolim Cipria.

Uenir ic inis Cipir. Mairt isin Tráic trenChicil. Liber Pater dema de. isin Teba ata saide.

Hercoil i tír na Tiri ra loisc tríana lonchridi Aesculapius ra fis fuir ro hadnacht i nEpiduir.

Saturn son of Pollus, his grave was kept in Mount Caucasus, the burial of Mercury before a stone tomb in Ermoupolis [in] Cypria.

Venus on the island of Cyprus. Mars in Thrace of the strong-breasted [i.e., Amazons]. Liber Pater died from it, it is in Thebes that he is.

Hercules in the land of the Tyrrhenians burned through his full heart. Asclepius, it is known about him that he was buried in Epidaurus.

According to the poet's euhemeristic approach, the Classical gods were mortals and their graves had become cult sites. While relatively common among medieval accounts of pagan gods, euhemerism was only one of many approaches taken towards the Olympians in medieval Irish literature and the Classical adaptations. Flann Mainistrech's poem Éstid a eólchu can ón, preserved in Lebor Gabála, takes a similarly euhemeristic approach and enumerates the deaths of various members of the Túatha Dé. In Razvan Stanciu's words, this is done ‘presumably with the aim of proving their humanity’, although he notes that Flann also calls them gods (dee) in the same work. Stanciu concludes that día is ‘a weak label’, which may mean nothing more than ‘supernatural figure in general’.

Egbunike's and Nwankwo's volume, ALT 39, provides a critical frame for engaging the tenets of Africanfuturism as laid out by Nnedi Okorafor in her conception of Africanfuturism. The volume provides content narratives, critical frames, and theoretical constructs to read and critique writings in the genre.

Since the publication of ALT 39, questions have been raised about the nature and component of the genre, its artistic conception, conventional framework for writing, and paradigms for literary interpretation. Two questions have been foremost in the motivation for editing this volume: the question of African specificity and the imagined alternative African future. This volume draws from the spirit and content of ALT 39 to tease out the implications of these two questions for Okorafor's conception of the genre and its significance for both writer and critic.

There are editorial parallels in both volumes in terms of content analysis and critical frames the articles use in interpreting Okorafor's conception of Africanfuturism. What makes ALT 43 distinct is the effort of contributors to robustly interrogate some of the features outlined by Okorafor and present their own interpretation of the creative and interpretive constructs of the genre. As such, the practice adopted in this volume is framed around the amplification of themes critical to conceptualizing the genre convention but also a contestation of some of the principles pivotal to understanding its nature and function.

Fifteenth-century music and musical culture has enjoyed an exceptional position in Czech historiography. Narratives on the Hussite revolts against the Roman Church, which escalated after the death of Jan Hus at the stake in 1415, are accompanied by depictions of the powerful role of music cultivated in all social spheres—vernacular Czech liturgy in the Hussite church, religious songs in devotional and private cultures, and Hussite songs inciting men to fight without fear against their enemies. For more than a century, Czech music historians have been inspired by the undeniably strong social power of these musical repertories and have highlighted Hussite vernacular chant and vernacular song as the peak of Czech medieval music and cultural developments. Fifteenth-century chants have been used as melodic and symbolic material for countless nineteenth- and twentieth-century music compositions that evoke the Hussite legacy, and in this way they contributed to the shape of modern Czech identity.

Discovering and interpreting authentic documents, Czech music historians defined fifteenth-century Bohemia as a period in which the renowned “Czech musicality,” closely connected to the vernacular Czech language, was born and reached its first peak. However, Bohemia usually appears (if at all) in surveys on medieval and early Renaissance music as a truly peripheral region, which for a time and as a result of political events was separated from the musical life of western Europe and where music was literally conserved in a special microclimate.

From Cristóbal Méndez to Fox Morcillo, humanist thought in Spain during the 1550s subscribed to a fervour for dance conceived of as paideia and medicine for the body and soul. This enthusiasm left its mark on several political and pedagogical treatises written in the aftermath of the emperor's reign and intended for the future Philip II. One generation later, when the reign of Philip II's heir was fast approaching, the number of espejos de príncipes (Specula principum) increased. However, when it came to dance, the discourse was less enthusiastic than in the treatises written prior to King Philip the Prudent's reign, all the contrary.

Rigourist Inflections during the Dawn of Philip III's Reign

Forbidding Dance to Avoid Effeminising the Royal Body

One of the first treatises to be published in the context of the impending royal succession was the Jesuit Pedro de Ribadeneira's Tratado de la religion y virtudes que debe tener el príncipe cristiano para gobernar (1595). This expansive treatise, presented as a Christian riposte to Machiavellian tenets, is a political work presented in the style of espejos de príncipes. Addressed to the future king, Philip III, it does not offer any specific instructional plan but, rather, it demonstrates a palpable effort to (re)orientate the education of the future monarch. Its essential goal is therefore political and moral rather than pedagogical; it does, however, provide some observations regarding education. In the book's chapter on the virtues, dedicated to condemning refined education, the moral concept of strength underlies the whole treatise.

Although northern women writers in English expression appeared late on the Nigerian literary scene, it is a historical fact that Princess Nana Asma’u (1793–1864) wrote an impressive volume of creative works in Arabic and Ajami during the nineteenth century (Tsiga & Gumi). Northern Nigeria occupies approximately 29 percent of Nigeria's land mass and has a large population that embraces Islamic teachings, moral codes, norms, and values. In this regard, it is expected that works from the region, especially those works by women, would uphold a high level of Islamic and Christian mores, values and tradition. However, the twenty-first century women writers from the region have begun to jettison the cultural values by unashamedly depicting sex and sexuality in their works without recourse to learned moralistic considerations. This article takes a look at the generational portrayal of sexuality and the morality codes in the works of women from northern Nigeria who write in English. Using the feminist kaleidoscope, the article establishes the way and manner that the century has impacted on the writings of women from the northern region of Nigeria.

Sexuality is often a difficult term to talk about, especially in a traditionalized religious setting like northern Nigeria. This is so because of the strict Islamic religious disposition of the people of the region; being predominantly Muslim, the teachings of the religion permeate every aspect of life of the people such that it becomes difficult to trace the point where culture terminates and religion begins.

This book brings together three areas of scholarship that have too often developed on separate trajectories: the histories of women, religion, and emotions. Spanning from the 1840s to the 1970s, the chapters in this volume show the ways that these strands of research intertwine and how considering them in connection deepens and enriches the understanding of all three. Its contributors demonstrate that rather than being a relic of the past, religion continued to play vital and complex roles in modern European women's public and private lives well into the twentieth century. The growing field of the history of emotions offers new tools to understand the connections between religion and culture, and this volume draws on methodologies from the history of emotions to illuminate the meaning and manifestation of religion in three areas of women's experience: in public discourses about women's perceived place and duties in the modern European state and society, in women's professions and their professionalization, and in the private realm.

The Role of Religion in Everyday Life and Women's New Nineteenth-Century Opportunities

For most modern European women, religion formed the foundation on which they created their lives. Religious ceremonies marked the most important turning points in life—birth, marriage, and death. Religious holidays divided the changing seasons and the week into times of work and leisure. Europeans awoke in the morning to church bells, religious celebrations marked civic events, and prayers honored secular and religious leaders alike. Many Europeans prayed when they awoke, before each meal, and before they turned in for the night. Children learned those prayers in churches, synagogues, and schools, and most schools in fact were officially affiliated with one of the two major denominations, Catholicism or Protestantism.

Of the many challenges facing higher education today, one of the most troubling has been the steep decline in humanities enrollments. It is a trend which shows no signs of abating. A recent piece in The New Yorker magazine (February 27, 2023) goes so far as to declare the numbers to be “in free fall.” The field of German studies has not been spared this fate; indeed, it seems particularly acute there. Perusing past issues of The German Quarterly one finds references to a “crisis” in German studies cropping up with alarming frequency already as far back as 1989.

“Crisis”: The word speaks of a difficult, if not urgently dangerous situation. Its etymology contains the sense of having arrived at a turning point, a moment of decision. Though the situation is dire, or precisely because it is dire, it can create a space for new possibilities. Yet, where are these “new possibilities” to come from? How are we to find them? The usual course of events after the announcement of a crisis and the widespread acceptance that one in fact exists is for diagnoses to be tendered, followed by concrete proposals to remedy the situation. Just as likely, if not more common, is that when faced with a crisis, we stand helpless before it and simply carry on pretty much in the same way as before.

The Ethical Need for Shape

The analogy drawn by Richard of St. Victor between human thinking and the flocking of small birds is a particularly rich one and serves well as a motif for the rest of my study of the essential role geometry plays in all structured forms of thought. What the image captures so well is the flexible, provisional shaping that our reasoning requires to be at all productive. Characteristic of evil thought is its inability to adjust its shapes. Dante's Satan is frozen in ice because his desire, will, and mind are thoroughly fixed into just one shape stuck in one place, and flapping his wings can take him nowhere. Inferno is also a place only of individual souls with no hint of communal concern or harmonious interaction. But, as we just saw, Richard compares inventive, productive human thinking to birds flocking, in and out, up and down, spiraling, flying apart, coming densely together in a cloud, sometimes seeming to be fixed in the air in one place, but then changing their configurations again, until they gather in place together in their one communal roost. Though many different bird species form flocks, the term “murmuring” is used particularly of flocking starlings, a bird whose habits were known throughout Europe from antiquity.

The three modes of human thinking that Richard identified – cogitation, meditation, contemplation – are distinguished by their movements and directions. Cogitation's motions are shapeless and indirect, wandering about here and there without any particular end in mind.

Eudo dapifer is the quiet man of Anglo-Norman England. He fails to appear in the narratives written by Orderic Vitalis, Henry of Huntingdon, or William of Malmesbury, or indeed in the ODNB! Yet he was ‘at the core of the Norman establishment’, a man who served the first three Norman kings with seeming unquestioned loyalty, who was frequently literally at their side both in England and Normandy, both on military campaigns and as an administrator. He was an official who, as principal steward, was of a status commensurate with the chancellor in the royal household, sufficiently trustworthy to be granted custody of one of William I's greatest castles, and who, though not amongst the wealthiest tenants-in-chief, held estates, some substantial, in eleven shires, overwhelmingly concentrated in East Anglia and the south-east Midlands.

The Sources

With the exception of Domesday and other royal records virtually all that can be recovered of Eudo, his family origins, and his foundation of the Benedictine abbey of St John the Baptist, Colchester, derives from sources probably of Colchester provenance and mostly associated with the abbey (the Annales Colescestrensis). Five survive, though there were undoubtedly others, particularly a now-lost set of annals. The relationship between them is extremely complex. Arguably the earliest (though it remains possible that amendments or additions were made at any time up until the manuscript was written in the fourteenth century), and perhaps the most reliable, is found in a modest and defective volume of 40 folios (now BL, MS Harley 1132).

From the earliest attestations of the Irish word druí ‘druid’ as a gloss on biblical magicians in the Würzburg Glosses, Irish druids and Latin magi have been linked, representing an instance of interpretatio integral to many works of medieval Irish literature. This chapter reviews the arguments for identifying druids with biblical magi and questions the degree to which Classical magic-workers also influenced the conception and depictions of druids in medieval Irish literature. This discussion of Classical influence will involve two stages: I first ask whether Classical ethnographic portrayals of (primarily Gaulish) druids could have influenced medieval Irish Latin and vernacular authors, before turning to the use of druí to translate Classical magicians, priests, and prophets in the Middle Irish Classical adaptation texts, giving special attention to In Cath Catharda. Finally, I will discuss the implications these depictions of druids have on both Classical and Christian translatio studii and the growth of Irish identity in relation to world history and salvation.

The equation of the terms druí and magus has become commonplace in scholarship on medieval Ireland, based largely on the use of magus for practitioners of magic in seventh-century Hiberno-Latin texts set in conversion-era Ireland. While it is generally recognized that these texts tell us far more about perceptions of the pagan past in the seventh century than about the pagan past itself, the degree to which any pre-Christian Irish priesthood stands behind the characters designated as magi in these seventh-century texts is a matter of debate.

A History of Women Photographers (1994) underlines important points when we consider what photography can reveal of women in Latin America. Though this book shows that generally speaking, coverage of women's photography is gradually expanding, this publication shows that the presence of women photographers in the world canon is still thin. In most cases, when featured at all, this percentage is normally less than 1 percent. Furthermore, even in books dedicated to the topic of women in photography (such as the one mentioned above), Latin American women make up less than 5 percent of women in focus. As you consider this, it is important to note that this coverage is not unique to the Americas. Similar attention (or lack thereof) to other areas of the Global South is mirrored in other photographycentered books. As you will observe in the chapter on the canon, many of the Latin American women who achieve international reputations, along with a mention or inclusion in the world canon, have a body of photography that is linked to the exotic or the esoteric. Even so, as this chapter will underline, noteworthy women photographers do not always follow such patterns.

Histories of women photographers reveal specific patterns that are also replicated in Latin America. In the early days of photography, many Latin American women who were photographers learned the craft from a male significant other (spouse or otherwise) or a professional mentor in some cases (Rosenblum A History of Woman Photographers 42–6). This is a pattern found throughout the history of photography, though notable exceptions have shown that, sometimes, the woman is the teacher and the man the student (Kaplan and Manseau).1 Some of these women, after a season of learning and practice, later established their own reputation as photographers, showing their visual outlook in the process. In the early history of photography in Latin America, the pattern is present in Edward Weston and Tina Modotti as well as Manuel Álvarez Bravo and Lola Álvarez Bravo.

Introduction: Preparing the ground

It is without parallel in the history of medieval Icelandic skaldic poetry that three major contemporary poets, working in the north of Iceland about the middle of the fourteenth century, should have composed such a large corpus of verse about one man, Bishop Guðmundr Arason (1161–1237, in office from 1203). These poets were Arngrímr Brandsson (c. 1290–1361) and Árni Jónsson (d. c. 1380), both sometime abbots of the Benedictine monasteries of Þingeyrar and Munkaþverá respectively, and Einarr Gilsson, a lawman for the north and west of Iceland, known to have been in post between 1367–9.

It is commonly assumed that this body of work was composed, alongside several prose lives of the bishop, one possibly in Latin, the others in Icelandic, in order to promote Guðmundr's case for canonization to the Pope and ecclesiastical authorities in the Holy See. Although the promotion was ultimately a failure, the campaign was nevertheless the stimulus for a remarkable corpus of Icelandic poetry. In later chapters this poetry will be considered in both a literary and a socio-political context in an attempt to account for its character and extraordinary intensity; here the objective is to examine the poetry first of all in its extant manuscript environment, where it forms an extensive commentary on and exemplification of the events of Guðmundr's life, his struggles against the secular chieftains and the miracles he is thought to have performed.

Introduction

Investing in wetland reclamation is not a one-off investment: ditches, drains, banks and sluices must be maintained continuously. Drains and ditches need to be dredged, sluices and dikes require repair. Since most of this maintenance necessitated a collective effort, communities had to design rules to apportion areas of the maintenance tasks to landowners or farmers and to monitor the quality of the maintenance performed. At first the regulation of water management was the responsibility of the general local or regional administration of a village, seigneurie or Landgemeinde. Later specialised water authorities emerged that organised and regulated water management within their territories. This development of the organisation of water management is discussed in the first part of this chapter. How agriculture fared in the reclaimed wetlands is addressed in the second part.

Organisation of Water Management in the Middle Ages

Since most reclamations were undertaken by relatively small groups of farmers, it is not surprising that the upkeep of water works was organised at the level of local communities everywhere in the drained wetlands of the southern North Sea area. Parishes, villages, hamlets or seigneuries were the units within which these maintenance duties were performed.