Introduction

There is an overlap in time between this chapter and the previous two, because although peat shrinkage and storm surges continued to plague the inhabitants of the North Sea Lowlands, the first half of the sixteenth century also witnessed the beginning of a new period of expansion. This expansion was so strong that I will call the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the era of the Second Reclamation of the North Sea Lowlands. This Second Reclamation was less impressive than the Great Reclamation of the central Middle Ages as far as land area was concerned, but it required much more capital than the earlier reclamation phase and it fundamentally changed property relations and farming systems in the lowlands. The strongest drive for this change was the growth of population and economy in the Low Countries, first concentrated around the port of Antwerp, later in the northern Low Countries, the emerging Dutch Republic. Like the preceding periods, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries will be covered in two chapters. This chapter will demonstrate how Dutch capital, expertise and institutional innovations made the Second Reclamation possible. Chapter six will be dedicated to the changes in property relations and farming following this second wave of reclamations. Firstly, a survey of the history of the North Sea area from 1500 to 1700 provides context.

The forest in medieval romance is a liminal landscape that variously provides a haven for lovers, a proving ground for young knights, and a gateway to the Otherworld. In a specific textual tradition, the forest also becomes a refuge for mothers who have been wronged by chivalric elements of elite society and, as such, allows romance authors to explore an alternative way to raise and educate sons that foregrounds maternal influence. Whereas the previous chapters in this book have shown how women in romance assert their role as mothers in the built environment, such as birthing rooms and castles, the next two chapters explore how mothers behave in ostensibly natural spaces that have been nonetheless shaped by human perception and interaction: the forest and the sea. Motherhood in these natural spaces is characterised by levels of isolation (from court) and interaction (with other characters) that show that they are part of, rather than existing outside, society.

The representation of the wild forest as both separate from and essential to the courtly environment occurs in a number of medieval romance texts, including Sir Orfeo and Perceforest.

In the historiography of Israeli art music there is a gaping absence: that of Verdina Shlonsky (1905–1990), the only female among the so-called founding fathers generation of composers who settled in British Mandate Palestine before the outbreak of World War II. Over the years, Shlonsky has been all but forgotten, largely excluded from the canon of Israeli music. Though in recent years, some attempts have been made to rectify this situation, her public image remains that of an outsider, a stranger to Israeli culture as well as to the Hebrew language. Such an image can only act to reinforce and even justify her continuing neglect.

And yet, as Shlonsky's life story reveals, she was anything but an outsider to the Yishuv's society and culture. On the contrary, she was a primary contributor whose status, participation, and involvement in contemporary cultural life was thorough and prolific. During the 1920s and 1930s she was identified as “the very growth of this soil, well-rooted in this country's life,” and as representing it to the world. Through her early performances across British Palestine, often in collaboration with her sister Yehudit (Ida, 1903– 1977?) and at times also with her famous brother, poet Avraham Shlonsky (1900–1973), Verdina became the voice of the Yishuv, its representative and musical emissary.

Moreover, despite her general absence from historiography, she held a pioneering position in the history of musical life in the Yishuv. To her contemporaries, Shlonsky represented the community's first grassroots growth, a young composer whose art carried the sounds of the Jewish revival in Palestine to the world. Particularly notable is her first publication, the Images Palestiniennes (1933).

Amajor aspect of the neoclassical revival in Germany was the appropri¬ation of the literary forms of antiquity. Among these the fable and the epigram played perhaps surprisingly important roles. In his autobiography Dichtung und Wahrheit (Truth and Fiction; 1811–1813, 1830) Goethe recalls that Swiss theoreticians Johann Jakob Bodmer (1698–1783) and Johann Jakob Breitinger (1701–1776) had indeed declared the fable to be the foremost literary genre bar none—a declaration comprehen¬sible only in the context of an age that placed the highest premium on imaginative pleasure coupled with moral edification. While some writers emphasized the pleasurable side of the equation, Lessing stressed the instructive potential of the form, often with satiric intent. He utilized the epigram in much the same manner and to much the same end.

We saw in chapter 1 that Lessing's fables were notably present in American periodicals during the first half of the nineteenth century. His epigrams and particularly his verse had much lower profiles but nonetheless possessed a degree of visibility. Even the relative popularity of the fables, however, resulted in little commentary. At the same time, Lessing's efforts in the three forms elicited certain remarks and, in a few instances, applica¬tions to current events that are interesting and suggestive in various ways.

The Fables

Joseph G. Cogswell approaches Lessing's fables from his essays on the genre. For Cogswell, these treatises perfectly exemplify the manner in which such studies should be executed. He considers the fables them¬selves “no bad exemplification” of the principles established in the essays.

There is a reason that, despite the ubiquity of medievalism across popular media forms today, the popular affective sense that the Middle Ages were an other time, foreign and defined by alterity to modernity, persists. The scholarship of the mid- to late twentieth century bore this out, with an increasing focus on the ‘hard-edged alterity’ of medieval thought and ways of being;1 attention to the idea of the Middle Ages as ‘the West's shadowy “other”, against which the Renaissance and modernity itself was defined’, facilitated this framing. While recent medieval and medievalist studies have demonstrated useful ways of bridging this temporal and affective gap, including by framing the Middle Ages through the political and social imperatives of contemporary criticism, the fundamental otherness and inaccessibility of the medieval nevertheless linger in popular consciousness and some critical spaces. Undergirding this may be the tacit acknowledgement that, despite the foreignness of the early modern/Renaissance period, modern critics begin to recognise patterns of thought and ways of being more readily once we have departed from the late medieval period, the last gasp of the pre-modern. In particular, the technologies and cultures of literature begin to become more familiar in the sixteenth and eventually seventeenth centuries: the move to print rather than manuscripts, changing reading habits that prioritised literacy over orality, changing tastes and textual access, etcetera. The consumption and dissemination of earlier verse romances, as discussed in the Introduction to this book, involved a mix of oral and literary traditions reliant on folkloric and intertextual elements; print culture moves away from this form of reading.

A general survey of the settlement of Bretons in Lincolnshire after the Norman Conquest together with an account of the development of the honour of Richmond in the county, held for some two-thirds of the period to 1399 by the dukes of Brittany or their cadets, has recently been published. In it attention was drawn to some manuscript material, now housed at Nantes in the departmental archives of Loire-Atlantique, relating to late fourteenth-century Boston and other Lincolnshire estates of the honour, which has not been seriously exploited by previous scholars. The opportunity to offer a short contribution to this volume of essays for Nicholas Bennett, who has spent so much of his life making available to others through his own published research and as general editor of the Lincoln Record Society the wealth of documentary evidence available for the historic diocese of Lincoln, is an appropriate one to further highlight the value of this evidence for the social and economic history of medieval Lincolnshire.

The immediate political context explains why these documents are now to be found in Nantes. Following renewal of the general Anglo-French war in 1369, to cement a new alliance with his former ward, John IV, duke of Brittany (1364–99), in 1372 Edward III returned to him the earldom and honour of Richmond that had traditionally been held by his ancestors since shortly after the Norman Conquest. They had last been held briefly by the duke's father, John de Montfort, some thirty years earlier at the beginning of the Breton War of Succession (1341–65), but then used, following Montfort's capture by the French and subsequent early death (1345), to maintain Queen Philippa's household and provide the king's third son, John of Gaunt, with an earldom.

In addition to sailing through a region of turbulent monsoonal weather and somewhat uncharted seas, the country traders operating in the Malay region and between India and China had to pass close by countries with a variety of cultures, ethnicities, languages, societies and values. Robert J. Antony has described the South China Sea, for example, as ‘a maritime melting pot’. Thus, when the route went through the Malacca Strait, through the Malay Archipelago and through the South China Sea and the country traders came into contact with the peoples of these regions they were often faced with social customs outside of their own European-based value systems.

One such traditional custom involving the sea was that generally described in modern studies as maritime raiding. In island Southeast Asia during the late eighteenth century there was ‘an upsurge in Maritime raiding’. ‘Piracy’ – the term formerly applied by the British to the hostile and unauthorised seizure of goods or ships by the local people in a maritime setting – covered a variety of activities intrinsic to local indigenous societies. It could, for instance, be considered a part of legitimate trading, a section of the informal economy, an extension of state power (privateering), opposition to foreign traders or simply a means of increasing labour supply by capturing slaves. It came in many forms by a variety of people, including mutiny by indigenous crews.

Descriptions of particular ‘piratical’ attacks on British shipping have been included in various studies of trade and traders in the Malay Archipelago.

In Christian Petzold's Phoenix (2014), Lene, a friend who helps Nelly (Nina Hoss), the protagonist and a concentration camp survivor, back on her feet after the war openly expresses her anger at Nelly. Coming in response to Nelly's naive insistence on her love for her former husband, Johnny (Ronald Zehrfeld), and her conviction that he neither betrayed nor stopped loving her despite all information to the contrary that Lene provides, Lene's anger returns viewers to the site of Germany's genocidal treatment of the Jews that Nelly suppresses. After listening to Nelly for a while, she arises agitatedly from the sofa, marches over to her desk and lights a cigarette. Slamming the lighter down on the table, she nervously rolls her cigarette between her fingers, and slowly and tensely turning toward Nelly, declares: “Weist du, was mich wirklich anwidert? Wir Juden haben geschrieben, gesungen, und malocht. Manche sind fur Deutschland in den Krieg gezogen. Und die einen wie die anderen wurden vergast. Und jetzt kommen die Uberlebenden zuruck und verzeihen. Die Gaskammern horen auf zu arbeiten und wir verzeihen…jede Feigheit, jeden Verrat. Ich spiele das nicht mit, Nelly.” (Do you know what disgusts me? We Jews wrote, sang, and slogged away. Some went to war for Germany. And regardless of what they did, they were gassed. And now the survivors come back and forgive. The gas chambers stop working and we forgive…every cowardice, every betrayal. I won't play along with that, Nelly.) Lene's anger emerges in response to Nelly's denial of systemic injustice and personal betrayal. Directing it toward Nelly in this moment, she reacts against implicit albeit unintentional participation in a return to normal that elides systemic and individual acts of racism and genocide.

The hardest thing for all of us was the silence of speech and movement…. After many months, many errors, and many patient instructions from our Novice Mistress, we are beginning at last to settle into a more quiet way of living.

Sister Mary (b. 1941), recollecting her recent experience in the novitiate of a Catholic convent in 1960s Wales, wrote of her difficulties in adjusting her everyday bodily movements and auditory practices to conventual ways of movement and speech. Since the foundation of the Sisters of Charity of Our Lady, Mother of Mercy in 1832, Sister Mary and generations of sisters had been schooled in this “more quiet way of living.” This was not a process unique to this religious institute. From the nineteenth century, the formation of a religious sister included being educated in the novitiate, as a postulant and later as a novice, on the aims of the religious institute as well as its spirituality, ministries, customs, and practices. The surge of interest in religious life in the nineteenth century resulted in dramatic increases in the numbers of sisters and nuns particularly in Europe, North America, and the Antipodes. In Catholic France, according to historian Claude Langlois, the number of women religious increased tenfold from 1808 (12,343 members) to 1901 (128,315 members). In Protestant Britain, the nineteenth-century surge in numbers of female religious was more modest, but still significant nonetheless: from a handful of women religious before the 1790s to likely ten thousand sisters and nuns by 1900. The majority of female religious into the twentieth century were sisters who taught, nursed, and engaged in social welfare.

After the Economical Reform Debates of 1779/80, administrative reform became a major political issue. The potential consequences of this reform impulse were at first unclear. When debating reforms, Parliament and the political public mostly concentrated on general issues such as the military and political crisis, national debt, and corruption. With the reports of CEPA, public administration also became a specific subject. Even though few appreciated the minutiae of state administration, administrative reform was in demand. The prospect of reform aroused great expectations, but also great fears.

Prior to the end of the eighteenth century, five ministries dealt with the call for reform: the ministries of North (1770–82), Rockingham (1782), Shelburne (1782–3), Portland (‘Fox–North’, 1783) and, finally, Pitt the Younger (1783–1801). Of these five ministries, the Shelburne ministry and the Pitt ministry provided crucial stimuli for administrative reform. Shelburne announced a ‘general and grand reform’ and took this promise seriously. His ministry sent out a wave of information requests to the departments in order to amend the lack of knowledge about the administrative system. At the same time, Shelburne commissioned a number of agents to prepare reform recommendations for various departments. Although a reform of the Treasury was the only one to be completed, the impetus of the ministry's information gathering effort and reform activity extended far beyond the Treasury. During the Shelburne ministry, administrative reform began to take concrete shape. Pitt also had the reputation of a reformer. After his initial efforts, however, Pitt shifted the issue out of the political limelight, as it proved to be an issue which was vulnerable to attacks from the opposition.

It seems to me that to finish in any definitive manner a book that is about Beginning, with a neat wrap-up in which the great detective Explains All, or that other classic nineteenth-century linear plot in which the characters’ later lives are each summed up would be perverse. True lines in the geometry this book describes do not end, but explicate outward infinitely from their creating dimensionless point, often “kissing” others to form the angles that shape all the specific forms in Nature.

So instead of a formal Conclusion, I will end this study by examining a work that in many ways mirrors, though imperfectly, the one I began with, the fifteenth-century Cardinal Nicolas of Cusa's “On a bowling game” (De ludo globi). Nicolas used geometry as a dynamic structuring device to teach some important virtues of governance, both of self and state, to young princes of a royal household. The work I want to examine now is also by a cleric teaching novices. But this short work is Victorine, from the later twelfth century, and entirely monastic in its intended audience. It addresses not the ways of secular rulers but the ways of contemplative composing and preaching. It is an ars predicandi of a sort but intended for a particular audience, the Augustinian community of St. Victor in Paris, located a short distance away from the precincts of the University that was then just coming into being, although in spirit and institutional mission they seemed far apart.