Based on the 1819 historical novel The Bride of Lammermoor by Sir Walter Scott, the main conflict in Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor is centered around a long-standing feud between two families in the Lammermuir Hills of late sixteenth-century Scotland. Before the start of Act I, Enrico Ashton has killed the head of the Ravenswood family and now occupies his castle and lands. Forced to live in a run-down shack on the edge of the castle grounds, the last surviving Ravenswood (Edgardo) has fallen in love with Lucia Ashton after rescuing her from a wild bull. Their love is kept a secret until it is discovered by Enrico that Lucia and Edgardo meet every morning to walk the grounds together. After receiving such news from his trusted advisor (Normanno), Enrico is doubly upset, for not only is Lucia in love with a mortal enemy but she is also destroying his plans to marry her off to a wealthy benefactor (Lord Arturo Bucklaw), who will rescue the Ashton family from financial and political ruin. Everything in the opera therefore rests upon the actions of Lucia; what she does or does not do has consequences for all. In the end, Lucia breaks off her secret engagement to Edgardo, marries Arturo, kills him on their wedding night, eerily greets her brother and the wedding party in a blood-soaked night dress, sings gleefully of her love for Edgardo and then dies the next day owing to the damaging effects of an acute mental derangement. When Edgardo, who has been waiting at the tomb of his forefathers to fight Enrico, hears of Lucia's death, he commits suicide, leaving Raimondo (a Presbyterian minister) and a chorus of mourners to pray for his soul.

An examination of the musical material of the Sinfonietta reveals the extent to which Janáček had achieved an extraordinary level of com¬positional sophistication by the time he came to write the work. Hans Hol¬lander declared that with the Sinfonietta, ‘Janáček reached the zenith of his orchestral works… . Although he remains faithful to his characteristic idiom, his style is of a thematic density and formal conciseness as in no other work. His inspiration has freed itself from its habitual literary and extra-musical stimulus, and has created a series of five orchestral minia¬tures that are of absolute mastery in invention, sound and structure.’ The overall five-movement form of the Sinfonietta has been likened at various times to a ‘suite’ (by Helfert and others), a ‘divertimento’ (by Hollander), and even a ‘symphony’ (by Janáček himself in a letter to his wife). These attempts to redefine or explain the title demonstrate how difficult it is to pin any conventional genre description on this highly original structure. In the published score, seen through the press by the composer, the movement titles have no programmatic designations, underlining Hollander's point about the composer moving away from any specific non-musical stimulus:

• I. Allegretto

• II. Andante

• III. Moderato

• IV. Allegretto

• V. Andante con moto [Allegro]

The Písek, Sokol and Brno inspirations, all discussed at length in Chapter 1, were of great significance for Janáček himself, but no mention of them is to be found in his manuscript or in the editions published in his lifetime.

Near the end of the twelfth-century Pamplona Illustrated Bible, there is a picture sometimes called the ‘Crowd of the Damned’ (Fig. 1). It is an illustration of countless souls waiting, patiently, it seems, for judgement. Taking up almost the full page in its manuscript, it is as ‘visually spare and unpretentiously rendered’ as the other scenes from the Old and New Testaments and various saints’ lives that are depicted there.1 The image is repetitive; many of the figures’ features (such as their rather bulbous hairstyles) are reproduced identically, over and over, and one has the sense that the illustrator would be fine with the charge of quantity over quality. In this, the image is reminiscent of many other medieval depictions of large groups, like the crowds of saints that can be found in Books of Hours, or the masses of carved sculptures that adorn cathedral chancels and lintels.2 But spend enough time looking at the people in the ‘Crowd of the Damned’, and one begins to see that the sea of sameness is punctuated sporadically, here and there, with a distinctive difference: a figure looks to the side; hair falls over a few foreheads; there are various styles of beards and personal grooming. There is no narrative need to distinguish between these figures (the point is not who they are, simply that they are many, and they are damned), but a sporadic individuality emerges nonetheless through the subtleties of distinction scattered through the crowd.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Americanah continues the exploration of the complications of return to the migrant's homeland. The novel instantiates the possibilities that return migration affords both the returned migrants and the society to which they returned. The chapter predicates this possibility on the construct of the new hybridity that argues for a fusion of the migrant's experience abroad with the potential for transformation at home. I argue that when the worldliness of the returned migrant is combined with the transformative potential of the homeland, return is meaningful, even if complicated.

Americanah is crucial for my argument of return because it explores all three phases of the migration process—flight, arrival, and return. I focus on the otherness of the migrant to analyze the challenges to African migration as justification for return. This chapter has two main parts. In the first, I examine precarity as a necessary reason for return by analyzing the experiences of Ifemelu and Obinze in America and Nigeria, respectively. In the second, I assess their successes upon return through exploring the construct of the new hybridity, while also pointing out the challenges. Return makes possible the construction of a hybridized identity that is crucial to transforming individuals and society. I also include sections of the novel for examination where integration encounters obstacles and barriers.

Book II gives a legalistic veneer to the entire poem when Gower labels it, in the prose headnote, a libellus, a word which means both “little book” and a petition entered to initiate a lawsuit in an ecclesiastical court. Gower calls upon the outcry of the vox populi (the people's voice) to sustain his complaint, which is based on the violation of religious and moral values that in his view has led to the present deplorable state of circumstances. Prior to Gower, vox populi has an obscure but apparently lengthy non-biblical history linking it as a commonplace equivalent to vox dei. Although the earliest documented appearance known of the two together is in a letter from Alcuin to Charlemagne dated ca. 800, its origins are doubtless earlier. Closer to Gower's time, Canon 8 (Qualiter et quando) of the Fourth Lateran Council (1215), for instance, explains its authority as a component of inquisitorial procedure in response to widely circulated accounts of clerical abuse:

Ex quibus auctoritatibus manifeste probatur, quod non solum cum subditus, verum etiam cum praelatus excedit, si per clamorem et famam ad aures superioris pervenerit, non quidem a malevolis et maledicis, sed a providis et honestis, nec semel tantum, sed saepe, quod clamor innuit et diffamatio manifestat, debet coram ecclesiae senioribus veritatem diligentius perscrutari.

Bianca Cappello (Venice 1548–October 20, 1587) brought Venetian sixteenth-century fashion to Florence through her elevation to Grand Duchess following her marriage to Francesco I de’ Medici, Grand Duke of Florence, in April 1578, following the demise of Johanna of Austria, Francesco's first wife. Bianca, with Isabella de’ Medici and Eleonora of Toledo, wife of Cosimo I de’ Medici, first Grand Duke of Florence, were known as the “Three Graces” of Florence. Eleonora's style, imported from the Spanish and Neapolitan courts, introduced a type of grandeur in dress well-documented in the portraits of her by Bronzino. In contrast, Bianca Cappello based her fashions on the Venetian opulence of textiles and the Cypriot court style of Caterina Cornaro, Queen of Cyprus (1468–89), whose garments were copied and borrowed for Venetian state weddings. This essay focuses on how Bianca's adoption of Venetian and Cypriot designs influenced the manner of Florentine women's dress as evident in state portraits, such as by Alessandro Allori (fig. 1) and Scipione Pulzone (fig. 2).

Bianca's first husband, a Florentine bank clerk, was made the Keeper of the Wardrobe to the Grand Duke through Bianca's connection to Francesco I. Her installation in a casino near the Medici estate Villa Pratolino, ensured her inclusion in the Medici ducal court life, although clandestine. Once the relationship between Bianca and Francesco de’ Medici was established, Francesco had a palazzo built by Bernardo Buontalenti, 1570–4 at 26 via Maggio in Florence, near the Ponte Vecchio.

Setting a Pattern: an introduction

In 1325, the English monarchy faced a crisis, at the heart of which was the problem of the foreignness of the queen. After years of political corruption, mismanagement of aggrieved barons, military losses, and overt preferential treatment for his favourites(/lovers), Edward II's reign was finally challenged by the rebellion staged by his wife, Isabella of France (b. 1296, d. 1358). The daughter of Philip IV of France and sister to the following three reigning French monarchs, Isabella's position between the French and English crowns highlighted the powerful mediating, or destabilising, potential of foreign queens in English politics during her time as consort and regent from 1308 to 1330.1 Her links to the French throne were seen as carrying both dynastic and political value, and she was chosen multiple times to intercede with the French king on behalf of her husband.

However, these links to France were eventually also seen as potentially dividing her allegiances: in 1325, during a period of increasing conflict with France over the governance of Gascony, Edward responded to the political tensions by seizing the lands and holdings of French persons residing in England – including his own wife. Reacting to the perceived threat of Isabella's Frenchness and the risk that her natal relationships might outweigh her marital loyalties, Edward gave Isabella's lands – and their children – into the care of his favourite, Hugh Despenser the Younger.2

Te room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was Spawning snow and pink roses against it Soundlessly collateral and incompatible: World is suddener than we fancy it.

World is crazier and more of it than we think, Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion A tangerine and spit the pips and feel Te drunkenness of things being various.

And the fre fames with a bubbling sound for world Is more spiteful and gay than one supposes – On the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palms of one's hands – Tere is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses.

Louis McNeice, ‘Snow’

While there is no wrong time or place to be reading Louis MacNeice, my quotation here of ‘Snow’ has its immediate purposes. It is a poem that has a lot more to do with looking at Middle English manuscripts than one might think, and especially one like the Auchinleck, which contains such a variety of things. MacNeice's ‘Snow’ invites us to rethink, and to wonder at, so simple a concept as a ‘room’ – both as a place to be, and as a unit of containment – and does so in a way that might help us approach Sir Tristrem's presence in the Auchinleck manuscript, and hopefully to appreciate the poem, and the codex which contains it, in their own particularity and in the unique confguration of practices that makes them historically inseparable.

Te room in MacNeice's poem, before the poet renders it inseparable from the objects and impressions it contains (or fails to contain), is an ordinary space, and an ordinary idea.

Numerous publications in recent years have reconsidered the role of pastoralism in English music of the early twentieth century, calling into question its (mis-)identification as an escapist, patriotic, or a-historical mode. Of particular interest are works in which composers turned to pastoral settings or modes to address themes of morbidity, pain, isolation, and the grotesque.1 These reassessments have revealed traditional interpretations of pastoralism, landscape, and Englishness in music to be increasingly problematic. John Ireland has often been identified with a wave of early twentieth-century English pastoralism, but the focus of commentators has primarily been on his popular short-form works, which show only one aspect of the composer's pastoral character, often associated with the secondary theme of nationalism that was only pronounced in Ireland's music during the 1910s as a consequence of the First World War.

Ireland's Legend for piano and orchestra has long been associated with the landscape of the Sussex Downs, which Ireland claimed to have played a central part of its inspiration. His friend the writer Jocelyn Brooke summarized the standard account of Legend's origins:

“Viera zajisté jest z slyšenie a slyšenie skrze slovo Kristovo” (Truly, faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ). A print from 1493 includes this translation by Václav Koranda the Younger (at that time already a former administrator of the Utraquist Church in Bohemia) of a line from the apostle Paul's epistle to the Romans. The quotation encapsulates the entire intellectual principle underlying the existence of chant in the Czech language, which relates more or less closely to liturgical practice in the Czech lands as a whole; it emphasizes performative action, the educational nature of the imparted word, and the active role of its lay recipients. For Koranda, the cited verse is a central argument for a wide-ranging defense of the use of Czech in sacred contexts, which becomes an intellectual keystone between Hussite demands for vernacularization of the liturgy and the development of this practice in the sixteenth century.

For medieval thought, the word, transmitted aloud and accompanied by visual or other elements, is of fundamental significance, for it involves a manifestation, or even the very incarnation, of what is heard—“verbum caro factum est.” Any study of medieval musico-literary culture therefore has to reckon with the tension between “performance” and the written word. Moreover, in the case of Czech ecclesiastical chant of the late fifteenth century, we are dealing with a repertory that exists to the side of the main corpus of music for the liturgy and is just beginning to develop and find its place in church practice. The problem of the relationship between performance and written text shows up already in cursory reviews of the source material and subsequent interpretations by scholars.

Smack goes my pussy. Smack, smack, when she feels good and can spread out. When she feels safe and knows that she still has untold thousands of orgasms ahead of her. And, until then, my pussy lips will continue to flutter and thrive without hiding or forcing themselves to conform to any norms.

—Reyhan Şahin, a.k.a Lady Bitch Ray, “Sex”

Introduction

Few readers would be surprised to learn that a 2020 survey of thirty thousand German rap songs reported a prevalence of strong sexist and anti-feminist lyrics. The songs and artists were chosen based on hip-hop charts from approximately 1995 to 2019 and relied on a list of three hundred keywords such as “Bitch,” Hure (whore), and Fotze (cunt) to analyze the texts. But while such phrases may seem expected, the rap duo with the most anti-feminist lyrics per song may come as a surprise: the hiphop duo SXTN, active from 2014 to 2019, was found to have the most sexist content per song. Why is that surprising? Because the duo is composed of two women. Nura Habib Omer and Juju (Judith Wessendorf) are of Eritrean and Moroccan descent, respectively, and together have created a body of work with strong anti-racist and female empowerment themes expressed in the aggressively “vulgar” and often angry language of male-dominated German hip-hop. While SXTN uses similar tools to their male counterparts, they do so strategically to disrupt the intersecting nexus of sexist and racist narratives and thereby reclaim sexual agency.

11.1 Introduction

Amlaíb mac Gothbrith's death in 941 was, in retrospect, a turning point: he is the last Dubliner whose obit contains a version of the formula rí Dubgall ocus Finngall, denoting something like king of York and overking of Dublin. Subsequently, his cousin Amlaíb Cúarán mac Sitriuca reigned at York, more or less precariously, for periods in the 940s and 950s. Amlaíb Cúarán's second expulsion from York in 952 was followed two years later by absorption of Northumbria and York into the kingdom of England. Amlaíb Cúarán, for the rest of his long career, was preoccupied with Dublin, Ireland and the Norwegian Insular Viking zone. He presided over a contraction of Dublin's political influence. Not only were his best efforts to secure York – the ‘jewel in the crown’ of his ‘imperial’ predecessors – unavailing; Dublin's influence at Waterford and Limerick evaporated, as these became, in differing degrees, apanages of Munster kings. A Dublin foothold in east Ulster, evident in the 920s and 930s, is not documented under Amlaíb Cúarán. (See Fig. 11.1 for locations in Ireland.) As he struggled and failed to hold York, c. 950, Dublin played a key role in the politics of the Uí Néill. (See Fig. 11.2 for locations in Britain.) The shifting alliances that this produced are reminiscent of the third quarter of the ninth century, the era of Amlaíb and Ímar. Here too, however, Dublin's power ultimately declined.

Limerick leaders seemingly had included renegade descendants of Ímar, through his son Bárid (d. 881), fuelling rivalry with Dublin in the 920s and 930s.

Reverend Sir,

I am favour’d with two Packets from you, which came to Town, while I was at Tunbridge Wells in Kent during the Recess of the Society, so that I had not the pleasure of seeing Mr. Greenwood, & of receiving from him by word of Mouth a Relation of your success in inoculating the Small Pox in New England, which otherwise I should have been glad to have done. I have read over your Case of the Small Pox inoculated, farther cleared, with a great deal of satisfaction. I must needs say, that not only the Publick, but in particular all our Faculty are obliged to you for your Condescension & pains you have taken in refuting the many weak Arguments brought against Inoculation. For certainly if those be of any force, & it be a Crime to incurr, or inflict a lesser natural Evil, or Danger, to avoid a greater, there must be an end of our Practice.

Your Book was Presented to the Royal Society at one of their late meetings, when I likewise read to them your several Letters on the Curiosa Americana, & I am commanded to return you the thanks of the Society for the one and the other.

It is clear that photography is a necessary and useful tool for recording Latin America. Additionally, it has shown that it is possible to use this technology to understand Latin America in specific and unique ways that other media do not offer. In fact, the photography record shows that such observations are not new (Figure 10.1). Indeed, the usefulness of this technology in understanding Latin America has been underlined on many occasions. This has been evident from its earliest days. Consider one example from the first years of photography in Western Europe as described by Frank Howard. As he writes about how photography can be used, he notes special advantages that it offers compared to fine art in a paper he delivered on June 7, 1853. This paper was published in the thirteenth edition of The Journal of The Photographic Society in Liverpool, England. It draws upon an example from the lives of two explorers in Central America to discuss when photography is the ideal technology to represent new knowledge coming out of the Global South.

Howard relates that a Mr. Stephens and a Mr. Catherwood had come across some lost cities in Central America. Mr. Catherwood sat down to sketch what he had found, while Mr. Stephens continued exploring the area. When he returned from exploring several hours later, Mr. Catherwood had not sketched anything. His explanation for failing to do so became incorporated in Howard's examples of occasions when photography is a preferred mode of representation. “He [Mr. Stephens] returned after some hours’ absence but to find Mr. Catherwood still seated in the same place, without having made the slightest commencement of his drawing; and in explanation he said that the forms were so different from anything he had ever seen before, that he did not know where to begin, and was completely bewildered” (Howard 156).

“Wordweaving” in Old English Texts

The textile metaphors discussed thus far have chiefly involved associations between women and the spinning and weaving of abstract elements: peace, death, creation, and fate. Another image related to textiles, the subject of this chapter, is that of “wordweaving,” or literary composition. The most direct equation of weaving and the composition of text in the Old English corpus comes in the poem Elene, as the poet-narrator Cynewulf says that, despite his aged mind and body, he wordcræftum wæf ond wundrum læs, / þragum þreodude ond geþanc reodode / nihtes nearwe “wove with wordskills and selected marvels, deliberated at times and searched out ideas carefully through the night” (1237–39a). Cynewulf elaborates on the nature and source of his inspiration: gife unscynde / mægencyning amæt ond on gemynd begeat, / torht ontynde, tidum gerymde, / bancofan onband, breostlocan onwand, / leoðucræft onleac “the Mighty King bestowed a glorious gift and anointed the intellect, revealed a brightness, prolonged the hours, unbound bodily frame, unwound the mind, unlocked poetic skill” (1246b–50a). Similar metaphors appear in the Anglo-Latin corpus as well.