Albeit here numbered as Thirteenth Century England XIX, to avoid confusion over its appearance ahead of its immediate predecessor in this series, this, in reality the twentieth such conference, took place in Heidelberg, in mid-September 2023, as ‘England and Germany: Economic, Social and Personal Connections and Comparisons’. This was the first time in its distinguished history that the Thirteenth Century Conference had travelled to Germany. Given the extent of Anglo-German entanglements across the reigns of the first five Plantagenet kings, the delay here was perhaps somewhat surprising. It is nevertheless easily explained. England remains the focus of the conference, for many years indeed known specifically as ‘Thirteenth Century England’. As most participants are based in the British Isles, English or Welsh universities have been its customary hosts. Not until 2009 did the conference travel overseas. Inevitably this was to Paris, in commemoration of the Treaty of 1259 in its 750th anniversary year. Not for a further fifteen years did an opportunity arise to transpose the event to Germany. This occurred almost by accident, as a result of a phone call between Jörg Peltzer and Andrew Spencer (at that time joint-host during the conference's stint in Cambridge). As a result, the fifth of the bi-annual conferences, originally scheduled for Cambridge in 2023, instead migrated from the Cam to the banks of the Neckar, and from Fenland flatness to the magnificently elevated Odenwald.

Heidelberg has a distinguished tradition of research into the history of thirteenth-century England and France.

This chapter discusses how photography can help us observe the place of children in Latin American society. Even though children make up a significant percentage of the Latin American population, they are particularly absent from the official records (Rocha 15, Hecht 5). With important exceptions, most children will normally be obliged to wait until they are grown up to see if their presence will be noted in most social and historical records (Guy 139–40). As observed by John Mraz and other historians, children, women, and the marginal have a greater presence in the photographic record of society than in the written one (299). For that same reason, photographs of children are an excellent way to reveal their presence in society (Heidelberger 1125).

The presence of children in the photographic record is an important area to consider. As Edmundo Desnoes notes in “Six Stations of the Latino American Via Crucis,” children are a major focus of Latin American photography. While Desnoes explains that in his view children represent authenticity, innocence, and the future (also true of all children globally) (11), he does not expound upon the Latin American photographers that focus on them in their visual essays. Neither does he further develop his core ideas on children and the future. This chapter will add nuance and examples to the idea that seeing children as hope and the future is one of the ways in which children are depicted in some of the visual essays by key Latin American photographers. Additionally, this chapter will examine topics in Latin American photography that help us identify how some social challenges affect children and how portrayals of children help to break down misconceptions that have been promoted by Latin American intellectuals. This section will contemplate how visual evidence invites further reflection and offers new insights on these topics.

Looking back on the terrain just traversed, we recognize the point where our journey ended as the omphalos whence our journey began: the ginkgo tree. How could it possibly be otherwise? Like the levitating Paters floating between heaven and earth, we stand uneasily on an airy foundation, suspended always between two realms. In the “Epilogue” that marked the final stretch of our passage through Faust, we accompanied Andrew Jaszi on a contemplative walk that led us into the umbra, a somber aporia where darkness waits hopingly upon some “distant morning,” not knowing if or when it might ever arrive. In Jaszi's autobiographical fragment it was the glimmering stars, “infinitely remote and beyond comprehension,” that provided this same, barest, beacon of hope. Dark and light, hope and despair, permanence and change, dream and reality, unity and separation: The complementary contrarieties that establish the contextual space for anything that is could be multiplied endlessly. But it's darkness which in Andrew Jaszi's vision seems to predominate here at the end, just as it did in the penultimate scenes of Goethe's Faust.

INTRODUCTION

This document is a speech made in the court of justiciary by an advocate defending an accused witch. It was published in 1672 by its author, Sir George Mackenzie of Rosehaugh, as one of a collection of his ‘pleadings’ or speeches in court.

During his career, Mackenzie engaged with the crime of witchcraft in three distinct roles: as a judge, as a defence advocate, and eventually as king's advocate, in charge of the legal system as a whole. His earliest and formative witchcraft role was as a judge, and this should briefly be noted. He was a justice depute between 25 July 1661 and 8 December 1663, responsible for acting as a judge in criminal trials and in particular witchcraft trials. His tenure of office coincided with the largest and last of Scotland's national witchcraft panics, beginning in April 1661 and continuing until it faded slowly during the spring and summer of 1662.

Mackenzie's biographer Andrew Lang, who outlined his career at this point, assumed that he already held the sceptical view of witchcraft that he urged in his later writings. Lang quoted a letter by Mackenzie boasting of having ‘killd hundreths’ and called it ‘unintelligible’, but it seems clear that Mackenzie was referring to convicted witches whom he had sentenced. The number of his death sentences may have been significant, even if ‘hundreths’ was an exaggeration. Mackenzie may well have been influenced by witnessing judicial excesses during the 1661–2 panic, and most of the sceptical anecdotes that he later related about particular witches probably arose from his experiences at this time.

Book III opens with a prose headnote once intended, apparently, as a transition from the dream and the voice of Book I, offering further evidence of Gower's composition process. The headnote is followed by another prologue that briefly summarizes the second book's argument against Fortune, and reasserts the legalistic tone of the poem by terming it a libella (l. 13). What follows thus suggests this as the point at which Gower began writing. The prologue's second paragraph introduces the notion of the three estates that will be the subject of this and the ensuing three books, followed once again by a humility topos not unlike that found in Book II. The reader is again asked to overlook the author's inadequacies, God's assistance is again summoned to the work, which is again sent forth into the world with the author's hope for its acceptance, Christ is called upon once again to be the poem's guarantor, and – in a gesture rooted in classical metaphor – the poet casts off his mooring lines and apprehensively sets sail. Perhaps not quite as detailed as the second Book's prologue, this one nevertheless touches all the requisite bases and could just as well stand as the poem's actual beginning, which at an early stage of development it was no doubt meant to be.

The subject matter of Book III is the secular clergy. Its first concern is the prelates – the cardinals, archbishops, bishops, certain deacons and even sub-deacons – who are considered the princes of the Church.

Sir.

For some very good Reasons, which yet there is no need of mentioning, I have addressed certain Letters to you; and joyn’d you with my Excellent friend Dr. John Woodward in a small Collection of Curiosa Americana, to the making whereof I devoted near a fortnight a Little before the sailing of the fleet from hence, as far as my many other Employments would give me Leave.

I could have been glad I could have provided a Richer Entertainment for you; But your Candour will accept of these mean things because they were the best, that I could in so little time as I could allow myself to be master of. I despair not that if I live, I may annually entertain you with something or other from these parts of the World that a Secretary of the Royal Society may judge it proper to take some notice of. And tho’ I cannot presume so much upon my own merits as to dream of being thought worthy to be admitted a member of that more than illustrious Body but rather to belong to the order of the fratres Ignorantiae, yet I will here venture to subscribe the Promise which your Candidates make at their admission; That I will Endeavor to promote the good of the Royal Society of London for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge.

The conflation of the secular and spiritual aspects of the presentation of Charlemagne in the chansons de geste is evident from the earliest surviving poem in which he appears and recurs in a recognizably similar form in the poetic accounts of his death and burial. Karl-Heinz Bender makes the prototype of the Oxford manuscript of the Chanson de Roland, which he dates to the late eleventh century, the first text in which Charlemagne is specifically ‘God's elect’. In the Oxford manuscript of the Chanson de Roland he appears in majesty at the start of the council scene in which Blancandrin and the Saracen emissaries from Marsile approach him. He is seen seated on a golden throne, under a pine tree and next to an eglantine bush. Although the poet is not precise about its type, the pine tree may be of the Mediterranean kind: an umbrella pine offering shelter and acting as a form of awning over a dais. However, its broader anthropological significance is in the straightness of its trunk acting as a ‘polar’ link between earth and heaven. The eglantine or wild rose has a more immediate Christian significance, because of its symbolic association with the Virgin Mary. Such is the emperor's personal presence, conflated from his secular imperial and spiritual persona, that no one coming to his court has to ask who or where the king is. This is in sharp contrast to the other iconic king, Arthur, who seems to demonstrate a lack of self-evident kingliness.

Each chapter of this book has read the motifs of individual character types within their sub-generic spaces, observing that their reiterations generate productive tension for our reading of gender and genre structures of romance. My focus has been on distinct sub-genres rather than the bleed between them, the broad, generic intertextual resonances that link one magical woman to another. But more often than not, romance folds these patterns into each other, rendering modern scholarship's divisions between one character and another anachronisms; the modern impulse to disambiguate texts and contexts may therefore occlude meaning found in this intertextually rich space. This book proposes a reparative approach to this trend by asking: what happens if we look at broad, genre-wide expectations of magical femininity in romance by reading across textual and narrative borders? How might the disparate points of tension, anticipation, and revelation coalesce when read intertextually? One route through this broad web of narrative influences and connections is to follow the footsteps of a single character throughout her different incarnations – and for this, there is none more appropriate, nor generically revealing, than Morgan le Fay.

Of all romance's characters that ought, by virtue of their familiarity, to be read through anticipation and expectation, perhaps the most obvious is Morgan le Fay. Viewed by modern scholarship and popular medievalism alike as romance's quintessential magical woman, Morgan embodies aspects of all the previously discussed models of magical femininity in her various iterations – healer, exotic queen, fairy mistress, monster-mother – and her character synthesises many of the generic motifs and points of expectation discussed throughout the previous chapters. Morgan therefore serves as a cipher for romance's meditations on magical women's power and an embodiment of the tensions and desires these characters reflect.

The oratorio Tikkun Ḥatzot (Midnight Vigil) by Mordecai Seter (1914– 1997), setting a libretto compiled by the poet and novelist Mordecai Tabib (1910–1979), was hailed as an unprecedented masterpiece of Israeli art music at its premiere in 1963, and its critical stature has only risen in subsequent years. It is an ambitiously large-scale work, calling for one soloist, three mixed choirs—often in dialogue with each other—and a large orchestra, sparingly and strategically used to enhance dramatic climaxes. The work presents an inner psychological drama within the soul of one individual (the Worshipper) during a solitary prayer vigil at an empty synagogue. As he performs the Kabbalistic rite known as the midnight vigil, the Worshipper experiences a series of visions—starting with the tribulations of exile and culminating in the promised salvation of the Jewish people and their celebrations at the rebuilt Temple in Jerusalem. The work ends as the Worshipper's visions fade, and he returns to reality as the congregation enters the synagogue to begin the morning prayers.

The work presents a powerful narrative, rising from the depths of grief and despair to the heights of triumphant joy. These sensations are not just those of one individual; the Worshipper is clearly an archetype, a Jewish Everyman, whose visions represent the emotions that had stirred Jews through centuries of Diaspora and that continue to inspire Jews today, in Israel and in the Diaspora alike. Ronit Seter therefore suggested that the work “expresses (or even serves) the [Zionist] melting pot ideology, identifying the foundation of the State of Israel with the transition from slavery to salvation.”

The people who speak this language [i.e., Welsh], who read this literature, who own this history, who inherit these traditions, who venerate these names, who created and sustain these marvellous religious organisations, the people forming three fourths of the people of Wales – have they not a right to say to this small propertied class [i.e., the gentry] … We are the Welsh people and not you? This country is ours and not yours.

The Rev. Henry Richard's stirring 1868 speech to the electors of Merthyr and Aberdare encapsulated a powerful vision of Welsh nationhood embodied in the image of a Welsh-speaking, nonconformist and politically radical ‘gwerin’ populace. Responding to the influence that had been exerted by this rhetoric two generations later, the south Wales squire Herbert M. Vaughan lamented that, branded as ‘“aliens in birth, in religion, in politics and in language,” the Welsh gentry are ruled out as having any part in Wales as a nation’.

Padhraig Higgins notes of late eighteenth-century Ireland that public ‘celebrations and commemorations, with the rich array of symbols, imagery and gesture employed by participants, were important occasions for the expression of patriotic understandings of “the nation”’. This chapter analyses coming of age celebrations in Wales as comparable occasions through which Welsh and British identities and patriotism were expressed and negotiated.

A woman of letters

The fiction writer, playwright, and essayist Júlia Lopes de Almeida (1862– 1934) was one of the most important female Brazilian writers of her time; however, most historians of literature have forgotten her name for decades since her death. An active figure in the cultural scene both of the capital (Rio de Janeiro) and the state of São Paulo (the richest in the country), the writer worked with several periodicals, some of them aimed explicitly at women, others with a wider reach and more varied themes. Her published texts shared pages with renowned writers such as Machado de Assis (1839–1908), Artur Azevedo (1855–1908), and Carmen Dolores (1852–1910), all of whom were also fiction writers, playwrights, and chroniclers.

One of Almeida's most enduring collaborations was with O País (Rio de Janeiro, 1884–1934), a republican daily founded at a ‘time of intense political unrest’, which encompassed the anti-slavery and republican movements.2 Between 1884 and 1912, she had almost 500 fictional and non-fictional texts published in this newspaper: chronicles, letters, short stories, children's literature, and an epistolary novel. Her contributions were irregular at first, interspersed with long breaks, but later became a regular, weekly feature in the paper. Her texts were almost always printed on the front page; most were signed with her own name, and just over 100 were written under a pseudonym. The texts were often also reproduced by other periodicals, an indication of how well they were received.

In this chapter, we will analyse some of the confrontations and conflicts experienced by the writer in her efforts to remain an active intellectual in a markedly male environment.

Put on the spot tasked with developing an architectural concept for a Chinese fashion business on the grounds of an old warehouse in Berlin, Greta, the protagonist of Tatjana Turanskyj's film Eine flexible Frau (A Flexible Woman, 2010) launches into an absurd and convoluted speech riddled with empty phrases that echo the lingo of what Richard Florida has termed “the creative class.” In urgent need of employment, she stumbles and almost trips as she gives her jumbled pitch. Instead of trying to stay on task, Greta appears to choose to use her speech to convey her thinly disguised desperation, aggravation, and frustration. Her expression is one of veiled anger performed and perceived as craziness—madness.

After struggling to close the zipper on her dress, Ines Conradi, a business consultant and the main character in Maren Ade's 2016 film Toni Erdmann, spontaneously decides to host a birthday brunch with her colleagues at work as a “naked party,” claiming it is a team-building exercise. She opens the door naked for her surprised guests with her typical stern, almost angry-looking face. Nobody openly questions or confronts her, yet everyone seems deeply uncomfortable. Ines hosts the party naked, frustrated, and angry but also slightly amused and defiant.

Introduction

As legal rights concerning gender equity and reproductive rights have come under renewed attack in parts of the Global North, this essay provides reflections on women's longstanding fight for bodily autonomy and mental competency by highlighting a story that remains as relevant today as it was one hundred years ago. In 1922, four years after German women obtained the right to vote, Expressionist writer Bess Brenck- Kalischer (1878–1933) published her narrative “Die Knabin: Aus einem Brief” (The Boygirl: From a Letter). The story appeared as part of Die Mühle: Eine Kosmee (The Mill: A Cosmos), an avantgarde collection of twenty-six self-contained yet loosely connected episodes of Expressionist poetry and prose. The title of the narrative captures, to some extent, the very essence of Weimar Germany, a time generally known for its progressive stance on social and cultural norms, its loosening of traditional gender roles, and its experimentations with sexuality: As a feminization of the word “Knabe” (lad, youngling), the term “Knabin” typically refers to the “new” urban, educated and/or professional women in Weimar Germany who started blurring traditional gender lines by wearing more masculine clothes or cutting their hair short.