What is nature? It is a question that evokes an answer that is both theoretical and practical. The early nineteenth century took up this question by investing time and human energy into unlocking the world of the unseen, which to many held the fullness of all knowledge, whether it be defined deep within the Earth or far into the sky. For example, the relatively new scientific profession of geology was taken up throughout Europe as a way to engage the on-going debates on the formation of the Earth. The debate began in the eighteenth century between the so-called ‘plutonists’, who believed that the rock bed of the Earth was formed by the deposit of lava from volcanoes, and the so-called ‘neptunists’, who believed that the land was formed by sediment from one enormous flood. The discussion became even more pronounced with the ability to carve paths deeper into the Earth, which allowed for a more adventurous and entrepreneurial group of individuals to discover the riches of such depths and force the debate to enter the industrial and economic realms. The mining industry thus became for the nineteenth century a fascination of wonder, commerce and scientific research, so much so that German philosophers would often use the mine as a metaphor to define the depths of the human soul and the progress of industrial society.

Equally far reaching, the celestial experiments of William Herschel (1738– 1822) and his sister Caroline (1750–1848) in the early 1800s brought increased attention to light rays that lie outside the visual spectrum, namely infrared radiation. By placing a mercury thermometer outside the red band of sunlight refracted from a prism in a dark room, William came to understand the existence of ‘invisible light’ and the possibility of ‘seeing’ beyond our own world.

Part I of this study was dedicated to the Musenhof as a site of polite sociability, republic of letters, and dynastic and reform patriotism. This chapter will continue the exploration of Musenhofe in the conglomerate state of Denmark. Eutin and Emkendorf, the case studies in this chapter, were significant centres of enlightenment and literary patronage in the Danish Schleswig and Holstein.

Eutin – one of the two ‘Weimars of the North’ was the summer residence of Friedrich August von Schleswig-Holstein-Gottorf (1711–85) and Peter Friedrich Ludwig von Schleswig-Holstein-Gottorf (1755–1829) in the eastern part of Holstein. These princely bishops, or Furstenbischofe, were descended from the old dynasty Schleswig-Holstein-Gottorf, with territories that belonged to both Denmark and the Holy Roman Empire. Linked by marriage to Russia, the dynasty produced Tsar Peter III Fjodorowitsch (Karl Peter Ulrich von Schleswig-Holstein-Gottorf, 1728–62) and his son Paul I (1754–1801), who governed the Gottorf territories in personal union with Russia until 1773. The treaty of Tsarkoye Selo granted Denmark the Gottorf territories, which therefore governed the whole of Holstein as part of its conglomerate state. Both Friedrich August and Peter Ludwig were prominent patrons of the arts. They attracted writers and philosophers to the court, many of whom had close connections to the Danish court and public sphere, but also to other German circles. The dramatist Heinrich Wilhelm von Gerstenberg (1737–1823), for instance, lived in Copenhagen between 1765 and 1775 and was part of the German circle around Klopstock. Gerstenberg and his fellow editors Christian Fleischer and Peter Kleen published Soroske Samling, a periodical that signified a true symbiosis of Danish-German culture in the conglomerate state.

In the past decade, new subfields of German-language comics have been growing. This includes comics by German artists that attempt to capture the trauma of migrant experiences in Germany. Recent examples include works such as Paula Bulling's Im Land der Frühaufsteher (In the Country of Early Risers, 2012) and Reinhard Kleist's Der Traum von Olympia: Die Geschichte von Samia Yusuf Omar (2015; An Olympic Dream: The Story of Samia Yusuf Omar, 2016) and Geschichten aus dem Grandhotel: Comic-Reportagen von Augsburger Design-Studierenden (Stories from the Grand Hotel: Comic Reports by Augsburg Design Students, 2016). These comics are often rendered in documentary style and portray the artist's experiences with displaced persons. In addition, in line with the international rise of the field of Graphic Medicine, health-related comics, often about lived experiences of illness and disability, have emerged in Germany, ranging from Daniela Schreiter's Schattenspringer series (2014, 2015, 2018; The World Beyond My Shadow, 2016), which deals with autism, to Regina Hofer's Blad (2018; Fat, 2021), which portrays experiences related to eating disorders and body image. In the last decade, fictional comics about nature and climate crisis have gained prominence in the national and international comics scene and include works such as Frauke Berger's Grün (Green, 2018).

… le colonisateur, qui, pour se donner bonne conscience, s’habitue à voir dans l’autre la bête, s’entraîne à le traiter en bête, tend objectivement à se transformer lui-même en bête.

Aimé Césaire, Discours sur la colonisation (1955: 8)

Our Share of Night (2022) by Mariana Enríquez is a fantasy horror novel that tells the story of a secret sect called the Order, which seeks to seize the knowledge of a god called the Darkness. To achieve this, they enslave powerful mediums from racialized lower classes who establish contact with the god. The turning point comes when the last medium, Juan, weary of a life of subjugation and exploitation, rises against his oppressors, embarking on a life-and-death battle to reclaim his freedom and protect his kin. Enríquez shapes a narrative that critically confronts the last Argentine dictatorship (1976–83), making the novel an allegorical fractal that can be viewed through a decolonial lens. From this perspective, both the Order and the dictatorship uphold European values of domination and colonialism, perpetuating the division between the white man and the Other by creating a Manichean separation between colonizers and the colonized, between domination and exploitation, and between bodies that exploit and bodies that are exploitable.

In this chapter, I analyze Our Share of Night as an allegory of colonialism. In doing so, I highlight the figures of the monster and the beast as metaphors for both the colonial and decolonial worlds, while examining the effects of internal colonialism.

Bibebant uinum, et laudabant deos suos aureos, et argenteos, et aereos, ferreos ligneosque et lapideos.

…auerei mihi uidentur dii: qui saeculari ratione compositi sunt; argentei: qui habent eloquii uenustatem et rhetorica arte constructi sunt; qui autem inferunt fabulas poetarum, et uesustis utuntur traditionibus, habentes inter se multam uel elegantiae uel stultitiae differentiam: isti uocantur aenei et ferrei; qui autem penitus inepta proponunt: lignei appellantur et lapidei.

They drank wine, and praised their gods of gold, silver, bronze, iron, wood, and stone.

Thus Jerome explains the idols worshipped at Belshazzar's Feast in Daniel 5:4. Like Belshazzar's dinner guests, we will meet many gods of gold and silver in this book. While this is a book about the Classical Greco-Roman gods in medieval Ireland, Jerome makes a natural starting place. Some of the Classical and Irish mythological figures that will be discussed in this study are interpreted, like Belshazzar's gods, as idols made of precious metals. Some are depicted as the rulers of lost Golden Ages, such as Saturn in Ovid's Metamorphoses. Others are god-like Otherworldly figures festooned with gems and shining garments.

In London in August 1709, a royal brief was ordered to pay for maintenance of the Palatines. Briefs took the form of letters, which were distributed to clergy and churchwardens, who countersigned the back keeping note of amounts raised. In theory, they were returned for approval by a master of the court of chancery within two months of completion of the collection. In practice, briefs were often issued during one visitation and collected during the following, meaning some time could elapse before all funds were deposited in chancery. From Elizabethan times to their abolition in 1828, a separate business had grown up around the collection of briefs for worthy causes, involving middlemen or undertakers, who worked on commission. Henry Walker of Staffordshire was the chief undertaker for briefs between 1686 and 1720. He offered to deal with the Palatine briefs at a reduced commission of 6d. per brief, as opposed to his normal rate of 9d. In August 1709 Walker gave a receipt on collection of 12,660 of 13,000 briefs printed by the queen's printer. The remaining 340 briefs were sent to be laid with weekly bills of mortality, whereby briefs were used at local level to assist those impacted by sudden death. Queen Anne's brief for the Palatines described how

the great wants and necessitys of several thousand Germans of the Protestant religion who being oppressed by the exactions of the French in their own country have fled for refuge into this Kingdom and must have perished had not Her Majestys generous and seasonable Bounty subsisted them.

An early medieval schoolboy used a stylus to sketch a crude image of his teacher in the margin of the Regula pastoralis he or his peers had annotated for sense. Frustrated students carved slashes in the margins of another copy from present-day western Germany, marking the ends of long Latin periods. Teachers from northeastern France erased errant student notes and doodles in yet other copies, while leaving the more useful ones for subsequent readers. And a scribe in a Welsh schoolroom untangled the Regula pastoralis with a developed system of symbolic marks, the same one grammarians used to construe the complex syntax of Latin auctores like Arator and Iuvencus. Meanwhile, King Alfred of Wessex, likely through a scribe recorder, bemoaned the fallen state of contemporary Latinity. He proposed a solution that featured the translation of this same text into the vernacular, and the education of eligible youths. Accounts of the Alfredian Pastoral Care have resisted framing the translation as consonant with Latin education – not unreasonably – but the proximity of these classroom copies of the RP to the clerics that supported the Alfredian intellectual programme allows us to do so no longer. Archbishop Plegmund and his Mercian companions, Asser of St David’s, John the Old Saxon, and Grimbald of Saint-Bertin, named either in the ‘Prose Preface’ to the Pastoral Care or in Asser's Vita Alfredi, represent some of the same locales – Wales, northeastern Francia and the Old Saxon language region – from which classroom copies of the RP emerge.

When Europeans arrived in the second half of the nineteenth century in the region, interlacustrine diplomacy had decades of experiences with handling incoming foreigners. Its rulers regarded Europeans, Khartoumers and coastal traders undoubtedly as foreigners. When Speke asked Rumanika how he saw the Europeans, he told him he had initially assumed monsters were arriving at his borders and he had to be very careful how to treat them. For Rumanika the Europeans were strange beings. What to expect from them, he could not know. How to handle them was a difficult question, they obviously did not know how to behave in diplomatic encounters. As these strange beings were approaching their borders, interlacustrine rulers used their diplomatic channels to obtain more information. Rumanika immediately sent his envoys to Mutesa, his powerful neighbour, to inform him about the arrival of Speke; Mutesa thereupon sent his emissaries to gather more information. Some years later, when British missionaries arrived in the late 1870s in the region, Mutesa asked neighbouring rulers of Busoga about their opinion regarding this new type of travellers. He later told the missionaries that he had initially regarded them as a danger to his throne. Mutesa's successor Mwanga was equally suspicious about the arrival of the first representatives of the IBEAC in Busoga in 1889. The kabaka invited Zibondo Namubongo Kisira, ruler of one of the Busoga principalities, to confer about the aims and schemes of the British.

To Dr. John Woodward

Sir,

The Philosophy of Generation, was become one Subject of a short Contemplation with your Servant.

I thought, Among the Vegetables, the least Part of that which we call, The Seed, is really so. The True Seed lies in so Little Room, that it is not visible to the Naked Eye: The Rest serves but as a Lodging for it, and for its most proper Nourishment and Expansion at the first Opening of it. But in that little Room there lies the whole Plant, in all the True Parts of it; which is afterwards evolved, and extended, and filled up with its Adventitious Nutriment, until it be carried as far as the original Stamina, are capable. And then, the Growth stops. But perhaps towards the Period of the Growth, so weak may be the Stamina, that according to the Strength of the Soyl in which the Plant is lodged, the Growth may be more or less, tho’ but a little, varied.

And then I thought, why may not the Seeds of Animals, have the like said of them? Yea, The Microscopical Inquisitions, have made it more than probable; That the True Seeds of Animals, floating in their Suitable Vehicle, have, lying in a Space much less than the Naked Eye can discern, the whole Bodies of the Animals, even to all their Nerves and Fibres:

which afterwards Grow as aforesaid, until their original Stamina can be no further carried out.

In an era that pre-dates modern health crazes such as Cross Fit and Pilates, and some time before modern medicine began drawing clear connections between certain activities and expected physical outcomes, how did active individuals understand the notion of exercise, and what were their goals? The question may seem simple, but it ties into a larger, complexly embattled notion of bodily normativity that pervaded all aspects of early modern life while also being undefined and arbitrary from example to example. In short, there is a more important gain to be had from studying early modern exercise routines: aspirational body goals point to important aspects of what early modern men and women wanted their embodiment to say about themselves. While it is certainly true that embodiment in the period was heavily filtered through the hyper-idealized neoclassical representations of the body, as seen in wide-ranging texts, from anatomical treatises to “discovery” narratives, those notions of embodiment were unattainable for many early moderns. While unattainability surely slowed early modern men from trying to conform to those standards about as much as it does to today's male workers-out, we can recover more practical aspirations related to exercise routines, and doing so tells us something about what, pragmatically, men hoped to achieve by working out. An examination of how early modern exercise built up the man's range-of-motion, with the larger goal of attaining the amorphous ideal of “effortless skill,” shows us how early modern men who possessed this type of embodiment relied on the metaphors that undergirded it as an avenue to self-fashioning.