Chapter 3 has sketched out Dorothea von Kurland's precarious personal and political life in the Duchy of Courland. In 1790, Peter von Biron tasked her with petitioning the court of Poland on behalf of Courland, nominally a vassal state of Poland but under threat from Russia. As Poland itself suffered internal conflicts, any settlement or alliance between Courland and Poland remained inconsequential. As a result of the Third Polish Partition in 1795, the Duchy of Courland fell to Russia. During these difficult times, Dorothea and her husband became increasingly estranged and the correspondence between the couple indicates a growing discord about the education and upbringing of their children. After Duke Peter abdicated in 1795, he left for the Duchy of Sagan (Żagań) in Silesia – a fief that he purchased in 1786.

In 1794, Johann Friedrich von Medem (1763–1838), Dorothea von Kurland's brother, bought the estates of Löbichau and Tannenfeld in the Duchy of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg for his sister, and transferred the property of Löbichau to her in 1796. The estate of Tannenfeld was let to Dorothea's then lover, Aleksander Benedykt Batowski (1760–1841), the Polish royal commissioner to the Duchy of Courland. As the manor house at Löbichau was partially destroyed by fire in 1766, von Kurland used the opportunity to rebuild and extend the house between 1798–1800 under the direction of the classical master builder and professor of architecture of Leipzig, Carl August Benjamin Siegel (1757–1832), financed by extensive loans in 1798 and 1800 which von Kurland had to take on. The gardens were designed in the contemporary fashion of English gardens with a small Comodienhaus amidst them.4 Kurland's general agent was Georg Gottlieb Leberecht von Hardenberg (1732–1822), the poet Novalis's uncle.

This chapter considers the reception of a text called the Tereoperica in the Old English medical corpus. The most substantial evidence for the reception of this text is a partial translation of it into the late Old English Peri didaxeon. The Peri didaxeon is significantly later than the other Old English medical texts discussed in Chapter 1, and most likely dates to the twelfth century. The text is also an outlier insofar as the earliest extant Latin witness of the text in England pre-dates the translation of the Peri didaxeon: London, BL, Sloane MS 2839 preserves the text known as the Tereoperica and most likely reached England before the Tereoperica was translated into English as the Peri didaxeon. This is the opposite trend we have observed in the preceding chapters of this book. The contention of this chapter is that, although the Tereoperica did not reach England until relatively late, probably the eleventh century, it nevertheless did leave a mark on the vernacular record in the form of Peri didaxeon.

Due to an abundance of similarities between the Tereoperica and the older pre-Gariopontean ensemble, the text has been suggested as a possible source for Bald's Leechbook. However, it was established in Chapter 4 that Bald's Leechbook is generally closer to the text of the pre-Gariopontean ensemble than either the so-called Practica Petrocelli Salernitani (i.e. the Tereoperica) or the Passionarius Galieni by Gariopontus of Salerno.

Agenda

Raids are of the essence of Viking activity, using Viking in the restricted sense of a pirate or marauder. In Ireland, such raids targeted churches especially. However, since the remarkable archaeological discoveries at Dublin and other cities and towns, beginning in the 1960s, accounts of the Vikings have cast them chiefly as pioneers of urban settlement in Ireland. A case has also been made for more widespread – including rural – settlement than was previously imagined. A dramatic impact on the economy of Gaelic Ireland has been attributed to increased circulation of silver mediated by Vikings, especially in the tenth century. Early pre-urban Viking bases – for which the term longphort has come to be used by many archaeologists as defining a monument type – have even been seen as having a trading as much as a raiding function. Towns and trade are widely seen as the enduring historical legacy of the Vikings to Ireland.

These assessments doubtless have merit, but it is a commonplace that contemporary preoccupations shape historical perception. Before the second half of the twentieth century, in an Ireland the prevailing ethos of which was nationalist and pious, Vikings were perceived chiefly as pagan assailants of Christian culture and as foreign invaders over whom, however, the Irish achieved a national and Christian triumph at the battle of Clontarf in 1014. Impressive new archaeological evidence and reassessed documentary evidence prompted, from the 1960s, a re-evaluation that is without doubt academically valid.

In 1780, the British Parliament tasked a group of experts with providing a clearer picture of state finances and uncovering malpractice in the fiscal offices. In the fifteen reports they laid before Parliament until 1787, these Commissioners for Examining the Public Accounts (CEPA) shifted the perception of administrative problems from isolated instances of corruption to a recognition of structural inadequacies. Where others had seen only individual offices and customary practices of accounting, the Commissioners defined offices in reference to a ‘system of economy’ that fulfilled the duties of state in order to further the public good. The Commissioners opened up a new perspective on the state by describing a system of offices and procedures that could and should be fundamentally reformed to fulfil the duties of state in a better and, ideally, cheaper way.

When reading the reports, the contrast between the Commissioners’ analysis of administrative issues and earlier sources compels attention. As a consequence, research literature has presented the Commissioners as heralds of modernity who created the principles of modern bureaucracy ex nihilo. A prime example for such an appraisal is John Binney's study of late eighteenth-century British public finance and administration.

For many people, life revolves around responsibility and compassion for their pets. Pets demonstrate an important human-animal relationship that exists across cultural borders. In this chapter, I investigate this relationship in two contemporary Spanish works of literature, Ana María Matute's short story, “Fausto” (1956), from her collection El tiempo, and Carlos Ruiz Zafón's novel, Marina (1999). In both works, the reader experiences a young girl accompanied by a pet cat. As Naama Harel underscores, “nonhuman animal figures in literature have been interpreted first and foremost allegorically, that is, as representing something else” (2020: 3). In these literary works, cats symbolize the sickness and death surrounding the protagonists, two young girls struggling in the post-Spanish Civil War and post-dictatorship era, respectively, in Spain. I have chosen these works as they both contribute to the literary trend focused on the social implications for Spaniards living in the second half of the twentieth century in Spain: a life filled with trauma from the past, political oppression, and economic devastation for many who were not in support of the regime. Indeed, Matute was writing during the dictatorship and Ruiz Zafón in the post-dictatorship era, which means that the latter author's work has not been subjected to the same scrutiny as the former, who wrote under the dictatorship's censorship policies. The authors’ personal experiences and opinions become evident in their respective works: Matute processing the events in real time and Ruiz Zafón as a means to recuperate the past. As Katherine O. Stafford notes, the death of Franco in 1975 allowed for authors to process the war and dictatorship within their works in a new way (2015: 133). Other scholars, such as Salvador Cardús i Ros (2000), Matthew John O’Neill (2011), and Sebastiaan Faber (2018), also reflect on the concepts of memory and trauma within Spanish society and literature, highlighting the trend that persists in the twenty-first century.

Semper ubi sub ubi is an old joke among Latin students that translates as “always where under where,” but is, of course, heard as “always wear underwear.” It is a cute joke and recalls the motherly adage that one should always wear clean underwear in case of an accident. Embedded in such sayings are powerful cultural ideas about protection, modesty, and cleanliness—all of which can be afforded to an individual through the wearing of undergarments.

Undergarments, despite being an often humble and usually hidden piece of apparel, are foundational, both physically and ideologically. Underwear worn by male-presenting figures (referred to as braies or braga in French, Italian, English, and Spanish medieval literature) appears in both secular and sacred images. By focusing on a selection of Northern European illuminations and panel paintings created between 1140 and 1450, I examine the metonymic nature of visual representations of braies: underwear as a stand-in for the body and ideas about the body.

The verism predominant in Northern European images also allows for a close examination of stylistic as well as ideological evolutions of braies as they appear on depictions of male figures. The garment reveals and reinforces ideas of constructed masculinity, male prowess, cleanliness, sanctity, shame, and lack of shame. Braies also serve to emphasize the voyeuristic nature of looking at images: the viewer, gazing at scantily clad men, can encounter didactic lessons on humility, admire the outline of shapely buttocks, or both.

As it emerged at the end of the eleventh century, the chronicle tradition of Eusebius–Jerome and Sigebert of Gembloux hinged on the meaningful inter¬action between chronographia and political order. The historiographical practice of adding to these chronicles was not a neutral act, exhausting itself in passively supplying monastic, regional or national history to the universal framework devised by Sigebert. My study has questioned such a tenet by taking seriously the ideological discourse of universal history-writing in the tradition of Eusebius–Jerome and Sigebert, and investigating the efforts that twelfth-century Norman chroniclers made in acquiring, revising and distributing their works specifically as continuations of this chronicle tradition. The politics of time underpinning this authoritative tradition functioned within Christian exegetical thinking to legitimise the providential ebb and flow of empires. However, once the imperial character was partly reduced, the ideological bundle connecting chronographia and political order became available to twelfth-century Norman chroniclers who wrote in the political landscape dominated by Henry II. On the one hand, chroniclers like Robert of Torigni, along with the anonymous authors of Ourscamp and Mortemer, approached the chronicle tradition to reconstruct Norman, English and British history as a unitary past for the Angevin dynasty in Normandy and England. On the other, the Savigny chronicler and, more explicitly, John of Salisbury acknowledged the political impact of Robert's and Sigebert's chronicles respectively and devised radical revisions. What all these writers have in common is active engagement with the texts and, thus, with the ideological implications of Eusebius–Jerome's and Sigebert's chronicles. By circulating revised, abridged and interpolated continuations of Eusebius–Jerome and Sigebert, chroniclers acquired and, moreover, propagated political narratives of Salvation history that supported their specific designs.

Birgit Weyhe is a key figure in contemporary German-language comics and her work has sparked a number of conversations on race and representation in recent years. Her graphic novels include Ich weiß (2008), Im Himmel ist Jahrmarkt (2013), Madgermanes (2016), and German Calendar No December (2019). Dr. Priscilla Layne is a Black professor of German at the University of North Carolina. This following conversation between Weyhe and Layne took place in the Goethe-Institute Montreal on October 6, 2023, as part of the GSA Comics Studies Network's programming at the 47th Annual Conference of the German Studies Association in Montreal, Canada. The hybrid discussion, which was moderated by comics scholar and UBC professor Dr. Biz Nijdam, provides insights into the lives of these two women, their lived experiences, and how they came to work together on a comic about Layne's life as a Black woman living and working in predominantly White spaces. It also sheds light on Weyhe's creative process and issues around race and representation in her comics.

This hybrid public event was cosponsored by the Goethe-Institut Montreal, the German Studies Association's Comics Studies Network, and the UBC Comics Studies Cluster. Weyhe and Nijdam participated on site in Montreal and Layne participated via Zoom from Italy.

Introductory Remarks by Biz Nijdam

Biz Nijdam: In 2018, Birgit Weyhe joined a room of German Comics scholars at a GSA panel on diversity and inclusion in German-language comics to bear witness to a presentation that openly criticized her graphic novel Madgermanes for its representation of Blackness.

Comparison of the Instrumentation on the Urtext Scores of Gustav Holst’s Original Military Band Works

No one seeing or reading Friedrich Durrenmatt's tragicomedy Der Besuch der alten Dame (The Visit of the Old Lady, 1956; usually translated into English as The Visit) would dispute that Claire Zachanassian, the “old lady” of the play's title, is one angry woman. The play is now almost seventy years old—older than Claire in the play—and dates back to a time long before women felt they could speak openly about men's sexual misbehaviors. This “old lady” of a play returns repeatedly and seems to be aging quite gracefully (unlike the character of Claire). One might ask why this particular work continues to hold the stage (and screen) since its main characters are neither young nor beautiful nor, perhaps more important, particularly admirable; it may, of course, be precisely their unsavory nature that continues to fascinate us. At different times over the years since the play premiered, the various themes that Durrenmatt sounded in this work have been the subject of heated debates, even causes célèbres, and, depending on the particular historical moment, the play and characters get different emphases in direction; thus the play continues to remain thoroughly timely and relevant, and allows us to see the characters through varied lenses.

The Tragicomedy, Then and Now

When Friedrich Durrenmatt created his masterpiece, he was thirty-five years old and had already realized some success as an author and playwright. But his real breakthrough onto the international stage came with the creation of Claire and the townsfolk of Gullen.

Introduction

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries tendencies that were already visible in earlier times continued: the role of oligarchies within the water authorities was strengthened; there was trust within the water authorities, but not between them. Localism, as Dorothy Summers termed it, was rampant. This tended to lead to stagnation in institutional development. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, for instance, Friesland was one of the last regions to introduce monetisation of dike maintenance while other regions stuck to maintenance in kind. Although some changes occurred in the eighteenth century, real change came mostly in the nineteenth. That change came largely from outside through both state intervention and, as a result of the Industrial Revolution, the introduction of the steam pump, which would cause a revolution in water management.

Following a general introduction and a survey of land reclamation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries this chapter will discuss six case studies that will illuminate the problems and opportunities confronting the North Sea Lowlands in this period: the slow and tortuous introduction of monetisation of water management in parts of the Netherlands and north-west Germany; the introduction of Internal Drainage Boards, and later the steam engine, in the English fenlands; the struggle against deteriorating drainage in the Frisian fenlands; the consequences of and response to the devastating floods of 1715 and 1717; and the development of water management in the Dutch province of Groningen. These case studies confirm S. R. Epstein's view that pre-modern states did not possess undivided sovereignty as they were confronted with groups and bodies claiming to have legal privileges, which were defended fiercely against the state and any other party.

In 1804, the Commissioners of Naval Inquiry triggered a scandal that shook the second Pitt ministry to its foundations. This scandal concerned Pitt's closest political companion Henry Dundas, now Viscount Melville. During his long tenure as Treasurer of the Navy (1783–1800), Dundas had not only left most of the duties to his deputy Alexander Trotter (1750–1830), but also tolerated the fact that Trotter systematically ignored basic regulations of the office. Trotter channelled the immense sums he accounted for through a private bank account, used the money to speculate in the stock market, and grew rich on the interest. Dundas had reformed the Treasurership of the Navy in 1785 by following the model of Burke's similar reform of the Army Paymastership. The inquiry revealed that Dundas had consistently disregarded the rules, which he himself had introduced. As the inquiry widened, the Commissioners of Naval Inquiry unearthed evidence suggesting that Pitt had similarly ignored reform legislation by systematically misappropriating money from the Civil List and permitting the Civil List to amass enormous debts without parliamentary approval. The findings of the inquiry incited new debates on economical reform issues in Parliament. The debates once again revolved around corruption, secret influence, and ministerial extravagance. The lines of attack, which the Whig opposition had developed in the 1760s, were very much alive half a century later. A decade after the Hastings impeachment, Parliament sat once again in judgement over a prominent politician. Starting with the Melville impeachment, moral outrage fuelled a renewed interest in administrative reform that attempted to root out individual wrongdoers and submit them to exemplary punishment.

Stitched together from her various guises within the corpus of Arthurian literature, Sir Thomas Malory's Gwenyvere is expected to perform multiple roles in the Morte Darthur. Often called contradictory in nature, her characterisations adhere to contemporary stereotypes that either villainised or idealised women as ‘Jezebels, who were overmighty viragos, adulterous wives, and wicked enchantresses, or Virgin Marys, who were supportive wives and mothers, and modest intercessors and peacemakers’. Malory's Morte bears remnants of many of the ancestral versions of Gwenyvere found in his source material, and tries to reconcile a textual history rife with contradictory depictions of Arthur, his queen, and women in general. Malory's Gwenyvere is an exemplary queen and, adultery aside, a loyal and obedient wife: as Helen Cooper notes, she ‘never acts publicly against the king’. She is the quintessential female lover of a chivalric romance, and she is the emotional woman, ruled by her passions rather than her mind.

Women's superlative – or supernatural – medical skill is one of the most common types of feminine power associated with magic in Middle English romance, and therefore a useful starting point for this study of gender and genre's intertextual accumulation of meaning and moral weight. Because romance's heroes regularly suffer grisly wounds – grave enough to demonstrate the extremity of their heroic prowess – the women who heal them must therefore be equally extraordinarily skilful. Their abilities, which walk the line between medicine and magic, are registered as benign within the structure of the genre. However, a close and intertextual examination reveals ways in which they may be sites of potential tension, generated by the complicated relationship between women's associations with medicine and also poison and the genre's uneasy relationship with the realities of social prohibitions against women's professional medical practice. Taking the unusually skilled and visible versions of the female-healer character type found in the Middle English Tristan texts – the fourteenth-century verse Sir Tristrem and Thomas Malory's fifteenth-century ‘Book of Sir Tristram de Lyones’ – as case studies, we may observe the way a narrow textual corpus transforms the role of the healing woman over time, responding to the changing cultural attitudes about women's medical authority.

The Tristan legend was one of the most popular romance narratives in the twelfth to fifteenth centuries, with a broad multilingual corpus of surviving texts. The two distinct (though related) branches of the tradition each trace back to fragmentary twelfth-century Old French texts, by Béroul and Thomas of Britain respectively, with closely related recensions in German and Old Norse as well as English.