Scholarship about the Spanish invasion of Peru tends to focus on the agency of European actors in the colonial project. As a result, scholars see few windows into the criticism Indigenous people expressed about the coloniality of their lives. One such critique comes to us through the illustrated chronicle of an Indigenous man, Felipe Guamán Poma, whose Quechuan names mean falcon (Guaman) and puma (Poma) and who possessed mixed Indigenous ancestry, with an Incan mother and a Yarowilca father. The author-artist, whose chronicle is titled Primer Nueva Corónica y Buen Gobierno (c. 1615), had hoped to deliver it personally to the king of Spain. Split into two parts, the first provides a history of Guamán Poma's culture and traditional lifestyle, and the second recounts how life changed in Peru after the Spanish invasion. Guamán Poma uses the chronicle genre as a means of educating the king about the ills of Spanish-Peruvian life. To adequately describe these unacceptable conditions, Guamán Poma reaches for the animal world to express a significant critique of the Spanish invasion and subsequent colonization of the Andean world (Andean, in this sense, includes the many Indigenous peoples and identities associated with pre-invasion and colonial Peru and Tahuantinsuyo).

Whether intentionally or not, Guamán Poma configures his seventeenthcentury text using several medieval forms, including the bestiary, chronicle, and mappamundi (map of the world). By using these genres, Guamán Poma frames the knowledge and critique that he extends to the king using a discursive strategy with which the king would have been familiar. Guamán Poma may even have been exposed to printed versions of medieval European works, such as the much-copied thirteenth-century Estoria de España, one of the earliest written chronicles for Spanish history.

During the Siglos de Oro, Spain was an active participant in a global ‘fashion’ and ‘obsession’ for dance also influencing other European courts of the period. Much more than a passing trend, dance was a practice intrinsically enmeshed in court culture. With deep roots in chivalric medieval society, dance was one of the core disciplines structuring the pedagogies of nobility during the dawn of humanism and an art central to court sociability and rituals.

In the transition from the ‘Autumn of the Middle Ages’ to the Renaissance, dance was consolidated as one of the practices of ‘homo ludens’ best adapted to a new culture of the body which no longer valued strength as much as it did elegance and skill. Simultaneously, it nurtured – somewhat nostalgically and idealistically – the ethical and physical ideals of chivalric society and courtly eroticism. The male dancing body was expected to demonstrate strength, vigour, and speed; the feminine body, grace, beauty, and elegance. The interaction between the two through dance was mediated by well-established codes of service and seduction. Moreover, the persistence of this ethics of service did not only regiment the dancing couple. It also influenced the dancing group as a whole. In short, dance exemplified, in a deictic sense (following the term’s etymological origins), the essential qualities of the person dancing.

Yet during the early sixteenth century, when politics became science and calculation at the hands of Machiavelli, ethos was no longer conceived in terms of morality or rhetoric.

While the preceding chapters scaled the lofty heights of Olympus, now we will plumb the depths of Avernus and turn from the Classical gods to their infernal counterparts. The present chapter will discuss the myriad Furies, witches, and battle spirits that appear throughout medieval Irish literature and their Classical influences and analogues. This is the area of Classical mythological reception that has drawn the most critical attention from scholars of medieval Irish, largely in response to the dramatic equation of Allecto and the Morrígan in the first recension of Táin Bó Cúailnge. However, with a few exceptions, the infernal characters who appear in the Classical adaptations have generated far less interest than the Furies who turn up elsewhere in Irish literature. We ask what the use of Morrígan to gloss Allecto can tell us about Táin Bó Cúailnge, but rarely how and why Allecto functions in the Classical adaptations more generally.

This is not to say that infernal beings in the Classical adaptations have received no critical attention. Both Brent Miles and Erich Poppe identify the enhanced description of Allecto in Imtheachta Aeniasa as an example of epic style pursued by the authors of the text. Jacqueline Borsje and Michael Clarke have examined the Furies in Statius (and a lesser degree Togail na Tebe), Fled Dúin na nGéd, and the second recension of Cath Maige Rath at length, as will be discussed later in this chapter. Clarke has also situated the Furies and Irish battle spirits within traditions of late antique and medieval demonology and Fulgentian allegory.

The Military Band's Quest for Repertoire

The year 1908 began inauspiciously for Holst with the announcement that his opera Sita had not won the Ricordi competition, though it did receive an honorable mention. Due to his embracement of folk songs and dances, Holst's compositional style had changed considerably over the past two years; it was now leaner and more direct. Although he would later dismiss Sita as “good old Wagnerian bawling,” he was still very depressed over the results of the contest. His three teaching positions were wearing him down, and now, with the birth of Imogen, he had three mouths to feed. Just when it appeared that he might be headed for some sort of a nervous breakdown, his friend Ralph Vaughan Williams came to the rescue once again.

Vaughan Williams, who was in Paris studying with Maurice Ravel, wrote to Holst,

Holst seized on the opportunity and, having secured a leave of absence from his schools, went on a solo bicycling holiday in Algeria. He saw and heard many things that were entirely new and exciting but also some that were irritating.

At the inaugural Battle Conference in 1978, Odo, bishop of Bayeux and earl of Kent, was famously described as ‘an ambitious, acquisitive and arrogant bishop-prelate whom William had in the end to crush’. This view has remained largely unchallenged thanks, at least in part, to the portrait provided by Orderic Vitalis. The following discussion takes a narrower focus, exploring Odo's relationship with Scolland, abbot of St Augustine’s, Canterbury, during the early years of the Norman Conquest. It will be argued that Scolland actively pursued a policy of close cooperation with the bishop, united as they were in their mutual distrust of the proprietary claims of Lanfranc, archbishop of Canterbury.

Little attention has been paid to the early history of St Augustine’s, beyond Susan Kelly's magisterial work on the Saxon charters, which is understandable given that the abbey's archive consists predominantly of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century transcripts scattered among several research libraries. Leaving aside the practical issue of access, evaluation of the material is difficult due to the tendency by scribes to update documents to reflect the status quo at the time of copying. For the purposes of this article, reliance is placed upon the first twenty-five folios of TNA, E164/27 commonly known as the White Book. As Susan Kelly has observed, these earlier folios contain, inter alia, a list of charters and named benefactors, Domesday- related surveys, manor rentals, papal privileges, and knights’ fees. Only the charter list (at fols 3v–6v) and a survey known as the Excerpta (fols 17r–25r) have been transcribed and published.

When considering the relationship of comics to social justice, textual meaning can be understood in two interconnected ways. First, new comics contribute to an ongoing tradition of graphic narratives reaching back over a century, documenting and supporting normative views of dominant groups, revolutionary social change from the margins, and everything in between. Second, their authors and readers engage with comics as formally malleable multimodal texts with unique affordances for representation. Given their communicative capacity through both content and form, comics’ ability to address representational injustice and other oppression that can lead to trauma requires that we effectively understand what as well as how they communicate.

To investigate the complexity of this interplay and how it relates to injustice and trauma, this chapter considers how Rolf Dieter Brinkmann (1940–75) samples comics in his Popliteratur work. In two poetry volumes created in dialogue with 1960s American counterculture, Die Piloten (The Pilots, 1968) and ACID: Neue amerikanische Szene (ACID: New American Scene, 1969), Brinkmann samples comics for his aesthetic goals—to interrupt normativity and preclude any attempt at literary analysis. This chapter focuses on the playful form and countercultural con tent—sampled from the American Beat and hippie movements—in the comics Brinkmann selects. It considers how their formal innovations ultimately fail to undermine certain content norms, specifically heteronormativity and hypermasculinity. Thus, through the results of considering their multimodal form and content separately, I point to the shortcomings in Brinkmann's project of using samples to break norms and—by extension—promote social justice.

The reign of James VII/II marked a unique moment for Catholic print in the seventeenth century. For the first time since Mary Tudor, overtly Catholic texts were sanctioned by the crown. This change is encapsulated in a pastoral letter from the Catholic Vicars Apostolic speaking about the role of Jesuits: ‘the exercise of it hath been private and precarious, tending rather towards the Preservation of it in yourselves, than a Propagation of it to others. But now you are in circumstances of letting it appear abroad’. Catholic print was now permitted and publicly advertised. Thomas Clancy's bibliography recorded a major increase in new editions of English Catholic books from 80 between 1681 and 1685 to 356 between 1686 and 1688, showing an enthusiastic response to this change in circumstances. To bring about this tidal wave of texts, the king bypassed parliament to patronise Catholic print through a series of dispensations derived from his royal prerogative. However, James did not immediately turn to pre-existing print networks; instead, he created a new structure with new players that he superimposed onto the market and onto existing networks. Analysing this at the end of a long study of Restoration Catholic print culture highlights the ways in which the print trade under James deviated from previous patterns. Many older networks found a way to incorporate themselves into this new system, and others still eventually joined. Nevertheless, it was a system shaped by the king and was far more religiously homogeneous than those of previous decades.

Alain Mabanckou's Blue White Red explores the circumstances that necessitate the flight of the protagonist from the Republic of Congo and his subsequent disillusionment when confronted with the realities of illegal immigration in France. Mabanckou uses irony and satire to condemn the greed and avarice that lure illegal migrants to Europe and exposes the ignorance and gullibility of African societies. In the examination of the life of the narrator in Paris, Mabanckou sends a clear message to Africans contemplating departure about the dangers of illegal migration.

At the opening of the novel, the narrator is in solitary confinement. The narrator, unnamed at this point in the story, is reflecting on his past and tells us of the psychological torture of being in detention awaiting deportation. Using memory as a structural device of plot construction, the author depicts the precarious lives of illegal African migrants in Paris. Further, in the narrative, he references numerous and continuous raids by both the police and immigration officers and the arbitrary arrests and detention of undocumented migrants in unsanitary facilities.

The voice of the unnamed narrator is personal, introspective, and reflective. Its subdued tone registers the honesty with which he assesses his situation in the context of the deep psychological struggle he is going through to make sense of his location. He reflects on the decision to migrate to France and questions the moral rightness of flight, even with the best of intentions. His mood shifts from justification to lamentation. Finding himself in this space between resignation and hope, the voice hints at the motivation for continued struggle despite the odds.

Patriotism was an essential but geo-politically and historically nuanced key concept in public debates across Enlightenment Europe in the eighteenth century. German historian Rudolf Vierhaus's dual division of patriotism is useful as a point of departure for a contextual and transnational comparison of the modalities of patriotism; enlightened patriotism and historical-estatist patriotism represent opposite ends of the spectrum of eighteenth-century patriotism. One important facet of patriotism that Vierhaus identifies covers the commitment to serve the public good, be it within the institutions of the state, or the court, or outside (the public sphere, polite sociability, patriotic societies). This moderate patriotism was driven by values of progress, improvement, and education. Sites of ‘microscopic or little enlightenments’ were not only situated, as Teodora Shek Brnardić suggests, in the public sphere, that is patriotic societies, but also, as dynastic/estatist variants, in small and regional courts. Whilst Wolfgang Martens identifies the shift in emphasis from the classical understanding of political patriotism (patriot as citizen) to an ‘apolitical patriotism’ that appealed to the apolitical Gemeinsinn [public spirit] in the eighteenth century, I would argue that the enlightened reform patriotism is indeed political. Though it does not necessarily elevate the patriot to a citizen (in a republican sense), it demands of the patriot political acts of reform and improvement. Furthermore, the patriot is simultaneously committed to the local and regional [Landespatriotismus], and to the global – the enlightened patriot is patriotic as he or she is a citizen of the world.

The trade of interlacustrine Africa with other regions had a long history. In the second half of the nineteenth century, however, contacts of the region with other parts of Africa and the world extended dramatically when it became a destination and intersection of two trading networks. The East African caravan trade, which connected the mainland with Zanzibar as an entrepôt to global markets, reached interlacustrine Africa in the late eighteenth century. In the interior, Kazeh (or Tabora), 250 km south of Lake Victoria, became a major trading centre in the 1840s. Some years later, the trade with the East African coast was an integral part of the economy of kingdoms like Buganda and Karagwe. Another trading network linked the region with the Mediterranean and the Red Sea. This network used the Nile as its main trading route with Khartoum as its most important gateway for the trade with the south. In the 1870s the two trading networks met at the border between Bunyoro and Buganda where traders from the East African coast exchanged ivory for cattle with traders from Khartoum.

The arrival of traders from outside the region was a challenge and a chance for interlacustrine rulers. This chapter has two main arguments. First, although individual interlacustrine societies reacted to these challenges in various ways, there was often an important regional aspect in these reactions, too. For centuries, interlacustrine rulers had fought for hegemony in the region, for the access to trade routes, natural resources, and production centres.

Chapter 1 explored motherhood in a space that was specifically female-coded, and came to the conclusion that romance texts advocated for the retention of that women-only space as essential for the act of childbirth and early motherhood. This chapter analyses representations of motherhood in a space that is open to men and women but in which men hold authority. In showing mothers interceding and negotiating within the castle and its vicinity, romance texts explore the power and contributions of women in patriarchal spaces that seek to either exclude or limit their authority. The words and actions of mothers change the power dynamics and gendered hierarchies of these spaces. In these texts, mothers intercede in public spaces when the actions of men have failed them or when that space itself is at risk from masculine deeds. Maternal characters in public spaces in the late fourteenth-century texts Athelston, Sir Degrevant, and the Roman de Melusine use the strengths of their role to compete with men's authority, illuminating how romance recognises and subverts certain concepts of gendered space. These texts present female authority derived from different aspects of motherhood, such as pregnancy and experienced caregiving, in negotiation with masculine authority in more public settings: halls, streets, and besieged castles. The outcome of mothers asserting their authority within these spaces varies, showing that how mothers interact with public space is as nuanced as the romance genre's portrayal of women themselves.