Initially conceived as a ‘micro-history’ focusing on a small sample of discussions on dance in Spanish neo-Aristotelian poetics, this book eventually expanded substantially the original scope and chronology it had set out to analyse. It ended up intersecting different scales in an analytical process which consisted of sifting through a plurality of erudite discourses, which in turn reflected on dance in surprising detail, and a series of discontinuous fragments recounting festivities and celebrations to find clues as to how a modern monarchy, the Hispanic Monarchy, instrumentalised the dancing body and incorporated it to its ceremonials and to the semiotic system through which the monarchy aimed to portray itself.

Along the way, this research confirmed some of its initial hypotheses. And it achieved its main aim: to analyse the cause and effect relation between a monarch's (Philip III) passion for dance and the interest in dance recorded in the poetics of the period.

This book's first result is, without a doubt, that it has demonstrated the central importance of dance to the court culture of the Hispanic Monarchy, which at the time found symbolic confirmation in the 1602 publication of the Grazie d’Amore, dedicated to Philip III. Spanish participation in this passion for dance translated into a practice exercised by the monarchs and their courts, and is evidenced by the importance afforded to dance in the theoretical debates which regulated its social praxis (within and beyond the palace), as with the instruction of the nobility and the princes.

Arngrímr Brandsson makes no direct reference to Einarr Skúlason's Geisli in his poetry, but he is likely to have been aware of the importance to his own project of both the poem and the cult of St Óláfr. The second refrain of his Guðmundardrápa, beginning at stanza 32 and repeated in stanzas 36 and 40, closely echoes the wording of ESk Geisl 66/5–6VII: ‘Lúti landsfolk ítrum | lim salkonungs himna’ [Let the people of the land bow before the bright limb of the king of the hall of the heavens [(lit. ‘the bright limb of the hall-king of the heavens’) sky/heaven > = God (= Christ) > saint = Óláfr]. Arngrímr imitates these two lines with ‘Lúti gjörvöll landsbyggð ítrum | lim stólkonungs bjartra himna’ [Let the whole population bow before the excellent limb of the enthroned king of the bright heavens [= God > saint = Guðmundr]] (Arngr Gd 32/5–6). Making allowance for the metrical change from dróttkvætt in Geisli to hrynhent in Guðmundardrápa, the similarity in wording of these lines indicates that they are likely to be consciously imitated from one drápa to the other.

Arngrímr mentions Guðmundr's proximity to the relics of St Óláfr on the former's visit to the archbishop of Niðaróss described in Arngr Gd 29/1, 3: ‘Byskup sótti skrín hið skreytta … Óláfs konungs’ [The bishop visited the ornamented shrine … of King Óláfr]. According to Geisl 41/1, 4 Óláfr's shrine (skrín it skreytta) was ornamented with bóli dreka [the dwelling of the dragon [gold]]. With Finnur Jónsson (Skj BII, 379) I understand Arngrímr's text here as a literal reference to the actual shrine that would have been on display in Niðaróss cathedral in both Guðmundr's and Arngrímr's day.

The Restoration of the monarchy in 1660 signalled a return to the Church of England and an end to the Puritan commonwealth. For English Catholics, it brought both new advantages and disadvantages. The regicide and the Interregnum affirmed the danger of nonconformists to the monarchy. Recusant gentry had demonstrated their loyalty during the recent wars, including the sheltering of Charles II after the Battle of Worcester in 1651, yet they suffered from the fines and sequestrations of the 1640s and 1650s. 1660 brought the return of Catholic queens, first the queen mother, Henrietta Maria, and then, after 1662, the queen consort, Catherine of Braganza, with their overwhelmingly Catholic households. The year also saw the Declaration of Breda, ideas of which had been circulating since 1657, which promised liberty of conscience to all ‘in matters of religion which do not disturb the peace of the kingdom’. Despite the hardships they had suffered under Cromwell, Britain's Catholic population thus faced spring of 1660 with strong reasons to believe that their status as a persecuted minority would be left behind.

However, it was not to be. Parliament revived the Elizabethan and Jacobean statutes fining recusancy and labelling priests as traitors, and a series of acts passed between 1660 and 1665 known as the Clarendon Code introduced new restrictions on the movements of recusants and dissenters alike.

If the account provided by the magazine ¡Hola! is to be believed, Franco himself chopped the wood that was to hold up the Christ without a cross that had been offered up to him to be hung above the main alter of the basilica of the Valley of the Fallen. He said that a simple wooden cross would suffice to mark his grave and, indeed, he was buried beneath that very cross in 1975 – under the cross made from the tree he himself had cut down in Riofrío. The cycle of Generalísimo Franco's life and death, and the construction of family as the epitome of the legitimation of the dictator and the basic unit of everyday life, reached Spain's inhabitants through privileged channels. Gossip magazines aimed at women, known as the ‘prensa rosa’ (literally, the ‘pink press’) in Spanish, were one such channel. These magazines brought a smiling, relatable Caudillo who was nonetheless powerful and transcendental into Spanish women's homes and hairdressers. Franco was portrayed as Catholic Spain's Christian witness. He was leading the country towards its highest destiny, even when faced with the most powerful enemies.

The aim of this book is to describe the reception of Latin medical texts from the beginnings of Anglo-Latin literary culture with the Augustine Mission of 597 to the Norman conquest of 1066. The period is significant because it represents a time before the Arabic and Persian syntheses of Greek medicine – which would form the mainstay of the medicine taught in the medieval universities – had even been composed, never mind translated into Latin. The principal evidence for this reception in early medieval England was, of course, the existence of a corpus of medical texts written in Old English which were based upon Latin models. I will thus provide a thoroughly updated account of the Old English medical corpus of the ninth to eleventh centuries, illustrating its debt to the Latin medical literature which circulated in manuscripts of a similar age, i.e. the eighth to eleventh centuries. I will also highlight the need for more fundamental scholarship on these late antique and early medieval Latin texts themselves.

In the period in question, between the decline of the western half of the Roman Empire in the fifth century and the rise of the earliest universities in the eleventh, the main institutions in which texts were copied and preserved were monasteries. However, it would be a mistake to assume that professional physicians outside the cloister did not compose, transcribe or own such books for their own use. This early period of medieval medical history has often been viewed quite unfavourably. Peregrine Horden noted that historians of the twentieth century ‘saw in early medieval medical texts, with their supposedly mindless copying of sterile formulae, clear signs of cultural deliquescence’.

This chapter moves from the ‘hodge podge’ of the early years of Elizabeth's reign to the sharp dilemmas of obedience precipitated by the Vaux mission of 1567–8, the government's response to the resulting ‘papist confederacies’, and the frst systematic drive to confessionalise ofce-holding. Two opposite forces acted on the loyalty of Elizabethan nobles and gentry. One was the state's developing construction of the disloyalty implicit in religious dissent. The other was the construction Catholic authority placed on conformist compliance and the transmission to the faithful of Rome's sharpening position on schismatic attendance.

The Elizabethan state required attendance on Sundays and holy days at the forms of worship prescribed in the 1559 Uniformity Act. It chose not to investigate inner belief and prosecute for heresy. What was required was not subscription to a doctrinal formulary but outward conformity equated with loyalty to sovereign and statute. With state and church conceived of as coterminous, an integral commonwealth under a single supreme governor, nonconformity in religion was construed as political as well as ecclesiastical disobedience, carrying civil as well as spiritual penalties, exclusion from ofce as well as ecclesiastical sanctions.

However, Catholic laity received no clear papal directive to separate from the state church until the mission from Rome of Laurence Vaux in 1566–7. Vaux brought the papal message to his native Lancashire, in efect the Stanley clientage, and from there it was conveyed across the northern counties. Government alarm at the resulting oath-taking ‘confederacies’ set of a major confrontation between the regime and its Catholic subjects. The ensuing arrests of high profle Catholic gentry in 1568 fed into a widening political crisis which issued in 1569 in the Rebellion of the Northern Earls and in 1570 in the papal bull of deposition.

Our discussion of the early modern commentaries of the Poetics, which opened this book with the first Italian texts published during the Renaissance, now leads us to a final excursus on French theorisations of a poetics of dance. While there may not be a direct textual exchange between Spanish and French dance poetics during the seventeenth century – in contrast to the frequent Spanish references to Italian or Flemish texts, French poetics’ theorisations of dance are very particular within a European context, and this particularity helps us to draw up a comparison with other national traditions. With regards to Spain, the difference is especially palpable, particularly with respect to the role of the fable, a mimetic tool that signals a certain degree of poetisation of dance, which in turn tends to transform it into narrative. Completely foreign to Spanish conceptualisations of dance in López Pinciano and González de Salas, the concept of ‘fable’ is a cornerstone in the theory of dance in French poetics. However, the divergence between French and Spanish approaches is not the result of purely aesthetic or formal matters. It is the consequence of certain political stakes which, in France, led to an institutionalisation of dance unprecedented in seventeenth-century Spain. By way of a counterpoint, the following pages will focus on the discourse of dance in French neo-Aristotelianism. This final exercise in comparison will attempt to account for how and why the corpus of commentaries on a single text, Aristotle's Poetics, could lead to such differing interpretations over such a short timespan.

Syr, You are better known to me, than I can be to you; And I congratulate unto myself as well as unto the World, the fælicity of your Succession in the Office of Secretary, to the Royal Society. But in order to a mutual Better Knowledge, I owe you, & must now give you, some very short Account of myself; more particularly, with relation to that Illustrious Body, whereof, I hoped, I had the Honour of being esteemed a Member.

Having the Pleasure of some Correspondence with your excellent Predecessor, Mr. Waller, I did communicate unto him (and unto my valuable Dr. Woodward) a great Number of American, and philosophical, Curiosities; with an Intimation of my Purpose to continue the Communications. These Gentlemen putt the, as unexpected as undeserved Respect upon me, of proposing me for a Member of the Royal Society; and they both wrote unto me, That I was chosen accordingly both by the Council and Body of the Society, on the Anniversary Day for such Elections, in the Year 1713. – Adding, that the only Reason of my not having my Name in the Printed List of the Society, was, because of my being beyond-Sea, and yett a Natural Born Subject, & so not capable of being inserted among the Gentlemen of other Nations. Your Secretary also, Dr. Halley, in the Philosophical Transactions of 1714. printed my Name, with an F.R.S. annexed unto it. Mr. Petiver did the Like, in his Naturæ Collectanea; And in his Letters to me, he had these Words, “Your Election succeeded without Opposition, and you was elected after the usual Method of Balloting.

Robert of Torigni's rewriting of the chronicles of Eusebius–Jerome and Sigebert occupies a considerable portion of the Chronography. However, with the exception of David Bates's seminal article, Robert's interpolations have attracted limited attention, with scholars generally stressing their derivativeness. While acknowledging Robert's purpose of continuing Sigebert as a ‘grand design’, Thomas Bisson similarly dismissed the interpolations and emphasised the value of the Chronography only for the period after 1147. What was Robert's design? To answer this question, it is necessary to turn to Robert's writing practices and the political context that prompted them. Robert conceived the Chronography following the rise of Henry Plantagenet as duke of Normandy in 1150, his recognition as heir and successor of King Stephen in 1153 and his coronation as king of England in 1154. By interpolating Eusebius–Jerome's and Sigebert's chronicles, Robert proceeded with a thorough rewriting of universal history, which reveals his strategies in elaborating a specific politics of time.

Robert of Torigni's interpolations in context (1139–54)

Robert completed the GND with the addition of book VIII shortly before 1139.4 Only afterwards did he embark on the Chronography, having acquired the two books which were to be the pillars of his work: Sigebert's chronicle, as extant in the Beauvais manuscript, and Henry of Huntingdon's Historia Anglorum. Robert requested Sigebert's Chronographia from Beauvais and, possibly, had a copy produced for the Bec library in the late 1140s when he still was a resident monk. While it is possible that Robert had already considered universal history-writing before the Beauvais manuscript came into his hands, the Chronographia was available at Bec only in the 1140s.

The fundamental problem in studying medieval revolt is the nature of the available sources, which, as Claude Gauvard notes, ‘come to us almost exclusively from authorities and […] give us only the point of view of those holding power and the dominant social classes’. Juridical and narrative sources alike generally frame revolt activity as criminal or outside the proper conduct of political life: as a threat to, or an interruption of, the harmonious society of orders. For this reason, oblique or passing references to revolt in literature or other sorts of texts, in which the marginalising agenda found in most conventional political sources is secondary or absent, can help uncover a new side of these historical phenomena.

It is in this context that I turn to an odd little story in the form of a parable, found in the Mesnagier de Paris. This story, which I will call the parable of the Bourgeois Rebel's Wife, comes from the section on wifely obedience in Chapter 6 of the first of three ‘distinctions’. Most of this chapter's instruction on a wife's obligation to be obedient is delivered in the form of parables, or exempla, drawn from sources both popular and learned: biblical stories, didactic Bible commentaries, conduct books and folklore, as well as the author's personal experience. Unlike the more famous stories in this section of the Mesnagier (such as the Griselda tale), this parable has received little direct attention from scholars.