Were medieval people obsessed with ‘type’? Ruminations on the seven sins, four elements, twelve zodiac signs, and countless other lists abound in what survives from the period, leading some historians to draw connections between medieval scholasticism and the medieval perception of personhood. To these critics, classification, hierarchy, and distinction were central to conceptions of self: ‘to conform to a pattern is to be somebody. Not to conform is to be nobody’, concludes John A. Alford; Judson Boyce Allen has meanwhile argued that ‘medieval classifications were made, apparently, in the faith that any given entity – act, person, or fact – was enhanced by being so classed. One's label, one's context, was properly a part of one's essence and definition, and one could not do without it’. Although a preoccupation with adequately distinguishing is evident in texts such as the widespread distinctiones (which offered scholastic explication and exegesis from the second half of the twelfth century; ‘in them, meanings were broken down, divided into their constituent parts, so that the senses or aspects of key words were easier to grasp’, A. J. Minnis describes), there is of course a difference between establishing the components of the trivium and the quadrivium, and the construction of personhood – or the creation of literary character, the subject of this chapter and this book more generally.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, interlacustrine Africa was reshaped on the ruins of ancient empires like those of the Babito and later of Bunyoro-Kitara. From these ruins, however, emerged a new kind of political organisation: the kingdom ruled by a ruler who mediated the great aristocratic families. The main place of this mediation was the king's court, which was a new arena of political struggle and representation. From the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, royal courts shaped much of the political landscape of the region. It had been mainly the desire of conquest that motivated the elites to accept one of their rivals as the primus inter pares. Only a federal coalition of the powerful aristocrats was able to provide the necessary strength to expand and to thwart contenders. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the court, however, rose to be a political force on its own. Not so much as a powerful player itself, but as a power centre, where the elites vied for influence and power. Interlacustrine politics were highly competitive, and this was foremost expressed in struggles for the succession of a new ruler. The establishment of the court as a centre of gravity was not new, the region had a long history of ceremonial politics bound to the residence of the ruler. But in the nineteenth century, the court became an important political, economic, and cultural centre, and that combination was clearly an innovation.

This article begins with a simple but hitherto unexplored premise: for nearly three centuries the most famous speech in Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte Darthur was attributed to the wrong speaker. Malory's eulogy for Lancelot at the end of the tale is universally accepted as belonging to Lancelot's halfbrother, Ector de Maris, hence the more oft-quoted title for the speech, Ector's threnody. In every modern edition of the Morte, the eulogy is both contextually and verbally assigned to Ector because, upon his arrival at Joyous Garde, Ector is told of Lancelot's death by his fellow Round Table knight Sir Bors de Ganis, at which time he ‘threwe hys shelde, swerde, and helme frome hym [. …] And whan he waked it were harde for ony tonge to telle the doleful complayntes that he made for his brother’.2 If the context of this passage is not enough (and it should be) to support attribution of the eulogy to Ector, then the double-quotative Malory introduces in the ensuing clause unambiguously affirms attribution of the eulogy to Lancelot's half-brother: ‘“A, Launcelot!”, he sayd, “thou were hede of al Crysten knyghtes! And now I dare say”, sayd Syr Ector, “thou Sir Launcelot, there thou lyest, that thou were never matched of erthely knyghtes hande”’ (my emphasis). Here I am quoting directly from P. J. C. Field's 2013 edition, but attribution of the speech to Ector remains the same in all editions going back the last two centuries.

Yoruba Pentecostalism and Child Witchcraft Accusations emerged from a personal and professional need to address a troubling yet persistent societal issue: witchcraft accusations and their intersectional impacts. The stories and voices included here are both painful and urgent, representing experiences that often go unheard or misunderstood. This book seeks to shed light on these realities and to provide a framework for understanding, challenging, and ultimately correcting the structures that perpetuate such violence and marginalization.

The journey to this book began with my second master's and then doctoral research, where I sought to understand the interplay of culture, religion, and societal norms in shaping perceptions of witchcraft. While my academic training provided a foundation, it was the voices of the participants—women and children accused of witchcraft—that gave this work its direction and purpose. Their courage and willingness to share their experiences transformed this project from a scholarly endeavor into a call for systemic change.

Building upon years of qualitative research, this book invites readers to engage deeply with the lived experiences of accused women and children. It challenges surface-level discussions, advocating for systemic change and offering insights grounded in a cultural and historical understanding of Nigerian Pentecostalism.

I refer to Yoruba Pentecostalism instead of Nigerian Pentecostalism because approximately 70 percent of the founders and megapastors of Yoruba Pentecostalism are from diverse Yoruba ethnic groups. They have shaped this movement nationally and internationally with their liturgical emblems, practices, and teachings, which are deeply interwoven with their cultural backgrounds. Today, many Pentecostal movements in other regions and ethnicities across Nigeria and the diaspora have imitated these Yoruba pastors and fine-tuned their respective practices and tenets in their languages and cultures.

Both Alison Weir and Jeanette Lucraft have written about the ‘huge influence’ on modern perceptions of Katherine Swynford exerted by the publishing sensation that is Anya Seton's Katherine.3 Nevertheless, despite exhaustive studies, both writers – as well as Anthony Goodman4 – have struggled to find a convincing historical figure behind Seton's romantic heroine. Lucraft draws attention to Katherine's exploitation of heraldry as evidence that she was well able to assert her personal identity. This detail exemplifies Katherine's capacity to ‘play the game’; it is evidence that she had the necessary skills and accomplishments of diplomacy, learning and personality, Lucraft supposes, to convince John of Gaunt that she could be a credible wife for him, and not just a discrete mistress.

The British Brass Band Movement

It is not surprising that Gustav Holst would compose and arrange for the British brass band. During Holst's lifetime, aside from ceremonial functions, the military bands entertained primarily the middle classes in their park concerts. The musicians were entirely from the military, though it must be pointed out that there existed a few civilian bands of military band instrumentation. The brass bands, however, were (and still are) an entirely different matter. Their clientele was the working class, a much broader spectrum of the population. For many, these bands represented a mode of existence, one that was not aligned with British mainstream musical events and societal happenings for at least three-quarters of a century.

Origins of the British brass bands are not difficult to identify. Violet Brand comments,

Gustav Holst (1874–1934) is always worth visiting and revisiting. The musical experiences of his lifetime extended from the omnipresent parlor soirées and spa concerts of the Victorian era to the electronic recording, radio broadcasting, and sound motion pictures of the Great Depression. As a composer, Holst followed his own path. His compositional technique developed over the course of more than forty years during a time that witnessed traditional Romanticism being challenged, and sometimes overtaken, by a variety of twentieth-century “isms,” including Impressionism, Expressionism and Neoclassicism. Yet, Holst didn't particularly favor any one of these styles; he was an original. Whereas his earliest works were composed in the expected Romantic vein, over time his lifestyle and his music took on the influence of such diverse entities as the poetry of Walt Whitman, Sanskrit literature, English folk tunes, North African music, Greek mythology, and of course, astrology. When he adopted twentieth-century techniques, such as polytonality and mixed meters, he did so not to call attention to the fact that he was using them but simply for supportive purposes.

The present volume, while focusing on Holst's wind works, is holistic. The narrative takes into account the continuum and trajectory of the composer's life and works.

Holst's body of works can generally be divided into either three or four periods of creativity. His wind works appear in all of them. The self-contained first period, lasting until about 1905, would include all of his student compositions and those works composed shortly thereafter, when Holst was under the spell of the German romantic Richard Wagner. The early works for chamber winds were written during this period. The second period, lasting until about 1913, displays a more linear approach, embracement of the ancient modes, and includes works that either make use of folk tunes directly or display his ability to create folklike melodies. The military band suites fall into line here.

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.