The year 1930 turned out to be one of the most productive years that Holst ever had. In January, he was finishing up work on his chamber opera The Tale of the Wandering Scholar, Op. 50 [H175]. Its libretto was written by Clifford Bax. The action is based on a vignette from the novel The Wandering Scholars by the Irish poet and playwright Helen Waddell (1889–1965). This underperformed twenty-five-minute opera, Holst's last and shortest, features four vocalists and chamber orchestra forces that can be characteristically reduced to a woodwind quintet, a string quartet, and string bass.

After touring the Netherlands during St. Paul's Girls’ School's Easter break, Holst settled into composing A Choral Fantasia, Op. 51 [H177] for soprano, SATB chorus, organ, strings, and brass. Although panned by the critics at the time, the work is seen today as one of the two crowning achievements of Holst's choral output, the other being the First Choral Symphony from six years earlier.

There were two particularly noteworthy orchestra concerts during the early part of the year. The first, on February 24, featured Holst conducting the orchestral version of Bach's Fugue à la Gigue in Cheltenham. The second, a Royal Philharmonic Society concert on April 3 at Queen's Hall, featured the premiere of his Double Concerto, Op. 49 [H175] for two violins, played by sister Hungarian violinists Adila Fachiri and Jelly D’Aranyi. The first and last movements each quote a passage from his Terzetto.

In a much-quoted passage from A View of the Present State of Ireland, Edmund Spenser considers the nature of Irish bardic poetry. Eudoxus asks ‘have [the poems] any arte in their composicons’ or ‘bee they any thinge wyttye or well favored, as poems shoulde bee?’. Irenius replies that, although ‘sprinckled with some prettye flowers of theire owne naturall devise’, they are ‘skilled not of the goodly ornamentes of Poetrie’, and, furthermore, are ‘abused, to the gracinge of wickednes and vice’. That Spenser would have been vaguely familiar with bardic poetry and have ‘caused diuers of them to be translated’ is not altogether surprising. His castle at Kilcolman was surrounded by a host of hereditary bardic poets who were constantly engaging in vibrant literary activity and exchange. This included different branches of the Uí Dhálaigh, who served lords like the de Barra and de Róiste. Beyond Mallow lies Cluain Mín Castle, where the poet Aonghus Ó Dálaigh Fionn, ollamh (chief-poet) to the Mac Carthaigh Mór, penned devotional poetry that uncannily echoes motifs in The Faerie Queene. There were also the Ó Dálaigh poets of Kilsarkan, hereditary ollamhs to the Earls of Desmond, who adapted – as well as commemorated in elegy – the beheading of three Fitzgerald (or Mac Gearailt) patrons. To the north lay the territory of the Fitzmaurices (or the MacMorrises), Lords of Kerry and bountiful patrons to a slew of poets. It is these poets – Spenser's Irish contemporaries – that are the focus of the present collection.

The African writer in the 21st century should forget the complexes of the past and be more imaginatively aggressive and expansive, invading other continents and even the skies as new settings, striving to have a global outlook in his creative output, mounting a new international phase and not limiting his canvas to the African soil. He should break away from the retoux aux sources fixation that informed the Negritude aesthetic of the last century. (Nnolim 4)

The Nigerian-American Africanfuturist and Africanjujuist, Nnedi Okorafor, has since met the above-quoted forward-looking challenge. With her African-based science fiction, magical realism and futuristic intuition, she has transcended the margins by being ‘more imaginatively aggressive and expansive, invading other continents and even the skies as new settings … and not limiting [her] canvas to the African soil’ (Nnolim 4). Her narratives demonstrate so much of her vast cerebral mind with an unlimited amplitude of imaginative ingenuity that astounds her readers. Okorafor skillfully blends African sensibilities with science-based mathematical equations to espouse the futures of African intellectual and scientific relationship and relevance.

Africanfuturism is the brain-child of Okorafor. It is a burgeoning genre/theory that is reshaping the margins of African literature; and Okorafor has been and is still at the forefront of its development and evolution through her creative as well as critical output. This assertion does not overlook the significant contributions of speculative works by earlier African writers, such as Amos Tutuola and Kojo Laing as well as Ben Okri. Rather, it recognizes the pioneering place of these writers in the literary tradition, yet, it must be stated that Okorafor has extended the frontiers in the broader literary tradition.

Described by Rowohlt Theater-Verlag as being “without doubt one of Elfriede Jelinek's darkest” texts to date, WUT was written in response to the 2015 terrorist attacks on the offices of the Charlie Hebdo satirical magazine and the kosher supermarket Hyper Cacher in Paris. As the title in all capital letters suggests, the text is a tirade, a streamof- consciousness treatise that has been brought to the stage in various postdramatic manifestations since 2016. Nobel Prize recipient Jelinek's words read as the author's own fury over the deep injustices committed against and suffered by humanity, past and present. On the stage, this rage is embodied by men and women alike, representing a wide spectrum of furious individuals: from religious extremists to Wutbürger (enraged citizens), from those who kill out of wrath to those who avenge such murders. In Martin Laberenz's 2017 production in the Kammerspielen of Deutsches Theater in Berlin, the expression of unharnessed anger at the world and a complete disillusionment with religion of all forms culminated in the exasperation of the performer Linn Reusse, as she screamed at the audience: “Wollt ihr ewig leben? Was rettet euch noch?” (Do you [all] want to live forever? What is going to save you [all] now?).

This essay considers how a postdramatic text, and performances based on that text, can be productive if challenging artistic forms for expressing feminist rage, as well as for giving voice to—and in this case, thematizing—the raw emotions common to human experience.

The clergy of medieval Western Europe got away with murder: both in spiritual terms, through their neglect of the souls of their parishioners, and literally, by using the privilegium beneficii (known more often in England as ‘benefit of clergy’) to escape capital punishment, even when secular courts declared them guilty of a felony. This was, at least, the claim of their contemporaries, and the belief of later historians. Thirteenth-century episcopal and papal legislation (as well as that later and earlier) spoke anxiously of the absence and ignorance of many of the parish clergy who were responsible for guiding their parishioners towards Heaven, and sought ways to remedy these failures. The secular courts knew that they must hand over felonious clergy to the Church courts. They were, equally, certain that in doing so, they allowed many guilty men to be found innocent, by undergoing the simple process of compurgation in which the accused swore to their own innocence, supported by others who testified, on oath, to their good reputation.

However ‘bad’ or ‘good’ the clergy were – the assessment of which depends very much on the values held, and filters applied to them, by their contemporaries and historians – one thing is usually taken for granted: that the ‘clergy’ were regarded as, and thought of themselves as, part of a separate caste from the laity, answerable to ecclesiastical, rather than secular, jurisdiction and that contemporary secular administrations shared this view. There are some exceptions.

In his essay “Photography in Nineteenth-Century Latin America: The European Experience and the Exotic Experience,” Boris Kossoy charts the arrival of photography in Latin America. In it, one can clearly observe that the history of photography is a global story of the advancement of this technology. Within a year of Louis Daguerre's 1839 presentation of the Daguerreotype to the French Academy of Sciences in Paris, Daguerreotypists had already reached the shores of Latin America, and Daguerre's predictions of the tropical sun being better suited for photography were being put to the test (Kossoy 20). However, Kossoy's research underlines that while Europe and the United States have contributed greatly to the global story of photography, the flow of technology is not unidirectional. Kossoy's work on the history of Latin American photography, The Pioneering Photographic Work of Hercule Florence, identifies Hercule Florence (a French immigrant living in Campinas, Brazil) as making a successful independent discovery of photography in the Americas several years before the daguerreotype would arrive there (as well as being the first in the world to use the word photographie in relation to what we now call photography) (Kossoy “Photography in Nineteenth-Century Latin America” 25).

Kossoy notes that Florence founded his ideas on some of the same European studies of light and image that helped lead to Daguerre's and others’ discoveries in Florence's native continent (The Pioneering Photographic Work of Hercule Florence 92–103). As this scholar charts the arrival of photography in Latin America, he clarifies that Europeans from a variety of countries came with the intention of becoming daguerreotypists.

The revolt which erupted in November 1569, rather than a rebellion of the entire north or all of its earls, was a rebellion of the two north-eastern earls without the engagement of the wider Catholic political front. Pushed by the assertive Catholic gentry of North Yorkshire and the Palatinate of Durham, and jumped into premature action by the queen's summoning them to court, the earls of Northumberland and Westmorland took to the feld behind the banner of the Five Wounds of Christ. Tey did so without the support of their already detained southern allies, Arundel and Lumley, or the military backing of the north-western Catholic magnates, Derby, Cumberland, and Dacre. Cumberland made no move, Dacre moved too late, and Derby held back, which both the regime and the rebels acknowledged as decisive. The changing intentions of the English magnates through October 1569 are difcult to track. As Spes put it, ‘afairs here are like the rising and the falling tide, fuctuating from one moment to another. Tis is why I write so diferently in my various letters’.

The fourth-century physician Oribasius is perhaps one of the more colourful personalities associated with late antique medicine. He is said to have hailed from the island of Pergamum before receiving his medical training in Alexandria. His notoriety stems far less from his medical writings than his implication in the apostasy of an ordained Christian deacon by the name of Julian, who was later to become emperor in AD 361 and has been known to posterity as ‘the Apostate’, having renounced Christianity and attempted to restore Imperial pagan observance to the Empire. Sifting for objectivity in his biography is difficult, as details such as his reception of the final utterance of the Delphic oracle seem most likely fictitious, at least according to Baldwin. What is certain is that he and his lifelong friend Julian sought to restore state paganism to its former glory, and, in their relationship of patronage, perhaps hoped to emulate the relationship between Marcus Aurelius and Galen of Pergamum. On Julian's death in 363, Oribasius was exiled, but he was recalled by the Emperor Valens (r. 634–78) some time after 364.

While Oribasius himself was certainly a colourful character, his surviving corpus of work has been somewhat neglected, in no small part due to its turgidity. Reviewing Joseph Raeder's edition of the surviving works of Oribasius for the Corpus medicorum Graecorum in 1934, W. H. S. Jones went so far as to say that he ‘is an author that nobody wishes to read through, though many may want to consult him about some special point’.

Leechbook Fragment (Harley 55)

To better demonstrate the ways in which Old English texts were compiled from multiple sources, a discrete text is presented from London British Library Harley 55, the ‘Leechbook Fragment’, which preserves text closely matching the capitulary entry for Bald's Leechbook ii.59, which is now lost. The Old English text draws from two principal sources: the Liber tertius and the Synopsis of Oribasius, but this is augmented with long digressions from other sources, such as the procedure for administering a radish emetic from Synopsis I, alongside a recipe for oxymel which is possibly adapted from Dioscorides, De materia medica. Where Oribasius offers only the most perfunctory dietetic advice, the Old English text lists those foods with the required qualities, quite possibly relying on Synopsis II for that information. There are further resonances of the Liber Esculapii in other passages, such as the use of aromatic pine resin.

Because it is obvious that the Leechbook was drawn from the New Latin text of Oribasius, that is the text which was chosen. The text is not without its problems, however. What is presented is based on Stuttgart, Wurtembergische Landesbibliothek HB XI 8, fol 201v–202r. While this reading is superior to Molinier's transcript of Laon 424, it is nevertheless quite difficult to make sense of the text as it stands. The presented translation therefore also takes account of the Old Latin reading and the Greek. The surviving portion of Leechbook ii.56 on dysentery then follows, supplemented by its probable sources, illustrating a similar compilation technique from multiple sources.

This short chapter features restorative justice at its peak when the monarch controlled the provinces, and the authority of the emperor ensured that there was but one set of memory-keepers to ensure that those who challenged the state and were defeated were brought to justice according to spelled-out principles. The Zemene Mesafint had shown the faults of “forgive and forget.” Going back to the Bible, restorative justice was revamped in such a way that forgiveness was realigned with the understanding that forgiveness involves both the forgiver, empowered to set the conditions upon which forgiveness is given, and the forgiven who agrees to abide by those conditions to show their contrition. “Conditional forgiveness” increased the chances for durable peace and reconciliation between rival parties because it unequivocally announced the winner and the loser; moreover, it communicated consequences for either living according to the stipulations which could mean lenient revision of the terms, or more punitive terms added if they were abused.

Using the honor and shaming ceremonies of Menilek, before he became emperor, and that of Ras Alula, this chapter gives historical weight to Ethiopian traditions of restorative justice described in detail in Chapter 1. In short, the years 1868, after Emperor Tewodros's death, to 1896 and the Battle of Adwa was the period in which restorative justice worked smoothly. However, the analysis picks up in 1855 where the administration of justice veers to an extreme during the reign of Tewodros II, before settling upon its reasonable middle course.

Introduction

The D-version of Guðmundar saga (GBpD) is a very different work from Arngrímr Brandsson's Guðmundardrápa (Gd), although the aims of each of them, to honour Bishop Guðmundr Arason and present his case for sainthood, are congruent. A comparative analysis of the working methods of their author, presumed in each case to be Arngrímr, throws considerable light on what he hoped to achieve by these compositions. In the three previous chapters of the present study I have investigated what are likely to have been Arngrímr's guiding principles of composition of his Guðmundardrápa in the context of both conventional expectations of the skaldic drápa form and of fourteenth-century religious poetry of personal devotion. Here I undertake a short analysis of the authorial ideology and methodology of GBpD and compare it with that of the drápa.

There have been several recent studies of GBpD concerned with the question of the saga's authorship and sources and, in particular, with whether or not this Icelandic life of Guðmundr was a translation of a now-lost Latin Vita that Arngrímr had already composed. It is commonly assumed that some kind of document in Latin in support of Guðmundr's sanctity would have been necessary for the campaigners to present to the papal authorities, because the latter would not have understood a document in Icelandic. Opinion has veered between considering a lost Latin Vita the primary composition and GBpD its translation into Icelandic, and an alternative position in which GBpD is viewed as an independent work, which may have been partly based on one or more documents in Latin, but need not have been a word-for-word translation of them. My own opinion favours the latter possibility for reasons discussed below.

By the turn of the nineteenth century European country traders were well established in the East Indies.

British trade in the Malay Archipelago had increased dramatically during the second half of the eighteenth century as a result of Britain's expanding trade with Canton (now Guangzhou). Tea was the main product purchased by Europeans from the Chinese and, in the case of the British, paid for increasingly by the sale of opium and cotton from British India, together with tin and the ‘exotic’ products of the islands of the East Indies. This trade between England, India and China was dominated by the English East India Company (EIC) within an arena of commercial rivalry with other European nations and Americans, inter-Malay altercations and ‘piracy’. From 1792 until the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, which itself prompted further interest in commercial activities, much of the business was complicated by war with France.

British private or ‘country’ traders, also referred to as free mariners, were quite distinct from EIC employees. Independent, risk-takers and pioneers, they were among the leading seamen who collected and carried the opium, cotton, tin and exotica to Canton under licence from the EIC whose own vessels could not keep up with the demand nor openly carry illegal cargoes of opium. Not all country traders sailed to China; many confined their trade to the archipelago, dealing in Indian rice and textiles, pepper, spices, betelnut, benzoin, dammer, tin and opium. Sometimes a country trader would load a cargo for China onto another ship en route to Canton.

‘Sire,’ fait il, ‘qu’est mere? Et s’on le mangera? Samble oisiel u beste? Nel me celes vous ja.’ ‘Fuis, ains est une fame qu’en ses flans te porta.’

‘Sire,’ the boy asks, ‘what is a mother? Is it something you eat? Like a bird or a beast?’ ‘Son, a mother is a woman who carried you in her womb.’

This scene, from the Old French La Naissance du Chevalier au Cygne (c. 1192), directly asks the question at the heart of this book – what is a mother in medieval romance? The question is asked by a young man who has been raised by a hermit and a doe, isolated from any human society, let alone the civilised environs of the court. The fact that it is asked at all shows that not only did the question concern romance writers and audiences of the period, but that the answer is not obvious. The hermit's answer to his foster son is reductive and fails to address the complexities of motherhood within that very text, let alone within a genre that, embroiled as it is with issues of lineage, dynasty, and human relationships, presents many varied and sometimes unexpected facets of motherhood.