Three illuminated manuscripts now in the British Library were once the property of Henry Despenser, who served as bishop of Norwich from 1370 to 1406. That they were made for him during his long episcopacy is evident from his distinctive heraldic devices displayed prominently in each: quarterly first and fourth, argent; second and third, gules fretty or; a bend sable overall; a bordure argent of bishop's mitres or. These manuscripts are: London, British Library MS Additional 34114 (olim Spalding), containing five poems, all in Anglo-French (a version of the Chanson d’Antioche, the Roman d’Eneas, the Roman de Thebes, Le Songe Vert – a dream-vision – and a 170-line segment of the Ordene de Chevalerie, attributed to Hue de Tabarie); BL MS Arundel 74, a copy of Bede's Historia Ecclesiastica; and BL MS Cotton Claudius E.viii, a compendium of works bound together by Robert Cotton in the seventeenth century. The main texts of this last, a Flores Historiarum with the Continuatio chronicarum of Adam Murimuth brought to 1340, belonged unequivocally to Despenser. Previous scholars (with different degrees of certainty) have assigned the production of these books to Norwich based on the evidence of their provenance – criteria that are ultimately insufficient for establishing origin. We hope here to build a more rigorous case for the bishop's commission of all three books – not in London or even Oxford, but locally – in the city of Norwich itself, and we will do this by analysing the two main artists involved, together with a larger grouping of contemporary illuminated manuscripts uniform in both style and provenance.

1. Vindicatory violence and lèse-majesté: the struggle for control over peacekeeping practices

The advent of modernity, both juridical and judicial, has traditionally been identified with initiating the process that made criminal law independent from civil law, to the detriment of the latter, and the concurrent emergence of the public criminal process at the expense of private solutions to conflict resolution. On the terminus a quo of this evolution, historiography has not always been in agreement. Some have preferred to relegate the entire pre-revolutionary era to a sort of archaism in which jurists were inclined ‘to treat criminal issues […] with a civil law mentality, as if criminal law were a necessary complement to civil law, a complex of defences prepared to protect particular positions of privilege of individuals or the community.’ Others have instead highlighted how much modernity was already present in the criminal doctrine of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, which was increasingly forced to address the issue of the public relevance of crimes, the threat they posed to the security and preservation of the state. The transformation, in the direction of an indefinite expansion, of the concept and fields of application of the crimen laesae maiestatis was, as Mario Sbriccoli showed almost half a century ago, one of the main instruments – underpinned by an ideology, which may perhaps be seen as the primary force that allowed state jurisdiction to erode fundamental areas of legitimacy from competing jurisdictions, especially feudal ones.

Reverend Dr.

Some Months are now past since I sent you by the Conveyance of my good friend Mr. Jeremy Dummer a Letter in answer to your former, which I hope came to your hands, in that I gave you an account of my having recieved your Manuscript of ingenious Letters to Dr. Woodward and my selfe, tho’ as I then intimated, they had bin so Short a time in my possession that I could not make a sutable return for the Kindness and the honorable sentiments you are pleased to entertain off me.

As for yr being chosen a ffellow of the Royal Society, that has bin don ﹛.﹜ you have bin approved by the Council and Elected by the Body of the Society, so that only the Ceremony of an actual admission is wanting, which you being Beyond sea cannot be performed, and you being a natural born subject, cannot be inserted among the Gentlemen of other nations in the printed Liste, which is the reason that your name is not printed in the Liste herewith sent you. The chief reason of printing these Listes is for the convenience of the fellows present in choosing the Council President and Officers for the ensuing year.

But to come to the contents of your Letters in your Manuscript at the Desire of the Society I made a large Extract of them which was read at our publique meetings.

Johann Wilhelm Ritter (1776–1810) was a German physicist, philosopher and chemist, who was an early believer in the power of the invisible forces in nature. His work culminated in a discovery of the outside area or ultra-region of the visual spectrum, the so-called UV or ultraviolet-ray band. Analogous to his scientific interest in invisible light is Ritter's fascination with the visualization of sound via the vibration plates of Ernst Chladni (1756–1827). Like Chladni's ‘sound figures’, which allowed one to see sound drawn by sand, Ritter's discovery of invisible light proved that nature continually presents oscillating symbols or hieroglyphs to be deciphered by the senses. For Ritter, chief among all the senses, was hearing:

The sense of hearing is among all the senses of the universe the highest, greatest, most encompassing, certainly, it is the only general, the universal sense. There is no perspective of the universe so whole and unlimited as the acoustical one.

This understanding of nature became the basis of a musical aesthetic that mirrored sound on to light, a concept Ritter introduced in a two-volume 1810 publication, Fragmente aus dem Nachlasse eines jungen Physikers: Ein Taschenbuch für Freunde der Natur [Fragments from the estate of a young physicist: A pocket book for friends of nature], where he even goes so far as to proclaim that sound is conscious, a living thing: ‘As is light, so too is tone consciousness. Every tone is a life of the sounding body and in it which continues as long as the tone does but vanishes with it.

Reverend Sir, Since my last, I am favour’d with two Letters from you, one of Oct. 5th & the other of Dec. 15th by Dr. Boylston, whom I shall be so glad to serve upon all occasions on account of his own Merit, that he stands in no need of your Recommendation, tho’ that will always have the greatest weight with me. Besides these, I have received your large Packet of Letters to Dr. Woodward myself, which I have at times communicated to the Royal Society, & am commanded to return you their thanks for the several curious relations contain’d therein. I have likewise received several small Pieces publish’d by you upon different subjects, for which I return you my hearty thanks & beg you will accept of my account of Inoculation herewith enclos’d, as a poor return for so many favours. Give me leave to hope for some assistance from you with regard to my Proposal for Observations upon the Weather. If you cannot conveniently take in the whole, any part of it, as the Winds, Weather, and the heights of the Barometer, will be very acceptable. In the mean time, I have orders to make a request to you in the name of the Royal Society, on the following occasion.

In Phil. Trans. No 339 is published an Extract of one of your Letters to Mr. Waller, containing the following remarkable passage.

The weekly chronicle as a combat weapon Carmen Dolores was the pseudonym of Emília Moncorvo Bandeira de Melo (São Paulo, 11 March 1852 – Rio de Janeiro, 16 August 1910), a writer from Rio de Janeiro of aristocratic descent, the great-niece of the viscount of Sepetiba, who had been minister of state and senator of the empire, and daughter of Carlos Honório de Figueiredo, a member of the Brazilian Historical and Geographical Institute, a scientific institution supported by Dom Pedro II. Her first son, from her marriage in 1867 to Jerônimo Bandeira de Melo, was baptised by Minister João Alfredo, and the Bandeira de Melo family had lived with Joaquim Nabuco, the baron of Cotegipe, the viscount of Saboia, and the baron of Sousa Lima, as well as frequenting the imperial residences. Her children were students at the traditional Pedro II school. Despite her express interest in culture in general and literature in particular, which may have been partly the result of the upbringing typical of her social class, she decided to publish her writings late in life, having debuted with Gradações, a book of short stories, in 1897, at the age of forty-five.

After making sparse contributions to periodicals, Carmen Dolores achieved genuine public prominence when she was invited by journalist Alcindo Guanabara to write the weekly chronicle for the morning newspaper O País (Rio de Janeiro, 1884–1934), one of the most important Brazilian periodicals, and a bastion of the governments of the First Republic. This was the most traditional type of chronicle in Brazilian journalism and had been practised in the 1850s by pioneers Francisco Otaviano and José de Alencar, who were expected to provide humorous commentary on the main events of the past week in all fields: politics, behaviour, festivities, social and artistic events, book releases, police events, etc.

Imperialism came to the region as a hydra with many different heads: it came as the warlordism of buccaneers of the frontier zone of global trade; in the 1870s it came with officials of an Egyptian state inspired by European models and whose representatives were often Europeans. It came in the shape of missionaries, who were preaching the gospel and were trading in political influence and even arms; and it came with scientific explorers, who were often rather adventurers than scientists. In the late 1880s and early 1890s, it came as a hybrid being of the chartered company, half colonial state, half capitalist enterprise. Finally, it first evolved into a colonial state in the figure of a man who had incorporated all these roles for much of the time: Emin Pasha, an explorer turned into the representative of the Egyptian state, who finally became the first German colonial official in 1890 when he established a German outpost at Lake Victoria in 1890.

This multiheaded hydra was what interlacustrine elites had to deal with. Its contours were not always clear, its agenda ambivalent and hard to assess. As we have seen, interlacustrine societies were already in the midst of a profound transformation caused by the rebalancing of the regional power system and the growing engagement in international trade. The underlying argument of this chapter is that regional politics played a decisive part in African reactions to the arrival and different incarnations of the colonial hydra. In the 1870s, when the Egyptians tried to impose themselves as a new hegemon, Buganda was still at the height of its power.

In 1555, Mary I – the daughter of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon, and first Queen regnant of England – appeared to be pregnant with her first heir. At this moment, a few years after her coronation, the need to produce heirs was urgent for Mary, who was now in her late thirties. Royal and noble women faced significant pressures to reproduce in early-modern England, because their central duty was to continue the family line and ensure legitimate heirs, preferably male ones. This pressure was intensified for Mary because her reign was perceived by many as illegitimate. There was strong political anxiety surrounding Mary's accession to the throne and her rule, as she was the first woman to rule England since Empress Matilda's failed reign in the twelfth century. Her enthronement was the subject of much criticism, owing to the fact that female rule was seen as unnatural. This was epitomised by the Scottish Protestant minister John Knox's well-known polemical tract, published in 1558, where Knox described female rule as ‘a thing most repugnant to nature’. Not only was Mary a woman, she was also Catholic, and heavily criticised for her role in the persecution of Protestants, as well as her controversial marriage to Prince Philip of Spain, whom many feared was a ‘potential conqueror and tyrant’. Historians suggest that Mary may have been able to quell the criticism and anxiety surrounding her reign with the birth of a male heir. As Carol Levin contends, when Mary took the throne in October 1553 she was unmarried and in her late thirties, thus, a marriage and procreation were central to her being seen as rightful ruler in the eyes of the Privy Council and the public.