Ilse Aichinger's “Spiegelgeschichte” (Story in a Mirror), written in 1948–49 and published in 1953, is the very short story of a young woman who dies following an illegal abortion. The nameless woman, who lost her mother as a child and had to help raise her younger brothers, begins a relationship with a young man, and after giving in to his pressure to have sex, she becomes pregnant. Unable to deal with the situation, the young man merely utters the name of the street on which a known abortionist resides. The woman undergoes the abortion procedure alone and in unsanitary conditions; after developing sepsis, she dies slowly and painfully, again alone, in a hospital bed. The story can be—and has been—read as a sad tale of a poor girl who got herself in trouble and paid with her life. The narrator's concluding words, “Still! Las sie reden!” (74, “Quiet! Let them talk!” 70) has been understood by most as an appeal for the acceptance of fate. Conversely, I believe that the story's impact lies precisely in its angry refusal let the woman be a victim and a corpse. I argue that the temporal reversal and the angry tone within the secondperson narration, beyond condemning the circumstances that lead to the botched abortion, create an emancipatory trajectory for its protagonist that is tied to a critique of patriarchy and of realism, and our interpretation has to contend with both.

In a lengthy passage in the History of King Richard III, Thomas More described an interesting historical figure, a woman he calls Shore's Wife. More reflected on the London mercer's wife's journey from her city shop to King Edward IV's bed, the royal mistress's life at court, her good deeds, and her final disgrace during Richard III's reign. He dwelt on the character of Shore's Wife – she was witty, merry, and well-spoken, able to both read and write, intelligent and politically astute enough to become the king's special confidante – and he also noted her exceptionally good looks. At the end of this passage, however, More anticipated censure from prospective readers, who might think that the story of a mere woman of questionable morals would hardly fit alongside the dynastic battles, military heroics and political manoeuvrings that he was otherwise interested in:

Today's modern preconceptions of “magic” and “medicine” place them at opposite poles, but these oppositions do not appear to have operated so simply among the early medieval English peoples. In instances that might approximate either term, or both, the pre-Conquest English identified the use and invocation among them of supernatural and other healing and cursing aids, some of which include material and metaphorical textile tools and processes. This chapter addresses important questions based on this evidence: do patterns exist for those who appear to have used these aids? How were textile objects and processes used in such contexts? Why might textile production, material or metaphorical, have proven resonant for magic? Are magical women related to a pattern easily attested in poetic and historical texts of seeing some women as deathweavers and binders, in contrast to the “peaceweavers” of the previous chapter? Finally, do similar patterns exist among the cultures of related people? The answers form the core of this chapter.

Magic in Context in Early Medieval England

In a discussion of magic, some definition of the term is, of course, indispensable. It is nonetheless a difficult task, as one must define “magic” in a way that would be as accurate across the early Middle Ages in England, as it is comprehensible today. The dividing lines between science, magic, and medicine are far more distinct for us today than they likely would have been for medieval peoples more generally, rendering the task additionally complex. The simplest definition for “magic” is the belief in or attempt to harness supernatural forces for the aid of a living creature, whether to curse or bless, heal or kill.

Really, universally, relations stop nowhere, and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle within which they shall happily appear to do so.

Henry James, preface to Roderick Hudson

This book is about beginnings, both of human crafting and of cosmic Creation. Because of that, it is also necessarily about the processes of forming, designing, and crafting thinking – the complex of procedures involved in what is called poeisis in Greek, faciendi and poesis in Latin, and both “fashioning” and “making” in English. For Cicero and for Horace, and the many centuries of authors who followed them, ars poetica was not confined to fashioning metrical verses, but is an extensive title, including all of what we now know as “language arts” (and have come to rigidly separate from one another, as well as sharply from all the “mathematical” and “scientific” arts of the quadrivium). Aristotle remarks at the start of his Metaphysics that philosophers must also be myth-lovers (philomuthos) “since myths are composed of wonders” and therefore will set us to wondering about the world around us, a remark that certainly includes Plato as well as Pythagoras, both of whom were myth-lovers. In the Latin school manuals used for centuries to teach rhetoric, procedures for fashioning language are called dispositio, in English “Organization”; most commonly in medieval Latin they are collectively called ordo or ordinatio, and humans have invented and used their own orderings for their understandings of the ordered universe in which they find themselves.

Athelston is extant in a single manuscript, Cambridge Gonville and Caius College MS 175, and was written for an audience of educated tradespeople.1 In this Middle English romance, four messengers become sworn brothers. One of their number, Athelston, inherits the English throne, bestows earldoms on Egelond (who marries Athelston's sister, Edith) and Wymound, and invests his third sworn brother, Alryke, as archbishop of Canterbury. In time, Wymound becomes jealous of Egelond's wife and sons, and tells Athelston that Egelond is plotting to poison him. Athelston vows to kill Egelond and his family, summoning them to the capital on a pretext, bringing them into a space of his power and authority in order to challenge Egelond. Although Edith is heavily pregnant, they travel to London and are imprisoned by the king. Athelston's wife, who is also pregnant, attempts to intercede, but her husband kicks her in the stomach, killing his unborn heir. The queen sends a messenger to Alryke, who hurries to Westminster. Alryke orders a great fire of nine plough lengths to be laid out outside St Paul's Cathedral as a trial for the accused Egelond and his family. Egelond endures the trial without harm, followed by his two sons. His wife, Edith, then walks across the fire and goes into labour. She publicly gives birth to St Edmund, whom the penitent Athelston immediately makes his heir.

In Charlemagne literature written outside French political space, the Charlemagne portrayed is necessarily politically different. In the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Charlemagne was so firmly identified as king of France that writers from different regions of Europe had to contend with this tradition in presenting Charlemagne. This posed problems for many writers, in particular for writers in German, since the French were considered the traditional invaders of the German-speaking lands of the Empire. Such authors took pains to dissociate the French companions of Charlemagne in their tales from these traditional foes, avoiding any use of ‘French’ to describe Charlemagne's men, but rather preferring ‘Franks’ and stressing their Germanic origin. Even in the case of writers working in the French language, a political location outside the French kingdom means that their portrayal of Charlemagne will inevitably be problematized. This is less evident, as we shall see, when authors depict an idealized emperor who is still recognizably king of an idealized France, a nation which itself has a privileged role. However, when texts portray the tensions and conflicts inherent in governing, and in particular when they criticize Charlemagne as a ruler, the fact that the text was produced outside France is important to the text's interpretation.

This chapter will consider texts by two authors working within what could broadly be termed the Burgundian sphere of influence, though they do not relate to the alternative centre of power, the Burgundian Valois regime, and therefore to Charlemagne in the same way. The authors are Jean d’Outremeuse and David Aubert.

Given the exceptional size of its ringwork, scale of imposition in the landscape, and the remarkable symmetry between its central motte and concentric multivallate form, it is somewhat surprising that Old Sarum has garnered only passing commentary in general studies of Norman castles. Considered by its stewards to have elements of international and national significance, and as one of very few ‘urban’ castles in Wiltshire and Somerset, it was evidently intended to be of regional administrative importance (Fig. 1), with a case for constitutional significance in its connections to Domesday Book. A recent review of the substantial but problematic archaeological records has established that the form the monument takes today is largely the result of the Iron Age hillfort being extensively refashioned in the half-century or so following 1066 and this study seeks to develop that analysis to explore what the monument tells us of the Norman Conquest and its aftermath in the following century. In light of the shortcomings of the archaeological data and scarcity of historical detail, this study will draw on nearly four decades of scholarship that has convincingly established that grounded assertions can be made about the world view and cultural aspirations of aristocratic and royal elites through the reading of the physical, structural, and topographical alterations they made to fortifications and their landscape settings in the symbolic projection of power. The approach offered here seeks not only to set Old Sarum in a new light but, in so doing, provide a fresh perspective on the Norman Conquest and its longer-term impacts, interpreted through the statement in earth and stone made by the Norman elite in central southern England.

Introduction

On 6 August 1457 John Copuldyk, priest and vicar choral of Lincoln Cathedral, made an oath before the dean and chapter which was copied into the Chapter Acts in the first person. promising that ‘if it should happen in future that I am convicted of any crime or excess then I wish and consent that then I should be completely removed both from my vicarage and chantry which I hold in the said church and from any other office of ministering by the said dean and chapter, forever and ever, suspended by these words’. The repetition of this oath upon John's institution as a chantry chaplain provides an example of what a chantry founder and the dean and chapter believed that a good chantry chaplain ought to be, and that failing in their moral and spiritual obligations or committing a crime rendered a vicar unworthy of carrying out their duties.

This chapter, intended as a companion piece to that by Hanna Nüllen, does not pretend to constitute an authoritative discussion of record-making and recordkeeping in thirteenth-century English boroughs and the English-held city of Dublin. Instead, it presents a broad-brush and simplified survey of surviving municipal documentary culture created in England and Ireland between c.1190 and 1300, principally to facilitate a comparison with similar phenomena occurring simultaneously in German-speaking towns. The comparison illustrates, in effect, that civic governments across all three regions of northern Europe were affected by wider thirteenth-century trends that promoted the production and accumulation of written records: urbanisation, demographic expansion, personal mobility, and the rise of an administrative elite of trained clerks and scribes. When English and Irish civic governments began routinely creating and preserving their own archives, and even what kinds of records they chose to make and keep, roughly followed the same patterns that Nüllen finds in her survey of German-speaking urban authorities. Key contrasts between the form of these records – with an almost total absence of municipal records in book form surviving for thirteenth-century English and Irish towns – may suggest, however, that these urban governments perhaps diverged from their German counterparts in their idea of the functions that an archive should perform, or at the very least used and accessed their records in different ways. The emergence of the municipal codex in England and Ireland in the years immediately after 1300 – notably, to supplement but not to replace rolls and single sheets – shows not that towns in the king of England's dominions had caught up with the more ‘advanced’ documentary practices of precocious continental towns, but perhaps instead reveals an under-appreciated shift in how English and Irish urban authorities understood the purpose of record production and preservation.

J. H. Todd's edition is cited by page and paragraph/chapter number, and pages and lines of the diplomatic edition of the Book of Leinster version, the readings of which are often better, are cited. Asterisks mark raids not included in Lucas's schedule (‘Plundering and burning’, pp. 215–28). As far as possible, an approximate date range for the unique items is proposed, by reference to items in each paragraph or short chapter that correspond to items in the other annals. Place-name identifications from Hogan, Onomasticon, are sometimes cited, without implying acceptance. Where the location of a church is not certainly identified, the Irish form is given.