Fire on board was one of the most dangerous of the misadventures faced by mariners. Outside the risks of fire associated with warfare, there were risks associated with lightning strike; the carriage of gunpowder or saltpetre or fibrous cargo such as cotton; wood fires in the galley; or a spark from candle or lantern falling into a broached keg of spirits, with tarred rope and oiled canvas always ready to burn. As well there was the possibility of arson on the part of disgruntled seamen while in port. Lascars were commonly blamed for fires, the idea being that after taking wage advances they would burn the ship and abscond. James Horsburgh was one of those who believed that ‘a rage for burning ships pervaded the native sailors of India’. Four of the ships that protested at Malacca in 1816 and 1817 were later destroyed by fire, attributed to arson, while in port: the Bombay Castle bound for China with a load of cotton burnt off Saugor Island in May 1846; the Cornwallis was burnt in Bombay with a load of cotton on board in 1841; the Duchess of Wellington burnt in Saugor with a cargo of saltpetre in 1816 and the Upton Castle, again in Saugor, laden with cotton in 1817, the latter after a foiled first attempt. In the case of the Duchess of Wellington the report in the Asiatic Journal asserted that:

In 1599, Gerónimo de Huerta (1573–1643) began translating the Natural History of Pliny the Elder, the 1624 edition of which contains a “Tabla de las efigies de gentes monstruosas, animales, pescados, aves e insectos.” The Historia natural / de Cayo Plinio Segundo; traducida por el Licenciado Geronimo de Huerta … y ampliada por él mismo, con escolios y anotaciones, en que se aclara lo oscuro y dudoso y añade lo no sabido hasta estos tiempos provides in the Castilian language – as the complete title of the translation indicates – more information on the many things there are to say about animals. Both the Latin writer and the Spanish humanist contributed to the encyclopedia on animals. The last words of the title of the translation relay that Pliny's work was expanded by Geronimo de Huerta, who added material on previously unknown topics. Here, the question arises: what information pertaining to animals, according to the translator, was unavailable in Pliny's time, which the Spaniard, as a scholar of philosophy and natural history, thought should be included to bring the work's zoological matter up to date? To answer this question, using comparative literature as a methodology, I explain how Gerónimo de Huerta incorporated zoological findings from various sources into his notes. Thus, both the “Table” and the annotations to the translation of the Natural History present, on the one hand, the fauna that inhabited the territories identified by Pliny (first century), and, on the other, reveal the fauna that inhabited the places known to the Spanish translator (sixteenth to seventeenth century).

The above piece, an extract from a letter published in the “Thanksgivings” pages of the Irish Messenger of the Sacred Heart in September 1932, is eloquent in its expression of feelings: despair, pain, sadness, depression, the determination to persevere, and, finally, relief and delight. If emotion is, in William M. Reddy's terms, “a dialogue between one's conscious and subconscious thoughts in which numerous sensory inputs are being decoded and translated,” the writing above is a powerful expression of this process. As the study of history moves on from seeing humans merely as “actors in shifting historical scenery,” the aim is to focus more on the experience and emotions of individuals. As Rob Boddice explains, “The historian's role has come to include an appraisal of what it was like to be in the past: we have come to ask, what did it feel like?”

INTRODUCTION

Edmund Spenser made a fleeting appearance in early scholarly discourse on the Irish dánta grádha (love poems): in his introduction to T. F. O’Ra¬hilly's pioneering Dánta Grádha: An Anthology of Irish Love Poetry (1916), Robin Flower suggests that, had Spenser been introduced to the dánta grádha, ‘he would have recognised a familiar note in them’ due to their similarity to contemporaneous English love poems such as those published in Tottel's Miscellany in 1557. While Spenser can rightfully be categorised as a love poet, he is not among those English poets whose work has been shown to have had a direct influence on the dánta grádha. The present chapter takes inspiration from Flower's imagined encounter by examining a contemporary of Spenser’s, Eochaidh Ó hEódhusa (c. 1568–1612). I will focus on Ó hEódhusa's love poems, most of which have received little critical attention to date, and I will consider the question of how appropriate the label of ‘love poet’ is to this most multifaceted of poets.

EOCHAIDH Ó hEÓDHUSA

Eochaidh Ó hEódhusa was from the townland of Baile Uí Eódhusa (Bally¬hose), Co. Fermanagh. His father was Maoileachlainn Ó hEódhusa, also a poet and chief of his name. Ó hEódhusa (junior) received training as a poet in the northern half of Ireland and in Thomond in Munster. He returned to Ballyhose as an adult, was later granted land at Currin near Ballinamallard, Co. Fermanagh, and in 1610–11 was granted a plantation grant of 210 acres in the barony of Clanawley in that same county

Wallace MacCafrey's study of the ‘shaping of the Elizabethan regime’ concluded that though the essential decision of the English Reformation was made ‘with surprising ease and minor disturbance’ at the very outset of the reign, only after the determinative climacteric of 1569–71 was it possible ‘to feel some sense of its permanence’. The wheel had not turned.The regime, as Francis Bacon put it, continued to be ‘imbarcked into the Protestant cause’. The narrowed political options to which Catholic notables were subsequently reduced have been outlined. Tis concluding chapter seeks to draw out underlying reasons for the failure of Catholic noble leadership in the crisis years.

It might be argued that, insofar as it was derived from the unwillingness of key Catholic nobles to deploy their militarised afnities, Catholic political failure saved England from a full-scale war of religion. Equally, it might be argued that England had had its – episodic-war of religion. As Peter Marshall has reminded us, though Tudor England avoided the full-scale religious confict aficting France from 1562 to 1598, the progress of the English Reformation ‘was at every stage lubricated by copious efusions of blood’, some of it ‘spilled in skirmishes and battles between armed forces in the feld’.

Introduction

In 2005 the Dutch Agricultural History Society organised a symposium on biographies of leading figures of the Dutch agricultural sector. A lot of attention was paid to the Mansholt family, a wealthy family of Groningen farmers, and its most prominent member: Minister and European Commissioner Sicco Mansholt. One of the participants remarked ironically that the Society was somewhat behind the times. Nowadays, he said, in the agricultural sector the money is no longer being made by the arable farmers of lowland Groningen, but by the intensive animal farmers of the uplands. Therefore, he suggested, it would be more useful to focus on their leaders. Unsurprisingly, this remark was made by a professor at Maastricht University in Limburg, the most upland part of the Netherlands. He was right, however, and his remark illustrates the shifts that took place in the countryside. As early as 1910 the German economist Friedrich Swart had remarked that during the preceding decades the uplands had been catching up with the lowlands. The time of the prosperous lowland farmers, who lived like ‘small kings’ on their large farms and looked down upon the poor uplanders, was coming to an end.1 Therefore, the 1880–1980 period is fundamentally different from the previous centuries. Although mechanisation and the use of artificial fertilisers and pesticides led to unprecedented levels of land and labour productivity, the lowland farmers lost their prominent position in rural society. Paradoxically, the agricultural sector itself prospered, but individual farmers lost wealth, power and status.

On May 1, 1653, an unusual hailstorm struck North Frisia. In his Nordfresische Chronik (North Frisian Chronicle, 1666), M. Antoni Heimrich reports that, along with the usual ice clumps, there fell on that day “ein groß geschmeiß einer sonderlichen art von fliegen fast wie ein schnee herunter gefallen, daß man nerlich die augen dafür hat können auffthun” (a large shower of a strange sort, one made up of flies fell like snow, such that it was nearly impossible to open one's eyes). His report of a shower of insects falling from the skies seems fantastic, but is by no means impossible: so-called “rains of animals,” while rare, do take place and can be explained scientifically. Other events Heimrich records, however, defy rational explanation. In 1636, on the Feast of the Chair of St. Peter, for instance, he says that a local administrator in the town of Lunden found a signum sanguinis around his house, and when he went to wash himself, he discovered five death's heads in his washbasin. Two centuries later, Theodor Storm lifted these events directly out of Heimrich's chronicle for his 1888 novella Der Schimmelreiter (The Rider on the White Horse). But whereas Heimrich depicts these incidents straightforwardly as “real” enough that they do not trouble the chronicle's claim to historical truth, in Storm's novella these and similarly fantastic elements can only appear at odds with Der Schimmelreiter's realist claims.

One of the earliest English-language programme notes on the Sinfo¬nietta was written by Rosa Newmarch (1857–1940), Janáček's most enthusiastic advocate in Britain and the person to whom Janáček dedicated the work – a fact Newmarch mentions in the heading of her note. She gives no hint of any extra-musical significance or inspiration, preferring instead to approach it entirely in terms of absolute music. Originally written for the work's London premiere in 1928 conducted by Henry Wood, Newmarch's note was reprinted in 1938. Its historical interest lies primarily in its status as an introduction to British audiences of a composer whose music was completely unfamiliar at the time. In general, Newmarch's comments are typically concise and clearly expressed, though curiously she makes no mention of the entry of the banda trumpets in the second movement (she even omits trumpets from the list of instruments). She is more perceptive about the structure and thematic inter-relationships of the third movement and has useful comments on the finale. Above all, this note is fascinating in presenting the thoughts of the work's dedicatee – a dedication of which Newmarch was understandably proud. In her later book, The Music of Czechoslovakia, Newmarch summarised Janáček's style in this piece: ‘What he has to say is said tersely, swiftly, and directly, with no time lost upon extended developments. This is strongly marked in the Sinfonietta for orchestra, a work in five movements, each of which is scored for a different combination of instruments.’ Her earlier thoughts provide a more detailed commentary.

In Occitan-speaking lands, Charlemagne was commemorated as a warrior, a founder and restorer of holy shrines, and a model of authority. As in the rest of the regions that were nominally or actively ruled by the French crown from the High to the Later Middle Ages, Charlemagne was often remembered as rex Francorum. However, by dint of his strong identification with locations, the emperor that circulated in Occitan-speaking lands was sometimes more regional than either spiritual or imperial. In terms of the three functions, his profile remained consistently identified with the first (spiritual authority) and the second (military power). As has been shown by Amy Remensnyder, many texts and sites in Occitan-speaking regions combined the historical Charles the Great with the legendary figure familiar from chansons de geste, and it is not easy to distinguish one from the other. In these regions, the Pseudo-Turpin Chronicle (hereafter Pseudo-Turpin) is often the bridge between the historical and the legendary Charlemagne. Indeed, until the discovery in 1912 of a manuscript that contained two Occitan Roland poems, there was little written evidence that the Midi had possessed a vernacular Cycle du Roi, the tradition of chansons de geste centred on Charlemagne. Part I of this chapter traces the evidence of an epic tradition, and more specifically of a heroic Charlemagne, while Part II analyses selected texts in terms of their geographical and socio-political context.