Critics have widely acknowledged the hybrid nature of Cervantes’ writing when explaining the mixture of genres in his work, in which different literary forms coexist (Riley 2001). The result of this coexistence of genres creates an original product, anchored in a multiplicity of traditions: chivalric novels, pastoral novels, Moorish novels, cape and sword novels, and picaresque novels are some of the novelistic genres that Cervantes masters and combines in his work in a free and experimental way. This propensity for generic crossover represents not only an innovation in literary terms but also, in a neat coherence between form and content, a reflection on Spanish identity during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries linked to the concept of “purity of blood.” Written at a time when the Iberian Peninsula was under constant scrutiny to determine the “cleanliness” of its inhabitants, the discourse on identity, as well as the ability to transform or conceal said identity, is crucial to understanding Cervantes’ work and its relationship to the complex world in which he lived.

After the capture of Granada in 1492, the Catholic Monarchs prohibited the profession of any non-Catholic religion in the peninsula. As a result, Spanish Jews and Muslims had two options: conversion to Catholicism – whether sincere or insincere – or exile. Now, how was the authenticity of any such conversion to be determined? Who would rule on its authenticity and according to what criteria? To hold onto their identity, many of the Muslims and Jews who became Christians continued to practice their own religion in private throughout the sixteenth century, as well as their customs, many of which were shared by Christian Orthodox Spain (Fuchs 2009: 1). Spanish identity based on difference (the Old Christian is defined in opposition to the Jew and the Muslim) was difficult to determine in a world in which the exotic was often commonplace (Fuchs 2009: 11).

This chapter assesses the chaos Italy caused Ethiopia and efforts to rebuild the Ethiopian state after liberation in 1941. It begins with the Italian invasion, the rationale for creating spacio vitale (“living space”) in which to settle Italy's impoverished population, the brutality of occupation and the degree to which Italians imposed their own political, economic, and judicial institutions on Ethiopia. To balance the analysis, a summary of Italy's reputed positive contributions will be gauged and shown to be harmful to Ethiopia's autochthonous development. Yet despite their negative effects, Italy's re-engineering of Ethiopia's infrastructure accelerated Ethiopia's push towards modern development afterwards. The focus of the chapter, of course, is the liberation of Ethiopia by British forces fighting alongside Ethiopian Patriots. After the defeat of Africa Orientale Italiana (Italian East Africa) in 1941, a reckoning was in order. While traditional forms of restorative justice had been deemed superior for bringing about peace and reconciliation, in post-liberation Ethiopia international understandings of “rules of war” determined how the Italian army and askaris were to be treated. A confusing mixture of Western legal systems was used to administer justice for Italian civilians and Ethiopian collaborators. Almost forgotten were the indigenous juridic mechanisms previously discussed. This chapter attempts to explain why restorative justice was overlooked and only resorted to in a few cases in which European legal solutions were thought inadequate.

After liberation the task of administering justice split the Ethiopian population down the middle: Patriots versus collaborators, and the indifferent were forced to assert that they had always been on the winning side, surreptitiously aiding the Patriots by supplying food and shelter or through a million other micro-actions. Naturally the ranks of the collaborators shrunk and shrunk again until only a small number were deemed traitors worthy to stand trial.

Biological reductionism is constitutive of the dominant ideology in the contemporary Western metropolitan world and, often undetected, pervades all spheres of human life. The contemporary obsession with DNA—manifest, for example, in the increasing popularity of genetic hereditary testing—is only one of many phenomena indicative of the triumph of positivism in the social sphere. In the world of academia, this triumph is reflected negatively in the steady decline of the humanities, which conventionally do not produce positivistic knowledge, and in the anguished attempt of Digital Humanities scholars, amongst others, to extract quantifiable “value” from culture. As the culture industry perpetuates an ideology that undermines its foundations, making claims about the conditio socialis on the basis of quantifiable data has become a common practice. Thus, idiosyncratic hereditary material is thought to determine not only hair or eye color, or “roots” that purportedly lie in a physical location identified with some faraway ancestors, but also social categories, such as ethnic or racial identity. The persistence of racial paradigms originates in a mechanism inherent to positivist discourses, namely the conflation of social and biological elements: race, a social category, appears as a quantifiable, biological fact, derived from hereditary transmission.

4.1 Introduction: Published Literature

With the chronology and regional distribution of Viking raids on churches clarified in the preceding chapters, we can now move on to the motivation for such raids. At one level, there is the immediate purpose of the raids: what was it that Vikings were looking for when they attacked a church? At a second level, there is the question of why in general Vikings attacked churches and how this relates to their broader objectives in Ireland. The first issue, the immediate purpose of attacking churches, is the subject of this chapter. The broader context of Viking objectives in general is teased out at length in Chapters 6 to 12. Archaeological as well as documentary evidence has been deployed by previous writers to determine what Vikings sought when they raided churches. Archaeology is considered in this study too, but pride of place goes to the annals, the testimony of which, it will be shown, is crucial to illuminating the immediate purpose of Viking raids. The findings of the preceding chapters on chronology and distribution of raids bear out the view, put forward in the introductory chapter, that convincing historical synthesis requires closer analytic studies of the annals than have so far been undertaken. This is further underlined by what follows, as we will see.

The question of what Viking church raiders were looking for has elicited diverse answers, since Anthony Lucas denied that ecclesiastical metalwork was the main attraction. He reasoned that the bullion value of Irish church metalwork was generally low, being chiefly bronze.

1. Bi-confessionality, social peace and arbitral justice: the monarchy of France

The presence of a significant Huguenot minority and the bloody civil war that erupted from the early 1560s made France an extraordinarily important laboratory for the development of the concepts of concord and peace. The intense theoretical reflection on religious concord was not detached from the practices aimed at overcoming interconfessional conflict, which in the context of communities could arise from other factors (personal and family enmities, hatred, vengeance). The 1973 essay by Natalie Zemon Davis on the rites of violence in religious conflict in France undoubtedly marked a historiographical turning point, not least by her ability to graft the anthropological perspective onto the historical data of ‘crowd violence’. Just as it is possible to write a history of violence, even in its ritual and performative dimension, one can attempt to write a history of peace and the search for peaceful coexistence in contexts of bi-confessionality. The challenge, as in the analysis of conflict and explosions of violence, lies in evaluating the degree of impact of religious motivation in the search for concord, assuming it is possible to fully separate it from social factors.

The theoretical reflection on religious concord took its cue from the reflection on social concord, a common heritage, as has been seen, of Renaissance political thought, as well as from Erasmus-inspired Christian irenicism.

In this Anglo-Latin poem by Aldhelm (c.639–709), famed Latin and Old English poet of early medieval England, the speaker describes the curious life it can call its own. Its story begins in a leafy forest, but the speaker moves away to a busy life, whirling about in thread and making robes, all to prevent cold from harming men. For modern readers, this imagery can be perplexing, but it would not have been for the people of Aldhelm's day, or many others who lived hundreds of years before or after his time. For them, this narrator's identity would have been clear and resonant because of their daily interaction with the material culture and the process of textile production, from the spinning threads of the riddle to finished webs in the loom.

Book VII pulls together the argument of the poem, which now specifies that it has discussed not the three estates but (as the first headnote puts it) “the spiritual as well as the secular degrees of society” responsible for the present state of affairs. The Book's opening lines draw a direct parallel between what can be learned from the past and England's own present difficulties:

What is wont of late to lurk in ancient figures, We can verify from our own troubles.

An account of Nebuchadnezzar's dream of the shattered statue whose sole remnant is its feet, one of clay and the other of iron, is offered in evidence of the poet's reading of history. Avarice and lust, the two sins that have been the primary focus of Gower's attention throughout the poem, are shown to be deeply seated in human affairs. The iron of the shattered statue's one foot represents avarice, which characterizes the iron heart of the miser who lacks compassion. The other foot's clay stands for the lust that renders human life and institutions brittle, able to be shattered in a moment. The world, intended by God as a place of preparation for the day of judgment, has been turned upside down by humanity's misdirected desires, all the more deplorable because everything worldly is transitory, and unworthy when compared to eternal permanence. Commitment to the world and its pleasures, characterized by the seven deadly sins, leads to damnation. Commitment to Christian values leads to life everlasting.

We are ready now to turn to the seminars themselves. Andrew Jaszi taught Kafka throughout most of his career, though he was not known as an expert on Kafka like his friend and colleague at Berkeley Heinz Politzer. What “not being an expert” means in the world of a major research university like Berkeley is that Andrew Jaszi did not publish on Kafka, nor did he claim, or even aim, to possess a thorough knowledge of every text, every diary entry, and all the correspondence that Kafka ever wrote and received. Politzer had worked with Max Brod in Jerusalem in the 1930s editing the first four volumes of Kafka's collected works and in 1962 published a landmark book of Kafka interpretation, which to this day remains widely read and cited. So Politzer enjoyed the reputation, welldeserved, of being Berkeley's resident Kafka expert. Still, it is clear from the comments preserved in the audio recordings that Andrew Jaszi had meticulously studied the central texts by Kafka and was also quite familiar, even if not exhaustively so, with much of the secondary literature. It is equally clear that despite his self-effacing tendency to defer to Politzer and others in all matters of primary research, Jaszi was, in his own right, a penetratingly original Kafka interpreter of those texts in which he specialized. Certainly, as a teacher, Andrew Jaszi was unmatched. We recall the high praise accorded him by Politzer, with whom Jaszi occasionally cotaught seminars: “His method of teaching is the closest approximation to the Socratic way of pedagogy I have encountered since I was a student of Martin Buber in Jerusalem.” In line with his general preference for teaching shorter texts, the works Andrew Jaszi favored were the parables and major tales, notably “The Metamorphosis,” “A Report for the Academy” and “Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse People.” His two favorite stories, however, the ones to which he returned again and again, were “The Judgment” and “A Country Doctor.”

This entry from the sixteenth-century churchwardens’ accounts of the parish church of St James, situated in the Lincolnshire market town of Louth, is one of many regarding the maintenance of the church's clock along with its peal of bells. The latter were contained within the fifteenth-century steeple, itself crowned with one of the most architecturally impressive spires in the country; Nikolaus Pevsner affirming that St James's was ‘one of the most majestic of English parish churches’.

The Louth churchwardens’ accounts are some of the county's most comprehensive surviving parish records. These continue in an almost unbroken sequence from the beginning of the sixteenth century, opening a panorama on the financial undertakings of a large and relatively wealthy parish church. The first published transcription, edited by Reginald Dudding, rector of Saleby (1859–1937), covered the years 1500/1 to 1523/4 and recounts the construction of the church's spire in considerable detail.

Appendix 1:

Catalogue of Viking Raids on Irish Churches in the Annals, 795–1015

Almost all raids up to 850 are in AU, but after 850 the other annals together (AFM, AI, AC, ARC, CS, FA and, from 974 AT) provide much data.1 For details of editions of annals, see the bibliography. Locations of places suggested in Hogan, Onomasticon, and elsewhere, are sometimes cited, without implying acceptance. Where the location of a church raided is not certainly identified, the Irish form is given. Raids on groups of churches not individually identified are underlined. References to raids on Iona are noted in square brackets, but not used in the analysis, which covers Ireland alone.

795 (1) Rechru (Lambay Island, Co. Dublin, or Rathlin Island, Co. Antrim) burned (loscadh, AU 795.3) and (a) shrine(s?) destroyed and stripped.2 (2) Inishmurray and (3) Inishbofin, Co. Galway plundered (orcain, AI) [also Iona], with Viking involvement not explicitly stated.

798 Inis Phátraic (apparently St Patrick's Island, Co. Dublin) burned (combustio), cattle tribute of the territories (bórime na crích) levied, Dochonna's shrine broken and great raids/incursions besides in Ireland and North Britain/Scotland (Alba) (AU 798.2).

[802 Iona burned (combusta est) (AU 802.9)]

Patriotism was an essential but geopolitically and historically nuanced key concept in public debates across Enlightenment Europe in the eighteenth century. One important facet of patriotism in mid-century Europe encompassed a commitment to serve the public good, be it within the institutions of the state (the court, for instance, as outlined by Henry St John, first Viscount Bolingbroke (1638–1751) in The Idea of a Patriot King, 1738) or outside (the public sphere). In Part I, I identified variants of reform and dynastic patriotism that materialised from specific geopolitical and historical positions and was explored and debated in salon sociability, conversations, letters, and correspondences. Such patriotism allowed balancing partiality, as the love for one's own country or, important to this chapter, for a region, with the more universal commitment to Enlightenment values of justice and human rights. In short, the objective was to balance patriotism with progressive reforms. In the case of Dorothea von Kurland, as one example, her commitment to the human rights of the Livonian serfs and peasants was an essential part of her dynastic reform patriotism for Courland and fed into the later Romantic nationalism in the region. She continued her economic reforms and social engagement in her new home in Löbichau and Tannenfeld in the duchy of Saxony-Gotha-Altenburg (see Chapter 6).

In the following chapters, I want to explore further facets of the reform patriotism: economic/agrarian patriotism.

On 18 April 1593, in the archdeaconry court at St Albans, Hertfordshire, Elizabeth Stuttesbery submitted an account of her administration of the estate of her late husband, who had recently died intestate. The inventory of Richard Stuttesbery's movable goods, valued at just less than £14, reveals his involvement in the preparation of hemp and flax for spinning. He had died in debt to several creditors, three of whom (owed £10 10s between them) successfully sued Elizabeth for her late husband's obligations, recovering their costs and being awarded damages. By the time Elizabeth had also paid all the fees due for the probate process, her total expenditure in settling her late husband's affairs amounted to almost £20, a third more than the value of his assets. The yawning chasm between the gross and net value of Richard Stuttesbery's estate would be just one more sad story of a widow confronting the awful reckoning of her liabilities were it not for the fact that, some fifteen years later, the fees that she had incurred as administratrix became a point of contention in the Court of Star Chamber. In 1608, the sum of £1 9s 8d paid by Elizabeth Stuttesbery to James Rolfe, official of the archdeacon of St Albans, was merely one case among hundreds at issue in the prosecution of Rolfe for malfeasance and corruption. This suit generated testimony extensive enough to be an invaluable source for the reconstruction not only of ecclesiastical court practice, but also of the texture of social relations, in late Elizabethan and early Stuart Hertfordshire.

Coming of age festivity was heavily reliant on its spatial setting: landscapes and built environments across Wales provided theatres for celebration and were actively used and fashioned to ascribe meaning to the occasion. As we saw in chapter 1, entire towns, villages and stretches of countryside were temporarily transformed by these celebrations, but these events also had a tendency to leave their mark, in the form of permanent physical memorials to the occasion and as memories which shaped people's understanding of and attachment to place. Land and locality formed core features in the discourse generated through these celebrations, reflecting the fact that the nature of the event, and the social relationships impinging on landed estates, were underpinned by concepts of property, tenure, inheritance, land use and estate management. Coming of age celebrations provide a range of distinctive insights into the lived experience, spatial configuration and territorial identity of landed estates. This chapter makes use of the evidence of such festivity to consider how estate landscapes interacted with and helped shape the places of Wales.

Views and Perspectives on Estate Landscapes

Since the emergence of English landscape history as an area of study under W. G. Hoskins in the 1950s the subject of ‘designed’ landscapes has gained ever-increasing traction in the historiography. Hoskins’ focus on the active ‘making’ of landscape over time has been followed by a stream of studies which have pursued the agency and inspiration involved in ‘creating’, ‘shaping’, ‘fashioning’, ‘arranging’ or ‘moulding’ landscapes. Such approaches are particularly pertinent to understanding the multigenerational formation of estate landscapes.