Princess Elizabeth inherited a kingdom in a multi-faceted state of crisis when she became Queen on November 17, 1558. England was fractured along religious lines so that national unity was always a goal, never a given. But there was much more. The coinage had been systematically debased under Henry VIII and Edward VI, hampering commerce and contributing to inflation. The royal navy, neglected for many years, was ill-equipped and short on ships. The nation's ports were in need of repairs and massive new infrastructure. To solve these and a host of similar problems Elizabeth needed cash, something she was desperately short of throughout her reign. She took many extreme measures to raise and save money, from leaving offices vacant (including bishoprics and offices in her own household) to recalling ships of the royal navy from service against the Spanish Armada in order to save both wages and gunpowder. On her summer progresses, she routinely visited her wealthier subjects, allowing them to lodge, feed, and entertain her entire court. In 1567 Elizabeth and her chief ministers approved what seemed to be a reasonable plan to fill the exchequer: they announced a grand national lottery. In broad outline, the scheme was designed to raise a total of £200,000. Of this, prizes and expenses would absorb £100,000, leaving the balance to be applied to repairing and upgrading the nation's ports and harbors.

The crown appointed treasurers of the lottery in each shire, backed up by receivers who collected the money and drummed up support for the venture in their neighborhoods.

From the twelfth century to the fifteenth, legends of Charlemagne spread across England and the rest of the British Isles in several languages, with French a major vehicle for their transmission. The Legend of Charlemagne in Medieval England deals in detail with those Charlemagne narratives translated into Middle English, namely the narratives of the Battle of Roncevaux (the Pseudo-Turpin Chronicle and the Chanson de Roland), Fierabras and Otinel. To complement that study, the main focus of this chapter is those texts which were known in medieval England but not translated into English before Caxton in the late fifteenth century. Texts in the French of England are often divorced from continental material, but the reality was that there were ongoing links across the medieval French-speaking world throughout the Middle Ages. In this volume we are accepting both the particularity of Anglo-Norman, in that it is being treated in a chapter on its own, and its place in a wider medieval Francophone tradition.

The theoretical framing here is very different from that used in The Legend of Charlemagne in Medieval England, which had a focus on translation and appropriation, so occasional reference will be made to the Roncevaux tradition, Fierabras and Otinel. In line with other contributions to this volume, the approach of this chapter is based on the trifunctional hypothesis of Georges Dumézil and is constructed in terms of the ‘functions’ of kingship.

Book I

i.1 On tissum arestan lacecraftum gewritene sint lacedomas wid eallum heafdes untrymnessum. (In these first remedies are written cures for all diseases of the head)

More than thirty recipes for multiple diseases of the head including headache, migraine and sinusitis. Sources include:

Marcelli de medicamentis i.61, i.100, i.108

Physica Plinii Bambergensis i.1, i.4–5, i.8, i.23, i.26–7, viii.4, viii.9–10, viii.16–17

(Florentino-Pragensis I.i.1, I.i.4–5, I.i.8, I.i.23, I.i.26–7, I.viii.9, I.viii.11, I.viii.17–18)

De herba uettonica liber 1

Latin Alexander i.45–6 (less likely, Oribasius Synopsis viii.20 for the same) i.2 Lacedomas wit eagna miste (Cures for mist of the eyes)

More than fifty individual remedies for multiple diseases of the eye. Sources include:

Herbarius Apulei lxxiv.1–2

Physica Plinii Bambergensis xvii.27

Oribasius, Euporista iv.16

Oribasius, Synopsis v.27

Physica Plinii Bambergensis xiii.9, xvii.1, xvii.3, xvii.8, xvii.11, xviii.3

(Florentino-Pragensis I.xiv.8, I.xviii.1–2, I.xviii.7, I.xviii.9–10, I.xviii.48)

Herbarius Apulei xxxv.2, lxxiv.2

Marcelli de medicamentis viii.92, viii.105

i.3 Lacedomas wid eallum earena sare 7 ece 7 wid earena adeafunge 7 gif wyrmas on earan synd otte earwicga 7 gif earan dynien 7 earsealfa fiftyne craftas. (Remedies for all pain and ache of the ears and for deafening of the ears and if worms or earwigs are in the ear and for tinnitus, and ear salves, fifteen recipes.)

Twenty-five individual cures, many from the Physica Plinii with interference from Marcellus, including:

On December 3, 1927, the following letter was sent from the British Broadcasting Corporation to Gustav Holst, long since recognized in the UK as one of its leading composers:

This episode marks the culmination of Thomas Malory's Le Morte Darthur. The promise of Caxton's title at long last reaches fulfilment: critically wounded, Arthur sends his loyal follower to throw his enchanted sword Excalibur into the water, where it is caught by a magically appearing arm. Then a mysterious barge appears, bearing ladies – including Arthur's sister, Morgan le Fay – ready to carry the king away to the magical island of Avalon. It is a pivotal moment: the end of Arthur's life, the end of Camelot, the end of an era. If Arthur is to return as the fabled Once and Future King, he will only be able to do so through the magical healing abilities of his sister and erstwhile foe, Morgan. At the ‘morte’ of Arthur, his supernaturally powerful, morally ambiguous sister is at his side.

As one of the best-known representations of the medieval world, Arthurian literature rose in popularity throughout the twentieth century as authors and readers found ‘that these tales serve to generate […] questions as important to the modern world as they were in the 12th century’. Furthermore, the legend's variations allow authors to re-create the narrative in ways that suit different audiences and arguments throughout time. In a tradition that had rarely admitted female authors, it was not until the second half of the twentieth century that Arthurian women novelists became common. Limited by patriarchal boundaries, women writers manoeuvered – with varying degrees of success – around literary confines using different strategies to empower female roles, and, through those, themselves.

This study analyses the different means women use to expand literary boundaries and claim power for their interpretation of the legends. The article begins with an overview of women's contributions to Arthurian historical fiction/fantasy, placing their works in the context of the literary tradition. This is followed by examining two boundaries restricting female innovation and how the authors engage with them. The foremost constraint is the lack of critical acceptance of women's rewritings, leading novelists to use paratexts. The second boundary is gender roles associated with the legends, as many female characters conform to conventional images of Arthurian stereotypes. Finally, I analyse the novelists’ innovations, examining how some authors break these boundaries.

The only German to have played significant roles in each of the Christian Democratic, Communist, and Social Democratic movements, Maria Meyer-Sevenich (1907–70) embodied the ideological warfare of modern German history. One of Hessen's most prominent female politicians and a leading voice in occupied Germany, Meyer-Sevenich stood out not only for her political trajectory, but for her impassioned rhetorical style. Accused of histrionics in the immediate postwar period and characterized by scholars as “an irresponsible and hysterical rabblerouser” and “exotic being,” this self-described Catholic convert offers a valuable lens through which to view postwar German emotions as they intersected with gender and religion. By revealing West German elites’ efforts to demarcate an emotional landscape and limit female agency, Meyer-Sevenich's challenges to postwar norms illuminate the inherent politics of public emotion.

Discursive boundaries governing emotional expression are not simply political but the direct product of governments with specific agendas of emotional control. As William Reddy explains, to secure power a government must “establish as an essential element a normative order for emotions, an ‘emotional regime.’” Relying on state rituals and actions, emotional regimes exercise hegemony by rendering public invisible emotions in government-approved ways. Significantly for German history, emotional regimes span the political spectrum from dictatorships determined to contain their subjects to democracies concerned to maintain “emotional conformity” by restricting “emotional expression,” especially along the axes of class, gender, and race.

INTRODUCTION

A witchcraft panic broke out in 1704 in Pittenweem, a small fishing town on the coast of Fife. It began with a case of demonic possession that resembled, and was influenced by, the Bargarran panic of 1696–7 that has featured above in the present volume. Aspects of the Pittenweem panic have been discussed in print from time to time, most fully in an excellent recent study by Brian Levack. The briefer account that follows is intended to aid comprehension of the text of the five pamphlets edited below.

In March 1704, Patrick Morton, a 16-year-old apprentice blacksmith working for his father, had a dispute with Beatrix Laing. Laing was a small trader in her own right, while her husband, the tailor William Brown, was a former treasurer of the burgh. Laing asked Morton to make her some nails, but he refused, saying that he had a prior engagement to make nails for a ship. There was a quarrel; it was later alleged that Laing had threatened Morton with revenge. At any rate, Morton began to fear Laing's witchcraft. He probably had psychological problems of his own, though their nature would be hard to reconstruct. He became ill and refused to eat. In May, his condition worsened, and he began periodically to display what were described as ‘fits’ in which his body became uncontrollably contorted – and he declared that witches were afflicting him.

During this worsening of Morton's condition, Patrick Cowper, minister of Pittenweem, became involved. Cowper (1660–1740) was an influential presby¬terian who had been imprisoned and exiled during the Restoration period.

To John Woodward.

My most honoured Friend.

The Communications, with which I have endeavoured some Entertainments for you, since I have had the Honour to be related unto your Illustrious Society, have been so many, that my Letters have pretty near as I suppose, æqual’d the Number of Months that ha's passed over me, besides what I might say of other Performances, & Remittances. But for these two or three last Years, I have never been so happy, as to know that my Packetts have not miscarried; and particularly, whether what I addressed unto you, near a Year ago, and the Hortus Siccus of Plants, peculiar to America, which I address’d unto Mr. Petiver, have reached you. Nothing shall discourage me from doubling my Diligence, to add what I can unto your Stores, from what I may think proper for them, in these American Regions; whereof a few Weeks hence, I intend you a more ample Testimony. But I could not lett this Opportunity pass, without Beginning to make some Amends, for my Delay to answer your Desire, to be furnish’d with some Collection of our Fossils. The Truth is, the Load of my various Employments, oblige me to wish and wait for the Assistences of a young Gentleman, whose name is Mr. John Winthrop, and whose Grandfather (the Governour of one of our Colonies) was a Virtuoso, in the very Beginning of the Royal Society.

2.1 Introduction: the Annalistic Database

Detailed analysis of evidence for Viking raiding of churches begins, in this chapter, with chronology. The extant literature presents no consensus about trends in raiding over time, as pointed out in Chapter 1. There, I surveyed the value of the extant books of annals and argued that the widest range of annalistic sources is admissible to supply the database for this study. Accordingly, all the extant regular annals are used in this and the following chapters, along with the data from Cogad. Among the categories of data studied here, I mention a special case at the outset. This comprises generalised annalistic references to Viking raids on churches of a region, without naming individual churches. Such raids are not precisely quantifiable and so are not amenable to quantitative analysis. As we will see, however, general impressions derived from such references are broadly in accord with the conclusions that emerge from quantitative analysis of raids on churches identified by name.

In tabulating the evidence for the chronology of Viking raiding, then, I examine first the ninth century, defined for present purposes as extending from the 790s to 900. Material for the period 901–1015 is considered next. Detailed analysis of each period is followed by a summary of conclusions reached in relation to the period in question. Terminal dates of 900 and 1015 for the respective sub-periods into which the study is divided are adopted because, for the purpose of detecting quantitatively significant patterns, the data relating to Viking raids and all other matters studied and compared are grouped in half-decades.