This appendix aims to provide brief descriptions of significant manuscripts mentioned in this book, being more than an index of manuscripts, with a specific focus on those manuscripts which exist in digital facsimile. Manuscripts primarily transmitting Herbal material are not generally included unless their contents have been specifically discussed in Chapter 1. Where the language of a manuscript is explicit in its shelf mark, no further remarks are necessary, but it will be noted where this information is not explicit.

Belgium

*Louvain-la-Neuve, Universite Catholique de Louvain, Centre General de Documentation, Fragmenta H. Omont 3. s. ix, Old English This single leaf of medical cures was discovered only in the late twentieth century. It dates to the ninth century and is written in an Anglian dialect, most likely Mercian, according to Cameron and Schauman, who published a transcription and translation of the recipes. The relationship of this text to other Old English medical texts has been discussed by Meaney.

Czech Republic

Prague

Narodni knihovna Česke republiky, MS XIV. A. 12 s. xv, Latin

This medieval Bohemian manuscript was produced in Prague in the second half of the fifteenth century. It contains of Pliny's Historia naturalis followed by the Physica Plinii Florentino-Pragensis in three books from folio 324v, with several other texts wrongly attributed to Pliny. Excepting the epistles of Pliny the Younger (item 10), the remaining contents are strictly medical and unusually old for a medieval Bohemian manuscript.

In addition to delays caused by storm damage, groundings, fire and ravages by pirates, country traders could also be impeded by imprisonment, detention, embargoes and other forms of harassment. Surprisingly, these interruptions to trade did not result solely from altercations with wartime enemies, such as the French, but arose also from the different agendas of the Malay States or from clashes with that ostensible defender of the country traders, the British Royal Navy. The following Protests have been divided into these different groupings where belligerence could result in loss of life, goods and time.

The Protests (nine cases)

Capture by the Malays

On a slightly different plane to the European notion of wartime capture there was also the possibility of capture by the Malays as an extension of their custom of maritime raiding. The murder of Captain Thomas Sadler at Mempawah in 1795 falls into this category.

The event has previously been described in some detail. In summary, however, the Protest, in English, signed by Thomas Groube, first mate, and other officers of the country trader vessel Transfer, reported the murder of their captain. It was presented to the Dutch notary on 5 August 1795 when the Transfer called at Malacca. Sadler was an experienced, highly regarded country captain who had traded around the archipelago for at least twelve years, including to Mempawah. On the particular voyage in question, the Transfer arrived at Mempawah on Sunday 12 July 1795 and Sadler spent the next few days ashore while cargo was being traded.

Two powerful metaphors found in the literature of the early medieval English peoples are the weaving of peace and the weaving of death. Both metaphors have generated a long history of argument and discussion, a history which this chapter and the next necessarily address. In this chapter, I begin with an overview of critical opinion on the potential definitions to date for “peaceweaver/peaceweaving,” and then follow with the definitions considered here. Meanings considered in this work take into account all of the elements of the word “peaceweaving,” including the often under-considered second half of the metaphor: “-weaving.” Anglo-Latin evidence has also rarely been taken into account in this conversation, and I do so here, documenting previously unaddressed evidence. After assessment of this full range of evidence, the chapter will also examine potential analogical influences in the development of the early medieval English metaphor for weaving peace.

It is not comfortable to be an individual, and it is not easy being the best. This is the wisdom of Achilles in Madeline Miller's modern imagining of the greatest of all Greek warriors, who demands the following of his lover Patroclus:

Part of what makes Miller's novels (The Song of Achilles, Circe) compelling is the self-conscious quality of her characters: they are more than literate in their own mythos, and understand with sometimes painful precision the roles they are to play. Achilles knows the sort of man he is to become; myth is a living, dynamic force in this storyworld, informing the decisions he makes (and thus the shape of the plot). Achilles looks back at the great heroes of his culture, and sees that great fame goes hand in hand with pain, and that adventure is the product of difficulty and disaster. Like the superlative tragedy faced by Amis and Amiloun discussed in Chapter 1, there is a sense that such a superfluity of anything must teeter on the edge of dismay. Fame – being known of – is not the same as being known (the unspoken preoccupation of the romance characters I discussed in Chapter 2).

Introduction

Robert Grosseteste stands out, even among so illustrious a group as the medieval bishops of Lincoln, as an exceptional character. In modern times he has been celebrated as a pioneer of scientific method, as the first chancellor of the University of Oxford and as an energetic reformer of the Church who defied both pope and king. Grosseteste's career was certainly remarkable. For most of his adult life he was a student, teacher and scholar at the nascent university of Oxford, with, possibly, a period of study at Paris, the predominant centre of theological study in Europe. By 1213 or 1214 he was master of the schools at Oxford, a position generally agreed now to be the chancellorship in all but name. Here he established an international reputation as a theologian and philosopher and produced a substantial body of works on theology, biblical exegesis and natural philosophy (what we might call science), as well as writing on pastoral instruction and composing poetry. He was in his late sixties when, evidently to his surprise, and likely as a compromise candidate in a contested election, he was chosen as Bishop of Lincoln, a position which he was to hold for eighteen years (1235–53). Rising to the challenge of such a momentous change at this age, he went on to become an extraordinarily energetic proponent of reform in the diocese, his tenure characterised in particular by his strenuous and indefatigable efforts to improve the standards of pastoral care in his diocese, striving constantly to ensure the provision of suitable priests, to correct abuses, and to encourage preaching.

Witchcraft was a live issue in Scotland during the sixteenth, seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Trials for witchcraft sometimes became headline news, and news of specific trials also raised general intellectual questions about the nature of witchcraft. Everyone wanted to make sense of the strange magical events that witches were said to take part in, and intellectuals wanted to use witchcraft to contribute to debates about how the world should be understood. This volume collects a number of written narratives about specific trials, and written tracts that discuss witchcraft in a more general or theoretical way. It complements a recent volume, Scottish Witchcraft Trials, also published by the Scottish History Society; that volume collects a number of records of witchcraft trials themselves.

The idea of witchcraft, as a crime involving both magical harm and a pact with the Devil, arose in Europe in the early fifteenth century and spread gradually throughout the Continent during the remainder of the century. In Scotland, there were occasional trials for witchcraft from the late fifteenth century onwards. Witch-hunting became more common after the Reformation; the Scottish parliament passed an act against witchcraft in 1563. Narratives and tracts of the kind collected in the present volume began to be written in the 1590s, a time of national panics over witchcraft. Further such works continued to appear until even local panics began to subside in the 1700s.

INTRODUCING NARRATIVES AND TRACTS

Witchcraft was a shocking and sensational crime, and it attracted wide attention. The period in which witchcraft prosecutions first rose and then declined was also the period in which news media, especially printing, developed and became more sophisticated.

Textiles are meaningful signifiers across many cultures and represent far more than simple, fiber coverings. We can safely assume that the people throughout the early Middle Ages, like people today, relied upon clothing and other textiles for their physical needs, but also for their emotional, social, and spiritual ones. All available evidence suggests that, as a non-industrialized people, the early medieval English naturally knew the time-tested (and time-intensive) methods for making textiles and meeting those needs, and they valued their textiles accordingly. The technologies they used were commonly known and practiced throughout Europe and beyond, and such technologies furnished not only material articles, but also images and associations. Thus, textile process and product came to evoke connections between meeting basic human needs and related, abstract social ideals, and textile terms consequently permeated the literary vocabulary and metaphors of Old English and Anglo-Latin texts across centuries. Archaeological, linguistic, and documentary evidence provides us with a sense of what the material culture of textiles looked like among the pre-Conquest English, and that evidence also reveals the extent to which the early medieval people and their literary vocabularies, virtually independent of century or region, were influenced by the symbols of their daily need to dress and find protection and comfort. This chapter will examine the evidence for both the process of textile production and its products, discussing the metaphors that grew out of both among the early medieval English.

The lessons imparted by animal fables, it is usually supposed, pertain to human society, above all else – the diverse range of creatures depicted is there to entertain and to edify, and they are not the true subject. Jacques Derrida, notably, deemed fables ‘a discourse of man, on man, indeed on the animality of man, but for and in man’. Susan Crane has claimed, along the same lines, ‘From an animal studies perspective, the trouble with fable is above all that the form invites little thought on creatures other than human […] In the fables’ move from narrative to apologue, the beasts of narrative are useful in that they illuminate human ways, but they are of no interest beyond that usefulness’. It is easy to argue that fables, despite all the animal characters, don't say much about animals. Not only do fables unapologetically anthropomorphise, particularly in portraying animals who talk, but fable authors and literary critics alike, from antiquity to the present, have maintained that imparting a figurative interpretation of the animal actors for human instruction is the deeper purpose of fables.

Published in Madrid in 1596, Alonso López Pinciano's Philosophía antigua poética can be considered one of the first Spanish poetics. This extremely ambitious treatise was dedicated by its author, an eminent physician, to Hans Khevenhüller, imperial ambassador to Madrid (1573–1606). Further, its publication must be contextualised within the effervescent intellectual and artistic life in Pinciano's city of birth: Valladolid.

Sixteenth-century Valladolid was the hub of a vibrant cultural scene thriving around its university, one of the most reknowned in Spain. The University of Valladolid was equivalent to the universities of Salamanca and Alcalá in terms of student numbers, variety of courses, and the prestige of its professors; it was especially renowned for its curricula in medicine. However, cultural and intellectual interests in Valladolid were not limited to an academic setting. Throughout the sixteenth century, Valladolid was also an artistic point of reference, specifically in the areas of architecture and sculpture, not to mention that it had a lively theatrical scene. The intellectual interests, modern mind-set, and overall vivid cultural life during this period in Valladolid were key to the initial reception of the Poetics. Further evidence of the city's cultural effervescence during this period are the magnificent book collections amassed by prominent Valladolid figures such as the Count of Gondomar (15,000 books towards the late 1590s) and humanist Juan de Idíaquez.

Hence, it is not surprising that the first detailed commentary of Aristotle's Poetics was produced in Valladolid. Moreover, the links López Pinciano had to Austria as physician to the Infanta Martha, future wife of the Emperor Maximilian, would also have expedited his access to Castelvetro's Poetics. In all likelihood, Pinciano was attempting to emulate Castelvetro's gesture of dedicating his text to the Emperor Maximilian when dedicating his Philosophía antigua poética to the Austrian ambassador.