When Lewis Foreman abandoned his attempt to write a biography of John Ireland in 2011, he claimed that there were simply too many ‘gaps in the documentary record’ to sustain a full-length study. Years later, and more than half a century after Ireland's death, a biography of this composer remains non-existent. More than seventy years after his death, Arthur Machen remains likewise without a definitive biographical treatment. Meanwhile, studies of composers like J.S. Bach, Franz Schubert, and others whose evidential records are arguably much sparser continue to appear. This suggests that there are more elements frustrating Ireland's potential biographers than mere ‘gaps’ alone.

In his 2006 study of H.P. Lovecraft, the most celebrated exponent of the weird tale, Michel Houellebecq concluded that all attempts at ‘demystification’ of this author have failed, leaving Lovecraft's character suspended in ‘the aura of strange pathos’ typifying his stories; we cannot read Lovecraft in isolation from the Lovecraftian. Ireland, a composer whose style was rooted in literary sources characterized by the unfathomability of human experience and the inability of language to convey what is meant, echoes Houellebecq's representative summation of the weird artist and serves as an illuminating case study in the complexities of weird historiography. For Machen, biography is seen as a suggestive and exploratory process; it requires an oblique relation to the comprehensive or definitive.

This chapter presents a historical overview of Yoruba Nigerian Pentecostalism. The following section addresses the Yoruba Initiated Church (YIC), which adopted practices from the Aladura (“the praying one”) churches into its liturgical traditions. I examine these liturgies to show how Yoruba Pentecostalism continues interacting with Yoruba traditional religious culture by carrying over these beliefs and practices. It discusses the interactions between witchcraft and the Bible. The final section addresses witchcraft beliefs among Yoruba Muslims.

Historical Overview of the Emergence and Growth of Pentecostalism in Nigeria

Christianity is generally seen as a religion the West introduced to Africa during the colonial era, but this is untrue. Christianity came to Africa via North Africa, as noted by the appearance of the Ethiopian Eunuch in chapter 8 of the Acts of the Apostles. Unlike northern Africa, colonial-era Christianity was brought to West Africa in the fifteenth century by Portuguese explorers.

In July–August 1570 the younger sons of the earl of Derby, operating from his principal residence at Lathom, began a conspiracy with Sir Tomas Gerard to liberate the queen of Scots from captivity at Chatsworth and stage an attempt to place her on the English throne. Tere is no existing study of the Stanley–Gerard conspiracy. Sir Tomas Gerard of Bryn (Wigan) was the father of John Gerard, the Jesuit priest celebrated for his extraordinary escape from the Tower of London in 1597. On the frst page of his autobiography John Gerard recalled that at the age of fve he and his brother had been removed from their home and lodged in ‘a strange house among heretics’ because his father and ‘two other gentlemen’ were ‘imprisoned in the Tower of London because they had plotted to rescue Mary Queen of Scots and restore her to the throne’.

Political and Ideological Context

The precise context of the conspiracy was the threat of Franco-Spanish intervention in the Catholic cause and the fever-pitch invasion scare outlined in the last chapter. French ultimata had driven Elizabeth into re-locating Mary from close confnement at Tutbury to freer access at Chatsworth and ordering serious negotiations on her return to Scotland and rights to the English succession. By early July, Sussex and Maitland were negotiating the disarmament of the opposed Scottish parties on the basis of four articles agreed between Elizabeth and Mary's chief negotiator, John Leslie, Bishop of Ross.

Letter. the 1st.

To Doctor JOHN WOODWARD.

Sir,

Your excellent Essay towards the Natural History of the Earth, ha's obliged and even commanded, the true Friends of Religion, and Philosophy, to serve you with as many Communications as they can, that may be subservient unto your Noble Intention. But the Letters wherewith you have honoured me, have laid me under your more particular Commands, to supply you with such Subterraneous Curiosities, as may have been in these Parts of America mett withal. I do with much Alacrity apply myself immediately to obey your Commands, in one Remarkable Instance, wherein I apprehend myself best able to do it; reserving for another Opportunity (if perhaps, I find myself a Master of) any further Treasures, worthy to be laid before a Person of so clear a Judgment, & so reaching a Sagacity. And that I go cheerfully about this Point of my Obedience, you will conclude it, when you see me begin with assuming the Air of telling you, That you must look upon all the American Curiosities which are sent you, as being in some sort Subterraneous; inasmuch as you know, who have understood the Inhabitants of America, by, The Things under the Earth, which the Sacred Oracles tell us, are to bow in the Name of our Glorious JESUS. But indeed one must be as ungeographical as the Dayes of Lactantius, to admitt the Interpretation; and therefore I shall endeavour a nearer Approach unto your Satisfaction.

In the winter of 1890 to 1891 the city of Braunschweig experienced a precipitous decline in the quality of its drinking water. The cause: beet sugar factories in the surrounding area were releasing such high quantities of hydrogen sulfide—the major byproduct of beet sugar production—into the Oker River watershed that it exceeded the capacity of the leach fields on which the city then relied to purify its water. Wilhelm Raabe described the results in a letter to his daughter Margarethe dated January 17, 1891: “Sei Du froh, daß Du nicht in Braunschweig bist. Der reine Schweinestall! Wir waschen uns nicht mehr, wir putzen uns nicht mehr die Zähne, selbst durch das gekochte Essen schmeckt man das durch zwölf Zuckerfabriken versaute Okerwasser: Pfisters Mühle in fürchterlichster Vollendung!” (Be glad that you are not in Braunschweig. The absolute pigsty! We no longer bathe, we no longer brush our teeth, even in our cooked food one can taste the water from the Oker, spoiled by twelve sugar factories: Pfister's Mill in its most terrible completion!). The letter describes the intrusion of a byproduct of modern industry into a city that in a short essay from 1866 Raabe had praised for embodying the “uralte Pracht und Schönheit der niedersächsischen Bürgerherrlichkeit” (ancient magnificence and beauty of lower Saxon bourgeois splendor). Environmental crisis is here also an aesthetic crisis: quotidian habits of hygiene and consumption are suddenly disrupted as the ugly signs of modern industry move from the duchy's peripheral industrial settlements into the beautiful, pre-industrial urban core.

When Frederick II (king of Germany from 1212, emperor 1220–50) was deposed by Innocent IV at the Council of Lyon in 1245, Matthew Paris describes him as displaying the following emotions: ‘As soon as Frederick heard about this, scarcely restraining himself from indignation, he burst into a most violent rage’. Likewise, when Henry III (king of England, 1216–72) was challenged by the barons in parliament in 1252, having asked them for aid, he is depicted as reacting similarly: ‘As though he was infected by fury, unable to restrain his anger, he raised his voice in an uproar, and ran furiously away from all who were in his chamber’.

At first sight, the similarity of these reactions may be easily explained since both descriptions come from the pen of the English chronicler, Matthew Paris. We might therefore assume that a comparison between the two descriptions would support one strand of research in the ‘history of emotions’: that the emotions we find in historiographical sources are portrayed there by chroniclers who aim to present a certain image of a king, be such an image tyrannical or ideal. In short, chroniclers used emotions as rhetorical devices to frame their narratives. Karl Schnith, for instance, notes that the depictions of the king by Roger of Wendover and Matthew Paris depend on the idea of the tyrannus as opposed to the rex iustus.

In the nineteenth century, the colonial administration in British India would serve as a model for the British Civil Service. The foundations of the world's first ‘Civil Service’ were already in place by 1800. Yet, from the 1760s until into the 1790s, the administration of British India had been synonymous with corruption and maladministration. Between the assumption of territorial rule by the British East India Company (EIC) in 1757 and the end of the eighteenth century, the colonial administration underwent several transformations. Decisive economical reforms took place in 1788 and they were based on the recommendations of the Commissioners for Examining the Public Accounts. British India provides the prime example of a consistent administrative reform process in the eighteenth century.

The administrative reforms in British India were embedded in a larger transformation of the colonial government. With the assumption of territorial sovereign rights in 1757, a merchant company turned into a territorial government, but it continued to be managed as a joint-stock company. Neither the Company structures nor the Company staff were prepared for their new tasks. Accordingly, the EIC came under massive pressure and the shareholders’ unrealistic expectations of returns added to widespread internal uncertainty. Twice, in 1772 and in 1784, the EIC faced bankruptcy. The British state intervened in both cases, regulated the Company, and successively assumed executive control. The British territories in India repeatedly came under military threat, so that the continued existence of the dominion was far from safe. Even more so than in Britain, the reforms in India took place against the backdrop of permanent crisis.

In Europe, the winter of 1708–9 was one of the harshest on record. On 15 January 1709 Adam de Cardonnel, secretary to the duke of Marlborough, wrote:

I hope you have been better advised than to stir abroad this extream cold weather, the most severe that has been known in this country for many years the poor soldiers and other poor people froze to death like rotten sheep.

The poor soldiers were of course those engaged in the War of the Spanish Succession, which saw an alliance of England, the Dutch Republic, Prussia, Portugal and numerous German States, including some of those in the Rhineland, face down the Bourbon alliance of King Louis XIV of France and King Philip V of Spain. In the midst of these turbulent times, upwards of 13,500 people travelled down the Rhine to Rotterdam in search of a new life in the English plantations. There is much debate among historians about the response in England to the Palatines, which contrasts sharply with the welcome afforded to an earlier influx of Huguenots. These debates tend to run along political, religious and economic lines. It has been said that the Tory party in England regarded both the Palatines and the Huguenots who came before them as ‘the scum of all Europe’. The Palatine migration has been framed as a Whig initiative and it was certainly the Whigs who pushed through the Naturalisation Act of 1708, just in time for the arrival of the Palatines.

INTRODUCTION

In the contemporary world, futuristic literary explorations inspired by traditional African mythologies often offer interesting opportunities for understanding the continuous role of traditional mythologies in shaping the future. By employing the perspective of speculative posthumanism, Nnedi Okorafor's Lagoon presents a posthuman world where extraterrestrial intervention disrupts human identity, agency, and power structures. However, these disruptions are shown to be just another transformative event in a continuous stream of transformative events already inherited from antiquity. Unlike Western speculative post-humanism which has traditionally focused on the advent and influence of contemporary and emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, cybernetics, and technological transcendence; Lagoon blends African mythologies, indigenous ontologies, and extraterrestrial transformation, creating a hybrid post-humanism that moves beyond Western frameworks.

By engaging with the work of speculative post-humanist scholars like Francesca Ferrando, Donna J. Haraway, and N. Katherine Hayles, this analysis explores how Lagoon redefines posthuman futures within an African cosmological framework, not through technological singularity, but through the convergence of mythological and extraterrestrial forces. Adding the magical to the mundane and the scientific in strange otherworldly settings with humans and myriad other nonhumans from various sides of multiple divides makes Okorafor's speculative tale of the aftermath of an alien visitation on Lagos very posthuman.

Several critics have examined the interplay between the mundane and the fantastic in African literature, highlighting how authors blend everyday realities with supernatural or magical elements to reflect complex social and cultural landscapes (Mposa).

This book is a tribute to the influence of Bernard Capp, Emeritus Professor of Early Modern British History at the University of Warwick, and Fellow of the British Academy, one of the most distinguished and innovative early modern historians of his generation. When asked what his specialism is, Bernard invariably replies ‘seventeenth-century England’, a response which reflects the thematic and chronological breadth of his academic pursuits over the last fifty years. Since the 1970s, Bernard has consistently been at the forefront in ‘the shift from narrower social historical to broader cultural historical approaches’, producing eight important monographs as well as a significant number of influential journal articles and essays. These works have not only responded to wider changes in early modern studies but also have shaped our understanding and influenced the direction of developments in the social and cultural history of early modern England.

This is not the first ‘Cappite’ tribute. In 2010 a collection of essays, including several written by some of the most eminent historians in the field, expressly celebrated Bernard's role in ‘help[ing] us to reassess our ways of thinking about the ordinary and extraordinary experience of past actors’ and his ‘major contribution to our understanding of the fluid and culturally constructed nature of the “norms” which early modern people negotiated’ via ‘his distinctive capacity for empathy and originality’. In the fifteen years since that volume was conceived, Bernard has continued to open up new avenues of research, having produced another three monographs and numerous other key publications that have further transformed and enriched our view of the inner and outer worlds inhabited by seventeenth-century English people.

My most honour’d Doctor.

For your most acceptable Present, which I received, when you honoured me with your Defence of your Natural History of the Earth, I return you all the Thanks of a Mind fill’d with Gratitude.

Your Triumphs over the Doctor of Tubingen, do but whett our Appetites for that most valuable Work; whereof I find my excellent Friend Dr. Edwards in a learned Essay with which he favoured me, raising also our Expectations.

I am overwhelmed with some Confusion, that I have not all this while yeelded a due Obedience to the Commands you laid upon me, to make a Collection of our Fossils. I can plead nothing for my Delay of my Duty in this Matter, but my being overwhelmed with Employment. For truly, Syr, I am far from what some have putt into their Letany, Homo unius Negotii. But I am forming the best Projection I can, in an Infant Countrey, entirely destitute of Philosophers, to have this, and other Intentions answered.

In the mean time, I pursue my Design, as well as I can, to make my Annual Presents of American Curiosities.

I am very much afraid, whether one of my Collections, did not miscarry; In which I also enclosed a Couple of Guinea's or, Louis d’ors, (I forgett which,) to be spent by you, and our dear Mr. Waller, when you should (with your Treasurer,) undergo, the Trouble of Reading over my tedious Letters. I therefore look’d out ﹛for﹜ some Imperfect Copies which I kept of those Letters, & have thrown them into the Packett now before me. If you have had ‘em, — tis well; There is no hurt in this Repetition.

The history of art music in Israel began with the 1931–1939 wave of Jewish immigration that brought more than forty professionally trained and accomplished composers from Central and Eastern Europe to Palestine, then under British Mandate. The amazingly large repertory created in the Jewish community of Palestine, and later in the State of Israel, featured a diversity of ideological trends and created an imaginary line connecting two ideological poles.

The Heritage of the West

Confronting the trauma of enforced displacement under often terrifying conditions in Europe, most of the immigrant composers were reluctant to part with the heritage of the West within which they were trained and had composed. Their cultural attitude was an inversion of medieval Jewish poet-philosopher Jehudah Halevi's famous line, “My heart is in the east / and I am in the uttermost west.”

Example 2.1 presents the opening section of the “Praeludium” from the Suite for Cello Solo that Josef Tal (1910–2008), then Grünthal, composed in May 1937, exactly three years after he came to Palestine. The work combines two stylistic worlds: (1) the order and discipline of Bach's austere solo sonatas, an admired model for all German-educated composers; and (2) the Berlin-Vienna avant-garde of Arnold Schoenberg and his disciples on which Tal was raised. Indeed, the work opens with a nearly regular twelve-tone series, save for a brief passing return of D♮ in measure 2.

The year 1926 was an exceptionally happy and productive year for Janáček. His works enjoyed great success with Káťa Kabanová pro¬duced in Berlin, the revised Mr Brouček's Excursion to the Moon given in Brno, and world premieres of the Concertino and The Makropulos Affair. Janáček was invited to London, where he was warmly welcomed (in spite of his visit coinciding with Britain's General Strike) and his music was generally well-received there. His native village of Hukvaldy unveiled a commemorative plaque at his birthplace – the Hukvaldy school – which pleased him greatly. New compositions that year included the Capriccio and the expanded version of Nursery Rhymes (Říkadla), alongside two large-scale works: the Glagolitic Mass and the Sinfonietta.

As discussed in the Prologue, Janáček had only completed four works for full orchestra before 1926 (apart from his early folk music arrange¬ments): Jealousy (Žárlivost) and three symphonic poems – The Fiddler's Child (1913), Taras Bulba (composed during the war years in 1915–8) and the Ballad of Blaník (1919–20). All four have some kind of programmatic, extra-musical element. Jealousy was based on a folk ballad, ‘The Jealous Man’; The Fiddler's Child took its inspiration from Svatopluk Čech's poem about a deceased fiddler and an abandoned orphan; the ‘Slavonic rhapsody’ Taras Bulba is based on Gogol's novella about a Cossack leader and his sons; and the Ballad of Blaník was inspired by Jaroslav Vrchlický's poem about the legendary Knights of Blaník. Programmatic or narrative ele¬ments were also to be significant for the unfinished Danube Symphony and the abandoned Violin Concerto, ‘The Wanderings of a Little Soul’, though there is little detail about what their precise inspiration might have been, literary or otherwise. Janáček also drew on extra-musical programmes for several of his chamber music pieces, including the Fairy Tale (Pohádka) for cello and piano and both string quartets.