Edmund Spenser feared Ireland's poets. In his notorious prose tract on how to Anglicise the Irish, A view of the present state of Ireland (1596), he writes that it was their

Eradicating Gaelic culture with a dose of muscular Anglicisation was made difficult, however, by the inability to tell on the surface who was ‘mere’, or truly, Irish and who of English origin. For a mind like Spenser's that traded in binaries, identifying such essential difference was crucial to the colonial state's self-appointed, twinned tasks of civilising and guarding against cultural degeneration. To press home the seriousness of the threat of backsliding, he offered example of how the process could claim even the greatest of lineages:

Many scholars regard medieval exegesis as a derivative literary genre. After all, its value depends on the priority of the divine Word, which biblical commentators seek to explain by elaboration. Conversely, Beryl Smalley, Henri de Lubac, Alastair Minnis and others have adopted a more generous approach to the rich tradition of Latin exegesis and its influence on vernacular religious writing. In their view, Augustine's long series of sermons on the Psalms or Gregory the Great's expansive meditations on Job, to take two major examples, are autonomous literary works: inspired by Scripture, but at the same time sophisticated and expressive in themselves. While serving the sacred text, Augustine and Gregory eloquently explore ideas and themes that arise from their deep reading of the Bible, such as the nature of God, ethics, the relationship between sacred and profane discourse, and literary authority. In a nice metaphor for his own exegetical process and avidity, Augustine compares the figurative language of Psalm 127 (Beati omnes) to a beautifully wrapped gift: ‘involucrum’. Unwrapping it reveals hidden spiritual treasures and is also pleasurable in itself. The mystery of the divine Word challenges, in a bracing way, the ingenuity of the commentator. In the twelfth century, the Scholastic William of Conches associated Augustine's term ‘involucrum’ with another Latin word, ‘integumentum’ (‘a covering’), which he regarded as synonymous with the more common Latin term (carried over from Greek) ‘allegoria’.

A number of studies of late medieval Icelandic religious poetry have observed a connection between the two Guðmundardrápur of Arngrímr Brandsson and Árni Jónsson and the better-known devotional poem Lilja [Lily] (Anon LilVII), named for the Virgin Mary, but whose subject is the broad sweep of human salvation history. Although Lilja's latest editor, Martin Chase, has declined to attribute the poem to a named author, several possessors of the name and title ‘Brother Eysteinn’ have been suggested, all members of the clergy. Both in terms of language and subject matter, Lilja can be dated to the mid-fourteenth century and, as Chase has written, the poet can be situated ‘at the centre of European literature and theology … show[ing] familiarity not only with standard liturgical, theological, and rhetorical texts that were known and used throughout the Middle Ages, but also with [texts] … which demonstrate his awareness of the most recent developments in European devotion.’

One of the most notable areas in which the Lilja poet asserted his modernity and the influence of the new poetics associated with such foreign grammarians as Geoffrey of Vinsauf (fl. c. 1208–13) was in the field of skaldic diction and metrics. Peter Foote, in particular, has traced the influence of foreign rhetorical figures on the Lilja poet. Among other observations, he has demonstrated how stanzas 15–18 of Lilja, which represent Adam's and Eve's temptation and fall in the Garden of Eden, recreate in Icelandic poetry a passage of Geoffrey's Poetria nova on the same subject.

In Europe, the centuries around the beginning of the second millennium are sometimes termed the period of the Great Reclamation. During these years vast tracts of woodlands and wetlands were reclaimed. This chapter will show how, and under which circumstances, the Great Reclamation, when hundreds of thousands of hectares of wetlands were transformed into farmland, took place in the North Sea Lowlands. These circumstances were of great importance because they determined the economic and social relations that emerged in the reclaimed areas, and they in their turn influenced the organisation of water management and agricultural development in the long run.

A discussion of the physical environment and settlement patterns on the eve of the Great Reclamation will be followed by a section on the Great Reclamation itself, showing how it came about in different landscapes and under varied institutional arrangements. This second section will be followed by two sections focusing on the long-term consequences of the medieval wetland reclamations. The first is on the unintended consequences of the reclamations, such as the lowering of the surface level, which are haunting farmers and engineers to the present day. The second is on the political and economic freedom of the inhabitants of the wetlands. People in reclaimed wetlands tended to enjoy more freedom than inhabitants of older settled areas, but how much freedom did they actually enjoy and what consequences could this have had for agricultural development? But we will begin by addressing the demographic, economic, social and political developments in the North Sea area during the high Middle Ages.

Among the reasons for controversy surrounding translation in the Middle Ages and beyond was a widespread awareness that it is fundamentally interpretative. In order to translate, one needs to understand a text, and often to make a choice between several possible interpretations. Prioritising and presenting to an audience a particular reading, a translation inevitably comments on a text, and therefore there is no strict boundary between translation and commentary. This can be illustrated by comparing a translation technique, tolerant of interpretation and attested in the two versions of the Wycliffite Bible, with a different approach known from the works of some of its predecessors, particularly Robert Grosseteste.

Attempts to dissociate commentary and translation were certainly made, but they were ultimately unsuccessful and paradoxically required even more commentary. An example of this is the translation practice of Robert Grosseteste, whose scholarly work almost certainly provided a model for the translators of the Wycliffite Bible. Grosseteste was a recognised authority on translation whose writings were readily available in Oxford and would have been known to the translators. He was frequently cited by Wyclif, and Anne Hudson draws attention to the impressive length and diversity of such quotations, as well as to references independent of Wyclif in a number of Lollard compilations. Several of Grosseteste's works are also cited by Richard Ullerston in his treatise on translation of around 1400, based on academic exercises held in Oxford.

This chapter surveys the publication history of Lessing's work in the United States over the better part of the long nineteenth century, from 1773 to 1898. At the same time, it provides first glimpses into the ways Americans reacted to these writings as well as to Lessing himself, topics that are examined in detail in subsequent chapters.

Lessing's profile in the United States was significantly heightened during the so-called “German craze” that swept Boston and environs beginning in the early 1820s. During the preceding decade, Harvard men George Ticknor, Edward Everett, Joseph G. Cogswell, and George Bancroft initiated what soon became a wave of American students who studied at the University of Göttingen and other German institutions and then returned home to share their enthusiasm for German literature and thought from the college lectern and/or in print. These individuals exerted a well-documented and carefully scrutinized influence on New England Transcendentalism and created a climate in which knowledge of German belles lettres and learning of the Classical-Romantic era became an essential part of an American education.

However, Lessing emerged as a presence in the New World even before his premature death in 1781, indeed, even before the American colonies declared their independence from Great Britain. On September 18, 1773, his fable “Die Furien” (The Furies), that ironic jibe at female and male virtue, appeared in the Providence Gazette of Providence, Rhode Island. Before the end of the eighteenth century, “Die Furien” and two other fables had been published eight times in four other states ranging from Massachusetts to Maryland.

Over the past two decades, numerous Taiwanese musicologists have embarked on the exploration of the lives and works of twentieth-century composers who pioneered the adoption of Western compositional techniques and instrumentation in Taiwan.1 Despite being a nascent discipline, however, Taiwanese musical history appears to replicate familiar male-centric narratives. The omission of women from the historical discourse results in a partial history of Taiwanese musical culture. This chapter repositions the piano music of Deh-Fang Swen Lai (賴孫德芳, 1920–2009) against this backdrop. Lai Swen was the first Taiwanese musician to study composition in the UK, obtaining a master's diploma from Trinity College in 1948.2 Her works encompass piano pieces and suites, military marches, chamber music, symphonic poems, English and Mandarin art songs, chorus and organ pieces. As a skilled pianist, she used the piano as her primary vehicle for sketching and realising her musical imagination. Apart from one Chinese-language paper of mine,3 focusing on her two marches, there is a complete absence of scholarly publications on her piano compositions and music more generally.

In 1996, Susan Reynolds published an essay summarising the essential features of the ‘English town’ – and this in a volume explicitly dedicated to comparative perspectives on the High Middle Ages in England and Germany. In her critical summary of the current state of English historiography on the subject, she pointed to the problems arising from the application of nineteenth-century German concepts of urban history to English towns. While emphasising the differences in towns and cities between England and Germany, she argued that their similarities have been obscured by terminological confusion and national historiographical bias. Reynolds suggested that these similarities become more apparent with the emergence of municipal record-keeping in the thirteenth century. Even so, remarkably few attempts have been made to compare the evidence for urban record-keeping on either side of the Channel. For instance, neither the ‘Utrecht Studies of Medieval Literacy’ series nor the papers collected in Richard Britnell's Pragmatic Literacy, East and West, 1200–1330 (1997) sought to compare evidence for urban literacy across a European panorama. In 2020, the universities of Mainz and Aberdeen launched a research project comparing financial records from Aberdeen and Augsburg. On the other hand, in his 2006 monograph, Tobias Herrmann deliberately excluded English towns and cities from his overview of urban literacy in central and western Europe. In justification he cites the differences between English and European legal systems and their impact on forms of record-keeping, noting specifically the dominance of royal writs in England. While his observations may be correct, the relationship between urban records on both sides of the Channel warrants closer investigation.

I sat with a student in our classroom on Mount Scopus in Jerusalem sometime in December 2024. While we were discussing some point of the task at hand, I paused mid-sentence and looked up at the ceiling to listen to the sound of what was likely some big piece of furniture being moved across the floor in the classroom above us. My student nodded at me and empathized, “Yup, we’re all post-trauma.” Without a word, we both knew why the completely innocuous noise upstairs had caught my attention. After a breath, we went back to the assignment.

What Gascia Ouzounian calls “anticipatory listening” is a known phenomenon in civilian experiences of war and has become central to the experience and discourse of Israelis over the course of a number of wars with Hamas in Gaza since 2008.1 Since the events of October 7, 2023, when Israel entered its longest period of war, this heightened state of alert has intensified, placing greater physical and emotional strain on civilians. This chapter examines what sound and silence communicate during times of war, exploring how different types of sounds prescribe actions, emotions, and behaviors through culturally shared knowledge. By analyzing the informational and symbolic meanings embedded in Israel's wartime soundscape since October 7, I demonstrate how the soundscape both frames Israelis’ experience of war and creates regimes of cultural knowledge, taking into consideration both epistemological and phenomenological approaches to the study of aurality.

Popular Navalism and Naval Propaganda

Navalism in Britain sought to place naval strength at the forefront of national discussion, exert pressure on the government and educate the general populace. By the turn of the twentieth century, Navalist sentiment, imperialism and national identity had become inextricably linked. Navalism especially took hold in the Edwardian period; a phenomenon that saw the Royal Navy, and militarism generally, increasingly embedded in the public consciousness. In a time of such concentrated focus upon the navy and nationalism, together with subsequent panics over the comparative strength of other European navies, key developments in naval propaganda took place, encouraging a greater public awareness of political debate. In particular, the race between Britain and Germany to build the largest navy and most powerful ships prior to 1914 saw the two countries responding rapidly to each other's innovations and propaganda in a bid to secure naval supremacy. Pax Britannica, the belief that global peace was facilitated by British rule and the maintenance of freedom at sea, justified this rapid development of popular navalism in the 1890s, especially when naval dominance appeared to be coming under threat.

Ghana Must Go by Taiye Selasi begins the conversation on migrants’ return to their homeland and the difficulties surrounding the process of reintegration. Kweku Sai's dismissal from Beth Israel Hospital provides the impetus for his return to Ghana, and the racism that underlies the incident is influential in his decision. Dismissed, blacklisted, and forcibly removed from the premises, Kweku returns to Ghana without informing his family, builds a house, marries another woman, and settles down until his death. The challenges to Kweku's return are highlighted in his abandoned relationship with his family and their struggles to reconcile. I argue that while Kweku's return and death provide an alternative to the racism in America, the move is not without its complications.

The critical reception of Selasi's novel has been enthusiastic. Conventionally received and critiqued in view of its connections to Afropolitanism, largely due to his seminal essay “Bye-Bye Babar,” Aretha Phiri points out that Selasi “describes the aesthetic appeal and political agency of ‘the newest generation of African emigrants,’ whose embodied specificity and universality testify to the increasingly mobile and fluid, globalised character of Twenty-first century African subjectivities.” Several critics have drawn from this essay and Selasi's theorizations on mobilities and crossings, borders and boundaries, and their implications for identity, gender, race, and class to explore the experience of the Sai family in the novel—a mobile experience that constitutes journeys from Accra, Ghana, and Lagos, Nigeria, to New York, to Lagos, back to New York, and then to Accra. In this framework of spatial and temporal mobilities, writers have offered varied and at times contested readings of the novel.

INTRODUCTION

This is a pamphlet-length narrative about the investigation and trial of four witchcraft suspects in Irvine in 1618. The author was evidently an eyewitness of, or participant in, the investigation. His access to pre-trial confession documents suggests that he may have been one of the ministers or others involved in the interrogations. The pamphlet is similar to many English witchcraft pamphlets of this period. It also bears comparison with the best-known Scottish witchcraft pamphlet, Newes from Scotland (c.1591). It may well have been written for publication, though no contemporary published version is known.

The narrative initially concerns Margaret Barclay, the wife of Archibald Dean, burgess of Irvine. In 1617 she brought a slander case before the kirk session against John Dean, a skipper, her brother-in-law, who had called her a thief. The case was ended by a reconciliation. However, on John Dean's next voyage, late that year, his ship was wrecked at Padstow in Cornwall; he and five others, including the burgh's provost, were drowned. It turned out that the sinking had allegedly been foretold in Irvine by a wandering magical practitioner, John Stewart, known as ‘the Juglour’, who was arrested in April 1618 and interrogated. Stewart's detailed confession implicated Barclay, who had allegedly cursed the ship vengefully; she too was interrogated, and confessed under torture. Stewart's and Barclay's confessions drew in two more suspects, Isobel Inch – whom Stewart picked out of an identity parade – and, later, Isobel Crawford – whom Barclay named.Crawford eventually confessed under torture also. Further colourful evidence was provided by Inch's 8-year-old daughter, Margaret Taylor.

What did Robert of Torigni see in the chronicle tradition of Sigebert of Gembloux? To answer this question, we should not only analyse which chron¬icles Robert read and continued but also explore what those texts meant to twelfth-century readers: how their message (political or otherwise) was trans¬lated and made real. The journey into Robert's Chronography and its manuscript culture must therefore start with the Chronographia of Sigebert of Gembloux. Sigebert was considered a modern authority because of the historical value of his chronicle and – perhaps above all – the exactness of its computus. The Chronographia enjoyed an enormous success across north-western Europe and found many continuators, starting within the cloister of Gembloux. The first continuator was Anselm, abbot of Gembloux (d. 1136), who updated the chronicle until 1135. After Anselm, the Chronographia was carried on locally until 1148 by two Gembloux monks who produced the so-called Continuatio Gemblacensis. The volume containing Sigebert's Chronographia, along with the Continuatio Gemblacensis, became the basis for independent local continu¬ations which, throughout the twelfth century, spread Sigebert's chronicle further into Germany, west of the Rhine, and into France where it became the epitome of the genre of universal chronicle-writing.

However, Sigebert's chronicle, in the textual arrangement conceived by its author, was not the format in which the Chronographia became most successful. After Sigebert completed the so-called second redaction, this version of the Chronographia was acquired by the abbey of Saint-Sauveur d’Anchin in north-eastern France. At Anchin, Sigebert's chronicle was attached to the chronicles of Eusebius of Caesarea (263–339), in the Latin translation of Jerome (347–420), Jerome's continuation, and the spurious Chronicon Imperiale or Gallic Chronicle 452, erroneously attributed to Prosper of Aquitaine (390–445). This association defined a textual corpus that travelled with Sigebert's text for most of its twelfth-century transmission. In Normandy, Sigebert's chronicle circulated via Paris, BnF, MS Latin 17545, a manuscript that was derived from the original Anchin exemplar. Produced at Beauvais in the first half of the twelfth century, BnF MS Lat. 17545 presented a version of the text that not only differed from Sigebert's early project, but also from the Anchin version of the text.