This chapter concentrates on the different ways in which hermits shaped the political and religious culture of seventeenth-century England. Through a series of case studies, it examines the boundaries at which an eremitic existence could be regarded by early modern contemporaries as acceptable and the point at which it tipped into something concerning, perhaps even extreme or dangerous. The marginality of hermits and their frequent connection to religious and political dissent picks up on threads that span much of Bernard Capp's scholarship. The gestation of this research, connected to a broader project on early modern solitude, is in no small part owing to Capp, who has supplied a constant stream of archival titbits over the years. The hermits whose stories are documented here – Thomas Parkinson, Roger Crab, Henry Welby, Thomas Bushell, John Bigg and Benjamin Lay – are testament to Capp's eclectic interests in the people who formed part of the radical social and cultural fabric of the age. As this chapter shows, the solitude of those who chose to live outside society had an important place in shaping the values, norms and ideals of those who remained within.

Collectively, these cases will reveal the unexpected contribution that hermits made to early modern life. They also underscore important themes in how individuals became hermits and how others responded to their lifestyles. First, they emphasise that, for the hermitic life to succeed, it needed to be a voluntary state.

Ó DÁLAIGH's SURVIVING POEMS AND SPENSER's PROXIMITY TO GAELIC POETS

As with most professional poets of early modern Ireland, little biograph¬ical information survives about Domhnall Ó Dálaigh. We do not have much information about his life beyond that which we can glean from the manuscripts containing his surviving poems; we know neither the year of his birth or his death, if or whom he married, where he lived or where precisely he was educated. We know, based on the patrons for whom Domhnall composed his works, that he was alive and active in Munster around the turn of the seventeenth century. He lived through turbulent and transformative years in Irish history when the social and political landscape of the country was turned on its head. The dominance of Gaelic institu¬tions, including the poetry schools from which he derived his education and livelihood, would soon become a thing of the past. Despite the violence and socio-political chaos that surrounded him, Ó Dálaigh found himself in a privileged position as he was the recipient of patronage from the Gaelic and Anglo-Norman aristocracy in Munster, most notably Dáibhíth de Barra (fifth Viscount Buttevant) and his sons. Of the seven surviving poems attributed to Ó Dálaigh, four are addressed to members of the de Barra family. The fifth and sixth are addressed to members of the Mac Cart¬haigh Riabhach dynasty of Carbery, and the seventh to Dáibhíth de Róisde (seventh Viscount Roche of Fermoy).

INTRODUCTION: MAN 1, MAN 2–TELOS MAN

In the Caribbean theory landscape, spanning from Aimé and Suzanne Césaire to Menil, from Fanon to Wynter to Walcott to Glissant, one central question persists: What does it mean to be black? How can we understand what we are or who we are in this world? What is our place and space? Who holds space for us and how do we plant ourselves in this place? Can black people exist free from the enduring consequences of colonialism and slavery? We believe that the answer to these questions is simple – we need stories. To understand what we are as black people, from our genealogy up until this point, we need stories. We need stories of our birth, stories of those who came before us, stories that speak about how we moved or were moved, and lastly stories that complicate the stories that have previously given us identity. The legacy of exploitation, slavery, and colonialism, which has been reinforced through imperialist fiction, cannot be erased, and its effects are still evident today in various ways. While black people have undeniably lost much in their encounters with Europeans, there are pathways through which remnants of their identity can be reclaimed, particularly within creative spaces. In these environments, we can witness the transformative power that occurs when marginalized individuals assert their agency, position themselves in these spaces, and begin to narrate their own stories. Chinua Achebe put it brilliantly in Things Fall Apart when he said, ‘until the lion learns how to write, every story will glorify the hunter’. Similarly, David Soyka in an interview with Science Fiction Weekly addresses the impact and poses the following questions:

Whether unicorns, jaguars, giant snakes, or troglodytes, real and imagined animals have the human experience grafted onto them. In literary contexts, animalian agents reflect and critique society's values, ambitions, and inequalities. When animal characters enunciate these messages, their human audiences are asked to bend reality, to imagine alternative pasts, presents, and futures, and therefore alternatives to the problems with which animal characters and their human projections often struggle. In light of the current climate crisis and social issues stemming from unequal wealth and resource distribution, it is timely to consider what alternatives might be encoded within the role of animals and beasts across the centuries, particularly as actors who resist the status quo.

This is a book about the way writers contributing to the Hispanic literary tradition have turned animals into symbols over the past 600 years, a period that widely spans the modern age. It explores how writers under different circumstances and of disparate backgrounds imagine the human experience through animals, real or imagined. Beneath the fur and scales lie the etchings of human knowledge, experiences, values, and vices. These creatures have adapted and evolved to suit different literary genres over the centuries. They appear in codices, explorers’ diaries, manuscripts, novels, artwork, theater, and film, always making their presence visible along with the preoccupations of their authors. Working to better understand how Spanish and Latin American authors and artists have understood and interacted with animals and beasts, this volume sheds light on the use of animals as symbols, emblems, and projections, as well as their role in constructing others as less human and monstrous.

Grainger's enormous autoarchiving project served to shape an auto-biographical narrative that he hoped would guide future musicians and scholars to a deep – and particular – understanding of his life and work. As we have seen, however, it was not Grainger alone implicated in this collecting process. The archive is a vast resource in the study of many significant historical figures through its preserved correspondence between Grainger and numerous American, European and Australian musicians, writers, artists, journalists, and figures from the wider music industry, ranging from business transactions to the most intimate personal communications. One figure who holds a prominent place in the collection is Grainger's wife, Ella, whom he met in 1926, and credited with pulling him out of the deep depression that followed his mother's death.

This chapter considers the play with music, Grainger at Home, written by Karen Van Spall and Lucy Esdaile, which interrogates Grainger's biog¬raphy through Ella's eyes. First fully produced in 2019 at the Kew Court¬house and restaged in a revised version in 2022 at La Mama Theatre, both in Melbourne, this play presents vignettes of Percy and Ella's life together, told through Ella's recollections, in dialogue with a musical programme of Grainger's and his contemporaries’ compositions. It asks questions about Ella's agency, including her willingness to participate in Grainger's self-ar¬chiving project and the public presentation of intimate details of their lives, but also aims to add her experience and voice to his already well-known story.

In the sixteenth century, Fray Bernardino de Sahagún, missionary in New Spain (modern day Mexico), wrote about Xólotl, a god who feared death. According to the legend, the gods had gathered at Teotihuacan and discussed who would be responsible for bringing each new day. In order to move the great mechanisms in the sky, an offering was necessary, and the gods created a great pyre in which to sacrifice themselves for the newly created sun. Xólotl alone refused death and cried until his eyes were swollen. When his turn came, he ran into the corn fields and transformed into a corn stem with two stalks (xolotl) and then hid as a double-leafed maguey (mexólotl), finally taking refuge in the water as an axolotl. It was in this form that he was found and killed, and the wind took to ensuring that the sun and moon moved as expected. Xólotl's final form, “axolotl,” takes its name from the Nahuatl “xólotl de agua” or “water xólotl,” which can be translated as “water toy,” “water twin,” or “water monster.” The little creature is tied to the god of fire and lightning, as well as monsters, misfortune, illness, and deformities (Bartra 2011: 35). Today, the axolotl is nearly extinct in its natural habitat, but its dissemination has far surpassed its narrow local beginnings, garnering in metaphorical power what it lost in tangible territory.

Writers including Aldous Huxley, Giorgio Agamben, and René Daumal have deployed the little salamander to better explain theories of infancy, immaturity, and societal liberation. The axolotl has also permeated popular culture, with the example of Frank Herbert's ghola clones being produced in an Axolotl tank in the Dune trilogy, inspired by the salamander's neoteny and regenerative properties, and Japanese artists Satoshi Tajiri and Ken Sugimori have taken inspiration from its form to create not one but two creatures for their world-phenomenon Pokémon.

François Moylin was the second of the five known children of Christophe Moylin and his wife Françoise de Plon (or Duplong): Marie-Alberte (born c. 1684), François (born c. 1689), Guillaume (born c. 1694), Simon (born 1697), and Marguerite (born c. 1699). Simon is the only sibling for whom we have a baptismal certificate. The other dates are extrapolated from death certificates, where the age given for the deceased may often be extremely inaccurate; an approximate age can also be inferred from marriage certificates, where the bride and groom are sometimes referred to as mineur, which in France meant under twenty-five.

The first fully documented mention of the Moylin family is in 1699, when Christophe Moylin signed a marriage register. On another marriage register in 1715, Christophe Moylin, now deceased, was described as an army surgeon, ‘chirurgien major des armées de sa majesté’, and his son Guillaume as ‘natif de Bruxelles en Flandres’ [a native of Brussels in Flanders]. Although some of the Moylin children were described in eighteenth-century accounts as Flemish by birth, they were born in Flanders simply because their father was in the army of Louis XIV that invaded the Low Countries in the 1690s. Christophe was in fact a native of Coucy-le-Château in Picardy, but the family also had strong links with the south-west of France. Throughout their careers, all three brothers returned there frequently, particularly to Toulouse and Bordeaux.

Arthur Nikisch was born on 12 October 1855 in Lébényi Szent Miklós, a small provincial town in that ethnically diverse part of Hungary, close to the border with Austria to the west and the old Kingdom of Moravia (now part of the Czech Republic) to the north. This largely agricultural area was something of a breeding ground for musicians: Haydn (1732-1809), Liszt (1811-86), Hans Richter (1843-1916) and violinists Joseph Joachim (1831-1907) and Carl Flesch (1873-1944) were all born in this remote corner of the sprawling Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Arthur was the third child of August Nikisch and Louise von Robosz. His paternal ancestors were farmers who came originally from Liegnitz in what was then Prussian controlled Lower Silesia (now in south west Poland). His grandfather Karl Niekisch eventually migrated away from an agrarian to an artisan existence and settled in the Moravian town of Neutitschein, where he found employment as a cloth cutter (Tuchscherer). Here he took advantage of the financial security provided by regular work and married Marie Knobloch, Arthur Nikisch's paternal grandmother. Their son August, Arthur's father, was born in 1821.

Nikisch's mother was of Hungarian origin on her father's side but had a Viennese mother. There is even a suggestion that she may have been half Jewish, although this is far from clear and difficult to determine with any certainty. The only source claiming that Arthur Nikisch had a Jewish maternal grandfather is the revised 1949 edition of Gdal Saleski's Famous Musicians of Jewish Origin. The original 1927 publication makes no mention of Nikisch.

Sir,

You cannot but form some very strange Conjectures, concerning the Matter which upon the first Opening of this Letter, you find enclosed in it, if you allow any time for Conjecturing before you have read all the Letter over.

If I make so much Haste, as to tell you, that you have here enclosed, a Snow-ball, you will wonder what the American Snow should be made of; & you will affirm, this is the first Time that ever a Gentleman sent his Friend a Parcel of Snow wrapt up in a Letter to him; at least at such a Distance, as the Breadth of the wide Atlantic.

When you have read of Heaven giving Snow like Wool, I know, you have taken it, as it is, for a poetical Expression; & very much approv’d and admir’d the Sacred Poetry.

But a Snow of Wool without a Metaphor is a thing so unusual, as to be almost Incredible; And yett I must ask that such a Thing may find some Credit with you.

For, Sir, I do assure you, That this Wool did fall from Heaven; and a considerable Quantity of it; at a Time when more common Snow was falling.

I have unhappily mislaid the large, & full, and well-asserted Account of it, with which I furnished myself, at the Time of it, which was a few Years ago: so that I cannot be so particular in my Relation, as I shall be; if I happen to recover it.