Although the history of recent Basque literature remains open, one can summarize its trajectory since the year 2001 as moving away from the position of ‘minor literature’, as articulated and consolidated by Atxaga's Obabakoak in the 1990s. Although small, contemporary Basque literature is situated in globalization, and it is no longer minor nor imagines itself as a national minority or exotic Other. Basque literature is shifting direction towards its consumer–readers so that the latter's desire is represented not as an attempt to imagine a national community, but rather as a means to locate their selves within Basque and global reality – that is, as a means of belonging to a postnational community among others. Yet, after its hybrid and heterogeneous explosion in the 1990s, Basque literature has begun to face the new challenges of the market–oriented model of culture imposed by neoliberalism and global capitalism in the 2000s. As a result, contemporary Basque literature's new trails are centered on the ways to confront the global market and its neoliberal ideology, while rescuing the desire of its heterogeneous readers as the new postnational axis of writing and reading.

The political and institutional developments brought about by global capitalism to the Basque Country have a complex history that must first be framed in the context of the Spanish and French states, in order to understand the ensuing changes in Basque literature. Globalization fostered more authoritarian and neoliberal governments in Spain and France – even the socialist governments that ruled for a few years in the new millennium upheld a neoliberal agenda (Spain 2004–11, France 2012–17). In Spain, the conservative governments of the Popular Party (1996–2004, 2004–17) moved to outlaw the independentist Basque party Popular Union (Herri Batasuna) and to close the only Basque–language newspaper in existence, The Daily (Egunkaria), in 2003. One of the most famous judges of the time, Baltasar Garzón, made a slogan famous, ‘Everything is ETA’, by which he meant that all things Basque were suspect of terrorism – and thus were potentially liable to criminal prosecution. The conservative Spanish governments of the PP made this slogan into a doctrine of their own, and turned Basques, along with illegal immigrants from the Global South, into the two main Schmittian ‘foes that threatened the very existence of the Spanish state’ – even after the economic crisis of 2008 and the permanent ceasefire declared by ETA in 2011.

Durante el reinado de Carlos IV, las relaciones exteriores españolas se caracterizaron, más que en todo el siglo, por sus alternativos acercamientos y distanciamientos hacia Francia y el Reino Unido, países que continuamente se intercambiaron los papeles de aliados y enemigos españoles. Como consecuencia del agitado panorama geopolítico de estos años, la prensa vivió al socaire de los acontecimientos políticos. Es por ello que, precisamente en este último tramo del siglo, es imprescindible considerar la prensa española dentro de su curso histórico, siendo esta la perspectiva previa de cualquier otra lectura que se quiera llevar a cabo.

Tras el estallido de la Revolución en julio de 1789, Carlos IV decidió sustituir la política de hostilidad hacia Francia que el ministro Floridablanca había implementado hasta comienzos de 1792 por otra que representara los lazos del pacto de Familia todavía vigente, especialmente tras la crisis internacional provocada por el conflicto hispano-británico de Nootka en 1790. Así, en un principio, a pesar del desencadenamiento del proceso revolucionario, España consiguió mantener un estado de neutralidad; estado que, finalmente, se vio alterado definitivamente con la ejecución del monarca francés Luis XVI el 21 de enero de 1793. Manuel Godoy, nuevo secretario de Estado, acabó optando por la alianza inglesa en marzo de ese mismo año, mediante la cual España entró en guerra contra la Convención. A pesar de esta tregua temporal con la nación inglesa, los sentimientos de desconfianza y el desentendimiento entre ambos países no llegaron a desaparecer, ya que para los españoles el verdadero objetivo de Inglaterra seguía siendo separar a España y Francia para destruir su marina e imponerse así como dueño indiscutible del poder marítimo y colonial. El conflicto alcanzó su fin en abril de 1795 con la firma del Tratado de Basilea —que le supuso a Godoy el título de Príncipe de la Paz— por el que España reconocía la República Francesa, a la cual cedía la isla de Santo Domingo a cambio de restaurar los límites originales de las fronteras españolas peninsulares perdidos durante la contienda.

La firma de este tratado implicó la renovación de la alianza con el país galo, ahora republicano, que se vio reforzada el 18 de agosto de 1796 con el Tratado de San Ildefonso, por el que ambos países acordaban mantener una política militar conjunta frente a Inglaterra, recuperándose así los papeles tradicionales.

Apart from the ecclesiastical pieces, many of which are still in the churches for which they were made, the work of the Wardle family can be seen in various places beyond Leek, as listed below.

Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery

The Gallery has original designs by William Morris that were converted into printed fabric by Thomas Wardle in Leek.

Cartwright Hall, Bradford

Cartwright Hall has a large tussar silk hanging commissioned to celebrate Thomas Wardle's achievements. It was designed by Shenaz Ismail and made in Karachi in 2012. Her design contains the book title Silk and Empire woven into the structure.

Department of Economic Botany, Kew Gardens, London

The Department holds skeins of embroidery yarns dyed by Thomas Wardle.

Edinburgh and Glasgow Museums

The Museums have a small selection of items, some donated by Thomas Wardle.

Gawthorpe Hall, Padiham, Lancashire

Gawthorpe Hall has a selection of finished and unfinished embroidered pieces and dyed silk threads from Leek, and a photograph of Mrs Wardle with local embroiderers.

Goldsmiths College, London

There are a few examples of ecclesiastical embroidery in the Constance Howard collection.

Leek Library, Staffordshire

The Library holds a selection of documents and publications related to the Wardle family.

The Museum of London

The Museum has a dress made from a fabric with an Indian-inspired pattern block printed in Leek.

Reading Museum

Leek's facsimile of the Bayeux Tapestry is on permanent display at the Museum. It still intrigues, although the embroidered panels seen today have been through a long and strenuous peripatetic life, which, unsurprisingly, has caused some wear and tear. The various attempts to clean and restore the panels have also taken their toll, which is to be expected. Some colours have faded, probably because they have been constantly exposed to light and have endured numerous washings, which released dyestuffs from the wool threads. Consequently, the facsimile does not look exactly as it did when it was assembled in Leek in 1886. Some recent commentators, aiming to compare it with the original, have relied on photographs in publications or online, as it is impossible to take the Leek facsimile to France to make a true appraisal. Yet photographing textiles is a notoriously tricky business despite the latest camera technology and can give an unsatisfactory result where colour reproduction is concerned.

Concept

Liszt used the term partition initially for his arrangement of Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique (1834) in a letter to Adolphe Pictet in 1838:

Through his designation of partition, Liszt explicitly claims that he is ushering in “a new method” for a piano arrangement by underscoring his fidelity to the original. By “following the orchestra step by step,” he determines to remain unremitting in his goal of “scrupulously” rendering the original as if treating it as a “sacred text.” In addition to his adherence to the structure of the symphony (“the symphony's musical framework”), Liszt aims at capturing the nuanced, variegated effects of the orchestral sounds (the “detailed effects” and “the mass and variety of [the orchestra]'s sound”) as well as the intricacy of the orchestral textures (the “multiplicity of its instrumental and rhythmic combinations”).

In the same letter to Pictet, Liszt also continues to discuss the compositional procedure and aesthetic underlying his partition of Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique, from which another group of his partitions of Beethoven's symphonies is extrapolated, relating the two groups of arrangements to each other:

Introduction

ONE of the highlights of Alice's Memoir, in which the lives of Joanna, George and – eventually – Henry too, are told largely in their own words, is her own commentary. Although she was only five when her mother died, her father had ensured that Joanna's memory was kept alive in all her children: it is apparent from the commentary that Alice had absorbed an enormous amount of family history, which, even in old age, she was able to bring to bear on her parents’ story and that of their respective families.

Joanna Mary Boyce began her art training early, encouraged by her father. She was not yet 12 when, in the summer of 1843, she studied landscape and architecture under Charles John Mayle Whichelo, and her first drawing book (now in the British Museum's Prints and Drawings Collection) is full of increasingly complex and sophisticated studies of castles, cottages and Gothic churches. In the very first pages are architectural sketches, shaded boxes and a round house with a conical roof. On page 14 there is a beautiful sketch of a ruined abbey and cottage – her first drawing to include people. It is signed and dated 4 May 1843, and next to it, in the centre of the page, Joanna has written: ‘My darling father was pleased with these figures.’

Though sketching tended to be regarded primarily as a social and practical accomplishment for young women (Charles's brother, Henry Mayle Whichelo, was the author of a popular students’ guide to sketching landscape, designed to help the young traveller abroad), the maturity of Joanna's style, even at that age, is impressive.

The Memoir begins with the childhood letters of Joanna and her elder brothers, George and Matthias, which reflect a charmed existence. They include Matthias enthusing to Joanna about the visit to Brighton of the ‘Ioway’ Indians, probably brought to England by George Catlin, while George lectures her in a lordly fashion on the history of the area of Shropshire in which their maternal relations lived: the celebrated ‘Bone Well’ – a holy spring near Ludlow – went on to have both sad and happy memories for Joanna. George also took pleasure in testing her on her French, while his passion both for the theatre and for music is already apparent, as is her love of singing.

WHEN Jephte's daughter beautifully laments by relentlessly exploiting a chromatic inflection of the Neapolitan sixth chord in Giacomo Carissimi's oratorio Jephte (c.1650), it becomes clear that this piece is actually about her and not about her father as the title suggests, for she is the one who sings the most memorable music. This nameless, obedient creature from the Old Testament is in Carissimi's oratorio depicted in a rather different light: the musical representation of her acceptance of the destiny forced upon her is of a truly dramatic diva whose inner struggle moves from grieving to rage and despair, and from bitter memory to final acceptance. Carissimi even makes her cries resound in echo, thus giving her the power to reflect through music. ‘Lament, ye valleys, bewail, ye mountains and in the affliction of my heart be afflicted’: the first soprano repeats the daughter's phrase, and the second soprano imitates it at the upper third, simulating the reverberations of the voice through the mountains. The combination of various rhetoric devices – the deflection to the Neapolitan harmonic sphere, the use of echo and its elevated repetition – create the powerful effect in this lamenting scene. Jephte displays many of the expressive potentials of seventeenth-century music, but the echoing voice brings them all together. The echoing voice is a rhetorical reinforcement of the personal outburst of sorrow and the musical representation of a reflective early modern self, which, although aware of personal potentials and limits, is still deeply conflicted about the same: what are the potentials, and where do the limits begin? Jephte's daughter accepts her destiny, not with an easy acceptance, but with a questioning one.

Around the time of the creation of Carissimi's oratorio, Athanasius Kircher (c.1602–80) – ‘the last man who knew everything’ – writes about the phenomenon of echoing and its connection to the ancient classical myth of a runaway nymph, Echo:

Many accounts of the South African student movement locate the beginnings of the #RMF and the later #FMF (Rhodes Must Fall and Fees Must Fall) movements in the bucket of human excrement that Chumani Maxwele brought on to the campus of the University of Cape Town on 9 March 2015, and emptied on to the statue of Cecil John Rhodes (Booysen 2016: 3). While origin narratives can never be trusted completely (there are, for example, other versions that locate the beginnings of this wave of student activism elsewhere, that start earlier, or that relate his actions more clearly to service provision protests involving excrement), it is nevertheless a powerful story, drawing attention to questions of dirt, cleansing and the often disjointed and disorienting journeys many students have to make between home and the university campus.

In this chapter I make two linked arguments. The first is that discourses around cleaning, cleansing and dirt are suggestive as a way of understanding some of the demands of the student movement. The first part of the chapter traces the life cycles of various forms of dirt and cleansing in the debate about the nature of the university and its historic and symbolic legacies. The second part of the argument is that these dirt discourses are informed by notions of blood and belonging. In other words, I read the student movement through blood and not through shit. It is not unusual for student movements to claim allegiance to workers’ movements (Ayelew n.d.; Zeilig 2007), and this was the case too in South Africa. Striking in the South African student movement of 2015 and onwards have been the utterances of identification with ‘our mothers the domestic workers’ (and sometimes, but less frequently, ‘our fathers’). Through these statements, students were making a complaint about fees and the economic barriers faced by those from cash-poorer homes trying to enter tertiary education. This aspect of the student movement has often been interpreted through the lens of class struggle, and I return to this point below. What is striking here is the assertion of intergenerational allegiance, and the ways in which kinship and blood ties figure.

There is a conceptual gain in reading this proclaimed affiliation of blood and belonging alongside and over the dirt discourses.

The eight chronicles edited here are the principal surviving historical narratives of the Wars of the Roses written in English by men who lived during those wars. They are complemented by a number of other important chronicles – some written in English or Latin by Englishmen with a broader or longer view of history extending to matters (often civic or ecclesiastical) somewhat to the side of the Yorkist-Lancastrian conflict or to events that preceded or followed it; some written in Latin or French by foreign observers for foreign readers; and some written retrospectively from a sixteenth-century perspective. And there are, of course, thousands of other texts – letters, charters, acts of parliament, registers, treaties, household accounts, and memoranda – that continue to flesh out historians’ understanding of the period. But these chronicles are the best accounts by commoners (and one duke) written for their fellow Englishmen with a usually narrow, often exclusive, focus on the battles and politics of the Wars of the Roses.

Five of these chronicles recount in detail particular events of limited duration: battles, in The First Battle of St Albans (21–23 May 1455) and The Siege of Bamburgh Castle (June–July 1464); campaigns, in The Chronicle of the Rebellion in Lincolnshire (March 1470) and The History of the Arrival of King Edward IV (March–May 1471); and negotiations in The Manner and Guiding of the Earl of Warwick (22–30 July 1470). The remaining three describe the development of the larger conflict over extended periods: The Continuation of Gregory's Chronicle (1450–69), Howard's Chronicle (1461–70), and Warkworth's Chronicle (1461–74).

It is obvious from this list that only the first half of the Wars of the Roses period, traditionally 1455–85, is covered by these chronicles. That may perhaps be explained by the period of relative peace that followed Edward's crushing victories at Barnet and Tewkesbury and the consequent deaths of Henry VI and his son, Edward of Westminster. By the end of May 1471, it must have looked to these mainly Yorkist chroniclers as if the conflict was permanently resolved. What followed was more than a decade of dynastic calm, punctuated by the adventures of the die-hard Lancastrian John de Vere and by a few months of phony war in France.