When she drew up her will in 1448 Beatrice Melreth bequeathed to her sister, Agnes Burgh, a small collection of devotional books and rolls, some written in French, some in English, and others in Latin. Beatrice also left a Psalter-Hours (a primer and psalter bound together in one volume) to her son-in-law Henry Bardolf, and a “black primer” to one of her executors. Her small collection of devotional books was distinctive and suggests that Beatrice was a pious woman who valued her spiritual texts and was able to read several languages. She is, in fact, exactly the kind of medieval woman that Mary Erler's painstaking scholarship has done so much to draw out of the shadows. Beatrice listed the contents of her small collection with considerable care and it is clear that the rolls and books were important to her. She did not leave these to a clerk or priest or member of a religious house, but to her sister, Agnes Burgh. Beatrice had two other sisters whom she named and to whom she made bequests of girdles and clothing, but it was Agnes who was to receive this special collection of pious texts.

This distinctive collection of books prompts further investigation. Who was Beatrice Melreth and what is it possible to find out about the world, or worlds, in which she lived? Beatrice was the – probably eldest – daughter of John and Joan Waleys, who held the manor of Glynde in Sussex: a reasonably prosperous manor which yielded £80 per annum at the end of the fourteenth century. The family resources were augmented by income from other local manors, and amounted to some £120 per annum in all. As Professor Nigel Saul has observed “A figure of this order represented a not insubstantial income for a knightly family. Many would have had to subsist on a good deal less.” John Waleys in 1409 had inherited the estates from his father, with whom, however, he had had a protracted dispute over the distribution of the Waleys manors between various male heirs. But John need not, perhaps, have been so troubled about his lands because his wife Joan, whom he had married in 1398, was the only child of Sir Robert Turk, and so his heiress.

Virtues and Social Identity

This chapter is concerned with interpreting and analyzing the virtues that are necessary to rebuild or reconstruct the social fabric, ethos, or socio-ethical identity of Nigeria, the practices of excellence that go to the core of the functioning of a nation as a pluralistic community geared toward optimum human flourishing. This declaration may be misconstrued to mean that our interest in virtues is limited to community well-being. But concern for the national wellbeing is simultaneously a concern for what the individual person can do and be if such a person is not limited. Our discourse of virtue ethics in this chapter assumes that every individual has been endowed by God (gods) with certain gifts to bless his or her community or nation, and the community and the nation need to help the individual to fully realize these potentials.

We will try to use this connection between virtue and community well-being to ground a standard of citizenship moral behavior. According to this standard, the pursuit of a citizen's social life or work is grounded in the person's useful conception of the identity of a person-in-community. The new ethical social life that I am advocating in this book consists in the efficient pursuit of one's values that define what needs to be in the context of a community. It is a notion of self-identity and national well-being (precisely, the socio-ethical identity of Nigeria) that recognizes and embraces connectedness and accents virtues and self-esteem.

When self-identity is properly understood and handled, it dovetails into selfesteem or sustenance of self-esteem and it bleeds into virtues. For people will value their self-identity only to the extent that they continue to believe in the esteem they enjoy from such an identity. “For esteem will rule people's lives only so far as they can continue to believe in the possibility of estimable or virtuous behavior and only so far, therefore, as there are at least some individuals who offer persuasive examples of virtue.” Self-identity dovetails or becomes tangential to esteem when the person seeking to act out of self-identity presupposes reindentifiability (wants a recognizable name) and desires the honor and approval of others.

There Was Once a Dream

Let me begin our study of the social identity of Nigeria with a personal reflection on the changes in the images or identifications that the name Nigeria has conjured up in the past fifty-five years. The word Nigeria has been nearly emptied of its originally powerful meaning. While growing up in the 1970s, it had a magical significance, brimming with hope, creativity, and pride. As primary-school children we all thought or were taught that it was in the body of Nigeria that the black race was going to enter into the history of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries with technological power, dignity, and justice. We believed that in the body of Nigeria, in the idea of a very determined and proud group, all the potencies of the black race were concentrated and were arranged in such a way that they could transcend their earlier forms and rise to the level of global respectability. Alas, that Nigeria appears to have slipped away.

Local leaders came to our primary schools and set ablaze our imaginations. They told us we were the leaders of tomorrow and that we should aim to be the best in the world. Thus when I was either in primary three or four and I read somewhere that the average American child read over one million words a year, I decided to out-read every American child. Boy, I did read all the way to first-class honors in economics and earning summa cum laude in ethics at the PhD level, and I am still reading. Somebody, some cruel being, has taken that Nigeria away from me. Where is that Nigeria that can inspire small boys and girls?

When in 1975 soldiers and bureaucrats came to us in the secondary schools and promised that in the year 2000 everything would be great we believed them. As secondary students in forms one and two, we believed the promise wholeheartedly. The Year 2000 campaign fired our imaginations. We were ready to take on the world.

The canons of the Lateran were the prime movers in arguing for the supremacy of their basilica. The extant manuscripts in the Lateran archive provide written evidence of the canons’ thoughts and debates, and it is not difficult to imagine one of the canons talking about the site in a way that resembled the Descriptio as presented in the previous chapter. What was the context for their promotion, and who were their addressees?

An important audience of the Descriptio was provided by the many pilgrims and the legates who arrived in Rome from all over Europe. At the beginning of the twelfth century, the Roman papacy claimed universal jurisdiction, regulating dioceses and monasteries throughout Western Christendom. The papal administration evolved as an organization that governed from Iceland in the north to Sicily in the south, from Portugal in the west to Poland in the east. The most important and effective instrument of papal government was the legation. Legates were dispatched from Rome as envoys with the instruction to implement papal decrees. At the same time, a constant flow of European prelates wended their way to Rome. Among these were newly appointed metropolitans and archbishops who were about to receive their pallia at St Peter's and ecclesiastical representatives who wished to bring appeals before the pope. The Pseudo-Isidorean decretals stated that ‘Appeals are to be made to the Roman church by all, but especially by the oppressed. They should flock to her as to their mother, to be nourished by her breasts, defended by her authority and relieved of their oppressions.’ Until Pope Paschal II (1099–1118) began to delegate cases to members of the curia, the pope judged all cases personally. This meant that the petitioners had to wait, often for weeks or months, until they were summoned into the papal presence. Herman of Tournai was one such disgruntled petitioner who described the delay that he experienced in 1142 when he ‘almost starved from boredom in the Lateran palace’ while awaiting the pope's response.

Before looking directly at the historical sources (principally the inquisitorial manuals) which are at the heart of this book and what they can tell us about change, it may help to sketch out the wider context in which they were produced. This includes a short history of the inquisition in Languedoc and Aragon as well as the wider history of the time and an account of the lives of Gui and Eymerich; little is known about Ugolini. Those who want to know more can of course find a number of useful and much fuller accounts, some of which are listed in the bibliography.

History of Inquisition in Languedoc and France

This book starts formally from the time when Gui became an inquisitor, in 1307. Like all such starting points it is arbitrary, but it does represent a time of significant change for the inquisition. A number of events which took place around that time marked the change. Marguerite Porete was executed in 1310; the affair of the Templars reached its climax with the execution of Jacques de Molay in 1314; 1316 was the year in which John XXII acceded to the papal throne; and 1317 was the year of the promulgation of Multorum querela and Nolentes, the last papal Bulls legislating on the medieval inquisition. Those Bulls were in fact a delayed response to difficulties in the early 1300s in Carcassonne and Albi (described later), but they also marked the first limited reining in of the inquisition, rather than an increase in its power. They can be seen as the end of a first phase in which the inquisition was created and reached a mature form. But there were also new developments at the same time. The Bull Ad nostrum, which accompanied Multorum querela and Nolentes, opened up new ground by creating new heretics in the shape of the Beguines in Germany, the alleged heresy of whom was that they believed in their own perfectibility. The year 1318 also saw the burning of four Spiritual Franciscans for heresy. The Spirituals' beliefs had been rendered heretical by papal decision; other heresies, like Catharism and Waldensianism, had involved beliefs which put their adherents squarely outside the Catholic Church. This illuminated the fact that heresy was, in part at least, defined by choices made by the Church.

Introduction

FROM September 1855 onwards, Alice's commentary falls away and she allows the papers to speak for themselves. On 25 September 1855, Joanna, her mother and her younger brother Bob left London for Paris. Joanna's engagement was at an end, but the letters she continued to write to Henry smack of a despair at the prospect of losing him that she had not shown before. And it is characteristic that even in the midst of that despair she is thinking of her painting, and wondering aloud to him whether she should study under Rosa Bonheur or under Thomas Couture.

Joanna went to Paris at a turning point in French art. Although the École des Beaux-Arts (like the Royal Academy) championed the academic tradition in its teaching, there were already a significant number of artists – Jean-François Millet, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Theodore Rousseau, Gustave Courbet and Paul Delaroche among them – who were developing new forms of realism. Barbizon, a village near Fontainebleau, became an artistic centre where Corot and Millet went to paint and students to learn.

At this stage there were relatively few artists accepting female pupils. Rosa Bonheur, a realist painter and sculptor specialising in landscapes and animals, was one of the most successful and Joanna was tempted to study under her; but Bonheur favoured large canvases, while Joanna's work thus far had tended towards small-scale portraits. Thomas Couture, who represented the juste milieu, in which French art, in the period following the revolution, strove for a happy medium between the Classical tradition and the Romantic avant-garde, appealed to her – partly because under his tutelage she would become versed in the tradition of the tête d’expression (in which students learned to depict passions and emotions in their paintings and sculptures of heads), and partly because Henry had studied with him for six months in 1850. Joanna had become accustomed to taking Henry's advice in artistic matters and there is no doubt that he exerted a powerful influence on her decision.

Her letters to him paint an invaluable picture of her life in Paris. Whatever she had initially decided after breaking off their engagement, her ingenuous habit of assuming their correspondence would continue even though she declared each letter to be the last, ensured its continuation.