The diverse roles played by entrepreneurial women in trade and agriculture in pre-colonial Africa have been the subject of a number of studies in the last four decades. This scholarship has focused particularly on elite merchant women – donas (wealthy African and Eurafrican women), signares and nharas (both words, ‘from the Portuguese senhora … signified women of wealth and influence’) – although the experiences of poor and enslaved women have recently been traced through parish records in Angola. The planting of a new port town at Freetown on the Sierra Leone peninsula in the closing decade of the eighteenth century opened up opportunities for neighbouring Temne women, as well as newly arrived migrant women of African origin and descent, to generate income through food cultivation, trade, commerce and service provision.

This chapter explores how uprooted and displaced women, who had already experienced multiple forms of migration, drew on skills from their earlier lives to exploit economic opportunities in West Africa. The settlers’ migrant origins placed constraints on their capacity to conduct long-distance trade and to profit from the accumulation of slave labour. Freetown was not an indigenous African settlement, and its distinctive abolitionist agenda meant that the experiences of women in this new town were markedly different to those of coastal merchant women in other settings. In contrast to trading women in Benguela, Luanda and Saint Louis, women in Freetown were prohibited, in theory if not always in practice, from slave trading or owning enslaved Africans. The arrival of ‘recaptive’ Africans after 1808 altered the situation, and settler women were able to capitalise on a new supply of labour to support their economic enterprises (see Map 2). As these female settlers were also outsiders and ‘strangers’ with no contacts to inland societies, their opportunities for wealth accumulation were more limited than those of entrepreneurial women in other coastal settings.

By the turn of the nineteenth century, the convergence of various streams of Atlantic migration on Sierra Leone resulted in an intermixing of women from diverse cultures with different life experiences of freedom and enslavement in America, Africa, the West Indies and Europe. As the chapters by Hilary Jones and Kristin Mann in this volume demonstrate, inward migration shaped the cosmopolitan character of other coastal towns in West Africa.

The original recordings of the conversations between Skempton and Cavett were transcribed and edited by Cavett. The Conversations omit pauses and other markers of time, thought or consideration that may have occurred, as well as exchanges felt irrelevant to the task at hand. The Conversations, therefore, are not diplomatic representations of what passed between Skempton and Cavett, and text or references enclosed [thus] are provided by way of editorial intervention.

Each paragraph in the Conversations is attributed to its speaker by way of their initials: HS for Howard Skempton, EC for Esther Cavett. The paragraphs are also identified in the margin by way of a number, allowing for any of the contributors to point to a specific part of a Conversation within their Reflection: C2 §3 directs the reader to Conversation Two, paragraph 3, for example. First names of composers and other creative artists, other than those who are widely familiar, are generally given when they are initially mentioned in each Chapter and (if applicable) Reflection but not thereafter. Dates of compositions are typically provided on first reference in each Chapter and Reflection but not thereafter.

Full bibliographic details for in-text references can be found in the select bibliography. Works referred to in the text are italicized and capitalized according to normal guidelines, except capitalization of the titles of Skempton's works, which follow the composer's preferences, as displayed in the authorized worklist.

Where appropriate, notes in pitch-class set notation are referred to as “(125)” rather than “[125]” or “[1–2–5].”

In a 2011 visit to Warwick Castle – home to the Beauchamp earls who loomed large in Malory’s formative years and then to Richard Neville, the 16th Earl of Warwick, known by the moniker ‘Kingmaker’ because of his role in the civil wars that dominated Malory’s later life – I saw ‘The Mighty Trebuchet,’ heralded on the castle website as ‘the largest working siege machine IN THE WORLD!’The site goes on to exclaim, ‘The colossal catapult is an authentic recreation of one of the biggest and most deadly military machines of all time.’ I cannot verify the first claim, as I am no expert in medieval weapon re-enactment, though I will say it was big.The second claim seems patently false, even in the era of the ‘alternative fact.’ The massive death tolls caused by bombs in the last century tragically dwarf the abilities of the trebuchet and other siege engines. But it is not just the numbers of casualties that separate modern and medieval weaponry. Today’s high-tech weapons (such as drones, long-range missiles, airplanes) and military tactics (midnight raids and air strikes, for example) allow much more physical distance – and potentially psychological distance, too – than even the most powerful of medieval siege engines could afford. Malory’s Morte Darthur, written in a time of war and changing military tactics, examines the personal side of confrontations staged in and around castles. The proximity of combatants in the wars that close the Morte and the heightened attention to the castle invite a look at the effect of space on war and that of war on space. Wars include not just combat itself, but also communication in the form of both letters and conversations. We see allies huddle together and opponents negotiate from opposite sides of sieges. These battles thus play out as personal conflicts shaped by and trying to shape the spaces where they happen. Lynch argues that ‘[f]ights provide … the major places in Malory.’He further notes the use of combat to map the narrative. I find this especially relevant as the Morte moves back into full-scale war toward its end.

Although the Basotho have deployed a number of strategies to construct and assert their belonging, questions have continued to be asked about their origins and where they ‘actually belong’ in daily conversations with their non-Sotho neighbours. In the course of my fieldwork for this book, one of the members of the Basotho community shared with me his experience of constantly being asked about his ‘unusual’ surname, first at school, and afterwards at work. He highlighted how, each time he introduced himself to people, they invariably quizzed him about his origins, given that his surname is considered uncommon in Zimbabwe. Faced with such uncertainties, some of the progenies of the original Basotho migrants who settled in the country in the 1890s have turned to retracing their roots in South Africa and, in some instances, applying for South African citizenship. While some have turned to this option because of the tumultuous economic and political conditions in Zimbabwe since 2000, there are also examples of others who made efforts to retrace their origins in South Africa much earlier. I intend, here, to show how the Basotho, in the present, are using history as a resource in their struggles to reclaim South African citizenship while at the same time holding on to their belonging in Zimbabwe.

The strong kinship ties among the Basotho, based on years of practising endogamous marriages as well as attachment to their family farms, has meant that a large number have continued to have some kind of attachment to the Dewure Purchase Areas. Moreover, the Basotho's communal ownership of Bethel Farm and the practice of burying their dead at Bethel Cemetery have also meant that even though some individuals have migrated to other areas, they still consider the Dewure Purchase Areas their home and a number continue to bury their dead there. They even continue to refer to Bethel Farm as ‘our farm’. Thus for them, Bethel has remained a key reference point in their construction of belonging in Zimbabwe because it is where some of their relatives are buried and also because a number of their kinsmen still live on farms in the area. However, in spite of their attachment to Zimbabwe in general and the Dewure Purchase Areas in particular, the Basotho feel strongly about their historical roots in South Africa more than a century after their forefathers migrated into what is now Zimbabwe.

Howard Skempton came of age in a schismatic moment in British new music. He began his training privately with Cornelius Cardew in the summer of 1967, and was closely involved both with Cardew's Scratch Orchestra (of which he was a founding member in 1969) and the experimental music classes at Morley College out of which the Scratch Orchestra evolved. In 1967, though, when Skempton started studying with him, Cardew's attraction was not as the father of Scratch, nor as the politically committed artist he later became, but as a figure who bridged the European avant garde and American experimentalism (Harris, 2013, p. 53).

Perhaps it's more accurate to say that Cardew simply maintained the long-standing connections between these two scenes. In the process, though, he ended up presiding over the development of a distinctly English experimentalism by the early 1970s. Indeed, he oversaw the growth of “experimentalism” as a distinct category in British musical discourse, one that only became relatively stable with the publication of Michael Nyman's 1974 book Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond (see Harris, 2013, pp. 4–5). Skempton's story is bound up with this development. But it also does much to suggest the precariousness and contingency of the category of experimentalism, and the stakes involved in placing oneself within it.

Cardew's fluid approach to American new music and the European avant garde is evident from the early days of his lessons with Skempton. Their first meeting, after all, was at a Stockhausen concert, and Cardew, who had worked as Karlheinz Stockhausen's assistant in Cologne, introduced Skempton to him only to find they had already been in contact by letter (Tilbury, 2008, p. 339; C1 §42). After Skempton's first lesson with Cardew, meanwhile, he reports leaving “armed with a pile of La Monte Young scores” (Tilbury, 2008, p. 339); Morton Feldman, as we've seen, was already a model for Skempton before his lessons began, but Cardew would have encouraged this interest as well.

Throughout the 1960s, Cardew had championed both Young's and Feldman's music. He had first met Young at Darmstadt in 1959 (Stockhausen was again the link, as Young had travelled there to work with him).

Introduction

In the early decades of the nineteenth century, Italian works dominated operatic stages throughout Europe, but in the eyes of many German observers, they swerved from true drama and served only as a vehicle for vocal virtuosity. The confrontation between Italian and German conceptions of opera came to a head in December 1821 when the Italian impresario Domenico Barbaja leased the Viennese court theatres and produced mostly Italian operas, namely those of Gioacchino Rossini, gaining unprecedented success.

Ignaz von Mosel (1772–1844), deputy director of the Viennese court theatres from 1820, insisted in his ‘Essay on the Aesthetics of Dramatic Musical Composition’ of 1813 that, above all, dramatic music should involve the ‘heightened declamation and the powerful, vital, warm expression of the emotions that are to be found in poetry’. For Mosel, music was not to hold up the action, nor distract listeners by means of empty showmanship. In an earlier essay, ‘On Sung Drama’ (1807), the likeminded poet and playwright Heinrich Joseph von Collin (1771–1811) demanded the complete fusion of music and poetry, promoting the idea of a musical drama that could surpass other forms of theatre: ‘if opera grants us everything that drama does and surpasses the latter in delight, shall we complain about a catastrophe from which we will gain a lot? I am convinced that the dramatic art will necessarily arrive at this point and thus be brought to the highest degree of perfection’.

Schubert, who had begun to establish himself as a composer of stage music in 1820, certainly followed the lively debate between the supporters of emergent German Romanticism and those of Italian opera. While, under the wings of his teacher Antonio Salieri, he had modelled his early stage works on French and Italian comic opera, the young composer now joined the ‘German school’ and soon adopted the idea of an all-sung drama for his opera Alfonso and Estrella, D. 732, of 1822. But, disappointed by its rejection at the court theatre in 1823, he returned to the traditional model of French comic opera when he began work on his next opera Fierabras, D. 796.

Introduction

Franz Schubert's ‘Standchen (“Horch, Horch! die Lerch”)’ (D. 899; 1826) and ‘Standchen’, from Schwanengesang (D. 957; 1828), rank among the composer's most beloved Lieder. Contrasting in mood – one exuberant, one ruminative – these songs reflect just some of the tremendous diversity of his oeuvre. The first draws upon text adapted from William Shakespeare's late play Cymbeline and depicts an outdoor scene wherein an ebullient swain cajoles a silent lady nearby, enthusiastically coaxing her to arise and enjoy the beauty of nature. It expresses an active monologue, one in which the central character pursues a courtship goal. The second sets poetry by Schubert's contemporary, Ludwig Rellstab, and it portrays a more serious situation in which the primary persona, whose words betray both distance and desire, discloses yearning too intimate and insecure to be expressed directly. Ultimately revealed to be a rehearsed entreaty to the persona's beloved, rather than an in-person petition, it remains an interior monologue, articulated in isolation indoors by the song's main agent. Nevertheless, the two songs have much in common.

Both are serenades – love songs in which a dramatic persona addresses an object of affection. In each instance, the latter never responds directly to the former's fervent words, yet is reflected in them. Neither Lied is ‘serene’, as the genre's name would imply, and neither seems the least bit casual or disinterested. Indeed, ‘Standchen (“Horch, Horch! die Lerch”)’ and ‘Standchen’ present instances of interpersonal persuasion within which a central character hopes to gain a positive response from an apparently reticent companion. In these Lieder, drama resides within the portrayal of persuasion.

Both songs communicate dramatic implications of their poetic texts via contextual processes derived from the same persuasive plan. These consist of purposefully positioned musical elements that direct attention ahead. Eliciting expectations and producing a perception of growing momentum that culminates in a climactic musical arrival, they underscore and vivify each text's unique dramatic narrative. Understanding these contextual processes involves identification of their shared strategy's functional phases, analysis of their expressive elements, assessment of their musical effects, and interpretation of the expressive messages they convey.

In 1975, in typically surreal fashion, the British comedy group Monty Python parodied that staple of medieval entertainment: Arthurian legend. In one scene, our hero approaches two peasants. One, inexplicably named Dennis and unaware of Arthur's identity, objects to the fact that Arthur automatically treats him as an inferior. Arthur justifies his haughty behaviour by replying that he is king. This does little to ameliorate Dennis's disgruntlement. At this point Dennis's female companion exclaims that she did not vote for Arthur to be king. ‘You don't vote for kings’, Arthur retorts incredulously. The peasant woman then asks how Arthur became king and he explains that the Lady of the Lake presented him with the sword Excalibur, signifying by divine providence that he should be king. This is too much for Dennis, who interjects with the memorable line that ‘strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.’ In the inauguration ceremonies investigated in this book, swords played a prominent role, though they were bestowed on the monarch by men of the cloth rather than lake-dwelling fairies. The assent of the clergy and people was also a feature of medieval inaugurations, though twelfth-century kings could hardly have been described as having a mandate from the masses. Rather, the relevance of this scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail to the subject matter of this book lies in the similarity between the impertinent peasants’ approach to King Arthur and the manner in which modern scholars have approached high medieval kingship.

While focusing on the rituals of royal and imperial inauguration, this book aims to contribute to a much wider debate about the nature of kingship in what has come to be seen as a transitional period. Like Dennis and his female companion, modern scholars have often assumed the inevitability of the modern secular state so that the liturgical trappings of high medieval kingship, particularly in England, have been treated simply as the ‘froth on top of serious government’. Inherent to the paradigm of modern state formation is the assumption that the sacrality of monarchy, and the spell of its divine providence, at some point wanes.

The emergence of Afro-European societies on Senegal's Atlantic coast is predominantly a history of women. In the heyday of Portuguese trade along the coast of Senegambia in the early seventeenth century, women served as intermediaries between European sailors and African rulers. In the eighteenth century, African families settled around the European forts built on the coastal islands of Gorée and Saint Louis. Some African women who lived in these settlements entered into unions with European merchants, soldiers or officers, called mariage à la mode du pays (marriage in the custom of the country). Known in the literature as signares, senhoras or nharas, this class of socially esteemed women became associated with inter-racial marriage and entrepreneurial acumen. Signareship resembled the practice of casar on the Gold Coast where elders married free daughters or domestic slaves to Europeans resident in the trade towns. In Senegal, however, the extent to which the extended family played a role in brokering marital alliances to expand the lineage and incorporate strangers is unclear. In Senegal as in the Gold Coast, the women who entered into these unions not only facilitated the encounter between Africa and Europe but also provided the foundation for the expansion of commerce and diplomacy. By establishing Afro-European households, these women laid the groundwork that subsequently allowed French officials as well as male rulers, clerics, traders and urban politicians to establish the patterns of accommodation that made colonialism work in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Although historians have paid a great deal of attention to the role of the signares, the literature tends to render the women of Saint Louis and Gorée as one-dimensional figures. For example, interpretations of town life gloss over Muslim women's roles; female slaves are quantified in population data, but scholars rarely address them as individual personalities. French officials typically recorded statistics for the ‘useful [male] population’ of the towns. Furthermore, the administration's bias towards individuals who conformed to French cultural norms meant that extant notarised documents and the civil registries tend to reflect the marital, baptismal, death and property records of women who belonged to European or property-owning, French-educated mixed-race families rather than those of Muslim and African women. One informant reminded me that for the women commonly known by the title signare we rarely know their actual names or the names of their mothers, sisters and friends.

The purpose of this appendix is to enable the reader swiftly to find the full texts of the ordines referenced in this book and to give an idea of the number of surviving manuscripts. As no critical edition of the English ordines exists, all printed works containing readings of individual manuscripts are given and the manuscripts containing witnesses to the English ordines are also given in full. As the French, German and imperial ordines have all been edited in relatively modern critical editions, only the edition cited in the book and a summary of surviving manuscripts has been included in this appendix. Full details of surviving manuscripts and previous editions of the texts can be found in the relevant critical editions.

English Second Recension (late tenth century)

Alternative names: The Edgar Ordo

Editions

1. L. G. Wickham Legg, English Coronation Records (London, 1901), 15-21.

2. V. Leroquais, Les pontificaux manuscrits des bibliothèques publiques de France. Étude et description, 3 vols. (Paris, 1937), II, 160-4.

3. H. A. Wilson, The Benedictional of Archbishop Robert, HBS 24 (London, 1903), 140-7.

4. D. H. Turner, The Claudius Pontificals, HBS 97 (London, 1971), 89-95.

Manuscripts

Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 146 (s. xex)

Douai, Bibliothèque municipal, MS 67 (s. xii)

London, British Library, Additional MS 57337 (s. xex/s. xiin)

London, British Library, MS Cotton Claudius A.iii (s. xex/s. xiin)

London, British Library, MS Cotton Vitellius A.vii (s. xmed)

Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS lat. 943 (s. xex)

Rouen, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 369 (s. xex)

English Third Recension (twelfth century)

Editions

1. Legg, English Coronation Records, 30-9.

2. Turner, The Claudius Pontificals, 115-22.

3. H. A. Wilson, The Pontifical of Magdalen College, HBS 39 (London, 1910), 89-95.

Manuscripts

Cambridge, Trinity College MS B.II.10 (s. xiiex)

Cambridge, University Library MS EE.II.3 (s. xiiin)

Dublin, Trinity College MS 98 (formerly B.3.6) (s. xiiin)

London, British Library MS Cotton Claudius A.iii (s. xiiin)

London, British Library MS Cotton Tiberius B.viii (s. xiiex)

Oxford, Bodleian Library Rawlinson MS C.400 (s. xivin)

Oxford, Magdalen College MS 226 (s. xiiex)

Royal Ordo from the Romano-Germanic Pontifical (c.950)

Alternative names: Ottonian Ordo, Mainz Ordo

Edition

Vogel & Elze, Le pontifical romano-germanique, I: 246-69.

This chapter examines two horticultural metaphors, the garden and the field, both symbolizing the body of the Virgin. I will begin by situating them in one of the scriptural sources most often mined for images of the Virgin, the Song of Songs. I will then study the works of Gonzalo de Berceo, one of the poets most studied by Hispano-medievalists, reassessing his famous verdant space in the light of liturgical and theological sources.

In the Song of Songs, a garden symbolizes the young woman three times (4.12, 4.15, 5.1). She is also compared to other green and verdant spaces. She is a mountain of myrrh and her shoots form an orchard (4.13). She is also a flower of the field (2.1). The Song of Songs eulogy of the Shulamite, the beloved bride, compares her to an Eastern paradise teeming with lush vegetation, filled with exotic plants, releasing beautiful perfumes into the air, and providing shade and recreation to those inside. The lover's metaphor for his bride, an enclosed and planted space, reveals that, from time immemorial, verdant places have symbolized womanhood. The earth is tilled by the gardener, seeds are sown, and the garden is watered. The seeds sown there bloom and flourish, just like the male seed sown in a woman's womb in procreation. Both women and gardens are fertile and bear new life. Woman, like the land, can be fruitful or barren. Woman, like the earth, can be ploughed, dug, and watered in the sexual act. From ancient times to the Middle Ages, when theologians still associated women with the earth, gardens provided a powerful metaphor of two states of womanhood: land untilled represents virginity and cultivated land, fertility. Earth was the essential element of the Creation story, with man, Adam, created from the earth.

Along with many other objects and places in the deeply erotic symbolism that the Song provides in its various translations, gardens became the paradigm of human love in vernacular poetry.5 The garden and its fountain are closed to outsiders. They are sealed, yet redolent of the promise that they will eventually open.