‘Cyfiawnder rhwng tyddynwr a phenaeth a lawcha wlad’. This message, delineating that ‘justice between tenant and chief will succour the land’, was inscribed into the silver-rimmed cups that were used at the celebrations accompanying the coming of age of Robert Williames Vaughan of Nannau in 1824. The Vaughans provided custom-made acorn-shaped cups for each of the principal sites of celebration, fashioned from the wood of the fallen ‘Ceubren yr Ellyll’ oak tree that had previously stood near Nannau as a primary marker of the family's ancestry in the landscape. Participants were encouraged to share in the sentiments of the inscription by communally drinking from the cups in accompaniment to the toasts delivered at the celebratory dinners. The cups also displayed an engraving which reinforced the meaning of the Welsh inscription: a scale in hand with the words ‘landlord’ and ‘tenant’ balanced in equilibrium on each side. One of the speeches proclaimed that this signified that ‘equity and justice should always be the characteristic essential of every transaction between Sir Robert and his tenants.’ More generally, it symbolised the reciprocity and cooperation required to make the landed estate function effectively, positioning the relationship between landowner and tenant as critical to the operation or ‘succour’ of society. In this equation, the associated inscription of ‘Llwydiant i etifedd …’ (‘Prosperity to the heir …’) had larger resonance for the future of everyone connected with the celebration: his prosperity was presented as being intricately bound up with that of the wider estate community.

Critics have widely acknowledged the hybrid nature of Cervantes’ writing when explaining the mixture of genres in his work, in which different literary forms coexist (Riley 2001). The result of this coexistence of genres creates an original product, anchored in a multiplicity of traditions: chivalric novels, pastoral novels, Moorish novels, cape and sword novels, and picaresque novels are some of the novelistic genres that Cervantes masters and combines in his work in a free and experimental way. This propensity for generic crossover represents not only an innovation in literary terms but also, in a neat coherence between form and content, a reflection on Spanish identity during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries linked to the concept of “purity of blood.” Written at a time when the Iberian Peninsula was under constant scrutiny to determine the “cleanliness” of its inhabitants, the discourse on identity, as well as the ability to transform or conceal said identity, is crucial to understanding Cervantes’ work and its relationship to the complex world in which he lived.

After the capture of Granada in 1492, the Catholic Monarchs prohibited the profession of any non-Catholic religion in the peninsula. As a result, Spanish Jews and Muslims had two options: conversion to Catholicism – whether sincere or insincere – or exile. Now, how was the authenticity of any such conversion to be determined? Who would rule on its authenticity and according to what criteria? To hold onto their identity, many of the Muslims and Jews who became Christians continued to practice their own religion in private throughout the sixteenth century, as well as their customs, many of which were shared by Christian Orthodox Spain (Fuchs 2009: 1). Spanish identity based on difference (the Old Christian is defined in opposition to the Jew and the Muslim) was difficult to determine in a world in which the exotic was often commonplace (Fuchs 2009: 11).

This chapter assesses the chaos Italy caused Ethiopia and efforts to rebuild the Ethiopian state after liberation in 1941. It begins with the Italian invasion, the rationale for creating spacio vitale (“living space”) in which to settle Italy's impoverished population, the brutality of occupation and the degree to which Italians imposed their own political, economic, and judicial institutions on Ethiopia. To balance the analysis, a summary of Italy's reputed positive contributions will be gauged and shown to be harmful to Ethiopia's autochthonous development. Yet despite their negative effects, Italy's re-engineering of Ethiopia's infrastructure accelerated Ethiopia's push towards modern development afterwards. The focus of the chapter, of course, is the liberation of Ethiopia by British forces fighting alongside Ethiopian Patriots. After the defeat of Africa Orientale Italiana (Italian East Africa) in 1941, a reckoning was in order. While traditional forms of restorative justice had been deemed superior for bringing about peace and reconciliation, in post-liberation Ethiopia international understandings of “rules of war” determined how the Italian army and askaris were to be treated. A confusing mixture of Western legal systems was used to administer justice for Italian civilians and Ethiopian collaborators. Almost forgotten were the indigenous juridic mechanisms previously discussed. This chapter attempts to explain why restorative justice was overlooked and only resorted to in a few cases in which European legal solutions were thought inadequate.

After liberation the task of administering justice split the Ethiopian population down the middle: Patriots versus collaborators, and the indifferent were forced to assert that they had always been on the winning side, surreptitiously aiding the Patriots by supplying food and shelter or through a million other micro-actions. Naturally the ranks of the collaborators shrunk and shrunk again until only a small number were deemed traitors worthy to stand trial.

Biological reductionism is constitutive of the dominant ideology in the contemporary Western metropolitan world and, often undetected, pervades all spheres of human life. The contemporary obsession with DNA—manifest, for example, in the increasing popularity of genetic hereditary testing—is only one of many phenomena indicative of the triumph of positivism in the social sphere. In the world of academia, this triumph is reflected negatively in the steady decline of the humanities, which conventionally do not produce positivistic knowledge, and in the anguished attempt of Digital Humanities scholars, amongst others, to extract quantifiable “value” from culture. As the culture industry perpetuates an ideology that undermines its foundations, making claims about the conditio socialis on the basis of quantifiable data has become a common practice. Thus, idiosyncratic hereditary material is thought to determine not only hair or eye color, or “roots” that purportedly lie in a physical location identified with some faraway ancestors, but also social categories, such as ethnic or racial identity. The persistence of racial paradigms originates in a mechanism inherent to positivist discourses, namely the conflation of social and biological elements: race, a social category, appears as a quantifiable, biological fact, derived from hereditary transmission.

4.1 Introduction: Published Literature

With the chronology and regional distribution of Viking raids on churches clarified in the preceding chapters, we can now move on to the motivation for such raids. At one level, there is the immediate purpose of the raids: what was it that Vikings were looking for when they attacked a church? At a second level, there is the question of why in general Vikings attacked churches and how this relates to their broader objectives in Ireland. The first issue, the immediate purpose of attacking churches, is the subject of this chapter. The broader context of Viking objectives in general is teased out at length in Chapters 6 to 12. Archaeological as well as documentary evidence has been deployed by previous writers to determine what Vikings sought when they raided churches. Archaeology is considered in this study too, but pride of place goes to the annals, the testimony of which, it will be shown, is crucial to illuminating the immediate purpose of Viking raids. The findings of the preceding chapters on chronology and distribution of raids bear out the view, put forward in the introductory chapter, that convincing historical synthesis requires closer analytic studies of the annals than have so far been undertaken. This is further underlined by what follows, as we will see.

The question of what Viking church raiders were looking for has elicited diverse answers, since Anthony Lucas denied that ecclesiastical metalwork was the main attraction. He reasoned that the bullion value of Irish church metalwork was generally low, being chiefly bronze.

1. Bi-confessionality, social peace and arbitral justice: the monarchy of France

The presence of a significant Huguenot minority and the bloody civil war that erupted from the early 1560s made France an extraordinarily important laboratory for the development of the concepts of concord and peace. The intense theoretical reflection on religious concord was not detached from the practices aimed at overcoming interconfessional conflict, which in the context of communities could arise from other factors (personal and family enmities, hatred, vengeance). The 1973 essay by Natalie Zemon Davis on the rites of violence in religious conflict in France undoubtedly marked a historiographical turning point, not least by her ability to graft the anthropological perspective onto the historical data of ‘crowd violence’. Just as it is possible to write a history of violence, even in its ritual and performative dimension, one can attempt to write a history of peace and the search for peaceful coexistence in contexts of bi-confessionality. The challenge, as in the analysis of conflict and explosions of violence, lies in evaluating the degree of impact of religious motivation in the search for concord, assuming it is possible to fully separate it from social factors.

The theoretical reflection on religious concord took its cue from the reflection on social concord, a common heritage, as has been seen, of Renaissance political thought, as well as from Erasmus-inspired Christian irenicism.

As C. L. R. James used to say, Beethoven belongs as much to West Indians as he does to Germans, since his music is now part of the human heritage’. More than three decades after the death of the influential Trinidadian thinker, we have reached a moment that is perhaps unique in the story of classical music. Finally, for the first time, questions of equality, diversity and inclusion are beginning to be seriously addressed, at least in some quarters. The gatekeepers flee the fortified walls, the canon is being dismantled and dead white men no longer rule the roost. Revolution is in the air. Liberté, égalité, fraternité!

At the same time, the historically informed performance movement has become an accepted part of the contemporary musical landscape. We find ourselves during the first moment in musical history where it has become not only de rigeur, but even expected that musicians will play certain music on old instruments. As we become comfortable with this anachronism, some anomalies are still to be ironed out; for instance, a modern piano employed for Baroque music in an orchestra or chamber ensemble is now seen as dated and unstylistic, whilst audiences still enthusiastically flock to hear Angela Hewitt or András Schiff give recitals of solo Bach keyboard works on a Steinway piano. Then there is the curious chamber/symphony orchestra divide, in which smaller ensembles are currently much more likely to play in a way that is considered ‘stylistically aware’ than their larger counterparts, as if historical concerns relate to the number of players on the stage.

In this Anglo-Latin poem by Aldhelm (c.639–709), famed Latin and Old English poet of early medieval England, the speaker describes the curious life it can call its own. Its story begins in a leafy forest, but the speaker moves away to a busy life, whirling about in thread and making robes, all to prevent cold from harming men. For modern readers, this imagery can be perplexing, but it would not have been for the people of Aldhelm's day, or many others who lived hundreds of years before or after his time. For them, this narrator's identity would have been clear and resonant because of their daily interaction with the material culture and the process of textile production, from the spinning threads of the riddle to finished webs in the loom.

Book VII pulls together the argument of the poem, which now specifies that it has discussed not the three estates but (as the first headnote puts it) “the spiritual as well as the secular degrees of society” responsible for the present state of affairs. The Book's opening lines draw a direct parallel between what can be learned from the past and England's own present difficulties:

What is wont of late to lurk in ancient figures, We can verify from our own troubles.

An account of Nebuchadnezzar's dream of the shattered statue whose sole remnant is its feet, one of clay and the other of iron, is offered in evidence of the poet's reading of history. Avarice and lust, the two sins that have been the primary focus of Gower's attention throughout the poem, are shown to be deeply seated in human affairs. The iron of the shattered statue's one foot represents avarice, which characterizes the iron heart of the miser who lacks compassion. The other foot's clay stands for the lust that renders human life and institutions brittle, able to be shattered in a moment. The world, intended by God as a place of preparation for the day of judgment, has been turned upside down by humanity's misdirected desires, all the more deplorable because everything worldly is transitory, and unworthy when compared to eternal permanence. Commitment to the world and its pleasures, characterized by the seven deadly sins, leads to damnation. Commitment to Christian values leads to life everlasting.

We are ready now to turn to the seminars themselves. Andrew Jaszi taught Kafka throughout most of his career, though he was not known as an expert on Kafka like his friend and colleague at Berkeley Heinz Politzer. What “not being an expert” means in the world of a major research university like Berkeley is that Andrew Jaszi did not publish on Kafka, nor did he claim, or even aim, to possess a thorough knowledge of every text, every diary entry, and all the correspondence that Kafka ever wrote and received. Politzer had worked with Max Brod in Jerusalem in the 1930s editing the first four volumes of Kafka's collected works and in 1962 published a landmark book of Kafka interpretation, which to this day remains widely read and cited. So Politzer enjoyed the reputation, welldeserved, of being Berkeley's resident Kafka expert. Still, it is clear from the comments preserved in the audio recordings that Andrew Jaszi had meticulously studied the central texts by Kafka and was also quite familiar, even if not exhaustively so, with much of the secondary literature. It is equally clear that despite his self-effacing tendency to defer to Politzer and others in all matters of primary research, Jaszi was, in his own right, a penetratingly original Kafka interpreter of those texts in which he specialized. Certainly, as a teacher, Andrew Jaszi was unmatched. We recall the high praise accorded him by Politzer, with whom Jaszi occasionally cotaught seminars: “His method of teaching is the closest approximation to the Socratic way of pedagogy I have encountered since I was a student of Martin Buber in Jerusalem.” In line with his general preference for teaching shorter texts, the works Andrew Jaszi favored were the parables and major tales, notably “The Metamorphosis,” “A Report for the Academy” and “Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse People.” His two favorite stories, however, the ones to which he returned again and again, were “The Judgment” and “A Country Doctor.”

Appendix 1. Chronology