This episode marks the culmination of Thomas Malory's Le Morte Darthur. The promise of Caxton's title at long last reaches fulfilment: critically wounded, Arthur sends his loyal follower to throw his enchanted sword Excalibur into the water, where it is caught by a magically appearing arm. Then a mysterious barge appears, bearing ladies – including Arthur's sister, Morgan le Fay – ready to carry the king away to the magical island of Avalon. It is a pivotal moment: the end of Arthur's life, the end of Camelot, the end of an era. If Arthur is to return as the fabled Once and Future King, he will only be able to do so through the magical healing abilities of his sister and erstwhile foe, Morgan. At the ‘morte’ of Arthur, his supernaturally powerful, morally ambiguous sister is at his side.

As one of the best-known representations of the medieval world, Arthurian literature rose in popularity throughout the twentieth century as authors and readers found ‘that these tales serve to generate […] questions as important to the modern world as they were in the 12th century’. Furthermore, the legend's variations allow authors to re-create the narrative in ways that suit different audiences and arguments throughout time. In a tradition that had rarely admitted female authors, it was not until the second half of the twentieth century that Arthurian women novelists became common. Limited by patriarchal boundaries, women writers manoeuvered – with varying degrees of success – around literary confines using different strategies to empower female roles, and, through those, themselves.

This study analyses the different means women use to expand literary boundaries and claim power for their interpretation of the legends. The article begins with an overview of women's contributions to Arthurian historical fiction/fantasy, placing their works in the context of the literary tradition. This is followed by examining two boundaries restricting female innovation and how the authors engage with them. The foremost constraint is the lack of critical acceptance of women's rewritings, leading novelists to use paratexts. The second boundary is gender roles associated with the legends, as many female characters conform to conventional images of Arthurian stereotypes. Finally, I analyse the novelists’ innovations, examining how some authors break these boundaries.

The only German to have played significant roles in each of the Christian Democratic, Communist, and Social Democratic movements, Maria Meyer-Sevenich (1907–70) embodied the ideological warfare of modern German history. One of Hessen's most prominent female politicians and a leading voice in occupied Germany, Meyer-Sevenich stood out not only for her political trajectory, but for her impassioned rhetorical style. Accused of histrionics in the immediate postwar period and characterized by scholars as “an irresponsible and hysterical rabblerouser” and “exotic being,” this self-described Catholic convert offers a valuable lens through which to view postwar German emotions as they intersected with gender and religion. By revealing West German elites’ efforts to demarcate an emotional landscape and limit female agency, Meyer-Sevenich's challenges to postwar norms illuminate the inherent politics of public emotion.

Discursive boundaries governing emotional expression are not simply political but the direct product of governments with specific agendas of emotional control. As William Reddy explains, to secure power a government must “establish as an essential element a normative order for emotions, an ‘emotional regime.’” Relying on state rituals and actions, emotional regimes exercise hegemony by rendering public invisible emotions in government-approved ways. Significantly for German history, emotional regimes span the political spectrum from dictatorships determined to contain their subjects to democracies concerned to maintain “emotional conformity” by restricting “emotional expression,” especially along the axes of class, gender, and race.

Across Western medieval literatures, the biblical text forms a central point of reference, inspiring a wide range of interpretive responses. Practices of scriptural exegesis are crystallised in the tradition of commentary, a genre which forms the backbone of textual engagement in the Middle Ages. Nor is the genre restricted to biblical interpretation; rather, it stretches from traditions of scholarship on classical texts to later applications of commentary practice to emergent vernacular literature. Commentary can encompass a range of forms, as well as of materials. At its most traditional, biblical commentary explicates the meaning of the scriptural text according to an established structure, deriving its readings from the Church Fathers and other authorities. However, biblical commentary also suffuses medieval culture in other shapes, including poetic, literary, and devotional writings. Indeed, even non-textual productions, from architecture to illuminations, can comment on the Scriptures or other sources. A major site of creativity in medieval Europe, commentary is so versatile and ubiquitous that it can prove difficult to discuss the genre as such with any specificity.

A certain expansiveness inheres in the very etymology of ‘commentary’ and related terms. The term commentum, and its modern equivalent ‘comment’, derives from comminiscor, meaning ‘to devise, invent, contrive’. The term thus implies the generation of multiplicity.

INTRODUCTION

A witchcraft panic broke out in 1704 in Pittenweem, a small fishing town on the coast of Fife. It began with a case of demonic possession that resembled, and was influenced by, the Bargarran panic of 1696–7 that has featured above in the present volume. Aspects of the Pittenweem panic have been discussed in print from time to time, most fully in an excellent recent study by Brian Levack. The briefer account that follows is intended to aid comprehension of the text of the five pamphlets edited below.

In March 1704, Patrick Morton, a 16-year-old apprentice blacksmith working for his father, had a dispute with Beatrix Laing. Laing was a small trader in her own right, while her husband, the tailor William Brown, was a former treasurer of the burgh. Laing asked Morton to make her some nails, but he refused, saying that he had a prior engagement to make nails for a ship. There was a quarrel; it was later alleged that Laing had threatened Morton with revenge. At any rate, Morton began to fear Laing's witchcraft. He probably had psychological problems of his own, though their nature would be hard to reconstruct. He became ill and refused to eat. In May, his condition worsened, and he began periodically to display what were described as ‘fits’ in which his body became uncontrollably contorted – and he declared that witches were afflicting him.

During this worsening of Morton's condition, Patrick Cowper, minister of Pittenweem, became involved. Cowper (1660–1740) was an influential presby¬terian who had been imprisoned and exiled during the Restoration period.

To John Woodward.

My most honoured Friend.

The Communications, with which I have endeavoured some Entertainments for you, since I have had the Honour to be related unto your Illustrious Society, have been so many, that my Letters have pretty near as I suppose, æqual’d the Number of Months that ha's passed over me, besides what I might say of other Performances, & Remittances. But for these two or three last Years, I have never been so happy, as to know that my Packetts have not miscarried; and particularly, whether what I addressed unto you, near a Year ago, and the Hortus Siccus of Plants, peculiar to America, which I address’d unto Mr. Petiver, have reached you. Nothing shall discourage me from doubling my Diligence, to add what I can unto your Stores, from what I may think proper for them, in these American Regions; whereof a few Weeks hence, I intend you a more ample Testimony. But I could not lett this Opportunity pass, without Beginning to make some Amends, for my Delay to answer your Desire, to be furnish’d with some Collection of our Fossils. The Truth is, the Load of my various Employments, oblige me to wish and wait for the Assistences of a young Gentleman, whose name is Mr. John Winthrop, and whose Grandfather (the Governour of one of our Colonies) was a Virtuoso, in the very Beginning of the Royal Society.

2.1 Introduction: the Annalistic Database

Detailed analysis of evidence for Viking raiding of churches begins, in this chapter, with chronology. The extant literature presents no consensus about trends in raiding over time, as pointed out in Chapter 1. There, I surveyed the value of the extant books of annals and argued that the widest range of annalistic sources is admissible to supply the database for this study. Accordingly, all the extant regular annals are used in this and the following chapters, along with the data from Cogad. Among the categories of data studied here, I mention a special case at the outset. This comprises generalised annalistic references to Viking raids on churches of a region, without naming individual churches. Such raids are not precisely quantifiable and so are not amenable to quantitative analysis. As we will see, however, general impressions derived from such references are broadly in accord with the conclusions that emerge from quantitative analysis of raids on churches identified by name.

In tabulating the evidence for the chronology of Viking raiding, then, I examine first the ninth century, defined for present purposes as extending from the 790s to 900. Material for the period 901–1015 is considered next. Detailed analysis of each period is followed by a summary of conclusions reached in relation to the period in question. Terminal dates of 900 and 1015 for the respective sub-periods into which the study is divided are adopted because, for the purpose of detecting quantitatively significant patterns, the data relating to Viking raids and all other matters studied and compared are grouped in half-decades.

Within the repertoire of classic monstrous figures in Gothic literature (vampires, the undead, witches, and doppelgängers, among others) the werewolf is one of the most challenging to approach critically. The monstrous nature of the werewolf lies in the possibility of finding a hidden, bestial, animalistic space, guided purely by instincts of destruction, in the personality of individuals who in other social circumstances may seem charming. The contemporary werewolf cannot be thought of solely in terms of a physical representation of change, although there are obviously countless narratives in which this is seen explicitly, but rather as the product of a psychic split within a character that engenders a complex and multiple personality, where attachment to social norms and behavior of the most absolute animal bestiality can coexist.

In line with the proposals of critics such as Chantal Bourgault du Coudray, “The more psychologized werewolf … would not necessarily undergo a literal transformation, but it would certainly exhibit lupine behaviour, indicative of an interior disturbance” (55). An approach to the figure of the werewolf that only contemplates narratives where the physical transformation of the subject into a beast is explicit can lead to the assumption that there are practically no iterations of this monster in contemporary Latin American literature. On the contrary, if we take a broader view of the monster, we can observe that contemporary Mexican narrative offers numerous examples of lycanthropic narratives.

The three narrative works that I will analyze in this chapter have the werewolf (and the were-woman) as a common thread. I will argue here that the appearance of this figure is not a mere coincidence but a determined attempt to use the classic figure of horror and Gothic fiction as a means to develop a popular representation of a series of complex political, economic, and social changes that have swept through Mexico during the past three decades.

For a decade the position of Catholic politicals may be described as attentisme, waiting for events in the hope of a turn in their favour, possibly the queen's marriage or, as almost happened in October 1562 when she contracted smallpox, death.1 But in the last months of 1568 conservative magnates, outraged by what they saw as the mounting excesses of the Protestant camarilla at home and abroad, made a concerted attempt to stage a peaceful coup to overturn the regnum Cecilianum and reverse the regime's religious policies. Tis was the beginning of a political crisis which, as Wallace MacCafrey recognised, was the frst – and last – great Catholic attempt ‘to shift the whole policy of state’ and re-determine England's dynastic and religious future.2

We may distinguish three overlapping projects into which Catholic nobles played in changing, often confusing, combinations. The frst, beginning in late 1568, was an attempt to stage a palace revolution which would remove Cecil and ‘restore religion’. The second, gaining momentum when the frst failed, was a project to settle England's religious and dynastic religious future through the marriage of the queen of Scots to the duke of Norfolk. And the third, an underlying, covert, scenario continuously envisaged by some if other means failed, was rebellion supported by papally approved intervention by Catholic monarchs, empresa. The most dramatic expression of the politicoreligious crisis, the Northern Rebellion of 1569 or ‘Rebellion of the Northern Earls’, was, as we shall see, a partial, premature, and strangulated attempt at the insurrectionary, invasionary project. Beginning as a defensive refex, the northern rising aimed to liberate Mary and set of a wider Catholic revolt with external support.

Coming of age events were celebrations of dynastic continuity. They were loaded with a symbolism which glorified in the preservation and hereditary characteristics of the estates system. It was the ownership of land which underpinned the social, political and economic power of the gentry, squirearchy and aristocracy, and their claimed position as ‘natural leaders’ of their communities and the country at large. At local levels these occasions actively promoted the perpetuation of ‘landlordship’ and its associated markers of status, influence and authority into the next generation. Continuity was the key characteristic. However, Welsh coming of age celebrations emerged and then proliferated across a period infused with significant change: shifts and transformations which in several ways disturbed and threatened the traditional hierarchies, world views and form of society attached to the operation of landed estates. The time frame covered by this book, c.1770–1920, saw the British aristocratic class transition from a position of immense collective power, influence and security, to one of decline – evinced in Wales by the political rejection of landowners at the ballot box from the late nineteenth century, followed in succeeding generations by the mass sale and break-up of their estates and country houses. Despite assertions of stability, landed society was in a continual state of flux across this entire period, characterised by multiple failures of patrilineal succession and the establishment across all parts of Wales of several essentially new aristocratic entities.

The Conservatoires for music and declamation in Iaşi and Bucharest (both founded after the unification of the Romanian principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia in 1860 and 1864, respectively) expanded considerably at the end of the nineteenth century and created new specialisations and departments. After World War I, Greater Romania was founded in 1918, uniting the so-called Old Kingdom with Transylvania (and other Romanian-populated provinces). A natural consequence of this was the founding of the first Romanian Conservatoire in Cluj (1919). From then on, these three institutions (in Iaşi, Bucharest, and Cluj) went through various stages, aiming for university status, which they only officially obtained after World War II. Instrumental teaching, which was initially based on the efforts of numerous amateurs, gradually gave way to increasing professionalisation, with guest teachers from abroad or Romanian teachers trained at schools in Western Europe.

In this context, the piano school was shaped by several leading women in the first half of the twentieth century: coming from intellectual circles, in some cases from families that had left their mark on Romanian literature, history, and philosophy, they returned after their studies in Leipzig and/or Paris with the enthusiasm and determination to put into practice what they had learnt. Here I tell the stories of the new wave of women pianists born at the end of the nineteenth century: Constanţa Erbiceanu (1874–1961), Florica Musicescu (1887–1969), Aurelia Cionca (1888–1962), and Muza Ghermani-Ciomac (1890–1970), each of whom returned home after studying in Leipzig and, in some cases, a promising concert career.