Put simply, a universal chronicle is a history of the world, usually beginning with Creation or the Incarnation and continuing up to the most recent time. Described in these terms, a universal chronicle may not sound particularly exciting. It is not exactly a new form of historiography, for it belongs to a tradition reaching back to antiquity. Moreover, it may not be especially useful, since no account of history with such breadth can ever be truly complete or exhaustive. However, chroniclers in twelfth-century Normandy did not see it this way. In a remarkable passage at the end of book III of the Historia Ecclesiastica, the Norman historian Orderic Vitalis did not restrain his enthusiasm for the tradition of chronographia – the term contemporaries often used to describe universal chronicle-writing. Orderic reported having seen the Chronicon of the monk John of Worcester during a visit to the abbey at Worcester in England. In addition, Orderic recalled that, while at Cambrai, Fulbert, abbot of Saint-Sépulcre, showed him a copy of the Chronographia of Sigebert of Gembloux (c. 1030–1112) whom Orderic mistakenly called Englebertus Gemblacensis. Orderic marvelled at the rigour and scale of John's and Sigebert's chronicles. In these works an interested reader could find information ranging from the kings and judges of the Hebrews, to the consuls and emperors of the Romans, up to the deeds of the Germans, the Franks and the English since the first Saxon kings Hengist and Horsa and the first missionaries Augustine and Mellitus. Similarly, the chronicle of Sigebert of Gembloux reported the history of the Goths, Huns, Persians and many other peoples while omitting, however, the deeds of the ‘islanders of the western ocean’ – an evocative periphrasis for the English. Orderic concluded: ‘I am happy to mention these books in this record so that would-be readers may seek the manuscripts out for themselves, for they are the fruits of great learning and are hard to come by. They have been written by men of this age and are not yet widely circulated.’

A limited body of work attributed to the late sixteenth-century Clare poet Domhnall (mac Dáire) Mac Bruaideadha is found in manuscripts dating from the sixteenth century and later. His poems were composed in the classical bardic style for members of the Gaelic and Old English (Anglo-Norman) aristocracy and bear witness to some of the events of the turbulent period during which they were composed. They are addressed to a variety of patrons and often exemplify the type of bardic poetry Edmund Spenser must have had in mind when he wrote that it was a ‘greate pittye to see soe good an ornament abused, to the gracinge of wickednes and vice’. This essay aims to give an account of Domhnall mac Dáire's work, focusing especially on a number of poems that have not yet been published with translations into English.

Clann Bhruaideadha were a prominent learned family located in County Clare, with several branches and landholdings in different parts of the county. Domhnall was the second son of Dáire Mac Bruaideadha, whose chief residence and landholding of some 900 acres was at Knockanalban, south-west of Slieve Callan in west Clare. The patronymic mac Dáire (son of Dáire) is often used with reference to both Domhnall and his better-known older brother, Tadhg, who initiated the voluminous poetic disputation between southern and northern poets known as Iomarbhágh na bhfileadh [The contention of the poets] (c. 1616–24). Tadhg mac Dáire also had a special affinity with Donnchadh Ó Briain, fourth earl of Thomond, composing several poems for him, including a poem of advice beginning Mór a-tá ar theagasg flatha [Much is dependent on the instruction of a prince] and an elegy following the earl's death in 1624. From the brothers’ grand-nephew, Antonius Bruodinus, we know that Domhnall mac Dáire was married to ‘Maria Fitzgerald, daughter of the illustrious knight Master John of Ballynamona, in County Kerry’. Aside from this, little is known of the particulars of his life.

Introduction

Júlia Lopes de Almeida, born Júlia Valentina da Silveira Lopes and known to her admirers as Dona Júlia, was born in Rio de Janeiro on 24 September 1862. In 1902, a journalist from the Gazeta de Notícias (Rio de Janeiro, 1875–1956) wrote of her novel A falência (1901): ‘frankly, we really cannot see anyone at the present time who surpasses her in the genre to which she is most dedicated, except Machado de Assis, the master’. The story of Júlia Lopes de Almeida effectively illustrates the exclusion of women from the Brazilian Academy of Letters (ABL). Although she was considered for the inaugural list in 1896, her name was disregarded due to the ban on including women in the institution. According to Venâncio Filho, Lúcio de Mendonça, who sought national representation for the Academy, advocated for the inclusion of Almeida, as well as other prominent female authors like Narcisa Amália de Oliveira Campos and Francisca Júlia da Silva, the latter proposed as a correspondent. In a series of articles titled ‘Cartas Literárias’, he presented a list of forty names deemed worthy of being founders of the ABL, including Almeida. However, only men were accepted as founders. In another article titled ‘As três Júlias’, published in the newspaper República in 1897, Mendonça lamented the exclusion, highlighting the literary quality of Júlia Lopes de Almeida, Júlia Cortines, and Francisca Júlia, and expressing sadness over the lack of space for female voices in the Academy.

In 1242–43, the monks of Spalding priory recalled how ‘Lucy, countess of Bolingbroke’ had granted them twelve carucates of land in Pinchbeck in pure alms more than a century earlier, together with further properties in Spalding, Weston and Moulton. By the thirteenth century, there was a long tradition of prominent secular female landholders in Lincolnshire and its neighbouring counties. Pauline Stafford's seminal study, The East Midlands in the Early Middle Ages, highlighted the importance of women landowners in this region in the ninth, tenth and eleventh centuries, who successfully laid claim to shares of paternal inheritances, transferred estates to others and acted as valued benefactors of religious houses, especially as widows. There were also strong associations between the East Midlands and royal women before and after the Norman Conquest. Domesday Book recorded how Edward the Confessor's wife, Queen Edith, held land in dower in Lincolnshire in Gayton le Wold, Grantham, Great Ponton, Horncastle, Nettleham, Stamford and Torksey in 1066. Property in Rutland, located immediately to the south of the county, was routinely assigned to Mercian, and later, English queens, including Ælfthryth, Emma, Edith, Matilda of Scotland, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Berengaria of Navarre and Isabella of Angoulême. Local heiresses also came to prominence in the immediate aftermath of the invasions of Cnut of Denmark (1016) and William of Normandy (1066), when incoming Danish and Norman lords married Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Scandinavian women as a means of legitimising their English conquests.

The jaguar (Panthera onca) once roamed the Americas, from the Grand Canyon to Patagonia. It is now a vulnerable species due to overhunting. Because of its widespread habitat and its role as a large, powerful top-feeder, this feline historically occupied a unique cultural place. In many Amerindian and Latin American contexts, from pre-Columbian to contemporary times, the jaguar was revered as a magical, mythical animal. Traditional Indigenous stories in the Amazon often tell of shamans who don jaguar pelts to transform into the animal. Other tales explain how the body, under the semblance of a jaguar, contains a human soul.

Such figurations have also made their way into written, non-Indigenous literary texts, and their representations reveal the presence of Amerindian beliefs regarding this animal as mythical and significant for understanding the connection between humans and nature. In this chapter, I draw on Amerindian approaches to the human/animal divide to read modern and contemporary jaguar-themed texts from Spanish America and Brazil from an ecocritical perspective. I consider pre-Columbian beliefs in tonalli (animal souls) and naguales (companion animals) as notions that illuminate the connections between humans, animals, and destiny in Mesoamerican thought. Akin to tonalismo and nagualismo in the southern hemisphere, the Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro discusses “perspectivism” as an Amazonian notion that unsettles Western definitions of a “fixed” human nature.

A number of mishaps were reported at Malacca without reference to bad weather or fire. The Protests discussed here concern collisions, overturning, loss of anchors and cables, and leaks.

The Protests (thirteen cases)

Collisions

Collisions were most likely to occur in port, either during a storm or while participating in manoeuvres. Paul Van Dyke describes such occurrences in Whampoa. Arthur Bowes Smyth recorded in his journal the shambles that characterised the departure of the New South Wales First Fleet from Botany Bay to Port Jackson on 26 January 1788:

the Prince of Wales and Friendship who cd not keep in stays came foul of each other and the Friendship carried her jib-boom. The Prince of Wales had her New Main sail & her Main top mast Stay Sail rent in pieces. The Charlotte also came foul of the Friendship afterward & carried away some of the carv’d work from her stern, & it was with the greatest difficulty the Lady Penrhyn escaped the same fate.

The collisions reported at Malacca, however, all took place on the open sea, though they were related to travelling in convoy.

William Colvel, Commander of ‘het particuliere Engelsche schip Saijgon’ on a voyage from Madras collided with a royal naval vessel. He presented a part of the ship's journal (not retained in the archives) to the Malaccan authorities on 26 August 1801 to convey what happened.

The metaphorical associations of Beethoven’ s high registers in the late works discussed in relation to the late sonatas derive from and apply to a nexus of works in different genres, including the late string quartets, the Missa solemnis and the Ninth Symphony, the premiere of which, in May 1824, immediately preceded the composition of the Bagatelles Op. 126, Beethoven's final serious work for the piano. Published in 1825, the Op. 126 Bagatelles were more than mere Kleinigkeiten or ‘trifles’, the term used by Beethoven in a letter to the publisher Schott in November 1824. Rather, as Beethoven wrote, the six bagatelles were ‘more fully worked out and probably the best of this kind which I have composed’. Whilst we have found striking uses of registral structure in some of the earlier bagatelles, including the Op. 119 set, and the much earlier Op. 33 Bagatelles (see chapter 5), Op. 126 offers a fascinating crucible to examine Beethoven's use of registral structure in the realm of the short form in the ‘late’ style. The following chapters explore the unique ways in which sonic space is employed in these short pieces, whether they convey metaphorical symbolism in a similar way to the late works already discussed, and whether cyclic elements emerge in relation to the registral parameter. Whilst distinct from the collections of character pieces which pervade the Romantic era, the cycle reflects, in its compressed and short forms, some of the lofty ideas expressed in the more monumental and large-scale works. I begin with a discussion of Op. 126 as a complete cycle, and proceed to look at each bagatelle, nos 1–3 below, and nos 4–6 in the following chapter.

INTRODUCTION

Sometime in the second half of the 1580s, Edmund Spenser took up residence at Kilcolman Castle. Around the same time, news reached Munster of the premature death of Tadhg Mac Carthaigh, baron of Valentia, in France. Tadhg was the son and heir of Domhnall Mac Carthaigh Mór, earl of Clancare (†1596), and of Honora, the daughter of James Fitzgerald, the fourteenth earl of Desmond. His death brought great uncertainty as to the future of his father's extensive landholdings in Munster; under English law, and under the conditions of the earlship, it had been agreed that Mac Carthaigh Mór's lands would revert to Crown possession should he die without an heir. This would bring about the division and distribution of his vast estate. This potential was not lost on Spenser; later, in a View of the Present State of Ireland, Irenius would suggest planting ‘a good towne’ on lands ‘forcibly kept’ from Elizabeth I ‘by a rough tayle kerne that proclaimes him selfe the bastarde sonne of the Erle of Clancar, beinge called Donnell Mac Chartie’.

Two bardic elegies were composed on the death of Mac Carthaigh Mór's heir. As few sources document this event (in either English or Irish), these poems are of particular historical interest. They capture the contempo¬rary significance and magnitude of the death of Tadhg Mac Carthaigh in a way that the English-language sources do not. While diplomatic editions of the poems on the baron's death are available in A Bardic Miscellany (henceforth ABM), they have not hitherto been translated or fully edited. By providing full editions of the texts, this paper offers further insights into Spenser's immediate surroundings and into a world to which he had only limited access.