In early 2017, white supremacist Richard Spencer was publicly punched in the face by an unknown activist. Spencer's supporters decried the act as an attack on freedom of speech, an assault on democracy. Even liberal news outlets, who generally do not favor Spencer and his ilk, produced a slew of articles with titles such as “Is it ok to Punch a Nazi in the Face? Leading Ethicists say: ‘no’” (Newsweek), “When is it ok to Punch a Nazi?” (Haaretz), “Why you shouldn't Punch a Nazi” (Boston Globe), and “Attack on alt-right Leader has Internet asking: is it ok to punch Nazis?” (New York Times). At a time when authoritarian worldviews are becoming more mainstream and de rigueur by the day, the debate on dealing with the so-called “alt-right” and their extreme views may feel tenuous, frustrating, and at times infuriating.

Over fifty years ago, human rights activist and Nazi-hunter Beate Klarsfeld came up with her own way of dealing with Nazis. On November 7, 1968, the then twenty-nine-year-old publicly slapped German chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger to express her outrage about his Nazi past and subsequent rise in post war German politics. She found herself the subject of similar debates: was there not a better way to express her anger, was it necessary to become physically violent? While Klarsfeld's activism encompassed much more than the slap, to critics, even to some sympathizers, her act of anger seemed to nullify all her other accomplishments, such as her archival research, her writing, her speaking engagements and public lectures, and her petitions to parliament.

To celebrate the centenary of the publication of El gaucho Martín Fierro, in 1972, the Argentine writer Victoria Ocampo was asked to pay homage to her relative José Hernández. In “Las mujeres y el Martín Fierro,” the intellectual excuses herself by claiming that her reluctance to participate is due to the way in which women are represented in the poem, and for that reason, she accompanies Hernandez's verses, “Tuve en mi pago en un tiempo / hijos, hacienda y mujer” with the following comment in parentheses: “(The order in which he lists these three possessions indicates their importance)” (Ocampo 2001: 999). In response, Ocampo revisits the verses uttered by Cruz about his partner's infidelity (“Cuando la mula recula, / señal que quiere cosiar …”) to display a masterful lesson in irony: “I feel like a mule, and I recoil from the subject. I cannot pay tribute to someone who deserves it while kicking at the same time. I leave Hernández to you” (1000, emphasis in the original). Many years later, when the Argentine writer Gabriela Cabezón Cámara (b. 1968) is interviewed, she also refers to the absence of female voices in Hernández's work and repeats Ocampo's remark: “Pay attention to the fact that it states: ‘Tuve en mi pago en un tiempo / hijos, hacienda y mujer.’ In that order!” (Viola).

It is no coincidence that the protagonist of the novel Las aventuras de la China Iron (2017) by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara similarly climbs onto the wagon of the Scottish Elizabeth with “menos modales que una mula” (2020: 14) to begin an individual journey, propelled by and intertwined with the animal imaginary of gaucho literature (Hamed 1996: 14; Ludmer 2002: 131), which ends in an alternative sociopolitical community. In this chapter, I examine how in Las aventuras de la China Iron the category of “animal” operates as a matrix that articulates a counter-hegemonic epic, anchored to a plural experience of bodies and desires, to outline a “Nosotros engordado” that harmoniously brings together humans and non-humans (Cabezón Cámara 2020: 176).

Introduction: Follow the Arts

Early in her prose romance, The Unfortunate Florinda, Hester Pulter reveals that she expects her audience to have read – or at least seen – a specific book. Pulter describes Alonso, who is in love with the Florinda of the title, “walking (just like the picture in the frontispiece of Democritus Junior), with his hat over his eyes, as if no object was worthy of his view but his admired Florinda.” As Alice Eardley notes in her 2014 edition of The Unfortunate Florinda, this passage references Robert Burton's 1628 The Anatomy of Melancholy, in which the title page includes an illustration of a man with a large hat pulled over his eyes. Pulter thus assumes her audience is familiar enough with Burton's book that the frontispiece can be a shortcut to a character description. Although Pulter likely did not disperse her writing outside her family circle, this reference to Burton hints at Pulter's attitude toward reading and her readers in particular. Hero Chalmers writes of The Unfortunate Florinda that it “foreground[s] the need for a discerning reader whose ethical capabilities will be honed in the process of questioning their response to the conventions of romance.” In this essay, I explore how Pulter envisions that “discerning reader” through her portrayal of reading and study.

In the mid-nineteenth century matching tombstones were erected by an Irish emigrant family of Youngs in St Patrick's Anglican cemetery, Stafford township Ontario, Canada and in Nantinan graveyard in Co. Limerick, Ireland. Both stones contain a verse from Scripture reflecting the Lutheran origins of the Young family, while the stones also provided the Canadian branch of the family with a sense of place and identity in Ireland. But for those familiar with the landscape, mention of Nantinan, an area of known Palatine settlement, also hints at the origins of the Young family among a group of early eighteenth-century immigrants to Ireland. A narrative has evolved that the Palatines were religious refugees, fleeing persecution by the French on the continent. The word refugee hinges on a 1690 definition of the French word refuge as a ‘place of retreat where someone who is persecuted goes to seek his safety’. The word refugee was used in the eighteenth century to describe people fleeing religious persecution and traditionally was used to describe French Protestants forced to seek asylum in other countries. There is little evidence to support such claims in relation to the Palatines, who arrived in large numbers in London in the spring of 1709. Exceptions to this were Baptists and Anabaptists, originating in Bern in Switzerland, among the Palatines, who were regularly sent to the galleys for failing to recant. Their presence among the Palatines in London is confirmed by mention of a Ritter camp there in 1709. As early as 1705 the Ritter Company put forward a proposal to the Board of Trade in London for the settlement of a group of Anabaptists and landless poor in the New World.

This chapter is concerned with the attempted administrative reforms in Ireland in the wake of the parliamentary union of 1801. By means of the union, Westminster hoped to gain control of the critical situation in Ireland. The Irish Rebellion of 1798 and simultaneous French invasion attempts showed that Britain was vulnerable through its western flank. Moreover, a revolt spreading throughout the Irish troops would pose an existential threat to the entire Empire. The Acts of Union settled the integration of the Irish Peers and Commons into the Parliament of the United Kingdom in London. The acts did not settle the integration of the executive, i.e. of government and administration. In the aftermath of the union, the divergent administrative discourses of Britain and Ireland clashed.

The administrative history of the union is connected to the history of economical reform in Britain through its protagonists. In 1798, Charles Cornwallis went to Ireland as Lord Lieutenant to end the Irish Rebellion and to secure approval for the union in the Irish Parliament. Acting against his economical convictions, Cornwallis pulled all the patrimonial stops and bartered away offices on a grand scale among the Irish Ascendency, the Protestant elite that was the cornerstone of the British dominion over Ireland. The following year, Charles Abbot became Chief Secretary and received a mandate to implement the union by means of sweeping administrative reforms based on the principles of the Finance Committee.

In 1797 and 1798, a parliamentary Finance Committee brought a fresh impetus to the reform discourse. This impetus was not what the Pitt ministry had intended. Against the backdrop of the ongoing wars, the ministry was still trying to keep the lid on economical reform issues. For Pitt, the Finance Committee constituted a small concession to the independents on whose votes he depended. That the Committee started a thorough stocktaking of the administrative reform process in Britain and pressured the government for new reforms resulted from the unexpected agency of Charles Abbot, the Committee's chairman. Abbot was a staunch reformer who was not afraid to provoke resistance.

Under Abbot's leadership, the Finance Committee set itself the task of examining to what extent the recommendations of the Accounts and Fees Commissioners had been implemented. The Finance Committee also updated the recommendations of the earlier reform commissions and adopted their principles. It expanded the approach to administrative reform in two ways. First, it further developed the reform principles, in particular by introducing statistical methods. The large-scale collection of standardised data in tabular form clarified the differences between the departments and opened up new questions. Second, the Finance Committee broadened the scope of the administrative reform principles to include the judiciary. The Finance Committee examined the courts of justice, and also included the judiciary in a broader sense, namely law enforcement and the prison system.

In the twenty-one months between May 1896 and December 1897, there was a tailing-off in advertisements for Hungarian music in the Vienna press.

The preceding chapters have focused on the role of the cardinal points within particular genres of literature and how, up to the twelfth century, they came to serve as significant categories within exegetical, geographical and historical literature. With this foundation in place, we are in a position to consider how authors made use of this vocabulary to make sense of their place in the world within the massive social and cultural upheaval that characterised the first half of the twelfth century. Western Europe was turning outwards in a decisive fashion. This period stands at a key axis in the double process of physical expansion – in the north, in Spain and in the Eastern Mediterranean – and the cultural interconnection that Robert Bartlett describes as ‘the Europeanisation of Europe’. It likewise coincides with a growing awareness of Eastern Christianity and the place of Islam in the Mediterranean world that had been developing from the mid-eleventh century. This expanding perception of the world, and coordinate development of colonial structures of centre and periphery along side it, spurred the development not only of categories of alterity, as Bartlett emphasises, but also necessitated a renegotiation of still dominant post-Carolingian conceptions of space and identity. The following chapters will extend and complicate this idea of renegotiating these late antique and Carolingian conceptions through a series of case studies that highlight the changing spatial categories in the first half of the twelfth century.

Though the study of identity has seen significant advances since the mid-twentieth century, this work has concentrated above all on ethnic identity, especially in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages.

9.1 Introduction

If church-raiding was all but abandoned in the era of Amlaíb and Ímar, with the implication that the regime had access to more regular revenues, the last quarter of the century saw some reversion to raiding. Church-raiding is recorded mostly in the central eastern region in the later ninth century. As shown, this reflects two factors, textual and historical. From about 850 to about 890, there was a marked contraction in annalistic coverage of ecclesiastical affairs generally. A south midlands Clonmacnoise-focused strand disappears from the extant annals for more than a generation, re-emerging only about 890. Allowing for this text-internal factor, Viking church-raiding in reality was probably more restricted in range and, after about 850, it all but ceases in the south midlands and is confined, where it occurs at all, to the central east. This is certain from about 890, when a resurgence in Viking church-raiding affects only the central east, despite restoration of the south midlands Clonmacnoise-focused strand in the ecclesiastical record. It seems likely, but is not demonstrable, that church-raiding was similarly restricted in range for much of the period after 850.

As we will see, Viking activity generally, after the era of Amlaíb and Ímar, was largely confined to the central eastern region. This is an indicator that the fortunes of the Vikings in Ireland, and in Dublin, in particular, were probably in decline in the last quarter of the ninth century.

An enquiry into how a text of Beowulf could have reached the authors of Grettis saga in Iceland must begin by defining the date, provenance and political aim of the Beowulf manuscript in England in the early eleventh century. First the early English reputation, then the surviving manuscript, of the poem will be discussed here towards this end. As many as five surviving allusions to the legend and poem of Beowulf may be used to locate the transmission of this eponymous poem in Winchester and York and to suppose a knowledge of its leading characters in Durham. On this basis it may be deduced that the poem existed in more than one copy by the early eleventh century, and that a copy was preserved in a manuscript in an archive in Winchester from the time of King Æthelwulf (839–58). The corollary is that King Cnut Sweinsson (1016–35), having won England from Kings Æthelred II (978–1016) and Edmund II Ironside (1016), was introduced to Beowulf in Winchester in the first few years of his reign. Thereafter I shall argue that the poem's sole extant manuscript, BL, Cotton MS Vitellius A.XV, was copied near the heart of the former kingdom of Mercia, in Lichfield, in the year that followed his victory in 1016. My argument follows Kevin Kiernan's conclusion that the ‘Laurence Nowell’ who inscribed his name on the eponymous Nowell Codex in 1563 was not the antiquarian of that name but, rather, his cousin, the dean of this diocese in 1560–76. The lurid style of the manuscript's monsters, particularly in The Wonders of the East, along with that of a gold-glamorous heathen warlord in the Old English Letter of Alexander to Aristotle, will be read as evidence that Beowulf and the texts before it were commissioned for one of Cnut's commanders.