The aim of this chapter is to analyse the contributions of the Portuguese Maria Amália Vaz de Carvalho to the Brazilian newspaper O País (Rio de Janeiro, 1884–1934). In order to understand the writer's trajectory, we must reflect on the technical and social transformations that marked the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century. On the other hand, her refined education, her family's social standing, the constant support she received at home, and her marriage to an intellectual are some of the aspects that supported her inclusion in the world of writing, though it should be noted that her work was always reviewed by her peers under the shadow of the clearly expressed gender hierarchies of the time. Her favourite themes can be ascertained from a careful reading of her contributions to the widely circulated Brazilian daily: her conservative stance towards the feminist demands that were gaining strength at the time, but also her role as a cultural mediator, since she introduced and commented on myriad writers, philosophers, legal experts, historians, scientists, and visual artists, be them contemporary or classic figures.

Technical innovations and social changes in the late nineteenth century

Having lived from 1847 to 1921, the writer witnessed the profound transformations that marked the turn of the twentieth century. Her professional career was made possible by technical innovations and the consequent opportunities, starting with railroads and steamships, that not only allowed people to cross continents and oceans in a much shorter time, but also brought a new pace to daily life, due to set routes and predictable schedules, in so far as overcoming long distances was no longer an undertaking shrouded in risk and uncertainty.

In her essay “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” Audre Lorde writes that women have been taught that to be strong, they must suppress the erotic. According to Lorde, this strength is an illusion as it was created in the context of patriarchal models of power. In Lorde's view, the erotic is not “the confused, the trivial, the psychotic, plasticized sensation” found in pornography, but instead “a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings.” Lorde explains that the word erotic is derived from the Greek word eros, “the personification of love in all its aspects—born of chaos, and personifying creative power and harmony.” Lorde understands the erotic as “an assertion of the lifeforce of women; of that creative energy empowered, the knowledge and use of which we are now reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives.”

In his work An Account of the State of England in Anno Domini 1600, which included details of England's economy in 1600, Thomas Wilson wrote that in Norwich, children between the ages of six and ten years earned ￡12,000 sterling annually towards their keep, chiefly by knitting fine jersey stockings. He also stated that “every child being able at or soone after seven yeares to earne 4 shillings a week att that trade, which the marchants uttered [i.e. put for sale] att London; and some tradeing with France and other parts.”

Hand knitting in England was a domestic employment in this period, with no structure or regulatory body, which means no systematic records exist. A wide range of archival records, including household accounts and national and local government documents, shows that knitted jersey stockings were well known in England at this date. Wilson's comments are a very rare thing: information on the work of child textile workers in a specific area of England in 1600, and the markets for their product, complete with numerical data. Although other evidence shows that Wilson's estimate of earnings of four shillings a week for children is far too high, other sources confirm the existence of child knitters in Yarmouth and Norwich and a trade in jersey stockings in the late Tudor period. These include Yarmouth export port books, which detail both the trade in jersey stockings and their traders who can be linked to Norwich, and the 1570 census of the poor in Norwich, which records child knitters.

Since time immemorial riddles have intrigued us, partly for their mirthful manner of connecting incongruous ideas, partly for their arresting way of opening fresh perspectives on our shared human condition. When we think of riddles, we normally recall verbal conundrums from cultures around the globe. But riddles can penetrate non-verbal aspects of our existence as well. Masking messages in music so that they lurk beneath the sonorous surface is an august Western tradition spanning the Middle Ages to the present. Known as musical cryptography, this puzzling pursuit is the subject of this book, construed broadly enough to capture not just musical ciphers and codes but also a curiosity shop of related techniques, which arguably can advance the greater virtue. They entertain and edify, but also bedevil and bewilder, and, when unsolved, perplex and perturb.

To illuminate our question, let us begin with Johann Sebastian Bach. For many the epitome of the Baroque, he applied two methods of enciphering ‘Bach’ into his scores, in effect ‘signing’ them, ‘as in paintings where the partially concealed name of the artist appears’.1 The first involved translating the four letters into pitches (ex. 1.1), so that B, A, C and H mapped onto B-flat, A, C and B-natural (in German musical nomenclature, B=B-flat, while H=B-natural).

Ehu, oh Ehu, my bride

I love you with pride

Adorned by the stones

That line up your thrones

Have my allegiance

Paid to your radiance

Brightening every day

In no staggered way

Oh the waist that shook

When my eyes did look

From the shoulders on

To your face like Zion

How you made me strong

I’ll do you no wrong

My courage, I’ll try!

I will throw Akpai

Kpo…kpo…kpotimgba

Og’ Amamgbala

Is full with viewers

And atamajas

I will throw Akpai

To create you and I

Just me and Ehu

My sweet sweet Ehu

When Akpai is down

And I have the crown

When the gong will sound

Your voice will resound

Dancing with radiance

Your nipples shooting

To me-ward pointing

Bleaching, beckoning

To my reckoning

I shall pick your face

Beholding your grace

Eyeball to eyeline

I shall read the line

The pleasant parting

The most precious thing

Oh your pair of lips

That of longing drips

And a pair of eyes

That all the truth tells

Solemnly piercing

Sweetly tingling

My thin blood has heard

My muscle is hard

Even in this state

I shall know to state

And know to adore

Your priceless glamour

My truly pure one

Till your heart I’ve won

And your price I’ve paid

I shan't have you laid

I shall not shame you

My beloved Ehu

Nor shall I abuse

Nor shall I use

Your innocence to play?

Your waiting delay?

Nor your loving mock?

No no I won't mock!

I won't mock my bride

In my bride I’ll pride

On my Ehugbo

I’ll build my ugbo

In Chapter One, I quoted from a profile published in the New York Times in 1915 shortly after Grainger's American debut. The author concluded that, for an audience member, after a few moments in the presence of Grainger's ‘sweetness and light … you are his – or, to put it another … way, you feel he is yours’. The idea that a performer might belong to their audiences is hardly new, and much recent celebrity studies research has identified the ways in which fans claim ownership over their favourite artists. But throughout the research and interviews I have conducted, it seems that, for Grainger, even long after his death, questions of ownership arise again and again. Legalities and copyright questions aside, who does Grainger, his life and works, ‘belong’ to? Who gets to tell his story, or to say which elements of his life should be discussed, or for what purposes they should be used? These questions have influenced the direction of the works I have considered here, and the ways their creators interacted with Grainger's established life-narrative and the institutions that preserve it.

Questions of ownership over Grainger and his legacy might begin with his physical body. As we have seen, the final version of Grainger's will, signed in 1959, included a clause that directed ‘that my flesh be removed from my bones and the flesh destroyed’ as he bequeathed his ‘skeleton to the University of Melbourne … for preservation and possible display in the Grainger Museum’.

The fairies of Shakespeare's plays are not typical of the fairies of early modern belief. While the fairies in Shakespeare's most famous play, A Midsummer Night's Dream, are portrayed as relatively benign, and ultimately good, the fairies of early modern England were almost universally viewed as evil spirits. The darker opinion of fairies in early modern England is attested to in a variety of sources, including literary, religious, legal, and contemporary works of scholarship. The early modern English material on fairies establishes two things: first, that fairies were considered real, in the sense that they were believed to be real beings who really inhabited the English countryside, and second, that they were pernicious.

In A Discourse Concerning Devils and Spirits, first appearing in print as an appendix to the 1665 edition of Scot's Discovery of Witchcraft, the anonymous author discusses the abodes of fairies and like creatures:

Subordinate unto these of the Air, are the Terrestrial Spirits, which are of several degrees according to the places which they occupy, as Woods, Mountains, Caves, Fens, Mines, Ruins, Desolate Places, and Ancient Buildings, called by the Ancient Heathens after various names, as Nymphs, Satyrs, Lamii, Dryades, Sylvanes, Cobali … And more particularly Faeries …

All of these locales are places that would be found in the countryside, and all are the sorts of ordinary places that English villagers would be familiar with in their area.

Pede Hollist's So the Path Does Not Die is the culmination of the migration process. The novel accomplishes two distinct objectives in this chapter: first, it extends the conversation on the theory of the new hybridity in Americanah in the previous chapter. It uses the hyphenated identity of Dimusu-Celeste, the child born to Cammy and Finaba, to explore this construct. I use Sten Moslund's concept of a globalized society as context to situate this hypothesis.

Second, the novel introduces the concept of constructive liminality as a pathway to navigating dual identities in the migrant's homeland. I posit an aesthetic of liminality to examine returned migrants with dual nationalities trying to make sense of the demands of the in-between space this identity offers them. Liminality as a framework to explore the possibilities to return migration posits that the migration process has not come to an end. Rather, it creates a space where the process for reconciling cultural opposites can be enacted. By its duality, the space allows for an embrace of Indigenous identity while also retaining some indications of Western acculturation as symbolized by the American passport. Constructive liminality posits that this brand of returned migrants occupies a liminal space that is both productive and ambivalent, an opposition with possibilities for a synthesis. Finaba can still embrace her Sierra Leonean identity while also keeping her American passport. Dimusu-Celeste can reclaim her African ancestry while still keeping her Caribbean one. This ability to reconcile seemingly opposing identities creates the context for understanding the benefits that a liminal framework to theorizing return provides.

This book began as a follow-up to a little monograph of fewer than eighty pages, published in 1996 as Viking Raids on Irish Church Settlements in the Ninth Century: a Reconsideration of the Annals. It was originally my intention simply to expand that close, mostly quantitative analysis of Viking raiding to cover the tenth century, up to the era of the battle of Clontarf in 1014, after which church-raiding is of little significance and all but disappears from Irish annalistic records. That is what is presented in the shorter first part of this book, comprising about one-third of the whole. Inasmuch as the book is a follow-up to the essay of 1996, it has been long in the making, its completion delayed by numerous distractions. Not least of these has been the pursuit, over more than twenty years, of shorter pieces of research, several on wholly unrelated topics, but many concerned with Vikings.

Apart from a survey (in French) of the annalistic evidence for the Vikings, these extended beyond Viking raiding of churches to other aspects: political relations between Vikings in Ireland, north Wales, Man and the Scottish Isles; the location of the Viking polity/polities designated Laithlinn/Lochlann, the first of which intervened in Ireland in the mid-ninth century; the terminology used for Vikings in the Irish annals, notably the controversial usages ‘Dark Foreigners’ and ‘Fair Foreigners’; the location and military significance of the crucial battle of Cenn Fúait in 917; the impact of the Vikings on the church of Glendalough; the light shed by the Hiberno-German-Latin Vita Findani on early Viking captive taking in Ireland and on the date of Viking settlement in northern Scotland; the historical significance of the early Viking base at Linn Dúachaill/Annagassan, in the context of Viking strategies in England and Francia in the first half of the ninth century; Viking-Age ships and fleets as reflected in the Irish annals; a review of the military and general historical significance of the famous battle of Clontarf; a further study of Viking captive taking and the relative importance of a slave trade in Ireland and beyond.

The evidence presented by the Protests recorded in the Malacca Prothocol Books provides a distinctive perspective on British and other European activities in the East Indies in the last decade of the eighteenth and first decades of the nineteenth centuries. This was an era when sail was a vital means of travel for people, of transportation for goods and of communication, both personal and official. The country traders participated in all these undertakings but their raison d’être was trade, where disruption by misadventure meant delay, and every delay a potential loss of profit.

The misadventures described in the Protests highlight at first hand the ever-present dangers faced by country traders sailing in the Bay of Bengal, the Malay Archipelago and the South China Sea. In addition to the normal hazards that mariners everywhere encountered, it can be argued that sailors in this part of the world had to deal with additional and more intense hazards: they had to sail through the monsoon storms of the Bay of Bengal, navigate the narrow channels of the Malacca Strait and Western Malay Archipelago and they had to prevail against the typhoons of the South China Sea. Not only that, the European sailors had to safely guide their vessels through an alien region far from home where hostility to foreign intervention often prevailed and the norms of some societies encouraged the seizure of foreign vessels. They also had to deal with the political fallout in the East Indies engendered by European wars.

The calamities were mostly met with on voyages between India and Canton or within the seas of the Malay Archipelago itself and were recorded at Malacca because it was a traditional staging post with the appropriate facilities.

The view of the “Orient” as an important and suitable source for the forging of specifically Israeli music began to take shape as early as the arrival of the first Jewish pioneers to the Holy Land in the last decades of the nineteenth century; it gained greater momentum after World War I. The search for the inspiring Orient was animated by aspirations of return to the Hebrew civilization of ancient Israel. To this end, the renaissance of the Hebrew language represented an important dimension, given that its particular intonations might bestow a special character on the new sonorous production. In turn, the idea of supporting this rebirth by recourse to the heritage of Jewish Oriental musical traditions, and, to some extent, the heritage of the neighboring Arabs, became the subject of a basic ideological debate. As a witness to a considerable part of this development, I have observed that the supporters of the ideology of Oriental influence usually referred in their arguments to a kind of multifaceted and amorphous Orient.

Unlike those who defended and exalted the idea of an inspiring Orient, other protagonists in the debate denigrated the linking of art to ideology, maintaining that artists should express their individuality, in the belief that the use of the Hebrew language and of themes related to Judaism within the cultural norms of Western music should be sufficient to create a special Israeli style.