In 1799 a correspondent to the Oracle and Daily Advertiser complained that all the honours and rewards of the present war were being bestowed on the victors of naval battles — Howe, st. Vincent, Duncan and Nelson — while Rainier's conquests were being forgotten. Comparing the recent celebration of Nelson with the plight of Rainier, he protested that ‘the former is surrounded in a blaze of glory, the latter seems enveloped in a cloud’.

It was no accident that the Oracle's correspondent signed himself ‘an E.I. Proprietor’ and pointed to the ‘immense territories’ and ‘countless treasures’ secured to the East India Company (and hence to Great Britain) by the commander of the East Indies station. ‘The name of Vice Admiral Rainier’, he asserted, ‘will always appear with distinction amongst those officers who have effectually served their country, and signalised themselves in the present war.’

Rainier abundantly demonstrated that he possessed the right qualities for his task. To command effectively the most distant station in the navy, where it could take a year between sending a message and receiving an answer, required patience, great self-confidence and independent spirit. Commanding the widest, as well as the most distant, station also necessitated foresight and organisation.

‘Castration is a motif running through the Rose’ asserts Sylvia Huot in The Romance of the Rose and Its Medieval Readers. The thirteenth-century Old French Romans de la rose that Huot examines, one of the most popular works of the European Middle Ages, occurs in two parts. The original text, an approximately 4,000-line first-person verse allegory composed by Guillaume de Lorris around 1230, recounts the dream vision quest of the young narrator for the rose he seeks. The continuation, written a generation later by Jean de Meun (c. 1270), amounts to an encyclopedic 17,000-line, often satiric gloss on Guillaume's Rose that retells, amplifies, and at times diverges from the young lover's story. The four primary examples that Huot presents of the mutilation motif in the Rose all appear in Jean's poem. David F. Hult, in ‘Language and Dismemberment: Abelard, Origen, and the Romance of the Rose’, arrives at a rather extreme assessment of Jean's work, finding that the author exhibits an ‘unrelenting fascination with castration’. Jean presents the four castration commentaries – on Saturn's dismemberment by his son Jupiter, on Abelard's by the henchmen of his wife's uncle, on Genius's exhortation against it, and on Origen's self castration – as generally negative, even if Jean, as author, identifies some positive results from such violent actions.

Derek brewer was the founding figure in the post-war study of Chaucer. Through his eponymous publishing firm, he subsequently went on to contribute more than any other individual to furthering modern study of the early literatures and cultures of these islands. An irrepressibly positive and genial personality, his humanity and kindness as a teacher, scholar and publisher enabled and changed many lives. In a sixty-year career as a critic of medieval English and other literature, Brewer foresaw and pioneered much that has since developed into defining aspects of the field. Far from being a backward-looking memorial volume or Festschrift, the present book celebrates how some of the topics Brewer made central to the study of medieval literature are being taken forward, both because of his influence and beyond it. In so doing, this book aims to build towards an intellectual biography of a very modern medievalist.

Derek Brewer was born into a relatively modest background, the son of a clerk with the General Electric Company. Educated at his local Crypt Grammar School in Gloucester, he won a scholarship (‘demyship’) to Magdalen College, Oxford for the year 1941–42. As he later remarked, ‘getting to Oxford to read English had been my heart's desire’, and he wrote in his eighties that Magdalen was still, for him, simply the most beautiful place in the world. But after one short year at Oxford he joined the army and in 1944 was posted to Italy; he taught himself Italian on the troopship with the aid of a Hugo's language course, a characteristic foresight.

The archives of the Basilica of St. Nicholas and of the Cathedral of Bari, capital city of Apulia, the southern Italian region that stretches along the coast of the Adriatic Sea (fig. 1.1), contain many public and private notarial acts, which have been partially published in the Codice Diplomatico Barese-Pugliese. Among the private documents, which include sales, donations, leases, wills, inheritances, etc., are marriage contracts. These are dated by the year of the empire or of the reign of the ruling sovereign, and the month (but not always the day). They may therefore be ascribed to the Byzantine or Greek period (888–1071), the Norman-Swabian period (1071–1266), or the Angevin period (1266–1442).

All the extant and edited marriage contracts, from the oldest fragmentary example dating to November 971 to the last, drawn up on Feb. 17, 1397, testify to the practical application of marriage law in force in the then multicultural city of Bari. This law derived from the merging of two originally distinct socio-juridical traditions, the Roman and the Germanic, and it survived for a surprisingly long time, throughout the various regimes that controlled the city until the end of the Middle Ages and beyond.

In the course of research for a book-length study on the penetration and subsequent assimilation of Langobard marriage institutions into the customary law in force in the city of Bari in the Middle Ages, I became aware of the rich evidence for garments, dress accessories, and personal jewellery contained in the accounts of dowry provisions in marriage contracts: It was the custom in Bari to include a detailed list of the goods with which the bride was endowed, along with a note specifying their monetary value.

Literary tradition, influence and genealogy are overlapping tropes of historical emplotment that have been centrally important, and indeed in many instances structurally indispensable, to feminist criticism of lyric poetry over the past four decades. At the same time, as Jonathan Culler notes, while it has been both easy and productive ‘to treat novels as social and political documents that record the travails of women […] lyric poetry has been less amenable to such treatment and the question of its relationship to feminist issues and what sort of historical act or historical representation it involves remains largely unsettled’. Despite the chronologically and politically situated (and in this sense ‘dated’) impact of such forceful critical manifestos as Adrienne Rich's essays ‘When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision’ (1971) and ‘Vesuvius at Home: The Power of Emily Dickinson’ (1975), or Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's and Annette Kolodny's respective responses to Harold Bloom's theory of poetic influence, historical narratives of Western lyric tradition have remained relatively resistant to a comprehensively convincing feminist appropriation. If this is true even in the Anglo-American context, where practical feminist engagement with the study of literature has flourished most robustly, it has been much more manifest in Portugal, where gendered readings of the lyric and its place in the narrative of national literary history have been rehearsed only on rare occasions and by scholars either based abroad or at a distance from the academic mainstream of the field, often in departments of Anglo-American studies (as is the case of Portugal's most prominent feminist critic of lyric poetry, Maria Irene Ramalho).

Wallace Stevens, a poet I have often brought into contact with Fernando Pessoa, says in one of his ‘Adagia’ that ‘poetry is a sense’. It seems to me that, more than a sense, poetry is an affair of the senses. Stevens himself would agree: ‘With my whole body I taste these peaches’, reads a line of ‘A Dish of Peaches in Russia’. For many modernist poets, the sensuous experience of everydayness tends to be far more important poetically than divinity or transcendence. Pessoa's poetry as a whole is witness to this conception, which is best grasped in his heteronym Alberto Caeiro, the poet who claims, ‘Eu nem sequer sou poeta: vejo’ [I am not even a poet: I see]. As in Stevens, the senses of sight and hearing are foremost in Caeiro, but as in Stevens also both are metonyms for the experiencing body. Unlike Stevens, however, Caeiro leaves the frightful wonder of everyday existing unquestioned. The anguished doubts are left to the orthonymous Pessoa (who confides to the world, ‘tenho-te horror porque te sinto ser’ [I abhor you because I feel you being]), Álvaro de Campos (who is ‘uma sensação sem pessoa correspondente’ [a sensation without a corresponding person]), the alleged semi-heteronym Bernardo Soares (who says, ‘dói-me a vida’ [life aches me]) and, in a stoically serene manner, to Ricardo Reis (who claims to be merely ‘o lugar / Onde se sente e pensa’ [the place / Where one feels and thinks]).

After the Anglo-Norman invasion of 1169 two entirely different legal systems concerning women and their rights upon marriage co-existed within Ireland. One system was based on the principles and tenets of the English common law which the invaders brought with them in the later twelfth century. This legal system enforced coverture, that is, the basic premise that, legally, married women were under the rule of their husbands. In contrast to this, Gaelic Irish society functioned according to its own ancient legal code, commonly called the Brehon law, which had reached its apogee and received codification in the seventh and eighth centuries but which was still in use in the later medieval period. Under this system women's rights after marriage were often very different from those provided for under the imported English common law. Because the two co-existing legal systems and societies were so different, women's experiences after marriage varied greatly within Ireland. These systems flourished and evolved separately but did not integrate or amalgamate in any way successfully. Of course certain habits and practices were adopted by both sides, but not to a significant extent. Indeed there was no overwhelming desire on either side to accommodate the traditions of the other, and thus these two societies grew ever more separate and alien to each other. Problems also occurred when intermarriage took place, as often both the married couple and those around them were confused as to which legal system to follow when it came to the woman's rights at marriage.

From most vantage points the fifteenth century in England must appear to be the age of the long poem, more often than not responding somehow to Chaucer, whether directly or through the influential oeuvres of his most prolific imitators. A number of these long poems were evidently widely read, and thus ‘popular’ in the sense that they were widely transmitted and had substantial reputations: works of this kind by Lydgate, Hoccleve, Hardyng and Walton survive in some numbers, as other chapters in this book make clear. But it is probably fair to assume that readers with the means to acquire copies of such works, and the time to spend appreciating them, were from comparatively limited social strata. What do we know of verse with a more widespread appeal, whose circulation crossed social boundaries in the ways that have come to be associated with what is properly ‘popular’? (for some definitions, see Davis 1992; Putter and Gilbert 2000: 1–38).

Verse of this kind was clearly in circulation in the fifteenth century, supplying a number of devotional, instructive, social, diverting and other needs. It is, however, frustratingly hard to gain much sense of its nature, or any accurate understanding of the scale and patterns of its circulation, since one of the features most likely to have determined its popularity – shortness – must also have ensured its exiguous survival.

Charlotte Brewer and Barry Windeatt have allowed me to see the book for which they asked me to write a short piece. Derek and Elisabeth Brewer were close friends of mine for almost sixty years. I knew Derek best when we saw each other almost every day in Birmingham at the beginning of our academic lives, and of course I saw less of him when the three of us, Geoffrey Shepherd, Derek, and I, were no longer together discussing everything we did by way of teaching and scholarly writing. I am glad that this book, a monument raised in his honour, is so full of praise. His honour and integrity are mentioned several times.

I recall receiving a surprising phone call in my room in Pembroke College, Oxford, from Peter Clemoes, Derek's colleague at Emmanuel College, telling me that Derek was being considered by some of the Fellows for the office of Master. What did I think? I remember saying that the Fellows could not do better, and that Elisabeth would be an excellent person to have as the wife of the head of house. His virtues, many mentioned in this book, came to mind, and among them, above all else, his utter trustworthiness, that he would deal with undergraduates as with Fellows as with those in college offices honestly, saying what he thought and always doing his best to the best of his great abilities.

Statistics

HIV/AIDS has long been a taboo topic in South Africa; however, judging by available statistics (as problematic as they might be), the scope of the South African epidemic can hardly be overestimated. According to the UNAIDS World AIDS Day Report 2011, South Africa has the highest number of people living with HIV/AIDS in the world; approximately 5.6 million South Africans are HIV-positive (UNAIDS 2011, 7). Comparing the findings of national health surveys from 2002, 2005 and 2008, it becomes evident that the overall HIV prevalence has stabilised at approximately 11% (Shisana et al. 2009, 30). Although variations between men and women are notable, particularly in younger age cohorts, women still face a higher risk of infection in almost all age groups. The results of the three surveys show persistently high levels of HIV prevalence among women, increasing rapidly with age, reaching 6.7% among 15-19-year-olds, 21.1% among 20-24-year-olds and peaking at 32.7% among 25-29-year-old women (ibid., 30-1). Young women aged 15 to 19 are about 2.5 times more likely to be infected than their male counterparts; aged 20 to 24, they are at about a four times greater risk of infection; and in the age group 25 to 29, HIV prevalence among women is about twice as high as among men. For males, by comparison, the epidemic curve peaks at 25.8% among 30-34-year olds.

Introduction

Among the artists and illustrators in nineteenth-century France inspired by Dante's Divine Comedy, Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) is unique for the attention he accorded the seventh canto of Inferno. The numerous drawings Rodin created as he read Dante's poem in preparation for his monumental sculpture, the Gates of Hell (Fig. 1), are remarkable for their treatment of the canto's primary figures. These figures' prominent placement in significant relief on the Gates suggests that the artist grasped the importance of canto 7 not only within the Inferno, but also in relation to the entire Divine Comedy. While ostensibly concerned with the punishment of the Avaricious and the Prodigal, central to Inferno 7 is the question of free will in relation to man's changing circumstances as administered by the goddess Fortune. Rodin came to Dante through the lens of nineteenth-century France and its interpretation of the poet's work, however, suggesting that his understanding of the issues raised by canto 7 was affected by the advent of the modern age and its skepticism. And while Dante ultimately affirms man's ability to choose his course in response to the challenges in life wrought by change, where Rodin ends on the issue of free will and the possibility of salvation within the context of the modern world is left ultimately in question on his Gates of Hell.

Romance, as a literary mode, is frequently characterised by its resistance to narrative closure – a resistance fuelled, as in any Charles Dickens novel, by multiple and multiplying incidents and characters, frequently spanning generations as well as continents (Parker 1974: 1 and passim). That picture of generation, movement and the crossing of new boundaries fits well with the history of verse romance texts themselves in fifteenth-century England. As more and more romance texts are sent forth, like young aspirant adventurers, by their makers or foster-parents – ‘Go, litel bok, go’ (TC, V.1786) – and as older textual ‘warriors’ continue to find new armour in which to fight their battles, romance texts seem to venture forth with the inexhaustible strength and generative capabilities of the romance heroes themselves. Romance, in the hands of fifteenth-century readers, authors and redactors, is as prolific and procreative as the worlds that it depicts.

If previous accounts of fifteenth-century verse romance have tended to denigrate its achievements in comparison to Ricardian literature (Wallace 1999: xii), then a corrective defence needs to be mounted first of all in relation to the multitude, variety and later influence of verse romance writing in the fifteenth century. The focus of this chapter must be on romance in verse, though the strong development of prose romance in the latter part of the century is not a self-contained act: the success of Caxton's romances inevitably owed something to the century's insatiable appetite for romance narratives of all kinds.

The Global Situation in 1793–4

The French Wars of 1793 to 1815 were fought on a global scale. The attempt of revolutionary and imperial France to become the pre-eminent power in Europe eventually failed due to the fluid permutations of the continental powers of Russia, Austria, Prussia and Spain combining with the colonial and industrial power of Britain. Naturally the conflict centred on Europe, but the colonial aspirations of Britain and France, together with the declining powers of Spain and the Netherlands, and the rising power of the United States, meant that the conflict spread to all parts of the globe. And the resources provided by the east Indies were essential to enable Britain to sustain these long and exhaustive wars. Rainier had been placed and kept in a key position to protect these resources.

The role played by Britain in the downfall of Napoleon was primarily naval and financial as its navy was by far the biggest in the world and its army comparatively tiny when compared with the manpower that could be put into the field by the continental powers. The incipient industrial revolution gave Britain enormous wealth, which it realised through trade with other countries. Naturally the naval efforts were concentrated around the shores of Britain and the coast of Western Europe.

Mention of the word ‘landscape’ floods the mind’s eye with images of the picturesque, with recollections of canvases evoking the natural sublime or bucolic country scenes. And appropriately so: the term ‘landscape’ derives from art. Coined in Dutch and used to talk about painting, it reached England in the seventeenth century and became a means to think about space. It is, then, a concept that was not readily available to medieval men and women. There were, for example, no obvious cognates for the term in the lexicons of medieval Latin writers, though a number of chroniclers, such as Henry of Huntingdon, were keen to ‘emplace’ their narratives and enter into topographical description. Others, notably Gerald of Wales, wrote narratives which were self-consciously perambulatory. Even if they lacked a concept of landscape, they were interested in the kinds of things that we describe using the term as shorthand. So if we think loosely about landscapes as, in Simon Schama’s words, ‘constructs of imagination projected onto wood and water and rock’, we have a subject that can be explored in our period. By concentrating on the inflection given those imaginative constructions by belief, we are, of course, touching on something that was of concern to the chroniclers and hagiographers who will be the principal subjects of this article.

What I propose to do here, then, is to explore inter-relationships between landscape and belief. I will begin by thinking about how certain beliefs and ideological projects gave rise to particular representations of landscape in texts. Then I will move on to examine the reverse influence: how landscape, and landscape change, may have shaped belief. At times this article bursts out of the chronological boundaries that the brief for this journal suggests, but necessarily so, for some of the issues that arise in consideration of landscape and belief bleed inevitably into adjacent periods, especially later periods. A consequence of this broad approach is that what follows is tentative: a preliminary sketch rather than a finished product, it follows some possible lines of argument and ends not so much with conclusions as with conjectures.

*

I will begin with a subject that has attracted a fair amount of historiographical attention already: representations in monastic writings of the wilderness.

1755 Corps of Marines and Marine Department

On 23 January 1755 the government ordered a mobilisation of the fleet and general press in preparation for war with France. With this mobilisation came a movement for the re-establishment of a Marine Force, as had been the case in all previous wars since the Second Anglo-Dutch War. But the government and Admiralty were slower than the public in the anticipation of this new Marine Force. By January the press was beginning to report that ‘a regiment of Marines is to be raised directly’, even stating later that there were to be ‘four regiments’. Other papers speculated that the ten regiments from the last war would be re-raised. This was not an unreasonable speculation as all previous marines had been formed into regiments and there was no public expectation that something different would be established. However, rumours were growing that something new was being thought about: ‘4000 Marines are to be raised, and that they are to be formed into Companies of 100 Men each, and to be under the Command of Majors on Half-Pay; and the other Officers are likewise to be taken from among those who are upon Half-Pay’. These companies were reported to have ten men out of each company taken from Guards' regiments to be made sergeants and corporals. This policy connected with the previous regimental formations, and the order was later confirmed by the Admiralty in May. But the Admiralty was clearly ending its policy of regiments of marines and instead looking for something new; possibly even ‘independent companies’.

Here Windeatt evokes the gentlemanly virtues – the remnants of a knightly value-system wherein great store was set by honour and gentilesse (nobility of birth or rank together with the attendant moral qualities of nobility of character or manners; generosity, kindness, gentleness, graciousness and the like). Indeed, it was no surprise to read, in the Telegraph obituary, Derek Brewer being described as ‘a gentlemanly, kindly man’. The thought that I want to offer in this paper is that those same virtues enabled Derek to gain some of his greatest insights into Chaucer's mind and art (to use a phrase in vogue in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when he was producing much of his best work). I am going to celebrate some of those insights – expanding them here, qualifying them there – because I believe they have withstood very well the buffets of changing academic fashions.

On 2 July 1875 a meeting took place of the administrative committee of the Société de l’Histoire de Normandie, chaired by the famous historian, philologist, and librarian Léopold Delisle. In a wide-ranging opening address, Delisle began by thanking his listeners for their scholarly studies of Norman history at a time when, in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War, ‘the misfortunes of the fatherland have made the memories of an often glorious, ever-interesting past even dearer to us’. After a survey of the chief Latin narrative sources for the history of medieval Normandy prior to its annexation by the French monarchy in 1204, Delisle finally arrived at a neglected, thirteenth-century French prose composition generally known as the Chronique de Normandie. Lamenting that the death of Ernest Lépinois, founder of the Société, had left plans for a new edition of the Chronique in disarray, Delisle charged that:

Despite this exhortation, however, Delisle (who died in 1910) was to remain disappointed in his hopes for a new edition of the Chronique de Normandie. The obvious hesitancy with which his audience evidently approached the text is understandable. Its rather imprecise title, granted by later printers, serves to cover a very broad range of vernacular histories of Normandy composed between around 1200 and 1350, all of which are unified by the reproduction in whole or in part of a translation of the Latin history of the Norman dukes most widely available to medieval audiences: the Gesta Normannorum Ducum (GND).

The first redaction of this work, produced by William of Jumièges in the years prior to 1070, revised and updated Dudo of Saint-Quentin’s earlier Latin chronicle of Norman history and was itself later modified and continued by Orderic Vitalis (c. 1109–13) and Robert of Torigni (c. 1139).