Loosely translated as ‘random drawings or sketches’, manga (漫画) and its derivative media can still be frowned upon as an unhealthy subculture, but there is no denying their economic, social, and cultural impact on both domestic and global levels. To begin with, the manga media are a multi-million-dollar industry, in which a single series – often spanning decades – generates countless jobs and income, not only through the traditional sale of books and magazines but also by branching out into animation, merchandise, video games, and collaborations in other forms. Take Berserk as an example: during the past thirty-six years of its serialisation and despite its lack of an ending, the manga has been made into two animated series (1996–97, 2016–17), one animated film trilogy (2012–13) which was re-versioned into a memorial series (2022), and three video games (1999, 2004, 2016), while an exhibition has been touring Japan since 2021. It even has a collaboration cafe in Tokyo where fans can enjoy character- themed snacks and purchase limited edition household items. Nor should the vigorous fan culture be ignored: in addition to staging iconic scenes through cosplay, fans also participate in the process of creation by producing fanart and dōjinshi – that is, self-published print works exploring the manga's narrative world as the fans see fit. On the global level, the manga industry has steadily expanded into international markets since the early 2000s.

In this article, I explore the Angevin royal family's role in the Guelf and Ghibelline conflict that engulfed late medieval Italy. More specifically, I identify the extent of Angevin involvement in Tuscan warfare in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and I explain how the success or failure of monarchs in that conflict shaped contemporary narratives surrounding several monarchs, including Charles I, Robert I, Louis I and Duke Otto of Braunschweig. So, through a close reading of chronicles, letters and epic poetry, I suggest it was this factional violence as much as any other event that shaped the legacy of not only individual rulers but also the Angevins more generally in Italy.

Often did the sounds and cries of war echo around Tuscan cities during the later Middle Ages. Without fear of hyperbole, it is clear that factional warfare, and warfare's terrifying violence, was a common reality for many Tuscans. In fact, the violence was so ubiquitous that medieval chroniclers and other literary voices often framed notable events, ranging from the torture of an abbot to a fire that destroyed half of Florence in 1304, within the light of this great conflict. Dino Compagni (c. 1255–1324) calls the factions an “evil” (mali). Giovanni Villani (c. 1276–1348) writes that “Italy was stained and almost all of Europe, and many ills and perils, and destructions and changes have followed thereupon to our city and to the whole world.”

As often happens in my experience, this project has grown by design from earlier work and accidentally by chance. In Chrétien Continued: A Study of the Conte du Graal and its Verse Continuations, I analyzed the peculiar character of the first Grail romance as represented in the manuscript tradition: unfinished despite its atypical length and followed by four narrative expansions in a variety of combinations. Chrétien's enigmatic romance thus functioned as “mother text” initiating a dialogue with successive continuations which resembled a series of commentaries on their model, not unlike Jewish midrash whose narrative stories aim to expand, explain, and fill in gaps in the biblical text. When I was subsequently invited to participate in a multidisciplinary graduate course by responding to a talk by my art historian colleague on the representation of Judges 19 in the earliest Bible moralisée (Vienna, ÖNB 2554), I once again found myself engaged with biblical issues of interpretation and authority. Intrigued by this serendipitous encounter with one of the most repellent but fascinating episodes in the Bible, I decided to embark on a new project that would be bookended by further analysis of Vienna 2554, its spectacular images accompanied by paraphrase and gloss in French, and a study of Chrétien's Conte in relation to Jewish and Christian exegesis. For a conference at Fordham University on rethinking romance across disciplines, I had already planned to grapple with suggestions, as yet unsubstantiated, that Chrétien's narratives reflected the exegetical turn toward the literal among biblical scholars of the twelfth century. Hence the conception of Jewish- Christian Dialogue in Medieval French Literature: Inscribing Biblical Encounters in the Vernacular.

In the historiography of the fiscal-military state, much emphasis is placed on whether the bureaucratic apparatus of the Customs was equal to its tasks of raising revenue, enforcing trade regulations, and policing revenue crimes. Analysed in a framework that evokes comparisons with the Excise and introduces numerical ‘efficiency’ as a yardstick, the Customs are largely seen to fall short of these tasks. As it is corruption and smuggling in particular that tend to be seen as responsible, much blame is heaped on either the outdated bureaucratic structure of the Customs as giving ample opportunity for sinecurism, collusion and negligence or the branches concerned with coastal policing as responsible for large-scale Customs evasion. Chapters 3 and 4 are an attempt to approach the administrative setting of the Customs from a different angle, with the aim of challenging the straightforward, but misleading assumption of fiscal efficiency typically adopted in modern scholarship.

The present chapter is aimed at a better understanding of the bureaucracy. It is argued here that an undue focus on fiscal efficiency misrepresents the purpose of this branch of service. To make this point, it is necessary to reintroduce a number of administrative complexities that characterised the mechanics of coastal policing in the eighteenth century but have subsequently been obscured by modern notions of bureaucracy. Even at the centre of the executive, different ideas about the purposes of coastal officials prevailed. Nominally part of the Customs, other departments regularly imposed their own agendas on these officials.

The most important evidence for the formation of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles in the early Middle Ages is their extant manuscripts and witnesses that testify to now-lost versions. Seven manuscript versions of the Chronicle survived from the Middle Ages into the early modern period. Not all have survived to the present day complete. Since 1848 each of these has been known by one of the first eight letters of the alphabet (A–G); to these have since been added the single leaf fragment H and I, a set of Easter Table annals extending from 988 to 1268, discussed in the following chapter. The manuscript of the G text, made at the beginning of the eleventh century, was largely destroyed in the Cotton Library fire of 1731. The same fire at Ashburnham House caused the leaves of the B manuscript to shrink. The D version was already missing a number of folios (probably two quires, covering the years 261–693) by the sixteenth century. Remarkably, the surviving manuscript copies of the Chronicle come very close to encompassing its life as a text in early medieval England: A's Scribe 1 wrote his annals c.900, about a decade after the common stock entered circulation c.892; the final entries in E were made in the mid-1150s at Peterborough, after which no version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle was continued. The first section of this chapter first describes these manuscripts and identifies their scribes, many of whom also appear in later chapters where their roles in the making of the Chronicles are discussed in further detail.

In his ground-breaking and still widely disputed account of the ‘Radical Enlightenment’, Jonathan Israel recounts the story of the epochal transformation of Western civilisation beginning around the 1650s, when ‘a general process of rationalization and secularization set in which rapidly overthrew theology's age-old hegemony in the world of study, slowly but surely eradicated magic and belief in the supernatural from Europe's intellectual culture, and led a few openly to challenge everything inherited from the past’. Yet, notwithstanding its centrality to the ‘making of modernity’, the historical dimension of the Enlightenment in Israel's view ‘continues to be very inadequately understood and described’.

Whether Israel actually undertook a genuinely historical investigation of the Enlightenment, or he pursued instead an ideological agenda aimed to reassert the primacy of modern Western liberal and democratic ideals, is a question that remains highly controversial. While it is not the purpose of the present book to take sides in this scholarly controversy, nonetheless it takes on Israel's call for the importance of conducting new research on the ‘historical dimension’ of the Enlightenment as key to the serious understanding of such a movement. As Darrin McMahon has effectually pointed out, Israel's apparently contradictory statement originates from the ‘ambiguity inherent in the very word enlightenment’, which is widely used to refer both to the ‘still unfolding process of modernity’ and ‘to the historical movement that gripped Europe and the Americas in the late seventeenth century and the eighteenth’.

The first thing you saw … was a path going through. I think they were probably yew trees, but it was really dark, and quite kind of sinister. And then you came to the entrance of the hospital itself, and walked in… .

And there was someone on reception, and they rang through to Priscilla who came and got me. And she was very kind, you know, not at all kind of upset about me arriving late. She was … a very striking figure because she was a very elegant woman really, in quite an understated way. There was just something about her that was kind of calm and dignified… . She had this … shock of white hair.

And she took me through a very long corridor which was really grim, and then out the other end, and across to a much more modern building which was where she had her music therapy room and office. So, I think on that very first day, I think I nearly turned back and fled. But I didn’t.

These are the words of Esmé Towse, remembering her first encounter with Priscilla Barclay, Dalcroze Eurhythmics practitioner, occupational therapist, and music therapist. As a music therapy student in the mid-1970s, Towse was on placement with Barclay at St. Lawrence's Hospital, Caterham, England. At the time, this was one of the country's largest institutions for children and adults with physical and learning disabilities.

This is an example of the hundreds of documents stored from the legal proceedings involved in the High Court of Admiralty decisions. The two stamps of sixpence each which make this a legal document are imprinted at the top of the one sheet of paper, folded in half with the text on two and a half sides. The first page always has as an introductory two sets of text separated by a line, which is represented below.

The amount of detail disclosed by the interrogations of the three individuals is testament to the clever transition from personal data to revealing background history. This set of interrogations also highlights the fluidity of ownership. The vessel changed hands three times, and the London-born Thomas Oldfield was probably grateful to have been captured yet again.

Lists for the men released in 1807 as a result of John Armstrong's diplomatic efforts and of those released in early 1813 and sent to Brest survive in the archives of the Service Historique de la Défense at Vincennes, scattered amongst different cartons in the Yj series. It is not clear if these lists are complete. No departing passenger lists for the vessels on which they left France survive. The twenty-six British or Irish men released with the 1813 group are not included here. The names of a small number of men who were released individually are given at the end.

Seamen Prisoners of War released in 1807

These men were released in November 1807 and marched to Dieppe or Antwerp; most of them took ships to America. Because of the complaints of seamen in Arras that most were masters, those who were have their status as such indicated in bold type. Ash, Robert, of Baltimore, shipmaster, held at Verdun and Valenciennes

Barnes, William, of Boston, seaman, held at Arras

Bunker, Christopher, of Nantucket, shipmaster, held at Verdun and

Valenciennes

Carpenter, Joseph, of Baltimore, shipmaster, held at Verdun

Carteret, Samuel, of Boston, seaman, held at Valenciennes and Verdun

Chute, David, of Salem, held at Arras

Clemens, William, of Salem, seaman, held at Arras

Conner, John, of New York, seaman, held at Arras

Cook, Richard, of Philadelphia, shipmaster, held at Verdun

Dodds, Thomas, of Falmouth, Massachusetts, held at Arras

Dunlop, Robert, shipmaster, held at Valenciennes and Verdun

Only a year and a half after the 1707 Acts of Union – which created the first unified British state on the island of Great Britain, and granted its inhabitants ‘full Freedom and Intercourse’ with that state's imperial possessions – an issue of The Tatler suggested that all might not be well in this newly constructed nation. Amidst the hurly-burly of contemporary imperial London, where a passing ‘Citizen’ might have ‘his Head […] upon Woollen, Silks, Iron, Sugar, Indigo, or Stocks’, one of the Tatler's cast of characters worried that

It is clear that the Tatler's tone here is not entirely serious: no-one in 1709 was worrying about a revived Saxon-Danish conflict. Nevertheless, the passage implies some genuine disquiet about the viability of this new ‘British’ culture. It is a rather unusual contemporary expression of what Colin Kidd has called the ‘hollowness at the heart’ of early eighteenth-century Britain – a nation incompletely unified in 1707 by a process that opponents and outsiders perceived as being nothing more than a ‘shady deal, elements of which met the respective national interests of the contracting parties’.

Recent years brought their share of losses, among them the loss of close musician friends, including composers David Macbride and Stephen Siegel, my dear friends Maxine Neuman and Reinhard Humburg, my close childhood companion, Jay Hamburger. These losses have struck home in an entirely different way than the deaths from an earlier time, and they have magnified my sense of gratitude for having been allowed to live this long, and until recently with only minor health problems.

My migraines vanished as mysteriously as they had begun. Up until recently I escaped serious health issues, apart from two sobering reminders of life's finitude that had an impact on musical work: moderate hearing loss, limiting perception of upper frequencies and requiring hearing aids; and surgery on my left hand, contracting it, diminishing its mobility, and making it impossible to play many of the pieces that I used to navigate easily.

I have never tired of teaching composition, and I remain eager to see the students’ work in progress, amazed by their inventiveness and imagination. I try to observe the Hippocratic Oath and “do no harm”; sometimes I can be helpful. I flatter myself that I may have absorbed some aspects of my father's editing skills.

I particularly enjoy exploring with students the old forms that Norwood taught us about, and I regularly offer a course with the electronic music faculty in composing music for acoustic instruments with electronics, despite having never worked this way myself.

Throughout this study I have argued that, for Scottish writers creatively recollecting the Wars of Independence, the past is crucial in shaping responses to the present situation; that is, rather than these historiographical and literary works being concerned solely with detailing the wars as historical record they recollect the past precisely to affect the present and the future. For example, in Chapter 4 I argued that Hary's Wallace creatively reimagines English violence as moments of punctual trauma, revealing a vehement conviction of the dangers posed to Scottish sovereignty and identity by rapprochement with the English. Hary's assessment provides one way of reading, but it is misleading. James III's policies, and his overall approach to governance, were met with opposition that resulted in open rebellion and his death at Sauchieburn in 1488; nevertheless, Alasdair MacDonald tempers the view that he alienated all of his nobility to note that James ‘retained the loyalty of important intellectuals and counsellors, such as John Ireland and William Elphinstone’. MacDonald points out that James III's reputation inevitably suffered because he ‘had the ironic misfortune to be the father of a son whose reign is generally … upheld as marking the Golden Age of late medieval Scotland’.

Classical mythology, Hellenistic odeporic and teratological literature, and medieval Christian bestiaries all teemed with human-animal hybrids. This paper will focus on two such therianthropic beings, the (hippo) centaurs, half-human and half-equine, and the onocentaurs, half-human and half-asinine, as described in the Liber monstrorum de diversis generibus (henceforth LM), a teratological compendium from early eighth-century England. While the origin of centaurs and onocentaurs can be traced to times and places very distant from pre-Conquest England, they form two perfect case studies of a distinct category of monsters, namely those creatures whose monstrosity originates from a degradation of humanity or from the aberrant conjunction of the human and the bestial, which seems to have especially resonated with early English sensibility. The porosity of the boundaries between the human and the monstrous is precisely one of the most distinctive, if disturbing, traits of the LM, as well as of texts which have been closely associated with it, such as Beowulf

or Aldhelm's Aenigmata. While the immediate sources of the two LM entries on (hippo) centaurs and onocentaurs have been identified as Jerome's Vita S. Pauli eremitae and Isidore of Seville's Etymologiae, XI.iii.39, respectively, they in fact rely on a blend of ultimate sources. These multiple layers of sources will be explored and disentangled by also looking at Aldhelm, who has long been attributed with the authorship of the LM and dealt himself with hybrid monsters, such as the Minotaur and the centaur.

This premiere took place on 30 December 1846 with Paul Barroilhet as Robert and Rosine Stoltz as Marie. The plot was concocted by two librettists, the Belgian Gustave Vaez (1812–62) and the Frenchman Alphonse Royer (1803–75).

The situation at the Opéra is extremely serious. I shan't deal with the question of money, about which I’m ignorant and which anyway I’m not competent to write about; as I understand it, it's a question over which the government has the right to intervene, rather than any individual. Instead, I’ll concentrate on the musical resources still available to this unfortunate theatre, and on the influence of the disastrous condition to which it finds itself reduced upon the state of the art throughout France, to the astonishment of those who visit our country. This ruin of an institution which was, and maybe still is, so beautiful, so much loved by our country in every way – for which it makes so many sacrifices each year, and which it's in the habit of regarding as the focal point of its pretentions to artistic splendour –this ruin is due to causes we can't help wondering about, the reality of which continues to strike everyone who can see clearly and is without prejudice.

Having failed to acquire a new work from any of the major composers of Germany, Italy or France, the Opéra has found itself constrained to beg Rossini to do them the insulting favour of rummaging around in his paperwork to extract from it fragments of old scores made popular throughout Europe by the best Italian singers – admirable fragments, no doubt, but which, put together more or less competently by someone else, could not by any means, at any time or in any country however barbarous, constitute a true, serious work of art or, whatever the posters might tell us, justify the title of ‘a new opera’.

The Encyclopaedia of Music in Ireland represents the first comprehensive survey of Irish musical experience across recorded history, although its principal span extends from the early Middle Ages to the present day. EMIR (to use the abbreviation by which it is now known) addresses several distinct areas of musical practice, including traditional music, art music, church music, popular music and the music trade (printing and publishing; instrument manufacture), as well as the relationship between music, literature and political culture in Ireland. It also documents Irish musical practice elsewhere, notably in North America (the United States and Canada) and the United Kingdom.

Perhaps the most important aspect of EMIR from the general perspective of musical lexicography is its attempt to broaden the base of musical practice as this is conceived in older works of musical reference. In particular, EMIR reflects a sequence of editorial principles sufficiently pliant to address the topography of Irish musical practice, in which there has long been a pronounced tension between the claims of the composer and the musical work on one side, and the claims of oral and popular culture on the other. Although EMIR represents the apparatus of Irish art music (as in biographical and critical entries on composers, complete with worklists, sources and bibliographies), it also engages closely with the transmission and dissemination of traditional and popular music. But however comprehensive its address, EMIR implicitly draws attention to the fundamental challenge of musical lexicography (in Ireland as well as elsewhere), which is to reconcile an apparently insatiable quest for information with the imperative of critical and historical interpretation.

The Five Axes

In the poetry of many cultures, there is an enduring image: of a shore that recedes even as you move towards it. If transformative constitutionalism's metaphor of the bridge expresses confidence that the chasm between the past and the future will be bridged, then the language of poetry warns us about the ‘essential cruelty of hope’. Transformative constitutionalism may be a bridge, but a bridge to a horizon that is always receding.

The chapters in this book trace the journey of transformative constitutionalism under Kenya's 2010 Constitution, between the bridge and the horizon. These chapters – each dedicated to a constitutional dispute that was brought before the Kenyan courts between 2010 and 2025 – correspond to five axes of transformation.

The first axis is that of constraining the executive and empowering the People. This was at issue in the BBI Case, where an executive-driven attempt to make large-scale changes to the 2010 Constitution was rebuffed by the courts. The ball was set rolling by the High Court, which reached into history to hold that sweeping constitutional change could not be done without a correspondingly deep participation of the People. In doing so, the High Court offered to the world a new – and distinctively Kenyan – articulation of the famous basic structure doctrine. While the Supreme Court disagreed with the High Court on the applicability of the doctrine to the Kenyan context, its own interpretation of the Constitution affirmed – in substance – the document's commitment to public participation in constitutional change.