When we can identify a manuscript's first owner or a scribe involved in the initial production of the manuscript, then we can discuss their socioeconomic class(es), their occupations, and their location(s) with historical data as our evidence. However, in the case of Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, MS Brogyntyn ii.1, a small codex produced between 1463 and 1470 by eleven scribes in Warwickshire, neither the first owner nor the scribes have been identified. We can nevertheless examine other kinds of evidence and the inferences that may be drawn from them. The first section of this chapter will conclude that what evidence is available points to the probability that the manuscript was made for a person, family, or household in the gentry class. The second section will consider what this probability implies for understanding the manuscript better and connecting its contents to its historical context. The third section will look at later uses of the manuscript,

first as an exemplar of another fifteenth-century manuscript and then as a site of writing practice. Most of the writing added to Brogyntyn ii.1 in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries suggests that its early modern owners were also members of the gentry. For codicological reasons, this chapter will concentrate on the gentry connections of Quires 2–27. Most of Quire 1 was copied by three scribes (A, D, 14 Nancy P. Pope and H) who do not seem to have been collaborating with the eight scribes (I, J, K, L, O, Q, R, and S) who wrote the remaining twenty-six quires, the last of which is defective through loss of leaves. Henceforth, references in this chapter to Brogyntyn scribes refer to the eight scribes who copied the bulk of the manuscript.

1

George Moore and Charles Villiers Stanford were exact Irish contemporaries: both were born in 1852. In the remorseless annals of reception history, moreover, both invariably defer to their better-known and more generously regarded peers, namely James Joyce and Edward Elgar. No matter how strenuously we might argue otherwise, Moore is unlikely to unseat Joyce's exemplary claim to pre-eminence as an Irish literary modernist who worked in the world at large. Stanford, likewise, will remain in Elgar's shadow. But it seems fruitful nevertheless to consider all four members of this quartet in relation to each other, no matter how unevenly they may have fared as writers and composers in the aftermath of their achievement. This is not only because of the precursory relationship that exists between Moore and Joyce and between Stanford and Elgar, but also, as I wish to argue here, because of the culturally formative differences between Ireland and England in the emergence of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century art music in either country.

The stakes of representation in the media are high for minority populations since the majority society typically has little personal contact with them. This holds particularly true for people of color owing to the legacy of European colonialism and the racialized images it produced to legitimatize the subjugation of African and Asian nations. The depiction of people of color in film and television has, therefore, a disproportionate impact on their perception by mainstream society. It is not simply a matter of quantitative but qualitative visibility of minority populations in the media. Concerning entertainment formats, the key questions are: “What kinds of roles are people of color given, and what messages do those roles send to audiences?” The experience of the Vietnamese German actor Aaron Le is a case in point: “[A]s an Asian person you are only cast as a cigarette seller or monk.” Echoed by other actors of color, such “migrantisches Casting,” i.e., casting roles according to phenotype and racial cliches, remained prevalent in German film and television well into the twenty-first century. Current stereotypes circulating in the public sphere are part of a representational regime that historically restricted “asiatisch gelesene,” i.e., German actors perceived as “Asian,” not German, because of their phenotype, to playing villains, victims, or dimwitted sidekicks speaking their native German with fake foreign accents.

Africa's environmental history has received extensive attention from scholars. This scholarly shift sought to remedy the linear trajectory of narrating the African experience. Before its inception, the historiography of Africa was human-centric in focus and thus unbalanced the existing narrative. It is important to note that this same defect was evident, at a point, in other continental histories. However, the second half of the nineteenth century witnessed a tremendous shift in historical perspectives on world history. Primacy was also given, among other things, to the agency of ecological features in history. Environmental history is said to have begun in Europe and America through the writings of the French Annales historians. This school of thought evinced a strong environmental determinism to explain history. However, it took the activities of environmentalists in the 1980s to trigger what we now call environmental history. This explains why earlier works on environmental history were more about environmental conservation. For example, pioneering works by scholars such as Donald Worster, Alfred Crosby, and William Cronon focused on the historical background of conservational issues at that period. Their works demonstrate how environmental events such as population increase, disease environment, modern capitalist economy (industrialization), and the scientific revolution (atomic bombs and pollution) have led to environmental changes in world history. In Samuel Hays’ estimation, the need to address these challenges makes the study of environmental history an attempt to conserve nature. It is instructive to note that African environmental history developed around the same “practical” narratives. Here, the practical approach was usually premised on the impact of colonial exploitation of the African environment.

This is a study of coastal administration and coastal policing in eighteenth- century Britain. Its argument is twofold: with the rise of the British fiscal-military state during the seventeenth century, the political significance of the coast changed dramatically. Driven by economic and political concerns, the coast became, for the first time, a politically distinct space complete with designated legislation and unique bureaucratic structures. The study shows both why and in response to what circumstances the necessity for coastal enforcement first arose, and how this political interest in coastal policies fluctuated in relation to political events and economic policies across the century. In mapping these fluctuations the book argues, secondly, that satisfactory solutions to the problem of coastal enforcement remained forever elusive. Endless debates could not solve the political riddle that the coast presented, namely that the apparent ineffectiveness of coastal policies was a result, not of bureaucratic failures or the criminal ingenuity of the smuggler, but of the inherent contradictions of the fiscal-military rationale itself. This failure was twofold: an exclusively fiscal focus on coastal enforcement fell forever short of its administrative complexity. And economic policies of protectionism combined with political interventionism in imperial and European affairs ensured both the necessity for stricter coastal policing and rendered its execution more difficult. Taken together, these arguments aim to bring the well-established conceptual findings about the ambiguity of the coast to bear on the domestic setting. By placing the political awareness of the coast and the instruments of coastal administration into the context of the eighteenth-century British state, the study exposes important limitations of the fiscal-military state, ultimately arguing that it was precisely on the domestic coasts that the process of state-building remained, in many ways, inconclusive.

INTRODUCTION

Jean Craig lived in the parish of Tranent in Haddingtonshire. She was married to William Steill, a coal-miner; she herself also worked in a coal-pit, probably as a coal-bearer. Her mother was Beigis (Margaret) Wallace, who had been burned as a witch in 1629, during the panic of 1628–31. Wallace had named her daughter as a witch shortly before her execution. Family relations among women came to the fore in this trial, as one of the witnesses against Craig was her sister-in-law. The voices of the witnesses, the accused and the judiciary come to the fore.

Craig's investigation and trial took place in March and April of 1649, which was another period of panic over witchcraft. Our earliest dated evidence, from 17 March, is a letter from James Baillie, brother of the politician Sir William Baillie of Lamington who was a member of the committee of estates that then governed Scotland. Lamington was in Lanarkshire, but Sir William Baillie also owned a coal-mining estate at Penston in Haddingtonshire, which James Baillie seems to have managed. Craig had worked at Penston when she had allegedly bewitched Beatrix Sandilands; James Baillie's letter outlined this incident, which would soon be investigated in much more detail. He also mentioned Craig's association with the witches of the 1620s. He wrote his letter, to the minister of Tranent, in response to an enquiry from the parish elders; we do not know what prompted these elders to open the investigation.

By 28 March, Craig had been arrested and imprisoned in the tolbooth of Tranent. This was by warrant from the chancellor, according to the presbytery record. Local secular authority, in the form of the baron bailie of Seton and Tranent, was also operating in co-operation with the ministers.

INTRODUCTION

This case is about much more than ‘witchcraft’. It is one of the most spectacular instances of necromancy and elite magic ever to have occurred in Scotland. It involved political conspiracy at high levels of government, the ritual summoning of spirits using a book of learned magic, and prophecies by witches in Scotland and Norway. The central figure in the conspiracy was Sir William Stewart.

William Stewart was a herald, one of the ceremonial messengers of the crown. This did not give him great political power, but he moved in elite circles and was involved in international diplomacy. He was probably the son of Alexander Stewart of Dalswinton, in Dumfriesshire, and may have been born around 1540. He married a Norwegian woman, Dorothea Christoffersdatter Thronsden (or Tronds). His father, knighted in 1565, was a kinsman and ally of the earl of Lennox, and Stewart himself may have owed his initial advancement to this Lennox connection during the personal reign of Mary Queen of Scots. He first appears as Ross herald in 1566. He had connections with the Protestant church, contributing a prefatory ‘Table for the shyneing of the Mone’, and a sonnet, to Scotland's new Protestant prayer book in 1565. The table shows him to have had an interest in astronomy and numbers which must have fed into the astrological activities revealed at his trial. Also in 1565, he published a Scots translation of a French Calvinist tract, displaying a learned acquaintance with theology and etymology.

Stewart was also connected with the queen's illegitimate half-brother, James Stewart, earl of Moray, who became regent of Scotland in August 1567 after Mary's deposition. We are told that William Stewart had been ‘brocht up witht the regent’.

Introduction

This chapter explores the radical, evangelical vision of improvement developed by the British labouring-class writer James Woodhouse (1735–1820) across his extensive literary career. Considering his early 1760s poetry and the 28,013-line verse autobiography that he produced as a London bookseller in the 1790s, The Life and Lucubrations of Crispinus Scriblerus (hereafter Crispinus Scriblerus), this chapter illuminates Woodhouse's increasingly overt communitarian understanding of improvement in the context of changing attitudes towards estate management. It begins by re-considering Woodhouse's fractious relationship with Elizabeth Montagu, by whom he was employed as land steward of Sandleford estate in 1767, before being dismissed – first in 1778 and again, after several years as Montagu's majordomo, in 1788. Montagu was not only a well-connected woman of letters but, increasingly across this period, a ‘Bluestocking businesswoman’, who transformed her late husband's (d. 1776) fledgling coal-mining operation in Northumberland and was eager to increase the agricultural productivity and profitability of Sandleford. Focusing on this period in Woodhouse's life, the chapter explores how a divergent, classbased conception of improvement was a central feature of his disagreement with Montagu, and how his experience as farmer and land steward at Sandleford led him to further develop his sense of the injustice of land improvements then increasingly practised, as a means of enhancing one's private property rather than the collective good.

In the previous chapter, we examined the role of the People as an external counterbalance to Presidential power, and as a check upon the Imperial Presidency. Classical constitutional theory, on the other hand, has always focused on what Gargarella labels a system of internal checks and balances: that is, the different institutions of the State checking and constraining each other. This is the ‘separation of powers’: originally between the legislature, the executive, and the judiciary, and, in recent times, a more complex distribution of public power involving fourth branch institutions such as independent commissions, and other bodies.

The separation of powers has always been more ideal than reality. To start with, in parliamentary systems, there is no clean-cut separation between the legislature and the executive. The latter is drawn from the former and while, in theory, is meant to be answerable to it, in practice, often dominates it. Besides, the complexity of modern governance can no longer sustain (if it ever could) the bright-line division between law-making (the legislature), implementation (the executive), and adjudication (the judiciary). This complexity has, in turn, seen a mid-twentieth-century drift towards greater executive power, whether in parliamentary systems (beyond their inherent tendency of executive domination), or presidential ones. Courts have grappled with doctrines such as ‘excessive delegation’ (where the legislature passes vague laws, giving the executive so much discretion that the line between implementation and law-making dissolves), the executive abuse of temporary rule-by-decree powers, and so on.

Appendix: List of Works by Allen Shawn

Before chronicling the reigns of the ‘kings’ in the title of his 1137–39 Historia regum Brittaniae [History of the Kings of Britain, hereafter HRB], Geoffrey of Monmouth fabricated a national myth of origins for Britain, founded by Aeneas's grandson Brutus, a Trojan War refugee seeking land on which to establish a ‘New Troy’. Preceding Geoffrey's HRB were accounts about Brutus by Isidore of Seville, Bede, and Geoffrey's probable source, the ninth-century compilation, Historia Brittonum, generally associated with Nennius. The Galfridian version of Brutus's colonization inspired subsequent vernacular adaptations: Wace's 1155 Roman de Brut, Laȝamon's thirteenth-century Brut, and Castleford's Chronicle (1327). In HRB, Geoffrey reworked Historia Brittonum's negative characterization of ‘Brutus exosus’ from a parricide- and matricide-committing pariah into ‘a brave and generous leader’ and ‘worthy ancestor’ in whom all Britons could take pride as the ‘founder of a new nation’. As depicted in HRB, upon reaching the island ‘Albion’, Brutus claimed and renamed it ‘Britain’, for himself, after exterminating its native population, whom Geoffrey labeled ‘giants’. Although Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Michelle Warren have treated Geoffrey's invented foundation myth as examples respectively of ‘Monster Theory’ and ‘postcolonialism’, I view this episode through the lens of the philosophy of primitivism, which complements these discourses. Indeed, Albion's giants are analogues of the physically huge, clothing-free, cave-inhabiting, club-wielding, medieval Wild People who exemplify primitivism.

When I started this research several years ago, I was hesitant to focus on gender given the sensitivity of some of the topics which may, and ultimately have come to light in this book. However, when I joined FairPlé in early 2018, I felt compelled to conduct this research after witnessing the sheer bravery and courage of individuals in the organisation as well as sister organisations such as Mise Fosta. Although my experience working with and being surrounded by those in FairPlé and our sister organisations has certainly influenced this book's research direction, it is also important to note that this research would not have been possible without the contribution of all who shared their experiences with me and broadened my understanding of the different experience's practitioners can have. The research has hence grown into something much larger than originally anticipated, continuously shaped by the ethnographic research, activist work, and the continuous ever-growing body of studies on identity and Irish traditional music.

Be that as it may, the main goal of this book has remained constant, to examine and understand the experiences of women in Irish traditional music. It is clear that rather than a story of constant progress, the role, occupation, status of, and attitudes toward women in Irish traditional music from the twentieth century to present day can be understood in terms of ebb and flow.