English colonial lobbyists triggered new impulses of knowledge production to vindicate their overseas agendas in the late sixteenth century. Eyewitness testimonies collected in this process were entangled with the linguistics and epistemology of the New World, inviting further attention that transcends the originally intended scope of colonial promotion. The protagonist of this paper is the Oxonian polymath Thomas Harriot (1560–1621). I attempt to elucidate how he approached aboriginal languages and perceived the New World. Harriot acquired Algonquian rudiments from Manteo and Wanchese, two Native Americans lodging in London. Harriot designed an alphabet for the “Virginian” tongue, proposing a sound script covering all the languages, where his algebraic mapping of articulation showcases a scientific endeavour to decipher the unknown in encounters. Subsequently, in 1589, symbols from this phonetic alphabet appeared on a map of Irish plantations, which semiotically connects Ireland and the Americas in the expanding English colonial agenda. Four years earlier, Harriot had crossed the Atlantic and sojourned in Roanoke, the socalled “Virginia” colony. Probably assisted by Manteo, Harriot’s field observations underpinned his A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia for colonial promotion. Succeeding versions of this printed account circulated in England and continental Europe, which further informed a wider readership of the New World. These inquiries into linguistics and epistemology not only reveal how Harriot comprehended “Virginia” and endorsed English colonisation. Pinpointing the knowledge production in the North Atlantic world, Harriot’s experience sheds light on how oral and written culture converged and how the worldview changed in Elizabethan colonial encounters.

When Thomas Harriot listened to Algonquian sounds articulated by Manteo and Wanchese, he had to perceive those phonemes, imitate, memorise, and ponder a way to write them down. Harriot’s encounter with the Amerindian language delineates how he approached an unknown tongue through his communications with these two Indigenous travellers. Manteo and Wanchese, two Native Americans from Roanoke, were brought to England through Sir Walter Raleigh’s voyage in 1584. Residing in London, they met Harriot, from whom they learned the English language; in return, they passed on more Amerindian linguistic knowledge than had ever been extracted from previous Indigenous travellers across the Atlantic.

In light of the transformations in Ecuadorian society triggered by the Feriado Bancario and its long-lasting consequences, one may ask: how is the Ecuadorian nation reimagined in fiction after 1998? I consider this to be a vital question for understanding contemporary Ecuador because when we reflect on the history of Latin America, we see that nations are built – and, as such, are to be found – in narrative. As I discuss in the first chapter of this book, nation and narration go hand in hand in the making of Latin American nations. From novels presenting romances that function as national allegories, as observed by Doris Sommer, to the importance of intellectuals who put their writing to the service of national and political projects, as noted by Carlos Altamirano, narrative has had a prominent role in the nation-building processes of the region. Twenty-first century Ecuador is not exempt from this logic.

At the same time, by shedding light on contemporary fiction, it is also possible to fill a gap left by the majority of the academic readings on the cultural responses to the economic crisis, which have overwhelmingly focused on the figure of the migrant. In the introduction to his compilation of ‘narrativas, autorías y lecturas teorizadas de las migraciones ecuatorianas’, Diego Falconí Trávez argues that the numerous displacements caused by the 1998 economic crisis triggered the emergence of a series of discourses centred on the evaluation of the ‘cuerpos de origen ecuatoriano que han ido llegando (y regresando) durante varios años a diferentes destinos’. These discourses, he says, have taken the form of scholarly studies, documentaries, films and TV shows that give form to a body of work that frames the understanding of the Ecuadorian migrant as a particular type of subjectivity. Although Falconí Trávez’s intention is clearly far from making an exhaustive list, it is still surprising that he fails to mention literature among the cultural responses to the migration phenomenon. This is especially the case if we are to consider that there is a substantial number of novels focused on the issue. Nonetheless, even more surprising than such omission is the almost undivided attention that the study of migrant subjectivities has received among the manifold consequences of the Feriado Bancario.

The rapid expansion of Spanish power in the fifteenth century throughout the Iberian Peninsula and across the Atlantic resulted in the first truly global empire. This conquest provoked the question of how the newly unified, and now international, Catholic monarchy would govern converted, non-European subjects. In particular, the lingering Converso and Morisco communities still living in Spain, and the indigenous populations in Mexico challenged the Spanish church. Up until the thirteenth century, Catholic governments in the kingdoms that would form Hapsburg Spain had allowed a limited religious tolerance. This toleration was based on the assumption that the souls of heretics and heathens were already too “hardened” in their error to be converted. Intellectual developments in early modern religious and scientific cultures challenged this notion.

Growing religious intolerance in Spain was expressed through the nationalization of medieval inquisitions and conversion projects into the formidable, global Spanish Inquisition. The Renaissance spurred a shift in how the nature of the human soul, and its potential for change was regarded. Intolerance and the push for conversion corresponded with a more nuanced understanding of the non-Catholic ethnic groups. This shift is mirrored in contemporary theories of mineral formation, and the process of alchemy. Positive change in both religion and alchemy was possible based on refinement and cultivation of the original “good” in the material, whether it was a vulgar metal or a human soul. Although this essay is too brief to properly connect these ideas, they are related and fed off each other in the Spanish Renaissance.

These metaphysical relationships are especially apparent in the overlap between the language and logic of written discourses on both the alchemical and the religious conversion processes. When Granada fell in 1492, the limited toleration of Islam and Judaism was firmly replaced with the goal of religious union. These ethnic and religious minorities had “debased” Spain, and while they could not be passively tolerated, they could be converted. Ferdinand and Isabella’s decree of expulsion highlighted the danger that Jews would cause in Spain. They argued that any social contact with them would cause weak Christians to apostatize. Although the decree does make a distinction between Jews who were “native” to Spain through their generational presence, the decree prioritized Christianity over familial history.

The space around medieval church altars at times involved various audiences – from both clerics and members of the laity – who observed or handled objects in a range of media in the performance of the liturgy. This theme of access to works of art and the relationship between media and use has been a strong undercurrent in the scholarly and pedagogical work of Joanna Cannon, with whom I shared a memorable, indeed careeraltering, conversation about Bernardo Daddi and painters of illuminated manuscripts. That discussion was the catalyst for a journey – of a long bus ride and dizzying hike – to a remote parish church in the hills of Tuscany that is associated with an impressive array of fourteenth-century objects, some of which are still there and some of which can be traced back to it. These objects are the subject of this essay.

The polyptych with The Crucifixion and Saints, presently in The Courtauld Gallery (Plate XIII), was arguably the last great commission undertaken by Bernardo Daddi and his workshop. Beneath the central panel is an inscription indicating the artist’s name and the date 1348, providing a chronological point of reference for the commission and indicating a terminus point for Daddi’s career, as he died on 8 August of that year, likely as a result of causes related to the Black Death. The painting once adorned an altar within the intimate space of the parish church of San Giorgio a Ruballa (Osteria Nuova di Bagno a Ripoli), founded by at least 1273 and renovated around 1337. The glimmer of the Trecento interior is almost completely lost, now overshadowed by the Baroque stucco work of Giovan Martino Portogalli (1707) and the architectural redesign by Niccolo Matas (1863). Yet three early Trecento works are still housed within. The first is a large devotional panel with the Maesta: The Virgin and Child with Angels and Saints Matthias the Apostle and George, dated with a partially abraided inscription to 1336 or 1337 and thought to be the work variously of Maso di Banco, Orcagna, Bernardo Daddi or an artist in his shop, or an anonymous painter conventionally referred to as the Maestro di San Giorgio a Ruballa (Fig. 10.1). Next is a choir book assigned to the workshop of Pacino di Bonaguida and stylistically dated to the 1330s – (Plate XIV).

The outbreak of the Second World War in 1939 brought mixed fortunes for Southern Rhodesia. Whereas the colony previously relied largely on imports for manufactured goods, it now turned to local products because of the interruptions in international trade caused by the war. Imports became increasingly unavailable, inducing scarcity and high demand. Shortages stimulated calls for local industry to fill the vacuum. Consequently, an import substitution industrialisation (ISI) drive temporarily developed. However, this impact of the Second World War was not unique to Southern Rhodesia. It was also felt in some other parts of sub-Saharan Africa. The only exception to this was South Africa, which had a comparatively established secondary industry by the time the war broke out. Not all industrialisation was sparked off by the conditions of the war, however. For example, in British West Africa, Lord William M. Hailey had already recommended in 1938 that Britain allow her dependencies to develop local secondary industries. While these factors are acknowledged, the impact of the war stood out, as it accelerated industrial development.

At the same time, secondary industrial development in colonies such as Kenya and Southern Rhodesia was aided by the greater buying power of their White settler population. Southern Rhodesia had the crucial advantage of being a self-governing colony, a status that gave it some considerable control of the domestic economy. Southern Rhodesia under the Responsible Government was free to manipulate tariffs, something denied to every other colony. Shigeru Akita has observed a similar tendency in British India during the Great Depression, wherein a self-governing India took full advantage of her fiscal independence to promote her industries, which had the effect of elbowing out Britain’s efforts to dominate the Indian market.

Without a doubt, Jorge Icaza’s Huasipungo (1934) is one of the most famous Ecuadorian novels of all time. It is, in fact, one of the few recognisable examples of Ecuadorian writing that has transcended the limits of national and regional circulation, reaching not only Spanish-speaking audiences but also readers beyond the Hispanic world: it has been translated into and published in several languages, including English, French and Japanese. Proof of the widespread reach of the novel is the multiple reeditions it has undergone since its original publication in 1934, not to mention that it has also been adapted for theatre and into children’s literature.

The national and international attention that Icaza’s novel has managed to attract makes it a unique case study for Ecuadorian literature. Not only because it is an early example of literary success from a country that is often invisible in terms of literary recognition and circulation, but also because of the effects of this success on the development of Ecuadorian literature and – more broadly – its impact on the ways in which the Ecuadorian nation is imagined in narrative. In this chapter, I argue that to discuss how the Ecuadorian nation is thought of in contemporary fiction, it is first necessary to revisit Huasipungo in order to challenge some supposedly solved questions raised by Icaza’s seminal work. To do so, I revise the critical attention received by Huasipungo, attention that helped it in its positioning as the non plus ultra of Ecuadorian writing and the national novel of Ecuador. My argument is that, from a normative position in the cultural field, attained thanks to a consecrated status granted by institutions including literary criticism and the education system, Icaza and other writers from his generation established a national model that conditioned further developments of Ecuadorian literature and limited the frameworks under which we understand what the Ecuadorian nation is.

The national model I identify in Huasipungo frames the Ecuadorian nation in connection to a sense of ‘uniqueness’ to be found in history and territory. That is to say, it imagines Ecuador in connection to place and time, an essentialist approach that – rather than being the product of an accurate representation of reality – is a construct outlined by Icaza’s views.

As the heads of the Greek and Latin Churches sought to unite their respective institutions during the Council of Florence in 1439, they and their entourages were treated to elaborate, public displays of the Florentines’ devotion to two of their most important patron saints: John the Baptist, and the early Christian bishop, Zenobius (d. c. 424). On 26 April the council participants attended the translation of Saint Zenobius’s relics from the crypt of the medieval cathedral of Santa Reparata to a chapel dedicated to him in the east tribune of the new cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore (Fig. 15.1). Slightly less than two months later, the same prestigious cohort witnessed the annual celebration of the Baptist’s feast on 23 and 24 June. The April and June events were celebrated with a great deal of pomp, and the visiting ecclesiastical dignitaries must have departed their host city with the impression that the Florentines accorded a similar amount and kind of attention to both of their saintly protectors.

One would never arrive at the same conclusion today. Since 1975, Saint Zenobius’s traditional feast of 25 May has been observed on 10 May, when its celebration is efficiently, if ahistorically, bundled with that of Florence’s other sainted (arch)bishop, Antoninus Pierozzi (1389–1459). The very modest recognition of Zenobius on that day, which consists of special masses and the display of the saint’s head reliquary (Plate XXII) near the Saint Zenobius Chapel, largely passes unnoticed. The feast of Saint John, in contrast, is celebrated from morning to night each 24 June with a procession, complete with a corps of drummers and the choreographed movements of costumed flag-bearers, Mass in the cathedral, a rousing game of calcio storico, and an impressive display of fireworks over the river Arno. The discrepancies in the degree to which each saint’s feast is presently celebrated in Florence have long found a parallel in the historical and art historical literature, which unequivocally privileges the place the civic patron, John the Baptist, occupied in Florentine devotions over that of the episcopal patron, Zenobius.

Forecwide – Prefatory Matter

Translations into what is now called Old English are by no means a novelty of the twenty-first century or a pastime activity practised by ambitious literary scholars and linguistic historians, lofgeorn, ‘eager for praise’, in a field related to their profession. Translations of modern texts into Neo-Old English have also been undertaken on the basis of the pleasure principle, as both Peter S. Baker and Manfred Görlach have pointed out in their studies. The beginnings of translating foreign language texts into English are much earlier and closely linked to the early stages of literary culture in the English language – some 1300 years ago. To be sure, the list of translators whose names have come down to us is not a very long one, but it can boast of an outstanding and famous representative: King Alfred the Great. Alfred was king of the West Saxons from 871 to c. 886 and king of the Anglo-Saxons from c. 886 to 899. He and his circle of learned clerics and scholars initiated the so-called Alfredian Renaissance and actively contributed to it with a series of translations into English.

In the context of his ambitious project, the translation of Pope Gregory’s highly influential Latin handbook Cura Pastoralis, Alfred reflected on the difficult tasks resulting from such an undertaking. These tasks must have been especially complex and demanding since Alfred’s source text belongs to a long-standing and highly developed tradition of literary activities and culture, that is, Latin, while the target language, the West Saxon dialect of Old English, was still in the process of developing into a literary language.

Commenting on the difficulties connected to his project, Alfred provided a few hints relating to his methods in his preface to his translation of Pope Gregory’s Cura Pastoralis. These methods are quite simple, to be sure – but their simplicity allows for an easy and highly flexible application to the task: ‘[wende ic ða boc] on Englisc ðe is genemned on Læden “Pastoralis” ond on Englisc “Hierdeboc”, hwilum word be worde, hwilum andgit of andgiete’ [I translated into English the book called Pastoralis in Latin and ‘Shepherd’s Book’ in English, sometimes word by word, sometimes meaning for meaning].

Leprosy deeply impacted on the lives of medieval European populations, even though its prevalence declined after the thirteenth century. Social attitudes and responses to the disease varied in time and space, making its history and the reason for its decline difficult to reconstruct or explain with any certainty. One hypothesis for this decline is cross immunity between the biologically related pathogens responsible for leprosy and tuberculosis; that is, cases of leprosy may have diminished due to the increasing prevalence of tuberculosis. However, without ruling out some partial impact of tuberculosis, other environmental, social and biological factors should also be considered when examining changes in the prevalence of leprosy. This chapter explores how different biosocial factors affected – either increased or decreased – an individual’s capacity to mount a proper immunological response against leprosy, in order to explain changes in its prevalence in medieval Europe. In particular, the chapter uses a syndemic approach to consider how a set of different biosocial factors could have worked together, synergistically (or counter-synergistically), to affect an individual’s capacity to fight leprosy.

This chapter does not offer a complete historical and bioarchaeological review of leprosy in medieval Europe. Instead, it uses historical and bioarchaeological evidence to explore how larger bioecological environments and social structures converged to produce infected or uninfected spaces. This, in turn, reveals that complex and heterogeneous immunological landscapes marked the disease’s prevalence. The syndemics approach helps to expand the ‘immunity’ concept by replacing it with ‘immune competence’. It also generates a new dialogue among and between disciplines such as immunology, bioarchaeology and history to reconstruct potential interactions between them. It equally helps to identify mortality burden contributions of chronic infectious diseases and biosocial factors in past populations.

Hansen’s disease is an infectious disease caused by Mycobacterium leprae, which com-monly generates a chronic infection primarily affecting nerves and skin.

In a 2006 article analysing the state of affairs of Ecuadorian literature at the beginning of the twenty-first century, Carlos Arcos argues that Ecuadorian society changed more radically in the period between the late 1980s and the early 2000s than it had changed in the previous two centuries. In his view, this transformation was to result in the emergence of a different kind of Ecuadorian literature. That is, a new type of writing that would emerge from – and engage with – the breakdown of social paradigms, the shattering of collective expectations in the social order and the scattering of Ecuadorian society around the globe that followed the hectic 1990s:

So far, I have argued that the changes Arcos points out find their origins in the Feriado Bancario, a watershed experience that this book deems essential for understanding contemporary Ecuador. My proposal in the previous chapter rests on the idea that contemporary Ecuadorian literature has emerged to meet the challenges that post-crisis Ecuadorian society presents. In doing so, authors such as Leonardo Valencia, Gabriela Alemán and Carlos Arcos create fictions that reflect and engage with the transnational experiences that have become part of the fabric of twenty-first century Ecuador.

As fiction that navigates national boundaries, contemporary Ecuadorian literature not only reimagines Ecuador. By transgressing and redefining frontiers, it also dialogues with a wider issue: through novels such as the ones analysed in the previous chapter, which are informed by transnationality and help us to see Ecuador as a transnational space, contemporary Ecuadorian literature engages with and challenges a broader discussion regarding the exhaustion of single-nation frameworks for understanding and reading literature. This discussion, as I seek to demonstrate in the next pages, relates not only to the Latin American context but also to a ‘global’ domain: that is, to World Literature.

Existing conventional wisdom on the Rhodesian economy during UDI posits that the state muzzled organised secondary industry, which became acquiescent. This assertion captures developments on the political front. However, this chapter shows that in the economic sphere, industrialists remained forceful in pursuit of their interests. They manipulated the state’s overreliance on the manufacturing sector to provide employment and consumer goods vis-à-vis sanctions. The chapter also revisits the accepted belief that UDI was the period of high import substitution industrialisation (ISI) and economic nationalism. In this vein, it examines the interaction between the state and industrialists over the administration and implementation of the import control policy and currency allocations – the two major economic instruments of the UDI regime. The chapter suggests that Tor Skålnes’s notion of societal corporatism – the changing role of interest groups and their relationship with the state, as well as their collaboration in a broader sense – may be a more useful way to understand the relationship between the ARnI and the state during this period.

In addition, the chapter analyses the numerous interactions between the state and industrialists over several challenges affecting the economy in general and the manufacturing sector in particular. Both the Rhodesian war of liberation and the constitutional negotiations with Britain attracted comments from the industrialists, and as such warrant examination. The chapter begins in 1966 with the imposition of sanctions by both Britain and the United Nations (UN), which necessitated the introduction of a new economic policy. It then moves on to examine the implementation of the economic policies, the challenges faced, and industry’s views on decolonisation and African majority rule. It ends in 1979, with a discussion on the nature, pattern, and structure of secondary industry that emerged during UDI.

UDI, Economic Policy, and State–Industry Relations

The UDI in November 1965 had huge economic and political consequences for Rhodesia. Following the White rebellion, Britain and the UN imposed economic sanctions on Rhodesia. The sanctions were applied piecemeal. Britain initially introduced financial sanctions from 12 November 1965 to 16 December 1966. British embargoes were also imposed on Rhodesian tobacco, sugar, and other products, and Rhodesia’s Commonwealth trading preferences were suspended, as was the country’s access to the London capital markets.