This Middle Ages is expanding and all-consuming. It devours the Renaissance/ Early Modern, the Baroque, and the Classical – all periods which do not speak to the popular imaginary. One day it may well be The Past, the only historical past aside from the Bible and the American Revolution, in that imaginary.

William Calin penned these lines a few years ago relating to what he saw as an unwelcome trend in (predominantly) US popular culture. Calin's critique first and foremost targeted media such as film, television, and literature, and not so much – if at all – digital games. Yet it may seem, even at a cursory glance, that his verdict is all the truer of video games that use history as their subject matter. The medievalist imaginary features prominently in such games, so prominently that it prompts the question whether this leaves any space for the depiction of other historical periods. So, in this chapter, I ask this question specifically about Early Modernity: is it devoured by the Middle Ages within digital games?

To pursue this enquiry, I employ a reception-centred approach focusing on the perceptions of these games by their audiences – players, reviewers and travellers within the paratextual ecosystem surrounding digital games – and not primarily on the character and content of the games themselves. In this respect it is not crucial whether the game in question utilises historical entities in sufficient depth and coherence to be labelled a historical game according to a more production-side centred approach, so I do not consider the matter here.

During the late Middle Ages in France, like the rest of Europe, the prosecution of war grew dramatically in scale and complexity. Nowhere is this more regularly evident in the historical record than in the various municipal registers that towns kept to manage and account for their own defense and to support their lord's passing armies. Much important work on urban fortifications and finances has been done to help us better gauge the shift to bastioned enceintes during the age of gunpowder weapons and the growth of public authority that made them possible. Yet as a subject of historical investigation, municipal account registers remain little studied in terms of their genesis, purposes and use as instruments of negotiation and control. They proved decisive during the initial decades of the Hundred Years’ War, where towns suddenly assumed more responsibilities over local military affairs, above all their enceintes, along with the financial means to fulfil them. This shift reflected a new stage of development for the bonnes villes as they scrambled after the 1340s to provide for common defense and other needs. The accounting practices they used enabled them to enhance the warmaking roles of towns. As towns undertook more ambitious goals, rudimentary bookkeeping practices gave way to more sustained and sophisticated forms of managerial accounting; while not planned, these changes led to the development of a culture of planning and a permanent, professional municipal administration. The monarchy and territorial lords created oversight authorities but tended for practical reasons to concede a good amount of fiscal autonomy to their towns. Common accountancy standards developed organically and then intentionally with the establishment of Chambres des comptes in the fourteenth century.

INTRODUCTION

This case is from the regality court of Broughton, like that of the ‘Leith Witches’ of 1579 edited above. As with that case, here we have the minutes of the court, summarising the accused's offence and the court's deliberations, but no full dittay.

The case illustrates the overlap found occasionally between witchcraft and beneficial magic. William Murray's crime is categorically stated to have been ‘witchecraft and sorcerie’, but he was treated basically as a magical practitioner. His first offence was the use of magic to heal John Hutson's child, and there was also mention of the healing of the son of the goodwife of Wariston ( Jean Livingston, a member of the elite who later became notorious). Murray was not said to have committed malefice, nor was there any mention of a demonic pact. Nevertheless, this was a criminal court, not a kirk session, and he received a criminal sentence rather than being made to do penance.

The interrogators were John Brand, minister of the Canongate, and Robert Pont, minister of St Cuthbert’s, both veteran ministers who had taken leading roles in the church. Pont was also a noted intellectual with an interest in quasi-magical topics.2 Brand's role is natural, as the court was attached to the burgh of the Canongate, but the reason for Pont's involvement does not appear. It would be interesting to know whether it was Brand and Pont who employed the words ‘witchecraft and sorcerie’ to describe Murray's offence, but this cannot be ascertained for certain from the record as we have it.

Murray's healing rituals, involving the blood of a cat, a bannock with special ingredients, and a Gaelic incantation, are of interest.

New Making and Makers

As important as musicians, journalists, and collectors were in promoting Cremonese violins, makers and restorers also had a strong hand in confirming their superiority. New makers pledged allegiance to classic models and replicated the physical appearance of instruments made by Cremonese masters. For their part, restorers kept the originals in circulation, camouflaging structural defects wrought by age and use, and material changes occasioned by their work.

Throughout this book, I have traced how some of the major Scottish literary productions of the late-fourteenth to the mid-sixteenth century encourage their audiences to draw on the past as an essential component of shaping and reshaping their conceptions of Scottishness. The book set out to examine how late medieval writers of northern England and Scotland sought to engage memory – a fundamental part of European medieval culture – to formulate and articulate expressions of Scottish national identity that was primarily predicated on Anglo-Scottish tension, real or imagined. Memoria takes on various forms in these writings, and the texts of this study reveal a multifaceted relationship between memory and the cultivation of national feeling.

The preceding six chapters have explored a range of texts, from Gray's Scalacronica to Wedderburn's Complaynt of Scotland. All of these works demonstrate that, between the mid-fourteenth and mid-sixteenth centuries, memory informed, permeated and enhanced textual articulations of Scottish identity at specific moments in the history of the nation. They draw together several modes of memory – genealogy, historiography, invented memory, enforced forgetting, dream vision – to construct a framework of collective national imagining. The memorial modes reach across both Latin and vernacular texts and indicate a sustained engagement with remembering and rewriting the past throughout late medieval Scotland. For texts such as Gray's Scalacronica, Holland's Buke of the Howlat and Andrew of Wyntoun's Original Chronicle, borders – physical and psychological – provide a focus for the cultural production of national memory; a border's presence, and permeability, becomes a distinctive feature of the literary imagination. In quite different ways, Gray and Holland see the Anglo-Scottish border as a dominant marker of identity.

The Yoruba of Southwestern Nigeria have a deep-rooted tradition of entrepreneurship and mobility. This trait is inherited from the pre-colonial economy, where families held distinct economic specializations and controlled various occupational guilds. During the early years of colonial rule, the Yoruba emerged as one of the primary craft masters in Nigeria and across West Africa. Their long-standing tradition of migration to places like Ghana and Kano took on new dimensions under British colonial rule.

The central theme of this book revolves around the economic and social history of the Yoruba diaspora in Kano and Tamale, focusing on how diaspora identity evolved within the ever-shifting landscapes of colonial and post-colonial contexts. It revisits the scholarly discourse on the tensions between political structures, identity construction, unequal citizenship, and the dynamics of social exclusion and inclusion. It is reminiscent of Frantz Fanon's cautionary observations regarding the nationalisms of exclusion in countries like Côte d’Ivoire, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ghana, and Senegal in the early 1960s where “nationals” incited against “foreigners” while advocating for opportunities to be reserved exclusively for “authentic” citizens.

Following the declaration of independence, migrant communities found themselves subjected to hostile actions by the native populations. This hostility forced migrants to evacuate, while their shops and properties fell victim to arson or looting. For example, Senegalese attacked Sudanese migrants, and Senegalese migrants in Congo underwent similar ordeals as they were compelled to abandon their settlements in Leopoldville and Elizabethville.

In an article headed ‘Germany wants more Irish culture. Why can't we deliver?’ published in the Irish Times on 23 October 2010, Derek Scally begins:

If the bust of Felix Mendelssohn had feet they would have been tapping along with the music echoing through the vaulted hall below the Irish Embassy in Berlin. In the old home of the Mendelssohn Bank, the new traditional Irish music group Cirrus give it their all and soon even the German junior minister in row two is jiggling his foot in time with the music.

The evening is a welcome distraction from the doom and gloom about Ireland in the German media, but it's not quite what it seems…

Government agencies do tremendous work promoting Ireland abroad but, looking in from outside, there appears to be a worrying gap between the reality and the lip service the State pays to promoting what makes Ireland uniquely Irish.

Scally goes on to explore the contrast between traditional Irish music in Germany, ‘where the hunger for Irish culture is almost insatiable’, and the ‘apathy’ of Irish government initiatives at home in the enterprise of promoting and indeed selling traditional music for a ready market abroad. He makes a persuasive case for traditional music as a commodity whose commercial potential has been underdeveloped in Europe (and above all in Germany), notwithstanding a more general assent to traditional music as a flagship of Irish culture, so that as a living expression of Irish culture and history it remains under-resourced as a means of attracting European tourists to Ireland.

Witchcraft was a statutory offence in Scotland between 1563 and 1736, and the authorities held many trials and executions for witchcraft in this period. This book presents a selection of the records of these trials.

Witch-hunting was intense in Scotland, but every European country executed witches, and witch beliefs shared broad similarities all over Europe. Peasants believed that witches could harm them, their families and their livelihoods. Witchcraft accusations often originated in quarrels between women, and women's curses seem to have been feared more than men’s. About 85 per cent of Scottish witches were women. One typical pattern of accusation was that someone would suffer a misfortune which they would then link back to a quarrel that they had had with someone else; they would conclude that the other person was getting their revenge through witchcraft. However, people usually sought to end such quarrels through reconciliation; peasants rarely seem to have taken the initiative in demanding the execution of their local witches. Numerous reconciliations, successful at the time, are recorded in the documents below.

Educated people shared some of the beliefs of the common folk, but they also developed a set of distinctive views about witchcraft, which can be collectively described as demonology. In this, witches were held to make personal pacts with the Devil, entering his service and gaining from him the power to do harm. One particular power they received was the power to fly, and they could also inflict illness and death. Witches met collectively to worship the Devil. Thus, the beliefs of the peasants and the elite were compatible with each other, but still distinct. For the peasants, the crime was practising witchcraft, while for the elite, it was a thought crime: the crime of being a witch.

Toleration, Union, and the Protestant Enlightenment

Proposals for union between the churches of Europe were mainstream at the turn of the eighteenth century. For all the scholarly concern with the emergence of toleration in the Enlightenment, pluralism resulted from the failure to fashion united confessional polities whether they were comprehensive of diversity or uniform. Early modern Europeans took a divided Christendom to be scandalous. The logic of the peace of Westphalia (1648), a stalemate that ended the seventeenth-century wars of religion, was to fashion a gospel imperative into a geopolitical desideratum. The memory of those wars and the fear that history might repeat itself haunted the eighteenth-century European imagination. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz sought rapprochement between Catholics and Protestants with Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, bishop of Meaux, the Franciscan Christoval Royas de Spinola, bishop of Wiener Neustadt, and Gerhard Wolter Molanus, Lutheran abbot of Loccum. Uniting the Church of England with the Gallican Church was the central theme of the correspondence between William Wake, archbishop of Canterbury, and the likes of Louis Ellies Dupin and Piers de Girardin. Lutheran syncretists like Molanus and John Ernest Grabe, influenced by Georg Calixtus, looked to reconcile Catholics,

Lutherans, and Calvinists by removing differences about adiaphora. Once the challenges of reconciling doctrine with Tridentine Catholicism proved insurmountable, Leibniz turned to unity among Protestants.

The canon of Irish traditional music, which was largely dominated by white heterosexual middle class ethnically Irish men, was primarily constructed within a nationalist framework during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with the help of nationalist organisations such as the Gaelic League and Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann. As a consequence, Irish traditional music became, in Smyth's words:

one of the principal cultural signifiers of Irish identity… Traditional music's position as an easily recognizable sonic representation of Irishness was consolidated by the development of a complex infrastructure throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (including various amateur and academic initiatives) which guaranteed it a crucial role within Irish cultural life.

As nationalist ideologies such as historical symbolic representations of Ireland in place in the eighteenth century reinforced patriarchal hegemonic beliefs, Irish traditional music's connection with nationalism ultimately contributed to the exclusion of women from the Irish traditional music scene. Adding to this, songs and poetry which depicted such representations of Ireland as a woman were mostly performed by men and therefore women were largely silenced from the image and sound of Irish traditional music to begin with.

With the establishment of the Free State, Irish traditional music became of even more critical importance to the new Irish identity as it represented Ireland's Gaelic past, bolstered notions of “Irishness”, and was inherently foregrounded in ideas of authenticity, ethnicity, and nationalism.

It was important for the navy that as many French mariners as possible could be taken off the sea. Head Money made ships of war very acceptable targets, but merchant vessels also carried sailors. Privateers carried many more men, as they needed to fight as well as to take possession of their captures. One way and another, a large number of French sailors landed up in England. By the end of 1758 the French admitted that the British had 20,000 prisoners to France's 3,000. It was important that the equivalent captured English were exchanged as soon as possible, and cartels were organised as soon as it was feasible to do so, to bring English sailors back into service quickly. Few prisoner exchanges took place after 1757 when most British prisoners had been repatriated. As described below, prisoner exchange in the West Indies, where ‘flags of truce’ were used as a device to trade with the enemy, was a law unto itself.

The status of French prisoners was of concern before war was declared, and the London Gazette carried a long article about it;

There having been various and injurious reports relating to the State of the French sailors detained in England, it is thought proper to remove any prejudice that may be entertained to give the following account of their treatment.

Introduction

With changing socioeconomic and cultural dynamics, environmental structures and settlement patterns have undergone major transformations: they have transformed from naturally rural to urban settings. Notably, Africa is the region with the greatest rate of urbanization and urban growth in contemporary times. African urbanization is propelled by a combination of factors, some of which force its inhabitants out of rural regions while others pull/draw them into cities. On one hand, the lack of basic amenities and the outbreak of environmental issues often force people out of rural cities. On the other hand, the availability or promise of socioeconomic opportunities – such as education, employment, and healthcare – attracts many, particularly young, people to urban areas. From ancient times, international rivers such as the Nile, Niger, and Senegal have contributed to urban development by transforming surrounding riparian zones into trade hubs and by serving as vital routes that connect distant and nearby settlements to these hubs. In contemporary times, the role of rivers in urbanization is observed in its provision of communication and transportation channels for the migration of persons from rural settlements to growing cities. However, there are some evident impacts, mostly negative, which urbanization and urban expansion have had on river systems, their ecology, and the ecosystems of riparian zones. To gain a deeper understanding of the interrelationship between rivers and cities, the discussion in this chapter will incorporate the ecological impacts of urbanization processes on river systems, the socioeconomic dynamics of the rivers–cities relationship, and workable mitigation and management strategies to redress such adverse implications.

Two works within Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, MS Brogyntyn ii.1 seem aimed at the education of young women. One is the life of St Katherine of Alexandria, a lengthy prose saint's life, and the other is ‘The good wyfe wold a pylgremage’, a shorter advice poem. While both of these works clearly deal with education and young women, they are otherwise quite different: different genres, different registers, and, in some ways, different social classes. St Katherine of Alexandria was a very popular saint, a patron saint of young women and of learning. She was famous for her mastery of classical learning and Christian doctrine. She was also a patron saint of royalty; her cult was introduced to England by the royal family in the twelfth century. By the fifteenth century, her popularity had trickled down and expanded across social classes, making her popular among gentry with ambitions of upward mobility. In contrast to St Katherine's life, ‘The good wyfe wold a pylgremage’ is clearly focused on middle-class concerns and directed at middle-class women, with each verse addressed to a young woman. And, of course, the genre of a short poem with its regular chorus could not be much further from the lengthy, ponderous prose of the saint's life. These two literary works are so dissimilar that it would be easy to dismiss any relation between them, but I see surprising resonances.

Introduction

Convicted traitor, Robert Devereux, 2nd earl of Essex, aged thirty-four, resplendently but soberly clad in a black velvet gown, satin suit, and felt hat, climbed the scaffold in February 1601, and addressed his audience:

My Lords, and you my Christian brethren, who are to be witnesses of this my just punishment, I confess to the glory of God that I am a most wretched sinner, and that my sins are more in number than the hairs of my head; that I have bestowed my youth in pride, lust, uncleanness, vain glory, and divers other sins, according to the fashion of this world, wherein I have offended most grievously my God … for all which I humbly beseech our Saviour Christ to be the Mediator unto the Eternal Majesty for my pardon; especially for this my last sin, this great, this bloody, this crying, and this infectious sin, whereby so many for love of me, have ventured their lives and souls, and have been drawn to offend God, to offend their Sovereign, and to offend the world, which is as great a grief unto me as may be. Lord Jesus, forgive it us, and forgive it me, the most wretched of all.

Traditionally interpreted according to the conventions of the ars moriendi tradition, this passionate speech in which Essex confessed his sins, showed remorse, and asked for forgiveness is generally seen as an excellent example of the genre of last dying speeches. Even those who claim that Essex was merely playing a role rather than being sincerely religious view him as a penitent figure.

In a letter from 1752, the surveyor, mine-owner, and antiquarian Lewis Morris is caught worrying anxiously at his brother about their newly founded Welsh revivalist society. Referring to it initially as the ‘British Society’, a name based on the much-vaunted ancestral connection between the Welsh and the Ancient Britons, Lewis nevertheless seems wary about emphasizing their ‘original’ Britishness too bluntly:

The society would, in fact, become best known under this ‘disguised’ name of ‘Cymmrodorion’, a relatively obscure Welsh word often defined as ‘aborigines’, but retaining the sense (in Lewis's gloss) of ‘Old Inhabitants’. As this name suggests, such claims of descent from Britain's first possessors were symbolically central to eighteenth-century Welsh revivalism. However, there was also – for Lewis Morris – a degree of malleability regarding this traditional Welsh narrative, and a tactical politics to making this ancestral claim: if it was perceived purely as national resentment (as in the quotation from the Tatler that opens this book), it might lose any cachet gained from association with the post-1707 state's Britishness.