On 29 December 1170, Archbishop Thomas Becket was brutally murdered in Canterbury Cathedral. Accounts of the horrific event spread rapidly throughout England and Europe, fostering the development of a cult that encouraged widespread veneration and engendered a fascination with the Canterbury martyr that has lasted until the present time. Soon after the murder, visual imagery depicting Thomas Becket and his martyrdom began to appear. As Richard Gameson has remarked, these early depictions were ‘simultaneously a byproduct of his cult, and a major catalyst for its development’. Some of the first works portraying the saint were mosaics and wall-paintings created in Sicily and France, and during the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries images of the saint appeared in other genres, including manuscript illuminations, stained-glass windows, sculptures, seals, pilgrim tokens, and enamel reliquary caskets from Limoges.

INTRODUCTION

In Shetland, there were several late witchcraft cases, unlike Orkney, where the bulk of trials seem to have finished in the 1640s. Shetland had seven cases during the years 1673–5 and six from 1700 until 1725. In comparison, Orkney may have had only one case after 1675, in 1708.

On 9 June 1708, two sisters and one brother of the Ratter family from Collaster (‘Colvaseter’) in Sandness, Andrew, Katherine and Elspeth (or Elizabeth), were brought before the presbytery of Shetland. They were accused of witchcraft, sorcery and deluding the people – phrases from the 1563 witchcraft act. They were questioned, and a series of witnesses, mainly neighbours, were cited, men and women. The witnesses testified that the Ratters went to their neighbours’ houses, begging for food and other items. If they were refused, they cursed the people involved. Shortly afterwards, sickness and death occurred, allegedly as a result of the curse. There were also several successful reconciliations in which a sick person recovered. The Ratters argued against these allegations, and seem to have claimed some healing powers.

The three Ratters did not always agree, since Elspeth accused Andrew and Katherine of bewitching her. A further sister, Christian Ratter, was also mentioned, but does not seem to have been under suspicion. The presbytery’s enquiries also identified another witchcraft suspect, Margaret Watson, who was also interrogated. One of the neighbours, James Jeromson, gave information both about the Ratters and about Watson, but this is the only recorded connection between their cases. Watson was investigated again in 1724–5, and all the documents relating to her case are edited below in the present volume. The story of Katherine Ratter has lived on in oral tradition, giving information about her trial. It is rare today to find oral tradition about individual witchcraft trials from around 1700.

This appendix brings together all the songs in the above-translated texts for which there exists a thirteenth-century notation that unequivocally indicates a fixed rhythmic pattern in line with the rhythmic modes. For more details, see ‘Rhythm’ in the ‘Songs and Music’ section of the Introduction (pp. 34–6).

This chapter is about hospitality, literal and figurative, and the difficulties of disentangling the difference as represented in the first of the moralized Bibles produced for the Capetians in the early thirteenth century. Through the lens offered by the final, horrific story told in the book of Judges, it addresses the fusion of hospitality and hostility, its only apparent opposite – hostipitality, as Jacques Derrida phrases it – represented in the words and images of Vienna, ÖNB 2554. Hosting quarrels arise in the Bible moralisée not only when Sodomites (in 2554's French vernacular) come to claim li Dyakenes (the Deacon), a guest under his host's protection. They arise not only when the rape and death of the Deacon's wife lead to war between men of the city and the tribes of Israel. In the moralizing images and text, hosting quarrels also engage the sacraments, specifically figured as the Eucharist threatened by heretics (populicanz and mescreanz), and pagan philosophy protected by Jerome and Augustine against the rise of Aristotelianism at the university of Paris. All this is made explicit in two slim columns of texts lined up with their corresponding biblical and commentary images.

Many early medieval saints struggled to work with their materials, particularly wood, which quickly degrades in moist climates without regular maintenance. Cadog of Llancarfan (d. 580 C.E.), for example, ‘[worked] bodily with his hands’ (manibus corporaliter operando) to build his monastery, moving earth into a tumulus and constructing a wooden kastil upon it. When Cadog departed for Ireland to study at Lismore, leaving his followers in charge, he returned after three years to find ‘his principal monastery destroyed, and the timber of the roofs scattered rudely’ (suum principale monasterium dirutum tignisque laquearium rudero … dispersis intuitus). Cadog, ‘[grieving] at the downfall’ (ruine condoluit), brought his disciples and ‘workmen’ (operariis) to the forest to harvest new wood (lignorum materiem) and rebuild the community's home. Later construction projects at Llancarfan, as described by Lifris, Cadog's hagiographer (ca. late eleventh century), sometimes assumed life-and-death significance: while cutting timber to build an oratory at Neath, Cadog's crew of twelve operariis murdered their professional rival, the Irish craftsman Linguri, ‘a truly skilful master-builder,’ because he ‘surpassed [the others] in [his] skill and ability’ to work with wood (artificiosum … architectum … paululum post, omnes artificio et uirtute excedebat). This tale, a grotesque parody of the carpenter Christ and his twelve apostles, reveals the potentially high stakes when operarii, frustrated in working with materia, begin to resent their rivals, even to the point of homicide.

Queens were typically accompanied by many persons at public and private events. As this brief description from the coronation of Elizabeth Woodville shows, the queen's entourage often included her ladies and gentlewomen as well as various officials, well-wishers and probably hangers-on. The question here is who, of the many individuals who surrounded a queen, could reliably be counted as being members of her affinity.

The term ‘affinity’ has often been used for this body of people by late medievalists, but it defies easy description. Scholars have characterised this group slightly differently, sometimes even contradictorily, with the result being that what we call the affinity lacks concrete definition. Affinity has been used interchangeably with retinue and at least one scholar believes that it possesses the same basic features as a clientele. Then again, one may regard the affinity as being on the same footing as a network, whether kinship, social, cultural or even political. However, an affinity was not necessarily the same as a network, although there could be significant overlaps.

The argument I put forward in the preceding article will no doubt attract many to contradict it; I fear it will be very hard to demolish a generally held opinion, and all the more deeply so because it has been agreed without reflection or reasoning. Experience must be more powerful than anything I could say, and I write only to provoke it. While waiting until experience has given rise to conviction, quotations and examples could not be adduced too generously: it's vital, by every possible means, to shine a light on this question and destroy a prejudice that has, for many artists, been a cause of discouragement, and whose influence is still so damaging for the direction of musical studies in general, and for the taste of the public.

So I shall now add to what I have said about works whose power has survived the passage of time, choosing my examples only from the most familiar compositions: What is fresher or more beautiful in its calm majesty than Palestrina's madrigal Alla riva del Tebro? It's clearly a lasting piece, and thousands of years will in no way alter the purity of its form or the charm of its expression. People will say, ‘It's not tuneful enough, and its effect stems really just from the chordal sequences and the successive voice entries. No one is denying that its harmony will ensure its survival, it's just the melody that's the problem’. – Very well. In that case, proofs will not be lacking.

Peter Smart (1569–1652), rector of Boldon, Durham, and prebendary of Durham cathedral, might have remained obscure had he not reacted so vehemently against the liturgical innovations and excesses of his younger colleague John Cosin (1595–1672). Both careers were transformed, Cosin becoming a ceremonialist celebrity, and Smart a long-term prisoner. The dispute between them reflected deepening divisions with the Caroline church.

On Candlemas Day, the feast of the Purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary, 2 February 1628, John Cosin lit the high altar and the east end of Durham cathedral choir and chancel with more candles, more flames of light, than seen there since the reformation. Cosin's Candlemas extravaganza was a reverencing of the holiest part of the church, an act of devotion for God and the Virgin Mary, but also an announcement, a provocation, and a material manifestation of the controversial ecclesiastical tendency later associated with Laudianism. Cambridge wits, in the circle of Samuel Ward, master of Sidney Sussex College, quickly shared news from Durham, that

Franziska's visits to the Petofy house continued for several weeks, but then broke off rather conspicuously, and even the count's visits to Salesiner Street, which had gone on for a time, stopped. It was said that he was off traveling, and this was indeed so. Finally, he sent word from Paris and apologized in the most obliging way for his abrupt departure. But as obliging as his words were, they were still cooler than usual, or at least more reserved.

Franziska could sense this, but had become too accustomed to such changes to give them any great weight.

It was different in the small circle that continued to gather in the countess's salon on every third evening. Here, a degree of importance was attached to Franziska's absence, and even more so to the count's departure, nor did they refrain from whispering the strangest things among themselves. The old count must be completely besotted with the young lady, or at least interested in her to the point of distraction; the entire trip to Paris must be nothing short of an escape. The countess, furthermore, knowing the count's stubbornness, had initially objected to the trip—with the intention, of course, of making him all the more determined to go. Others dismissed all of this, saying that the old count's jours de fête were over. This only earned them the mockery of the habitues of the club and the casino, who never grew tired of pointing to the seventy-year-old Goethe, or even King Sigurd Ring, who fell passionately in love at ninety and went a-wooing. The count was surely capable of more, full-blooded Hungarian that he was.