Bestiaries supply knowledge required, in Saint Augustine's view, to read and understand God's word and works. Two metaphorical books, the Book of Beasts and the Book of Nature, correspond to each other and each responds to Holy Scripture. So the first aspect of biblical encounter to explore in this chapter concerns the character of the meeting arranged by a third-century Greek author between animal lore from ancient sources and a large variety of biblical verses. Physiologus, identified only by his role as Naturalist, brings them into relationship in order to explain how knowledge of animals may illuminate Christian understanding of God's word and world. When we pay close attention to the overlap between the Book of Books and the Book of Beasts, we also discover the bestiary as a borderland space where Jews and Christians intersect by virtue of their shared link to the Hebrew Bible, transformed into the Old Testament and read through the typological lens of the New. This second facet of bestiaries as biblical encounter is combative and polarizing, as Jewish-Christian contrasts extend the play of animal-human others and re-stage disputed claims for authority over sacred text and sanctioned gloss. By highlighting the nature of the bestiary's Scriptural connections, with the resulting potential for Christian-Jewish polemics, I will argue for reading bestiaries as a contact zone par excellence for Jewish-Christian interaction, contestatory and exegetical.

The interest in kings and royal power in all the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles is their one enduring and binding theme. At some moment around the middle of the tenth century the rhetorical register of the annals with regard to kings shifted, moving from the selective reporting of their deeds to outright praise. Among the surviving OE versions, Scribe 3 of the A Chronicle is the earliest to make this move with the inclusion of a copy of a poem in praise of King Æthelstan and his brother Edmund as annal 937. It is not known if the poem known as The Battle of Brunanburh was expressly written for inclusion in a Chronicle, though it is evident that later poetic annals were. The employment of verse in the annals continued into the eleventh century, an extended moment when the character of traditional OE verse itself was undergoing a radical transformation and new verse forms, such as those based on rhyme, developed in English. The challenge of defining a boundary between verse and prose in the Chronicle is not always an easy one. In his edition, Plummer formatted seventeen passages as verse, while Elliott van Kirk Dobbie included only six poems from the Chronicle in the Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records, on the criterion that only these have ‘sufficiently regular meter’. This chapter takes a broad view when discussing verse in the Chronicle, though not all those passages read as verse by Plummer are discussed in detail. While formal aspects of some of these passages are a matter of discussion, they are united in the way they establish the genre of OE political poetry.

Defence of the realm was a primary concern for any government, and Kent's geographical position enhanced its strategic importance to the English Crown. This was laid out with clarity by the people of Kent on 3 May 1593, when they petitioned for moderation in the assessment of the county for purveyance for the queen's household because of the burdens placed upon them both financially and militarily on both land and sea, their obligations being ‘more charg then any inland cowntie or any other marytime shiere’. The century spanning the last decade of the reign of Henry VIII to the eve of the English Civil War was one of particular significance for Kent militarily, especially concerning its role as a defensive bastion against foreign invasion. The final years of Henry's reign witnessed a building programme of coastal defences in England and Wales on an unprecedented scale, with several new fortifications constructed, principally along the south coast, and in Kent in particular. Nearly half a century later, the Spanish Armada brought the threat of invasion via a landing on the Kentish coast at Margate, and even after that immediate threat had passed, hostilities (and English vigilance) remained until the cessation of conflict with Spain in 1604. Thereafter until the Civil War, Kent's role as a defensive bulwark diminished as the realistic prospect of invasion dwindled, but the county never entirely left the government's defensive cognisance.

There is a moment in Book Two of The Faerie Queene when the text mixes up two important names. It's disorientating and we’re not sure who to blame, so we move on. Then there is a more serious challenge about mid-way through the tournament cantos of Book Four (cantos iv and v), when things get simultaneously chaotic and lacklustre and an impatient reader thinks ‘well if you can't be bothered, Spenser, neither can I’. Emboldened and inspired by Catherine Nicholson's brilliant inversion of The Faerie Queene's reception history towards a reading of the poem itself (especially large sections of that history in which readers have complained about reading it or refused to continue doing so), this chapter considers these two moments at greater length. Are they signs of badness? If so, what kind of badness, and where is it located?

The theme of ‘bad poetry’ threatens a collision of aesthetics and morality; it is in part for fear of this collision that value judgments have long been eschewed by those professionally involved with literary interpretation. We may find a middle way in ethics, which could permit a value judgment that is somehow aware of its own prejudices and still of use to other people. This middle way, I argue, can be found by way of accident and necessity, the key terms of this chapter. Accident and necessity sit athwart the question of bad or good; ‘it was an accident’ can work in some circumstances as a defense against moral and/or aesthetic condemnation because they raise but do not answer each other as questions, and this crisscrossing of fields, I will argue, makes a complex ethical awareness possible.

In about 1000 C.E. Norse people planted small colonies at places they called Vinland, Markland and Hop, on the north-east coast of the North American continent. According to the thirteenth-century Icelandic sagas The Saga of Eirik the Red and The Greenlanders’ Saga, and other textual historical evidence, the Norse meant to stay, as they did for a few centuries in Greenland and permanently in Iceland. The settlements were, however, by the saga accounts and evidence from the sole archaeological site discovered to date at L’Anse aux Meadows in Canada, comparatively short-lived. There are, at most, possible traces in the oral histories of First Nations peoples of the north Atlantic coast of North America. Memory of the Norse settlements in North America lasted longer than the colonies but seems to have ‘faded into oblivion in the fourteenth century’ in Iceland and continental Europe.

By the post-medieval period written references in historical documents faded to ‘erratic and even cryptic’ scattered mentions until ‘Vinland fever’ took hold in western nations in the nineteenth century. That fever has never subsided. In twenty-first- century western popular culture, the Vinland colonies loom curiously large.

There are countless novels, films, television shows and video games that feature Norse people in North America. Few, if any, major productions focussed on Vikings fail to feature what is most commonly called ‘Vinland’. The History Channel's seven- season show Vikings (2013–21) makes its colonisation a major narrative arc, while Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed Valhalla (2020) places significant plot development of both the game and the franchise it is part of there.

Every now and then Berlioz let fly with his armoury of denigration and sarcasm, when he felt especially strongly that his subject had shown laziness, incompetence or poor taste.

This Jessonda belongs to the family of the Coras and Amazilys and the rest, who love a handsome stranger, almost always Spanish or Portuguese, whom a cruel priest wants to murder, and who, at the moment of climbing the stake or lowering themselves alive into the tomb, are rescued by their faithful lover. Jessonda has in addition a sister, whose charms have inspired a culpable passion in a young Brahmin; and he, moved by the prayers of the girl he loves, joins forces with the Portuguese and gives them the wherewithal to save Jessonda from the stake. Add some dancing girls who pretend to dance, some soldiers and priests who pretend to sing, and you’ll have a reasonably good idea of the interest and details of this drama, in which we find echoes of Fernand Cortez, Le Sacrifice interrompu, and Die Zauberflöte.

The score of Jessonda enjoys a certain reputation in Germany, but it's far from being Spohr's best work. On the whole, the Paris audience found it dull, lacking in character, short on excitement, contrast, and variety, short on ideas that are fresh, grandiose, or out of the ordinary, short on what ultimately gives life to music, especially to musical drama. The structure of scenes here often seems indecisive and truncated; we don't know when they start or when they stop; voices are frequently overpowered by the orchestra, and we especially find, to an irritating degree, the fault (with which Spohr has so often been taxed) of piling up disparate harmonies in the shortest space possible, in such a way as sometimes to place four or five different harmonies under a single note of the melody.

INTRODUCTION

Anna Wood's case arose in the small seaport town of Carriden. It involved elaborate fantasy, and fears of witches aboard ships.

Wood's initial accuser was a young seaman, Robert Nimmo. He reported a terrifying hallucinatory experience: he was coming home one night when he was followed by uncanny cats that threatened to kill him, carried him into the air, and then changed into birds and finally into women – one of whom was Wood. He feared her because, two years before, he had refused to carry out a ‘commission’ for her ‘to Holland’ – presumably to buy or sell some goods for her there – whereupon she had threatened him.

Once he had the session's attention, Nimmo added to his story, telling of further detailed visions of Wood, including one aboard his ship that may have arisen from an episode of sleep paralysis. This vision was seconded by another seaman, James Linlithgow. The session ‘admonished’ Linlithgow ‘to take heed quhat he said’, although they do not seem to have said this to Robert Nimmo. Perhaps they suspected that Nimmo was deluded, but that Linlithgow was backing him up with deliberate deception. Nevertheless, a third witness, the skipper James Steedman, contributed a further story: he had seen a vision of Wood in the cabin of his ship in port in the Netherlands in the previous year.

The kirk session elders may have been cautious, but they clearly thought that they might be onto something. They investigated Wood's whereabouts at the time of Nimmo's visions. They also asked Wood herself about her dreams, evidently hoping that she would come up with a dream or visionary experience that matched those of the accusers. However, she denied everything. She admitted that she had visited the Netherlands, but not, she said, for the last twelve years.

On the last day of the cure, which she had never actually begun, Phemi had left Oslau with a touching quotation on her lips and returned to Vienna. But life on the veranda remained the same. The old count appeared every day to pay his visit, and only the countess was again rather more reserved.

As much as Franziska had felt drawn to the kind old lady, on their first acquaintance and even more since its resumption, she nonetheless accepted this change with ease and equanimity, as she had that of the past winter, and adapted to it without inquiring curiously into its cause. It seemed to her that it was the ancient privilege of the upper classes to be changeable in their moods: sunlight would be followed by clouds, and the clouds by sunlight again.

This moment of “sunlight again” arrived even sooner than expected and was the result of a letter of Father Fessler’s, at the end of which these words appeared:

“Taken all in all, my dear Countess, the outcome, whose possibility now fills you with such care, might not be for the worst, and for this reason: it would put an end to fears—which, if one dwells on them constantly, are almost more unpleasant and certainly more unsettling than when one sees them come to pass. It is easier to deal with facts than with possibilities. Furthermore, if I am not mistaken, it is a happy choice in more ways than one, and the young lady's soul is of an alloy which may become a ringing bell.”

The British Library manuscript Sloane MS 3822 comprises the occult interests of an early modern antiquarian. Described succinctly but accurately as ‘a medley of papers from the desks of Simon Forman, Elias Ashmole, and other English magicians’, its miscellaneous contents centre on the practical applications of astral magic, a form of Arabic ritual magic that came to be used alongside spirit conjuring in late medieval Europe. Also known as astrological image magic, astral magic utilises the hidden forces of heavenly bodies, which are captured in sigils that are constructed under appropriate astrological conditions. Consisting of gemstones, wax objects or metal plates inscribed with divine and spirit names and incomprehensible symbols called caracteres, these sigils could be used to communicate with planetary and stellar spirits, and to further one's aims by occult means, such as physical and spiritual protection, and friendship, love or hate between people. In the early modern period, astral magic was practised widely among professionals and scholars, including the antiquarian Elias Ashmole (1617–92), who assembled Sloane MS 3822 in the final decade of his life. In addition to heraldry and alchemy, Ashmole's interests encompassed the occult, for which he collected and copied objects and astrological casebooks, diaries and other writings of well-known early modern occultists who were known to be spirit communicators, with an eye not only to preserve valuable knowledge about the occult, but also to follow in their footsteps by practising magic himself.

INTRODUCTION

This large group of documents concerns a panic over witchcraft centred in Alloa, near Stirling. It was a chain-reaction hunt for witches, in which one suspect named others and these were then investigated in their turn. There were at least twenty-seven suspects overall. At least sixteen were brought to trial, and seven were executed; there was also one death in prison. The detailed and varied documentation of the panic enables us to see how ideas of demonic witchcraft and malefice were developed and refined over several months. Repeated interrogations of the suspects created different versions of many stories – stories of meetings with the Devil, and stories of collective malefices. There were also depositions from aggrieved neighbours that told of individual malefices.

Alloa was a small town, with a population of perhaps one thousand. Some of the accused witches lived in the town itself, while others were from nearby settlements like Cambus and Tullibody. Some witches from two locations further afield, Stirling and Kippen, were also drawn into the panic. The Alloa prosecutors came partly from the burgesses and bailies of the town, and partly from the landed elite of the surrounding area. The local justices of the peace, all lairds, played prominent roles. The presbytery of Stirling was involved early on, and the panic also drew in the Stirling burgh authorities and even the military officers in Stirling Castle.

The panic occurred in two phases, broadly May to August 1658 and November 1658 to March 1659. The initial suspect, whose confessions seem to have launched the panic, was Margaret Douchall. She was arrested and interrogated by local authorities in Alloa in early May 1658.

Verum ea, quae temporum distinctione latius digesta sunt, ob memoriam conseruandam breuiter recapitulari placuit.

Across more than 250 years from the later ninth century to the mid-1150s, the annals of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles were authored and compiled, copied and augmented, collated and deleted, in a vast collective endeavour of remembering English history. These annals were first created at a moment when viking raiders and settlers were remaking the political map of England. They were copied and extended across the following centuries: as a new English kingdom extended its power in Britain across the tenth century; when this fell into Danish hands at the beginning of the eleventh century; was then conquered by the Normans after the Battle of Hastings in 1066; and into the twelfth century until a moment of relative peace after the anarchy of civil war during the reign of King Stephen and the accession of Henry II in 1054, the date of the Chronicles’ last entry. Some of the scribes involved in the ongoing enterprise of copying the annals were probably also makers and authors of the Chronicles, while some borrowed and revised the work of others. Across more than two-and-a-half centuries commitment to the Chronicle would wax and wane; it is difficult to know whose interests drove the ongoing work of chronicling, but some degree of patronage, ecclesiastical or lay, is likely, especially at the moment of the Chronicle's genesis.

Introduction

Swift, a servant, was found guilty of cozenage (deceit and fraud) in 1603 for concocting a plan to ruin the reputation of his master's beloved daughter, aged under fourteen, and for blackmailing his employer. Swift had successfully manipulated the girl into agreeing to a secret pre-contract, then, when she was later to be married to another, pressured his master into redeeming the bills to save his daughter's reputation. Swift was fined, placed in the pillory in Cheapside and Westminster, imprisoned at her majesty's pleasure, and ordered to make a public confession on his knees. While in the pillory he behaved, according to contemporary reports, “slanderously and contemptuously” by claiming he was being punished for loving a gentlewoman, by declaring himself innocent after he had been convicted, by terming his punishment infamous penance, and by scorning the order for his confession. This was a juicy tale with multiple moral and criminal offenses to consider. “A Breviat of Swift's Case” contained in the Gawdy papers, which itemized Swift's transgressions, placed at the top of the list of nine not cozenage, not contempt, not his callous treatment of a young girl but “ingratitude.” Swift was ungrateful because “He had been brought up by his master's charity from 10 till 26. After he was 18 his master gave him 12l. a year, for meat, drink and livery.” Swift, however, “thought his master miserable towards him” and so plotted “to get some greater gain.” To understand why Swift's ingratitude was regarded as his most egregious act requires an investigation of the place of gratitude in early modern society.