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Whether unicorns, phoenix, and chimera, or axolotl, jaguars, and giant snakes, animals have often had the human experience grafted onto them, in a conscious or unconscious reflection of a society's beliefs, ambitions, and inequalities.
This volume seeks to explore different representations of real and imaginary animals across Hispanic literary production from the early modern era to the present day in order to gain a better understanding of how they serve as projections of human identities, knowledge, values, and vices. How do beasts enable the colonizing gaze and its reaches? How might beasts offer a means of decolonizing the Hispanophone world? And how do beasts articulate social unrest and a desire to resist inequality, poverty, and other ills of the modern world that collectively reinforce the status quo?
Working to better understand how Spanish and Latin American authors, illustrators, and graphic artists have understood animals and beasts, and how they interacted with them, contributors from the United States, Canada, Mexico, and Spain shed light on the use of animals as symbols and emblems, as well as how they have been employed to construct others as monstrous and less human.
Illuminates the dynamics of church raiding by Vikings in Ireland, relating this phenomenon to their wider objectives and political ambitions.
This book offers the first comprehensive investigation of Viking raids on Irish churches from the late eighth to the early eleventh century, drawing on a wide range of sources, including Irish legal and literary material, archaeological and historical evidence and English and Frankish chronicles. Through a rigorous quantitative analysis of annalistic evidence, it sheds light on all aspects of this phenomenon: its chronological development, geographical distribution, immediate purpose and the broader context of Viking engagement with Gaelic Irish royal polities. Challenging the view that such raiding was merely a precursor to settlement and trade, it demonstrates that these attacks remained intrinsic to Viking activities throughout this period; it argues in particular that human captives-rather than metalwork or bullion-constituted the primary objective of church raids, with many held for ransom or sold into slavery. By tracing the evolution of random raids to strategically motivated attacks, it establishes church raiding as a deliberate instrument of political strategy, until the Battle of Clontarf (1014) marked a turning point in Viking-Irish relations.
An exceptional study of private peace pacts in early modern Italy that challenges earlier notions of the place of these private agreements in the development of the courts and state.
Private settlements were among the most prominent yet least conspicuous aspects of justice in early modern Europe. Traditionally seen as incompatible with our notions of judicial modernity, these settlements reflected a deeply ingrained culture of negotiation and transaction-one that often viewed resolution by litigation with extreme scepticism. However, rather than existing in opposition to sovereign justice, this practice of private settlement coexisted with the implacable authority of rulers who alternated between exemplary punishments and royal pardons to maintain social harmony.
In this English translation of his seminal study, Governare l'odio. Pace e giustizia criminale nell'Italia moderna (secoli XVI-XVII), Paolo Broggio shows how private settlements were far from being a purely benevolent mechanism of reconciliation, often carrying unsettling similarities to institutional coercion and even acts of revenge. Judicial authorities are revealed as not only tolerating these private agreements but shown to have actively facilitated and manipulated them as a means of exerting their control within a community. Religious justifications further lent these agreements a veneer of moral obligation, masking the underlying pressures at play. Through detailed examples such as proceedings in the Papal States, Broggio explores how courts encouraged settlements not only to manage caseloads but to also reinforce existing social hierarchies and power structures.
This expansive study re-examines the role of peace settlements in early modern justice, revealing them as a fundamental yet coercive tool of governance rather than a simple, private, alternative to judicial authority.
Using John Ireland's fascination with Arthur Machen as case study, this book challenges our perception of the correspondence between music and literature in twentieth-century Britain.
The composer John Ireland (1879-1962) declared repeatedly that no one could understand his music until they had first read the work of his favourite writer, Arthur Machen (1863-1947). This book is the first study to take Ireland at his word. Revolving around Machen's classification as a founding figure of 'weird fiction', it uses weird aesthetics as an interpretative lens with which to understand Ireland's notoriously cryptic life and music. Its four chapters deal respectively with Machen's and Ireland's parallel experience of fin-de-siècle London; with their engagement with the English pastoral tradition; with their explorations of weird art's relationship with eroticism; and with unsettling implications of alternative historiography.
The resulting portrait reveals Ireland to be one of Britain's pre-eminent 'weird artists', placing Ireland in the aesthetic context with which he wished to be associated. It therefore fills a significant gap in British musicology, while at the same time contributing to a growing appreciation of Machen as a major figure in British culture, one whose influence exceeds far beyond the literary sphere to which he is traditionally confined. Using Ireland's fascination with Machen as its case study, this book makes a timely and necessary connection between the literary weird and its musical doppelgänger, enriching and challenging our perception of the correspondence between music and literature in twentieth-century Britain.
Explores the transmission and reception of the medieval legends of Charlemagne in the literatures of the French-speaking areas of France, Burgundy and England, and Occitania.
The spread of Charlemagne's myth after his death was even more extensive than the empire he ruled during his life. This volume turns to the birthplace of many of these myths, and to the languages of the North (langue d'oïl) and South (langue d'oc) of that land. The first chapter traces the presence and development of his legend the diverse political and cultural areas south of the Loire generally known as Occitania. The two following chapters analyse the often contradictory representations of Charlemagne in northern French-speaking regions in the twelfth to fourteenth centuries, through a careful selection of chansons de geste and chronicles. Using ethnographic theories, they consider his roles as warrior, secular ruler and conduit to the divine. The fourth and fifth chapters examine the exploitation of those images among readers of French in England and in French-speaking provinces ruled by the Dukes of Burgundy. Finally, the epilogue traces the continued vibrancy of Charlemagne stories in popular and high culture through to the twentieth century.
Identifies and analyses a wide range of textile metaphors and imagery from peace-weaving in Beowulf to word-crafting in Elene.
Textile metaphors, or metaphors involving the process and product of cloth-making, occur widely in literary traditions around the world. The same phenomenon holds true among the peoples of early medieval England. As close observers of a long and culturally significant textile tradition, pre-Conquest English writers drew upon their close familiarity with spinning and weaving to create a wide range of metaphorical textile images in both Old English and Anglo-Latin literature.
This book examines early medieval English textile imagery in close detail, situating it within its cultural and material contexts and addressing the ways in which lived experience informed these metaphors, whether inherited, invented, or both. It explores imagery linked to themes of creation, peace, death, magic, and fate in a comprehensive variety of texts, including Beowulf and Elene, Anglo-Latin letters and riddles, the Exeter Book riddles, prognostics, penitentials, hagiographic and homiletic texts, medical collections, and glosses. Overall, it demonstrates how an understanding of this important body of textile metaphors alters and shapes the ways in which we read the literature of this period.
A detailed literary study of fourteenth-century poetry composed in honour of a controversial thirteenth-century bishop.
Vernacular poetry was a powerful influence in fourteenth-century Icelandic elite literary culture, even to the extent of providing the means of elevating a local bishop, Guðmundr Arason, to sainthood. Three Icelandic poets, Abbots Arngrímr Brandsson and Árni Jónsson, and Lawman Einarr Gilsson, composed impressive encomia of Guðmundr, with the intention of recording the holy bishop's sanctity in the language of contemporary religious devotion and to persuade Church authorities in both Scandinavia and the wider Christian world to canonize him. While the local campaign ultimately failed to sway the Catholic Church, it did succeed in producing a significant corpus of vernacular religious poetry, unmatched in combining the traditional diction and metres of Old Norse skaldic verse with the vernacular poetics of affective piety and Christian hermeneutics.
This important group of poems is examined here for the first time as literary works. The manuscript context of the Guðmundr poetry is investigated in the first chapter. The next three chapters offer a detailed analysis of the poems themselves while the final chapters situate the Guðmundr poetry within the milieu of the vernacular learning that flourished particularly in mid-fourteenth-century Icelandic bishoprics and monasteries. They also explore the relationship between contemporary prose sagas of Guðmundr Arason and the poetry composed in his honour, which, it is argued, offers figural interpretations of the substance of the prose texts.
An account of the life and ideas of Sir William Young, a leading opponent of the abolition of slavery, who used the rhetoric of paternalism to argue that slavery could be ameliorated to become a benign system.
This book charts the life and ideas of Sir William Young, owner of enslaved people on Antigua, St Vincent and Tobago and a leading opponent of the abolition of slavery. It outlines how he used the rhetoric of paternalism to argue that slavery could be ameliorated to become a benign system, akin to the paternalism which he worked towards in rural England, and contrasts his aims width his failure to implement them. It considers his place in the British elite - country gentleman, active back-bench MP and a man of learning - and examines his activity in attempting to improve conditions for the rural English poor. It explores his eventual financial failure, which included the loss of both his West Indian and his English estates, and his last years as Governor of Tobago. William Young was a considerable figure in both the world of the Caribbean, source of his wealth, and the world of London and the English countryside, where he spent that wealth. Young's doctrines of paternalism, unreal and self-serving as they may have been, were widely accepted by the British upper classes.
Investigates the relationship between two texts separated by hundreds of years and nearly two thousand miles.
In the saga, Grettir fights a giant who wields a hepti-sax; in the poem, Beowulf uses a hæft-mēce on Grendel's mother. These two unique words for "hafted blade" appear to be related. Can the same be said for the works that surround them? This book says yes, arguing not that the weapons have a common origin, nor that their likeness is a coincidence, but that Grettis saga has borrowed from Beowulf.
The case for a textual loan begins in the context of England's connection with Denmark in the reign of Cnut the Great (1016-35). This book argues that Cnut took an interest in Scyld and the Scyldings of Beowulf and that his skalds transformed these names into "Skjǫldr" and the "Skjǫldungar". The Beowulf manuscript is placed in Lichfield in 1017, with the suggestion that it was commissioned by Eadric Streona as a gift for Earl Thorkell of Skåne. It is proposed that in 1159 a copy of Beowulf was brought from Lincoln to Iceland to serve the interests of a family that claimed descent from Skjǫldr, that in the 1180s the poem influenced Skjǫldunga saga, and that in the 1190s Beowulf went north to Þingeyrar abbey, where Oddr the Monk, author of Grettis saga, used it to enhance Grettir's fights with Glámr and the trolls of Bárðardalr. This is a daring book that sheds new light on the circulation of Beowulf, on questions of dating and patronage, and on the authorship of Grettis saga.
A detailed exploration of the works for winds by Gustav Holst, the renowned composer of The Planets, aided by musical analysis and rich historical documentation.
Gustav Holst (1874 - 1934) was an English composer and music educator whose work spanned four decades. Though he remains most widely known for his orchestral suite The Planets, his works for band or wind ensemble are also performed frequently, yet have rarely been studied in such systematic detail. They vary widely in genre (from chamber music to military and brass-band works) and in form (from sonata cycle to suite to symphonic poem).
As author Jon Mitchell shows, Holst's works for winds give plentiful evidence of the many influences on him, both musical (including Wagnerian romanticism, English folk song, and Baroque polyphony) and nonmusical (e.g., Sanskrit literature, William Morris, and Walt Whitman). The book gives careful attention to these influences and to the evolution of the works through analysis of sketches and full manuscript scores.
Holst and the Winds makes use of a wide array of primary sources, including Holst's personal papers, written correspondence, programs, and periodical reviews. Music educators, performers, conductors, and anybody who loves Holst's music will enjoy the insights provided herein.
A long-needed reassessment of the musical culture of fifteenth-century Bohemia, liberating it from nineteenth- and twentieth-century nationalist agendas and reassessing its position in European music history.
What was musical culture like in a country in fifteenth-century Central Europe where theologians tried to restore the values of the early church--including through musical practices--only to be branded "heretical"?
Bohemian theologians tried to return to Christianity's "roots" by promoting frequent bread-and-wine communion for all (including children) and by encouraging lay participation in worship through translations into the vernacular. Unlike in many other European lands, monophonic chant and sacred songs were primarily used (though some advanced contemporary polyphonic settings circulated as well). These religious and musical developments formed part of the seedbed that would develop more fully during the European Reformation through the work of Martin Luther and others.
Music in Fifteenth-Century Bohemia: Between Reform and Identity Building contains essays on liturgy, song, and the influence of the Hussite movement. The book resists both nationalistically tinged narratives and the marginalization that has long resulted from an emphasis on the disparities between Czech and Western European musical traditions. One chapter demonstrates how a fifteenth-century song was employed in the revival of Czech culture in the nineteenth century.
Taken as a whole, the essays in this important collection illustrate the distinctive and often effective ways in which fifteenth-century Czech culture dealt with the dichotomy between religious reform and cultural identity.
An overview of what destroyers were and how their capacity for heroic deeds captured the popular imagination.
Destroyers, first developed over the course of the late 1880s and 1890s, were fast, manoeuverable warships intended to escort larger vessels and defend them against a wide range of threats. In Britain their speed, nimbleness and capacity for heroic deeds captured the popular imagination, and they became symbolic vessels, encapsulating the fortitude and ingenuity which contemporaries felt characterised the British navy. Based on extensive original research, this book provides both an overview of destroyers' operational roles and how these developed over time and also a detailed examination of destroyers' place within British culture, society and identity. Considering a wide range of sources including news reporting, pageantry, literature, film, art and more, the book reveals how the destroyer as symbol was used as propaganda, fitted in to popular, civic and artistic cultures and affected naval policy, British people's morale and outlook, and international views of Britain's naval power. One striking example of the depth of British people's attachment to destroyers was the scheme during the Second World War for individual towns to each adopt their own destroyer, a scheme which achieved astonishing success, with many small towns raising huge sums sufficient to fund entirely the building of their own destroyer.
Interdisciplinary study of the medieval commentary tradition, covering a range of sources from the Wycliffite Bible and French Marian Lyric to John Lydgate and Anselm of Canterbury.
Textual and material survivals from across medieval Europe testify to a pervasive commentary culture on Scripture. The biblical text becomes a central object of explication and comment, generating a variety of interpretive texts and genres. But precisely because it is so ubiquitous, medieval commentary can also prove elusive, requiring perspectives from different disciplines. How can we define commentary, and how does it develop and function in different linguistic and geographical areas? What role do commentaries play in the formation and reformulation of personal and national identities across the period? How can contemporary scholars best approach this fundamental genre of the medieval world?
Exploring these among many other questions, this volume revises and refines our current understanding of the intellectual, cultural, and literary dynamics of the medieval commentary tradition. Contributors consider matters such asauthority, patronage, readership, textual genesis, and material contexts of commentary, as well as the absences and lacunae in our knowledge, and how we might take these into account from today's perspective. Expansive in their chronological, methodological, and disciplinary scope, the chapters here illuminate the origins and forms of commentary from Late Antiquity to the late medieval period in Western Europe, extending across Hebrew, Latin and vernacular texts, and examine a wide range of literary and cultural artefacts, from single-authored works to manuscript compilations.
An interdisciplinary study of how early nineteenth-century science and opera articulated a transnational romantic vision of harmony between self and nature, and how this ideal gave way to mid-century realism and social conflict.
The end of the Napoleonic era ushered in a transnational outlook for Europe, where the traditional boundaries that separated people, ideas and things were blurred in favour of a unified and cosmopolitan vision for society. The result of this shift created a 'romantic vision', a new way to perceive the imagined potential of the self in correspondence with the infinite reality of the natural world. Early nineteenth-century scientists such as Alexander von Humboldt (earth sciences), Franz Anton Mesmer (mesmerism), Johann Wilhelm Ritter (galvanism) and Frédéric Dubois d'Amiens (hysteria) are explored in this context to see how the romantic vision was reflected in their work and received by society. Seeing opera as a confluence of all the arts and encompassing a similar romantic vision, this book examines three paradigmatic operas that contend with the forces of nature: Weber's Der Freischütz (1821), Meyerbeer's Robert le diable (1831) and Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor (1835). In these three highly successful works from separate operatic traditions, the unseen, inner world of nature reveals a wholeness of the self with the divine, showcasing a healthy optimism for society.
The book concludes by discussing Gounod's Faust (1859), a work that highlights the struggle of an early-16th-century scientist and places it against the context of the social revolutions of 1848 and the seminal publication of Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species in 1859. In this post-1850 era, the potential of the unseen reality of nature is cast aside and replaced with the certainty of the everyday-the violence of man against man, the struggle for power and the destruction of nature itself.
Collection of essays showcasing how one of the greatest historians of seventeenth-century England has shaped and continues to influence the direction of studies in early modern society, culture and belief.
This collection of essays showcases how, over an illustrious career spanning more than fifty years, Professor Bernard Capp FBA has shaped and continues to influence the direction of studies in early modern English social and cultural history. Initially influenced by the historiographical agendas set in the 1960s by Christopher Hill and Sir Keith Thomas, over the last five decades Capp has produced important studies of religious radicalism, print culture, gender and sibling relations, the culture wars of the 1650s and the maritime world. Collectively this body of work enabled him not only to recover the experiences of the marginalised, but also to highlight the importance of topics previously deemed (at best) of marginal interest to historians of seventeenth-century England.
The contributions to this volume, produced by a new generation of historians whose doctoral work Capp supervised and examined, are similarly wide-ranging and innovative. Engaging in dialogue with Capp's work, as well as those he has been in dialogue with himself, the authors provide novel studies of hermits, sailors and surgeons, as well as shedding fresh light on topics such as the politics of the parish, the lives of plebeian women, men's emotions, and the cultural worlds of 'Jane' Shore and John Taylor the Water-Poet. Like Capp, the authors use evidence from legal records, life-writings and cheap printed texts to recover marginalised voices and reconstruct the everyday lives of those overlooked and misunderstood by their contemporaries and by historians. By doing so, they demonstrate how one of the greatest historians of seventeenth-century England continues to inspire the production of innovative studies of early modern society, culture and belief.
CONTRIBUTORS: Richard Blakemore, Heather Falvey, Jasmine Kilburn-Toppin, Anu Korhonen, Peter Marshall, Angela McShane, Elaine Murphy, Naomi Pullin, Tim Reinke-Williams
When reproduction defied certainty, it unsettled medicine, law, and belief. This book reveals how ambiguous pregnancies reshaped knowledge, emotion, and the cultural meaning of conception across centuries.
Across the long durée of the early-modern period, British medical practitioners and society at large were preoccupied with the elusive phenomenon of "false generation"-a term encompassing false conceptions, molae, moles, and spurious pregnancies. These non-foetal pregnancies, often indistinguishable from true gestations, generated profound uncertainty in medical, legal, and theological thought. Drawing on sources ranging from anatomical treatises and midwifery manuals to women's letters, diaries, and court records, Donaghy traces how false generation shaped reproductive knowledge and understandings of the embodied experience. Through case studies such as Mary I and Joanna Southcott, the book highlights how reproductive ambiguity was not merely a private ordeal but a public and intellectual crisis. Engaging with figures like Galen, Jean Fernel, François Valleriola, and Frederik Ruysch, the book situates British debates within wider contemporaneous European contexts as well as a transhistorical development of medical knowledge.
By foregrounding uncertainty as both an emotional and conceptual force, this monograph contributes to the history of emotions, knowledge, and the body. It offers a field-defining account of how false generation unsettled assumptions about life, conception, and pregnancy, and how these ideas evolved into modern categories such as molar pregnancy. The book speaks directly to current debates in reproductive justice and healthcare, while presenting a compelling case for the historical contingency of reproductive knowledge and the diverse ways it has been shaped by cultural, scientific, and experiential factors.
Details the wide, integral and influential role played by 'amateur' participants in early nineteenth-century Vienna's musical life.
During Franz Schubert's lifetime in early nineteenth-century Vienna, amateurs and dilettantes were a vital part of the music scene, so much so that Eduard Hanslick considered it the high point of musical dilettantism in Vienna. Schubert himself participated extensively in this rich world of domestic music-making. Around 1800 terms such as "amateur" and "dilettante" had broader and more positive connotations than today, and "amateurs" could indeed often portray a high skill level. The book considers the amateurs' and dilettantes' identities and motivations for making music, and their various roles in the musical life of early nineteenth-century Vienna. It dives deeply into contexts, performance practices and spaces, as well as instruments that have so far been little explored. Musical Amateurs in Schubert's Vienna uncovers new key agents in early nineteenth-century Viennese musical life who have so far remained invisible.
This volume explores the representation of political, racial, sexual, and environmental trauma in German-language graphic narratives, which has thus far received little scholarly attention.
In recent decades, as graphic novels have exploded in popularity and have increasingly been engaged with by scholarship, there has been a marked increase in comics that deal with traumatic experiences. These experiences arise variously from warfare, genocide, terrorism, racism, sexual violence, domestic violence, illness, disability, migration, natural disasters, or climate-change, among other causes. Indeed, scholars including Hillary Chute and Gillian Whitlock have argued that graphic narratives are particularly well-suited to portraying traumatic experiences through the lens of individual memories.
This edited volume builds on the emergent body of work on the representation of trauma in graphic narratives, but focuses exclusively on German-language graphic narratives, whose exploration of trauma has so far received little scholarly attention. Essays dealing with theoretical and conceptual concerns are joined by analyses of individual creators of graphic narratives, including Olivia Vieweg and Volker Reiche. In addition, there are transcribed conversations among the contributors to the graphic story compilation But I Live, Miriam Libicki, Gilad Seliktar, and Barbara Yelin, and between Birgit Weyhe, creator of the graphic narratives Madgermanes and Rude Girl, and the Germanist Priscilla Layne, who is the model for the main character in the latter book. A final essay looks back further with a critical appraisal of the poet Rolf-Dieter Brinkmann's sampling of comics in his late 1960s Popliteratur works.
Essays addressing Anglo-German connections and comparisons across the period from 1190 to 1300, with particular attention to the economic, social and personal aspects of an entangled transregnal connection.
A wide range of topics are covered in this significant collection. It begins with an examination of macro-economic developments, together with comparative studies of serfdom, and the record-keeping of English and German towns. Personal contacts are the subject of articles on the hostages delivered by Richard the Lionheart following his release from captivity by the Emperor Henry VI, the diplomatic initiatives of 1227, the subsequent marriage of Henry III's sister Isabella with the Emperor Frederick II, Richard of Cornwall's German itinerary, and relations between England and Cologne. Another article investigates what happened if foreigners travelling in England came into conflict with the law. Turning from people to manuscripts, three articles analyse in turn the English reception of Oliver of Cologne's Historia Damiatina, the representation of English kings in Gervase of Tilbury's Otia imperialia, and Matthew Paris's attempts to depict royal emotion.
Using close readings of nine novels by African or African-descended novelists, this book examines three phases of African migration: departure, disillusionment and the impulse to return.
The experiences of African migrants in the diaspora are deeply inflected by the condition of living as Black bodies in white spaces. In this work, author Ernest Cole examines closely the narratives of migration and return presented in nine powerful novels by authors who include Chimamanda Adichie, NoViolet Bulawayo, Teju Cole and others. The novels reveal a reversal of expectations that migrants from Africa experience upon arrival in the West, a reversal prompted in part by the racial prejudice they are confronted with as Black individuals. As the author notes, the novels also illustrate the desire to return to the homeland as a better alternative to the precarious life in the West, even though such a move is not without its complications.
The study is divided into three parts with seven chapters. The first two chapters deal with the reasons for the departure of migrants from the continent, the next two depict the experiences of migrants in the West, and the last three focus on contemplations of the return journey home. Collectively, the chapters lay out three phases in the migration process: departure from home, disillusionment in the West, and return to the country of origin. Within this framework, the book uses displacement and dislocation to examine a host of themes - social alienation, alterity and the precarity of Africans in the diaspora.