Introduction

This manuscript is in the National Records of Scotland, among the papers of the Hume of Polwarth family, Berwickshire, the Earls of Marchmont. It is a satirical poem, date uncertain, but records accurately local events in Melrose in Roxburghshire in early 1682, and was probably written close to that time. Although a poem is highly unusual as a piece of historical evidence, this particular poem presents a vivid insight into the local community, and is both corroborated by more conventional historical documents and enhances the picture that they present.

The poem is written on two folios made from folding one large sheet of paper, three sides used, each with double columns of tightly written text, 333 lines in total. The handwriting is sometimes difcult to read, though the rhyming nature of the poem (successive pairs of lines rhyming) is helpful when tackling mystery words. In structural terms the poem is split into sections, depending on whose account or viewpoint is being presented, for example ‘Earle of Roxburgh to Blindlie’, ‘John the Clerk to Bailzie Blindly’, and so on. The language used throughout is English with some Scots vocabulary, and Latin expressions are used occasionally.

The manuscript is attributed to ‘Vincent Winge’, not the name of any poet known today. Vincent Wing (1619–1668) created a well-known series of almanacs, which continued to be published long after his death. His name would have been familiar to many, and could easily have been adopted as a pseudonym.

In her last charter, dated sometime before her death on November 2, 1083, Mathilda of Flanders constructed something along the lines of a will.

By the divine clemency of the eternal father, I, William, the leader of the Normans, to the true of the most blessed of mother church wherever they are distributed, faithfully to be known to all who believe in Christ, grant them not to be deprived of the inheritance of blessedness, but to exist as worthy co-heirs of God, who are placed in the midst of this unstable life, those things which they seem to possess by hereditary right, in the places consecrated to God, in the necessary continuous prayers of those vacant there, fulflling their duty to charity, arrange to share them by hereditary emancipation. Faith, confrmed by the apostle's authority as well as by the promise of the Lord, is directed to that which must be undoubtedly believed. For the Apostle says, ‘Indeed you are heirs of God, but joint heirs with Christ.’ For in the gospel, when the Lord foretold the future reward of those who had performed good deeds, he designated those who persevered with a worthy army to be co-heirs of the heavenly joys, saying, ‘And they shall inherit eternal life.’ Terefore, we shall not consider those who write down their father Christ as heir to their earthly labors to be deprived of the eternal inheritance of the celestial kingdom.

Change Beckons in the Cathedrals

The immediate effect of the outbreak of the First World War on the daily round of cathedral life appears to have been minimal. Some lay clerks would have enrolled in the forces, but given that most were beyond call-up years, serious disruption to choral services was unlikely. The university choral foundations would have lost most of such choral scholars as they were accustomed to have, but all still relied mainly on lay clerks. It would be the aftermath of the war, with its economic and social upheavals, which ushered significant changes in the world of cathedral music, minor as these were in comparison with what would occur in the latter part of the century. Among the most important developments of the inter-war years was the gradual abandonment in most cathedrals of weekday choral Matins. Its continuation was becoming a major impediment to both the engagement of lay clerks and the education of the choristers. What had still been manageable in late Victorian Britain became increasingly anachronistic after the First World War. With the employment uncertainties of the period, the opportunities for lay clerks to find suitable work outside singing duties were far fewer than earlier – not many employers would now be prepared to allow an hour's absence in the middle of the morning – for Matins was still usually at 10 a.m. – as well as early release for a 3 p.m. Evensong. Work round the cathedral might be provided for a few, but some form of self-employment, which could be precarious, is likely to have been the most common way to supplement an average singing man's salary of ￡100–150 per year.

THE RING CYCLE takes between fourteen and fifteen hours to perform. Its length is its most obvious feature, something which seems to be both unnecessary to point out and unimportant to consider. As Tovey said, however, the scale of a work is by no means irrelevant: “Macaulay once shrewdly observed that the size of the Great Pyramid was essential to its sublimity, ‘for what could be more vile than a pyramid thirty feet high?’”1 The same is true of the Ring. Its sublimity is inseparable from its length and from the necessity of performing it over four successive days (or over a week, with days off in between each part). Attending a complete cycle usually requires something like a pilgrimage, which is exactly what Wagner intended, and its parallel and intersecting narratives, its allenveloping musical texture, and its constant linking of present moments to past moments contribute to the sense we often have that we are inhabiting the work rather than merely watching it. Characters and events are with us when we arise the morning after a performance and live with us until we rejoin them in the afternoon. The Ring becomes an experience, a period in one's life on which one can look back and contemplate.

The cycle is structured and coherent as life is not, but just as “life lessons” trivialize real life, the Ring is trivialized when it is reduced to morals or to lessons of varying banality about the values one should adopt. It is not hard to pick out plot points and dialogue to support the idea that it is about the superiority of love over power, but that opposition must be set among others—separation and self-surrender, individualism and community, finitude and infinitude, stasis and transformation, concept and reality—and all these must be understood as existing only provisionally, as artifacts of our self-separation within a world which is profoundly one. Whether or not we attain that understanding, in turn, defines two different worlds and the shapes of human life which are appropriate and possible within them.

Method is inextricable from meaning. How we go about describing a given manuscript object delimits how we can go about describing the literary relationships between its component texts. Indeed, the process by which an assortment of disparate manuscript elements becomes a collection of texts affords multiple, sometimes contradictory perspectives on possible literary relationships among those texts. Manuscripts circulated “as objects within the cultural world, where people interact[ed] with them in meaningful, readable, ways” and modified them according to variable, competing cultural interests. Manuscript scholars, however, do not use a single well-defined term for the act of describing the production and modification of a handwritten codex over time. In this chapter, through “recomposing” BodL. MS Bodley 851, I aim to make evident some of the multiple and overlapping relations between texts materially embedded within its pages, according to the material processes by which they came to be included alongside one another. I ask, in brief, how did such a codex come to be, in which Walter Map meets Piers Plowman? For whom might this meeting have been evident? How might it have signified? Under what conditions and assumptions were the material texts of Bodley 851 collected together? To what literary effects?

Traditionally, the task of reconstructing a book's production would be understood to fall within the remit of bibliographical analysis (or “analytical bibliography”).

In her revision of Paul Hazard's classic work on the Crisis of the European Mind, Margaret C. Jacob anchored it in the political experience of the English Revolution, particularly in the ‘increasing emphasis upon natural law, contract theory, classical republicanism, even, although very rarely, Utopian communism’ that characterised the work of the Levellers, Hobbes and James Harrington. In a similar fashion, Frederick Beiser argued that the period from the Reformation to the Enlightenment in England was characterised by the emergence of ‘the sovereignty of reason’, which he ascribed mainly to the work of the Cambridge Platonists. The works of Jacob and Beiser exemplify two overlapping approaches to the understanding of intellectual change in England in the period here considered, which have been very influential on subsequent scholarship. Basically, these approaches have stressed the essentially insular dimension of the crisis of English culture and its radical departure from the modes of Reformation and humanistic thought, which culminated in the emergence of the Enlightenment. However, both interpretative strands overlook the way in which English authors engaged with the wider European dimension. This consideration is further supported by the fact that some of the most authoritative and comprehensive accounts of the transformation of English religious and intellectual culture in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, including those that have considered the European contexts of England's revolutions, have paid little attention to the transnational dimension of the crisis of the European mind, almost as if these two fields of investigation proceeded on two parallel tracks.

This chapter examines the process through which the notions of reason propagated by the work of Grotius, Descartes, Spinoza and Bayle contributed to the transformation in English attitudes towards rationality and philosophy from the Restoration until at least the first decades of the eighteenth century. I argue that, along with consolidating the old-dating argument that theological doctrines ‘above reason’ could be ‘accommodated within a rational system of religion’, the reception in England of modern continental ideas concomitantly enabled three important and interrelated transformative processes. The first was the shift of Anglican apologetic from reason to scholarship and history. The second concerned the shift in Anglican theology from doctrinal speculations to pastoral care and ‘practical Christianity’. These first two aspects will be introduced here, and explored in more detail in chapter 5. The third process consisted instead in the separation of metaphysics and natural philosophy, or even, of metaphysics and philosophy of science. Focusing particularly on the case of Newton, I will show that, while the latter process emerged earlier than, and thus independently from, the development of modern philosophical systems, it was nonetheless accelerated, and theoretically refined, by the engagement with contemporary strands of Cartesian philosophy originating in the Dutch Republic.

Reason: which reason? To what extent is it possible to assert that those in England who relied on reason in dealing with biblical scholarship, ethics and natural philosophy, or traced, instead, a separation of faith and reason, were influenced by Descartes, Spinoza or Bayle?

The Natural and the Supernatural

Döblin's short stories, many of which are now available in an attractive English translation by Damion Searls, vividly illustrate how he went about exploring a wide range of idioms in which human beings have traditionally imagined the world they inhabit. It is in the idiom of gentle fairy tale, for example, that he tells of a clumsy young giant by the name of Wenzel lumbering into the city of Berlin and terrifying the townsfolk, who progressively hound him to his death—whereupon his mother covers his petrified remains beneath a greensward. The word “nature” does not appear in the text, but the allusion to the cliché of “Mother Nature” is unmistakable. When Döblin wrote his own version of the Bluebeard story, by contrast, the range of allusions he wove into his text was considerably more complex.

In 1077, Pope Gregory VII (r. 1073–85) composed a letter addressed to the Christian communities of Narbonne, Gascony, and Spain. In this letter, he recommended his legate, Bishop Amatus of Oleron, to the addressees:

In this directive, Pope Gregory VII not only stressed Bishop Amatus’ role as a representative of the papacy but also urged the recipients to offer him the same reverence and obedience as if they were interacting directly with the pope, and with St Peter no less. According to Kriston Rennie's extensive research, this was an important conceptual underpinning of papal legation. Rennie argues that legates did not merely represent the pope; they embodied the pre-eminence of the Roman Church. Legates personified the Petrine doctrine that Christ had entrusted the keys of heaven to St Peter, who passed them on to his successors in perpetuity: the popes.