On January 27, 1955, an “Open Letter to Our Writers”signed “in the name of the workforce of the VEBBrown Coal Works Nachterstedt” by a diverse cast ofcharacters, from Heroes of Labor to members of thelocal Commission for Cultural Work to stenographers,apprentice mechanics, kitchen workers, engineers,housewives, dispatchers, and the works librarian,appeared in Tribüne,the daily newspaper of the FDGB, the East Germantrade union federation.1 Known as the “NachterstedtLetter,” or Nachterstedter Brief, this missivecatalyzed a wide-ranging dis¬cussion of the role ofcontemporary literature in the young GDR. The letterframes itself as a contribution to the upcomingFourth Congress of the German Writers Union (DSV)and immediately stakes a claim to publicparticipation in the literary public sphere ofsocialism: “We are of the opinion,” the letterstates, “that this congress is a significant eventnot only for authors, but also for millions ofreaders.” The letter contin¬ues by outlining whatthe workers of Nachterstedt expect of the “literaryproduction of our writers,” and its “greatsignificance for the struggle of our people topreserve peace, to achieve the unity of ourfatherland and to further strengthen the GermanDemocratic Republic.”

The structural organization of this book owes a debt to Edward E. Baptist's examination of slavery in the nineteenth-century United States. It may seem a strange inspiration; the subjects of these two books are separated geographically by an ocean and chronologically by a thousand years. The center of Baptist's analysis is the black enslaved body; written on the slave is the history that would produce modern American capitalism. The harrowing experience of an American slave ofers few points of contact with the biography of a medieval queen. Yet, a focus on power's interaction with the body crosses boundaries of time and space. The intimacy and viscerality of power is something medieval queens and kings would have understood. Royal power in the eleventh century was personal and individualistic. Bureaucracies of the exchequer, the treasury and representative institutions were certainly present, but were less concretized than they would be even 100 years later. Political power in the central middle ages was based on a web of personal relationships between human beings, not merely administrative structures. Power was navigated through channels of intimate relationships, whether friendly, hostile or opportunistic. Women's elite power, moreover, was regularly contextualized in terms of female bodies. Whether their power was celebrated or demonized, women's fesh was constantly evoked. Royal women, especially, were subjected to body-centered ideology and at the same time drove it. Elizabeth I's claim to the ‘heart and stomach of a king’ may be the most famous to modern audiences, but her claim rested on a centuries-old trope of female power drawn from bodily awareness. Tus, a study of Mathilda of Flanders, centered on her royal body, draws that viscerality back into frame; a position that refects its centrality in medieval sources.

The stage set for Act Two of Götterdämmerung shows the open entrance to the hall of the Gibichungs on the right and the banks of the Rhine on the left. A rocky hill rises diagonally from the shore, and paths lead up its slopes to a small altar for Fricka and larger ones for Donner and Wotan. These are sites for animal sacrifice, and in his scene with the vassals Hagen tells them to bring bulls for Wotan, a hog for Froh, a deer for Donner, and sheep for Fricka. The vassals comply; at the close of the act the processions of young men and women leading sacrificial beasts to flower-bedecked altars make an ironic backdrop for the personal dramas, Gutrune's and Siegfried's naïve happiness contrasted with Brünnhilde's and Gunther's suppressed fury.

Hagen knows, however, that the sacrifices he commands are pointless. In the dream colloquy that opens the act Alberich had told him that the gods will not answer. They have accepted their defeat and sit silently in Valhalla, paralyzed with fear and awaiting their end. The Wotan narrative is over. This was not the situation in Siegfrieds Tod, but all of Wagner's revisions to that text develop this theme, and he revised the staging of this act to heighten the dramatic irony of the useless rituals and the discord between the simple faith of the populace and the godless acts of their betters. In 1848 there had been no visible altars, and the sacrifices were offstage and made known only through the sounds of a “sacrificial song.”

The gods’ silence is only part of a broader and deeper calamity. Wagner had a habit of presenting events and only later explaining them, as he does in the first act of Die Walküre, and the Norn scene with which he opens Götterdämmerung is another example of that procedure. It is here that we are told about Wotan and the fatal wound he inflicted on the world ash-tree. We learn, too, that the spring at its base, the source of the Norns’ wisdom, had dried up.

In May 2022, Netflix premiered the Chilean limited series, 42 Días en la oscuridad (42 Days of Darkness) inspired by journalist Rodrigo Fluxa's true-crime book Usted sabe quién: Notas sobre el homicidio de Viviana Haeger (You Know Who: Notes on the Murder of Viviana Haeger). The show had been pitched to Netflix by Fabula, the production company founded by Pedro and Juan de Dios Larrain, and went on to become one of the top non English-language shows on the platform. Its success is down to the high production values of the series and the universal appeal of the events depicted: a woman disappears and her husband reports her as kidnapped, only to find her dead body forty-two days later stashed in a crawl space in the family home. The husband falls under suspicion, and this deepens when the killer is caught – a poor, working-class man who claims the husband hired him to kill his wife. While the killer is found guilty, there is insufficient evidence against the middle-class husband, who is found innocent.

The success of this series and of the book that inspired it reflects the enormous popularity true crime currently enjoys in print, on television, in podcasts and on streaming platforms, a phenomenon not limited to Chile. True crime offers an endless supply of new material, alongside the perennial appeal of revisiting old cases from fresh perspectives. The genre accommodates a wide range of voices and approaches. In the broadest sense, a true-crime narrative is a non-fiction account of a real crime, contemporary or historical.

Background and Early Career

George Stuart White was born in Portstewart, County Londonderry, on 6 July 1835. He was the second son of James Robert White, a barrister, and Frances Stuart, daughter of Frances Ann and George Stuart, of Donaghey, County Tyrone. Like many of the senior officers in the Victorian army, and his most significant patron, Lord Roberts, White was born into an Anglo-Irish family. The Whites had originally settled Ulster in the 17th century as Presbyterians, but George White's grandfather had recently converted the family to Anglicanism. The Anglican Church and Ulster served as two important pillars throughout White's life.

Soldiering was not an important tradition in the White family's history. As Deputy Governor of the Country of Antrim, an ancestor had commanded the militia during the 1798 Irish Rebellion, but it was not until the Napoleonic Wars that a White, George White's uncle John, served in the Army overseas. John White saw action with the 36th (Herefordshire) Regiment of Foot under Major General Robert Crauford at Buenos Aires in 1806 and later at Corunna in 1809. When John White died in 1857, the family ancestral home, Whitehall, in Broughshane, County Antrim, passed to his younger brother, James Robert White, George White's father.

White had looked forward to leaving Upper Burma for some time. The climate did not suit him, the dangers were too great to bring his wife and family out, and, he believed, his accomplishments were going unnoticed in London. After being offered a choice of divisional commands in India by Roberts, White wrote to Sir Robert Sandeman, the Chief Commissioner, Balochistan, to better understand the challenges he might face if he chose the Quetta command [90]. Amy White knew Sandeman through her father's work in India. White respected Sandeman's ideas regarding how to improve relationships with the local tribes and had great admiration for his knowledge of the people and the region. Sandeman encouraged him to take the posting. The cantonment at Quetta seemed certainly more hospitable in terms of climate and stability then what he had experienced during his time in Mandalay, and he felt that it was safe enough to allow Amy to join him. White opted for Quetta and let Roberts know at once. Although cholera, fever, and winter storms all hit Quetta while he was in command, his life there was the quietest he had enjoyed in years [98].

Quetta was the largest town in Balochistan and its cantonment, located just on its northern outskirts, housed British troops able to keep a watch on activities across the border in Kandahar [110]. Situated so close to Afghanistan and with the Russians extending their influence south of Merv to Serhetabat in 1890, to within 75 miles of Herat, White naturally grew more interested in the Central Asian Question or the ‘Great Game’.

As an extension of papal authority, it was crucial for a papal legate to be easily recognisable. At the core of a legate's authority lay his ability to associate himself with all things papal, including Rome, St Peter, and, ultimately, Christ. Invoking one aspect automatically invoked the others through association: to invoke ‘Rome’ was automatically to invoke ‘pope’, ‘St Peter’, and, eventually, ‘Christ’ (or Vicarius Christi). The a latere designation facilitated these associations because it highlighted the legate's close proximity to the pope. Entering his province, the legate had to display his connection to the pope, thereby reinforcing the concept of the universal Roman Church and compelling people to believe that he ultimately brought the presence of St Peter and Christ with him.

To achieve this objective, the curia employed a strategy centred around insignia and ceremony. This was (and still is) one of the most potent languages of power. The pope acted, in this way, no differently from other medieval lords, operating largely within an existing framework of lordship.

The Lake District, or more specifically Westmorland, was famously described by Daniel Defoe during his tour of Great Britain in the early eighteenth century as:

a country eminent only for being the wildest, most barren and frightful of any that I have passed over in England, or even in Wales itself.

While this seems a harsh description of today's tourist hotspots of the Lake District and Eden Valley, the topographical contrasts and stark climate of the area must have prevented easy cross-county communication in the seventeenth century. Such a description does not suggest an obvious location for literate, amateur music-making during the early modern period, let alone the sale of printed music. However, 2.5 miles north of Windermere beyond the village of Ambleside stands Rydal Hall, the home of magistrate and bibliophile Sir Daniel Fleming (1633–1701) and his family. Fleming's library, believed to contain c.1500 books, was dispersed during the twentieth century. However, the survival of an extensive archive, including his personally compiled library catalogue, book bills and receipts, letters and household accounts, provides not only spectacular insight into the reading and collecting habits of a northern gentleman during the seventeenth century but also rich evidence of multigenerational, familial music-making. Within Fleming's archive is a bookseller's bill from 1679 that details his purchase of Musick's Hand-maid, a printed keyboard tutor book published by John Playford.

Sometime after Prince George of Denmark (1653–1708) and his suite returned to Copenhagen from his European Grand Tour, his tutor and confessor, Christen Jensen Lodberg (1625–93), wrote a detailed account of the journey in the form of a diary. Prince George's Grand Tour began in 1668, when he was just sixteen. Intended to complete the prince's education, the tour's itinerary encompassed the palaces and cities of the Low Countries, France, England and Italy. The tour introduced the prince to Europe's diplomatic and dynastic communities and reinforced the significance of the Oldenburg dynasty within them. Throughout, the prince honed his knowledge of languages, court ceremonial, art and science, and learned to negotiate the discomforts, perils and pleasures attendant on travel. The tour concluded two years later when the suite was recalled to Denmark upon the death of George's father, Frederik III of Denmark (1609–70).

The Grand Tour, Kavalierstour, or academic peregrination, was a trans-European, cosmopolitan practice mobilising mostly young and elite males and their tutors within well-trodden scholarly, cultural and social circuits. Educational travel from the sixteenth century onwards originated in many territories, including the Nordic periphery. Collectively, its dispersed alumni spun an intricate web of exchange entangling the state, church and city bureaucracies of Europe. The tour far exceeded its temporal bounds. The princely traveller's adventures were written down and circulated in manuscripts, embodied in his deportment and manners, articulated through learned languages and the gesture of ceremonial encounter, and materialised in objects of knowledge and art that entered into the collections of his court of origin.

The study on the mortality of the Norse gods contained in the following pages serves as a natural continuation of my previous book-length study of Norse mythology, Gods and Humans in Medieval Scandinavia: Retying the Bonds from 2018, but it also takes a new (perhaps bolder) direction. The previous study focused on the framing and presentation of mythological materials in medieval Scandinavian literary texts, most notably on euhemerism. The present effort is more willing to speculate on the prehistory of the figures known to medieval Icelanders as the Æsir.

My scholarly training in Old Norse at the University of Bergen in the 2000s and Classics at the University of Copenhagen in the late 1990s was philological in a broad sense. Once I felt I could navigate these fields with some confidence, my interests turned to the Latin–vernacular literary interface and in particular texts translated into Old Norse from Latin. Over time, I have gradually learned to balance the two traditions, giving both their due attention in a broader context of medieval studies. Achieving equilibrium is especially critical in studying Old Norse myth and religion, where a pronounced division exists between those who take the traditional nature and deep local history of the textual materials as a given and those who argue for its artificiality. My philological training has profoundly impacted the direction of this study and determined my frames of reference, and like my previous book the present volume is grounded in what I consider a solid traditional historical-philological methodology, but it also takes a more venturesome diachronic approach.

This book is about matters of language and about how language matters. Karla Taylor has taught her students to appreciate the matter of language: the ways language is materially apprehended, the sheer intricacy of linguistic patterning, and the relation between language's literal meanings and its literary, social, and historical figurations. With characteristic intensity, she has also taught us that such study of language matters. She has always articulated a varied and deeply ethical sense of its value and purpose for students and, indeed, for any readers.

We bring together some of Taylor's former students both to recognize her influence on the field of Middle English studies through her graduate teaching and mentorship and to explore the current intersection of two disciplines that Taylor's pedagogy brings together: literary study and linguistics. The work of Taylor's students is gathered in this volume to illuminate the utility of imaginative literature for historical linguistics and the provocation that the etymological, semantic, and phonological capacities of literary lexicons offer a critical understanding of Middle English literature and its social significance. The volume's project suggests the currency of Taylor's approach in our disciplinary moment. As Catherine Sanok proposes in the second chapter of this book, current methods in both fields lay the groundwork for a newly productive relationship between socio-linguistics and literary analysis because they share an interest in how language matters, both to a text's avowed projects and as evidence of its reciprocal relation to the social worlds in which it is produced and received.

Some of the captured sailors from vessels condemned in the Vice-Admiralty Court of New York would have been sent to detention facilities under British control. These men, often from low social backgrounds with no military training, were considered to be regular rebels as opposed to soldiers by the British armed forces, meaning they were not recognised as prisoners of war and thus were not subject to the standards of treatment required for prisoners of war by international agreements. Up to 18,000 Americans died in British captivity during the conflict. When the American Commissary General of Prisoners, Elias Boudinot, signed the preliminary articles of peace in 1783, the British treatment of American prisoners of war was glossed over. It was not conducive to the establishment of peaceful relations and the treaty declared that “all past Misunderstandings and Differences that have unhappily interrupted the good Correspondence and Friendship” between the now independent United States and Britain were to be put aside.

John Jay had been one of the negotiators of the 1783 peace treaty and had, in this capacity, travelled to London. In mid-December 1783, Jay noted that he had met his cousin, William Bayard (Sr), on the street there. Cousin ‘Billy’ was a loyalist, John Jay a patriot civil servant. Loyalists were often looked down upon as “fools and traitors”, their conduct during the war considered worse than that of the British. The different political outlooks and choices that the two cousins had made were, at this point, insurmountable. They passed each other on the street as if they were strangers.

Shadowy fgures inhabit the seventh century – names without bodies, bodies without names. Their legacy comes from diverse sources, from rare conserved manuscripts and from numerous graves and artefacts buried under the ground. Pieced together from king-lists and Bede is a sequence of East Anglian kings, members of the Wufnga dynasty that would endure until the mid-eighth century. In addition, thousands of men, women and children have been rediscovered in their graves, along with their dogs and horses. We can give names to none of them, although all were individuals. And there is a special group of people, seldom encountered in their burials but declared by their handiwork: gold and garnet weaponry, brooches of gilt bronze, necklaces of coloured beads, intricate animal patterns on the jewellery of humans, solemn human faces on the harness of horses. And there are Old England's placenames that survive in every part, and there are East Anglia's rivers which still fow, their tides still drawing steadily in and out. On a summer morning on the River Deben you can still see and smell and hear the same landscape with the same birds and same trees and weeds, and no more sounds of travel than a shout and the slap of a sail.

How daring can we be with words and pictures to remake the past? Can we capture its challenges, anxieties and exhilarations with any conviction? Can we ever reproduce, by rediscovering their swords and bridles, or the lines of vanished ship, a moment of ancient thrill or trauma or triumph that may come to life today? One way is to think one's way into such moments and imagine and write about them; but another is to relive them today.