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.

Among the most arresting images in Paris, BnF MS francais 1, the exceptionally large vernacular manuscript made in later fourteenth-century England that I have called the Welles-Ros Bible, are the illustrations of Ezekiel's vision (Ez 1) (Fig. 1).

In the upper register of the historiated initial “E” that opens this Prophetic book, a bovine tetramorph representing the four living creatures of the prophet's fiery vision strides toward the left (Ez 1.5ff.), while below, the “spirit of life” in the form of a nude male figure spreads arms and legs wide to lift the “wheel in the center of a wheel” into the “likeness of the firmament” (Ez 1.20–22). Ezekiel's wheels are rendered as two concentric wheels that share their center or hub but not their spokes. Riding the rim of the outer wheel like passenger cars on a Ferris wheel are the faces of the “four living creatures,” the “quatuor animalia” of the Vulgate, held by Jerome and other Christian authorities to signify (among other “fours”) the Gospels and their evangelist-authors.

Both images attest to their creators’ deft reformulation of a broad spectrum of pictorial traditions; but it is the image in the lower register on which I focus here. This composition finds a suggestive analogue in a depiction of the Wheel of Fortune in Dijon, Bibl. Mun. MS 562, a copy of the Histoire Universelle or Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César made around 1260 in Acre (Fig. 2).

On a panel, the Mexican writer Elmer Mendoza stated that, when attending a literary congress at Columbia University, it took him by surprise to hear that his literary work was classified as ‘narcoliteratura’ (or narcoliterature). Even more was he shocked to learn that he was identified as the father of this emerging genre. Mendoza's astonishment was due to two reasons. First, in Mexico, the term ‘narcoliteratura’ does not enjoy a favourable connotation and it has been used to criticise his writings. Second, Mendoza affirms that his literary works did not intend to inaugurate a genre. The author chiefly aimed to recount the stories that shaped his life in his native city Culiacan, Sinaloa, an urban area dominated by the operations of the drug cartels. Mendoza's anecdote reveals that the criticism of the narco-narratives oscillates between two opposite points of appreciation. On the one hand, this literary production is seen with disdain within the Mexican territory; on the other hand, scholars beyond the Mexican borders are interested in the study of these texts and consider it a literary genre. Additionally, there is no unanimous agreement about the correct term to name this current literary manifestation.

A similar discussion exists around the literature regarding the narco-universe in Colombia, which is not a surprise because both nations share strong ties with drug trafficking, the derived violence, and the succeeding narco-culture. As a whole, this phenomenon seems not to have an end soon.

The grant by letters patent which restored the Isle of Man to the earl of Derby and the ensuing private Act of Parliament which confirmed it marked the beginning of a period of forty years during which the Stanleys devoted far more attention to the exploitation of their estates in the Island than at any time since the early fifteenth century. This was in effect merely continuing the determined policy of Earl Henry in the later sixteenth century to reassert the rights and prerogatives of the lord of Man which were perceived to have been somewhat eroded over time and to maximise his income from the Island, but it was given added impetus by the financial burdens which followed from the protracted legal dispute over the Stanley estates and the relentless rise in prices which affected all landowners in the century after 1540. Indeed, the earls of Derby pursued much the same estate policy in the Isle of Man as on their estates in England and Wales in their efforts to offset the effects of inflation and in this they were acting no differently from other competent landlords. After James, Lord Strange, effectively became lord of Man in 1627, he continued this vigorous policy of enforcing his rights and husbanding his revenues in the Island and when the circumstances of civil war in England dictated that James had to take up residence in Castle Rushen in the 1640s, it was a policy which he was able to oversee in person. The exceptional pressures of the civil war period, especially the loss of the Stanley estates in England and Wales, compelled him to resort to financial measures to pay for the defence of the Island as well as his expedition to England in 1651 in support of the Royalist cause and, not surprisingly, these exactions were highly unpopular.

In a2021 piece for the online forum The Conversation, BogdanCostea, management expert and translator of ErnstJünger's 1932 visionary fas¬cist tract The Worker: Domination andForm, argues that the Soviet Hero ofLabor Alexei Stakhanov, ironically, lies at the coreof the contemporary work ethic promoted by Westernmanagers.1 Tracing Stakhanov's legacy in thesocialist world, Costea notes: “Stakhanov became theembodiment of a new human type and the beginning ofa new social and political trend” in the USSR. Thelegendary Stakhanovites of the 1930s, “a new people,people of a special type,” as Stalin referred tothem, “became a symbol burdened with meanings,” notonly an example of national heroism but “one with amodern, rational, progressive mind which couldliberate the hidden, untapped powers of technologyand take command of its limitless possibilities.” Asa “Promethean figure, leading an elite of workerswhose nerves and muscles, minds and souls, wereutterly attuned to the technological productionsystems themselves,” the Stakhanovite was the figureof a “new humanity,” whose “specialness,” forStalin, lay in “surpassing the present technicalstandards, surpassing the existing designcapacities, surpassing the existing production plansand estimates.”

Karla Taylor's philology, as Elizabeth Allen describes it in the previous essay, has what may at first seem an uncanny resonance with recent methods of literary study that orient critical reading toward greater attention to the linguistic “surface” of a text. From a different disciplinary vector, it may also open a question about the relationship between literary studies and sociolinguistics, which has recently made space for research on self-consciously literary texts. Beyond celebrating Taylor's contributions to Middle English studies as a scholar and a teacher, this volume launches from the example of her scholarship to pursue a disciplinary question and an interdisciplinary one: first, why have the methodological similarities between philology and some recent critical practices not been recognized and, second, how might we rethink the relationship between literary studies and linguistics through their shared methodological interest in the linguistic “surface” of literary texts. The rubric of “philology” as claimed by Karla Taylor, that is, may encourage us to attend to the histories and affordances of current language-oriented approaches to literature.