Henry Purcell's early life is obscure. His birth date is unknown, though he was 24 in 1683 according to his portrait in Sonnata's of III Parts, and he was in his 37th year when he died on 21 November 1695. Thus he was born in 1659 or possibly late 1658. When the court musician John Hingeston made his will in 1683, he named Henry Purcell, son of Elizabeth, as his godson. This must be the Elizabeth named as relict in the probate of Henry Purcell, Gentleman of the Chapel Royal and Master of the Boys at Westminster Abbey, who died on 11 August 1664. Henry senior and Elizabeth had six children, of whom Henry junior was third, probably born in the house the couple shared in Great Almonry near the Abbey; Daniel, the youngest, may have been born after his father's death. Henry senior had sung in The Siege of Rhodes, the first English opera, in 1656, and received a place in the court Lutes and Voices in 1662.

After Henry's death Elizabeth moved, presumably with her children, from Great Almonry to a dwelling leased from Westminster Abbey in nearby Tothill Street. She must have benefitted from the support of her brother-in-law Thomas, a Gentleman of the Chapel Royal like his brother, as well as composer to the Twenty-Four Violins. No string music survives by him, and it was probably a sinecure: court posts were often allocated just because they fell vacant at a convenient moment. No document mentions Henry junior before 1673, the year his voice broke and he left the Chapel; boys were normally about eight when they joined.

How the reconstructed Sutton Hoo (Mound 1) ship came to be proposed, initiated and funded is a somewhat entangled tale. The principal players of the early days were the Sutton Hoo Research Trust, the National Trust at Sutton Hoo and the Woodbridge Riverside Trust, all fercely independent local organisations. They were also particular in their aims: some saw the reconstruction as an international research project, aligned with comparable ventures by other maritime nations, notably Denmark, Norway and Greece; while others saw it as an addition to the Sutton Hoo story designed to serve a wider public, and others again as a local initiative celebrating Woodbridge and its maritime heritage. Ideally these aims should be combined, and it was this that would become the mission of the Sutton Hoo Ship's Company.

The reconstruction of the ship from Mound 1 was certainly an enterprise with multiple objectives: to boost the cultural identity of the locality, to relive the earliest days of English seafaring, to promote an adventure that could be shared by the nation and to provide a fulflling experience for a host of dedicated volunteers. But underpinning all these were the research objectives, the search for new knowledge which would last longest and have the greatest net impact for people of all ages in the future.

To ensure their long term value, research projects have a particular structure: defning the research questions (what we would like to know), evaluating the evidence (what's available), isolating the objectives (what we want to do), designing a programme to deliver them, carrying it out and publishing the results for the public, the participants, the sponsors and the academic community, custodians of the long-term memory of what was done and why.

Medieval Laudes Regiae in Chronological Order

In this volume's call for papers (cfp), applicants were invited to submit “feature articles of 6,000–12,000 words (including notes) on any postmedieval responses to the Middle Ages” or 3,000-word essays that respond to one or more of the following questions:

Even though foreign crime fiction has been available in translation in Brazil since the 1930s, Brazilian crime fiction did not become a part of the nation's cultural landscape until the 1980s. The most popular international representatives of the genre, notes Amelia Simpson in 1990, have ‘been widely distributed and read in Brazil. Bookstores regularly carry detective titles, usually a substantial selection of British classics and, especially more recently, hard-boiled works’. However, Simpson continues, until at least the end of the 1980s, crime fiction ‘remains a relatively unassimilated product, receiving little attention either as a foreign ingredient of Brazilian culture, as a set of conventions of formal, critical interest, or as a form to be cultivated’ (62). The genre had little prestige within the Brazilian literary field. Brazilian modernism specifically, since the 1920s, was characterised by a critical revision of national cultural traditions and an attitude of distancing from the influence of foreign cultural values. This was not a context conducive to adapt the genre to a local context. An additional factor contributing to the lack of intellectual prestige of the genre in Brazil was ‘a linha regionalista que propunha uma identidade do pais baseada na natureza e no campo’ (the trend of regionalist literature that proposed an identity of the country based on nature and the countryside), while the detective genre, for the most part, reflected the vicissi-tudes of the modern individual in the modern city.

Most cardinals were Italians. They found themselves far from home, far from their networks, and far from their resources, which left them in a vulnerable position. Still, they were considered to be powerful lords, and as such, they wielded significant power. Not only might legates have anticipated the adventus with unease, recipients of cardinal-legates might have felt likewise. Recipients, especially if they were minor players, needed to live up to expectations, executing the adventus successfully, lest they wanted to risk the ire of one of the most powerful ecclesiastical lords in Europe.

Numerous adventus ceremonies have left no written evidence beyond the casual note. Many have undoubtedly been lost to the passage of time, leaving no trace whatsoever. In many instances, the preparations for and the performance of the ceremony likely depended on collective experience and tradition. Medieval authors only showed interest in the specifics of a reception if something particularly significant was at stake or if a reception held a special meaning. In like manner, some authors composed treatises on the appropriate way to welcome a dignitary with an adventus, often in response to some form of monastic reassessment or reform. The titles of these treatises vary in the medieval sources – sometimes there are no titles – but I have labelled them collectively as ‘adventus instructions’ for the sake of convenience.

As dermatologists recognise, skin is one of the most extensive and important organs of the human body. As a mechanism for protection, it serves as a barrier, shielding people from external impacts and variations in pressure, while as an instrument of regulation, it ensures that body temperature remains within acceptable parameters. With its network of nerve cells, skin is the most widely distributed of the sense organs and the only one that is essential for life. As it detects and relays changes in external environments, skin functions as a universal, an anatomically essential component of the body that – in the absence of injury, disease, or acts of self-inflicted transformation – serves as a leveller, uniting beings in a common evolutionary bond. Yet from a socio-cultural perspective, skin is one of the most complex and ambivalent parts of the body. Appraised in some contexts as a stand-in for the individual, a synecdoche, or pars pro toto of human identity, it is viewed in others as a mask, a barrier, a form of protective armour that impedes contact with the individual artificially trapped within. It stands thus, paradoxically, both as a representation of the true and authentic self, and as the facade that conceals it. This process, which is further complicated by the curious and controlling operation of the gaze, which imposes identities through procedures of scopic surveillance, ensures that just as the skin of the individual projects an identity outwards towards the observer, it serves simultaneously as a canvas, a text, a receptacle for the imposition – whether warranted or not – of a range of culturally significant meanings.

The story of British choral music up to around the time of the Black Death (1348) is essentially that of activity in its monasteries and cathedrals, after which, up to the Reformation in the middle of the sixteenth century, other institutions also begin to play a significant part. The liturgies of the early church started to take systematic shape in the fourth to sixth centuries, although it was not until the era of Charlemagne in the eighth and ninth centuries that standard forms emerged from many diverse local practices. With references to psalms and hymns being sung in Christian worship from the earliest days, music in one form or another has always played an important role, and the 150 psalms of the Hebrew Bible were eventually to form a backbone of worship throughout the Western church. Chanting – at its simplest, essentially the use of heightened speech – is a natural feature of many religions, serving principally as a means of elevating words from the realm of the everyday. Sung liturgy also came to have the practical benefits of aiding clarity in large buildings, and of preventing the words being rushed – you cannot easily gabble when chanting! For the whole of the Middle Ages, communal services (as opposed to private Masses) appear to have been more or less sung throughout, except for any sermon – certainly in monasteries and cathedrals. In the twenty-first century we are accustomed to much of the liturgy (and especially the lessons) being spoken, even in the most musical of establishments. The continuous singing still found in the Orthodox churches perhaps offers the closest impression of the atmosphere of Western medieval practice, as does the fact that their liturgy is celebrated in an area closed off from the laity, as was the case both in the quire of a cathedral or monastic church, and (to a lesser extent) the chancel of a parish church.

Two ancient traditions about how to respond to the suffering of the world unexpectedly intersect in fifteenth-century England. The life of Buddha is the ultimate source of Barlam and Iosaphat, a popular saint's life, which in the late fifteenth century was translated into Middle English, somewhere around London or the southern Midlands. It resembles the ascetic Christianity displayed in Sir Thomas Malory's version of the Grail quest, translated nearby at about the same time. Both texts emphasize the sorrows that spring from the unstableness of the world and humans’ wavering will. In particular, Malory suggests Launcelot's adultery is a symptom of the more fundamental problem of his unstableness. When explaining why Launcelot will not achieve the Grail, the hermit Nacien says:

Gervase of Canterbury and Roger of Wendover shared certain similarities. Both were Benedictine monks and chroniclers. Their social backgrounds were probably quite similar. Historically, Christ Church and St Albans maintained certain connections such as Lanfranc's Monastic Constitutions, which Lanfranc composed for both Canterbury and St Albans. Nevertheless, the views of Roger and Gervase on the papacy and its legates stood worlds apart. English criticism of the papacy was not novel, but Roger took it to a new level. The world had changed since Gervase wrote his Chronica: King John had offered up England as a fief to the pope.

In 1213, King John had found himself in deep trouble. Excommunicated by the pope for his stance on the Stephen Langton affair, facing rebellion, and expecting a French invasion, John had capitulated to Pope Innocent III to curry favour and offered England as a fief to the pope. Roger found this manoeuvre outrageous. He accused the king of selling his country and his people into slavery. The pope, in the same vein, was a traitor in Roger's eyes because he had accepted the offer. Innocent became the feudal lord of England, John, receiving England as a fief, his vassal. Roger viewed this arrangement as a momentous shift in Anglo-Papal relations. It greatly affected his outlook on the legatine adventus. While he, like Gervase, viewed the legatine adventus as the ceremonial affirmation of papal-legatine authority, he interpreted the implications in a radically different way.