Acentral focus of Mathilda of Flanders’ energy was her construction of a Benedictine abbey for women, Holy Trinity in Caen, dedicated in 1066. Mathilda's choice to establish her new monastic foundation in honor of the Trinity, as opposed to a saint or the Virgin Mary, was an early indicator of her spiritual preference for the Holy Spirit and, through it, apostolic authority. The mysteries of the Holy Spirit were connected in scripture to prophesy, which would be another fascination for her. Historians have long argued that Holy Trinity was founded as a penance for Mathilda's marriage in the face of a papal ban. Yet her creation of Holy Trinity eventually swept over the past to embrace a breathtakingly uncertain venture: the Norman invasion of England. In what follows, I consider Holy Trinity in light of the Norman conquest. Holy Trinity was Mathilda's frst contribution to Norman victory. Mathilda established the monastery's connections to the military ofensive from the beginning, despite the uncertainty of its success, and the conquest remained a central element of its character long afer her death. The second contribution was the Mora, the ship she had constructed for the invasion, that carried William to England. Tus, through the work of her hands, she placed herself at the heart of the Norman Conquest. To these two conquest gifs, one must add the most notable – her daughter, Cecelia. Given as an oblate on the day of Holy Trinity's dedication, Cecelia's role in the family's success was a critical one. Her career as the second abbess of Mathilda's new foundation was surely planned from the start.

Introduction

Archibald Pitcairne (1652–1713) was one of the most signifcant Scottish intellectuals of his age. He was an innovative and infuential physician, a talented writer in Latin and Scots, and an accomplished mathematician. In his medical career, he rose rapidly after graduation from the University of Rheims in 1680, becoming a founder member of Edinburgh's Royal College of Physicians in 1681, and being appointed as one of three professors of medicine in Edinburgh's town college in 1685. He served as professor of the practice of medicine at Leiden University in 1692–3. His publications developed an iatro-mathematical theory of medicine, winning him international acclaim but dividing Edinburgh's community of physicians. Pitcairne had a parallel literary life, writing elegant Latin verse and hilarious vernacular satires. Moreover, he studied mathematics in the company of David Gregory (1659–1708), professor of maths at Edinburgh's town college, with whom he was among the frst promoters of Isaac Newton's Principia. After the revolution of 1688–90, Pitcairne was a bibulous Jacobite and critic of the presbyterians in control of the Church of Scotland; as a result, he had many detractors as well as admirers.

Two fundamental questions arise when considering the topic of British choral life: what exactly constitutes a choir and where do the boundaries of choral music lie? How many people do you need before you call a group of singers a choir rather than a vocal ensemble? Asked to define a ‘choir’ and a ‘choral sound’, many would say that its essence lay in the doubling of voices on the individual parts, so that eight voices might be considered a minimum for a group singing in four parts. That said, church choirs may be found with fewer numbers, either from the lack of recruits, or as a deliberate choice by those churches who perhaps employ a professional quartet of singers – such a group may fulfil the functions of a choir, even though the resulting sound is not one which would necessarily be described as ‘choral’. The doubling of parts, however, is not always a pre-requisite for a ‘choral sound’; it is also partly a question of texture. Although a four-part work sung by single voices may not sound ‘choral’, an eight-part one sung this way comes much closer. And all would agree that Tallis's forty-part motet, ‘Spem in alium’, originally conceived for, and still usually sung by single voices, is certainly a choral work. Nevertheless, however undefined the borderline, there is a generally recognized distinction between what are called vocal ensembles and choirs. While no-one would call the six voices of The King's Singers a choir, by the time you get to the eponymously named The Sixteen, that is undoubtedly one, even if of ‘chamber’ size. The one thing that perhaps defines any sort of choir, as opposed to the singing of a church congregation or a football crowd, is that is pre-supposes a degree of rehearsal, or at least the exercising of already acquired skills.

Appendix: Lords of Man – 1405–1830

Leonardo Padura Fuentes (1955–) is one of the most celebrated Cuban writers of his generation. His works of fiction have been translated into eight languages and won prestigious literary prizes over the world. While Padura's fame did not result into his exile from Cuba, where he continues to live in the Vibora house of his childhood, it came with the evolution of his writing style, from non-fiction and journalism to historical and detective novels. Those last two categories, in which Padura excels, are so closely connected that his latest detective novels have been praised for their contribution to the historical novel genre. In this chapter, I will map out and analyse the evolution of the character of Mario Conde, with whom Padura cut ties with the Cuban policíaco revolucionario, and paved the way for the rise and success of the Cuban neopolicial in the late 1990s.

After the detective series of the ‘four seasons’ series (Pasado Perfecto in 1991, Vientos de Cuaresma in 1994, Máscaras in 1997 and Paísaje de Otoño in 1998 – translated as Havana Blue, Havana Gold, Havana Red, Havana Black), Padura reoffended; but this time with a Conde quitting his official state policeman job to work as a trafficking book seller in Havana, still solving murders but on personal invitation (La Cola de la serpiente (Grab a Snake by the Tail) and Adiós Hemingway in 2001; La neblina del ayer (Havana Fever) in 2005).

The last two Conde novels, Herejes (Heretics, 2014) and La transparencia del tiempo (The Transparency of Time, 2018), while keeping Conde as a protagonist, weave the detective narrative into a historical emplotment, which spreads across medieval Europe to contemporary Cuba.

The colonial conquest of Angola, largely complete by 1920, allowed the Portuguese government in Luanda to install a countrywide system to distribute low-wage contract labour, helping coffee estates expand in the face of smallholder competition. The Department of Native Affairs (Negócios Indígenas) used tax rolls, census data, and labour requests supplied by district administrators to organize the movement of African wageworkers within and between colonial districts. The resulting labour flows often followed established geographical patterns, with the Angolan Central Plateau remaining an important source of migrant workers. Nevertheless, the scale and scope of recruitment expanded as a growing settler economy needed more labour and governments applied pecuniary and non-pecuniary measures to push an ever larger number of Angolans into wage contracts. While there were about ten thousand serviçais in the coffee sector around the turn of the century, the number of contract workers annually hired by European coffee planters had officially grown to ninety thousand in 1959.

Since the introduction of contract labour in the Portuguese empire during the late nineteenth century, scholars and journalists have compared it to the system of bondage it replaced, variously describing it as ‘modern slavery’, ‘slavery by another name’, or ‘forced labour’. Historians of labour in colonial Africa generally prefer using the later term. They emphasize that the direct involvement of colonial states in recruitment led to a variety of coercive practices that had little in common with enslavement defined narrowly in terms of ownership. Under colonial rule, as Suzanne Miers and Julia Seibert have shown, slavery gradually disappeared while new forms of coercion emerged, which could be crueller than slavery because employers no longer had to treat workers as capital assets.

When the transatlantic slave trade ended in 1865, the business of selling people had dominated economic life in Angola for almost three hundred years, creating trade routes, shaping social relations, and stimulating some commercial activities while stifling others. From the early nineteenth century, however, coffee plantations, large and small, had begun to change the land in this corner of Atlantic Africa, where they steadily became crucial sites for wealth creation and labour exploitation. While the coffee crop transformed Angola, local producers transformed the global coffee trade as they pioneered the commercialization of Coffea canephora, also known as robusta, a species that grew in several native and naturalized varieties in the montane forests of northern and central Angola. Step by step, these new coffees found their way through international trade networks into the blends that grocers and manufacturers in Europe and North America prepared for their customers. Cheaper than most commercial varieties of the better- known Coffea arabica, African robustas became increasingly popular during the twentieth century. By the time of the Angolan war of independence (1961–74), global dependence on robusta had encouraged the creation of more than a thousand large and medium-sized white-owned coffee plantations in Angola, which competed for space and labour with the farms of some thirty thousand African coffee growers. Supported by the Portuguese colonial state, European planters employed approximately 90,000 workers annually on short- and long-term contracts, plus an unknown number of informally and often randomly recruited men, women, and children.