ABBOTS OF RUSHEN – 1408–1540

From the founding of Rushen Abbey in 1187, only fourteen are known by name. Five are recorded in the period 1408 to the dissolution.

Richard 1408–18

Henry Radcliffe 1495–97

John Faragher 1503–07

Thomas Radclyf 1531–32

Henry Jackson 1540

In a literal sense, Cantigas de amigo are songs sung by young women (amiga) about (de) their boyfriend (amigo). This medieval poetic tradition of maiden songs constitutes one of the main genres in the Indo-European oral tradition of women's songs. Transmitted by women – mothers and daughters across the centuries – the reminiscences of their voices have been registered since the earliest written manuscripts. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, folklorists rediscovered these women's voices and songs as a living oral tradition of lyrical and lyrical-narrative work, dance, and worship songs and collected them.

However, these songs were typically ignored by historiographers of the national European literatures, who sometimes classified them as anonymous women’ songs, as in the case of the frauenlied (woman's song) and the winileod (song of the wini, friend, or beloved) in German historiography, for example. Eventually, they would ascribe these songs to male poets, who then became the authors of the songs. Only in some rare instances were these songs featured in histories of literature (for example, in the case of the first chapter of the Portuguese Literature History). However, save for a few exceptions, the genre was virtually ignored in the histories of Spanish, German, French, and English literatures, which focused instead on the great national epic when discussing medieval poetry.

When the Royalist refugee William Blundell landed in the Isle of Man in 1646, he discovered a land which was in some ways quite different from his native Lancashire.1 While there were some superficial similarities in that agriculture and fishing were, and had long been, the main occupations of the inhabitants of the Island, as they were of the people living on or near the coasts of the Irish Sea, there were many striking contrasts which Blundell observed. One of the most obvious of these was that the majority of the natives of the Island spoke primarily, if not exclusively, Manx, but their clothing and customs were also unfamiliar to the Englishman. Nearly all of the population lived in isolated houses, scattered throughout the countryside, in much the same way as those who eked out a living in the upland areas of England, but even the larger landholders, those regarded by Blundell as gentry, lived on their estates rather than in any of the four recognized towns, the number of residents in which scarcely exceeded that of many English villages. One similarity of which Blundell was perhaps not aware was that the population seems to have been rising steadily, if slowly, in the Island, as it certainly had been in England and elsewhere in Europe, since at least the early sixteenth century. Whereas this upward trend levelled off in England in the second half of the seventeenth century, the rise in the number of inhabitants in the Island appears to have continued equally steadily into the eighteenth century and beyond, partly as a result of the changes to the Island's economy which began to develop during the last eighty years of the Stanley lordship. The rise of trade between England and its overseas colonies from the middle of the seventeenth century onwards and English legislation to regulate its conduct led directly to the increasing importance of the Isle of Man to merchants who were determined to increase their profits from this traffic by circumventing the duties imposed on their cargoes.

Introduction

In this study, we explore various lyrical materials from the Iberian Peninsula, based on a hypothesis of continuity (Alinei 1996) between musical archaeology and musicological studies. These materials may not necessarily be directly derived from primary tradition sources, but rather from musical systems that frequently exhibit stronger ties to cognitive processes and memory than direct tradition or imitation. Nevertheless, we will not neglect aspects such as contrafacta or the simultaneous existence of medieval and traditional lyrical repertoires. Our aim is to establish guidelines for musical interpretation and highlight the modern embodiments of traditional Hispanic music, which, in our opinion, represent the true heirs of the peninsular lyrical tradition.

Tracing the medieval antecedents of traditional songs and the remnants of ancient repertoires is a common practice among musicologists, philologists, and performers. Only in rare instances can connections between the two repertoires be established, mostly due to chronological factors and the alteration of preserved testimonies, often perpetrated during the Romantic period, in the nineteenth century (Chaillou-Amadieu 2017; Zink 1996). However, we must still consider the cultural impact of these repertoires and the popularity of traditional repertoires throughout the extensive medieval period. Our objective is to discuss Hispanic medieval repertoires that have been preserved with music and examine the aspects that have been maintained in traditional lyrics, whether in manuscripts or in oral tradition.

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.