When the readers at the Colegio Jesuita de Zaragoza (Jesuit College of Zaragoza) highlighted the most striking passages in their reading of Jaume Roig's misogynist Catalan work, the Espill (The Mirror, ca. 1460), the miracle of the profaned Host was sure to figure among them (vv. 3502–3816, pp. 171–175). Set in the city of Zaragoza itself, the story recounts the prodigious transformation of the sacred Host (the bread or wafer consecrated in the Eucharist) into a human baby and the baby's return to their original form. In the Espill, the episode's entire chain of events begins when a domestically abused Christian woman seeks the help of a Muslim sage to increase her abusive husband's love. The sage agrees to help, but on the condition that the woman pay him and bring him the sacred Host. The woman complies but, upon delivering the Host to the sage, they find that the Host had miraculously transformed into a baby. The woman tries to kill the child by immolation, thus confirming her evil nature for nonmodern audiences. After a series of subsequent events, the woman dies in the end, miraculously struck and killed by a bolt of lightning, although nothing is said about the fate of the Muslim sage.

This book draws on my long-term involvement with South African townships. Townships are from the perspective of the suburb, which I use as shorthand for the wealthiest fraction of the country's population, the “other” South Africa. Getting to know the lives of township residents has meant crossing boundaries. I am not alone in crossing from suburb to township, but, tellingly in a deeply divided country, we are few.

I started to visit townships after arriving in South Africa in January 1994. I wanted to know what life was like for people there. Curiosity is an important academic attribute, and without it I would not have collected much of the material in this book. But it does not explain why my engagement with townships now stretches to decades. This has been sustained not only by curiosity, but also by political belief and moral conviction, and because the township has become a home and people within it friends.

The book only partially answers what life is like in townships. The menyetla or opportunities described and analysed are only one facet of township life, but an important one. It illustrates the lex lokasi, or law of the township, that is the book's focus. It is, however, an uncomfortable topic to be delving into; mud raking in the lives of township residents, most of whom are poor. Reviewers of the manuscript have stressed the need for contextualisation. Paraphrasing, their concern is that describing how people hustle to make ends meet creates a picture of township residents as law breakers. In turn, this produces a racialised narrative that obscures the larger framework of South Africa's structural violence, historical and current.

March 1719

During 1718, Spanish ambitions to recover former Habsburg territories in the Mediterranean area led to the creation of a quadruple alliance of Britain, France, Austria and the United Provinces, and in August to the defeat of a Spanish fleet by British forces at the battle of Cape Passaro. In retaliation, the Spanish government decided to support the Jacobites and mount an invasion of Britain. In March 1719, one force led by the 2nd duke of Ormond aimed to land in the south-west of England, and a second diversionary force led by George Keith sailed to Scotland.

The government and other authorities in London were aware of the danger by 10 March. Archbishop Wake evidently suggested to the earl of Sunderland, first lord of the treasury, that there should be some religious response: he may have suggested a fast day. On 16 March, Sunderland reported that the king considered that it would be ‘sufficient to have some Prayers appointed to be said on the litany days’ (Sunday, Wednesday and Friday), in the same style as the three prayers issued for the earlier Jacobite rebellion (1715–E). Sunderland enclosed a copy of this form of prayer with his own proposed amendments, and enquired about the correct manner of signifying the king's order for the issue and use of the prayers.

This chapter is on the triangular relation between romance, tragedy, and decolonization as both themes and tropes in African fiction. The primary concern in the chapter is the work of the novel in the late colonial period and first decade of independence in Africa when the genre was tied closely to the politics of cultural nationalism. A key premise in the chapter is that the turn to the novel among African elites was bifurcated. On one hand, the genre attracted African elites in the late colonial period because they assumed that the genre would best register the tragedy of colonization, notably its cultural deracination, its destruction of subjects, and its denial of African agency. On the other hand, the novel was often asked to help African subjects imagine a future beyond colonialism. The novel in Africa came to be structured by the need to develop a language in which the tragedy that was seen as a defining characteristic of colonial history and the lived experience of colonized subjects, would be countered by the romance of a future that the novel as a genre was imagining and willing into being.

INTRODUCTION

Michael Erskine, a miller at Newbyres Mill in Newbattle, was accused of witchcraft and sodomy and investigated by the presbytery of Dalkeith. He was arrested at some point after 15 October 1629 in response to an order that had also named two other men and two women. On this occasion, the presbytery referred to a warrant for arrest which had previously been issued by the privy council. The later documents write of Erskine alone, so it is not clear what happened to the other four suspects.

Erskine was kept in prison in Newbattle for six weeks. He seems to have been tortured with sleep deprivation until he confessed to all the crimes. Then, on 17 December, the presbytery petitioned the privy council, asking for him to be transferred to Edinburgh tolbooth because people in the parish refused to continue guarding him, and the house in which he was imprisoned was insecure. He was then moved to the tolbooth of Edinburgh.

More than three months later, on 2 April 1630, Erskine's trial came up in the central court of justiciary in Edinburgh. The prosecutor was Joseph Miller, substitute to the king's advocate. Dittays from 31 March 1630, based on depositions before the ‘Lord Justice’ (Alexander Colville, justice depute, who was the judge in charge of the trial), and likewise from the presbytery, were read in the presence of the assize. Erskine denied the crimes. The assize unanimously found him guilty, with the exception of witchcraft committed against Robert Hogg. Whether this was the only witchcraft charge, or whether there were other witchcraft charges of which he was found guilty, was not specified. He was sentenced to be strangled and burned in Newbattle.

An early leader in the girls’ Young Christian Workers (YCW) in England, Lancastrian Mary Lyons recalled in old age how the Movement had shaped her life, including her choice of husband and how they celebrated their wedding in 1942. She married a fellow YCW, Austin Lyons, and at their wedding, she wrote, ‘We sang “Rouse Up” and had the YCW badge as decoration on the wedding cake’. “Rouse Up” was the rallying song of the Movement, shared by both boys and girls, but the girls also had their own songbook. ‘Be proud to be a worker girl, like Christ your worker King; for carry on the world could not, save you your labour bring’ ran the chorus of one of the songs, set to the tune ‘Boys of Wexford’. Another began ‘What's that badge, what's that badge, O my brave Jocist girl’, and ended with a call to action typical of the YCW spirit:

Whilst sentiments of this kind were not unusual in the defensive and somewhat triumphalist culture of the English Catholic community in the 1940s and 1950s, the specific depiction of the status, dignity and mission of girls, and particularly of worker girls, was distinctive and rare.

To begin indirectly: any Irish person of my generation (I was born in 1958) who has read even a fraction of the commission reports and commentaries that have issued from Ireland in the past fifteen years on the record of pervasive child sexual abuse (much of it perpetrated by priests and religious and lay teachers), on the complicity between the Irish State and the Roman Catholic Church in the confinement and forced labour of young women and girls, on the systematic humiliation and punishment of unmarried mothers within institutions in which their children either died as infants or were forcibly taken from them as a matter of course, or on the incarceration of children within the vast and terrifying apparatus of industrial schools, will realise that the Irish story has been hollowed out. We are not as we once seemed to be.

1.1Como la comunidad de Pisa, toda Italia y casi todo el mundo os consideran extraordinario, invencible y victorioso señor Alfonso, rey por la gracia de Dios de Castilla, Toledo, León, Galicia, Sevilla, Murcia y Jaén, como el más distinguido de todos los reyes que viven o que vale la pena recordar […] y además saben que Vos amáis sobre todo la paz, la verdad, la piedad y la justicia, que vos sois el más cristiano y más fiel […] sabiendo que descendéis de la sangre de los duques de Suabia, una casa a la que pertenece el Imperio con derecho y dignidad por decisión de los príncipes y por entrega de los papas de la Iglesia […] Bandino di Lanzia's speech

Once the prize had been condemned, the agents were responsible for applying for the Bounty or Head Money due to their clients. They had to provide copies of the necessary documents:

• • The proof of condemnation

• • The proof of the number of men involved in the prize

• • The Power of Attorney from both crews

• • The certified muster lists from both crews

• • A reminder of the Act by which Bounty was to be paid

• • A statement by Samuel Seddon, the Admiralty's Solicitor, that the documentation was complete

• • The Treasury confirming that no flag officer had claimed a share within the fifteen days’ grace allowed

• • The deposition by the master of L’Heureuse that there had been seventysix men on board at the time of the capture

[On the cover of the little parcel of papers] Received the 22nd April 1757 No 395 extra William Redstone, James Bensley, Charles Brett and Philip Stephens Bounty to the Tartar and Happy sloop for taking the Heureux a French privateer £380 0s 0d

The state of the case of William Redstone, James Bensley, Charles Brett and Philip Stephens Esq claiming payment of Bounty Money at £5 per head for 76 men taken in the L’Heureuse a French privateer by his Majesty's ship the Tartar Captain John Lockhart Commander and the Happy sloop Captain Thomas Burnett Commander on 16th September 1756.

To have any hope of being released from French imprisonment, the American merchant seaman held as a prisoner of war had to be able to prove two things: that he was truly American and not British, and that he had not been working for the British at the time of capture. This is only partially analogous to the plight of the impressed American in the Royal Navy, who had to prove only his nationality, although most of the prisoners in France did not understand that.

There is a substantial amount in the historiography of impressment, of the impressment of Americans by a British institution, and of how that led to the creation of a document designed to prevent it, which in turn influenced the development of a modern understanding of citizenship. The 1924 publication, Impressment of American Seamen by James Fulton Zimmerman, remains the foremost study of the British practice as it was used against Americans. Denver Brunsman, in his article “Subjects vs. Citizens” defines its application as a sort of “forced migration”, while Jean Choate termed it “involuntary servitude”; but J. Ross Dancy, in opposition to such views, wrote “though impressment was not the tyrannical and evil implement that history has depicted, on some level it did physically deny men their freedom”, seeming not to perceive that that denial of freedom was the point of contention or that it required tyrannical and evil behaviour on the part of Royal Navy officers to enforce. Dancy's apology brought disputing responses from other historians, particularly Isaac Land. Because so few of the American seamen who ended up as prisoners of war in France had also been impressed by the Royal Navy, impressment is not the real concern of this chapter.

Meta-analysis of previous VAR studies shows that QE multipliers can differ by a factor of 100. But it is unknown if this wide dispersion arises from the use of different QE measures or different VAR modelling approaches. This chapter examines this question