On the morning of 20 January 1658 the members of the Other House gathered at Westminster for the opening of the second session of the second Protectorate Parliament. After taking their oaths in the Painted Chamber they filed into the former House of Lords and were seated ‘by a herald at armes after the wonted manner there’. The faces of those occupying the benches were new, but the chamber looked much as before. The Council had ordered the Master of the Wardrobe to furnish it with all the familiar items, complete with ‘Wool Packes’. The only material difference was that the arms emblazoned on the great ‘cloth of estate’ of ‘wrought gold’ hanging over the throne at the focal point of the chamber bore the Cromwellian, rather than the Stuart, coat of arms.

Ambassadors and newswriters recognized that the ceremonials mirrored closely a royal opening of parliament. Following Cromwell's arrival at the Other House, ‘formerly call'd the Lord's House’, Black Rod was sent to summon the Commons to attend the Protector. After ‘a little time’, the members of the Commons, led by their Speaker attended by the mace, entered what the newsbooks described as ‘the House of Lords’ and crowded at the bar. The members of the Other House stood and removed their hats as the Protector rose to make an uncharacteristically short speech, which opened by pointedly addressing ‘My Lords, and Gentlemen of the House of Commons’. Claiming to be unwell, Cromwell, in further echo of royal practices, turned to Lord Commissioner of the Great Seal, and Speaker of the Other House, Nathaniel Fiennes, who was ‘richly clad with crimson robes trimmed with gold’, to detail the government's agenda.

Fiennes stressed the importance of upholding the new constitutional arrangement ‘we now stand upon’; by their oaths they were ‘all sworn to it’. He derided those Republicans and Royalists who sought ‘either Utopias of I know not what kind … or daydreams of the return of I know not what Golden age with the old Line’. Instead, Fiennes urged compromise. Given the ‘great variety of humours and judgments’ among the people of the nation, he thought it ‘no wonder’ that ‘every one cannot have what he thinks best in his judgement’; they ought to be ‘content …

INEVER MET Derek Jarman in person. My one physical encounter with him was in May 1992, when he introduced a special benefit concert by the Pet Shop Boys at Manchester's legendary Haçienda nightclub. This was the first time I had seen Jarman films, which were screened as back projections for some of the songs. Several of these films had been used previously on the band's 1989 tour; two additional Jarman Super 8s from the early 1970s, A Garden in Luxor and Studio Bankside, were also set to Pet Shop Boys songs. I remember being especially taken by the haunting footage that accompanied the song “King's Cross.” Incorporating Jarman's trademark techniques of associative montage, the film takes viewers on an inconclusive journey through the ticket hall of London's King's Cross underground station, intercut with shots of people and buildings in the surrounding streets. The camera's view then switches to a train travelling into the mainline station; a young man (Chris Lowe) seemingly arrives off the train and wanders alone through the station concourse. The film possibly resonated with my own feelings of disorientation after relocating to Manchester to study for a degree in Medieval Studies. At the time, I was a lonely teenager – finding my way in a brave new world of city living, sexual identity, academia and the Middle Ages.

Here I am now, a quarter of a century or so later, writing in an office not far from King's Cross station – and, for that matter, just a short distance from Jarman's alma mater at the Slade. I've been thinking about how Jarman's queer art and politics have informed my own development as a scholar. What are the threads connecting my future vocation as a (queer) medievalist with the events that transpired that summer? How are my own medievalisms bound up with Derek Jarman's? These questions are ultimately unanswerable, of course, but certain patterns appear in retrospect.

When I began researching and writing on medieval sexualities, for example, I became increasingly aware of the existence of a scholarly double standard. “Anachronism” usually operates as a morally freighted category – the egregious error that every historian of sexuality should avoid.

This chapter engages with material, not included in Rodó's books, which was written around three years either side of El mirador de Próspero (1913). It aims to account for work done and dusted, as it were, up to the point when Rodó left for Europe, on 14 July 1916, to embark on a journey that represented a break with his Uruguayan past and a new phase in his life and career – notwithstanding the strong continuities in the work he produced during his nine-month sojourn in the old world, until his untimely death.

The material can be divided into two broad categories, corresponding to two main groups of texts, though naturally there are connections between them. The first is what we can call, using a modern designation, the work of Rodó as a public intellectual, as he engages both with matters of the day and with more permanent issues associated with his essays. The adjective “public” is justified by his awareness of the potential impact of his ideas in the world through education in its widest sense. The texts in this group come mostly from three sections in OC: what the editor calls “literary courtesy”, which includes reviews, prologues and letters supporting the work of fellow writers (983–1031); miscellaneous writings (1175–214); and notes about the First World War (1217–40).

The second category represents a little-studied side of Rodó's production, namely his collaboration on two large-scale publications that adapted, for the Hispanic world, multi-volume encyclopaedic works that had been successful in the English language. Rodó developed a relationship with the International Publishing Society, an Anglo-American publishing house that set up a branch in Buenos Aires, and he acted as editor and contributor to two of their most important works. This material is, again, quite consistent with his major writings.

The Public Intellectual

Rodó did not himself use the term “intellectual” as a noun in his major works (Ariel, Motivos, and El mirador de Próspero), though the collective expression “intelectualidad” does appear, but he did employ the label in a 1900 letter to the Venezuelan writer César Zumeta, who had sent him a copy of his El continente enfermo (The sickly continent) (New York, 1899).

As is well known, Chaucer's rendition of the tale of Ceyx and Alcyone in the frame-tale of The Book of the Duchess departs from its sources in a small, but significant, detail with respect to the role of Morpheus. Guillaume de Machaut's Fonteinne amoureuse, a known central source for the Duchess, has Morpheus adopt Ceyx's shape as a simulacrum, as happens in Machaut's sources (Ovid's Metamorphoses and the Ovide moralise). Chaucer, on the other hand, has Morpheus go to the sea in which Ceyx has been drowned, ‘take up Seys body the kyng, / That lyeth ful pale and nothyng rody / … [and] crepe into the body / And doo hit goon to Alcione’ (BD 142–5). Instead of merely looking like Ceyx, Morpheus reanimates Ceyx's dead corpse to ferry the message of his death to Alcyone. Chaucer further emphasizes his curious departure from his sources by reiterating it some lines later: Morpheus ‘[t]ook up the dreynte body sone / And bar hyt forth to Alcione’ (195–6). Furthermore, Ceyx's body, controlled from inside by Morpheus, speaks before Alcyone's bed while she sleeps, rather than from inside her dream as in Chaucer's sources. Chaucer thus insists on adding an uncomfortable authenticity to the scene: instead of hearing an image in a dream, Alcyone hears her actual husband communicate with her, but, rather than merely looking like Ceyx, he is being awkwardly reanimated and manipulated from the inside out.

The differences in Machaut's and Chaucer's treatment of Morpheus’ role in the Ceyx and Alcyone tale extend to that tale's subsequent relationship to the larger plot of both works. In the Fonteinne, the Ceyx and Alcyone story is rendered within a complainte spoken aloud by a lovesick nobleman, which the text's protagonist, Guillaume, overhears and copies down verbatim. Later, he presents this perfect rendition of the nobleman's words to him and garners the prince's favor, friendship, and, most importantly, his patronage. As an anagram in the Fonteinne reveals, moreover, the nobleman in question represents Machaut's real-life patron John of Berry.

When the first civil war ended after Charles I's surrender to a Scottish covenanter army in May 1646, it left the three British kingdoms in an unresolved crisis. Parliament remained divided about what victory should bring, and communities throughout the British Isles suffered from war's economic and social scars. The majority in England appear to have desired a return to government by both king and parliament, and some kind of established church, though the form either of these should take was widely disputed. Presbyterians in Scotland and Catholics in Ireland continued to push (and in Ireland, fight) for their own religious settlement. During the following two years, as efforts towards a political compromise between parliament and the king foundered, and peace brought no relief from heavy taxes and harvest failure, dissatisfaction with the parliamentarian regime in England grew.

This eventually broke into fresh conflict in 1648, in a series of uprisings and the invasion of England by the Scottish Engager army, led by the royalist marquis of Hamilton. One of the most significant of these uprisings took place within the naval fleet stationed in the Downs. In May 1648 a substantial proportion of the fleet's sailors rejected their commander and expressed support for some kind of political accommodation with the king. This soon escalated into open warfare, as parliament prepared a new fleet to counter this threat, and the mutineers were pushed from forceful petitioning into outright royalism, accepting the leadership of the prince of Wales. This chapter will discuss these developments and their consequences during the second civil war, which resulted in victory for the more radical faction in parliament, leading to the execution of Charles I and the establishment of the Commonwealth.

Loyalty and sovereignty, January–April 1647

Although the conclusion of the first civil war brought an end to fighting on land in England and Scotland, warfare continued in Ireland and at sea. The navy achieved some success in their efforts to protect merchant shipping, providing convoys on major trade routes, and capturing a number of privateers.

When Ovid's Alcyone dreams of her dead husband, Ceyx (who is in fact Morpheus in disguise, sent by Juno to relieve the queen's anguished uncertainty about his fate at sea), she awakens in distress, roused by the sound of her own voice (‘uoce sua … turbata’, Met. 11.677). Interestingly, Alcyone's voice straddles both dream and reality; she really does speak, but she is speaking to someone, in her dream, who isn't ‘really’ there. Her voice attempts a poignant translation – from dream to waking – that it cannot complete. The episode beautifully illustrates the dream's work as a kind of transitional space for Alcyone, representing her husband, one last time, in the act of telling her that he isn't there. Once shaken out of sleep into reality, Alcyone begins the process of accommodating her husband's death. But in this bereft waking world her own voice now rapidly ceases to be able to articulate her emotions, and we are told that wailing took the place of words as she absorbs her loss (‘uerboque interuenit omni / plangor’, 11.708–9).

The dream seems to pave the way for what happens next: a sighting of the dead body itself, which washes ashore in front of her and elicits an immediate deictic recognition: ‘ille est!’ (11.725). But this direct confrontation with the body of Ceyx – the real body, it appears, not the phantom shape conjured by Morpheus – precipitates a final cutting off of her ability to speak, and she metamorphoses into a bird characterized precisely by its plangent, though of course speechless, cries (11.734–5). Because the appearance of the body of Ceyx is not part of Morpheus's plan, it seems to result at least in part from the psychological process set in motion by the dream and partially articulated in Alcyone's grief-stricken cries. The appearance of the body marks a forward movement in her understanding of her husband's death. But the metamorphosis suggests that the process of accommodation – what Freud will call the work of mourning – stalls precisely at the vision of the corpse. As the bird Alcyone becomes a figure for an inarticulate sorrow that will never develop into a more psychologically integrated form. Her affective state – sorrow – has literally taken over her body.

WEALTHY men and women made a point of investing property, money and equipment to develop All Saints’ resources, benefiting their own souls along with all the others in its care, both living and dead. Generosity by some obliged others to devote steadfast effort in overseeing the parish's increasingly complex interests, which included the management and maintenance of a growing property portfolio; but parishioners would never have entrusted so much to contemporaries and successors had they not had confidence in All Saints’ administrative competence. While developments may be hard to chart, managerial practices had emerged by the second half of the fifteenth century (and probably well before that) equal to the demands made of the parish. Such a capacity not only helped to shape parishioners’ expectations in the decades preceding the Reformation but must also have helped to reinforce the behavioural procedures that have emerged in previous discussion. It is clearly time to investigate how All Saints’ organised itself both to manage and to advance shared interests.

The first chapter in this section considers the role played by the parish clergy and explores their generosity. Well aware of their pastoral and liturgical responsibilities to their flocks, priests, like everyone else, hoped for salvation. Since this was a goal best achieved by collaboration with others in the parish community, the clergy's interests integrated closely with those of the churchwardens and the parish elite. One of the themes that then emerges clearly in the chapter following (chapter 9) is the degree of co-operation visible between clergy and different registers of the laity, as each worked closely with the others to direct parish affairs in the decades preceding the Reformation.

SOCIETY IN CHANGE – A WIDENING HORIZON?

In the period 1600–1718 Sweden was undergoing rapid change, and various aspects of the country, such as the economy, the military, administration and urban development underwent modernization. As a result the kingdom became centralized and its people hierarchically classified. Research on early modern Sweden and its transformation from a medieval society on the northern fringes of Catholic Europe to a nation with grand political ambitions is very extensive. Political history is today somewhat relegated to the background and the more specifically social aspects of society, along with Sweden's participation in globalized networks, are at the forefront of scholarly interest.

In the 17th century, the small and old-fashioned Swedish towns were in the front line of regulatory efforts. Partially, this endeavour stemmed from an awareness of a lack of the sophistication and development characteristic of other aspiring European countries, such as France and the German states. When planning for the funeral of the king Gustavus Adolphus in Stockholm, the government hesitated to invite foreign guests, since “when their ambassadors come, they will see our poverty…”. An urban policy, including regulation of the old towns, foundations of new towns, and relocation of some of the most important towns, was intended to act as a driving force for the rest of society. The massive campaign of modernizing and regulating towns on the Swedish mainland, as well as in the provinces on the Baltic Sea, has recently been studied through a large body of preserved town plans.

IMAGINING AMERICA

In the early decades of the 17th century, when the idea of the Swedish colony of New Sweden was conceived and realized, America had a vague place in popular consciousness. Knowledge of the new continent was rather limited, and early Swedish images of it were influenced by tales told by foreign travellers and sailors, by pictorial representations in prints and maps, and by news and reports published in foreign and domestic newspapers and broadsheets. These diverse accounts mixed fact with fiction and presented the continent as a confusing place.

America was often judged to be the materialization of a biblical paradise, a land of plenty promising quick and substantial profits. Such a version of the continent was presented by Willem Usselincx in his 1624 negotiations with Gustavus Adolphus to establish a Swedish colonial trading company, and promoted by Johan Risingh, New Sweden's last governor. The potential of the New World and benefits of a colonial venture were painted with broad strokes as an answer to the aspirations of the ambitious Swedish kingdom. Usselincx and Risingh argued, for example, that the New World and trans-oceanic connections were the major source of wealth of the Dutch Republic and Spain, and Sweden should follow the colonial path to enhance its economy, political status and culture. The perception of America as a seemingly boundless source for quenching European appetites and desires was also fuelled by reports of the legendary riches of the Spanish treasure fleet that occasionally appeared in Ordinari Post Tijdender (“Regular Mail Times”), founded in 1645.

Volume 14 spans the fields of textiles, dress, and fashion, including fashions in that most natural of garments, body hair!

Evidence for dress in multicultural, sixth-century Ravenna in a Latin charter is newly translated by Olga Magoula, who contextualises the inventory of bequests from a member of the Ravenna urban elite, a class who had seen better times. It reveals an extraordinary mixture of opulence and workaday in a document which lists silk garments alongside slaves and household goods ranging from silver spoons to a broken cauldron. Also concerning Italy, Megan Tiddeman, analyzing both literary and nonliterary textual sources, discusses the vocabulary and loanwords in Anglo-Italian mercantile transactions, mostly from the 1200s to the 1400s, when Italian merchants and bankers were prominent in England. She demonstrates a two-way linguistic traffic, with Italian terms transferring into Anglo-Norman/Middle English, especially with reference to luxury silk fabrics which Italians were importing, and from the languages of England into Italian, particularly relating to English wools which were being exported to Italy.

Anne Hedeager Krag examines the incidence of Byzantine and Oriental silks in Denmark, ranging from fragments decorating Viking women's dress to magnificent silks honouring the remains of saints, with suggestions as to how the precious textiles might have been transmitted. Surviving remains date from about 800 to about 1200. Monica L. Wright tackles the question of whether the mysterious garment called a bliaut in French literature is really shown on the statues decorating the Royal Portal of Notre-Dame de Chartres as has been generally supposed, and produces a decisive answer. Karen Margrethe Høskuldsson re-examines the appearance of the French hood in drawings and portrait medals as well as painted portraits, producing new theories about its construction, a proposed chronological development, and innovative suggestions about the evolution and purpose of the feature known as the bongrace. John Block Friedman discusses evidence from the late twelfth to late fifteenth centuries showing that removal of hair from the forehead, the eyebrows, and the body was a courtly feminine ideal promoted, to a considerable extent, by male gynophobia. He describes methods of depilation and professional practitioners of the art, relating some of their more disastrous treatments as well as their successes for women who wished to give the appearance of higher social class or simply to please their husbands.

By enforcing colonial institutions in the region, the colony of New Sweden left traces in America. New Sweden, however, had an impact on those who served in the colony, who corresponded with the old country and in some cases those who came back to Sweden. The returnees brought with them things: objects that served as physical reminders of their extraordinary experience. Some of these experiences seem to have been important and formative for the continued development of these people's lives. The former governor of New Sweden, Johan Printz, for instance, kept material objects from his time in the colony throughout his life, and so too did his daughter Armegot. The pastor Johannes Campanius Holm, who served in the colony from 1643 to 1648, and who translated Luther's Catechism into Algonquin, had his grave slab in Sweden inscribed in the Native American language. One may ask if these objects and material imprints were brought to the old country out of nostalgia, or whether other sentiments too were included: it is well recorded that Johan Printz disliked living in the colony, and the same probably went for Johannes Campanius Holm. Yet Printz actually used objects he obtained from the native inhabitants in America and he kept them all of his life.

Certain aspects of these entangled histories of people and things related to the New Sweden colony will be discussed in this chapter, where I will examine the context of the collection of indigenous material culture from Lenapehoking and north-east America in mid-17th-century Sweden. As a parallel to this, I will also discuss the use of material culture traded by the Swedes to the Native Americans in the region of the colony.

Parliament's maritime forces have attracted considerable attention from historians, with particular interest in political and administrative developments within the navy, overall strategy, and military impact. For the most part these scholars have concluded that, although there were no major seaborne engagements on the same scale as the battles on land, the navy played an important role in protecting trade (and therefore customs revenues), interrupting the shipping of arms to royalists, and preventing foreign intervention, as well as supporting coastal garrisons. The impression of overwhelming parliamentarian strength at sea has been corrected by research into the activities of royalist and Irish privateers, but nevertheless control of the navy contributed to parliament's eventual victory in the first civil war. As Bernard Capp noted, had Charles I possessed the naval strength to blockade London, the war could have ended considerably sooner as parliament's war machine would probably have ground to a halt. Indeed, the navy's main significance for parliament may well have been in defending London, the Thames, and maritime trade to the capital. At the same time, the Thames and Medway were the site of England's major naval bases, and – as discussed in Chapter 2 – parliament's success in taking control of the navy depended upon mobilising support amongst the capital's seafarers. Parliament relied upon the navy to protect London, while at the same time they relied upon London to support the navy. In a similar way to their land forces, parliament utilised existing military structures, but expanded and (to some extent) reformed them for the demands of civil war. This chapter will first examine the purposes for which parliament used the navy, before turning to naval administration and politics, and then the various ranks of naval personnel. Finally, we will look at the considerable auxiliary maritime forces mobilised by parliament.

Defence and authority

At times, as discussed in the previous chapter, the fleet was pivotally important to the course of the land war. In 1643, the navy supplied both Plymouth and Hull by sea while these towns resisted a royalist siege; in 1644 the earl of Warwick commanded naval forces supporting the besieged port of Lyme, and in the same year the Irish squadron under Richard Swanley was instrumental in rescuing parliamentarian fortunes in Pembrokeshire.

In his account of the story of Ceyx and Alcyone, the narrator of the Book of the Duchess describes how Juno sends a messenger to the god of sleep. In the versions of this story with which Chaucer was familiar, the messenger is identified as the goddess Iris, but in Chaucer's telling he becomes male and is given no name. The messenger finds the slumbering bodies of the god and his company lying in the dark cave in which they live, and he rouses them by blowing his horn and crying, ‘Awaketh!’ (BD 183). Morpheus, displeased, opens one eye to ask, ‘Who clepeth ther?’ (185). Before going on to relate Juno's orders, the messenger responds with three simple words of self-identification:

In this brief scene of recognition, the messenger's voice, or his presence before Morpheus as an embodied voice, is enough to transmit unproblematically some sense of his identity, even as Chaucer deliberately suppresses the proper name that might help his readers anchor their understanding of who this figure might be. The scene encapsulates, I believe, one of the central concerns of the Book of the Duchess: What is the relationship between a thing spoken and the one who speaks it? Represented in a ‘book’ – the ‘book’ of the Duchess – this concern expands to embrace something yet more fundamental to the work itself: What is the relationship between a thing written and the one who writes it? The sense that linguistic self-referentiality might be enough to guarantee the link between voice and self (and the troubling and necessary implication that it might not be) finds an echo in the narrator's only attempt at self-identification: ‘I, that made this book’ (96). In a work in which Chaucer explores his position in relation to a known extra-textual figure, John of Gaunt, the question of how one should speak for oneself becomes particularly urgent, even if the answer remains oddly elusive.