Entre 1659 y 1662, el pintor italiano Guido Cagnacci, por entonces establecido en la corte vienesa de Leopoldo Guillermo I, llevó a cabo dos versiones distintas de La muerte de Cleopatra (Ritschard y Morehead 122–27). La primera, hoy en la Pinacoteca di Brera en Milán, nos presenta a una mujer sola y desnuda de cintura para arriba, sentada en un sillón de cuero y con una pequeña serpiente atrapada entre el brazo derecho y uno de los brazos del sillón. La mirada de Cleopatra es ambigua: si el mordisco ya se ha producido, no sabemos si en el brazo o en el pecho, lo que presenciamos es la agonía o muerte de la reina, matizadas por la placidez del gesto y por unos ojos entornados y oscurecidos que no miran nada; si el mordisco está a punto de producirse, tal vez en el pecho izquierdo, hacia donde la víbora apunta fijamente la cabeza, lo que vemos es un gesto ensimismado y una mirada provocativa, a la Gentileschi, en los que se cifra el desafío de la reina a Augusto y al propio espectador. En la segunda versión, última de las numerosas versiones del suicidio de Cleopatra que realizara Cagnacci y hoy en el Kunsthistorisches Museum de Viena, compuesta muy poco después de la versión de Milán, desaparece cualquier señal de ambigüedad: Cleopatra, de nuevo semidesnuda, luce ahora los símbolos inequívocos de su poderío (la corona) y riqueza (la famosa perla), y el sillón en el que descansa se acerca mucho más al trono de una reina; la serpiente, a pesar de que los pechos se le ofrecen desnudos, muerde uno de los brazos; y la cabeza y mirada de Cleopatra, ambas inertes, son la inequívoca expresión de una muerte apenas consumada. Cagnacci, además, acompaña la imagen sedente de Cleopatra de siete doncellas que, replicando algunas el semidesnudo de su ama, se arremolinan alrededor del trono inyectando de gestualidad y sentimiento la quietud de la reina muerta.

Los cambios incorporados a esta segunda versión nos recuerdan dos aspectos importantes de la iconografía cleopátrica a tener muy en cuenta a la hora de entender lo que lectores y público barrocos buscaban leer y ver en la reina egipcia. Estos cambios, creo, resultan especialmente relevantes para acercarse a las versiones teatrales auriseculares de la historia cleopátrica, a las cuales se dedica por entero este capítulo.

Thomas Hobbes, reflecting on the history of the 1640s and 1650s, found it a ‘strange thing the whole house of Lords should not perceive that the ruine of the Kings Power, and the weakning of it, was the ruin or weakning of themselves’. By fighting the king, the Lords condemned themselves to oblivion; they could hardly ‘think it likely, that the people ever meant to take Soveraignty from the King, to give it them’. In reality, there was no reason for those peers who sided with parliament in 1642 to foresee the destruction of their chamber. Although the Act abolishing the House of Lords, passed by the Rump of the House of Commons on 19 March 1649, claimed that they had ‘too long experience’ of the inconveniencies that the Lords posed, it was really the experience of the 1640s, and particularly the events of the winter of 1648–49, that led them to this conclusion.

From the outbreak of the war, parliamentarian arguments advanced to make plain the king's contractual and subordinate position vis-à-vis parliament, rendered the position of the House of Lords increasingly anomalous. The story of parliamentarian political thought can be told as one of unintended consequences. By justifying the war effort, parliamentarian writers with no interest in subverting England's ancient constitution of king, Lords and Commons, promoted ideas that were ultimately invoked by a minority of parliament's supporters to dismantle that framework.

Parliamentarian thought developed only tentatively during the early 1640s, responding to constitutional questions as they arose, or as opponents posed them. Ideas were not the stimulus for actions, but were found to justify them. Once articulated, defended and clarified, however, those ideas became systematized and concretized into a holistic parliamentarian position that was difficult for its adherents to forget or refute. Most obviously, the idea of parliamentary supremacy became integral to those defending the taking of arms against the king, meaning it could hardly be reneged on at a later stage – to do so would undermine the parliamentarian cause itself. Moreover, ideas, once invoked to justify actions, acted as a guide – or limit – to the range of acceptable future actions open to the parliamentarians.

South Africa’s mining industry drew workers from labour-sending areas across southern Africa, but the small mountain Kingdom of Lesotho had become particularly dependent on such migrancy, with the large cohort of Basotho mineworkers playing an active role in the development of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM). They were hard hit by the dismissals following the 1987 strike and, while the post-strike struggles described in the previous chapter were playing out in the Transkei, an analogous process was unfolding in Lesotho.

Lesotho was not always dependent on migrancy. Instead, when gold was first discovered in South Africa, Lesotho became known as the granary of the goldfields, increasing its agricultural output in response to the associated rise in demand. This changed when South Africa imposed new borders in 1912, pushing Lesotho further up the mountains and transferring vast swathes of productive agricultural land from Lesotho into South Africa’s Orange Free State.

With Lesotho largely forced out of South Africa’s agricultural markets, its people became increasingly integrated into the labour market instead. The 1986 census found that nearly half the working male population of Lesotho worked on South Africa’s mines; in 1988, mining remittances contributed to 62 per cent of Lesotho’s gross national product, dropping to just 18 per cent over the next ten years (Hassan 2002, p. 3). Lesotho also has its own complex political history, securing independence from Britain in 1966 to become the Kingdom of Lesotho. Two main parties competed for power. However, when, in 1970, the Basotho Congress Party (BCP) won the elections on a progressive and antimonarchist ticket, the ruling Basotho National Party (BNP) annulled the election and declared a state of emergency. The BNP ruled for the next sixteen years, banning the opposition and forcing its leaders into exile or into the mountains, from where they fought a low-key guerrilla war (Gay and Hall 2000, p. 7).

This did not stop massive international aid flowing into Lesotho. A case study of a World Bank funded development project in Lesotho in the period 1975–84 is provided in James Ferguson’s classic ethnographic study, The Anti-Politics Machine. Ferguson describes the aid-funded development apparatus as ‘an anti-politics machine, depoliticizing everything it touches, everywhere whisking political realities out of sight, all the while performing, almost unnoticed, its own pre-eminently political operation of expanding state power’ (Ferguson 1990, p. xv).

Against the backdrop of the power struggles in the Eastern Cape and Lesotho described in earlier chapters, four new NUM co-ops finally went into production during 1989. In South Africa, these were in the Transkei, in Qwe Qwe (outside Umtata) and in Flagstaff; in Lesotho, they were in the small towns of Quthing and Leribe. These co-ops represented a rather steep learning curve for NUM, in which most of the kinds of problems experienced in the early 1900s in the ‘associations of producers’ described by the Webbs and discussed in the previous chapter were manifest in stark forms – along with quite a few they could never have anticipated.

With the first four co-ops just up and running, the pressure to roll out more was already intense, with NUM embarking on a co-op expansion strategy focused on establishing agricultural production co-ops in every district of the Transkei and Lesotho. This expansion phase was supported by funding from the European Union through a local entity called Kagiso Trust. This allowed the NUM Co-op Unit to rapidly enhance its staff capacity with a mix of ex-miners, professional financial managers and specialist agricultural capacity.

In this period, the Co-op Unit was exposed to the more established co-op movements in Zimbabwe and Botswana, where experience and thinking on the issues was far ahead. We drew from this experience by recruiting James Sarakusebwa from the Co-operative Self-Finance Scheme in Zimbabwe. Over this period, in 1990, the ANC and the South African Communist Party (SACP) were unbanned; a range of staff members with specialist skills were drawn from amongst these returning exiles.

NUM’s Co-op Forum – comprised of representatives from each co-op – became a platform for significant inter-co-op learning and exchange. With meetings translated routinely into three languages at least (isiXhosa, seSotho, sometimes English and sometimes seSwati) these meetings tended to extend through the night. The debates were intense, with co-op members’ passion for participation unflagging through to dawn.

This was all taking place against the backdrop of history in the making, as political leaders started to be released from prison and as the constitutional negotiations began, along with negotiation between the ANC, the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), the SACP and other democratic formations over the content of the Reconstruction and Development Programme envisaged for the post-apartheid period.

In the late medieval and early modern periods, the northern part of Finland, at that time part of the Swedish kingdom, became a veritable melting pot of different cultures and ethnicities. The northern parts of Fennoscandia were largely populated by the indigenous Sami people when the first colonial expansion of the Swedish kingdom began during the 14th century. Then the first peasant villages on the northern river estuaries were founded, based on the Crown's centrally-organized relocation of peasant families from the more southern part of the kingdom. Relations between Sweden and the Sami are best described within the framework of colonialism. “Colonialism” refers to a situation of unequal power relations between peoples: Wolfgang Reinhard, for instance, defines it as “the control of one people by another, culturally different one, an unequal relationship which exploits differences of economic, political, and ideological development between the two”. Sometimes too the term “internal colonialism” is suggested to describe the relationship between the Sami and the Swedes, especially during the early modern period when the northern areas were already formally a part of the Swedish kingdom.

The intensification of the Swedish Crown's economic and political interests in the north began in the medieval period. The Crown aimed to strengthen its power in the north by taxation of the native population and by encouraging the establishment of agrarian settlement. Moreover, Christianity was promoted as the Catholic Church began to expand into the area and new parishes were founded.5 An expansion with clearer colonial agendas and ideologies took place from 17th century onwards.

ALL Saints’ steady accumulation of vestments and vessels, no less than its swelling collection of liturgical books, flags up the significance attached to decorous ceremonial. As well as reinforcing general impressions of ample staffing in the church, it signals something, too, of the likely calibre of its clergy who, naturally, led the worship in All Saints’. For herein lay the parish's rationale: overshadowing any role that it played in pastoral instruction, All Saints’ – like every other ecclesiastical community – existed primarily to ‘increase divine service’. While the All Saints’ archive permits an unusually good impression of the liturgical developments sponsored by a wealthy urban neighbourhood, we nevertheless still ‘see through a glass, darkly’. Many of the finer points of day-to-day practice in All Saints’ remain obscure for the simple reason that surviving evidence was produced by and for the laity: it treats only obliquely with the clergy.

Unto the more laud and worship of Almighty God: Parishioners and the liturgy

As a result of their continual, and carefully commemorated, investment in the material provision underpinning the parish liturgy, parishioners displayed a clear determination to weave themselves into the rites observed within All Saints’. By commissioning chantries, for instance, wealthier parishioners provided for the celebration of daily Masses at designated altars within the church either for a fixed duration or, occasionally, in perpetuity; anniversary founders, too, ensured that exequies on the eve and a Requiem Mass on the morrow would be celebrated, either for a number of years or in perpetuity, ordinarily marking the date of their death. Parishioners exercised clear influence, both in enhancing the volume of divine service enacted within All Saints’ and also defining aspects, at least, of both the appearance and rhythm of sacral and commemorative rites. Vestments associated patron and chaplain, either at the daily Mass or when the priest swelled the number of those assisting with the daily office in the choir. Complementing the lessons of the bede roll and the General Mind (both of which impressed on parishioners who their benefactors were and what they had given), patrons took pains to identify their chaplains and, hence, their contribution in expanding the forces responsible for decorous worship within the parish.

Memorandum appended to the All Saints’ Churchwardens’ accounts for 1524–25 [ASB 2, p. 311], concerning the parish's reacquisition of much of Haddon's endowment.

fo 9v

Memorandum the last day of the month of May in the year of Our Lord God 1524 in the presence of the vicar and of the whole paryshons all such plate as was in pledge to the church by Master Thomas Pacy and by Jerome Grene (as it appears by their bill) was delivered to the said vicar, to Thomas Pacy and Davy Lawrens, and also at the same time was delivered to them a basin and ewer of silver and a standing cup of silver parcel gilt, a small nut whole gilt, a spice dish of silver parcel gilt, and the same vicar, Thomas Pacy and Davy Lawrens promised to discharge the said church and p[ar]issons against the Abbot and Convent of St Austins of Bristol of ￡45 and against the vicar and p[ar]ishons of St Leonards of ￡22 10s. for the sales of Master Hawkes lands which the paryshons of the said church have bought; the spice dish weighs 7. oz at 3s. 6d. the oz., amounting to 26s. 3d., the nut weighs 13. oz at 3s. 4d. the oz. with the shell, amounting to 44s. 2d., the basin and the ewer and the standing cup weigh 80 oz at 3s. 4d. the oz., amounting to ￡13 6s. 8d. Master Thomas Pacy's plate lies for ￡20. Jerome Grene's plate lies for ￡25. At the same was delivered to the vicar [and] to Thomas Pacy and Davy Lawrens of the church money – 29s. 2d. Item the same vicar, Thomas and Davy must recover of this church's duty of Richard Harvy – 40s. Sum – ￡65 6s. 3d. More the said vicar, Thomas and Lawrens must recover of John Gervys proctor – 43s. 9d., the which money was paid on the 25th day of June anno 1524 by the hands of Thomas Younge.

The Easter Sepulchre that William Canynges gave to St Mary Redcliffe, Bristol, 4 July 1470. Transcription from E. E. Williams, The Chantries of William Canynges in St Mary Redcliffe, Bristol (Bristol, 1950), p. 74 – from the Braikenridge Collection of the Archives of St Mary Redcliffe.

Memorandum that Master Canynges has delivered the 4th day of July in the year of Our Lord 1470 to Master Nicholas Pyttes vicar of Redcliffe, Moses Conyeryn, Philip Bertlemewe and John Browne proctors of Redcliffe beforesaid.

A new sepulchre well gilt with fine gold and a cover thereto.

Item an image of God Almighty rising out of the same sepulchre with all the ordinance that belongs thereto – that is to say a lath made of timber and the iron work thereto etcetera.

Item thereto belongs heaven made of timber and stained cloths.

Item hell made of timber and iron work with devils the number of 13.

Item 4 knights armed keeping the sepulchre with their weapons in their hands, that is to say 2 spears, 2 axes and 2 pavyes.

Item 4 pairs of angels wings for 4 angels made of timber and well painted.

Item the Father, the Crown and visage. The Balle with a Cross upon well gilt with fine gold.

Item the Holy Ghost coming out of heaven in to the sepulchre.

Item belonging to the 4 angels 4 chevelers.

Throughout the 17th and until the beginning of the 19th century, Sweden's most controversial contact with Islamic cultures was with the so-called Barbary powers: Tripoli, Tunis and Algiers, all regencies of the Ottoman Empire and Morocco. Between 1650 and 1770 approximately 1,000 Swedish subjects were captured by corsairs roaming the waters of the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. The large majority of the captives were civilians serving in the merchant fleet, and many of them ended up on slave markets in North Africa. Captivity in North Africa could mean a life spent chained to an oar, working in harbours, in private households or as servants in palaces. Compared to other Europeans, Swedish subjects represented only a small fraction of those held in North African captivity. The majority of captives were Spanish, but there were also French, Dutch, German, Portuguese and other Scandinavians. Approximately half of the captured Swedes made it back home. Captivity and potential death for those working in the merchant fleet was the price of the state enterprise to import salt directly from southern Europe – a commodity of vital importance for preserving food during the winter in Sweden.

The Ottoman Empire had long been “the Other” in the eyes of Europe, and vice versa. But between the two there was also a fascinating exchange of ideas and commodities, and personal encounters between individuals such as merchants, travellers, diplomats, consuls, soldiers and captives. Those who returned could tell stories about the other, narratives that often blended fact and fiction and fed the European imagination of “the Turk” and slavery on the Barbary Coast, as will be discussed in this chapter.

The early days of the co-op programme took place against the backdrop of the final stages of a repressive state of emergency in South Africa; unimaginable as it seemed at the time, the end of apartheid was just around the corner. In early 1990, the ANC and other banned organisations were unbanned; later that year, the task of representing the democratic movement to meet Nelson Mandela as he finally exited from Pollsmoor Prison went to NUM General Secretary Cyril Ramaphosa. By 1993, Ramaphosa was leading the country’s constitutional negotiations; within the democratic movement, the terms of a post-apartheid Reconstruction and Development Programme were under negotiation. A transition to democracy seemed plausible, if not yet certain. The idealised socialism of the imagination was not yet dead, even if the socialism of the Eastern Bloc was crumbling. It was a different era from the one in which the co-op programme had begun. It had new possibilities, new spaces within which to work and the promise of the transition to democracy ahead – with all the unknown territory this would entail.

Nevertheless, retrenchments in the mining industry continued unabated. In 1991, NUM initiated the first Mining Industry Summit, bringing together labour, the industry and government to negotiate a social plan to address the crisis of retrenchments in the industry. The outcomes were disappointing, with no commitment to limit retrenchments, and only a lukewarm response to NUM’s proposal for a wide-reaching social plan to address the development needs of mining towns and mine labour-sending areas.

Meanwhile, by 1993, the NUM Co-op Unit had drawn the conclusion that support to worker co-ops was not offering a sufficiently effective strategy for creating jobs for ex-miners at scale. The numbers of people able to benefit relative to the costs of set up and of ongoing technical support were just too low, with success rates and returns to participants low also. The approach was an insufficient response to the challenges confronted. We needed to reach far greater scale.

Close involvement of NUM’s National Executive Committee (NEC) members in mediating disputes at co-op level meant a high level of exposure to the challenges and to the limited gains this route offered to members.