HAWKESBURY'S ROLE MANAGING relations with the king and business in the House of Lords made him a key figure in Portland's government. Cabinet rivalries, however, threatened its cohesion. Since Pitt left no obvious successor, his more ambitious followers refused to subordinate their own claims. Only a neutral figure like Portland, who never intended an active role, could mute jealousies by taking the nominal lead. With so many ministers of equal or near equal pretensions, as Perceval noted, the Portland administration inevitably became a “government of departments” vulnerable to a split. Poor coordination and differences on managing the war heightened tensions. Responsible for defending measures his colleagues initiated and directed, Hawkesbury gained stature by prudent counsel and loyalty. Besides yielding his own claims to facilitate arrangements, he managed to keep out of quarrels that split the cabinet. When the break came, Hawkesbury helped forge a new government from the wreckage. Taking over the War Department then gave him responsibility for managing the war at a critical stage.

What Louisa called their year of holiday ended in 1807. The hurry, bustle, anxiety, and worry brought by high office sharply contrasted with the tranquil séjour they had enjoyed. Although she did not rejoice at the change, Louisa hoped that Hawkesbury had not been spoiled by his brief escape from a minister's hectic life. It was Hawkesbury's only time out of office since his twenties, a fact that underlines how politics dominated his life. Liverpool's age and growing infirmity drew Hawkesbury into closer involvement with family matters, including arrangements for his half-sister Charlotte's betrothal to Lord Grimston's son James Walter Grimston. Negotiations over a settlement broke down, much to the young couple's dismay, when the elder Grimston insisted upon a more generous dowry. Since additional money for Charlotte would come from Hawkesbury's inheritance, Liverpool refused. He became more adamant on learning Grimston had more wealth than he had admitted. The story echoed Hawkesbury's earlier romance with Louisa. It ended with Charlotte taking her inheritance early so long as Grimston gave his son an additional £500.

Rodó's aim to inspire young people to create a more idealistic world permeates his writing. Central to Ariel in particular, as its dedication to the youth of America makes explicit, but present in all his work in one way or another, there is a recurring preoccupation with the young as the embodiment of energy, potential and cultural renewal. The theme is ubiquitous: he uses the terms “juventud/joven/juvenil” (youth/young/youthful) 38 times in his most famous essay, placing the lexeme at a significant point in the range of words we can expect to find there. It shares a place with “cultura” (culture) and sits comfortably above “cristiano/cristianismo/Jesús” (Christian/Christianity/Jesus) (16), “Grecia/ griego/heleno/ateniense” (Greece/Greek/Hellenic/Athenian) (20), “educar/ educación” (educate/education) (25), and “bello/belleza” (beautiful/beauty) (27). Counting on upwards, youth terms lie below but not so far from other related lexical items such as “América/americano” (America/American) (42), “superior” (superior) (48), “moral” (moral) and “civilización” (civilization) (both 53). And while it cannot quite compete with two of the most abstract and central references in the book, namely “ideal” (ideal) (65) and “espíritu/espiritual” (spirit/spiritual) (121), these are often explicitly associated by Próspero with the young mentees he addresses in his valedictory speech. Two instances of this are: “el espíritu de la juventud es un terreno generoso donde la simiente de una palabra oportuna suele rendir, en corto tiempo, los frutos de una inmortal vegetación” (a young mind is hospitable soil in which the seed of a single timely word will quickly yield immortal fruit); and, having told the parable of the hospitable king, the master's advice is as follows “¡la vida de que son parte la meditación desinteresada, la contemplación ideal, el ocio antiguo, la impenetrable estancia de mi cuento!” (Selfless meditation, ideal contemplation, the otium of ancient times, and the impregnable chamber of my tale are necessary components of this inner life!) (OC 207; 217; UTP 32; 48).

This partiality for youth is consistent with Rodó's Peter-Pan-like attitude towards his own age: he took as many as three years off when he had the chance. He was born José Enrique Camilo Rodó Piñeyro in Montevideo on 15 July 1871.

The period of intense papal–imperial hostilities coincided with equally turbulent events taking place in the Midi, as Count Raymond VII of Toulouse struggled to recover his former lands. His supporters hoped that Frederick could be drawn to intervene against the French in the defence of his rights in the kingdom of Arles, and their hatred of the clergy there naturally merged with the anticlerical stance of Frederick's own supporters. Occitan troubadours voiced outrage at what they saw as a perversion of the true purpose of crusading, and contrasted the call of the Holy Land with the ‘false crusade’ of the French against Toulouse. They were not entirely unsupported by their northern colleagues.

By 1224 Raymond VII had retaken possession of many castles captured by the French, and restored them to their exiled holders. At the council of Bourges on 30 November 1225 he was excommunicated, and on 30 January 1226 Louis VIII took the cross and marched down the Rhone valley at the head of a powerful army, accompanied by the papal legate Romain de Saint-Ange. They reached Avignon after encountering no resistance on the way. As a result of an obscure misunderstanding, the city first yielded to the king, then defied him during a long hot summer of siege. Faced with growing discontent in his army as a result of the exorbitant cost of food and the spread of dysentery, Louis attempted an assault on the city, but failed. The defeat was generally ascribed to the treachery of some of his barons, particularly to the trouvere Thibaut de Champagne, who, according to Jonathan Sumption, had only joined Louis’ crusade under duress. He had relatives inside Avignon and apparently remained in constant contact with them throughout the siege. Suffering from hunger and unaware of the gravity of Louis’ situation, the Avignonese surrendered on 9 September, and more and more of Raymond's supporters submitted to the king, who marched triumphantly through the Languedoc.

The response of Tomier and Palaizi to the imminent arrival of the king's army at Avignon's city walls highlights the bitterness in the region at the corruption of the very notion of crusade (BdT 442.1).

Rodó's most famous work is a slim volume whose subtle and elusive message has been debated in Latin America and beyond for over 100 years. The essay addresses the future leaders of the subcontinent, who are advised to live their lives according to high ideals. Their individual development, moreover, is presented as a model for their society at large, as these young men are given the task of safeguarding and developing Latin America's cultural identity at a time when it is being threatened by materialism and utilitarianism. Ariel is a sort of compendium for their becoming the Latin Americans of the future.

In the early decades of the twentieth century the book inspired a movement across the subcontinent, styled arielismo (hereafter Arielism), led by students and young intellectuals who were concerned with the improvement of their culture and society in a rather vague and idealistic but also heartfelt way. Ariel's message later fell out of favour as new circumstances inspired political ideas and actions that were to culminate in the Cuban revolution and in a widespread belief that some form of Marxist project was the way to provide social justice and progress for the region. But the essay never altogether ceased to draw attention, both from supporters and critics. In the United States, the “arquetipo del Norte” (the image and likeness of the North) (OC 232; UTP 71) which is presented in Ariel both as essentially different from the rest of the continent and as an undesirable model for the South, the book inspired two English translations undertaken or commissioned by diplomats to the River Plate. The first, a personal, amateur project, considers that the book “has much to say to us”; for the instigator of the second, a scholarly team effort, Próspero “seemed, in fact, to be addressing […] most particularly our own [generation]”.

After a summary of the essay's argument, the present chapter will address four main aspects. It begins by revisiting what Rodó means by idealism, since this concept is the driving force behind the essay and is fundamental to his emphasis on youth, his advice about fostering a balanced personality, and the connection between morality and aesthetics (the subjects of parts one to three of Ariel).

Middle Ages Out of Bounds

CARAVAGGIO IS a fictionalised biopic, made in 1986, about the Italian painter Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571–1610). Jarman's fifth feature, the work is notorious for its manipulations of time and history. Whether deployed as a visual device, or as an interpretive framework that serves to connect aspects of Caravaggio's paintings and biography, anachronism is deliberately cultivated in the film as a representational strategy. Rejecting the golden rule of mainstream art history – or indeed any kind of history – not to “project” our own realities onto the realities of the past, Caravaggio reinvents the biography of the eponymous painter as an imperfect mirror of Jarman's own. “Rome circa 1595 meets New York circa 1985” is how one representative of the museum world, Keith Christiansen, summed up Jarman's project. “As entertainment,” Christiansen scoffs, “I am sure it has its fans, but I cannot recommend it to anyone interested in an art-historical shortcut.” Here, conversely, I propose a revaluation of Jarman's filmmaking that serves to draw out its art-historical potential: the director's sense of images as temporally discordant objects throws into relief art history's customary refusal to attend to what one of the discipline's major dissenting voices, Georges Didi-Huberman, has called the “sovereignty of anachronism.”

Additionally, this chapter brings into sharper focus Jarman's investment in what he perceived as a characteristically “medieval” relationship to time and history. The anachronism that, the filmmaker suggested, typified Caravaggio's own approach to the classical and biblical subject matter of his paintings was rooted in the aesthetic codes of the Middle Ages. In an interview given shortly before Jarman began work on filming Caravaggio, he describes how painters in modernity increasingly strove to “reconstruct the past with the look of the past,” thereby developing a more “archaeological” approach to visualisation of the past. “This reaches a crescendo,” he adds, “in the 19th century with artists like the pre-Raphaelites who do biblical and medieval scenes.” Characterising this “archaeological field” as an attitude that has in turn shaped approaches to history in contemporary British cinema and period drama, the director subsequently aligns himself with what he calls the “other tradition,” whereby:

These words, reportedly delivered by Cromwell at the dissolution of the second Protectorate Parliament on 4 February 1658, seem to offer a crucial insight into his motives when nominating the Other House. This chapter explores in detail those men nominated by Cromwell to sit in the new parliamentary chamber to see whether they bear out his claims. The first section examines the nomination process: if Cromwell's later assertions are to be verified it is first important to assess whether the membership really was of his own choosing. The core of the chapter then focuses upon those nominated to better understand the complexion of the Other House. It suggests that, on a number of levels, Cromwell's choices ensured that the Other House would be a ‘balance … to themselves’.

The Nomination Process

Cromwell's choice of members was the matter of prolonged speculation. A fortnight after his second investiture on 26 June, there were already indications that he was sounding out candidates. Given that parliament had adjourned until 20 January 1658, however, Cromwell was apparently in no rush to make his choices. Not until late autumn did rumours of impending nominations intensify. Edward Montagu reported to Henry Cromwell on 5 December that ‘the list of the other house is every day expected’, but he knew ‘nothinge of the persons designed for it’. Time was running out. As Thurloe informed Henry on 1 December, ‘there are but 7 or 8 dayes left for the finall resolution, there being a necessitye, that the writs issue 40 dayes before the parliament meets’. Yet, Thurloe believed there was ‘not yet any one man fully resolved upon’. By 9 December one newsletter even reported that ‘the members of the other House (its said) will not be named’.

Late medieval and early modern art often depicts aristocratic women with arched plucked eyebrows, and foreheads with strikingly high manipulated hairlines. And when nudes appear, they frequently have no pubic or underarm hair. The artists’ evident concern to show these forms of hair removal reveals the influence of a powerful discourse at work about male-directed and -controlled canons of beauty. Variations in what is considered “fashionable” in clothing and appearance have, of course, existed at least since the late fourteenth century. But in this case, the evidence suggests that by the end of the Middle Ages, misogynistic scientific writing had made female body hair a psychic and physical danger to men, and for the woman, even a locus of anxiety about marriage prospects and fertility. With motivations thus ranging from simple vanity to fear of marital rejection, medieval women engaged in a variety of practices revealed by a surprisingly well-documented body of materials, methods, and practitioners to help them achieve their goals.

Cosmetic manuals, beginning with the ensemble of Latin texts known as Trotula in the late twelfth century and remaining popular through the sixteenth, offered instructions for reducing or removing hair on the face and even the genitalia (armpit hair seemed silently included in these recipes). These precepts seem to lie behind the medieval ideal of female hairlessness—a beauty and hygiene canon that apparently had widespread acceptance and internalization by both aristocratic women and those who wished, cosmetically at least, to appear like them. Such treatments of depilation offer not only a fascinating glimpse into cosmetic practices but also alert us to the existence of a class of professional depilators who traveled to homes, bathhouses, and courts to practice their craft.

Though medieval writing about female cosmetics has been examined by Monica Green, Claudio da Soller, and Montserrat Cabré, among others, and the female body has been recently treated in such works of art history as Sherry C. M. Lindquist's collection The Meanings of Nudity in Medieval Art, the topic of female depilation has not had close attention from cosmetic and fashion historians. This is surprising, since instructions for depilation, next to whitening the skin, are the most frequent recipes in the cosmetic manuals, which were almost all written by men though addressed to women, sometimes of high or royal social status.

A LANDSCAPE BETWEEN NATURE AND CULTURE – A LANDSCAPE BETWEEN PREHISTORY AND HISTORY

The encounter between the settlers of New Sweden and the indigenous population in 17th-century America has for a long time produced a somewhat contradictory image. On the one hand, Swedish historical accounts appropriated the widespread European notion of the American landscape as virgin, pristine and bountiful, full of riches and potential resources, but virtually devoid of culture or civilization. It was characterized, in writing as well as in visual representations, as a natural landscape rather than a cultural one, thus legitimizing and manifesting territorial annexation. This notion has been appropriated into academic research as well, whereby maps of colonial America carefully outline the territorial extent and claims of New Sweden in relation to the other colonial powers, but rarely include the Native American communities who shared the political landscape. Accordingly, an interpretative model is perpetuated based on European hegemony, where the Swedes are envisioned as pioneers who transplanted all the institutions and material traditions of home on to the wilderness, while the Native Americans are relegated to the borderlands or margins of colonial landscapes (physical as well as mental) and given the role of “the others” in the narrative of New Sweden. On the other hand, we have several 17th-century Swedish sources that acknowledge the Native Americans as rightful owners of the land and emphasize the close relationship and dependency between the Swedes and their indigenous neighbours, though their physical presence in the landscape is noted or implied rather than detailed. These accounts are in turn often highlighted by the few, primarily historical, studies that have sought to inscribe indigeneity into the colony of New Sweden.

More, it seems, than any other of Chaucer's works, the Book of the Duchess epitomises citation. The density of its textural tissue is noted by many of the contributors to this volume. It is possible to track three-quarters of its lines to other poems, largely French verse narratives. So well known a fact hardly bears repeating; yet there is surprisingly little discussion of what this might mean to our sense of how and why Chaucer composed the poem in this form. For although most of his poems draw directly or indirectly on what have traditionally been called ‘sources’, none does so with quite the kaleidoscopic abandon of the Book of the Duchess over such a concentrated stretch of writing. Traditional source study, by meticulously identifying the detail and range of these borrowings, and labelling them thematically and line by line, has been as distorting as it has been illuminating. We are left puzzling over the simultaneously thick stuff of reference and the minute detail of its cross-hatched character, of the way individual ‘source’ texts seem broken up into pieces and intricately recombined with utter disregard for their original linearity. Chaucer appears to veer from text to text, at one moment through word-by-word translation and at another through large-scale structural amplification or compression, and then back to the word-by-word translation. It's not the allusiveness per se, but the seemingly random character of the citational process that catches our attention.

For this reason, the Book of the Duchess also epitomises why source study fails. A list of parallels does not make sense of either a reading or a composing process. If we were to take the list at face value, then we would have to imagine Chaucer in a great modern library or, as Ruth Evans has wittily described, in cyberspace, as if he had (like his modern critics) too many windows open on his laptop and was cutting and pasting from his internet searches as he wrote. In fact, as Evans also points out, the uncanny (and of course unlikely) appropriateness of this model to Chaucer's compositional methods should not be dismissed too swiftly.

It is well known that Italians—especially the Tuscans and Venetians—played a pivotal role in the English textile and wool trades of the later Middle Ages. They dominated the luxury cloth market, importing silks and brocades from both their home cities and their extensive trading empires, and they were principal buyers and exporters of medieval England's most precious commodity: high-quality, raw wool. Records of this commercial activity have long attracted economic historians, with administrative documents from the busy port of Southampton—a key destination for Italian carracks and galleys—amongst the first to be edited, including the Anglo-Norman port books and the Middle English stewards’ books. More recently, Adrian Bell, Chris Brooks, and Paul R. Dryburgh have edited allowances and wool contracts drawn up between the Crown and Italian merchant societies in the late 1200s and 1300s, and Helen Bradley has published (in English translation) details of goods bought and sold by Italians in London, Southampton, and Hull in The Views of the Hosts of Alien Merchants, 1440–44. A key study by the cloth historian Lisa Monnas looked into the various silk types purchased by the royal household and reproduced sections of the Great Wardrobe inventories from 1325 to 1462. Similarly, a long-term project called The Lexis of Cloth and Clothing in Britain c. 700–1450 (LCC) has culminated in an online database of vocabulary from sources including the Anglo-Norman Dictionary (AND), Middle English Dictionary (MED), and Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources (DMLBS), along with a related (yet separately funded) “multilingual sourcebook” of textile vocabulary in documents including wills, accounts, petitions, and rolls of livery. A large number of the sought-after, expensive fabrics in these records were imported from, and often woven in, Lucca, Florence, and Venice.

However, as the late David Trotter first highlighted in 2011, language contact between Italian dialects and Anglo-Norman (AN) is an area that has yet to be fully investigated, even though the first Italian loanword (AN fangot, “bundle of cloth” < It. fangotto) was identified over a century ago in a Southampton port book. Traditionally, loanword studies overlook insular French and assume a near-total dominance of Continental French (CF) as the conduit for Italianisms into England before 1500 and, indeed, direct borrowings from Italian into Middle English (ME) are very much a rarity in the corpora of the MED and the Oxford English Dictionary (OED).

For the foreign merchant settled in early modern Sweden, family networks were very significant. Family members and relatives were not only engaged with each other in commercial activities as, for example, creditors and shareholders in ships and companies, but they were also involved in sustaining and shaping social and cultural values, tastes and practices of burghership.

The foreign merchants who lived in Sweden often chose to marry outside of their own ethnic group and into other burgher families of foreign origin. Examples from Arboga, Stockholm and Gothenburg illustrate, for instance, intermarriages between German and Scottish as well as German and Dutch families. These unions were frequently dictated by pragmatic thinking and expectations of economic and social benefits. The decisions to relocate to Sweden and intermarry stemmed from the wish to boost capital, obtain monopolies and expand the area of business and the types, volumes and qualities of merchandise through access to new markets. Factors such as extending geographical contact networks and international relations, especially for families who could be described as Misch-Europäer – culturally mixed Europeans – had a great economic and social impact, too. These networks facilitated the formation of trust and credibility, which helped the merchants to avoid risk and cut business transaction costs. In the credit market, these factors were vital.

Migration, trading activities and partnership strategies of foreign merchants who settled in Sweden are the central focus of this chapter. Attention will be paid to the national and international orientations of their contact networks and the importance of family background and family origin in the ability to participate in, take advantage of and generate earnings from large-scale mercantile operations.

Eighteenth-century Canton was a key hub in the global trade network, and yet, all commercial contact was restricted to the small foreign quarters. In a place only a few kilometres long and wide, a multitude of traders from different places had to negotiate norms and learn local practices: in short, they had to make trade work. For most of the long 18th century, international trade worked quite well there: Chinese goods were exported to Europe, and silver flowed into the Qing Empire.

Smooth trade operations rely upon trust, and Canton was no exception in this regard. Foreigners and Chinese alike had to be able to rely on debts being paid, cargo being delivered and deadlines being met. In the words of the historian David Sunderland, trust can be defined as “an expectation, expressed in action and disappointed or fulfilled, that a partner will honour his implicit or explicit obligations.” Through the lens of trust, we can study the social environment of the foreign quarters of Canton, and even map some of the power hierarchies that emerged.

The aim of this chapter is to analyse how trust was established, negotiated and lost in the foreign quarters of 18th-century Canton. Firstly, attention is paid to the individuals between whom trust could be established, and secondly to the logistics of the process – the spaces, practices and strategies – used in negotiating and upholding trust. To establish trust with someone it was essential to present oneself in a specific way, while at the same time evaluating the person with whom one interacted. Establishing oneself as trustworthy was intertwined with the construction of gender, nationality, and class.