When the printer John White moved to Newcastle upon Tyne in 1708 and established what would become a very lucrative business he was a pioneer in a fledgling industry. There had not been a publisher based in Newcastle since the Restoration. Moreover, White was the first producer of books to settle permanently in the town, and as others followed in his footsteps Newcastle became an important print centre. This was part of a more general growth in provincial printing that can be linked to the lapsing of the Printing Act in 1695, as this had ended the London Stationers’ monopoly on publishing. Yet, this legislative change did not prevent London's continued dominance of the book trade, and in isolation it does not explain why provincial printing expanded as it did. A clearer picture of causation emerges if this trade is considered as part of the wider economic developments that were underway, but the print industry was more than an aggregate of individual business endeavours. Printers provided a means of communication and cultural expression that helped to engender the social milieu in which their businesses prospered. Printing is also often associated with a strengthening of national identities, Benedict Anderson influentially linking early modern ‘print capitalism’ to the forging of nationally focused Imagined Communities. This investigation of Newcastle's print trade therefore provides an opportunity to re-evaluate the significance of provincial printing in both a national and regional context whilst exploring the interdependent nature of economic and cultural change.

Focusing attention upon the print trade can result in technologically determined accounts of cultural production that cast the printing press as an agent of change or credit printers with the ability to define ‘public opinion’. Even if only implicitly, such claims suggest that the uniform production of print results in a refinement or homogenisation of ideas. But if eighteenth-century ‘print culture’ is assumed to reflect a specific set of values and opinions that were disseminated through the medium of print then it is a problematic concept. If, on the other hand, the expanding print trade is assumed to have allowed for a wider and more dynamic discussion of competing and complementary ideas, then it can indeed help us to understand what set the eighteenth century apart from earlier times.

This chapter looks at the use of vernacular poetic sources in Latin prose accounts of the First Crusade in the first half of the twelfth century. It begins by defining what vernacular poetry means in this context and how its traces can be detected. It analyses the use of vernacular poetry, concentrating on four genres: the chanson de geste, the lai, hagiography, and the lyric. It then offers some conclusions about the use of vernacular poetry in First Crusade sources, arguing that poetic source material already existed at this date; that it was routinely used in these accounts; that it was used in specific contexts; and that there was nothing surprising in contemporary or near-contemporary figures making their way swiftly into verse. The chapter does not tackle the wider question of accounts of the First Crusade written in poetry, whether Latin or vernacular, and does not examine songs and lyrics which specifically depict or discuss crusading activities: it focuses purely on the use made of poetry in Latin prose accounts of the crusade.

DEFINING VERNACULAR POETIC SOURCES

What is a poetic source?

It is important to differentiate poetic sources from the wider and ill-defined category of oral and vernacular sources. The latter introduce a wide range of material spanning personal anecdote, eyewitness accounts, and fantastic elements. Poetic sources may overlap with these but are not the same. By definition they are sources which show affinity with extant poetic sources and genres through subject material and/or form. They are a way of portraying and expressing a common view of events in the vernacular at a time when vernacular prose did not exist: in the words of Zumthor, ‘la poésie médiévale apparait moins […] polarisée par le dessein de percevoir et de manifester les qualités particulieres de son sujet, qu'engendrée par une activité mimétique, fondée sur un besoin de communication collective’.

What does vernacular mean?

The boundary between Latin and vernacular poetic sources is fluid. Thus Orderic Vitalis retells the vita of William of Gellone, the eponymous hero of the Guillaume cycle of chansons de geste.

From “Kanak” Culture to Religious Cosmopolitanism

FERIDUN ZAIMOGLU (b. 1964 in Bolu, Turkey) came to Germany from Turkey in 1965, where he remains best known for his polemical debut Kanak Sprak: 24 Mißtöne vom Rande der Gesellschaft (Kanak Speak: 24 Discordant Notes from the Edge of Society, 1995), which spawned the “Kanak Attak” subculture movement. Yet despite the domination of his earlier interview-based work—still often viewed as ethnographic fieldwork rather than literature in our overall understanding of his oeuvre— Zaimoglu's profile as a writer of fiction and as a dramatist has grown. His work has received increasing scholarly and media attention, and he has won prestigious awards: the Chamisso Prize (2005), the Carl Améry Prize for Literature (2007), the Berlin Literature Prize (2016), and, with Ilija Trojanow, the Tübingen Poetry Lectureship, published as Ferne Nähe (Distant Proximity, 2008).

Zaimoglu's work is exceptionally varied, in both its form and content— he has written collections of monologues, plays and chamber operas (all in collaboration with Günter Senkel), short stories, novels, and a diary, all dealing with a range of themes such as folklore, the gentrification of German cities, and the Berlin art world, in addition to disenfranchised Turkish German youths. He has also exhibited paintings, and his novel Der Mietmaler (The Painter for Rent, 2013) contains images of some of his portraits of women.

Most important for this study, however, are the multiple concepts of religion and spirituality that figure in Zaimoglu's writing. Cheesman notices a religious cosmopolitanism emerging in the 2004 short story collection Zwölf Gramm Glück (Twelve Grams of Happiness) that counteracts the prevailing secularizing Enlightenment understanding of the cosmopolitan. This critique of atheism's totalizing claims can also be found in the folk belief and superstition that feature in the trans- European novel Hinterland (2009), the Ruhr revenge story Ruß (Soot, 2011), and the play Alpsegen (Alpine Blessing, 2011), among other works. Yet a multifaceted understanding of Islam emerges as the most prominent aspect of Zaimoglu's interest in religion and spirituality. While post-9/11 texts such as the novel Leyla (2006)—a fictionalized biography of the author's Turkish mother—engages with Islam in the form of culturally Islamic patriarchal traditions, others explore Islam in terms of religiosity and faith.

APPEARANCE AND BEAUTY are key concerns of new-feminist texts. Writers of such texts are concerned with the objectification and sexualization of young female bodies. This question is linked to the availability of pornography via the Internet and to the continued growth of the sex industry. The issue of appearance has implications for women's professional and public status: slights on women's looks function as a “Shut-the-Fuck-Up-Tool,” as Jessica Valenti puts it. Female corporeality involves shame: “to be made of female flesh is to be well-schooled in the abjections and humiliations of embodiment.” Eating disorders constitute an extreme, if common, manifestation of such humiliation, as Laurie Penny contends. The questions of diet and weight raise the matter of agency: Ahmed notes that in the contemporary context, fatness is viewed as the result of a failure of will. This assumption accords with the neoliberal imperative to “succeed” at conformity with mainstream ideals. As Alison Phipps argues, in the context of neoliberalism, “success is measured by individuals’ capacity for self-care via the market, and those who do not achieve their potential are viewed as failures.”

While contemporary feminists have on the one hand challenged dominant standards of beauty, which—as Naomi Wolf has argued—serve as an imprisoning construct, there has at the same time been a defense of self-adornment and enjoyment of one's appearance—this as a reaction to the perceived ugliness and joylessness of “1970s feminists.” According to Thea Dorn, the women she interviews in her book wear lipstick without fearing that they are thereby succumbing to the patriarchy. And the authors of Wir Alpha-Mädchen assert, “Wir können Freude an Lippenstift und enthaarten Beinen haben, ohne uns deswegen als hilflose Opfer männ licher Fantasien oder einer riesigen Industrie fühlen zu müssen” (We can take pleasure in lipstick and hairless legs without having to feel that we're helpless victims of male fantasies or of a massive industry). Yet they also point to the issues of sexism and objectification, and to profitmotivated representations of bodies. They use the term “Schönheitslüge” (beauty lie) to describe dominant ideals of attractiveness. This is a matter that once again raises the questions of individualism versus collectivism, interpellation versus resistance—that is to say, the issue of will.

THE TERM “SISTERHOOD” functions strategically here as a reference to a mythical “1970s feminism.” It connotes a sense of shared political struggle among women, a notion that is not unproblematic but which is nonetheless crucial as a legitimizing and enabling condition of feminism. I have already mentioned claims that certain new-feminist texts ignore differences among women and so unwittingly reproduce hierarchies founded on race, class, and sexuality. This gesture might be strategically essentialist, but it also risks simplifying and reducing female subjects. However, such texts do also gesture toward internationalism and intersectionality. And in any case, the issue of dividedness among women is arguably the more pressing one, as analyses of femininity in neoliberalism, and the literary texts under discussion, suggest. Ahmed's “army of the wayward” appears far from the point of assembly.

Beauvoir wrote in 1949 of the alienation of individual women from each other. How are relationships between women conceived and lived out in the context of neoliberal postfeminism? The nonfiction texts featured in chapter one of this volume note the importance of role models and of stereotypes. Natasha Walter, for example, underlines the significance of stereotypes such as male leader and female caregiver in shaping self-perception and ambition. Representation is key here. Yet in the literary texts I have explored so far, excepting Moran's and Grether's, in which the protagonists find strength in female musical artistes, there is a distinct absence of role models in evidence. The mother-daughter relations featured in these texts are, on the whole, dysfunctional or distant. Appearance causes tensions among women, as becomes even clearer in this chapter. Complex hierarchies and patterns of desire emerge. Such tensions and difficulties are symptomatic and representative of the neoliberal, postfeminist context, as Alison Winch suggests in Girlfriends and Postfeminist Sisterhood.

Winch refers to “the complex emotions and systems of control that permeate female sociality in a postfeminist context” (9). In particular, she discusses the feelings of “competition and comparison” that neoliberal popular culture fosters and legitimizes (196). She argues: “technologies of oppression structure the gestures, conversations and interpersonal reflexivity enacted by and between women” (197).

THE POST-9/11 MUSLIM TURN in German literature and the increasing participation of Muslims in German public life generally are shaping the cultural scene at the beginning of the twenty-first century. This is part of the many transformations that take place within the wider cultural mêlée: Christianity itself came initially from the East, and Islamic culture and thought have influenced Germany and Europe in earlier epochs. Indeed, many Sufi mystics, such as Ibn Arabi, came from Moorish Spain; thus the authors studied in this book are partly reestablishing a connection with a forgotten European Islamic heritage in their writing. Although the drive to halt such cultural transformations, fix identities, and “purify” cultures is perhaps part of a historically specific need for a stable and coherent sense of self and, by extension, community, such thinking ultimately leads to stagnation and conflict. It obscures the cosmopolitan and spiritual potential these authors locate in the heterogeneous nature of identity and of our interconnected being-in-the-world.

The complex and innovative notions of spirituality, community, and identity conveyed in the writing of Şenocak, SAID, Zaimoglu, and Kermani are of central importance to today's global debates around otherness, inclusion, religion, fundamentalism, and cosmopolitanism; they also have a particular importance for both Germany and Islam. As Clemens Pornschlegel comments, the German attitude is too often “Mitreden in unseren Angelegenheiten sollt und könnt ihr mangels ‘citizenship’ und guter deutscher Herkunft nicht, auch wenn es dabei um eure Aufenthaltsgenehmigungen und Rentenkassenbeiträge geht, aber eure wunderbar fremdländische Kultur interessiert uns natürlich!” (Having no citizenship and no good German heritage, you can't and shouldn't join in conversations about our affairs, even if they are about your residence permits and pension contributions. But we find your wonderfully exotic culture interesting, of course!) The work of nonethnic German writers is often received as mere exotic cultural enrichment, a passive symptom of broader intellectual movements, instead of being taken seriously for its contribution to current philosophical and political debates and literary trends. The current intellectual paradigm of interkultureller Germanistik, the canonical use of labels such as “Turkish-German,” and the Chamisso Prize, contribute to this situation by separating so-called minority authors from wider German culture.

Cosmopolitanism, Religion, and the Role of Literature in Kermani's Thought

NAVID KERMANI WAS BORN in 1967 to Iranian parents in Siegen and has dual German and Iranian citizenship. He is the most recent arrival on the literary scene analyzed in this study, and his growing success is evidenced by the chair he holds at the German Academy for Language and Literature and the various lectureships and awards he has won, including the Kleist Prize (2012) for his entire oeuvre. He was also the quickest to intervene in post-9/11 debates, arguing against the dichotomization of Islam and the West in the wake of al-Qaeda's attacks in an article for the Süddeutsche Zeitung as early as September 13, 2001: “Es sind die Muslime selbst, die unter dem Fanatismus der Taliban, der iranischen Staatsajatollahs, der puritanischen Petromuslime auf der arabischen Halbinsel leiden…. Es gibt kein Wir, das westlich, und ein Ihr, das muslimisch wäre, so tatkräftig Terroristen vom Schlag Bin Ladens an genau dieser Polarisierung arbeiten, so nahe sie von der westlichen Kommentierung gelegt wird.” (It is the Muslims themselves who suffer under the fanaticism of the Taliban, of the Iranian state Ayatollah, of the puritanical ‘petro-Muslims’ on the Arabian Peninsula…. There is no us that is Western and a them that would be Muslim, as actively as Terrorists like bin Laden work on exactly this polarization, as much as it is suggested by Western commentary.) Kermani's literary debut, Das Buch der von Neil Young Getöteten (The Book of Those Slain by Neil Young, 2002), was published after 9/11, so his response to that event cannot be traced through changes in his published work. But the newspaper articles from 2001 to 2005 collected in Strategie der Eskalation: Der Nahe Osten und die Politik des Westens (Strategy of Escalation: The Near East and Politics of the West, 2005) demonstrate a profound engagement with the global impact of Islamist terrorism that is comparable with Şenocak's Das Land hinter den Buchstaben, SAID's Ich und der Islam, and the emergence of Zaimoglu's religious cosmopolitanism in Zwölf Gramm Glück.

Previous academic research into religion and spirituality in Kermani's fiction focuses on intercultural negotiations that either ironically foreground aspects of Muslim or German identity at different times for utilitarian reasons or intentionally blur religious boundaries in the name of tolerance in order to leave room for doctrinal differences.

Multifaceted Diversity at the Core of Empire

The first step in adapting the sociological concept of “plebeian society” for a historical study is to localize and contextualize its application—for example, “Russian urban plebeian society.” Here, “urban” refers to big cities that served as melting pots of people of particular, differentiated mindsets into a common space produced by the “infamous men.” But what difference does it make when a plebeian society is identified as Russian? Even when using “Russian” in the same way as “urban,” thus further defining the location by referring to the borders of the Russian Empire, the question remains: Did all those “Russian” urban centers have the same plebeian society? What, if anything, was Russian about plebeian society?

A recent attempt by a group of leading Russian historians to produce a series of studies of Russian imperial borderlands has yielded an unexpected answer to these questions. By singling out distinctive external parts of Russia proper (the Baltic provinces and Poland, the Caucasus and Central Asia, Bessarabia and Siberia, etc.), these studies have vividly demonstrated something that was rarely understood before: the Russian Empire may have had a periphery, but it lacked any clear-cut and homogeneous core. Even the ultimate heartland of the Russian Empire—the proverbial Russian river Volga— was as multiethnic, multiconfessional, and economically diversified a region as many of the recognized borderlands were. This means that diversity was not a marker of imperial regions that were somehow different from the norm of the core, but of the fundamental principle of Russian imperial formation as such. After the Revolution of 1905, this structural diversity of regions and populations was complemented by the unprecedented upheaval caused by new social mobility, both upward and horizontal (migrations). The most modern loci of the Russian Empire, its urban centers, became the testing grounds for imperial society's ability to accommodate this dramatic escalation of its diversity, including the rise of a profoundly different “nonspeaking” plebeian society. Two major cities of the Middle Volga region, Nizhny Novgorod and Kazan, reveal a situation in the deep heartland of the empire that by no means could be seen as the empire's normative (homogeneous and dominating) core.

In my discussions of the Euthyphro and the Ion, I have focused on what I understand to be the primary theological aim of dialectics. But Plato's dialogues also contain other insights about piety and divinity, insights that might have been discovered through conversations, introspection, or some combination of the two. For instance, there are three passions that, according to Plato's indications, may have a special connection with piety. A fuller consideration of those passions, and of the Platonic dialogues in which they are treated in more detail, would be necessary to do justice to his account of piety.

Plato indicates that the love of one's own, and especially family love, is connected with piety, and may even serve as one root of it (see Laws 729c5– 8). Our love for our spouses and children, in particular, may predispose us to hope that even when we cannot protect them, something else will. But the love of one's own is a primary theme of neither dialogue we have investigated. Neither Euthyphro nor Ion appears to be a family man or a conventional patriot. In fact, Euthyphro is engaged in the prosecution of his own father for murder. And Ion's patriotism is channeled into rhapsody instead of conventional politics. In order to understand more fully the love of one's own, in its potential connection with piety, it would be necessary to look beyond the Euthyphro and Ion in order to investigate the Republic and the Laws.

Second, Plato indicates that love, not as the love of one's own but as eros, may be connected with piety. Eros, understood not only as the love of the noble or beautiful, or as the desire to have the good for oneself always (Symposium 206a), but as the desire for a particular beloved, might inspire a hope for divine recognition of self-forgetting or self-sacrifice. Yet neither Euthyphro nor Ion is a particularly erotic interlocutor, at least in any conventional sense of the word. In the Euthyphro, there is only a single reference to eros. And in the Ion, eros is never mentioned.

We now have some understanding of Euthyphro's character, by which I mean especially his moral character. Euthyphro has strong opinions about justice understood as service to the common good of Athens. He has strong opinions about justice understood as the impartial giving to each of what is owed. What a person is owed will depend on his virtue or his vice. Therefore, Euthyphro, if he understands what is owed, must also have some understanding of virtue and vice. He himself, as we have seen, desires to do what is noble. We can see the effects of this desire in his general deviation from what is normal, in his public prophesying, in his prosecution of his father, and now in his effort to save Socrates, the hearth of the city, from indictment and death. The question to which we now turn is that of the connection, or lack thereof, between his moral opinions and his piety. For Euthyphro appears to have had some experience of divinity that allows him, in strident opposition to his family, his community, and the prevailing understanding of morality and piety, to know that it is in fact pious to prosecute his own father for murder. But how is Euthyphro so certain that this action is pious? What delimits the class of the pious, or what gives Euthyphro certainty as to which actions are demanded by the gods?

Definition One: The Pious as the (Punitively) Just (5d8–6e10)

Having agreed to the terms according to which Socrates wants to be taught, Euthyphro provides the dialogue's first definition of the pious (5d8–5e2). Without pausing he offers, unprompted, a “great proof” that this definition is accurate (5e2–6a6). There follows in the wake of this proof a lengthy digression by Socrates, who speaks with incredulity about the Athenian religious tradition while Euthyphro, intervening, twice attempts to lure him into listening to secret and fantastic stories about the gods (6a7–6c7). Socrates, uninterested in these stories, at last returns to the subject of the definition that Euthyphro had offered to him only to discard it abruptly, insisting that Euthyphro has failed to teach him the idea of the pious and must try again (6c8–6e10).