In the early twentieth century, when monumental effigies began to receive the attention of art historians, it was widely assumed that their production, like that of other high-status consumer items, was an urban phenomenon, and was generally linked to work on major ecclesiastical sites such as Wells, Westminster and York. In the 1920s, Alfred Fryer put Bristol at the centre of the production of freestone effigies found throughout the West Country, which were also exported to locations across southern Wales and into Ireland. This workshop, it was argued, was originally set up by the masons who had worked on the west front of Wells Cathedral in the early thirteenth century, and was said to have continued there until the sixteenth. The products of the workshop were held to have certain characteristics, such as the use of Dundry stone and the lengthwise carving of mail down the arms of military effigies. The existence of the Bristol workshop and the supposed homogeneity of its products have since been challenged by Brian and Moira Gittos, who pointed out that Fryer's geological deductions were not always correct and that examples of lengthwise mail can be found far outside the supposed area of Bristol influence. It is now understood that many sources of monumental production flourished in the West Country during the Middle Ages, although it is still true to say that Bristol played a crucial part in the export trade of monuments made from Dundry and some other West Country stones, including across the south Wales coastline. The current understanding of the wider medieval monument industry is that it was highly complex and heterogeneous, sculpted effigies, cross slabs and brasses being manufactured variously in urban workshops, at quarries, at ecclesiastical building sites, by local masons and by itinerant craftsmen. This variety of organisational structures is reflected in the eclecticism of the monuments of south Wales, although it will become apparent in this chapter that this is more a feature of the earlier part of the period.

The erection of a commemorative monument was the end result of a complex interrelationship of factors bearing upon both the patron of the memorial and the craftspeople responsible for producing it, and thus was inevitably influenced by the basic market forces of supply and demand.

‘Meine Liebe ist grün’ Op. 63 no. 5 (Junge Lieder I) (comp. Dec. 1873, publ. Nov. 1874)

‘Wenn um den Holunder’ Op. 63 no. 6 (Junge Lieder II) (comp. summer 1874, publ. Nov. 1874)

‘Versunken’ Op. 86 no. 5 (comp. May 1878, publ. July 1882)

IN AUGUST 1855, the 22-year-old Brahms spent the night at the Schumanns’ home in Düsseldorf while Clara Schumann was away. He wrote to her:

The youngest of the Schumanns’ eight children, Felix, was a baby at the time, Eugenie Schumann three years old. Clara Schumann was pregnant with Felix when Schumann went into an asylum at Endenich in 1854; he never saw his last child. As a result, Brahms was virtually in loco parentis in those years. His Variations on a Theme of Robert Schumann Op. 9, was effectively a gift to Clara Schumann at that time, and his arrangements of fifteen folksongs for children, the Volks-Kinderlieder WoO31, were probably created for the Schumann children. The Schumann settings are intensely personal compositions, impossible to untangle from the short life of the poet; for this reason, further context on Schumann's life has been integrated into this entry.

The normally strict Clara Schumann was especially fond of her youngest child (called ‘Lix’ and ‘Lixchen’ in family letters) because of his precocious talent, his physical and temperamental similarity to his father, and his poor health. By his late teens, Felix Schumann hoped to train as a violinist, which his mother discouraged in order to avoid unavoidable and potentially detrimental comparisons with his famous father. Joachim, who was then director of the recently formed Königliche Hochschule für Musik in Berlin, was more encouraging.

Looking out over Dja Dja Wurrung country from Pyramid Hill in 1835, Mitchell, seemingly unaware of the people his claims would displace, observed ‘A land so inviting, and still without inhabitants! As I stood, the first European intruder on the sublime solitude of these verdant plains … I felt conscious of being the harbinger of mighty changes; and that our steps would soon be followed by the men and the animals for which it seemed to have been prepared.’ By the late 1840s his vision had become reality, but with consequences few had predicted. Mitchell later saw that the introduction of livestock had been ‘by itself sufficient to produce the extir¬pation of the native race, by limiting their means of existence; and this must work such extensive changes in Australia as never entered into the contemplation of the local authorities’. The European colonisation of Australia seemed ‘to involve, as an inevitable result, the extirpation of the aborigines; and it may well be pleaded, in extenuation of any adverse feelings these may show towards the white men, that these consequences, although so little considered by the intruders, must be obvious to the natives, with their usual acuteness, as soon as cattle enter on their territory’.

‘Silently, but surely’, wrote Mitchell, ‘that extirpation of aborigines is going forward in grazing districts, even where protectors of aborigines have been most active; and in Van Diemen's Land, the race has been extirpated, even before that of the kangaroos, under an agency still more destructive.’ Scottish explorers such as Mitchell were at the forefront of both imperial and global European expansion, the necessary consequence of which was the removal of indigenous peoples from their land. No history of Scotland's diaspora is complete without consideration of the people the Scots – as essential and, indeed, proud partners of the British Empire – dispossessed and massacred across lands seized for the imperial project. As one Australian historian observed, the narrative of the Scots abroad and the tragic history of Aboriginal dispossession ‘do not sit well together, and yet, of course, they are connected. Though the task is challenging and difficult, it is worth consid¬ering both Scottish diaspora and Indigenous histories together, for when we do, we can better understand some of the complexities of empire and colonisation in the nineteenth century.’

In 2009, Livia Visser-Fuchs offered what she called a ‘bio-bibliography’ of Richard, duke of York. In it she suggested that a collection of books ‘through their contents and the manner in which they were acquired, reveal things about the owner not found in narrative and documentary sources’. She noted that the six books that were then associated with the duke of York constituted a tiny collection that was far less adequate to the task she had undertaken than the twenty owned or associated with his son Richard III. Nonetheless, Visser-Fuchs was able to offer new and very personal insights into Richard, duke of York's life. York's wife, Cecily Neville, offers a significantly different prospect. As a result of the record in her household ordinances that she regularly listened to one of seven named devotional books, Cecily has become a familiar exemplar in studies of female book ownership, piety and mysticism. Yet this perception of Cecily as a pious reader or listener does not do justice to the wealth of surviving information about her relationship with books. In total there are some fifty-three works, in different forms, that can be associated with the duchess of York in her adulthood. It is also possible to list a number of books in her mother's possession with which Cecily is likely to have been familiar in her youth. The purpose of this article is to draw attention to the broader literary culture that Cecily inhabited, thereby offering a ‘bio-bibliography’ that is more appropriate to her varied career.

As the daughter of Joan Beaufort, countess of Westmorland, Cecily had grown up with a striking role model of book ownership. Joan Beaufort was clearly recognised by her contemporaries as a lady who appreciated books, someone who might be expected to provide patronage to authors, and indeed who was interested in a wide variety of literature. The most precious possessions mentioned in Joan Beaufort's will included two books. One was a psalter that had previously belonged to her own mother, Katherine, duchess of Lancaster (John of Gaunt's last duchess), so it brought with it a memory of Joan's royal heritage, as well as its own intrinsic value. The other book was ‘quemdam [sic] librum magnum de Fisica’ (a certain great book of Physic).

When rulers wish to secure political allegiances, they inevitably interact with social identities. In Margrave Albrecht I of Brandenburg-Ansbach, flattered by Enea Silvio Piccolomini as the ‘German Achilles’, we meet a fifteenth-century ruler who developed a substantial and significant strategy for harnessing social identities to his political ambitions. His rhetoric of antagonism between town and nobility borrowed from and sought to amplify and redirect existing discourses about ‘town’ and ‘noble’ identities in late medieval Upper Germany in the service of his political objectives. This article poses questions about the nature of Albrecht's rulership, and about the relationship between his discursive strategies and the identities through which they operated. How should we read the interaction between this particular instance of identity politics and the discursive formation of fifteenth-century ways of seeing German-speaking society?

In September 1440 Albrecht succeeded his father Friedrich of Hohenzollern as a prince of the Holy Roman Empire. He took the title of margrave by virtue of his father's status as margrave of Brandenburg, but his elder brother ruled Brandenburg itself. Albrecht's share of the inheritance was a part of the family's southern lands, centred on the town of Ansbach in Franconia. Within the Empire's highly decentralised political structures he had considerable autonomy, but he was also firmly anchored in the dynamic and competitive world of the secular and ecclesiastical princes. The lordship of these regional power brokers is commonly but somewhat misleadingly labelled ‘territorial’: the princes’ rule was spatially defined, but Albrecht's lordship, like that of any other prince, was an accumulation of highly localised lands and jurisdictions interspersed with the rights and claims of others. Amongst these neighbouring powers were imperial towns, de facto city states under the emperor's direct but nominal authority. Albrecht repeatedly clashed with the powerful town of Nuremberg, and there were fundamental antagonistic factors in the relationship between princes and independent towns: towns were often the economic (and in many ways political) centres of the regions which the princes otherwise controlled (or sought to control), and many princes had claims to authority over certain towns or denied towns the right to exercise any authority beyond their walls. The place of the towns in the wider imperial constitution was also highly contentious.

In this essay I look at a group of texts written in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, which were initially circulated in manuscript as contributions to the ‘Lollard’ debates about church wealth and clerical morality in that period. They were then printed in the early 1530s (and reprinted in the 1560s and 1570s) as contributions to similar debates a century and more later than their origin. These texts, Lollard writing re-presented for Reformation reading, offer an interesting case study of chronological and epistemological distortion, as they might be argued to distort conceptions of time and history around them both ‘positively’ and ‘negatively’ – if those terms have any meaning – but always powerfully and provocatively. The texts present challenges to our definitions of how they might be categorised, what they might suggest about the communities that produced and received them, and what they imply about our own sense of their relationship to time and the creation of historical narrative.

Late medieval works printed in the Tudor period have generally been read, explicitly or implicitly, in terms of the posthumous or the undead, as examples of the ‘afterlives’ of medieval writings. But I want to consider them here not only as revenants, things not quite dying, but also as things not quite new-born, as contributions to the work in progress of the never entirely achieved project of English religious Reformation. So, in so far as they might be distortions of late-medieval authorial intentions, disinterred and reanimated by Tudor printers, they are also elements of a new reformed typology of protest, fresh texts offered to new readers as part of a campaign to free hearts and minds allegedly long-manacled by the old lies of catholic deception. As we shall see, both their novelty and their antiquity were central to their presentation and reception.

To begin very simply: these texts certainly distort modern readers’ perceptions of the terms of debate in the early exchanges of Henry VIII's Reformation, with polemical claim and counter-claim clouding any clear sense of the facts at issue. Just how much wealth did the Tudor Church possess?

Introduction

Oddr Snorrason's saga of the Norwegian king Óláfr Tryggvason has a strong claim to the status of the ‘first Icelandic saga’. Written in c. 1190 in Latin and translated into Old Icelandic shortly afterwards, it tells the story of Óláfr's kingship and missions in Norway, ending with his disappearance at the battle of Svõlðr in the year 999/1000. As the first text with ‘full saga dimensions’, it draws on an eclectic mix of genres, which have been variously identified as saint's life, secular biography, romance, heroic epic and folktale. Paradigms from the Bible and from popular saints’ lives jostle with traditional heroic tales of vengeance and sportsmanship, and clash with some sadistic scenes of trickery and torture. Óláfr's birth and childhood, for example, are based on Christ's Nativity and the Flight to Egypt; he is sold as a slave in Russia, where he rises quickly to pre-eminence, like Joseph; and he is transfigured like Christ and seen talking with angels. But he also avenges his foster-father at the age of nine, striking off the head of his killer in one blow; he is fond of women and has multiple marriages; and he makes a glorious last stand at the Battle of Svõlðr, surrounded by his loyal thanes. He finally disappears in a blinding flash of light and is rumoured to have become a monk in the East. The result is a composition that Andersson describes as ‘bipolar’ and Bagge characterises more politely as ‘fairly chaotic’: Oddr was a talented storyteller, but he struggled with the extended narrative form. Whether he actually intended to promote Óláfr as a saint has been disputed, but either way, the saint's life is the main literary model for his work. He depicts Óláfr as a great Christian missionary king: at the very least, his account can be described as ‘semi-hagiographic’. The most recent editor of his work, Ólafur Halldórsson, suggests that Oddr set out to make Óláfr a saint, but had to give up in the face of the oral stories in circulation; he could find no way to evade the ‘gruesome’ killings that dominate the second half of Óláfr's life.

When Harold Bloom wrote that all reading was misreading, that all prision was in fact misprision, and that poets learned from and imitated their forerunners by misreading them, he inaugurated a now well-established school of literary aesthetics. For Bloom, the material means by which a text was transmitted from a writer to a reader was in itself apparently unproblematic. He happily reified mediation in his impatience to delineate the shaping force of literary history. In fact, the study of distortion shows that, in a sense, Bloom is exactly wrong. All reading is correct reading, because each textual artefact is unique.

Distortion is the moment at which the physical means of transmitting a text irrupt into a reader's experience of it. I will discuss distortion here as a phenomenon occurring in printed materials, but I do not wish to exclude other recognisable instances such as static in a radio signal, or white noise on a cathode-ray-tube television screen. To speak of distortion as an impairment, however, is to confirm the Platonic priority of another book-object. As textual scholars have shown, locating this authoritative ur-text can be, to say the least, difficult. Distortion is not a condition befalling individual textual artefacts (‘book-objects’) here and there: there is no non-distorted reading. In fact, a belief in non-distorted reading amounts to believing in pure, transparent mediation that leaves no trace of itself on the mediated. Leaving aside for the purposes of this essay the profound political implications of placing the labour of mediation under erasure, I will offer here a heuristic of distortion. Absent such a heuristic, ‘distorted’ book-objects and their texts will always be treated as degraded derivatives. The corollary of that treatment is to elevate an unknown, possibly non-existent ur-text to a position of unimpeachable authority, and to degrade both the experience of reading and of the embodied text and reader. We can solve the problem of distortion by placing the irreducible phenomenological singularity of the book-object at the centre of our experience of a text. This is existential reading: you are reading what you are reading and not anything else.

The Ottoman Empire, the pre-eminent Islamic naval state of the early modern period, entered the age of fighting sail at a date much later than most Christian states but also later than a number of the smaller Islamic sea powers. Despite the issuing of a fatwa in 1650 that required the building of between twenty and thirty warships fully dependent on sail, ships propelled by oar continued to retain considerable significance. Only in 1701, with the issuing of a kanun, a state ordnance, was a more definite direction taken; it laid down that the navy's main fighting arm should be composed only of large sailing ships, with the Ottoman naval dockyards to begin or continue work upon the construction of fifteen galleons to enhance the twenty-five already completed. The term used on both occasions was kalyon, a general term for a large warship propelled by sail and not reflective of any particular ship type. Nevertheless, galleys were not totally abandoned, remaining of considerable importance in the Red Sea, while, in the Mediterranean, galleys continued in use for the towing of sailing ships when the winds were unfavourable and for directly supporting the army in a range of military operations.

In this opening section, while concentrating on the workings of the Ottoman state navy during the age of fighting sail, it will be necessary to give attention to the years immediately preceding the full introduction of sail in order to understand the reasons that lay behind this apparent delayed transfer to sail. A delimiting factor in this discussion, as reflected in the use of the term ‘to the west’, is that of focusing here on the operations of the Ottoman navy in the Mediterranean and Black Sea, with consideration of activities in the Indian Ocean (including the Red Sea and Persian Gulf) to be considered in a later section.

While the Ottoman navy in western waters had, during the age of fighting sail, often to compete with some of the most technically advanced navies of the world, the Ottomans were rarely deficient in technology appropriate to a naval power. Evidence will be produced to show that Ottoman warships during the age of fighting sail were the equal of those of Christian Europe, while ordnance and gunpowder carried were in no way deficient.

A fundamental challenge for understanding the history of medieval middle Britain is: how did the Border of the Scottish kingdom, which in the east originally ran through a society whose inhabitants on both sides identified themselves as English, become a frontier between two peoples, Scots and English? The most cogent answer to date is that divided allegiance led to a difference in identity. It is argued here, however, that the connection between allegiance and identity was only possible as a result of a radical change in how the Scottish kingdom was imagined as an entity distinct from the king or the royal lineage. This takes us exclusively into the realm of ideas rather than political reality. Since the ninth century (at least) the kingdom was identified with the landmass north of the Forth; in the late twelfth century, however, all territories under the ultimate authority of the king of Scots began to be seen as forming the core ‘kingdom of Scotland’ or ‘kingdom of the Scots’. It is argued that this was an essential preliminary to the Border becoming a frontier between two peoples so that, by the late thirteenth century, it is likely that all north of the Border identified themselves as ‘Scots’.

This can readily be recognised as part of a fundamental European development identified by Susan Reynolds: a growing assumption that ‘kingdom’ and ‘people’ naturally coincided regardless of size. She has shown that this pattern of thinking about kingdoms began to take root in the twelfth century. England was one of her main case studies; in this chapter attention will focus on Scotland, where this process can now be studied in unparalleled depth due to a new digital research tool and a quirk of Scottish charters. This is not, however, simply a matter of providing a more detailed example of a wider European phenomenon. A fundamentally new perspective is offered by placing charter scribes centre stage. Susan Reynolds saw the ‘background of values and assumptions that are taken for granted’ as crucial for understanding political ideas. She sought to investigate this background through studying lay collective activity as revealed in an impressive range of sources.

Direct English and Scottish interest in Mediterranean affairs began with the possibilities of trade and profit. The territorial advances of the Ottoman Empire in the Eastern Basin caused great disruption to the Italian cities’ trading systems, at first particularly that of Genoa, later of Venice, as the cities found themselves on the wrong side at various times in the frequent Ottoman wars. In the 1450s (about the time the Turks finally captured Constantinople) one British merchant, Robert Sturmy of Bristol, had attempted to trade there, carrying wool, cloth, tin, and wheat to Italy and the Levant, and purchasing spices and silk, and alum, in exchange – in effect copying the Venetian system in reverse. However, his two ventures both ended in disaster. In the first, his ship, having delivered 200 pilgrims to Jaffa in Palestine, was wrecked on the Greek coast on the return voyage; in the other, his ship was intercepted and looted by Genoese ships who disliked the competition; Sturmy was killed in the fighting. This seems to have deterred other ventures, but also pointed up the possibilities. By the end of the fifteenth century voyages by English merchants to Italy and the Eastern Basin – to Crete and the Levant – were frequent enough for a consul to be appointed to Pisa by King Henry VII. This was a port city subject to Florence, and so it was outside the range of hostility from Genoa and Venice; there were English merchants in several other Mediterranean ports at this time also.

The voyage to the Mediterranean lay past Portugal and Spain, and in both countries there was a longstanding English political and mercantile connection. An alliance of sorts between England and Portugal had existed since 1398, but the connection went back to the Second Crusade centuries earlier; in Spain there was a fluctuating presence of English merchants, particularly in the Andalusian area, since the fourteenth century, centred on Seville, its outport of San Lucar, and at Cadiz. There, they knew of the discovery and settlement of the Canary Islands from the 1390s. English traders were familiar with the islands, where some settled and bought estates, and with Madeira, which was settled from Portugal in the mid-fifteenth century, eventually to be the source of sugar and a much-appreciated wine.