With the naval reforms adopted by Kapudan Paşa Cezayirli Gazi Hasan still gathering pace, a further war with Russia broke out in August 1787, prompted by various Russian infringements into Ottoman territory and an awareness in Istanbul of Catherine's ultimate goal, that of re-establishing the old Byzantine Empire through the seizure and division of all Ottoman lands. It is more than possible that war would not have been declared if the tasks given to Hasan had not been so extensive for, at the time the declaration of war was under discussion in the Divan-ı Humayun, he was with the fleet in Egypt quelling a local uprising. For this reason, he was not present in Istanbul and so unable to explain that, with reforms to the navy only just beginning to take effect, the navy was not ready for war. Instead, lacking the advice of the Kapudan Paşa, the war faction of the Divan, convinced that war against the infidel overrode any concerns of practicality, won the argument. Among those who opposed this rationale was Ahmed Resmi, a diplomat who favoured negotiation and peace over Holy War. He accused those who had influence of being ‘ignorant scoundrels’ who did not respect ‘this desirable and customary law’, bluntly adding that the ‘simple-minded ones, not known for their thinking ability, engineered the Russian campaigns of that earlier war that broke out in 1768.

The seaborne element in this new war against Russia was primarily fought in the coastal waters of the northern Black Sea shoreline, where the Russians were attempting to secure unrestricted entry into the Black Sea through the capture of Ottoman-held fortresses that stood at the mouth of the Don and Dnepr estuaries. Catherine, since the previous war with the Ottoman Empire that had been brought to a conclusion in 1774, had continued to improve the standing of her fleet, using the proclaimed independence of the Crimean Kharnate, now effectively under full Russian protection, to establish an additional naval base at Sevastapol.

This book has shown that one of the most distinctive features of the monumental culture of south Wales is its chronological development, from burgeoning growth up to the middle of the fourteenth century, in which it demonstrates a common trajectory with contemporary trends in England, to collapse, stagnation and limited recovery prior to the Reformation. In this, it departs from English patterns to a considerable degree, as the English monumental industry recovered from crisis and regained its buoyancy during the fifteenth century and beyond. The reasons for this contrast are far from straightforward, and while they must to a great extent reflect Wales's early-fifteenth-century set-backs, there is clearly more to it than this. The investigation into the production of south Wales's monuments has demonstrated that it was tied up to a certain extent with the failure of native production. But whatever the causes of this phenomenon, it is clear that we must now introduce to our current picture of the increasing democracy of monumental commemoration at the tail-end of the Middle Ages a few caveats and more subtlety.

The south Welsh picture has an extra layer of complexity owing to the region's ethnic make-up, which is likely to have been a contributory factor to the way in which monuments are located across the region. While the basic facts of population density, transport availability and suitable terrain inevitably determined where monuments are likely to be found, the geographical distribution of Welsh monuments was also dictated to a certain extent by the observed preference for them, especially in their effigial form, among the non-Welsh settler population. This preference may also play a part in the reasons why south Wales seems to have a disproportionately large percentage (in relation to its mostly rural medieval character) of monuments in urban locations. These conclusions can only be carried so far however. The unavoidable fact that the huge bulk of cross slabs must remain anonymous, as well as the hints from Brecon Priory and Cardiff Greyfriars that the Welsh certainly did have monuments in urban churches, simply raises more questions about why monuments are sited where they are.

What I have argued, in this book, is that one cannot approach the sagas of Icelanders in a literary vacuum: it is right neither to view them in isolation from European genres, nor to think of them as borrowing passively or unconsciously from better-established literary traditions. Metaphors based on the linear development of genre (whether in terms of ‘emancipation’ or ‘decline’) fail to capture the lively friction between genres that is such an energising force in literary creativity and innovation: the sagas of Icelanders developed as they did not because they were isolated from European literature, but through active engagement and dialogue with other – more mainstream – literary genres. Once we move away from the idea that the saint's life was merely a starting point for the saga, we can appreciate more fully exactly what the relationship between these two genres entailed. So the differences between saga and saint's life have been an important focus of this study: it is precisely because the chronotopes of these genres – the spatiotemporal configurations within them – are so different that their interrelationship is so interesting. The sagas of Icelanders rarely intrude on the territory of the saint's life because the saga hero is considered to be a saint. It is more often the other way round: engagement with the saint's life becomes a way of defining what the saga hero is not. Either way, interaction with the saint's life should be recognised as a self-conscious literary act: the saga can only define its own horizons in interaction with other types of narrative prose.

Polysystem theory, developed by Even-Zohar, is particularly helpful for an understanding of the interaction between genres, and has already been usefully applied to the relationship between saga and romance. It posits a hierarchy of genres, and potentially multiple literary systems in multilingual areas, which evolve as a result of constant movement between centre and periphery, as innovative genres arise on the margins and work their way towards the centre. This theory, I have argued, applies well to the literary situation in Iceland where major genres like the saint's life are far better represented in quantity of manuscripts than vernacular genres that are unique to Iceland.

The primary motivation behind the commissioning and erection of memorial monuments across medieval Christian Europe was spiritual – the easing of the soul's path through purgatory, which the monument aimed to effect by soliciting prayers from clergy and passers-by. Such requests were implicit in the very existence of the monument in the first place, drawing attention to the plight of the deceased in an eye-catching and persuasive manner, but they could also be made explicit through elements of the tomb's design and location. In common with their counterparts throughout Britain and Europe, many medieval Welsh monuments include devotional imagery or inscriptions calling for prayers, or were sited in a spiritually potent part of the church, in the chancel or near a side altar or image. In some cases monuments formed just one part of a wider commemorative scheme that may have included chantries, stained glass and other parts of the church fabric and fittings; as one scholar has recently expressed it, monuments were ‘another vital weapon in the battle for salvation’.

MEDIEVAL WELSH SPIRITUALITY

Two very different forms of written evidence which allow us an (admittedly distorted) view of medieval Welsh popular spirituality as expressed by the individuals themselves, or their proxies, are wills and poetry. Both indicate that the Welsh were orthodox and conservative in their religious beliefs, a view confirmed by the material evidence to be gleaned from monuments. Welsh testators were not only entirely mainstream in their interests, they also seem to have been largely unfamiliar with (or uninterested in) the more exotic of the new devotional trends, whether orthodox or heterodox in nature.

Given this religious conservatism it is not surprising that devotion to the Virgin Mary is a thread running throughout the available evidence, and within Wales as a whole she was more popular than any other saint. Testators commended their souls to her and requested burial before her image or in chapels dedicated to her, while several chantries and lights are known to have been dedicated to her. The famous shrine of the Virgin at Penrhys in the Rhondda Valley proved so powerful a draw for pilgrims that it was bringing in £6 per annum just before the Dissolution and Llantarnam Abbey derived one-fifth of its income from offerings there.5 In 1493 Thomas Kemmys, a gentleman of Newport, left a velvet gown to adorn the image in his will.

In the earlydays of the 2011 Egyptian revolution, western media outletslike The Baltimore Sun newspaper andThe New Yorker, proposed ‘Best Books onEgypt’ lists to their readerships, ostensibly to help themto better understand the country and its revolution.Interestingly, many of those proposals were fictional texts,some written more than fifty years before the revolution,chief among which were Yusuf Idris's The CheapestNights, Naguib Mahfouz's The CairoTrilogy and Alaa Al Aswany's TheYacoubian Building: A Novel. Such indicationsbring to mind the interrelationship between literature andhistory which is a hallmark of African art. The functionalpremise often accorded African art forms by both writers andcritics alike indicates that, in most if not all cases,readers expect the continent's literature to speak about itshistorical evolution. For instance, Chinua Achebe says thatAfrican literature, like all other literature, ‘speaks of aparticular place, evolves out of the necessities of itshistory, past and current and the destiny of its people’(‘The Role of the Writer in a New Nation’: 7). For Ngugi waThiong'o in Writers in Politics, theAfrican ‘writer's work is often an attempt to come to termswith the thing that has been, a struggle, as it were, tosensitively register his encounter with history, hispeople's history’ (39). The books listed above might havebeen selected because they help the reader to understand thecollective reality of the Egyptian peoples, theirperceptions of the world and their place in it. At the sametime, they underline the artist's role in ‘bringing theincomplete picture that the historical perspective offersinto sharper relief’ (Fox ‘Egypt: The Search for Identity’).This resonates with the Aristotelian perspective of thesuperiority of art to history because of the former'scapacity to discuss events ‘as they were or are, or as theyare said to be or seem to be, or as they ought to be’ (‘Onthe Art of Poetry’: 69). Herein lies the prophetic dimensionof literature that is the focus in this paper.

This visionaryquality occurs when the writer's composite representation ofthe historical moment informs both the present and thefuture.

Ola Rotimi (1938–2000) lived somewhat in the shadow of his fellow Nigerian dramatist Wole Soyinka but, while Soyinka commands international respect and admiration, Rotimi's reputation in Nigeria, both as a playwright and director, is unsurpassed. His fellow Nigerian dramatist Femi Osofisan has said that Rotimi ‘has no equal on the Nigerian stage when it comes to the control of physical space or the manipulation of audience response … Rotimi is lord of the arena stage, and his link with the audience is immediate, tactile and sensual’ (Osofisan, 1986).

Born of Yoruba and Ijo parents (a significant cross-community parentage in terms of Rotimi's committed stance against the destructive elements of tribalism), his father was an engineer and trade unionist. It is surely significant that both parents were heavily involved in amateur dramatics. Rotimi's father regularly directed shows, while his mother for a time ran a women's dance troupe and promoted drama in the Ijo language. Rotimi was educated at the prestigious Methodist Boys High School in Lagos and then in the United States at Boston University and Yale, specializing in playwriting. His first play, To Stir the God of Iron, was performed in Boston in 1963, with his much more famous and frequently produced socialist prowomen and anti-politician comedy, Our Husband Has Gone Mad Again, premiering at Yale in 1966 and winning an award as Yale Major Play of the Year. While studying in the US, Rotimi married his British wife Hazel May Guadreau who was also at Boston University, studying music.

Rotimi returned to Nigeria in 1966 to teach at the then University of Ife (now Obafemi Awolowo University) where he founded the Ori Olokun Players, basing their activities in a disused hotel. The simple hotel had the traditional Yoruba open courtyard, surrounded on three sides by single story buildings. Rotimi and his colleagues converted this into a performance arena, with the playing space on a shallow platform in the courtyard and the audience sitting around it, as shown in the illustration overleaf. Rotimi's early plays, The Gods Are Not to Blame (1968), Kurunmi (1969) and Ovonramwen Nogbaisi (1971) were premiered in this space.

Oxford, Bodleian Library, Junius 85 and 86 are two manuscripts that contain mostly anonymous, vernacular homilies that focus on the fate of the human body and soul. They also contain an Old English translation of the Visio Sancti Pauli, four bilingual charms, and a homily by Ælfric (c.955–1010). This may seem surprising, as Ælfric explicitly condemned the copying of apocryphal literature, like the Visio Pauli, and, moreover, repeatedly denounced the vernacular textual traditions of his time, cautioning against charms, prognostications and heterodox writings. It is interesting, then, that Ælfric's homily comes directly after a sequence of charms and vernacular homilies of questionable orthodoxy. Many studies have focused their critical efforts on making sense of these unusual groupings, but hardly any explore the material text as the form in which these works survive. As such, this essay will argue that current scholarly understanding of Junius 85 and 86 is distorted by a focus only on specific texts, or on the general appearance of the codices, rather than on a more holistic approach to details of compilation and production.

One useful study of these books is that by Jonathan Wilcox in his examination of the Ælfric homily. Wilcox, however, focuses solely on that text to make a case for its independent transmission amongst the laity in booklet form, and so only briefly mentions the manuscript as a whole. Indeed, when scholars have commented on the state of the material text, their brief remarks are almost wholly negative. Wilcox refers to them as ‘a strikingly low status pair of manuscripts’ that are ‘incongruously scruffy, messy’ and ‘materially poor’. Richard Gameson focuses on the collection's fragmentary nature and observes that the manuscripts are ‘badly damaged’. N. R. Ker's only assessment of the physical condition of the books is that the ‘parchment varies in quality’ and that a few of the mise-en-page features are ‘unusual’. Aside from their shared aesthetic judgements, scholars are also unanimous in their belief that Junius 85 and 86 once constituted a single manuscript that was split into separate volumes at a later date.

The repeated campaigns against Algiers and the other Barbary states by English (and other) naval forces had been, above all else, a defence of their merchant ships trading in the Mediterranean. For states with Mediterranean coasts there was also the even nastier issue of the kidnapping and enslavement of their people who lived along those coasts. This was also an issue, if a lesser one, for the English and Scots, whose citizens were taken from the captured ships and enslaved; freeing such captives by raising cash ransoms became a major charity activity in both countries in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The treaty with Algiers agreed by Admiral Herbert meant that the English had now no intention of establishing a permanent English naval presence in the sea, despite English rule in Tangier. With the evacuation of Tangier in 1684, there was no requirement for an English naval presence; no English warships sailed that sea until 1690.

In the year the new war began, 1688, the French demonstrated very clearly their naval power in the sea. Their Mediterranean fleet, annoyed at the Algerine depredations in previous years (while the English and Dutch treaties were in force) turned their bomb vessels on the city, destroying much of it; a dozen Frenchmen who were in the city at the time, including the consul, were executed in revenge, by being fired from the Algerine guns. It was all pointless, for, as Louis XIV became involved in the European war (using a similar policy of frightfulness, such as the ravaging of the Palatinate, which simply angered his victims and horrified others), he sent a secret envoy to Algiers to make peace, and the dey successfully extracted very favourable terms. Algiers was at war with its Barbary neighbours in Tunis and Morocco at the time, and any defeat tended to mean the deposition and probable execution of the ruling dey – including the man who made the French peace. The real result was a powerful and continuing hatred of France by the Algerines.

An English naval squadron returned to the Mediterranean in 1690 because of the new French war, the Nine Years’ War (or War of English Succession, or War of the League of Augsburg).

After 1783 both Britain and France were exhausted yet again, but the British financial and commercial systems were better organised and more robust than those of France, so its recovery was correspondingly quicker and less disruptive. France even by 1787 was incapacitated by increasing internal difficulties, and soon sank into its revolution. One of the casualties of these difficulties was the French navy, an expensive institution. In Britain, by contrast, even though the country had been defeated and was internationally isolated during and after the American War, a mainly stable government and an active diplomacy brought it back into play in the European system fairly quickly. With its power reduced, and chastened by defeat, it did not seem so dangerous.

The Royal Navy was one of the elements in the British system which was, for once, well attended-to during the peace. The number of its line-of-battle ships rose from 117 in 1785 to 145 in 1790, and cruisers from 82 to 131, which made it the most powerful single naval force in the world. This was largely the result of defeat in the preceding war, no doubt, during which on several occasions enemy fleets had reached the Channel in sufficient strength to force the Channel Fleet to avoid a fight – the ‘fleet-in-being’ option normally despised by British sailors; the need for a fleet to dominate the Channel had thus been demonstrated in the most graphic way. After 1783, however, Britain was also in naval competition with other countries, almost all of whom were busy building up their ship numbers at the same time; together, the fleets of Britain's most persistent enemies, the allies Spain and France, outnumbered the Royal Navy by 1790. In Europe as a whole the number of line-of-battle ships of the major naval powers, except Britain, increased by well over a hundred between 1780 and 1790, to which a dozen or more built by minor powers could be added.

Three crises between 1783 and 1793 signalled the re-emergence of Britain on to the international scene, and at the same time, brought an end to the Franco-Spanish association for a time.

For all of the changes that American literature has been through since the Culture Wars – African American, Asian American, Latina/o studies, feminism, queer theory, post-colonialism and transnationalism, to name just a few – perhaps the least understood part of American literary history is its very beginnings, rooted in Indigenous origin stories passed down as part of the oral tradition. If we return for a moment to the benchmark for measuring the increasing diversity of the canon of American literature, The Norton Anthology of American Literature, this distortion comes clearly into focus. As of this writing, the current eighth edition of the Norton Anthology's opening section, ‘Stories of the Beginning of the World’, contains just two origin stories – Navajo and Iroquois – before Columbus and the conquistadors claim the continent and colonise American literary history.

How can one measure such a massive distortion? First, the temporal distortion: recent archaeological excavations at San Bartolo revealed Maya glyphs in murals dating to around 300 BCE, nearly two millennia before Columbus wrote in his journal, ‘With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do what whatever we want.’ The Kwakwaka'wakw of British Columbia are still recounting stories performed as dances, with magnificent carved masks, and songs accompanied by a huge drum made out of a hollowed-out cedar log. The Kwakwaka'wakw say these stories are six thousand years old and very much alive. Second, the cultural distortion: in the Unites States alone there are currently more than 540 federally recognised tribes, each with their own distinct origin stories; to include only stories from two cultures thus grossly diminishes the cultural diversity hidden behind the term ‘Native American’. Third, the formal distortion: as the folklorist Barre Toelken points out, the term ‘oral tradition’ can inadvertently oversimplify a more holistic approach that could be more fully described as ‘performance of arts, crafts, foods, stories, songs, and dances’ enlivened by an ‘emotional commitment in the form of body movement, breathing, use of vocal cords, tasting, and hearing the resultant “texts”, better understood as “constellations of meaning”’. And yet, because American literary scholars do not, generally speaking, do field work, most encounter origin stories primarily in print form.

The range of what is wrongful or criminal in Spain in the modern period is broad, and in some ways specific. The wrongdoing of claiming a new identity, that is, the crime of identity theft, as illustrated in the example discussed below, is of particular interest because of the social relations and networks it reveals. It does not constitute one of the ‘great fears’ that beset the city, but it does constitute a diffuse type of threat that gave rise to a different type of concern, and which, in addition, has come to be of particular interest in our times.

Some definition of terms is needed so as to clarify what is meant by ‘identity theft’. The Dictionary of the Real Academia Española (electronic edition) states that an impostor is ‘one who supplants another, a person who pretends to be someone he is not’. This rather general definition acts as an umbrella term to indicate a wide variety of behaviours, not described in the Academy dictionary, including those who take the identity of another, those who invent a new identity for themselves, those who claim to have a profession or occupation that is not theirs, those who have others believe that they are of another sex, and so on. In discussing identity theft, we are dealing, it should be added, with a form of behaviour that historically was relatively frequent and that tells us about the cultural codes of the society in which it was found.

There is an additional aspect: changing one's identity or personality is also fascinating from a psychological viewpoint. It should thus not be studied only as a type of wrongful behaviour, not least because on many occasions it does not actually lead to a wrong being committed. Changing one's personality or identity is a term that covers a whole universe of different intentions, ranging from the wish to fulfil certain personal aspirations that are thwarted by society or physical limitations, to the simple desire for adventure, and at times entailing the occurrence of mental illness. The urgent desire to be what one is not, or to have a relationship with people to whom, whether by reasons of class or gender, one would never normally have access, can provide some explanation for these forms of behaviour.