Introduction

The missionary saint is well represented in Icelandic literature, even if the saintliness of some of these figures proves to be somewhat questionable. Less well documented, perhaps, is the medieval interest in the desert saint, who also has a literary presence in the sagas. According to Íslendingabók and Landnámabók, Irish monks came to Iceland before the arrival of the Norsemen, seeking heremum in oceano (‘a desert in the ocean’): for them, Iceland was equivalent to the monastic desert in which the early Fathers of the Church chose to live out the biblical call to exile from one's homeland for the love of God. Among the early settlers in Iceland, two are described as becoming einsetumenn (‘hermits’) in their old age: Jõrundr inn kristni (‘the Christian’) at Garðar and Ásólfr Konálsson at Hólmr. Like many Irish saints, Ásólfr provides for himself and his followers through miraculous catches of fish, and eventually settles in a kofi (‘hermit's cell’), which later becomes the site of a church dedicated to Kolumkilla (‘Columba’). An understanding of Irish peregrinatio must lie behind this story, even if the writer is not entirely in sympathy with it. One of the earliest converts to Christianity, Máni inn kristni (‘the Christian’), also opts for the eremitic life: we are told that ‘hann hefir byggt svá sem einsetumaðr, því at svá sem hann var fjarlægr flestum mõnnum þann tíma í hugskotinu, svá vildi hann ok at líkamligri samvistu firrask alþýðu þys’ (‘he lived as a hermit, so that just as he was far from most people at that time in his mind, so also he desired to distance himself in physical interaction from the noise of the multitude’). The story of Máni is attributed to Gunnlaugr Leifsson from the monastery of Þingeyrar in the north of Iceland, and the eremitic life was well established in the northern diocese: sagas of Bishop Guðmundr mention two anchorites at Þingeyrar, Bjõrn and Úlfrún, and Jóns saga helga tells the story of the anchoress Hildr at Hólar.

Rima listenedto the voice of the radio announcer droning on, dishing outinformation about new appointments in the Police Force, asshe pressed the accelerator to get the car going faster. Thevoice was very female; the pretentious drawl andnear-perfect foreign intonation irritated Rima. TheseNigerians who try to imitate the accent of the owners of thelanguage, who pronounce dodo asdou-dou, she thought, laughing. ‘Theyare more Oyibo than the Oyibo people sef,’ she chuckledaloud.

She switchedoff the car radio and concentrated on the highway. This roadwas notorious for accidents – what she always saw as anirony considering that it is in excellent condition, assmooth and flawless as a pebble just retrieved from theObi-Iyi River, in her home town. For a moment she recalledhow excited she was to gather pebbles from the river andused them to decorate her little room in her home. That waslong ago. She had been deliriously happy and carefree as ateenager. Pebble hunting was her favourite pastime. She wasnot alone in this guileless game. Her friends joined in theadventure and they used to fight over the pebbles,especially when two or three people sighted a pebble at thesame time and made a dash for it. Sometimes two chargingheads knocked together and bodies collapsed in utter agony.It was fun too. Rima sighed wistfully. It was indeed longago when life was simple, uncomplicated and livable. Nowthings had changed. Living these days was a nightmare. Youfelt cheated as though someone had sneaked into your houseand robbed you of all your valuables. People wereinsensitive, cruel. Brutish. Her thought settled briefly onthe Uzo-Uwani murderous attack perpetrated by the so-calledFulani Herdsmen. She shuddered. She had lost an uncle and acousin to the mindless and brutal attack. Where would theystrike next? Which village or town was the next target? Whocould say?

If there is one thing upon which most medieval authors of Merlin stories appear to agree, it is that Merlin is the son of a devil. The suggestion itself originates with Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia regum Britanniae, where Vortigern, king of the Britons, interrogates Merlin's mother as to why her son apparently has no father. She responds that she became pregnant by a mysterious man whose identity she did not know, but who would suddenly appear to her in her room and vanish into thin air. A wise man is consulted as to the credibility of the tale; he identifies the young man as a possible incubus, a variety of devil which has the power to impregnate women:

As Stephen Knight observes, Geoffrey leaves the identity of Merlin's father deliberately ambiguous. Vortigern's supposedly wise advisor has already demonstrated his incompetence by suggesting that the king's tower can only be successfully built if Merlin's blood is mixed with the foundations; Merlin himself is quick to prove him wrong, throwing into question the advisor's authority.

The motif of Merlin's conception by a devil captured the imagination of later vernacular authors, and became a stable feature of the Merlin story in subsequent translations and rewritings. It forms a fundamental aspect of Merlin's identity, presenting the devil as the source of his shape-shifting, knowledge of all things past and present, and magic, and at the same time forms a counterweight to his God-given prophetic powers. In saving Merlin's soul, however, God does not erase the abilities that are inherited from his demon father: ‘ne vaut pas Dix que li diables perdist chose qu'il doie avoir, ains veut bien que il ait ce que il doit avoir’ [did not want the devil to lose that which properly belongs to him; in fact, he wanted him to have it] (pp. 593–94).

Since the seventeenth century, Shakespeare's drama has travelled to virtually every corner of the world – first to continental Europe, then Africa, Asia and the Americas. These routes have been remarkably well documented. Indeed, scholarship on Shakespeare in Germany, China, Japan, India and beyond has been instrumental in broadening our understanding of Shakespeare's global reach. Studies of Shakespeare in Japan, for instance, have meticulously documented the fertile cross-pollination between his drama and Japan's long-standing theatre traditions: Bunraku, Kabuki and Noh. In India, scholars have investigated the ways in which Shakespeare was co-opted as a colonial agent by Britain in the nineteenth century, and later renovated as an ‘inciter of nationalism – as if the people of India had said, “We will learn your game of cricket and beat you at it”’. By mapping his transmission nation by nation, however, the critical project of global Shakespeares has more recently threatened to become an obstacle to its own inquiry. What do we mean in the twenty-first century by Japanese, Indian or, in this study's case, Korean Shakespeares? That is to say, what are we constructing – intentionally or unintentionally – and what are we occluding when we examine Shakespeare's dissemination in units of the nation? How has nationhood inflected the study of Shakespeare, and what does Shakespeare bring to our sense of the nation as an empowering yet also inhibitive idea?

The problem of imagining the nation is, of course, a dilemma Shakespeare himself explored in Henry V, a play that registers the political tensions within and surrounding early modern England as it sought to establish its geopolitical relevance in a global context. Among the first plays to be staged at the newly constructed Globe Theatre in London, Shakespeare's last history play is a literary enterprise that reaches back into England's past as a way to reconstruct, celebrate and project its national and imperial ambitions. King Henry's St Crispin's Day speech repeatedly appeals to a collective, English sense of ‘we’ in an attempt to unite the different regions of Britain represented by Captains Fluellen, Gower, Jamy and MacMorris under a single national banner: ‘But we in it shall be remembered, / We few, we happy few, we band of brothers’.

In the introduction to his book African Dance in Ghana: Contemporary Transformations, Francis Nii-Yartey says he hoped that both the student of dance and the general reader would enjoy the edition. The book achieves its aims. It is a highly informative, though not academic book, written by an academic-artist. He draws on his life in dance, as a performer, choreographer and a participant in the development of dance as a profession and academic subject in Ghana. His experience is of one who was trained by leaders who were involved in developing the infrastructure of newly independent Africa. Artists were very much involved in the politics of adapting Western-style institutions to serve Africa needs and vice-versa. We had S.dar Senghor as poet-president, S.kou Tour. launching the first national dance company in Africa and Kwame Nkrumah commissioning Professors Nketia and Opoku to start the national performing arts companies. Nii-Yartey was one of Professor Opoku's first batch of students. He quotes mainly Professor Opoku who was the first artistic director of the Ghana Dance Ensemble. Other than that he conveys in a straightforward manner his knowledge of traditional dance as a practice in Africa and the emergence of ‘The New Paradigm’ – theatrical dance otherwise known as concert dance, in the early 1960s. The foreword by Professor Emeritus, Kwabena Nketia, frames Nii-Yartey's story historically in the heady days of ‘national awakening’ when pan-Africanism was our hope.

After a short introduction to Ghana as a country the book provides us with an overview of traditional dance in Ghana. This is not a list of traditional dances but a description of features and characteristics which are found in a wide range of forms. Most overviews of this kind focus on physical attributes such as the use of flat foot, bent knee and supple spine. This overview reveals some less discussed information such as how traditional dances are formed through dialogue between individuals and the community, the idea of choreography and improvisation, though not described with those terms, in traditional contexts, and how the same dance might appear in different contexts performed to display different qualities depending on whether it is for a funeral or a celebration.

This book seeks to provide a multi-layered comparative history of northern England and southern Scotland – ‘middle Britain’ for short – during one of the most formative periods in their development, with particular emphasis on the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. A justification for the book's geographic and temporal parameters will be laid out in due course. For the present, we are concerned to establish a preliminary frame of reference for understanding the multiple forces at work on the regions involved, and we begin with a sequence of views from York and Carlisle.

It was the Scandinavian occupation of York in 866–7 that set the seal on the demise and fragmentation of the ancient kingdom of Northumbria, which in its heyday had ranged from the Humber to the Forth and across the Pennine–Cheviot watershed to the Irish Sea. West Saxon royal lordship first arrived in Northumbria with the seizure of York in 927 by King Alfred's grandson Æthelstan, following which he swiftly received the submissions of the Northumbrian elite and brought into his peace both the king of Strathclyde and the king of Scots. Nor was it any coincidence that from now on Æthelstan and his successors regularly took the style ‘king of the English’, rex Anglorum, and might even stake claims to rulership over all the island of Britain. Carlisle, another former node of Northumbrian power, may already have fallen to the kings of Strathclyde by 927, and seems to have remained more or less securely under their control until Mael Coluim III, king of Scots (1058–93), had brought it within his orbit by the 1060s. The next snapshot takes us back to Carlisle in 1092, when it was fortified by the Norman king-duke, William II (Rufus), in what was then the northernmost assertion of direct rule in western Britain by any king of the English. A different scene presents itself when we find that Mael Coluim's son David I died in possession of Carlisle, and within the walls of its castle, on 24 May 1153.

From 1923 onwards, the Mediterranean fleet was the major naval force under British control. In the North Sea the elimination of the German navy in 1918–1919, by the surrender and scuttling of its ships, had cleared the sea of the most serious enemy; in the Far East there was apprehension at the growth of both Japan's and the United States’ naval power, though these two tended to cancel each other out, being mutually hostile; the naval base at Singapore formed the basis for British power in the Indian Ocean and the China Seas. These two regions, therefore, were not held, in naval terms, very strongly, and their reserve strength was the Mediterranean fleet. Positioned as it was, its ships could sail quickly into the Atlantic and British waters, or reinforce the Indian Ocean and the Far East. The Rock of Gibraltar and the Suez Canal were therefore seen even more than before as essential imperial maritime links, and Malta was the main naval base.

In order for the Mediterranean fleet to be of use in a crisis, it had to be large, well-trained, and fully equipped. It was put through constant exercises, in many parts of the sea, and kept up-to-date in equipment so far as possible. It received the reinforcement of aircraft carriers from the beginning; the original carrier, Argus, was already being used in the Russian and Turkish troubles in 1921–1923, and the fleet received as its commanders the most capable admirals. But as the political situation developed, especially after 1930, its clear maritime advantage of the 1920s gradually eroded.

This was the classic age of the Mediterranean fleet. Sailors and officers were professionals, the disciplinary regime was benign, sailors received regular leave, and were rotated into different ships and through regular educational and retraining programmes. There were annual visits by parts of the fleet to places all around the sea – Greece and Turkey were favourites, though France and Yugoslavia and Italy were included; the visits were social occasions as much as exercises, promoting good international relations, at least supposedly (but they were also exercises in intelligence gathering). The ships were polished and painted to impress, but exercised in evolutions, firing practice, and navigation as well. Plans were developed to cope with possible naval operations. For ten years or so after 1923 the fleet rode the Mediterranean unchallenged and with vast confidence.

This chapter considers the ways in which various criminal anthropologists and lawyers, some of them of the stature of Rafael Salillas, Tomás Maestre and Constancio Bernaldo de Quirós, were involved in or interested in what at the time was known as ‘metapsychic research’. By this term was meant research intended to examine in a scientific manner, and particularly from the perspective of psychology, ‘psychic’ phenomena prompted into being by the supposed extraordinary and/or unconscious activities of certain individuals (such as mediums). It is possible that in Spain this interest in the metapsychic derived from the admiration of Spanish intellectuals for the work of the Italian anthropologist Cesare Lombroso, considered to be the father of modern criminology, and also known for his defence of the study of ‘spiritualism’. As far as Lombroso was concerned, there was no fundamental conflict between monism and anthropological materialism on the one hand and, on the other, belief in matter that was fluid in form, and visible and at times palpable.

This is not simply a question of early twentieth-century Spanish criminologists, inspired by Lombroso, thinking about how one might engage in the scientific study of metapsychic or paranormal phenomena. A brief look at the press of the period reveals the open debate, not to mention overt social anxiety, about the possibility that certain crimes might be committed by ‘spirits’ or, for example, about the possibility of ‘distance killing’, as in the cases referred to by Bernaldo de Quirós as ‘magic murders’ or ‘deaths by telepathy’ (1910: 80–81). ‘Distance killings’ were cited as possible causes or explanations of crime; other notions included hypnosis, suggestion and black magic. Debate in this area was not confined to popular publications or novels, as might be suggested by the newspaper articles and novels of Emilio Carrere, but also took place in the scientific arena. We can even find in this period suggestive ideas such as that of a ‘Spiritualist criminology’, defined by the Lombrosian anthropologist Fernando Ortiz, whose writings would have been well known in Spain, and particularly by Rafael Salillas and academic lawyers in the University of Madrid.

‘Distortion’ is nearly always understood as negative: it can be defined as perversion, unnoticed alteration, impairment, caricature, twisting, corruption, misrepresentation, deviation. Unlike its close neighbour, ‘disruption’, currently enjoying a makeover in British government-speak as a newly positive term (in such collocations as ‘disruptive technologies’ and ‘disruptive industries’), it remains resolutely associated with the undesirable, the lost or the deceptive. The process of distortion is generally seen to create a form of the original (factual, true, authentic, real) that is not transubstantive as such, but deformed: warped, misshapen, skewed, shrunken, amplified or simulated. Even in acoustics or music, the notion of distortion, however aesthetically pleasing in itself, most often connotes loss of purity or clarity of signal. And yet, it might equally be said that only through distortion can one find the presence of the original. Indeed, in literary and historical studies, one might argue that all textual transmission is inevitably distorted – either through mediation, translation, appropriation, colonisation, canonisation and authorisation of an elite corpus or authentic version, digitisation, remediation or, more obviously negatively, through misunderstanding, lack of contextualisation, deliberate falsification or pretence.

In the Collegium held at Stanford University in 2015, at which some earlier forms of these essays were presented (Cayley, Ogilvie, Powell, Scorcioni, Walker), the three-day discussion ranged from core issues of space, place, time and context in the production of literary and artefactual meaning, to the archive and its necessary interpretation – whether through sorting and cataloguing or editing, retrieval and display. In tussling with the term and its implications, we returned frequently to the concept of the undistorted and what it might imply, whether in theory or practice. An antonym of ‘distortion’ seems always to be the search for the authentic, the original, the true, as if that might exist textually. Yet, alongside this inbuilt distrust of the text or artefact as a bearer of undistorted meaning, there is an equally evident suspicion of the oral, and of sound or speech – with their evanescence and ephemerality, even when recorded (as is shown brilliantly in Powell's essay).

The return of Minorca to British control in 1763 restored the geopolitical position of Britain in the Mediterranean only superficially. The wide British triumph in the Seven Years’ War stimulated further dislike among its European rivals. Both France and Spain busily developed their navies during the subsequent peace with the clear intention of seeking revenge for defeat, the Dutch retreated even more determinedly into neutrality, and other states – Prussia, Russia, Denmark, Sweden, Austria – were deeply disturbed by the new power which Britain now appeared to wield.

They did not really need to worry, for that power was as fragile as that of any other suddenly prominent state. The military triumph in North America was followed by an assault on long-cherished local autonomies in the British colonies. The dispute began as soon as the war ended with quarrels over taxes on sugar and molasses, and developed through disputes and arguments into riots and overt threats, aggressiveness on both sides and eventually into fighting, beginning at Boston in 1775. The newly expanded British Empire was thus shown to be as hollow as any other – indeed more so than most - and this provided the opportunity for Britain's European enemies to bring down the sudden giant.

The approach to a wider conflict was, as usual, slow and indirect. The fighting in North America – the American Rebellion, or the War of Independence – had been going on for three years before the French made a decisive move into belligerency, though clandestine and not so clandestine help had gone to the American rebels from the start, both officially and privately. That is to say, the war crept up on its future participants in irregular, incremental stages, with neutrality cloaking careful moves to achieve an early advantage. French ships were at sea, cruising to protect American shipping for a year before France went to formal war. It was therefore no surprise to the British government when formal war finally began in February 1778. As France became increasingly hostile between 1775 and 1778 the usual precautions had to be taken – line-of-battle ship squadrons in the Channel, blockades, reinforcements sent to the Mediterranean.

Introduction

Today we may think of hagiography as a minor genre, too artificial and unrealistic to merit much serious attention. Medieval writers – it is important to understand – did not see things this way. Hagiography is not only the best represented of medieval genres in terms of manuscripts, but also has the longest continuous history: saints’ lives were composed, translated and copied from the second century up to and beyond the Reformation, and they spread from east to west and from the Mediterranean to the north, as new countries declared their arrival in the Christian world through the appropriation of the cult of saints. It was one of the few medieval genres that all classes of society were exposed to, from the lay person who might have heard them read out in church, to the clerical and the secular élite, who would have read them as part of their personal devotions, either in Latin or in the vernacular. Saints not only dominated the rhythm of the Christian year, through the liturgical cycle of saints’ days, but also permeated the medieval sense of place: their power was channelled through the materiality of their relics and expressed in their patronage of Church estates. While composing saints’ lives was primarily the preserve of clerics, the cult of saints both depended on and served the needs of lay people: the way in which Margaret, a virgin martyr, became known in the West as a patron of childbirth is a striking example of how the needs of ordinary women influenced clerical composition; her life continued to be copied long past the Reformation because women in labour depended on its help. Although saints themselves are typically of aristocratic lineage, miracle collections are one of the few places in medieval literature where the needs of ordinary people matter: single mothers, neglected children, the poor, the infirm. The importance of the cult of saints to medieval people (and to many Catholics today) cannot be emphasised enough.