This essay approaches the topic of distortion from an unashamedly recuperative angle. The epigraph here is that most famously reprised biblical quotation: ‘For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known’, from 1 Corinthians 13:12. It is cited out of context in a hundred different songs, television shows, films and poems, including as the title of a 1961 Ingmar Bergman film, which exploits the notion of human misapprehension and the distorted or partial nature of human knowledge, of human works and endeavours in the face of the divine. The perhaps questionable reception of this quotation forms a jumping-off point for our investigation of the reception and/or distortion of medieval texts, from the moment they emerge in written form, to their modern manifestations under foot or digitally translated and transformed.

Within the field of medieval French literature and manuscript studies, the textual and material phenomena of incompleteness, instability and fragmentation – or perhaps what we might rather more positively call continuations, variance and multiplication – have been the subject of a number of studies in recent decades. The discrete text is often left incomplete or unfinished through the common medieval trope of the refusal or deferral of ending or judgement (especially in the dialogued or debate poem), which is projected beyond the diegetic frame of the text through a number of textual devices: an unreliable narrator; an absent judge; a delay to find legal representation; ambiguity, and so on. This might seem unsatisfactory until one realises that a continuation is usually offered, often in the shape of a further text or texts; and indeed that the ‘original’ text gains from its contextual – or as Jean-Claude Mühlethaler puts it, ‘co-textual’ – reading across the linguistic surfaces of a manuscript or printed compilation, or cycle.

In this context, the ‘original’ itself is held up as imperfect, unfinished, continuable; and therefore any ‘distortion’ in the sense of continuation or adaptation may be seen as a positive gain. Indeed, ‘distortion’ itself is a not unproblematic word, since while more often than not used to indicate deviation from a norm or original form in a pejorative sense, it can signify positively in certain contexts.

Unaccompanied men's choir:

‘Goldne Brücken seien alle Lieder mir’ (comp. by 1853)

‘Spanisches Lied’ Op. 6 no. 1 (comp. April 1852, publ. Dec. 1853) – see also Heyse

‘Frühlingslied’ Op. 85 no. 5 (comp. March 1878, publ. July 1882)

‘Geistliches Wiegenlied’ Op. 91 no. 2 (comp. 1863–4?, publ. Dec. 1884)

‘Mein Herz ist schwer’ Op. 94 no. 3 (comp. 1883–4, publ. Dec. 1884)

BRAHMS LEFT just a small number of settings of poetry by Geibel. However, an 1878 letter to Dessoff declares:

We cannot know how many works Brahms destroyed, but one early setting for male-voice choir was recently discovered in the City Archives of Celle, northeast of Hanover. A concert in early May 1853 in that town included a male-voice quartet ‘Goldne Brücken seien alle Lieder mir’:

It is hard to image a poem more ideally suited to setting. Evocative images are conveyed in a transparent metre, at an ideal length. It is little wonder that Geibel appealed to the youthful Brahms.

Another early setting, the solo song ‘Spanisches Lied’ Op. 6 no. 1, stems from a volume Geibel compiled in collaboration with Heyse, the 1852 Spanisches Liederbuch. Brahms's song dates from April 1852, just short of his nineteenth birthday, when the volume was hot off the press. His choice of poem, in which the young Spanish girl delights in her seductive powers, shows his early interest in Madchenlieder. Brahms may have been inspired by Schumann's Spanisches Liederspiel Op. 74, published in 1849. (He cannot have known Schumann's Spanische Liebeslieder Op. 138 because, although this was composed in the same year, it was only published in 1857).

The Crimean War highlighted many of the new conditions in which the British navy operated, but developments soon after the war produced much more crucial changes. In the Crimean War, considerable numbers of ships in both the British and French fleets were powered by steam, though many of these were small paddle steamers which were used as handmaids of the traditional windpowered line-of-battle ships, pulling them into position or into and out of harbour. The next stage in this development, the replacement of paddle power by screw propulsion, had begun, though it was going to be some time before the biggest ships used such power. The paddle steamers had proved to be all too vulnerable to enemy fire, their paddle wheels being very exposed; the screw ships had greater speed and potentially more power and manoeuvrability.

In 1853 Admiral Dundas had sent his messages from Malta to London, first by ship to Marseilles, whence they were sent by telegraph to London. By 1855 cable telegraphy had reached Constantinople and the Crimea, and the admirals found that orders could be sent to them directly from their governments. Napoleon III was notoriously liable to second-guess his commanders, effectively stifling their initiative, unless, like General Pelissier, they were tough-minded enough to ignore him. The British government does not seem to have been quite so interfering, though the First Lord of the Admiralty, Sir James Graham, had a distinct tendency that way.

These changes – steam power, telegraph, iron ships – tend to be regarded as violently altering naval affairs, but in fact they were the culminating developments of a long line of gradual changes. It took over a century to get from the first small fragile steamships to oil-powered battleships like the Dreadnought; in other words, the speed of change was fairly gradual, and it followed on from continuing changes in ship construction, improvements in the sail plan, better charts and navigation, more accurate means of communication, and copper-sheathing, which had characterised the eighteenth century. The engine for these changes was, of course, the never-ending competition of repeated warfare, and that was also something which continued.

The Material Text in Wycliffite Biblical Scholarship examines the biblical scholarship of John Wyclif and his successors, treated here in material dating from approximately 1380 to 1420. Like so many other academic projects on late medieval writing and religious culture, this one is profoundly indebted to Anne Hudson's account of Wycliffism's history and textual oeuvre. Despite the growth of interest in Wycliffism following publication of The Premature Reformation in 1988, however, the archive there designated as “Lollard biblical scholarship” – a broad category encompassing works such as the Wycliffite Bible and Prologue, sermon collections, interpolated versions of the Psalms, glossed commentaries on the gospels, compendia of hermeneutic terms and concepts, and polemical religious writings from later stages of the movement – has gained prominence in medieval studies only recently. There is the obvious fact that for many years key Wycliffite texts remained unedited or limited to incomplete collations. Such work also has a marginal relation to Middle English literature as currently surveyed and anthologized, though this too is changing as scholars explore how writers reframed or otherwise adapted Wycliffite terms, concepts, and forms in the process of cultivating their own diverse literary vernaculars. But this evolving critical orientation must also contend with a strong impulse towards homogeneity and transhistorical coherence in the study of medieval religious movements. Variations in the development and transmission of reformist thought are sometimes difficult to discern in the case of Wycliffism given its attitudes towards scriptural authority and post-biblical revelation. Unlike contemporaries of his who sought to embed biblical scholarship in the history and tradition of the church, or to preserve the important truths which reason by itself may “fynde, leerne, and knowe,” in Reginald Pecock's words, Wyclif afforded scripture the anteriority of a divine archetype or idea. The receptivity such a “text” demands of its readers was reflected in terminology emphasizing scripture's overall unity and authority of meaning, most especially in what Wyclif referred to as the liber vitae, with everything this figure implied about retrieving the sacred sense from the material flux of written artifacts.

MohamedSalmawy's Butterfly Wings is setpredominantly in Egypt and Italy. In these macro spaces, thecharacters create and recreate themselves as they evolvefrom innocence to awareness. The narrative is focused on theprinciple of self-discovery with all the characterssearching for themselves. This becomes more intriguing asSalmawy careful crafts this individual search to be includedin the search for the Egyptian nation. The purpose of thisessay is to underscore the fact that travelling out of the‘home’ context begins the transformation process of theprinciple characters whose quests are carefully linked tothe search of the Egyptian nationness. Thetransformation process, as perceived in this essay, ties inwith Bill Ashcroft's interpretation in which he discussesthe postcolonial people and cultures in the process of‘adapting’ and not being destroyed. He writes: ‘Many criticshave argued that colonialism destroyed indigenous cultures,but this assumes that culture is static, and underestimatesthe resilience and adaptability of colonial societies’(Post- Colonial Transformation: 2).This polemics is relevant as it highlights differentpositions and responses to the colonial process. However,though adaptation has come to be the best option forcolonial societies today because even resiliency is highlycontested, it does not undermine the fact that many of thecultural values of people from Africa and many more of theAfrica diaspora were destroyed. And so, adaptability,defined from a different temporal/spatial context cannot gowithout the feeling of loss or some void that is hard tofill. Salmawy's characters undergo transformation as theybegin to define themselves as time/space becomes the‘addresser’ that gives them the opportunity to be‘addressees’ of their quest. Working within the framework ofthe postcolonial theory, therefore, this essay dwells onGeorge Lamming's essay ‘The Occasion for Speaking’ and othersalient tenets to defend the fact that with the politicaldilemma that dominates the Egypt that one finds in thenarrative, both nation and citizens, as seen in thenarratives, are in the search for themselves. This becomespossible, as the narrative programme suggests, only when oneleaves the ‘home’ context. This means that evennationness is better constructed in the‘elsewhere’.

The Ottomans were able to prevent the Portuguese gaining a secure position in the Red Sea, but their failure to develop a deep-water navy capable of operating in the wider Indian Ocean, or a navy to operate in the Persian Gulf, left the Portuguese in a general position of strength. Only at Basra did the Ottomans possess a naval port that gave them direct access into the Persian Gulf, this through taking possession of this port in the early sixteenth century following the conquest of Baghdad. With the Portuguese at that time holding and fortifying several of the islands at the mouth of the Persian Gulf, including Kish, Kishm (Qeshm) and Hormuz, this effectively prevented the Ottomans making full use of Basra as a naval base. Piri Reis, in an expedition that set out from Suez in 1551 with a force of thirty galleys, while managing the capture of Kish, was unsuccessful in an attempt on Hormuz, unable to take the fortress that gave protection to the harbour and the Portuguese warships stationed there. In sailing on to Basra, where he anchored, Piri subsequently lost part of his fleet when it was attacked by pursuing Portuguese warships, Piri eluding capture by taking just three of his galleys, and the plunder they carried, back into the Red Sea, but losing one further vessel before reaching Suez. His reward for abandoning his fleet, and giving priority to the safety of the plunder he had taken during the campaign, was his arrest and, under order of Suleiman I, beheading. A subsequent attempt by Sidi Ali Reis to return the surviving ships of Piri's fleet, after battle-damaged repairs had been undertaken at Basra, met with further losses, when it was out-fought by a Portuguese fleet off Hormuz before entering the Indian Ocean, and virtual destruction when it headed into a hurricane and was driven onto the shores of Gujarat.

This chapter takes as its focus the work of Antonio de Hoyos y Vinent, a notable decadent writer of Spanish fin-de-siècle literature, and it concentrates specifically on his novel El caso clínico, which serves as a prime example of the unrest permeating fin-de-siècle culture, and which in general is related to a rejection of the project of modernity, in so far as we understand modernity as a set of socio-historical relations sketched out via new regimes of control over the subject. Fin-de-siècle aesthetics run against the project of modernity, so that, as Felski notes (1995: 4–5), we find opposed to the narrative of modern subjectivity, which is linked to a process of rationalization, productivity and repression, a counter-narrative in which the modern subject is passive, pleasureseeking, ungrounded and – with some frequency – feminized.

The phenomenon of decadence is fundamental to this counter-narrative, the idea of decadence being as omnipresent in European culture of the second half of the nineteenth century as it is difficult to pinpoint and define (Praz 1970; Balakian 1977; Constable, Dennisoff and Potolski 1999; Bernheimer 2003). The issue is even more complex in Hispanic culture, where ‘el término decadencia fue pronto asociado al modernismo, que a veces era considerado como causa, a veces como manifestación de decadencia o a veces como ambas cosas’ (the term decadence was rapidly associated with modernism, at times seen as what had brought it into being, at times as a symptom of decadence, or at times as both) (Litvak 1990: 113), so that formal characteristics of modernism (renewal of vocabulary and metrics, eclecticism, and so forth) and the attitude of the modernistas (opposition to positivism, rebellion against social norms) were understood in direct relation to the idea of decadence.

Going beyond the list of themes and images that often stands in for a definition of ‘decadence’, including prominent figures such as the femme fatale, the androgyne, the dandy and the bohemian, we should emphasize the degree to which the notion of decadence is closely linked to the awareness of the process of history that informs the project of modernity We can find this sense of history in foundational pieces as early as the sonnet ‘Langueur’ (1883) by Paul Verlaine and the manifesto ‘Aux lecteurs!’ by Anatole Baju and Luc Vajernet which opened the publication of Le Décadent littéraire et artistique (1886).

Starting in November 1804, the administration of the Ottoman state navy was completely reorganised by Selim III through the introduction of a series of wide-sweeping reforms that really began to tackle the institutionalised systemic failings that had bedevilled the Ottoman navy from the very onset of the age of fighting sail. In doing so, he also ruffled the feathers of an entrenched elite, those who had long benefited from a system that had allowed them to profit from the old ways of doing things. Both those within the civilian departments (purchasing, procurement and shipbuilding) and those who held rank at sea had developed various ways to ensure personal lucrative advantages from the managerial positions they held. It was before these reforms could bite, however, that Selim was removed from office, with those primarily responsible for his overthrow opposed to a generality of modernising reforms that were far from restricted to the navy.

It was the janissaries, the premier units of infantry recruited under the devşirme system, who took the lead in trying to bring an end to the reforms, their own concern being the creation of a new-style military force, the Nizam-I credit or New Army, which was trained in Western European military doctrine and practices. The janissaries were totally opposed to such foreign ideas, believing that they diminished soldiering by expecting them to fight as part of a machine rather than to show individual bravery. As within the navy, there was a further factor that fostered their opposition to the Nizam-I credit, that of this military force superseding them, resulting in the janissaries losing the various privileges that they had gained since their formation in the fourteenth century and which now made them a virtual law unto themselves. It was a rebellion led by the janissaries, but supported by other anti-reforming elements, including those within the navy, that forced Selim III to abdicate.

Any survey of the evolution of rural settlement in the period covered by this book is restricted by the paucity of datable evidence. Closely dated archaeological excavations from the period are limited, as are extant documentary sources before 1300, particularly for Scotland. As a result, indirect means of research are necessary if any coherent picture of rural settlement is to be built. The aim has to be to deduce patterns from field survey data, marrying these where possible with documentary sources to create a model of changing patterns of settlement. Furthermore, the terminology of settlement differs from one side of the Border to the other, as do standard models of settlement and settlement change, making comparisons difficult. The deserted rural settlement sites which often form the starting-point (and much of the archaeological evidence) for discussions of medieval settlement patterns differ in date and character. In Scotland the nineteenth-century clearance township is the norm, while in England it is the deserted medieval village, even though many villages were not deserted until the post-medieval period, especially in northern England. When settlement patterns have been mapped, deserted medieval villages stop at the Scottish Border, while infield-outfield systems of agriculture are treated as apparently something peculiarly Scottish. The national models tend to be simplistic (not all villages were deserted and not all townships were cleared), and most field survey evidence for northern England and southern Scotland is predominantly post-medieval rather than medieval.

Furthermore, settlement patterns have been studied, if at all, from opposite sides of the Border, and the understanding of medieval settlement in Scotland has lagged behind that in England. To complicate matters further, recent rural settlement syntheses in England have posited settlement provinces that divide along the Pennine ridge, raising questions about settlement in Scotland that no one in Scotland is asking. Both northern England, particularly Northumberland, Cumberland and Westmorland, and the Border zone of Scotland, especially in the south west, were peripheral areas, far distant or at least distant from the heartlands of the two kingdoms. Yet the very Border itself, only finally fixed during the thirteenth century, split ancient political territories, the early medieval kingdoms of Northumbria and Strathclyde/Cumbria, between the kingdoms of Scotland and England, thus dividing the cultural region within which the roots of the medieval settlement pattern had evolved.

The three British possessions in the Mediterranean – Gibraltar, Malta, Corfu – had all been acquired by the British navy, and the first two were retained primarily for the navy's use. All three were also human communities which were only partly dependent on the British navy for their livelihood. They were composed of people of varied origins, and these were in large part not British in persons or religion or language.

Gibraltar by the end of the Napoleonic wars had been a British possession for over a century. It had suffered several sieges by Spanish (and French) troops, during which most of the people of Spanish origin had been driven out as unreliable, or potentially so. In at least two of the sieges the civilian town had been largely battered into ruin, and then rebuilt. The place was essentially a fort, with the town crouching behind solid fortifications which had stood up to the Spanish bombardments much more successfully than anything in the town. Its people were dependent on imported supplies from Spain, if the border was open and the Spanish government permitted commercial traffic to pass, or from North Africa; in wartime supplies had to come from Britain as well. There was not enough space on the Rock to develop a local indigenous food supply other than some vegetable patches.

Malta was an archipelago of islands – three were inhabited – which contain monuments which predated the development of civilisation anywhere in the world. The population was at least in part descended from the makers of these monuments, a people therefore which had inhabited the islands for at least seven thousand years. They spoke a language of North African origin, much affected by Arabic, which was transliterated into Latin characters in a very awkward way, and they were Roman Catholic in religion. They had, for nearly three centuries, been ruled by the violent crusading order of the Knights of St John of the Hospital, which had developed from a group aiming to assist pilgrims in the Holy Land into an aristocratic coterie of celibate warriors. The Maltese had been unenthusiastic subjects, liable to heavy taxation, conscripted to public works and the galleys, and all too often kidnapped by the enemies of those Knights.