At thebeginning of Sanya Osha's On a Sad Weather-BeatenCouch, Ade Bantan lies on a sofa ‘in hisgirlfriend's room fanning himself and trying to seize on ameasure of coolness. He had nowhere to go.’ More than twohundred pages later, at the end of the novel, he finallyvacates the couch that he had inhabited throughout most ofthe narrative and walks out on his girlfriend, Enitan.Interestingly, he is roused out of his inertia by jealousy,among other considerations. When he hears Enitan angrily sayor misspeak that she ‘didn't mind if she had to sleep withevery cop and attorney needed to achieve her aim’ (to punishPapa Osaze, who had duped her), Ade ‘understood why Enitanconfused memories of her other lovers with theirs’. In histhinking, ‘every one of her memories of romance wasinterchangeable to her and it did [not] matter as long asshe had a man.’ In leaving Enitan, Ade also flees ‘from asinking neighborhood riddled with vigilante gates, orphanedstreet urchins, and cacophonies that didn't make sense andperhaps weren't ever meant to’. Between these two states ofbeing or consciousness – Ade on the couch and Ade in flight– is a character study that focuses on athirty-seven-year-old artist who is apparently withoutprospects, even though everyone had once believed that hewas ‘destined for impressive things’. But the novel is notsimply about Ade's current ‘creative cul-de-sac’. Oshamanages – by the introduction of related as well asrelatable incidents and spatializing tale-tellers – toexpand a portrait of an individual crisis into a noirishpainting of a neighbourhood's existential dilemma that isalso a figuration of a national (or African) dystopia.

The choice ofAde and Enitan as central characters is pivotal to thestructural dynamics of On a Sad Weather-BeatenCouch. Ade is inclined toward creativity andtranscendental essences. He is rather disdainful of themindless materialism all around him, which in his perceptionhas transformed people into corpses: ‘Corpses everywhere.Zombies. Corpses as fathers of the nation. Corpses disguisedin robes of laughter and gaiety.’ Enitan is initiallypresented as an opportunist who envisions a relationshipwith Ade as her passport out of the urban jungle and thedaily grind that she is trapped in. But their relationshipgrows in irony as the narrative progresses.

In his book Rue des maléfices, Jacques Yonnet considered how one could not get to know the city of Paris without first becoming familiar with ‘sus fantasmas, impregnarse de sus grises, confundirse con la sombra indecisa, ser el hermano silencioso y distante del mendigo, del borracho incluso’ (its ghosts, sinking oneself in its grey colourings, becoming one with its indefinite shadows, being the silent and distant brother of the beggar, even of the drunkard) (Yonnet 1954: 14–15). Yonnet was a journalist and illustrator who regarded visiting the Parisian underworld almost as an occupation in itself. His work invites us to immerse ourselves in the darkest corners of reality during the years of the Nazi occupation of Paris, to go exploring in the depths and shadows of contemporary society, to look squarely at the fear and panic that arose from this society itself.

From the 1990s onwards, work on the history of urban societies has emphasized the multiple and contradictory nature of the processes of modernization before the Second World War. Massive movements of migration with the concomitant processes of industrialization and urbanization, the modernization and expansion of systems of transport and communication, the appearance of new forms of social living and social organization of space all combined to bring about improvements in the life of the individual and ways of collective living. They also brought about adaptations, even full-blown metamorphoses, in the fears, problems and objects of hatred of the past. The process of modernization gave birth to its own dark side, produced by its multifaceted, changeable and unstable nature, able to provoke reactions of both fascination and repugnance. All of these phenomena became more acute from the end of the nineteenth century, and spread to the majority of large cities in the West, above all in the interwar period (Lees and Lees 2007; Whitehand and Carr 2001).

The city of our times, a laboratory for the elaboration of modernity, has become the locus for the contradictions, tensions and resistance to the processes of change in lifestyles and social behaviour, in the exercise of new systems of values and the codification of new forms of social representation.

The continual success of the ghāzī sea warriors was in sharp contrast to the very limited success of the Ottoman navy during the same period. For this there are a number of underlying reasons, of which comparative seagoing experience and levels of motivation are prime. While the ghāzī sea warriors were frequently at sea in their endless war against Christianity, Ottoman warships spent years in harbour and only fully mustered a ship's crew when immediate necessity arose. Even then, time at sea was restricted, usually a few summer months in which an untested crew had little time to learn the skills of sailing and fighting such ships. As for motivation, the ghāzī sea warriors, through the influence of religion and the lure of prize money, were characterised by passion and enthusiasm. Again, this contrasted sharply with those who served in the Ottoman navy. Here prize money was rarely awarded, and religion certainly could not be used as a motivating factor, as those most skilled in sailing the warships of the Ottoman navy were likely to be Christian rather than Muslim.

That combination of prize money and religious fanaticism as a factor for incentivising those who manned warships during the age of fighting sail was one rarely found in other navies, other than that of the crusading orders of the Knights of St John and the Knights of St Stephen. In making such a statement it is important to recognise that a typical ghāzī crew would not be equally motivated by these factors, for not all would be born-Muslims, with varying proportions composed of born-Muslims indoctrinated with the tenets of Islam and Christian apostates likely to be less committed to Islam. While the former were frequently committed to the jihad or ‘Holy War’, the latter may well have had no such commitment. Perversely, and for very different reasons, both would still have been heavily motivated by religion, one group in a positive way and the other negatively.

Studies of parishes within the territories of the former Northumbrian kingdom that were divided by the Anglo-Scottish borderline as it crystallised in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries have been approached traditionally from either English or Scottish perspectives rather than by viewing those lands as a unit. Geographically and topographically, the region from the Humber to the Forth can be treated as a block, united by the spine of the Pennine and Cheviot Hills that merge into the massif of the Scottish Southern Uplands. Edged by low-lying coastal fringes and penetrated by long and often deeply cut river valleys, this zone had historically long-established settlement patterns where population was concentrated most densely on the coastal plains and in the lower reaches of the valleys and more thinly – in both permanently and seasonally occupied sites – through the upland areas. In the early centuries AD, during long periods of relatively benign environmental conditions, many parts of the uplands supported more substantial settled populations, which were exploiting for pasture the grasslands covering much of this region and were cultivating the scattered patches of better soils. But deteriorating climate, epidemic and political disturbance in the fifth and sixth centuries led to the emptying of much of the upland zone of all but a thin scattering of settlements and a shift towards its short-range, seasonal exploitation by communities in its lowland fringes.

Towards the end of the ninth and through the tenth centuries this situation began to change as ameliorating climate conditions encouraged the permanent recolonisation of upland. That recolonisation process intensified as an upswing in the northern European economy in the eleventh century stimulated trade and encouraged population growth. Throughout the former Northumbria, between the 1090s and the middle of the thirteenth century, record evidence reveals a landscape busy with woodland clearance, expanding agriculture, new settlement and an overall rise in population levels, and the attendant growth of structures and systems of exploitation and control which these new settlements entailed. Amongst those structures and systems were the institutions of organised religion, principally the dioceses and their administrative subdivisions of archdeaconries and rural deaneries and, at local level, the parish.

‘Liebestreu’ Op. 3 no. 1 (comp. Jan. 1853, publ. Dec. 1853)

‘Juchhe!’ Op. 6 no. 4 (comp. April 1852, publ. Dec. 1853)

ROBERT REINICK'S gift for transparent, fresh, jingling lyrics endeared him to song composers throughout his century, and he remains a significant figure in German children's literature. ‘Juchhe!’ dates from April 1852, just short of Brahms's nineteenth birthday (and only two months after Reinick's death), and the tremendously successful ‘Liebestreu’ (Brahms's first published song) from the following January. It seems that Reinick continued to interest him during the following year, since he copied four more poems into his notebook. Various editions of Reinick's poetry were in print at the time, but textual variants indicate Brahms used the 1844 edition of Lieder. However, his copy has no name in it and contains no markings.

It is striking that Brahms set so little of Reinick's poetry given his importance to Schumann, who set numerous Reinick texts and attempted to collaborate with him on the libretto of his opera Genoveva. Robert and Marie Reinick were close to the Schumanns and godparents to their eldest surviving son, Ludwig (b. 1848). Although Brahms wrote his songs before meeting the Schumanns, they may well have brought Marie Reinick's attention to the young composer's settings, since she sent Brahms a copy of the second, 1852 edition of the Lieder on 7 March 1855 as a gift. Brahms in turn gave it to Clara Schumann in August of that year.

Reinick delighted in devices like internal rhymes, repetition and ellipses to create internal cohesion and expressive intensity, as can be seen in ‘Liebestreu’.

‘La muerte de una leyenda’ was part of a lecture given in Paris on 18 April 1899 in which Emilia Pardo Bazán set out a series of concerns that she would later include in Dulce Dueño (1911). Her references to the oppression underlying Spanish gallantry, in company with the cult of women, the limits to their education and the consequent lack of paths open to them, converge in one of the most subversive passages of this novel: the scene of masochistic violence between a ruling-class woman and a prostitute. This chapter seeks to illustrate the place that Dulce Dueño holds in relation to the debate on prostitution in the context of the fin de siècle.

The eastern bay of the Mediterranean was, for much of the age of fighting sail, a secure ‘Ottoman lake’, through being surrounded by mainland coastal territory ruled in its entirety from Istanbul. In terms of being a protected lake, this was a description that applied with even greater force to the Black Sea where, for many years, the role of the Ottoman navy was simply to ensure that the various suzerain states conformed to the wishes of the Sublime Porte, and where piracy had also been more or less eradicated. It was Cossack raids emanating from ungoverned areas to the north and beginning some time during the mid-sixteenth century which began to undermine this situation, a point made by Guillaume Le Vasseur de Beuplan (1600–73), a French army engineer and cartographer who, in 1639 travelled the Dnieper by boat. In his Description d'Ukranie, de Beuplan provides clear evidence of Cossack activity and the uncertainty caused by their raiding activities among those whose lives were intertwined in some way with the Black Sea and its littoral. According to de Beuplan, the Cossacks used shallow-draughted rowing boats that rose just a little over a metre above the water and were usually equipped with a small cannon. These boats, often manned by as many as seventy and assembled in tightly grouped fleets of up to 300, were highly manoeuvrable, having rudders both at the bow and stern. When such a fleet of Cossack boats attacked large merchant galleys at sea, de Beuplan wrote:

(As the audience enters the hall, soft nostalgic music is playing. On the backdrop there is an atmospheric sunset glow. In the middle of a garden there is a raised platform on which a table and chairs are set. To the right is a raised veranda and the front door of an old house, and to the left the way to the offstage gate. Lights go out and in the dark a cigarette is lit stage left. After a while a woman's voice is heard singing a lullaby.

The light on stage is switched on and a woman (the wife) wearing a short skirt that shows her shapely legs crosses the stage from left to right. With a double take she notices a man (the husband) lying on a reclining chair wearing sunglasses and smoking a cigarette.)

Wife What's wrong?

Husband (Without turning.) What's wrong?

Wife Why were you sitting in the dark?

Husband There is nothing new to be seen in this compound. I know every plant and its location like the back of my hand. So what do I need the light for?

Wife Shall I turn it off then?

Husband But now you are here! (He places the cigarette on the ashtray.)

Wife Do you mean to say that you don't know me? (She places the fruit she was carrying and a newspaper on the platform.)

Husband (Moving close to her.) If the first man does not know the first woman … (He embraces her from behind.)

Wife Adam knew his wife Eve!

Husband She took of the fruit and gave unto her husband; and he did eat.

And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked.

(He kisses her on the neck and she laughs. After fooling around, she takes a grape and stretches her hand toward his mouth, but when he is about to eat, she eats it herself. When she does this once more, he grabs her hand and eats the grape.)

I have travelled frommy city, Cairo, to most of the world's countries before I eventravelled to any country in Africa; despite the fact that the landof Egypt is located in Africa. We are born in it, we live in it, andwe are buried in its ground; our material and cultural roots as wellas the sources of our river (the Nile) are enshrined in the heart ofits body.

But our faces and eyeshave always looked towards the North, towards the ones who havetortured and oppressed us in Europe and America, and our backs havealways turned to ourselves, in Africa and the South. Oppression iscertainly double when one turns her or his back to herself orhimself, when one is ashamed of her or his tanned or black skin andhides it with a white powder, in the same way a woman is ashamed ofbeing a woman when she feels that her face is a flaw. She hides itwith a cover. The slavery and colonial system have hurt women, thepoor and Africans, when it robbed us of our economic resources andthe treasures of our civilization, which extend in history, beforethe beginning of history. It robbed us of our material and culturaltreasures which are buried in the earth's belly, and which remain onits surface until today, such as the pyramids, obelisks, statues,and the creative monuments that the peoples of the world seek tosee. But the big colonial offence was that arrow that the white manhas aimed at the heart of the African man. Africa has become asource of shame and his black skin a sign of slavery.

My trips to Africa havecome relatively late, at the end of the seventies, when I served asa consultant with Africa's Economic Committee at the United Nations.My residence was in Addis Ababa, but my job required travel to allAfrican countries. Some trips were long, others were short. Theywere not sufficient to allow me to go inside the heart of the vastand ancient continent, even though they were enough to open my heartand discover myself and that I am African.

Traditionally, the relationship between saints and sagas is formulated in terms of origins: in the words of Turville-Petre, the Icelanders would not have written sagas if they had not first been ‘trained in hagiographic narrative’. The translation of Latin saints’ lives predates the earliest sagas about Icelanders, so the saint's life has been considered in some sense a starting point for the saga: Boyer, for example, speaks of the ‘emancipation’ of the saga; he describes sagas as saints’ lives without a saint in them. These views are, perhaps, not wholly surprising given the distinctiveness of the saga: here we have a genre uniquely Icelandic, in contrast to the international and ubiquitous saint. Yet the relationship between saints’ lives and sagas deserves attention beyond the ‘origins’ of Icelandic literature: the Icelanders translated, copied, composed and revised a range of hagiographic literature well up until, and in some cases past, the Reformation. Saints’ lives survive in more manuscripts than all the vernacular genres combined: they were of keen interest to the same audiences that appreciated the sagas of Icelanders. In this book, I argue that there is a creative interplay between saints’ lives and sagas throughout the saga-writing period, and that this had a significant impact on how saga narrative developed.

I start from the premise that saints’ Lives are sophisticated literary texts, with much to offer the saga authors. They combine heroic narrative with a strong ideological challenge to secular heroism and material values. The world of the saint's life is one in which the invisible and spiritual takes on material form: it seeks to transcend historical particularity and reaches towards the interrelatedness of all times and places. Saints offer a model of virtue in the daily struggle against sin and temptation, and throw into relief the eschatological trajectory of all human life. Most importantly, perhaps, the saints were not just literary characters to the medieval Icelanders, but a powerful and active presence in their lives.

In this book, I wish to explore some of the ways in which sagas engage creatively with the lives of saints.

An investigation of lord–tenant relationships in medieval societies implies examining how, fundamentally, estate owners were sustained by their estates. The social relations surrounding lords who lived from tributes of produce were different from those in a regime of predominantly cash rents and other dues, or in one of agricultural production on demesne farms. In northern England and lowland Scotland we have a clearly defined starting-point for our investigations, thanks in large measure to Geoffrey Barrow and Glanville Jones. Their explorations of the topographical and social structures of the units of lordship referred to as ‘shires’ or ‘multiple estates’ give us a demonstrable common foundation for forms of lordship across what became the Anglo-Scottish Border. Characteristically such estates contained a grouped hierarchy of separate settlements, of which one was the estate centre and others were dependencies with varying obligations to render labour or produce, or both, to the lord and his retinue. Geographically they often covered a more or less compact tract of territory, including both lowland and upland terrain. A fertile, lowland location formed a core area containing the institutional focal points of local society: the estate centre and (in many cases) an early religious site nearby. Shires also provided a framework to patterns of economic exploitation, with belts of particular resources (especially pasture or woodland) to which communities across the estate might share access. Such estates show considerable diversity of size, composition and administrative purpose. As units of lordship they had a twofold aspect, as economic structures for the maintenance of a lord and his entourage, and as units for the administration of law, custom and seigneurial power. By the twelfth century they survived most evidently where they operated as units of local government, as small shires, thanages or sokes. Some had become seigneurial liberties, outside the regular course of royal administration, such as the bishop of Durham's liberties of Bedlingtonshire, Islandshire and Norhamshire.

Not only are shires or multiple estates equally in evidence in northern England and lowland Scotland in the historical record, but their history has become closely associated with that of ancient forms of tribute from dependants that also occur on both sides of the Border.

It was the inability of the Ottoman navy to provide security of passage for the reinforcement and supply of troops during the ultimately successful Ottoman campaign to capture the island of Crete that finally led to a reinvigoration of the imperial navy and its adoption of sail over oar. Known as the fifth Ottoman-Venetian War, or sometimes the Cretan War, the conflict broke out in 1645, with the popular version of its cause relating to a squadron of six galleys belonging to the Knights of St John capturing and towing in to the Cretan port of Chania an Ottoman galleon bound for Mecca. Among those on board the captured vessel, so it was said, were a number of women bound for the seraglio and possibly also a child of the Sultan. In having put into Crete, the Knights gave to Bernardo Morosini, the Venetian-appointed Governor of the island, gifts taken from the galleon, including some fine Arabian horses. In the words of Kâtip Çelebi (1609–57), ‘the ruler of Crete did not take the rights of the Sultan into consideration’, and when these events were relayed back to Istanbul, the matter was discussed by the Divan-ı Humayun, the executive council of the Empire, with Çelebi recording the outcome:

Given that the Ottomans were able to assemble in less than six months an invasion fleet in excess of 400 galleys, together with transports and 50,000 troops, it seems highly likely that plans were already in place to undertake the island's conquest. In this respect, the claimed outrage to the Sultan's dignity was little more than subterfuge.

The war over Crete was to last a total of twenty-four years (1645–69); for although Chania fell within two months, Rethymnon the following year, and much of the rest of the island quickly taken, Heraklion was to hold out for twenty years.

Introduction

Christian missionaries and desert saints extend the generic range of the sagas of Icelanders, allowing them to embrace new values and produce different types of hero. In this final chapter, I wish to come full circle and return to royal saints in the sagas: King Óláfr Tryggvason, the would-be saint of Chapter 2, and King Óláfr Haraldsson, patron saint of Norway. The importance of these two kings is clear from the central position of their lives in Snorri Sturluson's Heimskringla as well as in the various separate sagas about them, including the large compilations of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries (p. 18). Their relationship to the Icelanders has a political edge: Óláfr Tryggvason was traditionally responsible for the conversion of some prominent Icelandic chieftains, and resistance to his policy of forced conversion provided a way of asserting Iceland's autonomy vis à vis Norway. In the case of Flateyjarbók, Rowe has argued that the relationship between king and Icelander is viewed as one of ‘cultural paternity’: Norway is reasserted as the spiritual fatherland to promote the ‘benevolent coexistence of Olaf's paternalism and the Icelanders’ self-will’. Either way, what is striking is how the figures of Óláfr Tryggvason and St Óláfr come to mediate between saints’ lives and sagas of Icelanders: uniquely, they are able to cross between these two genres, and thus these two literary worlds. The ‘interference’ of the two Óláfrs in the lives of Icelanders is most obvious in the cases of Hallfreðr vandræðaskáld and Þormóðr Kolbrúnarskáld: Hallfreðr and Þormóðr were the court-poets, respectively, of Óláfr Tryggvason and St Óláfr, and their poetry is quoted in the kings’ sagas in tribute to the lives and deaths of these two kings. The sagas of Hallfreðr and Þormóðr might thus be thought of as companion pieces to the lives of the kings they served, allowing a different narrative angle on the same body of events. This is no doubt why later compilers cut up Hallfreðar saga and Fóstbroeðra saga and inserted them in roughly chronological order into Snorri's lives of Óláfr Tryggvason and St Óláfr, creating a multi-generic approach to the problem of heroism and sanctity.