Had events in 1066 turned out differently, Edgar the Aetheling would have been King Edgar II of the English. He was a grandson of King Edmund II Ironside and was briefly proclaimed King of the English between the death of King Harald II Godwinesson at the battle of Hastings and the arrival of Duke William the Bastard of Normandy in London, but William simply brushed him aside. Oddly for such a ruthless man, William did not kill his competitor, and Edgar – only a teenager at the time – faded into an existence as an occasional rebel leader, a minor landowner in Hertfordshire and an habitué of royal courts. In the reign of William II Rufus, he was a friend of Robert of Normandy, the Conqueror's eldest son, who was twice excluded from the throne by his younger brothers. Edgar was employed on several tasks of a diplomatic or military nature, including an expedition into Scotland to sort out the Scottish succession (his sister was Queen Margaret, the wife of Malcolm Canmore), in all of which he performed quite competently; any political ambitions he might have entertained in England had clearly expired. One of the tasks he took on was to command a fleet of ships manned by Englishmen which took part in the First Crusade.

Edgar joined the fleet at Constantinople. Its men were probably part of the Byzantine imperial guard of the Emperor Alexios I, which by this date was largely manned by English exiles – the emperor was anxious to ensure that the lands he had been promised by the crusaders were actually delivered, and the only way to make this happen was to have a force on the spot. Edgar's participation illustrates his ambivalent situation, for the exiles were men who had left England because of the Norman conquest and its brutal rule, while Edgar himself was a good friend of one of the Crusade's leaders, Robert of Normandy; the fleet was also carrying Italian pilgrims, many of them from the south of Italy, where Normans ruled (and where Edgar had led a Norman expedition several years before). It also, more usefully from the point of view of the crusaders, carried a consignment of siege materials supplied by the Emperor Alexios in Constantinople.

As is well known, the bandit is an established stereotype in nineteenth-century Spanish popular culture, ranging across broadsheets (pliegos de cordel), aleluyas and the serialized novel (folletín). This chapter will focus on a later moment, from 1926 to 1932, when the bandit was taken up as a cultural motif in Spain not only by the mass-cultural medium of film but also by high culture. In this instance, the self-reflexive treatment of the stereotype leads to its destabilization through the emphasis on the crossing of class boundaries; that is, on ‘passing’ in class terms. The bandit's ability to ‘pass’ is seen strikingly in the first two texts discussed: José Buchs's silent film Una extraña aventura de Luis Candelas (1926) and the avant-garde writer Antonio Espina's novelized biography Luis Candelas, el bandido de Madrid (1929). The protagonist of both texts – the early nineteenth-century Madrid urban bandit Luis Candelas – was famed for his ability to pass as a bourgeois gentleman. We may note that this contradicts Eric Hobsbawm's much-criticized notion of bandits as ‘primitive rebels’; as we shall see, Espina's biography associates Candelas specifically with modernity. The third text discussed – the folkloric drama by the brothers Antonio and Manuel Machado, La duquesa de Benamejí (1932) – depicts a crossing of class boundaries in the opposite direction, with its Andalusian duchess protagonist who falls for, and throws her lot in with, a bandit, in a case of ‘slumming it’ that involves cross-dressing in gender as well as class terms. In all of these texts there is a self-reflexive emphasis on identity as masquerade, as ‘dressing up’ (or ‘dressing down’). Self-reflexivity and masquerade are features that characterize not only the 1920s avant-garde, with its play on the notion that identity is a ‘costume’ that can be put on and taken off, but also popular culture, with its love of mimicry and mistaken identities. The class passing depicted in these texts is not unrelated to the ability of the bandit figure to move between popular and high culture in this period.

All three works are set under or in the aftermath of the despotic rule of Fernando VII, which enables the bandit to be seen as an emblem of freedom: Luis Candelas's dates are 1806–37; those of José María el Tempranillo, ‘el rey de Sierra Morena’ (the King of Sierra Morena), on whom the Machados’ play is loosely based, are 1805–33.

In his Livres dou Tresor, Brunetto Latini recites the canonical list of strong or wise men famously deceived by women. There is ‘David le prophete, ki por la beauté Bersabee fist meurtre et avoutire’ [David the prophet, who was driven by Bathsheba's beauty to commit murder and adultery], ‘Salemons, ses fils’ [Solomon, his son] who was induced by his wives to worship false idols, and Samson, who, due to a woman's betrayal, ‘perdi puis la force et la vertu et la vie’ [lost his strength, his virtue, and his life]. Within this survey of classical and Biblical victims of love, we find a familiar name:

The list derives from classical rhetoric and Patristic writing, and was circulated throughout the Middle Ages in the form of exempla demonstrating the destructive power of sexual love. As the collection absorbed characters from popular stories and legends, Aristotle, Virgil, and Merlin were added to the repertoire. The story of Merlin's demise at the hands of the Dame du Lac is even more controversial than the story of his birth, but all French and Italian versions agree on a number of details: Merlin falls in love with the Dame du Lac, who is not a fairy or supernatural being, but a precociously clever lady. She promises Merlin her love in exchange for lessons in magic, and then uses that magic to confine Merlin to a cave, a tomb, or – in the Vulgate Cycle – a magic castle, causing him to withdraw from the main action of the narrative. After this, Merlin either becomes completely absent, or continues to prophesy from inside his tomb, but only to the chosen few who are able to find him.

By the early twentieth century, the Scottish diaspora in Australia was marked by a social, political, and cultural diversity that mainstream Australian ideas about Scottish identity, culture, and character did not fully encompass. The way in which some of the new arrivals were received in Australia places the boundaries of the Scottish diaspora into sharp focus. While many nineteenth-century Scottish migrants to Australia drew upon an imperial tradition to make sense of their iden¬tities and to construct a diasporic culture, by the eve of the Second World War the Empire had become less important to Scotland. Migrants from Scotland brought with them increasingly divergent ideas about what it meant to be Scottish, and what was meant by ‘Scotland’.

The foundations of Scotland's identity and culture before 1914 were imperial and focused on militarism, economic expansionism, the missionary ethic, and the role of Scots abroad, and the middle class largely constructed this identity – and exported it overseas. The impact of the war and its aftermath tested these foun¬dations in several ways. The Reform Act of 1918 almost doubled the voting popu¬lation of Scotland and enfranchised working-class men and women over the ages of 31. The Labour Party slowly supplanted the Liberal Party, politics progressively became dominated by class interests, and attention shifted to domestic conditions in Scotland. Interwar Scotland experienced traumatic social, economic, cultural, and political dislocation that caused the Scottish imperial identity to deterio¬rate into a state of crisis. For many in Scottish society, the Empire had become almost irrelevant. Those committed to imperial visions of Scottish national identity struggled to adapt these notions to the new circumstances of postwar Scotland; although, Empire-building Scots would limp through the Second World War and their favourite image of imperial Scotland – the Highland regiment – would linger well into the twenty-first century.

Replacing popular imperialism was a new vision of politics. From the middle of the nineteenth century, working-class campaigns for Scottish self-government and sympathy for the ideals of international socialism developed in parallel, and the subordinate role of Scotland as an internal British colony was a common theme in leftwing discourses. In the aftermath of the First World War, British patriotism in Scotland was in decline, and in the period from 1919 to the mid-1930s the nation's political sphere was coloured by a complicated mix of nationalism and socialism, throughout which the latter seemed to have dominated political life.

The previous chapter has argued that Merlin's prophetic words challenge the logic of the narrative, and, more specifically, that the very challenges they pose encapsulate the same semiotic difficulties of translation between incompatible systems of expression. The incomprehensibility of Merlin's prophecies, which is manifested in fragmented symbols or a fragmented delivery, characterises the translatio between supernatural and human thought. Such knowledge cannot be transmitted in full; just as a translator of an ambiguous word often has to prioritise one meaning and omit another, the totality of Merlin's knowledge can only be conveyed partially, ‘through a glass, darkly’. This chapter will continue the discussion of prophecy from the perspective of translation, but it will turn instead to the mouvance of Merlin's political prophecies between versions of the Venetian Prophecies de Merlin written in Franco-Italian, French, and Italian dialects. In his Italian incarnation, Merlin still speaks in obscures paroles, but his words have a different function; rather than pointing forward to a later episode in the narrative, they instead refer back to recent events from Italian history, and forward to the Apocalypse. This extension of prophetic discourse beyond the confines of the narrative has further implications for translation; that is, not simply the translation between the different dialects, but between literal and figurative levels of expression. As this chapter will demonstrate, the use of prophetic symbolism has the dual effect of obscuring the political message of the prophecy, yet at the same time relying on the general knowledge of a certain type of reader to point explicitly to the people, places, or events that are signified. The semiotic challenge of translation is, here, simultaneously linguistic, temporal, and spatial. Because these people, places, and events are never articulated literally in the text, their identification depends on the context of reception – a context that changes as the text is transmitted to different places and periods. Yet, as I aim to demonstrate, the time- and location-specific reception does not become redundant as it moves away from the text's original context of thirteenth-century Venice. Because the Prophecies de Merlin is an ‘open text’, defined by Umberto Eco as a text that demands reader participation in the creation of its meaning, the unarticulated referents become open to resignification.

On 25 April 1914 an enormous crowd went out on to the streets of Toledo, marching towards the gates of the Spanish government delegation to voice their strong protest. Local businesses had also closed to convey their discontent, in order to support the demonstration. The protesters unanimously sought one thing: the pardon of Aniceto Camuñas. The accused was well known to the authorities; he had previously been jailed for burglary, and at his last appearance in court had been condemned to death for the cold-blooded murder of his wife, who, to make matters worse, had been pregnant. The sentence had been ratified by the Supreme Court only a week before the demonstration for clemency. Execution by garrotte was to take place in the prison of Toledo, where the prisoner was detained while awaiting the final declaration of sentence (see Anon. 1914a; Anon. 1914b; Anon. 1914c).

The image the public were able to get of the accused from the local press was of an unscrupulous or disturbed habitual offender, and there was not thought to have been any fault of procedure, torture or political involvement in his treatment while the case had been investigated. Nothing of this nature was suggested during the trial, either by the defence or in the press, that would kindle the support of the political or social groups that were most critical of legal and political institutions at the time. Nor would it have been possible to arouse any sort of community support in Toledo regarding the misfortune or harsh treatment about to be faced by one of their own, someone with whom they might have common bonds or experiences, ties of family, friendship or social dealings. The accused came from Madridejos, a village of La Mancha more than 70 kilometres from Toledo, increasing the likelihood that he had never set foot in the city until his arrival at the prison there. However, as soon as the news about him broke in the local press, an enormous movement of public opinion clamouring for change broke out in Toledo, demanding his pardon regardless of his undeniable guilt in the matter (Anon. 1914d). On 30 April 1914, five days after the demonstration, the village was relieved to receive the confirmed decree of pardon for the accused.

Symbolism is toliterature what a good wine is to a good dinner. In thisregard therefore, writers have used concrete symbols toinvest things with a representative meaning or have usedartistic methods of revealing ideas or truth through the useof symbols. Visual and concrete terms can easily representabstract terms and thus give form to the formless. Nawal ElSaadawi is renowned for the use of deliberate powerfuldiction which often has underlying meanings. This enquiryexamines her language use, especially the recurrent use ofthe word ‘eye’ and its varied colours as an indicator to thecentral meaning and understanding of two of her novels,Two Women in One and God Diesby the Nile. Consequently, it is through thesymbolic presentation of the ‘eye’ that the reader sees theauthor's themes unravel themselves.

Literally, asymbol is said to be a thing that stands for somethingbeyond itself. This is to say that a symbol must always beconsidered beyond its outward presentation. Symbolism hasbeen defined in various ways. For example, Arthur Symons inThe Symbolist Movement in Literaturerefers to it as ‘visual or pictorial’. Robin Mayheadbelieves that, in writing, ‘[i]magery is something bodiedforth by the writer's imagination’ (UnderstandingLiterature: 135). This means that, throughimagination, contrasting symbols and images can beartistically brought to bear on our reality, thus giving ‘usa completely new and refreshing sense of the world in whichwe live’ (135).

In the samevein, Fowler sees symbols in literature as attributes of anobject ‘which serve the rational idea as a substitute forlogical presentation, but with the proper function ofanimating the mind by opening out for it a prospect into afield of kindred representations stretching beyond its ken’(Dictionary of Modern Critical Terms:188).

Additionally,William Butler Yeats in The Symbolism ofPoetry (1900) maintains that a ‘continuousindefinable symbolism’ is ‘the substance of all style’, andthat ‘the excellence of symbol consists in thesuggestiveness that derives from the suppression of ametaphor's directly apprehensible terms of reference: “as asword blade may flicker with the light of burning towers”,so the symbol evokes unseen worlds’ (quoted in Fowler:188).

I think we normally underestimate the value of preservation. Organizing the transcription and translating of Mother Uganda and Her Children made me realize just how much of an issue this is for Ugandan theatre. Firstly, I was thrilled when Jane Plastow contacted me about the translation. I had heard so much about Professor Rose Mbowa while I was studying theatre at Makerere University, and participating in preserving one of her works has been an absolute pleasure. When I watched the broken bits of the recording of the play – a poor quality and partial VHS tape transferred onto DVD – I was even more excited. I thought to myself; this is going to be easy, and fun. Although I was right about the latter, I was very wrong about the former.

The play centres around folk songs and dances from ten languages and sub-regions from across the country including West Nile, Acholi, Buganda, Busoga, Samia, Bugisu, Ankole, Kigezi, Karamoja and Bunyoro. However, although this was a large number, I was confident I could find people who spoke those languages easily. Uganda is a place that prepares you for such diversity, being such a daily canvas of multiple ethnic groups.

The first step I made was to contact a friend of mine who teaches at the Performing Arts and Film Department at Makerere University, Ms Lillian Mbabazi. She put me in touch with people from the Dance and Music sections who spoke most of the languages from the regions mentioned above. I contacted them and this was a very good start. I wanted to contact musicians because I believed they would understand the folk music best, many having investigated local music cultures. It was also a consideration that the poor quality of the recording meant it was likely that experts would most easily recognize and be able to translate the songs.

Apart from a few of these academics who were incredibly helpful, the rest were very busy and we had very few weeks to get the work done. I moved from one contact to another, meeting dead ends everywhere. Sometimes a person would take the work home and after a few days call back to say they couldn't hear a single discernible word.

The monuments of south Wales fall generally within the mainstream insular traditions of monumental design and production (themselves influenced by those of France) which developed in England from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries. However, the fundamental characteristics of southern Welsh society outlined in the previous chapter had a shaping effect on the monumental culture of the region, giving it a distinctive flavour compared to that found in other parts of the British Isles. This chapter will take both a wide and a long view of this culture, beginning with a survey of the historiography and documentary evidence available to the historian. It then moves on to focus on changing levels of interest in monumental commemoration across the chronological span of the period, which are compared to the patterns familiar from English studies and considered in the light of demographic change. The physical distribution of the surviving material evidence across the region is then examined, and its relationship to settlement patterns and the dispersal of ethnic groups is assessed. The focus is then narrowed to consider institutional location.

THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF WELSH MONUMENTS

The medieval monuments of Wales, in contrast to those of England, have been largely neglected until relatively recently. Even though this is so, it is important to acknowledge that a good beginning on their systematic study was in fact made in the nineteenth century. In 1869 a plea was made in Archaeologia Cambrensis, the journal of the Cambrian Archaeological Association, for the greater study of the monumental remains of Wales, and of Glamorgan in particular. The author claimed that ‘there are a great many monuments, incised slabs, coffin-lids, etc. to be found in the parochial churches of this county…. All these remains ought to be engraved and published, and a most interesting volume would be the result.’ Encouraging as this attitude would appear to be from the modern researcher's point of view, this was a time when the study of Welsh memorial sculpture, in common with that of England, was rooted in the antiquarian tradition, and consequently the majority of the nineteenth-century articles on monuments published in Archaeologia Cambrensis concern themselves with descriptive details of heraldry, genealogy, armour and dress and are lacking in what we would consider to be scholarly analysis.

NoVioletBulawayo's debut novel is a deeply and freshly cut storythat excites and startles at the same time. It iscontemporary in temper and like many other African novels iscommitted to drawing attention to the myriad troublesbesetting Africa in contemporary times. It is in two parts:the first part explores Darling's and her friends’ lives ofpoverty and hardship in Paradise (Africa) due to colonialinvasion. The destruction of their former system affectsevery family such that the children become guava hunters ina forbidden area (Budapest, white settlement). Hungeremboldens them and they regularly trespass into the whitearea in search of food (guava). The harsh experiences ofbeing forced to cater for themselves at a tender age andabject poverty push the children to always dream of escapingto other countries. Somebody like Darling does not have theprotection and love of either of her parents. Her Fatherabandons them: ‘Now Father is in South Africa, working, buthe never writes, never sends us money never nothing. Itmakes me angry thinking about him so most of the time I justpretend he doesn't exist; it's better this way’ (22-3). Hermother on the other hand is so busy with trading and herselfthat Darling is left to the care of her not-lovinggrandmother. Darling's only true family is her circle offriends. This explains her always feeling out of place,inadequate and sad whenever circumstances force her to beaway from them. An instance of her frustration is seen whenher sick Father returns from South Africa, and she is forcedto not only stay away from them, but to lie to them in orderto prevent the fact that her Father has HIV from spreadingin the vicinity. ‘It's not the lying itself that makes mefeel bad but the fact that I'm here lying to my friends. Idon't like not playing with them because they are the mostimportant thing to me and when I'm not with them I feel likeI'm not even me’ (94).

In the secondpart of the novel which is set in America, the text exploresthe different world views that will appear strange inDarling's country and culture but are very acceptable inAmerica.

It was threedays to my departure to Cambridge for a much-anticipatedprofessional development opportunity, but offices, shops andairports were closed. The usually bustling network of roadsthat run like the veins of a leaf through the city of Lagos,Nigeria's commercial capital, were desolate. And every tickof the clock increased my apprehension over a careeradvancement opportunity that was swinging on the pendulum ofuncertainty. And so, early on that first Monday of July2003, I called Patricia, the officer in charge of thearrangements at the British Council, my sponsor. She was asoft-spoken, dimpled, and amiable lady who walked sorhythmically one would think she was waltzing to some ghostmusic in her head.

‘Hey, Nduka’,she responded on the other end, as if she had been rousedfrom a reverie. ‘I've been trying to get hold of the travelagents on the phone without luck. I hate to believe that theproprietress has switched off her phone on a day like this.Other workers of the travel agency I tried are alsounavailable.’

‘So what do wedo?’ I asked.

‘I'm not aboutgiving up, Nduka’, Patricia assured me. ‘I'll keep tryinguntil I get through. But then, even if I succeed, how wouldyou handle transportation from the mainland where you liveand pick up the ticket on the Island? I hear the roads arebarricaded and, besides, I understand the airport isdead.’

‘Just leavethat to me. Let's get the travel documents first. Youhaven't forgotten that as a journalist I am permitted tocover the strike?’

Patricia's loudchuckle on the phone forced a smile out of me – a relievingact at a time when laughing seemed like a luxurious exerciseunless, of course, you were a Nigerian, curiously describedby a UK-based research group, as ‘the happiest people onearth’. Indeed, Lagos could force one into believing thatclaim. Despite prevalent privations, the streets of Lagoswere a theatre of tragicomedies and melodramas. In thatinstant, a scene I had witnessed flitted through my mindlike a dreadful dream.

Robert de Boron, Merlin en prose

The Merlin tells the story of Merlin's conception by a devil and his birth, and explains the origins of his supernatural powers: he receives the ability to know all the events of the present and the past from his devil father, and the gift of prophecy from God. His mother, having been raped by a devil, is in prison for having sex outside marriage (even though she is unaware of the identity of her baby's father); the newborn Merlin, who possesses the miraculous ability to talk, defends her in court and secures her acquittal by proving that the judge who is trying her is in fact the son of a priest and, therefore, also illegitimate. Merlin then travels with his mother's confessor, Blaise, to the court of King Vortigern, who is trying to build a tower, that will not stand. Merlin explains that the tower will not stand because of two dragons sleeping beneath it. When the dragons are awoken and begin to fight, Merlin tells Vortigern that the defeat of the red dragon by the white dragon symbolises Vortigern's own defeat by the sons of the King Constance, whose throne he usurped. As predicted, Constance's sons, Uther and Pendragon, return from exile to defeat Vortigern. Merlin becomes advisor to the new king, Pendragon, but spends much of his time in the forests of Northumberland, dictating prophecies to Blaise. Merlin predicts Pendragon's death in battle against the Saxons, and Uther subsequently inherits the crown. Afterwards, Merlin creates Stonehenge by magically transporting stones from Ireland, and instructs Uther to build the Round Table. When Uther falls in love with Ygerne, the wife of one his barons, Merlin uses magic to transform Arthur's appearance to that of Ygerne's husband, so that Uther may sleep with her. The child they conceive is Arthur, who is taken away by Merlin to be raised by another noble family. When Uther dies without an heir, a sword driven into an anvil is discovered outside the cathedral, and the bishop tells the court that it has been sent by God to select the next king. When his step-brother Kay requires a replacement sword during a tournament, Arthur takes the sword from the anvil, and this part of the text ends with his coronation.