‘Nosce te ipsum’

Medieval and early modern concepts of what it meant to be human invoke the need for self-awareness, to ‘humillarse y reconocerse’, according to the definition of ‘humano’ given by Sebastián de Covarrubias Horozco in his Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española (2006: 1078). Summed up by the popular Latin tag ‘Nosce te ipsum’, or ‘know thyself’, the concept of self-knowledge has its origins in Greek philosophy and involves the idea that the search for truth had to originate from an understanding of oneself. In medieval Christian and ascetic traditions the point of this quest for self-knowledge was unity with God. For example, Hugh of St. Victor writes in the Didascalicon de studio legendi that ‘ascendere ad deum hoc est intrare ad semetipsum et non solum ad se intrare sed ineffabili quodam modo in intimis etiam se ipsum transire’; and the pseudo-Bernardian Meditationes Piissimae de cognitione conditionis humanae advises ‘Stude cognoscere te; quam multo melior et laudabilior es si te cognoscis quam si te neglecto cosnesceres cursum siderum’. Self-knowledge also appears in the prologue to Hernán Núñez de Toledo's 1499 commentary on Juan de Mena's Laberinto de fortuna. Here it is glossed by Núñez, who cites Lactantius Firmianus's statement that ‘“Pravitatis causa est ignoratio sui” (la causa de todo peccado y error es la ignorancia de sý mismo)’ (2016: 177), thereby positioning self-knowledge as a sort of coping mechanism or strategy for overcoming spiritual and earthly difficulties (fortune, age, illness, slander or subjugation to any other force).

In the Renaissance this idea continued to hold sway with Neo-Platonists such as Marsilio Ficino, who believed that knowledge, like love, unified the subject and the world and, to quote Ernst Cassirer, strove ‘to overcome the separation in the elements of being and return to the point of their original unity’ (1963: 134), i.e. to bring mankind back to God – a sentiment that underlines the integrity, harmony, and sense of proportion thought to exist between humanity and the created order. Bernard Murchland describes the image of self-hood in works such as Ficino's Theologia Platonica as ‘a contemplative ideal with clear moral implications dominated by the spiritual experience of an inner ascent that leads the soul through several degrees of knowledge and of love to the immediate vision of God’ (1966: xvii-xviii).

IF the prime purpose of every monastic order was prayer – with the additional component of preaching in the case of the friars – there had to be an economic infrastructure to support this. Even St Francis could not pray and preach on an empty stomach with no shelter for the night; this latter aspect was even more important in late medieval England than on a warm night in thirteenth-century Umbria.

If we were studying a Benedictine monastic house we would naturally seek records of the monastic officers who administered the kitchen, the church or the guest wing. These obedientiaries’ accounts are particularly well preserved at Benedictine houses that were also cathedrals, such as Norwich or Durham, or in monasteries that converted to a cathedral after the Dissolution, such as Peterborough or Westminster. Unfortunately no such records survive from English friaries; indeed, it is uncertain to what extent friaries even had such officers. However, the rather scattered sources certainly do make mention of friars with administrative roles, even if the structure was not quite as formally organised as at a large Benedictine institution. At Grey Friars, for example, there were friars who served as a physician (Eric de Vedica, specified as an ‘obediencer’ of the priory), a gardener (Walter Roben) and a butler (Geoffrey Turner), as well as an almoner and an infirmarer.

Reconstructing the finances of Austin Friars

Given the lack of any surviving obedientiaries’ rolls for English friaries – if indeed this sort of record was kept – one must make do with the sources that do survive. The starting point chosen here is the chance survival of a summary account showing money paid by the English province of the Austin Friars to the order's headquarters in Rome. The document of 1522 records money paid by the prior of the London Austin Friars, Edmund Bellond, to an Italian agent, Raphael Maruffus, for transfer to the papal Curia at Rome. The financial transfer seems to have been the result of a special fundraising exercise by Bellond, who had obtained a papal indulgence in order to raise money for a building project (probably not at the London house).

La Carpa de la Reina was essentially a large circus marquee (‘carpa’) set up by Violeta Parra in La Reina, a city region in the east of Santiago close to the foothills of the Andes. La Carpa was intended by Violeta to be a venue for the performance of Chilean music and dance and for the exhibition of artwork. Opened on 17 December 1965, it was also to be a cultural centre in which she could bring to fruition her plan for a National University of Folklore. This was the artistic and didactic endeavour to which Violeta devoted her enormous energy and belief in the last years of her life. La Carpa is, however, mostly remembered now as an ambitious yet fatally conceived project, the site of Violeta's decline on a seemingly inexorable path towards her suicide on 5 February 1967. La Carpa de la Reina has become a type of myth, as her son Ángel Parra has said. He is right: La Carpa seems made from citations that turn into air, from stories, anecdotes, memories, testimonies. There is nothing remaining of it: very few images and some recordings, including one with different artists, La Carpa de la Reina. Violeta Parra y otros intérpretes (1966), and her final record, Las últimas composiciones de Violeta Parra (1966), which includes the work she wrote during her last years. In this chapter, I start to reconstruct the space of La Carpa and recuperate it as a place for the realisation of the goals of Violeta's life's work, a space for creativity and apprenticeship, for teaching and learning, and for bringing dignity, recognition and renewal to the folk music, dance and art of Chile. La Carpa de la Reina was the culmination of her development as an artist; that it failed is also the tragedy of her life's final labour.

THE seven London friaries were much more than churches: at the very least the friars required food and accommodation to sustain their duties of prayer and preaching. As the numbers of friars increased (along with the ambitions of priors), they came to need other buildings: libraries and schools for study, cloisters for traditional monastic contemplation, service wings to supply the kitchen, and gardens for horticulture and leisure. And both friars and lay people required accommodation after death in cemeteries. The size and layout of these priories thus developed over time, as needs changed and as the sponsorship of Londoners and others permitted.

The early friaries in the thirteenth century

The needs of the thirteenth-century friars of London were relatively simple: a plot on which to build a church and an accommodation wing, with space for a small cemetery. The location and basic shape of the early friary precincts were to a large extent a matter of chance – the result of accepting the foundation bequest of a patron, usually in the form of a parcel of land not a purse of money. The Dominicans, Carmelites and Pied friars were given their friary plots outside the old Roman wall that defined London; the Franciscans, Austin, Sack and Crossed friars were given intramural urban plots for their priories (Figure 69). This urban/suburban distinction explains the varying size of the early friaries: the Black, White and Pied friars were given fields or closes (over 3 acres in the case of the White friars) whereas the others had smaller urban messuages (a tenth of an acre for the Sack friars: Figure 69). The varying origins of the friaries also created differences in the priors’ ability to enlarge and adapt their friaries. So, during the two decades after they established their London house, the Crossed friars only managed to add one neighbouring messuage to their precinct (Figure 53; Table 11) but in the same period the Black friars acquired six additional suburban plots or closes (Figure 4; Table 3).

Although the documentary and archaeological evidence is generally lacking in detail for this early period in the friars’ history, the Grey Friars Register and the account of the early Franciscan Thomas of Eccleston suggest that the early guardians concentrated on building a small chapel followed by a single accommodation wing.

AT the heart of each friary was the church, whose east end framed the two spiritual nodes, the high altar and the choir stalls. The friary churches were not, however, static: priors and lay sponsors added to the buildings over the three centuries of mendicant life in the capital. The most important distinction is between the friars’ early churches of the thirteenth century and those they began to build in the following century; this distinction must surely correspond to a change in emphasis about the role and function of the friars and their priories.

Thirteenth-century churches

We lack precise evidence for the dimensions, layout and architectural detail of the seven thirteenth-century churches but, in nearly every case, there is some indication of size and shape – whether from archaeological excavation, documentary measurements or from cartographic information on adjacent streets and buildings. The early priors of the thirteenth century must have had in mind a model for the friary church: in nearly every case they built a relatively small, single-aisled chapel of three to six bays (Figure 64). These churches were never more than about a hundred feet long, often less, and in the case of Sack Friars, half that length. They would have had plain timber roofs, three to six windows on the long sides (presumably simple lancets or pairs of lights in an Early English style), a door at the west end and a grander window (perhaps three lancets?) at the east end. The eastern bay may have been vaulted above the high altar to mark its higher status, like the surviving mid-thirteenth-century Franciscan church in Cortona (Italy). Unfortunately, no architectural fragments of these early London churches have so far been identified in archaeological excavations, although the surviving window arch of the late thirteenthcentury chapter house undercroft at the (second) Black Friars gives an indication of the plain architectural taste of the early mendicants (Figure 65). Documentary evidence gives us occasional glimpses of the early chapels of the London friaries; for example, Edward I spent over 10 marks on Purbeck marble to finish off the Carmelites’ church in 1273, for use in the high altar.

FROM SEPTEMBER 1814 to June 1815, Vienna played host to Napoleon's conquerors - the King of Prussia, Tsar of Russia, Emperor of Austria, and ministers of the English and (restored) French Bourbon monarchs, accompanied by retinues of aristocrats, military commanders, and assorted dignitaries - all intent upon redrawing the European map and determining the continent's future. The Congress of Vienna, as this lavish spectacle was known, was effectively the first international summit of the major European powers. By day, royalty and diplomats crisscrossed Vienna's cobbled streets in tailored finery and handsome fiacres and convened at the Hofburg and nearby palatial residences, where the main players negotiated, bargained, and haggled as they began reconfiguring Napoleon's shattered empire. By night, the Habsburg capital thrummed with the ‘sparkling chaos’ of masked balls, sumptuous banquets, concerts and intrigue. In addition to foreign nobles, invited delegates, and self-appointed representatives, Vienna opened its gates to perhaps as many as one hundred thousand visitors. The composer whose name was on many of their lips, including those of royalty, was Beethoven.

Festivities celebrated at the congress included Beethoven's refashioned opera Leonore, now titled Fidelio, performed already that September 1814 before several heads of state, and another concert of his music presented on 29 November before a large, enthusiastic audience that included the King of Prussia, Empress of Austria, and Tsarina of Russia. This event, which featured Beethoven's Seventh Symphony, the patriotic, crowd-pleasing Wellingtons Sieg (‘Wellington's Victory’), and a new cantata, Der glorreiche Augenblick (‘The Glorious Moment’), with its triumphant orchestral opening and reassuring, massed chorus acclamation ‘Europa steht’ (‘Europe stands’), was repeated twice during the following month. Then, in January of the new year, Beethoven appeared before an illustrious audience to perform his song ‘Adelaide’. The concert, in honor of the tsarina, whose birthday was being fêted, proved to be among Beethoven's final public appearances as a pianist.

The composer was now at the height of his international fame. Indeed, in February 1815, London was treated to a performance of Wellington's Victory under Sir George Smart that was repeated three days later. Yet while Beethoven's reputa tion had spread well beyond the Habsburg realms, his private world was steadily shrinking on account of his deafness.

THE Friars of the Penitence of Jesus Christ, popularly known as the Sack Friars, were a mendicant movement formed in Provence in the 1240s, inspired by the teaching of Franciscans. Their official name hints at their connection to penitential groups of lay people such as Beguines, while their unofficial name in the vernacular must refer to the sack-like cloth they wore, and reveals the emphasis the friars placed on humility and poverty. In 1251 they received official approval from the pope and adopted a Dominican version of the monastic Rule of St Augustine. The movement spread rapidly and won high-ranking backers including Louis IX of France and Henry III of England. By the third quarter of the thirteenth century they were the third largest order of friars, behind the Dominicans and Franciscans, of course, but often more numerous in members and more popular with lay people than the Carmelites and Augustine friars. The Sack friars planned their move into England in 1256 and they arrived the following year.

They set up their first English house in London, initially based in the parish of St Lawrence Jewry. They soon moved to a larger site just outside the city walls to the north, probably before 1259, funded by a donation of 100 marks (£66 13s 4d) from Henry III. This first priory was in the parish of St Botolph Aldersgate, although its precise location is not known. In the 1260s the friars received continuing support from the king in the form of grants of food and fuel and, in 1266 and 1268, of timber for building projects and repairs. They received a donation of land in St Botolph from a lay benefactor with which to enlarge their priory and they owned at least one property in another parish. However, by the end of the decade the friars had chosen to move to another site within the walls, perhaps because the Aldersgate friary was too close to the Grey Friars, or because they wanted a more central and prestigious location. The Sack friars received a royal licence to sell their Aldersgate friary in February 1270, presumably having acquired (and begun work on?) a new site in Colechurch Street, later known as Old Jewry (Figure 58).

The Poetic Edda and Its Transformations

AROUND THE YEAR 1270, an unknown Icelandic scribe copied an anthology of poems into a manuscript now known as the Codex Regius, or Konungsbok (the royal manuscript); this collection is usually called the Poetic Edda. Some leaves of the manuscript are missing now, but over two dozen poems are preserved in what is left of it. Of these, eleven are mythological, placed together in the first half of the manuscript. The remaining poems are based on heroic legends about the Volsungs – a dynasty including Sigmundr the Volsung, descended from the god Óðinn, and his son Sigurðr the celebrated dragon-slayer, who is betrothed to the valkyrie Brynhildr, but marries Guðrún, the sister of the Burgundian heroes Gunnarr and Hǫgni.

It is not known how, or from where, these poems were sourced by the anthologist, so we know nothing of their age, authorship or provenance, which might have been very various in each respect. But it is clear that the anthologist – or his immediate source – carefully ordered the individual poems in ‘chronological’ narrative order to produce a legendary history of the Volsungs in which key episodes such as the killing of the dragon by Sigurðr, or his murder at Brynhildr's perverse and vengeful instigation, are each represented by a vividly dramatic poem either largely or wholly made up of the speech of the protagonists, interspersed with some explanatory prose links.

Many of these episodes were evidently popular and had long been widely known throughout northern Europe in the Middle Ages. There are plenty of Viking Age stone carvings of Sigurðr killing the dragon, for instance, a good number of them in northern England. Another unknown medieval Icelandic author took the legendary material of the Codex Regius – before some of the poems were lost – and turned it into saga narrative: Vǫlsunga saga (The Story of the Volsungs). This prose account necessarily loses some of the drama and immediacy of the original poems, but offers in its place continuity, consistency and some (arguably unconvincing) explanation of character and motive (many readers have judged the saga to be a disimprovement of the material).

The Paradox of the Prostitute

This study has so far considered aspects of the human condition through members of the dominant social group – Calisto, Melibea, and Pleberio, who are educated, noble, wealthy individuals. But the question of man's misery and dignity did not only concern the elites in society, as Noël Salomon has shown in his study of ‘el villano digno’ in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century dramatic works, which include heterogeneous and individualised depictions of those on the margins (1985: 623–761, 674–705). This is clearly also exemplified by Celestina, whose representation of life from multiple viewpoints, including nobles and merchants, servants, go-betweens, sorceresses and prostitutes, recognises various experiences of the human condition. Indeed, the peripheries of society were of considerable interest to early modern societies. Artwork from this period reveals a fascination with the old, infirm, and physically imperfect in addition to the courtly and elegant. Leonardo da Vinci's drawings, Study of Five Grotesque Heads (1494) or Caricature of the Head of an Old Man (c. 1507) acknowledge the breadth of the human condition as well as providing a humorous caricature, as do Lucas Cranach's Courtesan and the Old Man and The Old Fool (both ca. 1530) and Quintin Massys's Grotesque Old Woman (1513).

In the sixteenth century, marginal groups are also brought centre stage as protagonists in literature. Though not demonstrative of its entire print tradition, an example of this can be seen in the title pages of some editions of the Tragicomedia, which feature the eponymous old bawd in a more prominent position (figure 5). With the emergence of the picaresque, we find more attention being paid to non-noble characters – something that Giancarlo Maiorino, in his introduction to The Picaresque: Tradition and Displacement, attributes to the cultures of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, which ‘could not but take notice of the need to reach out toward the lower levels of society’ (1996: xiii). Maiorino adds that the picaresque ‘popularized artforms more responsive to the pulse of life and the broader spectrum of a human nature’ (1996: xiii). Servants, prostitutes, gypsies, and peasants all feature as primary protagonists in Pietro Aretino's Ragionamenti (1534), Francisco Delicado's La Lozana andaluza (1534), Lazarillo de Tormes (1554) and El Crotalón by Cristóbal de Villalón (c. 1556), as well as Celestina's continuations.

Although Prince George had a tumultuous relationship with his father George iii, they shared a love of the medieval. While George iii used the Black Prince and Edward iii as part of his programme to reinvent the monarchy in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Prince George simultaneously sought to reclaim this heroic time by offering his own images of the Black Prince to express his power as prince of Wales, and, later, as Regent. Scholars have pointed to George iv's coronation as the realisation of his medievalist inclinations. It was a grand medieval-themed affair involving an elaborate coronation ceremony at Westminster Abbey followed by a lengthy procession where guests in full regalia with ‘feudal’ costumes and knights of chivalric orders arrived at Westminster Hall with its newly installed ‘Gothic’ features. During the later banquet there, the King's Champion, fully armed and on horseback, entered with his herald to throw down the gauntlet as a challenge to those who might oppose the king. After his coronation, the king was even rumoured to have had the artist Thomas Lawrence make a sketch of him ‘in the armour of the Black Prince’ though the writer John Timbs wryly wrote the artist ‘had the good sense not to carry the matter further than a sketch’.

Yet the coronation was only part of a long process whereby George IV reclaimed the heroic Middle Ages. This chapter will turn to George's earlier focus on the fourteenth century and the Black Prince's image to expose competing royal uses of the period from the 1780s. At the same time, it will explore how playwrights, politicians and writers responded to these reinventions, using Edward's image to offer their own commentaries on royal relationships and power.

In 1776 Alexander Bicknell employed Edward's image to model ideal princely behaviour to the future George IV in his History of Edward, prince of Wales. Bicknell, a loyal subject, used Edward's image both to legitimise the current rule of the Hanoverian monarchs by tying them to their predecessors and to instruct them on appropriate conduct for future success.

Violeta Parra is a name that evokes strong sentiments about nation, culture and the meaning of authenticity. As quickly as an image of her is constructed, a counter-image comes to the fore. Parra has become a supple icon: a communist, a social democrat, an artist, an emotional female, a strong female, a religious singer, a possible atheist, a mother, a depressive, the embodiment of a national culture. At the inauguration of the Violeta Parra Museum in October 2015, President Bachelet stated, ‘Violeta Parra está viva y sigue cuestionando nuestras certezas, remeciendo las ideas fijas sobre nuestra identidad y llamándonos a repensar Chile’ (Violeta Parra is alive and she continues to question our certainties, shaking those set ideas about our identity and forcing us to rethink Chile). While paying homage to Parra's unquestionable creative and intellectual capacity, the museum symbolises an act on the part of the state to capture her image within the national memory.

Why a book on Uruguayan cinema? As most of us know, Uruguay is not necessarily well known for film production. Whereas Uruguayan literature has been widely acclaimed and recognised for several decades thanks to writers such as Mario Benedetti, Eduardo Galeano, Juan Carlos Onetti, Juana de Ibarborou and Idea Vilariño, it was not until the beginning of this century that Uruguayan films started to gain more attention. This seems to be very clear to the many people that throughout the years have asked me: ‘is there any cinema in Uruguay?’, ‘I didn't know films were made in Uruguay’, ‘I';ve heard of one… I think it was called Whisky, am I right? Or is it from Argentina?’ ‘Do you have enough material for a book?’ And ‘how many films were made in Uruguay?’ I would not blame anyone for these honest reactions. On the contrary, this kind of question triggered many others in me: what concept of cinema did they have in mind? Were they only thinking about film shot on celluloid? Or would they also consider films recorded on video? How should I respond to the question on quantity? Should I count only fiction features? Or would short documentaries be seen as samples of cinema as well? In fact, in trying to find these answers, I realised that this book would contribute not only to an exploration of Uruguayan cinema – a cinema which has been under-researched – but also to discussions on what is usually understood by the concept of ‘cinema’ and how this has changed and continues to change not only as time passes and new technologies are adopted, but also as different historical, political and economic contexts are taken into account.

The present work emphasises the importance of broadening the definition of cinema, when exploring cinemas without an established film industry. Amateur, institutional, documentary and animated film made in diverse film gauge and video formats should be placed on an equal footing to avoid discarding most of the production. Moreover, both the text and the materiality of these films are key elements to be analysed. In line with current approaches to film history, this work considers that it is important to explore those practices which, as Charles R. Acland and Haidee Wasson put it, are ‘beyond questions of art and entertainment’ and have not been exclusively made on 35mm film stock.