THE MOST RECENT literary exploration of the dream of philosophia perennis, Gabi Gleichmann's novel The Elixir of Immortality, culminates in a firm conviction: life without end in “this world” would be worth aspiring to and attainable not in the form of an unlimited extension of the normal life span (which Gleichmann, unlike all other authors discussed in this book, does not even try to imagine). Only in the form of living sustained by the memory of generations past and the confidence of living on in the memory of generations to come would immortality be thinkable, possible, and desirable. Passed on from generation to generation, such memory would amount to nothing less than the very idea of culture, protected against the onslaught of transitoriness and oblivion and forever stimulating us to re-think the examined life.

This culture is Janus-faced. As we look back to the generations before us, the past becomes present; what we make of ourselves takes shape in the light of our thoughtful—and critical—remembrance of what we were. But it is not only the look back that helps us understand who we are. Our eyes are also opened to the human condition as we look ahead to what we might be and what not a few of us hope to be in our uncharted future. Such eye-opening is attempted in the excursions of what Borges called “reasoned imagination” into the counterfactual world of immortality: speculative and creative expeditions into an alternative realm beyond the finiteness that is the sine qua non of our lives. Such expeditions are indebted to “the classic philosophical method of counterfactual thought experiments,” as the American philosopher Thomas Nagel formulated it: “To understand the significance of something, imagine its absence and see what else changes.”

One of the more recent of such imaginative explorations of the surreal world of immortality on earth was undertaken in 2005 by the Portuguese Nobel Prize winner José Saramago in his novel As Intermitências da Morte (Death at Intervals, 2008; see above, pp. 152–57). What could have persuaded the author best known for his political and social criticism of the realities of the contemporary scene to turn to the counterfactual theme of life without end? It was his hope to reduce the risk of no longer “know[ing] … what it means to be human” (as the epigraph has it).

IN the Introduction to this book I stated its purpose: to reconstruct the urban landscape of the seven medieval friaries of London, and to understand something of the experience of the friars and visitors who used them. Using the available evidence (800 or so documents, nearly one hundred archaeological excavations and a handful of maps: Table 2), the authors have attempted to describe and analyse these medieval friaries. Focusing for a moment on the numbers, one can note that by the sixteenth century the friars’ precinct walls enclosed 20 acres of valuable urban land, about 5% of the whole walled city of London (8.1ha out of 143ha; 20 out of 353 acres), and the suburban White Friars accounted for another 5 acres (2.1ha). This simple numerical expression of the friars’ footprint in the city shows just how important the friars were to the Londoners and other patrons who had paid for the friaries. The 160 or so friars living in the five friaries in the fifteenth century constituted less than 0.5% of the population of the city; put another way, this elite group of religious men had about twenty times as much space as the average Londoner.

Turning to the methodology of studying these friaries (and other urban monastic houses), the present study continues the interdisciplinary academic tradition of monastic studies pioneered by late nineteenth-century archaeologist-historians such as William St John Hope. If historians studying British monastic sites lack the art-historical material available to colleagues working in, say, northern Italy (think of Assisi with its surviving medieval basilica complete with Giotto's late thirteenth-century fresco cycle), we have to make the most of the evidence we have. The strand of evidence that has perhaps been undervalued, but which lies behind most of the maps and plans in this book, is the use of historic maps and map regression (Introduction, ‘The approach of this book’; Figure 2). By working backwards in time from modern maps to sixteenth-century maps, the size and some of the internal patterns of the monastic precincts can be understood.

INTO THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY, women continued to be marginalized in family and cultural memory about National Socialism. As historian Margit Reiter observed in a series of interviews with the second postwar generation, the majority still construe the Third Reich as the past of their fathers and grandfathers; “die Mütter werden hingegen marginalisiert oder sie bleiben sogar gänzlich ausgeklammert” (mothers, by contrast, are marginalized or they are completely disregarded). The family stories that do feature women tend to focus on their fortitude and suffering during the war rather than on their political agency or complicity. At first glance, contemporary novels that revisit the Nazi past from a female perspective unfold along similar lines. They frequently foreground the hardships endured by women during the Second World War and the occupation era. For example, novels including Larissa Boehning's Lichte Stoffe (Light Materials, 2007), Kathrin Gerlof's Alle Zeit (All the Time, 2009), and Annette Pehnt's Chronik der Nähe (Chronicle of Closeness, 2012) depict women's struggles to bring their family through the war and the chaos of its aftermath. Others turn in more detail to women's experience of flight, expulsion, and wartime rape, notably Günter Grass's Im Krebsgang (Crabwalk, 2002), Reinhard Jirgl's Die Unvollendeten (The Incomplete, 2003), and Tanja Dückers's Himmelskörper.

The ubiquity of fictional and nonfiction reassessments of the past in 2003 alone caused journalist Ulrich Raulff to christen it the year “in dem 1945 zurückkehrte…. Ein Jahr, das man zu kennen glaubte, und das auf einmal in neuem Licht dasteht” (in which 1945 returned…. A year that we thought we knew and that has suddenly appeared in a new light). The sheer number of writers to reassess the Nazi past at such a historically insignificant moment, without an obvious public prompt, betokens the inadequacy of official memory narratives (molded around anniversaries) that decree what is to be remembered, when, and how. Raulff suspects that rhetorical rituals of Vergangenheitsbewältigung sidestep the issues that touch the emotional core of individual and communicative memory. If the recent eruption of memory narratives can be considered a “return of the repressed,” then, we are talking about repressed emotions as well as forgotten topics. The idea of a “historical uncanny” has been more explicitly invoked by literary scholars in the past decade.

The Food Riots of 1801

On 6 April 1801, in the midst of the most serious subsistence crisis of the Napoleonic war years, four or five hundred Kingswood colliers struck work in an attempt to persuade city magistrates to reduce the price of provisions in Bristol market. Two days earlier, disturbances had broken out in the streets of the city over the price of meat, butter and potatoes; indeed the whole south-west region had been gripped by marketplace rioting, chiefly over bread supplies, for a number of weeks, leaving civil and military authorities severely stretched. It was not the first time the colliers had taken collective action over the price of food. Similar tactics had been used in 1709, 1740, 1753 and, to a lesser extent, in 1795, but the 1801 dispute marked a watershed in relations between the Bristol crowd and the corporation over the principle of marketplace intervention. Quite simply, magistrates were no longer disposed to cooperate.

However, the colliers’ confidence was initially strengthened by knowledge that a customary mix of mobbing and formal parleying had earned crowds in Bridgwater, Taunton and several other regional centres, substantial market reductions. A list of these ‘agreed’ Somerset prices were accordingly drawn up by the colliers into a petition to the mayor of Bristol, and pressure put upon farmers in the region to add their signatures to it. ‘Our whole intention is peace’, insisted the colliers, but ‘through hard living, many of us are not able to perform the labour we wish to do’. But the mayor had no intention either of receiving the petition or adopting Somerset prices.

The so-called Bridgwater agreement had been brokered after crowds forced dealers to accept price reductions at Wellington and Taunton at the end of March, then walked from Stogursey to Nether Stowey, Goatchurch, North Petherton, Bridgwater and Otterhampton, in search of a magistrate to sign a petition of endorsement for lower prices. Although magistrates consistently refused to do so, they had been unable to disperse the crowd by persuasion or military force, without promising assistance. A day later they called together the farmers, gentlemen and principal inhabitants of the district and contrived a public agreement to relieve the markets with plentiful supplies of cheaper food the following week.

The analyses in the preceding chapters reveal that emotional representation is not only culturally contingent and socially determined, but moreover reflects generic dispositions that one must assume audiences would have recognised and to which they would have responded. Admittedly generic distinctions are to some extent modern categorisations and serve a modern desire for demarcations of the medieval past. Such fixed modern notions may contain and stabilise the shifting concept of the Middle Ages, rather than illuminate medieval perceptions of literary traditions. Nevertheless, the configurations and manipulations of the diverse emotive scripts evident in the literary material discussed in the previous chapters suggest that audiences are likely to have been able to decode the varying representations of emotion accurately. They would therefore have been able to situate them within a political, cultural and, significantly, generic context, thereby providing those codes with signifying potential.

By curtailing and adapting the emotive scripts to suit the socio-cultural or literary conventions of their receiving audiences the translated romances shifted the fundamental tenet of the emotive subtext of their sources. The indigenous romances then reformulated the emotive framework of the courtly romance to encompass the particular cultural concerns of fourteenth-century Icelandic audiences as well as the later reading communities. The emotive literary identity of the courtly romance was refashioned to encompass alternative emotive scripts, aimed, for instance, at hagiographical compassion in Mírmanns saga or featuring burlesque gender politics, as can be seen in Viktors saga ok Blávus. Some of the native Icelandic romances from the fourteenth century, including Sigur ðar saga þogla, in fact show more affinities with the fornaldarsögur (the legendary sagas) than with the romance as a generic form.

The sub-genre of the maiden-king romances, which focuses on female sovereignty and agency, moreover indicates the flexibility of the genre to encompass and contend with social issues, particularly those related to gendered behavioural norms and the presumed threat posed to social stability by any deviations from those norms. The romance as a genre thus provided a platform in late-medieval Iceland for hybridisation, where motifs, themes and styles could be combined, unravelled and re-signified.

Castilian romances of chivalry, the libros de caballerías, were the dominant form of fiction when the Spanish Empire ruled so much of the world. During the sixteenth century, this genre multiplied with uncanny speed and at least eighty-seven different romances were written in the span of this century. More than two hundred Castilian editions of the libros de caballerías were published in this epoch; many of them were translated into Dutch, English, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, and Portuguese, thus multiplying its cultural influence. The pages of the libros de caballerías conquered the audience and readership of Castile, the Iberian Peninsula, Western Europe, and, despite their prohibition, they crossed the Atlantic into the New World. Whilst in Castile the popularity of the genre significantly decreased after the sixteenth century, outside the Peninsula several imitations and translations of romances of chivalry were written in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Many adventures of these romances were adapted into other genres and media, such as ballads, plays, and operas. Therefore, the genre had a crucial part in the development of early modern fiction and it played a central role in the formation of modern Western fiction. Nevertheless, Hispanists and other literary scholars alike have often overlooked Castilian chivalric romance.

During the early modern period, it was not only Don Quijote's dreams that were full of Amadises, Esplandianes, and Belianises. The emperor, the nobleman, the soldier, the cleric, the merchant, and the peasant dreamt of defeating Endriagos, basilisks, and dragons alike. Equally, women were well acquainted with the damsels in distress and the damsels in shiny armour within the genre; some of them, such as Beatriz Bernal, themselves became writers of libros de caballerías, and some romances paid particular attention to their female audience. From a material perspective, the genre's widespread circulation and cultural impact was in part a result of the introduction of the movable-type printing press to Castile late in the fifteenth century. Most often, the transmission of Castilian romances of chivalry occurred in the new format, the imprint, and not in the old format, the manuscript book or codex. However, the new medium is not the only factor that explains the importance of the genre in the sixteenth century.

Language, ‘Civilitas’, and Selfhood

In his discussion of elegant style and persuasive rhetoric in the Dialogo de la lengua (1535), Juan de Valdés holds Celestina up as a didactic exemplar suitable for lessons on poetics and rhetoric to teach ‘good conversation’. According to Valdés, ‘ningún libro ay en castellano donde la lengua sté más natural, más propia y más elegante’ (1998: 255). This statement mirrors Rojas's own confession that what first attracted him to the found fragment was ‘su sotil artificio, su fuerte y claro metal, su modo y manera de labor, su estilo elegante, jamás en nuestra castellana lengua visto ni oído’ (Rojas 2000: 6). In the verses accompanying the Comedia he once again draws attention to the quality of his novel-in-dialogue:

Alonso Proaza, Celestina's first editor, reinforces this message in his own concluding stanzas, placing Rojas in a hierarchy alongside if not superior to authors of classical antiquity:

As Valdés's comment shows, Celestina's use and representation of language was clearly a factor in its success. It is no coincidence that Celestina's success in Spain and Italy coincided with a period when speech, oratory, rhetoric, and the art of ‘good conversation’ were at the forefront of intellectual concern.

In Italy the questione della lingua sought to establish linguistic norms and codify the use of the vernacular as well as establish which Italian dialect was most suitable for literary activity.3 Lucia Binotti argues that linguistic discussion in Spain remained much more circumscribed to academic circles (2007: 336).

IN the first decade of the thirteenth century a young man in his twenties called Giovanni, the son of a wealthy Italian silk merchant, Pietro di Bernardone, renounced military service, his friends, his family and even his inheritance. Under his family name of Francesco and with a toponymic surname recording the Umbrian town of his upbringing, Francis of Assisi began a career of simple popular preaching. Recognised by Pope Innocent III in 1210 and in 1215, and with a Rule approved by Honorius III in 1223, Francis’ informal group of poor itinerant preachers quickly grew into an international religious order. Francis termed his preachers fratres minores, lesser brothers, with the term ‘minor’ alluding to an exhortation to poverty and humility in the Rule: et sint minores – ‘let [the friars] be the lowest’. The first Franciscans – a party of nine – arrived in England in September 1224, during the lifetime of their founder. Four of them quickly made their way to London, staying initially with the newly established Dominicans and then at a house in Cornhill. The following year they moved to newly granted premises in the parish of St Nicholas Shambles, near Newgate in the west of the city. In England the friars quickly became known as Grey friars, a reference to the colour of their hooded woollen habits or cowls.

The numbers of London Franciscans quickly increased from that first group of the 1220s, reaching a peak of about ninety in the early fourteenth century. After this, numbers seem to have declined for the rest of the house's existence, with fewer than fifty residents by the late fourteenth century and thirty-five in 1460 (including the guardian and provincial prior). Twenty-seven friars remained in 1538 to sign the dissolution agreement. Of all the London mendicants, the Franciscans had the least secure finances and the greatest reliance on alms: they had a church and buildings second only to the Dominicans in terms of grandeur and extent, but they lacked their counterparts’ regular royal income and large rental portfolio. They would have struggled to meet the annual living costs of some £50, just for feeding the friars, let alone paying for servants, repairs and the house's contribution to the province and prior general in Rome.

1977: Lionel Fire Angel Dean Maggie Drake's Dream

‘It's not my show. It may be garbage. It may be an obituary,’ Lionel Bart told the press before the opening night of Lionel (New London Theatre, 16 May 1977; 40) This ‘musical created from the works of Lionel Bart, Composer N.E.1’ was an indignity that beggared belief, visited on the man who, seventeen years earlier, had been the saviour of the London, if not the British, musical. Society photographer Alan Warren, modestly describing himself in the theatre programme as a ‘multi-talented personality’, conceived and produced this disastrous tribute, hiring John Wells to write a script that had a very young Bart centrestage, flashing forward in time via a plotline that managed to grind its troubled subject's face deeper into the dirt. Inhabiting a sort of pastoral Stratford East, ‘Li’, played by adolescent Todd Carty, has dreams that take him off to wherever provided an excuse for one of Bart's old songs. Thus, Li's nightmare about war throws up ‘Who's This Geezer Hitler?’ from Blitz!, and so on through thirty numbers. Two practised performers of Bartiana, Avis Bunnage and Aubrey Woods (a Fagin take-over in the original Oliver!), had the style necessary for this stuff, but Lionel, mercilessly recalling Bart's recent years of failure, bankruptcy and professional isolation, must have been a difficult thing for its off-stage hero to stomach.

Bart had been banned from rehearsals, but did see the show, accompanied by his teddy-bear. The critics, for once, were united with him in not taking it seriously. Michael Billington lamented ‘a plot-line that is fatuous to the point of incomprehensibility’, while the Sunday Telegraph looked on as ‘dreams turn to nightmares, and nobody pays his bills’ in a show that ‘carries foolhardiness into the area of masochism’. It surely deserved B. A. Young's description of a ‘save-trouble musical’, cobbled together by choreographer Gillian Gregory, unable to disguise the fact that ‘Revisiting these songs now reveals them as ephemeral.

1990: Someone Like You King Bernadette

‘Blood and No Guts’ and ‘Dixieland Blues’ were two of the discouraging headlines after the first night of yet one more ‘musical love story’, Someone Like You (Strand Theatre, 22 March 1990; 44). It would have stood very little chance of reaching the stage without the involvement of Petula Clark as both star and writer. Clark was inspired to write it after visiting the Civil War battlefields around West Virginia; co-inspired, in fact, as she credited Ferdie Pacheco with sharing the original idea. Some of the music had already been composed by the time she teamed up with lyricist Dee Shipman, but by the time the show premiered in October 1989 at Cambridge Arts Theatre it had been through a pretty rough war of its own. Its ace card was Clark in the lead role of English nurse Abigail, searching for her missing husband and falling in love with ‘The Major’ (the show's other main asset, Dave Willetts). With a cast of twelve and one static (and, for him, quite dull) set by Tim Goodchild, and an eight-piece band, Someone Like You was taken up for London by producer Bill Kenwright. Novelist Fay Weldon was brought in on the book to create a female triumvirate of writers, altering the tone of the show by turning it into some sort of allegory of Greek tragedy. Once in rehearsal at Cambridge, director Robin Midgley rewrote it with (and without) Weldon. Midgley's apparently autocratic manner towards Clark and the company was an unsettling influence. As the show headed for London, the project was taken over by Harold Fielding, about to be brought down by his own financial problems.

Willetts thought that the show might have suffered from so strong a feminine basis. Argumentative rehearsals did not help. Along the way, it slipped away from the piece it had started out as, something supposedly life-enhancing about how the human spirit overcomes devastation. Someone Like You got stuck with being worthy and took a turn for the worse by being dreary, and nothing – its songs, its set, its stars – could pull it back. It was ‘ponderous entertainment’; it had ‘an execrable script and tuneless songs’.

Viennese quartet composers around 1800 looked to Haydn for inspiration; for dissemination they were also well served by local resources. We can speak of a veritable ‘quartet boom’ in printing and publishing in Vienna at this time. Several new and significant presses – firms like Artaria and Bureau des Arts et d'Industrie – rivalled the output of the Parisian houses in the quality and quantity of their output, and forged ahead with newer technologies for music publishing, like engraving and lithography. This thriving industry played a key role in the outstanding production of string quartets at this time. But the flourishing of the string quartet in Vienna, and chamber music in general, was driven as much by the market as by the technology – and by Haydn's impetus. New music printing technologies were developing at the right time and in the right place. They facilitated a quartet boom fuelled by the Viennese amateur musicians’ desire for small-scale, relatively simple music for flexible forces, at a time of socio-political disruption and high inflation. A self-reinforcing cycle operated in the emerging Viennese print culture, in which composers and publishers took advantage of market exigencies, while buyers reaped the benefits of cheaper music and wider distribution.

This chapter considers the marketing of chamber music in Vienna around 1800, with special attention to string quartets. Analysis of Viennese publishers’ catalogues from the era is central here. They provide information on the distribution of chamber music by composer and genre, and demonstrate cultivation of the string quartet, above all, in this period. But they also reveal vagueness in defining genres such as ‘string quartet’, and show that several other chamber genres, notably the string quintet, were also very popular. In examining this complex market, the printing and design practices used by publishers are taken into account, especially the use of decorative title pages for marketing canonical and more ephemeral works alike.

Publication patterns changed during the period. Trends towards generic decline and demise can be traced in the Viennese symphony, while the Viennese string quartet continued to flourish. The 1799 Viennese publishing catalogue of Johann Traeg and its 1804 supplement are invaluable aids for charting this change. However, apparent evidence of a genre's decline must be read carefully, taking into account the non-chamber works, especially operas but also symphonies, that were arranged as chamber music.

BY the 1270s the Dominicans had acquired, planned and partly built a sizeable and convenient friary on one of the main approach roads to the walled city of London (Chapter 1: The First Black Friars in Holborn). However, between about autumn 1273 and summer 1275 the friars decided to move their priory into London itself. When royal permission was granted in October 1273 to obtain timber for building materials, the focus of the friars’ plans was still very much the Holborn friary, but by June 1275 Robert Kilwardby, the Dominican archbishop of Canterbury, was beginning to acquire the properties for a new friary site on the west side of the walled city. The project was particularly complex and ambitious: the large site comprised numerous properties and straddled the old Roman city wall. A remarkable planning meeting must have taken place in about 1274 to make the decision to move – a decision which would entail relocating a 225-yard stretch of the city wall of London! Complex negotiations must have taken place over the coming months between the prior, archbishop, mayor and king. The Dominicans certainly had a fortuitous combination of key personnel: John of Darlington, the prior or outgoing prior of the house, had been confessor to Henry III and was an experienced royal minister; the archbishop, Robert Kilwardby, had been the Dominican provincial prior and had plenty of experience of building new priories; and the mayor, Henry le Waleys, was a long-term friend to the mendicants and another favourite of the king with experience of urban building projects. As will be seen, the acquisition and construction of the new friary, including the additional requirement to build 565 yards (515m) of new city wall, was to take place in a remarkably short time.

The refounded Dominican friary was the largest, wealthiest and most politically significant of the English friaries. It housed nearly a hundred friars at the turn of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and still had about sixty in the late fourteenth century after the effects of the Black Death. The friary contained the order's studium provinciale, which trained English and some foreign Black friars and sent them on for higher study at Oxford, Cambridge and Continental universities.