The parish church of St Botolph, Billingsgate was one of the City churches burnt down during the Great Fire. Unlike the three other London churches dedicated to St Botolph which were rebuilt by Sir Christopher Wren—St Botolph, Aldgate; St Botolph, Bishopsgate; and St Botolph, Aldersgate—the Billingsgate church was not one of those rebuilt by Wren. John Stow considered that ‘This parish of S. Buttolph is no great thing’ because it was a place where ‘diuers strangers are there harbored’. And yet, foreign visitors may have provided the stimulus for the dedication to St Botolph, since he was sometimes regarded as the patron saint of travellers. However, Stow, writing in 1598, suggested that the church was ‘a proper Church’ which had ‘many fayre monumentes therein, now defaced and cleane gone’. John Strype, writing of the year 1559, provides an explanation for this destruction:

During August of 1559, as a result of the Royal Visitation following on the Acts of Supremacy and Uniformity, many churches in London suffered the burning of images and roods. On 15 August, ‘the Roods in St Paul's were pulled down, and the High Altar, and other Things pertaining, spoiled’. On 24 August, ‘two great Fires made of Roods and Images of Mary and John, and other Saints’ were made in ‘Cheapside, against Ironmonger-lane, and St Thomas of Acres’ (St Thomas of Acon). Here the fires created ‘great wonder of the People’.

The church of St Botolph was home to another even more remarkable image, although it is not known if it survived up to 1559, only to be burned along with the images of Mary, John and presumably St Botolph himself.

INTRODUCTION

NEVER LESS THAN INDIVIDUAL in his creative position, Simon Holt always offers new bridges between personal language, musical forms and the sister arts. These relate to his originality as a musical thinker about visual art, poetry and the drama of performance. Through such connections, Holt has found new ways of conceptualising music. Since his music cannot be described simply as ‘conceptual’, my title uses an older word, formerly tied to materialist debates. But it is intended to evoke conceptual art.

Holt's music regularly questions the meanings we might ascribe to the ‘objects’ which he offers. He is very particular in not wishing to compose ‘works’; he suggests ‘pieces’. There is evidence that the music which he hears and writes exists as a kind of object which is not wholly made of music. Furthermore, any metaphysical quality in his art has had various consequences at different times, since his music shifts periodically: ‘[As] a body changes its cells completely once every seven years I probably change my material’. In discussion with Julia Bardsley (Chapter 12, pp. 253–4) the composer clarified part of what I have labelled ‘conceptualism’:

Any resulting tensions in a finished piece, however, may well not be apparent as such: Holt is not nakedly experimental. He distances himself from Cage but aligns himself with Feldman: Cage, said Holt, ‘was forever asking “Why” … He was asking the same question as Feldman, but Feldman made music out of it’; the latter composer thus represents ‘a yardstick’.

IN HIS UNFINISHED ROMANTIC NOVEL Heinrich von Ofterdingen (1799– 1801) Novalis tells the medieval tale of the young poet Heinrich, who sets out with his mother from his paternal home in Eisenach to her childhood home in Augsburg. The journey south to his motherland is a mystical journey that leads Heinrich both back in time and into his future. Through the recurring theme of reincarnation—recollections of moments previously experienced and lives previously lived—all time is one. After a jocular evening of wine and tales of martial valor with old veterans of the Crusades, Heinrich takes his leave “gripped by a war-like enthusiasm,” with “his whole soul in a state of tumult.” Wandering through a thicket, disoriented, he comes into a moonlit clearing and his mind is stilled:

Heinrich listens breathlessly to the song of the beautiful Arab maiden Zulima, whom he discovers comforting a crying child. Heinrich's heart swells with compassion as Zulima recalls “the romantic beauties of the fruitful regions in Arabia” and the “colonies of paradise … full of fresh springs that ripple through dense grass and over sparkling stones among venerable old groves.” She laments the brutal wars of the crusaders, the horrors of which have “separated the East from Europe forever.” Heinrich does his best to console Zulima, and the next day, before Heinrich departs, she seeks him out and gives him the lute upon which she played the previous evening. “It was my brother's,” she explains; “take this small token of my gratitude and let it be a pledge of your remembering poor Zulima.

Part I: Introduction

CONSIDERED BY MANY to be America's finest chronicler of the war in Vietnam, Tim O'Brien is best known for his trio of novels that explore the war's impact on the psyches of the individual soldiers who fought it— Going after Cacciato (1978), The Things They Carried (1990), and In the Lake of the Woods (1994). These traumatized soldiers, who typically share O'Brien's own midwestern background, range from decent men who try their best to behave honorably in untenable situations—not unlike some of Vonnegut's hapless, utopian dreamers—to morally complicated, damaged, and even dangerous people who are willing to do anything for love. But while Vonnegut's tone is almost always humorously ironic (if sometimes sad and even despairing), while he depicts the darkly buffoonish nature of modern war, O'Brien's tone tends to be less cartoonish, more serious and more realistic, more emotionally wrenching. Arguing that good war stories must “make the stomach believe” (Things 78), O'Brien reaches for an emotional resonance in his work, a connection with readers in which they are able to feel, at least partly, what O'Brien's characters feel as they face moral and philosophical crises in their lives. But what is perhaps most surprising about O'Brien's work is that he achieves a sense of the real, his own compelling brand of emotional honesty, not through straightforward storytelling so much as through a postmodern exploration of the constructed nature of fiction, the relationship between story and real life. Like Vonnegut, he frequently uses metafictive and other postmodern techniques in his work, often commenting on the stories he is telling as he tells them, blending elements of fact and fiction, utilizing multiple narrators and complicated perspectives, and questioning the reliability of historical truth. Like both Hemingway and Vonnegut, then, O'Brien is interested in the process of narrative itself—how telling stories can be a way of arriving at truth, often a more meaningful and emotionally charged truth than can be achieved through factual history.

American fiction about the Vietnam War has sometimes been criticized for focusing almost exclusively on the individual experience of the everyday soldier rather than raising large questions about the history and morality of the war.

Part I: Introduction

JUST AS HEMINGWAY became the icon of an era—representing a search for authenticity and meaning for a generation “lost” following the First World War—Kurt Vonnegut can be seen as a representative of his times. A writer whose playful, humorous, and often fantastical stories first generated a cult following on college campuses in the mid-1960s, Vonnegut developed into one of the most popular and easily recognized post– Second World War American writers with the publication of his masterpiece, Slaughterhouse-Five, in 1969. Because his work, with its reliance on a deceptively simple, nearly childlike style that includes a conversational tone and short, easy-to-read chapters, was accessible to a wide audience, it is easy to overlook how his antirealistic novels meshed with the most pressing literary, philosophical, and social concerns of the late twentieth century and helped usher in the postmodern period in American literature. Not only do his works, with their humorous drawings, cartoonish characters, and tales of flying saucers and space aliens, blur the line separating high and low culture, much like Andy Warhol's soup cans, but Vonnegut was in the forefront of postmodern writers who adopted metafictional techniques in order to explore the relationship between art and reality. In his novels, Vonnegut frequently includes opening and closing chapters that comment on his own writing, he draws attention to the artifice of his stories as he tells them, and he even appears as a character in his own work who interacts with his fictional creations. Like much postmodern literature, Vonnegut's works depict a reality that is linguistically determined— the stories we tell about reality shape the reality we experience. Vonnegut's experimental, nonconventional writing style suggests that if we want to change reality, we must first change the way we tell stories about reality.

But, perhaps most importantly, Vonnegut's fiction offers a scathing critique of social injustice, war, and environmental degradation, all the while managing to express compassion for the weak, “listless,” bewildered, and lonely human beings who experience the suffering and atrocity of the Second World War and postwar life.

KANT FAMOUSLY DEFINED HIS PURPOSE in the Critique of Pure Reason as “deny[ing] knowledge in order to make room for faith.” The “Copernican Revolution” of his Critical philosophy sought to provide an epistemological foundation for Newtonian mechanics while simultaneously defending against David Hume's potent skepticism regarding the possibility of human freedom. The rational faith in the possibility, even the necessity, of freedom through practical reason was the central concern of the works of moral philosophy that were the focus of Kant's intellectual efforts throughout much of the 1780s. The purpose of this chapter is to examine Kant's definition of autonomy and his developing understanding of the place of human freedom in his philosophy of history. As will be seen, autonomy as Kant defines it is actually the source of a considerable amount of anxiety because of its tenuousness. It is hard-won, for the individual and for the species, and easily undermined by the seductive power of “pathological” influences. As Kant worked through these ideas about rational self-determination, the Orient served two important purposes: First, it represents a relatively early stage in the historical development of reason, one that has been overcome in the historical maturation of the human race. Second, the Orient is also seen as a contemporary threat to the continued progress of reason because of the persistence of Romantic enthusiasm for the exotic and irrational, especially in the twin forms of religious enthusiasm (whether Pietist or Catholic) and pantheism.

Kant's Philosophy of History

For Kant, reason is what sets human beings apart from nature. Somewhat paradoxically, this seems to have been the plan of nature herself. The historical development of reason is a central theme of two brief essays published in 1784—“An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?” and “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim.” Taken together with the later essay “Toward Perpetual Peace” (1795), these essays constitute Kant's most detailed attempt at a philosophy of history, an attempt to identify and trace a teleological narrative of reason in its progressive development in human history.

In “Idea for a Universal History” Kant distinguishes between the work of the historian and that of the philosopher. For the historian the past is a subject of empirical study.

Fifteenth-century Florence was a city abuzz with new humanistic ideas but still profoundly attached to the texts and images and piety of the late Middle Ages. From the 1420s onwards, three laudesi [hymn-singing] confraternities founded in the fourteenth century in the Oltrarno, Florence's ‘Left Bank’, each took responsibility for performing a spectacle to mark the principal feast day of their respective churches. The primary purpose of these confraternities of adult men, mostly artisans, was to sing vernacular hymns [laude] to the glory of God and the Virgin. They employed professional singers to assist and train them, and much of their effort must have been for their own pleasure in singing together on a daily basis. But by the 1440s, all three confraternities were investing considerable effort in celebrating the principal feast day of their church with a festa or performance.

Leaving aside the more famous Annunciation in San Felice, this chapter will examine the Ascension and Pentecost feste performed annually by the confraternities of Santa Maria delle Laudi e di Sant'Agnese, which met in the Carmelite church of Santa Maria del Carmine, and of Santa Maria delle Laudi e dello Spirito Santo, which met in the Augustinian church of Santo Spirito. It will argue that the actual events on the Thursday of Ascension and ten days later on the Sunday of Pentecost were only a small part of the performance; rather, the whole production process should be seen in terms of performance, from the annual purchase of new keys, rat-poison and brooms through to the celebratory dinner that followed the festa. The confraternities owned their feste from beginning to end and their shape was determined not by the finality of their spoken text but by a collective process, their knowledge of how such things were done.

The material that allows us to reconstruct this process is contained for the most part in confraternal account books, inventories and meeting-records, which escaped the Leopoldine suppression of confraternities in 1785 and which entered the State Archives in Florence in 1861 following Unification and the renewed secularisation of church property.

In significant recent work, Claire Sponsler has urged for a more appropriate balance between literary and theatrical approaches to medieval drama, and offered an exemplary instance of how the latter should properly encompass varieties of performance culture whose material and institutional auspices do not altogether match ‘theatre’ as conventionally understood. In seeking to further such a ‘breakthrough into performance’, as it was called when something similar happened in Folklore studies, what follows will also, as it happens, engage with the late medieval ‘mummings’ or ‘disguisings’ which loom large among the materials Sponsler studies, and for which indeed there is sometimes ‘no room’ in standard surveys. However, they will here be studied, not directly, but in the form of ‘intrusions’ (the first connotation of the term in my title) into larger dramatic productions. In this instance, rather than of interest in their own right, they have a strictly subordinate function as an effective illustration of this chapter's broader thesis, which is that the study of early performance culture might benefit from deploying an action-orientated analogue of the concept of ‘intertextuality’ that is well established in analysing the relationships between literary texts: I suggest, based on the same model, we term it ‘interaxionality’.

Rather than considering dramatic texts, interaxionality encompasses the performance aspects of drama, such as the appearance (dress, posture, facial expression), gesticulation, and movement of performers, their interaction with each other, with the performance space, and sometimes with spectators. From this perspective, words spoken in performance are downgraded from their literary pedestal as the essence of drama (which can be supported by action), to the humbler status of vocal auxiliaries to action, although they can often have the added value of indicating action (‘Come let us …’; ‘See how he …’) which may not be registered in explicit stage directions. And of course interaxionality also encompasses, as intertextuality cannot, both sequences of unscripted performance lacking a vocal element, and indeed entire forms, like dumb shows and some types of mumming, which are wordless.

THE COPERNICAN REVOLUTION of the Critique of Pure Reason rendered two different standpoints from which to look at the world and the human subject within it. In its sensible character, the world is determined, subject to the limitations of time and space and the categories of human understanding, most notably causality. As it exists “in-itself,” however, the world has an existence that defies these limitations. In all of creation (as far as we know), human beings alone have a kind of existence that Kant calls “intelligible”: “In its intelligible character (even though we have nothing more than merely the general concept of it), this subject would nevertheless have to be declared free of all influences of sensibility and determination by appearances.” Herein lies the great promise and almost incomprehensible challenge of autonomy—complete freedom and independence in the face of the “influences of sensibility.” In Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals Kant hits the nail on the head when he wonders at the “paradox that the mere dignity of humanity as rational nature, without any other end or advantage to be attained by it—hence respect for a mere idea—is yet to serve as an inflexible precept of the will and that it is just in this independence of maxims from all such incentives that their sublimity consists, and the worthiness of every rational subject to be a lawgiving member in the kingdom of ends.”

This wonderment at the “sublimity” of human freedom goes to the heart of the anxiety of autonomy. Its achievement constitutes the true worth and dignity of the human being, precisely because it would seem nearly impossible. The immensity of this accomplishment is summarized most powerfully at the end of the Critique of Practical Reason: “Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and reverence, the more often and more steadily one reflects on them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.” But here we also see the problem with which Kant struggles in his moral philosophy, a problem that is ultimately inseparable from aesthetic concerns. In order for the moral law, the command of reason, to weigh so heavily against the force of our subjective inclinations, it must also affect us, it must produce some kind of “moral feeling.”

BY THE END OF SEPTEMBER 2001, New York City was awash in poetry. People pasted poems on lampposts, bus shelters, and subway stations; they taped poems to apartment windows and passed then around by hand; they mailed poems to newspapers and to fire and police stations; they organized poetry readings to raise funds for 9/11 victims; they created websites and e-mail Listservs to circulate poetry. The sheer volume of poetry responding to 9/11 was astounding, notoriously prompting one New York City fire chief, in his thank-you for the food, blankets, and flowers sent in by concerned citizens, to plead, “but please, no more poetry” (Johnson and Merians ix). Nor did this outpouring of words stop after the immediate shock of the attacks wore off. By February 2002, more than twenty-five thousand poems had been published on the website poems.com, while the website Poets against the War received nearly thirty thousand poems by the time it was closed to submissions in 2010, and more than ten anthologies of 9/11 poetry were published in the years immediately following the attacks (Metres; Keniston 659; Luger 184). Stories, essays, and popular songs addressing the events of September 11 appeared not long after the initial poetry. Television shows such as The West Wing and Third Watch scripted episodes to specifically focus on 9/11, and the first documentaries and feature films were released in 2002. The first novels to address 9/11 began to appear in 2003; they ranged from those in which the events were fairly peripheral, such as American science-fiction writer William Gibson's Pattern Recognition, which depicts the main character's father as disappearing during the attacks, to works such as French writer Frédéric Beigbeder's Windows on the World, set in the restaurant atop the North Tower where the terrorist attacks take center stage. Clearly, the impulse to transform the trauma of 9/11 and its aftermath into literary art, to explore the attacks through the written word, was profound and deep seated. Yet, at the same time, the attacks reignited questions concerning the relationship between trauma and literature that have long persisted and that arose especially in relation to Holocaust writing.

THE IBERIAN PENINSULA, from the decline of the Roman imperial dominance until at least the end of the Inquisition period, had been a land of political and religious conflict, of oppression and at times suppression, aggravated on occasion by outbreaks of bubonic plague, smallpox and typhus. One can only imagine what it must have been like for the powerless ordinary people living during those centuries of unavoidable confusion and uncertainty – of fear even. No ethnic or religious group felt entirely comfortable living or working alongside the others, despite the fact that in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the Jews, in some cases, were allowed to lead Islamic forces and even become members of regional governments, while the Gitanos were keeping themselves deliberately apart, mostly mobile, and safe.

In spite of all this confusion and suppressed conflict, the Jewish and Arab societies were, at the time, the most sophisticated and learned in Europe – an important legacy for us being the Arabic numerals, which almost certainly entered into European culture via the Iberian peninsula. In its southern region during that period, much fine poetry was written: by Arabs in Arabic, which at that time was the most expressive language in common use in Spain, and by Jews – also in Arabic or a little later in modified biblical Hebrew and Ladino, the form of Spanish adopted and adapted by the Jews for broader communication. Already in this poetry we find elements of duende, the spiritual awareness of the proximity of death or the inevitability of fate. That word, as mentioned in my Introduction, has many meanings, from ‘goblin’ to ‘spiritual collapse’, but chiefly refers to a particular type of creative spirit. In a lecture Lorca gave on the subject in Havana in 1930, and in Buenos Aires and Montevideo in 1933, he offered the following clues as to its nature, which I have paraphrased as:

ALTHOUGH AMERICAN LITERATURE that responds to the 9/11 terrorist attacks has been described as presenting a significant break with the past—a new kind of literature for a new kind of crisis—this book argues for a continuity of concerns between 9/11 fiction and the twentiethcentury American war fiction that preceded it. Each major catastrophe underpinning the events described in the war fiction examined here was experienced as a traumatic and unprecedented break from the past, from “the war to end all wars,” the common phrasing of a moniker first used by H. G. Wells in 1914 to describe the First World War, to the genocide of Nazi extermination camps and the total destruction threatened by the atomic weaponry of the Second World War, to what has been called a loss of America's mythic self-vision in its first major international defeat during the Vietnam War, to the vulnerability associated with the terrorist attacks in the heart of the American homeland. Further, American writers have responded to the cataclysmic events in American history in similar ways. Each of these events has been theorized as a fall from innocence. While soldiers such as Frederic Henry in A Farewell to Arms could enter the First World War with heroic ideals, they could not leave war with those ideals intact. Even Hemingway himself said that he was an “awful dope” going into the war, imagining it as a sporting event, with himself playing on the “home team” and the Austrians on the “visiting team” (C. Baker 8). Vonnegut, in writing about the Second World War, asserts that scientists working on atomic weaponry have known “sin” after the war, and he depicts characters such as Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse-Five who try to recapture a lost Eden, a prelapsarian world free of sin. O'Brien utilizes repeated images of men falling into holes and trapdoors and tunnels to explore the perpetrator's guilt often associated with American involvement in Vietnam, especially for young soldiers brought up on the sanitized mythology of the Second World War as “the good war.” Finally, in 9/11 literature, the complacent globalism and prosperity of 1990s America gives way to the War on Terror, in which Americans are not safe at home and America is not beloved in the world.

Wherever and whenever present-day scholars attempt to analyse and discuss a named ‘people’ of the Early Middle Ages such as our ‘Frisians’, they are dealing at one and the same time with a phenomenon that was thoroughly real and of great significance in its own time and yet also one that is intrinsically slippery and deceptive, if not downright illusory, in key respects. It has now long been the familiar and conventional understanding of the peoples of that period – often referred to as nationes in contemporary Latin sources, and nowadays frequently as ‘ethnic groups’, in connection with a phenomenon of ‘ethnogenesis’ – that they are constructions, formations which were dynamically adapted to needs and opportunities provided by changing circumstances, while what these groups certainly were not is substantially solid and fixed entities that lived purely organically and reproduced themselves naturally, generation succeeding to generation. Indeed, a recent study implies that a necessarily endless process of identity-formation is a feature of history and archaeology we can handle with more confidence than we ever should think in terms of the presence and functioning of completed ethnic identities (Pohl 2013).

Of a significance equal to the questions listed in the title above for the definition of the focus of the present volume, therefore, has to be the historical context in which the attempt is made to present and examine ‘the Frisians’, and their neighbours. The principal chronological range is a period of four to five centuries, from the beginning of the 5th century ad into the 9th: a long period, falling between the end of the maintenance of effective Roman imperial rule in western Europe and the impact of the Scandinavian Viking expansion and incursions that began at the end of the 8th century. Of course, evidence from both before and after that period sheds light upon aspects of it, and is included here too where appropriate. The 5th century was, however, indisputably at the heart of a convulsion in Europe, marked primarily by the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West. The consequences of that fall were massive, both socially and economically. Across western Europe, the Roman structures of government were replaced by ‘barbarian’ kingships – mostly Germanic in terms of language, albeit several had Turkic elements too.

In the late seventeenth century the British Empire in the Atlantic was a variegated, institutionally disjointed entity, in many respects little more than a patchwork of diverse religious, political, ethnic and economic cultures. Though the population was primarily English, settlers also migrated from Scotland, Ireland and Continental Europe under the aegis of a composite British monarchy. Government structures and church establishments varied from colony to colony, adding a layer of institutional confusion. Pennsylvania, Maryland and South Carolina, among others, were governed by proprietors, not by the crown. Virginia and a number of the Caribbean colonies were royal colonies whose governors were royal appointees answerable to the king. By the late seventeenth century England and Scotland possessed, through plantation or conquest, nearly twenty Atlantic colonies, each with a separate and unique government or charter, creating a lively variety of local institutions and political cultures. These diverse settlements, looking to London as the metropolitan centre of an expanding empire were united by a shared history, heritage, economy, a public sphere and, increasingly throughout the early eighteenth century, the rage of party.

Prodigious amounts of scholarship have debated the origins, structures and ideological features of British party politics in the early eighteenth century. Parties were divided by issues of religion, finance and theories of empire. Although such conflict is well established within the context of England, Scotland and Ireland, there is much more to be said about its transatlantic impact. Party conflict affected political appointments, among other things, directly connecting colonial political cultures to British party divisions. Moreover, issues undergirding the rage of party were also undoubtedly linked to questions concerning the Protestant succession, an event with dramatic imperial consequences. The overlap evident in Jacobitism and Tory political culture during the rage of party in Britain, especially the years 1710 to 1714, did not go unnoticed in the colonies. As the appointments illustrate, a hazy distinction between Toryism and Jacobitism was instrumental in shaping colonists’ views of Jacobitism. The existence of Jacobitism and Toryism in the British Atlantic, whether the result of local politics or imperial appointments, suggests the likelihood and significance of both in larger transatlantic interactions. Jacobitism was a central aspect of Tory and Whig political divisions, and therefore a significant element in an increasingly cohesive, though multifaceted, transatlantic political culture.