If God gives back to Theophilus the “eyes of his heart” (Gautier 650) what will this new vision allow him to see? The answer is surely not the filthy, stinking, “ordure” that Rutebeuf used to describe Theophilus's sinful self. That image of self is based in dissemblance. The new image that Theophilus must find the vision to see is based in resemblance and thus constitutes the other side of the dynamic we used to make sense of the negative self-images in Chapter Two. But in order to move into the “region” of resemblance Theophilus will need to become a more active participant in his own vision. This active participation requires no more than simply gazing, in Cynthia Hahn's sense of the word, on the Virgin. But such a form of gazing is more than a simple turning of the eyes. “Literal gazing, in the sense of absorbed, longing visual contemplation of the image, facilitates an identification with the depicted viewer, rapt in visual absorption” (Sand Vision 19). He will also need a mediator. The Virgin and her “ymage” will play these roles. While it is tempting to turn the legend over to the Virgin once she enters the picture – some visual representations do this – the collective representations of the legend do not leave Theophilus behind at this point. The legend fuses his quest for his imago with the Virgin's own capacity to incarnate herself as “ymage,” representation, alongside her identity as imago, image of God, and her identity as a prototype capable of infusing and informing her earthly manifestation. The encounter between Theophilus and the Virgin plays itself out through the gamut of representational animation that characterizes the role of the Virgin in thirteenth-century spirituality. This runs from Theophilus's encounter with a painting, a statue, an animated statue, a vision of the Virgin, and an apparition of the Virgin herself.2 Our examination of the specific events of the intervention will follow this gamut. In this chapter we will focus above all on intervention of the Virgin and the dynamic of vision associated with the Virgin and the way these permit Theophilus to see a different image of himself.

The intervention of the Virgin takes place in several clear steps that are fairly consistent across the different textual and visual versions of the legend.

FOLLOWING the rescue of the Festival by the Duke of Norfolk in 1798, the number of Stewards rose to six, three clerical and three lay, in each city. Even so, rising costs and falling receipts placed an increasingly formidable burden upon these gentlemen. After 1817(G), when receipts exceeded expenditure and the Stewards were able to invest a surplus in consols, the Festival made a loss every year until 1853(G). In 1836 it was rumoured that at a meeting of the Worcester Stewards ‘some good round sums were offered by certain of them to be released from their impending responsibility’. This is hardly surprising: deficits in the previous decade had exceeded L750 per annum, reaching a peak of L1,365 1s. 0d. in 1832(G).

Between 1836 and 1838 three meetings took place at the Episcopal Palace in Worcester of a committee appointed ‘to consider the best means of ensuring a more enlarged and efficient support of the Triennial Musical Festival in Worcester’. The result was the setting up in Worcester of a guarantee fund amounting to L746 in which thirty-two gentlemen and members of the clergy, including the Bishops of Worcester and Rochester and three members of Parliament, agreed to subscribe the whole, or such proportions as necessary, of amounts from L5 to L20 each towards the Worcester Music Meetings. This sum, together with L50 from each of the, by then, eight Stewards was used to defray expenses, the payment from each subscriber being made in proportion to the amount of their subscriptions.

In 1844 a guarantee fund was opened in Gloucester too, but there the preferred method of raising an extra subsidy was to increase the number of Stewards. In 1847 James Henry Brown took over as secretary of the Gloucester Festival. Not only was he a first-class administrator but he also had a gift for attracting men of means and influence to the ranks of the Stewards; in 1853 there were twenty-three, in 1862 fifty-four, and by 1868 there were no fewer than 106.

Since the end of the Cold War, and especially since September 2001, religion has been recognised as an increasingly important factor in personal and group identification and mobilisation. In a global environment increasingly dominated by economic neoliberalism, tensions between Islam and Christianity have become especially salient. However, a detailed understanding of the dynamics of religious conflict – and accommodation – is obscured by the overwhelming focus of analysts and commentators on the global North. In this context, attacks by Islamic groups and the perception and treatment of Muslim minorities in the culturally Christian societies in the US and Europe are often seen to confirm the existence of a ‘faultline’ between ‘Western civilisations’ and ‘Islamic civilisations’, which has been transposed somewhat uncritically to different African contexts. In this way, Africa is treated as little more than a ‘reservoir of raw fact’, which is made to fit the theories and truths produced on the basis of European and North American knowledge and praxis.

But although the social and political transformations following the end of the Cold War reflected the politics of the global North, the complexity of their implications reveals itself more fully in the societies in the South. While Africa has its share of Muslim–Christian conflicts, not all religious violence on the continent takes place across a religious divide. In Uganda and neighbouring countries, the Christian Lord's Resistance Army has terrorised communities for many decades irrespective of religion. In the Sudan, the self-consciously Muslim Janjaweed militia has committed large-scale violence against coreligionists. Similarly, Islamic insurgent groups in Mali and northern Nigeria have targeted fellow Muslims far more frequently than Christians and other non-Muslims.5 While the implications of this phenomenon cannot be explored in detail here, the high incidence of intra-Muslim violence certainly challenges the notion that conflict is necessarily associated with religious difference.

But the opposite also applies: even in highly religious societies, religious difference is not necessarily associated with conflict. Thus Africa is also home to several states and regions where Muslims and Christians coexist without large-scale conflict. In South Africa, the country's liberal post-Apartheid Constitution has enabled a diverse Muslim minority to pursue religiously distinctive rights.

Drawing on the case study of Ede and south-west Nigeria, this book offers an understanding of inter-religious relations that challenges the notion that Muslim–Christian difference is inherently conflictual. We suggest that the dominant role ascribed to conflict arises from the assumption that the experiences of the global North, where the increase of Muslim–Christian conflict has been an important feature of the religious encounters between clearly bounded groups, is paradigmatic for the rest of the world. As a result, interfaith debates and practices centre on the need for mutual toleration. However, in Africa, both the growth of intra-religious mobilisation in some contexts, and the close social relations between members of different religions in others, illustrate that conflict – and the need for toleration – is only one form of interreligious engagement.

In order to understand the full implications of the growing political importance of religion, we must recognise that in Africa and the global South, the social diversity and creativity subsumed under functioning forms of rationality in the global North are often ‘promiscuously visible’. Examples of the wide range of practices that shape Ede's mixed religious landscape certainly include practices of toleration and low-level conflict, particularly in the context of clearly bounded religious groups (chapters 5–7, 8). It is especially in these cases that religious boundaries are produced in relation to other forms of identity, such as descent and belonging, and in relation to social or institutional hierarchies. In other words, it appears that both potential conflict and the need for tolerance are of particular importance where religion is closely linked to social or institutional structures. In such contexts, practices of tolerance do not solely reflect explicitly normative values but also rely on practical strategies that reflect entrenched social interests. In other words, tolerance does not exist independently of relations of power, and is thus itself subject to criticism from different vantage points: as chapter 8 illustrates, even toleration on an equal level between two important groups may alienate those who do not feel included by the resulting compromises.

Place as it features in the Old English literature has received much attention from scholars in recent years, with various studies dedicated to understanding its role and significance. Fabienne Michelet's 2006 publication, for example, offers an in-depth investigation into the Anglo-Saxon's ‘spatial imaginaire’ by exploring such themes as displacement, possession and control, as well as centres and peripheries. Yet, despite these various studies, place as it features in the Old English riddles has received little or no attention. Why scholars have not addressed place in the riddles is perplexing. It is certainly the case that ‘in some writing the physical context may be minimal or may not have a sufficiently important influence on the chief interest of the work to merit our attention’, yet this is not the case for the Exeter Book riddles. A large number of the riddle subjects define themselves by place, and place is often at the forefront of the subject's or narrator's consciousness. A riddle subject's sense of place can be just as important to a riddle's narrative as the beorges setl ‘hill habitation’ is to Guthlac A (383b), the eorðscræf ‘earth-cave’ to The Wife's Lament (28b) and the ærsceaft ‘ancient building’ to The Ruin (16b). As in other Old English texts, place in the riddles is often more than an incidental backdrop; it is fundamental to the fabric of their design. Certain riddles, including primarily, though not exclusively, Riddles 15 (‘badger’), 53 (?), 60 (‘reed-staff’), 71 (‘sword’), 72 (‘ox’), 73 (‘spear’), 77 (‘oyster’), 81 (‘weathercock’), 83 (‘ore’), 88 (‘antler’) and 93 (‘antler’), emphasise a sense of place and make the environment a key part of their narratives, often depicting subjects that lament the loss of their original home. Michelet states that Old English texts ‘are populated by characters deprived of their original home’ but does not offer any riddle subjects as examples of displaced individuals. I hope to address this omission here.

A sense of place is one of the key components of an ecological text, often perceived as ‘foundational for ecological consciousness’. Place can be more than simply a backdrop or setting, grounding humans and non-humans alike in a physical world, an ‘actual environment’.

Riddle 83 depicts its subject, ore, being taken out of the earth by miners and turned into money, when it can then enact a form of revenge on humans through the establishment of hæftnyd ‘captive bonds’ (Riddle 83, 9b). The writer employs a human social metaphor of ancestral usurpation and destruction; the narrator's ancestors, its fromcynn, are removed from their eard ‘land’ by a fah ‘hostile one’ (Riddle 83, 7a–8a and 4b). This metaphor, in part, leads Marie Nelson to argue that ‘[the subject's] humanity is more discernible than its identity’ and to propose that the answer to the enigma is ‘human being’. I suggest that, despite the riddle writer's use of the human social metaphor, Riddle 83 more readily invites an ecocentric, as opposed to anthropocentric, reading. In its depiction, through the use of metaphor, of the removal of ore, the riddle speaks to two of Buell's tenets of environmental texts. These tenets are that ‘human accountability to the environment is part of the text's ethical orientation’ and that ‘the nonhuman environment is present not merely as a framing device but as a presence that begins to suggest that human history is implicated in natural history’. The text implicates humanity in the ore's destruction and claims that the ore has its own history, a history that is destroyed by the violent actions of human beings. Ore sees itself as ‘a creature of unstable history, easily undone’, to borrow a phrase from Jeffrey Jerome Cohen's study. In this chapter, I discuss the ecological underpinnings of Riddle 83, connecting humanity's use of its resources to the post-lapsarian relationship between humans and nature. In doing so, I also compare the riddle to the depiction of mining in Job 28.1–11, which has been celebrated for its ecological underpinnings but which is substantially more anthropocentric than Riddle 83. Having discussed the removal of ore from the ground, my discussion leads finally to the return of the resource to the ground and the parallel lives of humans and ore, as depicted in Beowulf. Just as the dragon ‘slumbers atop a hoard of precious objects in a mound (beorh) built by a vanished nation’ so ‘Beowulf's cremated remains will be laid to rest within a similar earthwork’.

THIS BOOK HAS TREATED a number of case studies, taken from the past three decades of Austrian cultural production, to examine the diverse ways in which Austrian writers, filmmakers, and artists have treated Austria's multiple historical legacies, foremost among them the legacy of the Nazi past. At the same time, we have seen that the political changes, which have swept Austria since the mid-1980s, have not failed to leave their mark on the country's cultural production, with writers, filmmakers, and artists responding to such turning points as the Waldheim affair, and the 1999 elections, in their work. It is this dual concern of an intense preoccupation with the country's past, coupled with a keen focus on documenting and reflecting the present, that dominates the work of the writers, filmmakers, and artists explored in this study.

The early films of Ruth Beckermann, examined in chapter 1 of this study, continually oscillate between the present and the past. The melancholy journeys to the past, whether this be to interwar Vienna in Wien retour, the historical area of Bukovina in Die papierene Brücke, or Vienna's historical textile quarter in Homemad(e), are always allied, in Beckermann's films, with explicit or oblique commentary on present-day Austria. Her films, while insistently concerned with the past, specifically with the legacy of the Holocaust in Austrian culture, are simultaneously a documentary chronicle of contemporary Austria, whether this be the culture of silence around Austria's Nazi past, which predominated up until the late 1980s (Wien retour); the Waldheim affair of the late 1980s (Die papierene Brücke); or the 1999 elections, which saw the Austrian Freedom Party enter the coalition government (Homemad(e)).

Similarly, Anna Mitgutsch's Haus der Kindheit, dealing with the topic of Nazi-era “Aryanization,” continually reflects the legacy of this past in the present, indirectly commenting on political developments in Austria in the area of restitution, which became an increasingly prominent issue at the turn of the twenty-first century, when Mitgutsch's book was published.

TOWARD THE END OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR, on the night of March 24–25, 1945, days before the arrival of the Red Army, approximately two hundred Jewish slave-laborers were murdered in a small Austrian village on the Hungarian border, purportedly in the context of a party hosted by Countess Margit Batthyány at Rechnitz Castle. The exact events of that night remain shrouded in mystery, the perpetrators have not been brought to justice, and the mass grave has not been found to this day. Instead a wall of silence has descended on the village regarding the events of that time, with Rechnitz serving as a model case for the repression and silencing surrounding the Nazi past in postwar Austria.

As Walter Manoschek has pointed out, the Rechnitz massacre was by no means a unique case in Austria in the final stages of the Second World War. It was one of a series of what Christiaan Rüter has termed “Endphasenverbrechen” (end-phase crimes) that took place in Austria in the spring of 1945. In contrast to the concentration camps largely situated in Eastern Europe (with notable exceptions, such as Mauthausen- Gusen and Ebensee in Austria), far away from the eyes of the Austrian and German civilian population, thereby creating a “räumliche, soziale und emotionale Distanz” (spatial, social, and emotional distance) from the events, the camp evacuations and death marches of tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews to Eastern Austria, which began in the summer of 1944, meant that the last phase of the Holocaust “spielte sich … vor der Haustüre ab” (played out … in front of the house door). The two hundred victims of the Rechnitz massacre were engaged in building the socalled Southeast Wall fortifications, designed to stop the Soviet advance.

In her book The Riddle of Creation, Ruth Wehlau asserts that ‘the [Exeter Book] riddles play with torment, turning it into an entertainment’. For Wehlau, the violence in the riddles is a ‘play violence’, whereby ‘creatures are beaten, eaten, tortured, and torn apart in a make-believe version of war and torment’. Read in this way, the depiction of non-human suffering is not to be regarded as sympathetic:

Wehlau's assertions are as startling as they are anthropocentric. It is true that in the majority of Old English poetry there is no sympathy for the non-human world – as Neville muses, ‘the Seafarer who laments his cold feet does not pity the sea birds with their icy feathers’– but in the Old English riddles, where animals and human resources are described and ruminated on, special consideration is given to the point of view of non-human beings and the injustices they suffer at the hands of humans. To use the words of ecotheologians writing about biblical texts, the riddles ‘may be more sympathetic to the plight […] of Earth than our previous interpretations have allowed’. Read through the sympathetic lens of ecotheology, which considers the point of view of the non-human world and the suffering of the natural world after the Fall, the plight of non-human beings in the riddles becomes very serious indeed. Condemned to a post-lapsarian world of suffering like their human masters, the subjects of the natural world lament their labours and relate narratives of suffering. Reading the riddles in this way, it is impossible to interpret Riddle 72's depiction of the toiling ox as entertaining, unsympathetic or unreal.

DURING William Done's fifty-one years at Worcester he had worked with Gloucester colleagues John Amott, Samuel Sebastian Wesley, Charles Harford Lloyd and Charles Lee Williams; and with George Townshend Smith, Langdon Colborne and George Robertson Sinclair at Hereford.

Lloyd made his Three Choirs debut in the organ loft at the Hereford Festival of 1876. Selections from Samson and The Creation in the gaslit cathedral provided a special attraction at an evening concert: ‘Lurid glares of gas fell upon the stately pillars, and pierced through gloom to the far-off roof, giving a weird-like appearance to nave and aisle.’

A Gloucestershire man, born at Thornbury in 1849, Lloyd had graduated in Arts and Music at Magdalen Hall, Oxford. At his first Gloucester Festival, in 1877, it quickly became apparent that the young new cathedral organist was a musician of ability and distinction, and, moreover, one who seemed 'to possess the right stuff for a conductor, combining those essential attributes of firmness, quietude, and self-control, in the absence of which any hope of reaching eminence as a ruler in this particular sphere of art-demonstration must be altogether illusory. The Musical Times reserved to the end of a review of the week's events a notice of especial praise for Lloyd's conducting, praising ‘not only his skill in conveying … an accurate knowledge of the tempi of the several pieces, but his evident intimate acquaintance with the scores, and the intelligence he evinced in the endeavour to realise every point indicated by the composer.’

Lloyd was an innovator. We have already noted his introduction at the Gloucester Festivals of Brahms's Ein deutsches Requiem in 1877 and of Beethoven's Missa solemnis in 1880, both drawing much-needed oxygen into the suffocating ultra-conservatism of nineteenth-century provincial taste. We have seen too that Parry's Prometheus Unbound, accepted by Lloyd for performance in the 1880 Festival, was later identified as the work which marked the birth of the renaissance of English music.

THE ‘CATULLAN LAW’

The idea of the ‘Catullan’ in Renaissance verse was largely a matter of licence. It presented a risqué extension to the chart of decorum permissible to the humanist author. The ‘Catullan Law’ or Lex Catulliana, drawn from Catullus 16 and coming to the modern age by way of Martial, was invoked by many writers as a justification for bawdy content. This is relevant to the history of the basium genre in particular, as well as to the Neo-Catullan style and humanist obscenity more generally; for Catullus 16 was connected with the kiss from the very start:

‘Vos, quod’ in line 12 was an early Renaissance correction (in MS R) for the corrupt ‘hosque’ and ‘vosque’ of earlier versions. It remains the standard reading today. The implication is that Furius and Aurelius have read some of Catullus's poems of kissing, and think him less virile on that account.

IN his later years, William Hine seems to have become disillusioned with his provincial lot at Gloucester. The Gloucester Journal of 19 September 1722 has a reference to ‘A Consort of Vocal and Instrumental Musick’ given in his benefit, and this included ‘several songs in English and Italian with their Symphonies, perform'd by Mr Priest's FAMOUS BOY from Bristol’,1 but after that, nothing. And by 1730 his life was, in any case, drawing to a premature close. He died on 28 August in that year, aged forty-three, just days before the start of a Gloucester Meeting of the Three Choirs.

Life in eighteenth-century England may not have been quite so nasty and brutish as in former times, but it was very often short. Hine was buried in the cloisters of Gloucester Cathedral, where a small tablet to his memory, erected a few paces to the left of the Chapter House door, bears the following inscription:

A further couplet was added to the inscription, recording the death of Alicia Hine, also at the age of forty-three, on 28 June 1735.

Hine's compositions, chiefly consisting of music for Gloucester Cathedral, remained unpublished in his lifetime but, after his death, Alicia had published by subscription Harmonia Sacra Glocestriensis, or Select Anthems for 1, 2, and 3 Voices, &c.

Oríkì Tìmì Munirudeen Adésọlá Lawal Láminísà (2007–)

Oríkì Tìmì Tìjání Ọládòkun Oyéwùsì (1976–2007)