The Chronicle (Ar. Taʾrīkh) of Khalīfa b. Khayyāṭ (d. AD 854) was composed in the early-to-mid ninth century and is the oldest Islamic chronicle still extant. Its compiler was a scholar of Qurʾān and ḥadīth – that is, a scholar of both of the Qurʾānic revelation and of the ‘reports’ or ‘traditions’ about the Prophet Muḥammad and the earliest Muslims. Khalīfa lived and worked in the large southern Iraqi port city of Basra – at the time one of the foremost centres of learning in the Islamic world. His Chronicle is arranged annalistically by years of the lunar Hijri calendar, beginning, after a short introduction, with year one – the year of the Prophet Muhammad's emigration (hijra) from Mecca to Medina (AD 622) – and ending with year AH 232/AD 847. It covers, in summary fashion, the political and administrative history of the Muslim polity, from its origins in Medina at the time of the Prophet and under the first caliphs through to the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates.

Despite its early date, Khalīfa's Chronicle has received little attention in modern scholarship. Survey and textbook accounts tend to remark on its being the earliest surviving history in Arabic arranged chronologically, in contrast to earlier extant works which are structured thematically or arranged as biographical entries on individuals by generations. Modern historians have tended to dismiss it as telling us little or nothing that is not found in later, more famous works of the ninth century. It is, after all, much shorter than the surviving compendious histories produced in Iraq two or three generations later by al-Balādhurī (d. c. 892) and al-Ṭabarī (d. 923): al-Ṭabarī's History of Messengers and Kings (Taʾrīkh al-rusul wa-l-mulūk) is perhaps twenty times as long; al-Balādhurī's genealogically-arranged historical work, Genealogies of the Tribal Notables (Ansāb al-ashrāf), is perhaps about fifty times the length of Khalīfa's work.

But although Khalīfa's Chronicle may not provide many facts not known from later works, his framing of the material and the context of its compilation are markedly different from other early histories. In other words, the Chronicle itself is a hitherto-overlooked historical fact that raises important questions about the origins and development of Arabic chronicle-writing and the different ways in which the early Muslims went about finding their place in history and politics.

Carved during the last decades of the fifteenth century, the choir stalls of Ripon Minster replaced the earlier set that had been damaged by the fall of the lantern tower in 1450. The tower collapse strained the minster's resources for many years, but essential masonry repairs to the tower itself, the south transept and the choir had been completed by about 1480, permitting the minster clergy to beautify the choir with new woodwork. The stalls have folding seats with misericords: adorned with fantastic images of dragons, birds, griffins, flowers, green men, pigs playing bagpipes, mermaids and much else, they provided ledges for the clergy to lean against during the portions of the liturgy when they were expected to stand rather than sit. One of the bench-ends on the south side of the choir displays a shield with three wavy-armed stars crowned by a mitre: the arms of St Wilfrid. The richness of the carving exemplifies the grandeur of the medieval minster, while the number of stalls conveys its institutional scale. There are thirty-four stalls in total, arranged just as they would have been in a cathedral or monastic choir. There were places for the minster canons and also the vicars and chantry priests, all of whom were expected to gather in the choir for the daily round of services. Together with their deacons, subdeacons and others in minor orders, the minster clergy performed a grand and elaborate liturgy not to be found in most medieval parish churches.

The minster clergy, like St Wilfrid, strongly influenced religion and society in the parish of Ripon. They struck a balance between their own liturgical requirements and those of their parishioners, but the cure of souls within the parish was not always their primary concern. At one and the same time their institution was similar in many ways to a monastery or cathedral while also resembling six parish churches fused into one. A significant development in its long history was the formal establishment in the early fourteenth century of vicars for each of the six prebends. Their task was to guarantee that the cure of souls was performed within each of the parish's six territorial divisions. The canons, who were supposed to provide for this, often did not reside in Ripon personally and did not always hire a vicar to act in their stead.

Introduction

In his 1974 Nobel Prize lecture titled ‘The Pretence of Knowledge’, Friedrich von Hayek chastised his fellow economists about their love affair with analytical approaches that mimicked physics or biology, especially after their discipline had ‘been conceded some of the dignity and prestige of the physical sciences’. He argued forcefully and convincingly that some of the gravest errors of economic policy are a direct consequence of this ‘scientistic error’ (von Hayek 1974). Decades later, his criticism of economic methodology in general is still valid and has been endorsed by a wide range of economists, including some of the most influential in the field (Solow 2008, 2009; Krugman 2008; Stiglitz 2010; Caballero 2010). The ‘scientific’ validity of economic methods has become even more controversial in the aftermath of the 2008–09 Great Recession, and for a good reason: the crisis confirmed once more that the assumptions of markets as optimal institutions where rational and generally well-informed agents make individual decisions that eventually serve the interests of society as a whole were misleading. Yet, these assumptions remain the foundations on which modern economic theory is built.

Jane I. Guyer's work of social and economic anthropology, which focuses on the grey zones between formal and informal economies where various patterns of confrontations and collaboration constantly take place, sheds light on how economic agents facing hard budget constraints but eager to conform to sets of social norms make decisions, how the productive economy in such settings actually works, how the division of labour among heterogeneous groups takes form, and how the money is managed to serve as a unit of account, a medium of exchange and a store of culture, meaning and value. It is to their own detriment that macroeconomic theorists have not paid more attention to the stunning insights from the very practical analyses of how people perform economic relations ‘on multiple and overlapping scales of value’.

This chapter, which draws on Monga (2011, 2015), builds on some of the insights from Guyer's landmark book, Marginal Gains: Monetary Transactions in Atlantic Africa (2004) and discusses the state of macroeconomic theory today to suggest a few lessons that social theorists could draw from the study of Africa.

Since Paul Strohm's 1992 study demonstrated Gower's reliance on the rhetoric of the official Lancastrian justification of Henry IV's accession in “In Praise of Peace”, this poem has been read primarily within the context of the turbulent political climate of the first years of Henry's reign. Whereas recent scholarship has done much to enrich our understanding of the poem by uncovering the complex layers of meaning generated by Gower's paradoxical attempts simultaneously to advocate peace and to defend Henry's forcible seizure of the throne, there is another dimension to “In Praise of Peace” that has hitherto received relatively little critical scrutiny: Gower's ardent pleas for the resolution of the papal schism and for a permanent peace between England and France. In explicating the central factors that led to the oppression of “Cristes pes” (IPP 253), Gower identifies the Schism as the root cause of the prolonged conflict between the two countries, which in turn makes all of Europe vulnerable to external threats. Gower's repeatedly expressed concern over the disunity of the Church, coupled with his insistence on the responsibility of secular rulers to restore peace to Christendom, invites comparison with the writings of his continental contemporaries, such as Philippe de Mézieres, Eustache Deschamps, Honorat Bovet, and Christine de Pizan, who all gave voice to their anxiety and frustration over the divided papacy and its consequences for European peace.

The primary aim of this essay is to situate Gower's poetry in a cross-Channel literary movement committed to the promotion of peace in Europe. To this end I will analyze “In Praise of Peace” in comparison to Philippe de Mézieres’ Epistre au roi Richart and Songe du vieil pelerin, both of which bear affinities to Gower's poem in their construction of an authorial self-image as an old sage ideally suited to offer wisdom to a king, their prominent use of pathological imagery in their reflections on the perilous state of Christendom, their treatment of Alexander the Great as a negative exemplum of uncontrolled belligerence, and their representation of kingship as the single source of authority capable of providing a “cure” for Europe's socio-political “illness.”

Gower is the only medieval English author of whom we have a tomb effigy. The tomb erected (and possibly recycled) for Chaucer in the 1550s once had a portrait of him, engraved or perhaps painted on its rear wall tablet, but that has long since gone. Gower lies in splendor with his head resting on the three volumes of his works, watched over by the virtues, and recently repainted in vivid gloss, in what was once the priory church of St. Mary Overy and is now Southwark Cathedral. Between those two incarnations, it was St. Saviour's, the parish church of the Globe Theatre, where Shakespeare's younger brother is buried; and it may perhaps have been Shakespeare's familiarity with the tomb, as well as his familiarity with a widely known story, that encouraged him to turn to Gower as the inspiration for and the presenter of Pericles. The tomb presumably represents the form in which the poet himself wished to be remembered, his works outliving the mortal body represented in the effigy. Gower was a man who thought about mortality; and he did so most evidently, not at the ends of his more overtly religious or moralizing works, but at the end of the Confessio Amantis, in that moment when we are required to rethink all that as readers we thought we knew. When the lover's confession is complete and all the tales are told, the narrator encounters Venus. She asks his name; and he answers, “John Gower.” It is a crucial moment analogous to Beatrice's naming of Dante––a moment of total self-knowledge, though with the opposite import, not about salvation, but about death. For she follows that up with a brutal reminder of his own mortality: “Remembre wel hou thou art old.” It is now one of the most famous lines in the whole poem; but in context, it is an extraordinary statement, because it is completely unexpected, by both lover and readers, and the shock it delivers is enough to knock him unconscious. It may not do that to the readers; but it still has a powerful effect, and not just in narrative terms, in the discovery that this is not a typically young lover, as one had assumed.

In Book VII of John Gower's Confessio Amantis, between the stories of the pitiless tyrant Spertachus and the timorous ruler in the “Mountain and the Mouse,” Genius voices the astonishing advice that the king should shape his face so as to control what it expresses to others:

According to Niccolo Machiavelli's memorable assessment of the relative value of ethical virtue in The Prince, “it is unnecessary for a prince to have all the good qualities I have enumerated, but it is very necessary to appear to have them.” Genius’ pragmatic advice would fit right into Machiavelli's guide to effective rule, but in the context of the Confessio, it is bewildering, for it is difficult—perhaps impossible—to reconcile with Gower's commitment to plainness and transparency, both ethical and referential. Twisty in lexis and syntax, it undermines both the Golden Age ideals of political rule with which the poem begins, and the education in such ethical matters as “trouthe” with which Gower seeks to restore a more ideal form of governance to England. In order to clarify what is so discomfiting about Genius’ advice, this essay will first sketch in the common medieval association of physiognomy—the science of reading faces—with the arts of rule, using one of Gower's chief sources for Book VII, the Secreta Secretorum. The physiognomic thinking that underlies the key contexts in the Prologue and Book VII will then help in teasing out what makes Genius’ advice confounding. Finally, a set of distinctively Gowerian terms interpolated into the Clerk's Tale and its framing will adumbrate Chaucer's response to the advice; by reading backward from this response, we can discern the problems it creates not just for the political renovation the Confessio seeks to bring about, but also for the ethics of the poet himself as an advisor to princes.

On 12 September 1453 Matilda Coke appealed to the chapter court on behalf of her husband, Thomas Coke. In a meadow that lay between the towns of Ripon and Bishopton, Robert Poode and John Writhson had attacked and injured him. The meadow was within the bounds of the liberty of Ripon, and thus within the jurisdiction of the chapter court. The court threatened Thomas Coke's assailants with excommunication if they did not appear within fifteen days. On the last day of this grace period, John Writhson's father and one of Robert Poode's relatives persuaded the court to grant an extension of eight days. At the end of this second period, Robert and John finally appeared and submitted to the judgement of the court. Their penance was to lead the Sunday procession in the minster for six weeks, each one carrying his offending weapon in one hand and a lit candle weighing 1lb in the other. At the end of this term they were to leave the wax as an offering ‘at the image of St Wilfrid in the nave of the church’ and their weapons on the high altar.

Not long afterward, on 7 October of the same year, before the hour of nones, three men attacked the pair of penitents as they approached the minster along Crossgate, the street that leads from Ripon's marketplace to the western portal of the church. The assailants were Milo Pikke, Henry Brancke and another man identified as Thomas Coke's servant. They beat Robert Poode and John Writhson with staffs and other weapons, preventing them from reaching the minster and performing their penance. The court discovered that the three attackers had threatened to kill the two penitents if they could catch them, which may explain why the two men initially fled after assaulting Thomas Coke. The chapter court could not tolerate this vengeful act. It had already passed sentence on Poode and Writhson, and they were under the chapter's protection when performing their penance. Facing excommunication, Pikke, Lowe and Brancke dutifully appeared in court and submitted to the judgement of the chapter. They received the same penance as Poode and Writhson plus two additional Sundays, one at the head of the procession at Beverley Minster and another at York Minster.

It is a particular pleasure to contribute to this engagement with Jane Guyer's work. Jane and I have known each other since the beginning of both our careers. We were junior faculty members at Harvard, Jane in Anthropology, me in History, during the late 1970s and we were both part of a lively community of Africanists in the Boston area. Since Harvard had a tradition of faculty not talking to each other – and African studies there was particularly moribund at the time – we usually got together at Boston University's African Studies Center, for a time located in a rambling old house on the Brookline–Boston border. In the 1980s, there was a diaspora of Africanists from Boston-area universities – including the migration of Jane and Sara Berry to Johns Hopkins and me to Michigan – a process that makes this period of exchange and mutual influence particularly poignant in, at least, my memory.

There is more than nostalgia to the interest that this period holds. It was formative in terms of the theoretical incisiveness that characterized the study of Africa, and Jane was very much part of the movement both to raise questions and to innovate in the conceptual apparatus, within and beyond her discipline. Anthropology had a long track record in the study of Africa, and that meant it had a closet-full of concepts that had to be sorted through, perhaps to be discarded, perhaps to be reinvigorated. History was starting from a more naïve, or perhaps less overburdened, position, for the mere claim that Africans had a history was enough of a founding principle for the field in the 1960s. What historians were to make of that fact was not so clear. A formative moment in the rethinking process came when the African Studies Committee of the Social Science Research Council (SSRC – a committee that was abolished some years later in a fit of anti-area-studies hubris) commissioned for the African Studies Association meeting of 1980 a series of presentations on important conceptual issues. It had the temerity to ask younger (i.e. untenured) scholars to present some of these studies, beginning a process that the SSRC pursued for some years. Jane presented a paper on ‘Household and Community’ (Guyer 1981) and I did one on ‘Africa and the World Economy’ (Cooper 1981).

This chapter continues this book's reflections on historiographical writing in the imperial milieu. It focuses on Rudolf of Ems's Weltchronik, written in the first half of the thirteenth century and dedicated to King Konrad IV, the son of the emperor Frederick II of Hohenstaufen. The Weltchronik is a crucial work in the development of Middle High German historiography. This chapter interrogates its social background (including Rudolf's close ties with the Hohenstaufen family), exploring the traces it left in the author's organization of his material. The chapter delineates some characteristics of early vernacular historiography in the Empire to show how it asserted itself in relation to Latin literature.

L'exposé qui suit consiste en une présentation, nécessairement tres incomplete, de la premiere chronique universelle rimée en langue allemande affichant l'ambition d'englober l'ensemble de l'histoire de l'humanité ainsi qu'un véritable savoir encyclopédique. Deux textes, l’Annolied composé vers la fin du XIe siecle et dont la réception fut probablement assez limitée, et la Kaiserchronik, beaucoup plus célebre que ce dernier et datée de 1150 environ, lui ont ouvert la voie. La Weltchronik de Rudolf von Ems est a peu pres contemporaine de la Sächsische Weltchronik, en prose, et de la Christherre-Chronik, dont la perspective est plus clairement théologique. Bien que restée a l’état de fragment, elle témoigne d'une ambition sans précédent dans le domaine de l'historiographie en langue vernaculaire, ce qui s'explique en grande partie par le fait que son commanditaire, Konrad IV, appartenait a une brillante dynastie royale, celle des Hohenstaufen, qui fut aussi la plus controversée de son temps. Cette image a double face de la dynastie souabe n'est sans doute pas étrangere a son succes: le texte de Rudolf a été l'objet d'un intéret sans cesse renouvelé, non seulement au Moyen Âge ou il engendra une tradition historiographique tres riche, par le biais de nombreuses compilations incluant la Christherre-Chronik et la Weltchronik du Viennois Jans Enikel, et dont la Weltchronik attribuée a Heinrich von München est, au xive siecle, l'un des représentants les plus spectaculaires, mais aussi a l’époque contemporaine, dans la recherche, ou elle a suscité des études tres denses.

Peleus was a powerful king who also was very worthy, sage and courtly. His dominion extended across Greece and he ruled a very large part of the realm. He held his land freely, in great peace and wisely. This king had a brother, son of the same father and mother, who was called Aeson. I do not know whether he was king, count or duke of the city of Peloponnesus, for Dares's Book does not tell me anything more about him. This Aeson had a son named Jason, who, as I find it, was very handsome, worthy and intelligent. He was very strong and powerful, and known throughout many a realm. Being very courtly, noble and honourable, he was greatly loved by all. He conducted himself in a very noble fashion and was very fond of fame and largesse. He was very highly regarded and had achieved so much since his youth that his name was widely known throughout many lands and regions. (715–40)

When King Peleus saw Jason's ever-increasing rise and his celebrity that grew daily, he became anxious and began to fear that his nephew might grow and rise so high that he would drive him out of his own land. He was afraid that, if Jason lived long, he would leave nothing to his uncle. Peleus profoundly feared being ousted from his kingdom, for if Jason should decide to attempt this he could easily drive him away completely. Peleus harboured very treacherous feelings towards Jason. All he could think of was how he might plot and contrive to destroy his nephew, so as to keep his lands from him and prevent him from doing him any harm. Peleus made every effort to deceive Jason, although he kept his thoughts very much to himself, showing his nephew no sign of his intentions. During this time, as I find in my reading, a great marvel appeared on the island of Colcos in the sea; that is how I heard the place named not long ago. As is well known, there was a sheep there with a fleece all of gold.