In December 1817 the radical publisher William Hone was tried three times, on three consecutive days, because he had parodied the church's prayers to make political points about the corruption of Parliament and the state. One of the publications for which he was prosecuted, The Sinecurist's Creed, parodied the Athanasian Creed in order to attack those who had been given a well-paid job in return for political loyalty to the government:

Another of the offending pamphlets, The Late John Wilkes's Catechism, parodied a religious catechism to offer instructions ‘to be learned of every Person before he be brought to be confirmed a Placeman or Pensioner by the Minister’. Its central character, Lickspittle, is taught to become ‘the Child of Corruption, and a Locust to devour the good Things of this Kingdom’ by doing the ministry's every bidding. It offered ‘ten commandments’, which included the injunctions ‘Thou shalt not take the Pension of thy Lord the Minister in vain’ and ‘Thou shalt not say, that to rob the Public is to steal’. The catechism also included a parody of the Lord's Prayer:

A third offending publication, The Political Litany, similarly used a parody of conventional religious responses in order to attack corruption.

Introduction: Gower, Constitution, Governmentality

Certainly one of the most durable and vexing topics of Gower studies is his relation to contemporary politics and law, a subject that has spawned a large body of scholarship now in its seventh decade, if we take George Coffman's foundational work in 1945 as its beginning. Scholarly interest and activity have accelerated in the last ten to twenty years as we have learned more about Gower's legal and political environment from the 1360s to the turn of the fifteenth century. Most recently Candace Barrington, David Carlson, Conrad van Dijk, and others have investigated the poet's central focus and anxieties concerning not just kingship but also a wide range of issues attendant to the law, political power, and poetic practice in the turbulent period surrounding the Lancastrian usurpation. This is a natural and in some ways inevitable temporal focus, as Gower was the one major public poet to comment directly on current events. The intensity of those political engagements has also prompted investigation into the generic innovations he deployed to make them. But the desire to parse out a partisan timeline or clear affiliation—that is, what side Gower was on, Ricardian or Henrician, and when—has also tended, at times, to emphasize more distant and abstract sources of legal context, such as the procedures of English common law or the doctrines of civil law. What results is a curiously bifurcated Gower, simultaneously immediate yet abstract, with a potentially awkward fit between our reading of his politics and the known textual and intellectual environment of his work. This bifurcation makes it difficult for us to see Gower in a new perspective, one that might shed a different light on his genre-experiments and political commitments.

The particular examples of this dynamic that I would like to consider here are two sources of his political writings that are both traditionalist and innovative: his adaptations of the De regimine and Secretum secretorum. Gower was the first composer of an English Furstenspiegel (leaving aside Trevisa's translation of Aegidius’ De regimine) and, at the same time, a firstrate storyteller. Given the florescence of De regimine writings and the many English adaptations of the Secretum secretorum that followed in the fifteenth century, Gower clearly stood at the start of an important trend.

One of the most inspiring ideas in Jane Guyer's rich oeuvre is her consistent attention to ‘marginal gains’ to be made by crossing disjuncture between different registers of value and knowledge. Especially her work from the 1990s on the role of ‘composition’ (in contrast to ‘accumulation’) as characteristic to economic agency in Equatorial Africa was most inspiring for both of us in our research in that area – notably for our efforts to make sense of the quite chaotic developments during the boom in wild rubber that marked so deeply the brief period of German rule in Cameroon (see Guyer 1993, 1986; Guyer and Eno Belinga 1995). No wonder, because there is a clear regional overlap: Guyer's examples in these articles come from the forest zones of Equatorial Africa, where the rubber boom took especially dramatic forms – in Cameroon under German rule as much as in the two Congos under the Belgians and the French. But even more than the regional fit, the original implications of these ideas were most stimulating to us. To simplify a very fine-grained line of argumentation: for Guyer it can be misleading to speak of ‘accumulation’ if one wants to understand the strong rivalry among ‘big men’ that marked relations in this area (as it still does). She proposes to use the term ‘accumulation’ in contexts where the aim is to accumulate the same on the same (as in capitalist accumulation: money on money). The rivalry between big men in her examples from Equatorial Africa is rather marked by ‘composition’ – the possibility of composing bundles of different forms of value and knowledge in order to claim pre-eminence; Guyer speaks also of ‘multiple self-realization’. Or to simplify even further: excellence in any field could be invoked in order to prevail in the confrontations with other big men that marked everyday life in these societies with their strong emphasis on personal achievement.

To one of us (Oestermann 2013), these ideas were inspiring for his efforts to make sense of the apparent readiness among many locals to become involved in the production and trading of wild rubber, a new product, the uncertain valuation of which developed under chaotic and often quite violent circumstances.

At the heart of this chapter stands a question about models. More specifically, I would like to sketch the English background to the historiographical endeavours of Matthew Paris (c.1200–1259), author of perhaps the most famous universal chronicle from medieval England: the Chronica majora (written c. 1240–59). My focus should not be misread as suggesting that there was no European dimension to Matthew's writing – there manifestly was, as anyone who has read Matthew Paris can confirm. However, considering the Chronica's English context raises some intriguing questions. Matthew's was by no means the first universal chronicle to survive from post- Conquest England. So far, though, there has not been much of an attempt to situate Matthew within this insular context, beyond what is sometimes (mistakenly) referred to as the ‘St Albans School’ of historians (about which more below). Yet, by leaving unexplored the question of origins, we are in danger of overestimating the degree of innovation in Matthew Paris, and of underestimating the rich indigenous tradition on which he drew. Most importantly, Anglo-Norman and Angevin writers of history embraced a horizon of reporting that stretched well beyond what we would normally associate with a merely regnal (as opposed to universal) chronicle. Surveying that tradition will help us to get a better sense of what was distinctive about Matthew, but also of the intellectual culture of Norman and Angevin England.

Matthew's example further helps highlight an odd gap in modern scholarship on medieval world chronicles. There seems, in fact, to be an implicit understanding that the genre fell into abeyance between the mid twelfth and very late thirteenth century. The standard point of reference on world histories in the later Middle Ages thus mentions neither Matthew Paris nor any of the other writers of universal history active between Sigebert of Gembloux (d. 1112) and Martin of Troppau (d. 1278): Roger of Wendover, Godfrey of Viterbo, Alberic of Troisfontaines, Helinand of Froidmont, Albert of Stade, or Vincent of Beauvais, to name but the most obvious, are all absent. Such neglect could, of course, partly reflect the fact that, Matthew's Chronica apart, none of these works is available in anything resembling a critical edition. What we have are heavily truncated renditions, if a printed version exists at all.

‘Struggle’ Economy & City Life

In her preface to the important volume, Money Struggles and City Life, Jane Guyer (2002: ix-xvi) raises interesting questions about the ways in which those of us who live and work in urban Africa witness what de Certeau (1984) describes as the ‘practice of everyday life’, which ‘encompasses systems of employment, provisioning, and meaning-making of impressive magnitude and relentless resilience’ (Guyer 2002: ix). In reflecting on the ‘domain of human struggles and achievement’ – particularly in Ibadan and other urban centres in southern Nigeria – within which ‘chronic uncertainty is pervasive’ (ibid.: x), Guyer argues that ‘(c)ase studies have to be a source both of data for analysis and of witnessed documentation of the realities of life’ (ibid.). In this chapter, I take up the task that she commended to African(ist) scholars in the ‘context of the intellectual and empirical challenges’ of 1990s Nigeria by focusing on an otherwise marginal phenomenon, albeit one that reflects the deep crisis of urban life in Africa in the post-structural adjustment era – an era which still bears not only the structural, economic, including fiscal, and social disasters imposed by Structural Adjustment Programmes, but also dramatizes the consequences of authoritarian rule with its attendant lack of urban planning.

This collection exemplifies the kinds of engagements across disciplines, subjects of study, and areas of the world that are so important to initiate and sustain, once we have recognized the fruitfulness of all the connections that provoke commitment to the intellectual tasks of the twenty-first century, appreciation of originality, and a stamina in our scholarship that can do justice to the commitment, originality and stamina of our colleagues and the world we study. The authors all represent disciplines with which I have tried to work – history, geography, economics, political studies, philosophy and broad subfields within anthropology – in ways that can open up new vistas.

When all the chapters are taken together, the impetus of the collection goes forward into futures: both intellectual and regional. Every chapter opens a new pathway or draws new attention to one already on the map, even though it may have become neglected for a while and needs re-clearing and re-directing. That the authors can find, in my own past work, the clues to some of these pathways, and the encouragement to keep hacking away at the older ones and opening up new ones, is also a source of new cues for me, as to where to go next. The image reminds me of other, previous, experimental maps for thought that derive from Africa: Paths in the Rainforest, by Jan Vansina (1990), Paths Towards a Clearing, by Michael Jackson (1989), The African Frontier, edited by Igor Kopytoff (1987), and the journeys of the epic Moneblum, transcribed by Samuel Eno Belinga (1978), on which I drew for the idea of ‘wealth-in-people as wealth-in-knowledge’ and ‘traditions of invention’, both of them cited in these chapters. The journey, as exploration and inspiration rather than conquest, is a common orientation in African studies. Its literal nature is expressed in the African arts, as in Amos Tutuola's (1987) book Pauper, Brawler, Slanderer, which I used to explore a philosophy of life that incorporates recurrent ‘confusion’ (Guyer 2015), in a paper cited here by Michael Watts. The journey as a literal trajectory is similar to the intellectual orientation highlighted here by Fred Cooper, that concepts ‘launch an enquiry, not … close off analysis by slotting something definitively into a category’.

As Saint Augustine suggests in his discussion of style in De doctrina Christiani, the world is full of humble things that can signify divinity and arouse the affect of Christian readers. In chapter 18, as part of his discussion of the three levels of style, he cites Matthew 10:42: “And whosoever shall give to drink to one of these little ones a cup of cold water only in the name of a disciple, amen I say to you he shall not lose his reward.” Augustine's attention is drawn to the “cup of cold water” as a commonplace image that illustrates the way in which Christianity elevates the humble:

When a preacher chooses this text from Matthew, he does not calibrate his style of speech according to the humbleness of the object in question, the cup of water. Rather, the presence of God exalts the humble object and demands “eloquence” and “power” in speech.

At the heart of this volume is the opposition between two terms, corroding and binding, between the capacity of satire and laughter simultaneously to subvert authority and confront iniquity while also solidifying communities of readers. Nowhere was this opposition more carefully, anxiously or contentiously studied than the golden age of English satire, between the restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660 and the deaths of Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope in the middle of the eighteenth century. These debates targeted the nature of satire: what it was and what it was supposed to do. During this same period, a second philosophical dispute also opened up on the margins of literary, sociological and psychological theory about the nature and function of laughter. Both sides of these debates were eagerly and antagonistically argued: satirists were high-minded public moralists or they were vindictive lampooners; laughter was a form of splenetic superiority or merely a pleasing response to an innocuous incongruity.

This chapter is an attempt to trace those debates. But it is also an attempt to account for the ticklish relationship between satire and laughter more broadly from the perspective of recent psychological theories. In both eliciting laughter and solidifying communities, I claim, satirists were also offering a deeply affective experience for readers. According to most theorists then and today, satire was supposed to correct vice – either the vices of the satiric victim or those of the reader. But such a theory of satiric correction presupposes that readers and targets, having read a work of satire, will proactively apply the lessons of the work to themselves. Richard Morton has offered the pithiest articulation of this thesis: ‘The aim of satire was reformation through perceptive ridicule. The satirist saw what was wrong with the world; the reader reciprocated by agreement and amendment.’ Critics of satire, however, have had severe doubts, both then and today, that there is any simple or straightforward transaction between reading satire and reforming vice. Readers might have laughed at satiric works and their victims, but many questioned whether those chortles so readily translated into an easily imbibed lesson or practical self-correction.