Solomon teaches us and tells us, and one reads this in his writings, that no one should hide what he knows. Rather one should make it public so that it becomes profitable and honourable, for this is what our ancestors did. If those who invented the division of the seven arts and wrote great books about them had remained silent, as well as the philosophers who composed treatises that provide instruction for everyone, we would truly now be leading foolish lives and living like beasts. We would not even be able to distinguish between knowledge and folly, nor differentiate among them. These men will always be remembered and renowned for their great learning, for knowledge that is not made known is quickly forgotten and lost. Whoever possesses learning, but does not teach or communicate what he knows, cannot fail to be forgotten. Knowledge that is communicated germinates, flowers and bears fruit. You should be aware that things often improve for whoever desires to learn and makes an effort to do so. No one can hear, know or remember too much that is good. Nor should anyone hesitate to do or teach what is good. Whoever is more knowledgeable should achieve more. No one should shirk this task. That is why I wish to apply myself to beginning a work of history. I would like to translate it from the Latin in which I find it, providing I have sufficient intelligence and skill, into the French vernacular so that those who are ignorant of Latin can enjoy it in French. The history is most noble and grand, and it treats of a great enterprise and great deeds. The destruction of Troy has been related in many diverse ways, but the truth of the matter is rarely heard. (1–44)

Homer, who was a wonderful cleric, wise and learned, related the destruction, the great siege and the reason why Troy was deserted in such a way that it was never again repopulated. But his book does not tell the truth, for we know for certain and without doubt that he was not born until a hundred years after the great expedition was assembled.

Infinite/Unfinished Books

The Estoria de Espanna and the General Estoria, written under the supervision of Alfonso X of Castile roughly between 1270 and 1284, are two of the major historiographical enterprises of the Middle Ages. With them, the so-called Learned King attempted to offer a comprehensive view of human history with a special focus on Iberia, in support of his claims to the imperial throne and supremacy over the other Hispanic kingdoms. As such, the ‘estorias’ occupy a place of honour at the core of the vast Alfonsine manuscript production, encyclopedic enough to grant the king a sort Solomonic aura that resonated far beyond the Hispanic realm. The luxurious codices he commissioned not only bore witness to the king's own life and ideals but also constituted an intellectual legacy that his heirs had to confront. In this regard, the durable trace left by the General Estoria and, most specifically, the Estoria de Espanna can be discerned in all subsequent attempts to write a history of the Iberian Peninsula until recent times. But the same ambition was also the cause of their relative failure, since neither of these projects was finished. As a consequence, these royal manuscripts’ present condition seems to turn them into ‘libros infinidos’, at a time ‘without ending’ and ‘of impossible finalization’, to use the term coined by the infante don Juan Manuel, Alfonso X's nephew.

The General Estoria and the Estoria de Espanna were composed roughly in parallel, as if they were two sides of the same historiographical effort. Thus, the former was conceived as a world chronicle encompassing all human knowledge from the Creation until the time of writing, including not only the biblical episodes of the Old Testament but also a detailed account of pagan history.

Introduction

In sub-Saharan Africa in the last decade or so ‘bottom-of-the-pyramid’ (BoP) or ‘bottom billion capitalism’ has taken off. So has the associated scholarship (see for example Cross and Street 2009; Dolan and Roll 2013; Blowfield and Dolan 2014). The literature spans two distinct sets of disciplines: economics, business and development studies, on one hand, keen to think about the global margins as sites of new opportunity, and those disciplines in the interpretive social sciences and humanities, on the other, that see a new market logic at work on the global limits and about which there is some significant scepticism. In the main, the extension of micro-finance and the creation of new consumer markets aim at the inclusion of populations previously presumed extrinsic to capital. If in the past the poorest and most vulnerable were the subjects of ‘Third World’ development, they are now understood as capable of unleashing entrepreneurial potential that will bring about economic development as a consequence of sound business practice at the bottom (see for example Hart 2005; London 2009; cf. Roy 2010). Rather than ‘uplifting’ the poor, the new economics of ‘bottom billion capitalism’ casts the poor as ‘stakeholders’ and ‘change agents’ eager to use commercial acumen as a means to self-empowerment. Yet, predictably, the spread of BoP schemes also involves the spread of new technologies of ‘capture’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987) that not only formalize previously informal modes of livelihood, but also routinely produce new relations of subjectivation (Elyachar 2005; also see Lazzarato 2011). Such technologies not only presume knowledge of the poor, they also derive from such knowledge the means to new modes of governance over marginal and vulnerable populations.

My focus in this chapter is on South Africa and the forms of financial inclusion ostensibly afforded by the rise of ‘bottom-of-the-pyramid’ efforts there. As such, financial inclusion bears specific consideration in the face of South Africa's transition to democracy and embrace of neoliberalism.

Book VI of the Vox Clamantis is Gower's most important analysis of England's legal system. Except for its remarks about the king, however, the book is hardly noted in the context of medieval legal studies or even in work on Gower. It is substantial, comprising 1366 lines divided into twenty-one chapters, slightly less than half of which are devoted to an open letter to Richard II (Chapters 8–18) that is its climax. This speculum principis is the energy-absorbing black hole of Book VI, indeed of the entire Vox Clamantis after the conclusion of the Visio Anglie. Addressed to young Richard in his capacity as head of state and law, it has attracted such attention, ever since G. C. Macaulay indicated how Gower's thought about the king evolved, that the poet's focus on the law's other representatives has gone largely unnoticed. Maria Wickert devoted an entire chapter to this Fürstenspiegel in her groundbreaking Studien zu John Gower, and John Fisher, whose views on the Vox were shaped throughout his own study by Wickert's conclusions, considered it the midpoint in the poet's evolving thought about his young monarch: “In its final form […] the Vox Clamantis and Cronica Tripertita […] become a unified commentary on the tragic course of Richard's rule from 1381 to 1400, with a prologue (the Visio), a midpoint (the Epistle), and an epilogue (the Cronica).” The speculum principis occupies centerstage in an evolving royal drama, and the A- and B-Text variants at its beginning and conclusion bracket the tipping point in Gower's changing opinions about the monarch he once thought to guide.

Book VI also contains a considerable amount of commentary on other aspects of the legal system. Most important for our purposes is Chapter 5, an open letter to the judiciary who preside over England's common-law courts. This chapter comprises the first instance of an epistle in the sixth book, and it has gone largely unnoticed and unremarked. Wickert notes its existence dismissively at the outset of her detailed discussion of the open letter to the king and passes it over without investigation. Yet it comprises an entire chapter of Book VI and is introduced, like the letter to the king, by an anticipatory chapter. It is therefore a substantial component of Gower's survey of the law.

The Middle High German Kaiserchronik, the chronicle of the emperors, is the first extensive verse chronicle in the Middle Ages in any European language, including Latin. Probably composed in Regensburg in Southern Germany around 1150, it soon became enormously popular: forty-nine manuscripts and fragments survive from the period between its composition and 1549.

The poem covers the period from the founding of Rome to the reign of Conrad III in 1146. It contains a history of kings and popes, in a somewhat erratic order, with episodes from the reigns of thirty-six ‘Roman’ and nineteen ‘German kings’ (some of whom are ahistorical), told alongside stories of various popes. Often, the stories are introduced with a formula: ‘The book tells us that X then held the Empire’ and most end with the length of the ruler's reign in years, months, and days, which are in most cases invented by the author. The stories differ considerably in length: the shortest are accounts of the king's reign articulated in just a few lines, the longest include long narratives (Claudius-Faustinian, for example, stretches to 2863 lines), entire legends (such as those about Sylvester and Veronica), short hagiographies, descriptions of pagan religion, exempla, long dialogues and debates (such as the dispute between St. Peter and Simon Magus in the Faustinian story).

The Kaiserchronik offers imperial history written in a vernacular language, composed at a time when the writing of universal histories in Latin was prolific. It draws extensively from a variety of sources, both Latin and vernacular. The chronicle attracted scholarly attention early on and keeps scholars busy to this day. The reason for this ongoing attention is that the chronicle, criticized by many for its lack of coherence, its many ‘errors’ and its sometimes inartistic narrative, is a unique work that has not yet been fully understood. A vast field of questions remains open, ranging from the author, to the place and circumstances of its composition, its use of sources, its genre, its target audience and its actual readership, the intention behind its composition and its literary context. The immense success of the work, despite what its modern readers sometimes consider its problematic composition, makes understanding the Kaiserchronik all the more important for what it reveals about literary consumption from the twelfth century onwards.

Laughing Gas

From 1797 to 1798 and again between 1803 and 1805, there was an outpouring of prints depicting Napoleon Bonaparte and the threatened – on many accounts, impending – invasion of Britain. The unequivocal message of the prints was that Bonaparte and the French army posed a credible threat to Britain, in particular around the south coast where the crossing of the English Channel, or La Manche, seemed an eminently practical possibility. Some prints were clearly fanciful and humorous, but even these had more serious components. For example, Isaac Cruickshank's scatological Bonne Farte Raising a Southerly Wind (Plate I: 1798) depicts Bonaparte bent over, his breeches pulled down, being fed a purgative to enable him to fart a stream of invasion balloons, men on horseback, guillotines and sundry military forces and apparatus across the channel. On the right, a huge fish delivers up members of the French Assembly to Dover, including Gaspard Monge, the mathematician credited with designing a giant raft for the invasion, to be welcomed by Charles James Fox who comments on the fragrant breeze. At the centre of the scene, in the middle distance, is Monge's huge invasion raft surrounded by accompanying smaller vessels. This representation is dramatically more realistic than most of the other elements in the picture.

Did people at the time think that this print was funny? How did they react and how were they meant to react to the invasion raft? It is one of the more popular prints today but it raises some difficult questions about who would laugh at it and why, and what the relationship might be between the humorous elements and the more realistic representations of danger in the print. And those questions need to be answered if we are to understand the creation and publishing of caricatures and popular prints, how designers and engravers might have conceived of what they were doing and the place that prints had in the political culture of the period.

One possible source for the printmakers’ construction of their craft, albeit much critiqued in the eighteenth century, was Hobbes's suggestion that ‘Laughter is nothing else but sudden Glory, arising from some sudden Conception of some Eminency in our selves, by comparison with the infirmity of others, or with our own formerly.’

In the 1760s, an English recusant who ended his days in Spain put together a series of biographies of Old and Middle English writers. One of the authors portrayed is John Gower, who is presented as:

This unpublished manuscript is the earliest known reference to John Gower to be found in Spain throughout the early modern period, despite the fact that two of the most important libraries in the country have copies of the medieval Portuguese and Castilian translations of the Confessio Amantis. Actually, it is with a certain perplexity that we discover the first published notice of any of these translations in Spain only at the end of that same century, in an appendix to a bibliographical compilation.

The location of the two Iberian Confessios among the holdings of, on the one hand, the Royal Library in Madrid (the Portuguese manuscript) and, on the other, the Royal Library of El Escorial (the Castilian manuscript) has tended to be unquestionably associated with what is common assent among scholars: the Lancastrian affiliation of both translations through John of Gaunt's daughters, Philippa and Catherine, who were married, respectively, to the kings of Portugal and Castile. Thus, the Iberian reception of Gower's Confessio Amantis within the context of the monarchy has been taken for granted, even for the two extant manuscripts. However, some recent codicological studies are offering new views on the scribal contexts of these manuscripts as well as on the history of their early ownership. The purpose of my essay is to examine these findings from a heretofore unexplored perspective: the early modern reception of the Iberian copies of the Confessio. The fact that these royal libraries were only founded in the early modern period makes us wonder about the fortune of the two manuscripts between the fifteenth century—when they were copied—and the time when they were acquired for those collections.

This book has considered the social production of time, focusing on religious practices and memorial culture within the vast parish of Ripon during the fifteenth century. The minster was the most powerful influence, dividing the day with its bells, the week with its Sunday high masses and the year with its calendar. The spiritual authority invested in the chapter bolstered this power by enabling it to enforce proper observance. Yet the minster was not the only force that shaped time in Ripon and the surrounding area. Lay elites used important feast days as opportunities to display their status, various types of founders endowed their own masses inside and outside the minster, and for much of the year many people followed their own routines in the numerous chapels of the parish. The families and other groups powerful enough to take hold of these opportunities could use them to reinforce their power. Furthermore, ritual and attendance at the minster fluctuated according to the day and season, so it is only within this context that its potential to commemorate the dead can properly be understood. The same applies to the dual nature of the parish and the privileged religious practices of the gentry. While many of the demands imposed by the liturgical calendar were universal, the special character of the ritual year in Ripon was determined by their combination with the feasts of the minster's own saint.

St Wilfrid, apostle of the north of England, was the spiritual patron and lord of late medieval Ripon. His lordship was symbolised by his heraldry, displayed alongside that of the knights and archbishops who sponsored the rebuilding of the nave in the early sixteenth century, and it was manifested in the oaths of fealty that the knights and gentlemen who were Marmion tenants swore to him when they inherited their lands. This special form of tenure integrated new lords into parish society when old families became extinct in the male line of succession. Even if they no longer carried the relics of the saint at Rogation, their oaths were still timed to correspond with Ripon's major annual procession. In their place other men of good standing in the parish bore the relics of their patron, who protected their lands and livelihoods from disease, bad weather and demonic influence.

This list of the known manuscripts of the Roman de Troie is based on Jung, La Légende de Troie, chapter 1.6, and Constans's edition of the Troie, VI, chapter 1. These volumes should be consulted for codicological information relating to folio references, date, illustrations, rubrics, etc. The sigla by which these manuscripts are designated are those found in Jung. Note that since the publication of Constans's edition (1904–12), a number of the libraries housing these manuscripts have been renamed.

The following thirty manuscripts contain a complete or almost complete text of the Roman de Troie:

Introduction

Historical narratives figure prominently in contemporary African affairs. Since the late 1980s, international initiatives seeking to ‘democratize’ African governments and decentralize governing institutions have prompted widespread debate, sometimes conflict, over land claims, citizenship, eligibility for political office, and the relevance of historical precedents for social and political entitlements in the present. Describing the return of electoral politics to a northern Beninese town in the early 1990s, Bako-Arifari wrote that ‘history [was] a subject of permanent discussion’ (1997: 6). By linking authority and resource access to precise delineations of territory and ownership, neoliberal projects for protecting property rights and decentralization intensified debates over local and national belonging, prompting people to search for historical precedents to guide and legitimate social and political action in the present (Bierschenk et al. 2000; Chauveau 2000; Lentz, 2013; Tsikata and Yaro, 2011; Amanor 2012).

Understandings of the past have also been brought to bear in negotiating value in the marketplace. As competition over land and landed property increased in the years after independence, contestants engaged in a vigorous search for historical precedents to validate their claims and discredit those of their rivals. Historical imagination plays a role in a wide array of economic transactions, from the purchase and sale of ‘antiquities’, to loans, outlays on environmental protection, and the production and transmission of historical knowledge itself. Drawing examples from a variety of ethnographic and historical studies of economic conditions and practices in Africa, this chapter reflects on history in the marketplace, asking how history adds value to things transacted in the marketplace, and how the production of history and the constitution of market value inform and reflect on each other.

Markets for History: Objects, Activities, Landscapes & Knowledge

History enters into the negotiation of market value in different ways. Writing of things with ‘historical value, derived from acts of production, use or appropriation that have involved the object in the past’, David Graeber refers specifically to heirlooms – objects preserved and handed on from one generation to the next – and the rich body of anthropological writings that has accumulated on them (2011: 105). The present discussion suggests that history adds value not only to scarce and specialized heirlooms, but also to a wide variety of marketed things that take account of the past in many different ways.

Since antiquity, war has been the subject of a wide-ranging sub-genre of narrative poetry or historical fiction, from Homer's epics and the Bhagavad Gita, Statius's Thebaid and Vergil's Aeneid, to modern novels and war poetry such as Lynette Roberts's poem ‘Gods with Stainless Ears’, from which the second epigraph to this volume is taken. Yet all these works treat the same phenomenon: the fortunes of the warriors and others who experience whatever in war is at stake. The men who shine darkly are warriors whose epic heroism reveals a darkness that the trauma of war allows to extend throughout the narrative, much as darkness does each day on the battlefield in the Troie. A more ‘visible’ depiction of war's atrocities and traumas is literally available today in Ken Burns's documentary, The Civil War, and, of course, in newspaper accounts and photographs of war, in sites and climes that are not that far removed from the presumed battlefields of historic Troy in Turkey. In war, as in other walks of life, plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. Benoît's Roman de Troie depicts war, with its causes and effects, over a period of ten years and more of animosity and hostility between Greeks and Trojans. It can claim originality in the way it brought to its twelfth-century vernacular audiences a subject that was less well known to them than it was to those who had received a Latin education.

The Medieval Reception of the Troie

The Roman de Troie is a medieval masterpiece that was greatly admired by the public at which it was aimed. We therefore begin our exploration of the medieval reception of the Troie in the Middle Ages by assessing the number of extant manuscripts. Five names survive as twelfth-century French authors whose narrative poetry remains prominent in our own time: Thomas d'Angleterre, Marie de France, Chrétien de Troyes, Wace and, last but not least, Benoît de Sainte-Maure. However, not all the narrative poetry of these authors enjoys the prominence and attention that it enjoyed in their own time. If we compare the number of surviving manuscripts of these authors’ works and the frequency of medieval translations and adaptations of them in their own and other languages, striking differences in taste are evident.