This volume presents an exciting collection of recent scholarship addressing some of the most important and intellectually consequential issues in contemporary African studies. It is inspired by, and achieves its thematic coherence in relation to, the extraordinarily profound and extensive contributions to that field by Jane I. Guyer over the last four decades. Guyer's insights have extended widely across a range of foundational issues in African studies, but they have largely clustered around a set of themes and questions that animate the contributions to this volume. These include gender and household economy; wealth, knowledge and personhood; currencies, money and value; labour and informality; and the intersections of debt, social obligation and temporality. One way of characterizing this volume, then, would be to say that it is a collection of outstanding recent contributions to scholarship that are united by their focus on a set of linked topics associated with Guyer's most important work.

To put matters this way would be accurate enough, but I do not feel that it would really get at the real core either of this volume or of Jane Guyer's scholarly contributions over the years. Instead, it seems to me that it is perhaps less a unity of topical focus than a shared intellectual sensibility that is the real common thread here. Central to this sensibility is what I regard as an extremely valuable, and perhaps not always fully appreciated, approach to the relation of the theoretical and the empirical. While we have long ago learned to mistrust the old separation of empirical descriptions from the theories that would account for them, there are few scholars who have so completely worked through the full implications of treating empirical accounts as always-already theoretical. Guyer's most profound theoretical contributions have never involved ‘applying’ a theoretical framework to a body of ‘raw’ data; instead, they have always worked from a careful and imaginative interpretation of the mundane realities that lie right before our eyes. Engaging ordinary practices – of work, of trade, of coordinating and ‘composing’ social relationships – in all their concreteness, she has enabled us, again and again, to see how taken-for-granted analytical frames have misled us.

Until recently there was a tendency in the study of medieval universal historiography to privilege texts that were regarded as original, in that they had brought something new to the genre and could be relied upon to illustrate new trends in historical writing. Other texts were also singled out because they deviated so clearly from a particular norm or tradition that they were deemed to be exceptional, or because they had enjoyed extraordinary popularity, and therefore were thought to have impacted on a relatively large cross-section of society. Such a focus on the exceptional, or the exceptionally popular, of course refers to more general trends in how past generations of medievalists have thought about relevance when studying medieval narrative texts. But it is important to realize that such a methodological position risks overlooking a substantial body of evidence that does not match any of these criteria.

These overlooked sources belong to a group of what I call – for want of other ways to classify them – ‘boring’ universal chronicles. They lack originality as regards the contents, in that they add little to what was already being transmitted in older or more prestigious works; they represent a way of thinking about the past that was, in some way or other, behind the times; and they failed to reach an audience beyond their authors’ immediate circle, remaining virtually unread until they were discovered by modern scholars. None of these factors – or, indeed, all of these factors combined – constitutes a good argument for dismissing these texts as irrelevant to our understanding of medieval historiographical culture, and of the various (social, educational, other) uses of chronicles. Although many are known through only one or two copies, as a ‘subgenre’ works of this type are extremely well attested in the manuscript evidence and in medieval booklists. Furthermore, the simple observation that there was a demand for such texts (however redundant they may look to us from an intellectual or creative viewpoint) – and the fact that substantial numbers of such texts were acquired in addition to what we consider to be the canon of medieval historiography – justifies us asking questions about why they were produced in the first place, what interests and concerns they reflected, and who found them useful.

Medieval religion was structured around the seven sacraments: baptism, confirmation, ordination, marriage, extreme unction, penance and the eucharist. Penance and the eucharist were the most regularly repeated of the two. On Sundays and feast days laypeople encountered the eucharist as a component of the mass, though for the most part they only consumed the consecrated host once a year, at Easter. They prepared themselves for this act by making their annual confessions and undertaking the penance assigned to them by their confessors. The other five sacraments marked changes of status and are therefore often interpreted as rites of passage. Through baptism in the parish font an infant became a member of the parish as well as of the wider Church. Membership brought certain obligations, including the payment of tithes, church attendance on Sundays and feast days, and annual confession and communion. Marriages were solemnised in parish churches after the priest had ascertained that the couple were in fact free to wed. Similarly, when a person died after properly receiving extreme unction, the parish churchyard was the most likely place of burial. Most laypeople would look to receive the sacraments from the hands of their parish clergy at their parish churches, so that in theory the ‘model of the Christian extended life course – from conception to afterlife – was fully realised in the materiality of the parish church and cemetery’. The parish church was also a conduit of saintly help. It would normally have an image of its patron saint and any number of other saints’ images. The images of the saints helped laypeople to seek their patronage and honour them. Groups such as guilds formed for fellowship, mutual support, moral development and the veneration of their own particular patron saints.

In practice the workings of the parish of Ripon were more complex, but the principle still applies: to understand how the parishioners of Ripon practised their religion, it is necessary to determine where they ordinarily heard mass and where they received the other sacraments. When focusing on sacraments and saints, it is immediately apparent that religious practices varied significantly depending on an individual's status, proximity to the minster and membership of a guild. Above all, these factors affected when and where a parishioner heard mass. It was very rare for the majority of parishioners to be in the minster together at the same time.

The following sixteen essays originated as part of the Third International Congress of the John Gower Society, held at the University of Rochester, June 29–July 3, 2014. The Third Congress represented both a kind of homecoming and an evident evolution for the Society: a homecoming because, in part out of conversations initiated in Rochester thirty years ago, the John Gower Society began to take shape; and an evolution for reasons that, it is hoped, the essays collected here will provide ample evidence. About half of the attendees and presenters at the Third International Congress were under thirty-five years of age. “Who are all these people?” Derek Pearsall is reported to have said, amazed at the number of younger scholars writing with such commitment and enthusiasm on Gower, expanding the conversation into fresh areas of inquiry and looking at familiar topics with keen, contemporary eyes. This reconceptualizing of Gower studies figures into the title and the contents of the present collection. John Gower: Others and the Self presents fruits of the rich and varietous––but profoundly cohesive—scholarly interchange that marked so strongly the Third International Congress. All the essays here have been included because in one manner or another they comment on facets of selfhood: views of the inside, the personal, and of the exterior, the outside in its interaction with the “other,” defined in several ways. Commissioned from long- established scholars and from Gowerians of the next generation as well, all the work included here has been produced specifically for this volume, and appears for the first time in print.

The book is divided into three sections. Part I, “Knowing the Self and Others,” consists of five essays that, taken together, reflect on multiple aspects of self-encounter. In the opening essay, “The Materiality of Cognition in Reading, Staging, and Regulation of Brain and Heart Activities in Gower's Confessio Amantis,” Russell A. Peck grounds the volume in a broad-ranging examination of the materiality of thought and feeling as Gower delineates them in his Middle English poem.

Dispute over the Palladium

This destruction of Troy took place as I have told you and as I found it in my Books. Beginning now, you will hear how the Greeks also encountered great obstacles along with immense and terrible catastrophes. You will now hear what their individual destinies were. When I have told you these things, you will not claim that any other people ever experienced greater suffering. As we read it, all of them came to grief and perdition. (26591–602)

The Greeks were perplexed and at odds as to whom the Palladium should go, given that Achilles was dead. If Achilles had been alive, no one, great or small, would have put forward any disagreement, unjust claim or opposition that stated he should not have it. But now Ajax Telamon claimed that it was right and reasonable for him to have the Palladium, since, as he put it and argued, he was so valiant and of such standing, and, moreover, he had already aided the members of the host on many occasions with his sharp, naked sword. In addition, he had satisfied their hunger so many times when they were in such misery and lacked nourishment, and he had also sustained so much combat. Diomedes too asked for it, pleading and demanding that all of them should consider his claim very carefully, for, if they listened to reason, no one had a greater right to it than he did. Therefore, the Palladium belonged entirely to him. He stated clearly and claimed that he had maintained the great effort and been victorious in deadly battles, rescuing them many times, so much so, indeed, that, if he alone had not defended them, they would have been forced to withdraw in anguish and dismay. None of the Greeks had endured as much as he had. If they were to decree that he was not to get the Palladium, this would weigh more heavily on him than anything else, although he would have to accept his loss. With these claims (as we read) arose great clamour and heated disputes. King Telamon became very angry and began to speak with great arrogance.

This article discusses the complex relationship between the cosmology, the philosophy of history, and the political ideology of the Pantheon, a ponderous universal chronicle written in prosimetrum (prose and verse) in the twelfth century by Godfrey of Viterbo. To understand the context in which this work should be placed, it is helpful to give a short account of the life of this littleknown medieval author. Godfrey was born around 1125 and refers to the Italian city of Viterbo, north of Rome, as his own patria. He was probably of German descent, as his own name, and those of his brother Werner and nephew Reimbert, suggests. Godfrey most likely had connections with the imperial family, and was sent by the emperor Lothar III to the cathedral school of Bamberg in 1133. Under Conrad III (1137–1152) he assumed the position of chaplain and notary at the imperial court in 1151, a post which he still held in the days of Henry VI (1191–1197). He was a member of the first Italian expedition of Frederick Barbarossa (1154–1155). He rose to a position of some importance in the imperial chancery, since he appears among the witnesses of the Treaty of Constance with Pope Eugene III in 1153 and in its renewal in 1155. He is called ‘Gotefredus Viterbensis capellanus regis (Godfrey of Viterbo, king's chaplain)’ in the Treaty of Constance (1153). He was probably also in Italy with Barbarossa in 1158, since he presents himself as an eyewitness to the conflict between Barbarossa and Milan. Between 1158 and 1162, Godfrey seems to have travelled several times between Italy and Germany.

Godfrey was in Frederick Barbarossa's entourage at Dôle when he attempted to meet with Louis VII in 1162. He was again with Barbarossa in Italy in 1163 (with the third Italian expedition of this German emperor) and was present in Barbarossa's fourth and fifth expeditions to Italy (1166–1168 and 1174–1178). An imperial charter from October 1169 is worth noting, in which Frederick Barbarossa bestows on Godfrey, his brother Werner and his nephew Reimbert a palatium built by the recipients themselves, which the emperor promises to reimburse, and grants them several exemptions and privileges, including exemption from the authority of the consul and people of Viterbo.

Introduction

In this chapter, I offer a view on the prospects for democracy in Nigeria against a backdrop of Jane Guyer's timeless concern with the dynamics of autonomy, resilience, co-optation and capitulation of micro (marginal, local) processes, structures and actors in their daily interactions and negotiations with the macro (dominant, national). In this regard, I attempt an outline of elements of continuity, change and the suspended – if restive and tense – state between change and continuity, in the role of patronage in the evolving democratic possibilities in Nigeria's Fourth Republic. I do all this in the specific context of Jane Guyer's enduring focus on and contributions to African studies in general and the study of Nigeria in particular. No less important, this chapter also engages with Guyer's intellectual encounters and collaborations with African scholars against the backdrop of her steadfast commitment to, and interest in, life in Nigeria, which has yielded unusual insights evident in her work on the African continent – a continent described by some as characterized by wholesale marginality of entire populations (Guyer 2002: xiii). She has devoted herself to the study of the people and their money, the people in other areas of the economy, the people and energy, the people, their spaces and places (rural and urban), and the people and politics.

I start at the level of the personal. As a student and teacher of political science, I come, along with many others, from a long tradition of adherence to the point, stated recently by Larry Diamond (2013: vii), that:

Sound, as Jean-Luc Nancy notes, is an assault. Our senses absorb sound without impediment—unlike the eye, the ear is multidirectional and always open. We can focus on particular sounds at the expense of others, but barring mechanical or artificial apparatuses, we cannot “close our ears” to sound. The act of listening is thus an opening to the presence of sound as it moves through space and time, and, as Nancy writes, “To listen is to enter into that spatiality by which, at the same time, I am penetrated, for it opens up in me as well as around me, and from me as well as toward me.” As a result, he argues, “To be listening is always to be on the edge of meaning.” Yet, of course, to hear is not the same as to listen: in both, the human body interacts with a sonic event, either through production or reception, but the mechanisms by which sound exerts pressure upon the ear are markedly different. In listening, we attend to a sound, be it a speech-act or a soundscape, with intention; listening is a temporal act of subjective engagement. Hearing is not an act; it is compulsory. In hearing, we are passive: provided we are awake and aware of sensation, sound enters into our consciousness without invitation. Listening, on the other hand, is our awareness of the present presence of sound as it unfolds in time, and it works through anticipation and expectation. We anticipate the word that is coming next. We find pleasure in the satisfying conclusion of a melodic turn or in the completion of a couplet. To look, the eye chooses to move from one sight to another, or (alternatively) to close and shut out sight altogether; to hear, the ear is passively waiting for sound to unfold; to listen, sound becomes an element of temporal subjectivity that is open to the other.

As such, to consider how Gower uses sound, and more specifically, how he uses the sound of his voice in the Vox Clamantis, is to question how we attune ourselves to his language and how we attend to the poetics of the text as it unfolds.

At the beginning of the thirteenth century, Wauchier de Denain wrote the oldest extant universal chronicle in French, the Histoire ancienne jusqu'a César. He was the first author we know to have borrowed this prestigious genre from Latin literature, transferring it to the French vernacular. In choosing to address a lay audience – the court of Flanders and the lord of Lille, Roger IV, who valued the use of French above all for political reasons – the author spearheaded a profound change in the refashioning and reinterpretation of ancient history at a time when the royal court was still deeply attached to the use of Latin.

La premiere histoire universelle écrite en langue française nous est connue sous le titre Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César: il s'agit d'un intitulé moderne, qui fait référence a l'interruption du récit au beau milieu de la conquete de la Gaule Belgique par César, puisque l'oeuvre est en effet inachevée, bien que déja tres longue. Dans l'un des manuscrits les plus anciens, le manuscrit de Paris, BnF, fr. 20125, ou elle occupe 375 folios, elle est introduite par la rubrique ‘Ci comence li prologues ou livre des estories Rogier et la porsivance’, qui contient le nom du mécene de l'auteur, Roger IV de Lille, d'ou le second titre donné par la critique moderne: Estoires Roger ou Histoires pour Roger. L'auteur de l’Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César ou Estoires Roger est le premier auteur français a transposer en langue vernaculaire ce genre prestigieux de l’écriture latine qu'est l'histoire universelle, en s'appuyant essentiellement sur le texte qui représente sans nul doute l'un de ses plus éminents modeles, les Historiae adversus paganos d'Orose, l'historien le plus lu au Moyen Âge selon B. Guenée. Le changement de langue et le choix d'un nouveau public, qui, au-dela d'un désir de connaissance et de divertissement, apprécie sans doute aussi pour des raisons politiques l'usage du français, s'accompagnent de modifications profondes dans la recomposition et l'interprétation de l'histoire antique, ainsi que d'une transformation des liens entre histoire et théologie.

I shall tell you briefly about the actions that will make up my whole book and about what I propose to treat in it. At the very beginning I shall tell you about Peleus, who lived for more than a hundred years. He had a noble wife, lady Thetis; that was her name, I believe. The two of them had a son, Achilles, who became very worthy and renowned. Next I shall tell you how Jason and Hercules, through their ingenuity and treachery, went to seek the Golden Fleece and how Medea used her knowledge to help them obtain and get hold of it. Then I shall tell you by what pretext they brought down Ilion and all of Troy, which was not yet very large, and how Laomedon, who was king and lord of that country, was slain. And you will hear how, after this destruction, Priam, a wise and courtly king, rebuilt it, how wide it was and how broad, and by which people it was populated; how they deliberated with lord Hector and Paris about seeking their aunt Hesiona, and how the noble count Antenor went to Greece to ask for her return. Afterwards, you will hear told and recounted what lord Paris, who abducted lady Helen, accomplished, how the temple, in which a thousand men were hacked to pieces, was destroyed, and about their marriage and its consummation, for which many paid dearly. (145–84)

Afterwards, you will hear the prophecies that no one wanted to heed or believe in any way at all, and because of this misfortune befell Priam. For Agamemnon and Menelaus, Telamon and Ajax, Palamedes and Ulysses, the duke of Athens and Achilles, together with a hundred powerful and renowned kings, set sail in anger with a great and formidable fleet to attack the Trojans. Never before or after did so many powerful knights unite, according to what I find in Dares's History. You will hear how many were in the fleet, how it was assembled, including the descriptions and appearances, the manners, characteristics and features of the kings and princes, damsels, ladies and the maidens who were part of the expedition.

This chapter engages with three broad themes addressed in Jane Guyer's (2007, 2016a, 2016b) recent work: temporalities and near futures (and especially the temporalities of immediate precarity and deep or structural time), modernity's aporias (the doctrines of the religious and the secular in relation to the contradictions and failures of modern secular national development) and the figure of the pauper or more properly the relations of violence and poverty. Much of Jane's work has of course built upon her hugely influential exploration of the cultural and political economy of Nigeria, a part of the world that has struggled throughout its postcolonial history with the failures of secular development, with the challenges of building a democratic future in a pluri-ethnic federal system, and with stark realities of political violence that surfaced almost immediately after independence with the descent into the Biafran civil war. Nigeria will be my crucible too in this chapter but I want to view the trio of concerns through the lens of the two insurgencies that have arisen since the return to civilian rule in 1999.

Boko Haram and the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) arose in different parts of the country and appear to share few family resemblances. They are of course very different. One is draped in the language of true Islam, the full implementation of shari'a law, a rhetoric of restoration and purity, and a hostility to any sense of multi-religious tolerance linked to Boko Haram's deepening affiliations with global jihadist networks. The other is resolutely secular and modern; it appears to resemble a militant civic nationalism calling for ‘resource control’ and constitutional reform (including of fiscal federalism).

Introduction

Stack after stack of pallets, each piled high with crates of oranges, await the trucks that will take them from the farm of Grootplaas, located on South Africa's border with Zimbabwe, to the port of Durban on South Africa's Indian Ocean coast. From there, ships will take them to countries across Europe, the Middle East and East Asia. Different crate designs signal different agents, buyers and brands. The logos of British supermarkets and American citrus providers (even though South African oranges reportedly cannot be sold in the United States) jostle with those of Capespan fruit agents and the local Limpopo Valley trade name. Michael, Grootplaas's personnel manager and packshed administrator, moves between the pallets, dressed in a white coat and armed with a clipboard. Key to his role is producing the labels that detail each pallet's journey. As they sit next to the loading bay, the pallets of oranges evoke industrial-scale production, global connections, and the clinical formality of factories in the fields. Certainly, this is a long way from the old stereotypes of South African farms as quasi-feudal, anachronistic backwaters.

At the very centre of the packshed's network of conveyor belts, and the gantries overlooking them, is Michael's harvest-time office. Visible to all, it is a statement about the importance of paperwork in the work of the farm. Alongside the export labels and documents lie Grootplaas's personnel records, for which Michael is also responsible as personnel manager. These follow Michael in a bank of filing cabinets, as his work moves seasonally between the packshed and the farm's workshop. The contents tell one version of work and life on the border farms. Applications for employment, contracts, South African documents for ‘normalization’ (regularization), and records of dismissal all speak in a corporate register – ‘thank you for your interest in our company’, the application for employment declares. But, among these documents, Zimbabwean departure permits signed by thumbprint speak of another reality – of migrant workers fleeing the estate, even without their official identification.

Working on the border farms involves constantly relating to official and semi-official documents and institutionalized arrangements. This is doubtless what we expect of formal employment.

I want to begin with two classic observations about incest and medieval cultural attitudes. The first will be known to anyone with even a passing familiarity with Gower scholarship. G. C. Macaulay opens his editor's notes on Book VIII of the Confessio Amantis by remarking: “We may suppose that our author had some embarrassment as regards the subject of his eighth book.” He goes on to suggest that Gower made incest the seventh deadly sin rather than lechery as he had somewhat improvidently already treated most of the other subcategories of the sin in earlier books. At the distance of a century-plus, it is fairly easy to see the embarrassment here is Macaulay's rather than Gower's. It may be ours as well, although probably in a different sense than Macaulay intended. Gower's prominent interest in incest may have embarrassed his readers from the very beginning. We can find a certain anxiety in the first recorded reaction to the Confessio. I refer, of course, to the distaste for the tales of Canace and Machaire and Apollonius expressed by one of Gower's contemporaries, a fellow Londoner, fellow poet, and a socialclimbing bureaucrat to whom posterity has been somewhat kinder than it has to Gower. To help us begin to come to conceptual grips with this challenging aspect of Gower's work, I turn to my second citation.

While the citation itself may not be as familiar to Gower scholars as Macaulay's remark, the sentiment it expresses certainly will be. It comes from the great psychoanalyst, Otto Rank. Rank begins the chapter on the Middle Ages in his epic 1912 study, The Incest Theme in Literature and Legend as follows:

Readers of our translation of the Roman de Troie will have different purposes and differing degrees of acquaintance with the Old French language. This Appendix is aimed at those with access to the original text of the romance, or indeed to other contemporary Old French texts, who wish to be aware of some of the intricacies of Old French vocabulary and who have at least a rudimentary knowledge of Old French. In this section we examine some of the problems that translators of this language encounter. In particular, we wish to take a look at some of the significant Old French terms that are found in the Troie and other contemporary texts and that usually have an apparent equivalent in Modern French and sometimes also in Modern English. These seemingly straightforward words are not always as easy to translate as one might think, as the old and modern meanings are often not the same, or not entirely the same. For example, in addition to the meaning ‘rich’ the very commonly used Old French term riche often means ‘powerful’ or, when describing an object, ‘splendid’. A good translation of a particular example may be ‘rich and powerful’. The present list of terms selected for comment is by no means exhaustive, but it is hoped that it will provide anyone who consults texts from the second half of the twelfth-century with a glimpse of the range of options that are available to the translator. An important aspect of the words studied here is that they often have close links to the feudal world, i.e. to the overall socio-political context of Benoît's work, and also to the courtly world, i.e. to the way in which the aristocracy lived at the time and to the values it embraced. Unless otherwise stated, examples cited here are from the Roman de Troie (Old French spelling varies to such an extent that no effort is made here to include all variant forms of the words studied).