Until after the Civil War, few women in America played brass instruments even recreationally. A woman who dreamed of joining a band, much less becoming a brass soloist, faced the prospect of invading a steadfastly male domain. Later, beginning in the 1870s, family bands, which included the girls and “young ladies” as well as the male members of the family, became popular concert attractions. The Strohl Family, promoted as the “musical marvels of the age,” included eight siblings (three brothers and five sisters) who all played in the brass band. The Noss Family Band featured both Bertha Noss and May Noss on cornet. Kittie Shepard's cornet solos were among the most popular numbers on the Shepherd Family's concerts. Anna Berger, who became widely known as the cornetist with the Berger Family, enjoyed a successful career as a soloist after the family concert company was no longer active. By the 1880s and continuing into the early twentieth century, female cornetists such as Mattie Babel, Bessie Gilbert, and Marie McNeil rivaled their male counterparts in popularity.

“America's Greatest Lady Cornetist”

Alice Raymond, who began her career during the mid-1880s and enjoyed billing as “America's Greatest Lady Cornetist” for three decades, was perhaps the best known of the female cornet virtuosos. She performed throughout America and widely abroad, appeared at leading expositions, performed as a soloist with the Marine Band under the baton of John Philip Sousa in Washington, DC, and entertained magnates such as Andrew Carnegie (see figure 4.24).

Despite her fame, the details of Raymond's biography have remained clouded for several reasons. At various times, she used four different names: Alice Little (her birth name), Alice Alvord (during her first marriage), Alice Kurkamp (during her second marriage), as well as Alice Raymond (her professional name, taken from the opera Raymond, by Ambroise Thomas). Additionally confusing, while growing up, she lived first in Springfield, Illinois, and later in Springfield, Massachusetts. After 1904 she was abroad for more than twenty years during the prime of her career. Later in her life, she changed her birth year in most records to appear ten or twelve years younger than her actual age.

Despite a century of scholarship troubling the boundary between medieval and early modern, one still encounters Jakob Burckhardt's periodization that sets apart a medieval classicism – distant, reverential, and decontextualizing from renaissance classicism, which, conscious of historical difference and change, engaged classical authors as peers and familiars. This development was epitomized by Petrarch's letters to Cicero upon his “discovery” of Cicero's familiar letters and was dramatized by Florentines giving orations in ancient Roman dress. Nevertheless, medieval scholars since Charles Haskins have found ever earlier instances of the kinds of discourse and self-representations that get called “humanism,” “classicism,” “individuality,” and so forth. The milieu examined in this chapter, north-western France in the late eleventh century, featured a small group of high-status men, the Loire Valley poets, who imitated classical authors, especially Ovid and Horace. They had a good ear for meter, a refined aesthetic sensibility, and a propensity for reimagining their lives and circumstances through poetic analogy to the lifeworld of high-status Roman men represented by ancient Roman lyric. The Loire Valley poets engaged with the classics in a playful, creative way, treating classical texts not as disembodied, ahistorical authorities offering phrases for colour and pomp, but as living utterance and social performance.

Like their early modern counterparts, highly educated literary men of the late eleventh century played in the wardrobe of personae offered by Roman lyric poetry, and there found costumes from which they fashioned authoritative masculine personae. The Roman patrician masks fit the roles these medieval poets played in their lives – not as spiritual authorities (though they were all highly ranked churchmen), but as heads of households and administrators of material property and ranked hierarchies of men at work. The lyric poetry they wrote on the playful and even erotic themes were not juvenile exercises to be replaced in maturity by more serious writing; according to internal references, these poets were already abbots, archdeacons, and bishops charged with the care of souls and significant temporal power.

Their poetic exchanges, then, were not then a discursive space of retreat from responsibility, but a signifier of their authority, status, social relations, even partisan affiliation in contemporary controversies over church governance.

ALTHOUGH IMAGES OF distributive diagrammatic trees, such as trees of virtues and vices, trees of Jesse, and trees of knowledge from the liberal arts, are omnipresent in the meditative imaginary of the late Middle Ages, they are not the only exegetical tools and mnemotechnic devices to use the model of a tree to guide the faithful on the path of wisdom (Fig. 6.1). Other structures that played an essential role in meditation, exegesis, and the recollection of Scripture from the thirteenth century onwards were vegetal and/or arboreal areas such as forests and orchards. These places are characterised by large numbers of trees, and when used as a mnemotechnic device they describe, by analogy, the organisational activity of the mind. Indeed, in a similar manner to the trees of the forest, which are thinned for humans to find their bearings more easily as they traverse it, and planted for their produce, so too must the individual who desires knowledge clear her mind and cultivate her memory in order to gain new knowledge and remember Scripture. In the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, forests and orchards had close lexical, imaginary, and metaphorical links with other places where plants grow, such as meadows and gardens. While neither the meadow nor the garden is, strictly speaking, an area containing a significant number of trees, in the Middle Ages an area described as a ‘meadow’ could also refer, by extension, to an orchard. On the one hand a meadow is, by definition, a place where no trees grow: the only trees that come into contact with meadows are those that mark their boundaries, i.e. hedgerows. On the other hand, the garden, whose definition varies from one context and period to another, is characterised by the coexistence of several kinds of plants that are not necessarily trees.

Among the areas covered by tree canopy, the orchard occupies an intermediate position between the garden and the forest. Unlike a forest, an orchard does not consist of trees that have grown naturally according to an ordo determined by the Creator, rather it is the consequence of human intervention, which aims at optimising nature's generative power.

It is a commonplace that the world became much smaller for everyone in the course of the twentieth century, but for the inhabitants of remote St Helena the changes took longer to materialize than for most. It might be mentioned that while the logistical and technological changes that form the basis of this final chapter were being acted out, the national status of the islanders themselves within the world underwent a period of unaccustomed turmoil.

Having formerly enjoyed undifferentiated full British citizenship since the granting of the East India Company's royal charter of 1673, St Helena was reclassified as a British Dependency in 1834. For a century and a half the change of status had little discernible impact, but with the introduction of the British Nationality Act 1981 the islanders found themselves suddenly placed at a major disadvantage when (along with thirteen other such territories) they were deprived of their rights of residence in the UK – collateral casualties of government moves to block potential large-scale immigration from Hong Kong to the UK as Britain's ninety-nine-year lease on the New Territories approached its end. Although the numbers directly affected on St Helena were comparatively small, the slight was deeply felt by the entire population, which had come to regard itself as occupying ‘the lost county of England’. Two decades of intensive lobbying followed, with the islanders taking their complaint of injustice as far as the United Nations. Eventually, with the passing of the British Overseas Territories Act on 21 May 2002 (the putative 500th anniversary of the island's discovery), full rights were restored. Even with its national status cemented, far-reaching changes in St Helena's international relations continued to unfold, as they had done throughout the island's history.

The coming of the submarine telegraph

The Boer War had brought to the island a more oblique benefit than that represented by the prisoner-of-war camp (Chapter 8): this was the arrival on 26 November 1899 of a submarine telegraph cable, laid with the primary aim of enhancing communication between South Africa and London.

ARS EST ARBOR, homo est arbor, scientia est arbor, anima est arbor (‘Art is a tree, man is a tree, knowledge is a tree, the soul is a tree’): these Latin statements were so common during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, when tree frameworks represented simultaneously anthropological and cosmological conceptions, that their value as a cultural indicator is often overlooked by modern scholars. Originally attributed to Aristotle by Diogenes Laertius, the statement above reflects on the sweetness of the fruits of science with respect to the bitter efforts required to discover the principles of knowledge, whose roots lie deeply hidden in nature. From Late Antiquity to the Middle Ages this multidirectional approach to the discovery and creation of knowledge was transmitted via visual representation. This paper goes beyond revisiting the multiple instances of tree structures in the medieval scientific tradition. Indeed, my aim is to demonstrate how the conceptual structures of medieval scientific thought owe their development to arborescent structures. However, without conceptual references and an understanding of their pragmatic contexts these representations cannot be effectively understood; I therefore adopt a historical perspective which also allows for consideration of their philosophical aspects.

Ramon Llull (1232–1315) extended the Aristotelian statement cited above by drawing an analogy between the perceived motion of thought in progress and the natural growth of flowers as they appear on branches, following the movement of nutrients to the buds:

En un ensayo de 1986 dedicado a la correspondencia de César Vallejo, David Sobrevilla llamaba la atención sobre el significativo aporte que hacían las cartas a los estudios vallejianos. Según él, las misivas contribuían a la cronología y a la exégesis de la obra, a la construcción de la biografía y a la dilucidación de cuestiones ecdóticas. Sin dejar de ser cierto todo esto, cualquier acercamiento crítico a la correspondencia como clave de acceso a la vida y obra de César Vallejo debe evitar posiciones excesivamente optimistas.

Una lectura atenta de las cartas, como la que aquí proponemos a través de nuestra anotación, hace surgir más preguntas que respuestas y pone de manifiesto, a la par que nuevas informaciones, importantes lagunas y carencias. Así, nos parece evidente que el uso de las cartas para cuestiones ecdóticas es limitado: ninguna de las misivas que se conocen hasta la fecha discute la composición de poemas específicos; tampoco nos explican por qué Los heraldos negros se publicó en 1919 (a pesar de que su aparición se había anunciado, como inminente, un año antes) ni aclaran las fascinantes escrituras y reescrituras de Trilce, ni la de los poemas publicados póstumamente. Lo mismo sucede con la composición de Escalas, Fabla salvaje, El tungsteno y Rusia en 1931. Dentro de esta limitación, encontramos en las cartas unos pocos datos que, por humildes que sean, conviene tener en cuenta: la fecha de composición aproximada de un par de poemas incluidos en Los heraldos negros; una referencia a la entrega de Trilce a la imprenta; otra sobre los móviles de Vallejo al dar a conocer sus poemas inéditos a Luis Alberto Sánchez en 1927 y permitirle su publicación; además de una mención a la extensión de su libro «L’art et la révolution». Por último, destacan las alusiones que Vallejo hace a su «libro publicable de versos» en misivas a Juan Larrea de fines de 1935 y comienzos de 1936, particularmente importantes para la historia de la edición de la obra póstuma de Vallejo.

De la afirmación de Sobrevilla debemos rescatar que la recopilación de las cartas se justifica por una contribución central: no hay lugar a duda de que el aporte más importante que estas hacen es el biográfico.

With Kildare as the king's leading old colonial lord in Ireland, a major aristocratic rapprochement that spanned the Tudor realm materialised in the 1520s. With the support of Lord Grey of Dorset, Kildare returned to favour at Court and was allied with the Marques through marriage to Elizabeth Grey. After supporting the Boleyn match (albeit with little choice) Kildare was of high standing in an aristocratic faction that also included Wiltshire and Norfolk. Since his governorship, Thomas Howard had been sought by various figures in Ireland but over the course of the decade he became aligned with Kildare. Although the flow of complaints against Kildare contributed to tensions and suspicion, this had long been a feature of Irish politics, and one which the ninth earl was generally confident he could transcend. What follows is an account the Geraldine position from 1524, because as suggested above, a broad assessment from this perspective is required in order to more fully understand the true character of the rebellion. This is attempted, firstly by examining the shared interests of Kildare and Norfolk along with the wider strategies pursued by the earl. Finally, a specific courtly context is assessed in the hope of shedding fresh light on the cultural politics of the Kildare ascendancy.

Kildare campaigned widely across the island from 1524–6, firstly in support of Con Bacach O’Neill, whose appearance at Christ Church had so appalled the author of the ‘Discourse’. The return of Kildare stabilised Ulster and as one of the earl's chief ‘confederates’, O’Neill also campaigned in the midlands. While a crown commission regretted the ‘divers oppressions’ and ‘varyaunce betwixt the said erles…of long season’, concerns were overshadowed by articles of agreement between Desmond and Francis I, for the ‘making of a warre’ against Henry. Kildare's power to arbitrate was demonstrated in the assembling of O’Neill and Hugh Dubh O’Donnell in prolonged attempts to compose terms which finally came to fruition in 1527 when Sir Thomas Fitzgerald (the earl's brother) deputised for Gearóid Óg. Elsewhere in 1526 Kildare intervened in Breifne by imposing his candidate Fearghal O’Reilly before moving west to foray in Connaught. Certain regional interests in contested parts of south Leinster were important to the maintenance of this alliance. Norfolk's vast inheritance included estates and titles in Ireland, many of which were controlled by Kildare.

Surrey's legacy as lord lieutenant in a sense splintered into separate facets. His learning curve in Irish matters and cognisance of the practical necessity of aristocratic delegation led to a rapprochement with Kildare (discussed in chapter six). But his time in Ireland stirred optimism among proponents of conquest. Kildare was reappointed in 1524 amid acrimonious relations with Ormond and growing contention in many quarters regarding the crown's Irish policy. Certain perspectives shifted over the course of the decade, most notably Surrey, and as it is here argued, those of his servant Thomas Bathe. Surrey (who succeeded his father as the third duke of Norfolk in May 1524) also maintained relations with both Piers Butler and a circle of moderate reformers. It is here proposed that Archbishop Inge, Patrick Bermingham and in particular Bathe came to take a less anti-Kildare view while Finglas, Rawson and Butler proponents hardened their stance. By the end of the decade, the ‘Breviate’ re-emerged c. 1529 as a notable addition to conquest-orientated literature of decay. In the preceding years, Robert Cowley was the most vocal and influential Butler advocate. Having initially served Kildare up to 1513 when he was dismissed by Gearóid Óg, Cowley became a secretary to Piers Butler and an implacable enemy of Kildare. Cowley, like Bathe, was a merchant with legal training. Both have been accredited authorship of the ‘Discourse’ (c. 1526), a long-overlooked document which can be compared with the ‘State’ (c. 1515) and the ‘Breviate’. Recent arguments have been made for Cowley's authorship, including a detailed case by Heffernan who has brought the entire document into print for the first time. Heffernan points out that as Piers Butler was referred to as Ormond, it must predate 1528 and also traces similarities between the ‘Discourse’ and Cowley's later policy proposals. It appears that the ‘Discourse’ (c. 1526) was not the specific document of ‘one Bath’ refuted by Cowley in 1528. Chad Marshall questions Cowley's authorship, and given elements of doubt, he tentatively accredits Bathe as the author. In what follows, it is proposed that the ‘Discourse’ was written by Bathe shortly after Kildare's restoration and when Surrey inherited his dukedom, before a revised ‘boke’ was offered in 1528 with a softened position regarding Kildare.

SOBRE LA CARTA MÁS FAMOSA DE CÉSAR VALLEJO

Todo lector familiarizado con la correspondencia de César Vallejo echará en falta, en nuestra edición, la famosa carta del poeta a Antenor Orrego tras la publicación de Trilce. Este texto, tempranamente divulgado por José Carlos Mariátegui en 7 ensayos de interpretación de la realidad peruana (1928), no ha sido incluido en nuestro corpus porque, como trataremos de demostrar, el hecho de que Vallejo sea su autor en su literalidad es, cuando menos, dudoso. Para poner de relieve las razones de nuestras dudas enumeramos, en primer lugar, las diferentes instancias de la historia textual de esta carta; en segundo lugar, hacemos un recorrido por algunos escritos de Antenor Orrego para tener una visión panorámica de cómo utilizó su correspondencia con Vallejo en su lectura de la obra del poeta.

Historia textual

Hasta donde alcanzamos, Antenor Orrego reprodujo este texto por primera vez en un artículo poco conocido, «El americanismo de la obra literaria de César Vallejo», publicado en el periódico trujillano El Norte, el 1 de enero de 1926, es decir, más de tres años después de la supuesta fecha de redacción de la misiva. Reproducimos el texto aquí, con las comillas, puntos suspensivos y cursivas, tal y como aparecen en el diario:

While the neoliberalization of the African state has generated new conditions of political exclusion and new forms of violation for those individuals and communities unable to harness capitalism's privileged mechanisms of economic advancement, the neoliberalization of the publishing industry during the same period has, paradoxically, given African writers of detective fiction a new instrument to represent and critique some of the specific neoliberal rationalities responsible for these emergent forms of subjugation. The new tool is the franchised novel series. While not new per se, novel series publication only becomes widely available to African writers in the first years of the 2000s. Once accessible, writers from West, East, and Southern Africa began to experiment with the narrative possibilities of seriality to build profitable brands, but also to explore the types of critical engagements made possible by a long-form series.

I have emphasized elsewhere in this book that the crime mystery is as much a genre of time as it is of investigation and discovery. Within an individual story, a detective fiction writer's ability to make effective use of suspense, delayed exposition, and a future perfect narrative grammar, as well as to play on the genre's implicit promise of future justice, is as important in sustaining a reader's attention as the fabrication of a seemingly unsolvable mystery. As the Nigerian writers of the 1970s and 1980s whom I examined in Chapter 3 additionally make clear, the strategic manipulation of narrative time also expands the genre's potential for social critique, especially for what the mystery genre can be made to reveal about the arrested teleology of decolonization. With seriality's expanded repertoire of temporal devices – namely, multi-novel plot lines and repetition – the series affords writers additional and unique opportunities to historicize the neoliberalization of everyday social life. The series format turns out to be equally productive for dissecting neoliberalism's own temporalities for their material and epistemic impact on the ongoing decolonial project.

As critical theorists emphasize, those impacts are significant. David Harvey (1991), for instance, contends that the delinking of nation and capital in favor of flexible production and flexible accumulation on a global scale has put the notion of national development, and with it its temporal registers, at risk of becoming irrelevant.