For reasons other than those of the romantic narratives of the Great Earl ‘reigning royally’, Kildare's epithet is apt. In the context of what is here discussed, the sheer scope and significance of the Kildare project may add to established scholarship. In recent decades, the range of factors behind Kildare's prominence, his capacity in terms of manraed, estate management, distribution of patronage along with a myriad of political, social and also cultural approaches have been studied. From the mutually agreeable bond of 1496, he was in the position to comfortably fulfil the obligation to defend the Pale and the king was satisfied with the relative security and financial viability of the colony with its English institutions in reasonable order. Prompted by a ‘long tyme (of) great and haynoux discord discention and variance’, a tripartite indenture marked a calming of Geraldine- Butler tensions.

Kildare held parliament at Castledermot in 1499, augmenting the 1488 Act of Marches and Maghery with meaures for ‘thencreasinge of Englishe manners and conditions’. The political nous of the Great Earl was demonstrated in his constructive relationship with Thomas Butler, even after what had transpired in the preceding years. Writing two months before Piers Butler killed Sir James of Ormond, whose enemies by then even included James Wise of Waterford, the earl required Kildare to have his ‘landes there in fferme’. Gearóid Mór Fitzgerald did not simply manage Ormond estates but also Piers Butler himself, and Kildare's ‘good cousinage’ was an advantage to Thomas Butler distanced from Ireland at Court. Ormond's debt of gratitude stemmed from the ‘letting of the third parte of my landis in your partes’ and Pier's ‘drede’ of Kildare. Ormond accounts reflect concerns that in 1499, ‘lawes of yrlond…noyr manne holde hyes londis by eyrre wtowtte any clayme the lorde schall neuur have recouvre’. A debt of gratitude may be seen in an appeal for restitution of his prisages of wines through parliamentary grant and was exempted from absentee legislation shortly thereafter.

At Court, Kildare's agent Thomas Kent procured the co-operation of Ormond while the king's ‘poletique’ approach was similar to the policies of the late Yorkist crown.

During the first decades of self-rule, decolonization was commonly understood as a telos predicated on state-driven socio-economic development and progress. Through collective endeavor, national agricultural, industrial, and economic planning, and the simple fact of political autonomy on the world stage, newly independent African nation-states would attain over time a similar standard of living as the former colonial powers and other economic leaders of the Global North. As anthropologist James Ferguson puts it: ‘If “backward nations” were not modern, in this picture, it was because they were not yet modern. Modernity figured as a universal telos’ (2006: 178). This modernizing ideal propelled governments to pump revenue into ‘ambitious national development plan[s]’ and to invest ‘in parastatal industries, education, hospitals, and mass media’, as well as in the ‘sports stadiums, national monuments, bridges, highways, and palatial hotels’ that would visibly signify these efforts (Apter 2005: 22). The euphoric anticipation of a quickly achieved modernization proved difficult to sustain. For one, it had become impossible to mask the vast quantities of revenue that were being siphoned off into the private bank accounts of government officials and their business-world cronies. Additionally, the global recessions of the 1970s and precipitous drops in commodities prices left vastly insufficient revenue to feed the voracious appetites of a corrupt leadership and fuel further construction and investment or even, for that matter, to fund the basic operations of the state bureaucracy.

As the foreclosure of the developmentalist telos became increasingly apparent, the criminal doings of the emergent kleptocracy proved irresistible to African detective fiction writers. In Amaeche Nzekwe's 1985 novel A Killer on the Loose, for example, Nigeria's Home Secretary hires Ken Whisky, a harddrinking and hard-living private detective and security consultant, to find his wife's killer and keep the story out of the press. For reasons that become clear later, the Home Secretary also hires the private detective to keep the police at arm's length. As it will turn out, the crime itself is commonplace. The wife was killed by a resentful ex-lover whom she had left for the greater material luxury of marriage to the Home Secretary.

On 11 June 1534, the feast of St Barnabas, Thomas Fitzgerald, Lord Offaly, withdrew his allegiance to the crown, setting in motion a string of unintended and destructive consequences. This revolt has since been seen as the dramatic climax of Kildare conflict with both the crown and their old colonial rivals, in which the Geraldines overreached to their ruin. While the tenures of the eighth and ninth earls of Kildare are known to mark the zenith of the Leinster Geraldines’ ascendancy, their rise under the seventh earl, Thomas Fitzgerald, has been understudied. Furthermore, insufficient prior contextualisation has been given to the rise and fall of the Butlers of Ormond, roughly under the Lancastrian crown. Within a few generations, James Butler the White Earl (fourth) of Ormond (1393–1452) and later Gearóid Mór Fitzgerald the Great Earl (eighth) of Kildare (c. 1456–1513) governed as dominant ruling magnates while adopting a broad pan-cultural approach to the maintenance of power. This study begins with an examination of the expressions of power in late medieval and early Tudor Ireland while comparing the ascendancy of the White Earl and the Great Earl as governors. The timeframe of this study commences with the final lord lieutenancy of the White Earl of Ormond, at which point the relations between the Butlers and the Kildare Geraldines were cordial. In developing the argument that non-state paper sources are best interpreted through alternative conceptual tools, this opening chapter examines the fourth earl of Ormond whose supremacy was based on alliances with a considerable network of Gaelic lords. His ascendancy was augmented through extensive cultural patronage that was often non-textual. It was not until the decline of the Butlers alongside the rise of the Kildare Geraldines that these positions and strategies were reversed.

The foremost houses of the old colonial community, active both in the colony and among the Irishry, sustained an equilibrium where stability was largely preserved. This involved the use of Irish extortions, or coign and livery, to deploy a lord's manraed or armed forces. Military support from England was not provided in any meaningful sense and little effort was made to reverse a colony which was in decline until the 1470s.

COMENTARIOS SOBRE ESCRITORES

En esta sección incluimos, en orden cronológico de publicación, los comentarios de César Vallejo sobre la obra de otros autores que aparecieron como material paratextual publicitario. En algunos casos, es posible que estos comentarios hayan sido remitidos en una carta. Cabe notar que la integridad textual de los dos comentarios publicados póstumamente, que incluimos aquí por razón de exhaustividad, es más cuestionable que aquella de los publicados en vida de Vallejo.

[1. Sobre Abraham Valdelomar]

Con Abraham Valdelomar, el artista proteico, la literatura americana presenta su primer esteta. Después de José Enrique Rodó, el divino maestro de optimismo, pro-feta mayor y primer capitán de energía espiritual, surge el conde de Lemos, este joven maestro de idealismo y de lucha; este cerebro golpeado por el negro martillo metafísico. Porque el espíritu ateniense de Valdelomar vive y vibra con la grandeza dolorosa de un conquistador victorioso y herido. Sus últimas obras, donde ya apare-ce la médula del pensador, me han hecho llorar.

Él, como el apostólico y glorioso Manuel González Prada, ha roto también, o mejor dicho, ha pulverizado el academismo anacrónico que asfixiaba nuestra

mentalidad. Director de «Colónida», ha traído rebeldía, libertad, amplitud de horizonte, más oxígeno sentimental. Por él, pues, se ponen de manifiesto los mediocres en todo su liliputismo; y por él hallan espacio las alas grandes.

Valdelomar apunta una época nueva en la literatura peruana. –

CÉSAR A. VALLEJO. LIMA. – 1918. –

[2. Sobre Roberto Mac Lean y Estenós]

«Democracia” revela en su autor la valentía de su orientación política y su profunda inquietud espiritual. Ese libro vale mucho y puede servir de pauta a quienes viven sepultados entre ladrillos filosóficos, más o menos cambiantes, y, en todo caso, des-moronables. – César Vallejo. – (De «La Semaine Parisienne». París).

[3. Sobre María Alicia Domínguez]

Estos poemas, jugosos de un fresco jugo de corazón de mujer, me han revelado un real y efectivo temperamento creador. Creo en su lírica, cálida y palpitante…

No me parece usted colonizada por esa gripe erótica que actualmente azota a más de una adolescente de América que ha leído a nuestras «clásicas” del verso lujurioso y herbívoro.

Anexo

Nigerian novelist Kole Omotoso pinpoints the central challenge facing African detective fiction writers, namely ‘how to prosecute the people who are powerful enough to totally ignore the process of law. The private dick angle doesn't work; somebody has to do more than this’ (1979: 10). The conflict between the classic British whodunit's implicit promise of legal justice and the entrenched fallibilities of Nigeria's judicial system animates Omotoso's claim. For him, the scenarios and resolutions of the typical British mystery cannot credibly accommodate Nigerian realities. To plausibly provide the pleasures of suspense and catharsis, detective stories must reflect the worlds in which their readers live. Omotoso's example of legal accountability for the rich and powerful is less uniquely African than he suggests as other global crime mysteries play on the same dynamic. He also overlooks the elasticity of the ‘private dick angle’ to account for a wide range of social and judicial scenarios, including the Nigerian situation. Yet Omotoso's question about how African detective fiction writers will represent the law and the courts, notions of criminality and justice, and the relationship between the citizen and state more broadly signals the imperative for African writers to interrogate what kinds of stories their detective fiction should tell and, most significantly, to what ends.

By the early 1940s, African writers had already begun answering Omotoso's question. Rather than replicate British manor-house mysteries with little more than an Africanization of character names, the earliest writers turned the tyrannies of colonial policing and the challenges of achieving equitable justice under colonial judiciaries into rich material for suspenseful and convincing detective stories. Over time, other African writers would do the same with the criminalization of state institutions by self-dealing politicians, the authoritarianism of military rule, and the neoliberal elevation of unbridled selfinterest to a public virtue. Ghana's R.E. Obeng was possibly the first to reimagine the detective genre for an African context, in 1942, with his collection of mystery stories featuring the detective Issa Busanga. Nigeria's Cyprian Ekwensi followed Obeng later in the decade with his first two investigation narratives and was joined in the 1950s and ‘60s by writers from South Africa, Ghana, and Ethiopia.

azsThe first four earls of Ormond augmented their inheritance and title over the centuries, enjoying a continual rise since the founding of the comital houses in 1326. Located between both Geraldine earldoms, the Butlers of Ormond did, however, face geographical disadvantages and Kilkenny castle was some distance from the administrative centre of the Lordship. By the time James Butler, the ‘White Earl’ of Ormond, served as deputy Lieutenant for the third time in 1442, he was the most prominent old colonial magnate in the early fifteenth century. Despite acrimony with the Talbots and insidious Geraldine-Butler feuding in Munster, Ormond's career in general was marked by a broad vision that echoed his dominance. This feuding was intermittent. Ormond maintained good relations with Desmond in the 1420s as commissioners of the peace were well briefed but by 1441 co-operation had ceased. As governor, warlord and politician he was belligerent, successfully holding power in what was a ruthlessly competitive environment. Like his bitter rival, John Talbot, Shakespeare's ‘great Alcides of the field’, Ormond served in France under Henry V up to 1420. Efficient and aggressive, as demonstrated by the regulations of coign in his ‘Ordinances’, Ormond's patria and patronage were also broad in scope. The Ormond strategy in Ulster had been to counterbalance O’Neill and O’Donnell. Even as Richard Nugent, baron of Delvin, held the viceregal office in 1448–9, peace in Uriel and south-east Ulster ‘twene english and yrish (was made) by auctoritie of (the) depute and the Eirle of Ormond’. In 1449, when Ormond intervened in the O’Reilly lordship, he was indispensable as Richard duke of York pursued the vestigial earldom of Ulster.

Ormond-Talbot feuding erupted again in the early 1440s.Archbishop of Dublin Richard Talbot and the (disputed) Geraldine prior of Kilmainham Thomas Fitzgerald had been vehemently opposed, with ‘malice’, to Ormond.10 Giles Thorndon originally a royal intermediary serving as Treasurer was driven from Ireland under intimidation from the deputy Lieutenant. He was accused of having consorted ‘with…Thomas Fitzmorice, a notorious traitor…broken the king's prison and gaol in which lay Brother Thomas Fitzgerot styling himself prior of the Hospital of St John of Jerusalem in Ireland’.

In 1960, the prolific Ghanaian fiction writer Gilbert A. Sam self-published what is possibly the first Anglophone detective story to appear in print in a politically independent African nation-state. The novella, Who Killed Inspector Kwasi Minta?, is set in Accra in the late 1940s and traces the police inquiry into the murder of a fellow police investigator. Tasked with the case, Sergeants Oduro and Ahia pursue the investigation with little fanfare and a great deal of the drudgery that defines routine criminal detection in both the police procedural and real life. Sam's cops are never less than methodical, practicing what Sergeant Oduro describes proudly as ‘practical criminology’ (9). The novella's main plot twist comes when Minta's love interest Georgina beats the cops to the big reveal, eliciting the killer's confession while the police can merely listen from the wings, present only to make the formal arrest. From the moment of Oduro and Ahia's introduction, however, there is never a question that with or without Georgina's private sleuthing they will prevail over the killer. Set as it is during the colonial era, Sam misses no opportunity for his African protagonists to show up their white British superiors, demonstrating again and again Ghana's superior claim to self-government. Even the plot resolution, with the private citizen dedicating herself to the public good, suggests the primacy of popular sovereignty for effective and democratic governance. For its post-independence readership Who Killed Kwasi Minta? dramatizes the socially beneficent power of a civicminded citizenry working in tandem with an equally civic-minded African police force. In every respect, Sam's vision of the state as a guarantor of the rights and protections of citizenship contrasts radically with the assessment of state power laid out in the colonial-era texts encountered in the previous chapter.

As it would turn out, in Nigeria, too, the first detective story to appear after independence, Cyprian Ekwensi's Yaba Round-about Murder (1962), was a police procedural with a similarly salutary vision for the state. Other West African writers would follow, steadily producing police investigation narratives throughout the 1960s and early 1970s. The announcement of fully participatory democracy in South Africa in 1990 ushered in the quick publication of two Black South African-authored police investigation novels there as well.

Exploding within an already toxic political atmosphere, the outbreak of rebellion was a source of profound bewilderment for both sympathisers and enemies alike. A shocked Thomas Finglas did not even remotely anticipate Offaly's actions ‘as fere as [he] had knowlege at that tyme’ and Robert Cowley was quick to deem the ‘seducyous proditorious rebelling’ as heresy. Framing the westward conquest as a crusade, Ossory's indenture of 1534 had portrayed the king as a ‘vertuous and most cristen prince’ in reducing Ireland to ‘Cristen manners’. Having failed to take Dublin, Thomas moved to secure Maynooth and the south Leinster buffer between Kildare and Ormond. The arrival of Skeffington with a force of 2,300 men eventually allowed for the rebellion to be quelled with a great deal of ferocity as the shires of Kildare, Meath and environs were laid waste. Aylmer, Alen and Brabazon later commented on the destruction, as the former liberty of Kildare was ‘all brent’. The Pale was rocked by violent exchanges and the infamous incidence of slaughter was the ‘pardon’ of Maynooth. After the fall of Maynooth, with Kildare in retreat, there was a significant loss of momentum for the rebels. Fitzgerald's appeal to Rome in May 1535 was less a theological move and more an act of desperation born of necessity. An absolution from Rome was required to preserve support for the rebellion but it also obstructed paths to a possible resolution with the crown. It was Lord Leonard Grey as marshal of the army who relayed the surrender of Kildare in August 1535. Thomas was then bound for Court with the promise of a pardon.

Cowley's reproof of Offaly's stance as the ‘popes secte and bande’ obscured a more complex picture. Yet there was always an ecclesiastical, if not religious, aspect to the rebellion even as recent scholarship has moved away from religion as its main cause.8 While the Reformation exposed a weakness in the crown's position, the break with Rome also ran against Kildare's pan-cultural patronage and influence. As a result, a blind spot for Kildare was a failure to appreciate the significance of the Henrician religious Reformation.