BEOWULF IS NOT accompanied by illustrations in the sole surviving manuscript of the poem, and the text on the page has no foliate margins, yet the edges of its world teem with arboreal life. Though I have recently noted that in certain respects Beowulf is ‘uncommonly treeless for an Old English poem’, this chapter challenges that view by arguing that the tendrils of trees and other plants are in fact entangled in its borders. In this role they operate as a complex extended metaphor for human life in the wilderness east of Eden, where Adam and Eve were driven after the Fall, and the garden of Paradise to which humans may one day return. To begin, I will address the main appearances of trees in Beowulf, with those found in the song of creation, at Grendel's mere, and at the forest of Ravenswood. In addition to recognising the woodlands of the early medieval material world as an element of Beowulf's landscapes fully integrated into the symbolic world of the poet, my argument will then consider these trees in light of other marginal arboreal presences in early English material culture. Here, in considering the foliate margins of various objects, including the Newent Cross, the Franks Casket, and several brooches decorated with foliate designs, I will argue that when considered in concert, these artistic productions reflect a complex set of understandings about the place of the cultural world of humans within the ‘surrounding forest’, with the forest in this context serving as a capacious metaphor for the material world and everything in it.

Creation Songs

Trees make their first appearance in Beowulf not long after the poem has begun, in the first song sung in Heorot. This song of creation perhaps reflects the creation of a world in the poem itself, but also the manner in which the building of Hrothgar's hall is comparable with the timbering of the cosmic hall – a parallel also found in Bede's commentary on Genesis, as Jennifer Neville has noted.

The notice shown in figure 6.1, confirming that the keyed bugle virtuoso and bandleader Francis Johnson (1792–1844) was indeed alive, was published at a key point in his career. By October 1824 he had been performing at social and military events in Philadelphia for a decade and a half. Johnson was the city's most in-demand musician for parades and balls, and his band had grown from four musicians to ten. He had mentored his bandsmen so well that trumpeter James Hemmenway was now both a published composer and an assistant conductor who could lead the band in Johnson's absence— or when the band was double-booked and needed to perform in two places at the same time.

Johnson's own reputation had grown beyond Philadelphia, with his band performing summer seasons in the resort hotels of Saratoga Springs, New York. When the Marquis de Lafayette made his much-anticipated return to the United States, from July 1824 to September 1825, Johnson and his band were hired to play for the parades and balls that Philadelphia held in the French general's honor. Johnson himself also accompanied Lafayette from September 26 through about October 12, 1824, providing music as various militia groups escorted the general from Trenton to Philadelphia, and then onward to Wilmington, Delaware, and Baltimore. Despite never before composing for the theater, Johnson received a commission to write a new score for William Moncrieff's spectacular equestrian melodrama Cataract of the Ganges. His band played for the American premiere at Philadelphia's Olympic Theatre on October 10, 1824, just days before the publication of the notice in figure 6.1.

Although he enjoyed a certain degree of celebrity as one of the most successful bandleaders of his day, Francis Johnson has only recently begun to receive serious attention from scholars. The bulk of scholarly attention has focused primarily on his compositions from the 1830s and early 1840s, when his career was at its peak and when he was most frequently and most violently confronted with the racism endemic to the antebellum United States.

In his 1512 reflections on why Florence was bound to “lose both her liberty and her state,”1 Francesco Guicciardini bemoaned the infighting among Italians, the might of foreign princes, and the fact that civic life was out of order. This last point was evidenced by several factors, among them “the spirits of effeminate and indolent men, turned to a dainty and – relative to our means – extravagant life.” Guicciardini thus laid the blame for the imminent dissolution of the Florentine republic, at least in part, on “effeminate” men. It was a condemnation of effeminacy that would be echoed by writers throughout the sixteenth century. Like Guicciardini, these writers argued that men had abandoned an ideal past model of masculinity (e.g. Roman or chivalric) for a lesser and “effeminate” modern substitute and that military and political ruination were the result.

My chapter will focus on two texts that constructed the spectre of the modern effeminate man in contrast to the militant man of the past. These texts enact what Peter Hennen has described as the historical function of a discourse of effeminacy, where it is “deployed as a means of stabilizing a given society's concept of masculinity and controlling the conduct of its men based upon the repudiation of the feminine.” I will consider how Anton Francesco Doni and Scipione Ammirato used differing techniques to create unease about masculine gender performance by linking so-called “effeminate” dress and appearance to failed militancy. I consciously identify and name this unease as anxiety. The effeminophobic anxiety that I discuss herein does not describe a psychological experience of readers of texts but, rather, the discursive tool employed by authors in the social control of men. My argument about the function of effeminophobic anxiety is invested in the literary, where the strategies of literature – as Jane Tylus and I wrote over a decade ago – not only represent masculinity, they produce it.

EFFEMINATE, EFFEMINACY, AND NORMATIVE GENDER PROJECTS

The term effeminato circulated with sufficient frequency to appear in the 1612 Vocabolario of the Accademia della Crusca: “Effeminate: of feminine manners, gestures, and spirit, delicate, soft. Latin effoeminatus, muliebris, delicatus, mollis.”

Bands occupy a problematic space within the field of musicology. One might expect, given the centrality of bands as a dominant form of popular music in America from the 1830s to the Great Depression, that bands would be well represented in prominent journals and conferences alongside jazz, rock, country, and hip hop. These popular genres have received seemingly constant attention over the years, ranging from books and dedicated periodicals to entire general education courses at most colleges and universities. On the other hand, bands—central to American popular music for at least as long as all the other genres combined—have been consistently overlooked. Various reasons for this disparity exist; by considering several of them in this introduction, we hope to begin the process of remedying the situation.

The dedication of the collection to Frank Cipolla offers an excellent opportunity to reflect on the field of band research as it exists at present and how it will evolve in the future. Cipolla wore many hats over the course of his long and productive career—orchestral trumpet player, band director, conductor, scholar, bandsman, and educator. Each of these roles gave him a unique perspective on the many “inflection points” in band history. In 1961 he became director of bands at SUNY-Buffalo, where he remained for three decades. During the early years of his appointment, when the university played Division I football, marching band and pep band—the bands most popular and visible to the general public—occupied much of his time. The university marching band disappeared in 1971 when the school discontinued its football team. Left with more time to explore the artistic side of bands, Cipolla concentrated his efforts on his wind ensemble and concert band. Along the way he published essays and was an advocate for greater knowledge of band history among both educators and scholars. He wrote on the major figures of band history, edited essay collections containing foundational research, maintained a bibliography of scholarly writings, and worked to integrate historic band music into the repertoires of modern high-school and college bands.

Seemingly incidental, men's facial hair signaled a variety of significant differences and masculinities during the Renaissance. In medical, legal, and social terms, the ability to grow a beard was considered a distinctive, exclusive marker of the adult male reproductive body. But that normative structure did not always mean that men did not shave. There were shifts in the practice over time: on the whole, men shaved in the fifteenth century but began to grow beards by the second decade of the sixteenth century, and that habit was maintained until facial hair was replaced by false, sometimes ludicrously abundant, wigs in the late seventeenth century. In some examples of fifteenth-century portraits, stubble or morning shadow was subtly represented in portraits in order to assert the sitter's full masculine virility and identity. By the sixteenth century, for a variety of reasons, groomed beards became fashionable and remained so for some time thereafter. This chapter offers an overview of the meaning of certain differences between facial hair and examines reasons for the adoption of beards, thereby bringing to the fore a consideration of how such personal yet socially recognizable habits resonated with power differences between men.

The visual shift in self-presentation from shaved to fully bearded faces was partly due to the mere vagaries of fashion, which usually cycle back and forth. However, a fashionable trend is more about popularity than change; that is, description of a vogue is not the same as an analytical explanation of its initial cause and subsequent acceptance. Studies that focus on the different styles of beards – as is also done with contemporary beards today – similarly reduce the mode to no more than personal taste and neglect social meanings. I argue, instead, that differences in facial hair were not about styles for their own sake and did not merely indicate the wearer's choice or character, which are modern, superficial criteria about fashion. Today and in yesteryears, facial hair and its meaning depend on such factors as genetics and physiology, health, age, wealth, origin, the pressure of ethnic and national norms, religion, and, at times, occupation, status, or desirability and sexuality.

The simple spur is an often described but rarely analyzed item of armorial dress. It was a minor riding accessory: a handful of pieces of metal and leather strapped to the foot used to apply pressure and guide the animal's movements. An iron tool in its earliest forms, the medieval spur – now cast in copper alloy, gilded and tinned – became intrinsically connected with knightly status and chivalric masculinity. Ambiguity followed, as negotiations of masculinity changed in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and the semiotic resonance of spurs declined. In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries they became a highly symbolic article of dress as they moved into the contemporary fashion system, bringing with them an embodiment of the masculine ideal now distilled into portable form. This change in the way spurs were perceived and used was an expression of the rising anxieties about gender and the body that rippled through this period.

This research project began with a question, one about significance and symbolism, and about performances of masculine display in an early modern colonial setting. The Acadians, French colonists who arrived in modern-day Nova Scotia in the 1630s, have historically been represented as isolated peasantry and farmers. Archaeological investigations of Acadian homesteads and villages in the mid-to-late twentieth century, on the other hand, unearthed counterexamples to this archetype of poverty. The Melanson settlement, across the Annapolis River from the English Fort Anne, was first excavated in the summer of 1984. Among the finds was a partial copper-alloy spur buckle cast with floral designs, curling leaves, and a pair of fleur-de-lys (Fig. 5.1). Far fancier in design than the other known Acadian spur – a rowel spur of plain metal, likely iron, found at the Roma site on Prince Edward Island – this decorated buckle seemed incongruous. Why would one of the Melanson men have worn a fancy pair of spurs on a small farming settlement in the early eighteenth century? They had horses, certainly, but the predominant forms of riding gear in the region were cruder iron and pewter.

In January 1557 in Rome, a notary of the governor's court deposed a young woman lying in bed sorely injured. After having lost her virginity amidst group sex to a soldier at her village of Santa Fiora (so she claims), Camilla had come to Rome and moved in with a Signora Margarita, and then made her living trading sex for income. Camilla said that, shortly before, she had fallen in with a Frenchman. Naming him she then tells what happened next.

Camilla then adds that, with treatment, she is recovering.

This is clearly an ugly, tawdry story of unfeeling sex and callous harm. Rome's criminal records teem with such tales of cruelty, where men inflict harm on those weaker, be they women or other men who have less strength or social backing, or who just suffer momentary disadvantage. It would be easy, using records such as these, to depict masculinity as a toxic distillation, much unkind sex, and far more violence. But we should not.

ALL THINGS ARE connected, but not all things are connected equally – this is one of the central tenets of the ecologies in which all things exist, (inter)relate, and communicate. Recognition of this coextant, if unequal, connection between entities is becoming more commonplace when engaging with things and spaces and places – both of the present and of the past. This increased awareness of interrelational connections is certainly true for those working with material culture and objects, but is also seen in a wider socio-cultural context and more broadly in academic discourse. Pioneering work by the likes of Donna Haraway, Tim Ingold, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Andrew Patrizio, Jane Bennett, and Timothy Morton (among others) has sought to highlight the interrelational and fluid network of things that form, inhabit, and shape the environments in which they and we exist and move, seeking to decentralise the human-centric narratives and structures which have traditionally shaped understanding of the world, and of the species and objects that inhabit it. As noted by Andrew Patrizio, ‘natural history is entangled with the images and processes of the visual (social history of art is a natural history of art)’. Such work has radically shifted the possible discussions surrounding things and objects; it reaches for a more complex and nuanced approach to living, knowing, and being in and of this network, instead of a top-down model of production, patron, viewer, or a human/object binary. These approaches acknowledge and promote the importance of a collaborative and fluid spectrum of natural and unnatural, human and non-human that make up a material and embodied being-in-the-world, of which these medieval objects, their makers and viewers are part. Alongside this awareness of an eco-critically inflected approach to these objects and these materials, it is also important to acknowledge their lush materialities, as discussed by Anne F. Harris and Karen Eileen Overbey in their ‘manifesto’ on ‘Lush Ethics’, where they write: ‘This is a material moment, and we want a material future […] a future of abundant encounters with the material and natural worlds, a future of touching objects that touch us back’.

For over three centuries, while the attention of the government and population of the island was focused on matters of survival and improvement, St Helena played host to a succession of scientists pursuing research in a variety of fields, attracted by the island's isolated geographical location in the South Atlantic, the geological history locked in its rocks, the indigenous flora and insect fauna with which it was blessed (and subsequently robbed), or the denizens of its surrounding seas. Few places on the planet can have proved so popular a laboratory for the compiling and testing of scientific theories and for field surveys – a practice that survives today; recent years have seen the island used as a base for exercises as diverse as satellite tracking and deep-sea oceanography.

A constellation of astronomers

During the development of (on the one hand) modern astronomical practice in Britain from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century and (on the other) the extension of the British Empire into the southern hemisphere and the Far East, St Helena proved repeatedly inviting to aspirant astronomical observers. Despite its strategic location on the surface of the globe, however, the island's topography and the vagaries of its weather conspired on more than one occasion to frustrate the ambitions of would-be observers, however carefully-planned their expeditions.

Edmond Halley

Edmond Halley (1656–1742) arrived on the island in 1676, having just turned twenty-one but already with a respectable reputation as an astronomer. He had begun making observations while still at school and continued to do so at Oxford, publishing his results in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. It is from his correspondence with Henry Oldenburg, the society's secretary, that we first learn of Halley's ambitions to observe the southern stars and of his nervousness that a rival astronomer then preparing a book in Paris might pre-empt his aim to be the first observer in this field:

In retrospect, it seems inevitable that the American Civil War was a crucible for bands in the United States. Certainly the timing was auspicious, given the widespread acceptance of valved brass instruments, the expanding manufacturing and publishing industries that led to increased accessibility and affordability, and a growing middle class hungry for music that suited its tastes and lifestyles. It did not hurt that amateur and professional bands established themselves with American audiences in the decades leading up to the war, playing music from any genre in most every performance setting possible. Bands were an everyday part of life for the average American by 1860.

Yet the nineteenth-century soundscape was changing, as a new concert culture began to take shape. Tension emerged between the Eurocentric intelligentsia that desired edifying music (epitomized by the orchestra) and those with more democratic tastes who happily consumed most every kind of music (and the band in particular). This was the first stage in what would become the entertainment versus education argument seen in the public statements by John Philip Sousa and Theodore Thomas regarding music at the Columbian Exposition of 1893. Some saw music as a useful part of daily life, while others viewed music as a special event that served no purpose other than aesthetic contemplation. “Great” music, it was argued, was not constrained by the mundanity of daily life. Art served the intellect, transporting the listener into a spiritual realm above material existence; it was l’art pour l’art. For these listeners, any music that served a nonmusical function would fall short of this Romantic ideal. This is what lay behind John Sullivan Dwight’s critique of bands from 1856: