This book honors the scholarship and, no less, the teaching of James Simpson, one of the most influential figures in medieval and early modern literary studies over the past half century, and perhaps the single figure who has come to represent the center of the field of late Middle English studies in the form it has taken over most of the past twenty-five years in particular. More specifically, it honors Simpson's signal commitment to the distinctive category of the literary. Over the past four decades, his energetic work has illuminated new intersections between literary and more dominant public discourses, while unsettling received hierarchies of power and disrupting intellectual systems centered on periodization, literalism, and liberalism, especially in relation to what he has taught us to call the Trans-Reformation period. At the heart of these interventions is always the transformative and thus central role of literature as agent and instigator, instrument and subject. Simpson's scholarship tests the boundaries of literary history, exposing tacit cultural structures and passive myths of cultural alterity. His contributions have profoundly shaped scholarship on late medieval literature, from nudging the canon to embrace John Gower, Thomas Hoccleve, and John Lydgate to influencing how an entire generation of students and scholars approaches William Langland's Piers Plowman. Meanwhile, the revisionist bent of Simpson's cultural narratives continues to dislocate the periodizing wedge that has long been driven between the medieval and the proto-modern. In turn, Simpson's hermeneutics of periodization and his polemical probing of the origin myths of modernity (e.g. humanism, liberalism, literalism, iconoclasm, and Protestant triumphalism) have opened up fruitful paths for thinking about literary and intellectual history over the longue durée.

The book grew out of a conference held at Harvard University in the fall of 2022 to mark the occasion of Simpson's retirement from the Donald P. and Katherine B. Loker Professorship of English, which he held for almost twenty years, six of them as Department Chair.

The contents of this, the eighth of the Navy Records Society's Naval Miscellany series, chronicles the activities and adventures of the Royal Navy, its officials, its officers and its men – both in British employment and out of it – over a period of some six hundred years. Ranging from the reign of Edward III to that of Edward VIII, its contents shine a spotlight into hitherto partially understood corners of naval history, from the maintenance and victualling of the Royal fleet of the fourteenth century to the diplomatic and personal minefields encountered by officers when escorting the Emperor Haile Selassie into exile following the Italian invasion of Abyssinia.

Thomas de Snetesham was one of the first to hold the title of Clerk of the King's Ships. His duties covered the building and repair of royal ships, their care and maintenance when in harbour or laid up, and the supply of victuals and naval stores. The documents printed here give extensive details and enable the reader to form an impression of how mariners, dockyard artisans and royal officials kept Edwards III's fleet seaworthy. Snetesham's papers provide insights into the operation of shipyards, the nature of the work force, the design of the ships themselves, the nature of their equipment and the source of naval supplies. Of particular interest is the earliest documented mention of a timing device and a form of magnetic compass to be used on an English ship.

Much has been written about Mary Rose following the raising of Henry VIII's favourite flagship from the mud of the Solent in 1982. The material found and the supporting documentation have enabled a picture to be formed of the structure of the vessel, her armament, the life of her crew and how she worked as a functioning warship. But not all the detail has been settled, and the documents which form the second contribution to this volume fill some of these gaps. The victualling account, for example, shows exactly the official scale of rations in terms of such things as bread, meat, fish and beer. Likewise, the shipwrights’ report not only confirms the form of Mary Rose 's missing stem, but shows that alterations were being considered to the bow section of conventional English sailing ships at the time to give them the notoriously effective forward-firing capability of the galley.

The forbidden miracle cult of Simon de Montfort earl of Leicester, who died in 1265, produced a remarkable body of literature before expiring from natural causes after some fifteen years. The writings included laments, prayers and hymns, and a book of some two hundred miracles. The products of that creative surge reveal how some people tried to cope with political events that they could feel and describe but could not influence.

In 1840 James Orchard Halliwell published an edition of the miracle book and, whatever the shortcomings of the sole manuscript and however slight his contribution to our understanding of it, Halliwell's edition has been consulted with profit by generations of historians. A century and a half later Iris Pinkstone, founder of the Simon de Montfort Society, was aware that an English translation would be needed if the full potential of the miracle book were to be appreciated, especially as proficiency in Latin ought no longer to be assumed. A further consideration was that many of the names mentioned in the manuscript were unrecognizable after medieval recopying; Halliwell could not overcome that obstacle, but in the present century it can be breached with tools that he never had. Iris therefore tried to find a competent translator. I understood her aspiration at the time and might have offered to help, but I was busy with other publications and sadly, just as I found myself able to make a start, we received the news of Iris's death.

Nevertheless, my belated readiness to carry out her project coincided happily with the re-emergence of another scheme, which I had imagined some decades earlier but had not been qualified to begin at the time: a collected edition and translation of the Montfortian verses and prayers. It became obvious that such an edition would complement that of the miracle book, and the present volume therefore assembles all the known texts that Simon de Montfort's cult produced. Most of them have been printed at least once since 1800, but in scattered places and in various editorial styles. It will be a modest step forward to have them brought together, freshly edited and translated.

The Simon de Montfort Society has of course encouraged the project from the beginning. I record my thanks to all the repositories that have provided images of manuscripts in their possession.

At the end of 1825, the newly independent Empire of Brazil went to war with the newly independent Republic of Argentina – then called the United Provinces of the River Plate – over control of the north bank of the Plate Estuary and consequently of the river itself. It was a replay of the long-standing dispute between the Portuguese and Spanish colonial Empires over what was confusingly called the ‘Banda Oriental’ (properly the ‘Banda Oriental del Uruguay’). Originally a Spanish province, the area had been occupied by Brazil in the confusion which followed the Napoleonic Wars. In 1825, a rebellion against Brazilian rule brought the United Provinces into the conflict and drove the two countries to war. It lasted for two years and resulted in a stalemate – the United Provinces dominating on land, the Brazilians at sea. Eventually, the state of Uruguay was created as a compromise and a buffer between the two.

The two nations that confronted each other in the River Plate were strikingly different. The United Provinces was a republic, with a small, largely immigrant population scattered over a vast land mass politically dominated by the city and province of Buenos Aires. It had a large international trade, carried out principally in British, American and French vessels, but few maritime pretensions. Its naval forces were modest and, at the beginning of the war, consisted of no more than six small warships and a dozen gunboats for port defence. Brazil, by contrast, was a monarchy, ruled by the former Crown Prince of Portugal who, as the Emperor Pedro I, had led the country to independence in 1822–23. It was a vast country with a huge coastline, an extensive seaborne commerce and a large and experienced navy comprising some 96 ships of all sizes carrying 690 guns. The strategy of the two nations in the maritime war reflected their circumstances: Brazil's aim was to strangle the trade of Buenos Aires by blockade; while that of the United Provinces was to keep the waters of the Plate open while unleashing a swarm of privateers on Brazil's sea borne commerce.

Manpower and Foreign Recruitment

A remarkable feature of the war is that the navies of both sides in the conflict relied heavily on foreign sailors – notably British and Americans – to command and man their ships. This tradition had been established during the struggles for independence from Spain and Portugal.

INTRODUCTION

Verses of Praise and Joy (VPJ) is a slim volume of poetry published in the immediate wake of the 1586 Babington Plot, a conspiracy to assas-sinate Elizabeth I and place her Catholic cousin Mary, Queen of Scots, on the throne in her stead. While the contents of VPJ certainly express joy at Elizabeth's delivery and praise her governance, they also pour scorn on the plotters and their ideological motives, and revel in their punishment. One of the verses in this volume is signed ‘T.K.’, and although no evidence unambiguously identifies him, circumstantial and linguistic evidence make Thomas Kyd the likely author. The text of the present edition reproduces the whole volume, including one poem certainly not by Kyd, a ‘lamentation’ by the Babington conspirator Chidiock Tichborne (c. 1558–86) written on the eve of his execution. Although various components of the printed volume circulated separately, the 1586 publication was evidently designed as a suite of texts to be read together, and there seems no reason to disagree with Boas's suggestion that ‘T.K. was the writer of the whole tract’ (Tichborne's poem excepted).

CHIDIOCK TICHBORNE AND THE BABINGTON PLOT

The assassination plot has come to be named after one of its ringleaders, Anthony Babington (1561–86). But it was Tichborne who responded in verse to the plot's failure, setting up the poetical response of VPJ. Tichborne was born in Southampton to Roman Catholic parents, Peter Tichborne and Elizabeth, née Middleton. As a young man, he had travelled on the Conti-nent without a licence and, with his father, had been interrogated about illegal ‘popish relics’ brought back from abroad. In June 1586, just two months before the plot was exposed, the family had faced another accusa-tion of ‘popish practices’. In May 1586, Babington was visited by the Jesuit priest John Ballard, who told him of John Savage's plans to assassinate the Queen; the two men began to gather conspirators, including Tichborne. Letters to and from Mary were intercepted by Gilbert Gifford, a government plant among the conspirators, or by Thomas Barnes, then deciphered by Thomas Phelippes for Sir Francis Walsingham, resealed, and sent on to the intended addressees..

In his important discussion of Chaucer's Criseyde in Reform and Cultural Revolution, James Simpson offers the aside that provides my title quotation. “However painful it finally turns out to be,” he observes, Troilus possesses a freedom profoundly different from the circumstances that constrain Criseyde. Contrasting Troilus's immediate vision of love with her painful decision-making, he establishes the former's comparative social freedom as a foil to his real focus: the intense psychological narrative of Criseyde's “shrewd appraisal of the conditions in which she finds herself.” I will return to James's account of Criseyde shortly; but despite its brevity, I want to engage with this comment on Troilus's limited and painful freedom, and with James's work elsewhere on the concept of recognition, to propose this observation as a rather unexpected departure point: toward a theory of human love, and a changed understanding of tragedy. By a “theory of human love,” I mean the model of a freely willed, mutually self-constituting bond between individual, non-substitutable human beings; and when I say “toward,” I mean to suggest that lacking such a culturally sanctioned model, Chaucer responded to human reality with a radical experiment. That experiment, rooted in the freedom of the will and the ethical necessity of recognition, performed an act of transformation upon his sources: and so he also, I will argue, created a new form of tragedy.

There were of course many culturally sanctioned theories of love in the Middle Ages. Perfect divine love was idealized for humanity as universal caritas for God and neighbour; Aristotle's highest form of love between persons, philia, a relation between “men who are good, and alike in virtue,” had with Aquinas been Christianized as the necessary inclination of the soul toward the good, a participant in the greater love that leads to God. Responding to Cicero's classic treatise on friendship, Aelred of Rievaulx's On Spiritual Friendship defined love as “quidam animae rationalis affectus” (“a particular affection of the rational soul”), which in its highest form (“spiritual” as opposed to “carnal” and “worldly”) “inter bonos vitae, morum studiorumque similitudo conglutinat” (“is cemented between the good by similitude of life, morals and pursuits”).

129. The Secretary of the Admiralty to Milne

[Milne Mss MLN/114/1]

Admiralty

1 December 1860

[received 18 December]

No 431 M

Sir

I am commanded by my Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty to send you herewith for your information a copy of a letter1 from Commander Wood of the Barracouta dated the 15th Ultimo reporting the state of health of the Supernumeraries and Crew on board the Ship under his command, and giving his reasons for having returned to Spithead instead of proceeding to Halifax as directed by Commodore Dunlop, and I am to acquaint you that their Lordships have fully approved of the steps taken by Commander Wood on the occasion, and also of his having ordered the Hydra to proceed to Halifax.

P.S. I am desired to express their Lordships regret at the sickness and loss of life on board the Hydra reported by Commodore Dunlop[.]

130. Aldham to Milne

[ADM1/5763]

Valorous off Vera Cruz

5 December 1860

Sir,

I have the honor to acknowledge the receipt, on the 4th instant, of your Despatch of the 15th November, via New Orleans, enclosing a Copy of the opinion of the Queen's Advocate on the Legal mode to be pursued when claims were made on the Granadian Government.

2. The Communications from the Foreign Office, referred to in the Despatch, have not yet reached me, negotiations on the General points mentioned, have however been commenced, and I trust that an amicable arrangement on all [points] will be speedily come to without having recourse to coercive measures. Indeed, should it become imperative to adopt such a course, I hardly know, in the face of the Queen's Advocate's opinion, what would be the most efficacious mode of proceeding in regard to this Country.

3. To blockade the Port of a nation for the purpose of obtaining claims, he considers illegal, but it would be more so with this Country. To blockade Vera Cruz and Tampico would annihilate entirely our commerce, even now much impeded by high Tariffs, it would also cause the immediate Suspension of the Dunlop Convention, by which at present we are in receipt of more than 50 percent of the Custom's dues, which is the chief source of the Revenue of this Government, and the only hold we have at present on them for the payment of British claims.

ON 12 September 1484, at Nottingham Castle, Archibald Whitelaw addressed Richard III and his selected council, in his best humanist Latin, as a spokesman and ambassador for James III. The occasion was a diplomatic mission from the Scots, offering a truce and a royal marriage; Whitelaw was the royal secretary and archdeacon of Lothian. In 1522, at the Ascensian press in Paris, Hector Boece's first historiographical work was printed, Vitae Episcoporum Aberdonensium et Murthlacensium. In this work, Boece attributes to William Elphinstone, bishop of Aberdeen and Boece's patron, another ambassadorial speech on behalf of James III, this time to Louis XI in c. 1479. In both cases, humanist Latin is pressed into Scottish political service. The choice of approach reflects the interests and preferences of the men involved: from the evidence of their libraries, both Whitelaw and Elphinstone were engaged with the intellectual developments related to the Renaissance in mainland Europe, while Boece, a generation younger, is even more deeply embedded in humanist learning and practice. Nevertheless, in these speeches, there is more than personal preference at stake: the deployment of humanist rhetoric in these diplomatic situations asserts the speakers’ intentions that the views of the Scottish crown be taken seriously, by ally and by enemy. Through an examination of the rhetorical features of these speeches, particularly their references to Classical Latin literature, this essay will consider the nature of these examples as two of the earliest demonstrations of Scottish humanism, its uses and its significance. In so doing, it will rely heavily upon Roger Mason's work on Scottish descriptions and definitions of national identity – indeed, the juxtaposition of speeches that is the core of this essay is suggested by his article ‘Regnum et Imperium: Humanism and the Political Culture of Early Renaissance Scotland’. There Mason draws attention to the significance of Whitelaw and Elphinstone as ‘early adopters’, and outlines what humanism might have contributed to Scottish government through the centrality of those bureaucrats and their intellectual allegiances, and what they passed on to their successors. This essay looks specifically at the rhetorical productions attributed to Whitelaw and Elphinstone, with three particular questions in mind: firstly, in what ways might these speeches be defined as humanist; secondly, how do they display their knowledge of Classical material; and finally and most significantly, to what end?