This chapter focuses on parrhesia, the ancient term for criticizing a superior, typically the emperor. This was a particularly tricky thing to do, not only given the power of the emperor, but also because the superior was supposed to be more virtuous than their inferior. Through a display of virtue, the inferior could temporarily overcome the social distance and speak out. Contrary to current views that parrhesia was only really possible in democratic societies and therefore in Late Antiquity the preserve of marginal figures of society, such as holy men, I show that parrhesia was a much more widespread practice that, however, demanded great skill and courage.

Chapter 6 shifts its attention to the southern extremities of the lake and illustrates historical connections tying the lake together from another thematical angle: commercial flows. It examines the broader regional trade networks around Lake Kivu, emphasizing the interconnectedness of Goma and Bukavu in Congo with Gisenyi and Cyangugu in Rwanda. It introduces the concept of a “transboundary space,” shaped not only by colonial border impositions but also by preexisting social, political, and ecological asymmetries. The asymmetries created an “arbitrage economy,” enabling Africans, particularly those close to the border, to exploit differences across regions.

The chapter further considers cattle trade between the center of Rwanda and the westerns shores of Lake Kivu. This cattle trade connected different cultural and ecological zones, fostering commercial interactions long before colonial intervention. The chapter argues that the border accentuated existing disparities, emphasizing differences in the distribution and societal meanings of cattle. Despite colonial attempts to regulate the cattle trade, African traders managed to capitalize on their “liminality” – the ability to inhabit different spheres simultaneously. The chapter further underscores the significance of this “liminality” as it facilitated the negotiation of oppressive colonial structures. At times this “liminality” was embedded in formalized bonds of friendship, sometimes formalized through bloodpacts. Highlighting the everyday impact of borders demonstrates how they could be used to circumvent colonial policies, even though they could never undo the consequences of colonialism.

To demonstrate the complexities and contradictions laid out in the previous chapter, Chapter 5 zooms in on a colonial scheme to “transplant” – colonial lingo – Rwandans to Masisi (nowadays in North Kivu) to provide labor for the colonial plantations there. Commonly known as “le MIB” (Mission d’Immigration des Banyarwanda), a name that it only started to carry in the second phase, this chapter focuses on the first phase of this scheme between 1937 and 1948. This scheme is often seen as one of the origins of North Kivu’s endemic conflicts, but many details remain shrouded in vagueness. In the first chapter of this book focusing on this scheme, the motivations and experiences of Rwandan immigrants within the broader context of historical mobility and court politics are analyzed. In doing so the chapter argues that many migrants, especially those from the northern extremities of Lake Kivu, were “willing migrants,” exploiting colonial policies for personal interests. It demonstrates that at least for a considerable part of these migrants, labor mobility was not solely a result of colonial initiatives or coercion but also rooted in nineteenth-century patterns of mobility, and often based on previous connections. In doing so, it adds nuance to simplistic narratives of longstanding antagonisms between “autochthons” and newcomers.

O’Casey found solace in the home of the founder and patron, as well as the most prolific and popular playwright, of the Abbey Theatre, Lady Augusta Gregory. It might not have been expected that, during the 1920s, the owner of the grand estate of Coole Park would befriend a manual labourer who worked on the Dublin railways. But in that decade Lady Gregory and O’Casey became close acquaintances, and she proved to be one of the figures who most encouraged and developed his playwriting. This chapter examines the mentoring and friendship that Gregory provided to O’Casey, and emphasises her wider influence upon him, which has tended to be underplayed in the years after her death.

Shelley was a prolific and varied writer of correspondence throughout his short life. The work of collecting, editing, and annotating Shelley’s letters has been going on since the 1840s, but large portions of his early and Italian correspondence remain lost. The essay discusses this corpus and its critical history before examining three types of letters that Shelley was particularly adept at writing. Shelley’s adversarial letters to older men such as his father show his mastery of a radical bombast; correspondence with contemporaries such as Hogg and Hitchener shows him harnessing the form for the debate of ideas; and his long descriptive epistles about Italy, addressed to his friend Peacock, constitute some of the finest travel writing in English. T. S. Eliot was quite wrong to claim Shelley’s letters are ‘insufferably dull’: this essay begins to think about the elements of their content and style that reveal their literary achievement.

In this final chapter, I explore how the experience of democratic conflict might be conceptualized by religious traditions in theologically and ethically meaningful ways. I return to the Augustinian tradition and its understanding of love as a resource for thematizing agonism theologically. First, I consider the role of love in Augustine’s moral psychology and political theory, showing how pluralist politics can be understood as a practice of discovering and pursuing “common objects of love” amidst difference. Next, I analyze the notion of political friendship in Augustine and Aristotle in order to show how social relations around these common objects of love might incorporate forms of conflict, disagreement, and parrhesia that are ordered to tending these common goods. I conclude by looking at two figures who extend Augustine’s political theology of love in distinctly liberative directions under the notion of enemy-love. Gustavo Gutiérrez and Martin Luther King, Jr., I argue, develop accounts of the imperative to love the enemy in ways that encompass forms of confrontation, opposition, and conflict in seeking to convert enemies to friends.

Although a product of his time – the literary traditions of Pope, Addison, and Swift; the Toryism and churchmanship of the eighteenth century – Samuel Johnson also transcended it through his own gifts and forceful character. After a difficult early life, marked by melancholy, a troubled relationship with his family, and an early departure from Oxford University, Johnson began to find his way in the 1730s. He married Elizabeth Porter, moved to London, and began to make his mark through work at the Gentleman’s Magazine and works such as the Life of Savage. He achieved renown as an essayist and fame as the compiler of the Dictionary but also suffered from bereavement and continuing financial insecurity. After the award of a government pension in 1762, Johnson’s works have a more relaxed style, and his final major work, the Lives of the Poets, helped to establish this era as the Age of Johnson.

Chapter 3 focuses on the kinds of domestic duties expected of women in gentle, noble, and royal establishments and thus offers an understanding of everyday life in a late medieval elite household. The range of activities required of highborn household servants was broad, encompassing both public and private obligations. They saw to their queens’ or noblewomen’s personal needs in terms of apparel, entertainment, and piety. They traveled when duties demanded it and assisted their queens and ladies with medical care. To perform these tasks, they were entrusted with significant household resources and also, sometimes, care and custody of royal and noble children. Over years of service, through daily serving the needs of their employers, some serving women and their mistresses developed affectionate relationships as they shared literary tastes and devotional practices. Their employment provided opportunities for elite female servants to live a sumptuous lifestyle surrounded by luxury and entertainments, and also to network with other courtiers. I argue that investigating the domestic duties and daily lives of these often-overlooked women completes our understanding of courts and great households by showing the importance of female employment in the Middle Ages.

While the Mansfeld Regiment traveled through southern Germany in August 1625, flag-bearer Hieronymus Sebastian Schutze accidentally shot and killed his friend Hans Heinrich Tauerling during a drinking bout. Two days later, one of the regiment’s cavalry companies started a fire in the small town of Remmingen near Ulm. Thick descriptions of these events reveal daily life in the Mansfeld Regiment, as well as attitudes toward masculinity, murder, guilt, drunkenness, and violent death.

This chapter examines every muster roll from the Thirty Years War in the Saxon State Archives in Dresden to determine the demographics of the entire Saxon army during the entire war. In contrast to enduring stereotypes of early seventeenth-century soldiers as rootless social outcasts, these soldiers were recruited and often served near their homes. Both infantry and cavalry were far more urban than the average central European population. Soldiers called themselves righteous guys and lived within a dense thicket of social networks that included friendship, similar religion, and place of origin.

This chapter explores the different types of illicit and informal economy in the two migrant communities and examines why and how Sanhe gods get involved in the gray economy. It also discusses state intervention in the communities through surveillance, raids, and compaigns as well as through gentrification projects. It ends with a discussion on Sanhe gods’ friendships in the community.

This chapter explores the idea of gendered social performance through the texts of Plutarch and Sima Qian. Chandra Giroux investigates two categories of social performance in particular: friendship and authority, and death and grief. Both categories are approached from the perspective of each author’s own social performance in these scenarios as well as how they represent the social performance of women in them. Through an investigation of Plutarch’s and Sima Qian’s self-representations of their own social performances, she argues that both authors attempt to establish themselves as exemplary figures, ones that focus on the idea of the maintenance of harmony. In this way, Plutarch’s and Sima Qian’s actions are meant as a mirror for their readers’ own lives. In comparison, the chapter analyzes the examples of Timokleia and Timoxena in Plutarch’s corpus, as well as that of Nie Ying in Sima Qian’s work, to explore the authors’ notions of the ideal female reaction to friendship and authority, as well as that of death and grief. In this analysis, Giroux finds that both authors’ representations of women are based in the gender expectations of their respective societies. It is thus the differences between their cultures’ approaches to gender relations that dictate how Plutarch and Sima Qian understood the ideal female reaction to death, grief, friendship, and authority.