THE MATERIAL AND LITERARY WORLDS of the medieval period remain richly alive in the twenty-first century. Can lived inner experience also speak across the centuries? Julia Boffey describes evocatively ‘the difficulty of writing about individual inner lives without many of the written sources available for more recent periods’; yet, she suggests, ‘the pendulum may be swinging the other way’. Boffey's recent research has extended her seminal work on the fifteenth century to chronicle and life-writing. The Book of Margery Kempe speaks in unique ways to the exploration of inner lives, as well as to Boffey's interests in the intellectual contexts of books. It is a book of feeling, shaped by but also startlingly different from the books Kempe knew. Its powerful affect has surprised, compelled and alienated its readers. ‘Wondirful revelacyons’, the moving of the soul through visionary experience, are the subject of Kempe's narrative. The Book is shaped by the struggle to discern the cause and meaning of such experience, and the challenge to interpret and convey it. Read as an inner life, it is newly animated.

Reading Kempe

The anxieties and risks of Kempe's book have coloured readers’ perceptions, sometimes evoking unease. When rediscovered in 1934, the Book proved startlingly different from the pamphlet of extracts printed by Wynkyn de Worde (c.1501, STC 14924), reprinted by Henry Pepwell as one of seven mystical treatises in The Cell of Self-Knowledge (1521, STC 20972). Pepwell's characterization of Margery as ‘devout ancress’ was difficult for Hope Emily Allen, one of her first editors, to sustain: ‘[the Book] does give remarkably elevated spiritual passages, but they are interspersed with others highly fanatical’. Allen uses theories of Kempe as neurotic to explain her ‘suggestibility’ and reflection of ‘the highly spiritualised ideals of piety in her world’. Twentiethcentury feminist scholarship, eager to discard the label ‘hysteric’, shifted the focus from interior to exterior, to claim Kempe as proto-feminist, a woman who refused to ‘go spynne and carde [wool] as other women don’ (4330–1).

There are many responses to the music of faith in our society today. Music has the power to move us deeply and to inspire us. Some responses to powerful and inspirational music are eloquent, beautiful and artistic expressions in their own right. One example is the work of the Wiltshire-born artist Janet Boulton who, in recent years, has been working on an artistic project known as ‘Eye Music’. It is Janet's motivation, faith and inspiration that form the focus of this chapter. For me, Janet's ‘Eye Music’ project beautifully captures the relationship between music and faith. The artistic connection between the sung notes within Christian liturgy, particularly in the service of Tenebrae in Holy Week, is explored in a personal way, recognising the movement, both within the liturgy and within the heart of the believer, from darkness to light, from despair to hope. My research into this interconnectedness between sacred music, its impact on a congregation or audience, and the subsequent artistic expression of that experience in visual art has been hugely advanced by knowing Janet and her work, and learning of the fascinating motivation and meaning of this important project.

The ‘Eye-Music’ series of watercolour/collage and paper-pulp reliefs are inspired by the idea of graphic musical notation. Janet writes that she

Joe Scarffe writes of her work:

Clergy are given the task of communicating the Gospel of peace. The Ordinal of the Church of England states that they are ‘to proclaim the word of the Lord and to watch for the signs of God's new creation. They are to be messengers, watchmen and stewards of the Lord … With all God's people, they are to tell the story of God's love.’ This proclamation is, of course, often achieved by using words, in sermons, in the scriptures and in the liturgy. So we now explore how music relates to the Word: the story of God's love. Our way into this exploration begins with the work of Maeve Louise Heaney, who has addressed this relationship in her book Music as Theology: What Music Says about the Word. If theology is ‘faith seeking understanding’, as Anselm wrote, then, Heaney argues, ‘could music not also be theological? Does it not offer us, at the very least, a form of understanding of our faith …?’ Of course, her answer to this question is ‘yes’. Her conviction is that music offers a way to understand our faith which is complementary to ‘linguistic and conceptual’ comprehension. When she uses the term ‘Word’ she refers to the logos, the incarnate God, the Word made flesh, Jesus Christ. If theology aims to mediate an understanding of this logos, then music is a powerful mediator. So far as this goes, it is a music theory with which reformed theologian Jeremy Begbie would be able to concur. However, Heaney also alludes to music's ability to reveal the divine in a more intuitive sense that would appeal to those who do not assent to the salvation narrative of scripture surrounding the figure of Christ: ‘I therefore intuit that the acts of listening to and making music have something to teach us about who God is and who we are …’.

Men and women framed the past using narratives and symbols centred on physical experiences and practices accumulated over long periods. Existing works on memory and the body in medieval culture, however, focus more on their interrelation in learned rather than non-elite contexts. For instance, the intellectual tradition of the ars memoria emphasised synaesthesia and embodiment in the formation of memory. The human heart was itself interpreted as the storehouse for memory in ancient and medieval thought, and was often used as a metaphor for remembrance in literary and religious texts. A number of studies on mystical texts similarly note how the body became a site of contemplation and mortification as men and women channelled affective responses to Christ and his suffering. By the mid-fourteenth century, the Passion was itself enshrined in devotional lyrics in the form of the literary Charters of Christ, in which legalistic language and structures were applied to the metaphor of Christ's crucified body. Likewise, pain was inflicted upon young bodies in both pedagogic and everyday settings, especially in cases concerning proof of land ownership, demonstrating a belief that physical chastisement could help imprint memories of past events.

Such work highlights the embodied nature of remembrance, particularly in religious settings, yet the relationship between memory and the body in lay contexts remains underexplored. A constellation of practices underpinned the formation of memory in everyday life as embodied pasts were recalled in accounts that centred on the body and its affective states. This included fields of behaviour where the role of gender seems more overt, like sexual activity and childbirth, as well as areas such as work and physical violence, where gender initially appears less central but on closer analysis exerted a constitutive force. Popular memories thus developed in bodies that bore meaning in the present, by accommodating individual and collective notions from the past. This chapter explores the use and formulation of physical forms of memory in everyday contexts, while sexual and reproductive histories are addressed separately in Chapter 4.

Memories associated with the body and its practices represented attempts to stabilise physical behaviour into coherent testimony.

In 1270, Sibilla de Hinteworth testified in a matrimonial suit that reached the Court of Canterbury on appeal from the archdeaconry of Huntingdon. Despite the preference for male witnesses in most cases in the English ecclesiastical courts at the time, a large number of women remembered the birth of the female party in the case, Cecilia, daughter of Bartholomew, to prove that she was under the approved age of twelve at the time of the marriage. Sibilla told the clerical examiner that she remembered the child's birth as she ‘was deflowered during the Lent that next followed’. She gave no further details about the circumstances surrounding her experience, an absence compounded by the shifting meaning assigned to the act of deflowering in this period. In manorial communities, ‘deflorata’ was most commonly used to describe women's loss of virginity outside marriage, appearing in fines made upon bondwomen and the female poor for fornication or illegitimate children. It also surfaced in some accounts of rape and sexual assault, accompanied by language that implied physical force, and lay behind payments of compensation for damage to women's marital value.

The fragmentary nature of Sibilla's memory alludes to the marginalisation of women's voices in a range of suits in the medieval church courts. The focus of her account simultaneously underscores the potential for female memories to subvert clerical assumptions about women's speech and sexual shame. Other women witnesses in the case recalled childbirth, marriages, work, and the deaths of kin in patterns that diverged to an extent from the recollections of men in comparable situations. Yet Sibilla's memory implies the ability for non-elite women not only to testify in suits that mattered in their local communities, but also to articulate rather than suppress gendered sexual experiences that involved contact with manorial or Church authorities.

This book traces everyday perceptions and uses of the past among non-elite men and women in England from the early thirteenth century to the end of the fifteenth century. It draws on the wealth of detailed legal testimony on a variety of issues that survives for the church courts of Canterbury and York, and opens up these archives for further study by medievalists in various areas. This is not a procedural history of canon law in the English church courts, although it speaks to many of the themes that concern scholars in that field.

Situated on the Rhine frontier between the Holy Roman Empire and the Kingdom of France, the city of Strasbourg was both strategically and economically important. As with other free Imperial cities, a large part of Strasbourg’s military pride was wrapped up in its use of ranged weapons – first arbalests, then gunpowder weapons. The practice of such weapons was promoted by the city government: Strasbourgeois arbalesters and gunners took part in numerous battles and sieges, and even after the decline of the civic militia and the rise of standing armies in the early sixteenth century, the self-perception remained, and the manufacture of firearms was a major industry. In a 1588 military parade, only 275 of 880 footmen did not carry firearms – 80 came with pikes (Langspiess), 70 with halberds (Hellenpart), 65 with two-handed swords (Schlachtschwert), and 60 with boar spears (Federspiess). When Louis XIV made his triumphal entry into the city in 1681, he was greeted by a salute from 300 guns.

This was reflected in the official sporting culture of the city by well-publicized shooting competitions, such as a 1576 match with Zurich commemorated in verse by the Strasbourg literatus Johann Fischart (c. 1545–91; see Fig. 1) and in art by his frequent collaborator Tobias Stimmer (1539–84), in which a pot of porridge cooked in the Swiss city was still warm 19 hours later when the Zurich team carrying it arrived by boat in Strasbourg.

The entries are dominated by the battle of the Somme. The infantry attack began at 7.30 am. Among the battalions to advance was 1st Battalion of the Newfoundland Regiment. Attacking at Beaumont Hamel at about 8.45 am the unit had suffered 90 per cent casualties within fifteen minutes. On 17 July Gwynne paid a visit to the unit whilst it was in the process of being reformed. It would appear that he had known the commanding officer (CO), Lieutenant Colonel Arthur Lovell Haddow in the Sudan. Gwynne also visited the Ulster Div which had suffered a high casualty rate on 1 July. Gwynne was aware of the casualties and spent much of the early part of the month visiting various medical units. He noted that there was an expectation of 250,000 casualties during the battle. He made no comment about the scale of the casualties. At the end of the month he paid another visit to London.

July 1

Over the parapets, or trenches as they are here, went our lads this morning. The French and our right accomplished their objective and our left did well up to a point but were held up by a strong point. Rumour has it we have advanced two miles on some part of our front. The IV Div had to meet the strongest opposition and lost about 4000 men. Our casualties up to yesterday afternoon were about 20,000. The French are said to have captured 2000 and we 1000 prisoners. An airman in the CCS saw the German lines full of Germans who were suffering badly from our shell fire. I travelled down from S. Omer this afternoon bringing Gen. Kentish the Army Officer Schools Expert as far as Auxi-le-Chateau Brought ACG to dinner at Amiens and called on CCS.

July 2

The Casualty Clearing Station expected such a full influx of wounded that the little chapel was also used as a hospital ward. Consequently I had no place to celebrate our Holy Communion. I did not get up early as I sat up late reading, ‘The Soul of the War’, by one ‘Gibbs.’

I begin my paper with a quotation from R. S. Thomas, whom Vincent Gillespie once described to me as ‘the sublime poet of divine apophasis’. Of course, this is a description which applies as well to Vincent as it does to the irascible Welsh poet; his academic reflections on ‘[t]he play of absence and presence’ which characterize ‘the human experience of engagement with the ineffable’ have always teetered on the brink of the poetic. Yet, as is the case with R. S. Thomas, the apparently effortless lyricism of Vincent's writing has been hardwon, born of rigorous engagement with difficult questions.

My choice of quotation is based on Thomas's location of the object of his enquiry ‘everywhere / And nowhere’. In situating that which he seeks in a realm of impossible paradox, the poet positions himself in a theological tradition which recognizes the incapacity of language fully to capture the essential alterity of the divine. He echoes Anselm of Canterbury (who echoes Augustine of Hippo) in finding God ‘ubique et semper et nusquam et numquam’ (‘everywhere and always and never and nowhere’). In taking us back to the theological landscape of early medieval England, this recollection of Anselm is pertinent; the influence of his prayers and meditations on the anchoritic literature which is the focus of this chapter has been long recognized. Indeed, the rhetorical and theological delight that Anselm takes in the exploration of divine paradox (God as compassionate yet beyond passion; Christ as strong in his weakness, lofty in his lowliness, and powerful in his impotence) informs the English material under consideration here. A discursive mode founded on paradox and apparent antithesis is fundamental to its effective operation. The focus of this chapter is on anchoritic literature's preoccupation with the paradox of the enclosed life as fundamentally exposed, and exposing.

Anyone familiar with Ancrene Wisse and its associated literature (the texts of the so-called Katherine and Wooing Groups) will know that these writings share a preoccupation with walls, both literal and metaphorical. Most notably, the rhetoric of Ancrene Wisse emphasizes that its anchoritic readers are bound by the walls of both anchorhold and body, and it repeatedly reiterates the dangers of violating these boundaries.

LONDON, BL, MS HARLEY 367 is a manuscript compilation associated with the celebrated antiquarian and historian John Stow (1525–1605). It comprises a diverse, and often confusing, collection of materials, aptly summarized by the Harleian catalogue as ‘many papers and fragments, with various poems’. The material may be divided into four loosely defined sections: fols 1r–12r contain largely autobiographical material concerning Stow himself, his various disputes and petitions; fols 13r–54v predominantly contain historical notes in Stow's hand, potentially working notes for his publications; fols 55r–144r contain a broad collection of poetry including George Ripley's ‘Twelve Gates’, and works by Lydgate, Heywood, Skelton and Scogan, among others. Somewhere around fol. 145r the material begins to post-date Stow's life; his hand is not present after fol. 144r and much of the later the material is dated to the 1620s and beyond. Scholarly interest in the manuscript has been limited to a few key areas: its likely use of John Shirley's manuscripts as exemplars, especially in the copying of Lydgate's poetry on fols 80r–87v; Stow's handwritten record of, and notes upon, his dispute with rival chronicler Richard Grafton (fols 1r–3v, 11r–12r); and the unique occurrence of several poems including Skelton's flytings upon ‘Master Garnesche’ (fols 101r–109v) and the rhyme royal variant of ‘London Lickpenny’ (fols 127r–v, continued 126r–v).

Possibly because of the seemingly unrelated, diverse elements which make up MS Harley 367, the manuscript has not previously been considered in its entirety. Although a singularity of purpose or design cannot be attributed to MS Harley 367, several themes and ideas emerge which traverse a range of its contents: an interest in libels, disputes and legal justice; considerations of money, recompense and patronage; ideas of civic and national duty; the relationship between past and present, specifically manifested through comparisons of England and ancient Rome. Doubtless, further transcription of Stow's copious historical notes would yield additions to this list. It is the suggestion of this chapter, however, that Stow himself offers something of a unifying force in the manuscript and that MS Harley 367's linking of its various themes to Stow's own life and work helps to construct an ideal vision of antiquarianism.

In contemporary Africa, the development of transport labour is intrinsically connected to the expansion of the typical, capitalist form of labour relations: free wage labour. Historically, labour power in transport has proven to be particularly prone to be exploited in exchange for wages: the transport worker of twentieth-century Africa, from the porter to the aviation pilot, is usually a wage worker.

In the twentieth century, caravan routes made up of porters or camels began to be used by trucks and cars; additionally, the sailing boats of the Nile and along West African rivers were joined by motorized vessels. In response to the increasing use of motor vehicles and trucks, colonial governments put emphasis on road construction – albeit on a small scale and using fairly rudimentary tools commensurate with that period. The colonial authorities were keen to make headway in the hinterland primarily to extract and transport raw materials to seaports for onward transmission to their European capitals; thus, the driving force for road construction was not to provide a public service for African colonial subjects. Another important transport initiative of the twentieth century was the construction of railways. The African railway network's main lines were completed by the 1930s. Often, mining and the export of agricultural crops were the almost exclusive reasons for the construction of railways. Seaports and paved roads also developed significantly in the twentieth century. Unlike railways, seaports and roads had existed for centuries in Africa. What changed was the introduction of the steam engine, and later the petrol engine, imported from Europe and North America to Africa during the colonial years – especially in the period encompassing the two world wars and the introduction of lorries and cars, which introduced driving as an important type of job. Railways also required new labour and mechanical expertise. Commercial air transport expanded in the second half of the twentieth century. The air transport industry in Africa directly generated an estimated 400,000 jobs in 2012. A good portion of these workers are highly skilled and well paid.

TRANSPORT AND THE ORIGINS OF FREE WAGE LABOUR

The workers who make the transport of goods and people possible are not restricted to the types we usually think of, such as dock workers/ longshoremen, sailors, train drivers or pilots.

January remained a month of relative quiet for the BEF. Gwynne was on leave in England until the 8th. During that time, he spent time with the CG at his home in Norwood. He joined with the Reverend Dr J. Simms, the principal chaplain, in a complaint to the AG about instructions being given to chaplains without the knowledge or permission of their respective offices. The question of who exercised authority over a chaplain was a matter of concern for the churches. The reference to the town of Kut was to the British force that had been besieged in the town since 7 December 1915.

1 January

Holy Communion at 8 am with Dick and the girls. It poured with rain, but Howell, Edie and I motored to see the Stackpoole’s for lunch. They have a very nice house and seemed very pleased to see us. In the afternoon on our return Howell and I went for a long walk in the Park and visited the game keeper to see about ferreting for rabbits.

2 January

I had a blessed Sunday. Early in the morning I went to the Holy Communion and preached in Dick's Church on S. Paul's epistle to the Romans. The whole creation groaning etc. In the afternoon I spent quietly in the Rectory and had a walk out before tea. I preached again at the Evening Service on Ps LXXI, ‘If ye had hearkened not my voice. I should soon have put thine enemies to confusion.’ I had supper with the Mawbyns and good talk with Howell and Harry afterwards.

3 January

Dick and I walked in the Park all morning and met Nellie and the girls taking the air.

And in the afternoon while Howell and Donald Snow beat the bounds in the glebe, Harry and I had a shot at the birds – none of us were clever enough to bring one down.

4 January

Charlie arrived yesterday afternoon. I walked towards Dunmow in the Evening. This morning we had some ferreting with dogs – a poor miserable sport wh. soon sickened me – so Charlie and I went out for a long walk and talk all over the park. In the afternoon we had another shoot over the glebe without much result. Harry left tonight.

A volume focused on workers’ problems and experiences would be incomplete without a chapter that approaches the relations between labour and capital by exploring how capitalists sought to manage their relationships with workers, thereby affecting the latter's experiences in the labour market and the workplace. Thus, this chapter discusses the changing nature of ‘the labour problem’ as understood and reacted to by masters and employers in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In turn, any analysis of capital– labour relations, especially in economies in which much of the population was – and remains, albeit to a steadily diminishing extent – primarily engaged in agriculture, needs to take account of the availability of natural resources, especially cultivable land and economically useful minerals. The argument here focuses upon the uneven and incomplete transition from a general abundance of land in relation to labour at the beginning of the colonial occupation of most of Africa (1879–c. 1900), to the early twenty-firstcentury situation of increasingly widespread shortages of land and relative abundance of labour in large parts of the continent. It must be said that the notion of this incomplete transition is much more salient south rather than north of the Sahara. It is of particularly little relevance to the most populous country of North Africa, Egypt, where population densities in its arable zone were already relatively high long before the twentieth century. So, while the discussion below is framed in continental terms, the focus will be on sub-Saharan Africa.

‘Capitalists’ are understood here as owners and managers of capital. The term overlaps with ‘entrepreneurs’, in the sense of those who bring the factors of production (labour, land and capital) together. But not all entrepreneurs in Africa are capitalists, unless the latter term is overstretched to include family farmers and lone market stallholders, among others. Besides its definition as a role or structural position, entrepreneurship is also often defined as an attitude towards investment: one of taking the long view and willingly accepting risk. Again, not all capitalists in Africa or anywhere else are entrepreneurial in attitude, nor is such an attitude confined to owners of capital, though having capital to invest creates the opportunity to display or develop such an orientation.