One of the most obvious connections between music and faith is literature – the writings of those whose words are set to music in hymns, songs, plays, operas, oratorios, anthems and canticles. Words about music can be obtuse and meaningless in their analysis, compared with words within music, where poetry or prose is transformed into musical sound and the colour of each word is enhanced by musical painting. Think of a Schubert song, where even ordinary poetry can be transported into profound significance by the skilful use of melody and harmonic scoring, economically composed for a pianist and singer to interpret.

Writers have long made a close connection between the created order and divinity, from the garden of Eden in the book of Genesis, to the Hellenic world of Pythagoras, Plato and Plotinus, to Christ's incarnation itself. Many a poet has perceived God in nature and none more so than Thomas Traherne (1636/7–74), the seventeenth-century English Metaphysical poet, priest and theologian, in his beloved Herefordshire. For him the beauty of God was directly connected to the beauty of nature:

For Traherne, nature was Christ to him and he wanted nothing more than to be in the natural world and therefore dwell within Christ himself. The creativity that this ‘natural’ faith inspired spilled over into his poetry, which in turn has inspired composers such as Gerald Finzi to craft musical settings and responses to Traherne's words of faith. Both music and poetry have now inspired a third art form in Thomas Denny's visual tributes to both Traherne and Finzi in his Hereford and Gloucester cathedrals stained glass. Of the windows in Hereford Cathedral's Audley Chapel [Figure 1], Christopher Gibbs writes:

‘Humans are a cultural species.’ We inherit and acquire a plethora of cultural practices, which fundamentally affect our behaviour. We may agree with Mesoudi that culture changes and evolves but, with regard to music, we may also agree with Davidson that, throughout human history, the creation and performance of music has had a constant and unchanging characteristic and aim – it has almost always involved a level of social communication. The ‘real or implied presence of others’, even when music is practised alone, points to the human need for social interaction. We have seen, in our brief exploration of the powerful social effects of psalms and hymns in the Judeo-Christian story, how music's social purpose has been a constant feature of Christian faith communities throughout history. Outside of any religious context, music, and especially singing, implies interaction: ‘singing a lullaby, a work song, a hunting song, or a school song; chanting as a member of a football crowd …’ and so on. A wide spectrum of research techniques in the psychology of music has developed in order to examine music as social behaviour, but in the realms of psychological or anthropological evolution, one scholar in particular has developed experimental techniques and analyses which help us to understand the fundamental importance of communal singing for our social cohesion and well-being.

Robin Dunbar is Professor Emeritus of Evolutionary Psychology at the University of Oxford. He describes his work as being ‘concerned with trying to understand the behavioral, cognitive and neuro-endocrinological mechanisms that underpin social bonding in primates (in general) and humans (in particular). Understanding these mechanisms, and the functions that relationships serve’, he says, ‘will give us insights into how humans have managed to create large scale societies using a form of psychological mechanism that is evolutionarily adapted to very small scale societies, and why these mechanisms are less than perfect in the modern world. This has implications for the design of social networking sites as well as mobile technology.’

IN TRIBUTE TO JULIA BOFFEY'S MANY IMPORTANT CONTRIBUTIONS to the study of Middle English poetry, I examine here a pleasing alliterative poem for which little modern analysis exists, despite obvious signs that its poet was accomplished and that his poem was widely read in England for close to a century beside such major texts as Piers Plowman. The Pistel of Swete Susan has been taken by modern critics to be little more than a paraphrase of the story of Susanna and the Elders in Daniel 13, which, though now apocryphal, was included in the medieval Vulgate Bible. The alliterative poet cared, however, about more than rendering a sacred text with a facade of vernacular ornamentation. Creative endeavours inevitably reflect the ideology of the culture for which and in which they are produced. The changes made by the poet are so delicate as not to alter the original story, yet they quietly impart a doctrinal lesson to a fourteenthcentury audience: that God in Trinity abides as the supreme third party in a sanctified Christian marriage. While foreign to the Vulgate original, this message distils ideas found in later patristic exegesis and liturgy.

As an exemplum on faith and married chastity, the biblical story of Susanna was universally recognized for how it features a miraculously efficacious prayer uttered at a dire moment. To revere the essence of this act, the Middle English poet constructs Susan so as to promote and reward a devout person's prayerful absorption of it: he encrypts into the poem the names and actions of the Triune Presence, unveiled progressively. Reading worshipfully, the meditant will feel that she has gained an affirming, divine response. Alexandra Barratt has detailed how women in religion were exhorted to undertake ‘hertely redyng’: ‘Clene and chast soules euer desiren so forto rede tat tei myght feele it sauourly with-in forth. Hertly redyng is a gracyous mene to gostly feling.’ The reading experience of Susan operates along similar lines. In detecting the enigma hidden plainly in Susan's lines, as would a medieval reader, we may glimpse the concerns of a society that sought such art for its edification.

This collection of essays is both the fruit of and a contribution to a recent rebirth of interest in the history of labour in Africa. Labour has never ceased to be an important part of social and economic life in Africa, but serious research on the topic has wavered. With some notable exceptions – especially among specialists on southern Africa – historians had lost interest by the late 1980s. The trend was not unique to Africa; indeed, it was part of a crisis in Marxist scholarship and social history and sociology more generally. Scholars are as fashion conscious as anybody, and they often follow trends – be it the ‘cultural turn’, the ‘linguistic turn’ or the ‘imperial turn’. Interest in labour's past has long been associated with an interest in labour's future – with projects of social reform and social revolution. The collapse of the communist alternative to capitalist hegemony had much to do with the disaffection at century's end of leftist scholars from political economy. Much of the energy of progressive scholars that had once gone into such subjects went in other directions.

The struggle to liberate South Africa from apartheid and the hopes vested in the post-1994 future kept the subject alive in that part of Africa. More generally, the International Institute of Social History and journals such as International Labor and Working-Class History and Movement Social tried to keep labour and social history alive. In the last decade or so, labour history has revived, but with different emphases. The Centre for the Study of Labour and Life Course in Global History at Humboldt University in Berlin has since 2009 brought together scholars with an interest in the subject for regular conferences, summer academies for advanced graduate students and post-doctoral fellowship years. Perhaps the revival of this domain of scholarship has something to do with the cyclical nature of scholarly fashions – as new trends prove themselves no more able than older approaches to provide a convincing way of looking at the world. Perhaps the moments of citizen mobilization in certain African countries have encouraged renewed attention to popular mobilizations of different sorts.

Under the category ‘Tolerated prisons’ Defoe numbered Bedlam and fifteen private ‘mad-houses’. Despite being places of confinement he was drawing a distinction between them and ordinary prisons. Although from early on the distinction between the mad and the sad and the mad and the bad has been maintained, the mentally ill and those with a criminal mentality have always been linked. Both groups were detained in coercive institutions, be they gaols for criminals where the ill were cast in with the evil, hospitals for ‘lunatics’ (as they were called) such as Bedlam, asylums for the criminally insane such as Broadmoor, therapeutic centres within prisons for violent sociopaths, such as the Barlinnie Special Unit, or the only entirely therapeutic prison for the socially and psychologically disturbed, HMP Grendon.

The priory of St Mary of Bethlehem – or Bethlem – was founded in 1247 outside Bishopsgate but just within the City. It existed for prayer and to raise alms for the crusades, but soon took on the roles of caring for the poor, providing lodging for travellers and offering hospitality to visiting dignitaries. It thus became a hostel or ‘hospital’, but not in the clinical sense of being a specialised institution for the care of the sick. After a century of obscurity it was taken ‘under the protection and patronage’ of the mayor and aldermen of the City of London. Financially more secure and having survived the ravages of the Black Death, around 1400 it first began taking in ‘distracted persons’ and has continued in this task to the present day, making it Europe's oldest extant psychiatric hospital.

The prison system in crisis as security concerns and numbers threaten to overwhelm it. With increasing political involvement in the running and management of prisons, and ever-increasing pressure to be tough on criminals, rehabilitation takes on a secondary role. Does prison work and to what end?

This chapter discusses the salient aspects of mutualistic associations and cooperative labour in Africa in the twentieth century. The introduction covers the conceptualizations of mutualistic associations and cooperative labour in Africa. They are discussed under the theory of African communalism and neoliberalism, highlighting the contending issues. Given the regional variations and contexts, the study of mutualistic association and cooperative labour takes cognizance of their similarities and differences in North, East, West and Southern Africa. The focus is on the factors for their growth, scope, performance and the challenges they faced. The role of state and/or governments in either promoting mutualism or cooperative labour or in the demutualization of African societies is investigated.

Mutualism is an alternative means of economic organization, namely common ownership of the means of production, where workers share in its profitability. In social mutualism, employees share in the management of public services. It is the process of bringing together cooperative and voluntary associations to achieve the desired objectives. According to the labour theory of value, labour or a service must be paid for commensurately. In the context of utopian socialist theory, Robert Owen outlined the selfish principle in humans, called the competition principle, for the gratification of their wants and propensities as embedded in neoliberalism. Conversely, the cooperative principle promotes acts of benevolence and reciprocity. Neoliberalism promotes an economy based on competition, leading to inequality and unstable societies. This is what led to the establishment of cooperatives in England in the mid-nineteenth century, when liberalism undermined the social foundations of society and promoted inequality and unstable business.

The concept of mutualistic associations and cooperative labour principles was ingrained in African societies even before colonialism. These principles were modelled on kinship and neighbourhood groups formed to perform certain tasks. They allowed the pooling of resources and the sharing of proceeds. These traditional cooperative principles were adopted in the building of homesteads, the breaking of land, planting, herding, harvesting and hunting. The cooperative spirit or the notion of self-help and mutualistic association was widespread. In Arab North Africa, traditional and informal types of self-help and mutual help societies referred to as Jam'iyyat, or Al taawaniya for formal cooperatives, were popular. Many of them were seen as a combination of ‘self-help’ and ‘charitable’ activities, as well as providing social services and assisting poor families.

In his 2013 essay on ‘fatherless books’, Vincent quotes Thomas Gascoigne's account of Reginald Pecock's defence at his 1457 trial for heresy, that he wished to be answerable only for books he had written in the last three years. Aside from the idea of writing ‘books’ in that time period, this is a plea with which almost any modern academic could sympathize. Not Vincent though. His huge corpus (of writings), scattered across journals and decades, consistently shows vast knowledge, understanding, and literary sensitivity, whatever the subject under his eye. When a collection of his most important essays was made newly accessible in the volume Looking in Holy Books, he might have recalled Richard Whitford's explanation for printing his twenty-year-old treatise in 1537: ‘And nowe of late I haue been compelled […] to wryte it agayne & agayne. And bycause that wrytynge vnto me is very tedyouse I thought better to put it in print.’ Sending out multiple offprints is no doubt less tiring than copying the whole thing out again (especially if the thing is A dayly exercise and experience of dethe), but the long list of Vincent's publications shows how he has haunted and shaped the field, setting the agenda with a self-effacing modesty (‘This is a very simple argument’).

This volume begins with the thirteenth century, that great age of pastoral expansion, religious educational programmes, and the first real efflorescence of vernacular religious writings: in many ways, the ground for Vincent's earliest work on pastoral manuals and vernacular miscellanies. Annie Sutherland examines a resonant image in Þe Wohunge of ure Lauerde, of Christ's birth taking place in a ‘house without walls’. She traces and elaborates the literal, descriptive aspects of this image – illuminating a continuity in communal, roadside life from the first-century Middle East to thirteenth-century England – and considers its implications for anchoritic readers, whose lives are seemingly defined by walls, but whose apotheosis of spiritual attainment renders all walls immaterial.

Nicholas Watson takes on the vastly influential Mirror of Holy Church of Edmund of Abingdon, arguing for its composition a decade later, and for a different audience, than is elsewhere suggested. In locating the Mirror in the context of the Salisbury canons, Watson uncovers newly available implications in the work's emphases and omissions.

In its 1930 Convention on Forced Labour, the International Labour Organization defined ‘forced or compulsory labour’ as ‘all work or service which is exacted from any person under the menace of any penalty and for which the said person has not offered himself voluntarily’. Representatives at the Geneva Convention further clarified forced labour as a particular ‘practice of compulsory labour exacted by a state or by agencies of a state, other than as a punishment for a criminal offence or for the purpose of the military defence’. Colonial powers faced enormous pressure to sign up to the 1930 ILO Convention, and several states delayed ratifying it. Despite this general agreement on the abolition of forced labour, despite increased pressure from non-governmental humanitarian groups and despite efforts by colonial reformers – including Jules Marcel de Coppet, the Governor General of French West Africa (1936–38), and Henrique Galvão, inspector of the Portuguese colonies and former governor of Huila Province in southern Angola – forced labour in colonial Africa persisted in many regions through the period of decolonization and into the present. Forced labour in twentieth-century Africa was a widespread means of building and maintaining infrastructure, supporting the mining sector and developing and servicing the export-oriented agricultural sector in French, German, Belgian, Portuguese, Italian and Spanish colonies, and, to a lesser degree, in the British colonies, where public labour ordinances, compulsory labour ordinances and communal labour ordinances served similar goals. Decolonization did not, however, end forced labour. Several postcolonial states have continued this practice, often under thinly disguised forms of military recruitment.

This chapter examines the variety of practices of forced labour during the colonial period on the African continent and its persistence into the postcolonial period. It provides a framework for understanding the context in which Western colonial powers engaged in forced labour and describes the major forms of forced labour used by both the colonial powers and the newly independent African nations. Forced labour was part of a wider set of practices using coerced labour. This chapter focuses on forced labour as a practice of state mobilization of labour in Africa during the twentieth century. As Frederick Cooper reminds us, during ‘the five hundred years in which Europeans and Africans have known each other rather well, no element has been more central in their relationship than work’. Forced labour was a central part of that relationship.

The spotlight shed on gaols by John Howard, Elizabeth Fry and others, and the demand for reform of the old and the creation of something new. The question of the purpose of imprisonment became a major public concern, and for the first time differing ideologies competed about how to achieve the Holy Grail of crime eradication. The temporary nature of the hulks and disquiet about transportation led to the construction of penitentiaries under either the separate or silent systems. Millbank and Pentonville both came under mounting criticism from eminent Victorians, and both were deemed failures. Attempts by Alexander Maconochie to fashion an alternative approach were frustrated.

In December 1966 the Report of the Inquiry into Prison Escapes and Security by the Admiral of the Fleet, Earl Mountbatten of Burma, was presented to parliament. Two months earlier, and two days after the escape of George Blake, Mountbatten had been appointed by the Home Secretary, Roy Jenkins, to conduct an inquiry and to make recommendations. Having accepted the task on condition that his findings would be acted upon, as he was not prepared to waste his time otherwise, he performed it without fuss and with becoming promptitude. This was all the more impressive as, in addition to Blake, he had to deal with twenty other newsworthy escapees, including two of the most notorious – and admired – criminals of the day who in April 1964 had been sentenced to thirty years’ imprisonment for their part in the ‘Great Train Robbery’: Charles Wilson, who three months later had escaped from Birmingham after his accomplices broke into the prison; and Ronald Biggs who had been whisked away from Wandsworth in 1965. Mountbatten also took evidence from a wide variety of sources, visited seventeen prisons, made detailed proposals, and even gave some consideration to Scotland which was outside his official remit.

George Blake was a spy for the Soviets and traitor to his adoptive country. After his conviction in May 1961 under the Official Secrets Act 1911 he was sentenced to forty-two years’ imprisonment – supposedly a year for every agent his betrayal had compromised – the longest determinate sentence ever handed down by a British court. Had he been charged with treason he would have hanged. This was in effect a slow death sentence. He was allocated to a cell in ‘D’ Hall of Wormwood Scrubs where well-behaved long-term prisoners were housed. There this most serious of offenders, and national security risk, was left for five years.

[Inside Front Cover]

BEETHOVEN: From March 11, 1820.

[Blatt 1r]

JOSEPH CZERNY [seemingly at the Birne or a similar establishment close to Beethoven's apartment on the Josephstadt Glacis; probably the afternoon of Saturday, March 11]:

I am married—I go somewhere in the evenings only to rest from the exertions of the day. // One lives only for himself here. Were you at [the] Kam[eel]? // I drink only water at midday; today, however, I will drink wine in the end. //

<I have also learned a great deal already, of the matters which—u ei de.> [//] [Blatt 1v] I only wanted to say that I have learned a great deal of what is being spoken about. // Against you and for you. //

You surely want to demonstrate only good deeds for Karl, and any other mother would kiss your hand for it. // <She is> One knows her. // It is to be wished that these matters will soon be over. That is the opinion of all your friends and admirers. [//] [Blatt 2r] You have a great deal of annoyance. // It would be better for her child, if she [Johanna] were perhaps in the penitentiary—like so. //

She [Beethoven's housekeeper?] wanted to tell me that concerning the butter, but I do not understand it. // She wanted to do it very well, and in the future she will know it already. //

I also love life in the country, and this year shall also go to the country, but unfortunately only for 4 weeks. // To Heiligenstadt or Baden. [//] [Blatt 2v]

She [Beethoven's housekeeper?] says that today she didn't deserve any wine at all, but in the future, she wants you to look over everything that you wish personally. //

Yesterday I was at Count Traun’s, and the day before yesterday at Kollowrath’s, where Wildfeuer is. // He is in the military. //

Your Karl has asked me to bring him some [piano] piece with accompaniment [of one or more instruments], which he then wants to play on St. Joseph's Day (Blöchlinger's name day). [Blatt 3r] Now I am bringing him the Trio in B-flat major. Are you satisfied with that? [//] [presumably continues on Blatt 5r →]