Informing the experience of ordinary soldiers and their families, the military culture of Britain's West African army evolved through periods of instability and decentralization separated by a few decades of stabilization and centralization. During its formative years in the late nineteenth century, Britain's West African military was unstable and dispersed, comprising separate paramilitary units made up of many men who had escaped enslavement and enslaved men indirectly or directly purchased by British agents at Cape Coast, Lagos, or interior slave markets who were transformed into colonial soldiers. This situation often put the early British paramilitary forces at odds with local West African elites who lost their labor to the colonial army, and slaves who had become soldiers exacted revenge on former oppressors both real and imagined. In this period, British officials and ordinary West Africans applied the term “Hausa soldiers” to the men of diverse hinterland origins (and usually some past association with slavery) who joined Britain's West African constabularies in what is now Nigeria and Ghana. The term “Hausa soldier” did not exist in Sierra Leone, although some of the same processes related to formerly enslaved men were evident. At the same time, men from other communities enlisted in these colonial forces, including large numbers of Yoruba from western Nigeria and almost every ethnic group of Sierra Leone.

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when Muslim troops dominated the ranks in Nigeria, the Gold Coast, and the Gambia (and formed a sizable minority of those in Sierra Leone), a simplified and adaptive form of Islam developed in Britain's West African army supported by military imams and occasionally Arabic teachers and mosques. While a racial hierarchy dominated these colonial paramilitaries all led by British commanders, a few prominent “native officers” helped with recruiting and provided local knowledge important for military operations. Although similar to the institution of “native officers” in British colonial India, there were far fewer such leaders in West Africa. Fighting numerous wars of conquest that expanded British rule inland, these West African paramilitary regiments set up a network of many small military outposts to supervise subjugated populations, impose colonial policies like taxation, and quickly suppress resistance.

Books have functioned as repositories of knowledge and collective memory for centuries. Richard Ovenden has written on the destruction of libraries and archives, an occurrence which, sadly, has occurred all too often. In times of war or civil unrest, attempts are frequently made to destroy those records which preserve history and inform the present. Our revulsion at such acts comes, in part, from the reverence in which books are held by so many. They are valued not as ephemeral objects but rather as something to preserve and cherish, representing far more than simply the words on their pages. Societies, groups and individuals have, for centuries, preserved on bound folios their most authoritative and sacred texts.

There is a long tradition of situating books at the centre of ceremonial activities. Some images within religious medieval manuscripts show signs of use indicative of them having been touched or even kissed, an action that would have imitated the kissing of a missal by a priest during Mass. Since 1945, the St Augustine Gospels, a sixth-century manuscript now in the library of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, has been taken to Canterbury for the swearing of the oath in the enthronement of new archbishops. The practice apparently revives an earlier tradition, a factor which is of great significance to those involved in the modern-day ceremonies.

The art contained within bound manuscripts often shows images of books. The depiction of John Banister delivering his anatomy lecture whilst a volume sits open on a lectern demonstrates the notion of an authoritative text. In other instances, books being presented to a patron or situated within a depiction of worship can be found, highlighting the significance of both their message and medium. What these images have in common is a focus on the book as an object.

From medieval Libri Vitae to twentieth-century war memorials, society has become accustomed to using a single item or fixed point to represent the individuals within a group or community. The guild book of the Barbers and Surgeons of York was not created to preserve the memory of the deceased, but it did function as a symbolic point of focus for the Guild.

To describe the human dislocation caused by war, climatic disaster, and economic exploitation in our modern, unequal, globalized societies, Zygmunt Bauman has proposed to speak of “‘human waste,’ or more correctly wasted humans (the ‘excessive’ and ‘redundant,’ that is the population of those who either could not or were not wished to be recognized and allowed to stay).” The presence of “human waste” seems to be an unavoidable feature of the present, something that goes beyond our possibilities for action: “an inescapable side-effect of order-building … and of economic progress.” Bauman nevertheless suggests. way out: “to take another, and somewhat different look at the allegedly all-too-familiar modern world we all share and inhabit.” In other words, the problem should be regarded with. distanced gaze that would “den gesellschaftlich beeinflussbaren Vorgängen den Stempel des Vertrauten wegnehmen, der sie heute vor dem Eingriff bewahrt” (“remove from those incidents that can be influenced socially the stamp of familiarity that protects them against intervention today”). The last statement is paragraph forty-three of the Kleines Organon für das Theater. Short Organon for the Theater) in which Bertolt Brecht placed the task of revealing the world's alterability at the center of the “Theater des wissenschaftlichen Zeitalters” (“theatre of the scientific age”) that he, with an eye to the social sciences, aimed to found.

In what follows,. will show what coming to terms with this aspect of our social reality has meant in the experience of Teatro Due Mondi, an Italian theater group established in 1979 in Faenza (Ravenna), which in recent years has made of the work with non-actors an essential part of its artistic activities.

One of the earliest works that prescribes penances, a short Welsh tract known as The Synod of North Britain (c. 545), stands as an important witness to early Christian confessional practices. Its penitential discipline is aimed primarily at the clergy, as is clear from the passage on illicit liaisons:

The severity of a sinner's punishment here depends on his clerical rank, and his penance – banishment to a monastery abroad and, possibly, exclusion from his order – is centered around monastic life. Insofar as the text outlines a programme of confession and penitential discipline aimed at the clergy, The Synod of North Britain is broadly representative of writing on confession prior to 1250. As we shall see, such writing tended to be directed toward the clergy and read under the careful watch of the Church.

The Synod of North Britain may be one of the earliest works to prescribe penances, but it is not otherwise an outlier. There is nothing unusual about finding a work about confession written before the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215. Moreover, while it is true that manuals for penitents – in the sense of comprehensive guides expressly aimed at coaching an individual through confessional preparation – were an innovation of the thirteenth century, texts that could guide penitents through the process of identifying and reflecting on their sins were not. Nor were such texts new in the twelfth century – which is typically cast as having been particularly concerned with the individual and with the discovery of the self.

The Guild and the City

Documentary evidence for York's medieval medical practitioners is limited and scattered amongst various city records. The City Council's ordinances of 1301 refer to medical services, and the entry for physicians and doctors is quoted here in full:

The subsequent entry in the Ordinances refers to the practice of apothecaries, including the instruction that one was not ‘to make concoctions for human use as medicine unless he knows his calling well’. A medicine found to have been made incorrectly ‘is to be burned, and [the apothecary] shall abjure his call forever’.

The Ordinances were instituted by Edward I as he established York as a staging post for his military campaign into Scotland. Made with the full agreement of the civic authorities, they were intended to improve the sanitary conditions in the city. The insistence that physicians and doctors should have received appropriate instruction before treating patients is to be expected. Yet beyond this, there is a focus on ensuring violent attacks did not pass unrecognised and unpunished.

Late Medieval Astrology

The guild book's images were intended to work in conjunction with the manuscript's texts, beginning on fol. 54v, in order to present an explanation of astrological theory and its application to medical practice. Although there is a clear relationship between the texts and images of the guild book, the two are less successfully integrated than in a volume like Sloane MS 1088. Here, written material and visual devices such as lunar and planetary tables and a diagram named the ‘rota celi’ are intermingled, allowing for an explanatory text to be placed directly alongside the visual device to which it refers. The physical separation of the guild book's visual scheme from its texts highlights Egerton 2572's function as a manuscript for display. Nevertheless, the texts either complement the images or supply additional information which would have been core to the Guild's medical activities.

Hilary Carey has persuasively argued that in late medieval England the popular use of astrology spread from an elite class downwards. Whilst for centuries there had been those who looked to the heavens for information, it is suggested that from the reign of Henry VI onwards, astrologers enjoyed increasing patronage from English royalty. From here it entered a middle-class sphere, as demonstrated by references in the Paston letters and the notes of clients recorded in the manuscript of John Crophill. Thus the guild book represents knowledge that had become part of everyday life for many people. Indeed, the content of the German Volkskalendar shows that the widespread popularity of compilations of texts such as those found in Egerton 2572 was not limited to England. As Lauren Kassel has observed, astrology ‘provided a social and cosmological framework in a world where people experienced much anxiety and little medical efficiency’. The York Guild would, therefore, have understood the desirability of demonstrating a grasp of astrological concepts in 1486. Comparison with other manuscripts demonstrates that Egerton 2572 was emblematic of the types of material circulating in 1486. Such knowledge would have been just as relevant in the late sixteenth century when the guild book was revised.

The medieval core of Egerton 2572 was a representation of the understanding of astrology which underpinned the medical activities of the Guild's members. The medieval mind placed the Earth at the centre of the universe.

A combination of European and African military cultures and histories informed the involvement of women in Britain's West African colonial army. Up to the 1700s, western European armies included large numbers of women mostly categorized under the vague heading of “camp followers.” These women provided various support services including soldiers’ wives and children who foraged for food and firewood, merchants who sold food and liquor, and cooks, laundresses, tailors, and sex workers. From the middle 1700s, the number of “camp followers” in European armies gradually decreased with the development of formal military logistical systems to maintain an increasing number of troops, the rise of Enlightenment ideals of femininity that disapproved of women's presence during wars and the changing status of soldiers from hired mercenaries to citizens serving the nation. During this period, the British Army imposed severe restrictions on marriage among its all-male troops indirectly encouraging what became a stereotypical military “culture of womanizing and misogyny.” This process of reducing the informal involvement of women continued in the Victorian-era British Army given military professionalization and centralization, the wider development of separate social and economic spheres for men and women, and the idealization of Christian marriage and nuclear family life coming out of industrialization. As previously discussed, a series of nineteenth-century Contagious Disease Acts (CD Acts) attempted to protect the sexual health and military effectiveness of Britain's male soldiers and sailors by imposing a regime of medical inspections and detention on female sex workers. By the late nineteenth century, the period of the so-called Scramble for Africa, the British Army and many of its western European counterparts became increasingly male institutions as female “camp followers” almost disappeared, and the small number of women and children associated with the military comprised members of officially regulated nuclear families. Historians know much less about the participation of women in African armies before the twentieth century. While evidence for the role of women in precolonial African warfare remains very limited, the infrequency of standing armies and the absence of logistical services means that the situation in many places likely resembled the “camp follower” culture of early modern European armies. Female fighters like the “Amazons” of Dahomey and celebrated female military leaders such as Queen Nzinga of Angola or Queen Amina of Zazzau (Zaria) in Northern Nigeria were extremely rare in precolonial Africa, with women more typically providing male combatants with food, firewood, intelligence, and motivation.

British colonial forces in Africa and other parts of the world relied on violent punishment or more commonly the threat of violent punishment to maintain discipline among the rank-and-file. Racism informed this practice as during the early nineteenth century, when flogging applied as a punishment to all British troops and could mean hundreds of lashes, the black soldiers of the WIR were more likely to be beaten and beaten more severely than their white colleagues. Britain established its locally recruited West African paramilitary forces during the late nineteenth century around the same time that the metropolitan British Army outlawed official corporal punishment. Nevertheless, Britain's African forces continued to use flogging as a disciplinary instrument among African soldiers until the Second World War. The existence of corporal punishment within military law in British Africa reflected white officers’ racist attitudes towards African troops but also the existence of flogging within the broader legal frameworks in these colonies. Within the system of indirect rule, Britain administered most of its African territories through a network of African traditional leaders governing by local customary law that often included options to inflict corporal punishment on offenders. During the first half of the twentieth century, one of the main differences between the experience of British metropolitan and West African soldiers was that many of the latter experienced or witnessed formal flogging.

In Britain's colonial African army, flogging represented one of the most serious among a number of punishments including imprisonment, fines, demotion, and dismissal available for authorities to impose on African soldiers convicted of violating aspects of military law. Most soldiers charged with offenses appeared before their commanding officer, who possessed the authority to deal summarily with a range of offenses but those accused of the most serious crimes faced trial by court-martial, presided over by a panel of officers with greater powers of punishment. Flogging represented both a legal punishment and an element of military culture performed as a ritual, whereby an African NCO using a hide whip or cane inflicted an assigned number of lashes on an offending soldier who had to lie on the ground before his entire unit. It represented a form of humiliation and deterrence. Reinforcing the racial hierarchy of these colonial units, white officers determined and observed punishment but remained aloof from its violent implementation.

Aside from their involvement in the colonial state's internal security operations or other military campaigns, Britain's West African soldiers committed acts of brutal violence against civilians across the region and at different times during the colonial period. To be clear, West African soldiers engaged in independent acts of violence against West African civilians separate from the “everyday and extraordinary violence” they perpetrated on behalf of the colonial state. On the other hand, and beyond the context of anticolonial rebellion, civilians did not always remain passive victims of such arbitrary military abuse and they periodically attacked soldiers. Examples of seemingly random violence by Britain's West African soldiers against civilians seemed to occur more commonly in the conquest era of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, faded away during the interwar era and became rampant again during the Second World War. Historians of the British colonial military in East and Central Africa have identified a similar periodization of soldiers’ maltreatment of civilians. In this way, the ebb and flow of such unofficial violence paralleled official flogging and incidents of mutiny within Britain's West African army. Acts of informal everyday violence also took place among Britain's West African soldiers who sometimes inflicted terrible abuse on each other and attacked troops from units originating from other territories. A recent study of the extreme violence perpetrated by Soviet soldiers against civilians during the Second World War offers some useful points for understanding the mistreatment of civilians and sometimes colleagues by Britain's West African colonial troops. For the Soviet case, violence by military personnel against civilians did not represent pointless or mindless acts but “served as a mode of self-expression among soldiers.” As total institutions, armies including those of the Soviet Union and British West Africa establish “their own set of harsh orders, symbols and social hierarchies, providing soldiers with little space outside the institution and nurturing a perception of `us against them.’” In colonial West Africa, these violent acts carried out by soldiers seemed to express their sense of separateness and superiority when compared to civilian communities and occasionally colleagues from other regiments or of lower rank. Absent a large body of written accounts by ordinary soldiers and civilians, these disturbing events illustrate the place of the West African soldier within the region's colonial society and how that changed over time.

Sollten einigen Lesern die unten in Abbildung. abgedruckten Zeilen Brechts irgendwie bekannt vorkommen, so hat dies aller Wahrscheinlichkeit nach einen eingängigen und triftigen Grund, denn mit ihnen beginnt Heinrich Breloers sehenswertes Dokudrama über Brecht, das im März 2019 im deutschen ARD-Fernsehen ausgestrahlt wurde. Brecht-Editoren klassifizieren sie als eine sogenannte “autobiographische Notiz,” die in der BFA auf die Zeit “um 1926” datiert wird (Herta Ramthun hatte die Notiz ein wenig später datiert, auf “um 1930”). Allerdings ist in Breloers Dokudrama die filmische Darbietung dieser Notiz so arrangiert, dass man gar nicht anders kann als sie für eine Äußerung aus Brechts letztem Lebensjahr 1956 zu halten, also sage und schreibe rund dreißig Jahre später.

Dass eine solche Notiz über die “merkwürdige Gleichgültigkeit” gegenüber der “Geliebten der Jugend” eben nicht, wie man meinen könnte

oder vielleicht sogar meinen müsste, aus der Feder eines auf sein Leben zurückblickenden Endfünfzigers sondern der eines Endzwanzigers entspringt, muss aufhorchen lassen. Vor allem aber enthält die autobiografische Notiz drei Aspekte, die ich weit darüberhinausgehend als grundlegend für Brecht ansehe und anhand von ausgewählter früher Lyrik untersuchen möchte. Der Klarheit halber werde ich jeden dieser drei Kernpunkte separat einführend darstellen, um sie dann jeweils anhand von ein oder zwei Gedichten detaillierter zu untersuchen.

Der erste Aspekt ist die Erfahrung der Entfremdung, in diesem Fall der Selbstentfremdung. Es handelt sich hierbei um eine Selbstentfremdung besonderer Art, denn die selbstdiagnostizierte “merkwürdige Gleichgültigkeit” des unter permanenter Amnesie leidenden Brecht ist eben nicht nur eine Gleichgültigkeit in der Rückschau (also diachron), sondern ein ständiger Begleiter, ein Wesensmerkmal Brechts (also synchron).

Dieses Phänomen—Brecht als der sich selbst Fremde—manifestiert sich in der Lyrik besonders deutlich beim Thema der Frau und des Weiblichen. Die Frau wird somit zu einem Ort der Selbstentfremdung, und dies in einem Genre wie der Lyrik, das spätestens seit dem frühen neunzehnten Jahrhundert in der europäischen Literaturtradition zunehmend so verstanden wird, dass es zumindest die Illusion einer gewissen Intimität und persönlichen Nähe suggeriert, ja geradezu herausfordert. Die Fremdheit der Frau ist unter anderem deshalb so interessant, weil Brecht das Weibliche, zu dem der Dichter auf Distanz geht, autobiografisch in mehreren sehr unterschiedlichen Manifestationen erfährt: in der Gestalt der Mutter, Sexpartnerin, vertrauten Freundin oder Mitarbeiterin erzeugt das Weibliche unterschiedliche Formen biologischer, physischer, emotionaler und professioneller Nähe, von der sich Brecht distanziert.

Provenance

Stamped in gold to a small rectangle of marbled paper and pasted inside the upper board of the guild book is the coat of arms of the eighth earl of Bridgewater, Francis Henry Egerton. The title was inherited by Egerton in 1823 and with it came the wealth that enabled him to make a bequest of over £12,000, in addition to his collection of manuscripts, to the British Museum. A supplementary £3,000 was bequeathed to the British Museum in 1838 by Charles Long, Baron Farnborough and cousin of Egerton. Monies from the Farnborough fund were used to purchase the York guild book in 1881. A brief minute reported the purchase on 9 April for the sum of £30 from W. H. Richardson. Custodianship by the British Museum, now British Library, is but one stage in the use and provenance of the manuscript.

The volume was sold, presumably on two occasions, following its ownership by the Guild and before it entered the collections of the British Museum. A note written in gold ink on fol. 34v states that the ‘book came into the possession of Mr. E. N. Alexander, by purchase, AD 1817’. This refers to Edward Nelson Alexander, a solicitor from Halifax with genealogical connections to medical men of York. Upon his death in 1859, the Halifax Guardian reported that ‘in a literary view, he will be much missed, he being one of the deepest read antiquarians of the parish’.

In 1830 Alexander had been a founding member of the Halifax Literary and Philosophical Society and he was subsequently elected as the Society's curator for antiquities and coins. Alexander was also a collector; he donated to the Society 150 coins from his personal collection and exhibited to his colleagues three antique gems in his possession. Antiquarian interests and financial means make Edward Nelson Alexander just the sort of person who would have acquired the guild book in 1817. It might even have been familial connections to medical practice in York that made the manuscript an attractive purchase; fol. 108v notes that a Doctor Alexander was made a contributor of the Guild. Regardless, the volume was not purchased as a source of useful medical knowledge but as a means of exploring the past.

Chaucer's Parson, who notably refuses to tell a ‘tale’ but instead offers a lengthy exposition on sin and confession, has been read as a Promethean figure bringing the high ‘Latinate’ theology of sin to the uneducated masses – either the travelling group of pilgrims or Chaucer's actual medieval audience. According to this view, the Parson's Tale is unusual and potentially subversive, because it operates as an ‘academic treatise’ in the vernacular. Proponents of this view include Derrick G. Pitard, who claims that the Parson's Tale functions as an ‘academic’ text because it is ‘a translation and compilation of three Latin penitential tracts originally intended for use by clerics’, it contains ‘internal references to various academic authorities, including Saint Jerome, Saint Bernard, Saint Augustine, and of course the Bible’, it ‘exhibits a dearth, and hence an apparent mistrust, of narrative plotting and poetic imagery’, and because it contains ‘a hierarchically organized, encyclopedic attention to detail’. Pitard writes that these supposedly ‘academic’ elements make the Parson's Tale distinctive among texts in English – ‘the language of the illiterati, a language with little or no academic tradition’. He argues that, ‘Before the last half of the fourteenth century, and especially the last quarter, academic treatises on religious matters intended for lay consumption are rare’.

Related to this view is the claim that the Parson's Tale is unusual among works on sin in that it places a powerful emphasis on the inner life. So, Katherine C. Little suggests that the Parson's Tale is unique among contemporary theological guides in the vernacular in its emphasis on contrition and in its interest in the ways in which the vernacular shapes the self. This suggestion, that the tale encourages a profound interest in the self, sounds much like Pitard's claim that the tale encourages penitents to ‘become their own interpreters’.

These models, by variously reading the Parson as the purveyor of previously inaccessible forms of academic thought and a particularly modern form of self-reflexivity, cast the Parson – and through him, Chaucer – as a harbinger of intellectualism and modernity. As such, these models participate in a broader pattern of reading Chaucer as a quintessentially modern figure – one who celebrated the kinds of self-reflexivity and freedom of thought that are now associated with modernity in the face of a restrictive medieval Church that unilaterally imposed uniformity and control upon medieval civilization.

A true collation is rendered impossible due to the original folios now being attached to guards. Nevertheless, from an inspection of the parchment and paper contained within the guild book a collation showing the book's modern appearance is given below. It has been divided into sections, largely based on the disposition of the parchment and paper folios. In the modern collation, fol. 16 and fol. 161* are represented individually whilst only fol. 16 appears in the 1774 collation.

Section 1: 11 (contemporary flyleaf, fol.–1*), 2–51 (fols. 1–4).

Section 2: 18 (fols. 5–12), 2–151 (fols. 13–25), 162 (fols. 26–27), 17–181 (fols. 28–29), 192 (fols. 30–31), 20–251 (fols. 32–343*), 262 (fols. 344*–345*), 271 (fol. 346*), 284 wants 1 (fol. 347*–36), 29–311 (fols. 37–39), 322 (fols. 40–41), 33–381 (fols. 42–47), 394 (fols. 48–51), 401 (fol. 52), 412 (fols. 53–54), 42–441 (fols. 55–57), 452 (fols. 58–59), 46–501 (fols. 60–64), 512 (fols. 65–66), 52–551 (fols. 67–70), 562 (fols. 71–72).

Section 3: 1–31 (fols. 73–75), 42 (fols. 76–77), 5–101 (fols. 78–83), 112 (fols. 84–85), 12–161 (fols. 86–90), 172 (fols. 91–92), 18–211 (fols. 93–96), 222 (fols. 97–98), 23–261 (fols. 99–102), 272 (fols. 103–104), 28–421 1 cancelled (fols. 105–118), 432 (fols. 1181*–1182*), 44–481 (fols. 1183*–1187*), 492 (fols. 1188*–1189*), 50–521 (fols. 11810*–11812*).

Section 4: 12 (fols. 119–120).

Section 5: 11 (fol. 121).

Section 6: 12 (fols. 122–123), 2–31 (fols. 124–1241*).

A collation based on the manuscript's 1774 appearance is given below, followed by a pictorial representation. It remains impossible to state with certainty when some folios were removed. Nevertheless, the reconstruction is based on evidence to be found within the manuscript and is intended to serve as an illustration of how different quires were once integrated into a bound volume. As with the previous collation, the sections demonstrate changes of writing support between parchment and paper.