Based on a life story interview with Doreen (21 September 2019)

I go by the name Doreen Andrews. My government name is a dead name, my before-name. I am now living my life as Doreen Andrews. Doreen is many things but to put it in a few words: I am a non-binary person, a calm person, a community person. I am recently a mother. I didn’t biologically give birth to these kids, but they look up to me and they like some of the attributes I have that motivate them to live their lives, to be happy with who they are. They look up to me for that. So, now they are like my daughters. It’s so hard, and it’s so fun; it’s a responsibility but it’s a loving responsibility: you get an opportunity to have someone who relies on you, and also, you rely on them. I worry about them and they tell me, ‘Oh, mummy, I need money to go somewhere! Mummy, I want to buy something!’ But it gives you that kind of acceptance of yourself, that I am no longer just living my own life, but having someone else who is looking up to me.

Right now, we are at The Nature Network: a resource centre, offices, a home, a safe house to so many refugees, the place where refugees are free to express themselves. Nature Network is a home, it’s a mother to me, I cannot ever repay Nature Network. But I wasn’t always so safe. You know, there are those events that happen in your life that you wish never happened, you wish didn’t exist in your life. You know? Sometimes I want to forget them. Some of this brings back traumatic moments. But I want to share; I want to tell the world; I want to show people that what happens now doesn’t determine tomorrow; what happened in the past doesn’t determine today. So, when I came to Kenya, for me it was a way to escape the life that I was living in Uganda, the life I was living when my family was putting up all these rules and barriers for me so I could not express who I really am.

The Regula S. Benedicti charged Benedictine monasteries with a duty of care and hospitality and, as the previous chapters have established, most cure-seekers travelled to the place of their healing. However, the Regula S. Benedicti also impressed the need for a level of separation and the cloistering of the brothers. These concerns were later re-emphasised in the canons of the First Lateran Council and later medieval visitation records, both stressing the need for monastic seclusion. Nevertheless, cure-seekers deliberately sought out the locations in which the saints (or rather their relics) resided and would have expected a hospitable welcome from their hosts. Being welcoming to, and separated from, the laity, monasteries had to balance two juxtaposing duties to fulfil their spiritual and charitable responsibilities. Yet miracle accounts show little concern over the presence of cure-seekers – instead presenting the shrines as being open to all people and at all times – with limited indication of the supervision of, or the boundaries between, sufferers, saints and the monastic community.

We arrive in this final chapter then, along with the cure-seekers, at the shrines of the saints. Of course, it must be understood that the experiences of the churchmen who were miraculously cured, especially those of the cult-centre community, would have differed from those of the lay cure-seekers. But what would the majority of cure-seekers have expected on arrival at the shrines? To address this, the question of where in the monastery cure-seekers sought their cure must be asked. We must also consider the regulation and reception of lay visitors, and the matter of whether cure-seekers were seen to be ‘guests’ of the monastery. It must be recognised that Benedictine monasteries like our seven cult centres were, to an extent, independent institutions. Consequently, the ways that monasteries approached the issue of lay presence might well differ. Those that were established, larger and located in urban centres such as Canterbury, Ely and Winchester, which were visited by numerous travellers, would have been more practised in handling lay visitors than smaller, rural monasteries. Conversely, establishments such as Burton, with a principally local focus, could have developed stronger relations with the local laity. Reading had a special duty of hospitality written into its foundation charter, while Norwich permitted lay access to William’s tomb in the monks’ cemetery and chapter house (prior to the translation to the cathedral itself).

In taking the next step on the journey to the shrine, and following the previous chapter’s establishment of who our cure-seekers were, this chapter addresses the geography of the cults. Considering the distance travelled by cure-seekers, as represented in the miracles, through statistical and literary analysis, provides better insight into the geographical scope of the cults. While local supporters were the primary demographic of cure-seekers, well-established and popular cults had the potential to attract widespread attention. As a result, it might be expected that hagiographies, in their promotion of their saint, would emphasise reports where journeys of longer length were made. An interesting issue therefore arises with regard to the representation of travel and geographic locale.

The geographical reach of the cults of saints has been a feature of studies produced since Finucane’s Miracles and Pilgrims. The importance of the reach of saints, for Finucane, was that it provided insight into the spread of the cult. Although his analysis revealed that cults found greater support in the local vicinity, Finucane noted that within the closing accounts in many miracula there were higher numbers of pilgrims from further afield, and concluded that this showed both the developing scope of the cult and also a dying down of interest in the cult’s immediate vicinity. That a hagiographer might wish to promote the increasing influence of their saint’s cult is understandable, although whether this should mean that interest closer to home was declining is worth querying. Just because there was an increase in accounts relating to those who were at a greater distance from the cult does not mean that there was a decrease in local devotion. Ward’s Miracles and the Medieval Mind and, more recently, Yarrow’s Saints and Their Communities have also seen the merits of considering the importance of geographic scope in understanding the shape of the cult. Both, like Finucane, recognised the value of the cults to their immediate area. For Ward, the shift in the saint’s patronage, from protector to healer, in the high Middle Ages reflected the changing relationship between the saints and their local communities. Yarrow too considered this element of care in highlighting that William’s cult might have acted as an extension of the bishop of Norwich’s own pastoral care.

The audience for Patience must have been similar to the audience of the Pistel and other poems in this book: high-class, lay, steeped in romance literature. Since Patience appears alongside Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in British Library MS Cotton Nero A X, it is the best known of the poems I have discussed so far, and more scholarly attention has been given to its author and original reading context, despite the frustrating absence of evidence. We know that the manuscript, which also includes Pearl and Cleanness, was copied around 1400, and that since Cleanness is indebted to Mandeville’s Travels, it cannot have been composed before c. 1360. The language of the poems is that of the north-west Midlands, probably Cheshire. Most scholars have assumed that the same poet wrote all four poems in the manuscript, which share a common alliterative metre, dialect and stylistic similarities, and an apparently similar controlling intelligence, and I share this assumption. The fact that the poems appear together in Cotton Nero, copied together by a single scribe, implies that the manuscript was made for a single audience. Of course, this scribe’s intended audience was not necessarily the same as the poet’s. Indeed, it has sometimes been argued that Patience was written for clerics. But I will assume that the four poems were also composed for a single, lay audience. There seems to me to be a significant continuity between the way the author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight depends on his audience’s deep knowledge of romance, making witty in-jokes about Gawain’s literary reputation and knightly convention before wrong-footing them at the poem’s climax, and what he does in Patience. I will argue that for Patience, too, an audience steeped in romance is necessary for the poet to achieve his desired effects.

As Putter and Stokes show, Patience was written for reading aloud to a group of listeners. This is the context conjured up by the poet’s invitation ‘Wil ye tary a little tyne and tent [pay attention to] me a while?’ (59), but more persuasive evidence is offered by the poem’s division into two instalments, which indicates a stable audience who would hear it as entertainment over a couple of days: most plausibly, a household group. The first instalment ends with a quatrain of summary and anticipation:

Confessio Amantis, 8 single leaves missing and two quires at the end London, s.xv, first quarter (late)

Contents

(fols 1r–181v; numbered 1–179 because of doubling of 98 and 106) Confessio Amantis, Prol. 1 to VIII.782, ending incomplete

Prologue (fol. 1r) missing 504–657 (wants original fol. 4, replaced by a numbered blank parchment leaf, with the missing text supplied in a s.xvii hand, six lines being left blank at the bottom of fol. 4vb because of a mistake in the ruling); also missing 984–I.30 (wants original fol. 7, replaced by a numbered blank parchment leaf); Book I (fol. 8ra) begins imperfect (missing lines 1–30 due to missing fol. 7), also missing I. 199–336 (wants original fol. 9, replaced by a numbered blank parchment leaf); also missing I.3402–II.108 (wants original fol. 28, replaced by a numbered blank parchment leaf); Book II (fol. 29ra) begins imperfect, missing 1–108 due to wanting fol. 28; Book III (fol. 49r); Book IV (fol. 65v); Book V (fol. 87r) missing V.7718–VI.40 (wants original fol. 129, replaced by a numbered blank parchment leaf); Book VI begins imperfect (missing VI.1–40 due to wanting fol. 129) and missing VI.2343–VII.60 (wants original fol. 143, replaced by a numbered blank parchment leaf); Book VII begins imperfect (missing VII.1–60 due to wanting fol. 143) and missing VII.5399–VIII.126 (wants a leaf between fols 175–76, not replaced); Book VIII begins imperfect (missing 1–126) and missing VIII.271–441 (wants fol. 177, replaced by a numbered blank parchment leaf), and also wants leaves (two quires of eight, reckoning 145 lines per folio in text of 2331 lines) after fol. 179, with VIII.783–3114*. All but the last of the eight missing single leaves would have contained pictures or borders (see ILLUSTRATION, DECORATION, below).

Text: collated by Macaulay (sigil G), version Ib. Macaulay (ed., Works, II.cxliv–cxlv) comments on the close relation (and superior spelling) to London, Society of Antiquaries, MS 134. See also John Young and P. Henderson Aiken, A Catalogue of the Manuscripts in the Library of the Hunterian Museum in the University of Glasgow (Glasgow, 1908), 10–11.

This Descriptive Catalogue of the English Manuscripts of John Gower’s Confessio Amantis has been long in the making. The origins of the project were coeval with the publication in 1978 of the seminal article by Malcolm Parkes and Ian Doyle on the scribes of the copy of the Confessio Amantis in Trinity College Cambridge, which opened a new window on the production practices behind the professional copying of late medieval Middle English poetry. At this point Derek Pearsall, at the University of York, started to develop the idea of a catalogue of Gower manuscripts with three young graduate students: Jeremy Griffiths, then working in Oxford on the scribes of the Gower manuscripts under the supervision of Malcolm Parkes; Kate Harris, working on a D.Phil. thesis on the early reception of Gower’s Confessio with Elizabeth Salter and Derek Pearsall at York; and Jeremy Smith, working in Glasgow with Michael Samuels on the language of the Gower manuscripts. The model for the manuscript descriptions, adopted at the outset on the advice of Jeremy Griffiths and still surviving in the present catalogue, is indebted to the work of Malcolm Parkes.

At this early stage, it was intended to encompass the entire corpus of manuscripts preserving the works of the trilingual poet, including his major French poem the Mirour de l’Omme and his Latin work, the Vox clamantis. Supporting the ambition to advance the understanding of the production history of Gower’s oeuvre was a plan (funded by the British Academy) to commission photographs of examples of the work of all scribes involved in the production of copies of Gower’s poems. As this early ambition remains to be fulfilled and has of recent years become a focus of more controversy than is usual in the case of palaeographical studies, it is hoped that the collection of images accrued at this time may at some point be made available in a public repository to facilitate further investigation.

Originally the hope was that some further insight into the poet’s work over time on the Confessio, creating, then revising, his poem, might be gained, and targeted collation of the text was part of the original remit for work on each manuscript copy of the English poem.

Confessio Amantis, a small paper MS.

London, mid-fifteenth century

Contents

(fols 1ra–167vb) Confessio Amantis, Prol. 1–VIII.1102

Prol. (fol. 1ra); Book I (fol. 7va) wants one leaf after fol. 7 (I.63–216); Book II (fol. 25ra); Book III (fol. 44ra); Book IV (fol. 59ra); Book V (fol. 79ra) wants two leaves after fol. 105 (V.5229–5594); Book VI (fol. 117vb); Book VII (fol. 131ra); Book VIII (fol. 161va) wants three leaves and at least a quire of eight after fol. 167 (VIII.1103–3114*).

One leaf lost, the last of quire i, after fol. 7, with I.63–216; the parchment leaf now numbered fol. 8 belongs to quire ii rather than quire i: it is slightly smaller than the paper leaves either side and thus not a match for fol. 1, and it bears the signature of ‘bj’ central in lower margin to match ‘b2’, ‘b3’, ‘b4’ and ‘b5’ on fols 9–12. However, fol. 8 is a singleton, the end of quire ii being marked by a catchword at fol. 16v, after the due eight leaves. Two leaves are lost after fol. 105 (not after fol. 116, as Macaulay states, followed in all subsequent descriptions), where the central bifolium of quire xiv is missing, with V.5229–5594. Just over 2000 lines are missing at the end of the poem after fol. 167 (VIII.1102–3114*), with loss of at least three leaves and one eight-leaf quire; the Latin last line (the first line of the accompanying Latin gloss) is scribbled over in both black and red.

Text collated by Macaulay (sigil Ar): recension Ic (Macaulay [ed.], Works, II.cli).

Illustration

None

Decoration

Decoration is quite simple, in blue and red, and incomplete. On fol. 1ra, the Prologue begins with an eight-line blue initial with red penwork flourishing. A blue letter with red flourishing of this sort marks the beginning of Books II (three-line), III (ten-line) and IV–VII (four-line), but Books I and VIII have only guide-letters for a one-line and a four-line initial respectively.

Abbreviations for the Latin and French addenda to the Confessio:

Ex ‘Explicit iste liber’

Qc ‘Quam cinxere’, with preceding prose rubric ‘Epistola super huius’

Q ‘Quia unusquisque’

P Carmen super Multiplici Viciorum Pestilencia

M Short Latin poems, occurring in various permutations

T Traitié pour Essampler les Amantz Marietz

Manuscripts in the United Kingdom

• 1. Cambridge University Library, MS Dd.8.19 (deliberate substantial omissions), s.xv, first quarter, missing V.1–1442, 2150–7184end, VII.3684–5438end, all of Book VIII. [Macaulay (ed.), Works, II.cl, Ic, sigil D]

• 2. Cambridge University Library, MS Mm.2.21, s.xv, first quarter, no losses. [Macaulay (ed.), Works, II.cxl–xli, Ia, sigil M]

• 3. Cambridge, Pembroke College, MS 307 (at present on deposit at the Cambridge UL), c. 1420–30, no losses. Ex Qc Q, also table of contents. [Not known to Macaulay]

• 4. Cambridge, St Catharine’s College, MS 7, s.xv, mid-century, missing I.3089–3276, II.3331–3518, V.1182–1363, 6225–6388, VI.107–460, VII.984–1155, VIII.2941*–3114*end. Ex Qc Q. Much disorder, without loss of text, in Books III–V. [Macaulay (ed.), Works, II.cxlvi–vii, Ib, sigil Cath]

• 5. Cambridge, St John’s College, MS B.12, s.xv, first quarter, missing I.631–814, V.57–213, 1615–1770. Ex Qc Q. [Macaulay (ed.), Works, II.cxxxix–xl, Ia, sigil J]

• 6. Cambridge, Sidney Sussex College, MS 63 (Δ. 4. 1), s.xv, second quarter, missing Prol. 1–140. Ex Qc, also Cato’s Distichs, in English. [Macaulay (ed.), Works, II.cliii–iv, IIa, sigil Δ]

• 7. Cambridge, Trinity College, MS R.3.2, s.xv, first quarter, missing entire Prologue, entire Book I, II.1–2686 (in all, the first five quires). Ex Qc Q P M T. [Macaulay (ed.), Works, II.cliv–v, IIb, sigil T]

• 8. Glasgow UL, Hunterian MS 7 (S. 1. 7), s.xv, first quarter, missing Prol. 504–657, 984–I.30, I.199–336, I.3402–II.108, V.7718–VI.40, VI.2343–VII.60, VII.5399–VIII.126, VIII.271–441, VIII.783–end. [Macaulay (ed.), Works, II.cxliv–v, Ib, sigil G]

• 9. London, British Library, MS Add. 12043, s.xv, first quarter, missing Prol. 1–786, IV.1–190, 559–932, V.4606–4983, VII.3071–3268, VIII.1440–1632, 2404–end. [Macaulay (ed.), Works, II.cliv, IIb, sigil Ad]

• 10. London, British Library, MS Add. 22139, s.xv, third quarter, missing Prol. 1–175, 455–78, 505–27, 716–26, 979–1061, I.199–II.156, III.1150–IV.1516, IV.1643–68, V.7807–44, VI.1–154. Ex Qc Q, with four short poems by Chaucer. [Macaulay (ed.), Works, II.cxlvi, Ib, sigil Ad2]

Confessio Amantis, with Latin addenda; begins at I.3305, twenty-two leaves missing in all; later books much disordered due to misbinding.

s.xv, second half.

Contents

1

(fols 1ra–110ra) Confessio Amantis, I.3305–VIII.3114*end

Prologue lost; Book I, beginning at fol. 1ra, has only 3305–3446end; Book II (fol. 1va); Book III (fol. 16ra); Book IV (fol. 27rb); Book V (fol. 41vb); Book VI (fol. 73ra) lacks four leaves after fol. 73, in quire xii, with loss of VI.264–1306; Book VII (fol. 93rb); Book VIII (fol. 91vb) lacks one leaf after fol. 103, in quire xvii, with loss of VIII.2566–2833. There is considerable confusion from Book V (quire xi) onwards, with leaves missing and many leaves displaced, the page-numbering meanwhile proceeding consecutively without regard to missing leaves or text (see Collation, under PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION, below). This explains, amongst other things, why Book VIII appears to precede Book VII.

Macaulay was able to inspect the MS when it was sent from Castle Howard for his use (ed., Works, II.cli). He gave it a sigil (Hd) but did not make a full collation. He noted some textual similarities with Bodleian, MS Laud 609, and assigned it to his recension Ic.

For further information about the following Latin and French addenda that Gower caused to be added to MSS of the Confessio, see Appendix III.

2

(fol. 110ra) ‘Explicit iste liber’

3

(fol. 110ra) ‘Quam cinxere freta’

4

(fol. 110ra–rb) ‘Quia vnusquisque’

Illustration

No surviving illustration.

Decoration

Decorated initials for each book and for text-divisions within books are all alternating two-line red and blue initials, plain without flourishing.

The first part of this book has presented the narratives of twelve gay and trans refugees from Uganda who at the time of sharing their stories lived in Nairobi, Kenya. As stated in the Introduction, these stories are part of, and contribute to, a recently emerging body of African LGBTQ+ life narratives, and they add to the building of queer African archives. Having shared these life stories, Part II of this book engages in what we call an inter-reading of the life stories with select biblical stories. The present chapter offers an account of the rationale for, and methodology underlying the research presented in this book. First, it discusses the significance of LGBTQ+ autobiographical storytelling, relating this to traditions of feminist, postcolonial, and queer activism and scholarship, specifically in African contexts. Second, it examines the status of the Bible as an authoritative religious text and a popular cultural archive in contemporary Africa, explores biblical hermeneutics of liberation, and discusses some examples of using biblical texts for purposes of community empowerment and social transformation. Third, it introduces the specific approach of community-based participatory research that was followed in this project and outlines the process by which community members creatively engaged the selected Bible stories, transforming them into plays that set the stories in their own present-day context.

The significance of life storytelling

The use of autobiographical storytelling has a long tradition in feminist, postcolonial, and queer activism and scholarship. This has to do with the ability of storytelling to render visible the lives, and to make heard the voices, of those who hitherto remained marginal, if not invisible and unheard, in academia and in society at large. For marginalised people and communities, as the feminist philosopher Shari Stone-Mediatore puts it, life storytelling has great political and epistemological significance as it produces ‘knowledges of resistance’:

On 3 January 1925, less than three years after the March on Rome, Prime Minister Benito Mussolini announced the beginning of the dictatorship to the Chamber of Deputies of the Kingdom of Italy. Following the assassination in June 1924 of Giacomo Matteotti – the secretary of the Socialist Party – and the protest movement that had emerged opposing Mussolin’s cabinet, the enforcement of an authoritarian state came to represent the best solution to the impasse, one that could both win over the most intransigent fascists and, at the same time, satisfy the nationalist and conservative bloc, which was hoping for a process of normalisation without being particularly punctilious about the loss of fundamental freedoms.

In spite of persistent opposition until around 1928 within parliament to the constitution of a fascist state, the 1925 speech effectively marked the end of liberal Italy. In late 1925, the first leggi fascistissime [ultrafascist laws] transformed the existing constitutional monarchy into an authoritarian and totalitarian dictatorship via the centralisation of power in the hands of the premier and his party, the violent suppression of opposition parties, the control of the press and the media, the institution of a secret police force and, afterwards, the confino [internment] of anti-fascist activists.

It is somewhat astonishing to learn that the diffusion of Bartók’s music in Italy started to flourish around the mid-1920s within this distinctive and leaden political context. Between March 1925 and April 1929, Bartók gave thirteen concerts in Bergamo, Cremona, Florence, Genoa, Milan, Naples, Palermo, Trieste, Venice and Rome. In the 1930s, thanks to the ambitious cultural, media and pedagogical policies of the regime, he was acclaimed as one of the most important musicians of his time. His Allegro barbaro and Suite op. 14 were introduced in the new syllabuses of the Italian conservatories, while his most recent compositions were regularly performed at the International Festival of Contemporary Music in Venice: not only the Music for Strings (premiered in 1937), but also the String Quartet no. 4