Wisdom literature, that is works that use exemplary fables, parables and aphorisms to provide practical and moral guidance to readers, has been described as a ‘singularly mobile genre’ (Marlow 2013: 2). It was a tradition shared across religious boundaries, with specific texts frequently translated between Judaism, Christianity and Islam. An example of this movement can be found in the collection of exemplary fables known in Arabic as Kalila wa-Dimna, which was composed in Baghdad around 750 CE by a Persian convert to Islam named Ibn al-Muqaffa. This book had a strong presence in the Iberian Peninsula during the Middle Ages. Ibn al-Muqaffa's translation likely came to al-Andalus at some point during the Umayyad Caliphate, and thereafter circulated in Arabic orally and in numerous manuscripts (Cacho Blecua and Lacarra 1984: 13). During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries it was translated three times from the Arabic: once into Castilian and twice into Hebrew. The Castilian Calila e Dimna was made in 1251 at the behest of the soonto- be King Alfonso X while still infante. Exact dates for the two Hebrew translations are not known; the earliest, attributed to a mysterious ‘Rabbi Joel’, has been dated between the late twelfth and the middle of the thirteenth century given that the Latin translation based on this by Juan de Capua, the Directorium humanae vitae, which became the source for later translations of the book into vernacular European languages, was completed between 1262 and 1278. The second Hebrew version, a translation in rhymed prose by the Toledan scholar and poet Jacob ben Eleazar, has been dated to the start of the thirteenth century.

Kalila wa-Dimna exemplifies how medieval wisdom literature functioned as a site of shared cultural heritage, a topic that has been addressed by Luis Girón-Negrón (2005), Y. Tzvi Langermann (2012) and Oded Zinger and David Torollo (2016) in recent years in relation to both this collection of fables as well as to other works of this genre. Indeed, given the ease with which it appears to have moved between religions and cultures, previous scholarship has tended to view the book as possessing universal meaning.

This article explores the role of the phantom in relation to legendary historical constructions of place. It takes as its focus Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (hereafter SGGK) and the first component romance of the bipartite Awntyrs off Arthure at the Terne Wathelyn (hereafter Awntyrs A). Unlike the other English Gawain romances, which typically trace the extension of Arthur's insular kingdom to the north and the west through the deeds of his knight Gawain, these are concerned not with the growth of Arthurian power but its decline. In their imaginings of insular imperium and its limits, both romances draw on a dominant medieval discourse explicitly concerned with place: political prophecy. A long tradition informed by Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia regum Britanniae (c. 1138), and its prophetic seventh book, the Prophetiae Merlini, political prophecy in England is for the most part concerned with the movements of insular political power rather than religious revelation. It is, however, ascribed to a number of prophetic authorities alongside Merlin, which include among their number saints and even the Virgin Mary. The phantoms with which this article is concerned function as another distinct category of prophetic authority, on some occasions held to be synonymous with the fairy, and on others aligned with souls returned from purgatory. This material presents a salient reminder of the porous division between the sacred and the secular in Middle English romance. I suggest that both romances make use of longstanding purgatorial systems of representation, which provide a model for the interventions of phantoms in imaginings of the movements, and the limits, of earthly power.

Twelfth-and Thirteenth-Century Analogues

The political situation of the phantom is not unique to medieval Arthuriana. It is a staple of classical epic, which finds a precedent familiar to medieval authors, both sacred and secular, in Book VI of the Aeneid, where the shade of Anchises prophesies to Aeneas a succession of Roman emperors, and the attendant fortunes of Rome. The motif recurs throughout the Middle Ages, including the Vision of Charles the Fat (c. 888), an apocalyptic prophetic endorsement of the accession of the future Louis III, delivered by his uncle and grandfather from purgatory.

In the Vulgate Cycle Queste del Saint Graal, the Grail quest opens with a transition between landscapes. As the knights leave the castle of Vagan, we hear that they ‘departirent maintenant li uns de l’autre einsi come il l’avoient porparlé, et se mistrent en la forest li uns ça et li autres la, la ou il la voient plus espesse, en tous les leus ou il trovoient ne voie ne sentier’ [‘dispersed, as they had decided previously, and entered the forest at those points where they found it to be thickest, following no path or trail’]. The forest outside of the castle of Vagan represents a point of transition between two different types of spatial framework: stepping away from the path, leaving the well-worn tracks of Arthurian romance behind, signifies a move into the symbolic world of the Grail. The knights are no longer travelling through a known landscape traversed by their predecessors and in which, at any point, they may encounter a friend or an enemy, but instead will be entering a new world in which each knight is the first voyager and every journey is unique. In ‘The Tale of the Sankgreal’ Thomas Malory omits the mention of the forest and instead further emphasizes the importance of individual choice to each knight's journey, writing that ‘on the morne they were all accorded that they sholde departe everych from othir. And on the morne they departed with wepyng chere, and than every knyght toke the way that hym lyked beste’ (677.23–26). In both texts, although the geographical features that form each knight's quest physically resemble some of the landscapes of more secular Arthurian romance, the spatial framework that he occupies becomes a physical manifestation of the inner journey of spiritual improvement that he must make. Thus, each knight's spiritual state takes precedence over the actual spaces through which he rides and determines the physical journey that he experiences. In the world of the Grail, interior becomes exterior; the private relationship that each knight has with his God is projected onto the Arthurian landscape.

This interaction between secular and spiritual spaces and spatiality within the Grail quest reflects the fusion of secular and spiritual priorities fundamental to medieval concepts of chivalry. Maurice Keen defines medieval chivalry ‘as an ethos in which martial, aristocratic and Christian elements are fused together’.

Untouched by original sin, Mary of Nazareth attained unrivaled popularity in the history of Christianity with a cult that is exceeded only by that of Christ himself. Mary is still the most honored and venerated saint in the Roman Catholic Church, a highly privileged status testified to by her eminent degree of worship and by her countless poetic epithets, tutelary titles, scriptural typologies, and honorific salutations. More than fifty formal and informal Marian titles are collected in the petitions of the Litaniae Lauretanae, the most widely disseminated praises and supplications to the Virgin that officially became part of the rosary ritual from the last quarter of the sixteenth century. Among these, four invocations have a profound rhetorical and theological poignancy, since they profess the great Marian dogmas of divine motherhood, perpetual virginity, immaculate conception, and glorious Assumption. They were proclaimed as truth by four ecclesiastical decrees: ‘Sancta Dei Genetrix’ (‘Holy Bearer of God’) [≈ ‘Deipara’ (‘Bearer of God’) Council of Ephesus, AD 431]; ‘Maria Semper Virgo’ (‘Mary Ever Virgin’) [≈ ‘Semper Virgo’ (‘Ever Virgin’) Lateran Synod, AD 649]; ‘Regina sine labe concepta’ (‘Queen conceived without sin’) [≈ ‘In primo instanti suae conceptionis […] ab omni originalis culpae labe praeservatam immunem’ (‘In the first instance of her conception […] she was preserved free from all stain of original sin’) Infallibilis Deus, 1854]; and ‘Regina in caelum assumpta’ (‘Queen assumed into heaven’) [≈ ‘Corpore et anima ad supernam Caeli gloriam eveheretur, ubi Regina refulgeret ad eiusdem sui Filii dexteram, immortalis saeculorum Regis’ (‘She might be taken up body and soul to the glory of heaven, where as Queen she sits in splendor at the right hand of her Son, the immortal King of the Ages’) Munificentissimus Deus, 1950].

Despite the late date of Munificentissimus Deus, attempts to promote Mary’s bodily assumption date back as far as Late Antiquity, when an impressive number of hymns, sermons, and apocryphal narratives describing Mary’s death and departure into Paradise were first composed.

On 10 April 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope project published an image based on data collected from eight radio observatories of the supermassive black hole in galaxy Messier 87. In Brussels, at one of five simultaneous press conferences held internationally to announce the event, Heino Falcke introduced the image by invoking the cultural associations of a black hole:

Within this cultural digression of only twenty-five seconds, Falcke touched on several connotations that the phenomenon of black holes have accrued within a few decades of theoretical discussion and indirect observation: they are unimaginable, a portal to hell, the boundary of the physical universe, and a microcosm of the chronological end of the universe. Falcke’s final point is that black holes inspire awe. This locates them in the realm of the sublime. The black hole is one of the more recently recognised species of naturally occurring vortices that comprise a venerable tradition of metaphorical resonance in literary and cinematic texts. The cultural associations listed by Falcke frequently collocate with one another in such texts. This chapter focuses on how these associations combine in texts about one particular type of vortex, the whirlpool. In the later twentieth century, the metaphorical connotations of the whirlpool became applied, virtually wholesale, to the black hole. This chapter limits itself to a series of close readings of literary depictions of whirlpools’ connections to the dislocatory depths of hell that anticipate and inform, if not directly inspire, later depictions of black holes.

Charybdis and Hell

Rather than taking the nekyia (evocation of the dead) in Book XI of the Odyssey as the starting point of an exploration of hell, this chapter considers the series of episodes that occur upon Odysseus’ return from the house of Hades.

Celebrating its twentieth anniversary in 2014, the annual ¡Viva! Spanish and Latin American Film Festival has been a long-standing feature of Manchester’s cultural scene. Inaugurated in 1995, ¡Viva! – initially a Spanish film festival – was held every March at Cornerhouse cinema and centre for contemporary visual arts on Oxford Road until 2015, after which it moved to HOME, Manchester’s new international centre for contemporary visual art, film and theatre. As Latin American film was incorporated into the festival in 2004, the festival allows for a focused and in-depth examination of the contemporary production and consumption of Latin American culture in Manchester. In chapter 2, I analysed the development of Latin American magical realism in the British press (1940–2015) and demonstrated how magical realism became, and is still used as, a primary prism through which Latin America is interpreted in the UK. In order to assess the extent to which such an interpretation exists within the contemporary cultural production of Latin America in the UK beyond the press, in this chapter I examine the encoding of Latin America through ¡Viva!. The chapter analyses festival brochures, podcasts, programming, imagery, advertising, film reviews and press articles, as well as Q&A sessions with film directors and personal interviews conducted with festival organisers.

I begin with a history and overview of ¡Viva! and note how, as for many film festivals worldwide, it has become increasingly difficult for ¡Viva!’s organisers to secure regular funding and sponsorship. In an effort to appeal to and attract larger paying audiences, lead festival images have repeatedly foregrounded aspects of Latin American geography, ethnicity, culture and society that the White middle-class majority of the ¡Viva! audience, living in the UK, would find markedly different to their own, even though this has, in fact, been largely unrepresentative of the films in the festival programme. As part of the general discourse of difference encoded into the festival (which complies with the ethos of Cornerhouse, and now HOME, as a space of ‘alternative’ cinema and art), films, as well as festival brochures and film reviewers, have encoded Latin America with the notion of ‘quirky’ and ‘offbeat’ characters and situations.

From the thirteenth century, maritime commerce crossed borders and inaugurated a network of routes, from Scandinavian port towns to Castile and Mediterranean markets; a network of seaways giving rise to the consolidation of an increasingly prosperous and fluent mercantile traffic. Medieval maritime commerce was governed by consuetudinary uses and customs of mariners, transporters and carriers; it later became necessary to commit these norms to writing as a means of facilitating their dissemination and enforcement, providing security to mercantile traffic, offering assurance for merchants and seamen and expediting the resolution of conflicts.

Thus, a set of legal corpora – ius privatista – was developed and disseminated along the Atlantic waterfront, systematising maritime transport services, with the main aim of preserving the cargo, since ‘the ship is its cargo’. Areas covered include the loading, type and form of stowage, protection during the voyage and the unloading, storage and, if necessary, the transhipment of merchandise.

A task as complex as that of cargo handling drove the adaptation of port compounds through the building of infrastructures to facilitate tasks and incorporate specialised technology for the handling of cargo that on occasions was weighty and voluminous. Hence, a long chain of players participated in maritime transport, men of the sea and men of the land, the latter being the final actors in the loading and unloading of merchandise.

THE BLESSED PLOT

Not all writers felt the need to understand the cultural history of the landscape in which they lived as exiles from their mother country, and not all felt the need either in actuality or in imagination to visit the far beyond. John Ruskin, who was all his life a passionate lover of mountains and uplands, nevertheless remarked in 1853 in the course of analysing The Nature of Gothic that

So while those upper regions where different laws apply have been celebrated in several texts, English-speaking writers from the eighteenth century onwards also passed on a literary heritage celebrating those more modest places which meant home. When the naturalist parson Gilbert White (1720–93) wrote in the 1780s of a ‘vast range of mountains’ he was referring to the Sussex Downs (White 1996, 64; The Natural History of Selbourne), not the Lake District, the Cairngorms or the European, Asian and African peaks climbed by ‘true’ mountaineers. When he wrote about the rights and wrongs of hunting nearly a hundred years before Thoreau, like that other English country parson Gibson referred to in chapter 6, he was reflecting on an embedded social system, concerning which he asserted that ‘most men are sportsmen by constitution’. (Landry 2001, 30–4). This is in contrast to Ruskin a century later who, as Roger Deakin comments, was harking back to medieval Gothic as ‘a positively revolutionary force’ which enabled and valued the craftsman prior to those economics which reduced him to ‘slavery’ (Deakin 2008, 113). This is that continuing theme of nostalgia for a certain kind of rural past we have seen noted by Raymond Williams here united to strong social criticism of the present in a most unexpected context.

Like Thoreau later, for White his local pond, Bean's Pond, ‘[was] worthy of the attention of a naturalist or a sportsman’ (White 1996, 30–3; NHS), and he too measured the dimensions of that pond.

FOLLOWING the relative stability of the 1890s, the Edwardian decade saw the emergence of new types of political radicalism. Although the peak of anarchist propaganda by the deed seemed to reach a new, truly global dimension after the assassination of both the Italian King Umberto I and the American President William McKinley within the span of just over a year, the anarchist colony in Britain continued to rapidly decline. Instead, the new challenge for British authorities came increasingly from home-grown movements like the militant suffragettes (who after 1906 began advocating violent methods in their struggle for female enfranchisement) and the labour movement, sections of which were increasingly responsive to the advanced socialist doctrines circulating on the continent.

Simultaneously, the problems posed by colonial unrest and the mounting wave of immigration from Eastern Europe were only further highlighted by spectacular and violent episodes involving foreigners active in revolutionary and nationalist politics. At first glance, the British government's response to these new challenges appears to have changed very little when compared to the previous decade. Scotland Yard and the Home Office continued to display the same circumspect conservatism in regard to strategies of containing politically motivated violence, all the while insisting that political crime was not even a category recognized by British law. Change was nonetheless forthcoming and as the following pages will show, the decade preceding the First World War had a profoundly transformative effect on the expansion and development of political policing in Britain.

On 3 December 1901, in his first annual message to Congress, the twenty-sixth President of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt, decried the assassination of his predecessor William McKinley by a ‘criminal whose perverted instincts [led] him to prefer confusion and chaos to the most beneficent form of social order’, adding that anarchism was ‘a crime against the whole human race; and all mankind should band against the anarchist. His crime should be made an offense against the law of nations, like piracy and… the slave trade… [and it] should be so declared by treaties among all civilized powers.’

In 2016, the Dominican Order celebrated the 800th anniversary of the confirmation of the order, also known as the ‘Ordo Praedicatorum’ (‘Order of Preachers’). The Order was founded by Dominic of Caleruega (1170–1221), also called Dominic de Guzmán, with the approval of Pope Honorius III (1150–1227) in 1216. Inspired by this event, I examined the dissemination of information about St Dominic in Norway and Iceland. The Old Norse-Icelandic legend of St Dominic is preserved in Reykjahólabók, which has been dated to around 1530–1540. The codex is a legendary based for the most part on a now-lost Low German version of the High German Der Heiligen Leben. In addition, relevant episodes about St Dominic are preserved in Maríu saga. These episodes cover features of the traditional lore of the saint and are clearly based on a version different from that in Reykjahólabók.

Dominican religious houses existed in Scandinavia, but there is no evidence of any Dominican institution in Iceland. Margaret Cormack is of the opinion that St Dominic enjoyed a very limited cultus in medieval Iceland and mentions the fact that there was only one church dedication, at Kolbeinsstaðir (in south-western Iceland), where he was listed as a co-patron probably by the Dominican Jón Halldórsson, who came from the Dominican friary in Bergen and became bishop of Skálholt in 1322. The Nikulásskirkja at Kolbeinsstaðir was (re)consecrated during his episcopate, though Cormack mentions the possibility that the decision to dedicate the church to St Dominic was made by one of his successors at the see of Skálholt, the Danish Bishop Vilkin Hinriksson (d. 1405), who was also a member of the Dominican Order. It is in his 1397 inventory that the consecration is first recorded.

This article investigates Old Norse-Icelandic texts dealing with St Dominic in an attempt to determine how and in what kind of form information about him found its way to Iceland and seeks to relate this information to the history of the Dominican Order in medieval Norway.

St Dominic died on August 6 1221, and was buried ‘Sub pedibus Fratrum’ (‘under the brethren’s feet’) in the Church of St Nicholas of the Vineyards in Bologna.

During the summer of 2017, one song dominated the UK charts, spending eleven non-consecutive weeks at Number One. That song was Despacito, a reggaeton-Latin pop fusion by Puerto Rican singer Luis Fonsi and Puerto Rican rapper Daddy Yankee. The version which hit Number One in the UK contained lyrics in English and Spanish by Canadian singer Justin Bieber remixed with the original Spanish-language song. The original and remixed versions achieved unprecedented worldwide success. In October 2020, the music video for the original Spanish-language version became the first video to hit seven billion views on YouTube, making it the video-hosting website’s most viewed upload to date.

Whether you are sick and tired of hearing the opening bars to Despacito by now or not, the fact that a song almost entirely in Spanish spent eleven weeks at the very top of the UK chart was and remains both a little surprising and intriguing. In a country that a year earlier had voted to leave the European Union, projecting an isolationist and increasingly nationalistic image to the world, the popularity of Despacito with the British public clearly demonstrated that the Latin American, and the consumption of Latin American culture in particular, remains highly attractive for many British consumers. While some might attribute the popularity of Despacito to a catchy rhythm and the illusive promise of sun, sex and sensuality amidst a dreary British summer, it is undeniable that Latin American culture more broadly has become increasingly popular and prevalent within mainstream British society over the past few decades.

Since the 1980s, for example, mainstream British audiences have developed a keen interest in salsa, beginning with the salsa clubs opened by Latin American migrants in major UK cities and expanding to encompass the vast array of salsa classes held in fitness centres, dance studios, bars and nightclubs up and down the country today. The late 1990s and early 2000s saw Latin music becoming popular in the UK beyond salsa, evidenced by the success of the Buena Vista Social Club, the rise in popularity of tango and the success of international recording artists such as Jennifer Lopez, Ricky Martin and Shakira in the UK pop charts.

HEAT IN CYNDERS

Contemporary theorists are exercised by the question whether nature is served best by being considered in temporal terms or in spatial ones. This is a debate in which ‘literature's transgressive social function’ – its capacity to undercut the complacent platitudes or certitudes of a given culture – is seen as playing a key role (Goodboy 2014, 61 seq). But the sixteenth-century love poems and plays considered in the last chapter seemingly have not asked whether nature qua nature is most truly envisaged in terms of space or time. Yet this question not only became a major concern for their successors but was already an important preoccupation in the writings of English Renaissance poets, playwrights and essayists, as this chapter seeks to demonstrate. As always, the double mirror operates: on the one hand the capacity of nature to be seen in either perspective (space or time) enriches the literary tradition; on the other, individual cultural-literary choices illuminate how a given society sees, and has seen, those aspects of a natural heritage. This is an ancient crux, intimately related to how various literary pathetic fallacies have simultaneously comforted and challenged the reader, particularly when nature is perceived essentially as process and mortality. Robert Pogue Harrison, attempting to move Toward a Philosophy of Nature, spells out the grim necessity underlying culture as

Or, as a Guardian crossword put the issue more succinctly: Clue: ‘human’; Answer: ‘mortal’ (Guardian 28 March 2019). In contrast to our obsession with technological time-keeping, and long before twentieth-century analyses of the relationship between time, nature and history, early modern writers did impress upon the natural world their vision of its temporality. This came to include for them, as most famously for the seventeenth-century French mathematician Pascal (1623–62), the wonder and terror of space's enormity. There was, inevitably, a variety of responses to the unassailable fact of death and therefore to the challenge of how literature might incorporate as culturally acceptable the contrast between human nature as essentially finite with the abiding but ambiguous presence of the non-human (or inhuman) world.