This chapter examines e-book realness in terms of identity and love: e-books shared or not shared, displayed or not displayed, and made a cherished part of the reader’s personal history or barred from such status. It examines aspects of display and cultural capital in forms specific to digital and forms specific to print. It investigates how stereotypes (of some readers as unqualified and some reading practices as inferior) and assumptions (including tropes of furtive reading) interact with existing narratives of literary decline, technology as a threat to culture, and women as incompetent readers. It explores love for reading devices as well as love for print, and how identity as a bibliophile proves compatible with e-reading. E-books are only sometimes real, but it is their very flexibility that makes them so valuable to book lovers. They can be public or private, permanent or ephemeral, valuable or valueless, intimate or distant, depending on one’s usage and settings but also on one’s idea of what an e-book is; and, as demonstrated, that idea is highly adaptable and at least sometimes under one’s conscious control.

Chapter 2 analyzes kinship both between employer and servant and between the female attendant and her other family members in service. Ladies-in-waiting usually owed their positions at court and in great households to connections within their kin group, sometimes through active negotiations and promotions that appear in surviving records, but mostly through maneuverings that occurred behind the scenes. The surviving documents allow me to argue that courtier families used kinship ties to build networks of influence. In return, employers gained new servants from connections already known and trusted. Marriages within the household were well rewarded and female attendants often took advantage of opportunities to wed fellow servants and promote their children, siblings, cousins, and even grandchildren into similar employment. This chapter also asserts that the familial networks of ladies-in-waiting paralleled the dynastic networks that made for effective monarchy. Although only one royal body, usually male, ruled the kingdom, a king could not rule successfully in isolation; rather monarchs employed consorts, siblings, and other kin to govern and enhance royal prestige. Similarly, courtier families worked together to promote members of their kin group and parlay influence into rewards.

In order to situate the women who worked in royal and aristocratic households in their proper context, the first chapter explores household composition, demonstrating similarities of servant arrangements at all levels of elite society even though household size varied at different status gradations. Over time, households of every status level grew, offering further career opportunities, especially since elite households became more welcoming to women in the late fourteenth century, even though throughout the Middle Ages they remained almost exclusively male domains. This chapter argues that female servants gained their positions through kinship and patronage opportunities that favored their placement and promotion. In investigating the qualities that employers desired in their servants, I contend that they chose attendants who demonstrated useful skills, good character, and pleasing appearance. This chapter reveals that turnover occurred due to death, retirement, marriage (which did not necessitate retirement), dismissal, or transition to different households, and seems to have been a frequent aspect of life for a lady-in-waiting, yet I also assert that a minority of attendants served their ladies for long durations, at least a decade or more.

Chapter 5 argues that Villa Pisani cannot be seen in isolation from its suburban context. It examines Montagnana’s identity as a small but significant urban center; the character of the district where Villa Pisani was built; and the role of civic benefactor that Pisani cultivated for himself.

Chapter 5 argues that the increasing number of female servants and resulting visibility of women at court had political ramifications. By exploring the more active roles played by ladies and damsels in political events of the realm, I demonstrate how female courtiers found ways to access privilege for themselves, their families, and other associates through intercession. For example, they dramatically assisted Isabella’s coup against her husband Edward II and courageously stood by Catherine of Aragon during her divorce crisis. On the other hand, when national sentiment turned xenophobic, a queen’s foreign attendants faced scorn, retribution, and even banishment during periods of conflict. Some female attendants faced misogynistic attitudes that attacked their perceived propensity toward immodest sexuality, greed, and darker forces like witchcraft and poisoning. This role of women at court – apart from queens and particularly notorious examples like Edward III’s mistress Alice Perrers – has been neglected in many discussions of medieval court politics and patronage. I contend that the hostility experienced by some female courters highlights how medieval contemporaries themselves recognized women’s potential access to insider information about monarchs and the favors that could be bestowed to their kin, friends, and associates.

Chapter 2 traces the biography of the patron, Venetian patrician Francesco Pisani (1509–67), addressing his family affairs, political offices, and cultural patronage in Venice. An investigation of where and how Pisani lived when in his native city clarifies the reasons for his investment in his mainland estate.

The many years of service evident in the careers of some ladies-in-waiting who received annuities for decades while continuing to complete responsibilities in the royal household demonstrates that the opportunities of court service were valued by many. Such service offered one of the only salaried professional positions available to women in later medieval England, and for many was a true career. Families sought to promote their daughters at court because female servants could seek to gain not only remuneration but also intangible patronage opportunities for themselves, their families, and their associates. Employment in elite households enhanced servants’ loyalty, built and deepened relationships, and also heightened the status of the royals and nobles who bestowed rewards. Including gender in the analysis helps us to recognize the porous boundary between domestic life and political life at the royal court, and, in an era when politics was all about access to the decision-making monarch, female courtiers enjoyed and benefitted from such informal routes to access. Although in service, and always answerable to the needs and commands of their queens and aristocratic employers, understanding the history of ladies-in-waiting underscores how they nevertheless found ways to exercise agency and access political power in medieval England.

Chapter 2 will begin by emphasizing the role of elite patrons in the production of educational treatises on the science of music. The chapter will then provide an analysis of the relationship between learning the science of music, and musical practice, including performance, poetic skills, and listening to music. After providing some medieval philosophical arguments regarding the necessity of learning the science of music in order to better appreciate music performance, the chapter pivots toward presenting the sociocultural benefits of learning the science itself, especially among the elite of the city of Baghdad between third/ninth–seventh/thirteenth centuries. Through aphorisms and entertaining anecdotes by famous Baghdadi literati such as Ibn Khurdadhbih, al-Sarakhsi, and al-Tawhidi, I demonstrate how knowledge about music – as opposed to art-music itself – was used by the elite as a social currency to gain access to certain social circles that would have otherwise remained inaccessible to them.

This chapter explores how notions of reciprocity shape new fiscal subjectivities in Ghana’s capital Accra. Drawing on historical sources, public debates and observations in public tax forums, I first discuss the long-term dynamics of ‘tax bargaining’ in Ghana since the colonial times, premised on power holders providing sufficient evidence of recipocity and return for tax payments. Secondly, this chapter provides a portrait of the intimate stakes of reciprocity between the state and citizens that characterize the process of becoming a taxpayer. By zooming in on the aspirations of a single female trader who went through the bureaucratic journey of formalizing her business and becoming a taxpayer, I propose the notion of the “nurturing state” to illustrate the intimate, personalized qualities of reciprocity that characterise emerging fiscal subjectivities in Ghana.

Derval Conroy concludes the focus in the collection on the seventeenth century with an examination of the printed text. The numerous accompanying elements included in printed plays – peritexts – were key to the reader’s reception, argues Conroy. Concentrating on two of these, dedications and prefaces/addresses, and in the light of recent scholarship regarding theatre and female agency – women as protagonists, dramatists, readers, spectators and patrons – Conroy accounts for the vital role played by peritexts in the economy of exchange, patronage, criticism and creation which characterized the early modern theatre world. After an examination of Françoise Pascal’s titlepages, her chapter focuses on how dedications to women validated women’s roles as cultural agents, creating spaces for the female reader–spectator–critic. Consideration is then given to prefaces by the women dramatists Françoise Pascal, Mme Ulrich, Catherine Bernard and Marie-Anne Barbier, and how they use these printed spaces to defend their work, their foray into the public space of playwriting, or more broadly their dramatic vision.

This introduction sets the stage for the different chapters of the volume by offering general considerations about the production and consumption of poetry in twelfth-century Byzantium.

It takes as its point of departure the period beginning from the moment that Alexios I Komnenos ascended the imperial throne in 1081 to the Latin sack of Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade in 1204. This period saw an unprecedented growth in the production of poetry, as well as various innovative literary developments, including the emergence of vernacular poetry, the extensive use of poetry for ceremonial and didactic purposes at the imperial court and beyond, and the mixing of poetry and prose in so-called schede. While many poets were active in Constantinople, a large amount of the surviving poetry was written in places far away from the Byzantine capital, particularly in southern Italy and Sicily. The introduction discusses the social and intellectual contexts of twelfth-century poetry, addresses issues of geographical distribution and material circulation, and introduces some of the key figures and texts of the Komnenian period.

The chapter looks at a substantial number of texts outside the boundaries usually placed in Byzantine Studies through conventional taxonomic categories such as genre or antithetic pairs like learned versus vernacular language. Four larger themes are used to explore this varied textual production and offer a proposal for understanding its basic socio-cultural and aesthetic functions for its immediate recipients and later readers. The four themes discussed are education and literature, patronage and literary production, rhetoric and genre in prose and poetry, narrative art from the enormous to the small. Despite the strong presence of ‘Hellenic’ subjects, Komnenian literature owes more to its own dynamism (deriving from a reformed teacherly practice in the schools) than to the imitation of ancient models. At the same time, the role of the patrons in promoting literary production shapes much of both learned and vernacular literary experimentation, while religious literature generously defined is strongly involved in an ongoing experimentation with form and content. Finally, the chapter asks whether any form of change can be traced within the literary production of the Komnenian era.

This chapter explores the rationales of the paratexts accompanying John Tzetzes’ commentary on Hermogenes in the bespoke copy contained in the Vossianus Gr. Q1. Besides clarifying the circumstances prompting that specific copy of the commentary, these paratexts scaffold Tzetzes’ authorial agency as well as his social role in a cultural economy based on patronage. The chapter also shows how they speak to the way Tzetzes exploits the inherent ambiguities of language and tradition, by looking at them as examples of enacted ἀμφοτερογλωσσία, resting on dialectic.

The chapter looks at twelfth-century Byzantine poetry in the context of the milieu in which most Byzantine literature was initially published: the social gatherings known as theatra in which writers performed their compositions before an invited audience, usually presided over by an aristocratic patron. Poetry was particularly suited to such ‘theatre’ performance, and theatra flourished in the twelfth century as never before. This chapter illustrates the dramatic subject matter, style and narrative technique of much twelfth-century verse composition, with particular attention to three texts: a ceremonial poem by Theodore Prodromos, Constantine Manasses’ Synoptic Chronicle and Constantine Stilbes’ lament on a devastating urban fire in 1197. The discussion then turns turns to the question of how far the ‘theatrical turn’ of twelfth-century Byzantine literature, in both poetry and prose, had the potential to develop into real theatre. The contention here is that Byzantine writers perfected the art of purely verbal dramatic representation as a conscious substitute for reviving the institution of ancient theatre in material form.

Chapter 5 takes a step back and considers, individually and comprehensively, the eight Byzantine churches that housed Christ’s miracle cycles. Specifically, I examine how the overall iconographic program of each church impacted the inclusion of the miracle cycle. I ask who were the promulgators of this new iconographic program and what kind of audience we imagine viewing these scenes. By trying to answer these questions, this chapter defines the role played by the miracle cycle in the broader context of church decoration and patronage, leading to a claim of its distinctive status.

Chapter 1 chronicles how the distractibility of a king, the agency of objects, the desires that cloud judgment, and the memories that haunt the present shape events perhaps even more than ideology. Prior to the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, the Duke of Newcastle proposed returning to a Caroline-style theatrical marketplace, but he was outmaneuvered by courtier-playwrights long accustomed to deploying networks of access. Contingency also determined outcomes. The particular circumstances of Charles II’s upbringing certainly benefited William Davenant and Thomas Killigrew, the two successful patentees. Unlike his royal predecessors, the new monarch regarded the commercial theatre as a gift to be bestowed upon persistent clients who would enjoy monopolistic control going forward. No one foresaw, of course, the economic repercussions of that gift, namely, how the transformation of the theatre from a purely commercial to a hybrid enterprise would require substantial support beyond the box office. Additionally, the duopoly so sought by Killigrew and Davenant exerted its own unexpected agencies. As the following chapters explore, its resulting economic and cultural logic galvanized a host of decisions about repertories and performance practices that would prove both innovative and ruinous.