Richard Aldington (1892−1962) was a prolific reviewer and translator in his time, though probably better known to later readers as an Imagist poet and author of the First-World-War novel Death of a Hero. In autumn 1924 he published The Mystery of the Nativity, his translation of a fifteenth-century text in Walloon French. In December 1924 there was a performance of his translation in the Church Room of St Mary the Virgin Primrose Hill, London. Neither this performance nor Aldington's translation itself have made their way into standard accounts of the revival of religious drama in England in the early twentieth century. This chapter will make a brief analysis of Aldington's handling of the text and consider what inferences can be drawn about the performance of it at St Mary's from materials preserved in the parish archive and in the archive of George Allen & Unwin Ltd, and from the brief press notices I have found to date.

Beyond the citation of his source text Aldington does not indicate in the published edition how the play first came to his notice or what in particular prompted him to undertake the translation. But correspondence preserved in the archive of his publishers, George Allen & Unwin Ltd, reveals that the initiative for the publication came from Aldington himself, who enclosed a copy of his translation in a letter dated 24 March 1924, in which he notes that he had permission from Gustave Cohen, the editor of the French text, to publish his translation of it without charge. Aldington's friendship with Cohen at a later stage of his life is documented by his most recent biographer. But the letter of 1924 indicates that he was already in correspondence with him at this point, and a batch of letters written in 1921 by Aldington to Cohen, published in 2003, shows that Aldington had sent his translation to Cohen for comment, and identifies Aldington as the author of an anonymous review of Cohen's edition in the Times Literary Supplement 31 March 1921. The choice of text reflects Aldington's deep interest in medieval French literature, amply attested in his translation and reviewing work. The particular subject matter of the play evidently attracted him for what he saw as its poetic power rather than for its ostensible doctrinal import.

The Croxton Play of the Sacrament has been one of the most widely studied texts in relation to depictions of the body, including Christ's body, the body of the ‘other’ (in this case, the Jewish body), and the medical body. In the majority of such studies, bodies seem to be conceived within and through a dichotomy that privileges bodily ‘wholeness’ over bodily damage or disintegration. It is fairly easy to find justification for this privileging: one sense of the Middle English word hole (whole in modern spelling) signified the healthy, undamaged state of the body, and an undamaged body tends to have a more pleasant sensory experience than a damaged one. However, ‘wholeness’ of the body is not privileged over disintegration in all late medieval contexts: in some examples, the un-whole body is an important signifier. This prompts a reconsideration of how to refer to the quality of being un-whole without invoking the dichotomy and denigrating the un-whole state of bodies to a state of being damaged. My term of choice is porousness, defined as the capacity of the body to have its superficial integrity violated without descending into dysfunction or damage; this then enables it to enter relationships and transactions with other bodies through that very state of porousness. Accordingly, to avoid resorting to ‘disintegration’, I will also refer to the process of achieving such a state as ‘becoming-porous’. By suspending the dichotomy between whole bodies and damaged bodies, we can enrich our understanding of the pivotal scene during the Passion sequence of the Croxton Play, in which the Host (or the body of Christ) and the hand of the character of Jonathas are joined. The adjusted perspective and the reading that it offers augment existing scholarship on the role of bodies and subversion in the play, as well as affecting how we view un-whole bodies (including the body of Christ), highlighting porousness not as the negation or absence of wholeness, but as a self-sufficient property of bodies.

I argue that from such a perspective, the simultaneity of the performance of becoming-porous in the bodies of both Christ and Jonathas (the oppressed and the oppressor) unites Christian and Jewish bodies through the very state of porousness, blurring the purported natural differences between them. Consequently, it offers an opportunity for the subversion of the hierarchy of status between them.

On 6 May 2023, as I sat down on my couch to watch King Charles III's coronation, I cannot say that I was especially excited about it. I am not from the United Kingdom and did not feel particularly engaged by an event that I perceived to be closely tied to that country and culture. However, I was curious enough to turn on the television that morning: the fashion would undoubtedly be interesting (would the hats be even more wonderful than those seen at royal weddings?) and it would be fun to spot our own Swiss president sitting in Westminster Abbey. As the ceremony started, my excitement rose and I found myself wanting to see the crown jewels, all the gold and the wealth on display, and museum pieces worn again. I was eager to listen to the music, some of which – like Handel's Zadok the Priest – I was aware had been composed for similar ceremonies in the past. Spectacle (defined here as ‘stage display or pageantry’) was therefore the primary draw for me to watch King Charles III's coronation. I was intrigued because the event was beautiful and unique, but also because I felt I was watching, in some ways, a recreation of a historical spectacle.

Yet, was the coronation not more than this spectacle? Was it even as ‘historical’, and perhaps medieval, as I felt it was when I was watching it? What was its meaning and how was it expressed through spectacle? Prompted by these questions, this article reflects on the meaning of this twenty-first century coronation and on its evolution over its 1,000-year history. It will do so by exploring the discourse around the coronation of King Charles III and by comparing the features of this royal event with those of its medieval antecedents. Both the perception of the coronation, and the choices that were made during its organisation reflect the current – and the changing – view of kingship. I will first examine the meaning of the coronation as it was explained by those involved in planning and enacting it; I will then move on to consider the extent to which the intended meaning was understood, appreciated, or embraced by the recipients, the spectators of the event.

The study of historic disability has enjoyed increasing interest among scholars working across the arts and humanities. The role of disability on the early modern stage has drawn particular critical attention, as scholars look to shed further light on some of those ‘thousand natural shocks’ to which Hamlet says all flesh is heir. Richard III's deformity, Gloucester's blindness, Lear's madness, the ubiquitous bodily mutilation in revenge tragedies such as Titus Andronicus, for example – many of these iconic staged ‘impairments’ have featured in recent studies of historic disability. This chapter takes a different tack. Drawing on the substantial evidence offered by the Records of Early English Drama (REED) project, which identifies record references to pre-modern performances across Britain, it ultimately looks at some of the evidence for actual performance by those with physical disabilities, in order to begin to place these examples alongside the well-known fictional representations. Attempting to draw together some of the different kinds of evidence for disability and premodern performance raises a couple of key questions: beyond the much studied literary and artistic examples, what might the evidence offered by REED have to say about the physically disabled body as it played a part in premodern performance? And can records for performers with apparent physical disabilities tell us anything about how they might have been conceptualised, characterised and/or accommodated in premodern British society? This chapter hopes to initiate potential responses to such questions.

Derived from a wider study of the performance of disability in the early British and Irish record,3 this chapter highlights the surviving record evidence in order to reframe how such performers contributed to wider premodern performance culture. The latter part of the chapter presents the evidence that relates specifically to musculoskeletal difference in the Records of Early English Drama. It suggests that the published and forthcoming REED collections can tell us a good deal about those performers whose physical impairment and/or difference affected their conceptualisation as performers. I do not include the references to so-called dwarfs or giants, as focus here is trained solely on performers identified as differently shaped rather than differently sized.

The Book of the Seven Sages of Rome seems on the face of it an unlikely text to interest those who work on medieval theatre. But this engaging performance raised a number of fascinating questions about the methods and purposes of theatrical presentation of medieval material to modern audiences. It also proved a stimulating demonstration of the inherent theatricality of expert storytelling and its ability to mediate complex points of view to live audiences.

The Middle English and Middle Scots versions of the work generally known as The Seven Sages of Rome have a profound temporal and geographical hinterland. The framed story collection derives from the East with versions of 100 or more tales included in Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, Latin, Persian, and Syriac re-tellings. In the Middle Ages the work was translated and reworked in most of the languages of Europe, proving hugely popular. Its frame narrative tells the story of an Emperor, who on the death of his wife entrusts the education of his only son to seven Sages, away from the court. Some years later, the Emperor marries a second young wife who persuades him to bring the young man back to court where, when he rejects her advances, she falsely accuses him of rape and urges her husband to put him to death. This results in an extended storytelling contest: each day, one of the Sages tells a story, generally hinging on the untrustworthiness of women, that persuades the Emperor to doubt his wife and postpone the execution of his son; each night the Empress tells a counter tale that questions who and how one should believe, urging the young man's death. The situation is finally resolved when the son, who has remained silent throughout, finally tells a tale of his own that convinces the Emperor of his innocence, and the Empress is executed.

The blatant misogyny of many of the tales, along with the bare and undeveloped literary style of their re-tellings, have probably contributed to the lack of modern interest in the work. But this production, which dovetails with a research project on the Seven Sages at the University of St Andrews, succeeded in developing a suggestive performance that engaged with the first, and looked beyond the second.

Last year I had the pleasure of acting as editor for Nadia T. van Pelt's ground-breaking article on ‘John Blanke's Wages’. This acquainted me with the website of the Project devoted to John Blanke, one of the trumpeters to Henry VII and Henry VIII, and the claims being made on his behalf as ‘the first person of African descent in British history for whom we have both an image and a record’. The existence of visual as well as documentary evidence for John Blanke has proved irresistible; it gives him a face, however fictitious, and one apparently sufficiently characterised for a modern viewer to relate to. A name and a handful of appearances in administrative accounts are not nearly so evocative – though his surname and the tag, ‘the blacke Trumpet’, that often accompanies it are intriguing.

To summarise what we know of him: he first appears in November 1507 in Henry VII's Chamber Books as ‘John Blanke the blacke Trumpet’. He is paid 20s a month, half the wages of the elite King's trumpeters, until January 1508/1509, when he appears to have been added to the strength on full wages of 40s a month. On 21 April that year, Henry VII dies, and John Blanke, with the other King's trumpets, is granted mourning livery for the funeral on 9 May 1509; then on 24 June 1509 comes the coronation of Henry VIII, for which nine named ‘Kyngs Trompyttes’, including John Blanke, are given scarlet livery. Some time around December 1509 he asks, apparently satisfactorily, for his salary arrangements to be regularised: he seems to have dropped back to 20s, possibly in the administrative confusion that always followed the death of one monarch and the accession of the next. On 12–13 February 1510/1511 he appears at the Great Tournament in Westminster, not by name, but as a presumably identifiable image in a commemorative heraldic painting. On 14 January 1511/1512, not quite a year later, he is given a suit of clothes of violet cloth for his wedding – and that is the last we hear of him. The next time the king's trumpeters are listed by name, in February 1513/1514, his is not among them. His time in the limelight of the English court could have lasted as little as four years, or as long as six.

So far, no one has found out what happened to him.

If the word ‘strategy’ is now essential for us, it was however absent from French vocabulary of the eighteenth century. At that time no theorist of naval war considered anything than ‘tactics’, that is to say ‘the art to arrange the Navies in the order which is appropriate for the object that one proposes & to regulate their movements’. It meant a science of naval evolutions, or, in other words, operations, which a squadron could carry out. This science is the general officer's one, but, reading the French theorists, from the P. Hoste to the vicomte de Grenier via Bigot de Morogues, it is clear that its subject was not yet a ‘universal science of the war’ including the art of preparing a plan of campaign. That was the task, not of the seaman, but was the monopoly of the king and some of his ministers. On the other hand, the vocabulary then of use in France strained to catch a reality of this. Although the neologism ‘la stratégique’ appears in 1771 from the quill of the Lieutenant-Colonel Joly de Maizeroy, the erudite translator of Byzantine military writings, and it was useful to name such a science which forms and prepares the projects before directing them, the word, nonetheless, remained rare and was not yet applied to the sea.

To this first linguistic difficulty is added a second, related to the frequent absence of sources in archives on the discussions and the methods of decision making by the king in his council. Generally, the design of a plan of operation remains opaque to us. Only the orders given as a result are directly known; all the former stages remaining a state secret. At most we can guess that the development of a plan of campaign was conditioned by political objectives of the Bourbon monarch, by the theoretical structure of the naval forces, fixed on different occasions during the century, and by the concrete constraints amongst units available or likely to be so a few months later. Everyone always expected a short war, such as only one campaign at sea, of a few months, would be enough to confirm the decision.

One of the paradoxes of slave-trade history is that while we now know a lot about the gut-wrenching process of turning Africans into slaves and the hazards of trafficking on tropical coasts, we know relatively little about the sailors who manned the ships. To be sure, historians have dredged the smattering of life writings that refer to slave ships, many of which reveal graphic accounts of the brutality of captains and mates and a seaman's induction into the trade. Yet precisely who the sailors were, from what ports they hailed, how they were recruited, remains elusive if not opaque. This has not stopped historians generalizing about slave-ship sailors: they are said to be ‘multiracial’, a ‘motley crew’ from different quarters of the globe.

One exception to this trend is Mike Breward who has made use of the detailed muster rolls of Bristol at the end of the eighteenth century to offer a portrait of slave-ship crews. The muster rolls earlier in the century did not have a lot to offer the historian, which typically record the pay due to sailors for months at sea and the last ships the seamen entered. These rolls were designed to assess the contribution seamen made to the hospital fund, legislated in 1747. In Bristol, the task of tracking the levy and its administration was put under the jurisdiction of the Merchant Venturers, which is why the muster rolls are in its archives. The early rolls tell us little about the social provenance of the seamen beyond noting the port from which they typically sailed, and because captains were sometimes lax about their entries, this information is not always reliable. The differential payments allotted seamen do reveal the number who died or ran during the voyage, those discharged at the port of delivery and the sailors who were impressed or even elected to enter men-of-war during wartime. This information is vital to assessing the volatility of crews. The one other advantage of the mid-century muster rolls is that the more regular ones list the last ship on which the seaman sailed, giving historians a chance to measure persistence, an issue that maritime historians have seldom addressed.

Refoulement in the French Colonial Conception of the City

The two decades from 1914 to 1934 saw increasingly heightened concern in the colonial state's perception of Africans as the principal undesirable element of the capital of France's important West African colony. Administrators adhered to a race-driven concept of urban modernity, one that was threatened by Dakar's growth even as that growth brought the city to greater prominence. State vision was for a grand capital, major Atlantic port, and modern city. This was expressed throughout the years of high colonialism— key decades for the development of Dakar—but was also accompanied by a current of concern among officials that the capital's African setting and social makeup could compromise its potential. As the men who staffed the colonial state attempted to hone their professional approach to urban management, they brought into their work a rhetoric around Africans that was embedded in the language of modernity. Within it, the majority of Africans were cast as inappropriate to city dwelling, making the generation of strategies to discourage them from coming to or remaining in town a vital aspect of running the capital. Part of the project of making Dakar what they believed was modern was dealing not only in the technical details of urban planning but also in the social attributes of the city. Yet, these ideas did not correspond to realities on the ground. Ultimately, the energy and effort devoted to making Dakar a modern European city did little to wrest the day-to-day power to shape urban life from the hands of those who lived it. The way in which this was perhaps most obvious was in the simple fact of Dakar's growth from the 1910s through the 1930s to an African-majority city, a process that stood in deep contrast to the goals and visions of the state.

In France, a reconceptualization of urban space began in the 1850s with Haussmann's transformation of Paris, but it was in the early decades of the twentieth century that its relationship to urban life, human development, and modernity was more explicitly drawn out in circles of urban planners, architects, and sociologists. As colonial administration of FWA congealed, the concept of professionalized rule took shape in Dakar, informed not only by colonial imperatives but by global trends.