Writings of the late Sierra Leonean scholar of African theology, Harry Sawyerr, God: Ancestor or Creator? (1970) and The Practice of Presence (1968) discuss God in traditional West African religion. He is the supreme being, creator, omnipotent, the Great Ancestor, and “a living God who can do for human beings what nobody else can” (Sawyerr 1970, 4). In Sierra Leone, the Mende calls him Ngewo, the Kono, Yataa and the Temne, Kurumasaba. Ancestral spirits are intermediaries between God and humans as ancestors remain an integral part of the family, clan, and ethnic group. There is an intricate relationship between spirituality and nature. Ceremonies involving the ancestors occur at sacred places such as forests, bushes, trees, water bodies, caves, stones, and shrines generally categorized as the sacred bush. In the traditional worldview, it is sacrilegious to violate revered places, and trees in the sacred bush should not be cut down. In precolonial times, that sacrilege was punishable by death. Today, arbitrators might levy heavy fines on the guilty (Fenton 1948). A major area of conf lict between communities and mining companies is the desecration and/or destruction of such places. Many sites of religious significance to landlordindigene communities in Sierra Leone have been lost to mining. This loss continues as extraction expands in the country. I document some examples of lost sites that are also of anthropological interest. I also discuss how government policies and laws address the sacred bush and other cultural heritage matters.

Christian missionaries observed strong religious beliefs, spirituality, and attachments to sacred places of worship among Sierra Leoneans. These proselytizers and others did not fully understand the underpinning worldview such as the important role of ancestors and responsibilities to future generations. Rituals at sacred sites were viewed as primitive, superstition, or witchcraft that ideally should be eradicated.

Despite what are in certain respects quite similar literary careers, the attitudes towards textual production and literary authority presented by John Skelton and William Dunbar resist close association. Very rarely have the two been studied together. And yet, their position as the vernacular poets most obviously affiliated with the English and Scottish royal courts,1 as well as the broad similarities between those courts as centres of textual production, invites comparison of their diverging claims for the authority of their writings.

Skelton, in The Bowge of Courte, transforms satire of the court into a satire of the poet. His depiction of his textual double, Drede, seems an unlikely strategy for authorial self-promotion; yet it is not too great a leap from self-scrutiny to self-regard, and the Bowge shares with Skelton's Garlande or Chapelet of Laurell an interest in the nature of poetry and the function of the poet expressed through the dream vision. The outcome of the Bowge is apparently to deny the ability of poetry to convey pre-existing truths; however, Skelton's decision to make the poet himself into an object of scrutiny demonstrates his willingness to break down in order to rebuild the concept of authorship, in particular, his authorship, which is given permanent inscription in the Garlande's Skelton Poeta. Dunbar, though working in superficially similar circumstances and – in The Goldyn Targe at least – the same ‘Chaucerian Tradition’, has a quite different use for the dream vision. Dunbar, unlike Skelton, seems less concerned with his personal status as a Scottish author than in his place among a brotherhood of Scots makaris. His allegorical narratives evoke a lively, literary court culture, of which Dunbar is but one valuable exponent, rather than, as will be seen in Skelton and the Garlande, a biographically specific, self-justifying authorship dissociated from any single, external source of poetic legitimation.

Neither poet's strategy was entirely successful in promoting their name and writings: Dunbar's transmission relies on continued interest in the court culture that he represents, whilst Skelton's somewhat convoluted authorship did not long outlive its conception.

While investigating a tranche of captains in the mid-eighteenth century in The National Archives, a unique cache of documents was found in the letters to the Admiralty in Captain Archibald Kennedy's file. The importance of these documents is that they reveal the events in New York and the eastern seaboard of North America during the Stamp Act crisis which occupied the last three months of 1765, as they impinged on a naval captain – not a politician, colonial official or merchant. This perspective is different from that usually described in histories and is worthy of a wider audience.

Captain Kennedy was senior naval officer at New York from 1763, and most of his correspondence with the Admiralty had to do with the difficulties of impressing men from the merchant vessels trading in and out of New York. Trade was booming in the years after what was known in America as the French and Indian War and in Britain as the Seven Years’ War. Merchant vessel owners could afford to pay their crews more than the navy offered, which made manning his vessels difficult. Kennedy reported to his Commander-in-Chief Lord Colvill, stationed in Halifax, and copied his letters to the Admiralty when it seemed likely that ships would reach England more quickly than ice-bound Halifax. He deployed the three sloops he had at his disposal as best he could to meet the many conflicting demands of the local colonial officials.

In 1764 everything changed. The Grenville administration had long planned to recoup from the colonists themselves some of the costs of protecting the American colonies from the French. Leading lawyers from the colonies, such as John Tabor Kempe, the young Attorney General in New York, had discussed this in London. Politicians in Britain anticipated no difficulty in levying taxes in America. If they had realised that the cost of collecting customs dues charged on American trade was three times the amount that officials raised in money they might have thought again. It is easy with hindsight to see that politicians in London should have paid more attention to the warnings of colonial administrators in America who were unable to persuade the colonial assemblies to vote them any income. Trading with the enemy was not confined to the American colonies: the Irish supplied beef to the French army despite being much more closely governed than the colonies were.

Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 354, produced at the very end of the sixteenth century, was written by the London-based astrologer-physician Simon Forman (1552–1611). Thanks to the book-collecting tendencies of Elias Ashmole (1617–92), many of Forman's autograph manuscripts survive in what is now the Ashmole collection. This particular volume contains treatises on divination and astronomy, and opens with Forman's own treatise on geomancy – De arte geomantica. After this opening text there is another predictive treatise in Forman's hand, beginning with the verse above on fol. 174r, with a corresponding figure on fol. 174v. This is a procedure to predict the outcome of a variety of life events: from choosing friends or a spouse, finding out the winner or loser in combat, and avoiding danger, by using the letters of someone's name; it is called onomancy.

To anyone familiar with Forman's character, it won't be a surprise that he wasn't being completely truthful about the origin of this art. ‘This is a ruele of my devise’ is a falsehood, at least concerning the art of onomancy as a whole. While he may have come up with elements of the specific version copied into his book, onomancy – divination by converting the letters of personal names into numbers – can be documented as far back as fourth-century CE Greece, although it is almost definitely a much older practice. Onomancy was present in a host of ancient and early medieval cultures and languages outside of the Latin West, including Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Syriac and Ethiopic. That this was so isn't surprising. One of the most unifying themes in human experience is anxiety over big, unanswerable life questions, such as Will I get married? Will I have children? Will that friend betray me? How will I do in business?

The Tragedye of Solyman and Perseda is an enigmatic play. Appearing first in an undated, anonymous, and rather untidy quarto that gives no hint of playing company or initial performance contexts, the play closely follows a single primary source and yet is innovative and experimental. Before a recent flurry of interest in its dramatization of Christian-Islamic conflict it was largely neglected by nineteenth- and twentieth-century directors and scholars, with no recorded performances and only a small number of editions since that first quarto, which probably dates to late 1592 or early 1593.

Although its title page offers scant information in most other respects, the colophon of the first quarto does indicate that it had been printed by Edward Allde for Edward White and was to be sold from his shop ‘at the little North doore of Paules Church, at the signe of the Gun’. The play, then titled Salamon and Perceda, had been entered into the Stationers’ Register to Edward White on 20 November 1592, and was licenced for publication by John Aylmer, the Bishop of London. The same partnership of Allde and White subsequently produced a second quarto – now Solimon and Perseda – that was dated to 1599, the second issue of which was stamped on the title page as ‘Newly corrected and amended’. Here are the first potential connections to Thomas Kyd: his celebrated play The Spanish Tragedy had been entered into the Stationers’ Register not long before, on 6 October 1592, and a similarly undated quarto of that play printed by Edward Allde and published by Edward White appeared around the same time. Another play associated with Kyd, Arden of Faversham, was also entered earlier in the same year to White (on 3 April 1592) and was published that year by the same partnership of the two Edwards. This may suggest a selling off of manuscripts by Kyd to White (who would produce second editions of all three) at this point and, as Lukas Erne notes, although ‘it is impossible to recover what events or processes’ led to the near simultaneous appearance in print of these three plays, it is nonetheless ‘intriguing’.

IN LATE FEBRUARY 2022, Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine coincided with a simultaneous crackdown on domestic dissent. New laws criminalizing even casual criticism of the Putin regime had a chilling effect on Russian-speaking social media. Some voices fell silent, others spoke in euphemisms. Among the latter, “The Suffering Middle Ages” (“Stradaiushchee Srednevekovie”), a project with accounts on several social media platforms, became a surprising antiwar rallying point. Created a few years earlier by Konstantin Meftakhudinov and Iurii Saprykin, then students at Moscow Higher School of Economics, “The Suffering Middle Ages” started as a social media page for sharing medieval-themed memes. The project won its early fans by writing humorous captions making fun of overly emotive or “suffering” facial expressions in medieval art. “The Suffering Middle Ages” has since expanded into producing medieval-themed merchandise, a board game, and even publishing a book series by prominent medievalists. Its most recent venture is a learning platform featuring courses in the humanities taught by emigree scholars forced to flee Russia in recent years. Still, memes remain the projects most popular output, especially during the war. In the largest conflict of the twenty-first century, images shared over social media have become as much a tool of resistance as “Radio Free Europe” during the Cold War. On one particularly poignant image, a man's body is half-consumed by a monstrous dragon. “It's not that simple, we don't know the whole truth,” announces the Pythonesque caption, mocking the de facto slogan of Russia's state propaganda. Yet the content of the image speaks for itself, echoing a surreal disconnect between the brutality of Russia's actions and the propagandists’ attempts to lull their audiences into the comfort of epistemic apathy.

At first glance, medieval art may seem an odd medium for expressing dissent. In actuality, “The Suffering Middle Ages” and its creators continue a decades-long tradition of using the Western Middle Ages as a form of political and social commentary in the Soviet Union and Russia. Since the late 1930s, appeals to medieval western Europe became a safer form of expression for artists and intellectuals seeking to share their experiences of living under totalitarian or authoritarian regimes.

Introduction

With When Death Comes Stealing, African American writer Valerie Wilson Wesley introduced her protagonist Tamara Hayle in 1994 and has since penned eight novels featuring the character. A single mother, Hayle is a Black woman, who used to work as a cop with the Belvington Heights police department,1 a space dominated by White men, but owing to her teenage son Jamal's racial victimization by her coworkers, she resigns from her job and during the course of the novels runs a private investigation firm, Hayle Investigative Services, Inc. Primarily set in Newark (except for her third novel, Where Evil Sleeps (1996), which is set in Jamaica), the novels are narrated in the first person, and are written from the perspective of a Black woman2 (Soitos 1996, 234), and Hayle examines the lives of African Americans in Newark, New Jersey, in the way Walter Mosley's Easy Rawlins examines African American lives in Los Angeles. As such, Wesley's novels provide readers with what Astrid Erll refers to as “both a first- and a second-order observation” which gives “us the illusion of glimpsing [a] past” (in this case experiential), while simultaneously reflecting upon the “very processes of representation” (2008, 391). This is evident, as Hayle is proud of her city and its cultural heritage and, as critic John Gruesser has argued, both Hayle and the city of Newark are “overlooked and underestimated” by the dominant White males, and yet they survive. Hence, Hayle can be viewed as a symbol for the city (Gruesser 2005a, 89). Additionally, the novels contribute to the cultural memory of a traumatic past (c.f. Erll 2012, 239) as they capture the aftermath of the racial riots of 1967, which shaped the current sociopolitical reality of the city of Newark, and primarily deal with Hayle's lived experience as she tries to professionally confront the world of crime while forging a decent life for herself and her son.

Secondary readings reveal a little more about Wesley and her literary creation. For instance, about the characterization of Hayle, in an interview with John Gruesser, Wesley herself states, “I wanted to create a character who was a very empowered, very smart, savvy professional private detective” (Gruesser 2005b, 171).

Introduction

William Shakespeare is one of the few authors in the world who have gained the privilege of beginning their work by means of a question when this is too often considered a testament to bad style. His tragedy Macbeth (c. 1606) opens with the first witch asking, “When shall we three meet again? In thunder, lighting, or in rain?” instigating a play which continuously poses new questions, rather than presenting a clear-cut moral compass that leads its audience to the road of individual redemption. This opening question symbolizes the omnipresence of paradoxes which infiltrate the entirety of the play, in this case, that neither of the tempestuous phenomena to which the witch alludes here would normally appear in complete isolation. Right from the outset, Shakespeare denies any certainties in the dramatic world of Macbeth. Elena Ciobanu notably writes that

However, rather than framing this ambiguity as logical waste, it also carries with it its own counterpart, namely a productive understanding of early modern mentalities and the move from the Middle Ages to the early modern age (cf. Gaskill 2000). Following Malcom Gaskill's argument that one should refrain from capturing the ideas of the early modern mind statically, as if ideas and mentalities were inactive, and his alternative is turning toward investigating “interactions between discourses and historical actors participating in them” (2000, 16), this chapter explores how the conceptual flexibility of the early modern mentalities is used by Jo Nesbø's 2018 adaptation Macbeth to rewrite Shakespeare's tragedy into a twenty-first-century tale of crime, drugs, and corruption. The notion of “cultural memory,” as used by Astrid Erll, offers itself here well to identify the historical and conceptual contexts which are subsequently referred to by the novel, that is national, temporal, or genre boundaries, since cultural memory studies as a field of research defines itself “by the transcending of boundaries” (Erll 2008, 4).

The bishop of Durham’s certificate, containing the archbishop’s mandate and the royal writ

[294v] Reverendissimo in Christo patri et domino Domino Thomae, permissione divina Eboracensi archiepiscopo, Angliae primati et apostolicae sedis legato, eius ve commissario seu commissariis uni vel pluribus quibuscunque in hac parte deputatis vel deputandis, vester praehumilis oboedientiae filius Hugo Snell, decretorum doctor, reverendi in Christo patris et domini Domini Iohannis, Dei gratia Dunelmensis episcopi in remotis agentis, vicarius in spiritualibus generalis oboedientiam et reverentiam debitas tanto patri cum honore. Literas reverendissimas dicto venerabili patri Dunelmensi episcopo seu nobis vice sua nuper directas quarto decimo die mensis Ianuarii anno Domini instanti [14 January 1487] cum ea qua decuit reverentia sub tenore qui sequitur recepimus exequendas:

Thomas, [permissione divina Eboracensis archiepiscopus, Angliae primas et apostolicae sedis legatus,] venerabili fratri nostro Iohanni, Dei gratia Dunelmensi episcopo, suffraganeo nostro, eiusve vicario in spiritualibus generali, salutem et fraternam in Domino caritatem. Breve regium sub magno sigillo domini regis nobis transmissum nuper recepimus sub eo qui sequitur tenore verborum: