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This thesis explores visual representations of British West Indian sugar in relation to the African slave trade practiced during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. During this time, sugar played a vital role to the lives of both European and non-Europeans as it was a source of great wealth for many and became transformed into one of the most demanded and widely consumed commodity. From the earliest days of British colonization, the cultivation and production of sugar in the Caribbean has been inextricably linked with the trade in African slaves to provide free labor for plantation owners and planters. This thesis considers how European artists visually represented sugar in its various forms---as an object for botanical study, as landscape and as consumable commodity---and in so doing, constructed specific ideas about the African slave body and the use of African slave labor that reflected personal and imperial agendas and ideologies.

In this thesis, the dissolution of the monasteries is treated as an event in the history of patronage relationships between the English crown and local patronage groups. In a comparative approach, the regions of East Anglia and Yorkshire are examined in search of patronage-related differences that help to explain the contrasts in regional political responses to the dissolutions. / The first section deals with aspects of patronage in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, exploring through test cases the normal patterns of patronage on monastic estates and the estates of lay landlords and the Crown. Normal durations in tenure, remuneration and networking patterns are explored, in order to show what expectations monastic servants would have held as to the effects of the dissolutions on the duration and value of their positions as well as the creative or destructive impact of the dissolutions on patronage networking. / The second section then analyzes patronage on the monastic estate under the management of the Court of Augmentations, following through in case studies the patronage impact of the sale of major blocks of monastic property to lay landlords in either region. The study finds that the northern region underwent more severe patronage dislocation than was the case in East Anglia, partly on account of long-term structural conditions and partly because of the differences in the more immediate political relations between the crown and elites in either region.

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The outbreak and continued progress of the Irish rebellion of 1641 played a significant role in the birth and development of domestic newsbooks in England between 1641--49. This thesis examines the manner in which these periodicals reported the insurrection to their readers. As relations between king and parliament deteriorated during the winter of 1641--42, the attention awarded to this uprising by these publications helped to ensure that Ireland became a popular concern. Weekly chronicles of Irish affairs continued unabated after the onset of civil war in England. Amid fears that Ireland could be utilized by Charles I in his struggle with Westminster, pro-parliamentary, and subsequently pro-royalist editors employed the rebellion as part of a propaganda war that accompanied armed conflict in all three Stuart kingdoms. Accordingly, this study suggests that a principle stratagem of the newsbooks was not necessarily to communicate news of Irish matters, but more often than not, their motivation lay in manipulating accounts relating to the rebellion in order to wage political combat in England.

This thesis utilises the evidence from mortuary archaeology to explore the identity of the inhabitants of Britain during the period of Roman rule. It assimilates burial evidence from diverse sources both published and unpublished and integrates it with other material and literary evidence to investigate the people of the province and examine aspects of their lives. By assessing the extent and reliability of the mortuary evidence and by combining this evidence from major cemeteries, smaller burial sites and individual or isolated burials it has been possible to determine aspects of their lives from a different perspective than that previously employed. The thesis has been divided into five parts. Part 1 (chapters 1 to 3) serves as an introduction. Part 2 (chapters 4 and 5) considers the evidence available while Part 3 (chapters 6 to 8) focuses on specific groups within the population. Part 4 (chapter 9) looks at instances of death and burial that differ from the norm and Part 5 (chapters 10-12) presents a picture of the daily life of these people. The study concludes with a summing up of the evidence and a look at the future of mortuary studies of Roman Britain. The introductory chapters set out the objectives of the dissertation, look at the work that has already been done in this area and evaluates the need for a synthesis of the available evidence. The scope of the project, both temporally and geographically is outlined in chapter 2. The third chapter takes a look at the contemporary written evidence available, in the form of literary and epigraphic contributions, and assesses its reliability as an indicator of the appearance and lives of the Romano-Britons. This survey looks not only at the Roman view of the natives of the province but extends beyond the Roman period to examine the literary evidence that is available from the subsequent centuries. Chapters 4 and 5 take an in-depth look at the evidence available on the people of Roman Britain. The extent of the burial evidence is reviewed in chapter 4 while chapter 5 deals specifically and in depth with how this evidence can be utilised. The skeletal evidence is assessed for its extent and reliability. Factors affecting the survival of the remains is appraised and the effects of the biases created by such differential survival considered. Grave-goods and the organisation of the cemeteries are brought into the evaluation and the strengths and weaknesses of all of the evidence evaluated. The following chapters (6 to 11) focus on discrete aspects of the population. Chapters 6 to 8 look at the representation of specific groups within the community - the young, the elderly and those who arrived from other parts of the empire. With the aim of providing an indication of the diversity of both the composition of the population, the communities they represent and the associated burial rites, chapter 9 examines some of the more distinctive burials from Britain during this period. An area of intense interest, decapitation burials provides the focal point of this chapter. What may appear to be more mundane aspects of the lives of these people occupy chapters 10 to 12. What kept them busy, their occupations and their pastimes is viewed from the perspective of the burial evidence in chapters 10 and 11, while chapter 12 examines the mortuary evidence, in the form of funerary art and the remains of clothing, hair and accessories for their appearance.

In 'A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism', Jerome J. McGann writes, '[A]n author's work possesses autonomy only when it remains an unheard melody'. For the published and successful writer in the nineteenth century, such autonomy was often unattainable. Publications such as The Pickwick Papers inspired an array of opportunistic successors, including stage plays, unauthorized sequels, jest books, song books, and shilling and penny imitations. Despite the proliferation, this strain of writing is rarely studied. This thesis recovers ephemeral, scurrilous texts, often anonymous or pseudonymous, and reads them in the context of their canonical sources. Retrieving bibliographical environments, it demonstrates how plagiaristic, parodic, and willfully unoriginal works impacted on the careers of three novelists: Charles Dickens, Edward Bulwer Lytton, and George Eliot. The thesis argues that formal distinctions among modes of Victorian writing - criticism, parody, and plagiarism - often blur. Further, it argues that our understanding of a particular novelist's work must be broadened to include sequels, spinoffs, and imitations: to know a particular author means to know the spurious and oftentimes bad (morally or aesthetically) works that the author inspired. The Spurious Victorians of the title form something of countercanon to the 'major' writers of the period. Thomas Peckett Prest, Rosina Bulwer Lytton, and Joseph Liggins, among many others, informed and influenced the literary history that has in turn denied them admission. William Makepeace Thackeray wrote, 'If only men of genius were to write, Lord help us! how many books would there be?' Of course, Victorian print culture found room for the genius and the subgenius, Boz as well as Bos. 'Spurious Victorians' recovers works that have been lost from view in order to better understand the process by which an individual authorial voice emerged amid an echo chamber of competing, imitative voices.

This study advances and adds detail to our history of the reading of verse in England c.1350-1500. Scholarship has established major twelfth- and thirteenth-century changes in reading, and linked these changes to manuscripts containing the modern Middle English verse canon. Historians of early modern reading have also argued for distinctive changes in their own period. But the examination of reading between these two clusters of change has been limited. This study therefore asks how later medieval Middle English verse was read. The surviving copies of The Prick of Conscience and Speculum Vitae, two hugely successful religious instructional poems, form the primary body of evidence. This body is augmented by reference to hundreds of other manuscripts containing Middle English verse. Together, these can reveal much about what was normal and abnormal in reading. They are also an important part of the context for the reading of more canonical Middle English verse. Manuscript studies often proceeds through case studies of individual books and unusual evidence such as marginalia. This thesis turns to codicology to understand more widespread evidence for reading, combining qualitative case studies with quantitative techniques borrowed and developed from continental scholarship. The first chapter examines evidence of provenance, revealing that both The Prick of Conscience and Speculum Vitae were read by an impressive range of people and remained current into the sixteenth century. The second chapter considers the navigational aids used in copies of both poems. Reading in this period has been characterised as 'discontinuous', but it could be discontinuous in diverse ways, and readers also read continuously. The third chapter is a large-scale study of books' size and shape, showing how these features can reveal books' reading histories, sometimes in counterintuitive ways. The fourth chapter contends that readers in this period attended closely to rhyme and probably read for balanced rhyme structures. The fifth chapter uncovers the ways in which these poems were rewritten for new readers and investigates the composition of the Southern Recension of The Prick of Conscience, arguing that this new text was partly a formalist intervention. The conclusion summarises the new 'baseline' history of the reading of Middle English verse which is offered here, and gestures towards implications for our reading of the Middle English poems which are canonical today.

This thesis investigates the ways in which British and French imperial heroes involved in the exploration, conquest or administration of Mrica between 1870 and 1939 were selected, packaged and promoted to the various sections of the public of their respective countries. It seeks to unveil the commercial, political and personal interests that lay behind the imperial hero-making business. This research analyses the hidden mechanisms, as well as the reasons that led to the appearance of a new type of hero in the context of the 'new' T Imperialism and the 'Scramble for Mrica': private connections, political lobbies (especially colonial advocates and nationalists), commercial interests (journalists, writers, biographers, hagiographers, publishers, film-makers) and personal ambition, the combination of which underpinned the creation and success ofheroic reputations. The first part of the thesis investigates the process through which imperial heroes progressively became widely known in their homelands, and how it was facilitated by the technical and social improvements of the Second Industrial Revolution. Drawing upon a wide variety of printed and manuscript sources, it shows the ever-increasing commercial success of imperial heroes throughout the period, analyses how they could serve political ends, and explains the values for which 'they were held up as examples. The second part examines the case studies of two military commanders in times of Anglo-French rivalry in Africa (the Sirdar Kitchener and Major Marchand before, during and after the Fashoda confrontation of 1898), in order to compare the modalities of the development of these legends, and the different backdrops against which they took shape. This thesis is the first to combine quantitative evidence (such as print run figures) and qualitative sources (such as police records) to demonstrate conclusively the prevalence and complexity of the hero-making process brought about by the conquest of Mrica, and to evaluate the reception of these heroic myths among the public.

Historians of political development in the High Middle Ages often focus on the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries as the generations in which monarchy finally triumphed over aristocracy to create a monopoly on governing institutions in western Europe. However, it was precisely in this period that Simon of Montfort emerged from his modest forest lordship in France to conquer a principality stretching from the Pyrenees to the Rhône. A remarkable ascendancy in any period, it is perhaps especially so in its contrast with the accepted historiographical narrative. Nonetheless, Simon has been largely overlooked on his own terms, especially by English historiography. Despite the numerous works over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries devoted to the Albigensian Crusade, only a handful of biographies of Simon have been published, none of which are in English. Furthermore, those French works dedicated to his life have been little more than narrative retellings of the Albigensian Crusade from Simon's perspective, with an introductory chapter or two about his family background, participation in the Fourth Crusade, and life in France. French domination of the historiography has also prevented any deep exploration of Simon's English connexions, chiefly his inheritance of the earldom of Leicester in 1206. The substantial inquest regulating this inheritance awaits publication by David Crouch, but at least forty other acts from Simon's life remain unedited, despite increased interest in the Albigensian Crusade and several having been catalogued for over a century. Though one of the aims of this thesis is to correct the lack of Anglophone attention paid to this seminal figure of the early thirteenth century, a biographical study of Simon has consequences beyond the man himself. The inheritance of his claims to the Midi by the French Crown after his death means that his documents survive in a volume uncharacteristic of a baron of his station. The dedicated narrative history of his career provided by Peter of Vaux-de-Cernay's Hystoria albigensis is likewise the most intimate prose portrait of a comital figure available from the period. Thus Simon's life is perhaps the best recorded of his contemporary peers, offering a rare insight into the priorities and means of a baron's administration of his lands and leadership of a crusade. Moreover, despite the supposed triumph of monarchy during his lifetime, Simon's meteoric career took place largely outside of royal auspices and sought crowned approval for its gains only after the fact. Simon's experience was certainly exceptional, both in itself and in the volume of its narrative and documentary records, but it nevertheless provides a challenge to an uncomplicated or teleological understanding of contemporary politics as effectively national affairs directed by kings. Rather than spend his life in the train of one particular king, as did his contemporaries William the Marshal or William of Barres, Simon's career, in its various geographical manifestations, saw him in the lordship of three different Crowns: France, England, and Aragon. Though his relations with the first of these were almost entirely amicable - if not always harmonious - he was more often in open conflict with the latter two. As a crusader, Simon was also subject to a fourth lord, the pope, for the major events of his career. But even while executing papal mandates, Simon at times came into conflict with the distant will of Rome. However, none of these lords successfully prevented Simon's ascendancy. Angevin and Barcan influence in the Midi was drastically handicapped by the Albigensian Crusade, in the latter case, definitively. And while popes may have disagreed with some particulars of Simon's prosecution of the crusade, he remained their best hope for curbing the threat of heresy. One reason for Simon's success in the face of opposition was his ability to exploit the margins of monarchical authority, retreating from his obligations of fidelity to lord in favour of another, thus presenting himself as a legitimate actor while interfering with the designs of a nominal superior. Such independence, however, required alternative bases for his own power that could not be found in the largely rhetorical refuge offered by a distant overlord. In the absence of support from above, Simon worked to cultivate relationships with his social peers and the lesser French nobility. Notably, however, outside of his immediate family, adherence to his cause more often came from his socially inferior neighbours and those with common spiritual devotions than from his wider kinship network. His extended family, of roughly equivalent social standing to himself, were more interested in following the French king in his campaigns to consolidate royal power than investing deeply in Simon's crusade. However, those with similar ideological concerns or dependent on his success saw in Simon a charismatic and effective leader worthy of their allegiance. For Simon himself, the crusade was animated by the programme of reform advocated by the Cistercians and certain Parisian theologians. His context was permeated by the reformers, especially in his close connexions with the abbey of Vaux-de-Cernay. Concerns about just war, the liberation of the Holy Land, ecclesiastical liberty, sexual morality, and the purgation of heresy espoused by Cistercians and schoolmen were reflected in Simon's career. He was more than a simple cipher for ecclesiastical priorities: his campaigns and government were ambiguous in their attitude toward mercenaries and complicit in the problem of usury. Nevertheless, Simon's crusades to both Syria and the Midi demonstrated a remarkable dedication to building a Christian republic according to the vision of the reformers. But Simon was not always a crusader, and the majority of his career - though not the majority of its records - took place in his ancestral lands in France. Though his time in the shadow of Paris does not offer the same salient examples of baronial independence as his conquest of the Midi, it does provide a crucial glimpse at the ordinary exercise of aristocratic government on a more intimate scale. His forest lordship furnished lessons of administration that would prove relevant to his rule in the Midi, such as the diplomatic projection of authority, the value of seigneurial continuity, the economic benefit of thriving towns, the necessity of an intensively participating chivalric following, and the advantage of wide ecclesiastical patronage. Similarly, Simon's brief seisin and subsequent disseisin of the honor of Leicester demonstrated the fragility of his power when many of these elements were lacking. In addition to abstract lessons of governance, his northern lands also provided the financial backing necessary for at least the initial phases of his crusading career. Thus Simon's lordship in France and England, though not nearly as autonomous as in the Midi, is far from irrelevant to his later manifestations of independence: it rather informs his later government and even made it possible.