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Mercury and Hermes in Lewis's scholarship, That Hideous Strength, and poetry. The Babel curse, multivalence, puns, and the faculty of componendo et dividendo. The donegality of The Horse and His Boy. ‘Meeting selves, same but sundered’, Castor and Pollux, swiftness, heraldry, theft, skill in speech, quicksilver. A manifestation of hesychastic prayer, of the Trinitarian spirit and of consubstantiality.

In heraldry, ‘the names of the nobility were related totemically to the natural world, especially to animals’. Heraldry was vitally important in the late 14th-century English courtly world, as witnessed by Richard II's lavish distribution of his badge of the white hart. Yet the heraldic sign was never an innocent marker, but a counter in political debate — in Mum and the Sothsegger the king is accused of favouring the ‘harts’, his followers, at the expense of young, hungry deer. In fact, heraldic discourse was subject to various kinds of fracturing because of its engagement with physical form. Readings of heraldic texts (e.g. by John de Bado Aureo, Bartolo di Sassoferrato, and Nicholas Upton), of poems, of Froissart's tale of Math, the king's greyhound, and of passages from Chaucer and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight follow, as well as discussions of the Devonshire Tapestries and the Wilton Diptych.

This chapter presents a reading of Chaucer's Knight's Tale, which takes up the theme of human-animal relations as an enterprise of control. It is argued that in the Tale, the degree to which the human characters attain mastery over events is partly expressed through the way in which they are linked with different animals. Heraldic elements, as well as real animals, permeate the descriptions of Lygurge and Emetreus; while Palamon and Arcite are linked with more lowly bodies — the drunken mouse, the crow's black carcass, the hunted deer — in keeping with their socially marginal status, fated to be acted upon rather than actors themselves. The Tale ends without resolving these questions, despite Theseus's attempt at philosophizing in his closing oration.

This chapter considers the extent to which the some of the central institutions, customs, and practices of the Tudor era were constructed, paradoxically, on Ricardian foundations. The examples explored here range from institutions founded in Richard’s reign, to buildings on which he left his physical or memorial mark, to the traces of late fifteenth-century trajectories and traditions still evident in the palimpsest of everyday urban life in the Elizabethan period. Shakespeare’s world—the world into which he launched his Richard III—was Richard’s as well: a world whose administrative and cultural contours the last Plantagenet would have recognized, and which he had in certain respects helped to bring into being.

This chapter argues that romance representations of sovereign relations defined by protection and exile invite a consideration of the shared being of the beast and the sovereign. An analysis of the symbolic use of animals in heraldry and the material use of animal skin structure the chapter's inquiry. The first part of the chapter reads Chrétien de Troyes’s Chevalier au lion (Knight of the Lion) as a romance about the use of animal skins as armor and animal images as heraldic emblems; both uses of animals designate human identity. The second part of the chapter turns to the thirteenth-century Guillaume de Palerne (William of Palermo), where skins represent both disguise and animal transformation, and where the beast and the sovereign merge.

We may believe that books should be bought to be read and studied, but there is plentiful evidence, through human history, of people being mocked for owning books more for display and self-image. This chapter looks seriously and systematically at motivations for book ownership in the seventeenth century, recognizing that there is a range of attitudes between textual utility and the valuing of books for their aesthetic or luxurious qualities. Bookbindings, bookplates, heraldic markings, wills, and other kinds of evidence are drawn on, through various case studies, to show that for most people a mixture of approaches was probably involved—that we should think more in terms of a matrix than a linear spectrum. Book historians may define the history of reading as the key interface to be explored between books and people, but this is too narrow a focus if we really want to understand why people owned books.

This chapter examines the place of heraldry in Tudor and early Stuart portraiture. It discusses the social context that made heraldic devices so important in the England of this era; the sort of craftsmen who painted the devices themselves; and the portraits that featured them. It concludes by suggesting the significance of heraldic painting for the native-English school of portraiture at this time.

This chapter examines the miscellany’s links with antiquarian compilation and chorography (the branch of geography concerned with the particulars of a specific region or place). Its primary interest is with textual production in the two fields, and with the practices of annotation and organization that allowed antiquaries and chorographers to turn their heterogeneous notes into orderly narratives. The manuscript miscellany, it argues, was essential to the kind of assemblage scholars carried out here. Compilers discussed in the chapter include William Lambarde, Edmund Tilney, George Owen of Henllys, Abraham Ortelius, and most extensively William Camden. The chapter shows that this kind of antiquarian assemblage was most commonly conceived as a kind of stitching or tailoring, in keeping with one of the more frequent early modern metaphors for textual and miscellaneous production.

This chapter examines gentry involvement in the parish and the parish church as an aspect of proprietary lordship, showing how gentry advowson holders might use appointments to benefices to reward clerical relatives or family dependants, and arguing that gentry lords actively championed parishioners’ interests when these were under challenge from outsiders. It is shown that a more self-interested side to gentry proprietorship might reveal itself in the tendency to incorporate the parish church and cemetery within the moated bounds of the manorial enclosure whenever local landscape improvements were undertaken. The suggestion is ventured, however, that if ordinary parishioners might sometimes feel marginalized by lordly assertiveness, they were nonetheless the beneficiaries of generous lordly expenditure on church fixtures and fittings.

This chapter illustrates how the growing control of abbots and priors over monastic finances provided further opportunities for expenditure on their own office. Over the course of the later Middle Ages, increasingly large sums of money were devoted to the financing of the head’s household and to impressive abbatial residences. Late medieval superiors also adopted new and ostentatious forms of display, utilizing their initials, rebuses, and even personal coats of arms to advertise their high-status artistic and architectural patronage. In short, monastic superiors were becoming more prelatical over this period, adopting the bishop as their model. This increased emphasis on the dignity of the abbatial office should not be equated with ‘worldliness’, but was rather the expression of an ecclesiastical magnificence thought appropriate for princes of the Church—even if this pursuit did not sit particularly comfortably with traditional monastic ideals.