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FRAMING THE PAST AND FUTURE Members of new religious movements (NRMs) typically share a heightened sense of cosmic significance by believing their activities are crucial for human history (“macro-history”), even its very culmination (“the End Times”). The term macro-history denotes the writing and envisaging of the past as a whole, and doing so usually entails explaining present conditions and presaging momentous events in the future. NRM leadership usually encourages adherents to locate themselves in (sacred) time and look forward to group vindication, renown, and salvation. Sometimes earthly events are viewed as incidental to huge cosmic processes, stressing a descending hierarchy of spiritual powers before matter and human beings appear, or conceiving us in a vast succession of worlds, in which cases we talk of cosmo-history. At other times myth or story dominates, to explain how current predicaments have arisen, making the denotations “myth-history” or “mythological macro-history” most appropriate. The most basic frames of macro-historical reference are progress; regress; recurrence; and unfolding towards eschatological consummation. Teachings or freer-floating ideas within NRMs respond to these paradigms in varied, often complex ways. When movements stress their own role in reclaiming some past glory, for example, they can at the same time lament decline yet optimistically believe that what has been lost can be recovered (by rebirth, reform, final progress, or apocalyptic perfection).

12 th August .— Fenton Forest .—After more than the interval of a month I resume my tale. No Arabian tale alas! but one of dull and downright reality, and I think before I tell you aught of my ‘forest sanctuary,’ it were well to let you hear how I got to it, as that was a consummation at one time very doubtful, so I must take you back to Hobarton. On the 12th [of July] the weather had cleared; a very bright morning, too bright to last, decided Fenton, and though he was extremely weak, we set off in our buggy with Flora on my knee, her nurse and a girl from the Orphan Asylum having gone the evening before, to wait our arrival at New Norfolk. I need not detail all promises to write and parting regrets.… The thing was to be done one way or other, and though I felt both ill and very nervous, from knowing my illness was only the commencement of a period of indefinite suffering, I knew too, that the effort must be made, and the sooner the better for all parties. … We descended into what might be termed an ocean of forest, as far as the eye could reach. The Derwent was still on our right, and far between might be seen farm-houses with their naked fences closing in patches of cultivation; in some, the trees only felled, and the ground cultivated between the stumps, for it appears the process of taking them altogether out of the ground is expensive, and therefore a progressive business.

O n the Acropolis of Athens we watched the glory and the consummation of Greek art; to the Acropolis of Pergamos we must turn to see its downfall and its ruin, and again the offering is made to the honour of Athene. It is Athene who with her shield on her arm, her aegis on her breast, is grasping the strong-winged giant by the hair, and she is the victress now as before, for near her floats Nike, the victorybringer, and conquest is assured. It is the meaning of this triumph and the manner of its expression that we must seek to understand. The slab (Fig. 9) lies now in the Museum at Berlin, but it came to us from the summit of the hill at Pergamos; we have its history to learn in the present and the past. More than twenty years ago a young German engineer whose name must always claim our reverence—Carl Humann—travelling on the coast of Asia Minor for his health, stayed for a while at Pergamos, now the modern Turkish Bergama (the citadel). He noticed that native workmen, in their customary ruthless manner, were breaking up large fragments of sculptured marble, building them into walls and burning them in lime-kilns. He was at the time engineer, not archaeologist; but educated as he had been in a country which though poor in antique originals is rich in cast-museums, he saw at once the value of the marbles. For a time his exertions stopped the havoc, but he left Pergamos and again the barbarians began their work. Fortunately he returned in 1869 to undertake engineering work and took up his headquarters at Pergamos.

We depend on documentary records for most of what we know about the conduct of marriages during the later middle ages, and for all that we know about marriage litigation during that period. This situation presents the historian with a problem: the survival of a document depends on medieval criteria for archiving, and we know that the vast majority of documentary evidence has not survived. Hence the material on which we must base our analysis is peculiar in two respects: first, it was written down under certain special conditions, and second, it managed to survive. Verbatim oral evidence has not survived at all from this period, when there were no court stenographers or tape recorders. Depositions record oral evidence only selectively and in a somewhat stylized, stereotypical form. Nevertheless, we can sometimes reconstruct both oral evidence and lost documents on the basis of the documents that remain. In this chapter, by performing just such a reconstruction, I consider what kinds of negotiation preceded marriage in late-medieval England and what kinds of contracts were involved. I also try to ascertain whether or not people in the Middle Ages drew a sharp jurisdictional distinction between the “secular” and “spiritual” contracts made during marriage negotiations. The method chosen is to examine in detail the evidence of five fourteenth-century cases. One case was brought before Parliament, whereas the other four belong to the cause papers of the consistory court in York.

THE PROBLEMS OF CLANDESTINE MARRIAGE Any marriage that failed to meet all of the Church's demands for solemnisation was termed clandestine; this description therefore covered a large variety of ways in which unsolemnised consent could be given. In Shakespeare's time there was also considerable dispute about the particular form of the Prayer Book solemnisation required by English law. As we have said, even though the teaching of the Church of Rome was that marriage was a Holy Sacrament (or, in the Prayer Book of the Church of England, ‘an honourable estate’), a failure to go through church solemnisation of a marriage was not fatal to its validity. Instead a clandestine marriage was treated as valid but a sin, and was punished as such in the church courts. Erring parties were usually ordered to comply with Prayer Book regulations for solemnisation and to do penance, and priests involved could be punished by suspension or loss of living. Such an outcome was unsatisfactory to many people. Wealthy families and patriarchs wanted more control over children's marriages. The more conservative Protestant reformers deplored the lack of regulation and wanted the validity of marriage controlled by the Church. Other Puritan reformers disagreed and objected to any clerical involvement at all in marriage. The clerical establishment complained about the activities of poor unbeneficed priests working outside Church hierarchies for profit. Common lawyers and Protestant reformers both complained that the church courts were insufficiently active in punishing those who flouted the law.

INTRODUCTION As we have seen in chapter 1, John Webster's Duchess of Malfi and her steward Antonio marry privately by mutual consent. Each uses unconventional and metaphorical language to express their intent to marry one another, and yet by this they are married. For, as discussed above, any expression of genuine present intent, with no need for a particular formula or type of words, created a valid and binding marriage contract by spousals. The Duchess then says, using the word ‘force’ with a meaning perhaps hovering between legal ‘enforcement’ ( OED ‘enforce’ III, 14) and moral compulsion: ‘What can the church force more?’ Antonio hints at misgivings, but she reiterates: How can the church bind faster? We are now man and wife, and 'tis the church That must but echo this:– No clearer statement could be made of the rules, which we have previously examined, governing consensual marriage. These rules, current in Shakespeare's England, did indeed ensure the inability of the Church or its ceremonies to ‘bind faster’ in marriage than spousals did. Church solemnities, the Duchess says, are merely an echo of what went before. Webster's play makes equally clear, however, that such a marriage by spousals alone could be disastrous for all concerned. The not uncommon practice of unsolemnised or ‘clandestine’ marriage was much debated, as we shall see in chapter 6. Here we will consider the other side of the same coin, the question of solemnisation itself.

The Central African Federation (1953–63) was the most controversial largescale imperial exercise in constructive state-building ever undertaken by the British government. It appears now as a quite extraordinary mistake, an aberration of history (‘like the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem’), a deviation from the inevitable historical trend of decolonisation. Paradoxically, one of its principal architects, Andrew Cohen (head of the African department of the Colonial Office) is also credited with having set the course for planned African decolonisation as a whole. There have already been several attempts to explain how an error so interesting and surprising, so large and portentous, came to be made. No-one, however, has yet presented an analysis based on British government archives, and the authoritative evidence that they alone can provide. Several historical reference-points constitute the background. Foremost among them, perhaps, was the famous British propensity to look to the ‘federal panacea’ as a solution for the perennial imperial problem of governing big intractable areas, of establishing more viable units, to whom power could be safely transferred. Some successes had been initiated in the white dominions in the past, at least when the situation was sufficiently dynamic, the local elite keenly committed, the imperial government tactfully supportive, and where an external threat imparted an expediting sense of urgency. Canadian confederation was actually completed in 1949 by the accession of Newfoundland, a consummation strongly promoted by prime minister Clement Attlee.

“Comparisons are odorous” Dogberry, 3.5.16 Given the lip service (Macbeth terms it “mouth honor”) paid to Shakespeare's artistry, some theatrical professionals are hesitant about rescripting, at least in its most visible forms. Such restraints can disappear, however, when the script in question is linked to Kyd, Marlowe, Jonson, Dekker, Marston, Webster, Middleton, Ford, or Beaumont and Fletcher. When confronting such less prestigious playwrights, directors can more readily imagine themselves as an Elia Kazan reshaping and giving fuller meaning to raw material provided by a Tennessee Williams. To investigate the rescripting process in this group of plays (labeled “primitive” by one director I talked with) is then to see the same kinds of omissions and alterations found in productions of Shakespeare but on less contested ground. To deal with such material is to run various risks. First, readers in tune with the major plays of Shakespeare are less likely to be familiar with Every Man In His Humour, The Fawn, The Maid's Tragedy , or The Broken Heart so may find some of the accounts that follow mystifying. Moreover, the rationale behind the adjustments to these non-Shakespeare plays is often comparable to that outlined in chapters 1 and 3, so that there is a danger of redundancy. Nonetheless, to focus on the rescripting of such plays is to see with added clarity issues and problems basic to this study, a consummation devoutly to be wished.