1 00:00:00,590 --> 00:00:06,290 My name is Nicholas Perkins, I'm a university lecturer in medieval English, and I'm a fellow here at St Hugh's College in Oxford. 2 00:00:06,290 --> 00:00:09,800 My current research is mostly about what we call medieval romance, 3 00:00:09,800 --> 00:00:15,770 which is a huge topic and one of the main ways of transmitting myth and narrative and history 4 00:00:15,770 --> 00:00:19,940 and all sorts of things like that from about the 12th century or really to the present day, 5 00:00:19,940 --> 00:00:23,780 but in the medieval context, right through into the 15th and 16th centuries. 6 00:00:23,780 --> 00:00:31,400 And more specifically, what I've got interested in is what happens in these stories when people give gifts to one another, 7 00:00:31,400 --> 00:00:40,520 when objects circulate in narratives, and when people or protagonists in the stories themselves can be read as if they're gifts circulating 8 00:00:40,520 --> 00:00:47,120 between communities developing obligations and value as they go being passed on from one person to another, 9 00:00:47,120 --> 00:00:51,980 sometimes against their will and also then sometimes coming back home at the end of the story. 10 00:00:51,980 --> 00:00:58,520 So romance is typically have, in inverted commas, a happy ending there comedies in a classical sense from that point of view. 11 00:00:58,520 --> 00:01:02,810 But those endings, a little bit like Shakespeare's comedies, are often quite problematic, 12 00:01:02,810 --> 00:01:10,700 and they involve sacrifices and compromises and treating objects and people both as parts of exchanges between 13 00:01:10,700 --> 00:01:15,980 communities and between families is one way of thinking a little bit more carefully about what's happening, 14 00:01:15,980 --> 00:01:22,460 what's at stake in those so-called happy endings and the happy endings to the objects get returned to their rightful owner? 15 00:01:22,460 --> 00:01:30,710 Yes, very often that's true. And sometimes there are pairs of objects. So, for example, a broken sword, the two pieces of which gets combined, 16 00:01:30,710 --> 00:01:37,700 or in one French story I could think of and not which cannot be undone except by the person who's done it, 17 00:01:37,700 --> 00:01:42,590 or in some stories, something like a chastity belt and its key, which, you know, 18 00:01:42,590 --> 00:01:46,850 symbolically and in all sorts of ways can only be unlocked by the appropriate person. 19 00:01:46,850 --> 00:01:50,510 So sometimes these objects are also people. They're lovers, for example, 20 00:01:50,510 --> 00:01:54,920 who get separated and who in weird and wonderful ways travel around the known 21 00:01:54,920 --> 00:01:59,780 world to the exotic Orient and then come home again and find their true love. 22 00:01:59,780 --> 00:02:06,170 Or perhaps a child is reunited with its parents having been orphaned and cast away at the beginning of its life, 23 00:02:06,170 --> 00:02:14,300 perhaps because it's been born out of wedlock. You're doing an exhibition at the moment about we put on an exhibition in 2012 at the Bodleian, 24 00:02:14,300 --> 00:02:23,900 which looked at how mediaeval romance has been transmitted and read and enjoyed not only in the mediaeval period, but right through the present day. 25 00:02:23,900 --> 00:02:28,850 And the modern library is one of the best places to study and to look at these kinds of things, 26 00:02:28,850 --> 00:02:36,020 work in the English faculty as I do the body, and has a big proportion of mediaeval manuscripts of English romances. 27 00:02:36,020 --> 00:02:43,400 And so we can have a look at those. We wanted to display not only some of the most magnificent and beautiful manuscripts for the Middle Ages, 28 00:02:43,400 --> 00:02:46,850 many of which do have romance, is in the body and has some of those. 29 00:02:46,850 --> 00:02:53,840 But also look at how romance was a popular form as well, very often actually transmitted orally, 30 00:02:53,840 --> 00:02:59,030 by which I don't just mean sort of the idea of the mediaeval minstrel, you know, just getting up and speaking Adelaide. 31 00:02:59,030 --> 00:03:06,440 But these stories were known. They were part of the repertoire of storytellers and they were passed around in families and communities as well. 32 00:03:06,440 --> 00:03:11,540 Now, by definition, if that happens, we don't then have a written record of it always. 33 00:03:11,540 --> 00:03:18,920 But we do also have very modest bits of manuscript, little books which contain more straightforward or simple romances. 34 00:03:18,920 --> 00:03:20,270 Sometimes there's room for children. 35 00:03:20,270 --> 00:03:28,220 So romance ranges from those simple products right up to really elaborate and expensive and very complex works of literature as well. 36 00:03:28,220 --> 00:03:35,030 The kinds of things that we then more often study in English course, it's like perhaps the best known single romance from the Middle Ages in England. 37 00:03:35,030 --> 00:03:42,020 So going in the Green Knight or the romance is which Chaucer included in The Canterbury Tales or Chaucer's Ein masterpiece Troilus and Crusade, 38 00:03:42,020 --> 00:03:45,470 which in some ways is a romance, as well as all sorts of other things as well. 39 00:03:45,470 --> 00:03:51,230 So the exhibition looked at those. It looked to objects also which carry romance stories. 40 00:03:51,230 --> 00:03:56,570 So works of art, things like ivory carvings and jewellery and painting, 41 00:03:56,570 --> 00:04:01,730 which also have some of the famous romance stories like that of Tristan and Isolde or King Arthur, 42 00:04:01,730 --> 00:04:02,720 Lancelot, Guinevere, 43 00:04:02,720 --> 00:04:09,830 those kinds of stories that still are actually very much at the front of how the myths that we tell one another and that we're interested in, 44 00:04:09,830 --> 00:04:15,740 you only have to look at something like, you know, Merlin or something that's been on television recently or off and stories and ideas, 45 00:04:15,740 --> 00:04:23,750 you know, more generally to see that those are very long lasting mythologies that have continued to interest people right up to the present day. 46 00:04:23,750 --> 00:04:27,530 And for me, I spend most of my time obviously working on the literature of that period. 47 00:04:27,530 --> 00:04:33,860 It was really fascinating to be able to have a look at what's there in museums and galleries around 48 00:04:33,860 --> 00:04:38,540 the country to talk to the curators of those places like the British Museum and the Victoria and 49 00:04:38,540 --> 00:04:43,820 Albert Museum in London and also the Ashmolean Museum here in Oxford to ask if we could borrow some 50 00:04:43,820 --> 00:04:49,880 of the things and to try and see how they might relate to the literature of the period as well. 51 00:04:49,880 --> 00:04:54,590 And also to give visitors people who don't necessarily have access to precious manuscripts in 52 00:04:54,590 --> 00:04:59,750 libraries to give them the chance to see first hand what these things actually looked like and. 53 00:04:59,750 --> 00:05:06,980 I think it's tremendously exciting for people to have that direct contact, as it were, really touch the things, 54 00:05:06,980 --> 00:05:13,280 but they're very close to them to have that contact with a book that could have been held by Chaucer or that was around in that period. 55 00:05:13,280 --> 00:05:22,160 And to get that just that little sense of what it was like to experience the literary culture during the Middle Ages as well. 56 00:05:22,160 --> 00:05:29,750 And I think to be able to see it right there, which I my. 57 00:05:29,750 --> 00:05:36,200 And it was just there with the illustrations in everything. Yes. 58 00:05:36,200 --> 00:05:42,560 Yes, that's absolutely right. And in a way, that's something that drew me into mediaeval studies, 59 00:05:42,560 --> 00:05:49,460 that excitement of still being able to look at these tremendously rare now in some ways, 60 00:05:49,460 --> 00:05:55,850 precious objects, often objects that are actually quite ordinary then, but which have developed importance as they've gone through, 61 00:05:55,850 --> 00:06:01,040 partly because of nearly having been lost or been forgotten about like something like the Beowulf manuscript that sort 62 00:06:01,040 --> 00:06:06,290 of laid around in the library was nearly burned and was the only in the 19th century really sort of brought back. 63 00:06:06,290 --> 00:06:10,190 And it was realised was one of the greatest works of literature that we have. 64 00:06:10,190 --> 00:06:15,440 And it's great to be able to be involved in a project which not only has a research academic focus, 65 00:06:15,440 --> 00:06:19,580 but which also has an aspect of it which can show people what it's like. 66 00:06:19,580 --> 00:06:26,090 One of the great things about the exhibition was that we were able to do some other events around it, like draw in school groups, 67 00:06:26,090 --> 00:06:32,330 primary school children, sometimes, sometimes six former students, and have a look at the exhibition to talk about it and think about that, too. 68 00:06:32,330 --> 00:06:38,750 But we also commissioned a new work, if you like, a new piece of storytelling with music from a group called The Devil's Mining Company. 69 00:06:38,750 --> 00:06:47,600 And they were retelling stories really from the romance tradition, one of them, the kind of folk version of what Shakespeare rewrote as King Lear. 70 00:06:47,600 --> 00:06:53,900 Another was the wife of basketball from the Canterbury Tales by Chaucer. And another one was the Franklin's tale, also from The Canterbury Tales. 71 00:06:53,900 --> 00:07:00,530 So Daniel Morden, who's a well-known storyteller, he kind of reworked those stories into a show with a group of musicians. 72 00:07:00,530 --> 00:07:07,100 And that was something we were able to commission as part of the project. And it's still going around on tours both in the UK and internationally. 73 00:07:07,100 --> 00:07:13,190 So romance is really quite easily defined genre. Yes, absolutely. 74 00:07:13,190 --> 00:07:20,390 Studying genre in literature is in one way it's inevitable because we all in some senses want 75 00:07:20,390 --> 00:07:25,100 to find a pigeonhole and put a piece of literature there just even as a holding position, 76 00:07:25,100 --> 00:07:29,240 just to say, well, this is how we're going to study it. But genre is also very slippery, 77 00:07:29,240 --> 00:07:35,000 and I think people are realising more and more the genre is very fuzzy around the 78 00:07:35,000 --> 00:07:40,580 edges and very often works of literature make a claim to be in a particular genre. 79 00:07:40,580 --> 00:07:44,390 But actually they're often doing that in quite a playful way and they very often 80 00:07:44,390 --> 00:07:48,080 are rejecting some aspects of the genre that actually that they're inside. 81 00:07:48,080 --> 00:07:54,260 I think some people tend to think about the development of genre, that genres start off, as it were, straight, 82 00:07:54,260 --> 00:08:02,000 and they get more and more complicated and strange and sort of self-referential or comedic or ironic as they go through history. 83 00:08:02,000 --> 00:08:05,660 But romance is one of the genres, I think, which really disprove that idea, 84 00:08:05,660 --> 00:08:11,720 that teleological idea about genre that we sort of get more complicated and interesting the further on in history we get. 85 00:08:11,720 --> 00:08:17,060 Some of the first romances are also some of the most self-aware, some of the most funny, 86 00:08:17,060 --> 00:08:22,790 some of the most sort of undercutting and ironic as well, especially those by the great crosscountry writer and ATWA. 87 00:08:22,790 --> 00:08:27,200 And in the wake of those, you could do all sorts of things with romance stories. 88 00:08:27,200 --> 00:08:33,950 But generally speaking, people tend to think of romance as being written not in Latin, but in the vernacular, so often in French. 89 00:08:33,950 --> 00:08:37,610 And then English romances often are translated from French versions. 90 00:08:37,610 --> 00:08:43,550 They are written through narratives, often of a life, often a hero's life, the classic when we think of as a night, 91 00:08:43,550 --> 00:08:49,910 you know, going out and fighting and meeting challenges and then coming back to sort of win a bride or something like that. 92 00:08:49,910 --> 00:08:55,940 Often they're also, I think we'd now think of as being more like sort of family sagas as well. 93 00:08:55,940 --> 00:09:00,110 They sometimes passed down generations or they're about the relationship between parents 94 00:09:00,110 --> 00:09:05,930 and children or a younger couple and their misunderstanding or problematic parents. 95 00:09:05,930 --> 00:09:11,840 Overbearing fathers are a particular problem in romance, is in law, also have quite a bad press as well. 96 00:09:11,840 --> 00:09:17,000 So those are some of the aspects that they're interested in. But they go out into different directions as well. 97 00:09:17,000 --> 00:09:25,160 They might be about the Crusades and the interaction between Christian ideology and Muslim or non Christian ideology. 98 00:09:25,160 --> 00:09:30,620 Very often they misunderstand or don't really have any idea about non Christian beliefs, 99 00:09:30,620 --> 00:09:38,750 but whether it's Muslims or whether it's Vikings or whether it's other kinds of monstrous enemies that they invent, 100 00:09:38,750 --> 00:09:44,120 they're often testing the limits of what we think of as good behaviour or ethical behaviour as 101 00:09:44,120 --> 00:09:48,500 against an enemy that might represent something that's that's wrong or bad from that point of view. 102 00:09:48,500 --> 00:09:58,070 But in doing so, lots of romance is also a quite inquisitive and quite reflective about the rules and the structures and the ethics. 103 00:09:58,070 --> 00:10:07,280 That's what we call core. Society is very difficult term, but aristocratic or society wants to impose on itself to go back to our most famous example. 104 00:10:07,280 --> 00:10:11,180 So going in the Green Knight going takes up a challenge from this strange Green Knight. 105 00:10:11,180 --> 00:10:17,090 He drops his head off and the Green Knight picks the head off and says, right, come fly me in a year's time and I'll return the blow. 106 00:10:17,090 --> 00:10:20,840 So on the one hand, you've got going, who's like us? And Green Knight, who's monstrous. 107 00:10:20,840 --> 00:10:24,980 He sort of comes across a castle and stays there for a while and he has a very genial 108 00:10:24,980 --> 00:10:28,820 host and the host wife is even more accommodating and wants to sleep with going. 109 00:10:28,820 --> 00:10:32,840 He's being tested in a way which is much more rigorous, in a sense, 110 00:10:32,840 --> 00:10:40,290 a much more subtle about his own ethics and his own belief system than simply a military conflict would allow for. 111 00:10:40,290 --> 00:10:43,670 And by the end of the romance, not to give the game away too much. But by the end of the romance, 112 00:10:43,670 --> 00:10:49,160 it's really this Green Knight figure who is as much the arbiter of ethics as 113 00:10:49,160 --> 00:10:52,580 the European Court has shown sometimes in the poem to be a little bit silly. 114 00:10:52,580 --> 00:11:00,230 And so it's really very finely poised and it involves all sorts of secular but also religious ideas and brings them together in a way which 115 00:11:00,230 --> 00:11:08,220 I think is much more impressive and it's much more powerful because it's contained within a story that's also exciting and interesting. 116 00:11:08,220 --> 00:11:11,900 So generically, mediaeval romance is difficult. The language is difficult. 117 00:11:11,900 --> 00:11:17,180 Why should we study it? Well, I wouldn't say it's difficult. 118 00:11:17,180 --> 00:11:21,380 The genre is mixed and patchwork, but that's what makes it interesting. 119 00:11:21,380 --> 00:11:24,080 The language of, let's say, a middle English romance. 120 00:11:24,080 --> 00:11:31,160 It can be a challenge, particularly a text like so going in the green light, whose dialect is from the North West Midlands around Chechu area. 121 00:11:31,160 --> 00:11:36,140 But from my perspective, that challenge is part of the excitement of doing it. 122 00:11:36,140 --> 00:11:39,500 And also, I think the very difference in language, 123 00:11:39,500 --> 00:11:48,920 the way in which you can't take for granted that a word means what you think it means in 21st century usage kind of requires you to read more closely. 124 00:11:48,920 --> 00:11:55,400 It means you can't get away with just skin reading and assuming you know that the subtlety of what the language says. 125 00:11:55,400 --> 00:12:00,170 Now, actually, you can't really do that when you're reading something from the mid 20th century. 126 00:12:00,170 --> 00:12:07,700 You know, you might be reading Graham Greene or George Eliot or Noel Coward or something and reading a conversation in a play, 127 00:12:07,700 --> 00:12:14,450 or you also really need to be on your guard. But very often you forget that because the language is easy enough if you like to get through it. 128 00:12:14,450 --> 00:12:15,800 I think in mediaeval literature, 129 00:12:15,800 --> 00:12:23,600 it's really worth the challenge of approaching the language directly and having a think about how words have changed their meaning, 130 00:12:23,600 --> 00:12:27,110 how they're under debate at that time, how they're changing, 131 00:12:27,110 --> 00:12:34,730 how they're different groups or different people with agendas are actually trying to define certain kinds of words in a particular way. 132 00:12:34,730 --> 00:12:41,840 A particular kind of classic word that a lot of people pick up on in this period and in this kind of romance is the middle English word truth, 133 00:12:41,840 --> 00:12:49,700 which we might translate it's truth, but can also mean faith or loyalty or a sense of self integrity, we might call it. 134 00:12:49,700 --> 00:12:54,560 All of those kinds of things are wrapped up in that. So it's not really a word with one direct meaning. 135 00:12:54,560 --> 00:12:59,270 But then when we start to think about it, no word really has one direct meaning or correspondence. 136 00:12:59,270 --> 00:13:03,440 And so it's worth investigating those and sort of seeing what their hinterland is, if you like. 137 00:13:03,440 --> 00:13:08,450 And would you say that the main function of mediaeval romance is to be provocative, 138 00:13:08,450 --> 00:13:12,590 to make you think the main function of it, I suppose you could say, is entertainment? 139 00:13:12,590 --> 00:13:17,720 Now, that doesn't rule out being provocative and thoughtful and reflective as well. 140 00:13:17,720 --> 00:13:25,940 And I think that's something that literary studies has to some extent had to come to terms with only really relatively recently. 141 00:13:25,940 --> 00:13:33,200 So in the mid 20th century, in order to sort of be taken seriously as literature and to an extent be taken seriously as literary scholars, 142 00:13:33,200 --> 00:13:41,690 people kind of competed to sort of show that their work that they were studying was very serious and it fitted certain kinds of hierarchies, 143 00:13:41,690 --> 00:13:51,230 lyric poetry, tragedy, the novel with a capital n those sorts of genres and ideas and mediaeval romance was often dismissed because it was popular. 144 00:13:51,230 --> 00:13:57,170 And the phrase popular romance has sometimes been used up until really quite recently to mean actually not very good stuff. 145 00:13:57,170 --> 00:14:02,600 Now, obviously, quality is variable. I'm not saying that all of this material is great literature, 146 00:14:02,600 --> 00:14:07,580 but that depends on what you mean by that and how you think about its function in culture and in society. 147 00:14:07,580 --> 00:14:14,030 But leaving that aside, I think many of the romances which had previously been dismissed are really because people didn't understand how to read them. 148 00:14:14,030 --> 00:14:16,880 They have a different kind of aesthetic like folk stories. 149 00:14:16,880 --> 00:14:22,760 They're not interested in some of the sort of literary effects that other kinds of genres strive for. 150 00:14:22,760 --> 00:14:29,540 But they have a kind of story patterns and repeated formulae which have a kind of power in their own 151 00:14:29,540 --> 00:14:35,090 right and sort of build up that kind of have an accretion of meaning that builds up through repetition, 152 00:14:35,090 --> 00:14:41,180 through sort of subversion of that repetition and through other kinds of patterning, which are really important. 153 00:14:41,180 --> 00:14:45,620 The great scholar Derek Brewer called these traditional stories and the idea of the traditional 154 00:14:45,620 --> 00:14:49,850 kind of story where that comes from the Bible or whether that comes through mediaeval romance or, 155 00:14:49,850 --> 00:14:56,150 say, Shakespeare's late romance plays, which were often based on mediaeval romance or other kinds of factors like that. 156 00:14:56,150 --> 00:14:59,210 I think they have their own kind of power that we need to sort of take. 157 00:14:59,210 --> 00:15:06,290 And interesting, you said earlier about Arthur being very popular mediaeval romance that we now find on TV today, 158 00:15:06,290 --> 00:15:09,420 and I believe one of the things that you're working on at the moment is, am I right? 159 00:15:09,420 --> 00:15:15,500 And that story of that has similarities to Grimm's fairy tales and other European fairy tales, 160 00:15:15,500 --> 00:15:19,760 sort of creepy father and the daughter had to run away with a magical cloak or something. 161 00:15:19,760 --> 00:15:25,290 Are there any other conventions of mediaeval romance that still resonate today? Yes, I think that's absolutely right. 162 00:15:25,290 --> 00:15:27,290 But there are there are lots of them. 163 00:15:27,290 --> 00:15:35,000 And that in some ways is because romance never really just sort of stopped happening at the end of the Middle Ages. 164 00:15:35,000 --> 00:15:44,000 It was still very much being performed, sometimes in versions like plays being rewritten by people like Spencer in the Fairy Queen and by Shakespeare. 165 00:15:44,000 --> 00:15:49,010 And then it carries on being rewritten and transformed in different ways, you know, through the centuries. 166 00:15:49,010 --> 00:15:50,990 So in some ways, it never goes away. 167 00:15:50,990 --> 00:15:56,750 Both the traditional folktale type stories and story patterns look, like I said before, about family relationships, 168 00:15:56,750 --> 00:16:03,030 about the generations, particularly about male and female desire and where the boundaries of those ought to be. 169 00:16:03,030 --> 00:16:10,910 You mentioned the romance MRA and in that story, the main protagonist is a young woman whose father wants to have an incestuous relationship with her. 170 00:16:10,910 --> 00:16:14,540 He wants to marry her and she refuses. And then she's cast out. 171 00:16:14,540 --> 00:16:17,010 She gets washed ashore for complicated way. 172 00:16:17,010 --> 00:16:23,990 She then ends up marrying this prince and his mother takes against her and tells him that she's given birth to a monster, 173 00:16:23,990 --> 00:16:28,220 even though it's a perfectly healthy baby. And she again gets cast out. 174 00:16:28,220 --> 00:16:32,300 And it's only much later that she manages to kind of bring the whole family together. 175 00:16:32,300 --> 00:16:35,720 Of course, it's not realistic in any way. It's totally farfetched. 176 00:16:35,720 --> 00:16:42,320 But some of those patterns of rejection and desire and anger and revenge and 177 00:16:42,320 --> 00:16:46,580 family relationships and the power of love to sort of heal those rifts are, 178 00:16:46,580 --> 00:16:49,190 of course, fundamental to all sorts of stories. 179 00:16:49,190 --> 00:16:57,970 And to some extent, the novel takes over some of those ideas and some of those developments into prose narrative in later centuries. 180 00:16:57,970 --> 00:16:59,930 So that's one of the reasons why that stuff's still there. 181 00:16:59,930 --> 00:17:07,190 The other reason is, of course, that modern writers read mediaeval romances and read other kind of mediaeval texts as well. 182 00:17:07,190 --> 00:17:13,850 And in Oxford in particular, people who taught or studied in Oxford have had quite a lot of exposure to mediaeval 183 00:17:13,850 --> 00:17:16,880 materials because of the sort of traditions of the course in the university. 184 00:17:16,880 --> 00:17:25,460 So writers like C.S. Lewis are Tolkien, like Diana Wynn James, Susan Cooper, The Dark is Rising series. 185 00:17:25,460 --> 00:17:28,670 All of those whose work to some extent sort of plays on. 186 00:17:28,670 --> 00:17:34,940 Of course, Tolkien is absolutely obviously, you know, uses his expertise in mediaeval literature to kind of construct these new worlds. 187 00:17:34,940 --> 00:17:40,520 That has a direct impact on modern fantasy narrative, on romance stories and so on. 188 00:17:40,520 --> 00:17:46,640 And I mean, another quick example just might be a character who's called Harry Potter that some people may have heard about. 189 00:17:46,640 --> 00:17:55,580 And he grows up in a way, the kind of story structure is very much similar to some basic story patterns in romance and in folktale. 190 00:17:55,580 --> 00:17:59,480 You know, he's an orphan. He's brought up not knowing his own heritage. 191 00:17:59,480 --> 00:18:07,280 There's magic involved. He's got these very problematic kind of foster parents and he sort of could have got to make his way like that. 192 00:18:07,280 --> 00:18:09,620 There are these sort of monstrous elements. 193 00:18:09,620 --> 00:18:15,230 There's there's a kind of heroic quest there, all of those kinds of things which go to make up the narrative. 194 00:18:15,230 --> 00:18:20,750 Now, those are basic story patterns which are still very powerful. And, of course, they get dressed up in different ways, 195 00:18:20,750 --> 00:18:27,860 but they're still things that we are drawn to and which are still part of our kind of literary and artistic culture. 196 00:18:27,860 --> 00:18:32,720 It speaks to us somehow. Yeah, absolutely it does. And I think having read those kinds of things, 197 00:18:32,720 --> 00:18:40,730 then going back to read some of the mediaeval materials allows you both to see how they're the same and how they're also kind of exciting like that, 198 00:18:40,730 --> 00:18:46,910 but also what differences there are and what kinds of ideas or ideologies are at play. 199 00:18:46,910 --> 00:18:55,698 You know, five, six hundred years ago when when similar story patterns were being thought about and produced under different circumstances.