A definitive study of Janáček's Sinfonietta, tracing its creation, reception, and rise to international prominence.
This book provides a musical 'biography' of Leoš Janáček's (1854-1928) most famous orchestral piece - his Sinfonietta - by analysing its sources, composition, reception history, recordings and musical component parts. The most up-to-date research on the genesis and performance history of the work, it considers in detail Janáček's orchestral writing, the inspiration and genesis of the Sinfonietta, a documentation of all the surviving sources for the work, the work's performance history during Janáček's lifetime and following his death until the end of the Second World War, including press reviews and relevant correspondence.
The book also examines the growth in the worldwide popularity of the Sinfonietta. This evolved from cautious and hostile critical responses to the premiere recording in 1946 to its gradual acceptance as one of the key works of the 1920s, largely thanks to the advocacy of conductors whose work is considered in detail, alongside other significant recordings. Questions of performance, rehearsal, interpretation and the musical text are considered in a wide-ranging interview with the conductor Jakub Hrůša, and a concluding chapter provides a detailed commentary on the music itself. The book includes a valuable appendix describing the annotated scores used by conductors such as Otto Klemperer, František Neumann and Henry Wood, as well as a comprehensive discography.
Thirteenth Century England XIX
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Essays addressing Anglo-German connections and comparisons across the period from 1190 to 1300, with particular attention to the economic, social and personal aspects of an entangled transregnal connection.
A wide range of topics are covered in this significant collection. It begins with an examination of macro-economic developments, together with comparative studies of serfdom, and the record-keeping of English and German towns. Personal contacts are the subject of articles on the hostages delivered by Richard the Lionheart following his release from captivity by the Emperor Henry VI, the diplomatic initiatives of 1227, the subsequent marriage of Henry III's sister Isabella with the Emperor Frederick II, Richard of Cornwall's German itinerary, and relations between England and Cologne. Another article investigates what happened if foreigners travelling in England came into conflict with the law. Turning from people to manuscripts, three articles analyse in turn the English reception of Oliver of Cologne's Historia Damiatina, the representation of English kings in Gervase of Tilbury's Otia imperialia, and Matthew Paris's attempts to depict royal emotion.
Inventing Percy Grainger
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Investigates the dialogue and tensions between Percy Grainger's public biography and his self-conscious autobiographical construction via his own writings and autobiographical museum.
The Australian-American composer Percy Grainger (1882-1961) described himself as an 'all round man': composer, pianist, artist, inventor, linguist, ethnographer, essayist, and more. He also went to great lengths to shape his own biographical narrative, developing an eccentric public persona in the press, writing extensive autobiographical texts and establishing a vast autobiographical museum. But what happens when this self-fashioned narrative meets writers, scholars, and creatives in the decades since his death? This book traces the construction and negotiation of Grainger's biography on page, stage and screen through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, exploring the tensions and dialogue between these and Grainger's autobiographical self.
Through a series of case studies, with a focus on works created in Australia, the book explores how Grainger's public persona and received biographical narrative were developed then transformed by other writers, playwrights, filmmakers, and performance artists to suit the changing needs of their own time and place. Examining a variety of texts, from celebrity profiles, obituaries, and traditional academic studies, to film, theatre, opera and poetry, the book offers a biography of an afterlife: a study of how Grainger set up a series of mechanisms to control how his life would be remembered, then tests these against a succession of works that engage directly with those sources.
Hanns Eisler and His Circle in Republican Spain
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Studies the development and impact of Hanns Eisler's music and Marxist activism in the tensions of 1930s Spain, revealing the interplay of varied influences, ideology and antifascist propaganda.
Hanns Eisler in Republican Spain is the first comprehensive study to explore the political, artistic, and intellectual engagements of Hanns Eisler and his circle of Marxist musicians - including the singer Ernst Busch and the musicologist Otto Mayer-Serra - in relation to Spain between 1931 and 1939. The book reconstructs Eisler's collaborations with a broad range of Spanish antifascist organisations, examines the reception of his compositional and theoretical work in Republican Spain, and assesses the deep impact of the Spanish civil war on his vocal and symphonic music. It highlights the influence of key local, national, and international communist structures - notably the Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia (PSUC), the Communist Party of Spain (PCE), and the Comintern (Third International) - on the musical and political projects of Eisler and his circle. Grounded in detailed analysis of an extensive corpus of textual, musical, and press materials - primarily preserved in archives in Spain, Germany, Russia, France, and the United States - this study offers new critical frameworks for understanding the role of Western modernist music in contexts of ideological conflict and war. It provides a fresh perspective on the complex entanglements between antifascist propaganda and musical modernism in the interwar period. Hanns Eisler in Republican Spain makes a vital contribution to scholarship at the intersection of music, exile, propaganda, communism, and antifascism, and more broadly, to the study of how political ideologies shaped music, aesthetics, and musical thought across national boundaries during a pivotal era in twentieth-century European history.
On publication this book is available as an Open Access ebook under the Creative Commons license CC BY-NC.
Slave Owner and Paternalist
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An account of the life and ideas of Sir William Young, a leading opponent of the abolition of slavery, who used the rhetoric of paternalism to argue that slavery could be ameliorated to become a benign system.
This book charts the life and ideas of Sir William Young, owner of enslaved people on Antigua, St Vincent and Tobago and a leading opponent of the abolition of slavery. It outlines how he used the rhetoric of paternalism to argue that slavery could be ameliorated to become a benign system, akin to the paternalism which he worked towards in rural England, and contrasts his aims width his failure to implement them. It considers his place in the British elite - country gentleman, active back-bench MP and a man of learning - and examines his activity in attempting to improve conditions for the rural English poor. It explores his eventual financial failure, which included the loss of both his West Indian and his English estates, and his last years as Governor of Tobago. William Young was a considerable figure in both the world of the Caribbean, source of his wealth, and the world of London and the English countryside, where he spent that wealth. Young's doctrines of paternalism, unreal and self-serving as they may have been, were widely accepted by the British upper classes.
Early Medieval Medicine in Context
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Fresh perspectives on how medical texts, broadly construed, were recorded, perceived and utilised.
The past few decades have witnessed significant shifts in the scholarly investigation of early medieval medicine and its texts, moving far beyond outdated stereotypes of stagnation and superstition, not least via close study of the manuscript evidence, which has enabled a better appreciation of the processes involved in the recording and transfer of medical knowledge and healing practices. This book builds on these recent developments. With a particular focus on transmission, translation and transformation, the essays collected here offer detailed explorations of sources, contexts, producers and uses, examining material ranging from Bald's Leechbook and continental Latin recipe collections to Old Norse sagas and a Byzantine Greek treatise on venomous animals (Book V of Paul of Aegina's Pragmateia). Several contributors explore Old English's multifarious connections with the Latin tradition, discussing charms, obstetric and gynaecological texts, as well as the Peri didaxeon. The volume concludes with an afterword by Peregrine Horden on future directions of study, inviting further research into this vibrant and growing field.
Chapter 3 is available as Open Access under the Creative Commons licence CC BY-NC-ND. The article received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement no. 101018645.
Old English Biblical Prose
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Provides the first in-depth study of the earliest attempts to make the sacred words of the Bible available to English readers, clerical and lay, in prose writing.
"This is a hugely valuable study - deeply informative about an important tradition of biblical translation from the early medieval period, bringing together material that has previously been considered in isolation, and drawing out a big-picture account of the ebb and flow of biblical translations into the vernacular. Will be a useful point of reference for any interested reader and includes surprises and delights for even the most specialist readers." Professor Jonathan Wilcox, University of Iowa
The story of the English Bible begins not with the King James Version or Wycliffe but in the Old English period. Between the ninth and eleventh centuries, a remarkably diverse corpus of biblical translations, paraphrases, adaptations and summaries were produced in Old English. Yet while Old English biblical verse has been extensively studied, the much larger corpus of vernacular biblical prose remains neglected by historians of the Bible and medievalists.
This book provides the first in-depth study of the genre. Dispelling the notion that access to the Bible was restricted to the Latinate clergy in the early medieval period, it demonstrates how Old English biblical prose made key elements of Scripture available and meaningful to laypeople. Through case studies of the Prose Psalms, Mosaic Prologue to the Domboc, Wessex Gospels, Heptateuch and Treatise on the Old and New Testaments, as well as many other works, it highlights the crucial contributions of well-known figures such as King Alfred and Ælfric of Eynsham while also showcasing the work of anonymous authors who translated, adapted and interpreted the Bible, sometimes in creative and surprising ways. Cumulatively, these case studies show how vernacular biblical prose played a central role in the emergence of English national identity before the Norman Conquest.
This book is available as Open Access under the Creative Commons licence CC BY-NC-ND.
The Philosopher’s Ring—Wagner as Thinker and Dramatist
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Presents Wagner as a serious philosopher and offers a fresh perspective on the Ring and its unique fusion of myth, human drama, and philosophical insight.
Few figures of the nineteenth century were more influential than Richard Wagner, and few works of art have the scope and historical significance of The Ring of the Nibelung. Wagner himself said that it expressed his entire philosophy of life. Yet little attention has been paid to him as a philosopher, aesthetic theories aside. Instead, the Ring has been viewed in the light of Schopenhauer, Feuerbach, or even Hegel. Wagner's own ideas do not deserve this neglect, and this book addresses that omission. It starts with the more widely read philosophers of his day, such as Fichte; in their context Wagner's often fragmentary thoughts reveal a coherent "materialist idealism" that constitutes a late but significant contribution to Classical German philosophy. His acute social and psychological insights are still relevant, and so is the philosophical history that he saw prefigured in Greek tragedy.
Wagner's philosophy also illuminates the structure of the Ring and offers fresh insights into the characters and conflicts of that endlessly interpretable work. Approachable and engagingly written, balancing narrative, philosophical analysis, and a detailed consideration of the Ring's four music dramas, The Philosopher's Ring shows the cycle to be a work of unparalleled philosophical depth, one reason that it continues to challenge audiences even now, a century and a half after its premiere.
Music in Fifteenth-Century Bohemia
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A long-needed reassessment of the musical culture of fifteenth-century Bohemia, liberating it from nineteenth- and twentieth-century nationalist agendas and reassessing its position in European music history.
What was musical culture like in a country in fifteenth-century Central Europe where theologians tried to restore the values of the early church—including through musical practices‐only to be branded "heretical"?
Bohemian theologians tried to return to Christianity's "roots" by promoting frequent bread-and-wine communion for all (including children) and by encouraging lay participation in worship through translations into the vernacular. Unlike in many other European lands, monophonic chant and sacred songs were primarily used (though some advanced contemporary polyphonic settings circulated as well). These religious and musical developments formed part of the seedbed that would develop more fully during the European Reformation through the work of Martin Luther and others.
Music in Fifteenth-Century Bohemia: Between Reform and Identity Building contains essays on liturgy, song, and the influence of the Hussite movement. The book resists both nationalistically tinged narratives and the marginalization that has long resulted from an emphasis on the disparities between Czech and Western European musical traditions. One chapter demonstrates how a fifteenth-century song was employed in the revival of Czech culture in the nineteenth century.
Taken as a whole, the essays in this important collection illustrate the distinctive and often effective ways in which fifteenth-century Czech culture dealt with the dichotomy between religious reform and cultural identity.
The Lives and Deaths of the Norse Gods
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A comprehensive study of the mortality of Norse gods, with close readings of the Prose Edda, Poetic Edda and Saxo Grammaticus' Gesta Danorum.
Divinity usually implies immortality. The very phrase "gods and mortals" highlights an ontological gap between two distinct categories of existence: immortal deities and transient humans. This divide, however, does not hold true in the Scandinavian mythological tradition, where the gods themselves are mortal. This mortality is central to myths such as those of Baldr and of Ragnarøk, and affords the Norse gods narrative potential, that is unparalleled in other traditions, such as those inherited from antiquity.
The first half of this study explores some salient consequences of this attribute, highlighting the striking anthropomorphism of the gods. The second half takes a more diachronic approach, examining the prehistory of the group of gods who became known as the Æsir and arguing that they developed from non-anthropomorphic divine forces shaped by and mobilized in ideologies of leadership and warfare in pre-Christian Northern Europe. By examining how divine mortality not only drives Norse mythic narratives but also reflects wider patterns of thought and belief, including early medieval theories of rulership and the sacralization of human excellence, this book reconsiders the boundaries between godhood and humanity in pre-Christian Scandinavia and, in doing so, questions what it means to be a god.
The Early Parliaments of Henry VIII, 1510-1523
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An administrative study of Henry VIII's early parliaments (1510 to 1523), which systematically explains and analyses every aspect of parliament in the early sixteenth century.
This book is an administrative study of Henry VIII's early parliaments (1510 to 1523). It systematically explains and analyses every aspect of parliament in the early sixteenth century, from legislative procedure to the composition of the House of Lords and the House of Commons. Some of the matters under discussion include statutory litigation - how parliamentary legislation was actually applied in the king's courts - and the rules of precedence and inheritance of title in the Upper House. The book's main purpose is to explain how parliament worked - what parliament did, how it was done and who was involved in doing it. It forms part of a burgeoning academic movement known as the New Administrative History, which seeks to restore a knowledge of administrative processes to its rightful place of importance in the historiography of early modern England. The book will be essential reading for anyone wishing to understand the early history of parliament.
The Third Crusade (1189-1192)
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Fresh perspectives on one of the largest and most complex crusades ever launched, covering all aspects of the expeditions - from preparation and commencement to results and consequences.
Saladin's victory at the Battle of Hattin in 1187 produced three profound results: a shattered Jerusalem army, a pope falling dead from the news, and the launching of the Third Crusade in response. Under the banners of renowned rulers like Richard the Lionheart, Philip Augustus, and Frederick Barbarossa, men and women from across Latin Christendom took the Cross and joined in the largest western military expedition since Urban II's call to arms in 1095 for the First Crusade.
Long dormant in the renewal of crusade studies in the twenty-first century, the Third Crusade has in recent years begun to attract increased scholarly attention. Adopting a cross-cultural focus that examines both western and eastern societies, this book offers a substantial and timely reappraisal. Chapters shed light on the crusade's causes, context, organization, participants, preparations, commencement, military progress, and short and long-term consequences, and scrutinise well-known sources through new lenses. They also engage with communication theory, the history of emotions, textual criticism and textuality, historiography, archaeology, and topography. Together, they provide both a fresh view of this complex and multifaceted war and a useful survey of its major contours.
Women, Transnational Networks and Patriotism in Northern and Central Europe, 1763-1814
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A gateway to the complex world of eighteenth-century sociability of elite women and of their lasting impact on modern concepts of national identity and community.
In the dynamic intellectual and social landscape of eighteenth-century Northern Europe, the interplay between patriotism, nationalism, and cosmopolitanism was pivotal in shaping the era's cultural and political discourse. This study delves into the intricate networks of elite women who navigated and influenced these concepts through their participation in salons and literary circles. By examining figures such as Anna Amalia of Weimar, Dorothea von Kurland, members of the Bluestockings, Friederike Brun and the grande Dame of eighteenth-century salon world, Mme de Staël, the narrative uncovers how these women fostered transnational dialogues and cultural exchanges that were crucial in redefining public spirit and national identity.
Grounded in extensive archival research and touching on the lives of over twenty-five individuals, the work highlights the nuanced roles these women played as cultural mediators and agents of change across national borders, challenging the traditional male-dominated historiography. The exploration of their contributions offers fresh insights into the interconnectedness of European intellectual life and the critical role of gender in shaping historical discourses. This book not only broadens our understanding of the Enlightenment but also provides a rich, interdisciplinary perspective on the socio-political transformations of the era.
Imagining Franco
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Is Spain really still tied - culturally, politically, and emotionally - to the dictator Francisco Franco? What was (and is) his place in the public imaginary? What remains today of the man and his legacy?
This book examines the public image of Franco and the social construction(s) of his public biography over four different periods: the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), the post-civil war period (1939-1949), the rest of the dictatorship (1950-1975), and the democratic period and recent times (1975-2020). Delving into biography, narratives, and public and political motivations, it analyses the role that the idea of Franco has played and continues to play in contemporary Spain. It argues that the multiplicity of narratives that have existed in Spain and abroad regarding the figure of Franco are closely related to both the rhetoric and images generated by those in power and a sort of popular 'banal Franco' which takes in multiple stereotypes. This latter concept is central to understanding not only Franco's importance in contemporary Spain but also the fervent allegiance to his figures by a substantial part of Spanish society. Providing a complex picture of how the public image of the dictator has been constructed over time, the book addresses how ordinary Spaniards have imagined Franco and what their sources for doing so were.
Land and God: the City, County and Diocese of Lincoln over Nine Centuries
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This volume of essays draws together research from the twelfth to the twentieth century and across the eight counties of the ancient diocese of Lincoln, in tribute to one of its most important historians.
For over 50 years Dr Nicholas Bennett has been one of the lynchpins of academic research in Lincolnshire as archivist, academic and general editor of the Lincoln Record Society. The essays collected here consist of contributions from Dr Bennett's colleagues on the Council of Lincoln Record Society. The volume includes editions of previously unpublished records as well as new analysis of more familiar texts, through examinations of medieval secular and ecclesiastical records, nineteenth-century accounts and twentieth-century magazines. The articles demonstrate how the concerns and challenges of Church and State remain remarkably similar over 800 years; they also allow the reader to engage with the lives of great men and of those who are otherwise unknown, including bishops and rectors, justices and criminals, and widows and suffragettes.
Charlemagne in the Francophone World and Occitania
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Explores the transmission and reception of the medieval legends of Charlemagne in the literatures of the French-speaking areas of France, Burgundy and England, and Occitania.
The spread of Charlemagne's myth after his death was even more extensive than the empire he ruled during his life. This volume turns to the birthplace of many of these myths, and to the languages of the North (langue d'oïl) and South (langue d'oc) of that land. The first chapter traces the presence and development of his legend the diverse political and cultural areas south of the Loire generally known as Occitania. The two following chapters analyse the often contradictory representations of Charlemagne in northern French-speaking regions in the twelfth to fourteenth centuries, through a careful selection of chansons de geste and chronicles. Using ethnographic theories, they consider his roles as warrior, secular ruler and conduit to the divine. The fourth and fifth chapters examine the exploitation of those images among readers of French in England and in French-speaking provinces ruled by the Dukes of Burgundy. Finally, the epilogue traces the continued vibrancy of Charlemagne stories in popular and high culture through to the twentieth century.
Diplomacy, Trade and Imperialism in East Africa, 1850-1900
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A detailed overview of East African diplomacy at the end of the pre-colonial era, which provides a corrective to the commonly held view that African diplomats were inexperienced, naïve and parochial.
This book traces the history of an elite group that rose to power and wealth in the interlacustrine kingdoms of East Africa at the end of the eighteenth and over the course of the nineteenth century. Katikiro played a major role in shaping the history of their societies at a time of profound change. Royal administrators, chief advisors, envoys - these influential men navigated and directed shifts in the balance of power as old hegemons like the kingdom of Bunyoro stumbled, new contenders like Buganda and Rwanda emerged, the region opened up to trade with the East African Coast and Egypt, and Europeans arrived, first as explorers and missionaries and then as colonial rulers.
Katikiro were in midst of these changes: as politicians they shaped them; as diplomats they mediated them; and as wealthy businessmen they profited from them. Their rise in the nineteenth century offers a unique inside into the agency of Africans in these events and highlights the many continuities of pre-colonial and colonial histories in the region.
The Diary of W. G. Footitt
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W. G. Footitt was an architectural draughtsman in the office of Charles Hodgson Fowler, architect to Durham, Lincoln and Rochester Cathedrals. His diary illuminates the professional practice and daily life of an individual immersed in the production and restoration of ecclesiastical architecture during the last years of the Gothic Revival. Significantly, it highlights the important contribution made by draughtsmen, whose names rarely appear in published histories of architecture. Their meticulous work, essential to the realisation of architectural visions, translated concepts into detailed plans and drawings, supporting the creative process and enabling craftspeople to execute designs with precision. A talented artist with a passion for antiquities, Footitt produced many drawings to illustrate the publications of leading archaeologists in County Durham and Northumberland, thus playing a crucial role in bringing archaeological discoveries to a wider audience. He was also a keen observer of the world around him, travelling widely across Britain and recording holidays in Ireland and Switzerland. His first-hand impressions of social, cultural and technological change make the diary a vivid chronicle of modernity.
Feminist Anger in German-Language Cultural Production
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Essays by feminist scholars of German Studies looking at how women-particularly women of color-have put their anger to use in German-language cultural production and how they themselves might do so in their scholarship.
In Germany and in Western culture more broadly, women experience anger in response to misogyny, racism, and other injustice, but open expression of that anger is often considered unwomanly. Yet a rich tradition of feminist thinkers of color-including Audre Lorde, Brittney Cooper, Amia Srinivasan, and Sara Ahmed-understands anger as energizing and imperative for structural change. How might we cultivate an anger that is affirming, inclusive, legitimate, creative, animating, and most of all, feminist?
This volume of essays by feminist scholars of German Studies-writing in dialogue with such thinkers while acknowledging their own largely white, privileged positionalities-looks at how women have put their anger to use in German-language cultural production and how they themselves might do so in their scholarship. The eleven contributions approach the topic of female anger intersectionally and transnationally. They examine angry women in the contexts of politics, activism, philosophy, economics, race, nationality, sexuality, illness, and humour. Covering a wide array of genres and discussing works from the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries, they explore creators including writers, filmmakers, comedian/activists, musicians, and journalists. They investigate the tensions between the emotion of anger and the practice of being an angry woman, global responses to anger, and artistic representations of angry women in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.
Dance, Embodied Politics and Court Culture in Early Modern Spain
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Does dance tell a story? What, if anything, is it intended to represent? How was it conceived in the early modern period?
This book examines the theories and political uses of dance in Spain during the period preceding and following the 'Poetics turn', which coincided with the rule of Philip III (1598-1621), also known as the Dancing King, and the onset of the reign of Philip IV. While this turning point finalised the definition of dance as an art form, it was also paradoxical. Indeed, this development saw the emergence of an aesthetic thought of dance within Aristotelian poetics, thanks to a common court culture, yet it never led to the formulation of a poetics of ballet.
By recontextualising this turning point, the book examines the relationship between dance and representation during Spain's Golden Age. It revisits the initial codifications of dance in Italy and figurative experiments at the Burgundian court during the second half of the 15th century, as well as their influence on subsequent practices and humanist theories of dance at the courts of Charles V and Philip II. Subsequently, it focuses on the various shifts in court dance as it became a scenic art at the beginning of the seventeenth century, interrogating the possibility of the king performing dance himself. The book concludes that, in Spain, neo-Aristotelian ideas enabled a shift from an ethical to an aesthetic problematic, which saw dance, whether symbolic or purely kinetic in nature, as a legitimate art form to be placed at the service of the monarchy.
The Epic Modernist Alfred Döblin
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Provides the English-speaking reader with a comprehensive guide to the fiction of Alfred Döblin, a major figure in German and European literary modernism.
Alfred Döblin was born into a Jewish family in 1878 and grew to become a leading German literary figure before he had to flee from the Nazis in 1933. His big-city novel Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929) is often compared to Joyce's Ulysses, but Döblin had been exploring modern narrative techniques since the early 1900s, and his themes were entirely his own. In view of the highly diverse character of his fictions and their settings-ranging from Europe to China and South America, and from the sixteenth century to the twenty-seventh-the first four chapters of this book present them according to broad thematic concerns-Person, Power, Nature and Culture-rather than chronological sequence. The aim is to encourage readers to identify aspects of his writing that they would like to investigate further for themselves. The introduction provides initial orientation in Döblin's early thinking and the way he conceived the writer's task, and that is followed by a concise description of his family background and his subsequent personal biography. The final two chapters focus respectively on the development of his skill in the deployment of specific narrative techniques and on how historical circumstances affected his philosophical and religious orientation in the course of his adult life, from the language skepticism of his early years and his professed agnosticism in the 1920s to his late conversion to Catholicism.
Bartolomé de las Casas
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A deep look at the impact of Christian scripture on Bartolomé de las Casas, one of the first and strongest critics against Spanish colonialism of the New World and for Indigenous rights.
Theologian, activist, reformer, political philosopher, historian and anthropologist Bartolomé de las Casas, OP (1484-1566) was a polarising figure in his own time and continues to provoke debate today. Arriving in Hispaniola as a settler and friend of conquistadors, in time las Casas became the official "Protector of the Indians" and a zealous advocate for their rights. His writings, in particular the History of the Indies and Brief History of the Destruction of the Indies, today constitute the best source for the first three decades of Spanish exploration and conquest in the Americas.
This book provides an accessible account of las Casas's life, achievements, teachings and legacy. Importantly, it underscores the tremendous influence of Christian scripture on las Casas, a surprisingly overlooked aspect in previous biographies, considering his status as a churchman and missionary. The book places him in his socio-political and religious context and traces the evolution of his thought, showing how his ideas on freedom, just war, natural law, social justice, and evangelisation frequently put him at odds with most of his contemporaries and especially the secular and ecclesiastical elites. Two centuries before Thomas Jefferson announced that "all men are created equal," las Casas proclaimed that "all mankind is one" and wielded the principle of government by consent in defence of Indigenous rights.
How the Holy Cross came from Antioch to Brogne
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The first critical edition, with facing-page English translation, of a thirteenth-century source, offering insights into crusading, material culture, and aristocratic-monastic relations.
In 1152, a knight from the southern Low Countries named Manasses of Hierges returned home after eleven years spent crusading in the Holy Land. He carried with him a precious relic, said to be a fragment of the True Cross that had belonged to the princes of Antioch. Nearly sixty years later, a writer associated with a nearby monastery composed a new Latin narrative, hagiographical, and liturgical textual programme known as Quomodo Sancta Crux ab Antiochia allata sit in Broniense cenobium (How the Holy Cross Came from Antioch to the Monastery of Brogne). It tells the story of Manasses, his career in Europe and the Near East, and of the conflict that broke out over possession of the relic after his death.
This volume provides the first critical edition and English translation of a source that contributes greatly to our knowledge of the medieval world, from crusading to material religion to relations between the lay aristocracy and religious communities. The work of a learned author with ambitions to a high literary and homiletic style, it offers a fresh perspective on the question of what motivated crusaders and on the history of the Holy Land under crusader occupation, providing critical new details to the story of the civil war between Queen Melisende of Jerusalem and her son, King Baldwin III. The sustained account of the conflict over a relic provides a window into the importance of sacred objects, and competing notions of sacrality, legal possession, and value. Previously unknown to historians, this work provides a rich illustration of the place of crusading in the memory of a local community. A detailed critical apparatus establishes what can be known about the work's composition and the author's reliance on Classical, Patristic, and Scriptural authorities, while an introduction gives an account of the work's political, cultural, and intellectual context.
Jewish-Christian Dialogue in Medieval French Literature
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Examines a range of vernacular works within the context of Jewish and Christian exegetical traditions.
Just as Jews and Christians encounter each other in unequal power relations in the "contact zones" of medieval cities, so the Hebrew Bible meets two Christian Testaments in dynamic tension. Vernacular literature mirrors that confrontation whenever it integrates biblical material, whether quotations and images, translation and paraphrase, people, events or practices. In whatever shape or form, the use of biblical matter introduces vital questions, as competing claims to possession and authority are enmeshed with new approaches to interpretation. Christians and Jews, Judaism and Christianity, meet each other figuratively around the reinvention of their shared sacred texts to define and dispute their identities.
This study examines how biblical material enters into a variety of twelfth- and thirteenth- century French works by following the way literal and spiritual meanings are intimately entwined. In examples ranging from the romances of Chrétien de Troyes and bestiaries to theatre and moralized bibles, biblical citation serves as an expression of belief, a tool of persuasion, and a weapon of aggression. As current debates on antisemitism intensify, a brief epilogue considers what this study can contribute to Jewish-Christian dialogue when medieval and modern, past and present, challenge each other to deepen knowledge and expand possibilities.
Renaissance Papers 2024
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Renaissance Papers collects the best scholarly essays submitted each year to the Southeastern Renaissance Conference.
The 2024 volume features essays from the conference held at The Citadel, as well as essays submitted directly to the journal. The opening essay focuses on an idiosyncratic strategy used for fundraising by the English Crown: Queen Elizabeth's "poetry" lottery. Five essays on Shakespeare probe the complexity of his plays. The first is a Jungian analysis of how the archetype of the dragon manifests itself in King Lear. It is followed by a study of how early modern exercise culture constructs masculinity and health in As You Like It. A provocative reinterpretation of A Midsummer Night's Dream then illuminates the culturally subversive way in which Shakespeare portrays his fairies. The fourth and fifth essays examine the implications of female political agency in Measure for Measure..
Four Musical Romances
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Influential medieval romances are translated, with the accompanying music and an absorbing explanatory introduction.
The thirteenth century saw the flourishing of a vibrant new literary genre in France: the romance with musical interpolations. The four works translated here are outstanding examples. Their authors incorporate songs in highly inventive ways, not simply for embellishment or atmosphere. They explore the potential of song to advance narrative, create jeopardy, to reveal their characters' inner lives and even to provide ironic comment. Jean Renart, in his Guillaume de Dole, declared himself the originator of the genre. If the innovation was his, it inspired many works that followed. The most notable include the other three in this collection: Le Roman de la Violette (The Romance of the Violet) by Gerbert de Montreuil (almost certainly the Gerbert who wrote arguably the most accomplished Continuation of Chrétien de Troyes' Perceval), Le Roman de la Poire (The Romance of the Pear) by Tibaut and LeDit de la Panthère (The Panther of Love) by Nicole de Margival. Together these works raise absorbing questions about how medieval romances were performed, to the point where Le Roman de la Poire is very nearly a play, understandable only as a piece to be delivered by multiple voices. They will be of great interest not only to literary scholars and musicologists but to all those interested in the performance of romance. All the songs and refrains for which the music has survived are translated into singable form, and all the surviving notations are included in the text, edited by Matthew P. Thomson.
African Rivers
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The Nile, Congo, Niger, Chad and Zambezi are names that evoke watershed periods in Africa's history. Yet, until now, scholars have paid little attention to Africa's riverine environment or how it has shaped the continent's civilizations.
African rivers are not only part of the ecosystem but also hold immense ecological, political, economic, and sociocultural significance. At the same time, there are numerous challenges to their exploitation and sustainability due to human activities, transboundary conflicts, and climate change.
This book explores major thematic preoccupations with the study of African rivers. The first section discusses the epistemology of rivers in Africa, reviewing historical perspectives and identifying associations of rivers with identity and spirituality in Africa. The second section turns to the economy of African rivers, namely their commercial and economic benefits, political perspectives and dimensions, ecological and hydrological impacts, as well as their impacts on agricultural management and food security in the continent. In the third section, challenges associated with the exploitation, management, and sustainability of African rivers are discussed including geopolitics, dam construction, eco-tourism, transboundary disputes, and water scarcity. Beyond merely pointing out these challenges, however, the authors also propose solutions for the future of sustainable river resources in Africa. Ultimately, the book aims to promote knowledge of African rivers to help governments, corporations, and communities define and address their future needs
Art and Artifice in Twelfth-Century Iberia
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"This innovative, wide-ranging and erudite book illuminates the sophistication of artistic exchange at this time and place." Costanza Beltrami, Stockholm University.
Sculptors and painters produced exceptional, and sometimes eccentric works of art in the middle decades of the twelfth century in Iberia. The high-level artistic expertise needed to produce such works could be gifted, loaned, and even stolen in the same way as other precious items. It could be moved, like a commodity, across networks forged by reforming churchmen and rulers that traversed the Pyrenees and the Peninsula. Much of this sculpture and wall-painting shows an ability to play with the different repertoires that emerged from these established routes of exchange.
The pilgrimage roads of the Codex Calixtinus have had a strong imaginative pull and even been invoked to explain such artistic production. By contrast, this book argues that the more playful and satirical aspects of that manuscript - the pseudonyms, exaggerated claims, and pointed selections - resonate not only with a wider culture of forged charters and re-invented institutional histories but also with the imaginative, eclectic, and sometimes ludic art of these decades. This art encompasses sculpted church façades, painted interiors, illuminated missals and cartularies, as well as carved Atlas figures that encapsulate the complex status of the artists who made them.
South Africa’s Constitution and the Law of the Township
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How are residents of South Africa's townships responding to socio-economic inequality and a pervasive sense that the country's democratic transition has not delivered on its constitutional promises of social justice?
Based on extensive fieldwork, this book challenges beliefs that the agency of township residents is limited to waiting for handouts or demanding delivery from the state, showing how they are instead assisting themselves by taking advantage of the opportunities, menyetla, available. In the kasi, or urban townships, where almost half of the urban population lives, there is limited state-enforced order; while the lex constitutional may be the law of the land, the lex lokasi governs day-to-day life in the township. The book opens with a description of life in townships and the interconnected crises facing the country before examining commonly practiced township menyetla to illustrate how the lex lokasi operates: stealing electricity, informal charges to access the Social Relief of Distress grant, fare evasion on the Metrorail, the illicit sale of alcohol during COVID-19 prohibition, medical aid scams, and looting.
Exploring how this looting from below protects those looting from above, it provides a different perspective to the view that state capture is the primary cause of the country's current entropic trajectory and that the application of the much-vaunted constitution can bring South Africa back on track.
Women Journalists in the Brazilian Mainstream Press
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A nuanced and complex portrayal of female voices which have long been silenced, offering a fresh perspective on the history of Brazilian journalism and restoring women's rightful place in Brazil's cultural memory.
This book examines the groundbreaking contributions of Maria Amália de Carvalho, Júlia Lopes de Almeida, Emília Moncorvo Bandeira de Melo (pseudonym Carmen Dolores), and Maria Benedita Câmara Bormann (pseudonym Délia) in Brazil's mainstream press, focusing on their writings published in the influential newspaper O País between 1884 and 1912. Employing psychoanalysis, gender studies, media theory and literary criticism, the chapters in this book explore how these four writers cultivated a collective intellectual network and how their columns became a forum for a critical engagement with the conservative narratives of the male-dominated public sphere. This book questions why their legacies have been marginalised in traditional literary histories and aims to restore their rightful place in Brazil's cultural memory. By presenting a nuanced analysis of these silenced voices, it challenges the persistent myth that women's writing was limited to the 'small press'. A vital reassessment of press history, this book demands a more inclusive understanding of Brazil's journalistic and intellectual heritage, one that properly recognises women as active participants in shaping the Brazilian literary system.
ANA CLÁUDIA SURIANI DA SILVA is Associate Professor in Brazilian Studies at University College London (UCL), UK.
TANIA REGINA DE LUCA is Professor in the History of Brazilian Republic at São Paulo State University (Unesp), Brazil.
CONTRIBUTORS: Alexandro Henrique Paixão, Álvaro Santos Simões Junior, Ana Cláudia Suriani da Silva, Milena Ribeiro Martins, Tania Regina de Luca.
Taking Newton On Tour
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This volume provides a critical edition of an exceptional example of the 'Scientific Grand Tour' taken by Martin Folkes. Martin Folkes (1690-1754) was Newton's protégé, antiquary, mathematician, and the only simultaneous president of the Royal Society and the Society of Antiquaries. In 1733-5, he went on Grand Tour as a scientific ambassador for the Royal Society, demonstrating Newtonian optics to Italian virtuosi. He also measured ancient and Renaissance buildings to understand past architectural engineering and design. His 97-page illustrated diary (in the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford, shelfmark MS Eng. misc.c.444) also challenges the long-standing, mistaken impression among scholars that the Royal Society was in decline in the eighteenth century. Analysing Folkes's activities abroad and creating an edition from this source tracing his Italian route provides a novel reading of Newtonianism and the purpose of the Grand Tour as a vehicle for scientific research and statesmanship.
Classical and Popular Music in Israel
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Original historical and analytical research into the Israeli music scene, treating important composers as well as broader issues such as Jewish-Arab encounters, Holocaust memorialization and post-October 7th soundscapes.
Does a nation's music reflect its distinctive, definable spirit and aspirations? As this wide-ranging volume demonstrates, Israel's pluralistic musical scene offers a unique crucible in which to study transcultural processes and encounters. Through the nineteen essays by established and younger scholars and musicians, what emerges is a vivid picture of a dynamic musical culture balancing regional and global tendencies. The essays touch on a wide range of classical and popular musics. Micro-histories of individual composers highlight Arnold Schoenberg's relationship to Israel, Josef Tal's and Mordecai Seter's Israeli modernism, the neglected genius of Verdina Shlonsky, and the postmodernism of Mark Kopytman and Oded Zehavi. Broader surveys address musical responses to Jewish and Arab traditions, Holocaust memorialization, satirical cabaret, prog rock, nationalistic "folk" songs, and the soundscape of a country at war since October 7, 2023.
Further insight is offered in chapters devoted to composers' perspectives, including Palestinian Arab creativity, composing in a time of war, and the inspiration of the Bible. For the scholar, performer, and music lover interested in exploring new repertoire, as well as for students of Jewish and Middle Eastern culture, the volume provides an authoritative and thought-provoking account of Israeli music in its varied guises, enhancing appreciation of the aesthetic quality and significance of a still-evolving, thriving musical culture.
Maritime Misadventures in Early Modern Southeast Asia
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An analysis of the misadventures which befell British, Danish and Portuguese merchant mariners in Southeast Asia between 1790 and 1820, a time when British trade and imperialism were expanding.
This study describes and analyses the misadventures which befell British, Danish and Portuguese 'country traders', that is, merchant mariners who operated independently of but with the approval of the English East India Company, in Southeast Asia between 1790 and 1820, a time when British trade and imperialism were expanding. It is based on hitherto un-utilised first-hand accounts by captains and crew members as given to authorities at the major port of Malacca. These accounts, required by insurance companies, were a statement of the events which had occurred and a declaration by the declarant of non-culpability. The misadventures ranged from typhoons, groundings and piracy to fire, mutiny and collisions with other vessels.
The work places the misadventures in the context of the contemporary knowledge of navigation of the area's seas, current awareness of the local climatic conditions, the local indigenous societies and the contemporary European rivalry between the imperial powers. The analysis of the reporting is seen against the background of local administrative arrangements in Dutch-ruled Malacca, whereby the British, in control from 1795-1818, nevertheless maintained the continuity of Dutch procedures and Dutch personnel. Overall, the book provides rich information about everyday life in the eastern seas in the period.
ALT 43: Afrifuturism
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This issue of ALT provides content narratives, critical frames and theoretical constructs to read and critique writings in the emerging genre of Afrifuturism.
In contrast to Afrofuturism, which explores the intersection of primarily Diaspora Black culture with Western technology and hence perpetuates, to some extent, a colonial mindset, Afrifuturism looks to imagine an African and global Black future beyond industrial, technological and capitalist terms, one rooted in African cosmologies and history. Contributions in this issue seek to interrogate, contest, and reformulate some aspects of its convention by suggesting alternate frames, shifts in focus, changing perspectives of history and points of view, new narrative methods, new epistemological structures, thematic concepts and pedagogical praxis that offer new ways of defining the African and for imagining alternative futures for African peoples. Together, they shed further light on the complexities of Afrifuturism and offers alternative models for thinking about the past and the future of African people, with important implications for diaspora and postcolonial literature.
Alfonso X, the Dream of Empire, and (Re)Writing History in the Estoria de Espanna
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Why did Alfonso X of Castile-Leon-Galicia relentlessly pursue his claims to the imperial thrones of the Holy Roman Empire and the Iberian 'empire', despite the high costs and probability of failure?
This book examines how the concept of imperium shapes the structure and ideology of the Estoria de España, the first major history of Spain in the vernacular, written under Alfonso's patronage. Through a detailed analysis of its Roman section, it explores how Alfonso's scriptorium translated, adapted, and expanded sources to bolster his imperial claim. More than a chronicle, the Estoria served as propaganda, reinforcing Alfonso's legitimacy by challenging papal authority in imperial elections and appealing to both the Castilian-Leonese nobility-whose financial support was crucial-and other Iberian monarchs.
Alfonso's imperial vision drew not only on the Imperium Hispanicum of his father, Fernando III, but also on his Staufen lineage through his mother, Beatriz of Swabia, whose ties to the Holy Roman Empire likely influenced the historiographical models of the Estoria. By blending Iberian and European traditions, Alfonso positioned Castile as heir to both the Roman and Hohenstaufen legacies, setting a new standard for Iberian historiography that endured for centuries.
Jiny Lan and the Art of Subversion
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Examines the career and message paintings of the feminist conceptual artist Jiny Lan, analyzing a cross-section of works that invite literary, historical, socio-political and transcultural interpretations.
Jiny Lan is an avant-garde Chinese artist based in Germany. A founding member of the feminist art collective "Bald Girls," she infuses astute, politically charged, and iconoclastic criticism into her conceptual and visual art. Jiny Lan and the Art of Subversion provides a hermeneutic and critical analysis of Lan's idiosyncratic, provocative, and ingenious artwork. "Subversion" refers not only to her political and cultural subversiveness but also to her iterative technique of reproduction and repainting, which she uses to create a series of genealogically related "sub-versions" of her own paintings.
As an émigré and immigrant artist, Lan is profoundly influenced by both eastern and western cultures and traditions. Her immersive experience and extensive knowledge of two contrasting national histories, cultures, and political systems endows her with a unique intersectional positionality. Her artwork is at once figurative and abstract, realistic and fantastic, chaotic and logical, appropriative and creative. It interrogates serious issues such as censorship, authoritarianism, democracy, human rights, sexism, racism, war, migration, and Covid-19, but in a dynamic and often humorous manner. This book lays a foundation for evaluating Lan as an artist whose work invites discussions about portraiture, power, temporality, space, corporality, and sex.
This book is available as Open Access under the Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND.
The Grand Tour of Prince George of Denmark in England, 1669
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This annotated diary describes the politics, cultural richness and practicalities of elite educational travel in England during the early reign of Charles II.
Prince George of Denmark is best known to Anglophone historiography for having married Queen Anne of Great Britain, in 1683. This critical edition of the diary detailing the Prince's Grand Tour in England, which took place in the summer of 1669, sheds light on the critical complexity of George's role within Stuart political history, a role that commenced during his youthful, incognito travels. The Grand Tour was an important rite of passage introducing young princes to the European political stage, and the ongoing political, ceremonial and multilingual exchanges characterising Baroque diplomacy.
From his base in York House, London, Prince George's itinerary ranged from Canterbury Cathedral, to the fleet at Chatham to Whitehall Palace, from Hampton Court to Windsor Castle, from the Tower of London to the Pall Mall laboratory of Robert Boyle, from the Tradescant Museum to the University of Oxford. The diary describes these experiences in astonishing detail.
This edition puts England on the map as a Grand Tour destination, and shows how the Restoration court acted as an important hub for a host of seventeenth-century European princelings undertaking all-important educational travel.
The edition is enhanced and contextualised by hitherto unpublished archival sources, including the Tour's financial accounts.
Careers and Crises in the Age of Charles I
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Examines a selection of Charles I's people, exploring their aspirations and discontents, their engagement with kindred and colleagues, and central authority, in an age they recognized as 'troubled'.
This book examines the lives and circumstances of a variety of English men and women in the decades before the English Civil War, and follows some of them to the Restoration. It introduces a selection of Charles I's people, some of them previously undocumented, and explores their aspirations and discontents, their engagement with their kindred, their colleagues and central authority. These were members of the clerical, professional and commercial classes or from the minor gentry and aristocratic fringe - the backbone of the political nation - engaged, in various ways, with military, governmental, ecclesiastical or commercial affairs.
Most feature little in previous historical studies, but key moments in their lives are reconstructed here from scattered references or rare collections. They are shown negotiating the shoals of ambition and opportunity, kinship and patronage, religious anxiety and personal distress, in an age they recognized as 'troubled'. Preoccupied by their own careers and comforts, and driven by personal anxieties and ambitions, Charles I's subjects coped with the pressures of public occurrences and the business of church and state. In that regard they shared some stresses with our own age, though theirs eventuated in civil war and revolution.
Forests and the Power of Marginalised People in Southern Africa
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Decades after independence and the end of apartheid, why have forest communities in Zimbabwe and South Africa not been able to recover the land and resource rights they lost under colonialism?
This book explores the politics of conservation in southern Africa through the lens of chronic liminality, a 'state of in-betweenness' or 'waiting', to explain the status quo in local people-state forest relationships and why progress has been so slow. Using the Dwesa-Cwebe Nature Reserve, the Gwayi Forest and Mafungabusi Forest as cases studies, it examines the consequences on people living in and around protected areas of neoliberal approaches to conservation and of the legacy of colonial property relations.
The book asks why local communities have not engaged in collective or rebellious action against the government and how they have instead found themselves in a liminal position, caught between waiting for conditions to change and advancing their rights through collective action. It also asks why states have likewise pursued a politics of liminality and continue to prevaricate about whether to restore local rights or maintain the status quo around forest reserves. Overall, the book advances scholarship around conservation in Africa and other postcolonial regions by providing a different perspective on the continued marginalisation of local people and arguing for a need to rethink forest ownership and management.
Published in association with the Collaborative Research Centre FUTURE RURAL AFRICA, funded by the German Research Council (DFG).
Vox Clamantis by John Gower: "The Voice of One Crying"
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The first English translation into verse of the full Vox Clamantis, with explanatory notes.
John Gower's Vox Clamantis is one of the major poetic achievements of the Middle Ages. Its subject matter ranges from his dream-vision account of the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 to sharp critiques of the clergy, merchants, and lawyers, all with the intention of teaching the lessons of the past as a guide to the present. In Gower's view, everything that is and happens must be read and interpreted for the guidance God provides: history, Scripture and nature are replete with auguries sent by God to guide rulers if they but learn to read them. Ultimately for Gower, rulers - and we ourselves - are responsible for our own choices, for good or ill.
This line-by-line translation from the original Latin into Modern English is intended for a wide audience, and to be easily readable by scholars and non-scholars alike. It replicates Gower's Latin meter as closely as possible in English, uses straightforward language, and clarifies many difficult points of medieval legal theory, Classical allusion, and theological interpretation heretofore left unexplained in any previous attempts, full or partial, to translate the poem. Extensive notes trace Gower's sources, from Ovid to Peter Riga's Aurora to Alexander Nequam's De Naturis rerum to Nigel Wireker's Speculum Stultorum and the Bible, among many others. Classical and Biblical allusions are identified and fully but succinctly explained. This book also includes the "Letter to Arundel", translated in verse for the first time.
Sir Tristrem
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A vibrant revival of a neglected witty and daring medieval gem, and a foundational work for English romance and translation studies. Essential reading for students of medieval literature and manuscript culture.
In the late thirteenth century, as English began to assert itself against Anglo-Norman and French literary traditions, Sir Tristrem emerged as one of the earliest and most inventive Middle English romances. Uniquely preserved in the Auchinleck Manuscript, this poem reimagines the Tristan legend with a bold comic tone, distinctive stanza form, and a sharp awareness of its audience's expectations. Both a translation and a transformation of Thomas of Britain's Tristran (c.1170), it stands alongside the more courtly German and Norwegian retellings by Gottfried von Strassburg and Brother Robert of Norway-yet diverges from both in its brevity, tonal shifts, and performative agility.
This edition pairs a lively modern English verse translation with the complete Middle English text-offering, for the first time, a dual-language format that remains sensitive to the poem's performance-driven origins. The accompanying study reconsiders Sir Tristrem not only as literature, but as a document of transmission: oral, scribal, and manuscript. It explores its triangulated relationship with other Tristan traditions, its place within a manuscript collection of romances shaped by translation, and the formal innovations through which it reshapes a familiar narrative.
Resisting the reductive labels of its critical past, Sir Tristrem, as presented here, reclaims its role as a serious, playful, and quintessentially English contribution to medieval narrative tradition.
Bad Poetry? New Perspectives on the Value of Sixteenth-Century Literature
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An examination of the messy, often contradictory processes of poetic production and reception. The volume offers an invitation to read widely, question deeply and think critically.
In the wake of C. S. Lewis's still-contested taxonomy of 'drab' and 'golden' poetic ages, this volume rethinks the critical and aesthetic stakes of bad poetry in early modern England-not to dismiss it, but to ask what it meant, how it functioned, and why it mattered.
Revisiting poets like Arthur Gorges, Walter Ralegh, Thomas Lodge, and Thomas Churchyard, contributors interrogate the literary marketplace, aesthetic judgment, and evolving generic conventions between 1520 and 1609. Through close readings of works by Spenser, Shakespeare, Skelton, and others-alongside notorious outliers like Richard Stanyhurst-the collection considers poetic failure as both historical artifact and interpretive opportunity. From the clumsy excess of hexameters to the ideological weight of neo-Latin verse, from scribal emendations of Mother Hubberds Tale to the uncertain metrical charge of the lengthy fourteener, these essays reveal how poets and readers alike navigated shifting ideas of taste, style, and literary value.
Grounded in close reading, textual scholarship, and formal analysis, this collection offers a model of sustained, comparative literary criticism that is both theoretically engaged and deeply historicised. It foregrounds the interpretive value of stylistic awkwardness and aesthetic resistance while charting the long afterlives of poetic judgment from Lewis to the present.
Debating Enlightenment
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A bold reappraisal of Enlightenment legacies this volume uncovers the fractured, global, and contested nature of modern Europe's most influential intellectual transformation.
Emerging from the intellectual upheavals of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Enlightenment has long served as both a foundational moment and a battleground for narratives of Western modernity. Once anchored in the writings of Spinoza, Kant, Diderot, and D'Alembert, its genealogy is now understood to stretch from the rhetorical afterlives of Renaissance humanism and the polemics of the Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes, through the religious pluralism of the Dutch Republic and the confessional fractures of the Holy Roman Empire, to the text-critical methods of orthodox theologians and the radical secularism of the philosophes.
This volume rethinks the Enlightenment as a dynamic espace de débat-a field of contested meanings shaped by transnational circulation, institutional conflict, and historiographical reinvention. Drawing on debates around the "Enlightenment project", "radical" and "religious" Enlightenment, and the tensions between cosmopolitan ideals and national traditions, it engages with the works of Jonathan Israel, Dan Edelstein, and Jeffrey Burson, amongst others, to explore longue durée patterns of intellectual exchange and secularisation.
Rich in case studies from Paris, London, Amsterdam, Leipzig, and beyond, the collection speaks directly to those navigating the plural legacies of Enlightenment historiography in an era increasingly shaped by digital tools, global frameworks, and postcolonial critique.
British Naval Prize Law in the Seven Years' War
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Examines in detail the full legal process of prize law from capture of the prize to payment of the prize money.
Naval historians are well aware that prize money was a huge incentive for British naval officers and sailors during the eighteenth century and much has been written about prize taking and the associated fighting. What is much less known about are the processes which then followed, the legal process which confirmed that the prize was lawful, or otherwise, the valuation and sale of the prize, the allocation and distribution of the prize money.
Based on extensive original research and including detailed case studies this book takes the reader through the full process from capture to payment. It outlines prize law, explores the role of prize agents, and discusses how the courts worked when considering prize cases. It covers appeals, examines how some naval officers gained great wealth through prize taking with others being much less successful, and highlights how particular individuals influenced the process. Throughout the reader follows the stories of individual captains and their struggles and triumphs in the prize law process.
Anglo-Norman Studies XLVII
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"A series which is a model of its kind": Edmund King
The articles collected here demonstrate the range and vitality of current work on the Anglo-Norman period. Writers and writing form an important strand, with analyses of the work and contribution of Peter the Deacon; the portrayal of Harold and Tostig Godwinson and William the Conqueror in Old Norse sagas; the forging of charters in the twelfth century; the production of charters in Oxfordshire in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; and what the career of Baldwin of Bury St Edmunds tells us about the production of diplomas during the reign of Edward the Confessor. The volume also includes articles on the relationship between Bishop Odo of Bayeux and Abbot Scolland of St Augustine's Canterbury; the rise and fall of Old Sarum as a centre of Anglo-Norman power; Archbishop Lanfranc of Canterbury, Pope Clement III and the papal crisis of 1088; the career of Eudo Dapifer and his foundation of St John's abbey in Colchester; the Augustinians in Britain and Normandy c. 1100-c. 1215; and the activities of papal judges-delegate during the reign of King Stephen.
Count Petöfy
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First English translation of an unjustly overlooked novel by the great German realist novelist Theodor Fontane.
Set in Austria and Hungary in the 1870s, this novel is the story of Count Adam Petöfy, a lifelong bachelor, who at age seventy, unexpectedly proposes marriage to a young actress, Franziska Franz. He explains that he is only looking for companionship and affectionate regard - apart from this, he will give Franziska carte blanche. Despite their differences of age, class, and background, they marry. Adam takes Franziska, now Countess Petöfy, from Vienna to his family's ancestral estates in the Hungarian countryside. Here they begin their new life: a life of ease and privilege - but later, of struggles which neither has anticipated.
Count Petöfy has been a neglected book, even in Germany, and has been overshadowed by Fontane's celebrated "Berlin" novels, such as Effi Briest. This first-ever English translation will allow a wider audience to read and study Count Petöfy for its exploration of missteps and the limits of self-realization, of questions of gender and social convention, of honour and duty; and for a narrative craft that reveals and conceals at the same time. The translation is bookended by contributions from two noted Fontane scholars: a contextualizing introduction by Brian Tucker, who has written on Count Petöfy before, and an afterword by Helen Chambers on the novel's relationship to the novelist's other works.
The early journals of Hensley Henson: Birkenhead and All Souls 1885-1887
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One of the most outstanding diarists in modern Britain, the leading churchman and public figure Herbert Hensley Henson (1863-1947) commenced his Journal in Birkenhead in 1885, while tutoring the indolent son of William Rathbone, a Liverpool shipping magnate. This extensively annotated edition publishes the first four volumes in full. It covers his experiences in a ship-building town hit hard by the industrial depression of the mid-1880s, and mired in religious sectarianism; his return to All Souls College, Oxford, and establishment of the Oxford Laymen's League for the defence of the Church, while agonising over whether he should become ordained; and his work at the Oxford House, the Anglican settlement in Bethnal Green, in combatting the influence of secularism. The value of the Journal from its earliest volumes is evident in its incisive commentary on people, places, and events, its searching reflections on Christianity and the authority of the Church, and in its fine literary style.
The Reception of Latin Medicine in Early Medieval England
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Uses Old English medical texts - ranging from recipe collections and illustrated herbals to the therapeutics of ancient authorities - to reconstruct the diffusion and reception of Classical medical knowledge in early medieval England.
Direct evidence for the earlier Latin sources and transmission of early medieval medical texts in England is sorely lacking - which has led to scholarly neglect. This is a gap this book addresses, via a close examination of the Old English medical corpus, including the Lacnunga and Bald's Leechbook, to shed light on the diffusion and reception of this knowledge. It considers exactly which Latin medical texts were used in the compilation of the Old English versions, showing that they were, in many cases, translations of Greek medical texts. From this, it argues that the Old English corpus as a whole was a creative endeavor to synthesize the best medical knowledge available at the time, from the various Latin works of Soranus of Ephesus to the sixth- or seventh-century Latin traditions of Galen of Pergamum, Oribasius of Pergamum and Alexander of Tralles. Covering over eight centuries of the textual tradition of medicine, it demonstrates that the dissemination of medical knowledge in pre-Conquest England was far wider than previously believed.
European Migrants in Eighteenth Century Ireland
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A study of an unexpected large-scale migration, of the many issues it gave rise to, and of its aftermath.
Although Ireland is usually thought of as a place from which people emigrate, there was in the early eighteenth century a significant immigration to Ireland of 'poor Palatines' from southwestern states of the Holy Roman Empire. This book explores this mass immigration and the related issues. It outlines what caused the sudden movement of so many people in one six-month period - successive wars, widespread devastation, famine and the notably cold winter of 1708/09. It discusses the role of pan European Protestantism, with churchmen working alongside colonists and shows how the migration was a Whig initiative, supported by a major public relations exercise in which leading literary figures participated.
It situates the migration within the migration of poor Palatines more widely in Britain and Britain's American colonies and examines the subsequent evolution of the Palatine community as they struggled with problems of identity and worked to settle and integrate, in some cases making significant contributions to Irish life. Throughout, the book highlights the debates, familiar at present, as to whether migrants were potential contributors to the wealth of a nation, or simply a likely drain on a nation's resources.
Meditation, Invention, and Designing Thought in the Augustinian Middle Ages
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A fresh perspective on how early scholars perceived the cosmos and the nature of knowledge through a tour-de-force study of the central role geometry played in medieval creativity.
Geometry, rhetoric and creativity were intricately linked in medieval thought. Early thinkers integrated mathematical and linguistic frameworks in their attempts to understand both divine and human creation with geometry providing the means through which these scholars tackled everything from theological speculation to the medieval art of "Invention".
Through detailed explorations of the works of figures such as Augustine, Calcidius and Cassiodorus, this book reveals how medieval thinkers conceptualized beginnings-not as fixed points but as unfolding processes with metaphors of weaving, mapping and journeying reflecting how these scholars navigated the act of creation, whether that terrestrial or cosmological.
Engaging with philosophy, theology and intellectual history, this work offers fresh insights into how medieval minds reconciled the limits of human understanding with the vast complexity of the universe. In doing so, it challenges modern assumptions about the separation of mathematical and linguistic thinking, demonstrating the dynamic, process-oriented nature of medieval ideas about the mind and the procedures of thinking.
Christian Faith and Namibian Liberation
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Illuminates how Christian communities shaped the trajectory of one nation's liberation struggle through the life of Namibian refugee pastor, Salatiel Ailonga.
Born at a Finnish mission station in South West Africa (SWA), Salatiel Ailonga was part of a generation of contract labourers who first imagined themselves as belonging to a multi-ethnic Namibian nation and who played a central role in liberating it from apartheid South African rule. This book examines the interplay between Christian missionary work and anti-colonial nationalism through Ailonga's life, in the context of Southern Africa's liberation wars and exile experiences during the late twentieth century - a period that united an international community across the Cold War divide and shaped the future of an African region.
Ailonga joined the South West African People's Organisation (SWAPO) in 1960, and in 1974 he became the first chaplain affiliated with a Southern African liberation movement in exile. When, amidst SWAPO internal conflict, he and his Finnish missionary wife were deported from Zambia to Finland, he sought to free Namibians detained in the frontline states and became part of a SWAPO dissident community. In 1990, just after Namibian independence, the Ailongas repatriated to Namibia, where conflicts and rumours from exile followed him home; competing memories of his life have reverberated ever since, outliving his death in 2015.
Highlighting the way in which Christian communities have sought to shape the trajectory of African nationalism, the book casts light on the interplay between religion and politics and the role of religion in conflict and peace-building processes in Africa.
The French Conquest of the Canary Islands, 1402-1405 (Le Canarien)
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A translation of two rival accounts of an expedition that deteriorated into friction and feuding, offering an unusually intimate view of chivalry and conquest at the close of the Middle Ages.
Le Canarien tells the gripping story of a French expedition that conquered three of the Canary Islands between 1402 and 1405. It is the only surviving written account of this pivotal moment in the history of the archipelago. The European invaders successfully employed strategies that would become the template for the colonization of the New World. The islanders were overwhelmed by the devastating military superiority of the invaders who killed countless people and sold many others into slavery, before beginning the process of colonization.
Le Canarien was written by two chaplains who took part in the expedition and celebrated it as a grand chivalric and crusading enterprise to convert the indigenous peoples of Lanzarote, Fuerteventura and El Hierro to Christianity. Their mission was led by two French noblemen, Jean IV de Béthencourt and Gadifer de La Salle, who fell out disastrously with one another during its course. As a result, there are two rival versions of the story: one bitterly accuses Béthencourt of treachery, whilst the other expresses surprise and incomprehension at Gadifer's allegations. This book presents translations of each of these versions of Le Canarien that reveal the dark truths hidden behind the façade of chivalry and open a fascinating window into late medieval views on crusading, conversion and conquest.
Kent and Europe, 1450-1640
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An in-depth overview of Kent's economy, society and politics, and their relationship with Kent's environs over two centuries.
Kent is surrounded by water on three sides, close to both the European continent and London: geography that has influenced those who have lived there in countless ways. This book explores their history in this setting from the mid-fifteenth to mid-seventeenth centuries, emphasising Kent's deep connection with Europe. Its chapters, which draw on a wide range of local and national sources, primarily centre on maritime affairs, reflecting the historical and ongoing significance of the sea to the region's inhabitants. These include a bold new description of Kent at the end of the Middle Ages and a reconstruction of the county's early modern maritime trade, including its merchants, both native and foreign, the commodities traded, as well as the impact of migration. An in-depth study also provides quantitative analyses of shipping and of the lives and careers of the shipboard community.
Furthermore, there is a detailed examination of the military community of Kent, with a particular focus on the county's coastal fortifications and a chapter on predatory maritime activities in adjacent waters. Overall, the book puts forward the findings of deep research that connects Kent's economy, society and politics with its environs over a long period. As such, it exemplifies how future county studies might be composed.
Cotton Mather’s Curiosa Americana, Scientific Letters to the Royal Society
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An abundantly rich and vivid resource for anyone interested in the flora, fauna, medicine and scientific knowledge in early colonial America.
At the crossroads of faith and science, Cotton Mather-Puritan minister, political figure and fellow of the Royal Society-pursued a rigorous inquiry into the natural world. Between 1712 and 1724, he sent over 80 letters to the Royal Society, engaging with the same intellectual network as luminaries such as Isaac Newton, Edmond Halley and Robert Boyle. His Curiosa Americana letters document New England's flora and fauna, unusual meteorological events, medical advancements and transatlantic scientific discourse, revealing Mather as a pivotal figure in the early Enlightenment, deeply engaged in the era's defining debates.
This volume presents the first complete, scholarly edition of Curiosa Americana, offering transcriptions and annotations that illuminate Mather's contributions to natural philosophy. His observations-ranging from smallpox inoculation and germ theory to "monstrous" births and marine volcanoes-capture the dynamic interplay between science, religion and colonial identity. Accompanied by a substantial introduction, the collection situates Mather within the broader networks of the early modern Republic of Letters, challenging long-held assumptions about the intellectual landscape of colonial America. Essential reading for scholars of early modern science, intellectual history, and Atlantic studies, this work restores Mather's letters to their rightful place in the history of transatlantic knowledge production.
Vikings in Early Medieval Ireland
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Illuminates the dynamics of church raiding by Vikings in Ireland, relating this phenomenon to their wider objectives and political ambitions.
This book offers the first comprehensive investigation of Viking raids on Irish churches from the late eighth to the early eleventh century, drawing on a wide range of sources, including Irish legal and literary material, archaeological and historical evidence and English and Frankish chronicles. Through a rigorous quantitative analysis of annalistic evidence, it sheds light on all aspects of this phenomenon: its chronological development, geographical distribution, immediate purpose and the broader context of Viking engagement with Gaelic Irish royal polities. Challenging the view that such raiding was merely a precursor to settlement and trade, it demonstrates that these attacks remained intrinsic to Viking activities throughout this period; it argues in particular that human captives-rather than metalwork or bullion-constituted the primary objective of church raids, with many held for ransom or sold into slavery. By tracing the evolution of random raids to strategically motivated attacks, it establishes church raiding as a deliberate instrument of political strategy, until the Battle of Clontarf (1014) marked a turning point in Viking-Irish relations.
The Piano in Beethoven’s Chamber Music
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Donat's vast expertise provides unique insight into the history and genesis of key works in the chamber music repertoire.
This is the first full-length study in English of an important area of Beethoven's output that has seldom been explored in detail. The principal compositions covered are the violin sonatas, cello sonatas and piano trios of the composer's maturity, ranging chronologically from the three piano trios op.1, to the two cello sonatas op.102 which stand on the threshold of his last period. The repertoire includes some of Beethoven's most famous chamber pieces, among them the 'Spring' and 'Kreutzer' violin sonatas, and the 'Ghost' and 'Archduke' piano trios.
The works are analysed in detail with the help of copious music examples, and are placed in their historical context through extracts from letters and contemporary reviews. The book provides performers, music students and music lovers with an insight into the history and genesis of some of the greatest works in the chamber music repertoire.
Criminal Justice and Peace-making in Early Modern Italy
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An exceptional study of private peace pacts in early modern Italy that challenges earlier notions of the place of these private agreements in the development of the courts and state.
Private settlements were among the most prominent yet least conspicuous aspects of justice in early modern Europe. Traditionally seen as incompatible with our notions of judicial modernity, these settlements reflected a deeply ingrained culture of negotiation and transaction-one that often viewed resolution by litigation with extreme scepticism. However, rather than existing in opposition to sovereign justice, this practice of private settlement coexisted with the implacable authority of rulers who alternated between exemplary punishments and royal pardons to maintain social harmony.
In this English translation of his seminal study, Governare l'odio. Pace e giustizia criminale nell'Italia moderna (secoli XVI-XVII), Paolo Broggio shows how private settlements were far from being a purely benevolent mechanism of reconciliation, often carrying unsettling similarities to institutional coercion and even acts of revenge. Judicial authorities are revealed as not only tolerating these private agreements but shown to have actively facilitated and manipulated them as a means of exerting their control within a community. Religious justifications further lent these agreements a veneer of moral obligation, masking the underlying pressures at play. Through detailed examples such as proceedings in the Papal States, Broggio explores how courts encouraged settlements not only to manage caseloads but to also reinforce existing social hierarchies and power structures.
This expansive study re-examines the role of peace settlements in early modern justice, revealing them as a fundamental yet coercive tool of governance rather than a simple, private, alternative to judicial authority.
A Companion to Early Iberian Traditional Lyrics
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Accessible and reliable introduction in English to the earliest vernacular lyric poetry in the Iberian Peninsula.
Dating to the tenth century, the earliest vernacular lyric poems in the Iberian Peninsula have been seen as evidence of an even older, oral, folk tradition and attest to the multicultural, multilingual nature of the genre from its very beginning. Primarily preserved in manuscript and printed songbooks, these poems were widely diffused across the Hispanic world.
This Companion offers an accessible, reliable introduction in English to early Iberian traditional lyrics from a comparative and interdisciplinary perspective, paying special attention to their multicultural origins and their complex nature as both oral and written compositions. The opening chapters discuss the importance of understanding this dual essence in studying traditional lyrics today, provide an outline of their structure and formal features, and offer a contemporary overview of the field. The volume then examines the kharjas, the cantigas de amigo, and the tradition of Catalan lyricism before turning to a comparison of popular lyrics with the poetry of the cancioneros and romanceros and the preservation of the tradition in Sephardic ballads. The final chapters examine the survival of popular lyrics into the modern era and explore a new means of interpreting these poems through musical archaeology and musicological studies.
Coming of Age Celebrations on Welsh Landed Estates
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The first comprehensive study of gentry coming of age celebrations, offering insights into the social and cultural dynamics of estate communities in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Wales.
"Coming of age" celebrations were landmark events in the annals of gentry families and for local society, marking the occasion when the heir or heiress to an estate attained their majority at the age of twenty-one, with an assumption that they would eventually inherit the land together with all the privileges and responsibilities attached to its proprietorship. Hundreds of these lively dynastic occasions were celebrated in Wales from the late eighteenth through the "long" nineteenth century, involving masses of participants in an array of public festivities; they provide fascinating evidence for understanding the social and cultural dynamics of estate communities in a rapidly changing environment.
This book provides the first comprehensive study of these events, examining their development, purpose and significance. It considers the role that gentry and aristocracy played in their communities, why landed estates were an integral part of Welsh society, and how they contributed to the character and experience of place, landscape and landowner-tenant relations. Overall, it offers a reassessment of still-prevalent interpretations of an anglicised, alien and absentee landowning elite bearing no connection with or consideration for Welsh communities, culture and consciousness in the two centuries prior to the mass sale and breakup of their country houses and estates in the early-mid twentieth century.
Constructing the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles
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Offers insights into sources and inspirations, authorship and authorial style, and patterns of separation and convergence across versions of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles.
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is one of the most important documents to survive from early medieval England. Written in Old English, it was first created during the reign of King Alfred the Great (871-899). Up to Alfred's reign, and then in multiple continuations extending into the twelfth century, the Chronicle versions often provide a unique record of events, at times reported in the barest style, at others with passionate commentary.
This book is the first to tell the story of how the Chronicles came to be, providing a clear but detailed account of the development of its various versions. It starts with an examination of the textual and manuscript evidence, then explores the work of the two chroniclers first responsible for the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle's creation in the late ninth century, arguing that the first made a set of annals from disparate sources. The author then contends that a later reviser aligned with the Alfredian political programme wrote the annals for Alfred's reign, and at the same time also revised earlier entries, including the famous story of Cynewulf and Cyneheard. This book also sheds new light on the annals of Æthelred the Unready, arguing that Archbishop Wulfstan of York is likely to have authored some of these, together with some tenth-century annals. Its final chapter provides the first comprehensive study of all the Chronicles' poetry.
Classical Myth in Medieval Ireland
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Explores medieval Irish interest in Classical mythology and historiography and how it could be situated within the framework of Christian salvation history.
From allusions to the Olympians in seventh-century glosses to twelfth- and thirteenth-century vernacular adaptations of the epics of Vergil, Lucan, and Statius, Irish authors creatively re-imagined Greco-Roman mythology throughout the Middle Ages. They developed many strategies for situating the Classical deities within medieval Christian historiography, but rarely did they downplay or eliminate them. Some of these strategies, as this study reveals, reflected wider medieval European trends in Classical reception and mythography, whilst others were strikingly original and paralleled the ways in which Irish authors imagined the supernatural beings of their own pre-Christian past.
This book examines why Irish authors were interested in the history and mythology of the ancient Mediterranean, and how Classical polytheism influenced their ideas about their own pagan past. It explores the ways in which depictions of Irish Otherworldly characters both shaped and were shaped by the gods and supernatural figures of the Classical adaptations. Based on close readings of texts such as the Irish version of Lucan, In Cath Catharda, this book argues that Classical scholarship in medieval Ireland was closely tied to medieval ideas about salvation history. Ultimately, it concludes that medieval Irish authors and audiences applied the same interpretive tools used for biblical exegesis to characters and events from Greco-Roman mythology, history, and literature, and to the supernatural inhabitants of pre-Christian Ireland alike.
Boundaries, Space and Register in Beethoven’s Piano Music
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Develops a new theory of space and register which will be essential reading for the music analyst, while offering radical new interpretations of canonical repertoire for the pianist, Beethoven scholar and informed listener.
This is the first book to demonstrate the significance of registral structure and spatial narrative in Beethoven's oeuvre across his stylistic evolution. Introducing a far-reaching new analytical method and theoretical framework to a substantial corpus of piano music including sonatas, variations and bagatelles, the book extends conventional notions of register, Beethoven's handling of the highs and lows of pitch, to the broader concepts of pitch boundaries and the shaping of sonic space. Tracing theories of register from Schenker to the present-day, Miller moves beyond these approaches in his discussions of what he terms "spatial analysis". Proceeding from simple to more complex forms in a broadly chronological sequence, the author describes 'spatial narratives' of each work by means of cutting-edge computational diagrams and close-to-the text commentary.
This book shows how linear patterns at extreme boundaries correlate with structural highpoints and divisions within musical forms, for instance sonata structures, forming striking large-scale connections within, and between, individual movements. Analysed are interactions of high and low boundaries through gestures such as registral bridges, registral shifts, and the distribution of climatic peaks and wide-spans. Equally central to Miller's study is the survey of keyboard instruments of Beethoven's day, keyboard choreography, and spatial expansion and contraction, reflecting pianistic virtuosity and expression. The mediation of structural and expressive aspects culminates in the physicality and spirituality of the late works interpreted with metaphorical symbolism.
Affective Authority: Passions, Morality and Governance in Early Modern England
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Throws new light on the history of emotions, as well as on cultural norms and elite governance in early modern English society.
This book investigates the intimate connection between emotion and morality in the landed ranks in England from 1580 to 1700, reintegrating the artificially separated spheres of emotions and ethics. It argues that, long before the "modern" eighteenth century, emotions lay at the core of early modern ethics: virtues and passions were fused and affect underpinned authority. Passions, affections, and ethics were intertwined and must be understood together: feelings enabled and constituted ethical conduct and were often mandated obligations, while cultural norms were based on affective concepts. Through a detailed analysis of four key affective values - love, gratitude, repentance and obedience - the book throws new light on the history of emotions, as well as on cultural norms and elite governance in early modern English society. The book merges social, cultural and intellectual history. It explores how ideals and concepts were practiced in daily life, emphasizes the importance of the domestic, familial world for the understanding and exercise of public authority and governance, and insists on the centrality of the passions and affections to early modern morality. It contributes to the history of emotions by reconnecting affect and ethics, advances the history of English society by showing how authority was based on affect, thus demonstrating the relevance of emotion to larger historical issues.
The Painted Histories of the Welles-Ros Bible (Paris, BnF Fr.1)
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A lavishly illustrated study of the Welles-Ros Bible, exploring its provenance, ownership, design and production.
At some point between c.1366 and 1373, the noblewoman Maud de Ros, widow of the Lincolnshire baron John de Welles, commissioned what is now the earliest surviving entire translated Bible from England. The Welles-Ros Bible contains the most complete edition of the Anglo-Norman Bible - a close, often literal translation of the Vulgate into insular French - as well as 82 narrative, highly personalized illustrations.
As this first long-form study of the manuscript argues, Maud commissioned the Bible to serve as a mirror, guide, family archive, dynastic chronicle, and source of spiritual instruction and consolation for her youthful son, John, 5th Baron Welles (1352-1421). Moreover, Maud played a key role in the production of the text edition and the design of many of the images. This book analyzes the manuscript, its text, and its vivid illuminations in the context of rich traditions of medieval biblical translation, production, and illustration, offering fresh insights into the roles of images in shaping and mediating scripture and religious experience. Adding to our understandings of life among the lower nobility in later fourteenth-century England, this cultural history of a major artefact also expands our picture of the cultural patronage and creative agency of laywomen, as well as medieval strategies of memorialization, responses to the Plague, and ideas about gender, identity, sexuality and the emotions.
Foes to Friends. Spain, the United States and the United Kingdom from the Civil War to the Cold War
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Was Franco's Spain really a pariah in the Anglosphere?
This book examines pro-Francoism and the significant influence of a "Spanish lobby" in shaping US and British policy towards Spain during the Second World War and the years leading up to the Pact of Madrid in 1953. This lobby included not only pressure groups but also legislators and members of the executive as well as the armed forces, who shared economic and strategic interests and ideological sympathies in the growing anti-Communist atmosphere of the First Cold War.
The first two chapters provide the historical background to this rapprochement, examining monetary and credit policies in the United States and Spain during the 1930s and 40s, focusing in particular on the key roles played by American financial and business sectors, including Chase National Bank, to further the clandestine economic activities of US state companies and agencies in Spain during the Second World War. The book then turns to the role of the Spanish lobby in post-war US-Spanish diplomatic relations, looking at American individuals directly courted by the Spanish embassy in Washington as well as pro-Francoist congressmen who favored a closer relationship with Spain. The next chapter moves from Washington and New York to the West Coast to analyze local Spanish consular efforts to 'normalize' Spain in the eyes of the United States. Finally, the book turns to British relations with Spain during and after the Second World War and shows how the government's dependency on the US led to Britain becoming the junior partner in the formulation of Western policy towards Franco.
The Crisis of the English Mind, 1650-1750
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Places the central intellectual and religious debates of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England in a refreshing transnational perspective.
Between 1650 and 1750 the intellectual and religious landscape of England underwent profound transformations, shaped by an unprecedented engagement with Dutch and French books and ideas. Works by Descartes, Grotius, Spinoza, Bayle and others introduced new modes of thought, prompting English thinkers to reimagine the relationship between scripture, reason, ethics and scholarship. These texts, circulating in Latin, French and English, challenged traditional authority and invited scholars to reconcile Christianity with history, philosophy and the emerging natural sciences.
Marco Barducci presents a detailed exploration of how these imported ideas catalysed key conceptual shifts. This book shows how scripture was read as a cultural artifact; metaphysics was disentangled from natural philosophy; the church's role was reframed to prioritize social cohesion; and human agency was increasingly viewed through a worldly lens. By viewing these changes as part of a transnational framework of writers, the book highlights how intellectual exchanges between England and the Continent shaped English responses to crises of faith, scholarship, and epistemology.
Combining intellectual and book history, this study not only reframes the notion of an "English Enlightenment" but also interrogates broader questions of secularization and modernity. It offers fresh insights into the interplay of ideas, books, and society, while examining how England adapted-and transformed - Continental thought.
The Making and Meaning of a Medieval Manuscript
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Develops a method for placing book-historical evidence in dialogue with literary meaning through a detailed investigation of a MS Bodley 851.
How do you read a medieval book? And what is the relationship between the study of manuscripts as material artifacts and the study of their textual contents? This book develops a method for placing book-historical evidence in dialogue with literary meaning. Medieval manuscripts do not simply witness the texts they contain: through the process of their making, they preserve and generate knowledge about literature itself.
Central to the expression of method in this study is a detailed investigation of an immensely complex composite manuscript, Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Bodley 851. This manuscript survives as an important representative of textual cultures popular in late-medieval England: it attests the work of at least eight scribal agents and contains an infamous scribal version of Piers Plowman (Z-text), the sole surviving copy of Walter Map's De nugis curialium, and an array of satirical Anglo-Latin poetry, including the Apocalypsis goliae episcopi, the Speculum stultorum, and the Bridlington Prophecy. Close attention to the production of Bodley 851 underpins critical examinations of fragmentary misogamy, the construction of literary sequences, and the extent of pseudonymous authorship in the manuscript record.
Conduct Literature and the Politics of the Stage Controversy
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Examines the struggle between factions debating the morality and impact on public behaviour of the theatre following the Glorious Revolution, and the political significance of public feeling around this controversy.
In 1698 the Jacobite clergyman Jeremy Collier published his famous pamphlet in which he attacked a number of prominent playwrights on the grounds that their work contained profanity, blasphemy and indecency, and therefore was undermining public morality. He called for the closure of the stage, and in so doing sparked vigorous public debates that lasted for three decades. This book investigates the relationship between this Stage Controversy and the period of political instability evident in Britain in the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution.
Instead of adopting the definition of the Stage Controversy as a pamphlet war and as a literary or moral event, Huang argues that in both pamphlets and plays, especially reform comedies, the discussions of conduct were employed to make political points. The book characterizes this controversy as a competition for public opinion and support, in which the stage controversialists sought to convince the audiences of the rightness of their interpretations of behaviour in drama. Contributing to debates about the nature of post-revolutionary political thinking and action, this work will be of great interest and use to scholars and students of the political, social and cultural history of late seventeenth-and early eighteenth-century England.
Samuel Bentham, Inspector General of Naval Works, 1796–1807, Letters and Papers
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Enlightened reformer or dangerous maverick? This book examines the controversies created by Samuel Bentham, who fought to enhance the performance of the British navy during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars.
Samuel Bentham, Inspector General of Naval Works, 1796-1807, built successful ships, advocated non-recoil gunnery and introduced steam powered machinery into the royal dockyards. The facilities he created at Portsmouth remain as a memorial to his ambition. As a technologist and ideologue, he straddled the 18th and 19th centuries and helped to create the steam navy. Yet, in virtually everything he did, he courted controversy, not least because he attacked vested interest and, like his elder brother, Jeremy, pursued the interest of the public by commitment to the Principle of Utility.
Trained in the royal yards as a shipwright, Bentham went to Russia in 1779 and entered the service of Catherine the Great and Prince Potemkin. There he fostered his talent for invention and innovation, developed the concept of the Panopticon and learned the value of individual responsibility. Having equipped the flotilla of small craft that fought and defeated the Turkish navy in the Black Sea, he returned to Britain in 1791 aged 34 and a Brigadier General.
Attached to the Admiralty from 1795, he aimed to enlarge the capacity and efficiency of the dockyards, as measured by the turn-around speed of ships refitting and undergoing minor repairs. He admired 'mill practice' and developed the Wood and Metal Mills at Portsmouth to demonstrate the ability of the navy to become as productive as private industry. To this end, he aimed to use contemporary science, logical thinking and education to enhance yard productivity. To this end, in 1800 he advanced a programme of administrative reform based on personal accountability, detailed accountancy and central cost control.
Bentham was supported by First Lords Spencer and St Vincent but he aggravated members of the Navy Board by the works he directed at Portsmouth and he aroused their apprehension by his obvious ambition and condemnation of board collective responsibility. In 1805 he was sent to Russia on a mission to build ships for Britain. While he was away, his Admiralty post was abolished and in 1808 he was obliged to accept the post of Civil Architect and Engineer at the Navy Board. In 1812 that post too was dissolved
Samuel Bentham was nevertheless a brilliant man of extraordinary capabilities, a polymath who planted modern ideas in the civil departments of the navy. A challenging character, he has been too little known. His friend, the Mechanist Simon Goodrich, advised him he was regarded as a 'strange creature' at the Navy Board. Yet in 1812 he left a record of Services which became a source of guidance during the post-war rationalisation. The Whig government of 1806 admired his ideas and, in conjunction with those of his brother, they continued to have influence in the nineteenth century when the Whigs returned to power.
Manorial Account Rolls and Rentals of Walsham Le Willows 1327 to 1559
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This fourth volume, featuring a good series of manorial accounts and rentals, complements the court roll material by painting a more textured picture of life in late-medieval Walsham.
The Suffolk Records Society has already published three volumes on Walsham Le Willows: 17, the Field Book of 1577 edited by Kenneth Dodd, and 41 and 45, the Court Rolls of 1303-1399, edited by Ray Lock. This fourth volume, featuring a good series of manorial accounts and rentals, complements the court roll material by painting a more textured picture of life in late-medieval Walsham through furnishing further details of its society and economy. These include documents from the small lay manor of High Hall, which was highly typical of medieval English lordships but hardly any sources have survived from such places. The accounts and rentals provide insights into Walsham's agricultural practices, including woodland management for the production of fuel, the balance of crops and livestock, the disposal of produce, the remuneration of workers, the consumption habits of harvest workers and local lords, and the role of women in the management of the manorial estate. There are insights into local tensions following the national political turmoil in the summer of 1450. Yet even these four volumes hardly scratch the surface of the surviving archive. In addition to the published fourteenth-century court rolls there is a long run of rolls from 1399 through to the early twentieth century and there are many more surveys and rentals from the early modern period. Indeed Walsham may reasonably claim to be one of the best documented places in England between 1300 and 1900.
The Isle of Man, 1405-1830 - Social and Economic History
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This is the first comprehensive modern account of the history of the Isle of Man, through the years between the establishment of the Stanley lordship early in the fifteenth century and the Revestment of 1830 by which the Island's lordship was returned to the English crown.
Focusing on social and economic aspects, it traces developments in society, economy, religion and the Island church, education and literacy, daily life, arts and culture, and landscape and the built environment. Generously illustrated, it explores demographic changes, charts the growth of trade, and surveys social and cultural change including the changing status of the Manx language. It discusses disputes over land ownership, considers improvements in agriculture and fishing, and examines the encouragement of industry. Throughout the book emphasises the distinctiveness of the Manx experience, connected to, but different from the history of England, and of Scotland and Ireland.
Storytelling in Gaelic from AD 700 to the Present
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Examines common themes and connections in Gaelic storytelling from the Middle Ages to present day.
From the great medieval saga Táin Bó Cúailnge to cautionary folk tales in contemporary Gaeltacht areas, storytelling has remained a cornerstone of Gaelic culture for over a thousand years. Pre-Christian motifs and ecclesiastical influences, with nods to classical literature and poetic devices, provide the framework for many stories that remain familiar today (such as St Patrick's journey across Ireland and the exploits of Finn mac Cumhaill). However, despite this rich tradition, scholarship on Gaelic storytelling that crosses both medieval and modern fields is a rarity; as a result, there is a question mark over what of the early tradition remains in the modern, and what this can tell us about the ecology and the survival of Gaelic storytelling.
This volume presents ground-breaking research from scholars in both areas, providing a dynamic insight into the refractions of Gaelic storytelling across a broad chronological period. Contributors address matters such as composition, style, narrative techniques, audience, and the importance of physical and social landscapes, drawing on a variety of methodologies, including philological, narratological, comparative literature, folkloristic, and translation studies. From seminal research on notions of scél "story" and truth to an exploration of the issues facing a Gaelic translator today, these essays work together to widen and deepen our understanding of how and why stories were so fundamental - and remain so fundamental - to Gaelic culture.
The American Experience of British Prize Law, 1776-1804
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A detailed examination of one of the key issues for British-American relations, for international trade and for international law.
The taking of prizes, that is the capture of enemy vessels either by the Royal Navy or by private individuals licensed as privateers, was a crucial component of British naval strategy in the eighteenth century. The legality of prize-taking depended on the determination of the nationality or neutrality of both vessel and cargo - a major point of contention between Britain and other powers, including the United States. This book examines the American experience of British prize law from 1776 to 1804, with additional insights up until the 1820s, examining how this branch of international law changed and perpetuated in the wake of the Revolution and the Jay Treaty. It traces the lives of Robert Bayard, a loyalist and New York Vice-Admiralty Judge, Samuel Bayard, US agent for British prize cases in London in the 1790s, and William Bayard Jr., an American economic lobbyist, politician and merchant. Setting these lives in the wider context, it analyses court records held in previously unexplored archival collections, including about 1,600 court actions and 1,150 appeals cases. The book draws new conclusions on an individual, national and international scale and alters our outlook on the impact of prize law on American and British foreign policy, on the lives of maritime and mercantile communities and on the development of American maritime law.
Institutions, Individuals and Modern British History
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This collection of essays celebrates the influence of David Cannadine and examines the place of Britain's political and cultural institutions, and the impact of individuals in their formation and evolution.
The focus of this Festschrift is the steady making and remaking of British political and cultural institutions since 1800, and the importance of individual agency in that process. Such focus reflects the preoccupations of one of Britain's most prominent professional and public historians: Sir David Cannadine. Cannadine has written on the changing public face of the monarchy and on the impact of aristocratic sensibilities on modern British political culture. He has examined some of Britain's most well-established institutions, and interpreted the British empire as a project to sustain and promote social hierarchy. In Cannadine's writings on aristocracy, empire, institutional life and national historical memory, individuals appear as history-makers, but always situated in their social and cultural contexts.
Essays in this volume draw inspiration from all these themes. Among the institutions discussed are Parliament, the Primrose League, the civil service, the London Library, the Institute of Historical Research and the National Portrait Gallery. The role of individuals in context features in essays on Benjamin Disraeli, Henry Drummond Wolff, Winston Churchill, the museum director Roy Strong and the National Park publicists Walter Greenwood and Laurie Lee. Tensions between intellectual work and institutional public service are uncovered in essays on Noel Annan, Geoffrey Crowther and Owen Chadwick. Authority (political, social, cultural) - its construction and re-construction - is the central concern guiding the essays. An introductory section discusses the many-sided work of Cannadine himself, both as a historian and as a servant of institutions.
Cultural Connections between the Continent and Early Medieval England
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Essays exploring the literary, material, scholarly and linguistic ties between the Continent and early medieval England.
"Anglo-Saxons were tied to the Continent in many ways", Rolf H. Bremmer Jr once observed. Throughout the early Middle Ages, a crucial phase for Anglo-Continental contact, cultural connections between the English and their neighbours across the North Sea developed in a number of forms, from missionary activities to political contacts, intellectual exchanges and military confrontations, with people, books, texts, artefacts and ideas travelling back and forth. The language and culture of the Anglo-Saxons became once again part of the scholarly exchange between England and the Continent during the early modern period, when philologists from either side of the North Sea laboured on the recovery of Old English and made new connections between Old English, the other Old Germanic languages, and more distant tongues.
This volume investigates these dynamic interactions between Anglo-Saxons and the Continent. Contributors break new ground in shared traditions in runic writing, legal ideas in England and Frisia, moments of transcultural and translingual contact, the influence of continental texts in early medieval England, the manuscripts which provide unique glimpses of the dissemination of texts and ideas, and early modern attempts to apply Old English to novel purposes. They thus form an appropriate tribute to the inspirational scholarship of Rolf H. Bremmer Jr in the field of Old English philology.
Berlioz the Critic
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Hector Berlioz combined writing music with lively and informed music criticism. This collection of articles, engagingly translated by Roger Nichols, covers the middle years of his critical career.
PRESTO MUSIC BOOK OF THE MONTH JUNE 2025
Berlioz's music criticism from 1837 to 1850 covers a period druing which he composed some of his finest works, and travelled abroad to perform them before appreciative audiences in Germany, Russia, and England. Roger Nichols has chosen and translated extracts from fifty-eight articles of particular interest, with commentary and notes identifying people mentioned. Berlioz scholars Peter Bloom and Julian Rushton provide an informative introduction and a comprehensive editorial apparatus.
In the selected articles Berlioz discusses Paris performances of early and modern music, including new operas and revivals, and concerts at the Paris Conservatoire. He comments freely but with understanding on conductors, singers and instrumentalists. The essays demonstrate the composer's concern with innovation in the design of musical instruments and assess the quality of performing venues. Berlioz writes on the musical life of London, France, and Germany, most entertainingly about the inauguration of statues of Beethoven and Rossini. The selection is framed by major articles on "Imitation in Music" and on Gluck's opera Alceste.
Bluestockings and Landscape in Eighteenth-Century Britain
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Captures in unprecedented depth the cultural significance of the designed landscape and its relationship with Bluestocking philosophy.
Situated within the broader context of eighteenth-century intellectual and cultural history, this collection redefines the role of the Bluestocking circle in shaping Britain's landscapes and social ideals. Against the backdrop of Whiggish notions of "improvement"-encompassing agricultural innovation, aesthetic refinement, and moral progress-it explores how women such as Elizabeth Montagu, Mary Delany, and Elizabeth Carter navigated the intersections of polite sociability, intellectual production, and estate management. Their contributions reveal a dynamic interplay between cultural critique and practical reform, positioning them as active participants in the period's debates on land, labour, and national identity.
Drawing on insights from the Elizabeth Montagu's Correspondence Online (EMCO) project, these essays uncover the creative and social tensions embedded in iconic estates such as Montagu's Sandleford and Lord Lyttelton's Hagley Hall. They delve into the poetic and philosophical musings of James Woodhouse, the sociable artistry of Mary Delany, and the symbolic landscapes of Wrest Park. By examining correspondence, poetry, visual arts, and cartography, this volume offers an unprecedented exploration of the ways Bluestocking women engaged with and redefined the designed landscape as a site of intellectual and environmental innovation.
This interdisciplinary collection reshapes the historiography of gender, environment, and cultural progress, offering fresh insights into the enduring significance of eighteenth-century landscapes and the intellectual communities that shaped them.
Hungarian “Gypsy-Band” Music in Vienna, 1850-1914
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A detailed investigation, based on extensive study of press reports and early recordings, of the popular Hungarian bands in Vienna who influenced Brahms and other composers.
It has long been recognized that Viennese composers, especially Brahms, were profoundly influenced by Hungarian "Gypsy bands." Furthermore, the style hongrois repertory and style in which these bands specialized has been identified as important in its own right. The bands themselves, however, are generally relegated to the status of being part of an unknowable oral tradition, of which nothing remains apart from some highly exoticized literary hyperbole. Jon Banks's pathbreaking Hungarian "Gypsy-Band" Music in Vienna, 1850-1914 redresses this imbalance by presenting a detailed account of these "other" musicians and their interactions with the mainstream of Western classical music. To do so, it analyzes thousands of advertisements, news reports, and anecdotes in the Viennese press relating to "Gypsy bands" (whose members were often but not always Romani) and builds a detailed picture of who the musicians were, where they played, and how the conditions of their employment affected their lives and their music-making. The press notices are collated with evidence from contemporaneous Hungarian sources as well as an analysis of the hundreds of recordings that these bands made in the first decade of the twentieth century. In undertaking this first systematic examination of these different kinds of materials, Jon Banks's book provides a reanimation of some extraordinary personalities and careers in the light of their own achievements as well as their influence on others.
Studies in Arthurian and Chronicle Traditions in Memory of Fiona Tolhurst
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Essays examining Arthurian and Chronicle texts, contexts, and reception, in honour of Fiona Tolhurst's contributions to Arthurian Studies.
In her all-too-short but ground-breaking academic career, Fiona Tolhurst made significant contributions to the discipline of Arthurian Studies, advancing, amongst much else, understanding of Geoffrey of Monmouth, Arthurian Women, the English Mortes, and modern Arthuriana, including cinematic versions of the legend. The essays assembled here reflect her commitment to explication of Arthurian and Chronicle texts and contexts. Several engage with Geoffrey of Monmouth, examining, among other topics, the depiction of women in his narrative of British origins; the function of giants and significance of landscape and geography in his writings; the contrast between Geoffrey's Trojan-British empire and the Graeco-Egyptian foundation narratives of Scottish and Irish chronicles; and the reception and use of his writing from the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries. Other contributors consider characterization and politics in the Brut tradition and Malory; the puzzling dualities of the alliterative Morte; the reception of Malory's "Trystram"; continuities between medieval and modern readings of the MorteDarthur; and the uses, adaptation, and appropriation of Arthurian themes and ideals in the twenty-first century.
The Journals of Henry Sharpe
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Henry Sharpe's journals are an early-Victorian treasure-trove, rich with observations about the great political and social concerns of the time, as well as the ups and downs of family life and raising children.
Henry Sharpe's journals are an early-Victorian treasure-trove. This remarkable document is rich with observations about the great political and social concerns of the time, with an extraordinary range of ideas and depth of discussion on literary, artistic and philosophical matters. He reveals detail about historic events not mentioned elsewhere, expanding our knowledge of Hampstead and of wider London history.
Sharpe's great passion was for education. He spent much of his spare time teaching in local schools and setting up Reading Rooms and evening classes for working men. His accounts of the ups and downs of family life and raising children are both touching and amusing, putting Victorian fatherhood into a new light. His trenchant views, especially on political and religious matters, are often startling, contradicting the usual stereotype of the Victorian middle classes.
Women in Irish Traditional Music
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Traces the position, experiences and reception of women in Irish traditional music through detailed ethnographic and statistical findings.
This book is the first of its kind to engage with the larger subject of women in commercial Irish traditional music. It considers the experiences of performers in the various commercial arenas of the tradition, while also engaging in critical discussions of choice, agency, feminism and sexualisation. It reveals how the commercial music industry and Celtic music label continues to place women within a stereotypical idealised role or occupation.
The book provides new insight into the legacy of women-led bands and compilations as well as their impact on Irish traditional music over five decades. Its findings on commercial dance shows are equally significant. While these shows had a positive impact on performers, at the same time they enforced gendered, racial and heteronormative expectations.
Drawing on extensive ethnographic and statistical research, the book finds strong evidence that women and other marginalised practitioners continue to face greater challenges and different expectations when maintaining a professional career and participating in Irish traditional music. It also uncovers characteristics and dynamics related to the recreational and commercial spaces of the Irish traditional music and Irish dance scene that enable harmful and predatory behaviour.
The author's findings support understandings and aid future legislation for creating a safe, inclusive and equitable performance space for all.
Cover artwork by Claire Prouvost
Thomas Mann’s Antifascist Radio Addresses, 1940–1945
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First complete English translation of Mann's uncannily insightful wartime anti-Nazi radio addresses, once again urgently topical in the context of the current worldwide rise of anti-democratic movements.
Upon Hitler's rise to power in 1933, the great German writer Thomas Mann, 1929 Nobel Prize laureate on the strength of his monumental novels Buddenbrooks and The Magic Mountain, chose exile, eventually moving to the United States in 1938. An early critic of National Socialism, he gave over 150 public lectures with titles such as "The Coming Victory of Democracy." From 1940 to 1945, he authored and narrated a series of anti-Nazi radio addresses that were broadcast to Germany by the BBC; German listeners risked severe punishment.
Mann's radio addresses constitute his most sustained contribution to the Allied war effort. In them, he comments on the progress of the war, contrasts fascism with democracy, measures Hitler against Roosevelt, and counters German propaganda with international consensus, lies with facts. After initially encouraging the Germans to resist the Nazi regime, Mann prepares them for the consequences of defeat, but also instills hope in them for future reconciliation with the community of nations.
Today, when democracy is again endangered in much of the world, Mann's antifascist radio addresses have once again acquired urgency. This edition presents for the first time English translations of all of Mann's 58 radio addresses, with a foreword by Mann's grandson Frido Mann, an introduction by leading Mann scholar Hans Rudolf Vaget, careful annotations and a selection of photographs.
A Companion to Latin American Photography
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How can photography enrich our knowledge of Latin America?
Photography provides unique insights into Latin America. It acts as a witness, agent, and archive - containing a wealth of knowledge about the continent, its social classes, and its multiple ethnicities. This companion introduces the reader to the role that photography plays in Latin America, offers ways in which it can be studied, and reveals how this medium can promote a deeper awareness of the region.
It reviews the history of photography in Latin America; ways in which the technology transmits distinctive information; the influence of specific photographers and their relationships with patrons, mentors, and students; the role of institutions in promoting photography; and the developing Latin American canon. The Companion to Latin American Photography also explores how the medium can shape Latin American narratives and cultural identities; assert or question power; serve as testimony and memory; and represent and empower women, children and youth, as well as marginalized groups such as the disappeared.
The study is intended not only to provide an overview of Latin American photography (including dozens of images from a vast array of photographers over the past two centuries), it also discusses innovative work taking place there. Above all, this book can be viewed as a guide to the ways in which photography can enhance and expand a viewer's knowledge of Latin America.
Fieldwork: Essays on the Cultural History of Music in Ireland
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An absorbing study of the development and reception of musical culture in Ireland by a pioneering and deservedly renowned author.
This volume is a collection of fourteen essays on the history and reception of Irish music and music in Ireland. It addresses three prevailing themes: the historiography of Irish music, the influence of music on Irish writing (and vice versa), and the cultural identity and reception of Irish music both domestically and in the world at large. Its principal protagonists include Thomas Moore, W. H. Grattan Flood, George Moore, Edward Martyn, Charles Villiers Stanford, James Joyce, Dora Pejačević, Ina Boyle, Aloys Fleischmann and Jennifer Walshe. These essays also identify and interrogate key questions underpinning a general crisis of reception in relation to Irish music, and particularly art music, within the domain of Irish studies. Fieldwork examines this crisis in the aftermath of The Encyclopaedia of Music in Ireland (published in 2013) and a major retrospective of Irish art music, Composing the Island (curated and presented in 2016). It thereby engages closely with contemporary Irish art music and the challenges which this music has faced in the early decades of the twenty-first century.
This well-conceived and beautifully written work testifies to Harry White's central place in the shaping of the discourse surrounding the cultural history of Irish music over the last 40 years. White's gift for expression and memorably poetic turns of phrase allows the complexity of ideas and range of historical and literary knowledge examined in these essays to be deftly excavated and evaluated. Curiosity, provocativeness, imagination and literature are threaded through his exploration of how Irish history and experience have been imagined musically.
NLW MS Brogyntyn ii.1
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The first full examination of a fascinating manuscript, Brogyntyn ii.1, a Middle English miscellany with a little Latin, compiled in the 1460s for an audience of low-ranking gentry.
Its 57 texts include the romance Sir Gawain and the Carl of Carlisle, practical information, almost every genre of verse, and many items in prose, two of which were adapted from poetic versions by their scribes. More than half of these items are either unique to this manuscript or have been uniquely altered from their sources and analogues.
The essays here offer both a comprehensive and foundational understanding of the manuscript. They consider the intended readers' social class, analyse the scribal handwriting, and for the first time identify the dialectal provenance of all the scribes who wrote in English. Further chapters consider specific texts (The Siege of Jerusalem in Prose and a life of St. Katherine of Alexandria), while four others look closely at the variety of lyrics, different kinds of practical texts and their parodies, and sequences of poems with thematic connections. It also includes editions of four previously unpublished items.
Goethe Yearbook 32
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This year's volume features special sections on gambling in the Age of Goethe and on Goethe and music, as well as book reviews, a translation of Lenz's "Zerbin" and other essays on the period.
The Goethe Yearbook is a publication of the Goethe Society of North America, showcasing North American and international scholarship on Goethe and other authors and aspects of German literature and culture of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In volume 32, Joanna Raisbeck analyzes two recently discovered sonnets by Karoline von Günderrode, uncovering an a priori pessimism that anticipates nineteenth-century thinkers. This is followed by Brian Donarski's scholarly introduction to and translation of Lenz's Zerbin, or Recent Philosophy-the first time this text has appeared in English. Ethan Blass reads surprising similarities in staging and visual language between Goethe's Die natürliche Tochter and Hitchcock's film Marnie, arguing that Goethe's theatrical innovations are protocinematic. The next four articles, by Claire Baldwin, Austen Hinkley, Jürgen Overhoff, and William H. Carter, offer an exploration of the theme "Gambling in the Age of Goethe." These essays touch on both canonical and forgotten figures to illuminate a rich discourse around chance, coincidence, risk management, and play that connects with key aspects of historical discourse and literary representation in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The final two pieces, by Jonathan Guez and Matthew Poon, treat musical responses to Goethe's works by Franz Schubert and Robert Schumann. A collection of book reviews that offer a comprehensive view of new work in the wider field closes the volume.
Interpreting Court Song in Uganda
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A critical interpretation of essential Kiganda royal court songs that examines how the meanings of their lyrics enter into dynamic dialogue with contemporary national politics in Uganda.
Lyric interpretation, which Damascus Kafumbe defines as a process of creative renewal that infuses vitality into songs, enables interpreters and analysts to derive a multiplicity of meanings from songs instead of being limited to a single literal narrative. As he and his research collaborators demonstrate, the process extends the life of a song by allowing it to generate new versions, meanings, and relevance. Kafumbe examines how lyric interpretation serves to renew the lives of twenty-one songs from the repertoires of royal court musicians of the Kingdom of Buganda, arguing that the meanings of these songs are not singular, static, and monolithic but rather dynamic and multivalent. Through extensive research within past and present contexts, Kafumbe presents a series of unique perspectives on the ways Kiganda court songs reflect varied kinds of power relations. These meanings, which surface via lyric interpretation, come from daily interactions among citizens and between leaders and subjects. This interpretive process helps illuminate truths and clarify myths about the power dynamics that shape political life in present-day Uganda, highlighting the relevance of court song lyrics to contemporary national contexts. By engaging with the book's wide range of voices, readers will learn to appreciate these songs, their historical and contemporary contexts, and their composer-performers' stories and interpretations more fully.
This book is available as Open Access under the Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND.
Victoria County History of Westmorland I
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This long-awaited volume, the first installment in the Victoria County History of Westmorland, covers the 13 townships of scenic and historic Lonsdale Ward from prehistory to the near present.
This landmark book is the first Victoria County History publication for the historic county of Westmorland and the 250th volume in Red Book series. It provides an account of the 13 townships comprising Lonsdale Ward, one of the four ancient divisions of the county of Westmorland, parts of which now lie in the Yorkshire Dales National Park. Most of these townships belonged to the parishes of Burton-in-Kendal and Kirkby Lonsdale, both centres of pre-Conquest worship. Kirkby Lonsdale developed as a market town at a major crossing of the River Lune. The medieval Devil's Bridge has long attracted visitors and tourists to the town, as has the view from St Mary's churchyard, which was immortalised by J.M.W. Turner and John Ruskin. Lying on a major north-south route, Burton was a significant corn market from the late 17th century. With a largely rural upland landscape, agriculture was the chief occupation in the area for centuries. An exception was Holme, where a flax mill and industrial settlement developed in the 1800s. A lack of industry helped to preserve the historic character of Kirkby Lonsdale and Burton-in-Kendal, where many Georgian buildings survive.
Welsh Revivalism in Imperial Britain, 1707-1819
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Reframes the study of Welsh cultural revivalism, highlighting transnational and imperial contexts.
In the long eighteenth century, as Britain grappled with the aftermath of the 1707 Acts of Union and consolidated a global empire, Welsh 'Cambro-Britons' developed a movement of cultural awakening, reinventing their traditions for a new age. Amid profound local, national and imperial transformations, Welsh authors and activists sought to reimagine their history, language and literature, claiming a place for Wales and the Welsh diaspora in the British imperial order. Far from being an insular phenomenon, this revival intersected with key debates of the era, from enlightenment science and radical politics to colonial expansion, transatlantic abolitionism and metropolitan sociability.
This study reframes Welsh cultural revivalism, revealing its fundamentally international and archipelagic dimensions. Nationally significant Welsh authors like Lewis Morris, David Samwell, Thomas Pennant, and Iolo Morganwg are placed in their transnational, imperial, and global contexts. Examined alongside Thomas Gray's British bardism, William Jones's Orientalism, and the imperialism of Cook's voyages, their writings demonstrate how Welsh thinkers engaged with - and shaped - shifting ideas of Britishness, empire, race, and identity. Drawing on new archival research, and giving equal attention to Welsh and English language texts, Rhys Kaminski-Jones challenges traditional narratives of Welsh cultural nationalism as a simple precursor to modern Welsh nationhood, instead positioning the revival as central to transatlantic intellectual currents. With its pathbreaking bilingual and interdisciplinary approach, this book offers fresh insights into the complexities of nationhood, empire, and cultural memory.
Children’s Health and Urban Ecology in England, 1885–1919
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Analyzes public health efforts to reduce infant mortality and improve children's health in three large English cities: Birmingham, Liverpool and Manchester.
While English public health efforts had reduced the threat of infectious diseases and improved sanitation by the end of the Victorian era, soaring infant mortality rates brought children's health to the forefront of public health concerns. Efforts to understand the causes of infant mortality and improve children's survival required attention to the environments where infant mortality was often highest, i.e., in the cities.
Children's Health and Urban Ecology in England, 1885-1919 examines the history of urban public health campaigns in three of the largest English cities, Birmingham, Liverpool and Manchester. It considers how local environments impacted children's health by creating ecological conditions ripe for the spread of disease, as well as opportunities for improvements and interventions. Between 1885 and 1919, English public health leaders began to establish increasingly localized approaches to public health that included interventions in households and at schools. This work was conducted by new types of public health professionals, including health visitors to new mothers and school medical officers. While these programs emerged from local environmental conditions, two imperial military conflicts (the Second Anglo-Boer War and the First World War) drew national attention to the importance of children's health. In examining the effects of these conflicts as well as the urgent response to local environmental conditions, Children's Health and Urban Ecology highlights how the epicenter of public health shifted from cities to the state by the end of the First World War.
Music and Desire among the Austro-German Romantics
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Investigates the composition and reception of works by key Romantics such as Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, Wagner and the Schumanns with attention to the role of sexual desire in the composers' lives and music.
Scholars have for several decades been devoting increasing attention to aspects of sexuality and desire in the music of the Austro-German Romantics. Undertaking a close analysis of the sources, the four chapters of this book show how our assumptions about what those composers desired are often in fact contingent on what we, their commentators, have wanted them to desire over the course of reception history. Beethoven's Fidelio and Schubert's Winterreise tend to be regarded as a hymn to freedom, on the one hand, and an interior monologue of an alienated lover, on the other, though in neither case does such a view correspond to what the composer intended. In contrast, Richard Wagner dismissed his own opera The Ban on Love as a youthful indiscretion extolling the "free love" of the Young German movement; but he was reinterpreting an early work to align it with his later aesthetic.
The final chapter examines the chronology of the friendship of Robert and Clara Schumann and Johannes Brahms in order to discern the likely truths about their triangular relationship before and after Robert Schumann's incarceration in a mental asylum. By adhering to the sources and placing them in the social, linguistic, and geographical contexts of their time, author Chris Walton grants all these protagonists a greater agency of desire than has hitherto been the case.
Cultural Journalism in Germany, 1815–1848
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The first critical anthology of major programmatic texts of cultural journalism from the crucial period known in Germany as the Vormärz, the time before the March Revolutions of 1848.
Cultural journalism-a broad category of periodical writing encompassing criticism, reporting on the arts, popular culture, politics, and society-was one of the most dynamic fields of German intellectual activity in the nineteenth century, particularly during the crucial period in Germany's history known as the Vormärz, leading up to the March revolutions of 1848. Many of the most prominent German writers, among them Heinrich Heine, Ludwig Börne and Goethe, were active in cultural journalism during this period of increasing nationalism and clamor for a unified, democratic Germany on one hand and absolutist repression, including censorship, on the other.
This critical anthology is the first collection, in English or German, of major programmatic texts of German cultural journalism from the period. It provides complete texts or excerpts, many for the first time in English, along with critical introductions to each text by a leading scholar in German Studies or a related field. It reveals the richness and dynamism of the period's discussion of the status and function of journalism and its significance for politics, aesthetics, historiography and philosophy. Of interest to scholars in German Studies, media and book history, and those working on the history of political journalism, the book is also well suited for undergraduate and graduate courses on European literature, history and media studies.
A Companion to Latin American Crime Fiction
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The first integrated overview in English of Latin American crime fiction, a flourishing genre with unique perspectives and characteristics.
Latin American crime fiction has a long and rich history, and this volume offers the first integrated overview in English of a flourishing tradition with unique perspectives and characteristics. Featuring contributions from leading scholars of a multifarious genre often shortened to neopolicíaco or neopolicial, this Companion explores noir literature in Latin America. The first part looks at the history of the novela negra and its manifestations in Mexico, Argentina, Cuba and Brazil. The second part examines patterns and trends including literary crime fiction, the narconovela, a concern for increasing racial and sexual diversity and the phenomenon of true crime. In the third part, expert analyses are given of four leading authors and their work: Paco Ignacio Taibo II, Leonardo Padura Fuentes, Claudia Piñeiro and Rubem Fonseca. The book closes with a chapter on screen adaptations of crime fiction for film and television. Overall, the Companion provides a clear and authoritative account of Latin American crime fiction, showcasing its variety, fluidity and adaptability.
National Prayers: Special Worship since the Reformation
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A history of the annual British and Irish state and religious anniversaries and occasions of special worship from the sixteenth century to the present.
Since the sixteenth century, the governments and established churches of Britain and Ireland have summoned their nations to special acts of public worship during crises, wars and times of celebration, or for annual days of commemoration and remembrance. These special prayers, special days of worship and religious anniversaries were national events, reaching into every parish. They had considerable religious, ecclesiastical, political, ideological, moral and social significance, and they produced important texts: proclamations, council orders, addresses and - in England and Wales, and in Ireland - prayers or complete liturgies which temporarily supplemented or replaced the services in the Book of Common Prayer, and most recently in Common Worship. National Prayers. Special Worship since the Reformation in four volumes, provides the edited texts, commentaries and source notes for over 900 occasions of special worship and for each of the annual commemorations.
The final volume, Anniversary Commemorations, Additional Material and Indices, 1533-2023, describes the orders and services for the nine early modern state anniversaries, including Accession day, Gowrie day, Gunpowder Treason day, Restoration day, and commemoration of Charles I's execution and the Great Fire of London, and for the modern state anniversaries of Armistice day and Remembrance Sunday. It includes materials on particular occasions of special worship for 2016-23, including the Covid pandemic, commemoration of Prince Philip, platinum jubilee and funeral of Elizabeth II, and coronation of Charles III. Appendices provide supplementary material for the whole period of the edition, including extensive additions to the list of particular occasions of special worship observed from 1533 to 1660. An index of biblical references and a general index are provided for all four volumes of the edition.
Music, Politics and Religion in Early Seventeenth-Century Cambridge
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This major study of the famous seventeenth century music manuscripts at Peterhouse sets them in the context of the religious and political movements leading to the Civil War.
The Peterhouse partbooks constitute a unique resource for studying two periods of English choral music. Their witness to musical trends at the time of the Henrician Reformation has attracted much attention since their assimilation into scholarly accounts of English music in the mid-nineteenth century. Less has been written, however, about what the collection can tell us about music on the eve of the English Civil War, in the period when the partbooks were brought together and when much of their music was composed. This volume considers the music of the partbooks as part of the broader cultural, intellectual, and material history of the 1630s. It breaks new ground in describing the institutional context for the creation of the partbooks and in providing an account of the materials used in them, as well as analysis of the scribal cultures from which they originated. For the first time, it properly situates the partbooks within the developing ecclesiology of the Church of England and investigates the influence of local and personal commitments on the liturgy and practice for which they were compiled.
Local and personal factors shaped the implementation of national political and religious change in the 1630s and this volume shows how these forces came together in short-lived and contentious innovation in cultural and intellectual life. Contributions consider the extent to which musical renewal formed part of a conscious programme of architectural, artistic, literary, and liturgical change whose purpose was to redirect the education and formation of future generations of priests and patrons within the Church of England. While exploring the mechanisms of change, they also consider the force of reaction to and dissatisfaction with novelty and the resulting turmoil, iconoclasm, and exile that transformed the careers of the protagonists in the story of the partbooks. Although particular in focus, the volume demonstrates how political, intellectual, and religious dispute infiltrated the lives of individuals and communities and generated conflicts that proved impossible to control. The story of the Peterhouse partbooks provides an unusually rich opportunity to review a critical period of British history through the prism provided by a remarkable example of musical and cultural survival.
Reading Texts in Music and Literature of the Long Nineteenth Century
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This collection offers students a practical guide to understanding the ways music and literature intersect and the influence of each on the other, as well as developing methods of study.
This is the first coursebook to help students explore the many types of relationship that exist between music and literature when studied in historical or aesthetic contexts. It fosters interdisciplinary study among students in these subject areas and helps to break down the barrier of music as seeming "impenetrable" to students outside musicology. Chapters each discuss music/text relationships via an important social, aesthetic or cultural theme that maps onto key preoccupations of the long nineteenth century.
Each chapter presents a case-study text first, followed by a short summary that sets out the challenges of approach and interpretation involved. A section on background then places the featured case-study in historical or aesthetic context, leading to a detailed discussion. The book offers a learning experience combining the methodological in music/text relationships with the substantive or thematic.
Contributors: Charlotte Bentley, Philip Burnett, Alisa Clapp-Itnyre, Elicia Clements, Jeremy Coleman, Sarah Collins, Katharine Ellis, Daniel M. Grimley, Elizabeth Helsinger, Fraser Riddell, Emma Sutton, Shafquat Towheed, Phyllis Weliver, Christopher Wiley
Putting Plastic Surgery on Paper
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An interdisciplinary approach to medical history that shows the key role that drawings and photographs had in shaping the material, professional, emotional and aesthetic parameters of plastic surgery.
Plastic surgery in twentieth-century Britain was a medical discipline with deep ties to art, artists and art history. It was also a field still in the process of creating its reputation and its archives. Putting Plastic Surgery on Paper examines these archives, focusing in particular on the works on paper held within these collections by two artists: Diana "Dickie" Orpen and Percy Hennell. Plastic surgeons depended upon the drawings and photographs made by these and other medical illustrators to craft certain narratives about their field and their surgical practice.
In addition to telling an art history of plastic surgery during this period, Putting Plastic Surgery on Paper engages with the affective parameters of archival objects, and with what working as a historian involves when done within potentially traumatic spaces. Paying particular attention to the emotional dimensions and effects of this visual culture and the ways in which it is archived and framed by the discipline of plastic surgery - then and now - Putting Plastic Surgery on Paper explores not only what it meant to make art in a surgical space but also what it means to study these affecting paper objects in the archive today. This book is available as Open Access under the Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND.
Brahms Patriotic and Political
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Offers a historical context in which to understand how Brahms's three most intensely political and nationalistic works interact with questions of German patriotism, liberalism and nationalism.
Johannes Brahms rarely composed music that engaged the national-political issues of the day. Three of his works, though, do precisely this: the Fünf Lieder für Männerchor; the Triumphlied for eight-part chorus and orchestra; and the Fest- und Gedenksprüche for eight-part chorus a cappella. In Brahms Patriotic and Political, David Brodbeck challenges notions that Brahms's political music evinces embarrassing anticipations of later Prussian militarism and German chauvinism. Instead, he provides a thick historical context in which to read these works and offers a more nuanced understanding of the intersections of Brahms's music and questions of German patriotism, liberalism, and nationalism than has been customary in the field of historical musicology.
In particular, Brodbeck relates the Männerchor-Lieder to the debate over how and in what form a German nation-state might be achieved; he relates the Triumphlied to the euphoria but also the solemnity that attended the foundation of the German Reich; and he relates the Fest- und Gedenksprüche to the necessary work of instilling in the diverse German people a genuine sense of national belonging. At the same time, he traces Brahms's changing attitude toward Otto von Bismarck, the "Blacksmith of the Reich," whom he originally loathed but, in time, came to venerate. Brahms Patriotic and Political will appeal to readers with interests in both nineteenth-century German music and Central European history.
A Reader's Guide to Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus
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Provides the English-speaking reader with the tools needed to appreciate Thomas Mann's most ambitious novel, one of the greatest literary works of the twentieth century, now timely once again.
In 1938, the great German author and Nobel Prize winner Thomas Mann emigrated to the United States. There, he became a figurehead for the intellectual opposition to Nazism, giving more than 150 public lectures and recording more than fifty anti-Nazi radio addresses that the BBC broadcast into Germany. His political activities also left a profound mark on his fiction, most importantly on the 1947 novel Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn as Told by a Friend. Ostensibly the biography of a fictional modern composer, Doctor Faustus also serves as a post-mortem of Nazism and a reckoning with five centuries of cultural history that led to dazzling heights but failed to prevent Germany's ultimate fall.
Doctor Faustus is an astonishingly complex novel, both because of the range of its intellectual references and because of its stylistic inventiveness, which has provoked comparisons with Joyce. And yet, at a time when democracy around the world once again seems in retreat and the forces of irrationalism are in advance, it is also an extremely timely book. This guide will equip English-speaking readers with all the tools necessary to appreciate one of the greatest literary works of the twentieth century.
On publication this book is available as an Open Access ebook under the Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND.
Napoleon's American Prisoners
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Tells the story of the 1,500 or so common seamen of the American merchant marine who were held as prisoners of war in France during the Napoleonic Wars.
Based on extensive original research, this book tells the story of the 1,500 or so common seamen of the American merchant marine who were held as prisoners of war in France during the Napoleonic Wars. Although the United States was neutral, Napoleon interpreted neutrality narrowly, and included among the enemy merchants doing business with the enemy and seamen working on enemy vessels. Drawing on remarkably full source material in French, American and British archives, including the seamen's letters, their pleas for help to the consuls, the correspondence about them between the French authorities and the US diplomatic service, and the British Admiralty lists of prisoners, the book reveals a great deal about who these seamen were, and about their vastly different experience in French prisons. It contrasts their fate with that of British seamen and officers, discusses the labyrinthine maritime laws that ensnared the seamen and how their nationality, in an era before passports, was determined, charts the establishment of the US consular service, first established at this time to help "distressed American seamen", and relates the American seamen's experiences to the wider scholarly literature. Throughout, the book includes fascinating case studies of the adventures and misadventures of individual seamen.
