'Charms', Liturgies, and Secret Rites in Early Medieval England
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A re-evaluation of the mysterious "charms" found in Anglo-Saxon literature, arguing for their place in mainstream Christian rites.
Since its inception in the nineteenth century, the genre of Anglo-Saxon charms has drawn the attention of many scholars and appealed to enthusiasts of magic, paganism, and popular religion. Their Christian nature has been widely acknowledged in recent years, but their position within mainstream liturgical traditions has not yet been fully recognised. In this book, Ciaran Arthur undertakes a wide-ranging investigation of the genre to better understand how early English ecclesiastics perceived these rituals and why they included them in manuscripts were written in high-status minsters. Evidence from the entire corpus of Old English, various surviving manuscript sources, and rich Christian theological traditions suggests that contemporary scribes and compilers did not perceive "charms" as anything other than Christian rituals that belonged to diverse, mainstream liturgical practices. The book thus challenges the notion that there was any such thing as an Anglo-Saxon "charm", and offers alternative interpretations of these texts as creative para-liturgical rituals or liturgical rites, which testify to the diversity of early medieval English Christianity. When considered in their contemporary ecclesiastical and philosophical contexts, even the most enigmatic rituals, previously dismissed as mere "gibberish", begin to emerge as secret, deliberately obscured texts with hidden spiritual meaning.
Food, Eating and Identity in Early Medieval England
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A fresh approach to the implications of obtaining, preparing, and consuming food, concentrating on the little-investigated routines of everyday life.
Food in the Middle Ages usually evokes images of feasting, speeches, and special occasions, even though most evidence of food culture consists of fragments of ordinary things such as knives, cooking pots, and grinding stones, which are rarely mentioned by contemporary writers. This book puts daily life and its objects at the centre of the food world. It brings together archaeological and textual evidence to show how words and implements associated with food contributed to social identity at all levels of Anglo-Saxon society. It also looks at the networks which connected fields to kitchens and linked rural centres to trading sites. Fasting, redesigned field systems, and the place offish in the diet are examined in a wide-ranging, interdisciplinary inquiry into the power of food to reveal social complexity.
Allen J. Frantzen is Professor of English at Loyola University Chicago.
Law, Liberty and the Constitution
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A new approach to the telling of legal history, devoid of jargon and replete with good stories, which will be of interest to anyone wishing to know more about the common law - the spinal cord of the English body politic.
Throughout English history the rule of law and the preservation of liberty have been inseparable, and both are intrinsic to England's constitution. This accessible and entertaining history traces the growth of the law from its beginnings in Anglo-Saxon times to the present day. It shows how the law evolved from a means of ensuring order and limiting feuds to become a supremely sophisticated dispenser of justice and the primary guardian of civil liberties.This development owed much to the English kings and their judiciary, who, in the twelfth century, forged a unified system of law - predating that of any other European country - from almost wholly Anglo-Saxon elements. Yet by theseventeenth century this royal offspring - Oedipus Lex it could be called - was capable of regicide. Since then the law has had a somewhat fractious relationship with that institution upon which the regal mantle of supreme power descended, Parliament. This book tells the story of the common law not merely by describing major developments but by concentrating on prominent personalities and decisive cases relating to the constitution, criminal jurisprudence, and civil liberties. It investigates the great constitutional conflicts, the rise of advocacy, and curious and important cases relating to slavery, insanity, obscenity, cannibalism, the death penalty, and miscarriages of justice. The book concludes by examining the extension of the law into the prosecution of war criminals and protection of universal human rights and the threats posed by over-reaction to national emergencies and terrorism. Devoid ofjargon and replete with good stories, Law, Liberty and the Constitution represents a new approach to the telling of legal history and will be of interest to anyone wishing to know more about the common law - the spinal cordof the English body politic.
Harry Potter is a former fellow of Selwyn College, Cambridge and a practising barrister specialising in criminal defence. He has authored books on the death penalty and Scottish history andwrote and presented an award-winning series on the history of the common law for the BBC.
The Study of Medieval Chant
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Comparative studies of medieval chant traditions in western Europe, Byzantium and the Slavic nations illuminate music, literacy and culture.
Gregorian chant was the dominant liturgical music of the medieval period, from the time it was adopted by Charlemagne's court in the eighth century; but for centuries afterwards it competed with other musical traditions, local repertories from the great centres of Rome, Milan, Ravenna, Benevento, Toledo, Constantinople, Jerusalem, and Kievan Rus, and comparative study of these chant traditions can tell us much about music, liturgy, literacy and culture a thousand years ago. This is the first book-length work to look at the issues in a global, comprehensive way, in the manner of the work of Kenneth Levy, the leading exponent of comparative chant studies. It covers the four most fruitful approaches for investigators: the creation and transmission of chant texts, based on the psalms and other sources, and their assemblage into liturgical books; the analysis and comparison of musical modes and scales; the usesof neumatic notation for writing down melodies, and the differences wrought by developmental changes and notational reforms over the centuries; and the use of case studies, in which the many variations in a specific text or melodyare traced over time and geographical distance. The book is therefore of profound importance for historians of medieval music or religion - Western, Byzantine, or Slavonic - and for anyone interested in issues of orality and writing in the transmission of culture. PETER JEFFERY is Professor of Music History, Princeton University. Contributors: JAMES W. McKINNON, MARGOT FASSLER, MICHEL HUGLO, NICOLAS SCHIDLOVSKY, KEITH FALCONER, PETER JEFFERY, DAVID G.HUGHES, SYSSE GUDRUN ENGBERG, CHARLES M. ATKINSON, MILOS VELIMIROVIC, JORGEN RAASTED+, RUTH STEINER, DIMITRIJE STEFANOVIC, ALEJANDRO PLANCHART.
Myths and Legends of the British Isles
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Tales from the dawn of Christianity to the age of the Plantagenets reveal a mythology in its time as potent as that of the classical world.
The British Isles have a long tradition of tales of gods, heroes and marvels, hinting at a mythology once as relevant to the races which settled the islands as the Greek and Roman gods were to the classical world. The tales drawntogether in this book, from a wide range of medieval sources, span the centuries from the dawn of Christianity to the age of the Plantagenets. The Norse gods which peopled the Anglo-Saxon past survive in Beowulf; Cuchulainn, Taliesin and the magician Merlin take shape from Celtic mythology; and saints include Helena who brought a piece of the True Cross to Britain, and Joseph of Arimathea whose staff grew into the Glastonbury thorn. Tales of the British Arthur are followed by legends of later heroes, including Harold, Hereward and Godiva. These figures and many others were part of a familiar national mythology on which Shakespeare drew for Lear, Macbeth and Hamlet, creating the famous versions that are known today. Here the original stories are presented.
RICHARD BARBER's other books include and The Knight and Chivalry.
Prize Money in Nelson's Navy
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An overview of British prize law from the late seventeenth century to the twentieth century, focusing especially on how prize law disputes were handled in the era of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars.
Bringing the experience of a practising lawyer and drawing on previously untapped contemporary Georgian law reports, this book provides a fresh legal perspective on British prize law from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. Focusing on how prize law disputes were handled in the era of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, the book takes the reader into the socially connected worlds of lawyers, courts and naval officers. Setting out how conflicts were resolved within the rule of law, it considers real cases, notably the four-year litigation between Nelson and his patron Lord St Vincent over the 'flag' share of prize money from captured Spanish treasure. Highlighting how prize-taking was a crucial part of war strategy, it illustrates how the rules for the division of prize money evolved as an incentive, revealing a dynamic system adapting to economic and social pressures in a war for national survival. It also considers how prize money fitted in with 'international' law, how the United States handled prize money, discusses attempts to set up an International Prize Court that were ultimately rejected by Britain and explores how prize money in Britain was eventually brought to an end in 1945.
Grahame Aldous KC, barrister, judge, ocean sailor and naval historian completed his doctorate at King's College, London.
The Angevin World, 1154-1204
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Fresh perspectives on how we understand the complex nature of the Angevin lands.
At the time of his death in 1189, the lands which Henry II had brought under his rule through inheritance, marriage, and military might stretched from Northumbria to Gascony, and across the Irish Sea. This vast agglomeration, often described in English as "the Angevin empire", and in French as "l'espace Plantagenêt", was a dominant force in the politics of western Europe until its fragmentation under John, beginning with the loss of Normandy to the French king Philip Augustus in 1204. Yet beyond the forceful personalities of its rulers, what - if anything - bound these wide and disparate lands together? To what extent were they interconnected politically, economically and culturally? This multi-disciplinary volume brings together specialists in history, literature, material culture, art history, and manuscript studies to approach these questions from a range of different perspectives. From the cultural interactions of courts, to political thought and symbols of power, the diffusion of historical writing, and practical responses of the Angevins to the challenges of governing, whether in Aquitaine or in Ireland, and of waging war in expansion or defence of their territories, this book aims to provoke fresh thinking regarding how we understand the complex nature of the Angevin lands.
Medieval Welsh Genealogy
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First in-depth investigation of the genealogies of medieval Wales, bringing out their full significance.
Genealogy was a central element of life in medieval Wales. It was the force that held society together and the framework for all political action. For these reasons, genealogical writing in medieval Wales, as elsewhere in Europe, became a fundamental tool for representing and manipulating perceptions of the socio-political order across historical and literary time. From its beginnings within an early medieval Insular genre of genealogical writing, Welsh genealogy developed across the Middle Ages as a unique and pervasive phenomenon.
This book provides the first integrated study of and comprehensive introduction to genealogy in medieval Wales, setting it in the context of genealogical writing from Ireland, England and beyond and tracing its evolution from the eighth to the sixteenth century. The three most important collections of secular genealogies are carefully analysed and their composition is considered in relation to medieval Welsh politics. Particular attention is devoted to the pedigrees of the kings and princes of Gwynedd, which were subject to many intricate alterations over time. The book also includes fresh critical editions of the most significant extant collections of secular genealogy.
Observations on Modern Gardening, by Thomas Whately
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Edition, with commentary, of the first comprehensive attempt to describe the landscape garden.
Thomas Whately's Observations on Modern Gardening (1770) is the first and most comprehensive study of what has come to be known as the English landscape garden, often claimed to be this country's greatest original contribution to the fine arts. It became the standard text on the subject; its authority was accepted at home and abroad, and the book was read widely across Europe, mainly in a French translation. It influenced taste and design; taught visitors how to respond to gardens; analysed natural and built elements of the garden; suggested principles of design; and provided descriptions of major gardens of the day, such as those at Blenheim and Piercefield (Monmouthshire), together with the author's responses, aesthetic, mental and emotional. It indicates a taste for the natural and the "picturesque", foreshadowing romanticism.
This first modern edition of the text is accompanied by an introduction and full commentary, covering both general considerations and specific points and topics. Contemporary illustrations have been chosen to illuminate further the gardens and places discussed.
Shostakovich in France
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Traces how Shostakovich's music in France shifted from being seen in its communist context to an emblem of humanism and resistance across the twentieth century.
This book examines shifting critical responses to Shostakovich's music in France throughout the twentieth century - from its introduction in Paris during the 1930s, through to the 1990s, when the symphonies and Lady Macbeth were being performed and staged widely in the capital and across the provinces.
The story begins with the role of Shostakovich's music in 1930s Paris before investigating the period of repression of Soviet music under Vichy France and German Occupation. After the Liberation, an influx of Shostakovich symphonies premiered in Paris. The early years of the Cold War see Shostakovich making his only visit to France, when his music became entangled with international political and aesthetic debates regarding the creative freedom of artists. The era of political and cultural détente goes hand in hand with a warmer reception of Shostakovich's music across France, while Shostakovich's music sees intense programming during the revolutions of 1989 and the end of the Cold War. The narrative concludes with a look at programming Shostakovich in Paris and the provinces after the demise of the Soviet Union.
As this account shows, Shostakovich's music served as a means for French writers to articulate their own ideas, opinions and concerns about the Soviet Union: ultimately, the music of Shostakovich evolved from an icon of French Communism to a symbol of humanism and resistance with a broader social and political appeal.
Borders and the Norman World
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Study of the Norman World's borders, frontiers, and boundaries in Europe, shedding fresh light on their nature and extent.
The Normans exerted great influence across Christendom and beyond in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Figures like William the Conqueror and Robert Guiscard subdued vast territories, their feats recorded for posterity by chroniclers such as Orderic Vitalis and Geoffrey Malaterra. Through travel and conquest, the Normans encountered, created, and conceptualised many borders, with the areas of Europe that they ruled and most affected often being grouped together as the "Norman World".
This volume examines the nature, forms, and function of borders in and around this "Norman World", looking at Normandy, the British-Irish Isles, and Southern Italy. Three sections frame the collection. The first concerns physical features, from broad frontier expanses, to rivers and walls that were both literally and metaphorically lines of division. The second shows how borders were established, contested, and negotiated between the papacy and lay rulers and senior churchmen. Finally, the third highlights the utility of conceptual frontiers for both medieval authors and modern historians. Among the subjects covered are Archbishop Anselm's travels across Christendom; the portrayal of borders in the writings of William of Jumièges, Orderic Vitalis, and Gerald of Wales; and the limits of Norman seigneurial and papal power at the edges of Europe. Overall, the essays demonstrate the role that the manipulation of borders played in the creation of the "Norman World", and address what these borders did and whom they benefited.
The Royal National Lifeboat Institution, 1824-1897
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An overview of the early years of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI), highlighting the debates about how far the organisation should be self-supporting or state-funded.
One of the key dilemmas for the state in nineteenth century Britain was how far should it provide public services. The case of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI), a private charity founded in 1824, demonstrates this dilemma in action. By 1850, despite a promising start, the RNLI was in danger of total collapse with a severe lack of funds, unable to provide the lifeboats required. This book, based on extensive original research, explores how the government, after some hesitation, funded the charity for a fifteen year period, withdrawing from involvement once the charity was back on its feet. The book examines how this limited support enabled the charity to re-organise and expand into a truly national service, absorbing many previously independent lifeboat organisations, so that by the end of the century the RNLI was a large, sophisticated and complex charity wielding considerable influence at the highest levels of the establishment, developing pioneering fundraising techniques and highly sophisticated publicity, branding and reputation management strategies. Overall, the book refines our understanding of how laissez-faire and state intervention worked in practice and shows how it came about that Britain and Ireland's lifeboat service is provided by a charity rather than the state.
Orientalism and the Making of Turkology in the Age of the Enlightenment
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Reveals how early modern European engagement with Muslim and Chinese sources forged Turkology and offers a cohesive synthesis of how Enlightenment Orientalism was shaped by both cross-cultural circulations and local dynamics.
Set against the backdrop of the Long Eighteenth Century, this book traces how European scholars engaged with the pre-Ottoman past and geographic presence of Turkic peoples, gradually defining a distinct field within Oriental studies: Turkology. Following the movement of people, books, manuscripts, artefacts, and ideas across Eurasia, it shows how transnational circulations, alongside careers, institutions, and scholarly practices, shaped emerging understandings.
Structured in two parts, Despina Magkanari's study offers a clear overview of scholarship on Turkic peoples. The first examines Barthélemy d'Herbelot's Bibliothèque orientale and its role in debates on Turkish origins. Through this lens, Magkanari reveals how d'Herbelot mediated between East and West, revisiting key Muslim sources with Antoine Galland to reshape European historical understandings. The second part explores Jesuit scholarship through Claude Visdelou, whose use of Chinese sources in the Histoire abrégée de la Tartarie reframed Inner Asian historiography. Visdelou's writings are situated within the political, religious, and intellectual landscapes of Qing China and Enlightened Europe, while highlighting the challenges of disseminating his work.
The study offers a cohesive synthesis of Enlightenment Orientalism, its actors, sites, practices, and transnational networks, while remaining attentive to local dynamics and reinterpretations.
The Life and Music of Charles Wood
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Reassesses the life, music and enduring influence of Charles Wood, a central figure in British and Irish music and one of the foremost teachers of his generation.
Charles Wood (1866-1926), Armagh chorister and student of Chares Villiers Stanford, was one of the most significant figures in British and Irish music of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and one of Britain's most important teachers.
This study not only evaluates the substance of Wood's ecclesiastical music, in which, together with Stanford, his contribution was pre-eminent, but also his work in other genres, such as secular vocal music, arrangements of Irish folksong and the Irish cultural revival, orchestral music, opera and, in particular, the string quartet. Wood also found himself at the heart of a new antiquarian revival of early music, plainsong, psalmody and hymnody where his knowledge was uniquely encyclopaedic. This book offers a reassessment of his lasting legacy, the admiration he drew from figures such as Vaughan Williams, Dent and Tippett, and also discusses a considerable series of posthumous publications.
Translating Swiss Theatre in Apartheid South Africa
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Examines how Afrikaans translations of Frisch and Dürrenmatt's plays shaped identity and resistance in apartheid South Africa.
In apartheid South Africa, the plays of the Swiss writers Max Frisch and Friedrich Dürrenmatt found an unexpected life in Afrikaans. Because they did not follow their international contemporaries in supporting the cultural boycott, their works were frequently translated and staged there between 1948 and 1994.
This book investigates these Afrikaans translations by engaging in close readings of surviving scripts, interviews, and archival traces to uncover the lives and motives of the people who translated, directed and performed them. In the process, it reveals the sparks generated between the plays themselves and the South African political context in which they circulated.
Frisch and Dürrenmatt's plays helped to shape the growth of Afrikaans as a world language and an emblem of Afrikaner identity. Yet they were also enlisted as vehicles of resistance, carrying new ideas into an increasingly airless intellectual environment. Exploring these crosscurrents, the book moves beyond the specific concerns of translating Swiss literature into Afrikaans to consider cultural boycotts, censorship, and the ways translation can be harnessed to promote or subvert political and aesthetic values.
On publication this book is available as an Open Access ebook under the Creative Commons license CC BY-NC.
Forgeries and Historical Writing in England, France, and Flanders, 900-1200
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A close analysis of forgeries and historical writings at Saint Peter's, Ghent; Saint-Denis near Paris; and Christ Church, Canterbury, offering valuable access to why medieval people often rewrote their pasts.
What modern scholars call "forgeries" (be they texts, seals, coins, or relics) flourished in the central Middle Ages. Although lying was considered wrong throughout the period, such condemnation apparently did not extend to forgeries. Rewriting documents was especially common among monks, who exploited their mastery of writing to reshape their records.
Monastic scribes frequently rewrote their archives, using charters, letters, and narratives, to create new usable pasts for claiming lands and privileges in their present or future. Such imagined histories could also be deployed to "reform" their community or reshape its relationship with lay and ecclesiastical authorities. Although these creative rewritings were forgeries, they still can be valuable evidence of medieval mentalities. While forgeries cannot easily be used to reconstruct what did happen, forgeries embedded in historical narratives show what their composers believed should have happened and thus they offer valuable access to why medieval people rewrote their pasts.
This book offers close analysis of three monastic archives over the long eleventh century: Saint Peter's, Ghent; Saint-Denis near Paris; and Christ Church, Canterbury. These foci provide the basis for contextualizing key shifts in documentary culture in the twelfth century across Europe. Overall, the book argues that connections between monastic forgeries and historical writing in the tenth through twelfth centuries reveal attempts to reshape reality. Both sought to rewrite the past and thereby promote monks' interests in their present or future.
Translating Swiss Theatre in Apartheid South Africa
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Examines how Afrikaans translations of Frisch and Dürrenmatt's plays shaped identity and resistance in apartheid South Africa.
In apartheid South Africa, the plays of the Swiss writers Max Frisch and Friedrich Dürrenmatt found an unexpected life in Afrikaans. Because they did not follow their international contemporaries in supporting the cultural boycott, their works were frequently translated and staged there between 1948 and 1994.
This book investigates these Afrikaans translations by engaging in close readings of surviving scripts, interviews, and archival traces to uncover the lives and motives of the people who translated, directed and performed them. In the process, it reveals the sparks generated between the plays themselves and the South African political context in which they circulated.
Frisch and Dürrenmatt's plays helped to shape the growth of Afrikaans as a world language and an emblem of Afrikaner identity. Yet they were also enlisted as vehicles of resistance, carrying new ideas into an increasingly airless intellectual environment. Exploring these crosscurrents, the book moves beyond the specific concerns of translating Swiss literature into Afrikaans to consider cultural boycotts, censorship, and the ways translation can be harnessed to promote or subvert political and aesthetic values.
On publication this book is available as an Open Access ebook under the Creative Commons license CC BY-NC.
The Politics of Religious Toleration in Scotland, 1689-1714
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An examination of the last attempt to enforce Presbyterian religious uniformity across Scotland, and how toleration was perceived on the eve of the Enlightenment.
The revolution of 1688-90 was regarded by many as an opportunity to return the Church of Scotland to the Presbyterian uniformity and orthodox Calvinism of earlier generations. These aspirations, however, were undermined by a growing culture of Protestant nonconformity as the Episcopalians, among other dissenting groups, challenged the mono-confessional uniformity that the Presbyterians hoped to achieve.
Drawing on recent scholarship on religious toleration, this book explores how interconnected political, intellectual, and social forces reshaped Scotland's religious landscape and forced the Church gradually to concede that its exclusive monopoly on religious worship had ended. It provides new insights into the means by which uniformity was enforced and contested, moving beyond high politics to consider the practical realities of religious co-existence, the challenge presented by heterodoxy, the emergence of a tolerationist movement, the Scottish response to "liberty of conscience", and how the union of 1707 accelerated the collapse of uniformity. In doing so, it reveals how Scotland's reluctant embrace of pluralism contributed to the broader religious diversity of the emerging British state.
British Statecraft and the Baltic Sea Region
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Offering editorial commentary and interpretation while presenting wide-ranging sources from the early modern period to the present day, the book chronicles how British statecraft has functioned in the Baltic as a geopolitical space.
British Statecraft and the Baltic: A Documentary History chronicles how British statecraft has functioned in the Baltic as a geopolitical space and shows how Britain's relationship with the region has shaped the evolution of British political economy. Bringing together a carefully selected variety of variety of sources, it begins in the early modern period, with the rise in diplomatic and commercial engagement with the Baltic Sea region and continues to the present day, engaging with the consequences of Brexit and increased Russian hostility. Britain's relationship with the Baltic has always been defined by its proximity firstly to the European geopolitical struggle centred on Germany, and secondly to a 'Eurasian hinterland' that has long provided Europe with crucial natural resources, from the grain, potash and naval stores that passed through the Danish straights, to oil and natural gas, and that gives Russia huge influence over the region. In light of these proximities, British statecraft in the Baltic has been fundamentally shaped by the challenges of preventing imperialism in Europe. From the role of neutrality in economic coercion to the question of whether, and how, Britain should commit to defending the sovereignty of European states, the Baltic is where Britain has always wrestled most acutely with the meaning of sovereignty.
Outside the European Union, Britain's relationship not only with 'Europe' as a single, increasingly integrated geopolitical area, but with different European geopolitical spaces and states has become even more important. The Baltic remains one of the key areas of geopolitical interest for Britain today, with British troops deployed to Estonia and Poland, and longstanding commercial and political relationships with states across the region established. The authors take a clear view: that Britain must continue to commit to its commitments under Article 5 to preserve liberty and democracy at home. However, by engaging with the historical documents that chart British statecraft over 300 years, British Statecraft and the Baltic allows specialist and non-specialist readers alike to form their own understanding of British statecraft.
Historical Performance in Baroque Music
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A practical and scholarly guide to performing Baroque music with historical insight and artistic confidence.
This is an in-depth guide to the performance of Baroque music for musicians, listeners, undergraduate and graduate music students, and conservatory and university instructors. Rigorously scholarly, yet readable by non-specialists, it is designed to serve not only as an introduction to historical performance for those new to the subject, but also as a reference book for those experienced in the field, and as a course book in early music performance practice. Part 1 covers essential topics such as historical voices and instruments, articulation, and ornamentation and improvisation. Part 2 turns to particular performance issues in selections ranging from vocal chamber music by Strozzi, Handel, Jacquet, and Bach to instrumental compositions by Castello, Corelli, Couperin, and (again) Bach. The book draws on the author's broad experience as a performer, teacher and writer on Baroque music. It can serve as a general handbook on historical performance practice that also addresses specific questions raised by commonly performed recital and concert repertoire.
Women, Money and Markets, 1770–1914
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A rich exploration of the many ways women shaped the economic and cultural life of the eighteenth and nineteenth century.
This collection redefines the role of women in the development of modern capitalism, revealing their active participation as investors, entrepreneurs, theorists, and cultural producers between 1770 and 1914. Drawing on archival research and literary analysis, the essays uncover how women shaped financial systems, navigated market constraints, and leveraged sentiment, education, and capital to assert economic agency.
Bridging literary studies with social and economic history, Women, Money and Markets challenges the conventional portrayal of the marketplace as a purely rational domain, highlighting instead the emotional and relational dynamics that underpinned women's economic lives. From shareholder lists to fictional representations, contributors explore how women influenced the financialisation of the economy and contested their marginalisation in both historical records and cultural narratives.
Featuring fresh readings of authors like Wollstonecraft and Gaskell alongside lesser-known voices, this volume offers a plural and nuanced account of women's economic engagement, and its representation, across diverse contexts. It is essential reading for scholars of literature, history, gender studies, and anyone interested in the invisible hands that helped shape the modern world.
EMMA NEWPORT is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Sussex. JOYCE GOGGIN is Associate Professor of Literature at the University of Amsterdam.
Constructing Polish Musical Identities outside Poland since 1880
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Examines music's role in political and cultural images of Poland during a period in which Poland regained independence, suffered cruelly in warfare, was a member of the Soviet bloc, then overthrew communism and joined the European Union.
This collection analyses the function of music in twentieth and twenty-first century constructions of 'Polishness' by non-Polish, or Polish emigré, musicians, writers, critics, film and TV makers. Musicological studies are interleaved with collaborations from scholars in related disciplines (literature and film studies) to generate new understandings of music's role in political and cultural images of Poland during a period in which Poland regained independence, suffered cruelly in warfare, was a member of the Soviet bloc, then overthrew communism and joined the European Union.
During this eventful period the musical images of 'Poland' made beyond its boundaries have taken fascinating turns. Music has played a key function in how constructions of 'Polishness' in artistic work, media and critical discourse made outside Poland have inflected Poland's international image and standing. Essays examine diverse musical styles and sources and their roles in composition, performance, cinema, television, literature, poetry, politics, the writings of history, and constructions of biography. Together, they contribute significantly to furthering the broader debates on ideas of Polishness. Contributors have diverse relationships with Poland. This diversity complements the disciplinary range represented. Musical figurations of 'Polishness' are therefore illuminated from multiple angles.
Medieval Clothing and Textiles 20
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The best new research on medieval clothing and textiles, drawing from a range of disciplines.
The essays collected here continue to showcase the Journal's wide-ranging and eclectic tradition. The topics addressed are a technical analysis of a fragment of the Bayeux Tapestry that was cut from the hanging and later restored; the inner workings of a fifteenth-century Lucchese cloth business; the luxurious textiles used and re-used for the Field of Cloth of Gold; the wardrobe of Kateryn Parr, Henry VIII's last queen, and how she manipulated clothing and textiles for political ends; Henry Stewart, Lord Darnley's use of sartorial strategies during his short reign as king of Scotland; and a detailed investigation of the textile known as the "Bacton Altar Cloth" that reconsiders its history and uses.
Rewriting the First Crusade
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An exploration of the letters from the First Crusade, yielding evidence for a number of reinterpretations of the movement.
The letters stemming from the First Crusade are premier sources for understanding the launch, campaign, and aftermath of the expedition. Between 1095 and 1100, epistles sustained social relationships across the Mediterranean and within Europe, as a mixture of historical writing, literary invention, news, and theological interpretation. They served ecclesiastical administration, projected authority, and formed focal points for spiritual commemoration and para-liturgical campaigns.
This volume, grounded on extensive research into the original manuscripts, and presenting numerous new manuscript witnesses, argues that some of the letters are post hoc "inventions", composed by generations of scribe-readers who visited crusading sites from the twelfth century on, adding new layers of meaning in the form of interpolations and post-scripts. Drawing upon this new understanding, and blurring the distinction of epistolary "reality", it rewrites central aspects of the history of the First Crusade, considering the documents in a new way: as markers of enthusiasm and support for the crusade movement among monastic clergy, who copied and consumed them as a form of scribal crusading. Whether authentic letters or literary "confections", they functioned as communal sites for the celebration, commemoration and memorialisation of the expedition.
The British Country House Revival
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British country houses have experienced a renaissance since the early 1970s. A new accord is needed today, recognising the increasingly contested contribution of country houses to British cultural life.
Fifty years ago, the future for country houses in Britain looked bleak. The Victoria & Albert Museum's exhibition The Destruction of the Country House, which opened in October 1974, charted the loss of over a thousand country houses in the preceding century. The makers of the exhibition warned that history could be "about to repeat itself" because of the threats besetting mansion properties, principally from higher taxation. Houses faced the prospect of having to be stripped of their collections and sold for use as offices, hotels, or hospitals, with their parks and gardens turned into golf clubs. Government might afford to save just a handful of the most significant of these places, working in tandem with charities such as the National Trust. The rest would be consigned to history.
This book traces the history of country houses in Britain, from the Destruction exhibition to the present day. The wave of country house losses anticipated in 1974 never actually happened. Instead, over the next five decades Britain's country houses experienced a renaissance. Fiscal rules changed in the mid-1970s to make it easier for owners to hold on to their assets. Economic improvements in the 1980s and 1990s allowed many houses and estates to develop profitable commercial businesses. All of this was achieved only after dedicated campaigning from heritage organisations in support of the country house cause. The book argues that a new accord is needed today, to recognise and value the ongoing, if increasingly contested, contribution of country houses to British life and culture in the twenty-first century.
The Church of England’s Western Schism
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Examines one of the most significant events in the history of the late Georgian church, and revises accepted notions of Evangelical and Anglican ecclesiology and identity.
This study examines the establishment and progress of the Western Schism, which occurred between 1815 and c.1825-the first group secession from the Church of England since the Nonjurors during the late seventeenth century. As such, the Schism proved to be one of the most significant events in the history of the Church between the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the enactment of the 'Constitutional Revolution' of 1828-32. Despite the fears of many inside and outside the Church that the Schism would produce a wave of Evangelical secessions throughout England and Ireland, its influence was largely confined to London and the counties of Devon, Dorset, Gloucestershire, Hampshire, Somerset, Sussex and Wiltshire. Its leadership was comprised of a comparatively small group of clergy and laity drawn from prominent and influential commercial and clerical families (especially those from the Baring banking tribe) and bound by close ties of kinship, friendship and ideology. These factors, along with the Schism's heretical pronouncements and unusual ecclesial practices, its inclusion of women's ministry, and its secretive nature, generated considerable sensationalism and novelty value. The same factors also provoked a sustained period of criticism in which numerous leading religious figures, journals and newspapers participated. Surprisingly, while this criticism of the Schism emerged from every point on the religious compass, including High Churchmen, liberals and Nonconformists, it was the Evangelicals who quickly emerged as the Schism's principal critics. Evangelicals denounced not only the heretical nature of the Schism, but also its inclusion of women in leadership, its abandonment of the Established Church and its attempts to tarnish the reputation of the 'gospel party' by calling into question its adherence to apostolic fidelity and the Reformed heritage of the English Church. This work, the first extensive examination of the Western Schism, revises accepted notions of Evangelical (and Anglican) ecclesiology and identity during the late Georgian period. It discloses how a prominent and small, but influential, group of clergy and laity, alarmed by the Church's failure to respond adequately to the disruptive social and spiritual events of the day, set out to establish a rival ecclesial body which, despite the investment of significant energy and financial resources, ultimately failed to coalesce into a viable and lasting alternative to the Established Church.
The Importance of Elgar
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A landmark celebration of Edward Elgar's life, music and enduring influence, bringing together leading voices from across the musical world.
Of the many biographies and other books published about Edward Elgar few have brought together as many composers, performers, and writers as this anthology, in celebration of his art and life. Published to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the Society which bears his name, The Importance of Elgar brings together both executant musicians and others who share their love and appreciation of his music and what it means to them and, more widely, his place in the canon of western music. With a foreword by the Society's President, Sir Mark Elder, the more than 60 contributors include Dame Janet Baker, Sir Stephen Hough, Sir James MacMillan and Christian Tetzlaf. The choice of the word 'importance' ensured that those who contributed to this volume would write something personal. The Elgar Society's first President, Sir Adrian Boult, was one of the great interpreters of Elgar's music and his commitment remains an inspiration to many today. It was Sir Adrian who suggested the formation of The Elgar Society during a series of concerts in Malvern in 1950. Four months later, in January 1951, what became the largest composer society in Britain was formed. Edited by David Morris, The Elgar Society's Secretary, and Andrew Neill a former Society Chairman, this book offers the practising musician and music lover alike some fresh insights into Elgar's music and his importance beyond the shores of Britain.
Gender, Science and Sociability in the Diary of Jane Ewbank of York (1778-1824)
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Examines the newly-discovered diary of Jane Ewbank as a vital site of knowledge-making, illuminating women's intellectual lives in Enlightenment York, where science, cultural criticism and sociability intersected.
Between 1803 and 1805, Jane Ewbank of York kept a fascinating diary which chronicled her place within the lively Enlightenment world of northern England. Written in engaging prose, the diary offers a rare, richly textured account of a provincial woman's engagement with science, cultural criticism, and sociability in York and beyond.
This interdisciplinary volume includes an annotated transcription of Ewbank's 34,000-word diary alongside essays situating it within the gendered knowledge networks of northern England. Exploring her participation in scientific lectures, women's writing and the arts in York, contributors interrogate the diary as a media technology, a cognitive tool, and an emotionally informed thinking device. Ewbank's encounters with figures such as the novelist and educationalist Maria Edgeworth, the scientific lecturer Henry Moyes, and the philanthropist Catherine Cappe are explored throughout. Intersecting topics ranging from natural theology and scientific education to literature, theatre and music are all discussed.
The essays variously engage with historiographies of early modern life-writing, Enlightenment sociability, and the emotional economies of medicine, while offering reflections that challenge colonial silences and foreground global entanglements. Drawing on recent work in the history of science, literature and feminist theory, this volume redefines the diary as a critical artefact of Enlightenment culture and offers a compelling model for studying gendered intellectual life in regional contexts.
MATTHEW DANIEL EDDY is Durham University's Professor and Chair in the History and Philosophy of Science and Co-Director of the Institute for Medieval and Early Modern Studies.
RACHEL FELDBERG is a doctoral candidate at the Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies, University of York.
JANE RENDALL is an Honorary Fellow of the Centre for Eighteenth Studies and the History Department at the University of York.
Contributors: Michael Brown, Matthew Daniel Eddy, Rachel Feldberg, Corinne Fowler, Joanna de Groot, Roseanna Kettle, Karen Lipsedge, Jon Mee, Jane Rendall, Gillian Russell, Millie Schurch.
Granville Bantock and the Orchestral Refiguring of Literature
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Illuminates Bantock's experimentation with musical structure to create effective representations of literature, while offering new notions of the modern in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century music.
Granville Bantock (1868-1946) remains one of the most significant British composers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. This book provides an in-depth exploration of a series of orchestral compositions by Bantock based on different forms of literature (the poem, the drama, the novel) penned by a wide range of authors including Robert Browning, Samuel Butler, Dante, Ernest Dowson, Thomas Moore, Percy Shelley, Sophocles and Robert Southey. The majority of the musical works discussed date from Bantock's most successful period as a composer (c.1899-1911), when his music was perceived to be 'modern'. Although critics were struck by his skills in orchestration, central to his modernist credentials is his distinctive approach to musical structure. The book's in-depth analyses, drawing on a wide range of literary scholarship, demonstrate a more meaningful way to appreciate these designs as individual responses to the literary texts on which they are based. As well as tackling the vexed issue of programme music, the book also highlights Bantock's association with orientalism. As the first major study of Bantock's orchestral music, this book not only demonstrates the composer's experimentation with musical structure to create effective representations of literature, but its findings also have a wider significance in terms of notions of the modern and the interdisciplinary potential of music-literature studies in general.
British Merchant Seafarer Training and Education
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The first overview of merchant seafarer training and education in a single volume, outlining the development of training and education from the earliest time to the present.
Because merchant seafarers practise their occupation largely out of sight of the general population ashore, there persists a widespread ignorance of seafaring and seafarers, which has been labelled "sea blindness". Moreover, much writing on seafarers and seafarer training is dispersed in journal articles, which tend to be restricted in scope. This book presents the first overview of merchant seafarer training and education in a single volume. It outlines the development of training and education from the earliest time to the present, examines the different aspects of training and education, and covers the numerous and differing policies and training structures put in place by various shipowners. Despite national state regulation merchant shipping is not a single organisation like the Royal Navy. In addition to being a contribution to maritime studies and maritime history, the book also reveals a great deal about vocational training and education in general.
Janáček's Sinfonietta
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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.
Lloyd George and the Coalition Liberal Party
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Key documents from around the time that the Labour Party replaced the Liberals as the main opposition to the Conservatives.
The Scovell papers provide previously unseen insights into the Coalition Liberal party: a party created to support David Lloyd George, prime minister 1916-1922, and his allies who had split from the main Liberal party during the First World War. They document the evolution of British politics at the point when the Liberals were giving way to Labour as the opposition to the Conservatives. They also document Lloyd George's failure to achieve a fusion of the Conservatives and Coalition Liberals to create an anti-socialist centre right party to stem the rise of Labour. The documents, at the intersection between the party at Westminster and the wider party in the country, make a significant contribution to debates about the relative primacy of the higher level versus the lower level within the evolution of British political system in this period. They show that the Coalition Liberal party had genuine substance at the local level,built up with painstaking spadework by Scovell and others, sufficiently strong to strike local deals in the 1922 election, thereby raising Lloyd George's hopes, falsely as it turned out, that he would be a key power broker and potentially still prime minister in the new parliament.
Medieval Arms and Armour: A Sourcebook. Volume III: 1450-1500
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Authoritative reference guide, using the documents in which arms and armour first appeared to explain and define them.
Medieval arms and armour are intrinsically fascinating. From the smoke and noise of the armourer's forge to the bloody violence of the battlefield or the silken panoply of the tournament, weapons and armour - and those who made and bore them - are woven into the fabric of medieval society. This sourcebook will aid anyone who seeks to develop a deeper understanding by introducing and presenting the primary sources in which these artefacts are first mentioned. Over seventy original documents are transcribed and translated, including wills, inventories, letters and chronicle accounts, from a period which saw rapid advances in military technology. The book also includes an extensive glossary, and is lavishly illustrated with images of both extant armour and weapons from the period, and contemporary artistic depictions from illuminated manuscripts and other sources. This book will therefore be of interest to a wide audience, from the living history practitioner, crafter, and martial artist, to students of literature, military history, art, and material culture.
Richard Wagner: My Life [Two Volume Set]
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The first fully annotated scholarly edition and masterful new translation of Wagner's autobiography, revealing the composer's self-fashioning and mythmaking.
Richard Wagner's life was as tempestuous as his music and in his own retelling it constitutes a gripping narrative. His autobiography, My Life, matters if one wants to understand the composer's life or the way in which he himself saw that life. And yet, it has a flawed publishing history: Bayreuth published the first commercial edition in 1911, but it was not until 1963 that the full text appeared in an annotated German edition. An anonymous English translation was published in 1911, the work of a translator unfamiliar with the subject. A second translation, published in 1983, remains problematical. Until this day, no edition published in any language has risen to the challenge of providing adequate annotation. This new scholarly edition and translation by Stewart Spencer is the first edition to do so.
Annotations provided here explain references and allusions that Wagner himself took for granted and correct lapses of memory that the text contains. The edition highlights various strategies of concealment as far as Wagner's love life and revolutionary activities were concerned. As the text illustrates, by the 1860s Wagner was anxious to portray himself as Beethoven's natural successor, and his life in defence of art as a bulwark against the decline of Western civilization. This new critical edition and translation of Richard Wagner's autobiography is a response to one of the most pressing needs in the entire Wagner bibliography.
The British Army, Society and Soldiering in Ireland, 1699-1793
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A comprehensive overview of the British army in Ireland in the eighteenth century and the army's relationship with the local population.
The eighteenth-century army in Ireland, which consisted of 12,000 to 15,000 men, and which was its own quasi-independent "Establishment", paid for, housed by, and commanded from Dublin, represented a significant proportion of overall British military forces. This book, based on extensive original research, presents an overview of army life in Ireland in the period. It covers the administration of the Irish Establishment, recruitment, desertion, criminality, drunkenness, everyday routines, soldier-civilian relations, the response of soldiers to growing revolutionary unrest, and more. It overturns much established thinking, demonstrating for example that desertion in the army in Ireland was no different from desertion in the army elsewhere, that the army in Ireland was well-trained and efficient, and that Irish soldiers were far more common in British service than previously thought. In addition, the book discusses ideas of masculinity, the army's place in the defence of Ireland against foreign invasion, in securing the ascendancy regime and in suppressing unrest, and the unusual situation of Ireland as both subject and participant in the development of the British empire.
The Tithe War in England and Wales, 1881-1936
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Brings to life a fascinating page of history in a scholarly but highly readable account of the "tithe war".
Co-WINNER: 2025 Thirsk Prize (British Agricultural History Society)
During the 1930s, farming communities waged a campaign of "passive resistance" against Tithe Rentcharge, the modern version of medieval tithe. Led by the National Tithepayers' Association, farmers refused to pay the charge, disrupted auctions of seized stock and joined demonstrations to prevent action by bailiffs. The National Government condemned their "unconstitutional action", ruled out changes in the law and mobilised police to support the titheowners. Meanwhile, the Church of England and lay titheowners - including Oxford and Cambridge colleges, public schools and major landowners - sought to vindicate their right to tithe; in a particularly shameful episode, the Church established a secret company to buy taken produce and remove it from farms.
This "tithe war" was fought outside farms, in the courts, in the press and in the wider arena of public opinion. It posed problems for the Church, legal system, and every political party; split the National Farmers' Union; and provided opportunities for the British Union of Fascists and other sections of the extreme right to cause disturbance.
Drawing on extensive archival research, accounts in local newspapers, and private papers, John Bulaitis traces the evolution of what has been described as this "curious rural revolt", from the late nineteenth century to its climax in 1936, when the Tithe Act brought an end to this form of tax.
Textiles of the Viking North Atlantic
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An examination of the uses, meanings, and social impact of Viking Age textiles.
This volume offers the first full study of archaeological fabrics and their decoration found in the North Atlantic region and dating broadly from the Viking or Norse period. With contributions from both academic scholars and practitioners, it shows how approaching early medieval textiles from archaeological, historical and literary contexts, and through the processes of learning and employing the traditional skills of making them, brings about a more nuanced understanding of early medieval cloths: their creation, use and meanings within their respective societies.
The book is divided into two parts. The first, "Textiles and their Interpretation", takes the reader on a journey from how wool was processed in the Viking Age, and the conservator's role in preserving and interpreting archaeological textiles, to different types of analyses that researchers use to understand and explain textiles from across the wide area of the Viking-influenced North Atlantic region. The second, "Understanding through Replicating", investigates the results of practical experiments in the reconstruction of surviving medieval fabrics and the resulting empirical conclusions that can be made about their manufacture and wider cultural implications.
Medieval Arms and Armour: A Sourcebook. Volume II: 1400–1450
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Authoritative reference guide, using the documents in which arms and armour first appeared to explain and define them.
Medieval arms and armour are intrinsically fascinating. From the smoke and noise of the armourer's forge to the bloody violence of the battlefield or the silken panoply of the tournament, weapons and armour - and those who made and bore them - are woven into the fabric of medieval society. This sourcebook will aid anyone who seeks to develop a deeper understanding by introducing and presenting the primary sources in which these artefacts are first mentioned. Over a hundred original documents are transcribed and translated, including wills and inventories, craft statutes, chronicle accounts, and challenges to single combat. The book also includes an extensive glossary, lavishly illustrated with forty-six images of extant armour and weapons from the period, and contemporary artistic depictions from illuminated manuscripts and other sources. This book will therefore be of interest to a wide audience, from the living history practitioner, crafter, and martial artist, to students of literature, military history, art, and material culture.
Scotland, the Wars of the Roses, and European Politics
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Traces Scotland's involvement in the increasingly dynamic international relations of the fifteenth century.
In 1461 the eyes of much of Europe were trained on Scotland. King Henry VI of England had fled into exile there following his defeat by Edward of York at Towton. This attention may have been exceptional, but it demonstrates that despite its location, Scotland was an integral part of the European political world and, in particular, between the 1450s and 1490s, a key external player in the Wars of the Roses. However, although Scotland's role in these decades was never confined to Britain, scholarship has tended to downplay its continental connections. This book demonstrates the extent to which the Scots were active and engaged participants on a wider stage. Military, dynastic, and economic contacts meant that during the fifteenth century, Scotland was a recognised factor in the diplomacy of rulers from Italy to Scandinavia. It shows the importance of maintaining external relationships for the Scots, the fluctuating value of these relationships to other rulers, and how English political events were also bound up with wider patterns abroad.
The Thun-Hohenstein Album
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The first extensive study of the depiction of the armour in the Thun-Hohenstein Album against the vibrant artistic and cultural contexts that created it.
In late medieval and early modern Europe, armour was more than a defensive technology for war or knightly sport. Its diverse types formed a complex visual language. Luxury armour was fitted precisely to a wearer's body, and its memorable details declared his status. Empty armour could evoke an owner's physical presence, prompting recollection of knightly personae, glittering pageantry, and impressive feats of arms. Its mnemonic power persisted long after the battle had ended, the trumpets had gone silent, and the dust had settled in the tournament arena.
Previously believed to contain preliminary designs sketched by master armourers, the Thun-Hohenstein album is a bound collection of drawings by professional book painters depicting some of the most artistically and technologically innovative armours of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Like a paper version of the princely armories that first formed during the 1500s, the album's images offered rich sites of meaning and memory. Their organization within the codex suggests the images' significance to their compiler. At the same time, the composition and details allow the reader to trace the transmission of recognizable armours, and the memories they embodied, from the anvil to the page.
This book is the first to examine the album, and the armor it depicts, in their vibrant artistic and cultural context. In five thematic chapters, it moves from case studies of these drawings to explore the album's complex intersections with the genres of martial history, material culture, and literature. It also reveals the album's participation in cultures of remembrance that carried mythic, knightly personae constructed around powerful Habsburg princes forward in time from the Middle Ages into the early modern era, from the courts of the Holy Roman Empire to emerging urban audiences.
The Importance of Elgar
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A landmark celebration of Edward Elgar's life, music and enduring influence, bringing together leading voices from across the musical world.
Of the many biographies and other books published about Edward Elgar few have brought together as many composers, performers, and writers as this anthology, in celebration of his art and life. Published to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the Society which bears his name, The Importance of Elgar brings together both executant musicians and others who share their love and appreciation of his music and what it means to them and, more widely, his place in the canon of western music. With a foreword by the Society's President, Sir Mark Elder, the more than 60 contributors include Dame Janet Baker, Sir Stephen Hough, Sir James MacMillan and Christian Tetzlaf. The choice of the word 'importance' ensured that those who contributed to this volume would write something personal. The Elgar Society's first President, Sir Adrian Boult, was one of the great interpreters of Elgar's music and his commitment remains an inspiration to many today. It was Sir Adrian who suggested the formation of The Elgar Society during a series of concerts in Malvern in 1950. Four months later, in January 1951, what became the largest composer society in Britain was formed. Edited by David Morris, The Elgar Society's Secretary, and Andrew Neill a former Society Chairman, this book offers the practising musician and music lover alike some fresh insights into Elgar's music and his importance beyond the shores of Britain.
Agricultural Modernisation and the Green Revolution in the Twentieth-Century World
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An overarching history of the origins, development, and application of agricultural innovation in the past, and of the paradigms and institutional frameworks in which they were developed throughout the twentieth century.
From the late nineteenth century onwards, rural societies and agrarian production across the world were profoundly transformed. Prior to the Second World War, technological innovations developed within an intensive organic framework and advanced largely in dialogue with existing producers. After the war, social engineering became the prevailing model in agricultural and rural policies almost everywhere. Modernisation was imposed from above, targeting so-called "archaic" or "anti-modern" peasants and farmers, who were pushed to produce ever-greater quantities of food, timber, and other raw materials through the expanded use of industrial and inorganic resources. Applied as a USA political programme in Asian, Latin American and African countries, this strategy became known as the "Green Revolution". Although it undermined rural societies and eroded the sustainability of agricultural production, it remained central to political agendas, leaving a difficult legacy for future generations.
This book analyses agrarian change and agricultural policies before and after 1945, highlighting the socio-economic and environmental consequences of these two very different periods in global agrarian history. Its diverse case studies span continents and political systems, considering topics from post-war reconstruction in the UK and Denmark to development policies in the Belgian Congo and post-fascist Ethiopia; from production projects in communist Hungary to agricultural transformations across the Southern Cone and India.
Chapter 6 is available as Open Access under the Creative Commons licence CC BY-NC-ND
Drawings in Books in Medieval Britain from the Ninth Century to the Reformation
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The first broad and long study of a major aspect of British medieval art, examining the historical relationships between medieval drawings and books.
The art of drawing and its products had a determining relationship to the visual arts of the Middle Ages. They also had other purposes, which if understood, help one to grasp the broader availability and usefulness of the medium. This groundbreaking study deals particularly with the historical relationships between medieval drawings and books. Using a wide range of material and documentary evidence, it explains how book-bound drawings may be defined, classified, and understood in relation to their physical settings and the ends they were made to serve. In orientation, the study is primarily art historical: most of its arguments emerge from curiosity about the psychology and experience of making drawn images. As such, it tackles a surprisingly neglected field. Because it deals with a pervasive aspect of book-design, it also makes a basic contribution to medieval codicology. There are six substantial chapters, the first two dealing with the definition of drawings, existing scholarly approaches to them, and issues of artistic status and agency. These lay the groundwork for the rest of the study, which analyses the placement of drawings at the fronts and backs of books (chapters 3, 4), and drawings embedded in the bodies of manuscripts that were mainly devoted to text (chapters 5, 6). Drawing emerges as an accessible, flexible medium of expression to rank with writing.
Destroyers, Naval Culture and British Identity
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An overview of what destroyers were and how their capacity for heroic deeds captured the popular imagination.
Destroyers, first developed over the course of the late 1880s and 1890s, were fast, manoeuverable warships intended to escort larger vessels and defend them against a wide range of threats. In Britain their speed, nimbleness and capacity for heroic deeds captured the popular imagination, and they became symbolic vessels, encapsulating the fortitude and ingenuity which contemporaries felt characterised the British navy. Based on extensive original research, this book provides both an overview of destroyers' operational roles and how these developed over time and also a detailed examination of destroyers' place within British culture, society and identity. Considering a wide range of sources including news reporting, pageantry, literature, film, art and more, the book reveals how the destroyer as symbol was used as propaganda, fitted in to popular, civic and artistic cultures and affected naval policy, British people's morale and outlook, and international views of Britain's naval power. One striking example of the depth of British people's attachment to destroyers was the scheme during the Second World War for individual towns to each adopt their own destroyer, a scheme which achieved astonishing success, with many small towns raising huge sums sufficient to fund entirely the building of their own destroyer.
Global Perspectives on Women Pianists
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Pathbreaking study that explores the piano as an instrument of globalism, colonialism and mobility and what this meant for women pianists from around the world.
This book surveys women pianists around the world. It focuses on the mid-nineteenth to the late-twentieth centuries, an era that witnessed sustained interest in piano performance against a backdrop of technological and socio-political transformation. The authors range from emerging to established scholars, from the Americas, Europe, Africa, and Asia. They take diverse approaches to the piano as an instrument of globalism, colonialism, class, and mobility, within women's lives. These include explorations of mapping, networks, and cultural transfer; feminist examinations of archival traces; the implications of distinctive geographies and socio-political conditions; and the links between gender and genre, including contemporary and experimental musics. The volume offers a bold account of global approaches to women in music and encourages innovative ways of rethinking piano culture.
Global Perspectives on Women Pianists will be an exciting contribution to the growing landscape of global music history. This book will also contribute to the fields of gender studies, historical musicology, and material history.
The editors have curated a volume that achieves a genuine spread of "global" essays (and commendably, one that includes the "West" as simply another part of the globe).
JOE DAVIES is a faculty member in the Arts and Humanities Division at New York University Abu Dhabi. He previously held research and teaching positions at Maynooth University, the University of California, Irvine, and the University of Oxford.
NATASHA LOGES is Professor of Musicology at the Hochschule für Musik Freiburg. She was previously Head of Postgraduate Programmes at the Royal College of Music, London.
The Telemann Compendium
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The first guide to research on Telemann in any language.
The 'Telemann Renaissance' is now more than half-century old. The veritable explosion of performances, both live and recorded, of the composer's music in recent decades has won him an ever-increasing following among musicians and concert-goers worldwide. This book presents a much-needed gateway for further study. As with other books in the Composer Compendia series, the book includes a brief biography, dictionary, works-list, and selective bibliography.
Liberty in France and Britain, 1159–1789
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Documents the influence Britain and France had on the ideas of liberty and human rights from the twelfth century to the French Revolution.
Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, the motto of the French Republic, encapsulates the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man. The authors trace the history of each article in that Declaration to the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries. That period saw the invention by the French-speaking Norman rulers in England of the common law based on reason and natural rights, of limited monarchy and habeas corpus; and in both France and England the replacement of trials by ordeal and battle with the right to a fair trial or due process, the disappearance of chattel slavery, and the development of the rule of law and republican government. The authors show that the ideas that the French and British held in common from that period were deployed to justify the rebellions and revolutions in the Netherlands and Britain in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and in France and the USA in the eighteenth century. That in turn led to the adoption of human rights declarations, treaties and laws in the twentieth century. The authors trace these ideas from the Policraticus (1159) of John of Salisbury, the Englishman educated in France who dedicated his work to his patron Thomas Becket, through (among others) Thomas More's Utopia (1516), Jean Bodin's Six Books of the Republic (1576), John Locke's Treatises on Government (c.1689), Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws (1748) and William Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765-69) that was widely cited in France and propounds the natural rights of mankind listed in the 1789 Declaration.
Weird Music: Reading John Ireland and Arthur Machen
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Using John Ireland's fascination with Arthur Machen as case study, this book challenges our perception of the correspondence between music and literature in twentieth-century Britain.
The composer John Ireland (1879-1962) declared repeatedly that no one could understand his music until they had first read the work of his favourite writer, Arthur Machen (1863-1947). This book is the first study to take Ireland at his word. Revolving around Machen's classification as a founding figure of 'weird fiction', it uses weird aesthetics as an interpretative lens with which to understand Ireland's notoriously cryptic life and music. Its four chapters deal respectively with Machen's and Ireland's parallel explorations of weird art's relationship with eroticism; with fin-de-siècle London; with the English pastoral tradition; and with unsettling implications of alternative historiography.
The resulting portrait reveals Ireland to be one of Britain's pre-eminent 'weird artists', placing Ireland in the aesthetic context with which he wished to be associated. It therefore fills a significant gap in British musicology, while at the same time contributing to a growing appreciation of Machen as a major figure in British culture, one whose influence exceeds far beyond the literary sphere to which he is traditionally confined. Using Ireland's fascination with Machen as its case study, this book makes a timely and necessary connection between the literary weird and its musical doppelgänger, enriching and challenging our perception of the correspondence between music and literature in twentieth-century Britain.
Robert de Vere, Earl of Oxford and Duke of Ireland (1362-1392)
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The first full-length study of one of the most controversial figures of later fourteenth century England.
Robert de Vere was a close friend of the young King Richard II. He was accused of a wide range of political crimes and private vices by his opponents, the Lords Appellant. Defeated by them at the battle of Radcot Bridge in 1387, he died abroad in exile aged only 30. He was, in the eyes of many contemporaries - most notably the hostile chroniclers Walsingham and Froissart - and modern historians, a typical royal favourite: unmartial, immoral, self-seeking, and promoted and enriched far beyond what he deserved.
But what was a royal favourite, and what were the accusations made against them? This book investigates these questions across late medieval England, and assesses de Vere against contemporary criteria. Based on extensive archival research, this book shows there was more to de Vere than a grasping courtier. He had been Earl of Oxford since the age of nine, heir to a large landed estate, and had twice served in foreign wars. He also made a serious attempt to govern the English lordship in Ireland given to him by Richard. The findings here show him to be a far more rounded and complex figure than previously assumed.
The Janácek Compendium
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Leos Janácek (1854-1928) occupied a pre-eminent position in Moravian (and wider Czech) culture, not only as a composer but also as a folksong collector, journalist, educator and nationalist.
One of the greatest and most original composers of the early twentieth century, Leos Janácek (1854-1928) occupied a pre-eminent position in Moravian culture, not only as a composer but also as a folksong collector, journalist, educator and nationalist. His friends and associates included artists, writers, ethnographers and politicians, as well as conductors, singers and instrumentalists. Janácek's many pupils included the conductor Bretislav Bakala and thecomposer Pavel Haas. He had important associations with publishers in Vienna and Prague and with the earliest years of Czech Radio. Janácek was strongly attached to particular places - Hukvaldy, Brno, Luhacovice - and had professional links with Prague, Berlin, London and beyond. The Janácek Compendium includes nearly 300 entries on every aspect of Janácek's life and works, with detailed notes on all his significant compositions - above all the operas - providing the latest information to emerge about some of his most famous pieces. An extensive bibliography supports the entries, which are cross-referenced to enable wider exploration of particular topics.
The Accounts of Two Westminster Fraternities, 1474-1540
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An edition of the surviving accounts of two important religious fraternities, one based at St Margaret's Westminster, the other at the Chapel of St Mary Rounceval at Charing Cross.
These organisations drew their membership from across the social spectrum, from nobles and senior clergy, to local parishioners and merchants. They formed a key focus of social and religious life, and their accounts throw light on the regular activities of Westminster inhabitants.
Early Medieval Sculpture in Stone
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Multidisciplinary scholarship showcasing innovative methods for working with sculptural material - with essays ranging from Merovingian funerary art to Old English and Scandinavian runic inscriptions.
The stone sculptures surviving across Europe from the early medieval period are an exceptional resource for understanding the communities that created them. Found at waysides, in architectural settings, and graveyards - standing crosses, inscribed stones, runestones and grave-markers are just some of the highly varied forms that attest to the art, technologies and beliefs of both Christian and non-Christian societies. The new approaches to sculpture studies found in this volume range from rethinking late antique influences to exploring how sculpture was used and encountered in a variety of political and cultural contexts; contributors also draw out the dialogues inherent in form and decoration within and across temporal and national boundaries. These fresh perspectives on iconographies, narrative art, sculpture and nature and the power of sculpture in multi-media environments, alongside studies of sourcing, production and portability, and the afterlives of carved stones, reflect the vibrancy of current research and the way in which it now integrates digital, scientific and spatial methods.
The introduction and chapters 26 and 27 are available as Open Access under the Creative Commons licence CC BY-NC-ND. This work was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council [AH/R003556/1] and the British Academy [AQ2324\240012].
Chapter 17 is Open Access under the Creative Commons License CC BY-NC-ND with funding from the Swedish National Heritage Board.
The Art of Musical Ciphers, Riddles and Sundry Curiosities
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Offers the first comprehensive account of a centuries-old tradition of encrypting covert messages into music, from the Middle Ages to the present day.
Question: What do J. S. Bach, beef cabbage, coffee, the SATOR Square, and Marlene Dietrich have in common?
Answer: Composers have enciphered these and many other words into music.
Since time immemorial riddles have intrigued us, partly for their mirthful manner of connecting incongruous ideas, partly for their arresting way of opening fresh perspectives on our shared human condition. When we think of riddles, we normally recall verbal conundrums from cultures around the globe. But riddles can penetrate non-verbal aspects of our existence as well. Masking messages in music so that they lurk beneath the sonorous surface is an august Western tradition spanning the Middle Ages to the present. Known as musical cryptography, these puzzling pursuits form the subject of this book, construed broadly enough to capture not just musical ciphers and codes but also a curiosity shop of related techniques, which arguably can advance the greater virtue. They entertain, edify, and enthral, but also bewitch and bewilder, and, when unsolved, perplex and perturb.
The Experimental Sutton Hoo Ship
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Unearthed from its burial mound, the Sutton Hoo ship offers a profound window into the political, cultural and technological world of seventh-century East Anglia.
On the eve of war in 1939 the remains of a wooden ship nearly 90 feet long were excavated beneath a mound at Sutton Hoo in Suffolk. Only the lines of iron rivets that secured the planking were still in place. This is the largest ship so far recovered from north-eastern Europe in the pre-Viking period. Now this great vessel is being reconstructed by the Sutton Hoo Ship's Company on the Woodbridge waterfront.
In this book - the first of three - Martin Carver pictures the people that created the ship in the seventh century, and explores their world of beliefs, burial, ornamental metalwork, clothes, and carpentry. The treasure found in the ship marks the high point of the kingdom of East Anglia, a realm linked with continental Europe, the Mediterranean and the Byzantine empire. This coincided with the creation of great timber halls and great clinker-built wooden ships. In order to see what influenced the design and construction of the Sutton Hoo ships, we have to look at the surviving evidence for seventh century boats from a wide variety of countries.
This roll-call of broadly contemporary boats is followed by a description of how our ship came to be reconstructed today, through the initiatives of Sutton Hoo's researchers and custodians and the people of Woodbridge, how it was designed and made a reality, concluding with an overview of what we can learn from this kind of recreation of a major archaeological discovery.
The Art of Musical Ciphers, Riddles and Sundry Curiosities
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$190.00
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Offers the first comprehensive account of a centuries-old tradition of encrypting covert messages into music, from the Middle Ages to the present day.
Question: What do J. S. Bach, beef cabbage, coffee, the SATOR Square, and Marlene Dietrich have in common?
Answer: Composers have enciphered these and many other words into music.
Since time immemorial riddles have intrigued us, partly for their mirthful manner of connecting incongruous ideas, partly for their arresting way of opening fresh perspectives on our shared human condition. When we think of riddles, we normally recall verbal conundrums from cultures around the globe. But riddles can penetrate non-verbal aspects of our existence as well. Masking messages in music so that they lurk beneath the sonorous surface is an august Western tradition spanning the Middle Ages to the present. Known as musical cryptography, these puzzling pursuits form the subject of this book, construed broadly enough to capture not just musical ciphers and codes but also a curiosity shop of related techniques, which arguably can advance the greater virtue. They entertain, edify, and enthral, but also bewitch and bewilder, and, when unsolved, perplex and perturb.
The Growth of Law in Medieval Wales, c.1100-c.1500
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2022 Hywel Dda Award (University of Wales Literary Awards)
A ground-breaking study of the lawbooks which were created in the changing social and political climate of post-conquest Wales.
The Middle Ages in Wales were turbulent, with society and culture in constant flux. Edward I of England's 1282 conquest brought with it major changes to society, governance, power and identity, and thereby to the traditional system of the law. Despite this, in the post-conquest period the development of law in Wales and the March flourished, and many manuscripts and lawbooks were created to meet the needs of those who practised law. This study, the first to fully reappraise the entire corpus of law manuscripts since Aneurin Owen's seminal 1841 edition, begins by considering the background to the creation of the law from the earliest period, particularly from c.1100 onwards, before turning to the "golden age" of lawmaking in thirteenth-century Gwynedd. The nature of the law in south Wales is also examined in full, with a particular focus on later developments, including the different use of legal texts in that region and its fourteenth- and fifteenth-century manuscripts. The author approaches medieval Welsh law, its practice, texts and redactions, in their own contexts, rather than through the lens of later historiography. In particular, she shows that much manuscript material previously considered "additional" or "anomalous" in fact incorporates new legal material and texts written for a particular purpose: thanks to their flexible accommodation of change, adjustment and addition, Welsh lawbooks were not just shaped by, but indeed shaped, medieval Welsh law.
North, South, East and West in Twelfth-Century Thought
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Considers how twelfth-century authors used the four cardinal points as a conceptual system to make sense of and construct their world.
From the Great White North to the West End or the Global South, we frequently carve up our world according to the cardinal points. These divisions are rarely mere geographical conveniences; they bring with them a host of ideas about regions and their inhabitants.
This book examines how this phenomenon operated in the Middle Ages, drawing on sources from the Ordinary Gloss on the Bible to the geographies of Hugh of Saint Victor and Honorius Augustodunensis. It begins by tracing the consolidation of the cardinal points as a foundational spatial vocabulary in the Middle Ages and looks athow these terms accumulated new meaning and significance in biblical exegesis, geography and history writing over the twelfth century. It pays particular attention to the ways in which authors actively engaged with and manipulated this tradition, showing how authors like Sigebert of Gembloux, Romuald of Salerno and Orderic Vitalis made use of these ideas to underscore the broader narrative agendas of their universal histories. Subsequent chapters focus on the role of space in narratives of identity formation, using as case studies histories of the First Crusade, the duchy of Normandy and the abbey of Cluny.
Musical Amateurs as Artistic Citizens in Schubert’s Vienna
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Details the wide, integral and influential role played by 'amateur' participants in early nineteenth-century Vienna's musical life.
During Franz Schubert's lifetime in early nineteenth-century Vienna, amateurs and dilettantes were a vital part of the music scene, so much so that Eduard Hanslick considered it the high point of musical dilettantism in Vienna. Schubert himself participated extensively in this rich world of domestic music-making. Around 1800 terms such as "amateur" and "dilettante" had broader and more positive connotations than today, and "amateurs" could indeed often portray a high skill level. The book considers the amateurs' and dilettantes' identities and motivations for making music, and their various roles in the musical life of early nineteenth-century Vienna. It dives deeply into contexts, performance practices and spaces, as well as instruments that have so far been little explored. Musical Amateurs in Schubert's Vienna uncovers new key agents in early nineteenth-century Viennese musical life who have so far remained invisible.
British Choral Singing
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Charts choral traditions in Britain, evolution, sociological composition, engagement with and place within cathedrals and secular spaces.
Choirs are living organisms and ever changing. This book tells the story of British choral singing (not choral music) and deals with both sacred and secular choirs and institutions from the medieval era through to the Covid pandemic and its aftermath. A series of different choral traditions has emerged over the centuries. The oldest is that of the all-male cathedral choir, while the secular choral society evolved from the eighteenth century onwards. Although there are many histories of individual cathedrals and choral societies, this is the first general history of British choral traditions. While English matters predominate, those of Scotland, Wales and Ireland are also considered. Even though British choral traditions have penetrated many parts of the world, there has also been much cross-fertilization of late with the rich choral cultures of other nations in Europe and beyond. Choral singing inevitably involved matters of social class, and a much more nuanced story is told here than the current view of choirs as being a largely middle-class phenomenon might suggest.
Scholarly in method while highly readable, the book offers invaluable background to choral practitioners. When choral activity is reviving healthily after the Covid 19 pandemic, such a volume appears timely, reminding the reader of the essentially communal and social nature of the choral experience.
British Choral Singing
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$170.00
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Charts choral traditions in Britain, evolution, sociological composition, engagement with and place within cathedrals and secular spaces.
Choirs are living organisms and ever changing. This book tells the story of British choral singing (not choral music) and deals with both sacred and secular choirs and institutions from the medieval era through to the Covid pandemic and its aftermath. A series of different choral traditions has emerged over the centuries. The oldest is that of the all-male cathedral choir, while the secular choral society evolved from the eighteenth century onwards. Although there are many histories of individual cathedrals and choral societies, this is the first general history of British choral traditions. While English matters predominate, those of Scotland, Wales and Ireland are also considered. Even though British choral traditions have penetrated many parts of the world, there has also been much cross-fertilization of late with the rich choral cultures of other nations in Europe and beyond. Choral singing inevitably involved matters of social class, and a much more nuanced story is told here than the current view of choirs as being a largely middle-class phenomenon might suggest.
Scholarly in method while highly readable, the book offers invaluable background to choral practitioners. When choral activity is reviving healthily after the Covid 19 pandemic, such a volume appears timely, reminding the reader of the essentially communal and social nature of the choral experience.
Gabriel Fauré: Influences and Influence
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Presents Fauré not as a solitary figure, but part of a vibrant continuum of nineteenth- and twentieth-century composers and the first member of a French musical 'trinity', with Debussy and Ravel.
A composition professor at the Paris Conservatoire since 1896, and its director from 1906 to 1920, Gabriel Fauré (1845-1924) was said to have created no school as Cesar Franck had before him, encouraging originality among his students rather than emulation. This collection portrays Fauré, influenced by Wolfgang Mozart, Fryderyk Chopin, and Felix Mendelssohn, plus the poetry of Charles Baudelaire and Paul Verlaine, as an early Modernist who provided a reference point for Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel, and Francis Poulenc. Casting a wide net, it explores Fauré's influence on his younger contemporaries Lili Boulanger and Frederick Delius, as well as on the later twentieth-century American composers Aaron Copland, Walter Arlen, Robert Helps, and Ned Rorem. Fauré no longer appears as a solitary figure, but part of a vibrant continuum of nineteenth- and twentieth-century composers, and the first member of a French musical 'trinity' that included Debussy and Ravel.
Science and the Romantic Vision in Early Nineteenth-Century Opera
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An interdisciplinary study of how early nineteenth-century science and opera articulated a transnational romantic vision of harmony between self and nature, and how this ideal gave way to mid-century realism and social conflict.
The end of the Napoleonic era ushered in a transnational outlook for Europe, where the traditional boundaries that separated people, ideas and things were blurred in favour of a unified and cosmopolitan vision for society. The result of this shift created a 'romantic vision', a new way to perceive the imagined potential of the self in correspondence with the infinite reality of the natural world. Early nineteenth-century scientists such as Alexander von Humboldt (earth sciences), Franz Anton Mesmer (mesmerism), Johann Wilhelm Ritter (galvanism) and Frédéric Dubois d'Amiens (hysteria) are explored in this context to see how the romantic vision was reflected in their work and received by society. Seeing opera as a confluence of all the arts and encompassing a similar romantic vision, this book examines three paradigmatic operas that contend with the forces of nature: Weber's Der Freischütz (1821), Meyerbeer's Robert le diable (1831) and Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor (1835). In these three highly successful works from separate operatic traditions, the unseen, inner world of nature reveals a wholeness of the self with the divine, showcasing a healthy optimism for society. The book concludes by discussing Gounod's Faust (1859), a work that highlights the struggle of an early-16th-century scientist and places it against the context of the social revolutions of 1848 and the seminal publication of Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species in 1859. In this post-1850 era, the potential of the unseen reality of nature is cast aside and replaced with the certainty of the everyday-the violence of man against man, the struggle for power and the destruction of nature itself.
Janáček's Sinfonietta
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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.
Hanns Eisler and His Circle in Republican Spain
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$36.95
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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.
Erik Satie
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Satie's music and ideas are inextricably linked with the City of Light. This book situates Satie's work within the context and sonic environment of contemporary Paris.
Sunday Times Classical Music Book of the Year
Erik Satie's (1866-1925) music appeals to wide audiences and has influenced both experimental artists and pop musicians. Little about Satie was conventional, and he resists classification under easy headings such as "classical music". Instead of pursuing the path of a professional composer, Satie initially earned a living as a café pianist and moved in bohemian circles which prized satire, popular culture and experiment. Small wonder that his music is fundamentally new in conception. It is music which is not always designed to be listened to attentively: music which can be machine-like but is to be played by humans. For Satie, music was part of a wider concept of artistic creation, as evidenced by his collaborations with leading avant-garde artists and in works which cross traditional genre boundaries such as his texted piano pieces. His music was created in some of the most exciting and creatively stimulating environments of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century: Montmartre and Montparnasse. Paris was the artistic centre of Europe, and Satie was a notorious figure whose music and ideas are inextricably linked with the City of Light. This book situates Satie's work within the context and sonic environment of contemporary Paris. It shows that the influence of street music, musicians and poets interested in new technology, contemporary innovations and radical politics are all crucial to an understanding of Satie. Music from the ever-popular Gymnopédies to newly discovered works are discussed, and an online supplement features rare pieces recorded especially for the book.
Charles Bridgeman (c.1685-1738)
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An examination of the garden plans of eighteenth-century landscape architect Charles Bridgeman, shedding light on his artistic vision and contributions to English garden history.
Charles Bridgeman was a popular and highly successful landscape architect in the first part of the eighteenth century. He was Royal Gardener to George I and George II, designing the gardens at Kensington Palace for them and working for many of the ruling Whig elite, including Sir Robert Walpole at Houghton Hall in Norfolk. His landscapes were audacious and monumental, but he is barely known outside the world of academic garden history; most of his gardens have disappeared, changed out of all recognition to chime with later tastes shaped by Lancelot Brown's vision of a more "natural" landscape, or buried under housing developments and golf courses; and there is little archaeological or written evidence of his work.
This book aims to redress this injustice and rescue his legacy. It draws on the only significant body of evidence which survived him: an extensive but wildly heterogenous corpus of garden plans. Close examination of them reveals an artistic vision heavily influenced by the late seventeenth-century geometric garden but deeply rooted in the "genius of the place", and working methods that include a proto-business model which prefigures the gentleman improvers who followed him. The volume brings him from obscurity to demonstrate his skill as an artist, a manipulator of space on a grand scale and a consummate practitioner, a deserved member of the canon of famous and revered English landscape gardeners.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The Chronicle of William of Puylaurens
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First translation into English of key chronicle for events of the Albigensian Crusade and the attack on heresy, including the siege of the Cathar stronghold, Montsegur.
The Albigensian Crusade, which forms the main subject of William of Puylaurens' Chronicle, was a defining episode in the history of France. Launched in 1209 by Pope Innocent III, it was directed against the aristocracy of southern France (especially the Counts of Toulouse) who were accused of protecting heresy, and especially Catharism, a dualist heresy which represented a major threat to the Catholic Church. The Crusade ended in 1229 with the defeat of Count Raymond VII of Toulouse. It was followed in the 1230s by the establishment of the Papal Inquisition against heresy. The long-term outcome of the Crusade was the defeat of Catharism, and the establishment of French Royal power in the region.
William of Puylaurens' Chronicle, here translated into English for the first time, is one of the main contemporary accounts of these events. It describes heresy in the south of France in the early 13th century; provides a narrative of the Crusade; and then outlines the growth of the Inquisition and the sustained attack on heresy which followed, including the siege of the Cathar fortress of Montségur in 1243-44. This translation is accompanied by an introduction, full notes, appendices, and a bibliography.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Women and Monastic Reform in the Medieval West, c. 1000 – 1500
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New approaches to understanding religious women's involvement in monastic reform, demonstrating how women's experiences were more ambiguous and multi-layered than previously assumed.
Over the last two decades, scholarship has presented a more nuanced view of women's attitude to and agency in medieval monastic reform, challenging the idea that they were, by and large, unwilling to accept or were necessarily hostile towards reform initiatives. Rather, it has shown that they actively participated in debates about the ideas and structures that shaped their religious lives, whether rejecting, embracing, or adapting to calls for "reform" contingent on their circumstances. Nevertheless, fundamental questions regarding the gendered nature of religious reform are ripe for further examination.
This book brings together innovative research from a range of disciplines to re-evaluate and enlarge our knowledge of women's involvement in spiritual and institutional change in female monastic communities over the period c. 1000 - c. 1500. Contributors revise conventional narratives about women and monastic reform, and earlier assumptions of reform as negative or irrelevant for women. Drawing on a diverse array of visual, material and textual sources, it presents "snapshots" of reform from western Europe, stretching from Ireland to Iberia. Case-studies focussing on a number of different topics, from tenth-century female saints' lives to fifteenth-century liturgical books, from the tenth-century Leominster prayerbook to archaeological remains in Ireland, from embroideries and tapestries to the rebellious nuns of Sainte-Croix in Poitiers, offer a critical reappraisal of how monastic women (and their male associates) reflected, individually and collectively, on their spiritual ideals and institutional forms.
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.
Women, Dance and Parish Religion in England, 1300-1640
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A lively exploration of the medieval and early modern attitudes towards dance, as the perception of dancers changed from saints dancing after Christ into cows dancing after the devil.
The devil's cows, impudent camels, or damsels animated by the devil: late medieval and early modern authors used these descriptors and more to talk about dancers, particularly women. Yet, dance was not always considered entirely sinful or connected primarily to women: in some early medieval texts, dancers were exhorted to dance to God, arm-in-arm with their neighbors, and parishes were filled with danced expressions of faith. What led to the transformation of dancers from saints dancing after Christ into cows dancing after the devil?
Drawing on the evidence from medieval and early modern sermons, and in particular the narratives of the cursed carolers and the dance of Salome, this book explores these changing understandings of dance as they relate to religion, gender, sin, and community within the English parish. In parishes both before and during the English Reformations, dance played an integral role in creating, maintaining, uniting, or fracturing community. But as theological understandings of sacrilege, sin, and proper worship changed, the meanings of dance and gender shifted as well. Redefining dance had tangible ramifications for the men and women of the parish, as new definitions of what it meant to perform one's gender collided with discourses about holiness and transgression, leading to closer scrutiny and monitoring of the bodies of the faithful.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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