Renaissance Papers collects the best scholarly essays submitted each year to the Southeastern Renaissance Conference.
The 2024 volume features essays from the conference held at The Citadel, as well as essays submitted directly to the journal. The opening essay focuses on an idiosyncratic strategy used for fundraising by the English Crown: Queen Elizabeth's "poetry" lottery. Five essays on Shakespeare probe the complexity of his plays. The first is a Jungian analysis of how the archetype of the dragon manifests itself in King Lear. It is followed by a study of how early modern exercise culture constructs masculinity and health in As You Like It. A provocative reinterpretation of A Midsummer Night's Dream then illuminates the culturally subversive way in which Shakespeare portrays his fairies. The fourth and fifth essays examine the implications of female political agency in Measure for Measure..
Nigel Bryant
Four Musical Romances
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Influential medieval romances are translated, with the accompanying music and an absorbing explanatory introduction.
The thirteenth century saw the flourishing of a vibrant new literary genre in France: the romance with musical interpolations. The four works translated here are outstanding examples. Their authors incorporate songs in highly inventive ways, not simply for embellishment or atmosphere. They explore the potential of song to advance narrative, create jeopardy, to reveal their characters' inner lives and even to provide ironic comment. Jean Renart, in his Guillaume de Dole, declared himself the originator of the genre. If the innovation was his, it inspired many works that followed. The most notable include the other three in this collection: Le Roman de la Violette (The Romance of the Violet) by Gerbert de Montreuil (almost certainly the Gerbert who wrote arguably the most accomplished Continuation of Chrétien de Troyes' Perceval), Le Roman de la Poire (The Romance of the Pear) by Tibaut and LeDit de la Panthère (The Panther of Love) by Nicole de Margival. Together these works raise absorbing questions about how medieval romances were performed, to the point where Le Roman de la Poire is very nearly a play, understandable only as a piece to be delivered by multiple voices. They will be of great interest not only to literary scholars and musicologists but to all those interested in the performance of romance. All the songs and refrains for which the music has survived are translated into singable form, and all the surviving notations are included in the text, edited by Matthew P. Thomson.
Toyin Falola and Victor Angbah
African Rivers
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The Nile, Congo, Niger, Chad and Zambezi are names that evoke watershed periods in Africa's history. Yet, until now, scholars have paid little attention to Africa's riverine environment or how it has shaped the continent's civilizations.
African rivers are not only part of the ecosystem but also hold immense ecological, political, economic, and sociocultural significance. At the same time, there are numerous challenges to their exploitation and sustainability due to human activities, transboundary conflicts, and climate change.
This book explores major thematic preoccupations with the study of African rivers. The first section discusses the epistemology of rivers in Africa, reviewing historical perspectives and identifying associations of rivers with identity and spirituality in Africa. The second section turns to the economy of African rivers, namely their commercial and economic benefits, political perspectives and dimensions, ecological and hydrological impacts, as well as their impacts on agricultural management and food security in the continent. In the third section, challenges associated with the exploitation, management, and sustainability of African rivers are discussed including geopolitics, dam construction, eco-tourism, transboundary disputes, and water scarcity. Beyond merely pointing out these challenges, however, the authors also propose solutions for the future of sustainable river resources in Africa. Ultimately, the book aims to promote knowledge of African rivers to help governments, corporations, and communities define and address their future needs
Rose Walker
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.
David Dickinson
South Africa’s Constitution and the Law of the Township
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How are residents of South Africa's townships responding to socio-economic inequality and a pervasive sense that the country's democratic transition has not delivered on its constitutional promises of social justice?
Based on extensive fieldwork, this book challenges beliefs that the agency of township residents is limited to waiting for handouts or demanding delivery from the state, showing how they are instead assisting themselves by taking advantage of the opportunities, menyetla, available. In the kasi, or urban townships, where almost half of the urban population lives, there is limited state-enforced order; while the lex constitutional may be the law of the land, the lex lokasi governs day-to-day life in the township. The book opens with a description of life in townships and the interconnected crises facing the country before examining commonly practiced township menyetla to illustrate how the lex lokasi operates: stealing electricity, informal charges to access the Social Relief of Distress grant, fare evasion on the Metrorail, the illicit sale of alcohol during COVID-19 prohibition, medical aid scams, and looting.
Exploring how this looting from below protects those looting from above, it provides a different perspective to the view that state capture is the primary cause of the country's current entropic trajectory and that the application of the much-vaunted constitution can bring South Africa back on track.
Edited by Ana Cláudia Suriani da Silva and Tania Regina de Luca
Women Journalists in the Brazilian Mainstream Press
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A nuanced and complex portrayal of female voices which have long been silenced, offering a fresh perspective on the history of Brazilian journalism and restoring women's rightful place in Brazil's cultural memory.
This book examines the groundbreaking contributions of Maria Amalia de Carvalho, Júlia Lopes de Almeida, Emília Moncorvo Bandeira de Melo (pseudonym Carmen Dolores), and Maria Benedita Bormann (pseudonym Délia) in Brazil's mainstream press, focusing on their writings in the influential newspaper O País between 1884 and 1912. Employing psychoanalysis, gender studies, media theory and literary criticism, the chapters in this book reveal how these four writers cultivated a collective intellectual network and how their columns became sites of resistance, challenging dominant narratives and asserting women's voices in a male-dominated public sphere. Yet despite their significant influence, their legacies have been marginalised in traditional literary histories. This book not only restores their rightful place in Brazil's cultural memory but also interrogates the exclusionary mechanisms that have long obscured women's contributions to the nation's literary system. A vital reassessment of press history, this book demands a more inclusive understanding of Brazil's journalistic and intellectual heritage, one that properly recognises women as active participants in shaping the Brazilian literary system.
Edited by Anna Marie Roos
Taking Newton On Tour
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This volume provides a critical edition of an exceptional example of the 'Scientific Grand Tour' taken by Martin Folkes. Martin Folkes (1690-1754) was Newton's protégé, antiquary, mathematician, and the only simultaneous president of the Royal Society and the Society of Antiquaries. In 1733-5, he went on Grand Tour as a scientific ambassador for the Royal Society, demonstrating Newtonian optics to Italian virtuosi. He also measured ancient and Renaissance buildings to understand past architectural engineering and design. His 97-page illustrated diary (in the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford, shelfmark MS Eng. misc.c.444) also challenges the long-standing, mistaken impression among scholars that the Royal Society was in decline in the eighteenth century. Analysing Folkes's activities abroad and creating an edition from this source tracing his Italian route provides a novel reading of Newtonianism and the purpose of the Grand Tour as a vehicle for scientific research and statesmanship.
Edited by Malcolm Miller
Classical and Popular Music in Israel
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Original historical and analytical research into the Israeli music scene, treating important composers as well as broader issues such as Jewish-Arab encounters, Holocaust memorialization and post-October 7th soundscapes.
Does a nation's music reflect its distinctive, definable spirit and aspirations? As this wide-ranging volume demonstrates, Israel's pluralistic musical scene offers a unique crucible in which to study transcultural processes and encounters. Through the nineteen essays by established and younger scholars and musicians, what emerges is a vivid picture of a dynamic musical culture balancing regional and global tendencies. The essays touch on a wide range of classical and popular musics. Micro-histories of individual composers highlight Arnold Schoenberg's relationship to Israel, Josef Tal's and Mordecai Seter's Israeli modernism, the neglected genius of Verdina Shlonsky, and the postmodernism of Mark Kopytman and Oded Zehavi. Broader surveys address musical responses to Jewish and Arab traditions, Holocaust memorialization, satirical cabaret, prog rock, nationalistic "folk" songs, and the soundscape of a country at war since October 7, 2023.
Further insight is offered in chapters devoted to composers' perspectives, including Palestinian Arab creativity, composing in a time of war, and the inspiration of the Bible. For the scholar, performer, and music lover interested in exploring new repertoire, as well as for students of Jewish and Middle Eastern culture, the volume provides an authoritative and thought-provoking account of Israeli music in its varied guises, enhancing appreciation of the aesthetic quality and significance of a still-evolving, thriving musical culture.
W. G. Miller and Ann G. Smith
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.
Ernest Ernest Cole
ALT 43: Afrifuturism
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This issue of ALT provides content narratives, critical frames and theoretical constructs to read and critique writings in the emerging genre of Afrifuturism.
In contrast to Afrofuturism, which explores the intersection of primarily Diaspora Black culture with Western technology and hence perpetuates, to some extent, a colonial mindset, Afrifuturism looks to imagine an African and global Black future beyond industrial, technological and capitalist terms, one rooted in African cosmologies and history. Contributions in this issue seek to interrogate, contest, and reformulate some aspects of its convention by suggesting alternate frames, shifts in focus, changing perspectives of history and points of view, new narrative methods, new epistemological structures, thematic concepts and pedagogical praxis that offer new ways of defining the African and for imagining alternative futures for African peoples. Together, they shed further light on the complexities of Afrifuturism and offers alternative models for thinking about the past and the future of African people, with important implications for diaspora and postcolonial literature.
Elena Caetano Álvarez
Alfonso X, the Dream of Empire, and (Re)Writing History in the Estoria de Espanna
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Why did Alfonso X of Castile-Leon-Galicia relentlessly pursue his claims to the imperial thrones of the Holy Roman Empire and the Iberian 'empire', despite the high costs and probability of failure?
This book examines how the concept of imperium shapes the structure and ideology of the Estoria de España, the first major history of Spain in the vernacular, written under Alfonso's patronage. Through a detailed analysis of its Roman section, it explores how Alfonso's scriptorium translated, adapted, and expanded sources to bolster his imperial claim. More than a chronicle, the Estoria served as propaganda, reinforcing Alfonso's legitimacy by challenging papal authority in imperial elections and appealing to both the Castilian-Leonese nobility-whose financial support was crucial-and other Iberian monarchs.
Alfonso's imperial vision drew not only on the Imperium Hispanicum of his father, Fernando III, but also on his Staufen lineage through his mother, Beatriz of Swabia, whose ties to the Holy Roman Empire likely influenced the historiographical models of the Estoria. By blending Iberian and European traditions, Alfonso positioned Castile as heir to both the Roman and Hohenstaufen legacies, setting a new standard for Iberian historiography that endured for centuries.
Qinna Shen
Jiny Lan and the Art of Subversion
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Examines the career and message paintings of the feminist conceptual artist Jiny Lan, analyzing a cross-section of works that invite literary, historical, socio-political and transcultural interpretations.
Jiny Lan is an avant-garde Chinese artist based in Germany. A founding member of the feminist art collective "Bald Girls," she infuses astute, politically charged, and iconoclastic criticism into her conceptual and visual art. Jiny Lan and the Art of Subversion provides a hermeneutic and critical analysis of Lan's idiosyncratic, provocative, and ingenious artwork. "Subversion" refers not only to her political and cultural subversiveness but also to her iterative technique of reproduction and repainting, which she uses to create a series of genealogically related "sub-versions" of her own paintings.
As an émigré and immigrant artist, Lan is profoundly influenced by both eastern and western cultures and traditions. Her immersive experience and extensive knowledge of two contrasting national histories, cultures, and political systems endows her with a unique intersectional positionality. Her artwork is at once figurative and abstract, realistic and fantastic, chaotic and logical, appropriative and creative. It interrogates serious issues such as censorship, authoritarianism, democracy, human rights, sexism, racism, war, migration, and Covid-19, but in a dynamic and often humorous manner. This book lays a foundation for evaluating Lan as an artist whose work invites discussions about portraiture, power, temporality, space, corporality, and sex.
This book is available as Open Access under the Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND.
Edited by Sara Ayres
The Grand Tour of Prince George of Denmark in England, 1669
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This annotated diary describes the politics, cultural richness and practicalities of elite educational travel in England during the early reign of Charles II.
Prince George of Denmark is best known to Anglophone historiography for having married Queen Anne of Great Britain, in 1683. This critical edition of the diary detailing the Prince's Grand Tour in England, which took place in the summer of 1669, sheds light on the critical complexity of George's role within Stuart political history, a role that commenced during his youthful, incognito travels. The Grand Tour was an important rite of passage introducing young princes to the European political stage, and the ongoing political, ceremonial and multilingual exchanges characterising Baroque diplomacy.
From his base in York House, London, Prince George's itinerary ranged from Canterbury Cathedral, to the fleet at Chatham to Whitehall Palace, from Hampton Court to Windsor Castle, from the Tower of London to the Pall Mall laboratory of Robert Boyle, from the Tradescant Museum to the University of Oxford. The diary describes these experiences in astonishing detail.
This edition puts England on the map as a Grand Tour destination, and shows how the Restoration court acted as an important hub for a host of seventeenth-century European princelings undertaking all-important educational travel.
The edition is enhanced and contextualised by hitherto unpublished archival sources, including the Tour's financial accounts.
David Cressy
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.
Frank Matose
Forests and the Power of Marginalised People in Southern Africa
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Decades after independence and the end of apartheid, why have forest communities in Zimbabwe and South Africa not been able to recover the land and resource rights they lost under colonialism?
This book explores the politics of conservation in southern Africa through the lens of chronic liminality, a 'state of in-betweenness' or 'waiting', to explain the status quo in local people-state forest relationships and why progress has been so slow. Using the Dwesa-Cwebe Nature Reserve, the Gwayi Forest and Mafungabusi Forest as cases studies, it examines the consequences on people living in and around protected areas of neoliberal approaches to conservation and of the legacy of colonial property relations.
The book asks why local communities have not engaged in collective or rebellious action against the government and how they have instead found themselves in a liminal position, caught between waiting for conditions to change and advancing their rights through collective action. It also asks why states have likewise pursued a politics of liminality and continue to prevaricate about whether to restore local rights or maintain the status quo around forest reserves. Overall, the book advances scholarship around conservation in Africa and other postcolonial regions by providing a different perspective on the continued marginalisation of local people and arguing for a need to rethink forest ownership and management.
Translated with notes by Robert J. Meindl, Mark T. Riley and R.F. Yeager
Vox Clamantis by John Gower: "The Voice of One Crying"
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The first English translation into verse of the full Vox Clamantis, with explanatory notes.
John Gower's Vox Clamantis is one of the major poetic achievements of the Middle Ages. Its subject matter ranges from his dream-vision account of the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 to sharp critiques of the clergy, merchants, and lawyers, all with the intention of teaching the lessons of the past as a guide to the present. In Gower's view, everything that is and happens must be read and interpreted for the guidance God provides: history, Scripture and nature are replete with auguries sent by God to guide rulers if they but learn to read them. Ultimately for Gower, rulers - and we ourselves - are responsible for our own choices, for good or ill.
This line-by-line translation from the original Latin into Modern English is intended for a wide audience, and to be easily readable by scholars and non-scholars alike. It replicates Gower's Latin meter as closely as possible in English, uses straightforward language, and clarifies many difficult points of medieval legal theory, Classical allusion, and theological interpretation heretofore left unexplained in any previous attempts, full or partial, to translate the poem. Extensive notes trace Gower's sources, from Ovid to Peter Riga's Aurora to Alexander Nequam's De Naturis rerum to Nigel Wireker's Speculum Stultorum and the Bible, among many others. Classical and Biblical allusions are identified and fully but succinctly explained. This book also includes the "Letter to Arundel", translated in verse for the first time.
Professor Thomas H. Crofts
Sir Tristrem
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A vibrant revival of a neglected witty and daring medieval gem, and a foundational work for English romance and translation studies. Essential reading for students of medieval literature and manuscript culture.
In the late thirteenth century, as English began to assert itself against Anglo-Norman and French literary traditions, Sir Tristrem emerged as one of the earliest and most inventive Middle English romances. Uniquely preserved in the Auchinleck Manuscript, this poem reimagines the Tristan legend with a bold comic tone, distinctive stanza form, and a sharp awareness of its audience's expectations. Both a translation and a transformation of Thomas of Britain's Tristran (c.1170), it stands alongside the more courtly German and Norwegian retellings by Gottfried von Strassburg and Brother Robert of Norway-yet diverges from both in its brevity, tonal shifts, and performative agility.
This edition pairs a lively modern English verse translation with the complete Middle English text-offering, for the first time, a dual-language format that remains sensitive to the poem's performance-driven origins. The accompanying study reconsiders Sir Tristrem not only as literature, but as a document of transmission: oral, scribal, and manuscript. It explores its triangulated relationship with other Tristan traditions, its place within a manuscript collection of romances shaped by translation, and the formal innovations through which it reshapes a familiar narrative.
Resisting the reductive labels of its critical past, Sir Tristrem, as presented here, reclaims its role as a serious, playful, and quintessentially English contribution to medieval narrative tradition.
Edited by Richard Danson Brown and Andrew Hadfield
Bad Poetry? New Perspectives on the Value of Sixteenth-Century Literature
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An examination of the messy, often contradictory processes of poetic production and reception. The volume offers an invitation to read widely, question deeply and think critically.
In the wake of C. S. Lewis's still-contested taxonomy of 'drab' and 'golden' poetic ages, this volume rethinks the critical and aesthetic stakes of bad poetry in early modern England-not to dismiss it, but to ask what it meant, how it functioned, and why it mattered.
Revisiting poets like Arthur Gorges, Walter Ralegh, Thomas Lodge, and Thomas Churchyard, contributors interrogate the literary marketplace, aesthetic judgment, and evolving generic conventions between 1520 and 1609. Through close readings of works by Spenser, Shakespeare, Skelton, and others-alongside notorious outliers like Richard Stanyhurst-the collection considers poetic failure as both historical artifact and interpretive opportunity. From the clumsy excess of hexameters to the ideological weight of neo-Latin verse, from scribal emendations of Mother Hubberds Tale to the uncertain metrical charge of the lengthy fourteener, these essays reveal how poets and readers alike navigated shifting ideas of taste, style, and literary value.
Grounded in close reading, textual scholarship, and formal analysis, this collection offers a model of sustained, comparative literary criticism that is both theoretically engaged and deeply historicised. It foregrounds the interpretive value of stylistic awkwardness and aesthetic resistance while charting the long afterlives of poetic judgment from Lewis to the present.
Translated with notes by Robert J. Meindl, Mark T. Riley and R.F. Yeager
Vox Clamantis by John Gower: "The Voice of One Crying"
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The first English translation into verse of the full Vox Clamantis, with explanatory notes.
John Gower's Vox Clamantis is one of the major poetic achievements of the Middle Ages. Its subject matter ranges from his dream-vision account of the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 to sharp critiques of the clergy, merchants, and lawyers, all with the intention of teaching the lessons of the past as a guide to the present. In Gower's view, everything that is and happens must be read and interpreted for the guidance God provides: history, Scripture and nature are replete with auguries sent by God to guide rulers if they but learn to read them. Ultimately for Gower, rulers - and we ourselves - are responsible for our own choices, for good or ill.
This line-by-line translation from the original Latin into Modern English is intended for a wide audience, and to be easily readable by scholars and non-scholars alike. It replicates Gower's Latin meter as closely as possible in English, uses straightforward language, and clarifies many difficult points of medieval legal theory, Classical allusion, and theological interpretation heretofore left unexplained in any previous attempts, full or partial, to translate the poem. Extensive notes trace Gower's sources, from Ovid to Peter Riga's Aurora to Alexander Nequam's De Naturis rerum to Nigel Wireker's Speculum Stultorum and the Bible, among many others. Classical and Biblical allusions are identified and fully but succinctly explained. This book also includes the "Letter to Arundel", translated in verse for the first time.
Edited by Marco Barducci
Debating Enlightenment
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A bold reappraisal of Enlightenment legacies this volume uncovers the fractured, global, and contested nature of modern Europe's most influential intellectual transformation.
Emerging from the intellectual upheavals of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Enlightenment has long served as both a foundational moment and a battleground for narratives of Western modernity. Once anchored in the writings of Spinoza, Kant, Diderot, and D'Alembert, its genealogy is now understood to stretch from the rhetorical afterlives of Renaissance humanism and the polemics of the Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes, through the religious pluralism of the Dutch Republic and the confessional fractures of the Holy Roman Empire, to the text-critical methods of orthodox theologians and the radical secularism of the philosophes.
This volume rethinks the Enlightenment as a dynamic espace de débat-a field of contested meanings shaped by transnational circulation, institutional conflict, and historiographical reinvention. Drawing on debates around the "Enlightenment project", "radical" and "religious" Enlightenment, and the tensions between cosmopolitan ideals and national traditions, it engages with the works of Jonathan Israel, Dan Edelstein, and Jeffrey Burson, amongst others, to explore longue durée patterns of intellectual exchange and secularisation.
Rich in case studies from Paris, London, Amsterdam, Leipzig, and beyond, the collection speaks directly to those navigating the plural legacies of Enlightenment historiography in an era increasingly shaped by digital tools, global frameworks, and postcolonial critique.
Arata Ide
Localizing Christopher Marlowe
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This study punctures the stereotyped portrayals of Marlowe, first created by his rival Robert Greene, and, yet, which still colour our view. In doing so, Ide reveals the social and cultural discourses out of which such myths emerged.
We know next to nothing about the life of the playwright Christopher Marlowe (b.1564 - d. 1593). Few documents survive other than his birth record in the parish register, a handful of legal cases in court records, Privy Council mandates and reports to the Council, the coroner's examination of his death, and a few hearsay accounts of his atheism. With such a limited collection of biographical documents available, it is impossible to retrieve from history a complete sense of Marlowe. However, this does not mean that biography cannot play a significant role in Marlowe studies.
By observing the details of the specific places and communities to which Marlowe belonged, this book highlights the collective experiences and concerns of the social groups and communities with which we know he was personally and financially involved. Specifically, Localizing Christopher Marlowe reveals the political and cultural dynamics in the community of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, into which Marlowe was deeply integrated and through which he became affiliated with the circle of Sir Francis Walsingham, mapping these influences in both his life and works.
A. B. McLeod
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.
Melissa D. Burrage
The Karl Muck Scandal
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The demonization, internment, and deportation of celebrated Boston Symphony Orchestra conductor Dr. Karl Muck, finally told, and placed in the context of World War I anti-German sentiment in the United States.
BEST CLASSICAL MUSIC BOOK RELEASE OF 2019 by Classical-music.com, the official website of BBC Music Magazine.
2019 SUMMER READS ABOUT CLASSICAL MUSIC by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
2019 BEST BOOK AWARD FINALIST in both the History and Performing Arts categories, sponsored by American Book Fest.
2019 SUBVENTION AWARD by the American Musicological Society, funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
One of the cherished narratives of American history is that of the Statue of Liberty welcoming immigrants to its shores. Accounts of the exclusion and exploitation of Chinese immigrants in the late nineteenth century and Japanese internment during World War II tell a darker story of American immigration. Less well-known, however, is the treatment of German-Americans and Germannationals in the United States during World War I. Initially accepted and even welcomed into American society at the outbreak of war, this group would face rampant intolerance and anti-German hysteria.
Melissa D. Burrage's book illustrates this dramatic shift in attitude in her engrossing narrative of Dr. Karl Muck, the celebrated German conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, who was targeted and ultimately disgraced by a New York Philharmonic board member and by capitalists from that city who used his private sexual life as a basis for having him arrested, interned, and deported from the United States. While the campaign against Muck made national headlines, and is the main focus of this book, Burrage also illuminates broader national topics such as: Total War; State power; vigilante justice; internment and deportation; irresponsible journalism; sexual surveillance; attitudes toward immigration; anti-Semitism; and the development of America's musical institutions. The mistreatment of Karl Muck in the United States provides a narrative thread that connects these various wartime and postwar themes.
Edited by Mark Hagger
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.
Theodor Fontane; translated and annotated by Rex Levang; Introduction by Brian Tucker; Afterword by Helen Chambers
Count Petöfy
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First English translation of an unjustly overlooked novel by the great German realist novelist Theodor Fontane.
Set in Austria and Hungary in the 1870s, this novel is the story of Count Adam Petöfy, a lifelong bachelor, who at age seventy, unexpectedly proposes marriage to a young actress, Franziska Franz. He explains that he is only looking for companionship and affectionate regard - apart from this, he will give Franziska carte blanche. Despite their differences of age, class, and background, they marry. Adam takes Franziska, now Countess Petöfy, from Vienna to his family's ancestral estates in the Hungarian countryside. Here they begin their new life: a life of ease and privilege - but later, of struggles which neither has anticipated.
Count Petöfy has been a neglected book, even in Germany, and has been overshadowed by Fontane's celebrated "Berlin" novels, such as Effi Briest. This first-ever English translation will allow a wider audience to read and study Count Petöfy for its exploration of missteps and the limits of self-realization, of questions of gender and social convention, of honour and duty; and for a narrative craft that reveals and conceals at the same time. The translation is bookended by contributions from two noted Fontane scholars: a contextualizing introduction by Brian Tucker, who has written on Count Petöfy before, and an afterword by Helen Chambers on the novel's relationship to the novelist's other works.
Julia Stapleton
The early journals of Hensley Henson: Birkenhead and All Souls 1885-1887
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One of the most outstanding diarists in modern Britain, the leading churchman and public figure Herbert Hensley Henson (1863-1947) commenced his Journal in Birkenhead in 1885, while tutoring the indolent son of William Rathbone, a Liverpool shipping magnate. This extensively annotated edition publishes the first four volumes in full. It covers his experiences in a ship-building town hit hard by the industrial depression of the mid-1880s, and mired in religious sectarianism; his return to All Souls College, Oxford, and establishment of the Oxford Laymen's League for the defence of the Church, while agonising over whether he should become ordained; and his work at the Oxford House, the Anglican settlement in Bethnal Green, in combatting the influence of secularism. The value of the Journal from its earliest volumes is evident in its incisive commentary on people, places, and events, its searching reflections on Christianity and the authority of the Church, and in its fine literary style.
Gillian Cookson, Christine M. Newman, Graham R. Potts
The Townscape of Darlington
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Darlington from Anglo-Saxon settlement to thriving town, via the middle ages and the coming of the railway.
It is exactly a thousand years since Darlington first appeared in written records. During the following millennium, the small Anglo-Saxon settlement grew into today's thriving town, its history now generally linked in the public mind with entrepreneurial Quakers and the birth of railways. But as this book shows, Darlington's history encompasses many more diverse aspects in the change from medieval village to modern town. Through a survey of its physical development, the book describes how the town flourished in the middle ages; was largely destroyed by fire in 1585; and grew again in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, before the coming of the railway in the mid-1800s reinforced its prosperity. Its story is taken up to the present day, showing how Darlington is characterised by residential suburbs, with a town centre where Victorian and eighteenth-century buildings populate the original medieval streets. Dr GILL COOKSON is the County Editor for the Victoria County History of Durham.
Conan Doyle
The Reception of Latin Medicine in Early Medieval England
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Uses Old English medical texts - ranging from recipe collections and illustrated herbals to the therapeutics of ancient authorities - to reconstruct the diffusion and reception of Classical medical knowledge in early medieval England.
Direct evidence for the earlier Latin sources and transmission of early medieval medical texts in England is sorely lacking - which has led to scholarly neglect. This is a gap this book addresses, via a close examination of the Old English medical corpus, including the Lacnunga and Bald's Leechbook, to shed light on the diffusion and reception of this knowledge. It considers exactly which Latin medical texts were used in the compilation of the Old English versions, showing that they were, in many cases, translations of Greek medical texts. From this, it argues that the Old English corpus as a whole was a creative endeavor to synthesize the best medical knowledge available at the time, from the various Latin works of Soranus of Ephesus to the sixth- or seventh-century Latin traditions of Galen of Pergamum, Oribasius of Pergamum and Alexander of Tralles. Covering over eight centuries of the textual tradition of medicine, it demonstrates that the dissemination of medical knowledge in pre-Conquest England was far wider than previously believed.
Claire A. McCormick
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.
Mary Carruthers
Meditation, Invention, and Designing Thought in the Augustinian Middle Ages
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A fresh perspective on how early scholars perceived the cosmos and the nature of knowledge through a tour-de-force study of the central role geometry played in medieval creativity.
Geometry, rhetoric and creativity were intricately linked in medieval thought. Early thinkers integrated mathematical and linguistic frameworks in their attempts to understand both divine and human creation with geometry providing the means through which these scholars tackled everything from theological speculation to the medieval art of "Invention".
Through detailed explorations of the works of figures such as Augustine, Calcidius and Cassiodorus, this book reveals how medieval thinkers conceptualized beginnings-not as fixed points but as unfolding processes with metaphors of weaving, mapping and journeying reflecting how these scholars navigated the act of creation, whether that terrestrial or cosmological.
Engaging with philosophy, theology and intellectual history, this work offers fresh insights into how medieval minds reconciled the limits of human understanding with the vast complexity of the universe. In doing so, it challenges modern assumptions about the separation of mathematical and linguistic thinking, demonstrating the dynamic, process-oriented nature of medieval ideas about the mind and the procedures of thinking.
Christian A. Williams
Christian Faith and Namibian Liberation
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Illuminates how Christian communities shaped the trajectory of one nation's liberation struggle through the life of Namibian refugee pastor, Salatiel Ailonga.
Born at a Finnish mission station in South West Africa (SWA), Salatiel Ailonga was part of a generation of contract labourers who first imagined themselves as belonging to a multi-ethnic Namibian nation and who played a central role in liberating it from apartheid South African rule. This book examines the interplay between Christian missionary work and anti-colonial nationalism through Ailonga's life, in the context of Southern Africa's liberation wars and exile experiences during the late twentieth century - a period that united an international community across the Cold War divide and shaped the future of an African region.
Ailonga joined the South West African People's Organisation (SWAPO) in 1960, and in 1974 he became the first chaplain affiliated with a Southern African liberation movement in exile. When, amidst SWAPO internal conflict, he and his Finnish missionary wife were deported from Zambia to Finland, he sought to free Namibians detained in the frontline states and became part of a SWAPO dissident community. In 1990, just after Namibian independence, the Ailongas repatriated to Namibia, where conflicts and rumours from exile followed him home; competing memories of his life have reverberated ever since, outliving his death in 2015.
Highlighting the way in which Christian communities have sought to shape the trajectory of African nationalism, the book casts light on the interplay between religion and politics and the role of religion in conflict and peace-building processes in Africa.
Translated by Craig Taylor and Jane Taylor
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.
Edited by Robert Blackmore and Craig Lambert
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.
Ernest N Emenyonu
ALT 42: Oral and Written African Poetry and Poetics
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Examines the state of African poetry today, the continuing influence of Africa's pioneer poets, today's new generation and their work in written poetry and in spoken word, continuing oral indigenous traditions.
Almost half a century after ALT 6 and thirty-three years after ALT 16, what is the state of poetry and poetics in Africa? This volume of ALT highlights major developments and continuities in the practice of the art of poetry in the continent. Contributions analyse new frontiers in the traditional African epic and the Yoruba oríkì genre and innovations in form and theme, such as 'spoken word poetry' shared on digital media and pandemic poetry in the wake of COVID-19. They compare and contrast the work of Romeo Oriogun, Christopher Okigbo, and Gabriel Okara and of T.S. Eliot and Kofi Anyidoho. Other essays examine the complexities of translation from Ewe into English and the development of oral African poetry, underscoring its dynamism and the centrality of performance. The volume also includes interviews with poets Kofi Anyidoho, Kwame Dawes, and Kehinde Akano and tributes to Ama Ata Aidoo. Altogether, it highlights the richness and vibrancy of contemporary praxis and points to future directions in the field.
Edited by Reiner Smolinski, Kenneth P. Minkema and Andrew Juchno
Cotton Mather’s Curiosa Americana, Scientific Letters to the Royal Society
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An abundantly rich and vivid resource for anyone interested in the flora, fauna, medicine and scientific knowledge in early colonial America.
At the crossroads of faith and science, Cotton Mather-Puritan minister, political figure and fellow of the Royal Society-pursued a rigorous inquiry into the natural world. Between 1712 and 1724, he sent over 80 letters to the Royal Society, engaging with the same intellectual network as luminaries such as Isaac Newton, Edmond Halley and Robert Boyle. His Curiosa Americana letters document New England's flora and fauna, unusual meteorological events, medical advancements and transatlantic scientific discourse, revealing Mather as a pivotal figure in the early Enlightenment, deeply engaged in the era's defining debates.
This volume presents the first complete, scholarly edition of Curiosa Americana, offering transcriptions and annotations that illuminate Mather's contributions to natural philosophy. His observations-ranging from smallpox inoculation and germ theory to "monstrous" births and marine volcanoes-capture the dynamic interplay between science, religion and colonial identity. Accompanied by a substantial introduction, the collection situates Mather within the broader networks of the early modern Republic of Letters, challenging long-held assumptions about the intellectual landscape of colonial America. Essential reading for scholars of early modern science, intellectual history, and Atlantic studies, this work restores Mather's letters to their rightful place in the history of transatlantic knowledge production.
John Elphinstone
Russian Faith, Honour, & Courage Displayed in a Faithfull Narrative of the Russian Expedition by Sea (1769 & 1770)
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Captain John Elphinstone's first-hand account of serving the Russian Empress Catherine the Great in the Russian navy during the Russian-Ottoman war and at the famous Battle of Çeşme.
Russian Faith, Honour & Courage Displayed in a Faithfull Narrative of the Russian Expedition by Sea in the Years 1769 & 1770 is British Captain John Elphinstone's four-volume account of his two years in the Russian navy, serving the Russian Empress Catherine the Great. The Faithfull Narrative contains descriptions of his voyage from the Baltic to the Mediterranean, movements through the Aegean Sea, and commentary on the activities of the Imperial Russian Navy during the Russian-Ottoman War of 1768-74. Elphinstone offers one of the few first-hand accounts of the expedition and the celebrated Battle of Chesme (1770), which gave the Russian empire its maritime credentials. The text covers the squadron's movements around the Aegean Sea, including the major events and incidents of 1770: the Battle of Chesme, the siege of Lemnos, the loss of Elphinstone's flagship, Sviatoslav. The final part of the text sees Elphinstone return to St Petersburg in 1771 and then to London at the end of that year, to deal with the repercussions of the voyage to the Mediterranean.
Walter E A Van Beek
Masquerades in African Society
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Explores the dynamics of African masquerades and mask performances on the continent, linking performative expressions to societal characteristics.
What is the meaning of masks and masquerades in African traditions and how can we understand their role in rituals and performances? Why do we find masks in some African regions and not in others, and what does this 'mask habitat' say about the general dynamics of masquerades in Africa? Though masks are among the most famous art icons of Africa, exploration of their uses and the way in which they articulate social characteristics of African societies has been underexamined. This book takes an anthropological perspective on the phenomenon of masquerades on the African continent to show how mask rituals are an integral part of African indigenous religions and societies, and are informed by and linked to specific types of social and ecological conditions. Having established the commonalities of mask rituals and a mask typology, the authors look at the varieties of mask performances and the types of rituals in which masks function in rites of passage and in rituals of gender, power, and identity. The following chapters focus on different types of rituals featuring masks, from initiation and death ceremonies to secrecy, kingship, law and war. With its broad examination of the use of masks on the continent, from Angola to Burkina Faso, Cameroon, DRC, Guinea, Ivory Coast, Liberia, Mali, Nigeria, Senegal, this well illustrated book will stand as an authoritative study of the use of masks, of interest not only to those in African Studies but to anthropologists and ethnographers worldwide.
W.A. Sibly
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.
Colmán Etchingham
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.
Misha Donat
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.
Paolo Broggio
Criminal Justice and Peace-making in Early Modern Italy
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$170.00
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An exceptional study of private peace pacts in early modern Italy that challenges earlier notions of the place of these private agreements in the development of the courts and state.
Private settlements were among the most prominent yet least conspicuous aspects of justice in early modern Europe. Traditionally seen as incompatible with our notions of judicial modernity, these settlements reflected a deeply ingrained culture of negotiation and transaction-one that often viewed resolution by litigation with extreme scepticism. However, rather than existing in opposition to sovereign justice, this practice of private settlement coexisted with the implacable authority of rulers who alternated between exemplary punishments and royal pardons to maintain social harmony.
In this English translation of his seminal study, Governare l'odio. Pace e giustizia criminale nell'Italia moderna (secoli XVI-XVII), Paolo Broggio shows how private settlements were far from being a purely benevolent mechanism of reconciliation, often carrying unsettling similarities to institutional coercion and even acts of revenge. Judicial authorities are revealed as not only tolerating these private agreements but shown to have actively facilitated and manipulated them as a means of exerting their control within a community. Religious justifications further lent these agreements a veneer of moral obligation, masking the underlying pressures at play. Through detailed examples such as proceedings in the Papal States, Broggio explores how courts encouraged settlements not only to manage caseloads but to also reinforce existing social hierarchies and power structures.
This expansive study re-examines the role of peace settlements in early modern justice, revealing them as a fundamental yet coercive tool of governance rather than a simple, private, alternative to judicial authority.
Claire P. Ayelotan
Yoruba Pentecostalism and Child Witchcraft Accusations
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An exploration of Yoruba Pentecostalism's role in child witchcraft accusations, examining migration, leadership, and collective responsibility to address faith-based child abuse globally.
What drives communities to accuse children of witchcraft, and how do religious beliefs and leadership dynamics perpetuate this phenomenon across borders? Claire Ayelotan delves into the involvement of Yoruba (Nigerian) Pentecostal leaders in accusations of child witchcraft in Nigeria and the UK. Using a multidisciplinary approach, her research examines the theological, cultural, socioeconomic, and legal influences that drive such behaviours. Ethnographic studies and interviews with pastors and practitioners reveal how power dynamics, gender roles, and international migration intersect to perpetuate these harmful beliefs. The book uncovers gaps in current literature and presents original insights on the collective responsibility, shared beliefs, and complexities of Pentecostal leadership in this context. By focusing on the global aspects of child witchcraft accusations, it sheds new light on how migration impacts these practices and the negative consequences they have on vulnerable children.
An important read for academics, policymakers, and child welfare professionals, this book challenges assumptions and urges immediate action to combat faith-based child abuse in all its manifestations.
Edited by Mariana Masera with the collaboration of Ana Rosa Gómez Mutio and Omar Xavier Masera
A Companion to Early Iberian Traditional Lyrics
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Accessible and reliable introduction in English to the earliest vernacular lyric poetry in the Iberian Peninsula.
Dating to the tenth century, the earliest vernacular lyric poems in the Iberian Peninsula have been seen as evidence of an even older, oral, folk tradition and attest to the multicultural, multilingual nature of the genre from its very beginning. Primarily preserved in manuscript and printed songbooks, these poems were widely diffused across the Hispanic world.
This Companion offers an accessible, reliable introduction in English to early Iberian traditional lyrics from a comparative and interdisciplinary perspective, paying special attention to their multicultural origins and their complex nature as both oral and written compositions. The opening chapters discuss the importance of understanding this dual essence in studying traditional lyrics today, provide an outline of their structure and formal features, and offer a contemporary overview of the field. The volume then examines the kharjas, the cantigas de amigo, and the tradition of Catalan lyricism before turning to a comparison of popular lyrics with the poetry of the cancioneros and romanceros and the preservation of the tradition in Sephardic ballads. The final chapters examine the survival of popular lyrics into the modern era and explore a new means of interpreting these poems through musical archaeology and musicological studies.
Misha Donat
The Piano in Beethoven’s Chamber Music
Regular price
$39.95
Save $-39.95
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.
Shaun Evans
Coming of Age Celebrations on Welsh Landed Estates
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$130.00
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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.
Daniel Anlezark
Constructing the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles
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Offers insights into sources and inspirations, authorship and authorial style, and patterns of separation and convergence across versions of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles.
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is one of the most important documents to survive from early medieval England. Written in Old English, it was first created during the reign of King Alfred the Great (871-899). Up to Alfred's reign, and then in multiple continuations extending into the twelfth century, the Chronicle versions often provide a unique record of events, at times reported in the barest style, at others with passionate commentary.
This book is the first to tell the story of how the Chronicles came to be, providing a clear but detailed account of the development of its various versions. It starts with an examination of the textual and manuscript evidence, then explores the work of the two chroniclers first responsible for the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle's creation in the late ninth century, arguing that the first made a set of annals from disparate sources. The author then contends that a later reviser aligned with the Alfredian political programme wrote the annals for Alfred's reign, and at the same time also revised earlier entries, including the famous story of Cynewulf and Cyneheard. This book also sheds new light on the annals of Æthelred the Unready, arguing that Archbishop Wulfstan of York is likely to have authored some these, together with some tenth-century annals. Its final chapter provides the first comprehensive study of all the Chronicles' poetry.
Brigid Ehrmantraut
Classical Myth in Medieval Ireland
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Explores medieval Irish interest in Classical mythology and historiography and how it could be situated it within the framework of Christian salvation history.
From allusions to the Olympians in seventh-century glosses to twelfth and thirteenth-century vernacular adaptations of the epics of Vergil, Lucan, and Statius, Irish authors creatively re-imagined Greco-Roman mythology throughout the Middle Ages. They developed many strategies for situating the Classical deities within medieval Christian historiography, but rarely did they downplay or eliminate them. Some of these strategies, as this study reveals, reflected wider medieval European trends in Classical reception and mythography, whilst others were strikingly original and paralleled the ways in which Irish authors imagined the supernatural beings of their own pre-Christian past.
This book examines why Irish authors were interested in the history and mythology of the ancient Mediterranean, and how Classical polytheism influenced their ideas about their own pagan past. It explores the ways in which depictions of Irish Otherworldly characters both shaped and were shaped by the gods and supernatural figures of the Classical adaptations. Based on close readings of texts such as the Irish version of Lucan, In Cath Catharda, this book argues that Classical scholarship in medieval Ireland was closely tied to medieval ideas about salvation history. Ultimately, it concludes that medieval Irish authors and audiences applied the same interpretive tools used for biblical exegesis to characters and events from Greco-Roman mythology, history, and literature, and to the supernatural inhabitants of pre-Christian Ireland alike.
Malcolm Miller
Boundaries, Space and Register in Beethoven’s Piano Music
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$160.00
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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.
Wale Adebanwi
Democracy and Nigeria’s Fourth Republic
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Examines Nigeria's challenges with consolidating democracy and the crisis of governance arising from structural errors of the state and the fundamental contradictions of society in Nigeria's Fourth Republic.
'Today we are taking a decisive step on the path of democracy,' the newly sworn-in President Olusegun Obasanjo told Nigerians on 27 May 1999. 'We will leave no stone unturned to ensure sustenance of democracy, because it is good for us, it is good for Africa, and it is good for the world.' Nigeria's Fourth Republic has survived longer than any of the previous three Republics, the most durable Republic in Nigeria's more than six decades of independence. At the same time, however, the country has witnessed sustained periods of violence, including violent clashes over the imposition of Sharia'h laws, insurgency in the Niger Delta, inter-ethnic clashes, and the Boko Haram insurgency. Despite these tensions of, and anxieties about, democratic viability and stability in Nigeria, has democratic rule come to stay in Africa's most populous country? Are the overall conditions of Nigerian politics, economy and socio-cultural dynamics now permanently amenable to uninterrupted democratic rule? Have all the social forces which, in the past, pressed Nigeria towards military intervention and autocratic rule resolved themselves in favour of unbroken representative government? If so, what are the factors and forces that produced this compromise and how can Nigeria's shallow democracy be sustained, deepened and strengthened? This book attempts to address these questions by exploring the various dimensions of Nigeria's Fourth Republic in a bid to understand the tensions and stresses of democratic rule in a deeply divided major African state. The contributors engage in comparative analysis of the political, economic, social challenges that Nigeria has faced in the more than two decades of the Fourth Republic and the ways in which these were resolved - or left unresolved - in a bid to ensure the survival of democratic rule. This key book that examines both the quality of Nigeria's democratic state and its international relations, and issues such as human rights and the peace infrastructure, will be invaluable in increasing our understanding of contemporary democratic experiences in the neo-liberal era in Africa.
Julie Hotchin
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.
Stephanie Newell
Newsprint Literature and Local Literary Creativity in West Africa, 1900s – 1960s
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Groundbreaking examination of literary production in West African newspapers and local printing presses in the first half of the 20th century.
From their inception in the 1880s, African-owned newspapers in 'British West Africa' carried an abundance of creative writing by local authors, largely in English. Yet to date this rich and vast array of work has largely been ignored in critical discussion of African literature and cultural history. This book, for the first time, explores this under-studied archive of ephemeral writing - from serialised fiction to poetry and short stories, philosophical essays, articles on local history, travelogues and reviews, and letters - and argues for its inclusion in literary genres and anglophone world literatures. Combining in-depth case studies of creative writing in the Ghana and Nigeria press with a major reappraisal of the Nigerian pamphlets known as 'Onitsha market literature', and focusing on non-elite authors, the author examines hitherto neglected genres, styles, languages, and, crucially, readerships. She shows how local print cultures permeated African literary production, charting changes in literary tastes and transformations to genres and styles, as they absorbed elements of globally circulating English texts into formats for local consumption. Offering fresh trajectories for thinking about local and transnational African literary networks while remaining attuned to local textual cultures in contexts of colonial power relations, anticolonial nationalism, the Cold War and global circuits of cultural exchange, this important book reveals new insights into ephemeral literature as significant sites of literary production, and contributes to filling a gap in scholarship on colonial West Africa.
Winner: 2024 Gustav Ranis International Book Prize
Linda A. Pollock
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.
Lynneth Miller Renberg
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.
Joan Santanach
The Book of Sent Soví
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The oldest Catalan cookery book.
The Book of Sent Soví, composed around the middle of the fourteenth century, is the oldest surviving culinary text in Catalan. It is anonymous and, like the majority of medieval cookery books, is the product of a complex process of transmission, with multiple manuscript copies and readers who have left their mark on it. The contents are eminently practical. Successive cooks have recorded their own methods of preparing the dishes and recipes included, blending several culinary traditions in a single work. Sent Soví is also a reliable source of information on the cookery of the territories of the Crown of Aragon before the revolution caused by the arrival of products from the Americas. This edition includes both an English translation, by Robin Vogelzang, and the original Catalan version. It has been the editor's aim to clarify the difficult passages in the book - sometimes corrupted because of the complex manuscript tradition - so that it can be understood as easily as possible by its twenty-first-century readers.
JOAN SANTANACH lectures on medieval literature at the University of Barcelona.
Published in association with Editorial Barcino.
Kathryn A. Smith
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.
Edited by Emilio Sáenz-Francés
Foes to Friends. Spain, the United States and the United Kingdom from the Civil War to the Cold War
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Was Franco's Spain really a pariah in the Anglosphere?
This book examines pro-Francoism and the significant influence of a "Spanish lobby" in shaping US and British policy towards Spain during the Second World War and the years leading up to the Pact of Madrid in 1953. This lobby included not only pressure groups but also legislators and members of the executive as well as the armed forces, who shared economic and strategic interests and ideological sympathies in the growing anti-Communist atmosphere of the First Cold War.
The first two chapters provide the historical background to this rapprochement, examining monetary and credit policies in the United States and Spain during the 1930s and 40s, focusing in particular on the key roles played by American financial and business sectors, including Chase National Bank, to further the clandestine economic activities of US state companies and agencies in Spain during the Second World War. The book then turns to the role of the Spanish lobby in post-war US-Spanish diplomatic relations, looking at American individuals directly courted by the Spanish embassy in Washington as well as pro-Francoist congressmen who favored a closer relationship with Spain. The next chapter moves from Washington and New York to the West Coast to analyze local Spanish consular efforts to 'normalize' Spain in the eyes of the United States. Finally, the book turns to British relations with Spain during and after the Second World War and shows how the government's dependency on the US led to Britain becoming the junior partner in the formulation of Western policy towards Franco.
Andreas Gemählich
The Kenyan Cut Flower Industry & Global Market Dynamics
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Investigates the production, trade and consumption of the bouquets sold in European supermarkets and the consequences of this for the globalised economy.
From a macro-perspective, it appears that the cut flower industry has changed into a buyer-driven value chain with corporate retailers as the new lead firms. Yet, as this book shows, this is insufficient to explain how new trade relations come into being, and the consequences of this, not only for global economics, but for the producers, climate change and rural livelihoods. As the retailers and wholesalers of the flower industry in the West linked directly to producers in the Global South, trade relations changed fundamentally, and this critical new book explores the complexities of the power asymmetries and the way in which corporate retailers have shaped the market to promote their own interests, as well as the role non-economic actors played. This book examines in detail the situation at Lake Naivasha, Kenya, which has played a central part within this new market order. Since the 1970s, the area has developed into one of the most important production areas for the ready-made bouquets that sell so cheaply in European supermarkets. For the flower growers themselves, however, coping with the new conditions of supply and demand, the new market order has brought financial precariousness. Farms needed to be flexible in the production and marketing of their flowers. Yet while they were able to expand their production and achieve more stable employment conditions, this has not resulted in significantly higher remuneration. The rapidly changing economic situation has also had a profound impact, not only on local stakeholders, but on the environment, where there is intensified competition for resources and new production technologies.
Published in association with the Collaborative Research Centre FUTURE RURAL AFRICA, funded by the German Research Council (DFG).
James Stevens Curl
Classical Architecture
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Celebration of the classical architectural tradition, spanning 2500 years but widely practised today. Professionals, students and enthusiasts will benefit from the profuse illustrations, including detailed line drawings, demonstrating this rich tradition and its prevailing themes and motifs.
Classical architecture continues to be widely practised today, and this book describes and demonstrates the fundamental principles from its origins in Antiquity and continuous development during the Renaissance, the Baroque and Rococo phases, Neo-Classicism, and survival in various forms into the current century. Heavily illustrated with colour and black and white photography, a particular strength of the book is the many detailed and annotated line drawings for which the author is well-known and a glossary which serves as a dictionary of Classical architecture in itself. The author celebrates the richness of Classical architectural vocabulary, grammar and language, and demonstrates the huge range of themes and motifs found in the subject. The book provides a basis for understanding this rich source of architectural design which has been at the core of Western culture for over 2500 years and continues to be widely studied and practised worldwide. For practicing architects, planners and students, this is the benchmark book for understanding the Classical tradition in architecture and landscape.
Marco Barducci
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.
Thomas C. Sawyer
The Making and Meaning of a Medieval Manuscript
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Develops a method for placing book-historical evidence in dialogue with literary meaning through a detailed investigation of a MS Bodley 851.
How do you read a medieval book? And what is the relationship between the study of manuscripts as material artifacts and the study of their textual contents? This book develops a method for placing book-historical evidence in dialogue with literary meaning. Medieval manuscripts do not simply witness the texts they contain: through the process of their making, they preserve and generate knowledge about literature itself.
Central to the expression of method in this study is a detailed investigation of an immensely complex composite manuscript, Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Bodley 851. This manuscript survives as an important representative of textual cultures popular in late-medieval England: it attests the work of at least eight scribal agents and contains an infamous scribal version of Piers Plowman (Z-text), the sole surviving copy of Walter Map's De nugis curialium, and an array of satirical Anglo-Latin poetry, including the Apocalypsis goliae episcopi, the Speculum stultorum, and the Bridlington Prophecy. Close attention to the production of Bodley 851 underpins critical examinations of fragmentary misogamy, the construction of literary sequences, and the extent of pseudonymous authorship in the manuscript record.
Chih-Hsin Huang
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.
Roger Morriss
Samuel Bentham, Inspector General of Naval Works, 1796–1807, Letters and Papers
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Enlightened reformer or dangerous maverick? This book examines the controversies created by Samuel Bentham, who fought to enhance the performance of the British navy during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars.
Samuel Bentham, Inspector General of Naval Works, 1796-1807, built successful ships, advocated non-recoil gunnery and introduced steam powered machinery into the royal dockyards. The facilities he created at Portsmouth remain as a memorial to his ambition. As a technologist and ideologue, he straddled the 18th and 19th centuries and helped to create the steam navy. Yet, in virtually everything he did, he courted controversy, not least because he attacked vested interest and, like his elder brother, Jeremy, pursued the interest of the public by commitment to the Principle of Utility.
Trained in the royal yards as a shipwright, Bentham went to Russia in 1779 and entered the service of Catherine the Great and Prince Potemkin. There he fostered his talent for invention and innovation, developed the concept of the Panopticon and learned the value of individual responsibility. Having equipped the flotilla of small craft that fought and defeated the Turkish navy in the Black Sea, he returned to Britain in 1791 aged 34 and a Brigadier General.
Attached to the Admiralty from 1795, he aimed to enlarge the capacity and efficiency of the dockyards, as measured by the turn-around speed of ships refitting and undergoing minor repairs. He admired 'mill practice' and developed the Wood and Metal Mills at Portsmouth to demonstrate the ability of the navy to become as productive as private industry. To this end, he aimed to use contemporary science, logical thinking and education to enhance yard productivity. To this end, in 1800 he advanced a programme of administrative reform based on personal accountability, detailed accountancy and central cost control.
Bentham was supported by First Lords Spencer and St Vincent but he aggravated members of the Navy Board by the works he directed at Portsmouth and he aroused their apprehension by his obvious ambition and condemnation of board collective responsibility. In 1805 he was sent to Russia on a mission to build ships for Britain. While he was away, his Admiralty post was abolished and in 1808 he was obliged to accept the post of Civil Architect and Engineer at the Navy Board. In 1812 that post too was dissolved
Samuel Bentham was nevertheless a brilliant man of extraordinary capabilities, a polymath who planted modern ideas in the civil departments of the navy. A challenging character, he has been too little known. His friend, the Mechanist Simon Goodrich, advised him he was regarded as a 'strange creature' at the Navy Board. Yet in 1812 he left a record of Services which became a source of guidance during the post-war rationalisation. The Whig government of 1806 admired his ideas and, in conjunction with those of his brother, they continued to have influence in the nineteenth century when the Whigs returned to power.
Mario Higa
Machado de Assis
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A lively and accessible introduction to Machado de Assis and his work
Machado de Assis (1839-1908) is a world-class writer and arguably the greatest of Brazilian literature. Susan Sontag deemed him "the greatest writer ever produced in Latin America," and Harold Bloom, "the supreme black literary artist to date." John Updike called him a "master," and Carlos Fuentes, a "miracle." This book guides the reader through Machado's biography, times, and critical reception and examines his various personas - the translator, poet, playwright, critic, cronista, short story writer, and novelist - paying particular attention to his fictional prose, which most clearly conveys his acerbic criticism of Brazilian society and his deft view of the human condition. The book closes with an updated list of Machado's works available in English translation and a selection of further critical studies.
Niamh Thornton
María Félix
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María Félix (1914-2002) left her mark on Mexican and European film as well as fashion, art and jewellery design. Cartier created one-of-a-kind pieces; Leonora Carrington and Diego Rivera painted portraits; Carlos Fuentes wrote a play; Agustín Lara, a bestselling song. But she was nobody's muse.
Did Félix really bring baby crocodiles to the Cartier boutique to request lifelike copies in a necklace? The story may be apocryphal, but it perfectly encapsulates her powerful, independent and unconventional persona. This book first examines Félix's life and work, reviewing her films and acting style and considering what they say about gender norms and a woman's place on screen. It then turns to her role as curator and benefactor, exploring how art, literature and song sustained her image. It concludes by exploring the persistent interest in her life story and evaluating her significance for contemporary audiences.
Mark Bailey
Manorial Account Rolls and Rentals of Walsham Le Willows 1327 to 1559
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This fourth volume, featuring a good series of manorial accounts and rentals, complements the court roll material by painting a more textured picture of life in late-medieval Walsham.
The Suffolk Records Society has already published three volumes on Walsham Le Willows: 17, the Field Book of 1577 edited by Kenneth Dodd, and 41 and 45, the Court Rolls of 1303-1399, edited by Ray Lock. This fourth volume, featuring a good series of manorial accounts and rentals, complements the court roll material by painting a more textured picture of life in late-medieval Walsham through furnishing further details of its society and economy. These include documents from the small lay manor of High Hall, which was highly typical of medieval English lordships but hardly any sources have survived from such places. The accounts and rentals provide insights into Walsham's agricultural practices, including woodland management for the production of fuel, the balance of crops and livestock, the disposal of produce, the remuneration of workers, the consumption habits of harvest workers and local lords, and the role of women in the management of the manorial estate. There are insights into local tensions following the national political turmoil in the summer of 1450. Yet even these four volumes hardly scratch the surface of the surviving archive. In addition to the published fourteenth-century court rolls there is a long run of rolls from 1399 through to the early twentieth century and there are many more surveys and rentals from the early modern period. Indeed Walsham may reasonably claim to be one of the best documented places in England between 1300 and 1900.
Margaret R. Greer
María de Zayas and her Tales of Desire, Death and Disillusion
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Who doubts, my reader, that you will be amazed that a woman has the audacity not only to write a book, but to send it for printing, which is the crucible in which the purity of genius is tested'?
A pioneer of early modern feminism, María de Zayas y Sotomayor wrote poetry, drama and prose but is best known for two page-turning collections of short stories: Exemplary Tales of Love (1637) and Tales of Disillusion (1647). This book provides an engaging introduction to Zayas and her work. It begins by relating what we know of her life, placing her in her socio-political and economic context and addressing the issue of women's literacy. Following chapters examine her use of sexual desire, violence and humour in her tales; her narrative structures; and her oral style. The book then turns to identity construction in her tales and in society, analysing questions of gender, class, family and 'race', and to her treatment of religion, magic and the supernatural. The final chapters explore Zayas's status as a proto-feminist; her early modern reception in Spain and elsewhere; and various critical readings of her work.
Tim Thornton
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.
Edited by Alice R. Taylor-Griffiths and Seosamh Mac Cárthaigh
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.
Suzanne Amy Foxley
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.
Jonathan Parry
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.
Edited by Thijs Porck, Kees Dekker and László Sándor Chardonnens
Cultural Connections between the Continent and Early Medieval England
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Essays exploring the literary, material, scholarly and linguistic ties between the Continent and early medieval England.
"Anglo-Saxons were tied to the Continent in many ways", Rolf H. Bremmer Jr once observed. Throughout the early Middle Ages, a crucial phase for Anglo-Continental contact, cultural connections between the English and their neighbours across the North Sea developed in a number of forms, from missionary activities to political contacts, intellectual exchanges and military confrontations, with people, books, texts, artefacts and ideas travelling back and forth. The language and culture of the Anglo-Saxons became once again part of the scholarly exchange between England and the Continent during the early modern period, when philologists from either side of the North Sea laboured on the recovery of Old English and made new connections between Old English, the other Old Germanic languages, and more distant tongues.
This volume investigates these dynamic interactions between Anglo-Saxons and the Continent. Contributors break new ground in shared traditions in runic writing, legal ideas in England and Frisia, moments of transcultural and translingual contact, the influence of continental texts in early medieval England, the manuscripts which provide unique glimpses of the dissemination of texts and ideas, and early modern attempts to apply Old English to novel purposes. They thus form an appropriate tribute to the inspirational scholarship of Rolf H. Bremmer Jr in the field of Old English philology.
Edited by Phyllis Weliver and Katharine Ellis
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
Translated by Roger Nichols, edited by Julian Rushton, Introduction by Peter Bloom
Berlioz the Critic
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Hector Berlioz combined writing music with lively and informed music criticism. This collection of articles, engagingly translated by Roger Nichols, covers the middle years of his critical career.
PRESTO MUSIC BOOK OF THE MONTH JUNE 2025
Berlioz's music criticism from 1837 to 1850 covers a period druing which he composed some of his finest works, and travelled abroad to perform them before appreciative audiences in Germany, Russia, and England. Roger Nichols has chosen and translated extracts from fifty-eight articles of particular interest, with commentary and notes identifying people mentioned. Berlioz scholars Peter Bloom and Julian Rushton provide an informative introduction and a comprehensive editorial apparatus.
In the selected articles Berlioz discusses Paris performances of early and modern music, including new operas and revivals, and concerts at the Paris Conservatoire. He comments freely but with understanding on conductors, singers and instrumentalists. The essays demonstrate the composer's concern with innovation in the design of musical instruments and assess the quality of performing venues. Berlioz writes on the musical life of London, France, and Germany, most entertainingly about the inauguration of statues of Beethoven and Rossini. The selection is framed by major articles on "Imitation in Music" and on Gluck's opera Alceste.
Edited by Markman Ellis and Jack Orchard
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.
Jon Banks
Hungarian “Gypsy-Band” Music in Vienna, 1850-1914
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A detailed investigation, based on extensive study of press reports and early recordings, of the popular Hungarian bands in Vienna who influenced Brahms and other composers.
It has long been recognized that Viennese composers, especially Brahms, were profoundly influenced by Hungarian "Gypsy bands." Furthermore, the style hongrois repertory and style in which these bands specialized has been identified as important in its own right. The bands themselves, however, are generally relegated to the status of being part of an unknowable oral tradition, of which nothing remains apart from some highly exoticized literary hyperbole. Jon Banks's pathbreaking Hungarian "Gypsy-Band" Music in Vienna, 1850-1914 redresses this imbalance by presenting a detailed account of these "other" musicians and their interactions with the mainstream of Western classical music. To do so, it analyzes thousands of advertisements, news reports, and anecdotes in the Viennese press relating to "Gypsy bands" (whose members were often but not always Romani) and builds a detailed picture of who the musicians were, where they played, and how the conditions of their employment affected their lives and their music-making. The press notices are collated with evidence from contemporaneous Hungarian sources as well as an analysis of the hundreds of recordings that these bands made in the first decade of the twentieth century. In undertaking this first systematic examination of these different kinds of materials, Jon Banks's book provides a reanimation of some extraordinary personalities and careers in the light of their own achievements as well as their influence on others.
Damascus Kafumbe
Interpreting Court Song in Uganda
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A critical interpretation of essential Kiganda royal court songs that examines how the meanings of their lyrics enter into dynamic dialogue with contemporary national politics in Uganda.
Lyric interpretation, which Damascus Kafumbe defines as a process of creative renewal that infuses vitality into songs, enables interpreters and analysts to derive a multiplicity of meanings from songs instead of being limited to a single literal narrative. As he and his research collaborators demonstrate, the process extends the life of a song by allowing it to generate new versions, meanings, and relevance. Kafumbe examines how lyric interpretation serves to renew the lives of twenty-one songs from the repertoires of royal court musicians of the Kingdom of Buganda, arguing that the meanings of these songs are not singular, static, and monolithic but rather dynamic and multivalent. Through extensive research within past and present contexts, Kafumbe presents a series of unique perspectives on the ways Kiganda court songs reflect varied kinds of power relations. These meanings, which surface via lyric interpretation, come from daily interactions among citizens and between leaders and subjects. This interpretive process helps illuminate truths and clarify myths about the power dynamics that shape political life in present-day Uganda, highlighting the relevance of court song lyrics to contemporary national contexts. By engaging with the book's wide range of voices, readers will learn to appreciate these songs, their historical and contemporary contexts, and their composer-performers' stories and interpretations more fully.
This book is available as Open Access under the Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND.
Edited by Dorsey Armstrong and K. S. Whetter
Studies in Arthurian and Chronicle Traditions in Memory of Fiona Tolhurst
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Essays examining Arthurian and Chronicle texts, contexts and reception, in honour of Fiona Tolhurst's contributions to Arthurian Studies.
In her all-too-short but ground-breaking academic career, Fiona Tolhurst made significant contributions to the discipline of Arthurian Studies, advancing, amongst much else, understanding of Geoffrey of Monmouth, Arthurian Women, the English Mortes, and modern Arthuriana, including cinematic versions of the legend. The essays assembled here reflect her commitment to explication of Arthurian and Chronicle texts and contexts. Several engage with Geoffrey of Monmouth, examining, among other topics, the depiction of women in his narrative of British origins; the function of giants and significance of landscape and geography in his writings; the contrast between Geoffrey's Trojan-British empire and the Graeco-Egyptian foundation narratives of Scottish and Irish chronicles; and the reception and use of his writing from the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries. Other contributors consider characterization and politics in the Brut tradition and Malory; the puzzling dualities of the alliterative Morte; the reception of Malory's "Trystram"; continuities between medieval and modern readings of the Morte Darthur; and the uses, adaptation, and appropriation of Arthurian themes and ideals in the twenty-first century.
Henry Sharpe
The Journals of Henry Sharpe
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Henry Sharpe's journals are an early-Victorian treasure-trove, rich with observations about the great political and social concerns of the time, as well as the ups and downs of family life and raising children.
Henry Sharpe's journals are an early-Victorian treasure-trove. This remarkable document is rich with observations about the great political and social concerns of the time, with an extraordinary range of ideas and depth of discussion on literary, artistic and philosophical matters. He reveals detail about historic events not mentioned elsewhere, expanding our knowledge of Hampstead and of wider London history.
Sharpe's great passion was for education. He spent much of his spare time teaching in local schools and setting up Reading Rooms and evening classes for working men. His accounts of the ups and downs of family life and raising children are both touching and amusing, putting Victorian fatherhood into a new light. His trenchant views, especially on political and religious matters, are often startling, contradicting the usual stereotype of the Victorian middle classes.
Joanne Cusack
Women in Irish Traditional Music
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Traces the position, experiences and reception of women in Irish traditional music through detailed ethnographic and statistical findings.
This book is the first of its kind to engage with the larger subject of women in commercial Irish traditional music. It considers the experiences of performers in the various commercial arenas of the tradition, while also engaging in critical discussions of choice, agency, feminism and sexualisation. It reveals how the commercial music industry and Celtic music label continues to place women within a stereotypical idealised role or occupation.
The book provides new insight into the legacy of women-led bands and compilations as well as their impact on Irish traditional music over five decades. Its findings on commercial dance shows are equally significant. While these shows had a positive impact on performers, at the same time they enforced gendered, racial and heteronormative expectations.
Drawing on extensive ethnographic and statistical research, the book finds strong evidence that women and other marginalised practitioners continue to face greater challenges and different expectations when maintaining a professional career and participating in Irish traditional music. It also uncovers characteristics and dynamics related to the recreational and commercial spaces of the Irish traditional music and Irish dance scene that enable harmful and predatory behaviour.
The author's findings support understandings and aid future legislation for creating a safe, inclusive and equitable performance space for all.
Cover artwork by Claire Prouvost
Thomas Mann; edited and translated by Jeffrey L. High, Elaine Chen, and Hans Rudolf Vaget
Thomas Mann’s Antifascist Radio Addresses, 1940–1945
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First complete English translation of Mann's uncannily insightful wartime anti-Nazi radio addresses, once again urgently topical in the context of the current worldwide rise of anti-democratic movements.
Upon Hitler's rise to power in 1933, the great German writer Thomas Mann, 1929 Nobel Prize laureate on the strength of his monumental novels Buddenbrooks and The Magic Mountain, chose exile, eventually moving to the United States in 1938. An early critic of National Socialism, he gave over 150 public lectures with titles such as "The Coming Victory of Democracy." From 1940 to 1945, he authored and narrated a series of anti-Nazi radio addresses that were broadcast to Germany by the BBC; German listeners risked severe punishment.
Mann's radio addresses constitute his most sustained contribution to the Allied war effort. In them, he comments on the progress of the war, contrasts fascism with democracy, measures Hitler against Roosevelt, and counters German propaganda with international consensus, lies with facts. After initially encouraging the Germans to resist the Nazi regime, Mann prepares them for the consequences of defeat, but also instills hope in them for future reconciliation with the community of nations.
Today, when democracy is again endangered in much of the world, Mann's antifascist radio addresses have once again acquired urgency. This edition presents for the first time English translations of all of Mann's 58 radio addresses, with a foreword by Mann's grandson Frido Mann, an introduction by leading Mann scholar Hans Rudolf Vaget, careful annotations and a selection of photographs.
Nathanial Eli Gardner
A Companion to Latin American Photography
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How can photography enrich our knowledge of Latin America?
Photography provides unique insights into Latin America. It acts as a witness, agent, and archive - containing a wealth of knowledge about the continent, its social classes, and its multiple ethnicities. This companion introduces the reader to the role that photography plays in Latin America, offers ways in which it can be studied, and reveals how this medium can promote a deeper awareness of the region.
It reviews the history of photography in Latin America; ways in which the technology transmits distinctive information; the influence of specific photographers and their relationships with patrons, mentors, and students; the role of institutions in promoting photography; and the developing Latin American canon. The Companion to Latin American Photography also explores how the medium can shape Latin American narratives and cultural identities; assert or question power; serve as testimony and memory; and represent and empower women, children and youth, as well as marginalized groups such as the disappeared.
The study is intended not only to provide an overview of Latin American photography (including dozens of images from a vast array of photographers over the past two centuries), it also discusses innovative work taking place there. Above all, this book can be viewed as a guide to the ways in which photography can enhance and expand a viewer's knowledge of Latin America.
Harry White
Fieldwork: Essays on the Cultural History of Music in Ireland
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An absorbing study of the development and reception of musical culture in Ireland by a pioneering and deservedly renowned author.
This volume is a collection of fourteen essays on the history and reception of Irish music and music in Ireland. It addresses three prevailing themes: the historiography of Irish music, the influence of music on Irish writing (and vice versa), and the cultural identity and reception of Irish music both domestically and in the world at large. Its principal protagonists include Thomas Moore, W. H. Grattan Flood, George Moore, Edward Martyn, Charles Villiers Stanford, James Joyce, Dora Pejačević, Ina Boyle, Aloys Fleischmann and Jennifer Walshe. These essays also identify and interrogate key questions underpinning a general crisis of reception in relation to Irish music, and particularly art music, within the domain of Irish studies. Fieldwork examines this crisis in the aftermath of The Encyclopaedia of Music in Ireland (published in 2013) and a major retrospective of Irish art music, Composing the Island (curated and presented in 2016). It thereby engages closely with contemporary Irish art music and the challenges which this music has faced in the early decades of the twenty-first century.
This well-conceived and beautifully written work testifies to Harry White's central place in the shaping of the discourse surrounding the cultural history of Irish music over the last 40 years. White's gift for expression and memorably poetic turns of phrase allows the complexity of ideas and range of historical and literary knowledge examined in these essays to be deftly excavated and evaluated. Curiosity, provocativeness, imagination and literature are threaded through his exploration of how Irish history and experience have been imagined musically.
Edited by Nancy P. Pope
NLW MS Brogyntyn ii.1
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The first full examination of a fascinating manuscript, Brogyntyn ii.1, a Middle English miscellany with a little Latin, compiled in the 1460s for an audience of low-ranking gentry.
Its 57 texts include the romance Sir Gawain and the Carl of Carlisle, practical information, almost every genre of verse, and many items in prose, two of which were adapted from poetic versions by their scribes. More than half of these items are either unique to this manuscript or have been uniquely altered from their sources and analogues.
The essays here offer both a comprehensive and foundational understanding of the manuscript. They consider the intended readers' social class, analyse the scribal handwriting, and for the first time identify the dialectal provenance of all the scribes who wrote in English. Further chapters consider specific texts (The Siege of Jerusalem in Prose and a life of St. Katherine of Alexandria), while four others look closely at the variety of lyrics, different kinds of practical texts and their parodies, and sequences of poems with thematic connections. It also includes editions of four previously unpublished items.
Edited by Sarah Vandegrift Eldridge and Eleanor Ter Horst
Goethe Yearbook 32
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This year's volume features special sections on gambling in the Age of Goethe and on Goethe and music, as well as book reviews, a translation of Lenz's "Zerbin" and other essays on the period.
The Goethe Yearbook is a publication of the Goethe Society of North America, showcasing North American and international scholarship on Goethe and other authors and aspects of German literature and culture of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In volume 32, Joanna Raisbeck analyzes two recently discovered sonnets by Karoline von Günderrode, uncovering an a priori pessimism that anticipates nineteenth-century thinkers. This is followed by Brian Donarski's scholarly introduction to and translation of Lenz's Zerbin, or Recent Philosophy-the first time this text has appeared in English. Ethan Blass reads surprising similarities in staging and visual language between Goethe's Die natürliche Tochter and Hitchcock's film Marnie, arguing that Goethe's theatrical innovations are protocinematic. The next four articles, by Claire Baldwin, Austen Hinkley, Jürgen Overhoff, and William H. Carter, offer an exploration of the theme "Gambling in the Age of Goethe." These essays touch on both canonical and forgotten figures to illuminate a rich discourse around chance, coincidence, risk management, and play that connects with key aspects of historical discourse and literary representation in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The final two pieces, by Jonathan Guez and Matthew Poon, treat musical responses to Goethe's works by Franz Schubert and Robert Schumann. A collection of book reviews that offer a comprehensive view of new work in the wider field closes the volume.
Damascus Kafumbe
Interpreting Court Song in Uganda
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A critical interpretation of essential Kiganda royal court songs that examines how the meanings of their lyrics enter into dynamic dialogue with contemporary national politics in Uganda.
Lyric interpretation, which Damascus Kafumbe defines as a process of creative renewal that infuses vitality into songs, enables interpreters and analysts to derive a multiplicity of meanings from songs instead of being limited to a single literal narrative. As he and his research collaborators demonstrate, the process extends the life of a song by allowing it to generate new versions, meanings, and relevance. Kafumbe examines how lyric interpretation serves to renew the lives of twenty-one songs from the repertoires of royal court musicians of the Kingdom of Buganda, arguing that the meanings of these songs are not singular, static, and monolithic but rather dynamic and multivalent. Through extensive research within past and present contexts, Kafumbe presents a series of unique perspectives on the ways Kiganda court songs reflect varied kinds of power relations. These meanings, which surface via lyric interpretation, come from daily interactions among citizens and between leaders and subjects. This interpretive process helps illuminate truths and clarify myths about the power dynamics that shape political life in present-day Uganda, highlighting the relevance of court song lyrics to contemporary national contexts. By engaging with the book's wide range of voices, readers will learn to appreciate these songs, their historical and contemporary contexts, and their composer-performers' stories and interpretations more fully.
This book is available as Open Access under the Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND.
Edited by Emmeline Garnett and Sarah Rose, with contributions by Christopher Donaldson, Fiona Edmonds and Angus J. L. Winchester
Victoria County History of Westmorland I
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This long-awaited volume, the first installment in the Victoria County History of Westmorland, covers the 13 townships of scenic and historic Lonsdale Ward from prehistory to the near present.
This landmark book is the first Victoria County History publication for the historic county of Westmorland and the 250th volume in Red Book series. It provides an account of the 13 townships comprising Lonsdale Ward, one of the four ancient divisions of the county of Westmorland, parts of which now lie in the Yorkshire Dales National Park. Most of these townships belonged to the parishes of Burton-in-Kendal and Kirkby Lonsdale, both centres of pre-Conquest worship. Kirkby Lonsdale developed as a market town at a major crossing of the River Lune. The medieval Devil's Bridge has long attracted visitors and tourists to the town, as has the view from St Mary's churchyard, which was immortalised by J.M.W. Turner and John Ruskin. Lying on a major north-south route, Burton was a significant corn market from the late 17th century. With a largely rural upland landscape, agriculture was the chief occupation in the area for centuries. An exception was Holme, where a flax mill and industrial settlement developed in the 1800s. A lack of industry helped to preserve the historic character of Kirkby Lonsdale and Burton-in-Kendal, where many Georgian buildings survive.
Rhys Kaminski-Jones
Welsh Revivalism in Imperial Britain, 1707-1819
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Reframes the study of Welsh cultural revivalism, highlighting transnational and imperial contexts.
In the long eighteenth century, as Britain grappled with the aftermath of the 1707 Acts of Union and consolidated a global empire, Welsh 'Cambro-Britons' developed a movement of cultural awakening, reinventing their traditions for a new age. Amid profound local, national and imperial transformations, Welsh authors and activists sought to reimagine their history, language and literature, claiming a place for Wales and the Welsh diaspora in the British imperial order. Far from being an insular phenomenon, this revival intersected with key debates of the era, from enlightenment science and radical politics to colonial expansion, transatlantic abolitionism and metropolitan sociability.
This study reframes Welsh cultural revivalism, revealing its fundamentally international and archipelagic dimensions. Nationally significant Welsh authors like Lewis Morris, David Samwell, Thomas Pennant, and Iolo Morganwg are placed in their transnational, imperial, and global contexts. Examined alongside Thomas Gray's British bardism, William Jones's Orientalism, and the imperialism of Cook's voyages, their writings demonstrate how Welsh thinkers engaged with - and shaped - shifting ideas of Britishness, empire, race, and identity. Drawing on new archival research, and giving equal attention to Welsh - and English - language texts, Rhys Kaminski-Jones challenges traditional narratives of Welsh cultural nationalism as a simple precursor to modern Welsh nationhood, instead positioning the revival as central to transatlantic intellectual currents. With its pathbreaking bilingual and interdisciplinary approach, this book offers fresh insights into the complexities of nationhood, empire, and cultural memory.
Jim Harris
Children’s Health and Urban Ecology in England, 1885–1919
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Analyzes public health efforts to reduce infant mortality and improve children's health in three large English cities: Birmingham, Liverpool and Manchester.
While English public health efforts had reduced the threat of infectious diseases and improved sanitation by the end of the Victorian era, soaring infant mortality rates brought children's health to the forefront of public health concerns. Efforts to understand the causes of infant mortality and improve children's survival required attention to the environments where infant mortality was often highest, i.e., in the cities.
Children's Health and Urban Ecology in England, 1885-1919 examines the history of urban public health campaigns in three of the largest English cities, Birmingham, Liverpool and Manchester. It considers how local environments impacted children's health by creating ecological conditions ripe for the spread of disease, as well as opportunities for improvements and interventions. Between 1885 and 1919, English public health leaders began to establish increasingly localized approaches to public health that included interventions in households and at schools. This work was conducted by new types of public health professionals, including health visitors to new mothers and school medical officers. While these programs emerged from local environmental conditions, two imperial military conflicts (the Second Anglo-Boer War and the First World War) drew national attention to the importance of children's health. In examining the effects of these conflicts as well as the urgent response to local environmental conditions, Children's Health and Urban Ecology highlights how the epicenter of public health shifted from cities to the state by the end of the First World War.
Edited by Meg Twycross, Sarah Carpenter, Elisabeth Dutton and Gordon Kipling
Medieval English Theatre 46
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Newest research into drama and performance from the Middle Ages and the Tudor period.
Medieval English Theatre is the premier journal in early theatre studies. Its name belies its wide range of interest: it publishes articles on theatre and pageantry from across the British Isles up to the opening of the London playhouses and the suppression of the civic religious plays, and also includes contributions on European and Latin drama, together with analyses of modern survivals or equivalents, and of research productions of medieval plays.
This volume is testament to the lively range of current research across the field of medieval theatre. It investigates different traditions of performance, through a variety of theatrical, theological, and material approaches. It opens with an analysis of a fascinating Dutch rhetoricians play-text, revealing how its engagingly disruptive female character, "Everyday Chitchat", proves central to a serious discussion of censorship - in a play which was itself censored. Although no play-text survives from medieval Beverley, the next contribution shows how local records of its Corpus Christi plays offer rich details of a range of pageants and organisation not dissimilar from its more famous neighbour, York. The two following articles investigate theological issues. A nuanced re-reading of The Treatise of Miracles Playing considers how priestly involvement in performance raised anxieties about the role and authority of priests, including at the Mass. Attitudes to "dread", revealed through the taxonomies of fear developed by medieval theologians, then illuminate the didactic role of fear, engendered in the protagonists and audiences of the Macro morality plays. The volume closes with the second part of an investigation into "John Blanke's Hat". Following the first part's demonstration, in the previous volume of METh, that the Black trumpeter's headgear was not a marker of his faith, this uncovers the true identity of the hat, asking how far it can offer evidence for his history. The present volume thus throws new light on familiar texts and questions, offering important contributions to newly developing fields of study.
Chris Walton
Music and Desire among the Austro-German Romantics
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Investigates the composition and reception of works by key Romantics such as Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, Wagner and the Schumanns with attention to the role of sexual desire in the composers' lives and music.
Scholars have for several decades been devoting increasing attention to aspects of sexuality and desire in the music of the Austro-German Romantics. Undertaking a close analysis of the sources, the four chapters of this book show how our assumptions about what those composers desired are often in fact contingent on what we, their commentators, have wanted them to desire over the course of reception history. Beethoven's Fidelio and Schubert's Winterreise tend to be regarded as a hymn to freedom, on the one hand, and an interior monologue of an alienated lover, on the other, though in neither case does such a view correspond to what the composer intended. In contrast, Richard Wagner dismissed his own opera The Ban on Love as a youthful indiscretion extolling the "free love" of the Young German movement; but he was reinterpreting an early work to align it with his later aesthetic.
The final chapter examines the chronology of the friendship of Robert and Clara Schumann and Johannes Brahms in order to discern the likely truths about their triangular relationship before and after Robert Schumann's incarceration in a mental asylum. By adhering to the sources and placing them in the social, linguistic, and geographical contexts of their time, author Chris Walton grants all these protagonists a greater agency of desire than has hitherto been the case.
Linda Cimardi
Performing Arts and Gender in Postcolonial Western Uganda
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Focusing on runyege, the main traditional performance genre of the Banyoro and Batooro people, this book explores the entanglement of traditional music, dance, and theater with gender and postcolonialism in Western Uganda.
Drawing on archival research and extensive fieldwork in the regions of Bunyoro and Tooro, Linda Cimardi examines the connection between traditional performing arts and gender in western Uganda. The book focuses on runyege, the main genre of the Banyoro and Batooro people, exploring its different components of singing, instrument playing, dancing, and acting and identifying their complex relationships to gender models and expressions. Today mainly performed at Ugandan school festivals and by semiprofessional ensembles, repertoires like runyege adhere to stage conventions that have developed over several decades. Some of these conventions are powerful devices allowing the actors involved (performers, teachers, students, adjudicators, and audiences) to collectively shape an image of local culture grounded in a gender binary that is perceived as traditional. At the same time, stage conventions are exploited by some performers to negotiate their gender identities and expressions in unconventional ways, thus challenging hegemonic gender models. Moving between analysis of historical recordings, oral accounts, and present-day fieldwork data and experiences, the book engages in a comprehensive analysis of the postcolonial entanglement of arts and gender.
Audio and video recordings presented in the book can be accessed on the book's companion website, http://hdl.handle.net/1802/37373.
Edited by Sean Franzel and Michael Swellander
Cultural Journalism in Germany, 1815–1848
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The first critical anthology of major programmatic texts of cultural journalism from the crucial period known in Germany as the Vormärz, the time before the March Revolutions of 1848.
Cultural journalism-a broad category of periodical writing encompassing criticism, reporting on the arts, popular culture, politics, and society-was one of the most dynamic fields of German intellectual activity in the nineteenth century, particularly during the crucial period in Germany's history known as the Vormärz, leading up to the March revolutions of 1848. Many of the most prominent German writers, among them Heinrich Heine, Ludwig Börne and Goethe, were active in cultural journalism during this period of increasing nationalism and clamor for a unified, democratic Germany on one hand and absolutist repression, including censorship, on the other.
This critical anthology is the first collection, in English or German, of major programmatic texts of German cultural journalism from the period. It provides complete texts or excerpts, many for the first time in English, along with critical introductions to each text by a leading scholar in German Studies or a related field. It reveals the richness and dynamism of the period's discussion of the status and function of journalism and its significance for politics, aesthetics, historiography and philosophy. Of interest to scholars in German Studies, media and book history, and those working on the history of political journalism, the book is also well suited for undergraduate and graduate courses on European literature, history and media studies.
Professor Philip Swanson
A Companion to Latin American Crime Fiction
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The first integrated overview in English of Latin American crime fiction, a flourishing genre with unique perspectives and characteristics.
Latin American crime fiction has a long and rich history, and this volume offers the first integrated overview in English of a flourishing tradition with unique perspectives and characteristics. Featuring contributions from leading scholars of a multifarious genre often shortened to neopolicíaco or neopolicial, this Companion explores noir literature in Latin America. The first part looks at the history of the novela negra and its manifestations in Mexico, Argentina, Cuba and Brazil. The second part examines patterns and trends including literary crime fiction, the narconovela, a concern for increasing racial and sexual diversity and the phenomenon of true crime. In the third part, expert analyses are given of four leading authors and their work: Paco Ignacio Taibo II, Leonardo Padura Fuentes, Claudia Piñeiro and Rubem Fonseca. The book closes with a chapter on screen adaptations of crime fiction for film and television. Overall, the Companion provides a clear and authoritative account of Latin American crime fiction, showcasing its variety, fluidity and adaptability.
Edited by Philip Williamson, Natalie Mears, Stephen Taylor and Alasdair Raffe
National Prayers: Special Worship since the Reformation
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A history of the annual British and Irish state and religious anniversaries and occasions of special worship from the sixteenth century to the present.
Since the sixteenth century, the governments and established churches of Britain and Ireland have summoned their nations to special acts of public worship during crises, wars and times of celebration, or for annual days of commemoration and remembrance. These special prayers, special days of worship and religious anniversaries were national events, reaching into every parish. They had considerable religious, ecclesiastical, political, ideological, moral and social significance, and they produced important texts: proclamations, council orders, addresses and - in England and Wales, and in Ireland - prayers or complete liturgies which temporarily supplemented or replaced the services in the Book of Common Prayer, and most recently in Common Worship. National Prayers. Special Worship since the Reformation in four volumes, provides the edited texts, commentaries and source notes for over 900 occasions of special worship and for each of the annual commemorations.
The final volume, Anniversary Commemorations, Additional Material and Indices, 1533-2023, describes the orders and services for the nine early modern state anniversaries, including Accession day, Gowrie day, Gunpowder Treason day, Restoration day, and commemoration of Charles I's execution and the Great Fire of London, and for the modern state anniversaries of Armistice day and Remembrance Sunday. It includes materials on particular occasions of special worship for 2016-23, including the Covid pandemic, commemoration of Prince Philip, platinum jubilee and funeral of Elizabeth II, and coronation of Charles III. Appendices provide supplementary material for the whole period of the edition, including extensive additions to the list of particular occasions of special worship observed from 1533 to 1660. An index of biblical references and a general index are provided for all four volumes of the edition.
Edited by Scott Mandelbrote
Music, Politics and Religion in Early Seventeenth-Century Cambridge
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This major study of the famous seventeenth century music manuscripts at Peterhouse sets them in the context of the religious and political movements leading to the Civil War.
The Peterhouse partbooks constitute a unique resource for studying two periods of English choral music. Their witness to musical trends at the time of the Henrician Reformation has attracted much attention since their assimilation into scholarly accounts of English music in the mid-nineteenth century. Less has been written, however, about what the collection can tell us about music on the eve of the English Civil War, in the period when the partbooks were brought together and when much of their music was composed. This volume considers the music of the partbooks as part of the broader cultural, intellectual, and material history of the 1630s. It breaks new ground in describing the institutional context for the creation of the partbooks and in providing an account of the materials used in them, as well as analysis of the scribal cultures from which they originated. For the first time, it properly situates the partbooks within the developing ecclesiology of the Church of England and investigates the influence of local and personal commitments on the liturgy and practice for which they were compiled.
Local and personal factors shaped the implementation of national political and religious change in the 1630s and this volume shows how these forces came together in short-lived and contentious innovation in cultural and intellectual life. Contributions consider the extent to which musical renewal formed part of a conscious programme of architectural, artistic, literary, and liturgical change whose purpose was to redirect the education and formation of future generations of priests and patrons within the Church of England. While exploring the mechanisms of change, they also consider the force of reaction to and dissatisfaction with novelty and the resulting turmoil, iconoclasm, and exile that transformed the careers of the protagonists in the story of the partbooks. Although particular in focus, the volume demonstrates how political, intellectual, and religious dispute infiltrated the lives of individuals and communities and generated conflicts that proved impossible to control. The story of the Peterhouse partbooks provides an unusually rich opportunity to review a critical period of British history through the prism provided by a remarkable example of musical and cultural survival.
Phyllis Weliver
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
Christine Slobogin
Putting Plastic Surgery on Paper
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$120.00
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An interdisciplinary approach to medical history that shows the key role that drawings and photographs had in shaping the material, professional, emotional and aesthetic parameters of plastic surgery.
Plastic surgery in twentieth-century Britain was a medical discipline with deep ties to art, artists and art history. It was also a field still in the process of creating its reputation and its archives. Putting Plastic Surgery on Paper examines these archives, focusing in particular on the works on paper held within these collections by two artists: Diana "Dickie" Orpen and Percy Hennell. Plastic surgeons depended upon the drawings and photographs made by these and other medical illustrators to craft certain narratives about their field and their surgical practice.
In addition to telling an art history of plastic surgery during this period, Putting Plastic Surgery on Paper engages with the affective parameters of archival objects, and with what working as a historian involves when done within potentially traumatic spaces. Paying particular attention to the emotional dimensions and effects of this visual culture and the ways in which it is archived and framed by the discipline of plastic surgery - then and now - Putting Plastic Surgery on Paper explores not only what it meant to make art in a surgical space but also what it means to study these affecting paper objects in the archive today. This book is available as Open Access under the Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND.
David Brodbeck
Brahms Patriotic and Political
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Offers a historical context in which to understand how Brahms's three most intensely political and nationalistic works interact with questions of German patriotism, liberalism and nationalism.
Johannes Brahms rarely composed music that engaged the national-political issues of the day. Three of his works, though, do precisely this: the Fünf Lieder für Männerchor; the Triumphlied for eight-part chorus and orchestra; and the Fest- und Gedenksprüche for eight-part chorus a cappella. In Brahms Patriotic and Political, David Brodbeck challenges notions that Brahms's political music evinces embarrassing anticipations of later Prussian militarism and German chauvinism. Instead, he provides a thick historical context in which to read these works and offers a more nuanced understanding of the intersections of Brahms's music and questions of German patriotism, liberalism, and nationalism than has been customary in the field of historical musicology.
In particular, Brodbeck relates the Männerchor-Lieder to the debate over how and in what form a German nation-state might be achieved; he relates the Triumphlied to the euphoria but also the solemnity that attended the foundation of the German Reich; and he relates the Fest- und Gedenksprüche to the necessary work of instilling in the diverse German people a genuine sense of national belonging. At the same time, he traces Brahms's changing attitude toward Otto von Bismarck, the "Blacksmith of the Reich," whom he originally loathed but, in time, came to venerate. Brahms Patriotic and Political will appeal to readers with interests in both nineteenth-century German music and Central European history.
Tobias Boes
A Reader's Guide to Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus
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Provides the English-speaking reader with the tools needed to appreciate Thomas Mann's most ambitious novel, one of the greatest literary works of the twentieth century, now timely once again.
In 1938, the great German author and Nobel Prize winner Thomas Mann emigrated to the United States. There, he became a figurehead for the intellectual opposition to Nazism, giving more than 150 public lectures and recording more than fifty anti-Nazi radio addresses that the BBC broadcast into Germany. His political activities also left a profound mark on his fiction, most importantly on the 1947 novel Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn as Told by a Friend. Ostensibly the biography of a fictional modern composer, Doctor Faustus also serves as a post-mortem of Nazism and a reckoning with five centuries of cultural history that led to dazzling heights but failed to prevent Germany's ultimate fall.
Doctor Faustus is an astonishingly complex novel, both because of the range of its intellectual references and because of its stylistic inventiveness, which has provoked comparisons with Joyce. And yet, at a time when democracy around the world once again seems in retreat and the forces of irrationalism are in advance, it is also an extremely timely book. This guide will equip English-speaking readers with all the tools necessary to appreciate one of the greatest literary works of the twentieth century.
This book is available as Open Access under the Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND.
Anne Morddel
Napoleon's American Prisoners
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Tells the story of the 1,500 or so common seamen of the American merchant marine who were held as prisoners of war in France during the Napoleonic Wars.
Based on extensive original research, this book tells the story of the 1,500 or so common seamen of the American merchant marine who were held as prisoners of war in France during the Napoleonic Wars. Although the United States was neutral, Napoleon interpreted neutrality narrowly, and included among the enemy merchants doing business with the enemy and seamen working on enemy vessels. Drawing on remarkably full source material in French, American and British archives, including the seamen's letters, their pleas for help to the consuls, the correspondence about them between the French authorities and the US diplomatic service, and the British Admiralty lists of prisoners, the book reveals a great deal about who these seamen were, and about their vastly different experience in French prisons. It contrasts their fate with that of British seamen and officers, discusses the labyrinthine maritime laws that ensnared the seamen and how their nationality, in an era before passports, was determined, charts the establishment of the US consular service, first established at this time to help "distressed American seamen", and relates the American seamen's experiences to the wider scholarly literature. Throughout, the book includes fascinating case studies of the adventures and misadventures of individual seamen.
