Transhumance and the Making of Ireland's Uplands, 1550-1900
Regular price
$120.00
Save $-120.00
First full survey of how transhumance operated in Ireland from the sixteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth.
WINNER: American Conference for Irish Studies Donald Murphy Prize for Distinguished First Book 2021 Special Commendation, Publication Prize in Irish History, NUI Awards 2021
SHORTLISTED: European Association of Archaeologists Book Prize 2023
The rearing of cattle is today a fairly sedentary practice in Ireland, Britain and most of north-west Europe. But in the not-so-distant past it was common for many rural households to take their livestock to hill and mountain pastures for the summer. Moreover, ethnographic accounts suggest that a significant number of people would stay in seasonal upland settlements to milk the cows and produce butter and cheese. However, these movements all but died out in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, meaning that today transhumance is mainly associated with Alpine and Mediterranean landscapes.
This book is the first major interdisciplinary approach to the diversity and decline of transhumance in a northern European context. Focusing on Ireland from c.1550 to 1900, it shows that uplands were valuable resources which allowed tenant households to maintain larger herds of livestock and adapt to global economic trends. And it places the practice in a social context, demonstrating that transhumance required highly organized systems of common grazing, and that the care of dairy cows amounted to a rite of passage for young women in many rural communities.
Samuel A. Claussen
Chivalry and Violence in Late Medieval Castile
Regular price
$120.00
Save $-120.00
First full investigation in English into the role played by chivalric ideology, and its violent results, in late medieval Castile.
The Kingdom of Castile in the late Middle Ages suffered from regular civil strife, warfare, dynastic contests, and violence, such that only a century before the birth of the Spanish Empire, it is difficult to imagine a successfulworld empire centered in this tumultuous realm. The chaos that marked this period of Castilian history was not mere chance, but the result of key historical developments which have not been fully examined in Anglophone scholarship. This book explores the roots of the disorder that plagued Castile in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, identifying the ideology of chivalry and its knightly practitioners as the chief instigators of the violence thatdestabilized the kingdom. The author argues that chivalry was far from being a code of good behaviour, scrupulously observed, but rather encouraged knights to avenge themselves violently upon their neighbours, pursue a zealous holy war against Islam, and tear at the social fabric of Castilian society. Their powerful ideas and values shaped the course of Castilian history in the crucial years before the unification of the Spanish kingdoms.
Gareth Williams
The Country Houses of Shropshire
Regular price
$140.00
Save $-140.00
A gazetteer of the many fine Shropshire country houses, which covers the architecture, the owners' family history, and the social and economic circumstances that affected them.
Shropshire is the largest English inland county, and has a wide variety of important landed country houses, with owners from diverse social groups, with links to trade in Liverpool, Manchester and London as well as the local gentry. This book is not simply about the houses they built, but also about the people who lived in them and the context in which the houses are set. The architecture is of course fully covered. What is distinctive about the author's approach is that he treats the histories of the families, their artistic tastes and their estates, as an integral part of the character of each house. Country houses can serve as a barometer of national tastes and of the social and economic times in which they were built. The work includes reference to the important sporting associations, fine and decorative art collections, and to important guests and social networks. Unlike most architectural guides, this aims at a wider readership, and will be an important resource for social historians, genealogists and local historians. The Country Houses of Shropshire considers the history of 347 identified houses of varying importance; those with a significant or influential history are given a main entry of up to 6000 words whilst lesser houses are treated with an entry of less than 1000 words. All houses have footnoted entries, enabling the reader to refer directly to source and to undertake further research themselves.
Hugh Macdonald
Bizet in Italy
Regular price
$65.00
Save $-65.00
The first English translation of Bizet's letters and journals from his stay in Italy, with explanatory texts from one of the leading authorities on the composer's life and music.
In 1857, Georges Bizet (1838-1875) won the prestigious Prix de Rome scholarship which allowed him to study in Italy for a few years at the expense of the French state. While Bizet's correspondence from this time suggests that he was not fond of Italian music, he was especially drawn to the landscape and Italian Renaissance art and painting. Though Bizet's thoughts later turned away from rural life and the masterpieces of the Renaissance, his letters and journals from this period document the growth of a young musician who would eventually write Carmen.
Translated into English for the first time, Bizet's letters from his stay in Italy (at the Villa Medici in Rome, with expeditions to various other parts of the country) reveal much about his character and tastes. These extraordinary documents are fully annotated, and presented alongside never-before-published translations of Bizet's journals from the same years. Linking textual guides supplied by one of the leading authorities on the composer provide unique insights into the composer's formative years that cannot be found anywhere else.
Philippa Turner
The Rood in Medieval Britain and Ireland, c.800-c.1500
Regular price
$85.00
Save $-85.00
New readings demonstrate the centrality of the rood to the visual, material and devotional cultures of the Middle Ages, its richness and complexity.
The rood was central to medieval Christianity and its visual culture: Christ's death on the cross was understood as the means by which humankind was able to gain salvation, and depictions of the cross, and Christ's death upon it,were ubiquitous. This volume brings together contributions offering a new perspective on the medieval rood - understood in its widest sense, as any kind of cross - within the context of Britain and Ireland, over a wide periodof time which saw significant political and cultural change. In doing so, it crosses geographical, chronological, material, and functional boundaries which have traditionally characterised many previous discussions of the medieval rood. Acknowledging and exploring the capacity of the rood to be both universal and specific to particular locations and audiences, these contributions also tease out the ways in which roods related to one another, as well as how they related to their physical and cultural surroundings, often functioning in dialogue with other images and the wider devotional topography - both material and mental - in which they were set. The chapters consider roods in a variety of media and contexts: the monumental stone crosses of early medieval England, twelfth-century Ireland, and, spreading further afield, late medieval Galicia; the three-dimensional monumental wooden roods in English monasteries, Irish friaries, and East Anglian parish churches; roods that fit in the palm of a hand, encased in precious metals, those that were painted on walls, drawn on the pages of manuscripts, and those that appeared in visions, dreams, and gesture.
Lloyd Bowen
Anatomy of a Duel in Jacobean England
Regular price
$120.00
Save $-120.00
Throws much new light on questions of gentry honour, the nature and prevalence of early modern elite violence, and the process of judicial investigation in Shakespeare's England
This book offers an analysis of Jacobean duelling and gentry honour culture through the close examination and contextualisation of the most fully documented duel of the early modern era. This was the fatal encounter between a Flintshire gentleman, Edward Morgan, and his Cheshire antagonist, John Egerton, which took place at Highgate on 21 April 1610. John Egerton was killed, but controversy quickly erupted over whether he had died in a fair fight of honour or had been murdered in a shameful conspiracy. The legal investigation into the killing produced a rich body of evidence which reveals in unparalleled detail not only the dynamics of the fight itself, but also the inner workings of a seventeenth-century metropolitan manhunt, the Middlesex coroner's court, a murder trial at King's Bench, and also the murky webs of aristocratic patronage at the Jacobean Court which ultimately allowed Morgan to secure a pardon.
Uniquely, a series of dramatic Star Chamber suits have survived that also allow us to investigate the duel's origins. Their close examination, as Lloyd Bowen shows, calls into question the historiographical paradigm which sees early modern duels as matters of the moment and distinct from, as opposed to connected to, the gentry feud. The book throws much new light on questions of gentry honour, the nature and prevalence of early modern elite violence, and the process of judicial investigation in Shakespeare's England.
Craig D Taylor
Jean de Bueil: Le Jouvencel
Regular price
$130.00
Save $-130.00
First full English translation of a major text, narrating the adventures of the Jouvencel whilst interweaving them with advice on military tactics and strategies.
Le Jouvencel is one of the most important and revealing sources for the study of medieval warfare and chivalry. It tells the story of a poor young soldier whose skill at arms enables him to rise through the ranks and eventually marry a foreign princess. Jean de Bueil (1406-1477 wrote the book around 1466, following his retirement from military service, drawing heavily upon his own experiences as one of the most prominent French soldiers of the fifteenth century. The pages of Le Jouvencel are filled with unusually detailed descriptions of military campaigns, sieges and battles, capturing the tactics, weapons and everyday life of the soldier with a vivid eye for detail. Many of the characters, places and events described in the apparently fictional story were actually inspired by recent history, as was revealed in a Commentary written just a few years after Bueil's death by one of his squires, Guillaume Tringant.
Jean de Bueil wrote Le Jouvencel to provide future generations of soldiers and military leaders with advice on chivalry, knighthood and the art of warfare. As a result, this remarkable chivalric narrative offers a window into the martial culture of French soldiers during the final stages of the Hundred Years War. This first English translation is presented with an introduction to the text and to Jean de Bueil, and explanatory notes.
Douglas MacMillan
The Flageolet in England, 1660-1914
Regular price
$120.00
Save $-120.00
The flageolet occupies a unique niche in musical history, and this book traces its history from its beginnings to its peak of popularity in the nineteenth century..
The flageolet is a recorder-like instrument whose history may be traced back to the seventeenth century. Predominantly an instrument of the amateur, the flageolet seldom featured in the orchestra but nevertheless occupied a smallbut unique niche in musical history. MacMillan traces the history of the instrument from its origin through to its heyday in England in the nineteenth century. The book is centred on an organological study of the flageolet, coupled with discussion of its repertoire, pedagogy, and place in musical society. It will be of interest to woodwind organologists, players of the flute and recorder, and to those who study the integration of musical instruments and their repertoire in relation to societal aspects of musical practice.
Michael Church
Musics Lost and Found
Regular price
$39.95
Save $-39.95
This ground-breaking book is the first in-depth global study of the role played in musical history by song collectors.
This is the first in-depth global study about song collectors, music's unsung heroes. They include the Armenian priest who sacrificed his life to preserve the folk music which the Turks were trying to erase in the 1915 Genocide; the prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp who secretly noted down the songs of doomed Jewish inmates; the British singer who went veiled into Afghanistan to learn, record and perform the music the Taliban wanted to silence. Some collectors have been fired by political idealism - Bartok championing Hungarian peasant music, the Lomaxes bringing the blues out of Mississippi penitentiaries, and transmitting them to the world. Many collectors have been priests - French Jesuits noting down labyrinthine forms in eighteenth-century Beijing, English vicars tracking songs in nineteenth-century Somerset. Others have been wonderfully colourful oddballs.
Today's collectors are striving heroically to preserve endangered musics, whether rare forms of Balinese gamelan, the wind-band music of Chinese villages, or the sophisticated polyphony of Central African Pygmies. With globalisation, urbanisation and Westernisation causing an irreversible erosion of the world's musical diversity, Michael Church suggests we may be seeing folk music's 'end of history'. Old forms are dying as the conditions for their survival - or replacement - disappear; the death of villages means the death of village musical culture.
This ground-breaking book is the sequel to the author's award-winning The Other Classical Musics, and it concludes with an inventory of the musics now under threat, or already lost for ever.
J. Michael Jefferson
The Templar Estates in Lincolnshire, 1185-1565
Regular price
$130.00
Save $-130.00
A new survey of major Templar landholdings offers fresh insights into key questions about their medieval history.
Much has been written about the history of the Knights Templar, the legendary Order of military monks. Far less attention, however, has been paid to the Templar estates in Western Christendom which supported their endeavours. Set within the context of the turbulent history of medieval and Tudor England, the book follows the fate of the Templar estates in the county of Lincolnshire. Beginning with the survey of Templar property undertaken by Geoffrey FitzStephen in 1185, the story of the estates is followed through the primary sources of the estate accounts of 1307-1312, the Report of Philip de Thame of 1338, the Valor Ecclesiasticus of 1535 and the 1557 letter patent of Mary Tudor. What emerges is the previously untold tale of the characteristics of the estates, the personnel who were involved and the nature of Templar agriculture in the early fourteenth century. A number of major questions are addressed, including how Edward II dealt with the Templar estates after the arrest of the Order in 1308; whether all the Templar estates were transferred to the Hospitallers as is widely supposed; and what happened to the Hospitaller inheritance of Templar lands during the English Reformation.
Beth Williamson
Reliquary Tabernacles in Fourteenth-Century Italy
Regular price
$95.00
Save $-95.00
Ground-breaking study of the enigmatic and unique tabernacles from fourteenth-century Italy, which for the first time combined relics and images.
Images and relics were central tools in the process of devotional practice in medieval Europe. The reliquary tabernacles that emerged in the 1340s, in the area of Central Italy surrounding the city of Siena, combined images and relics, presented visibly together, within painted and decorated wooden frames. In these tabernacles the various media and materials worked together to create a powerful and captivating ensemble, usable in several contexts, both in procession and static, as the centre of focussed, prayerful attention.
This book looks at Siena and Central Italy as environments of artistic invention, and at Sienese painters in particular as experts in experimentation whose ingenuity encouraged the development of this new form of devotional technology. It is the first full-length study to focus in depth on the materiality of these tabernacles, investigating the connotations and effects of the materials from which they were made. It examines especially the effect of bringing relics and images together, and considers how the impressions of variety and abundance created by the multiplication of materials give birth to meaning and encourage certain kinds of action or thought.
Professor Stephen D. Church
Anglo-Norman Studies XLII
Regular price
$95.00
Save $-95.00
A series which is a model of its kind: Edmund King
The wide-ranging articles collected here represent the cutting edge of recent Anglo-Norman scholarship. There is a particular focus on historical sources for the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and especially on the key texts which are used by historians in understanding the past. There are articles on Eadmer's Historia Novorum, Dudo of Saint-Quentin's Historia Normannorum, the historical profession at Durham, and the use of charters to understand the role of women in the Norman march of Wales. Other contributions examine canon law in late twelfth-century England, and Angevin rule in Normandy in the time of Henry fitz Empress. The Old English world is also represented in the volume: there is a fresh investigation into Harold Godwineson's posthumous reputation, and a new interpretation of the reign of Aethelred the Unready.
S.D. CHURCH is Professor of Medieval History at the University of East Anglia.
Contributors: Emma Cavell, Catherine Cubitt, John Gillingham, Mark Hagger, Fraser McNair, Charles C. Rozier, Nicholas Ruffini-Ronzani, Danica Summerlin, Ann Williams
Frances Nolan
The Jacobite Duchess
Regular price
$75.00
Save $-75.00
The fascinating life of Frances Jennings, elder sister of Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, charting her marriages and changes of fortune, her exile and return, her ambition, political manoeuvring and sincere piety.
Frances Jennings, elder sister of Sarah, duchess of Marlborough, had an interesting and eventful life, most notably as the influential wife of Richard Talbot, earl of Tyrconnell, Catholic viceroy of Ireland under James II. Born circa 1649 into a Hertfordshire gentry family, she was a noted beauty at the Restoration court. There, she met and married George Hamilton, a Catholic officer who, after 1667, served in Louis XIV's army. In Paris, Frances raised three daughters, converted to Catholicism, and became an active member of the English Catholic émigré community. Following Hamilton's death, she remarried to Richard Talbot. As vicereine of Ireland, Frances helped re-establish Catholic hegemony, assisting in the foundation of convents and re-consecration of Christ Church cathedral. During the Williamite-Jacobite War in Ireland (1689-91), Frances fled to James II's exiled court in France. In 1691, she received word that her husband, now Jacobite duke of Tyrconnell, had died. Attainted for high treason, she used the Marlboroughs' influence to recover her Irish estates. In 1708, she returned to Dublin, where she died in 1731. Highlighting Frances's political manoeuvrings, religious identity and deep family attachments, this book portrays a complex and contested figure, a woman who acted on multiple stages, in diverse roles, challenging expectations of rank, gender, and 'nationality' in unexpected ways.
Julie Farguson
Visualising Protestant Monarchy
Regular price
$140.00
Save $-140.00
The first comprehensive, comparative study of the visual culture of monarchy in the reigns of William and Mary and Queen Anne
This book provides the first comprehensive, comparative study of the visual culture of monarchy in the reigns of William and Mary and Queen Anne. It makes innovative use of material evidence and new primary sources to re-evaluate the practice of kingship and queenship to produce an original interpretation of the British monarchy during a period of vital transformation. The quarter century between the Glorious Revolution and the Georgian era witnessed prolonged military conflict with France and the birth of what we now call Great Britain. This book argues that a new style of monarchy likewise emerged in this period and that its survival largely depended on the efforts of the royal family: two English queens, a Dutch king and a Danish prince. Through a study of art and material culture (paintings, prints, the decorative arts, architecture, dress and royal insignia) within the broader political context, the book explores how the English people were persuaded to transfer their loyalties from a traditional style of kingship, centred on ideas of divinely appointed rule and hereditary right, to one rooted in Protestantism and Parliament. The book argues that both ceremony and art played a vital role in the way the monarchy functioned after the Glorious Revolution. Crucially, it examines not only the production of images and use of ceremony but also the ways in which they were received by audiences, both in England and abroad. The book sets the on-going changes in the ideology of British monarchy within the wider context of royal politicking in Europe and pays close attention to gender and the practice of queenship as well as the ways in which military conflict shaped royal representational culture. Using a method that is centred on the visual - ceremonies and art - and on visuality, the study makes an original and important contribution to our understanding not only of the monarchy but also the political culture of the post-Glorious Revolution era.
Humphrey Burton
In My Own Time
Regular price
$39.95
Save $-39.95
This long-awaited autobiography is a must-read for classical musical enthusiasts and those fascinated by some of the twentieth century's star performers. It also offers unique insights into the history of music, the BBC and arts broadcasting in twentieth-century Britain.
Sir Humphrey Burton is one of Britain's most influential post-war music and arts broadcasters. Witty, humorous and full of humanity, Burton's account presents us with never before recorded perspectives on the world of British cultural broadcasting and classical music. Burton worked with such outstanding directing talents as Ken Russell and John Schlesinger, before becoming the BBC's Head of Music and the Arts. Already in the 1960s, in conversations with Glenn Gould for instance, Burton helped to create innovative ways of presenting music to new audiences. Following Sir David Frost's call to LWT/ITV, Burton rose to prominence with presenting the award-winning arts series Aquarius (1970-1975). The early 1970s saw the beginning of Burton's long association with Leonard Bernstein. Burton was at hand filming the maestro's educational programs, as well as concerts with the Vienna Philharmonic. Unforgettable are his chronicles of Bernstein's last years, culminating in a worldwide broadcast of the conductor's Berlin Freedom Concert after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Burton's gift for communicating music turned him into a celebrated Bernstein biographer. With multi award-winning television programmes to his name, such as the BBC's Young Musician of the Year, Burton left an indelible mark on Britain's music and arts broadcasting history. Sir Humphrey Burton offers us many encounters with twentieth century classical music's superstars and former broadcasting colleagues. What transpires is a creative mind at work that never lost sight of the demand that the appropriate presentation of music can only go hand-in-hand with a deep understanding of music itself. This long-awaited autobiography is a must-read for classical musical enthusiasts and those fascinated by some of the twentieth century's star performers. It also offers unique insights into the history of music, the BBC and arts broadcasting in twentieth-century Britain.
Rodney M Thomson
For and Against Abelard
Regular price
$95.00
Save $-95.00
The famous letters of Bernard of Clairvaux attacking the philosopher Peter Abelard and a vituperative response to them are presented together for the first time.
The late eleventh and twelfth centuries were Europe's first age of pamphlet warfare, of invective and satire. The perceived failure, or at least hypocrisy, of its new institutions-the new monastic orders and the reformed papacy-gave rise to the phenomenon, and it was shaped by the study of grammar and rhetoric in the new Schools. The central figures in the texts in the present book are Bernard of Clairvaux, the powerful ostensible founder of the Cistercianorder, and the popular and influential teacher Peter Abelard, leader of the radical faction in the Schools of Paris. The event which sparked this controversy was the Church council at Sens in 1141 which had led to the condemnation of Abelard's doctrines. Abelard proposed to use reason to explain the mysteries of faith, and this had led him into all kinds of difficulties with established church doctrine. The leading light in the atttack on his ideas was Bernard, the famous abbot of Clairvaux, a group of whose letters, written to gather support for it before and after the Council, are presented here. A little while later Abelard was defended by the vituperative but otherwise unknown Berengar, who wrote an outrageous Apology attacking Bernard; we also edit his remaining polemical works: his Letter to the Carthusians, and his Letter to the Bishop of Mende. None of Berengar's works has been translated before.An extensive introductory essay describes the course of the debate and the personnel, and analyses the invective employed by both Bernard and Berengar. There is full annotation identifying the writers' sources and clarifying the issues.
Stephanie Carter
Music in North-East England, 1500-1800
Regular price
$130.00
Save $-130.00
This collection situates the North-East within a developing nationwide account of British musical culture.
Music in North-East England provides a wide-ranging exploration of musical life in the North-East of England during the early modern period. It contributes to a growing number of studies concerned with developing a nationwide account of British musical culture. By defining the North-East in its widest sense, the collection illuminates localised differences, distinct musical cultures in urban centres and rural locations, as well as region-wide networks, and situates regional musical life in broader national and international contexts. Music in North-East England affords new insights into aspects of musical life that have been the focus of previous studies of British musical life - such as public concerts - but also draws attention to aspects that have attracted less scholarly attention in histories of early modern British musical culture: the musical activities and tastes of non-elite consumers; interactions between art music and cheap print and popular song; music education beyond London and its satellite environs; the recovery of northern urban soundscapes; and the careers of professional musicians who have not previously been the focus of major published musicological studies.
Tim Somers
Ephemeral Print Culture in Early Modern England
Regular price
$130.00
Save $-130.00
Uses the collections of ephemera popular in the late seventeenth century as a way to understand the reading habits, publishing strategies and thought processes of late Stuart print culture.
Cheap' genres of print such as ballads, almanacs and playing cards were part of everyday life in seventeenth-century society - ubiquitous and disposable. Toward the end of the century, however, individuals began to preserve, arrange and display articles of cheap print within carefully curated collections. What motivated this sudden urge to preserve the ephemeral? This book answers that question by analysing the social, political and intellectual factors behind the formation of cheap print collections, how these collections were used by their owners, and what this activity can tell us about 'print culture' in the early modern period.
The book's central collector is John Bagford (1650-1715), a shoemaker who became a dealer of prints and other 'curiosities' to important collectors of the time such as Samuel Pepys, Hans Sloane and Robert Harley. Bagford's own rich and largely unstudied collection is afascinating study in its own right and his position at the centre of commercial and intellectual networks opens up a whole world of collecting. This world encompasses later Stuart partisan political culture, when modern parties and the 'public sphere' first emerged; the 'New Science' and 'virtuoso culture' with its milieu of natural philosophers, antiquaries and artisans; the aural and visual landscape of marketplaces, streets and alehouses; and developing practices of record-keeping, life-writing and historical writing during the long eighteenth century.
Nicolò Palazzetti
Béla Bartók in Italy
Regular price
$130.00
Save $-130.00
Examines the reputation of the Hungarian musician Béla Bartók (1881-1945) as an antifascist hero.
This book examines the reputation of the Hungarian composer Béla Bartók (1881-1945) as an antifascist hero and beacon of freedom. Following Bartok's reception in Italy from the early twentieth century, through Mussolini's fascist regime, and into the early Cold War, Palazzetti explores the connexions between music, politics and diplomacy. The wider context of this study also offers glimpses into broader themes such as fascist cultural policies, cultural resistance, and the ambivalent political usage of modernist music.
The book argues that the 'Bartókian Wave' occurring in Italy after the Second World War was the result of the fusion of the Bartók myth as the 'musician of freedom' and the Cold War narrative of an Italian national regeneration. Italian-Hungarian diplomatic cooperation during the interwar period had supported Bartok's success in Italy. But, in spite of their political alliance, the cultural policies by Europe's leading fascist regimes started to diverge over the years: many composers proscribed in Nazi Germany were increasingly performed in fascist Italy. In the early 1940s, the now exiled composer came to represent one of the symbols of the anti-Nazi cultural resistance in Italy and was canonised as 'the musician of freedom'. Exile and death had transformed Bartók into a martyr, just as the Resistenza and the catastrophe of war had redeemed post-war Italy.
Ashley Marshall
Political Journalism in London, 1695-1720
Regular price
$130.00
Save $-130.00
A major history of the evolution of political journalism in the late Stuart and early Hanoverian period.
The reign of Queen Anne (1702-1714) saw a remarkable boom in political journalism and newspaper culture in London, in which some of the leading literary lights of the age, Swift, Defoe, Addison, Steele, were heavily involved. While scholars have dealt at length with the physical development and circulation of these newspapers and with their literary contribution, much less has been done to trace the evolving ideologies of London's political newspapers in this period. In this major contribution to the study of eighteenth-century political culture, Ashley Marshall shows how the ideologies of the leading papers evolved in direct and indirect response to one another. She offers provocative re-readings of well-known journals, including Defoe's Review, Swift's Examiner and the various publishing ventures of Richard Steele, and first accounts of the wealth of smaller, short-lived journals which made up the ecosystem of periodical publishing at the time. A ground-breaking final chapter looks at the radically different ways in which periodical writers imagined and addressed their public. Drawing out the distinction between the Whig ideal of a highly engaged citizenry and a Tory press which conditioned its readers to be dutiful subjects rather than active citizens, Marshall argues that these rhetorical differences reflected an ongoing debate about the ultimate role of journalism.
Chris King
Houses and Society in Norwich, 1350-1660
Regular price
$75.00
Save $-75.00
First full archaeological study of the urban environment of Norwich when its power was at its height.
Norwich was second only to London in size and economic significance from the late Middle Ages through to the mid-seventeenth century. This book brings together, for the first time, the rich archaeological evidence for urban households and domestic life in Norwich, using surviving buildings, excavated sites, and material culture. It offers a broad overview of the changing forms, construction and spatial organisation of urban houses during the period, ranging across the social spectrum from the large courtyard mansions occupied by members of the mercantile and civic elite, to the homes of the urban "middling sort" and the small two- and three-roomed cottages of the city's weavers andartisans. The so-called "age of transition" witnessed profound social and economic changes and religious and political upheavals, which Norwich, as a major provincial capital, experienced with particular force and intensity; domestic life was also transformed. The author examines the twin themes of continuity and change in the material world and the role of the domestic sphere in the expression and negotiation of shifting power relationships, economic structures and social identities in the medieval and early modern city.
William C. Lubenow
Learned Lives in England, 1900-1950
Regular price
$130.00
Save $-130.00
If objectivity was the great discovery of the nineteenth century, uncertainty was the great discovery of the twentieth century.
This book explores the tangled relationships between knowledge and politics during the first fifty years of the twentieth century. Changes within universities, particularly in Oxford, Cambridge, and the London School of Economics,made them, more than before, research institutions. Additionally, renovations within the grand empires of learning, represented by the Royal Society of London and the British Academy, lead to the recognition and acceptance of different forms of learning. The less formal coteries such as the Bloomsbury Group, the Society for the Protection of Knowledge, and the Scholarship and Theoretical Biology Club, are not neglected in this exploration of learned life.Indeed, members of all these societies transported knowledge from North America and the Continent, especially from the Warburg Institute, shifting the demographic and conceptual bases of British intellectual life. Thus, certain important twentieth-century themes transpire throughout this study: specialization, professionalization, objectivity, the emergence of the expert, and the rise of the social sciences.
The twentieth century, with its hotand cold wars, distorted intellectual life by demands for application and for useful research. Learned people in Britain seduced themselves by patriotism and became complicit by developing defensive clichés seeking to explain howBritish knowledge was somehow different from German, and later, Soviet knowledge. If objectivity was the great discovery of the nineteenth century, as Lubenow demonstrated in "Only Connect": Learned Societies in Nineteenth Century Britain (2015), this book shows that uncertainty was the great discovery of the twentieth century.
Lewis Lockwood
Beethoven's Lives
Regular price
$19.99
Save $-19.99
Beethoven's Lives will be required reading for anyone interested in understanding how Beethoven biography has evolved through the ages.
When Ludwig van Beethoven died in March 1827, the world of music felt an intense loss. The composer's funeral procession was one of the largest Vienna had ever witnessed, and the poet Franz Grillparzer's eulogy brought the tensions between the composer's life and music into sharp focus: the deaf and aloof genius, the alienated and eccentric artist, unable to form a lasting relationship with a woman but reaching out to mankind. These apparent contradictions were to attract many Beethoven biographers yet to come.
Here, Lewis Lockwood, himself a much-lauded Beethoven biographer, tells the story of Beethoven biography, from the earliest attempts made directly after the composer's death to the present day. Beethoven's Lives casts a wide net, tracing the story of Beethoven biography from Anton Schindler as biographer and falsifier, through the authoritative Alexander Wheelock Thayer and down to the present. The list includes Gustav Nottebohm, the first scholar to study Beethoven's sketchbooks. With his work, biography could begin to reflect on the inner life of the artist as expressed in his music, and in this sense, sketchbooks could be seen as artistic diaries. Even Richard Wagner thought of writing a Beethoven biography, and the late nineteenth and early twentieth century saw the emergence of French and English traditions of Beethoven biography.
In the tumultuous twentieth century, with world wars and fractured politics, the writing of Beethoven biography was sometimes caught up in the storm. By bringing the story down to our time, Lewis Lockwood identifies traditions of Beethoven biography that today's scholars and writers need to be aware of. As Lockwood shows, each biography reflects not only on the individual writer's knowledge and interests, but also his inner sense of purpose as each writer works within the intellectual framework of his time.
LEWIS H. LOCKWOOD is one of the leading authorities on Beethoven worldwide. Having taught at Princeton and Harvard, some of his key Beethoven publications include: Beethoven: The Music and the Life (Norton, 2003; translated into many languages), as well as Beethoven's Symphonies: An Artistic Vision (Norton, 2015) and with the Julliard String Quartet: Inside Beethoven's Quartets: History, Performance, Interpretation (Harvard University Press, 2008). He is known for his studies of Beethoven's life and work, including the composer's autograph manuscripts and sketchbooks.
Stuart Bligh
Maritime Kent Through the Ages
Regular price
$95.00
Save $-95.00
A wide-ranging history of the geography and communities of Kent from the earliest times to the present day.
Kent, with its long coastline and its important geopolitical position close to London and continental Europe, and on major trading routes between Britain and the wider world, has had a very significant maritime history. This book covers a wide range of topics relating to that history from the earliest times to the present day. It sets Kent's varied coastline and waters in their geological and geographical context, showing how erosion and sediment deposition have contributed to the changing nature of maritime activities and populations. It examines Kent's strategic role in the defence of the country with the development and redevelopment of coastal defences, including four naval dockyards. It goes on to consider the supporting industries which grew up around the coastline, those which supplied raw materials and agricultural products from the county's hinterland, and its wider national and international trading links. It also discusses the diverse coastal communities of Kent and how they have changed in response to the demands of defence, trade, and changing population and migration patterns. In addition, the book includes detailed case studies which explore particular subject areas as exemplars of the major themes covered by the book.
Linda Clark
The Fifteenth Century XVIII
Regular price
$120.00
Save $-120.00
Essays on crucial aspects of late medieval history.
The essays collected here, offered by three generations of his friends and pupils, celebrate the outstanding career of Professor A.J. Pollard and pay tribute to his scholarship and enduring influence in furthering our understanding of late medieval England and France. Drawing inspiration from his own research interests and writing, which illuminated military, political and social interactions of the period, they focus on three main themes. The contrasting styles of governance adopted by English monarchs from Richard II to Henry VII; the differing responses to civil conflict revealed in a variety of localities; and the lives of men recruited to fight overseas during the Hundred Years' War, and beyond the border with Scotland in later years, are all explored here. These topics take us across England from the far north to the Channel, to London, the south-west and the Welsh lordship of Gower, while on the way also examining how townsmen resisted taxation, the gentry administered their estates and the western marches were ruled.
Richard C. Maguire
Africans in East Anglia, 1467-1833
Regular price
$130.00
Save $-130.00
What were the lives of Africans in provincial England like during the early modern period? How, where, and when did they arrive in rural counties? How were they perceived by their contemporaries?
This book examines the population of Africans in Norfolk and Suffolk from 1467, the date of the first documented reference to an African in the region, to 1833, when Parliament voted to abolish slavery in the British Empire. It uncovers the complexity of these Africans' historical experience, considering the interaction of local custom, class structure, tradition, memory, and the gradual impact of the Atlantic slaving economy.
Richard C. Maguire proposes that the initial regional response to arriving Africans during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was not defined exclusively by ideas relating to skin colour, but rather by local understandings of religious status, class position, ideas about freedom and bondage, and immediate local circumstances. Arriving Africans were able to join the region's working population through baptism, marriage, parenthood, and work.
This manner of response to Africans was challenged as local merchants and gentry begin doing business with the slaving economy from the mid-seventeenth century onwards. Although the racialised ideas underpinning Atlantic slavery changed the social circumstances of Africans in the region, the book suggests that they did not completely displace older, more inclusive, ideas in working communities.
S.D. Church
Anglo-Norman Studies XLIII
Regular price
$95.00
Save $-95.00
One opens each new volume expecting to find the unexpected - new light on old arguments, new material, new angles. MEDIUM AEVUM
The articles brought together here demonstrate the exciting vitality of this field. The volume begins with a keynote chapter on the failure of marriages among Christians and Muslims in crusader diplomacy. Other chapters consider the ceremony of knighting and the coronation ritual of Matilda of Flanders. There are also investigations of hunting landscapes in Cheshire, and Lancashire before Lancashire in the context of the Irish Sea World, while lordship is examined in two contexts, in post-Conquest England and early thirteenth-century Le Mans and Chartres. The sources for our knowledge of the period, as always, receive attention, whether drawn from documentary evidence or material culture, with essays on universal chronicle-writing and the construction of the Galfridian past in the Continuatio Ursicampina; the coinage of Harold II; and the patronage of the Bayeux Tapestry by Odo of Bayeux.
Adrian Wright
Cheer Up!
Regular price
$39.95
Save $-39.95
The first book to deal exclusively with the British musical film from the very beginning of talking pictures in the late 1920s through the Depression of the 1930s up to the end of World War II.
Cheer Up! is the first book to deal exclusively with the British musical film from the very beginning of talking pictures in the late 1920s through the Depression of the 1930s up to the end of World War II. The upsurge in production at British studios from 1929 onwards marked the real birth of a genre whose principal purpose was to entertain the British public. This endeavour was deeply affected by the very many emigres escaping Nazi Germany, who flooded into the British film industry during this decade, as the genre tried to establish itself. The British musical film in the 1930s reflects a richness of interest. Studios initially flirted with filming what were essentially stage productions plucked from the West End theatre but soon learned that importing a foreign star was a box-office boost. Major musical stars including Jessie Matthews, Richard Tauber and George Formby established themselves during this period. From its beginning, the British musical film captured some of the most notable music-hall performers on screen, and its obsession with music-hall persisted throughout the war years. Other films married popular and classical music with social issues of poverty and unemployment, a message of social integration that long preceded the efforts of the Ealing studios to encourage a sense of social cohesion in post-war Britain. The treatmentof the films discussed is linear, each film dealt with in order of its release date, and allowing for an engaging narrative packed with encyclopaedic information.
Matthew Hefferan
The Household Knights of Edward III
Regular price
$130.00
Save $-130.00
First extended survey of the subject, looking at the knights' activities, roles, background and service.
It was common for the kings of medieval England to retain a small number of knights in their personal service, as part of the royal household. These knights provided a core of loyal and talented men on whom each king could rely for military and political support. Household knights were a part of almost all aspects of the reign: they assisted in the raising and equipping of royal armies; they offered leadership for these armies once on campaign; they acted as trusted councillors and administrators at the centre of government; and they maintained the king's authority and landed interests throughout his kingdom. This book - the first full-length study of the household knight in late medieval England - takes as its focus those men serving during the successful reign of Edward III. It asks how and why household knights were retained, who was chosen to serve in such a capacity, what functions these men performed, and what rewards they received in return for their time in service. In doing so, it enables a more detailed picture of Edward III's kingship to be gained, and allows important questions to be answered about the ways in which wars were fought and kingdoms ruled in late medieval Europe.
Tess Knighton
Music and Instruments of the Middle Ages
Regular price
$190.00
Save $-190.00
Essays on important topics in early music.
Christopher Page is one of the most influential and distinguished scholars and performers of medieval music. His first book, Voices and Instruments of the Middle Ages (1987), marked the beginning of what might be called the"Page turn" in the study and performance of medieval music. His many subsequent publications, radio broadcasting (notably the series Spirit of the Age) and performances and recordings with his ensemble Gothic Voices changed the perception of and thinking about music from before about 1400 and forged new ways of communicating its essence to scholars as well as its subtle beauty to wider audiences. The essays presented here in his honour reflectthe broad range of subject-matter, from the earliest polyphony to the conductus and motet of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the troubadour and trouvère repertories, song and dance, church music, medieval music theory, improvisation techniques, historiography of medieval music, musical iconography, instrumental music, performance practice and performing, that has characterised Page's major contribution to our knowledge of music of the Middle Ages.
Barbara Crosbie
Age Relations and Cultural Change in Eighteenth-Century England
Regular price
$130.00
Save $-130.00
Interactions between age groups were central to major social and cultural developments in eighteenth-century England, and this book serves as a powerful reminder that people lived through not in the past.
This book explores the links between age relations and cultural change, using an innovative analytical framework to map the incremental and contingent process of generational transition in eighteenth-century England. The study reveals how attitudes towards age were transformed alongside perceptions of gender, rank and place. It also exposes how shifting age relations affected concepts of authenticity, nationhood, patriarchy, domesticity and progress.
The eighteenth century is not generally associated with the formation of distinct generations. This book, therefore, charts new territory as an age cohort in Newcastle upon Tyne is followed from infancy to early adulthood,using their experiences to illuminate a national, and ultimately imperial, pattern of change. The chapters begin in the nurseries and schoolrooms in which formative years were spent and then traverse the volatile terrain of adolescence, before turning to the adult world of fashion and politics. This investigation uncovers the roots of a generational divide that spilled into the political arena during the parliamentary election of 1774. But more than that,it demonstrates that the interactions between age groups were central to major social and cultural developments in the eighteenth century and serves as a powerful reminder of the need to recognise that people lived through not in the past.
Roger Leech
The Colonial Landscape of the British Caribbean
Regular price
$60.00
Save $-60.00
New research on the archaeology of the colonial landscapes of the Caribbean.
This volume brings together new research on the archaeology of the colonial landscape of the Caribbean. It focusses on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and on the British Caribbean: notably Bermuda, Jamaica, Florida, Barbados, Antigua, and especially St. Kitts and Nevis. Chapters cover a wide range of landscapes - domestic, military and industrial - and interests, including the archaeology and architecture of African-Caribbean slavery and emancipation, European settlements, sugar production, burial grounds, cartography, fortifications and trade.
Diana McVeagh
Gerald Finzi's Letters, 1915-1956
Regular price
$105.00
Save $-105.00
A fully annotated edition of more than 1600 letters from and to Gerald Finzi, spanning the composer's life from ca. the early 1920s up until his untimely death in 1956.
WINNER of the 2022 C.B. Oldman prize, by the International Association of Music Libraries, Archives and Documentation Centres (IAMLS UK & Irl)
Gerald Finzi's (1901-1956) masterpiece is the radiant and touching cantata Dies Natalis. He is also highly regarded for his Thomas Hardy song-settings, for his Intimations of Immortality, and for his fine cello and clarinet concertos. As a scholar, he championed the then neglected composers Hubert Parry and Ivor Gurney, and the eighteenth-century John Stanley, William Boyce and Richard Mudge, composers he revived with the amateur orchestra he founded. Diana McVeagh, Finzi's biographer, brings together more than 1600 letters from and to Gerald Finzi, spanning the composer's life from the early 1920s until his untimely death in 1956. His more than 160 correspondents include Ralph Vaughan Williams, Herbert Howells, Edmund Rubbra, Arthur Bliss and Howard Ferguson, Michael Tippett, Benjamin Britten and Sir John Barbirolli, the poet Edmund Blunden, and the artist John Aldridge, making this a portrait not only of Gerald Finzi but also of his group of composer, musician and artist friends in the first half of the twentieth century. In these mostly unpublished letters Finzi emerges as a multi-faceted and complex character, developing from a solitary, introverted youth into a man with strong views and wide interests: education, pacifism, vegetarianism, the Arts and Crafts movement and the English pastoral tradition, among others. From amusing trivia to the deeply serious ideas and principles Finzi set out at the onset of war and in the 1950s, these letters allow for first-hand insights into his personality and background. This definitive edition is fully annotated, offering context with substantial commentaries on the correspondence, illustrations by Joy Finzi, a chronology, bibliography and a catalogue of works.
Valerie Woodring Goertzen
The Creative Worlds of Joseph Joachim
Regular price
$170.00
Save $-170.00
Examines Joseph Joachim's vital legacy through a range of philological, philosophical and critical approaches.
Joseph Joachim (1831-1907), violinist, composer, teacher, and founding director of Berlin's Royal Academy of Music, was one of the most eminent and influential musicians of the long nineteenth century. Born in a tiny Jewish community on the Austro-Hungarian border, he rose to a position of unsurpassed prominence in European cultural life.
This timely collection of essays explores important yet little-known aspects of Joachim's life and art. Studies of his Jewish background, early assimilation into Christian society, Felix Mendelssohn's mentorship, and the influence of Hungarian vernacular music on the formation of his musical style elucidate the roots of Joachim's identity. The later chapters focus on his personal and creative responses to the contentious and rapidly evolving cultural milieu in which he lived: his choice of instruments as his musical "voice," his performances as sites of (re)enchantment in the modern age, his pathbreaking British career, his calling and sway as a quartet player, his pedagogical legacy, his influence on the establishment of the musical canon, and several of his most distinctive and original compositions.
With a wide variety of approaches-analytical, philological, archival, philosophical, and critical-this collection will prove enlightening to scholars, performers, and others interested in this brilliant artist and the musical aesthetics, culture, and styles of his time.
Jeremy Dibble
The Music of Frederick Delius
Regular price
$45.00
Save $-45.00
This book examines Delius's individual approaches to genre, form, harmony, orchestration and literary texts which gave the composer's musical style such a unique voice.
Frederick Delius' (1862-1934) music has proved impervious to analytical definition. Delius's approaches to genre, form, harmony, orchestration and literary texts are all highly individual, not to say eccentric in their deliberate aim to avoid conformity. Rarely does Delius follow a conventional line, and though one can readily point to important influences, the larger Gestalt of each work has a syntax and coherence for which conventional analytical methods are mostly inadequate. Delius's musical style has also defied one of the most essential critical tools of his musical epoque - that of national identity. His style bears no relation either to the Victorian or Edwardian aesthetic of British music spearheaded by Parry, Stanford and Elgar before the First World War, nor to the more overtly nationalist, folk-song-orientated pastoralism of post-war Britain in such composers as Vaughan Williams and Holst. In contrast, Delius acknowledged himself a 'stateless' individual and considered that his music refused to belong to any national school or movement. To test these claims, the book explores a number of important factors. Delius's musical education at the Leipzig Conservatorium and the works he produced there. Delius's musical voice, notably his harmonic and melodic style and the close structural relationship between these two factors. The book also explores the question of Delius and 'genre' in which the investigation of form is central, especially in opera, the symphonic poem, the choral work (where words are seminal to the creation of structural design) and the sonata and concerto (to which Delius brought his own individual solution). Other significant factors are Delius's cosmopolitan use of texts, operatic plots and picturesque impressions, his relationship to Nietzsche's writings and the genre of dance, and the role of his 'earlier' works (1888-1896) in which it is possible to plot a course of stylistic change with reference to the influences of Grieg, Sinding, Florent Schmitt, Wagner, Strauss and Debussy.
Laura L Gathagan
The Haskins Society Journal 31
Regular price
$115.00
Save $-115.00
New insights into interpretive problems in the history of England and Europe between the eighth and thirteenth centuries.
The articles in this volume of the Haskins Society Journal take the reader from early England to the thirteenth century, from Europe to the Holy Land. Chapters explore issues of Anglo-Saxon social status and settlement andpeasant agency in the France of King Louis IX; while, through a careful re-examination of documentary and narrative evidence, further articles offer new insights into succession crises in England and the Principality of Antioch, with special attention to the role of women in the assumption of political power and its narration. The record and moral horizons of both First and Fourth Crusaders also receive close attention; and finally, a survey of the construction of the Norman past in the French Chronique de Normandie rounds out the collection. CONTRIBUTORS: Mark E. Blincoe, Andrew D. Buck, Wim de Clercq, Theodore Evergates, Alex Hurlow, William Chester Jordan, Alexandra Locking, Alheydis Plassman, Stuart Pracy, Katherine Allen Smith, Veerle van Eetvelde, Steven Vanderputten, Gerben Verbrugghe
Kathleen Walker-Meikle
Medieval Pets
Regular price
$95.00
Save $-95.00
An engaging and informative survey of medieval pet keeping which also examines their representation in art and literature.
Animals in the middle ages have often been discussed - but usually only as a source of food, as beasts of burden, or as aids for hunters. This book takes a completely different angle, showing that they were also beloved domesticcompanions to their human owners, whether they were dogs, cats, monkeys, squirrels, and parrots. It offers a full survey of pets and pet-keeping: from how they were acquired, kept, fed, exercised, and displayed, to the problems they could cause. It also examines the representation of pets and their owners in art and literature; the many charming illustrations offer further evidence for the bonds between humans and their pets, then as now. A wide range of sources, including chronicles, letters, sermons and poems, are used in what is both an authoritative and entertaining account.
Dr KATHLEEN WALKER-MEIKLE gained her PhD at University College London.
Lisa Jefferson
The Register of the Goldsmiths' Company: Deeds and Documents, c. 1190 to c. 1666 [3 Volume Set]
Regular price
$650.00
Save $-650.00
This three-volume edition provides translations of the Goldsmiths' Company Register of Deeds with full explicatory annotation, and with a clear introduction to both the manuscript and the legal texts contained in it.
The Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths, commonly known as the Goldsmiths' Company, is one of the twelve Great Livery Companies of the City of London. This three-volume edition provides translations of the company's Register of Deeds with full explicatory annotation and with a clear introduction to both the manuscript and the legal texts contained within. Additionally, the volumes contain detailed name and subject indexes. The company's Register of Deeds has never been fully utilised by historians, but it contains a record copy made from the fifteenth century onwards of the original deeds of the company's acquisitions of property from the reign of King Richard I to the seventeenth century. These deeds reveal much about the precise location of properties and their inhabitants. Wills, often appearing in the Register, help to piece together a social history of the time. Charitable purposes were often the reason for monies or property bequeathed to the Goldsmiths, sometimes of an educational nature, or of almsgiving to the poor, or for the training and support of young goldsmiths and silversmiths. Many documents also concern women, either acting solely in their own name or jointly with a husband, sometimes also appearing as daughters or sisters, providing evidence regarding their legal position during the medieval and early modern period. The editing and translation of these documents (from Latin and French into modern-day English) will be of great use to historians interested in the buildings of medieval and Tudor London and their use as personal or business premises. But beyond these obvious confines, these so far hidden sources will help to rewrite a social, legal, and economic history of medieval and Tudor London. SPECIAL INTRODUCTORY PRICE: £395/$575. Rises to full price £450/$650 on 1st January 2023.
Elizabeth Eva Leach
A Medieval Songbook
Regular price
$130.00
Save $-130.00
Detailed exploration of an enigmatic manuscript containing the texts to hundreds of songs, but no musical notation.
The medieval songbook known variously as trouvère manuscript C or the "Bern Chansonnier" (Bern, Burgerbibliothek, Cod. 389) is one of the most important witnesses to musical life in thirteenth-century France. Almost certainly copied in Metz, it provides the texts to over five hundred Old French songs, and is a unique insight into cultures of song-making and copying on the linguistic and political borders between French and German-speaking lands in the Middle Ages. Notably, the names of trouvères, including several female poet-musicians, are found in its margins, names which would be unknown today without this evidence. However, the manuscript has received relatively little scholarly attention, partly because the songs' musical staves remained empty for reasons now unknown, and partly because of where it was copied. This collection of essays is the first to consider C on its own terms and from a range of disciplinary perspectives, including philology, art history, literary studies, and musicology. The contributors explore the process of creating the complex object that is a music manuscript, examining the work of the scribes and artists who worked on C, and questioning how scribes acquired and organised exemplars for copying. The peculiarly Messine flavour of the repertoire and authors is also discussed, with contributors showing that C frames the tradition of Old French song from a unique perspective. As a whole, the volume demonstrates how in this eastern hub of music and poetry, poet-composers, readers, and scribes interacted with the courtly song tradition in fascinating and unusual ways.
Steven G. Ellis
Ireland’s English Pale, 1470-1550
Regular price
$120.00
Save $-120.00
Challenges the argument that the English Pale was contracting during the early Tudor period.
A key argument of this book is that the English Pale - the four counties around Dublin under English control - was expanding during the early Tudor period, not contracting, as other historians have argued. The author shows how the new system, whereby "the four obedient shires" were protected by new fortifications and a newly-constituted English-style militia, which replaced the former system of extended marches, was highly effective, making unnecessary money and troops from England, and enabling the Dublin government to be self-financing. The book provides full details of this new system. It also demonstrates how direct rule by an English army and governor, which replaced the system in the years after 1534, was much more costly and led on in turn to the policy of "surrender and regrant" under which Irish chiefs became subject to English law. The book highlights how this policy made the English Pale's frontiers redundant, but how ideologically ideas of "English civility" nevertheless survived, and "the wild Atlantic way" remained "beyond the Pale".
Joanna Martin
Georgina Weldon
Regular price
$40.00
Save $-40.00
A fascinating account of the life of one of the most famous women of the Victorian era.
For more than a decade in the second half of the nineteenth century Georgina Weldon (1837-1914) was one of the most famous women in England. Weldon was an exceptional self-publicist, intelligent and utterly convinced that she was always in the right. A semi-professional singer, she came to prominence as a friend of the composer Charles Gounod. Her husband's unsuccessful attempt to have her carried off to a lunatic asylum caused a public scandal, and her subsequent efforts to drag her enemies through the law courts were widely reported. Weldon's resistance to being certified insane and her unceasing legal claims for defamation and/or loss of earnings contributed to changes in laws relating to private asylums and vexatious litigation.
Weldon sang in drawing rooms and concert halls, and on the music hall stage. She lectured on women's rights and law reform. The most notorious female plaintiff, and probably the first married women to represent herself in court, she advised many of her fellow litigants at a time when women were not permitted to practise law professionally. Her campaigns brought her notoriety and two gaol sentences.
Joanna Martin expertly retells the story of that notorious Victorian eccentric who suffered many bouts of delusion and was an ardent supporter of spiritualism. Martin's account manages to negotiate a biography situated between crazed behaviour and the pursuit of admirable causes. Weldon's story offers a wide canvas introducing phenomena such as celebrity culture and major and marginal characters of Dickensian quality. This biography of Weldon, based on primary sources including Weldon's own diaries and letters, therefore touches upon a wide variety of issues; Victorian society, nineteenth-century's women's history, the context of a social and cultural history of madness and marriage (law), and nineteenth-century British musical culture.
Valerie Smith
Rational Dissenters in Late Eighteenth-Century England
Regular price
$170.00
Save $-170.00
Rational Dissent was a branch of Protestant religious nonconformity which emerged to prominence in England between c. 1770 and c. 1800. While small, the movement provoked fierce opposition from both Anglicans and Orthodox Dissenters.
Rational Dissent was a branch of Protestant religious nonconformity which emerged to prominence in England between c. 1770 and c. 1800. Based on the sole study of the Scriptures and the application of individual reasoning to understanding the word of God, Rational Dissent rejected the role and authority of Anglican priests but also stood apart from Orthodox Dissent in its denial of the Trinity and Original Sin, arguing that these concepts were 'irrational'. While small, the movement provoked fierce opposition from both Anglicans and Orthodox Dissenters. Drawing on a wide range of contemporary published and unpublished sources, this study explores the theology of Rational Dissent in its entirety, arguing that it was considerably more diverse than has previously been acknowledged. Through an examination of lists of subscribers to Rational Dissenting publications and organizations, and of Unitarian libraries and their readers, the book uncovers the movement's less visible adherents, mapping them both socially and geographically. It also explores the impact of vehement attacks by Anglicans and Orthodox Dissenters on the development of a Rational Dissenting identity. Within the context of the struggle for civil and political rights and of the American and French Revolutions, the book establishes that the theology of Rational Dissenters underpinned their political beliefs and concepts of liberty, drove their ideas on the nature of society, and determined the lives and priorities of its lay adherents. The final stage of the book explores the largely Unitarian legacy of Rational Dissent and its theological, cultural and social impact in England post 1800.
William Kynan-Wilson
Henry of Blois
Regular price
$130.00
Save $-130.00
First modern study devoted to one of the twelfth-century's most enigmatic, influential and fascinating figures.
Henry of Blois (d. 1171) was a towering figure in twelfth-century England. Grandson of William the Conqueror and brother to King Stephen, he played a central role in shaping the course of the civil war that characterized his brother's reign. Bishop of Winchester and abbot of Glastonbury for more than four decades, Henry was one of the richest men in the kingdom, and effectively governed the English Church for a time as Papal Legate. Raised and tonsured at Cluny, he was an intimate friend of Peter the Venerable and later saved the great abbey from financial ruin. Towards the end of his life he presided, albeit reluctantly, over the trial of Thomas Becket. Henry was a remarkable man: an administrator of exceptional talent, a formidable ecclesiastical statesman, a bold and eloquent diplomat, and twelfth-century England's most prolific patron of the arts.
In the first major book-length study of Henry to be published since 1932, nine scholars explore new perspectives on the most crucial aspects of his life and legacy. By bringing ecclesiastical and documentary historians together with archaeologists and historians of art, architecture, literature and ideas, this interdisciplinary collection will serve as a catalyst for renewed study of this fascinating man and the world in which he operated.
Marc D. Moskovitz
Measure
Regular price
$29.95
Save $-29.95
WINNER of the 2023 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title Award
Follows the fascinating story of musical timekeeping, beginning in an age before the existence of external measuring devices and continuing to the present-day use of the Smartphone app.
The book opens with an exploration of musical time keeping as expressed in the artwork and musical writing of the Renaissance, sources that inform our early understanding of an age when music making was bound up with motions of the body and the pulsing of the human heart. With the adoption of the simple pendulum and the subsequent incorporation of tempo-related language, musicians gained the ability to communicate concepts of speed and slowness with ever-increasing precision. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries witnessed the development of a diverse array of musical time-keeping devices, yet it was not until the nineteenth century that a single device combined the critical elements of accuracy, functionality and affordability.
Enter the metronome: portable and affordable, a triumph of innovation that enabled musicians to establish and faithfully reproduce musical time with accuracy and ease. From Beethoven to Ligeti, Moskovitz looks to a number of distinguished composers who used or refused this revolutionary machine and explores the complicated relationship that unfolded between the metronome, the musical world and practitioners in other disciplines who sought to exploit its potential.
Engagingly written, Measure: In Pursuit of Musical Time will appeal to professionals and amateurs alike.
Laura L Gathagan
The Haskins Society Journal 32: 2020. Studies in Medieval History
Regular price
$95.00
Save $-95.00
Essays illuminate a wide range of topics from the Middle Ages, from the seals of an empress to priests' wives and the undead.
This volume of the Haskins Society Journal demonstrates the Society's continued engagement with historical and interdisciplinary research from the early to the central Middle Ages on a broad range of topics including militarism, piety, the miraculous and the monstrous. Chapters explore material culture through a mythic eleventh-century papal banner and the seals and coins of the Empress Matilda; offer new insights into Carolingian hagiography and into the undead in the Historia rerum Anglicarum. Further chapters feature new evidence on the role of priests' wives, the tensions of multiple lordships, shifting identities in the Irish Sea world, and the didactic use of royal anger. A fresh examination of Aelred of Rievaulx's Relatio de Standaro and a re-assessment of Flemish documentary practice continue the Haskins Society's commitment to primary source analysis. Two essays on the thirteenth century, including links between Crusade spirituality and lay penitential strategies and an investigation into the economic costs of waging war, round out the volume. Contributors: DAN ARMSTRONG, DAVID S. BACHRACH, DANIEL M. BACHRACH, JILLIAN M. BJERKE, HANNAH BOSTON, MARIAH COOPER, FIONA J. GRIFFITHS, JESSE M. HARRINGTON, JEAN-FRANÇOIS NIEUS, ALICE RIO, CHARITY URBANSKI, PATRICK WADDEN, MEGHAN WOOLLEY, LU ZUO
Pietro Piana
Rediscovering Lost Landscapes
Regular price
$95.00
Save $-95.00
Analysis of hundreds of art works from the period provides insights into forgotten landscapes and hidden geographies.
After the Napoleonic wars many wealthy British women and men settled along the coast in Liguria and travelled in Piedmont and Valle d'Aosta in search of warmth and health. They established English-speaking colonies of retired clerics, colonial officials, aristocrats and industrialists at places such as Alassio, Bordighera, Sanremo and Portofino. Many were keen artists.
This book assesses hundreds of topographical drawings, paintings and photographs of north-west Italy produced by these British visitors and residents in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Through the identification and analysis of these works, scattered today in private and public collections in Italy and Britain, it provides insights into the way Italian landscapes were understood and appreciated. Considered in conjunction with historical photography, maps, archives and fieldwork, they deepen our knowledge of past land management traditions and recover how the contemporary landscape looked. The artists are placed in their intellectual and geographical contexts; and interconnections between British and Italian artists and between topographical art and photography are explored. Different chapters assess the main subjects depicted, including mountains, seascapes, rivers, agriculture, trees and woodland, castles, churches, villages, industries and landscapes of luxury.
Philip MacDougall
The Great Anglo-Russian Naval Alliance of the Eighteenth Century and Beyond
Regular price
$120.00
Save $-120.00
Examines Naval co-operation between Britain and Russia and the often underappreciated prowess of the Russian navy.
Naval co-operation between Britain and Russia continued throughout the eighteenth century, with Britain providing huge assistance to the growth of Russia's navy, and Russia making an essential but often overlooked contribution to Britain's maritime power in the period. From 1698 when Tsar Peter the Great served briefly as a trainee shipwright at Deptford dockyard Russia recruited British, often Scottish, shipwrights, engineers, naval officers and naval surgeons who both helped build up the Russian navy and who were also key advisers to the Russian navy at sea. At the same time, naval stores from Russia, especially after Britain lost the American colonies, were vital for the maintenance of Britain's fleet. Moreover, as this book argues, Russian naval power was much more formidable than is often realised, with the Russian navy active alongside the British fleet in the North Sea and winning decisive battles against the Ottoman navy in the Mediterranean, including the battles of Çeşme in 1770 and Navarino in 1827. Britain did well to have Russia as a naval ally rather than an enemy. This book provides a comprehensive overview of this important subject, at a time when Britain's relationship with Russia is of considerable concern.
Sarah Kirby
Exhibitions, Music and the British Empire
Regular price
$130.00
Save $-130.00
Combining approaches from reception studies and historical musicology, this book demonstrates how the representation of music at exhibitions drew the press and public into debates about music's role in society.
International exhibitions were among the most significant cultural phenomena of the late nineteenth century. These vast events aimed to illustrate, through displays of physical objects, the full spectrum of the world's achievements, from industry and manufacturing, to art and design. But exhibitions were not just visual spaces. Music was ever present, as a fundamental part of these events' sonic landscape, and integral to the visitor experience.
This book explores music at international exhibitions held in Australia, India, and the United Kingdom during the 1880s. At these exhibitions, music was codified, ordered, and all-round 'exhibited' in manifold ways. Displays of physical instruments from the past and present were accompanied by performances intended to educate or to entertain, while music was heard at exhibitors' stands, in concert halls, and in the pleasure gardens that surrounded the exhibition buildings. Music was depicted as a symbol of human artistic achievement, or employed for commercial ends. At times it was presented in nationalist terms, at others as a marker of universalism. This book argues, by interrogating the multiple ways that music was used, experienced, and represented, that exhibitions can demonstrate in microcosm many of the broader musical traditions, purposes, arguments, and anxieties of the day. Its nine chapters focus on sociocultural themes, covering issues of race, class, public education, economics, and entertainment in the context of music, tracing these through the networks of communication that existed within the British Empire at the time.
Eilish Gregory
Catholics during the English Revolution, 1642-1660
Regular price
$120.00
Save $-120.00
Examines the experiences of Catholics during the period when England was ruled by Puritan Protestants.
This is the first book to examine thoroughly the ways in which Catholics adapted to political and social change during the turbulent years of the English Revolution. The book examines several important aspects of the Catholic experience in this period. It explores the penal laws by which the estates of Catholics were sequestrated, discussing the extent to which politicians designed the new laws to target Catholics specifically, rather than Royalists more generally, and outlining how the sequestration legislation operated in practice. It considers how Catholic gentry utilised their networks with influential Protestants with wider political connections when applying to have their sequestrations discharged. More broadly the book reveals how Catholics demonstrated their loyalty and assimilated into society despite being viewed as the natural enemies of the English Republic and Protectorate. The book also compares Catholic experiences to those of other religious minorities and sets the situation in England in the wider European international context of Catholic-Protestant rivalry and warfare, which made Catholics a particularly vulnerable religious minority in Puritan England.
Ian Wilson
The Book of Geoffroi de Charny
Regular price
$120.00
Save $-120.00
The Livre Charny (Charny's Book), by the 14th century French knight Geoffroi de Charny, translated here by Nigel Bryant with an introduction by Ian Wilson.
The poem known as the Livre Charny (Charny's Book), by the fourteenth-century French knight Geoffroi de Charny, has never been published, Nigel Bryant's brilliant new translation of this long-neglected poem, based on a hitherto overlooked original Charny manuscript housed in Oxford, vividly conveys Charny's self-deprecating and extraordinarily down-to-earth attitudes towards the knightly career.
Charny is surprisingly blunt in his descriptions of the mishaps and mortal dangers to be expected, from losing in a tournament, to homesickness on crusade, to being concussed whilst attempting to scale an enemy tower. Nothing else quite like it is to be found in medieval literature.
Ian Wilson's introduction provides a markedly revised understanding of Charny's career as tournament performer, serving soldier, crusader, councillor, and finally royal standard-bearer: he was killed at Poitiers in 1356.
Bryant and Wilson also argue that Charny's Book is so different in style from the Book of Chivalry, also attributed to him, that the latter is unlikely to be by the same author. Using the evidence of a hitherto unnoticed manuscript in Madrid, they show that the latter is likely to be a work of the 1380s composed by Charny's son of the same name, possibly as a kind of memorial to his heroic father.
Alberto García Porras
The Royal Workshops of the Alhambra
Regular price
$65.00
Save $-65.00
The Alhambra is one of the most famous archaeological sites worldwide, yet knowledge of it remains very partial, focussing on the medieval palaces. This book addresses that imbalance, examining the adjacent urban and industrial zone.
The Alhambra is one of the most famous archaeological sites worldwide, yet knowledge of the complex remains very partial, focussing on its medieval Nasrid palaces. Other aspects of the site are virtually unknown, not only to the general public but to archaeologists and historians as well. The Royal Workshops of the Almambra addresses this imbalance, examining the urban and industrial zone adjacent to the palaces. Once the most densely populated and extensive area of the complex, this zone, the Secano, contained houses, tanneries, and workshops including a considerable number of pyrotechnological facilities for the production of metal, glass and ceramic items. Presenting the results of the Royal Workshops of the Alhambra (UNESCO World Heritage Site) project, the book gives a much-needed insight into the industrial sector of the Alhambra. Crucially, the project focusses on the early modern era, when the manufacture of ceramic, glass and metal actually reached their peak. The opening chapters set the archaeological work and the Secano in context and discuss the methodology for archaeological investigation of pyrotechnological activity; while further chapters present the results of the research. Drawing on both traditional and ground-breaking survey and excavation techniques, the book provides an invaluable wide-lens picture of the palatial city.
David Wilson
Suppressing Piracy in the Early Eighteenth Century
Regular price
$130.00
Save $-130.00
Shows how Britain and its empire was not a strong centralised imperial state and that it was only through manifold activities taking place in different colonial centres with varied colonial arrangements that the surge in piracy in this period was contained and reduced.
This book charts the surge and decline in piracy in the early eighteenth century (the so-called "Golden Age" of piracy), exploring the ways in which pirates encountered, obstructed, and antagonised the diverse participants of the British empire in the Caribbean, North America, Africa, and the Indian Ocean. The book's primary focus is on how anti-piracy campaigns were constructed as a result of the negotiations, conflicts, and individual undertakings of different imperial actors operating in the commercial and imperial hub of London; maritime communities throughout the British Atlantic; trading outposts in West Africa and India; and marginal and contested zones such as the Bahamas, Madagascar, and the Bay Islands. It argues that Britain and its empire was not a strong centralised imperial state; that the British imperial administration and the Royal Navy did not have the resources to mount a state-led, empire-wide war against piracy following the sharp increase in piratical attacks after 1716; and that it was only through manifold activities taking place in different colonial centres with varied colonial arrangements, economic strengths, and access to resources for maritime defence - which was often shaped by competing and contradictory interests - that Atlantic piracy was gradually discouraged, although not eradicated, by the mid-1720s.
Ian Maxwell
Ernest John Moeran
Regular price
$65.00
Save $-65.00
This long-awaited study of the life and music of Anglo-Irish composer Ernest John Moeran (1894-1950) finally provides a full biography of the last senior figure in early twentieth-century British Music to have been without one.
This long-awaited study of the life and music of Anglo-Irish composer Ernest John Moeran (1894-1950) finally provides a full biography of the last senior figure in early twentieth-century British Music to have been without one.
Although Moeran's work was widely performed during his lifetime, he suffered neglect in the years following his death. It was not until a re-awakening of appreciation for the music of the folksong-inspired English pastoralism in the latter part of the twentieth century that Moeran's tuneful, well-crafted and approachable music began to attract a new audience. However, widely accepted misconceptions about his life and character have obscured a clearunderstanding of both man and composer.
Written with the benefit of access to previously unknown or unresearched archives, Ernest John Moeran: His Life and Music strips away a hitherto unchallenged mythological framework, and replaces it by a thorough-going examination and analysis of the life and work of a musician that may reasonably be asserted as having been unique in British music history.
Sarah Ward Clavier
Royalism, Religion and Revolution: Wales, 1640-1688
Regular price
$130.00
Save $-130.00
Analyses the role of long-term continuities in the political and religious culture of Wales from the eve of the Civil War in 1640 to the Glorious Revolution of 1688
In Royalism, Religion and Revolution: Wales, 1640-1688, Sarah Ward Clavier provides a ground-breaking analysis of the role of long-term continuities in the political and religious culture of Wales from the eve of the Civil War in 1640 to the Glorious Revolution. A final chapter also extends the narrative to the Hanoverian succession. The book discusses three main themes: the importance of continuities (including concepts of Welsh history, identity and language); religious attitudes and identities; and political culture. As Ward Clavier shows, the culture of Wales in this period was not frozen but rather dynamic, one that was constantly deploying traditional cultural symbols and practices to sustain a distinctive religious and political identity against a tide of change. The book uses a wide range of primary research material: from correspondence, diaries and financial accounts, to architectural, literary and material sources, drawing on both English and Welsh language texts. As part of the 'New Regional History' this book discusses the distinctively Welsh alongside aspects common to English and, indeed, European culture, and argues that the creative construction of continuity allowed the gentry of North-East Wales to maintain and adapt their identity even in the face of rupture and crisis.
Dr Eric Gallagher
The Crown Pleas of the Suffolk Eyre of 1240
Regular price
$75.00
Save $-75.00
Edition of the records of a medieval Suffolk eyre reveal rich details of life at the time.
The eyre was an organised judicial visitation to the counties of England by the king's justices to hear all types of plea, civil and crown, as well as to investigate any matters for the king that pertain to the county; it was thus a hugely important part of the legal process. This volume, edited by Eric Gallagher with an introduction by Henry Summerson, follows on from Dr Gallagher's edition and translation of the civil pleas of the same eyre, published by the Suffolk Records Society in 2009. But whereas the civil pleas deal primarily with litigation between landowners, the crown pleas are mostly concerned with the actions of townsmen and peasants, recorded both as killers and thieves, and as the victims of crime. Like the civil pleas, the crown pleas illuminate the workings of the common law, but in addition they illustrate the functions and purposes of local and central government, shedding light in sometimes vivid detail upon the lives of the humbler members of society, upon their occupations, relationships, misfortunes and quarrels - and the sometimes bizarre ways in which they met their deaths. The eyre was led by William of York, the King's justiciar and later bishop of Salisbury, and his colleagues who met at Ipswich, Cattishall (outside Bury St Edmunds) and Dunwich. The eyre roll, now in the National Archives, is the first from Suffolk surviving in full to have been edited and published; it has the particular interest of coming from a county that was then one of the most populous and prosperous of English shires.
Dr Neil McIntyre
Scotland and the Wider World
Regular price
$120.00
Save $-120.00
Provides for a historical perspective of Scotland's interaction with the world beyond its borders.
As one of the most prolific historians of his generation, Allan I. Macinnes, Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Strathclyde, has been foremost in promoting an international rather than insular approach to the study of Scotland. In a distinguished career he has written extensively on the Scottish Highlands, the British revolutions, the formation of the United Kingdom, the Jacobite movement, and Scottish involvement in the British Empire. The chapters collected here reflect the extent of these interests and a commitment to understanding Scotland - or indeed, other territorial units - in an international or global context. Covering a period from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, essays examine the complex interaction of the peoples of the British and Irish isles; they consider Scottish participation in Britannic and European conflict; and they explore Scottish involvement in business networks, political unions, and maritime empires. From intellectual and cultural exchange to political and military upheaval, Scotland and the Wider World will be key reading for anyone interested in the antecedents to Scotland's current international standing.
Cordelia Warr
Medieval Clothing and Textiles 17
Regular price
$75.00
Save $-75.00
The best new research on medieval clothing and textiles, drawing from a variety of angles and approaches.
The essays here take us from the eleventh century, with an exploration of the Bayeux Tapestry, into an examination and reconstruction of an extant thirteenth-century sleeve in France which provides a rare and early example of medieval quilted armour, and finally on to late medieval Sweden and the reconstruction of gilt-leather intarsia coverlets. A study of construction techniques and the evolution of form of gable and French hoods in the late medieval and the early modern periods follows; and the volume also includes a study of the Great Wardrobe under Edward I of England, and what it can tell us about textiles at the time.
Kevin Linch
Redcoats to Tommies
Regular price
$130.00
Save $-130.00
An examination of the lifecycle of soldiers, including enlistment, experiences of military life, the soldier's place in society and in politics, and military identity, memory and representation.
This book surveys and examines the history of Britain's soldiers from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. It focuses on the lifecycle of a soldier, including enlistment and experience, and on identity, representations and place in society. It covers the diverse military forces of the British crown - the regular army, home defence forces, part-time soldiers, auxiliaries, officers, non-commissioned officers and rank and file - across times of conflictand peace and their wider relationship to families, communities, government and society. Additionally, it considers both British troops, and, recognising Britain's soldiers as a transnational phenomenon, forces raised outside ofBritain and Ireland. By assessing the evolution of Britain's soldiers across three centuries, the book highlights continuity and change and gauges how far the basic fundamentals, principles and priorities of army life have endured or been transformed during the existence of a continual standing army. The book includes up-to-date research from a new generation of early-career researchers and reflections from established scholars.
CONTRIBUTORS: Ian Beckett, Timothy Bowman, Gavin Daly, Peter Doyle, Edward Gosling, George Hay, Kevin Linch, Matthew Lord, Eleanor O'Keeffe, Adam Prime, Michael Reeve, Jacqueline Reiter, Robert Tildesley, and Christina Welsch.
Peter Lynan
British Music, Musicians and Institutions, c. 1630-1800
Regular price
$130.00
Save $-130.00
Building upon the developing picture of the importance of British music, musicians and institutions during the eighteenth century, this book investigates the themes of composition, performance (amateur and professional) and music-printing, within the wider context of social, religious and secular institutions.
British music in the era from the death of Henry Purcell to the so-called 'Musical Renaissance' of the late nineteenth century was once considered barren. This view has been overturned in recent years through a better-informed historical perspective, able to recognise that all kinds of British musical institutions continued to flourish, and not only in London. The publication, performance and recording of music by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British composers, supplemented by critical source-studies and scholarly editions, shows forms of music that developed in parallel with those of Britain's near neighbours. Indigenous musicians mingled with migrant musicians from elsewhere, yet there remained strands of British musical culture that had no continental equivalent. Music, vocal and instrumental, sacred and secular, flourished continuously throughout the Stuart and Hanoverian monarchies. Composers such as Eccles, Boyce, Greene, Croft, Arne and Hayes were not wholly overshadowed by European imports such as Handel and J. C. Bach. The present volume builds on this developing picture of the importance of British music, musicians and institutions during the period. Leading musicologists investigate themes such as composition, performance (amateur and professional), and music-printing, within the wider context of social, religious and secular institutions.
Paul A. Elliott
Erasmus Darwin's Gardens
Regular price
$75.00
Save $-75.00
This first full study of Erasmus Darwin's gardening, horticulture and agriculture shows he was as keen a nature enthusiast as his grandson Charles.
Famous as the author of the Botanic Garden (1791) and grandfather of Charles Darwin (1809-1882), Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802) was a larger-than-life enlightenment natural philosopher (scientist) and writer who practised as a doctor across the English Midlands for nearly half a century. A practical gardener and horticulturist, Darwin created a botanic garden near Lichfield - which galvanised his poetry - and kept other gardens, an orchard and small "farm" in Derby. Informed by his medical practice and botanical studies, Darwin saw many parallels between animals, plants and humans which aroused hostility during the years of revolution, warfare and reaction, but helped him to write Zoonomia (1794/96) and Phytologia (1800) - his major studies of medicine, agriculture and gardening. Captivated by the changing landscapes and environments of town and country and supported by social networks such as those in Lichfield and Derby, Darwin avidly exchanged ideas about plants, animals and their diseases with family, patients, friends such as the poet Anna Seward (1742-1809), farmers, fellow doctors, huntsmen and even the local mole catcher. The is the first full study of Erasmus Darwin's gardening, horticulture and agriculture. It shows him as keen a nature enthusiast as his contemporary Rev. Gilbert White of Selbourne (1720-1793) or his grandson Charles, fascinated with everything from swarming insects and warring bees to domestic birds and dogs, pigs and livestock on his farm to fungi growing from horse dung in Derby tan yards. Ranging over his observations of plant physiology and anatomy to the use of plant "bandages" in his orchard and electrical machines to hasten seed germination to explosive studies of vegetable "brains", nerves and sensations, the book demonstrates the ways in which Erasmus Darwin's landscape and garden experiences transformed his understanding of nature. They provided him with insights into medicine and the environmental causes of diseases, the classification of plants and animals, chemistry, evolution, potential new medicines and foodstuffs and the ecological interdependency of the natural economy. Like the amorous vegetables of the Loves of the Plants (1789) which fascinated, scandalised and titillated late Georgian society, the many living creatures of Darwin's gardens and farm encountered in this book were for him real, dynamic, interacting and evolving beings who helped inspire and re-affirm his progressive social and political outlook.
Tom Reid
The Restoration of the Church of England
Regular price
$105.00
Save $-105.00
A complete transcription of the Lambeth Library MS 1126.
Lambeth Library MS 1126 was compiled, probably in late 1663, on behalf of Gilbert Sheldon, the new archbishop of Canterbury, as a conspectus of the parishes of Canterbury diocese and the archiepiscopal peculiars. A number of entries contain illuminating comments on the religious complexion of the parish, relating to both its incumbents and leading laity, of a type not found elsewhere for the 1660s. Its value for historians is twofold: first, the light it throws on the restoration of the episcopalian Church of England in the early 1660s. Notwithstanding the Act of Uniformity enforced at St Bartholomew's Day 1662, it is abundantly clear from this Catalogue that the Church of England remained divided and unsettled in the parishes, at least in Canterbury diocese. Second, the Catalogue is of interest for the administrative processes it records, as an incoming archbishop, necessarily non-resident, sought to become acquainted with the clergy and prominent laity in the parishes, information which was then updated over the next twenty years. In this respect, the Catalogue adumbrates the more routine and fuller collection of information about the parishes in the eighteenth-century church. A few of the comments in the Catalogue have already been referred to by historians, but this complete transcription has allowed in-depth analysis and concludes that Canterbury diocese must have experienced many more ejections of clergy than has previously been recognized, pointing to a need for more detailed examination of events in other dioceses.
John France
Journal of Medieval Military History
Regular price
$120.00
Save $-120.00
The leading academic vehicle for scholarly publication in the field of medieval warfare. Medieval Warfare
The articles here focus on activities in north-western Europe, with a reconsideration of the location of the battle of Stamford Bridge (1066), an examination of the role of open battles in the civil wars of the Anglo-Norman and Angevin kings, a re-assessment of the strategy of Edward I's war against Philip IV in 1297-98, and an analysis of the role of cavalry "coureurs" in late-medieval France. But regions further to the south and east are by no means neglected, with a dissection of the military rhetoric of Pere III of Aragon and his queen, Elionor of Sicily, and a discussion of the earliest European gunpowder recipes, from Friuli (1336) and Augsburg (1338- c. 1350). The volume also offers studies of the campaigns culminating in the battles of Firad in 634 and Qinnasrīn in 1134.
Ana María Rivera Medina
Ports in the Medieval European Atlantic
Regular price
$120.00
Save $-120.00
Presents a wealth of original research findings on how medieval ports actually worked, providing new insights on shipping, trade, port society and culture, and systems of regional and international integration.
This book responds to the increasing interest of maritime historians in the study of ports. These enclaves offer significant insights into a variety of subjects, including ships and shipping; trade, commodities, and consumption patterns; the economy, society and culture of port workers and port communities; and systems of regional and international integration. Based on extensive research in a wide range of European archives, the book provides much detailon the nature of ports in the medieval period, especially on the crucial subject of the operation of ports. Covering a range of ports in France, Spain, Portugal and the Canary Islands, the book contains a wealth of original research findings. It will be particularly welcomed by English-speaking scholars and others outside the region analysed, since it gives access to non-English-language archives, thereby considerably enriching the study of medieval portsbeyond ports in Britain and Ireland.
Alan Argent
Dr Williams's Trust and Library: A History
Regular price
$170.00
Save $-170.00
This first complete history of Dr Williams's Trust and Library, deriving from the will of the nonconformist minister Daniel Williams (c.1643-1716) reveals rare examples of private philanthropy and dissenting enterprise.
The library contains the fullest collection of material relating to English Protestant Dissent. Opening in the City of London in 1730, it moved to Bloomsbury in the 1860s. Williams and his first trustees had a vision for Protestant Dissent which included maintaining connections with Protestants overseas. The charities espoused by the trust extended that vision by funding an Irish preacher, founding schools in Wales, sending missionaries to native Americans, and giving support to Harvard College. By the mid-eighteenth century, the trustees had embraced unitarian beliefs and had established several charities and enlarged the unique collection of books, manuscripts and portraits known as Dr Williams's Library. The manuscript and rare book collection offers material from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries, with strengths in the early modern period, including the papers of Richard Baxter, Roger Morrice, and Owen Stockton. The eighteenth-century archive includes the correspondence of the scientist and theologian Joseph Priestley. The library also holds several collections of importance for women's history and English literature. The story of the trust and library reveals a rare example of private philanthropy over more than three centuries, and a case study in dissenting enterprise. Alan Argent illuminates key themes in the history of nonconformity; the changing status of non-established religions; the voluntary principle; philanthropy; and a lively concern for society as a whole.
Gillian Opstad
Emma and Claude Debussy
Regular price
$75.00
Save $-75.00
Emma Bardac and her relationship with Claude Debussy take centre stage in this insightful exploration of their lives together.
The singer Emma Bardac (1862-1934) has often been presented as a woman who ensnared Claude Debussy (1862-1918) because she wanted to be associated with his fame and to live a life of luxury. Indeed, in many biographies and composer-related studies of Debussy, the only mentions that she receives are brief and derogatory. Here Emma Bardac and her relationship with the composer take centre stage. The book traces Emma's Jewish ancestry and her background, the significant role of her wealthy uncle Osiris, her marriage at seventeen to the wealthy Jewish banker Sigismond Bardac, her affair with Gabriel Fauré and her liaison with and subsequent marriage to Debussy. As Gillian Opstad shows, the pressure and stifling effects of domestic life on Debussy's attitude to his composing were considerable. The financial consequences of their partnership were disastrous, and their circle of close friends was small. Emma suffered physically and mentally from the tensions of the marriage, particularly money worries, and the possibility that Debussy was attracted to her older daughter. She considered divorce but supported him through his deepest depression and during the First World War until he succumbed to cancer in 1918. After Debussy's death, Emma felt driven both on his behalf and for financial reasons to further performances of the composer's works and provoked the annoyance of other musicians by having early compositions resurrected, completed and performed. In this engagingly written biography, Gillian Opstad brings to light little-known facts about Emma's background and family, advances new insights into her relationship with Debussy, and provides a glimpse of an early twentieth-century Parisian milieu that experienced wide-spread antisemitism.
John Ling
Debating English Music in the Long Nineteenth Century
Regular price
$130.00
Save $-130.00
Situates the controversial narrative of 'The English Musical Renaissance' within its wider historical context.
Throughout the nineteenth century a fierce debate about the future of English music was raging in Britain. Just as English music was appearing to advance in quality, the impact of Richard Wagner altered the course of the debate. Alarmed at the Wagnerian influence on English composers, critics expressed relief when that influence appeared to abate, and then presented English music as the antidote to Wagnerian decadence. However, the optimism that England was in a position to lead the musical world was short-lived and a new generation of critics found English composition - with the exception of Elgar - severely lacking. The book identifies themes such as materialism and nationalism that emerged during the debate. It also places the narrative of 'The English Musical Renaissance' within its rightful wider historical context.
Michelle Phillips
Music and Time
Regular price
$120.00
Save $-120.00
How does music manifest through time and, simultaneously, how does time manifest through music?
For the experimental psychologist, the experience of time during music listening or performance is something that may be studied empirically. For philosophers, fundamental questions of time continue to be the subject of ongoing debate in philosophy: is time linear? What are past, present and future? What is duration and what makes a perceptual present, or moment? For the performer, musical time can exist as a subjective vehicle of expression. Although any of the three could be chosen as a starting point, the order presented in the text's structure offers a journey from empiricism to application, via contemplation.
This volume deals with the complex relationship between music and time. It presents a staunchly interdisciplinary perspective defined by the terms Psychology, Philosophy and Practice. The text is divided into sections concerning "experience", "enactment" and "meaning", as points of intersection between the three primary methodologies of the title. As such, this is a book for the scholar, the student of music, and the interested reader. For the scholar, it offers new interconnections and comparisons. For the student, its pluralistic approach presents the most comprehensive overview available to date regarding the topic. For the interested reader, the volume offers answers to questions which concern us as listeners and audiences at concerts, gigs, and festivals.
Chris R. Langley
The Clergy in Early Modern Scotland
Regular price
$130.00
Save $-130.00
A nuanced approach to the role played by clerics at a turbulent time for religious affairs.
From the early percolation of Protestant thought in the sixteenth century through to the controversies and upheaval of the civil wars in the seventeenth century, the clergy were at the heart of religious change in Scotland. By exploring their lived experiences, and drawing upon historical, theological, and literary approaches, the essays here paint a fresh and vibrant portrait of ministry during the kingdom's long Reformation. The contributors investigate how clergy, as well as their families and flocks, experienced and negotiated religious, social, and political change; through examination of both wider themes and individual case studies, the chapters emphasise the flexibility of local decision-making and how ministers and their families were enmeshed in parish dynamics, while also highlighting the importance of clerical networks beyond the parish. What emerges is a ministry that, despite the increasing professionalisation of the role, maintained a degree of local autonomy and agency. The volume thus re-focuses attention on the early modern European ministry, offering a multifaceted and historically attuned understanding of those who stood at the forefront of Protestant reform.
Edited and Translated by Theodore Albrecht
Beethoven’s Conversation Books Volume 4
Regular price
$65.00
Save $-65.00
A complete new edition of Beethoven's conversation books, in 12 volumes, now translated into English in their entirety for the first time. Covering a period associated with the revolutionary style of what we call "late Beethoven", these lively and compelling conversations are now finally accessible in English for the scholar and Beethoven-lover.
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) is recognized the world over as a composer of musical masterpieces exhibiting heroic strength, particularly in the face of his increasing deafness from ca. 1798. By 1818, the Viennese composer had begun carrying blank booklets with him, for his acquaintances to jot their sides of conversations, while he answered aloud. Often, he himself used the pocket-sized booklets to make shopping lists and other reminders, including occasional early sketches for his compositions. Today, 139 of these booklets survive, covering the years 1818 up to the composer's death in 1827 and including such topics as music, history, politics, art, literature, theatre, religion, and education as perceived on a day-to-day basis in post-Napoleonic Europe. An East German edition, begun in the 1960s and essentially complete by 2001, represents a diplomatic transcription of these documents. It is a masterpiece of pure scholarship but is difficult to use for anyone who is not a specialist. Moreover, Beethoven scholarship has moved on significantly since the long-ranging genesis of the German edition.
These important booklets are here translated into English in their entirety for the first time. The volumes in this series include an updated editorial apparatus, with revised and expanded notes and many new footnotes exclusive to this edition, and brand new introductions, which together place many of the quickly changing conversational topics into context. Due to the editor's many years of research in Vienna, his acquaintance with its history and topography, as well as his familiarity with obscure documentary resources, this edition represents an entirely new venture in source studies - vitally informative for scholars not only in music but also in a wide variety of disciplines. At the same time, these often lively and compelling conversations are now finally accessible for the English-speaking music lover or history buff who might want to dip into them and hear what Beethoven and his friends were discussing at the next table.
Brian Cowan
The State Trials and the Politics of Justice in Later Stuart England
Regular price
$130.00
Save $-130.00
The book discusses the 'state trial' as a legal process, a public spectacle, and a point of political conflict - a key part of how constitutional monarchy became constitutional.
State trials provided some of the leading media events of later Stuart England. The more important of these trials attracted substantial public attention, serving as pivot points in the relationship between the state and its subjects. Later Stuart England has been known among legal historians for a series of key cases in which juries asserted their independence from judges. In political history, the government's sometimes shaky control over political trials in this period has long been taken as a sign of the waning power of the Crown. This book revisits the process by which the 'state trial' emerged as a legal proceeding, a public spectacle, a point of political conflict, and ultimately, a new literary genre. It investigates the trials as events, as texts, and as moments in the creation of historical memory. By the early nineteenth century, the publication and republication of accounts of the state trials had become a standard part of the way in which modern Britons imagined how their constitutional monarchy had superseded the absolutist pretensions of the Stuart monarchs. This book explores how the later Stuart state trials helped to create that world.
Jessica Lutkin
Creativity, Contradictions and Commemoration in the Reign of Richard II
Regular price
$95.00
Save $-95.00
Aspects of the turbulent rule of Richard II freshly examined.
The reign of Richard II is well known for its political turmoil as well as its literary and artistic innovations, all areas explored by Professor Nigel Saul during his distinguished career. The present volume interrogates many familiar literary and narrative sources, including works by Froissart, Gower, Chaucer, Clanvow, and the Continuation of the Eulogium Historiarum, along with those less well-known, such as coroner's inquests and gaol delivery proceedings. The reign is also notorious for its larger than life personalities - not least Richard himself. But how was he shaped by other personalities? A prosopographical study of Richard's bishops, a comparison of the literary biographies of his father the Black Prince, and Bertrand du Guesclin, and a reconsideration of Plantagenet family politics, all shed light on this question. Meanwhile, Richard II's tomb reflects his desire to shape a new vision of kingship. Commemoration more broadly was changing in the late fourteenth century, and this volume includes several studies of both individual and communal memorials of various types that illustrate this trend: again, appropriately for an area Professor Saul has made his own. Contributors: Mark Arvanigian, Caroline Barron, Michael Bennett, Jerome Bertram, David Carpenter, Chris Given-Wilson, Jill Havens, Claire Kennan, Hannes Kleineke, John Leland, Joel Rosenthal, Christian Steer, George Stow, Jenny Stratford, Kelcey Wilson-Lee.
Brian Short
"Turbulent Foresters"
Regular price
$190.00
Save $-190.00
A richly detailed history of Ashdown Forest -- home of Winnie-the-Pooh.
The seeming tranquility of many rural landscapes can hide a combative history. This biography of one such landscape, Ashdown Forest in the Weald of Sussex, exemplifies the evolving conflicts that have taken place over many centuries. Wealth and poverty, power and exclusion, have all characterised this landscape through the ages. When a thirteenth-century boundary was erected to form a hunting park it was imposed upon a landscape which for centuries had provided sustenance for peasant families, for swine herds, for itinerant groups, all of whom had developed grazing and collecting rights and customary ties with the area. Conflict between manorial lords and commoners, "turbulent foresters", was born, and the evolution of this conflict over succeeding centuries is the recurring motif of this book. We move through the exploitation of iron ore and timber during the Tudor period, learn of the real threats of enclosure, of military occupation, to be followed by a landscape aesthetic bringing wealthy incomers, attracted by scenery easily reachable from London by train. All sides felt that the Forest was theirs by right. Victorian law-suits, twentieth-century protective legislation and a growing environmental consciousness have all left their mark. And the struggle for Ashdown continues amid ongoing development pressures. This book demonstrates that multi-layered conflict has been a characteristic feature of what still miraculously remains the largest area of internationally recognised heath in the South-East of England.
E. Amanda McVitty
Treason and Masculinity in Medieval England
Regular price
$130.00
Save $-130.00
Groundbreaking new approach to the idea of treason in medieval England, showing the profound effect played by gender.
Conflicts over treason tormented English political society in the later Middle Ages. As legal and political historians have shown, treason was always a constitutional matter as well as a legal one because it was pivotal in mediating the relationship between English kings, their political subjects and the abstraction of the crown. However, despite renewed interest in constitutional history, there has been no extended examination of treason in medieval England since the 1970s. This pioneering study presents a new interpretation of treason, not only as a legal construct, a political weapon and a tool for constitutional thinking, but also as a cultural category, aligning it with questions of gender, vernacularity and national identity. It examines cases from the 1380s to the 1420s, revealing how kings defended their claims to sovereign authority by using the laws of treason to bind their mortal male bodies to the enduring body politic of the realm, and explains how that body politic was masculinised through its entanglement in contests over manly honour and homosocial loyalties. Drawing on evidence from trial records, legislation and chronicles, it illuminates the ways in which cultural ideals of manhood reinforced or subverted government responses to crises of legitimacy, and demonstrates that gender conditioned understandings of treason in the political arena as well as the definitions embedded in statutes and case law. At the same time, it explores the varied ways men defended themselves from accusations of treason by invoking, and in the process helping to transform, shared beliefs about what it meant to be a man in medieval England.
Thomas McGeary
Opera and Politics in Queen Anne's Britain, 1705-1714
Regular price
$190.00
Save $-190.00
Explores the political meanings that Italian opera - its composers, agents and institutions - had for audiences in eighteenth-century Britain.
The reign of Queen Anne (1702-1714) was pivotal for both politics and opera in Britain. In this study, Thomas McGeary brings together a wide range of sources to show how the worlds of politics and opera were entwined. The associations that Italian singing and singers acquired by the 1690s were used in partisan Whig-Tory writings. Rather than a foreign invasion, McGeary shows how the introduction of Italian-style opera was a native product that grew out of plans for a new theatre in the Haymarket. A crucial event for opera was Handel's arrival in London in 1710.
While the criticism of opera by Whig writers such as Richard Steele and Joseph Addison is well known, McGeary uncovers how the early promotion and sponsorship of opera was, in fact, largely a Whig enterprise and cultural program. Indeed, major political figures (mostly Whigs) participated in the support and patronage of opera.
Opera and Politics in Queen Anne's Britain will be required reading for opera scholars and cultural and political historians of eighteenth-century Britain, as well those interested in the vibrant literature culture of the period.
James Titterton
Deception in Medieval Warfare
Regular price
$130.00
Save $-130.00
First full-length study of the use and perception of deceit in medieval warfare.
Deception and trickery are a universal feature of warfare, from the Trojan horse to the inflatable tanks of the Second World War. The wars of the Central Middle Ages (c. 1000-1320) were no exception. This book looks at the various tricks reported in medieval chronicles, from the Normans feigning flight at the battle of Hastings (1066) to draw the English off Senlac Hill, to the Turks who infiltrated the Frankish camp at the Field of Blood (1119) disguised as bird sellers, to the Scottish camp followers descending on the field of Bannockburn (1314) waving laundry as banners to mimic a division of soldiers. This study also considers what contemporary society thought about deception on the battlefield: was it a legitimate way to fight? Was cunning considered an admirable quality in a warrior? Were the culturally and religious "other" thought to be more deceitful in war than Western Europeans? Through a detailed analysis of vocabulary and narrative devices, this book reveals a society with a profound moral ambivalence towards military deception, in which authors were able to celebrate a warrior's cunning while simultaneously condemning their enemies for similar acts of deceit. It also includes an appendix cataloguing over four hundred incidents of military deception as recorded in contemporary chronicle narratives.
Ellie Gebarowski-Shafer
Contesting Orthodoxies in the History of Christianity
Regular price
$170.00
Save $-170.00
Examines the pursuit of orthodoxy, and its consequences for the history of Christianity.
Christianity is a hugely diverse and quarrelsome family of faiths, but most Christians have nevertheless set great store by orthodoxy - literally, 'right opinion' - even if they cannot agree what that orthodoxy should be. The notion that there is a 'catholic', or universal, Christian faith - that which, according to the famous fifth-century formula, has been believed everywhere, at all times and by all people - is itself an act of faith: to reconcile it with the historical fact of persistent division and plurality requires a constant effort. It also requires a variety of strategies, from confrontation and exclusion, through deliberate choices as to what is forgotten or ignored, to creative or even indulgent inclusion. In this volume, seventeen leading historians of Christianity ask how the ideal of unity has clashed, negotiated, reconciled or coexisted with the historical reality of diversity, in a range of historical settings from the early Church through the Reformation era to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. These essays hold the huge variety of the Christian experience together with the ideal of orthodoxy, which Christians have never (yet) fully attained but for which they have always striven; and they trace some of the consequences of the pursuit of that ideal for the history of Christianity.
Nicholas Rogers
Blood Waters
Regular price
$120.00
Save $-120.00
Far from the romanticised image of the swashbuckling genre of maritime history, the eighteenth-century Caribbean was a 'marchlands' in which violence was a way of life and where solidarities were transitory and highly volatile.
This book paints a picture of the eighteenth-century British Caribbean as a frontier zone in which war, international rivalry, disease and slavery are paramount themes. It explores the lure of the region as a vaunted site of potential wealth and derring-do, the fragility of tropical campaigns, the nature of slave insurrection, and the efforts of indigenous peoples (here, the Miskito of the Mosquito Coast and the Black Caribs of St Vincent) to carve out some autonomy from the British and Bourbon powers. It also explores the mutiny of a slave-ship and its unsuccessful raiding ventures in order to show how the dominant European powers sought to contain piracy in an expanding plantation complex. The book emphasizes the contrarieties of struggle, the difficulties preventing subaltern groups, whether slaves, free blacks, indigenous peoples or soldiers and sailors, from forging broader alliances, and the importance of tropical disease in shaping military outcomes. It warns against romanticizing resistance in the eighteenth-century Caribbean, showing that it was instead a 'marchlands' in which violence was a way of life and where solidarities were transitory and highly volatile.
Paul Brassley, David Harvey, Matt Lobley, Michael Winter
The Real Agricultural Revolution
Regular price
$130.00
Save $-130.00
An investigation into farming practices throughout a period of seismic change.
WINNER of the British Agricultural History Society's 2022 Thirsk Prize WINNER of the 2022 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title Award
"This meticulously researched book gives a detailed and authoritative history of agricultural change in the second half of the twentieth century. The book skilfully weaves together the hitherto underexplored individual returns of the Farm Management Survey with oral histories of the farmers who enacted change on the ground to offer an incisive account of the complex technological, political and cultural developments which gave rise to some of the greatest changes in English farming history. It will stand as the key reference point for those with an interest in the history of agricultural change in Britain." Professor Mark Riley, University of Liverpool
At the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939 British agriculture was largely powered by the muscles of men, women, and horses, and used mostly nineteenth-century technology to produce less than half of the country's temperate food. By 1985, less land and far fewer people were involved in farming, the power sources and technologies had been completely transformed, and the output of the country's agriculture had more than doubled. This is the story of the national farm, reflecting the efforts and experiences of 200,000 or so farmers and their families, together with the people they employed. But it is not the story of any individual one of them. We know too little about change at the individual farm level, although what happened varied considerably between farms and between different technologies.
Based on an improbably-surviving archive of Farm Management Survey accounts, supported by oral histories from some of the farmers involved, this book explores the links between the production of new technologies, their transmission through knowledge networks, and their reception on individual farms. It contests the idea that rapid adoption of technology was inevitable, and reveals the unevenness, variability and complexity that lay beneath the smooth surface of the official statistics.
G.A. Loud
The Social World of the Abbey of Cava, c. 1020-1300
Regular price
$190.00
Save $-190.00
A pioneering, comprehensive investigation into a major Italian monastery.
The Benedictine abbey of Holy Trinity, Cava, has had a continuous existence since its foundation almost exactly a thousand years ago. From its modest beginnings, it developed during the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries into one of the wealthiest and most influential monasteries in southern Italy.
This path-breaking study, based on many years research into the, largely unpublished, charters of Cava, begins by examining the growth of the abbey's congregation and property, and its struggle subsequently to defend its interests during the troubled thirteenth century. But, in addition, it uses the extensive evidence available to study its benefactors and dependents, administration and economy, and through this material to analyse the social and economic structures of the principality of Salerno. There is also a re-evaluation of the problem of forgery, practised on a large scale at Cava during the thirteenth century, a factor which has complicated and discouraged previous study of this important institution.
A major advance both in the study of the south Italian Church and of the medieval Mezzogiorno during the central Middle Ages, the volume presents a vivid and detailed picture of local society and its workings, and of the families and individuals who had dealings with the abbey.
Hedy Law
Music, Pantomime and Freedom in Enlightenment France
Regular price
$130.00
Save $-130.00
How did composers and performers use the lost art of pantomime to explore and promote the Enlightenment ideals of free expression?
This book explains the relationships between music, pantomime and freedom in pre-Revolutionary France. It argues that composers and performers recognized their agency when they attempted, from the 1730s through the end of the Old Regime, to revive a lost art called 'pantomime' for their compositions. In musical settings of pantomimes in French operas and instrumental works, leading composers of the time - Rameau, Rousseau, Gluck, and Salieri - used pantomime as a type of expressive dance and acting style that marked an aesthetic rupture between Louis XIV's absolutist governance and the Enlightenment ideals of free expression. In musical settings of pantomime, these composers cultivated various forms of freedom theorized in Enlightenment writings: artistic freedom for the composer; freedom as self-governance; interpretive freedom for spectators; freedom of action for performers; and freedom from dance convention. Thus, pantomime was not only a dance genre; it also functioned as an expressive medium for top performers and invited spectators to draw their own interpretative conclusions. Placing the cultural phenomenon of pantomime in the intellectual context of the Enlightenment, the book explains how composers helped develop thinking and feeling subjects in pre-Revolutionary France.
Alison Hudson
Bishop Æthelwold, his Followers, and Saints' Cults in Early Medieval England
Regular price
$95.00
Save $-95.00
An exploration of how Æthelwold and those he influenced deployed the promotion of saints to implement religious reform.
Bishop Æthelwold of Winchester and his associates were some of the most radical monastic reformers in tenth-century Europe. In two generations, they took over most of the powerful churches in the kingdom of England and implemented a number of the policies found in their ambitious monastic manifestos. They also had a major impact on the early development of the kingdom itself, taking a role in the establishment of a shire system that lasted a thousand years, negotiations with invaders, and attempts to create a standardized English language. Æthelwold and his circle were also enthusiastic venerators of saints. This book examines a range of sources, from hagiographies to charters, from liturgy to archaeological remains, to argue that saints' cults helped these men and women secure their power, wealth, and relationships with groups outside their monasteries. The saints that Æthelwold's circle promoted most lavishly were not necessarily the ones that they studied or the ones that matched their ideological agenda. Rather, Æthelwold's monks and nuns connected themselves to a wide range of saints, including the Virgin Mary, St Swithun, Æthelthryth of Ely, Iudoc, Grimbald, Botulf, Cuthbert, and many others. Venerating these saints helped Æthelwold and his followers appeal to other groups in society, including unreformed ecclesiastics, lay nobles, and the workers on their estates. This book therefore not only has implications for the study of early English history and literature, but also for the history of western European monasticism and saints' cults more generally.
Don Fader
Music, Dance and Franco-Italian Cultural Exchange, c.1700
Regular price
$170.00
Save $-170.00
Exposes the roots of 18th-century musical cosmopolitanism through an investigation of exchanges and collaborations between musicians and dancers from the two major national musical traditions in the early years of the century.
This study stems from discoveries in a trove of documents belonging to Charles-Henri de Lorraine, prince de Vaudémont, who served as governor of Milan under the Spanish crown from 1698 to 1706. These documents, together with a mass of other sources - letters, diaries, treatises, libretti, scores - offer a vivid new picture of musical life in Paris and Milan as well as exchanges between France and Italy. The book is both a patronage study and an examination of the contributions by - and the difficulties facing - musicians and dancers who worked across national and cultural boundaries.
Music, Dance, and Franco-Italian Cultural Exchange, c.1700 follows the careers of the prince and the French violinist and composer Michel Pignolet de Montéclair. In the context of a renewed fascination with Italian music in the 1690s, Montéclair made a name for himself in Paris as a pedagogue and composer who understood both national styles and blended them in a way that was successful on French terms. Vaudémont hired Montéclair to direct a French violin band and to compose dance music for a series of new operas that observers declared "the best in Italy" but are virtually unknown today. These productions involved collaborations among a mixed company of French and Italian musicians, dancers, composers, and librettists modeled on the practice of Turinese court operas. The book is an account of the contributions of these figures to the cultural life of Paris, Milan, and other northern Italian states, and to the creative mixing of musical styles, operatic conventions, and dance technique in France and Italy through the 1720s and beyond. The connections fostered by Vaudémont thus played a heretofore unrecognized early role in the development of 18th-century cosmopolitanism, and they attest to both the liveliness and the artistic importance of such exchanges in the era before the well-known travels of Handel, Telemann, and Vivaldi.
Steven Boardman
Kingship, Lordship and Sanctity in Medieval Britain
Regular price
$130.00
Save $-130.00
Essays reconsidering key topics in the history of late medieval Scotland and northern England.
The volume celebrates the career of the influential historian of late medieval Scotland and northern England, Dr Alexander (Sandy) Grant. Its contributors engage with the profound shift in thinking about this society in the light of his scholarship, and the development of the "New Orthodoxy", both attending to the legacy of this discourse, and offering new research with which to challenge or amend our understanding of late medieval Scotland and northern England.
Dr Grant's famously wide and diverse historical interests are here reflected through three main foci: kingship, lordship and identity. The volume includes significant reassessments of the reputations of two kings, Alexander I of Scotland and Henry V of England; an examination of Richard III's relationship to the lordship of Pontefract; and a study of the development of royal pardon in late medieval Scotland. Further chapters consider the social influence and legal and tenurial rights vested in aristocratic lineages, regional gentry communities, and the leaders of burghal corporations. Finally, the relationship between saints cults, piety and regnal and regional identity in medieval Scotland is scrutinised in chapters on St Margaret and St Ninian.
Katie Stevenson
Chivalry and the Medieval Past
Regular price
$120.00
Save $-120.00
An examination of the ways in which the fluid concept of "chivalry" has been used and appropriated after the Middle Ages.
One of the most difficult and complex ethical and cultural codes to define, chivalry has proved a flexible, ever-changing phenomenon, constantly adapted in the hands of medieval knights, Renaissance princes, early modern antiquarians, Enlightenment scholars, modern civic authorities, authors, historians and re-enactors. This book explores the rich variations in how the Middle Ages were conceptualised and historicised to illuminate the plurality of uses of the past. Using chivalry as a lens through which to examine concepts and uses of the medieval, it provides a critical assessment of the ways in which medieval chivalry became a shorthand to express contemporary ideals, powerfully demonstrating the ways in which history could be appropriated. The chapters combine attention to documentary evidence with what material culture can tell us, in particular using the built environment and the landscape as sources to understand how the medieval past was renegotiated. With contributions spanning diverse geographic regions and periods, it redraws current chronological boundaries by considering medievalism from the late Middle Ages to the present.
Katie Stevenson is Senior Lecturer in Late Mediaeval History and Director of the Institute of Scottish Historical Research at the University of St Andrews; Barbara Gribling is a Junior Research Fellow in the Department of History at Durham University.
Contributors: David W. Allan, Stefan Goebel, Barbara Gribling, Steven C. Hughes, Peter N. Lindfield, Antti Matikkala, Rosemary Mitchell, Paul Pickering, Katie Stevenson
George Kennaway
John Gunn: Musician Scholar in Enlightenment Britain
Regular price
$120.00
Save $-120.00
Examines the life and work of Scottish cellist and antiquarian John Gunn (1766-1824) through newly discovered sources.
The Scottish cellist and antiquarian John Gunn (1766-1824) is unique among British writers on music in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Learned and practical, at home in classical and modern languages, knowledgeable in a wide range of musical topics and with even wider-ranging interests, and committed to the ideal of progress through rational thought, he typified the Enlightenment. His published output was large and diverse: a cello treatise in two quite different editions; two books on the flute and one on the piano; a treatise on figured bass; a history of the harp in the Highlands; and a translation of a French work of music theory. The list of his unrealised publications is even longer, including a proof of the oriental origins of the Scots. He married Anne Young, a well-known Edinburgh piano teacher, and his letters cast new light on the circumstances and date of her death. Taking account of Gunn's diverse experiences as a musician-scholar in Cambridge, London and Edinburgh, studying his sundry occupations, and exploring his social connections through a recently unearthed cache of his letters, this study moves away from 'treatise archaeology' and offers a broader view than is usually possible with such figures. The book will be of interest to those studying historical performance practice, music education in Enlightenment Britain, and the dissemination of Enlightenment thought.
Margaret Bent
The Dorset Rotulus
Regular price
$170.00
Save $-170.00
The exciting discovery of new music from the Middle Ages sheds new light on knowledge of the medieval motet.
From its origins in the thirteenth century, the Latin-texted motet in England and France became the most significant and diverse polyphonic genre of the fourteenth, a body of music important both for its texts and its variety of musical structures. However, although the motet in England plays a vital role in the music-historical narrative of the first decades of the 1300s, it has too often been overlooked in modern scholarship, due largely to its preservation in numerous but almost entirely fragmentary sources. In 2017, substantial new fragments of medieval polyphony came to light. They originated at the Benedictine monastery of Abbotsbury, a major institution located high above Chesil Beach on Dorset's Jurassic Coast. The two leaves once headed an imposing musical scroll, and preserve significant portions of four large-scale Latin-texted motets from early fourteenth-century England. Discovery of this source brings to the fore a massive seven-section motet on St Margaret, hitherto known only through highly fragmentary snippets of two of its four voices, as well as a unicum with extraordinary features addressed to the Virgin Mary and St Nicholas. When coupled with the remaining motets, one on the Ascension and the other on the Virgin Mary, the Dorset motets expand our understanding of how the English developed their own approaches to the genre, forging styles and techniques quite independently of the continental norms against which earlier scholarship has judged (and sometimes demeaned) them. This book introduces the manuscript and its provenance in Abbotsbury, relates it to other scrolls of late medieval music, contextualizes its motets within the larger corpus of contemporary Latin-texted motets, and analyses and reconstructs each of the motets, providing complete performable transcriptions of three of these compositions as well as three of its large-scale comparands. Spurred by the Dorset discovery, this monograph, the first in thirty-five years devoted to the medieval motet in England, offers a new evaluation of the richness of the English repertory in its own terms.
Prof Rosalind Brown-Grant
A Chivalric Life
Regular price
$170.00
Save $-170.00
First English translation of the chivalric biography of the foremost knight of the late Middle Ages.
Jacques de Lalaing (c.1421-53) was undoubtedly the most famous knight at the court of the Burgundian duke, Philip the Good, one who was celebrated in his own lifetime for the dazzling feats of arms that he performed in jousts across Europe during the 1440s. Serving the duke first as a councillor and ambassador to launch a new crusade and then as a fearless military leader on a campaign to put down a revolt by the town of Ghent, Lalaing tragically met his death at the siege of Poeke at a relatively young age. The chivalric biography of Lalaing, written in the early 1470s, offers an entertaining and informative account of the life of a late medieval knight. Drawing on a variety of sources, it was designed not only to commemorate Jacques's deeds for posterity but also to encourage other young noblemen to imitate his shining example, with lavishly illuminated copies being made for members of his own family and other noble readers. This first English translation of the text, accompanied by an introduction and extensive notes based on new research into both archival and literary sources, aims to offer the reader an in-depth portrayal of Lalaing in the context of the chivalric, dynastic and political culture of his day.
Vasilis Kallis
Demystifying Scriabin
Regular price
$170.00
Save $-170.00
An innovative contribution to Scriabin studies, covering aspects of Scriabin's life, personality, beliefs, training, creative output, and interaction with contemporary Russian culture.
This book is an innovative contribution to Alexander Scriabin (1872-1915) studies, covering aspects of Scriabin's life, personality, beliefs, training, creative output, as well as his interaction with contemporary Russian culture. It offers new and original research from leading and upcoming Russian music scholars. Key Scriabin topics such as mysticism, philosophy, music theory, contemporary aesthetics, and composition processes are covered. Musical coverage spans the composer's early, middle and late period. All main repertoire is being discussed: the piano miniatures and sonatas as well as the symphonies. In more detail, chapters consider: Scriabin's part in early twentieth-century Russia's cultural climate; how Scriabin moved from early pastiche to a style much more original; the influence of music theory on Scriabin's idiosyncratic style; the changing contexts of Scriabin performances; new aspects of reception studies. Further chapters offer: a critical understanding of how Scriabin's writings sit within the traditions of Mysticism as well as French and Russian Symbolism; a new investigation into his creative compositional process; miniaturism and its wider context; a new reading of the composer's mysticism and synaesthesia. Analytical chapters reach out of the score to offer an interpretative framework; accepting new approaches from disability studies; investigating the complex interaction of rhythm and metre and modal interactions, the latent diatonic 'tonal function' of Scriabin's late works, as well as self-regulating structures in the composer's music.
Nigel Simeone
Ralph Vaughan Williams and Adrian Boult
Regular price
$50.00
Save $-50.00
The first detailed study of the working relationship and productive friendship between Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958) and Adrian Boult (1889-1983).
From 1918 onwards, Boult became one of Vaughan Williams's most important interpreters, giving the world premieres of the Pastoral, Fourth and Sixth Symphonies, performing almost all his major works (not only at home but with some of the world's greatest orchestras), and working in close collaboration with the composer on major projects including the first complete recording of Vaughan Williams's symphonies. Boult continued to be the most devoted advocate of Vaughan Williams's music to the end of his long career.
As this book shows, Boult's scores include numerous annotations derived from conversations and correspondence with Vaughan Williams and these provide important evidence of the composer's wishes including adjustments to orchestration, comments on interpretation, dynamics, phrasing and revisions to Vaughan Williams's notoriously unreliable metronome marks. The evidence of these scores is considered alongside the extensive correspondence between Vaughan Williams and Boult, Boult's private diaries and other relevant documents including contemporary press reports. The book includes three substantial supplements: a detailed description of Boult's marked scores, a comprehensive list of Boult's Vaughan Williams performances and a discography including surviving recordings of unpublished broadcasts. It will be indispensable reading for scholars and students of Vaughan Williams and historical conducting, Vaughan Williams enthusiasts and those interested in the history of recorded music.
Keith Neilson
The Foreign Office's War, 1939-41
Regular price
$170.00
Save $-170.00
Provides a forceful corrective to the idea that Britain 'stood alone' until the invasion of the Soviet Union and the attack on Pearl Harbor brought about 'the Grand Alliance'.
Based on extensive archival research, the book demonstrates that 1939 to 1941 was a period of intensive diplomatic activity by the British Foreign Office designed to ensure that Britain's potential enemies, especially Soviet Russia, Italy and Japan, remained neutral and that its most desirable potential ally, the United States, remained as friendly as possible until it could be persuaded to join in the conflict. The book highlights the importance of diplomacy towards neutrals for British policy, considers the complexities of the situation, tying together issues such as blockade and the disposition of British forces in various theatres, explores decision making within the British government, examining how the diplomatic considerations of the Foreign Office played into wider debates amongst ministers and senior civil servants, and discusses the various courses towards neutrals, including alternatives, advocated within the Foreign Office. Overall, the book provides a rich, highly nuanced view of British policy in this crucial period.
Harry Potter
Alexander Paterson: Prison Reformer
Regular price
$65.00
Save $-65.00
The first biography of the prison reformer Alexander Paterson (1884-1947).
Sir Alexander Paterson (1884-1947) is best remembered for his role as Commissioner of Prisons and as the individual responsible for some of the greatest British innovations in the field of penal practice. All major prison reforms of his day can be associated with his name. One of the key characteristics of Paterson's reform drive was that he brought a much more 'scientific' approach to penology, encouraging psychiatrists and psychologists to work in prison. He was the prime mover behind the rapid expansion and transformation of the Borstal System and the introduction of open prisons, gaining Britain an international reputation for being at the forefront of penal reform. Harry Potter's account is the first biography of Alexander Paterson and it is based on unpublished material from government and family archives. Besides his achievements as prison reformer, Paterson's life encapsulated many trends in English society in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: from the influence of Liberalism and Unitarianism in the industrial heartland of his youth, the Idealist philosophy of Thomas Hill Green at Oxford, to the impact of school and university 'missions' in the dark reaches of London. At Oxford he became friends with Clement Atlee. He also knew the radical Winston Churchill and it was Churchill who in 1910 first appointed him to a leading role in the aftercare of prisoners. Paterson's most formative years were undoubtedly spent living in a slum dwelling in South London when he devoted his time and energy to the Oxford and Bermondsey Medical Mission, one of the university settlements so common at the time - Attlee famously spent years in Hailesbury boys' club and Toynbee Hall in the East End. Paterson went on to publish a best-selling book - Across the Bridges - on his experiences in the South London slums. After a distinguished service in the Great War, Paterson devoted the rest of his life to the prison service at home and to penal reform abroad. Given current debates about prison reform and the general challenges the penal system is facing, revisiting Paterson's life and work will be a timely endeavour. Harry Potter - criminal barrister, historian and former prison chaplain - is ideally suited to write this biography.
David S. Bachrach
The Foundations of Royal Power in Early Medieval Germany
Regular price
$170.00
Save $-170.00
Provocative interrogation of how the Ottonian kingdom grew and flourished, focussing on the resources required.
The Ottonians were the most powerful monarchs in Europe during the tenth and early eleventh century, exercising hegemony in West Francia, Burgundy, and much of Italy in addition to ruling the German realm. Despite their enormous political and military success, however, the foundations of Ottonian royal power remain highly contested and largely misunderstood, with previous scholarship tending to have considered it as depending upon the ability of the king to shape and harness the power of the nobles.
This study challenges the dominant historiographical paradigm, rebutting the notion of putative power-sharing between the king and the nobility, which simply did not exist as a legal class in the Ottonian century. Rather, it argues that the foundations of royal power under the Ottonians comprised not only their own enormous wealth, but also their unique authority and ability, through the royal bannum, the authority inherent in the office of the king, to make use of the economic resources and labour of the broad free population of the realm, as well as from the Church. In so doing, the Ottonians drew upon and further developed the administrative, institutional, and ideological inheritance of their Carolingian predecessors, in the process creating the dominant polity in tenth-century Europe.
Edited by Richard S. Grayson
First World War Diary of Noël Drury, 6th Royal Dublin Fusiliers
Regular price
$115.00
Save $-115.00
The diary of an officer in the 6th Royal Dublin Fusiliers covering 1914-19 and four theatres of war.
Noël Drury (1884-1975) was from a middle-class Dublin Protestant family and served most of the First World War as an officer in the 6th Royal Dublin Fusiliers in the 10th (Irish) Division. The division was the first of Ireland's wartime volunteer formations to be posted overseas, arriving at Gallipoli in August 1915 in the Suvla Bay landings. Drury and his battalion experienced several key phases of the Gallipoli campaign before being redeployed to Salonika in October 1915. Drury was away from his battalion for a year in 1916-17 suffering from malaria, but rejoined in Palestine towards the end of 1917. From there his battalion was sent to the Western Front in the summer of 1918 to take part in the Hundred Days Offensive. Drury's diaries describe training, daily life, contrasting theatres of the war, and show what it meant to be an Irish officer in the British army.
John C. Appleby
Fur, Fashion and Transatlantic Trade during the Seventeenth Century
Regular price
$130.00
Save $-130.00
Offers insight, using the example of the Chesapeake Bay fur trade, into how the different elements of transatlantic trade in the seventeenth century fitted together.
This book explores the development of the fur trade in Chesapeake Bay during the seventeenth century, and the wide-ranging links that were formed in a new and extensive transatlantic chain of supply and consumption. It considers changing fashion in England, the growing demand for fur, at a time when the Russian fur trade was in decline, examines native North Americans and their trading and other exchanges with colonists, and explores the nature of colonial society, including the commercial ambitions of a varied range of investors. As such, it outlines the intense rivalry which existed between different colonies and colonial interests. Although the book argues that fur never supplanted tobacco as the region's principal export, noting that the trade declined as new, more profitable sources of supply were opened up, nevertheless the case of the Chesapeake fur trade provides an excellent example of how different elements in a new transatlantic enterprise fitted together and had a profound impact on each other.
Timothy Bowman
The Military Papers of Field Marshal Sir Claude Auchinleck, Volume 1: 1940-42
Regular price
$115.00
Save $-115.00
Key documents relating to Auchinleck's career up to the First Battle of El Alamein in July 1942, including his time as Commander-in-Chief of the Indian Army and of the Middle East Theatre.
The outbreak of war in 1939 saw the then Lieutenant General Claude Auchinleck recalled to England to take command of the newly formed 4 Corps. Between April and June 1940 he commanded British troops in the ill-fated Norway campaign. He then returned to the UK to take command of 5 Corps in Southern Command during the invasion threat of 1940. In January 1941 Auchinleck returned to India and started some much needed reforms of what was still, very much, a 'colonial army' before becoming C in C Middle East in June 1941. In the Middle East, Auchinleck faced many challenges in commanding a multi-national force, largely composed of 'citizen soldiers' and his problems were complicated by the demands of Winston Churchill, an anxious Prime Minister who desperately wanted to show his allies and the British public a major victory. Auchinleck is open to the charges that he did not fully understand armoured warfare and that he appointed a number of the wrong men to key posts. However, he did manage to fight Axis forces to a standstill at the First Battle of El Alamein in July 1942 before being replaced by the team of Field Marshal Sir Harold Alexander and General Bernard Montgomery. This volume is based on the Auchinleck papers held in the John Rylands Library at the University of Manchester and aims to bring these important records to a much wider audience.
Emma Cunliffe
Safeguarding Cultural Property and the 1954 Hague Convention
Regular price
$130.00
Save $-130.00
The role of the Hague Convention in today's world revisited.
Significant attention today focusses on heritage destruction, but the key international laws prohibiting it - the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict and its First and Second Protocols (1954/1999) - lay out two core strands to limit the damage: the measures of respect for armed forces, and the safeguarding measures states parties should put in place in peacetime. This volume incorporates wide-ranging international perspectives from those in the academy, together with practitioner insights from the armed forces and heritage professionals, to explore the safeguarding regime. Its contributors consider such questions as whether state parties have truly taken "all possible steps", as the Convention tasks them; what we can learn from past practice, and how the Convention is implemented today; the implications of new trends in heritage law and management - such as the rise of the World Heritage Convention, and in the increasing focus on safe havens rather than refuges; whether new methods of heritage management such as Risk Assessment theory can be applied; and, in a Convention specifically focussed on state parties, what of their opponents, armed non-state actors. Topics range from leadership and the role of the State Party Representative, to the responsibilities of armed non-state groups in safeguarding, to explorations of past and current practice in different countries. Using a mix of case studies and theoretical explorations of new and existing methodologies, the contributions cover a broad timespan from World War II to today, with examples from Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. Overall, the volume's purpose is to promote wider understanding of the practical effectiveness of the Convention in the contemporary world, by investigating the perceived opportunities and constraints the Convention offers today to protect cultural property in armed conflict, and firmly establishing that such protection must begin in peace.
CONTRIBUTORS: Maamoun Abdulkarim, Laura Albisetti, Pascal Bongard, Brittni Bradford, Rino Büchel, Emma Cunliffe, Philip Deans, Joanne Dingwall McCafferty, Paul Fox, Kristin Hausler, Stavros-Evdokimos Pantazopoulos, Nikolaus Paumgartner, Nigel Pollard, Lee Rotherham, Valentina Sabucco, Peter Stone, Raphael Zingg.
Benjamin W. D. Redding
The English and French Navies, 1500-1650
Regular price
$120.00
Save $-120.00
Challenges the received wisdom about the relative weakness of French naval power when compared with that of England.
This book traces the advances and deterioration of the early modern English and French sea forces and relates these changes to concurrent developments within the respective states. Based on extensive original research in correspondence and memoirs, official reports and accounts, receipts of the exchequer and inventories in both France, where the sources are disparate and dispersed, and England, the book explores the rise of both kingdoms' naval resources from the early sixteenth to the mid seventeenth centuries. As a comparative study, it shows that, in sharing the Channel and with both countries increasing their involvement in maritime affairs, English and French naval expansion was intertwined. Directly and indirectly, the two kingdoms influenced their neighbours' sea programmes. The book first examines the administrative transformations of both navies, then goes on to discuss fiscal and technological change, and finally assesses the material expansion of the respective fleets. In so doing it demonstrates the close relationship between naval power and state strength in early modern Europe. One important argument challenges the received wisdom about the relative weakness of French naval power when compared with that of England.
Christopher Fifield
Letters and Diaries of Kathleen Ferrier
Regular price
$49.95
Save $-49.95
Until now, Kathleen Ferrier has been a glorious voice, but through the pages of these fascinating letters and diaries, never previously published, we get to the real person.
Fifty years ago, Kathleen Ferrier, the greatest lyric contralto Britain has ever produced, lost her courageous battle with breast cancer. Her name endures to this day, for she struck a chord with a wide-ranging public - in concerts, on records and on the radio - despite a career which lasted barely ten years. Within a decade this former telephone exchange operator was singing on stage at Covent Garden or before royalty at private parties. She was surely fun to know: this collection of 300+ letters and twelve years of her personal diaries give a sunny picture of her life in the muted post-war years.
Her indefinable personality was a mix of extreme modesty and self-determined ambition, and a mischievously blunt sense of earthy Lancastrian humour. Until now, Kathleen Ferrier has been a glorious voice, but through the pages of these fascinating letters and diaries, never previously published, we getto the real person.
CHRISTOPHER FIFIELD is foremost a conductor, but also a writer on music history (Grove, DNB, Viking Opera Guide, Oxford Companion to Music), and the author of two biographies, of Max Bruch (recently reissued by the Boydell Press) and Hans Richter.
David Farr
John Lambert, Parliamentary Soldier and Cromwellian Major-General, 1619-1684
Regular price
$130.00
Save $-130.00
A biography of one of the most prominent soldiers in the New Model Army, who made Cromwell Lord Protector but stopped him becoming king.
John Lambert's life and career have long deserved this revealing study. The man who made Cromwell Lord Protector in 1653 also stopped him becoming king in 1657; and Lambert was the originator of the Instrument of Government, on which Cromwell's Protectorate was based. Committed to his deeply held, radical beliefs, Lambert first rose to prominence as a dashing cavalry commander in the civil wars of 1642 - 51, and he was a prominent upholder of the power ofthe New Model Army, particularly in his creation of the Major Generals, who ruled England in 1655. Lambert's refusal to countenance Cromwell as king saw his temporary fall from power, but he emerged after the Protector's death asa possible successor. His radical ideas seemed to threaten even 'his own side', and led to his imprisonment in the Tower in 1660, but he escaped and staged a last desperate republican stand against the return of Charles II. Although Lambert was subsequently convicted of treason, Charles did not have him executed - sure recognition that his character, private actions and beliefs were those of a man who was much more than a military revolutionary. DAVID FARR is head of history at Norwich School.
Ralph Moffat
Medieval Arms and Armour: a Sourcebook. Volume I
Regular price
$130.00
Save $-130.00
Authoritative reference guide, using the documents in which arms and armour first appeared to explain and define them.
"A substantial and impressive piece of scholarship, one that will serve scholars and enthusiasts of medieval arms and armour very well indeed". Dr Robert W. Jones, Franklin and Marshall College
Medieval arms and armour are intrinsically fascinating. From the smoke and noise of the armourer's forge to the bloody violence of the battlefield or the silken panoply of the tournament, weapons and armour - and those who made and bore them - are woven into the fabric of medieval society. This sourcebook will aid anyone who seeks to develop a deeper understanding by introducing and presenting the primary sources in which these artefacts are first mentioned. Over a hundred original documents are transcribed and translated, including wills and inventories, craft statutes, chronicle accounts, and challenges to single combat. The book also includes an extensive glossary, lavishly illustrated with fifty-two images of extant armour and weapons from the period, and contemporary artistic depictions from illuminated manuscripts and other sources. This book will therefore be of interest to a wide audience, from the living history practitioner, crafter, and martial artist, to students of literature, military history, art, and material culture.