Barbara Strozzi dedicated two of her music prints, Cantate, ariette, e duetti (Opus 2, 1651) and Sacri musicali affetti (Opus 5, 1655), to the Austrian Habsburgs, which raises questions about the nature of her relationship to the powerful imperial family. This essay places her prints into the context of the Habsburg courts and examines textual and paratextual elements of the prints to suggest reasons why she may have chosen to dedicate them to the Habsburgs. It argues that the dedications served different purposes but that both of them ultimately served as publicity for the composer herself, in that she used a connection to the Habsburgs to help shape her public image.

This chapter studies Pablo Neruda’s stay in Buenos Aires in 1933 through an urban perspective. His network is also considered, including Sara Tornú, Norah Lange, Oliverio Girondo, and Federico García Lorca. In a metropolis as cosmopolitan as Buenos Aires was at the beginning of the twentieth century, foreigners could quickly feel at home thanks to the existence of a solid network of sociability that facilitated the integration of the newcomers. For Neruda, who came with the ease that an official position allowed him, it was the possibility of quickly accessing already existing spaces both of expression and recognition, and of sociability (meetings at cafes, private social gatherings, homages). An analysis of Neruda’s urban footprint and his network reveals what a metropolis like Buenos Aires could bring to the intellectuals, especially to Neruda, who was starting then his international career. This urban perspective is thus intended to be a new methodological approach to the study of Pablo Neruda’s works.

Early modern Venice and its lagoon had a complex religious landscape, with two bishops, nearly eighty parishes, fifty nunneries, thirty-six male monasteries, more than 300 confraternities, and four ospedali grandi, all performing religious services as often as eight times a day or just once a year. Venetians and visitors could attend masses, vespers, devotional services, displays of relics, and processions, following published calendars, often indicating when musical performances could be expected. Venetian printers issued a constant stream of religious and devotional texts and images, facilitating private worship in the home, and those with the means could also purchase religious paintings. While Roman Catholics naturally dominated the city, there were also members of other religions, including Greek Orthodox, Armenians, and Jews, and even some clandestine Protestants.

This chapter situates Neruda’s early books (Crepusculario and Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada) in contexts that emphasize the legacy of pleasure and self-identification of his work. It attempts to “clear” some of the sins of Neruda by focusing on his poetry as sexually liberating for all parts involved, as a deliberate attempt at going back to a poetics of the flesh. Both Crepusculario and Veinte poemas are adolescent texts that deserve both respect and empathy as testimonies of the survival instinct that impels the young to do great and crazy things, sometimes simultaneously. We must regard Neruda as what he was when he wrote these powerful verses: a teen who self-consciously alternates between a state of revengeful, self-centered alpha-machito and the depths of sadness, solitude, and despair. Each poem, sometimes even each line, encapsulates that most Nerudian and adolescent of tensions: the feeling of uncontrollable power and a feeling of a sadness so deep that it does not even recognize itself except by reading itself from afar.

How is the Gulf understood in the global political economy, and how can we avoid the way in which this region is sometimes subject to exceptional treatment? This book lays out a framework that shows the importance of food to the Gulf states and how we can theorise this significance. This includes works on food regimes, resources, and technopolitics.

A certain mystique has evolved surrounding Barbara Strozzi and her compositions. The popularity of her work beyond the field of musicology and music history classrooms is evidenced by the many performances that occur worldwide, nearly every week. (Anyone who subscribes to Google Alerts can receive notifications of upcoming performances.) Her provocative music and persona have also inspired novelists: Russell Hoban featured her in his My Tango with Barbara Strozzi (2007) and she is also the protagonist of a new verse novel for young adults, The Star and the Siren, by Colby Cesar Smith.

This chapter examines the tone sandhi domains for pronouns, classifiers, and adverbs in TSM. Traditional X-bar theory projects pronouns under the noun phrase (NP). In this framework, a single pronoun forms a non-branching NP, which does not constitute a phonological phrase. Conversely, [Adj pronoun] constructions and coordinated pronouns form branching NPs, each establishing a phonological phrase. This approach, however, encounters a theoretical dilemma: a non-branching NP formed from a full noun constitutes a phonological phrase, while one formed from a pronoun does not.

The functional projection determiner phrase (DP) more accurately characterizes the phonological phrasing of pronouns: only a branching DP forms a phonological phrase, whereas an NP constitutes a phonological phrase regardless of branching status. In the analysis of classifiers, contemporary theories posit the classifier as the head of a classifier phrase (ClP), with the following noun as its complement, meaning [Num Cl] does not form an independent XP. This contrasts with the traditional view, which treats [Num Cl] as a modifier of the noun. In either case, [Num Cl] is not marked by a phonological phrase boundary. In contexts of nominal absence or topicalization, [Num Cl] may occupy the final position of the phonological phrase or undergo restructuring as a verbal adjunct if subject to semantic attenuation.

Barbara Strozzi’s musically striking lament on the execution of French courtier and favorite of Louis XIII, Henri Cinq-Mars (1620–1642), Il lamento “(Sul Rodano severo”) (1651 & 1654) paints a musically and textually vivid picture of the young marquis’s demise and his monarch’s remorse. The narrative circulated in muted form in the official French press (Gazette de France) as well as in memoires and letters and in anecdotes and hearsay. Unofficial accounts of the conspiracy and its unraveling turned the two men executed into martyrs. This essay assembles various accounts in circulation and suggests connections between the erudite and literary libertines of France and those of Venice in order to provide context for this lament and the ways in which the anonymous poet (and perhaps Strozzi) might have understood the relationship between Louis XIII and the young and beautiful Cinq-Mars through the different circulations of news between France and Venice.

In 1934, Pablo Neruda arrived in Barcelona as a Chilean diplomat, and in February 1935, he became the Chilean consul in Madrid. Living in Spain during the Second Republic and the Spanish Civil War marked a turning point in Neruda’s poetry. The Spanish Civil War provoked a historical awakening in Neruda’s poetics – as exemplified in España en el corazón – that paved the way to his ambitious poetic project of Canto general, as he aimed to historicize and politicize his portrayal of Latin American ruins. This essay on how the Spanish Civil War marks Neruda’s poetics examines how the use of the apostrophe throughout España en el corazón reveals the dialogic nature of his poetic project, which intends both to speak to a Republican Spain, with its dead soldiers and poets, and to defy the fascist leaders of the war.

This chapter analyzes Pablo Neruda’s engagement with the English-speaking world. Neruda’s presence made an indelible mark on the cultural spheres in the United States, United Kingdom, and other countries where English is used, notably through his English translations, international travels, and engagement with Anglophone literature. His Nobel Prize in 1971 solidified his status globally, yet his reception in the United States and United Kingdom was affected by Cold War politics. Neruda’s vast literary network, knowledge of Anglophone poetry, and cultural exchanges shaped his impact in the United States and United Kingdom, in particular. Exploring these aspects, supported by the poet’s own memoirs, literary studies, translations, and lasting influence in popular culture, highlights his legacy in the English-speaking realm. Neruda’s intercultural interactions therein emphasize the complex political atmosphere during many major events of the twentieth century in which Neruda played a crucial role and became well-known as both Chile’s greatest poet and a hero for the political Left.

Chapter Six delves into the intricate dynamics of the “second transformation” of the Safavid Empire, which was characterized by the deliberate erosion of the authority of the Qizilbash elite within the Safavid state apparatus. The chapter outlines how the gradual sidelining of Qizilbash notables from prominent positions in the Safavid political landscape had far-reaching consequences, not only for the Safavid Empire itself but also for its relationship with the Ottoman Qizilbash. By the 1650s, Safavid attempts to exert influence within Ottoman territories had significantly waned. Concurrently, Qizilbash subjects residing within the Ottoman Empire transitioned from being active participants in interimperial politics to becoming an increasingly isolated and marginalized community. This transformation in both Safavid Iran and the Ottoman Empire carried profound implications for the broader geopolitical landscape of the region, reshaping power dynamics and contributing to a more stable regional order for more than a century.

The so-called dispersed Nerudiana, composed of interviews, speeches, prologues, notes, and letters, provides a necessary horizon to rescue, organize, and disseminate. Nerudian letters, in particular, are a privileged source that has not been cataloged or collected in a single corpus. This surprising daily life of a famous writer, a sort of parallel itinerary, lies vast and dispersed in libraries, private archives, and documentary repositories awaiting a systematic effort that allows the long-awaited “deployment of the self-portrait” (à la Boersner), the ultimate goal of historical-literary research. Without his correspondence, in short, his self-portrait is impoverished, leaving room for criticism, speculation, and political dithyramb.

Chapter 5 compares Wilhelmine Germany with Edwardian England and arrives at an unconventional conclusion about their relative stability. There is a scholarly tradition of viewing the Second Reich, particularly after the fall of Bismarck and the political ascension of King Wilhelm II, as so ridden with internal contradictions that it was in near-permanent crisis. More recently, scholars have argued that Germany was in fact democratizing, suggesting again that this major historical case of competitive authoritarianism was volatile. I find instead that the balance of evidence indicates that Imperial Germany is a good case of institutionalized competitive authoritarianism, and that it was Edwardian England rather than Wilhelmine Germany where the most serious threat of regime change existed. I contest two widely held misconceptions: (1) that the UK had transitioned to democracy significantly before the outbreak of WWI and (2) that the landed elite acquiesced in this transition. I argue instead that the UK was not only a prototypical competitive oligarchy before WWI but also that it was in a constitutional crisis and close to civil war.

This chapter explores tone sandhi and tonal mutations in Taiwanese Southern Min (TSM). Each base tone corresponds to a specific sandhi tone, resulting from smooth or checked tone chain shifts that modify either register or pitch, but not both simultaneously. Despite some studies suggesting low productivity, real-word experiments and corpus analysis show high rates of tonal alternations, indicating that productivity is the primary mechanism. Future models of TSM tone sandhi should focus on productive phonological processes, with lexical storage for exceptional cases.

In diminutive suffixation, the pre-á syllable tone changes through register or pitch spreading from the -á suffix, forming a tone cluster. In neutral tone operations, spreading may lead to a default low tone.

Syllable contraction creates tone clusters from various tonal melodies, simplifying while preserving tonal information, typically through edge-in association and mora addition.

Trisyllabic reduplication involves an emphatic -á suffix on the leftmost syllable, with its high tone preserved as a floating tone if absent. Tetrasyllabic reduplication shows patterns of semantic emphasis. Some patterns form a single tone sandhi domain, while others split into two domains. The ABCC pattern, consisting of a subject NP and predicate VP, forms separate tonal domains.

Chapter 4 turns to France between 1848 and 1870. It examines how the first competitive authoritarian regime in Europe – the Second Empire (1851–1870) – emerged from the collapse of Europe’s first modern democracy, the French Second Republic (1848–1851). Louis Napoleon tilted the playing field in otherwise competitive elections through legal chicanery and media dominance, and the Bonapartist party he created has a legitimate claim to the mantle of the world’s first hegemonic political party. This system was quite stable and was brought down by a disastrous international war and not through internal opposition to it; elections reinforced competitive authoritarianism rather than undermining the regime. Bonapartism was also the model for Europe’s second competitive authoritarian regime: Imperial Germany from 1870 to 1918. Bismarck’s observation of, and extensive personal experience in, Bonapartist France changed his hitherto arch-reactionary views on universal suffrage and led him to see the electorate as a conservative rather than liberalizing force.