Ellen Rosand provides an overview of Strozzi in the fifty years since her groundbreaking article, “Barbara Strozzi, virtuossisima cantatrice: The Composer’s Voice” was published in the Journal of the American Musicological Society in 1976. In it she explores the many performances and recordings of Strozzi’s music, discoveries about Strozzi’s life, discussion of her music, the iconography associated with the composer (in particular the portrait by Bernardo Strozzi that Ellen and David Rosand identified), as well as her image in popular literature, on radio and in film, all of which have given us not only a much richer and fuller sense of who she was, but a greater appreciation of her the quality of her music.

In the 1880s, there was a growing interest in duplicating the success of the Suez Canal in Central America. As the French under Ferdinand de Lesseps’ leadership championed the Panama Canal, the United States had its eyes set on constructing a canal through Nicaragua that beckoned as the answer to the U.S. maritime and naval ambitions. Espousing ideals of liberal nation-making, Nicaragua sought to annex the Reserve to the Republic in 1894 and fulfill its vision of unbroken sovereignty from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Yet the crisis was also an internal one within the Mosquito Kingdom, pitting reserve “Indians” against non-Reserve Miskitus and reviving again the question of racial legitimacy of the Mosquito Reserve government. This chapter delves into this thorny crisis – also known as the “incorporation” of the Mosquito Reserve – to illuminate the violence that lay behind the dream of the interoceanic Nicaragua Canal and to show the centrality of the canal to geopolitical identity – both of the Republic of Nicaragua and post-Civil War United States. In the end, this chapter argues, the pursuit of the Nicaragua Canal was predicated on the elimination of the Mosquito autonomous territory.

As social and economic actors, women in early modern Italian city states enjoyed clear legal rights. Their actions, however, needed to be constantly negotiated with their kinship ties, since their wealth was basically transmitted from dowries and inheritance, both mechanisms implying some degree of mediation and compromise, as well as opportunities and limitations. Venetian laws and customs tended to protect and defend women’s property rights, and courts embraced the general principle of considering women and their husbands as separate financial entities even when they were married, thus permitting women to take advantage of the many opportunities to invest their wealth. Barbara Strozzi offers a precious case study: her economic independence, inherited but also hard-won and defended, was built on all the financial opportunities the still rich Venetian economy offered.

This concluding chapter looks at the ramifications of the Gulf’s position in the global food system. It explores the implications of regional inequality and potential trajectories in the domestic and international politics of food.

This chapter explores various approaches to syllable division, the factors influencing syllabification, and the interaction of these principles with phonotactic constraints within a TSM language. Three prominent approaches to syllable constituency are discussed: Initial-Final, Onset-Rime, and Body-Coda. The Sonority Sequencing Principle (SSP) and Moraic Theory are identified as key factors governing syllabification in TSM. Notably, segment-mora mappings effectively account for checked syllables in TSM. Compensatory lengthening and closed syllable shortening phenomena provide additional evidence that voiceless stop codas in checked syllables are not extrasyllabic.

Significantly, these diverse approaches to syllable division are not mutually exclusive. A speaker’s linguistic intuition likely encompasses all these divisions, allowing them to leverage relevant phonotactic constraints at various levels, including Rime, Nucleus, Coda, Onset, Body, and even the entire syllable. When the domain is extended to encompass the entire syllable, the [nasal] feature is prohibited from spreading across the boundaries of Body and Coda. Consequently, nasality in this language manifests as a crisp edge phenomenon.

The conclusion summaries the key arguments and ideas presented in this book. It also offers some brief thoughts on the overlap between Muslims’ and non-Muslims’ ideas about history-writing as well as on the nature of institutions in the early Islamic world.

This essay explores the use and eventual abandonment of two pitch aggregates – canto per bemolle (signature of a single flat) and canto per bequadro (void signature) – in Barbara Strozzi’s music. Rooted in the two cantus of Guidonian pedagogy, Strozzi’s practice distinguished tonalities according to their bemolle or bequadro signatures, which signaled distinct pitch collections, cadence points, and text affects that she associated with tonal flatness or sharpness. Between the 1640s and 1660s, Strozzi expanded her notated key signatures while maintaining the distinction between flatness and sharpness, but her tonal style never settled into the norms of functional tonality, such as clear tonic/dominant and major/minor oppositions. We must therefore understand Strozzi’s tonal practice as complete and coherent on its own terms, and not as a transition between Renaissance modes and eighteenth-century keys. In doing so, we perceive her flair for vivid, dramatic, and even bizarre text-expressive effects according to the tonal system of her era.

In 1967 Pablo Neruda wrote his only play, Fulgor y muerte de Joaquín Murieta, which recreated the popular legend of the Chilean emigrant in “gold rush” California, who ended up becoming a bandit, pursued, and killed by the rangers. With the data collected during his trip to the United States, Neruda wrote his piece with the collaboration of the director Pedro Orthous, a member of the Chilean National Theater and one of the best representatives of political theater in Latin America. Both in the staging and in the text, the influence of Bertolt Brecht, whose work began to be known throughout the world, is discernible, but also that of the political theater written in Spain before and during the Civil War, especially of Fermín Galán, the drama of another communist poet friend of Neruda, Rafael Alberti.

The Gulf is changing the geography of production and consumption. Its import demand is leading to control over production in agricultural countries in Asia and Africa. Its weight in export markets gives it influence over trade terms and standards of production. This is concomitant with the development of transport infrastructure and the growth of the Gulf’s logistical sector. A facet of this change is a fundamental reorganisation of regional food trade that has allowed countries such as the UAE and Saudi Arabia to achieve some of the largest values of food exports in the Arab region. Another trend is the increasing control that Gulf conglomerates have over food production in regional countries such as Egypt and Iran.

This essay focuses on Pablo Neruda’s politics as seen in his social and historical poetry, much of it having been published after the end of World War II. It concentrates on two collections: Canto general (1950) and España en el corazón (1937), in which one sees the development of a more pronounced political and historicist agenda. The latter text focuses on Spain and specifically on his witnessing of the Spanish Civil War, a conflict that forced him to take sides with the republicanos and the Marxist cause. Later, after the horrors of World War II, he published Canto general, where the Marxist and communist cause becomes fundamental to his poetry, whether it treats the “liberators” of Latin America throughout the centuries, the segregationist United States, or the Soviet Union. In sum, Neruda progressed in the mid-twentieth century into a profoundly committed political poet.

Food acts as a proxy for different political agendas in the Gulf states. For governments, it is a means to reproduce nationalism and identity; it is a vehicle for citizen upgrading. Questions of environmental sustainability and consumption pervade food and agriculture, and in the Gulf, this is managed through a techno-political discourse. The development of indoor farms that utilise technology presents farming as a means to produce food that is free of its social and ecological dimensions. Lastly, the chapter illustrates the way in which boycotts provide Gulf societies with a means of expression and agency.