Many of the more lurid predictions of the course of the French Revolution, such as the forecast of ‘torrents of blood’ made by Mably’s executors to Thomas Jefferson in 1791, or the warning about ‘fire and blood’ famously issued by Edmund Burke in his Reflections on the Revolution in France of 1790, or the scenario set out much earlier by the comte de Guibert in 1772, now look quite prescient. Other predictions of revolution, however, simply failed to materialise. Two, in particular, slowly faded from the sequence of events that began to unfold in France between 1787 and 1789. One set of predictions was centred on opposition to the royal government by the French Parlements, while the other focussed on the idea of a patriot king. Despite their disappearance, however, both are still relevant to the sequence of events that gave rise to the French Revolution partly because they were canvassed very widely at its beginning, but mainly because they also throw real light on the tangle of different and often competing assessments or evaluations of social, economic, moral and political conditions in late-eighteenth-century France. To some, like Voltaire, France was significantly backward, or not modern enough. To others, however, France was far too modern and possibly at a tipping point. One looked forward to the future, while the other looked backwards to the past. Both, however, converged on finding fault with the present.

Poststructuralist theory and postcolonial criticism represented the first major challenge to the institution of literary criticism as it had taken root in Britain and had been transported to Africa through the colonial university. This chapter discusses how the theories of literature, writing, and identity were geared toward a critique of the assumed relationship between language and identity and unsettled older forms of criticism and how this unsettling depended on the adoption of Africa as the quintessential zone of difference. A key question here is whether the notions of difference espoused by the new, poststructuralist criticism could rescue Africa from the old colonial accounts of the continent in which positioned Africa and Africanness as unmodern. Overall, the poststructuralist deconstruction of European systems of thought compelled intellectuals to rethink the location of Africa in global conceptual systems, leading to the rise of postcolonial criticism, a mode of thinking and reading whose goal was to question both the authority of English and American literary criticism and the nationalist foundations of earlier accounts of African literary criticism.

Francisco Franco's authoritarian regime continues to be the main focus of Spanish historians and foreign Hispanists. The Spanish Civil War of 1936–1939 and subsequent dictatorship, which only came to end with the Caudillo's death in 1975, is rightly seen now as an anomaly in the history of twentiethcentury Spain. The military uprising of July 1936 initiated a long parenthesis in Spanish political development that was characterized by liberal monarchy and a democratic republic, before the fratricidal conflict, and a parliamentary monarchy, following the transition to democracy and the promulgation of the 1978 Constitution.

Yet it is also true that Francoism is inseparable from the broader history of Spain and the international context in which the dictatorship emerged. The enormous and ever-growing historiography on the Spanish Civil War shows that it maintains an extraordinary presence in the imaginations of Spaniards and foreigners alike. While some prominent historians – Stanley Payne, Paul Preston, Edward Malefakis, Santos Juliá, and Hugh Thomas – have written about the war and the long dictatorship in general, others – for example, Joan María Thomàs, Enrique Moradiellos, Julius Ruiz, Fernando del Rey, Manuel Álvarez Tardío, and Mercedes Peñalba – have penned empirically based monographs on specific aspects of the sad story of the collapse of Spanish democracy in the 1930s. Unsurprisingly, there is no historiographical consensus on the subject, and these debates have resonated far beyond the ivory towers of academia as the meaning and legacy of the war remain high on the contemporary Spanish political agenda. Certainly, the recent, controversial Law of Democratic Memory has kept these difficult years firmly in the public eye.

The abundant similarities between the English and Frisian languages either side of the North Sea, especially in the Old and Middle English and Old Frisian periods, were observed and described very early in antiquarian scholarship. From nineteenth-century Stammbaum philology through to contemporary historical sociolinguistics, we are the heirs to some two centuries of scholarship that has been devoted to the goal of producing a satisfactory explanatory ‘model’ of the relationships between these branches of the Germanic language family. An important facet of this endeavour in recent decades has been recognition of the contribution that can be made by archaeological evidence, contextualising the history of populations not only within specific regions but also in terms of their connexions and interactions with neighbours and more distant groups. While maintenance of the critical methods intrinsic to the individual historical, philological and archaeological disciplines remains essential, there is no disputing that only an integrated cross-fertilisation of all such relevant specialisations can now be considered a proper basis for understanding relationships in the relatively distant past.

The scholarly study of the runic script has become sufficiently well founded now for ‘runology’ to be claimed as the name of a field of specialist knowledge. Here, too, a distinct ‘Anglo-Frisian’ branch of the runic writing system has long been argued for, even though it was a later arrival on the scene than the concept of an anglofriesische Sprache. In the early 1930s, Otto von Friesen, Professor of Swedish Language at Uppsala University, used the term anglofrisiska runor, and he declared ‘I have named them thus because they occur only in English lands besides also in Frisian areas’ [author's translation].

Old Toldy, having changed his role from gardener to gallery attendant, was already waiting at the entrance ramp. With him, Andras.

“Is everything ready, Toldy?” asked the count.

Toldy nodded.

“Fine. But we’re not going up this way, not the grand staircase. I want to show the countess the old tower.”

With these words he took Franziska's arm and, as Andras went ahead and Toldy followed, he led her to an ancient fieldstone tower, now incorporated into the newer castle building. Within it was a spiral staircase that ascended two stories. The only light came in through narrow openings, no wider than a hand, which pierced the thick stonework every five steps. At one of these, the count paused and pointed to the landscape, which was particularly beautiful from this angle. In the far distance the lake shimmered, while to its right there arose a tall, sharply profiled rock formation known as “the Bishop,” since people professed to see in it a bishop's miter and crosier.

A few steps higher, and instead of these apertures there was a low door with a pointed arch, leading to the newer part of the castle, and here Andras stood, to show them the way through the tunnel-like passage. The count bent down and reached his hand back to Franziska.

Cooking shows historically aired on American radio/TV but transformed in the 1990s into leisure entertainment. In the 1950s, cooking shows were local, cheap, live daytime fare. Aimed at housewives, they advertised new kitchen products and often incorporated ready-made ingredients. In the 1960s, cooking shows became national educational PBS-TV shows, due to Julia Child’s The French Chef, 1963–1973. Child facilitated cooking’s shift from a female domestic duty to a creative leisure outlet. By the 1990s when cable TV targeted niche audiences, the Food Network introduced masculine chefs, travelogues, and sporting competition formulas to attract male viewers and expand its audience beyond the home cook. Food TV entered another new era when social media and streaming services expanded cooking TV subgenres as well as their cultural diversity. Social media also created opportunities for amateur producers, although demands for high production values privilege some producers, even on popular apps Instagram and TikTok.

A wealth of primary sources documents Vasari’s meticulous planning for his posthumous commemoration, his death, and his heirs’ execution of his final wishes. This final chapter explores Vasari’s death and the fate of his earthly remains, as well as the unique place his high altar for the Pieve occupies within the tradition of funerary monuments and chapels made by and for early modern Italian artists and architects. As the largest and principal altar of one of Arezzo’s most prestigious churches and the site of Vasari’s burial, it is nothing less than the most personal work of his long and prolific artistic career. Its alienation in the nineteenth century from the church for which it was made and nearly all of the other works with which Vasari intended it to be seen, however, has long obscured its significance.

Between the years 1450 and 1509, England endured a tremendous amount of upheaval and unrest springing from the civil wars we know today as the Wars of the Roses. The feuds, revolts and other related violence that occurred during this conflict resulted in a startlingly large number of monarchic changes. In this relatively short amount of time, there were five different kings of England – Henry VI (r.1422–61, 1470–71), Edward IV (r.1461–83), Edward V (r.1483), Richard III (r.1483–85) and Henry VII (r.1485–1509). Except for the twelve-year-old Edward V, each of these kings was married. Consequently, there were four different queens consort – Margaret of Anjou (c.1430–82; r.1445–61, 1470–71), Elizabeth Woodville (c.1437–92; r.1464–83), Anne Neville (c.1456–85; r.1483–85), and Elizabeth of York (c.1466–1503; r.1486–1503). In a father–son monarchic changeover, the queen consort's successor would typically have been her daughter-in-law, the wife of the new king. None of these queens was related to each other in this manner.

Margaret of Anjou, a niece of the French king, Charles VII (r.1422–61), was married to the Lancastrian king of England, Henry VI, in 1445 as part of diplomatic efforts by England to resolve the long-standing war with France. Henry, however, lost the throne to the Yorkists in battle in 1461. Although he regained his crown (and Margaret her title as queen consort) in October 1470 with the help of Richard Neville, earl of Warwick – who had famously changed sides from the Yorkists to the Lancastrians – he lost it again after only six months. This short period is known as Henry VI's Readeption.

From the beginning of the patristic project to the end, William Dyngley was in control of his manuscripts. He acquired exemplars, hired the scribes, paid for parchment and decoration, and provided the guard pages. Dyngley's first patristic manuscript, MS 169, was a training ground for the skills he used to create his own patristic library. As we saw in Chapter Three, Dyngley did not just copy Tabula super custodiarum and Registrum Anglie: he shortened incipits, deleted words he deemed unnecessary, and rearranged material. As the Rouses demonstrated, his was a ‘deliberate policy of alteration’. He similarly reconstructed Robert Kilwardby's tabulae, alphabetising, deleting and rearranging details for thirty-five individual works by Augustine (Table 3.2). He also created his own tabulae for Augustine's letters (MS 88) and three opuscula in his patristic anthology (MS 203). For the patristic anthology he also indexed the entire volume.

Early in 1523, around March, Las Casas was formally initiated as a Dominican novitiate in Santo Domingo. These vows constituted a radical change of direction for the worldly “protector” of the Indians. He accepted the discipline of the order that “is a trial period of his new vocation. It is an apprenticeship in the obedient life, renouncing one's own will, with little communication with the outside world from inside the cell of the Dominican monastery.”

A test to this commitment soon appeared in the form of letters from Cardinal Adrian and some of the Flemish gentlemen at the court. They wanted Las Casas to return to the court where he had found so much favor.

We don't know who opened the letters. Las Casas himself says that “the Dominicans in the monastery [he was still in Santo Domingo] did not wish to show him the letters so as not to disturb him.” One of his biographers, Huerga, wrote that “at the least they told him what was in the letters.” But, for the time being, Las Casas renounced the world and went into a metaphorical “sleep,” as he himself described it.

But “sleep” to one man is quite different to another. From 1523 to about 1526 he devoted himself to the discipline demanded by his Dominican brothers in Santo Domingo – study and prayer. Indeed, much of Las Casas's erudition displayed in the next forty years originated during these years as he dug into the books of the great church fathers, read the ancient pagan philosophers, and immersed himself in Scripture. He may have been quiet and superficially contemplative, but his voracious appetite for knowledge and wisdom drove him on.

The pseudonym ‘Calixtus’ appears throughout the Codex Calixtinus, although he is not the only author mentioned in the manuscript. The liturgical section features the “prescription of Pope Calixtus on the matins of Santiago”. He is also the named author of elements in the second book that recounts the miracles of St James, and again as the author of a prologue to the first account of the translation of St James. The opening of the Pilgrim's Guide is presented as the argumentum of Pope Calixtus. Even Book 4, the Pseudo-Turpin, assigns its last chapters to ‘Pope Calixtus’, after the death of ‘Turpin’. At the end of the manuscript a false bull of Innocent II reiterates the fiction. The author portrait on fol. 1r of the Codex Calixtinus shows ‘Calixtus’ seated on an arcaded stool and writing his name on the recto of an open codex (see Figure 1). The decision to set the figure within the bowl of a dragon initial ‘C’, with one dragon head hovering above his head and a second under his feet, may also signal the satiric nature of this pseudonym.

Berlioz's general unwillingness to accept the status quo in any field is manifest in this review, emphasising the useful improvements orchestral instrument makers were introducing to their products. While we today may marvel at the expertise he displayed in his Grand Traité d’instrumentation et d’orchestration modernes (1843), his surprise was that so many composers should be so ignorant of the tools of their trade.

Among instruments of the orchestra, the only ones to have called for and received technical improvements recently are the woodwind. The flute, the clarinet, and especially the bassoon had long suffered from serious faults of intonation and tone which the skill of virtuosos had only managed to disguise up to a point. Boehm's invention for the flute, consisting of a new way of boring the holes for the player's fingers but which unfortunately alters the conventional fingering, has led to important improvements for bassoons and clarinets. We’ve already had an opportunity to mention this excellent development, thanks to which these instruments, whose sound was the most unsatisfactory, will soon boast one that's perfectly in tune and absolutely equal through all registers. As for the violins and lower strings, there's nothing left to say: you don't find Stradivariuses round every corner. Only the piano continues to make progress, sometimes in one direction, sometimes in another. Érard has got them to produce a volume of sound which means that, at least in Liszt's hands, they can compete with a standard orchestra. Pape has produced them in various shapes to suit amateur tastes, so that this instrument, which is growing in popularity the world over, from London and Paris as far as the Philippines and the Indies, can cater simultaneously both to every musical need and to the dictates of fashion and luxury.

The editor of the RGM wrote the following preface to Berlioz's text: ‘Since the excellent Philharmonic Society are to perform extracts from Gluck's Alceste next Tuesday, we think we shall be doing a real service to our readers to quote the fine pages written by Berlioz on these same extracts’. The ‘extracts’ are actually continuous from act 1, scene 3 to the end of the act in the French version of the opera (1776), and not much changed, bar the language, from the Italian original of 1767. The text translated below quotes two passages from reviews previously published in 1835 (they appear in quotation marks in the article). Since Gluck's operas constitute such an idée fixe in Berlioz's writings, it's only right that these final words should celebrate Alceste.

The third scene opens in Apollo's temple. Enter the high priest, the priest who will conduct the sacrifice together with the censors and other necessary instruments, and finally Alceste leading her children, the courtiers and members of the public. Here Gluck applies an extreme of local colour; it's ancient Greece he reveals to us in all its majestic, beautiful simplicity. Listen to the instrumental movement (aria di pantomimo) to which the cortege enters; listen to this gentle, veiled, calm, resigned melody, this pure harmony, this almost inaudible rhythm of the contrabasses, whose undulating patterns steal beneath the orchestra like the priestesses’ feet beneath their white tunics; lend your ear to the strange timbre of low flutes, to the intertwining of the two violin lines sharing the melody, and say whether there's any music more beautiful, in the ancient sense of the word, than this religious march.

Papal delegation functioned as the override mechanism of the visitation system. In each of the three documents examined in the chapter, the papacy intervenes in place of the routine system of visitation: in the first case, that of the Franciscan order; in the second, that of the Cistercians; and in the third, that of exempt religious houses of any order. Even exempt houses had been integrated into a system of inspection by the 1215 Lateran council, and the Cistercians and Franciscans, not to mention the Dominicans, long regarded as a model of rational organization, possessed highly developed systems of their own. Yet even the most rational systems break down. The documents show these mechanisms being overridden, following such breakdowns, by papal delegation. They serve as a synecdoche – part for whole – of the later medieval and post-medieval Latin church, in that papal delegation supplemented formal structures that at times failed to manage the complexity of life on the ground.

Soon after this, her toilette was complete, and while Hannah busied herself with other tasks in the room, Franziska took a random book from the shelf and sat down in the window recess to read. But she was distracted, and her mind was elsewhere, and so she put the book aside again and said:

“It's no use, Hannah. I’d rather take a look at something—the park or the garden. Tell me, what's the large room next to us for? Right now, probably to its surprise, it just seems like an antechamber to my room.”

“That's the dining room from the days of the Turks or Prince Eugene, when they’d just completed the new part of the castle. Toldy even showed me the very spot where Prince Eugene himself sat.”

“Oh, now, that's interesting. Prince Eugene! Come along, I want to see it. You have to take me through the whole castle and tell me everything you know. Then I’ll have something to talk about, when I make conversation with the count. He's fond of that. So far, I only know my own three rooms.”

As she was saying this, Franziska, followed by Hannah, had gone into the grand hall. It ran through the entire depth of the castle building; thus it had two balconies, one with a view of the lake and the distant countryside beyond, and another which had to content itself with overlooking the castle courtyard. Tall glass doors led to each balcony.