The chapter explores the multifaceted role of Roman villas, focusing on their dual function as symbols of social status and units of agricultural production, set within a broader landscape of towns, farms, and transport infrastructure. The focus of the discussion is peninsular Italy, but examples from other parts of the Roman world are also presented.

Chapter 4 investigates how mental models, particularly the Economist Mental Model (EMM), shape Italians’ support for globalization policies: EU membership, free trade, and immigration. Against a backdrop of economic stagnation and rising populism, the chapter shows that individuals with higher economic knowledge – those who think like economists – are significantly more likely to favor these welfare-enhancing policies. Notably, this holds even for “losers” of globalization in terms of lower income, lower education, or routine jobs, suggesting that economic reasoning can override short-term self-interest. The chapter also explores time preferences, finding that EMM adopters have lower subjective discount rates, making them more apt to weigh long-term gains over immediate costs. Additional tests confirm these findings are not driven by general education, highlighting the distinctive role of economic reasoning in shaping attitudes toward globalization.

Murcia is an important city in southeastern Spain, the center of what was once a small Islamic taifa state that was erased during the major Christian advances of the thirteenth century in the movement known as the reconquista. The ultimate disposition of reconquered territory around Murcia became an abiding cause of friction between the two major kingdoms of the Iberian Peninsula, Castile and the Crown of Aragon. Although the city itself fell to Castile, some of the territory that had once made up the Muslim kingdom became part of Aragonese Valencia and tension over this division remained for decades. Ultimately, the final settlement of the borders in this region became the major reason for the brutal, ten-year War of the Two Pedros.

This article will explore not only Murcia's role as a frontline city in that conflict, a staging point for what was largely a Castilian war of aggression, but also its enormous importance for our understanding the conflict as a whole, an importance it derives from the fact that surviving city documents provide much of what we know about the conflict from the Castilian perspective. We also learn about the asymmetry of source material scholars of medieval Spain encounter when researching and writing about the history of these two kingdoms.

Late in June, 1364, urban authorities in Murcia, a major city in southeastern Spain, received an urgent message from the king of Castile, one of the medieval period's most controversial monarchs, Pedro I (1350–66/1367–69), better known to history by his unflattering sobriquet as Pedro the Cruel.

By the last third of the eighteenth century, poetic recitation had thrown its anchor into the fertile waters of the Lied, a genre that possessed a formal malleability and a simplicity bordering on the domain of the improvisatory and the popular Volkston. Putting such declamatoria as Junker's ‘Genofeva’ or Dalberg's ‘Evas Klagen’ side by side with through-composed Lieder by Schubart or Zumsteeg reveals that their differences were more of degree than of kind. Both genres were animated by an idealised declamatory melos, explaining the Lied's attraction for modes of spoken declamation, however stylised these may have been. Still, this absorption of the declamatorium into the frame of the Lied remained conflictual: how far could the Lied go in its integration of declamatory speech without losing the defining quality of Sangbarkeit? This question led Reichardt, one of Zumsteeg's contemporaries, to devise by the 1800s the Deklamationsstück (what twentieth-century scholarship has usually rendered as ‘declamatory Lied’), a vocal piece with keyboard accompaniment, located at the junction between poetic recitation and Lied.

There is a continuous line running between Schubart, Zumsteeg, and Reichardt, in that all three composers intended to incorporate theatrical declamation within the musical frame of the Lied. Their strategies, however, differed greatly. Located at the crossroads between music and poetry, Schubart's contributions epitomise the primacy of an improvisatory, aus dem Stegreif approach. Zumsteeg explored the through-composed form by incorporating it into expanded, or modified, strophic forms, favouring a recitative-like approach in which the musical accompaniment bears similarities with the melodramatic score of the Benda model. As for Reichardt, he envisioned the Deklamationsstück. In this, Reichardt attempted to capture prosodic spontaneity, yet through much more calculated artistic means than Schubart and less complex formal approaches than those of Zumsteeg.

Who is Leonore? What is she? She's plain Fidelio in pants, Leonore on the dotted line, Florestan's angel, Marzelline's boyfriend, Jaquino's love rival, Pizarro's would-be tyrannicide, and all throughout a wife in drag. But if his title heroine has an identity problem, Beethoven's only opera has itself hardly fared better, for up until the mid-20th century, there was surprisingly little agreement about what it is. Wilhelm Furtwängler said it was “more of a mass than an opera,” the German critic Paul Bekker saw an “oratorio” in it, while Arnold Schoenberg called it one of the “fighters for liberal freedom” (comparing it, oddly, with Uncle Tom's Cabin). The most extreme reaction was Richard Wagner’s, who basically said Beethoven needn't have bothered writing it, since his third Leonore Overture said it all so much better. In 1940, Edward Dent remarked on how views on Fidelio shifted according to the opinions of the day, adding an obvious reference to contemporary tyrants: “German stage-directors after the revolution of 1918 saw [Florestan and Leonore] as man and woman of their own time; they are alive for us today, and Pizarro too.”

This kaleidoscopic reaction to Fidelio should not surprise us unduly, for it is arguably a late reflection of the vicissitudes of the work's own compositional history. Originally based on an extant French libretto that had itself already undergone numerous interpretations, Beethoven spent some ten years on it, working with three different poets to complete and stage three different versions, and writing no less than four different overtures (he at one point groaned that the labor he invested in the opera should entitle him to a “martyr's crown”).

The Peterhouse 1418 register is remarkable in the history of Cambridge libraries. It is not the first list of books – there are earlier inventories at Corpus Christi College and King's Hall and registers of borrowed books at King's Hall and Gonville Hall. It is, however, the first comprehensive register of a sizeable collection. The fourteen-word titulus capitulates the organization of the Peterhouse Library: a core collection of chained volumes, a circulating library, as well as books suitable for sale.

The experience of the American merchant seamen in the prison depots intended for British prisoners of war sheds new light on life in those depots. Compared with the British seamen together with whom they were held, the experience of the American seamen was more difficult: most received no aid, they could attend no school, they had no hope of exchange, almost none could hope for parole and they were so far from home that, though many tried, escape was almost pointless. They were, however, able to attend British church services and British hospitals that were established in the depots. Diplomatically, the British and French authorities had the formalities and structure for discussing and arranging the exchange of prisoners on both sides and there was regular communication between the Ministry of Marine and Colonies and the Royal Navy's Transport Board, comfortable as old adversaries. The American ministers and consuls had no such precedent, no treaties or formalities concerning prisoners held by a country with which theirs was not at war, and they struggled to argue every case individually.

The individuality of the cases of these American merchant seamen is what this study has revealed most of all. As prisoners of war in France, they were temporarily a distinct group. Before and after that, like all merchant seamen, they individually moved across other temporarily distinct groups.

INTRODUCTION

Margaret Martin, Katherine Grieve and Isobel Leitch were accused in a witchcraft panic in 1649 in the burgh of Inverkeithing in Fife. The document edited below is a partial record of their investigation in June and their local trial in July. It forms a small but vivid and detailed part of a much broader story that can only be summarised here. The minister of Inverkeithing, Walter Bruce, was a keen witch-hunter whose activities divided both the elite of the burgh itself and the members of the presbytery of Dunfermline. By the time of these prosecutions, he had already been suspended once by the presbytery and then reinstated. He later tried to arrest the wives of several Inverkeithing magistrates for witchcraft. Further research could well be carried out on Bruce's supporters and opponents. Those who helped him to interrogate these three women were clearly among his supporters.

Parliament issued a commission on 23 May 1649 to arrest and interrogate witchcraft suspects in Inverkeithing; two of the commissioners later reappeared as trial commissioners. The suspects were not specified individually, but they evidently included Margaret Martin, Katherine Grieve and Isobel Leitch. Walter Bruce and his colleagues interrogated these women over four days in June, presumably with the aid of sleep deprivation since they obtained compliant and stereotypical confessions to the demonic pact. The confessions duly recited the ideas of renouncing baptism, getting a new name, entering into a pact with the Devil, the Devil's mark and copulation with the Devil. Margaret Martin entered the Devil's pact when she was at a meeting in another woman's house, and the Devil asked her to be his servant.

My relationship to theater had not entirely ended. Even though it meant using a round-trip airplane ticket, I accepted James Lapine's invitation to go to the San Diego playhouse in the summer of 1993 to compose and perform the piano score for his play Luck, Pluck and Virtue, based on the satirical novel by Nathanael West.

It was wonderful spending time with James and his wife Sarah in San Diego, and an additional delight seeing my old friends Harvey Sollberger and pianist Aleck Karis there.

What a temperate and consistent climate San Diego has. Although at first it was not easy for me to adjust to James's request to write a “Coplandesque” score—I was no longer accustomed to fulfilling a director's expectations—it soon became natural to improvise during rehearsals, come up with ideas, and withdraw to the desk in the lobby of the theater to polish and copy them.

A photo taken of me during that time shows someone I hardly recognize, a laid-back southern Californian, not the tightly wound East Coast neurotic I actually am. Perhaps this was a needed vacation from that other self. But it proved to be my last plane flight, at least as of this writing.

The play was revived at a small theater in New York in 1995, and not long after that, Twelve Dreams was remounted for a third time in a sumptuous production at Lincoln Center Theater, with a chance to do further work on that score.

Chapter 3 analyzes some of the ways that stereotypes harm people’s sense of self and identity. One way is through expressive harm, which is the harm that results from the unwitting and inevitable perpetuation of stereotypes. Stereotypes have a pervasive cultural power that enables them to control people’s thoughts, feelings, behavior, and social interactions even when people actively disavow the stereotype. Other ways that stereotypes harm people’s sense of self and identity are through the internalization of oppressive social scripts, which ascribe motivations and expectations for behavior, and through stereotype threat, in which people inadvertently and paradoxically act in ways that correspond to stereotypes even as they are trying hard to avoid fitting stereotypes. When people with mental illness internalize oppressive social scripts and experience stereotype threat, they incorporate negative stereotypes into aspects of their experience and identity, which damages their identity and sense of self and also diminishes their autonomy.

The book of accounts kept by Philip Henslowe at the Rose playhouse provides considerable evidence on the offerings of seven adult playing companies, 1592–1603. Theatre historians generally agree that the plays marked “ne” were considered by Henslowe to be in some sense new; those not so marked were considered in some sense old. In terms of categories, one kind of play could be called old because it was still in production following its debut performance, another kind could be old because it had been retired from the stage but was now being revived. This chapter examines the evidence in Henslowe’s “Diary” that revival was a routine feature of repertorial commerce practiced industry-wide by the adult companies. It argues that Henslowe’s accounts document the commercial viability not only of those plays scholars consider successes due to the literary and theatrical reputation of their authors but also of those anonymous to us now and/or lost.

INTRODUCTION

This case began in October 1622 when Margaret Davidson started to believe that Christian Watson had harmed her health through magic. Davidson does not seem to have used the word ‘witch’, but she was thinking about bewitchment. She had fallen ill after a quarrel of some kind, during which Watson had threatened her. Davidson's chosen solution was to make a ritually secret approach to Watson in order to recover her health. She took advice from her mother and others, and recruited a male friend to aid her on the day. Whether Watson genuinely remained in ignorance when Davidson crept up behind her on Falkirk high street on a market day, or whether the ‘secrecy’ was an open secret understood by both parties, is not entirely clear, but the ritual succeeded and Davidson recovered her health. One remarkable aspect of this case is its detailed account of how a person could negotiate to recover their health once it was alleged that a witch had bewitched them.

However, someone – perhaps an eyewitness on the day – reported the incident to the kirk session. The session immediately described Davidson’s ritual approach to Watson as ‘consulting hir as ane witche’, an intriguing phrase for such a reconciliation ritual. This phrase then recurred at intervals throughout the recording of the case. Summoned before the session, Davidson testified that she had been persuaded to undertake her ritual by Janet Buchanan. Buchanan had previously had her own disputes with Watson about ale-brewing and petty debt, and had also had a successful reconciliation with Watson.

The kirk session spent the month of November interrogating various people who had been involved in Davidson's market-day ritual. It looked as though Margaret Davidson and Janet Buchanan were the ones in trouble. However, Buchanan's stories about her dealings with Watson began to sound like stories of bewitchment. In January 1623, therefore, Christian Watson raised the stakes by counter-attacking.

Das Liebesverbot—The Ban on Love—has long languished outside the Wagner canon. When the Bayreuth Festival under veuve Cosima decided to expand its repertoire backwards into what she considered the Master's proto-music dramas, she stopped at Der fliegende Holländer. Rienzi was probably too tainted with Meyerbeerian and Spontinian grand opera, despite Richard having happily conducted chunks of it in concert for many years, and despite its continuing popularity on stage (a popularity that dwindled, however, after it was banned from Bayreuth). Wagner's first opera Die Feen (The Fairies, composed in 1833) was similarly kept at arm's length and was not even given its world premiere until 1888. Das Liebesverbot had at least seen its first performance under the baton of the composer, in Magdeburg in 1836, though it remained unperformed thereafter until 1923. The closest Das Liebesverbot has ever got to the Festspielhaus is 1.3 miles, when it was given a student performance in the Bayreuth Stadthalle in 1972 (later released on the Mixtur label as the first-ever recording of the opera).

Das Liebesverbot occupies an unusual position in Wagner's oeuvre. It is one of only two comic operas he ever wrote (the other being Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg), and it is his only opera derived directly from Shakespeare (though it is noteworthy that the midsummer setting of Meistersinger and the topsy-turvy hurly-burly of its second act also echo Shakespeare).

Although I had a tendency to follow one kind of composition with a very different kind, I immediately followed the Suite with a comparable piece for violin and piano, Winter Sketchbook, which was likewise in five movements and likewise steeped in a darker spirit. It was performed at the college by a wonderful violinist, Joanna Jenner.

In April of 1989, Claudia Friedlander, who had stayed on campus past her graduation to work in the administrative offices of the school, put together a program that would include the premiere of the Clarinet Trio, which she knew had a particular meaning for me.

In rehearsal, Maxine was reassuring that the Trio was not the musical failure I had assumed it to be. As always, I was very nervous performing, and the piano part to the Trio was ferociously difficult. But the clarinet and cello parts were no less so. Maxine owned her part, and Claudia's performance was simply stunning. I don't think I have ever had a more exuberant response from an audience than I had for that piece that night.

Only a month later, I performed the piano solo part in Nocturnes with the Vermont Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Efrain Guigui. I had a 103-degree fever. Astonishingly, this undercutting of confident self-expression by illness had persisted since childhood.

In May of 1989, Jack Kernochan called with the news that the Galaxy Music catalogue had been sold to E.C. Schirmer in Boston, and that he and Donald Waxman would no longer be dealing with submissions and publication.