Introduction

The ‘Railway Mania’ is a term used primarily for the period 1844–46 when investment in railway projects became an all-consuming passion for a significant portion of the population. A bubble developed and eventually burst (or at least deflated). Many investors lost money. Nevertheless, a high proportion of the country's railway routes were promoted and commenced in those hectic years. There were no railways at all in Lincolnshire prior to 1844. By 1847, almost half the county's route-mileage had been authorised by Parliament.

Contemporary accounts alleged that many of the projects floated in those years were fraudulent. Railways were promoted, it is said, with no possible prospect of success, merely so that their promoters could allocate shares to themselves and sell them at a profit after their price had risen. Lawyers and even surveyors, it is said, arranged for lines to be promoted for the sake of the fat fees they could charge. Parliament had introduced certain Standing Orders on railway bills to act as a check on the powers of compulsory purchase that railways were granted in their Acts. By 1845, the House of Commons was enforcing these rigidly, as a way of throwing out a small proportion of the bills which threatened to swamp its sessions. Crooked promoters, it is alleged, would deliberately introduce certain errors in the plans they were obliged to deposit as a convenient way of killing their projects: they had made their money and had no wish to proceed further.

These allegations have been repeated in more modern accounts of the Railway Mania.

It is no secret that, for every puzzle of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight solved, another host of mysteries lift aloft their enigmatic (and possibly severed) heads. This epistemological illusiveness is, I contend, nonaccidental and significant to the poem's larger pedagogical and illustrative project. As a both deeply human and unflinchingly cosmic work, Sir Gawain draws on the characteristic caprice and otherworldly positionality of its fairies, presenting its readers and hearers1 with an engaging representation of what it is to live as a human in a transitory world that is also and always encompassed by a planned and orderly cosmos. In what follows, I will show that Sir Gawain is a poem formed and functioning in the image of the medieval cosmos. Influence, in this work, is multiple, interlinked, and tiered, with each fairy mover acting on and moving not only their own sphere of the narrative but also all the levels below and encompassed by their own. In this way, Sir Gawain becomes a poetic microcosm, mirroring both the structure and the order of the universe (as it was generally understood in late-medieval natural philosophy). As with the cosmos, form and arrangement are linked to and vital for understanding the content and lesson of this poem, acting, as a whole, to communicate the shape of the Divine order and to evoke the attendant theological and moral truths infusing both the cosmos and Gawain's moral journey. The poem's shape is thus inseparable from its message of reclamation and its emphasis on process and the perfecting of the soul over time.

In 1275, a set of regulations and fines on women's apparel was passed in the city of Montauban. Included was a clause requiring that the edicts be revisited fifteen years later. Accordingly, they were reviewed and updated in 1291. Comparison of these two documents offers fascinating information on apparel styles, modes of conspicuous consumption, and approaches to moral attitudes over two decades. There are enumerations of terms which clearly denoted sufficiently distinct styles to compel the authorities to distinguish between them, a signal that a fashion culture was at work in the town. A study of the sumptuary laws’ vernacular Occitan terminology can serve as an important contribution to the little-studied history of dress and consumption in the medieval Midi, the south of France. Enacted early in the timeline of medieval European sumptuary laws, these edicts also represent a possible model for later ones. Laws in vernacular Occitan (and adjacent Catalan, as well) share certain traits with those emerging in France, Spain, England, and Italy in this period and later, but other characteristics demonstrate that they deserve a place in the comparative work that has justly been called for by Laurel Wilson.2 Montauban's social and legal context was unique. The dress prohibitions need to be understood within the economic and political framework of this town in the last quarter of the thirteenth century as well as within the broader trend for issuing edicts intended to regulate consumption that was beginning to sweep European municipalities. The first part of this study will place the laws in the context of the town and their codicological transmission.

In Salvaging Spenser, Willy Maley asks, ‘What would the act of reading Ireland in the Faerie Queene entail’? For those scholars who have engaged with this question, as exceptions to the general ‘blithe disregard for any Irish dimension’ in Spenser's poetry, the recent answer has been important ‘historicist’ and ‘materialist’ explorations of the ‘cultural specificity of Ireland’. For Thomas Herron, the Irish context enlivens readings of ‘all six Books (and the fragmentary seventh) of the epic as well as many of Spenser's later, shorter poems’: Herron's use of Irish contexts when exploring the allegorising of Walter Raleigh as Timias in Book VI, exemplifies the procedure. Similarly, Richard McCabe uses political tracts as a means to uncover the Irish context of each Book's virtue, including how the virtues of Books IV–VI are intrinsically tied to Spenser's anxiety around colonial reform in Ireland. For these scholars the historical context provides fruitful ground for explorations of Spenser's colonial experiences in Ireland, whom he supported and celebrated, whom he fought against and denigrated, and how all of this is allegorised throughout his poetry and in the View in order for him to strive towards his ideal Irish colonial society.

Maley answers his own question by considering Ireland as a geographic space, applying the approaches of literary geography to consider how Spenser represents, engages with, and allegorises the spaces and places of Ireland in his works; evidenced through discussions of how the Faerie Queene's closing sequence is set on Spenser's Kilcolman estates, and by highlighting how ‘our knowledge of Spenser's familiarity with Ireland centres on the poignant allusion to the Fens of Allen in Book II, the river schemata of Book IV, Colin Clouts Come Home Againe, and the Mutabilitie Cantos’.

Q. What is it about the guitar that you love?

A. There is a mysterious universe that lives inside that box. For me, the guitar is what happens inside the structure. I’ve always been fascinated by guitar makers and by the process of putting pieces of wood together, taking such delicate care of how every piece of wood is going to vibrate and how all these pieces will function together in harmony, of putting soft woods against hard woods, and then enclosing it all. The most magical moment for most guitar makers is when they close the guitar. That is the time when the makers that I have known, such Rodríguez, Hauser, Blöchinger, and my son, have said that they have a very spiritual feeling, when the guitar is closed. The guitar is not a guitar until the top is connected to the neck. The next thing that happens is that the sides are glued to the top in the grooves that have been carved on the heel block. And then the back goes on top of the sides to create an enclosed space. To me, that space is the guitar.

I think that the whole Romero way of producing sound comes from understanding that it is not what you do with your hands, it is not what the strings do, but rather it is actually what happens to that space inside the box. That sound is the music. And the top becomes like a trampoline, so that when you pull the string you are uniting all the forces that are holding the guitar together, uniting them to create a sort of synergy.

As the first book that explicitly argues, as Malcolm Miller does in the introduction, for Israeli music's rarely explored and gradually growing international significance, this book is groundbreaking. A collection of highly diverse chapters, Classical and Popular Music in Israel paints an unprecedented panoramic overview, illuminating characteristic traits of Israeli culture that are known to local musicians and have repeatedly proven to be inspiring to outsiders.

A list of the graves of the Olympians appears in the poet Gilla in Chomdid Úa Chormaic's eleventh-century composition on world history, A Rí richid, réidig dam:

Satuirn ra commuid a chlais mac Polluir i sleib Chucais. adnacht Mercuir ri lecht lia i nErmopolim Cipria.

Uenir ic inis Cipir. Mairt isin Tráic trenChicil. Liber Pater dema de. isin Teba ata saide.

Hercoil i tír na Tiri ra loisc tríana lonchridi Aesculapius ra fis fuir ro hadnacht i nEpiduir.

Saturn son of Pollus, his grave was kept in Mount Caucasus, the burial of Mercury before a stone tomb in Ermoupolis [in] Cypria.

Venus on the island of Cyprus. Mars in Thrace of the strong-breasted [i.e., Amazons]. Liber Pater died from it, it is in Thebes that he is.

Hercules in the land of the Tyrrhenians burned through his full heart. Asclepius, it is known about him that he was buried in Epidaurus.

According to the poet's euhemeristic approach, the Classical gods were mortals and their graves had become cult sites. While relatively common among medieval accounts of pagan gods, euhemerism was only one of many approaches taken towards the Olympians in medieval Irish literature and the Classical adaptations. Flann Mainistrech's poem Éstid a eólchu can ón, preserved in Lebor Gabála, takes a similarly euhemeristic approach and enumerates the deaths of various members of the Túatha Dé. In Razvan Stanciu's words, this is done ‘presumably with the aim of proving their humanity’, although he notes that Flann also calls them gods (dee) in the same work. Stanciu concludes that día is ‘a weak label’, which may mean nothing more than ‘supernatural figure in general’.

Egbunike's and Nwankwo's volume, ALT 39, provides a critical frame for engaging the tenets of Africanfuturism as laid out by Nnedi Okorafor in her conception of Africanfuturism. The volume provides content narratives, critical frames, and theoretical constructs to read and critique writings in the genre.

Since the publication of ALT 39, questions have been raised about the nature and component of the genre, its artistic conception, conventional framework for writing, and paradigms for literary interpretation. Two questions have been foremost in the motivation for editing this volume: the question of African specificity and the imagined alternative African future. This volume draws from the spirit and content of ALT 39 to tease out the implications of these two questions for Okorafor's conception of the genre and its significance for both writer and critic.

There are editorial parallels in both volumes in terms of content analysis and critical frames the articles use in interpreting Okorafor's conception of Africanfuturism. What makes ALT 43 distinct is the effort of contributors to robustly interrogate some of the features outlined by Okorafor and present their own interpretation of the creative and interpretive constructs of the genre. As such, the practice adopted in this volume is framed around the amplification of themes critical to conceptualizing the genre convention but also a contestation of some of the principles pivotal to understanding its nature and function.

Fifteenth-century music and musical culture has enjoyed an exceptional position in Czech historiography. Narratives on the Hussite revolts against the Roman Church, which escalated after the death of Jan Hus at the stake in 1415, are accompanied by depictions of the powerful role of music cultivated in all social spheres—vernacular Czech liturgy in the Hussite church, religious songs in devotional and private cultures, and Hussite songs inciting men to fight without fear against their enemies. For more than a century, Czech music historians have been inspired by the undeniably strong social power of these musical repertories and have highlighted Hussite vernacular chant and vernacular song as the peak of Czech medieval music and cultural developments. Fifteenth-century chants have been used as melodic and symbolic material for countless nineteenth- and twentieth-century music compositions that evoke the Hussite legacy, and in this way they contributed to the shape of modern Czech identity.

Discovering and interpreting authentic documents, Czech music historians defined fifteenth-century Bohemia as a period in which the renowned “Czech musicality,” closely connected to the vernacular Czech language, was born and reached its first peak. However, Bohemia usually appears (if at all) in surveys on medieval and early Renaissance music as a truly peripheral region, which for a time and as a result of political events was separated from the musical life of western Europe and where music was literally conserved in a special microclimate.

Q. You started teaching at an early age. How young were you, and who were your first pupils?

A. We left Málaga when I was 9 years old, moving briefly to Valencia and then settling in Seville. There was a military doctor there named Antonio Álvarez who had helped my father get a sort of medical deferment during the Civil War, so that he would not have to serve in combat but could instead work in a military hospital. He remained a close friend of my father and also studied guitar with him even before we moved to Seville. Antonio developed what is called trigger finger, whereby he could not control the movement of his right-hand middle finger. So, he came to my father for help when we were still living in Málaga. But my father chose not to teach Antonio and said, “My son Pepe will fix you. You work with him.” Now, I was still just a kid, and I had no idea how to teach. The only thing I knew was the difference between what he did and what I did, that for me, it was easy to play, and for him, it was a struggle. It was easy for my hand to return to a completely relaxed position at a very high speed, but when he would pluck a note, his middle finger would get stuck. He couldn't release it. I found that his forearm would remain very hard after he plucked the strings, so I started working with his forearm. I didn't know anything about tendons, extensors, flexors, or joints, but I just tried to get him to work his right arm the same way that I was working mine.

From Cristóbal Méndez to Fox Morcillo, humanist thought in Spain during the 1550s subscribed to a fervour for dance conceived of as paideia and medicine for the body and soul. This enthusiasm left its mark on several political and pedagogical treatises written in the aftermath of the emperor's reign and intended for the future Philip II. One generation later, when the reign of Philip II's heir was fast approaching, the number of espejos de príncipes (Specula principum) increased. However, when it came to dance, the discourse was less enthusiastic than in the treatises written prior to King Philip the Prudent's reign, all the contrary.

Rigourist Inflections during the Dawn of Philip III's Reign

Forbidding Dance to Avoid Effeminising the Royal Body

One of the first treatises to be published in the context of the impending royal succession was the Jesuit Pedro de Ribadeneira's Tratado de la religion y virtudes que debe tener el príncipe cristiano para gobernar (1595). This expansive treatise, presented as a Christian riposte to Machiavellian tenets, is a political work presented in the style of espejos de príncipes. Addressed to the future king, Philip III, it does not offer any specific instructional plan but, rather, it demonstrates a palpable effort to (re)orientate the education of the future monarch. Its essential goal is therefore political and moral rather than pedagogical; it does, however, provide some observations regarding education. In the book's chapter on the virtues, dedicated to condemning refined education, the moral concept of strength underlies the whole treatise.

Although northern women writers in English expression appeared late on the Nigerian literary scene, it is a historical fact that Princess Nana Asma’u (1793–1864) wrote an impressive volume of creative works in Arabic and Ajami during the nineteenth century (Tsiga & Gumi). Northern Nigeria occupies approximately 29 percent of Nigeria's land mass and has a large population that embraces Islamic teachings, moral codes, norms, and values. In this regard, it is expected that works from the region, especially those works by women, would uphold a high level of Islamic and Christian mores, values and tradition. However, the twenty-first century women writers from the region have begun to jettison the cultural values by unashamedly depicting sex and sexuality in their works without recourse to learned moralistic considerations. This article takes a look at the generational portrayal of sexuality and the morality codes in the works of women from northern Nigeria who write in English. Using the feminist kaleidoscope, the article establishes the way and manner that the century has impacted on the writings of women from the northern region of Nigeria.

Sexuality is often a difficult term to talk about, especially in a traditionalized religious setting like northern Nigeria. This is so because of the strict Islamic religious disposition of the people of the region; being predominantly Muslim, the teachings of the religion permeate every aspect of life of the people such that it becomes difficult to trace the point where culture terminates and religion begins.

This book brings together three areas of scholarship that have too often developed on separate trajectories: the histories of women, religion, and emotions. Spanning from the 1840s to the 1970s, the chapters in this volume show the ways that these strands of research intertwine and how considering them in connection deepens and enriches the understanding of all three. Its contributors demonstrate that rather than being a relic of the past, religion continued to play vital and complex roles in modern European women's public and private lives well into the twentieth century. The growing field of the history of emotions offers new tools to understand the connections between religion and culture, and this volume draws on methodologies from the history of emotions to illuminate the meaning and manifestation of religion in three areas of women's experience: in public discourses about women's perceived place and duties in the modern European state and society, in women's professions and their professionalization, and in the private realm.

The Role of Religion in Everyday Life and Women's New Nineteenth-Century Opportunities

For most modern European women, religion formed the foundation on which they created their lives. Religious ceremonies marked the most important turning points in life—birth, marriage, and death. Religious holidays divided the changing seasons and the week into times of work and leisure. Europeans awoke in the morning to church bells, religious celebrations marked civic events, and prayers honored secular and religious leaders alike. Many Europeans prayed when they awoke, before each meal, and before they turned in for the night. Children learned those prayers in churches, synagogues, and schools, and most schools in fact were officially affiliated with one of the two major denominations, Catholicism or Protestantism.

Of the many challenges facing higher education today, one of the most troubling has been the steep decline in humanities enrollments. It is a trend which shows no signs of abating. A recent piece in The New Yorker magazine (February 27, 2023) goes so far as to declare the numbers to be “in free fall.” The field of German studies has not been spared this fate; indeed, it seems particularly acute there. Perusing past issues of The German Quarterly one finds references to a “crisis” in German studies cropping up with alarming frequency already as far back as 1989.

“Crisis”: The word speaks of a difficult, if not urgently dangerous situation. Its etymology contains the sense of having arrived at a turning point, a moment of decision. Though the situation is dire, or precisely because it is dire, it can create a space for new possibilities. Yet, where are these “new possibilities” to come from? How are we to find them? The usual course of events after the announcement of a crisis and the widespread acceptance that one in fact exists is for diagnoses to be tendered, followed by concrete proposals to remedy the situation. Just as likely, if not more common, is that when faced with a crisis, we stand helpless before it and simply carry on pretty much in the same way as before.

The Ethical Need for Shape

The analogy drawn by Richard of St. Victor between human thinking and the flocking of small birds is a particularly rich one and serves well as a motif for the rest of my study of the essential role geometry plays in all structured forms of thought. What the image captures so well is the flexible, provisional shaping that our reasoning requires to be at all productive. Characteristic of evil thought is its inability to adjust its shapes. Dante's Satan is frozen in ice because his desire, will, and mind are thoroughly fixed into just one shape stuck in one place, and flapping his wings can take him nowhere. Inferno is also a place only of individual souls with no hint of communal concern or harmonious interaction. But, as we just saw, Richard compares inventive, productive human thinking to birds flocking, in and out, up and down, spiraling, flying apart, coming densely together in a cloud, sometimes seeming to be fixed in the air in one place, but then changing their configurations again, until they gather in place together in their one communal roost. Though many different bird species form flocks, the term “murmuring” is used particularly of flocking starlings, a bird whose habits were known throughout Europe from antiquity.

The three modes of human thinking that Richard identified – cogitation, meditation, contemplation – are distinguished by their movements and directions. Cogitation's motions are shapeless and indirect, wandering about here and there without any particular end in mind.

Eudo dapifer is the quiet man of Anglo-Norman England. He fails to appear in the narratives written by Orderic Vitalis, Henry of Huntingdon, or William of Malmesbury, or indeed in the ODNB! Yet he was ‘at the core of the Norman establishment’, a man who served the first three Norman kings with seeming unquestioned loyalty, who was frequently literally at their side both in England and Normandy, both on military campaigns and as an administrator. He was an official who, as principal steward, was of a status commensurate with the chancellor in the royal household, sufficiently trustworthy to be granted custody of one of William I's greatest castles, and who, though not amongst the wealthiest tenants-in-chief, held estates, some substantial, in eleven shires, overwhelmingly concentrated in East Anglia and the south-east Midlands.

The Sources

With the exception of Domesday and other royal records virtually all that can be recovered of Eudo, his family origins, and his foundation of the Benedictine abbey of St John the Baptist, Colchester, derives from sources probably of Colchester provenance and mostly associated with the abbey (the Annales Colescestrensis). Five survive, though there were undoubtedly others, particularly a now-lost set of annals. The relationship between them is extremely complex. Arguably the earliest (though it remains possible that amendments or additions were made at any time up until the manuscript was written in the fourteenth century), and perhaps the most reliable, is found in a modest and defective volume of 40 folios (now BL, MS Harley 1132).

In August 1877, whilst Nikisch was working his passage as a rank-and-file violinist in the Vienna Court Orchestra, an enterprising inventor on the other side of the Atlantic called Thomas Edison completed the first-ever device capable of recording and playing back sound. A decade later in 1887, whilst Nikisch was in full flood as Director of the Leipzig City Opera, Hannover-born Emil Berliner was granted the first patent for his newly invented ‘gramophone'. These two seemingly unrelated events were to set in motion the biggest and most far-reaching paradigm shift in the perfor-mance, reception and dissemination of music since the invention of music printing. Together with its bedfellow broadcasting, which followed some five decades later, the invention of sound recording would ultimately drive the exponential growth of the music industry, creating a vast global behemoth which in the second half of the succeeding century raised up elevated platforms from which a select few of those on whom the stars looked down could wield unlimited power over the world of musical performance.

It is no coincidence that the twin meta-narratives of the emerging virtuoso conductor as an artist in his own right and the dissemination of music through sound recording went hand in hand. They were closely related phenomena and an early example of the marriage between music and technology which came to dominate so much music-making in the modern and postmodern eras. Nikisch was to play a small but not insig-nificant role in this shifting of the tectonic plates. He was one of the most high-profile conductors of his day, and the fledgling recording companies were keen to capture at least some of his celebrated interpretations on disc. Nikisch's heyday, however, was some years before the introduction in 1925 of the electric microphone.