The referents of many of these kennings are contextually determined, i.e. the choice between priest or bishop is based on consideration of the stage of Guðmundr's life to which the narrative relates and not only on the individual kenning patterns.

Kennings for Guðmundr Arason in Arngr Gd

heilagr skýlir hölda ‘the holy shelterer of men [= God]’ Arngr Gd1/7 [here used of God, but in Gd 39/1 used of Guðmundr]

yfirmaðr saðrar kristni várrar ‘superior of our true Christianity [bishop = Guðmundr]’ Arngr Gd 5/2

skýra skuggsjá skrautvaxinnar brautar dygða ‘the pure mirror of the beautifully grown path of virtues [= Virgin Mary > = Guðmundr]’ Arngr Gd 6/1–2

hoskur Hólabyskup ‘the wise bishop of Hólar [= Guðmundr]’ Arngr Gd 6/5

sútaukinn bætir sálna ‘the grief-swollen healer of souls [priest = Guðmundr]’

In a wide-ranging conversation with Nigel Simeone on 22 March 2025, Jakub Hrůša discussed the history of the Sinfonietta on record, the challenges of rehearsing and performing the work, and broader issues of Janáček interpretation. He offers some particularly valuable insights into the practicalities of preparing the Sinfonietta, especially the problems of orchestral balance. We began with a discussion of recordings and Hrůša was particularly eloquent on the great Janáček specialist František Jílek, whose work was revered in Brno, and a conductor who deserves to be known more widely.

NS: My first encounters with the Sinfonietta were on record: Karel Ančerl's famous recording, Charles Mackerras's passionate first version, and the more subtle (and very effective) Rafael Kubelík version with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra. How did you first get to hear the piece?

JH: František Jílek, with the Brno Philharmonic. It was not even on an LP but on a cassette tape which had the Sinfonietta on one side and Taras Bulba on the other. The ‘advantage’ of those tapes was it was not so easy to jump around, so it made you really listen to the music! But let me tell you what I think about Jílek – and what an important figure he was. It's very interesting because he conducted almost everything by Janáček, much more, I think, than other famous Janáček interpreters like Karel Ančerl or Rafael Kubelík. Jílek conducted the whole oeuvre. He did all the mature operas from Jenůfa onwards and even The Beginning of a Romance. But I had a more personal kind of indoctrination into Jílek's Janáček because the person who taught me when I was taking my very first steps in conducting was Evžen Holiš, who was Jílek's assistant for many years at the Brno National Theatre.

The ofttimes circuitious route we followed in the previous section addressed a period of profound changes not exclusive to dance or to the Hispanic Monarchy but which nonetheless found special resonance in both these areas. These shifts would modify, at least in part, the coordinates of the controversy surrounding dance, displacing the debate beyond a moral problematics while never completely superseding it.

In the Spanish context, language was the foremost tool used to configure the debate on the legitimacy of dance at a crossroads that seemed – only seemed – to resolve this tension. On the one hand, there was baile. On the other, there was danza. The former is considered popular and potentially vile. The latter is deemed noble and glorious. The former is lively. The latter is restrained. The former uses hands and arms. The latter, feet and legs. In 1611, Covarrubias was the first author to write of this distinction between the two choreic modalities of dance in his Tesoro:

Although Covarrubias does not condemn bailes as such, he does present a long list of examples that aim to prove their dangerousness. Danza, by contrast, is exemplified through a series of dances dignified by their ancient or military pedigree.

Gustav Holst lived at a time when the latter-day English musical renaissance was taking hold in his homeland, with composers seeking to break the chains of Germanic Romanticism and look toward expanding their own musical horizons. This Holst did in great fashion, adopting seemingly unrelated entities such as the words of Walt Whitman, Sanskrit literature, English folk tunes, astrology, and twentieth-century techniques into his compositions. But there were other influences as well, from writing down and incorporating Algerian oboe melodies to dealing with the constant criticism of his closest friend Ralph Vaughan Williams. In addition, Holst had to face and accept the reality of writing music for his students and other amateur groups that often featured instrumental contingencies that were less than complete. Sometimes this applied to professional ensembles as well; both versions of Hammersmith: A Prelude and Scherzo attest to this, offering options in instrumentation. It was a case of sacrificing the ideal for the practical.

Holst's wind works, particularly those for military and brass bands, have long since been acknowledged as staples of their respective core repertoires. These works are not islands in a sea of musical compositions but rather, important components in the continuum of the composer's life and work. They provide a legacy within the trajectory, in much the same way that many of his choral works do.

Here, then, is a complete listing of Gustav Holst's wind works. Yet, there is more. It is fitting to include the wind works of his daughter, Imogen Holst, as well, for starting with The Unfortunate Traveller, written heavily under her father's influence, and continuing through her editions of his wind works, she continued his legacy. Did it stop with her? No, of course not; it endures every time a performance of one of these works by either Holst takes place.

Mothers have been overlooked in romance scholarship in favour of fantastical adventures, courtly love stories, and connections with historical events. They are often, however, central to the action in these narratives. Recognising the importance of these characters not only reveals an additional depth to the romances, but offers a re-evaluation of the role of elite mothers in medieval society. The romance genre places mothers and motherhood in a variety of socially constructed spaces, leading to an exploration of the complexities of their identities and selfhood in relation to wider social structures. Their presence and actions in particular spaces, such as birthing rooms, castles, and the forest, reinforce or disrupt concepts of gender, status, and identity in the texts and beyond.

Romance uses representations of motherhood to explore the role's centrality to the complex negotiations of patrilineal society. Imagining the huge narratorial consequences of breaking down the protected space of the birthing room, for example, allows the Roman de Silence, the Roman de Melusine, Octavian, and Emaré to advocate for women within that space, implying that if women's agency in the birthing room is taken away, there are serious social consequences for families and nations. Beyond the birthing room, mothers in romance influence masculine endeavours, upholding the needs of their children and the wider community when male tempers flare. The acts of intercession explored in Athelston, Melusine, and Sir Degrevant show women using their maternal status to remind male characters that their actions have repercussions beyond the ostensibly masculine spheres of war and politics. In soothing tensions created by men, these characters provide a framework to guide society through subtler methods than combat and law. Motherhood represents a balance that stabilises society.

On 23 February 1235, Henry III, king of England, wrote to Joan, queen of Scots, informing her of the betrothal of ‘our and your beloved sister Isabella’ (‘dilecte sororis nostre et vestre Isabelle’) to Emperor Frederick II (d. 1250). This letter's affectionate tone and Henry's anticipation that Joan would be interested to hear about their middle sister, Isabella, almost makes us forget that Henry was announcing one of the most prestigious marriages of the Plantagenet dynasty: a marriage that united the English crown to the Empire. Henry reported to Joan how Frederick had sent messengers to England to negotiate this union, and how Henry, acting on the advice of his magnates, had consented to the match. Isabella, for her part, had accepted Frederick as her husband, with Peter de Vinea, Frederick's emissary and chief adviser, swearing on the emperor's behalf that he would take Isabella as his wife. The political importance of this alliance in Henry's eyes was confirmed further at the foot of this letter's enrolment on the close rolls, where it was recorded that similar news had been dispatched across the British Isles. Not only were similar letters sent to Luke, archbishop of Dublin (d. 1255), and Maurice fitzGerald (d. 1257), the justiciar of Ireland, but also to King Henry's brothers-in-law: Joan's husband, Alexander II (d. 1249), king of Scots, and Llywelyn ap Iorwerth (d. 1240), prince of Gwynedd, the husband of Henry III's illegitimate half-sister, another Joan.

Isabella's imperial marriage promised to place the English king, who was himself still unmarried, firmly at the heart of European politics. The excitement that accompanied the match, from an English perspective, was reflected in accounts written by contemporary writers.

Since the 1990s masculinity has moved from the margins to the mainstream as a subject of historical enquiry, and Bernard Capp has been central to the development of this intellectual trend, producing important studies of how the sexual double standard, married life, neighbourhood relations and sibling interactions shaped meanings and experiences of manhood in seventeenthcentury England. In doing so he contributed to another increasingly vibrant subfield of historical investigation, the history of emotions, producing a study of changing interpretations of men who wept in early modern England. During the sixteenth century, classical ideals provided a framework in which tears shed by men might be interpreted sympathetically, but during the seventeenth century male weeping became problematic, especially after the Restoration, which witnessed a backlash against the religious enthusiasm of the 1640s and 1650s. However, masculine lachrymosity become widespread once again in the age of sensibility, remaining so until hardening gender norms made such behaviour unacceptable after c.1780.

This account of male weeping was informed by the insights of William Reddy, who argued that, under successive ‘emotional regimes’, subjects and citizens were compelled (with varying degrees of intensity and success) to conform to emotional norms, with the French Revolution witnessing a shift from one such regime to another.

INTRODUCTION

This tract, published anonymously and carrying neither place, date nor printer's name, has been shown by Christina Larner to be probably the work of John Bell (1676–1707). Bell grew up in Glasgow and was educated at the University of Glasgow. From 1701 until his death he was minister of Gladsmuir in Haddingtonshire. Bell's autobiography, written in 1706, has recently been published. It is mainly about ecclesiastical politics, and it says nothing about witchcraft, but it shows Bell's strong commitment to presbyterianism and his determination to achieve his ends in the face of opposition. As Larner showed, Bell may well also have written an earlier ‘Treatise on Witchcraft’ in the 1690s; this is now lost, with only three fragments surviving. The Tryal of Witchcraft was probably printed in 1705.

Witchcraft trials had become rare by this period. Bell writes of ‘witches of whom I have read’ (p. 17), but he shows no sign of having encountered a witch or a witchcraft trial in person, even though he worked in Haddingtonshire, which in previous generations had prosecuted more witches than anywhere else in Scotland.

An unusual feature of Bell's reading is that it is mostly English. His main authorities are the treatises of William Perkins (1608) and Richard Bernard (1627). He also relies heavily on the anonymous narrative The Witches of Warboys (1593), about a case of demonic possession in the Throckmorton family in Huntingdonshire, and has one citation to a brief article from 1690 in the Athenian Mercury magazine.

According to Alfred Schnittke, a fellow disciple of Mark Kopytman at the Moscow Conservatory in the 1950s, a composer should be able to remember music not composed. “In my mind, this is a world of illusion, unlimited and endless. It has a sphere of shadow—which is not written down in notes, and which has no traces. And there is an area no longer that of the shadow, but of actual being—that which has remained.”

This impressive metaphor about a primary stage in a composer's creative process is close to an image used by Mark Kopytman in a similar context. While describing the compositional process, Kopytman asked, “Can you conceive of the notion that there are musical events in space, that strains of music appear and disappear, collide and confront each other, and that a piece of music is only a small window into this intersection of different layers?” And he suggested this hypothesis: “A composer has the happy gift of listening to this window and opening it up for the listener. We composers simply record the strains of existing music.”

Both composers spoke, in fact, about imaginary music not accessible to the listeners. At the same time, this imaginary music is the source for a real piece of music that could not be written without that “sphere of shadow,” as Schnittke put it, or without those “strains of existing music,” in Kopytman's formulation.

Recognised today as the consummate synthesist of the late Baroque, ‘der alte Bach’ lived long enough to experience the cultural movement known as the Enlightenment. When he travelled to Potsdam in 1747, he arrived at a Prussian court where Frederick the Great regularly conversed in French with the deist Voltaire and counted among a few other ‘enlightened’ monarchs (though absolutist, to be sure) who sympathized with philosophes such as Rousseau, Diderot, Hume and Kant, and placed their faith squarely in reason and optimism about mankind. The celebrated motto Kant revived from Horace, sapere aude (‘dare to know’), might well stand for the entire movement. But the desired knowledge now reached beyond the rational, quantifiable world to the murky subjectivities of emotions, domains of human experience that inconveniently resisted ‘the control of reason’. The new inquisitiveness also engaged aesthetics, a nascent field recognized by the philosopher A. G. Baumgarten to address how we perceive the beautiful, in turn challenging the centuries-old theory of mimesis, according to which art was like a mirror, imitating the world around it. Precisely how music participated with its sibling arts in this process – what exactly did music imitate? – had never been fully unravelled. If, after Horace, poetry was indeed ‘like a painting’ (ut pictura poesis), only with serious difficulty could music fit into what ‘rational’ arbiters of taste such as Gotthold Ephraim Lessing viewed as a Procrustean metaphor.

On 13 March 1271, in probably the most notorious crime committed anywhere in thirteenth-century Europe, Henry of Almain, nephew of Henry III of England and son of Henry III's brother Richard, king of the Romans, was murdered in Viterbo by the sons of Simon de Montfort. The international repercussions of the killing, which extended as far as Norway, are well known. Less attention has been given to its effects in England, and particularly to its judicial consequences. The procedures which followed were slow to commence. Although news of Henry's death reached London around 23 April, it was not until 15 October that writs to the sheriffs of Warwickshire/Leicestershire and Westmorland (and probably other sheriffs too) ordered that the appeal which one Thomas Archdeacon (a minor subtenant of Henry of Almain's brother Edmund) had brought against Guy, Simon and Amaury de Montfort should be prosecuted in their county courts, so that they be outlawed if they failed to ‘come to our peace to stand to right in our court before us for that death’. The process of ‘exigent’, of publicly demanding the attendance of a suspect at successive county courts, was duly begun but appears to have been abandoned, perhaps because of the younger Simon's death before the end of 1271. Certainly Amaury, the only Montfort who returned to England, was never referred to as an outlaw or treated as one. Here we find the first of several cases to be considered in which a crime committed overseas was in some way brought before a court in England.

In another such case we find the process of ‘exigent’ taking its full course and culminating in outlawry. Its target was Sir Walter de Baskerville, lord of Eardisley Castle in Herefordshire. In the 1250s he was numbered among the retainers of Richard of Cornwall. But his career provides a good example of the way in which the cause of reform after 1258 affected men's allegiances, for he became a diehard Montfortian who maintained the baronial cause in several different parts of England after the battle of Evesham, and seems to have failed to redeem his lands under the Dictum of Kenilworth because he had gone abroad.

Professor Rosalind Hill, the editor of the magisterial eight-volume edition of the rolls and register of Bishop Oliver Sutton of Lincoln (1280–99), considered with some justification that John de Schalby, Sutton's registrar, had developed registrational practices at Lincoln to their finest point when, in 1290, the rolls were replaced by the register format. From the bishop's accession until that year Schalby had followed the practice of keeping separate archdeaconry rolls, first devised at Lincoln under Bishop Hugh of Wells (1209–35), but in 1290 he abandoned the rolls in favour of the register, which enabled a more flexible subdivision of recorded business into many different category sections (by keeping a system of loose quires designated for each particular type of business and/or geographical area). What now survives for Sutton's episcopate, in addition to this large register covering the years 1290–99, are five earlier institution rolls (for the Lincoln, Northampton, Stow, Bedford and Leicester archdeaconries, the last mentioned incomplete) and a custody roll for the whole diocese. Institution rolls for the remaining archdeaconries of the diocese (Buckingham, Huntingdon and Oxford) are missing.

Dodsworth MS 107 in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, contains Roger Dodsworth's abstracts from early medieval Lincoln episcopal registers, including Sutton’s, made in 1641. The principal value of these notes is that at the time Dodsworth was consulting this material, the now lost institution rolls covering 1280–90 for the archdeaconries of Buckingham, Oxford and Huntingdon and the earliest portion of the Leicester archdeaconry roll 1280–86 were still extant. Dodsworth's notes on these lost rolls cover ten folios of the manuscript, and, as might be assumed, were clearly very selective in content, and were confined to brief notes of what was of particular interest to the antiquary.

Q. You are a person who exudes a passionate love of life, music, art, family, and everything beautiful. But aside from your parents and brothers, it is probably safe to say that your greatest human loves have been and continue to be your life companions and offspring. Where should we start?

A. I will say that my great loves began in my own fantasy when I was just a child and reading books, especially the love stories of Don Quijote. And I was moved by the great love affairs in Spanish poetry. Not surprisingly, I had my own imaginary woman, or girl. I cannot really say, because in my fantasy she was ageless. While playing music, I have always felt love, a physical love. And very often it was inspired by an imaginary love partner.

***

Q. All right, so love starts in your imagination.

A. Yes, and then as a result of wonderful circumstances. When I was little, I fantasized about different women or young girls, first envisioning and then finally meeting them. There was a young girl who lived near us in Seville; once, when I got sick with a high fever, she would come over to take care of me. On one occasion I was alone in the house, and her ministrations developed into a very romantic affair. At that time, we were living on a little farm on the outskirts of Seville, but then we had to move, and I was very sad to leave my first girlfriend behind. I was only 9 years old, and she was 15. I always went for older women, but then again, I was a very weird 9-year-old kid.