Our discussion of the early modern commentaries of the Poetics, which opened this book with the first Italian texts published during the Renaissance, now leads us to a final excursus on French theorisations of a poetics of dance. While there may not be a direct textual exchange between Spanish and French dance poetics during the seventeenth century – in contrast to the frequent Spanish references to Italian or Flemish texts, French poetics’ theorisations of dance are very particular within a European context, and this particularity helps us to draw up a comparison with other national traditions. With regards to Spain, the difference is especially palpable, particularly with respect to the role of the fable, a mimetic tool that signals a certain degree of poetisation of dance, which in turn tends to transform it into narrative. Completely foreign to Spanish conceptualisations of dance in López Pinciano and González de Salas, the concept of ‘fable’ is a cornerstone in the theory of dance in French poetics. However, the divergence between French and Spanish approaches is not the result of purely aesthetic or formal matters. It is the consequence of certain political stakes which, in France, led to an institutionalisation of dance unprecedented in seventeenth-century Spain. By way of a counterpoint, the following pages will focus on the discourse of dance in French neo-Aristotelianism. This final exercise in comparison will attempt to account for how and why the corpus of commentaries on a single text, Aristotle's Poetics, could lead to such differing interpretations over such a short timespan.

Syr, You are better known to me, than I can be to you; And I congratulate unto myself as well as unto the World, the fælicity of your Succession in the Office of Secretary, to the Royal Society. But in order to a mutual Better Knowledge, I owe you, & must now give you, some very short Account of myself; more particularly, with relation to that Illustrious Body, whereof, I hoped, I had the Honour of being esteemed a Member.

Having the Pleasure of some Correspondence with your excellent Predecessor, Mr. Waller, I did communicate unto him (and unto my valuable Dr. Woodward) a great Number of American, and philosophical, Curiosities; with an Intimation of my Purpose to continue the Communications. These Gentlemen putt the, as unexpected as undeserved Respect upon me, of proposing me for a Member of the Royal Society; and they both wrote unto me, That I was chosen accordingly both by the Council and Body of the Society, on the Anniversary Day for such Elections, in the Year 1713. – Adding, that the only Reason of my not having my Name in the Printed List of the Society, was, because of my being beyond-Sea, and yett a Natural Born Subject, & so not capable of being inserted among the Gentlemen of other Nations. Your Secretary also, Dr. Halley, in the Philosophical Transactions of 1714. printed my Name, with an F.R.S. annexed unto it. Mr. Petiver did the Like, in his Naturæ Collectanea; And in his Letters to me, he had these Words, “Your Election succeeded without Opposition, and you was elected after the usual Method of Balloting.

Robert of Torigni's rewriting of the chronicles of Eusebius–Jerome and Sigebert occupies a considerable portion of the Chronography. However, with the exception of David Bates's seminal article, Robert's interpolations have attracted limited attention, with scholars generally stressing their derivativeness. While acknowledging Robert's purpose of continuing Sigebert as a ‘grand design’, Thomas Bisson similarly dismissed the interpolations and emphasised the value of the Chronography only for the period after 1147. What was Robert's design? To answer this question, it is necessary to turn to Robert's writing practices and the political context that prompted them. Robert conceived the Chronography following the rise of Henry Plantagenet as duke of Normandy in 1150, his recognition as heir and successor of King Stephen in 1153 and his coronation as king of England in 1154. By interpolating Eusebius–Jerome's and Sigebert's chronicles, Robert proceeded with a thorough rewriting of universal history, which reveals his strategies in elaborating a specific politics of time.

Robert of Torigni's interpolations in context (1139–54)

Robert completed the GND with the addition of book VIII shortly before 1139.4 Only afterwards did he embark on the Chronography, having acquired the two books which were to be the pillars of his work: Sigebert's chronicle, as extant in the Beauvais manuscript, and Henry of Huntingdon's Historia Anglorum. Robert requested Sigebert's Chronographia from Beauvais and, possibly, had a copy produced for the Bec library in the late 1140s when he still was a resident monk. While it is possible that Robert had already considered universal history-writing before the Beauvais manuscript came into his hands, the Chronographia was available at Bec only in the 1140s.

The shaping of a new colony

Before it was ceded to Britain in 1763 St Vincent had long been occupied by peoples whom Europeans called Caribs. More recently, in spite of a formal agreement by France and Britain to leave the island unsettled by either of them, according to Young's investigations, some 750 French had established themselves in the island. They had brought in 7500 enslaved Africans to cultivate crops such as tobacco, coffee and cocoa. They had not attempted to introduce sugar, with its heavy demands for capital to finance the elaborate machinery needed to process it and the purchase of hundreds of imported enslaved labourers from Africa.

The introduction of sugar into an island which seemed geologically and climatically to be eminently suited for it was precisely what the new conquerors intended and St Vincent quickly came to resemble other British Caribbean islands dominated by sugar. From 1765 land was sold in plantation-sized lots by a British government commission headed by Young's father, later to become the first baronet. These lots were taken up by inves¬tors from the British Isles or from other Caribbean colonies, who were extensively financed by British merchants, largely based in London. British slave traders quickly responded to a new demand, bringing in 555 Africans in 1766 and over 3000 in each year from 1771 to 1773. Large parts of the island's luxuriant woodlands began to be cleared.

Attempts to impose a new British order on the Caribs, which involved their accepting British sovereignty and being deprived of access to much land to which they asserted their right, were resisted by them.

The fundamental problem in studying medieval revolt is the nature of the available sources, which, as Claude Gauvard notes, ‘come to us almost exclusively from authorities and […] give us only the point of view of those holding power and the dominant social classes’. Juridical and narrative sources alike generally frame revolt activity as criminal or outside the proper conduct of political life: as a threat to, or an interruption of, the harmonious society of orders. For this reason, oblique or passing references to revolt in literature or other sorts of texts, in which the marginalising agenda found in most conventional political sources is secondary or absent, can help uncover a new side of these historical phenomena.

It is in this context that I turn to an odd little story in the form of a parable, found in the Mesnagier de Paris. This story, which I will call the parable of the Bourgeois Rebel's Wife, comes from the section on wifely obedience in Chapter 6 of the first of three ‘distinctions’. Most of this chapter's instruction on a wife's obligation to be obedient is delivered in the form of parables, or exempla, drawn from sources both popular and learned: biblical stories, didactic Bible commentaries, conduct books and folklore, as well as the author's personal experience. Unlike the more famous stories in this section of the Mesnagier (such as the Griselda tale), this parable has received little direct attention from scholars.

The surprising likeness between two adjacent hapax legomena in Grettis saga and two words and collocations in a similar context in Beowulf calls for a wider comparison: not only between Grettir's fights with the troll-wife and cave-giant in Bárðardalr on one hand, and Beowulf's fights with Grendel and Grendel's Mother on the other, in which the verbal parallels arise; but also between Grettir's earlier fight with Glámr in Forsæludalr and Beowulf's with Grendel in Heorot. Objections necessarily focus on genre, in which the two works differ, but there lies the key: what might shut down a theory of common mythic origin may open the door to an argument that one text adapts the other. Beowulf's fights with Grendel and his mother in Beowulf are found in the first two-thirds of the poem, in the long Danish preamble to his dragon-fight fifty years later as the king of Geatland. Grettir's fights first with Glámr and then with the troll-wife and cave-giant are found respectively before and after his fateful second trip to Norway. Before we go into the wider comparison, let us see what happens where.

Synopsis of Grettis saga

Grettis saga is the story of Grettir Ásmundarson of Bjarg. His saga was popular, surviving in five vellum manuscripts dated to between the last quarter of the fourteenth century and the early sixteenth, with some ninety paper copies from between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. Although there is nothing in the saga to say where it was written or compiled, this was probably in a monastery or convent where the hero's memory might be celebrated on behalf of the people who claimed descent from him or his neighbours.

Duringhis school years in Meißen, Lessing received the classical education prevalent in his time, with its heavy emphasis on Latin, ancient Greek, and related studies. He once wrote that at St. Afra, Theophrastus, Plautus, and Terence were his world, and he would have agreed with his brother Karl's statement that at that institution, which Karl later attended himself, pupils talked more about ancient Greece and Rome than about Saxony and spoke more Latin than French.1 Not surprisingly, Lessing's favorite subjects at the university in Leipzig were classical studies, archaeology, and philosophy. Works like his fables and treatises on the fable, Philotas, Emilia Galotti, and the Hamburgische Dramaturgie, to mention only a few, reflect different aspects of his lifelong devotion to the cultural heritage of Greek and Roman antiquity.

Indeed, Lessing long pursued antiquarian studies per se, from his unfinished “Abhandlung über die Pantomimen der Alten” (Treatise on the Pantomimes of the Ancients) of 1749 to his two volumes of Briefe antiquarischen Inhalts (Antiquarian Letters) of 1768 and 1769 and his plans for a third volume of 1777. Laokoon emerged from his preoccupation with art-historical and -critical/theoretical issues, particularly from his disagreement with the interpretation of the Laocoön-group advanced by famed contemporary art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–1768). Central among his interests was the question of the comparability of verbal and visual art.

The critical reaction to Laokoon in nineteenth-century America should be seen against the background of American thinking on art during the period. This, however, is far easier said than done.

Book IV takes to task the regular clergy, who indulge in a gluttonous lifestyle, acquisition of wealth, and sexual misconduct, all in flagrant violation of the precepts of poverty and chastity to which they have vowed obedience. Gower's first topic is monks and canons; his concern, the disparity between the requirements of the way of life they’ve sworn to live and their behavior. He sees extraordinary misbehavior among the members of the cloistered orders, the most of whom live hypocritically worldly lives while professing an ascetic rejection of the world's delights. Their commitment to gastronomic excess in food and drink is richly described within a harsh account of a monastic life characterized by ambition, backstabbing, angry misbehavior, and a general disregard of moral values. Remarking the notorious sensual excesses of many religious houses, Gower condemns especially the presence of women and advises monks to keep “she-wolves” far from the cloister (ll. 431–68).

Women who live in cloistered communities come in for somewhat different judgment, based upon an assumed lesser intelligence and a fragile nature, both to be taken into account when critiquing their weaknesses. Incapable of understanding Scripture properly and naturally weak, they can't be held to the same standard as men, but those among them who uphold chastity will nevertheless be rewarded with a special status in paradise because of the high valuation God places upon virginity.

Q. It appears that whatever you do, you give 100% of yourself. What are the various challenges that you have faced, especially health challenges?

A. I think that the first challenge is time, i.e., time versus ambition. That has been the greatest challenge that I have faced from the time I started playing. My ambition has been to learn music and to play it as well as I can. I am like a horse with a carrot in front: no matter how far and fast I go, I still can't reach the carrot. And yet, on the other side, I am not frustrated by that fact. Perfection is a very blurry concept because it exists only in one's mind and desires. So, I have always tried to play better, and therefore I’m always working against my limits.

A long time ago, I was given some great advice by one of our managers at Columbia Artists, Carl Dahlgren. I was still a young guy, and he told me, “Pepe, when you’re thinking about your career, be like the horses that have blinders on. The reason they have the blinders is so that they don't get spooked by any other horse. Every artist needs to have blinders so that they think only of the race they are running. Don't worry about anybody else.” So, I’ve never, ever been competitive. How could I be competitive with my own father? I could not possibly compete with my idol, who was to me and continues to be larger than life. How could I compete with that which is the essence and foundation of everything I have done? I could never compete with him. I would have lost the battle before it even began.

Joe Davies and Natasha Loges

If a casual reader were asked to name a woman pianist, the name ‘Clara Schumann’ would surely spring to their lips. She is the iconic figure whose fame has burgeoned since her death, especially since the 1970s and, more recently, through a spate of world-class recordings. However, it has long been recognised that Schumann was one of many women who made substantial careers in association with the piano, usually in some combination of being performers, composers, and teachers – and always in negotiation with tightly controlled gendered norms. As pianos were transported across the world, they often retained aspects of their associations with middle-class women's gentility, but also fostered forms of women's empowerment by opening up means of self-expression as well as, crucially, independent income. This volume surveys women pianists who were active across the globe between the mid-nineteenth to the late twentieth centuries. It explores how gender, history, and geography intersected in their lives. This period witnessed sustained interest in public piano performance, both onstage and in recording, against a backdrop of socio-political and technological change, from the 1848 European revolutions, through two World Wars, to the decline of imperialism and the rise of second-wave feminism in the West. As this book shows, conceptions of women as pianists cannot be uncritically championed, nor can a linear, universal trajectory of progress be mapped out.