No one, perhaps, captured the paradoxes of late nineteenth-century music more cogently than Eduard Hanslick, who opined in the Viennese Neue Freie Presse on 26 February 1885 about Anton Bruckner, heir to the symphonic legacies of Beethoven and Schubert, and the chromatically sodden edifices of Wagner: ‘It remains a psychological enigma, how this gentlest and most peaceable of men … at the moment of composing turns into an anarchist, who mercilessly sacrifices everything one would call logic and clarity of development, unity of form and tonality’. As century's end approached, Bruckner's music exuded the autumnal Romanticism of the recent past and whirling ‘progress’ of the present. Many found an irreparable disconnect between his rustic Weltanschauung and ability to produce colossal symphonies Hanslick likened to strangulating boa constrictors. A provincial organist from Upper Austria, Bruckner seemed out of place in cosmopolitan Vienna. Even his successor Gustav Mahler described him as ‘a simpleton – half genius, half imbecile’ (halb Genie, halb Trottel).

Dominating Bruckner's personal life were odd, obsessive behaviours, in particular the need to count – bricks in a building, leaves on a tree, stars in the heavens. These enumerating disorders affected his devotional life as well.

Bibebant uinum, et laudabant deos suos aureos, et argenteos, et aereos, ferreos ligneosque et lapideos.

…auerei mihi uidentur dii: qui saeculari ratione compositi sunt; argentei: qui habent eloquii uenustatem et rhetorica arte constructi sunt; qui autem inferunt fabulas poetarum, et uesustis utuntur traditionibus, habentes inter se multam uel elegantiae uel stultitiae differentiam: isti uocantur aenei et ferrei; qui autem penitus inepta proponunt: lignei appellantur et lapidei.

They drank wine, and praised their gods of gold, silver, bronze, iron, wood, and stone.

Thus Jerome explains the idols worshipped at Belshazzar's Feast in Daniel 5:4. Like Belshazzar's dinner guests, we will meet many gods of gold and silver in this book. While this is a book about the Classical Greco-Roman gods in medieval Ireland, Jerome makes a natural starting place. Some of the Classical and Irish mythological figures that will be discussed in this study are interpreted, like Belshazzar's gods, as idols made of precious metals. Some are depicted as the rulers of lost Golden Ages, such as Saturn in Ovid's Metamorphoses. Others are god-like Otherworldly figures festooned with gems and shining garments.

In London in August 1709, a royal brief was ordered to pay for maintenance of the Palatines. Briefs took the form of letters, which were distributed to clergy and churchwardens, who countersigned the back keeping note of amounts raised. In theory, they were returned for approval by a master of the court of chancery within two months of completion of the collection. In practice, briefs were often issued during one visitation and collected during the following, meaning some time could elapse before all funds were deposited in chancery. From Elizabethan times to their abolition in 1828, a separate business had grown up around the collection of briefs for worthy causes, involving middlemen or undertakers, who worked on commission. Henry Walker of Staffordshire was the chief undertaker for briefs between 1686 and 1720. He offered to deal with the Palatine briefs at a reduced commission of 6d. per brief, as opposed to his normal rate of 9d. In August 1709 Walker gave a receipt on collection of 12,660 of 13,000 briefs printed by the queen's printer. The remaining 340 briefs were sent to be laid with weekly bills of mortality, whereby briefs were used at local level to assist those impacted by sudden death. Queen Anne's brief for the Palatines described how

the great wants and necessitys of several thousand Germans of the Protestant religion who being oppressed by the exactions of the French in their own country have fled for refuge into this Kingdom and must have perished had not Her Majestys generous and seasonable Bounty subsisted them.

An early medieval schoolboy used a stylus to sketch a crude image of his teacher in the margin of the Regula pastoralis he or his peers had annotated for sense. Frustrated students carved slashes in the margins of another copy from present-day western Germany, marking the ends of long Latin periods. Teachers from northeastern France erased errant student notes and doodles in yet other copies, while leaving the more useful ones for subsequent readers. And a scribe in a Welsh schoolroom untangled the Regula pastoralis with a developed system of symbolic marks, the same one grammarians used to construe the complex syntax of Latin auctores like Arator and Iuvencus. Meanwhile, King Alfred of Wessex, likely through a scribe recorder, bemoaned the fallen state of contemporary Latinity. He proposed a solution that featured the translation of this same text into the vernacular, and the education of eligible youths. Accounts of the Alfredian Pastoral Care have resisted framing the translation as consonant with Latin education – not unreasonably – but the proximity of these classroom copies of the RP to the clerics that supported the Alfredian intellectual programme allows us to do so no longer. Archbishop Plegmund and his Mercian companions, Asser of St David’s, John the Old Saxon, and Grimbald of Saint-Bertin, named either in the ‘Prose Preface’ to the Pastoral Care or in Asser's Vita Alfredi, represent some of the same locales – Wales, northeastern Francia and the Old Saxon language region – from which classroom copies of the RP emerge.

When Europeans arrived in the second half of the nineteenth century in the region, interlacustrine diplomacy had decades of experiences with handling incoming foreigners. Its rulers regarded Europeans, Khartoumers and coastal traders undoubtedly as foreigners. When Speke asked Rumanika how he saw the Europeans, he told him he had initially assumed monsters were arriving at his borders and he had to be very careful how to treat them. For Rumanika the Europeans were strange beings. What to expect from them, he could not know. How to handle them was a difficult question, they obviously did not know how to behave in diplomatic encounters. As these strange beings were approaching their borders, interlacustrine rulers used their diplomatic channels to obtain more information. Rumanika immediately sent his envoys to Mutesa, his powerful neighbour, to inform him about the arrival of Speke; Mutesa thereupon sent his emissaries to gather more information. Some years later, when British missionaries arrived in the late 1870s in the region, Mutesa asked neighbouring rulers of Busoga about their opinion regarding this new type of travellers. He later told the missionaries that he had initially regarded them as a danger to his throne. Mutesa's successor Mwanga was equally suspicious about the arrival of the first representatives of the IBEAC in Busoga in 1889. The kabaka invited Zibondo Namubongo Kisira, ruler of one of the Busoga principalities, to confer about the aims and schemes of the British.

In this book we have enquired into the ‘economy’ of musical amateurs and dilettantes in early nineteenth-century Vienna, understood broadly as a socio-cultural domain of interrelated human processes and transactions. It is this economy that supported amateurs to establish a sense of artistic citizenship, actively developing the cultural world around them. Central to the eighteenth-century definition of musical amateurs is that they engaged in music for love or enjoyment rather than money. The term ‘dilettante’ was mainly used in music contexts to signal a musician who was not employed as such. But if amateurs and dilettantes were not getting paid, what did they have to offer, and what were they getting in return?

The turn of the nineteenth century saw a new class of society, the bourgeoisie, seeking to distinguish and define itself. In the previous chapters, we have encountered various ways in which amateurs benefitted from music-making: in education and personal development, social connection and social standing, leadership and a sense of inclusion and well-being. These benefits were crucial to the middle classes in establishing their place in society and feeling included and valued, especially during the social and political uncertainty of the time.

Social capital – as defined by Pierre Bourdieu – is the non-monetary benefits derived from the various relationships among people who work and live together. It allows various classes of society to function effectively and develop a shared sense of identity, and confers status and belonging. For the middle classes, social capital was everything they held to be indispensable to defining themselves and establishing social cohesion. As we have demonstrated throughout the book, the salon was an ideal space to foster social capital via the sharing of ideas, conversations, and the cultivating of connections.

To Dr. John Woodward

Sir,

The Philosophy of Generation, was become one Subject of a short Contemplation with your Servant.

I thought, Among the Vegetables, the least Part of that which we call, The Seed, is really so. The True Seed lies in so Little Room, that it is not visible to the Naked Eye: The Rest serves but as a Lodging for it, and for its most proper Nourishment and Expansion at the first Opening of it. But in that little Room there lies the whole Plant, in all the True Parts of it; which is afterwards evolved, and extended, and filled up with its Adventitious Nutriment, until it be carried as far as the original Stamina, are capable. And then, the Growth stops. But perhaps towards the Period of the Growth, so weak may be the Stamina, that according to the Strength of the Soyl in which the Plant is lodged, the Growth may be more or less, tho’ but a little, varied.

And then I thought, why may not the Seeds of Animals, have the like said of them? Yea, The Microscopical Inquisitions, have made it more than probable; That the True Seeds of Animals, floating in their Suitable Vehicle, have, lying in a Space much less than the Naked Eye can discern, the whole Bodies of the Animals, even to all their Nerves and Fibres:

which afterwards Grow as aforesaid, until their original Stamina can be no further carried out.

In an era that pre-dates modern health crazes such as Cross Fit and Pilates, and some time before modern medicine began drawing clear connections between certain activities and expected physical outcomes, how did active individuals understand the notion of exercise, and what were their goals? The question may seem simple, but it ties into a larger, complexly embattled notion of bodily normativity that pervaded all aspects of early modern life while also being undefined and arbitrary from example to example. In short, there is a more important gain to be had from studying early modern exercise routines: aspirational body goals point to important aspects of what early modern men and women wanted their embodiment to say about themselves. While it is certainly true that embodiment in the period was heavily filtered through the hyper-idealized neoclassical representations of the body, as seen in wide-ranging texts, from anatomical treatises to “discovery” narratives, those notions of embodiment were unattainable for many early moderns. While unattainability surely slowed early modern men from trying to conform to those standards about as much as it does to today's male workers-out, we can recover more practical aspirations related to exercise routines, and doing so tells us something about what, pragmatically, men hoped to achieve by working out. An examination of how early modern exercise built up the man's range-of-motion, with the larger goal of attaining the amorphous ideal of “effortless skill,” shows us how early modern men who possessed this type of embodiment relied on the metaphors that undergirded it as an avenue to self-fashioning.

Jon Ceander Mitchell and I have been friends for nearly forty years. We have been members of the same professional organizations, have given papers at the same conferences, and have supported each other in our separate fields. I was a member of the Board of the International Society for the Research and Promotion of Wind Music (IGEB) that in 1990 published Mitchell's first book, From Kneller Hall to Hammersmith: The Band Works of Gustav Holst, as volume 11 in their Alta Musica series and was given to every member as a benefit of their membership.

Having had the pleasure of seeing his tome published in such a distinguished series, you would think Mitchell would close the book on Holst and move on to other projects. He did, writing works on Holst's friend and fellow composer Ralph Vaughan Williams and music critic Philip Hale, but he also continued to amass new information on Holst to the point where he felt the thirty-five-year-old book needed to be expanded and updated. I am sure the reader will be amazed at and pleased with the new information presented here, in a reference book that all serious band directors and music educators should have.

Some years ago, a distinguished band director of a major American university remarked that band music started with Holst's First Suite in E-flat. Although that shows a complete ignorance of the history of serious band music that can be dated back even to the French Revolution, not to mention the wealth of music written for Harmoniemusik, the earlier form of band music, it does show the reputation Holst had in the Anglo-American band world, a reputation the author of this volume hopes to revitalize.

In what remains one of his best-known essays, ‘The Context, Performance and Meaning of Ritual: The British Monarchy and the “Invention of Tradition”, c. 1820–1977’, David Cannadine described how elaborate royal ritual in Britain is typically seen as dating back many centuries, but is in fact a more recent invention. Cannadine's essay showed how, although we often think of British institutions as old, some are not. Like royal ceremonies, national parks are relatively recent arrivals on the British historical scene. The first four – Peak District, Lake District, Snowdonia and Dartmoor – were established in 1951, whereas Yellowstone in the United States, the world's oldest, dates from 1872, and Europe's first park, Sweden's Sarek, from 1909.

Why did Britain's national parks appear so late? The usual explanation is that by the time the first national parks in other countries were being envisioned in the late nineteenth century, Britain had little undeveloped or publicly owned land. And even after the British government took the first steps towards the creation of British national parks in the interwar years, first the Depression and then the Second World War intervened, limiting resources and diverting attention. These things, to be sure, were factors, but they only partly explain the delay. Here, I will argue that the first British national parks did not appear until the early 1950s because the forces which led to their creation only aligned after the Second World War, due to the social changes which the war unleashed.