If there is one thing that can be called a genuine breakthrough in the last half-century of Reformation studies, it would be the 'discovery' that the Reformation had a background. The reformers, all of whom were theologians, and a good number of whom had formal academic training in the discipline, emerged out of a theological landscape that profoundly shaped their horizons. Some elements from this late medieval theological bequest they rejected; some they appropriated; and still others they sublated by taking something old and fashioning from it something new. In other words, their ideas did not spring to life ex nihilo, or descend from above, or emerge full-blown from an 'objective' study of the Bible alone. They worked in the intellectual context of late medieval theology, and consequently, without some grasp of this context, there can be no adequate understanding of their theology. By today, this realization has had an impact on every area of Reformation studies.

One of the most prominent features of this landscape was its pluralism. The major theme of sermons preached at the papal court on the eve of the Reformation was that ‘Peace now reigns in Christian doctrine’. The research of the last half-century has made it increasingly apparent that nothing was further from the truth. The achievement of a pax theologica, proclaimed for whatever reason by these hand-picked sacred orators, was a chimera. The reality was that theological faculties at virtually all universities in Europe, from the venerable older institutions of Paris and Oxford to the newer German ones,were deeply divided into factions or ‘schools’ that differed not only on specifics but often also on fundamental approaches to the discipline.

One of the major developments on the critical scene in France in the last twenty years has been the emergence of genetic studies, a new branch of literary studies concerned with the processes involved in the production of literary works. The focus of genetic studies is not so much on the final, published, work but on the preparatory material - scenarios, sketches, rough drafts, fair copy, author's manuscript - known as the avant-texte (a term we shall use throughout this chapter). The rise of genetic studies has been associated with a process of renewal and enrichment in Flaubert studies. The works of Flaubert are increasingly viewed in relation to the work the author invested in their production, as reflected in a series of remarkably extensive avant-textes. The emphasis upon the avant-texte is not, however, without its detractors and, as we shall see in this chapter, there are a number of theoretical issues in genetic studies that have not been fully resolved. In particular, the nature of the relationship between avant-texte and the text itself has been the subject of much debate. For some, the value to be attached to material which, viewed from one perspective, was rejected in order to make way for the definitive version, is problematic. Avant-texte and text are, however, in a sense each dependent upon the other. The avant-texte can be constituted only because, as the term implies, there is a text that it precedes, but that text itself is the result of the process of production undertaken in the avant-texte.

On the eleventh of August 1823, Byron took a brief holiday from Turkish naval blockades and the already exasperating factional squabbles of the Greeks. With several companions, he had himself rowed across from his temporary base in Cephalonia to the adjacent island of Ithaca. There, he insisted that he was interested neither in classical ruins nor in fiction, whether Homer's or his own. 'I detest antiquarian twaddle', Trelawny reported him as saying. To which he added, 'do people think I have no lucid intervals, that I came to Greece to scribble more nonsense? I will show them I can do something better.' Offered a tour of supposed Homeric sites on the island, Byron resisted - only to wander off when the expedition nevertheless occurred, and seek out for himself, after a considerable climb, the cave in which Odysseus had reputedly secreted the treasures given him by the Phaeacians. Meeting with an old shepherd, he immediately identified him with Homer's loyal swineherd, Eumaeus, and invited him to share their picnic lunch. Byron liked Ithaca: 'If this isle were mine', Trelawny records him as exclaiming, 'I would break my staff and bury my book - What fools we all are!' (HVSV, p. 421) Trelawny's reports can never be entirely trusted. This, however, registers as a characteristically Byronic set of Shakespearean echoes and allusions, managing as it does to run together the cynical glee of Puck inA Midsummer Night's Dream ('Lord, what fools these mortals be!' (iii.ii.115)) with The Tempest: Caliban's 'This island's mine' (i.ii.331), Gonzalo's 'Had I plantation of this isle' (ii.i.144), and most explicitly, of course, Prospero's renunciation of his magic in Act v. But Byron has reinterpreted (as well as slightly misquoted) the last. Prospero was preparing for return to Milan and his dukedom. Byron, twisting Shakespeare's words, imagines for a moment that it might be possible to jettison both his military responsibilities and his poetry, not to mention Italy and England, and never leave Ithaca at all.

Famously dubbed the 'novelist's novelist' by Henry James, Flaubert has preoccupied almost every generation of writers since the mid-nineteenth century. From the seclusion of a large family home on the banks of the Seine near Rouen, the so-called hermit of Croisset raises the art of prose narrative to new levels and reveals its modernity. As he stomps up and down the avenue of lime trees in his garden, sometimes in the company of his friend and mentor Louis Bouilhet, Flaubert bellows out the sentences of Madame Bovary, to the amazement or amusement of the folk in passing river craft. This is the legendary gueuloir, or 'yelling place', where the novelist puts his writing through the test of sound, rhythm and vocal fluidity, subjecting it to the final quality control. For, as he writes to his mistress Louise Colet on 24 April 1852, 'prose was born yesterday, that is what we must tell ourselves. Verse is the quintessential form of ancient literatures. All the combinations of poetry have been tried out. But as for prose, far from it' ['la prose est née d'hier, voil à ce qu'il faut se dire. Le vers est la forme par excellence des littératures anciennes. Toutes les combinaisons prosodiques ont été; faites, mais celles de la prose, tant s'en faut' (Cor. ii 79)]. And so, as he opens up new pathways in technical and formal experiment, Flaubert also heightens awareness of the complexities and the possibilities of the novelist's craft.

After the French Revolution, Paris emerged as Europe's foremost political center and indisputable cultural capital, and the city began to attract composers both for occasional visits and for extended residencies. The Académie Royale de Musique (the Opéra), the most prestigious of the three major opera houses, held a particular allure. Combining splendor, technical innovation, and quality of performance, it became the institution in which any ambitious composer hoped to score lasting success. A number of Italian composers in particular made Paris their temporary or permanent home: Luigi Cherubini, Gaspare Spontini, and Gioachino Rossini wrote some of their most important works for the Opéra. Gaetano Donizetti and Giuseppe Verdi continued this tradition, the former with La favorite (1840) and Dom Sébastien (1843), the latter with Jérusalem (1847, an extensive reworking of I lombardi, 1843), Les vêpres siciliennes (1855), and Don Carlos (1867). By the time of Don Carlos, Verdi had mastered French grand opera to such a degree that Rossini declared him the genre's leading representative. Referring to the possibility that Verdi might again compose for the Opéra, Rossini asked the publisher Tito Ricordi to “tell [Verdi] from me that if he returns to Paris he must get himself very well paid for it, since – may my other colleagues forgive me for saying so – he is the only composer capable of writing grand opera.”

A burgeoning interest in music theory beginning in the 1960s led scholars to settle new empires, among them nineteenth-century Italian opera. Increasing sophistication of operatic analysis has been indebted to what Thomas Christensen has called “presentist” music theory, for which the craft of the critic/theorist provides a key to principles of order and value, and, by extension, an analogue to technological progress. In the early days of the academic bull market for Verdi's stock, even Pierluigi Petrobelli, a commentator not aligned to the Anglo-American theoretical establishment, observed:

By suggesting that the “determining power” of “formal principles” is nested in a web of “complex relations,” Petrobelli posits a fertile line of investigation that seems partly to attribute the “amazing richness” of Verdi's scores to immutable laws – by implication, deeply buried and ingenious ones – waiting to be discovered by perspicacious scholars with the right tools. Is there a secret method similar to that “discovered” by Alfred Lorenz in the works of Wagner, one which will reveal the craft behind the magic?

From the beginning, the libretto (“little book” because of its small printed format) played a fundamental role in operatic structure and style. Until the mid-eighteenth century, a dramma permusica was considered a literary text, judged according to the canons of spoken theatre. It led an autonomous life, and its music constituted an aspect of staging, one that could change over time. By the nineteenth century, however, this relationship was inverted: the music became more important, and composers intervened in writing the libretto, assuming the role of “musical dramatists.” This trend culminated in Germany with Wagner and in Italy with Verdi, who did not write his own librettos but influenced their genesis profoundly. Through this reversal, nineteenth-century librettos lost importance as a literary genre. They were compared unfavorably to their literary sources (especially when these were the greatest examples of dramatic literature by Shakespeare, Schiller, and others) and criticized for unrealistic plots and purportedly bombastic, antiquated language. In the last thirty years, however, literary critics as well as musicologists and those in theatre studies have recognized the nonliterary values of the libretto and have reappraised its function in musical dramaturgy.

In considering Verdi's librettos, it is useful to distinguish between dramatic, poetic, and literary design. The fact that Verdi intervened in the first category most and the third least implies that they should be considered as being of decreasing importance.

Between the middle of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth, the Reformed theology of John Calvin and several of his predecessors and contemporaries developed into a significant international movement that has come to be known as 'Calvinism'. As is typically the case in history, the movement was named, not by its proponents, but by its detractors, who took the name of its most famous leader as the basis for a label. The movement itself was in fact fairly diverse - bounded by confessional norms but guided by the thought of a group of founders and formulators rather than by a single person, and developed on an international scale by numerous theologians and exegetes, none of whom took it as their central task to reproduce Calvin’s theology in other times and places. Given this diversity in origin and in development, it is more accurate to speak of 'the Reformed churches' or of 'the Reformed tradition' than of 'Calvinism'.

ROOTS AND BRANCHES – PERSONS AND PLACES

The Reformed or Calvinist tradition is rooted in the Augustinian tradition of the Western church and, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, found its antecedents not only in the works of Augustine himself but in the medieval Augustinian tradition. This is not to say that one must reify a ‘new Augustinian school’ of thought (schola Augustiniana moderna) as some scholars have tended to do, but rather that the Reformed tradition looked to the theology of grace as mediated and developed by a host of medieval thinkers – Aquinas and Scotus among them, as well as theologians of the Augustinian order such as Giles of Rome and Gregory of Rimini.

What next?

Or, to frame the question somewhat more precisely, what problems in historical theology are likely to engage students of the Reformation in the twenty-first century? The short answer, of course, is that historians will continue to be fascinated by many of the same problems that fascinated their predecessors in the twentieth. There will always be fresh generations of scholars who will be captivated by the theology of the great figures of the sixteenth century - whether Luther or Calvin or Teresa of Avila - and who will devote their careers to resolving unresolved issues in the interpretation of their thought.

Popes were often reluctant to take the risks inherent in the convocation of a general council. They were painfully aware that the Council of Constance had deposed three competing popes and installed a fourth. By the time of Luther, however, it was generally conceded, even by theologians who were jealous defenders of papal power, that under certain circumstances the convocation of a general council might be the church’s only recourse to resolve a crisis that had proved impossible to resolve in any other way.

In an oft-quoted assessment of Shakespeare's Desdemona, Verdi described her as “not a woman, but a type. She is the type of goodness, resignation, self-sacrifice. They are creatures born for others, unconscious of their own egos.” Shakespeare's play, of course, provides ample material for this sort of interpretation, as characters extol her beauty, virtue, selflessness, and other merits. And as James Hepokoski has documented, in recreating Desdemona for their own Otello (1887) Verdi and his librettist Arrigo Boito were probably influenced by nineteenth-century critical traditions represented by August Wilhelm Schlegel and by Victor Hugo, who viewed Desdemona as “saintly” and as “a spiritualist and almost amystic,” and also seem to have drawn upon such late nineteenth-century literary themes as decadentismo devotional iconology and the femme fragile. Of course devout heroines in peril were nothing new to Verdi, the Leonoras in Il trovatore and La forza del destino being prime examples, while heroines falsely accused had long been stock-in-trade, and Violetta (La traviata) provided a precedent for the physically fragile heroine. So by emphasizing Desdemona's purity, naïveté, and vulnerability, Verdi and Boito adhered to an aesthetic involving the cathartic destruction of a sympathetic female lead with which their audience could readily identify.

Like his predecessors, Verdi relied on an elaborate system of conventions – termed the “customary forms” (“solite forme”) of set pieces (or “lyric numbers”) by Abramo Basevi in 1859 – for organizing introductions, arias, duets, and finales. Gradually narrowing the diversity of approaches found at the end of the previous century, composers such as Gioachino Rossini, Vincenzo Bellini, and Gaetano Donizetti had “standardized” designs sufficiently that even a provincial critic such as Carlo Ritorni, writing in 1841 about Bellini, could formulate accurate templates for the most extended version of each form. However, while adhering to shared outlines composers also revised internal details for new dramatic effects, a process that Verdi embraced in his own operas. Whereas Rossini's lyric numbers had summarized relationships presented in the scena or reacted to its events, Verdi's take an increasingly expository role in the foreground action, weakening the traditional polarized relationship between an active scena and static lyric number. Dramatic continuity is paralleled by continuity of musical style: the more frequent appearance of lyrical melody in the scena and declamatory singing in lyric numbers allows more flexible expression and stronger characterization in both sections. Innovative treatment of individual movements within the lyric numbers also enhances dramatic momentum, undercutting traditional dichotomies between active and reflective passages and weakening musical disjunctions. Verdi made the presence of these forms less obvious and adapted them to more diverse dramatic circumstances by varying the internal designs of movements, omitting movements, interpolating additional sections (particularly in extended ensemble scenes), and changing the complement of characters within scenes.

'I love history, madly. I find the dead more agreeable than the living. Where does the seductiveness of the past come from?' ['J'aime l'histoire, follement. Les morts m'agréent plus que les vivants. D'o ù vient cette séduction du passé?' (Cor. iii 95)] The fascination with history that Flaubert evokes in this letter of 1860 lasted throughout his life and colours all his work. Although at first sight his writings may seem to fall neatly into two categories - those set firmly in the France of his own time (Madame Bovary, both versions of L'Education sentimentale, Un coeur simple, Bouvard et Pécuchet) and those set in the distant past (most of his juvenilia, Salammbô, La Tentation de saint Antoine, La Légende de saint Julien l'Hospitalier, Hérodias) - this chapter will argue that a concern with the past, and how we make sense of it, runs through all of them. If he was seduced by the past, Flaubert also recognised that historians, like novelists, must sift and shape their material and find a perspective through which to view and reconstruct the world. He was acutely aware of the fluid and subjective nature of history, and his gradually evolving views on how to represent the historical past are fundamental to his conception of the creative process.

The years 1816-17 saw a major shift in the direction of Byron's poetry. This began in Childe Harold iii, where Byron turned away from the vision of extreme human suffering that had dominated his poetry since 1812 to explore other areas of human experience and consciousness. Here began the movement towards Don Juan, as Byron set his sights not on a future of painful memory but on the redemptive possibilities opened up by the human capacity to forget.

A glance back at the Tales will help to situate Childe Harold iii in its immediate literary context. In the Tales, the heroes are emotionally blasted by some devastating event. They are temporarily sustained by thoughts of revenge, but once this is accomplished they find themselves in a ‘dreary’ emotional ‘void’ (Giaour, 958) where the capacity to feel is crushed, the mind is a ‘leafless desart’ (Giaour, 959) and the future is a stretch of ‘journeying years . . . where not a flower appears’ (CHP, iii.3.8–9). But the Tales are studies of the power of painful memory to simultaneously devastate and, in a sense, redeem. The heroes find in their ability, indeed compulsion, to remember the pain that devastated them the capacity to still feel and the vacant bosom discovers a ‘pang’ (Giaour, 940) that makes it less vacant. Yet in remembering what devastated him, the hero subjects himself once again to its devastating power, locking himself in a tortured life of ‘sleepless nights and heavy days’ (Parisina, 547). Emotional death is escaped only through intense, indeed potentially fatal, pain. Childe Harold iii turns away from this Pyrrhic victory.

Flaubert is now recognised as one of the greatest travel writers. His travels may not have been of the same order of magnitude as those of, for example, the mighty Humboldt, whose accounts of South America, distilled into the Tableaux de la nature, Flaubert found so captivating. Yet he travelled far more widely and intensively than other major writers of the period who drew on travel as generously as he did for inspiration, writers such as Baudelaire, Fromentin, Gautier and Nerval. However, unlike most travel writers of the time, Flaubert did not publish any of his accounts, with the exception of one fragment from Par les champs et par les grèves, which does not look like travel writing at all. He held the genre in very low esteem: it was 'triste' (Cor. ii 327), 'facile' (Cor. iii 96), a poor, shabby sub-species of literature, which he had learned from his own experience was also almost 'impossible' (Cor. iii 561). According to his friend and travelling companion, Maxime Du Camp, Flaubert wrote travel accounts only in order to toughen up his style ['corser le style']; 'there was no difference in his mind between writing a travel account and reporting on some trivial event: both were low-grade literature' ['écrire un voyage ou rédiger un fait divers, pour lui c'était tout un, c'était de la basse littérature']. This, though - if we take a broader view of what constitutes 'style' than Du Camp did - is precisely what makes them the masterpieces they are. Even when Flaubert confines himself to note form, as in the Voyage en Italie, the Voyage en Orient and Carthage, the notes are so suited to their subject and to the writer's project, they are so acute, subtle and evocative, that they put apparently more 'finished' accounts by other writers in the shade.