Flaubert is the foremost nineteenth-century French innovator in prose style. But he had pioneering predecessors and like-minded contemporaries: the century was one in which the best writers treated prose as an experimental medium. Its relationship to poetry was both manipulated in practice and discussed in debates that became ideological as well as aesthetic. There is no sharp chronological dividing line. In the first decade or so of the nineteenth century, prose works such as Constant's Adolphe (1816) were still using a spare, maxim-studded style that owes much to the deft economy and bareness of the best seventeenth- and eighteenth-century writers. However, a new kind of prose had been emerging as from the end of the eighteenth century: Rousseau's Rêveries du promeneur solitaire (1782) has been hailed as the work that began to move towards the Romanticism of the early nineteenth century, not only because of its often wistful introspection but also because of the fluid, rhythmic style in which it celebrated both thought and 'nature'. And in the same period that Adolphe was being composed, Chateaubriand was writing lush narratives like René (1802), reliant on a vocabulary designed to evoke an undefined awe ('immense', 'confused', 'majestic'), on sighing cadences, on self-pitying exclamations and on extended similes. Whilst some of these similes are successful, others strike us now, at least, as clumsily overelaborate (such as one in which Chateaubriand compares the setting sun to the pendulum of the clock of the centuries slowly oscillating in a golden fluid). However that may be, Chateaubriand did have a 'poetic' conception of prose, and his stress on the imprecision of feelings (le vague des passions) bore fruit.

Huldrych Zwingli was born in January 1484, just six weeks after Luther. His life and ministry developed differently from Luther’s and some of the differences in context, education, and experience are factors in explaining the differences in their ministry and theology. Swiss patriotism influenced Zwingli as a boy, as Swiss humanism influenced him as a young man. His education in Vienna and Basel introduced him to scholasticism as well as to humanism, with the study of the writings of Peter Lombard, Thomas Aquinas, and Johannes Duns Scotus. The influence of the old way (via antiqua) contrasts with the influence on Luther of the modern way (via moderna). Zwingli was ordained in 1506 and served for a decade as priest in Glarus. His patriotism was expressed in his earliest surviving work, The Ox, an attack on Swiss mercenaries fighting for foreign powers. His experience of war as a chaplain deepened this opposition, especially the battle at Marignano (1515), in which thousands died fighting as mercenaries against the French. While at Glarus, Zwingli met Erasmus, who had a decisive impact on him. His crucial turning 'to Christ and to scripture' dates from this period. As a result, his reading shifted from the classics to the fathers, not least Augustine, and scripture.

After two years in Einsiedeln, a great centre of pilgrimage and Marian devotion, Zwingli was called to Zurich. His ministry there began on 1 January 1519 and lasted till his death in the battle of Kappel on 11 October 1531. In that period his influence went beyond Zurich to other cities in Switzerland and south Germany. His writings often reflect his engagement with supporters and opponents, especially conservatives and radicals in Zurich and Luther in Wittenberg. His early death meant that his theology was mediated in large part by others, especially Bullinger.

Fifteenth-century Europe viewed Jan Huss and the Hussites as heretics, while the latter perceived themselves as reformers. Conflict was inevitable. Huss was burned at the stake in 1415 and crusades were dispatched to suppress his recalcitrant followers. Despite these adversities, Hussitism aimed at reforming church and society. This reform programme codified its goals in the 'Four Articles of Prague', promulgated in 1420: free preaching of the Word of God, communion in both kinds for all believers, elimination of ecclesiastical secular power, and the punishment of serious sins. Free preaching existed virtually everywhere in Hussite Bohemia and utraquism - both bread and wine for all believers - began in 1414. Divesting ecclesiastical wealth became a consequence of the Hussite wars, and by the 1420s an office was established to deal with punishing sin. Across the broad expanse of Hussite theology, these 'Four Articles' functioned as a reform focus. Hussite reform can be fully understood only within an eschatological consciousness. This awareness can be detected principally within the radical dimensions of the Hussite movement.

In its earliest stages, the fifteenth-century reformation in Bohemia was neither doctrinal nor theological, but moral. This can be traced to a reforming tendency in the fourteenth century associated with Jan Milíč of Kromĕříž, Matĕj of Janov, and others. Huss stood in that tradition. Eventually, doctrinal reform and theology merged with moral renewal in an effort to reform the church ‘in head and in members’. Reform advanced along several theological fronts, but three are especially important: sacraments, scripture, and soteriology. Before turning to these issues, it is important to note that the guiding principle for Hussite theology and reform lay in an idea called ‘the law of God.’

It would be a mistake to suppose that all theologians who remained loyal to Rome during the first three decades of the Reformation were exclusively engaged in polemical activity against the 'new' gospel. For many academic theologians, perhaps for most, business would have gone on much as usual. But at the very least, especially for those in lands most affected, the religious upheavals altered fundamentally the context in which their theology was done. At the same time, their ranks were swelled considerably by those without academic appointments. Bishops, chaplains, members of religious orders lacking university connections - even kings, dukes, and lesser laypeople - all took up the pen in defence of traditional religion. For Catholics as much as for Protestants, theology became too important to be left to the divines.

The widely differing backgrounds of the Catholic controversialists alert us to the fact that their theological approaches differed as widely, and it is not surprising that the clamour of voices that would make themselves heard in the debates at Trent (Thomist and Dominican, Scotist and Franciscan, Augustinianist and Augustinian, to name but the loudest) could also be heard in earlier decades. It is no longer possible for us to speak of ‘pre- Tridentine Catholic theology’ in the singular, as Lämmer could in the middle of the nineteenth century; rather, we have to deal with a number of theologies and their exponents.

What can a novelist today learn from Madame Bovary? Everything that is essential to the modern novel: that it is art, created beauty, a construct that produces pleasure. As in poetry, painting, dance or music, this is brought about through formal success, which is the determining factor in the novel's content.

Before Flaubert, novelists sensed intuitively that form played a key role in the success or failure of their stories. Instinct and imagination led them to give stylistic coherence to their themes, to organise point of view and time in such a way that their novels could give an appearance of autonomy. But only after Flaubert does this spontaneous, diffuse and intuitive idea become rational knowledge, theory, artistic consciousness.

Flaubert was the first modern novelist, because he was the first to understand that the main problem to be resolved when writing a novel is that of the narrator, the person who tells the tale – the most important character in any story – who is never the author, even when the narrator uses the first person to take on the name of the author. Flaubert understood before anyone else that the narrator is always an invention. The author is a being of flesh and blood, the narrator is a creature made up of words, a voice. While an author’s existence precedes, succeeds and exceeds his tales, a narrator lives only when telling them, and only lives to tell them. A narrator lives and dies with the tale, and the two are interdependent. One cannot exist without the other.

Albrecht Dürer famously declared that even his expert hand could not flesh out the mind of Melanchthon. In many ways Melanchthon’s thought has remained similarly elusive to modern scholars. The protégé of Johannes Reuchlin, whose precocious talents in the humanities much impressed Erasmus, seems by pedigree and training to embody the classicizing concerns and values of a humanist. Indeed, his influential educational reforms of schools and universities (for which he earned the title Praeceptor Germaniae, 'teacher of Germany') were firmly based on the study of the classical languages, rhetoric, and dialectic. As a colleague and ally of Luther, he also elucidated Reformation principles in the Loci communes, conducted church visitations and diplomatic missions, and composed the public declaration of Lutheran doctrine, the Augsburg Confession. Despite his mild and irenic demeanour, he openly supported capital punishment of heretics such as the Anabaptists and Michael Servetus. He could also be a fierce and devastating polemicist, leading Erasmus to exclaim that he was 'more Lutheran than Luther himself'. And yet, that was precisely what Melanchthon’s erstwhile pupils and colleagues disputed in the last years of his life - for the 'gnesio-Lutherans' such as Nikolaus von Amsdorf and Matthias Flacius Illyricus, Melanchthon was no follower of Luther.

The sheer density of visual information and the pressure placed on the reader to be an observer, to behold the real, make Flaubert's work a model for pictorial representation in fiction. Flaubert is not unique in the history of the nineteenth-century novel for his valuation of the visual. But in his work the visual asserts itself as the single most reliable carrier of signification. The work rests on the power of the visual to sway us or to convince us of the accuracy, realism and truth-telling merit of its representations. Whether or not it ultimately delivers on the meaning it promises, the visual in Flaubert offers nonetheless an open invitation to interpretation and discussion. The centrality of the visual is as true in the realistic novels like Madame Bovary and L'Education sentimentale as it is in the romantic works like La Tentation de saint Antoine and Salammbô. Both styles are marked by a high degree of visuality and both exemplify the dominance of the visual in nineteenth-century literature and culture.

Within Verdi's long life and career, Italy witnessed two Wars of Independence (1848–49, 1859–60) and a social and political revolution: in 1861, the previous collection of small absolutist states became a single constitutional monarchy which subsequently enjoyed decades of rapid economic and civic development (particularly in the north) resulting from bourgeois liberalism. The theatrical world, with Verdi in a leading role, experienced corresponding changes: by the time of Falstaff, almost none of the system in which Verdi began his career – one that belonged essentially to the previous century – remained intact. To understand better Verdi's influential relationship to the opera industry and its gradual restructuring within a more modern environment before and after Italian unification, we first must examine the operatic world of 1825–40.

Although the peninsula was united by little more than an elite language written and spoken by educated citizens (and then only on formal occasions), the economic and cultural phenomenon of the “opera in musica” had become a central element of Italian identity and increasingly homogeneous since the mid-seventeenth century. Operatic style was based on widely known literary, musical, and theatrical conventions; while they differed from genre to genre and changed gradually over time, they nonetheless satisfied audience expectations and accelerated the composer's output. Operatic performances were widespread, and a growing number of theatres were open at various times of the year in both cities and smaller towns: eighty-two could boast working theatres in 1785–86 compared with forty at the end of the seventeenth century; one hundred and seventy-five different opera seasons were offered in 1830, around fifty more by 1840.

Martin Luther’s followers first defined themselves as a church through the Augsburg Confession of 1530, which was composed by Luther’s Wittenberg colleague Philipp Melanchthon to explain the introduction by certain princes and cities of the German empire of ecclesiastical reforms in accord with Luther’s theology. This confession not only served as a legal document defining the teaching of the churches of these governments for the emperor Charles V but also quickly became a guide for public teaching for Luther’s adherents. Melanchthon’s defence of its contents in his Apology of 1531, the Schmalkaldic Articles of faith (composed by Luther in 1537 as an agenda for confession at the papal council called in 1536), Luther’s Large and Small Catechisms, and the Formula of Concord of 1577 were brought together with the Augsburg Confession and the ancient creeds as the summary definition of the faith for Lutheran churches in the Book of Concord of 1580. Seldom cited in theological argumentation during the period, these documents nonetheless provided the legal and theological parameters within which Lutheran theologians expressed and explored their faith. These documents mark the path of Lutheran theological confessionalization.

The earliest Verdi criticism, chronicling the successes and failures of his first operas, appeared in music journals, at first on the Italian peninsula and eventually throughout Europe and the Americas. La gazzetta musicale di Milano held a particularly important position as the house journal of Verdi's principal publisher, Ricordi. As early as 1846, the Gazzetta reprinted a series of reviews by B. Bermani, hailing the young composer – who at the time had written only half a dozen operas – as a major figure who stood out among his contemporaries through his “exquisite taste, an untiring elegance, and [a] marvelous instinct … for effect.” During the following decade, Florentine music critic Abramo Basevi wrote an extensive series of articles about Verdi's operas, which he collected and republished in 1859 as Studio sulle opere di Giuseppe Verdi. Basevi's detailed and systematic discussion of the early and middle operas (through Aroldo) has exerted considerable influence on modern Verdi criticism. Notably, Basevi was the first critic to suggest two different styles or “maniere” in the composer's works, with Luisa Miller as the decisive turning point.

Verdi enjoyed a reputation as the undisputed living master of Italian opera during the latter part of the nineteenth century, and during this period the quantity of critical writings about his music continued to expand prodigiously. New and fertile territory for music criticism included such diverse topics as his changing musical style, historical position, and the relationship of his music and aesthetic ideals to those of Richard Wagner and the new verismo composers. These topics engendered lively debate that was not always favorable to Verdi, since many critics, particularly outside Italy, held fast to the belief that Wagnerian aesthetics were intellectually superior to the “popular entertainment” of Italian opera.

The writings of Antonio Gramsci might seem a strange place from which to launch a consideration of the vexed topic of Verdi's ties to the Risorgimento, particularly since Gramsci disapproved of opera and never had anything kind to say about Verdi. He did, however, possess a visionary understanding of the role of culture in nineteenth-century Italy, one all the more revealing for its unfriendliness to Verdi. Gramsci saw the popularity of opera in Italy as both a substitute for and an impediment to the development of his preferred vehicle for Romantic sentiment, a popular literature that demanded a solitary and reflective mode of consumption diametrically opposed to the experience of the opera house. His suspicion of opera was aroused partly by ties he perceived between operatic song and an oratorical style that reminded him of fascist speechifying: elsewhere in the Prison Notebooks he lamented the “operatic” taste of the “man of the people,” who seeks in poetry only the singsong rhymes and “hammering of metrical accents” that he enjoys in popular oratory. It was this willingness to be swept away by the “operatic,” Gramsci argued, that militated against the formation of what he called a “national-popular” style of literature in Italy and against a truly popular Romanticism.

In accepting a commission from the Teatro La Fenice, Venice, in 1843, Verdi was breaking faith with La Scala, for which he had composed all his previous operas, and for which he had been approached to provide another for the following season. It proved a decisive departure: leaving aside Giovanna d’Arco (1845), arguably no more than a nostalgic gesture, and a revised version of La forza del destino (1869), the composer's grand homecoming to Milan would occur only after he felt secure enough to impose his own rules, with the revised Simon Boccanegra (1881), Otello (1887), and Falstaff (1893). Moving to Venice meant more than adjusting to a smaller stage; it called for a kind of personal drama for which there had been no space in works such as Nabucco or I lombardi. This in turn deprived Verdi of the rich fund of reference associated with that specific theatrical milieu, forcing him to take on the personality, as it were, of a quite different establishment. Indeed, the imprint of La Fenice can be felt at all stages of the genesis of Ernani, from censorship of the libretto to the distinctive vocal style of the score.

The success of Ernani at its premiere on March 9, 1844 – in spite of the sets not being ready, and the tenor having lost his voice and the soprano her sense of pitch – seemed testimony that the opera would stand on its intrinsic qualities. Confirmation came with its warm reception at many other opera houses, and Ernani greatly enhanced Verdi's reputation at the national and international level, establishing it as second only to Donizetti's among Italian opera composers. Verdi’s own theatrical instincts can plausibly take most of the credit: if the idea of the subject first came to Count Alvise Francesco (Nani) Mocenigo, director of La Fenice in 1843–44, it was Verdi who, exercising the right to choose his own libretto for the first time, rejected a series of suggestions (including Catherine Howard, Cola di Rienzi, I due Foscari, The Bride of Abydos, King Lear, Cromwello, and Allan Cameron) and became enthused only when Victor Hugo’s Hernani was mentioned.

Byron hated an author who was 'all author' and he himself was anything but that. He has been a public figure whose private life has been the subject of intense interest since the publication of Childe Harold Cantos i and ii made him 'famous overnight'. He continues to be the subject not only of scholarly biographical interest but of popular films and television documentaries. To politicians, his political views remain of intense interest, while his sexual mores not only continue to be analysed but have been appropriated by various interest groups to serve their own ends. He is a cultural villain, an anti-hero, and a hero pure and simple. He has the status of a national hero in Greece because of his participation in the Greek War of Independence, and he is also a cultural hero in places as far apart as Russia and Japan. So we have sought in this Companion to place him first of all in the context of the narratives surrounding his own life, and then in the particular circumstances of that life, picking out three obvious areas of particular interest - his relationship to the world of books, to politics, and to sexuality. Only then have we attempted a closer focus on some of Byron's major works. In an output as large as that of Byron his poetical works alone fill some seven volumes. We do not attempt to be comprehensive in this section, but many texts not picked up here are referred to in the other two sections of the volume. Once some familiarity with the issues of the works, including Byron's very considerable contribution to English prose, has been achieved, we have moved on to broader literary and cultural contexts and focused there on Byron's ambivalent relationship to Shakespeare, his massive impact on European literature, and the strange way in which he can be seen in the light either of his attachment to the socially centred poetry of the eighteenth century, or of his prefiguring of postmodernism.

Modern scholarship identified a variety of reform movements within what continues to be called the Reformation. Besides the major distinction between Protestant and Catholic, or geographical distinctions (such as the English Reformation), one encounters socio-political designations, such as the princely, the city or communal reformation. Of course, the older, more purely theological distinctions between a Lutheran and Reformed (Calvinist) Reformation have lived on as well. The notion of a 'Radical Reformation' entered the historiography with George Williams' encyclopedic work by that title in 1962. His basic distinction between 'magisterial' and 'radical' reformers has shaped the nomenclature to the present. 'Magisterial' designates those reformers who received support from or collaborated with temporal authorities, be they civic or princely. The radicals, by choice or default, received no such support. Williams' third edition (1992) used both theological and social categories to designate radicals. Thus evangelical rationalists, antitrinitarians, Anabaptists, spiritualists, as well as rebellious peasants, appear under the rubric of radical reformation. Given the topological sweep of his work from Spain to Poland, its erudition and generous spirit, Williams' work remains a classic.

Williams’ daunting work is also an impossible act to follow. This essay will be more restricted, focused primarily on the Anabaptists, who make up the core of studies on the radical reformation. But even this shrinkage of focus faces the challenge of diversity. The uninitiated may well despair as to the variety of crusading, pacifist, evangelical, antitrinitarian, sabbatarian, communistic, apocalyptic,mystic-spiritualistic and biblically literalistic Anabaptists. Any attempt at distilling theological essence from such manifest variety seems at best a hazardous undertaking.

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Martin Bucer (1491-1551) came from an artisan family in Alsace - then part of Germany - at Séléstat (Schlettstadt), south of Strasbourg. After a twenty-eight-year career, becoming a major reformer, he died exiled in England. Reared by his grandfather because of the migration of his parents, Bucer acquired a progressive schooling at the local prestigious humanist Latin school of Schlettstadt. Further education was guaranteed on entering the Dominican order there in 1507. Ordained at Mainz in 1516, he demitted his vows in 1521, becoming a secular priest. From 1517 till 1521 he had studied at Heidelberg University, also acting as tutor and lector in the local Dominican seminary. He had, in addition, developed an enthusiasm for Erasmian Christian humanism. Encountering Luther at the Disputation of Heidelberg in 1518, Bucer experienced a religious and theological seachange. He perceived Luther as providing a cutting edge to what Erasmus advocated; both were lights of the gospel, showing the way from a depleted church, an atrophied theology, and a disorientated spirituality to the purer faith and love of original Christianity. Anxiety about the Cologne Dominican inquisitor, Hoogstraten, to whom he had been reported, helped Bucer to decide to flee the monastery in early 1521. Subsequently, his prospects were uncertain, though he networked with sympathizers with the humanist and evangelical causes, Erasmians and ‘Martinians’. He was in the vicinity of the Diet of Worms when Luther was sentenced, obtaining his release there from the Dominicans at the time. Having secured the patronage of knights such as Sickingen and Hutten, during their religious and political agitation, Bucer was provided in 1522 with pastoral charges at Landstuhl, near Kaiserslautern, and then Wissembourg (Weissenburg) in northern Alsace.