Introduction

Archibald Pitcairne (1652–1713) was one of the most signifcant Scottish intellectuals of his age. He was an innovative and infuential physician, a talented writer in Latin and Scots, and an accomplished mathematician. In his medical career, he rose rapidly after graduation from the University of Rheims in 1680, becoming a founder member of Edinburgh's Royal College of Physicians in 1681, and being appointed as one of three professors of medicine in Edinburgh's town college in 1685. He served as professor of the practice of medicine at Leiden University in 1692–3. His publications developed an iatro-mathematical theory of medicine, winning him international acclaim but dividing Edinburgh's community of physicians. Pitcairne had a parallel literary life, writing elegant Latin verse and hilarious vernacular satires. Moreover, he studied mathematics in the company of David Gregory (1659–1708), professor of maths at Edinburgh's town college, with whom he was among the frst promoters of Isaac Newton's Principia. After the revolution of 1688–90, Pitcairne was a bibulous Jacobite and critic of the presbyterians in control of the Church of Scotland; as a result, he had many detractors as well as admirers.

Leonardo Padura Fuentes (1955–) is one of the most celebrated Cuban writers of his generation. His works of fiction have been translated into eight languages and won prestigious literary prizes over the world. While Padura's fame did not result into his exile from Cuba, where he continues to live in the Vibora house of his childhood, it came with the evolution of his writing style, from non-fiction and journalism to historical and detective novels. Those last two categories, in which Padura excels, are so closely connected that his latest detective novels have been praised for their contribution to the historical novel genre. In this chapter, I will map out and analyse the evolution of the character of Mario Conde, with whom Padura cut ties with the Cuban policíaco revolucionario, and paved the way for the rise and success of the Cuban neopolicial in the late 1990s.

After the detective series of the ‘four seasons’ series (Pasado Perfecto in 1991, Vientos de Cuaresma in 1994, Máscaras in 1997 and Paísaje de Otoño in 1998 – translated as Havana Blue, Havana Gold, Havana Red, Havana Black), Padura reoffended; but this time with a Conde quitting his official state policeman job to work as a trafficking book seller in Havana, still solving murders but on personal invitation (La Cola de la serpiente (Grab a Snake by the Tail) and Adiós Hemingway in 2001; La neblina del ayer (Havana Fever) in 2005).

The last two Conde novels, Herejes (Heretics, 2014) and La transparencia del tiempo (The Transparency of Time, 2018), while keeping Conde as a protagonist, weave the detective narrative into a historical emplotment, which spreads across medieval Europe to contemporary Cuba.

Music Director at the Interim Theater

Smetana had long prepared himself for the position of music director at the Interim Theater. Since his time in Göteborg, he had regarded it as his main goal. With the position now secured, his success hinged on introducing the principles and artistic standards he had criticized his rival Maýr for lacking. However, he soon encountered formidable opposition—a conservative clique that considered Italian opera, with its extensive coloratura, the cornerstone of the operatic repertory. He had to implement reforms cautiously, navigating aesthetic, technical, and financial obstacles. Despite these challenges, he solidified his team and led them with boundless enthusiasm.

Departing from Maýr's routine, workman-like approach, Smetana introduced new methods and spirit into the theater. His distinctive conducting style and his attitude toward the personnel had already made an impression during the production of The Brandenburgers in Bohemia. These qualities were instrumental in securing him his current position. Rather than imposing tyranny on the orchestra, he worked collaboratively, showing genuine respect for their work and treating each musician as an individual. In rehearsals, he started by explaining the opera's nature and significance, then explored it with contagious enthusiasm, drawing everyone along with him. No mistake in entry or attack escaped his notice; he tapped his baton on the desk to offer polite and constructive feedback, often revisiting passages with meticulous attention to tempo and dynamics.

At that time, the orchestra was modestly sized, perfectly suited to the dimensions of the Interim Theater. Despite its small size, it included outstanding musicians, such as Antonín Dvořák in the viola section. During critical moments—such as in the early 1870s, when Smetana's adversaries sought to oust him—the orchestra rallied spontaneously behind their conductor. The seeds of such intrigue had been sown as early as 1868, during performances of Smetana's third opera, Dalibor.

Early Iberian Traditional Lyric

Old popular Hispanic poetry encompasses a multilingual tradition of Castilian, Catalan, Galician, and Portuguese non-narrative brief compositions. Although these texts originated in a rich oral tradition, in which they were transmitted across generations by word of mouth, court musicians and poets, influenced by literary-musical trends, adopted and adapted these popular poems to the written poetic conventions of the time. Largely, it is through these adaptations that we have come to know this tradition.

However, alongside these documented pieces, there exists an oral tradition that has persisted through the centuries, only coming to light through extensive field research conducted in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This research has uncovered a number of songs that have remained alive in the collective memory, revealing the enduring vitality and variability of these compositions. Songs circulated between the oral and the written mediums with remarkable versatility. The written compositions, such as songs and poems, were not confined to the pages of manuscripts but were performed by the troubadours and jongleurs, thus maintaining their oral character even after being documented. Conversely, the oral traditions, once thought to be ephemeral, found permanence through their transcription into written forms, enabling their preservation and dissemination across time and space. This interplay between orality and textuality suggests that these pieces possess a hybrid existence, operating simultaneously as oral performances and written texts. A comprehensive study of old Hispanic popular lyric requires an approach that recognises this mixed orality (Finnegan 1992), as the interdisciplinary research carried out in recent decades demonstrates.

A compendium or encyclopedia devoted to a single composer is the ultimate accolade from the scholarly community. After the complete works, the biographies, the critical and source studies and the scholarly conferences, a single volume consisting mainly of dictionary-style entries relating to various aspects of the life, works and reputation is a convenient way of summarising the accumulated scholarship devoted to a great composer. In Henry Purcell's case, this volume appears 30 years after the tercentenary of the composer's death in 1995, so it is a good moment to take stock. 1995 produced a spate of new Purcell biographies, none of them detailed and authoritative enough to replace Franklin B. Zimmerman's classic but ageing ZimPur – to use the bibliographic code explained below. Our brief Biography is intended only as a stopgap: there is an urgent need for a new full-length treatment, taking account of recent archival work and source studies, and in particular deploying a more sophisticated understanding than in the past of Purcell's milieu and his relationships with his family, colleagues and patrons. However, readers will notice that we frequently cite chapters from the two volumes of scholarly essays produced for the tercentenary, PurStu and PMHP, the latter the proceedings of a conference held at New College, Oxford in 1994.

A few years later, in 2000, Robert Shay and Robert Thompson revolutionised our knowledge of Purcell's manuscripts with ShaMan, work subsequently built upon by Rebecca Herissone in HerCre; in her invaluable online appendix HerCat; and in a series of ground-breaking articles, notably HerFow of 2006.

Upon its initial release, Robert Gluck's 1994 novel Margery Kempe was met with equal parts disgust and scorn by a bewildered reading public. While ostensibly a retelling of the fifteenth-century Book of Margery Kempe, Gluck parallels the waning gay romance of Bob – a thinly veiled representation of Gluck himself – with that of Margery Kempe and Christ. The result is a novel that is neither purely historical fiction nor clearly autobiography. A 1994 Publisher's Weekly review wryly declares that “Margery Kempe lives up to neither its potential nor its premise […] Whatever Gluck's intention, he has failed.” In the same year, an anonymous review in Kirkus voices great displeasure regarding having read Margery Kempe: “Gluck pushes the envelope way too far as he attempts to use the history of a failed, would-be saint from the 15th century to explore his own romantic obsession in the 1990s.” Holding little back, the reviewer ultimately finds Margery Kempe “[n]umbingly frenzied, frustrated, and futile.”

Unlike the queens who ruled England afer her, Mathilda lef behind a tombstone that utterly ignores her children. The text of her epitaph celebrates her royal genealogy and her activities as ruler – especially the construction of Holy Trinity – while the maternal element of her identity is completely marginalized. It is revealing that this contemporary representation of Mathilda does not communicate that she had any ofspring at all.

While the omission indicates that other identifying features took precedence, Mathilda gave birth to nine children, which had a signifcant efect on her life and rule.

A Programme of Diversity

To begin with a word of caution: in the “Remarks on the Novel” that Döblin published in 1917, he firmly rejected the notion that the style of a narrative text was there to be noticed and admired in its own right, likening it rather to the hammer with which a sculptor chisels out the shape he wishes to present to the world. The style of a literary text, in other words, was merely the instrument with which the distinctive character of a subject, or a situation, or an episode, is conveyed to the reader. And yet, as we noted in our introduction, no less a discerning reader than Jorge Luis Borges was moved to endorse Döblin's skill with that stylistic hammer twenty years later, in 1937, when he described him as the most versatile writer of his time. A similar point was made more recently by the German novelist Ingo Schulze when he recalled that the stylistic diversity of Döblin's narratives had helped him to see beyond the notion that, to be successful, literary authors needed to cultivate a style that was unmistakably their own.