Introduction

I

The ‘Letter about the soveraigne and supreme power’ has until now been seen as the most novel articulation of royalist political theory in Scotland. Robert Wodrow ascribed it to the Marquis of Montrose, an attribution followed by subsequent historians until David Stevenson demonstrated convincingly that it was more than likely the work of Archibald, 1st Lord Napier. Stevenson argued that the Letter was essentially a summary of Jean Bodin's The Six Books of the Commonwealth, and placed it within the context of French infuence on Scottish political thought. He argued that its absolutism and its failure to engage with the covenanters’ religious arguments for resistance made it unsuitable as a propaganda piece and that consequently it was rejected by the Plotters. However, a hitherto overlooked political treatise held in the Laing collection and catalogued under the title ‘Observations upon the divine right of kings’ bears a striking resemblance to the Letter in both subject matter and content.

It is dated from the seventeenth century and though the author is not named within the treatise itself, ‘Lord Napier’ has been handwritten next to the entry in the Laing hand list, and ‘? By Montrose or Napier’ on a slip of paper in the inside cover. The manuscript is a bound quarto volume, a little smaller than A6 in size, and there are 100 pages of text written in a fair hand. This may suggest it is a transcription or was intended for publication. The handwriting does not match that of a petition which is holograph of Montrose. The binding at times obscures the text in the guttering, and creases, variations in the density of the text and smudges render a few words illegible, and there are pagination errors.

Henry did not write again until 11 January, busy with his reading room report and other matters. Two hundred and fifty copies of the report were finally printed by 1 January and arranging the distribution to all the subscribers and members, and to different friends whom he knew would be interested, such as Bicheno, King and Wolff at Hamburg (who was thinking of doing something similar), took up a great deal of time. ‘On the whole I think it gives satisfaction; Evans, Highmore, Magrath (the committee men) have all come for more copies, the latter particularly is very busy puffing the Institution in Hampstead and in Town.’ He muses that all authors must, like him, be ‘very nervous and a little vain’, and imagine that everybody is thinking of their work. The only objection that reaches him is to the teaching of Latin, ‘which I stand up for stoutly, and believe to be the best thing in the place’. His main object was ‘to inform people clearly of what had been tried and succeeded, so that they might know what could be done in this way for the working classes if they have the zeal’.

Four months pass before his next entry on 27 April, at Sevenoaks Common where he has taken Eliza, who, though not exactly ill, is ‘in a weak state’, and needs a rest from the bustle of home and children. They are in the same lodging as eight years ago when Ellen was a baby, a very quiet and beautiful place. They stroll on the Common, read, and take an occasional drive in a donkey chaise visiting the pretty local villages.

My Country (Má vlast)

Shortly after the premiere of The Secret, an idea began to crystallize in Smetana's mind about completing his symphonic cycle. At that time, the cycle comprised only four symphonic poems: Vyšehrad, Vltava, Šárka, and From Bohemia's Meadows and Groves—the last of which he had composed three years earlier. According to a contemporary source, Smetana, having completed this symphonic “tetralogy,” shifted his focus primarily to opera, resisting popular demand for more works of the “tetralogy type” that had been so well received. Still, his tireless diligence and prolific nature eventually yielded, at least in part, to the public's desire for more of this music. The idea of extending the cycle had lingered with him for some time. On January 9, 1879, he wrote to Hostinský:

Although the chronological order of each part of this symphonic cycle is known, the genesis of this unique work remains obscure. Dalibor published an account of its origin, but it was based on conjecture, leaving the true nature of the creative process veiled. However, drawing from Zelený's allusions, insights from other friends of the composer, and Smetana's own correspondence, we can partially reconstruct its development. The first mention of Smetana's desire to compose Vyšehrad and Vltava appears in November 1872, following the completion of Libuše.

The medieval Christian author-scribes, to whom we owe much of our knowledge of Old Norse mythology, framed their narrative materials using explanatory and interpretive models prevalent in their time. Euhemerism is a particularly powerful model that prompts us to question where the lines are drawn to distinguish divinity from humanity and what those lines consist of. It seems clear that the dualism that sharply distinguishes between the divine and the human and envisions a vast impassable gulf between the two – a dualism that is prominent in the Judeo-Christian religious worldview and saturates the Western mentality today – was less discernible in the pre-Christian period in Scandinavia. During that time, the divine was conceived as both an immanent quality and a transcendent one, capable of revealing itself in many forms. When one encounters this strict bipartition between godkind and humankind in the mythology that has been preserved in our main sources, chances are that one is faced with highly selective and mediated material that has undergone a complex process of modification and adaptation, refined to the extent that it represents a literary mythology rather than a lived religious system. This mythology unfolds in a separate story world with no real place for human beings. When comparing Norse mythology to other mythologies, it is striking that the mythological sections of the two Eddas show little or no interest in and no concern for the human world and human affairs. Instead, the gods are mainly preoccupied with interactions among themselves and with the jǫtnar and other beings in the mythological universe. Part of the challenge for anyone wishing to study these materials is to ground them, bringing them back to earth and tethering them more securely to human concerns. The dearth of explicit theological reflection in the materials from the pre-Christian era means that one is forced to tackle this question of divine immanence through earlier non-mythological sources, as has been done in the preceding chapter, or perhaps through later sources that are unsympathetic to the idea and find it incompatible with their notions of divinity.

Theater Life in Prague

It was the dream of Czech patriots to establish an independent Czech theater, as they believed its absence hindered the development of Czech drama and opera. Although Czech performances were permitted twice a week in the Estates Theater, these productions were often suspended during periods of political unrest. In the period before the 1848 revolution, the Bohemian Diet owned two building sites in Prague, and in 1845, Prague citizens petitioned to have one of these sites dedicated to the construction of a Czech theater. This request was granted to an organization formed on May 3, 1845, which was tasked with coordinating all necessary arrangements for the theater.

This pivotal date in Prague's theater history also marked the rise of František Ladislav Rieger, a key political figure who would later influence Smetana's career. Born into a wealthy miller's family, Rieger combined his legal studies at the Prague university with a keen interest in economics and politics. At the time, the Society of Industry in Bohemia was the only Czech organization in Prague allowed to engage in political activity. Initially limited to nobility, the Society began admitting ordinary citizens in 1843, and Rieger quickly became its leading figure for the next twenty-five years. Rieger, with his youthful energy, stirred public interest in the idea of an independent Czech National Theater as early as 1844. His influence extended beyond organizational efforts into the artistic realm. By 1848, he had become a central figure in Czech political life, advocating for a new constitutional charter and championing the revolutionary principle that legislative power should originate from the people.

Wagner had finished the poem of the Ring by the end of 1852. He first read Schopenhauer almost two years later, in October, 1854, when he was working on the composition of Die Walküre, and The World as Will and Representation was, he told Liszt, “like a gift from heaven.” He wrote to Röckel that Schopenhauer's philosophy “completely demolishes the nonsense and charlatanism of the Fichte-Schelling-Hegel view,” and that it repudiated what he now thought of as the “heartless unreasoning optimism” of Judaism. The philosopher had somehow known what he himself had intuited but not recognized, that the Ring was a demonstration of the nothingness of all existence, and Schopenhauer's ideas had led him to “the only adequate key-stone to my poem in keeping with the whole idea of the drama, which consists in a simple and sincere recognition of the true relations of things and complete abstinence from the attempt to preach any particular doctrine.” Yet he left the text of the dramas and their all-important stage directions unchanged. With respect to the Ring Schopenhauer offered little, it seems, but an after-the-fact interpretation, making Wagner the first of the many commentators on his work.

The suddenness of this conversion calls for an explanation. Wagner’s own thinking had looked back to the philosophy of the first quarter of the century, and he may well have felt an affinity for Schopenhauer because Schopenhauer was, in reality, firmly in the tradition of early German idealism. The philosopher's persistent polemics against “the Fichte-Schelling- Hegel view,” as Günter Zöller says, “appear more as deliberate attempts to distance himself from competing approaches and to more starkly highlight his own philosophical contributions than might have been warranted by the fact of the matter.”

To the extent that it is about anything at all, Heiner Goebbels's theater installation Stifters Dinge (Stifter's Things) is as much about the atmosphere in the theater as it is about the things on the stage. In a press release upon its 2007 premier, the Théâtre Vidy in Lausanne, Switzerland, described it as a “composition for five pianos with no pianists, a play with no actors, performance without actors—one might say a no-man show.” Music from mechanically played pianos is interspersed with sounds from archival recordings, while lights illuminate a pool of dry ice, from which smoky tendrils curl into the air. The Théâtre Vidy says of Stifters Dinge that the things (they list “light, pictures, murmurs, sounds, voices, wind and mist, water and ice”) do not function in a merely illustrative role, but rather become the protagonists. The installation is, in that sense, uncanny, but its uncanniness is an atmospheric effect because it arises out of the interplay between the solid objects, components of the atmosphere as a geophysical system, and both pictures and sounds. Goebbels himself says that his aim was to afford the audience “die Entdeckung des freien Raums” (the discovery of free space). “Free space” is not empty space because the theater is not a vacuum. Rather, what the “discovery of free space” means in practice is that the atmosphere in the theater is both a part of and a result of the composition.

7 February. Sunday morning. My Journal has been discontinued for more than two months, my mind having been for a great part of the time too much filled with dismal views of our business to like to set down my thoughts. At times it oppressed me so much that I could only sit brooding, or at best occupy myself with a novel … I have generally found sufficient interest in my Reading Room occupations and other active employments, but even then, I was afraid to collect my thoughts and sit down to write. Just at present things look a little brighter, as a little of Hinck's money has come, there is some prospect of more, and the Lisbon business seems inclined to revive from its six month's almost total stagnation. The state of things is still dismal enough, but there is no good dwelling on it. We have no reason to despair of being able to earn a moderate livelihood, and more we need not ask for. At Hampstead we continue to endeavour to make every possible retrenchment without actually altering our mode of living; whether we shall reduce the number of our servants from three to two, is a point not yet decided upon; we could then hardly keep up what are called decent appearances in our present house. At Broad St. Buildings we have made still greater changes having parted with all our full paid clerks except Fitton; Henry Eddis leaves us on Lady Day.

Scholarly discussion of medievalism is no longer limited to heterocentric and androcentric approaches. However, at the intersection of these two concerns, there remains a neglected area of inquiry: how do women, whose cultural productions can be profitably understood within a “lesbian” and/or “queer” framework, respond to medieval texts and tropes? This chapter responds by examining two case studies from the modernist period: Gwen Lally's medievalist pageant held at Wroxton Abbey in 1928 and (John) Radclyffe Hall's novel The Well of Loneliness, sometimes referred to as the “bible of lesbianism,” published in the same year.

The upheaval of the conquest provided fertile soil for Mathilda of Flanders to expand the privileges and responsibilities of queenship. Amongst these developments was her participation in justice. Mathilda's judicial activity was truly woven throughout her reign. It consumed a signifcant portion of her time and was a defning factor of her queenship. Tat Mathilda acted as a royal judge is not a matter for debate; evidence is found in Domesday Book and the monastic chronicles surveyed below. The subject of this chapter is how she came to be there when previous English queens were not. The following discussion suggests that Mathilda drew from two sources that encouraged her to imagine herself as a judge: one practical and one ideological. The frst was the legal praxis of Norman female abbatial authority with which she was familiar. In Mathilda's duchy of Normandy, some women – particularly abbesses – handed down verdicts in their own manorial courts. This stands in contrast to eleventh-century English courts that were based on the assembly of the hundred, shire or county. The English structure allowed less room for lordly women to create manorial courts over which they had control. The second was the ideological foundation of the Ottonian empresses for whom Mathilda of Flanders was named. Ottonian traditions created a space for imperial women to preside over legal conficts. The imperial identity adopted by her mother may have predisposed Mathilda to assume prerogatives her English predecessors did not. Just as in earlier chapters, Mathilda can be found occupying unexpected spaces. This chapter shows her in the seat of justice.

The unrestrained circulation of foreign texts and ideas was seen by English authors from the mid-seventeenth to the early eighteenth century as a central factor in enabling the crisis. Significant portions of book sales catalogues and inventories of private libraries of individuals belonging to the English educated elite consisted of books written and/or published in Europe, which came to England mostly in Latin, or in French vernacular via the Dutch Republic and France, and which were often translated into English to satisfy a growing demand for foreign books and ideas. However, not all these books exerted the same impact on English intellectual culture. The analysis of English debates shows that there were just a few authors and books that most recurrently appear in contemporary discussion about the crisis and that generated serious apprehension for their actual or potential impact on a rapidly expanding readership. In this chapter, I will focus on the reception of the ideas and works of Descartes and Spinoza, and examine the contemporaries’ perception of their impact on English culture. Other names appear in English accounts of intellectual change, such as those of Galileo, Socinus, Gassendi and Bayle, and developments in disciplines other than natural philosophy, such as biblical scholarship, were accused of generating the crisis. But the main targets of apologetic literature in England were the French and the Dutch philosophers.

Although the philosophies of Descartes and Spinoza differ in many aspects including, most notably, the ‘mind-body problem’, the two authors were often coupled as promoters of a new mechanical strand of philosophy that, according to their early modern detractors, had potentially disruptive consequences for the churches and organised religion.

There is, at the heart of Adalbert Stifter's Bunte Steine (Motley Stones, 1853), a fundamental emptiness. This might seem like an odd thing to say. For the most part, Stifter's world is painstakingly, perhaps even lushly described. Natural landscapes, social relations, and physical objects are depicted with a care that some might consider excessive. The plotlines are driven by activity that runs the gamut from the measured to the manic, from calm routine to strife and disaster. The text offers us a bounty on the level of both action and description, but something still seems to be missing.

For Walter Benjamin, this absence is a fundamentally linguistic one, a form of what he calls “reticence” [Verschwiegenheit]. Because Stifter is cut off from “the essence of the world” [das Weltwesen] that is language, he cannot give a persuasive account of the relationship between the natural world and the moral one. The homologies that he tries to establish between the two remain restricted to the visual register and therefore mute. Because it is inarticulate, Stifter's world is also disarticulated, for an unbridgeable gulf separates material impressions from the forces that are responsible for them.