Introduction

This manuscript is in the National Records of Scotland, among the papers of the Hume of Polwarth family, Berwickshire, the Earls of Marchmont. It is a satirical poem, date uncertain, but records accurately local events in Melrose in Roxburghshire in early 1682, and was probably written close to that time. Although a poem is highly unusual as a piece of historical evidence, this particular poem presents a vivid insight into the local community, and is both corroborated by more conventional historical documents and enhances the picture that they present.

The poem is written on two folios made from folding one large sheet of paper, three sides used, each with double columns of tightly written text, 333 lines in total. The handwriting is sometimes difcult to read, though the rhyming nature of the poem (successive pairs of lines rhyming) is helpful when tackling mystery words. In structural terms the poem is split into sections, depending on whose account or viewpoint is being presented, for example ‘Earle of Roxburgh to Blindlie’, ‘John the Clerk to Bailzie Blindly’, and so on. The language used throughout is English with some Scots vocabulary, and Latin expressions are used occasionally.

The manuscript is attributed to ‘Vincent Winge’, not the name of any poet known today. Vincent Wing (1619–1668) created a well-known series of almanacs, which continued to be published long after his death. His name would have been familiar to many, and could easily have been adopted as a pseudonym.

In her last charter, dated sometime before her death on November 2, 1083, Mathilda of Flanders constructed something along the lines of a will.

By the divine clemency of the eternal father, I, William, the leader of the Normans, to the true of the most blessed of mother church wherever they are distributed, faithfully to be known to all who believe in Christ, grant them not to be deprived of the inheritance of blessedness, but to exist as worthy co-heirs of God, who are placed in the midst of this unstable life, those things which they seem to possess by hereditary right, in the places consecrated to God, in the necessary continuous prayers of those vacant there, fulflling their duty to charity, arrange to share them by hereditary emancipation. Faith, confrmed by the apostle's authority as well as by the promise of the Lord, is directed to that which must be undoubtedly believed. For the Apostle says, ‘Indeed you are heirs of God, but joint heirs with Christ.’ For in the gospel, when the Lord foretold the future reward of those who had performed good deeds, he designated those who persevered with a worthy army to be co-heirs of the heavenly joys, saying, ‘And they shall inherit eternal life.’ Terefore, we shall not consider those who write down their father Christ as heir to their earthly labors to be deprived of the eternal inheritance of the celestial kingdom.

THE RING CYCLE takes between fourteen and fifteen hours to perform. Its length is its most obvious feature, something which seems to be both unnecessary to point out and unimportant to consider. As Tovey said, however, the scale of a work is by no means irrelevant: “Macaulay once shrewdly observed that the size of the Great Pyramid was essential to its sublimity, ‘for what could be more vile than a pyramid thirty feet high?’”1 The same is true of the Ring. Its sublimity is inseparable from its length and from the necessity of performing it over four successive days (or over a week, with days off in between each part). Attending a complete cycle usually requires something like a pilgrimage, which is exactly what Wagner intended, and its parallel and intersecting narratives, its allenveloping musical texture, and its constant linking of present moments to past moments contribute to the sense we often have that we are inhabiting the work rather than merely watching it. Characters and events are with us when we arise the morning after a performance and live with us until we rejoin them in the afternoon. The Ring becomes an experience, a period in one's life on which one can look back and contemplate.

The cycle is structured and coherent as life is not, but just as “life lessons” trivialize real life, the Ring is trivialized when it is reduced to morals or to lessons of varying banality about the values one should adopt. It is not hard to pick out plot points and dialogue to support the idea that it is about the superiority of love over power, but that opposition must be set among others—separation and self-surrender, individualism and community, finitude and infinitude, stasis and transformation, concept and reality—and all these must be understood as existing only provisionally, as artifacts of our self-separation within a world which is profoundly one. Whether or not we attain that understanding, in turn, defines two different worlds and the shapes of human life which are appropriate and possible within them.

In her revision of Paul Hazard's classic work on the Crisis of the European Mind, Margaret C. Jacob anchored it in the political experience of the English Revolution, particularly in the ‘increasing emphasis upon natural law, contract theory, classical republicanism, even, although very rarely, Utopian communism’ that characterised the work of the Levellers, Hobbes and James Harrington. In a similar fashion, Frederick Beiser argued that the period from the Reformation to the Enlightenment in England was characterised by the emergence of ‘the sovereignty of reason’, which he ascribed mainly to the work of the Cambridge Platonists. The works of Jacob and Beiser exemplify two overlapping approaches to the understanding of intellectual change in England in the period here considered, which have been very influential on subsequent scholarship. Basically, these approaches have stressed the essentially insular dimension of the crisis of English culture and its radical departure from the modes of Reformation and humanistic thought, which culminated in the emergence of the Enlightenment. However, both interpretative strands overlook the way in which English authors engaged with the wider European dimension. This consideration is further supported by the fact that some of the most authoritative and comprehensive accounts of the transformation of English religious and intellectual culture in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, including those that have considered the European contexts of England's revolutions, have paid little attention to the transnational dimension of the crisis of the European mind, almost as if these two fields of investigation proceeded on two parallel tracks.

This chapter examines the process through which the notions of reason propagated by the work of Grotius, Descartes, Spinoza and Bayle contributed to the transformation in English attitudes towards rationality and philosophy from the Restoration until at least the first decades of the eighteenth century. I argue that, along with consolidating the old-dating argument that theological doctrines ‘above reason’ could be ‘accommodated within a rational system of religion’, the reception in England of modern continental ideas concomitantly enabled three important and interrelated transformative processes. The first was the shift of Anglican apologetic from reason to scholarship and history. The second concerned the shift in Anglican theology from doctrinal speculations to pastoral care and ‘practical Christianity’. These first two aspects will be introduced here, and explored in more detail in chapter 5. The third process consisted instead in the separation of metaphysics and natural philosophy, or even, of metaphysics and philosophy of science. Focusing particularly on the case of Newton, I will show that, while the latter process emerged earlier than, and thus independently from, the development of modern philosophical systems, it was nonetheless accelerated, and theoretically refined, by the engagement with contemporary strands of Cartesian philosophy originating in the Dutch Republic.

Reason: which reason? To what extent is it possible to assert that those in England who relied on reason in dealing with biblical scholarship, ethics and natural philosophy, or traced, instead, a separation of faith and reason, were influenced by Descartes, Spinoza or Bayle?

The Natural and the Supernatural

Döblin's short stories, many of which are now available in an attractive English translation by Damion Searls, vividly illustrate how he went about exploring a wide range of idioms in which human beings have traditionally imagined the world they inhabit. It is in the idiom of gentle fairy tale, for example, that he tells of a clumsy young giant by the name of Wenzel lumbering into the city of Berlin and terrifying the townsfolk, who progressively hound him to his death—whereupon his mother covers his petrified remains beneath a greensward. The word “nature” does not appear in the text, but the allusion to the cliché of “Mother Nature” is unmistakable. When Döblin wrote his own version of the Bluebeard story, by contrast, the range of allusions he wove into his text was considerably more complex.

In 1077, Pope Gregory VII (r. 1073–85) composed a letter addressed to the Christian communities of Narbonne, Gascony, and Spain. In this letter, he recommended his legate, Bishop Amatus of Oleron, to the addressees:

In this directive, Pope Gregory VII not only stressed Bishop Amatus’ role as a representative of the papacy but also urged the recipients to offer him the same reverence and obedience as if they were interacting directly with the pope, and with St Peter no less. According to Kriston Rennie's extensive research, this was an important conceptual underpinning of papal legation. Rennie argues that legates did not merely represent the pope; they embodied the pre-eminence of the Roman Church. Legates personified the Petrine doctrine that Christ had entrusted the keys of heaven to St Peter, who passed them on to his successors in perpetuity: the popes.

Jubilee Concert

In early 1880, extensive preparations were underway for the jubilee concert (on January 4) marking the fiftieth anniversary of Smetana's first public appearance in Litomyšl. This concert, intended as his final appearance as a pianist before a large audience, featured not only Smetana's own compositions but works by Chopin, at his insistence. The evening proved deeply moving and enjoyable, presenting a program rich in significance for both the composer and his listeners. Smetana received enthusiastic applause, and when called back to the piano, he performed his own polka—a piece described as “so Czech, so profoundly Czech—offering a final, heartfelt expression of gratitude for the affection he had been shown.” Congratulations and warm greetings poured in from across Bohemia. In a letter to Procházka dated February 18, 1880, Smetana humbly noted: “My artistic endeavors do not merit so much glory from all quarters. I have been moved to tears!”

The Two Widows in Hamburg

During that period, Smetana's friend Procházka moved to Hamburg, where his wife was engaged as a soprano at the Hamburg Municipal Theater. Procházka quickly became involved in the city's musical scene, regularly sending reports to Dalibor.

Thomas Bewick (1753–1828) of Newcastle upon Tyne is familiar for his engravings of north-eastern wildlife and fauna. His best-known book, A History of British Birds, was first published in Newcastle upon Tyne in 1797. What is perhaps less known is that Bewick was head of a business that provided more every-day items for local residents. In 1767, he was apprenticed to the engraver, Ralph Beilby (1744–1817), and became Beilby's partner in 1777, a partnership which lasted until 1797, after which Bewick set up on his own. The books connected with the partnership and Bewick's own business survive in the Tyne and Wear Archives (TWAM) in Newcastle; these include ledgers, cash and purchase books, day and weekly workbooks, subscription and debt books, as well as letters to Bewick and members of his family in the early nineteenth century, and various miscellaneous papers relating both to the family and to the business. The records cover a period from 1752 – when Beilby ran the business and before Bewick became an apprentice – until well into the nineteenth century; customers included local gentry, shopkeepers and professional clients, for whom Bewick (or rather his apprentices, in most cases) produced items such as visiting cards, seals, tickets for events, letter heads for tradesmen's bills, and other miscellaneous domestic items.

This study deals with the period from 1777 until the turn of the century, and with transactions with members of the musical community, both in the North- East and further afield.

Introduction

The oldest known Spanish ballad, La dama y el pastor (The lady and the shepherd), in which a high-ranking lady attempts to seduce a lowly shepherd, has survived for more than six centuries. First written down in 1421 by a Majorcan law student, Jaume Olesa, it appeared in print in the sixteenth century as, El villano vil (The lowly peasant). This early Spanish ballad has travelled far away from Spain as part of the Sephardi ballad tradition of Morocco and the Eastern Mediterranean. Its journey is typical of the dozens of medieval Spanish texts that make up the Sephardi ballad repertoire. Yet although these romansas (ballads) have remained remarkably faithful to their medieval Spanish roots, they have also evolved and taken on new characteristics to form a rich, vibrant, and unique tradition. As a result of the widespread pogroms that took place in Spain in 1391 and the 1492 Decree of Expulsion, tens of thousands of Jews chose to leave Spain rather than convert to Christianity. They were forbidden to take with them ‘gold or silver or minted coins’ (Edwards 1994: 52) but they took a rich and varied oral tradition of songs and folktales to their new homelands in Morocco and the Ottoman Empire where Jewish women continued to sing the ballads they had learnt in Spain.

The Spanish philologist Menendez Pidal has commented upon the medieval roots of those songs:

In Prague to Stay

After completing his studies in Pilsen and enjoying a vacation with his parents in Růžkovy Lhotice, Smetana resolved to dedicate his life to music and continue his studies in Prague. In August 1843, he visited Mladá Boleslav, where the Kolář family had recently moved, and his determination only grew stronger. Reuniting with Kateřina after months of separation brought him immense joy:

Upon returning home, Smetana faced the challenging task of sharing his aspiration for a musical career with his family. Initially opposed, his father eventually relented, though not without expressing concern for Smetana's future and imposing numerous suggestions and conditions. Like any well-meaning parent, he hoped his son would pursue a more stable path, perhaps as an official or by taking over the family business. Support from Professor Smetana, who believed his cousin could bring glory to the Czech nation through music, was crucial in bolstering Smetana's confidence. Although his father agreed in principle, he provided no financial support, forcing Smetana into years of struggle and hardship—challenges he would overcome through sheer determination.