“The most horrible fate ever to strike a composer overtook Smetana at the age of fifty,” writes Smetana's first biographer Teige.1 Despite Dr. Zaufal's exhaustive efforts, employing every known medical intervention of that time to alleviate his suffering, the illness persisted. Concerned friends, urging him to seek assistance abroad, prompted Smetana to consult foreign physicians. In a gesture of support, Countess Elizabeth Kaunitz, Smetana's former pupil, organized a private concert at her palace on February 23, 1875. Many of his aristocratic pupils participated for his benefit.2 Three days earlier, he had completed his symphonic poem Šárka and in a bid to gather additional funds for his trip, held a concert featuring the premiere of Vltava on April 4, 1875.

On April 18, 1875, accompanied by his close friend Václav Juda Novotný (1849– 1922), then editor of Dalibor, Smetana departed from Prague. Originally from Jindřichův Hradec, Novotný came to Prague with the intentions of studying history but was influenced by Ambros to focus on music. He also studied voice with Pivoda, violin with Bennewitz, and theory with Blažek. Novotný composed songs, collected and harmonized folk songs, and translated over a hundred opera libretti from various languages into Czech. Regrettably, he often made drastic adaptations, notably after Smetana's death, when he modified The Brandenburgers, Dalibor, and, most drastically, The Two Widows. Although well-intentioned, his renditions often ventured into the realm of questionable taste. Remaining an unwavering supporter of Smetana, Novotný assumed the role of music critic for Pokrok and later Hlas národa, in addition to his work for Dalibor. Novotný and Smetana often met at musical gatherings hosted by Procházka, and in one reminiscence, Novotný provided a detailed description of Smetana's appearance during that era. According to Novotný, Smetana was short, had long hair slicked straight back, a volatile temperament, and a love for humor.

Abdelazer, or The Moor's Revenge Z570 Purcell wrote a song, ‘Lucinda is bewitching fair’, and theatre airs* for a revival of Aphra Behn's bloody tragedy set in fifteenth-century Spain. The play was produced at Drury Lane* probably on 25 March 1695, with Jemmy Bowen* singing the song on stage. The airs were printed in 1697 in A Collection of Ayres* with the overture placed first and the other movements reordered, but an early manuscript (the violin book GB-Lbl, Add. MS 35043) preserves the order as played in the theatre – followed in PS 16. Benjamin Britten’s* Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra (Variations and Fugue of a Theme of Purcell, Op. 34, 1945) made famous the Third Act Tune Z570/2, a rondeau* in hornpipe* rhythm. However, the First Act Tune Z570/8, another hornpipe, was more popular at the time: its tune, entitled ‘The hole in the wall’, was given a country dance* choreography and was printed in all editions of The Dancing Master from 1698. BalSta, PlaDan, PriPur.

Academy of Ancient Music The Academy was founded in 1726 as the Academy of Vocal Music by professional musicians including the composers J.C. Pepusch and Maurice Greene, with Bernard Gates (1686–1773) and Henry Needler (1685–1760) leading its singers and orchestra. The last two had Purcellian connections. As a Chapel Royal choirboy, Gates would have known Purcell, while Needler, an accountant, had been taught the violin by John Banister* junior and ‘the principles of harmony’ by ‘Purcell’ – presumably Daniel Purcell* or Henry's son Edward. Following the notorious quarrel in 1731 over Bononcini's plagiarism of a madrigal by Lotti, and the subsequent departure of Greene and others to found the rival Apollo Academy, its name was changed to the Academy of Ancient Music. Under the direction of Pepusch and his successor Benjamin Cooke it focussed on old music, including Purcell, though it was never exclusively antiquarian, performing much modern Italian concerted music.

7 January. Omitted writing for ten days … I find my journal has dwindled down to a very meagre outline lately. … This year begins well in every respect; all of us in good health and happy; business flourishing; nothing to annoy us. My journey to Lisbon is more talked of and perhaps to take place in February; though I have not much heart for it. My Sister has asked Eliza to go to Hampstead during my absence, but it seems hardly practicable with all the children. Very cold.

9 January. … my Sister dined with us … she seems to have persuaded Eliza that she can go to Hampstead with the children while I am out. I have been fretting myself about the extent of our engagements with Hinck, who takes a great deal of accommodation in return for the profit we get from him; we must endeavour to reduce it if possible. William sent us a turkey which like some story I have read troubled us with thinking who we should ask to eat it; at last we have settled to have it comfortably to our own dinner without considering ourselves bound to give a party which we should not otherwise have done. … The coldest day.

His journal is more and more neglected with frequent gaps and perfunctory entries: ‘sometimes I am too lazy to fetch it up to write, sometimes I think I have nothing to set down; if I am out of sorts about anything I do not like to write; and it seems quite useless to force oneself to it’ (22 January).

This appendix provides a comparison of the adventus instructions of the Gilbertine and Cistercian orders by presenting the respective instruction texts in parallel. It also discusses one other item related to the instructions. The italics indicate differences between the two texts.

Second Visit to Weimar

During this sorrowful return to Prague, Smetana stayed at the Blue Star Hotel, while little Žofie lived with her grandmother. Deeply shaken by Kateřina's death, Smetana sought distraction in any way he could. The following weeks were tortuous, marked by inner turmoil as he wrestled with the demon of solitude. He wandered from place to place, seeking companionship. In his isolation, he resolved to visit Liszt and attend a music festival in Leipzig in early June, where Liszt and his entourage would be present. Upon his arrival, Smetana called on Liszt, who greeted him warmly. The following events, recorded in Smetana's diary, reflect a reaffirmation of their friendship and the discovery of new connections.

The festivities were organized in conjunction with the musicians’ convention, commemorating the twenty-fifth anniversary of Neue Zeitschrift für Musik. Karl Franz Brendel, the journal's editor and a supporter of Liszt's ideas, was among the key figures. The festival started on June 1, and Smetana met various musicians, including Hans von Bülow, mingled with Swedish artists, and encountered renowned Prague music scholar Ambros and critic Count Laurencin, both familiar faces. Among the predominantly German musicians, there was only one other of Slavic origin— Russian composer and critic Alexander Serov. Serov, a Wagnerian and a disciple of Liszt, was the enfant terrible of Russian critics and the only Russian musician of his era who truly understood Smetana's work. It is likely that Smetana and Serov engaged in lively discussions about the role and purpose of national art in the context of emerging romantic ideas. These conversations would later shape Smetana's artistic development and deepened his awareness of these issues.

One of the many generally overlooked reversals inClaudius's Menschen an unsererSeite has to do with the subplot aroundAehre's wife, Katrin. With Menschen an unserer Seite, Claudiusexpands his earlier factory-reportage Vom schweren Anfang by wayof the inclusion not only of thesemi-autobiographical Andrytzki plot, but also bythe integration of the marital conflict plotborrowed from Fydor Gladkov's socialist realistclassic Cement, wherethe Red Army soldier Gleb Chumalov returns homeafter the Civil War to find not only that hisfactory is a crumbling ruin roamed by goats andchickens, but that his home is left empty by hiswife Dasha, who has become a Communist Partyfunctionary and sent their daughter Nurka to achildren's home, where Nurka dies of starvation inthe course of the novel.

Guiding Threads

At the height of his fame, Döblin encouraged readers to think of each of his major works as having a foundation in ideas (“eine geistige Fundamentierung”: SLW 216). The context for this remark was an exposé in preparation for a public lecture on Berlin Alexanderplatz that he was to give at the University of Zurich in February 1932, and in it he went on to say that an epic work as he conceived it developed out of the presentation and exploration of an intellectual starting position (“Gedankenposition”), which was then put to the test in the course of the narrative, and was generally shown by the end of the work to have been superseded and replaced by a fresh question. Looking back on his writing career in 1948, in what he termed his “epilogue,” Döblin spoke indeed of each work ending with a question mark and “throwing the ball to the next one.”

Stifter's body of work is a typical, yet particularly interesting case of how nineteenth-century authors straddled the publication contexts of multi-author journals, anthologies, and annuals and of single-author books and collected works editions. As is the case with nearly all authors in the mid-nineteenth century, the vast majority of Stifter's writings were first published in cultural journals and anthologies. At the same time, he aspired to have his single-author collections elevate him above the status of a mere writer for journals. His notorious obsession with reworking his texts—polishing and filing them down (ausfeilen), as he put it—is unique in literary history. Stifter's affirmative vision of what Johannes John calls “the utopia of the finished text” is undeniable, something that has led scholars to apply classicizing conceptions of completion and monumentality to Stifter's mature work, with ideals of perfection (Vollendung) informing the critical works editions published not long after his death. These editions sought to profile him as a “classic” German-language author, an aspiration arguably supported by Stifter's stated affinity to Goethe later in life.

That the Welles-Ros Bible is among the largest surviving illuminated manuscripts from fourteenth-century England underscores the ambition of Maud de Ros's project. The volume's page dimensions are surpassed by only a few of the lavish largescale missals made in England in the years around 1400, including the Sherborne Missal (see Fig. 8) and the originally massive Carmelite Missal. Also larger than or comparable to the Welles-Ros Bible in respect to their page dimensions are the two famous, mainly Middle English devotional and didactic collections known as the Vernon (c.1382–1400) and Simeon (c.1390–1400) manuscripts.

Produced from consistently smooth, professionally-prepared vellum with relatively few holes or tears, each bifolium of the Welles-Ros Bible would have been cut from a single calfskin. The scriptural text was written for two columns of sixty-one lines by several contemporary scribes who used minimal abbreviations. Nora Elizabeth Ratcliff estimated that the now-missing text containing the end of Hebrews and the Book of Revelation would have required about thirteen additional sides to complete. Assuming that Revelation included no extra or especially large illustrations, that biblical book would probably have ended on fol. 421v or possibly fol. 422r. Thus, a total of 212 or 213 skins would have been required for the (unfoliated) table of contents and the scriptural text together. This estimate includes the folio numbered (in a later hand) 328bis that contains the final half-column's worth of 2 Maccabees, the last book of the Old Testament. Unlike virtually all of the other pages of the scriptural text, this one is not foliated with a large roman numeral at upper left on its verso, probably because this verso is blank.

The following transcriptions are of two protestations that were written and made public in October 1681. A ‘protestation against the parlimenters’ was penned by Stirlingshire blacksmith Robert Garnock and presented by him to the Privy Council on 1 October 1681. The second protestation is dated 7 October and labelled a ‘protestation against the assize’. It is signed by Garnock and the fve other men from across Scotland that were indicted and tried alongside him: David Farrie; James Stewart; Alexander Russell; Patrick Foreman; and George Lapsley.

Both transcriptions are taken from the original documents in the men's own hands. Although acknowledged at their trial in Edinburgh's High Court of Justiciary on 7 October, neither protestation was copied into additional legal records. Instead, both papers survive among uncatalogued trial material in the National Records of Scotland's JC26 High Court of Justiciary processes series. Analysis and contextualisation of these protestations can be aided by other contemporary records, such as the High Court's Book of Adjournal, witness accounts, like those of lawyer John Lauder of Fountainhall, and other texts written by the six men who composed and subscribed these protestations.

Protest and dissent

A protestation was an instrument of Scots law: a formal statement of either written or verbal protest against a legal ruling. During the seventeenth century this judicial device was adapted as a means of public protest.

“Do not imagine you are powerless”

In a letter to the “Mothers of England,” intended to mobilize them against child sex trafficking, British feminist, reformer, and outspoken campaigner Josephine Butler addresses accusations of being too harsh, hyperbolic, and incensed, and to have “wounded the susceptibilities of the men of other nations.” She reminds them, however, that even Christ himself, “our perfect example,” has “looked round about ‘with anger,’ because of the hardness of hearts.” Butler wants God “to kindle a holy and purifying fire in many hearts” by way of her letter, and spur them to action. “Do not imagine you are powerless,” she tells her fellow women. God will welcome them “in his great army of deliverance” and provide “the weapons to bring against this inhumanity.”

Searching for waste in Stifter's Der Nachsommer (Indian Summer, 1857), a novel in which everything glistens in cleanliness and orderliness, may seem like an odd endeavor.1 The domestic spaces that the protagonist inhabits as a child and visits as an adult are veritable paragons of orderly households. These include the city apartment and subsequent suburban domicile of his parents in Vienna as well as the two country estates that help shape his later development: the Asperhof belonging to his paternal friend and mentor Risach and the Sternenhof, where his future wife Natalie and her mother Mathilde reside. Not a single speck of dust sullies these abodes, nothing lies purposeless within their confines; furniture is looked after with care, household items treated with deference. The same holds true for the extramural gardens and their harmoniously arranged grounds, particularly at Risach's Rosenhaus, where every fallen leaf is instantly removed, sandy pathways are regularly raked smooth, and trees receive a thorough bark-scrubbing every spring. Indeed, even in the otherwise detritus-generating realm of labor—here for instance the Asperhof's artisanal workshop—order and tidiness remain a top priority. Thus, given this initial sampling of hygienic examples drawn from the novel, what is the point of pursuing traces of waste therein?

1 January. How differently has the old year ended and the new one begun to what I expected. On the 30 Dec. I wrote to Hinck that everything in the world was going as I wished, and the very next day was one of the most melancholy I ever passed. Sutton came up again on Thursday from Brighton, Dan saw him on Friday and thought him much the same; on Saturday morning I went to his chambers determined to make him call in other advice, but after waiting an hour and a half went away without seeing him, as he was out. At 2 oclock his friend John Romilly sent a messenger to us in the City to say he was much worse and we must come up immediately. I went and found him attacked by paralysis and speechless. His apothecary had sent for Dr Bright, and as he could not come till 6 asked me to stay with him, which I did. He was downstairs in his library, sometimes sitting in one chair sometimes in another, walking up and down the room, taking down a book and putting it up again, cutting with his knife and so on to kill time. I took a book to read that I might not fuss him by appearing to watch him; I spoke occasionally and he tried to answer but could not articulate a word intelligibly. It was a most wearying time. … His face was very slightly drawn and fixed in one expression without the power of change or smiling. Bright treated him as Welbank had done before, cupped him and gave him a powerful medicine and I came away at 7.