Throughout his career, White was always anxious about his next posting. Since Afghanistan, he relied on Roberts to a great extent to find him something. However, he rarely sat tight and passively waited, and his letters reveal that he, as well as his wife, created important networks which aided in his advancement. Immediately upon his return, he made himself available to a number of professional societies, advocating for his vision of the military's role in the empire and keeping his name in the news [160] . Senior British officers routinely found themselves on half-pay when they could not find a suitable position and White, in 1898, was not ready for the quiet life. When Lord Lansdowne, as Secretary of State for War, offered him the administrative position of Quartermaster- General, White accepted, even though he knew the work no more suited him then had serving as Lord Ripon's Military Secretary. Immediately after arriving in London, he asked Wolseley, the Commander-in-Chief, to find him alternative work. In July 1899, Wolseley offered White the Governorship of Gibraltar where General Sir Robert Biddulph's term was coming to an end. White accepted, and eagerly looked forward to the new challenges [161]. The plan, however, was soon derailed. In January 1881, while working with Ripon, White's 92nd Regiment was ordered to South Africa. White was desperate to join his comrades but his multiple requests were refused.

Adalbert Stifter, “the greatest landscape-painter in literature,” as Hannah Arendt famously described the Austrian author, is renowned for his evocative prose describing the meadows, forests, and mountains of his Central European home, which encompassed both his native Bohemian Forest and the Upper Austrian Alps that he frequented later in his adult life. Yet, glaciers, one of the most striking geological features of the Alps, are largely missing from his oeuvre. The icy masses appear prominently in only two of Stifter's works: the 1845/53 short story Bergkristall (Rock Crystal) about two children who go missing in the mountains on Christmas Eve and Der Nachsommer (Indian Summer), the 1857 three-volume Bildungsroman that follows Heinrich Drendorf up and down the Austrian peaks as part of his ideological and aesthetic development. In a third text, Das alte Siegel (The Ancient Seal, 1844/1847), a glacier is briefly mentioned in one paragraph when the titular seal is thrown into a crevasse.

This dearth of glaciers is particularly surprising in light of Stifter's otherwise deep interest in geology and “lifelong obsession” with wintery landscapes. Indeed, from contemporary reports, we know that Stifter did not ignore glaciers out of a lack of interest—he was fascinated by the frozen forms. He just never stepped foot on a glacier himself. This may explain why he never painted glaciers in his visual works and why he largely omitted them from his literary texts. It makes the instances in which glaciers do appear, however, all the more remarkable. This chapter is not interested in the narrative or symbolic role of glaciers in Stifter's stories, but rather the act of depicting the ice itself. How did Stifter manage to portray glaciers? What do they tell us about his prose and the Austrian landscape he so carefully sought to describe?

The dimensions of the crisis scrutinised so far in this volume, comprising the anxieties generated by the unrestrained circulation of texts especially among uneducated readers, the controversies about the capacity and limits of human reason, the changes in the knowledge of ‘God's two books’ brought about by mechanical philosophy and biblical philology, and, last but not least, the shifting focus within the organised church from theology to ethics and the sociable, all had repercussions on the general understanding of human agency and its implications for ethics and society. As for the other dimensions of the crisis, English debates about the interconnected issues of free will, freedom of conscience and freedom of expression occurred within the framework of anti-atheism and the ancients–moderns discourse, and were fuelled by the impact of Continental ideas on the more typically insular contexts of heterodox and parliamentary claims for free press and the search for a post-revolutionary religious settlement. The point of departure of my analysis of the powers and limits of human agency is the resurfacing of the long term problem of liberty and necessity in seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century philosophical and religious discourse. At variance with the claim that intellectual change was characterised in this period by a general retreat from philosophy, Knud Haakonssen and Stephen Gaukroger have argued that the core that held early modern philosophy together was ethics.

After the passage of the Act of Anne (1710), London booksellers expressed concern about the threat to their profits posed by unauthorised reprints of works produced inexpensively in Ireland and imported into England. Until the Copyright Act of 1801, which extended protections granted by the 1710 statute to the Irish, English copyright holders had no legal way to prevent members of the Irish trade from printing and selling reprints of works purchased by them. They repeatedly argued that these could make their way into the English market, reducing their sales. Like booksellers, members of the London music trade regarded Irish reprints of their music as a threat to their business. Unfortunately, scholars working on the music trade have limited information about the networks by which unauthorised reprints made their way into England and the strategies available to London music sellers to fight the challenge they perceived to their profits for two reasons. First, because Irish music printers were not governed by English copyright law, London music sellers could not sue them directly in British courts for copyright infringement when unauthorised editions appeared in England. Second, research in this area has been hampered by the scarcity of records in Ireland since most court documents before 1922, stored at the Public Record Office in Dublin, were destroyed during the Irish Civil War.

However, a recently discovered Chancery suit filed in 1796 provides a glimpse into one network used to transport unauthorised reprints into England and the efforts of London music sellers to stop these imports.

In 1883, shortly after the New Year, Smetana resumed work on his Second String Quartet, though only in short bursts. He was becoming increasingly fatigued, and his memory occasionally failed him. Even minor everyday frustrations felt overwhelming. The previous summer, he had entrusted all publisher negotiations to Srb- Debrnov, telling him he would eventually grant him written power of attorney to handle all financial matters. Smetana's main concern was securing his family's financial future, as they were deeply worried about his health and doubtful of his capacity to manage business affairs effectively in his fragile, irritable state. Family members attempted to intervene, but even their slightest involvement irritated Smetana. They began to question Srb-Debrnov's effectiveness as well, while Smetana continued to trust him completely and did not want his son-in-law Schwarz involved, despite holding him in high regard.

Smetana frequently discussed these family tensions in his letters to Srb-Debrnov. His letters hint at Bettina's growing anxiety over her and their daughters’ future. Although their finances had improved slightly after Smetana received the prize for Libuše and a monetary gift at the 100th performance of The Bartered Bride, Bettina had taken control of the family's savings. On January 24, 1883, while contemplating another visit to Prague, Smetana referred to “distressing family matters” involving his wife. During a heated argument, she refused to show Smetana the bankbook, and his agitation escalated to the point where he considered seeking legal advice. In the letter, he implores Srb-Debrnov not to share the details of the dispute with anyone else, asking him to be his “trusted advisor in this fresh crisis.”

One of the intriguing facets of perspective is how what might appear trivial and unimportant to some can appear spectacular and decisive to others. In hindsight, Roger of Howden deemed the adventus of Octavian and Hugh de Nonant to be of little significance. Roger's account, or rather the absence thereof, in his Chronica even exudes a sense of disappointment. In contrast, Gervase of Canterbury wrote passionately about the adventus at Canterbury Cathedral.

The reception occurred not only during the heightened religious importance of Christmas, but also amid escalating tensions within the Canterbury chapter, of which Gervase was a part. The chapter at Canterbury Cathedral was Benedictine, with its abbot doubling as the archbishop of Canterbury. This arrangement not only enhanced the power of the archbishop-abbot relative to the chapter, but also made it crucial for the king and the episcopate to have a say in the election of the archbishop-abbot. This was much more pronounced than if Christ Church had been just another Benedictine house, primarily concerned with the division between monastic and abbatial income (a conflict that the Canterbury monks and the archbishop-abbot also experienced). Those chosen might be more interested in the archiepiscopal office than in the abbatial office, and the archbishop was often away on business unrelated to the office of abbot. These sources of estrangement between the monastic community and the archbishop-abbot likely aggravated the clashes between the Canterbury chapter and successive archbishop-abbots over the archbishop's plans to construct a new cathedral. The two legates arrived just as a fifteen-year long dispute was commencing.

Was there a vernacular lyric poetry in the Iberian Peninsula prior to the poetry of the Old Provençal troubadours? This question has been widely debated from the first decades of the twentieth century onward – especially since the publication in 1948 of Samuel M. Stern's seminal article ‘Les vers finaux en espagnol dans les muwaššaḥs hispano-hébraïques. Une contribution à l’histoire du muwaššaḥ et à l’étude du vieux dialecte espagnol “mozarabe”’ (Stern 1948: 299–346). It is, thus, not easy to find a fresh way to approach this topic. Upon it converge many questions, such as the ‘vers finaux’ alluded to in Stern's article; the origin, history, and relationship to other genres of Romance lyric poetry of the muwashshaḥs; the influence of Arab-Andalusi strophic poetry over some poetic forms in medieval Romance poetry.

In 1912, in his study on the Dīwān by the Cordoban poet Ibn Quzmān (d. 1160) after the facsimile edition by D. Gunzburg (1896), Julián Ribera y Tarragó (1928) pointed out the strophic structure of many of its poems, also found in the poetry of Guillaume ix de Poitiers (1071–1126) (1912: 59), the first of the Provençal troubadours. Ibn Quzmān, whose dīwān had the peculiarity of being written in the local Arabic dialect, was not the first poet of al-Andalus to write strophic poems. Since the beginning of the eleventh century, a flourishing strophic poetry in Classical Arabic had captivated ever wider audiences. Thus, it is possible that the strophic poetry of al-Andalus had, at least in the formal aspect, influenced that of the Old Provençal troubadours (Menéndez Pidal 1941; Menéndez Pidal 1956).

Mathilda of Flanders was the only daughter of a royal mother and an aristocratic father. Her potential – and the expectations for her – were rooted in her bloodline. Like every medieval aristocrat, her birth was Fortune's gif. Her connections to the most celebrated dynasties in Europe were available to be exploited, but only if she had the will and the occasion to do so. Her royal blood was celebrated and remarked upon by poets. It is a central feature in the identifcation clauses in the charters in which she appears. Chroniclers, poets and charter evidence all sing the same chorus of royal blood. This chapter refects on the heritage that blood brought with it – practical, philosophical, dynastic – bequeathed to Mathilda from her experience as the daughter of the Flemish court in the eleventh century. Medieval Flanders has a substantial historiography and I will not attempt to distill it here. Instead, in what follows, I attempt to trace out the primary elements of Mathilda's natal context that informed her choices and expectations. These center on three chief themes: First, her mother Adela's experiences in Flanders, raised as a young woman of French royal blood in the Flemish court, who became its countess. Second, the infuence of the Ottonian foremothers that Adela herself embraced. Adela commissioned her own copy of the Epitaph of Adelheid, that celebrated the famous empress's life and experiences. Tird, Mathilda's experience of the political and social contours of her natal court. In conclusion, because the Epitaph provided models for Mathilda's conception of royal rule, a comparison between Mathilda and Adelheid is considered.

Seeking a Libretto

Driven by necessity, Smetana sought to establish himself in Prague through concerts, but his primary artistic goal was opera. Finding a suitable libretto, however, proved challenging, as Czech authors had little experience in the genre. With the help of Procházka, as Smetana notes in his diary, he eventually obtained an operatic text from Karel Sabina. The resulting work, The Brandenburgers in Bohemia (Braniboři v Čechách), is a three-act opera set in the late thirteenth century, when the Czech lands were occupied by Otto of Brandenburg. Eager to begin, Smetana completed the first act by late February 1862 and played it for Procházka, who praised the entire act. Sabina, the librettist, was one of the most intriguing Czech writers of the time. Although he initially studied philosophy and law, he later dedicated himself to writing and journalism. A pioneer of Czech literature, Sabina wrote realistic village novels and short stories about the Czech spiritual revival, promoting the ideals of fraternity, progress, and humanity.

Sabina's Libretto

The Brandenburgers in Bohemia dramatizes a romantic, yet improbable plot based on a historical episode from around 1280, with echoes of other key moments in Czech history, especially 1939. The narrative unfolds after the sudden death of Czech King Ottokar II (r. 1253–78). In the aftermath, Duke Otto of Brandenburg becomes regent and guardian to the young heir Wenceslaus II

One of the main intellectual changes that occurred in early modern Europe was the transition in ways of reading the Bible from the Calvinist and the Catholic hermeneutical approaches to the interpretation of the received text of the word of God, to the historical and philological reading of Scripture ‘as a work of culture’. According to Protestant hermeneutics, which dated to the authority of Luther and Calvin and which also underpinned the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England (1563), the following attributes distinguished Scripture from other literary works: auctoritas (‘in that its cause efficient is God, and many of the reasons adduced to support it, such as miracles, prophecies etc. were not deemed to be believed essentially through the experience of faith’); claritas (‘accessibility of God's message to all believers although duly mediated by education and catechetical practice – while those passages which are obscure to the readers, are so due to the interpreter's lack of understanding and/or faith, which can be enlightened and deciphered by using other clearer biblical texts’); perfectio and sufficientia (Scripture is perfect because it contains ‘all the necessary knowledge in the sense of a canon and a guiding principle that is necessary to know for the attainment of salvation’). As regards the Catholic context, instead, on 8 April 1546 the Council of Trent adopted a decree concerning the edition and the use of sacred texts, which was sometimes understood as prohibiting any emendation of the Vulgate ‘authentic’ version of the Scripture, ‘on account of its long-standing usage and approbation in the Catholic Church’.

In a literal sense, Cantigas de amigo are songs sung by young women (amiga) about (de) their boyfriend (amigo). This medieval poetic tradition of maiden songs constitutes one of the main genres in the Indo-European oral tradition of women's songs. Transmitted by women – mothers and daughters across the centuries – the reminiscences of their voices have been registered since the earliest written manuscripts. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, folklorists rediscovered these women's voices and songs as a living oral tradition of lyrical and lyrical-narrative work, dance, and worship songs and collected them.

However, these songs were typically ignored by historiographers of the national European literatures, who sometimes classified them as anonymous women’ songs, as in the case of the frauenlied (woman's song) and the winileod (song of the wini, friend, or beloved) in German historiography, for example. Eventually, they would ascribe these songs to male poets, who then became the authors of the songs. Only in some rare instances were these songs featured in histories of literature (for example, in the case of the first chapter of the Portuguese Literature History). However, save for a few exceptions, the genre was virtually ignored in the histories of Spanish, German, French, and English literatures, which focused instead on the great national epic when discussing medieval poetry.