The poetic ballad is a favourite Sturm und Drang fetish and rightfully so. Barely one year before Medea stormed the stage in Benda's melodrama, the Göttingen Musen-Almanach published in its 1774 issue ‘Lenore’, a poetic ballad by Gottfried August Bürger, whose text is viewed today as the most paradigmatic example of this genre in the German literary pantheon. Its plot is cut from the most classic Gothic fabric: unable to accept that her husband will ever return from the Seven Years War, Lenore is fooled by Death herself, who, taking the appearance of a knight and pretending to be her spouse, rides her to her own death during a stormy and spectral night.

The poetic ballad is attuned to Sturm und Drang for many reasons: the genre heralded some of the main period's artistic and cultural credos as well as its contradictions. Like melodrama, the ballad was a curious hybrid. Its orality was construed as a marker of ‘authenticity’, exhibiting its archaism through acoustic figures, such as its reliance on onomatopoeias: ‘Und außen, horch! ging's trap trap trap, | […] Ganz lose, leise, klinglingling! […] Und hurre hurre, hop hop hop!’ These utterances pointed towards a supposed natural form of expression predating figurative language. And yet, the ballad could not have existed without the artificial elaboration of writing. Fuelled by a patchwork of geographically diverse literary traditions, the ballad was nevertheless promoted as a typical emanation of the German Volksgeist, an association that has always been at the core of this genre; by the 1900s, the ballad became increasingly tied to culturally and politically reactionary ideals until it was ideologically hijacked by nationalistic discourses during the Third Reich.

By the summer of 1794, the store of examples, precepts and precedents that was available from the past had partly permeated the present. The concept of a droit de commune that was used to underpin the fall of the Bastille and the establishment of the National Guard went on to be used to assert the political entitlements of the network of communes in Paris and provincial France and justify the rival claims of Paris over the provinces or the provinces over Paris at the height of the conflict between Jacobins and Girondins in 1793. The idea of a Hebrew republic that once stood either for a combination of divine sovereignty and civil magistracy or for absolute monarchy and its Monarchomach alternatives was later invoked not only to justify the civil constitution of the clergy as a closer approximation to the original church but also to question the compatibility between the monarchy and a republic and, echoing Tom Paine, to highlight the old, but now new, salience of democracy to the modern age.

In such a large project and with such a complex edition, it has been difficult to avoid some miscalculations and mistakes. References in volumes 1 and 2 to the location of the material for anniversary commemorations and to the appendices should be corrected from volume 3 to volume 4. Additions and corrections for the 1533 to 1660 section of volume 1 are given in Appendix 1 in this volume. The texts – orders, forms of prayer and addresses – were checked with particular care, but some errors have been found in the introductions and commentaries. Slips in spelling and grammar will be evident to readers, and easily corrected. The following list is concerned with factual errors, and more serious misprints. For the period to 1660, the evidence for the corrected dates and causes is supplied in Appendix 1.

VOLUME 1

pp. xv–xxiii and cxiii–clvii, the summary list 1533–1688 and the ‘Analytical list of particular occasions of special worship’. Further research has revealed additional occasions, which for 1533–1660 can be found in Appendix 1 of this volume; for 1689– 1870 in the ‘Additions and corrections’ and revised summary list in volume 2, pp. xvii– xxx, and for 1871–2016 in the ‘Additions and corrections’ and revised summary list in volume 3, pp. xix–xxix. Additional occasions after 2016 are in ‘Particular occasions 2016–23’ in this volume, pp. 413–91.

p. xlviii, lines 24–5. It is not easy to be precise about the total number of particular occasions presented in this edition, given the difficulties with (and likely losses of) early evidence and the problems of definition from the 1980s (for which see volume 3, pp. 687–9).

The New Laws of 1542

On November 20, 1542, in Barcelona, Emperor Charles V signed into law a decree for the governance of the Indies. The “New Laws of 1542” legislated on the treatment of Indians and replaced the “old” laws issued in the cities of Burgos and Valladolid in 1512 and 1513. The New Laws of 1542 were milestones in Spain's endeavor to reform and control the devastating consequences of the conquest in the Americas.

The laws represented the practical application of newly emerging theories on the nature of man, of freedom, of rights, and even of international law. As such, they stand as monuments to man's spirit ad desire to do what is right, on the basis of both Scripture and natural law.

That Las Casas is more closely associated with laws than anyone else makes them central in his life, iconic in both name and act. One can argue that they were, in fact, the highlight of his long career. The New Laws, along with his authorship of the Brief History of the Destruction of the Indies, which ignited and fueled the Black Legend are, indeed, what he is best known for in the history of Western civilization.

Let's examine his own words briefly. “My main motive,” he wrote in his History of the Indies, “in dictating this book was that I saw Spain had an urgent, a mortal need to have the truth, the light of the truth shed on Indian affairs, a long-standing need, and at every level of society.” Then Bartolomé warmed to his subject.

The book is the culmination of a research project funded by the Ministry of Science, Innovation, and Universities of Spain entitled “American and British Pro-Francoism during the Early Cold War: Actors, Agendas, Influence Strategies, and Spanish Interlocutors (1945–1960).” The research for this book was undertaken between 2018 and 2021, and it was previously published in Spain in 2022. It is for the reader to decide whether the book's distinctive approach to the survival of the Franco regime during the first years of the Cold War is a convincing one.

While I have had the privilege of preparing the English edition of this book with the assistance of the excellent team at Tamesis led by Megan Millan, the ultimate credit for this work goes to Joan María Thomàs. He was the principal investigator of the research team that came together in 2017, and he was fundamental to the ultimate success of this project. Thomàs is an internationally renowned authority on Francoism, particularly in its early years, and his inspiration, support, and encouragement were instrumental in overcoming the challenges posed by COVID-19. I have had the good fortune of knowing Joan María for over ten years, having invited him to a seminar that I organized in Madrid in 2010 on Francoist foreign policy during the Second World War. His work had previously shaped key aspects of my doctoral research, but this seminar marked the beginning of an enduring friendship, accompanied in my case by deep admiration. We have since worked together on various projects, including the volume that he co-edited with Raanan Rein, Spain 1936: Year Zero (2019). The present book is certainly the most significant collaborative venture, but fortunately it will not be the last one.

Abstract: Beyond having strikingly similar plots and imagery, Goethe's Die Natürliche Tochter and Hitchcock's Marnie are emphatically concerned with the visual interplay of figure and ground. Both works highlight the volatile dynamic between a figure seeking to appear, or to make an entrance, and an obscure background that threatens to engulf the figure. This article accounts for such resonances by considering certain protocinematic aspects of Goethe's theatrical project. As Juliane Vogel has shown, Goethe's theater transforms the space of the background, demystifying its tragic depths and rendering it productive of emergent figures. This article maintains that Goethe's transformation of the theater is evocative of cinema and that from this vantage point, it allows Die Natürliche Tochter and Marnie to become mutually illuminating. In light of the parallels between these works, we see Goethe employing means of visual storytelling that bear a comparison with cinema, while Marnie can be understood as participating in Goethe's project of demystifying the obscure background of tragedy.

Keywords: Goethe, Hitchcock, Marnie, Entrance, Figure, Ground, Background, Cinema

The story concerns a girl of mysterious origins. Her favorite pastime is horseback riding. In one episode, she suffers a fall from her horse. In another, she unlocks a chest full of forbidden treasures. She is on the run; there are people seeking to do her harm.

Popularity and the Middle Ages

The Middle Ages are an essential part of contemporary popular culture and flourish in almost all genres and media formats. In literature, the genres of epic fantasy, the historical novel and children's and young adult literature use medieval scenarios and mythologies to construct fictional worlds. With the success of Peter Jackson's ground-breaking film adaptations of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings (2001–03) from the beginning of the century, and subsequently The Hobbit (2012–14) and TV shows such as HBO's Game of Thrones (2011–19) and The History Channel's Vikings (2013–20), medieval imagery and settings seem to have become an integral part of the film and TV media, more popular than ever. Medievalism has also been strikingly successful in twenty-first century video gaming, from Blizzard's World of Warcraft (2004) and Bethesda's The Elder Scroll V: Skyrim (2004) to multiple game offerings in franchises such as Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed (2007, 2009, 2020), Paradox's Crusader Kings (2004, 2012, 2020), and Bioware's Dragon Age (2009, 2011, 2014, 2024). The successes of such high-profile products, which, like Game of Thrones, are frequently themselves adaptations of preexisting works, have resulted in the creation of vast transmedia franchises. Further, in activities such as board games, role-playing games and video games, reenactments and live-action role-playing games (LARPs), in music and musical theatre, in merchandising (textiles, trading cards, artifacts), material objects deriving from medievalist worlds are certainly far more popular than those from any other bygone era.

We discuss classical results on phase transitions in Erdős–Rényi random graphs and related recent results on random planar graphs and random graphs embeddable on other orientable surfaces of constant genus. The main focus is on how imposing the planarity constraint (or more generally, the genus constraint) a_ects the global and local structure of random graphs, such as their component structure, local limits, and maximum degree.

2020–1 Day of prayer (and period of prayer) during the coronavirus pandemic

Sunday 22 March 2020 (United Kingdom), and 17–23 March 2020 (England)

A coronavirus pandemic (code-named COVID-19) began in China in November 2019. It spread rapidly to other nations, placing health and hospital systems under severe strain and leading to large numbers of deaths. The World Health Organization declared an international public health emergency on 30 January 2020. On the following day, the first cases of the disease were reported in the United Kingdom; the first deaths were announced in early March. From February, as the number of cases and estimates of the likely death toll increased, the government of the United Kingdom and the devolved governments in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland announced a series of measures to try and contain the spread of the disease, and to prevent the National Health Service from becoming overwhelmed. These included ‘social distancing’ – keeping a two-metre distance between people who were not members of the same household. Health regulations issued by church leaders as well as the governments placed increasing limits on public worship and church business. On 10 March, Justin Welby and John Sentamu, the archbishops of Canterbury and York, advised that the chalice should not be used at holy communion. On 16 March, the UK government announced regulations against large gatherings and all ‘non-essential’ travel and contact with other people. This resulted in all churches and religious faiths announcing the suspension of services in their places of worship.

On 22 April 1947, the first performance of Béla Bartók's Concerto for Orchestra to be given in his native Hungary took place, some two years after the composer's death in exile in 1945. The work's accessibility immediately divided critical opinion. Modernists condemned its stylistic pluralism and genial virtuosity as a ruinous concession to popular taste; socialists proclaimed its emancipation from the ‘coldly lit world of the laboratory’ and praised its engagement with melody, harmony and counterpoint as agents of reception and sheer auditory pleasure.1 This, at last, was music that expressed the vox populi in the new socialist dispensation of postwar Hungary, but music which nevertheless belonged to one of the greatest European composers of the twentieth century. In a political regime which took its cue from Stalin's vehement indictments of formalism (condemnations which could and did lead to the concentration camp), the attenuation of Bartók's musical modernism in his last great work was not merely a matter of aesthetic preference or debate. It seemed instead to signal – however fortuitously – the collapse of a musical progressivism that had championed the serial (and resolutely non-tonal) hegemony of European modernism which would endure in the West, but which in the East would be decisively supplanted by the restoration of tonality and of ‘music for the people’.

Writing about the possibility of ‘Yeats as an Example’, Seamus Heaney tried to characterise the relationship between biography and art that Yeats's work constantly affirms in the following way:

All through his life, and ever since his death, Yeats has been continually rebuked for the waywardness of his beliefs, the remoteness of his behaviour and the eccentricity of his terms of reference. Fairies first of all. Then Renaissance courts in Tuscany and Big Houses in Galway. Then Phases of the Moon and Great Wheels. What, says the reliable citizen, is the sense of all this? Why do we listen to this gullible aesthete rehearsing the delusions of an illiterate peasantry, this snobbish hanger-on in country houses mystifying the feudal facts of the class system, this charlatan patterning history and predicting the future by a mumbo-jumbo of geometry and Ptolemaic astronomy? Our temptation may be to answer on the reliable citizen's terms, let him call the tune, and begin to make excuses for Yeats.

The only detriment to Heaney's rhetoric is that no one needs to make excuses for W. B. Yeats, whose poetry lives at once in the world and as an expression of Irish history (depending on who reads it). The fallibility, the mere vulnerability of Yeats as a man disappears sooner or later into the imperishable resilience of the poetry, even if his biographers are also historians who remind us that there is another Yeats, a determined apologist for the enterprise of art in the vision of Ireland which he helped to create, with or without the fairies.

Many pages have been filled regarding the question whether there was one Enlightenment, or many: that is, if there was one encompassing intellectual movement, or if there was a variety of different manifestations and appropriations, a history of intellectual entanglements for which ‘even the Hasidic Jews qualify’. A researcher's position on that matter will strongly depend on their disciplinary background and the resulting methodological toolkits: intellectual historians in a classical sense, who consider their voices as part of the public debate, will lean towards more essentializing approaches which, more or less explicitly, support a political narrative that roots ‘Western values’ in the eighteenth century. Followers of a conceptually more advanced history of science and scholarship, on the other hand, will put more emphasis on the preferred topics of the cultural turn, like practices, spaces and materialities, thereby, often deliberately, cutting ties with politics and science journalism.

To be sure, intellectual historians have also made efforts to re-contextualize and de-essentialize the epic of the Enlightenment. But what is the result for a public debate, in the German-speaking world and elsewhere, in which the historical self-assuring of liberal democracies is so intimately tied to a rather a-historical concept of ‘Aufklärung’?

What can productively be observed in the discussion, however, is the way in which present academic cultures, embedded in a variety of different political and media settings, strongly shape the view of a historical object which in itself is fluid and the result of decades-long processes of positive and negative intellectual genealogizing.

In an essay published in The New York Review of Books on 5 October 2023, George B. Stauffer remarked that the Metropolitan Opera in New York ‘has not presented an opera written by a woman since Kaija Saariaho's L’Amour de loin in 2016’. ‘More astonishing still’, Stauffer continues, ‘in the 140 years since its founding in 1883, the Met has produced only one other work by a female composer: Ethel M. Smyth's Der Wald (The Forest) in 1903. Given the remarkable advances in equality made by women in America and Europe in the past fifty years, including entry into professional music circles, that is a jaw-dropping statistic’.

This kind of marginal presence would not come as an astonishment, however, to those musicologists (many of whom are women) currently preoccupied by the retrieval of women composers, and indeed of women musicians generally, from the archives of silence. While it is unmistakably the case that the contribution of women to art music as performers (notably in opera and on the concert platform), and more recently as conductors, is a subject of incremental interest to journalists, scholars and film-makers (among many other people), the programming and circulation of music written by women remains peripheral not only in North America, but throughout Europe. In Ireland, initiatives such as the Women and Music in Ireland conferences (2010–2012) and the volume of the same name arising from these proceedings (published in 2023), together with the Sounding the Feminists project (2017–2023) have mapped both the extent of this neglect and the means of redressing it.