INTRODUCTION

Margaret Beveridge and John Corse were a wife and husband living in the burgh of Dysart in Fife. They were first suspected of witchcraft during a panic in 1643, but came under more sustained investigation between December 1657 and January 1658. Their case is notable for this long back story, but even more for the unusual way in which their confessions were negotiated.

Beveridge and Corse were named as witches on 25 October 1643 by another alleged witch, Isobel Propp, at a time when many witches were being accused in the parish. We learn this in the text below because the kirk session clerk, writing in 1658, provided extracts from the earlier records for the use of the prosecutors, but the original 1643 record also survives for comparison. Another extract shows that Beveridge and Corse had both been named as witches on 16 December 1647 by another woman accused of witchcraft, Grisell Rankin. But in December 1657 John Corse himself claimed that his wife was a witch.

John Corse evidently suffered from nightmarish visions of some kind. He probably had difficulty even in making sense of the visions for himself, let alone in explaining them to other people. His interrogators placed him under pressure – how much pressure we do not know, but there were suggestions of torture – to shape or convert his visions into a narrative of having made a pact with the Devil. They succeeded to some extent, but one striking feature of this case is that Corse tried repeatedly to tell alternative versions of his story.

Abstract: Karoline von Günderrode's philosophically informed work has recently been interpreted as offering a metaphysics invested in ideas of progress and perfection, in which the individual's worth is derived from its relational connection to the whole of the cosmos, or earth. It is wellknown that the circumstances of Günderrode's death led to the destruction of a considerable number of her works, but recent archival research has revealed new variants of known poems, and two sonnets about the wisdom of Silenus. In these, Günderrode works through ideas common with Friedrich Creuzer's Symbolik project, and this essay argues that, more importantly, the sonnets promote a form of a priori pessimism that anticipates both Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. Specific to Günderrode is a concern with the function of poetic speech and the problem of articulating the idea that life is not worth living. These poems act as thought experiments that stand alongside Günderrode's other progressive metaphysics and raise the question of what the prehistory of a priori pessimism might have been before Schopenhauer.

Keywords: Karoline von Günderrode, pessimism, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, the function of poetic speech

The last few years have proven to be a fortuitous time for scholarship on German women philosophers around 1800. Thanks to the efforts of, among others, Dalia Nassar, Kristin Gjesdal, and Corey W. Dyck, works by authors known primarily from the literary sphere—such as Bettina von Arnim, Sophie Mereau, and Rahel Levin Varnhagen— are being productively read as contributions to the history of philosophy.

Abstract: The eighteenth century was an age in which play was highly valued in all areas of society. The playful element was central to sporting competitions, which were now also held at school. Even other school subjects such as mathematics, reading or writing were now taught in a playful manner, based on the educational theories of the English pedagogue John Locke. Gambling, whether in the form of lotteries or card games, also became increasingly popular. Interestingly, Friedrich Eberhard von Rochow, a Prussian aristocrat and an important school reformer in Germany, advocated indulging the urge to gamble in all its forms. He considered gambling to be a stimulating counterbalance to the business of everyday life, which is why he regularly took part in it himself at the leading German spas. However, he warned against the consequences of gambling addiction, which could result from an unbridled passion for gambling. After his shocking encounter with Prince Leopold I zur Lippe, who was heavily addicted to gambling, Rochow developed the concept of controlled gambling as an ideal: anyone who gambles must always know when and how to stop, keeping one's own health and even the dignity of fellow players or opponents in mind. For Rochow, the gambler is only fully human when he knows how to maintain control, boundaries, decency, compassion and self-respect in the game.

Keywords: gambling, addiction, sport, play, education, entertainment, spa, Friedrich Eberhard von Rochow, Prince Leopold I zur Lippe

Although Bismarck had used a series of three wars to bring about national consolidation in 1871 under Prussian leadership, he sought to avoid military conflict thereafter, understanding that only peace and stability could ensure the Reich's security. Above all, it was paramount in his calculations for Germany to avoid being squeezed by its hereditary enemy, France, in the west, and a hostile Russian Empire in the east. To that end, he engineered a series of alliances designed at once to isolate France and to encourage the other Great Powers to grow dependent on Berlin so as to mitigate the possibility of the formation of any effective anti-German coalition. This approach was generally successful at first—indeed, relations between France and Germany improved remarkably between 1877 and 1885—but by the mid-1880s a state of permanent crisis was becoming the norm.

Consider the fate of the Three Emperors’ Agreement of 1881. This accord stipulated that Russia and Austria-Hungary would remain neutral should Germany become involved in a war with France.

The conversation was interrupted by the appearance of the old count, who made a vigorous, almost hurried apology for not keeping better track of time. Count Egon was with him. No introduction was made; they had met at the soiree.

“Oh, don't apologize!” said the countess when the two gentlemen had taken their seats. “To tell the truth, we didn't miss you, nor Egon either—least of all during these last few minutes, when we had the privilege of hearing confessions. And, Adam, you know how much confessions mean to us! Our dear guest was speaking of Vienna in glowing terms, and not just Vienna, but of the Redemptorist Fathers too, which may surprise you most of all. But will it please you?”

“Everything our dear friend says or does pleases me, and even Fessler will agree with me on this occasion.”

Fessler nodded.

The young actress, however, cast a look toward Egon, whose presence seemed to make her self-conscious, and then said, as she tried to recapture the earlier casual tone of the conversation:

“I almost fear that my confessions put me in a comical light. But the roles I play at least border on the naive—so that may excuse me. After all our profession determines the way we talk and carry ourselves.”

Goethe's libretto for Proserpina is viewed as his most realised play from his tenure as the director of the court theatre in Weimar (1791–1817); it represents the culmination of his highly stylised conception of acting. This judgement applies solely to the second version of the work, the one performed in Weimar in 1815 with an orchestral score by Eberwein. Indeed, commentators do not address the fact that Goethe had finished writing his libretto at the end of 1777, thus well before his official appointment at Weimar, or that it had been premiered in 1778 with an orchestral score devised by Karl Siegmund von Seckendorff. That Goethe had been experimenting since the 1770s with melodrama should not be surprising, considering his involvement in theatre during that decade: when he wrote the libretto, the first wave of melodramas following Benda's Ariadne auf Naxos and Medea (1775) was peaking.

The main difference between the 1778 and 1815 versions resides in their musical scores, as the 1815 version does not bring any significant revisions to the libretto. And yet, it is this second version that is supposed to reflect the Weimar style actively cultivated by Goethe. Only Lorraine Byrne Bodley has paid attention to the musical setting but exclusively that of the 1815 version. Seckendorff's version has barely received any scholarly attention except for the involvement of the singer Corona Schröter who created the role of Proserpina in 1778. According to Byrne Bodley, Goethe ‘revised’ Proserpina in 1815 ‘as a melodrama [sic] creating a very emotional piece’, which leads her to argue that Seckendorff's setting, which she inaccurately considers to be lost, ‘differed from the strict form of contemporary melodramas, in which purely declaimed passages alternated with orchestral passages’.

Abstract: Goethe served as an enormous influence on many nineteenthcentury composers, including Robert Schumann (1810–1856), whose overtures to Hermann and Dorothea (1851) and Scenes from Goethe's Faust (1853) were inspired by literary works of the same name. This essay analyzes these two overtures using what music theory terms the “new Formenlehre,” to show how they interpret their source material, and in doing so, create novel works of art. Specifically, I draw upon notions of formal incompleteness (where a unit is missing its beginning and/or ending function), sonata failure (where a sonata form avoids its essential cadential closure), and references to the Beethovenian per aspera ad astra plot archetype, suggesting ways through which these compositional techniques illustrate specific aspects of Goethe's literary works.

Keywords: Robert Schumann, Faust, Hermann and Dorothea, overture, formal functions, sonata theory

Introduction & Historical Context

Robert Schumann's (1810–1856) final two overtures—Hermann and Dorothea, op. 136 (1851) and Scenes from Goethe's Faust, WoO 3 (1853)—provide us with a pair of purely instrumental responses to Goethe's works. Both overtures fall into what Schumann scholars commonly consider to be his late period, a time after about 1850 that was marked by professional disasters and health issues, culminating in a suicide attempt in 1854 and his subsequent admittance into an insane asylum.

The configuration and GPDS models allow the degrees of the vertices to be exactly specified. They are mathematically more challenging than those considered in Chapters 11–13, because the assignment of edges is no longer independent. The configuration model, which generates multigraphs, acts as a more tractable alternative to the GPDS model, because of the symmetries inherent in the random mapping that is used to define it, and because each realization from the configuration model that is simple is also a realization from the GPDS with the same vertex degrees. In this chapter, the neighbourhood structure in the configuration model is approximated by that of a related branching process, and a threshold theorem for the appearance of a giant component is also derived. For subgraph counts, the configuration multigraphs are first made simple, by collapsing multiple edges and deleting self-loops; the resulting graphs are shown to satisfy a subgraph threshold theorem. Finally, the neighbourhood structure is used to derive an approximation to the distribution of the length of the shortest path between two vertices. The proofs in this chapter are very much more involved than those elsewhere in the book.

Hannah was sleeping soundly and her breathing was regular. The fever had visibly abated, and Franziska, knowing that this sleep was a sign of recovery, left the alcove as quietly as she had come and went to sit by the fireplace in her living room.

The fire in the hearth was half burned down, but above the fireplace was a stove whose heat came from outside the room and which radiated a comfortable temperature even at this hour. This was no surprise: the man in charge of the heating department, a mustachioed Slovak who had only appeared when the rains started, habitually did too much rather than too little.

It was not yet late, and Franziska took a random book down from the shelf. It was a volume of Rousseau, the Confessions, and as she leafed through it, she could see that the first fifty pages at least had a multitude of thin pencil strokes in the margins. The reader, very probably the count's mother, had apparently grown more inimical toward the author as she progressed, for the thin strokes, which clearly expressed agreement, became fewer, and question marks more numerous. In the middle of the book was a white, gold-edged sheet with a maxim on it, and the maxim read: “Before each man stands a picture of what he is to become. As long as he is not that, his peace is not complete.” Franziska stopped short. “How simple,” she said, “and plain, almost! And yet it moves me. And why? Because I see ‘the picture of what I am to become’ before me, like a premonition? Or is it, on the contrary,—is it because I don't see it? How strange.”

This chapter argues that when separated from loved ones in the nineteenth century, enslaved people who had the opportunity to do so utilised letter writing to maintain networks of love and affection. Though enslaved people were largely forbidden from learning literacy skills, some did acquire these skills through being taught by their enslavers or through secret lessons by community members. Focusing on messages that enslaved people sent to their families and communities in letters to their relatives or enslavers, this chapter argues that enslaved people used letter writing as an emotional practice, to name, communicate, mobilise and maintain familial love. Working within the confines of anti-literacy laws and white letter-writing conventions, enslaved people appropriated aspects of sentimental culture, moulding this to suit the needs of a mainly illiterate population. Positioning letter writing within enslaved communities as an oral practice, this chapter reveals how the orally transmitted nature of these letters worked to create and maintain a network of affection between vast communities, in refusal of their enslavers’ attempts to decimate their kinship ties.