The news of a betrothal between the count and Franziska was much talked about. But a month later, when the double ceremony had taken place, first in the Augustinian Church and then in the Protestant church in Gumpendorfer Street, the excitement subsided, and all the more quickly because all that might be said in the way of spiteful bon mots had already been put into circulation in the days beforehand. In any case, none of it reached the ears of the noble couple, who had immediately left to spend several weeks in northern Italy. They took with them only Andras and Josephine, a freshly engaged lady's maid, Viennese through and through. Their return trip would take them directly to Arpa Castle; Hannah and several of the servants had already gone there as soon as the wedding was over. Franziska had found it hard to part from her, but, precisely because they were so very close, had judged this separation necessary.

The stay in Italy began at Lake Garda; then came a visit to Venice, which was even lovelier than the Venice of Franziska's thoughts and dreams. Nonetheless, after ten days of eating ice cream of every kind and feeding countless bags of peas to the pigeons in St. Mark's Square, she was happy on the eleventh day to see their sojourn end, especially since the count was prepared to make stops along the way back; most importantly, in Verona, his garrison town of more than fifty years ago, and the scene of his first triumphs.

The Library Register, dated on the vigil of Christmas 1418, confirmed what Dyngley already knew. Augustine was not represented among the books that could be assigned to the associates (assignata sociis) and was only minimally represented in the chained collection. At about this time Dyngley was copying a series of indexes for the Old and New Testaments, and he also had in hand a copy of Robert Kilwardby's patristic tabulary, largely devoted to Augustine. The next step was straightforward. Dyngley would extract indexes from the Kilwardby tabulary and copy them in tandem with Augustine's texts, thereby filling the lacuna in the Peterhouse holdings. Eventually he widened the scope to include other patristic authors. His patristic project would thus provide not only authentic copies of the originalia but also instrumenta studiorum, the finding tools essential for tapping the wisdom of the Fathers. In order to integrate the finding tools, Dyngley developed an efficient working strategy with his primary text writer, known as the Fish Scribe because he drew a fish around catchwords. This chapter describes the characteristic features of the manuscripts copied for the patristic project: the introductory template (the perpenditur preface and table of contents, typically written on a guard page, Tables 2.1 and 2.2); the finding tools, the Kilwardby source and Dyngley's reconstructed indexes (Table 2.3); the working protocol estab-lished between Dyngley and the Fish Scribe (Table 2.5); and the recorded costs with special attention to limning (Tables 2.6 and 2.7).

—Johannes Brahms

During the same period that saw the resolution of the German Question, Brahms was completing a major work in which “German” was written into its very name. Ein deutsches Requiem nach Worten der heiligen Schrift, op. 45, for solo voices, chorus, and orchestra, is the longest and in many respects the most ambitious work of Brahms's career, and the one that first brought him widespread international fame. What it is not, in my view, is a German nationalist work, at least not in the political sense that is seen so clearly in the Fünf Lieder für Männerchor. (The national significance that would attach to the work after 1870, however, is another matter altogether, as we shall see.) Although the slow funeral march heard in the second movement evidently derives from an aborted duo sonata that was conceived under the pall cast by Robert Schumann's tragic collapse in 1854, most of the composition dates from the mid-1860s. Whatever the connection to Schumann may be, it is reasonable to assume that the death of the composer's beloved mother, on February 2, 1865, was the work's primary motivation. Writing to Clara Schumann in April of that year, Brahms made mention of the first two movements and included a piano score of the fourth, which he described as a “choral piece … from a kind of German Requiem.”

Another clue to the political meaning of Collier's anti-stage tracts is his interaction with the first two reform comedies, Cibber's Love's Last Shift (first performed in January 1696 at Drury Lane) and Vanbrugh's The Relapse; Or, Virtue in Danger (first performed in November 1696 at Drury Lane). Because they were produced before the publication of A Short View in 1698, the emergence of Reform Comedy was not a response to Collier. Yet, this fact should be treated with care as it neither precludes all causal relationships between Collier's criticism and Reform Comedy nor renders, as Hume contends, Collier's ‘impact on genre, short or long term […] negligible’. What is worth noting here is that Collier rarely mentioned Cibber's play but reacted violently to Vanbrugh's sequel to it. In Love's Last Shift, the virtuous wife, Amanda, was married to Loveless, a man ‘of a debaucht life’, who ‘left her, and the Town, for Debts he did not care to pay’ in the second year of marriage and wandered around Europe for eight years. Remaining constant at his return, she successfully reformed Loveless by seducing him into her bed without revealing her identity as his wife beforehand. In contrast, The Relapse inverted the process of reform and narrated the protagonists’ degeneration from virtue into vice. When Loveless relapsed into his old hedonistic lifestyle, Amanda's virtuous image was gradually deconstructed to the extent that she almost surrendered to Mr Worthy's gallantry at the end of the play.

Christine Weder, Ruth Signer, and Peter Wittemann, eds. Auszeiten. Temporale Ökonomien des Luxus in Literatur und Kultur der Moderne. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2023. 310 pp.

This rich and multifaceted edited volume addresses the temporal economies of luxury, and it is the first in a book series titled Luxus und Moderne, edited by Christine Weder and Hans-Georg von Arburg that has emerged from a Swiss-based research group. There has been good recent scholarship on shifting conceptions of luxury as well as on the multivalent temporalities of modernity but not much on their intersections. This volume approaches such intersections broadly, though the core of the essays deal with the mid- and late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. A concentrated set of essays focus on literary and aesthetic debates from this period, with multiple contributors attending to shifting concepts of luxury and free time and the related semantics associated with both fields. In addition, the volume is admirably interdisciplinary, representing approaches from literary studies, philosophy, social theory, visual studies, cultural history, and more. Multiple essays return to visual studies approaches to explore how images of various sorts negotiate concepts of luxury. This mixture of approaches results in what might be considered an extended interdisciplinary conceptual history of luxury and its temporal filiations. There are several key literary-aesthetic inflection points that multiple contributors return to, including Rousseau's luxury critique, reading debates at the end of the eighteenth century, and aesthetic shifts characteristic of the Goethezeit. In this context, the volume editors mark their focus on temporal rather than material aspects of luxury, which have been dealt with more by the scholarship.

On 11 April 1689, the Dutch stadtholder William of Orange and his wife Mary Stuart, James II's daughter, were crowned William III (r. 1689–1702) and Mary II (r. 1689–94) in Westminster Abbey. But this was not the end of the grand drama of England's Glorious Revolution of 1688–9. Within ten days of their coronation, the Parliament of England passed the ‘Oaths of Allegiance and Supremacy Act’, abrogating the old oaths of allegiance to James II and imposing an obligation to swear to the new joint monarchs as a condition for holding civil or ecclesiastical offices. This piece of legislation kindled the fire of the Nonjuring schism, the clerical counterpart of Jacobitism. Believing that their oath of allegiance to James II was valid during his lifetime despite his absence, nine bishops, including Archbishop of Canterbury William Sancroft (1617–93), and some four hundred lower clerics defied the law. The ensuing conflict culminated in the deprivation of their offices on 1 February 1690. Besides failing to subdue these recalcitrant priests, this punishment drove them to declare that ‘the Established Church born of the Revolution of 1689, was as illegitimate as the new political regime’ and to maintain a separate ecclesiastical system. Yet the Nonjuring clergymen, as well as members of their congregations, dealt with their relationship with the post-revolutionary Church of England in diverse ways. Some continued to attend services at local or regional churches. Others broke communion with the Williamite Church and worshipped in private chapels.

The ‘revolution’ that transformed the Department of English at the University of Nairobi was sparked by a short paper by three African staff members, among them Ngugi wa Thiong’o. They argued for its replacement by a Department of Literature centring works by Africans in the first year and proceeding in the next two years through concentric circles of world literature; ‘African literature’, crucially, was construed to include oral tradition. When Ngugi published this document – which was already locally famous – it took on global cultural significance. Makerere was also reconsidering its colonial-era literature syllabus, and the new University of Dar es Salaam was developing a syllabus aligned with the country’s socialist values. All three countries were nation-building in a highly politicised environment that problematised the free expression of ideas advocated by the literature revolutionaries. At Nairobi, a path towards the revolution had been opened by the expatriate department head, and the revolution itself was shepherded by his expatriate successor. Although success seemed inevitable when Ngugi became department chair in 1973, President Jomo Kenyatta and his allies felt threatened by the spread of ideas, and the government’s suppression ultimately drove him into lifelong exile. His call for ‘decolonising’ the African mind still rings out, not yet achieved.

In this chapter, I focus on the Gwayi Forest case in Matebeleland, North Province of Zimbabwe. A forest that has a long history of settlement by local people who were allowed to continue to reside inside to serve as a cheap labour reserve pool for the timber industries that were linked to the rail economy envisioned by Cecil John Rhodes at the beginning of the 20th century (Kwashirai, 2009). While there is also a history of resisting dispossession and some of the tenets of conservation practices during the heart of colonisation in the mid-1950s–1960s (Alexander et al., 2000), this chapter focuses on the conservation practices and struggles of the 1990s to the present that I witnessed and that form part of the lives of local forest populations. This chapter therefore traces the politics that peaked at the height of the pursuit of neo-liberal dictates in forestry conservation in Zimbabwe, for conservation to pay for itself. As already highlighted in chapter 1, the Forestry Commission of Zimbabwe (FC) needs to maximise the commercial potential of Gwayi Forest in a climate of diminished state funding that was ushered in the 1990s with the Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP). This chapter provides material evidence of the complexity of the chronic liminality of populations living inside protected forests, unlike the other two cases in the book. Complex in the sense that while the people won their battles to continue to live in the forest valleys they have farmed for generations, these rights are neither secure nor accompanied by full benefits of access to social services provided to other rural citizens of Zimbabwe. Such services include schools, health facilities, and access to protected water.

According to a famous story published in 1830 in the memoirs of the comte de Montlosier and repeated a year later in a biography of the duc de la Rochefoucauld-Liancourt written by his son, Louis XVI was said to have asked the duke on 12 July 1789 whether the popular insurrection then underway in Paris was a revolt. ‘No, sire’, came the reply, ‘it is a revolution’.1 It is still usual to take the story to be indicative, first, of the categorical difference between a revolt and a revolution; second, of the new meaning imposed by the events of 1789 on earlier concepts of revolution; and third, of Louis XVI’s characteristic failure to keep up, both with conceptual innovations and with events in France. Before the French Revolution, it is said, the concept of revolution meant something circular and referred standardly to a process closer to the literal meaning of a revolution. In this usage, a revolution meant reverting to origins, going back to first principles, reviving something original by, in keeping with the same metaphor, reforming root and branch or, more simply, doing something radical.

VALUES, GOOD AND BAD

It would be hard to argue that the question of value haunts the humanities at the moment; that it has been a source of anxiety for some years; and that those who study literature feel the problem most keenly. On the one hand there is the issue of whether the humanities have any real and widespread value in modern society. On the other, there is the question of whether professional critics and general readers have abandoned the vexed issue of evaluating literature at all. Does it actually matter if we read The Odyssey in the same way as ‘Meet the Kardashians’, or argue that Taylor Swift's songs are as profound as War and Peace? Isn't ‘value’ simply a relative construct that has been appropriated by the Establishment (or even the ‘deep state’) to impose standards on the rest of us?

Possibly. And, of course, anyone who has studied or worked in a literature department in the last fifty years will have heard such arguments rehearsed many times. The problem has become especially acute when not only are humanities student numbers in decline across Europe and North America, but people are reading less literature than they did some years ago from childhood onwards. If any form of writing is as good as a literary classic then it is little wonder that people are not persuaded to read works of literature. For Stanley Fish, writing over thirty years ago, the concomitant problem is that literary criticism compensates by over-reaching itself.

An additional contributing factor to impact the role, status, occupation of, and attitudes toward, women in Irish traditional music was the increased commercialisation of the genre and use of the “Celtic music” label during the 1990s. As discussed, the 1970s was a key period of change as well as a time of increased learning and experimentation in terms of innovation and creativity in the tradition. During this time, Irish traditional music bands such as Planxty, Bothy Band, Dé Danann, and the Chieftains all achieved legendary status, due not just to their musical excellence, but because they emerged during a period of rapid social, cultural, and economic development. By the 1980s, the commercialisation of the Irish traditional music scene reached new heights on account of the growing globalisation of the music industry. Prior to this, for much of the twentieth century, many of the major international record labels seldom recorded local folk musicians – as Taylor recalls: “it was not thought to be economically viable to scour small countries looking for a promising musician who might sell enough recordings in the major markets to justify the expense of production, marketing, and distribution”. However, by the 1980s, non-Western and traditional musicians increasingly became noticed in Western society, with African popular music growing in popularity. In order to categorise this new genre of ethnic non-Western music for the retail market, the category of “World Music” was coined.

The count arrived at Arpa Castle in the late evening, as his telegram had announced; but only the next morning did they all gather to greet each other. The count was jovial and relaxed, and had a wealth of incidents to relate. His fine sense of the comic lent color and life to all his stories.

“And now I’m eager to know,” he continued, “what has happened here in the meantime, here and in the wider world. I haven't had a newspaper in my hands for four days, and don't even know if Gambetta has taken his revenge or not. I suspect not, but I’d be glad to have it confirmed. And this I would like to hear, if possible, from sister Judith. Yes—Judith shall read; after all, she's had the paper in her hand for a quarter of an hour, waiting for me to stop talking. I didn't let her silent criticism interrupt me in mid-speech; all the same, I constantly felt that her impatience and her long face were sucking the marrow out of my account of the sessions at Gruz. So, as a punishment, Judith, read, and start with France. That's always the most interesting. Even their squabbles are full of life.”

He continued to talk and gave the impression that his wish to hear about the wider world was none too pressing. But at length he recollected himself and said, “Well, what have you found? Give us the essentials.”

The Irish Constitution combined with the power of the Catholic Church sought to define Irish women within a patriarchal society, her role within the home as a mother and a wife. Historical symbolic representations of Ireland in addition to legislations and sexist attitudes further enforced this idealised role, deterring and restraining women from actively pursuing a career. These challenges for women in Irish society were likewise reflected in the Irish traditional music scene as “many married women put aside their instruments altogether, unless they taught their children to play”. For the women who continued to play after having children, Slominski refers to these musicians as “tradition bearers”:

mothers like Molly Morrissey (no relation to the piper), Margaret O’Callaghan, and Pearl O’Shaughnessy. Many of these women rarely played outside their homes, but motherhood allowed them to pass on the tradition in time-honoured and politically supported ways. Today their names most often appear in connection with their sons.

While much has changed since twentieth-century Ireland, recent studies have shown that women still face significant challenges when pursuing a career and being a mother. According to a study of 1200 adults in 2021 by Matrix Recruitment (a national recruitment company with offices in Dublin, Waterford, Athlone, Galway and Carlow):

77% of those surveyed this year said they believe motherhood impacts a woman's career progression with 63% of respondents connected it to the assertion that women are still considered primary carers. Over half (57%) said they believe employers have an unconscious bias towards women who may be considering starting a family, suggesting discrimination starts even before a woman becomes a mother.

My sense of intimacy with the legend that was Ngugi came from the strong emotional response I had on first reading his A Grain of Wheat while studying English at the University of Ghana. Reading it gave me a sense of the immense emotional power of his writing. This piece uses A Grain of Wheat as a starting point to think through Ngugi’s work in general, tracing the ways in which it took an increasingly satirical turn from the late 1970s after his exile from his native Kenya. This overview of his work is both celebratory and critical, and I try to speculate on why he was not awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in his lifetime.