In his ground-breaking and still widely disputed account of the ‘Radical Enlightenment’, Jonathan Israel recounts the story of the epochal transformation of Western civilisation beginning around the 1650s, when ‘a general process of rationalization and secularization set in which rapidly overthrew theology's age-old hegemony in the world of study, slowly but surely eradicated magic and belief in the supernatural from Europe's intellectual culture, and led a few openly to challenge everything inherited from the past’. Yet, notwithstanding its centrality to the ‘making of modernity’, the historical dimension of the Enlightenment in Israel's view ‘continues to be very inadequately understood and described’.

Whether Israel actually undertook a genuinely historical investigation of the Enlightenment, or he pursued instead an ideological agenda aimed to reassert the primacy of modern Western liberal and democratic ideals, is a question that remains highly controversial. While it is not the purpose of the present book to take sides in this scholarly controversy, nonetheless it takes on Israel's call for the importance of conducting new research on the ‘historical dimension’ of the Enlightenment as key to the serious understanding of such a movement. As Darrin McMahon has effectually pointed out, Israel's apparently contradictory statement originates from the ‘ambiguity inherent in the very word enlightenment’, which is widely used to refer both to the ‘still unfolding process of modernity’ and ‘to the historical movement that gripped Europe and the Americas in the late seventeenth century and the eighteenth’.

Only a year and a half after the 1707 Acts of Union – which created the first unified British state on the island of Great Britain, and granted its inhabitants ‘full Freedom and Intercourse’ with that state's imperial possessions – an issue of The Tatler suggested that all might not be well in this newly constructed nation. Amidst the hurly-burly of contemporary imperial London, where a passing ‘Citizen’ might have ‘his Head […] upon Woollen, Silks, Iron, Sugar, Indigo, or Stocks’, one of the Tatler's cast of characters worried that

It is clear that the Tatler's tone here is not entirely serious: no-one in 1709 was worrying about a revived Saxon-Danish conflict. Nevertheless, the passage implies some genuine disquiet about the viability of this new ‘British’ culture. It is a rather unusual contemporary expression of what Colin Kidd has called the ‘hollowness at the heart’ of early eighteenth-century Britain – a nation incompletely unified in 1707 by a process that opponents and outsiders perceived as being nothing more than a ‘shady deal, elements of which met the respective national interests of the contracting parties’.

The container methods are powerful tools to bound the number of independent sets of graphs and hypergraphs, and they have been extremely inuential in the area of extremal and probabilistic combinatorics. We will focus on more specialized graph container methods due to Sapozhenko (1987) that deal with sets in expander graphs. Entropy, first introduced by Shannon (1948) in the area of information theory, is a measure of the expected amount of information contained in a random variable. Entropy has seen lots of fascinating applications in a wide range of enumeration problems. In this survey article, we will discuss recent developments that exploit a combination of the two methods on enumerating graph homomorphisms.

Classical mythology, Hellenistic odeporic and teratological literature, and medieval Christian bestiaries all teemed with human-animal hybrids. This paper will focus on two such therianthropic beings, the (hippo) centaurs, half-human and half-equine, and the onocentaurs, half-human and half-asinine, as described in the Liber monstrorum de diversis generibus (henceforth LM), a teratological compendium from early eighth-century England. While the origin of centaurs and onocentaurs can be traced to times and places very distant from pre-Conquest England, they form two perfect case studies of a distinct category of monsters, namely those creatures whose monstrosity originates from a degradation of humanity or from the aberrant conjunction of the human and the bestial, which seems to have especially resonated with early English sensibility. The porosity of the boundaries between the human and the monstrous is precisely one of the most distinctive, if disturbing, traits of the LM, as well as of texts which have been closely associated with it, such as Beowulf

or Aldhelm's Aenigmata. While the immediate sources of the two LM entries on (hippo) centaurs and onocentaurs have been identified as Jerome's Vita S. Pauli eremitae and Isidore of Seville's Etymologiae, XI.iii.39, respectively, they in fact rely on a blend of ultimate sources. These multiple layers of sources will be explored and disentangled by also looking at Aldhelm, who has long been attributed with the authorship of the LM and dealt himself with hybrid monsters, such as the Minotaur and the centaur.

This premiere took place on 30 December 1846 with Paul Barroilhet as Robert and Rosine Stoltz as Marie. The plot was concocted by two librettists, the Belgian Gustave Vaez (1812–62) and the Frenchman Alphonse Royer (1803–75).

The situation at the Opéra is extremely serious. I shan't deal with the question of money, about which I’m ignorant and which anyway I’m not competent to write about; as I understand it, it's a question over which the government has the right to intervene, rather than any individual. Instead, I’ll concentrate on the musical resources still available to this unfortunate theatre, and on the influence of the disastrous condition to which it finds itself reduced upon the state of the art throughout France, to the astonishment of those who visit our country. This ruin of an institution which was, and maybe still is, so beautiful, so much loved by our country in every way – for which it makes so many sacrifices each year, and which it's in the habit of regarding as the focal point of its pretentions to artistic splendour –this ruin is due to causes we can't help wondering about, the reality of which continues to strike everyone who can see clearly and is without prejudice.

Having failed to acquire a new work from any of the major composers of Germany, Italy or France, the Opéra has found itself constrained to beg Rossini to do them the insulting favour of rummaging around in his paperwork to extract from it fragments of old scores made popular throughout Europe by the best Italian singers – admirable fragments, no doubt, but which, put together more or less competently by someone else, could not by any means, at any time or in any country however barbarous, constitute a true, serious work of art or, whatever the posters might tell us, justify the title of ‘a new opera’.

The Encyclopaedia of Music in Ireland represents the first comprehensive survey of Irish musical experience across recorded history, although its principal span extends from the early Middle Ages to the present day. EMIR (to use the abbreviation by which it is now known) addresses several distinct areas of musical practice, including traditional music, art music, church music, popular music and the music trade (printing and publishing; instrument manufacture), as well as the relationship between music, literature and political culture in Ireland. It also documents Irish musical practice elsewhere, notably in North America (the United States and Canada) and the United Kingdom.

Perhaps the most important aspect of EMIR from the general perspective of musical lexicography is its attempt to broaden the base of musical practice as this is conceived in older works of musical reference. In particular, EMIR reflects a sequence of editorial principles sufficiently pliant to address the topography of Irish musical practice, in which there has long been a pronounced tension between the claims of the composer and the musical work on one side, and the claims of oral and popular culture on the other. Although EMIR represents the apparatus of Irish art music (as in biographical and critical entries on composers, complete with worklists, sources and bibliographies), it also engages closely with the transmission and dissemination of traditional and popular music. But however comprehensive its address, EMIR implicitly draws attention to the fundamental challenge of musical lexicography (in Ireland as well as elsewhere), which is to reconcile an apparently insatiable quest for information with the imperative of critical and historical interpretation.

On January 11, 1896, Johannes Brahms spent several memorable hours in the company of Adolph Menzel, the dean of German artists in the second half of the nineteenth century. Menzel had recently marked his eightieth birthday, and Brahms, who enjoyed a warm friendship with the artist in his autumn years, had come to join him in a belated private celebration at his Berlin atelier. After ascending four flights of stairs, the composer was greeted by his host in the corridor and escorted into the studio. Upon entering he would have immediately caught sight of the large unfinished oil painting “Frederick the Great Addressing His Generals before the Battle of Leuthen” (1859–61), which was prominently displayed on one of the studio walls. The two men soon sat down to a deluxe meal of oysters served with fine wine. The drinking was heavy, the examination of the artist's work so engrossing, that Brahms lost all track of time and barely made it to a dinner that had been arranged in his honor by the Prussian Academy of Arts. Max Kalbeck, the author of the first substantial biography of the composer, described the visit in characteristically flowery prose:

The tiny hoary [Menzel], in whom a sorcerous necromancer was hiding, had held [Brahms] spellbound. One glass after another was emptied as libation for the spirits that emerged from the books and folders all around and took on flesh and blood when the conjurer, to the boundless astonishment of his guest, called them all by name.

Murcia is an important city in southeastern Spain, the center of what was once a small Islamic taifa state that was erased during the major Christian advances of the thirteenth century in the movement known as the reconquista. The ultimate disposition of reconquered territory around Murcia became an abiding cause of friction between the two major kingdoms of the Iberian Peninsula, Castile and the Crown of Aragon. Although the city itself fell to Castile, some of the territory that had once made up the Muslim kingdom became part of Aragonese Valencia and tension over this division remained for decades. Ultimately, the final settlement of the borders in this region became the major reason for the brutal, ten-year War of the Two Pedros.

This article will explore not only Murcia's role as a frontline city in that conflict, a staging point for what was largely a Castilian war of aggression, but also its enormous importance for our understanding the conflict as a whole, an importance it derives from the fact that surviving city documents provide much of what we know about the conflict from the Castilian perspective. We also learn about the asymmetry of source material scholars of medieval Spain encounter when researching and writing about the history of these two kingdoms.

Late in June, 1364, urban authorities in Murcia, a major city in southeastern Spain, received an urgent message from the king of Castile, one of the medieval period's most controversial monarchs, Pedro I (1350–66/1367–69), better known to history by his unflattering sobriquet as Pedro the Cruel.

By the last third of the eighteenth century, poetic recitation had thrown its anchor into the fertile waters of the Lied, a genre that possessed a formal malleability and a simplicity bordering on the domain of the improvisatory and the popular Volkston. Putting such declamatoria as Junker's ‘Genofeva’ or Dalberg's ‘Evas Klagen’ side by side with through-composed Lieder by Schubart or Zumsteeg reveals that their differences were more of degree than of kind. Both genres were animated by an idealised declamatory melos, explaining the Lied's attraction for modes of spoken declamation, however stylised these may have been. Still, this absorption of the declamatorium into the frame of the Lied remained conflictual: how far could the Lied go in its integration of declamatory speech without losing the defining quality of Sangbarkeit? This question led Reichardt, one of Zumsteeg's contemporaries, to devise by the 1800s the Deklamationsstück (what twentieth-century scholarship has usually rendered as ‘declamatory Lied’), a vocal piece with keyboard accompaniment, located at the junction between poetic recitation and Lied.

There is a continuous line running between Schubart, Zumsteeg, and Reichardt, in that all three composers intended to incorporate theatrical declamation within the musical frame of the Lied. Their strategies, however, differed greatly. Located at the crossroads between music and poetry, Schubart's contributions epitomise the primacy of an improvisatory, aus dem Stegreif approach. Zumsteeg explored the through-composed form by incorporating it into expanded, or modified, strophic forms, favouring a recitative-like approach in which the musical accompaniment bears similarities with the melodramatic score of the Benda model. As for Reichardt, he envisioned the Deklamationsstück. In this, Reichardt attempted to capture prosodic spontaneity, yet through much more calculated artistic means than Schubart and less complex formal approaches than those of Zumsteeg.

Who is Leonore? What is she? She's plain Fidelio in pants, Leonore on the dotted line, Florestan's angel, Marzelline's boyfriend, Jaquino's love rival, Pizarro's would-be tyrannicide, and all throughout a wife in drag. But if his title heroine has an identity problem, Beethoven's only opera has itself hardly fared better, for up until the mid-20th century, there was surprisingly little agreement about what it is. Wilhelm Furtwängler said it was “more of a mass than an opera,” the German critic Paul Bekker saw an “oratorio” in it, while Arnold Schoenberg called it one of the “fighters for liberal freedom” (comparing it, oddly, with Uncle Tom's Cabin). The most extreme reaction was Richard Wagner’s, who basically said Beethoven needn't have bothered writing it, since his third Leonore Overture said it all so much better. In 1940, Edward Dent remarked on how views on Fidelio shifted according to the opinions of the day, adding an obvious reference to contemporary tyrants: “German stage-directors after the revolution of 1918 saw [Florestan and Leonore] as man and woman of their own time; they are alive for us today, and Pizarro too.”

This kaleidoscopic reaction to Fidelio should not surprise us unduly, for it is arguably a late reflection of the vicissitudes of the work's own compositional history. Originally based on an extant French libretto that had itself already undergone numerous interpretations, Beethoven spent some ten years on it, working with three different poets to complete and stage three different versions, and writing no less than four different overtures (he at one point groaned that the labor he invested in the opera should entitle him to a “martyr's crown”).

The Peterhouse 1418 register is remarkable in the history of Cambridge libraries. It is not the first list of books – there are earlier inventories at Corpus Christi College and King's Hall and registers of borrowed books at King's Hall and Gonville Hall. It is, however, the first comprehensive register of a sizeable collection. The fourteen-word titulus capitulates the organization of the Peterhouse Library: a core collection of chained volumes, a circulating library, as well as books suitable for sale.

INTRODUCTION

Margaret Martin, Katherine Grieve and Isobel Leitch were accused in a witchcraft panic in 1649 in the burgh of Inverkeithing in Fife. The document edited below is a partial record of their investigation in June and their local trial in July. It forms a small but vivid and detailed part of a much broader story that can only be summarised here. The minister of Inverkeithing, Walter Bruce, was a keen witch-hunter whose activities divided both the elite of the burgh itself and the members of the presbytery of Dunfermline. By the time of these prosecutions, he had already been suspended once by the presbytery and then reinstated. He later tried to arrest the wives of several Inverkeithing magistrates for witchcraft. Further research could well be carried out on Bruce's supporters and opponents. Those who helped him to interrogate these three women were clearly among his supporters.

Parliament issued a commission on 23 May 1649 to arrest and interrogate witchcraft suspects in Inverkeithing; two of the commissioners later reappeared as trial commissioners. The suspects were not specified individually, but they evidently included Margaret Martin, Katherine Grieve and Isobel Leitch. Walter Bruce and his colleagues interrogated these women over four days in June, presumably with the aid of sleep deprivation since they obtained compliant and stereotypical confessions to the demonic pact. The confessions duly recited the ideas of renouncing baptism, getting a new name, entering into a pact with the Devil, the Devil's mark and copulation with the Devil. Margaret Martin entered the Devil's pact when she was at a meeting in another woman's house, and the Devil asked her to be his servant.

INTRODUCTION

This case began in October 1622 when Margaret Davidson started to believe that Christian Watson had harmed her health through magic. Davidson does not seem to have used the word ‘witch’, but she was thinking about bewitchment. She had fallen ill after a quarrel of some kind, during which Watson had threatened her. Davidson's chosen solution was to make a ritually secret approach to Watson in order to recover her health. She took advice from her mother and others, and recruited a male friend to aid her on the day. Whether Watson genuinely remained in ignorance when Davidson crept up behind her on Falkirk high street on a market day, or whether the ‘secrecy’ was an open secret understood by both parties, is not entirely clear, but the ritual succeeded and Davidson recovered her health. One remarkable aspect of this case is its detailed account of how a person could negotiate to recover their health once it was alleged that a witch had bewitched them.

However, someone – perhaps an eyewitness on the day – reported the incident to the kirk session. The session immediately described Davidson’s ritual approach to Watson as ‘consulting hir as ane witche’, an intriguing phrase for such a reconciliation ritual. This phrase then recurred at intervals throughout the recording of the case. Summoned before the session, Davidson testified that she had been persuaded to undertake her ritual by Janet Buchanan. Buchanan had previously had her own disputes with Watson about ale-brewing and petty debt, and had also had a successful reconciliation with Watson.

The kirk session spent the month of November interrogating various people who had been involved in Davidson's market-day ritual. It looked as though Margaret Davidson and Janet Buchanan were the ones in trouble. However, Buchanan's stories about her dealings with Watson began to sound like stories of bewitchment. In January 1623, therefore, Christian Watson raised the stakes by counter-attacking.

Das Liebesverbot—The Ban on Love—has long languished outside the Wagner canon. When the Bayreuth Festival under veuve Cosima decided to expand its repertoire backwards into what she considered the Master's proto-music dramas, she stopped at Der fliegende Holländer. Rienzi was probably too tainted with Meyerbeerian and Spontinian grand opera, despite Richard having happily conducted chunks of it in concert for many years, and despite its continuing popularity on stage (a popularity that dwindled, however, after it was banned from Bayreuth). Wagner's first opera Die Feen (The Fairies, composed in 1833) was similarly kept at arm's length and was not even given its world premiere until 1888. Das Liebesverbot had at least seen its first performance under the baton of the composer, in Magdeburg in 1836, though it remained unperformed thereafter until 1923. The closest Das Liebesverbot has ever got to the Festspielhaus is 1.3 miles, when it was given a student performance in the Bayreuth Stadthalle in 1972 (later released on the Mixtur label as the first-ever recording of the opera).

Das Liebesverbot occupies an unusual position in Wagner's oeuvre. It is one of only two comic operas he ever wrote (the other being Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg), and it is his only opera derived directly from Shakespeare (though it is noteworthy that the midsummer setting of Meistersinger and the topsy-turvy hurly-burly of its second act also echo Shakespeare).

I. The Lay of the Land

“God loveth the gladde giver,” taken from 2 Corinthians 9:7, was, as Felicity Heal describes it, one of the “predictable sentiments” of early modern English culture, so commonplace that historians merely note before passing on. We should dwell a moment. There were so many adjectives that could have been chosen: God could have loved a generous giver or a pious giver, or even a frequent giver, for example. But the phrase that found purchase in early modern England was an emotive one: God loved the glad giver. God also, according to John Donne, and perhaps more surprisingly, loved “a cheerful taker.” The coupling of emotive terms with social norms was a striking feature of early modern English culture.

How ought one to live? An easy question to ask, but much more difficult to answer satisfactorily and responses will vary according to culture, era, and writer. The answer in the modern Western world might well be: one ought to be happy. Early modern society might agree but their understanding of what happiness meant was not the same and the answer would be phrased differently. Happiness, in the sense of denoting joy, pleasure, and contentment, is a modern concept. The ancient concept of eudaimonia, usually translated as happiness or well-being, referred not to pleasure but to a condition of living well that could not be achieved without virtue. Early modern society was heavily influenced by the model of eudaimonia, ensuring that happiness was conceived of as an ethical, rather than solely an affective, state, produced by a virtuous life.

INTRODUCTION

Janet Irvine was one of over a dozen people to be tried for witchcraft in Orkney and Shetland in 1615 and 1616. These trials were evidently connected with the new regime being established in the islands in this period. The royal government had imprisoned the last autonomous earl of Orkney, Patrick Stewart, in Edinburgh in 1609. Royal authority was tightened after the defeat in 1614 of a rebellion led by the earl's illegitimate son Robert Stewart; father and son were executed early in 1615. These political events were important, not just for the prosecutors, but for Irvine herself.

Irvine seems to have lived in the town of Kirkwall, latterly at least, but when we see her working for a living it is in rural occupations: being employed to herd and milk cattle, carrying a load of corn, stacking her own peat, and gathering shellfish on the shore. She was clearly an older woman. There is no mention of a husband or children.

Most of the evidence against Irvine came from her own confession, but several instances of harm to named individuals were mentioned, and these people may have given information against her. She was twice evicted or threatened with eviction, so she had difficulties with neighbours, and she was stated to have a reputation as a witch. She herself related that the Devil had taught her a ritual to obtain ‘hir heartis desyre’ (vengeance) upon people with whom she had quarrelled. Usually, she was said to have inflicted illness. She was also alleged to have sunk a boat coming from Westray, drowning several people, but she denied this. The assize acquitted her of this charge, but they convicted her of the other charges, and she was executed.

Irvine confessed to a relationship with the Devil that contained a mixture of stereotypical and idiosyncratic elements.