Although Chopin seems to have had a low opinion of his music, Berlioz admired his piano-playing and compositions. There was some friendly correspondence in the 1830s including a dinner invitation partly in Italian that begins: ‘Chopinetto mio, si fa una villegiatura da noi à Montmartre …’.

After a long and terrible period of agony, Chopin has just died. We shall not, in his case, use the regular formula and say that his death is a loss for art. Sadly, Chopin had been lost to music for some time. His exhaustion and sufferings were such that he could neither play the piano nor compose; even the shortest conversation tired him to an alarming extent. By and large he tried to make himself understood by using sign language. This was the reason for the kind of isolation in which he chose to live the last days of his life, an isolation that many people criticised, some attributing it to a disdainful pride, others to depression, both of which were utterly foreign to the character of this charming, supreme artist. Far from being gloomy, in the days when his sufferings were still tolerable Chopin was displaying a witty cheerfulness that lent an irresistible attraction to the meetings with his friends. He brought to every conversation that humour which was the principal charm and essential character of his rare talent.

This capitulation at Vilagos was clearly the finest painting in the gallery, but Franziska, try as she might, was unable to work out the portraits in it. And so in the end she did have to beckon Toldy over. For Toldy, a long-awaited moment.

“I can't work it out, Toldy,” she said. “Here on the left, I can see by the green uniforms that these are all Russians. And these are you, the Hungarians. But I don't recognize anyone. Who is this here, with the gray beard?”

“Is Kiss. General.”

“Dead?”

“Dead. Piff-paff!” And he raised both arms as if firing a rifle.

“And this one here?”

“Is Nagy Sandor. General.”

“Dead?”

“Dead.” But now, instead of his gesture for firing a rifle, he made one showing a hanging. “And,” he continued, without waiting for further questions, but speaking more and more emphatically, “here Leiningen. General. Dead. And here Aulich, general. Dead. And here Rudiger. General, but Russian general. And here Gorgey. Dog.”

“You mustn't say that, Toldy.”

“I can, my lady. Gorgey traitor. And traitor is dog.” And sparks shone in his old eyes, and a stream of incomprehensible Hungarian flowed from his lips, though with many names scattered through it, which allowed her to grasp that he was speaking of Count Ludwig Batthiany, and especially of the executions by hanging at Arad.

‘Bristol lost most of its medieval heritage in the war’, is a truism often heard in the city when conversation turns to things medieval. As often the case with generalisations, it does not tell the entire story. Central Bristol was bombed in World War II, and its medieval architectural heritage suffered along with its citizens for its role as a port city. This is undoubtedly true. However, one important and unrecognised facet of Bristol's medieval heritage was protected by being small and naturally dispersed, scattered across institutions around the city: its manuscripts.

Part I: Introducing the Manuscripts

Handwritten on the leather product known as either parchment or vellum, made in England from calf, sheep, or goat hide, or sometimes on imported paper, manuscripts in the Middle Ages cost an enormous amount in time and materials. Earlier in the Middle Ages manuscripts were frequently copied by monks in monasteries. By the thirteenth century, however, most manuscripts were made in towns and cities, by lay artisans. Scripts changed over the centuries, and these specialised too.

Today we find the blocky script scholars call ‘gothic’ so iconically medieval that it is frequently used in marketing. Gothic script (also called textura or textualis) was very slow to write, as each part of every letter required its own stroke of the pen, and letters remained separate.

STYLISTIC BASENESS, YOUNG READERS, AND THE MOTHER HUBBERDS TALE MANUSCRIPTS

To begin by stating the obvious: Edmund Spenser's witty satire Prosopopoia: or Mother Hubberds Tale (MHT) is not a bad poem. Nevertheless, its author goes to some lengths to alert readers to its supposed poetic deficiencies. The dedicatory epistle to Lady Compton and Mountegle presents the poem as a piece of unpolished juvenilia. Additionally, he refers to MHT as a ‘simple present […] of these my idle labours’, warning that while unnamed ‘others’ liked the poem, it has flaws, even if those flaws may be part of the appeal: ‘Simple is the deuice, and the composition meane, yet carrieth some delight, euen the rather because of the simplicitie and meannesse thus personated’. Spenser's repeated insisting that in terms of contents and execution his poem is ‘simple’ and ‘mean’ – that is, crude, with implications of poor quality – go beyond the ordinary modesty topoi and authorial hedging that readers might expect to find in an early modern dedication, and the theme is continued in the frame narrative of the poem. The narrator surrounds the Tale proper with further disclaimers about flaws of content and form, culminating in his famous declaration that there will be no need to invoke any muses because ‘Base is the style, and matter meane withall’ – a direct echo of the epistle's ‘simple is the deuice, and the composition meane’.

While Spenser's dedication blames the baseness of style on the ‘raw conceipt of his youth’, the narrator's disclaimers blame it in equal parts on his fever-addled brain (he is suffering from a plague-like illness notorious for depriving sufferers ‘of sense and ordinarie reason’) and the ‘bad tongue’ of Mother Hubberd, a Wife of Bath-like figure.

William Keatinge Clay's Liturgical services: liturgies and occasional forms of prayer set forth in the reign of Queen Elizabeth (Parker Society, Cambridge, 1847) has been a standard reference work for scholars of sixteenth-century England. This appendix compares the special prayers and services which are listed and reprinted in Clay's volume with the texts and commentaries provided in volume 1 of this edition. It also explains why some of the forms of prayer listed by Clay are omitted from that volume. Clay's system of identification for services and prayers, by Roman numerals, is given, together with the page numbers for the items in his list and also, where provided, for his transcribed texts of the services and prayers.

Clay I (p. 458): redated to 1562. See explanation in the commentary for 1562–E1.

Clay II (pp. 458, 475): see 1560–E.

Clay III (pp. 458–9, 476–7): see 1562–E1.

Clay IV (pp. 459, 478–502): see 1563–E.

Clay V (pp. 459, 503–7): a form for private, household prayer described in the commentary for 1563–E.

Clay VI (pp. 459–60, 508–12): a manuscript prayer, noted in the commentary for 1564–E.

Clay VII (pp. 460, 513–18): see 1564–E.

Clay VIII (pp. 460–1, 519–23): see 1565–E1.

Clay IX (pp. 461, 524–6): see 1565–E2.

Clay X (pp. 461–2, 527–35): see 1566–E.

Clay XI (pp. 462, 536–7): a prayer to be said after the first four parts of An homelie against disobedience and wylful rebellion, and given in 1570–E.

Appendix 1: Documentary Dates

Arthur Golding's translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses (first published in part in 1565, followed by a complete version in 1567) is a key work of Elizabethan humanism, informed by an appetite for Classical learning alongside the steadying hand of moral reading. According to the Preface to the Reader, Ovid's poem is ‘fruitful to the mind’, full of ‘counsels wise and sage’, ‘good ensamples’, and ‘reproofs of vice in youth and age’, in what reads to modern scholars as a largely vain attempt to tether the erotic energies of the Metamorphoses to the sensibilities of Golding's own Protestantism. It has been extravagantly praised, both as the Ovid used by Shakespeare, and by Ezra Pound, as a major canonical work in English in its own right. For Pound, Golding was so important that he provided ways of understanding Ovid: ‘Can we… know our Ovid until we find him in Golding? Is there one of us so good at his Latin, and so ready in imagination that Golding will not throw upon his mind shades and glamours inherent in the original text which had for all that escaped him?’ This is almost intimidating praise, which has been much qualified by later writers. J. A. K. Thomson, for example, offers the rebuke of many a Classicist to a translation which seldom sounds like Ovid: ‘how could a man, who could read Ovid's Latin with ease and pleasure, bear to read Golding instead?’ As we shall see, Golding's Ovid is more often referred to than read; in my own experience, when I have discussed Golding with Renaissance fellow travellers, their reaction to the idea of reading the entire poem has been a mild horror both at the undertaking and (crucially) bewilderment at the idea of having to read so many fourteeners.

General methods for assessing model fit are motivated, and are applied to network data, with modifications appropriate to the network context. For instance, plots such as the QQ-plot can be used to give a graphical idea of how well the distribution of a statistic matches its theoretical (perhaps simulated) distribution. As an example, the empirical distribution of the degrees in a Bernoulli random graph can be compared to the distribution function of their theoretical binomial distribution; although such a fit typically looks good, there is actually a difference between the two that is detectable by repeating the experiment often enough, because of the dependence between the degrees. Fit can also be judged by using generalized likelihood ratio tests, and pure significance tests such as Pearson’s statistic. When a model is not available, it may still be possible to justify Monte Carlo tests. Goodness of fit is considered in particular in the context of Bernoulli and Erdős–Rényi mixture models, the GPDS model and exponential random graph models.

During the 1800s, Thomas Becket's reputation underwent substantial re-fashioning in Britain: new biographies and transcriptions of medieval texts were published, his story was reimagined for the stage, and he became an important figure in the Roman Catholic revival. Less well-studied is the renewed appreciation for medieval material culture related to the saint. Initially viewed as curios, over the course of the late 1700s and throughout the 1800s these artefacts became popular and widely recognised works of medieval art. Central to the reception and circulation of such objects was the antiquarian network comprising private collectors and scholars, curators, and dealers. Their collective output, including lectures and demonstrations at society meetings and published proceedings, codified Becket's iconography and fundamentally shaped his position as one of England's most important historical figures. This spirit of enquiry was often prompted by new discoveries, such as pilgrim tokens unearthed in the City of London, and by Victorian exhibitions that presented Becket to the wider public. This article will chart how the discovery, collecting, and display of such objects sheds light on our understanding of Becket's eighteenth- and nineteenth-century legacy. Due to the volume of material, it has not been possible to provide a comprehensive survey of all media and representations of St Thomas. Instead, I will examine selected antiquities related to the saint in circulation during this period, explore several case studies including Limoges enamelled chasses and pilgrim souvenirs, and reflect on their place in public exhibitions.

Berlioz's first article, the first of three entitled Polémique musicale, was published in Le Corsaire on 12 August 1823 when he was nineteen. He asked of Spontini's opera La Vestale, among other things, ‘Why does the orchestra make so much noise?’ Berlioz's propensity for causing trouble lasted throughout his career as critic; but at the same time, he was happy distributing praise when he felt it to be deserved. Other outlets in these early years included Le Correspondant (1829), the Berliner allgemeine musikalische Zeitung (1829), which published eight articles translated into German, the Revue européenne (1832), L’Europe littéraire (1833), Le Rénovateur (1833–5), L’Italie pittoresque (1834), Le Monde dramatique (1835), and La Chronique de Paris (1837–8).

There were two journals to which he remained loyal to the end of his critical career, if one counts as one the weekly Gazette musicale de Paris (1834– 5), which became the Revue et Gazette musicale de Paris (RGM) in 1835 (so before the period covered in this selection of articles). This was a specialist publication, as its name implies, edited by Maurice-Adolphe Schlesinger (1798–1871), also a music publisher of works by Berlioz and his teacher Jean-François Le Sueur among others; contributors to Schlesinger's periodical included Robert Schumann, Liszt, Wagner, and George Sand. The other was the Journal des débats (JD), a political daily for which Berlioz first wrote in 1835. A fuller account of these journals, their editors and owners, and Berlioz's connections to them, personal and professional, may be found in Peter Bloom's introduction.

Appendix 4: The Fish Scribe: Pembroke Manuscripts

January 30, 1944

German Listeners!

When you read certain statements that appear in Nazi propaganda, which continues its work mechanically and almost soundlessly, one wonders whether they are the product of pathological isolation, of an eerie detachment from the world and reality, whether they stem from the nonconformism of insanity, or whether they signify the impudent falsification of reason, the unconscionable perversion of the meaning of language, the deliberate turning of truth on its head. “Look at the world around you,” Goebbels said, “and ask yourself whether life would still have any meaning for humankind if our enemies were to achieve their goal.”—Is that insolence or insanity? It is probably a combination of the two. But the combination is more repulsive than either alone would be. Just hearing the word “humankind” coming from this mouth—how does that make you feel? Where did he get it from? Is it even in his vocabulary? Does he lack any healthy awareness of the fact that anyone in a given position, a position necessarily informed by a set of doctrines and deeds, those of National Socialism for example, must refrain from invoking certain words and concepts, because they belong to another sphere, the counter-sphere, and those in certain positions are not entitled to use them? Does he think that one can simply steal and plunder and “expropriate” in the spiritual and moral realms like one does in the physical realm? What gives him the right to talk about “humankind”?

This chapter discusses earlier histories of the world, and explains the social and cultural approach of this book. It lays out the book’s five chapters.

Brahms's return to Vienna coincided with the first Viennese visit of Robert von Hornstein (1833–1890), a Swabian-born composer whose one-act operetta Die Pagen von Versailles (The pages of Versailles) was given its premiere at the city's Carltheater on October 13, 1863. In his memoirs, Hornstein discusses at length the many pleasant interactions he had during this visit with Vienna's leading musical figures. He spent a good deal of time in particular in the company of the music critic Eduard Hanslick and his friends. It is probable, therefore, that Brahms, who was already on Du-terms with Hanslick, was among those who made Hornstein's acquaintance.

What is beyond doubt is that Brahms would have been familiar with Hanslick's high regard for the visitor's music. In his review of the first performance of Die Pagen von Versailles, the critic wrote:

We were interested in this new work because not long ago we were convinced by this composer's songbooks that a pleasing, popular talent has appeared here, which is as if it were made for the badly neglected field of the light-hearted Singspiel. The first three of Hornstein's [four] Soldatenlieder, op. 28—“Hans Ziethen” [no. 2], “Seidlitz” [no. 1] and “Grenadierlied” [no. 3]— astounded us with their simple popular power, which is so seldom encountered in our days of refined and over-refined composition.