Two works within Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, MS Brogyntyn ii.1 seem aimed at the education of young women. One is the life of St Katherine of Alexandria, a lengthy prose saint's life, and the other is ‘The good wyfe wold a pylgremage’, a shorter advice poem. While both of these works clearly deal with education and young women, they are otherwise quite different: different genres, different registers, and, in some ways, different social classes. St Katherine of Alexandria was a very popular saint, a patron saint of young women and of learning. She was famous for her mastery of classical learning and Christian doctrine. She was also a patron saint of royalty; her cult was introduced to England by the royal family in the twelfth century. By the fifteenth century, her popularity had trickled down and expanded across social classes, making her popular among gentry with ambitions of upward mobility. In contrast to St Katherine's life, ‘The good wyfe wold a pylgremage’ is clearly focused on middle-class concerns and directed at middle-class women, with each verse addressed to a young woman. And, of course, the genre of a short poem with its regular chorus could not be much further from the lengthy, ponderous prose of the saint's life. These two literary works are so dissimilar that it would be easy to dismiss any relation between them, but I see surprising resonances.

Introduction

Convicted traitor, Robert Devereux, 2nd earl of Essex, aged thirty-four, resplendently but soberly clad in a black velvet gown, satin suit, and felt hat, climbed the scaffold in February 1601, and addressed his audience:

My Lords, and you my Christian brethren, who are to be witnesses of this my just punishment, I confess to the glory of God that I am a most wretched sinner, and that my sins are more in number than the hairs of my head; that I have bestowed my youth in pride, lust, uncleanness, vain glory, and divers other sins, according to the fashion of this world, wherein I have offended most grievously my God … for all which I humbly beseech our Saviour Christ to be the Mediator unto the Eternal Majesty for my pardon; especially for this my last sin, this great, this bloody, this crying, and this infectious sin, whereby so many for love of me, have ventured their lives and souls, and have been drawn to offend God, to offend their Sovereign, and to offend the world, which is as great a grief unto me as may be. Lord Jesus, forgive it us, and forgive it me, the most wretched of all.

Traditionally interpreted according to the conventions of the ars moriendi tradition, this passionate speech in which Essex confessed his sins, showed remorse, and asked for forgiveness is generally seen as an excellent example of the genre of last dying speeches. Even those who claim that Essex was merely playing a role rather than being sincerely religious view him as a penitent figure.

In a letter from 1752, the surveyor, mine-owner, and antiquarian Lewis Morris is caught worrying anxiously at his brother about their newly founded Welsh revivalist society. Referring to it initially as the ‘British Society’, a name based on the much-vaunted ancestral connection between the Welsh and the Ancient Britons, Lewis nevertheless seems wary about emphasizing their ‘original’ Britishness too bluntly:

The society would, in fact, become best known under this ‘disguised’ name of ‘Cymmrodorion’, a relatively obscure Welsh word often defined as ‘aborigines’, but retaining the sense (in Lewis's gloss) of ‘Old Inhabitants’. As this name suggests, such claims of descent from Britain's first possessors were symbolically central to eighteenth-century Welsh revivalism. However, there was also – for Lewis Morris – a degree of malleability regarding this traditional Welsh narrative, and a tactical politics to making this ancestral claim: if it was perceived purely as national resentment (as in the quotation from the Tatler that opens this book), it might lose any cachet gained from association with the post-1707 state's Britishness.

The ‘Collier Controversy’ has conventionally been defined as a pamphlet war between Collier and the defenders of the stage, especially playwrights. From 1698 to 1708, Collier initiated the controversy over the morality of the theatre with A Short View, engaged pro-stage writers with three Defences, and associated the great storm of November 1703 with his Dissuasive from the Play-House. These five pamphlets established Collier's reputation as the most prominent figure in this controversy. All participants, whether they agreed or disagreed with him, had to engage with his arguments. Rather than challenging the conventional definition as the initial step of this book, this chapter focuses on Collier's anti-stage pamphlets and seeks to understand what actually happened in this pamphlet war. I will first reflect on modern preconceptions about the interaction between Collier and the playwrights before reconsidering the nature of Collier's writing on the stage and, in the next three sections, discussing its structure and features.

Whose Stage Controversy?

The relationship between the Stage Controversy and its researchers deserves as much attention as the relationships among its participants. The history of the study of the Stage Controversy can be traced back to Dr Samuel Johnson (1709–84), whose description of the Stage Controversy – published in 1781 in the life of the playwright Congreve in the Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets – as a ‘long-continued controversy between Collier and the poets’ set the tone for the scholarship of the next two centuries.

1. Archiv der Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Wien, Brahms- Nachlass, Briefe Sophie v. Sell an Johannes Brahms 314, 1.

Berlin, 5. Februar 1895

Hochverehrter Herr Doktor.

Bevor ich nach Schwerin zurückkehre, muß ich Ihnen als Vereinsvorstand das Diplom—wie bestellt “auf großem Bogen”—übersenden. Wenn Sie nur hätten sehen können, wie viel Freude es meiner Freundin und mir gemacht hat es anzufertigen! Und wie schön wird es sein, wenn wir unserm verehrten Fürsten Bismarck zum 80. Geburtstag gratulieren und auch den Zweigverein Wien mit aufführen können! Nehmen Sie noch herzlichen Gruß und Dank. Ich habe mir's stets gewünscht, Ihnen einmal persönlich danken zu dürfen für all’ die schönen Stunden, die mir ihre Musik bereitet hat und immer auf's Neue bereitet. Sei es, indem ich sie höre; sei es, indem ich mich selbst mit Ihren herrlichen Liedern beschäftige. Und neulich habe ich Ihnen von alledem kein Wort zu sagen vermocht! So geht es mir immer. Sie zeigten aber über den Bismarckverein ein so wunderbares Wissen,— vielleicht haben sie auch ein wenig von dem gemerkt, was ich auszusprechen nicht den Mut fand! Und seien Sie nicht böse, dass ich es schriftlich versuche. Ein Versuch bleibt es freilich. Vielleicht kann man nur Gott, der den Menschen die Macht gegeben Anderen so hohe Freuden zu bereiten, in rechter Weise für dieselben danken.

The island where the boat had run aground was only a short distance from the eastern shore of the lake, so that an hour later, when the storm died down, Egon was able to send a message to the old count. A twelve-year-old boy who knew the lake as well as his Our Father was ready to take the message, crossed the lake safely, and arrived at the castle at two in the morning. He found everyone still awake, and gave Count Adam a note that Egon had written. It read: “Saved. Franziska weak and exhausted. At daybreak we take the ferry to Szent Gorgey, and will expect a carriage there. Egon.”

After reading this, the count gave the note to Judith. She was in a state of extreme anxiety, and saw in all this nothing less than a miracle and an answer to prayer. She promised to make a benefaction to the church, while her brother gave the credit for the miraculous escape to the two boatmen, and resolved to make sure they profited by it.

“And,” he concluded, “now that we know that Egon and Franziska are safely resting, we should do the same. A bit of sleep is always a good thing; otherwise we won't have the strength to celebrate their rescue. For joy with weary eyes is only half a joy. And so, good night.”

The next morning, nothing stirred in the castle till fairly late, and it was long past ten o’clock when they finally gathered at breakfast; first there were warm greetings, then questions and a recounting of what had happened.

Had Harry White not become such a gifted and pioneering musicologist, he might have been a skilled archaeologist, such is his talent for deep excavation and evaluation. These essays lay bare the manifold layers he has spent decades working through with adroitness and flair. Curiosity, provocativeness, imagination and literature are threaded through his intellectual journeys and probing of how the Irish experience has been imagined musically.

Three themes predominate here: musicology in Ireland, the relationship between music and literature, and the way Irish music has been received, transmitted and sometimes ignored. The book is a clarion call for a textured understanding of these strands. The difficulties of sustaining an interest in European art music in Ireland over the last century prompt much reflection on its ‘invisible and inaudible condition’. His explorations incorporate assessments of individual composers and their legacies, the role of gender and ‘the silent reception and subsequent recovery of Irish women composers’, and the literary imagination. His determination to revise and expand the framework of the cultural history of music in Ireland, or what he terms ‘the formative intimacies between music and letters in Irish cultural history’, is captured in his reflections on James Joyce's conflation of music and language. For Joyce, ‘music exerted a foundational claim’ on his imagination, amounting on occasion, as seen in Ulysses, to a ‘mesmeric enchantment’.

South Korean German woman film director Cho Sung-hyung's documentary Endstation der Sehnsüchte (Last Station of Desire, released in English as Home from Home, in Korean as 그리움의 종착역 or 독일 마 을, 2009) opens with black-and-white archival footage documenting a historical moment at Frankfurt Airport in the early 1960s. A group of South Korean women, all dressed in traditional gowns (hanbok), disembark from an airplane, smiling and waving to onlookers below. The camera captures—through close-ups of the women's beaming faces—their excitement and pride in being part of a privileged group able to travel and work internationally at a time when few South Koreans could. As we soon learn from the intertitles, between 1963 and 1976, approximately ten thousand women from South Korea (Republic of Korea, ROK) worked as nurses in West Germany (Federal Republic of Germany, FRG) through a Gastarbeiter (guest worker) program.

This opening sequence of Endstation der Sehnsüchte shows the intertwined history of West Germany and South Korea, which is also embedded in individual memories. Born in Busan in 1966, director Cho Sung-hyung briefly visited West Germany as a child when her mother worked there as a nurse. Cho later returned to Seoul and earned her Bachelor's degree from Yonsei University. After pursuing graduate education in art history, media studies, and philosophy from the University of Marburg in the early 1990s, she settled permanently in reunified Germany and became a naturalized German citizen in 2015.

Sir Thomas Smith, in this late sixteenth-century quotation, revealed what he considered the household to be based on. The central figures were a husband, his wife, and their children; they were joined by several others, including animals, possessions and servants, all of them under a single roof. Smith's definition provides a helpful portrait of the premodern household, although there was a great deal of variety as might be expected. While elite households were also focused on similar figures, they were often much larger than the average household. Royal households in particular could be quite fluid and typically included a wide variety of persons who were related to or served the head of the household. For this study's purposes, I regard the queen's household as having encompassed all who served the queen in relation to her domestic needs whether they physically resided under the same roof as she did or permanently lived elsewhere. It also included those of the queen's immediate family and relations who lived at least semi-permanently in her household and were supported financially by her. The heir to the throne typically had his own household, as in the cases of Margaret and Henry's son, Edward, Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville's heir, the future Edward V, and Arthur, the son of Henry VII and Elizabeth of York. Royal children other than the heir could reside in the queen's household, as did Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville's daughters, Elizabeth and Mary, for whose upkeep the queen received an additional grant of £400 a year.

A cornerstone of combinatorics is extremal theory, in which one asks for the optimal value of a parameter of a combinatorial object, given certain constraints. Extremal graph theory is one of the most robust areas in combinatorics, with classical results that has produced sophisticated techniques and a fundamental understanding of graphs.

Extremal questions have been asked about other combinatorial objects, and, in recent years, there has been a growing interest in extremal problems in the area of partially ordered sets (posets). In this survey, we will review some of the more well-known results in extremal poset theory, focusing on Turán-type and Ramsey-type problems. We will also present fundamental open questions that have motivated and continue to motivate this emerging area of combinatorics.

At the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, Thomas Mann (1875–1955) was the most famous living German author, having been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929, largely on the strength of his novels Buddenbrooks (1901) and to a lesser degree The Magic Mountain (1924). Long before 1939, Mann's political views had changed sharply. During the First World War, he defended the German monarchy and rejected democracy, arguing that it was a form of government unsuited to the pursuit of “Kultur”—culture with a capital C. He poured all his fiercely anti-Western views and biases into a massive essay of 600 pages, tellingly titled Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man (1918). After Germany's defeat and the creation of a democratic republic in 1919, Mann came to embrace the political culture of the West and to support the fledgling Weimar Republic when parties on both the left and right of the political spectrum rejected and tried to undermine democratic rule. He voiced his new-found political beliefs in his essay “On the German Republic” (1922). With the rise of Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) to power in 1933, Thomas Mann and his family went into exile, first in Switzerland, and from 1938 in the United States. By that time, he had become an ever-more-vocal critic of National Socialism. Beginning in October 1940, one year after the outbreak of the war, and continuing beyond Germany's capitulation in May 1945 until December of that year, Mann wrote and delivered a series of monthly radio addresses to the German people that were broadcast to Germany and German-occupied Europe by the British Broadcasting Corporation.