Sailors aboard the royal warship Vanguard, under orders from the Admiralty for a mission of high diplomatic and strategic significance, were so alarmed and angry by what was expected of them in 1625 that they moved to mutiny. Some declared that ‘they will rather be hanged or thrown overboard’ than continue as ordered. Defying chains of authority from the quarterdeck to the royal court, they challenged official instructions and refused to comply. Senior officers shared their unease, though not their intransigence. Questioning directions that seemed to him dangerous, misguided, and dishonourable, Vanguard's commander John Pennington (1584–1645) suffered bouts of ‘perplexity’ in ‘a business of very great consequence’ as he weighed obligations to his ship, to his God, and to his king.

The ensuing drama produced a stream of high-level correspondence exposing hesitations and contradictions in English foreign policy. It threatened officers and men with punishment, and tested the leadership and loyalty of Captain Pennington who had orders, in extremis, to turn his own guns against ships under his command. Facing misleading messengers and duplicitous diplomats, in a time of shifting dynastic and confessional conflict, seamen were exposed to pressures as confusing as the winds and the tides. Captains questioned their orders, mariners manufactured delays, and officers fomented refractoriness. This sorry episode at the beginning of Charles I's reign brought more embarrassment than glory, as professional ambitions and habits of obedience clashed with moral, patriotic, and religious duties.

This article examines the deployment, service, wages and regional composition of armies in fourteenth century Italy through a close examination of the muster records of one force, the cavalry of the commune of Bologna from 1376–92. Once grievously understudied, the military history of late medieval Italy has been the subject of a concerted scholarly effort in the last two decades. But this rich research has been written largely from the perspective of the leaders of these armies, whether individual, notable commanders alone or their captains and lieutenants in the aggregate. By turning to a different sort of source, muster records, this essay nuances earlier interpretations through a spatial and individualized analysis.

This essay examines the deployment, service, wages and regional composition of armies in fourteenth century Italy through a close examination of the muster records of one force, the cavalry of the commune of Bologna from 1376–92. Once grievously understudied, the military history of late medieval Italy has been the subject of a concerted scholarly effort in the last two decades. Thanks to Alessandro Barbero, Fabio Bargigia, William Caferro, Marco Conti, Kenneth Fowler, Paolo Grillo, Armand Jamme, Marco Merlo, Antonio Musarra, Aldo Angelo Settia and Peter Sposato, among others, today we know much about the recruitment, structure, pay and operations of the militaries of Italy's late medieval communes from 1250–1400, a period when these armies transitioned from feudal levies to paid soldiers.

Despite the heading, the material on the Harmonium itself has been omitted; what appears here is the section on its usefulness. The article is one of several that show Berlioz not only to have been a perfectionist where music was concerned but also to have possessed what we would now call a ‘social conscience’, a feeling not so widely spread among composers of the time; it could well have come to him, at least in part, from his father, whom he saw ‘to be a humane, unprejudiced, sensitive man of liberal outlook and broad intelligence, well read in Latin and French classical literature, and devoted to his work and his fellow-creatures’. As the doctor in the small town of La Côte-St-André, Louis-Joseph Berlioz was, by all accounts, not merely respected but loved.

The popularization of music in small provincial towns, market towns, and even in villages far away from musical centres has often attracted the notice of serious-minded people who take an interest, either in the progress of music itself, or in the civilization of the lower classes, and who regard music as a very powerful means of achieving these ends. Sadly, in very many cases such attempts have, in my view, tended to produce either the opposite result to that intended, or no result at all. For music to exist, there are absolute requirements that must be met. Without these, the noises that are given the title of music must necessarily horrify those of a delicate disposition and encourage the barbarism of those who aren’t. I conclude from this that it would be better not to play any kind of music to people who are totally deprived of it, rather than get them used to the sort they’re all too often given.

Women play Irish traditional music, and they always have. I first became interested in playing Irish traditional music at a young age, influenced by both a friend and by hearing stories about my ancestors – “the McCabes of the Halla” – who played music weekly for their neighbours in their rural home in County Cavan. I began my musical journey in a local Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann branch in north County Dublin, attending weekly button accordion, grúpaí ceoil, and céilí band classes, which quickly became the highlight of my week. While I first became aware of the masculine associations of the button accordion from competing at Fleadh competitions and by how I was taught by instrumental teachers who mostly identified as men, growing up, my band mates and musical peers were mostly all girls. So, other than the associations of my chosen instrument, I did not put much thought into any potential gendered issues in the tradition and, contrary to what people may assume, my experience of the Irish traditional music scene was for the majority of the time mostly positive. The branch felt like a community, one that was continuously supportive throughout my journey. It was a place that provided ample opportunity for performances and also supported me by providing a job once I became profficient enough to teach. Thus, throughout my childhood and teenage years, music was my passion and the weekly lessons and sessions were a place to escape to from the stresses of school work and everyday life.

Luigi Lablache (1794–1858) was an Italian bass of French origin. He made an immediate impact at La Scala in 1821, as Dandini in Rossini's La Cenerentola. At the Théâtre-Italien he had also had a great success in Cimarosa's Il matrimonio segreto. He was a great favourite of the young Queen Victoria, who took lessons with him when he came to London. The concert reviewed here took place on 10 February. The cast for the performance of Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro included Albertazzi as Cherubino, Persiani as the Countess, Grisi as Susaana, Tamburini as Count Almaviva, and Lablache as Figaro.

It was a good idea of Lablache to choose this masterpiece for his benefit performance; apart from a few evenings of [Mozart’s] Don Giovanni, one can say that we have not heard at the Théâtre-Italien for a long time music as pure, expressive, lively, skilful, and natural as this. I have never admired to such a degree the creative power of Mozart's genius, nor the unfailing lucidity of his intelligence. There's something heart-breaking, I was going to say ‘provoking’, in this unvarying beauty, always calm and sure of itself and demanding incessant homage from beginning to end of this lengthy opera. Even so, most of the audience were saying on the way out, ‘it doesn't make an impact, it's cold’. Our Paris public has the wretched habit of taking its lead from the applause in the parterre, in many cases the most misleading and least trustworthy of sources. A host of blatantly mediocre offerings, to put it mildly, can certainly stir them to excitement without the applauders really caring that much about what they are apparently turning into a success. On the other hand, masterpieces can be played before an audience that is calm but attentive, displaying a profound, measured admiration far superior to shouts and handclapping.

The prominent philosopher Ernst Cassirer noted that there is no natural or human phenomenon that ‘is not capable of a mythical interpretation’. The descriptive and explanatory power of myths provides one answer to the question of why they remain popular today, even though the present is often described as experiencing a ‘crisis of narratives’. Another explanation may reside in the inherent openness and adaptability of mythical narratives. Every group or society that adopts a myth narrates it from its unique perspective, occasionally to the point of changing its meaning for brand new purposes. This general pattern is also applicable to the Vikings as a historical and cultural group who significantly shaped large parts of early medieval European history, and their myths, that is, all cultural and social stories both historically and currently associated with the Vikings. Today, some people venerate the Viking gods within neo-pagan cults, some get Viking rune tattoos, while others employ Viking myths and their associated interpretations for ideological purposes, as a basis for constructing nations, and sometimes racially defined identities.

Regardless of the underlying motivations for the contemporary usage of Vikings, it is striking that current representations increasingly draw upon earlier interpretations of Viking history and culture, ones that themselves have been significantly shaped by popular media. This includes novels, comics, and TV series such as the highly successful Vikings (2013–20).

INTRODUCTION

Janet Boyman was a visionary, healer and prophet who practised in Edinburgh for twenty-four years. Her dittay, edited below, is full of remarkable detail about encounters with fairies and other spirits. She provides important evidence for the cult of the ‘seely wights’ – fairy-like nature spirits. She was also involved in the political conspiracy of Sir William Stewart, whose case is edited above in the present volume.

The main dittay edited below calls Boyman's crime ‘diabolicall’, but there is otherwise nothing in these documents about the Devil. Her spirits are not equated with the Devil or demons, and there is no sign of the demonic pact that would later attain such importance in Scottish witchcraft. Instead, the authorities recognised Boyman principally as a practitioner. They initially thought of her as having a ‘trade’, a word used in the draft dittay; the main dittay changed this to ‘craft’. Unlike most healers, she specialised in ‘supernaturall seiknessis’, which presented particular challenges to the practitioner. She found her clients among the local gentry and craftspeople.

Boyman was a practitioner of charisma and power. She possessed the power to summon and command spirits, unlike most visionaries who waited passively for their spirit-guides to appear to them. She could also induce visionary experiences in her clients, warning them that strange experiences were ahead and instructing them how to cope. In the detailed case that opens the accusations against her below, Alan Anderson and his wife reported experiencing frightening nocturnal noises after they had carried out a ritual that she prescribed. Most of the information in the dittay comes from Boyman's confession, but some material in this initial case seems to derive from statements by Anderson's unnamed wife, Boyman's client over several years.

The centenary of Charles Villiers Stanford's death in 1924 occurred in the aftermath of an official ‘Decade of Centenaries’ sponsored by the Irish Government between 2013 and 2023. In that enterprise, commemoration became an issue of controversy, as various acts of remembrance were contested as well as celebrated, while some projects were even abandoned altogether. As the sociologist Linda Connolly observed of these controversies, ‘commemoration in civil society is still contentious, hierarchical, politicised and sometimes forceful’. Remembrance is not always fond. In the case of Ireland, it is frequently divisive, as certain aspects of the ‘Decade’ itself made clear. This is especially the case when remembrance shades into reclamation, as when the ‘Decade of Centenaries’ sought to include the Royal Irish Constabulary within its purview, an ambition which it ultimately relinquished in the face of vigorous criticism, much of it voiced on social media.

In this essay, I would like to make a case for reclaiming Stanford that bears this distinction between remembrance and reclamation in mind. Stanford has been remembered in his centenary year: some of his major works have been professionally recorded for the first time; performances of his operas, choral-orchestral works and chamber music have been given in Dublin, Wexford, Waterford and elsewhere in Ireland, and a biography of the composer, first published in 2002, has been revised and reissued as a volume in the Irish Musical Studies series.

Fichte made this claim about history as the medium housing the free development of the human race in the context of a course of lectures intended to show why the French Revolution mattered both for the present age and for posterity. His interest in trying to understand and explain the mixture of routine and rupture involved in thinking about history was matched in the work of several of his contemporaries. To the royalist, Louis de Bonald, something like the same mixture supplied a basis for thinking about the differences between religious societies, commercial societies and authentically political societies. To the advocate of industrialism, Claude-Henri de Saint-Simon, and to the apostle of sociology, his dissident disciple Auguste Comte, the mixture supplied a basis for thinking about organic, critical and positive ages in human history. The parallel was more obvious in the work of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, both in his Phenomenology of Sprit and in his later, posthumously published, lectures on world history.

On 29 December 1170 Thomas Becket (1118–70), the archbishop of Canterbury, primate of England, and legate of the Apostolic See, was murdered in his cathedral. The canonisation of Becket by the Cistercian Pope Alexander III (r. 1159–81) on 21 February 1173 was one of several prominent canonisations undertaken during his papacy. Becket's own canonisation occurred during the Wendish Crusades (1147–85), a period when the Danes, the northern Church, and the Cistercian order partnered with the papacy to subjugate heretics and to convert non-Christians east of the Elbe River along the southern and eastern shores of the Baltic Sea [Fig. 5.1]. Becket's cult spread across the Latin West, including the medieval kingdoms of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, where it was fundamentally influenced by political developments in the Baltic region.

Instrumental practice, based on an understanding of the hand's anatomy, approved and annotated by M. Cruveilher, adopted exclusively by M. Thalberg

Berlioz takes the opportunity of this review to state his attitude towards rules in music. His discussion of the New Method involves physiological details that really call for illustrations and is omitted.

The exact sciences have not always made a positive contribution to music when they have decided to offer their help; far from it. In the study of harmony, for instance, the calculations of mathematicians have come up with theories that are, to say the least, strange, producing results which music had little incentive to welcome, and with which the ear had little reason to be satisfied. We may even suspect that quite often it was disgusted, since the calculating harmonists, instead of initially consulting the ear at the start of their experiments in harmonic progression, paid no attention to its feelings and failed almost entirely to consult it. We know what a maze of errors Rameau got himself into with his system based on the resonance of chords. What trouble that great composer gave himself by trying to use a fundamental bass to justify agglomerations of sounds which, regarded as real chords, shocked those of a delicate disposition, or by explaining others that sounded perfectly good and had no need of such explanations! He even reached the point of denying the evidence of his own ears and rejecting chords incompatible with his system, however good they might be, while in the case of others he remained in a state of total indecision, of absolute doubt.

I. Introduction

Elizabeth Bradbourne, around 1600, dashed off an irate letter to her “loving sonne Francis,” accusing him of spreading “false lyes” about her. Believing herself “curste” for having given birth to sons who maligned her publicly, she told him not to visit – the sight of him would only “vex me and doe me noe good.” Francis Bradbourne, in turn, roundly reprimanded his mother: “for shame good mother” he fumed, rather than accusing her sons of faults, she should “speake of yor chyldren wele that th[ey] may fear you and love you and hard[en] not their hartes agaysnt you.” A furious Sir Richard Hawkesworth declared in 1635: “if my daughter take these vyolent courses and not foullow the advyse of her lo[ving] father, I will never give her any thinge that I can by any means hinder of.” Cecily Tufton loved both her husband, Christopher, 1st Viscount Hatton and his close friend Charles Lyttelton, but in different ways. At her death a grief-stricken Charles confessed to his friend that he had hoped for what “she would ever acknowledge was due to you.” “Loving” sons accused of slandering their mother, “loving” fathers threatening everything in their power to harm their children, love deserved, and love due. The sentiments expressed above seem to be far removed from those of the Anglican minister John Kettlewell who defined love as “all kindness, benevolence, and good nature.”

We are reaching the end of what we may call the “essential” life of Las Casas that earned him – without a doubt – the title of iconic figure of his generation. He lived to 1566 and his life from the end of the Great Debate of 1550 to then is filled – as his life always seemed “filled” – with many other activities. But they were all defined, more or less, by what he had done or lived to then in defense of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas. Let's briefly examine his activities to do justice to an immensely full life, and, as you will see, still then intensely engaged to make things right in his world even as he faced death.

He wrote with a passion, everywhere he went, it sometimes seemed, especially in the Indies, with a small army of followers carrying his papers and documents across the mountains and deserts of the viceroyalty of New Spain. His principal work, no doubt, was his Brief History of the Destruction of Indies. His multivolume History of the Indies, composed as he traveled and worked in the Indies and Spain, was a grand expression of the overall history of the region in the age of the Conquest. These writings are covered below in Writings and Biographies: “The Multiple Personalities of Bartolomé de las Casas, or a Tour of His Biographies and Biographers.”

Perhaps the earliest notice of Las Casas by scholars other than those from Spain and the colonies of the New World was with respect to his early recommendation to import some African slaves from Spain to relieve the killing demands on the Taíno Indians of Hispaniola. Las Casas has been pilloried ever since by his critics for advocating one form of slavery to relieve another.