In my Introduction, I emphasized the fluid, shifting nature of sexual desire. It is now time to consider other, similarly fluid desires on the part of the protagonist who has played a more significant role than any other in how issues of sexuality and gender in music have been investigated in recent decades: the listener. Us, the authors of reception history. The author is dead, leaving us as the custodians of their work today. But as we have seen, the reception history of a work can narrow its impact and ossify its meaning, with one interpretation nudging out others like a cuckoo in a nest. And if we impose our preferred meaning in this fashion, we condemn composers to a second death by denying them their voice, negating their desires in favor of our own. The reception history of the composers investigated here is one in which they have repeatedly been denied agency, even to the point of being portrayed a victim, supposedly tossed about by either circumstances or hormones beyond their control.

Beethoven's Fidelio exemplifies how what we desire to see in a work today can cloud our vision as to what is actually there. Since the end of the Second World War, interest in Beethoven's erotic life has intensified, ranging from claims that his nephew was really his son to the never-ending arguments about the identity of the “Immortal beloved,” with Josephine von Brunsvik currently the most likely candidate and her daughter Minona yet another possible scion of the genius.

I. Introduction: the German and Catholic Origins of the Term Katholische Aufklärung

Sebastian Merkle's 1908 lecture at an International Congress of Historical Sciences in Berlin on Katholische Aufklärung is now regarded as a kind of founding historiographical event, the initiation of a process which eventually saw the term ‘Catholic Enlightenment’ move from the peripheries to the scholarly mainstream. Merkle's thesis was diffused through his subsequently published Die Katholische Beurteilung des Aufklärungszeitalters (Berlin, 1909). Over the last fifty years, the concept of a Catholic Enlightenment has become an established historiographical tool for the study of intellectual and ecclesial changes in myriad linguistic and national contexts during the long eighteenth century. ‘Catholic Enlightenment’ and ‘enlightened Catholic’ are terms commonly applied to actors and phenomena as diverse as mid-eighteenth- century Italian scholars under the patronage of Prospero Lambertini (Pope Benedict XIV), Josephinism in Austria, and Bishop John Carroll (1736– 1815) in the early United States.

Merkle's Katholische Aufklärung and its variants have been very widely employed, their use ranging from casual Schlagwörter to historiographical categories employed to frame studies in early modern Catholicism. The importance of the early twentieth-century context in which Merkle coined the term ‘Catholic Enlightenment’, however, has perhaps been underestimated, at least in English-language scholarship. The national context of Merkle, a Catholic, was post-Bismarck Germany. The ecclesial context in the first decade of the twentieth century saw the highwater mark of the Roman ‘anti-Modernist’ crusade. As an academic engaged in critical scholarship who was also an ordained priest, Merkle was particularly vulnerable to an accusation of ‘Modernism’.

Fiona Tolhurst accomplished a good deal more than most researchers do even though her academic career was cut far shorter than it should have been. She made meaningful contributions to many diverse but related fields: she was a Malorian scholar par excellence; she contributed to scholarship on the alliterative Morte Arthure; she was an expert in key areas of medieval history (especially Eleanor of Aquitaine); she wrote about medievalism and modern treatments of the medieval world; and she regularly took up the mantle of public medievalist. However, it is the contributions that she made towards the study of Geoffrey of Monmouth which are likely to be judged as her most influential. In her two books on the subject – Geoffrey of Monmouth and the Feminist Origins of the Arthurian Legend (2012) and Geoffrey of Monmouth and the Translation of Female Kingship (2013) – alongside her many other scholarly articles and talks, Fiona Tolhurst made the case for a contentious but very compelling reading of the twelfth-century Latinist Geoffrey of Monmouth. While most scholarship on Geoffrey's literary works tends to focus on their colonial and ethnic implications, Tolhurst shifted the conversation to his portrayal of females, and she offered this argument: ‘The varied, complex, and predominantly positive images of women Geoffrey creates in all three of his extant works distinguish him from most male authors of the Middle Ages and support the claim that he is a “feminist” for his time’.

How do books circulate in times of crisis? The first edition of the Complete Works of Voltaire, printed in Kehl, in Germany, between 1781 and 1789 is a good example of what war can do to books, and how our comprehension of Enlightenment fluctuates depending on the approach chosen. This book history is strongly anchored in the Enlightenment project as defined by Diderot and D’Alembert in the Discours préliminaire of the Encyclopédie. The aim is to spread to a wider public Voltaire's texts thanks to a new edition whose classification and presentation help the non-specialist reader to apprehend these vast and complex works. Voltaire is not only an exceptional writer, but his complete works are encyclopedic, spanning history, politics, society, culture, literature, arts, etc. It seems more than ever relevant to study real circulation of books and ideas related to the Enlightenment project, and to situate this concept as it is, nowadays, challenged by decolonial thought. Enlightenment is neither a static concept nor a permanent phenomenon. It is the contrary, and intrinsically dynamic. It is a permanent movement of books, ideas, and people, a constant reemergence of commitment, of synergies, of resistances. Book history's political background and social conditions can allow us to pull together how contingent this experience could be.

Beaumarchais's project of this posthumous edition was developed precisely at the time when France was once again at war with Great Britain. On February 6, 1778, France signed a treaty of trade with the Insurgents of America, thereby recognizing, implicitly, their United States.

In the field of architectural history, few primary sources offer as intimate and comprehensive an insight as the diary of a practitioner. While architectural plans and drawings can explain what was designed and when, personal accounts such as diaries can help us understand why. William George Footitt (1865–1936) was an architectural draughtsman in the office of Charles Hodgson Fowler. As architect to the Dean and Chapter of Durham Cathedral, Fowler had a successful practice specialising in the design and restoration of churches. Between 1897 and 1914, Footitt kept a diary to document his professional and personal life and to record his impressions of a rapidly changing world. This manuscript passed to his son John and eventually came down to the present Lord Shipley of Gosforth, the nephew of John's wife Elizabeth. By kind permission of Lord Shipley, this volume publishes the full text of Footitt's diary for the first time.

This unique text illuminates in rich and compelling detail the workings of an important architectural practice during a transformative period in history. Spanning nearly two decades, the diary is a fascinating record of the professional practice, creative challenges and daily life of an individual immersed in the production and restoration of ecclesiastical architecture during the later stages of the Gothic Revival.

This chapter interrogates how shifting contexts profoundly impacted Ngugi’s notion of history and his overall vison. Over the years Ngugi’s oeuvre has largely betrayed the conviction that African writing could intervene in the continent’s historiographical pursuits, and also in the actual determination of historical experience. As a result of complications in context, one sees in Ngugi’s later writing an attempt to reinvent himself in the process of interpreting and reinterpreting a perennially confounding postcolonial world in which the writer has been hewn from his history by the realities of migration, exile and globalisation. His later work is characterised by self-reflexivity as he wrestles with and casts doubt on the nature of narratives, especially their position, role or intervention in Africa’s historiography in a context that continues to defy logic. The act of writing is problematised and depicted as emblematic of a contemporary world where the increasing fluidity and unreliable nature of narratives call into question the very notion of historiography. Overall, Ngugi’s later major writing emerges as an epic journey of loss of faith that simultaneously questions, indicts and deconstructs the act of writing in a world where history seems contrived, concocted, deliberately chaotic and even stranger than ever before.

On 29 December 1170, Archbishop Thomas Becket was brutally murdered in Canterbury Cathedral. Accounts of the horrific event spread rapidly throughout England and Europe, fostering the development of a cult that encouraged widespread veneration and engendered a fascination with the Canterbury martyr that has lasted until the present time. Soon after the murder, visual imagery depicting Thomas Becket and his martyrdom began to appear. As Richard Gameson has remarked, these early depictions were ‘simultaneously a byproduct of his cult, and a major catalyst for its development’. Some of the first works portraying the saint were mosaics and wall-paintings created in Sicily and France, and during the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries images of the saint appeared in other genres, including manuscript illuminations, stained-glass windows, sculptures, seals, pilgrim tokens, and enamel reliquary caskets from Limoges.

INTRODUCTION

In Shetland, there were several late witchcraft cases, unlike Orkney, where the bulk of trials seem to have finished in the 1640s. Shetland had seven cases during the years 1673–5 and six from 1700 until 1725. In comparison, Orkney may have had only one case after 1675, in 1708.

On 9 June 1708, two sisters and one brother of the Ratter family from Collaster (‘Colvaseter’) in Sandness, Andrew, Katherine and Elspeth (or Elizabeth), were brought before the presbytery of Shetland. They were accused of witchcraft, sorcery and deluding the people – phrases from the 1563 witchcraft act. They were questioned, and a series of witnesses, mainly neighbours, were cited, men and women. The witnesses testified that the Ratters went to their neighbours’ houses, begging for food and other items. If they were refused, they cursed the people involved. Shortly afterwards, sickness and death occurred, allegedly as a result of the curse. There were also several successful reconciliations in which a sick person recovered. The Ratters argued against these allegations, and seem to have claimed some healing powers.

The three Ratters did not always agree, since Elspeth accused Andrew and Katherine of bewitching her. A further sister, Christian Ratter, was also mentioned, but does not seem to have been under suspicion. The presbytery’s enquiries also identified another witchcraft suspect, Margaret Watson, who was also interrogated. One of the neighbours, James Jeromson, gave information both about the Ratters and about Watson, but this is the only recorded connection between their cases. Watson was investigated again in 1724–5, and all the documents relating to her case are edited below in the present volume. The story of Katherine Ratter has lived on in oral tradition, giving information about her trial. It is rare today to find oral tradition about individual witchcraft trials from around 1700.

This chapter is about hospitality, literal and figurative, and the difficulties of disentangling the difference as represented in the first of the moralized Bibles produced for the Capetians in the early thirteenth century. Through the lens offered by the final, horrific story told in the book of Judges, it addresses the fusion of hospitality and hostility, its only apparent opposite – hostipitality, as Jacques Derrida phrases it – represented in the words and images of Vienna, ÖNB 2554. Hosting quarrels arise in the Bible moralisée not only when Sodomites (in 2554's French vernacular) come to claim li Dyakenes (the Deacon), a guest under his host's protection. They arise not only when the rape and death of the Deacon's wife lead to war between men of the city and the tribes of Israel. In the moralizing images and text, hosting quarrels also engage the sacraments, specifically figured as the Eucharist threatened by heretics (populicanz and mescreanz), and pagan philosophy protected by Jerome and Augustine against the rise of Aristotelianism at the university of Paris. All this is made explicit in two slim columns of texts lined up with their corresponding biblical and commentary images.