In ‘Representing Rural England’, an experimental paper published in the journal Critical Inquiry in 2015, a landscape painting – a ‘conversation piece’ set in a particular place at a specific time – marked the point of departure for a discussion of representations of estate management and labour relations in eighteenth-century England. The opportunity to read Edward Haytley's ‘Extensive View from the Terrace at Sandleford Priory’ against the correspondence of Elizabeth Montagu was all the more exciting since the Montagus are the family represented in its foreground. Written by an economic historian trained in the Thompsonian tradition of ‘history from below’, that paper was far less interested in Elizabeth Montagu herself than in the harvest labourers depicted in the background of the painting, not least because even under the watchful, telescopic gaze of their employer and landlord, Edward Haytley's haymakers seem to be doing anything but work. The paper ranged widely over questions of labour and leisure, industriousness and idleness, and paternalism and protest, and even dared (despite the author's complete ignorance of artistic convention) to say something about patronage and genre. At the same time, however, the paper had very little to say about the management of the Montagu estates, and virtually nothing about the terms on which they were held or by whom they were farmed.

The invitation to contribute to this volume is, therefore, a welcome opportunity to revisit Elizabeth Montagu's landscapes, turning away from questions of representation towards those of social and economic practice.

On Thursday 8 December 1639 Sir William Calley wrote from Burderop House in the parish of Chiseldon, Wiltshire, to Richard Harvey, steward to the courtier Endymion Porter in London, sending gifts from his country kitchen.

This simple piece of correspondence – one of a sequence of letters that spanned a dozen years – provides entry into a world of memories, connections, friendship, and service linking provincial England and the capital. It allows a glimpse of private traffic as otherwise invisible commoners like Thomas Smith the Marlborough waggoner carried letters and packages along the Great West Road between Wiltshire and the metropolis.

Franziska's relations with the old countess now also grew warmer, if such a thing were possible, and any minor, half-joking differences of opinion had no effect on this, since both knew that in serious matters they were of one mind. This became clear on one of the very first days, when Countess Judith, overcoming her aversion to climbing stairs, had paid a call on Franziska—as dictated by good manners, but no doubt from curiosity as well—and had an hour's friendly chat with her. As soon as she came in, she had been pleasantly surprised to encounter again the Madonna she well remembered seeing in her childhood in this very spot. And indeed, the only new addition was the rosary hanging from the infant Jesus’ arm. Franziska, who quickly realized what was going through the old countess's mind, pushed up a comfortable chair, helped her be seated with due care, explaining then to her in a soft voice that she thought the countess would have especially fond memories of this Madonna; for a time she had even asked herself whether she ought not to take it down from its place and set it up in the countess's bedroom. But as she had to admit, she herself had not wished to part with it. For the image of the Madonna had been the first thing to greet her at Arpa Castle, even before Hannah; and though as a Protestant she had initially been surprised and almost startled by it, the very next day it seemed to her that the little arch of the niche were growing, to take her too under its protection.

And so anon was the coronacyon made, and ther was [Arthur] sworne unto his lordes and the comyns for to be a true kyng, to stand with true justyce fro thensforth the days of his lyf.

And the moste party of all Inglonde hylde wyth Sir Mordred, for the people were so new-fangill.

The phrase ‘Time of Pandemic’ in my title is deliberately expansive; I mean for it to encompass not only the social environment during the outbreak of Covid-19 (January 2020 through May 2023) but also the socio-political tensions which had already been causing significant levels of stress and anxiety before 2019 and which then burgeoned under the emotional stress of the pandemic and, most importantly, continue to increase even as the Covid-19 pandemic itself recedes. ‘Time of Pandemic’ is thus a touchstone phrase for the emotional strain and socio-political uncertainty that increasingly characterizes the last ten years. A study of the incidence of ‘politically-focussed intrusive thoughts’, for example (published in 2018), notes that overall stress levels in the U.S. population steadily decreased from 2006 to 2016 and then rapidly increased following the 2016 presidential election. In 2017, ‘more than half (57%) of Americans reported marked levels of stress when asked about the current political climate of the U.S., and nearly two-thirds (63–66%) of U.S. citizens surveyed provided a similar answer when asked about the future of the nation’.

This three-act opera by Pierre-Alexandre Monsigny (1729–1817) was revived on 30 October with new orchestration by Adolphe Adam (1803–56).

I could have bet on it! No sooner is Mina declared a success than along comes a counter-success which threatens to steal public attention from that charming score. Is it a good thing or a bad thing for the theatre? I don't know. In any case, it's extremely awkward for the composers.

There's no way round it, Le Déserteur has had a huge success; it has pleased everybody, the young, the old, the Germans, the French, and the Italians. I saw an Italian voice teacher, the man who normally hates French opéracomique more than anything else in the whole world, and he was moved, thrilled, and enthused by this old music which he’d never heard mentioned. He declared that all its charming melodies were so written that you couldn't adapt them to other words without barbarism, and that it really was the ideal of truth and expressivity. For a master of Italian singing, a modern one, to bend the knee before such qualities! It's enough to make one cry out with Molière's malade imaginaire: ‘O Nature! Nature …’

I believe indeed that in no musical work destined for the stage has the sense of dramatic structure and the expression of feelings and characters been taken to such lengths. Monsigny is as true to his genre as Gluck to his. He is as unsophisticated as Grétry, with musical forms that are more developed and spacious. What could be more touching than Louise's aria ‘Peut-on affliger ce qu’on aime?’ (‘Can one hurt what one loves?’)?

Berlioz's immersion in the music of his own time and in its performance didn't prevent him from having strong views about its relationship with that of the past and the problems this presented to audiences.

At last we have something new! To be frank, it was about time! A repertoire intended for listeners who are always much the same has more need than any other of being renewed. It's not that I share in the slightest that viewpoint which tends to see music as a frivolous art, a pastime, a fashionable plaything, a flower whose scent and colours don't last beyond a day. Certainly not. Our idea of the art is far loftier; but our impressions, whatever their source may be, are they not always in the process of fading?

Enthusiasm wanes bit by bit. A warrior who, twenty-five years ago would have punished a slur on Napoleon's memory with death, today is content to shrug his shoulders and treat the blasphemer as an imbecile.

One day in 1830 I heard one of my friends say calmly that there are ‘some quite nice things’ in Gluck's Iphigénie en Tauride. ‘If you’d let slip such naivety six years ago’, I said, purple with shame and fury, ‘I wouldn't have spoken to you again in my life’. But if he said it again today, I’d go as far as biting my lower lip a bit, grinding my teeth quite quietly, and saying to him with a sideways smile, ‘Do shut up, you dilettante blockhead!’

If you announce public readings of a great poet's latest work, their success won't extend to the audience for the first reading turning up for the second, and the hall, full the first day, will be completely deserted by the weekend.

MS 111 is a composite manuscript comprising four independent blocks with diferent dates. There are nine text scribes, including Dyngley, as well as two capitular hands. The first block, Ambrose's Expositio euangelii secundum Lucam, is datable on the evidence of green in the sprays of the champ initial (1410–20). The initiating hand copied only the opening quire; two others completed the work. Hand 2 used a scroll for his frst catchword (fol. 16v); from folio 48v Hand 3 embellished half a dozen simple boxes with brackets. Block 1 concluded with well-formatted capitula. The fourth block was bespoke for Richard Bumpstede, who vacated Peterhouse c. 1441. Block 2, an independent gathering of six quires copied by Hand Zed, was originally designed for the frst block in MS 114. Zed is the one hand that appears elsewhere in the Dyngley corpus. Block 3 is an eight-quire gathering of three texts of Ambrose ad imperatorem, works that travelled together. The block was initiated by an otherwise unknown scribe writing textura, who stopped in the last quire near the conclusion of article 9 leaving a catchword for Dyngley's conclusion.

The length and content of this open letter make clear Berlioz's respect and affection for Liszt without need of further commentary other than to mention that they met in 1830 and corresponded less formally over many years.

Paris, 6 August 1839

I should really like, my dear friend, to be able to tell you absolutely everything that's going on in our musical world, or at least everything I know about: the deals that are being done, the business that's being contracted, the underground passages and mines that people are digging, the platitudes being committed; but I doubt very much whether my tale would have any chance of interesting you. It would tell you nothing new: the study of Italian musical habits has made you blasé about all their delights, and what happens in Paris horribly resembles what you’ve seen going on in Milan. In any case you wouldn't have the heart to laugh about it. You’re not one of those people who find all the outrages suffered by the muse we serve to be subjects for joking, you who would prefer, at any price, to keep secret the besmirching of its virginal robe and the sad injuries done to its divine veil. So let's say nothing about horrors that would irritate you as well as me, and against which we cannot even protest freely, for reasons you know and which M. de Balzac's terrific recent novel would explain if necessary.

Occupying a substantial portion of Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, MS Brogyntyn ii.1, The Siege of Jerusalem in Prose (item 45, hereafter Siege in Prose) presents a unique version of a narrative popular in the later Middle Ages, namely the fall of Jerusalem to Roman forces in 70 CE. Appearing on fols. 157v–184 and thus across three quires, Siege in Prose was produced entirely by Scribe O, one of the two scribes identified by Huws ‘who might stake a claim to have been prime movers in the enterprise’, the ‘organizer and tidier up’ of the manuscript as a whole. Scribe O is responsible for 153 pages of the miscellany in five stints; this hand also provided the rubrication for much of the manuscript (excluding the work of Scribe J, the other scribe-compiler, which J rubricated). Scribe O's role as potential organizer of the manuscript makes it all the more intriguing that, in placing Siege in Prose at this point in the manuscript, Scribe O seems to have deviated from a previous plan. Certainly, a compiler or scribe might change the ordering of works for a variety of reasons, such as the availability of new exemplars or the unavailability of others; yet the inclusion of a text spanning three quires and making up some 12% of the manuscript is a substantial change.

Norbert Lechner's film Ente gut! Mädchen allein zu Haus (Duck Good! Girls Home Alone; released in English as Fortune Favors the Brave, 2016) was part of an initiative called “Der besondere Kinderfilm” (Outstanding Films for Children), which was launched in 2013 by the German government and various media companies. The designation “Der besondere Kinderfilm” is significant for contextualizing the film in the German media landscape. It positions films such as Ente gut as alternatives to mainstream films within the overall genre of children's movies. Another characteristic of this series is that it invites original scripts and contemporary films rather than adaptations or fairy tales. This “originality” may be one reason why the initiative also welcomes narratives about migration, in this case, about Vietnamese Germans. In this chapter, I will address questions of race, class, citizenship, and cultural belonging in Ente gut while considering the generic specificity of children's film. The genre of children's film, like that of children's literature, is not easy to define. For instance, there are notable differences between films for children and films such as the Oscar-nominated Jojo Rabbit (Taika Waititi, 2020), which feature children as protagonists while deliberately appealing to adult audiences. Nonetheless, as Marah Gubar suggests, it may be productive to ask what distinguishes cultural texts for children from those for adults.

Ngugi wa Thiong’o was a leading postcolonial literary voice, advocating for the centrality of indigenous languages. His central argument is that since language was a fundamental instrument of colonisation, it is equally integral to the process of decolonisation. This has resonated among intellectuals and writers from formerly colonised societies who seek to redress legacies of colonialism. During the transitional period in South Africa, Ngugi became the most sought-after speaker on the preservation and development of African languages, shaping the discourse about language, culture and identity. Ngugi’s language ethos played a critical role in the recognition of indigenous languages in the constitution of South Africa. This chapter traces the impact of Ngugi’s language activism, particularly as it has shaped the author’s own development as a writer in both English and IsiXhosa. Through an autoethnographic lens, this chapter foregrounds personal reflection on Ngugi’s influence. It challenges the reductive tendency to confine Ngugi’s legacy solely to his direct intellectual and literary output, arguing for a more expansive appraisal of his enduring influence in shaping and sustaining language discourse among the formerly colonised. It recognises the evolution of Ngugi’s ideas over time and attributes this to his responsiveness to the shifting dynamics of contemporary society and global discursive formations.

The most fundamental task of any chronicler, as the word suggests, is establishing a chronology. Something, however, is seriously wrong with the chronology of the OE annals from the middle of the eighth century to the middle of the ninth. All seven versions of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle that survived into the modern period include a two-year dislocation for the annals dated 754–828 in all versions (correctly 756–830), and a three-year dislocation for the annals dated 829–c.851 (correctly 832–51). The dislocation was also present in the lost OE source of Æthelweard's Chronicon. A version of the Chronicle was among the sources used by the compiler of the Annals of St Neots (1120x1140). In St Neots, unlike all other witnesses, these eighth- and ninth-century annals do not show the chronological dislocation. Plummer argued that their correct dating in St Neots provided evidence of an original version of the common stock to c.892 with all entries correctly dated. This hypothesized OE source of St Neots was given a place in the Chronicle's family tree earlier than all other witnesses. In his interpretation, all the surviving OE versions and other witnesses descended from an archetype which had later and inadvertently introduced this error.

David Dumville has dismantled the entire basis of the belief that St Neots can tell us anything about the earliest phase of the making of the Chronicle.

Rem.1919

Archbishop Davidson reported to the diocesan bishops of England and Wales in October 1919 that proposals had been made in ‘different quarters’ (the records do not specify what these were) for the appointment of ‘a special day or days’ to be ‘permanently associated’ with the war or its outcomes, but that opinions differed on what to commemorate: remembrance of the war dead, thanksgiving for victory or inauguration of the League of Nations. Nor was there agreement on the date or dates: the most favoured were the anniversary of the armistice on 11 November, and empire day on 24 May, which had received government recognition in 1916. The bishops themselves were divided: some favoured a thanksgiving day in July to mark the anniversary of the peace treaty, while others were opposed to the appointment of any permanent anniversary day. Davidson himself commented that anniversary days carried ‘the danger of lessening interest as time went on’, but that he would seek the opinions of ‘some leading civil authorities’. No evidence of these consultations seems to have survived.

In the apparent absence of a government decision for the current year, the archbishops and leaders of most other churches had already agreed to assist a campaign by the League of Nations Union (LNU) for the anniversary of the armistice to be observed ‘in every city, town, and village as League of Nations Day’, to promote the League's cause.