Berlioz takes the opportunity of a large-scale concert to complain about one of his major bugbears, the poor tax (literally ‘right of the poor’) which varying in amount over the years, taxed the takings (not just the profits) of concerts and other entertainments. It had been introduced by Louis XIV, to be used for the maintenance of the poor. It was reduced to a mere 1 per cent in February 1848 at the outset of the revolution. The bracket […] in the third paragraph marks the omission of an anecdote whose relevance Berlioz himself questioned.

The Opéra is currently preparing a ceremonial concert of the greatest interest conducted by M. Habeneck: a large-scale performance of the famous oratorio The Creation. Haydn's masterpiece will be heard this time in its entirety; the five hundred performers, ranged on an amphitheatre built on the stage, cannot fail to make a colossal impact in the acoustic of the Opéra, whose dimensions, although vast, are not excessive.

The solos will be sung by Mme Gras-Dorus, Mme [Cinti]-Damoreau, Mlle Dobré, and MM. Duprez, Barroilhet, Roger, and Hermann-Léon. The concert will conclude with Weber's lovely overture Oberon and with the ‘Song of Triumph’ from Handel's Judas Maccabeus. The takings from this splendid evening are to be given to the Association of Musicians, a recently formed, really useful institution, which already includes most Paris musicians, as well as a large number of foreign ones.

Most people, in most societies, live private lives, with private crises, removed from the central events that exercise chroniclers and historians. Yet their lives are framed and constrained by the cultural and political circumstances of their age. This was true in early seventeenth century England when the majority of Charles I's subjects attended primarily to local and domestic matters until the crisis of the kingdom demanded their attention. Preoccupied by their careers and comforts, and driven by personal anxieties and ambitions, people had to cope too with the pressures of public occurrences and the business of church and state. In that regard they shared some stresses with our own age, though theirs eventuated in civil war and revolution.

Early modern England is one of the most intensively studied areas of history, a reflection not only of the drama of events but also the richness and depth of the sources. A bureaucratized royal government generated rooms full of paper concerning the nation's political, administrative, legal, financial, and religious business. Institutions of local and ecclesiastical government, courts of law, landed estates, chartered companies, and individuals added reams of documentation. Parish officials tended registers of rates, receipts, and life-cycle events, while leading families created private archives of accounts and correspondence. Although only a minority of the population was fully literate, most people were familiar with the written word, and the elite were awash with text. Despite lacunae, and four centuries of losses, a surprising amount of manuscript and printed material survives and has been made available for research.

When the shifting needs of propaganda and other factors changed Whig playwrights’ relationship with conduct literature and thereby made the reform comedies from 1704 onwards more moral than before, the anti-theatrical animus showed no sign of diminishing. Although Collier did not mention The Careless Husband in his last named pamphlet against the stage in 1708, it is certain that he saw no sign of moral improvement in contemporary drama after his publication of A Short View in 1698. Sharing Collier's opinion, Arthur Bedford, the second famous anti-stage critic, began The Evil and Danger of Stage-Plays (1706) with a chapter on ‘the Obstinacy of the Stage’. In fact, the attack on the stage became more violent. While Collier only criticized ‘the immorality, and profaneness of the English stage’, Bedford and John Tutchin denounced the theatre as the antithesis to the church. Because of these circumstances, recent researchers have never thoroughly abandoned the fading ‘playwright-versus-priest’ division but integrate it into the demarcation line between the attackers and defenders of the stage. As a result, ‘Collier’s’ Stage Controversy is reckoned to be a part of the Reformation of Manners, and Edward Stillingfleet, a Latitudinarian and Collier's political enemy in the Allegiance Controversy, is mistakenly thought to be his friend in the Stage Controversy.

Can the writers on the same side of the Stage Controversy be described as allies? To answer this question, we need to look beneath the surface of the escalated war against the stage. Collier's anti-theatrical criticism was indeed a brand, but not a political one.

This appendix lists royalist collections of prayers and royalist services that were printed from the outbreak of the civil war in 1642 to the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, and which contain references to public affairs. These collections and services are supplementary to the royalist prayers ordered for particular occasions from 1642 to 1645 and printed with the suffix ‘R’ in volume 1, between p. 387 and p. 445, and in this volume on pp. 606–8, 619–20.

The collections and services were issued for a variety of purposes. Some were for use in royalist armies during the civil wars; some were intended to maintain general royalist morale during these conflicts, and included reprints of prayers published to celebrate victories of the royalist armies. After parliament had prohibited use of the BCP in 1645, they provided material for private prayers or for ministers and congregations that wished to retain the use of set texts. Some of the collections of prayers (items 3, 4 and 6) were issued by Charles I's ‘command’. During 1648, a form was published by Prince Charles's ‘direction’ both to supply prayers for the now captive king of ‘Great Britane’ and to present his eldest son as a ‘pattern of piety’. During the year after Charles I's execution on 30 January 1649, two forms demonstrated Charles II's commitment to upholding the royalist cause and to the liturgical styles of the Church of England, adjusted to the new conditions of ‘trouble and adversity’.

Step inside the Middle Ages’ invites the cover copy of the game Stronghold 2. If medievalism is the ‘reimagining and repurposing of the Middle Ages’, then video games with historical settings have contributed, from their earliest beginnings in the 1970s, to the shaping and changing of medievalism. Even before the IBM-compatible personal computer and other home computer and console systems made video games more accessible and ever more popular, games set in history and specifically in medieval times came within reach of a growing circle. As early as 1972, people with access to a mainframe computer could use the new medium to enter (a) Kingdom or, with the help of Odyssey, one of the first commercial games consoles, start (an) Invasion in a virtual world described as medieval.

The following decades saw an upsurge of new digital games and games that made use of historical narratives. Among these was the Middle Ages, comparable to Antiquity and Early Modernity in popularity but still lagging behind the most favoured age in video games: the twentieth century with its two world wars. We should not underestimate how far the setting and choice of era has been just one of many factors affecting the success or failure of a game in the market and among players; the time period is very often subordinate to the fun factor of the gameplay, the difficulty level, or the degree of flawlessness of the programming. Sales figures, then, only partly account for the popularity of a game and its setting.

INTRODUCTION

The presbytery of Stirling compiled dossiers of evidence against three accused witches early in 1633: Janet Taylor from the parish of Alloa, Marion Mathie from the burgh of Stirling, and Helen Keir from the parish of Clackmannan. All three places were within a few miles of each other. Taylor and Keir lived in Clackmannanshire rather than Stirlingshire, but the presbytery's jurisdiction crossed the county boundary. As we shall see, all three were investigated and tried in Stirling itself. The investigation provides an example of how a presbytery approached community witches and magical practitioners.

Janet Taylor's dossier is the longest, and she also appears again in the dossiers of Mathie and Keir. She was a magical practitioner, or ‘charmer’, with a wide repertoire of healing practices. Some of her rituals were everyday ones, using nail parings, the client's clothes, or south-running water, but she ranged more widely, and her interrogators took an interest in several details. She recited a verbal charm mentioning a hedgehog, which they wrote down in full. She had a healing stone that she had brought from the Highlands long ago. She named the person who had taught her healing, John Dow Buchanan, who may well have been a Highlander; he had a partly Gaelic name (‘Dow’, or dubh, meant ‘black’), and there were Buchanans in the south-western Highlands. Her interrogators questioned her as to how her rituals worked; she explained that she had a special ‘charge’ to heal. She seems to have had a good reputation, having by her own account practised for thirty years.

The interrogators seem to have been willing to accept some evidence of Taylor's healing without trying to reinterpret it as overtly harmful or demonic.

The Russian composer Mikhail Ivanovitch Glinka (1804–57) had received a note from Berlioz three weeks earlier asking for details of his musical background. He evidently responded in some detail.

We French are rather inclined, in Paris especially, to base our reception of foreign composers of an unfamiliar type on a kind of prejudice, the injustice of which is always recognised too late to have any impact. Our opinion of them is settled in advance, an opinion that's either friendly or hostile, according to our surroundings, habits, and ideas, and we go along with it initially without any reasons to justify it, though with the possibility of changing it if we absolutely have to. So that if we mention a new Italian composer to the vast majority of Parisian artists, they’ll think, even if they don't say so, that he must be some mediocre cavatina merchant, unable to string three chords together properly, the servile copyist of copyists who imitated the imitators of Rossini, unaware of what's happening in the great musical world, as though it were some tune sung around Juggernaut's pagoda and that experiencing it was best avoided by anyone not wanting to be dubbed a stick-inthe- mud. As a result, the greatest Italian composers could suffer this kind of unwarranted stigma if they arrive here out of the blue. On the other hand, in the world of elegance, that of soirées with singing where the word ‘concert’ means the more or less grotesque performance of half a dozen Italian arias, duets, trios or whatever, with piano accompaniment, the new arrival would, on the contrary, be presumed a delightful composer, full of tuneful melodies, and deserving of the encouragement and support of everyone who loves and honours music.

Franziska woke up early, sat down at the open window and looked out over the lake. It was encircled by high mountains on the right, and on the left, lines of hills, with villages and vineyards. One of these hills, the highest of them, was the Castle Hill, whose steep descent, at least at the front, made it appear even higher and more imposing than it was. It marked exactly the point at which the hilly terrain began to turn mountainous. At its foot was a meandering brook, and Franziska, wishing to see where it began, traced its course upward and realized that this was the stream, descending from the top of the Castle Hill, that Hannah had searched out the night before.

Having thus gained her bearings, she turned back into her room in order to acquaint herself, gradually and at her leisure, with the space where she was now to live. The furniture was old but well preserved, and she found every piece interesting, especially a rococo chest, richly decorated with tortoiseshell and large gold drawer handles. Above the chest was a walnut etagere for books, on whose top shelf all sorts of Meissen and Chinese porcelain stood, including two small figurines on the left and right. She set their heads in motion and watched them nodding solemnly. Then, out of curiosity, she took down a few volumes.

Most of the classical empires collapsed in the middle of the first millennium, but despite this collapse various regions of the world became more culturally, commercially, and politically integrated in the millennium that followed, a process traced in this chapter. Mercantile and religious networks, including Islam, linked growing cities and glittering courts, where hereditary rulers and their entourages of elites developed institutions and ceremonies that strengthened royal authority, and created courtly cultures with distinctive codes of behavior. All of these relied for their wealth on a spread and intensification of agriculture, which happened in both the eastern and western hemispheres, and was interwoven with changes in social and gender structures. Cites such as Constantinople, Tenochtitlan, and Hangzhou grew into large metropolises, and religion, trade, and diplomacy motivated people to travel, creating regional and transregional zones of exchange in goods and ideas.

Berlioz takes the opportunity of this occasion to offer his views on the current state of French music.

In the absence of M. Dufaure, this occasion was presided over by the Directeur des Beaux-Arts, M. Charles Blanc. The speech he made at the start of the meeting was reckoned to be full of sense and relevance; it was notable too for an accurate judgment of the power of modern music and the importance it is tending to have among civilized peoples. M. Charles Blanc did not fail to underline the role played by music in those great political and social upheavals known as revolutions. Unfortunately, he was unable to say – if music has indeed contributed almost everywhere to the progress of those revolutions by stirring up the enthusiasm and the good or bad passions of the populace – whether it is equally the case that those revolutions have contributed to the progress of music. As it is, we have only too many reasons for believing the contrary, and the following passage of M. Blanc's speech, which was applauded by the whole room, explains to what extent the new state of things had given rise to fears for the most precious of our musical institutions: ‘I was present, gentlemen, at the Assembly when, considering the Conservatoire, it refused, when the question was raised by one of its members, to discuss your needs. At a time when circumstances demand so many sacrifices, the Assembly has left your funding intact, wishing to prove by that what generosity you can rely on when times become more prosperous’.

The idea of artistic expertise as a commodity has been at the heart of this study. In previous decades, gold, silver, silks and precious objects in metal or ivory had formed the main currency of exchange, mostly travelling northwards within Iberia and across the Pyrenees. Such portable objects and their potential agency have dominated many studies of art in this region. In this book, expertise, in the person of the artist, has been viewed similarly as a possible gift, to be exchanged or loaned, usually for a specific project. This hypothesis has implications for the mobility of artists and for the dynamics of transmission. It contests the idea that artists wandered of their own free will looking for work. It proposes instead that they were sent and usually returned when projects were completed. Artists may well have recognised such constraints as an essential aspect of their position and used atlantes, especially chained examples, as a way of expressing this.

This view has provided a rationale for the isolated and eccentric nature of the corpus of works studied here. It might be argued that low survival rate over centuries could account for this – and that is surely part of the answer – but time-limited and project-focused visits by a series of fully formed sculptors provide another explanation for such varied and accomplished works as Ona's refectory, the cloisters of Pamplona and Silos, the ivory plaques of the Passion and Resurrection, the sarcophagi of Dona Sancha and Dona Blanca, and the apostle columns of Antealtares. Together, these works constitute a middle phase of Romanesque art in Iberia, which lacks both the experimental nature of the early phase up to c.1100 and the more identifiable regional character of late Romanesque c.1200. Doubtless some will argue about the scope of this corpus and wish to exclude or include particular works.