In Israel, art that deals with bereavement has complex links with the official national rhetoric and with the public and private discourse about it. Some works serve the cult of the fallen that was forged when the state was young; others challenge it. Israeli art music, too, has often chosen to address the traumatic reality of life in this country. Ever since the time of the Yishuv (the pre-statehood era), music has been written to fill the space between the traumatic experiences of war, terrorist attacks, and the shadow of the Holocaust and the nation's rebirth in its land. Death and bereavement are an inseparable part of life in Israel. Many composers, living in the country and breathing its air, have used their music to deal with and convey their relationship to these traumas—whether in a personal expression or as an ideological and political statement.

The two pieces discussed here are very different, but both deal with bereavement as an individual or collective trauma: the cantata October Sun (1974) by Mark Kopytman (to words by Yehuda Amichai) and the chamber opera Dear Son of Mine (premiered in June 2000) by Haim Permont, with a libretto by Talma Alyagon-Rose. The opera was staged as part of the Israel Festival in 2000 but has never been revived. Both composers, teacher and student, quoted the well-known children's song “A Festival for the Trees” (which begins, “The almond tree is blooming and a golden sun is shining” and is generally referred to as “The Almond Tree Is Blooming”), each in his own compositional style. Kopytman—who was born in 1929 in Ukraine, came to Israel in 1972, and died in 2011—incorporated fragments of “The Almond Tree” as aleatoric sequences that provide a powerful and painful contrast to Amichai's words.

L’en deit, ki puet, le mal changer,

Pur milz aveir le pis laissier,

Faire saveir, gurpir folie,

Car co n’est pas novelerie,

Ki change pur sei amender

U pur sei de mal us oster;

Mais maint en sun cuer sovent change

Et quide troveir en l’estrange

Ce qu’il ne puet en sun prive:

Ce lui diverse sun pense;

Co qu’il n’ont volent assaier

Et en apres lor apaier.

E les dames faire le solent:

Laissent co qu’unt pur co que volent;

Asaient cum poent venir

A lor voleir, a lor desir.

Ne sai certes que jo en die,

Mais trop aiment novelerie

Homes et femmes ensement,

Car trop par changent lor talent

E lor desir e lor voleir

Cuntre raisun, cuntre poeir. (Tristran, lines 328–49)

[If possible, a man ought to exchange the bad,

forsake what is worse for what is better,

act wisely and abandon foolish ways,

for there is no fckleness involved

in changing so as to better oneself

or in order to escape from wicked ways.

Yet many have a change of heart,

who think to fnd in others

what they cannot fnd in themselves;

this sets their minds on diferent paths.

Tey want to try out what they have not

and seek to add it to what they have.

And this is what ladies commonly do,

they leave what they have for what they fancy,

seeking to fnd a way

to attain their wish and their desire.

In truth, what can I say,

except that men and women equally

are too attracted by novelty,

for they are too inclined to change their minds,

their desires and their wishes,

impossibly, and against all reason.]

En nú skal lýsa hversu ný skáld og fræðimenn, og einkannliga klerkarnir, vilja lofaz láta, hversu kveða skal, og ónýta eigi að heldr, það sem fornir men hafa framið, útan það sem klerkligar bækr banna, þvíað það er náttúruligt að menn sie nú smásmuglari sem fræðibækrnar dreifaz nú víðara.

But now it must be revealed how new poets and scholars, and especially the clerics, will have [people] praised, [and] how one should compose [poetry], and not on the other hand destroy that which men of old have promoted, except for what religious books prohibit, because it is natural that people are now more discerning, as the books of learning are now more widely distributed.

The identity of the author of the Preface to the four medieval Icelandic grammatical treatises in the Codex Wormianus (W, AM 242 fol), from which this passage comes, is unknown. This short work, occupying only one page (p. 83) of the manuscript and unique to it, is placed immediately after the end of part of the Skáldskaparmál [Language of Poetry] section of Snorri Sturluson's Edda and immediately before the first of the four treatises, The First Grammatical Treatise (FGT). It is here treated as an independent text, although previous editors have presumed it to be part of one or other of the grammatical treatises.

If the Bible is considered just another book, its stories and promises may be read as literature. But if read as the heirloom and peculiar treasure of the Jewish People—then it is our privilege and responsibility to integrate its spirit and character into the Israeli national ethos and lifestyle, adding to the physical regeneration of the “Promised Land,” a corresponding spiritual world view that transforms its message of faith and destiny into artistic content as cultural expression. Certainly, political Zionism has provided the unique opportunity to gather together many threads of Jewish history like pages torn from the prayer book, bind them together, and endow age old truths with new forms of expression attuned to the rhythm and style of our time and place. It suggests the possibility, perhaps even the obligation to redefine this heritage in works of art—an opportunity I did not want to miss. In an article entitled “In Search of a Sacred Ethos,” which appeared in the Israel Composers’ League publication New Music in Israel 1985–1987, I articulated and elaborated upon this viewpoint as follows:

One of the prerogatives of our time and place has been a protracted search to integrate Western artistic aspiration within a context of Jewish identification— a quest for ancient sources of inspiration against a backdrop of 20th century horror and despair. While the concept of the sacred is universal, it has acquired unusually powerful overtones in relation to the unique origin and history of the Jewish experience.

One of the primal deities in Greek mythology is Eris, who is frequently identified with discord and strife and who bears at least partial blame for the Trojan War. In some versions of the story of the fall of Troy, Eris throws a golden apple into the wedding reception of Peleus and Thetis, which prompts the beauty contest between Athena, Aphrodite, and Hera. Within Greek mythology and later philosophy, Eris is often contrasted with Eros and Harmonia. This contrast between Eris and Harmonia, framed in Platonic terms, was revived during the Renaissance in works such as Marsilio Ficino's Commentary on Plato's Symposium or De Amore. Outside of the sophisticated classical and revived “neo-classical” worlds, Eris has frequently been represented, especially in Icelandic or Scandinavian literature, with the figure of dragon. In the twentieth century, Carl Jung and his later disciples and popularizers, such as Northrop Frye and Joseph Campbell, have explored the important archetype of a dragon as figure for primal violence and chaos.

William Shakespeare, whom John Keats famously referred to as having “negative capability,” is a poet influenced by a seemingly never-ending set of sources. Critics, however, have tended to ignore the presence of Icelandic, Scandinavian, or Nordic myth and culture upon the bard. There are several key archetypal themes and images that appear, through a Jungian analysis, to have filtered from the cold world of the European north into William Shakespeare's works.

López Pinciano's interest in dance was not purely erudite. The sections where he discusses dance are testament to his interest in the practices of his period, whether it be the zarabanda or the danza de aire performed by the volatines. However, while he does reflect on these popular dances under the pretext of defining ancient dithyramb in his Philosophía antigua poética, he never directly discusses contemporaneous court dance. This omission is noteworthy, especially when taking into consideration the multiple connections López Pinciano had to the court, starting with his position as imperial physician.

This chapter takes into account this contradiction in its discussion of the years between Pinciano's 1596 Philosophía antigua poética and the 1620s, when late humanists once again focused on the Poetics to address dance. Yet during this period late humanists were no longer observing the same dances Pinciano discussed in his text. For this reason, this chapter will pay special attention to the profound shifts which affected the regimes of representation and interpretation of dance at court. It will go on to explain the visible mutations in the discourse on dance put forward by the new generation of commentators of Aristotle's treatise.

The working assumption for this chapter is that López Pinciano does not address courtly dance in his Philosophía because, while he was writing his treatise, the dance practised at court did not fall into the spectrum of what Pinciano considered poetics, no matter how broad his understanding of poetics and poetry might have been. For López Pinciano, poetry is either fiction or representation.

Introduction

As bishop of Lincoln, Edward Lee Hicks has attracted some considerable historical attention. This is partly due to the availability of his diaries, of which substantial parts have been published in a Lincoln Record Society volume. His extensive correspondence in the pages of the Lincoln Diocesan Magazine, however, has not generated a significant amount of consideration. One of the bishop's biographers explains that these regular contributions read ‘rather drily today’. The following chapter, not discouraged by this verdict, seeks to examine the bishop's letters to his diocese during the First World War and suggests that these were of some considerable significance at the time of their publication in ensuring his views on matters relating to the war and other issues were widely distributed amongst the diocese's clergy and laity. Some consideration will also be given to the bishop's hopes for the diocese and the country at large following the cessation of hostilities, as expressed in his contributions to the Lincoln Diocesan Magazine. During the period from the outbreak of war in August 1914 until its end in November 1918, the bishop published fifty monthly letters in the Lincoln Diocesan Magazine, with most being of between 750 and 1,000 words in length, comprising just under 50,000 words in total.

My case study of the Musenhof courts in the Margraviate of Brandenburg will show how the desire for agrarian improvement and economic reform, scientific interest and research, and polite sociability came together. In this way, Musenhof courts complemented the work of economic and patriotic societies with their study and experimentation. Furthermore, the cultural transfer of landscape aesthetics, and agrarian reformism between England and the Continent, allowed the ideal of the ‘country house ethos’ to be assimilated and reinterpreted as agrarian/economic patriotism. Given the advancements in agricultural management and garden design in eighteenth-century England, it is no surprise that there was a scientific cultural transfer between England and Continental Europe facilitated by transnational scientific societies, the emergence of patriotic-economic societies, and agronomic travel.

A dominant figure in the cultural transfer of progressive agriculture was Albrecht Thaer (1752–1828). Thaer's work on husbandry and soil amelioration made him a desired collaborator, correspondent, and advisor. After his formal training as a medical doctor, Thaer turned his focus on agriculture. He had a model farm in Celle, Lower Saxony. From 1780, when he was appointed by George III of Great Britain to promote progressive agriculture in the Electorate of Hanover, he belonged to the Celler Landwirtschaftsgesellschaft, an economic-patriotic society founded in 1764.2 Whilst he never travelled to England, he nevertheless wrote an influential treatise on English agriculture, Einleitung zur Kenntniss der englischen Landwirthschaft und ihrer neueren practischen und theoretischen Fortschritte (1800).

Gods of gold, silver, and many other substances have appeared in this book. From the material idols of the first recension of Togail Troí to the divine characters who presided over lost Golden Ages in Ovid and Tochmarc Étaíne to the golden ram that rescued Phrixus and Helle in the second recension of Togail Troí, the gods are multiple and multiplicitous. Just like the guests at Belshazzar's Feast, we have seen golden gods speak worldly reason, silver gods take shape through rhetorical art, bronze and iron gods relay their poetic fables and ancient traditions, and even a few risible wooden and stone deities strut upon the page. These represent just a few of the ‘dynamic processes’ through which mythological interpretatio occurred in medieval Ireland and Classical gods were reshaped. But, as any medieval Christian writer and reader knew, above them all sits one God and his gold is to be found in the heavenly city.

This book has argued that Christian salvation history played a crucial role in medieval Irish interpretations of Classical literature and that the types of mythographic interpretatio employed by medieval Irish authors reflected methods of biblical exegesis. Chapter 1 approached the workings of interpretatio in medieval Ireland as it was applied to the names and associations of Olympians, setting out the learned glossarial background to the later adaptations. Irish texts display multiple levels of interpretatio, representing Classical deities in terms of other Greco-Roman gods, as well as in Irish terms, from the earliest glossaries of the seventh century down to the Middle Irish adaptations and beyond.