The countries bordering the southern North Sea belong to the most agriculturally productive states in the world. The Netherlands in particular is an agricultural giant. Due to its very high productivity, this country, with its small agricultural acreage, is the world's third largest exporter of agricultural products after the United States and Brazil. Although many people are now rightly concerned about intensive farming's environmental downsides, this remains a remarkable achievement. What makes it even more remarkable is that it began in the soggy, inhospitable wetlands along the North Sea coast. Scholars such as Jan de Vries and Jan Bieleman have shown that already in the seventeenth century the coastal provinces of the Netherlands, with their relatively large commercial and productive farms, were worlds apart from the inland provinces and much of continental Europe with its small-scale subsistence farming.

This book aims to explain the advanced nature of farming in the Dutch coastal zone by looking at it from a comparative perspective and over a long period, from c. 900 to 2000. The coastal provinces of the Netherlands were part of a zone stretching from Calais in northern France to Ribe in southern Denmark, composed of reclaimed marshes, fens and floodplains situated around or even below sea level. On the opposite shore of the North Sea similar regions can be found in eastern England from the Pevensey Levels in East Sussex to Yorkshire. I will call them here the North Sea Lowlands.

Chrétien de Troyes’ twelfth-century verse romance, Chevalier au lion (Yvain), is one of the most widespread stories of the medieval Arthurian legend. The plot, in which the protagonist Yvain is rejected by his lady-love Laudine for breaking a promise to return home in a year's time, and subsequently must perform various heroic deeds, usually in defence of women, in order to regain her favour, needs no rehearsing. It is important to my argument, however, to emphasise the role of the lion in helping Yvain to regain his heroic stature, his identity, and his lady's favour. Julian Harris reads the lion as a Providential companion for the hero. Harris could not, however, explain what precipitates the divine intervention. As Harris points out, the hero cannot ask for help in his moment of greatest need, his spell of madness. Before that moment, Yvain does little to please the heavens. He breaks faith with his new wife, Laudine and, according to many critics, pursues her mortally wounded husband, Esclados, with a cruel vengeance. Yet perhaps something other than the hero's distress or merit persuades the Almighty to intervene. Jean Frappier assures us that Chrétien ‘est un apologiste du mariage’ (‘is an apologist for marriage’), and we know that the poet often borrows from Ovid's oeuvre while making frequent use of Christian symbols, the lion among them.

Picturesque Photography in Latin America

Picturesque photography in Latin America has an enduring legacy. Like magic realism, a literary style often associated with this region of the world (Faris and Parkinson Zamora, Hart and Ouyang), the picturesque as found in Latin American photography often underscores intriguing differences between Latin America, on the one hand, and Europe and many regions of North America, on the other. Both representations share a focus on the exotic, the beautiful, or inviting dissimilarities that Europeans and North Americans have found attractive while eschewing other aspects that cast Latin America in a negative light. The picturesque visions of the region (in the visual arts such as painting) tend to overlook important, but difficult, social truths while promoting the idyllic and the foreign (Bethell 77–80). So extensive were the different stereotypes and picturesque visions before them that writers lacked words, so they used images to represent what they observed (Poole Race and Modernity 104). Photographers found themselves focusing on professions from the popular classes such as aguadores “water carriers” and other elements from the picturesque (Poole Race and Modernity 119). Painters faced similar challenges in sifting through the vast options of the picturesque to represent Latin America. Attractive and enduring, as you will see, the legacy of the picturesque gave rise to the anti-picturesque (which continued to employ the original aesthetic to further its own arguments), which can be viewed as another representational strategy that can function as a middle ground between the picturesque and the documentary. Importantly, the ability of the picturesque to attract visual engagement enables it to promote Latin America in many ways.

Vessel Key: A=American, B=British, D=Danish, Dch=Dutch, H=Hamburg, M=Malay, P=Portuguese

In her memoir Wahrheit aus Morgentraumen, Friederike Brun fondly recollects her visits to Ny Bakkehus, the summer dwelling in Frederiksberg of the royal physician Johann Justus von Berger. ‘In the summer they moved into a friendly country house in Friedrichsberg, half a mile from Copenhagen, on a hill by the sea, which is why it was called Bakkehuus (the hill house).’ Berger's passion was music and he assembled a variety of literary and musical guests at Ny Bakkehus. These social gatherings ended when Berger died in 1791. But the Frederiksberg venue resurfaced again under the auspices of Knud and Karen Margrethe ‘Kamma’ Rahbek, and became one of the most significant literary meeting places of the early nineteenth century.

Though in a rural setting, and difficult to access during the winter months, Frederiksberg had gained popularity during the eighteenth century when King Frederik IV built his summer palace, Frederiksberg Slot, on top of the hill known as Valby Bakke. The palace was extended and rebuilt several times during the eighteenth century, and an English landscape garden (Frederiksberg Have), replaced the more formal Baroque garden. Kamma Rahbek's acquaintance, the royal gardener Peter Petersen (1754– 1826) was instrumental in the redesign of the garden in 1795. By the time, the Rahbeks moved to Frederiksberg in 1803, it had become an affluent yet still rural area.

There were, as the actress Johanna Luise Heiberg (1812–90) observed, ‘four Hill houses’ [‘fire Bakkehuse’]: the Gamle Bakkegard (Old Hill Farm, now the site of the Carlsberg Building), the Ny Bakkegard (New Hill Farm, partially rebuilt), the Bakkehus (now Bakkehuset Museum), and the Ny Bakkehus (now demolished).

My father, the composer Yehezkel Braun, composed his Piano Sonata no. 1 for the Israeli pianist Malka Mevorach in 1957. Its first movement is a classical sonata form in extended tonality, including modal elements and artificial modes. The two main expositional themes change places in the recapitulation. During my research into the connection between sonata form in the twentieth century with its diversity of styles and musical tension, I interviewed Braun, alongside three other composers whose styles varied greatly, ranging across tonal, serial, and electro-acoustic, between 2006 and 2010. Braun remembered the musical thoughts he had while composing the piece many years later. I used a novel method of “continuous interview,” in which the composer would talk almost without interruption while following the music measure by measure. The idea for a continuous interview corresponded with experiments in music cognition that measure the perception of musical tension while listening to music.

I asked Braun to try to remember what he thought in the past and what he thought now.

In the second interview, Braun was astonished by the way he reconstructed his own musical ideas fifty-three years ago, as he remembered the past and commented on it in the present. Talking about his 1957 sonata's first movement, Braun, then eighty-eight years old, vividly remembered that he built the climactic process within a nontonal context at the end of the development section.

The enmity between Harold Godwinson and his brother Tostig plays a key role in many medieval depictions of the year 1066. According to Aelred of Rievaulx, among others, this enmity began in childhood. In his Life of Edward the Confessor, the Vita sancti Eduardi, Aelred relates how Harold and Tostig were playing in the presence of the king and of their father, Earl Godwin: ‘when one of them, more ill-natured than the pleasure of play called for, rose up against the other, turning their play into a fight. Harold rushed wildly at his brother, took his hair with both hands, and would have suffocated the prostrate boy if a greater strength had not quickly pulled him off.’ Godwin refuses to see anything of significance in this event, but for King Edward it is an omen of the ill-feeling that will grow up between the brothers in adulthood. Eventually, he predicts, the hostility between them will affect the entire realm: ‘First they will seem to be playing at deceit and private plots; at the last the stronger will outlaw the weaker and will overwhelm the rebel, and shortly after the death of the one, an ensuing calamity to the other will expiate it.’

In Aelred's formulation, the bad feelings between Harold and Tostig are responsible for the conflicts of 1066 and thus, ultimately, for the Norman Conquest of England.

This book addresses the global significance of music by composers in Israel, exploring the confluence and contrasts of disparate traditions that make up the country's rich and varied cultural tapestry. While Israeli performers have long formed a significant presence in the international arena, music composed by composers in Israel is far less well known and even less discussed in the literature. Yet, throughout Israel's history, chequered with periods of conflict and calm, music by Israeli composers in a wide variety of genres and styles has attained a remarkably dynamic thriving impetus despite, and perhaps because of, the harsh realities of daily life. The nineteen contributions to this volume by experienced and younger scholars, as well as by composers and performers, shed fresh light on themes and topics that, without claiming to be comprehensive, cover a wide range of musical issues, personalities, and genres. At the same time, the book as a whole engages with diverse repertoires to reflect unique encounters between East and West, Arab and Jewish traditions, and regional and wider global trends within art, contemporary, and world musics. The essays reflect a variety of musicological and ethnomusicological approaches to historiography, theory, and comparative analytic methodologies, with an emphasis on richly sociopolitical, historical, and cultural contexts. In the world of the arts, there are no simple formulae to explain the mechanisms whereby culture reflects politics, as there are as many different approaches to express personal and societal political contexts as there are artists.

In early 1814, London was ablaze with talk of the millenarian prophetess Joanna Southcott. Not only had Southcott attained a large following through the influence of her printed prophecies, but she announced that she was now pregnant at the age of 65, with a new messiah. Southcott declared, in The Third Book of Wonders, that she had divinely conceived, and would soon give birth to the second messiah, named Shiloh. News of Southcott's virginal pregnancy quickly spread across England. Throngs of followers attempted to visit her and hear her speak, and numerous gifts were presented to her ahead of the birth, including an ornate crib for Shiloh. Southcott's detractors and critics, however, doubted her pregnancy, and they made this very well known in the presses. Deriding her proclaimed virginity, they lamented the fraud that they believed Southcott was committing on the British public. To combat these attacks, Southcott and her circle arranged for her pregnancy to be inspected by London physicians, surgeons, and midwives, to determine the veracity of her claims. Many of these practitioners affirmed that she was indeed truly pregnant, based on her swollen belly and other signs. Despite these assurances, Shiloh did not come, and in December 1814 Southcott passed away at her home. A few days later, after an autopsy, she was buried in secret at a cemetery in St Johns Wood, London, with only her closest followers present.

Southcott's life, and this divine conception, are well known episodes in nineteenth-century British history, and there are many historical works written about her life and religious influence.