Jon Ceander Mitchell and I have been friends for nearly forty years. We have been members of the same professional organizations, have given papers at the same conferences, and have supported each other in our separate fields. I was a member of the Board of the International Society for the Research and Promotion of Wind Music (IGEB) that in 1990 published Mitchell's first book, From Kneller Hall to Hammersmith: The Band Works of Gustav Holst, as volume 11 in their Alta Musica series and was given to every member as a benefit of their membership.

Having had the pleasure of seeing his tome published in such a distinguished series, you would think Mitchell would close the book on Holst and move on to other projects. He did, writing works on Holst's friend and fellow composer Ralph Vaughan Williams and music critic Philip Hale, but he also continued to amass new information on Holst to the point where he felt the thirty-five-year-old book needed to be expanded and updated. I am sure the reader will be amazed at and pleased with the new information presented here, in a reference book that all serious band directors and music educators should have.

Some years ago, a distinguished band director of a major American university remarked that band music started with Holst's First Suite in E-flat. Although that shows a complete ignorance of the history of serious band music that can be dated back even to the French Revolution, not to mention the wealth of music written for Harmoniemusik, the earlier form of band music, it does show the reputation Holst had in the Anglo-American band world, a reputation the author of this volume hopes to revitalize.

In her graphic novels Huck Finn (2013), Antoinette kehrt zurück (Antoinette Returns, 2014), and Endzeit (Ever After, 2018), Olivia Vieweg addresses the traumatic effects of global neoliberalism. By far outpacing similar developments in the West, neo-liberalization in post-1990 East Germany, where Vieweg grew up and continues to live and work, had particularly harsh consequences. In contradistinction to other artists, Vieweg openly identifies as an “Ossi,” and even tries to create an understanding of what East Germans experienced post-1990—and what they lost—in highly visible interventions, such as contributions to public television: socialized with firm expectations of social stability, egality, and the relevance of each individual, as well as the materialization of a more equitable society within their lifetime, East Germans had been affected all the more by deindustrialization, ghettoization, and the exclusion from the Western-dominated public sphere and politics. Post-1990 protests outnumbered those of 1989 but went unreported in the global press. As a result, psychological disorders spread like an epidemic. Vieweg works through the trauma caused by the Western takeover in what can be understood as her East German trilogy, Huck Finn, Antoinette kehrt zurück, and Endzeit, whose two versions bracket the other two texts.

In 1672, an unmarried servant woman, Sarah Peele, was accused of infanticide in York. In her deposition, Peele told the Justices of the Assize Court that, while she had ‘been begotten with child’ by one William Tennant, she had miscarried a shapeless matter. Peele stated that she had experienced ‘a miscarriage of a mention of a child not formed as it should be’. Nearly one hundred years later, another woman, Margaret Baker, from Saxhow in Yorkshire, was charged with infanticide after four women from the same town accused her. Like Peele, Baker admitted to experiencing pregnancy, but told the Justices that it had occurred three years earlier. She explained her recent pregnant appearance as the result of an illness which had stopped her menstruation, until eventually ‘something like a false conception came from her’. Across England ‒ and indeed Europe ‒ women like Peele and Baker who were accused of infanticide or abortion sometimes told authorities that they had not given birth to a human foetus, but mere shapeless flesh and blood. Sometimes, women used the language of ‘false conception’, as Baker did here, at other times words like ‘mole’, or more ambiguous phrases such as ‘shapeless’ or “formless’, were used to describe what had come from their bodies. In doing so, women under suspicion of infanticide sought to demonstrate to authorities that they were not guilty of such a crime; infanticide applied only to ‘children’ under criminal law in England.

Were medieval people obsessed with ‘type’? Ruminations on the seven sins, four elements, twelve zodiac signs, and countless other lists abound in what survives from the period, leading some historians to draw connections between medieval scholasticism and the medieval perception of personhood. To these critics, classification, hierarchy, and distinction were central to conceptions of self: ‘to conform to a pattern is to be somebody. Not to conform is to be nobody’, concludes John A. Alford; Judson Boyce Allen has meanwhile argued that ‘medieval classifications were made, apparently, in the faith that any given entity – act, person, or fact – was enhanced by being so classed. One's label, one's context, was properly a part of one's essence and definition, and one could not do without it’. Although a preoccupation with adequately distinguishing is evident in texts such as the widespread distinctiones (which offered scholastic explication and exegesis from the second half of the twelfth century; ‘in them, meanings were broken down, divided into their constituent parts, so that the senses or aspects of key words were easier to grasp’, A. J. Minnis describes), there is of course a difference between establishing the components of the trivium and the quadrivium, and the construction of personhood – or the creation of literary character, the subject of this chapter and this book more generally.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, interlacustrine Africa was reshaped on the ruins of ancient empires like those of the Babito and later of Bunyoro-Kitara. From these ruins, however, emerged a new kind of political organisation: the kingdom ruled by a ruler who mediated the great aristocratic families. The main place of this mediation was the king's court, which was a new arena of political struggle and representation. From the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, royal courts shaped much of the political landscape of the region. It had been mainly the desire of conquest that motivated the elites to accept one of their rivals as the primus inter pares. Only a federal coalition of the powerful aristocrats was able to provide the necessary strength to expand and to thwart contenders. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the court, however, rose to be a political force on its own. Not so much as a powerful player itself, but as a power centre, where the elites vied for influence and power. Interlacustrine politics were highly competitive, and this was foremost expressed in struggles for the succession of a new ruler. The establishment of the court as a centre of gravity was not new, the region had a long history of ceremonial politics bound to the residence of the ruler. But in the nineteenth century, the court became an important political, economic, and cultural centre, and that combination was clearly an innovation.

This article begins with a simple but hitherto unexplored premise: for nearly three centuries the most famous speech in Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte Darthur was attributed to the wrong speaker. Malory's eulogy for Lancelot at the end of the tale is universally accepted as belonging to Lancelot's halfbrother, Ector de Maris, hence the more oft-quoted title for the speech, Ector's threnody. In every modern edition of the Morte, the eulogy is both contextually and verbally assigned to Ector because, upon his arrival at Joyous Garde, Ector is told of Lancelot's death by his fellow Round Table knight Sir Bors de Ganis, at which time he ‘threwe hys shelde, swerde, and helme frome hym [. …] And whan he waked it were harde for ony tonge to telle the doleful complayntes that he made for his brother’.2 If the context of this passage is not enough (and it should be) to support attribution of the eulogy to Ector, then the double-quotative Malory introduces in the ensuing clause unambiguously affirms attribution of the eulogy to Lancelot's half-brother: ‘“A, Launcelot!”, he sayd, “thou were hede of al Crysten knyghtes! And now I dare say”, sayd Syr Ector, “thou Sir Launcelot, there thou lyest, that thou were never matched of erthely knyghtes hande”’ (my emphasis). Here I am quoting directly from P. J. C. Field's 2013 edition, but attribution of the speech to Ector remains the same in all editions going back the last two centuries.

Yoruba Pentecostalism and Child Witchcraft Accusations emerged from a personal and professional need to address a troubling yet persistent societal issue: witchcraft accusations and their intersectional impacts. The stories and voices included here are both painful and urgent, representing experiences that often go unheard or misunderstood. This book seeks to shed light on these realities and to provide a framework for understanding, challenging, and ultimately correcting the structures that perpetuate such violence and marginalization.

The journey to this book began with my second master's and then doctoral research, where I sought to understand the interplay of culture, religion, and societal norms in shaping perceptions of witchcraft. While my academic training provided a foundation, it was the voices of the participants—women and children accused of witchcraft—that gave this work its direction and purpose. Their courage and willingness to share their experiences transformed this project from a scholarly endeavor into a call for systemic change.

Building upon years of qualitative research, this book invites readers to engage deeply with the lived experiences of accused women and children. It challenges surface-level discussions, advocating for systemic change and offering insights grounded in a cultural and historical understanding of Nigerian Pentecostalism.

I refer to Yoruba Pentecostalism instead of Nigerian Pentecostalism because approximately 70 percent of the founders and megapastors of Yoruba Pentecostalism are from diverse Yoruba ethnic groups. They have shaped this movement nationally and internationally with their liturgical emblems, practices, and teachings, which are deeply interwoven with their cultural backgrounds. Today, many Pentecostal movements in other regions and ethnicities across Nigeria and the diaspora have imitated these Yoruba pastors and fine-tuned their respective practices and tenets in their languages and cultures.

Both Alison Weir and Jeanette Lucraft have written about the ‘huge influence’ on modern perceptions of Katherine Swynford exerted by the publishing sensation that is Anya Seton's Katherine.3 Nevertheless, despite exhaustive studies, both writers – as well as Anthony Goodman4 – have struggled to find a convincing historical figure behind Seton's romantic heroine. Lucraft draws attention to Katherine's exploitation of heraldry as evidence that she was well able to assert her personal identity. This detail exemplifies Katherine's capacity to ‘play the game’; it is evidence that she had the necessary skills and accomplishments of diplomacy, learning and personality, Lucraft supposes, to convince John of Gaunt that she could be a credible wife for him, and not just a discrete mistress.

The British Brass Band Movement

It is not surprising that Gustav Holst would compose and arrange for the British brass band. During Holst's lifetime, aside from ceremonial functions, the military bands entertained primarily the middle classes in their park concerts. The musicians were entirely from the military, though it must be pointed out that there existed a few civilian bands of military band instrumentation. The brass bands, however, were (and still are) an entirely different matter. Their clientele was the working class, a much broader spectrum of the population. For many, these bands represented a mode of existence, one that was not aligned with British mainstream musical events and societal happenings for at least three-quarters of a century.

Origins of the British brass bands are not difficult to identify. Violet Brand comments,

Gustav Holst (1874–1934) is always worth visiting and revisiting. The musical experiences of his lifetime extended from the omnipresent parlor soirées and spa concerts of the Victorian era to the electronic recording, radio broadcasting, and sound motion pictures of the Great Depression. As a composer, Holst followed his own path. His compositional technique developed over the course of more than forty years during a time that witnessed traditional Romanticism being challenged, and sometimes overtaken, by a variety of twentieth-century “isms,” including Impressionism, Expressionism and Neoclassicism. Yet, Holst didn't particularly favor any one of these styles; he was an original. Whereas his earliest works were composed in the expected Romantic vein, over time his lifestyle and his music took on the influence of such diverse entities as the poetry of Walt Whitman, Sanskrit literature, English folk tunes, North African music, Greek mythology, and of course, astrology. When he adopted twentieth-century techniques, such as polytonality and mixed meters, he did so not to call attention to the fact that he was using them but simply for supportive purposes.

The present volume, while focusing on Holst's wind works, is holistic. The narrative takes into account the continuum and trajectory of the composer's life and works.

Holst's body of works can generally be divided into either three or four periods of creativity. His wind works appear in all of them. The self-contained first period, lasting until about 1905, would include all of his student compositions and those works composed shortly thereafter, when Holst was under the spell of the German romantic Richard Wagner. The early works for chamber winds were written during this period. The second period, lasting until about 1913, displays a more linear approach, embracement of the ancient modes, and includes works that either make use of folk tunes directly or display his ability to create folklike melodies. The military band suites fall into line here.