Since its creation, photography has played an increasingly active role in how we represent our lives. If you were to survey those around you, you would probably find that more people now use photographic images to represent their lives than written text. This is one of the many pieces of evidence of the visual turn in our society. In fact, photography is now one of the main ways we represent our life; indeed, it is one of the most democratic mediums of representation in our present times. Modern society trusts, uses, and shares photography. It values such images as a faithful record of our experiences and the world around us. They break down myths and build up histories. Photography reveals unique information that is difficult or impossible to obtain from other sources. Such images convey hidden information and record the obvious and the mundane. For these and other reasons, it is imperative that we study photography and the ways it represents the world. This companion study aims to help you consider ways in which Latin America is revealed to us via photography and reflect upon photographic practices.

The technological side of photography has a global history that has been formed and shared by the countries that have contributed to its developments. No one person can claim sole credit for these processes that allow individuals to capture the reflection of light onto a memory card, a piece of paper, a plate of glass, or a buffered copper plate that has been coated in silver and mercury vapors. Before photography came to be, capturing an image inside a box, a camera oscura, was a well-known technique used by artists and others for centuries. The gap to be bridged in the invention of photography was how to allow that light to be captured and fixed onto an image.

“Music and medievalism” is already an established scholarly field encompassing a wide range of topics, and it constantly extends its scope. However, medieval music and medieval symbols as a vital part of modern Czech music culture has not yet been evaluated in the scholarly literature emerging from the “Western” discourse. Czech music historiography has offered several interpretations of musical works inspired by medieval personalities, such as Joan of Arc or Hildegard von Bingen. Dominant among them is the “second life” of the Czech church reformer Master Jan Hus (d. 1415) and the Hussite wars (1420–34) that disrupted a large part of the Czech kingdom for several decades. Pieces of art and scholarly discourse reflecting the legacy of Jan Hus and the Hussite movement (Hussitism) belonged to the pillars of “Czech” national “awakening” after 1800, and as such, they were marked by controversial interpretations. Music served as an important medium in shaping a seemingly authentic image of medieval subjects and concepts.

The concept of “medievalism” is well known in Czech music historiography. However, it has traditionally focused on the phenomenon's development after the 1860s. The date is marked by the introduction of the prime “authentic” medieval music document, the Hussite war song Ktož jsú boží bojovníci (You who are the warriors of God), previously understood exclusively as a literary monument. The present chapter, the result of interdisciplinary research and close study of musical documents, reveals that the ongoing tradition of the “Hus-Hussite” motifs—that is, motifs relating to Jan Hus and Hussitism—in Czech modern music has much deeper roots, reaching back to the turn of the eighteenth century.

After the Hussite wars (1419–36), the unique constellation of religious powers in the lands of the Bohemian crown gave rise to the coexistence of two official churches—the Catholic Church (celebrating the Eucharist with bread = sub una) and the Utraquist Church (celebrating with bread and wine = sub utraque)—which played a pivotal role in shaping the region's musical culture. In Bohemia, the focus of this study, it is estimated that around 70 percent of the population adhered to Utraquism and received communion sub utraque specie. Surviving sources of polyphony from the second half of the fifteenth century and the first decades of the sixteenth century largely stem from Utraquist circles. Consequently, our interpretation of the musical life in Bohemia during this period is defined by this context, with any exploration of “polyphony in Bohemia after the Hussite wars” inevitably reflecting the prevailing perspective of “polyphony within the Utraquist church.”

The coexistence of the two official churches had a profound impact on the parallel cultivation of distinct types and styles of polyphonic repertories. In this chapter, I refer to what I will call the “traditional” repertory as a body of polyphonic music transmitted persistently in full mensural notation from the 1470s onward, alongside the parallel circulation of polyphony written in void mensural notation. This “traditional” repertory is a phenomenon specific to the Bohemian Utraquist Church, which deliberately preserved music composed in central Europe up until the 1450s (including works by Petrus Wilhelmi de Grudencz) as a foundational repertory for festive Mass liturgies.

Franco's public biography began before 1936, when he played a role in the founding of the Spanish Foreign Legion, led troops in the Moroccan campaigns, and aligned himself politically with counter-revolutionaries. But it is inseparable from the Spanish Civil War – or, as the rebels called it, the National Crusade. The insurgents of 1936 (who became the victors of 1939) defined their war using this term. And this macro-narrative shaped the construction of the biography of the Caudillo, Generalísimo and victorious Head of the State, Francisco Franco. Biographies of Franco were constructed in a narrowed, teleological structure within the framework of Victory. This chapter will examine Franco's political and military actions during the war to understand how he became the leader of Nationalist Spain. It will then address how and why Franco's biography during the Civil War was identified with the imaginary biography of Nationalist Spain.

The fact that a variety of political and cultural tendencies came together in the coup of 18 July, the Civil War, and Franco's caudillaje does not diminish the unitary nature of that day as the accelerator and unifier of a regime that was as heterogeneous and functional as those that emerged from other similar experiences in Europe. As Ferran Gallego has noted, the civil war was the process by which Spanish fascism was forged, in a fundamental sense: it involved the adoption of a framework of generalised violence that was used not only in the repression of adversaries, but also in the construction of a national community defined by the radical exclusion of the defeated, both as individuals and in terms of what their individual and collective political experience represented.1 The Spanish far right joined the episode of the coup d’état and the ensuing war en masse.

The Catholicism of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries idealized “heroic victims” and “suffering souls” who welcomed the illness and corporeal afflictions that God sent them and cultivated—through devotional practices—a compassionate suffering with Christ. The comportment of such suffering victims fit the Catholic glorification of pain as productive and as an opportunity for their souls to grow. One subset of these voluntary sufferers were the so-called stigmatics, often women, who bore the wounds of Christ and therefore quite literally embodied the spiritual identification with Christ and his reparatory suffering. This chapter focuses on the emotional aspect of their suffering, their despair, compassion, and painful love of Christ and humanity. This chapter also presents an opportunity to examine their physical suffering, since it cannot be seen apart from the emotional aspect. As Heidrun Zettelbauer, Maria Fritsche, and Bozena Choluj have recently summarized in their introduction to a themed volume on the topic: “Pain is widely agreed to be an intersection of body, brain, and culture, simultaneously emotional, cognitive, and social.”

Les moeurs, a Mittau, offrent un mélange original de l’allemande et de la vivacité polonaise…

Étienne Léon baron de Lamothe-Langonbonhomie (ed.), Memoires

de Louis XVIII

Louis XVIII (1755–1824) spent some years of his long exile in Mitau, the seat of Peter von Biron (1724–1800). Biron was the last Duke of Courland, who ruled from 1769 until the Duchy of Courland was annexed by Russia in 1795. Louis’ praise of Mitau as culturally diverse gestured towards its political past rather than the actual diverse ethnic mix of Mitau and Courland. Since 1726, the duchy of Courland and Semigallia had been part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, with its own legislative and judicial powers, a strong presence of the old German Noble Corporations [Ritterschaften], and recently immigrated German scholars, ministers, and tradesmen. Hofman reminds us that Courland itself was not only settled by the German knights but also by Lithuanians and Latvians. The duchy was also geographically and politically connected to Russia. Duchess Anna Ivanovna was the reigning duchess of Courland between 1711 to 1730 and became Empress Anna I of Russia in 1730.

Mitau was a small but vibrant merchant city with a rich cultural and intellectual life, positioned strategically between Königsberg, Riga, and St Petersburg. Whilst Herder deplored it, calling it a ‘moral and literary desert’ in 1769, the writer and lawyer Johann Heinrich Liebeskind (1768–1847) praised Mitau on his journey in 1794 – thus at the height of the conflicts within Courland and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth – as a relaxed city where one could live freely despite the presence of the Russian Minister: