Whether unicorns, jaguars, giant snakes, or troglodytes, real and imagined animals have the human experience grafted onto them. In literary contexts, animalian agents reflect and critique society's values, ambitions, and inequalities. When animal characters enunciate these messages, their human audiences are asked to bend reality, to imagine alternative pasts, presents, and futures, and therefore alternatives to the problems with which animal characters and their human projections often struggle. In light of the current climate crisis and social issues stemming from unequal wealth and resource distribution, it is timely to consider what alternatives might be encoded within the role of animals and beasts across the centuries, particularly as actors who resist the status quo.

This is a book about the way writers contributing to the Hispanic literary tradition have turned animals into symbols over the past 600 years, a period that widely spans the modern age. It explores how writers under different circumstances and of disparate backgrounds imagine the human experience through animals, real or imagined. Beneath the fur and scales lie the etchings of human knowledge, experiences, values, and vices. These creatures have adapted and evolved to suit different literary genres over the centuries. They appear in codices, explorers’ diaries, manuscripts, novels, artwork, theater, and film, always making their presence visible along with the preoccupations of their authors. Working to better understand how Spanish and Latin American authors and artists have understood and interacted with animals and beasts, this volume sheds light on the use of animals as symbols, emblems, and projections, as well as their role in constructing others as less human and monstrous.

In the sixteenth century, Fray Bernardino de Sahagún, missionary in New Spain (modern day Mexico), wrote about Xólotl, a god who feared death. According to the legend, the gods had gathered at Teotihuacan and discussed who would be responsible for bringing each new day. In order to move the great mechanisms in the sky, an offering was necessary, and the gods created a great pyre in which to sacrifice themselves for the newly created sun. Xólotl alone refused death and cried until his eyes were swollen. When his turn came, he ran into the corn fields and transformed into a corn stem with two stalks (xolotl) and then hid as a double-leafed maguey (mexólotl), finally taking refuge in the water as an axolotl. It was in this form that he was found and killed, and the wind took to ensuring that the sun and moon moved as expected. Xólotl's final form, “axolotl,” takes its name from the Nahuatl “xólotl de agua” or “water xólotl,” which can be translated as “water toy,” “water twin,” or “water monster.” The little creature is tied to the god of fire and lightning, as well as monsters, misfortune, illness, and deformities (Bartra 2011: 35). Today, the axolotl is nearly extinct in its natural habitat, but its dissemination has far surpassed its narrow local beginnings, garnering in metaphorical power what it lost in tangible territory.

Writers including Aldous Huxley, Giorgio Agamben, and René Daumal have deployed the little salamander to better explain theories of infancy, immaturity, and societal liberation. The axolotl has also permeated popular culture, with the example of Frank Herbert's ghola clones being produced in an Axolotl tank in the Dune trilogy, inspired by the salamander's neoteny and regenerative properties, and Japanese artists Satoshi Tajiri and Ken Sugimori have taken inspiration from its form to create not one but two creatures for their world-phenomenon Pokémon.

Sir,

You cannot but form some very strange Conjectures, concerning the Matter which upon the first Opening of this Letter, you find enclosed in it, if you allow any time for Conjecturing before you have read all the Letter over.

If I make so much Haste, as to tell you, that you have here enclosed, a Snow-ball, you will wonder what the American Snow should be made of; & you will affirm, this is the first Time that ever a Gentleman sent his Friend a Parcel of Snow wrapt up in a Letter to him; at least at such a Distance, as the Breadth of the wide Atlantic.

When you have read of Heaven giving Snow like Wool, I know, you have taken it, as it is, for a poetical Expression; & very much approv’d and admir’d the Sacred Poetry.

But a Snow of Wool without a Metaphor is a thing so unusual, as to be almost Incredible; And yett I must ask that such a Thing may find some Credit with you.

For, Sir, I do assure you, That this Wool did fall from Heaven; and a considerable Quantity of it; at a Time when more common Snow was falling.

I have unhappily mislaid the large, & full, and well-asserted Account of it, with which I furnished myself, at the Time of it, which was a few Years ago: so that I cannot be so particular in my Relation, as I shall be; if I happen to recover it.

Serfdom is a deceptively simple shorthand term for any institutional system in which ‘a landlord was legitimately entitled to restrict the choices of people living on his lands, including binding them to his territory, compelling them to work for him and limiting many of their other economic and demographic decisions’. As such, it covered a wide range of social arrangements across Europe and Asia over the last two millennia. According to Dennison and Ogilvie, at core:

Serfdom consisted of two distinct components: personal serfdom, where the legal status of the serf was inherited by all his or her progeny, and tenurial serfdom, where the tenant's obligations to the lord were the result of holding unfree land. Furthermore, serfs – no less than free peasants – might also be subject to other restrictions imposed by their communities or by the state, such as agricultural bylaws or taxation. Hence serfdom generally implied subjection to a ruler as well as a lord.

The Festival of Empire

The year 1910 was a busy one for Holst. Since the composition of the First Suite in E-flat for Military Band the previous year, there had been a flurry of activity along the compositional front. Two major works appeared in 1910. The first was the orchestral suite Beni Mora, Op. 29, No. 1 [H107], which began life as a projected ballet. It was performed under the titles Oriental Suite and Suite in E minor before it was published. The second major work was The Cloud Messenger, Op. 30 [H111], described on its title page as an “Ode for Chorus and Orchestra on a Sanskrit poem of Kalidasa.” Over forty minutes in length, it is the composer's largest Sanskrit choral work. The orchestration is enormous, including a large orchestra, two harps, and organ, although perhaps in keeping with the identification of “ad lib” instruments in the First Suite in E-flat, Holst characteristically indicated that some of the instruments “can be dispensed with.”

The year 1911 was equally busy. The first group of his Choral Hymns from the Rig Veda, Op. 26 [H97] was performed for the first time, and Holst himself gave the first performance since the seventeenth century of Henry Purcell's opera The Fairy Queen with his students at Morley College for Working Men and Women. He also composed the 2nd Military Suite in F minor—the first version of his Second Suite in F for Military Band, Op. 28, No. 2 [H106]—during that year. In addition, there were two military band works intended for the Festival of Empire: Incidental Music for the Pageant of London [H114] and Morris Dance Tunes, Sets I and II [App III, 12]. There may have been a third, the untitled march known today as Three Folk Tunes [H106A].

In an age when shipping was the sole means of transport between continents and where commanders consequently enjoyed a high status in society, any records that extend our knowledge of the way in which this industry operated are worth examining.

The present work has three purposes. First, it provides a means of access to the marine records known as ‘Protests’ concerning the activities of private mariners operating in the crucial years of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in Southeast Asia. These testimonies are buried within the collection known as the Malacca Prothocol Books, part of the administrative records covering the period 1786–1825 at Malacca and now held in the British Library. The records were originally set up by the Dutch and continued to be maintained by Dutch officials during the period of British rule. It is hoped that by exposing them here their contents will be made more accessible for future research.

Second, in addition to providing details of the recorded ships, and the masters and crews of these mainly British, Danish and Portuguese ‘country traders’ as they were called, this study describes and analyses the dangers that the mariners faced and the tactics they used to overcome the ever-present perils. Third, the Protests reflect contemporary life, demonstrating how a collection of manuscripts while focused on particularities can open a pathway to a broader perspective on society and events. The work therefore also presents a discussion of the variety of contexts in which the country traders had to operate.

Who Was Goethe?

A curious news item from several years back made the rounds of the German media of the time, providing the nation's Bildungsbürger, its educated elite, with a few short moments of sneering amusement over what they saw as a sign of rising philistinism in the Federal Republic. What had occasioned this particular bout of class snickering were the results of a survey asking the German public the simple question: “Who was Leibniz?” Only about 10 percent of respondents, if I remember correctly, answered by identifying the famous philosopher and mathematician from Hannover—originator of differential calculus and leading pioneer of the Age of Enlightenment—the remainder guessing instead that the well-known name (practically every major German city has, somewhere, a street called Leibniz Strasse) belonged to the inventor of the Leibniz- Keks, the nation's most popular cookie, a rectangular-shaped butter biscuit imprinted with the name “Leibniz.” I very much doubt whether a similar survey on “Mozart” would yield such equally devastating results: Surely, one must hope, a majority of the population would associate that famous name with the Salzburg composer rather than the round, foilwrapped chocolate-marzipan treat, the Mozartkugeln, or “Mozart balls,” so popular throughout the German-speaking lands. As for Friedrich Schiller—dramatist, poet, aesthetic philosopher, co-founder of German classicism—he managed to escape a similarly sweet fate, joining instead Otto von Bismarck, erstwhile Chancellor of the German Empire, in lending his name to a savory, aquatic delicacy: the latter as Bismarck-Hering, the former as Schillerlocken, the skinned and smoked belly portion of the dogfish shark, an aliment whose pale-brown color and wavy shape recall the poet's curly blonde locks.

From 1946 onwards, the Sinfonietta made its way around the world, par¬ticularly through recordings. This chapter considers the work's recorded legacy by examining the approaches of different conductors, ranging from specialists like Kubelík, Bakala, Ančerl, Mackerras and Jílek to others who were less regular performers of Janáček's music.

Otto Klemperer

Following his early advocacy of the work, Klemperer conducted further performances of the Sinfonietta in the 1950s, starting with the Concert¬gebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam on 10 and 11 January 1951. These were warmly received, and the 11 January concert was broadcast and later issued on CD. So, too, was the performance Klemperer gave with the Cologne Radio Symphony Orchestra on 27 February 1956 – apparently the last time he conducted the work.

Klemperer's reputation in the 1960s was for granite-like readings that were often powerfully effective but became increasingly slow in his final years. However, apart from his unduly stately tempo for the Fanfares, his surviving accounts of the Sinfonietta show him more animated: Klemper¬er's conducting has a trenchant, rugged muscularity which reveals a per¬suasive grasp of Janáček's score. Moreover, these performances get us as close as possible to one that Janáček himself heard and apparently admired (he described Klemperer's Berlin performance in 1927 as ‘unmatched’). In short, Klemperer's recorded versions constitute an important link with the composer. The two performances are similar, with the Cologne one in slightly better sound.

Rafael Kubelík

After the war ended, Rafael Kubelík (1914–96) performed the Sinfo¬nietta on many occasions. Plans for him to conduct it at a BBC Sym¬phony Orchestra concert on 27 January 1946 were abandoned at the last minute. The performance was listed in Radio Times and publicity had been circulated (and programmes printed), but as the Western Morning Post reported, ‘The BBC's concert at the People's Palace was marred by the last-moment withdrawal of Janáček's Sinfonietta, which many must have made the journey eastward especially to hear.’

In the expansive structure of the Holy Roman Empire of German Nations, small states and duchies remained relatively independent, the borders between them permeable, yet the dynastic and kin relations were tight. Rulers facilitated and supported independent cultural sociability and cultural production at their courts with crosscutting networks according to their intellectual and cultural interests. The case study in this chapter shows that even smaller, provincial states and courts were part of larger social and cultural networks. The poet Jens Immanuel Baggesen (1764– 1826), who travelled through Germany after the scandal around his opera Holger Danske (1789, see also Chapter 10), complained about the region:

The deeper we progress into the multi-coloured Roman Empire, the more fanciful the statistics become, so that from a political point of view we really no longer know where we are and to whom the spot, we are walking on belongs to. Darmstadt, Hanau, Solms, Burggrafschaft, Kurmainz, and Pütter know how many governments are playing blind man's buff here in such a mess that you would think this part of Germany was once broken and happily pasted back together in a hurry.

This chapter will concentrate mainly on what is modern Hesse – exactly the region that Baggesen complained about – yet, with a focus on the town of Offenbach. In the eighteenth century, Offenbach was the family seat of the house of Isenburg-Birstein. It was connected to, and geographically situated between, two other important Musenhofe, and the Free City of Frankfurt. These Musenhofe in modern Hesse were motivated by different understandings of patriotism and political realities, which shaped their political strategies during the Coalition and Napoleonic Wars, and their existence after 1806.

The Epistle is known from a single manuscript, Oxford, All Souls College MS 98, which served G.C. Macaulay as the base text for his edition of most of the poems in Latin. It contains, along with the Epistle and the Vox Clamantis, the Cronica Tripertita, Rex celi Deus, H. aquile pullus, O recolende, the Carmen super multiplici viciorum pestilencia, Tractatus de lucis scrutinio, Est amor, the Traitié pour essampler les amantz marietz, Quia unusquisque, Eneados bucolis, O Deus immense, Quicquid homo scribat, and Dicunt scripture. Although Macaulay thought the manuscript “was certainly written and corrected under the direction of the author, and remained for some time in his hands, receiving addition from time to time,” more recent scholarship (most notably that of Malcolm Parkes) has shown most of Macaulay's guesses to be unfounded.1 This is especially true of the Epistle, which Macaulay and most subsequent scholars, following him, believed “seems to relate to this volume in particular,” thereby providing evidence that All Souls MS 98 “was eventually presented to Abp. Arundel.”

In fact, All Souls MS 98 is an assemblage of poems independently copied in two different scripts by five different scribes, the major texts, such as the Vox Clamantis, originally as stand-alone works. In Parkes's view, the composite volume never belonged to Gower, but rather was brought together for a patron-owner after Gower's death. It was thus not the “librum” mentioned in ll. 1 and 8, nor the “scriptum” of ll. 3 and 14, given to Arundel.