This article reads Thomas Hardy's many musical instrument poems as the meeting point for the concerns of several critical fields: material culture, memory studies and the emerging interdisciplinary field of musical haptics. Close readings illuminate not only their relevance to such enquiries, but also how Hardy's manipulation of poetic form engenders a tactile musicality or ‘poetics of touch’ (as Marion Thain puts it). This article focuses on the aspects of these poems which have undergone least exploration: the depiction of the bodily effort involved in music-playing. While some of the poems are critical favourites (‘Old Furniture’) many of those studied here are routinely overlooked.

A mnemonically-minded poet, Hardy wrote about the memories objects hold and the memories that may be mediated through them. For Hardy, the history of objects is inseparable from that of their now-dead owners: person and thing are tied together in memory. This is in part due to an object's inherent tangibility, and musical instruments are particularly tactile objects, benefiting from the further mnemonic of music itself.

The core of the article considers Hardy's late poem ‘Haunting Fingers: A Phantasy in a Museum of Musical Instruments’, which hears instruments speak out their memories of being touched, and through memory feel ‘old muscles travel/Over their tense contours’. Revisions to the manuscript show Hardy removing ‘death’ and privileging instead the immediacy of remembered touch.

Paying attention to the reading and note-taking Hardy did within nineteenth-century science, this article traces Hardy's imaginative explorations of the processes involved in playing musical instruments back to discoveries about the workings of the unconscious. Saleeby, James, Maudesley and Bastian informed Hardy's knowledge of the science behind music-playing, while musical haptics helps this study unpack why Hardy attends to the interactions which take place at the point of mechanical contact: finger to key, and to string.

The theory and methods of space syntax can help to rebalance the prevailing cultural perspective, which views maps as ideological representations, with an analytical approach that emphasizes maps as sources for understanding space and spatial relationships embedded in built forms. The quantitative descriptions of urban street networks produced by space syntax analyses can be used to formulate and test hypotheses about patterns of urban movement, encounter and socio-economic activity in the past that can help in the interpretation of other historical source materials to give an overall account of urban spatial culture. In this article, the authors explain how space syntax, a theory and method originally developed in the field of architectural research, is making a distinctive contribution to research in social and urban history. The key principles of the method are explained by clarifying the relationship of space syntax to HGIS (Historical Geographical Information Systems) and through a worked example of research undertaken into political meeting places. A survey of research into the urban history of the nineteenth-century city using space syntax is used to highlight a number of important methodological themes and also demonstrates the range of innovative contributions that this interdisciplinary approach is able to advance. A final, theoretical, section reflects on maps and the practice of ‘mapping’ from a space syntax perspective.

A new opportunity, and a new challenge, presents itself to urban historians. In order to obtain a deeper understanding of historical urban space and spatial relationships, the contributors to this Special Issue deploy new techniques of spatial analysis using mapping tools to explore the density, frequency and proximity of various features of towns and cities. The contributors focus on case-studies at various urban scales – from major commercial centres (New York, Rome, Paris and London) – to smaller towns in the urban hierarchy. They also range across the tenth to the twentieth centuries and so challenge a common assumption that mapping the town is essentially an approach best suited to the modern period. Individually and collectively, the authors demonstrate how the urban morphology of the city developed and how durable that spatial patterning can be.

The spatial growth of German cities in the years of upheaval in the nineteenth century has been, and remains, the subject of intense historical research. However, the origins of the socio-economic processes underlying these transformations actually predate the epochal transition into the modern era. This article deals critically with the popular conception of a ‘town–country dichotomy’ by comparing, on an empirical basis, urban, semi-urban and rural settlements in a sub-region of the north-west of Germany in the mid-eighteenth century. With the aid of a Geographical Information System (GIS), the cartographic and serial material of the ‘Brunswick Land Survey’ is evaluated in terms of its relevance to a socio-topographic comparison of the spatial micro-structures of the three respective settlement segments. The comparison focuses on the general morphology of the settlement segments, the conditions accompanying the growth of the settlements and the spatial structures of the agricultural activities pursued. In addition, it identifies the factors which led to the erosion of differences between town and country.

Often described as a social pathology, populism currently finds virulent expression in political movements across the world. Unlike the recognition that involves mutuality and respect, populism is typically founded on misrecognition; it pursues alterity, essentializes identity, offers ‘protection’ against the threat of hostile ‘others’. Often the social consequences are tragic. Music, however, can confirm or disrupt the way populism constructs identity. Epistemologically, genres can enable us to both understand and misunderstand our world: we can recognize ourselves (‘us’) in the genres that undergird the music we identify with, and (mis)recognize others (‘them’) in those we find alien. But genres can be undermined; they can be integrated, hybridized and directed towards more inclusive or cosmopolitan ends, thus destablilizing ontologies frozen around pre-fixed identities. I elaborate this theory, illustrating it with examples of focused genre-transgression, particularly in South African jazz, where progressive social tendencies have sought to create an integrated, cosmopolitan society.

Based on the different type of ecclesiastical institutions, an analysis of the plots owned and developed by the different orders reveals that some spatial characteristics endure in the modern city. The degree of fragmentation and the nature of subsequent urban development is shown to be a function of the type of church established in the medieval period. The examples are based on detailed plot analysis in Paris.

The research focusing on return migration from the perspective of migrants’ relationship with the country of origin has emphasized the emotional and economic ties. Quite often, these ties have been examined separately and there is little indication of what counts more. This article addresses this gap in the literature and analyzes the extent to which the sense of belonging, media consumption, networks of friends, and regular visits in the country of origin could affect the intention to return. It controls for remittances, voting in the elections of their home country, and age. The empirical analysis uses an original dataset including individual level data. This was collected through an online survey in January 2018 on a sample of 1,839 first generation migrants from Romania.

Cette étude propose d’explorer et d’identifier des moments particuliers où le changement linguistique se produit, afin de confirmer ou de rejeter l’idée d’une période spécifique désignée par le terme « français préclassique », avec une rupture – ou frontière chronolectale – détectable autour de 1630 (cf. Ayres-Bennett et Caron, 2016). Afin de vérifier dans quelle mesure cette chronologie peut être confirmée, il est nécessaire de multiplier des analyses fines et pointues sur des traits linguistiques qui ont subi des changements à l’époque en question et d’interroger une gamme de textes qui reflètent la variation discursive et pragmatique, au lieu de consulter le canon des traditions textuelles actuellement disponibles sur des bases numérisées, qui sont essentiellement littéraires. C’est pourquoi nous avons consulté des sources de nature différente, qui pourraient attester des usages émergents, à savoir les corpus du Réseau Corpus Français Préclassique et Classique (RCFC). Seront présentés les résultats de deux études de cas (la recatégorisation des formes dedans/dessous/dessus/dehors et la montée des clitiques), abondamment discutés par les remarqueurs.

Legalised accountability – the definition of torture as an illicit behaviour and the mobilisation of law-enforcement agencies, prosecutorial offices and courts to gather evidence, prosecute and convict torture perpetrators – has become central to anti-torture policies around the world, including Brazil. Based on legal-consciousness scholarship and in-depth interviews, this paper investigates the place and meaning of law in the everyday lives of Brazilian anti-torture activists. Counter-intuitive as it may sound, interviewees articulated an account in which law's authority is largely rejected, while non-legal tools against torture look much more preferable – even if they residually and cynically engage with the law. While exploring the discursive roots of such account, this paper highlights the role of law and justice institutions, particularly those in the criminal justice system, in the of building social support for – or rejection of – the law. These findings add to our knowledge of law's hegemony, while providing valuable insights for future legal-consciousness studies.

The role and importance of military musicians changed and intensified in the late eighteenth century through two important processes. The first was the culture of display that took root in both the home-based army and units in the colonies. The second was the result of successive militia acts which effectively ensured that military units with bands would be systematically placed in every corner of the British Isles.

It became evident that music as a component of military display served an important diplomatic purpose. Music performed in public spaces was heard by a population deeply sceptical of the army and with an essentially local sense of identity. The experience of the sight and sound of military music raised entirely new perceptions of nation and of the state as a benign power.

Two important and related themes emerge here. The first is the historical process that led, almost accidentally, to a realization that music as part of military display had potential to influence populations across the country and in the colonies. The second, more challenging, theme concerns the nature of the evidence for this idea and how it is to be treated. It is an idea that is totally convincing if the experience of hearing and seeing military spectacle by the mass of the people can be shown to have had impact. What is the evidence of listening to music by those people at whom it was targeted, how robust is it and what can be made of it?

Geographical Information Systems (GIS) are becoming increasingly popular in historical research, especially in urban contexts. However, digitizing historical sources in a way that can be mapped using the Cartesian co-ordinate systems of a GIS is often challenging, especially so in the case of records pre-dating centralized property registers or street numbering. This article explores how the vernacular spatial descriptions used in several case-studies of documents from late medieval and early modern London can be translated and geocoded into GIS compatible co-ordinates in a sympathetic way. Translating this data from a historical spatial paradigm into a modern one unlocks a whole range of new insights into spatial patterns, networks and relationships which would not have been feasible to construct using traditional methods

This themed issue focuses on the study of listeners in history. The articles address the personal responses to music of ‘ordinary listeners’ – that is, people whose experiences of music are recorded in personal documents and third-party descriptions (as opposed, say, to music critics who wrote about music in order to influence the ideas and tastes of a public readership). This overview essay proposes that the testimony of ordinary listeners can cast new light on musical practices, the way music has been heard and its role in past societies. It points to a perceived gap in historical musicology, whereby the evidence left by listeners in the past has been the subject of little targeted research and has generally been relegated to a supporting role. The themed issue emerges from work conducted as part of the Listening Experience Database project, a research project set up to address that gap, and focuses on empirical historical research.

This overview essay discusses the types of evidence on which the articles are based and some of the issues and cautions they raise, and sets out to demonstrate the unique quality and value of the evidence through the exploration of five topics in the history of British music in the long nineteenth century. The approach they exemplify has potential to shed light on music as part of the experience of ordinary people, often in contexts and places that have not featured prominently either in nineteenth-century music history or in musicological study generally.

The title quotation from Under Milk Wood encapsulates a widely held belief in the innate musicality of the Welsh and its religious roots. These roots were put down deeply during the nineteenth century, in a huge expansion of choral and congregational singing across Wales and particularly in the industrial communities. This development has been described as ‘a democratic popular choral culture rooted in the lives of ordinary people’, and central to it was the cymanfa ganu, the mass hymn-singing festival. Choral and congregational singing, typified by the cymanfa ganu, underpinned the perception of Wales by the Welsh and by many non-Welsh people as ‘the land of song’.

Alongside this phenomenon ran the tradition of the plygain, a Welsh Christmas carol service. While the cymanfa developed in nonconformist chapels in the mid to late nineteenth century, and on a large – often massive – scale, the plygain is a tradition dating from a period much further back, when Welsh Christianity was Catholic; it belonged to agricultural workers rather than the industrial communities; and the singers sang in much smaller groups – often just twos or threes.

This article describes the nature and origins of these contrasting traditions, and looks at the responses of listeners both Welsh and non-Welsh, and the extent to which they perceived these practices as expressive of a peculiarly Welsh identity. It also considers some of the problems of gathering evidence of working-class responses, and how far the sources give an insight into working-class listening experiences.

It has been argued in some recent work that there are many cases in which individuals are subject to conditional obligations to give to more effective rather than less effective charities, despite not being unconditionally obligated to give. These conditional obligations, it has been suggested, can allow effective altruists (EAs) to make the central claims about the ethics of charitable giving that characterize the movement without taking any particular position on morality's demandingness. I argue that the range of cases involving charitable giving in which individuals are subject to conditional effectiveness obligations is in fact quite narrow. Because of this, I claim, EAs must endorse the view that well off people have at least fairly demanding unconditional obligations.

This article explores ways in which material changes engendered by World War I influenced ideas about Cape Town and its people. For the city's middle classes, these conditions – including a rise in the cost of living, increased urbanization, the growth of factory work for women and the notable presence of soldiers in the city – heightened the sense that Cape Town was a place of increased moral corruption. In particular, females were portrayed as pivotal to the upholding of the moral and racial integrity of the city, nation and empire. Yet the perceived race and class of different Capetonian women influenced the expectations (and accordant condemnations) of their behaviour. This linked to white middle-class anxieties about miscegenation and urban order. As such, discourses around female behaviour during the war represented a nexus between issues of health, race and morality within the South African urban context.