That William Young had benevolent intentions, if strictly on his own terms, towards the enslaved who worked his plantations in Antigua, St Vincent and Tobago can hardly be doubted. It does not, however, necessar¬ily follow that his intentions significantly affected the lives of the enslaved for the better, above all in the fundamental questions of life and death: of the lifespan enslaved people could expect and of the numbers of children born and successfully nurtured through their earliest years.

A recent study by Richard S. Dunn of the enslaved on the Mesopotamia plantation in Jamaica is a grim example of the utter failure of good intentions to alter lives for the better. Mesopotamia was the property of Joseph Foster Barham from 1789 until his death in 1832. Like Young, Foster Barham was an absentee planter, living a patrician life in Britain and serving as a member of parliament. They were close allies in pressing for reform of the slave system to be left to the colonial communities. Foster Barham, like Young, proclaimed his generous intentions towards his enslaved. Yet, in Dunn's view, he inherited and permitted to continue in operation ‘an extraordinarily abusive slave system’ with a high death rate and low birth rate.1 Whether that was also the case with William Young's plantations in St Vincent and Antigua is the theme of this chapter.

St Vincent

The two plantations in St Vincent that William Young inherited from his father in 1788, Calliaqua and Pembroke, were his principal concern in his managing of his Caribbean estates, which was conducted mostly at a distance, other than two short visits to the islands.

Introduction

There is an overlap in time between this chapter and the previous two, because although peat shrinkage and storm surges continued to plague the inhabitants of the North Sea Lowlands, the first half of the sixteenth century also witnessed the beginning of a new period of expansion. This expansion was so strong that I will call the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the era of the Second Reclamation of the North Sea Lowlands. This Second Reclamation was less impressive than the Great Reclamation of the central Middle Ages as far as land area was concerned, but it required much more capital than the earlier reclamation phase and it fundamentally changed property relations and farming systems in the lowlands. The strongest drive for this change was the growth of population and economy in the Low Countries, first concentrated around the port of Antwerp, later in the northern Low Countries, the emerging Dutch Republic. Like the preceding periods, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries will be covered in two chapters. This chapter will demonstrate how Dutch capital, expertise and institutional innovations made the Second Reclamation possible. Chapter six will be dedicated to the changes in property relations and farming following this second wave of reclamations. Firstly, a survey of the history of the North Sea area from 1500 to 1700 provides context.

The forest in medieval romance is a liminal landscape that variously provides a haven for lovers, a proving ground for young knights, and a gateway to the Otherworld. In a specific textual tradition, the forest also becomes a refuge for mothers who have been wronged by chivalric elements of elite society and, as such, allows romance authors to explore an alternative way to raise and educate sons that foregrounds maternal influence. Whereas the previous chapters in this book have shown how women in romance assert their role as mothers in the built environment, such as birthing rooms and castles, the next two chapters explore how mothers behave in ostensibly natural spaces that have been nonetheless shaped by human perception and interaction: the forest and the sea. Motherhood in these natural spaces is characterised by levels of isolation (from court) and interaction (with other characters) that show that they are part of, rather than existing outside, society.

The representation of the wild forest as both separate from and essential to the courtly environment occurs in a number of medieval romance texts, including Sir Orfeo and Perceforest.

In the Book of Esther, the humble and modest young queen, selected as such despite having chosen not to adorn and beautify herself and being secretly a Jew, throws herself before the king to beg for the lives of her people who have been sentenced to death. In doing so, she risks her life, not only by revealing that she herself is Jewish, but because nobody is permitted to enter the King's chamber and approach him without being invited to, on pain of death. But King Ahasuerus tells her ‘Non morieris: non enim pro te, sed pro omnibus haec lex constituta est’ (Esther 15.13) (‘You will not die, for the law is made not for you, but for all the people’). Esther thus is shown to have a singular privilege; in approaching the king and interceding for her people, she saves them. In this, Esther can be read as a type of the Virgin Mary: just as the Virgin intercedes for sinners, and thereby helps Christians obtain salvation, the Jewish people are therefore saved by Esther's love of them, and the king's love for Esther. However, Esther's typological relationship with the Virgin extends beyond this intercession: Esther's exemption from the law, established in 15.13, is what enables her to save her people and parallels the Virgin Mary's exemption from the law of original sin, a parallel drawn upon in service of promoting the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, which teaches that Mary, at her own conception, was preserved entirely from all stain of original sin. Marian lyric abounds in the Middle Ages, and the vernacular French tradition uses commentary on the Book of Esther in the form of lyric as a way of praising the Virgin, but moreover as a means of advocating a contested doctrinal position.

Having introduced new theoretical concepts and analytical methods in the previous chapter, the present chapter clarifies and expands on those through a demonstration of the analytic approach in action, at both micro- and macro-levels. The two case studies, Für Elise WoO 59 and the Andante Favori WoO 57, are both well known and share a use of rondo form, thus enabling a comparison of the interaction of space and form. In each case, I employ PSM and RG diagrams to illustrate processes including the large-scale spatial structure, narrative design, and consider the use of specific devices and metaphorical meanings.

Case study 1: Für Elise WoO 59

Für Elise, WoO 59, one of Beethoven's most popular and widely-known piano miniatures, is a bagatelle composed in 1810. Because of its simple rondo form (see Table 3.1), the piece offers a wonderful example in which to show both the analytical methodology at work and some of the aforementioned types of registral strategies in practice. The 22-bar rondo theme is itself a closed rounded binary form, a1|| a2–a1’ with repeats applied at its first appearance. Its striking spatial characteristic is that all the dramatic expansions occur in linking sections, the largest and most impressive of which is in the longer link to the final appearance of the rondo theme. At the same time the two main episodes each represent excursions to upper and lower extremes of the range, whilst the rondo sections exert a stabilising effect by asserting registral identity, returning each time to the same pitch-space, within the normative range.

Pepe is the Spanish diminutive of José, and though the subject of this book was named at birth José Luis Romero Gallego, he is universally known as Pepe Romero. Born into a family of guitarists in Málaga in 1944, he was a genuine child prodigy and began appearing in public already in the early 1950s. His career really took off after the family moved to Southern California in 1957, seeking a wider field of opportunity for father Celedonio (b. 1913), his eldest son, Celín (b. 1936), Pepe, and Ángel (b. 1946). (Editorial note: Celin and Angel will hereafter be spelled in the English manner, without accents.) All four were virtuosos, and within a few years they formed the Romero Guitar Quartet, a novel ensemble that took the music world by storm. Pepe maintained dual careers as a quartet member and soloist, and he excelled in the realms of both classical and flamenco guitar, twin peaks rarely scaled by a single guitarist. Since those early days, he has continued to make his mark not only as a leading concert and recording artist, arranger, and composer, but also as a teacher. He is widely and justifiably regarded as one of the leading and most influential guitarists of the past six decades.

His is a life rich with memories, experiences, associations, and insights that have much to offer to a wide range of readers, not just guitarists. As he approaches retirement, he wishes to leave a permanent record of the music he has loved and played and of the people who have touched his life and whose lives he has touched in turn. It has been a rare privilege to assist him in this important task, but one might well ask how I came to merit such an honor.

This chapter outlines and analyses the pianistic and compositional work of musical trailblazer Chiquinha Gonzaga, with the main endeavour of contributing to an integrated scholarship that combines biographical, musico-theoretical, and socio-historical approaches. It also aims to encourage a rich, cross-hemispheric collaboration between scholars and performers, and to elevate the work of women pianists and composers from the Global South. An essential figure in Brazilian music but still less known in the Global North, Chiquinha had numerous musical and professional achievements – all the while battling the stigma of being the daughter of a former enslaved Black person, of being a divorced woman in highly conservative nineteenth-century Brazil, and of being a professional musician in an era in which music by women from the upper classes of Brazil was not permitted to leave the domain of the private sphere. Excluded from upper-class circles after her divorce, Chiquinha subsequently was forced to perform mostly in informal settings among the middle and lower classes of Brazil, where she helped create the new genre of choro and developed a vast knowledge of popular and folkloric genres. While her work as a performer in these genres went largely unnoticed by the arts press, her published sheet music and theatrical compositions were recognised and highly respected by music critics and journalists.

In the historiography of Israeli art music there is a gaping absence: that of Verdina Shlonsky (1905–1990), the only female among the so-called founding fathers generation of composers who settled in British Mandate Palestine before the outbreak of World War II. Over the years, Shlonsky has been all but forgotten, largely excluded from the canon of Israeli music. Though in recent years, some attempts have been made to rectify this situation, her public image remains that of an outsider, a stranger to Israeli culture as well as to the Hebrew language. Such an image can only act to reinforce and even justify her continuing neglect.

And yet, as Shlonsky's life story reveals, she was anything but an outsider to the Yishuv's society and culture. On the contrary, she was a primary contributor whose status, participation, and involvement in contemporary cultural life was thorough and prolific. During the 1920s and 1930s she was identified as “the very growth of this soil, well-rooted in this country's life,” and as representing it to the world. Through her early performances across British Palestine, often in collaboration with her sister Yehudit (Ida, 1903– 1977?) and at times also with her famous brother, poet Avraham Shlonsky (1900–1973), Verdina became the voice of the Yishuv, its representative and musical emissary.

Moreover, despite her general absence from historiography, she held a pioneering position in the history of musical life in the Yishuv. To her contemporaries, Shlonsky represented the community's first grassroots growth, a young composer whose art carried the sounds of the Jewish revival in Palestine to the world. Particularly notable is her first publication, the Images Palestiniennes (1933).

Amajor aspect of the neoclassical revival in Germany was the appropri¬ation of the literary forms of antiquity. Among these the fable and the epigram played perhaps surprisingly important roles. In his autobiography Dichtung und Wahrheit (Truth and Fiction; 1811–1813, 1830) Goethe recalls that Swiss theoreticians Johann Jakob Bodmer (1698–1783) and Johann Jakob Breitinger (1701–1776) had indeed declared the fable to be the foremost literary genre bar none—a declaration comprehen¬sible only in the context of an age that placed the highest premium on imaginative pleasure coupled with moral edification. While some writers emphasized the pleasurable side of the equation, Lessing stressed the instructive potential of the form, often with satiric intent. He utilized the epigram in much the same manner and to much the same end.

We saw in chapter 1 that Lessing's fables were notably present in American periodicals during the first half of the nineteenth century. His epigrams and particularly his verse had much lower profiles but nonetheless possessed a degree of visibility. Even the relative popularity of the fables, however, resulted in little commentary. At the same time, Lessing's efforts in the three forms elicited certain remarks and, in a few instances, applica¬tions to current events that are interesting and suggestive in various ways.

The Fables

Joseph G. Cogswell approaches Lessing's fables from his essays on the genre. For Cogswell, these treatises perfectly exemplify the manner in which such studies should be executed. He considers the fables them¬selves “no bad exemplification” of the principles established in the essays.

There is a reason that, despite the ubiquity of medievalism across popular media forms today, the popular affective sense that the Middle Ages were an other time, foreign and defined by alterity to modernity, persists. The scholarship of the mid- to late twentieth century bore this out, with an increasing focus on the ‘hard-edged alterity’ of medieval thought and ways of being;1 attention to the idea of the Middle Ages as ‘the West's shadowy “other”, against which the Renaissance and modernity itself was defined’, facilitated this framing. While recent medieval and medievalist studies have demonstrated useful ways of bridging this temporal and affective gap, including by framing the Middle Ages through the political and social imperatives of contemporary criticism, the fundamental otherness and inaccessibility of the medieval nevertheless linger in popular consciousness and some critical spaces. Undergirding this may be the tacit acknowledgement that, despite the foreignness of the early modern/Renaissance period, modern critics begin to recognise patterns of thought and ways of being more readily once we have departed from the late medieval period, the last gasp of the pre-modern. In particular, the technologies and cultures of literature begin to become more familiar in the sixteenth and eventually seventeenth centuries: the move to print rather than manuscripts, changing reading habits that prioritised literacy over orality, changing tastes and textual access, etcetera. The consumption and dissemination of earlier verse romances, as discussed in the Introduction to this book, involved a mix of oral and literary traditions reliant on folkloric and intertextual elements; print culture moves away from this form of reading.

The white-minority apartheid regime engaged in the intellectual repression of the black majority to promote acquiescence and so maintain itself in power. But black South Africans resisted through various means, including self-education. This book has traced the efforts of the tiny National Liberation Front, part of the transnational New Left movement, to form cells aimed at education about guerrilla struggle. Yet despite its aspirations to form a united front with like-minded groups, the National Liberation Front remained isolated from popular organizations. Nonetheless, the South African state saw its members as threats precisely because their writings challenged people to think critically about overthrowing apartheid.

Of the broad types of political trials outlined in the introduction, the trial of State versus Neville Alexander and Ten Others falls into Ronald Christenson's typology of a partisan trial aiming to eliminate dissenting opposition – removing intellectuals from circulation – to further entrench ethnic or racial domination. As the state was intensifying its repression of black South Africans, a tiny group of intellectuals broke from the abstentionist Unity Movement, hoping to promote a political approach combining education and activism.

Trials that criminalize critics of political regimes permeate society by creating ripples spreading far beyond the individuals convicted of anti-regime crimes. The families and close friends of the incarcerated suffer psychological trauma and economic hardship if a breadwinner is imprisoned. These trials hurt countless others, too. Many South Africans were compelled to flee the country because of their association with the NLF and other leftist groups or banned for refusing to testify for the state; some of these would have constituted the New Left generation. The fates of four individuals whose lives intersected with the NLF illustrate apartheid's reach and the varieties of suffering it produced, even for those on the trial's periphery.