Since the 1990s masculinity has moved from the margins to the mainstream as a subject of historical enquiry, and Bernard Capp has been central to the development of this intellectual trend, producing important studies of how the sexual double standard, married life, neighbourhood relations and sibling interactions shaped meanings and experiences of manhood in seventeenthcentury England. In doing so he contributed to another increasingly vibrant subfield of historical investigation, the history of emotions, producing a study of changing interpretations of men who wept in early modern England. During the sixteenth century, classical ideals provided a framework in which tears shed by men might be interpreted sympathetically, but during the seventeenth century male weeping became problematic, especially after the Restoration, which witnessed a backlash against the religious enthusiasm of the 1640s and 1650s. However, masculine lachrymosity become widespread once again in the age of sensibility, remaining so until hardening gender norms made such behaviour unacceptable after c.1780.

This account of male weeping was informed by the insights of William Reddy, who argued that, under successive ‘emotional regimes’, subjects and citizens were compelled (with varying degrees of intensity and success) to conform to emotional norms, with the French Revolution witnessing a shift from one such regime to another.

INTRODUCTION

This tract, published anonymously and carrying neither place, date nor printer's name, has been shown by Christina Larner to be probably the work of John Bell (1676–1707). Bell grew up in Glasgow and was educated at the University of Glasgow. From 1701 until his death he was minister of Gladsmuir in Haddingtonshire. Bell's autobiography, written in 1706, has recently been published. It is mainly about ecclesiastical politics, and it says nothing about witchcraft, but it shows Bell's strong commitment to presbyterianism and his determination to achieve his ends in the face of opposition. As Larner showed, Bell may well also have written an earlier ‘Treatise on Witchcraft’ in the 1690s; this is now lost, with only three fragments surviving. The Tryal of Witchcraft was probably printed in 1705.

Witchcraft trials had become rare by this period. Bell writes of ‘witches of whom I have read’ (p. 17), but he shows no sign of having encountered a witch or a witchcraft trial in person, even though he worked in Haddingtonshire, which in previous generations had prosecuted more witches than anywhere else in Scotland.

An unusual feature of Bell's reading is that it is mostly English. His main authorities are the treatises of William Perkins (1608) and Richard Bernard (1627). He also relies heavily on the anonymous narrative The Witches of Warboys (1593), about a case of demonic possession in the Throckmorton family in Huntingdonshire, and has one citation to a brief article from 1690 in the Athenian Mercury magazine.

According to Alfred Schnittke, a fellow disciple of Mark Kopytman at the Moscow Conservatory in the 1950s, a composer should be able to remember music not composed. “In my mind, this is a world of illusion, unlimited and endless. It has a sphere of shadow—which is not written down in notes, and which has no traces. And there is an area no longer that of the shadow, but of actual being—that which has remained.”

This impressive metaphor about a primary stage in a composer's creative process is close to an image used by Mark Kopytman in a similar context. While describing the compositional process, Kopytman asked, “Can you conceive of the notion that there are musical events in space, that strains of music appear and disappear, collide and confront each other, and that a piece of music is only a small window into this intersection of different layers?” And he suggested this hypothesis: “A composer has the happy gift of listening to this window and opening it up for the listener. We composers simply record the strains of existing music.”

Both composers spoke, in fact, about imaginary music not accessible to the listeners. At the same time, this imaginary music is the source for a real piece of music that could not be written without that “sphere of shadow,” as Schnittke put it, or without those “strains of existing music,” in Kopytman's formulation.

Recognised today as the consummate synthesist of the late Baroque, ‘der alte Bach’ lived long enough to experience the cultural movement known as the Enlightenment. When he travelled to Potsdam in 1747, he arrived at a Prussian court where Frederick the Great regularly conversed in French with the deist Voltaire and counted among a few other ‘enlightened’ monarchs (though absolutist, to be sure) who sympathized with philosophes such as Rousseau, Diderot, Hume and Kant, and placed their faith squarely in reason and optimism about mankind. The celebrated motto Kant revived from Horace, sapere aude (‘dare to know’), might well stand for the entire movement. But the desired knowledge now reached beyond the rational, quantifiable world to the murky subjectivities of emotions, domains of human experience that inconveniently resisted ‘the control of reason’. The new inquisitiveness also engaged aesthetics, a nascent field recognized by the philosopher A. G. Baumgarten to address how we perceive the beautiful, in turn challenging the centuries-old theory of mimesis, according to which art was like a mirror, imitating the world around it. Precisely how music participated with its sibling arts in this process – what exactly did music imitate? – had never been fully unravelled. If, after Horace, poetry was indeed ‘like a painting’ (ut pictura poesis), only with serious difficulty could music fit into what ‘rational’ arbiters of taste such as Gotthold Ephraim Lessing viewed as a Procrustean metaphor.

On 13 March 1271, in probably the most notorious crime committed anywhere in thirteenth-century Europe, Henry of Almain, nephew of Henry III of England and son of Henry III's brother Richard, king of the Romans, was murdered in Viterbo by the sons of Simon de Montfort. The international repercussions of the killing, which extended as far as Norway, are well known. Less attention has been given to its effects in England, and particularly to its judicial consequences. The procedures which followed were slow to commence. Although news of Henry's death reached London around 23 April, it was not until 15 October that writs to the sheriffs of Warwickshire/Leicestershire and Westmorland (and probably other sheriffs too) ordered that the appeal which one Thomas Archdeacon (a minor subtenant of Henry of Almain's brother Edmund) had brought against Guy, Simon and Amaury de Montfort should be prosecuted in their county courts, so that they be outlawed if they failed to ‘come to our peace to stand to right in our court before us for that death’. The process of ‘exigent’, of publicly demanding the attendance of a suspect at successive county courts, was duly begun but appears to have been abandoned, perhaps because of the younger Simon's death before the end of 1271. Certainly Amaury, the only Montfort who returned to England, was never referred to as an outlaw or treated as one. Here we find the first of several cases to be considered in which a crime committed overseas was in some way brought before a court in England.

In another such case we find the process of ‘exigent’ taking its full course and culminating in outlawry. Its target was Sir Walter de Baskerville, lord of Eardisley Castle in Herefordshire. In the 1250s he was numbered among the retainers of Richard of Cornwall. But his career provides a good example of the way in which the cause of reform after 1258 affected men's allegiances, for he became a diehard Montfortian who maintained the baronial cause in several different parts of England after the battle of Evesham, and seems to have failed to redeem his lands under the Dictum of Kenilworth because he had gone abroad.

Professor Rosalind Hill, the editor of the magisterial eight-volume edition of the rolls and register of Bishop Oliver Sutton of Lincoln (1280–99), considered with some justification that John de Schalby, Sutton's registrar, had developed registrational practices at Lincoln to their finest point when, in 1290, the rolls were replaced by the register format. From the bishop's accession until that year Schalby had followed the practice of keeping separate archdeaconry rolls, first devised at Lincoln under Bishop Hugh of Wells (1209–35), but in 1290 he abandoned the rolls in favour of the register, which enabled a more flexible subdivision of recorded business into many different category sections (by keeping a system of loose quires designated for each particular type of business and/or geographical area). What now survives for Sutton's episcopate, in addition to this large register covering the years 1290–99, are five earlier institution rolls (for the Lincoln, Northampton, Stow, Bedford and Leicester archdeaconries, the last mentioned incomplete) and a custody roll for the whole diocese. Institution rolls for the remaining archdeaconries of the diocese (Buckingham, Huntingdon and Oxford) are missing.

Dodsworth MS 107 in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, contains Roger Dodsworth's abstracts from early medieval Lincoln episcopal registers, including Sutton’s, made in 1641. The principal value of these notes is that at the time Dodsworth was consulting this material, the now lost institution rolls covering 1280–90 for the archdeaconries of Buckingham, Oxford and Huntingdon and the earliest portion of the Leicester archdeaconry roll 1280–86 were still extant. Dodsworth's notes on these lost rolls cover ten folios of the manuscript, and, as might be assumed, were clearly very selective in content, and were confined to brief notes of what was of particular interest to the antiquary.

Q. You are a person who exudes a passionate love of life, music, art, family, and everything beautiful. But aside from your parents and brothers, it is probably safe to say that your greatest human loves have been and continue to be your life companions and offspring. Where should we start?

A. I will say that my great loves began in my own fantasy when I was just a child and reading books, especially the love stories of Don Quijote. And I was moved by the great love affairs in Spanish poetry. Not surprisingly, I had my own imaginary woman, or girl. I cannot really say, because in my fantasy she was ageless. While playing music, I have always felt love, a physical love. And very often it was inspired by an imaginary love partner.

***

Q. All right, so love starts in your imagination.

A. Yes, and then as a result of wonderful circumstances. When I was little, I fantasized about different women or young girls, first envisioning and then finally meeting them. There was a young girl who lived near us in Seville; once, when I got sick with a high fever, she would come over to take care of me. On one occasion I was alone in the house, and her ministrations developed into a very romantic affair. At that time, we were living on a little farm on the outskirts of Seville, but then we had to move, and I was very sad to leave my first girlfriend behind. I was only 9 years old, and she was 15. I always went for older women, but then again, I was a very weird 9-year-old kid.

For many years, Josef Tal (1910–2008) was the leading modernist and thus also universalist among Israeli composers of concert music. He arrived in Israel in 1934 but, unlike most Israeli composers of his generation, was scarcely affected by the so-called Israeli Mediterranean School. Among other innovations, he pioneered serious electronic music in Israel. Among his nonelectronic works, his 1969 double concerto for violin and cello with chamber orchestra is one of the most challenging for listeners.

Tal was awarded the highly esteemed Israel Prize in that same year (although specifically for an electronic work). Unlike composers who had previously received the prize, his artistic output was not directly related to the national culture. One might be tempted to think of a universalist Zeitgeist that allowed this. In commentaries on Israeli culture, the years around 1970 reflect competing signals: it was the time of the War of Attrition between the 1967 Six-Day War and the 1973 Yom Kippur war—a short but intensive period that combined national centrism with the emergence of universal traits. Dating these years as the time of the Israeli breakthrough toward universality is based on the popular music scene (1970 was the year of the first significant Israeli rock albums); in the concert-music scene, however, modernist universalist composition had become the norm much earlier.

This double concerto, an adventurous tour de force of about twenty minutes in a single movement, includes no harmonious passages. While based on motivic remnants throughout, only sporadically does it include traditional motivic work.

In Madrid, 1633, Jusepe González de Salas published his Nueva idea de la tragedia antigua, the last neo-Aristotelian poetics to be written in Spain during the seventeenth century. In this treatise, he follows Heinsius's De constitutione tragoediae and centres his discussion on tragedy. In contrast to Pinciano and other minor poetics of the preceding century, the treatise's aims are radically different. For González de Salas, who was part of the intellectual circuits at Philip IV's court throughout his lengthy career, it is no longer a question of defining the primacy of poetics in the system of disciplines or of declining the different species of poems in a poetics conceived as an ante litteram anthropology, as was López Pinciano's Philosophía. Nor does he aim to provide a more accessible version of Aristotle's Poetics, understood as a vulgate version of the classical text, as Mártir Rizo, Ordóñez or Mariner had done a few years earlier.

González de Salas's ambition is to ‘illustrate’ certain modern theatrical practices in light of the theory (‘idea’) of ancient tragedy, and ancient spectacle more broadly. This exercise in illustration does not aim to provide a prescriptive definition of the rules of composition. Instead, it seeks to better understand spectacle and the singularity of its ancient and modern forms. Deploying a historical framework, this understanding of spectacle is based on an accumulation of ancient erudite facts. Yet González de Salas's treatise goes beyond erudite factualism to evidence a certain curiosity and vivid enthusiasm for his object of analysis. Specifically, he is personally interested in spectacle and, as a result, he supersedes the boundaries of a straightforward archaeological approach to the topic.

Book V begins as though it will be a critique of knighthood (milites), construed initially as the second estate of the three-tier social system Gower set out to analyze. It turns into a discussion of the commons, however, as the poet realizes that the system he has proclaimed will guide his account proves to be no longer useful to a discussion of a society that has outgrown it. The separation of a knightly class from the upper nobility, and the former's consequent interspersion alongside the commons, Gower saw reified by the protocols of parliament, which by at least the Good Parliament of 1376 had become bicameral, the peerage sitting apart from the commons, whose elected speaker reported the results of its deliberations to the upper house. The peerage comprising the House of Lords was restricted to some seventy or so families whose heads traditionally received periodic notification from the king that their counsel was required. The rest of the nobility necessarily came to belong to the House of Commons, represented there along with everybody else by Members of Parliament. If not already belted knights, elected by regional authorities, parliamentary members received the title “Knights of the Shire” for the duration.

Gower's commentary on the milites here must accordingly be taken to refer to knights and gentlemen, i.e. the gentry who constitute the rural elite, the shire landholders who were retained by magnates who expected loyal service in their affinities in return for lands. This is Gower's own class, and he chastises it severely, seeing around him contemporaries neglectful of their traditional responsibility to protect the Church, widows and orphans, and the common good.