Numerous publications in recent years have reconsidered the role of pastoralism in English music of the early twentieth century, calling into question its (mis-)identification as an escapist, patriotic, or a-historical mode. Of particular interest are works in which composers turned to pastoral settings or modes to address themes of morbidity, pain, isolation, and the grotesque.1 These reassessments have revealed traditional interpretations of pastoralism, landscape, and Englishness in music to be increasingly problematic. John Ireland has often been identified with a wave of early twentieth-century English pastoralism, but the focus of commentators has primarily been on his popular short-form works, which show only one aspect of the composer's pastoral character, often associated with the secondary theme of nationalism that was only pronounced in Ireland's music during the 1910s as a consequence of the First World War.

Ireland's Legend for piano and orchestra has long been associated with the landscape of the Sussex Downs, which Ireland claimed to have played a central part of its inspiration. His friend the writer Jocelyn Brooke summarized the standard account of Legend's origins:

In the nineteenth century, innovations in instrument construction facilitated amateur music-making, driving and being driven by musical trends and broad social and cultural influences. Writing about instruments in the salon, Beatrix Darmstädter explores the organological innovations that allowed the musical salon scene to flourish. Salon instruments were not just tools for music-making; they were also indispensable household items designed to look attractive and to display one's wealth and status. Pianos in particular exhibited an array of innovations reflecting their musical and visual functions in the salon, from various experiments in pedals to create all kinds of musical effects to decoration in a myriad of lavish, stylish ways to display the owner's taste. Space mattered too, and pianos were built in a range of sizes and shapes to ensure they could fit into even the most modest of salon rooms.

The salon has begun to receive the scholarly attention it deserves as a music-making venue and a window on society; but the private, personal, open-air pursuits of Viennese music lovers have gone almost unnoticed. In this chapter, we explore the ways in which the Viennese integrated their love of music with their love of nature and the outdoors. The combination boosted the popularity of portable instruments, so amateurs and dilettantes could take their music with them as they explored nature on hikes, boat trips, excursions, and walks in the famed Prater and Augarten city parks. In this chapter, we look at the instruments, both established and novel, that the Viennese took with them on their outings, with a special focus on the csakan (a nineteenth-century recorder in a′ flat) and guitar, both of which enjoyed immense popularity at the time.

“Viera zajisté jest z slyšenie a slyšenie skrze slovo Kristovo” (Truly, faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ). A print from 1493 includes this translation by Václav Koranda the Younger (at that time already a former administrator of the Utraquist Church in Bohemia) of a line from the apostle Paul's epistle to the Romans. The quotation encapsulates the entire intellectual principle underlying the existence of chant in the Czech language, which relates more or less closely to liturgical practice in the Czech lands as a whole; it emphasizes performative action, the educational nature of the imparted word, and the active role of its lay recipients. For Koranda, the cited verse is a central argument for a wide-ranging defense of the use of Czech in sacred contexts, which becomes an intellectual keystone between Hussite demands for vernacularization of the liturgy and the development of this practice in the sixteenth century.

For medieval thought, the word, transmitted aloud and accompanied by visual or other elements, is of fundamental significance, for it involves a manifestation, or even the very incarnation, of what is heard—“verbum caro factum est.” Any study of medieval musico-literary culture therefore has to reckon with the tension between “performance” and the written word. Moreover, in the case of Czech ecclesiastical chant of the late fifteenth century, we are dealing with a repertory that exists to the side of the main corpus of music for the liturgy and is just beginning to develop and find its place in church practice. The problem of the relationship between performance and written text shows up already in cursory reviews of the source material and subsequent interpretations by scholars.

Smack goes my pussy. Smack, smack, when she feels good and can spread out. When she feels safe and knows that she still has untold thousands of orgasms ahead of her. And, until then, my pussy lips will continue to flutter and thrive without hiding or forcing themselves to conform to any norms.

—Reyhan Şahin, a.k.a Lady Bitch Ray, “Sex”

Introduction

Few readers would be surprised to learn that a 2020 survey of thirty thousand German rap songs reported a prevalence of strong sexist and anti-feminist lyrics. The songs and artists were chosen based on hip-hop charts from approximately 1995 to 2019 and relied on a list of three hundred keywords such as “Bitch,” Hure (whore), and Fotze (cunt) to analyze the texts. But while such phrases may seem expected, the rap duo with the most anti-feminist lyrics per song may come as a surprise: the hiphop duo SXTN, active from 2014 to 2019, was found to have the most sexist content per song. Why is that surprising? Because the duo is composed of two women. Nura Habib Omer and Juju (Judith Wessendorf) are of Eritrean and Moroccan descent, respectively, and together have created a body of work with strong anti-racist and female empowerment themes expressed in the aggressively “vulgar” and often angry language of male-dominated German hip-hop. While SXTN uses similar tools to their male counterparts, they do so strategically to disrupt the intersecting nexus of sexist and racist narratives and thereby reclaim sexual agency.

11.1 Introduction

Amlaíb mac Gothbrith's death in 941 was, in retrospect, a turning point: he is the last Dubliner whose obit contains a version of the formula rí Dubgall ocus Finngall, denoting something like king of York and overking of Dublin. Subsequently, his cousin Amlaíb Cúarán mac Sitriuca reigned at York, more or less precariously, for periods in the 940s and 950s. Amlaíb Cúarán's second expulsion from York in 952 was followed two years later by absorption of Northumbria and York into the kingdom of England. Amlaíb Cúarán, for the rest of his long career, was preoccupied with Dublin, Ireland and the Norwegian Insular Viking zone. He presided over a contraction of Dublin's political influence. Not only were his best efforts to secure York – the ‘jewel in the crown’ of his ‘imperial’ predecessors – unavailing; Dublin's influence at Waterford and Limerick evaporated, as these became, in differing degrees, apanages of Munster kings. A Dublin foothold in east Ulster, evident in the 920s and 930s, is not documented under Amlaíb Cúarán. (See Fig. 11.1 for locations in Ireland.) As he struggled and failed to hold York, c. 950, Dublin played a key role in the politics of the Uí Néill. (See Fig. 11.2 for locations in Britain.) The shifting alliances that this produced are reminiscent of the third quarter of the ninth century, the era of Amlaíb and Ímar. Here too, however, Dublin's power ultimately declined.

Limerick leaders seemingly had included renegade descendants of Ímar, through his son Bárid (d. 881), fuelling rivalry with Dublin in the 920s and 930s.

Reverend Sir,

I am favour’d with two Packets from you, which came to Town, while I was at Tunbridge Wells in Kent during the Recess of the Society, so that I had not the pleasure of seeing Mr. Greenwood, & of receiving from him by word of Mouth a Relation of your success in inoculating the Small Pox in New England, which otherwise I should have been glad to have done. I have read over your Case of the Small Pox inoculated, farther cleared, with a great deal of satisfaction. I must needs say, that not only the Publick, but in particular all our Faculty are obliged to you for your Condescension & pains you have taken in refuting the many weak Arguments brought against Inoculation. For certainly if those be of any force, & it be a Crime to incurr, or inflict a lesser natural Evil, or Danger, to avoid a greater, there must be an end of our Practice.

Your Book was Presented to the Royal Society at one of their late meetings, when I likewise read to them your several Letters on the Curiosa Americana, & I am commanded to return you the thanks of the Society for the one and the other.

It is clear that photography is a necessary and useful tool for recording Latin America. Additionally, it has shown that it is possible to use this technology to understand Latin America in specific and unique ways that other media do not offer. In fact, the photography record shows that such observations are not new (Figure 10.1). Indeed, the usefulness of this technology in understanding Latin America has been underlined on many occasions. This has been evident from its earliest days. Consider one example from the first years of photography in Western Europe as described by Frank Howard. As he writes about how photography can be used, he notes special advantages that it offers compared to fine art in a paper he delivered on June 7, 1853. This paper was published in the thirteenth edition of The Journal of The Photographic Society in Liverpool, England. It draws upon an example from the lives of two explorers in Central America to discuss when photography is the ideal technology to represent new knowledge coming out of the Global South.

Howard relates that a Mr. Stephens and a Mr. Catherwood had come across some lost cities in Central America. Mr. Catherwood sat down to sketch what he had found, while Mr. Stephens continued exploring the area. When he returned from exploring several hours later, Mr. Catherwood had not sketched anything. His explanation for failing to do so became incorporated in Howard's examples of occasions when photography is a preferred mode of representation. “He [Mr. Stephens] returned after some hours’ absence but to find Mr. Catherwood still seated in the same place, without having made the slightest commencement of his drawing; and in explanation he said that the forms were so different from anything he had ever seen before, that he did not know where to begin, and was completely bewildered” (Howard 156).

“Wordweaving” in Old English Texts

The textile metaphors discussed thus far have chiefly involved associations between women and the spinning and weaving of abstract elements: peace, death, creation, and fate. Another image related to textiles, the subject of this chapter, is that of “wordweaving,” or literary composition. The most direct equation of weaving and the composition of text in the Old English corpus comes in the poem Elene, as the poet-narrator Cynewulf says that, despite his aged mind and body, he wordcræftum wæf ond wundrum læs, / þragum þreodude ond geþanc reodode / nihtes nearwe “wove with wordskills and selected marvels, deliberated at times and searched out ideas carefully through the night” (1237–39a). Cynewulf elaborates on the nature and source of his inspiration: gife unscynde / mægencyning amæt ond on gemynd begeat, / torht ontynde, tidum gerymde, / bancofan onband, breostlocan onwand, / leoðucræft onleac “the Mighty King bestowed a glorious gift and anointed the intellect, revealed a brightness, prolonged the hours, unbound bodily frame, unwound the mind, unlocked poetic skill” (1246b–50a). Similar metaphors appear in the Anglo-Latin corpus as well.

The countries bordering the southern North Sea belong to the most agriculturally productive states in the world. The Netherlands in particular is an agricultural giant. Due to its very high productivity, this country, with its small agricultural acreage, is the world's third largest exporter of agricultural products after the United States and Brazil. Although many people are now rightly concerned about intensive farming's environmental downsides, this remains a remarkable achievement. What makes it even more remarkable is that it began in the soggy, inhospitable wetlands along the North Sea coast. Scholars such as Jan de Vries and Jan Bieleman have shown that already in the seventeenth century the coastal provinces of the Netherlands, with their relatively large commercial and productive farms, were worlds apart from the inland provinces and much of continental Europe with its small-scale subsistence farming.

This book aims to explain the advanced nature of farming in the Dutch coastal zone by looking at it from a comparative perspective and over a long period, from c. 900 to 2000. The coastal provinces of the Netherlands were part of a zone stretching from Calais in northern France to Ribe in southern Denmark, composed of reclaimed marshes, fens and floodplains situated around or even below sea level. On the opposite shore of the North Sea similar regions can be found in eastern England from the Pevensey Levels in East Sussex to Yorkshire. I will call them here the North Sea Lowlands.

Chrétien de Troyes’ twelfth-century verse romance, Chevalier au lion (Yvain), is one of the most widespread stories of the medieval Arthurian legend. The plot, in which the protagonist Yvain is rejected by his lady-love Laudine for breaking a promise to return home in a year's time, and subsequently must perform various heroic deeds, usually in defence of women, in order to regain her favour, needs no rehearsing. It is important to my argument, however, to emphasise the role of the lion in helping Yvain to regain his heroic stature, his identity, and his lady's favour. Julian Harris reads the lion as a Providential companion for the hero. Harris could not, however, explain what precipitates the divine intervention. As Harris points out, the hero cannot ask for help in his moment of greatest need, his spell of madness. Before that moment, Yvain does little to please the heavens. He breaks faith with his new wife, Laudine and, according to many critics, pursues her mortally wounded husband, Esclados, with a cruel vengeance. Yet perhaps something other than the hero's distress or merit persuades the Almighty to intervene. Jean Frappier assures us that Chrétien ‘est un apologiste du mariage’ (‘is an apologist for marriage’), and we know that the poet often borrows from Ovid's oeuvre while making frequent use of Christian symbols, the lion among them.

‘Too many riddles weigh men down on earth. We must solve as we can, and try to keep a dry skin in the water.’

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, III, Ch. 3

The Russian composer Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840–93) encountered at least one weighty Dostoyevskian riddle – his sexuality. It affected his posthumous reception, when the question arose whether he died of cholera or by suicide mandated by a hastily convened court of honour or one of his ardent admirers, Tsar Alexander III, to forestall a scandal about the composer's pederastic trysts. As recently as 2018 this debate triggered renewed attention after the sensational release of a trove of family correspondence. For much of the twentieth century, the Soviet government had methodically groomed the composer's official commemoration: ‘… it would have been unthinkable to accept the idea that Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Russia's national treasure, was a homosexual. Therefore, he wasn’t’.1 Nevertheless, the composer's diaries, released in 1945 as the Second World War came to its tumultuous close, contained one compelling passage from 23 April 1884: ‘There was much Z. Oh, what a monster of a person I am!’2 In a footnote the editor of the diaries, Wladimir Lakond, surmised: ‘This was the secret symbol that, it appears, Tchaikovsky employed to refer to his homosexuality’.3 An entry from the previous day regarding the composer's thirteen-year-old nephew Vladimir Luovich Davidov prompted this annotation: ‘Tchaikovsky was very attached to him from his childhood and there is reason to believe that in his late years the attachment was more than platonic’.