The unrestrained circulation of foreign texts and ideas was seen by English authors from the mid-seventeenth to the early eighteenth century as a central factor in enabling the crisis. Significant portions of book sales catalogues and inventories of private libraries of individuals belonging to the English educated elite consisted of books written and/or published in Europe, which came to England mostly in Latin, or in French vernacular via the Dutch Republic and France, and which were often translated into English to satisfy a growing demand for foreign books and ideas. However, not all these books exerted the same impact on English intellectual culture. The analysis of English debates shows that there were just a few authors and books that most recurrently appear in contemporary discussion about the crisis and that generated serious apprehension for their actual or potential impact on a rapidly expanding readership. In this chapter, I will focus on the reception of the ideas and works of Descartes and Spinoza, and examine the contemporaries’ perception of their impact on English culture. Other names appear in English accounts of intellectual change, such as those of Galileo, Socinus, Gassendi and Bayle, and developments in disciplines other than natural philosophy, such as biblical scholarship, were accused of generating the crisis. But the main targets of apologetic literature in England were the French and the Dutch philosophers.

Although the philosophies of Descartes and Spinoza differ in many aspects including, most notably, the ‘mind-body problem’, the two authors were often coupled as promoters of a new mechanical strand of philosophy that, according to their early modern detractors, had potentially disruptive consequences for the churches and organised religion.

Bayard had vested many of his hopes in the commission of the Jay Treaty's London commission. In Article VII, the Jay Treaty specified that five commissioners were to meet in London for eighteen months to discern and evaluate: “Complaints […] made by divers Merchants and others, Citizens of the United States, that during the course of the War in which His Majesty is now engaged they have sustained considerable losses and damage by reason of irregular or illegal Captures or Condemnations of their vessels.”

The aim of this commission was to agree on and pay out an “adequate Compensation” to such merchants, to be covered by the British (or American) government. This systematic and formalised arbitration was new, introducing what has been termed as “the modern era of arbitral or judicial settlement of international disputes”.

For the London commission, American commissioners Christopher Gore and William Pinckney were ‘mixed’ with British commissioners, Dr Nicholl (who later resigned to take on the position of King's Advocate and was replaced by Maurice Swabey) and John Anstey. Therefore, the commission “consisted chiefly of lawyers with a wide cultural background”. Gore had studied law under John Lowell, a judge on the US Court of Appeals in Cases of Capture – the first federal US court and incidentally a law court that dealt in prize.

There is, at the heart of Adalbert Stifter's Bunte Steine (Motley Stones, 1853), a fundamental emptiness. This might seem like an odd thing to say. For the most part, Stifter's world is painstakingly, perhaps even lushly described. Natural landscapes, social relations, and physical objects are depicted with a care that some might consider excessive. The plotlines are driven by activity that runs the gamut from the measured to the manic, from calm routine to strife and disaster. The text offers us a bounty on the level of both action and description, but something still seems to be missing.

For Walter Benjamin, this absence is a fundamentally linguistic one, a form of what he calls “reticence” [Verschwiegenheit]. Because Stifter is cut off from “the essence of the world” [das Weltwesen] that is language, he cannot give a persuasive account of the relationship between the natural world and the moral one. The homologies that he tries to establish between the two remain restricted to the visual register and therefore mute. Because it is inarticulate, Stifter's world is also disarticulated, for an unbridgeable gulf separates material impressions from the forces that are responsible for them.

The Jay Treaty was published by the US government and widely disseminated in the press. Known as one of the first outcries in American politics and infamous for the public reaction to it, its circulation can barely be underestimated. 1 But how did US merchants interact with the commission or with Bayard in his capacity for assistance in claims and appeals? What information did the US government provide to mercantile communities, in which manner did they themselves interfere with the court process, and how was such information circulated?

Merchants were already following regular updates on condemnations and captures, both in the vice-admiralty courts and in the High Court of Admiralty. Decrees and lines of argumentation in court were published in newspapers.2 John Proctor obtained knowledge “by a late Bermudian paper, that the Ship Hamilton, Capt. Farrett, was taken by the Thetis British Frigate, and carried into Bermudas”3 and thus took up correspondence with the US government. Some government instructions had been printed in American newspapers, even printed in their entirety, with specific references made to the importance of providing merchants with information.4 The merchant community also functioned as a communication network in itself, with two merchants corresponding in 1797, whether they should contact other persons who might be in a similar position concerning captured property and get them in touch with Samuel Bayard.5 Yet the knowledge of what exactly the Treaty meant for their private cases remained unclear to many. The main initial point of governmental contact for most queries was the Secretary of State, although individual members of the commission, and additional staff on both sides, such as Jacob Wagner, Chief Clerk at the State Department, or Samuel Bayard, all received letters. Occasionally, citizens were referred there by other government officials.

While there has been no shortage of monographs on Beethoven's symphonies, string quartets and piano sonatas, his chamber music with piano has received relatively scant attention, particularly in the Beethoven literature in English. Yet this area of the composer's output contains some of his greatest and most famous works, among them the ‘Ghost’ and ‘Archduke’ piano trios, the ‘Spring’ and ‘Kreutzer’ violin sonatas, and the A major Cello Sonata op.69. It is true that the combination of piano and strings produces by its very nature a more heterogeneous form than the string quartet, and that Beethoven reserved some of his most profound and spiritual utterances for his late quartets in particular; but his piano trios, violin sonatas and cello sonatas together make up a larger corpus of works, and one that covers scarcely less stylistic ground – from his very first efforts at composition during the years when he was living in Bonn, to the threshold of his last period (the two cello sonatas op.102) and beyond (the two series of variations for piano and flute opp.105 and 107). No other composer, moreover, made as significant a contribution to all three principal forms of chamber music with piano. Haydn's piano trios, it is true, belong among his most remarkable and original chamber works, but the special nature of their textures assigns them a place apart in the history of the genre. Haydn, moreover, made no excursion into the field of duo sonatas; and if Mozart's violin sonatas number among them some of the finest works in the repertoire, and his piano trios contain a comparable number of masterpieces (though none, perhaps, that quite matches the grandeur and visionary quality of Beethoven's ‘Archduke’ and ‘Ghost’ trios), he never attempted to cultivate the more problematic medium of the sonata for piano and cello. Beethoven's five cello sonatas remain a unique achievement: not only did he essentially create the genre and contribute considerably more to it than any later composer of the front rank, he also raised it to a level of perfection that was never to be matched.

WAGNER SEEMS to have had, at best, an ambivalent attitude towards philosophy. His autobiography is not always a reliable source, and there are reasons to doubt his memory of his first encounter with Feuerbach, but it still provides an illuminating account of his early interest in the subject:

In his centenary year, 1978, Alfred Döblin was described on the dust jacket of a German academic publication—perfectly aptly—as “probably the least well-known” of the classic modernist authors. After returning to Germany at the end of the Second World War, Döblin had not regained the public prominence he enjoyed in the brief period between publishing his spectacularly innovative city novel Berlin Alexanderplatz in 1929 and fleeing from the Nazis early in 1933. For a combination of reasons, his publication history in the decade after 1945 was patchy, to say the least: works of his that did appear were divided between two West German publishers, broadly on the basis of their themes, while his last novel, Hamlet, written in 1945–46, did not appear until 1956, and then in East Berlin. From the 1970s onward, however, sustained scholarly teamwork created the annotated editions of Döblin's writings that were to provide the main basis for the systematic study of his works in the years that followed. While the most frequently quoted champion of Döblin in the German-speaking world remains Günter Grass, who spoke of him in a rousing lecture dating from 1967 as his “teacher,” a substantial number of other German novelists since the Second World War have similarly acknowledged that, without imitating him exactly, they had learned a great deal about the narrative craft and the range of its possibilities from Döblin's fiction.