The Therapeutica of Alexander of Tralles, or, more specifically the seventh- century Latin translation of it, is closely related to the other texts discussed in this book both by its reception in the Old English medical corpus and by its transmission in the Continental record alongside either the Latin Oribasius or the ensemble of texts which grew around the Galen's Ad Glauconem. In the previous two chapters, the name Alexander Trallianus, or Alexander of Tralles, has occurred many times. His book on gout forms part of the Ad Glauconem ensemble, as discussed in Chapter 4, while his complete works were transmitted, from a presumed insular archetype, alongside the Latin Oribasius in a ninth-century manuscript now BnF MS Lat. 9332 as discussed in Chapter 5. Alexander probably lived in Rome, most likely being a rough contemporary of Augustine of Canterbury (d. 604), meaning that he was living at the time that Latin literary culture was being reintroduced into England.

This chapter considers the reception of Alexander as that of one of the leading innovators in late antique medical theory and practice, and will therefore examine the ways in which Alexander's ideas were used in conjunction with those of previous medical authorities in the Old English synthesis of these works. As mentioned in the previous chapter, the Old English reception of Alexander is intertwined with the reception of Oribasius, and it can be difficult to precisely distinguish one authority from the other once they have been subject to the form of paraphrasing, rearranging, augmentation and omission which occurs in ancient and medieval translation practice.

To say that the absence of the Olympians in the Bellum Civile has excited considerable scholarly debate is an understatement. Unlike the gods in the epics of Homer, Vergil, or indeed Lucan's successor Statius, Lucan's Olympians never appear as direct actors in or instigators of the events of his poem. There are no councils of the gods, almost no divine visitations, and what prophecies mortals do solicit are through human intermediaries. Lucan's narrator periodically (and often contradictorily) comments on the role of fate (fatum), Fortuna, and the gods, but ultimately such questions are left deliberately ambiguous and impenetrable both to the text's characters and to the work's audience. Given such a startling absence in Lucan compared to other Classical Latin epics, this chapter will question how the translators and redactors of In Cath Catharda reimagined the role of fate and the gods, situating them within the framework of Christian salvation history. As neither Lucan's Bellum Civile nor its Irish adaptation include Classical deities in active roles, this case study will be better able to elucidate the historiographical foundations supporting medieval Irish readings of Classical literature and myth.

In Cath Catharda emerges as far more interested in constructing a coherent picture of fate and Fortuna than Lucan's Bellum Civile and positions its narrative in an eschatological light; that is, as a text concerned with endings and apocalypses, both Classical and biblical.

While writing on Russian music history over the past three-and-more decades, I have only occasionally discussed the contributions of women. There are many female colleagues today, of course, but within the historiography itself, women are known chiefly through their relation to male composers, such as Madame von Meck and Tchaikovsky, or Marietta Shaginyan and Rachmaninov – wives, lovers, singers of the composer's music, muses of some kind, and the occasional wealthy patron. A narrative centred on women in Russian music of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries requires a shift in perspective away from composers. Certainly, there are rediscoveries of female composers such as Valentina Serova (1846–1924) or Leocadia Kashperova (1872–1940), but they are small in number; there was no hidden cohort of female composers influencing the mainstream of composition. Where, then, are the women of Russian music? Were they marginal at best? As it happens, there was indeed a crucial musical domain where women were to be found in their hundreds. These women were successful and influential, creating opportunities for themselves and other suitably qualified women. These were the women pianists, who not only performed in public, but in greater numbers taught privately and institutionally, and even established new music colleges. This chapter is a report on the data that I have collected.

2nd Military Suite in F minor

Holst composed his 2nd Military Suite in F minor, the first version of his Second Suite in F for Military Band, in 1911.1 Reasons for his composing this work at this particular time remain unknown, although one probably would not be out of line in speculating that Holst wrote the work (a) in general—as a response to the constant plea for original military band works from established British composers and (b) in particular—as a result of his contacts with personnel at the Royal Military School of Music at Kneller Hall. It is also possible but not probable that, as in the case of his other 1910–1911 military band works, he composed it for the Festival of Empire. If it were, it probably would not have been composed for the Festival of Empire Military Band, since the instrumentation of that group was larger than that listed on his manuscript full score. Yet another possibility is that Holst, who was not immune from entering contests, composed it for the 1911 competition held by the Worshipful Company of Musicians.2

Although composed only two years after the First Suite in E-flat for Military Band, the 2nd Military Suite in F minor is more economically scored than its predecessor. There are no allowances for optional instrumentation here. Gone are the E-flat trumpets, B-flat trumpets, bass clarinet, tenor saxophone, and timpani, for this work was originally scored for the standard British regimental band instrumentation of thirty to thirty-five players used during the first two decades of the twentieth century

This praise, written by Mosel in 1808, reflects a moment when the musical culture of Vienna celebrated the participation of non-professional musicians – those referred to as amateurs or dilettantes – as a central part of civic life. Although today, these terms are often used pejoratively, suggesting a lack of skill or seriousness, in early nineteenth-century Vienna, they commonly referred to individuals who engaged in music with dedication, taste, and often high competence but without professional status. Such figures are now rarely considered in historical narratives, not because of their insignificance but because of the persistent focus of music historiography on composers and professionals – the ‘stars’ of concert life. This chapter reconsiders those overlooked participants, asking what it meant to be a musical amateur at this time and how amateurs’ roles contributed to the wider ecology of Viennese musical culture.

This chapter explores how terms such as ‘amateur’ (Liebhaber), ‘dilettante’, and ‘connoisseur’ (Kenner) were used and understood in Vienna around 1800. While modern usage often equates ‘amateur’ and ‘dilettante’ with low skill or superficial interest, in early nineteenth-century discourse, these labels encompassed a wide range of socially and musically active individuals, many of whom contributed significantly to Vienna's vibrant musical life.

Since its creation, photography has played an increasingly active role in how we represent our lives. If you were to survey those around you, you would probably find that more people now use photographic images to represent their lives than written text. This is one of the many pieces of evidence of the visual turn in our society. In fact, photography is now one of the main ways we represent our life; indeed, it is one of the most democratic mediums of representation in our present times. Modern society trusts, uses, and shares photography. It values such images as a faithful record of our experiences and the world around us. They break down myths and build up histories. Photography reveals unique information that is difficult or impossible to obtain from other sources. Such images convey hidden information and record the obvious and the mundane. For these and other reasons, it is imperative that we study photography and the ways it represents the world. This companion study aims to help you consider ways in which Latin America is revealed to us via photography and reflect upon photographic practices.

The technological side of photography has a global history that has been formed and shared by the countries that have contributed to its developments. No one person can claim sole credit for these processes that allow individuals to capture the reflection of light onto a memory card, a piece of paper, a plate of glass, or a buffered copper plate that has been coated in silver and mercury vapors. Before photography came to be, capturing an image inside a box, a camera oscura, was a well-known technique used by artists and others for centuries. The gap to be bridged in the invention of photography was how to allow that light to be captured and fixed onto an image.

“Music and medievalism” is already an established scholarly field encompassing a wide range of topics, and it constantly extends its scope. However, medieval music and medieval symbols as a vital part of modern Czech music culture has not yet been evaluated in the scholarly literature emerging from the “Western” discourse. Czech music historiography has offered several interpretations of musical works inspired by medieval personalities, such as Joan of Arc or Hildegard von Bingen. Dominant among them is the “second life” of the Czech church reformer Master Jan Hus (d. 1415) and the Hussite wars (1420–34) that disrupted a large part of the Czech kingdom for several decades. Pieces of art and scholarly discourse reflecting the legacy of Jan Hus and the Hussite movement (Hussitism) belonged to the pillars of “Czech” national “awakening” after 1800, and as such, they were marked by controversial interpretations. Music served as an important medium in shaping a seemingly authentic image of medieval subjects and concepts.

The concept of “medievalism” is well known in Czech music historiography. However, it has traditionally focused on the phenomenon's development after the 1860s. The date is marked by the introduction of the prime “authentic” medieval music document, the Hussite war song Ktož jsú boží bojovníci (You who are the warriors of God), previously understood exclusively as a literary monument. The present chapter, the result of interdisciplinary research and close study of musical documents, reveals that the ongoing tradition of the “Hus-Hussite” motifs—that is, motifs relating to Jan Hus and Hussitism—in Czech modern music has much deeper roots, reaching back to the turn of the eighteenth century.

After the Hussite wars (1419–36), the unique constellation of religious powers in the lands of the Bohemian crown gave rise to the coexistence of two official churches—the Catholic Church (celebrating the Eucharist with bread = sub una) and the Utraquist Church (celebrating with bread and wine = sub utraque)—which played a pivotal role in shaping the region's musical culture. In Bohemia, the focus of this study, it is estimated that around 70 percent of the population adhered to Utraquism and received communion sub utraque specie. Surviving sources of polyphony from the second half of the fifteenth century and the first decades of the sixteenth century largely stem from Utraquist circles. Consequently, our interpretation of the musical life in Bohemia during this period is defined by this context, with any exploration of “polyphony in Bohemia after the Hussite wars” inevitably reflecting the prevailing perspective of “polyphony within the Utraquist church.”

The coexistence of the two official churches had a profound impact on the parallel cultivation of distinct types and styles of polyphonic repertories. In this chapter, I refer to what I will call the “traditional” repertory as a body of polyphonic music transmitted persistently in full mensural notation from the 1470s onward, alongside the parallel circulation of polyphony written in void mensural notation. This “traditional” repertory is a phenomenon specific to the Bohemian Utraquist Church, which deliberately preserved music composed in central Europe up until the 1450s (including works by Petrus Wilhelmi de Grudencz) as a foundational repertory for festive Mass liturgies.

In February 2023, Australian conductor Benjamin Northey told the audience of ABC Classic FM's breakfast program the story of how Percy Grainger, the eccentric composer, had left a box in his equally eccentric museum marked ‘not to be opened until ten years after my death’. As Northey reported, ten years to the date of Grainger's death in 1971, the Museum excitedly hosted a public ceremonial opening of this mystery box, but the university administration was left humiliated to find inside not a new experimental musical instrument or long-lost composition, but a vast array of whips and photos, documenting Grainger's previously unknown sadomasochistic sex life.

While this is a good story – and the same one I was told as an under¬graduate at the Melbourne Conservatorium fifteen years ago – it is not entirely true. Grainger did leave a package marked ‘Private Matters: Do not open until 10 (ten) years after my death’, but this was opened at a Museum board meeting with little ceremony, and the committee resolved that its contents – an essay by Grainger explaining his views on flagellantism and a series of photographs documenting his practice – should simply ‘be lodged in a safe’. While there was no public unveiling, the contents of the package would hardly have been a surprise to the board: as we have seen, Grainger's sexual habits were well documented elsewhere in the collection.

The real public unveiling of this aspect of Grainger's life, as well as other significant elements of his now standard biography, occurred in 1976 with the publication of John Bird's pioneering study, Percy Grainger.

Franco's public biography began before 1936, when he played a role in the founding of the Spanish Foreign Legion, led troops in the Moroccan campaigns, and aligned himself politically with counter-revolutionaries. But it is inseparable from the Spanish Civil War – or, as the rebels called it, the National Crusade. The insurgents of 1936 (who became the victors of 1939) defined their war using this term. And this macro-narrative shaped the construction of the biography of the Caudillo, Generalísimo and victorious Head of the State, Francisco Franco. Biographies of Franco were constructed in a narrowed, teleological structure within the framework of Victory. This chapter will examine Franco's political and military actions during the war to understand how he became the leader of Nationalist Spain. It will then address how and why Franco's biography during the Civil War was identified with the imaginary biography of Nationalist Spain.

The fact that a variety of political and cultural tendencies came together in the coup of 18 July, the Civil War, and Franco's caudillaje does not diminish the unitary nature of that day as the accelerator and unifier of a regime that was as heterogeneous and functional as those that emerged from other similar experiences in Europe. As Ferran Gallego has noted, the civil war was the process by which Spanish fascism was forged, in a fundamental sense: it involved the adoption of a framework of generalised violence that was used not only in the repression of adversaries, but also in the construction of a national community defined by the radical exclusion of the defeated, both as individuals and in terms of what their individual and collective political experience represented.1 The Spanish far right joined the episode of the coup d’état and the ensuing war en masse.

The Catholicism of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries idealized “heroic victims” and “suffering souls” who welcomed the illness and corporeal afflictions that God sent them and cultivated—through devotional practices—a compassionate suffering with Christ. The comportment of such suffering victims fit the Catholic glorification of pain as productive and as an opportunity for their souls to grow. One subset of these voluntary sufferers were the so-called stigmatics, often women, who bore the wounds of Christ and therefore quite literally embodied the spiritual identification with Christ and his reparatory suffering. This chapter focuses on the emotional aspect of their suffering, their despair, compassion, and painful love of Christ and humanity. This chapter also presents an opportunity to examine their physical suffering, since it cannot be seen apart from the emotional aspect. As Heidrun Zettelbauer, Maria Fritsche, and Bozena Choluj have recently summarized in their introduction to a themed volume on the topic: “Pain is widely agreed to be an intersection of body, brain, and culture, simultaneously emotional, cognitive, and social.”