Three illuminated manuscripts now in the British Library were once the property of Henry Despenser, who served as bishop of Norwich from 1370 to 1406. That they were made for him during his long episcopacy is evident from his distinctive heraldic devices displayed prominently in each: quarterly first and fourth, argent; second and third, gules fretty or; a bend sable overall; a bordure argent of bishop's mitres or. These manuscripts are: London, British Library MS Additional 34114 (olim Spalding), containing five poems, all in Anglo-French (a version of the Chanson d’Antioche, the Roman d’Eneas, the Roman de Thebes, Le Songe Vert – a dream-vision – and a 170-line segment of the Ordene de Chevalerie, attributed to Hue de Tabarie); BL MS Arundel 74, a copy of Bede's Historia Ecclesiastica; and BL MS Cotton Claudius E.viii, a compendium of works bound together by Robert Cotton in the seventeenth century. The main texts of this last, a Flores Historiarum with the Continuatio chronicarum of Adam Murimuth brought to 1340, belonged unequivocally to Despenser. Previous scholars (with different degrees of certainty) have assigned the production of these books to Norwich based on the evidence of their provenance – criteria that are ultimately insufficient for establishing origin. We hope here to build a more rigorous case for the bishop's commission of all three books – not in London or even Oxford, but locally – in the city of Norwich itself, and we will do this by analysing the two main artists involved, together with a larger grouping of contemporary illuminated manuscripts uniform in both style and provenance.

Francique's company returned from the southwest to Paris early in 1726. Parfaict's marginal note at the head of the entry for the Foire Saint-Laurent of 1726 refers to the ‘Opéra-Comique du Sieur Honoré associé avec Francisque’.1 ‘L’Opéra-Comique du Sieur Francisque’ is also named in the reports of the fair which appeared in the Mercure,2 and the words appear on the title page of Les Pèlerins de La Mecque, published separately in September 1726, although not when the play was included in the sixth volume of Le Théâtre de la Foire in 1728. There can therefore be little doubt that the ‘Opéra-Comique du Sieur Honoré associé avec Francisque’ (Mémoires) and ‘L’Opéra-Comique du Sieur Francisque’ (Mercure) were one and the same thing. The large casts of this season's productions indicate that Francisque probably retained many of Honoré's actors, along with his own family and old associates. This is the first season in which all four major fair authors – Lesage, Fuzelier, d’Orneval and Piron –wrote for Francisque and his company.

1. Vindicatory violence and lèse-majesté: the struggle for control over peacekeeping practices

The advent of modernity, both juridical and judicial, has traditionally been identified with initiating the process that made criminal law independent from civil law, to the detriment of the latter, and the concurrent emergence of the public criminal process at the expense of private solutions to conflict resolution. On the terminus a quo of this evolution, historiography has not always been in agreement. Some have preferred to relegate the entire pre-revolutionary era to a sort of archaism in which jurists were inclined ‘to treat criminal issues […] with a civil law mentality, as if criminal law were a necessary complement to civil law, a complex of defences prepared to protect particular positions of privilege of individuals or the community.’ Others have instead highlighted how much modernity was already present in the criminal doctrine of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, which was increasingly forced to address the issue of the public relevance of crimes, the threat they posed to the security and preservation of the state. The transformation, in the direction of an indefinite expansion, of the concept and fields of application of the crimen laesae maiestatis was, as Mario Sbriccoli showed almost half a century ago, one of the main instruments – underpinned by an ideology, which may perhaps be seen as the primary force that allowed state jurisdiction to erode fundamental areas of legitimacy from competing jurisdictions, especially feudal ones.

Reverend Dr.

Some Months are now past since I sent you by the Conveyance of my good friend Mr. Jeremy Dummer a Letter in answer to your former, which I hope came to your hands, in that I gave you an account of my having recieved your Manuscript of ingenious Letters to Dr. Woodward and my selfe, tho’ as I then intimated, they had bin so Short a time in my possession that I could not make a sutable return for the Kindness and the honorable sentiments you are pleased to entertain off me.

As for yr being chosen a ffellow of the Royal Society, that has bin don ﹛.﹜ you have bin approved by the Council and Elected by the Body of the Society, so that only the Ceremony of an actual admission is wanting, which you being Beyond sea cannot be performed, and you being a natural born subject, cannot be inserted among the Gentlemen of other nations in the printed Liste, which is the reason that your name is not printed in the Liste herewith sent you. The chief reason of printing these Listes is for the convenience of the fellows present in choosing the Council President and Officers for the ensuing year.

But to come to the contents of your Letters in your Manuscript at the Desire of the Society I made a large Extract of them which was read at our publique meetings.

Johann Wilhelm Ritter (1776–1810) was a German physicist, philosopher and chemist, who was an early believer in the power of the invisible forces in nature. His work culminated in a discovery of the outside area or ultra-region of the visual spectrum, the so-called UV or ultraviolet-ray band. Analogous to his scientific interest in invisible light is Ritter's fascination with the visualization of sound via the vibration plates of Ernst Chladni (1756–1827). Like Chladni's ‘sound figures’, which allowed one to see sound drawn by sand, Ritter's discovery of invisible light proved that nature continually presents oscillating symbols or hieroglyphs to be deciphered by the senses. For Ritter, chief among all the senses, was hearing:

The sense of hearing is among all the senses of the universe the highest, greatest, most encompassing, certainly, it is the only general, the universal sense. There is no perspective of the universe so whole and unlimited as the acoustical one.

This understanding of nature became the basis of a musical aesthetic that mirrored sound on to light, a concept Ritter introduced in a two-volume 1810 publication, Fragmente aus dem Nachlasse eines jungen Physikers: Ein Taschenbuch für Freunde der Natur [Fragments from the estate of a young physicist: A pocket book for friends of nature], where he even goes so far as to proclaim that sound is conscious, a living thing: ‘As is light, so too is tone consciousness. Every tone is a life of the sounding body and in it which continues as long as the tone does but vanishes with it.

Although historians of medieval geography have long recognised that the study of geography in the Middle Ages was hardly stagnant, there remains a pervasive notion in the wider scholarly community that, at least in terms of its formal structures, medieval geography was a fundamentally passive receptor of the ancient geographical tradition. The reason for this is not hard to see, since medieval authors themselves were often at pains to stress their deference to older authorities. The late ancient formula for the division of the world into Asia, Europa and Africa, for example, remained ubiquitous and largely unquestioned well into the sixteenth century. No less emblematic of this deferential attitude is Otto of Freising's offhanded suggestion that those who wish to know more about Asia, Europe and Africa should simply consult Orosius – an approach that is still alive and well in the 1539 geography of Jacques Signot.

On 5 October 1717, Nathaniel Mist's The Weekly Journal or Saturday's Post reported that Johann Jacob Heidegger, whose management of the opera with Handel at the Haymarket had run into financial difficulties, intended to bring a company of French actors from Paris for the winter season, to replace the opera. This report was contained in a letter ‘from an ingenious Hand’– the first of many examples of the xenophobia provoked by the company's visits:

The writer concluded:

Winchester, capital of Wessex, is where Cnut could most plausibly have seen a copy of Beowulf. Having been crowned king of England in 1017, he visited the town a few times in the following two or three years, and then more often towards the end of his reign. His marriage to Emma, King Æthelred's widow, in 1017 was a stabilising measure that speaks for his interest in preserving some continuity with the old regime, whereby an ideology of common ancestry would also have been welcome. The genealogy in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in the annal 855 tells us that King Æthelwulf was descended from Scealdwa (‘Scyld’). As we have seen, the earliest version of this entry survives through Æthelweard's Latin translation of an Old English text which pre-dates the version of 891 which gave rise to the Chronicle in versions A–F. This version says that Scyld's father ‘Scef’ came from ‘Scani’ (‘Skåne’). It seems likely that the same information in vernacular form encouraged Cnut to adopt Scealdwa as his ancestor in common with King Æthelred. As we shall see, the (proper) noun Skjǫldr, a Norse cognate, begins to appear in conjunction with the more common epithet Skjǫldungar in eulogies composed by Cnut's skalds in the late 1020s. A sizeable body of poetry was created by these men in this period of Danish acclimatisation to England. If it is thought that only the genealogies in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle were needed for this influence to be made, it is worth recalling that Scyldingas, the word for ‘Danes’ which marked the meaning of Skjǫldungar, is found only in Beowulf.

William Young's grandfather, also named William – as have been all the eldest sons of the family ever since – was a Scottish doctor who settled in Antigua and made a large fortune as a planter in the boom con¬ditions for Leeward Islands’ sugar in the first half of the eighteenth century. He sent his son William, the father of the subject of this book, to be edu¬cated at a fashionable school in England. There he seems to have severed all connections with Scotland1and, through the West Indian wealth that he inherited at the age of fifteen on his father's death in 1740, began to transform himself into a person who was eventually to move in the high¬est strata of English genteel society. He married twice, his first wife dying within a few months of their wedding. Both his wives were from gentry families in Kent, where Young lived for some years in a large country house near Canterbury. After a tour of France and Italy in 1751, spending heavily on collecting paintings, sculpture and music, for which he had a particular passion, he bought a house near Salisbury in Wiltshire. There he acquired aristocratic connections such as that with the earl of Pembroke of Wilton House, after whom he was to name one of his sugar plantations. In 1767 he moved closer to London, buying ‘the mansion and manor house’ of Dela¬ford at Iver in Buckinghamshire for £18,300.

The power and glory of the newly unified Germany were most immedi-ately apparent in the city of Berlin. The Prussian capital and seat of the Imperial Hohenzollern family was now not only the administrative and commercial centre of the most powerful state in a greater Germany but, through Bismarck's policy of Weltpolitik, the focal point of an empire intent on increasing dominance in world affairs. As such, visible signs of national self-aggrandisement were much in evidence here, too. In late 1895 Emil Hundreiser's statue of the presiding goddess ‘Berolina’ was moved from its original location in Potsdamerplatz to a more prestigious position in Alexanderplatz where, on 17 December, it was unveiled with great pomp and ceremony as a symbol of the pride and self-assurance of the new German capital. Also, in 1895 Kaiser Wilhelm II began to lay out his ‘Avenue of Victory', a grandiose triumphal route lined with statues of former Prussian figures of varying significance. Intended as a personal gift to the city, this portentous alleyway was widely derided by critics, and even some of Wilhelm's most ardent supporters found it vulgar and in poor taste. It was, however, indicative not only of the unpredictable Wilhelm's personal hubris but of Imperial Germany's growing self-image and sense of importance on the world stage.

In socio-economic terms, Wilhelmine Berlin was a city of ‘new money'. The rising wealth and influence of the propertied middle classes far outweighed those of the landed but financially diminished aristocracy and the educated elites of the Bildungsbürger.

A celebrated harpsichordist and Bach interpreter, Wanda Landowska (1879–1959) once quipped, ‘You play Bach your way, I’ll play him his way’, as if to have the last word in a controversy involving the cellist Pablo Casals, who visited her in 1941, not long before she fled the Nazis’ advance in France and embarked for New York, arriving on 7 December, Pearl Harbor Day. Then as now, apprehending Bach's ‘way’ was tantamount to chasing a chimera, but surely it would have recognized special features of his music relevant to us, whether ciphers, signatures and palindromes, or fascination with numbers and proportional parallelisms.

Among the most cerebral of musicians, Bach is often viewed as a composer able to turn the mysteries of contrapuntal causality to his advantage. But for the less erudite, Bach's music soon fell out of favour; by the 1730s, the critic J. A. Scheibe rejected it as turgid (schwülstig); not quite a century later, Eduard Devrient was contending with the abiding conviction that old Bach was an ‘unintelligible musical arithmetician’. The longer view embraced by Devrient and his friend Mendelssohn held otherwise – the very complexity of the Thomaskantor's music obscured its overpowering spiritual truths, apparent to those who grasped multiple levels of meaning operating in the music. There was, for instance, the chromatic aura associated with the ‘Kreuzsymbol’, the cross-shaped motif depicted on a musical stave by connecting the pitches B and H, A and C. Or the fugal ciphers on the plaintext ‘BACH’, of which the composer's own family produced several examples. Or the numerological symbolism of perfection hiding behind proportionally related sections, movements and compositions.