It is no secret that documentary forgeries abound in the archives surviving from the early and high Middle Ages. There is a large historiography which examines examples of forgery and explains them in their local contexts. In this essay, I want to do something slightly different, to think about some of the ideas we use for understanding forgery and the assumptions we bring to them. For there is a dominant model for understanding documentary forgeries, and it has both shaped thinking about them and helped to decide what kinds of forgery get studied. The model is, of course, that in Michael Clanchy's seminal From Memory to Written Record, first published in 1979 and with a third edition in 2013. It is among the most read and most cited works on English medieval history over the last half century, and is consistently prominent in works on forgery.

The Clanchy model starts with an old debate from the first half of the twentieth century: most forgeries were produced in churches, so how could people with religious commitments and beliefs – monks, nuns, and priests – produce documents which were fraudulent, and which they knew were fraudulent? Clanchy's response was that much forgery was more subtly linked to the idea of fraud: ‘In England the greatest period for forging documents was the century after the Norman Conquest, when the old houses of Black monks had to convince the incomers of their ancient dignities and privileges.’

Interpretations surrounding the Battle of Segale fall into a deep sinkhole in Ethiopian historiography. Briefly stated, the Battle of Segale marks the beginning of Ras Tafari/Emperor Haile Selassie's fifty-eight years at the helm of the Ethiopian state, and, not coincidentally, the end of Lij Iyasu's brief interregnum. A coup d’état by the leading dignitaries including Lij Iyasu's second cousin, Ras Tafari, brought him down but not without a fight. For decades historiography reflected Ras Tafari/Emperor Haile Selassie's triumphalism arguing that Lij Iyasu's indiscretions, administrative mismanagement, and apostasy justified regime change. As new primary sources are unearthed, a reappraisal of Lij Iyasu's politics and administration sketches a different picture, one in which he assiduously pursued modern tax and customs reforms to ensure a solvent national treasury as well as attempts to sever the religious tie between church and state in order to bring about reconciliation between Christians and Muslims. Through a twenty-first century lens those pursuits appear prescient. The fault line separating the pro-Lij Iyasu camp from the pro-Tafari camp centers on a reassessment of the coup d’état, the Battle of Segale and Lij Iyasu's treatment afterwards. This chapter treads on firmer ground focusing on measures the coup-makers took to validate their rule by conforming to conventional political practices, ensuring economic stability and following accepted restorative justice modalities.

One further issue, the Battle of Segale was the last time the Ethiopian government resorted to using traditional forms of restorative justice exclusively to settle a dispute that easily could have torn the country apart. As Chapters 6 and 7 will demonstrate, in subsequent decades appropriated Western legal systems were used to administer justice at the expense of socio-political reconciliation.

The Reverend David Chamba was a man we all loved. In our little town of Mundemba in Cameroon, good deeds did not go unnoticed. Especially by the children. Everywhere Father Chamba passed on his mini-scooter motor bike children would scream out his name, or rather his title which had become his name.

‘Father … Father … Father…!’

The children would scream and wave and Father would wave back at them in double measure, smiling all the way through. Many times we worried if the children would not bring bloodguilt upon our heads. What if the reverend caused an accident trying to wave with one hand and control his motor bike with the other? What is all this waving at the priest for? The children really made us angry sometimes. They were distracting the man of God from meditating on the message of comfort he was going to deliver to the spiritually disabled in our neighbourhood.

Father visited our neighbourhood at least every fortnight. He was always carrying a message of hope to someone. You see, there were many deaths in our community. People died all the time. Ours was a town where witches and wizards contested for supremacy. And we had come to accept that there would always be casualties. Even when children did not die mysteriously at noon time or old men just never woke up from their sleep, people still needed comfort. Life was hard. Business was bad. The rainy season had stayed for too long. We were getting irritated. Father came around to make us smile. We felt less agitated after listening to his words, and we complained less about the daily increase in the price of salt.

This is a book about a teacher, written by one who is himself a teacher. Teaching, the act or art of it, thus figures centrally in what follows— though it is by no means the sole concern. Some readers may even find various other matters treated here to be of greater interest or value. Still, there's no way around it: Teaching is an important subject throughout these pages, and the very word is plain. One could even call it dull. In a world where the only actions that truly count are those whose effects are by some means countable, the actions of a teacher count for little. Of course, everybody likes to talk up teachers: admire their dedication and laud their sacrifices, occasionally even credit their influence. More often, though, people like to blame teachers: for being too tough, for not being tough enough, for not making learning “fun,” or for why the US ranks just below the Slovak Republic on the latest PISA results.

University professors have it significantly better, especially those whose field of research makes them attractive to corporate sponsorship, or those whose expert opinions on matters of the day are sought by the media. These scholars reap the rewards of their profession, where success is measured in terms of the number of publications, grants, fellowships, prizes, and conference papers delivered. Such distinctions bring career advancement and higher salaries. All this belongs to the business of education, however, and may have little or nothing to do with teaching. Good teaching is generally the least rewarded activity at major academic institutions today.

A young woman clasps her hands in prayer, embodying piety and an elegant symmetry that displays her fashionable gown, made from a green-and-gold patterned silk with tight-fitted, set-in sleeves embellished with buttons from above the elbow to the wrist, as well as a red band of trim decorated with gold floral swirls along the neckline. However, the body wearing these garments is crafted of polychromed walnut, not flesh and blood. She represents one of the Virgin Martyrs of Cologne and served as a reliquary container for bones associated with the cult (fig. 3.1). The sculpture was produced in the mid-fourteenth century and is now in the collection of the Schnutgen Museum in Cologne, where it is identified with the record A 974. It is one of hundreds of wooden reliquary busts made for the relics of Cologne's Virgin Martyrs, although the half-length torso with arms and hands is a more unusual form. The majority of busts extend only to the shoulders.

The Virgin Martyrs of Cologne did not always number eleven thousand or follow a leader named Ursula. The canonical number of eleven thousand virgin martyrs and the designation of St. Ursula as their leader gained acceptance in the centuries after their mid-fourth-century martyrdom near Cologne. The earliest descriptions of the massacre of an unknown number of virgin martyrs came from a dedicatory plaque installed in the early fifth century by a devotee named Clematius who restored the basilica dedicated to their martyrdom.

Mindful of the identity created for them in London and the part played in enabling this migration by Sir Alexander Cairnes, members of the SPCK and the Whigs, it is possible to find Palatine families in Ireland outside of those who settled in known colonies in Limerick, Carlow and Wexford. After all, there was little to prevent migrants joining the multiplicity of nonconforming churches which sprang up in Ireland in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. For migrants whose orthodoxy was Reformed an easy alternate identity available was Huguenot. This was an option taken in New York in 1725 by Daniel Champenois, one of the Palatine signatories of the September 1709 petition to Henry Boyle, who along with his wife Marguerite, became members of the French church of New York. Although registers of the Irish Huguenot Churches suggest that ministers were keen to identify migrants as a separate subset of Palatine ‘other’, at least initially, it seems likely that over time Palatine families became integrated into Huguenot faith communities.

Huguenots fleeing persecution in France found an unlikely refuge in Ireland. As early as 1677 the 1st duke of Ormond encouraged 500 families of Walloon and French weavers to settle in Carrick-on-Suir, Co. Tipperary. A draft agreement dated 1698 survives between Lord Massereene and Baron De Luttichau for the settlement of continental Protestants on Massereene's Monaghan estates. Massereene later appeared on the list of gentlemen who drew Palatines to his estates in 1710, purportedly retaining five families of twenty drawn the following year.

Nicholas Bennett has long been a keen student of the activities of the clergy of the diocese of Lincoln, and continues to be engaged on the editing both of the massive episcopal register of Bishop Burghersh (1320–42) and of a biographical dictionary of the Lincolnshire clergy between the early-thirteenth and the late-twentieth centuries. He well knows that clerics sometimes came into significant conflict both with lay people and with each other, and that this could involve physical violence resulting in court action. Many of the legal disputes involving clergy were of a kind that were dealt with not by the church courts but by the royal courts of justice, the surviving records of which become increasingly voluminous in the second half of the thirteenth century. Lincolnshire was the second largest county in England, and one of the most prosperous and well populated, so it is not surprising that a very significant proportion of the pleas dealt with by the Bench, or Common Bench (later known as the Court of Common Pleas), and the Court Coram Rege (later known as King's Bench), arose within its boundaries. The King's Bench came into continuous existence during the reign of Henry III, in the later 1230s, and the two courts subsequently continued to work side by side, and also in competition with each other, for 600 years.

At the end of 1738, Francisque's company was financially ruined. In place of the lucrative Benefits that they had been promised in the Land of Guineas, they were reduced to receiving charitable donations to cover their debts and expenses. Their final departure was reported by de la Barre:

The Weltausstellung, the “World Exhibition” of 1873, made Vienna the third European imperial capital to hold such a grand celebration of industry and the arts, following selfconsciously in the footsteps of London (1851 and 1862) and Paris (1855 and 1867). The gauntlet of imperial grandeur had thus been thrown down in no uncertain way, and in the year of Emperor Franz Joseph's twenty-fifth anniversary his capital city responded magnificently; the site chosen was five times larger than the one in Paris in 1867, and its centerpiece was the mighty Rotunda, a dedicated exhibition space conceived from the outset to be crowned with the largest dome that had ever been built to date.

From Ferrara to Aragonese Naples

Court festivities, such as they were reinvented in the context of the courts of the Quattrocento under the of impulse humanist thought, set a figurative and symbolic system into play which incorporated and took advantage of the innovations of the first codifiers of noble dance. Hired by these courts both to teach dance and to produce luxurious dance spectacles, the dance masters of the period found a framework ripe for experimentation while their noble patrons took advantage of the figurative possibilities provided by this dance. In this way, some of Domenico's balli reference in their titles the festive occasion they were composed for, e.g. the balli Leonzello vechio and novo, referencing the first and second weddings of Leonello d’Este, with Margherita Gonzaga in 1435 and Maria of Aragon, illegitimate daughter of Alfonso the Magnanimous, in 1444.

Some noteworthy examples of festivities which included the works of the maestri di ballo are the nuptials of Beatrice d’Este to Tristano Sforza in April of 1455, with the joint participation of Domenico da Piacenza and Guglielmo Ebreo, or the wedding celebrations of Battista Sforza to Federico da Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino, in Pesaro in 1460, with dances also choreographed by Guglielmo. Over time, during the last few decades of the century and specifically under the influence of Florentine festive culture, the maestri di ballo's choreographies were incorporated to increasingly complex and lavish spectacles which combined dance, music, poetry, and figurative arts.

During 1923–1927, Holst composed no band music, though he remained close to the medium. This doesn't mean that he had no interest writing for bands; circumstances simply pointed him in other directions.

First North American Visit

In the autumn of 1922, Holst received two offers from the University of Michigan School of Music at Ann Arbor: (1) guest-conducting at their annual May Festival in 1923 and (2) a professorship there. The first offer was probably instigated by Frederick A. Stock (1872–1942), conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, one of two orchestras that gave the American premiere of The Planets on December 31, 1920. The second offer, which he considered but ultimately rejected, was probably through Albert A. Stanley (1851–1932), an American organist and music educator who had recently acquired professor emeritus status at the university. Stanley had founded the university's May Festival in 1894, and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra had been the featured ensemble there since 1905. The initial offer for guestconducting was for $1,000, but Holst asked for an extra $600 so that Isobel could accompany him. The university actually did better than that. In a letter dated February 10, 1923, Charles Albert Sink (1879–1972), secretary and business manager of the School of Music, gave Holst the good news that the university decided to increase that amount to $2,000.

The good news did not reach Holst, however, until after the composer had suffered a cataclysmic fall. On February 11 (the day following Sink's correspondence), while conducting a rehearsal at University College in Reading, Holst fell from a makeshift podium and landed on his head.

Czechoslovakia: Prague and Brno

Although Václav Talich conducted the world premiere of the Sinfo¬nietta, that occasion was almost certainly his first and last performance of it. In spite of his advocacy of Janáček's operas and of Taras Bulba (which he later recorded), Talich never gave another concert performance of the Sinfonietta. However, there is a tantalising listing in Radio-Journal previewing a broadcast on 2 July 1938 as part of the Czech Radio pro¬grammes to celebrate the Tenth Sokol Rally. The programme for this ‘gala concert for the rally’ is given complete: Martinů's Rally Overture, Suk's Fantasia for violin and orchestra, Janáček's Sinfonietta and Dvořák's Eighth Symphony, with the Czech Philharmonic conducted by Talich. But this concert is not listed in the Czech Philharmonic's archives, nor in Milan Kuna's exhaustive list of Talich's performances, and it is very likely that Talich was listed in error.

Despite Talich not conducting it again, the Sinfonietta was regularly performed in Prague in the decade after Janáček's death and, later, during the years of Nazi occupation. On 20 October 1928, it was given by the Czech Philharmonic conducted by Franz Schalk (alongside Weber's Freischütz Overture and Bruckner's Eighth Symphony); and on 10 February 1937, the Czech Philharmonic played it with another distinguished visi¬tor, Erich Kleiber, whose conducting of Jenůfa in Berlin had so delighted Janáček in 1924.

Karel Boleslav Jirák (1891–1972) performed the Sinfonietta with the Czech Philharmonic on 14 October 1931 and again on 23 September 1938 in a broadcast billed as the ‘First Concert of the Janáček Festival’ which also included Taras Bulba.

Beethoven continued to evolve new pianistic techniques and new sonorities long after his own public performing career had ceased by 1815. The use of high registers is often considered as one of the most characteristic features of the late creative period, ethereal sonorities that adorn the final piano sonatas Opp. 109–11, the ‘Diabelli’ Variations Op. 120 and the late Bagatelles Opp. 119–126. As in the Symphony No. 9, the Missa solemnis and the late quartets, the frequent use of such extreme ranges form part of the new soundworld of Beethoven's late style, an essential condition of which, as Lewis Lockwood has observed, is ‘a heightened sense of musical space and time’.

Beethoven's choice of extreme registers has been often interpreted as a response to his hearing loss. Robin Wallace has observed that ‘the works of the late period are usually heard today as more personal, more intimate, and also more difficult to understand. From the very first, though, these pieces were understood as products of Beethoven's deafness. For many of their first hearers, this meant they were defective. For others, the fact that this music was written when Beethoven was deaf was a proof of its greatness.’ The context of Beethoven's personal challenge of hearing has led scholar–fortepianists like Tom Beghin to explore the relationship of the late works with the technical modifications to conventional pianos, which Beethoven adapted to his individual requirements, notably the ‘hearing machine’ (discussed in chapter 4). Using this adaptation of the piano, Beethoven was able to ‘hear’ the resonances of his music in a more amplified manner, to enable him to be more responsive to the vibrations of low and high frequencies.