Nikisch's early chroniclers habitually treat his tenure as Music Director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra as something of an interruption to his otherwise ineluctable ascent towards European musical hegemony. Pfohl, for example, brackets Nikisch's time in Boston and the following two years in Budapest as an 'Intermezzo' between his departure from the Leipzig City Opera in 1889 and his return in 1895 as Gewandhaus Kapellmeister. Arthur Dette is even more perfunctory, dismissing Nikisch's residency in America in two terse sentences. Such writers were, however, commenting from specific German-centric historical perspectives inflected both by the ideological mores of their time and an unshakeable conviction that only on European soil could European musical art truly flourish. With more than a century of hindsight it can be seen that, far from being an interruption, Nikisch's American sojourn not only marked a crucial phase in making the transition from provincial Kapellmeister to international celebrity conductor, but has a broader significance as part of a growing movement that would see the centre of gravity of musical art gradually shift westwards to the point where it would, if not supplant, then prove a serious rival to the old Europe when it came to attracting top executants.

Amongst the first to cross the Atlantic was the mercurial Hans von Bülow, the man who had not only provided sterling service to Wagner by conducting the premieres of Tristan und Isolde (1865) and Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (1868), but, as is well known, had for his pains been thoroughly cuckolded by the Meister in the process.

The position of women musicians from former colonies (in this case, of the Netherlands) is a blind spot in historiography. What did it mean for a talented, teenage Surinamese girl with a Chinese, African, and Indian ethnic background to build a career during World War II in Europe, far from her home and family? Her middle-class background was part of her success as a pianist. Her success under National Socialism may seem surprising but arose from often-overlooked and complex race hierarchies under National Socialism, which offered her the option of an Indian stage identity. Her marriage in 1951 to Roland Garros (1924–83), manager of Air France and nephew of the famous aviation pioneer, enabled her to find worldwide compositional inspiration in the countries where they lived, but also crippled her performance career due to gendered expectations. After her divorce in 1972, she devoted herself to what she considered her life work: writing an opera about the story of contract work, slavery, and exploitation, integrating the different music styles from the South, East, West, and Suriname. In doing so she was ahead of her time.

Composition opened the door to Majoie's future career. As one newspaper reported, ‘on a certain day, a Dutch theatre company came to Paramaribo. The twelve-year-old [Majoie] saw a play for the first time and, impressed by the experience, wrote a “romance”[Romanze].’

In a characteristically bravura piece published a quarter of a century ago, David Cannadine sketched the Victorian Palace of Westminster as the ‘Palace of Varieties’: the mise-en-scène of a nation's ceremonial that, like Barry and Pugin's gothic confection, provided a sense of history and continuity over a century and a half while its constitution and practices of government were transformed by the new realities of politics in a mass democracy. In other ways, however, that transformation threatened to make the Palace obsolete almost as soon as it was finished. For it had been designed around styles and rhythms of political life that suited not just the political objectives, but also the social habits and routines of a closely knit and leisured political elite. As the electoral system and social change introduced new types of political actor with different objectives and routines, the styles and rhythms of political lives changed too.

Lying at the heart of that process in the late nineteenth century was dinner. Dinner, because the deepening habit of the United Kingdom parliament to begin its daily plenary proceedings well into the afternoon and continue long past midnight coincided with the growing emphasis of London society life on evening sociability. The slide into later and later daily starts and finishes for the House of Commons had been evident since the late seventeenth century. Why is difficult to explain, though it was probably connected with the professional commitments of lawyers, on whom the efficient operation of parliamentary business heavily depended; in any case the consequence was that parliamentary time now coincided with hours normally devoted to pleasure, entertainment or home comforts.

In 1894, the German explorer Adolf Count von Götzen arrived at the borders of the kingdom of Rwanda. Götzen was about to cross Africa for exploration and to investigate the progress of the Congo Free State on behalf of his government. He himself was a trained diplomat from a noble family. Only one European had set his foot into the kingdom; two years before, the Austrian Oscar Baumann had roamed through the border regions of Rwandan but was pushed to leave after a few weeks. He had seen neither the capital of the kingdom nor met its ruler, Rwabugiri. Götzen, however, was awaited at the borders by a young man introducing himself as Schirangawe, a son of Rwabugiri. His father, he told Götzen, wanted to have him at this court for negotiations; his task was to guard him and to serve him with all means necessary on his way. When Götzen eventually reached the residence of Rwabugiri, Schirangawe asked him to wait and stay on his side of the river separating his camp from the residence of his father. As the night was approaching, the German agreed, but the next morning he crossed the river. Halfway, an envoy blocked his advance trying to explain the diplomatic rules for his reception at the court. Götzen nonetheless ignored him and stormed with his soldiers into the compound. The court put a good face on this outrageous behaviour. The negotiations were polite but short, nothing more than “ceremonial palaver”, as Götzen noted. The next day the German demanded food, which the Rwandans courteously refused because they still had not received gifts from the guest.

In England, after Mary I's pregnancy experiences in the 1550s, several commentators argued that her so-called pregnancies were in fact molas, false, unnatural conceptions, rather than ‘true’ foetuses. Many critical observers to these events, and those writing in the centuries afterwards, argued that the misdiagnosis of Mary's pregnancies was the result of ‘foolish’ women and midwives. Yet, as we saw in the previous chapter, many of Mary's English and Spanish male physicians also believed she was truly pregnant, based on the physical signs of her body. What did these men know about true and false conception, and how did they get the diagnosis so wrong? This chapter explores the knowledge about false conceptions and moles that Mary I's physicians would have learnt during their medical studies. The issue of human generation was a prominent one in European medicine and natural philosophy, and false generation was of particular interest to physicians, anatomists, and natural philosophers over the mid-sixteenth to mid-seventeenth centuries. Not only did the study of false generation offer key insights into embryological development and the nature of the soul, but it helped to explain the uncertainties attached to the reproductive body. Like Mary I's physicians, the doctors and philosophers who investigated and wrote about false generation commented on its ability to render true generation and pregnancy deeply uncertain.

European knowledge about moles and false conceptions formed the backbone of the theories about false generation in British medicine and midwifery that were discussed in the previous chapter. These ideas were circulated by the movement of people, as well as print and correspondence. From the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, many English and Scottish students travelled to Italian, French, German, and Dutch universities to study both formally and informally.

Who counts as a historian? Whatever the criteria may be, Gervase of Tilbury (c.1150–1222), the English jurist and author of the Otia Imperialia (‘Recreation for an Emperor’) presented to the ill-fated Holy Roman Emperor Otto IV (r. 1198–1218), seems rarely to have met them, at least in modern eyes. Most studies of the Otia, an encyclopaedic text of history, geography and mirabilia (‘marvels’), have focused on its geographical content (especially its relationship to the Ebstorf mappa mundi), or the lively content of the mirabilia. Its historical material, however, has been much neglected, to the extent indeed that Gervase has not often been considered a historian at all, even being characterised as a mere ‘littérateur’. This article considers Gervase's practices as a writer of historical material, and specifically how these practices were deployed in his account of the history of the British Isles. Gervase presented this history in two sections: the first from the legendary origins of Britain to the death of Cadwalladr, and the second as an account of English history from the Norman Conquest. As a guide to the events of this history, Gervase is of very limited reliability: his first section is almost wholly derived from Geoffrey of Monmouth, while his second is factually incorrect in most of its contents, diverging considerably from other contemporary accounts. The value of Gervase's historical writing, therefore, lies not in its assembly of ‘facts’ but in how Gervase shaped existing material for his particular audience. This in turn leads us to consider whether Gervase's many inaccuracies might be the result not of incompetence but of deliberate design, with the accuracy of facts subordinated to a wider purpose.

Introduction

This chapter examines the lives and careers of two women pianist-composers across the Gulf of Finland: Mina Boije (1818–75) and Sigrid von Horschelmann-Antropoff (1886–1987). As professionally trained virtuoso musicians from the upper echelons of society, both Boije and Horschelmann- Antropoff are examples of musically ambitious Finnish, Estonian, and more generally northern European women who forged an independent transnational career. Both travelled in search of income – Horschelmann- Antropoff across Europe, and Boije all the way to the United States. Although they were renowned pedagogues and performing artists whose compositions were performed or, in Boije's case, even published, their musical achievements have not been granted a place in mainstream music historiography, which has been dominated by narratives of ‘great men’.

What kinds of professional careers did these women pianist-composers pursue? How did their identities as composers intertwine with their roles as internationally active performing artists and piano teachers? And how does this affect our understanding of Finnish and Estonian musicians in the context of cross-border pianistic cultures? Our previous research on Finnish women composers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries highlighted that most women pursuing an artistic career were pianist-composers who earned their livelihood primarily as music teachers.

Although Robert's Chronography primarily circulated within the Benedictine network, its dissemination extended beyond Benedictine Normandy. Norman Cistercians showed an early appetite for Eusebius–Jerome's and Sigebert's tradition. The abbeys of Savigny and Le Valasse acquired early copies of the Chronography. In addition, the Beauvais manuscript independently reached the Cistercian abbey of Mortemer in Normandy, fifty kilometres south-west of Beauvais, where the series temporum was updated and continued locally. Shortly afterwards, the Mortemer manuscript was copied at the Cistercian abbey of Ourscamp, in Picardy, just outside Normandy. The early transmission of the Chronography and independent copies of the Beauvais manuscript suggest that Norman Cistercians participated in the enthusiasm for universal history-writing. Did they use a different approach to Eusebius–Jerome's and Sigebert's tradition? This question is pertinent because historiography, though particularly developed in some communities, has traditionally been considered an exception within Cistercian writing. While historiography played a crucial role in shaping the identity of Cistercian communities, Cistercian writers tended to prioritise spiritual and theological exploration. Cistercians were key to transmitting texts like Sigebert's chronicle and the Vita Karoli Magni in Normandy, though universal history-writing was not a priority. With the exceptions of Otto of Freising, pseudo-William Goddell and the later Cistercian chroniclers Helinand de Froidmont (d. after 1229) and Alberic of Trois-Fontaines (d. 1252), White Monks were not prolific writers of world-chronicles, contenting themselves with either sparse continuations of Sigebert's Chronographia or local annals. In contrast to the attention and praise received by the Mortemer ‘chronicle-cartulary’, the Continuatio Mortui Maris has been inter¬preted as an unsophisticated chronicle serving the local audience at Mortemer.

The tradition of Eusebius–Jerome and Sigebert provided Norman chroni¬clers with a framework to structure the unfolding of time as the succession of power. As we have seen, Robert of Torigni, along with the Savigny, Mortemer and Ourscamp chroniclers, negotiated the ebb and flow of English kingship within universal history in relation to the rise of Henry II. In the second half of the twelfth century, John of Salisbury (1120–80) joined the same chronicle tradition, writing his so-called Historia Pontificalis as a continuation of Sigebert of Gembloux. A contemporary of Robert of Torigni, John was a prominent member of the Angevin political network. However, unlike the monk-historians analysed so far, John was a secular clergyman and a scholar. Secondly, the Historia Pontificalis cannot be counted as part of the Norman textual community, for John did not access Sigebert's chronicle through the Beauvais abridgement of the liber chronicorum. This makes John of Salisbury an outlier from the tradition discussed thus far, but a helpful one. Despite the different ways in which John approached universal chron¬icle-writing, he still considered himself a continuator of Sigebert's tradition and, as we shall see, shared many of the preoccupations that impacted Robert's Chronography.

Scholarship has so far overlooked John of Salisbury as Sigebert's continuator, admittedly not without reason. Historiography was not a prominent feature of John's written production. Christopher Brooke described the HP as ‘an unfinished, semi-satirical, semi-serious essay in history as viewed from the papal curia’. According to Marjorie Chibnall, editor of the HP, John was mainly concerned with human conduct and used historiography as a storehouse of moral examples.

This book places musical amateurs at the centre of music history, examining their roles as performers, composers, and cultural agents. While professional musicianship and the musical canon have long dominated historical narratives, we return attention to the domestic spaces, salons, and social circles where amateurs thrived. In 1869, Eduard Hanslick described the early nineteenth century as a high point of musical dilettantism in Vienna – using the term not in its later pejorative sense, but in a manner consistent with its earlier usage as a near-synonym for amateur. Both terms referred to musically engaged individuals who pursued the art not as a profession, but with skill, dedication, and pleasure. Revisiting this period with that perspective allows us to enrich our understanding of amateur music-making at its height. Far from being marginal, these activities were deeply embedded in contemporary cultural, aesthetic, and political life. Through this reframing, we present amateurs as artistic citizens: individuals whose musical engagement shaped personal identities and contributed meaningfully to public discourse.

Our framing of the amateur as an artistic citizen is partly motivated by the work of Thomas A. Regelski, whose thinking helps illuminate how amateurs can be understood as well-rounded musical citizens. While Regelski does not use the term ‘artistic citizen’ explicitly, his reconceptualisation of amateur music-making as grounded in passion, dedication, and authenticity – rather than in any supposed lack of professionalism – foregrounds the intrinsic role of music in an amateur's identity and day-to-day life. He challenges hierarchical models that position amateur practice as deficient or derivative by highlighting the aesthetic, ethical, and social value of musical participation outside institutional or career-driven frameworks.