In 1660, the Catholic lawyer Thomas Blount openly and legally published through the London press Boscobel: Or, the History of His Sacred Majesties Most Miraculous Preservation After the Battle of Worcester. This text recast Charles II's 1651 defeat at the battle of Worcester into a heroic tale flattering the king. It also explicitly emphasised the critical assistance given by Catholics in helping the king to survive and escape. Despite calling for a halt to penal laws, Boscobel became a bestseller endorsed by Charles II and sold by the king's own bookseller, Henry Seile. A second edition emerged the same year, and Blount received a royal order to further expand the work. Boscobel's existence and the support it received show that English Catholic books were not always illegal, not always printed abroad and smuggled into the country, and not always solely produced or read by Catholics.

Boscobel also highlights the changing nature of the book trade and those who governed it. A third edition emerged in 1662, sold by Seile's widow, Ann, that continued the narrative of the king's escape from Worcester to France. However, the king complained that the new edition ‘hath diverse errors and mistakes in it, and therefore [was] not to be admitted as a true and perfect Narrative of his Sacred Majesties Deliverence’. This third edition crossed an invisible line in terms of content and lost the favour of the king, who set the tone for English censorship. No new editions appeared for almost two decades. However, Boscobel re-emerged in 1680 amid a royal succession crisis, serving as a reminder of god's deliverance of the king and a tool to combat presumptions to regulate the king. With royal support re-established, it was even permitted to keep the additions from the third edition. In truth, the unstated rules for Catholic books were rarely stable.

We saw in chapter 1 that Americans’ association of Lessing with the theater goes back at least to 1785, when students at the German Institute of Philadelphia demonstrated familiarity with his Nathan der Weise. Before the end of the eighteenth century a translation of Minna von Barnhelm had appeared, and two performances of the play had gone across the boards. Notice of Lessing as a drama critic was soon to follow. In a general article on the German stage, Lessing's work for the National Theater in Hamburg, including his Hamburgische Dramaturgie, came to the fore—this in the year 1800, long before George Ticknor and his Harvard classmates initiated what became the “German Craze” in American cultural life. Only six years later the editor of The Theatrical Censor could think of no better way to fend off criticism of his editorial stance than to cite Lessing's words, “Criticism … is often as disagreeable to those we praise as to those we condemn. The former think they are not sufficiently commended, and the latter, that they are too much blamed.”

Had Lessing lived during the nineteenth century—and not been made of sterner stuff—, he might have lodged both complaints at his American commentators. For, while virtually unanimous in their admira¬tion for his Hamburgische Dramaturgie, they expressed mixed opinions of his success as a playwright, as the present chapter shows. The explanation for this state of affairs lies partly in the nature of the works, partly in the nature of American dramaturgical thought and dramatic practice over the course of the period, that is, the absence of a teleological progression toward either an artistic or ideological end in the unfolding of drama criticism and playwriting in nineteenth-century America. One witnesses, in the most general terms, a movement from neoclassicism to realism and, concomitantly, reflections of from patrician to middle- and working-class views on society and politics. However, the critical perspectives and the plays were too diverse to permit any further historical reduction.

When I first played the Op. 47 Kreutzer Sonata, as part of a complete cycle in my early twenties, it was one of the final Beethoven Violin Sonatas that I approached. I had never been drawn to the piece, and finally learned it only to complete the set. My misgivings were around the fact that it did not seem like a coherent sonata to me, in the sense that I could not intuit a unified narrative running through its three movements, culminating in a satisfying whole. I also felt distant from some of the musical content of this most popular of works; I simply couldn't find a connection with the piece. It is by no means rare for musicians to experience this kind of ‘personality clash’ with a work, even when it is by a composer who they admire, but it is the only time that it has happened to me amongst Beethoven's chamber music with piano and string instruments.

As I came to know the work better and find out a little about its genesis and reception, I grew to admire the Sonata more. Over time, I developed a certain awe at its ground-breaking qualities and dauntingly sophisticated structure (particularly in the first movement), and I started to relish performances with sportive anticipation. I would throw myself into the virtuosity of the work, never quite sure how I would emerge at the other end, but familiarity could never completely dispel some of my initial doubts.

This book presents the outcomes of the research project ‘É preciso falar sobre as ausentes: a colaboração feminina no jornal O País (RJ 1884–1934)’ [It is necessary to talk about the absent voices: women's collaboration with the newspaper O País (RJ 1884–1934)], a study carried out with funding from Brazil's National Research Council (CNPq), the State University of Campinas’ Student Support Service (SAE/Unicamp), and University College London's Global Engagement Funds (UCL). There is a hint of irony in the title, since this absence refers to the silencing of literary historiography in relation to women's participation in mass-circulation newspapers since the late nineteenth century. The project set out to analyse the collaboration of the Portuguese Maria Amália Vaz de Carvalho (1847–1921) and Brazilian writers Maria Benedita Câmara Bormann (pseudonym Délia, 1853–1895), Emília Moncorvo Bandeira de Melo (pseudonyms Carmen Dolores and Júlio de Castro, 1852–1910), and Júlia Lopes de Almeida (1862–1934), who also went by the name Ecila Worms, from the newspaper's foundation until 1912, the year in which Almeida ceased her collaboration with O País.

The research involved identifying a diverse group of over thirty women writers and analysing more than a thousand texts, including the four authors whose works are examined in this book. Their chronicles, short stories, and novels were directed primarily at the growing female readership of everyday matters and invite us to re-evaluate the presence of women writers in the mainstream press and their role as cultural mediators and opinion formers.1 In a male-dominated world, some women writers managed to make a name for themselves; hence the importance of enquiring about their strategies to carve out a place in the Rio de Janeiro literary and cultural networks.

To John Chamberlayne.

In February 1720, Mather's sent a bundle of twelve Curiosa letters (Fifth Series) to his former student and Harvard graduate Henry Newman (1670– 1743), secretary of the SPCK, to be communicated to John Chamberlayne (c. 1668–1723), secretary of the Royal Society, having heard that John Woodward had died. (See Mather's Letter to Henry Newman, February 17 1720, MS draft, AAS [SLCM, pp. 301–2]; and Newman's reply, September 17 1720, MS, AAS).

John Chamberlayne acknowledged their safe arrival, allegedly forwarded them to Sir Isaac Newton and to Edmond Halley, and responded to Mather (August 3, 1720) with profuse praise:

I thank you for your Noble Entertainment with which so many of my [Chamberlayne’s] Friends were Regaled, before I could gett a Snap for myself, who hungred & thirsted for it, that I had not the pleasure thereof till very lately, and indeed too late to communicate the same pleasure to your Illustrious Brethren, the Gentlemen of the R.S. who have always a long Recess at this time of the year. As soon as I had perused your learned Letters, I Immediately communicated them unto Sr Isaac Newton, our Excellent Præsident; And he has referred them to the most Learned Mathematician and Great Traveller, Dr Halley, whose Report I expect with no small Impatience. But, as I beleeve, you expect to be informed of their Destiny, with respect to their coming to my hands, I was resolved not to slip the opportunity of telling you, They are safe arrived.

In the music history of central Europe, the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries witnessed vigorous creativity in the field of sacred song, both in Latin and the vernacular. Musical sources of that period teem with new songs, reworkings of older songs, Latin contrafacts of secular music, and new liturgical chants with tropes more closely resembling the melodic qualities of contemporary song than traditional chant. The rich song tradition of central Europe became a prominent scholarly topic in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; during this time the process of self-determination of central European nations influenced the way that regional song traditions were investigated and interpreted as national heritage. This approach could sometimes lead to the marginalization of interregional connections and the implicit appropriation of moments of innovation by scholars for their own modern nations. The evolution of hymnological research against the background of the troubled history of central Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries requires a broader treatment than this study can provide. Nevertheless, one particular aspect deserves attention because new musical as well as nonmusical sources continue to emerge that allow us to change our perspective: that is, the use in liturgical services of songs created between ca. 1350 and the beginning of the German Reformation in the 1520s.

As a result of the nationalist movements, Czech and German hymnology in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries advanced in close parallel but still relatively independently. After the end of World War II, scholarly exchange was further hindered. The “Iron Curtain,” which separated the larger part of the German-speaking territories from the rest of central Europe, made any academic interchange with the West difficult. Western scholars had little access to and knowledge of the sources in Czechoslovak archives.

Friederike Brun was German-born, multilingual, grew up in Denmark, travelled to, and lived for extended periods of time in Italy and Switzerland.

She was well-connected via kinship, friendships, and literary contacts with the wider European republic of letters. Brun favoured the concept of community over society, and constructed the idea of pan-European shared loyalties, values, kinship ties, and cultures against Napoleonic despotism. Indeed, the underpinning for this patriotism beyond the state was Brun's belief in universal political sovereignty, cultural nationhood, and a European public sphere.

This is reflected in Brun's autobiography of her youth, Wahrheit aus Morgentraumen (1825). Brun fashioned herself as a true cosmopolitan, one that, above nations and states, recognised human beings as ‘the ultimate units of moral concern’.

I really do not know which nation I actually belong to; and this may well be the origin of my complete lack of exclusive love for the fatherland,

which has kept my mind, heart, and eyes open to the goodness and ailments of peoples and countries as I have seen them.

Brigit Tautz characterised Brun's intellectual and cultural disposition as ‘domesticised cosmopolitanism’, one that integrates the foreign and cosmopolitan into the local and familiar.

I would develop this argument and underscore that Brun's cosmopolitanism was pan-European, if nostalgic and conservative in its ethical outlook. ‘Moderate hereditary monarchies’ [‘Gemäßigte Erbmonarchien’] were, according to Brun, the only political systems that would serve ‘old mother Europe’ [‘gute Matrone Europa’] in the best way – a conviction that she came to hold after the initial excitement over the French Revolution.

Driving up the M1, someone new to the UK may be surprised to find, alongside the major cities one would naturally expect to see on highway signage, directions to ‘The NORTH’. Of course, one need not explain to the British reader that this represents more than a mere geographical convenience, as there is a long history of value laden assessments of the north. A petition to parliament of 1647 to establish a university in York, for example, explains that ‘wee inhabitants of the northerne parts … have beene looked upon as a rude and allmost barbarous people’ and in prelude to William I's subduing of Exeter, York and the harrying of the North, Orderic Vitalis describes how unrest emerged as ‘the inhabitants were still barbarous’ in the north and west of the kingdom. In the late 1930s, George Orwell can still describe the southerner going north feeling like ‘a civilised man venturing among savages’, while the Yorkshireman ‘comes to London in the spirit of a barbarian out for loot’. We should, of course, take care not to exaggerate the similarities between 1125, 1647 and 1937, but the M1 road signs highlight how directional groupings, be they local, regional or global, are frequently fundamental to the way that we carve up and understand the world around us. And as in this case, they are rarely if ever merely geographical in meaning.