Witchcraft was a live issue in Scotland during the sixteenth, seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Trials for witchcraft sometimes became headline news, and news of specific trials also raised general intellectual questions about the nature of witchcraft. Everyone wanted to make sense of the strange magical events that witches were said to take part in, and intellectuals wanted to use witchcraft to contribute to debates about how the world should be understood. This volume collects a number of written narratives about specific trials, and written tracts that discuss witchcraft in a more general or theoretical way. It complements a recent volume, Scottish Witchcraft Trials, also published by the Scottish History Society; that volume collects a number of records of witchcraft trials themselves.

The idea of witchcraft, as a crime involving both magical harm and a pact with the Devil, arose in Europe in the early fifteenth century and spread gradually throughout the Continent during the remainder of the century. In Scotland, there were occasional trials for witchcraft from the late fifteenth century onwards. Witch-hunting became more common after the Reformation; the Scottish parliament passed an act against witchcraft in 1563. Narratives and tracts of the kind collected in the present volume began to be written in the 1590s, a time of national panics over witchcraft. Further such works continued to appear until even local panics began to subside in the 1700s.

INTRODUCING NARRATIVES AND TRACTS

Witchcraft was a shocking and sensational crime, and it attracted wide attention. The period in which witchcraft prosecutions first rose and then declined was also the period in which news media, especially printing, developed and became more sophisticated.

Textiles are meaningful signifiers across many cultures and represent far more than simple, fiber coverings. We can safely assume that the people throughout the early Middle Ages, like people today, relied upon clothing and other textiles for their physical needs, but also for their emotional, social, and spiritual ones. All available evidence suggests that, as a non-industrialized people, the early medieval English naturally knew the time-tested (and time-intensive) methods for making textiles and meeting those needs, and they valued their textiles accordingly. The technologies they used were commonly known and practiced throughout Europe and beyond, and such technologies furnished not only material articles, but also images and associations. Thus, textile process and product came to evoke connections between meeting basic human needs and related, abstract social ideals, and textile terms consequently permeated the literary vocabulary and metaphors of Old English and Anglo-Latin texts across centuries. Archaeological, linguistic, and documentary evidence provides us with a sense of what the material culture of textiles looked like among the pre-Conquest English, and that evidence also reveals the extent to which the early medieval people and their literary vocabularies, virtually independent of century or region, were influenced by the symbols of their daily need to dress and find protection and comfort. This chapter will examine the evidence for both the process of textile production and its products, discussing the metaphors that grew out of both among the early medieval English.

The lessons imparted by animal fables, it is usually supposed, pertain to human society, above all else – the diverse range of creatures depicted is there to entertain and to edify, and they are not the true subject. Jacques Derrida, notably, deemed fables ‘a discourse of man, on man, indeed on the animality of man, but for and in man’. Susan Crane has claimed, along the same lines, ‘From an animal studies perspective, the trouble with fable is above all that the form invites little thought on creatures other than human […] In the fables’ move from narrative to apologue, the beasts of narrative are useful in that they illuminate human ways, but they are of no interest beyond that usefulness’. It is easy to argue that fables, despite all the animal characters, don't say much about animals. Not only do fables unapologetically anthropomorphise, particularly in portraying animals who talk, but fable authors and literary critics alike, from antiquity to the present, have maintained that imparting a figurative interpretation of the animal actors for human instruction is the deeper purpose of fables.

Published in Madrid in 1596, Alonso López Pinciano's Philosophía antigua poética can be considered one of the first Spanish poetics. This extremely ambitious treatise was dedicated by its author, an eminent physician, to Hans Khevenhüller, imperial ambassador to Madrid (1573–1606). Further, its publication must be contextualised within the effervescent intellectual and artistic life in Pinciano's city of birth: Valladolid.

Sixteenth-century Valladolid was the hub of a vibrant cultural scene thriving around its university, one of the most reknowned in Spain. The University of Valladolid was equivalent to the universities of Salamanca and Alcalá in terms of student numbers, variety of courses, and the prestige of its professors; it was especially renowned for its curricula in medicine. However, cultural and intellectual interests in Valladolid were not limited to an academic setting. Throughout the sixteenth century, Valladolid was also an artistic point of reference, specifically in the areas of architecture and sculpture, not to mention that it had a lively theatrical scene. The intellectual interests, modern mind-set, and overall vivid cultural life during this period in Valladolid were key to the initial reception of the Poetics. Further evidence of the city's cultural effervescence during this period are the magnificent book collections amassed by prominent Valladolid figures such as the Count of Gondomar (15,000 books towards the late 1590s) and humanist Juan de Idíaquez.

Hence, it is not surprising that the first detailed commentary of Aristotle's Poetics was produced in Valladolid. Moreover, the links López Pinciano had to Austria as physician to the Infanta Martha, future wife of the Emperor Maximilian, would also have expedited his access to Castelvetro's Poetics. In all likelihood, Pinciano was attempting to emulate Castelvetro's gesture of dedicating his text to the Emperor Maximilian when dedicating his Philosophía antigua poética to the Austrian ambassador.

An Extract of several Letters from Cotton Mather, D.D. to John Woodward, M.D. and Richard Waller, Esq; S. R. Secr. In PT 29.339 (June 30, 1714): 62–71.

The first Letter directed to Dr Woodward, is dated at Boston in New England, Nov. 17. 1712. In this the Writer gives an Account of a large Work in Manuscript, in two Volumes in Folio, but does not name the Author. This, according to the account of it, is a large Commentary upon some Passages in the Bible, interspers’d with large Philosophical Remarks, taken out of Natural Historians, and the Observations of himself and others, more particularly as to Matters observ’d in America, when he entitles the Work, Biblia Americana. This Work Dr. Mather recommends to the Patronage of some generous Mecænas, to promote the Publication of. As a Specimen of it, he transcribes a Passage out of it, being a Note on that Passage in Gen. Chap. 6. v. 4. relating to Giants; and confirms the Opinion of there having been, in the Antediluvian World, Men of very large and prodigious Statures, by the Bones and Teeth of some large Animals, found lately in Albany in New England, which, for some Reasons, he judges to be Human; particularly a Tooth brought from the Place where it was found to New York, 1705. being a very large Grinder, weighing 4 pounds and three quarter, with a Bone, suppos’d to be a Thigh-bone, 17 Foot long.

This essay has deep roots in my own musical life: I’ve been playing and listening to Schoenberg's music for more than half a century and writing about it (on and off) for almost as long. But the most immediate stimulus for this discussion came from relatively recent performances in London of his Pelleas und Melisande and Variations, Op. 31. Both performances were conducted (from memory) by Daniel Barenboim; both were of superlatively high quality. These are—to state the obvious—very different compositions, each with complex networks of associations and connotations for the critic-analyst to deploy. But should the fact that they were played by very different orchestras— the Berliner Staatskapelle and the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra— with very different positions in the convoluted narrative of present-day cultural politics have any relevance to the critic-analyst whose primary concern is to demonstrate aesthetic connoisseurship? Listening to those particular works of Schoenberg's in London sixty years after the composer's death in 1951 makes it easy enough to keep one's distance from other facets of the Schoenberg composition narrative, the Schoenberg performance narrative, the Schoenberg life-story narrative. And yet the very fact that I am aware of this distancing strategy—of excluding certain contextual topics on grounds of their alleged irrelevance to the subject in question—indicates the intricacy of the issues involved in any interpretative exercise relating to such a central figure in the history of music since 1900.

From the mid-thirteenth century onward, visitors to the Tuscan city of Lucca would have encountered two monumental church facades facing the primary public piazzas of the city: the Cathedral of San Martino (ca. 1196–1260) and the church of San Michele in Foro (ca. 1220–22). Both feature superimposed arcades, in which the spandrels are filled with confronted white figures of griffins and dragons, solitary lions, stags, and mounted falconers among other animal and human figures standing out against a green ground of verde di Prato marble (figs. 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, and 2.4), made with an inlay technique known as intarsia. Interspersed between the various figures are vegetal and abstract motifs, creating a dynamic pattern across the surface. I argue that the similarities in facade construction and decoration between these two churches were an attempt by the bishop and cathedral canons of San Martino, located in the old city center, to visually assert their power within the new and growing epicenter of Lucca at San Michele in Foro, where the communal palace, controlled by the municipal authorities of the podesta and popolo, was located. Specifically, this unified building campaign further functioned to assert the power of the bishop and cathedral canons to the larger Tuscan region by creating the appearance of a shared, specifically Lucchese, identity through the “textile mentality” of Lucca that was rooted in its status as a major center of textile production and trade in the global Mediterranean.

THE following Piece was scarce yet an Embryo, when I design’d its full Growth for your Protection. For tho we Authors generally seem fond of adorning the Frontispiece of our Books with pompous Titles, as if we deriv’d from those not only Security but Fame to our Works; yet I can't but remember that among the Ancients, the Name of a learned Friend was of greater Consideration with the Writer, than the Dignity of a Man of Power; and that the Greatness of any Man in the Political State, according to them, did not raise his Authority in the Common-Wealth of Letters, above his real Merits in the Arts and Sciences, unless he ennobled it, by giving such Encouragement to them, as they very rarely in our Days meet with from the Great Ones.

Being, therefore, to write on an Art, which has not been much cultivated in our Nation, either in the Practice or Theory; what I had most to wish for, on the Publication of this Essay, was the Approbation of One, to whom the Witty and the Learned allow some Place in the Politer Studies and Fine Arts. An Address of this Nature is not without the agreeable Vanity of recommending a Man to the World, as a Person skilful in the Matter, of which he treats; and the Merit of Mr. Steele, in the Kingdom of the Muses, is too well known to the Beaux Esprits, not to secure me from the Fear of the Railery of Ascyltos on Encolpius, in Petronius Arbiter – Ut foris Caenares Poetam laudasti; or of Manley on my Lord Plausible – That rather than not flatter, he would flatter the Poets of the Age, whom no Body else would flatter.

Introduction

In 2021, Anna Krylova claimed that ‘today, the mission of bringing gender into the Central-Eastern European and Eurasian studies has been accomplished. It is impossible to imagine these historiographies without utilising gender theory and methodology’. Indeed, since the 1990s, several studies on theoretical matters of gender have emerged within the context of Czech gender studies (and elsewhere in Central-Eastern Europe), supporting Krylova's claim at least to some extent. It is also true that the aspect of women's agency has been discussed as part of the historiography of nineteenth-century Czech (and Bohemian) everyday life (Alltagsgeschichte). However, in both cases the term ‘gender’ is understood in its narrow, binary sense, and, at least in Czech musicology, women and gender are still underrepresented both as analytical categories by way of theoretical frameworks and as research subjects in the sense of an applied feminist musicology. The reasons for this situation are manifold: general scepticism towards ‘Western’ versions of feminism as introduced in the USA during the 1990s; the perception that Communist regimes were supportive of women in society, thus making re-evaluations of the role of women redundant; gender-insensitive organisational structures in educational, performance, and funding institutions; lack of historical sources and neatly kept estates in accessible archives.

Sample Tour Itineraries: Boston Symphony Orchestra (1890) and London Symphony Orchestra in the USA (1912)

The referents of many of these kennings are contextually determined, i.e. the choice between priest or bishop or even archbishop is based on consideration of the circumstances of Guðmundr's life to which the narrative relates and not only on the individual kenning patterns.

Kennings for Guðmundr Arason in EGils Guðkv

ölbjóðr ‘the ale-offerer [man = Guðmundr]’ EGils Guðkv 2/6

váttr laga guðs ‘the witness of the laws of God [priest = Guðmundr]’ EGils Guðkv 3/2

gætir hreinna siða ‘the guardian of pure habits [priest = Guðmundr]’ EGils Guðkv 4/5, 6

veitir víns vígslu ‘the giver of the wine of consecration [priest = Guðmundr]’ EGils Guðkv 5/1, 2

Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109) wrote no biblical commentaries. There is something striking about this, given that the majority of his adult life was spent reflecting upon scripture. From his arrival as a young man at the Norman monastery of Bec in 1059 to his death as archbishp of Canterbury fifty years later, Anselm would hardly have encountered scripture at all without being called upon, in one way or another, to gloss it.

Commentary was embedded in Anselm's monastic vocation. Eleventhcentury Bec, a young foundation whose monastic school would make it famous, put a newly-tonsured Anselm immediately to work in its classroom, where oral commentary would have formed the backbone of his teaching. Following the pattern of his older colleague Lanfranc (c.1010–89), the logician ‘whose lofty fame’, Anselm's biographer Eadmer reports, ‘had resounded everywhere and had drawn to him the best clerks from all parts of the world’, Anselm's pedagogical strategy would have matched that of other eleventh- and twelfthcentury monastic educators. To teach was to model commentary. Teachers would offer line-by-line expositions of texts for their students to copy down and imitate, whether glossing a Psalm text to teach elementary Latin, a hymn text or other liturgical text for theological and grammatical training, or one of the standard classical textbooks for training in the trivium, such as Priscian's Institutiones grammaticae, the logical works of Boethius or his commentaries on Cicero's Topica and Aristotle's De interpretatione. Like many other medieval educators before and after him, it was in modelling commentary to his monastic students that Anselm equipped them with the staples of their education, and it was from the lecture notes those students took that written commentaries would usually be expected to issue.

NoViolet Bulawayo's We Need New Names provides insight into the motivations for flight and the precarity surrounding life in the country of origin. The novel is situated at the intersection of motivations for departure and the uncertainty of the conditions to be encountered in the migratory country. While the novel spells out the reasons for departure, it subtly hints at the possibility of dreams unaccomplished. The above lament is double-edged: it articulates both the pain at the sight of people leaving the country and the terrible reality of getting stuck in a foreign land. The lament presents the migrant with a choice that is seemingly a conundrum: the suffering at home or the privations in a foreign land.

Cinta azul

azul y naranja,

con el fleco verde limon

En la cinta azul, azul y naranja,

vaya escrito este nombre:

Rosa Garcia Ascot

Federico Garcia Lorca

Blue ribbon

blue and orange,

with a fringe of lime green.

On the blue ribbon, blue and orange,

let this name be written:

Rosa Garcia Ascot.

Rosa Garcia Ascot (1902–2002), pianist, composer, and only student of Manuel de Falla (1876–1946), could be regarded as both a symbol and touchstone of the great promise of modern Spanish musical-intellectual society before the Spanish Civil War, and of its great losses during and immediately after the Franco regime. Elegant and brilliant, acknowledged muse of the Residencia de Estudiantes, a cultural institution in Madrid founded in 1910 for scientific and artistic exchange, Garcia Ascot was the only female member of the Grupo de los Ocho. She was on the cusp of a promising career in 1930–5, just before the tragedy of the war (1936–9). Among her friends was Garcia Lorca, a founding member of the Generation of ‘27, a parallel group devoted to Spanish poetry and literature at the Residencia.