The intersection of narrative elements and form is especially compelling in programmatic works where a more specific narrative emanates from extra-musical texts and contexts, embedded within or embodied by the music. It is all the more interesting to find parameters of tonality, motive and – as in our current discussion – register participating in that narrative, shaping, reinforcing and interacting with extra-musical associations. The Sonata in E flat Op. 81a ‘Les Adieux’, composed in 1809 and subtitled ‘Das Lebewohl, Abwesenheit und das Wiedersehen’ offers a prime example. It is programmatic, sharing aspects with the proto-Romantic Pastoral Symphony: for instance its titles for each movement, ‘Das Lebewohl’ (The Farewell), ‘Abwesenheit’ (Absence), ‘Das Wiedersehen’ (The Return) are both specific (dates, names and places are included) and suggestive, rather like those of the symphony, which Beethoven made clear should be considered not a concrete imitation of nature, the objectivist pictorialisms deemed too concrete and restrictive, even inartistic, but rather should comprise ‘more the expression of feeling’. In this attitude to avoidance of concrete imagery Beethoven anticipates the Romantic approach to character pieces evinced by Mendelssohn, Schumann and Liszt.

As Nicholas Mathew has explained, the sonata forms part of a tradition of ‘farewell’ works. Mathew reminds us that many works, orchestral and choral as well as instrumental, including individual songs, were composed to celebrate the return to Vienna of noblemen who fled during the various Napoleonic wars, for instance including Emperor Franz I, who left and returned in 1806. Indeed, the sonata may also have been influenced by Dussek's similarly titled ‘Les Adieux’ (Farewell) Sonata Op.

INTRODUCTION

In the contemporary world, futuristic literary explorations inspired by traditional African mythologies often offer interesting opportunities for understanding the continuous role of traditional mythologies in shaping the future. By employing the perspective of speculative posthumanism, Nnedi Okorafor's Lagoon presents a posthuman world where extraterrestrial intervention disrupts human identity, agency, and power structures. However, these disruptions are shown to be just another transformative event in a continuous stream of transformative events already inherited from antiquity. Unlike Western speculative post-humanism which has traditionally focused on the advent and influence of contemporary and emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, cybernetics, and technological transcendence; Lagoon blends African mythologies, indigenous ontologies, and extraterrestrial transformation, creating a hybrid post-humanism that moves beyond Western frameworks.

By engaging with the work of speculative post-humanist scholars like Francesca Ferrando, Donna J. Haraway, and N. Katherine Hayles, this analysis explores how Lagoon redefines posthuman futures within an African cosmological framework, not through technological singularity, but through the convergence of mythological and extraterrestrial forces. Adding the magical to the mundane and the scientific in strange otherworldly settings with humans and myriad other nonhumans from various sides of multiple divides makes Okorafor's speculative tale of the aftermath of an alien visitation on Lagos very posthuman.

Several critics have examined the interplay between the mundane and the fantastic in African literature, highlighting how authors blend everyday realities with supernatural or magical elements to reflect complex social and cultural landscapes (Mposa).

This book is a tribute to the influence of Bernard Capp, Emeritus Professor of Early Modern British History at the University of Warwick, and Fellow of the British Academy, one of the most distinguished and innovative early modern historians of his generation. When asked what his specialism is, Bernard invariably replies ‘seventeenth-century England’, a response which reflects the thematic and chronological breadth of his academic pursuits over the last fifty years. Since the 1970s, Bernard has consistently been at the forefront in ‘the shift from narrower social historical to broader cultural historical approaches’, producing eight important monographs as well as a significant number of influential journal articles and essays. These works have not only responded to wider changes in early modern studies but also have shaped our understanding and influenced the direction of developments in the social and cultural history of early modern England.

This is not the first ‘Cappite’ tribute. In 2010 a collection of essays, including several written by some of the most eminent historians in the field, expressly celebrated Bernard's role in ‘help[ing] us to reassess our ways of thinking about the ordinary and extraordinary experience of past actors’ and his ‘major contribution to our understanding of the fluid and culturally constructed nature of the “norms” which early modern people negotiated’ via ‘his distinctive capacity for empathy and originality’. In the fifteen years since that volume was conceived, Bernard has continued to open up new avenues of research, having produced another three monographs and numerous other key publications that have further transformed and enriched our view of the inner and outer worlds inhabited by seventeenth-century English people.

Excepting Schoenberg and Berg, active German cypherjugglers included Hanns Eisler (1898–1962), who experienced firsthand the advent of twelve-tone serialism as Schoenberg's student during the early 1920s. When Eisler's music was banned in 1933, he fled Germany and settled in Los Angeles, where he composed dozens of film scores. Because of his communist sympathies Eisler was blacklisted in Hollywood, interrogated by the House Committee on Un-American Activities, and deported in 1948. He spent his final years in East Berlin, where he resumed a lifelong friendship with Bertolt Brecht, and composed the national anthem of the German Democratic Republic.

Like many composers tied to East Germany, Eisler drew inspiration from the BACH cipher, as in the Präludium und Fuge über BACH for string trio, Op. 46 (1934), in which the tetrachord generates through two transpositions an entire tone row. But, as Eisler explained, ‘the choice of the “B-A-C-H” motto is not meant to honour Johann Sebastian Bach … The choice … should connect much more to the bourgeois mysticism of the common musicians, who often only understand no more of Bach than the letters B-A-C-H’. Another work, Fourteen Ways to Describe the Rain Op. 70 (Vierzehn Arten den Regen zu beschreiben) originated in a score for Joris Ivens's silent film Rain (Regen, 1929), but was repurposed for Schoenberg's seventieth birthday in 1944.

My most honour’d Doctor.

For your most acceptable Present, which I received, when you honoured me with your Defence of your Natural History of the Earth, I return you all the Thanks of a Mind fill’d with Gratitude.

Your Triumphs over the Doctor of Tubingen, do but whett our Appetites for that most valuable Work; whereof I find my excellent Friend Dr. Edwards in a learned Essay with which he favoured me, raising also our Expectations.

I am overwhelmed with some Confusion, that I have not all this while yeelded a due Obedience to the Commands you laid upon me, to make a Collection of our Fossils. I can plead nothing for my Delay of my Duty in this Matter, but my being overwhelmed with Employment. For truly, Syr, I am far from what some have putt into their Letany, Homo unius Negotii. But I am forming the best Projection I can, in an Infant Countrey, entirely destitute of Philosophers, to have this, and other Intentions answered.

In the mean time, I pursue my Design, as well as I can, to make my Annual Presents of American Curiosities.

I am very much afraid, whether one of my Collections, did not miscarry; In which I also enclosed a Couple of Guinea's or, Louis d’ors, (I forgett which,) to be spent by you, and our dear Mr. Waller, when you should (with your Treasurer,) undergo, the Trouble of Reading over my tedious Letters. I therefore look’d out ﹛for﹜ some Imperfect Copies which I kept of those Letters, & have thrown them into the Packett now before me. If you have had ‘em, — tis well; There is no hurt in this Repetition.

The history of art music in Israel began with the 1931–1939 wave of Jewish immigration that brought more than forty professionally trained and accomplished composers from Central and Eastern Europe to Palestine, then under British Mandate. The amazingly large repertory created in the Jewish community of Palestine, and later in the State of Israel, featured a diversity of ideological trends and created an imaginary line connecting two ideological poles.

The Heritage of the West

Confronting the trauma of enforced displacement under often terrifying conditions in Europe, most of the immigrant composers were reluctant to part with the heritage of the West within which they were trained and had composed. Their cultural attitude was an inversion of medieval Jewish poet-philosopher Jehudah Halevi's famous line, “My heart is in the east / and I am in the uttermost west.”

Example 2.1 presents the opening section of the “Praeludium” from the Suite for Cello Solo that Josef Tal (1910–2008), then Grünthal, composed in May 1937, exactly three years after he came to Palestine. The work combines two stylistic worlds: (1) the order and discipline of Bach's austere solo sonatas, an admired model for all German-educated composers; and (2) the Berlin-Vienna avant-garde of Arnold Schoenberg and his disciples on which Tal was raised. Indeed, the work opens with a nearly regular twelve-tone series, save for a brief passing return of D♮ in measure 2.

The year 1926 was an exceptionally happy and productive year for Janáček. His works enjoyed great success with Káťa Kabanová pro¬duced in Berlin, the revised Mr Brouček's Excursion to the Moon given in Brno, and world premieres of the Concertino and The Makropulos Affair. Janáček was invited to London, where he was warmly welcomed (in spite of his visit coinciding with Britain's General Strike) and his music was generally well-received there. His native village of Hukvaldy unveiled a commemorative plaque at his birthplace – the Hukvaldy school – which pleased him greatly. New compositions that year included the Capriccio and the expanded version of Nursery Rhymes (Říkadla), alongside two large-scale works: the Glagolitic Mass and the Sinfonietta.

As discussed in the Prologue, Janáček had only completed four works for full orchestra before 1926 (apart from his early folk music arrange¬ments): Jealousy (Žárlivost) and three symphonic poems – The Fiddler's Child (1913), Taras Bulba (composed during the war years in 1915–8) and the Ballad of Blaník (1919–20). All four have some kind of programmatic, extra-musical element. Jealousy was based on a folk ballad, ‘The Jealous Man’; The Fiddler's Child took its inspiration from Svatopluk Čech's poem about a deceased fiddler and an abandoned orphan; the ‘Slavonic rhapsody’ Taras Bulba is based on Gogol's novella about a Cossack leader and his sons; and the Ballad of Blaník was inspired by Jaroslav Vrchlický's poem about the legendary Knights of Blaník. Programmatic or narrative ele¬ments were also to be significant for the unfinished Danube Symphony and the abandoned Violin Concerto, ‘The Wanderings of a Little Soul’, though there is little detail about what their precise inspiration might have been, literary or otherwise. Janáček also drew on extra-musical programmes for several of his chamber music pieces, including the Fairy Tale (Pohádka) for cello and piano and both string quartets.

Peace Not War: Traditions of Restorative Justice in Imperial Ethiopia, 1769–1960 traces the use and improvements made to restorative justice practices that characterized Ethiopian history into the early twentieth century. Overlapping, the book also assesses the pull of modernity that both forced and lured Ethiopia to cast aside its endogenously evolved legal remedies and adopt European jurisprudence that aligned more with retributive justice. This Epilogue demonstrates how thorough and encompassing was this transition to retributive justice, for when the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) overthrew the Marxist dictatorship in 1991 and felt the necessity to apply transitional justice to try Derg members (Amharic for Committee and the term popularly used to refer to the military junta) in a court trial for their crimes against humanity and genocide, the EPRDF leadership did not even entertain the use of Ethiopia's traditions of restorative justice.

Peace Not War's agenda is twofold. First, it contributes to the literature on restorative justice by showing how Ethiopia, through trial and error, corrected the “forgive and forget” ideation of restorative justice as one-and-done, blanket amnesties that, as was shown (Chapter 2), did not bring about reconciliation, but rather encouraged enmity and war. It also demonstrated that historical analysis can uplift significant improvements that were made to restorative justice modalities through the development of “conditional forgiveness” that evinced ingenuity, flexibility, and adaptability to, in fact, reconcile warring parties and bring about lasting peace. Second, the historical method possesses a perhaps unintended consequence, for, by focusing on the way national threats to the sovereignty of the state were resolved, it outlined how one legal remedy was supplanted by another – restorative for retributive justice.

The 1688 Revolution, much like the accession of Elizabeth I, the regicide, the Interregnum, and the Popish Plot, did not halt the Catholic book trade. It did not stop the presence of Catholics in England or erase the appetite of Protestants for Catholic works. There remained a consistent presence of a Catholic book market based in London that serviced the city, the country, and even the continent. While statistically this market might have comprised only a minor part of the greater English book trade, its impact was extensive. ‘Popish books’ represented both a great source of anxiety and a common commodity explored by many Protestants and Catholics. In London, these books were produced through cross-confessional networks of bookmen, often linked to urban-based Catholic patrons, including Catherine of Braganza, which increasingly coalesced around the Lincoln's Inn Fields area. These networks utilised contemporary methods of production, circulation, and obfuscation, and understood the political, literary, and financial realities that shaped the Restoration market. At the same time, they engaged in older, established Catholic systems of survival based around missionaries and recusant communities. Religious bonds merged with associations formed around commercial and social ties. The print trade survived through the combination of these methods and networks and owed much of its success to the involvement, for various reasons, of Protestants. These demonstrably adaptable networks persisted even through moments of intense anti-popery and continued to evolve during James VII/II's short-lived experiment in royally legitimised Catholic print. As a result, these networks manage to capture both elements of the classic Catholic divide between the ‘inward’ needs of a Catholic religious group and its ‘outward’ engagement with a Protestant majority.

Eighteenth-century perspectives on judicial modernity

It is always an interesting exercise to observe how the Enlightenment culture projected its idea of modernity onto European institutions – political, legal and social – of preceding centuries, an idea to which we are still deeply attached. The administration of justice, and thus the governing of violence and conflict, concerns the most fundamental dynamics of communal living, and the Enlightenment was able to grasp the centrality of peace in laying the foundations of legal institutions arising from the dissolution of the ancient world. In the eighteenth-century debate, from France to Scotland, the formation of Roman–barbarian realms, with the consequent emergence of feudal institutions, was generally identified as the birth of Europe, as is well known.

In the XXXth book of the Esprit des lois (The Spirit of Laws), in chapter XIX, when addressing the issue of the Compositions chez les peuples barbares (On Compositions among the Barbarous Nations), Montesquieu provides very precise coordinates useful for conceptually placing peace in the development of European civilisation. Just before, in the XXVIIIth book, the great French philosopher had outlined the main differences between Salic law and the laws of other barbarian peoples regarding compositions (financial settlements), the judicial evidence required (such as duelling), and the point of honour. Now, drawing on Tacitus, Montesquieu reminds us that among the Germans hatred was quenched through a composition, as only two types of criminals were punished with death: traitors (by hanging) and cowards (by drowning).

Este libro quizá se empezó a escribir antes de que tú y yo estuviéramos vivos. Tal vez podría situarse hace 15 000 años, cuando personas cruzaron el estrecho de Bering (Rutherford 2016); cuando los grupos mesoamericanos se enfrentaron en batallas y tuvieron intercambios interoceánicos (Duverger 2008; Borrell 2007) o cuando se realizó la peregrinación de la mítica Aztlán hasta Tenochtitlán, tal como representa la Tira de la peregrinación del códice Boturini (INAH 2014). Este libro quizá se empezó a escribir cuando Malinalli Tenépat —“La Malinche”— jugó un rol fundamental como traductora entre los españoles, nahuas y mayas (Franco 2004); cuando los escritos de sor Juana Inés de la Cruz se publicaron en España y fueron cimiento del intercambio cultural atlanticista de la época colonial (Glantz 1994) o cuando Francisco Xavier Mina y Servando Teresa de Mier se reunieron en Inglaterra y Estados Unidos con el propósito de llevar a cabo acciones en favor de la independencia mexicana (Herrera y Santa Cruz 2011).

There are diverse opinions about when and where cryptography arose. It was an inevitable by-product of writing, originating after the florescence of early recorded languages, whether Mesopotamian cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphs, Minoan tablets transmitting early Greek (Linear B) or Old Germanic runic futhark. Balancing the desire to communicate ideas through written symbols was the countervailing need to restrict them to the need-to-know few.

Probably to most Egyptians, hieroglyphs remained shrouded by veils of secrecy, even though their original purpose was not necessarily to conceal. Thus, funerary inscriptions on the pharaohs’ tombs were commemorative, celebrating nobility who had entered the afterlife. But in 391 ce, when the Christian Roman emperor Theodosius closed Egyptian temples, the need for hieroglyphs abruptly declined, and they ceased to be understood. In 1823 Jean-François Champollion cracked the ‘code’ of the Rosetta Stone, a granite slab recovered by Napoleon's engineers during the Egyptian campaign of 1799 in the western delta. Chiselled into the stele were fragments of a text in three tiers: at the top, hieroglyphs; in the middle, the same rendered in a cursive form known as demotic; and, near the base, the same in Greek letters, key to unlocking the meaning. Now a prized possession of the British Museum, the Stone revived the Western fascination for Egyptology, and spurred cryptanalysts to expose secrets of antiquity.

Naija, the colloquial name for Nigeria, is known for its resilience, relentless drive, creativity, and hustle spirit. This vibrant energy, aptly captured in pidgin ‘Naija no dey carry last’ is undoubtedly a microcosm of the city Lagos. As the former capital of Nigeria, Lagos represents the beating heart of the country. From the yellow rickety Danfos to the aggressive vendors in the bustling streets of Ikoyi or third mainland bridge, and the notorious gridlocked traffic, Lagos encapsulates the complexities of the country's untapped potential. Therefore, it is not surprising that many authors have depicted this resilient city in their works across various literary genres. This focus on Lagos persists even within the Africanfuturist genre, as seen in the works of four notable authors. Within the Africanfuturist genre, Nnedi Okorafor reimagines Lagos in her first novel Lagoon as a space that aliens invade, while Suyi Okungbowa in his novel, David Mogo, Godhunter, situates Lagos as a mystical, fantastical space where Yoruba deities battle for power and control. Like Okorafor, Tade Thompson envisions an alien spaceship, what he calls a ‘biodome,’ invades Nigeria, settling somewhere around Lagos. Also, Wole Talabi, depicts Lagos as a dystopian, post-apocalyptic city in his short story titled ‘The Last Lagosian.’ That these four authors choose Lagos as a setting in their narratives, suggests that the city is an appropriate site for science-fictional engagements. Badagry, Lagos was the first part of Nigeria to become a British colony – also where slave traders did their trade.