Seeking a Libretto

Driven by necessity, Smetana sought to establish himself in Prague through concerts, but his primary artistic goal was opera. Finding a suitable libretto, however, proved challenging, as Czech authors had little experience in the genre. With the help of Procházka, as Smetana notes in his diary, he eventually obtained an operatic text from Karel Sabina. The resulting work, The Brandenburgers in Bohemia (Braniboři v Čechách), is a three-act opera set in the late thirteenth century, when the Czech lands were occupied by Otto of Brandenburg. Eager to begin, Smetana completed the first act by late February 1862 and played it for Procházka, who praised the entire act. Sabina, the librettist, was one of the most intriguing Czech writers of the time. Although he initially studied philosophy and law, he later dedicated himself to writing and journalism. A pioneer of Czech literature, Sabina wrote realistic village novels and short stories about the Czech spiritual revival, promoting the ideals of fraternity, progress, and humanity.

Sabina's Libretto

The Brandenburgers in Bohemia dramatizes a romantic, yet improbable plot based on a historical episode from around 1280, with echoes of other key moments in Czech history, especially 1939. The narrative unfolds after the sudden death of Czech King Ottokar II (r. 1253–78). In the aftermath, Duke Otto of Brandenburg becomes regent and guardian to the young heir Wenceslaus II

One of the main intellectual changes that occurred in early modern Europe was the transition in ways of reading the Bible from the Calvinist and the Catholic hermeneutical approaches to the interpretation of the received text of the word of God, to the historical and philological reading of Scripture ‘as a work of culture’. According to Protestant hermeneutics, which dated to the authority of Luther and Calvin and which also underpinned the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England (1563), the following attributes distinguished Scripture from other literary works: auctoritas (‘in that its cause efficient is God, and many of the reasons adduced to support it, such as miracles, prophecies etc. were not deemed to be believed essentially through the experience of faith’); claritas (‘accessibility of God's message to all believers although duly mediated by education and catechetical practice – while those passages which are obscure to the readers, are so due to the interpreter's lack of understanding and/or faith, which can be enlightened and deciphered by using other clearer biblical texts’); perfectio and sufficientia (Scripture is perfect because it contains ‘all the necessary knowledge in the sense of a canon and a guiding principle that is necessary to know for the attainment of salvation’). As regards the Catholic context, instead, on 8 April 1546 the Council of Trent adopted a decree concerning the edition and the use of sacred texts, which was sometimes understood as prohibiting any emendation of the Vulgate ‘authentic’ version of the Scripture, ‘on account of its long-standing usage and approbation in the Catholic Church’.

Astute readers of Karla Taylor's Chaucer Reads ‘The Divine Comedy’ will recognize in my title a reference to a key concept in her elucidation of Chaucer's reading of Dante's Commedia: authentication, and its spectral double, the inauthentic. Authentication in her work refers to the literary devices a poet deploys to establish the credibility of both the narrator (primary) and the world he has constructed (secondary). That's no mean feat in Dante's Commedia, whose credibility is staked to its comprehensive synthesis of Christian theology. Since, as Taylor puts it, “death marks a radical break with the past,” Dante co-opts this stance of conversion as a mark of radical rupture, tied to the linguistic performance of the “eternal present” of the literary text, effectively inventing a formal system that insulates his text from the ravages of the world. The eternal present with which Dante's poem conspicuously ends is contrasted with the narrator's return – “gia volgeva il mi disio e ‘l velle” (“my desire and will had already rotated/revolved”) – by Dante's use of a verb in imperfect tense (volgeva) against the present tense of that famous last line: “l’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle” (“the Love that moves the sun and other stars,” Par. XXXIII, 143–5). Language matters deeply to Dante's authentication of the reader's experience of the Commedia, because it aligns a theological vision with a core premise of the work: that the “converted” narrator, now “dead” to his previous self, can view not just his own life, but the lives of others, in the clear light of transcendent vision, authenticated by the beauty of poetry.

ABBOTS OF RUSHEN – 1408–1540

From the founding of Rushen Abbey in 1187, only fourteen are known by name. Five are recorded in the period 1408 to the dissolution.

Richard 1408–18

Henry Radcliffe 1495–97

John Faragher 1503–07

Thomas Radclyf 1531–32

Henry Jackson 1540

In a literal sense, Cantigas de amigo are songs sung by young women (amiga) about (de) their boyfriend (amigo). This medieval poetic tradition of maiden songs constitutes one of the main genres in the Indo-European oral tradition of women's songs. Transmitted by women – mothers and daughters across the centuries – the reminiscences of their voices have been registered since the earliest written manuscripts. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, folklorists rediscovered these women's voices and songs as a living oral tradition of lyrical and lyrical-narrative work, dance, and worship songs and collected them.

However, these songs were typically ignored by historiographers of the national European literatures, who sometimes classified them as anonymous women’ songs, as in the case of the frauenlied (woman's song) and the winileod (song of the wini, friend, or beloved) in German historiography, for example. Eventually, they would ascribe these songs to male poets, who then became the authors of the songs. Only in some rare instances were these songs featured in histories of literature (for example, in the case of the first chapter of the Portuguese Literature History). However, save for a few exceptions, the genre was virtually ignored in the histories of Spanish, German, French, and English literatures, which focused instead on the great national epic when discussing medieval poetry.

When the Royalist refugee William Blundell landed in the Isle of Man in 1646, he discovered a land which was in some ways quite different from his native Lancashire.1 While there were some superficial similarities in that agriculture and fishing were, and had long been, the main occupations of the inhabitants of the Island, as they were of the people living on or near the coasts of the Irish Sea, there were many striking contrasts which Blundell observed. One of the most obvious of these was that the majority of the natives of the Island spoke primarily, if not exclusively, Manx, but their clothing and customs were also unfamiliar to the Englishman. Nearly all of the population lived in isolated houses, scattered throughout the countryside, in much the same way as those who eked out a living in the upland areas of England, but even the larger landholders, those regarded by Blundell as gentry, lived on their estates rather than in any of the four recognized towns, the number of residents in which scarcely exceeded that of many English villages. One similarity of which Blundell was perhaps not aware was that the population seems to have been rising steadily, if slowly, in the Island, as it certainly had been in England and elsewhere in Europe, since at least the early sixteenth century. Whereas this upward trend levelled off in England in the second half of the seventeenth century, the rise in the number of inhabitants in the Island appears to have continued equally steadily into the eighteenth century and beyond, partly as a result of the changes to the Island's economy which began to develop during the last eighty years of the Stanley lordship. The rise of trade between England and its overseas colonies from the middle of the seventeenth century onwards and English legislation to regulate its conduct led directly to the increasing importance of the Isle of Man to merchants who were determined to increase their profits from this traffic by circumventing the duties imposed on their cargoes.

Introduction

In this study, we explore various lyrical materials from the Iberian Peninsula, based on a hypothesis of continuity (Alinei 1996) between musical archaeology and musicological studies. These materials may not necessarily be directly derived from primary tradition sources, but rather from musical systems that frequently exhibit stronger ties to cognitive processes and memory than direct tradition or imitation. Nevertheless, we will not neglect aspects such as contrafacta or the simultaneous existence of medieval and traditional lyrical repertoires. Our aim is to establish guidelines for musical interpretation and highlight the modern embodiments of traditional Hispanic music, which, in our opinion, represent the true heirs of the peninsular lyrical tradition.

Tracing the medieval antecedents of traditional songs and the remnants of ancient repertoires is a common practice among musicologists, philologists, and performers. Only in rare instances can connections between the two repertoires be established, mostly due to chronological factors and the alteration of preserved testimonies, often perpetrated during the Romantic period, in the nineteenth century (Chaillou-Amadieu 2017; Zink 1996). However, we must still consider the cultural impact of these repertoires and the popularity of traditional repertoires throughout the extensive medieval period. Our objective is to discuss Hispanic medieval repertoires that have been preserved with music and examine the aspects that have been maintained in traditional lyrics, whether in manuscripts or in oral tradition.

On January 27, 1955, an “Open Letter to Our Writers”signed “in the name of the workforce of the VEBBrown Coal Works Nachterstedt” by a diverse cast ofcharacters, from Heroes of Labor to members of thelocal Commission for Cultural Work to stenographers,apprentice mechanics, kitchen workers, engineers,housewives, dispatchers, and the works librarian,appeared in Tribüne,the daily newspaper of the FDGB, the East Germantrade union federation.1 Known as the “NachterstedtLetter,” or Nachterstedter Brief, this missivecatalyzed a wide-ranging dis¬cussion of the role ofcontemporary literature in the young GDR. The letterframes itself as a contribution to the upcomingFourth Congress of the German Writers Union (DSV)and immediately stakes a claim to publicparticipation in the literary public sphere ofsocialism: “We are of the opinion,” the letterstates, “that this congress is a significant eventnot only for authors, but also for millions ofreaders.” The letter contin¬ues by outlining whatthe workers of Nachterstedt expect of the “literaryproduction of our writers,” and its “greatsignificance for the struggle of our people topreserve peace, to achieve the unity of ourfatherland and to further strengthen the GermanDemocratic Republic.”

The structural organization of this book owes a debt to Edward E. Baptist's examination of slavery in the nineteenth-century United States. It may seem a strange inspiration; the subjects of these two books are separated geographically by an ocean and chronologically by a thousand years. The center of Baptist's analysis is the black enslaved body; written on the slave is the history that would produce modern American capitalism. The harrowing experience of an American slave ofers few points of contact with the biography of a medieval queen. Yet, a focus on power's interaction with the body crosses boundaries of time and space. The intimacy and viscerality of power is something medieval queens and kings would have understood. Royal power in the eleventh century was personal and individualistic. Bureaucracies of the exchequer, the treasury and representative institutions were certainly present, but were less concretized than they would be even 100 years later. Political power in the central middle ages was based on a web of personal relationships between human beings, not merely administrative structures. Power was navigated through channels of intimate relationships, whether friendly, hostile or opportunistic. Women's elite power, moreover, was regularly contextualized in terms of female bodies. Whether their power was celebrated or demonized, women's fesh was constantly evoked. Royal women, especially, were subjected to body-centered ideology and at the same time drove it. Elizabeth I's claim to the ‘heart and stomach of a king’ may be the most famous to modern audiences, but her claim rested on a centuries-old trope of female power drawn from bodily awareness. Tus, a study of Mathilda of Flanders, centered on her royal body, draws that viscerality back into frame; a position that refects its centrality in medieval sources.