On January 11, 1896, Johannes Brahms spent several memorable hours in the company of Adolph Menzel, the dean of German artists in the second half of the nineteenth century. Menzel had recently marked his eightieth birthday, and Brahms, who enjoyed a warm friendship with the artist in his autumn years, had come to join him in a belated private celebration at his Berlin atelier. After ascending four flights of stairs, the composer was greeted by his host in the corridor and escorted into the studio. Upon entering he would have immediately caught sight of the large unfinished oil painting “Frederick the Great Addressing His Generals before the Battle of Leuthen” (1859–61), which was prominently displayed on one of the studio walls. The two men soon sat down to a deluxe meal of oysters served with fine wine. The drinking was heavy, the examination of the artist's work so engrossing, that Brahms lost all track of time and barely made it to a dinner that had been arranged in his honor by the Prussian Academy of Arts. Max Kalbeck, the author of the first substantial biography of the composer, described the visit in characteristically flowery prose:

The tiny hoary [Menzel], in whom a sorcerous necromancer was hiding, had held [Brahms] spellbound. One glass after another was emptied as libation for the spirits that emerged from the books and folders all around and took on flesh and blood when the conjurer, to the boundless astonishment of his guest, called them all by name.

Murcia is an important city in southeastern Spain, the center of what was once a small Islamic taifa state that was erased during the major Christian advances of the thirteenth century in the movement known as the reconquista. The ultimate disposition of reconquered territory around Murcia became an abiding cause of friction between the two major kingdoms of the Iberian Peninsula, Castile and the Crown of Aragon. Although the city itself fell to Castile, some of the territory that had once made up the Muslim kingdom became part of Aragonese Valencia and tension over this division remained for decades. Ultimately, the final settlement of the borders in this region became the major reason for the brutal, ten-year War of the Two Pedros.

This article will explore not only Murcia's role as a frontline city in that conflict, a staging point for what was largely a Castilian war of aggression, but also its enormous importance for our understanding the conflict as a whole, an importance it derives from the fact that surviving city documents provide much of what we know about the conflict from the Castilian perspective. We also learn about the asymmetry of source material scholars of medieval Spain encounter when researching and writing about the history of these two kingdoms.

Late in June, 1364, urban authorities in Murcia, a major city in southeastern Spain, received an urgent message from the king of Castile, one of the medieval period's most controversial monarchs, Pedro I (1350–66/1367–69), better known to history by his unflattering sobriquet as Pedro the Cruel.

By the last third of the eighteenth century, poetic recitation had thrown its anchor into the fertile waters of the Lied, a genre that possessed a formal malleability and a simplicity bordering on the domain of the improvisatory and the popular Volkston. Putting such declamatoria as Junker's ‘Genofeva’ or Dalberg's ‘Evas Klagen’ side by side with through-composed Lieder by Schubart or Zumsteeg reveals that their differences were more of degree than of kind. Both genres were animated by an idealised declamatory melos, explaining the Lied's attraction for modes of spoken declamation, however stylised these may have been. Still, this absorption of the declamatorium into the frame of the Lied remained conflictual: how far could the Lied go in its integration of declamatory speech without losing the defining quality of Sangbarkeit? This question led Reichardt, one of Zumsteeg's contemporaries, to devise by the 1800s the Deklamationsstück (what twentieth-century scholarship has usually rendered as ‘declamatory Lied’), a vocal piece with keyboard accompaniment, located at the junction between poetic recitation and Lied.

There is a continuous line running between Schubart, Zumsteeg, and Reichardt, in that all three composers intended to incorporate theatrical declamation within the musical frame of the Lied. Their strategies, however, differed greatly. Located at the crossroads between music and poetry, Schubart's contributions epitomise the primacy of an improvisatory, aus dem Stegreif approach. Zumsteeg explored the through-composed form by incorporating it into expanded, or modified, strophic forms, favouring a recitative-like approach in which the musical accompaniment bears similarities with the melodramatic score of the Benda model. As for Reichardt, he envisioned the Deklamationsstück. In this, Reichardt attempted to capture prosodic spontaneity, yet through much more calculated artistic means than Schubart and less complex formal approaches than those of Zumsteeg.

Who is Leonore? What is she? She's plain Fidelio in pants, Leonore on the dotted line, Florestan's angel, Marzelline's boyfriend, Jaquino's love rival, Pizarro's would-be tyrannicide, and all throughout a wife in drag. But if his title heroine has an identity problem, Beethoven's only opera has itself hardly fared better, for up until the mid-20th century, there was surprisingly little agreement about what it is. Wilhelm Furtwängler said it was “more of a mass than an opera,” the German critic Paul Bekker saw an “oratorio” in it, while Arnold Schoenberg called it one of the “fighters for liberal freedom” (comparing it, oddly, with Uncle Tom's Cabin). The most extreme reaction was Richard Wagner’s, who basically said Beethoven needn't have bothered writing it, since his third Leonore Overture said it all so much better. In 1940, Edward Dent remarked on how views on Fidelio shifted according to the opinions of the day, adding an obvious reference to contemporary tyrants: “German stage-directors after the revolution of 1918 saw [Florestan and Leonore] as man and woman of their own time; they are alive for us today, and Pizarro too.”

This kaleidoscopic reaction to Fidelio should not surprise us unduly, for it is arguably a late reflection of the vicissitudes of the work's own compositional history. Originally based on an extant French libretto that had itself already undergone numerous interpretations, Beethoven spent some ten years on it, working with three different poets to complete and stage three different versions, and writing no less than four different overtures (he at one point groaned that the labor he invested in the opera should entitle him to a “martyr's crown”).

The Peterhouse 1418 register is remarkable in the history of Cambridge libraries. It is not the first list of books – there are earlier inventories at Corpus Christi College and King's Hall and registers of borrowed books at King's Hall and Gonville Hall. It is, however, the first comprehensive register of a sizeable collection. The fourteen-word titulus capitulates the organization of the Peterhouse Library: a core collection of chained volumes, a circulating library, as well as books suitable for sale.

The experience of the American merchant seamen in the prison depots intended for British prisoners of war sheds new light on life in those depots. Compared with the British seamen together with whom they were held, the experience of the American seamen was more difficult: most received no aid, they could attend no school, they had no hope of exchange, almost none could hope for parole and they were so far from home that, though many tried, escape was almost pointless. They were, however, able to attend British church services and British hospitals that were established in the depots. Diplomatically, the British and French authorities had the formalities and structure for discussing and arranging the exchange of prisoners on both sides and there was regular communication between the Ministry of Marine and Colonies and the Royal Navy's Transport Board, comfortable as old adversaries. The American ministers and consuls had no such precedent, no treaties or formalities concerning prisoners held by a country with which theirs was not at war, and they struggled to argue every case individually.

The individuality of the cases of these American merchant seamen is what this study has revealed most of all. As prisoners of war in France, they were temporarily a distinct group. Before and after that, like all merchant seamen, they individually moved across other temporarily distinct groups.

INTRODUCTION

Margaret Martin, Katherine Grieve and Isobel Leitch were accused in a witchcraft panic in 1649 in the burgh of Inverkeithing in Fife. The document edited below is a partial record of their investigation in June and their local trial in July. It forms a small but vivid and detailed part of a much broader story that can only be summarised here. The minister of Inverkeithing, Walter Bruce, was a keen witch-hunter whose activities divided both the elite of the burgh itself and the members of the presbytery of Dunfermline. By the time of these prosecutions, he had already been suspended once by the presbytery and then reinstated. He later tried to arrest the wives of several Inverkeithing magistrates for witchcraft. Further research could well be carried out on Bruce's supporters and opponents. Those who helped him to interrogate these three women were clearly among his supporters.

Parliament issued a commission on 23 May 1649 to arrest and interrogate witchcraft suspects in Inverkeithing; two of the commissioners later reappeared as trial commissioners. The suspects were not specified individually, but they evidently included Margaret Martin, Katherine Grieve and Isobel Leitch. Walter Bruce and his colleagues interrogated these women over four days in June, presumably with the aid of sleep deprivation since they obtained compliant and stereotypical confessions to the demonic pact. The confessions duly recited the ideas of renouncing baptism, getting a new name, entering into a pact with the Devil, the Devil's mark and copulation with the Devil. Margaret Martin entered the Devil's pact when she was at a meeting in another woman's house, and the Devil asked her to be his servant.

My relationship to theater had not entirely ended. Even though it meant using a round-trip airplane ticket, I accepted James Lapine's invitation to go to the San Diego playhouse in the summer of 1993 to compose and perform the piano score for his play Luck, Pluck and Virtue, based on the satirical novel by Nathanael West.

It was wonderful spending time with James and his wife Sarah in San Diego, and an additional delight seeing my old friends Harvey Sollberger and pianist Aleck Karis there.

What a temperate and consistent climate San Diego has. Although at first it was not easy for me to adjust to James's request to write a “Coplandesque” score—I was no longer accustomed to fulfilling a director's expectations—it soon became natural to improvise during rehearsals, come up with ideas, and withdraw to the desk in the lobby of the theater to polish and copy them.

A photo taken of me during that time shows someone I hardly recognize, a laid-back southern Californian, not the tightly wound East Coast neurotic I actually am. Perhaps this was a needed vacation from that other self. But it proved to be my last plane flight, at least as of this writing.

The play was revived at a small theater in New York in 1995, and not long after that, Twelve Dreams was remounted for a third time in a sumptuous production at Lincoln Center Theater, with a chance to do further work on that score.

INTRODUCTION

This case began in October 1622 when Margaret Davidson started to believe that Christian Watson had harmed her health through magic. Davidson does not seem to have used the word ‘witch’, but she was thinking about bewitchment. She had fallen ill after a quarrel of some kind, during which Watson had threatened her. Davidson's chosen solution was to make a ritually secret approach to Watson in order to recover her health. She took advice from her mother and others, and recruited a male friend to aid her on the day. Whether Watson genuinely remained in ignorance when Davidson crept up behind her on Falkirk high street on a market day, or whether the ‘secrecy’ was an open secret understood by both parties, is not entirely clear, but the ritual succeeded and Davidson recovered her health. One remarkable aspect of this case is its detailed account of how a person could negotiate to recover their health once it was alleged that a witch had bewitched them.

However, someone – perhaps an eyewitness on the day – reported the incident to the kirk session. The session immediately described Davidson’s ritual approach to Watson as ‘consulting hir as ane witche’, an intriguing phrase for such a reconciliation ritual. This phrase then recurred at intervals throughout the recording of the case. Summoned before the session, Davidson testified that she had been persuaded to undertake her ritual by Janet Buchanan. Buchanan had previously had her own disputes with Watson about ale-brewing and petty debt, and had also had a successful reconciliation with Watson.

The kirk session spent the month of November interrogating various people who had been involved in Davidson's market-day ritual. It looked as though Margaret Davidson and Janet Buchanan were the ones in trouble. However, Buchanan's stories about her dealings with Watson began to sound like stories of bewitchment. In January 1623, therefore, Christian Watson raised the stakes by counter-attacking.

Das Liebesverbot—The Ban on Love—has long languished outside the Wagner canon. When the Bayreuth Festival under veuve Cosima decided to expand its repertoire backwards into what she considered the Master's proto-music dramas, she stopped at Der fliegende Holländer. Rienzi was probably too tainted with Meyerbeerian and Spontinian grand opera, despite Richard having happily conducted chunks of it in concert for many years, and despite its continuing popularity on stage (a popularity that dwindled, however, after it was banned from Bayreuth). Wagner's first opera Die Feen (The Fairies, composed in 1833) was similarly kept at arm's length and was not even given its world premiere until 1888. Das Liebesverbot had at least seen its first performance under the baton of the composer, in Magdeburg in 1836, though it remained unperformed thereafter until 1923. The closest Das Liebesverbot has ever got to the Festspielhaus is 1.3 miles, when it was given a student performance in the Bayreuth Stadthalle in 1972 (later released on the Mixtur label as the first-ever recording of the opera).

Das Liebesverbot occupies an unusual position in Wagner's oeuvre. It is one of only two comic operas he ever wrote (the other being Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg), and it is his only opera derived directly from Shakespeare (though it is noteworthy that the midsummer setting of Meistersinger and the topsy-turvy hurly-burly of its second act also echo Shakespeare).

Although I had a tendency to follow one kind of composition with a very different kind, I immediately followed the Suite with a comparable piece for violin and piano, Winter Sketchbook, which was likewise in five movements and likewise steeped in a darker spirit. It was performed at the college by a wonderful violinist, Joanna Jenner.

In April of 1989, Claudia Friedlander, who had stayed on campus past her graduation to work in the administrative offices of the school, put together a program that would include the premiere of the Clarinet Trio, which she knew had a particular meaning for me.

In rehearsal, Maxine was reassuring that the Trio was not the musical failure I had assumed it to be. As always, I was very nervous performing, and the piano part to the Trio was ferociously difficult. But the clarinet and cello parts were no less so. Maxine owned her part, and Claudia's performance was simply stunning. I don't think I have ever had a more exuberant response from an audience than I had for that piece that night.

Only a month later, I performed the piano solo part in Nocturnes with the Vermont Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Efrain Guigui. I had a 103-degree fever. Astonishingly, this undercutting of confident self-expression by illness had persisted since childhood.

In May of 1989, Jack Kernochan called with the news that the Galaxy Music catalogue had been sold to E.C. Schirmer in Boston, and that he and Donald Waxman would no longer be dealing with submissions and publication.

I. The Lay of the Land

“God loveth the gladde giver,” taken from 2 Corinthians 9:7, was, as Felicity Heal describes it, one of the “predictable sentiments” of early modern English culture, so commonplace that historians merely note before passing on. We should dwell a moment. There were so many adjectives that could have been chosen: God could have loved a generous giver or a pious giver, or even a frequent giver, for example. But the phrase that found purchase in early modern England was an emotive one: God loved the glad giver. God also, according to John Donne, and perhaps more surprisingly, loved “a cheerful taker.” The coupling of emotive terms with social norms was a striking feature of early modern English culture.

How ought one to live? An easy question to ask, but much more difficult to answer satisfactorily and responses will vary according to culture, era, and writer. The answer in the modern Western world might well be: one ought to be happy. Early modern society might agree but their understanding of what happiness meant was not the same and the answer would be phrased differently. Happiness, in the sense of denoting joy, pleasure, and contentment, is a modern concept. The ancient concept of eudaimonia, usually translated as happiness or well-being, referred not to pleasure but to a condition of living well that could not be achieved without virtue. Early modern society was heavily influenced by the model of eudaimonia, ensuring that happiness was conceived of as an ethical, rather than solely an affective, state, produced by a virtuous life.

After the sale or sales of the prize the agent had to make two public notifications of the distribution of shares in the London Gazette or, if in a Vice Admiralty Court, in the newspaper of most authority in the island or place where the condemnation had taken place. The notification had to be made at least three days before the initial distribution and contain the address of the agent, and the precise day of the month and year in which the further distributions would take place. If these conditions of advertisement were not met, there was a penalty of £500 payable to Greenwich Hospital.

The prize agent had further responsibilities: if the captured ship was thought fit to be brought into the navy once it had been condemned as a prize, a bill for her value, together with that of her ‘stores, apparel, guns, and furniture’, had to be made out within fifteen days ‘according to the course of the navy’ to be distributed and divided as laid down. ‘And for the further encouragement of such officers, seamen and others who shall actually serve on board’ the distribution was made without fee or reward. The amazing number of deductions for legal fees and charges had of course already been made, but the morale of the men concerned was maintained.

Admiralty and Parliament were anxious that the Prize Acts after 1739 achieved their goal of encouraging seamen, and that payments of prize and bounty money were made promptly, accurately and publicly in order to do so.

INTRODUCTION

Janet Irvine was one of over a dozen people to be tried for witchcraft in Orkney and Shetland in 1615 and 1616. These trials were evidently connected with the new regime being established in the islands in this period. The royal government had imprisoned the last autonomous earl of Orkney, Patrick Stewart, in Edinburgh in 1609. Royal authority was tightened after the defeat in 1614 of a rebellion led by the earl's illegitimate son Robert Stewart; father and son were executed early in 1615. These political events were important, not just for the prosecutors, but for Irvine herself.

Irvine seems to have lived in the town of Kirkwall, latterly at least, but when we see her working for a living it is in rural occupations: being employed to herd and milk cattle, carrying a load of corn, stacking her own peat, and gathering shellfish on the shore. She was clearly an older woman. There is no mention of a husband or children.

Most of the evidence against Irvine came from her own confession, but several instances of harm to named individuals were mentioned, and these people may have given information against her. She was twice evicted or threatened with eviction, so she had difficulties with neighbours, and she was stated to have a reputation as a witch. She herself related that the Devil had taught her a ritual to obtain ‘hir heartis desyre’ (vengeance) upon people with whom she had quarrelled. Usually, she was said to have inflicted illness. She was also alleged to have sunk a boat coming from Westray, drowning several people, but she denied this. The assize acquitted her of this charge, but they convicted her of the other charges, and she was executed.

Irvine confessed to a relationship with the Devil that contained a mixture of stereotypical and idiosyncratic elements.

In the Translatio of Edith of Wilton, daughter of the English King Edgar, Goscelin of St-Bertin (d. 1099 C.E.) includes a tale about three goldsmiths commissioned by King Cnut to craft a shrine for Edith's relics in the monastery's church. Though Cnut paid the smiths generously for their materials and labor, they were consumed by greed: ‘the workmen's clawing hands’ (aduncas manus artificum), which should have honored the saint with their skill, instead grasped for profit, using only a small amount of the king's ‘pure gold’ (auro puro) and presumably pocketing the remainder. In ‘their colossal avarice’ (auaricie uastitas), Goscelin says, the smiths ‘made [the reliquary] with silver with a thin gilding’ (uix argento deaurato confecere), both breaking their ‘royal vow’ (regium uotum) and insulting Edith, a saint and princess of Wessex. As punishment for their crime, all three craftsmen were struck blind, so that ‘together with the coveted light of the metal they lost the light of the world’ (cum cupidinea luce metalli perdiderunt lucem mundi), begging to survive after stealing from the king and the saint. Their names, ‘Ælfmær, Winstan, and Wulfstan, formerly famous for their skill’ (prius arte clari), thereafter lived in infamy, like that of another dishonest goldsmith, Spearhafoc, abbot of Abingdon, who would disappear in 1051 with Edward the Confessor's gold.

Music and Performers

The violin emerged at a time when musical activities were connected to an assortment of institutions and locales (courts, the church, markets, inns, and families) and for the most part served their social and cultural requirements. Toward the end of the eighteenth century, however, music managed to break free of the gilded cage of patronage and began to generate its own institutions. Indeed, one of the most significant features of musical life in nineteenth-century London and other European capitals was its autonomy from official functions of any kind, be they courtly or governmental.

When we think of a medieval manuscript, we often picture an illuminated prayer book or bible. We might think of a massive book, hundreds of leaves of smooth, off-white parchment, often illuminated with gold leaf. Such deluxe manuscripts made up a small number of medieval books, being for the most part luxury items rather than those intended for frequent use. The most common working manuscripts were religious, and the most common of these were liturgical. A liturgical book might be illustrated and illuminated if it came from a well-endowed religious establishment like a monastery or cathedral, and then might subsequently serve as a ‘hand me down’ to a parish church. More often, liturgical books were less lavishly illustrated (on which, see Chapter 3). Another common type of working manuscript was that containing works designed to aid clergy in pastoral care.

In the Christian tradition, the pastor is an ordained clergyman who looks out for the needs of other Christians, primarily in the domain of the spiritual, but also in feeding the poor, ministering to the sick, and the like. Throughout the Middle Ages, learned churchmen had drawn up treatises to help clergy with the major components of pastoral care: moral guidance and the hearing of confession, teaching Christian morals and doctrine, and administering the other sacraments, those rituals like communion through which the Church administered the visible grace of God through physical processes. The sense of a need to look out for the spiritual needs of laypeople went back to the early days of the Church. Writers such as St. Augustine of Hippo (354–430) and Pope Gregory the Great (r. 590–604) had composed guidebooks for giving laypeople moral and spiritual guidance.