INTRODUCTION

The document edited below as Source 1, with the contemporary title ‘Names of the Witches 1658’, is a list of names of 113 accused witches connected with the witchcraft panic of 1658–9. It covers eight counties, of which six are in the south-west, and two (Stirlingshire and Perthshire) are in central Scotland. These counties probably represent one of the ‘circuits’ of the regional circuit courts that tried serious crimes in this period. It is printed below alongside two documents edited as Source 2 and Source 3, for Ayrshire alone, listing forty-two almost identical names for that county but giving additional contextual information.

‘Names of the Witches 1658’ does not state what purpose its list is intended to serve, but some physical details may help to elucidate this purpose. The manuscript is a single booklet with sixteen pages, neatly written in three different hands. Once written, the booklet has been folded up very small. The outside leaves are dirty, showing that it has been much used, probably by a messenger or messengers on horseback. Messengers sometimes carried such documents in their riding boots, where dirt could enter.

The three different hands often relate to specific counties or groups of counties. Perhaps different administrators took responsibility for certain areas within the region covered by the court. However, the different hands may also or instead indicate that different parts of the list were written at different times. The first writer may have co-ordinated the document's production; he certainly took a continued interest in it, since he made edits to later parts of the document (as also did the second writer). More study of these hands might well be revealing. The first writer, for instance, was also the clerk who minuted the circuit court trials of March 1659, on which more in a moment.

The emperor, as head of the empire, holds the ultimate responsibility for the destinies of its people and the survival of the institution. As suggested in the previous chapter, this theme recurs throughout the Estoria de Espanna, especially in its Roman section. It serves to impart lessons and justifications concerning the succession of the empire, thereby bolstering Alfonso X's claim to the throne of the Holy Roman Empire. Chronicles in general, in their expositive nature, were the perfect space for the construction of complex narratives in which genres and purposes combine. In the case of the Alfonsine Hispanic chronicle, this resulted in a multifaceted text that reinforced the ideological vision crafted by the Castilian-Leonese monarch and his scriptorium in pursuit of the imperial crown. The Estoria de Espanna, aside from constructing and defining the idea of what an empire is, and how it transcends time, was also very detailed when it came to discussing the ways of succeeding to the imperial throne. In this sense, the chronicle justifies the existence of an imperial lineage and reinforces the idea that the emperor should be chosen within said linna. As we have also explored previously, this system of succession showed more complexity and acknowledged that lineage on its own did not provide sufficient legitimisation for imperial succession, and that an emperor was defined and valued by the nature of his actions. By using different emperors as role models and object lessons, the Estoria de Espanna builds a didactic dimension into the chronicle that exploits its moral lessons on the legitimisation of empire, becoming a sort of Speculum – mirror – in which rulers should find themselves reflected.

The case of the Estoria de Espanna is paradigmatic in its use of the didactic genre, in the sense that it consolidated previous traditions, both peninsular and continental, and created a new account of moral history, in which the borders between pedagogy and justification became blurred.

We have become used to the sophistication of Jane Austen and the subtle analysis of landscape that she provided at the end of the eighteenth century. Terms central to this volume – prospect, improvement, landscape – are central also to her novels; but if the term Bluestockings is notable largely for its absence in her work, their influence upon her, and on a generation of writers in the early years of the nineteenth century, was profound. By the 1810s, with so many of Montagu and her circle's letters coming into print for the first time, a Bluestocking aesthetic had become available to readerships far beyond their tight social coterie.

Two things are of note here. One is that the flood of letters appearing after the deaths of Montagu and Carter stand to challenge any lazy assumptions that we might have about ‘nature’ and landscape as the domain of men in the Romantic period. The other – as this volume repeatedly demonstrates – is that Bluestocking authors from across the eighteenth century engaged in, and offered their shared readership, highly sophisticated models of landscape as a mode of self-reflective analysis. That mode – of intense reflection on the natural world – might draw inspiration from the late seventeenth-century sermons of Bishop Tillotson, or from James Hervey's mid-century Reflections, but it was used repeatedly by the Bluestockings with an understanding that landscape has metaphysical expectations, expectations that place their subjects in a dynamic space between the physical and spiritual world. Indeed, we might argue that this mode of analysis was practiced by women in ways far less often seen amongst male letter writers.

In the fall of 2015, Christie's auction house staged a special exhibition entitled The Art of Music. The display, comprising eight Cremonese stringed instruments, was accompanied by an extensive program of lectures, art forums, recitals, and an interactive documentary tracing the history of violin-making through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Consisting of several videos interspersed with blocks of florid text, the documentary featured a section on “Violins in Art,” playing up the strong connection between the violin as a beautiful object and its visual representation in art. Christie's is an auction house; the instruments—four violins and one cello by Antonio Stradivari and three violins by Giuseppe Guarneri del Gesù—were for sale: a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to acquire “objects of near-mystical perfection” with “an extraordinary lineage of owners and players, including Napoleon Bonaparte, Nicolò Paganini, Yehudi Menuhin, and Jacqueline du Pré.” According to the documentary transcript, “the extraordinary and ceaseless innovators” Stradivari and del Gesù “reached a pinnacle of excellence as assured and complex as anything achieved by other great Renaissance masters.”

Bartolomé de las Casas is alive and well today, if not in body, most certainly in spirit. He wears, as usual among his many students and admirers over the past five hundred years, many hats.

Years ago the U.S. historian Lewis Hanke wrote a pathbreaking study of Las Casas, whom he labeled a pioneer in “social justice.” My own colleague David Lantigua and I, in Bartolomé de las Casas and the Defense of Amerindian Rights, labeled him a political philosopher, canon lawyer, and reformer both within and outside the church.

When approached by the publishers for a book on the “iconic” Las Casas, I wondered “which one?” And I quickly deferred to the dictionary for an official meaning of a word which has become popular among scholars today.

Iconic. What exactly does iconic mean? Our handy dandy Merriam Webster's states that it is of, or relating to, or having the characteristics of an icon, widely recognized and well-established, and/or widely known and acknowledged especially for distinctive excellence. The first definition for an icon is a person or thing widely admired, especially for having great influence or significance in a particular sphere.

Was Bartolomé de las Casas iconic? He fits the bill in virtually all instances of iconic, or, to state it simply, is one of the best recognized of all Spaniards in the conquest of the New World, and, secondarily but no less important, widely admired today for what he did with respect to justice, truth, the Christian faith, and equality of all people, to name just a few areas, in the Spanish conquest. And, to be fair here, he was also reviled as a defender of pagans and such a severe critic of his own Spanish nation as to be a traitor to his country.

Introduction

The interactions of human with other species and the natural environment and their appropriation of natural resources are central to any discourses centering on human history. Drawing from this awareness and understanding, scholars across different fields of academic study have attempted to explore the history and dynamics of human relationship with the natural environment. These studies and scholars particularly paid laser-focused attention to Africa's international rivers and the impacts of changing dynamics in the allocation, use, and management of river resources on the environment and climate. Notably, African rivers serve as conspicuous indicators of the environmental and climatic transformations that are occurring throughout the continent; their modified circulation patterns and reduced strength function as a disconcerting caution. As revealed in this chapter, the diverse and substantial evidence of change in these critical waterways emphasizes the severe repercussions that this has on both ecosystems and human societies. This is evident in changes in river flow regimes, reduction in rivers’ sizes and water compositions, eutrophication of rivers, destruction of aquatic habitats, loss of biodiversity, and climate change. Though the carefree use of river resources without concerns for sustainable development is not the only cause of environmental and climatic change, an understanding of the history and dynamics of allocation, use, management, and conservation of river resources is crucial to a full-picture analysis of Africa's environmental history, and the changing environmental and climatic dynamics on the continent.

According to Beinart, environmental history runs in parallel with trends in African history because it shares many well-established Africanist concerns and perspectives about the environment.

Traditionally, investigations of Sir Thomas Malory's adaptation and rewriting of the Arthurian stories he inherited from French and English sources have provided original insights into his Le Morte Darthur. In this chapter I propose to re-examine the literary legacy of Malory's sources in his work, in particular his characterisation of Lancelot and Guenevere. Specifically, I examine his approach to rewriting Arthur's end in the light of historical writing of his day, including the importance granted to ‘fair speech’ and good governance in both highly charged situations in the Morte Darthur, particularly in the last Tale, and the Middle English Brut chronicles. Rather than read fifteenth-century political events into the Morte, I suggest that his writing reflects the political outlook of his generation and, what is more, contributed to the flourishing of English prose at a key juncture in the history of its development.

Malory's Lancelot is usually predominantly considered in terms of his literary legacy as a romance hero, characterised by his impressive chivalric stature and his response to the limitations of courtly love. The literary legacy Guenevere brings to Malory's text, on the other hand, draws on both romance elements from the French tradition and the English chronicle tradition going as far back as Geoffrey of Monmouth. In small but significant ways, Malory presents new facets to Lancelot and Guenevere that enhance their potential to leave a literary legacy as political actors – as opposed to only romance-derived characters, acting in a chivalric world of a golden age in the Morte Darthur.

Following an unhappy year at the Friends Seminary School on 14th Street, I followed my brother's path to the progressive and artistically minded Putney School in Putney, Vermont. In a sense, I had already been influenced by their remarkable music teacher, Norwood Hinkle, through Wally. He had introduced me to Bach's B Minor Mass, Christmas Oratorio, St Matthew Passion, and several cantatas, along with the late quartets of Beethoven, works which we regularly listened to while following the scores. These pieces—particularly the St Matthew Passion and the Beethoven quartets—became personal touchstones for me, and their beauties have never faded.

At Putney, all of the students learned to read music and sang together on Friday nights, and everyone took Music I, in which traditional classical forms were studied and a standard history of Western classical music was outlined. The excellent, enthusiastic, and plain-spoken form summaries of Donald Tovey were read by every Putney student. Norwood was a great musician who poured the intensity and depth of a Szell or Klemperer into conducting his teenage orchestra and chorus, sometimes achieving astonishing results.

With my questionable clarinet playing, I participated in Beethoven's eighth Symphony, Haydn's “The Clock” and Symphony no. 104, Mozart's 40th Symphony, and pieces by Ralph Vaughan Williams, among many other things. I also got to play the piano part in the delightful Concerto Grosso by Ernest Bloch.

Reconciling Ton and Rhythmus

In his 1874 doctoral thesis ‘Ueber Sprache und Vortrag’, Rudolph Genee lamented how theories on declamation had come to be exceedingly close to the laws of Tonkunst. By this he did not mean that declamation had erred in adopting the melodic scale, which would have amounted to a late nineteenth-century revamping of Seckendorff's argument. Instead, Genee reminded his readers that the attention should primarily focus on rhythm, the role of which is to provide the ‘foundation for the two forms of expressions of feelings: the linguistic [sprachliche] and the musical’. Genee's claim benefitted from a retrospective view on the state of declamatory theories as they had been unfolding during the nineteenth century. Perceived along a vocalic and melodic continuum, declamation had started to move away by the 1800s from its more holistic eighteenth-century theorisation, which was still perceptible in the ‘rhythmic song and musical declamation’ that Reichardt had evoked to Goethe (Chapter 3, p. 96). Genee deplored such a move: therefore, by reinviting rhythm into the declamatory debate, he marked a decisive return to Goethe's rule and to eighteenth-century concepts that posited the primacy of rhythm as the first element to have appeared in music, prior to melody, and as the common denominator between music and poetry.

Genee's return to rhythm was even more apparent in that nowhere did his thesis mention any of the early nineteenth-century theorists who had dealt with a melodicised approach to declamation: Kerndorffer, frequently quoted in nineteenth-century treatises, is absent, as is Schocher, who had entered progressive oblivion since the first part of the century. The culprit behind this melodic approach to declamation was the separation between melody and rhythm, which Genee viewed as the ‘two fundamental conditions’ (Grundbedingungen) of poetry and music.

In 1937, Herbert Selpin directed Alarm in Peking, which revolves around the Boxer Rebellion, an anti-Christian and anti-Western mass movement that culminated in the Boxers besieging representatives of eleven imperialist nations in the Legation Quarter in Peking from June 21 to August 14, 1900. The film lists Walter Zerlett-Olfenius and Selpin as co-screenwriters and stresses in the opening credits that the plot and characters are fictitious. However, a notice published in the Viennese newspaper Mein Film on March 19, 1937, cited a literary source for the film: “Gustav Frohlich is secured to play the lead role of the film Alarm in Peking, which Herbert Selpin is filming based on the play Neun Offiziere [Nine Officers, 1936] by Georg Fraser.” The German playwright Fraser was employed as the chief dramaturge of the Scala Theater in Vienna at the time, so the reviewer was giving a nod to a local artist. A comparison of the plots and personae of Alarm in Peking and Neun Offiziere bears out the anonymous reviewer's observation that the film is a loose adaptation of the drama. Given the many similarities between Neun Offiziere and Alarm in Peking, it is curious that Fraser and his play went uncredited in the film and were scarcely mentioned in reports and reviews.

This essay unravels for the first time the complicated adaptation and reception history of this obscure film, revisiting in the process a littleknown case of censorship during the Third Reich.

Introduction

On 24 October 2019, the remains of General Franco were exhumed from the Valley of the Fallen. This imposing mausoleum, built by the Franco regime and located to the north of Madrid, is perhaps the most important monument erected by the regime in all the years it held power in Spain. It is the “El Escorial” of the regime. Despite the government's decision to seek a new burial place for the Generalísimo, the valley still houses the remains of José Antonio Primo de Rivera, founder of the Falange movement, and those of no less than 30,000 Civil War combatants. Not for nothing did the Francoist propaganda of the time present the Valley of the Fallen as a monument to all the combatants who had lost their lives in the conflict.

The decision of the socialist government, which at the time had only been in power for a few months, led to a furious backlash and heated debate in Spain. It attracted the attention of the international press and the live broadcast was followed with uncommon interest by over seven million people in Spain.3 The court battle that took place in order to impose the wishes of the government of Pedro Sánchez – in the face of resistance from the Franco family and the Benedictine community in the valley – had the predictable effect of generating renewed interest in the monument itself.

On May 16, 1890, Brahms traveled from Vienna to Bad Ischl for his annual summer holiday. Packed in his bags that day were the first two volumes of Heinrich von Sybel's Die Begründung des Deutschen Reiches durch Wilhelm I. (The foundation of the German Reich by William I). These books were a birthday present from Laura von Beckerath, whose inscription is found on the flyleaf of the first volume: “May 7, 1890. In grateful memory of beautiful times in the past.” As Brahms would discover, Sybel's project was, in effect, a history of Bismarck's foreign policy during the period 1850–70.