This article examines the deployment, service, wages and regional composition of armies in fourteenth century Italy through a close examination of the muster records of one force, the cavalry of the commune of Bologna from 1376–92. Once grievously understudied, the military history of late medieval Italy has been the subject of a concerted scholarly effort in the last two decades. But this rich research has been written largely from the perspective of the leaders of these armies, whether individual, notable commanders alone or their captains and lieutenants in the aggregate. By turning to a different sort of source, muster records, this essay nuances earlier interpretations through a spatial and individualized analysis.

This essay examines the deployment, service, wages and regional composition of armies in fourteenth century Italy through a close examination of the muster records of one force, the cavalry of the commune of Bologna from 1376–92. Once grievously understudied, the military history of late medieval Italy has been the subject of a concerted scholarly effort in the last two decades. Thanks to Alessandro Barbero, Fabio Bargigia, William Caferro, Marco Conti, Kenneth Fowler, Paolo Grillo, Armand Jamme, Marco Merlo, Antonio Musarra, Aldo Angelo Settia and Peter Sposato, among others, today we know much about the recruitment, structure, pay and operations of the militaries of Italy's late medieval communes from 1250–1400, a period when these armies transitioned from feudal levies to paid soldiers.

Despite the heading, the material on the Harmonium itself has been omitted; what appears here is the section on its usefulness. The article is one of several that show Berlioz not only to have been a perfectionist where music was concerned but also to have possessed what we would now call a ‘social conscience’, a feeling not so widely spread among composers of the time; it could well have come to him, at least in part, from his father, whom he saw ‘to be a humane, unprejudiced, sensitive man of liberal outlook and broad intelligence, well read in Latin and French classical literature, and devoted to his work and his fellow-creatures’. As the doctor in the small town of La Côte-St-André, Louis-Joseph Berlioz was, by all accounts, not merely respected but loved.

The popularization of music in small provincial towns, market towns, and even in villages far away from musical centres has often attracted the notice of serious-minded people who take an interest, either in the progress of music itself, or in the civilization of the lower classes, and who regard music as a very powerful means of achieving these ends. Sadly, in very many cases such attempts have, in my view, tended to produce either the opposite result to that intended, or no result at all. For music to exist, there are absolute requirements that must be met. Without these, the noises that are given the title of music must necessarily horrify those of a delicate disposition and encourage the barbarism of those who aren’t. I conclude from this that it would be better not to play any kind of music to people who are totally deprived of it, rather than get them used to the sort they’re all too often given.

This chapter looks at one generation of American merchant seamen in the larger context of maritime social history. The maritime social history is a fairly new field in historical study. Beginning with Harold D. Langley's Social Reform in the United States Navy, 1798–1862, which came out in 1967, and Jesse Lemisch's “Jack Tar in the Streets: Merchant Seamen in the Politics of Revolutionary America”, which was published the following year, labour, or working-class, historical studies were applied to American mariners. Writing such histories was an uphill battle, as many historians wrote, against the overly romantic view of a seaman's life wandering the world's oceans. Another difficulty, and one that affects this work particularly, has been the effort to separate the study of the merchant seaman from that of the naval sailor. In Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700–1750, Marcus Rediker, writing about an era before the United States and thus, American seamen, existed, that “It is impossible to separate the work experiences and the cultural life of the merchant service and the Royal Navy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.” There then were then a number of writings about every aspect of the lives of seamen and sailors of previous centuries, from their wages to their tattoos to their friendships to their masculinity. With each decade, the research into who the merchant seamen were goes deeper, always hampered by the inevitable conflation with naval sailors.

Women play Irish traditional music, and they always have. I first became interested in playing Irish traditional music at a young age, influenced by both a friend and by hearing stories about my ancestors – “the McCabes of the Halla” – who played music weekly for their neighbours in their rural home in County Cavan. I began my musical journey in a local Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann branch in north County Dublin, attending weekly button accordion, grúpaí ceoil, and céilí band classes, which quickly became the highlight of my week. While I first became aware of the masculine associations of the button accordion from competing at Fleadh competitions and by how I was taught by instrumental teachers who mostly identified as men, growing up, my band mates and musical peers were mostly all girls. So, other than the associations of my chosen instrument, I did not put much thought into any potential gendered issues in the tradition and, contrary to what people may assume, my experience of the Irish traditional music scene was for the majority of the time mostly positive. The branch felt like a community, one that was continuously supportive throughout my journey. It was a place that provided ample opportunity for performances and also supported me by providing a job once I became profficient enough to teach. Thus, throughout my childhood and teenage years, music was my passion and the weekly lessons and sessions were a place to escape to from the stresses of school work and everyday life.

Luigi Lablache (1794–1858) was an Italian bass of French origin. He made an immediate impact at La Scala in 1821, as Dandini in Rossini's La Cenerentola. At the Théâtre-Italien he had also had a great success in Cimarosa's Il matrimonio segreto. He was a great favourite of the young Queen Victoria, who took lessons with him when he came to London. The concert reviewed here took place on 10 February. The cast for the performance of Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro included Albertazzi as Cherubino, Persiani as the Countess, Grisi as Susaana, Tamburini as Count Almaviva, and Lablache as Figaro.

It was a good idea of Lablache to choose this masterpiece for his benefit performance; apart from a few evenings of [Mozart’s] Don Giovanni, one can say that we have not heard at the Théâtre-Italien for a long time music as pure, expressive, lively, skilful, and natural as this. I have never admired to such a degree the creative power of Mozart's genius, nor the unfailing lucidity of his intelligence. There's something heart-breaking, I was going to say ‘provoking’, in this unvarying beauty, always calm and sure of itself and demanding incessant homage from beginning to end of this lengthy opera. Even so, most of the audience were saying on the way out, ‘it doesn't make an impact, it's cold’. Our Paris public has the wretched habit of taking its lead from the applause in the parterre, in many cases the most misleading and least trustworthy of sources. A host of blatantly mediocre offerings, to put it mildly, can certainly stir them to excitement without the applauders really caring that much about what they are apparently turning into a success. On the other hand, masterpieces can be played before an audience that is calm but attentive, displaying a profound, measured admiration far superior to shouts and handclapping.

When Reginald Marsden prepared for the Navy Records Society the two volumes of Law and Custom of the Sea printed in 1915–16, he commented:

… the prize records are in a fair state of preservation, and the prize sentences, in particular, appear to have been carefully filed and preserved. They exist in vast numbers and were at an early date bound in volumes and indexed. They are, however, disappointing as regards the light which it might have been expected they would throw on the growth of prize law. Framed as they are in the same bare and technical terms, they contain little more than a bald statement of the condemnation or order for restitution of the ship or goods in dispute.

Over one hundred years later, exactly the same comment can be made. They are evidence of the huge amount of work done behind the scenes by the clerks who copied and recopied the documents, and prepared the indices to the volumes. If you know the name of the capture, you are taken to the page on which the condemnation is recorded. But we learn very little of the thinking of the law lord who passed down the condemnation or release of the vessel.

The law of nations required good faith, therefore every ship had to be provided with complete and genuine papers, and the master at least ought to be privy to the truth of the transaction (although the French contended that the master could not be expected to have such knowledge). During the trial, evidence was consulted to determine the ownership of the vessel and cargo, with the caveat that the doctrine of ‘free ship, free goods’ had to be established.

The prominent philosopher Ernst Cassirer noted that there is no natural or human phenomenon that ‘is not capable of a mythical interpretation’. The descriptive and explanatory power of myths provides one answer to the question of why they remain popular today, even though the present is often described as experiencing a ‘crisis of narratives’. Another explanation may reside in the inherent openness and adaptability of mythical narratives. Every group or society that adopts a myth narrates it from its unique perspective, occasionally to the point of changing its meaning for brand new purposes. This general pattern is also applicable to the Vikings as a historical and cultural group who significantly shaped large parts of early medieval European history, and their myths, that is, all cultural and social stories both historically and currently associated with the Vikings. Today, some people venerate the Viking gods within neo-pagan cults, some get Viking rune tattoos, while others employ Viking myths and their associated interpretations for ideological purposes, as a basis for constructing nations, and sometimes racially defined identities.

Regardless of the underlying motivations for the contemporary usage of Vikings, it is striking that current representations increasingly draw upon earlier interpretations of Viking history and culture, ones that themselves have been significantly shaped by popular media. This includes novels, comics, and TV series such as the highly successful Vikings (2013–20).

INTRODUCTION

Janet Boyman was a visionary, healer and prophet who practised in Edinburgh for twenty-four years. Her dittay, edited below, is full of remarkable detail about encounters with fairies and other spirits. She provides important evidence for the cult of the ‘seely wights’ – fairy-like nature spirits. She was also involved in the political conspiracy of Sir William Stewart, whose case is edited above in the present volume.

The main dittay edited below calls Boyman's crime ‘diabolicall’, but there is otherwise nothing in these documents about the Devil. Her spirits are not equated with the Devil or demons, and there is no sign of the demonic pact that would later attain such importance in Scottish witchcraft. Instead, the authorities recognised Boyman principally as a practitioner. They initially thought of her as having a ‘trade’, a word used in the draft dittay; the main dittay changed this to ‘craft’. Unlike most healers, she specialised in ‘supernaturall seiknessis’, which presented particular challenges to the practitioner. She found her clients among the local gentry and craftspeople.

Boyman was a practitioner of charisma and power. She possessed the power to summon and command spirits, unlike most visionaries who waited passively for their spirit-guides to appear to them. She could also induce visionary experiences in her clients, warning them that strange experiences were ahead and instructing them how to cope. In the detailed case that opens the accusations against her below, Alan Anderson and his wife reported experiencing frightening nocturnal noises after they had carried out a ritual that she prescribed. Most of the information in the dittay comes from Boyman's confession, but some material in this initial case seems to derive from statements by Anderson's unnamed wife, Boyman's client over several years.

The centenary of Charles Villiers Stanford's death in 1924 occurred in the aftermath of an official ‘Decade of Centenaries’ sponsored by the Irish Government between 2013 and 2023. In that enterprise, commemoration became an issue of controversy, as various acts of remembrance were contested as well as celebrated, while some projects were even abandoned altogether. As the sociologist Linda Connolly observed of these controversies, ‘commemoration in civil society is still contentious, hierarchical, politicised and sometimes forceful’. Remembrance is not always fond. In the case of Ireland, it is frequently divisive, as certain aspects of the ‘Decade’ itself made clear. This is especially the case when remembrance shades into reclamation, as when the ‘Decade of Centenaries’ sought to include the Royal Irish Constabulary within its purview, an ambition which it ultimately relinquished in the face of vigorous criticism, much of it voiced on social media.

In this essay, I would like to make a case for reclaiming Stanford that bears this distinction between remembrance and reclamation in mind. Stanford has been remembered in his centenary year: some of his major works have been professionally recorded for the first time; performances of his operas, choral-orchestral works and chamber music have been given in Dublin, Wexford, Waterford and elsewhere in Ireland, and a biography of the composer, first published in 2002, has been revised and reissued as a volume in the Irish Musical Studies series.

On 29 December 1170 Thomas Becket (1118–70), the archbishop of Canterbury, primate of England, and legate of the Apostolic See, was murdered in his cathedral. The canonisation of Becket by the Cistercian Pope Alexander III (r. 1159–81) on 21 February 1173 was one of several prominent canonisations undertaken during his papacy. Becket's own canonisation occurred during the Wendish Crusades (1147–85), a period when the Danes, the northern Church, and the Cistercian order partnered with the papacy to subjugate heretics and to convert non-Christians east of the Elbe River along the southern and eastern shores of the Baltic Sea [Fig. 5.1]. Becket's cult spread across the Latin West, including the medieval kingdoms of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, where it was fundamentally influenced by political developments in the Baltic region.

Instrumental practice, based on an understanding of the hand's anatomy, approved and annotated by M. Cruveilher, adopted exclusively by M. Thalberg

Berlioz takes the opportunity of this review to state his attitude towards rules in music. His discussion of the New Method involves physiological details that really call for illustrations and is omitted.

The exact sciences have not always made a positive contribution to music when they have decided to offer their help; far from it. In the study of harmony, for instance, the calculations of mathematicians have come up with theories that are, to say the least, strange, producing results which music had little incentive to welcome, and with which the ear had little reason to be satisfied. We may even suspect that quite often it was disgusted, since the calculating harmonists, instead of initially consulting the ear at the start of their experiments in harmonic progression, paid no attention to its feelings and failed almost entirely to consult it. We know what a maze of errors Rameau got himself into with his system based on the resonance of chords. What trouble that great composer gave himself by trying to use a fundamental bass to justify agglomerations of sounds which, regarded as real chords, shocked those of a delicate disposition, or by explaining others that sounded perfectly good and had no need of such explanations! He even reached the point of denying the evidence of his own ears and rejecting chords incompatible with his system, however good they might be, while in the case of others he remained in a state of total indecision, of absolute doubt.

Introduction

In this chapter I discuss three Finnish artists-pedagogues and examine how they applied the ideas of Émile Jaques-Dalcroze in their work at the music institution that was first called the Helsinki Music Institute (founded in 1882), then the Helsinki Conservatory (1924), and finally Sibelius Academy (1939–, later referred to as SibA in the text) – nowadays the only university-level music institution in Finland. These artists are Maggie Gripenberg, a student of Jaques-Dalcroze, Ilta Leiviskä, a student of Gripenberg, and Inkeri Simola- Isaksson, a student of Leiviskä.

Gripenberg applied Jaques-Dalcroze's ideas in her work as a dancer, choreographer, and dance pedagogue. She initiated the teaching of Dalcrozian rhythmics and movement at SibA and was a pioneer of modern dance, which eventually came to be accepted as a respected art form in Finland. Leiviskä was a dance artist, choreographer, and music pedagogue who continued Gripenberg's work and developed her ideas for the benefit of a wider range of participants. Simola-Isaksson was primarily a music educator and a “social musician,” as she called herself, who inspired diverse crowds of people to make music through movement and is considered a pioneer of Finnish musicand- movement education. She expanded the Dalcroze-based practice in terms of content areas and styles of music and movement. In addition, she developed the practice according to the needs of general music education and a variety of other educational, social, and therapeutic contexts, always stressing the inclusiveness of practices and the positive experiences of participants.

I. Introduction

Elizabeth Bradbourne, around 1600, dashed off an irate letter to her “loving sonne Francis,” accusing him of spreading “false lyes” about her. Believing herself “curste” for having given birth to sons who maligned her publicly, she told him not to visit – the sight of him would only “vex me and doe me noe good.” Francis Bradbourne, in turn, roundly reprimanded his mother: “for shame good mother” he fumed, rather than accusing her sons of faults, she should “speake of yor chyldren wele that th[ey] may fear you and love you and hard[en] not their hartes agaysnt you.” A furious Sir Richard Hawkesworth declared in 1635: “if my daughter take these vyolent courses and not foullow the advyse of her lo[ving] father, I will never give her any thinge that I can by any means hinder of.” Cecily Tufton loved both her husband, Christopher, 1st Viscount Hatton and his close friend Charles Lyttelton, but in different ways. At her death a grief-stricken Charles confessed to his friend that he had hoped for what “she would ever acknowledge was due to you.” “Loving” sons accused of slandering their mother, “loving” fathers threatening everything in their power to harm their children, love deserved, and love due. The sentiments expressed above seem to be far removed from those of the Anglican minister John Kettlewell who defined love as “all kindness, benevolence, and good nature.”

Émile Jaques-Dalcroze's eurhythmics had a significant influence on art forms involving movement in Russia before and after the 1917 Revolution, a period of intensive artistic experiment. Jaques-Dalcroze sought to teach musicianship through developing sensitivity to rhythm and pitch, using movements of the whole body and aiming to make the musical experience open to all. Rhythmic gymnastics or rhythmics, as the work was usually termed in Russia, contributed to mainstream and avant-garde arts developments, then the revolutionary project of arts for the masses. Rhythmics fermented experiment in dance, stage-movement work, and musicality in theatre, as excitement grew about the potential for rhythm to be applied to all arts as a principle uniting internal and external phenomena, verifiable by natural science. Rhythmics, as artistic expression through movement, was important to the rejection or deconstruction of the “word” that characterized the modernist era, in the context of ideas such as Friedrich Nietszche's questioning of the idea that “truth” could be expressed by language, and Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure's assertion of the existence of a science of signs going beyond verbal language. In the wake of Charles Darwin's theory of a universal expression of emotions, claims were made for universality of meaning in gesture. This underpinned the work of François Delsarte (1811–71), whose codification of gestural signs as emotional and spiritual expression, based in his experience of singing and oratory, became influential in theatre and dance in Europe, America, and Russia and was known to Jaques-Dalcroze.

Subscribing to the belief that languages of the body could express what had previously been inexpressible, Prince Sergei Volkonsky (1860–1937) was a key figure in developing rhythmics in actor training.

We are reaching the end of what we may call the “essential” life of Las Casas that earned him – without a doubt – the title of iconic figure of his generation. He lived to 1566 and his life from the end of the Great Debate of 1550 to then is filled – as his life always seemed “filled” – with many other activities. But they were all defined, more or less, by what he had done or lived to then in defense of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas. Let's briefly examine his activities to do justice to an immensely full life, and, as you will see, still then intensely engaged to make things right in his world even as he faced death.

He wrote with a passion, everywhere he went, it sometimes seemed, especially in the Indies, with a small army of followers carrying his papers and documents across the mountains and deserts of the viceroyalty of New Spain. His principal work, no doubt, was his Brief History of the Destruction of Indies. His multivolume History of the Indies, composed as he traveled and worked in the Indies and Spain, was a grand expression of the overall history of the region in the age of the Conquest. These writings are covered below in Writings and Biographies: “The Multiple Personalities of Bartolomé de las Casas, or a Tour of His Biographies and Biographers.”

Perhaps the earliest notice of Las Casas by scholars other than those from Spain and the colonies of the New World was with respect to his early recommendation to import some African slaves from Spain to relieve the killing demands on the Taíno Indians of Hispaniola. Las Casas has been pilloried ever since by his critics for advocating one form of slavery to relieve another.