Fresh from King Edward IV's (r.1461–70/1471–83) victory over Richard Neville, earl of Warwick, at Barnet on 14 April 1471, a paean of celebratory verses encouraged the Yorkists’ former foes to change sides for the decisive battle that was to follow at Tewkesbury. ‘Turn again [Conuertimini], ye comyns, & drede your kyng’ ran the refrain:

The commons were urged to revert to their former allegiance. Edward IV's triumph flouted public opinion which, in the previous year, had been so decisively opposed to him. In 1470 Warwick's invasion had attracted overwhelming support and most of Edward's supporters deserted his cause. The king, along with key allies, fled into exile. Edward's recovery owed nothing to public backing. Similarly, a decade before in 1460 and two decades before in 1450, the populace had swept Lancastrian governments out of London and the south-east. Each time the commons were aroused by publicity that focused on their particular grievances and aspirations, as well as articulating the remedies. The people took to politics during the Wars of the Roses, sometimes decisively. A series of kings in 1475, 1483 and in 1489 were wary of them. How the people were mobilised by effective propaganda is the theme of this essay.

The writings of Caesarius (470–542), bishop of Arles from 502 and papal vicar for Gaul from 514, had a powerful influence on Anglo-Saxon thought and literature, both English and Latin, Insular and Continental. To mention just some of the best-known examples, a long sequence of phrases from his Sermo 18 on good works is incorporated into the chapter on converting to God in Alcuin's De virtutibus et vitiis. The chilling ‘dry bones speak’ exemplum in his Sermo 31, based on an ancient memento mori distich inscribed on Roman tombs (‘What thou art now, famous in the world, traveller, I have been, and what I am now, thou shalt be’) was adapted by the authors of at least six Old English homilies. His Sermo 33 was the very first text of any kind to articulate a clear distinc tion between voluntary charitable almsgiving (elemosina) and divinely mandated regular tithing (decimae), a distinction that had a far-reaching impact on tithing legislation, including the English law code known as I Athelstan. His denunciation of those who give heed to omens or who seek out sorcerers, soothsayers and fortune-tellers, as expressed in his Sermo 54, is quoted by Boniface in a letter to Pope Zacharias dated 742 and is translated by Ælfric in his sermon On Auguries. The dramatic Doomsday address of Christ to sinners before they are cast into hell in his Sermo 57, an address now often referred to as Christ's Ego te, homo speech, is repurposed in at least six Old English homilies and in the Exeter Book poem Christ III.

Berlioz was fairly unusual among European composers of the time in finding the English in general musical, well organized, and willing to pay for their enjoyment. He might have been pleased had he been able to read a passage in Thackeray's Vanity Fair (1847) describing a ballad sung by his anti-heroine Becky Sharp: it is ‘not, be it said, very brilliant, in a musical point of view, but contains numberless good-natured, simple appeals to the affections, which people understood better than the milk-and-water lagrime, sospiri, and felicità of the eternal Donizettian music with which we are favoured nowadays’. This article begins with a review of the first appearance of the tenor Claude Marié de l’Isle, omitted here.

The revival of Fernand Cortez, which in any case would have caused a stir quite apart from the strange legal incident that it provoked, drew a large, attentive audience to the Opéra, curious to test the persistence of its onetime admiration. If the composer could have heard, after the second act, the explosion of bravos that filled the hall and the exclamations of praise that were heard in the corridors, in the public foyer, in the wings, in the dressingrooms of the singers and chorus, in the orchestra, and everywhere, I doubt he would have persisted in his opposition. M. Spontini may be assured (I am at least profoundly convinced of this) that the Opéra's administration may perhaps have staged this revival at rather short notice, but also out of total loyalty and with a sincere desire to promote its success.

The concert at the Conservatoire on 22 April 1838 was the ninth and last of the season. It also included, among other items, excerpts from Méhul's operas Joseph and Le jeune Henri, movements from Beethoven's Septet, and a scene from Mozart's Idomeneo. The short final passage dealing with these is omitted here.

The performance was of Beethoven's Eroica Symphony [no. 3]. The first movement filled me with inexpressible admiration. A feeling of deep, one might say ‘antique’, sadness was dominant throughout, and I have never better understood or admired the grandeur and power of music. On the other hand, when the last chord had sounded and this audience, which passes for the best educated and most responsive of all Paris audiences, seemed to have been so little affected by such an outpouring of nobility, of melancholy, of sublime fury, of grace and pride, I could not help but weep for the unhappiness of the composer who, afire with such enthusiasm, could not make himself understood, even by an elite audience, to the point of elevating them to the heights of his inspiration. It was all the sadder because this same audience, on other occasions, comes alight, their hearts beating and weeping with him. They exhibit true, lively passion for some of his other compositions which, it's true, are equally admirable but not more beautiful than this one: they appreciate the true value of the A minor Adagio of the Seventh Symphony [sic: it is an Allegretto], the Allegretto scherzando of the Eighth, the finale of the Fifth and the scherzo of the Ninth; they even seemed deeply moved by the funeral march of the one mentioned here [the Eroica]; but as for the first movement, it's impossible to be mistaken.

A week later, they were once again settled in the old Petofy mansion, and on the very next day, the count received a note delivered by Andras, the intermediary between the two wings, in which Judith briefly stated that she had spoken with Franziska. Franziska had not seemed greatly surprised, or at least had been completely calm, and was now awaiting his visit.

It was eleven o’clock when the note came into his hands, and before an hour had passed, he was on his way to Salesiner Street. Life on the fashionable Ringstrasse felt even more carefree than usual today, and as he went from the Old Town into the adjoining district, the building itself, standing there in the midday sunshine, seemed to betoken only happiness and joy.

Upstairs he met Hannah, who, with some slight embarrassment, invited him in. The young lady was at rehearsal; but she would be back very soon.

The room into which Hannah led him was the same one in which Franziska had tried to describe the countess's cercle intime, after that first gathering. There was nothing of the boudoir about it, nothing of that atmosphere of Russian patchouli generally associated with the living arrangements of young actresses. Rather, there was a typically North German simplicity and order and a cleanliness that might have come from Holland itself. On the table by the sofa was a marble bowl with vine leaves and strawberries in it and, next to that, a jewelry stand, left there as if by chance, or perhaps in haste, as if its owner had spent too long getting dressed.

The relationship between land-holding magnates and urban communities in England and Normandy was always fraught but never more so than during war time. Fortified urban centers were key strategic objectives, vital to the projection of military force and the defense of territory, but rulers could not always rely on the citizens’ loyalty as they could with their own garrisons. This essay will analyze incidents when urban communities shifted their loyalty during war time and helped attackers to gain access to their fortifications, often in opposition to the garrison of their own citadel, and the motivations that chroniclers ascribed to them. This will reveal the complex political relationships that existed between rulers and urban citizens and how communities in key strategic locations, such as the Franco-Norman frontier, tried to exploit conflicts between polities for their own gain.

European medieval society had a particular horror of treachery. Famously, the lowest circle of hell in Dante's Inferno is reserved for traitors, where Satan's three mouths chew forever on the bodies of Judas Iscariot, Brutus and Cassius. In a culture structured around the bonds of mutual obligation between lord and vassal, master and servant, king and subject, the person who violated that bond was the most heinous criminal, guilty of attacking the fabric of society itself. Moreover, as these bonds were often confirmed with a religious oath or vow, the traitor offended both the earthly and divine order. Treachery was not just criminal, it was sacrilegious.

The Pilgrim's Guide lingers on descriptions of sculpture around the portals of the cathedral at Santiago de Compostela. By contrast, it has nothing to say of the spectacular theophanic tympana completed at Cluny, Autun, Vezelay, Sainte-Foy at Conques, Saint-Pierre at Moissac, Beaulieusur- Dordogne and Paris. It does not even mention the Ascension depicted on the Porte Miegeville at Toulouse. Indeed, beyond his detailed account of the cathedral at Santiago de Compostela, the author of the Guide acknowledges few architectural achievements elsewhere. He is content to refer only to the occasional “immense” basilica on the other side of the Pyrenees, which may also be “of admirable workmanship”. Yet, around the time of the compilation of the Codex Calixtinus, an unusual number of churches in Iberia received new facades. In this chapter, I shall argue that they can be seen as reflections of changing institutional identities, parallel to foundation legends and forged charters. Their archives or scriptoria often inform these displays. The backdrop for the new facades was an architectural landscape that preserved a large number of buildings, including palaces and mosques built by the taifa kingdoms and a significant number of Christian structures from the ninth, tenth and eleventh centuries.

Popular culture's interest in the Middle Ages has rarely been as great as it is currently. Fantasy adapts and popularises motifs, archetypes and epistemes of medieval literature and culture. Yet stories such as The Lord of the Rings, The Once and Future King and A Song of Ice and Fire neither revive the Middle Ages as an historical period nor have an interest in a scientifically legitimised representation of the period. In fact, fantasy has a special relationship to the Middle Ages, as ‘[n]eomedievalism finds a way of clinging to the past by rejecting the “history”, the alterity, the time and space that separated it from its desired object and bringing it into the present’. In epic fantasy, medieval motifs, narratives and inventories are removed from their original contexts, recombined and thus transformed within modern narratives and aesthetics. The ‘hyperreal, neomedieval texts’ created produce a simulacrum that appears authentically medieval to the reader. This is how neomedieval narrative worlds are formed: they are not trying to be ‘the Middle Ages’. Rather, they create a ‘secondary Middle Ages’, which in various media (such as literature, film and TV shows) frequently achieve top positions on bestseller lists, in download charts and at the cinema box office. The secondary Middle Ages of fantasy are popular.

This neomedieval fantasy frequently combines elements from medieval literature and culture with key themes within contemporary social discourse. Neomedieval worlds, such as Arda, Gramarye or Westeros, reflect on race and diversity as well as on female agency (gender) or question fair political governance.

I returned to a very different campus in the fall of 1994. My original colleagues had been my musical family of origin at the college. Even those who were my own age had been my mentors, giving me a footing in a way of life that included composing, performing, and teaching.

Like me, many faculty felt set adrift by the administration in a situation in which we were simultaneously bereft and also singled out as fortunate, or worse, complicit, in something brutal.

I met with all of the music students. My classroom was packed, with at least seventy-five students crammed into the small space. No one had expressed any sympathy for their grief, their grievances, their feelings of having been betrayed, their concerns. It was astonishing.

For a while, I was like a pontoon bridge over which people walked as they established a new campsite across a ravine. I held the music program together on both ends, hanging onto the spirit and practices of the past while trying to facilitate the new. Some changes were for the good, others I resisted. Some of the changes I advocated for didn't happen. Some of my resistance I later regretted. Gradually, I just became one of many faculty members, and no longer a pontoon bridge.

It took many years for the music program to fully rebuild itself. When it did, it was on a new basis, suiting a new time.

A lot of excellent composers were essentially self-taught, Poulenc, Schoenberg, and Takemitsu among them. Bernstein was highly schooled in piano, conducting, and orchestration, but apart from receiving personal critiques from Copland (“This passage isn't you”), he evolved as a composer without interference. In fact, he mainly used his counterpoint classes with Arthur Tillman Merritt at Harvard as a stimulus to write his own spiky, dissonant, and rather Coplandesque piano pieces.

On one occasion, when Merritt pointed out that what Bernstein was playing did not fulfill the assignment, he pounded his fist on the piano and said, “Well, I like it!”

As someone who has now tried to “teach” composition for roughly fifty years, I would say that composers need information and practice most of all: information, practice, and support. Much of the information they need comes from hearing what they write. No teacher can tell them more than their own ears can. And if their ears learn nothing from hearing their own work, then no teacher can help them. But aside from information and practice and support, composers mainly need respect (including respectful listening on the part of the teacher) and to be left alone.

Erudition in music is a good thing, but music itself is not academic. It is actual.

Study that is beneficial tends to be at an angle to original work: playing, listening, score study, analysis of other (mainly older) music, ear training, counterpoint and harmony study, and many other kinds of practice and immersion in the substance of the art. Listening as broadly as possible is a good idea. You never know where the tentacles of a mind will stick: it could be in the Middle Ages, or in Indonesia, or in the West Indies, or Appalachia.

On May 23, 1889, Brahms received a telegram from Carl Petersen, the mayor of Hamburg. This brought word of the Hamburg Parliament's decision to confer on him the right of honorary citizenship (Ehrenbürgerrecht). The composer gratefully acknowledged receipt of this news by return wire and then, on May 30, followed up with Petersen in a heartfelt letter of gratitude. Playing a discreet role behind the scenes was Hans von Bülow, a long-time friend and champion of Brahms who was then serving as the conductor of the city's Abonnement Concerte. In late March the archivist of the Hamburg Senate, Otto Beneke, prepared a memorandum of recommendation for that body's consideration—likely ghostwritten by Bülow—in which he vouched for Brahms's artistic significance by referring to his sterling reputation in the leading music journals and encyclopedias of the day and suggested that the conferral of an honorary citizenship might induce the composer to write a new work specifically for the inauguration of the city's new city hall, which was then in the early stages of construction. On April 26, the Senate submitted its formal nomination to the Hamburg Parliament. Word of this soon leaked in both the political and musical press, and on May 8 the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik published the text of the nomination in full.

The long eighteenth century provides the setting for countless studies of gambling by historians, cultural theorists, literary critics, philosophers, and sociologists. Champions and detractors of wagering and games of chance, from rulers and local administrators to public intellectuals and average citizens, contributed to the era of play that grew out of the Enlightenment. Around the middle of the century, the expansion of lotteries across Europe exemplified both the ascent of reason and the enduring appeal of superstition. As rational beings weighed the costs and benefits of wagering, the contrast between homo economicus and homo ludens blurred. At the same time, unchecked Spiellust fueled with a belief in luck could quickly be transformed into Spielsucht. Gambling has always been about calculated risks, but by the eighteenth century, the calculation of probabilities and emphasis on mathematical outcomes augmented how gambles were evaluated. Fate gave way to chance and, by the end of the long century, the calculability of accidents. The contributions to this special section address gambling and its various forms— cards, dice, lotteries—in the work of marquee authors and important yet lesser-known figures. Drawing on a variety of approaches, the essays analyze the intersecting topics of play within limits, managing information overload, the subjective experience of gambling in the age of reason, and fallibility in decision-making. The authors demonstrate how major cultural, political, and scientific developments across Europe shaped approaches to contingency and risk in Germany during this period. Since the Age of Goethe, forms of gambling have not changed significantly. However, technological advances have transformed where and how bets are placed as well as the speed with which one learns the results.

Coming Out to Battle As Las Casas “came out” of his outpost on the north coast of Española in the early 1530s, he came out fighting. In 1533 the judges of the Audiencia of Santo Domingo accused him of preaching sermons while prior at Puerto Plata, “prejudicial to the service of His Majesty and people of this land.”1 Preposterous, Las Casas responded with a Pauline-style defense that sounds whiney, and self-serving at first glance.

By now we know that Bartolomé was no loving, saintly, quiet individual given to piety, forgiveness, and suffering in silence. In a long letter to the Council of the Indies sent in 1534, he recounted his past endeavors, over many years, in the service of the Crown, trying to protect the Indians, although “now I’m getting old, and, to tell the truth, I’m a bit tired.” But that was just the prolog to the letter. He then lambasted the council. Perhaps he was imagining his smug, self-righteous adversaries in Guatemala, or Mexico, or Spain reading this, and so wrote with special force, his concentration probably scaring off even his closest retainers used to puttering around his quarters.

“But, for the glory of God and the service of Your Majesty, and Your Excellencies, I cannot stop.” Indeed. He was coming out swinging.

“Why, in your service, I have not only done so much on this (Española] island, but also specially in securing all of the island of Cuba [emphasis added] and subjecting it to your Royal Service.”