INTRODUCTION

The presbytery of Stirling compiled dossiers of evidence against three accused witches early in 1633: Janet Taylor from the parish of Alloa, Marion Mathie from the burgh of Stirling, and Helen Keir from the parish of Clackmannan. All three places were within a few miles of each other. Taylor and Keir lived in Clackmannanshire rather than Stirlingshire, but the presbytery's jurisdiction crossed the county boundary. As we shall see, all three were investigated and tried in Stirling itself. The investigation provides an example of how a presbytery approached community witches and magical practitioners.

Janet Taylor's dossier is the longest, and she also appears again in the dossiers of Mathie and Keir. She was a magical practitioner, or ‘charmer’, with a wide repertoire of healing practices. Some of her rituals were everyday ones, using nail parings, the client's clothes, or south-running water, but she ranged more widely, and her interrogators took an interest in several details. She recited a verbal charm mentioning a hedgehog, which they wrote down in full. She had a healing stone that she had brought from the Highlands long ago. She named the person who had taught her healing, John Dow Buchanan, who may well have been a Highlander; he had a partly Gaelic name (‘Dow’, or dubh, meant ‘black’), and there were Buchanans in the south-western Highlands. Her interrogators questioned her as to how her rituals worked; she explained that she had a special ‘charge’ to heal. She seems to have had a good reputation, having by her own account practised for thirty years.

The interrogators seem to have been willing to accept some evidence of Taylor's healing without trying to reinterpret it as overtly harmful or demonic.

The Russian composer Mikhail Ivanovitch Glinka (1804–57) had received a note from Berlioz three weeks earlier asking for details of his musical background. He evidently responded in some detail.

We French are rather inclined, in Paris especially, to base our reception of foreign composers of an unfamiliar type on a kind of prejudice, the injustice of which is always recognised too late to have any impact. Our opinion of them is settled in advance, an opinion that's either friendly or hostile, according to our surroundings, habits, and ideas, and we go along with it initially without any reasons to justify it, though with the possibility of changing it if we absolutely have to. So that if we mention a new Italian composer to the vast majority of Parisian artists, they’ll think, even if they don't say so, that he must be some mediocre cavatina merchant, unable to string three chords together properly, the servile copyist of copyists who imitated the imitators of Rossini, unaware of what's happening in the great musical world, as though it were some tune sung around Juggernaut's pagoda and that experiencing it was best avoided by anyone not wanting to be dubbed a stick-inthe- mud. As a result, the greatest Italian composers could suffer this kind of unwarranted stigma if they arrive here out of the blue. On the other hand, in the world of elegance, that of soirées with singing where the word ‘concert’ means the more or less grotesque performance of half a dozen Italian arias, duets, trios or whatever, with piano accompaniment, the new arrival would, on the contrary, be presumed a delightful composer, full of tuneful melodies, and deserving of the encouragement and support of everyone who loves and honours music.

Franziska woke up early, sat down at the open window and looked out over the lake. It was encircled by high mountains on the right, and on the left, lines of hills, with villages and vineyards. One of these hills, the highest of them, was the Castle Hill, whose steep descent, at least at the front, made it appear even higher and more imposing than it was. It marked exactly the point at which the hilly terrain began to turn mountainous. At its foot was a meandering brook, and Franziska, wishing to see where it began, traced its course upward and realized that this was the stream, descending from the top of the Castle Hill, that Hannah had searched out the night before.

Having thus gained her bearings, she turned back into her room in order to acquaint herself, gradually and at her leisure, with the space where she was now to live. The furniture was old but well preserved, and she found every piece interesting, especially a rococo chest, richly decorated with tortoiseshell and large gold drawer handles. Above the chest was a walnut etagere for books, on whose top shelf all sorts of Meissen and Chinese porcelain stood, including two small figurines on the left and right. She set their heads in motion and watched them nodding solemnly. Then, out of curiosity, she took down a few volumes.

A few prisoners discovered that giving information about the British to the French could help prove that they were not British. Desperate to get out of a prison depot, or to avoid being sent to one, they revealed whatever they knew about France's enemy.

The Geneva Convention on the Treatment of Prisoners of War was nearly a century and a half in the future. Article Seventeen of that convention states that

No physical or mental torture, nor any other form of coercion, may be inflicted on prisoners of war to secure from them information of any kind whatever. Prisoners of war who refuse to answer may not be threatened, insulted, or exposed to any unpleasant or disadvantageous treatment of any kind.

The belligerents of the European and American wars of the early nineteenth century would have laughed at such restriction. Brutality toward prisoners of war was exhibited on all sides. Seamen prisoners were starved into signing on to French privateers, heaped together in filth and misery on British hulks, left to starve and freeze, were severely beaten (as was Francis Felton) or shut in the dungeons and prisons of their captors. Though it was standard behaviour, the captors usually had enough sense of what human decency should be to have been ashamed and not to have recorded their own brutality. The documents do not state that the American seamen were beaten or forced to give information but it may have been so. Alternatively, their experiences of forced labour or floggings on board Royal Navy vessels (of which many accounts have been recorded) may have been such that they willingly did what harm they could to the British cause.

Berlioz takes the opportunity of this occasion to offer his views on the current state of French music.

In the absence of M. Dufaure, this occasion was presided over by the Directeur des Beaux-Arts, M. Charles Blanc. The speech he made at the start of the meeting was reckoned to be full of sense and relevance; it was notable too for an accurate judgment of the power of modern music and the importance it is tending to have among civilized peoples. M. Charles Blanc did not fail to underline the role played by music in those great political and social upheavals known as revolutions. Unfortunately, he was unable to say – if music has indeed contributed almost everywhere to the progress of those revolutions by stirring up the enthusiasm and the good or bad passions of the populace – whether it is equally the case that those revolutions have contributed to the progress of music. As it is, we have only too many reasons for believing the contrary, and the following passage of M. Blanc's speech, which was applauded by the whole room, explains to what extent the new state of things had given rise to fears for the most precious of our musical institutions: ‘I was present, gentlemen, at the Assembly when, considering the Conservatoire, it refused, when the question was raised by one of its members, to discuss your needs. At a time when circumstances demand so many sacrifices, the Assembly has left your funding intact, wishing to prove by that what generosity you can rely on when times become more prosperous’.

Alcohol in South Africa

The World Health Organisation reports that 70 per cent of South Africans aged fifteen and older say they do not drink alcohol. You might find this hard to believe on a township weekend. The WHO estimates the per capita South African consumption for those fifteen years and older is 9.3 litres of pure alcohol per year, compared to the global average of 6.4 litres per year. Among those who do drink, the average consumption in 2016 was 29.9 litres, with males drinking more than twice as much as females (37.5 and 13.7 litres respectively). The WHO goes on to report that South Africa is a country with one of the riskiest drinking cultures. Almost one in two men and one in five women who drink, binge drink; that is, consume large amounts of alcohol over a short period. Binge drinking is a significant factor in violence, road accidents, and disease.

In South Africa, liquor legally refers to any drink with more than 1 per cent alcohol, not only distilled spirits. I use the terms alcohol and liquor interchangeably for all alcoholic drinks. Alcohol is widely used in South Africa for recreational and social purposes. Drinking is a major feature of township life. It is an important social lubricant and pastime, particularly for men. Indeed, drinking together is the primary form of socialisation for many township men. The most consumed drink is beer. This is typically sold in 750ml quarts or 1-litre bottles, though a range of other sized bottles and cans are available, especially for higher-end premium brands.

Once war had been declared against France, the King signed the Prize Act into law. It was then immediately proclaimed through the London Gazette, the usual official channel for dissemination of information. The Prize Act laid down the proportions into which any benefit from taking a prize would be divided. The elements were:

• • Once any capture had been judged a lawful prize, all benefit went to those on board the captor

• • Five pounds would be paid for every one of the enemy alive at the start of the engagement, without deductions

• • The bounty would be divided into eight parts, the captain receiving three eighths unless he was under the command of a flag officer, who had one of his eighths

• • One eighth to be divided amongst the lieutenants, the master and the captain of marines

• • One eighth to be divided amongst the warrant officers

• • One eighth to be divided amongst the inferior warrant officers

• • Two eighths to be divided amongst the able and ordinary seamen and everyone else

• • A list of everyone on board the captor had to be made, and checked for Accuracy

• • An agent had to be appointed to act for the ship's company

• • The produce of the agent's labour was to be distributed in the same Proportions

• • The geographic location of a flag officer entitled to a one eighth portion was laid down

The idea of artistic expertise as a commodity has been at the heart of this study. In previous decades, gold, silver, silks and precious objects in metal or ivory had formed the main currency of exchange, mostly travelling northwards within Iberia and across the Pyrenees. Such portable objects and their potential agency have dominated many studies of art in this region. In this book, expertise, in the person of the artist, has been viewed similarly as a possible gift, to be exchanged or loaned, usually for a specific project. This hypothesis has implications for the mobility of artists and for the dynamics of transmission. It contests the idea that artists wandered of their own free will looking for work. It proposes instead that they were sent and usually returned when projects were completed. Artists may well have recognised such constraints as an essential aspect of their position and used atlantes, especially chained examples, as a way of expressing this.

This view has provided a rationale for the isolated and eccentric nature of the corpus of works studied here. It might be argued that low survival rate over centuries could account for this – and that is surely part of the answer – but time-limited and project-focused visits by a series of fully formed sculptors provide another explanation for such varied and accomplished works as Ona's refectory, the cloisters of Pamplona and Silos, the ivory plaques of the Passion and Resurrection, the sarcophagi of Dona Sancha and Dona Blanca, and the apostle columns of Antealtares. Together, these works constitute a middle phase of Romanesque art in Iberia, which lacks both the experimental nature of the early phase up to c.1100 and the more identifiable regional character of late Romanesque c.1200. Doubtless some will argue about the scope of this corpus and wish to exclude or include particular works.

Elizabeth Montagu (1718–1800) was a pioneering writer, literary critic, businesswoman and salon hostess. Her vast correspondence with leading politicians, intellectuals, writers and artists spans nearly the whole of the eighteenth century and represents an important historical corpus for literary and historical scholars.

Montagu was prolific in her letter writing. From her teens until her eighties, she dedicated some hours every day to composing letters, be they virtual essays about literature and the arts to British intellectuals, business letters to the stewards of her estates and architects of her mansions, or personal letters to her extended family. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a limited selection of her letters was published, but they were heavily edited and censored, and at times inaccurately transcribed. Until now, most scholarship on the Bluestockings has had to rely on these unsatisfactory sources.

The surviving letters are scattered through a variety of archives, with the vast majority in the Huntington Library, San Marino, California, which holds 6,923 documentary items, including letters from Montagu's correspondents. There are hundreds more Montagu letters in the British Library, the Bodleian Library, and in UK and US universities. To date, EMCO has identified twenty-five libraries and special collections that hold letters by Elizabeth Montagu, as well as letters in private collections. This makes it difficult for researchers to access the complete collection.

The concert on 7 February included Haydn's Symphony no. 102, two choruses from Handel's Samson and Alexander's Feast, and two arias from Rinaldo and Scipione sung by Pauline Viardot, who also sang an aria from [Mozart’s] Così fan tutte. It ended with Prosper Dérivis and the chorus in the excerpt from [Gluck’s] Iphigénie en Tauride.

Hunters know how distressing and irritating it is to walk on ploughed land in pouring rain, when you’ve already gone twenty miles, when your game bag and your stomach are empty after you’ve had the stupidity to miss a deer; and when water has seeped into your gun barrel, the dogs insist, despite this concatenation of daunting circumstances, on finding the scent of any number of game. You come and go, up to your knees in mud, stumbling with every movement. But a dog has stopped dead, you must keep going; a hare breaks cover, you fire, the gun jams! The rain falls even more heavily! And not a tree to shelter you, not a drop of brandy to warm you up; the flask broke when you fell in the last ditch! And you think of the jokes waiting for you when you get back: ‘Some hunter! He covered thirty miles on foot and brought back a chaffinch!’ etc., etc.

Well, all that's nothing compared with the trouble critics have with various concert notices, the most positive and instant result of which is to upset everybody. You have to say something about a work, new or old, about a singer or an instrumentalist.