Here, in the first two paragraphs of a much longer review, is Berlioz once more campaigning for composers’ rights … for which a useful German word is ‘Werktreue’.

Let's climb the Capitol and give thanks to the gods! A great event took place in the first part of this concert. It was a veritable proclamation of principle; someone had the nerve to recognize that performers owe fidelity and respect to the great masters; that it is not their job, as interpreters, to alter and distort the original offered for their interpretation. Finally, to sum up, here was the brutal frankness of confessing this awkward but unarguable fact: there is no conductor, violinist, flautist, horn player, nor even a drummer, capable of giving Beethoven lessons in orchestration. Maybe one day it’ll happen: but for the moment this precious teacher is nowhere to be found.

Indeed, let the future decide, for better or worse! Let's go for it! ‘Fortune favours the brave!’ Whoever risks nothing has nothing! After all, the public won't eat us: LET's PLAY THE FIFTH SYMPHONY WITHOUT CORRECTIONS; let's keep the contrabasses at the start of the Scherzo; be prepared! It's twenty-two years they’ve been kept on the leash, those wretched contrabasses; twenty-two years during which the Société des concerts of the Paris Conservatoire have been giving Europe the fine example of enlightened support to the glory of poor Beethoven, who had used basses there to such poor effect and what's more, impossible to play. But now, let's see what that’ll produce, let's light the fuse of this bomb.

Before Drab there was Winters. In the 1930s, Yvor Winters (1900–68) was Stanford's most famous English professor. A poet and critic, Winters was married to Janet Lewis, whose novel The Wife of Martin Guerre (1941) was partly based on a false conviction that was overturned after Winters wrote a pamphlet about the case, a murder on the Stanford campus. “Poetry,” famously, “makes nothing happen,” but poets do, sometimes. Winters was also a moralist. His favorite Wordsworth poem, one of his colleagues told me, was not “Daffodils” or “Tintern Abbey,” but “Ode to Duty.” He was friends, for a time, with Hart Crane, but the friendship foundered because Winters didn't think that Crane was taking his social responsibility, as a poet, seriously. It's almost unimaginable today, but in 1939 Winters persuaded Chicago's Poetry magazine, where he had multiple contacts, to publish a three-part essay, “The 16th Century Lyric in English.” It argued that the best poets of the 1500s were not, in fact, Sidney and Spenser – whose charms are “obvious” though “often superficial” – but the school of poets that C. S. Lewis would later label Drab: Barnabe Googe, George Turberville and, soaring over them all like an eagle, George Gascoigne, whose masterpiece, “Gascoigne's Woodmanship,” Winters pronounced “unsurpassed in the century except by a few of the sonnets of Shakespeare.”

Now “Gascoigne's Woodmanship” is a fine poem, a fine poem. But if you had told undergraduate me that Tudor poetry had nothing better to offer than “Gascoigne's Woodmanship,” I would have closed my eyes and thought of Milton.

The sixteenth-century copies of the Espill vary in appearance and use. Some are in near perfect condition, such as BITECA copid 1546 (Valencia, 1561), which is currently housed at the Biblioteca de la Casa Ducal de Alba in Madrid, and bears no signs of readers’ annotations, as if it had sat untouched in the Biblioteca's collection for a long time. Many copies exhibit sparse to modest signs of wear and use, while others are extremely worn, such as BITECA copid 3249 (Valencia, 1531), held at the Arxiu Municipal de Castelló de la Plana, which presents wormholes and readers’ notes. Copid 1546 is marked by opulent, modernist binding in red leather. It is decorated with gold leaf and preserved in a rigid red box, while copid 3249 is bound simply in flexible parchment without ornamentation, except for the book's author and title on the spine, “Roig Llibre de les dones.” Previous owners of the ornate copid 1546 include an anonymous person in 1753 and two others, as indicated by three ex-libris: “Do fr[…] M[…]o[…] 1753,” “Vincencius Borras” (Vicentius Borras?), and the intellectual Vicente Castañeda Alcover (b. 1884–d. 1958), who held a doctorate in law, was a member of the Real Academia de la Historia, and hailed from a family with roots in Valencia, among other biographical details.

Auctions and Auctioneers

The nineteenth century witnessed two related developments that had momentous repercussions for the violin itself and the violin world: the emergence of a thriving market in art and objets d’art, and the growth of the auction as a public means to service this market. With these developments, the violin evolved into a commodity whose value resided less in its costs of production or the sound it emitted than, increasingly, in abstract concepts such as creativity, genius, and ultimately, authenticity. Two of the key actors associated with this change—the auctioneer and the dealer—shared the same retail clientele of players and collectors; they were also equally dependent on makers and restorers to prepare their stock and were both charged with overseeing transfer in ownership of instruments. The striking fact about this new playing field is that value is not only signaled but also created during transfers of this kind.

This succinct entry for October 1, 1853, in Robert Schumann's Haushaltbuch (his household diary) marks the beginning of one of the most celebrated friendships in music history. Its outlines can be found in every book on either Robert Schumann, Clara Schumann or Johannes Brahms, and it has acquired an almost mythic quality. Brahms was twenty and a complete unknown when he turned up on 30 September 1853 more or less unannounced at the Düsseldorf doorstep of the famous composer and his equally famous pianist wife. They weren't in, so he came back the next day, played for them, enchanted them (hence “a genius”), and Robert shortly afterwards announced the arrival of the “young eaglet” to the world in a front-page essay in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik. This article alone could justifiably claim to be the best-known text on music from the mid-19th century. Less than five months later, however, Robert's mental health collapsed. He was placed in an asylum and prevented from seeing his wife again until shortly before his death, two years afterward. Brahms meanwhile rushed back to Düsseldorf to help Clara through the trauma of her husband's incarceration. He fell in love with her and poured his passion into his First Piano Concerto.

Looking briefly at the shipping and navigation laws of the different nations relevant to this study, the United States, France and Britain, is necessary in order to show how American merchant seamen's lives, work and, in some cases, freedom were affected by them. It is not possible, in this chapter, to describe all of the three countries’ maritime laws and treaties, nor would it be particularly helpful in understanding the plight of the American prisoners of war in France. However, a basic survey will help to demonstrate that laws on shipping and commerce affected not only merchants and shipowners but the seamen who operated the vessels and transported the merchandise. Laws that applied to the vessel also applied to the men. If a vessel were operating illegally, for example with false papers, the crew were all considered to be criminals. On a pirate ship, all men, whether forced onto the crew or not, were considered pirates. Whatever his place of birth, a seaman was treated initially as if he were of the same nationality as that of the vessel. Thus, a seaman on a Royal Navy vessel was considered British, even if he were of a different nationality and had been forced onto the vessel. By the same reasoning, all seamen captured on French vessels by the British were treated as if they were French. When wars broke out, vessels of a nationality that may have traded on friendly terms suddenly could have become enemy vessels and their crew enemy seamen. News of changes in laws and even of war travelled slowly and voyages at sea could be long.

What did King Charles the Great or ‘Charlemagne’ (768–814) think of English kings? As his vassals, if we go by his extant letters to the most powerful among them, Offa of Mercia (757–96). In one letter, he asks Offa to have a priest escorted back to his bishop in Ireland. In the other, probably written in early April 796, he alludes to a past ‘foedus’ [treaty] and acknowledges that he is at last replying to the ‘epistolis quae diversis siquidem temporibus per missorum vestrorum manus nobis delatae sunt’ [letters which have been brought to us at various times by the hands of your messengers]. Answering Offa's questions on trade, he reveals here that he has sent some exiles to safety in Rome. Finally, speaking like a king to his margrave, Charlemagne announces that, from treasures recently given him by Lord Jesus (from his victory in Pannonia), he has sent dalmatics and palls to churches in Mercia and Northumbria, and to Offa ‘unum balteum et unum gladium Huniscum et dua pallia sirica’ [a belt, a Hunnish sword, and two silk cloaks]. In return, he asks Offa to organise regular prayers ‘pro nobis nostrisque fidelibus, immo et pro cuncto populo christiano’ [for us and our faithful servants, indeed for all the people of Christ]. Thereafter he calls him the doughtiest patriot and most devout defender of the faith.

No other correspondence with English kings survives from Charles, king of France and patrician of Lombardy and Rome and later crowned emperor in St Peter's on Christmas Day 800.

High Court of Admiralty

A monition was a warning, usually issued by an ecclesiastical court, advising an individual not to commit an offence. However, as issued by the High Court of Admiralty, the warning was that the interested parties should attend the court hearing about to be held. The decision to be made was whether the capture was a legitimate prize and could be condemned, or not and should be returned.

There was a concentration of ecclesiastical lawyers in the City of London, and in the fifteenth century these became loosely associated into a Society which fulfilled the functions of an Inn of Court. Referred to as ‘Doctors of the Arches’ in 1496, the advocates together with a few proctors specialised in canon and civil law. Their ancient home was the church of St Mary-le-Bow, or in Latin, Sancta Maria de Arcubus – the Arches. After the great fire of London in 1666 the premises in which Doctors Commons were based were rapidly rebuilt around two quadrangles, one entered from Great Knightrider Street, the other from St Benet's Hill, with a covered passage connecting them. The new court room was used for the sittings of the Court of Admiralty and of the prerogative Court of Canterbury and the Bishop of London's Consistory Court.

Doctors Commons

No trace of Doctors Commons survives, although the space where the building once stood is just below St Paul's Cathedral.

After more than thirty years of teaching and research, Rolf H. Bremmer Jr retired from Leiden University on the 16th of June, 2017. At Leiden, he had been the occupant of two professorial chairs: ‘Frisian Language and Linguistics’ and ‘English Philology, with a particular focus on the Middle Ages’. An internationally renowned expert in both fields, Bremmer was celebrated for his efforts in Old Frisian studies with a festschrift in 2017 on the occasion of his retirement. The present volume, published for his 75th birthday in 2025, honours the major contributions that Bremmer has made and continues to make to the field of English philology. Bremmer's impressive scholarly output covers not only the history and traditions of Old English philology, but also showcases his keen interest in continually innovative approaches to Anglo-Saxon materials.

Bremmer has shared his respect for tradition and his fascination for methodological innovation with his students, many of whom he inspired to pursue academic careers. His combined interest in philological tradition and methodological innovation is reflected in the topics of his first and last PhD students. Kees Dekker, Bremmer's first doctoral student, wrote his dissertation on the origins of the philological study of Old Germanic languages in the early modern Low Countries, while his last PhD student, Sander Stolk, completed his thesis in 2023 on a Linguistic Linked Data approach to the Thesaurus of Old English, developing a new digital technique for studying Old English language and literature.

Despite the political destabilisation at the beginning of the sixteenth century that resulted from Flodden and the long minority of James V, the king's personal rule during the 1530s quickly sought to re-establish the crown's authority through a course of action that has been represented by Gordon Donaldson as ‘something of a reign of terror’ that betrayed ‘a streak of sadistic cruelty in his nature’. Jamie Cameron points out that it is ‘difficult to find the evidence on which Donaldson builds such a damning and influential verdict’ of James. For Cameron, while the domestic power struggles of the reign were prolonged – lasting at least until the execution of James Hamilton of Finnart in 1540 – the personal rule of James V was also marked by the effective development of the judicial system and the intention to craft a Scottish imperial monarchy. In Cameron's assessment, James V was no more ruthless and effective than many of his forebears, and his reign was marked by tensions both within and outwith Scotland's borders. While Anglo-Scottish relations were tense during the 1520s, by the mid-1530s they had acquired a religious dimension as anti-clerical factions attempted to persuade the king to emulate Henry VIII's assertion of monarchical supremacy over the Church. Aware of England's isolation in Europe following Henry's break with Rome, James adeptly navigated the political landscape by leveraging a Protestant England against a Catholic Europe. James's marriages, first to Francis I's daughter, Madeleine of Valois (1537), and then to Mary of Guise-Lorraine (1538), demonstrate a strategic use of the marriage market, positioning Scotland as a kingdom oriented towards European alliances and interests as well as obtaining papal securities.