INTRODUCTION

John Kincaid was not a witch but the most active of the witch-prickers in Scotland. This document shows him explaining his practices to a sceptical justice depute.

Kincaid was originally from Tranent in East Lothian. His activities in pricking witchcraft suspects to detect the Devil's mark are recorded from 1649 until 1662. On 31 March 1662 he was imprisoned in the tolbooth of Edinburgh on suspicion of malpractice. The document edited below records the answers he gave to a justice depute who interrogated him four days later. Kincaid remained in prison until June, when he petitioned the privy council for liberation on the grounds that he was old and ill. He was freed on 13 June on finding caution to carry out no further pricking without warrant. This seems to be the last that we hear of him.

The Devil's mark in Scotland was usually assumed to be an insensitive spot on the witch's body that the Devil had nipped as part of the process of formalising the demonic pact. Prickers seem to have had some knowledge of where in the body a pin could be inserted without causing unbearable pain or injury. It has occasionally been suggested (notably by Sir Walter Scott in 1830) that prickers might have used a deceptive retractable bodkin rather than a pin, but there seems to be no contemporary evidence for any use of a bodkin with a handle. Kincaid certainly used an ordinary pin, since a drawing of a pin that he used was included in a manuscript of 1657. It is just under 5cm long; some descriptions of longer pins may have been exaggerated. Formally witch-pricking was not ‘torture’, but the two were sometimes conflated by contemporary sceptics. Kincaid's own bond of caution promised that he would carry out no pricking or torturing.

It was the end of January, one of those uninviting days when the heavens seem unable to decide between a mist and a fine rain. Gray clouds drifted over the rooftops, and the quiet street on which the Petofy mansion stood was even quieter than usual. But in front of the mansion itself, there was life: not only were azaleas, rhododendrons, and other tall potted plants being unloaded, but all sorts of cases containing musical instruments and, finally, baskets of bakery goods, artfully piled so high that they seemed to have pushed the basket lids to one side.

There could be no doubt: today was the day of the old count's winter reception.

And now the hour of twelve had arrived. The clouds were vanishing, and the sky was growing bluer; and just as a nearby pigeon-fancier, encouraged by these signs, proclaimed this change in the weather by releasing a flock of his birds, there drove up to the Petofy mansion an elegant cabriolet. On the upper floor of the building across the street, there was a large dressmaker and milliner's establishment, and at its window, the girlish heads of three or four young damsels immediately appeared. They avidly watched the young officer who now placed the reins in his servant's hands.

“Ah, the nephew—Count Egon!” one of them exclaimed. “And look how his uniform fits him! There's nothing finer than a hussar.”

Born in Toledo on 23 November 1221, Alfonso X became King of Castile and Leon at the age of 30, following the death of his father, Fernando III, in 1252. During the preceding years Alfonso had already participated actively in the ruling of the kingdom as heir to the throne. He had led campaigns of conquest against the Muslims of places such as Murcia and Jaén and had received a refined education that would have prepared him well for the duties of a king. One could have said that he began his reign on the front foot.

He had inherited an apparently stable kingdom from his father. Fernando III, known as the Saint, had enjoyed quite a successful reign that was mainly marked by expansion and the reinforcement of royal power, in spite of a tumultuous start – due to the annulment of his parents’ marriage, for they were too closely related in the eyes of the Church. King of Castile since 1217, Fernando became also King of Leon in 1230, reunifying the two realms once and for all, after the death of his father, Alfonso IX. The support of Fernando's mother, Queen Berenguela of Castile, was essential in this regard, since it was following her advice that Fernando III reinforced, through marriage, his position as the legitimate heir to the kingdoms of Castile and Leon, as will be explored in detail in future chapters. Additionally, his numerous conquests in Andalucía against the Muslims strengthened his position, not only within his kingdom, but also amongst the rest of the Iberian monarchs. While Fernando III focused primarily on territorial expansion and the consolidation of royal authority, he paved the path for his son Alfonso's many reforms, which put the Kingdom of Castile and Leon in the European vanguard of legislative changes based on Roman law and have been the subject of scholarly attention for decades.

Abstract: Studies of Schubert's Goethe settings have tended to focus on Schubert's musical techniques and neglect the “music” that is already there, in the poem. This paper examines a few of Goethe's early poems, elucidating the features of the poetry that Schubert may have found so musical, to understand the impact that Goethe's poetry might have had on Schubert's compositional development. Through close reading of “Rastlose Liebe” along with historical and documentary sources from both Goethe's and Schubert's circles, it argues that this and other poems by Goethe were decisive for Schubert's musical development—to put it actively, that Goethe played an important role in Schubert's education.

Keywords: Goethe, Schubert, Lieder, Form, Music

The growth of [Schubert’s] mind … is a highly characteristic growth, and Goethean.

Can it be coincidence that so many of [Schubert’s] most original early songs are settings of Goethe?

In a diary entry dated June 13, 1816, the nineteen-year-old Schubert noted that the success of a performance of his “Rastlose Liebe”—which had been received with “unanimous applause”—was due not to his own setting of Goethe's lyric but to the “essential musicality of Goethe's poetic genius.” The conceit is striking because it throws into relief the extent to which studies of the composer's Goethe settings have tended to focus on Schubert's musical doings, to the exclusion of what “music” is already there, in the poem.

Introduction: R50 out of R350

In May 2020, during South Africa's first COVID-19 epidemic lockdown, President Ramaphosa announced the introduction of the Social Relief of Distress (SRD) grant, intended to relieve the hardship of the lockdown. The grant was for those without work or other income and who were ineligible for other social security grants. The grant was set at R350 per month and came to be known as the “Ramaphosa” or “three-fifty” grant. As the epidemic subsided it was withdrawn but then re-introduced and is now a de facto permanent component of South Africa's social security system.

The SRD grant covered what had been a major gap in South Africa's social security system, the long term unemployed. While the country's social security is now comprehensive in scope, the size of the grant provides only limited relief. When introduced in 2020, the food poverty line, the bare minimum required to buy adequate food for a month, was estimated to be R585. The grant remained at R350 until April 2024 when it was increased to R370.

Any large-scale benefit provision provides opportunities for corruption and fraud and the SRD was no exception. Fraudulent claims were made and post office employees in the retail outlets, initially the key distribution mechanism for the grant, were able to use their position to extract bribes from claimants, particularly in townships. While the term bribe was not used, the tellers’ involvement in what came to be known as the express system was classic corruption; the misuse of public office for private gain.

As discussed in Part I, Klopstock conceived of language as the acoustic embodiment of affect and expression, asserting its unmediated relation to these. Affect and expression give shape to the Klang (sound) and Ton (tone) of speech, which in turn define the Aussprache. This emphasis on the acoustic materiality of language – that is, Klopstock's concept of zweite Tonbildung – challenged the normative relationship between sound and meaning. In Parts II and III, we saw how experimenting with the potentialities of the German language was encouraged by the emergence of the declamatorium and the melodrama, artistic genres that acoustically showcased the poetic qualities of German, and how these practices consequently affected the Lied. Still, addressing a viable theorisation of declamation in German continued to be a daunting task. By the 1800s, the arguments about the superiority of vocalic, southern languages as opposed to northern, consonantic languages continued to be deeply ingrained in European discourse.

These theories grew during the vogue of the declamatorium; several of its authors were themselves artists and pedagogues specialised in this practice. Consequently, the production of treatises, textbooks, and other Lehrbücher on the topic of declamation significantly increased during the last third of the eighteenth century, a phenomenon that persisted throughout the nineteenth century. By the 1810s, declamation was fully established as an artistic practice per se, conceived and performed beyond the theatrical stage. It is also during this period that German philologist, Deklamator, and musician Christian Gotthold Schocher sketched out the first theory explicitly intended for the art of poetic recitation, suggesting an approach to declamation according to musical criteria and outside its theatrical function. Professionally active in Leipzig as a magister, Schocher was also a teacher of declamation and a Deklamator himself – his reputation in both fields was well established. According to her biography, Deklamatorin Elise Burger (1769–1833) studied with Schocher in Leipzig.

That was how the morning passed.

In the evening came the party. The young actress appeared and was introduced to Countess Judith.

But before this introduction took place, there was a turn of events which threatened to jeopardize, not the gathering itself, but certainly its prevailing mood.

The invitations had been for nine o’clock. The old count was awaiting the first guests, especially Judith’s, when Egon appeared in the grand festive hall with two friends, Counts Pejevic and Coronini. Like Egon they were adjutants to the archduke. Egon went up to his uncle, visibly perturbed. The latter greeted the gentlemen with his characteristic courtesy, but quickly realized from their demeanor that something must have happened.

“What is it, Egon?”

“Gablenz …” He stopped short.

“Out with it. I can guess.”

“Shot himself. We just received the telegram. I didn't want you to be surprised, with your guests around you.”

The two young counts confirmed this news.

This brief conversation took place in a small niche formed by laurels and palms.

The old count made no reply, only steadying himself on a marble table which stood next to some chairs and then gestured the gentlemen to be seated. After that he took a seat himself, twirling his white beard, staring ahead, silent. It was clear that he was absorbed in his own thoughts and had momentarily forgotten his visitors.

“You were fond of him.” It was Egon, beginning to feel embarrassed by this situation, who finally spoke.

On 22 February 1452, Stirling Castle bore witness to one of the most extraordinary killings of the Middle Ages. In a fit of rage James II (r.1437– 60), king of Scots, stabbed William, eighth earl of Douglas, ‘in at the colere and down in the body’, after which Patrick Grey struck the earl with a pole axe ‘that strak out his harness [brains?]’. Earl William was then stabbed by others in the king's entourage, receiving a total of twenty-six wounds from his attackers. There were numerous examples across medieval Europe of kings ordering the execution of rebellious aristocrats, but for the king to commit such a violent act with his own hands was without any obvious precedent. Although several men stabbed Douglas, the two blows inflicted by the king on the earl's neck and chest would have been sufficient to cause his death. The motive for the continued attack, which effectively mutilated Douglas’ corpse, probably stemmed from a desire by the participants to demonstrate their loyalty to the king and their general dislike for the earl.

The dramatic and gruesome killing provides a window into understanding royal and noble power in fifteenth-century Scotland, but it also illustrates wider trends in the development of magnate power and how kings perceived ‘rebellious’ nobles across late medieval Europe. The pretext for James losing his temper was Douglas’ refusal to break a tripartite bond with Alexander Lindsay, earl of Crawford, and Alexander, lord of the Isles.

Writing, through his secretary, from the comfort of his country retreat at Woodstock, Charles I gave instruction to the earl of Danby on 3 September 1635 about a remarkable rock in rural Oxfordshire.

Here was the king extending protection to a feature of the landscape, and privilege to a subject who wished to develop it into a major visitor attraction. Enstone, Oxfordshire, was less than eight miles from Woodstock, well within the orbit of royal recreations, and King Charles himself had ‘viewed the place’, and thought it fit to be ‘preserved’. Though the Enstone rock was a ‘natural curiosity’, a ‘rarity of nature’, it was not remarkable enough to be enjoyed without improvement. Thomas Bushell had begun that improvement by ‘discovering’ the rock and drawing it to royal attention, and now he had licence for its improvement with ‘groves, walks, fishponds, gardens, and waterworks’.

Amour – Love – starts with the alphabet's first letter. And that Alpha has passed sentence on me, a sentence I must suffer unless it be revoked by the one I’ve loved and shall continue to love unceasingly, without counting the cost and without measure – and indeed increasingly, at a higher rate and faster than a usurer charges interest! It's clear, and will become clearer still, that an urge has come upon me which, I promise you, would never have stirred in my heart had it not been for the prompting of Love and of my lady. Credit must go to them both; I’m indebted to my lady for sure – indeed I am entirely hers, and here become her liegeman, and from her will hold Courtesy as my fief. With joy in my heart and in every limb, I’m bracing myself and sharpening my pen, preparing now to express my thoughts in several forms of verse, and all with the sole aim of giving pleasure to my lady. [20] [Love:]

‘I am the god of Love; I rule the lives of lovers. To the faithful I give succour and relieve them of affliction; With joy and sweet pleasure I will fill them constantly; But the fakers, the false-hearted, I’ll condemn to misery.

Being the sovereign god of lovers as I am, I sit before Fortune, as radiant to the eye As an angel of heaven, endowed with six wings. I fulfil more of my wishes than does any mortal man.

Fortune is wise indeed; we both know our business well. She directs and pays my passage: we have great control and power! We wash the faithful free of all their sickness and their pain, But the false-hearted pay a forfeit and we bar their way.

At Harvard, it took me until junior year to be accepted into Earl Kim's composition class, and until senior year to be accepted into Kirchner’s. But already in my first year, I was plunged into a world of study far from the personalized tutelage of Miss Dillon and Emilie Harris, the mini-paradise of Kinhaven, or the joyful hands-on music making at Putney. Classes included heady dissections of Brahms by theorist David Lewin, somber musicological discourses on Monteverdi given by pale and nervous graduate-scholars, a challenging course in traditional forms taught by composer John MacIvor Perkins, in which we composed sonatas, minuets, and rondos in the idiom of Haydn, and realizations of Baroque figured bass at the keyboard with the vivacious and brilliant pianist Luise Vosgerchian, who had studied with Nadia Boulanger in Paris.

Rather quickly, I met a number of composers my own age whose histories were similar to mine. These included my roommate Danny Troob, who eventually became a noted movie and Broadway orchestrator and composer. Danny had written orchestral pieces at an early age, too, and was a fine pianist. He performed the Mozart A Major Concerto with the Bach Society Orchestra. Others included Bob Telson—today a successful song writer and composer for film and dance—and Leonard Lehrman, a fiercely driven and prolific composer who wrote music reviews for The Harvard Crimson and later studied with Boulanger in Paris alongside me.

Introduction

Existing studies of U.S.–Spanish relations in the years of the Second Spanish Republic (1931–1936) have been unduly influenced by two later events: the Cold War and the Spanish Civil War. The prevailing narrative is that the eyes of administration officials in Washington were tainted by an excessive zeal, leading them to see Communist agents where there were only leftist reformists. In turn, these suspicions paved the way for the policy of neutrality, parallel to European non-intervention, which the United States practised after 1936. This interpretation is, to a degree, a somewhat ahistorical outlook, because both American and Spanish decision-makers were totally ignorant of events that lay only in the future. In fact, it is impossible to separate the Spanish policy of the Great Powers from the situation then existing in Europe. As Scott Ramsay has recently stated with respect to the United Kingdom:

By considering Foreign Office perceptions of political developments in Spain between 1931 and 1936, British responses to the outbreak of the civil war came into focus not as an ideologically-driven attempt to facilitate the overthrow of the Republic, but as responses to what the British government perceived as a major threat to its foreign policy objectives.

There is ample evidence to say something of the same kind about the United States. The uncertainties that arose in official U.S. circles when the new regime was proclaimed in April 1931 soon vanished.