‘Dear friend, from my life I write to you in your life’: so wrote Katherine Mansfield in one of her journal entries. For Mansfield, the purpose of writing is to create conversations that transcend the boundaries and confines of time and space, allowing life narratives to intersect and intertwine. This convergence of stories finds resonances in the long and rich Jewish commentary traditions where the sages actively read, interpret, and comment on the lives of biblical characters. In ancient Jewish literary history, this commentary tradition is characterised by the sages’ imagined conversations with the past biblical heroes, which showcase the sages’ active reading and interpretation of the life of the biblical characters. To create such conversations, the Jewish sages tend to use two major strategies. First, they take on the persona of biblical characters by transforming their ancient predecessors into contemporaneous sages who address cultural and historical experiences of their time. As the voice in the text presents both the sage himself and the biblical figure under interpretation, conversations take place between the sage and the biblical figure whom he aims to present. The other strategy is more straightforward. The sage directly addresses the biblical protagonists without becoming like them. The voice of the text remains distinctly that of the sage who composes the text, yet the interlocutor as the biblical protagonist is manifest in the sage's appraisal, interpretation, and reflection of the life of the biblical character under portrayal.

Examples of French cipher-plying musicians continued to accumulate after the offerings for the Haydn centenary in 1909, when the Revue musicale inaugurated six new piano compositions based on his name (see Chapter 7). In contrast to this neo-Classical revival, French composers did not wait a centenary to adopt BACH, the universal musical symbol of the Thomaskantor. Among examples is one by Vincent d’Indy in the Tableaux de voyage, Op. 33 (1888), a suite of thirteen piano pieces depicting his travels in Germany. The eleventh, ‘Beuron’, illustrates a Benedictine abbey in the Black Forest, which drew from d’Indy a chromatic fugue in a severe, ‘high’ style. Here he committed the final bars to four statements of BACH.

More fugal treatments followed from French composers in the twentieth century, in particular in 1932, when Arthur Honegger's Prélude, Arioso et fughetta sur le nom de Bach and Albert Roussel's Prélude et fugue sur le nom de Bach, Op. 46 appeared in a supplement to a special Bach issue of the Revue musicale.2 The Swiss Honegger, pupil of Widor and d’Indy, alluded in the title to two late nineteenth-century piano works by César Franck, the Prélude, Choral et Fugue (1885) and Prélude, Aria et Final (1886). But while Franck's pieces were cipher-free, Honegger allowed BACH to permeate all three movements of his composition. First, in the toccata-like prelude, he dispersed the four, chromatically adjacent pitches over a span of two octaves, transforming the half-steps into expansive sevenths (ex. 12.1).

For medievalists whose research and teaching interests are in the history of art and iconography, commentaries on the Bible have been and remain fruitful sources for unravelling the meanings and significances of visual representations of biblical subjects. The late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century shift in history of medieval art towards giving serious attention to the meaning of images can be attributed to Emile Mâle (1862–1954). For his monumental work, first published in 1898, L’Art religieux du XIIIe siècle en France: Etude sur l’iconographie du moyen age et sur ses sources d’inspiration, and later known in English as The Gothic Image, Mâle drew heavily on commentary literature; this was one of the ‘sources d’inspiration’ for distinctive and sometimes puzzling medieval iconography. Authorities of this kind informed the other two of Mâle's volumes, the subjects of which stand chronologically on either side of his most well-known work: L’Art religieux du XIIe siècle en France: Etude sur l’origine de l’iconographie du Moyen Age (1922) and L’Art religieux de la fin du moyen âge en France: Etude sur l’iconographie du moyen âge et sur ses sources d’inspiration (1908). Mâle was among the first scholars in the modern era to use these monumental medieval texts of commentary as sources; this in turn gave prominence to works of this kind and promoted investigations of their nature and content by those who were not necessarily biblical scholars or textual critics.

En nú skal lýsa hversu ný skáld og fræðimenn, og einkannliga klerkarnir, vilja lofaz láta, hversu kveða skal, og ónýta eigi að heldr, það sem fornir men hafa framið, útan það sem klerkligar bækr banna, þvíað það er náttúruligt að menn sie nú smásmuglari sem fræðibækrnar dreifaz nú víðara.

But now it must be revealed how new poets and scholars, and especially the clerics, will have [people] praised, [and] how one should compose [poetry], and not on the other hand destroy that which men of old have promoted, except for what religious books prohibit, because it is natural that people are now more discerning, as the books of learning are now more widely distributed.

The identity of the author of the Preface to the four medieval Icelandic grammatical treatises in the Codex Wormianus (W, AM 242 fol), from which this passage comes, is unknown. This short work, occupying only one page (p. 83) of the manuscript and unique to it, is placed immediately after the end of part of the Skáldskaparmál [Language of Poetry] section of Snorri Sturluson's Edda and immediately before the first of the four treatises, The First Grammatical Treatise (FGT). It is here treated as an independent text, although previous editors have presumed it to be part of one or other of the grammatical treatises.

If the Bible is considered just another book, its stories and promises may be read as literature. But if read as the heirloom and peculiar treasure of the Jewish People—then it is our privilege and responsibility to integrate its spirit and character into the Israeli national ethos and lifestyle, adding to the physical regeneration of the “Promised Land,” a corresponding spiritual world view that transforms its message of faith and destiny into artistic content as cultural expression. Certainly, political Zionism has provided the unique opportunity to gather together many threads of Jewish history like pages torn from the prayer book, bind them together, and endow age old truths with new forms of expression attuned to the rhythm and style of our time and place. It suggests the possibility, perhaps even the obligation to redefine this heritage in works of art—an opportunity I did not want to miss. In an article entitled “In Search of a Sacred Ethos,” which appeared in the Israel Composers’ League publication New Music in Israel 1985–1987, I articulated and elaborated upon this viewpoint as follows:

One of the prerogatives of our time and place has been a protracted search to integrate Western artistic aspiration within a context of Jewish identification— a quest for ancient sources of inspiration against a backdrop of 20th century horror and despair. While the concept of the sacred is universal, it has acquired unusually powerful overtones in relation to the unique origin and history of the Jewish experience.

One of the primal deities in Greek mythology is Eris, who is frequently identified with discord and strife and who bears at least partial blame for the Trojan War. In some versions of the story of the fall of Troy, Eris throws a golden apple into the wedding reception of Peleus and Thetis, which prompts the beauty contest between Athena, Aphrodite, and Hera. Within Greek mythology and later philosophy, Eris is often contrasted with Eros and Harmonia. This contrast between Eris and Harmonia, framed in Platonic terms, was revived during the Renaissance in works such as Marsilio Ficino's Commentary on Plato's Symposium or De Amore. Outside of the sophisticated classical and revived “neo-classical” worlds, Eris has frequently been represented, especially in Icelandic or Scandinavian literature, with the figure of dragon. In the twentieth century, Carl Jung and his later disciples and popularizers, such as Northrop Frye and Joseph Campbell, have explored the important archetype of a dragon as figure for primal violence and chaos.

William Shakespeare, whom John Keats famously referred to as having “negative capability,” is a poet influenced by a seemingly never-ending set of sources. Critics, however, have tended to ignore the presence of Icelandic, Scandinavian, or Nordic myth and culture upon the bard. There are several key archetypal themes and images that appear, through a Jungian analysis, to have filtered from the cold world of the European north into William Shakespeare's works.

Hebrew and Punic, Phoenicians and Canaanites

The local character specific to various early Christian communities was as much acknowledged in antiquity as those communities have been subject to study by modern scholarship. Christianity in Africa, generating a sectarian movement long understood to be the bearer, if not also a product, of its local culture, has merited special consideration in this respect. This chapter will explore how the similarity between Punic and Hebrew, and the Canaanite roots of Punic Christians, impacted the identity and exegetical world of Roman African Christians. It will be suggested that this informs something of the context for the way in which they read themselves into the scriptural world, accounting thereby for some of the peculiarities of the African exegetical tradition. This follows in the wake of recent work to better understand African Christianity within its own context, against a dismissive tendency to ascribe certain of its stranger features to naïveté or else a benign primitivity. The Semitic cultural consanguinity of Punic Christians may lie behind, or at any rate reinforce, some of the hermeneutic understanding, and the practices and attitudes downstream from it, which have long struck students of African Christian letters as rather strange. Such an approach has a family resemblance to Frend's attempt to uncover a ‘Berber’ religious psychology and inheritance responsible for other theological tendencies of North Africans.

López Pinciano's interest in dance was not purely erudite. The sections where he discusses dance are testament to his interest in the practices of his period, whether it be the zarabanda or the danza de aire performed by the volatines. However, while he does reflect on these popular dances under the pretext of defining ancient dithyramb in his Philosophía antigua poética, he never directly discusses contemporaneous court dance. This omission is noteworthy, especially when taking into consideration the multiple connections López Pinciano had to the court, starting with his position as imperial physician.

This chapter takes into account this contradiction in its discussion of the years between Pinciano's 1596 Philosophía antigua poética and the 1620s, when late humanists once again focused on the Poetics to address dance. Yet during this period late humanists were no longer observing the same dances Pinciano discussed in his text. For this reason, this chapter will pay special attention to the profound shifts which affected the regimes of representation and interpretation of dance at court. It will go on to explain the visible mutations in the discourse on dance put forward by the new generation of commentators of Aristotle's treatise.

The working assumption for this chapter is that López Pinciano does not address courtly dance in his Philosophía because, while he was writing his treatise, the dance practised at court did not fall into the spectrum of what Pinciano considered poetics, no matter how broad his understanding of poetics and poetry might have been. For López Pinciano, poetry is either fiction or representation.

Introduction

As bishop of Lincoln, Edward Lee Hicks has attracted some considerable historical attention. This is partly due to the availability of his diaries, of which substantial parts have been published in a Lincoln Record Society volume. His extensive correspondence in the pages of the Lincoln Diocesan Magazine, however, has not generated a significant amount of consideration. One of the bishop's biographers explains that these regular contributions read ‘rather drily today’. The following chapter, not discouraged by this verdict, seeks to examine the bishop's letters to his diocese during the First World War and suggests that these were of some considerable significance at the time of their publication in ensuring his views on matters relating to the war and other issues were widely distributed amongst the diocese's clergy and laity. Some consideration will also be given to the bishop's hopes for the diocese and the country at large following the cessation of hostilities, as expressed in his contributions to the Lincoln Diocesan Magazine. During the period from the outbreak of war in August 1914 until its end in November 1918, the bishop published fifty monthly letters in the Lincoln Diocesan Magazine, with most being of between 750 and 1,000 words in length, comprising just under 50,000 words in total.

Of course, Wagner's cryptic initials were meant for his eyes alone, like furtive diary entries projecting onto Sieglinde's and Siegmund's illicit union the composer's inner turmoil over his liaison with Mathilde Wesendonck. In the nineteenth century initialism also appeared in literature, including the novels of Charles Dickens, who early on became a ‘professional language player’. From a letter of 1833 signed ‘Charles I.B.L.K.Y.N. Dickens’ to a wall inscription at Staple Inn

P

J T

1747

contemplated by Hiram Grewgious in The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870), Dickens indulged in word games. Both examples remain unsolved, though Dickens did offer some options for the second – ‘Perhaps John Thomas’, ‘Pretty Jolly Too’ and ‘Possibly Jabbered Thus’. Elsewhere, he was more forthcoming. For example, early in Pickwick Papers (1837) we encounter ‘P.V.P.M.P.C.’ and ‘G.C.M.P.C.’, identified in the author's footnotes as ‘Perpetual Vice-President – Member Pickwick Club’ and ‘General Chairman – Member Pickwick Club’. Later in the novel, Pickwick encounters Peter Magnus, who proffers his business card: ‘“Curious circumstance about those initials, sir’” … “you will observe – P.M. – post meridian … I sometimes sign myself ‘Afternoon’. It amuses my friends very much, Mr. Pickwick”’.

After elucidating our riddle, we may consider other ways composers conceal messages in their scores. By and large, these techniques parallel well-established devices in other arts, suggesting that even if, as Walter Pater observed in 1877, ‘all art constantly aspires towards the condition of music’, not infrequently music has responded in kind to sibling disciplines. Thus, Webern's attempt to realize the Sator Square as music led him to consider not only palindromes, but also acrostics and anagrams, all supported by literary traditions stretching back to classical antiquity.

Originating possibly with the poet Sotades, active in Alexandria during the fourth century bce, the palindrome (Greek for ‘running back again’) is one example. The Roman epigrammatist Martial turned his mordant wit on sotadic verses: ‘… I don't pride myself on palindromes or read pathic Sotades backwards’. Nevertheless, Roman poets exploited the emordnilap Roma-amor, which infiltrated Pompeian word squares. In the third book of Ars armatoria (The Art of Love) Ovid contrived at the ends of lines 507–10 a telestich spelling ‘amor’ when read vertically, while the last word of line 510 was ‘amor’, or ‘Roma’ spelled backwards, completing the word pair

My case study of the Musenhof courts in the Margraviate of Brandenburg will show how the desire for agrarian improvement and economic reform, scientific interest and research, and polite sociability came together. In this way, Musenhof courts complemented the work of economic and patriotic societies with their study and experimentation. Furthermore, the cultural transfer of landscape aesthetics, and agrarian reformism between England and the Continent, allowed the ideal of the ‘country house ethos’ to be assimilated and reinterpreted as agrarian/economic patriotism. Given the advancements in agricultural management and garden design in eighteenth-century England, it is no surprise that there was a scientific cultural transfer between England and Continental Europe facilitated by transnational scientific societies, the emergence of patriotic-economic societies, and agronomic travel.

A dominant figure in the cultural transfer of progressive agriculture was Albrecht Thaer (1752–1828). Thaer's work on husbandry and soil amelioration made him a desired collaborator, correspondent, and advisor. After his formal training as a medical doctor, Thaer turned his focus on agriculture. He had a model farm in Celle, Lower Saxony. From 1780, when he was appointed by George III of Great Britain to promote progressive agriculture in the Electorate of Hanover, he belonged to the Celler Landwirtschaftsgesellschaft, an economic-patriotic society founded in 1764.2 Whilst he never travelled to England, he nevertheless wrote an influential treatise on English agriculture, Einleitung zur Kenntniss der englischen Landwirthschaft und ihrer neueren practischen und theoretischen Fortschritte (1800).