Gods of gold, silver, and many other substances have appeared in this book. From the material idols of the first recension of Togail Troí to the divine characters who presided over lost Golden Ages in Ovid and Tochmarc Étaíne to the golden ram that rescued Phrixus and Helle in the second recension of Togail Troí, the gods are multiple and multiplicitous. Just like the guests at Belshazzar's Feast, we have seen golden gods speak worldly reason, silver gods take shape through rhetorical art, bronze and iron gods relay their poetic fables and ancient traditions, and even a few risible wooden and stone deities strut upon the page. These represent just a few of the ‘dynamic processes’ through which mythological interpretatio occurred in medieval Ireland and Classical gods were reshaped. But, as any medieval Christian writer and reader knew, above them all sits one God and his gold is to be found in the heavenly city.

This book has argued that Christian salvation history played a crucial role in medieval Irish interpretations of Classical literature and that the types of mythographic interpretatio employed by medieval Irish authors reflected methods of biblical exegesis. Chapter 1 approached the workings of interpretatio in medieval Ireland as it was applied to the names and associations of Olympians, setting out the learned glossarial background to the later adaptations. Irish texts display multiple levels of interpretatio, representing Classical deities in terms of other Greco-Roman gods, as well as in Irish terms, from the earliest glossaries of the seventh century down to the Middle Irish adaptations and beyond.

For about six decades, starting in high school band, the works of Gustav Holst have fascinated me—not as an obsession, perhaps as a passion, but definitely as an appreciation.

It was my original intent to revamp my first book, From Kneller Hall to Hammersmith: The Band Works of Gustav Holst, originally published in 1990 through IGEB (International Gesellschaft zur Erforshung und Förderung zu Blasmusik—International Society for the Research and Promotion of Wind Music) as part of their Alta Musica series for their membership by a publisher that no longer exists. My second book, A Comprehensive Biography of Composer Gustav Holst (2001; original title Gustav Holst: An American Perspective), largely sold to libraries. It unavoidably contained snippets of the same material, but its focus was quite different, being a biography of the composer by an author from the western side of the Atlantic.

Since the time of those publications, I continued my career as a college professor/conductor (and now professor emeritus), expanding my field of research to include articles and books about other composers (Beethoven, Vaughan Williams, Anton Rubinstein, etc.) as well as a book on a major critic (Philip Hale). Still, I never totally veered away from Holst, especially in practice. I would venture to guess that my “home” orchestra, the University of Massachusetts Boston Chamber Orchestra, performed more Holst than any other college orchestra in the country. Away from the university, I recorded many CDs with professional orchestras in Eastern Europe. Among the CDs was Gustav Holst: Composer as Arranger. I’ll never forget the look of astonishment on the producer's face as he heard the warm sounds of the heretofore unrecorded Greeting [H54].

As I have already noted, motherhood in romance is particularly brought into focus in liminal spaces: in the birthing room, poised between life and death; on the thresholds of castles; and in the forest, where mothers attempt to shelter their sons from the machinations of courtly life. This chapter focuses on another liminal space: the sea. Mothers at sea in romance are on the brink of annihilation: they have been cast from their homes and forced to create a new existence for themselves and their children when it is assumed by their persecutors that the ordeal will kill them. These characters are often categorised as calumniated queens, who are (falsely) accused of adultery or defiance against paternal wishes and cast out to the sea with their infants. The sea in Middle English romance is a space that allows female characters’ identities to form and, in some cases, thrive outside the perceived restrictions of courtly society. Moreover, motherhood at sea makes connections beyond families, between people, nations, and territories.

Like many other romance locations, the sea is a space in which the importance of motherhood to medieval social structures can be explored. We have seen romance's representations of motherhood in spaces that have been coded as feminine and private (birthing rooms) and masculine and public (the castle), showing that these binaries are, in fact, more nuanced and intricate than they appear.

The culture and politics of the economically and ethnically diverse area of central Europe into which Arthur Nikisch was born on 12 October 1855 were determined by the long shadow and enduring aftermath of the revolutions of 1848. In Hungary, the land of Nikisch's birth, the Magyar revolt led by Lajos Kossuth (1802-94) had been brutally crushed by the Habsburg armies under the youthful Emperor Franz Joseph with the help of Russian support. The savage reprisals inflicted on the Magyar rebels by the victorious Habsburg forces left a smouldering and long-lasting legacy of resentment against the re-imposition by force of Habsburg rule. Some idea of the fierce passions this could still invoke amongst ethnic Hungarians, even after many years, can be gained from the outburst cited above.

Across German lands a similar post-revolutionary hardening of authoritarian attitudes in the wake of the failed uprisings led to the re-establishment in 1850 of the German Confederation, a loose association of sovereign states dominated by the increasing rivalry between Austria and Prussia that in 1866 erupted in the Austro-Prussian War. Prussia's humiliation of Austria at the Battle of Sadowa (3 July 1866) and the subsequent decline of Austrian influence fractured former allegiances and prompted a gravitational shift northward with the formation in 1867 of the North German Confederation, now under Prussian hegemony. Austria under the Emperor Franz Joseph responded by bringing its eastern territories more firmly under Habsburg rule through the Austro-Hungarian compromise (Ausgleich) of 30 March 1867 and the creation of the dual monarchy.

This chapter discusses the Psalms and their commentaries as material objects that invite physical performance. In exploring Eleanor Hull's early fifteenthcentury commentary on the Penitential Psalms along these lines, this chapter makes the case that Hull provides a practical, ‘performative’ application of the same non-dualistic model of personhood theorised by Thomas Aquinas. After introducing the Penitential Psalms and Eleanor Hull's commentary, I delineate the Thomistic model of personhood as laid out in the Treatise on Human Nature (Summa Theologiae 1a, QQ 75–89) and then bring it into conversation with contemporary discussions in phenomenology and philosophy of mind. The Thomistic model is non-dualistic (i.e. does not subscribe to a mind– body ‘division’) and emphasises the importance of embodied experience, as well as the receptiveness of the soul to external experiences. The person is a potentiality in that it has the capacity of becoming, with the Psalms and their commentaries being the actuality, as I argue below. Using concepts from phenomenology and philosophy of mind, this chapter contends that the Psalms and the commentaries become part of the human person, with implications for the temporality of existence, a temporality that becomes broader in an ongoing interaction between readers and texts.

I do not suggest any direct influence from Aquinas on Hull, but I am rather hoping to demonstrate the usefulness of a reading of Hull through the Thomistic lens as proposed here.

Photography has specific advantages when used as testimonio. Georg Gugelberger outlines in The Real Thing: Testimonial Discourse and Latin America that important discussions within Latin American literature were taking place during the 1980s and the 1990s that focused on testimonio. While a significant amount of those intellectual exchanges centered around whether it was possible to represent marginal classes, what you could learn from their representation and the efforts to help them speak, and film as testimonio (Williams 225–53), photography was not central to the discussion. However, this does not mean that some intellectuals and scholars writing on testimonio did not consider photography, at least to a degree. For example, Margaret Randall included photography in her genre-defining article “¿Qué es y cómo se hace un testimonio?” [“What is and how do you create a testimonio?”]. In this piece, she confirmed with great clarity that photography can be testimonio “la fotografía también puede ser un testimonio/photography can also be testimonio” (41). That article is evidence that photography's suitability for inclusion in the testimonio genre was established years previously. Yet, at the time of writing, the subject of photography as testimonio has only received minimal critical consideration. Engagement up to this point has mostly been limited to photography being accepted within the definitions of testimonio. In that respect, it is useful to consider these definitions to see how interaction with photography has been envisaged. We will then consider a text that uses photography as a case study, focusing on how this medium is able to function as visual testimony.

In 1877, the Catholic educator and publicist Ludwig Auer commenced the publication of the first German periodical devoted to maidservants. Notburga appeared bi-weekly from 1877 until 1941. Quickly becoming the largest publication for maidservants in Germany, its subscribers grew from fifteen thousand in 1883 to ninety thousand in 1910. Each issue consisted of a serial novella and other short stories about maidservants, pastoral letters, prayer requests, poems, and reports about Catholic associations for women and maidservants. The magazine also reported on the Catholic Jungfrauenvereine and Marienvereine, which originated in the nineteenth century. The latter specifically served maidservants, as the Catholic Church was the first institution to show interest in their situation. Notburga also offered its readers some practical advice about housekeeping, health, and personal hygiene, but this was not a major concern. Rather, Notburga's singular focus was on the trope of the exemplary, pious maidservant.

This chapter illuminates how Notburga encouraged and admonished its readers to emulate this ideal of the exemplary maidservant through the embrace of a particular feminine religiosity. In practice, this meant a significant emphasis on the fostering and suppression of specific emotions. This mission seemed so urgent because the reputation of maidservants in Imperial Germany was very poor and their moral improvement became the focus of an intense public debate in which Catholics and Catholic publications like Notburga were vocal participants. The servant question (Dienstbotenfrage), as this debate became known, focused on the twin issues of the acute shortage of maidservants and their purported low quality. In Imperial Germany, the number of job seekers did not keep pace with the rapid growth of middle-class households for whom at least one “maid of all work” (Mädchen für alles) became an indispensable necessity and key status symbol.

In a very fine analysis of the break-up of Welsh landed estates across the early–mid twentieth century, John Davies asserts that:

In England, farmers felt, on the whole, an identity of interest with their landlords which was largely absent in Wales. … The tenants of Wales and particularly Welsh-speaking Wales … rejected their landlords because the landlords had, over the generations, alienated themselves from the society in which they lived and from which they drew their rents.

This statement is echoed in Kenneth Morgan's influential conclusion that the divergence between landowners and tenants in nineteenthcentury Wales constituted a ‘clash of two societies’, which ‘divided every village and valley into two communities’.2 The evidence analysed across this book presents a very different view of Wales across the period c.1770–1920.

This is a study of gentry ‘coming of age’ celebrations in Wales across the late eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These celebrations were important events in local society, when the heir (or sometimes an heiress) to a landed estate attained their majority at the age of twenty-one. It was a life-cycle threshold and rite of passage for heirs, signifying their legal transition from adolescence to adulthood, with an expectation that they would henceforth assume a more active role in the life of their community and across the various spheres of influence which characterised landed society. The coming of age was celebrated as a dynastic milestone, recognising the likelihood that the now-adult and usually male heir would one day inherit the family estate and assume a position of leadership in society.

Apart from providing early evidence of Sir Tristrem's reception (or that of an analogous early Middle English romance) Robert Mannyng's Chronicle (c. 1338) makes for a good companion as we seek familiarity with the world in which Sir Tristrem was composed (c. 1290), recited or performed (we know not how many times), and copied (in the Auchinleck manuscript, our sole witness, c. 1330). As early practitioners of translation into Middle English, both the Tristrem-poet and Robert Mannyng show a consciousness of the exploratory, experimental nature of their work, and of their medium's unique possibilities. Te Tristrem-poet says nothing explicitly about his approach to translation, nor about the benefts, or even the function, of translating material into Middle English; he does not call his poem a translation, nor does he mention the French language (or the English one) at all. He leaves such questions to us. Mannyng, on the other hand, is discursive on the topic. Hence the great value (and relevance to Sir Tristrem) of the Prologue to his Chronicle, which is explicit on the function, and the great benefts, of translation into English.

It is instructive merely to remember that literary translation in Robert Mannyng's time was not an industry, nor even an activity of self-evident worth. Much of Mannyng's Prologue is in fact devoted to justifying his translation project, and directing, as best he can, his work's reception.

Reverend Sir

It is with all the appearance of Justice, that you may think, I ought to be asshamed to own the Reciept of your obliging Letter dated December the 1st 1712: after so long an omission of returning you a suitable answer, and must beg the ffavour of your accepting for my Excuse, an account of the Truth of the matter that caused the Delay. Sir, your Letter to me mentioning the Curiosa Americana; I apprehended, at first, that they were some Collections of natural Raritys of New-England designed for the Royal societys Repository; till our common friend Dr. Woodward informed me that the Curiosa Americana were several Observations you had made, and communicated in diverse letters you had bin pleased to write partly to him selfe and the Rest to me. The Manuscript of which I had not the Happyness of receiving from him till the 15th instant: when to my surprize I found my selfe obliged in so great a Debt; that at present I must own my selfe unable to make a tollerable satisfaction, and like other unhappy insolvents, desire time for Repayment: I have not since I recieved the MSs had time and leisure to read over all your Letters nor consider duly of all that curious collection of Discoverys and Observations you have therin communicated.

INTRODUCTION

This text is a linked pair of demonological essays by the royalist soldier Sir James Turner (c.1615–c.1689). Turner is best known today for his military career and his ‘Memoirs’ describing this. He was a graduate of the University of Glasgow; his father was a minister and hoped that his son would follow him in the ministry, but Sir James instead became a military officer. No precise date can be given for his essays, which were never published, but they are likely to have been written in the period between 1668 and 1681, when he was in retirement from military service and is known to have written several other works. The work for which he was best known in his lifetime, Pallas Armata, published in 1683, was stated on the title page to have been written in 1670 and 1671.

Turner's essays cover a variety of topics, most of which relate to public, political life more closely than his essays on magic. In the manuscript, he listed the titles of his collected essays as being of ‘Dueties of soveraigns and subjects’, ‘The supreme pouer in all republicks’, ‘Monarchie’, ‘Aristocracie’, ‘Democracie’, ‘Orators, and preachors’, ‘Magick’, ‘The Jews Cabale’, ‘Friendship’, ‘Externall evills, and misfortunes’, ‘Imprisonment’, ‘Anger’, ‘Revenge’, ‘Duells’ and ‘Crueltie’ (fo. 34v.). His work has some similarities to academic dissertations, but such dissertations would normally cover a narrower field. He belongs rather to the genre of essayists following Michel de Montaigne and Sir Francis Bacon. Within this genre, Turner is closer to the public-minded Bacon than the introspective Montaigne.

The dominant classes adopted photography quickly. Early portraits of Latin American presidents show that they were quick to take advantage of this technology (Morales Carrillo 408). While official painted portraits exhibit leaders in full regalia, as you can observe in José Gil de Castro's portrait of Simón Bolívar (“Retrato de Simón Bolívar”), photography offers another vision of power. For example, contrast the portrait José Gil de Castro made of José San Martín (“Retrato de San Martín”) in 1818 with his daguerreotype taken in Paris thirty years later (Figures 4.1a and 4.1b). This type of representation in early daguerreotype photography shows conformity to the democratic style and pose of those caught by the camera's lens (Braive 75–82). The painter's influence, which imbues the portrait with a certain air of grandeur and military pomp, evaporates when faced with the technical conventions of the daguerreotype. The portrait of San Martín made by the painter is, like others of the type, is highly complementary, amplifying the sitter's positive qualities and helping to support his almost mythical status in Latin American history. However, San Martín's sitting for a daguerreotype in Paris, one of the photography capitals of the world at that time, produced an extraordinary portrait of one of the founding fathers of Latin America – extraordinary because it was extraordinarily democratic. Aside from looking into the eyes of one of Latin America's most prominent historical figures, you can observe that this specific capturing of power and authority followed specific technical conventions that directed the canon of the time, reminding us of the limits of the technology in that day and age (Flusser 33–4). Exposure times dictated pose and facial expression.