It was the year 1872. Spring had arrived with all the splendour and magic that in no other large city captivates the senses in quite the same way as it does in Vienna. I was at the time still a student at the Conservatory. Thanks to a recommendation from Joseph Hellmesberger, I had been asked to deputise for an indisposed violinist in the Court Opera Orchestra. I was delighted, as it was now possible to get to know the masterworks more intimately than before, when I was in the habit of queuing for the Opera from 3.00pm in the afternoon in order to listen from the best possible place in the fourth gallery. Fidelio and Don Giovanni in the old Kärtnertor-Theater with Dustmann, Beck and Gustav Walter in the leading roles made a lasting impression on a twelve-year-old boy. These performances penetrated to the innermost core of my being. My natural inclination up to now, due in no small measure to the influence of my family, had been towards musical conservatism. However, Wagner's music made an overwhelming impact on me. I would often sit for half the night by candlelight over piano reductions [of his operas] (the full scores were of course inaccessible) absorbing the incomprehensible wonders of this music until my burning, aching eyes gave out. The happiest times were in the afternoon, when, directly after lunch, I created an artificial twilight in my room by drawing all the curtains and playing, for example, Tristan from beginning to end.

The most common misadventures recounted by country traders at Malacca in the period under consideration were caused by bad weather in the Bay of Bengal and the South China Sea. While bad weather accidents were also common in the seas off the Coromandel and Malabar coasts these were not often the subject of Malacca Protests. Such cases, especially when related to coastal shipping, were presumably more likely to be recorded at Bombay (now Mumbai), Calcutta or Madras. Mishaps could also be caused by stormy conditions in the Malacca Strait, but the Protests recorded at Malacca by ships in trouble in the Strait were usually associated with the destructive force of reefs, rocks or sandbanks rather than with bad weather alone: these incidents are listed in Chapter 2. Many of the ships reporting storm damage were from Calcutta and on their way to or returning from China. Bombay country ships feature less commonly, perhaps because there were fewer of them in the first place. Nevertheless, several Bombay ships did report storm damage, particularly on the outward voyage to China. Whether these ships sailed through the Bay of Bengal and down the Malacca Strait or used the alternative route to China down the west coast of Sumatra and through the Sunda Strait, Malacca would still be their port of recourse.

The weather patterns were all-important to the maritime traders of India and the Archipelago. The mariners were dependent on the southwest monsoon winds to convey them ‘to the East’ and the northeast monsoons to bring them back home again and had to take their chances with the accompanying storms, planning their voyages to avoid the worst of the typhoon months in the South China Sea and preparing to battle hurricanes in the Bay of Bengal.

From 1967 onwards, various plans were developed for the future of the small island of Tiengemeten in the south-western Dutch delta: it was to become a recreation park, or an airport, or a depot for polluted soil, or factories were to be built on the island, or residential neighbourhoods. Eventually, in 1997 the island was sold to the Dutch Society for the Preservation of Natural Monuments and changed into a nature reserve.1 One thing was never considered by the planners: to continue to use the land on Tiengemeten for agriculture, the reason why it had been reclaimed during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This oversight had nothing to do with the quality of the land. The young friable marine clay soils of Tiengemeten are among the most fertile soils in the world. It was instead caused by the changed position of agriculture in the Dutch economy, and by the changed position of lowland agriculture within the Dutch agricultural sector.

According to Otto Knottnerus, the Lowlands on the Wadden coast have become peripheral areas. Firstly, transport over sea is no longer that important, and new traffic infrastructure is leading traffic inland and to the south, where the economic and cultural centre is now situated.2 What Knottnerus writes about the Wadden area can be applied to most of the North Sea Lowlands. Only Holland is situated in the economic, cultural and political heart of the Netherlands, but agriculture does not profit very much from that location. The farming sector in Holland is squeezed between growing cities. Haarlemmermeer, for instance, once a prosperous arable district, is now mostly covered by residential neighbourhoods, business parks and Schiphol Airport. Secondly, due to continuing mechanisation, employment in agriculture was reduced enormously.

In Chapter 9 of The Prince, Machiavelli makes an observation that identifies common political tendencies in a way that is both succinct and profound. He notes the conflicting interest of the nobles (“i grandi”), who want to oppress the common people and the common people (“il popolo”), who want not to be oppressed. When first we see Isabella in Measure for Measure asking for greater restrictions as a nun, she might seem an unlikely representative of Machiavelli's liberty-loving “popolo,” but I wish to make just that argument. Following the important work by Melissa Sanchez on the female as political subject, I propose to consider Shakespeare's Isabella as a model of the political subject beleaguered and oppressed by worldly political forces. Isabella's struggles as she is summoned from the convent's sanctuary and dispatched into the licentious world of Vienna mirror recent Tudor politics and evoke general issues of freedom and oppression. Isabella's expulsion from the convent reflects the dissolution of convents and monasteries throughout England in the mid-sixteenth century. As the Tudor state expanded its reach at the expense of competing institutions and at the cost of disrupting the infrastructure traditionally provided by the church, it limited the life choices available to its subjects, particularly its female subjects, for whom the religious life had hitherto offered an alternative to marriage or prostitution.

The expropriation of convents by the Tudor state, which provides one historical backdrop for Measure for Measure, epitomizes a general pattern of appropriating the trappings of religious authority by the secular state described by the term political theology.

INTRODUCTION

This is the first of three texts in this volume about the witchcraft trials that arose from the alleged demonic possession of Christian Shaw, daughter of the laird of Bargarran in Renfrewshire. Christian was aged 10 when in August 1696 she began to experience convulsions (‘fits’) and other bizarre behaviour. Over the next several months she named several people who were ‘tormenting’ her through witchcraft. Judicial investigations began early in 1697; eventually seven witches were brought to trial at Paisley in April and May. All were convicted, and executed on 10 June; an eighth suspect had previously committed suicide in prison. A more detailed discussion of the case is given in the introduction to the third and longest of the texts, the True Narrative of the Sufferings and Relief of a Young Girle (1698), below. The trial records themselves have been published in the companion volume to the present one, where a further discussion of the case will also be found. The present introduction, meanwhile, focuses on the specific features of the Relation of the Diabolical Practices itself, and the ways in which it resembles, and differs from, the two texts that follow it in the present volume – the ‘Bargarran Witches’ manuscript and the True Narrative.

The Relation is much shorter than the better-known True Narrative, but it has its own independent value. It deals mainly with two specific early phases in the proceedings: the gathering of evidence against the suspects in February 1697 at Bargarran and Renfrew, and the beginning of the trial proceedings in April 1697 at Paisley. After seven or eight months, Christian Shaw's possessed behaviour was now coming to an end. The bulk of the Relation consists of copies of documents produced in February. The Relation then skates much more briefly over the later trial proceedings, though it does mention the convictions in May and the seven executions that ensued in June.

Appendix 3. Discography

The eighteenth century can be characterised by its increasing emphasis on reason, methodical analysis, and empiricism. Discussions on the significance of ‘the Enlightenment’ aside, there was a trend towards a critical scrutiny of all spheres of activity. Savants sought to understand the world and the human condition hoping to improve them, and the ideas of these thinkers increasingly affected reform practices. In the seventeenth century, scientific knowledge revolutionised natural philosophy with its mathematical and experimental methods. However, the ‘scientific revolution’ remained mostly confined to a small elite of experimental philosophers within the Republic of Letters. The process of consolidation and dissemination of scientific knowledge happened mostly in the eighteenth century and the effects of this process were, arguably, just as revolutionary. Scientific knowledge entered public knowledge because it was more widely applied than before. In this process, the division of scholarship into natural and moral philosophy and the cogency of related vocabularies lost their appeal. Instead, intellectual practices slowly began to emerge as distinct disciplines. This epistemic transformation did not happen overnight, but through a slow process: especially in the second half of the eighteenth century, scholars increasingly employed historical and empirical methods to identify the fundamental principles of complex phenomena and analyse them as ‘systems’. Designations as ‘science’ or ‘scientific’ implied the questioning of self-evident, customary notions and reflected the growing self-confidence in such approaches.

Introduction

The ‘Railway Mania’ is a term used primarily for the period 1844–46 when investment in railway projects became an all-consuming passion for a significant portion of the population. A bubble developed and eventually burst (or at least deflated). Many investors lost money. Nevertheless, a high proportion of the country's railway routes were promoted and commenced in those hectic years. There were no railways at all in Lincolnshire prior to 1844. By 1847, almost half the county's route-mileage had been authorised by Parliament.

Contemporary accounts alleged that many of the projects floated in those years were fraudulent. Railways were promoted, it is said, with no possible prospect of success, merely so that their promoters could allocate shares to themselves and sell them at a profit after their price had risen. Lawyers and even surveyors, it is said, arranged for lines to be promoted for the sake of the fat fees they could charge. Parliament had introduced certain Standing Orders on railway bills to act as a check on the powers of compulsory purchase that railways were granted in their Acts. By 1845, the House of Commons was enforcing these rigidly, as a way of throwing out a small proportion of the bills which threatened to swamp its sessions. Crooked promoters, it is alleged, would deliberately introduce certain errors in the plans they were obliged to deposit as a convenient way of killing their projects: they had made their money and had no wish to proceed further.

These allegations have been repeated in more modern accounts of the Railway Mania.

It is no secret that, for every puzzle of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight solved, another host of mysteries lift aloft their enigmatic (and possibly severed) heads. This epistemological illusiveness is, I contend, nonaccidental and significant to the poem's larger pedagogical and illustrative project. As a both deeply human and unflinchingly cosmic work, Sir Gawain draws on the characteristic caprice and otherworldly positionality of its fairies, presenting its readers and hearers1 with an engaging representation of what it is to live as a human in a transitory world that is also and always encompassed by a planned and orderly cosmos. In what follows, I will show that Sir Gawain is a poem formed and functioning in the image of the medieval cosmos. Influence, in this work, is multiple, interlinked, and tiered, with each fairy mover acting on and moving not only their own sphere of the narrative but also all the levels below and encompassed by their own. In this way, Sir Gawain becomes a poetic microcosm, mirroring both the structure and the order of the universe (as it was generally understood in late-medieval natural philosophy). As with the cosmos, form and arrangement are linked to and vital for understanding the content and lesson of this poem, acting, as a whole, to communicate the shape of the Divine order and to evoke the attendant theological and moral truths infusing both the cosmos and Gawain's moral journey. The poem's shape is thus inseparable from its message of reclamation and its emphasis on process and the perfecting of the soul over time.

In 1275, a set of regulations and fines on women's apparel was passed in the city of Montauban. Included was a clause requiring that the edicts be revisited fifteen years later. Accordingly, they were reviewed and updated in 1291. Comparison of these two documents offers fascinating information on apparel styles, modes of conspicuous consumption, and approaches to moral attitudes over two decades. There are enumerations of terms which clearly denoted sufficiently distinct styles to compel the authorities to distinguish between them, a signal that a fashion culture was at work in the town. A study of the sumptuary laws’ vernacular Occitan terminology can serve as an important contribution to the little-studied history of dress and consumption in the medieval Midi, the south of France. Enacted early in the timeline of medieval European sumptuary laws, these edicts also represent a possible model for later ones. Laws in vernacular Occitan (and adjacent Catalan, as well) share certain traits with those emerging in France, Spain, England, and Italy in this period and later, but other characteristics demonstrate that they deserve a place in the comparative work that has justly been called for by Laurel Wilson.2 Montauban's social and legal context was unique. The dress prohibitions need to be understood within the economic and political framework of this town in the last quarter of the thirteenth century as well as within the broader trend for issuing edicts intended to regulate consumption that was beginning to sweep European municipalities. The first part of this study will place the laws in the context of the town and their codicological transmission.

In Salvaging Spenser, Willy Maley asks, ‘What would the act of reading Ireland in the Faerie Queene entail’? For those scholars who have engaged with this question, as exceptions to the general ‘blithe disregard for any Irish dimension’ in Spenser's poetry, the recent answer has been important ‘historicist’ and ‘materialist’ explorations of the ‘cultural specificity of Ireland’. For Thomas Herron, the Irish context enlivens readings of ‘all six Books (and the fragmentary seventh) of the epic as well as many of Spenser's later, shorter poems’: Herron's use of Irish contexts when exploring the allegorising of Walter Raleigh as Timias in Book VI, exemplifies the procedure. Similarly, Richard McCabe uses political tracts as a means to uncover the Irish context of each Book's virtue, including how the virtues of Books IV–VI are intrinsically tied to Spenser's anxiety around colonial reform in Ireland. For these scholars the historical context provides fruitful ground for explorations of Spenser's colonial experiences in Ireland, whom he supported and celebrated, whom he fought against and denigrated, and how all of this is allegorised throughout his poetry and in the View in order for him to strive towards his ideal Irish colonial society.

Maley answers his own question by considering Ireland as a geographic space, applying the approaches of literary geography to consider how Spenser represents, engages with, and allegorises the spaces and places of Ireland in his works; evidenced through discussions of how the Faerie Queene's closing sequence is set on Spenser's Kilcolman estates, and by highlighting how ‘our knowledge of Spenser's familiarity with Ireland centres on the poignant allusion to the Fens of Allen in Book II, the river schemata of Book IV, Colin Clouts Come Home Againe, and the Mutabilitie Cantos’.

Q. What is it about the guitar that you love?

A. There is a mysterious universe that lives inside that box. For me, the guitar is what happens inside the structure. I’ve always been fascinated by guitar makers and by the process of putting pieces of wood together, taking such delicate care of how every piece of wood is going to vibrate and how all these pieces will function together in harmony, of putting soft woods against hard woods, and then enclosing it all. The most magical moment for most guitar makers is when they close the guitar. That is the time when the makers that I have known, such Rodríguez, Hauser, Blöchinger, and my son, have said that they have a very spiritual feeling, when the guitar is closed. The guitar is not a guitar until the top is connected to the neck. The next thing that happens is that the sides are glued to the top in the grooves that have been carved on the heel block. And then the back goes on top of the sides to create an enclosed space. To me, that space is the guitar.

I think that the whole Romero way of producing sound comes from understanding that it is not what you do with your hands, it is not what the strings do, but rather it is actually what happens to that space inside the box. That sound is the music. And the top becomes like a trampoline, so that when you pull the string you are uniting all the forces that are holding the guitar together, uniting them to create a sort of synergy.

As the first book that explicitly argues, as Malcolm Miller does in the introduction, for Israeli music's rarely explored and gradually growing international significance, this book is groundbreaking. A collection of highly diverse chapters, Classical and Popular Music in Israel paints an unprecedented panoramic overview, illuminating characteristic traits of Israeli culture that are known to local musicians and have repeatedly proven to be inspiring to outsiders.

A list of the graves of the Olympians appears in the poet Gilla in Chomdid Úa Chormaic's eleventh-century composition on world history, A Rí richid, réidig dam:

Satuirn ra commuid a chlais mac Polluir i sleib Chucais. adnacht Mercuir ri lecht lia i nErmopolim Cipria.

Uenir ic inis Cipir. Mairt isin Tráic trenChicil. Liber Pater dema de. isin Teba ata saide.

Hercoil i tír na Tiri ra loisc tríana lonchridi Aesculapius ra fis fuir ro hadnacht i nEpiduir.

Saturn son of Pollus, his grave was kept in Mount Caucasus, the burial of Mercury before a stone tomb in Ermoupolis [in] Cypria.

Venus on the island of Cyprus. Mars in Thrace of the strong-breasted [i.e., Amazons]. Liber Pater died from it, it is in Thebes that he is.

Hercules in the land of the Tyrrhenians burned through his full heart. Asclepius, it is known about him that he was buried in Epidaurus.

According to the poet's euhemeristic approach, the Classical gods were mortals and their graves had become cult sites. While relatively common among medieval accounts of pagan gods, euhemerism was only one of many approaches taken towards the Olympians in medieval Irish literature and the Classical adaptations. Flann Mainistrech's poem Éstid a eólchu can ón, preserved in Lebor Gabála, takes a similarly euhemeristic approach and enumerates the deaths of various members of the Túatha Dé. In Razvan Stanciu's words, this is done ‘presumably with the aim of proving their humanity’, although he notes that Flann also calls them gods (dee) in the same work. Stanciu concludes that día is ‘a weak label’, which may mean nothing more than ‘supernatural figure in general’.

Egbunike's and Nwankwo's volume, ALT 39, provides a critical frame for engaging the tenets of Africanfuturism as laid out by Nnedi Okorafor in her conception of Africanfuturism. The volume provides content narratives, critical frames, and theoretical constructs to read and critique writings in the genre.

Since the publication of ALT 39, questions have been raised about the nature and component of the genre, its artistic conception, conventional framework for writing, and paradigms for literary interpretation. Two questions have been foremost in the motivation for editing this volume: the question of African specificity and the imagined alternative African future. This volume draws from the spirit and content of ALT 39 to tease out the implications of these two questions for Okorafor's conception of the genre and its significance for both writer and critic.

There are editorial parallels in both volumes in terms of content analysis and critical frames the articles use in interpreting Okorafor's conception of Africanfuturism. What makes ALT 43 distinct is the effort of contributors to robustly interrogate some of the features outlined by Okorafor and present their own interpretation of the creative and interpretive constructs of the genre. As such, the practice adopted in this volume is framed around the amplification of themes critical to conceptualizing the genre convention but also a contestation of some of the principles pivotal to understanding its nature and function.