Upon its initial release, Robert Gluck's 1994 novel Margery Kempe was met with equal parts disgust and scorn by a bewildered reading public. While ostensibly a retelling of the fifteenth-century Book of Margery Kempe, Gluck parallels the waning gay romance of Bob – a thinly veiled representation of Gluck himself – with that of Margery Kempe and Christ. The result is a novel that is neither purely historical fiction nor clearly autobiography. A 1994 Publisher's Weekly review wryly declares that “Margery Kempe lives up to neither its potential nor its premise […] Whatever Gluck's intention, he has failed.” In the same year, an anonymous review in Kirkus voices great displeasure regarding having read Margery Kempe: “Gluck pushes the envelope way too far as he attempts to use the history of a failed, would-be saint from the 15th century to explore his own romantic obsession in the 1990s.” Holding little back, the reviewer ultimately finds Margery Kempe “[n]umbingly frenzied, frustrated, and futile.”

Unlike the queens who ruled England afer her, Mathilda lef behind a tombstone that utterly ignores her children. The text of her epitaph celebrates her royal genealogy and her activities as ruler – especially the construction of Holy Trinity – while the maternal element of her identity is completely marginalized. It is revealing that this contemporary representation of Mathilda does not communicate that she had any ofspring at all.

While the omission indicates that other identifying features took precedence, Mathilda gave birth to nine children, which had a signifcant efect on her life and rule.

When Henry VIII removed the English Church from the authority of the pope in 1534 as a result of the latter's refusal to grant annulment of Henry's marriage to Catherine of Aragon, it was to prove the catalyst for events which were to bring about profound changes for the church's music and musicians. Although the theological repercussions of the Reformation set in motion by Martin Luther in 1517 soon found discussion and support in England, it was firmly repressed and its sympathisers persecuted, until Henry's break from Rome enabled English reformers to embolden themselves. For choirs, the first realization that their traditional life was under threat came with the dissolution of the monasteries between 1536 and 1540. For the most part they were no longer in the vanguard of choral life, but the greater monastic houses were still significant centres of choral activity, with perhaps as many as fifty having choirs involving the employment of boys and lay adults. Although the monks were pensioned off and many monastic buildings were destroyed, not all their musical bodies were disbanded. The eight old monastic cathedrals remained, transformed into secular establishments headed by a dean and chapter – many of the posts being occupied by former monks – with a choir of boys, minor canons and lay clerks, doubtless formed in part from the previous Lady Chapel choirs, but now regularly occupying the stalls of the quire. Such was the transformation effected at Canterbury, Carlisle, Durham, Ely, Norwich, Rochester, Winchester and Worcester. But Henry's reorganisation did not stop there, for, in addition, five former monastic churches which had never been cathedrals, were given that status as mother churches of the newly created dioceses of Bristol, Chester, Gloucester, Oxford and Peterborough. Westminster Abbey was also briefly made London's second cathedral at this time, but, after reverting to an abbey under Mary Tudor, in 1560 it was turned into a ‘royal peculiar’, which it remains to the present day.

A Programme of Diversity

To begin with a word of caution: in the “Remarks on the Novel” that Döblin published in 1917, he firmly rejected the notion that the style of a narrative text was there to be noticed and admired in its own right, likening it rather to the hammer with which a sculptor chisels out the shape he wishes to present to the world. The style of a literary text, in other words, was merely the instrument with which the distinctive character of a subject, or a situation, or an episode, is conveyed to the reader. And yet, as we noted in our introduction, no less a discerning reader than Jorge Luis Borges was moved to endorse Döblin's skill with that stylistic hammer twenty years later, in 1937, when he described him as the most versatile writer of his time. A similar point was made more recently by the German novelist Ingo Schulze when he recalled that the stylistic diversity of Döblin's narratives had helped him to see beyond the notion that, to be successful, literary authors needed to cultivate a style that was unmistakably their own.

The compositional history of the three op.1 piano trios has been the subject of much debate. It was Ferdinand Ries who set the cat among the pigeons, by relating that the works had been tried out in Haydn's presence at a soirée given by Prince Lichnowsky, to whom they were dedicated.

Most artists and music lovers were invited, especially Haydn, for whose judgement everyone was eager. The trios were played and immediately made a great stir. Haydn, too, said many nice things about them, but advised Beethoven not to publish the third, in C minor. This greatly astonished Beethoven, as he regarded it as the best, just as today it is the favourite and the one that creates the greatest effect. Therefore this remark of Haydn's made a bad impression on Beethoven and left him with the idea: Haydn was envious and jealous, and bore him no good will. I must admit that when Beethoven told me this I gave it little credence. I therefore took the opportunity of asking Haydn himself about it. But his answer confirmed Beethoven's statement, inasmuch as he said he did not think that this trio would be as quickly and easily understood, and as favourably accepted by the public.

For a long time, Ries's anecdote was unquestioningly accepted – not least by Alexander Wheelock Thayer, who advanced the theory that the trios had originated during the composer's Bonn years, and had been radically after Haydn had left Vienna for his second visit to London. On the occasion described by Ries, explained Thayer, the trios had been heard in a preliminary form.

A term commonly used in Old Norse to refer to the gods, or at least a group among them, is áss (pl. æsir). The word is glossed “One of the Æsir, pre-Christian Nordic god” in ONP. The Æsir are the dominant group of gods in the Prose Edda and in Heimskringla, where they are under the leadership of Óðinn. Another group of gods, the vanir, seems to occupy a more subordinate position, although three Vanir, Njǫrðr, Freyr, and Freyja, have been incorporated among the Æsir and live among them. There seem to be other Vanir, in addition to the three named ones, living separately from the Æsir, but the mythological sources are not concerned with them and have very little to say about them.

The term for the Vanir, as well as their names, is primarily known from Scandinavian tradition, while that of the Æsir had wider currency, and cognates are known from all three main branches of the Germanic languages. On this basis, one can establish with some certainty the existence of a Proto- Germanic form of the noun áss and seek to determine the etymology and meaning of this term. The Proto-Germanic root is commonly recognized to be *ans- although, as will be seen, the various branches of early Germanic may have assigned this root to different stem-classes. The existence of the Vanir group, on the other hand, cannot be established with certainty for the Proto-Germanic stage, and they may represent a distinct Scandinavian element or development of a common Germanic tradition.

The first season of Barbaren (Barbarians), premiered on Netflix in 2020. The series is an original German-language production that dramatizes the legend of Arminius and his victory over the Romans in the year 9 CE. Barbarians joins a catalog of recent television series that celebrate a variety of national historical fictions, particularly those that have defined what we now know as Europe. Collectively, these series reveal that, in a supposedly post-national Europe, we continue to tell national histories – stories of place and of these places are still tied to national mythologies.

In Netflix's retelling, the ancient story of Arminius resonates in the present as a narrative of belonging. The story itself follows the general arc of the familiar tale in which the Germanic tribes defeat the Roman legions led by Varus. The first season shows the brutal and exploitative Roman occupation of Germanic territory, the return of Arminius (Ari) to the lands from which he was taken as tribute when he was a child, and his eventual accession to the leadership of his tribe. Season one ends with the defeat of the Romans and the death of Varus.

Hand-made and hand-ruled manuscript paper sometimes offers useful evidence about the music written upon it as well as the context in which sources were created. In seventeenth-century England, the availability of commercially produced manuscript paper contributed to a cultural change apparent both in the success of instruction books such as Playford's Introduction to the Skill of Music and in the variety of material created for and by amateur as well as professional musicians.

English manuscript sources of the later seventeenth century normally display a remarkable degree of standardisation. Their paper is sourced from specific areas, and stave ruling is normally applied by practised hands using multi-stave compound rastra. Formats are usually confined to folio, in which a single complete sheet of paper creates two leaves of a book, oblong quarto, in which the sheet is also folded and cut horizontally to produce four folios, and oblong sexto, with two horizontal folds making six folios; oblong formats were preferred to their upright equivalents because they preserve the original width of the paper, thus allowing for longer staves and fewer line-ends. Such consistency in paper, format and ruling is highly unlikely to have arisen by chance or through a common understanding of what was needed, suggesting, on the contrary, a well-informed and highly centralised controlling commercial interest. The Playfords, who dominated the market in printed music during the later seventeenth century and regularly advertised ‘Rul’d paper for Musick’ in their publications, undoubtedly played a pivotal role in this aspect of the music trade, and GB-Lbl Add. MS 31430, a set of manuscript partbooks demonstrably linked to John Playford, may be taken as representative of the kind of material he supplied as blank volumes or scribal copies.