7 February. Sunday morning. My Journal has been discontinued for more than two months, my mind having been for a great part of the time too much filled with dismal views of our business to like to set down my thoughts. At times it oppressed me so much that I could only sit brooding, or at best occupy myself with a novel … I have generally found sufficient interest in my Reading Room occupations and other active employments, but even then, I was afraid to collect my thoughts and sit down to write. Just at present things look a little brighter, as a little of Hinck's money has come, there is some prospect of more, and the Lisbon business seems inclined to revive from its six month's almost total stagnation. The state of things is still dismal enough, but there is no good dwelling on it. We have no reason to despair of being able to earn a moderate livelihood, and more we need not ask for. At Hampstead we continue to endeavour to make every possible retrenchment without actually altering our mode of living; whether we shall reduce the number of our servants from three to two, is a point not yet decided upon; we could then hardly keep up what are called decent appearances in our present house. At Broad St. Buildings we have made still greater changes having parted with all our full paid clerks except Fitton; Henry Eddis leaves us on Lady Day.

Scholarly discussion of medievalism is no longer limited to heterocentric and androcentric approaches. However, at the intersection of these two concerns, there remains a neglected area of inquiry: how do women, whose cultural productions can be profitably understood within a “lesbian” and/or “queer” framework, respond to medieval texts and tropes? This chapter responds by examining two case studies from the modernist period: Gwen Lally's medievalist pageant held at Wroxton Abbey in 1928 and (John) Radclyffe Hall's novel The Well of Loneliness, sometimes referred to as the “bible of lesbianism,” published in the same year.

The upheaval of the conquest provided fertile soil for Mathilda of Flanders to expand the privileges and responsibilities of queenship. Amongst these developments was her participation in justice. Mathilda's judicial activity was truly woven throughout her reign. It consumed a signifcant portion of her time and was a defning factor of her queenship. Tat Mathilda acted as a royal judge is not a matter for debate; evidence is found in Domesday Book and the monastic chronicles surveyed below. The subject of this chapter is how she came to be there when previous English queens were not. The following discussion suggests that Mathilda drew from two sources that encouraged her to imagine herself as a judge: one practical and one ideological. The frst was the legal praxis of Norman female abbatial authority with which she was familiar. In Mathilda's duchy of Normandy, some women – particularly abbesses – handed down verdicts in their own manorial courts. This stands in contrast to eleventh-century English courts that were based on the assembly of the hundred, shire or county. The English structure allowed less room for lordly women to create manorial courts over which they had control. The second was the ideological foundation of the Ottonian empresses for whom Mathilda of Flanders was named. Ottonian traditions created a space for imperial women to preside over legal conficts. The imperial identity adopted by her mother may have predisposed Mathilda to assume prerogatives her English predecessors did not. Just as in earlier chapters, Mathilda can be found occupying unexpected spaces. This chapter shows her in the seat of justice.

The A major Cello Sonata op.69 and the two piano trios op.70 belong to one of the most fruitful creative periods in Beethoven's life. The main work on the sonata was carried out in 1807 and 1808, following the completion of the Mass in C op.86, and at a time when Beethoven was also devoting his energies to his Fifth Symphony. By the time the piano trios were ready, in the following year, not only had the symphony been completed, but also its successor, the ‘Pastoral’ op.68. The five instrumental works are astonishingly different in character and outward form. Indeed, the cello sonata and the first of the trios – both of them among Beethoven's most original and perfectly achieved chamber works with piano – are in a sense complete opposites: while the sonata lacks a self-contained slow movement, and has a scherzo as its centrepiece, the trio's exceptionally quick and dynamic outer movements obviate the need for a scherzo, while at the same time necessitating the presence of a broad slow movement at the heart of the work. The success of the op.69 Sonata's plan is due not only to the largely relaxed nature of its opening movement, but also to the short Adagio preceding the finale – not so much an introduction, as a drastically abridged slow movement proper.

While the op.5 cello sonatas had often been weighted in favour of the piano, op.69 is the first work of its kind to find a successful solution to the problems of balancing and blending the two instruments with an equitable distribution of material between them. Beethoven's compositional draft of the first movement reveals the extent to which he refashioned the music's texture in order to achieve a satisfactorily balanced sound.

The unrestrained circulation of foreign texts and ideas was seen by English authors from the mid-seventeenth to the early eighteenth century as a central factor in enabling the crisis. Significant portions of book sales catalogues and inventories of private libraries of individuals belonging to the English educated elite consisted of books written and/or published in Europe, which came to England mostly in Latin, or in French vernacular via the Dutch Republic and France, and which were often translated into English to satisfy a growing demand for foreign books and ideas. However, not all these books exerted the same impact on English intellectual culture. The analysis of English debates shows that there were just a few authors and books that most recurrently appear in contemporary discussion about the crisis and that generated serious apprehension for their actual or potential impact on a rapidly expanding readership. In this chapter, I will focus on the reception of the ideas and works of Descartes and Spinoza, and examine the contemporaries’ perception of their impact on English culture. Other names appear in English accounts of intellectual change, such as those of Galileo, Socinus, Gassendi and Bayle, and developments in disciplines other than natural philosophy, such as biblical scholarship, were accused of generating the crisis. But the main targets of apologetic literature in England were the French and the Dutch philosophers.

Although the philosophies of Descartes and Spinoza differ in many aspects including, most notably, the ‘mind-body problem’, the two authors were often coupled as promoters of a new mechanical strand of philosophy that, according to their early modern detractors, had potentially disruptive consequences for the churches and organised religion.

Bayard had vested many of his hopes in the commission of the Jay Treaty's London commission. In Article VII, the Jay Treaty specified that five commissioners were to meet in London for eighteen months to discern and evaluate: “Complaints […] made by divers Merchants and others, Citizens of the United States, that during the course of the War in which His Majesty is now engaged they have sustained considerable losses and damage by reason of irregular or illegal Captures or Condemnations of their vessels.”

The aim of this commission was to agree on and pay out an “adequate Compensation” to such merchants, to be covered by the British (or American) government. This systematic and formalised arbitration was new, introducing what has been termed as “the modern era of arbitral or judicial settlement of international disputes”.

For the London commission, American commissioners Christopher Gore and William Pinckney were ‘mixed’ with British commissioners, Dr Nicholl (who later resigned to take on the position of King's Advocate and was replaced by Maurice Swabey) and John Anstey. Therefore, the commission “consisted chiefly of lawyers with a wide cultural background”. Gore had studied law under John Lowell, a judge on the US Court of Appeals in Cases of Capture – the first federal US court and incidentally a law court that dealt in prize.

There is, at the heart of Adalbert Stifter's Bunte Steine (Motley Stones, 1853), a fundamental emptiness. This might seem like an odd thing to say. For the most part, Stifter's world is painstakingly, perhaps even lushly described. Natural landscapes, social relations, and physical objects are depicted with a care that some might consider excessive. The plotlines are driven by activity that runs the gamut from the measured to the manic, from calm routine to strife and disaster. The text offers us a bounty on the level of both action and description, but something still seems to be missing.

For Walter Benjamin, this absence is a fundamentally linguistic one, a form of what he calls “reticence” [Verschwiegenheit]. Because Stifter is cut off from “the essence of the world” [das Weltwesen] that is language, he cannot give a persuasive account of the relationship between the natural world and the moral one. The homologies that he tries to establish between the two remain restricted to the visual register and therefore mute. Because it is inarticulate, Stifter's world is also disarticulated, for an unbridgeable gulf separates material impressions from the forces that are responsible for them.

The Jay Treaty was published by the US government and widely disseminated in the press. Known as one of the first outcries in American politics and infamous for the public reaction to it, its circulation can barely be underestimated. 1 But how did US merchants interact with the commission or with Bayard in his capacity for assistance in claims and appeals? What information did the US government provide to mercantile communities, in which manner did they themselves interfere with the court process, and how was such information circulated?

Merchants were already following regular updates on condemnations and captures, both in the vice-admiralty courts and in the High Court of Admiralty. Decrees and lines of argumentation in court were published in newspapers.2 John Proctor obtained knowledge “by a late Bermudian paper, that the Ship Hamilton, Capt. Farrett, was taken by the Thetis British Frigate, and carried into Bermudas”3 and thus took up correspondence with the US government. Some government instructions had been printed in American newspapers, even printed in their entirety, with specific references made to the importance of providing merchants with information.4 The merchant community also functioned as a communication network in itself, with two merchants corresponding in 1797, whether they should contact other persons who might be in a similar position concerning captured property and get them in touch with Samuel Bayard.5 Yet the knowledge of what exactly the Treaty meant for their private cases remained unclear to many. The main initial point of governmental contact for most queries was the Secretary of State, although individual members of the commission, and additional staff on both sides, such as Jacob Wagner, Chief Clerk at the State Department, or Samuel Bayard, all received letters. Occasionally, citizens were referred there by other government officials.