While there has been no shortage of monographs on Beethoven's symphonies, string quartets and piano sonatas, his chamber music with piano has received relatively scant attention, particularly in the Beethoven literature in English. Yet this area of the composer's output contains some of his greatest and most famous works, among them the ‘Ghost’ and ‘Archduke’ piano trios, the ‘Spring’ and ‘Kreutzer’ violin sonatas, and the A major Cello Sonata op.69. It is true that the combination of piano and strings produces by its very nature a more heterogeneous form than the string quartet, and that Beethoven reserved some of his most profound and spiritual utterances for his late quartets in particular; but his piano trios, violin sonatas and cello sonatas together make up a larger corpus of works, and one that covers scarcely less stylistic ground – from his very first efforts at composition during the years when he was living in Bonn, to the threshold of his last period (the two cello sonatas op.102) and beyond (the two series of variations for piano and flute opp.105 and 107). No other composer, moreover, made as significant a contribution to all three principal forms of chamber music with piano. Haydn's piano trios, it is true, belong among his most remarkable and original chamber works, but the special nature of their textures assigns them a place apart in the history of the genre. Haydn, moreover, made no excursion into the field of duo sonatas; and if Mozart's violin sonatas number among them some of the finest works in the repertoire, and his piano trios contain a comparable number of masterpieces (though none, perhaps, that quite matches the grandeur and visionary quality of Beethoven's ‘Archduke’ and ‘Ghost’ trios), he never attempted to cultivate the more problematic medium of the sonata for piano and cello. Beethoven's five cello sonatas remain a unique achievement: not only did he essentially create the genre and contribute considerably more to it than any later composer of the front rank, he also raised it to a level of perfection that was never to be matched.

WAGNER SEEMS to have had, at best, an ambivalent attitude towards philosophy. His autobiography is not always a reliable source, and there are reasons to doubt his memory of his first encounter with Feuerbach, but it still provides an illuminating account of his early interest in the subject:

In his centenary year, 1978, Alfred Döblin was described on the dust jacket of a German academic publication—perfectly aptly—as “probably the least well-known” of the classic modernist authors. After returning to Germany at the end of the Second World War, Döblin had not regained the public prominence he enjoyed in the brief period between publishing his spectacularly innovative city novel Berlin Alexanderplatz in 1929 and fleeing from the Nazis early in 1933. For a combination of reasons, his publication history in the decade after 1945 was patchy, to say the least: works of his that did appear were divided between two West German publishers, broadly on the basis of their themes, while his last novel, Hamlet, written in 1945–46, did not appear until 1956, and then in East Berlin. From the 1970s onward, however, sustained scholarly teamwork created the annotated editions of Döblin's writings that were to provide the main basis for the systematic study of his works in the years that followed. While the most frequently quoted champion of Döblin in the German-speaking world remains Günter Grass, who spoke of him in a rousing lecture dating from 1967 as his “teacher,” a substantial number of other German novelists since the Second World War have similarly acknowledged that, without imitating him exactly, they had learned a great deal about the narrative craft and the range of its possibilities from Döblin's fiction.

As is to be expected, many Latin American crime novels have been adapted for the screen, though the process has rarely been a case of faithful page-to-screen transposition. Among other considerations, an account of how these adaptations occur needs to attend to: (1) the often febrile political, cultural, industrial, and economic backgrounds against which film adaptations are made; (2) the pervasive influence of Hollywood film noir and neo-noir conventions on crime fiction adaptation; (3) the ways in which noir modes can be argued to have developed endogenously in Latin America, sometimes in response to some of those same political and social conditions; and (4) the filtering and creativity inherent to the act of adaptation itself. All of these concerns are further worth framing with the aid of the rise of adaptation studies over the past two decades, during which time seminal works by Linda Hutcheon, Thomas Leitch and Robert Stam, among others, have served to significantly develop the field. Whereas cinematic adaptations might once have been evaluated primarily in terms of how much they adhered to or diverged from their literary source, recent work has challenged some of the assumptions built into this approach; Stam, for instance, posits adaptations as critical ‘translations’ or ‘readings’ engaged in a creative, two-way dialogic exchange with their sources. Stam's conceptualisation is arguably doubly relevant in the context of genre fiction which, in Latin America as elsewhere, has never really benefitted from the elevated status that traditional cultural hierarchies conferred upon literature over film.

INTRODUCTION

Michael Hoy

A.W. Moore, in his two volume History of the Isle of Man and his diocesan history Sodor and Man, written at the end of the nineteenth century, is the first historian to give a comprehensive history of the Island church and its contribution to the ordering and administration of insular and parochial society, together with accounts of customary religious practice, biographical sketches of some bishops and other ecclesiastical figures, and descriptions of key buildings and other aspects of church life. Before Moore's work, the historiography of accounts of religion and the church in the Isle of Man is for the most part limited to studies of the established church as a political and administrative instrument in the context of the Stanley, Atholl and Crown lordships, and biographies of a handful of Island bishops which are limited in scope and design. Three biographies of Bishop Wilson – Clement Cruttwell's late eighteenth-century account, tagged on to his eight-volume collection of Wilson's works, and two more detailed nineteenth-century accounts by Hugh Stowell and John Keble – and Weedon Butler's Memoirs of Mark Hildesley are for the most part merely descriptive and hagiographical, and none offers any critical reflection on or contextual evaluation of their subjects.

There is little modern biographical writing, although a more recent authoritative account of the Island's bishops and clergy, with factual and anecdotal notes on personalities and parish life, may be found in John Gelling's History of the Manx Church, 1698–1911, published in 1998. This begins relatively late in the period of this volume with the arrival of Bishop Wilson, however, and the work is not referenced.

Introduction

The account

George Wishart of Drymme was a sub-collector of the queen's rents and incomes working for the comptroller Sir John Wishart of Pittarrow. His surviving account covers a part of the years 1563 and 1564. There is a charge or income section followed by discharge or expenditure. The structure and content is summarised on p. 6. George Wishart passed most of the money to ofcers of the queen's household. These particular transactions are for the most part not recorded in Pittarrow's accounts of the Thirds of Benefces, or in other accounts made by the Scottish exchequer, although some similar payments or totals of recurring payments can be found. Payments found here for the Royal Guard, Captain Robert Anstruther, and the fortress island of Inchkeith, also appear in the accounts of the Thirds of Benefces. This account has not previously been published, but has occasionally been quoted by historians. Gordon Donaldson highlighted payments to household ofcers, including David Rizzio, who appears as ‘David Rischo, Italiane’, and to John Knox, as part of his stipend and as sums of money given to his servants, Margaret Fowlis and John Reid. Another payment for Knox was given to Robert Watson, a merchant in Edinburgh. The manuscript was consulted in the nineteenth century for similar purposes; Charles Rogers cited the account for Rizzio's salary from a copy in the papers of George Chalmers, while Chalmers seems to have used fgures from Wishart's account to illustrate courtiers’ salaries.