10 May 1840 Sunday

I mean again to try to keep a journal. I have often thought of doing it, without carrying my resolution into execution and have just now been reminded of it by reading Sir C. Romilly's [sic]. One admires the man so much that one is glad to imitate him even in indifferent things. A good time to write it will generally be the quarter of an hour at night after Eliza is gone up to bed before I follow her. Nothing very particular to record this first day. Had a very nice talk with her in the morning. Went with her to chapel; Dr. Hutton gave a sermon upon the very important duty of the heads of families not neglecting to inculcate good principle into the minds of those dependent on them, showing how they too frequently were prevented from recommending some particular virtue by the consciousness of not exercising it themselves. Hope I may improve by the lesson. In the afternoon walked out to Sam's at Highbury, & back to tea. Rained on the way home, when I walked a mile holding my umbrella over a little girl that its father was carrying on his arm. Read a lecture of Dr. Channing's in the evening. A happy day.

11 May. …As there has been break of ten years in my journal I ought to a certain extent put down an outline of the things that would have been recorded in it: I was then living at my sister's in Ormond Street, & wrote this book I remember at my office in Pinner's Hall.

Fulcoius of Beauvais, ‘Jephthah’

For many historians, the fifteenth century has been seen as witnessing significantly new departures in the history of the Isle of Man. Previously, they would argue, the situation in the Irish Sea was rather chaotic, with confused succession to control over the Island and considerable influence on the part of the Scots at least possible if not de facto. Now as the fifteenth century progressed, it has been suggested, the situation became more stable, and in a ‘better epoch’ the Island became more clearly subject to English influence. At the very least, there has been seen to be a more stable succession to the lordship, through the persons of the Stanleys, and a change in the nature of the rivalry between England and Scotland, with more stability in Scotland leading to a more fixed stand-off between the two kingdoms. Yet this is deceptive: here it will be argued that there are good grounds to question the stability of succession, or at least its applicability in the Isle of Man; and it will also be argued that the Scots were more confident and still assertive in their approach to the Isle of Man, while the English themselves continued to see the Island as Scottish. Internally, the fifteenth century witnessed not subjection to English ways but the consolidation of traditional Manx political and legal structures.

It is important initially to consider the evidence we have for growing stability and Anglicisation. There is a case to be made that during the fifteenth century the focus of English royal foreign policy shifted very clearly to France, with Henry V's novel interest in Normandy and then, as circumstances allowed, in the French throne.

Pilsen

Pilsen, Bohemia's second largest city, has gained a global reputation for its exceptional beer and the impressive Škoda munition works. Nowadays, a charming park envelops the historic houses that boast the coveted “license to brew.” However, when Smetana first arrived in Pilsen, the city was only beginning to dismantle its old town ramparts. The mayor was determined to beautify the city, systematically tearing down the walls and gates that once protected this Catholic community from the Hussites in the fifteenth century and Wallenstein's soldiers during the Thirty Years’ War. In the 1840s, the town still retained much of its prosperity and prestige. The central square featured a Gothic cathedral and a Renaissance town hall. A testament to history, the house where Mikuláš Bakalář's printing press operated in 1504 still stood. This press, one of the oldest in Bohemia, delivered the first news to the Czechs about the discovery of America. On the town's outskirts, Czech villages preserved their traditional customs and vibrant costumes, much like those depicted in The Bartered Bride. Along the Berounka and Radbuza rivers, old castles dotted the landscape, likely serving as destinations for many youthful, romantic escapades. When Smetana arrived, Pilsen's population was around 12,000, consisting mainly of affluent individuals, mostly of Czech origin, though German was the preferred language of the upper class.

The college faculty was predominantly composed of Czech Premonstratensians, and the student body comprised Pilsen's privileged youth. During these three years, young Smetana immersed himself in the humanities, preparing for practical life under much more favorable circumstances than in Prague. This was largely because one of his teachers happened to be his cousin.

How do you read a medieval book? Answers to this broad methodological question generally fall into two related disciplinary categories, the bookhistorical and the literary-critical. One way to read medieval books is to study them as material objects. In this, the book-historical (or “codicological”) perspective, to read a medieval book is to inquire into the physical components of that book, to understand those components in terms of historicized and geographically localized mechanical processes, and to derive from the features and arrangement of those components information about the people who made the book and books like it. Without significantly addressing textual contents, book historians can uncover an astounding array of information surrounding the economic, social, and political processes that governed medieval manuscript production. We can identify the chemical processes that allowed for the manufacture of parchment or ink, survey the use and variety of medieval bindings, estimate the supply of sheepskin and quills for major cities and remote provinces, and model the circulation of skilled labor, in England and on the continent, by way of paleographic analysis and attention to shifting practices in decoration and illumination. From features of a manuscript such as the size of its pages, the breadth of its margins, how it was prepared for the act of writing, how the writing itself was imposed and corrected, and the overall tactile impression of the object, we can make surprisingly accurate inferences about the kinds of texts it is likely to contain and the audiences it was likely meant to reach.

Beethoven's cello sonatas number only half as many as his sonatas for violin, but they were composed at widely spaced intervals, and taken together they give us a clearer picture of his stylistic development. There is, indeed, a sense in which the cello sonatas more neatly define the composer's ‘early’, ‘middle’ and ‘late’ periods than do even his string quartets: the two op.5 sonatas were composed only a year or so after the op.1 piano trios; the A major Sonata op.69, of 1807–8, belongs to the period of the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies; while the two sonatas op.102, composed in 1815, clearly signal the emergence of Beethoven's late style.

With these five works Beethoven broke new ground. No composer since Bach had attempted to write for a stringed instrument of similar range with obbligato keyboard. In the second half of the eighteenth century the prevailing method of writing cello sonatas or variations was to provide the principal part with no more than a simple accompaniment for a second stringed instrument – either another cello, or a bass. In this way the virtuoso player who held a position at court could give his aristocratic employer the satisfaction of joining in the music-making without placing an undue strain on his or her technical proficiency. This type of texture, locating the melody instrument in a high register virtually throughout, is one that was cultivated extensively by such leading players of the day as Boccherini and the Duport brothers; but such use of the cello as essentially a form of viola pomposa was hardly likely to be of interest to Beethoven, whose great achievement was to find instead a viable means of exploiting the distinctive lower end of the instrument's range.

In 1732, the Archdeacon of Middlesex and ‘chaplain in ordinary to his Majesty’ Daniel Waterland (1683–1740) published Christianity Vindicated Against Infidelity, in which he complained how ordinary people debated ‘in shops and stalls’ about the ‘cavils of Spinosa and Hobbs’, the present canon of Scripture was ‘disputed’ and priests were ‘without distinction traduced as imposers on the credulity of mankind’. Waterland explicitly ascribed attacks on Scripture and the clergy to the increasing diffusion in England of ideas developed abroad:

I know not if these licentious principles were the proper produce of our own soil, or may not be rather said to have been transplanted hither from abroad, where it is certain they had taken root and spread, for a hundred years or more, before they met with any favourable reception […] in this grave and serious, and for the most part well-disposed Kingdom.

Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English authors were conscious of the widespread diffusion and potentially destabilising impact of European texts and ideas on English culture and religion. Especially after the lapse in 1695 of the Licensing Act ‘for preventing the frequent abuses in printing seditious treasonable and unlicensed books and pamphlets’, the writings of modern French and Dutch philosophers and biblical scholars were advertised in almost every booklist and newspaper.