In writing this book, I had two aims. One was to provide readers in the English-speaking world with a comprehensive guide to the fiction of Alfred Döblin (1878-1957) that would help them to appreciate his achievement. The other was to convey the kind of information and interpretative suggestions that would be useful to anyone studying his works in an academic context and in the original German, whether at a senior or a more junior level. (It is with them in mind that I have included the sort of footnotes that will help them to fine-tune their understanding of particular aspects of Döblin's works and to shed further light on them themselves.)

In describing Döblin on my title page as an “epic modernist,” I had more in mind than the sheer length and complexity of some of his fictions, and in the course of my Introduction I explain what Döblin himself had in mind when he applied the term “epic” to his own writing. Overall, I hope to have shown why he deserves to be regarded as an important and intriguing European writer for our time as well as his own.

‘Several circumstances render society here peculiarly easy and pleasant; in many respects the place unites the advantages and escapes the evils both of London and provincial towns. It is near enough (to London) to allow its inhabitants to partake in the society, the amusements, and the accommodations of the capital as freely as ever the dissipated could desire; whilst it affords pure air, lovely scenery, and retired and beautiful walks. Because every one here is supposed to have a London set of friends, neighbours do not think it necessary, as in the provinces, to force their acquaintance upon you; of local society you may have much, little, or none, as you please; and with a little, which is very good, you may associate on the easiest terms. Then the summer brings an influx of Londoners, who are often genteel and agreeable people, and pleasingly vary the scene. Such is Hampstead.’

The first days of January are uneventful, and Henry again rather neglects the journal, writing it up all at once on the 17th. Margaret Cooper from Caversham comes to stay with them, and he ‘glued playthings for the children’ (Sunday 2 January). Joseph Janson visits on the 6th: ‘It was beautiful to see how all the children played with him.’ It is cold enough for skating on the Heath ponds.

Eliza's parents decide to move to Hampstead and Eliza and Henry look for a suitable house for them, finding one on Squire's Mount; he measures up the rooms, and on his way home on the 8th passes by Gower Street to tell them about it.

In Christianity Vindicated against Infidelity, Bishop Waterland ascribed the increasing diffusion in England of a view of the clergy as ‘imposers’ directly to the ideas of Hobbes and Spinoza. This assertion could be hastily dismissed as an orthodox defence of the basis of belief and identity of the Anglican Church resulting from the processes of confessionalisation and of the reconstruction of orthodoxy ongoing almost everywhere in seventeenth-century Europe. After all, there is hardly anything new in this partisan justification of the peculiarity of the English Church with respect to other religious and intellectual traditions developed in Europe. Almost one century earlier and with a similar purpose, English bishops warned their students in theology not to read foreign authors, specifically those accused of ‘Arminianism’. They invited students rather to rely – to use the words of Robert Skinner, Bishop of Bristol – on ‘our own excellent writers’ Jewel, Hooker, Bilson and Andrewes, as guides to the reading ‘of the Fathers, Councils and the schools’. Nonetheless, the quotation from Waterland suggests seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English authors were aware of the profound diffusion and impact of European ideas about church authority and ‘priestcraft’ on English religious and ecclesiological debates.

The intellectual climate of the crisis occurring in England and Europe was characterised by a confrontation between a widespread spirit of anticlericalism and an intellectual strand of apologetics, which often recurred to the arguments and languages of its ‘atheist’ and ‘sceptic’ adversaries to defend organised church and religion. The development of biblical scholarship and the diffusion of debates about the relationship between reason and Revelation, philosophy and theology, nature and the supernatural examined earlier had an effect on the interpretation of biblical passages concerning the nature of priesthood and thereby challenged existing assumptions about the nature and functions of church authority.

From the middle of the eleventh century, the papacy embarked on a series of ecclesiastical reforms aimed at improving religious observance, repositioning the Church relative to the secular powers, championing papal independence, and asserting papal primacy and authority. These reforms profoundly impacted the relationship between the papacy and the rulers of Latin Christendom. Frictions and disputes erupted, particularly between the popes and the German emperors, but, oftentimes, popes also managed to cooperate peacefully with the emperors and other rulers.

One of the papacy's most important tools of reform was its legates. Legates were the pope's most elevated representatives, acting as his deputies and implementing (sometimes sweeping) changes to local churches while engaging in highlevel diplomacy. The most powerful were the legati a latere, who ranked above all other prelates. The popes almost exclusively selected these individuals from the cardinalate – the group of men comprising the liturgical, advisory, and jurisdictional body surrounding the pope – hence the denomination a latere, meaning from ‘the side’ of the pope. Cardinal-legate and legate a latere were largely synonymous terms.

25 January. Resolved yesterday to keep a journal, as the best check against wasting my time, by enabling me to look back on former resolutions, as to my conduct, and also by seeing what long periods are passed without any real advantage to myself to stimulate me to employ it better. I intend also that it shall contain an account of the principal daily occurrences and my feelings respecting them; my opinions of the persons I come in contact with that I may see how they vary, my views for life, prospects in business, intentions as to study, account of what I consider to be the state of my mind from time to time, everything which it may be agreeable to look back to, at some future period. Principally suggested by reading Gibbon's memoirs although I had often thought of it before.

At my office in Pinners Hall Broad St. London. Received a letter from Lewis Drusina at the Mauritius, with an account of his getting on well, a letter and remittance for his mother, he and his brother both thriving; …… it is nearly a year since he left. Read yesterday Gibbon's life of himself, a delightful book & shows what a man may do to raise a name in the world. Business appears doing well and I trust that the last year, a blank both as to profits and pleasure, this one will compensate every way. If I make for my share from £300 to £400 I shall be satisfied; I intend this year to spend about £200. Last year only spent about 150.

Mathilda of Flanders died on November 2, 1083. Her illness must have lasted only a matter of months as she was active in mid-July of that year. According to Orderic Vitalis, she fell ill sometime in September and her condition rapidly declined. It is possible that Abbot Baldwin of Bury St Edmunds treated her as he was in Caen at the time. If so, he was unable to improve her health. Orderic reported that her death was mourned for many days in Normandy and England. Both Orderic and William of Malmesbury indicate she was celebrated with a lavish funeral.

Mathilda was interred at Holy Trinity, Caen just as she intended, her body placed between the choir and the altar. Orderic attests that many archbishops, bishops and abbots were present for the ceremony, as well as monks, nuns and ‘a great throng of poor people’. Mathilda was set beneath an elaborate black Tournai marble monument covered in gold and jewels, decorated with a golden efgy. Orderic records her epitaph, carved in gold, which celebrates her bloodline, her piety and her foundation of Holy Trinity (Plate 7).

Over a century has passed since Menendez Pidal's initial studies pointed out the existence of a common poetic tradition that flourished in the Iberian Peninsula during the Middle Ages. Since then, numerous investigations have been conducted, which have deepened and illuminated our understanding of early Iberian traditional lyricism.

Debates on the origins of Hispanic lyric poetry have revolved around two main schools of thought: the individualista (individualist), which posits that popular poetry derives from learned written poetry, as seen in the essential works of Alfred Jeanroy and Aurelio Roncaglia; and the tradicionalista (traditionalist), which suggests the presence of an oral poetry of popular origin, as seen in the fundamental works of Ramon Menendez Pidal and Margit Frenk. Currently, while the debate between them is still ongoing, the presence of an early traditional oral poetry has been widely accepted by scholars.

Menendez Pidal affirmed the existence of an ancient common tradition that nourished the various poetic traditions that emerged over the centuries, across different areas of the Peninsula, framed within various cultures and languages. The scholar asserted that, beside the Latin poetry composed by clerics during the High Middle Ages, there existed a lyric poetry in vulgar Latin and the primitive Romance languages. This poetry, sung by the unlettered masses, was a type of lyric that no one considered worth writing down (2014: 250), a lyric that had lived for centuries in a ‘latent state’ (en estado latente) (2014: 251).

Even more surprising than the recent spate of publicity given by international Anglophone newspapers to Isabel Fargo Cole's translation of Bunte Steine (Motley Stones, 2021 [1853]) is their common celebration of Adalbert Stifter as the defining European writer of the more-thanhuman world. This is a writer whose friends characterized his work as “kleinliche Detailmalerei unwesentlicher Dinge” (petty detail paintings of unimportant things) and whose reception outside of Central Europe has been largely restricted to academia. This recent embrace of Stifter by a broader audience owes something to the renewed recognition by contemporary pandemic-stricken readers of the ecological importance of the dimensionally insignificant (relative to human magnitude). The insights that Stifter makes into these relationships and the awe that he reserves for small things are derived in no small part from his engagement with geological matters and methodologies through which inquiry into everyday stones leads to earth-magnitude phenomena. In the following, I scrutinize Stifter's motley, multi-faceted stones as they inform his aesthetic geology but also as they are informed by and deformed under the political duress, in particular regarding the public debate around Jewish emancipation and assimilation, that becomes manifest in his novella Abdias (Abdias, 1842).