The incursion of keyboard instruments into the domain of chamber music began with their participation in the continuo of the Baroque sonata. With the music's harmony firmly delineated by the harpsichord, and the bass line more often than not strengthened through the presence of a viola da gamba, the two melody instruments of the characteristic trio sonata were able to weave their contrapuntal lines with increased freedom. If the distinction of having emancipated the bass line of the continuo part so that it became an integral component of the musical discourse belongs above all to Corelli, it was Bach who carried the process a stage further by at the same time elevating the keyboard player's right-hand contribution to the status of an independent part.

Bach's six sonatas for violin and keyboard, and the three for viola da gamba, are the first significant works of their kind. They are essentially trio sonatas whose texture has been refashioned in such a way as to make it perfectly feasible for the music to be performed by only two players, the part traditionally assigned to the second melody instrument being transferred instead to the upper register of the keyboard. (Significantly, the first of the viola da gamba sonatas, BWV 1027, is a transcription of a work originally scored for two flutes and continuo.) Moreover, even in those movements – such as the opening Adagio of the E major Violin Sonata BWV 1016, or the Siciliano of the C minor Sonata BWV 1017 – where the keyboard instrument clearly assumes the role of accompanist, its part is written out in full. Only in the quick fugal movements are remnants of a figured bass notation intermittently in evidence.

The night of May 10, 1068 was a scene of great solemnity in Westminster Abbey. Candles pierced the darkness throughout the nave, gleaming as the vigil of Pentecost unfolded. Of all the nights in the church calendar, this one – save perhaps the night before Easter – was the most sacred. In the morning, a triumphal mass would commemorate the coming of the Holy Spirit upon the apostles in the Upper Room in the form of a mighty wind, in tongues of fame. In this miraculous moment, according to scripture, the apostles spoke in many languages – a sign that the Spirit of God inhabited them. This was a fundamental mystery of the church year. The next morning the church would be flled with music; Pentecost mass featured special chants and songs dedicated to the Holy Spirit and the beginnings of Christ's church on earth. Pentecost Sunday at Westminster 1068, moreover, would see another beginning. Mathilda of Flanders’ coronation and anointing in this church would transform her through sacred ritual into a persona mixta – a ‘mixed person’; part human, part divine. The mass of Pentecost would enfold a diferent, parallel mystery that transmuted a woman into Christ's representative on earth. Something more, then, was playing out on that late Saturday night in May, before the gathered crowd of English and Normans, standing together in the dark. The expectation of the central event – the crowning of a new Norman queen – charged the atmosphere in the shadowed church. Mathilda stood as the central fgure as the sacred readings for the Pentecost Vigil were recited in the gloom. The Norman conquerors were probably thrilled with their new queen, every inch an unparalleled royal presence.

On the evening of 18 April 1800 Beethoven took part in a benefit concert given in Vienna's Kärntnertor Theatre by the horn player, violinist and composer Giovanni Punto. According to the theatre's poster for the occasion, the programme began with a ‘new grand’ symphony by Haydn, and continued with a scena by Ferdinando Paer (sung by the composer's wife, Francesca Riccardi), a horn concerto by Punto himself, an overture by Méhul, a clarinet concerto by Antonio Cartellieri, a further aria by Paer, and ‘a brand new sonata composed and played by Herr Ludwig van Beethoven, accompanied on the horn by Herr Punto’.

Giovanni Punto was born in 1746, in the German-speaking region of Bohemia later known as the Sudetenland. His real name was Johann Wenzel (or Jan Václav) Stich, and his master, Count Thun, sent him at an early age to study first in Prague, and later in Munich and Dresden, where, from the well-known player and teacher Anton Joseph Hampel, he learned the relatively new technique of hand-stopping which allowed the production of chromatically altered pitches. Following his return, Stich found the restricted terms of his employment no longer to his taste, and together with four fellow members of Thun's private orchestra he managed to flee to Germany in the spring of 1768 – hotly pursued by the Count's henchmen, who had orders either to bring him forcibly back or to knock out his front teeth so that he could not play for anyone else. Fortunately for him and posterity, Stich managed to escape both fates, but he thought it wise to change his identity. He was thenceforth known, in an Italianised form of his name, as Giovanni Punto. He died in Prague in 1803.

Although in the international arena Rubem Fonseca (1925–2020) is best known for his crime fiction, in his native Brazil he is considered a canonical author. Early on in his career, Fonseca's skill as a short story writer caught the attention of critics, who praised his well-written yet raw portraits of modern urban life in Rio de Janeiro along with his more experimental prose works that included metafictional interviews, plays and short fiction. Through his ability to portray the speech of all levels of Brazilian society, from lower-class criminals to members of the highest echelons, Fonseca transformed Brazil's literary landscape. Indeed, he became a literary tour de force when his 1983 novel A grande arte (High Art) achieved best-seller status, a rarity in the Brazilian market. My aim is to offer an overview of Fonseca's works of crime fiction, contextualising his work within Brazilian history, literature and culture. This is important because, when read out of context, his oeuvre may seem to focus too much on the violence associated with Latin American culture, a perception that has led critics to brand his fiction as ‘dirty realism’. Such interpretations do not recognise the more subtle literary aspects of his works, especially his sense of irony and the depth of his understanding of Brazilian culture.

In the grand narrative arc of Norse mythology, as it is presented in Gylfaginning of the Prose Edda, time moves relentlessly towards Ragnarøkr, or the “Twilight of the Powers” as the term can be translated. Ragnarøkr is described as “endi veraldar” (the end of the world), and Hár, one of the aspects of the Óðinn-trinity that Gylfi encounters in Gylfaginning, describes in highly dramatic terms the great battle at Ragnarøkr in which, it seems, most of the prominent gods succumb along with their enemies. The battle is followed by a great conflagration in which earth and heaven burn and everything is destroyed. However, the end of everything also constitutes a new beginning. The earth rises green and beautiful from the sea. Some of the younger gods – Þórr's sons Móði and Magni and Óðinn's sons Baldr and Hǫðr – return. These godlings settle down at the plain Iðavǫllr where Ásgarðr once stood and pass time by discussing the events of the previous age. In the grass, they find the golden gaming pieces with which the previous generation of gods enjoyed themselves in the days of yore. Two humans have also survived the cataclysm by hiding in Hoddmímir's grove and living off the morning dew: “En af þessum mǫnnum kemr svá mikil kynslóð at byggvisk heimr allr” (Such great progenies come from these people that the entire world is populated). The old sun has also given birth to a daughter who traces the path of her mother.

During the first half of the twentieth century, crime fiction in Latin America was read largely in translation, and readers were exposed primarily to European classic detective novels, by Agatha Christie and Arthur Conan Doyle, for example, and hard-boiled US crime fiction by authors such as Dashiell Hammet and Raymond Chandler. The Latin American crime novel emerges in the 1970s, with the exceptions of Mexico and Argentina where examples of native crime fiction date back to the 1940s. Most critics agree that Antonio Helu, Pepe Martinez de la Vega and Maria Elvira Bermudez, all of whom began publishing crime stories in the 1920s, were the founding authors of the Mexican crime genre. Some of the Mexican seminal crime novels that pushed the ever more transgressive genre towards new directions were Rodolfo Usigli's Ensayo de un crimen (Rehearsal for a Crime) (1944), Vicente Lenero's Los albañiles (The Builders) (1964) and Rafael Bernal's El complot mongol (The Mongolian Conspiracy) (1969). Despite their positive reception, the Mexican literary and social critic Carlos Monsivais could not fathom the relevance of crime novels in his native country. He famously asked ‘.A quien le importa quien mato a Roger Ackroyd […] si nadie sabe (oficialmente) quien fue responsable de la matanza de Tlatelolco? (Who cares who killed Roger Ackroyd […] if nobody knows (officially) who was responsible for the killings at Tlatelolco?)’.

Hispanic Lyrics in the Late 1400s

The late fifteenth century is considered the beginning of the Modern period due to various events that changed the course of history: the invention of the movabletype printing press by Gutenberg in 1440, the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453, and the discovery of America in 1492. In what is now Spanish territory, the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon were united in 1469 through the marriage of Isabel i and Fernando ii, the respective monarchs of each kingdom. During those final decades of the century, the literary landscape also experienced closures, transitions, and innovations, with poetry being no exception.

At that time, the population of the Iberian Peninsula could mainly be divided into two classes: on one hand, the upper class, led by the aristocracy and nobility, who were literate and were the only ones who had libraries with valuable manuscript books in their palaces. The religious guild also belonged to this class; they were avid readers, and one of their tasks was precisely to make manuscript copies of primarily devotional books. During that period, urban centres were few and mainly comprised the capitals of the kingdoms, with no significant population.

The other part of the population was the rural majority, consisting of peasants, farmers, shepherds, artisans, blacksmiths, and so on. They lacked formal education and were unable to read or write, resulting in their limited access to written culture. Nonetheless, they maintained a rich oral tradition encompassing legends, ballads, tales, songs, and riddles, which they would perform through singing and dancing during festivities or leisurely occasions. Within this repertoire, narrative ballads found widespread favor, in part because of their timely and relevant theme.

Introduction

Cuban crime fiction has often been considered a derivative subproduct that replicates foreign models. According to that traditional view, the history of the genre started with Edgar Allan Poe, continued with the English classics, and then arrived in the United States, where the hard-boiled developed; at some point, the genre reached Cuba, where the English or the American model were duplicated. As Allan et al argue, this approach is highly problematic as it ‘privileges and reproduces an Anglo-American perspective’ and fixes ‘crime fiction as one thing’, instead of perceiving it as ‘mutable, fluid, and transgressive’.

In the following chapter I aim to demonstrate that Cuban crime fiction has always strived to find a personal voice, that it cannot be considered a mere by-product, and that it has reinvented itself through various reincarnations in which tradition and innovation constantly interplay. I first discuss an embryonic phase in which the collective novel Fantoches (Puppets) and Lino Novas Calvo’s short stories are briefly considered. The chapter focuses then on the policial revolucionario (pro-revolutionary crime fiction), which in the 1970s and 1980S received extraordinarily generous support from cultural officials and the MININT (Ministerio del Interior, or Home Office) and the neopolicial, which flourished in the 1990s in line with similar genre developments in other parts of Latin America. The chapter concludes with a review of the recent tendency towards hybridisation.

The previous chapters have each, in various ways, explored attitudes, expectations, and concepts related to legates, insignia, and the adventus. What is uncovered therein is a complicated, contradictory, and everchanging picture. On the one hand, papal legates a latere were not merely among the most powerful lords within Latin Christendom; they were extensions of papal authority. Even kings sometimes felt that curial legates were meddling in their affairs. On the other hand, cardinal-legates were usually far away from their primary bases and central networks. They were dependent on their subjects to a greater degree than most other rulers, not being part of the local structures of power. The reception of a papal legate held both opportunities and dangers.

In the ensuing four chapters, I will explore how different authors viewed and represented the adventus of cardinal-legates a latere. This exploration necessitates a comprehensive study of each author, encompassing their life, experiences, and viewpoints. It is also essential to study the specific circumstances surrounding each legate and his mission, as these influenced the opinions of the commentators. Such an analysis will illustrate the remarkable diversity with which the commentators interpreted and presented the legatine adventus. While none of the commentators were immune to the authority radiating out from papal Rome, they reinterpreted the curial image within their own unique frameworks. The result is four different perspectives.

Many studies have been published on the development of maritime courts. Maritime courts (including admiralty jurisdiction) and their existence as part of an international network of common legal ground have been traced back in time through the ages. Some researchers trace this common European legal practice through the codifications of the Consulato de Mare, the Black Book of the Admiralty, Rhodian sea law, to the Tabular Amalphitana, the Rôles d’Oléron, Jerusalem or the Baltic and Hanseatic states. Other experts emphasise that merchant and consular courts had been prevalent previously. Merchant courts reflect how commercial communities found measures to ensure their interests in maritime trade. Such measures were gradually taken over by the state. Consular courts show a different approach to issues of the marine, not focusing on commercial business as a common denominator, but instead highlighting the international character of maritime trade interactions. Consular courts reduced the possibility of individuals later claiming to have been wronged as foreigners and gave leeway to different legal practices as enacted in different countries, regions or cities. Both merchant and consular courts would be replaced by admiralty courts in the long term, with the consular prevailing significantly longer. Consular courts continued to be used regularly as alternatives to prize courts well into the eighteenth century, mainly due to the practicalities of international jurisdiction. Whatever their origins, the demand for maritime courts was a direct result of international trade and its expansion. Admiralty jurisdiction was to solve this demand by addressing maritime law in a more standardised, regulated and clear fashion.